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2020-02-19 12:48:46
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5616|London, England

uziq wrote:

you’re not going to get me to post in defense of stockbrokers, believe me. but it’s pretty telling that you consider the very definition of upper-middle class people to be ‘stockbrokers’.

maybe it's a cultural difference. here in the UK, the city/traders are one of the most egalitarian, class-blind of all professions. you get lots of cheeky cockneys in those careers. you basically need a math degree and/or a hunger for it and you're in. they're not really the definition of the respectable upper-middle classes.
No, but they're the ones that can afford to live around here. There are still some old-money types floating around, but they're more into backbiting and tearing each other down than anything. I'm not talking European old-money either. I'm talking grandfather or great-grandfather did well and passed down money to the grandkids. Kids who grew up privileged enough to stick around when half their classmates got priced out. It's fucking sad, honestly. The people who inherited their wealth should be happy, but they're the most miserable fucking people. I swear, there's more depression and status striving among them than among the arriviste. Most of the "arriviste" around here came from Brooklyn first, set up their careers, had kids late and moved out here. They're not into the social status games, bless them.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
2020-02-19 12:53:30
uziq
Member
+497|3710
i dated a girl from montauk for about 16 months. she was living in berlin, doing cancer research. NYU, harvard medical school. spoke three languages, lived and darted between europe, new york city, long island, and argentina. a daughter of the upper-middle class, basically.

her dad's a surgeon, her mother an academic. i didn't really meet any family friends – they were mostly iranians – but it sounded like the norm around that part of long island was dentists, surgeons, people who did medical research or had private companies/start-ups, etc. i'm not talking about rothschilds and rockefellers.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-19 12:54:47)

2020-02-19 12:59:52
uziq
Member
+497|3710

Larssen wrote:

we have a house of lords with hereditary peerages. what are you actually talking about? half of scotland is still owned by about 12 aristocrats. the situation obtaining in england and wales isn’t much different.

the landed gentry are huge here. have you picked up a Tatler’s recently?
Oh I was mostly speaking from the perspective of rock quarries and swamps full of troglodytes. You'll find firstly that the landed gentry here wasn't that all powerful or well developed, second that in the places where world wars 1 & 2 were physically fought little remains of them. Now it's just some families with large estates that cost more in maintenance and upkeep than they make in tourism revenue. Most end up in the care of the state as landmarks of historical importance.

Yes, forgot about hereditary peerage in the UK for a second. Glad I don't live there.

My mother used to complain about all the 'new money' that infested  the place she grew up in. The landed gentry didn't last far beyond the sixties that's for sure.
the house of lords actually did us credit at many times throughout the brexit process, reining in the more hasty and suicidal efforts of commons' politicians who couldn't get their act together. it was a moderating influence, as it should be, not unlike the senate.

as it happened that was all for naught, in any case, but the institution performed its function, much as the supreme court did when called upon.

noblesse oblige, dear boy, noblesse oblige. and no, that's not a sports car manufactured by Lotus.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-19 13:22:18)

2020-02-19 13:00:16
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5616|London, England

uziq wrote:

i dated a girl from montauk for about 16 months. she was living in berlin, doing cancer research. NYU, harvard medical school. spoke three languages, lived and darted between europe, new york city, long island, and argentina. a daughter of the upper-middle class, basically.

her dad was a surgeon, her mother an academic. i didn't really meet any family friends – they were mostly iranians – but it sounded like the norm around that part of long island was dentists, surgeons, people who did medical research or had private companies/start-ups, etc. i'm not talking about rothschilds and rockefellers.
Montauk is different. It was the middle class version of the Hamptons when I was younger. In the past 10 years it was "discovered" by Hamptonites and it's not the same.

Anyway, yeah. Doctors, lawyers, corporate executives, finance types etc.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
2020-02-19 13:01:51
uziq
Member
+497|3710
her name was lila. if you ever see her around NYC tell her i miss her. uzi wants his baby back

the last time i mentioned her on here you insisted that montauk was a few surf shacks and nothing was there. you must surely be socially climbing.
2020-02-19 13:07:55
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5616|London, England

uziq wrote:

her name was lila. if you ever see her around NYC tell her i miss her. uzi wants his baby back

the last time i mentioned her on here you insisted that montauk was a few surf shacks and nothing was there. you must surely be socially climbing.
No, it's a town. Mostly cheap expensive motels on the beach. A town square that has a diner and a few staple restaurants. A couple of surf shops. Deli etc. Up by the docks there's an open air mall and some restaurants. Between the docks and the town there are vacation homes. If she grew up there I'm surprised. It's very much a seasonal beach town and she must've had maybe 20 people in her class growing up.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
2020-02-19 13:13:17
uziq
Member
+497|3710
she went to a private school somewhere near montauk. i don't think her family actually lived in montauk itself, just nearby.

anyway. an enlightening discussion on the class differences between US and UK. i like to know where i stand, who can wear velvet, who can wear ermine, etc.
2020-02-19 13:43:10
Larssen
Member
+99|2145

Jay wrote:

uziq wrote:

you’re not going to get me to post in defense of stockbrokers, believe me. but it’s pretty telling that you consider the very definition of upper-middle class people to be ‘stockbrokers’.

maybe it's a cultural difference. here in the UK, the city/traders are one of the most egalitarian, class-blind of all professions. you get lots of cheeky cockneys in those careers. you basically need a math degree and/or a hunger for it and you're in. they're not really the definition of the respectable upper-middle classes.
No, but they're the ones that can afford to live around here. There are still some old-money types floating around, but they're more into backbiting and tearing each other down than anything. I'm not talking European old-money either. I'm talking grandfather or great-grandfather did well and passed down money to the grandkids. Kids who grew up privileged enough to stick around when half their classmates got priced out. It's fucking sad, honestly. The people who inherited their wealth should be happy, but they're the most miserable fucking people. I swear, there's more depression and status striving among them than among the arriviste. Most of the "arriviste" around here came from Brooklyn first, set up their careers, had kids late and moved out here. They're not into the social status games, bless them.
I once read inherited wealth usually lasts for about three generations, coincidentally the same span of time as tyrannies in ancient greece.

This should teach us all to be less concerned with our primogeniture, or to be less fiscally responsible. Odds are your grandchildren will vaporise it all anyway so you might as well spend your worldly gain on you, apart from a university fund or two, safely locked away in a trust.

Sadly I've come to the conclusion my mum must've been the third generation as well.

Last edited by Larssen (2020-02-19 13:44:10)

2020-02-19 14:03:22
uziq
Member
+497|3710
tyrannies in ancient greece lasted three generations because the city states had about 20 major families and a few thousand people.

there are families in the UK that still have land and wealth from 1066.
2020-02-19 14:17:18
Larssen
Member
+99|2145
And how much of that is survivorship bias? I'm willing to bet even in the UK the amount of offshoots from wealthy families and aristocratic lineages that lost their fortunes and/or died far, far outnumber the ones who remain. The fact that the house of percy is still alive is a remarkable exception, not a rule. Should also be noted that their position among the wealthy was unique, much like royalty.

On the continent - if not decapitated during the revolutions, their fortunes and estates confiscated or destroyed during the wars, what remains was often split up between too many children most of whom weren't the master investors they imagined themselves to be.

Last edited by Larssen (2020-02-19 14:18:04)

2020-02-19 14:19:19
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,815|6364|eXtreme to the maX
This is so funny.

Uziq defending the class system which has done him so much harm and delivered a bunch of braying fools into government. "I earn a pittance but have great social capital because I snort cocaine with stockbrokers and know not to wear brogues with a suit" well done chap.

'Landed gentry' - Thats a nice sounding term. Lets use the proper one - Oligarchs. With some exceptions Britain's oligarchs are now largely dependent on govt handouts and selling scones to tourists.

The class system has held Britain back, I'd dismantle it, starting with lopping the heads off the royals. Harry Hewitt is a hilarious example. "I have no useful skills but people will pay $50,000 to shake my hand because of who my mother was married to".
A system which values lawyers over engineers deserves to fail. Maybe the Aztecs sued each other to oblivion, who knows.

Jay - The new social capital in Starship Troopers world is whether you're a veteran and how much you complain about paying taxes.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm actually in a coma and the two-dimensional characters of my teenage leisure and english lit reading have come to life and are dancing around in my head, as I lie there melting into my hospital bed.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-02-19 16:13:36)

Fuck Israel
2020-02-19 14:26:02
uziq
Member
+497|3710

Larssen wrote:

And how much of that is survivorship bias? I'm willing to bet even in the UK the amount of offshoots from wealthy families and aristocratic lineages that lost their fortunes and/or died far, far outnumber the ones who remain. The fact that the house of percy is still alive is a remarkable exception, not a rule. Should also be noted that their position among the wealthy was unique, much like royalty.

On the continent - if not decapitated during the revolutions, their fortunes and estates confiscated or destroyed during the wars, what remains was often split up between too many children most of whom weren't the master investors they imagined themselves to be.
i wasn't even talking about the house of percy (though there are many more families with wealth and land from that time).

the founder and owner of the boiler room, for example, one of the hippest coolest new media companies ... is a direct descendent of william the conqueror. nephew of an earl.

see what i mean? these people still run the media and the government. to say they are a faded power is moronic.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-19 14:26:35)

2020-02-19 14:29:37
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,815|6364|eXtreme to the maX
So what? I'm sure descendents of William the Conqueror's serfs is running billion-dollar corporations somewhere.

The class system only exists to people who care about it and defer to it, its a bit like a snooty version of Santa Claus really.

Funny that you reference Tatler, a rag devoted to tracking how quickly worthless half-wits are partying away their parents fortunes.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-02-19 14:37:49)

Fuck Israel
2020-02-19 14:35:11
uziq
Member
+497|3710
stick your head in the sand and pretend that inherited privilege doesn't exist if you want, but it does. you and jay are both full of wishful thinking, a pretty damning susceptibility in an engineer, i would have thought.

you only have to look at eton and how the familial power perpetuates, indeed builds, on itself over generations.

The born Etonian was at one with his heritage. The quickest way to ascertain a boy’s natural Etonianness was to find out if his father had gone there. Plenty had. Then I would start my plebeian social arithmetic. If his father went there, then thirty or so years earlier his grandparents had had the money to send his father there. So his grandfather was probably an old Etonian. Which meant that sixty or so years earlier his great-grandparents had had enough money ... It was dizzying, climbing backwards along the branches of these golden family trees.

It was unimaginable to me, the quickly privileged descendant of schoolteachers and shopkeepers, that these Etonians had been privileged for so long that the precise origins of their fortune could no longer be located. What amazing security: to have always been well-off probably suggested that one would always be well-off. The future would look comfortingly like the past. Amusingly, David Cameron is often described as being ‘upper-middle-class’, but the originary arithmetic doesn’t lie. His father went to Eton, as did his grandfather. And on his mother’s perhaps fancier side, his grandfather went to Eton, and his great-grandfather also went there, and his great-great-grandfather, and actually his great-great-great-grandfather did, too ... I think we can bump him out of the middle classes.
but wait, i thought it was 'the people' who have spoken up, irrevocably, and elected the current lot into power? i thought this was people-power, populism? the english lion roaring again, saying 'no' to foreigners and europe? what does this have to do with posh nitwits again?

also where have i claimed that i have social capital? i've certainly never hung around with stockbrokers.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-19 14:36:30)

2020-02-19 14:49:04
Larssen
Member
+99|2145
That is a problem unique to the UK though. Perhaps England should've had the same social upheaval in the 18th-20th centuries which happened in the rest of Europe. You should read up on the state of whatever remains of the old french nobility today. Probably less than 100 families by now, controlling nothing.

With serious talk of the seperation of scotland and northern ireland I also don't foresee a long and prosperous future for Eton and other environments that spawned the likes of Cameron and Bojo.

Last edited by Larssen (2020-02-19 14:52:23)

2020-02-19 14:54:38
uziq
Member
+497|3710
eton spawned the likes of most of our PMs, whether its the national nadir of brexit or any number of apogees in the past. take your pick, the privilege is apparent.

we have the oldest democracy in the world, we don't have a written constitution and we didn't need maniacal terror and bloodletting. i think we're okay.

meanwhile belgium basically isn't even a real country. weren't you made up after we saved you in the great war? i can barely remember. no wonder you're a lickspittle for the french. belgium is like the skimmed milk version of france.

Dilbert wrote:

Funny that you reference Tatler, a rag devoted to tracking how quickly worthless half-wits are partying away their parents fortunes.
lol i definitely have never read tatler. i have too much self-respect as a litterateur, dilbert. but it exists, yes, as good evidence that the braying gentry and their children are fine and well in the UK. the fact there's a major circulation magazine dedicated to the country-set and gentry is good enough refutation of larssen's comments that they've 'disappeared'. on the contrary, they have in-house photographers, they're so visible.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-19 14:58:41)

2020-02-19 15:01:02
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+642|3977
I would guess that any country that still has a monarchy also still has a bunch of minor nobility running around. I can see that title of nobility also being able to open more doors for people that otherwise would have been shut.

There is an interesting scam in the U.S. where nobles or Europeans pretending to be nobles will sign over their title of nobility to you for a lot of money. Of course the "titles" are for Germany, France, and Italy, and mean literally nothing. Can't cash the title in or get the government of Germany to recongize you as anything but a dumb American who got scammed by Euro trash.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Qrgm0i2uU2U/maxresdefault.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
2020-02-19 15:05:01
uziq
Member
+497|3710
germany, central europe, italy, poland, etc. still have tonnes of minor noble families. their privilege is far from washed out. in fact, if you look closely at a place like germany or the scandinavian states and see how the various princes are still getting on just fine, living lives of immense privilege, you start to see his france example is the most extreme of all of europe. hardly representative.

look at the big names in german real estate, or any of the other major economic bubbles and 'players' today. you can't swing a pork sausage on a 3 metre radius at a party there without hitting someone with a triple barrelled surname whose father is the herzog of hoffen-stauben-prenzlauerberg.

go to somewhere like monaco or saint-tropez in summer and tell me class doesn't exist or titles don't matter in europe anymore.

i went to school with a few german 'vons', it's generally a giveaway. that and the fact they're being sent to be educated at very expensive english boarding schools and universities.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-19 15:09:51)

2020-02-19 15:09:49
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+642|3977

uziq wrote:

germany, central europe, italy, poland, etc. still has tonnes of minor noble families. their privilege is far from washed out. in fact, if you look closely at a place like germany or the scandinavian states and see how the various princes are still getting on just fine, living lives of immense privilege, you start to see his france example is the most extreme of all of europe. hardly representative.

i went to school with a few german 'vons', it's generally a giveaway. that and the fact they're being sent to be educated at very expensive english boarding schools and universities.
I know there are still German princes and nobles. Are their titles recognized by the government or come with any rights or anything?
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
2020-02-19 15:11:24
uziq
Member
+497|3710
i very much doubt any noble families anywhere in europe still have aristocratic privilege and power. they've just got canny and diversified.

dilbert is right that many of them are now just heritage custodians of country piles, selling scones to american tourists; but just as many are seriously connected, still political actors, or still running huge financial empires.

the current duke of westminster inherited his title at age 27 or something, and with it around $12 billion. they've owned a sizeable chunk of central london for 300 years. so much for 'family wealth spent in 3 generations'.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-19 15:13:19)

2020-02-19 15:32:51
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,815|6364|eXtreme to the maX
Of course inherited privilege exists, and yes 'the people' were fooled into voting for their antithesis.
Misdirecting and keeping the peons down is why the aristocracy exists isn't it?

What is 'inherited privilege' anyway?
Does it amount to anything more than wealth passed to the next generation, a value system and being sent to an expensive school?
Or are you saying that bluebloods do have some inherent genetic superiority? Their heads separate from their necks just the same as your average hayseed.

Besides money free of pesky taxes, a rob and oppress the plebs mindset and a posh tie it what does the class system amount to?
The whole 'cultural capital' thing is nothing more than a pretentious version of the masonic handshake. So you can quote Goethe and hum Rachmaninov, great now we can talk business.
That its a flimsy smokescreen so easily blown away by a light breeze is what scares people like you.

That people like Jay can build their own wealth now instead of waiting for their parents to die must be horrifying. The children of dreadful arrivistes who don't know that you don't talk shop or boast about your military career at garden parties could be in the same school as your little Cuthbert?
How awful, I mean, inherited wealth being so much better than earned wealth - you can smell the difference when you handle the wads of notes.

Jeff Bezos is a mere grocer who never read Plato - what a pleb! And who was his father exactly?
Fuck Israel
2020-02-19 15:40:24
uziq
Member
+497|3710
i didn't say any of those things, thanks, though. i was baiting jay because he's promoting himself up through the classes at a dizzying rate.

obviously i'd never say anything like "arriviste's leave a sour note" or "really, it's too terrible". old army majors and people with bar tabs at White's talk like that. should i have finished every sentence with a 'what, what?!' and a twirl of a moustache for you?

of course you're riled because HVAC engineers aren't recognised on the same level as doctors and lawyers. take up your problem with the is/ought fallacy, not me.

it's cute you're so mad though! another STEM guy who has never read a novel in his life who rages against the notion that human beings value culture and cultivation in one another, and the generally accepted view that it enriches one's life and social world. and i thought you were on the side of stone masons? what's wrong with stone masons, dilbert?
https://imgur.com/y3Ebl5W

amazingly you will take jay down to pieces over his avarice and griping over tax, continually mentioning his military background; but when the good name of engineering is in the discussion! oh no, jay is the noble 'self-made-man', building his fortune today ...

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-19 15:57:45)

2020-02-19 16:18:23
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,815|6364|eXtreme to the maX
Doctors - Expert systems have consistently been shown to deliver better results at a fraction of the cost.

Lawyers - They only deliver value to themselves.

Culture has its uses, I'm not sure it was supposed to be used to keep worthless people entrenched in power and wealth.
Fuck Israel
2020-02-19 16:20:07
uziq
Member
+497|3710
dilbert, you've had bad experiences with lawyers. we get it. family stuff.

but lawyers 'only deliver value to themselves'? oh grow up.

you can go first letting a computer/robot extract a tooth or perform a bypass. and i'm sure automation will never affect engineering in any way.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-19 16:27:16)

2020-02-19 16:25:01
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,815|6364|eXtreme to the maX
What value do lawyers deliver to society, I can't think of any.
Fuck Israel

 

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