Saturday, October 9, 2010

"Shoddy preparation of . . . documents"

Reading in the paper (a really old-fashioned way to get news, I know, but there you are) about "mortgage lenders’ shoddy preparation of foreclosure documents" and record-keeping so bad that it's sometimes not clear what institution, if any, has the right to foreclose on a house, and thinking of the recent College Misery posts about papers so ridden with technical errors as to be nearly unreadable, I can't help but wonder if there's a connection -- the same attitude, if not the same people. In fact, I know that, during the height of the real estate boom, some of my students were working as pre-screeners for lenders even before they graduated (one of many signs that something was wrong), and that many more wanted to go into lending and/or real estate after graduation. The larger issue, I suspect, is a prevailing attitude among some (not all) Americans, young and older: do the minimum necessary to be able to say you finished the job and reap (or demand) the immediate rewards thereof, and don't think about the long-term consequences; somebody else will surely deal with those.

11 comments:

  1. CC you're aiming too low; everybody in real-estate was in this "sell it, even if you bend the rules" mode because the CEOs looked the other way and the government didn't play its proper role as watchman. Certainly these fuckfumbling student pre-screeners had a role to play, but they had bosses willing to let them get away with their slapdash work. Let it also be written that the vast majority of this incompetence in S. Florida home financing comes from Bank of America, which actually tried to re-posses the home of a man who had paid cash for his house and had no mortgage with B of A AT ALL.

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  3. Now you know why, whenever I look at the work my engineers-in-training do, my heart is filled with the most abject and unutterable fear and loathing. Don't even get me started on the pre-meds.

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  4. @F. Frankenstien from Fresno

    Flunk `em. If they are incapable of doing the job correctly you can't have them around. It's like if I were to use a bad resistor in a circuit; it might not blow the first time I power it up, but over time the likelhood of it burning out grows, so is it worth soldering into the circuit in the first place? I know I'm vicious toward the snowflakes but only so because they halfass everything academic, and the academics are the true reason for college - not the keggers, humping the passed out chick at the Greek party at 3am, stealing the wrong exams, and all that other "Animal House" horseshit. Somebody has to hold the line.

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  5. @Strelnikov:

    Oh, I certainly do. But I very nearly didn't get tenure because I have long done so. I am also a lone voice in the wilderness, and our new Provost thinks the physics department flunks too many people already. It's also discouraging to give an assignment that uses 7th-grade math, and not a one of them comes back 100% correct. We're not going to need to wait 500 years to achieve "Idiocracy."

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  6. You tell those apparatchiks that if your dumbed-down students had designed the plane they last flew in, they would not have come back at all. Physics should be understood by the most sub-literate retard administrator* as the Queen of the Sciences and the hardest, most grueling course of study outside of medicine. It's not something you can bullshit though like English, Political Science, Law, Economics - you have to know the formulae, how set up an experiment, notate, and keep expermenter error from creeping in, among other things.

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    * Ever notice how they get duller the higher they go, until the head of the school is some grinning imbecile? If politics is Hollywood for ugly people, what does that make the college administration - Romper Room for the middle-aged?

    Postscrpt: My only problem with Idiocracy is that it never shows the rest of the world. Have the Mexicans and Canadians walled off the US to keep the stupidity from spreading, or did they all move to a terraformed Mars, leaving the United States of Dumbass behind? If the stupidity was not universal, it would make sense that somebody would try to invade, if just to remove the threat of a nuclear armed idiot state. (I could make some nasty crack about Pakistan or Israel, but I won't.) It just seemed too implausible that the US would look like that with such a mentally enfeebled population.

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  7. I was thinking the same thing when I saw the news on this foreclosure stuff.

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  8. @Strelnikov:

    My guess is that the U. S. of Dumbass nuked the rest of the world during the last chance they were capable of doing so. This would explain the observed rapid rate of human evolution: the mutation rate was scary high.

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  9. @Strelnikov:

    I agree, physics ought to be the hardest, most grueling course of study, even more so than medicine, since if you can memorize, you can do medical school. (I'd want more from someone who can practice medicine, however.) A serious problem with this is that students who can do this are getting rarer all the time: they simply do not have the brains to do it.

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  10. @ Froderick
    I think they DO have the brains, but they're just too damn lazy to apply themselves.

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  11. Strelnikov - believe me, there are just as many idiots north of your border.

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