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

The Lost Asimov Directive there

Hance (err, sic?) Saki's memorable epigram: "She was a good cook, as cooks go. And as cooks go, she went."

This is great! C'mon, that article was gold.

x-post-

Within the last decade, DC spending per pupil has gone up higher than I recalled from the '90s, but according to the Washington Examiner

The greater needs factor helps to explain why D.C. schools appear so lavish in their spending, as well. Compared with the 50 states, and especially its relatively wealthy neighboring states, the District has a far greater percentage of students with needs that require ?-- often by law -- higher staffing levels.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/dc/2011/05/dc-maryland-rank-near-top-pupil-spending#ixzz1amhOAhy2

Wow, hadn't read that Per Se restaurant review till now:

Dinner for two can scratch at $1,000 — or about the same as the median weekly household income in New York State.

By point of context, though, an aisle orchestra seat at the Metropolitan Opera for Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” runs $330, also excluding wine.

seeing d'Amore without wine would be completely missing the point of course.

hey, if i could, or had someone who would take me, would love to dine at per se, don't see that as that evil
was, and have been, drooling ever since reading that piece

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/fashion/nose-jobs-arent-for-everyone-the-mirror.html?_r=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/nyregion/once-wall-streeters-and-now-cabbies.html?pagewanted=all

Janet was finishing an afternoon shift the other day in her work uniform: a navy blazer, floral scarf and Ralph Lauren sunglasses. She was raised in Manhattan; cab driving was never part of the plan. “I always thought cabdrivers were idiots,” she said. “I still do. If anything, that has been reaffirmed.”

yes but do they know what i mean when i say "myrtle and washington"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/realestate/the-hunt-a-high-rise-change-of-plans.html

They had a problem with the refrigerator, which wouldn’t make ice. It took months of attempted repairs to fix the problem, which seemed to be a kink in the water hose, Mr. Fuller said. The situation would have been comical were it not so depressing, he said. For their summer beverages, “we had to make sure to buy a bag of ice, as opposed to using our icemaker,” he said. When the problem was finally resolved, “I never thought I could be so happy over ice.”

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Taffy Brodesser-Akner

They would have to walk their Shih Tzu, Kravitz, near auto body shops and beware-of-dog signs.

I love the poker face that NY Times reporters do with sentences like this one

though the circumstances are kinda deplorable, the general tenor applies.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/19/naomi-wolf-arrest-occupy-wall-street
"What did I take away? Just that, unfortunately, my partner and I became exhibit A in a process that I have been warning Americans about since 2007: first they come for the "other" – the "terrorist", the brown person, the Muslim, the outsider; then they come for you – while you are standing on a sidewalk in evening dress, obeying the law."

Yeah, I was kinda torn on that one between "she's basically right" and "man is she exaggerating."

I mean she compares being taken to a different city jail than the ones protesters thought to extraordinary rendition (where literally NO ONE has any idea where you are for months or years).

also as others have pointed out she is wearing a cocktail dress not an evening dress

Yeah, I was kinda torn on that one between "she's basically right" and "man is she exaggerating."

― pass the duchy pon the left hand side (musical duke) (Hurting 2), Thursday, October 20, 2011 9:40 AM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ladies and gentlemen... naomi wolfe

The cop in that video is absolutely not screaming at her. There are not twenty policemen taking her away. There are about twenty photographers on hand though and press shouting questions at her.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/world/africa/in-his-last-days-qaddafi-wearied-of-fugitives-life.html?pagewanted=all

Under siege by the former rebels for weeks, Colonel Qaddafi grew impatient with life on the run in the city of Surt, said the official, Mansour Dhao Ibrahim, the leader of the feared People’s Guard, a network of loyalists, volunteers and informants. “He would say: ‘Why is there no electricity? Why is there no water?’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/us/personal-eco-concierges-ease-challenges-of-going-green.html?_r=1&hp

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/realestate/childhood-homes-the-toys-are-gone-but-its-still-home.html

“I’m still very ambivalent,” said Mr. Geist, whose mother lives in Greenwich Village and whose father died in 2005. “I appreciate how much space I have compared to many people, but it’s an odd mix of cozy and entrapment. I look out the bedroom window and see the same view I’ve seen for as long as I could remember. I can alter the space, I can rearrange the furniture, but there’s very little I can do about the view.”

dayo - A+

Emoticons can produce another layer of confusion, however: they don’t always read the same way across different technical interfaces. “In the text function of my BlackBerry there is a sidebar menu of emoticons (how ridiculous is that?) that shows the yellow smiley faces, except they are also crying and raging, and winking and blowing kisses, etc.,” Dr. Bates wrote. “I sent a fairly new acquaintance a ‘big hug’ emoticon — which, for the record, was ironic. But anyway, on his iPhone it came up with the symbols, not the smiley face, which don’t look anything like a big hug. From his perspective they look like a view of, er, splayed lady parts: ({}).“He then ran around his lab showing colleagues excitedly what I had just sent him. Half (mostly men) concurred with his interpretation, and the others (mostly women) didn’t and probably thought he was kind of a desperate perv.”

like a view of, er, splayed lady parts: ({})
like a view of, er, splayed lady parts: ({})
like a view of, er, splayed lady parts: ({})
like a view of, er, splayed lady parts: ({})
like a view of, er, splayed lady parts: ({})
like a view of, er, splayed lady parts: ({})
like a view of, er, splayed lady parts: ({})

the new york times printed that.

The great splayed lady

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/24/can_a_portlandia_comedy_sketch_destroy_a_fashion_trend/

"I made a mental inventory of my own birded totes and T-shirts and saw them as trite for the first time. Ashamed, I recognized myself. "

Ha, about a month ago a coworker of my wife's stopped by with what was apparently (I found out later) a very expensive limited edition marc jacobs bag with these gold-plated birds on it. I pointed at it and said "Put a bird on it!" She got the reference. My wife wondered later if she was going to stop wearing the bag now.

You have a v expensive marc jacobs bag you wear it. it's now a very expensive ironic joke *head explodes*

Man, I hope people never figure out that stuff with SKULLS are trite. Entire segments of products are just going to die off

On the plus side it would mean Ed Hardy would kill himself,

Ed Hardy is dead

It worked!

Actually he's alive. Maybe I was thinking von Dutch? But he's just an old school tattoo artist who sold his name and rights to some douchebag designer.

Ed Hardy the dude seems ok, just old.

Their only complaint is the small size of the garbage and recycling closet in the hallway. It fills quickly, so they must either call the porter or take their boxes to the trash room off the lobby.

call the what now

hey porter

This could go in any number of threads, but since there's a rolling NYT thread, here we are: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/opinion/what-the-costumes-reveal.html?_r=1&hp

The party is the firm’s big annual bash. Employees wear Halloween costumes to the office, where they party until around noon, and then return to work, still in costume. I can’t tell you how people dressed for this year’s party, but I can tell you about last year’s.

That’s because a former employee of Steven J. Baum recently sent me snapshots of last year’s party. In an e-mail, she said that she wanted me to see them because they showed an appalling lack of compassion toward the homeowners — invariably poor and down on their luck — that the Baum firm had brought foreclosure proceedings against.

When we spoke later, she added that the snapshots are an accurate representation of the firm’s mind-set. “There is this really cavalier attitude,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that people are going to lose their homes.” Nor does the firm try to help people get mortgage modifications; the pressure, always, is to foreclose. I told her I wanted to post the photos on The Times’s Web site so that readers could see them. She agreed, but asked to remain anonymous because she said she fears retaliation.

Let me describe a few of the photos. In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.

A second picture shows a coffin with a picture of a woman whose eyes have been cut out. A sign on the coffin reads: “Rest in Peace. Crazy Susie.” The reference is to Susan Chana Lask, a lawyer who had filed a class-action suit against Steven J. Baum — and had posted a YouTube video denouncing the firm’s foreclosure practices. “She was a thorn in their side,” said my source.

A third photograph shows a corner of Baum’s office decorated to look like a row of foreclosed homes. Another shows a sign that reads, “Baum Estates” — needless to say, it’s also full of foreclosed houses. Most of the other pictures show either mock homeless camps or mock foreclosure signs — or both. My source told me that not every Baum department used the party to make fun of the troubled homeowners they made their living suing. But some clearly did. The adjective she’d used when she sent them to me — “appalling” — struck me as exactly right.

These pictures are hardly the first piece of evidence that the Baum firm treats homeowners shabbily — or that it uses dubious legal practices to do so. It is under investigation by the New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman. It recently agreed to pay $2 million to resolve an investigation by the Department of Justice into whether the firm had “filed misleading pleadings, affidavits, and mortgage assignments in the state and federal courts in New York.” (In the press release announcing the settlement, Baum acknowledged only that “it occasionally made inadvertent errors.”)

wooooooooow

just a bit of fun

I can kind of get behind the 'technology is replacing jobs' part of this op-ed but the author is really tone-deaf. the by-line is a nice punchline too

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/sunday/our-unpaid-extra-shadow-work.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=all

There was a time when a gas station attendant would routinely fill your tank and even check your oil and clean your windshield and rear window without charge, then settle your bill. Today, all those jobs have been transferred to the customer: we pump our own gas, squeegee our own windshield, and pay our own bill by swiping a credit card. Where customers once received service from the service station, they now provide “self-service” — a synonym for “no service.” Technology enables this sleight of hand, which lets gas stations cut their payrolls, having co-opted their patrons into doing these jobs without pay.

Reminds me of a line in the New Yorker's otherwise mostly good Ikea feature -- something to the effect of "Ikea has stealthily scored a massive coup by shifting labor to the customer." I mean it's not like everyone used to just get pre-assembled, delivered furniture at Ikea prices.

Half of that article belongs in our "society is in the gutter" thread, seriously.

I understand the whole "shadow work" thing but I've heard it applied much more effectively to modern living than the examples given. These are basically the "why must I move things with my hands" complaints. The parts where they complain about the end of travel agents and the like is especially lulzy

Yeah I'm kind of split on this one between being sorry that this kills jobs for people but also just feeling like "Come on, I can pump my own goddamned gas." I do hate self-checkouts though, those are for suckers.

I like them when I have very few items or I'm feeling misanthropic.

IIRC, a lot of the places that had massive amounts of personal service (department stores, forex) back in the old days also did massive amounts of markups on merchandise.

I do hate self-checkouts though, those are for suckers.

how about signs on the checkout lanes at co-ops that say 'due to the repetitive stress involved in moving a large number of items per day, we ask you to please remove your own items from your cart at checkout'.

I tuned out when you said "coops" as that is its own world of quiddities and agonies