Didn't we get issued several dozen mirror versions of this piece during the fat years, with various university and college presidents arguing that college was worth it even if you weren't studying engineering or economics, so quit complaining about working at Starbucks, Johnny Liberal Arts B.A.? I suppose they tended to shy away from the bootstraps bit that this woman abuses.
Obviously, only people with full scholarships based on merit should work at McDonald's. They don't have debt.
2: Didn't somebody Slate or Salon try that one a few years ago, suggesting a "National Blue Collar Work In Lieu of National Service" program drafting affluent college graduates into "urban" areas for neo-CCC labor in what I can only assume would have been WWII-movie-esquely diverse platoons ("Hey, Ox, pass the trowel!" "OK, Trev, keep your shirt on.")?
But if a person with a 4-year degree can only get a job at Starbucks, McDonalds or a relatively low-level clerical job, they should take it.
That's what I did. I wouldn't recommend it as a path to success.
Double shot, pull the lever down.
Double shot, for we're fixing up a town
And you'll always know your neighbor
And you'll always know your pal
If you've ever frothed 2% at the Latte Canal.
Didn't somebody Slate or Salon try that one a few years ago, suggesting a "National Blue Collar Work In Lieu of National Service" program drafting affluent college graduates into "urban" areas
It's nice to have something you can point to when someone says "Slate? Aren't they basically the same as the Khmer Rouge?"
"Slate? Aren't they basically the same as the Khmer Rouge?"
"Please Give Me a Book Contract Alice Waters is Right: Mass Murder is the Only Way to Get Local, Organic Foods into Public Schools," by Matthew Yglesias.
3: Wait a second! Are you talking about City Year?
That's an actual Americorps program.
http://www.cityyear.org/default_ektid22283.aspx
8: I had no idea that was still happening. I used to see those kids in Columbus (somewhere near Broad and High).
8: No, no, it was something much more totalitarian-pie-in-the-liberal-sky than City Year.
The CCC was just the WPA's less popular sibling.
9: I still do see them on the bus here.
I guess Pittsburgh was insufficiently 3rd World for this program.
http://www.cityyear.org/default_ektid22283.aspx
Pittsburgh is probably too small, population-wise. It is obviously poorer than Columbus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest-income_metropolitan_statistical_areas_in_the_United_States
According to that, Pittsburgh is poorer and has a higher population than Columbus.
The MSA is bigger, but Pittsburgh proper (which is pretty much what the school district is based on and I think City Year is focused on schools) is much smaller the Columbus proper.
I am counting down to bob appearing and saying that, actually, killing everyone wearing spectacles and sending the rest of the city populations to labour in the fields would be a terrific idea.
The phrase "make your own luck" frosts my nads. It's not luck if you have control over it, stupid lady.
OT to Witt: It's in the paper now but I heard it from you first.
It's also beyond irritating when writers whom the smart money says had their parents pay for college forget that the majority of college students worked their way through school so they wouldn't have to work at Starbucks. Worse is when the same writers blithely suggest that the students just learn a trade, because it obviously takes only a weekend to be an electrician and surely none of those fields have suffered in the recession. The trades aren't a glorified wanderjahr.
The phrase "make your own luck" frosts my nads.
Similarly, I get pissed off when people fetishize "risk takers", when really they only care about are people who took risks that paid off. But risks are only risks if they entail a significant chance of failure that is beyond the control of the risk taker. So, when people take risks that don't pay off - like borrowing a lot of money for college and then graduating into today's economy - they aren't risk takers, they are lazy moochers.
You should only take risks if you're too big to fail.
Or really drunk. Drunk people are really good at taking risks.
"I can prove these shoes are fireproof."
I had this conversation briefly/incompletely (i.e. until I decided it was going to be friendship-damaging) with Lone Conservative Friend. I just wonder if these people believe they would take and stay at a job at McDonald's. I guess they do believe this.
Also, nothing builds a resume after graduation like being a hamburger preparation specialist at Micky D's.
26: I think they believe they would never have to.
Because they made their own luck, see?
Or if they did they'd develop* the next Big Mac and end up VP of Marketing.
*In the first week.
I was already to jump in and say, all contrarian-like, "Hang on. She's right. Better a crap job than no job if you have debt to pay off." But then I clicked through to the article and see this woman really is a nitwit as represented.
First, when people get a job, there is nothing stopping them from making their own luck.
Oh! Hey! Now I read the comment thread, too! Nothing stopped me from making my own pwned.
The phrase "make your own luck" frosts my nads. It's not luck if you have control over it, stupid lady.
It's luck by divine right.
It's luck by divine right.
One of the more unfortunate founding principals of our country, that one.
The phrase "frosts my nads" is greatly liked by me.
Or if they did they'd develop* the next Big Mac and end up VP of Marketing.
You think Ronald McDonald gonna go down to the basement and say, "Hey Mr. Nugget - you the bomb. We sellin' chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I'm gonna write my clowny-ass name on this fat-ass check for you"? Shit. Man, the nigga who invented them things? Still working in the basement for regular wage, thinking of some shit to make the fries taste better or some shit like that. Believe.
I may have seen it linked here several years ago, or maybe somewhere else, but isn't there a body of work in cognitive ethics* that suggests people have a strong tendency to believe the world is more or less just in the configuration it's presently in? The rich must have done something to deserve their money, the victim of that violent crime opened herself up to it, somehow...
*dunno if that's actually what the field is called
38: Right. These are the best of all possible squirrels.
37: Heh. I had looked up the details on Big Mac, which originated in Pittsburgh in 1967, for the Obesity thread. Credit is given to the franchisee, but Wikipedia has it: The Big Mac was invented in the kitchen of Delligatti's first McDonald's franchise which was located on McKnight Road.
37: He still had the *idea*, though.
The CCC was just the WPA's less popular sibling.
Not where I come from. The WPA built the local school (boo-hiss), whereas the CCC Camp (long since abandoned) was the best to go discreetly park your car and smoke dope and/or have sex.
I saw a bumper sticker on a car today that looked like the guy had designed it and printed it himself. It said "SUCCESS ENVY" and something about how liberals hate "ACHIEVERS", which bumper sticker made me think immediately of two things: the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers; and, the line about Dubya being born on third base and thinking he'd hit a triple.
20: Ha! That's hilarious, Moby. And I hadn't seen that article, so thanks.
32: Di stole my comment.
The phrase "make your own luck"
I make my own, artisanal luck. Hand-crafted.
46.1: That clinic is in the same building as my beer store and you still told me first.
Wow, that article is really just flamethrowingly ignorant. At least the top few comments are good. I like it when people push back in an articulate way.
I think there is a market niche: start a website that posts an engaging yet rational article on the linkbait topic du jour. One week you could do the stupid Time magazine cover with the nursing 4-year-old, and the next week you could do Ms. "I make my own luck."
Free idea! Somebody take it!
Further support for my theory that Obama will win because Romney is the new Al Gore.
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Apparently, the baby stink bug invasion was just the beginning. Our evening has included two long snakes and a nest of at least a dozen paper wasps. Documentation in the Flickr pool.
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17
The phrase "make your own luck" frosts my nads. It's not luck if you have control over it, stupid lady.
To a certain extent you can make your own luck by giving yourself many chances to get lucky.
21
... the majority of college students worked their way through school so they wouldn't have to work at Starbucks. ...
Some of these students were basically swindled which is too bad but doesn't entitle them to a good job.
It doesn't entitle them to anything, but to tell someone that first they should better themselves by going to college and second that they shouldn't have expected to better themselves by going to college is thoroughly boneheaded.
Contra 22, going to college has not been pushed as a lottery, but as the safe, responsible thing to do, so responsible that even significant amounts of debt are worthwhile. It was certainly the line that I heard growing up. (While the news stories always dig up some art major who is two hundred thousand in debt, average debt is in the mid-twenties and art majors are something like 0.1% of college graduates, so what I want to know is that given that the art majors can't be all of the unemployed, are we ever going to get a story about someone regretting going into debt for their marketing major?)
53: Then presumably you agree that "nothing stopping them from making their own luck" is an exaggeration?
55: Do you actually think that the advice to get a job wherever one can is wrong, then, or just that the tone is inappropriately judgmental?
55
It doesn't entitle them to anything, but to tell someone that first they should better themselves by going to college and second that they shouldn't have expected to better themselves by going to college is thoroughly boneheaded.
I am not responsible for the bad advice they got from other people.
51: I thought he was the new Kerry. Looks like a president, oughta win, but as much as people hate his opponent, no one feels that strongly in favor of him.