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

i had a full time job last year and was making a little more than half of what that twin makes in a year

and i NEVER got to talk about why heidi klum married seal

why because he look intertsing

So there was this column a couple of weeks back:

Too Rich to Worry? Not in This Downturn

Various people wrote in expressing dissatisfaction. The author responded:

All This Anger Against the Rich May Be Unhealthy

Apparently neither of these are parodies. Meanwhile, as DougJ of Balloon Juice noted, "I don’t normally like to make things this personal, but this picture of the reporter is worth at least a thousand words."

http://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/sullivan190.jpg

http://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/sullivan190.jpg

All This Anger Against the Rich May Be Unhealthy

“To revile the rich is to revile the American dream,” said Robert Clarfeld, president of the wealth management firm Clarfeld Financial Advisors.

this fuckin guy

"Bowties and Reaganomics are for losers. You can cry for the rich all you want, the rest of us will be happy to see them get taxed."
OTM Randomly quoted dissatisfied person.

http://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/sullivan190.jpg
"After all, if you’re wealthy and no one likes you, you still have lots of money."

“You’re worth $500 million one day and wake up the next and it’s $350 million and you’ve pledged $100 million to the Met,” said Rob Elliott, senior managing director at Bessemer. “What are the family’s goals? Is it philanthropy or bringing along the next generation?”

They’re human — they sell too soon and they buy too high,” Mr. Beringer said. “It used to be, ‘I’m going to buy A and B.’ Now it’s, ‘I’ll buy A or B.’”
The bigger choice is what they do as a family when members are against both A and B. If that is left unresolved, tensions can fester.

I think this is similar to the wrenching choice I am occasionally forced to make between tuna melt or veggie max at Subway

it depends on which is the $2.99 special right?

The bigger problem is when in not in the mood for tuna OR the veggie max. When that happens, as in sure you all know, tensions can fester.

In = I'm

Damn yooouu Phooooooone!

i don't think dude understands that "having money" isn't so much the cause of the hate. pretending that your problems involved in having money are at all comparable to the problems involved in not having money -- well, yes, he should be slapped repeatedly until his bowtie spins.

It really is a conspiracy of bowties:

http://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/sullivan190.jpghttp://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/george_will_2.jpghttp://www.winnbus.com/Gifimages/celebs/russell.jpg

http://www.theonion.com/content/files/images/onion_imagearticle1807.jpg
O RLY

They're EVERYWHERE.

http://www.theonion.com/content/files/images/onion_imagearticle1807.jpg

All This Anger Against the Rich May Be Unhealthy

for the rich

xxxxpost - for the record I had a lot of friends at Rutgers who hustled their way into various substantial magazine/newspaper/writing/editing/PR/media jobs including at least one that's a minor "name" in his field. They were generally smart, hardworking and had a clue unlike the twins above. I have no idea whether the Rutgers name helped, hurt or neither though. One disadvantage of Rutgers compared to NYU is that (as far as I know) there isn't some "internship office" at Rutgers that just hooks you up with places - you're on your own. The advantage, however, is the relative lack of debt that allows you to survive while struggling through your first few jobs. Also the closeness to NYC lets you do stuff while in school.

Meantime, while this Sullivan guy stays employed, this:

New York Times to cut 100 newsroom jobs

That's an 8% reduction. The Times will offer buyouts to union and non-union employees, and resort to layoffs if it can't get enough people to leave voluntarily.

One disadvantage of Rutgers compared to NYU is that (as far as I know) there isn't some "internship office" at Rutgers that just hooks you up with places - you're on your own.

My gf just graduated from Columbia and I sorta expected there to be exactly this sort of 'internship office' that was gonna hook her up, but no, the extent of the extra job help is some website with job/internship listings...and I mean, it uses the same software and looks the same as the Berkeley one. (I was expecting it to be way better...)

They're both *okay* and it's nice to have a handful of extra listings (and I know people who have gotten stuff off em) but if you're paying 250k for your education, yeah you'd expect some sort of office that is on top of their shit w/r/t your future. Most of her friends who have jobs just knew people...which is the real benefit of private schools, I guess / the rich kids don't need that office anyway.

yeah i thought the whole thing about going to ivies isnt the intern office its the, you know, your roommate is the niece of barry diller or whatever

yeah exactly

yeah, that hasn;'t really been the case in a couple of generations, altho obv. you will get connected classmates, just not in great numbers. mostly just upper middle class kids from a relatively small group of suburbs ime

^^ yeah, pretty much.

i think u make just about the same connections at any top-50 school.

the other part of it is the alumni network though--in certain fields you cant throw a rock w/out hitting a princeton/columbia/harvard/yale grad--so you seek out ppl who went 2 ur school

I think where you're starting out from also makes a difference in this, though.

yeah

fwiw almost none of her friends seem to be getting by without parental assitance and having gone through the job app process with her, having a columbia degree alone def doesn't open many doors these days.

except the door... to knowledge

xxp - most of my friends were also middle class kids from more middle-american locales. maybe that speaks to an aspect of human nature of seeking out people like oneself, but maybe it's just me being shitty at networking.

i went to a not-really-an-ivy school but not a bad school either--most of my friends were similarly middle class or lmc and none of them in any kind of position to hook ME up with connections...

but i knew of/knew a lot of kids who werent "friends" per se who definitely had those connections, & if i had been more of a snake/better at networking i could have buttered them up and probably had a real job by now

there are def some middle class kids at the ivies (and yeah my gf's friend group is more middle class than the school in general) - but the statistics don't lie, middlle-middle class ppl are a minority at any top50 private school...hell, they're a minority at lots of crappy private schools.

^^ i am partially convinced that Brown admitted me as part of some diversity initiative, so they'd have someone with first hand experience of people who do all their shopping at Wal-Mart.

I practically got paid to go to Sarah Lawrence because we were LOLpoor during my HS years due to mom's health issues (long since resolved) but it's not as if I went there not knowing what fork to use etc. SLC is very heavy on media, the arts and film/TV and prob 250 of the 1000 students there had some kind of network-worthy connection to those professions due to parents, other relatives and family friends but people didn't discuss it up front. A good chunk of the people you'll read about who went there and now direct movies or whatever have family in the entertainment industry. That said, when I graduated and moved over to London a ton of people from the Oxford college affiliated with SLC's JYA program turned out to know people I'd been to college with, greasing the wheels of industry somewhat.

the closest I am at the present to college connections professionally is the program officer at one of the organization i work for's largest funders went to Brown when I did, but I'd rather that guy not remember me. I think I made fun of some project he was involved in in some campus publication, and I thought he was kinda douchey.

oh u went to BROWN well u might as well have just gone to COMMUNITY COLLEGE i mean JESUS

yeah - I considered that i might have been better off going to UC Berkeley, could have had four years' lead time on rent controlled Bay Area apartments.

plus you'd have been there in the era when there was the student who just walked around naked 24/7

SLC is very heavy on media, the arts and film/TV

Even with the v obvious context, years of abbreviating Salt Lake City this way lead me to be like, "Has Salt Lake changed or something? That wasn't my experience with it..." :P

^^ yeah, that was my first thought upon seeing that abbreviation, too!

IME if you're not looking to go into medicine, law, or i-banking, ivy league intern offices are pretty useless

journalism is a pretty good field for ivy-league grads ime

well yeah the dailies at ivies are basically NYT pressure cookers

by "good" i mean "slowly-dying and yet somehow attractive to graduates of our countrys best universities lol"

I see what you did there

the one time I visited a career counselor at my career office...the lady just said "think about what you like to do! then try to find a job doing that! don't give up!"

she also had several empty bottles of wine hidden in the back of her bookshelf

my career counselor was a MFA and published poet

made me feel psyched about pursuing a career as a writer ;_;