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

the real hawaiian jackpot is the loco moco, which for some reason always goes for like $8 on the mainland instead of the $1.99 it should be. (admittedly even hilo, hawaii's venerable cafe 100 has broken the $2 barrier in recent years, but i'm just gonna pretend everything is always as it was when i was putting away one of these every day in high school.)

Perhaps already noted upthread and more of a general vent than a quiddity report but worst paranthetical ever:

(Remember them? Remember albums?)

I don't know whether that belongs in this thread or not, but I'm happy to talk about anything besides hawaiian spam delicacies right now

Risks for G.O.P. in Attacks With Racial Themes
By JIM RUTENBERG
Recent comments by Newt Gingrich lay bare the risks for his party when it comes to invoking arguments perceived to carry value-laden attack lines.

this is such a weird perspective to occupy, writing about dog whistling

"invoking arguments perceived to carry"

would prompt an expletive thought to convey "for fuck's sake"

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/education/early-admission-applications-rise-as-do-rejections.html

You do not need a perfect score on the math SAT to know that if more people are applying — many top-tier colleges say the number has doubled or tripled over the last five years — competition is stiffer. So in certain precincts of Manhattan, parents of those who were deferred or rejected in December have been swapping stories ever since about the seemingly perfect senior at the Spence School who did not make the cut (“If not her, who?” lamented one parent) and the six Brearley School girls who were deferred from Yale (“I thought Yale loved Brearley,” cried another, pointing out that 20 Brearley graduates have gone to Yale in the last five years, more than any other university).

Was it the international students who pay full freight? The public schools who do more for diversity? Occupy Wall Street fomenting anger at the 1 percent?

“Maybe it’s that they are tired of New York City private school kids,” worried the mother of a senior who was deferred from Yale, echoing a common refrain. “The juniors,” she added, “are flipping out.”

http://nobodyputsbabyinahorner.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/heidi-montag-schadenfreude.jpg?w=426

news flash everyone in the entire world is tired of nyc private school kids

feel like that last Rudd movie "Our Idiot Brother" belongs here tbh

That entire movie rides on the fact that Paul Rudd is immensely likable and all of his character's sisters were kind of quiddities material

"Early admission to top colleges, once the almost exclusive preserve of the East Coast elite, is now being pursued by a much broader and more diverse group of students, including foreigners and minorities."

OK, WHO TOLD THEM???

I mean it's not like it costs more to apply ED/EA, you just have to get done a lot faster and thus be on top of your shit/be supported by parents/guidance counselors who can get you to be on top of your shit. Never really quite understood the point of applying early; I guess if you are Generically Strong Applicant A and you want Prestigious University B to know that you really really like them best and won't ditch them for Equally Prestigious University C there might be some benefit there? But I bet the conditional probabilities on admission don't really work out that way.

well I believe it exists primarily so schools can lower their overall admissions %, and the tradeoff is that they do accept more people during that process

early action is silly - early decision makes more sense imo

I mean considering the forecasting/arbitrage that goes into college admissions on the school side it makes sense to offer the ED option since for each person you admit ED, that's anywhere from like 1+epsilon to maybe several people you don't have to admit in the regular pool; if the only reason ED was advantageous for certain kinds of students was that it was generally underutilized, then I guess that'll be less the case going forward (duh and/or hello). Really though ED is way more useful to the schools than to people who are applying ED unless they really really value those extra 4 months of senior slump.

it is more useful to the schools no doubt, but they can basically do whatever they want in this market

ha - my worst freshman roommate was a graduate of the Spence School!

nabisco summed up the premise of this thread several years before it was started:

But yeah, I mean, anyone who posits (e.g.) nanny-hiring as a significant symptomatic thing in the American mainstream is talking about a pretty particular reality that not everyone (to put it mildly) actually shares; good news for her, I guess, that the actual brown-skinned domestics, who may secretly be much closer to defining an American mainstream, probably go home to households a lot more like the ones she praises.
Inevitable result of having a chattering media class = some portion of the conversation that comes from inside it will be the conversation of that class, its own status issues, assumed as representative of Everything and symbolic/symptomatic of What's Happening in America

...

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, April 21, 2006 3:49 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i thought the premise of this thread was 'look at these douchebags and assholes'

that's the premise of ILX

j. you are correct

dayo too

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2094921_2094923,00.html

Via Whiney

That's some terrible accounting.

Feel like this might be a *controversial* Q&A post, but:

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/27/joining_the_food_stamp_nation/singleton/#comments

Sorry
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/27/joining_the_food_stamp_nation/singleton/

why does that belong itt? seems like a fine article.

b/c he lives in an expensive city, just traveled to India, smokes, shops at Whole Foods, etc.

and also I don't know how many hours a day he "hustles for stories" or whatever but it seems like he could at least get a part-time job to supplement income.

yeah well I consider home mortgage interest deductions, capital gains tax rates etc. etc. a much more dangerous form of welfare than 'poor journalist gets $200 for food'. you're buying into a right-wing narrative about how people should and shouldn't be allowed to consume. food stamps are a form of government spending w/ an incredibly high keynesian multiplier - the highest iirc - so if anything we should be aiming to get more people on food stamps. even ~people who smoke~ ffs.

I don't really have a problem with this guy getting food stamps so much as I have a problem with him pitying himself as a person who seems more poor by lifestyle choice than by economic reality.

well you're not a millionaire by lifestyle choice, you could have studied harder and become an investment banker

Public assistance has always carried the puritanical stink of stigma and guilt. As Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward explained in their classic book ”Regulating the Poor,” guilt and shame have long been intentional features of public aid — along with various forms of coerced labor and invasive monitoring — dating back to England’s poor laws of the 16th century, through to today’s much demonized welfare capitalism in America, where Republicans goad and bait our nation’s first black chief executive as “the food stamp president.”

this is the paragraph you need to read again and again

jesus was "the bread loaf prophet" and see how far that got us

my only beef w/ him is that he's buying organic chicken and farmer's market vegetables and shopping at whole foods - that stuff is expensive!! but it's his choice

the idea that fresh/organic produce and meat should be a luxury ie only for the middle class and above is absurd.

what's wrong with frozen veggies and no meat?

no need to collapse the distinction between fresh/organic there xp

I call myself frayed white collar — part of the privileged poor. I have a college degree, a career and an array of middle-class, working-class and more economically privileged friends; together we are a fairly good representation of the 97 percent, or maybe the 95 percent. And most of us are hard-pressed; even my teacher friends, making about $60,000 a year, are perpetually flat-lined economically, eking across each month’s finish line thanks to credit cards.

i know this is a weird demographic and not as attractive as the straight-up poor but its explosive growth is why shit is blowing up worldwide right now and the guy touches on some real stuff about debt and guilt as long-term methods of control in religious and secular societies alike and seems self-aware enough even if he needs to find a cheaper place to buy kale. (the guilt thing is unattractive and annoying to read about, i agree, but i guess that's how you know it works.)

look the bigger issue is that there's nothing to be gained from judging poor people based on what you consider to be their poor decisions other than self-satisfaction. you can go to a welfare office and judge all the young women w/ babies for their life decisions or you can look at this from a policy perspective and think 'what's the best way to help raise poor peoples' standard of living and boost economic growth?' a more efficient way would be just giving people cash but that's not gonna happen in a world where everyone assumes poor people will waste it on drugs (or organic foods.)

well if his goal is to engender sympathy and to reverse the narrative of guilt and shame associated with government assistance, without giving his opponents an easy way to lash back, he doesn't have to mention that he shops at whole foods! but I agree about the larger point overall, which is that there should be no shame in taking government assistance.

nobody wants to hear it but 60k a year in new york, even in jersey, does not allow you to raise a family without resorting to credit and will never ever allow you to buy a home. so if the answer there is "well move to another state" or "just eat chef boyardee asshole" something is broken.

I picked out that angle on the story because I have a belief that people should live below their means no matter their class, fwiw

and people should have a right to fresh produce and/or meat! but it doesn't have to come from whole foods

well even going down that path it makes a lot more sense to judge him for smoking than for buying healthy food

yeah I don't know what cigarette taxes are like in san fran. I guess I'd need to know more before I really judge him - like maybe the WF is the closest supermarket to his apartment. so whatever premium he pays is offset by the time/money it takes to get to a cheaper supermarket. *shrug*

xp well it sure as hell ain't coming from pathmark or any of the other ethnographic slow death traps that sell food adjacent to the projects.
i spent five years trying to buy groceries at one of those joints and there are nine rows of canned foods drenched in salt and eight rows of frozen or dried or liquid processed salt/sugar/fat and two rows of shitty and tasteless factory farm veg and fruit and a row of subpar grocery meat/factory meat. "local" butchers/fishmongers in the area do not deal reasonable quality meat and co-ops are a good option but require a large investment and a car. farmers markets are more expensive than whole foods. I rely heavily on freshdirect, which is not totally unreasonably expensive but definitely out of the reach of anyone without a computer/internet connection. trust me when i tell you that my urban area, without a whole foods in walking distance, offers very few options for anyone to buy fresh produce / veg for them and their family without owning a car OR making around 60K.
i have lived in rural areas and am aware that this varies depending on location.
and cigarettes are addictive folks.

i ain't asking argentina to cry for me, but the megamart experience makes it easy for people to subsist and slowly get diabetes/obese/otherwise incapacitated unless you have a lot of time to devote to your menu. There is not a magical local grocer that is accessible for a lot of urban folks; big box food/retail killed A LOT of that shit dead or pushed the price into the stratosphere.

I picked out that angle on the story because I have a belief that people should live below their means no matter their class, fwiw
--dayo

if we all did this the American economy would collapse.

maybe I just have low standards but I've always found big box supermarkets to have adequately fresh produce and/or meat - that includes pathmark, shoprite, save-a-lot, aldi, various chinatown bodegas, wal-mart, acme...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MqIYJf13Hw

This guy was the best at taking apart the Old Gray Lady