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

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-purell-wipes-amazon-sellers.html

Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each, he said people forget that his price includes his labor, Amazon’s fees and about $10 in shipping. (Alcohol-based sanitizer is pricey to ship because officials consider it a hazardous material.)

Current price-gouging laws “are not built for today’s day and age,” Mr. Colvin said. “They’re built for Billy Bob’s gas station doubling the amount he charges for gas during a hurricane.”

He added, “Just because it cost me $2 in the store doesn’t mean it’s not going to cost me $16 to get it to your door.”

Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” his brother said. “The major metro areas were cleaned out.”

...

Mr. Colvin said he was simply fixing “inefficiencies in the marketplace.” Some areas of the country need these products more than others, and he’s helping send the supply toward the demand.

...

He thought about it more. “I honestly feel like it’s a public service,” he added. “I’m being paid for my public service.”

so many choices here.

Real heroes fix market inefficiencies.

Noah Colvin is just a small-time arbitrageur.

this @cwarzel piece about a group of rafters who left for a 25-day trip and came back to pandemic includes exactly the kind of quote you would want from people who go on a 25-day rafting triphttps://t.co/PNvISwoUGG pic.twitter.com/IvQu5RUfOT

— Kathryn VanArendonk (@kvanaren) March 17, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/style/coronavirus-honeymoon-stranded.html

By Sunday, they were the only guests at their resort, the Cinnamon Velifushi Maldives, which normally is at capacity this time of year, catering to some 180 guests. (“Room rates start at $750 a night,” its website still says.) The resort comprises the entirety of its speck of an island. There is nowhere to go. The couple reign like benign yet captive sovereigns over their islet. The days are long and lazy. They sleep in, snorkel, lounge by the pool, repeat.

The resort’s full staff are at hand, because of the presence of the two guests. Government regulations won’t allow any Maldivians to leave resorts until after they undergo a quarantine that follows their last guests’ departure. Accustomed to the flow of a bustling workday, and the engagement with a full house of guests, most of the staff, having grown listless and lonely, dote on the couple ceaselessly. Their “room boy” checks on them five times a day. The dining crew made them an elaborate candlelit dinner on the beach. Every night performers still put on a show for them in the resort’s restaurant: Two lone audience members in a grand dining hall.

At breakfast, nine waiters loiter by their table. Hostesses, bussers and assorted chefs circulate conspicuously, like commoners near a celebrity. The couple has a designated server, but others still come by to chat during meals, topping off water glasses after each sip, offering drinks even though brimming cocktail glasses stand in full view, perspiring. The diving instructor pleads with them to go snorkeling whenever they pass him by.

man Buñuel was really repeating himself by the end there

lol

When Citadel Securities, a sibling to the hedge fund company Citadel, decided to isolate a team of stock traders to keep business humming during the coronavirus pandemic, the firm’s billionaire founder, Kenneth Griffin, secured sumptuous Florida quarters: the Four Seasons hotel in Palm Beach.

The firm booked the hotel for New York and Chicago traders just before Palm Beach County put a hold on March 26 on new hotel reservations, and it began operations there on March 30. A few days later, Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a stay-at-home order across Florida.

The resort is guarded by off-duty officers from the Palm Beach Police Department who are hired by Citadel Securities. No one other than employees for the firm or the hotel is allowed inside. Mr. Griffin, a prominent political donor and top contributor to Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, owns property nearby and is not staying at the hotel.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/us/coronavirus-citadel-securities-four-seasons-florida.html

https://nypost.com/2020/04/14/i-hired-a-private-chef-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic

https://nypost.com/2020/04/14/i-hired-a-private-chef-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic

not very quid, whole lotta ag

This weekend we are introducing At Home, a new print section of The New York Times. It is devoted to the belief that we can live rich lives at home even while we are quarantined during the coronavirus pandemic, even while we are maintaining social distance from one another, even while we begin the slow, unsteady steps toward reopening our cities and states, our world.

At Home is meant to bring art and beauty into your home, along with health, style, deliciousness and a little bit of fun. The section will bring you games and virtual voyages, tips for beauty and fitness, easy recipes to cook. It will look at what’s happening in the night skies, and at paintings in virtual museums. It has things to say about childcare and self-care, and about what to watch and listen to. It will help you organize your space. It will encourage you to read poetry and fiction, to draw and to make. We hope it will be of service as we navigate together how best to live full lives in a difficult time.

At Home will replace, temporarily, our print Travel section, which will return after the coronavirus pandemic has eased, and Sports Sunday will move into the first section of the newspaper, also temporarily. (Travel news will continue to run in other print sections of The Times, including At Home.) We are, all of us, eager to hear from you as we get underway.

<barf>

It has things to say

The Times has been tone deaf plenty of times, but that's the first time I've felt postal-level rage at them

what’s the antecedent to these posts? the “at home” section?

Telling people what you did during quarantine is going to be the new where I was on 9/11

Except drawn out over 12-36 months or whatever.

everyone will have the same stories

i was just thinking about how tedious it's gonna be talking to thirtysomethings in my old age and listening to them telling me how the quarantine was

lol, I was just thinking about how bored in advance I was about the idea of having to tell some kind of "story" about all this, and I started planning to just fall back on the pretense that it was some kind of traumatic experience I preferred not to talk about.

the "grandpa doesn't want to talk about the war" approach?

I'm going to tell people I died.

the year was 2020... and I died.
NEEDLE SCRATCH
but i'm getting ahead of myself! This story begins way back in 2001...

"so back in 2020 my self-control shattered and I alienated a bunch of people on a messageboard, because of a global disaster"

I might be missing something here but what exactly is the hideous moral outrage of running recipes and childcare articles instead of sports

I swear to god every fucking thing is wrong anymore

agree

here’s the problem. that it appears staffed by, or at least edited with, the same type of people who ran the travel section. ie the height of quid-ag culture. or maybe the foyer to the heights (which has always been Style). it’s a boon for hate-readers like me though.

here’s a current strip of in-house marketing links in the app:

At Home > Meditate: With Alanis Morissette. Watch: Workplace Comedies. Rethink: Your Wedding. Dance: With Whales.

Rethink: Your Wedding. Dance: With Whales.

well, ok.

Each of those leads inexorably to the next.

1 whale can take the place of at least 10 wedding guests

Rethink: Your Wedding. Have: A Whale Of A Time.

undersea whale weddings will become the norm as the sea levels rise

***rich*** lives, you say?

Amazed I get to be the first to post this

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/realestate/virus-rentals-hamptons.html

In mid-April, when the coronavirus made living in their Manhattan co-op increasingly untenable, Dan and Jessica Aronson and their two sons, ages 8 and 9, decamped to Remsenburg, a hamlet in Southampton with nary a stoplight. They rented a six-bedroom, three-bath house with a hot tub, pool and tennis court — sight unseen — for $11,000 a month, planning to stay through the end of May.

Late last month, concerned that New York City “wouldn’t open up enough to enjoy it,” Mr. Aronson, 47, who is working remotely in his insurance brokerage job at Marsh & McLennan, extended the lease for another $10,000 to the end of June.

“We didn’t get to go on our Turks and Caicos trip” in mid-March, Mr. Aronson said. “A lot of that got turned into this. A week on an island turned into a vacation home for weeks and weeks.” Now, with summer camps unlikely to open for their sons, the Aronsons are considering extending through July.

nary a stoplight

the novels that will be written

"I Was In The Pool"

[img src="https://filmschoolrejects.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/the-swimmer-burt-lancaster-party-750x405.png";]

'isn't it terrible, darling?'

'isn't what terrible? are you talking about the coronavirus again?'

'you mean you haven't heard? the squash courts on 75th won't open until july at the earliest'

https://filmschoolrejects.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/the-swimmer-burt-lancaster-party-750x405.png

brb, getting in time machine to invest in hamptons fisherman shacks
Jill-Mandy and Carlo Voutta of Jersey City, N.J., lost out on one lease they signed because the previous renter refused to leave. They found a 1930s fisherman’s shack on Davis Creek in the town of Southampton, and are paying $10,000 a month.

Jill-
.
.
.
.
.
Mandy

otm

It really shows how much America's class structure has crumbled over the last few decades that a woman named Jill-Mandy was permitted to marry a man named Carlo.

Maybe it's actually Gilmandi

I'M GONNA PUT YOU IN A SHACK
AND NEVER LET YOU BACK
JILL-MANDY

My name is Jill-Mandyus, Queen of the Hamptons

Oh Jill-Mandy, well you came and you knocked without renting
But I sent you away, oh Jill-Mandy

http://i.imgur.com/dyWBhDo.png

motherfuckers out here renting estates for less than a year for 2 mill