the obvious fly in the ointment is getting offshored employees to do good work, even (esp., even) in STEM work.
― by (mennen), Saturday, 10 December 2011 22:24 (twelve years ago) link
btw bonsoir from Paris, where we spent last night talking that sort of thing out over a lovely Sancerre.
― by (mennen), Saturday, 10 December 2011 22:27 (twelve years ago) link
cool, where are you in paris?
― iatee, Saturday, 10 December 2011 22:28 (twelve years ago) link
I'm jealous
Pigalle right now, looking out over the Place
― by (mennen), Saturday, 10 December 2011 22:29 (twelve years ago) link
this is hors sujet but I was reading about autolib today, have you seen them on the streets yet?
― iatee, Saturday, 10 December 2011 22:31 (twelve years ago) link
no, I don't think so, but I'm not sure: would they be all marked up?
I could watch out the window now as I'm looking out over Blvd de Clichy but I'd probably get distracted by the whores out there; it's Sat night & the bathhouses & porn shops are hopping.
― by (mennen), Saturday, 10 December 2011 22:33 (twelve years ago) link
more on topic, I spent tonight out with a colleague from a top American institution with whom we decided that Kant would have been worth a $400,000 salary, but that no present philosophe is...even though that's what "the market" has decided some of us are "worth".
― by (mennen), Saturday, 10 December 2011 22:36 (twelve years ago) link
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/12/structural-adjustment-for-the-middle-class.html
Here the concern is that maybe Bruce Springsteen was right -- "these jobs are going, boys, and they ain't coming back to your hometown." Jobs with decent wages -- manufacturing jobs, union jobs, professional service jobs -- have declined precipitously in the past twenty years (not just since the recession). And that means that the opportunities for many workers to have "middle-class" incomes have become much more restricted. Here is a sober report from Chemical and Engineering News --
The severe national recession of the past several years is having a negative impact on the employment and the starting salaries of chemists and chemical engineers. The latest data from the American Chemical Society on graduates from 2009 found that median starting salaries fell about 5% for those receiving bachelor’s and doctoral degrees compared with the previous year. New graduates with master’s degrees appeared to have gotten a jump in pay.Even the banking and financial sector has contracted (link):The financial services industry, hammered by job cuts and record losses, is in for an even bigger contraction as the global recession deepens, said Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report. “The financial sector will contract and it will contract much more than we’ve seen so far,” said Faber, who was in Tokyo to speak at an event hosted by CLSA Ltd. Financial professionals have “been in paradise for the past 25 years.”More than 275,000 jobs in the financial industry have been lost in the last two years, according to Bloomberg data, while losses and writedowns at global companies exceeded $1 trillion in the past year. Faber said the contraction could rival declines seen in the 1970s following the collapse of Bernard Cornfeld’s Investors Overseas Services that shook confidence in the industry for a decade.
― iatee, Sunday, 11 December 2011 18:19 (twelve years ago) link
OWS needs to worry more about the 0.01%. Those are the lads who are doing the most damage.
― Aimless, Sunday, 11 December 2011 21:18 (twelve years ago) link
It's true, Lessig made the same point--"You are the 99.999%"
― HOOS aka driver of steen, Sunday, 11 December 2011 21:21 (twelve years ago) link
well people who make $500k a year are generally not the movers and shakers of the world, but they still nerd to be paying substantially more in taxes
― iatee, Sunday, 11 December 2011 21:33 (twelve years ago) link
need
― iatee, Sunday, 11 December 2011 21:34 (twelve years ago) link
people who make $500k a year are to the truly rich what like whiney is to hipsters
― є(٥_ ٥)э, Sunday, 11 December 2011 21:39 (twelve years ago) link
in any case that's an article about structural changes in the economy and the 1 but not .01 might not be personally responsible for those changes but they are nevertheless people who benefit from them, even if they benefit less than the .01.
― iatee, Sunday, 11 December 2011 21:39 (twelve years ago) link
xp
― iatee, Sunday, 11 December 2011 21:40 (twelve years ago) link
also fwiw 'the one percent' is rarely used literally, when OWS goes on tours of the 'houses of the one percent' they visit the CEOs on the UES and not lower-upper-upper middle class professionals in park slope (/they don't take a walk in basically any residential neighborhood in manhattan)
ows doesn't spend that much time talking about people who own a few car dealerships or whatever, even the ones in 'the one percent'
― iatee, Sunday, 11 December 2011 21:54 (twelve years ago) link
Had a phone interview Thursday that went really well.Was supposed to meet them Friday, which was postponed till Wed because the woman I was going to meet was sick.Now get a phone call saying they are essentially going out of business and obv won't be hiring.
I want to get drunk.
― big popppa hoy, Monday, 12 December 2011 15:55 (twelve years ago) link
what's the industry?
― iatee, Monday, 12 December 2011 17:41 (twelve years ago) link
cold calling, obv, this is the generation limbo thread.
― big popppa hoy, Monday, 12 December 2011 18:05 (twelve years ago) link
in a lot of ways this isn't a 'generation' thing even, but rather 'the future of labor, paid and unpaid'. I think people 20 years from now are even more fucked.
― iatee, Monday, 12 December 2011 18:40 (twelve years ago) link
after a month of clicking the submit button and typing in my dad's credit card number I've applied to twelve PhD programs…limboing my way into the future.
― silby, Thursday, 15 December 2011 01:42 (twelve years ago) link
godspeed
http://chronicle.com/article/Income-Gap-Widens/129980/
― iatee, Thursday, 15 December 2011 01:49 (twelve years ago) link
i always rmde when i read abt the 'rare skill set' thats required to run these institutions like any fourth grader cant read a powerpoint presentation someone else made
― є(٥_ ٥)э, Thursday, 15 December 2011 01:55 (twelve years ago) link
it requires skill to effectivize a university's brainput
― nice catch cuauhtemoc blanco niño (dayo), Thursday, 15 December 2011 01:55 (twelve years ago) link
also I'm willing to say okay yeah not *anybody* could run harvard or whatever, but $2m a year to run...mountain state university???
― iatee, Thursday, 15 December 2011 01:57 (twelve years ago) link
well i think its probably much rarer to have the 'skill set' it takes to become president of harvard or any big corp but i dont believe it takes an real skill or set of abilities to run one.
― є(٥_ ٥)э, Thursday, 15 December 2011 02:01 (twelve years ago) link
yeah I think it would be pretty hard to fuck it up
"hey guys lets change the school's name"
that's pretty much it?
― iatee, Thursday, 15 December 2011 02:02 (twelve years ago) link
also mountain state university dude making $1.8/m = university in beckley, west virginia where:
The median income for a household in the city was $28,122, and the median income for a family was $38,110. Males had a median income of $35,780 versus $23,239 for females. The per capita income for the city was $18,912. About 16.4% of families and 20.9% of the population were below the poverty line, including 33.9% of those under age 18 and 9.5% of those age 65 or over.
what does someone even do w/ that kinda money there
― iatee, Thursday, 15 December 2011 02:03 (twelve years ago) link
every time i get in a big argument w/ dad abt stuff like this im like 'putting together ikea furniture is harder than running exxon mobil' and he gets really mad but i firmly believe that to be true
― є(٥_ ٥)э, Thursday, 15 December 2011 02:05 (twelve years ago) link
drill more wells
― nice catch cuauhtemoc blanco niño (dayo), Thursday, 15 December 2011 02:15 (twelve years ago) link
I think it's ultimately a combination of
1. a child's take of 'how capitalism works'...'no u see we have a perfectly competitive market for literally everything in america, including college presidents and that's just the going rate to bag a good one, here's a supply/demand curve, nothing we can do'
2. everyone secretly hopes that people at the top of our important institutions are actually these hyper competent beasts instead of...mostly regular people socialized into certain roles.
― iatee, Thursday, 15 December 2011 02:16 (twelve years ago) link
does your dad run exxon mobil? can he put together ikea furniture? xps
― silby, Thursday, 15 December 2011 02:16 (twelve years ago) link
http://www.quickanded.com/2011/12/credits-credentials-and-collective-consciousness.html
this is also interesting
― iatee, Thursday, 15 December 2011 04:53 (twelve years ago) link
i'm taking that course!
also signed up for the human-computer interaction course in january
― HOOS aka driver of steen, Thursday, 15 December 2011 05:07 (twelve years ago) link
what do you think of it so far?
― iatee, Thursday, 15 December 2011 05:32 (twelve years ago) link
some of it goes over my head, so i'm not exactly pulling a 4.0, but it's really enlightening overall. highly recommend future outings.
― HOOS aka driver of steen, Thursday, 15 December 2011 05:34 (twelve years ago) link
haha feeling kinda queasy thinking abt the 'opportunities for intimate engagement' @ stanford
― є(٥_ ٥)э, Thursday, 15 December 2011 06:02 (twelve years ago) link
theres probably a better thread for this but:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/the-politics-of-the-1-percent/#more-20281
― є(٥_ ٥)э, Thursday, 15 December 2011 06:57 (twelve years ago) link
haha well this thread has been pretty flexible and I think can be used to discuss anything relating to how we're systemically fucked in the long-term
I think the key part on that article is this:
The 1 percent cares more about deficits than the economy. When asked to name the most important problem facing the country, 32 percent of respondents said the deficit and 11 percent said the economy. By contrast, in an April 2011 CBS News/New York Times poll, 49 percent of Americans said the economy or jobs and only 5 percent said the deficit.
if wall st. (and friends) spent its political capital and PR money pushing for fiscal stimulus - which would actually help them most really - they'd be (slightly) harder to demonize. same dynamic exists w/ big business and universal health care - who would benefit most from not having to worry about health care spending? and yet.
this is ultimately why it's hard to take anything they do or say in good faith.
― iatee, Thursday, 15 December 2011 16:15 (twelve years ago) link
don't they care mostly about inflation, though?
― by (mennen), Friday, 16 December 2011 23:32 (twelve years ago) link
well I said 'wall street' and not 'rich people' because although all superrich are rentiers on a certain level and have reasons not to want inflation, the financial sector ultimately depends on "productive capitalism"/economic growth (whether or not it creates it itself is up for debate) and has a lot more to lose from a double dip recession than from moderate inflation.
― iatee, Saturday, 17 December 2011 00:50 (twelve years ago) link
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rogoff87/English
― iatee, Monday, 19 December 2011 14:51 (twelve years ago) link
Fourth, today’s capitalist systems vastly undervalue the welfare of unborn generations
*head explodes*
― nuhnuhnuh, Monday, 19 December 2011 19:17 (twelve years ago) link
Has anyone here done a masters in ol' Britisherland? How did you pay for it? Student loans? How much did all factor up to cost? I r starting to look at courses to maybe take up next year. And starting to pay off debt in the hope to mebbe save some too.*
*Of course I might just change my mind a fuck off travelling for 6 months instead with savings.
― big popppa hoy, Tuesday, 20 December 2011 08:14 (twelve years ago) link
look into cheaper EU degrees maybe? brits can do that, right?
― iatee, Tuesday, 20 December 2011 14:35 (twelve years ago) link
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/12/future-0
that's a good article! Is undervaluing the welfare of future generations related to declining interest in having children in the global North?
― by (mennen), Tuesday, 20 December 2011 16:37 (twelve years ago) link
depends on your views on the 'welfare of existence' I guess
― iatee, Tuesday, 20 December 2011 16:41 (twelve years ago) link
eh I think that's too abstract: I just mean that if you have kids then you have a p concrete reason not to want the environment to go to pot. I don't have enough experience to know if the opposite's the case & I suspect sample matters a lot here since its not just liberal-types who go kidless
― by (mennen), Tuesday, 20 December 2011 16:45 (twelve years ago) link