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

I guess maybe now there's potentially more money in the kind of boutique, high-end farming? Although I don't know if that's even true, and it's probably a tough business to establish oneself in.

artisanal vegetables

It may have changed but my impression is that unless you live in a cool area where you can sell your goods directly or to people who will pay a decent amount for what you're growing/raising, so much of farming is selling to larger corporations because they're the only ones who buy, and they are pretty much out to keep you poor. The only rich farmers I knew growing up were the ones who came from money and never actually worked their own farms.

oh, you mean heirloom vegetables xp

artisanal = avoiding the crude and artless things that farmers do to actually make ends meet = how to makes a small fortune is start with a large one.

no he means handcrafted tomatoes

i find it weird that vanity farming hasn't been turned into a turnkey operation with an army of roomba robots doing your bidding.

haybaling app

there are lots of small boutique-y farms that sell directly to fancy restaurants or fancy wholesalers and who make good money doing it. and a lot of them are run by old educated ex-hippies. the guys who went back to the land and decided not to leave the land and go to law school.

the guys who get laughed at by regular farmers but who make good money selling fancy potatoes to french restaurants. i thought it was funny that lorrie moore wrote about one of these guys in her last novel cuz i knew people like that when i lived and worked in philly. philosophy-major old dudes who had the most killer onions you've ever seen in your life.

It may have changed but my impression is that unless you live in a cool area where you can sell your goods directly or to people who will pay a decent amount for what you're growing/raising, so much of farming is selling to larger corporations because they're the only ones who buy, and they are pretty much out to keep you poor. The only rich farmers I knew growing up were the ones who came from money and never actually worked their own farms.

I read an article once that detailed how farmers get fucked in this system, particularly in dealing with Wal-Mart, who'll just refuse to pay for a shipment if they leave it sitting and anything goes bad.

after a semi-dumb facebook argument, I realized that the article is kind of conflating three things (1) people who just wanna do a farm internship after college for an "experience, (2) romantic types who think they can be farmers, and (3) people who actually go to agricultural colleges to study farming (I'm guessing that's what the colorado state tractor guy is). People in category 1 don't intend to be serious about it in most cases, people in category 2 do and mostly fail (but occasionally succeed), and people in category 3 are mostly serious about it and are much more likely to succeed.

I'm rooting for category 3. go Aggies!

I'm starting 'farm for america'

let me guess - no tractors though

:)

Solar powered tractors! (cue Jackson Browne)

More 'Booming' LOLs but

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/booming/25match-booming.html

http://theamericanscholar.org/numbers-game/

think he just touched the third rail there

man let me at the posts from that weekly blog

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/realestate/how-do-you-get-a-key-to-gramercy-park.html?hp

had no idea there was an entire series

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/features/timestopics/series/booming/index.html

ugh, old people

Reading through the list of articles reminds me of an email my wife got from my mom yesterday. Apparently my mom was reading reviews of some random book on Amazon and came across a review written by someone in Austin (where I live), so she wanted to know if my wife wrote the review or if not, did we happen to know the person who did.

So anyway, that's what boomers are like.

I once met a person from Austin, where you live. She was very quick to jump to conclusions and made broad generalizations about the world and other people, mostly based on little or no experience.

So anyway, that's what Austin residents are like.

well, now I been told

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/dining/reviews/restaurant-review-yunnan-kitchen-on-the-lower-east-side.html

ATMOSPHERE Contemporary, with Chinoiserie limited to framed jewelry and a carpet showing a tiger standing on its head.

thank GOD the chinoiserie is limited!

thank god I can eat ethnic food at a restaurant not owned by immigrants

opening line is so perfect for this thread

SOME dream of the redistribution of wealth. For eaters in search of fresh adventures, a more pressing agenda might be the redistribution of excellent ingredients.

Actually I think the way he meant it was less quiddy than I thought, nm.

'How dare you show that in public. Keep it hidden away.' Well, not an exact quote...

i had a feeling that would end up here

“BlackBerry users are like Myspace users,” sneers Craig Robert Smith, a Los Angeles musician. “They probably still chat on AOL Instant Messenger.”

It has been so long since I've used chat I have no idea what people would even use now.

tons of NYC lawyers still have blackberries. they don't seem ashamed.

Ugh, lawyers.

All right, I was trolling, I admit.

I still miss the keyboard. Even as the iPhone autocorrect has gotten much better, I find it humiliating not being able to accurately type the words myself. It's like having prosthetic robot hands or something.

BlackBerry users are like Myspace users

The vanity of small differences.

"sneers"

Ugh, lawyers.

I get my lawyermail right in my iPhone inbox. With iPhone, nobody has to know you're a lawyer!

they are really going hard on this BBC/jimmy savile thing. which of their demos cares about that? is it the ruling class?

i don't think the nyc ruling class knows who he was, so no

cd have something to do with a certain new ceo of ny times named mark thompson?

ah ha

tracer otm

though i'd kinda think they'd soft-pedal it given that thompson himself could be implicated - dunno

theres a big ongoing contract fight btw the newspaper guild and management! its a power play

also: http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/times-must-aggressively-cover-mark-thompsons-role-in-bbcs-troubles/

aha yes

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-31/wall-street-finds-sandy-silver-lining-in-wine-monopoly.html

“I had to go to the wine cellar and find a good bottle of wine and drink it before it goes bad,” Murry Stegelmann, 50, a founder of investment-management firm Kilimanjaro Advisors LLC, wrote in an e-mail after he lost power at 6 p.m. on Oct. 29 in Darien, Connecticut.

The bottle he chose, a 2005 Chateau Margaux, was given 98 points by wine critic Robert Parker and is on sale at the Westchester Wine Warehouse for $999.99.

“Outstanding,” Stegelmann said. He started the day with green tea at Starbucks, talking with neighbors about the New York Yankees’ future and moving boats to the parking lot of Darien’s Middlesex Middle School.