What does Lisa Birnbach say about preppy cars?
I happen to have a copy of The Official Preppy Handbook, and it seems that preppy cars barely changed at all since the book was written in 1980. That’s 41 years ago!
Lisa Birnbach says the following car makes are preppy:
Land Rover
Toyota Land Cruiser
Jeep
International Harvester
Woody station wagons
Volkswagen
BMW
Volvo
Peugeot
Mercedes Benz
Any English car (today, that would include MINI, although MINI is owned by BMW)
I didn’t especially notice any Toyota Land Cruisers in the preppy town in New England. I think that Toyota lost its preppiness because they have become too common in the United States. Plus now, every European manufacturer sells SUVs, as does Subaru which is more preppy than Toyota.
International Harvester no longer exists, but it was the precursor to the modern SUV craze.
No one makes woody station wagons anymore.
Peugeots are no longer sold in the United States.
Lisa Birnbach says that Volkswagen is preppy because of “reverse snobbery.” There’s also a picture of a Volkswagen Rabbit. The Rabbit was renamed the Golf, and sadly 2021 is the last model year that the Golf will be sold in the United States. Americans hate hate hate hatchbacks. Vintage Rabbits in good condition sell for a lot of money!
For some reason, Lisa Birnbach fails to mention Audi as being a preppy car, but I saw plenty of Audis in the preppy town in New England, and Audi is a luxury Volkswagen, so I think that was an oversight. Unless Audis weren’t preppy in 1980 and have since become preppy, but that seems pretty unlikely.
And I guess that Subarus weren’t preppy in 1980 but they are preppy today, the most preppy Japanese car. Like Volkswagen, Subaru fulfills the role of being a reverse snobbery car. Or maybe Subaru is just popular in New England because of the all-wheel drive.
Preppy Cars
I’m in a preppy place in New England and I notice the cars are different here than in prole parts of the New York metropolitan area.
The quick summary is that European cars are preppy, American cars are not preppy (except for Jeeps which are preppy), Korean cars are not preppy, Japanese cars are neither preppy nor unpreppy, except for Subarus which are preppy.
A longer answer is that there are three types of wealthy people:
1. Those who show off their wealth with an expensive luxury car. Especially European luxury cars.
2. Those who can afford an expensive car but choose not to own one because they are gauche or nouveau riche.
3. Those who are culturally preppy but not actually that rich.
Between category 1 and 2 are people who drive Volvos. I’ve seen lots of Volvos around here.
Especially popular SUVs are Range Rovers and Jeeps.
Other popular luxury brands are the Mercedes, Audi, BMW and Porsche. You see Japanese luxury brands, but they are not as popular as the European brands.
You see a lot more MINIs around here than in prole places.
Japanese cars are like the NFL, they cut across all social classes. But one Japanese brand in particular is preppy, and that’s Subaru.
Of course you do see Toyotas and Hondas, but you see as many Volkswagens as you do Toyotas, while in the rest of America there are three to four times as many Toyotas on the road as Volkswagens.
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I forgot to mention electric cars. Teslas are not preppy. Electric cars are not preppy.
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So the bottom line is, that if you want to drive something preppy, and you can’t afford a Volvo or a Range Rover, get a Subaru or a Volkswagen.
What’s going on with Manhattan residential real estate?
The article above says that prices in Manhattan are going up? What happened to the narrative that people are LEAVING Manhattan because they can work from home?
Well I don’t know for sure, but I have some theories.
Theory #1: Prices for real estate are going up everywhere and not just in Manhattan. There’s just a massive wave of asset inflation happening because of super-loose monetary policy from the Fed and massive inflationary government spending.
Theory #2: There are people who can now work from home, yet they don’t want to move out of Manhattan. Instead, they want to move into a larger co-op/condo/apartment in Manhattan. This pressure for more space is causing an increase in the price per square foot for all sizes of residential until.
Theory #3: Yes, NYC is in a death spiral, but hardly anyone has fully grokked it yet. Right now could very well be the peak of Manhattan residential real estate prices, and it will only go down from this point forward.
Red Planet by Robert Heinlein
Warning: I suppose this contains some minor spoilers.
Over the past few years I’ve been re-reading Robert Heinlein books that I read a long time ago when I was a kid. (Although I’ve certainly been taking my time. It has been four and a half years since I started this project, and I still haven’t read Rocket Ship Galileo, Space Cadet or The Rolling Stones. When I was a kid I could have read all these books in the course of one or two weeks.)
I believe that this book is one of the first Heinlein books that I ever read, but also one that I only read once and never again. Until now.
I recalled that it’s a book about a boy and his pet Martian, and was expecting to find out that the Martian pet was really something else, and indeed that was the case.
But I totally didn’t remember any of the book’s political stuff. This is really two stories in one. The first half of the book is an adventure story about Jim and his friend Frank trying to make their way home from a boarding school run by an evil headmaster (shades of the Harry Potter book when Dumbledore was cast out and an evil headmaster took over) while chased by Martian cops.
And then the book segues into a story about a revolution on Mars, with the right to bear arms playing an important role. It’s very classically Heinlein, and you can see the precursor to Heinlein’s more famous adult book, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. This is not Heinlein’s only juvenile about colonies revolting from Earth, there is also Between Planets.
The Martians described in this book seem to be the same Martians from Stranger in a Strange Land. These are the only two Heinlein books, that I am aware of, that share this depiction of Martians.
Those looking to be offended will find some things in this book that they could call “misogynist.” I previously wrote that Heinlein novels tell us that girls can do anything boys can do, but what they really want to do is have babies. But in this book written in 1949, one of his very earliest novels, he hadn’t even reached that stage in his writing evolution. The women in this book don’t do much besides raise children and cook.
I rate this book as being better than Between Planets if you want to read a juvenile about a revolution, and I recommend it for big fans of Stranger in a Strange Land who want to learn more about the Martians. Although I wonder if Stranger in a Strange Land actually has any big fans because I found it to be Heinlein’s must overrated novel.
But nevertheless, this isn’t Heinlein’s best juvenile. I still recommend Citizen of the Galaxy, Tunnel in the Sky, and Starman Jones, as his best.
For serious Heinlein fans, an essay about how the edition originally published in 1949 (which is what I just read) was altered from what Heinlein intended: https://www.heinleinsociety.org/2003/10/red-planet-blue-pencil/
What I think The Father is about
This is all spoilers, so don’t read if you haven’t watched the movie.
Read the rest of this entry »Self-driving cars and remote work
At first glance, it’s easy to think that they have nothing to do with each other. Self-driving cars are touted as a more convenient way to commute to work, but if people are working from home then it doesn’t matter if one’s car is self-driving or human-operated.
But in fact, what remote work and self-driving have in common is that they are both vehicles (excuse the pun) for enabling people to live more effectively in suburbs, exurbs, or even rural areas, and will combine to make big cities more obsolete.
People (almost always liberals) who advocate for public transportation claim that one of its benefits is that you can do your own thing while someone else does the driving for you. But with self-driving cars, you get the same benefit of someone else (or rather something else) doing the driving, but with the convenience of door-to-door service. Anyone who has any experience with public transportation knows that it takes at least a half hour to get anywhere by the time you walk to the transit stop, wait for the public transit to arrive, and then have to walk to your actual destination. And it’s a huge hassle on top of that.
Self-driving cars plus remote work means that no one ever needs to live in a city again.
Lion was dead-on right about predicted Covid-19 deaths
We keep getting worse and worse at social distancing, we are sending kids back to school, a new wave of cases before we get a vaccine seems kind of inevitable. I predict between 400,000 and 800,000 U.S. deaths from Covid-19 before the pandemic is ended with a vaccine.
We have now passed 400,000 officially tallied deaths (although excess deaths are higher than that so one can argue that the real number of deaths from Covid-19 is higher), so my prediction is proven true.
Let’s review some comments I received to that post in August.
“jg” wrote:
Thank you for sticking to a quite high 400k+ US additional death prediction, which I expect will fail.
Sorry, I was right, you were wrong.
“destructure” wrote
Why do you have to be so negative? Do you suffer depression or something?
So it’s mental illness to accurately predict the future? The world needs more mentally ill people.
“Seingalt” wrote:
Lion i think you completely lost the plot. Have you noticed that in countries such as Italy the virus is killing almost no one and the intensive care units are empty?
As I pointed out back then, Italy was benefitting from stricter enforced social distancing than we were in the United States.
Also, there were a lot of comments about Cuomo. Trump supporters HATE Cuomo because Cuomo was extremely good at communicating about the pandemic and thus was widely lauded, while Trump sucked at everything to do about the pandemic. I’ll repeat what I said before:
Trump supporters think Covid-19 is a lot of bullshit. Except for when Cuomo required nursing homes to take back medically stable Covid-19 patients. In that one, and only one, scenario, Covid-19 is a Very Serious Disease.
400,000 in U.S. dead from Covid-19, just as I predicted
Back in August, I wrote:
[T]he cost of a bozo in the White House is 170,000 dead from the virus, and America’s international reputation shattered. The hypocrisy of Trump supporters who railed on and on about how you shouldn’t vote for Hillary because four Americans died in Benghazi, but the same Trump supporters are totally unconcerned about 170,000 dead from the virus. And with Trump at the helm, 170,000 is likely to become 400,000 before he leaves office.
Was I racially profiled?
Once, in my parents’ neighborhood in Staten Island, I was walking down the sidewalk when a Chinese woman comes out of a crappy townhouse and starts accusing me of taking something from her lawn or something.
Instead of having a big chip on my shoulder about being racially profiled because I was white and she was Chinese, I instead tried to explain to her that I was just walking down the sidewalk and I didn’t see anything and I didn’t know what she was talking about. But she was not convinced, and I walked away because I had no idea what she was talking about.
It occurs to me that, if I had been black and the woman had been white, and I acted more hostile to her with a big chip on my shoulder about being racially profiled, and I took a video of the incident with my phone, it could have become a viral thing on Twitter with everyone hating on the woman.
Grandmaster plays chess hustler in Washington Square Park
The highlight of the game is when the chess hustler, losing to the grandmaster, attempts to cheat by using sleight of hand to remove his opponent’s knight from the board, but grandmaster Maurice Ashley doesn’t let him get away with it.
Maurice Ashely’s family moved from Jamaica (the island nation) to a ghetto neighborhood in Brooklyn (Brownsville) when he was 12, and he went to Brooklyn Tech high school (which requires an admissions test to get into, but you needed a much lower score than you needed to get into Stuyvesant).
At Stuyvesant, several of the black kids were avid chess players. I had no hope playing against them.
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Why aren’t there more black grandmasters? My theory is that, with affirmative action, a black with the mental discipline needed to play chess can get a much more profitable career doing something else.
Lion of the Blogosphere 