Metafilter comments vs. Youtube comments

At my downwardly mobile pace of the last 4 years, I could pay off 101k in debt - if I really worked at it - in about 101 thousand years.
Tough week for children's authors.
Likewise, "Julie of the Wolves" was one of my favorite childhood books for its model of independence, and love of animals and nature. .
this is fucken bullshit wheres my free iPad goddammit
A lot of people pass up Christmas with their families because it's too expensive, do you judge them too? Likely those people weren't blowing $1300/mo on "entertainment" just 6 months before Christmas.
Back when my library had inter-library loan, I got several of these novels and read them. I particularly liked The Time Machine Did It.
Privilege has its advantages, I guess. This privilege talk is getting really really old. He's certainly fortunate in a number of ways. Not least of which is that he or a family member didn't get sick or have a bad accident during this process; it's worth mentioning that when he says "As cliche as it sounds..." about having his health and a healthy family, that is a really huge deal, and not everyone is that lucky.
Yeah, I'm trying to think of a point of comparison for people who don't live in DC for what an important cultural touchstone he was, especially for DC natives and I'm really coming up short. Growing up in dc is weird, because almost everybody rich and famous in dc came here from somewhere else, and the ones who came from dc left and got rich and famous somewhere else. He was one of the few hometown boys who done good and stayed and built a scene and a community.
My friend and I approached him after his Christmas show last year and asked him to draw moustaches on our faces. He was an absolute gentleman, though he refused the proffered eyeliner and insisted on using his own sharpie. I never washed my face again.
Why are there still drops on the hard hat? Shouldn't those have blown off first?
There are many students (socially, financially) like this guy who will find his blog to be an inspirational and practical guide to become debt free. But no, unless you're 99%/working class/poor/starving/dead you are privileged and an obvious target for snark. Practical guide? His miraculous way of paying down his debt was to sell off his "second car," his motorcycle, and start renting out his "extra rooms" in his house to - horror of horrors - Crigslist strangers. That is super practical, the rest of us can just get right on figuring out what to do with our extra cars and motorcycles and extra rooms in the houses we own.
> Yes, please educate me on how banks print money and lend it to people. Sure, why not?
Metafilter: You are being replaced by people who skive off less at the office.
Soooo, are they going to illegally mass spam mail these out, and create an app that ninja links it on Facebook? Because I am pretty sure without the extra-legal distribution methods, these are probably not going to make a dent... Hi, I am pazazygeek, and I am no fun.
Don't forget "Purple Monkey Dishwasher"
It must suck to not be able to do something like this without it being posted all over the internet and dissected.
Outstanding!
Swartzwelder is responsible for many iconic episodes, yet he was writing for them for at least 5 years after 1999, which was the last time I remember the Simpons having a decent episode. Did he slack off during his final years with the show?
Just be careful when you're picking up hitchhiking celebrities, because you could get stuck with Bono instead.
Oh, and while we're at it: As Americans Get Poorer, Members of Congress Get Richer
The average American's net worth has dropped 8 percent during the past six years, while members of Congress got, on average, 15 percent richer, according to a New York Times analysis of financial disclosure. The median net worth of members of Congress is about $913,000, compared with about $100,000 for the country at large, the Times' analysis found. This wealth disparity between lawmakers and the people they represent seems to be continually growing. Nearly half of Congress — 249 members — are millionaires, while only 5 percent of American households can make the same claim.
The grayest Congress
Congress, in fact, is the grayest it's ever been, and don't expect this to change much after the November midterms. The average age of a senator is 60 (the oldest ever) and the average age of a member of the House is 55 (the oldest in more than a century). The aging Congress, experts say, is partly a reflection of more members -- like Byrd and Akaka -- deciding to stay in office for their own personal reasons. But it's also a reflection of their political parties wanting them to stay. "What is indisputable is that both parties are begging their incumbents to continue serving, regardless of age," Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, wrote at the beginning of this election cycle.
@snofoam: but that's exactly what we do. We retranslate books when the English into which they are translated itself requires translation. Translations contemporary to the original are not always the best ones---compare the Constance Garnett Dostoyevsky translations to the Pevear/Volokhonsky ones. (I don't know Russian, but Garnett certainly makes Crime and Punishment into a George Eliot novel, which just seems the wrong tone)
It's funny--I don't care for his movies much (although I feel like I *should*...they just mostly leave me going :meh:), but I love listening to him recount stories in interviews and the like. Bless him and his completely unapologetic sense of self.
So, all your money is stuffed in a mattress? Got it. Stuffed in a mattress. Not, say, in a savings account that allows a bank to loan it out so I can get a car loan? Apparently you are unfamiliar with the concept of velocity of money. GDP is directly related to the velocity of money, which is how quickly money is turned over from person to person in spending for goods and services. Particularly in the current economic liquidity trap, putting your money in the bank does nothing to help when there is a shortage of demand. He is exactly right that rich people don't spend enough. Banks are full of more money than they know what to do with right now.
Of course, as Chevy Chase was once overheard to say, on the phone to his partner just before Weekend Update aired: "You don't actually blow, that's just a figure of speech."
Doesn't matter; Had profit
OH THE BITTERNESS. As a lifelong Astros fan I obtained a white hot fury of the Mets because we WERE ONE STRIKE AWAY FROM THE GODDAMN WORLD SERIES IN 1986.
"OR-LANDO!"
Oh wow, so the answer was to make a lot of money and not spend it. Thanks, guy.
Aw man, I drive on 70 in Ohio all the time! No John Waters, though.
When I was his age, I was writing laughably fake papers on Hamlet and uploading them to essay sites. The key was to make the first and last paragraphs seem superficially reasonable, and then to ramp the insanity up and down in the middle. I'm not very cool.
...but I feel like I'm reading a ton of defensive reactions that aren't really based on his actual words. This isn't about his actual words. It's a highly paid (compared to a lot of Mefites) Harvard graduate talking about his money problems from getting his expensive Harvard degree. When people are living close to the edge or just making less money, a lot of people will take it as attack of sorts when said Harvard Graduate talks about how paying off debt isn't rocket science.
My, what white teeth you (all) have!
It's amazing how long the "work at home stuffing envelopes" thing has been around. I remember seeing want ads in newspapers at least thirty years ago with that scam.
I looked and looked in my couch cushions, but I just couldn't find the $25K that I'm pretty sure I left there. Maybe I'll go look again.
. Thought he'd never go.
In your alternate reality, does everyone you don't immediately personally identify with have some ulterior motive for everything they do? Actually, I pretty closely personally identify with him--I fall generally into the same demographic group, albeit slightly older and married now. Why do YOU think a Harvard MBA would start publishing a blog on money management, using his goofy personal experience to sell it in a kind of perverse Morgan Spurlockesque fashion? It couldn't POSSIBLY be because he has an interest in tapping into the lucrative inspirational/self-help/money management guru market, could it?
please im a children's author, and i got a book contract and the deadline is soon and i want to write it but im really really really busy, and i really loved your book and i thought maybe you can write one for me, please please please, thanks!!!!!
Herzog and Waters Meet the Mummy Herzog and Waters Meet the Keystone Kops Herzog and Waters Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Herzog and Waters Go to Mars Herzog and Waters Meet Captain Kidd Herzog and Waters in the Foreign Legion Herzog and Waters Meet Frankenstein
And I thought about my own efforts in this direction, how I have spent the last four months saying "I will not go out to dinner or lunch this month"...and failed every month. I'm with Davejay on this. The guy started out on third base obviously but he still made some pretty big sacrifices. I owe 5k, and somehow, it's not diminishing because of all of the small things that I am NOT doing. Or the small things I am buying. It's not going to work for everyone, and it's not like "hey, everyone, why don't you pay off your $36k in student loans on your 26k job faster???" because as noted, the basic cost of living doesn't shrink proportionally to the smaller salary. But as Davejay said, I'm just going to take my own take home message from it. Stop wasting money! (although I will still probably buy a coffee and bagel on way to work tomorrow, never learning. And living in NYC, even worse financial decision!)
EmpressCallipygos: " I'd imagine your reponse may have been different, then, if this caught you in the "poor" phase. I've had similar luck, but the "back to middle class" is only just now kicking in, and I know that I always bristled at all of the well-meaning advice to save money because "oh, yeah, after I pay rent and utilities and buy food maybe I'll have a whole three cents, whoop-te-do."" Here's what I don't understand: I do not see him giving people advice by saying, "I'm totally in your exact situation and this is what you should do to get out of it." I really don't see that anywhere on his blog, and I've read a great deal of it. The most he ever seemed to say was that some people reading his blog might get something out of it. And that by reducing unnecessary expenses and using his life's savings he was able to accomplish something. He acknowledged that his entire situation was very lucky: he has a really good job, a high salary, low personal expenses, no illnesses, no family to support, no crises, no real problems and he was living in an area of the country where the cost of living is very low. I have mostly stayed out of this conversation because I'm the OP and I don't want to steer the thread, but I feel like I'm reading a ton of defensive reactions that aren't really based on his actual words. I think he made some deeply stupid choices that I personally wouldn't have made. If I had a life's savings of 25K I certainly wouldn't make it vanish overnight to pay off a low-interest loan, for example. But I'm not really seeing how he's lecturing the rest of us regarding how we can spend down out debt. Nor (as someone said above,) implying that we're somehow deficient for not following his advice.
If you would like to buy his books, I believe he is selling them semi-directly through this ebay account. From what I recall, others have said they reek of a thousand cigarettes when you open the box.
It seems pointless to interact with the kid, except to maybe stop at his first bit of advice: "tell the teacher you're behind, but garner sympathy by saying you were actually motivated to contact the actual author." However, as a parent of an elementary school student, I must say that I hate hate hate homework. "Dad, the teacher said we had to look up pictures of plants on Google, and print them out in colour for school tomorrow." "Dad, the teacher said we had to look up 5 recipes on the Internet tonight, and print them out and bring them to school tomorrow." "Dad, the teacher said we had to look up stuff on YouTube..." Arrrrggh!!!!
Jean Craighead George has died.

George was an author of young-adult literature, including the Newbery Medal winning Julie of the Wolves and My Side of the Mountain, which won the Newbery Honor. Her works doubtlessly introduced millions of young readers to the joys of literature.
HBS: I forgot about interest
Although really there shouldn't be so much emphasis on the single man part since you're better off as a couple, as long as you both work and aren't childless.
Why does it make more sense for millions of wealthy parents to pack individual lunches when the school systems, which already have the economies of scale to feed millions of kids, can do so? Or do the poor kids not deserve healthy meals too? I think the real challenge there is that delivering healthy meals is harder and more expensive at that kind of scale than delivering frozen tater tots and chicken nuggets. It's absolutely worth it, but it's a challenge. Yesterday, I ate a bag lunch as a chaperon on a field trip in a school system that is putting a lot of effort in to making it's lunches healthier. The lunch was sort of middling on the healthiness front (Chicken Salad sandwich with a bit of lettuce and tomato, pita chips, apple), but it was a fair bit better than what I would have been fed as a kid. That said the kids (from a very poor neighborhood) were pretty likely to have packed something else that was even worse for them (potato chips, fried chicken, etc.). The school officially has a no junk food policy, which was a nightmare to enforce because basically no kid brought anything that wasn't sort of junk food and having to decide whether Cheez-Its were better enough than Cheetos to be okay was not a fun way to spend the afternoon. Honestly, I've decided that the solution is probably to ban outside food, but making the school lunches healthy enough to make that worthwhile is hard.
Metafilter: 'Sometimes death is the only option'.
From Adam Bertocci, author of Two Gentlemen of Lebowski (previously): Overthinking Ghostbusters.
What does lead to more employment is a "circle of life" like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me. We had low employment and plenty of consumers 10 years ago. So what happened to all the jobs? Maybe this idea that creating consumers can set in motion significant hiring is just another "article of faith." Or the idea that enough knowledge jobs will available for anyone who has the right education. This doesn't seem like a well thought out talk. I'm sure there are economists like Stiglitz, Krugman, or Reich who could have provided a more convincing and detailed argument for what kinds of jobs can be created sustainably in today's economy and how. Banks are full of more money than they know what to do with right now. And a boat load of toxic assets from the real estate bubble and Euro crisis.
Oh Wow
.
John Waters once tried to pick me up. In a bar. I was flattered, but honestly I was more creeped out.
I don't think I can ever forget Purple Monkey Dishwasher. Also: THE HAND THING MEANS THE TAXES HONK IF YOU LOVE COOKIES THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT FLYING A KITE AT NIGHT THAT'S SO ......UNWHOLESOME
verstegan : I think it's interesting to see the way the debate is being framed in this thread, as essentially about finding careers for PhDs who aren't lucky enough to land a tenure-track job [...] Alt-academia isn't going to emerge from the shadows until people start choosing to pursue it as preferable to a conventional academic career, not just the least-worst option because the academic jobs aren't there. I usually take a negative tone on issues like this, but this time - Kudos to all the alt-acs! You guys "get" exactly the problem with the modern education system - People racking up huge debts learning un-employable skills in the hopes of someday going on to teach that same subject. Not so, for you! You fully intended to use the non-mainstream skills provided by your college education, and for that, I applaud you. And as a side-bonus, the more, and more visible, people we have making a basic living with their humanities degrees to counterpoint the "luxury" of the tenured professorial class, the fewer people will consider the pursuit of such courses of study a good way to sink 4-10 years of their life and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I also would have read Maman as a name. I think 'ma' has most of the connotations he's looking for. It's more warm than 'mom' and not as childish as 'mommy' or 'mama'. Perhaps it's a little hokey.
You don't have to be wealthy to pack a peanut butter sandwich with a banana. Indeed. And I am super lucky to be home to pack my kids lunches 2 days a week (and weekends). The other three days I leave before they get up at 6am. My partner makes lunches those days, but I'm reluctant to judge if people aren't great lunch makers. The lunch was sort of middling on the healthiness front (Chicken Salad sandwich with a bit of lettuce and tomato, pita chips, apple) Bulgaroktonos, I'm not in the US, so some dietary stuff is over my head, but that sounds like a pretty healthy lunch, the kind I send my kids off with regularly. Why are you saying it only just makes grade?
so, who is the guy in the lab poster with the pointy hat?
He's going to be upset when the student debt bubble destroys the economy regardless of his personal responcibility. But I have to admit that it is good that he made a plan and met his goals.
It's irrelevant whether the kid is an ESL student. You don't need to be a fluent English speaker to know that it's a moronic idea to start a major assignment two days before the due date, or to know that it's beyond the pale to ask the author of the book that you're studying to do your homework for you.
When does he actually start talking about specific things in the movie?
As a former academic, now curator, I guess I belong to the alt-ac constituency and I should be very sympathetic to this movement. But the 'alt-ac' label makes my hackles rise, with its implication that academics and alt-academics belong to separate teams. (I much prefer the term 'para-academic' which Julia Flanders uses in her essay.) We're all in the same boat, and if there was a sudden cut in academic funding, the alt-academics would be among the first to lose their jobs. As other people have already said, there's nothing new about alt-acs. (A.E. Housman isn't the best example -- he was a clerk in the Patent Office, basically a non-academic job, and did his academic work in his spare time -- but the point is a valid one.) But the claim that 'alt-ac is the future of the academy' seems to me to overlook the crucial fact that in many ways, opportunities for fruitful cross-fertilisation between academic and alt-academic positions are far less than they used to be. The 'scholar-librarian' was once a familiar figure; not any more. Librarians and archivists are now, quite rightly, expected to have professional training and qualifications in their own fields, which takes them on a different career track from that of the research PhD. I think it's interesting to see the way the debate is being framed in this thread, as essentially about finding careers for PhDs who aren't lucky enough to land a tenure-track job. (Failed in academia? Why not become a librarian instead!) The stereotype of the 'failed academic' is difficult to dislodge. And there are good reasons for this. For all the doomy talk of 'the decline of the academy', 'loss of academic freedom', 'death of tenure' and so forth, the fact remains that tenured academic posts are still highly desirable and sought-after, offering a level of job security, salary, flexible working, public status and reputation that most alt-academics can only dream of. Alt-academia isn't going to emerge from the shadows until people start choosing to pursue it as preferable to a conventional academic career, not just the least-worst option because the academic jobs aren't there. Not many people are making that choice yet (there are some of us, but not many), and however bad things get in the academy, I don't see that changing any time soon. Academia is still the preferred option. And it is, of course, very much in the interests of academic departments to keep it that way.
1. Come up with suggestive name for project. 2. ??? 3. Profit!!
Arrrrrgh I hate this kind of crap. Student doesn't do his work, then starts begging for illicit assistance, adding in lies about how much he's already done, and lies about special circumstances that excuse his slackassery (dead uncle). When busted on his plagiarism, the student will try several different lies to dodge the charge, including an insistence that he didn't copy anything word-for-word. This, too, will be a lie. This happens even when the assignment is crystal clear, entirely straightforward, and perfectly reasonable... But then ZOMFG add information about that horror show of an assignment and the kid's douchebaggery starts to seem understandable. Cripes, do people really give assignments like that? I'd just skip it and take the zero, kid.
.
As a grand poobah, I declare by fiat that the author has nice hair and smells like cinnamon!
I like that this Krug post is immediately followed by one about Bollinger.
I suppose the Teddites aren't going to have Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein on either. That'll be of a piece with the stodgy, old-fashioned Sunday morning network talk shows, even though their book is one of the most talked-about out there right now. "TED is avowedly non-partisan. We want to share ideas in a way that brings people together, doesn't throw sand in their faces." Then you'll quickly become irrelevant. The common currency these days are ideas that drive us further and further apart and that throw as much sand in each other's faces as possible.
now, right from the start, the American reader is faced with a foreign term, with a confusion not previously present Despite the fact that Bloom goes on to dismiss this--because, he contends, an English speaker would have no problem figuring out that Maman is a female parent--I must be an uncultured rube because I'm sure it would take me a few paragraphs to figure it out. As far as our first impressions of the narrator go, if I read a novel in English that began "Maman died today," I'd assume at first that the speaker was an fairly pretentious effete prone to using an overly precious substitute for a common noun;
Mummy passed away today, don't you know? Dreadfully sad, that. Actually, not to put too fine a point on it, vis a vis the actual time of her demise, but it occurs to me that it may have in fact been yesterday when she rung down the curtain and all that. The telegram wasn't terribly accurate w/r/t the exact time of death, I'm afraid. So...yes. My dear mother's earthly residency appears to have come to an end within the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours. It really makes one think, doesn't it, about the ultimate futility of life and all that rot. Dash it all, I believe I'll pop down to the beach for a bit...
This sign is on Route 70W just outside the Baltimore beltway. It does kind of seem like an invitation or a dare maybe. Good for John for taking it up.
would imply that we should re-translate all books periodically to make the tone more contemporary. We absolutely do that. Each translation is unique after all. In the words of Keats: On First Looking into Chapman's Homer Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise — Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
the idea that minorities together comprise some sort of group is fallacious Likewise is the idea that whites comprise some sort of group. That doesn't mean we should ignore the passing of a demographic milepost.
Why does anyone start a blog? To document their life, or some specific part of it. I did wrote a blog for awhile about my weight loss without the slightest thought of anyone ever reading or caring. Look, maybe you're right, and maybe he is 100% honest when he says he documented it purely to create a bit of motivation and public accountability for his goal. But I'll bet you dollars to donuts that he has a book out next year. I don't even really mean that as a criticism. It's great that he set a goal and worked hard to achieve it, and maybe he can provide some useful advice to people. I'm just a natural skeptic.
I don't think I've ever heard an indie-bandier name than that. You obviously haven't heard of Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.
Flabkiller Acai Berry Extract Helps You Lose! Make big money from home with Envelope Elf! iPads for just $39.99 at Deals R Us!

Don't worry, my account hasn't been hacked. These websites are part of a new educational campaign from the Massachusetts Office of Consumer Affairs to warn about common internet scams. Clicking on any of the links takes you to information about the type of scam and how to spot it.
Privilege has its advantages, I guess. This privilege talk is getting really really old. There are many students (socially, financially) like this guy who will find his blog to be an inspirational and practical guide to become debt free. But no, unless you're 99%/working class/poor/starving/dead you are privileged and an obvious target for snark.
Yeah, lose your job, have kids, encounter a few unexpected medical bills and a major issue with your car...have your rent raised (oh wait, he was able to leverage his mortgage on his house if needed), live in the Bay Area...and this guy's "Mission Accomplished" would be like wearing a codpiece flight suit on an aircraft carrier.
The money sitting in a vault is a red herring. His point about the rich not buying consumables is a good one. While one of the functions of the modern banking system is to make money available instead of having it sit around in a vault, that must be part of a larger functioning system in order to do any good. Yes, as mentioned above, prices and interest rates can fall, but if you still don't have enough people employed, of if not enough people can qualify for a loan, or (as we are seeing more of now) no one wants to borrow, it doesn't matter how much rich people put in banks. In fact, you could make the argument that this directly backs up his main point, which is that economic stimulation does not work well from the top down, because the only way this works is if the middle class is secure and borrowing. Someone asked above how we got here, since there was high employment ten years ago. I can't believe I have to say this, but the housing bubble happened, wiping out a lot of savings and removing a lot of money that would have otherwise been spent on consumer goods. Demand fell, and jobs were cut. This also backs up his main point.
From the article: The question, then, becomes: what makes Ghostbusters so damned good? You don't know what it's like out there. I've worked in the private sector and they expect results.
. Julie of the Wolves was one of those books (like MSotM) I fiercely remember reading at a time in my life when I needed to be fortified by stories of independence and survival and children who found their way. It was one of my happiest moments as a parent when I was able to reread it with my oldest, who, though living through quite different circumstances than I did, connected with it just the same. Now I want to go back and read everything all over again.
Wow. That nuts 'n' bolts picture is completely created? I would have figured the individual objects as photoshopped together, sure, but that's pretty damn good creation from scratch. I suppose I should have guessed that kind of thing was now widely available, but hadn't thought about it. "Photographers: You're being supplemented by highly trained 3D artists!" wouldn't get as many page views. And also wouldn't have quite captured the philosophical distinction, I think. Thanks, Brandon, that was an interesting, informative link.
The word everyone is looking for here is "plurality."
@chaff but if you get mad at someone who's doing that, that means they win! they win like, uh, loneliness, and not having a lot of people want to talk to them, and not getting much respect, and uh... look they win, alright, they just do. enough questions.
it's really not up to the standard of the best TED talks, which are often summations of actual research, often original to the speaker. That's entirely untrue. Some of the best TED talks aren't about research at all, but instead are art pieces or reflections by artists on what they do, or are in fact performances themselves. I don't know how many TED talks are op-ed pieces like this one, because I haven't watched them all and haven't bothered to fully categorize the ones I have watched. But I know I've seen some really great TED talks which have nothing to do with research but have left me breathless and amazed and full of wonder at the end of them. That's a pretty good summation of what makes a >20minute talk by anyone good, no matter what the subject matter.
TED - Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies "We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust. In "The Spirit Level," Richard Wilkinson charts data that proves societies that are more equal are healthier, happier societies" Well it certainly isn't income inequality per se that they object to covering.
I suffered willingly as a Mets fan throughout my childhood and the 1986 team made up for everything. There are several essays on how being a Mets fan is like a lesson in life. "We know joy. We know pain. We're Mets' fans and we know life."
I love the effortless "deep history" in the movie. Then you realize it was only effortless because Akroyd probably believes all that stuff and has spent most of life in crazytown.
When burning man stopped being a free event on the beach and started costing in the range of $300 to attend it sort of stopped being able to decry commercialism... I don't go to burning man, but to run an event of that size needs a good deal of money. I'm sure the security costs that the Feds require is failed staggering, as is the cost to clean up all the stuff that burners forgot about, and at least trying to mitigate burn scars. Without that base budget, the event doesn't happen. Nothing on that scale will. Decry the size if you must, but anyone thinking that can be done for free more than once is simply not being realistic.
Oh, actually, I was really just talking about myself justgary. But way to project there, buddy.
In other news, pope still catholic, smokey bear still shitting in the woods. Did anyone believe TED was part of some sort of egalitarian socialist freedom party? Peter Weyland did a talk! ;)
The Mets were my first favorite baseball team, and the 1986 season was my first to have any interest in baseball at all. Amazing season, capped off with a great playoff series against Nolan Ryan and the Astros, and of course game 6 of the series against the Red Sox. I have never enjoyed a season of baseball as much as I did in 1986. The NES game RBI baseball allowed my friends and I to replay the World Series many times.
I get the GRAR, I really do, but I'd rather live in a world where people making a lot of money prevent the big banks from leeching more interest money out of the general population. The guy isn't actively scorning anybody, as far as I can tell. Yes, assholes will hold him up as a model of behaviour against people who don't have his choices and luck, which is what assholes do, but given the choice between: a) wealthy well-employed graduate pays Goldman Sachs a shit-ton of interest, forever and b) wealthy well-employed graduate pays off his loan fast, and puts his surplus interest money towards people that actually provide goods and services... ...I'll take the latter.
Interesting that the author gave no thought at all to "mama," which seemed like the obvious choice to me.
.
By which I mean I am excited to talk about this, of course! A comparison of number of lexemes is indeed considered to be the best possible rubric for fidelity; this is sometimes quite unfortunate. Oh, and a thought: "Today my mom died" would be perfect for me, but that's how I refer to my mother. "Mommy" seems jarring, childish to me--but so does just bringing the word "maman" into the English version. So YMMV.
And that by reducing unnecessary expenses and using his life's savings he was able to accomplish something. He acknowledged that his entire situation was very lucky: he has a really good job, a high salary, low personal expenses, no illnesses, no family to support, no crises, no real problems and he was living in an area of the country where the cost of living is very low. That's what's weird to me, though. The whole blog basically amounts to, "I got some very lucky breaks." Sure, my first reaction is, "Okay, student loans are a big issue in America and for a lot of people personally, so this is supposed to be instructive." But, okay, I'm going to move past that and say it's not supposed to be instructive, it's just a guy telling you about his life, right? But then I'm not sure what's interesting about the whole thing, you know? Like, I am glad for him that's he's financially secure, that's really great, a lot of people with similar incomes go their whole lives without attaining that. But I feel like there's no there there.
Okay so I thought some of his choices were a little crazy (weddings and Christmas are, to an extent, consumer frenzies, but they are also irreplaceable) but I actually quite liked the end of his last post. I have friends with substantial amounts of debt for BA degrees, who are employed at a percentage of what he is, and who do not consider things like: not buying clothing, bringing a flask, packing lunch, etc. They are well-aware of their student debt. They are managing to pay it off on the monthly plan, which is great! I am really, really lucky, and I don't have any debt. But I also don't make six figures, and some of the habits of avoiding clothing sales or never ordering lunch at work picked up in grad school have started slipping away. I could stand to save more, for the times when I will not be lucky, and this was a good reminder.
When half of congress consists of minorities, or half of the people in tv are minorities, then people can start freaking out. Or not. In the current 112th Congress...
In the House, there are currently 362 men and 76 women. In the Senate, there are 17 women and 83 men.
This article is from three years ago, but it's representative (so to speak):
In the total population, whites make up 66.0%, Hispanics are 15.1%, Blacks are 12.8%, APIA (Asian and Pacific Islander American) are 5.1%, and AIAN (American Indians and Alaskan Natives) are 1.2%. In Congress, whites make up 85.8%, Hispanics are 5.8%, Blacks are 7.5%, APIA are 1.7%, and AIAN are 0.2%. Men are 49% of the total population, while women are 51%. In Congress, men are 82% and women are 18%.
I think dropping to 900 deployed is more than possible, presuming we get one party to stop crying and taking their ball home. Removing all forces off of alert status will be harder, and I don't see either side going for that. I can see why they'd want to get rid of land based ICBMs -- it's practically impossible to see the alert status of those. SSBNs are much easier -- if they're in port with the hatches open, they're not on immediate alert. Unless, of course, they are able to surface launch and have the range to strike from home ports, in which case, then you can't tell if they're just servicing in port or prepping a first strike. The limit on first strikes is that you know you will be destroyed if you try it, but if you can see that the other side is more than, say, 20 minutes from a deployable weapon, you could theoretically take them out before the counterstrike can't happen. Part of the whole strategic treaty process has been to make sure that MAD doesn't go away unless it is clear and convincing that it goes away from both sides -- it was the core reason for the ABM treaty (if you can't defend against ballistic missiles, there's that much more chance you'll be destroyed after a first strike, and you will.) MAD may seem like a crazy way to run a world, but ever since two opposing sides have had nuclear weapons, nobody has used them, and people advocating their use get shut down by smart people who realize that everybody dies if they try. MAD has worked, and I'm not sure anything else would when you're talking about 900+ nuclear weapons.
Minorities Are Now Majority Of U.S. Births, Census Says --- "OMG, teh brown people are taking over" hysteria (come on, what an inflammatory AND idiotic headline) Walk me through this, please? How could this news be summarized more neutrally in your opinion? Is your objection with the fact that is being reported as news at all? Maybe it's the "minority" label itself? I just don't understand where you are reading this hysteria in any of links presented here.
Despite growing up within the reach of WPGC, it took el_lupino, a guy from the Baltimore suburbs, to bring go-go into my life (I was an HFS devotee). I will never forget the Chuck Brown and friends Folklife Festival show that he and I went to in 2000 (because how many go-go shows are there ever going to be on the National Mall?). Everybody was there getting down - it was apparently the best-attended Folklife concert ever - and looking around at the multifarious crowd convinced me that funk music is the key to world peace. Thank you for that, and godspeed, Mr. Brown.
A Grade 11 student, with a summary of Sean Dixon's novel The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal due in two days, gets help from the author. It does not go particularly well.
I keep having this memory of liking Ghostbusters 2 but then I watch it and go ...nooo wait I don't like this at all, th concept his pretty good but just...yeah not good. Back on topic, the statue motif he mentions is really interesting cause yeah tharp where a lot of loving close ups on statues and the like.
I'd sort of think "a Michigan parody" is something like a parody of Michigan pride and not a bland "our neighbors suck and that's the joke" statement, but I guess I don't get Michigan humor. So congrats on being stuck between dumb & dumber, I guess? You win?
Krug knows the market for its product perfectly well... rich assholes.
Judging by the photos in the first link... did they serve warm champagne? Disgusting! Looks flat, too.
JELLIED GASOLINE. FLAME THROWERS. TIME MACHINE. LOTS OF SHOUTING. SMELLS LIKE BACON.
And as a side-bonus, the more, and more visible, people we have making a basic living with their humanities degrees to counterpoint the "luxury" of the tenured professorial class, the fewer people will consider the pursuit of such courses of study a good way to sink 4-10 years of their life and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think it's important to point out for my field that the most selective programs in North America, the ones that fund their PhDs and are brutal about cutting people who aren't going to make it or finish in a timely manner and might run out of funding, are the ones that consistently place nearly all their students in permanent academic jobs their first year on the market. (I did not come from one of these programs, so I've got nothing to gain by writing this.) Most of the premier programmes aren't getting hundreds of thousands in dollars from their students; sure they get TAs and other benefits, but it's perfectly possible to finish a PhD and not be in debt if you go to a highly selective institution. The key thing is that there are only about five-ten such institutions in North America in my discipline and far more people who want to do PhDs than they can take...so you end up with gradually diminishing returns the further you get down the rankings. But I have to say that it's near impossible to convince some students that taking a poorly funded graduate place is a bad idea. I've flat out told people that this is a bad idea and will all end in tears and been ignored. So we're not all rubbing our hands and cackling in our wood-panelled offices as we sip brandy when we see students not get jobs, you know. I know departments that would happily close their entire PhD program because they don't have the money to fund it, but aren't allowed to because that might affect the university's rankings. And the consistent hammering that educational and arts budgets get year after year isn't helpful. Additionally, it's worth pointing out that the PhD in humanities is designed to enable you to produce a piece of original scholarship at the end; there's flexibility in how you define original scholarship and produce that scholarship, and that flexibility is increasing, but that's essentially its aim. (This is why so many academics used to get no training in teaching, with predictable results.) You could rejig it, and the research process teaches skills you can cross-sell (and that I have cross-sold), but it's not really designed to be an all purpose degree. We could decide as a society that we don't think that original research is worth anything at all and that we should all be doing professional degrees*, which would sadden me, but at least it would be more honest than the 'the PhD is useless because it doesn't teach you the skills it wasn't intended to teach' claims. The problems here go far beyond PhDs and into the collapsing value we place as a society on education that doesn't immediately have an obvious practical application and our willingness to slash funding for such education. That's not just a humanities problem though: there is an increasing reluctance in science to fund research that doesn't have an immediately obvious business function - see, for example, the current problems in veterinary science, where almost all the funded research is done in tandem with business, and anyone who might want not to sign on Monsanto's dotted line struggles hugely with getting money. *Which have their own set of issues: see most of the debates about laws school on the blue. And I suspect that many business programmes are in for their own revelations in due course.
In grade school the cafeteria food was sucky and unhealthy. By high school, it was sucky with options (were talking mid 1980's here) and most kids went the burger, chocolate milk, ice cream sandwich route, (esp. if they had smoked a joint the period before). There was a salad bar with a bowl of lettuce, but some kids threw unwrapped lubricated Trojans in it. If you knew someone with a car you usually snuck out to McDonalds or BK or whatever (usually smoked a joint or drank a 40, too). My point? Trying to tell people what they can and cannot eat is futile and annoying to boot.
This is amazingly telling, completely symptomatic of the rot at the heart of American political culture: even for TED, which we could easily take as representative of the saner wing of the ruling class, and even from a venture capitalist (hardly some dyed-in-the-wool radical), talking openly about economic inequality is simply anathema. Simple Keynesianism is now perceived as threateningly revolutionary. Has there been a ruling class this self-destructively short-sighted since the last days of Rome?
>Is every single person in this thread going to make the same joke? I'm not saying it needs to be repeated anymore, but I don't see that it's a joke.
"A great ballclub, a beautiful demonstration of what talent can do when assembled with planning and guided by intelligence." - Bill James, on the 1986 New York Mets

Allen Barra, "The Dynasty That Never Was" (2002): How good was Darryl Strawberry at his peak? How good might he have been? We'll never know the answer to the second question, but the first is perhaps best answered by comparing him to New York's three great power-hitting outfielders of the 1950s. The chart below picks up Strawberry's career after the 1988 season:
```
                    G    AB   HR   RBI  BB   SB
Darryl Strawberry  823  2885  188  548  449  165
Willie Mays        762  2899  183  519  351  161
Mickey Mantle      806  2924  173  575  524   43
Duke Snider        798  3062  151  538  325   44
```
Dwight Gooden was the youngest player ever to be named Rookie of the Year, and the youngest to lead the league in strikeouts. And that was just by age nineteen! By age twenty-one, he was already 58-19, had struck out an average of 215 batters a year for three seasons, and had posted three straight seasons of ERA under 2.50. Roger Clemens is considered by many, including myself, as the greatest starting pitcher in history. By the time Clemens had won 58 games, he was twenty-five years old and had already lost 22. How about a man who was, arguably, the best first baseman of the decade? Keith Hernandez was a bona fide star well before '86. Playing for the Cardinals, he had won the NL batting crown in 1979 with a .344 average, also winning the MVP award while leading the league in runs scored, doubles, and on-base average and winnning a Gold Glove at first base. 1986 was his seventh season over .300 and he also led the league in walks and fielding average. ... perhaps the finest-fielding first baseman in baseball history, with 11 Gold Gloves and a record six times leading the NL in double plays. But as good as Strawberry and Hernandez were, the heart of the Mets, or at least what was supposed to make them the team of the '80s, was their pitching staff, particularly the starting rotation. Some called it the league's best rotation without Gooden. At his best, Sid Fernandez was actually more unhittable than Dwight: three times he held NL hitters to the lowest batting average in the league. How great is that? Well, the greatest lefthander in New York baseball history, Whitey Ford, never did that once.... Walter Johnson, who won 417 games, many of them in the low-average, dead ball era, was hit for a .227 average. Sid Fernandez pitched for fifteen seasons and opponents hit just .209 off him. Think about that for a moment. Howard Johnson hit 10 homers in 88 games for the '86 team while filling in at third and short. He was twenty-six. For the next five seasons, he put on a power-speed exhibition that few third basemen in baseball history have ever approached. Only two players in baseball history have had at least four seasons with at least 30 home runs and 30 stolen bases. Howard Johnson and Barry Bonds. Gary Carter is one of the four or five best catchers in National League history, and one of the top ten - maybe one of the top seven or eight - best ever. He was a ten-time All Star, has nine seasons with 20 or more home runs, and seven seasons with more than 80 RBI. Behind the plate, he led the league in assists four times, double plays five times, and total chances a record high eight times.
A famously reclusive writer, John Swartzwelder is responsible for many of The Simpson's iconic episodes. He stopped writing for the show in '04 and began to self-publish a series of increasingly absurd Sci-Fi Detective novels.
My call to action: If you see suspicious marketing activities like this going on at the event, subtle or not, every participant should feel empowered to contact a Black Rock Ranger or any organizer to report the activity for investigation.
Not sure it really matters if the stat is 30 or 40 or 80 percent. The nation and the rest of the world is getting fat as hell and it's accelerating rapidly. Exactly. Even if the BMI is flawed, I can't see anyone arguing that an increase in the numbers of a population that is "BMI-obese" would correlate strongly with a similar trend by some other hypothetical, ideal metric. Link to a map showing obesity in the U.S. over time.
Just for those wondering about what kind of life he could have. As a single guy with no kids, I have a nice life on significantly less than $3000/month (after taxes, deductions, retirement, and student loans), and I live the Bigger City Nearby. On about $2000/month I: - live alone, inside the loop, a 10 minutes bus ride from work, - have a car, - feed my dogmonster and myself regularly, - eat out about once a week or so, - experience more than my fair share of the excellent culture and events this city offers, - have internet service, - a Netflix account, - renter's/car insurance, - a gym membership, - pay for my iPhone as well as my sister's and - VERY rarely pass up an invitation to go do things. Living in Texas (and Houston, specifically) is INCREDIBLY affordable.
Pursuant to this article - I am unashamed to say, in an absolutely unqualified sense, that I love the mother fuck out of John Waters. That is all.
If I were the author I would have trolled the fuck out of that kid.
Cool, but these look very heavily Photoshopped. Even in 150+ MPH winds the skin ripples but your features don't get distorted as "shown" in these shots. Here's a closeup of around 100 MPH on the face.
Yeah, there's no way I would have helped in the first place because that sort of entitlement pisses me off no end. I think he was hoping the kid would then TAKE IT FROM THERE, but instead the student apparently figured he had a live one and was going to milk it for all he could get.
I still maintain that the most beautiful thing that could happen to Burning Man is for the creators to completely sell it out to MTV and RedBull and Budweiser and who ever would pay. Have the Jersey Shore kids at Bachelor Pad Camp. It used to be about creating beautiful things and then burning them to the ground, and the second part of that has felt a little missing as art shows up from the Playa in front of banks in SF and the festival itself becomes an institution. It needs a little more transience and creative destruction again, and I can think of no surer and purer way to destroy it than to let the marketers and brand managers of the world at it. Burn the man.
What vac2003 said above. Adding in that little pronoun -- my -- changes the formal and impersonal "Mother" into something much more understandable, without being childish or jarring: my mother. (One of the New Yorker commenters made this suggestion as well.) "Today, my mother died. Or maybe it was yesterday. I don't know." "Est morte" is problematic as well. I like the cadence of, "Today, my mother is dead." However, that doesn't make sense with the sentence that follows.
You left off the address! You can help fix this flaw in the system by sending an email with your name, address, daytime phone number, social security number, and bank account information to.... And send one dollar to HappyDude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield.
I admit to being a little bewildered by this initial comment: "But no, unless you're 99%/working class/poor/starving/dead you are privileged and an obvious target for snark And putting the others aside, that 99% just LEAPED out at me. I mean, well, yes? If someone in the top 1% of a particular subgroup, talks about the harrows and hardships of getting just a little bit higher, then, er, that's obviously not exactly as inspiring as someone down the bottom end of things? I mean, Darkstar - paying off $12k on $25, that is pretty damn impressive! Regardless of the income, I'm a little surprised this made mefi, because there's about, oh, a zillion blogs on the same topic? And even this ahem, "really obscure" radio show called the Dave Ramsay Show, where people ring up multiple times a week, detailing the similar, or far more magnified sacrifices they made in order to pay off debt, along with books, and classes, suggesting all the same moves he has made. It actually looks a hell of a lot like the Dave Ramsey plan, down to stopping paying the 401k while he was paying debt, and getting quite fanatical about it for the short term. Still, yay for people who learn to live within their means!
This is probably precisely why Neil Gaiman has a strict "no, I won't do your HW clause" in his FAQs. And no, I'm not at all convinced this is an ELL issue; that kid's writing (sadly) looks very normal to me. Kid had all kinds of options for HW, but couldn't be arsed to find ONE? Hope s/he grows out of it and learns how to knuckle down.
OK, so touch the end of your nose. It's probably hard, right? Lots of cartilage in there keeping it rigid. I know a few people (all from the same family) who don't have any hard cartilage in their noses--a bit of bone projection at the bridge, and then just skin all the way down. They look like perfectly normal noses, but they can do freaky things like press their faces directly into walls because their noses are able to just smoosh down completely. In fact, my nose used to do that - because the cartilage was damaged when I broke my nose as a kid (hockey, of course!) and over the course of the next few decades it diminished some more every time I re-injured it. The net result was that my nose was soft and pliable and squishy. Anyway, when I had a septoplasty done a couple years ago, the nice doctor took a bunch of cartilage from other areas of the nose and restructured it. Now it is weirdly firm and I can no longer to the face smushing trick. My doctor was curious why I didn't have it corrected sooner. I suspect it was because I didn't go around touching enough noses; I had no idea that noses weren't supposed to be squishy.
Why the criticism of anyone, no matter how much money they make, taking on a challenge to live especially frugally to meet a goal? Because hard-working, motivated, goal-oriented people piss me right the fuck off.
. bust loose in peace chuck.
Have you ever known a company to hire more people even though they can get the work done with the amount they currently have? Yes, actually. Managers of a certain kind do exactly this to have more people reporting to them to make themselves look more important. It doesn't make the papers because there aren't good visuals, but believe me, it happens. (There's even a section on this phenom in Northcote Parkinson's In-law and Outlaws, I think, and I didn't believe it until I saw it with my own eyes.)
I suppose the Teddites You're talking about the TEDdy boys.
more than half of all babies born were members of minority groups So were the rest, at least among their immediate cohort.
. Jim Vance, long time co-anchor of NBC News4 in DC, was as close to tears last night announcing this as I've ever seen him. Gimme the bridge now, gimme the bridge now!
CGI is more labor/time intensive than photography, therefore more expensive.....just because its technically possible to make the similar image doesn't mean that switch will happen across the board. Probably just where the shot is difficult/expensive to set up. I can't see how a day's work at least for a computer jockey saves anything on a photographer who can get that shot plus 20 others in the same day. That being said, being a photographer has been squeezed to shit the last decade. So has journalism, film/video, post-production facilities, recording studios, and specialists skills like color correction in film, on-line editing, sound recordist, etc. Some of it is technical, barriers to entry and capital costs rapidly falling, some of it supply and demand, and some of it hard driving customers in a buyer's market just deciding things like, well , the associate producer can hold the boom forget hiring a sound man. For that matter, stick a camcorder in his hands rather than hire an experienced shooter to get those pickups. So some of it is just what people are willing to pay for and what they'll accept as an outcome.
Bill Bollinger was an important post minimalist sculpture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of a generation of people who changed what sculpture meant.

His early work was noted for it's use of found and industrial materials. He became famous for the quote "I only do what it is necessary to do. There is no reason to use color, to polish, to bend, to weld, if it is not necessary to do so" This led to work made of cyclone fence, rope, or rubber pipe. His 1969 Graphite Piece, where one half of a room is filled with powdered graphite, and the other half of the room is empty, becomes a discussion of materiality, physical presence, and human impact on built space. He was part of two art shows that defined what this new post-material sculptures would look like. The 1968 9, at the Warehouse space of landmark dealer, Leo who represented among others, Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and Warhol. 9 was named after the number of artists in the show, and those artists included Giovanni Anselmo whose most famous sculpture makes you wait for lettuce to rot so a marble block can fall, Eva Hesse, who was known for early and innovative use of fiberglass, latex, and other forms of plastic; Stephen Kaltenbachwho moved between linguistic conceptualism and more industrial pieces ; Bruce Nauman, the early video, audio and neon innovator; Alan Saret, and his tenuous pieces in wire Richard Serra whose early work (pdf) shared the industrial materials with his later work but was on a much smaller scale, Keith Sonnier who was known for abstracted neon, and Gilberto Zorio fellow Artist Povera with Anselmo. He was also part of the famous exhibition Live in Your Head at the Kunsthalle Bern. A show that had 34 artists, which became a canon of process, conceptual, post-industrial, minimalist, language, and installation artists. In 1972--Bollinger departed from his more installation and found work to make a series of cast iron work, that shared an interest in abstraction. sharing some material and scale choices with Serra. Eventually he worked with a set of sculptures about water, that were expensive, and hard to sell. As the glitz of the 1980s replaced the slightly scruffy 1970s, his work became more and more difficult to sell and he was ignored. As interest in the 9 show developed including Marcia Garcia Torres' pamphlet on the 9 show, interest in Bollinger slowly increased. The first major step of Bollinger's critical reception was Wade Saunder's poetic and critical investigation of his work, published in the March, 1st issue of Art in America. Saunder's article begins with the heart breaking epigraph: "Richard Serra: There were a lot of good people in that show ("9 at Leo Castelli," December 1968). Nauman was in that show, there were a few interesting Italians in that show-- Chuck Close: Eva Hesse was in that show. Richard Serra: Eva Hesse was ill the show. There was a really talented guy--1 don't know what happened to him--Bill Bollinger. Chuck Close: Bollinger was very interesting. There were some beautiful Sonniers in that show, the best he ever did, I think. --New York City, Oct. 2, 1995, from The Portraits Speak: Chuck Close in Conversation with 27 of his Subjects (New York, A.R.T. Press, 1997) It took almost a decade, but that 2000 article has now resulted in a set of major career retrospectives, 40 years after Bollinger's death. The first, in February 2011, was at the Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein. (youtube video of the show, in German, but good images. This show moved to the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, in November. The curator of that show Christiane Meyer-Stoll had a conversation with the curator of the Fruitmarket, Fiona Bradley. They also produced a major catalog. Here is the Scotsman's review of the show. Here is The Glasgow's Journal. Here is the visual Art Blog Distorted's review. That show is now at the Sculpture Center of Long Island. Here is the notice of the Sculpture Center. Here is an Art Info review. This retrospective might rework his reputation.
No, obvious troll is obvious. The repeated incorrect use of the article "an" is a dead giveaway. He might not be a native English speaker. His email seems to indicate that he's Indian.
He says that business don't create jobs, but he can't seriously believe that.
"What does lead to more employment is a "circle of life" like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me."
His point is that businesses don't exist without customers and when there's mass unemployment or underemployment there are many fewer customers. Businesses don't hire people because they have got a tax break, they hire people because there's increased demand for their products or services. Tax breaks for businesses and rich people just means a few more coins stacked in their Scrooge McDuck money rooms.. and maybe a new pair of pants. This should be obvious, but... like many common sense ideas these days it needs to be spelled out for some people.
You haven't been listening to your Simpsons DVD commentary. posted by Space Coyote In your face!
For some reason I always find it weird when article-based sites take their comments seriously (or even notice them at all), whether it's Time or The AV Club. I know that the idea of the comments section is to create dialogue between the readers and the site's writers, but whenever that happens it seems to break some kind of fourth wall for me. I have no idea why.
Reading over his account, it's an interesting study in how someone with a high income can still overspend, and how dramatic the turnaround can be when they decide to stop overspending. To wit: "I had a mortgage on my house and two cars and a motorcycle, and I had become accustomed to spending $1,300 per month on entertainment.... Other than maintaining a six-month Screw You Fund, contributing 10% of my paycheck to my 401k, and making sure I could pay off my monthly credit card balance, I wasn't thinking much about my financial future..." His 'not doing much at all' point is a lot better than most Americans can manage when they scrimp. It's not intended to undermine his post, but... yeah.
HE EVEN LOOKS LIKE RON SWANSON. I want to be in the Schwartzwelder - Pawnee Rangers
*crosses self, genuflects*
I still have "finding a big sack of money" in my monthly budget, which fucks up my numbers pretty much every month. But when the day comes that I do find that big sack of cash, I will make sure to pay it forward and pass that advice on to the rest of you.
‘You will never go wrong anticipating doom in my books, any more than you’ll go wrong in anticipating doom in ordinary life’—László Krasznahorkai.

The acclaimed Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango has recently been published in an English translation by George Szirtes. Satantango is Krasznahorkai’s first novel, but the third (after The Melancholy of Resistance and War & War: both likewise translated by Szirtes) to appear in English. Patient filmgoers may be familiar with Béla Tarr’s 450-minute black-and-white movie version of this tale. Krasznahorkai and Tarr have collaborated on several other films, notably The Werckmeister Harmonies (based on ‘The Melancholy of Resistance’) and, most recently, The Turin Horse , reportedly Tarr’s final opus.
Chuck Brown was the real deal. He played a range of styles well, he had a great live show and he was a gentleman ambassador for go-go, a genre too often associated here with violence. The celestial choir'll be chanting, "Wind me up, Chuck!" aav.
From the article: The question, then, becomes: what makes Ghostbusters so damned good? Just watched Ghostbusters a few days ago with my 10 year old (seeing it for the first time) and I propose an answer in three parts: 1.) Bill Murray 2.) The Stay Puft marshmellow man 3.) Sigourney Weaver's one shoulder dress
I don't understand how money in the bank is any use when no one is buying. If no one is buying, prices fall and interest rates fall until someone starts buying. If you have money, the best time to buy is when no one else is buying.
Oh god, I remember when someone finally pointed out that Ghostbusters/Lovecraft connection to me and it was like, well I can't explain it well, it was like I could Suddently see color cause YES OF COURSE HOW OBVIOUS OMG. It's interesting how much Ghostbusters' structure would be followed by movies with similar tropes and concepts.. Comparing it to the Orginal pitch, which was a futuristic world of well funded ghost police, you can start to trace out the changes for the better the limited budget and conflicts caused.
Why does it make more sense for millions of wealthy parents to pack individual lunches when the school systems, which already have the economies of scale to feed millions of kids, can do so? Or do the poor kids not deserve healthy meals too?
Apparently successful people sharing their experiences and life stories is now yet another thing metafilter doesn't do well. Is the only good outcome where everyone loves the FPP subject and everyone agrees? If that doesn't take place we're doing things badly?
This blows.
*blog
Teachers: You're Being Replaced by Software
I would like to nominate John Waters for America's Sweetheart. That would be Divine.
If Diablo 3 were a girl. [SLYT]
If you make 1/10th of this money, and have 1/10th of this debt, this is still a good reminder that high salary != high money, unless you manage it well.
It's called DIY S&M, that's what 50 Shades of Grey is about.
2N2222, one of the biggest platitudes of all, and very boilerplate too, is to label something a platitude and 'This is so old--we've heard all this before.' This argument itself is a very old and tired put-down.
> I believe the kid asks for a summary of "The Girls Who Saw Everything," which appears to be a prequel to The Last Days... It's the same book. It was first published in Canada as "The Girls Who Saw Everything", and then published everywhere else as The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal.
Then you realize it was only effortless because Akroyd probably believes all that stuff and has spent most of life in crazytown. Cattle mutilations are up.
.
Heh. I had just finished slaying a couple of Nigerian All-Natural ADD Remedy spammers on another forum, when I clicked over here and saw the FPP. Talk about a fright! Kudos to Mass for taking this approach.
. If you were somehow doubting Chuck's importance to DC after reading the great comments above, the impromptu vigil on U Street has virtually shut down traffic in that part of the city.
That said, a few of the points in his story are really irritating. One is that he stopped contributing to his employer-matched 401k in order to pay off debt that was costing him only a little over 3% interest. That's a stupid financial strategy for anyone. The drive to be debt-free is laudable, but in this case, the emotions took him in a direction that was totally unwise, fiscally. I missed the employer-matched part. In that case, it is profoundly stupid to stop contributing in order to pay off 3% student loans. He's just giving away free money at that point.
Saving (investing) and spending are economically indistinguishable in most occasions. It seems silly to argue the rich should buy a second home instead of depositing their money in a bank to lend out for someone else to buy their first. This economy, with 8% unemployment, near-zero core inflation, and negative real rates on federal funds, is not "most occasions." Spending a lot of money on "entertainment" (which, looking at his charts, looked to mostly be going to bars, restaurants, and movies) leads to more folks getting jobs in foodservice and bartending, as well as building the bars and restaurants. Regardless of what it meant for the economy, it did make sense for him to pay down his student loans quickly, however. Not so quickly as to miss out on 401(k) match, but the interest wasn't deductible at his income, and there's no guaranteed 5-10% interest available on anything in this market. Stocks may return that in the long run, but that's in no way guaranteed. US Treasury securities, which are as close to guaranteed as you can get in this world, have a negative real rate of return. But he wasn't even trying particularly hard to save money, seeing as he was still paying for haircuts, had an $85/mo. cell phone plan, and was making all his own food yet still paying $10/day for groceries. He could have saved on car insurance if he didn't have a terrible driving record, as well.
I prefer the work by Austrian actor Arnold Schwarzenegger in depicting people eating plo chops.
My point? Trying to tell people what they can and cannot eat is futile and annoying to boot. I don't really get this. I used to not know that soda was loaded with sugar and had a ton of calories in it. Then somebody told me, and after they told me, I knew, and I stopped drinking so much soda. It never would have occurred to me to be like, SCREW YOU, MAN, SODA 4EVA. I still drink soda when I really feel like a soda. But I'm glad somebody told me it wasn't that good for me.
"Septimus Smith!"
This has also been done at the Federal level. Perhaps, one day, all the internet scams will be nothing but redirects to government sites telling people they are scams. Sadly, when that day comes, the government will probably have been replaced with internet scammers....
I'm a 5'8", 170 lb woman, with defined musculature, who competes in half and full marathons, can squat 275 pounds and deadlift 200. Which is to say that throwing out arbitrary numbers that we're all supposed to accept as obviously obese and unhealthy is unhelpful. Some people are horrible unhealthy at those weights, others are not. posted by Kurichina at 3:01 PM on May 16 [+] [!] Way to miss the point completely, and bully for you all the same. I'll be sure to clarify my oversimplification the very instant I see even a single instance of what you describe yourself as in my office in any given 12 month period instead of the usual parade of overweight, sedentary and malnourished adults filling our waiting room.
Is there an income ceiling beyond which you just shouldn't have a personal website or blog? Not if you blog about knitting or sports or bicycles or photography tips or cooking or books you like or physical fitness or cool stuff on the Internet or learning a foreign language or volunteering at an animal shelter or awesome movies or places you would like to travel or car shows or gardening or model trains or great albums or bad albums or playing the guitar or dating or excellent liquor or interpersonal relationships or sex or housecleaning or found notes and art or history or psychology or video games or math. If you blog about how hard it was to pay off your debt by selling your second car (when "you" are one person and not a two-adult household or something) and not getting a new phone, then yes, there is.
hellojed:That's nothing, I almost ran over Ira Glass last week. dr_dank: All things considered, sounds like you had a pretty good week. Wait, wait, don't tell me--you're going to have to call your mechanic for some car talk?
Businesses that create jobs are artifacts of a system that fosters a consumer landscape where more jobs are needed. This is nearly a tautology, since businesses will always resist adding costs (employees) that are not needed. With this understanding in place, it is the system that creates jobs by creating the need for them, not businesses (which avoid creating jobs as much as they are able). The system can either hurt the consumer landscape to benefit businesses in the short term (hurting both consumers and businesses in the long term), or it can tax businesses to make the consumer environment (and therefore businesses themselves) more robust. It's a perfectly sane argument, John Cohen. It may be wrong, sure. But if the premises are true, the conclusion is true. And the premises are not far-fetched.
He should have booed off the stage. Not for having a bad idea. No, actually, I agree with whole-heartedly. But for just being a generalized dumb-ass. For example: ... we don't buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. So, all your money is stuffed in a mattress? Got it. Stuffed in a mattress. Not, say, in a savings account that allows a bank to loan it out so I can get a car loan? Whatever, bud. Get off the stage and let someone else make salient, useful points instead of fulminating about nothing of real weight. Take your mattress and go Occupy something. Shirts. Jesus. Fuck. He's talking about pants and shirts.
Man - I used to fake sick home from elementary school so I could sit at home watching this documentary again and again and again. I wore the tape out.
I don't understand. If Diablo III were a girl, it would be one of those girls who shows you her hand-made teeshirt and then assaults you? Is that... is that a thing? "It's a hip-hop world, son. Keep up or get out of the way."
sort of a double.
Somebody needs to film people like this trying to recite lines from, say, Downton Abbey or Mad Men and then composite the heads onto the actors in actual scenes from the show.
Ahh, yeah that's another way of looking at it I guess, sperose.
Est Morte is not past tense, as the translations suggest, but present tense. Now my French is so long behind me that I'm not sure if this is idomatic or something. Then why do you insist on commenting on this issue of which you know precisely nothing? This is the passé composé. It is absolutely basic grammar.
Part of the reason this blog (and to a certain extent similar discussions about stuff like law school debt) bothers me is that it moves the conversation about student debt to well-compensated business professionals with post-graduate degrees at the expense of the people who are actually disproportionately burdened with student debt in America- poor people who borrow to attend a for-profit college or a local comprehensive university. This sounds like saying we shouldn't talk about people who are 'struggling middle class' because then we'll ignore homelessness. This guy is only an outlier if you stick him into the population 'people with student debt'. He's a regular member of the group 'employed people who decided to get an MBA' and I think dismissing the possibility of discussing that group for fear of confusing them with '18 year olds who signed away $50,000 per year for poetry because society promised them they needed it and it would be worth it' is foolish.
Behavior like this is fine. Blogging about it is what makes it obnoxious. Fair enough, I guess I disagree. I found what he wrote interesting in spite of the fact that he makes huge amounts of money and will likely make more in the future. But, I generally like reading about people who set ambitious goals and go out and make them happen. To me that's all this was.
I want the Ghostbusters RPG so fucking much.
Oh, I should mention: I was a closeted gay guy at the time, so I had no interest in dating. A big help in saving money. :) Serious dating, I find, can be an extreme drain on finances!
I mean, Darkstar - paying off $12k on $25, that is pretty damn impressive! It has been 20 years ago, so I don't know if the numbers would work today. But basically, as I can recall, here's my budget at the time: 25,000 gross - about 12% effective overall tax rate = $22,000 take-home /12 months = $1833/month take-home Monthly expenses: $1000 to debt reduction $833 to living expenses. That $833 went toward: $380 room rental (sharing a rental house with three other guys) $65 my share of utilities (electricity, water, cable, telephone) $60 car insurance $70 gas ($50 for my car and $20 for roommate's, with whom I occasionally carpooled) $120 food (yes, you could eat okay on $4/day if you planned well, took box lunches to work and seldom ate out) $40 entertainment (a nice meal or two and maybe a movie once per month - no bars, no booze, no coffees, etc.!) $100 misc, including clothes, toiletries, haircuts, household supplies and the occasional treat. Thankfully, medical insurance was covered through work. Once a year, I'd get back a few hundred bucks from my tax refund and could set that aside for any unforeseen expense that might arise (car repairs, trip to see family). I spent most of my spare time sitting at home hanging out with roomies, reading, watching tv and playing computer games. Fortunately, in a household of four guys, there was a lot of social interaction, so I never really felt deprived for entertainment/social interaction and was never really tempted to go hang out at bars (the biggest cause of wasted money in my earlier days). I will say that, having been relatively poor before I got the job, it was a lot easier to maintain lower expectations of opulence in my lifestyle. And I'd still had an aversion to buying anything new if I could get it for free or on loan. Bought my clothes at Ross and Target if I needed it new (e.g., socks, underwear). Even so, I could only do all this in a very narrow window of my life because I was single, healthy and childless, with few other family obligations. I lived this for about three years until I got a better job and was able to retire the rest of my debt in short order. (After which, I went WAY deeper in debt when I bought my house!)
I think I dated one of these guys, a long time ago. Best blow job ever!
It kind of looks like all the models have been smushed against a window... ...or a scanner. I have no idea I have no idea how these people got themselves wedged into their scanners or why.
The film hides a joke in the wild-eyed ramblings—the irony of the title of Keymaster conferred on a guy who keeps locking himself out.
Wow. I'm kind of ashamed of how many times I have seen Ghostbusters in my life and yet this joke completely went past me until just now.
Well that's wishful thinking. It would seem to me that the people who attend Burning Man are not regular Champagne drinkers, nor are they likely to become ones. It seems to you based on... what, exactly? Knowing people who attend? There's a huge range on income level amongst attendees, and a lot of them enjoy alcohol and spending money. Chavenet, do you know what "the waffle" is? Or are you assuming?
I think I'm more comfortable with the Russian military pointing nukes at my head opposed to decommissioning them and having the plutonium vapourize into the ether. The ether being likely somewhere near Peshawar just east the Afghanistan border. You should fucking run for office. Everyone knows that 900 nukes isn't nearly enough nukes.
That's a pretty neat program by Massachusetts. Good for them. I find some of these types of online scam fascinating. The FBI's Internet Crime Report 2012 has more details on a few more. Especially the money mule phenomenon is interesting - an evolution of the "work at home" scams like the envelope stuffing one.
I just came here to give temancl a gold star for actually knowing the correct name for the woods-shitting bear. Only you can prevent florist friars.
Also, anyone who's already pissed off with the 1%-ness of it all, don't read the comments where it says 'he's only making 100 clicks (assume that means dollars) barely worth getting out of bed for'. I felt a little bit of blood boil there myself.
So this guy Has A Problem about money. Consider that he first racked up expenses that are ridiculous by anyone's standards - I mean, $15K per annum in entertainment expenses? I know people who live on less than that in New York City! And then when he suddenly decides that he has to fix his debt: "I didn't go home for Christmas, and I missed my friends' bachelor parties and weddings." How much did he save by not going home for Christmas? A thousand dollars? My parents have passed away, and I'd write a check for a hundred times as much if I could spend one more Christmas with them. How long would it have delayed his repayment plan if he'd not blown off his friends and his family? Well, it took him 10 months to pay off his $100K+ debt - so "less than a month" is my guess. Utterly wrong priorities. Not someone I'd want as a friend.
Good news. I'm excited to see what America looks like in 40 years, hope I'm still around.
He should have taken Rt. 10 or something, more cultural contrast. He should be taking back roads. Rt.70 is fairly benign. I'm pretty sure that id this is for a forthcoming book, he's going to go further off the beaten path than we're probably prepared for.
You know, every time I find some old thing I put out in public when I was a juvenile and think to myself "this has to be one of the stupidest, most embarrassing things I could have possibly done, I don't know how I never got flamed right out of existence for this crap," it seems like some generous youth finds a way of making me feel better about myself. Because I'm almost completely certain the author really was trolling the kid from the beginning. I mean, really:
The novel's engine is comic, and somewhat quixotic, and in fact the turning point is a haircut, but it's nestled within a unifying theme of 'reading lives.'
And I can't really say I'm shocked that some 17 year old whose (I hope) first language isn't English managed to miss the very substantial degree to which s/he was not being taken seriously here, but nonetheless come away convinced that this kid deserves to feel much, much worse about this in fifteen years than I do about anything I did online fifteen years ago. Also: I believe quite firmly that you ought to help cheaters by giving them terrible things to cheat with, such as book reports they couldn't have written or history essays which get all the pertinent facts hopelessly wrong. I would have had a lot more fun with certain roommates in college had I taken this view back then. It also might have actually done them some good in the long run: they replied to my self-righteous refusals to give them free homework by buying it from someone else.
No, obvious troll is obvious. The repeated incorrect use of the article "an" is a dead giveaway.
Photographers - you are mostly being replaced by other cheaper or free photographers that are sourced via the interwebs.
Maybe TED didn't want to post the talk because it's incoherent. He says that business don't create jobs, but he can't seriously believe that. Of course businesses create jobs by hiring people, as he admits. Anyone who's ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalists course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn't just inaccurate, it's disingenuous. By the same token, you could say that customers buying products is a "course of last resort." You'd always prefer not to part with your money, but you'll spend money if you decide it's worth it. That applies to employers and consumers alike. This isn't a reason to deny that consumers buy stuff, or that businesses create jobs by hiring people.
unless you're 99%/working class/poor/starving/dead you are privileged This guy is a little above "not poor and starving". If the bar for "inspiring" is now "going without $1300/month entertainment for 9 months" we are pretty doomed.
When Nigel, Stuart and I decided to go to our school's fancy dress day as The Ghostbusters, we had a week long, epic, screaming argument about who got to be Venkman which culminated in Stuart actually stamping his feet and crying. Even as 12 year olds, we knew discretion to be the better part of valour and so, unlicensed, cardboard nuclear accelerator on my back, I acquired some spectacles from another classmate and resigned myself to being Spengler. I *killed* with the ladies with my 'spores, moulds and fungus' line though.
They look like perfectly normal noses, but they can do freaky things like press their faces directly into walls because their noses are able to just smoosh down completely. Well, that clears up a question I had about video 2 from that bicycle airbag thread a couple days ago.
Maybe if we just trim a zero off all his numbers, then they'll be less off-putting?
Now that is Interface Design.
zoinks, my family refers to that as the 'depressing ass sign'.
he's written 59 episodes of The Simpsons, far more than any other writer, even when the show is quickly approaching five hundred episodes he could barge into any publishing house and declare "I've written 20% of all Simpsons episodes" Well, he could say that, but it might make him look math-challenged.
I started The Time Machine Did It once it went up on the Kindle store. It is dense with jokes, and entertaining enough, but I found that made it almost impenetrable. I really should give it another go though.
Grand Poobahs of Metafilter If we are honest with ourselves, we are more like Grand Eeyores.
Minority can also refer to the power a group wields. You know, like how women can be considered a minority? When half of congress consists of minorities, or half of the people in tv are minorities, then people can start freaking out. Or not.
As John Scalzi would say, he's playing on easy mode. Doesn't take anything away from his accomplishments in life or in this instance, but the reactions should be colored by understanding the degree of difficulty.
I think I found out about Chuck Brown through WHFS back in the day. .
On an unrelated note, when can I get my Grand Poobah hat? Some of the commenters think we're a 'cabal'. I figure that's at least worth a lapel pin. Sean, we're just a bunch randoms on the interwebs, shooting the breeze. Please don't take it personally. For my part, I found your blog post entertaining
Isn't the entire point of going into debt for a Harvard MBA to get a well paying job at a Fortune 500 company, that then lets you pay off that debt?
According to the U.S. census bureau, from July 2010 to July 2011, more than half of all babies born were members of minority groups, a first for the United States.

"This is an important landmark," said Roderick Harrison, a former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau who is now a sociologist at Howard University. "This generation is growing up much more accustomed to diversity than its elders."
Is his first novel set on Phobos?
I think I'm more comfortable with the Russian military pointing nukes at my head opposed to decommissioning them and having the plutonium vapourize into the ether. The ether being likely somewhere near Peshawar just east the Afghanistan border. I think the first round of decommissioning worked perfectly fine in the 90s, with no worries about plutonium.
steinsaltz: " I was glad to look him up and see that Salam is working for UNICEF." Interesting! Thanks for mentioning that. I didn't know.
A lot of people pass up Christmas with their families because it's too expensive, do you judge them too?
I stopped reading at "Burning Ma..."
And the Oscar for DERP goes to...
Good question. How about you get some stats about people entering grad school, especially for an MBA? That's actually possibly a relevant demographic. Because most people in the US don't go to graduate school, so most student debt and most people with student debt have it from their undergraduate education. Part of the reason this blog (and to a certain extent similar discussions about stuff like law school debt) bothers me is that it moves the conversation about student debt to well-compensated business professionals with post-graduate degrees at the expense of the people who are actually disproportionately burdened with student debt in America- poor people who borrow to attend a for-profit college or a local comprehensive university. If the conversation about the problem of student debt starts with the assumption that most debtors could pay off their six-figure loans with less than a year of belt-tightening, then it doesn't seem like there's much of a problem with student debt, right? But there is. Because this guy is an outlier.
On an unrelated note, when can I get my Grand Poobah hat? You have to earn your Junior Poobah wings first, then Midshipman Poobah sash next before you can test for the Grand grade. I'm studying for my Exalted Semi-Poobah certification now. Can you help me with some answers?
Because the hidden narrative, as mentioned above, is that students can pay off their debts, all they need to do is tighten their belt buckle a little. Sure, there is that larger narrative, and this story can fit into it that way. But on the other hand, this guy doesn't even have a six-figure salary. He's very privileged, and he's a lot wealthier than you or me, but he's a hell of a long way from being part of the 1%. I feel like we misdirect our (entirely justified) anger when we point it at him, instead of at the people who are actually responsible for economic injustice.
Strawberry was a great player, but he was never in Mantle or Mays's class. If you use a better statistic, like Wins Above Replacement, those first six seasons you're counting come to this: Mantle 39.5, Mays 39.1, Strawberry 23.8. And both Mantle and Mays would hit double digits the next year, something Strawberry never came close to (6.1 in '87 was his best). Any team would kill for a 6.1 WAR from anybody, but Mantle and Mays were a cut above. Snider is not in the elite group with them, good as he was. Bear in mind all three were CF, while Strawberry was a RF, where defensive prowess is much less important and big hitters tend to congregate. I'd actually rate Carter higher than you; I think only Bench comes out higher than him, though I-Rod, Berra and Piazza aren't too far behind.
Uh oh uh oh uh oh
why bother announcing your displeasure in this thread? because it's presented here in such a way as to make it seem interesting, but it's fairly unremarkable given his situation, isn't it? A single, unattached person with a high salary can pay down huge debts quickly by cutting back on certain unnecessary lifestyle expenses. Was it not kind of a foregone conclusion?
I agree that the kid is stupid, but what did the author do to deserve these comments? Agreed to do homework for someone who had not read the book, then acted indignant about it when asked to continue to do homework. How was the author to know that with his first kindly act this muffin-headed kid was going to be a useless wart and demand a diorama? There's nothing shitty about trying to help out a highschooler, and there is certainly nothing shitty about being disgusted that the student is subsequently revealed to be a lying, ungrateful and entitled layabout. I hope his teacher googles the summary and discovers he's a plagiarist as well.
Overthinking it? I dunno, it seems a pretty good, slightly tongue-in-cheek analysis of a beloved comedy. I suppose the "overthinking it" was a pre-emptive defense against the inevitable criticism by dullards upon encountering anything lovingly crafted that is not obviously making someone money: "Looks like someone has a lot of time on his hands." Note: If you fear you may be an asshole, your chances of being one will drop 40% if you banish this phrase from your vocabulary.
attacking the guy because someone else might use him as an example to nefarious ends seems like an odd choice. I wasn't clear, then; my train of thought is that that's more of a gut-level, instinctive RE-active thing, rather than something as thought-out as you're saying; it's not so much "oh, this guy's blog could be misinterpreted, so I shall critique it", it's more like "good god I"ve had to listen to stuff like this from my mother for the past 5 years because she's a Glenn Beck addict and she's always sending me these financial-planning workbooks because she just doesn't freakin' get it and oh god here comes another one grar snarl foam bleh".
I really thought this would be about that iphone app that makes peoples' photos all "filmy." It seems for a large number of people, that's all they want out of photography.
In the pictures of this post, they are using a focused air stream aimed at the mouth. There is less pressure elsewhere on the face, so the skin is allowed to blow outwards. Certainly true, but does that explain the distortions to the facial bones, such as in the 10th picture from then top? (The one where the guy's nose is all twisted.) I don't think that would be possible without a trip to the hospital. It appears the photographer has enhanced what the airstream did to make the pics more compelling.
Not So Pure Michigan (youtube), a play on Michigan's "Pure Michigan" tourism campaign. (For more on Michigan's troubles with its neighbors see Mitten-gate.)
CB was the perfect local celebrity - lavishly talented, but self-effacing, approachable + with a deep and obvious commitment to the place where he was known and loved best. Even without "Bustin' Loose" and the breakbeats, he'd be remembered.
Yeah, it's very cool that 10% of US electricity comes from decommissioned Soviet nukes right now. It can be done safely, and we should keep doing it. If we need a nuclear deterrent, why not just scrap all nukes but the ones on subs? We'd have fewer nukes floating around causing accidents, yet maintain a well-protected and mobile second-strike capability. According to a book on the topic (sorry, forgot the title) this has been suggested many times within the US government, but has been shot down by the non-Navy parts of the Pentagon every time.
That is super practical, the rest of us can just get right on figuring out what to do with our extra cars and motorcycles and extra rooms in the houses we own. Ten bucks says metafilter demographics skew pretty far towards second cars, expensive toys, and nice houses.
> It's a hashtaggy new name for a well-established line of work. Maybe they can get together with other cobbled-together-by-bloggers groups like the 'brogrammers' and form a union.
Really? Ya rly! Well, snappy pop culture retorts aside, soda is constantly served as an automatic side with things. It's something they actively have to teach people that you need to read 'juice' packages to be certain you're not buying something marketed as 'drink' or 'punch', because the latter go out of their way to promote real fruity goodness as loudly as the same sized carton or say, ordinary orange juice from concentrate. You don't default come knowing things about nutrition, and even my education's system's token effort to teach the Canada food guide didn't cover more than incomprehensible advice to have 7-8 servings of vegetables and/or fruit. Since food packaging labels whatever it likes as a typical serving, you have people equip with the idea that they need to eat an astronomically large amounts of broccoli and people who think the baseline of the average budget brand soft drink is good for them because its hydration--- and not even particularly sweet, and people like me who cut fountain drinks with water or skip them are freaks. You really cannot underestimate human innocence in the face of how things work.
$1,300 per month on entertainment Sound to me like could have just found some cheaper hookers.
Skulls, skulls, skulls.
The Russians and Americans aren't the ones I'm worried about.
It's almost as if, sometime around the end of the Carter administration, the US decided to start taking the last line of the Gettysburg Address as a challenge rather than an ideal.
If I ever needed outside comforting for never having been to Burning Man, it comes in the form of this fragment from the "apology" linked above: "amongst them many burners who participated in the construction of the Waffle."
Yeah, this guy has done better with his previous stuff, I think he's running out of material. It's one thing to make fun of ourselves here (God knows we have reason to do so), it's not really necessary to go after the fine states of Wisconsin and Oh... Ohi.... Ohi... crap, I can't even say the word. But, anyway, his other stuff is better... Hail to the Victors...
it's also worth remembering that many of life's fixed expenses -- things like paying to renew the plates on your car or getting a prescription filled or the price of gas driving to work -- don't drop by 90% if you make less money. An interesting point, and a valid one. I was thinking about this recently, that moving to a place with lower housing costs and lower salaries, for instance, doesn't equate to an across-the-board lowering of expenses, because lots of things are going to be more expensive relative to the lower salary, like (for instance) a car, or a computer. Not life's essentials, necessarily, but relevant to lots of people nonetheless. and hey, if you were once poor, and now you're not, it is easy to say "hey, I'm not poor, I can splurge all the time" and end up wasting so much money, just painful amounts; it is good to get that reminder to sweat the small stuff. Not hard != not worthwhile.
Other people have addressed the privilege comments, so I won't pile-on. I will say that his narrative contributes to the idea that student loan debt, even massive student loan debt, is not a problem so long as you are hard-working, responsible, and willing to make sacrifices. This is part of the standard conservative rhetoric about the nature of poverty. The reality is that, for many people, no amount of hard work, responsibility, or sacrifices will enable them to pay off their student loan debt in their entire working lives, much less in 10 months. I want to know how to help those people and how to prevent more people from ending up in that same situation. The Harvard MBAs making above-average income in management positions at Fortune 100 companies can likely take care of themselves.
"The commie Russians might get us" is still an effective bogeyman? Don't know if it's terribly effective (or just effectively terrible), but Romney's been rambling about the Russian menace already.
I disagree with the (implied) premise. Generating a big pile of cash by thrifty living is awesome. Spending that cash to pre-pay student loans is ridiculous. Student loans have low interest rates, that interest is deductible for people with middle-class incomes, and payment can be deferred in many circumstances when unemployed. "Cash is king" but only if you have it. This is especially true in tough times: you might be out of work, or a loved one, or if not other people are and that results in assets being for sale cheap for you to buy (if you have the cash!)
The kid is a dink but I have to say that assignment is ridiculous. I used to hate teachers that dreamt up shit like that.
He did way more than cut down expenses. He rented rooms in his house, took on additional jobs (pedicab? Really?), sold a lot of possessions. He gave up on the pedicab after two days. And the stuff he sold was the extra car, the motorcycle, his road bike and accessories for the motorcycle and the road bike. Most of the money he throws at the debt does seem to come from the roomates, cutting his entertainment budget, and getting a performance bonus. I clicked through a few of his entries and I'm glad people are finding something valuable in his efforts, but it's definitely not for me.
Swartzwelder wrote "Kill the Alligator and Run" and a lot of superfans won't forgive him for that, but they keep watching the fucking show even though they haven't enjoyed it in 15 years?
The one-percenters decamped after they realized the man to be burned was not a homeless person.
Could someone summarize the thread MeFites desperately hate anyone who is paid to write; would run over their own mother's with a truck for a chance at getting a book deal.
Apparently successful people sharing their experiences and life stories is now yet another thing metafilter doesn't do well. It's not really that, though. Consider the James Cameron Deep Sea Challenge post. That was, in many ways, a rich person blogging (well, tweeting) about their experience. It went pretty well. That's an example of a rich person blogging about an experience that is unobtainable for a normal person. It's fun to live vicariously through other people's interesting experiences, whether they be rich, athletic, highly skilled, insanely lucky, or whatever. But this isn't that. Here the person is blogging about an all-too-obtainable experience: having student debt. Paying it off quickly is unusual, but he didn't pay it off in a particularly interesting way (e.g. a bizarre scholarship just for left-handed people named Steve Thomas, or finding buried pirate gold, or whatever). He paid it off by making a lot of money and not having a lot of expenses. Ultimately it reduces to "here's a particularly grating example of how wealthy people have it better than non-wealthy people." Reminders of the benefits of wealth and how being poor makes their lives worse is not something people generally seek out or enjoy hearing about.
Well, given that I'm looking for well-written funny novels, this is so very serendipitous. Thank you!
MAD works until it doesn't. I guess a more statistically significant sample size of nuclear crisis is needed before we can say for sure how well MAD works empirically. They came pretty close in Cuba. We had to send a U-2 over to gain reconnaissance information on whether the Soviet missiles were becoming operational. We believed that if the U-2 was shot down that—the Cubans didn't have capabilities to shoot it down, the Soviets did—we believed if it was shot down, it would be shot down by a Soviet surface-to-air-missile unit, and that it would represent a decision by the Soviets to escalate the conflict. And therefore, before we sent the U-2 out, we agreed that if it was shot down we wouldn't meet, we'd simply attack. It was shot down on Friday [...]. Fortunately, we changed our mind, we thought "Well, it might have been an accident, we won't attack." --McNamara In early 1992, it was confirmed that Soviet forces in Cuba had, by the time the crisis broke, received tactical nuclear warheads for their artillery rockets and Il-28 bombers.[72] Castro stated that he would have recommended their use if the US invaded despite knowing Cuba would be destroyed.[72] It's hard to imagine that the U.S., Russia, and the PLA would trust each other enough to go off "alert" status now.
My new best friend's name is EARL
You know who else likes pun threads? That's right, Reddit.
I was hitchiking up Hwy 1 in 1970 and got picked up by this guy. He was not very talkative but when I asked him what he did, he said "I'm a comedian". For who, depressives? I thought. Well, a couple weeks later, I'm watching Ed Sullivan and there he is, my dry-humored comedian. Turned out it was Flip Wilson. Oh, and as long as I have the floor, several years later, I'm on my motorcycle, just entering the Bay Bridge, heading to the East Bay, and see a car broken down on the side of the road. I stop to see if I can help....and it turns out to be Eldridge Cleaver.
[Expanding on my last comment about what I learned about finances from working in family and having a little window into people's lives.] "Well, if I were in his/her shoes, I could handle that financial situation better!" statements frustrate me not because they aren't true — in most cases, I think those statements are true. But the reason they're true is that you are on the outside looking in. Locating the problem is so much easier from that perspective. This happens in family court all the time. Opposing counsel will put a litigant on the stand and grill him about the financial choices he made. "You borrowed money from your mother for your mortgage while still paying for your country club membership?" "Instead of sticking with your perfectly fine car, you bought a much fancier one that you can't afford, while still stuck with hundreds of thousands of dollars left in mortgage payments?" "Here's a chart of your dining-out expenses from the last year. How do you reconcile that with asking your recently-laid-off ex-wife to split your child's college expenses?" It's blindingly obvious to everybody except the litigant: He made a bad financial choice. The first few times I saw this happen, I rolled my eyes. "Irresponsible with money, and in this economy — how could he?!" And then I saw it happen again. And again. And again. And eventually I came to understand. "There but for the grace of God go I." — These people were irresponsible with their money. — They didn't intend to be. — They recognize that they made a bad decision but still don't understand the magnitude. — They will genuinely try to be better about their money. — Most of them will continue to make more financial mistakes. — If you showed them another case file with litigants who also made bad financial decisions, they would be able to point out the financial mistakes made by those litigants. They have adjusted to the (temporary) lifestyle that comes with bad, short-sighted financial decisions. (After all, it's a nice lifestyle while it lasts!) They are trying to adjust back to the lifestyle that is actually in their budget, and they are struggling very badly. And for what it's worth, most of them did not grow up with that lifestyle. (They weren't obscenely privileged, spoiled children who grew up into entitled and financially irresponsible adults.) They grew up with parents who were reasonably financially responsible, and they were at one time financially responsible too. Then one month they spent a little more than they should have, and found that it didn't drastically affect their finances. They did it again a few months later. And again. They were toeing the line. And then they spent a little more the following month. And then again. And now they're in court on the witness stand, being questioned by opposing counsel about their financial decisions, and they're realizing that the line they were toeing is now a speck in the distance behind them. "There but for the grace of God go I."
Cool, but these look very heavily Photoshopped. Even in 150+ MPH winds the skin ripples but your features don't get distorted as "shown" in these shots. Here's a closeup of around 100 MPH on the face. In that photo, he's getting the 100MPH wind distributed all over his face, so pressure entering the mouth is neutralized by the wind flattening the lips and surrounding area. In the pictures of this post, they are using a focused air stream aimed at the mouth. There is less pressure elsewhere on the face, so the skin is allowed to blow outwards.
I read MSofM to the older kids a year or two ago. They loved it since it was survival stuff but without some of the gore of Hatchet. .
slkinsey: " So if you want to figure what your $2,000 a month would get you in NYC" Why are we trying to figure that?
If we're seriously reduced to claiming that "alt-ac is the future of the academy" — that is, that the future will see even more PhDs shunted out of the academy in response to its ever-worsening labor conditions — then the academy has no future. "Alt-ac" is not a solution to the systemic labor crisis, even if it's a good option for individual underemployed PhDs to consider.
"A Harvard MBA Pays Down $101K Of Debt." Two years after he graduated from Harvard with an MBA, Joe Mihalic, now manager of strategic alliances and business development at Dell, vowed to do "everything in my power–short of lying, cheating, and stealing–to pay down" his student loan debt, (then totaling 90K,) "in the next ten months." After applying for a weekend delivery job, he also decided to chronicle the steps he was taking on a blog: "No More Harvard Debt." First page of posts is here. Penultimate post explains his process: "Mission Accomplished."

From the "Mission Accomplished" post: "...there were definitely some contextual factors at play here. My income was higher than the average household income of $50k and I lived in a city that has a relatively low cost of living. I was also single and childless, so the lifestyle changes I made were generally victimless."
more than half of all babies born were members of minority groups What, like the gay Republican caucus or something?
Well, here's a bit more info. I hope he's doing ok.
I guess we won't get the annual mid-summer NPR feature on Chuck and Go-Go this year? Bummer. .
The point is, it's not that people just want to snark. It's galling when millions of people are choosing between eating and going to the doctor for some rich guy to blog about how easy it really is to pay down debt, all we have to do is just sell off our motorcycles and extra cars. The implication being that other people who are having problems paying down their debt are just deficient compared to him. When the reality is just simply that he could pay down his debt so easily, in large part, because he had lots of dough. That's hardly a revelation, that all you need is lots of dough and you can be debt free.
Metafilter: I should set up a Google docs spreadsheet.
I think it's interesting to see the way the debate is being framed in this thread, as essentially about finding careers for PhDs who aren't lucky enough to land a tenure-track job. (Failed in academia? Why not become a librarian instead!) This is a nice way of framing some of the problems I have with the "alt-ac" debates. I assumed, and was encouraged to think, that a PhD was the only good way of engaging with my subject and becoming a fruitful and happy member of the club. I got a master's instead, dealt with crippling doubt about my worth and prospects for two years, and I'm just now finally getting around to being okay with alternative careers and choices, and seeing those not as the failures they were presented to me, but as interesting and worthy careers in their own right. I would love to go back and do a proper degree, even if it takes eight years, but I don't think I'll ever go back to dreaming of a tenure track job. I don't think it's a bad thing to have the alternatives encouraged, but some of the framing in this debate really is problematic in terms of how it deals with the academically-aligned careers that have always existed as complementary options.
He did write some good ones: "Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment" is one of my favs and "Homer the Great." I thought he wrote "Homer Badman" (with the appearance of the great Gummi De Milo and my favorite line "eh, you don't like the old timey bikes, huh?"), but I was wrong. I'm still kind of partial to Conan's episodes ("Homer Goes to College" is sheer humor and "Marge v. Monorail" is funny). And I like Ken Keeler's off-beat episodes (the Space Coyote episode and the first appearance of Disco Stu in "Two Bad Neighbors").
I'm not an expert on child dentistry, but would you really put crowns on baby teeth? Well, I wouldn't. But, yeah, I have heard of dentists who press for such procedures. I've actually heard of practitioners advising for braces on baby teeth. Part of me thinks shit like this is the leading edge of what's to come in fields like dentistry...services which aren't typically part of basic healthcare insurance. As more and more people can't afford to add dental coverage to their insurance (let alone afford insurance at all) the dental trades will find themselves with a diminishing clientele (or a clientele that reduces visits to once every couple of years or more), requiring some of them to seek more...creative...means to keep up with the boat payments.
PapaLobo, was it better in 2006 when we finally made the World Series? (And then got @*$(%))@#(# swept. Sigh.) And against the White Sox no less. Those disco-killing mother fuckers.
Many of them look like well preserved bog people.
From Role Models: "My real passion is hitchhiking . . . cars pick me up immediately; it's like hailing a cab."
verb: " His 'not doing much at all' point is a lot better than most Americans can manage when they scrimp. It's not intended to undermine his post, but... yeah." Yeah. I was fascinated by this article and his blog for a lot of reasons, but the biggest had to be that the way he cut down was to stop living outside of most people's means. Also worth noting that the interest rates on the loans he was paying off (and freaking out over) ranged from 3.13 - 7.90% Which is really, really low compared to the interest most people are carrying on their debt loads.
But I have become horrifically cynical lately. I hope this is in earnest, But it's very hard, at this moment, when the discussion of lowering student debt has come to the mainstream, and when the president is addressing it, for me not to feel like maybe, just maybe, there is something else going on here. Yes, this dude racked up six figures of business school debt five years ago, began paying it back last August, launched a blog, all to perfectly coincide with a week-long Obama campaign push on student loan debt. Those dastardly Republicans/1%'ers!!!!!!
Why the criticism of anyone, no matter how much money they make, taking on a challenge to live especially frugally to meet a goal? Imagine he walked into an AA meeting and talked about how he met a self-imposed challenge to limit himself to just 3 drinks at a recent party. And that other people called him "inspiring" for doing so.
I stopped reading at "I stopped reading at..."
oh yeah, and when my dishwasher, clothes dryer and furnace all crapped out earlier this year, I did the research, bought the parts and fixed 'em all myself, and I'm damn proud of that. I'm also aware that I should be grateful I can afford a dishwasher, clothes dryer and furnace in the first place, as well as the replacement parts, and believe me, I am. But I still saved a lot of money fixing them myself, even though I had to learn how and made several false starts that cost me time and money.
I hate being THAT GUY that doesn't pick up an album by artist until right after they die, but Chuck Brown has been on my "need to check out" list for years. I'm a fan of Trouble Funk, but I never dug deeper into Go-GO and bought something by Chuck. Just watching a few minutes of those live clips and I realize I have been doing myself a great disservice.
"Yes, please educate me on how banks print money and lend it to people. What's that? They don't print the money they lend? It comes from ... Wait for it ... Savings and investments made by others?" I'm not a MMT person, but they're right when they point out that in practice, banks don't lend from their savings. They lend for whatever reasons they choose, and the Fed (indirectly) accommodates that. It is, in a truer sense than you think, printing money. They have a reserve requirement they have to meet, and general regulation of soundness, and so in the longer term stuff converges roughly to the equivalency you're asserting. But you're asserting, both in macro terms and in banking terms, that an accounting identity is both how it really works in practice and, more importantly and wrongly, that the implications of it being a simple accounting identity correctly describe the macroeconomic effects of these transactions. And you're wrong. All investments are not equal and some money literally sits in a vault. And a lot more money, especially under certain macroeconomic conditions, might as well be sitting in a vault. And you'd understand that this is necessarily true, and how this relates to the concept of the velocity of money, if you thought a moment about the implications that all investment is not equally risky and it's therefore not equally priced. If the extent of your knowledge and reasoning about these issues is that one person's savings is another person's debt, then you don't know enough to be writing about it because the oversimplification leads to some very false conclusions.
what a depressing mess i agree with R. Schlock's message
I can't tell you how many times a man at 200 lbs or a woman at 175 who was 30 pounds lighter a decade ago feels that they are at a healthy weight because they aren't as fat as their obese colleague or friend. I'm a 5'8", 170 lb woman, with defined musculature, who competes in half and full marathons, can squat 275 pounds and deadlift 200. Which is to say that throwing out arbitrary numbers that we're all supposed to accept as obviously obese and unhealthy is unhelpful. Some people are horrible unhealthy at those weights, others are not.
"I'll admit that luck also had a lot to do with it–I didn't experience any major or even minor disasters over the past seven months. My car did get randomly towed and–unrelated–a couple of old moving violations came back to haunt me, but on the whole, unanticipated expenses were minimal. My house and all of its appliances behaved themselves, my car never needed a major repair, I stayed employed, and I didn't get sick or injured which could have resulted in an expensive hospital bill. Life didn't really throw me any serious curveballs. My mom says that God had a hand in all of it." I'll say that I'm interested in reading more of his blog. Nothing wrong with being disciplined and living within your means and spending down debt when you have the wherewithal to do so. But he admits here that "luck also had a lot to do with it." What's so hard to understand about that? Especially for you all who are mocking the people who aren't quite so lucky. Basically, it's a version of the same argument that Romney uses on the campaign trail. Ask your mom and pop for cash, start a business, raid some corporation -- sure, then, and only then, you'll be able to pay off your astronomical $100k+ in student loan debt. But, you know, good luck with that. Which brings us back to this gentleman's original statement: Luck also had a lot to do with it!
And don't stare at me, you got the bug-eyes.
Ah TED, the normative standard of a liberal economic ethos.
So no kids I presume
No, the undeniably worst part of the movie is the whole plot with getting New Yorkers to love each other and the shitty special effects with the walking Statue Of Liberty. There's a kernel of a great movie buried in there someplace, but so so so much of it went wrong in the process of it getting written and made that even a really talented fan edit of the movie would be left wanting for any real structure and the results would be more of a highlight reel of great ideas without any framing or resolution.
I don't understand why the author is so frustrated. Kid asked author to do homework for him, author foolishly agreed to do it, then kid understandably kept asking author to do more homework for him. They both seem like idiots to me.
He is right, although he explains it inadequately (astrobiophysician does much better above). But he's not really aiming to convince through explanation, he's aiming to persuade through rhetoric. Although I wholeheartedly agree with his underlying thesis, and would like to see it promoted a great deal more vehemently in a lot more venues, I don't think that it's appropriate for TED to be a venue for rhetorical speeches. It's for explanatory speeches. Now, a rhetorician of great skill could craft a speech that explained societal money flow in such a way that it would be blatantly obvious, so that anyone but a complete fool or blinkered partisan would draw the conclusion from that speech that you need to pay people well so that they can spend money freely, and perhaps the listeners might go out and spread that message in turn in their various ways, and perhaps that speech would be welcome at TED. However this is not that speech.
That's cool. I was curious because I wasn't sure if maybe English was taught as the primary language in (some) schools in India, though I kinda thought that Hindi was the primary language.
Kid: if you're reading this, print out the thread and show it to your teacher.
For the 15 months leading up to my NMHD challenge, I was spending an average of $7,754 per month, and that figure excludes my student loan payments. During the past seven months, the average has been $3,129. Sincere question: what kind of lifestyle can a single man have on $3000? Any mefites from the city where this guy lives?
Before you dismiss them offhand for their 'indie' band name, Here We Go Magic actually make pretty good music. no. no, in this case, they must be dismissed. that name is intolerable.
$1,300 per month on entertainment And there's 1/6th of his solution already. Reduce the 10% 401k to 5% for a year and sell a car and you are done. Why did he need a blog, let alone an MBA from Harvard, to do this?
Serves them right for stealing all that work from portrait painters last century.
Is every single person in this thread going to make the same joke?
Doesn't this all come down to time? It all comes down to money, and time is one factor thereof. So also is equipment, location costs, etc. If it takes twice as long to create the image with software, but it can be done by someone working at home for low wages without needing anything but a relatively cheap computer, that may well end up being worthwhile for the content consumers. It may not be worth it to someone who actually wants to do photography, but for the people who only care about the end result, it will be.
I saw this today and almost cried at the smile at the end. Can't even imagine...
I interviewed Chuck in 2007. It was my first interview ever. Like literally, I had never spoken to a person before for a magazine or blog or anything. I liked his music a lot, but I wasn't really a gogo connoisseur, so I researched for 24 hours straight before showing up to talk to him. I was so nervous I was losing my mind, because all my research confirmed (like his NPR interview) that he was a little irascible but loved telling long wild stories and reminiscing and expected you to know everything he was talking about. Anyway it was terrifying. I asked my girlfriend at the time what to do and she said "Take two quick shots of tequila" so I did and then dressed up a little and went to meet him, rechecking my minitape recording over and over again to make sure it was working. I walked into the basement of Bohemian Caverns thinking he would be a little old man or something since I had never seen him live (<--idiot). He was dressed just as you see in those pictures--nice suit, green shoes, sunglasses indoors, carrying his guitar. Like, not for the interview, but because it was fucking tuesday. It was too dark in the club, so the photographer insisted on shooting us in this old shoe shine/repair place on U street, where somehow Chuck knew EVERYbody. The place was filled with old scrapped shoes and dirty chairs. There was a proprietor, and 2 or 3 old dudes sitting on overturned buckets who lit up like Christmas when he came in and hugged him and asked after a bunch of random people that he pretended to remember. He plopped down in the chair and proceeded to ignore my questions and talk to the shoe guys for 45 minutes, all of which I dutifully recorded on my minitapes. I couldn't distract him... I was in awe, and scared shitless. Finally I relaxed and just tried to join the conversation as well, asking him whether he'd come to places like this on U as a kid (I knew the answer, he used to walk up and down the street listening to the music in the theaters), so we talked about old times for a while and finally he turned to me and said, "OK man what's your questions?" And I asked about his early musics use of Timbales, which I didn't know how to pronounce, and he corrected me, and then answered that and the hundred other stupid questions I had while I sweated through my shirt but still marveled at what a legitimate goddamn legend he was. Like a real legend, beyond some bullshit marketing proposal or branding strategy. A god, a hearth god, a protector of the city. The shoe store is gone now, replaced by idontknowwhat, probably a coffeeshop. Now Chuck is gone too. But I still have those tapes. Someday I'll dig them up and relearn everything there is to know about music that I forgot again, and listen, much more carefully, to his memories and his voice.
Unfortunately, for many people, this is not how the world works. I filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy within this past year for a couple who found themselves over $35,000 in debt. This was their second bankruptcy in the past 12 years. The husband was making $11 an hour and the wife was disabled. Medical bills did them in. They lived in a trailer park and had relatively few possessions. It's only a matter of time before medical bills catch up with them again.
We should adopt the phrase post minimalists around here.
The kid is a dumbass but the author seems like a real piece of shit. This is like, number 1A on the list of things you should just ignore if you want to be professional. No winners here. I expected to feel this way, because I expected the author to troll and then mock the kid. Really though it seems like he responded in good faith and provided true information and real help. I can't fault him for that, and even blogging about it doesn't seem that bad.
Werner Herzog discovers John Waters is Gay
BTW, "Indie Band" = Here We Go Magic.
Hm. I read this... During the past seven months, I haven't gone on a single dinner date or been to the movies. I took a flask with me every time I went out with friends, I stopped contributing to my 401k, I didn't go home for Christmas, and I missed my friends' bachelor parties and weddings. I got better at DIY and figured out things like how to use duct tape to repair my car and zip-ties to repair my house. In the past seven months, I haven't bought a single article of clothing or a single "must-have" gadget or gizmo. I've completely eschewed consumerism, and it actually felt pretty good. To make extra money, I rented my spare bedrooms to strangers on Craigslist, I tried pedi-cabbing, and I started a landscaping business. I sold my second car, my motorcycle, my roadbike, and a bunch of random junk on Craigslist. I got rid of things that I thought I could never live without, and it actually felt pretty good. And I thought about my own efforts in this direction, how I have spent the last four months saying "I will not go out to dinner or lunch this month"...and failed every month. How I can't bring myself to stop contributing to my 401K, even though I could make great strides if I did. How I just bought new shoes, although I did repair my boots instead of replacing them. How I felt really good about making progress, and then I bought an iPad on a whim, because I'm not as disciplined as I need to be. How I have a scooter in my garage that I can't bring myself to sell, even though I'm not riding it right now, and my garage is full of junk that I might be able to sell if I got off my ass. How I keep thinking about taking a job on Saturday nights/Sundays (the only time I have free) and yet haven't done so. And meanwhile, there's my second mortgage, the one keeping me from doing better than breaking even, even though I feel like I've cut so many expenses. And the truth is, it isn't the second mortgage, it is my own habits that are still keeping me down. So yeah, focus on the motorcycle, the second car, the room renting if you want...but can you go seven months without eating out? Can you BYOB to a bar your friends are hanging out at? How many jobs do you have? My point being that you can't cherry-pick the stuff that doesn't relate to you, without ignoring stuff that is relevant to many people. I'll just go ahead and be inspired by this. I guess that makes me the 1% (of people who will be inspired by this.) Heh.
Of course at this point the damage to their brand will end up being much greater than the promotion gained by their stunt. Well that's wishful thinking. It would seem to me that the people who attend Burning Man are not regular Champagne drinkers, nor are they likely to become ones. So even if the brand is damaged amongst this target audience it would not register in reduced sales. On the other hand "rich assholes" just might like that fact that their (now) favorite brand punked a bunch of hippies and their little festival and that would only enhance the brand with the target audience who actually buy the stuff.
the formal and impersonal "Mother" into something much more understandable, without being childish or jarring: my mother Except that "Mother" is as name, what some people call their mother, and often as intimate and personal as "Mom," "Mama," or "Mummy." "My mother" is a phrase you would only use to refer to your mom when talking to someone outside your immediate family. If you say to yourself "my Mother died" it seems like you're thinking about yourself. If you're thinking about your mother, you'd say to yourself "[what I call my mother] died" (e.g. "Mom died" or "Mummy died" or "Mother died" or "The Old Shrew died" or "My Dear Mama died.") "Today, Mother is dead. Maybe it was yesterday. I don't know." That seems perfectly idiomatic to me (and I'd assume "Mother" is the name the narrator uses for his mother) if the narrator is thinking first about the significance of Today and then realizing he doesn't know for sure when his mother died. "Mother died today" puts the emphasis on the fact of his mother dying rather than the awareness that Today is significant.
Despite the fact that Bloom goes on to dismiss this--because, he contends, an English speaker would have no problem figuring out that Maman is a female parent--I must be an uncultured rube because I'm sure it would take me a few paragraphs to figure it out. I agree, that part of the article is ridiculous. I studied French for several years, and I wouldn't know what to make of "Maman" if I read it in a book out of the blue.
I dunno. The speech is kind of liberal boilerplate stuff, not particularly insightful, some of it verging on platitudes. I think TED should not shy away from partisan talks. But if it does do a partisan talk, it really needs to cut against the partisan opinion it seeks to cut, and not just be comfort food for its sympathizers.
zylocomotion: "This child is a genius, and deserves an A+." He'd only be a genius if he had done it on purpose. He fell into the situation by accident.
I just pressed alt-acs on my computer and it cut my salary in half.
I thought it was really interesting that the story included Salam Pax, the real-life Baghdad blogger and an institution in the early blog years. In the early post-9/11 years, the jingoistic "war bloggers" were obsessed with proving that people like Salam were Ba'athist stooges teaming up with Michael Moore to betray America. I was glad to look him up and see that Salam is working for UNICEF.
Yes, really. I mean, I knew it had sugar in it, but if you told me "when you get a quarter pounder, fries, and a large Coke, the Coke has about many calories as the fries and not so much less than the quarter pounder," well, that was news to me. Is it supposed to be obvious for some reason?
I refuse to believe the Swartzwelder/Swanson similarities are a co-incidence. Swartzwelder is also supposed to be kind of gun nut, which fits even more. That said, I almost liked it better when he all thought "John Swartzwelder" was a fictional construct.
A rather uncomfortable amount of teeth in these blow job pics. One might even say grotesque.
HuronBob, most of the money goes to law enforcement and art grants. There are lots of disputes to be had about how the money is spent exactly, and the effects that the popularity has had on the way people approach things, but it's either tickets or no event on that scale. The people with badges and guns won't allow it. Just because money is involved doesn't make it commercial, and there are considerable good faith efforts being spent to keep it from being leveraged as a product in most instances.
well that pretty much offends just about every one. well done.
Pixel-wrangler makes a shitty macro photo. I'm so scared for our future. I mean, sure, it's nice. It has detail. The lighting looks like a simulacrum of natural light. But, come on, tricking the eye with good skillz is it's own thing, no matter how "life-like." No one is replacing a photographic eye, unless they work for the State Department. But that ship has sailed, hasn't it?
EmpressCallipygos: "I think a lot of the defensiveness is coming from run-ins with other people who point to guys like him and say, "well, he didn't have any problem paying things down, so what's the big deal?" Many of these other people are in our government, to add insult to injury... So the blogger may acknowledge that he's had a lot of luck and is starting from a lucky place, but Sen. Roscoe H. Blowhard is going to conveniently overlook that when he incorporates a story about ths blogger into his latest stump speech." OK, I can see that. It makes sense. You know, there were definitely a few things I really thought worth criticizing in his methods and assumptions. But attacking the guy because someone else might use him as an example to nefarious ends seems like an odd choice.
I don't have time to read this. Could someone summarize the thread and the blog post for me?
It's something they actively have to teach people that you need to read 'juice' packages to be certain you're not buying something marketed as 'drink' or 'punch', because the latter go out of their way to promote real fruity goodness as loudly as the same sized carton or say, ordinary orange juice from concentrate. And as it turns out, there's no health difference between juices and a coke. 7%, 100% its all sugar, empty calories, and we're finding out quite possibly toxic. Thanks FDA nutrition label.
I like to think it's not that he slacked off, but that the tone of the show changed so much over the years. Is there an alternate universe where "Homer at the Bat" could be a S14 episode? Maybe. Swartzwelder wrote "Kill the Alligator and Run" and a lot of superfans won't forgive him for that, but he was so good in his prime I don't think it matters. As far as the novels, I've heard that the first one is great but they start to get repetitive.
Fans are commonly used in fashion photograph but I'd like to see them used at a higher wind velocity setting. "You're beautiful! Work it! Show me what you've got! Not so much gum! Love the camera! OK, i'm going to repeat; not so much gum! The camera loves you! Try to pull that eyelid down!"
It was the first book in French for me in high school as well. I always thought of that opening line as, "Today, Mother is dead."
Do you find it ultimately better or worse to get fast feedback? Always worse. The client (under all sorts of commercial pressures themselves) would start to want to try entirely new ideas, or start to worry that the original idea was in fact rubbish (which, this being advertising, often was indeed the case...) It's all just tech progress and I guess it all settles down into new ways to get results and creativity, but the main part of adapting was finding new moments to actually think.
Artists of One Kind: You're Being Replaced by Artists of Another Kind But it is a dramatic change. Even as a hack commercial photographer, you were aware that everything you did was about manipulating light. You end up with fascinated by guys like Kubrick procuring NASA lenses in order to shoot a whole movie by candlelight. With images that are 100 percent born and bred inside the computer, it's not clear what substance you're shaping with your hands. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it just eliminates another element of the fun.
No, I google his email address from his comment to see what would show up. It split it into his full name (which I won't put here to be prudent) with the last name of Vadhadiya, which appears to be a somewhat common Indian name. This does not mean he is an ESL student. There are many, many people with Indian names who were born and raised in English-speaking countries. Also, I think a 17-year-old in India would be reading the classics for school, and not making dioramas.
I guess my perspective is skewed a bit by my having been raised middle class, then spending several years poor, then eventually being middle class again; I see "people with money saving money is [grar grar]" and I think "well, if people with money save money, then they'll have that money when they're unemployed", because I always assume employment and socioeconomic status ebb and flow. I'd imagine your reponse may have been different, then, if this caught you in the "poor" phase. I've had similar luck, but the "back to middle class" is only just now kicking in, and I know that I always bristled at all of the well-meaning advice to save money because "oh, yeah, after I pay rent and utilities and buy food maybe I'll have a whole three cents, whoop-te-do."
Huh. I don't quite understand the author's contention that getting periphrastic with the verb in English would be "more literal". The passé composé is the only viable way in French to describe someone dying in the past. Sure, it also subsumes the English "has died", but I don't think it's fair to say that it's more accurately translated that way.
Hey kid, if you're reading this! The best possible thing you could do as your project now is a simple video summary of Sean Dixon's The Lost Disco Boys of the Blue Lagoona Coil, a la Harper Lee's How to Kill a Mockingbird. If you don't get at least a B with that, I'll mail you cookies myself. After I get to see the video.
I skimmed the first link and then read the second link through. I thought for sure that the synopsis sent to the student was a hilarious troll-by-novelist and that the real book must be about some young people coming of age in one location, maybe in the 1970's. Then I came back here and read the thread and WAIT REALLY, that's the plot of the book? It had read to me as a list of opposites of things that would make sense and form a coherent novel. I don't mean that the book is incoherent or senseless! I have not read it or anything. Just, wow, the motives I ascribe when I think I'm reading a somebody trying to make fun of someone else without them knowing. Since he did NOT troll the kid, I don't know why someone would criticize him or his decision to post the exchange. Here there is no case of an adult being unduly mean to a kid. In fact, the adult is being more polite than many adults I've seen on internet -- the kid who wants his homework done is being rude, behaving with dumb entitlement, insulting the author by making so plain his disinterest in the subject novel, and providing choicely obnoxious button-pushers that couldn't be better designed to ignite a negative reaction. (Which is why I agree with whoever posted upthread that homework kid is the troll in this story! If so, it is quality trolling in that it is TOTALLY PLAUSIBLE ON FIRST READ. And actually scanning your assignment and emailing it to the author, to demand that he do your poetry-form book report for you, is kind of genius, I MEAN IF IT'S TROLLING.) I think we can all agree that "No" would have been ultimately a kinder reply than pasting that plot summary. A half-literate (probably non-actual) young person can not do anything useful with that summary. I love the idea of giving the kid advice! I only love that idea because I am no longer a young person. So here goes, if I were in the author's boots. First round advice would be "do your homework on time! That will give you habits that might help you accomplish small things in your adult life! And it will definitely help you stress out less about your marks!" I would use all the exclamation marks because kids love them and I feel that if anything, adults employ them with too much restraint. My second round of advice would be "Don't lie about your relatives dying to elicit sympathy, it is in super bad taste and also adults can tell you're full of shit."
I think there is a lack of basic understanding of both math and words in this thread. Let me try to explain, and also to appear superior and patronizing at the same time. Firstly, it is a well-known fact that every person is - legally - a minor until the age of 18. Hence every baby is a minor. Together, these babies form the "minority". This means that 100% of babies born in America today are in the minority. This is a frightening statistic. The "majority", however, is composed of those who have obtained the rank of Major in the Army or Marines. This is actually a very elite group, numbering far less than 0.1% of the population. Again, one jiggles with well-justified fear upon hearing this terrorsome fact. Between the minority and majority, however, stands the mediocrity. The rest of us are members of this faction, although we try to deny it. But, it is TRUE and we should face up to it, or America will never prevail from the toxic peril in which it currently bathes. It is clear, then, that we need to radically lower the age of consent and commission each newborn with officer rank in the armed forces IMMEDIATELY, in order to bolster the ranks of the majority. Only then can we catapult tens of thousands of plump-limbed, drooling infant soldiers at our enemies and laugh as they explode on their terrorist camps and secret nuclear-weapon facilities. Then American mediocrity will be safe from the scourge of the minority, and democracy will triumph. "Democracy" is a demon who smokes crack, by the way. I thought you might need that explained to you all as well.
Gale force winds are nothing to laugh about. ("No, I'm not laughing; it's just my cheeks being blown back.") Gale force winds are the main reason I decided not to become a reporter for the Weather Channel.
A Harvard MBA is better at managing his personal finances than the average schmo? Shocking!
This sensationalistic title pretty much ruins an otherwise decent article. It's not like a box of software grows arms, crawls it's way to your keyboard and starts stealing your clients. "Photographers: You're being supplemented by highly trained 3D artists!" wouldn't get as many page views. See previously: "Photographers: you're being replaced by easy access to consumer cameras" See also: "Painters: you're being replaced by photographers!"
If there are 6 groups that make up 10% of the population and 1 group making up 40% then the minorities would be the majority no?
Why do YOU think a Harvard MBA would start publishing a blog on money management, using his goofy personal experience to sell it in a kind of perverse Morgan Spurlockesque fashion?
Externally, I think the blog itself was actually quite effective in helping me achieve my goal. I can literally count on one hand the number of times I've ever flaked out on anything in my life, and while I complained from time to time about how uncomfortable it was to relive moments from especially difficult days by writing about them on my blog, I believe that making this challenge public was helpful to my follow-through.
That's nothing, I almost ran over Ira Glass last week.
Is it very wrong to want a NSFW version? You might have been taking Blow Job a little too literally. But while we're on the subject, am I the only one who finds it confusing that, in this context, the words "suck" and "blow" mean the same thing? They seem like opposites.
A Harvard MBA is better at managing his personal finances than the average schmo? Shocking! The average schmo doesn't make six figures while having almost no unavoidable expenses. As he says in the post, this is not rocket science, it's obviously possible for someone with a huge income to live like they only make minimum wage and pocket/invest/pay down their debt with the rest. The fact that so many people spend almost everything they make no matter how low their real expenses are is why net worth is a better measure of current wealth than current income is.
Minority ensues.
From an email exchange with Mrs George from just under a year ago: Mrs George, When I was 11 years old, as a city kid at church camp, I wandered away from my group, and I got myself lost in the Pisgah National Forest. I had nothing but the clothes on my back. I was scared, hungry, cold, and (obviously) alone. Having, at that point, pretty much memorized "My Side Of The Mountain", I knew to stick to what few paths there were, to follow the terrain downhill, and to generally keep my head about me. I eventually found a river, at which I made a clumsy attempt to catch a fish. (You're right, it's hard to make a good fishing hook). But I did find some nice grubs and river tubers to eat, and some kind fishermen eventually found me and brought me back to the camp. I think I had been gone a total of 15 hours. Not much time to most, but an eternity to me, at the time. Anyway, as you will surmise, I survived. I'd just like to thank you for the ensuing 30 years my life. I'd also like to thank you for awakening in me a love of literature that abides to this day. With Deepest Gratitude, Daryl Jean George ✆ 24/05/2011 to me Dear Daryl, What an extraordinary letter. That you kept your wits about you at 11 is amazing. I am so delighted to know MSM was such a source of your wisdom, but you were the one with fortitude and strength. Jean Craighead George _______ What a lovely woman.
Okay, saying he's "a piece of shit" was an overreaction and I apologize for that. But why go public with this dumb kid's emails? It's like the ultimate FIAMO situation. Just strikes me as holier than thou. Since time immemorial kids have tried to get out of homework assignments.
Way to miss the point completely, and bully for you all the same. There was a point there? It looked more like a way to feel morally superior based on a random bodily metric with no context whatsoever.
Both The Killing Fields and Amadeus are wonderful, wonderful films; neither is a Happy Place, but both are excellent. As is Ghostbusters. The late 70's and early 80's were the last really fabulous period for the movies, mostly because the late 60's and early 70's had high-concepted all of the fun, cheesy, over-the-top silly stuff out of the studios -- and then movies like Star Wars and Rocky and Superman proved that pure entertainment was marketable. But they were made by directors who had stories to tell and who wanted to entertain pretty directly -- they weren't overprocessed derivative crap designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator of the audience -- and they had to fight to get them made, since no-one believed they'd make any money.
One fine morning in the month of May, my elegant mother might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne. She seemed a little flushed.
I don't think English is that kid's first language. Seriously.
vidur: "Sincere question: what kind of lifestyle can a single man have on $3000? Any mefites from the city where this guy lives?" I made about $4500 total last year so, approximately $400 a month. (I even ended up paying income tax since it was all selfemployment) Here's how I did it: I own my own shack and food stamps. Of course, when my shit car died I didnt have money to replace it, so I'm borrowing my PhD advisors shit truck (no public transit in the rural area i live.) I'm paying $30 a week to buy groceries and commute to a pt job hich pays $200 a week. Yeah, i have a phd in mathematics and i'm on food stamps. Here's what I didnt do: pay anything on my student loans. Maybe i should be blogging. (oh and i cant move without abandoning my kids)
So... what? I'm the only one so far who immediately saw a family reunion of this guy?
I'm stuck in a loop - I went to the FPP link, but a link there sent me back here. Help!
Well, between this and the brain worm post, I'm not gonna sleep tonight.
Totally doable here in Corvallis OR: No car I guess. That seems like a pretty major expense that most people in the US have.
Behavior like this is fine. Blogging about it is what makes it obnoxious. I have to disagree; I see it as similar to someone like this (warning, daily mail article, but it is a good one.) On the one hand, yes, these people's circumstances aren't directly equivalent to ours (in the case of the linked video, for instance, we're talking about someone who obviously has a great deal of time to dedicate to their efforts) but they can still serve as an inspiration to some folks.
How does one factor in the U.P.?
Oh, come now. He's been making sacrifices all over the place. He wasn't sure if his boss liked him enough to give him a BIG bonus (office median was $8K, he needed double that to close the gap in his arbitrary window of time), so he just went down the street and got a better, also-six-figure job on a lark. Problem is, that means 50-60 hour weeks for a couple of months to ramp up. Meanwhile, the house he had purchased had some extra rooms in it, so he just leased them out to some people, and that means having ROOMMATES. And he had to sell his second car AND his motorcycle, leaving just one car to get around in! I for one feel the pain of his sacrifice both deeply and personally.
I've read four of the Frank Burly books. Quick reads but fun and funny. For a while I thought it was a dark shot that Swartzwelder might write @DadBoner, some of the voice was similar, but I guess that ship has sailed.
If you make 1/10th of this money, and have 1/10th of this debt, this is still a good reminder that high salary != high money, unless you manage it well. Well, of course, if you only make 1/10th of his money and have 1/10th of his debt, remember to only eat 1/10th the amount of food, use 1/10th the amount of electricity, pay 1/10th as much for insurance and rent, and you'll be good to go.
So how did a guy with that personality get the Simpsons job in the first place? And why isn't he published by a major house?
Well that's wishful thinking. It would seem to me that the people who attend Burning Man are not regular Champagne drinkers, nor are they likely to become ones. So even if the brand is damaged amongst this target audience it would not register in reduced sales..
It's simple really. Start a couple of memes and publish fake articles/blogs of poor kids saving up to buy Krug to drink on street corners. Turn it into a "thing", perhaps get some help from the Juggalos so they can pretend that they all love the Krug. Brand death within 5 years. They'll probably sell more champagne, but inside they'll be dying.
One thing that astonishes me about this, in addition to all the obvious things, is how well her proprioception (apologies if I am using a technical term incorrectly) works here. She's controlling a larger-than-life mechanical arm whose shoulder joint is a couple of feet away from her as if it were part of her own body. I can bring a thermos to my mouth without thinking but controlling an external object to do the same thing is much harder.
I do not see him giving people advice by saying, "I'm totally in your exact situation and this is what you should do to get out of it." My problem isn't with the blog itself. Wealthy successful guy wants to talk about how his wealth was useful to him? Great. Indeed, the blogger is right: he was able to do what he did through a very uncommon combination of positive factors that apply to very few people. And the very few people it does apply to will probably be able to handle their debt just fine, one way or another. My question is, given all that, why should almost anyone care about what he has to say?
Sarah Weinman, a lit news hound (and publishing marketplace news editor), has a theory that this whole hitchhiking deal has to do with John Waters's next book. I hope she's right.
I believe the kid asks for a summary of "The Girls Who Saw Everything," which appears to be a prequel to The Last Days...
The Acai berry scam advice is very close to the broadcast advertising code on weightloss products here in the UK. It's amazing how long the "work at home stuffing envelopes" thing has been around. I remember seeing want ads in newspapers at least thirty years ago with that scam. I was really confused by this as a kid, as I could not for the life of me work out why putting something in an envelope and posting it would make some money. I had heard about piecework (ie. people assembling items at home and posting them out or sending them to a manager) but not pyramid schemes, so I imagined soon to be millionaires surrounded by towering stacks of envelopes. The more you do, the more you make, right?
The article in Nature: Reach and grasp by people with tetraplegia using a neurally controlled robotic arm (subscription required).
Just wanted to echo scdjpowell's response to RogerB. Be careful who you cast as being "shunted out of the academy" before you know who you're talking about. Many of alt-acs have wanted just this kind of career — which combines practical skill and intellectual rigor and is challenging in the best possible way — since beginning graduate study, and these jobs are highly sought after. You're right, of course, to be wary of a contracting academy and a worsening academic labor market. But many alt-acs have chosen their careers precisely in order to effect real change in the academy. Many of the people in the census Orinda points to are campaigning for better working conditions, reimagined publishing models, and open access to scholarship. Moreover, it strikes me that this narrow definition of who does intellectual work — this notion that only tenured professors can be scholars — is part of what's so troubling about the modern academy. It prevents us from seeking common cause with the librarians, technologists, adjuncts, and all the others who might offer us a more expansive idea of what scholarship can be and do. Are alt-acs the solution to the academic job crisis? No, they can't be. There aren't enough of these jobs. But a broader definition of who does intellectual labor, and what that labor looks like, can only benefit us.
I wonder if that's really the kid in the comments. I'm sort of inclined to believe this is real. That'd be some skillful writing to write that convincingly like an idiot, and googling, "last days lacuna cabal summary," doesn't come up with anything immediately useful.
I don't understand how money in the bank is any use when no one is buying. It goes right back to the original argument. Banks can no more create money than VCs can. Banks aren't buying consumables. Who are they going to lend that money to when there's high unemployment and businesses are going under? And, sure enough, banks are tightly holding on to their money ve right now. A lot of people are complaining that the banks policies are what is causing the recession. But banks aren't going to lend money out when there are few customers for the businesses.
Bah! *poos*
I mean the second link
Reading many of the comments here I've been genuinely confused at the resentment so many people have for the writer. I couldn't understand why people can't look past the fact that he's in a better economic situation than they are and take his story at face value. Maybe even learn something to better themselves. The resentment seemed irrational to me. But then I suddenly thought of a situation where I have what is probably an irrational resentment and suddenly had that aha moment. It reminds me of how I feel when actors and models go on about how great their diet and/or exercise plan is and how "anybody can do it". It's easy for them because they have the aid of expensive personal trainers and dieticians and have the financial career and incentive to motivate them. I never see one of those people and think "that's great that they got in shape, I could do the same thing". I end up cursing them and resenting their whole spiel as arrogant and out of touch with normal people. I'm still glad I was turned onto this blog and will take some bits of his story and apply them to my own personal financial planning. But at least now I sort of get why there are so many comments totally dismissing him right off the bat. So if any you felt my eye-rolling at you - I'm sorry.
What is his next project? "I bought a 1,000,000$ house and awe shucks I think I can pay it off in two years easily." Please write a self help.
Rethinking "Mother died today": Translating a work requires a surprising amount of thought to avoid leading readers into contextual pitfalls, and The Stranger is no exception. "Within the novel's first sentence, two subtle and seemingly minor translation decisions have the power to change the way we read everything that follows."
Back around Halloween 2009, we were buying snacks for a party and picked up a bare-bones DVD of Ghostbusters for ten dollars. Over the next two or three months, we watched it at least once a week. I am really looking forward to reading this. Also, seeing Two Gentlemen of Lebowski live was one of my favorite theatrical experiences.
...well in that case, they're hardly minorities anymore, are they?
How was the author to know that with his first kindly act this muffin-headed kid was going to be a useless wart and demand a diorama? How is what he did a "kindly act?" The kid asked, in so many words, -I didn't read your book, so would you please write my book report for me-. Agreeing to do so is foolishness, not a kindly act. I'm surprised the kid didn't ask for his bank account information after the author demonstrated such poor judgment the first time around. There's nothing shitty about trying to help out a highschooler, But he didn't try to help out a highschooler. He agreed to write a book report for a highschooler who didn't read the book. and there is certainly nothing shitty about being disgusted that the student is subsequently revealed to be a lying, ungrateful and entitled layabout. Lying? About what? He was upfront from the beginning about being an ungrateful and entitled layabout, and the author, for some reason, agreed to facilitate his about-laying.
THIS IS MY COMMENT WHERE I WAIL AND GNASH MY TEETH BECAUSE SOMEONE MAKES MORE MONEY THAN I DO AND HAS AN EASIER TIME ACHIEVING THE GOALS THAT I WISH TO ACHIEVE... casually forgetting the fact that I was a slacker in high school, college, and law school and therefore eliminated all possibility of pursuing such high-paying jobs. Whomp. Fucking. Whomp. posted by jph HERE IS MY COMMENT WHERE I ASSUME THAT EVERYONE THAT ISN'T ROLLING IN MONEY MUST BE LAZY/DUMB/A SLACKER AND IS A JEALOUS HATER. I wish I lived in your black and white world. If you're not running for a Republican office you've missed your calling. Good for him. It's amazing how many people that make loads of money barely get by because of their spending. But come on, there's only so much inspiration you can get from someone that cut back from spending 1,300 a month on entertainment.
The kid is a dumbass but the author seems like a real piece of shit. They both seem like idiots to me. I agree that the kid is stupid, but what did the author do to deserve these comments?
Sorry about the bug-eyes thing. (I'll be in my office.)
Gums are not attractive.
In the blog post, it says that the costumes were furnished by Krug. I have no idea if that makes it better or worse. But, hey, at least they're not all acting independently. Yuck. Honestly, I was so floored that I didn't even read the details. I guess the moral of the story is that racism has institutional support. Which makes sense; aside from a few rando hipsters making their own "headdresses", you can't really wear one unless you can buy one, and it's not like native folks are selling them off on the streets of Williamsburg. (Or has all the action moved to Park Slope or Brooklyn or some place now?) I would hope that if someone tried to make me wear a native headdress like that I would have had the fortitude to refuse, although I suppose that if one were very young and naive one might not like to say no to a PR person. A good rule seems to be that the type of business which creates special things for "elite" customers only is a bad place to patronize.
"Hello? Is this, uh, GBM? I read in the personals you were seeking a soulmate. Well, I also like rainy days and movies."
Ok you guys who wrote the blog?
It must suck to not be able to do something like this without it being posted all over the internet and dissected. there is not a shot in hell that john waters gives a fuck what everyone on the internet is saying about him one way or another. even if he reads it, im sure it just amuses him, mildly.
I don't think I've ever read the transcript of a TED talk before. Distilled down to text its about 2.5 minutes of reading. Somehow seems to take the wind out of their sails doesn't it? That all "their great ideas worth spreading" could be blurbs on the back of a paperback novel?
Greg Daniels worked on the Simpsons in the early years and is a creator of Parks & Rec. I refuse to believe the Swartzwelder/Swanson similarities are a co-incidence. that is a fucking amazing point, and if anyone has the ability to ask him, please please do and share it.
You would think everyone on here is destitute sometimes. Nah, but few people enjoy or admire the struggles of the rich when they're really struggling. It's not surprising that a lot people on Metafilter are reacting negatively to the blog. FWIW, the most interesting parts are in the Mission Accomplished post. He talks about what he learned and whether he'll go on a shopping spree with the extra $1K a month and go back to his old life style or not.
the rest of the world is getting fat as hell You're not wrong about that. I wonder what personal choices are causing increases in rat or primate obesity?
This is kind of a silly question. Yeah, what was I thinking with that historically overgeneralizing handwaving — in a TED thread, of all places? (Of course you're right, though.)
Virgina = dead turkey lying on the ground (now that you've seen it you will not unsee it.)
I heard about these years ago, meant to check them out, and then promptly forgot. Now it's different, though. Now I own a Kindle, so I'm off to Amazon to buy The Time Machine Did It before I forget again.
Lols were had. Damn you Diablo!
Metafilter's Own™ nasreddin blogs about how he used to think that term papers are BS, and still thinks so now that he's grading them. (I'm sure his reasoning applies equally well to dances and diaries about novels.)
And, of course, at that point, why not update all fiction regardless of what language it was written in. Instead of shooting an Arab, maybe Mersault could have a skateboard competition with him? Awesome.
If you make 1/10th of this money, and have 1/10th of this debt, this is still a good reminder that high salary != high money, unless you manage it well. Yeah, that's definitely an important reminder, and it's good advice. However, it's also worth remembering that many of life's fixed expenses -- things like paying to renew the plates on your car or getting a prescription filled or the price of gas driving to work -- don't drop by 90% if you make less money. That's the part that makes it much, much harder the farther down on the income scale you go. It needs an infographic or something. I guess my point isn't to snark or criticize; it really is an interesting blog, but for me the interesting part is how much light it sheds on the relative ease with which high-income-earners can dig out when they find themselves in debt.
He was making $52,000 a year and borrowed a hundred large for an Ivy League graduate degree. What on earth does that have to do with ... undergraduates? Good question. How about you get some stats about people entering grad school, especially for an MBA? That's actually possibly a relevant demographic.
Darn you, JHarris, I was just about to say that I plan to read this article with a nice cold glass of Crystal Head Vodka. But for what it's worth, Crystal Head is quite tasty. It's not worth the price point alone, but for $50 you get 750ml of very good vodka and an awesome bottle shaped like a human skull. I'd pay $20 or $30 for the bottle alone, so when you add it up it's a good value.
Does it need to be called blow job? They are essentially photographs of heads, why not just "head"? Blow job seems some how provocative. Interesting zombie effects though.
Yeah, author deserves a break. On an unrelated note, when can I get my Grand Poobah hat?
Hey folks - the dude has an MBA from Harvard and is well-paid in a management job at Dell. He has no kids or family. It's pretty obvious that what he does likely won't apply to someone with a husband and kids paying off student loan debt from a poetry degree, so why bother announcing your displeasure in this thread? Because just quietly managing his money won't get him on to the speaking circuit. In your alternate reality, does everyone you don't immediately personally identify with have some ulterior motive for everything they do?
I don't drive and I don't live in the US, but I still feel bummed out that I've never picked up John Waters hitchhiking.
I think it's important to live in a world where the rich have their share of bad speeches.
Pat Buchanan warned us about this! Nice, clean white folk need to have more babies who will grow up to uphold Western civilization! Either that, or to grow up to hate their parents and vote in a gay Latino president.
So I was in San Fransisco with nothing to do but ride the tiny aftershocks of a tiny earthquake that hapened a day before and still spooked me out cause hey, east coast kid, when I noticed there was a midnight movie showing of Ghostbusters near me. Great! I loved that movie growing up! I must have seen it fifty times, although none since puberty. I got in with my cherry coke ( augmented with a flask of rum) and my popcorn and despite the presence of guys in full 'busting uniforms, I had a lingering fear it wouldn't be as good as I remembered.. I was so wrong you guys. It was better. I got all kinds of jokes and nuance that just flew over my head as a kid. I was admiring how well thought out the structure was ( Louis constantly being denied entry for one) when we got to the Walter Peck " shut it down!", a scene I remember being really thrilling as a kid cause of the spooky music and flying demonic engery and just as the force of ten thousand demons burst through the firehouse roof......we had another, not so small aftershock that lead to the entire audience having the same progression of emotions what was that Are We Okay? THAT WAS AWESOME. There was a cheer. It was one of the best times I've ever had at a movie theatre.
A plate of beans for the guys in the jumpsuits in the corner booth please.
Overthinking... wow, that's no lie. Oh, and The Real Ghostbusters cartoon was awesome.
Dell still exists?
For some reason I read that as "Philosophers: You're Being Replaced by Software".
I plan on talking about this tonight at Outback Steakhouse to which I am about to get a free gift certificate from Bill Gates for forwarding this email to twenty people.
But... but... but... WELFARE QUEEN!
Don't have an MBA, much less from Harvard, but was in a similar situation about 2 years back with considerably ... different, numbers. Had been repaying my education loan for about five years to that point, and was frustrated to see that there still was a substantial amount that needed to be repaid. Decided I'd go in for the jugular; was more of an emotional, than rational, response to be honest, and started putting everything into this: tried to cutback on expenses, and pump stuff in. I learned five things from that exercise: a) While the sweet scent of freedom when you see the outstanding amount go to zero is liberating, but like everything in the world that's money-related, it's ultimately fleeting; at least in my case, I still had to save up for my wedding and family-life and so on. b) Scaling down a lifestyle is significantly harder than scaling up a lifestyle. This is a cliche, but true; for instance, to take a completely unrelated and hopefully benign example, I find it very very hard now to stay in shared dorms, as opposed to single rooms, even though I spent a significant amount of my early twenties sleeping / living in such places. c) The hardest part of a scale-down exercise is socializing. It's extremely difficult to try and save while wanting to hang out with your buddies who have no similar goals to reduce spending; at least in my case, it has led to me drifting away from a certain friend circle. So I have much respect for anyone who's tried it and succeeded in any way possible; I know I've failed at keeping my social circle constant (which is not necessarily a bad thing, as you'll see in the next point) d) Related, but the biggest change I've seen in people post-MBA is actually their personal lifestyle; friends whose idea of a good time would be to spend a Saturday night en boite in a neighbourhood pub now don't think twice about heading to Macau or Phuket or some exotic destination to play at the casino or golf or snorkel or something. (So the anecdotes about Harvard MBA's splurging crazy rings extremely true for me). e) Finally, and this directly addresses the blog in question here, but whenever you discuss money matters with anyone, you should always try to make it a qualitative discussion. The moment you bring numbers into the talk, people will take it personally and start placing you in bubbles, thereby cheapening the value of your experiences.
What happened to you, Burning Man? You used to be about the burning.
People, the man gave us THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING, he could've retired after that.
I'm taking Krug off my list for pouring over dancers with immediate effect.
I'm pretty sure you mean you're an children's author with an book contract.
I found what he wrote interesting in spite of the fact that he makes huge amounts of money and will likely make more in the future. But, I generally like reading about people who set ambitious goals and go out and make them happen. To me that's all this was. Perhaps I'm getting the sense that he hopes to appeal to a wider audience than this is actually suited for. He thinks he can inspire not only the Ivy-League-grads-in-med-school, but also the "little guy," who in truth doesn't have a prayer of paying off debt early with money that just happened to be "sitting around." It is possible to interpret his blog through a filter of "generally inspirational". But for many, the issue of debt relief and money hits a little too close to home at present to put yourself at the remove you'd need to be at in order to see this as just "guy diligently attains generic goal".
I would have insisted that the kid phrase his requests in actual human sentences before I would give him any help.
So, I just learned that one of the problems of self-publishing is that your work isn't really available in a medium-to-small city's libraries. Look into inter-library loaning. I actually started doing it to read these books, and it was totally worth it. My library charged maybe $1.50, and I got to read library books from Salt Lake City, Binghampton, NY and southern California. Fun times!
David Cohen once related a story of Swartzwelder going on an extended diatribe about how there is more rain forest on Earth now than there was a hundred years ago.[7] No words.
Mr. Dixon, in case you happen to read this, you went way beyond the call of duty on this one. Hat's off, sir. But this is unfortunately what often happens when you give someone who won't do his own homework a favor: they take advantage. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, give a man a fish and all of that. Was a nice gesture, though.
The intro is incredibly long.
...well in that case, they're hardly minorities anymore, are they? Can't tell if serious.
Ghostbusters is one of the classic examples of mass appeal movies being better and more influential than the prestige dramas and Oscar bait. Consider--these were the five contenders for Best Picture in 1984, the year Ghostbusters was released:
1. Amadeus
2. The Killing Fields
3. A Passage to India
4. Places in the Heart
5. A Soldier's Story
With the possible exception of Amadeus, who remembers any of these films today? Even if you do, can you really say that any of those was the best of what 1984 had to offer compared to Ghostbusters? Conversely, mass entertainments are rarely this well-written, well-produced, and original--and successful! (Joss Whedon may have scored big with The Avengers, but only on three of those four points.) When are we going to get a tentpole movie that isn't a retread, a reboot, a sequel, or an adaptation of something already popular? I'm not holding my breath. Since this thread is going to devolve into a quote-fest anyway, my nomination for best line in the movie: "Tell him about the Twinkie." "What about the Twinkie?"
>Capitalists and businesspeople like to believe that everything is supply-driven, and it's incredibly self-serving of them to believe this. This sounds like a just-so story. It's very convenient if one is trying to shore up a particular narrative that goes over well around here. But when I compare it to the capitalists and business people I actually know, it's kind of... fanciful.
. I hadn't heard of him till today. The link on wiki to tracks containing the roach breakbeat is pretty cool.
PapaLobo: "OH THE BITTERNESS. As a lifelong Astros fan I obtained a white hot fury of the Mets because we WERE ONE STRIKE AWAY FROM THE GODDAMN WORLD SERIES IN 1986" That sounds funny considering the Astros lost in six games... but I also agree with you. Their Cy Young winner Mike Scott would have pitched game 7 and he had the Mets completely and utterly buffaloed. I think the Mets knew damn well that if they lost that game six, it was over for them. (I also think the 86 Mets were a collection of some of the least likeable baseball players you could imagine, but I might be a bit biased. Heh.) PapaLobo, was it better in 2006 when we finally made the World Series? (And then got @*$(%))@#(# swept. Sigh.)
Yeah - the Killing Fields is one of the most memorable films I've ever seen. Certain shots still haunt me today. But it's really comparing apples to oranges to put it up against Ghostbusters. Blood oranges. Going for your throat.
(Context: I'm a PhD in humanities computing who—as several other altacs—has found herself working in an academic library.) RogerB -- you write: It's a hashtaggy new name for a well-established line of work, in administrative and research and staff positions — and one that's grown massively in FTEs and salaries just as professors' salaries have shrunk and their positions have been replaced with adjunct labor, so no surprise that it seems attractive at the moment. But that's not quite what's happening. Altac (about which name I have my own aesthetic concerns, but whatever) is a new name for a well established set of jobs, not line of work. Sure, library jobs existed before. But the work that librarians now do is different from before. Library and information science curricula have changed radically in the past couple of decades, much more so than academic degrees usually change in a comparable time period. This is in response to the radically changing demands of library jobs. We think about information in different ways. We think about what's possible in terms of organizing information in different ways. We think about the containers of information in different ways. These happen to be many of the same ways in which digital humanists have reconceived their raw materials, which is part of why DH and digital libraries are so chummy these days. This is only one way in which altac has emerged from AND is feeding back into new ways of doing scholarship. Others can say smarter things about, for example, producing software as an altac career path. So no, it's not a new name for an old thing. It's a new name for a new thing that's been shimmying its way into old structures.
Meh, I knew it was fake. You can tell by the pixels.
You aren't truly part of the nation's future until your particular sub-set of economic casualties receives a media-friendly monicker.
Total rates don't explain the whole picture though, this map on the same CDC page shows the incredible increase in statewide obesity rates, most went from less than 10% to more than 30% over 20 years. In one of the shorts on Poverty and Obesity, they found areas in Philadelphia with >90% obesity rates). In the last documentary Challenges (click to the 3rd section) they found areas where life expectancy changed by more than 20 years across one zipcode.
Ya'll should have picked your own damn cotton and dug your own damn holes.
It's a fair comment, zarq. I think a lot of the defensiveness is coming from run-ins with other people who point to guys like him and say, "well, he didn't have any problem paying things down, so what's the big deal?" Many of these other people are in our government, to add insult to injury... So the blogger may acknowledge that he's had a lot of luck and is starting from a lucky place, but Sen. Roscoe H. Blowhard is going to conveniently overlook that when he incorporates a story about ths blogger into his latest stump speech.
I probably should hasten to point out that I think the lifestyle changes he was willing to make to pay down his debt load were admirable. We should all have such discipline. I just think he took it a bit far when it came to sacrificing his personal and familial relationships.
Well, that was stupid.
I thought "death is the only option" is the universal theme for all stories about the human condition.
I'm kind of fixated on how the author is reading this thread and taking offense at it. While I can relate -- I'd probably take it personally, too -- I kind of wish he wouldn't. Emailing an 11th grader a book summary because it is oddly like a plot point, then posting the exchange on the blog, is fun and idiosyncratic enough that I want him to be blithely unaware of something as mundane as snark. Also, I totally want him to make some disguised version of the kid a character in his next story.
Things are getting interactive ... +++ Later still. Now the grand poobahs of Metafilter have chimed in, after somebody posted it there and sent me the link. From this I learn that by interacting with a Grade 11 student, I have exposed myself as unprofessional, an idiot and a 'piece of shit'. But thank you, Grobstein, for defending my honour. And Bwithh is right. My synopsis doesn't make any sense.
I followed this guy from when he first started blogging on this topic. The thing that drove me crazy about his approach was his complete disregard for any freelancing position that was not completely structure by someone else. This guy has an MBA from Harvard--he should be able to start a business in his sleep--and he was afraid of just putting an ad on Craigslist to start tutoring kids, or offering some of his business acumen to others for a hefty sum. He only wanted to tutor if it was through Kaplan or start a business (that went nowhere) where he only did the manual labor. I would never hire this guy for his MBA skills. To sneak drinks into a bar for me? Maybe.
Bort: Ok, there are a couple tells that suggest maybe ELL or ESL--specifically "an coppy" and similar singular/plural errors. However. This writing is exactly like many of my regular native-speaking students' writing. Like, indistinguishable. 11th grade. New York state. Why do you think s/he is Indian? (as opposed to another English-language learner). Is there some particular tic that you are familiar with?
. (I had no idea our local scene had so many adherents here on the Blue.)
Businesses hire people as a form of growth and investment, before the customer has shown he cares, all the time. They also, and often, don't lay off as many people or as soon as they might when demand subsides, in a desire to maintain capacity to rebound with the market. To judge by LinkedIn, half the people in tech have made most of their 10- and 15-year careers through "on spec" hiring and retention. Beyond this, the idea that first world consumers create change and innovation driven jobs is true only in the most trivial way. They live in satiated societies, and are perfectly happy to consume whatever they consumed the day before unless business make investments to take risks to put something different in front of them. Consumers are the judges who decide who gets the prize, but it is businesses who are the performers and create the event to begin with.
Why not just lie and say you got a Harvard MBA? No debt and you can use the huge increase in salary to pay legal fees if you get sued. I mean its not like you could become the CEO of a major company by just making stuff up.
IAmBroom: "MoonOrb, I don't see it as a criticism of him, per se, but the implied arrogance in suggesting that his situation is directly relatable to 99% of his readers' life situation." Out of curiosity, who suggested that?
Ummm...okayyyy... Privilege has its advantages, I guess.
I think I'll pass on this book. I could barely even follow the author's blog post. I mean, am I misunderstanding what happened, or did the author actually seek out to help this kid after seeing the kid's plea on some random book review site? Why would he do that? Is this what blocked authors do with their time?
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Metafilter: everything published online has to apply to you or me.
I do online tutoring and the kid's writing and comprehension skills are about on-par with most of my students. It is tremendously depressing.
Astounding to see just how craven and subservient to corporate power the people running TED actually turned out to be. I guess when a totally mainstream rich dude is censored for even mentioning the word 'inequality' in some idle chat in a room, you have a real pre-fascist situation in the USA.
Part of the reason this blog (and to a certain extent similar discussions about stuff like law school debt) bothers me is that it moves the conversation about student debt to well-compensated business professionals with post-graduate degrees at the expense of the people who are actually disproportionately burdened with student debt in America- poor people who borrow to attend a for-profit college or a local comprehensive university. Student debt is indeed a problem for poor people, but please don't be under any illusions about the conditions of people with law school debt. There's been a great deal of writing on the blue, and elsewhere, about the employment vs. debt prospects of law grads. It's not like they can't both be screwed.
They actually discuss this in the 4th documentary. It has to do with the fact that there is "no functioning market" for fresh vegetables in the country like there is for soy and corn, nor are there the myriad of federal risk, insurance and repayment systems for industrial production of healthy foods. As a result less than 2% of farms in the U.S. produce any fruits and vegetables. /end thread sitting
. The Washington City Paper has a roundup of reactions to Brown's death.
Ted has jumped over the shark and into the Republican party?
Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice! Glad I looked around and found...Hawaii! About as far from Michigan as I can get and still be in the U.S.A., although I considered Alaska and found it was too cold and too Republican. If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look somewhere else.
I pefer to think of them as still panels in a comic book showing people being hit with a supervaillian's Melting Ray.
Primate obesity? They go to the bar and overindulge in Buffalo Bananas.
This is the Benetton campaign of my nightmares.
I don't think he's going to be helping with Grobstein's homework anytime soon. So, anyone wondering if the kid tried getting hold of Mary Shelly on Twitter to sing him a Frankenstein song?
His basic point that lower taxes on businesses and rich people don't create jobs is backed up by the facts. Federal Income Taxes and Corporate Taxes have been at their lowest rate in decades and yet unemployment and underemployment remain at historic highs. I'm not sure how arguing that further cuts in taxes on the ultra rich and corporations that already pay next to nothing in taxes would in any way be a boost to the economy.
IMO, the US economy prospered like no other because we created a middle class like no other. We had the largest economic engine with the most fuel - disposable income. Broad and strong. The most democratic version of "money talks". The thing is this: the middle class was not created by the market. It was created and supported by political will. And it's being destroyed the same way. Along with the economy.
>>Passing up these occasions because you don't feel like spending the money is more regrettable and less understandable. Unless you've chosen to only do it this once because you have set being debt-free in the shortest possible time as a goal for yourself. Just as we wouldn't like it if he tried to lecture US about our spending habits, I doubt we come off well lecturing him about his. Setting an arbitrary personal goal that means you won't spend important occasions like Christmas with your family or (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime moments like weddings with your friends for a year represents a selfish personal choice, and one which doesn't reflect well on him as a son and a friend. If I were getting married and a good friend of mine told me that he could afford to attend my wedding, but wouldn't be because he chose to prioritize paying off his student loans a month earlier... well, he wouldn't be such a good friend of mine after that. But why stop there, right? Suppose he decided he could pay down his loans a month earlier if he canceled his phone service and internet accounts, meaning that he wouldn't even communicate with his parents for a year in the service of his goal. Is that laudable or deplorable? It's only just this once! And after all, what's the chance something would happen to his parents in a year, right?
Colorado = Wyoming
Welcome to America - where medicine is based on greed.
Gotta say, I was blown away by these images.
*twitch* Don't DO that!
So this seems like an exercise in sloppy thinking aimed - perhaps rightfully - at any equally sloppy claim of the rich to be 'job creators.' His anti-point touts the middle class but then ends up with sensible talk of the feedback ecosystem between capital and consumers. Any VC will tell you "the customer" is the right answer without hesitation to most any job creator's challenge. Nor have I ever heard of an interesting start-up that couldn't use a bit of capital to get started. You need a chicken. You need an egg. O.k.? Most institutional VC's are actually just spending the middle classes' cash anyways. It's capital that gets allocated from your pension fund or - even more circumspectly - it is from sovereign funds in China or the Middle East that are just conduits of middle class spend on plastics and oil. So really even Venture Capitalist Jobs are created by the middle class... if you look at it that way... wait! no! You see, VC's funded the companies that turned oil into plastic... so Chicken! No egg! It's like someone marching around a room and declaring "THIS" point of view to be the REAL view. It isn't helpful. There is a real point about efficient markets bla bla bla but polemics like these (from either side of the circuit) just get people angry and drown out the less explosive policy and technical considerations that actually change information and capital asymmetries in the political landscape. Luckily there does seem to have been some changes on that front recently. I would be curious to know if his portfolio has his money following his mouth. I keep thinking I'll see some crowdsourced exchange platform arise from the JOBs act aimed at making it easier for the public to invest in start-ups.. I've seen a few companies that look like that from afar but are not when you look closer..
"Blow Job" is a series of portraits of people with gale-force winds blown directly into their faces. (SFW)

The artist is Lithuanian photographer Tadao Cern. More images can be found on his Facebook page.
Quote from my cousin to a [past] girlfriend of several years when she was giving him a hard time about him playing games with us: "Video games were here before you... they'll be here after you."
Hitchhiking Director John Waters Picked Up In Ohio By Indie Rock Band
I think I make about 2500-3000 a month after taxes, and in two years in richmond, va, I managed to pay back a few thousand in debt and saved up enough money that I'm going on vacation for a few months, while buying way more apple stuff than I probably should have. With an apartment downtown and going out to eat pretty much daily. Free internet, no cable and not having credit card debt or a car payment and living five minutes from the office helps a lot. Also not having kids and not drinking.
Sponsored by BMW.
.
Ahem. Hernandez shared the '79 NL MVP. The only tie in MVP history. I too despised that Mets team. For those outside NY, it was not a particularly appealing group of players, and there was some schadenfreude when it all fell apart.
"We want to share ideas in a way that brings people together, doesn't throw sand in their faces." Some ideas throw sand in people's faces, suck it up.
> Oh, and The Real Ghostbusters cartoon was awesome. Funfact: The head writer for Real Ghostbusters (and Captain Power) was none other than J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5. Ghostbusters was, by a long shot, my favorite movie as a kid. My favorite videotape was a copy of the movie recorded off TV, that I watched so many times I even had the commercials memorized. Watching the non-bowdlerized version later on was a bit of a shock ("It's true, Your Honor. The man is some kind of rodent, I don't know what.") Much later, as an adult, I was shocked again at the sheer quantity of humor that flew right over my younger head (see post title)...
Jesus. I hope that this is just straight up billing fraud, and they didn't actually X-ray a four-year-old's head ten times. To say nothing of the root canals and crowns--I'm not an expert on child dentistry, but would you really put crowns on baby teeth?
He has a REAL girlfriend.
I'm wondering about the teeth and gums - was it just the angle of the fan, or is this telling us something about facial anatomy that's not usually apparent? Is the top lip a whole lot weaker than the lower one? I'm curious.
. I have many good friends who grew up in DC in the '80s. When one of them got married, about 6 years ago, Chuck Brown played his wedding. It was amazing. Lemme see, here we go.
'Tis no man, 'tis a remorseless eating machine
All ~~Cretans~~ turkeys are liars, Navelgazer.
"I always wanted to be a juvenile delinquent but my parents wouldn't let me." ― John Waters
. I just don't understand how a system with massive purchasing power wouldn't be able to do so more cheaply and effectively than individual parents. It's the prep time and staffing levels
How does one factor in the U.P.? Well, ya gotta kinda twist da other hand around and point da pinkie down an da tumb up, eh?
Oh, "Virgina." Right. Oops.
There is a lot of inner upper lip and gums in these photos. Gums are not attractive. ^♫ Guuuuuuums in the wind All we are is gums in the wiiiiiind... ^♫
Only the minority will make that jo....gaah I just can't do it.
There are aspects of his story that are inspirational and aspects which are totally unrelatable and perhaps a little obnoxious in a tale ostensibly meant to be about sacrifice to meet a goal (like being able to use 25k just sitting around, selling the extra car, cutting back on the 1300/month entertainment, etc). I will say that the time I was making 25k a year and able to pay off 12k debt per year over three years seemed, at the time, to be one of the greatest personal achievements I've ever accomplished. That said, a few of the points in his story are really irritating. One is that he stopped contributing to his employer-matched 401k in order to pay off debt that was costing him only a little over 3% interest. That's a stupid financial strategy for anyone. The drive to be debt-free is laudable, but in this case, the emotions took him in a direction that was totally unwise, fiscally. Good for him, for being debt free and well-employed, though!
That's an awful lot of babies who are going to grow up ineligible to vote (because there are people working on that - hard).
THIS IS MY COMMENT WHERE I WAIL AND GNASH MY TEETH BECAUSE SOMEONE MAKES MORE MONEY THAN I DO AND HAS AN EASIER TIME ACHIEVING THE GOALS THAT I WISH TO ACHIEVE... casually forgetting the fact that I was a slacker in high school, college, and law school and therefore eliminated all possibility of pursuing such high-paying jobs. Whomp. Fucking. Whomp.
For the first time since she was paralyzed by a stroke 15 years ago, a woman in the BrainGate2 clinical trial served herself a drink of coffee ... with a brain-controlled robot arm (with heartwarming video)
oh. It would appear that I have failed in doing the most basic of research. I wasn't even aware that there was an email address. I made the assumption that it would have been redacted.
Anonymous said... Don't worry about the opinions of the metafilter cabal. they take every post as an opportunity to display how high and mighty they are. 17 May, 2012 3:30 AM Pfft. Anonymous.
pullquote from here.
Will not a brave ~~admin~~ warrior banish this FPP back to the depths of hell to which it belongs?
Also, Damn could RunDmc ever rap. Just love that album.
Doesn't this all come down to time? If it takes more time to create a photo-realistic image with software (which must be true with this nuts and bolts example), as opposed to just taking a photo - photo wins, no?
This is all so incredibly dependent on where you live. For example, a $50,000 salary in Houston, TX equates to around a $120,000 salary if you live in NYC/Manhattan. So if you want to figure what your $2,000 a month would get you in NYC, imagine what it would be like living in Houston on 800 bucks a month. Yeah there is always the Manhattan scale factor. Wasn't it said that your (USA-based) happiness increases with an increase in pay up to $75,000....but in Manhattan the number was $137,000? (I was wondering why I've been so unhappy!)
The rise of altacs is not in itself worrisome; there are plenty of wonderful jobs to be done by academics who work outside the tenured system. But the sorts of problems identified by Tina Brown in The Gig Economy are present here at an institutional level: not only job instability, as gerryblog described so well; but drawbacks for the academy, wherein "colleagues are an amorphous, free-floating army of rotating waifs whose voicemails are clogged with plaintive requests from their own offices for missing information." Tenure is not only about providing a "luxurious" lifestyle (in the hopefully ironic scarequotes of pla), but about creating institutional memory, a stable research environment, a reputation for a school or department that generates exciting scholarship. In my field, environmental policy/science, so-called altacs are fairly prevalent in environmental or community-based NGOs, government departments, or in non-traditional academic jobs, and they're often quite well regarded. So perhaps I don't see the controversy as clearly because there is already widespread acceptance of the roles of these altacs. Within the humanities, though, and within some of the theoretical and radical fringes of my own field, I see a very strong reason to continue to strive for and support tenure-track positions. Tenure-track faculty, for one thing, can pursue work that is outside the narrow confines of applied research. Who will do the really radical stuff, the feminist political ecology, if we're all chasing the same grants that benefit the same industries? Who within our society is presenting a well-formulated challenge to existing social structures? Altacs within environmental fields must provide usable information for one or another position, and they cannot take a giant step back and do what tenured university faculty do well: criticize the very systems in which they're involved. (and, btw: I do applied research and I recently accepted a tenure-track job funded by industry. So... whatever.)
I'm surprised none of the links went to this piece, which was getting a lot of play in academic circles today. I'm pretty skeptical of the proposed reforms, which seem mostly directed towards establishing "alternative tracks" that will make it easier to blame students for the fact that there are no jobs, but other people seem quite taken with it.
sour cream, it looks like it's an "Independent Study Program" (ISP), possibly in some kind of charter school. He may be in this program because of language difficulties or other obstacles to learning in a traditional composition class. Maybe his procrastination flunked him out of the regular program and/or school. In any case, usually an ISP is designed with the cooperation of the student, so at some level he probably agreed to this.
I absolutely loved, loved, loved her books as a child. Her descriptions of nature evoked some of the most beautiful images my imagination could ever make. My family was more of a "town" family, so we never camped or hiked or did anything in nature, so until fairly late in life, those images were the only ones I had of being in the wilderness. When I finally did make it to a national park, MSM was what I remembered and compared everything to -- and it was just as wonderful as her books. What a lovely writer. .
For some reason I read that as "Philosophers: You're Being Replaced by Software". That's a Deep Thought.
The NES game RBI baseball allowed my friends and I to replay the World Series many times. RBI Baseball really does replay that game quite well.
From the speech:
Anyone who's ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalists course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn't just inaccurate, it's disingenuous.
Wow, a perfect enunciation of the problem. This is the alleged partisan flavouring in the speech:
This idea is an article of faith for republicans and seldom challenged by democrats and has shaped much of today's economic landscape. (emphasis mine)
Seems like he was an equal-opportunity offender. TED should be ashamed of itself if it thinks this is being partisan.
Please confine discussions of deletions and other moderation activity to MetaTED.
Oh, man, and if you haven't read Army Man yet, waste no time. #1 was reprinted in an old issue of the Believer that I have lying around somewhere. WACKY WEDDINGS If Sheila Fucking married Steve Asshole she'd be Shelia Fucking Asshole. If Crystal Gayle married Billy Crystal she'd be out of her mind. Too bad steak isn't considered a precious metal, because I'd like to go into a restaurant and order a steak and pay for it with a steak. It would give everyone a chill because they would be thinking, "What kind of a world have we gone and created here?" Eighteen months ago, doctors at Mercy Hospital told Manny Hofstadter he would never walk again. Sadly, they were right. Hofstadter is still in a wheelchair. The good news is that his three doctors will receive the prestigious Lundberg Prize for Diagnostic Excellence.
Beyond go-go was his duet work with the late, lovely Eva Cassidy. RIP CB, and thank you.
I don't know why everybody in the article is acting like WI doing the mitten thing is new. WI has been a mitten for much longer than I've been alive. I was raised to see the mitten from birth. (I secretly agree with Roentgen that oven-mitt is better).
Blender is a good example of a tool that should be hard to use. Modeling in 4D (3 space, 1 time) is a hard problem to solve. If it were easy for the n00b, it would be crap at making the impossible possible. This is not necessarily true, or, it's surely not the right approach to software design. It's not a contradiction to want a modeling tool that makes easy things easy, but hard things possible as well. Getting to that stage is hard, but if we're talking about making the impossible possible...
By the same token, you could say that customers buying products is a "course of last resort." You'd always prefer not to part with your money, but you'll spend money if you decide it's worth it. The savings rate is about 3.5%. I think most people think money is for spending.
The whole reason the lunches are pure shit is because they have to crank out hundreds at a time and they have to be consumed in the 10 minutes left in the lunch break leftover after waiting in line. I'm not saying that it would be easy to convert the infrastructure and supply chain toward producing mass quantities of healthier meals. I just don't understand how a system with massive purchasing power wouldn't be able to do so more cheaply and effectively than individual parents. I am assuming, of course, that the goal is to make said meals accessible to all students, not just the privileged.
Huh. They fall down a bit when they list under 'other things to avoid':
Websites that don't have reliability seals such as Verisign Trust, BBB Accredited Business, or McAfee Secure Trustmark

.
grobstein: The book's author clearly says in his leader that the book is "pretty good." And who would know better than him?
I agree with the sentiment articulated in the speech, but it's really not up to the standard of the best TED talks, which are often summations of actual research, often original to the speaker. Yeah, I thought so too. Interesting hypothesis, but he presented absolutely no data to back it up.
Sorry, here is an AP article from NPR with the headline.
Wind me up, Chuck. You will be missed.
. I read My Side of the Mountain a hundred hundred times, and never stopped daydreaming of a hollow tree house and my own falcon, despite being a suburban kid with no woodsman skills to speak of.
Living in Texas (and Houston, specifically) is INCREDIBLY affordable. Texas (as well as Florida) also does not have laws entitling creditors to garnish wages or take your house away from you. Texas also doesn't have state personal income tax. So, yeah, living in Texas helps.
♪
Weird - every Summer I seem to see a hitchhiker or two that reminds me of John Waters. I never thought it could ACTUALLY BE JOHN WATERS!
I am not sure the term mother would have been cold and aloof in the 1940s. Avoiding it because we find it so today would imply that we should re-translate all books periodically to make the tone more contemporary.
Also, Krug = piss. That there is just wrong. Krug is a great champagne once you get to about $150 a bottle.
I have never wanted a buddy-comedy film more than John Waters and Werner Herzog Hitchhike Across America.
I wanted my own side of the mountain, when I read the book as a kid. Still do. .
At the risk of sounding old... what is it with kids now in high school being unable to write complete sentences with punctuation and capitalization? It's the lingua franca of social networking. In my day, when text messages were just getting big, kids used to submit essays in text speak and get marked down for it. (GCSE marks are knocked off for using a plus instead of 'and', for example.) Written communication on the internet is less formal, so kids who aren't as aware of adapting language to a situation/formal setting will write as they would on the Facebook, lower-case, dialectal terms, lack of punctuation and all.
Huh. I get that skin is super flappy in high winds, but how the hell did that one dude's nose get so crazy-craze?
Growing up in DC in the 80s, I was a huge fan of Chuck Brown and got to see him live in an hours-long DC Go-Go extravaganza that ain't like nothing else in the world. I just can't listen to If it Ain't Funky without getting a huge smile on my face. RIP, Chuck.
Frowner, the action has moved to Bushwick. Park Slope is still just for new moms. (Also, all three of these places are neighborhoods within Brooklyn.)
Metafilter: Fine as frog hair, split three ways.
This shit is as reflexive as fuck. A+ comment.
2N2222, one of the biggest platitudes of all, and very boilerplate too, is to label something a platitude and 'This is so old--we've heard all this before.' This argument itself is a very old and tired put-down. But we have heard it all before. Almost every day here on Metafilter alone. This is a very old, tired, and applicable point. What I like about TED talks is the tendency to hear something new. A new idea. A new twist on an old idea. Hanauer delivered to a lower standard.
Amazing how thoroughly he misread his audience - or his medium - here. Really? We're here talking about it. Doesn't sound like the worst PR job the world has ever seen
As discussed in the blue before, how this is diagnosed is highly suspect. Not sure it really matters if the stat is 30 or 40 or 80 percent. The nation and the rest of the world is getting fat as hell and it's accelerating rapidly. Just because there isn't a glacier melting in your yard doesn't disprove climate change. Why does it make more sense for millions of wealthy parents to pack individual lunches when the school systems, which already have the economies of scale to feed millions of kids, can do so? Or do the poor kids not deserve healthy meals too? Watch the doc. The whole reason the lunches are pure shit is because they have to crank out hundreds at a time and they have to be consumed in the 10 minutes left in the lunch break leftover after waiting in line.
Mmm . . . Circumspicy.
Dude, it tastes sweet as hell and on the ingredients label, sugar and/or corn syrup is at the top. Even as a kid in the 70's I knew it wasn't good for me, I just liked it too much to care.
But why should people in Mihalic's situation do what he did? As stated above, student loan debt is a very particular form of debt. He wasn't living above his means before he decided to pay off his student loans. In fact, he was almost certainly already living below his means, considering he was saving for retirement and other things. So he went from living below his means to living well below his means. Good for him, I guess. I guess I have the opposite reaction -- why don't more people in a similar situation do this? Not having debt (even "good debt," like student loans) is incredibly freeing. You can take low-paid or volunteer positions that are rewarding in other ways or that open opportunities later, you can travel more easily, and you have more free cash every month to do, well, other things. And without the debt, you have a lot more insulation from something like a job loss or a drop in your income, or any of the other things that he was lucky enough to not have to deal with that year, like illness or a family crisis. I've never earned his level of income, and I've never had his level of debt. But I have made what were, for me at the time, fairly significant sacrifices to pay off what debt I had as fast as I could. So what he did makes sense to me. The mechanisms for how you would go about it are very different at higher and lower incomes, but there are at least a few commonalities.
With the possible exception of Amadeus, who remembers any of these films today? I remember all of them, but then I was a teenager working in a video store. A Soldier's Story is a powerful drama based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Places in the Heart was one of 1984's Farms in Trouble trifecta along with Country and The River. Sally Field won the Best Actress Oscar (her second) and started a meme by saying, "I can't deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!" in her acceptance speech. A Passage to India was boring Oscar bait and kicked off an official series of boring Oscar bait movies based on books by E.M. Forster.
.
That woman changed my life, or at least set it on a certain path. I grew up in the suburbs, in a quiet neighborhood surrounded on all sides by woods and a lake. A lot of the houses were old summer cottages back when rich folk would take the street cars from Boston to the "remote" camps out in what was then the country and his now Suburbia. Most of that woods is now cheap particle board houses, half of which are right up against the Mass. Turnpike, but when I was a kid they were woods. There's still some woods there and occasionally when I'm over doing chores for my mom we'll take a walk and I'll reminisce about my favorite sledding hills or places to ride my Huffy Thunder Road (#4, bitches!) or where the teenagers built their dugout fort or whatever. We never went anywhere when I was a kid. No camping, no hiking, no long vacations save for maybe one weekend in Maine (rented a pop-up at Point Sebego) or down the Cape. I grew up thinking traveling was something other people did. I used to beg my brother to take me down to the woods and as soon as I was old enough to go myself (which back then was maybe third grade) I would spend hours wandering around. I didn't read much but every now and then I'd pick up a book that would grab me. Tails of a Forth Grade Nothing, How to Be Funny by a guy named Jovial Bob Stein, who would one day go on to write some other books under the name of R.L. Stein, and one day in forth or fifth grade I picked up a book called My Side of the Mountain. It was the first book I ever read cover to cover without putting it down. The next day I read it again, and a few more times over the next months. I started seeing the woods in a whole new light. Rather than being somewhere you could explore for an hour or two, they were somewhere you could live. Sadly, none of the trees in my woods were big enough to hollow out but I would build lean-tos and other shelters and huddle down inside them for a few minutes pretending I was Sam. I built a couple of snare traps but I guess the local squirrels were too smart for me because I never caught anything. I grew up loving the woods, but the bigger woods might as well have been on the Moon. I couldn't drive and nobody would take me there. A school trip or two showed me that there was more out there but I still had no other chances to get anywhere. I had to live vicariously through Sam Gribley. Eventually I grew up, got my license and started getting myself and whatever friends I could drag up to the White Mountains in New Hampshire where I'd hike or backpack in that clueless way you do when you're a teenager. What I found was that I was always there for different reasons than my friends. I'd want to explore, to study the land like Sam, go further and higher but my friends just wanted to drink beer and toss their empty cans into the woods. I had to do better. Eventually I joined a hiking club (the AMC) and found people just like me. Hiking nerds, basically. I got more and more involved and eventually signed up for a leadership training class where I could qualify to lead my own hikes. One of the instructors and I hit it off really well but due to our age difference of ~~ten~~ nine and a half years and the fact that I had an on-again-off-again girlfriend we flirted but that was about it. Then, later that summer, both of us were in separate car/moose accidents up in New Hampshire. She used it as an excuse to call me, to talk about our shared experience. Long story short, a few years later our wedding cake was topped with bride and groom moose. It'll be fifteen years this October. All that might have happened anyway had I never read My Side Of The Mountain, I don't know. But when I think of it that's where it all started. If I didn't pick up that book I may never have learned to love the woods the way I did. I may never have wandered around in my "hiking boots" (Herman Survivors) in my local woods. I may have turned down the offer to join that "Hoods in the Woods" program in high school (Thanks, Mr. Beecher) where I first climbed a mountain (Mt. Liberty, which I climbed again with a Mefite this past winter) and gone on my first camping trip. I may never have spent hours and hours pouring over contour maps of the White Mountains, dreaming of one day reaching such remote places as Mt. Bond and it's neighboring peak, Bondcliff. My son has already read MSotM, though I don't think it hit him the way it hit me. Fortunately he has parents that take him places and he's been hiking and camping and on trips to amazing places that I could only dream of as a kid. He explores the world of his Minecraft server the way I explored the woods, so maybe when he's my age he'll be taking virtual vacations to Europa, I don't know. Anyway, this was a long rambling post to say thank you, Ms. George. No other book has had more of an influence on how I live my life. Thank you for providing the spark that set me on this path. It worked for me.
But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would all have failed and all those jobs would have evaporated. Didn't Henry Ford advocate something similar with his $5 day? And we all know he was a pinko-commie at heart.
Why the criticism of anyone, no matter how much money they make, taking on a challenge to live especially frugally to meet a goal? Shouldn't we approve of behavior like this?
I came here to gripe about "mom" being too short compared to Maman but one of the commentors at the original article beat me to it. So here's to you, Mexicomic, wherever you may be. "Today my mom died" is what I was hoping he'd have at the end of the article.
I think Mum, Mom, Ma, are all too regionally marked to be used here. If I read a translation with Mom or Mommy, it would be very jarringly American to me. Ma is a word I have only seen in Little House on the Prairie, so again, the wrong connotations. I assume the reverse would be true of Mum for Americans. Mama seemed like an okay option to me, except that it is a bit posh and old fashioned, which is maybe okay - I don't know the book, so I'm not sure if those are connotations you would want for that character. It didn't occur to me until I read the comment above that those are NOT the connotations mama has for everyone. It has no association of ruralness or anything for me. It does seem like maman in italics would be the safest choice among all the English alternatives.
Surely our collective financial problems were not caused by people living well within their means. It may be the case that governments shouldn't adopt his method of repaying debt, but he, of course, is not a government. Also, his critics generally agree they'd see this differently if he wasn't a white guy? That seems to me to implicitly underlie much of the criticism, or am I wrong?
Minority can also refer to the power a group wields. You know, like how women can be considered a minority? Not properly.
Cause, IMHO, making them a combination of Supernatural woo, hands on techs,and firefighters was the best choice they made causeYou know who loves firemen? EVERYONE.
This sign is on Route 70W just outside the Baltimore beltway. It does kind of seem like an invitation or a dare maybe. Good for John for taking it up. I feel that signs like this should exist at the beginning/end of all major highways. Another example is US 50. (In Ocean City, In Sacramento).
Huh. I get that skin is super flappy in high winds, but how the hell did that one dude's nose get so crazy-craze? OK, so touch the end of your nose. It's probably hard, right? Lots of cartilage in there keeping it rigid. I know a few people (all from the same family) who don't have any hard cartilage in their noses--a bit of bone projection at the bridge, and then just skin all the way down. They look like perfectly normal noses, but they can do freaky things like press their faces directly into walls because their noses are able to just smoosh down completely. I suspect there's something similar going on with this dude.
My point? Trying to tell people what they can and cannot eat is futile and annoying to boot. School food doesn't have to be sucky. Mine was pretty bad (a small salad with anemic iceberg lettuce and some carrot shavings plus a slice of tomato cost $4, the same fee as a plate of large fries) but you can provide students with acceptable food that both meets their caloric needs (which the one purely healthy option emphatically did not, and everything else was $7 lasagna type things) and not everyone is a marijuana smoking, burger sneaking salad spiker. In high school I ballooned up to 160lbs while going from about 5'3" to my current height of 5'5" probably blamed specifically on eating said fries as the only option that worked with my other lifestyle challenges- I usually skipped breakfast and never packed a lunch because both far exceeded my organizational abilities as a young teen and my parents simply did not have the time or inclination. So I would routinely down half of a large plateful of cheap fries using the money supplement my parents gave me for babysitting (intended to cover miscellany like new socks, birthday gifts for other people, etc...) and dole the rest out to friends. My relative fatness didn't bother me but during my junior and senior year when I wanted to eat healthier it was a nightmare. The easiest things in my budget with plants in them were dole fruit popsicles and onion rings. My point is that access matters, it sucks to be poor-ish and not be able to get anything better than the equivalent to salad with condoms in it.
I agree with the sentiment articulated in the speech, but it's really not up to the standard of the best TED talks, which are often summations of actual research, often original to the speaker.
Slight derail: wasn't there a scientist - mathematician or physicist - who did something similar, adopting an extreme savings plan - like living in a tent - his first years with a paying job, so that he could save almost his whole income because by investing so much money relatively early in his life it would generate enough income to allow him to live independently later on?
"You Only Move Twice" is just amazing, one of my favorites. I'll have to check out one of the novels. Also, the Johnny Cash Space Coyote is my spirit animal.
It is so hilarious to call people retards and assholes. I was laughing so hard. I am going to share this with all my friends because the filmmaker is such a fine representative of our great state. Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice!
"My mom says that God had a hand in all of it." ""There but for the grace of God go I." posted by hypotheticole You do realise that the phrase is from Bunyan's Billy Pilgrim, and is about predestination? "Back-of-the-envelope, 15-second math using the most basic assumptions indicates that I'll have $1M in savings by the time I'm 49. I can retire and live frugally off the interest and/or get a more meaningful job. " Yeah that right there says it all. "I believe life becomes optimized somewhere between an extremely frugal state and a financially wreckless state; a happy medium exists somewhere between spending and saving money." No fucking shit. Jesus this guy is a tosser of the highest order.
I trained and worked in photography in the late 70's & 80's – and then, it was 8x10, 4x5 and 2 1/4 film. That's what professionals used. And the work was in knowing your films and paper, knowing about chemicals and temperature; knowing composition and lighting. And it was about endless days in the darkroom, manipulating the developing and the printing. My first thought of the bolts picture is that it was done either with a really lousy camera or a poor quality lens. The lines of focus are really off (that was my first clue it was fake). The burning house – not convincing. I don't have any interest in digital photography, nor computers for that matter. It's just a different generation. However, I think the human contact element has been lost - but then, doesn't every generation say that about the next generation?. I would spend a lot of time prepping and posing people,which meant you had to have good communication skills and debating techniques, composition and styles with coworkers, during those late, late nights in the darkroom. I suppose there are techies out there, late at night, arguing about their photoshop techniques. Yesterday I was talking to a homeless woman on the street and she showed me photo's she had taken on her phone. My first thought – wow, you have a great camera eye – great composition. And I left her feeling so pleased that photography was now so simple, so accessible and still so meaningful.
The melting pot is melting from within.
No. But trying to remember if there was Ghostbusters 3 led me to this interesting Wikipedia bit: In March 2010, Bill Murray appeared on Late Show with David Letterman and talked about his potential return to Ghostbusters III, stating "I'd do it only if my character was killed off in the first reel."[17]
but Romney's been rambling about the Russian menace already. That's funny, the Russians have been rambling about the Russian menace lately, too.
Mississippi = Bart Simpson in profile.
.
smackfu: "No car I guess. That seems like a pretty major expense that most people in the US have." Actually, that was the gas expense (public transport is decent here). Arguably, I should include a depriciation rate on a vehicle. Straight line deprication on a 18000 dollar car is 150 a month. Insurance is another 50. And I really overestimated the food budget. But really, if we want to keep better track of this, I should set up a Google doc spreadsheet. RandlePatrickMcMurphy: "Slight derail: wasn't there a scientist - mathematician or physicist - who did something similar, adopting an extreme savings plan - like living in a tent - his first years with a paying job" That would be Walden, a book written to convince PhD candidates to be content with their meager stipend =)
Gonna be a White Minority! EAT IT RACIST SCUM!
Thievery Corporation, another DC music icon, had some nice words to say about Chuck Brown in that Washington City Paper roundup.
I like Pannapacker's writing but he really doesn't address the concerns he raises at the end of his piece satisfactorily at all. Are there actually significant numbers of jobs in alt-ac positions, are these jobs a permanent feature of the new academy or a transitional measure, and will growth in alt-ac jobs sustainably match new PhD production in perpetuity? This all seems like a very good exercise in branding for a limited number of hybrid positions but it's not clear to me that the answer to any of those questions suggests alt-acs are actually the future of higher education. As with charter schools, I think we should generally be skeptical when "revolutions" require the removal of worker protections without any clear reason for the removal. What sort of job security will alt-acs have? How can we protect the tenure system in an alt-ac context?
This seems unsustainable if "minority" is defined as "less than half".
Other TED talks posted online veer sharply into controversial and political territory, including... philanthropist Melinda Gates pushing for more access to contraception in the developing world. Really? That's what counts as controversial at TED these days? The philanthropist wife of a billionaire suggesting that people should have some control over when they have children? Honestly, Cracked, Reddit and Buzzfeed are spreading more controversial and political ideas than that.
You all would be alarmed at how common this kind of stuff is. This is why medicare and medicaid fraud and abuse estimates can be so high. But, this can be stopped. All you need to do is embrace the vilified trial lawyers who have the answer: qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur. 31 USC § 3730. Support trial lawyers. They help guard society and can help end abuse.
flaterik: Yet on the other hand - this kind of thing embodies the sort of conspicuous consumption that has overrun Burning Man, de-commodified gift culture or 10 principles or not. It's an event where you (ideally) invest a great deal of time, money and energy specifically for the purposes of intentionally burning that effort, money and energy in an orgy of transience and impermanence. No matter how much play-acting a participant does at trying to live like they're into permaculture - it's still a giant burning carbon footprint just getting oneself, the water, food and shelter one needs to survive out there in one of the most inhospitable and remote places in the continental US. This doesn't even begin to account for the carbon footprint of bringing any art out there, large scale or not, and then intentionally burning it. Burning Man has had 20+ years to "transform" our culture into something less dogmatic, less commercial and less rooted in consumerism. It hasn't succeeded at that on level that would warrant the footprint it occupies. Slow-growth and softer-spoken efforts like permies.com have done much more with much less than Burning Man ever has or ever will. It's long past time to actually come home. Home isn't actually Black Rock City or the playa, and it's alarming that so many people have convinced themselves that it is. It's not, and to believe otherwise is little more than an escapist delusional fantasy. So many smart people shouldn't be planning all year every year to blow all of that effort in a single week's worth of orgiastic partying, not to mention all the hedonistic partying with compression/decompression parties and fundraising parties and everything else that goes on with Burning Man "culture" that more and more seems to just be lots of drinking and drugs in silly hats. I actually hope that the rumors about this being the last year of Burning Man are true. It's over. It's technically been over for 10 years or more. The moral/spiritual battle was lost ages ago. Enough escapism. It's time to come home.
There have always been 'alt-acs', and it is a bit depressing that so much of the alternative career for academics narrative seems to have so little understanding of history. AE Houseman was one, for heaven's sake! Admittedly, now there are larger numbers of PhDs out there and a need for a more professional training for those going outside the academy, but the academy has never hired all the higher level degrees it produced for a variety of reasons. The trouble is that frequently to get a good alternative career you need to do many of the same things you have to do to have a shot at an academic career: got to a top tier program, hone some impressive extra skills, network like crazy, and be incredibly lucky. The idea that lovely lab jobs are out there for the plucking if only students were counselled better and not shuffled into academia by their delusional professors is an illusion. It doesn't mean that there isn't a need for students and their advisors to think of alternative careers, but, unfortunately, most of those careers aren't going to be long term or that lucrative. Especially not if they're in educational institutions having their budgets slashed: if you think it's only departments that suffer, then you're wrong. Tweet away all you like, but it's not going to change that fact, nor is it going to change the fact that administration of various sorts has for years and years been an alternative career path for academics. Given the collapse of large portions of the academy we're all going to be looking further afield and facing the fact that we're going to have to cut PhD production as a lot of the second and lower tier institutions, not just look for other jobs. Though if I'm honest, I'm just going to admit that I find alt-ac an unfortunate abbreviation. It reminds me only of cough medicine. I say this as someone who spent a number of years not teaching as an adjunct at university because the pay was so horrifically bad; there's no way on earth I would have identified myself as an alt-ac. I preferred to say 'hey, this is what I do. For money, lovely money.' It reminds me of trying to organise a TA union at my PhD granting institution: the amount of people who wouldn't sign up simply because they needed to separate what they were doing from other forms of work was astonishing to me. A lot of the alt-ac stuff seems to have that same spin going, with people wanting to think of themselves as subtly different from other people in the same jobs. I'm not sure why, though it does fit with the way a lot of professors really refuse to think of themselves as workers either - until the axe comes swinging that is. I may well be wrong in this perception, though, and it will obviously vary for many.
By the same token, you could say that customers buying products is a "course of last resort." You'd always prefer not to part with your money, but you'll spend money if you decide it's worth it. I just bought a new bike today. My old one worked just fine, I just wanted a better one, and I could afford it. And I tend to be pretty frugal. Have you ever known a company to hire more people even though they can get the work done with the amount they currently have?
Ummm...okayyyy... Privilege has its advantages, I guess. Don't hate. Appreciate.
Unless I'm missing something, photographers are being replaced by graphic artists, not software. That said, it's always sad when a body of hard-won knowledge is lost merely because some final effect (or even side effect) can be achieved some other way.
Doesn't this all come down to time? And style. The software image has its own perfect look which is all the rage. This is great for product shots, not so much for portraits and photo journalism. This comment was untouched by human hands.
That's nothing, I almost ran over Ira Glass last week. I was in a car with a computer scientist when he almost ran over Don Knuth. He saw his whole career flash before his eyes. You could accomplish anything after that and still just be "the guy that ran over Don Knuth".
.
Businesses create jobs to satisfy demand; the customer's demand is prior, and this is obvious because you can have the best pet rock business in the world with an infinite monopoly on the supply of pet rocks, but unless someone wants to buy pet rocks, you are going to go out of business and jobs will be lost. Isn't that why we have advertising, for the creation of desire?
Bill Murray is so unbelievably brilliant that it hurts me. Bill grew up in Wilmette, IL in an Irish Catholic family. I was born and raised not more than five miles away, with a family of similar background, and Bill's sense of humor to me perfectly encapsulates everything that is great about what I've come to call the "Irish Catholic humor" of my family, which I will always associate with suburban Chicago. Everything he touches turns to gold. Even the lesser Murray films have that little sparkle of satirical wit.
.
Why the criticism of anyone, no matter how much money they make, taking on a challenge to live especially frugally to meet a goal? Shouldn't we approve of behavior like this? MoonOrb, I don't see it as a criticism of him, per se, but the implied arrogance in suggesting that his situation is directly relatable to 99% of his readers' life situation. If you live above the poverty level by a significant multiplier, it's just not that impressive that you can erase debt quickly. It's like an article by a weightlifter on "how I managed to get all these 200-lb boxes on the top shelf" (hint: he lifted them one at a time).
Our long, national nightmare is over
He has more patience than I would have. Being addressed by someone who uses "u" as "you" drives me nearly ballistic under the best of circumstances. I think he gets points for letting this kid hang out on his lawn as long as he did, too bad the kid couldn't do anything useful with that access.
From what I've read, the arguments in NYC over who was the best of that trio of star center fielders were heated and everlasting in the 50s and later. There was even a 1981 song about them -- Willie, Mickey, and The Duke. Being a Dodgers fan, I will naturally support Duke Snider in that debate. Mays and Mantle, being a Giant and Yankee respectively, I will always superficially revile. Catch me on a good day, and I will admit to Willie Mays' amazing abilities. But you want to talk about what might have been...what might have been if Mickey Mantle had stayed healthy and away from booze?
Liberals might look at these numbers and conclude that minorities are not being afforded the same access to birth control and abortion. Conservatives, looking at these same statistics, might conclude that it's time that minorities get all the cheap birth control and abortions they can handle.
Indiana = Michi-tucky
Shout "Who ya gonna call?" in a crowded room and everybody knows the answer. Any character in anything ever written by Virginia Woolf.
He talks a lot about how freeing it is to live frugally and how he doesn't think he'll go back to his previous lifestyle even though he doesn't have student loan repayments to make anymore (but also how the seasons played a role, e.g. it's easier to spend less in the Fall and Winter and more tempting in the Spring and Summer) (and also he still has a mortgage to repay). More than trying to impart practical advice, he's talking about playing a mental game and how he got more enjoyment out of figuring out ways to save money than he did from spending it. I'd be all ready to jump all over this guy, because I think people who have wealth are obligated to spend/redistribute some of it, instead of just letting it accrue forever to the point where their money is making more money than most people make in wages... but he also talks about using his accrued wealth to quit his job and start "a humanitarian enterprise" in his 50s so, I guess I can't hate on him too much. More than knowing how to properly manage money, what this guy knows is how to "game" his own mind so he can accomplish his goals even when he doesn't have some kind of external whip spurring him on. On that level I guess it's inspiring: if he can accomplish this, he can accomplish other things, and take more of a long-term view. As far as his actual accomplishments, though: wealthy people living below their means isn't a moral accomplishment. You could even argue it's a immoral accomplishment, because it removes money from circulation. I hope he does something good with the money that's not going to HP, Apple, the banks, etc.
Argh! L'Etranger is a whole novel. It's not the first sentence, or the first paragraph. It is in French, so an English translation will naturally carry some inaccuracies. The details of those inaccuracies in one sentence are not so important. Unless you're some smug literary critic type who has a passing knowledge of high school French and so sink your teeth into that first sentence, the easy one, the one whose grammer you think you understand. So can go on pretentiously about it while ignoring, you know, the rest of the book. I've been hearing about this "controversy" about the first sentence since I first read the book in high school in, oh, 1988. It's totally overwhelmed anything I've heard discussed about the rest of the book. It's lazy and tiresome, cocktail party conversation.
Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J'ai reçu un télégramme de l'asile: «Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués.» Cela ne veut rien dire. C'était peut-être hier.
As for school meals, the most money a school can get reimbursed from the federal government for a lunch is $2.94 cents. Which sounds like a lot until you factor in all the other allowable costs that creating a school lunch requires. Direct Costs Wages and salaries of food service workers Cost of purchased food Food service supplies Media/promotional materials relating to the food service Capital expenditures relating to food service (e.g., food service equipment purchases) Indirect Costs Payroll services Human resources Workers' compensation Procurement Utilities such as gas, water, electricity, trash, etc And remember, they only get that $2.94 cents if the school is severely needy. The less free and reduced-price students the school has, the less money they get from the feds. And the less money the school is probably getting from paid meals, because in wealthy areas kids seem to bring their lunch from home more often. School lunches may not be the best thing ever, but they're improving, and for some kids it may be the only square meal they get during the day.
Yeah, this isn't the kind of "not-going-well" I expected when I clicked. Would-be plagiarist fails learn a lesson.
Wow, in five minutes, MetaFilter has managed to present more facts on this than the Baltimore Sun.
Herzog prefers walking long distances.
"I can say with confidence that rich people don't create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small," said über-rich venture capitalist Nick Hanauer in a March 1st TEDx talk, which TED is refusing to put on its website.

When asked why, TED curator Chris Anderson stated that "We have a general policy to avoid talks that are overtly partisan, and to avoid talks that have received mediocre audience ratings." Was it overly partisan or mediocre? When Geekwire asked, Hanauer stated that he got a standing ovation. In a discussion on Reddit, user TEDChris, reportedly the TED curator Chris Anderson, states that "The trouble with this talk is that it tackled the issue in a way that was explicitly partisan, framing it as a critique of "an article of faith" for Republicans. TED is avowedly non-partisan. We want to share ideas in a way that brings people together, doesn't throw sand in their faces." The National Journal has posted the full text of the speech here.
I can't really relate, I'm a bit annoyed that this pisher is better with his money than I am with mine.
Asshole move, Krug, but I lost most of my sympathy for the complaining Burning Man attendees after their nth use of "corporate whores."
Are there any potential repercussions for Zoo Camp for enabling this?
Before you dismiss them offhand for their 'indie' band name, Here We Go Magic actually make pretty good music. 2nd link nsfw, natch.
Oh this is some good stuff.
Translation is an art and there are few exact word for word translations between languages that are accurate. Every translator makes choices and I don't know that this author's suggestion is better than any others. French conjugations translate to multiple English ones and vice versa. And I found the use of "Maman" jarring as well. Plus the French, in my experience, use Maman for Mother, Mama and Mommy.
Awesome. Beautifully expressed.
From the same website, here's the opposite approach: Photos of a Perpetually Burning House
Look at the photo shoot!!!! A TON of people are wearing those fakey native headdresses!!! (I mean, in theory those people could all be native folks who decided to wear some kind of regalia to a champagne dinner, but that seems vanishingly unlikely.) In the blog post, it says that the costumes were furnished by Krug. I have no idea if that makes it better or worse. But, hey, at least they're not all acting independently.
Sheesh. I left out an "also" (as in, "I ALSO followed the link from the kid's comment..."). The link to GoodReads is in the body of the post.
My Side of the Mountain was by far my favorite book growing up, and perhaps my first "favorite" anything. I found it on the shelf in Elementary school and felt it was very much my own discovery, something I could champion to others, and have as part of me. I can thank MSotM for inspiring me to seek out music, movies, books, etc that were traditionally off my radar, which certainly is a big part of my life (or was, when I had the time). It's at the top of my list to reread, and remember. .
> Paying off the $25k was easy–I used money that was just sitting around [September 8] Dude. DUDE. That $25,000 wasn't just "sitting around," it was in his backpack. It only seemed like it was sitting around because he couldn't see the backpack.
"... members of the nearly 70 percent of Americans currently diagnosed as overweight or obese" As discussed in the blue before, how this is diagnosed is highly suspect. There is a problem here, but it has to do more with car culture than weight.
So a guy sees a woman he slept with when she was 12 and he starts undressing in public? See this is why I don't play video games any more.
vidur: "Sincere question: what kind of lifestyle can a single man have on $3000? Any mefites from the city where this guy lives?" Totally doable here in Corvallis OR: * 2 BR apt: 850 * cable, internet, electricity, netflix: 170 * food: 300 * dining: 300 * gas: 30 * income tax: 300 * health insurance: 300 * medical expenses: 300 * hookers & blow: 450 Obviously NYC is a silly place and you'd want to factor in extra cost of living into your salary, or try to avoid living or working there.
Belgian Waffle at Burning Man.
Nice nuts and bolts. I'm sure the hardware photographers are shaking in their boots right now. Last time I checked there was no uncanny valley with fasteners.
And weirder/scarier still is how obesity makes the merely overweight feel/seem/imagine themselves to be normal. I can't tell you how many times a man at 200 lbs or a woman at 175 who was 30 pounds lighter a decade ago feels that they are at a healthy weight because they aren't as fat as their obese colleague or friend. I am a 5'10", 170 lb male who works in an office in Texas. My BMI is smack in the middle of normal. They call me "Slim".
ReachOut Healthcare America, a dental management services company, "built its business model on the premise that low-income parents often don't have time or transportation to take children to the dentist. So mobile teams pack equipment in large cases, load up a minivan, head to schools and set up in gyms, libraries or classrooms." Services are billed to Medicaid. ReachOut and other dental management services companies are increasingly backed by private equity firms. What could possibly go wrong?

A 4-year-old in Arizona received two "baby root canals," crowns and 10 X-rays -- all while he was at school. And without his mother's knowledge or consent, she says. State investigators are examining complaints that ReachOut-dispatched teams billed Medicaid for unnecessary work on children. ReachOut says what happened is not common practice.
I suffered willingly as a Mets fan throughout my childhood and the 1986 team made up for everything. Growing up in Long Island in the 70s, all the kids were Yankees fans. It was easy to be a Yankees fan. They were winners. There was one kid who was a Mets fan. He was given a hard time. I thought about him often after '86. I liked to imagine that for him too, it had made up for everything.
.
It's good to see Jim Carrey is still getting work.
> Shouldn't we approve of behavior like this? Behavior like this is fine. Blogging about it is what makes it obnoxious.
Is there an income ceiling beyond which you just shouldn't have a personal website or blog? No, feel free to talk about your moneys all you want if you want to look tacky and out-of-touch with 99% of America. (And if you end up getting robbed (or first against the wall when the revolution comes), don't come crying to me.)
Why is #10 the only one with a bent nose?
Who are the alt-acs? They are people with graduate education (mostly in the humanities and library science) who have decided to pursue alternative academic careers. They choose to skip the "dues-paying crap" often associated with pursuing a traditional tenure-track job, and avoid languishing in unrewarding adjunct assignments. They also tweet like mad. The results of a new (and, as of this writing, ongoing) #alt-ac census show alt-acs thriving in diverse positions; there's a strong contingent involved in the digital humanities, but also a historian at the U.S. Department of State, an exhibit developer at the National Constitution Center, and a self-employed "Editor, musicologist."

Even William Pannapacker, often cited by MeFites for his advice "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go", has repeated the claim that alt-ac is the future of the academy.
I'm pretty skeptical of the proposed reforms, which seem mostly directed towards establishing "alternative tracks" that will make it easier to blame students for the fact that there are no jobs, but other people seem quite taken with it. I couldn't disagree more, although I'd love to hear more. In my department (English, with a healthy dose of digital humanists) this piece was greeted with appreciation with a hint of relief that somebody was finally paying attention to what we needed and desired from a humanities graduate program. We're not stupid, and all of us are aware of the statistics in relation to time to completion of degree, availability of tenure-track jobs, and the almost pathological level of competitiveness present in today's humanities. Everything is most profoundly not fine, and we nearly all saw this as a useful reconfiguration that may allow graduate students in the humanities to move forward. The Inside Higher Ed piece doesn't seem geared towards blaming students when they can't find jobs; it seems to be saying that 1) There are no tenure track jobs in the humanities. 2) We train you for them anyways in a way that precludes any other viable career path. 3) Maybe we should train you for something else, or at least not solely for one thing (tt jobs). 4) How might that look? Considering the response of nearly every humanities department everywhere to the 30-year "crisis" in the humanities is to respond that "Good people always get jobs," can you blame us for applauding when someone like Russel Berman (former Pres. of MLA) comes out with a plan for something other than naive acceptance? Well, look, obviously I'm being flip -- I absolutely don't think there's any bad faith on the part of the writers of the plan, just that it won't solve the problems it seeks to address very well. The crucial elements of the plan are: * formalize an alt-ac development track that students embark on in year 2 * reduce time to degree The second point fundamentally misunderstands why it is people take so long, which is (1) because it just takes about that long (the average time to degree in history apparently has been 8 years for about a century, regardless of reforms) (2) because people only "finish" when they get a job, and when there are insufficient numbers of jobs people stay longer. A lengthy time to degree is half baked-in, and half a symptom of the jobs crisis rather than one of its causes. Focusing on reducing time to degree without dealing with the systemic job crisis is a way of shifting blame to the students, whether one realizes or intends that; it ignores the actual situation and instead locates the "blame" for what's happening in students who aren't producing enough / working insufficiently hard. Additionally, because of the economics of academic departments, it will tend to only accelerate the problem: every student out is another open slot for an incoming first-year, so if we're doing PhDs in half the time we'll wind up making twice as much. The first point is a great idea, but you can't put the decision point in year 2. The fact is, with plenty of exceptions like miriam's, most people are entering grad school because they want to be professors, and by year 2 they all still want that. It's just way too early for students to properly evaluate the situation at hand and make an informed decision about what they want for themselves. The inflection point for alt-ac careers is much later, usually after comps in the write-up phase or even in the job-search phase; that's when students find themselves in crisis looking for other options. Between year 1 and year 5/6 the training is going to have to be overlapping if this is to be practical. How is this "directed" towards blaming students? Well, call me cynical, but I've just finished a PhD in the humanities and seen how the faculty-student relationship works at many different institutions. If a plan like this is widely adopted, I am certain that the primary result will be a great many students finding themselves at the end of unsuccessful job searches being told "Well, we gave you this other option! You should have made a better decision in year 2!" Faculty by-and-large are desperate about the job crisis and will cling like a liferaft to the idea that the student, rather than the system, brought them to this point.
The SNAP/Food Stamp Challenge. Can you eat a healthy diet and/or lose weight on $4 a day?
angrycat: If you read the part about the ten principles, you'll find that the exact thing that attracts many people to Burning Man is that it's a week without branding and advertising. To film an ad there, and specifically a private dinner with a guest list," is basically a huge "fuck you." I'm overall with flaterik - this is really terrible, but the thing that was most galling is that they didn't clean up after themselves. This seems to have been (shamefully) produced in concert with an established camp; they should have known better. For those who have never been, Black Rock City has no garbage cans but also virtually no litter. People pack things out and in. It's incredible.
Oh yeah, and don't forget: admitting your goals and your efforts toward them publicly is actually very, very motivating. The act of blogging, or making a video to share, or whatever method you choose to say "I am doing this, world, notice me" comes with a great big scoop of "and because you notice me, I'll feel even worse if I stop doing this, so I'd damn well better succeed so I don't look like an ass." Very motivating.
Ignore all the times I said cents. I was thinking about the additional 6 cent meal reimbursement that schools will get if they conform with the new guidelines of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. Six cents! Woohoo!
Swartzwelder sounds like Ron Swanson. Greg Daniels worked on the Simpsons in the early years and is a creator of Parks & Rec. I refuse to believe the Swartzwelder/Swanson similarities are a co-incidence.
You would think everyone on here is destitute sometimes.
But no, unless you're 99%/working class/poor/starving/dead you are privileged and an obvious target for snark. No, not poor/starving/dead, -- but a Harvard MBA grad (with accompanying social network) and an executive at a high-tech company reportedly making more than $50K but less than $100K/year. Hey, great for you paying down $100K debt in less than a year by cutting back on expenses, but you have to expect some snark in the mix when the vast majority of people in financial straits have none of his immediate benefits, nor any of his future riches to look forward to even if they do somehow manage to unbury themselves.
Tim Teufel the ol' dirty second baseman. Los Mets fo' life.
Munchausen by profit.
I know I should be offended for some reason, but this is the most hilarious reverse-troll I've ever witnessed. That it was a champagne company is just the icing on the cake.
Metafilter: This is why we can't have nice ideas. I am sooo sorry...
Hey, does anyone know what $5 wrinkle trick that mom discovered? It must be good if all the dermatologists hate her for it.
I made close to $100k for about two years once. In that time I paid off all my debts (some of which were in collections), bought a newish car mostly for cash. Bought a couple of new bicycles, a computer, a Canon 5d and all the lenses I wanted, etc., and saved up enough money to take a relaxing 8-month vacation when I quit. I also went on a few expensive holidays. What I learned is this: there's a salary level beyond which you have to work hard to spend all the money you earn. If you're making close to $100k as a bachelor and your debt level is increasing, you are an idiot. This story is about a guy who realized that he was being an idiot and curtailed his idiotic behaviour. The consequences are natural and obvious. People who make that kind of money (and more) usually don't realize how little consequence there is to a financial fuck-up. At that level you can misplace $5k and not really notice. This has two consequences: 1) they assume that people with less money should be equally resilient and attribute their lack of resilience to some sort of character flaw; 2) they have to screw up big-time to come to a crisis, and think of themselves as heroes when they manage to sort it out. Never mind that it's mind-blowingly easy to drag your ass out of debt when there's $6-7k (plus bonuses) magically appearing in your bank account every month, and mindblowingly stupid to mishandle it to the degree that you have a crisis in the first place.
That's nothing, I almost ran over Ira Glass last week. Did you circle back too?
Rt.70 of course ends at Baltimore (well technically at the Baltimore Beltway) so he's going to the other end (west).
I don't get why everybody is piling on the kid's writing skills. I mean, if all you get is assignments to read a book and then make a comic strip or a paining or a folk dance about it, how the f*ck are you supposed to learn to, you know, actually write coherent sentences? I hated assignments like that. I thought that they take away the last bit of fun of reading. A f*cking painting about the book? Seriously?
Oh no one at the SNPP ever liked anything.
I'm vaguely annoyed nobody asked me to write any comicbook scripts when I was a kid.
Let's remember it because of the arrogant, swaggering, drunken Mets. They were the last of a long line, and when they passed, the glory days of professional baseball passed with them. I don't know, even as a lifelong Mets fan for whom that 1986 team will never be surpassed as My Heroes, I thought it was rather poetic justice that the 2004 Red Sox, the team of the unbelievable, unprecendented comeback, later revealed they were doing shots to "get loose," as a team, right before all four of the LCS games that they won. Unless "drunken" in that description was code for "unbelievably coked up," in which case, yeah.
I'd be all ready to jump all over this guy, because I think people who have wealth are obligated to spend/redistribute some of it, instead of just letting it accrue forever to the point where their money is making more money than most people make in wages. Funny little fact, money doesn't grow unless you hand it off to someone else...
The link from steinsaltz shows just how much research Hanauer did in order to hone his message. Amazing how thoroughly he misread his audience - or his medium - here.
Kids have been doing that since my day.
I was Music Manager and Promotion Director for the George Washington University radio station (WRGW). It's to my shame I never got to interview him. Metafilter: Like, not for the interview, but because it was fucking Tuesday.
Three issues with this: 1. That guy is no novice. The simple act of understanding how to observe light and make note of what is happening with it and then create textures and shaders and use lenses and lighting that match the desired realistic effect is a sign of experience. Even talented newbies make 3D art that looks like it was photographed on another planet during a combination supernova and eclipse. 2. Blender has had big UI improvements but that hasn't made it easy to use. It just no longer makes you want to climb a clocktower once an hour or so. 3. I was under the impression that DSLRs and increasing abilities to correct in post had already killed 90% of well-paying photography as a career. I found his point that pro shooters screw themselves by erasing all signs of reality to be a very interesting and insightful one, though.
It's a tough problem, to be sure. But the overall tone Meursault takes throughout the book should be considered as well, and the first line should reflect that, though of course as it is the first line it is just as important in setting the tone as reflecting it. The way Meursault relates the story is sort of in confidence, to someone with whom he has no need to dissemble or disguise his feelings (such as they are) - like a close family member. And it is a confession of course in many ways. It should, from the start, be honest. But it is also conversational. Even though it's honest, I don't think "maman" is the way to go. I like Ward's translation otherwise and the first line is probably the most difficult one in the book for a few reasons. But the choice to use "maman" was, I think, shooting a little too high? "Mom died today" seems to be what Meursault would have said to the reader had he been an English speaker. Not "My mom," since you wouldn't say that to someone with whom you are close enough to bare your soul. Not "mother," since that has that impersonal quality. But even "Mom died today," as the author of the piece notes, misses out on that syntactical irregularity, placing today before mom. I don't really buy the "today interrupted mom's death" metatextual interpretation he gives it, but I do think there is a certain je ne sais quoi that was intentional and, like so many things, nearly impossible to translate. But you can find the center of a circle once you feel its arc, so we don't all need to beat our heads against the wall because we'll never understand L'Etranger. We just won't ever have a proper English version of, at the very least, the first line.
. I loved all the Julie books and MSotM, but I am particularly grateful to Jean George for Who Really Killed Cock Robin which is the best introduction to the complexities of environmental politics that I've ever encountered. It was eye-opening for me as a child how even well-meaning people could screw up an ecosystem without realizing it, if the complexity of the system was not taken into account.
A 1985 SPIN article on go-go, including Chuck Brown.
If only you could choose your major...
A good rule seems to be that the type of business which ~~creates~~ hypes ~~special~~ pedestrian things for "elite" customers only is a bad place to patronize. There are lots of companies out there making really quality stuff for people who are really serious about whatever it is. And yet, somehow, I'm pretty much willing to bet your not going to see this brand of crap out of Lie Neilsen Toolworks or Rivendel Bicycle Works any time soon. TLDR Version: Blah blah style blah blah substance.
I grew up in rural Australia, where dental services were also reasonably sparse. ' One of the solutions to this, was a state run dental van which would travel around and fix children's teeth. The idea was actually noble, much like I think this one is - dental health is important, and can have a dramatic impact in later life. With all of that said, however, that van kept me from going to a real dentist for twenty years. The problem with a dentist in a van, is they do what they can to get by - you have to, you're a dentist in a van, not in a shiny office with access to rooms full of equipment and anaesthetic. Indeed, my worst experience was when I needed a filling, and they had run out of the days supply of anaesthetic. So they just did without - this had actually become their standard practice. I bit the dentists finger, which is appealing as a kid - but still, it didn't really make up for the horror. There is always going to be very little oversight in a van. And there is always going to be pressure - even driven internally (these are not the high paying private gigs for the dentists on the ground, these are people who want to make a difference) to perform as much good work as possible. I don't know how to solve these problems... but I am sceptical that a van is the answer.
$1,300 per month on entertainment And there's 1/6th of his solution already. Reduce the 10% 401k to 5% for a year and sell a car and you are done. That was my initial thought too. What's up here? Beanplating or viral marketing? I mean, I pretty much live his "no more student debt" life as my regular life, and the thing is, I just know it is not that hard. My life is not hard. I don't believe his life was that hard, either. Ditto. Yes, it is clear that his situation and strategies are not applicable to low- or even middle-income people for the most part. That does not mean that what he is talking about isn't interesting. Hmm. It kinda does. I guess I wonder what is new or interesting here? Sincere question: what kind of lifestyle can a single man have on $3000? Any mefites from the city where this guy lives? No problem in San Francisco. With roommates, you'll pay $400-$1,000/mo. rent. $3,000/mo. is darn good money most anywhere in the US. Plenty of money for hookers and blow. I've completely eschewed consumerism, and it actually felt pretty good. I'm all for that. Save money by not buying shit. I missed my friends' bachelor parties and weddings Not so much for that. But I Might Die Tonight
Although his income figures are considerably higher than my world, there is still some inspiration here to apply to my own finances. This is one of the better examples I've seen of someone walking through exactly how they met their financial goal with specific numbers and the impact of certain lifestyle changes. Plus I like his writing style, which makes this easier for me to digest than the typical "how to reduce your debt" article.
Imagine he walked into an AA meeting and talked about how he met a self-imposed challenge to limit himself to just 3 drinks at a recent party. And that other people called him "inspiring" for doing so. I guess where we disagree is that you seem to be saying that the world wide web is the equivalent of an AA meeting because his financial circumstances are so much better than everyone else in the world? I don't think the analogy works. I agree this would have been really obnoxious if he had directed it toward a group of people earning minimum wage and struggling with their own mountains of debt, like if he had published it in a newsgroup populated almost exclusively with people from that demographic. But if what you're saying is that "people who might access his blog on the world wide web" is essentially that demographic, well, fair enough.
Did anyone believe TED was part of some sort of egalitarian socialist freedom party? I did. I showed up to the party with two cans of 4Loko (vintage shit, before they took out the caffeine) and some uppers. Five hours later someone had apparently invited John Yoo. He spent the whole night huffing Dust Off and talking about Wolfowitz's noise hair. It was the best party I've ever been to.
All things considered, sounds like you had a pretty good week. Considering how much MeFi loves Ira Glass, the obituary post would be a serious mourning edition.
On about $2000/month I: - live alone, inside the loop, a 10 minutes bus ride from work, - have a car, - feed my dogmonster and myself regularly, - eat out about once a week or so, - experience more than my fair share of the excellent culture and events this city offers, - have internet service, - a Netflix account, - renter's/car insurance, - a gym membership, - pay for my iPhone as well as my sister's and - VERY rarely pass up an invitation to go do things. Living in Texas (and Houston, specifically) is INCREDIBLY affordable. This is all so incredibly dependent on where you live. For example, a $50,000 salary in Houston, TX equates to around a $120,000 salary if you live in NYC/Manhattan. So if you want to figure what your $2,000 a month would get you in NYC, imagine what it would be like living in Houston on 800 bucks a month.
I remember there being a scandal up in Scotland* about some dentists doing more treatment than was necessary. Now they have changed the system of NHS payments to make this much less likely. (Though I only got into my current dentist as the previous dentist there was prosecuted for fiddling the books - at least not the teeth) *Like the Irish making jokes about Kerrymen being stupid, the Scottish about Aberdonians being tightfisted, the rest of the UK pours scorn on the state of Scottish people's teeth - it's all that Irn-Bru and Tunnocks.
p.s. creepy. /bleeding heart liberal.
You guys are correct. The adult rate is 35.7% (CDC). Completely my bad for not checking that source. I'll ask for a correction.
Krusty Gets Kancelled so good. Gabbo!
There is a lot of inner upper lip and gums in these photos. More than I needed to see, really.
I say we try and get a triptych out of him.
For awhile my memory of MSM was tarnished because I was convinced that it was nothing but a libertarian fantasy. But then I remembered that the book was fucking great. RIP
This skin, it ripples.
I watched this last night. Lots of "whoa" moments and lots of "WTF" ones as well. Watching two obviously bright and together moms bitching that they wanted the school to feed their kids "fresh foods" was a real downer. Parental detachment to the extent that they feel ten minutes of creating a healthy lunch is outweighed by millions spent trucking in fresh vegetables for 600 kids is so much at the heart of this. How stupid or lazy do you really have to be, after all, to think putting a TV in your kid's bedroom is on any level something sensible. We are so fucked in this country from obesity that it will make any other health issue small by comparison.
chiefthe: "I followed this guy from when he first started blogging on this topic. The thing that drove me crazy about his approach was his complete disregard for any freelancing position that was not completely structure[d] by someone else." MBA stands for "Master's in Business Administration" and focuses on the administration of existing businesses in the big middle-aged, steady-state part of their lifecycles. If anything, the MBA probably predisposed him to eschew new ventures in favor of companies that were already established. But also remember that his goal was to increase his income for just a few months, well short of the ramp-up time for a new venture. All of his second-jobs seem well optimized for generating immediate cash. I can't comment on landscaping because I know nothing about that, but as a tutor myself I do know that signing up with an established tutoring company like Kaplan gets you a fast track through the early, painful parts of a tutoring service where you're spending more time searching for clients than teaching them. The same goes for signing up with an established modelling agency. Pedi-cabbing, even though it didn't work out for him, also gives immediate cash. You don't need a relationship with your pedi-cab passengers; you take their money now and say good bye.
I'm a creative person, and I'd like to understand the level of upset-ness that this happened, but I can't. So -- they'll tighten up their procedures? Case closed? Or is it wheels within wheels within something I don't understand?
The kid is a dumbass but the author seems like a real piece of shit. This is like, number 1A on the list of things you should just ignore if you want to be professional. No winners here.
If he excised the third paragraph which named Republicans and Democrats, would that have made the speech OK?
Is it very wrong to want a NSFW version? Just try to pretend you're not the least bit curious.
The story of Ron Paul's presidential candidacy as told by his supporters in Time Magazine's comments section. Extra-specially meta thanks to an update which posts comments from underneath the same post.
And that's only race! Don't forget to account for the minority ~3-10% who are GLBTQ, which will include some race minority and non-minority children.
My first reaction was "$1300/month in entertainment? I would LOVE to see $1300/month. In total. Period. What an ass." And, "$1300 on entertainment? Where's the $1300 for charity? Even I give to charity and I'm struggling!" But as I read through and read comments, I came across this comment: And I thought about my own efforts in this direction, how I have spent the last four months saying "I will not go out to dinner or lunch this month"...and failed every month... and it hit me like a ton of bricks. He's right. Absolutely right. I was born poor, I grew up poor, I'm less poor now but definitely not rich. Maybe, thanks to MasterCard, I'm lower-middle class. I'll probably die poor, too. When I was a kid, we never had enough food or a car or new clothes or enough to pay the rent or enough food. We had two favourite days that came around every month. One was the day when we somehow had money. That was the day that we got to go Buy the Month's Groceries, that we got to have pizza or Chinese food and we all went to bed full. That was the day that nobody fought and the tv and the phone worked (if we had them). We'd all be happy. Sometimes we'd even get to go shopping. The other day was Food Day, when my stepdad would go away somewhere and come back with boxes of food. Some good stuff, like bread and peanut butter and pasta, and some weird shit like dented cans of cranberry sauce and damaged boxes of breadcrumbs. That was usually a pretty good day too. We all went to bed full. The rest of the days of the month were- well- not so great. Especially the days when we were hungry enough to try and eat the cranberry sauce and breadcrumbs and stale bread-and-mayo sandwiches. Let me tell you, friends, that shit is not food. Those days we were all at each others' throats. If something bad was going to happen, well, that's when it would happen. Later, when I was a teenager and I lived on the streets, things were kind of rough. But if I was panhandling and someone gave me a $20, I could go to a diner and buy a big fat juicy burger, and a whole pile of fries, and as many free refills of coke as I wanted, and a piece of pie with whipped cream, and still have something in my pocket for tomorrow. And I could sit in there as long as I could make the meal last, so if it was cold outside, or some man was hassling me, or someone had pissed in the spot where I usually slept, it didn't matter. The waitresses were always real nice to me. Sometimes, if I ordered something, and another diner left some food on their plate, they'd let me have it. I always felt good that I got to leave a tip for those nice ladies. They never looked at me funny. I guess that because of that, I got this idea that going shopping, or buying food, was somehow related to being safe. And so, when I first got a Real Job, I shopped. I bought food and clothes and shampoo and toilet paper and laundry soap. Not just the basic food. GOOD food. Cartons of milk, as much milk as I could drink. Fresh bread, GOOD bread. Green fresh veggies. Crisp little asparagus. Shiny red peppers. Juicy plump tomatoes. Fat pink chicken breasts splayed out on white trays, glistening. New clothes. Brand new clothes, clothes that no one else had ever worn. Stiff blue jeans with no holes, without worn seams, that were actually in my size. My shoes got a hole in them? No problem! I could buy a new pair! But I never learned to eat this fancy food I bought or had time to cook it. I wanted it, but I wasn't used to it. I didn't really know what to do with it. I understood the theory of cooking, but it seemed like a crazy amount of work, and I wasn't good at it. Plus, I never knew what to make. I was used to people cooking food for me at shelters or else going hungry. It mostly just went bad in the fridge. But that was ok, because I had MONEY. I could just order pizza! I could buy lunch with everyone else. I didn't know how to take proper care of my nice new clothes, but it didn't matter because I could just buy NEW ones if they got damaged. I could do anything! I was safe all the time! So when the hours got cut at my Real Job, do you think I was going to go back to the way things were? I was used to living this way. It was comfortable. It was safe. It didn't matter if my hours were reduced. I had a MasterCard. I had habits that were set in stone; poverty habits. I've been worried for the past while about where next months' rent is coming from. I had to spend money for school, and I got myself into a payday-loan, student loan, MasterCard debt mess. Yet, in spite of this, I don't seem able to stop "buying food". I don't mean the basics; ramen and potatoes. I mean having lunch with coworkers, having a bad day and buying $15 worth of cookies, donuts and etc, I mean getting a new skirt from Value Village that I don't really need, I mean handing out money to panhandlers when I can't make my rent, I mean going shopping or out eating and leaving a big tio when I'm lonely and the whole world is mean because the waitressess and salesladies are always so nice. Because all of these things make me feel safe, and the more trouble I get in, the safer I want to feel. So yes, it's unfair that this guy is starting out from a place that allows him to spend $1300/month on entertainment and I can barely make ends meet. Yes, if I had a few spare vehicles lying around, I'd probably sell them off. Yes, this guy is incredibly lucky, and it's not fair, blah blah blah. But, at the same time, I think that because of my lack of self control, because of my self-comforting behaviour, because of this addiction to being comfortable, it's entirely possible that maybe, had I the same monetary advantage, I would still end up in the position that I find myself in now. I once read that if money was just about numbers, it would be easy, but money isn't about numbers, it's about emotions, and that's why it's hard. And I imagine that to sacrifice your lifestyle, publicly, in front of all of your MBA Harvard friends, must be incredibly difficult. So I think there is something to be learned, for me at least, even though I'm broke as shit. And it's not about buckling down and working hard, but it is about forgoing my own comfort and staying strong in doing that. So good for him. Who knows what shit he had to battle with himself to get where he is.
I was under the impression that DSLRs and increasing abilities to correct in post had already killed 90% of well-paying photography as a career My experience was not that you were instantly out of a job, but rather in tried and tested turbocapitalism fashion, you just had to work much harder because of digital, overnight. It was the workflow that changed everything. On the shoot your client would be reviewing your images instantly, standing next to you, and the assistant was now mocking up the ads on a laptop there and then (rather than making tea and chatting and occasionally loading a camera).
I stopped contributing to my 401k, I didn't go home for Christmas, and I missed my friends' bachelor parties and weddings. While getting rid of his debt is a great accomplishment, I have to say that it seems like in his haste, he lost out on more than just the student debt.
The real issue is when these alt-ac jobs become un-ac job. There are lots of highly educated PhDs and MA grads who are in jobs at centres and institutes in universities who are doing nothing in the way of academic research or teaching. I enjoy the entrepreneurship that comes with working in a training capacity, but the time I give to settling on a topic and researching is not paid for by anyone.
@scruss - I stand corrected. But I feel like we're still missing something. The author says that he only responded to the kid because the kid's request parallels something in the plot of the novel itself...a novel which is about kids bringing fiction to life. The kid was asked to bring a theme from the author's work into focus via an art project, so he chose the theme of blurring the line between fiction and reality, and expressed it by making a request that oddly paralleled the novel's plot, thereby drawing the author into a fairly ridiculous exchange. This child is a genius, and deserves an A+.
Passing up these occasions because you don't feel like spending the money is more regrettable and less understandable. Unless you've chosen to only do it this once because you have set being debt-free in the shortest possible time as a goal for yourself. Just as we wouldn't like it if he tried to lecture US about our spending habits, I doubt we come off well lecturing him about his.
.
.
This is another one of those moments where I'm profoundly grateful that the web did not exist when I was 16.
We want to share ideas in a way that brings people together, doesn't throw sand in their faces. This is why we can't have nice ideas.
"Any calls?" I asked. She didn't look up from her magazine. "What am I, your secretary?" "Yes." God. It just goes on and on.
It's remarkable how many people want to vote for Ron Paul that think he is some kind of Third-Party type. He's a Republican, simple as that. Why go further afield from that simple fact?
What is not mentioned in all the "OMG, teh brown people are taking over" hysteria (come on, what an inflammatory AND idiotic headline) is that the MAJORITY of births are to whites, at 63%. Sorry, here is an AP article from NPR with the headline. No, as that article clearly states, the majority of people total in the US are whites at 63%. But the demographic of births has changed, and white births in the time period in question came in at 49.6% of the total number of births.
hellojed:That's nothing, I almost ran over Ira Glass last week. All things considered, sounds like you had a pretty good week.
I think the real challenge there is that delivering healthy meals is harder and more expensive at that kind of scale Well, the overall scale of the amount of food that needs to make it to the kids is the same. Its just whether it goes through supermarkets or suppliers. I mean, I understand that it is hard _at current funding levels_, but thats because the burden of healthy food has been pushed onto parents. If the government took on that burden, it might cost _more than it does now_, but it should be able to do it more efficiently than 3,000 kids (number at my high school, for example) each doing it at retail pricing.
More tools for creativity = better.
pwnguin: " * cable, internet, electricity, netflix: 170" Holy shit. I pay that for cable tv, phone and cable internet here in NYC. ($169, including one premium channel: hbo and on demand. Electric is $200 during a month when we don't run the air conditioners that much. Netflix on top of that. Wow.
> Has there been a ruling class this self-destructively short-sighted since the last days of Rome? This is kind of a silly question. I am not a historian and I can tell you about the Bourbons in France that got guillotined and American Confederate plantation owners to name two just off the top of my head. I could take a guess that the Russian Romanovs in 1916 weren't looking too far into the future.
Composition teacher here, the kid is not ESL. I would bet my house on it.
John Waters continues to be my hero, and he is also wearing Comme Des Garcon in that photo--i want to write a country song about having rest stop sex in a rest stop in Baltimore, staining Waters new Comme jacket with pure white cum.
.
I am only your memory, I cannot give you any new information.
.
I would like to nominate John Waters for America's Sweetheart.
Hoopo: because it's presented here in such a way as to make it seem interesting, but it's fairly unremarkable given his situation, isn't it? A single, unattached person with a high salary can pay down huge debts quickly by cutting back on certain unnecessary lifestyle expenses. Was it not kind of a foregone conclusion? Given the number of people that aren't doing it, it seems like you've answered your own question.
Once down the rabbit hole of this epic tome I found myself quite delighted by the thought of the Stay Puft Marshmallow man as Lovecraftian Horror revenge on simple guilty mankind.
I saw him on a stage on the mall by the Washington Monument maybe ten years ago. It was a fantastic show. .
.
I'm finding the notion that there is such a thing as a "society blogger" to be its own source of discomfort right now. Yes, well: with poop comes flies.
The bulk of the series, Dude.
What else would they lend from if not their savings? Their futures. I mean, it's not like they have to actually give you printed dollars in the vast, vast majority of cases -- they just need to increment your account balance. They can do that ("digital printing", if you like) and then let things balance out later. Their savings don't even need to come into it at all. Perhaps you spend that money by paying for a mortgage to a seller who deposits it in the very same bank, for instance. If then a lot of the debts go bad (the future disappears), or if a lot of the bank's creditors want their money in a hurry (the time window narrows), that might be a problem. Possibly a very big one if both happen at once (like we have now). Then the government needs to step in and sell its future to pay for the one the bank lost. But, yeah, either way What's that? They don't print the money they lend? is pretty much exactly wrong. If one person's debt was exactly another person's credit we'd not be in anything like the situation we actually are in.
Blender is a good example of a tool that should be hard to use. Modeling in 4D (3 space, 1 time) is a hard problem to solve. If it were easy for the n00b, it would be crap at making the impossible possible.
Consequences, Choices, Children in Crisis, Challenges. HBO's multi-part research documentary The Weight of the Nation examines obesity in America in four parts, marshaling leading doctors, epidemiologists, economists, researchers, and community leaders to understand and explain the individual costs and public solutions to a multi-faceted social and individual problem. The documentary both explores large picture statistics, while giving voice "to those that often too seek to be invisible: members of the nearly 70 percent of Americans currently diagnosed as overweight or obese. (AV Club Review)"

Also included online: Twelve bonus short films. A policy report on Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention. HBO will also air "The Great Cafeteria Takeover" about students involved with Rethinkers "Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools" who "convinced Aramark to deliver locally grown produce" (AVclub ibid) to their school. Trailer / HuffPo Article Bonus : 60 Minutes interview with Dr. Nora Volkow on Hooked Why bad habits are hard to break, and not character defects.
I'd sort of think "a Michigan parody" is something like a parody of Michigan pride and not a bland "our neighbors suck and that's the joke" statement, but I guess I don't get Michigan humor. So congrats on being stuck between dumb & dumber, I guess? You win? Actually, I definitely got that vibe from a lot of the other videos. The DEMF and the Ren Fair one in particular were mean enough that it made me smile.
Implementation is unlikely in an election year. "The commie Russians might get us" is still an effective bogeyman?
I'm pretty wary of this guy. He's written some brilliant eps, "Homer the Vigilante", "You only move twice", "Bart's Comet", but then he's also written utter shit like "Maximum Homerdrive", "Mountain of Madness", etc. Seems like his novels could go either way.
Really fascinating article. I have always failed to comprehend why "today" is not the first word of the novel in any of the translations, that seems to be a far more clear-cut situation than the completely intractable "maman" issue. It would even make the sudden uncertainty in the second sentence more striking, even a little comical (though maybe that was not the goal). Unfortunately (or fortunately I guess, b/c always so much fun to agonize over this stuff), an article of similar length & richness could be written for every single translated sentence ever.
I don't think I've ever heard an indie-bandier name than that.
My son just tore through her books about six months ago, after his reading group at school read MSoM. The whole group became obsessed with the woods and the outdoors, and in stolen moments from recess and lunchtime, the kids built an entire "survival village" in the woods outside the school. They play in it every day. Thank you, Ms. George. Oh, and her autobiography about her life and pets, The Tarantula in my Purse, is worth reading as well.
I agree that the kid is stupid, but what did the author do to deserve these comments? Agreed to do homework for someone who had not read the book, then acted indignant about it when asked to continue to do homework.
I almost flagged this.
The nuclear-disarmament group Global Zero just released a report proposing a ten-year plan for the United States and Russia to reduce their arsenals below 900 warheads each, well below the New START treaty limits of 1,550 deployed warheads each by 2018. Implementation is unlikely in an election year.

Global Zero's plan would also dismantle all of the Air Force's land-based ICBMs and remove remaining nuclear forces from "alert" status, disabling the ability to launch a massive strike within minutes. The primary author, retired four-star General James Cartwright, led the U.S. Strategic Command (the unified combatant command for all American nuclear forces) from 2004 to 2007. Read the full report here (26-page PDF).
I'm not sure there's actually any extra info in that second link, just the same info slightly re-organized in order to scam some page views.
vidur: "Sincere question: what kind of lifestyle can a single man have on $3000? Any mefites from the city where this guy lives" Dunno about Dallas, but for a period of about 1.5 years, I went out every night on about that. However, I did not date, and was drinking Old Style.
rich assholes and burning man participants are separate groups? Yes. For a long time, and I'm guessing in large part still today.
How does one factor in the U.P.? The U.P. is a rabbit bounding westward.
I think the real question is: How long until we see Facebook screencaps of racist people on Reddit using this news as justification for some racist action/activity?
Fair enough, I guess I disagree. I found what he wrote interesting in spite of the fact that he makes huge amounts of money and will likely make more in the future. But, I generally like reading about people who set ambitious goals and go out and make them happen. To me that's all this was. I'm glad for the dude that he's got financial freedom, but I don't think his goal was that ambitious or that he sacrificed that much. I mean, I pretty much live his "no more student debt" life as my regular life, and the thing is, I just know it is not that hard. My life is not hard. I don't believe his life was that hard, either.
What is not mentioned in all the "OMG, teh brown people are taking over" hysteria (come on, what an inflammatory AND idiotic headline) is that the MAJORITY of births are to whites, at 63%. This is what doesn't get top billing, because it's not as scary as blacks, Latinos, and Asians allied together as a group.
I kind of love the end of that piece:
As we passed by, our sound guy said 'John Waters' Luke said, 'Yep, definitely John Waters.' We got off at the next exit and circled back. He was still there. We pulled up, opened the door and asked where he was coming from. 'Baltimore,' he said. And we said 'Get in, sir.' "
A lot of the comments so far feel like they're knocking the guy because he's not paying down as much debt other people, that he has a Harvard MBA so he should be better at managing his personal finances, that he has it a lot easier than the rest of us because he has a high income and only had to cut back on expenses that most of us can't afford anyway. All that is fair, but I still think that paying down that much debt in that short amount of time is impressive. And from what I've seen, paying down so much so fast is not something that most people end up doing less than three years after they take out student loans (even with a graduate degree from a top school). I work in family court. I have a very strange window into people's personal finances, from multimillionaires who have more fancy cars than they do fingers to the flat-out broke folk who can't find jobs despite their very best efforts and are about to be evicted. (They sit next to each other in the courtroom gallery, by the way.) I wish I could boil down what I've learned from working there into to one memorable "life lesson"-type sentence, but I can't. Just know that statements to the effect of "well, if I were in his/her shoes, I could handle that financial situation better!" are frustrating to me. "Privileged white male with a Harvard degree, only has to cut back on expenses in order to pay off his debt, psh — other people have it worse!"-type statements are equally frustrating.
If your idea of photography is a pack-shot, then yes indeed.
Part of the problem here is the assumption that it's a good thing for society if he pays off his debts rather then spending money. That's not really true at all. It's good for him if he prefers living debt free rather then having fun, but other then that it may not even be good for him personally, so long has his income is secure, which, for a Harvard MBA it should be.
This privilege talk is getting really really old. There are many students (socially, financially) like this guy who will find his blog to be an inspirational and practical guide to become debt free. But no, unless you're 99%/working class/poor/starving/dead you are privileged and an obvious target for snark.
Eh, I agree it's getting a little overused, but this is a pretty good example, though. The problem is, if you're not having trouble making your interest payments, there isn't any actual benefit to living debt free for most people, other then security. Living debt free is great if you're uncertain about your future. But if you're sure to be getting a steady income, it makes sense to have some debt, depending on the interest rates. And student loans are some of the cheapest debt you can get. If you have $100k in debt at 3% interest, and you have $100k you can invest and earn back 5-10% interest, guaranteed, it would actually be stupid to use the $100k to pay back the loan rather then take the investment. On top of that, student loan interest is tax deductible. Hello. The big problem, though is that this 'anti-debt' attitude has taken over the national economic debate. The situation is even worse for the country as a whole.
And there's 1/6th of his solution already. Reduce the 10% 401k to 5% for a year and sell a car and you are done. -- DU
See, that's a perfect example of how "debt phobia" can cause people to make bad economic decisions. Depending on the return on his 401k and the interest on his loans, he could end up with more money 30 or 40 years from now by putting money into his 401k and making minimum payments on his student loans. Again it depends, and it's slightly more risky, but in general it isn't an obviously good idea to chose loan payments over investment.
Why did he need a blog, let alone an MBA from Harvard, to do this?
Without the MBA from Harvard, he would not have had the debt to pay off in the first place. Duh.
Why the criticism of anyone, no matter how much money they make, taking on a challenge to live especially frugally to meet a goal? Shouldn't we approve of behavior like this?
Not really. That $1300/month on entertainment pays for entertainment jobs. Not just Hollywood types, but probably waiters, waitresses, bartenders, hookers, and so on. Taking that money and paying back student loans doesn't really benefit anyone other then himself. For the economy as a whole it's better if you spend your money. Saving money benefits yourself so encouraging it isn't good for society as a whole, especially when you're talking about rich people anyway. If they can afford to spend money on things, it's better for everyone if they do, rather then horde it. However, renting his second rooms probably helped some people out.
Part of the reason this blog (and to a certain extent similar discussions about stuff like law school debt) bothers me is that it moves the conversation about student debt to well-compensated business professionals with post-graduate degrees
There are a lot of people who went to law school in the past few years and are definitely not making a lot of money today.
I get the GRAR, I really do, but I'd rather live in a world where people making a lot of money prevent the big banks from leeching more interest money out of the general population.
I don't know about for Harvard MBA, but for the most part student loan debt is owed to the government, not big banks.
Oho, is that a challenge to list bands that just reek of indie-band-ness from their name, like Choir of Young Believers, or Vacationer? Because that would be an entertaining derail.
Judging by the photos in the first link... did they serve warm champagne? Disgusting!
As someone who is completing a second student teaching placement (teaching 11th grade English), I must say that the tone and syntax of those emails reads genuinely to me--and I believe this kid is a native English speaker, not an ELL or ESL student. Many of these kids simply lack the ability to modulate based on audience/purpose/tone. Or, they kind of sort of know, but they choose not to. They think that all emails are supposed to be . . . well, completely informal. They are gravely mistaken, but there you have it.
It's always good to hear about children being born.
Yes, there's always someone who has it easier than you. But believe me, he also has his crosses to bear. White man's burden.
The answer, my friend...
Photographers: You're Being Replaced by Software
And we could throw up our hands and simply stammer that they just don't make 'em like they used to, as if that was any sort of excuse; Nobody EVER made them like this!
Many of my favourite epsides are by other writers, but for sheer volume nobody beats Swartzwelder -- the only Simpsons writer whose name is used as a proper adjective. I wish my public library had these books because I'm too poor to buy them.
I'm finding the notion that there is such a thing as a "society blogger" to be its own source of discomfort right now.
How would one translate assiette de haricot?
Oh good grief. This article has so many problems I don't even know where to start. The two fallacies that struck me right off: 1) Appeal to Fear: "YOU will be replaced... By a COMPUTER!!" This is nonsense. If you think composing an image takes time and effort in meatspace, I can promise you it will take longer in a tool like Blender or Maya. It is the artist's time, effort and talent a client pays for, not his gear. 2) Slippery Slope fallacy: "Blender can render photoreal objects... AND SOON HUMANS!!!" See above. Making any image look good is hard enough as it is. Digging yourself out of the Uncanny Valley makes it infinitely harder. Admittedly, some of what he says is true, if you're a hack photographer whose clients have no taste or sense. Such clients will eventually realize they can pay a different hack less money for images that suck in a different way. I find it strangely hard to get upset about that.
Werner Herzog sounds exactly like that guy who does Arnie impressions.
windykites: "I once read that if money was just about numbers, it would be easy, but money isn't about numbers, it's about emotions, and that's why it's hard. And I imagine that to sacrifice your lifestyle, publicly, in front of all of your MBA Harvard friends, must be incredibly difficult. So I think there is something to be learned, for me at least, even though I'm broke as shit. And it's not about buckling down and working hard, but it is about forgoing my own comfort and staying strong in doing that. So good for him. Who knows what shit he had to battle with himself to get where he is." THIS. That's why I get so uncomfortable when things like "privilege", "born on the third base" and "playing the game on easy mode" are dropped in such a cavalier manner around here. Yes, there's always someone who has it easier than you. But believe me, he also has his crosses to bear.
This is sad and I'm not referring to just the kid.
I think I'm more comfortable with the Russian military pointing nukes at my head opposed to decommissioning them and having the plutonium vapourize into the ether. The ether being likely somewhere near Peshawar just east the Afghanistan border.
Heh. Pwned.
Man, those Michigan people sure got upset when someone else took their dumb gimmick. Way to vigorously defend an irritating and nearly universal state quirk, people from Michigan.
I'm unimpressed. Living at all costs a certain amount of money. The more you make in excess of that the easier it is to have money left over for things like rapidly digging out of debt and investing. A couple years ago I made 42K a year. I spent relatively little and managed to save something like 7 thousand a year. Pretty good all told. I recently moved onto a new job where I make about 70K a year I don't suddenly have kids. I can easily save 30K a year. If I made 100K I could save 50K a year, The normal way to do things is to spend almost all your money no matter how much money you make. If you make more money you get a bigger nicer house and a bigger nicer car because you have more money. You specify your liquor when you order a drink at a place where the drinks cost more because the other people are wearing expensive clothes too. But all the extra is optional, the baseline is not. Food, clothing, shelter. In order to save money at 30K you are out of low hanging fruit. You can save maybe 60 dollars a month walking two miles to work every day instead of riding the bus. When you make six figures you can cut 60 dollars by ordering take out once or twice instead of going to a fancy restaurant. Being rich and living like you aren't rich is psychologically challenging (maybe) but it requires very little in the way of sacrifice, ingenuity, or even inconvenience. I'm surprised that more people don't do it but I'm very reluctant to give people credit for pulling of the trick of simply not gilding their cages.
Sincere question: what kind of lifestyle can a single man have on $3000? Any mefites from the city where this guy lives? I now make a bit more than that, but that's roughly the range I've spent basically my whole adult life in. $3000/month, after taxes. I live alone, I go out to eat often, date regularly, spend pretty freely when I do. I used to have a car payment, too. Granted, I wasn't putting much away - but the short answer to "What kind of lifestyle can a single man have on $3000" is "A perfectly fine one, thankyouverymuch."
This comes up a lot in life, I find, but it's important to note that "can't afford" and "don't want to spend" are two completely different things. Passing up important milestone friend and family occasions of which there is not an infinite supply because you can't afford them is regrettable but understandable. Passing up these occasions because you don't feel like spending the money is more regrettable and less understandable.
Werner Herzog discovers John Waters is Gay Now I'm dying to know if Herzog thinks Ralph is a metaphorical Viking
This is a very good thing. The sensory equipment can be made very much more sensitive than is required to achieve this fairly low level of dexterity. Over time the brain adapts, and feedback will improve the user's fine control over the prosthesis. Replacing lost functions of the natural human body is a mere beginning. Potentially this is is the neurological jack of cyberpunk fiction, a USB port for the brain, and you will be able to plug in whatever devices, real or virtual, you have taught yourself to control. There are some cautions around this: cancer and blood poisoning, loss of actual motor function if those areas of the brain are retrained (although they could likely be trained again), and semi-voluntary twitching and "tics" that could cause serious injury to others or the user. However, this may be as socially significant a development as widespread car use, or mobile telephones.
Can you find an example of a TED talk covering the same ground, but better? It's not like Hanauer is saying anything new here, No, TED can't handle the truth.
Has anyone started xTed yet?
oh how I pine for the three minute edit window!
I love that they just left a mess for someone else to clean up. It's perfect, and from now on when I think of Krug champagne that's what will immediately come to mind: "We shit on your floor so you don't have to."
My real passion is hitchhiking . . . cars pick me up immediately; it's like hailing a cab In Baltimore unlicensed hacks are so prevalent that hitchhiking pretty much does replace hailing a cab for a lot of people.
Guess: Nostrodamus?
The band is on their way to do a show tonight in the small college town where I live, at my local bar. This town is Freaking Out with hope that Waters might tag along with them this far.
The Werckmeister Harmonies is a movie I try to watch every year. Even though I'm often turned off by Eastern European obvious metaphor movies, I really love it, especially for that first scene. It's very challenging, and I consider it a normal reaction to drift off while watching it, but I can never get it out of my head.
This reminds me of one of my favorite AskMe questions: How can I convince my wife that living in a Yurt would be fun while I'm in medical school?
This demographic shift is one of the reasons the House voted to end the ACS. (previously)
Also, I agree with EmpressCalypigos' point that this will no doubt be spouted by right-wing republicans soon. God you can just hear the speech right now.
I'm going to need a time machine and a flame thrower before my head explodes.
"He says that business don't create jobs, but he can't seriously believe that. Of course businesses create jobs by hiring people, as he admits." Businesses create jobs to satisfy demand; the customer's demand is prior, and this is obvious because you can have the best pet rock business in the world with an infinite monopoly on the supply of pet rocks, but unless someone wants to buy pet rocks, you are going to go out of business and jobs will be lost. Capitalists and businesspeople like to believe that everything is supply-driven, and it's incredibly self-serving of them to believe this. Such people basically imagine that an advanced economy is pretty much just like an undeveloped subsistence economy where there's a lot of unmet demand and a huge amount of economic potential that is being neglected due to the absence of capital investment and development. So, in their minds, when they open up their management consulting firm, they're heroes because they're risking their capital to help dirt farmers. Most of the time, though, they're selling pet rocks. Or another fast-food burger with a different branding. Very, very occasionally they're Apple making iPods or Henry Ford making automobiles.
Yakuman, according to the HuffPo link The Whelk provided on the Swanson is Swartzwelder hypothesis: "Starting off as a writer on "Saturday Night Live" in the mid eighties during the non-Lorne Michaels years, in 1988 he began contributing to the magazine "Army Man," a hugely influential humor periodical founded by George Meyer that only lasted six issues. Based on the underground success of the 'zine, he and many of his "Army Man" cohorts joined the inaugural writing staff of "The Simpsons." Swartzwelder would go on to have 59 episodes of the show credited to his name, more than any other writer."
I am so not worried for Waters. He's a big boy. I used to hitch hike, it's not dangerous as you'd think. I'm sure he was out on that highway taking a walk on the wild side.
Quote from my cousin to a [past] girlfriend of several years when she was giving him a hard time about him playing games with us: "Video games were here before you... they'll be here after you." In other words, that game is a way for a girl to instantly tell which dudes are a waste of youth, emotion, and time. I'll pass it on.
Student debt is indeed a problem for poor people, but please don't be under any illusions about the conditions of people with law school debt. The blogger is an MBA, not a lawyer, and most lawyers aren't business professionals. So while your concerns are valid, they're not really applicable here.
It's always good to hear about children being born. Speak for yourself! (Get off my lawn and some such...)
It's irrelevant whether the kid is an ESL student. It's irrelevant to the foolishness of waiting until too late and asking someone else to do his work. But it is relevant to whether or not he's a troll or for real. Those of us talking of ESL were discussing the later.
Also steinsalz, why is this creepy? To figure out which political arguments would appeal to different ideological groups, they hired digital marketing company Marketfish to send eight different versions of an email from their non-partisan think tank, the True Patriot Network, to two million voters in the under $100,000/year income range. Then they studied how their Republican, Democratic, and Independent guinea pigs responded to the messaging. Its long been standard practice for the private sector and political consultants to test market campaigns on "guinea pigs" through focus groups and polls and now being done on-line.
Hi, I am pazazygeek, and I am no fun. You can help fix this flaw in the system by sending an email with your name, address, daytime phone number, social security number, and bank account information to.... Everyone Can Be a Winner!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I got the impression that blogging, for him, was a way of sticking to a difficult plan by making it public and by being held accountable to "readers". It seems to have worked. Perhaps instead of arguing about how poor he has to be to make this a feat worth respecting, you could identify something learn-able from his experience: that behavior change thrives with a set of public circumstances, daily milestones, a sense of progress, constant reflection, etc.
I probably didn't come close to running over ira glass, but he still gave me a weird look as I drove past. Also: dude has way less gray hair than I imagined.
So yeah, focus on the motorcycle, the second car, the room renting if you want...but can you go seven months without eating out? Can you BYOB to a bar your friends are hanging out at? If you're unemployed you have no choice but to do these very things. I think this is where some of the ire is coming from.
delmoi: "On top of that, student loan interest is tax deductible. Hello. " Actually, that deduction phases out for MAGIs above between 60k and 75k, and is capped at 2500 in interest. Moreover, it's ridiculus how student loans are currently priced. The govt borrows at at ten year tenor for 1.76 percent, which is basically 0 or negative when adjusted for inflation. Charging students 6.8 percent is crazy talk, regardless of your stance on student loans or tuition prices. For a specific personal situation, it's possible repaying student loans are a better investment than broad index funds. Saving money benefits yourself so encouraging it isn't good for society as a whole, especially when you're talking about rich people anyway. Saving (investing) and spending are economically indistinguishable in most occasions. It seems silly to argue the rich should buy a second home instead of depositing their money in a bank to lend out for someone else to buy their first.
I wish there was more variety in models, just because I'm curious. What about older people? Fatter people? Darker people? Younger people? Oh jeeze, maybe there really was a diverse crowd there but the wind machine is the great leveler.
I'm trying to think of a point of comparison for people who don't live in DC for what an important cultural touchstone he was, especially for DC natives John Waters comes to mind, and not just because of the hitchhiking thing. He seems to have a similar reputation in terms of graciousness and love for his community. I expect to hear more go-go than usual walking home. It's a good day to be driving with the windows open and the top down, and go-go is one of the sounds of summer for me now. Thanks, Mr. Brown.
They'll probably sell more champagne, but inside they'll be dying. Just ask Burberry. They had to stop using their distinctive tartan because they were being associated too much with chavs.
I'll bet John Waters is enjoying the ride as much as the band is. He's one of those people that seems to genuinely enjoy the company of strangers just for the sake of talking to new people.
I want him to do this project with boxers and great danes and bulldogs. Blowing dog jowls are epic.
smoke: "Holy crapamole, unless Blender has dramatically improved since I used it last (a few years ago, I grant)" Blender 2.6+ is somewhat easier to use, yes. It's not a night-and-day difference though.
I always laugh at these articles about CG, they always seem to be targeted at people who have absolutely no knowledge of the subject, and laughable to anyone with the least bit of practical experience. I remember in art school, my photo professors would always say you don't take photos, youmake photos. One of my professors did some research to see how many variables were involved in even the simplest SLR rig in a studio photo. You start with classic Zone System. You have a combination of aperture and shutter speed, you can vary them to give priority to an aperture or a shutter speed. With aperture changes you also have the ability to change focus continuously from the front of the scene to the back. You can meter the light and if you're really into the Zone System, you can pick a different ASA film and vary the developing to optimize for the contrast and curve to match the scene. Already you have a nearly infinite number of choices to pick from. And we haven't even considered the direction you point the camera and the position (nearly infinite choices again), position of studio lights, using different lenses and filters, etc. By considering only a handful of variables, commonly used by all photographers, you have an infinite set of choices. It's like a chess game, a noob has to consider all the potential choices (or ignore most of them) but a grandmaster intuitively knows which choices are likely to be the best options to consider. CG is like that, but it offers even more controls, so it is infinitely more complex. I will give you just one example. One morning, I woke up with an image from a dream in my head. It is a simple scene of one particle that breaks into maybe 50 particles, and each of those particles breaks again into 50 more and starts falling randomly, and then those particles break up, like a fractal. I could draw you a schematic of the scene in about 5 or 10 minutes, I could probably produce a fairly good drawing in a day or two of work. Photographically? Forget it. I decided to try to render it in Maya. It uses simple particle dynamics, so I have to model an object that breaks apart into self-similar parts. That was easy. Then I have to let the particles run for a few frames, to fall randomly and scatter under gravity, until they reached an attractive, scattered look. That's easy with Maya particle dynamics. Then they break apart. Okay, not too bad, computationally expensive but possible. Then those particles have to run until they scatter a bit, and break apart again. I hit a wall, it is too computationally expensive on a single CPU, even doing two levels. I wanted to do five levels. The computational cost increases more than exponentially, and even then I had already I scaled it back from the original 50 subparticles to merely 20, to reduce the computational power needed. I did a little back of the envelope calculation, I figured that to properly render this scene the way I envisioned it, it would take more computing power than was available on Earth, or in fact, greater than the aggregate sum of all computing power created to date, or using Moore's Law, likely to exist within the next decade. It has been a decade or so that I've been musing about this image, I've looked for shortcuts, and Maya has been upgraded from my first attempt on v3.5 to v.2013. I think I'm ready to take another crack at it again. But so far, I have only been able to render one level adequately, not even getting so far as them breaking apart.
This guy lives in Austin, BTW. Not NYC. $3000 a month is a pretty reasonable, professional-class existence in Texas. I'm really surprised that, with selling a car and his motorcycle, he had to stop eating out and buying drinks entirely and stop visiting friends and family to get down to $3000 a month. I guess it's good that he's learned how to budget. My two-person household's total month expenditures, including a mortgage, a car loan, student loans, short- and long-term savings, and eating out quite a bit on the weekends is about $4000 a month. Maybe he has a bad mortgage.
Well, thanks to this fpp, I went and downloaded the Burly books. I'm literally just a few pages in but:
"The fight was fairly even for awhile, but then the other guy got in a lucky roundhouse punch to my jaw, followed by three lucky kicks to my ribs, then he had the good fortune to step on my face."

"I've been told by people that I'm shaped kind of like a garbage can, but I don't know if that's the truth, or just some kind of an insult."
Holy crap. Good joke after good joke. Highly recommended.
What?
Let's go Mets! I still know every word to the damn song, it played constantly during the last half of that summer. I imagine the felt pennant and team posters are probably still hanging in my childhood room, along with hundred of baseball cards carefully organized by team.
. A name I hadn't thought of in a long while, but big bummer nonetheless.
I don't believe any of it. I think all the photos were air-brushed.
(and really, the fact that there is repeatedly reportedly a mess left behind is the truly unforgivable part. It's entirely possible that it wasn't all planned from the beginning to be as it was reported, but there's no innocent naivety that excuses a pile of unclaimed overused-acronym.)
Even though I studied french for years, by the time I was through reading that article I was mistakenly seeing "Mammon" instead of "Maman", and, well, that's the wrong connotation to accidentally bring into things.
I graduated from Harvard Business School with my MBA and $101k of student debt in May 2009 and I had made 21 monthly loan payments of $1,057 since then. I was expecting to see a balance of around $80k or so. I had failed to take interest into account; the balance actually stood at $90,717. I think the real issue here is that doofus spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on an MBA (note that middle letter, it stands for "Business") and graduated not knowing how interest works. From Harvard.
Ha ha ha, this is the guy who co-wrote The True Patriot. This was an attempt to create a grassroots pro-Democratic Party viral phenomenon, following the then-popular thinking of Think Like An Elephant, which held that the key to democracy was for Democrats to rely on more manipulative Republican language about steely values and so on. Hanauer's contention in The True Patriot was that steadfast, flag-waving centrist Democrats who believe America is the greatest country on Earth are better and prouder patriots than Republicans. I know because we shared a common book publicist. He planted me in Hanauer's audience at a Barnes and Noble in the Village to try and make it look like anyone was interested. I am glad Hanauer has come up with a better message but I can see the origins of the "partisan" charge.
We're all Americans now.
Apparently successful people sharing their experiences and life stories is now yet another thing metafilter doesn't do well. Is there an income ceiling beyond which you just shouldn't have a personal website or blog?
Just what the esthetic doctor prescribed, and plenty-o-links... Thanks. ...yes, there are people out here on MeFi that like minimalism.
They are all were krenshar.
Actually, given that only five comments out of 17 made that joke, I'd say only a plurality of commenters are going to make that joke.
If we're seriously reduced to claiming that "alt-ac is the future of the academy" — that is, that the future will see even more PhDs shunted out of the academy in response to its ever-worsening labor conditions — then the academy has no future. As a doctoral student currently working in literary studies and the digital humanities who has vigorously pursued the alt-ac track since my first month of PhD training, I would question your basic assumption here; namely, that alt-ac positions have been shunted out of the academy. The academy has always been, is, and should always be more expansive than a tenured professoriate (although it is an integral part). At the 2012 Modern Language Association convention in Seattle, the response of every alt-ac I heard speak to questions about tenure and job security were blunt: as a reality on the ground, tenure is quickly dying; to continue working in the academy in a way not limited to term-limited contracts on research projects either developed, overseen, or implemented by graduates of doctoral programs in the humanities, alt-ac positions provide a spectacularly useful niche. They see themselves not as outside the academy, but integral to its development in the 21st century, especially as related to digital technologies. As for job security, there isn't any unless you consider anything other than tenure as such. In Canada at least, most alt-acs enjoy the same labor protections as other university faculty and staff with the exception of tenure. This state of affairs is closely mirrored in many libraries, as I understand it, and as others on Metafilter might be better able to comment on than me. Julia Flanders, remarked once that she worried as much about getting fired as most other white-collar knowledge workers do--i.e., not that much. Don't get me wrong, I think tenure is a vital part of the academy. But the reality is that we asking how to protect it in the alt-ac context almost presumes that it still exists. To grad students like us, at least, that seems to be a mostly open question at this point. I'm pretty skeptical of the proposed reforms, which seem mostly directed towards establishing "alternative tracks" that will make it easier to blame students for the fact that there are no jobs, but other people seem quite taken with it. I couldn't disagree more, although I'd love to hear more. In my department (English, with a healthy dose of digital humanists) this piece was greeted with appreciation with a hint of relief that somebody was finally paying attention to what we needed and desired from a humanities graduate program. We're not stupid, and all of us are aware of the statistics in relation to time to completion of degree, availability of tenure-track jobs, and the almost pathological level of competitiveness present in today's humanities. Everything is most profoundly not fine, and we nearly all saw this as a useful reconfiguration that may allow graduate students in the humanities to move forward. The Inside Higher Ed piece doesn't seem geared towards blaming students when they can't find jobs; it seems to be saying that 1) There are no tenure track jobs in the humanities. 2) We train you for them anyways in a way that precludes any other viable career path. 3) Maybe we should train you for something else, or at least not solely for one thing (tt jobs). 4) How might that look? Considering the response of nearly every humanities department everywhere to the 30-year "crisis" in the humanities is to respond that "Good people always get jobs," can you blame us for applauding when someone like Russel Berman (former Pres. of MLA) comes out with a plan for something other than naive acceptance?
My costume for the evening.... a vibrant red wig! Fun!
gained by their stunt. Hey mods, kindly add an end italics tag to the end of the first line (which is taken from the second link) to separate my nonsense from hers.
Don't forget to drink some water, The Whelk.
They can create realistic images with computers now?
I don't understand. If Diablo III were a girl, it would be one of those girls who shows you her hand-made teeshirt and then assaults you? Is that... is that a thing?
You know, like how women can be considered a minority? Or a fringe group, even. Only the minority of them with bangs.
How many hours did I spend hunting through my woods for a giant oak to squat in thanks to My Side of the Mountain? I don't know, but undoubtedly each hour was complete enjoyment as I tested every tree hollow I came across and imagined adopting a falcon. .
Just for one example, Facebook has an estimated market cap of 100 billion USD, yet only employs 3,500 people (directly.) That's a lot of money and scant few jobs. The fact is that companies need fewer people to run day to day operations than ever before. Our tax policy is rooted in the last century, where in order to produce goods and services a company had to hire people. Today, companies have developed strategies to avoid hiring at any cost and have been rewarded with higher profits and lower tax rates. Let's at least be realistic about the motivations of "job creators." It's profit, not people.
HuffPo On the connection between Swanson/Swartzwlder
Who said that he's targeting people like you with his writing? Not everything published online has to apply to you or me for that matter. Then who is he targeting? He was making $52,000 a year and borrowed a hundred large for an Ivy League graduate degree. What on earth does that have to do with the 87% of Pell Grant-eligible undergraduates who leave college with loan debt? Or the 96% of students at private for-profit colleges who graduate with debt?* *click the June '10 fact sheet
There is a problem here, but it has to do more with car culture than weight. Car culture is part of the problem, but the issue, on a whole, is a lot more complex than that; as the documentaries point out, it also has to do with what we grow, how we fund farmers, marketing, availability, education, and exercise. Most people in New York City are pedestrians, but we've also seen a spike in obesity and obesity-related health problems. My anecdata: I was sitting in a low-cost medical clinic waiting for my appointment earlier this week, and out of maybe 40 people in the waiting room, about six weren't overweight or obese—and most of them were children under the age of five. Meanwhile, dialysis offices have been springing up like wildflowers in my neighborhood, in order to serve people who have diabetes-related kidney disease.
The professional author's post is marginally coherent, and we're questioning the kid's grammar skills? I'm having a hard time believing this is even legit; how many times is the phrase "Lacuna Cabal" mentioned in the author's post? A fuckton.
"a photographer who creates images that help organizations tell their stories" ... oh my.
"TED is avowedly non-partisan. We want to share ideas in a way that brings people together, doesn't throw sand in their faces."
Then you'll quickly become irrelevant. The common currency these days are ideas that drive us further and further apart and that throw as much sand in each other's faces as possible. TED has been around and following this policy for quite a while now. There are plenty of venues for shouting at each other; it seems there's room for at least one where people just talk.
"After 35 year of knowing John Waters, I turned to my wife and I said to her, I have a feeling that this man is gay." -Werner Herzog
.
John Waters is absolutely one of my favorite humans living or dead. I'm proud to say I've touched him more than once.
Please stop touching yourself like that when you say that.
I'm not a MMT person, but they're right when they point out that in practice, banks don't lend from their savings. What else would they lend from if not their savings? They lend for whatever reasons they choose, and the Fed (indirectly) accommodates that. It is, in a truer sense than you think, printing money. They have a reserve requirement they have to meet... The reserve requirement in America is only about ten percent, and in many other Western countries there's no reserve requirement at all. All investments are not equal and some money literally sits in a vault. And a lot more money, especially under certain macroeconomic conditions, might as well be sitting in a vault. What kind of money is "sitting in a vault"?
"What did you do, Ray?" is my go-to when something unexplained is occurring but it's apparent whatever it is is bad.
Why do you think s/he is Indian? (as opposed to another English-language learner). Is there some particular tic that you are familiar with? No, I google his email address from his comment to see what would show up. It split it into his full name (which I won't put here to be prudent) with the last name of Vadhadiya, which appears to be a somewhat common Indian name.
I have a hitchhiking story--I used to be able to hitchhike from my big city to my smallish town, because it was an industrial town and i look like a rig pig. The suburbs have grown up around now, and I look less like a rig pig and more like a serial killer or hipster. There is also a bus, but it doesn't run nights or holidays, so last new years, i had to pay 70 in cab fare.
Always worse. The client (under all sorts of commercial pressures themselves) would start to want to try entirely new ideas Yikes, that would definitely do my head in.
It really reminds me of the classic human face under high g-forces video. There are a lot of other videos on the web like this, by the way. You know, if that's your thing.
And then there's the apology, and the calling out of the apologizer... I came across this thing out there. They all walked away from a huge, huge mess. So fuckem. Also, Krug = piss.
So, I just learned that one of the problems of self-publishing is that your work isn't really available in a medium-to-small city's libraries.
Great idea for getting this message into the right eyeballs. Now you'll excuse me while I "spam" some friends with this stuff.
Don't get them started on panhandles.
Isn't that why we have advertising, for the creation of desire? But the creation of desire is arguably both easier and more ethical among people who have disposable income to risk on new goods. As I read the speech, he is not suggesting that businessmen be removed from the equation altogether - rather that you can have a fertile or an unfertile environment in which for the economy to grow, and that supporting the growth of a middle-class with disposable income makes for a much more fertile environment than providing tax cuts to the wealthy and larger businesses. This is not necessarily an iron-clad thesis, but it is not an unreasonable idea at all. Nor is it particularly inherently partisan - Nixon conceded that "we are all Keynesians now", while Clinton drifted towards more tax-cut based policies than his democratic predecessors (I think). As a quirk of history, one party of the two major parties in the US is currently vehemently opposed to it. That is all. And that seems to me very slender grounds for excluding it from a website about "ideas worth spreading". If there were some concern about its intellectual credentials, that would be one thing. But it seems like a decent enough idea with an intellectual pedigree - people should know about it, so that when legislators are urged to embrace tax cuts, they can think "well, hang on, perhaps we need to balance this tax cut demand against another point of view". And that seems to be a legitimate broadening of the public discourse. So I can't say I really agree with TED's stance on this.
If your idea of photography is a pack-shot, then yes indeed. I thought this was a very interesting little article - it's not art or even reportage but photography for marketing is an enormous industry. Seemed like only a few years ago the whole industry had to change over to digital workflow - now it's all change again. (Middle-aged person disclaimer: I was a photographer's assistant around 2002-2004, and we still used large format film).
Why did he need a blog, let alone an MBA from Harvard, to do this? Because just quietly managing his money won't get him on to the speaking circuit.
The lesson is that people who make more money can make more money? But you know what? It really is criminal how little we invest in promising young people, making them drown in a pool of debt.
Oh, that cyclone fence piece is charming. Thanks for the links.
Wait, we're saying rich assholes and burning man participants are separate groups?
Oh dear. I went looking for the big jumps in money, trying to psyche myself up for a plan of attack on my own debt, and this wasn't what I was expecting: Paying off the $25k was easy–I used money that was just sitting around [September 8] Dude. DUDE.
MeFite fails to proofread in rush to post the first snarky thread summary, makes disastrous apostrophe failure.
oh shit it's that puppet from the interpol video
So for a whole 214 days he stopped going out with friends, ate in and lived with a couple of roommates? That isn't deprivation -- that's a half-season reality show.
No, Bunny. Only the majority will.
I've read My Side of the Mountain more times than I can count; it was my perfect fantasy life for many of my formative years. I recognize now that it was also likely the earliest (albeit fictional) example I'd encountered of a young person making it in the world entirely in his own way and, most importantly, almost entirely by educating himself—through books as well as trial and error. My oldest child is now approaching her own formative years. I think I am going to try to dig up my old paperback copy this weekend.
gagglezoomer: " Some people (more so the conservative-minded ones, I've found) have this almost irrational "debt-fright"." Interesting. You can see some of this in action in his Mission Accomplished post. He mentions that if he'd thought ahead and not imposed the deadline on himself, he wouldn't have had to sell certain things.
they keep watching the fucking show even though they haven't enjoyed it in 15 years? Probably longer, people were already saying the show had gone downhill for most of the so-called classic era.
. I'm of the opinion that it's impossible to have grown up or lived extensively in the DC area for most of the last 30 years without Chuck Brown having some sort of effect on your musical tastes. Bust loose in peace, indeed.
Is that like Evel Knievil lining up fifty sharks for a jump only to crash on landing?
Buckner's error, and the emphasis that has been place on it, has always stuck in my craw. The Sox had the Mets down to their last out, bases empty, two runs up. If Buckner would have fielded the ball, it would have still been a tie game. I lay more blame on Calvin Schiraldi and Bob Stanley (who wild pitched a run in) for the collapse. Buckner had a great career, and it is unfair for him to be saddled with this for the rest of his life. Fuck the Redsox pitchers. Let them burn in hell.
Given the number of people that aren't doing it But why should people in Mihalic's situation do what he did? As stated above, student loan debt is a very particular form of debt. He wasn't living above his means before he decided to pay off his student loans. In fact, he was almost certainly already living below his means, considering he was saving for retirement and other things. So he went from living below his means to living well below his means. Good for him, I guess.
Why are there still drops on the hard hat? Shouldn't those have blown off first? Not if it's a directed and narrow blast of air. Notice how the skin on the fingers isn't be blown? Air is being blown at the face, not the top of the head.
You're not going to change the status quo if you're afraid of upsetting the status quo.
Because hard-working, motivated, goal-oriented people piss me right the fuck off. People who were born in the right circumstances, with the right skills and with the right connections and expect everyone else to do as well as them piss me right the fuck off.
I'd love to see slow motion video of these faces in the wind.
Hanauer & Liu presenting the topic on Charlie Rose.
Humans will eventually devolve into to the part of the machine that shits and eats.
Apparently successful people sharing their experiences and life stories is now yet another thing metafilter doesn't do well. I think MetaFilter's doing it pretty well. Some people think it's inspiring, others think it's grating, and a discussion about the reasons for those different reactions. Nobody's been attacking anyone else, and things haven't gotten fighty. 'Metafilter doesn't do X well!' isn't a code-word for 'I disagreed with a lot of the commenters on a mefi thread.' Is there an income ceiling beyond which you just shouldn't have a personal website or blog? Not at all; there's a lot of interesting writing by people with high incomes. For example, Angelina Jolie's post about how easy it is to get a job if you just submit a lot of applications.
Then you have the suggestively compound nature of Aujourd'hui, literally, "on the day of this day", although in simple usage terms that is forgotten. Still, "On this day" might better translate the sense in which Camus is using it here. Or even "So this is the day". I'm sorry, no. It means "today". It is in no way "suggestively compound". It is how "today" is said. There is no other way. This is a simple declarative sentence. This is how Camus writes. "Mum died today. Or perhaps yesterday, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home. 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Yours faithfully.' This means nothing. Perhaps it was yesterday." The telegraphic style is perfectly evident.
Then you realize it was only effortless because Akroyd probably believes all that stuff and has spent most of life in crazytown. Oh, just because the guy sells vodka in bottles shaped like human skulls.
If someone in the top 1% of a particular subgroup, talks about the harrows and hardships of getting just a little bit higher, then, er, that's obviously not exactly as inspiring as someone down the bottom end of things? ... Regardless of the income, I'm a little surprised this made mefi, because there's about, oh, a zillion blogs on the same topic? And even this ahem, "really obscure" radio show called the Dave Ramsay Show, where people ring up multiple times a week, detailing the similar, or far more magnified sacrifices they made in order to pay off debt, along with books, and classes, suggesting all the same moves he has made. But what makes his tale more interesting is that he took this project on even though he really didn't need to. While he had his vague reasons for reducing his debt, the debt wasn't a serious obstacle to his goals--unlike, I'm guessing, the people who call up the Dave Ramsay show. "Guy with debt problems scrimps and saves to makes ends meet" isn't that interesting because, like you suggest, it's happening all the time, everywhere. "Rich guy who scrimps and saves to eliminate mountain of Harvard debt even though he doesn't have to do it if he doesn't want to" is just simply more interesting. Of course, this guy isn't more worthy than the other people who do this. He's just different. And different, to many people, means more interesting. (On the other hand, I'm also the kind of person who'd probably also be fascinated by other people, like the Dave Ramsay call-in folks, who made big lifestyle sacrifices to meet financial goals, so I could be a freak like that).
So, all your money is stuffed in a mattress? Got it. Stuffed in a mattress. Not, say, in a savings account that allows a bank to loan it out so I can get a car loan? A glut of money held by elites turned into leveraged loans to the middle class by banks - what could possibly go wrong?
He should try playing on one of the higher difficulty settings.
If you're unemployed you have no choice but to do these very things. I think this is where some of the ire is coming from. I hear you. I guess my perspective is skewed a bit by my having been raised middle class, then spending several years poor, then eventually being middle class again; I see "people with money saving money is [grar grar]" and I think "well, if people with money save money, then they'll have that money when they're unemployed", because I always assume employment and socioeconomic status ebb and flow.
TED is most certainly jumping the shark, and that may have to be in past tense. There are a lot of good people involved, trying to do good things, but in the aggregate TED is an echo chamber, a Davos-esque club of connected and influential people, who don't have a lot of connection with 99% of working class folks. (Not that they are the one-percenters, necessarily, but there's some of that, too). There's a lot more science going on at TED than anything else, but if there's gonna be a speech on economics, it's going to necessarily be political. Obviously someone at TED liked an approved this speech beforehand, but someone (else?) changed their mind afterwards, for fear of blowback from the Republican Party. TED, I expect better from you. When in the past decade has the Republican Party shown themselves to be worthy of that kind of consideration?
You know, as someone who had to borrow gas money just to get to work today, I actually do find this blot to be very inspiring. As in, I'm inspired to figure out a way to earn craploads of money. $1300 on monthly "entertainment" sounds like something I'd enjoy tremendously.
This is good. The gimmick is good and produces entertaining images, but they also swing between hilarity and body horror. Sometimes in the same photo. Now do it with dogs.
That is an amazing list of books for one, non-Michener/Clancy person to produce.
I remember all of them, but then I was a teenager working in a video store. I remember all of them, and I was a teenager not working in a video store. Oscar nominees, for better or for worse, tend to carry some cachet and get a higher profile. For a keener glimpse into the transitory nature of film acclaim, I present to you the domestic box office for October 7-9, 1994: the much-beloved The Shawshank Redemption is at the high-water mark of its box office clout, coming in at #8. Among the films ahead of it: The Specialist, Jason's Lyric, Timecop, The River Wild and Only You. Do you know anyone who has any of these in his or her library today? Anyone who has seen them more recently than, say, an airline flight in early 1995?
I'm just imagining the kid reading all this.
"So, all your money is stuffed in a mattress? Got it. Stuffed in a mattress. Not, say, in a savings account that allows a bank to loan it out so I can get a car loan?" All savings is not equal. If you don't understand this, then you should...and be silent until you do. For that matter, you should look into how actual banks work with regard to savings and lending, because you're wrong about that, too.
I also studied French for years and I remember that Maman means mother. I think if you kept "Maman" in italics it would be reasonable to expect people to know that it is not a name and to look it up if they are unfamiliar with the term. I do think "Mom" is the closest alternative but, as the author notes, is too jarring a word to work well. I can see the argument for Mama, but it sounds so affected... no one calls there mother Mama in the third person. "Ma" somehow conveys a stronger emotional attachment than "Mom" to me - both affection and irritation.
Man, this tape is still down at my parents'. I think it probably still works. I loved this thing, and just playing it for 5 minutes I still pretty much remember it word-for-word. Game 6, I had given up and went up to my bedroom to watch the last three outs on my little 13" black and white TV. Thanks for letting me hear Bob Murphy one more time say "The Mets will win the ballgame! The Mets win! They win!" I still say Bob Stanley was the goat of game 6.
>I guess this is as good a place as any to ask: Is Ghostbusters 2 any good? I got this everyone. No, it isn't. Bill Murray made it so he could get another film made, as a favor to the studio. The undeniably worst part of the movie is Peter MacNicol (who at the time the movie was released was most known to me as the gay kid from Dragonslayer.) But the rest of the plot is a re-hash of the first movie, and the jokes just aren't as funny.
So, what do these people look like, at rest?
Chavenet, do you know what "the waffle" is? Or are you assuming? I have no idea. It's the phrase that gets me. But I'm game: What's the Waffle?
.
Be careful who you cast as being "shunted out of the academy" before you know who you're talking about. If it will bother you less, please feel free to substitute "shunted out of the traditional academic career" or whatever phrasing you prefer. But where on earth would you get the idea that I was saying "only tenured professors can be scholars"? This seems like a total misreading, and a distraction from the real issues of the situation (much as I believe the "alt-ac" rebranding to be, since it focuses us on the culturally divisive question of what exactly gets accorded the cultural prestige of being called an 'academic' career and away from material questions about the working conditions of all people who work in universities). Everyone here seems to be in perfect agreement about the economic reality of the situation — that is, that Pannapacker is nuts to point to "alt-ac" as a viable "future of the academy" career track, because the jobs are just not there. It's a hashtaggy new name for a well-established line of work, in administrative and research and staff positions — and one that's grown massively in FTEs and salaries just as professors' salaries have shrunk and their positions have been replaced with adjunct labor, so no surprise that it seems attractive at the moment. It's certainly true that an administrative, library, or tech job is often better compensated, and sometimes more secure, than a teaching job in today's university. And it seems like many people invested in the "alt-ac" rebranding campaign are trying to use it as a corrective to feelings and attitudes (say, feeling marginalized, being treated as outside the 'scholarly' world, whatever), which is a fair enough issue to address as far as it goes — but some, like Pannapacker, are treating these epiphenomenal cultural-prestige concerns as though addressing them could somehow fix the economic destruction of the academy, which is of course impossible. "Alt-ac" jobs are not a viable alternative career track for any but a few well-positioned and lucky PhDs, and we shouldn't let questions of the cultural prestige of competing definitions of "intellectual" labor distract from the more important issue of the conditions and compensation under which we actually do that labor (all of us, alt- or not). Working on the "idea of what scholarship can be and do" is not the same thing as trying to shore up the material conditions under which scholars work.
I think I'm more comfortable with the Russian military pointing nukes at my head opposed to decommissioning them and having the plutonium vapourize into the ether. The ether being likely somewhere near Peshawar just east the Afghanistan border. Into the ether? Just how stupid do you think these governments are? The nuclear material will be powering a home near you.
Someone want to send Mr. Dixon $5 so he can weigh in here if he likes?
When a CEO says a new tech is cheaper what he means is that the practitioners demand less pay than the experienced ones in the old tech.
Even as a hack commercial photographer, you were aware that everything you did was about manipulating light. If you ever want to be good at creating good CGI, you'll come to the same realization.
In college, I was the subject of a comedy sketch about the argument I had after I told my girlfriend that I loved Diablo II and her in different ways. I was lying, though. I loved Diablo II a lot more than I loved her. A lot more. Lord knows Diablo II was more responsive and made a more convincing attempt to care about my feelings.
What kind of lifestyle can a single man have on $3000? In Manhattan, that's what a lot of people call "rent + utilities".
Can you BYOB to a bar your friends are hanging out at? Please don't do this. If you aren't going to buy a drink, don't bring your own.
I'm sorry I never saw him play. RIP. .
You can watch the first documentary at the HBO site whether or not you are a subscriber.
exlotuseater, I'm pretty sure that it was indeed redacted from Sean Dixon's blog. But he included a link to GoodReads, where the student left a comment with his full email address. (I followed the link from the kid's comment on Dixon's page; it just went to the kid's Blogger profile, which did not include his address.)
With the possible exception of Amadeus, who remembers any of these films today? Um... Well, The Killing Fields is hugely important as far as historical films go, and also is hugely important if you're a Spalding Grey fan, as the filming of it forms the basis for Swimming To Cambodia. So, I'd say, a fuckton of people remember The Killing Fields for a variety of reasons.
My wonderful grandfather got sucked into an envelope-stuffing scam in the last years of his life. He had developed some cognitive problems in his later years and began to accumulate papers and other ephemera, but so slowly and gradually that no one noticed or was willing to point out what had become an 800 lb gorilla until it was way, way too late. When we went into his house to take care of his estate, it was in impeccable order, with the exception of the office and basement, both of which were stacked wall to ceiling with stuff, with a tunnel cut through that an adult man couLd just barely squeeze through. In going through those papers, we discovered that he was (literally) neck deep in a letter stuffing scam. My grandmother ended up spending a couple of years stuffing envelopes to recoup the significant investment he had made and pay off the enormous debt that he had been hiding from her. What a way to spend the years after your husband's death.
Blow wind, blow wind, blow my baby back to me.
.
Pretty interesting. I'd love to learn more about the entire effort. I think it is the case, generally, that there is low take-up of medical care and other in-kind transfers among low income families. The notion that lowering the transaction costs could increase that take-up is something worth considering, particularly given the significant gains to early childhood interventions that I'm constantly reading about in the economics literature these days -- paper after paper finding large returns extending well into adulthood. That said, I realize the post is focused purely on the efforts of a private group's solution to doing this, but the idea that we maybe could try more push in place of pull policies seems worth experimenting with.
Diablo III is so going to wreck lives. At least Blizzard released it as the semester is ending.
> how many times is the phrase "Lacuna Cabal" mentioned in the author's post? A fuckton. It's mentioned twice in the article, and three times in the blog's title and sidebar. As this is the author's promotional blog about the book, I think he's been quite restrained.
I'm starting to wonder if more than half of all mefites can write their own user numbers.
Watching Ghostbusters right now. Funny. Weaver was beautiful.
Maryland = Sub-machinegun
I think the only commentary I played all the way through was Dawn of the Dead with Romero and Savini. If you like Romero, there's a swell extra on the DVD of 'Tales of Hoffmann'.
I'm kind of disappointed that they didn't explain how bidding fee auctions work, since those seem to be a popular source of the "$18 iPad!" bullshit lately.
I'd never heard of Krug before this. So, I guess they won this round. Although, I dislike them on principle more than I dislike the idea Burning Man. So... can we call it a draw?
I recently read that interview in The Millions and just got Satantango from the library. While my wife and daughter are gone for a week this summer, I'm hoping to get a good bottle of wine and watch the whole film in one day.
Illinois = Upside-down pregnant lawn gnome. Iowa = 75% Vowel Ohio = 75% Vowel Why O Ming = Is it a state or a sentence? O hi O = Is it...no, it's not.
Just for one example, Facebook has an estimated market cap of 100 billion USD, yet only employs 3,500 people (directly.) That's a lot of money and scant few jobs. Directly, which you said. As a point of comparison, Zynga employs about 3,500 people, too, and Zynga is highly, highly reliant on Facebook's platform. And while Zynga is certainly the most famous, if not literally the largest, there are hundreds of other similar businesses.
Oh, and The Real Ghostbusters cartoon was awesome. I preferred the real Ghostbusters cartoon, personally.
Well, either way they have suddenly massively increased the audience of Nick Hanauer. It would probably have been another random talk on TED; now it's the message TED are trying to suppress because it appears to challenge The System too much. I'm sure he can crank out another speech that is recorded in front of a live audience and get X times more viewers than he would have had previously.
The Killing Fields is a very good movie, I'd suggest anyone watch it.
I don't know what the second and third sentences of the novel are, but I don't think it's true that most people would parse "Maman died today" or "Today, Maman died" as referring to the narrator's mother. I think the most common read would be that Maman was a name.
"a free, open-source, relatively easy-to-use software package called Blender. Holy crapamole, unless Blender has dramatically improved since I used it last (a few years ago, I grant), that is a wildly optimistic statement. Relative to what? Writing your own program? Maybe.
and I believe this kid is a native English speaker, not an ELL or ESL student I'm curious why you believe that. I'm pretty sure he's Indian, making him very likely to be ESL.
How am I just now hearing about this?
.
We are both too slow.
Sounds like an excellent subject for a TED talk, maybe with a tie-in to the next Gathering.
Fantastic post.
You know, like how women can be considered a minority? Or a fringe group, even.
The key sentence to me seems to be the second one of the novel, where the not being sure of whether it was today or yesterday paints a very concise picture of existential doubt. The first sentence is designed to shock, the second to confuse (and reflect eternal confusion).
Everyone knows Michigan is America's high-five.
some of what he says is true, if you're a hack photographer whose clients have no taste or sense. Welcome to advertising.
If I had a life's savings of 25K I certainly wouldn't make it vanish overnight to pay off a low-interest loan, for example. Some people (more so the conservative-minded ones, I've found) have this almost irrational "debt-fright". One of my friends, for example, makes around $200,000 a year but wouldn't spend more than $8500 for a car when he needed one because that's all he had in his savings. Without even remarking on how stupid it is to drain your savings to buy a car, I couldn't figure out why he wouldn't just take out a fucking 2 or 3 year 2.5% loan and buy a nice car.
Not to derail, but the second clause here is an offensive non-sequitor: My family was not religious at all and I derived my whole sense of morality and right and wrong from books.
Now do it with dogs. And Republicans! But stronger wind on the Republicans, please. Much stronger.
And, of course, at that point, why not update all fiction regardless of what language it was written in.
Before you dismiss them offhand for their 'indie' band name, Here We Go Magic actually make pretty good music. no. no, in this case, they must be dismissed. that name is intolerable. Agreed. That name is too cute and too indie, to be allowed to exist without merciless ridicule. Shit, I can literally smell the music they're going to make for Apple and HP and Dell and Honda in the near future... They must be dismissed, with extreme prejudice. Unless John Waters likes them. Then they're okay in my book.
This is pretty sad. =( Is the book good?
Brandon Blatcher: "a lot of people will take it as attack of sorts when said Harvard Graduate talks about how paying off debt isn't rocket science." I totally understand that. But my impression here, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, is that he's talking about paying off his own debt not being rocket science. Not the paying off debt in general.
I kind of love this. I'll be buying a book or two. The idea reminds me of one of my favorite books and it's set in one of my favorite cities. Also, Gilgamesh!
I think if you kept "Maman" in italics it would be reasonable to expect people to know that it is not a name and to look it up if they are unfamiliar with the term. I think that this is the worry with leaving the word untranslated. By saying "Maman" you're acknowledging that the meaning is hard to put into English, yet you're expecting somebody who knows no French to translate it by looking it up or using rudimentary French (I assume skilled French speakers would go straight to the French original). I feel as though the translater is pushing the work onto a reader who is not only less likely to know what the word means, but much less likely to know that there is some ambiguity in the English translation. The hurdle is only overcome by not letting anybody know there is a hurdle in the first place. You're effectively damning the reader to never understand exactly what the word means, rather than the partial understanding you can give by saying "Mum" or "Mom" instead. "Maman" is a bad choice.
Haha yeah, and Radioactive Man was one of the SNPP capsules I read earlier where people said stuff like "Gee, the writers have really run out of ideas!" I've always been curious which Simpsons writer is responsible for introducing the most memes into pop culture. It's not a Swartzwelder ep, but "The PTA Disbands" alone has the Slashdot favorite "In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!", Jasper's "That's a paddlin'", and the idea of Canada being all "tucked away down there". The density of classic bits in that episode makes me wish Jennifer Crittenden wrote more episodes.
oh how I pine for the three minute edit window! I have a friend who once found a 4'x4' box at a thrift store. It was filled to the brim with hot pink trucker hats that all said the same thing:
VIRGINA BEACH
I can't keep up with the Twitterverse: as vzafrin hints, the relevant hashtag has changed to altac.
And weirder/scarier still is how obesity makes the merely overweight feel/seem/imagine themselves to be normal. I can't tell you how many times a man at 200 lbs or a woman at 175 who was 30 pounds lighter a decade ago feels that they are at a healthy weight because they aren't as fat as their obese colleague or friend.
Today, the '86 World Series is remembered mostly because of Bill Buckner, who committed one of the great errors in baseball history when he let Mookie Wilson's soft grounder roll between his legs, allowing the Mets to win the game. But let's not remember it for that alone. Let's remember it because of the arrogant, swaggering, drunken Mets. They were the last of a long line, and when they passed, the glory days of professional baseball passed with them.
At the risk of sounding old... what is it with kids now in high school being unable to write complete sentences with punctuation and capitalization? Sentences written by these bright young things always end up as long, rambling, impossible to read fragments that would be even shunned on fanfiction.net. I don't get it.
Phalene: point takem. But if you look at the ages on our profiles you can see that were about a generation apart in age which would explain differences in our experiences and thus attitudes.
On a personal note she, Gary Paulsen, and JRR Tolkien are probably the reasons I am a fairly successful, reading-loving adult today. My family was not religious at all and I derived my whole sense of morality and right and wrong from books. .
There is surely room for humanities PhDs with IT expertise to remain around academia by administering automated grading tools and whatnot. I'd hope they negotiate salaries and benefits akin to industry IT workers though. There is however no good reason for anyone with a PhD to teach a semester long university level class for only $5k though. Academic social status is not worth going without healthcare, never saving any money for retirement, never buying a house, never contributing to your kids collage, etc. Also, there is a respectable chance that many lesser universities will fail when the student loan debt bubble bursts. I suppose the income based repayment system has postponed that bubble bursting by offering a continual bailout, but the for-profit universities will surely maximize their milking until congress changes its mind. Academia's fringes could easily find themselves unemployed with kids who cannot attend university because student loans are no longer being granted for middling universities. You know, many countries have good public universities with tough admissions criteria along with less well respected expensive private non-profit universities that admit whoever can pay but offer minimal financial aid or loan opportunities. America could wind up following that model within a decade or two.
Oh, for heaven's sake. I'm in Ohio and even I can quite clearly see that Michigan is the freaking mitten. Minnesota is a blob with a weirdly disproportionate tail.
John Waters's untitled [book] "undercover travel adventure" This was actually my first thought a stunt for a book. He should have taken Rt. 10 or something, more cultural contrast. He should be taking back roads. Rt.70 is fairly benign.
Since my daughter had a crown on a baby tooth; yeah, they do that.
This was the first book I read in French for High School French (in New Zealand). That first sentence has stayed with me ever since for over 30 years. It is very powerful indeed. I always translated it, in my head, as "Today my Mother died". That may not be technically correct but that those are the "translated" words for me. When my Mother died, that sentence had special resonance. As to process of translation itself I always think of the saying, Italian I think, that says something like "Translation is like a mistress: when she is beautiful, she is rarely faithful, and when she is faithful, she is rarely beautiful". No doubt that applies to the translation itself!
I liked a lot of the players individually, but man, did I hate that team. I have a vague recollection of a column in SI (Rick Reilly maybe, because I'm pretty sure it was on the last page) right after the Mets won the Series titled, "10 Reasons to Hate the Mets." The list began thusly: 1. Gary Carter 2. Gary Carter 3. Gary Carter OT, though, great post.
Why do YOU think a Harvard MBA would start publishing a blog on money management, using his goofy personal experience to sell it in a kind of perverse Morgan Spurlockesque fashion? Why does anyone start a blog? To document their life, or some specific part of it. I did wrote a blog for awhile about my weight loss without the slightest thought of anyone ever reading or caring.
I'm happy he paid off his debt. I'm happy he made a decision and stuck to it. But I have become horrifically cynical lately. I hope this is in earnest, But it's very hard, at this moment, when the discussion of lowering student debt has come to the mainstream, and when the president is addressing it, for me not to feel like maybe, just maybe, there is something else going on here. Because the hidden narrative, as mentioned above, is that students can pay off their debts, all they need to do is tighten their belt buckle a little. Now, maybe this isn't meant as a self-help guide for anybody else but the guy writing. But it's an awful useful time for this narrative to be coming out. It reminds me a bit of that guy who pretended to be homeless just to show that he could get himself off the streets and into a pretty okay life in a short while, but neglected to recognize that a lot of homeless people have unaddressed mental illness, which he didn't. The takeaway shouldn't be: Gosh, it's easy to get off the street. It should be: Gosh, it's easy to get off the streets if you're a college educated white man with no mental illness. In the same way, it's pretty easy to pay down debt if you have thousands of dollars to spend per month on entertainment. If you have so little that you're just barely managing to pay what's due, you may not be able to pay what you owe, and that's often the case for college grads who are burdened with massive debt. I mean, bully for this guy, but that means nothing for people who don't share his circumstance.
Michigan = mitten Wisconsin = oven mitt Florida = wang
Some ideas throw sand in people's faces, suck it up. posted by Cosine at 5:50 AM on May 17 Precisely. I despise the sort of "liberalism" or "open-mindedness" that refuses to recognise that not only some ideas but also some plain facts irritate the hell out of some people, and which is so weak and gutless it runs and hides from the slightest sniff of such things. Not that I'm saying that this particular idea is a plain fact, but that the principle of avoiding provocative or challenging ideas for fear of conflict - political or otherwise - is craven and weak. There are plenty of venues for shouting at each other; it seems there's room for at least one where people just talk. posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:43 AM on May 17 So long as they don't say anything to upset the vicar and dear old granny, eh? TED's motto is "Ideas Worth Spreading". Perhaps they should change it to "Ideas Worth spreading So Long as They Don't Make Anyone Feel At All Uncomfortable".
Sounds like a repeat of the talk of computers replacing musicians that play instruments.
This isn't about his actual words Honestly, I doubt most people even read the article, just the blurb at the top of this page. Why let the facts get in the way of ranting against the well off?
.
How am I just now hearing about this? You haven't been listening to your Simpsons DVD commentary.
That's pretty mean-spirited. One could re-run the exercise for any candidate and get insane stereotype-fitting comments, particularly with choice of forum. This reflects much worse on Time than RP.
I don't think I've ever read the transcript of a TED talk before. Distilled down to text its about 2.5 minutes of reading. Somehow seems to take the wind out of their sails doesn't it? That all "their great ideas worth spreading" could be blurbs on the back of a paperback novel? Well, the MAXIMUM time for a TED talk is 20 minutes. Many of them don't run that long. I seem to remember during junior high speech class learning that a single page of double spaced pica type (yes, I'm old enough that typing was done on a machine which had two choices, pica and elite... what of it?) would yield around a minute of spoken word. So, I have no idea how long this would be if actually given as a talk. I'm betting around 10 minutes, but that's just a hunch, not based on anything other than reading it through once. (Also, if it takes you 2.5 minutes to read the blurbs on the back of a paperback, you really need some help.)
Hey, take a look at my Harvard debt blog. It's about how I payed off my Harvard student loans resulting from my MBA at Harvard. It sure was hard to pay off all that debt racked up from Harvard that resulted from my earning a Harvard degree. Did you know I went to Harvard? Harvard.
How is what he did a "kindly act?" The kid asked, in so many words, -I didn't read your book, so would you please write my book report for me-. No, he didn't write the kid's book report. He wrote the kid a summary and told said urchin to be sure to tell his teacher that the summary was written by the author of the book if he turned it in. That is not writing a book report for a student. The kid didn't even need to turn it in; he needed to do a project about the book. Lying? About what? I have lots of other things for my other classes as well, and if I dont do well on this project then my mark will go down by a lot, and my favorite uncle just died today as well, so I can't focus on anythings at all! :( so please help me!! OK, maybe his favorite uncle really did die that day, in which case his teachers would probably grant him an extension on his assignments, so why bring it up? It sounds like a dog:homework:consumed excuse to me, but then when I left my computer on the train the week before finals, I was really not looking forward to telling my professors, just because it sounded like such a shite excuse. So maybe he's a perfectly truthful and non-manipulative child who just happens to want people to do his homework for them. I'm pretty sure he's Indian, making him very likely to be ESL. I'm sure this depends on where you're from, but I'd assume the exact opposite. Most of the East Indians I know under the age of 25 were born in the US.
Park Slope is still just for new moms. Don't forget the lesbians and writers!
OMG...OMG...OMG...OMG...OMG...this is terrible wait...no, no it's not.... When burning man stopped being a free event on the beach and started costing in the range of $300 to attend it sort of stopped being able to decry commercialism... Just my opinion folks.... don't burn me for it.... heh
Soon the viewing of photography will be replaced by software, and the circle will be complete.
Chuck Brown: DC Legend, Godfather of Go-Go and originator of some of the breakbeats that laid the foundation for hip-hop has passed away. Here's his live set at the 9:30 club from a few years ago. 2, 3, 4
Look at the photo shoot!!!! A TON of people are wearing those fakey native headdresses!!! (I mean, in theory those people could all be native folks who decided to wear some kind of regalia to a champagne dinner, but that seems vanishingly unlikely.) Okay, see, all this fuss about native headdresses and appropriation - I thought it was overblown and that no one actually did that. Partly because here in the Midwest we don't have has many cutting edge hipsters and partly because, I guess, there are a lot of actual native people where I live and you'd get called out or punched in the nose pretty quick. So when people were all "burning man, it's full of hipster racists in fake native clothes", I was like "oh, there are probably two. everyone knows that's dumb and gross." But there they are at the Krug dinner, for all the world to see and admire. I have to admit, I find that far more shocking than the Krug thing. That white folks who are almost certainly educated, either well off tech industry/arts types or slumming and probably socially liberal do something as tacky, crass and offensive as that in photos...I am genuinely shocked. It occurs to me that native headdresses are like the hipster/rich/media elite version of those racist blackface parties frat kids throw. I'm not kidding, I am actually shocked.
Ah, yes. The Hawaiian peninsula. It's a hell of a long drive from Los Angeles to Honolulu, but totally worth it.
I'm opposed to Maman as well, for overglow's reason -- fewer readers than you think would understand it isn't a name (although in a sense it is). The main problem with any of the English words is that they vary considerably according to culture. "Mom" works for me, that's what I grew up with, but is clearly American compared with "Mum" or "Mummy". The various "Mummy/Mommy/Mama" diminutives are further culturally divided; Americans would recognize "Mama" -- or even more so, "Ma" -- as a ruralism, most likely Southern. Then you have the suggestively compound nature of Aujourd'hui, literally, "on the day of this day", although in simple usage terms that is forgotten. Still, "On this day" might better translate the sense in which Camus is using it here. Or even "So this is the day". This starts to edge into quite subjective territory, of course, but that's the whole thing. I probably would also like the finality of "is dead" rather than any other verbal form of "die". English does have the problem of bowlderized phrases here such as "passed [away]" which might even convey the issue of fluid and uncertain timing better, but get away from the bluntness of emotion.
How does 900 equal zero? Thinking more broadly, until and unless the USA and other countries disarm, they have absolutely no leg to stand on morally when it comes to lecturing other countries (e.g. Iran) about nuclear weapons. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. Unless you believe in US exceptionalism (I know, I know) and that they have some god-given right to nukes that is not possessed by other countries, every time a US President opens his mouth about disarmament all that comes out of his mouth is cant and hypocrisy. Mind you, the UK is worse. That's just the last tattered remnant of their pretensions to Great Power status. If they didn't have nukes you'd really have to ask why they got a permanent seat at the UN security council. They can't afford them, and who do they think they're going to blow up anyway?
EmpressCallipygos: "it's more like "good god I"ve had to listen to stuff like this from my mother for the past 5 years because she's a Glenn Beck addict and she's always sending me these financial-planning workbooks because she just doesn't freakin' get it and oh god here comes another one grar snarl foam bleh"." Heh. :) Yeah, I understand now. Been there. Went to the lectures. Bought the damned workbooks....
Also, adhere strictly to the "Ghostbusters Principle" when interviewing for a job: "Ray, when someone asks if you're a god? You. Say. Yes."
Hanauer delivered to a lower standard. That would be relevant, if it had something to do with Chris Andersen's rationale for not publishing the video.
. I read MSotM in 6th grade. It was my favorite book, and gave me a sense of fierce independence that I've never been able to shake.
For that matter, you should look into how actual banks work with regard to savings and lending Yes, please educate me on how banks print money and lend it to people. What's that? They don't print the money they lend? It comes from ... Wait for it ... Savings and investments made by others? Who the hell are you? Ochocinco, is that you? 4:54 in the clip. His point about how the rich don't buy things is poppycock, and your derision is equally foolish. He says the rich can't play an impactful role in an economy because they can't buy enough pants, ignoring the fact that money not spents on pants is saved in accounts, not stored in vaults. If you don't get the difference, I can't help you; there is no discussion to be had here because you're (willfully?) ignorant of something as fundamental as gravity.
. The last supper.
I lay more blame on Calvin Schiraldi and Bob Stanley For me the lasting memory of that series is not the Buckner error but the rolling-eyeball look of terror on Calvin Schiraldi's face as he stood on the mound knowing in his heart that he was about to blow it and there was nothing he could do about it. He looked like a dog tied to a train track.
Yes, this is a landmark demographic shift, but the idea that minorities together comprise some sort of group is fallacious. They often don't have common interests or, sometimes, cultures. Asians have the highest per-capita incomes and educational attainment, even more so than whites. Blacks have the lowest (yet African immigrants have the highest educational attainment of any immigrant group). Hispanics are somewhere in the middle of income/education. People don't perceive unity within groups as well. Cuban-Americans aren't necessarily BFFs with Mexican-Americans. Hmong and Japanese have little in common with each other - not language, not (usually) religion, not food, not income. This Indian CEO has barely anything in common with this undocumented Latino immigrant or these exploited Native American girls except they all have a darker skin color than most whites. As long as these major differences persist, this development is kind of meaningless for white people's stranglehold on political power and wealth.
A single, unattached person with a high salary can pay down huge debts quickly by cutting back on certain unnecessary lifestyle expenses. Was it not kind of a foregone conclusion? He did way more than cut down expenses. He rented rooms in his house, took on additional jobs (pedicab? Really?), sold a lot of possessions. Speaking from my own experience, these are things that sound easy in theory but actually following through is hard.
You aren't a Ghostbusters nerd until you've played the Ghostbusters RPG. And afterwards you'll never be anything else.
The best argument against ICBMs is that eliminating them is that ICBMs are targets for counterforce strikes. A couple hundred nukes apiece would be enough to flatten each other's cities (and perhaps end civilization), but when the enemy's nukes are sitting in fixed locations in silos the temptation is to try to destroy their nuclear deterrent with a first strike. Counterforce, counter-counterforce and next thing you know both sides have ten thousand. Submarines at sea aren't vulnerable to counterforce strikes, and so a much smaller number of SLBMs missiles is enough to guarantee that destruction would be mutually assured. Of course, submarine launched missiles are a fine example of the paradox of deterrence: if the enemy has already destroyed your country, shooting back seems like pointless slaughter. The answer seems to be that uncertainty is enough. No one actually knows what British submarines would do if the Russians destroyed London. The answer is written in the form of a letter from the Prime Minister to each submarine Captain, but that letter is locked in a safe within a safe in each ship's control room, and will not be read unless it is needed. The Letter of Last Resort. Anyhow, we can't pull a Superman and fling surplus nukes into space, but we could use them to fling ourselves into space. Who cares about fallout, we're going to Callisto!
You haven't been listening to your Simpsons DVD commentary. I think the only commentary I played all the way through was Dawn of the Dead with Romero and Savini.
This medical student remembers when he was only $101k in debt.
You guys are correct. The adult rate is 35.7% That's obesity only. According to 2007-8 statistics, overweight and obese combined is close to 70%, exactly as stated in the post.
"Grand poobahs"? I like it! It has a nice ring. I didn't understand the author's synopsis of his book though
I want to date anyone who would put a picture like this as their online dating photo. provided it isn't a particularly gummy one
I just find it amusing that people are even criticizing how he stopped spending money. Haters got to hate.
Giving head?
Wow. But if you've read Role Models, well, this is oddly unsurprising.
False premise. You cannot overthink Ghostbusters. For example, if you wanted to start a days, perhaps weeks long debate within your geek circle, drop this little bombshell: Ghostbusters is the only successful adaptation of Lovecraft Mythos to the big screen - simply because the mythos allowed its creator, fans, the director and screenwriters to take liberties with canon that rewarded innovation and originality, by its very nature as a shared world-building exercise.
It was the workflow that changed everything. On the shoot your client would be reviewing your images instantly, standing next to you, and the assistant was now mocking up the ads on a laptop there and then (rather than making tea and chatting and occasionally loading a camera). Interesting, I can believe it. Do you find it ultimately better or worse to get fast feedback? On one hand it can be obnoxious but on the other hand it makes it less likely to spend time going down a blind alley that might be more difficult to get paid for.
Obligatory Michigan T-shirt links: - Michigan - The Best-shaped State in the Union - Bi-Peninsular and Proud
vegartanipla: "There is a lot of inner upper lip and gums in these photos. More than I needed to see, really" I love those. I love smiles like Vanessa Bayer's, where you're like, "Holy shit! There's a skull inside that face!"
For those outside NY, it was not a particularly appealing group of players You shut your goddamn mouth. I received my first baseball card in 1988 (at the age of 8) a duplicate poorly conditioned Tops Dwight Gooden card. Thus began my obsession with all things New York Mets. Over the next few years I would be the lone blue hat in a sea of friends rooting for the Red Sox. It is surreal to try to imagine rooting against all environmental instincts at that age (I also became a Giants fan for entirely circumstantial reasons, but I digress...) By the peak of my baseball collecting around 1993 I had amassed a staggering binder of almost 200 Doc Gooden cards. Especially by this year, with his career firmly in decline, the bewilderment on the faces of store owners as I plunked down hard earned allowance for obscure prints of this coked up has-been. It was my joy. Of course, given the timing, I learned about this particular '86 team entirely in retrospect, but that didn't make it any less grand. I studied them avidly. I had great stats, like one year Doc Gooden hit more home runs as a pitcher than my buddy's favorite player, Wade Boggs (I don't even know if it was accurate...) Because there was no internet, I had this entirely skewed perception of who these guys were because it was through the lens of baseball stats and magazines and 8-year old naivete. "Not particularly appealing"? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder my friend.
Cmon now, howm I sposed to make it rain on less than $1,300/month?? Completely unrealistic.
A lot of the problems in the present monetary paradigm are due to the fact that the most money you can possibly make (or lose, sucks to be JP Morgan right now) is made in betting on the activities of real economic actors. It is far better to trade stock in a publicly-traded company, than it is to work in it, be a customer of it, or even lend money to it in the ordinary manner. The big money is in stock market volatility. I bet that stock X will go up, you bet it will go down; one of us wins and one of us loses. If stock X gains much of its value from this exact activity, ie trading in stocks and derivatives, perhaps on a longer timeframe than the ordinary investor does, this amplifies the problem of the separation of real economic activity from betting on economic activity. The solution to this is supposed to be index funds, but given that index funds are drawn from the highest-value companies, and many of the highest-value companies are themselves stock traders, there is still a risk of cascading crashes (or cascading gains, which sounds great until we remember that they to actually get paid out they must be matched by losses on another side, and losses are limited). Then there's brokerage, which is a "tax" of sorts on every transaction whether it wins or loses. This is part of the argument for transaction taxes, which is a separate issue entirely. (Many traders neither notice nor care about variations in brokerage; very few bother to do proper market comparisons and the major effect it has is to move the profit point. For this among many other reasons, brokers squealing about transaction taxes being an onerous imposition is just self-serving bullshit.)
This is epony-frickin'-awesome. So is this.
Gummy bares.
I used to not know that soda was loaded with sugar and had a ton of calories in it Really?
I had a friend who did something similar - he paid down a lot of debt in a short period of time by moving to a shitty, tiny basement apartment, staying in most nights and tutoring 5 days a week on top of his sub-$30K job. I have about $25K of credit card debt, down from about $45K a few years ago. It's been hanging over my head for about 7 years now. I have a good job now, but I've had periods of unemployment where it caused intense anxiety. I came very close to going bankrupt (and in retrospect, I probably would be better off if I had, although there were extenuating circumstances). On my current repayment schedule, it will probably take me another 2.5 - 3 years to be debt free. This guy had a lot of options that I don't (selling a car, savings in the bank etc.). That said, a lot of his choices are possible for me -- I just don't want to make them. For example, I don't have spare rooms that I could rent out, but I could choose to move to a shared apartment. I could stop going out and spending on food, drinks and entertainment -- but I choose to have a social life. I think those choices are important to my mental well-being. I guess in the end I have chosen long-term, low level anxiety over debt over a short-term period of concentrated misery.
Calling your mother "Maman" in English is more fauntleroyesque than meursaultian.
I suppose it would have been better if he had written in terms of percentages. It's a bit blargh worthy when one reads about someone's former "entertainment" budget equaling more than half of one's monthly paycheck. There's nothing wrong with his blog or his desire to share it. Given the 99% tendencies of Metafilter, it might have been a bit strange not to expect this type of response. I'm all for someone paying off their debt, but like someone mentioned above, don't expect me to cheer exuberantly for them when they swim across the English Channel towed by a powerboat.
Artists of One Kind: You're Being Replaced by Artists of Another Kind
At Burning Man 2011, select participants were invited to an elaborate champagne dinner party, with food prepared by New York City chef Phil Winser of The Fat Radish. But who hosted the party, what was the reason for the dinner, and why were only certain participants invited? Well, the dinner was a marketing campaign for Krug.

With Burning Man as a backdrop, Krug's marketing team and events agency invited society bloggers and publications such as Town & Country and W Magazine to photograph and write about the "exclusive" dinner for its brand loyalists, with the intent of getting extensive coverage and brand exposure. After the dinner and photo shoot, Krug's teams abandoned the setup and left the entire mess for Burning Man to clean up. When the New York Times asked Krug's brand director Carl Heline about Burning Man, he remarked, "It's not that different than Fashion Week." Burning Man has a long-standing policy regarding advertising at and commodification of the event. While Burning Man allows media members to publish photographs for editorial purposes, Burning Man does not permit the use of images for branded articles and product placement. Outraged by Krug's marketing campaign and disregard for Burning Man's 10 Principles, the Burning Man community has been voicing their opinions of Krug on Twitter and Facebook. Burning Man organizers have posted the entire story on The Burning Blog.
That is an unusually enjoyable wiki link. Swartzwelder sounds like Ron Swanson. According to Matt Groening, Swartzwelder used to write episodes while sitting in a booth at a coffee shop "drinking copious amounts of coffee and smoking endless cigarettes". When California passed an anti-smoking law, Swartzwelder bought the diner booth and installed it in his house, allowing him to continue his process in peace.
My Side of the Mountain was the inspiration for many hours of playing in my backyard as a child -- somewhat impressive considering most of my waking childhood hours were spent inside with books. .
Hey, does anyone know what $5 wrinkle trick that mom discovered? Lots of Scotch Tape.
.
Honestly it would have been way more entertaining if the author did troll the kid.
Creepy!
What an awful assignment. Frankly, I find it hard to fault the kid or the author, given the appalling "do little bits of amateur art about a theme in the book" routine. My dad used to tell me about having professors assign collage-making during the heady days of the late sixties and early seventies and how dismayed he was to have to turn in a collage of magazine fragments "representing", say, The Faerie Queen. (Not that you couldn't make a complex and sophisticated collage about The Faerie Queen, but that generally was not what was expected or produced.) If my memory of HS english serves me well, it's difficult enough to get the kids to read well enough to get through a grown-up novel and then teach them to have some thoughts about its content and purpose and then to articulate those thoughts in a readable form. Making a mix tape or a comic or a collage to express your feelings about The Member of the Wedding or whatever is, perversely, only fun and instructive after you're a sophisticated-enough reader to get something out of the text. (Actually, I loathed that book.)
Yes, it is clear that his situation and strategies are not applicable to low- or even middle-income people for the most part. That does not mean that what he is talking about isn't interesting.
Teaching, not grading ought to be a teacher's job and if software grades similarly to human readers, that is probably due to the grading criteria, which are practical at best and often awful. Les Perelman [...[ has crusaded against automated essay grading by writing and speaking widely of his own, successful efforts to fool the Educational Testing Services' e-Rater, which has been used to grade the GRE and the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), into giving good scores to incoherent essays carefully crafted by Perelman to exploit its flaws.
I'm with spacewaitress on this one. Est Morte is not past tense, as the translations suggest, but present tense. Now my French is so long behind me that I'm not sure if this is idomatic or something. But literally translated it is, Today, Maman is dead. (I'd leave the Maman because it's very specific to French. Deal with it in a footnote. Doesn't it change the meaning of the sentense and the tone and feeling of the sentiment? It implies that a world has changed. In one day, the protagonist has gone from son to orphan, everything is different. It opens the door to dispair and lonliness and a special kind of alone-ness.
I make sure to never get out of debt so I can stay in touch with the people.
.
The rhetoric of the war on obesity, and on weight loss as a universal panacea for the evils of obesity is misguided, I think. Weight loss through dieting is not sustainable for most people, but healthy habits can improve your health outcomes, regardless of whether you are thin or fat. Pretending that fatness is the whole problem gives unhealthy thin people the false idea that if their BMI is under a certain number, they are fine. It also tells fat people that if their healthy habits are not causing them to lose weight, they are pointless.
Also I would pin the kid on being a native English speaker, simply because in general the native English speaking students I've met tend to be a lot more terrible at writing in English than non-native English speaking students.
I guess this is as good a place as any to ask: Is Ghostbusters 2 any good?
That is super practical, the rest of us can just get right on figuring out what to do with our extra cars and motorcycles and extra rooms in the houses we own. Who said that he's targeting people like you with his writing? Not everything published online has to apply to you or me for that matter.
Student loan debt should be proportional to average-income post-graduation for each different major. There. I said it.
So, I'm trying to think of a one word response to this, and considered the following: hmmmm odd weird strange dangerous fun neat interesting worried Good idea didn't qualify because it isn't one word and because it isn't.
Why does it make more sense for millions of wealthy parents to pack individual lunches when the school systems, which already have the economies of scale to feed millions of kids, can do so? Or do the poor kids not deserve healthy meals too? Because it's called responsibility. You don't have to be wealthy to pack a peanut butter sandwich with a banana.
i must not be the audience for this. it took me reading several comments until i realized i was confusing Keurig and Krug. the first reference to champagne had me thinking "is that their new coffee machine? what a strange name. is it a flavor of coffee?" but the comment about it costing $150 a bottle finally clued me in.

I WILL FUCK JLOO
wow 539,365,871 viewer with 968,307 likes, and 73,919 dislikes
magnifique le clip
Shakira's dancing makes me go WAKA WAKA ZHOM MINA MINA...
737,861,787 Views ! 1,203,078 Like And 2,558,940 Dislicke OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
haha fail :(
i want my comment be the one......!! just in vain
i will be rich and famous soon and wipe this kid off the planet
737,905,665
bieber better than ''EMINEM"?? arghahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.are you comedian?? ahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!
i like this lady gaga beat, smallz- bang bang (remix), pls view.
bagaimana saya bisa lihat video supaya tdk terputus putus
thumbs if you find funny troll beliebers
I like the 2,558,936 people that dislike dis fuckin' song.
gogogogooooo monster gogogoogogooooooo con todo monster mas reproducciones mas comentarios mas likes y mas millones x gaga googogogogooooo monster
A my mamy swoje koko!!
sexy my nuts
539.365.871
Please visit my page at 2001alasia. Thanks for your support!
Watch an awesome little girl sing her heart out......please visit Jesse Dee Just a Dream...an amazing song performed by Jesse Dee, written and composed by Jesse Dee ......10 year old with soul
Niall Horan did better .. :) And he rapped too! (;
2 years later and still watching! Hope they make another one like this for next FIFA.^^
this video sucks!! LOL!! guys checkout my newly created blog. its myhornylittlesister.blogspot.com Watch Videos 100% FREE!!! more hot videos to cum! :)
WAKA WAKA ES UNO DE SUS HITS MAS VISTO EN YOUTUBE!!
Who gives a shit how many Views it has ?!?!?
Guys, if you do not like the video, do not see it, you lose the time. But don't do that remove it because there where persons like me that want to see it. Kisses
539,365,871 :D
FUCK U U FUCKING FAGGOT!
dude...youre so fucking homo....get your ass are of here
oooooooooo very nice song i love it
Plasma Scirock: the new rock music on you tube!!
BAD ROMANCE MARATHON MONSTERS!!! :)
visit Plasma Scirock!! the new african sound of rock!!
I'd love to hear: This time for Poland.....
BAD ROMANCE MARATHON MONSTERS ALL DAY!!!
Nicki Minaj strikes again...
come SEE ME SHAKIN MY BOOTY ON MY CHANNEL :))))) message me !!! im taking requests!
/watch?v=qpnZUk1VvRQ&feature=plcp Please check! im 13 years old and my dream is to have many views on my lyrics videos! So please thumb this comment up! Subscribe to my channel and watch my videos! :) Thank you! :)
BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! Here: watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be
eres la mejor shakiraaa
Lol beats by dre where out in 2009? :O
im a man..thats why, in the first place, im gonna give you thumbs down
Lol this song was in my training for work lol, it was so funny i was just dancing while working :D
omg omg O M G I LOVE YOU JUSTIN
Go away, there are some people who like this video, they should then be allowed to hear it..
YOU HAVE NO LIFE!!!!!!
half a billion views ... is a lot
539,365,873 coll !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! Here: watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be
539.331.097 ~ 539,365,871 = 34 774 View With Only 28 minutes ! OMG
MIND ANORMALE
HERMOSA ♥
your comin to indonesia will not be real. sure this... i'm indonesian and i totally agree for your not comin
O YEA BAD ROMANCE I WANT IT :P :P
I miss the summer 2010!
maybe my answer is stupid , but nothing compared with bieber
wooow thats HD for real!!!
539.365.871....ha ha..
/watch?v=szQbrvZ5uls&feature=plcp Please check! im 13 years old and my dream is to have many views on my lyrics videos! So please thumb this comment up! Subscribe to my channel and watch my videos! :) Thank you! :)
465,254,460 que bien que vaMos con las reproducciones! sube como la espuma! :D ! 465,254,460 que bien que vaMos con las reproducciones! sube como la espuma! :D ! 465,254,460 que bien que vaMos con las reproducciones! sube como la espuma! :D ! 465,254,460 que bien que vaMos con las reproducciones! sube como la espuma! :D ! 465,254,460 que bien que vaMos con las reproducciones! sube como la espuma! :D ! 465,254,460 que bien que vaMos con las reproducciones! sube como la espuma! :D !
JENNIFER LOPEZ. JLO, IS FOBER'S MOST POWERFUL CELEBRITY OF 2012 yah...!!! =)
this video sucks!! LOL!! guys checkout my newly created blog. its myhornylittlesister.blogspot.com Watch Videos 100% FREE!!! more hot videos to cum! :)
كبيرة يا ختيارة جينيفر
BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! Here: watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be
Kla she le niul!
waka waka reingresa en el 42 de los mas vistos y addicted to you en el 24
You fuck justin :D
KOKO KOKO EURO SPOKO
wow ur so evilly bad ;D
BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! Here: watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be
@strawberrychewitgum, you can actually get a New iPad for Free, simply try to google for: freeipad3giveaway.info My 18 years brother just received one this morning, couldn't beleive my eyes!!!!
di pause aja trs tinggal browsing laen.. tnggu sampe buffering nya slese
กูคนไทยแสรด
BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! Here: watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be
hi :) this may sounds really ridiculous but we really really need your help. please view, like&share our (Michelle&me) video about bearings (mathematics) in my channel. this is our math project. our teacher wants us to have at least 1000+ views before 20th of May to get some score. so, please help! :(
Sanket rawal
come SEE ME SHAKIN MY BOOTY ON MY CHANNEL :))))) message me !!! im taking requests!
She is beautiful
if he is a loser and this song is 'shit' than why are you spending yur time on this video
man?! :)))....i can't imagine a "man" watching this piece of shit, but for a pink shirted fag
539.365.871 :)
no
465,254,461
a reproducir , comentar y muchos likes! bad romance tiene que permanecer en youtuve100 si o si!! 465 millones vamos por otro millon mas!! ;) a reproducir , comentar y muchos likes! bad romance tiene que permanecer en youtuve100 si o si!! 465 millones vamos por otro millon mas!! ;) a reproducir , comentar y muchos likes! bad romance tiene que permanecer en youtuve100 si o si!! 465 millones vamos por otro millon mas!! ;) LADY GAGA MEGA-ESTRELLA DEL POP! LO MAS GRANDE ACTUALMENTE!
hi :) this may sounds really ridiculous but we really really need your help. please view, like&share our (Michelle&me) video about bearings (mathematics) in my channel. this is our math project. our teacher wants us to have at least 1000+ views before 20th of May to get some score. so, please help! :(
539365871 it goes fast
THIS IS THE BEST VIDEO IN HISTORY ♥ *-* TE AMO LADY GAGA
todos los dias votar negativo :D
แม้วไงสัส
♥♥♥ 539,365,872 :x :x :x
what is this ???
:)nur
Amazing!
VOTA POR SHAKIRA EN MTV Y LOS PREMIOS JUVENTUD!!!
year im the 737.861.787 number that listen too that and i well never hear this shit again
BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! BAD ROMANCE NEW COVER!!! Here: watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be watch?v=8wGGU0emsgs&feature=youtu.be
Wow, justin bieber is so cute. Thumbs up if you are a man.
BAD ROMANCE MARATHON ALL DAY!!!!
Bieber = Un pauvre interprète :) C'est toujours les même style de clip avec des meufs qui sont amoureuse de ce gamin. 16 ans toujours pas muet, la grosse honte ;) Bieber < MJ
800.000.000 . fuck bieber

Created by Bertrand Fan using symfony and Yahoo Pipes.