“You better grow up” sounds like “you better be miserable.” It sounds like “why are you not doing something that sucks right now.” Why aren’t you home with your kids, swabbing shit out of the crack of their ass with a woefully inadequate hand-e-wipe. Why aren’t you rich. Why don’t you have a mortgage. Why don’t you own your own home and if you do why aren’t you on the phone with the contractor right now improving it in a manner that will increase its value so you can flip it. Why didn’t you get your cholesterol tested. Why is your credit rating below eight hundred. Why don’t you have kids yet and if you do why aren’t they enrolled in the finest schools. Why don’t you have a complete cable and internet package with a million channels you will never have time to watch.
Your eggs are dying. Your kid will be a mutant. He’ll be born with no digestive tract and your life will be wheeling him around all day worried about finding a public rest room where you can empty his colostomy bag. Why aren’t you married. Why don’t you even have somebody you might marry. Why does that person not have an advanced degree in a lucrative STEM field. Why don’t you have an IRA– if you had begun investing when you were 22 you would have ten million dollars now due to logarithmic growth. But don’t spend it– you’re gonna need ten times that much by the time you retire. You will have cancer and Alzheimer’s and stroke and kidney failure and fifteen years worth of logarithmic growth will pay for one alcohol swab to swipe the crack of your ass. Nobody’s gonna help you when your arm is just veiny turkey skin flapping off shivering tendons– why can’t you take some god damn personal responsibility.
Fifty per cent of marriages end in divorce. Ninety per cent of children have ADHD or are on the autism spectrum or have restless leg syndrome. Every white collar job on the planet requires you to be maximally productive for eighty hours per week. Why don’t you work and work and work and come home and fight with someone you don’t love and spend money on the mutant freak you paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to create by having a piece of your balls and a piece of her womb stuck in liquid nitrogen until you were adequately rich. Why don’t you have a ninety thousand dollar car and a cellar stocked with three hundred dollar bottles of wine. Because my twelve hundred dollar piece of shit gets me to the liquor store where they got pinot noir for three bucks is why, and and if I don’t like the woman I’m with I can kick her out. Just like a company can kick me out. We are in a free market, for fuck’s sake.
Here’s the good news, they tell you: inflation has stopped. You can have a 48 inch TV for fifty bucks. There are more and better goods available to you know than ever in the history of humankind– unless you want to have a house. Unless you want to go to school. Unless you want to get treated if you get cancer. Unless you want to leave town on anything besides a homemade hang glider or the back of a donkey. Inflation has stopped for everything except fuel, housing, education, health care, and food– uh, what the fuck else is there? You think I’m buying a new TV every week? We are in an age where it’s easier to get anything except anything you might ever want. Porn and TV’s are easy to come by but love and knowledge and shelter and health are all impossible. It’s time you grow up, they tell you, and the way to do that is by writing us a nice big fucking check.
delicioustacos 
Coincidentally, industries with the most regulation see the most inflation. Imagine fuel, housing, education, health care, and food fell in price every year the way electronics do. It was actually like that once.
Again with the fantasyland libertarian shit. There was also a time in the US when the streets were paved with gold. It was like that once.
I’m curious, at what period in American history did this free market utopia exist?
“Fell in price every year” == “streets paved with gold”. Thanks for clarifying that.
A given good or service getting more expensive is actually pretty anomalous in US history. Look at what inflation-adjusted prices of food have done over the last century and a half. I mean, I’m sorry to hijack DT’s blog here, but seriously, are you not aware that American material standards of living improved very steadily for a very long time, faltering only recently? (Non-material, not so much — buuut who am I to be critical?) Food is still pretty cheap, fuel really hasn’t gone all that crazy when you adjust for inflation. I’m not saying dressyarson is infallible, just that you’re a lot wronger.
The current outrageous and constantly increasing pricing of a few services — health care, education — is peculiar. We are very good in this country at making things more and more efficiently (often by making them in some other country), and we tend to do that with things people want. Every market for every good or service has a French Laundry option and that guy makes pretty decent money, but it’s the McDonald’s option that makes billions of dollars in profits. Hyundai makes a fuck of a lot more money than Ferrari and Rolls Royce combined. There is one Dean & Delucca, but there are thousands of Walmarts. Successful business people KNOW THIS. If you don’t, that doesn’t mean you know more about business than they do. It means you know less.
Pricing your merchandise out of the reach of the common consumer doesn’t make you rich. You don’t have to — you don’t WANT to — crank up profit per unit to some insane number: If you can sell something cheap, the dumb fat fucks will always, always consume more and you’ll make orders of magnitude more on the volume. A market like health care where there’s nothing BUT a Rolls Royce option is an interesting and odd departure from the way goods and services are generally provided and sold in the USA. And by “generally”, I mean you can count the exceptions on one hand. It’s weird enough to suggest that the market is operating under some very unusual constraints. SPOILER: It is.
Sorry, I know that Econ 101 stuff is heretical. If I float, I promise you can burn me.
I don’t know what this tangent was all about. I am aware that American material standards of living improved very steadily for a very long time, thanks to the “socialist” policies put forth in the New Deal. That’s a fact. You’re right, they started faltering recently, specifically about 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan started fucking with collective bargaining rights by breaking the PATCO union, and implementing the rest of his fucked up, free market economic policies.
Dressyarson’s comment suggests that we were more prosperous in, I don’t know, the fucking Gilded Age. When was this period of American history when we were all better off with less government
intervention? It is my belief that free market policies are not condusive to the necessary tension between labor and capital that made the American 20th century.
Sometimes libertarian policies provide a rational solution for problems. Sometimes they don’t. The war on drugs? Sure. Prohibition doesn’t work. But I like the fact that OSHA comes out to a job site I’m working on and makes sure that, say, the elevator shafts are cordoned off so I don’t accidentally plunge to my fucking death because some billionaire developer wanted to save a few bucks. I like the fact that my union requires a contractor I work for to provide me with some protective equipment before I stick my hands in a 480volt three phase panel hot. I’d rather not get cooked like a hot dog just so you can buy your converted loft a couple bucks cheaper.
Guaranteed the majority of these motherfuckers complaining about industry regulations don’t work in the industries they’re complaining about.
I like the fact that I’m guaranteed the right to collectively bargain for my wages and benefits, that I have at least a little bit of leverage against management recognized by the state.
If I wanted to work like a fucking scab under free market conditions, I’d move to one of those libertarian leaning right-to-work states in the south with the lowest wages and the highest rates of poverty.
And you’re right, I don’t know much about business. I have no desire to be a cocksucking piece of shit businessman.
None of my business (which doesn’t explain why I’m sticking my asshole oar in, obv, but if you write this shit on the internets what do you expect, it’s like driving at night in the summer and expecting not to get bugs on your windshield), but I’ve been reading a bunch of CBT shit and you are, at least when sober, a case study in like the Ten Habits of Highly Self-Sabotaging Depressed People. Jesus, you’re worse than I am. Or at least you pretend to be for laughs. But you can write infinitely better and you get laid more, so fuck you.
Btw I doubt CBT works. Everything is fucking hopeless, it’s just another bullshit self-help shuck. If it works for anybody, it won’t for me.
Ten COGNITIVE Habits, I meant to say.
I don’t know DT in person so I can’t say how well his blog reflects his personality and habits. I think the purpose of the blog, though, is to get page views and to get laid. The former is achieved by writing in hyperbole in order to get a rise out of you. Emotions means page views. The writing becomes more memorable if it’s emotional — that’s just how human memory works. If the blog is more memorable, people keep coming back to read the next episode of the DT saga. Don’t get me wrong, I love the writing.
As for getting laid, DT himself wrote somewhere I forget where, the blog shows the least attractive parts of his personality so any date that has read his blog and agreed to meet is a sure shot. Or at least, the date is closer to a sure shot. But that’s just my opinion.
I used to get paid $120k a year and I probably worked 4 hours a day. And by work I mean I sat there and talked with the other guys while they actually worked. They made slightly less than half of what I did. But the company kept renewing my contract. So. It’s not all poo jobs.
Don’t you pick artichokes out in Napa Valley now or something. What happened?
Lol, no. I’m going to school. I only ever did manual labor as an adult one day in my life and that was separating strawberry roots in Northern California. I just didn’t like getting paid to be forced to sit in an office and not do anything. Also, I didn’t like having to not do anything but being forced to do it the way someone else wanted me to do it. If that makes sense.
How did you get that job, Sylvia? I do know what you mean though…my last job consisted of not much more than Facebooking/blog reading time, and I would get so bored and mad even though I was getting paid good money. I didn’t make 120K though.
Oh and: don’t take this the wrong way but do you think the company kept renewing your contract because you are a female “minority”? Hope that’s not offensive…I’m female and (half) Asian and have had that experience personally.
I had the job for two years. I left right after I was fully vested. But I don’t think they kept me for any reason other than they thought they would need me in the future and it would be more important to keep me on in the chance they would need me than to save money.
*for the chance? on the off chance? just in case? idk…
I’m moving out of the fucking city.
Welcome to the dominion of the prole. What proles want is nearly free; what smart people want is inaccessible, because it’s a niche interest. LOL pwnt by the French Revolution.
So what you are saying is that members of the proletariat are, by definition, stupid? While at the same time alluding to some fantasy realm where the proletariat are somehow in charge, because “smart people” can’t afford their “niche interests”? What is your post even about, you ignorant fuck