quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

from that article's comments:

This article is very reminiscent of the student who slept in the NYU library because he “couldn’t afford the dorms.” NYU went ahead and gave him a dorm room that year after all the publicity. I remember because I was an undergraduate student at NYU at that time. And it made me angry. I had to take out loans and pay for my dorm but because that kid made the papers, he got his for free. This is going to happen again. I bet NYU will give him a meal plan after this. I wonder if he contacted the times (note he is a journalism major) or if they magically found out that he was applying for food stamps in booklyn….
Education costs money. We all have crazy loans from school (I am in grad school and am up to $200,000). This kid should have gone to state school if he wasnt willing to take out the money required for a private education.

— Elizabeth

I love how it starts off w/ the "I'm the voice of reason" tone and then ends with "oh and I have $200,000 in debt"

FWIW, I have known people who clearly thought it was cool that they were getting food stamps.

oh i know plenty, too, sarahel. if i see j0n pf3ffer again someday, i will punch that fucker in the gut.

ha ha ha! That's the dude from the band, Capi11ary Act1on, right? I think I know someone else who has similar feelings about him.

yeah, that's him. god, what an awful, smug, self-satisfied douche.

the dude I want to throw rocks at who went to Oberlin - similar kind of guy, though sometimes he can be okay - it's just his posts to this other message board/listserv I'm on is just the lethal combination of precocious youth + long-windedness + self-absorbtion + idiosyncratic word coinages and abbreviations. It's probably a very good thing that it's text only.

yeah I can't imagine what his animated gifs would be like

haaa

FWIW, I have known people who clearly thought it was cool that they were getting food stamps.

There was a couple in my wife's grad program who were doing this, it was really weird - everyone there had a teaching fellowship so the guy was covered, and his wife had at least a part time job teaching classes, all in a town that was super duper cheap to live in. They were like weird southern hippie christians and were really proud that they were getting food stamps, like it was stupid for anyone not to do that.

Me and my wife lived for a full year on just her TA money and it was tight but wasn't that hard at all.

xp - ha, more like, he avoided humiliation via image bombing.

I bet they'd be way too large

all in a town that was super duper cheap to live in.

Yeah, that makes a big difference.

food stamps are awesome tho: they get u food

tbh when i first dropped out of school and was working for %7/hr at barnes & noble i thought about going on food stamps.

I'll come out of the closet as an ex-middle class person getting food stamps right now. I'm broke-broke and unemployed and it's a nice burden off my back to know that I eat more than ramen! anyone who is broke / barely getting by should be on them, as far as I'm concerned.

they give you way more money than you need tho, as a single person

which = I eat better than I ever did when I had money

so they give you more free food than you can eat and that is somehow not cool

a friend of mine is on them - and she was weirded out about applying for them at first - but yeah, she said the same thing about giving you way more than you need as a single person.

yeah it's $200 a month (in california at least) which is like...I dunno, you can eat very, very well on that

ive heard also if youre willing to pay somewhat of a premium u can also buy drugs or weapons w/them

haha actually they make you sign something that says you promise not to trade them for drugs or weapons

a rule that I have obv broken many times

its the sort of ingenuity this great nation was built on

but yeah the fact that people are so disgusted that poor, unemployed (including some white people! including some college grads!) can get $200 a month so they can eat decently...I dunno, it's just this very american 'I don't need the government to get by' attitude. don't we have better things to be disgusted about, like uh, the government giving billions of dollars to rich people? any transfer of gov't money to the bottom percentiles is a good thing, considering where that money woulda gone otherwise.

On Thursday, Mr. McLendon applied for food stamps in Brooklyn(...) And he is reluctant to tell his mother and stepfather, who can’t afford to help him, about his decision.

But he is totally OK with telling the NYT about it, because he'd rather have them find out when a family friend forwards them the article.

i can understand people wanting to earn their keep and whatnot - thats their prerogative - but as far as im concerned if the government gave everyone $200 a/month for food regardless of need itd be a lot more worthwhile than much of what theyre doing right now - even if some chose to spend it on caviar and 8 balls

right, there are lower-middle class people who aren't on them and thus are spending less money on food than they would otherwise - which is bad for the economy

in fact everyone apply for food stamps right now - coke n caviar fap @ iatees house

remember tho: you have to trade for the coke, as most dealers do not accept food stamps

why is the government making stuff so hard for me

hold on a minute

oh i know plenty, too, sarahel. if i see j0n pf3ffer again someday, i will punch that fucker in the gut.

― my bach penises and their contrapuntal technique (the table is the table), Tuesday, October 20, 2009 11:22 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

dude this was one of my best friends from middle school ;_;

how the hell do you all know this same random dude????

L O L L

it's okay guys if you want to clown on him as we went to different high schools and the last time I hung out with him I also kinda thought he had turned into a douche and I tried to tell him his band wasn't very good and he got all defensive

...

so

xp - i saw his band play once, and a friend of mine did mastering work on their album, but i think it was a different friend that said he was a douche.

1- guy heckled jo3 t4ng4ri for MONTHS until he finally gave them a good review on pfork. (he told me, 'i owe jo3 t4ng4ri a steak dinner.')

2- math-core.

3- wildly heteronormative and weird about gays.

4- didn't ever credit me or thank me for helping him do interviews with TV on the Radio (in which most of the questions were mine) and The Holy Ghost Revival (again, same thing).

5- douche.

...I'm trying to remember if he wrote me about getting an AMG review. If this is the same person.

I remember rocking out to KoRn at his house and watching WWF Monday Night Raw

I can't imagine why this guy would have issues w/ the gays

are you all the same person, right now?

who is this person

its is u - sry u r racist douchenozzle

Jenna Catsos, 22, does not have a cellphone because she thinks the idea of always being reachable is “scary” and prefers to keep in touch with handwritten letters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/technology/23cell.html

i sympathize tbh - whenever someone calls me and my brain is like "i don't want to be reached right now, this is scary" but my arm just does what it wants and answers that phone, and then my mouth starts talking, and it's just like i was forced to be reached even tho the idea scares me. had no choice.

cheers to the author for using the phrase "smug satisfaction" in no less than the SECOND paragraph.

the only thing i dislike about having a cell at the moment is that a "restricted" number keeps calling me and i never pick up unless i have some idea of who's on the line. pretty sure it's not a creditor, probably a telemarketer that found a cell phone loophole.

Ladt Catsos

And even the best-laid plans falter. Jenna Catsos, 22, does not have a cellphone because she thinks the idea of always being reachable is “scary” and prefers to keep in touch with handwritten letters. While at college in rural Vermont, Ms. Catsos decided to drive to Massachusetts to surprise her father for his birthday. Halfway there, her car’s transmission broke down. She walked half a mile to the nearest gas station and called her parents from the payphone, but because they were not expecting her, they were not home. After leaving a message with the payphone number, she stood in the gas station parking lot for an hour waiting for them to call back.

“It’s situations like that when I would really love to have a phone,” she said.

Am I missing something? She DID have a phone - a payphone! If she travels across the country without an address book containing, for instance, the mobile phone numbers of her parents, she is simply a fucking idiot. Luddism has nothing to do with it.