Generation Bubble
recession regression
Nonprofit Squeeze: Tax-Exempt Institutions Feel the Recession's Pinch
One would suppose these institutions held nothing but reliable, blue-chip stock on their portfolios, stock that, while certainly not generating spectacular returns, at least produced reliable ones. No, these nonprofits were after sexier stuff — all gamine gyrations of puts, calls, strikes and options. And I begin to speculate myself. I wonder if these nonprofits weren’t up to something altogether venal, exploiting their tax exempt status as a way of increasing their profit margin.
Brokedown Palace: Higher Education À La Carte
For the shock troops who have been drafted into doing the teaching at nonelite universities — the graduate students and adjunct professors — there may be troubled times ahead, as the demand for their labor is consolidated in various online-education sites. If community-college students are to become clients, and college can be supplanted with watching videos of old lectures and exchanging emails with a generic instructor out in the cloud of computer servers, then fewer adjuncts will be necessary (and those university departments that have traditionally taken in large number of grad students to teach undesirable undergrad courses will shrink — and perhaps as fewer are accepted into literature programs in graduate English departments, the topics of dissertations will become less ludicrous). Adjuncts could find themselves in the same situation as reporters, as local colleges go the way of local newspapers — to extinction.
Bubble Living: DC by a Nose for Cocaine Use
One wonders how bad things really are if can still find money for an eight-ball. At any rate, cocaine is not necessary a drug associated with economic downturns. Smack, certainly. Crack, definitely. But blow retains too much of an uptown aura really to be associated with hard times. One thinks of all the 80s cocaine glam: Delorean car tires, shitters in some Manhattan or Miami nightclub, the backseat of a BMW 500 series — all mis en scènes for a drug that defined a decade. If crystal meth is the poor man’s cocaine, then cocaine remains the rich man’s cocaine.
Cheats, Shoots and Thieves: The No-Depression Gang's New Slang
The whole “green-shoots” things puzzles me particularly, predicated as it is on an even more puzzling “jobless recovery” (another meme that’s been rattling around the blogosphere). The latter seems to range beyond the strange late-70s phenomenon of stagflation. It suggests that market rallies now enjoy absolutely no relationship to conditions on the ground — job growth, credit expansion, consumer spending (all of which have stalled or contracted).
Boho Meets Hobo: Hipsters Hit Hard in “Youth Magnet” Cities
Overextended and underemployed in creative-class Xanadu is probably not how many hipsters envisioned their post-collegiate years, but such is the sobering reality for many of them. Which can come as nothing but good news for local employers, who stand to acquire specialized labor at bargain-basement wages, as well as for landlords, the ultimate winners in all such demographic trends.
All Hands on the Glad One: Cuddle Party USA
On Friday, May 8th, in Succasunna, New Jersey, twenty or so adults will gather for the expressed purpose of cuddling with each other. For this platonic group canoodle each participant will pay the modest sum of 20 dollars. Cuddle Party USA isn’t your usual gooey New Age, Esalen-inspired gestalt therapy rebooted for Info-Age neurotics; it’s something [...]
Little Big Home
Dances with mortgage wolves leavin’ you dizzy? Seeing your equity scalped settin’ you on the warpath? An uptick in your ARM got you feelin’ all Wounded Knee? Dr. Free’s your medicine man when it comes to subprime blues. His Tipi Life has the cure for what ails ya (our thanks to Gross nOOdz for the [...]
The Future of Food
April is the cruelest month — for varmints. Via cryptogon.com comes this story in today’s edition of The Detroit News. It concerns one Glemie Beasley, a sort of modern-day Robinson Crusoe, only without the island — or even the isolation. Not content to wait on the fickle largesse of auto traffic, Beasley takes a Bush-Doctrine [...]
Recession Regression
It’s jammie time for Generation Y! Sky Mall’s Spring 2009 catalogue contains this latest consumerist sugar tit: Millennials can now cosset themselves in supreme toddler comfort as they ride out economic downturns. Bibs and blankies not included. Can anyone say “bubble snuggle sesh?!” Related Posts:Serfin’ USA: The Taxpayer as Ignorant IngrateSol Invictus: From Boom to [...]
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