Tom Friedman Should Take The Week Off And Regroup - By Charles P. Pierce

[kpete]

From the article Pierce quotes:

“For those at the cutting edge of this trend, durable goods are viewed as temporal objects to enjoy and pass on rather than ‘belongings.’ Personally, I no longer feel like I ‘own’ anything.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-monetize-your-closet.html?hp&rref=opinion

btw: Friedman lives in "a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club." He "married into one of the 100 richest families in the country" - the Bucksbaums, whose real-estate Empire is valued at $2.7 billion.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/billionaire-scion-tom-fri_b_26164.html



TOM FRIEDMAN SHOULD TAKE THE WEEK OFF AND REGROUP
By Charles P. Pierce at 12:45pm


..........................

Yesterday, Friedman may have reached the apogee of entitled and detached foofitude. He once again found some plucky "entrepreneurs" who are the future of the economy, if we'd all learn how to look in our tool sheds, garages, and attics to find the fortunes hidden there. (Friedman would have made a great member of the Oakenshield clan, says the guy who saw the new Hobbit movie last night.) Of course, this only applies to those of us who can still afford homes in which to have garages and attics, and those of us who are not living in tool sheds since the Wall Street entrepreneurs played mumbledy-peg with the world economy back in 2008.

In DiNunzio's case, four years ago she was raising capital for her start-up,Tradesy.com. "I started Tradesy with about $12,000, from a combination of credit card debt and loans, and went on to generate an additional $28,000 to fund the company over our first 18 months of operations by renting out my spare room on Airbnb," she explained. "I used free Internet resources to teach myself web design, marketing and basic coding, and had everything I needed to start a business that now employs 22 people and serves 1.5 million customers every month." DiNunzio is one in a wave of entrepreneurs who've been buoying our economy from below, at a time when so much national economic policy has been paralyzed. These risk-takers never got the word that China will eat our lunch or Germany will eat our breakfast, so they just go out and start stuff, and build stuff, and invent stuff - and create 20 jobs here and 30 jobs there.

I mean, good for her, but, seriously, this is now the future? (I can't top Billmon, who tweeted that Friedman had saved the economy by "reinventing the consignment shop.&quot I note the absence of labor costs, including what we used to call "wages." Maybe that's the future. Everything's a glorified yard sale and we're all just mail-order houses. But maybe I can get a buck for that old lamp that I've come to hate.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/tom-friedmans-yard-sale-122313?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=1456_36519076

[politichew]

1. K&R for Charlie Pierce. nt

[Berlum]

2. "Entitled foofitude" - perfect descripto for Republicon 1% FoofWankers

Freakln Foofers (R)

[HughBeaumont]

3. You know, because a one-in-10,000 shot worked for her, it can work for ANYONEZZ!!!

Tommy Bucksbaum . . . A picture perfect example of a guy who pretty much never really had to work hard to get where he is in life, never really had to struggle, has networking skills and fell into all the right jobs (and eventually, married the right person), yet has an endless well of solutions that usually tend to ignore the giant-elephant factors of wage stagnation, astronomical college costs, unrealistic expectations of Corporate America, unrealistic odds of "Horatio Alger" type success and just plain-and-simple bad luck. I don't think a person such as that should deem himself such an authority as to what American workers have to do to better themselves. I might as well listen to an Ovarian Lottery winner like Steve Forbes on the subject; it'd make about as much sense.

Best comment of all from that article:

I own a business that employs managers, computer-based admin and sales staff and shop floor workers, and I can say with absolute certainty that a vast majority of our fellow citizens have no ability to succeed as entrepreneurs. And that if our society requires any significant percent of our fellow citizens to be entrepreneurs that we are all in very big trouble.

The idea that mainstream employment will evolve from hunting/gathering to farming to working in a factory to running a small Internet start-up is simply ridiculous. Despite what Mr. Friedman wants to believe, Internet entrepreneurship will have zero impact on falling middle class wages and quality of life.

[bvar22]

4. Steve Jobs built a computer in HIS garage,

....and is now worth Billions.
Why doesn't EVERYBODY just do that?

The Uniquely American Solution!

[madinmaryland]

5. Someone must have taken the "Moustache of Understanding"