MAMA SAID EAT YOUR VEGETABLES

There's an article in the New York Times today about how making $100,000/year is not the status symbol it used to be. Apparently, $200,000 is the "new black" (their words, not mine).


You see, it's shit like this that sometimes makes me want to go down to the New York Times' headquarters with a flamethrower and just incinerate the entire goddamn place. [By the way, how terrifying is this picture? It's resemblance to a NyQuil dream I had during finals is just a little too striking.]

Check out this hard-hitting analysis:

Not for nothing did Senator John Kerry propose rolling back tax cuts during the presidential debates on those earning more than $200,000, symbolic of "the rich." Not for nothing did the Nestlé candy company change the name some years back of its $100,000 bar. It is now the 100 Grand bar. It seems $100,000 doesn't summon the old magic.

Remember on the gong show when some weird looking dude would get up there and spin plates on his head or something and the judges would immediately beat the shit out the gong ... yeah well somebody needed to gong the jerkoff that wrote this article when he committed that last paragraph to paper. THE RENAMING OF A CANDY BAR AS EVIDENCE OF A SOCIO-ECONOMIC SHIFT !!! R U OUT OF YOUR MIND !!!

And I'm sure Kerry picked $200,000 because a handful of uber-yuppies felt that they just couldn't maintain their couture lollipop dream-circus lifestyle at $100,000.

I don't know -- people live in their own piss and shit in 2/3 of the world -- how did we get to the place where being in the top 2% of wage earners isn't quite good enough?

Now don't get me wrong, I plan on making a lot of money too. And I am by no means ashamed of the fact that the only reason I'm in law school is to make money. I don't think that there is anything dishonorable in wanting to make money ... the pursuit of money for its own sake, that
I'm not so sure about.

This right here is the meritocracy in a nutshell -- the power of 10:

Then again, Mr. Coleman of Salary.com is not sure people will ever quite strive for the $200,000 life in quite the specific way they dreamed of a $100,000 one. The latter "is a natural milestone," he said. "It's a power of 10."

"One hundred thousand is magical because it is 100 - 100 is perfect, remember when you're in school?" he said.

The real point, perhaps, is the dreaming itself, the sense among many professionals that there needs to be some light flickering on the horizon to get you through the long hours and the stress of a career. In that sense, Mr. Coleman said, the dream salary of today is the same as it's always been. "It's beyond reasonable expectation," he said, "but not beyond hope."

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