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

People with household incomes over $200K a year who are like "who can afford a carton of eggs anymore, am I right???" are the stock in trade of this thread, I can't even be bothered to find a link, I feel like it's basically a weekly column at this point

eh $200K a year isn't really the stock in trade ... it depends where you live, and if you have more than one child, you could be middle class and wishing you could afford to buy a house or wishing you could afford to pay off student loan debt ... classic quid/ag is more like john's example

I don't want to have a big fight about this but fundamentally yes I think people who make $200K and live in New York and aren't saving anything and wish they had more money are more part of the ruling class than not. And, whatever you think about their membership in the ruling class, they make up a much larger share of the New York Times's readership and implied "we" than do the people buying $5m condos.

I have never made more than 50 grand in a year in my entire life. Anyone making 200k a year is absolutely a member of the ruling class afaic.

otm

I have never made more than 50 grand in a year in my entire life. Anyone making 200k a year is absolutely a member of the ruling class afaic.

Ditto! Maybe I'm warped by having lived paycheck-to-paycheck until I was in my early 30s, but making 100k would make me feel like I was set for life (even here in not-so-cheap Chicago).

When I do my taxes at the end of the year I'm sometimes shocked by how much money has flowed in...and right back out again. (Usually somewhere between 60-75k, never more than that.)

I've never gotten more than 20K a year in my entire life. I don't have any withholding, so I only do my taxes so I can get a chunk of EITC money.

i'll probably crack 50k this year because of djing. i bought myself nice sunglasses to celebrate 😎 maybe i should have read an ny times article about it first tho

https://www.curbed.com/article/cost-of-living-nyc-calculator.html

The thing about the article caek linked is -- they asked people to describe their dream life! Of course it's expensive! I think the many "ugh spoiled millennials" responses to the article are totally misguided; they weren't asking people "what's your realistic plan given the income you're likely to have?"

But there are also a lot of "ugh look how you can't live in New York unless you have $150K a year to spend" takes and those responses are bad for the same reason! "You can't buy a house in brownstone Brooklyn and have a car and send three kids to private school and take two family vacations a year by plane unless you have $150K a year to spend" is probably true, but ... most New Yorkers live perfectly good lives without doing that? And most of the people in this article know they're not actually doing that?

True. The other response I’ve seen is “surely a family doesn’t spend $400 a week” on groceries, which I’ve got bad news for the aspiring parents.

I have to admit I don't quite see how you spend $400 a week at Trader Joe's (I do weekly TJ's shop for $250 tops with two adults two adolescent kids) but if I were to rigorously add up the dollar cost of all the food from all sources I cook for my family in a week it probably does come close to that figure

same. we don't spend it all at TJs, but we spend nearly that much total. i track it. the average for the past 18 months is $1490/month.

$400/week sounds low for people living in $5m homes with 3 kids!

the average for the past 18 months is $1490/month.

On groceries?? Is this including, like, ordering delivery all the time or something?

just groceries from the supermarket. we only go to trader joes and whole foods, and we're in LA, so it's expensive.

but my point is the grocery numbers in this article, for people who are way richer than us and have more kids than us, seem reasonable to low.

Oh you should check out Grocery Outlet. When they have what you need it's <3 <3 <3

I have to admit I don't quite see how you spend $400 a week at Trader Joe's (I do weekly TJ's shop for $250 tops with two adults two adolescent kids) but if I were to rigorously add up the dollar cost of all the food from all sources I cook for my family in a week it probably does come close to that figure

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, 24 May 2023 20:03 (three hours ago) link

I calculated our total weekly spend to average out to about $400/wk for a family of four (kids both old enough to eat full meals and a good amount of snacks), including non-food groceries (paper products, cleaning products, various costco non-food items). We do buy some organic items and could certainly spend less if necessary. Eating more at home since COVID definitely adds to the budget, but also cuts the eating out budget.

Back in NJ my wife and I were spending close to $1200 a month, between the grocery store and Target. Cleaning products are expensive, and we needed a lot — more than we do in Montana — because, no joke, our hateful downstairs neighbors would cook greasy food all night just to spite us.

I still say $400 of Trader Joe's groceries is a lot to buy in a week. Maybe they're eating a lot of the prepackaged meals?

Both quid-ag and really depressing, made me cry story— tony artsy private school tells queer student with learning disabilities that he can’t return in the fall, and the worst happens . I was upset but doin fine and then the picture just fucked me up.

yeah wow, that story is brutal :(

this thread really brought the heat. very illuminating. and i think some of you did some fine work over time. for real! there is real thought on this thread. wait, there is a part two, right? i'm remembering the picture of the people holding rats, i think. too much quid-ag out there.

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

love to get an exclusive interview (and push notification!) that Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray Are Separating despite the fact that

They are not planning to divorce, they said, but will date other people. They will continue to share the Park Slope townhouse . . .

NYT wants the clicks but apparently not enough to say Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray Are Opening Up Their Marriage And Want You to Know They're DTF

Completely chicken to not swing while they were in office.

Why is this news

a very good question!

Had a good time backreading this and the other thread, made the past couple of days more bearable

Separating without intending to divorce has been a growing trend, particularly among people who were married for decades.

Divorce is fucking expensive. Why go through that when you can move out and start a new family across the street from your old one, like John Banville did?

I’m chuckling a bit over the griping over Trader Joe’s prices. Wait till you try Erewohn

gen z reinvents tapas

Is It a Meal? A Snack? No, It’s ‘Girl Dinner.’

Typical girl dinners may include some kind of fruit, a block of cheddar, sliced salami, a sleeve of fancy crackers and a dish of olives. Girl dinner is “both chaotic and filling,” as one TikTok commenter put it, requiring none of the forethought, cooking or plating demanded by an actual meal. As another commenter observed: It’s “no preparation just vibes.”

The trend started when Olivia Maher, a showrunner’s assistant currently out of work because of the writers’ strike, posted a video on TikTok this spring extolling the virtues of a humble, medieval-peasant-inspired assemblage that she called “girl dinner.”

“I think the concept of girl dinner came to me while I was on a hot girl walk with another female friend of mine,” Ms. Maher, 28, said from her apartment in Los Angeles.

. . .

Alana Laverty, a 28-year-old food content creator in London who immediately embraced the phrase, said she started making what she called “snack plates” for dinner during summers when it was too hot to even consider turning on a stove.

“I feel like cooking full meals just gets so repetitive and exhausting, especially in the summer,” Ms. Laverty said. “When dinner came around, we would just pick up one main cheese or one main protein and get a fresh loaf of bread and throw it all on the plate. It’s a really normal way of eating for me now.”

Ms. Laverty started posting her beautifully arranged snack plates on TikTok last year. When the girl dinner trend began to take off, she recalled, “I was like, ‘I have never resonated with something more.’”

or meze. or smorgasbord. or zakuski.

Yeah, I saw that yesterday... the ploughman's lunch gets a gender revamp

food content creator

barf

wait wait did i miss the article explaining wtf a "hot girl walk" is?

ah okay then:

What is a "hot girl walk," exactly? Lind told CBS News it's a four-mile outdoor mindfulness walk during which you're supposed to think of three things:

What you're grateful for
Your goals
And how you're going to achieve them
"And lastly, how hot you are, of course," Lind laughs.

NYT trolling Tik Tok for content oy vey

august came early this year

xp This particular idea of putting together a bunch of grazing food on a plate and eating it for dinner has been taken from ADHD support Internet places, btw.

I mean it is also just called a charcuterie board.

I invited eating hunched over a sink grunting

Half of my meals are this. I am a fridge forager since my wife buys twice as much food as we need.

get your nunchucks and your dad's keys -- i know where we can find protein

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/31/nyregion/geraldo-rivera-fox-erie-canal.html

The 36-foot luxury motorboat, with its polished mahogany hull and American flag waving from the stern, set off from East Hampton on a recent Sunday morning, heading toward the tip of downtown Manhattan and passing beneath airplanes, bridges, thunderstorms and, eventually, a glorious blue sky. The trip would take the boat, named Belle, within view of the Statue of Liberty en route to the Hudson River and, finally, Lake Erie.

But first, she needed to navigate a narrow stretch of water that has haunted sailors for centuries: Hell Gate, a tidal strait named by Dutch explorers in the 1600s, where the currents of the East River, Harlem River and the Long Island Sound converge.

In just a few harrowing moments, Belle churned through the rough waters, and her crew exhaled.
“That was definitely hair-raising,” said the captain, Geraldo Rivera, his own tresses (and mustache) looking wind-tousled.

not the nyt but we still get the new yorker delivered and i have a weird post-pandemic aversion to it but whenever i pick it up - and yes i realize its the new yorker and its mascot wears a big top hat and a monocle - but i feel like they have just gone full speed ahead into some rarified peak capitalism world of ugh. these profiles that are just wide-eyed recitations of some rich guy's WILD exploits and all these weird justifications for excessive wealth. so, unfortunately, i can't unsee it and every page of the thing just seems like a capitalist apologia. maybe i'm just sensitive. taken for granted privilege is alive and well there. the times is so frequently ugh that i could probably post links here daily. there is a frantic nero-fiddling quality to conspicuous consumption now. this could be it. spend it while ya got it. or start a kicky little non-profit on the side. or buy a yacht. whatevs.

The rich have always been the legendary heroes of NY (in their own minds).

Did not even know this was a thing. You too can clone your dog for the simple cost of 50K!