Month: September 2003

Annals of Incredibly Bad Taste

Spoiled kids and trashy funerals. This trumps the ghetto prom and the ghetto wedding that people sent to me.

The baby stuff especially is egregious– it’s one thing to have a particular style, like the ‘ghetto’ images or like an import-car tuner. That, people make fun of because they look down on your culture or sub-culture at least as much as because it’s in actual poor taste. But the kid’s toys just scream “I don’t spend any time with my children and I spoil them to compensate,” as well as “I have no taste.”

Life is, indeed, a crapshoot.

Things! Places! Categories!

TMF picks up the earlier NYT story on happiness, noting that it has been scientifically proven that money will not make you (permanently) happier (unless you’re really actually poor). Nonetheless, people keep thinking about exciting new ways to make money, like micropayments, and of course, they go on Bravo! to have people buy them cool new furniture for their cool urban lifestyle.

Note that New American City covers an old favorite subject of mine: the LA River.

In summary, France Sucks

Forbes is carrying an editorial about European pension systems and how they’re underfunded and over-generous, that taxes and pension funding make it too expensive to employ people, etc. etc. The implication is that the US has it all right. Bullshit. Yes, tax burdens on employment are lower, for the employers, but they fall onto the employees instead, which is pretty close. And of course the big issue is not how generous the pension, or how early the retirement age is, or how much vacation you get, but whether it’s funded properly. In the US and in Europe, it’s a PAYG system: Pay As You Go. Meaning that the workers today pay for the retirees of today. And if there are more retirees than workers, then you have a structural problem, and that’s the problem that most of the developed world is having. Not just those [epithet] Europeans.

It’s jingoistic and misleading to imply otherwise.

Calculate your Destiny

According to the Motley Fool Calculators, I can buy a typical Boston-area one-bedroom condo by increasing my savings to well above my income and making a down payment significantly larger than my net worth.

Sounds like I should get involved in gun-running for Halliburton.

Also, financial advice for you youngsters out there: never breed. Single most significant correlating factor for personal bankruptcy is child-rearing.

Why I Don’t Read Sci-Fi

But jeez, Neal, 3,000 pages? Newton invented calculus in less time than it’ll take to read about it.

Hot authors get more influence over their editors because they’ve got an established fan base, so they don’t have the discipline needed to cut, delete, tighten, a novel into something readable.

My writing teachers used to say that the one great lesson of good editing is “murder your darlings,” which means you should cut a sentence, paragraph, chapter if it doesn’t fit, even if you love it. It’s not the whole, it’s not the end product. Be especially harsh on the parts you love best: the more you like it, the more likely you are to leave it in, even if it needs to go.

Urban Renewal

Woah. They tore down the Liberty Book Bin Adult Entertainment Center and Book Store that’s been one of the fading outposts of the ‘Combat Zone’ in what is now the upscalifying Chinatown and Washington Street Corridor. Amazing, and a big step for Chinatown, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and so forth.