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

also, no wonder this guy is a dipshit -- he's a pop-economist: http://www.toddbuchholz.com/about

this is all i really need to know:

"A former director of economic policy at the White House"

but he's really good at predicting when things will turn into shit! i guess that's nice. good job!

For about $200, young Nevadans who face a statewide 13 percent jobless rate can hop a Greyhound bus to North Dakota, where they’ll find a welcome sign and a 3.3 percent rate.

sounds like an euler argument

and is a co-producer of the Broadway smash “Jersey Boys.”

Victoria Buchholz, a student at Cambridge University, is at work on a book about the neuropsychology of the teenage brain.

will she finally crack the code???

for the price of leaving behind their families, friends, social connections, loved ones, young Nevadans who face a statewide 13 percent jobless rate can hop a Greyhound bus to North Dakota, but they're too busy reading facebook. bummer.

WHAT IF THEY HAD LEFT JERSEY? THEY HARDLY WOULD HAVE BEEN JERSEY BOYS, RIGHT? THEY STRUGGLED UNTIL THEY MET JOE PESCI AND THE REST IS HISTORY YOU ASSHOLE. IF THEY HAD LEFT JERSEY THEY NEVER WOULD HAVE FUCKING MET JOE PESCI!

sorry.

oh my god that is the actual stupidest thing thats ever been written

Why wouldn't a young person not want to go to North Dakota? You could hang out with Marilyn Hagerty.

lol i googled todd g. buchholz and google is telling me that his personal site 'may be compromised.'

that's what you get for fucking with kids in their parents' basements amirite

that guy should definitely move to north dakota. and stay there.

i feel like the new york times is totally trying to make me move out of this COUNTRY these days. is it just me? i like where i live! stop making me sick about this friggin' place, nyt! i beg of you. i just have to stop looking at it entirely.

was reading an article about supermax prisons and solitary confinement and here's the conclusion that prison officials and the new york times came up with: 23 hours of solitary confinement in a prison cell for months at a time might not be the greatest idea. this is 2012, right? is everyone on the planet this friggin' slow? i find it hard to believe. where do all the smart people live? gonna go get a passport, brb...

There is not enough alcohol in the world for me to write a rebuttal of that article, but this

Why are young people not crossing borders? “This generation is going through an economic reset,” said John Della Volpe, who directs polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, which surveys thousands of young people each year. He reports that young people want to stay more connected with their hometowns: “I spoke with a kid from Columbus, Ohio, who dreamed of being a high school teacher. When he found out he’d have to move to Arizona or the Sunbelt, he took a job in a Columbus tire factory.”

...is something people have been saying about poor inner-city (read: black) people for a long time. "Why don't they move to the country, where it's cheaper to live/poor people could have gardens if they were willing to work in them/there are ill-paying manufacturing (or farming, or etc) jobs in the middle of nowhere?" Because when you only survive by your known support system, you cannot afford to leave it. Who helps you with child care when you don't know anyone? No one. Who loans you $50 until payday when you're new in town and have no extended family? No one. Who feeds you when your kids are hungry? No one. How do you move to and work in a place that requires a car when you have poor credit and no license? How completely alone will you be when no one around you shares or respects your culture/heritage? And so on.

that's not how the PILGRIMS saw it

the pilgrims starved to death and died of frostbite i think. they were morons.

they relied on the red man to get by until payday.

essentially the article's view of human beings is that they're totally labor. it's a vision that completely eliminates the family, community, neighborhood, etc. everyone is just a body for the factory so it might as well move itself to where the factories are and if it doesn't, it isn't doing its job for capitalism. fuck this idea forever.

the recession would be solved if everybody would just move to north dakota

people in north dakota just stand around and close their eyes and pretend they live in arizona, don't they?

water capital flows downhill. why aren't ppl more like that? if money is speech, and also time, then ppl must be going downhill too

you should get the death penalty for exceptionally vapid and ignorant op-ed pieces like cmon

how many young people from north dakota leave that state every year and never go back? probably a lot! he should have written about them. they are the new pioneers.

I kinda like it in that it puts down on paper what a lot of dumb people are thinking but haven't been able to clearly express, so it's sorta useful almost. 'there have been no structural changes in the american economy since I was a child! kids just haven't listened to 'born to run' enough!'

btw peace corps volunteer #s are highest in 40 yrs

also a lot of states have raised the driving age to 18

okay, to be fair, north dakota population is rising slowly to 1930 levels:

1870

2,405

—

1880

36,909

1,434.7%

1890

190,983

417.4%

1900

319,146

67.1%

1910

577,056

80.8%

1920

646,872

12.1%

1930

680,845

5.3%

1940

641,935

−5.7%

1950

619,636

−3.5%

1960

632,446

2.1%

1970

617,761

−2.3%

1980

652,717

5.7%

1990

638,800

−2.1%

2000

642,200

0.5%

2010

672,591

4.7%

ppl's ability to construct a narrative that absolves them from any responsibility or need to think systemically is p amazing

and the reason, apparently, for the rise in north dakota population is the "oil-shale field" boom. which sounds lovely.

as paul krugman mentioned in some blog post the other day, the # of new jobs created in california since 2009 > the entire adult population of north dakota

it also sounds like something that young people SHOULD be flocking to. the oil-shale fields of north dakota.

lol oil projects arent really huge job creators

^^ the words of a guy who doesn't like tom joad

I think I did the math when I was having this argument w/ euler but the amount of people who need to move to north dakota to turn 3% unemployment to 8% is really *not that many*

this guy actually worked in the white house. doing stuff there. this is a government think tank brain trust economist from harvard. he gets paid money to think. and he runs a zillion dollar hedge fund. there is nothing he can't do.

yeah, i was gonna say, doesn't take much to boost numbers in ND.

nbd, nd has ~27% as many ppl as live in brooklyn

those ppl are all fucking slack-ass hipsters tho, so

if we make north dakota the new williamsburg we can solve a lot of problems

'oh yeah I work in the oil fields as a freelancer, starting my own band of miners'

what's really amazing is that someone at the NYT thought that this poorly-thought-out grab-bag of lazy, smug opinions was actually worth publishing. the NYT used to be known as "the paper of record," wasn't it? does this shit reflect staffers' opinions about allegedly shiftless young 'uns, were they blown away by this jackass's "impressive" credentials?!? God help us in either case.

is north dakota ready for orthodox brooklyn jews? well they'd better be, because that's where the action is in 2012

i tried to read this guy's woody allen movie review and i couldn't believe it was written by someone over the age of 17.

"This sounds like the same noble savage fantasy that’s made the rounds of literature ever since Jean Jacques Rousseau. The jungle and the farm are noble. The city and “civilization” are corrupting. Contrast Tarzan with Dorian Gray. In Tarzan immoral Londoners deceive the innocent ape-man, who knows more about honesty and decency than they. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the urban and urbane Dorian is a selfish, immoral monster. Clearly, he’d spent too much time in the civilized world and not enough time swinging from the trees in the jungle. These depictions are fantasies, not just because they are written by fiction writers. They are fantasies because crime rates are lower among city-dwellers than among primitives. Murder rates in Europe today are about one-tenth as high as in 1300AD, when just about everyone lived on the farm. As societies have become more focused on trade, commerce, and capitalism, they have become less violent, not more. In ancient burial grounds for primitive people, between 20-50 percent of the skeletons appear to have been bludgeoned to death. Unfortunately, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby falls into the same fantasy camp as Tarzan."

http://www.toddbuchholz.com/archives/713

this guy taught at harvard? is his biography on that webpage actually real? does he actually live in his moms' basement? i'm skeptical...

"Some Occupy protestors wave posters, whiskey and hypodermic needles. Others clutch iPads, Kindles and Nooks. I wonder how many are reading The Great Gatsby."

all his stuff really belongs on that stuff you read that sounds like an onion headline thread.

what's really amazing is that someone at the NYT thought that this poorly-thought-out grab-bag of lazy, smug opinions was actually worth publishing. the NYT used to be known as "the paper of record," wasn't it? does this shit reflect staffers' opinions about allegedly shiftless young 'uns, were they blown away by this jackass's "impressive" credentials?!? God help us in either case.

― kurwa mać (Polish for "long life") (Eisbaer), Sunday, March 11, 2012 9:53 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

my theory is that they are giving this guy enough rope

I eagerly await artisanal oil hand-extracted from local oil shale