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

guys I QUOTED the funny two paragraphs for you

i guess it is funny to pay $125,000 dollars for your undergrad expecting to get a job in publishing, in 2007

thanks max, now i know that Elfster exists.

“I am supposed to do something interesting, something with my brain.”

i have no sympathy for this dude

why? that seems like a reasonable expectation in a lot of ways although i can see reading 'interesting' as a little stronger

idk, it's not that i don't sympathize with the difficulty getting a career off the ground, because i feel like i fall squarely in this 'trend' -- idk, it just seems like there is a difference between feeling frustrated and undervalued at your job, and thinking that the only jobs that you *can* get are somehow beneath you.

"i am destined for important things! i will become a doctor!"

I agree with you entirely. In fact, I kinda feel like working a low-paying menial job after college/grad school is a (shitty) rite of passage.

otm

and i think it's not that he "wants to do something interesting" "with his brain," it's that he expects to be paid handsomely for it

ha, it's pretty easy to do interesting things with one's brain and not get paid for them at all.

Elfster was really the only quiddity part of that article but wow, so quiddy

I mean the whole "I went to a good school, I deserve a good job" is just meritocratic bullshit filtered through the lens of the academy. Correct reading of that passage above: I was sufficiently privileged as a child and thus admitted to a 'top' school that my parents paid for /was be-scholarshipped/attended on a good loan package, and now I should get a good job unlike those schmucks who didn't go to a college/went to a state school or community college/spent time in the military/took time off because I am a Hard Working Kid Who Deserves More even though I have done very little but attend a liberal arts program and maybe work summers serving ice cream on a pier.

dude it was on a pier
you don't know their pain

my personal big boob crisis

Isn't it Louis C.K. who says there's very little in the world worse than a 20- year old complaining about the kind of job 20 year olds take?

dude can't find consulting jobs out of biz school
works in a call center, bails
starts a retail drug site, fails
takes a job as a dockworker, dreams of becoming a doctor

i mean, in another economic climate, this dude might have hopped on a biz career path and sailed away, but as it is, i can't help but feel like this is just a dude whose ambitions do not match his work ethic

his first mistake was going to biz school

I don’t know why someone wouldn’t want their job to go really well. And I think usually it’s because they’re twenty. Because they’re twenty-year-old douchebags. I’m prejudiced against twenty year olds. Because, nineteen you’re still your parents’ fault. Twenty, you’re technically an adult, but you still haven’t done anything.

Twenty year olds at their jobs are always like, “This job sucks.” Yes, that’s why we gave it to you! Because you’re twenty. You haven’t done anything. You’ve just been sucking up resources, you’ve just been taking food and love and education and iPods, and taking it and judging—“I like that,” and “Oh, that sucks.” You’re like a big orange on a tree that’s rotting, and the tree is like, “Get off!” and you’re hanging on, “I don’t want to go.” If you’re twenty, you definitely have never done a thing for anybody.

Louis C.K. on Leno 3/23/11

"after my job failed as an economics analyst I took off my top and went crazy in N'orleans "

NYT's getting really good at even making people on poverty incomes sound like terrible ruling class:

Sure, her partner, Michael Fleming, is an artist and craftsman who tosses around phrases like “humble aesthetic” and speaks of the way driftwood “resonates,” but he can also toss around a hammer. He built their magnificent oak-and-maple bed, which is weathered silver and white. Of course, if he gets a buyer he will sell it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/garden/in-maine-gifts-from-the-sea-and-the-landfill.html

I hate these people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/fashion/fertility-is-a-matter-of-age-no-matter-how-young-a-woman-looks.html?ref=fashion&pagewanted=all

so apparently some people figured out that looking young doesn't equal being young

Those people are just funny.

STAB STAB STABBY

For so many reasons in that article.

“I’ve spent hours of my life and a lot of money making sure I was healthy, and that my hair was shiny, my teeth were white and my complexion clear,” said Ms. Foss, a magazine editor in New York City.

So when it came to conceiving a child with her husband, a marketing executive, Ms. Foss wasn’t at all worried. After all, she noted, those same traits of youth and beauty “are all the hallmarks of fertility.”

I MEAN WHAT. What a horrible person she sounds like.

I have more stuff to s

Isn't it Louis C.K. who says there's very little in the world worse than a 20- year old complaining about the kind of job 20 year olds take?
--remy bean

had never read the analysis of professor of economics ck he seems v interesting, however I would say there is pretty good evidence that today's job market is a little bit different from the job market when he was 20. the large majority of ameicans have never lived in an era w/ job prospects as bad as today's. /things are different/

that just sounds like an immeasurably stupid thing to believe?

that's an xp to laurel

well, if you're a dog breeder, she's not so far off.

"if i get my teeth whitened and my hair done i will totally have a genetically better chance of making a baby"

seems as if she confused genetic fertility with... guys wanting to have sex w/ you bcuz you're pretty

I mean the whole "I went to a good school, I deserve a good job" is just meritocratic bullshit filtered through the lens of the academy. Correct reading of that passage above: I was sufficiently privileged as a child and thus admitted to a 'top' school that my parents paid for /was be-scholarshipped/attended on a good loan package, and now I should get a good job unlike those schmucks who didn't go to a college/went to a state school or community college/spent time in the military/took time off because I am a Hard Working Kid Who Deserves More even though I have done very little but attend a liberal arts program and maybe work summers serving ice cream on a pier.
--remy bean

this is also bullshit btw

why

seems as if she confused genetic fertility with... guys wanting to have sex w/ you bcuz you're pretty

Ding ding ding (sorry if you hate that)

But this is just another totally gross, insidious example of pushing a very shallow kind of desirability as if it is other things that it's not. Like fertility, or character, or anything except "based on nothing but your appearance/photograph, more strangers are likely to want to fuck you". It also disinherits the UN"desirable" from the ranks of people who are "allowed" to have the traits in question -- fertility, in this case.

And there's just so much class grossness in that package that my brain is pushing the whole article away and refusing to ponder it much more than that.

that young lady seems typical of those who moved here to live inside Sex & The City.

I think Louis CK will be Dennis Miller in ten years or less.

what the fuck kind of gypsy curse is that

haha

why
--remy bean

I have to get on a train, will respond later

k

In re Amy Andronicus, Yglesias says things.

I'm sure Rollins considered it "professional suicide" when he joined Black Flag too.

Okay this is surely related, via my friend Abby on Twitter:

Dude whining near me on the patio: "My sister already started an orphanage in Ethiopia and she's TWO YEARS YOUNGER THAN ME."

hey guys, shitting on academia as a source for job security should imo be a lot more controversial than you are making it sound
i mean i have a friend who worked trying to get poor kids into college & i think he wd probably disagree

i tend to think that college is a bit overrated & shouldnt be treated as an 'in' to complete job happiness, but

its also a major financial investment (college loans etc) that should probably promise some kind of return!!

idk, it just seems like there is a difference between feeling frustrated and undervalued at your job, and thinking that the only jobs that you *can* get are somehow beneath you.

― elmo argonaut, Thursday, September 1, 2011 4:15 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

feel like in our america of today the virtue and vitality of work has been debased and its sad

like only good jobs are good and everything else is a shitty waste of time

something is "wrong" with a system where a guy can get a (or multiple!) degree(s) and not find work putting those degrees to use! and frankly it feels sorta unfair to point and laugh at the guy who bought into the system when there probably werent a lot of alternative messages out there. im all for "get over it" in certain circumstances but this dockworker MBA didnt come up with the situation were in

max & cr?m otm

Nobody's shitting on academia, as far as I can tell. But, I'm sorry, the insistance that college makes you more 'worthy' of a good/stable/high-paying job is silly, and kind of elitest – and that if you go to college you are more deserving of one than somebody who didn't/couldn't/hasn't yet.