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

I thought he said that very directly just by listing all those expenses! (I note though that he does seem to say even more directly that his wife did that too.)

Haha yeah, I guess the unsayable "direct" thing I had in mind was like "these KIDS were bankrupting us (that's right, Alex, I'm talking about you)"

I was going to jump past boggling at the beach house rental and wonder about the $700 at J. Crew, but I guess if you needed, like, one good suit and some decent sweaters for Christmas presents ... the world really does hold you to your socio-economic status, doesn't it -- even beyond nobody wanting to be the guy who gets divorced and suddenly has to start showing up to work in cheap suits, it'd be tough to be the guy making $100k who's like "I got you a candy bar for Christmas!"

yeah the erm narrative here is anyways at least partly "but banking professionals who should be my Friends and Advisors assured us it would be alright!"?

However fishy such blanket blame is in general, I'm not sure it's entirely misplaced re how things rolled out this cycle. At one point around 2006, I momentarily had a crazy amount of money in my account due to family property reorg stuff, and was by phone promptly invited to an "advisement meeting" with a dude at my bank, who tried to convince me he had the correct %ages I should place my assets in (all mediated by said bank, obv). (I still was in net debt though!) I was all very cynical and noncommittal, which is not due to my deep insight or anything, just because my current boss worked in a bank in the early 00s and has spilled much shit on how those outfits operate(d?). (My fave morsel: the guys who construct the deals don't actually inform the salespeople abt all potential downsides and builtin fees, as this may hurt their sales!)

I don't think this guy deserves much point-and-laugh, btw, though it is obv somewhat funny he writes on economics.

I don't know that that's a big surface narrative, given the "I wasn't duped" and the bit about how a banking professional's refinancing maneuvers actually worked to carve down some debt

it's about even someone who should have known better made some really dumb mistakes, which is always a story worth telling imo

Literal translation: quiddity = whatness

A weird thing about "quiddity" is that the first definition, "essence", seems to be the opposite of the second definition, "a trifling point". So it can either refer to the essence of something or a minor, trifling detail? Confusing. I have a feeling that it's a word that's rarely used correctly.

my point is that there are hundreds of thousands of people with stories just like this who don't write for the new york times and have six-figure salaries who are perhaps just a leeetle more representative of the mortgage fallout going on right now - my pointing and laughing is at the editors, not this poor schmuck

well, they wanted a personal, first-perosn story, so going with a new york times writer... kinda makes sense, no?

he will die at some point

can't write about that tho

That's a fair point, Tracer, but the fact that the Times can be willfully class-blind is hardly news to anyone who's ever read the Style section, for instance.

what is sadder loss or death

conceptually, I mean

loss is a kind of death, when u think about it??

imagine in that picture that the dog is dead but the money is lost

you can use death as a pillow but you can you the money you lost to get a bunch of people to type in the middle of the day

imagine yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile

uh oh i'm losing a life

actually, i am pointing and laughing at this guy too. sorry edmund.

It's funny that this guy gets himself into such deep shit but when the financial crisis comes it's actually a relief to him. For one thing, he can console himself with the spectacle of so many other supposed financial experts who screwed up at least as badly as he did. And more significantly, the banks are too swamped with delinquent borrowers to follow up on his case - so he has basically been living in the house rent-free for the past 8 months.

ya it's pretty crazy that that's how the story ends, i was expecting some sort of bankruptcy followed by a pledge of renewal or something remotely redemptive like that but it shocked me that it ended with him in this bizarre institutional limbo.

that there are hundreds of thousands of people with stories just like this who don't write for the new york times and have six-figure salaries who are perhaps just a leeetle more representative of the mortgage fallout going on right now

This is definitely true, but there is part of me that thinks ... well, even leaving aside the Times's readership -- or the fact that one of the notable things about the current situation is that its impacts are being felt higher up the economic ladder -- there's also the way it's all called into question the sustainability of a whole mainstream/normal middle-class existence that is built on suddenly shaky things like debt and home values. That is probably worth thinking about, and possibly edifying for middle-class people who are recognizing a shakiness to their economic lives that they hadn't previously had as big of a worry about.

Is 66% of your income anywhere near normal for alimony/child-support? I don't know anyone paying alimony (lol broek friends), but child support doesn't net them (everyone I know is on the receiving end) much.

should have used that credit line on a better divorce lawyer, amirite

I don't know that that's a big surface narrative, given the "I wasn't duped" and the bit about how a banking professional's refinancing maneuvers actually worked to carve down some debt

A fair enough point. The mania obv went beyond the professionals.

Talking of which: I don't know how recruiting works in this kind of business -- my biased, stereotypical prejudice says that you get the young people who are willing to work like 50 hrs weekly unpaid overtime etc from ambition alone, thus having no memory of even the Asia crisis, let alone the dotcom and the 80s yuppie downfall, thus by induction extrapolating bubble arising into Law of Nature or something. I dunno.

xpost nabisco correct on "normal middle-class" stuff after what I responded to btw. But they can't take away our Internet can they??? :p

A weird thing about "quiddity" is that the first definition, "essence", seems to be the opposite of the second definition, "a trifling point"

Haha good spot there, maybe this is a general defusing thing about words asserting importance -- see also moot (adjective):

1 a: open to question : DEBATABLE b: subjected to discussion : DISPUTED
2: deprived of practical significance : made abstract or purely academic

i suspect the second "quiddity" meaning might be contaminated with a sense of "quibbling" via misuse?

or else the identifying an object's "what-ness" is, in itself, a trifling pursuit?

je ne sais quid

i suspect the second "quiddity" meaning might be contaminated with a sense of "quibbling" via misuse?

Herring looks mighty red to me. Sorry.

Yup, we know what stuff which is what it is is (OR DO WE?).

There is a neverending demand for words meaning "thing I can't get worked up about", and obv the learnèd world (it's academic! it's just semantic!) is a fair source for this. (I like the pluralization "quiddities" btw!)

my guess was it was some 'liquiddity' pun or something?

Thread author! please inform on your intended meaning of quiddity!

1: whatever makes something the type that it is : essence
2 a: a trifling point

exactly the midpoint of these: trifling details that tell the tale; habits of the tribe

there's also the way it's all called into question the sustainability of a whole mainstream/normal middle-class existence

dude this guy writes for the new york times and pulls down $100K - he is not "normal"!

it wouldnt be controversial to call supporting a fam on 100k/yr in the nyc metro area "normal middle class"

actually he made more like $120,000 and the new light of his life made $60,000. not to mention the stock options.

(the house is in maryland.)

and the kids lived with the ex iirc

he wanted to pretend the monthly ass-whuppin his wallet was getting from his ex just didn't exist i guess

but i gotta say, it's a little hard for me to really put myself in his shoes

maybe a trunk full of j. crew cardigans would put me in the right frame of mind

i guess he should just lay down and die huh

(the house is in maryland.)

DC metro area is sufficiently comparable to NYC metro area that max's point is pretty much the same. Silver Spring is in Montgomery County, which is $$$$ to live in.

so that makes him a normal middle class dude? ...

his story is really about his failed marriage and his unwillingness to face his new situation - something you can fall into regardless of salary bracket - but he's trying like hell to make it sound like he's been forsaken by wild circumstance

and the editor waves it into print as testimony from the front lines of financial desperation

For the demographics of the place, sure. Montgomery County is full of millionaires. It's like the sixth-richest county in America. $120,000 would be a pretty middling salary there.

xxp

oh this guy was interviewed on all things considered today. i missed the beginning of the interview and was all confused as to why he kept invoking "the love of my life" as the reason he was in dire financial straits. he used the phrase "the love of my life" like nine times in two minutes, guys.

According to this, median income in Mo Co was $91,835 in 2007, $30,000 higher than the median for the state. So he was making more than the median, but not much more. Also, cost-of-living index there is 123.8, based on a US average of 100. For comparison purposes, New York County, which includes Manhattan, has a COL index of 187 and a median income of $64,217.

oh this guy was interviewed on all things considered today.

well knock me over with a feather.

Let's not get into an argument about average salaries, given that I never said his was average. I said, speaking of economic events over the past couple years:

it's all called into question the sustainability of a whole mainstream/normal middle-class existence that is built on suddenly shaky things like debt and home values

^ I think the above is true for a pretty broad range of incomes, from families bringing in $60k a year to families bringing in $180k -- the latter family is surely financing nicer stuff, but the fundamentals of a debt-based and home-value-centric middle-class existence are pretty similar, and I don't think they change significantly until you hit a kind of wealth that goes far beyond A Nice Income and enters a whole other kind of financial organization.

If you ask me how "normal" I think he is, I would probably say -- for those same reasons above -- that I think most American families bringing in $120k-$180k a year (especially, yes, in some specific places) live an economic life that's not so markedly different from their normal/mainstream middle-class peers who bring in less. The houses are bigger and the cars and clothes nicer and the vacations longer, but the fundamentals or debt and assets won't vary too much, I don't think.

I agree, though, that the main glaring thing here is the special circumstance that more than half of his income was suddenly going to alimony and child-support payments.

oh this guy was interviewed on all things considered today. i missed the beginning of the interview and was all confused as to why he kept invoking "the love of my life" as the reason he was in dire financial straits. he used the phrase "the love of my life" like nine times in two minutes, guys.

Yeah, I heard that segment and the "love of my life" stuff was interesting. Sounds a lot like he's trying to talk himself into believing it, considering that there's a lot of resentment for her bubbling under the surface of that NYT book excerpt. Sounds like she wouldn't or couldn't accept the austerity measures he knew they needed to institute, and he was too much of a pussy to insist.

So basically by "normal" I mean:

(a) being dependent on debt to cover not only a slightly inflated standard of living, but more necessary things like bills, repairs, things for children, etc., and

(b) having your financial existence completely tied into homeownership, home value, equity, and debt leveraged against that real estate

which I suspect describes more or less the bulk of American families

Some winners in this article:

They Fled City Jobs. Now, It’s Time for Farm Prom. A group of young urbanites gave up desk jobs to become farmers. They have earned the harvest party.

There was an oyster farmer with his date, a sometime organic-farm-stand cashier in a vintage fur, and a sungold-tomato grower in a plastic prom-king crown. At D.J. decks set atop a bale of hay was a flower farmer in a silver gown, bopping her head, which was topped with the Carhartt beanie she wears to work the fields.

But these farmers were not tilling the fields of America’s heartland.

Outside the barn doors were beach houses and wineries and the seaside resorts of Eastern Long Island. Few of the farmers stomping work boots on the dance floor came from agrarian roots. Most were corporate or academic refugees, who in recent years said they found new meaning in growing things.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/nyregion/farmer-prom-long-island.html

hrrruuuughggggghhhhhhnnnnnngggghhhh

Peter Treiber Jr., 35, an artist and vegetable grower on whose farm the dance took place

Google sez it's actually his father's farm, purchased after retiring from the family insurance brokerage.

insufferable savages

F you and your beanie

Ain’t gonna work on daddy’s farm no more

reminds me of the new yorker article on the fabulous new trend of FORAGING. the irony of rich people digging for edible plants when most of the world has been doing it forever lost on the people involved. omg, can you believe it, there's actual FOOD in the woods. and then the flood of wild mushroom photos on social media was unleashed.

don't get me wrong, i hate them too, but i'm honestly glad for rich people that they're discovering "growing stuff". presumably they are actually doing some growing themselves. not going to click thru and read about it though lol.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/20/style/class-of-palm-beach-tiktok-instagram-wealth.html

What the ultra rich wear to the grocery store