generation limbo thread - limbo in the sand

people who make $500k a year are to the truly rich what like whiney is to hipsters

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.

xp

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'

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.

what's the industry?

cold calling, obv, this is the generation limbo thread.

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.

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.

godspeed

http://chronicle.com/article/Income-Gap-Widens/129980/

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

it requires skill to effectivize a university's brainput

also I'm willing to say okay yeah not *anybody* could run harvard or whatever, but $2m a year to run...mountain state university???

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.

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?

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

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

drill more wells

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.

does your dad run exxon mobil? can he put together ikea furniture? xps

http://www.quickanded.com/2011/12/credits-credentials-and-collective-consciousness.html

this is also interesting

i'm taking that course!

also signed up for the human-computer interaction course in january

what do you think of it so far?

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.

haha feeling kinda queasy thinking abt the 'opportunities for intimate engagement' @ stanford

theres probably a better thread for this but:

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/the-politics-of-the-1-percent/#more-20281

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.

don't they care mostly about inflation, though?

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.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rogoff87/English

Fourth, today’s capitalist systems vastly undervalue the welfare of unborn generations

*head explodes*

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.

look into cheaper EU degrees maybe? brits can do that, right?

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?

depends on your views on the 'welfare of existence' I guess

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

there are stronger trends that go in the other direction, like very religious people have more kids, very religious people more often than not buy the conservative belief package w/r/t global warming. poorer people have more kids, less likely to be highly-educated. etc.

p skeptical of religious=don't care about environment claim

I hate to be this guy, but literal zero percent interest on student loans is basically like paying someone to borrow money (time value of money, inflation, etc.). Plus your incentive would be to pay it off absolutely as slowly as possible.

I guess if the government is the only lender in the game, that's all fine because you don't have to give the government incentives to lend. But then there's another problem, which is that schools will just take advantage of the endless flow of money by jacking up tuition insanely (which, to be fair, is already sort of what happens). Better solution: take more of the money that would go to loans and instead just massively subsidize public universities in every state.

http://rpgp.berkeley.edu/religion_global_warming

BTW this fits into my new theory that public-private hybrid solutions are always the worst of both worlds. Fully private universities that couldn't rely on public-backed loans would at least have to compete for your money and keep tuition reasonable; proper public universities would be run for the public good and not the bottom line. But when private schools have access (indirectly) to public funds, it's like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

1. p old poll
2. not worrying about global warming != not caring about environment

ake more of the money that would go to loans and instead just massively subsidize public universities in every state.

this itself is

a. a good idea
b. not enough to stop tuition inflation

1. p old poll
2. not worrying about global warming != not caring about environment

you don't think there is a correlation between
a. being religious and being consevative
b. being conservative and being skeptical about global warming / environmental issues?

I don't think it's a natural aspect of 'being religious', but it's something that exists today on some level

xpost -- Yeah but zero percent loans would INCREASE tuition inflation.

as a public u employee I applaud massive subsidies

think state control of health care costs through state-run public options could help keep tuition down---though IHE had an article p recently showing that it's not faculty costs tht are mot responsible for tuition jacking but rather admin costs & building costs for fancier facilities

Well I know one of the going theories, one that I find convincing is like this: (1) universities are driven by rankings (2) rankings are heavily dependent on spending (3) the current loan system provides a nearly unlimited supply of money, so (4) the incentive is to jack up tuition to capture that supply of money, then spend it on stuff that will keep you competitive in the rankings arms race.

So that would comport with costs coming from fancier facilities and the like.

I think there's lots of room between "global warming" & " environmental" issues---the former is politicized (dumbly for the right, duh) but that right-wingers aren't generally "mmmm more coal in the air, smells like victory". Rich right-wingers, yes, but there aren't enough of them to sway elections