rants and me
Okay, wow, I hadn't realized how long it's been since I last posted. I'm still alive. More or less. I graduated with my masters, am finishing up my research position, am furiously job hunting, and will probably be moving to DC in about a month unless I get a job offer from somewhere else within the next four weeks. Life, it keeps happening.
Incidentally, do I know people in the DC area that I should be networking with? If yes, please tell me becuase it's possible that I don't know that I know anyone.
Anyway, what actually brought me back to this account is a couple of different rants.
First, I've been mainlining the Olympics for the past few weeks and it has been awesome. Diving is fun, synchronized diving is AWESOME, gymnastics is exellent, and rhythmic gymnastics is ludicrously entertaining. Somehow the Russian rhythmic gymnastics team made hot-pink outfits made of glitter and lace look good and elegant. Impressive. So there is much eye candy going on. However, it is the sheer athleticism of it all that pulled me in. Here are athletes at the very peak of human ability, pushing themselves to their best performance. Higher. Faster. Stronger. Wow.
So why do I keep seeing articles about how people are disparaging Gabby Douglas' hair? This question actually breaks into two parts.
A) She's the 2012 Olympic all-round gymnast gold-medal winner! Who cares what her hair looks like?
B) No, seriously, what was wrong with her hair? I thought it looked really nice. It had texture and sparkle even when it was pulled tightly back. The Russian gymnasts with their glitter product just wished they could have hair as good looking as that. So what was the problem?
Second, another thing I've run across recently is various articles about rich people spending large sums on frivolrous items. The basic tenor of these articles is, isn't it appalling that these people are spending so much money when so much of the population has so little: they should be ashamed of themselves. Um.... what exactly do they think "trickle down economics" consists of?
I mean, clearly the whole trickle-down thing doesn't work, but the reason it doesn't work is that the majority of wealthy people hoard their money (that's how one gets rich, you know: getting money and then NOT spending it) rather than spending it on things that would keep the money in circulation.
Are they missing something or am I? Becuase to my mind, while a significant amount of the population should be trying to be conservative in their expenditures, reduce their personal debt, and build up a bit of personal savings, that's not actually what the 1% should be doing. Spending their savings down would actually be more useful to the economy in general and I presume they could find something to do with it that might even make them personally happier than having an extra zero on a piece of paper they get monthly. (Money is a means, not an ends, people!) Up to a certain point, saving money is good. Beyond that point, it's bad. It's kind of the like the happy medium between starving to death and binge eating to obesity. So the poor need to (somehow) create savings, while the wealthy need to find someway to spend down their savings. What, exactly, counts as a healthy amount of savings should vary from person to person, just as what counts as a healthy body weight will vary from person to person, but the extremes are better avoided in both directions.