I ran across a link to Beloit College’s Mindset List for the Class of 2010. I’ve seen these before, as they’re frequently forwarded around. This one is a bit bizarre. Some of them make me feel old:
- Windows 3.0 operating system made IBM PCs user-friendly the year they were born.
- Caller ID has always been available on phones.
- GPS satellite navigation systems have always been available.
Some of them are true of me (class of 2003):
- They have always been looking for Carmen Sandiego.
- Lenin’s name has never been on a major city in Russia. (I am of course aware of Leningrad, but I don’t think I learned geography with it. Presumably it’s the same for the class of 12.)
Shampoo and conditioner have always been available in the same bottle.
And some of them don’t make very much sense:
- The Warsaw Pact is as hazy for them as the League of Nations was for their parents. (I don’t know what this one is supposed to mean - our parents were unfamiliar with the League of Nations? That seems unlikely. But I do feel more familiar with the LN than with the Warsaw Pact, so maybe this one is true of me and that’s why I don’t get it!)
- Michael Milken has always been a philanthropist promoting prostate cancer research. (Who TF is Michael Milken?
- As a precursor to “whatever,” they have recognized that some people “just don’t get it.” (Is the latter supposed to be some sort of cultural catchphrase?)
So then I looked up the ones for the class of 2003 and some of them were great because they’re now outdated:
- They were born and grew up with Microsoft, IBM PCs, in-line skates, NutraSweet, fax machines, film on disks, and unregulated quantities of commercial interruptions on television.
- The moonwalk is a Michael Jackson dance step, not a Neil Armstrong giant step. (I’m going to guess that for the class of 2010, it’s the latter.)
Then some again seem wrong:
- Yugoslavia has never existed. (I had to look this up to be sure, but it existed until 2003! Or maybe they’re talking about the one that disintegrated in 1992, but still, I was definitely familiar with there having been such a country.)
- Ketchup has always been a vegetable.
And some don’t apply - apparently I was really not with the times, because I don’t (and never did) know the names of at least half the members of the “Brat Pack”, who Tina Yothers or Max Headroom is, which dolls had “Xavier Roberts” on their ear, what Willis was “talkin’ ’bout”, or what a Doozer is.
It’s true, though, that I have no idea why “Solidarity” is spelled with a capital “S”! (Wikipedia actually didn’t shed a whole lot of light on this one; I now know about a whole bunch of different leftist and socialist organizations called that, but it isn’t obvious what the list writers were referring to.)
The St. Louis Public Library is running a program this month called Read Down Your Fines. For kids 17 and younger, every 30 minutes they spend in the library reading erases one dollar of library fines. How cool is that? When I was a kid I could have used that. I used to have to spend my lunch money to pay my library fines, then I would have to eat lunch on a dollar a day. (Don’t ask why I didn’t ask my parents for more money. I was a weird kid.)
I don’t have anything to say about high apartment rents in NYC but I loved this part:
Students on tight budgets find it especially tough to find housing. Last fall, Kate Harvey, a part-time nanny and a junior at N.Y.U., and eight friends saved on rent by camping out in vacant offices at Michael Stapleton Associates, a downtown explosive-detection security firm. For nearly three months, they told the guards at 47 West Street that they were interns, even as they trudged in near midnight or pattered through the lobby at 10 a.m. in pajamas and slippers.
Ms. Harvey’s father, George Harvey, who is the chief executive of Michael Stapleton Associates, had lent them the space, which included two kitchens and two baths, after his company moved into a new office before the lease on its old one expired.
They sneaked furniture into the 11th floor on the freight elevator, squeezed three beds into the former chief executive’s office and turned filing cabinets into clothing drawers. One student pitched a tent. They brought their cat, Sula, past the front desk. They knew pets were allowed, they said, because the company had allowed bomb-sniffing dogs.
While most of the students who were interviewed said that they came from families that were fairly comfortable financially, they said that area rents were so high that they could not afford both housing and tuition.
“It was nine girls and a cat,” Ms. Harvey said, sipping on steamed milk in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse.
That’s kind of adorable. I can’t help thinking of my college-student sisters; it seems like the kind of thing Ellen would do!
A Simple Need, All Too Often Unmet
I’ll never forget what I saw years ago from my Times Square office window. It was not yet theater time and all the nearby restaurants had signs saying “Restrooms for customers only.” A well-dressed woman standing near Shubert Alley had an accident in the middle of the sidewalk and collapsed in tears in her companion’s arms.
No one should have to suffer such humiliation. The expression “When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go” is more often true than not. But where?
I am so glad there are people out there pushing for more access to public toilets. When I went to Germany as a high school student, I remember being shocked at how hard it was to find a restroom (oases: department stores and train stations, both of which do require payment). Until fairly recently, I thought it was another manifestation of how the Germans have evidently adapted to require less water than Americans (see also: no water fountains, rare free water at restaurants, and only beer comes in large sizes when you’re dining out). Once I started spending more time in American large cities, though, I realized that we have a problem too.
The author of the article lists some suggestions for finding restrooms while you’re out and about. Her experience generally lines up with mine, although I’ve actually been thwarted at a McDonald’s (in San Francisco, where we also found one of the public toilets she mentions and couldn’t get it to open up). In general, though, the only reason I ever patronize McDonald’s is the fact that they have toilets (I do always buy something once I’ve taken care of needs). And I have to say, one of the major pluses about the recent expansion of relatively upscale chain stores is that they almost always have bathrooms. Target, Barnes and Noble, and Starbucks have all saved me from possible embarrassment more than once.
Tim has an interesting post speculating on “which subjects will be the subject of moral revolutions in the 21st century.”
I think there are three ways to identify possible areas for moral change. First and most obviously, you can look at what’s currently in the process of changing and predict the eventual outcome. For example, we’ll see further gender equality, with the idea (e.g.) that women are the best caretakers of children becoming as unacceptable as the idea that, say, Jews are greedy. (Of course, there’s still room for progress there too.)
Secondly, you can think about where your own morals conflict with those more generally accepted by society. Nationalism is an example here; I truly do not understand why people believe that someone from Texas should have more of a right to go to Cleveland looking for work than someone from Mexico does. I think that as our world becomes more interconnected, national boundaries are going to seem less important and more arbitrary, and we’ll start seeing people from other countries as simply fellow humans.
Third, you can think about where your moral intuitions conflict with one another, or don’t match with reason. Here it’s difficult to predict what will happen, since if you knew how to resolve the contradiction it wouldn’t be a problem, but it provides a way to identify areas of change. Animal rights is a big one here; my moral intuition that stops me from hurting cute things conflicts with my intuition that meat is a normal thing to eat. And it’s not easy to resolve logically. My guess is that meat eating will become less accepted, especially since it’s now easy to get sufficient nutrients otherwise.
I note that my last two examples rely rather heavily on increased prosperity. The more productivity increases, the easier it will be to let more people compete in American labor markets - eventually there will be enough to go around. And technology and prosperity make it easy to survive as a vegetarian. It’s also probably true that increases in material wellbeing make less-economically-fraught changes easier as well; people who aren’t worried that anyone’s going to take their next meal away are more likely to focus on their own problems rather than causing trouble for anybody else. Plus, there are more overindulged college students available for protest duty.
Sometimes I wonder why it is necessary to include instructions on, say, soap. I suppose it is possible that some people have not figured out to use soap yet. However, I don’t think the following label will take care of that:
Directions: Wet hands. Work into a rich lather. Rinse.(Trader Joe’s “Next to Godliness” hand soap)
It doesn’t seem to mention the part where you add the soap.
Similarly, a frozen pizza I baked the other night instructed me:
Remove plastic wrap. Place pizza directly on oven rack. Bake 9-10 minutes or until cheese is bubbly.
It’s a good thing I knew that I should remove the cardboard under the pizza. Sure, that’s obvious, but it’s not as obvious as removing the plastic wrap! (If you hadn’t had frozen pizza before, you might not notice the cardboard since it can blend in with the crust.)
On a different note, I just purchased some “Blue Tabs” automatic toilet bowl cleaner. I noticed that the package says
Safe to use around pets and children, although it is not recommended that either be permitted to drink from toilet.
That is so awesome. I was dithering on whether I really needed toilet bowl cleaning tabs, but when I read that I decided that this company definitely needed to be rewarded with my business.
(It does later say: “HARMFUL IF SWALLOWED. EYE IRRITANT.” so I’m not sure exactly how safe it is.)
This morning I went to breakfast at Cracker Barrel with some friends who were on their way out of town. In the “country store” area they had these fake pets that look pretty lifelike and “breathe” as they “sleep” in their little baskets. I’ve seen these things before, and I always have to walk away, because they’re so pathetic it makes me sad.
The copy on the website says “Perfect Petzzz are cute sleeping puppies and kittens that offer unconditional love and are maintenance-free.”
I can’t help imagining some elderly lady who’s lonely and needs a companion, but can’t have a real pet because she’s too stiff to care for one or too poor to feed it, and her grandchildren who can’t be bothered to keep her company themselves buy her one of these things so she can try to pretend that she’s getting unconditional love from this pet that never ever wakes up. Gah, it’s so sad.
(As if my imagined pathos weren’t bad enough, I had to go read the testimonials at that website. Don’t do it.)
I am really annoyed at the amount of garbage companies - some of whom I have never even done business with - force me to throw away.
To Sierra Trading Post, Norm Thompson, and Omaha Steaks: Yes, I ordered from your website. That was because I want to shop online. I do not want to shop from catalogs. If I want anything else from you, I know where your website is because I’ve ordered things from it before. Stop sending me your freaking catalogs. (And Norm Thompson, the one thing I bought from you sucked anyway. You should have a disclaimer that your products are meant for middle-aged women.)
To the phone company: WTF? Why have I gotten three sets of phone books in the 17 months I have lived here? I am not even your customer, nor have I ever been. T-Mobile, whose customer I actually am, doesn’t leave heavy phone books on my porch so that I have to lug them to the dumpster. Why do you? Seriously. Why is it OK for you to drop garbage off on my front porch when I have never had any doings with you whatsoever?
Maybe I should save all the phone books and drop them off at the phone company’s doorstep once I have too many to carry at once.
I’ve seen discussions of this study (PDF) a few places, most recently Agoraphilia. It shows that social drinkers earn more money than non-drinkers.
Drinkers earn 10 to 14 percent more money at their jobs than nondrinkers and men who drink socially, visiting a bar at least once a month, bring home an additional 7 percent in pay, according to a new Reason Foundation report by economists Bethany Peters, Ph.D., and Edward Stringham, Ph.D.
“Social drinking builds social capital,” said Stringham, an economics professor at San Jose State University. “Social drinkers are networking, building relationships, and adding contacts to their Blackberries that result in bigger paychecks.”
The study finds that men who drink earn 10 percent more than abstainers and women drinkers earn 14 percent more than nondrinkers. However, unlike men, who get an additional income boost from drinking in bars, women who frequent bars at least once per month do not show higher earnings than women who do not visit bars.
The authors suggest that social drinking allows people to build social capital, which pays off career-wise.
While I find this explanation plausible, and suspect that it’s at work at least to some degree, I’ve read the study and still can’t figure out why they’re sure that social drinking causes you to have more money, as opposed to the explanation that people who already have more money drink more (because they can afford it). They did control for a bunch of things like age, education, region of the country, etc., but I don’t see how any of those apply to this particular causality question.
For example, I currently drink less in bars than I did two years ago. While I’m older and living in another region of the country, those aren’t the reasons why - the reason I visit bars less is, in fact, because I can no longer afford it now that I’m a full-time student. It seems logical that most people in my situation would make similar decisions. (Compare also the collegiate practice of “pregaming”, or drinking at home to get buzzed before going out to the bar, where it costs more.) And of course, drinking alcohol at home, while cheaper than drinking it at bars, is still more expensive than drinking iced tea or soda.
The finding that drinking in bars helps men more than it helps women would seem to support this theory as well - men need more money to drink in bars, both because they drink more and because women don’t always pay for all their own drinks.
But maybe I’m missing something; nothing I’ve read so far has speculated on this. Can anybody explain to me why it seems to be clear to everyone else that the causation goes in the direction the study claims it does?