Yeah, qz.com is pretty much Atlantic Media’s “Millenial-Friendly” Clickhole, so “technically true, but not substantive” headlines are to be expected. It’s unfortunate that the truth isn’t that much rosier, though, even once the hyperbole has cleared. We’re still left with the fact that the average wealth of a third of American households have zero or negative wealth, and according to the Guardian story that the OP cites, Trump’s cabinet is probably the wealthiest, and certainly the most stuffed with cackling robber-barons
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@c10 I think that’s right: many people have negative net worth (more debt than assets), such that the average net worth of the least wealthy 43 million households (note: HH, not people) is roughly $220.93 each.
I heard back from Dan Kopf, the author, and he conceded the point (that if Trump’s cabinet had $0 in assets, it would still be richer than the poorest third of US households put together), but he didn’t seem interested in amending or withdrawing the article.
@kingannoy Re: Obama’s cabinet, regardless of the precise wealth estimate one has for Obama’s cabinet, one would arrive at about the same number of households with equivalent aggregate net worth if you had a cabinet with $0 in assets vs. a $9.5B cabinet. So the specifics of Obama’s cabinet aren’t really an input.
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Making Light, shared blog by TNH, PNH, and friends. Mostly various friends writing the main blog posts at this point, with a long-established community in the open threads.
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I’m wondering what they’ll call this era, although I’ll admit to fondness for the term from Kim Robertson’s 2312: The Dithering.
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Pew - pew pew pew!!! It’s a video daily double!
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I am a huge fan of the paper “The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study”, stating that randomly selected managers are better. I don’t see a reason why this shouldn’t apply to politicians.
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I firmly believe that wanting to be president should disqualify you from running.
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The gelded age?
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“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
-Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
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He’s always had all the answers <3
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Him and PTerry.
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