We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.

I am not getting kicked out of my home, because I wasn't stupid enough to take out a mortgage that I couldn't afford, and I do rent within my budget for my income. I am not forced to choose between groceries and rent, because, again, I manage my money thoughtfully. I pay for my own medical care, and don't expect someone else to pick up the bill (yes, a majority of my insurance is covered by my employer, but that's a different argument). I don't have a college degree, and you're damn right I worked long hours for little pay, often at more than one job at a time, until I got into a company that promoted from within based on ability, rather than just whether I had a fancy paper with my name on it. I always had rights, though, because I refuse to give up my rights quietly. I certainly don't have everything, but I take care of myself, and, thus, have much more than nothing. I am most definitely NOT the 99 percent, at least by those standards.

If all these people are the 99 percent and many are complaining about student loans the Glenn Reynolds is right in that the education bubble is going to burst.

Really why do people get some of these degrees like gender studies or sorry literature. I mean before I went to secondary education I made sure I chose something that would possibly get me a job.

Checked out two of the signs, cold not really read more with out getting aggravated. One was a girl complaining about her debt with school and she was getting a communications degree. That is the one that always confused me. I mean what is communications. Business understand, English Lit - fine, but communications - what? Another was a guy complaining that he could not find a a residency. I mean wow he is a doctor albeit at 50 years old. He blames foreigners taking all the spots. I mean come one man! He chose something useful, try harder - I am certain there is a demand for doctors, true you might have to take a residency in some small place but it could be done.

In the end, these 99 percent people is about choices and consequences. Looks like a whole bunch of them made some choices and now do not want to accept the consequences and want a way out.

These people just set my teeth on edge. I was grown, and ensconced in a thoroughly middle-class family, before I found out that my father - and his eight brothers and sisters - was orphaned at the age of nine. The other eight went to live with grandparents, but, being somewhat of a rebel, he was kicked out by his grandmother, homeless - at the age of NINE! When I imagine my nine-year-old grandson in circumstances like this - well, words just escape me.

Although he never made it past third grade, my father was ambitious and a hard worker. The only thing I can think of that he was literally incapable of was whining. I never heard any of this except from people who knew his history. He was too busy working to sit around complaining.

I have zero - ZERO sympathy for these entitled punks.

Wow. Did I really see a sign saying that she was $40K in debt with school loans, and her monthly payment is almost $900? Who did she borrow money from, the mafia?

I'm still paying off my student loans, and I graduated 9 years ago. I went to school before I had children. I found a job and gained health insurance before I had children. I pay a second mortgage payment every month in daycare. I look for sales and coupons before I go grocery shopping. I don't buy things I don't need. Unfortunately, I'm NOT the 99%, because I actually think ahead a little further than a week or so...

My generation is nauseating. I have a friend on facebook that I graduated high school with. She posts about how someone berrated her for using food stamps at the grocery store. She said she was humiliated. She posted this from her smart phone. She also posted pictures from THREE different vacations/weekend getaways in six weeks time. From her smart phone. She's going to a geneticist to get genetic testing done to determine the LIKELIHOOD that she MAY develop breast cancer later on. Luckily, she can afford to pay for that...oh, wait, she's on government assistance.

My husband and I both work full time. We pay our taxes and spend wisely. Our kids are fed and they're clothes are clean. We took them on ONE vacation this year, and searched for deals before we went. We pay for health insurance and pay our own medical bills. We cannot afford to do more, so we don't. No one owes us anything, and we don't expect anything to be given to us, aside from wages that we earn by working hard everyday.

At least it was nice of her to post the pictures of the vacations and trips that my tax money made possible. If I paid for them, I should at least get to see the pictures, right?

Get back to work, suckers; someone has to pay for all that "social justice" they feel entitled to bring about, using the wisdom they gained at Directional State University's various liberal arts and social science classes.

I've asked a few people who are supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement to clarify what they are protesting and what change they are hoping to create but still don't have a clear answer. It seems to go along the lines of "down with the rich." When I asked what about those rich who got there through brains and hard work and they couldn't answer. I've never felt entitled or that anyone owes me. I got myself into a bad position and it is up to me to get out of it.

I'm not a freeloader, and I don't think I have a sense of entitlement. That said, I find myself agreeing with at least the sentiment of this "We are the 99%." When I see the graphs of wealth distribution in this country (especially the changes in the past few decades), and then see the policies that cripple small businesses and/or reward large corporations for less than honorable dealings, see CEOs run companies into the ground and still get their golden parachutes, etc, it's hard for me to believe that the American Dream is still alive. Sure that makes it more valuable to the ones who are smart enough to maneuver their way to it, but I also think that the cards are pretty well stacked against most of us.

I get that many of those letters are not the best example of it, but there are people like me who just want a fair shot, and the trend I see is that a fair shot is getting harder and harder to find. Adding more politicians or laws isn't the answer, and I'm not sure what is. I'm not saying I'm going to go write an angst ridden letter about my life and webcam it, but I do get the sentiment. YMMV.

It's not apparent that Occupy XYZ is actually bringing in anyone other than the usual suspects for these protests. This doesn't seem to be a popular movement, more so an amalgamation of the same lefty protesters and groups that show up at WTO events and the like. The MSM is desperate to polish them up and present them as a counterpoint to the Tea Party, but outside of the NYC group, most of the local groups are all of 10 or 12 people. The DC group that tried to break into the Air & Space was only a dozen people and had to glom onto another crowd that was upset about aerial drones. If you can't get more than a dozen people to protest in DC, you don't have a popular movement.

Unfortunately what's likely to happen is that they'll continue to escalate their tactics until someone gets hurt. They've already tried to break into private residences and demonstrated a propensity for roughing up security. Inevitably this will go too far and either they'll really hurt someone, or face violent retaliation.

Noam, you'd be surprised how popular it is in NY right now. They have tents with internet access, food and are receiving pizza deliveries as well as major donations. They are holding back on accepting some of the larger donations while they figure out exactly what the money should be used for. That is the part I don't like. If there was a clear-cut definition of who they are and what they want, other than the off with their rich heads part, I'd say more power to them. But I don't think they even know what they want.

"That said, I find myself agreeing with at least the sentiment of this 'We are the 99%.' When I see the graphs of wealth distribution in this country (especially the changes in the past few decades), and then see the policies that cripple small businesses and/or reward large corporations for less than honorable dealings, see CEOs run companies into the ground and still get their golden parachutes, etc, it's hard for me to believe that the American Dream is still alive. Sure that makes it more valuable to the ones who are smart enough to maneuver their way to it, but I also think that the cards are pretty well stacked against most of us."

And that, folks, is the problem in a nutshell: this person agrees with the "sentiment", but presents no facts, no suggested policy, no clear-headed analysis of the facts and policy intereactions.

In short, "sentiment" is being played upon, and some people fall for it, thinking that "sentiment" is a sound basis for deciding upon important matters, like whose political vision to support and who to empower with government's monopoly on the use of force to impose order.

"That said, I find myself agreeing with at least the sentiment of this 'We are the 99%.'"

I get where you're coming from. The problem is that the things that the OWS people are protesting are not capitalism. They're fascism. Bank bailouts, subsidies to politically-connected corporations, worthless securities pushed by government agencies -- none of these things have anything to do with capitalism. In a lot of ways, they are the antithesis of capitalism.

So what are the OWS people demanding to fix the problem of fascism? More fascism! They want more restriction, more regulation, more redistribution... more of the very things they are protesting. In 2008, they voted for the people who implemented the policies they are protesting, and they'll do so again in 2012. Here's what's really happening: It's not that they don't want a dictator. They do. But they want their dictator, someone will give stuff to them and not someone else. Obama has, much to their disappointment, turned out to be someone else's dictator. But they'll vote for him again because, as Reynolds says, they're self-identified rubes.

That's why the best strategy for dealing with OWS is to ignore them. Because it's impossible to craft a policy that would both satisfy them and be economically viable. They're demanding unicorns and magic wands. Let them act out for attention, because they more they expose their true selves to the public, the less sympathy the public has for them.

>> Noam, you'd be surprised how popular it is in NY right now.

I don't doubt that, but it's the question of whether they have any support outside of very Progressive cities and locals like NYC. Eventually the MSM will tire of trying to reframe these protests and the coverage will drop away.

And I get that people are frustrated, but I doubt that even very Liberal people are going to endorse the Occupy protests unless they can come up with something coherent that isn't patently ridiculous. Ranting about corporations may impress Tim Robbins, but he's an idiot.

"It isn't tragic, really it isn't, to attend a community college."

Unless it's because you were convicted of fraud for organizing an SAT cheating ring, in case it's the end of your life. Sorry, that one still bugs me.

As for the current situation, I find myself in the same boat - liberal arts degree, not entitled. I found a fulfilling (if not well-paying) job investigating fraud. I never had to sleep on a door, though. Ouch, Amy.

Spartee, thank you. I fully agree that my problem is a lack of direction. I say that with zero sarcasm.

I do my best not to make decisions on sentiment and I most certainly am not trying to be a leader. I've got a few vague ideas about the direction to go to make things better, but that's about it. I don't even know where to begin.

These OWS folks act as if they are the first generation to face economic uncertainty, rising costs, and a stiff job market.

They're not.

Many generations that came before them faced all these things ... and worse.

And preceding generations are partly to blame for this. The schools no longer teach students to survive. Instead, they teach students to feel good about themselves.

==============================

I see the same thing in my nieces and nephews.

A few weeks of struggling to make it on entry-level wages and they're calling everyone they know for a "loan."

I get that it's expensive today, probably proportionately more so today than in "my day." But wages are higher, too. There are still ways to survive those early lean years.

Move in with roommates to cut expenses (think of it as your own personal "Big Brother"). Learn to budget. Learn to cook. Shop outlets.

==============================

I grew up in a nice middle class household in a solidly middle class neighborhood. And, like today's youth, I had unrealistically high expectations of my college education in the job market.

Then I met reality.

When I got out of college, it took me several months to find a job. And the one I found was in telephone customer service and paid $5 with no benefits ... and I only got it because a friend worked for the company.

I lived in a house with intermittent heat and no A/C ... and rats. The convenience store down the street got robbed almost nightly. I drove an old beater car and had a pretty substantial credit card debt.

My roommate and I were too poor to afford cable and didn't have a VCR (the newest high-tech toy then). We did have a VHS tape which we put on top of the TV so we could tell people we were "watching a video tape on the TV." I slept on an old couch and he slept on a mattress on the floor.

My roommate was a high school drop-out who worked construction.

My parents would have kept me from starving, but beyond that, my survival was up to me.

I eventually paid off the credit card (after ten years), moved up in the company to better-paying jobs, and moved into an apartment with heat and A/C. A few years later, I went to grad school at a state school using a fellowship and student loans. I make a pretty decent living these days.

My roommate? He's now a DJ in a sizable market with a multi-year contract.

We didn't sit around blaming the 1% for our troubles. We worked. We weren't trying to take down the 1%, we were trying to join it. We never made it, but we landed on out feet.

Instead of spending their time complaining about not having a job, this "99%" needs to be out looking for a job. And, yes, the job search may take a while, be discouraging, and end up with them settling for a lousy telephone customer service job just to pay the bills. They may have no cable and a drafty apartment in a dodgy neighborhood. Welcome to reality (and not the one on "reality" television).

==============================

The note from the woman whose parents made >$36,000 and year, who spent $52,000 to attend a private school, who took a job in Korea, who will attend graduate school in the fall, and who wonders "what then?" amused me ... and then irked me.

What then? You'll be an adult, kitten. You'll be responsible for your own safety, survival, and sustenance. Grow up soon if you want to make it.

She complains that her parents are now unemployed and have two little children in the house. You just know she'll expect them (or the taxpayers) to assist her financially in graduate school when the student loan money doesn't cover all her expenses.

They are modern day draft protesters with no draft to protest.

It's sad when history passes you by.

Silly girl Conan - found the one you are talking about. Here is my advice for her. Take 5 years of hard work (I mean 12 hour days) in Korea, save your money, go out rarely and she could have her $52,000 dollar debt paid off. With her looks she could have some good job prospects teaching serious students. Skip the graduate school. Why waste the money for something that will likely just get you deeper in debt and holding a piece of paper.

Of course, I should take my own advice.

Reading over these posts them I am learning some lessons. From her I get the one little lesson - yes family is nice but when I turned 18 time to cut the apron strings. Plus with this day and age I can easily keep in contact. Grow up, and leave the house...

Another lesson I keep seeing is the mother trap. Sorry to the mothers out there. But I keep seeing these women saying they are 10s of thousand of dollars in debt to Student loans and then decide to stop working to raise their kids. Maybe it would be better to have the kids - preferabbly with a stable partner, then get the education - much later 5, maybe ten years later, or do not have kids if you are going to incur such a huge debt.

"We weren't trying to take down the 1%, we were trying to join it." Conan the Grammarian

This is what I find odd... somewhere along the line it stopped being socially acceptable to be ambitious, to have the DRIVE. These kids actually DO want the power, esp. over other people and what they think, but they want to act like they don't want wealth gotten the old fashioned way.

How much you wanna bet that some of those uber-hipsters are trust fund babies? They won't let anyone know, of course, that Daddy IS a wall st. banker, because they loathe and detest him except when they need money...

Interestingly most of the so-called 99% are much better off that many other countries entirety, and it is often pointed out that many people who are considered impoverished in the US would be solidly middle class in many countries.

I think this whole show is about people who have expectations instead of ambitions...

A little glimmer of hope....

http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/post/11250870394/i-am-the-99-occupywallst-org

amusing note from Dr. Helen:
"Most amusing comment I've read about the "Occupy Wall Street activists"
The easiest way to make them shut up and go home is to offer them work involving honest, physical labor. They will scatter like the cockroaches they are."

"My generation is nauseating. I have a friend on facebook that I graduated high school with. She posts about how someone berrated her for using food stamps at the grocery store. She said she was humiliated. She posted this from her smart phone. She also posted pictures from THREE different vacations/weekend getaways in six weeks time."

I'm probably of the generation of these people's parents, and believe me, I'm disgusted at their folks as well. Theses kids didn't get this sort of attitude out of nowhere.

"What then? You'll be an adult, kitten. You'll be responsible for your own safety, survival, and sustenance. Grow up soon if you want to make it."

Do you remember your previous comment about Wall Street?

"Wall Street didn't start the fire, but the investment banks happily toasted marshmallows while it burned. That's what Wall Street does, it takes advantage of market conditions to make money."

You were very quick to justify what Wall Street did. It is like saying Boys will be boys when they mow down their school mates with AK47.

Why do you fail to criticize Wall Street Owners while you have all the reason to mock the Wall Street Squatters?

Both of them are basically doing the same thing. Do whatever it takes to get other people's hard earned money without really working for it.

You cannot tell me Wall Street "earned" its money.

A big reason why I love, respect and admire Amy Alkon - is this post right here!

I own my home and car, paid $8k cash down on each
I have a college degree and have never missed a student loan payment
10% of my pay goes into savings & 5% to IRA
My IRA has not devalued below cost basis
I have 18mos living expenses in savings
I put $3000 into an HSA 4 years ago and still have money in it
I have enough credit cards to buy to a Cadillac, but never carry a balance
I've done all this on $37k gross, and without my parents help
I'm 30 years old and don't identify with the 99%
What am I?

You were very quick to justify what Wall Street did. ... Why do you fail to criticize Wall Street Owners while you have all the reason to mock the Wall Street Squatters?

Did you bother to actually read my entire post? I did criticize Wall Street for its part in the mortgage meltdown (especially Goldman-Sachs who bet againsst the mortgage market while selling their clients mortgage investments).

I mock the Wall Street Squatters because they, like you, appear to have no experience in the real world.

From their manifestos and comments, they expect that everything should be just like it was when they were in high school and had someone to support them or catch them when they fell.

College and food cost money. Just because you didn't pay for it when you were 17 doesn't mean it was free.

And while you kids were texting each other in history class, your parents were walking the tightrope of a real world existence, sheltering you from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Well, kittens, it's your turn on the tightrope.

Both of them are basically doing the same thing. Do whatever it takes to get other people's hard earned money without really working for it.

You cannot tell me Wall Street "earned" its money.

Go home, chang.

You have a naive outsider's view of the Wall Street ... as if it's just a club of some guys who are handed money because they know the secret handshake.

You take the time to learn the investment market (bonds, stocks, and other instruments), follow them daily trying to predict trends, and live and die on stock prices in a volatile market ... and tell me you don't "earn" your money.

While there's plenty of crony insiderism going on, there's also a lot of actual work going on (in the form of research, statistical and analytical modeling, and watching markets and corporate announcements for indications of which way stocks will move).

Wall Street serves a legitimate purpose. And it's not just to give rich guys and Princeton economics graduates jobs.

Wall Street serves as a market place bringing together people and companies that need investment funds with people and companies that have investment funds. If you get rid of Wall Street, you take away valuable part of the economy.

My 19 year old niece is one of the protesters in Portland. It totally cracks me up. She is going out daily to protest. She posts pics to facebook from her smartphone (that someone else pays for) and is all indignant about the injustice of it all.

"Wouldn't it be nice if everyone could have a job, live comfortably, not fear what our hard earned money is really being spent on, and be governed properly? We are the only ones you can change it. Or do you like being a robot? Occupy Portland! "

Hard earned money? She doesn't have a job! And isn't looking. And wouldn't take one if it were offered unless it were "really cool" and didn't interfere with her game-playing and socializing.

By the time I was 19, reality had bitch-slapped me across the room.

I disabled voice messaging on my cell phone. I never listened to the messages. I will call people back based on the "missed call" notice/number if I recognize the number. Of course, I usually call from home instead of when I am out and about.

"You take the time to learn the investment market (bonds, stocks, and other instruments), follow them daily trying to predict trends, and live and die on stock prices in a volatile market ... and tell me you don't "earn" your money."

What if I were a scientist and worked hard to make a rat poison, which contains rat's favorite food?

Then, I found out that you want to buy rat food to feed your rats in the lab. So what I did was to simply change my label from rat poison to rat food and sold it to you.

Did I "earn" your money? I don't think so. You earn your money by providing valuable goods or services to the buyer. It does not matter how hard you worked.

Well, that is what Wall Street did. They sold us rat poison while calling it rat food. They did all this with the knowledge that the product will kill the rat. But that did not matter to them as long as they were making money.

The problem I am having with you is that your unwillingness to show the same level of disgust to the Wall Street Squatters and to the Wall Street CEOs.

Both of them did not "earn" your money.

Right there with you, Amy. I majored in Communications my first go 'round and my first job out of college paid 14K a year. Three friends and I shared a studio apartment. I remember having to wash my clothes in the sink because I didn't have quarters (or any money, actually) for the laundromat. I didn't bitch and whine because everything I did have was MINE. I had earned that sweater, book, etc. No one gave it to me. It was all mine. And that feeling was awesome.
I do not understand how all these OWS people could be just fine having things they didn't work to earn handed to them. I was raised that accepting something for nothing was unacceptable. The sense if entitlement is nauseating. I agree with several previous posts: hand the little shits a mop and bucket and tell them we'll start redistributing after they clean all the bathroom stalls in the Port Authority buildings.

I'm graduating from college this May, so I'm right in the middle of this "entitlement generation." I don't identify with the attitudes expressed here, but I do sympathize with them, as isomber says, the attitude doesn't come out of nowhere.

My generation has a lineage of upward mobility. Our great or great-great grandparents came over on the boat; our grandparents grew up working class; parents grew up middle class; we grew up upper-middle class with full expectations to meet or exceed the trend. We were told by our parents, teachers, and guidance counselors that the key to this was a college degree--ANY degree, with emphasis on "doing what makes you happy" over salary or career prospects.

Consequently, you have 22 year olds graduating with $50,000 in debt for a Women's Studies degree from a third-tier liberal arts college, and absolutely no employment prospects. And the tragedy is that many of these students are smart, hard-working, and did everything right, but they're trapped by decisions they made at 17, 18, 19 years old because they listened to the well-meaning but flawed advice of previous generations.

Personal example: when my younger sister was choosing a major and I tried to talk with her about potential salaries and job prospects, my parents would literally shut me down, accuse me of being materialistic, and revert to the party line about "doing what makes you happy." It was interesting having this conversation in front of my 85 year old grandfather--I could tell that he was entirely on my side because he comes from an era where pursuing a job just because it makes you happy was a foreign concept. And of course my parents are well-meaning, but they're baby boomers who were able to put themselves through college and graduate school because tuition was exponentially lower, and be assured of a job on the other end because degrees were worth more back then. That worked 30 years ago, but the stakes have changed and parents and educators need to recognize that.

As for myself, I'm getting a degree in Finance and Economics from a state school that gave me a full ride and then some, so I'm graduating without debt. I interned at an investment bank last summer at an hourly salary equivalent to 50k a year if it was full-time--more than some liberal arts degrees can be expected to yield after 10 years. So I doubt I'll be holding up a sign on that website anytime soon. On the other hand, this time 4 years ago I was seriously torn between my school and a (less prestigious) liberal arts school that would have cost $40,000/year after scholarships. I wasn't that far off from taking on, oh, $150k in debt as a 17 year old. So yes, I can sympathize with my peers who find themselves in similar situations--and don't realize the consequences until it's too late.

"The problem I am having with you is that your unwillingness to show the same level of disgust to the Wall Street Squatters and to the Wall Street CEOs."

What color is the sky in your world, Chang?

Set aside the enormous economy Wall Street represents - big enough that its scraps enable "poor" Americans to enjoy cell phones and obesity. If you have a real problem with any corporation - as opposed to the chanting in your head - you can point at their charter, a legal document, and see not only what they must do, but the difference between what you think is going on and their legal obligation.

I suggest that the difference is large.

Dunno why I bother, but: Here's Alan Grayson explaining what the OWS folks are about on Bill Maher's show:
http://www.politicususa.com/en/alan-grayson-occupy-wall-street

Oh, I did this in my 30's. Got a Liberal Arts degree (to my credit, I was working full time in a FACTORY at the time, so it's not like I was sponging off the 'rents) but I did it because hey, if I'm going to spend the money on a degree, it might as well be in something I enjoy. I even suckered my boss into paying for part of it.

As it turns out, apparently and English Lit. degree qualifies you for a job in accounting, or at least that's kind of how it worked out for me. I got my degree, told my boss I was looking for less "physical" work, and they stuck me in the accounting department. Turned out I had a knack for it, and they paid for my accounting degree. Win!

But yeah, I moved from Michigan to Colorado at the age of 27 with a boyfriend, $1000, and whatever would fit in a '94 S-10 pickup truck. We lived in a motel for six months and I worked as a bill collector while he roofed houses. The thought of calling my parents for money was inconceivable - I literally would have starved to death first. Not because they wouldn't have helped us out, but because I would have been mortally embarrassed.

There's a lot to be said for being raised with a work ethic.

So, these people are finally figuring it out? Finally realizing what they have been told for years: don't get a worthless degree. I don't understand why people even go to school if they are going to get a crapass degree in Gender Studies, Women's studies, or the like. Why bother? You can bet your ass I'm never going to give my son the "you should do whatever you want" line. You go to college to prepare you for a job...and there no jobs in the liberal arts, unless you want to flip burgers.

What a bunch of whiners. I went from seriously being aggravated by all the signs to being seriously amused. This is what it has come to...whining about how entitled we all are.

I realized long ago I would never be a home owner, so I rent. I always pay credit cards off before they get interest, I drive a honda that will last for 15 years, and I take care of my son full-time with no help from his worthless mother. I started out making about 28,000 with a MS from a big state university, worked my tail off, got promoted twice, and now am making more than I could ever dream of 11 years later. I just don't understand these worthless losers complaining instead of out looking for a job.

A few things-

First, I love the comment SwissarmyD brought.

mike- I don't agree with "

> You cannot tell me Wall Street "earned" its money

Quotation marks! Who are you quoting?

If you're not quoting anyone, then why do you need the quotation marks to hold the word "earned" at arms' length? Why must you approach the topic backhandedly?... If you think Wall Street stole money, why can't you say so in an affirmative voice? Or are you trying to pretend that there's no such thing as "earnings", since you've never bothered to accrue any?

(This would be something like a lonely teenage boy saying there's no such thing as "orgasm"... We can be pretty certain that in the privacy of his model airplane collection, young Mister Pimples knows better.)

Here's the thing about Wall Street: They never promised nobody nuthin'. Long sheets of tiny print came with every deposit slip... Warnings required by law, decency, and practicality. People who invested in the popular financial instruments over the last twenty years or so should have known better. That's how adult commerce works. If you can't handle that, Young Mr. Occupier, you should take your cell phone and your tortilla chips and your sleeping bag and go home. Because you and your galactic protectors, Obama and his crew, are precisely the ones who insisted that the bankers be bailed out when their faulty judgments were exposed.

America's working adults are ready to deal with our loses in the investments we made. The tech bubble was no fun either, but the ones most hurt were the ones who most deserved hurting... They, like you, had come to assume that economic truth should comport to flattering fantasy.

It's meek urchins like yourself who surrender strength to the very forces, the very centers of power and corruption, which made big finance such a loathsome enterprise.

I don't like you.

Stupid big fingers! Sorry, I didn't mean to post the above comment yet.

Mike- I don't agree with the assumption (or whatever it should be called) of "Finally realizing what they have been told for years: don't get a worthless degree." because I'm not sure the kids have been told that for years. A lot of kids have had a lot of smoke blown up their ass and told how special they are, been coddled and told to follow their dreams. Aka- Been fed a lot of bullshit by hucksters. And I would venture much of the kids swallow that bs whole.

I wish I had the skill of being concise. Basically I think a lot of kids are not counseled to have realistic aspirations in life. I would agree with anyone who said that is a parents job, but that is cold comfort for the child who is spoiled with rotten parents telling them to follow their dreams disregarding how it can all by folly or moreso even disastrous financially.

I also wanted to mention something about real grievances in our land of opportunity. I recognize some that are aired in a few of the cardboard lamentations. Many are also to my mind laughable. One can easily mock in a sort of "what the hell did you expect to come of your choices?" but I think I would rather bring in a fuller subjective accounting to say that many of the ills in the U.S. are not these kids fault. There are not as many companies hiring today. The unemployment rate for younger people is massive. Yes, individual responsibility should be king for a persons work ethic and making things happen for themselves. But there is a lot more opportunity when things are booming vs slumping economically.

I wanted to tie all this up by coming back to the amusing "The easiest way to make them shut up and go home is to offer them work involving honest, physical labor. They will scatter like the cockroaches they are." Straight up some monocle wearing capitalist ought to go there and counter protest with a jobs fair. But I don't think such a benevolent thing will occur. It could nip all sorts of leftist populist tripe (yes I know I repeated myself twice) in the bud and be comedy gold but it's not going to happen. Because the jobs aren't there to give away like candy.

Thinking a prankster along these lines.

http://hotair.com/archives/2009/04/27/heart-ache-capitalist-pranks-hippie/

I graduated in '03 with a lib arts degree, after 5 months finally found a job as receptionist at a vet clinic. It quickly became office manager of same clinic, which I did until I stopped working outside the home. How many of these 99%ers would sniff arrogantly at a minimum wage minimum skill job? I'm betting most.

I realized that I was not going to be able to reenter the workforce with that lib arts degree once my kids were in school, so started on my nursing degree. That, I will have no problem finding a job in. I will be paying off my lib arts degree when my oldest enter college. My hubby got paid training courtesy of the US Air Force in a technical feild not many people enter, and banks big bucks. You better believe I will not be pushing college on my kids, I will be pushing practical preparation for life. It might be college, but they sure as heck will know the job they plan to get and that the degree will help for a fact, first.

> How many of these 99%ers would sniff arrogantly
> at a minimum wage minimum skill job?

Too many. My present client is a fantastically technical communications enterprise. There are a few dozen howling geniuses who keep the magic flowing.

Their heritage is not that of the Occupation.

They make crazy money, and they earn it.

The problem isn't minimum-wage jobs. I know a lot of these young adults who would gladly take them. The problem is that they aren't getting them. They are competing with people with degrees and 20 years experience. And even if they are offered minimum wage, that's not going to pay the minimum on the student loan, let alone the cost of rent and food and clothes.

Then we can rag on them for living in their parents' homes, I guess.

Never mind people who have 20 years experience and are being forced to accept a fraction of what they made before. Yes, we can tell them to suck it up, and they will have to, but sucking it up doesn't pay their mortgage or help replace their retirement funds. The resentment is building, and it's dangerous to ignore it, even if you think they all deserved what they got.

Not all of them are gender studies majors, as much fun as it is to poke at that field. Many of them studied things we would consider useful, and still, no jobs.

What I'm seeing here is massive hopelessness: They are so deep in debt and getting deeper. And yes, they could have bypassed the college degree. But for the vast majority of professional fields, a college degree is the price of admission. Some people manage to get by without one. We all know that guy who never graduated from high school and became CEO of Everything That Ever Was. But, like kids born to single moms hooked on crack who turn out OK, those people are in the minority,

So these young adults are trapped: They need a college degree to have a shot at a professional career, but that college degree is plunging them into debt for the rest of their lives. They're gambling that all that money will get them a job that can pay off the debt.

It's a fantasy that people can make it by simply rolling up their sleeves and doing some honest physical labor. Those jobs are disappearing, too. We're automating faster than we can create jobs. As a result, we're far more productive than we were with less need for bodies. The jobs that have been automated aren't coming back, and we're going to see more and more disappear.

Besides, what does it say about a society in which most of its population can't aspire to highly trained professional jobs for fear of going bankrupt? Doesn't make me confident for the future.

Unless someone can figure out how to create automation-proof jobs, we may eventually be looking at a situation in which staggering numbers of people are unemployable (like, 40% or more) are simply unemployable, not because they are lazy, but because the economy doesn't need them.

To be clear, I'm not in the 99%. I paid off my student loan years ago and, despite still being unemployed, my husband and I are doing just fine.

> Those jobs are disappearing, too. We're
> automating faster than we can create jobs.

I'll never believe it.

Everyone's so eager to believe that civilization has undergone some huge change, by technology or what-have-you, so that people are facing problems never seen in human history.

All the complaints from these people are built on a substrate of resentment that their lives won't be rote. Monica's right: They wanted to buy careers with college degrees. And because they're being so blind about it, academe has experienced an explosion in administrative costs. Why wouldn't it? They know their market doesn't have the imagination to do anything else... Just as, for so many years, investors didn't have the imagination to consider the value of the bullshit stocks and bonds that Wall Street was selling.

People don't want to think. They don't want to deal with conflict. They want solutions which are cheap, fast, permanent and sustainable. (Precious, darling sustainability.)

You don't have to be religious to see through this kind of mentality, though the better faiths will equip you with a fatalism which can be helpful.

Life won't be easy, and it won't be automatic, and you can't count on someone else to tell you how to earn your way through the world in good style.

Each of us, as individuals, must use our best judgment to figure out how to be useful to other people... So that they'll pay us and bring us other blessings.

Fuck the "Occupation", and fuck their childish fear. They've earned nothing better. The last thing those idiots want to to be "occupied".

And I can't imagine why anyone would want to play along with their "99%" rhetoric. You and your husband are "doing just fine" because –chief amongst other reasons– you fucking well work to make it happen. You are nonetheless not, I'm quite certain, in the top percentile of anything, and those little shits shouldn't make you pretend like you are.

Everyone's so eager to believe that civilization has undergone some huge change, by technology or what-have-you, so that people are facing problems never seen in human history.

No, this has been a work in progress for a while. It's just happening faster, and the population is growing larger.

At any rate, young people are the ones who do things like this, and it's poor judgment to ignore the situation when large numbers of discontented youth congregate.

You and your husband are "doing just fine" because –chief amongst other reasons– you fucking well work to make it happen.

I'm lucky. I married an engineer with a good job. In all honesty, I'm not currently doing squat to make our lifestyle happen, unless I want to consider my potentially functional uterus a marketable asset. The one thing I did really well was was not ever be in debt beyond my college loan, which was manageable. I would never want to be a young college student now.

For those of us who grew up in a time when education was affordable and simply working hard could make you a decent living, it can be hard to see how much these kids are fucked.

How long it takes to pay it off depends on her interest rate, which could vary greatly depending on how she got the loan. Interest rates can be low if she got a subsidized loan or very high if she took a private loan. Stafford loans are currently advertising a fixed interest rate of 3.4 percent for undergrad loans.

My loan was about $18,000, and it took about 10 years to pay off. I could have paid it off sooner, but I kept the payments very low ($150 a month) so I could manage other bills and still use it as a tax deduction. But this was over 10 years ago.

Didja know if you join the Army, they will pay off your existing college loan? 1/3 of it each year if you enlist for a 3 year term.

> It's just happening faster, and the population
> is growing larger

What has been a work in progress? How does it change anything at all?

Is there any decade history, including the toothless illiteracy of the Middle Ages, when people weren't eager to imagine that this (summer storm, royal ascension, new girl in town, whatever) changes everything? Peoples loves da drama.

Whatever you've done to make your lives successful, there's no reason the Occupiers shouldn't make the same effort... And I think the liberal habit is to habitually discount the steel in their own hearts and the pain of their sacrifices... As if they'd spent their hours of study and toil in the daydream that This shit isn't necessary... I shouldn't be bothered with this! No one should!

If there's something bad that recent generations have given to the Occupiers, some special burden, it's our sustenance of the fantasy that they can thrive in lives of riskless isolation.

Thoughtful people have always known this isn't true. Remember Steve Jobs? "You are already naked."

Student loans are the easiest loans to manage.

There are several deferment programs during which you make no payments and may even accrue no interest (on a subsidized Stafford loan - interest must be paid on unsubsidized Staffords). You simply need to meet some very basic requirements (unemployment,
active duty, economic hardship, etc.)

If you simply cannot pay, you can get up to three years of forebearance (interest accrues and is capitalized onto principal but payments are suspended).

So...$90K she could be paying off for the rest of her life, right?

Yes, depending on how well her gamble pays off. She basically took out a mortgage. She can stall paying, but she will eventually have to pay it. Not sure whether bankruptcy applies to student loans.

This is one of the many reasons why people are waiting until 35 to have children.

What has been a work in progress? How does it change anything at all?

Automation making a lot of us obsolete. We're ignoring it because it's unpleasant, that it may very well be that half of us aren't all that useful to the economy. And there's no drama here. Like the Cylon invasion, it has happened before and it will happen again. But it's going to be messy and a lot of people will suffer until they figure out how to adapt.

It's completely understandable that people who were encouraged to buy into an obsolete version of the American dream are miffed about mortgaging their futures for it, while the people who helped create this mess are falling to the earth with golden parachutes.

Not saying they don't need to try anyway. But protesting isn't a sign of moral weakness. Frankly, I'm surprised it took this long.

"America's working adults are ready to deal with our loses in the investments we made. The tech bubble was no fun either,"

I don't think you can compare the 2008 financial meltdown to the tech bubble in the go go 90s.

It is more like the Enron in 2001.

The architects of the Enron meltdown all but one went to jail for corruption and fraud. They argued the same thing you said above.

"Did you read the fine prints in 200 pages? The value might go down!!! You should have known better. Arthur Andersen said is O.K. to do this!! It is free market and no one forced you to buy Enron stocks!!"

The jury bought none of the bullshit above and sent them to jail. Now, let's talk about the one, who got away. His name is Lou Pai, who was CEO of Enron Energy Services and made a cool $300 million by selling his stocks right before it filed for bankruptcy.

His lawyer argued that he was forced to sell the stocks as a part of his divorce settlement and had nothing to do with insider trading. At that time his wife filed for a divorce as Lou could not stay away from the strippers.

The prosecution did not even bother to bring a charge against Lou because they concluded that no reasonable jury will convict him beyond the shadow of doubt.

Here is the point I am trying to make. The justice in a society mainly depends on the quality of jury at that time. It is the jury who decide someone to be punished or not regardless of one's guilt or innocence. The jury is you and myself.

That was 10 years ago. And something has changed since then. The communist were totally defeated and as a result the capitalist lost a major critic and we have only fan clubs.

If Enron happened in 2011, do you think Jeff Skilling or Andie Fastow would go to jail? All they have to say is "Your honor, we "never promised nobody nuthin'. Long sheets of tiny print came with every deposit slip... Warnings required by law, decency, and practicality. People who invested in the popular financial instruments over the last twenty years or so should have known better. That's how adult commerce works"

The government will not bother to bring any charges against Skilling as they know the jury in 2011 will include a guy like you. No jury in 2011 will convict him.

Do you know why not a single guy went to jail for 2008 financial fraud? People like you. People who are in love and got drunk with capitalism and hence unable to bitch slap when she does not behave herself.

"I don't like you."

It is O.K. to like me but don't fall in love with me. Otherwise, you will not be able to bitch slap when I do not behave myself.

> Not sure whether bankruptcy applies to
> student loans.

Nopers.

But see also, for the woman's own view.

> The jury is you and myself.

Christ you're a turd. Civics lessons with Chang, ever'body!

> People who are in love and got drunk with
> capitalism

Inebriation? There's nothing in the world as clarifying as earning, managing and keeping your own wealth.

You don't understand this.

And you don't want to.

Okay, because of this post, I've looked all over the net trying to see what the GOAL is for the Occupiers. I can't seem to find one. Do they just want people to know that they're mad? Do they just need a shoulder to cry on? Should we give them a large box of tissues? I know I'm being sarcastic, but seriously, what is the end result that these people are looking for? How do they know when to stop protesting? How do they know that they're "done"?

Oh yeah, and to the little girl holding up a sign that says, "Higher education is a right, not a privilage". You are correct. You have the right to an education. Last I checked, even girls can go to school! However, you do not have the right to get said education paid for. I checked the bill of rights and everything. It's just not in there!

Skilling and Fastow set up dummy corporations to hide Enron's liabilities and disguise losses ... and make themselves rich. This was active fraud for which Skilling and Fastow were held accountable.

Goldman Sachs sold mortgage instrumetns while buying hedges against the inevitable collapse of value in mortgage instruments. Using the rating companies' AAA rating, Goldman (and others) continued to sell those instruments as good investments. Goldman's actions were unethical. However, many market analysts were already publicly warning against investing in the mortgage instrument market so smart investors were warned.

Fannie Mae's Jim Johnson and his successor, Franklin Raines, actively hid losses and risk levels in their portfolio to goose financial performance and trigger generous executive bonuses. They moved riskier portfolios to subsidiaries to disguise Fannie's overall risk level. After auditing the GSE's books, the SEC said no honest corporation would have used Fannie Mae's accounting practices.

So, chang, if you think someone needs to go to jail for the sub-prime mortgage collapse, you should start with Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae.

But then you don't want to apportion actual blame. You just want an excuse to level another socialist rant against Wall Street and capitalism.

Student loans are the easiest loans to manage.

That generalization is used to talk countless individuals into taking on ridiculously large debts, and in many cases, it simply is not true.

1) Not all student loans are Stafford loans. There is a limit to the amount of Stafford money you can take out, as shown here. Many students resort to taking out loans directly from banks, which do not typically come with deferment/forbearance options.

2) If you consolidate your Stafford loans (as many people do in order to get a lower interest rate), you forfeit your rights to the deferment options.

3) I don't have time to verify this, but I believe student loans cannot be gotten rid of through filing for bankruptcy. You either pay them off, or they follow you to the grave.

Personally, I really feel for people with massive student loans. These are often the result of choices they made at eighteen, an age at which I think most people aren't equipped to make such life altering decisions. Especially when they have guidance counselors urging them to go to "good" (expensive) colleges, because it makes the high school look better.

I left college with a manageable 12k in debt (all subsidized Stafford), but that was only because I insisted on going against what every adult in my life was telling me. My personal favorite was a conversation I had with my father, who explained to me that student loan debt was GOOD DEBT that I should want and that it was part of being a grown up, like taking on a home mortgage. My response? "It's not like taking on a mortgage, because they don't give you a mortgage BEFORE you have the job that will enable you to pay it off." It just seemed irresponsible to me to take out large sums of money when I had no idea how I was going to pay it back. I didn't have any hard information to back up my belief; basically, I dodged a bullet based on a combination of stubbornness and intuition.

So if all those people deserve to be where they are because they made poor choices, are lazy, etc, does that mean that I deserve to be in a better place than they are, because I'm somehow better than them? A specialer, more glistening, snowflake?

How very Calvinist.

Not buying it. Sure, I'm where I am in life because of choices I've made, but most of the world didn't have those choices available to them to begin with. I am not a better or more deserving person than many of the jobless uninsured folks.

Luck of the draw, folks. When Fortune spins her wheel I could end up somewhere else. We all could.

One thing that bothers me on this blog is the attitude of "well, I have a sucky job with no insurance and lousy pay and I suck it up and deal, so everyone else should, too."

> I left college with a manageable 12k in debt
> (all subsidized Stafford), but that was only
> because I insisted on going against what every
> adult in my life was telling me.

I really, really like you.


> But then you don't want to apportion actual
> blame.

From his name (a little) and his tone (a lot), we know Chang comes from an authoritarian culture. He wants to be submissive. He's not kidding. And most of the world's cultures are like that... People don't mind being royal subjects (or slaves) if it means that but for a kiss of luck they might have been kings (or masters).

Take a look at this video. At about fifty-two minutes, a guy from the mainland tries to make a comment, and he's just completely stymied. He's just heard one of the best presentations on libertarian thinking he could hear... And he's crawling out of his skin! The idea that people might make their own arrangements for their lives, without direction from some idiot in government, is unbelievable to him.

The problem with Chang isn't just that he's young and naive, it's that the worldwide class of thinking he likes to share with us is from humanity's childish origins. When actual children fear a world without clear limits, it's understandable. But for adults, it's just cowardice.

> Luck of the draw, folks.

No. Culture means something. If you want to live like a dependent shitheel, leave me (and my markets and my government) out of it.

We are NOT all in this together, kids.

"My present client is a fantastically technical communications enterprise. There are a few dozen howling geniuses who keep the magic flowing."

Though you don't need me to say this, I am delighted! That can be awesome when you find somebody who plays ideas like his own Guarneri, AND I bet you don't have to endure what I hear repeatedly: "I'm just here for a paycheck."

-----

Hey, Chang? It's so funny that you cited Enron people. When it's a corporation, those people are evil and must be prosecuted - but when American government actually devalues the dollar with crazy moves that dwarf anything Enron does... not a peep.

Love government, do ya?

"This isn't the first time it's been tough for people leaving college. There were NO jobs when Gregg got out of college, and he worked on an assembly line and at a machinery graveyard."

I know things were pretty bad in the early 90's for grads when I was entering college. I vividly recall going to orientation for college and when they did an informal poll of majors a good 3/4 of students raised their hands for Business Majors. This was when every other Time/Newsweek/etc cover was bemoaning the complete lack of jobs for all the MBAs graduating. I was floored by how so many people clearly were not paying attention to reality and making judgements based on job possibilities.

I knew I had talents with computers and could see that there was a lot of growth happening there, so that's what I pursued. I actually realized pretty quickly that my original plan to be a programmer wouldn't work (I just don't go from design to code well) but found out that I was damn good at Systems Administration, and switched to that. Now I make a pretty good living, because I paid attention and tailored my skill set to what the market needed.

(Mr. Stymie is actually at 53:30. I've remembered his dishevelment for a decade now...)

"Luck of the draw, folks. When Fortune spins her wheel I could end up somewhere else. We all could."

Oh bullshit, Nicole. That's just an excuse that lazy narcissistic losers use so they don't have to face their own personality shortcomings. Improving yourself is hard work. Much easier to drag the rest of the world down to your level. I guarantee you that if you stripped Bill Gates of his every last dime and forced him to start over with just the clothes on his back, in five years he'd be wealthy again.

"One thing that bothers me on this blog is the attitude of "well, I have a sucky job with no insurance and lousy pay and I suck it up and deal, so everyone else should, too."

Why should they not? What makes them special fucking snowflakes?

While I disagree with almost every stupid idea to come out of the OWS crowd, I do have to add that they do have a point concerning student debt. Many people look back on their own college experience from 15 or more years ago and say to themselves: I managed to not go into too much debt, work a summer job, and pay it all off, why can't these people?

The fact of the matter is that today a college degree is required for large swaths of jobs, more so than it was in the past, and that earning a college degree has gotten astronomically more expensive in the past few decades. In comparison, the housing bubble was nothing more than a blip on the radar. Know any summer jobs that pay 30K a year?

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-07-19/wall_street/29961568_1_college-education-housing-bubble-prices

http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/20/pf/college/college_price.moneymag/

Add to this equation an awful economy, terrible job market, and the fact that this debt you've accumulated because you need a degree is unable to be discharged unless you're disabled, and you have the makings of a legitimate concern.

Tl;dr: College is a shit-ton more expensive than it was in the 80's and early 90's.

> College is a shit-ton more expensive than it was
> in the 80's and early 90's.

Point taken. You're right. Absolutely. Spot-on. Word, bro. Sing it. True dat.

But here's another way of looking at it. Ready?: College isn't as good a value as it used to be. Thoughtful people negotiate the market accordingly.

I think a lot of others don't go to college to learn how to make their way through the world, they go to college hoping the diploma will be something like a hall pass in difficult times.

Again, you're right... The "MAKINGS of a legitimate concern", but not all the way there yet.

My kid hasn't even graduated high school yet and he has solid job offers.

Looking ahead two years ago when he was but 15 and picking this path was daunting. Great choice for him though.

I wish I had been as smart as him when I was the same age.

I was a dorm & offcampus guy m'self, but this makes the Greeks look pretty good.

Forget 15 year differeces... I went to grad school and got a loan at 2.9% in 2005. My brother graduated in June with a loan at 6%... and interest rates are LOWER now than in '05. How is that anything other than luck?

Cousin Dave, Crid... if it is not luck of the draw, then I AM an extra special sparkly snowflake?

Bullshit. While it would be nice to toast the protesters with champagne and feel superior to them... I'm not. I'm not extra sparkly, I just happened to land on a better icicle.

And if I can have good luck, by definition others can have bad luck.

Cousin Dave they shouldn't suck up and deal and you shouldn't either.

I mean... someone said the protesters should go do back-breaking labor? Is that the America you want, one where a few people live high and everyone else picks cotton in the fields?

Bill Gates, btw, was hardly a starving orphan.

LauraGr, what does your kid do? Sounds like a great kid!

BTW, even majoring in something sensible isnt a great idea... I majored in computer science in the 90s. I wish I'd gone ahead and majored in something I loved instead.

Nic— Don't be so humble, you're not that great.

> How is that anything other than luck?

Reread the 7:24 PM comment: Some might think your brother a lousy businessman. You're only "luckier" than he if we agree that it's absolutely-mondomotherfucking essential that you both get advanced degrees to become the most wondrously magical Americans you can possibly be. But the error of that supposition is built into this discussion: Amy didn't go three sentences into the blog post without bringing it up in sincere humility.

And the bottom of your comment –"I wish I'd gone ahead and majored in something I loved instead"– may have been intended to double-down on your liberal propensity for emo manipulation... But it certainly derails your talk of luck, returning us to the topic of responsibility.

You ought not pester us with (or for) the "snowflake" language, since you were the one who brought it to the discussion. Nor is anyone here saying you should mock others with champagne.

Certain cultures make things go better than other cultures do... And cultures drift. That's what's happening in academe, indubitably... People with no affinity for education are clawing their way in, if merely into administration, because they know the money is as steady as money can be. And that's probably why you and lil' Bro-Bro want the extra sheepskin.... It's certainly part of the problem.

> Is that the America you want

You are certainly academically tainted; fears of Marxist social division cloud your thinking.

But for the record, yeah: I want Americans who can't make money with wordy, numbery work to find other ways to make themselves useful to others. For money. To a degree'd academic, that can sound like heresy: A life without air conditioning and endlessly flexible standards!

But it really isn't. A friend is going through this right now; she's leaving thickly technocratic office to work for a company that makes useful products out of physical materials. She's pumped as Hell to be working with people who deal with real things, and who won't try to hide lesser work with clever memoranda.

Dreaming the big dream.

(Yes, I know that academics are almost by definition degree-holders. It's late here.)

For Chang & Co.

"LauraGr, what does your kid do? Sounds like a great kid!"

He entered a two year diesel technology program at a tech high school. He is in the second year as a high school senior. Had to enroll and be accepted as a sophomore. He gets up extra early to ride the bus for an hour to spend half the school day at the tech school. Then he gets bussed back to his regular high school for the last 3 periods. He has to get his other required courses in those last 3 periods. But of course they aren't all offered when he can get them so he takes several classes online through BYU Independent study.

The amazingly cool thing is that this is paid for by his regular high school. They even provide the bussing.

The surprising thing to me is that so few kids take advantage of the opportunity.

My kid will run a wrench, but he will be very employable.

The kids in the program have to make a time sacrifice. Both in the very early mornings and the extra time needed for the online courses to keep up with required credits to graduate.

Entitled cretins are nothing new. I remember one of the previous job downturns. Watching a news story about protests, interviewing one of the protesters: "I have a Master's Degree, and I still can't find a job!" The guy's tone was dripping with entitlement. I remember thinking "No, you can't find a job because you are a jerk." Anyone interviewing this guy couldn't wait to yell "NEXT!"

What has changed is a generation of "you are special" parenting. Parents have created adult-children with more self-esteem than esteem for others, more self-righteousness than righteousness, more "me, me, me" than the "Me Generation." They have rewarded them for doing stuff that one simply should do as part of being, well, a regular person. In a futile effort to be a child's "friend" rather than parent, they tolerate behaviors counter to any reasonable social norm.

These protesters want their "Participation" ribbon. Parents have taught them that they "deserve" it. (Have you noticed the ubiquitous use of that word in advertising?) Let's give them their ribbons. Follow them up with a swift kick in the heinie, and an admonition to "get to work."

Probably all true, Ken, but I think recent generations haven't been taught to be stoic about ANYTHING. Maybe this is about the penetration of consumer culture into our lives... There's someone selling a solution for every problem, even when there are no problems. Trivial and fictional challenges are described as debilitating nightmares (Ronco kitchen products, "feminine" odors). It's not that anyone registers this stuff on a conscious level. Eelctronic advertising has filled our waking hours with this rhetoric for the last fifty years.

Serious question: Can you name ANY corner of public life where people are routinely told to face unpleasantness with stoicism?

Except for the churches, I can't. These kids think life is supposed to go great all the time, otherwise something's wrong. They don't want be told that there are solutions which don't involve policy.

"The surprising thing to me is that so few kids take advantage of the opportunity."
I think that a lot of the good training programs for tradesmen are being cut, unfortunately. The focus is on "college preparedness" instead of workforce preparedness. Highschools don't get the same amount of praise when they graduate kids that can weld or fix an Audi or have a beautician's license as they do for the kids they send on to Big State U to major in Art History.

> I think that a lot of the good training programs
> for tradesmen are being cut, unfortunately. The
> focus is on "college preparedness"

Agree completely.

And this obsession with college isn't working out for those of us who aren't in the college business.

Shouldn't the market correct this?

There have got to be a lot of really smart people out there who didn't bother with going to college. And seeing that they didn't go to college will be an ever-easier way for others to know that they're truly smart.

"Serious question: Can you name ANY corner of public life where people are routinely told to face unpleasantness with stoicism?"

http://asianloop.com/review/33/Old_Partner

Chang, I don't think you answered that question very well.

Wow, Chang, even your movie review is anti-production. We are to admire the organic farmer with an emotional connection to his beasts. The horror that those other people use pesticide!

{Pesticide - n. - any one of a class of chemicals interfering with the life cycle of insects, a major vector of disease and the bane of agricultural production worldwide.}

Want a clue? No? Then get it anyway: if American factory farming went away for any reason, between one and three billion people worldwide would starve to death. Big, nasty companies like Tyson, ADM and Beatrice have streamlined the production of nutrition so well that the loss of American agriculture is the single biggest killer in war games. It's not the A-bombs, it's the disruption of the production and shipment of food all over the world - by ship, by truck, by train, all built by those evil corporations again.

No, Aber, it's ok... I love the movies! Especially that one about the blue cars!

____________


"Turd" may have been disproportionate. For a stranger, on a blog, when both parties are (essentially if not literally) pseudonymous anyway.

But in person? At a cocktail party or something? If you'd said all things you say here out loud, including the part about forcing others to sustain you? I'd have responded the same way.

Much of the documentary is a tribute to a way of living that is not reduced by its simplicity and closeness to nature, but elevated. The only real needs are sustenance, companionship, and a sense of being useful.

Well, movies are all about fantasy, aren't they? Even in documentaries. And in this movie, the need for liberty isn't "real". Nor is that for modern medicine, even to old people with hypertension.

Tenderly shot, beautifully elegiac, Old Partner is a celebration of a forgotten part of Korea

Not entirely forgotten... 2.5 miles to the north there's a powerful example of Korean life before modernity. It sucked.

(Hitchens once said the average height in NK is six inches shorter than in the South.)

I love movies as well. I've been looking for a certain one you mentioned made by Hirokazu Koreeda for a while now. Seen others by him which makes it all the more frustrating not to see that one.

I will watch the movie that Chang gave us a link to. See if it roughly endorses the lifestyle or something. Just as subject matter I know I'll contrast it with Kaneto Shindo's "The Naked Island" which I would agree with anyone is beautiful. But the characters are also very stupid to desire subsistence living. There is no possibility of flourishing in life with such decisions. Of course that's non-fiction.

I know you are able to defend yourself spectacularly, so I didn't feign to. I just thought Changs answer was on a level of epic fail. He linked an article which is a movie review about subsistence farmers in a different country who live austerely apparently by choice and their ox. It fails on so many levels. There is no routinely being told there. The public life is thousands of miles away from wall street. Arguably this isn't even about public life. It's about the private lives of individuals as portrayed in a movie. WTF does that have to do with the question posed? And are these people told anything? Much less to face their unpleasantness with stoicism? I'm doubting that. Perhaps the guy is a stoic, but I gathered from the article that others were telling him to fricking live in the modern world finally. I think Chang got that completely in reverse.

As I understood the question, it was a challenge to make seen anywhere in the U.S. specifically where a person can be told that they have to deal with their choices in life. Where no palliative is being sold and the person is told to man up. My only guess which I think is a poor one is some country music and maybe a little bit of hip hop. But much more drowns that out in the glamour of the high life.

And p.s. Crid, I can't watch that movie with Steve McQueen. Yes, it does have him in it and it has that going for it, but it isn't the le Mans race of 1969! Four years of Ford domination was killed by rules changing in '70. Those old GT40's are awesome.

Dood... Yes they are! (And it's ironic that when they resurrected the GT40 as a modern car, Detroit did what it's always done: They bloated it out and bulked it up until you can't recognize it.)

The 917 has a special place in my imagination. No car since has seemed as revolutionary and successful.

It's kind of like the Slimline phone, developed just a year earlier, or the Fender Stratocaster from 1951. These midcentury designs were essentially unimprovable... They were the last champions to look different.

PS- The plot of Le Mans was ludicrous, but the music was golden.

Hahaha. No. That music is ludicrous too. So bad I almost want to see it. Almost.

Take it back! Great music. 'S brilliant.

It turns up in weird places, Disneyland at sunset, and places like that. It's Michel Legrand

Big Mac—

For all the admiring talk about bravery and perseverance, it's not really al that difficult to get young, unemployed people to spend a couple of weeks camping out somewhere. They have a low cost of time, they're in no danger, and yes, I have to say it, demonstrating is fun. No, don't tut-tut me. I was at the ACT-UP die-ins, the pro-choice marches, the "Sleep Out for the Homeless" events and the "Take Back the Night" vigils. It's fun, especially when you can see yourself on television. This is not the Montgomery bus boycott we're talking about here.

Wrong link, sorry.

"The 917 has a special place in my imagination. No car since has seemed as revolutionary and successful. "

No kidding. Roger Penske still says that the one that Mark Donahue drove to set the world closed-course speed record at Talledega is one of the few race cars that he's sold that he'd like to have back.

Remember what Mario Andretti said about McQueen? "I'm not getting beat by a fucking movie star!"

"Cousin Dave they shouldn't suck up and deal and you shouldn't either."

Too late. I already did. When you're 10 years old, you don't have a lot of choice about the matter.

Off topic but it is driving me insane. I've tried googling for hours on multiple days but I'm searching wrong or understand wrong.

How does a person put up a link to a story and have it appear as how you want it to rather than the actual address on the world wide web. I want to know so I can link to stuff like the above "917" and "Mac" pictures and stories respectively but without the long address. I hope this makes sense and anyone who gets me to "get it" will forever be my hero. I'm likely going to need an example that seriously spells it out in an elementary fasion. I hope with an example. One reason I need to know how to do this is so I can rickroll a buddy of mine.

Never gonna let you down...

PS- If you do more than one per comment here, your comment will probably get lost in the spam filter

Thanks crid but I must be doing something wrong. I tried sending myself an email in gmail to a random site using how I understand the architecture of the sequence of symbols to work and it didn't work.

I used the

So frustrating being in the dark! I need a damn eureka moment!

Woa. Half my above comment got swallowed. Maybe because I used the wedge symbol trying to explain how things weren't working. I should have previewed before posting. Hope I'm close to getting it.

If you try to type out an example here, the blog will try to use the example for real, which is why your line went blank.

Gmail has its own encoding for links. When you're in the "compose" page, turn on "rich formatting".

Or shoot me an email and I'll give examples

So I typed the wedge symbol, then a capital A, then HREF, then the equals symbol, then the site I want to direct to in quotation marks, then the wedge pointing the other direction and I type what I want it to look like, followed by the wedge, slash, A, and finished with the wedge. And it isn't working in my emails I'm sending myself.

Are emails different than blogs for this?

Yes!

What a long thread!!

I think some of the 99% from the website made a lot of huge mistakes for their choice (I agree with all the "entitled generation" rant for the most part), but not only that.

1) the cost of education increased dramatically!

I had to pay my wife student loan, but she managed really hard to keep it low. But between 2006 (when graduating) and now, the tuition went on a several hundred percent increase (state university), and I can read that it was the case before in most universities across the country. You can read this graph in case you have some doubts:
tuition cost
(note that medical cost had also increased dramatically, but less)

2) unemployment rate is very high at this moment: 9%.

see unemployment rate
Although we had known rate higher (25% in 1932), it is a pretty big rate for recent history.
I sincerely believed that the population is not that rotten that 9% do not want to work on menial job. I just don't think that the jobs are out there (I could not find a statistic on the number of open positions).

3) Last: for capitalism lover, the USA is not a capitalist country anymore, call it corporatism or oligarchy as you want.

Not that I am capitalist lover anyway obviously, but I rather live in a capitalist system rather than the one we are having now.

Hint: look at the number of former goldmann-sash people in the ministry of finance.... Or the number of monsonto/ pharmacy group people in the FDA... same with energy groups ... help you to remind that "We the people ..."

Wall street put the economy down the drain in 2008 and we are still in it, I find it amusing they get a payback for a bit. Although this movement will get nowhere.

PS: for the kids with high student debt: emigrate to another country with no law on international debt (do your homework for once).
For the young lady expecting a kid: time to abort before disaster or give to adoption (depending on your belief).

Dooooooooooood, you're DARK.

About the edu-costs thing, let me take one more swing: People seem to have decided that having a degree means never having to think very, very carefully about what we can do for other people.

I'm not religious, but people in my life think that's what were on this planet to do, is be useful to others. A convincing case can be made.

"I'm not religious, but people in my life think that's what were on this planet to do, is be useful to others. A convincing case can be made."

This is the major problem I have with you.

You are living on a useless planet. This planet you are living on is useless to any other planets. While it uses Sun and Moon for its existence, it returns nothing to Sun and Moon or anything else in the universe.

And you are preaching the goal of life on this useless planet must be useful to each other. Why? Is this Newton's new law I missed?

The movie I linked has three main characters. The old farmer, his wife (funny as hell) and old cow. They are all old and useless or going to be useless soon. That is the unpleasant part of life.

Yet, the old farmer refused to sell the old cow for meat and took care of the cow until it naturally died. He saw himself in that cow.

The old cow's uselessness and need for fresh diet made the old man's life actually useful. He had a reason to get up early in the morning to feed the old cow.

Here is the ironic twist. It is not the old man, who kept the cow alive. Actually it was the cow that kept the old man alive.

And they did it very stoically.

If the goal of life on this planet is being useful to each other, my uselessness might me very useful to you.

Crid,

The link trick you showed worked!!! Thanks.

> While it uses Sun and Moon for its existence, it
> returns nothing to Sun and Moon or anything else
> in the universe.

Teenage Cosmic! I love that shit!

> And you are preaching the goal of life on this
> useless planet must be useful to each other.
> Why?

Because for the moment, your life isn't worth the time of day, let alone "sustaining" with my own precious resources. Until you do something useful, no one cares if you starve. Why would they?

> Actually it was the cow that kept the old
> man alive.

Imagine what nutrition, medication, and engagement with modernity coulda done for him.

"Imagine what nutrition, medication, and engagement with modernity coulda done for him."

Carolyn Porco's team dropped a probe on Titan.

Chang, any attempt to show we are somehow a great failure because money isn't spread like mayonnaise is invalid. The children protesting at Wall Street aren't advancing us all in any way.