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

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v134/tracerhand/Picture1.jpg

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/magazine/17foreclosure-t.html

not photoshop

Noticed that earlier today. My heart was not immediately bent.

is this thread sponsored by gawker

The only problem was money. Having separated from my wife of 21 years, who had physical custody of our sons, I was handing over $4,000 a month in alimony and child-support payments. That left me with take-home pay of $2,777, barely enough to make ends meet in a one-bedroom rental apartment. Patty had yet to even look for a job.

Found it very hard to read past this paragraph for the reason of my head being filled with visions of these two idiots burning in an eternal lake of fire.

the best part of that photo is the kid on dog in the background

little orphan annie back there

^yea srsly i didnt even notice that at first

guys do you realize what this means? the economic crisis is even affecting rich people! this means it is really newsworthy!! it's like when straight people started getting hiv!!!

what's a quiddity?

think of the barefoot girls laying on dogs on the porches of brick homes in silver spring, md. x-post

“I feel as if I am finally at home,” she exclaimed as soon as we moved into the house. She could settle down and do the things she had always been best at: making a new home, nurturing her children and loving me.

But eventually:

The frosted-crystal shade on a beloved Italian floor lamp was cracked. The dog had gnawed the leg on her Biedermeier chair.

The Khaki Class

Thread of ;_;

I can't really join in on any rich-people schadenfreude here, because it sounds to me like this guy is not of some far-distant social class, and the $4k alimony/child-support + take-home of $2.75k equation actually does sound pretty rough to me -- what's weird about it is to read the contention that this felt like a natural situation to wind up falling into; I suppose at that age and social situation it might, but of the many people I know who take home around that much money a month, I can surely tell you that not that many of them expect homes on it, and I'm not even just talking about the ones in New York.

I mean, judging by that equation we might estimate an income in the general neighborhood of $100k a year, which is certainly pleasant but not some sort of distant class of wealth and privilege whose travails I might comfortably laugh at.

On one hand -- ugh, fuck this guy.

On the other hand, I have to give him credit for a little reality check. I just paid off the last of my credit card debt and I have a fixed rate mortgage, so I need to quit waking up at 4 a.m. and worrying about money.

On the 3rd hand, nice work of him to pull his story together and sell it to W.W. Norton.

you've got three hands? surely you can swing a book deal out of that.

it's true, nabisco - he never really was that rich, especially by the standards of the new york times - but he sure lives and writes like he is. which is of course where the trouble started. getting a monthly keelhaul from the ex didn't help, either - i wonder if he writes about that in his book? - but i think this man's most basic problem was imagining that a take-home of $2500 monthly was enough to buy a half-mil pile. it's enough to make a casual reader think that the financial crisis really is a result of damn fools like him. in any case, this thread isn't for schadenfreude per se - but don't let that stop you - it's a record of what kinds of voices the new york times tends to lean on.

i'm struck by his weaselly evasion of responsibility - despite the mea culpa undertones, he makes his wonderful new lady friend sound like a spendthrift bitch and says that his total lack of financial awareness was a symptom of the "same infection" that brought low the titans of industry. fat chance, ed.

i think this man's most basic problem was imagining that a take-home of $2500 monthly was enough to buy a half-mil pile

not enough OTM in the world for this

loooool @ tracer hand: voice of the underclass

I had assumed we would start by renting a house or an apartment, but it quickly became clear that it was almost easier to borrow a half-million dollars and buy something.

n.e.way: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/garden/14aaron.html

ny times does seem to have a thing for pictures of the sprawled daughters of the leisure class in front of their itlianate mansions

sorry Lamp i missed the part where you had a point

my takeaway from this article is that our "elite" journos are often just as ignorant and greedy as the rest of us humps -- not to mention that i feel a bit smug seeing how shitty the media's coverage of the whole real estate/subprime mess was.

The Khaki Class

lol South

i don't know crap about this guy, nor do i care, BUT

when i was 22 i dated this very cute but not-very-smart guy. it was long distance, so we wrote a lot of letters (this was in the lol 90s). in one letter he told me that being with me made him feel "quidity". i smugly laughed a little because i figured that he meant "tranquility" and wow was this guy adorable for not being able to use a dictionary. then i looked up the word "quidity" and realized that it was real (although not what he meant, i am 100% sure)

this thread is the first time i have ever actually seen anyone use this word. the end.

maybe he was like "wow she thinks my made-up word means something.. what a dim-bulb"

what do you think he actually meant?

pretty sure he meant tranquility, like comfort (i remember this from context, but really this was a long time ago and i can't remember much about the situation aside from this strange misused word)

Megan McArdle on the piece. Judge for yourself.

Actually I kind of like her points?

ya i mean... not really sure why this piece is as contempt-worthy as some are making it out to be. it's kind of brutally depressing.

It is in a 'there-but-for' sense for sure. Not that I was ever going to try and be an economics reporter for the NY Times, but as time has passed I'm beginning to think the soundest piece of advice I've ever received in regard to writing was something J. D. Considine told me years ago -- 1993 or so -- in response to a random e-mail or two I sent him. He pretty much said, "Freelancing and journalism is very hard work and you should only pursue it on a full-time basis if you are willing to stick to that level." I'm honestly glad I heeded that and I think what you see in both pieces, regardless of whatever else feeds into their respective situations, reflects that.

At the same time, I'm trying to put my finger on what still jars about McArdle's response and it seems to be this sense of keeping up with the Joneses as paramount driving factor/potential excuse. At what point is leisure travelling to Europe, for instance, a 'minimum necessity' -- and I speak as one who's been there a number of times now. Still, I realize it's a sliding scale, says the person who has participated in a CSA thing with a local farmer for some years now.

Literal translation: quiddity = whatness

Ned, I read her response as being more about the foolhardiness of ever thinking ANY of those things are necessities. She seems to be (gently) chiding that whole tendency?

Yah... she's just sayin' that you hang with people for whom this is true, you wake up with fleas

I think maybe something to add to McArdle's response is that we have this general cultural tendency to view attention as somehow related to money, a connection that really falls apart when it comes to writers of all sorts -- it's very easy to withhold sympathy from people writing about their woes in public, as if they're coming from a position of privilege or just courting attention, but in plenty of cases they don't have much concrete privilege and writing about their experiences is just, you know, work.

he never really was that rich, especially by the standards of the new york times - but he sure lives and writes like he is. which is of course where the trouble started. getting a monthly keelhaul from the ex didn't help, either - i wonder if he writes about that in his book? - but i think this man's most basic problem was imagining that a take-home of $2500 monthly was enough to buy a half-mil pile.

Yeah, exactly -- although if I had to summarize a problem here it would basically be that a middle-aged family-man homeowner with a decent salary expected to continue living like a middle-aged family-man homeowner with a decent salary, even after a divorce that meant the bulk of his income was going to support a family home occupied by other people. This is an unrealistic and dumb expectation to seriously act on -- you'd think that $4k would be a good monthly reminder that situations done changed -- but I can totally have sympathy for the situation itself; that would suck. It would be painful to have to support the family home you used to live in and have to support yourself and your new family on a fraction of what you're earning.

The other thing is that -- while he can't and doesn't come out and say this directly -- his one list of charges makes me suspect a bunch of money was getting borrowed to maintain a certain lifestyle for the kids

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

sorry to keep talking about lena wilson but someone share this passage from the about section of her website where she literally talks about "her martyr-like dedication to socially conscious cinema" like babe you talk about disney channel original movies for a living pic.twitter.com/CwvJKYBhJA

— official trustbusters stan account (@trillmoregirls) August 21, 2022

brb just finishing the syllabus for the tig notaro class i’m teaching this fall at brown

for PKD fans and any climate adaptation reporters:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/03/climate/cooling-clothes-climate-change.html

Hmm, not sure “country fans don’t care that an artist used the n-word” is the heartwarming underdog story this article thinks it is. https://t.co/w5madJPKkq

— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) September 13, 2022

interesting analysis of the housing market:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/25/upshot/starter-home-prices.html

Two responses might be to build smaller (with the implicit acceptance of cultural centralization and the distinction between urban, suburban, and exurban life) or to try to decentralize and enliven local communities (that is, favor greater distribution of coverage, the long tail in culture, etc.). I wonder which would result in less environmental damage and greater happiness overall.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/realestate/accord-ny-ulster-county.html

*vomits*

I am honestly not mad at all and I'm living pretty close to there myself. There's so much under-used rural and formerly agricultural land that no one is going to do anything else with. Tons of basically abandoned industrial buildings from when knife-making & mills pulled out of this whole area. Population density is very low and electorally it makes sense for people with further left values to percolate into the area and flip it.

I'm happy for anywhere that fosters a healthy, accepting LGBTQ community in this sometimes-cesspool of hatred. There are Lee Zeldin signs EVERYWHERE right now and that's appalling. A random neighbor I talked to on the street last week ended up shouting epithets about women and non-white people in broad daylight. People have had 40 years to make their communities better and this is what they've spent their time doing.

I worry far more about majority-minority places like Newburgh that are in the process of being gentrified out of their minds and pushing everyone into rural poverty where there are no support systems or transit.

I'm open to new information and I'm not unaware that transitioning to a service economy isn't good for everyone and the class analysis of the situation is not uncomplicated, but afaict there's not much else going on around here except Q-Anon-adjacent seething, gun ownership promotion, and growing numbers of Latinx and non-white people moving into areas without adequate community institutions.

If you're mad, please do something about it like donating to the Newburgh LGBTQ Center or Mutual Aid Beacon (full disclosure I work/volunteer there) or Fareground (food justice) or housing justice efforts in Ulster County at https://ucchj.squarespace.com/ and https://housingjusticeforall.org/

Keep Ulster Weird imo

https://elections.ulstercountyny.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/HudsonRowen.jpg

https://elections.ulstercountyny.gov/i-voted-sticker-contest/

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/12/nyregion/tal-oren-alexander-official.html

“How Two Luxury Real Estate Agents Spend Their Sundays
Tal and Oren Alexander start with a morning workout, then frequent exclusive clubs, show million-dollar-plus listings and watch football.”

assholes: they're just like us

In 2019, they sold a 24,000-square-foot penthouse at 220 Central Park South for $238 million to the billionaire Ken Griffin.

I'm surprised he's that successful!

https://e.snmc.io/i/600/w/9cd638346804e48aa73a6ec095b4a18a/4675434/ken-griffin-ken-griffin-at-the-organ-the-cuckoo-waltz-Cover-Art.jpg

His dreams got better.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FhiQLw2WYAAFip5?format=jpg&name=small

This latest bullshit about gen z “discovering” cameras has to be a new low

really embarrassing how easily the koch heiress Hannibal Lectered this journalist https://t.co/7zg2541AST pic.twitter.com/7Gm7A2FHX9

— protagonist of this site (@siteprotagonist) February 24, 2023

A very good scathing piece in the NYT about the Tory party and UK politics in general. What makes this doubly depressing is the NYT’s devotion to their own ruling class and also that a piece like this will never get published in a mainstream UK publication.

On the House of Lords:

Still unelected, the chamber now enables a kind of legitimatized corruption: A prime minister can give any ally — a fellow politician, a family member, a journalist, a press baron, a party donor — a job for life as a legislator, regardless of suitability, with full state approval. According to a recent analysis, one in 10 Tory peers has given more than 100,000 pounds, around $125,000, to the party. In any other context, we would know what to call such a practice.

In film and literature, most of the country’s favorite characters and story lines contain at least a seed of the Tory nation — the Old Etonian James Bond, who breaks the rules with a gentleman’s charm; the humble wizardry of Harry Potter, who risks it all to save his enchantingly regimented boarding school from evil outside forces; and the magic of Mary Poppins, the English nanny who wants only to keep the house in order.

Often Labour politicians seem keener on receiving the blessings of the current system — a peerage, a knighthood, a royal invitation — than on changing it. The current Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, decidedly follows this path. Idealism and hope are scorned in favor of pragmatism and common sense, two terms that, in Britain, almost always seem to mean cleaving to the right.

If there is hope, it’s that buried within Britain, suppressed by a political system constructed in the Conservatives’ favor, other visions of society exist. This is precisely what the Conservatives are committed to stifling.

Neither Britain nor the more Tory-voting England is fundamentally Conservative.

Not read the piece yet, will try and do so later.

I would agree that the country is Conservative, but there is a fragility there too. 2017 is where I saw it the most. But in general the thing there has been crushed and we are in a bad place with the riots I see in France a distant hope.

ahh i just posted about this in the ukpol thread soz

Isn't it a standard leftist canard that voters are progressives in their hearts but are somehow hoodwinked by powerful structural forces into voting more conservatively?

xp I don’t read your non-TC posts, sorry king

Isn't it a standard leftist canard that voters are progressives in their hearts but are somehow hoodwinked by powerful structural forces into voting more conservatively?

That article isn't saying people are progressive in their hearts, it's saying that the way voting is structured in the UK makes it impossible to know one way or the other

This is abysmal. https://t.co/CNnoJN7Db6

— Isaac Chotiner (@IChotiner) May 7, 2023

Thought you would be posting this

My coronation highlight? This clusterfuck of a paragraph from the New York Times on how Anglophile Americans have been marking the occasion. pic.twitter.com/sHbl6YentA

— Jon Lipsey (@JonLipseyMedia) May 6, 2023

Spent plenty of time mocking the colorful pomp and circumstance, then went to a bit of a Kentucky Derby party and realized the apple really doesn't fall that far from the tree. I met an old lady who woke up early for a coronation party, then changed outfits for the Derby party.

loool since when is Buck's Fizz non-alcoholic? Have they ever MET a Britisher?
And ah yes, the traditional breakfast pie. Coco Pops with a crispy mashed potato topping iirc.

not the nyt, but in the wall street journal* today there is a story of techies whose paychecks & stock compensation don't go as far as they used to. one guy got genuinely screwed over by facebook. but one woman amassed a $500K "brokerage account" balance by the age of 27 and decided to take a year off. now she has a new job at a higher salary, but no stock. so...she's cutting costs by washing her dog herself instead of going to a groomer.

* i get a free subscription through work.

People with household incomes over $200K a year who are like "who can afford a carton of eggs anymore, am I right???" are the stock in trade of this thread, I can't even be bothered to find a link, I feel like it's basically a weekly column at this point

eh $200K a year isn't really the stock in trade ... it depends where you live, and if you have more than one child, you could be middle class and wishing you could afford to buy a house or wishing you could afford to pay off student loan debt ... classic quid/ag is more like john's example

I don't want to have a big fight about this but fundamentally yes I think people who make $200K and live in New York and aren't saving anything and wish they had more money are more part of the ruling class than not. And, whatever you think about their membership in the ruling class, they make up a much larger share of the New York Times's readership and implied "we" than do the people buying $5m condos.

I have never made more than 50 grand in a year in my entire life. Anyone making 200k a year is absolutely a member of the ruling class afaic.

otm

I have never made more than 50 grand in a year in my entire life. Anyone making 200k a year is absolutely a member of the ruling class afaic.

Ditto! Maybe I'm warped by having lived paycheck-to-paycheck until I was in my early 30s, but making 100k would make me feel like I was set for life (even here in not-so-cheap Chicago).

When I do my taxes at the end of the year I'm sometimes shocked by how much money has flowed in...and right back out again. (Usually somewhere between 60-75k, never more than that.)

I've never gotten more than 20K a year in my entire life. I don't have any withholding, so I only do my taxes so I can get a chunk of EITC money.

i'll probably crack 50k this year because of djing. i bought myself nice sunglasses to celebrate 😎 maybe i should have read an ny times article about it first tho

https://www.curbed.com/article/cost-of-living-nyc-calculator.html

The thing about the article caek linked is -- they asked people to describe their dream life! Of course it's expensive! I think the many "ugh spoiled millennials" responses to the article are totally misguided; they weren't asking people "what's your realistic plan given the income you're likely to have?"

But there are also a lot of "ugh look how you can't live in New York unless you have $150K a year to spend" takes and those responses are bad for the same reason! "You can't buy a house in brownstone Brooklyn and have a car and send three kids to private school and take two family vacations a year by plane unless you have $150K a year to spend" is probably true, but ... most New Yorkers live perfectly good lives without doing that? And most of the people in this article know they're not actually doing that?

True. The other response I’ve seen is “surely a family doesn’t spend $400 a week” on groceries, which I’ve got bad news for the aspiring parents.

I have to admit I don't quite see how you spend $400 a week at Trader Joe's (I do weekly TJ's shop for $250 tops with two adults two adolescent kids) but if I were to rigorously add up the dollar cost of all the food from all sources I cook for my family in a week it probably does come close to that figure

same. we don't spend it all at TJs, but we spend nearly that much total. i track it. the average for the past 18 months is $1490/month.

$400/week sounds low for people living in $5m homes with 3 kids!

the average for the past 18 months is $1490/month.

On groceries?? Is this including, like, ordering delivery all the time or something?

just groceries from the supermarket. we only go to trader joes and whole foods, and we're in LA, so it's expensive.

but my point is the grocery numbers in this article, for people who are way richer than us and have more kids than us, seem reasonable to low.

Oh you should check out Grocery Outlet. When they have what you need it's <3 <3 <3

I have to admit I don't quite see how you spend $400 a week at Trader Joe's (I do weekly TJ's shop for $250 tops with two adults two adolescent kids) but if I were to rigorously add up the dollar cost of all the food from all sources I cook for my family in a week it probably does come close to that figure

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, 24 May 2023 20:03 (three hours ago) link

I calculated our total weekly spend to average out to about $400/wk for a family of four (kids both old enough to eat full meals and a good amount of snacks), including non-food groceries (paper products, cleaning products, various costco non-food items). We do buy some organic items and could certainly spend less if necessary. Eating more at home since COVID definitely adds to the budget, but also cuts the eating out budget.

Back in NJ my wife and I were spending close to $1200 a month, between the grocery store and Target. Cleaning products are expensive, and we needed a lot — more than we do in Montana — because, no joke, our hateful downstairs neighbors would cook greasy food all night just to spite us.

I still say $400 of Trader Joe's groceries is a lot to buy in a week. Maybe they're eating a lot of the prepackaged meals?