But how big, how skinny is he? Why do you omit the most important details?
Jesus Christ, that's fucking fast. I am in awe.
It's running an 18 second 100 meters (and that's faster than you think) four hundred and twenty one times in a row.
This, I admit, is a good way to convey the impressiveness of the feat. I'd bet that if you're not particularly fast (I'm not), it would take you around 14 or 15 seconds to run a 100 meters one time. That's unreal.
My pace bicycling is generally 10 MPH.
It was within the lifetime of some of us that one four minute mile was considered impossible, let alone twenty six in a row. (I know, this was closer to twenty six five minute miles, but still).
Whoa. His splits are 10 seconds faster than my best mile time. That's insane.
Remember Gladwell's description of Bannister training on lunch breaks, and what a different world that was?
Didn't realize TLL was another of us.
Jesus H.
Btw, I get the impression that practically all the men in Ethiopia are named some variant of Haile Selassie.
It turns out that world-class athletes are a shitload more athletic than us hacks. Also, rich people have a lot more money.
Now get back to work.
He is 34. No 34 yr old drops that much time without being on steroids! Have you seen how big his head has gotten?
Unprovoked Prufrock references are banned!
There's debate about this (incl. on this blog), but I'm of the opinion that assuming his run was on a grade which averaged out to flat you'd also need to be at at least a 1.0% incline on a treadmill.
Who runs on a fucking treadmill anyway? The purpose of going for a run is to get outside for a while.
get on a treadmill, set it to the highest speed it will go, which is usually 10mph, and think about doing that for two hours. Now consider that you're still going almost three miles per hour (30% !) slower than Gebreselassie's 12.7mph pace
And the treadmill is doing some of the work, of course.
Nah, the purpose of going for a run is to collect data.
And the treadmill is doing some of the work, of course.
Don't make me stop this blog and come back there.
16: There was a long argument about that awhile back, and LB and I both agreed that that's not true. I forget who was on the other side. Heebie, others?
If I trained really hard I could probably hold that pace for a 400. Maybe even an 800. On a track, like God intended.
Was I unclear that I was trying to pick this fight in 14?
Now w/d's probably right that you need an incline to make it as hard to run 10 mph over the ground as on a treadmill, based on the lack of a headwind. But the treadmill isn't doing the work.
My last crossed with 21: See, if you're trying to pick a fight, you have to manage to actually be wrong.
Who runs on a fucking treadmill anyway?
Um, people who live in climates where it's regularly, like, 20 degrees in the morning for 5 months of the year?
Warning: It's the first of the month and I'm entering my time. This renders me hostile and easily baited. The combination of tedium and self-loathing is a bad one.
Besides, you don't have this neato console controlling everything and constantly giving you feedback, if you run on a trail or the street.
Probably.
That's what God made all those cool high-tech outdoor fabrics for, so you don't have to run in a damp cotton sweatshirt with a layer of snow in your leg hairs any more.
I left out guilt and fear (over having kept lousy records of what I was actually doing all month, and worrying about getting busted for reconstructing my time inaccurately from memory.)
You're smart and beautiful, LB.
26: That should probably be on the Unfogged Google calendar.
You're smart and beautiful, LB.
That and 2100 hours will get me a bonus. Or, rather, won't.
31: Marked as "that time of the month."
That and 2100 hours will get me a bonus. Or, rather, won't.
That is a great month. Even the Carp would be proud.
32: Doesn't matter. You have the respect and admiration of your imaginary friends, which is far more important in some abstract and impractical way. And lizards are much cooler than even the fastest rat.
(None of this shit ever helped me any, either. Fucking timesheets.)
Not that anyone cares that much, but there's a rivalry aspect to the record. The guy whose record Gebreselassie beat, Paul Tergat, is the same guy he outsprinted at the end of the Olympic 10k in both 1996 and 2000. They've both been running fast for a long time.
Not that anyone cares that much
My co-worker does; he knows all these guys and has me watching youtube videos of these races regularly. Some of them are really exciting.
33: Ha. That's how I read it first time through. Frightening that I didn't think to myself, "That's a weird thing to acknowledge on website."
39: Er, how else could it be read? That is to say, what is she talking about?
Some of them are really exciting.
More or less exciting than the swimming video clips?
My co-worker does
I meant anyone here; running posts seem to have less appeal than swimming posts.
he knows all these guys and has me watching youtube videos of these races regularly. Some of them are really exciting.
Thanks to the internet I was finally able to see the Atlanta 10k, after NBC's horrible coverage practically ignored it at the time.
40: On the first business day of the month, my employer requires that complete records for all the time I billed in the prior month have been entered. I find that an irksome and irritating task.
But when a woman talks about being consistently irritable on a monthly basis, that's not the explanation most people go for first.
How did the Unfogged triathletes do this weekend?
40: She's entering what amounts to a time card for work into (I assume) a computer.
46 makes it sound so easy. It's not.
Did I mention it's in six-minute increments?
Six-minute increments in which Haile Gebrselassie could run more than a mile.
Set world marathon record 2.1
Figures out to what, six or seven hundred bucks?
You know, I actually haven't got the foggiest what I'm billing out at these days. Somewhere in the 3-400 range I'd guess -- could be lower, probably not higher.
In law firms, the really good marathoners finish in 12-14 hours.
I think she means dollars an hour (for the firm's coffers, not her pockets).
No, I was talking about my hourly rate. I've billed three-hundred-hour months, but very few -- I do know people who do that often. I've never hit four.
My hours are very low compared to what they should be. While I spend a hellish amount of time at work, most of it is consumed by self-loathing and inability to focus.
Oh, whew! Crisis re: professional adequacy averted.
In my firm, have to record all time for the month a full week before the month is over, for the convenience of the accounting department. (IANAL, by the way; we have merely adopted all the worst traits of that profession.)
See, it's not that other people are getting more done. It's just that when you're feeling self-loathing, and are nominally working on project/client X, you bill that self-loathing to X.
(My girlfriend used to be bothered by 6-minute billing in her government contracting job - you can spend that long going to the bathroom! Which project do you bill to? I pointed out that if you only had one project, you'd bill 8 hours a day to it, and not care how many times you went to the bathroom.)
re: B/annister.
I taught him a few years back. He was attending some IT course that I was teaching. He was quite cool in a 'stalwart chap' sort of a way.
58: Heh. I've had that crisis a number of times, except it's been real. Workaholic friends are intimidating and make one feel small.
He was attending some IT course that I was teaching
Pretty cool that he would do that. Isn't he a retired MD or somesuch?
I knew someone who copied entire books - maybe only 1 or 2 - he got from a library by billing a few pages each day to the accounts for a couple of clients he really didn't like.
: 63
Yeah, he's a retired professor of neurology or something. The course was a sort of intro to IT course. There were a lot of retired or aging academics who attended it. One guy, I still love thinking about. He came with his daughter, who was of pensionable age herself. It took me hours to get him to use Word so he asked if, rather than continue the rest of the course, he could use the time to write something and I could check to see he was managing OK.
He told me he wanted to write his autobiography. The first line began, "I began work as a surgeon, in Sheffield, in 1929".
Turned out it was this guy and he must have been 97 or 98 at the time:
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article347582.ece
Amazing life. Great man.
Top Ten Reasons Not to Run Marathons
51
What is the normal relationship between the bill rate and the pay rate? Is it different for associates and partners?
67: There isn't a fixed one -- I bill hourly, but I'm paid an annual salary. So the fewer hours I bill, the lower the ratio of bill/pay, the more hours the higher. Partner compensation is complicated -- I don't know how it works even here, and it's different firm to firm, but they're paid more than associates but don't consistently bill more hours. (Lots of them bill more hours than me, but not than associates generally.)
68: I assume so. I didn't say it was ethical, or something I approved of.
Yeah, he's a retired professor of neurology or something
Yes, neurologist; taught at Oxford, I think. My dad knew him professionally and spoke of him with great respect.
eb, I was just wondering. Plus, I like question marks.
66--
four people in the boston marathon have died of brain cancer in the past ten years?
say it ain't so.
you know there are like something like 20,000 entrants every year?
and that brain cancer kills around 13,000 people nationwide every year?
the fact that four out of that 130,000 deaths in the last year happened to be among the 200,000 runners in the last ten years seems not so surprising.
dsquared can show up and put the detals on this point, but, honestly.
sorry--"130,000 deaths in the last "
now i'm getting really narked:
74 should say "130,000 deaths in the last ten years",
only i put "ten years" in spitze klammern and it spits 'em out again.
eb, I was just wondering. Plus, I like question marks.
Oh, I didn't think you were being accusatory. I'm just covering in case I become a lawyer, or something.
Different sort of running, but WTF is wrong with Rudy G?
The man is a raving lunatic. The only reason he hasn't bitten the head off a bat on national TV is that it hasn't occured to him.
#66: Pritikin, Sheehy, Fixx, and Atkins, among many other originators of "healthy" practices died at comparatively young ages.
Is he talking about the Atkins diet guy, who died when he slipped on ice and hit his head on the pavement? Not really fair to link that to his diet plan.
Not mine, but can't remember where I heard it first.
And Atkins was over seventy, at which point you're allowed to die without being second-guessed about it.
I'd really rather that Hillary and Rudy not win the respective nominations, but if they do we absolutely must have a debate between the prospective First Spouses.
69
Ok, so what is the normal range?
"... but they're paid more than associates but don't consistently bill more hours. ..."
But aren't their hours billed at a higher rate?
79--
since lb applauds it, it must be funny.
wanna tell me what the joke is?
87: I'm not getting what you're asking. You want to know what a typical associate gets paid, how many hours they work, and what they're billed out at, and the same for a partner? There isn't a typical associate, and there really isn't a typical partner.
I could give you ballpark ranges for any one of those questions, but expressing it as a relationship between what you bill per hour and what you get paid per hour doesn't really make sense -- that's not how it varies.
88: Not really a joke, it just seemed to perfectly express the vast, abysmal recesses of Rudy's craziness.
But even knowing that the guy's a loon, it's hard to figure why he'd do something as bizarre and self-destructive as cooing at his wife on his cell phone while he's in the middle of a speech. I would have thought that pretending to give a shit about people who write checks to your campaign was covered in about the second lecture in Politician 101.
78 80
Guiliani may be crazy but this isn't really about him (except insomuch as the behavior of your spouse reflects on you). For more see this .
But aren't their hours billed at a higher rate?
Yes, but that's not how they make their money. Indeed, a partner who billed too many hours at the expense of developing clients would be doing the firm a disservice. The real money comes from "leverage", that is, taking the margin between what LB bills out and what she makes in salary, less overheads, times a whole bunch of LB's. Marx called this the "rate of exploitation".
Partners generally bill out at a higher rate. But (traditionally) they're not employees who collect a salary, they're owners who take home a share of the firm's profits. How they divvy up the profits is up to them, using whatever arcane methods they can dream up. And remember, these are fancy lawyers. Plus, income can be expected to vary with whether the firm as a business has a good or bad year.
Complicating things, today you see more and more "tiered" partnerships, where there are lots of people walking around who are called "partner" but who are really glorified senior associates, such that they receive the majority of their compensation as salary, and then possibly get a small slice of the profits as a bonus. They may or may not get a say in how the firm is run (ie how that profit pie is divided), all subject to the terms of the fantastically complicated partnership agreement.
92: She can be as crazy as she likes, but he's the one who answered his cell during a speech. That's about him.
It's a bit of a catch-22, isn't it? He can hardly divorce her.
89
I am looking for a reasonable rule of thumb for getting a ballpark estimate for how much a lawyer nets if I know what his time is billed at.
So to take a completely hypothetical example, if I know an associate bills at 300-400 $/hour what does that translate to in annual income?
Oh man, I love it when they let the mask slip a little:
Judith is a liability and a half. She is vulgar, uneducated, grasping and insecure -- and has failed to keep those attributes hidden. She offends major donors right and left by being rude -- especially to their wives, especially the attractive wives.
Just not our kind of people. And, now that you mention it, isn't Rudy some kind of Eye-talian or something?
82 -- add Rodale and Adele Davis. Health kills!
I love it when they let the mask slip
There's a mask?
97: There is no such rule of thumb. Better to just look for information about what lawyers are getting paid in whatever area you're interested in.
There's a mask?
Eh, might be just Botox.
There's not really a god translation.
First of all, I think that associate billing rates raise significantly faster than salaries, which are artificially high for the quality of work that first-years do.
Second, and more importantly, some of the best-paid lawyers in a firm will be the ones who bring in a lot of business, and their pay can be a lot higher than their firm peers who bill actual piece work at the same rate. Broadly, billing rates should roughly track the value of the service performed for the client, while pay should track the value of the lawyer to the firm. Those do not always line up.
97: You can't get there from here. Billing rates will probably vary more from firm to firm than an associate's salary will -- I worked for a while at a smaller firm where I made maybe 75% of what a big-firm associate makes, but billed at about half of what I would have at a bigger firm, for example. Partner incomes are going to be wildly, crazily variable, and their billing rates have nothing to do with it.
If you want to know about how much a given lawyer makes, there are ways to figure it out, but working from their billing rate doesn't tell you anything outside the context of an associate in a specific firm or group of similar firms.
97: from what I can tell, associates at big NY or SF firms make from $160k to maybe $250k per year. Bonuses for billing more hours than the minimum, which might be a little over 2000. Office space and (probably?) secretaries and support and such come out of the hourly billed to the client.
First of all, I think that associate billing rates raise significantly faster than salaries, which are artificially high for the quality of work that first-years do.
For example, LB's assistant's billing rate is not $0/hr.
AFAIK, administrative staff is overhead, but work done by paralegals in frequently billed directly to the client.
Paralegal work is pretty much always billed, secretarial work never. Oddly, they often do very similar tasks.
103-107 are all completely correct, and yet...
..there are actually rules of thumb. A 5X or 5.5X target multiplier is not uncommon common. If you assume associate cash compensation (excl benefits) is 20% of associate billings at target utilitization, you will not lie far from the mark. Put another way: A billing rate of $400/hour equates to $160,000 in cash comp, a $650/hour bill rate equates to $260,000.
This is an aggregate picture, however, and you can't draw conclusions about individuals on this basis. YMMV.
110: Put another way: A billing rate of $400/hour equates to $160,000 in cash comp, a $650/hour bill rate equates to $260,000.
Those don't look wildly far off to me (say, within 30% or so, maybe?), if you limit them to associates in very big firms. Once you're talking about partners, or about lawyers in any other employment context, it's a whole other ballpark.
It's running an 18 second 100 meters (and that's faster than you think) four hundred and twenty one times in a row.
It's running a mile in 4:45, 26 times in a row.
Or, it's like taking a single 3-foot stride in sixteen-hundredths of a second — 46,112 times.
Eh, wait, that one doesn't really work so well.
It's like driving twenty-six miles in first gear, with the parking brake on. Once.
It's like falling in love, all over again, for the first time.
Once you're talking about partners, or about lawyers in any other employment context, it's a whole other ballpark
Indeed. See 93 for partner comp. That's where the other 4X goes (less about 1.25-1.5X for rent, recruitment, unbillable time, and miscellaneous overheads).
It's like falling in love, all over again, for the first time.
No it isn't. Unless your first love was sort of a hopeless painful longing that went on and on and on and on and....
Yeah, maybe you've got a point.
It's like 10,000 spoons when all you've got is a knife, and that knife is relentlessly stabbing your lungs, feet and legs for two hours.
It's like turning up the rpm on a record until it sounds like Alvin & the other two and listening to it for two hours and four minutes while sitting in a bean-bag chair.
A bean-bag chair filled with millipedes, you mean.
It's like the rotting of a turnip, the generation of an animal, and the structure of human thought.
Millipedes with rich, wonderful inner lives who speak in frequencies too high for our ears to hear so we just sit on them.
It's like fighting off 421 five year olds, eighteen times in a row.
Everybody above is banned! Ogged for the post itself is banned!
It's like running 312 miles in one day, but only 1/12 of that, and not quite as fast.
It's like violating the analogy ban every day for a decade.
It's like reading a 26,200-page book at 211 pages per minute, except the pages are asphalt and your eyeballs are feet.
It's like taking a decade's worth of analogy violations and spitting them all out in two hours.
add Rodale and Adele Davis. Health kills!
And of course Herman Tarnower, who came up with a famous diet and then died of high-impact lead poisoning (granted, the causal relationship is a little convoluted in this case).
It's like listening to this for more consecutive hours than anyone ever imagined. And then scoffing at Paul Tergat.
It's like falling asleep with your face on the keyboard and waking up to a whole comment box full of k's and commas.
It like running 260 miles, but only a tenth of that. So this guy is basically a pussy.
It's like posting #125, while Paul Tergat gets pwned by posting #132. But a lot more painful.
Jesus, quit being reasonable. Health kills!
It's like getting tenure
It's like getting tenure and then coming home to give the kid and baby their dinner and put them to bed because your goddamn already-tenured wife just breezed off to Europe and then you're there on the couch with your imaginary internet friends and a bottle of beer and that's why you went to grad school and slaved away all these years.
135: And then doing the same thing, over and over again, for the rest of your life.
It's like 249.2 games worth of Rex Grossman's passing.
It's like rusty nails in rotten wood and cryin' in the rain.
And then doing the same thing, over and over again, for the rest of your life.
Hey, only 64 semesters to go!
It's like taking the "bar" exam, under the neon light.
133: Oh right. One should read the thread.
It's like Randy Moss being on track for 24 touchdowns in a season at halftime.
It's like being a Mets fan, but with winning instead of losing.
It's like having 262 domesticated quail released within 50 feet of you, and shooting them all in only 2 minutes and 4 seconds.
It's like brushing your hair one hundred times every morning for maximum shine.
It's like billing 80 hours/week at $400/hour for 4.326 weeks, if billable hours were feet.
it's like chewing each bite 5,280 times with false teeth.
Cryptic Ned is commenting from an undisclosed location.
It's like a death row pardon two hours and four minutes too late.
It's like a decaf coffee enema.
Wait, no, it isn't.
It's like a skinny latte half-decaf coffee enema with sprinkles.
It's like rubbing your ears off by accident doing the breaststroke.
It's like falling asleep during oral sex and dreaming that you're swimming the channel.
It's like "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida" and "Cat Scratch Fever" sung by angels.
It's like taking the fall for your good buddy who got busted for drunk driving for the third time so you pretend that you were driving and you feel deep down like what you're doing is very, very wrong but you're pretty lit yourself.
It's like leaving the window open on those late-summer, early-autumn evenings when you think it'll be great sleeping weather, but in the morning all you have is that sniffle, and it was the freezing cold night that made you sick.
It's like falling asleep during oral sex and dreaming that you're swimming the channel.
Yes, but not just any oral sex.
Heebie's in rare form tonight. And we even got a replay of one of her greatest hits.
Hey, I never understood the lawyer billing thing. Why can't you just fill in whatever? It's not like 2100 hours is that many hours to claim to have been in the office and working.
Before anyone gets huffy, I do realize that lawyers work a lot of hours, I just don't see why billing makes them do it.
Lawyers practice what appears to outsiders as a highly specialized form of ethics.
I do realize that lawyers work a lot of hours, I just don't see why billing makes them do it.
The only hours the employer cares about are the ones for which the firm gets paid. If some lawyer doesn't bill enough to cover salary, overhead, and adequate profit, an employer might think putting someone else in that office would be a good idea. It's not very complicated.
Thanks, marcus! It's like hoping your cats will end the stand-off and use the Citikitty toilet trainer because you're shocked that they've seemingly gone 24 hours with almost no number 1 or number 2. (One of each, total, for two cats.)
A friend just called to chastise me for not watching the NL wildcard playoff game, currently in the bottom of the 12th. Go Padres!
Now the imagined ordeals are getting less universal, more Heebie-specific.
164 is funny. It's like Charley is so ethical he can't imagine what I'm asking...let's make it clearer...why not just bill your Unfogged commenting time? What's to stop you? Is the evidence in the prodigious amount of work you do.
It's like finding out that the "pork rinds" you've been munching on were made out of a guy you knew slightly and were intensely annoyed by.
It's like making 26.2 of the wittiest comments anyone has ever seen, right in a row, with no break.
It's like rain on your rival's wedding day.
167 -- A law degree costs a lot in time, money, and energy to obtain, and settling into a big firm even more. Risking it -- and someone caught cheating on time gets escorted from the building, we'll mail you your stuff -- to help the stats for one month or another is pretty shortsighted.
As well as being stealing.
That's not to say that it wouldn't be a fine thing if Ungogged commenting was billable. You guys ready to take up a collection?
45: The triathlon went really well. Didn't swallow much of the Potomac (and what I did swallow didn't taste any worse than other open water swims I've been in). Seeing as I haven't been training really hard, I was actually quite impressed with myself. Finished the swim in under 30 minutes, had a 22.3 mph average on the bike course, and ran 8 minute miles for the 10k run at the end. Felt great afterwards. I'll post more later.
161: I think what you're missing is that you're not billing time to the law firm, your time is what determines the bill that gets sent to the client. It's not just numbers, it has explanations of what you were doing for that time, and the client is going to want those explanations to bear a reasonable relationship to useful work done that solved their problems.
It would be possible to fudge things some (I'm horrible about keeping contemporaneous records, so my time isn't as accurate as it should be. It's honest, on average, and where I'm not sure I lowball rather than highball, but I'm sure I've overcharged in some specific instances, and it's never come back at me), but not consistently, and not by all that much.
178
Is it really true that it would be hard to cheat materially? Suppose you can research and write briefs twice as fast as other lawyers at your level. Suppose you bill times consistent with what the average lawyer would take to do the work and spend your free time in the office but goofing off. It seems to me you that you would be unlikely to be caught.
And course you hear horror stories about clients who audit their bills and find lawyers charging 36 hours in a day and the like.
179: Oh, if you put some thought into it you could probably cheat materially along the lines you suggest, but the original question of 'why not just bill commenting time?' is that it would show up very obviously on the bill of someone who'd be interested in what they had been paying for.
Congrats Tweedle.
I agree with Charley. It is stealing.
178: thanks, that makes it clear.
And of course I wasn't saying it was right. Just that I always found it weird that lawyers felt themselves under such massive pressure to clock utterly inhuman hours, while at the same time they had no monitoring devices like time clocks, etc. to enforce correct counts of the hours they were really working. This situation clashed with my understanding of human nature.
The lawyer's ethical code strictly forbids copping to overbilling. It's their equivalent of "don't snitch". Once in a very long while, perhaps when drunk in a secluded location, a lawyer might casually ask his best, oldest lawyer friend, "So, do you think maybe some people overbill in this profession? About how much on the average? So probably someone who overbilled a little less than that would be safe?" But the guy asked alwaysy underreports his overbilling.
will "LOL" get you banned around here? Thanks for adding that perspective, John.
The problem that people like LB have is that their consciences define one billable hour as the amount of work that they are capable of accomplishing in one hour when fully engaged and hitting on all cylinders. Since they only attain that level of productivity a smallish fraction of the time, accounting for the rest becomes quite painful.
People who define one billable hour as the amount of actual work that would be accomplished in one hour by the worst lawyer in the firm--or, in a slow month, the worst opposing counsel they've ever encountered--do not have this problem.
See, that's marginalism. LB is a Marxist or Anabaptist or some weird ethical shit like that.
Butch Reformed. It's why she never gets catcalled.
It's like driving a Honda Civic over 200 miles a day, every day, for 12 years.
