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

Oh yeah, clearly leaving out the great job boom of 1843

Experts say a new generation of less destructive nuclear arms may make the prospect of a nuclear strike less unthinkable than it once was. https://t.co/hcBaMzI8gc

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 22, 2022

meet the new executive editor of the new york times

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FQuZGRIXwAA_W9f?format=jpg&name=medium

Kahn is the eldest child of Dorothy Davidson and Leo Kahn (1916–2011), founder of the Purity Supreme supermarket chain in New England and co-founder of the global office supply chain Staples.

he looks like a staple

very strong "I am a real human doing real human things" energy

Look, I have taken off my bespoke suit coat and am relaxing on my antique oriental carpet in only my silk shirt and $500 necktie.

“just a little more seething hatred for the camera joe… that’s it”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/magazine/van-life-dwelling.html

I truly don’t understand this article on several levels - reads like a series of dull emails from a whiny person who got paid to drive around for a week

For the most part, I don’t remember things.

I remember when Caity Weaver could write.

Paywalled. That sounds like a premise for an article that could be entertaining enough to read if done well, although not by someone who did it for a mere week.

Paywalled.

huh how’d this get here

wtf. i thought auto dealership owners were working class pic.twitter.com/cGhyMW5Oew

— jonathan financial-crime (@xoayquanh) May 15, 2022

A lot of people hammering me for having a PhD in economics and knowing nothing about how the economy works: I plead guilty. I got a PhD in economics largely because I loved Freakonomics & wanted to study the data of sports & random things about people.

— Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (@SethS_D) May 15, 2022

Thinking about how shocked people are that I didn't know about auto dealerships & beverage distribution as paths to get rich. Proves value of data. We ALL have misleading view of the world from unrepresentative stories; rich people in my town were athletes, actors, & rap stars.

— Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (@SethS_D) May 16, 2022

rich people own

pwn3d

Thinking about how shocked people are that I didn't know about auto dealerships & beverage distribution as paths to get rich. Proves value of data. We ALL have misleading view of the world from unrepresentative stories; rich people in my town were athletes, actors, & rap stars.

Translation: I unwittingly revealed how stupid I am about the world I live in, but in my defense, you're stupid, too, and ugly, so there.

Can’t wait for his work diving in to the economic realities of our big beautiful boaters.

I'll cop to the fact that I didn't know people who owned car dealerships made so much more money than doctors or lawyers, I thought those were all the same general type of rich people

“rich ppl i notice/know about” vs “irl rich ppl” are two different things & the ppl on the first ie your own may not even be ~on~ the second irl list

idk its just that arrogance of thinking that what you personally know is the sum of knowledge

also re auto dealers, i think i just knew this from watching Friday Night Lights, Buddy owned dealerships & was like the richest guy in town lol

yeah well I'm a real American who doesn't watch prestige dramas

Friday Nights Lights is Texas football, son. Aint nothin presige about it (spits)

I remember realizing this when Kid Rock was at the peak of pretending he was some kind of Detroit-era white-trash-made-good hero and it came out that his father owned a string of car dealerships all over Michigan and he grew up in a house the size of your average art museum.

I thought he was a cowboy

he is neither a kid nor does he rock, talk amongst yourselves

I wouldn't think 'car dealers' in general but the size of businesses - if you're employing hundreds of people in any context, I would assume you're pulling in a lot of income.

car dealerships are an enormous racket, and the dealers are rich and powerful enough in local and state politics to keep it that way

A "new car dealership" is at a completely different level than owning a "used car lot". The dealership is a big business backed by a global multi-national business, while the latter might be scaled down to about the equivalent of owning a junk antique shop.

The economics of new car dealerships are bizarre and opaque - almost no profit on actually selling a car (despite the risk tied to having a $50k fragile piece of machinery sitting on an open lot), all tied into whatever side deals they can wrangle on financing kickbacks and extended warranties and $500 bumper film and shit.

The economics of new car dealerships are bizarre and opaque - almost no profit on actually selling a car (despite the risk tied to having a $50k fragile piece of machinery sitting on an open lot), all tied into whatever side deals they can wrangle on financing kickbacks and extended warranties and $500 bumper film and shit.

yeah well I'm a real American who doesn't watch prestige dramas

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Monday, May 16, 2022 2:23 PM (one hour ago)

what about Arthur?

it's funny this guy is just now discovering capital is a thing, but how many people are we talking about here who own the kind of franchised car dealership that gives the owner an income of >1.6m? that's the salary of a mid-level engineering manager at facebook and google.

where do those mid-level engineering managers live, and what's the cost of living there? (and how many of them are there?)

A couple of thousand dealership (income-)millionaires, I'd guess - Ford has 3000 dealers, Chevy presumably similar, on down the list. But then you start to add in the people who own a dozen 7-11 franchises and Arby's franchises and et al..

i think there are more "auto groups" that are partnerships not just a guy

anyway the answer is this guy (rip)
http://static-20.sinclairstoryline.com/resources/media/63fb718c-d855-412c-a0dd-0eb52dfd6bc6-fuccillo.jpg?1437501962256

fuck did that not post? THIS guy
http://static-20.sinclairstoryline.com/resources/media/63fb718c-d855-412c-a0dd-0eb52dfd6bc6-fuccillo.jpg

welp

iirc google USA headcount is 30k. i would guess there are 1000 people at google earning over 1m. maybe the same again at facebook, apple, and microsoft, amazon. 500 each at netflix, twitter, airbnb, snap, etc. 70% in california, 10% in seattle, 20% in nyc.

pretty soon you're talking about real money.

i guess my point is that 1) granted, this guy is an idiot for not knowing that small business owners are very rich 2) i'm not sure if people realize (are sufficiently angry about?) how much big tech people with ~10 years of experience earn from their regular income (i.e. not once in a lifetime startup IPO stuff, just their W2 income).

I know this but I also lived in the Bay Area from 2008-2017

https://smile.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Americas/dp/1589795474 is in many ways a vile text, full of frugality gospel, but it's also a book the baby nate silver upthread should read.

this was the article (sorry, it's the atlantic) bandied about in the wake of yesterday's quiddities/agonies (i have not read it yet, but then i also did not publish a half-assed op-ed in the nyt about its subject)

American Gentry

The jet-setting cosmopolitans of popular imagination exist, but they are far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed elite group, one that sits at the pinnacle of America’s local hierarchies.

Patrick wyman?!

Another work in this genre (on my reading list but can’t vouch for it) https://newrepublic.com/article/163818/99-percent-upholds-inequality-book-review

I guess I didn't know car dealerships had like hundreds of employees! what do they all do? Or when they talk about someone who owns an auto dealership do they mean somebody who owns something with multiple locations all over town?

You also forget the absolute morons like my parents who only take their car to the dealer mechanics for repairs because…oh wait, there’s no actual reason for it, they’re just idiots.

The benefit to going to the dealership is also record-keeping for your warranty. I have saved receipts from oil changes/work on vehicles exactly zero times in my life, if you always go back to the Toyota dealership it's in their system.

The mark-up on routine maintenance is astronomical. I’ve had two dealerships give me different estimates for some routine work, and then taken it to a mechanic who did it for 1/3rd of the price…no problems.

As far as my experience and the experience of every single person I’ve ever met goes, this is pretty universal.

Milo has a point re warranties and such, and I think that the sitch might be different if you’ve had a lobg term relationship with your car dealer, but generally, getting a car serviced at a dealer is an enormous scam afaic.

That said, my point was sort of indirect— namely, that dealerships have tons of employees, from sales to mechanics to secretaries to cleaners to environmental consultants etc. Big businesses!

They may be wealthy and proportionally overrepresented in government but they don't *feel* that way so it's a wash https://t.co/VlbjACiguI

— Will 🦥 Menaker (@willmenaker) May 17, 2022

losing my fucking mind at this lmao https://t.co/w5hjsNbimI pic.twitter.com/YKPtf08IJZ

— David Mack (@davidmackau) August 21, 2022

only with close friends — and the national media!!!!! pic.twitter.com/1r8CozGgCK

— David Mack (@davidmackau) August 21, 2022

Not sure where put this, but a true social media self-immolation by NYT film critic Lena Wilson:

Lena Wilson explains why she reposted Amandla Stenberg’s DM about her #BodiesBodiesBodies review, which Wilson dubbed a “95-minute advertisement for cleavage”:

“I don’t want this person who has more social power than me to think that it’s fucking okay to do something like this.” pic.twitter.com/S0BadaoRWV

— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) August 19, 2022