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

Transferring executives, even when there is no functional reason doesn't produce well-rounded people, but it does keep those executives so disoriented in their lives outside of work that they become ever more centered in their work life to the exclusion of outside interests.

I really don't think "well-rounded" is what that passsage suggests they're going for. More like "generic."

more on north dakota:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/a-tale-of-two-resource-booms-continued/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html

Third-Best Jewish Ping-Pong Player Quits Bank

Starting his own firm, perhaps?

it might almost be credible if his golden era for goldman sachs was like the 50s instead of...the 00s??

'we just lost the values and care for our customer that we had during the bubble ;_;'

@pareene
Goldman used to be about making obscenely wealthy people wealthier while also making ourselves obscenely wealthy, now it is about GREED
19 minutes ago

also in the news:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx

remember when you could just quit your job at not write an op ed

and

The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years.

secret sauce

http://www.theawl.com/2012/03/the-goldman-sachs-op-ed#more

I'm in favor of anything that gets public opinion even more against wall street

i already posted this to the margin call thread: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/why-i-am-leaving-the-empire%252c-by-darth-vader-201203145007

dude should go work for grayson moorhead

http://www.hulu.com/watch/61335/saturday-night-live-moorhead-securities

lol i see max already went there ; )

i think this guy's more naive than slippery. after all, he started at Goldman Sachs around 2000 or so ... right when everyone's favorite former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was running things. i find it hard to believe that anyone with an ounce of real intelligence would seriously consider Paulson to be a model of probity, intelligence and ethics. (of course, had Smith started a few years before he did, he'd also have rubbed shoulders with that other upstanding example of business/political ethics Jon Corzine.) unless we're supposed to read this as a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment or something.

Between the move-to-north-dakota guy and the olive garden review I don't think North Dakota has been discussed on ILX as much in the board's entire life as it has this week.

xpost I wonder if it's more that during the boom everyone was so making money hand-over-fist that there wasn't as much need to be openly (within GS) out to screw your clients?

I am tempted to give the ex-GS's naivete stance a little credit - he did mention he came to the US from south africa for college, maybe he was just really impressionable?

BACK on the scale of home economics, Laura MacCleery discovered that it’s not cheap to buy a chemical-free bassinet. “We had it made with nontreated wood, by Amish people,” she said. “I think it was 400 bucks.” The organic mattress was hand-stitched.

“And then the baby was born large,” Ms. MacCleery said. “She was like 8 pounds 10 ounces.”

Maya outgrew the nontoxic bassinet in a month.

That purchase may sound frivolous. But then how much would you pay to keep your baby from being exposed to the formaldehyde emitted by some particleboard furniture?

Janet Golden, a professor at Rutgers in Camden, N.J., who is writing a history of the American baby, sees the quest for the perfect green nursery as a kind of second job. It’s “a status marker for women,” she said. “You have to have a lot of money to throw away a perfectly good shower curtain.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/garden/going-to-extreme-lengths-to-purge-household-toxins.html?ref=style

Took me until the fifth line to work out that a bassinet isn't a cross between a bassoon and a clarinet.

that is a solid gold classic of the genre right there.

rutgers professors called for their opinions on overpriced baby furniture = CHECK

organic, hand stitched mattresses why oh why oh why

Depending on whom you ask, it’s a media-induced mass hysteria, an eco-marketing trend, a public health campaign or a stealth environmental movement — possibly all of the above.

Looks like the NYT is really pulling for option #1 here.

Chemical-free makes me rage.

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/safe2.jpg

better not ever take that baby in a motor vehicle

haha, tracer otm

http://fnochemicalfree.tumblr.com/

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmi1n1U6L61ql91lpo1_500.jpg

hahaha, I actually just had an argument with my aunt because she was like "I want to buy you this new fabric shower curtain. It's eco friendly" and I was like "Do you think it's eco friendly to throw away a perfectly good shower curtain, let alone to exchange it with one that has to be washed in a washing machine?"

Wait, do you think it's better to get a plastic one that you toss out? That's an honest question. I usually buy the polyester hotel liners rather than the plastic ones. (I say "usually," but that more or less means once every three years or when we move into a new apartment, whichever comes first.)

Yeah the washable polyester ones are great

In theory you can keep a plastic one going for a long time by hand-wiping the bottom down and making sure you don't get soap scum caked on it but I've never had luck with that in practice

The plastic one I got is supposed to be "mold and mildew resistant."

well a single piece of plastic is a bad thing to focus on if you're really thinking about being green or w/e, also in this case he'd be buying it for the sake of buying it because he already had one

That's a dirty lie, ime.

If it's any better, I don't wash the poly ones anywhere near as often as I should (feel kind of gross admitting that, please don't judge me).

Hahaha the "mold and mildew resistant" claim, not iatee's post.

my posts are usually dirty lies tbf

iatee owns five cars. He drives one to work, and has four hired drivers drive the other four to work, in case he wants to drive a different car home. FACT.

It did emit that nasty VOC smell when I first got it, but I figured I wasn't in the room with it very much. Although so did the mattress pad we bought, which we sleep on. I mean this shit is sort of scary -- even the article admits that every year there are all kinds of new compounds being introduced into our products without much examination. I mean these two things were made in some factory in china under the lowest supervision standards imaginable. The mattress pad didn't even have a tag on it, so I don't even think I could sue a manufacturer if it made me sick. Under the circumstances it's hard to blame people for going a little overboard with the "non-toxic" products.

The main things that annoy me are (1) manufacturers taking advantage of the fears in a situation where there's clearly no added benefit ("organic maple syrup" -- there's no other kind), and (2) people confusing eco-friendly with non-toxic. E.g. organic produce is really not a health issue for the most part -- pesticide is water soluble and washes off of most fruits very easily. The reason "organic" is an issue was originally environmental.

It did emit that nasty VOC smell when I first got it

Mmmmm, pthalates.

I mean I don't remember so much stuff having that smell when I was a kid. It really does seem like a new and possibly bad thing.

we are all already sponges for industrial chemicals anyway, there's no escape, fluoride and chemtrails, just use a rubbermaid storage tin as your bassinet and surrender

I pay to have all my new stuff offgassed at a private facility before bringing it into my home

I actually had this semi-cynical business idea recently to become a green/non-toxic baby products "consultant" -- the idea being that for a not insignificant fee I would actually navigate you through every single baby product purchase you have to make, since the shit it so time-consuming for NYC's overworked professional parents.

none of yr shopping habits are doing shit for the environment youre alls trapped in a quiddities and agonies of the ruling class thread of your own design