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

friends of a friend moved up here from brooklyn - they had decent/cool nyc jobs - and are starting fresh and have no jobs and they are near my age and all i can think is ahhhhhhhh pressure/anxiety/etc. but i wish them a ton of luck. they are really nice. its a gutsy move. i mean, we did it too 3 years ago when we left the island and i opened up a store when stores of any kind were closing left and right, but, you know, we have the power of the lord on our side. don't know how others do it.

i mean it IS a ton cheaper here than brooklyn/nyc, so there is that. but still...hard to find decent jobs around here. really hard.

Telling people trying to find jobs to move to ND or whatever sounds so "What do you mean you have a fever? There's ice in the freezer! Problem solved! Quit yr whining."

I'm sure part of the reason behind any reduction in mobility is a pretty big decrease in average job tenure over the past couple generations - a major relocation looks much less appealing when most jobs are held for under five years.

Also it's obviously harder for a two income household to relocate than a single income household.

nd is over, real deal's going on in utah

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/12/148252561/on-utahs-silicon-slopes-tech-jobs-get-a-lift

Maybe this is getting too far off on a tangent, but I remember maybe five years ago or so there was a popular sociology book about how the new upper middle class (or at least the pre-crash upper middle class) was very geographically mobile -- one of the tradeoffs for high paying jobs in engineering, computers, the pharma industry etc. was that you were likely to have to move often, either to move to where the next job was or to wherever your employer relocated you to. The result, according to the book, was a kind of quiddity/agony situation that I actually do find a bit sad -- these people wound up with few long term friendships, no community relationships, their kids had to change schools, etc.

that's a pretty good summary of 'the organization man' (1956)

army brats. they all become famous actors! so there is that upside.

While these two might sound like ski bums, don't be fooled: They are both chief executive officers.

Layfield runs Backcountry.com, an online retailer in Park City, Utah, that did nearly $300 million in sales last year, according to industry analysts.

who woulda guessed a company called backcountry.com would be in utah. also, black diamond. plz.

otoh one of my friends is national head of sales for a beverage company and can live wherever he wants-- he lives at the bottom of little cottonwood and skied 74 days at snowbird last year.

Is the author more irritating, or is it his subject?:

Mr. Lipton’s music is sort of a sliced-and-diced Great American Songbook. “The thing we lean back into is a kind of jazz-folk-Americana idiom,” Mr. Lipton said of his band, known as Ethan Lipton and His Orchestra, “but we also try to push forward into something that sounds contemporary lyrically and also isn’t too dinosaury sound-wise.”

And so “No Place to Go” features a jaunty tribute to the New Deal-era’s job-creation effort, the W.P.A., but also pokes fun at the working man’s propensity to, when facing financial ruin, “make another macho move in Scrabble” and “see if there’s anything about it on The Huffington Post.”

Attn Generation Why Bother: Forget Fargo, just come to Knoxville.

that's a pretty good summary of 'the organization man' (1956)

― iatee, Tuesday, 13 March 2012 02:29 (13 hours ago) Permalink

Is it though? I thought the idea of the Organization Man was more about guys who stay in the same neighborhood and same company, keep their heads down, advance slowly through the ranks by being likeable and inoffensive and conformist, socialize via elks clubs and shit like that.

army brats. they all become famous actors! so there is that upside.

― scott seward, Monday, March 12, 2012 11:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Man, I got rooked. ;_;

nah a lot of the book is about the organization man's willingness to be transferred from one IBM branch to another, and how the uniformity of the new suburbs / corporate culture created a uniform culture that they could easily fit into

too lazy to type this up:

http://i.imgur.com/xCql9.jpg

It's true, you can move to a new suburb and go to another mall owned by General Growth/Westfield/etc. and eat at Applebees and live on a street with very beige homes.

If the expectation is that you'll spend your whole career at one company and that they'll take care of you with a pension and so forth, then it's probably a lot harder to say no if they ask to transfer you to a new city.

guys I have worked at one place forever and I'm vested in a pension plan

where is my job transfer?

Do low-level corporate managers eat at Applebees? I would think there's some more upscale casual chain that caters to them, but I don't know what that would be these days.

arugulabees

The uh Heartland Brewery? Do those exist outside NY?

There are definitely brew pub chains!

Maybe Houston's

Transferring executives, even when there is no functional reason doesn't produce well-rounded people, but it does keep those executives so disoriented in their lives outside of work that they become ever more centered in their work life to the exclusion of outside interests.

I really don't think "well-rounded" is what that passsage suggests they're going for. More like "generic."

more on north dakota:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/a-tale-of-two-resource-booms-continued/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html

Third-Best Jewish Ping-Pong Player Quits Bank

Starting his own firm, perhaps?

it might almost be credible if his golden era for goldman sachs was like the 50s instead of...the 00s??

'we just lost the values and care for our customer that we had during the bubble ;_;'

@pareene
Goldman used to be about making obscenely wealthy people wealthier while also making ourselves obscenely wealthy, now it is about GREED
19 minutes ago

also in the news:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx

remember when you could just quit your job at not write an op ed

and

The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years.

secret sauce

http://www.theawl.com/2012/03/the-goldman-sachs-op-ed#more

I'm in favor of anything that gets public opinion even more against wall street

i already posted this to the margin call thread: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/why-i-am-leaving-the-empire%252c-by-darth-vader-201203145007

dude should go work for grayson moorhead

http://www.hulu.com/watch/61335/saturday-night-live-moorhead-securities

lol i see max already went there ; )

i think this guy's more naive than slippery. after all, he started at Goldman Sachs around 2000 or so ... right when everyone's favorite former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was running things. i find it hard to believe that anyone with an ounce of real intelligence would seriously consider Paulson to be a model of probity, intelligence and ethics. (of course, had Smith started a few years before he did, he'd also have rubbed shoulders with that other upstanding example of business/political ethics Jon Corzine.) unless we're supposed to read this as a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment or something.

Between the move-to-north-dakota guy and the olive garden review I don't think North Dakota has been discussed on ILX as much in the board's entire life as it has this week.

xpost I wonder if it's more that during the boom everyone was so making money hand-over-fist that there wasn't as much need to be openly (within GS) out to screw your clients?

I am tempted to give the ex-GS's naivete stance a little credit - he did mention he came to the US from south africa for college, maybe he was just really impressionable?

BACK on the scale of home economics, Laura MacCleery discovered that it’s not cheap to buy a chemical-free bassinet. “We had it made with nontreated wood, by Amish people,” she said. “I think it was 400 bucks.” The organic mattress was hand-stitched.

“And then the baby was born large,” Ms. MacCleery said. “She was like 8 pounds 10 ounces.”

Maya outgrew the nontoxic bassinet in a month.

That purchase may sound frivolous. But then how much would you pay to keep your baby from being exposed to the formaldehyde emitted by some particleboard furniture?

Janet Golden, a professor at Rutgers in Camden, N.J., who is writing a history of the American baby, sees the quest for the perfect green nursery as a kind of second job. It’s “a status marker for women,” she said. “You have to have a lot of money to throw away a perfectly good shower curtain.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/garden/going-to-extreme-lengths-to-purge-household-toxins.html?ref=style

Took me until the fifth line to work out that a bassinet isn't a cross between a bassoon and a clarinet.

that is a solid gold classic of the genre right there.