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

i hear that having kids, like, gives your life so much meaning, and that you are changed forever? like, you never knew what love was before? idk that sounds p cool

haha can we start a board called I hate people-makers

tbf its not that hard to get a kid i see them all over the place

I think it would be unethical for me to have a child for a number of reasons but that'd be another thread.

but maybe its also unethical for you NOT to have a child think abt it

having kids means you get the BEST new excuse to act like a shitstain

How is private school a basic good to these people? It's not like the neighborhoods they live in are going to have bad public schools, right? Is there some New York public school truth bomb that is gonna get dropped on me here?

― Nicholas Pokémon (silby), Wednesday, February 29, 2012 2:39 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's not simple -- "brownstone Brooklyn" neighborhoods often have one good public that doesn't have enough spots for everyone and then a bunch of mediocre or downright bad schools. Of course it would help if more affluent people sent their kids to public schools and got involved in them.

but maybe its also unethical for you NOT to have a child think abt it

i know someone who will fervently argue this point to me while citing 'idiocracy' as trenchant social commentary, 'smart people need to have more kids' style

well we need some people to e around to make food and electricity for us when we are old but other people are already doing a good job at making those people, so

people to e around = people around

feel the vibe

thanking u for new dn

we need a plur around

okay, i found a recent restaurant review that belongs here:

All around, displayed like portraits against the wood paneling, were the residents of the East 80s, confident that for as long as their dinner at Crown lasted, the tiny flames and gentle wattage and dark lampshades would conspire to cast them and their jewelry in the kindest possible light.

Then a firefly would flash in a corner of the room and the portraits would be thrown into relief: a row of identical teeth, hair with an amethyst tint, an unyielding tightness in the flesh around the eyes.

Mr. DeLucie, the chef and proprietor, has cheerfully called his cooking here “comfort food for millionaires.” (And for their pets; the kitchen once prepared a côte de boeuf for a regular’s dog.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/dining/crown-nyc-restaurant-review.html?ref=dining

You will not get your first taste of sea buckthorn airlifted from Denmark, nor a plate of prosciutto from a boar the chef tracked and killed with a homemade crossbow. Like the work of the best Upper East Side caterers, most of the cooking at Crown is agreeably dull, with occasional pockets of excellence amid some patches of unalloyed boredom.

I'm going to believe this article is deliberately tongue-in-cheek b/c otherwise I can't countenance it.

I'm going out on a limb here, but doesn't this describe like 50% of the restaurants on the UES?

yes i.e. http://www.davidburketownhouse.com/space.html

Oh yeah, I've passed that place.

I mean my whole impression of the UES is don't-rock-the-boat luxury.

Not being from NYC: That food looks nice, but these places are such that everything is pretty much of good quality, delivered and presented in the most boring environment with the most obnoxious people, right?

ues restaurants are kinda notorious for being expensive and otherwise unremarkable

Noah Smith cares about rich people:

"I do care about the happiness of the rich. Why? Because most people I know are rich. Not in the vacation-in-Aspen sense, but compared to the vast majority of people on planet Earth."

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/i-care-about-rich-people-but-not-about.html

eh there is nothing wrong with that post

When people say "Heck, I'm not rich, I'm just comfortable", they don't understand that being comfortable is being rich.

Hermès also started as a luggage company iirc

Yeah Aimless I agree with that - it's corny but sometimes I sort of have to step back and be like, actually my middle-of-the-road salary gets me pretty much every material thing I want in life. That said if suddenly I started making hundreds of thousands of dollars I'd probably turn into one of these douches in a heartbeat.

I'm just saying, average Americans complaining about their money problems probably look just as venal and odious to most of the world as 1%-ers complaining about their problems look to average Americans.

Totally

The same point in chart form:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/01/world-income-inequality.html

happiness inequality and income inequality are also different things, but not completely unrelated

I'm confused tho, did you think there was something bad about noah's post?

I think this is a really interesting and paradoxical thing about the mechanisms of class in capitalism -- for most people a certain salary/profession means being a part of a certain class, and almost by definition most people in a certain class can "barely afford" the things that are perceived to be essentials of that class. For whatever reason it's really hard, psychologically, for most people to forgo the things that their colleagues/peers have. So the third-year investment banker wants to live in the kind of neighborhood the fifth-year investment banker lives in, go on the kinds of vacations he goes on, eat out at the same places, send his kids to comparable schools, etc. and then he says "why is it so hard for me to afford just the basics on my salary?"

isn't that more just a thing about human nature? we're never satisfied with what we have, always feel like we could be doing better

right, which is why high taxes on rich people is a great idea, cause they're not losing much

I mean this thread really should be titled 'why the highest tax bracket should be 70%'

I don't really mean about always feeling you can "do better" though (and fwiw, I don't accept that it's part of "human nature" to feel that way, I think it's a very capitalist idea). I more mean that our conception of "enough" usually comes from our immediate surroundings.

I'm confused tho, did you think there was something bad about noah's post?

No, not at all. I just posted it because it was another perspective on the whole quiddities thing - how one person's idea of modest comfort could be another's image of self-indulgent luxury.

okay I thought you were posting it as an example of quiddities stuff

It's a very NYC thing too - certain things are expensive here that a person could take for granted (at a middle-to-upper-middle-class salary) in other parts of the country, e.g. having a dishwasher and a washer and dryer.

well status games aren't isolated to nyc at all, but it's a pretty good place to observe them because of the amount of wealth here + the density of opportunities to signal wealth

Yeah for sure. But to be clear I'm kind of more talking about the "just keeping up" end of the status game rather than the flossy end. Like I'm more interested in the phenomenon of people making six figures feeling like they can't afford a decent standard of living than the phenomenon of flaunting wealth.

Conservative pundits would like to say you're not poor if you have a dishwasher or washer and dryer. But really, if you sell any of them for $100-$500 then you're poor again the next month, and now you don't have a washer.

Compare that to most of the nytimes quiddities, where they could sell one of several vehicles or, god forbid, their summer home on the cape.

well they mostly just ignore the fact that dishwashers / tvs / washer+dryers are fairly cheap mass-produced things, like you can buy an enormous tv for not very much money these days. rent, transportation, health care otoh.

Carefully phrased:

Shot in 24 days on a budget of about $6 million, “Casa de Mi Padre” tells the story of Armando Alvarez (played by Mr. Ferrell), the ne’er-do-well son of a Mexican rancher whose manhood is tested when he falls in love with the fiancée (Genesis Rodriguez) of his flashier brother, Raul (Diego Luna), and is drawn into a violent conflict with a drug baron (Gael García Bernal).

If that sounds like the plot of a garden-variety telenovela you might see playing on a cheap TV in a corner of your Laundromat, that is exactly the point.

it's YOUR laundromat, so it's okay

Laundromat

Ha, yeah. These newfangled futuristic inventions called "Laundromats."

So this isn't a perfect fit, but indirectly belongs here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/the-go-nowhere-generation.html?_r=1

also I don't think we have a boomers vs. millennials rolling FITE thread yet

that's because we so own them

This reads like satire:

AMERICANS are supposed to be mobile and even pushy. Saul Bellow’s Augie March declares, “I am an American ... first to knock, first admitted.” In “The Grapes of Wrath,” young Tom Joad loads up his jalopy with pork snacks and relatives, and the family flees the Oklahoma dust bowl for sun-kissed California. Along the way, Granma dies, but the Joads keep going.

Perhaps young people are too happy at home checking Facebook.

YES I'M SURE THAT IS IT.