Girls in the NY Times

The NY Times previews the upcoming season of Girls on HBO:

Last year some critics got traction with complaints that none of Ms. Dunham’s main characters were African-American — even though the cast is small, and mostly made up of insular, middle-class Oberlin alumni living in bohemian Brooklyn. Ms. Dunham dealt with the diversity dust-up by giving in — to a point. Her character returns to the screen with a sort-of boyfriend, Sandy (Donald Glover of “Community”), a good-humored, hip black law student who happens to be a Republican. Hannah can’t believe he actually likes her, but she also can’t believe he is actually a conservative.

I am glad that they are adding political diversity to the show, because it was unfair to Republicans that every character on the show was a Democrat.

Who cares if, in reality, Brooklyn is overwhelmingly Democratic outside of the Hasidic neighborhoods? This is television, it’s supposed to show a better version of reality.

This new character is also a smart move to increase ratings, because I’m sure a lot of Republicans from the Midwest will now tune in.

Photographing the rich

Here’s an interesting excerpt from a recent web/blog article about Robert Frank (that’s Robert Frank the photographer from last century and not the economist from Cornell or the journalist who used to write for the Wall Street Journal and who now works for CNBC):

One of the most poignant themes that Frank pursued in “The Americans” was the disparity of wealth in America, as well as the blatant racism. One of the subject matters that hadn’t been explored much during his period was the rich. He didn’t want to just photograph the poor and the middle class – as he wanted to paint a fuller-picture of the American socio-economic classes.

However the difficulty he found in photographing “the richer people, the upper class people” was that they were more difficult to find and photograph. Whereas the poor and the middle class would often be out in the open, the rich would be more secluded, behind closed doors. To locate and photograph the rich, he focused on finding them at movie premieres and balls where the wealthy were abundant.

Frank deserves credit for wanting to photograph the rich, who are the most important social class in the country. For some reason, most sociologists are more interested in studying the poor than studying the rich, yet there’s a lot more to be learned from the rich.

Frank seems to be describing what Paul Fussell called the “out-of-sight” rich, so called because they in live remote places and estates that are invisible from the road.

I don’t know about the 1950s, but there are a lot of in-sight rich people in today’s Manhattan. They walk out onto the streets just like everyone else. The problem is that, when they do, they usually don’t look very different from a regular upper middle class person (or a “bobo” to use the term favored by David Brooks), so you don’t even know that you are looking at a rich person.

It’s hard to tell apart regular bobos from the truly rich, but what they share in common that’s not shared by New York City’s poor is that they don’t just hang out. If you walk through a poor neighborhood in New York City, you will see poor people just standing around or sitting on stoops doing nothing. The higher class New Yorkers are always doing something or going somewhere when you see them outside of their houses.

The bobos project: intellectual life

After the chapter about work in the book Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks, there is a chapter about the “intellectual life.”

Here’s an excerpt:

In most intellectual organizations, the hard work of researching, thinking, and writing is done by the people who are too young to get out of it. A two-tier system develops. There are paper people—the young intellectual climbers who read and write things—and there are front people—the already renowned intellectuals, government officials, magazine editors, university presidents, foundation heads, and politicians whose primary job is to appear in places delivering the research finding, speeches, and talking points the paper people have gathered for them. The front people go to meetings, do Nightline, speak at fundraisers, host panel discussions, and give interviews on NPR. They get credit for everything.

It seems to me that there’s value transference going on in the intellectual world just as there is in the world of business. At the typical corporation, there are a large number of employees doing grunt work in cubicles earning modest salaries. A portion of the value that they create is transferred up to the people in the C-suite who earn massive amounts of money.

The only thing that’s different in the intellectual world is the currency, which is recognition instead of dollars. There are people at the bottom doing the real work of researching and writing, the value creation, while those at the top enjoy the glory of their efforts even though they don’t do any real work. Although people at the top of the intellectual world also make decent money. For example, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor was paid one million dollars for her book about the Obamas. (Perhaps as an actual working reporter, Jodi has less prestige than a more theoretical type of intellectual.)

Brooks didn’t have a clue about what it’s actually like to work in corporate America, but I assume what he writes about the intellectual life is accurate because that’s the world he lives in, so he should know.

Brooks also accurately explains that in the bobo world, a person’s status is a combination of how much money he makes plus how much self-actualizing he has accomplished. Some of the blog commenters think that Heather Eisenlord dropped in status when she left her job as an associate at Skadden Arps (which probably paid in the $200s) for a job as a director of the human rights program at the International Senior Lawyers Project which might pay as little as $65,000. But actually, in her mind, she might have moved up in the world because she went from working for money to working for self-actualization. In fact, it’s very difficult to get a job as the director of an international human rights program. Only the prestige of working at Skadden Arps and graduating from a Top 14 law school put her in the running for such a lofty position.

David Brooks ends the chapter with a discussion of “status-income disequilibrium.” According to Brooks, people who have high status intellectual jobs go home to shabby apartments that are all they can afford on a hundred-thousand-dollar salary and they feel great psychic pain that they have so much less than the top people in business. If you want to find out more about this theory, you don’t have to buy the book because he wrote about status-income disequilibrium a few years earlier in the Weekly Standard, and the article is on the web. The book just contains a slightly edited version of the article.

My complaint about this chapter is that it is mostly tangential to telling me about bobos, which I thought was the main purpose of the book based on the title. This is why Paul Fussell’s book on class is a much better read. All Fussell writes about is class.

New York City is Obama country

Bloomberg News, today, makes a point of telling us that New York City voters overwhelmingly supported Obama.

Obama beat Republican challenger Mitt Romney by 81 percent to 18 percent in the nation’s largest city… Obama’s share of the vote is the best showing by a presidential nominee in New York since its five boroughs were consolidated in 1898, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from the state elections board and the 2005 books “America at the Polls” and “The Encyclopedia of New York State.

The results underscore New York’s decades-long status as a Democratic bastion where most residents are racial and ethnic minorities. Of the city’s 8.2 million residents, 29 percent are Hispanic, 23 percent are non-Hispanic black and 13 percent are non-Hispanic Asian, according to 2011 estimates from the Census Bureau.
…
Manhattan, which includes Wall Street, is the one borough where Obama’s support edged downward, falling to 84 percent from 86 percent four years ago.

Why mention that Manhattan includes Wall Street? Wall street is a street and not a neighborhood, and not a street with many residential buildings. It’s a place where people go to work.

The writer of the article was probably trying to point out that the finance industry is New York City’s most conservative industry, and I agree. Yet still, I estimate that the majority of people who work in that industry and live in Manhattan, including extremely wealthy executives, voted for Obama and not Romney, but by a narrow margin, not like the media industry where probably 90% voted for Obama. (And other major industries in Manhattan, law, advertising, fashion, business services, all vote more Democratic than finance.)

There are a lot of mixed marriages in which the husband has a high-paying job in finance and votes Republican, and the wife votes Democratic. And if they have children old enough to vote, their children of both sexes also vote Democratic.

The slight drop from 86% to 84% probably is related to a general trend I saw in exit polls in which the wealthiest Americans switched their vote, by several percentage points, to Obama in 2012. Obama’s loss of support may have nothing to do with Obama or the economy and more to do with wealthy voters being unable to hold their nose and vote for a ticket in 2008 that included Sarah Palin, and that wealthy voters liked Romney because he’s very intelligent and has a track record of success in business endeavors.

Romney’s strongest support in New York City came from Orthodox and Hasidic Jews and Russian immigrants in Brooklyn, and from blue-collar whites in Staten Island.

NY Times and Pew tell us that college degrees are still good

There’s a NY Times article about a Pew Study which proclaims “Recent College Graduates Well-Protected Against Worst Effects of Recession.”

• Although all 21–24 year olds experienced declines in employment and wages during the recession, the decline was considerably more severe for those with only high school or associate degrees.
• Before the recession, just over half of young adults with a high school degree (HS) were employed, compared to almost two-thirds of those with an associate degree (AA) and nearly three-fourths of those with a bachelor’s degree (BA).
• Job losses during the recession made existing employment gaps even worse. The employment declines for those with HS and AA degrees were 16 and 11 percent, respectively, compared with 7 percent for those with a BA degree. …
• Out-of-work college graduates were able to find jobs during the downturn with more success than their less-educated counterparts.

There has been talk on some conservative blogs that maybe young people shouldn’t go to college, that it’s a waste of time and money, and they could make more money as plumbers or working in the oil fields.

I think that skipping college is pretty bad advice if the person doing the skipping does not have some other career lined up, and it’s very rare that 18-year-olds have some quality career waiting for them.

College graduates think that non-college graduates are losers, and no one wants to hire a loser for any job if they have the option to hire a non-loser college graduate instead.

However, because colleges below the top-twenty or so are pretty interchangeable, it’s a very bad idea for lesser qualified college students to attend an expensive program if there’s a low-priced local option available.

* * *

I should mention that the problem with the linked-to articles is that they treat all college degrees the same, making no distinction between prestige of the school or major.

New blog theme

Why a new blog theme?

People complained about the unnecessary white space and the Garamond italic.

This theme allows me to upload 696 pixel wide photos, as you can see above.

I think it may be a little bit too minimalistic.

THURSDAY MORNING UPDATE

I brought back the previous color scheme and the Adobe Garamond Pro for the blog title by editing the “Custom CSS.”

SECOND UPDATE

The Czechoslovakian lion is back.

iPod Touch after more than a month

I’ve had the iPod Touch for more than a month. An iPad after more than a month review is upcoming.

I bought the iPod Touch for professional development. What does that mean? I am the product manager for a mobile website, and the only mobile device I had was a corporate Blackberry. I felt the need to experience the mobile web the way actual customers would be experiencing it, so I bought an iPod Touch which is, for the most part, an iPhone without the phone.

What I learned from the iPod Touch is that the web is unusable on such a small device unless the web pages are optimized for smaller screens, or alternatively if you are nearsighted. Non-optimized web pages are not usable for middle-aged people whose close-up vision is probably failing them.

However, the iPod Touch has turned out to be extremely useful for reading the news on short subway rides or while waiting in lines. I try to remember to take the iPod Touch with me all the time; it easily slips into a pocket. The iPad is just way too big, heavy and unwieldy do use in those situations. In fact, I hardly ever take the iPad outside my apartment.

To read the news when offilne, you need to use the newspaper apps, like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal apps. The New York Times is kind enough to let you read the top stories for free. For some reason, I have an electronic subscription to the Wall Street Journal. Both the iPhone and iPad apps have a huge advantage over web-browser reading because they download the entire paper at once (or at least a good chunk of it), so that it’s nearly instantaneous flipping between stories and pages, unlike the annoyingly long load times you have to deal with when using a web browser.

The above tends to apply to various other apps that display downloaded content. They mostly work a lot faster and better than using a web browser.

You can also read books on the iPod Touch. You won’t be able to see a whole lot of text at a time so it’s not the most pleasant reading experience, but it certainly beats not having anything to read.

As a music player, the iPod Touch is surprisingly poor because there’s no physical pause button. Nor are there physical buttons to skip songs. The only way to do these things is to use the touchscreen. You can also pause it by removing the headphone plug (a non-obvious feature), but that’s kludgy compared to an actual pause button. I also wish that the music player would just play all of the albums from the same musician (which is what Windows Media Player does) instead of stopping at the end of an album. Does anyone know of a music player that does such a simple and obvious function?

If you just want a music player, I recommend that you skip Apple products and buy a Sony or a Sansa (both of which sell tiny music players with large memories for under $100 that have physical control buttons). I am still using my old Sony music players to listen to music.

Most anything you can do on an iPad you can do on an iPod Touch, but only if you can see the tiny screen and have nimble fingers. Watching videos (Netflix, stuff you stole from Pirate’s Bay, whatever), games, productivity apps, are all things you can do.

The newest iPod Touch has a 5MP camera with an f/2.8 prime lens. The lens is surprisingly sharp, but people looking for photographic perfection will find that the images have poor dynamic range and blown-out highlights, and even at the lowest ISO they suffer from heavy-handed noise filtering which smears fine detail. Nevertheless, the photos are pretty good considering the camera is an auxiliary feature and not the main function. The iPod Touch or iPhone might be good for “street photography” because strangers will think you are just fiddling with your phone and not surreptitiously taking their picture.

I will do a future post specifically about Instagram.

I suppose if I didn’t have a free Blackberry, it might be worth it to pay for my own iPhone plan, because it would be convenient having the power of a phone and an always-connected iPod Touch in a single device. I think it’s actually a little bit easier to “type” on the iPhone/iPod Touch touchscreen than on the Blackberry physical keypad, but I hate typing on either device.

Children probably like the iPod touch because they have better near vision than adults and because they have small nimble fingers.

Only the rich can afford to work

It’s interesting that my previous two posts were about young people with rich parents who work at unpaid internships, and Evgenia Peretz buying a $5.7 million townhouse even though she has a job of “contributing editor” at Vanity Fair which maybe doesn’t pay enough for her to afford even a $570,000 townhouse without the help of her inherited wealth.

This demonstrates a trend. In times past, someone like Evgenia wouldn’t bother having a job. Back then, work was something unpleasant that poor people had to do so they wouldn’t starve to death.

But times have changed. Poor people no longer have to work because they collect government handouts. Work is now a privilege to be enjoyed by the rich so that they can achieve self-actualization.

* * *

And don’t forget, only the rich can afford to learn about poverty:

Putney Student Travel, a private company, offers a five-week summer program of seminars at Yale and a trip to Cambodia to address poverty issues for $6,990.

I hope unpaid internships get abolished

There’s an editorial in the WSJ about a recent class action lawsuit against the Charlie Rose Show in which the show was forced to pay its interns minimum wage for the time they worked. And there are lawsuits outstanding against other media companies.

The editorial, which argues in favor of letting people work for free, is completely wrong.

The new unpaid internship system that is developing means that only young people with rich parents can afford to gain work experience in desirable career tracks.

Also, the media industry is completely dominated by liberals who voted for Obama, so it’s their just deserts that they should be required to pay their people doing grunt work both the federal minimum wage and the Obamacare benefits they are entitled to.

Self-actualizing work pays well

As reported at The Real Deal:

Documentary filmmaker and writer David Schisgall, and his wife, Vanity Fair writer Evgenia Peretz, purchased a single-family brownstone at 16 Garden Place, at Joralemon Street, for $5.7 million, according to records filed with the city.

Writing stuff sure pays better than computer programming. Obviously Schisgall’s Harvard degree in Philsophy paid off very well.

* * *

And in case you don’t know, Evgenia’s father is Marty Peretz who used to own the The New Republic, and her mother’s stepmother’s mother was the very famous physicist Madame Marie Curie, and her great grandfather was Stephen Carlton Clark who founded the Baseball Hall of Fame, and her great-great-great grandfather was Edward Clark who was a big business tycoon in the 1800s.