The service class/working class distinction is oddly phrased; I'd call his service class a segment of the working class not a different animal.
So "service class" means women with low-paying jobs, and "working class" means men with low-paying jobs. And "creative class" is the new name for "high-paid professionals"?
We have that Imus map on the wall in Zardoz's nursery.
On the other link, I guess college students are service class? Because they have Allston as a solid block of "service class".
That report, without reading it, sure looks like bullshit. Just graphic design-wise.
Oh not the farking creative class again. Abusing Occupational Classification Tables for fun and profit.
2: I noticed that as well. They're using a rather creative definition of creative.
Richard Florida has been beating this drum for a long time. At least it looks like he's finally backed off his claims that if cities spend money courting and catering to his "creative class", incomes for workers outside that class will increase by some kind of trickle-down effect.
a) My son loves making hand-drawn maps. They are a real source of pleasure for me.
b) The OP would sure explain why these are my neighbors.
Do "Just a lurker, I suppose" and "(dammit Jim I'm a) lurker" refer to different lurkers?
2: "Working class"= construction, manufacturing. "Service class"= waitstaff, retail, healthcare workers. (This is why college students end up listed that way.) Creative class is basically white collar. It groups high-paid folks like lawyers and doctors with folks who, for example, work at nonprofits and are generally not well compensated.
I don't know for a fact that Richard Florida is full of shit, but his whole professional demeanor and focuses makes it seem exceedingly likely.
10: Dammit Jim has been around for a while under a consistent pseud (and should just drop the rest of his pseud and join the club). I Suppose is, I think, new or at least very intermittent.
It's plausible for my area. I'm just inside deep purple from midpurple.
Skeptical about R. Florida too.
So does "creative class" always correspond to "MC/UMC white people" in these maps? Looks like it from what I'm seeing.
In the map of the East Bay, the "creative class" is definitely not clustering around public transit.
The whole thing is shit. The classification, the maps, the whole schtick.
The maps are truly awful. They should really get creative people to talk to them about colors.
15: Basically yes, but I thought it was a cute way to capture that even folks who aren't really MC/UMC for the area by income still end up in roughly the same place. Like in DC, interns don't actually live in the cheapest parts of town, they live with lots of roommates in middle class neighborhoods.
17: the Imus map, though, that's top-notch.
The name "Richard Florida" occupies the same space in my mind as "Ron Mexico" so I'm unable to form any coherent opinion about him.
And maps! Yay maps!
Me? No. Looking him up, the only time I spent in the building of the college he taught in was for a functional analysis class, and even that was just after he moved on.
10:
Let 'Just a lurker, I suppose' be the pseud. Then surely the statement that Just a lurker, I suppose posted the comment corresponds to the fact that Just a lurker, I suppose posted the comment. But we can substitute for the second Just a lurker, I suppose the logically equivalent '(the poster such that they are identical with Diogenes and Just a lurker, I suppose) is identical with (the poster such that they are identical with Diogenes). Applying the principal that we may substitute coextensive singular pseuds, we can substitute '(dammit Jim I'm a) lurker' for 'Just a lurker, I suppose' in the last quoted sentence, provided '(dammit Jim I'm a) lurker' is also a pseud. Finally reversing the first step we conclude that the poster Just a lurker, I suppose corresponds to the poster (dammit Jim I'm a) lurker, where 'Just a lurker, I suppose' and (dammit Jim I'm a) lurker are any pseuds.
I seem to recall that Richard Florida had a nice scam going running "Creative Class" seminars. It sounded like a bunch of UMC professionals and business types would pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege of spending a few hours listening to Richard Florida tell them how awesome and vital to the New Economy they were.
A nice gig if you can get it.
"Richard Florida" makes me think of a novelist, but I don't know which novelist.
Opinionated Donald's unclosed single quote up there has horrific implications for the rest of his semantics, and indeed for us all.
26: I guess I think of Richard Ford riding an alligator?
I pictured a cross between Richard Ford and Gary Indiana.
Hey, speaking of the Post, Catherine Rampell has been writing editorials for a while now that are both reasonable and witty.
For myself, I managed to misspell "primary" as "promery" in a piece of code and then to stare at it, knowing that something was wrong, for about 20 minutes without noticing. I look forward to dribbling coffee or food onto myself for an encore.
Andalucia, Ronda and Granada, Murcia, Valencia, and Catalonia; the portions best suited for the invalid.
As immortalised by the Beach Boys.
I like the hand crafted map as explained--the Slate piece actually explained it well. I may order it, just because I do so love maps...
I like it as explained, but I also think it's trying to do too much. That Chicago inset in particular is way too busy for my eye. The National Geographic one is busy, too--I guess I've become accustomed to not having that much info on any single map. If I need that, I either zoom in or use a different view
I'm not sure I can do this without paying someone a bunch of money or learning mapmaking in toto, but I have a vision of a map that distorts by population; not a cartogram warping the boundaries of geographic units like states or counties, which tends to the ugly, but varying the distance between points shown based on how populous the area is. So California would be mostly devoted to greater LA and Bay, with more room to show all those regions' different cities, but the rest of the state would be shrunk down. Maybe even have major highways with tick marks getting much closer together in the empty spaces spaces.
It doesn't exist, does it? Very hard to search for, but maybe I don't know the name for it.
36:Yes, we critiqued that map in some previous thread which I cannot find at the moment.
37: Did you tweet that question in the recent past?
37: I've seen more cartoonish maps that are like that--e.g. New York drawn as a big city (with visible skyscrapers) that scrawls over a significant portion of the northeast.
Richard Florida sounds like a Pynchon character to me.
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I just got a $350 check in the mail from this iPhone warranty litigation, which seems to be complaining that Apple inappropriately voided warranties for phones they said were damaged by liquid. Given that I literally dropped my first iPhone in the ocean, I feel like whatever the logic of the litigation was I probably don't legitimately deserve the check.
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39: Hmm, seems to be some hoohole stuff going on, as I distinctly recall discussing the great Raven map of California (IIRC, Halford claimed to have ordered it during the thread), but now I cannot find it. I did just buy that Raven map for someone out there who I was recently the house guest of. Also some Raisz landform maps for myself.
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I like to imagine Camille Paglia dressing up as a priestess of Diana and writing by candlelight when she drops stuff like this:
Sex crime springs from fantasy, hallucination, delusion, and obsession. A random young woman becomes the scapegoat for a regressive rage against female sexual power: "You made me do this." Academic clichés about the "commodification" of women under capitalism make little sense here: It is women's superior biological status as magical life-creator that is profaned and annihilated by the barbarism of sex crime.
Misled by the naive optimism and "You go, girl!" boosterism of their upbringing, young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.
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9a: My son loves making hand-drawn maps. They are a real source of pleasure for me.
One of my favorite things to do as a kid. Led me to find that the website of one of my favorite drawers of fictional* maps is back online. Claes Oldenburg apparently drew a lot of maps as a kid.
*However, IIRC when you mentioned this before you said your child draws maps of real places?
44: Were you live blogging your vacation?
38 gets it exactly right. Florida is a charlatan and the Creative Class is total bullshit.
45 -- I still have the Raisz I had to buy for a class at Cal. It's certainly outlasted all my textbooks. And most of what they tried to teach me. I used to have the Raven for Montana in my office in DC. It's not on display right now, maybe I should go dig it up.
The creative class remembers to hide its phone in its shoe before wading into the ocean.
That was my first comment from my new phone, btw.
The new pseud is hard to pronounce.
44/51: I watched my sister's now-husband, who is definitely creative class, flip a kayak with his phone in his pocket. His words right before were, "No, I'm taking my phone with me to take pictures!" I wonder whether he just found $350.
With the iOS7 waterproofing update, this shouldn't be a problem anymore.
Babies look like iPhones when you're on LSD.
Have I linked the mapping website Radical Cartography before? Links and images of lots of maps, with the guy's own stuff under Projects.
46 is True Detective, Victim-Blaming Edition.
I liked Richard Florida for longer than I should have because a) one of the first people to call bullshit on him was Joel Kotkin and b) I saw him speak at a conference and he made good noises about labor.
45: Ah, here it is (had to bing it). Starting at comment 330 where Sir Kraab linked the same Slate piece that heebie did in this post (nearly three years ago). Intermittent discussion and critiques follow (including references to Raisz and Raven, and Halford's map order). A good, rambling 818-comment thread that included SWPL War IV, Neanderthals and intelligence; and ending with a boffo (and a little disturbing) boarding school teacher/pupil sex discussion.
Inspired me at the time to make a "find your pseud" word cloud.
61: I guess it's a goohole instead of a hoohole.
Mathematical/geometrical thing I'm thinking about. you took maybe a hundred cities and used Census data to calculate how many people lived in, say, half-mile strips connecting each of them, would it be possible to place each city on a map such that the distance between each one is proportional to that population figure? Or would the required locations start to conflict with each other making it impossible?
That might be non-planar but I don't quite get what you mean the edges to be a function of. Do you mean it'd be proportional to the population that lives near the road between the two cities?
I guess graph planarity it's isn't really what this is about, but pretty sure that once you move beyond 3 cities it'll be over constrained. And even in the 3 city case it could easily violate the triangle inequality.
66: Not the road, ideally along a straight line, but yeah, that's the concept.
So consider NYC, Philly, and Scranton. The line between the first two goes through highly populous NJ and so the distance on the map will be long; the other two edges correspond to more rural land and will have to be shorter. But you can't plot that on a plane. You could make it a weighted graph of you didn't care about it being a map in the traditional sense, though.
What exactly are you intending to visualize by having this? Not quite sure what it could tell you.
I can confirm by secondhand anecdote that Florida is exactly the kind of dirtbag you'd expect from his whole shtick. And 49 gets him exactly right.
The funny thing about his career arc is that he first came to prominence while he was here, and he was always saying that Nedburgh was DOOMED because it wasn't doing what he said was important. We said FU, Florida, he went to Toronto, and he now uses our town as somehow positive proof for his nonsense.
Drawing maps is terrific fun. When I was a kid and we went on holiday somewhere new, the first thing my brothers and I would do would be to go out with compasses and staves and survey the area. My parents probably have an archive of all our maps somewhere around. Islands were the best because you had an obvious definition of where you should stop surveying and go home for tea.
I would be interested to see a map where distance on the map is proportional to travel time. London would be huge because it's impossible to travel faster than 11 mph anywhere in it.
re: 71
My uncle is a cartographer. Working for a place in Feltham, if you know where/who that might be?
He used to draw maps for us as a kid, which were great. I used to have a map of our street that he'd done, marked with personal/family stuff.
72: Ajay, my friends at MySociety invented something like that and to be honest are still wondering what to do with it. It's over here:
Actually, that shows areas on the map within a travel time x of one or more points of interest by public transport rather than moving the geography. But even that was surprisingly complicated.
Aha. I can't say I know him, but I am familiar with his work.
I have maintained a fondness for books with maps in the front (fantasy novels, Golden Age murder mysteries, history of the 'maps and chaps' school). I don't know what the fascination is that maps have for kids, but it's definitely widespread - maybe something to do with feeling you understand/control your environment?
Alex: I can't actually get that to work. It just shows me a normal map.
re: 75.1
I meant 'who' as in institution, rather than individual. He works as part of a team. Lots of security, though.
re: 74
That's interesting. Apparently I can get to the City [in the East] and Slough [in the West] all within one hour. Those are theoretical times, though, I assume. Because in practice, it might take me the best part of an hour to get to Southall, some days.
You're in Ealing, aren't you? Ealing Broadway to Bank is just over half an hour.
I'm slightly west of Ealing [still Ealing council district]. It's a bit under 2 miles. However, those 2 miles can take ... a LONG time, in rush hour. But yeah, generally, quicker to go east, much of the time, as Ealing Broadway and Boston Manor tube are both cycle-able. Anything involving buses or trains, and it starts to get unpredictable.
81: Come on, it can't be just me and various Iain Banks protagonists who did this. Next you'll be saying none of you built dams on beaches.
re: 82
No, but I did use to build dens in the woods, and explore around here:
http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/denny/torwoodcastle/index.html
[my Dad's friend lived in it]
and here:
http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/denny/tappochbroch/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tappoch_Broch
http://www.falkirklocalhistorysociety.co.uk/home/index.php?id=144
Funnily enough, where one of those links, says:
"A small internal chamber in the NE sector of the wall appears to be of modern origin and was not reported in either the original excavation of the survey by the RCAHMS in the 1950s. It has been suggested that this was formed by the Home Guard during the war."
I can call bullshit on that. As a friend of mine and I watched some travellers/hippies doing it in the mid 80s.
24--Damn it, Davidson, I'm a doctor, not a philosopher of language!
78: when it's working, Mapumental is really interesting for the way it shows up how the transport system works. If you're close to a decent railway route, the 60 minutes isochrone can be amazingly long - but only along the rail axis, which is what Ttam is seeing. There's a small patch of 20 minutes to my office centred on a station in north London; which is where I live!
I'll try it again later. Sounds pretty interesting though.
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In the middle of the night, I reached to turn off the fan, and knocked my ipad into my eye, and since it was pitch black, I didn't see it coming, and the corner of cover scratched up my eye and the skin around it. It hurt like a bitch but I went back to sleep.
In the morning there was dried blood around my eye and I think I scratched my cornea.
Later Hawaii noticed some of the blood and asked what happened, and I said "Remember when we were all standing around the mirror talking about how I hurt my eye?"
She said, "I didn't see the blood then. I thought it was this bruise on your other eye." Yep, pointing at just my normal bags under my eye. Oh well.
It still hurts a lot.
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I wonder if the eye doctor will want a huge, up-front co-pay.
Ha. Fuck. Of course. Or I could wait till we get to Vegas and then I'd have a separate out-of-network deductible, so I wouldn't have to get my deductible back from my OB.
It feels like there's a flap in my cornea. Mostly it's laying down flat and doesn't hurt at all, then something happens and it flips up and it's excruciating and I can't figure out how to get it to lay flat again.
Going to Vegas with an untreated eye problem sounds excruciating.
OT: I'm volunteering in a church today. They have a plaque with the names of the officers. One of them has Mohamed for a surname.
Any relation to the Most Reverend Dr Mohammed Omar (BA, BSH, DipTheol, MA, MEd, PhD, DD, MsD, OSA, acOSJ),
Arian Catholic Archbishop of London, Bishop of Middlesex, and Archbishop for the Far East and Philippines, Bishop for Wales, and Archbishop for Africa?
http://www.arian-catholic.org/arian/worship.html
I feel like too much time elapsed, and my ipad doesn't know it did anything wrong, and if I try to punish it now, it just won't make the connection to something that happened hours ago.
69: Thanks, that makes sense. So such a map can only be approximated, not made algorthmically, and maybe not even that.
The idea is sort of "the geographic area as people live it". Like a county population cartogram, but less ugly.
I am working very hard scraping paint because I don't want people to think middle aged white professionals from the East End are as shitty at manual labor as they are.
Optometrist also does not accept obamacare, for those of you keeping score at home.
His sign should say, "We don't even see Obamacare.l
"Ooh, nice corneal abrasion" said the tech.
99: Is there a little sign saying something to that effect? I'm very curious about what would happen if someone tried to use insurance gained through the ACA at a place like that. Mine is just a Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan, nothing really to distinguish it from any other plan. I don't think they'd even know they were dealing with an Obamacare victim.
it's an ER problem, scratching your eye seriously, not an optometrist problem!!! be a bitch in the ER and wait. my stepmom got her cornea scratched by one of our pit bulls, ruby, one time, and at the ER they put drops in there that made it like night and day--no pain! she asked if she couldn't take some of those eyedrops home and they were like ahhhh, no. this is a bottle of liquid cocaine.
ajay: I share your love of map-making. you should find some of your old ones, I bet they'd be fun to frame.
I'll try to get a photo of the sign on the way out. It specifically said something about exchange BCBS, as opposed to the rest, which I happen to have.
103: not sure the ER would be faster. They were able to get me a 9:30 am appt at the optometrist.
Don't know yet, still waiting for doc. But Jesus Christ I could use a painkiller. I figure lll get some sort of numbing drops at least?
59: Thanks for the link... I can see losing hours there!
74: Mapumental is interesting; I remember appreciating a similar map of travel times by bicycle vs. public transportation map in DC recently.
82: We rambled widely, but my maps were often of fantasy realms rather than reality. (It does seem like a fascinating way to occupy kids for long stretches.)
Fingers crossed for a good fix for you heebie! At least a no permanent damage diagnosis.
Do you have an eye ER? They're much better equipped to deal with this stuff than a general one is.
102: They might, because they get paid less by Blue Cross under a lot of Exchange plans. There was a CNN special about someone who got care through Covered Care in California and found out that her oncologist wasn't covered. In the end, she got a more comprehensive network by signing up for a high-deductible plan.
Ouch. Hope you feel better soon!
That sort of abrasion generally heals quickly and completely. I've had two (tree branches swiping back and hitting me in the eye) and no lasting ill effects save a mild antipathy towards trees.
Ack. The painkillers aren't ok in late pregnancy. Lubes and if it's still awful, a patch.
Totally go for the patch. I had one and my lasting regret was that my eye was healed by the end of the holidays so I couldn't go back to school with a cast-iron excuse to be wearing an eyepatch.
The lube did not work for me. I don't know why but drops always make my eyes feel drier and the lube did too. So eye patch it is. This whole thing sucks.
Also I feel like I'm thinking really slowly with this patch blockng half my vision.
It really does heal quickly but i found it surprisingly exhausting, as if my system were diverting max resources to heal the eyeball pronto. On the plus side, the antibiotic petroleum jelly they had me squirt in my eye totally convinced me of the value of keeping the eye area well moisturized! Amazing reduction in wrinkly effect around injured eye compared with uninjured eye!
apparently eye drop pain relief is based in prostaglandins, which is one of those things connected to onset of labor.
The lube did not work for me
This is one of those times when quickly scanning a thread upwards makes a person think, wait, what...?
heebie, they wouldn't let me take the numbing drops out of the ER because they said too dangerous as it risked re or further injuring eye but they certainly doled out some whacking great pain pills - are those not allowed?
Honestly even with the pain pills and a beer, all I wanted to do was lie down in a darkened room and wait for it to be over. Hideous pain.
113. "tree branches swiping back and hitting me in the eye"
I've had that happen too, and some really awesome painkillers after. I exorcise my rage mild antipathy against the trees with a nice big Husqvarna chainsaw. "RRRRRR! RRRRR! Take that, aggressive veggies!"
apparently eye drop pain relief is based in prostaglandins, which is one of those things connected to onset of labor.
As is sexual intercourse (connected, that is, perhaps incorrectly), which maybe contributed to my reaction. How far along are you? Also, corneal abrasions are truly miserable.
I'm 33 weeks. IIRC prostaglandins occur naturally in semen (please no jokes about DIY eye drops) which is why they tell you that sex may help jumpstart labor if things are dragging on. Point being that I really can't imagine that topical eyedrops do diddly-squat to your chances of preterm labor.
but they certainly doled out some whacking great pain pills - are those not allowed?
Wasn't given anything - the opthomologist seemed skittish, and told me just to follow my OB's rules for OTC pain relief. So...tylenol.
I am so cranky, hot, in pain, and trying to finish packing to fly to fucking Las Vegas. I hate everything.
That is some f*cked up barbarianism, heebie.
Stupid babies ruin everything.
If there were any way to make it work, heebie, I would give you this full bottle of Vicodin I've had sitting around for ages. It's probably expired by now, though. Three years? Good luck. I hope you get some rest.
You know, I actually have Vicodin sitting around, from a past L&D, so clearly they didn't think it was too bad for a breastfeeding newborn. We're at the airport already, goddamnit. Where it's probably 75° inside but of course I'm roasting. Thank you all for indulging my epic not-soon-to-end bitchfest.
You both can give me all your extra Vicodin.
You know what would be nice at the end of a shitty day? To sit next to Jammies on the plane. Haha, southwest seating, you're so funny. Next best is obviously middle seats separated by a couple rows.
Well, we're here. I'm still drug-free and unhappy about it.
I've never stayed at a hotel with a scale in the bathroom before.
Is it the kind of scale you can use to weigh drugs?
I ignored the terrifying eye details, but I hope it feels better tomorrow, heebie. Or you get drugs.
136: just one scale? What use is that? "Yes, you have weight."
Upon waking up, my eye no longer feels day-ruiningly painful! Hooray. These things do make quick progress.
Also:
1. I thought internet would be expensive, to discourage people from camping out in their rooms, but it is free!
2. I thought there'd be a coffee maker in the room, because it's a hotel room for godsakes, but apparently they want to discourage people from camping out in their rooms. Whatever.
3. The minibar/dry snacks area has a little note informing you that you have 60 seconds after you remove the item to check out the ingredients, at which point the item will be charged to your room. And if you replace it with an identical item THEY'LL KNOW.
Because of the mini-bar/amateur sex tape camera in the ceiling.
There is a full-length mirror that is so oversized and oddly mounted that it just about has to be one-way.
Also, this hotel advertises "Every room is a corner room!" on its website, and we appear to be an interior corner, so on one side of our window, there's a perpendicular wall jutting out. The view is lovely; I just had been curious about the shape of a building which would make all rooms corner rooms, and was amused to see how it's done.
Not many people know this, but as long as you don't touch the minibar you can completely trash the rest of the hotel room no charge.
The last hotel we stayed at had no minibar, but did have a free mini-fridge. That was nice.
Oh, gosh yeah. Try chucking the art out the window, just to see how it feels.
I don't see how to open the window. I think I'd have to break it.
149: the windows in Vegas hotels never open, for two good reasons, one of which involves air conditioning and the other of which doesn't. (See "The Hangover".)
144 last -- the Aria? I was suck there for a week once for work and it was pretty nice. Plus I had my best Blackjack run ever there so I think of it fondly.
Maybe I can just scratch the window up a lot, then. Would that be fun?
Glad the eye is less crazy painful today.
Do you think today is a lurk in the hotel room day? (My wife loves those.) Breakfast buffets at some other hotel (the Wyndham?) were busy but reasonable, with pretty good food.
I finally acquired some coffee! I'd love to spend today lurking. Apparently the bride and her friends have a cabana rented out all day, so at some point I should be social and go say hi. Worse things have happened than being forced to lounge by a pool.
Also, there's nothing really to say about Vegas ostentatiousness, because: Vegas, but sheesh anyway.
Having just spent a night at one of the big hotels in Reno (Atlantis), I can report that second-rate ostentatiousness is maybe even more sheesh. IIRC the room doors were fake marble--weird stuff like that. But relatively cheap rooms, although it did not seem to have the cheap eats that I expected from a casino (but had not really been in one in decades so maybe that is no longer a thing).
I keep feeling like it should be easy to acquire decadent chocolates and cheeses and things that I'm in the mood for, but they're not everywhere. Why aren't there circulating wait staff with hors deourves knocking on my hotel room door?
Maybe I can just scratch the window up a lot, then. Would that be fun?
Make sure to leave flaps of glass hanging off.
[cringes][wishes he had drugs at just the thought of it]
