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plemur:

pocketcontents:

scholvin:

ericmortensen:

Do us all a favor and don’t share your answer. Do it for yourself. 

I took this and found myself getting increasingly (and irrationally) angry at it, to the point where I intentionally answered a couple of questions to put myself deeper into my “bubble.”

I need to get out more because I don’t know a NASCAR driver? Fuck you, quiz. And the condescending dickweed author behind the whole thing can go whack himself raw while standing chest-deep in a pool of Busch Light. 

I got a 77.

Scoring

You got 77 points.

See below for scores Charles Murray would expect you to get based on the following descriptions. Note that there are ranges of possible scores for categories and some overlap. In the graphic, your score is denoted by the horizontal black line, and typical scores for each range are marked with gray lines. The possible overlap is represented by the blue bars.

The higher your score, the thinner your bubble. The lower, the more insulated you might be from mainstream American culture.

48–99: A lifelong resident of a working-class neighborhood with average television and movie going habits. Typical: 77.

42–100: A first-generation middle-class person with working-class parents and average television and movie going habits. Typical: 66.

11–80: A first-generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents. Typical: 33.

0–43: A second-generation (or more) upper-middle-class person who has made a point of getting out a lot. Typical: 9.

0–20: A second-generation (or more) upper-middle-class person with the television and movie going habits of the upper middle class. Typical: 2.

I’m sharing my score because, IMO, Charles Murray is full of shit. He lives for stereotypes. He makes assumptions about things that make him look like an ass. 

I grew up in a small, rural town, the child of blue-collar parents. I was well-educated, lettered in sports (oh, wait, cheerleading, so, not a “real sport” by Charles’ standards), and my neighbors didn’t have college degrees, for the most part.

Technically.

See, Charles Murray forgets that his quiz is flawed.

While my immediate 50 neighbors were not college educated, I lived in a county filled with well-educated ranchers and wealthy casino owners, making my school district one of the richest in the state of Nevada. My “rural” town was part of a valley of towns in Nevada that bordered California, the Sierras, and Lake Tahoe. I had educational opportunities that my peers in neighboring districts and states rarely had, as I found out when I arrived at college and started to compare notes with those kids.

I didn’t just buy Avon products; my mother sold that stuff. So did my cousin’s grandmother—for 50+ years, and her son was a doctor in one of those insular zip codes of “snobby people.” How does that make my “bubble thinner”? I have no fucking idea, Mr. Murray. I can tell you it makes me certain I have no desire to go knocking on doors in rural Nevada on a hot summer day, and that there are some shades of pink nobody should wear, and that one day in high school I had to have a cheap-ass ring cut off my finger by the school nurse because I wore one of my mom’s samples to school and couldn’t get it off. 

And that domestic beer in my fridge? It gets put in there because I find it more hydrating than the microbrew from my alma mater. Don’t think we don’t crack snobby jokes about it, though. We call it water. It sits on the same shelf as the store-brand seltzer, cuz we’re klassy like that.

I have worked jobs that made me hurt all over, not because I’m some sort of amazingly well-rounded, evolved person, but because my parents didn’t save for my college education, yet required me to go, because participating in cheerleading was my choice, not theirs and meant I footed the bill, and I lived in a place where we didn’t have a large immigrant population when I was a teenager, so dishwashing and bussing tables was still done by underage kids. Those jobs made me sure to get my ass to college and never look back on that small town. Nowadays, I don’t get out of bed for less than a certain dollar amount, which is sure as shit a lot more than it took to make my body hurt all over.

So, your quiz, Mr. Murray, is bullshit. Your bubble, is also bullshit. The zipcode where I currently reside includes a now-illegal clause that prevents people of color from residing here. In the prior fourteen years, I lived in a county with the highest number of PhDs per capita, yet I didn’t feel comfortable sending my kids to the public schools. Oh, and we didn’t even watch TV for three years while we were there. What does that have to do with anything?

Bullshit, Mr. Murray. Absolute bullshit.

A 61.

I won’t share my whole story here, but the result is so far off the mark I actually chuckled. Demographically, he would expect me to score out near a zero, but here I am scoring out at a 61. 

I’m guessing the guy is a complete ball of gas.

stoweboyd:

Clay Shirky offers up a precis of Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse Of Complex Societies, as the staging for an argument about media disruption:

Clay Shirky, The Collapse of Complex Business Models

In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter…

So, first the government kills the Indians. (In fact, before Grenville Dodge was a railroad magnate he was a general in the U.S. Army, and Wikipedia tells me that he ordered the punitive Powder River Expedition against the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1865.)

Then the government hands over the land for free to the railroads, along with giant subsidies of other kinds.

Then the railroad owned by one of the guys who killed the Indians hands over some of the free land he got from the government to Harry Koch. And he uses his government handouts to make himself and his family incredibly wealthy.

Man, that’s the invisible hand IN ACTION…just the free market making us all richer with no government meddling. No wonder Harry’s grandsons talk about that stuff so much.

(via selva)