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

real talk

someone get xhuxk klosterman on the phone

I didn't know where else to put this, story is from readwriteweb via NYT but um....whaaaaat the fuck:

http://m.readwriteweb.com/archives/sxsw_in_a_nutshell_homeless_people_as_hotspots.php

ha i almost posted that here too

seriously I am just O_o

haha ok to make it legal heres the sort of actual nyt on the topic http://nytsxsw.tumblr.com/post/19145988299/getting-a-decent-data-connection-at-sxsw-can-be-a

its too ridiculous i cant even be mad

Mr Veg thinks it's funny and I am still kinda speechless

if someone dropped a bomb on sxsw the world would just carry on

yeah I wd be okay with that

currently: seeking employment as a human hotspot

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/nyregion/feral-pigs-plaguing-upstate-new-york.html
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/03/12/nyregion/PIGS1/PIGS1-articleLarge.jpg

not at all quiddy but a great image+url combo

that pic is great

zombie pigs coming for u nyc

we all get what we deserve *oink oink*

what this guy says about fb & Springsteen is obv dumb & I don't want to speculate on generation limbo's gestalt but the idea of moving to follow the work seems right to me. I get Mordy's point about the value of community & roots, but I don't have those things in the USA (immigrant family) so it's hard for me to relate to. & I guess I have ideas about the value of labor for a good life, & so uprooting for that, if needs be, is worthwhile. clown me all you want for my North Dakota comments, but if there are jobs in California, or Arizona, or overseas, then fine: it seems to me compelling that you would at least take seriously the idea of going there.

short answer: I undervalue place & (over?)value work in terms of the good life; but I want to resist overvaluing the former & undervaluing the latter.

Generation Y has become Generation Why Bother

BOOM

A Disney TV show called “So Random!” has ranked first in the ratings among tweens. The word has morphed from a precise statistical term to an all-purpose phrase that stresses the illogic and coincidence of life. Unfortunately, societies that emphasize luck over logic are not likely to thrive.

i just

fuck

sorry, what i meant to say was

http://gifsoup.com/view/171204/danny-glover-s-thoughtful-nod-o.gif

that use of 'random' has been in popular middle school argot at least, since 1990 / gates not crumbling yet

not sure you are grasping the predictive power of word-cloud as cultural astrology, remy - buchholz gets it

i understand better when there's an interactive piece of scalable text art attached; i'll wait for the meme version.

i'm pretty sure people still move for jobs. even young people. despite what crazy bad writer says.

but but FACEBOOK

the mystifying lack of interest in paying monthly car insurance

i do miss not having a car. i hate cars. i lived in philly for 12 years and never drove once. didn't have a license. i walked everywhere. didn't even take buses or trains. i rarely ever left the city. one of the big draws about where we are now is that i can walk to my store. we can walk to stores if we need to. we have a car but we could live without one if we absolutely had to.

Not much time to comment right now, but Laurel was severely otm about support systems. I'd add that the other main issue with claiming there are jobs elsewhere and hey why don't you leave your community and family is that people have no idea how to do that even if they wanted to! There aren't exactly a lot of role models in poor/small communities who came back there after doing some sort of bootstraps move who is available for advice and questions.

I think the biggest reason north dakota has a 3% unemployment rate is that 95% of people could not tell you that north dakota has a 3% unemployment rate, and the chance of a non-north dakotan knowing about a ()(fairly small) resource boom in a remote part of the country is highly correlated w/ 'I don't want to live in north dakota or work in an oil field, also I don't really need to'

like if a super bowl announcer was like 'wow that was a nice tackle, also did you hear about how many jobs there are in north dakota', north dakota would not have a 3% unemployment rate, because a few thousand people would go there, and then that would be that.

I think I figured out a business model here guys:

- Use riskier drilling/hydraulic fracturing methods in North Dakota near population centers
- Set up a call center to take complaint calls about said methods and locate it somewhere with high unemployment that people actually want to live
- Employment!

Nitpicking individual idiocies out of that piece seems almost pointless, but one other thing it glides over: Nevada's massive unemployment rate now is partly a result of so many people moving there for jobs back when times were (or seemed) good. Chasing hiring booms is risky business.

yeah the states w/ the highest % of people born elsewhere: nevada, arizona, florida

It doesn't help that the jobs in those places were like 90% building houses and selling them to one another.

You can get a lot of bang for your buck when it comes to Nevada real estate right now. If you're willing to buy a partially finished home, probably even more!

been reading ppl actually in nd / in the process of moving there:
http://www.city-data.com/forum/north-dakota/

looks like lots of places have manhattan rents atm

Back in the early 1980s, 80 percent of 18-year-olds proudly strutted out of the D.M.V. with newly minted licenses, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. By 2008 — even before the Great Recession — that number had dropped to 65 percent.

insert Onion cartoonist's crying Statue of Liberty

i'm all for these local yokel sustainable ecology-minded young people with shitty jobs and no cars!

*The New Yokelism* was gonna be the title of my book. hand-crafted hatchets. farmer's markets. noise bands. you know, my scene.

needs a catchy subtitle though. a la this old thread:

Quick! What Is The Title Of Your New Ludicrously All-Encompassing Zeitgeist-Seizing Non-Fiction Book About The End Of Everything

As an aside, I was just thinking about how "local" has kind of taken the place of "imported" as a signifier of a certain kind of taste. Which is an interesting turnabout. Probably should go on that other thread about craftsmanship and virtue and stuff.

i will NEVER be able to top this one. nobody will. i bow to the master...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51B94Z4SCAL.jpg

gross

i buy from some of these evangelical free-range farmers, by the way -- they are creationists and their many kids all wear identical gingham dresses but they grow some fine organic arugula and they get my liberal $$$.

God Hates Pfizer.

God hates [Big] Ags.

what this guy says about fb & Springsteen is obv dumb & I don't want to speculate on generation limbo's gestalt but the idea of moving to follow the work seems right to me. I get Mordy's point about the value of community & roots, but I don't have those things in the USA (immigrant family) so it's hard for me to relate to. & I guess I have ideas about the value of labor for a good life, & so uprooting for that, if needs be, is worthwhile. clown me all you want for my North Dakota comments, but if there are jobs in California, or Arizona, or overseas, then fine: it seems to me compelling that you would at least take seriously the idea of going there.

Having a very small support system makes the uprooting even more difficult, IMO, because each node in that system is more responsible for the others.

ie looking at the reverse of Vegas-to-Bumfuck ND, a farm kid with two parents, one or two siblings, and little extended family is going to have a more difficult time packing up and moving to a city for white-collar work because they bear more responsibility for their family/parents. That translates all over the place - immigrant families sticking together and having family shops/industries, small households that don't live close to where their families came from in past generations, etc.

Future responsibility for one's aging parents is IMO a major element in keeping working and lower-middle class kids from setting off for parts unknown.

I mean that stuff doesn't 'not matter' but I really just think this is above all an information thing when it comes to the small nd resource boom. outside of that there aren't really many places today you can just travel to w/ a hs education and the clothes on your back and expect a job. parts unknown are economically as bad as home or at least 'still not great', there are relocation costs, and you'll know nobody.

I wasn't just talking about hs only people, though.

well I don't think nd has a drastic shortage of marketing execs or bloggers or w/e

non-coast america isn't experiencing a drastic shortage of college grads cause they all moved to brooklyn.