Why Complaining About How There's no Good Men Sucks

Hey, did you think that the well of “20-somethings-represent-a-whole-new-paradigm-for-adulthood-and-the-way-we-live” newspaper articles was empty after that long sorta-expose the New York Times did last year? Well, the Wall Street Journal doesn’t think so—they just published this long piece by Kay Hymowitz that at this moment has 47,000 Facebook likes and 1,100 comments. Hymowitz talks about all the stuff the Times article talks about (young people are undergoing extended periods of adolescence and not getting married, buying a house, and/or starting a career right after college, etc.) but adds her own little twist—in an endearing combination of feminism and reactionary traditionalism, she complains that this “pre-adulthood” is hurting women, because all the men are too immature to be long-term relationship material. Or as she puts it:

Among pre-adults, women are the first sex. They graduate from college in greater numbers (among Americans ages 25 to 34, 34% of women now have a bachelor's degree but just 27% of men), and they have higher GPAs. As most professors tell it, they also have more confidence and drive. These strengths carry women through their 20s, when they are more likely than men to be in grad school and making strides in the workplace. In a number of cities, they are even out-earning their brothers and boyfriends.

Still, for these women, one key question won't go away: Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers—a gender gap neatly crystallized by the director Judd Apatow in his hit 2007 movie "Knocked Up."

The immature, Apatow-movie-watching, maladroit geek in me wants to snark back with something like, “Where have all the good men gone, Kay? Away from you as fast as fucking possible, that’s for sure!” Then I’d high-five my grubby slacker buddy and we’d go right back to playing Left 4 Dead, snacking on salty, chemically-flavored chips, and periodically taking bong hits.

But you know what? I’m a fucking adult, so let’s actually talk about Hymowitz’s ideas. Perhaps because it’s is adapted from her book, the article is sort of confusing: after telling us about the dangerously low supply of good men in America, she backs away and discusses the formation of “pre-adulthood” in a gender-neutral way. It takes longer to get a good, stable job in today’s market—you have to go to college, and probably bounce around a few jobs before you have something you can properly call a “career.” People’s age at the time of their first marriage has been rising steadily since the 70s. And the media—oh, those bastards!—are encouraging our young men to remain barely-sentient towers of meat who giggle at fart jokes. Hymowitz blames the lack of good dating options for heterosexual women on Maxim, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, Spike TV, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Steve Carell, and Seth Rogen.


As much as I like the idea of a bunch of frat-humor outlets teaming up with Hollywood and advertisers to keep men dumb and single so they have disposable income to spend on body spray and fancy booze and video games, I think it’s probably more likely that being a grubby guffawing boor makes you read Maxim and watch Adam Sandler movies than the other way around.

To deal with the other pieces of Hymowitz’s narrative: people aren’t getting married as much as they were in the 50s and 60s, and that’s probably a good thing. Women couldn’t earn as much as men, so it made sense for them to land a fella and become housewives as soon as possible. Now that women can have careers, they do have careers and don’t get married so young. Another explanation for the marriage age rising, courtesy of Matt Yglesias: “Maybe this number just bounces around over time and it’s always been the case that some people are sometimes frustrated with some members of the opposite sex.”

Anecdotally, I would say that there are plenty of 20-somethings who follow the guidelines given to them by the trend pieces. But an upper class of shiftless layabouts who aren’t employed at anything in particular is nothing new. Remember the dandies or whatever in England, or wherever the dandies were? (They were probably invented by trend article writers too.) Remember Baudelaire, a prominent proto-pre-adult?

Hymowitz probably wouldn’t consider Baudelaire marriage material, what with the syphilis and the drug addiction and all. But he doesn’t match the description of the archetypal pre-adult man that she uses in her concluding paragraph: “Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does.”

Nor does that description match anyone I’ve ever met, except for maybe my dorm neighbor my freshman year, who would literally lie in bed eating candy and playing video games. Even the men I know who have moved back home with their parents, or are unemployed for long periods of time, or are chronically single, aren’t the kind of shiftless hedonists of the sort that Hymowitz is convinced are replacing the “good men,” Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style.

I’m not a woman, or an old person, but weren’t good men always hard to find? Wasn’t that the whole point of the saying, “A good man is hard to find”? Now that women can become successful for themselves and don’t need to latch onto a man—anything with a penis and a paycheck—for the sake of long-term security, they can take their time and pick out a man to share a life and a house and chromosomes with. Picking out a romantic partner can be pretty complicated, especially when you have high standards, and especially when you have to find someone who will love you back. That’s tricky! Maybe you’ll like someone and they won’t like you, or someone will like you and you’ll be in a relationship, or you’ll really like each other but one of you has to move across the country—both of you being hard-charging professional types—and thus, leaves the other behind. Love is complicated, as pop music has taught me. It’s complicated and hard, and you don’t have to invent bullshit pop-sociological reasons for why the guys who are around you are losers.

Where Have all the Good Men Gone? [WSJ]

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Abe Sauer's Great Piece on Why Christian Aid in Haiti Sucks

I don’t read everything that appears on the internet, but surely Abe Sauer’s long, exhaustively-researched hit piece on Christian aid groups in Haiti illegally using government money from USAID to proselytize to the voodoo-practicing Haitians before giving them aid was just about the best thing that flashed across anyone’s monitor last week. The law states that the US government can give money to Christian groups as long as they in turn spend that money caring for the needy and don’t thrust Bibles into native hands at the same time they, the Christian groups, are bandaging up those hands. Because, y’know, if the US formally funded groups devoted spreading evangelical Christianity in the third world it would violate the Constitution in a pretty direct way.

I don’t have anything really to say about the piece itself, other than you should go read it, right now, the whole thing, but I will say that whenever the religious right (and the organizations mentioned in this article are undoubtedly right-wing; they have Sarah Palin’s support and some are overseen by the Graham family) gets the government to bend backwards to appease their agenda, I get visibly angry. Not at the Christians, necessarily, but at the atheists, agnostics, and others that generally oppose the Christians’ goals but aren’t motivated or organized enough to stop them.

Look, I know the United States is a Christian nation--not “founded on Christian principles,” but clearly, dominated demographically by Christians. Furthermore, a lot of these Christians have no problem just standing up and yelling, “Stop teaching my children evolution!” or “Put the Ten Commandments outside of this motherfucking courthouse!” (They don’t say “motherfucking,” but the tone is close enough.) A lot of people who disagree with these statements—which are fucking insane, by the way—are more or less happy to ignore the Christians, or laugh them off, and basically go about their merry, non-spiritual business as organisms.

The problem with this is that the Christians win this way. As an atheist, I’m having more and more of a problem with that.

For years, I didn’t want to argue with any Christians, or be vocal about my non-belief. Because no one wants to listen to that smug asshole atheist yammering about the inconsistencies in the Bible and treating Christians like brain-damaged infants. But there’s a difference between letting people believe what they believe and having a situation where a US-funded aid group refuses to give a job to a Haitian man until he converts to Christianity. That shit is not okay, and it’s not anti-Christian to say so. We don’t have to fruitlessly debate the existence of God to point out that turning USAID into a Christian organization is terrible foreign policy.

Of course, some Christians believe that it is their duty to convert the unbelievers, especially the brown, downtrodden unbelievers who have just gone through a disaster and are emotionally fragile and have more immediate problems than a lack of Jesus, such as, their entire families are dead and they have no food or medicine. If you’re one of those Christians that believes that telling those people about Jesus is “helping” them, fuck you. Read more!

Why the New Anti-Poker Law in Washington State Sucks

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court in my old state of Washington ruled that a law passed in 2006 banning online gambling was perfectly constitutional. It was a 9-0 decision, and thus a pretty easy one for the justices to make, but the ruling carried enough weight for PokerStars, a popular online poker site, to ban anyone with a Washington State IP address from playing on it.

This is the kind of news that affects maybe only a few thousand people seriously, but for professional online poker players in Washington—some of whom I know personally—this was the worst possible news. Online poker has existed in a legal gray area for some time now, but this court ruling eliminated all shades of gray; playing poker on your computer, as opposed to in a casino, is a Class C felony. If all poker sites take this ruling as seriously as PokerStars had, it will become impossible to play online poker in Washington, meaning that online poker players who rely on poker to pay the bills will have effectively lost their jobs.

The more you consider the law, the less sense it makes. There is the old argument, “gambling is evil, all evil things should be illegal,” but gambling is legal in Washington State, and not just on Indian reservations. When I lived in Seattle, you could drive just outside the city limits and play poker in a number of card rooms. This document from the Washington State Gambling Commission says, “Gambling has a history of connection to crime and corruption and as a result is strictly controlled virtually everywhere. Just because gambling occurs on the Internet doesn’t change this potential or the concern.” But surely the converse of that last sentence is true too—just because gambling occurs in a brick and mortar casino or card room doesn’t make it any less addictive or prone to corruption.

So why was this law, which deprives a bunch of people of their formerly (semi) legal income, passed in the first place?

Well, duh, it was passed because a bunch of rich casino owners wanted it to be so. When people gamble online, presumably, they aren’t gambling in a casino, and this understandably outraged the Native American tribes who run large gambling enterprises like the Tullalip Casino. These tribes have boatloads of money and they’ve invested a lot of it in the one enterprise in America guaranteed to give you a good rate of return on your investment—campaign contributions.

The sponsors of the original bill--Margarita Prentice, Karen Keiser, Daniel Kline, and Paull Shin—all received substantial contributions from groups like the “Campaign for Tribal Self-Reliance” which have close ties to the Indian casino business. The Congresspeople did what politicians always do and help out the people who helped them out and introduced the online gambling law, which was quickly passed because the other Congresspeople likely wanted contributions from the tribes to keep coming, and also because passing laws against “immoral” activities like gambling is a fun and popular thing for politicians to do. Never mind that the anti-online gambling law was bankrolled by a bunch of people who make their living off of gambling addicts and suckers, and never mind that it hurts the professional and semi-pro poker players (who are the small businessmen of the gambling world). Gambling is bad, so anti-gambling laws must be good, right?

Gambling addiction is a serious problem, yes, but gambling addicts aren’t going to stop gambling because they can’t play online. They’ll just go to the casino instead—which is of course why this bill was passed in the first place, to benefit big in-state casinos at the expense of international poker sites and the people who make money by playing on them. (Not all professional online poker players can simply switch to playing in the casinos and the card rooms—that’s a long car ride for many of them, and many card rooms don’t offer the variety of games that the online sites do.)

The truly maddening thing about this law is not that it’s an arbitrarily oppressive law passed at the request of big-money interests. It’s that this law is an example of the system working pretty much perfectly. A special interest group wanted a law to be passed, they made the necessary (and legal) donations and the politicians did more or less what those groups wanted. Everything was documented, and although there was clearly a quid pro quo exchange, no one can be said to have done anything technically unethical. Everyone cooperated, and we got a law that puts people out of work so large moneyed institutions can thrive. Good job guys.
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Why Las Vegas Sucks

The New Yorker, that great publication that serves to chronicle the lifestyles of the extraordinarily rich for the benefit of the upper middle class, just did a profile of some guy who provides fancy Las Vegas restaurants with delicacies like truffles and cinnamon and (presumably) human skin. Here’s one interesting passage about the world of high food in Vegas that starts with a quote from chef Paul Bartolotta:

“Las Vegas is a pilot project to see if man can live on the moon,” he says. “There’s nothing local—our water comes from somewhere else, our electricity comes from somewhere else.” Fishermen have sent him texts in the middle of the night from their boats in the Adriatic, with pictures of themselves holding fresh-caught specimens and messages like “Want this fish?” On one such occasion, the fish was an eighteen-pound ombrina; when it arrived at the restaurant, forty-eight hours later, Bartolotta walked it onto the floor and offered it to a party of thirty golfers as the main course in a tasting menu they had ordered. He took it back to the kitchen, sprinkled some salt and pepper on it, tied up the tail so it would fit in the oven, and within ninety minutes the golfers were eating it. Their bill came to nearly five thousand dollars, before wine.

To recap: modern technology allows people across the world to communicate to one another instantaneously, and transport pretty much any object from any place to any other place in less time than it takes to watch all of the episodes of The Wire back-to-back, and we use this technology to provide a bunch of wealthy, drunken golfers with fresh fish.

I don’t want to turn this into a rant against the rich or global capitalism—although I suspect this already qualifies as such—but it’s worth noting that no matter how fantastical our abilities become, our ideas for how to use our powers remain bizarre. Why do we have this giant luxurious mecca of sin in the desert anyway? Living on the moon would be a gigantic waste of resources, which is why we never tried to do it. Las Vegas seems like a waste of resources too. Can’t we move all of those casinos somewhere a little easier to transport food and water to? Read more!

A Series of Tubes Sucks Us Down the Drain: Facebook and the Lost Potential of the Internet

Facebook is one of the most useful, most popular websites in existence. It offers, free of charge, a number of services that nearly everyone wants—services that weren't even imaginable 20 years ago. You can let all your friends know what you are doing at any given moment, or you can tell them all a joke, or you can post a link to something and comment on it. You can post pictures of yourself or your cat or other people and share them with all your friends, or the entire internet if you want. You can post links to blogs like this one, or videos, or anything at all that has a URL. You can voice your support of a cause, politician, music group, or abstract idea by hitting the “Like” button or joining a group whose members can share relevant content and have discussions about that cause/artist/idea. You can invite your “friends,” many of whom you don't know very well or actually hate, to parties, political rallies, and flash mobs. You can play a variety of online games, some of which are not even disguised marketing schemes. And you can watch all of the people you share tenuous social connections do all of these things in real time. I'm on Facebook right now, and maybe you are too.

So why do so many people hate it?

Maybe “hate” is too strong a word, but many, many people have voiced criticism of Facebook in the last few months, mainly over the site's privacy polices. Wired ran a disturbing article about the site censoring the content of private messages, as well as a somewhat rambling op-ed railing against Facebook; Gizmodo listed 10 reasons to quit Facebook; Time published a somewhat critical profile of the company; and quitfacebookday.com is exactly what it sounds like. There have been other attacks from more obscure sources as well, like this blog entry, which I read because my friend linked to it on Facebook.

Some of the criticisms are, too my mind, pretty minor. The author of the last post, for instance, describes a case where his friend got his account deleted for posting a picture of his cock, which is clearly against Section 3.7 of the Terms of Use Agreement. The author didn't notice his friend was kicked off and the friend missed out on some parties because he wasn't invited to them on Facebook—this shows that terms of use agreements are not merely randomly selected strings of syllables and that you should have ways of communicating other than Facebook. I'm also not convinced by attempts to portray Facebook as a Big Brother-esque monster who is logging our every keystroke—the site may have access to our personal information, but only because we put our personal information on a website whose stated purpose is to share personal information with others. No one forces you to use Facebook, although the way some bloggers talk, you'd think that was the case.

The meatier concerns over Facebook involve the site's privacy settings, which are complex and change every few months in response to user complaints. The basic problem is simple and practically unfixable under Facebook's current rubric: people want to pick exactly which of their “friends” sees what. If I want to share a status update that says, “Damn, I am really wasted considering it's not even noon,” I don't want my mother to see that. And I don't want my boss to see photos of me partying in a different city the night before I call in sick. But to Facebook, everyone is either a stranger, a “Friend,” or a “Friend of a Friend;” there's no way to differentiate between my family members, my coworkers, my oldest friends who now live in other cities, and the people I don't really know but friend anyway. We want to filter the information we give out on Facebook the way we do in real life, but we can't. Or to quote Marlo of The Wire, “You want it to be one way, but it's the other way.”

The way it is is this: Facebook is one of the first websites to take advantage of the internet's incredible, essentially unlimited capacity as a tool to share information. “Information” being not just academic papers, as in the days of ARPANET, but everything. Text, videos, photos, games, software, music--whatever the fuck you want, you can share and spread among friends, strangers, and people you've had sex with exactly one time, using a service not unlike what Facebook is now. The total, perfect, probably unrealizable form of the internet is communism on servers—everyone being able to access anything, all the time. Information is so plentiful it becomes free. The world's greatest library in history downloadable to every laptop without money changing hands. We could have that right now without any new technologies, except as the case of Facebook shows, we aren't ready.

For starters, users still regard information as private property. In the Time article, the author casually notes, “There's something unsettling about granting the world a front-row seat to all of our interests,” without further analysis. He's not talking about personal details like phone numbers, addresses, and other tidbits that could aid identity thieves, he's talking about a concern people have that people he doesn't know will know what he likes. What forbidden desires does he have that he doesn't want broadcasted? Similarly, Ryan Singel of Wired wants to “support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing,” which he thinks is a problem Facebook should be able to solve. Mr. Singel: if you want to donate money to anti-abortion cause, that is not something you need to tell Facebook. And if you fear that your peers will ostracize you for your political beliefs, maybe you need new peers. And are you really that afraid of your mother? I personally have no problem with giving the world a front-row seat to all of my interests, and I know a number of people who feel the same way. I like the Flaming Lips, sandwiches, and heterosexual intercourse, and I'm not afraid to let everyone know. One interesting question is whether the babies being born right now will have the same hang-ups concerning the sharing of interests that Mr. Singel and the man from Time have. Or will they use social networking sites as naturally as we use toilets?

I don't want to let Facebook itself off the hook though: it's not as if Mark Zuckerman and co. give a shit about my information-sharing utopia. The censoring of private messages between users is disturbing, but it comes from the attitude that they own the data that users choose to share with one another. This is spelled out specifically in Section 2.1 the User Agreement (linked to twice because if you use Facebook, you should read it), which says: “If you upload something, our company owns it just as much as you do.” The way Facebook chooses to use the information they own is to share it with advertisers, which allows them to make unspecifiably large amounts of money without charging its grouchy, constantly complaining users anything. The internet, despite its theoretical potential to become an anarchic hacker's wet dream of information-sharing, is run by for-profit companies like Facebook, and those companies generally make their by selling your personal information to other companies.

(This project offers hope to disgruntled Facebook users. I advise those folks to donate to the cause, but I'm holding my breath until I see a detailed explanation of who is going to be paying for these “seed” servers and how.)

The Time article warns that without more “transparency,” Facebook will become “the web's sketchy Big Brother, sucking up our identities into a massive Borg brain to slice, dice and categorize for advertisers.” That Borg model, of course, is exactly the model that will make Facebook and part-owners Microsoft the most money. Transparency and openness are for hippie programmers who don't conceive of the web as just another money-making machine. And what, really, is wrong with ads that target me based on my stated interests? If we're going to have advertising on the web, I'd rather see ads for things that I might actually use rather than ads for new cars I don't want and can't afford.

Like the Borg, Facebook is constantly adapting and seems impossible to kill. The recent changes to the privacy settings have made them (I think) fairly intuitive and easy to use, and whatever points Facebook's critics have, they haven't been very persuasive (quitfacebook.com has 23,000 committed quitters as of this writing, compared to over 4,000 Facebook users who want Slavoj Zizek to host Saturday Night Live). The truth is, there isn't a single website that does everything that Facebook does, except for maybe the still-imaginary Diaspora project linked to above. Someday, I imagine Facebook will be replaced by a sleeker, hipper replacement just as Friendster and MySpace have been replaced. But if that replacement site is just another for-profit service that regards information as a way to make a buck, and the population at large still imagines information to be the same thing as private property, expect exactly the same thing to happen.
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Making Monday Worse: We Have No Money, But Our GDP Is Doing Great

Monday is here again, and it means everyone has to go to work. Well, not everyone. If you are one of those parents who needed government-funded daycare to watch your children while you were at your job, you aren't going to work today, because, fuck, that daycare subsidy doesn't exist any more and you have to watch your kids instead. If you are a European who is approaching what used to be retirement age, however, you can look forward to many Mondays of hard work ahead because, fuck again, European countries are going to be bankrupted soon by all of their old pensioners living off of the government. I don't really understand exactly what happened, but all of a sudden there's less money in the world, and every single government in the world is poorer.

Ayn Rand's followers, those pillars of self-reliance who probably couldn't get laid in high school, might be rejoicing at the dawning of this new era, where even Europe is turning away from social safety nets. Then again, Randians had to deal with the embarrassing sight of favorite son Rand Paul* deliver a rambling defense of his criticism of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, during which he somehow got around to saying,

"Do you say that you should have the right to bring your gun into a restaurant even though the owner of the restaurant says 'well no, we don't want to have guns in here' the bar says 'we don't want to have guns in here because people might drink and start fighting and shoot each-other.'"

What? Maybe we should have laws against discrimination and bringing guns to bars, is that what's he's saying? Or is Rand saying that the government is forcing bars to serve the heavily armed? If so, I'm against it.

Meanwhile, oil is still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, a bullfighter became an internet phenomenon after getting his throat gored open, and Brooklyn continues to fill up with dead animals. But on the positive side, neoliberal policies have had a positive effect on the US GDP! Doesn't that make you feel better?

*Yeah, Rand isn't a “true libertarian,” blah blah, blah. He's pretty close for someone who could actually get elected. And why would a libertarian run for public office anyway? Shouldn't they be busy enough being titans of industry or whatever? Read more!

The Future Food Shortage Will One Day Suck

If you're like me, you enjoy eating, look forward to eating, and have assumed for pretty much your entire life that you would be able to keep eating for as long as you were alive. That is, if you live in a first-world country you have to figure that you will die of AIDS, cancer, heart disease, gunshot wound, drug overdose, nuclear terrorism, or car accident before you will die of starvation. Ha ha! Turns out you actually should worry about starving to death—at least, this British guy does. He argues that rising population, rising energy costs, climate change, and the crushing poverty that most agricultural workers worldwide live under could combine to create a “food crisis” not unlike the oil crises we've already seen. (It's a long article, but worth skimming at least.) He adds that the increased reliance on biofuels will mean that less of the crops we grow will be used for food, thus worsening the hypothetical future food shortage.

He lives in the UK, which imports way, way more food than the US does, so Americans shouldn't necessarily worry too much about this (not that Americans will worry about anything anyway), but the US now imports more food than it exports, and some of that food comes from China, which doesn't hold its food industry to the same rigorous quality-control standards that our FDA does in regards to American slaughterhouses. And while Tyler Cowen, who is smarter than me, isn't all that worried, we should remember that food is not infinite.

We might not end up actually starving, but food could get a lot more expensive if erosion, global warming, and random natural disasters/God start working together. For instance, the price of 40 ounces of beer in my neighborhood was be two bucks in 2006, and now it's three—a huge increase, percentage-wise. We should remember that most of the people who were born on this planet had to deal with food shortages, and this period of plenty is an aberration.

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Why Taking a Forced Gap Year Sucks

The other day I was emailing a friend of mine now living in Portland, Oregon, and I asked him if he had found any work. That's a pretty normal thing to ask the folks in my age/education demographic bracket these days—my bracket being kids in their early 20s who just graduated from prestigious or semi-prestigious universities who are mostly the children of middle and upper-middle class parents. Our bracket is getting the shit kicked out of it. My friend is living with his girlfriend (another bracket-mate, working as a nanny), on food stamps, and writing essays that he hopes to sell for low amounts of money. After sending out application after application via Craigslist and a brief, unhappy stint as a kickball umpire, my anonymous buddy has found work at a “really terrible smoothie shop inside of a gym.” This is a guy who graduated from my school a semester before I did, and who can presumably do something a lot better than telling gym rats exactly how many grams of protein is in the mango-strawberry blend. And he's not unique.

Some of my friends moved back into their parents' houses right after graduation. Others stuck it out in the city of their choice, but they usually got subsidized like a failing financial institution by their parents. Most, feeling the weight of their debt to their parents, took any opportunity to get a job that would give them an independent income—meaning they umpired kickball, scooped ice cream, applied to work at Home Depot just like they applied to Princeton five years ago, and learned the intricacies of government programs like unemployment, Medicaid, and food stamps. A surprising amount of them now play online poker for a living, which means they are smart, math-inclined, and disciplined enough to sit in front of their computer staring at numbers for hours at a time, yet they can't get a job. A whole lot of us work for the census, which is paying good money while it lasts, but knocking on doors like Tim Meadows isn't what we had in mind when we got those fancy degrees handed to us. Some of the people I know are going back to school already, either to get a more “useful” degree or to simply hide out in academia for a little longer.

But enough anecdotal evidence, which any competent economist or SABR-matician will tell you is a bunch of randomly occurring bullshit: here's a page of numbers. The numbers say that despite the progress the economy is making, 16 percent of 20 to 24 year olds are unemployed. That's better than the 16 to 19 year old age bracket, but the job market is always tough on 17 year olds—by the time you're in your 20s, you really should be able to get a job. So why can't my peer group get it together?

As with everything, there are a multitude of reasons. Number one has nothing to do with the economy: a four-year degree doesn't mean what it used to. College enrollment has been rising for decades, to the point where every middle class child is expected to grow up to attend the most expensive university that will have him. We did our duty and went straight from high school to college (which is basically high school where everyone gets laid), and when we graduated and got our piece of paper, we found out that everyone else our age had the same piece of paper, and that a bachelor's degree isn't the ticket to a white-collar job it once was. Even before money turned itself inside out, kids who were too old to really be called “kids” were moving back in with their parents after finding out that graduating from college doesn't automatically make you an independent adult. (The trend even has it's own Wikipedia entry.)

But in these troubling economic times, when “sub prime mortgage” is a part of everyone's vocabulary even if no one knows what it means, it's even tougher for young people to transition from college to a job to a career to an apartment without roaches to the final stage in life when you have kids and multiple bank accounts and don't stay awake late enough to watch The Daily Show. When my graduating class went into the job market we weren't just competing with each other but also with the swarm of older, more experienced workers who had just gotten laid off, for jobs that were getting scarcer and scarcer. Is it any wonder that so many of us are sitting in the basement bedroom where we used to masturbate three times a day as teens, playing poker for a living or scanning and refreshing Craigslist every five minutes?

I don't want to exaggerate—some of my friends, through a combination of luck, perseverance and talent, are doing very well, thank you for asking. But it's worth noting that the government, who is in the business of bailouts these days, hasn't done my demographic any favors. Extending unemployment benefits didn't help, since few of us recent graduates had worked enough hours to claim unemployment in the first place. Cash for Clunkers wasn't designed for people who didn't have cars. And I've yet to understand how the TARP money is going to trickle down to us. Politicians don't really care about young people—for all the talk about how the “middle class” and “small business” are “the backbone of our economy,” no one has mentioned what body part recent college graduates are supposed to be. (But I have a guess.) A while ago I had a daydream that the government would step in and directly create jobs through a new program based on the Works Progress Administration and smart, motivated young people would line up in droves to be part of it, but I guess that would be Socialism, and Socialism is what got us into this mess in the first place. (Wait, what?)

The irony to be found here is that the aspiring artists among my generation are more prepared for this economic climate than the rest of us. Artists expect to go through a period of destitution in their early-to-mid 20s. Hell, they practically look forward to it when they're teenagers. But now everyone is basically a starving artist, and that has created a new and weird hybrid economic caste—raised on middle-class values, educated like the upper-class, and now living below the poverty line. We buy organic food with our food stamps. We break off late-night discussions of Lacan and craft brewing to ask each other if the coffee shop down the street is hiring. We go to the library to use the computer and nod hello to the homeless guys hanging out there. We get mildly embarrassed when the rent check arrives from our parents, but that's wearing off. Most of us did actually work hard in college, and learned some skills that we thought would be useful, but no one is buying what we want to sell.

This sucks, right here.

I have no idea what the long-term impact of our demographic's mini-depression will be. At best, I suppose, we'll just be late bloomers when it comes to starting careers, buying homes, and raising kids. (Actually, at best we will rise as one and seize the country in the grip of revolution, but that's not happening.) At worst...who knows? Maybe twenty years down the road, ours will have turned out to be a generation of filing clerks and coffee serves who have whole libraries of unused knowledge in their heads. But I hope not. Read more!

Making Monday Worse: Your International Sucking Update

Hey there, postindustrial worker bee! You probably think your life is tough because you spent the weekend getting enjoyably shitfaced, or watching that movie that is just an 80-minute Youtube clip of cute babies, or getting shitfaced and then watching the babies movie, and now you have to drag your ass to your air-conditioned cubicle and pretend not to be playing computer solitaire for eight hours or so, but things could be a lot worse. For instance:

You could be associated in any way with the economy of Greece, which is so completely fucked it's threatening to drag the Euro down with it, plus the Greeks are rioting and burning down banks. The European Union is creating a TARP-like fund to protect the Euro but that might not even work, so, uh, yeah. Welcome to the worldwide economic panic of 2010, part II.

Those Greek rioters burned three bank employees to death, which seems like a big deal, but three murders would go almost unnoticed in Jamaica, where people are getting slaughtered every day by the police or by the gangs who have lately taken to butchering their victims with large knives. Jamaica has become one of the most violent places in the world, unnoticed by the college kids who are inhaling hits from their expensive bongs in front of Bob Marley posters as we speak.

Also unnoticed by the genial stoners of our universities who will soon be running our country: the AIDS epidemic in Africa is getting even worse, as the global economic crisis from two paragraphs ago is causing clinics to close their doors and medicine supplies to dry up. According to the article, "For every 100 people put on treatment, 250 are newly infected."

On the somewhat lighter side, a Catholic priest in Zimbabwe is blaming the media for the church's sex scandals, saying "They write and say such and such a priest has been chow-chowing small children – are they not also chow-chowing too?” Well, no. Some sins are worse than others. Like when your priests--who are supposed to be basically non-sexual beings--have sex with children to young to give consent and then your church covers it up and then doesn't fire those priests when their abuse gets revealed to the world, that's a fairly bad sin.

That priest should be glad that the press is just commenting on Catholic chow-chowing, rather than issuing death threats against opposition parties. That's what a government-owned paper in Sri Lanka did, and given the police-state conditions in Sri Lanka, printed death threats are usually serious. The article is (warning) from a socialist publication, but they point out that the Sri Lanka is, like Greece, deep in debt--the country might go from civil war to police state to widespread rioting in the space of two years. So even the Greeks can be thankful they aren't in Sri Lanka, I suppose.

Have an excellent week, and don't buy any Portuguese bonds!

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