This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think this is a very valuable truth to highlight. Boomer's (and analyses of their life paths) tend to forget how easy it was to fuck around and NOT find out. I had an uncle who ended up in his 50s and 60s doing a very pleated khaki finance job who spent his 20s and 30s doing his best Jack Kerouac - bumming around the Western US, taking odd jobs to get from town to town, drinking, and drugging. He never had a rock bottom or come-to-Jesus moment, he literally just decided at about 35 "eh, better get on the straight and narrow" and more or less walked into a management job (insert something here about white male privilege if you like, but I think it's still a red herring). The point is a hop-on-hop-off respectable life was possible.
Now, you have kids who start out at 22 with $100k in worthless degree debt. You can't work at the grain elevator and scrape together a few hundred bucks to get closer to California when the service on your debt alone is $1,500 a month. The PMC has made hiring and firing such a bureaucratic nightmare that the interview-to-fully-onboarded process is benchmarked at 4 - 5 months. I think this is so that PMC HR types can then brag about themselves reducing it to three months when thirty years ago that timeline was probably three days.
All of this is to say that I don't think "The Path" is much different than it was. To @FarNearEverywhere's point, it's definitely more narrow because of PMC rent seeking and vampiric "I don't do the work but I help enable the work" grifting. More than that, however, we've setup these weird fundamental barriers to overcome that used to not exist. That's the real tragedy. It's important to remember that GDP and GDP per capita is still higher than its ever been (in a decade over decade sense, annual fluctuations notwithstanding) but the overall fluidity and flexibility of the system is greatly atrophied. There's a reason Andreesen-Horowitz (this is a mega VC firm that is the epitome of PMC not-actually-working-but-actuall-fucking-rich careerists) has a whole thrust for "American Dynamism." We've become the mass monster powerlifter who can still move a ton of weight, but takes 15 minutes to get out of the shower.
There does seem to have been this golden moment for middle-class kids in the 60s/70s where they could indeed tune in, turn on, and drop out, wander the country from town to town getting work because there were plenty of manual labour jobs available and the cost of living wasn't too high, and they could indulge in the free love, drugs, and no responsibility scene. If they managed not to screw themselves up beyond repair, then when they wanted to finally settle down, their education level meant they could get a white collar job and work their way up and have the permanent, pensionable, retire with a gold watch life.
Like the Roger Miller song King of the Road, where two hours of menial work will mean enough to rent a room:
Enough work that you could get something, even a relatively decent job, just by turning up and being halfway presentable. Cost of living low enough that your earnings would cover the basics. The smaller cities and towns not yet hollowed out by the decline of manufacturing industry. A college degree still not a commonplace so it was worth something when you finished your wanderjahr to get you back on the ladder. And of course the combination of the infinite possibilities of youth with the wide-open spaces of the USA where you can travel as far as you like and still expect to find something new at the end of it.
That is why people still want to immigrate to the USA, because of that golden aura of possibility.
This was real but it wasn't some magic thing that just happened to happen, a thousand harsh winters in Northern Europe created the conditions for it. The floor was so high because you could always fall back on family, or if you'd truly burned your ass with them, the church
More options
Context Copy link
One thing to consider about that song is that the great growth of the welfare and regulatory state has pretty made that marginally-legitimate hobo lifestyle impossible. Regulations will make providing that room profitably illegal at the equivalent of 50 cents a night today, and other regulations and taxes made employing someone for the equivalent of 50 cents for two hours work also illegal.
Man, every single part of that sounds crazy today. Imagine running a flophouse where you rent out rooms to random drifters for 50 cents a night? Or the other side, being a drifter who just wanders around knowing he can pick up manual labor anywhere, and just a few hours of work to get paid instantly in cash? Or a business owner who's like "man I've got so much work to do, and no one to do it... that's ok, i'll just pay the next drifter who comes by to sweep the floors."
I know it must have been a super hard life, with no luxuries or safety net, but I do envy that level of freedom.
From "Book Review: On The Road" by Scott Alexander:
Ha, I guess that does sorta line up! Still a bit different to work for a few weeks rather than a few hours, though. But yeah, definitely a different era for job hunting... and they were able to make enough money from those few weeks of basic work to pay for another cross-country trip!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This probably exposes you to more risk (of the drifter stealing stuff or smashing things up) than the potential benefits. I can't see why you'd want to do this at any point of this historical development of the USA outsid maybe the civil war period where things really were that tight that such risks had to be taken.
At the very least get your low value add labour from an agency that does some vetting.
Now that you say that, I'm rethinking the meaning. It might have just been charity. Like, in the great depression there were a whole lot of broke guys, down on their luck, wandering around. I could see a hotel owner taking pity on them and saying "look, I won't give you money, but if you do a little honest work to help me out and prove you're a decent guy, I'll let you sleep here for free."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The wildest thing in all of literature to me is the perfectly normal trope up to about WWI of "Paying a street kid to do a random task for me."
The rate at which this went out of fashion differs wildly between countries. As recently as 10 years ago, my dad had some renovations done at the grandmother's flat in downtown St Petersburg which left him with a bunch of rotten window frames in the [upper floor] place. His solution was a quick trip downstairs to get "the alcoholics" at the bar across the street to carry them down ("alcoholics", in Russia, are a socioethnic group much like "drifters" or "gypsies"). My understanding is that three dudes did it for the equivalent of something like $10 each.
Perhaps relatedly, in the late 2000s, Germany (where I was living then) had a very prolific online marketplace for carpooling - if you were going from city A to city B, you would just put up an ad saying when and how many people you'd take for how much, and people could contact you via the website. It was vastly cheaper and more convenient than the train system (and the cheap intercity bus network was not as developed as it is now; I figure this contributed to the website's demise), and the cross-section through German society I encountered on those is a story for another time, but one thing that is memorable is that once I casually mentioned that I was taking such a ride to some very typical Middle American internet friends I had made on the phpBBs, whose response was one of concern bordering on panic ("you'll be robbed and left for dead in a ditch somewhere and nobody will know"). It took a lot of convincing them that everyone does those things over in Europe and bad things generally don't happen (and I might have mildly offended them by repeating the standard Euro talking point that it's not like the carpool people will have guns). I still think that societal trust in the US would be in a better place if they didn't have mass media with non-stop dastardly-crimes-in-your-area programming.
In the US you can pick up a few Hispanic guys at the home depot parking lot for something like this.
Or taskrabbit, or Craigslist…
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I love that song, but I think when he says 8x12 room he means a section of a freight boxcar, which the train's engineer will let him sleep in if he does some sweeping up.
No, it's an 8x12 four-bit room, thus the same one "for let, 50 cents".
I kinda always assumed those were also metaphors for boxcars, but I appear to be wrong
More options
Context Copy link
What Nybbler says. A very basic room in a flophouse, but he can still earn enough in two hours of menial labour to afford a room and bed for the night. You're probably not going to do that nowadays.
Unless you're in San Francisco, and some confident startup thinks it can charge you for a night in a bunkbed (I wonder if they're still in existence, this story was from 2019).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link