17 thoughts on “SL 729”

  1. I think I said this when we were talking about Sotomayor — a federal judge cannot be fired (apart from impeachment) and can retire with their full salary and thus, does not have to manage their future finances as most of us do. At a 3% rate of return, a judge, because of their guaranteed pension, has retirement “assets” of nearly 7000000 (to generate a 200K income stream on retirement). So, I’m not concerned about savings.

    I do wonder how they pay for the high SES lifestyle of schools, nationals tickets, . . . . They do need to live within their means. A concern about the debt + tickets might be that he is accepting money from individuals who might create a conflict of interest. I find the “fronting of tickets” + return of pay problematic if the individuals create conflicts (and, people get sloppy about that, especially if they interact with people for whom public conflicts of interest are not a concern). The cases involving the Virginia governor pretty much eviscerated any legal teeth my concern about conflicts involving people who are considered friends of the individual. And, Justices get to decide for themselves whether they’ll recuse themselves from cases.

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  2. I’m not buying Kylie Jenner being the youngest billionaire on the Forbe’s assessment of the value of her non-publicly traded cosmetics company. Maybe if she sells, or gets a viable offer. Otherwise, their 800M evaluation is a guess that could fall apart quickly since it is wholly dependent on Kylie Jenner’s status as an influencer.

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  3. Mary Poppins in the books is just a little bit creepy.

    I’m not sure that the public is ready to deal with that Mary Poppins.

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  4. In what sense is Ms. Jenner a self-made billionaire? Obviously no-one is a self-made billionaire — they all depend on other people, the state, copyright law, etc. But I don’t mean that. I mean, isn’t she from an wealthy family (top 0.1%)? Even if someone from my background (no money at all, but plenty of cultural capital) became a billionaire, it would be a stretch to call that ‘self-made’, No?

    Amy P. Yes! More than a little bit actually.

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    1. Isn’t self-made billionaire a mere technical term that means you didn’t inherit a billion dollars (say, as opposed to Laurene Powell, the Mars brothers, the Walton siblings, . . . )?

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  5. I was shocked when I reread Mary Poppins with my kids, and discovered how nasty she is.

    Kylie Jenner is a household name. I find some lists of “most influential internet” people, and she appears on lists from 2014. She’s been dubbed the “most influential person on the internet” this year http://www.rediff.com/getahead/report/glamour-kylie-jenner-is-the-most-influential-person-on-the-internet/20180701.htm.

    She makes an offhand remark about Snapchat, and it plummets in value.

    She has 111 million instagram followers. That’s a lot of people to sell product to. According to some articles, an instagram post by her is worth $1 million in sales. She has moved beyond being the “face” of a cosmetics company. She is the cosmetics company.

    “Sell to the classes, eat with the masses; sell to the masses, eat with the classes.”

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    1. I don’t understand the concept of Kylie Jenner at all. She is my Pauline Kael moment. I don’t deny that she has all these followers and sells all this stuff, but I don’t know a single person who would admit to me that they are a fan.

      Who are all these people?

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      2. People who watch reality shows? “Keeping up with the Kardashians” has been running for 11 years. Googling it, it has wildly different ratings. 2.8/10 for Imdb. 85% for all Google users.

        It’s a long running soap opera. I fear it will continue to be a phenomenon until Kris Jenner passes away or gives up control. Our grandchildren may be watching “Stormi visits North West.”

        It must be bizarre to grow up that way.

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      3. Meet my college students….

        Watching “Keeping Up With The Kardashians is consonant with getting a real college education?

        I feel like I should ask where you teach. I’ve always maintained that the true determiner of a good school or a bad school is not the quality of the faculty or the facilities, but rather who your fellow students are. My sons are going to be looking at colleges in a couple of years and I’d hate to think that their fellow students were in a large part Kylie Jenner fans.

        I just asked my older son if he knew who she was. He admitted only to having a vague idea. (Whether or not he just was telling me what I want to hear I cannot say.)

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      4. I have a couple of Kardashian anecdotes.

        1. My Star Trek loving kid overhears some girls in the school library talking about what she hears as “Cardassians.” I have to explain to her that, sadly, they were probably talking about the Kardashians.

        2. We were in a college cafeteria a few years ago when an enthusiastic white male student was talking loudly about the Kardashians. Interestingly, it didn’t look like any of his table companions were into it at all.

        I suspect we’re living in a time when media interests are very splintered, so we’re mostly watching different things.

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      5. Suffice it to say that I do not teach at an elite college. 😀
        I just asked my 16 year old if he knows who the Kardashians are and who Kylie Jenner is, and he said yes. I asked him if he cares, and he said, affronted, No! The 19 year old is asleep still, but I don’t think she cares about or follows Kardashians.

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    1. My college students, too! Kids these days with their Kardashians and loud music!

      My parents came from fairly humble backgrounds and strove (I think mostly successfully) to check my assumption of classism as we moved into the upper middle class. Still, I can’t help but believe that one of their ambitions in sending my sister and me to college was to send us to a university where our fellow students explicitly didn’t watch things like the Kardashians.

      I guess the perceived virtues of an education have changed.

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  8. Hmm, my daughter attended a reasonably elite college (Emory). I have never heard her mention the Kardashians or Kylie Jenner. But it’s possible that she knows that the conversation would go nowhere, since I don’t know who those people are. (That is literally true in the case of Kylie Jenner.) If I remember, I’ll ask her next time we talk if she follows Kylie Jenner on social media.

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