Filthy Commerce

Define necessity.

There's a photo going around on Facebook, which I've included to the left, where the emaciated forms of African children are contrasted with the chubby, Michelin man-like figures of frenzied Black Friday shoppers. While I appreciate the sentiment and I certainly think that more westerners could stand reminders of how easy we have it compared to the people trapped in climate-related or geopolitical nightmares, I think that photo's a bit facile. It assumes a lot about the fat Black Friday shoppers. It assumes they have any money at all.

Wages in the U.S. have not risen in line with consumer costs; in the last year, consumer prices rose 3.5% while average wages rose approximately half of that. People are feeling a little pressure in the wallet.

The logical thing to do when you have a lot of month at the end of the money is to tighten your belt and reduce expenses. But people have been doing that for a while. And Christmas is coming up.

I don't doubt that stores on Black Friday are happy hunting grounds for bargain shoppers. But I also think that those stores are where people go to stock up on the clothes their kids need (or they need). Those sales are where people go because if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to have Christmas at all. And although people can, and do, waggle their fingers about how the income-challenged should cut out non-essentials and just be grateful they've got the chance to work part-time for less than a living wage ... who among us really thinks that the working poor don't deserve the pleasure of watching their kids' faces light up when they behold presents under a tree on Christmas morning?

Not all Black Friday shoppers are mindless greedbots. Many are people who know if they sit out the sales, they sit out Christmas. Instead of stigmatizing the people who are scrabbling for sales merchandise, we need to realize that they're one front in a class war that's pitting the middle and working classes against one another. And we need to ask, "Who benefits from tsk-tsking the bargain shoppers and scolding the workers?"

Maybe they're the mofos who should be on the other half of that picture instead.

RIP, New Austerity (2008-2010)

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to eulogize the conviction that it's tacky to spend it if you've got it. ("For the Wealthy, A Return to Luxury Spending," USAT, Feb 21, 11) Higher-end retailer stocks have rebounded, which is a bellwether of spending among America's top 5%.

Other signs that the New Austerity is over, despite surveys asserting the contrary: Hotel room rates are back on the rise; the restaurant industry is expecting sales to rebound; men's underwear sales are picking up again. One can argue that the underwear thing is merely replacement-level shopping, but you can't make that argument with either eating out or staying at Holiday Inn Express.

Four fingers back at the employers

Companies became more productive by doing more with fewer workers. Some asked staffers to take on a broader array of duties - duties that used to be spread among multiple jobs. Now, someone who hopes to get those jobs must meet the new requirements.

[...]

The broader responsibilities mean it's harder to fill many of the jobs that are open these days. It helps explain why many companies complain they can't find qualified people for certain jobs, even with 4.6 unemployed Americans, on average, competing for each opening.

-- "Unemployed Find Old Jobs Now Require New Skills," WaPo, Oct 11, 10

To recap: Companies are sitting on unprecedented amounts of cash. They used the recession as a great excuse to slice entire job categories out of the org chart. They're persistently low-balling salary offers, and complaining that Americans don't want to work at the wages being offered. And now, it turns out that these poor companies are struggling to find candidates who are able and willing to do the work that used to require several different jobs.

A billion years ago, I worked at a pre-IPO startup and when the founders showed the employees the road show they were giving for investors, one of the PowerPoint slides they used to sell the company's fabulosity was the fact that they persistently under-paid us all by about 20% compared to the industry average. "We do more with less," beamed one of the founders, apparently forgettting who was sitting in the audience.

After that day, it became harder for that company to continue doing more, because the less suddenly had an idea of what they were worth and began gauging their output accordingly.

I don't know what "We do more with less" moments will be required to shake up the current workplace/worker situation. But I won't be surprised when people figure out a way to break the cycle of being asked for more while getting less -- and I may not grieve what gets broken in its wake.

So long as we're looking at the labor market ...

... If this recession taught folks until 45 nothing else, it should be, "Start saving for retirement now."

Specialization is for insects -- and a post-recession job hunter

The hard thing about this just-ended recession -- the hard thing about any recession -- is watching entire classes of jobs disappear.

Here's a hint: "higher wages" equals "more likely to spend"

This just in: so-called "Affluent Moms" also sacrifice their discretionary spending once the kids come along. Sayeth the Center for Media Research:

O eternal Alameda county optimists ... buy my house!

Since my husband and I are such unabashed romantics, we spent the morning of our 10th anniversary reminiscing about how different things used to be.

Namely, about how once upon a time, all one had to do to buy a house was slap down 10% of the purchase price and pinky-swear to the banks that you were good for the rest. In August 2010 -- a scant five years later -- we were sitting in a banker's office, learning that despite retaining at least 10% of equity in the house, paying down our principle, never making a late payment and boasting excellent FICO scores, we are not what the bank would consider a good risk for refinancing. There are some seriously sexy low-interest-rate mortgages out there ... but we are doomed to drooling and whimpering as we ogle them.

Moments like that can make one regret taking out a mortgage in 2005.

Bring on the heirloom tomato subsidy!

Here's a not-very-sexy food story that's been developing all week: due to Russian droughts and smaller wheat crops in Canada and Australia, wheat prices have surged 55% in the last two months. This is good news for American farmers -- they've got oodles of grain in easy-to-dispatch locations -- but not great news for any budget-conscious bread or cereal lovers. If wheat prices go up, the costs are going to get passed on to the consumers.

The Tiny House backlash will commence in 2012

Because we as a people always conflate market value with moral value, I am perpetually on the lookout for the next bellwether in consumption. I believe I have found it: the tiny house.

Granted, we've had Apartment Therapy beating this particular drum for years with its contests and now its Big Book of Small Cool Spaces. I give that blog a lot of credit for popularizing Sarah Susanka's ideas, which may seem inaccessible to those of us who do not have the cash to hire an architect to produce one exquisitely-designed 1200-square-foot house.

But within the past two weeks, two East Coast papers of note have run paeans to small-space living. On July 1, the NYT ran a blog entry titled, "When Less Was More," which concludes:

When you think about how many rooms you actually use, it seems obvious that various ideas from that optimistic era could make the next decade a happier, saner one than the overstuffed times we’ve just lived through.

The undercurrent in this piece: McMansions were emblematic of out-of-control consumerism and an architectural manifestation of moral illness. Now, when comes the revolution, those with a two-story great room that costs a few hundred dollars to heat in the winter will be first up against the wall!

Then, on July 10, the WaPo ran a real estate column enumerating the "Top 10 Reasons Building a Smaller House Is Better." 

You don't really need 10. It can be summed up in three: Small houses are cheaper to maintain, faster to clean, and easier to justify saying, "We just don't have the room" to unwanted objects or guests. The undercurrent in this piece: Living smaller is living smarter. What American doesn't thrill to the idea of optimizing their life without much effort?

I tell you, we're going to see more of these sorts of things. If this is the year of the shopping memoir, 2011 will be the year of the downsizing memoir, where some creative-class type will wax rhapsodic about the emotional catharsis of dropping off three unused rooms' worth of furniture at some socially-conscious re-use facility, segue into the chapter about how trying it is to share a bathroom with a life partner (even while carefully noting that having only one bathroom allowed them to indulge in Ann Sacks' penny tile and a tub filler by Waterworks), then wrap up the book by concluding that their small space has enlarged their life with new possibilities.

And then 2012 will be the year that we all decide people who live in small houses aren't morally superior to the rest of us, the same way we're now tired of locavores' yammering about foodsheds and extreme canning.

I have an opportunity to get ahead of this curve. Next month will mark the fifth anniversary of our buying our own Tiny House.  There is a lot to like about living in a tiny house: the electrical bills that clock in under $20 and the gas bills that hover around the $8 mark, the spring cleaning that takes all of a morning, the fact that having only 832 square feet of living space means everything in our house is there because we like it and use it.

But there are downsides too. We don't have space in our lives for a lot of clutter (which is good), but we also don't have the space to throw a decent family dinner (which is bad). Even for a committed organization nut such as myself, always thinking, It's nice, but where would we put it? gets old. Having no spare space means that fixing or changing the rooms you have is an epic pain in the ass. We are in the midst of repainting the house, and I am done with walking into rooms where displaced possessions are tetrised together against the day they'll return to their rightful place.

Tiny houses are not the next easy solution to whatever ails the American consumer. But I am chuckling in mordant anticipation of being told for the next 12 months how all I need to be happy is limited closet space, because I know that this too shall pass.

At this point, the Gray Lady's just trolling

So one of the ways media-centric websites try to maintain and/or increase their pageviews is by running the kind of content guaranteed to set off commenters. People read, get that cleansing jolt of righteous outrage ("My God, how can someone run this crap?") and log in to comment on a) what an idiot the author is for writing the article, b) what idiots the editors are for running it, and/or c) what idiots the subjects are for even existing. Then they visit and revisit the comments page in order to get the total validation one can only achieve when total strangers on the Internet confirm that verily, you are not the idiot. The people who got you to help boost their advertising CPM are.

And the July 7, 10, article in the NYT, "For a New Generation, an Elusive American Dream" proves that even Pulitzer prize-winning publications are not above ginning up the outrage traffic.

Working mothers, you're not allowed to plan for the future

Is there anything more satisfying than assuming you know why and how other people are spending their money? Going by the dreary similarity of blog commenters in different segments of the blogosphere, apparently not.

I speak, of course, of the myth that a two-career household is financially worse off than one in which there is one breadwinner. Working mothers are almost inevitably called out on both mommyblogs and personal-finance blogs, usually by someone who remarks with a blend of evangelical zeal and fact-free naivete:

"I bet if you just re-evaluated your priorities, you wouldn't have to work! Stop paying for cable, brand-name products, meals out. Then you could stop working and save all that money on day care too! Get off the job treadmill -- it's soooo much better for your family."

The formula for writing these sorts of comments is simple: Start by assuming the working mother is a financial idiot; add a dollop of anti-consumerist morality; stir in a mini-homily on re-evaluating priorities so your children don't grow up to practice skeet shooting in a bell tower (bonus points if you can imply " ... you shallow, label-obsessed Medea" without actually saying it); blend well and serve.

You know what is always, always missing from these "You don't need HBO, but your kids need you!" mini-lectures? Clear and explicit directions on how a one-income family is supposed to swing saving for two adults' retirements.

Who doesn't enjoy passing delicious judgment on others?

Say you're a working stiff. You have a thoroughly average American commuting time of 24 minutes (48 if you're commuting by public transit), and a thoroughly average American commuting workday of 8 hours or so. By the time you get home, approximately nine to eleven hours after you left that morning, you're going to be hungry. You may have also have had to kick in the thoroughly average 1.8 to 2.9 hours per day of childcare that American working mothers between the ages of 25-54 fit into their day.

In other words, by the time you get around to that meal, you have already put in anywhere from nine to fourteen hours on things like commuting, working and child-minding.

Time to get supper! Do you:

A. Order out?

B. Pull out one of the 45-minutes-or-less recipes you got from Everyday Food or one of the 30-minutes-or-less recipes you got from Rachael Ray?

C. Decry A & B as efforts that deny you nutrition or dumb down your cooking skills, and opt instead for an easy roasted chicken meal that takes "only" an hour?

What Karen Hill's decor says about bloggers

I love Goodfellas and Casino for many, many reasons. Among them: Each movie features a swag scene, where the female-actress-with-the-most-screen time* proudly shows off the hideous yet expensive goodies her husband's ill-gotten wealth can provide her. In Goodfellas, Karen Hill proudly displays a living room out of Sister Parrish's nightmares; in Casino, Ginger McKenna coos over a jewelry wardrobe that even the fine folks at Iced Out Gear might find excessively gaudy.

Those scenes have always struck me because they are such elegant little dissections of the social signals you send when you show off your stuff. This is why the haul video phenomenon on YouTube intrigues me. In a nutshell: these are YouTube clips where adolescent girls and young women show off their latest clothing or cosmetic purchases. ("Tube Tops and Teddy Bears," NYT, April 22, 10) I find it striking that these videos tend not to focus on the transactive angle of the purchase -- rare is the girl discussing clothing budgets or spending parameters -- but cut straight to Lookit my new stuff!

Naturally, marketers have discovered the haul video phenom.  The Star-Trib reports in "Teen Shoppers Hauling It In" (May 19, 10):

Young fashionista haulers with thousands of online followers capitalize on their popularity as a way to score freebies or paid-endorsement gigs from clothing and cosmetics companies.

Of course they do. The story also notes how heavily gendered the haul phenomenon is; it's primarily a heteronormative female genre:

Louise Dengerud, an account director at Olson, a Minneapolis creative agency that uses social circles to promote clients' products [said], "It's a more female psychology to want to share that you don't find in the straight male culture, except around tools and electronics. Guys would probably watch that kind of haul."

I am always fascinated by a blogging (or vlogging) segment's cheerful rush into commodifying what had once been a facet of private life.

Mommybloggers are, of course, your most prominent example, but personal-finance bloggers are no less complicit, nor are housebloggers, and if the wifeblogging genre ever gains traction ("A New Generation of Female Bloggers Is Championing the Importance of Being a Good Wife and Partner," LAT, May 15, 10), I have no doubt marketers will be finding ways to work tie-ins to Sandals Resorts, KY Jelly or Victoria's Secret.

There was a miniruckus of Moe Tkacik's recent revelation that her blogging persona was a construct meant to please an audience, not an accurate reflection of who she "really" is. You mean it's not her? The brazen gall!

This sort of "You don't really know me! You don't really know my life!" defense ought not be surprising. It's a tidy dodge: Instead of admitting you're an unreliable narrator, you're merely choosing to keep the audience selectively informed. This doesn't reduce the appeal of the authentic -- which is, after all, a tremendously marketable commodity -- but reserves the opportunity for further market expansion as the blogger selectively reveals "new" facets to their commodified persona all along. It is the kind of strategic thinking any product development team would love to have in the office.

I look forward to seeing where haul videos are going -- when they stop being descriptive and start proscriptively defining a marketer's desired spending behavior. Then, we'll have moved from Karen Hill to Kate from The Joneses.

* There are no female protagonists in a Scorcese flick. Not even Cape Fear.

Revisit the myth of the over-consuming American

So the HuffPo published an inadvertently hilarious post over the weekend wherein the author -- CEO of a personal-finance site LearnVest -- went 24 hours without spending any money and triumphantly concluded that if she could do it, anyone can. Not mentioned in the piece: How having a full pantry, a job within easy walking distance, and friends willing to socialize at her home really helps the "I didn't spend all day" case. Also not mentioned in the piece: How many of us call those days where we don't spend anything "Mondays" or "Tuesdays" or ... you get my point. For example, I fully expect not to spend any cash today.

The piece has since been deleted from HuffPo, but lives on elsewhere. Give it a read if you feel like it's been too long since your proletariat rage has been provoked.

I am not opposed to mindful consumerism. What I am tired of is the idea that not spending money is some sort of canny counterculture move.

I realize the idea of "America, Nation of Mindless Consumers" has become enshrined as a national myth, but the myth could use a reality check. U.S. consumer spending is not back at pre-recession levels, and economists have begun concluding that the habits we've picked up over the last two years are going to be very hard to shake. 

People are spending less money. This is not really news -- not to people who have been afflicted by setbacks during the downturn, not to people who watch sales figures, not to retailers. Maybe it's time to start looking at what the national character is doing now, instead of assuming the 1950s model of untrammeled consumption is still true 60 years later.

How dare you eat well on my dime!

Before we get to the link-baity article, let me drop some background on you:

-- "Relative to the price of everything else in the economy, sodas (the orange line) are 33 percent cheaper than they were in 1978. Butter (dark brown) is 29 percent cheaper. Beer (gray) is 15 percent cheaper. Fish (the yellow line), by contrast, is 2 percent more expensive. Vegetables (purple) are 41 percent more expensive. Fruits (green) are 46 percent more expensive." ("What's Wrong With This Chart?" NYT, May 20, 09)

-- Three years ago, Speaker Pelosi elected to spike the Fairness in Farm and Food Policy Amendment (offered by Ron Kind (D-WI) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ)), which would have cut subsidies to several commodity farmers and boosted spending for nutrition and food assistance programs. In 2008, the government launched a $20 million Healthy Incentives Pilot project to "determine if incentives provided to recipients at the point-of-sale increase the purchase of fruits, vegetables or other healthful foods among SNAP participants"

-- The USDA's Thrifty Food Plan is really tough to follow. Legions of bloggers can attest to that.

-- One in eight Americans now rely on SNAP to help stave off hunger, up from one in 50 back in the 1970s. Or, to put the numbers in a different perspective, in the 1970s, 2% of Americans needed federal assistance to get food on the table; now, 12.5% do.

Oh good, another anticonsumption experiment

So Dave Holmes has the genius blog where he says he's reading one of those A-Year-Of-Stunt-Living books a week, then writing about the experience. And I cannot wait for him to get a hold of The Great American Apparel Diet, wherein a group of women have vowed to give up shopping for new clothing from September 2, 2009 to September 2, 2010.

Y'all, this will be hard for them:

Like most women we are attached to our wardrobes in some form or another.  In fact buying a new something-or-other is as natural as a dark choclate [sic] pick-me-up.  We all have our reasons for embarking on this project but it all gets down to this…who are we without something hip and new in our closets?  We shall see.

Speaking as someone who hoards the three-ounce Scharffenberger 82% extra dark chocolate bars in her fridge like they are priceless gems and I am Smaug the dragon ... my dark choclate [sic] pick-me-up costs me approximately $2 per each delicious, 190-calorie hit, or about $8 per typical week. I defy you to find me any well-made $2-$8 sartorial pick-me up.

Even assuming a 45-week run of pick-me-ups (because vacations and Christmas breaks will have their own consolations), that's only $360 bucks for 180 moments of sensory bliss. And I don't have to deal with clutter in the closet.

But I'm getting away from my points. You know I'm opposed to disposable fashion for both environmental and financial reasons, and it's not winning any points for human rights practices either. I'm for making changes to your personal consumption patterns in order to reconcile your private beliefs against your public commercial actions.

But I'm growing a little weary of the one-two punch where it's "Hey, I'm going to stop doing [presumed mainstream consumer activity] for a limited period and then blog about it!" Having that escape hatch means that you're not really committing to any change, you're just experimenting.

And I'm a little weary of people not realizing what a luxury it is to give something up voluntarily. There is a tremendous amount of privilege in a life where you can say, "I have too much, so let me see what it's like to live without." 

During Lent when I was growing up, my family would have one night a week where we ate a bowl of rice, and we'd donate what we would have spent on that meal to the local food bank. The reasons for this were twofold. First, my parents believed that "going without" was something we needed to experience in order to appreciate what we had. Second, they believed that you weren't supposed to profit from the experience but use it to help others.

I'd respect a lot more of these attempted-unconsumption efforts if they were just as adamant about addressing those who do without by necessity as they were in celebrating those who do without by choice.

Eat the rich; they're healthier than the poor

Longtime readers will know that food-- how it's produced, what we pay for it, what we should pay for it, what criteria we use to determine how to spend our food dollar, transmuting those criteria to a food-lifestyle decision, how to prepare it -- is a recurrent topic on this blog. We've talked about the real and imagined obstacles to shopping at Whole Foods (more here), whether or not it's ever a good idea to eat fast food,how it's tough to be a thrifty food shopper/consumer if you don't already have capital to invest ... anyway, we all like to talk about food as a reflection of larger commercial and cultural forces.

We're all familiar with some basic facts: the current U.S. diet requires a hell of a lot of resources; junk food provides a bigger caloric bang for your buck; both urban and rural Americans struggle with "food deserts," i.e. places with limited to low access to grocery stores. (For the record: "low access" is defined as "no grocery stores within 10 miles or less.") With the exception of the very poorest of the U.S. poor, there is a strong correlation between obesity and poverty in the U.S. because of a killer trifecta: access only to cheap calories, a lack of places to safely exercise, and insufficient education on nutrition.

(For those who wonder why the rural poor, who presumably don't live in crime-ridden projects, can't take a jog, I have one word for you: sidewalks. When you live someplace without them, it's harder to get in even casual everyday exercise.)

Because it is so easy to look at the American foodscape and see the effects of the killer trifecta, it should, in theory be easy to be compassionate toward those who do not have the luxuries of choice and economy. And it should, in theory, also be easy to back the idea that personal and community health can be improved by giving people the tools they need to eat well over their lives.

You'd think it would be easy, yet somehow Caitlin Flanagan was unable to take time out of her busy scheduling of fapping over Twilight to give it a try. Instead, she denounces school gardens in "Cultivating Failure" (The Atlantic's Jan/Feb 10):

With these gardens—and their implication that one of the few important things we as a culture have to teach the next generation is what and how to eat—we’re mocking one of our most ennobling American ideals. Our children don’t get an education because they’re lucky, or because we’ve generously decided to give them one as a special gift. Our children get an education—or should get an education—because they have a right to one.

It's a poorly constructed argument.

First: at no point does Flanagan ever acknowledge why the idea of teaching children about nutrition and food production might have gained traction in the first place. Instead, she credits Alice Waters with mysterious powers of the occult and reasons that politicians and school administrators are all the victims of (organic) witchcraft.

Second: earlier in the piece, Flanagan righteously defended "education" as "the state standards for English and math." This conveniently overlooks the abundance of actual educational skills the kids can pick up while gardening -- planning ahead, problem-solving, analysis, observation -- much less the anthropological, biological and nutritional lessons afforded by explaining how the Native Americans' "three sisters" methods of planting afforded soil remediation, pest control and a diet rich in protein and vitamins.

Third: Flanagan doesn't bother to address and refute the point that our children's right to an education should include the right to know how their bodies handle the basic process of digesting food and absorbing nutrients. Instead, she claims that the one Ralph's she visited in Compton is proof that inner-city kids are at no risk of not getting vegetables.

Fourth: the entire piece is one in which she attempts to create a class war between well-educated "elites" and the immigrant/minority children they're depriving of their No Child Left Behind worksheets. While it is true that a lot of middle- and upper-class people are supremely oblivious to the genuine hardships a lot of people in this country face when it comes to getting decent food on the table, and it is equally true that some people think lifestyle consumption -- getting a CSA or buying organic -- is all we have to do to fix the broken American foodscape.

But explain how giving a child the tools to understand the world around them and the skills to grow their own food is so oppressive. She can't. She can only fling up her usual "The left is guilty of practicing what it preaches against! It's the real oppressor!" schtick and hope that people are too emotionally affected to bother picking apart her arguments.

Fifth: Try fact-checking beyond your neighborhood. After Wisconsin schools began teaching their kids about food and incorporating it into the daily grind, things like bad behavior plunged and academic performance rose. Going organic and local in Michigan helped keep tax dollars in the local economy, which in turn helps with municipal funding.

ANYWAY. You can read the article or you can shrug and say, "What can I do to help weaken the killer trifecta?" I'm going to point you toward the Community Food Security Coalition, which aims to execute "a comprehensive strategy to address many of the ills affecting our society and environment due to an unsustainable and unjust food system" And if you have any suggestions of your own, I'm all ears.

Walk away, but the responsibility still remains

There's a house in Alameda that's a foreclosure property, but it's still got all the utilities turned on. I know this because every night at 5 p.m. or so, the sprinkler system sputters to life. The sprinkler heads are set to douse the sidewalk, and one of them's been knocked off, sending a gusher of water into the street. The front yard is also flooded owing to poor siting or poor maintenance or the fact that it's the rainy season so really, there's no need to have your sprinklers on nightly.

Over the last two weeks, I've repeatedly called the bank listed on the property (Cyprexx, affiliated with GMAC) and I've called the real estate company listed on the sign in the window (Aurora Realty). I've even called the East Bay Municipal Water District, as California's still in the middle of a serious water shortage, and this is the kind of thing they should be interested in. EBMUD was super-helpful. The bank and realtor associated with this property? Not so much.

What has struck me, repeatedly, as I tried to get someone to fix this sprinkler issue, is how hard it was to find anyone who would take responsibility for the problem. Surely tending to a property is the ethical thing to do in a community, especially when one relies on the community's reputation and amenities to enhance the property's value?

In reading "Walk Away From Your Mortgage" (NYT, Jan 10, 10), the following stood out:

There are two reasons why so-called strategic defaults have been considered antisocial and perhaps amoral. One is that foreclosures depress the neighborhood and drive down prices. But in a market society, since when are people responsible for the economic effects of their actions?

Bzzzzt! Walking away from a responsibility doesn't automatically make it disappear. Someone needs to pick it up. And in the case of the broken sprinkler, it's the bank's responsibility, in theory. This is amusing when you consider that there's a case to be made that banks acted in bad moral faith in the first place:

There is an inherent imbalance in the borrower-lender relationship that makes this ["don't default"] message unfair to consumers: Banks set the rules during the housing boom, handing out home loans with no down payments, no income checks and inflated appraisals. Now that property values have dropped 20 to 50 percent in many areas, banks have been slow to modify troubled mortgages and reluctant to reduce principal debts.

-- "The Nation's Housing: Walking Away from a Mortgage," WaPo, Nov 28, 09

Which brings me to my contradictory point: I actually don't see a moral problem with walking away from your mortgage. Businesses often break or modify agreements without notice to the customer. Why shouldn't the customer have the right to do the same?  However, I do have a problem with consequence-free economic actions.

I really don't care if banks never wanted to get into the business of property management. What did they expect when they began peddling products they knew they'd be taking the collateral on? So step up to the plate instead of relying on the community to do it for you. There's no reason why the rest of Alameda should rip out their lawn and share toilet flushes because one willfully neglected sprinkler wastes water every night.

Pick a Fight Monday: There's no reason to romanticize the Great Depression

Over the last 18 months or so, there have been a plethora of articles and blog posts about how the adults of today are revisiting the habits of their Great Depression-era forebears. ("Great Depression Holds Lessons for Surviving Tough Economy," CNN, Oct 13, 08; "Survival Basics from Depression-era Kids," Wisebread, Oct 31, 08; "Wisdom of the Aged," Time Out Chicago, Dec 8, 08; "Making Ends Meet in the Great Depression," NYT, Apr 1, 09; "Catering to the Recession Mentality," WSJ, Nov 9, 09;  "Will the New Frugality of Born of the Recession Shape a Generation?" WaPo, Dec 20, 09; "Recession Generation Will Spend Less for Life," Newsweek, Jan 9, 10)

Think about how trendy things like gardening, canning and sewing have gotten among a certain subset of domestic bloggers. I am pretty sure the trend is peaking, as there's a book about to come out about channeling your grandmother's household skills, and lifestyle books usually reflect popular sentiment; they don't create it. ("Book Aims to Connect New Generation to Grandmothers' Skills," Spokesman-Review, Jan 10, 10) And plenty of green bloggers are now claiming the Great Depression was awesome in that everyone was forced to reduce, reuse and repurpose things.

Here's what everyone conveniently leaves out: People did these things not because they wanted to, but because they had to. An entire generation did not decide to make the 1930s the greenest decade, nor did they decide to reject consumerism for DIY empowerment. Those benefits were side effects.

Did the country lose its mind for the past ten years and go nuts with buying houses they couldn't afford and lifestyles financed by credit card? Yes. Are we paying for that now? Yes. Is it kind of awesome that people are changing some of their habits so they're not merely uncritical consumers? Yes.

But for God's sake, be critical of this Depression-revival chic too. The Great Depression created staggering workloads for women ("Life In (And After) Our Great Recession," The Atlantic, Oct 09), so remember that the next time someone asks why you're not cultivating your own organic plot/canning your own preserves/sewing your curtains out of old sheets/cutting your husband's hair/following the dictate to only eat food your grandmother would recognize. If you must embrace the habits of the Great Depression, do it with your eyes wide open to whether or not they're reconcilable to the realities of today.

Way to miss the real feminist issues, Cindi and Arianna

Check this PR stunt out:

"Cindi and I recently attended a women's conference and noticed how many high achievers were skipping sleep in their quest to 'do it all,'" says [Arianna] Huffington. "We want to remind women that sleep isn't an optional luxury, but a necessity that pays priceless dividends, from increased productivity to more happiness and creativity."

-- "Huffington Post and Glamour.com Team Up to Combat 'Feminist' Sleep Issue," MediaFishbowNY

Again, there is a difference between "busy as you want to be" versus "busy as you have to be."

But what is eyebrow-raising about this campaign is how neatly it ignores the reasons why women are apparently under-rested.

We can start with the second shift: U.S. women still do nearly twice as much housework as men do and that disparity doesn't go away even when the woman's a high earner. The default for domestic affairs still rests with the distaff partner.

Ergo, if you want to make anything a feminist issue, make "sharing household responsibilities" the cause celebre. Let's see Glamour.com organize a campaign telling their readers how to reform their household arrangements and re-examine their housework standards. Or is that too problematic for their advertisers, some of whom doubtlessly depend on women's persistent domestic insecurity to shill their products?

We can then take a look at how the workplace contributes to the sleep deprivation.  New mothers in the American workplace are screwed coming and going: They can't take off time during the period when their children are often sleeping for only a few hours at a stretch ("United States Isn't Home of the Paid Mommy Leave," Seattle P-I, Jul 27, 07; "Downsizing Maternity Leave," WSJ, June 8, 08; "As Economy Slips, New Mothers Cut Short Their Maternity Leave," WSJ, Mar 11, 09) and they're pressured to breastfeed, then expected to schedule milkings into an already-full workday ("Baby Food," New Yorker, Jan 11, 09). A lot of them end up bringing work home -- thereby adding yet another obligation to their already-full days.

So you know what would be an awesome feminist cause? Mandated paid leave of 3-6 months for all new mothers and fathers. But will Glamour.com and Huffington Post lobby for that? Not likely. It's easier to tell individual readers to shrug off the pressures of home and office and just sleep more than it is to be associated with any specific policy issue.

Being a mother can bias employers against you ("Fessing Up to Being a Mom Can Backfire on Job Seekers," Boston Globe, Aug 2, 09) so women have to work to override that impression in a way that working fathers do not. We could put teeth into current discrimination laws -- but again, that would require taking a policy stance.

This whole campaign demonstrates what's wrong with this kind of commodified "feminism." By saying that individual behavior is a feminist concern, the organizations get the gilding from a "progressive" stance without actually having to address the root causes of whatever's prompted their concern or taking a stance that could actually cost them something.

Where to point and click for e-holiday shopping

My friends and family are far-flung, and after the first few years of frantically shopping-and-shipping, I've decided to cut out the horrible Post Office ordeal and just go with e-commerce. I thought I'd share some of my favorite places for shopping. Please feel free to add yours!

Surprise! One man's trash is another man's trash too

Are any of y'all watching Hoarders on A&E? Does it make you want to ... declutter? Like, everything?

Refuse to pay the taxes for the right reason, not the infantile reason

The American Beverage Association has begun a $2 million ad campaign to oppose a tax on sugar-sweetened drinks, depicting it as a tax on "simple pleasures."

Last month, the group joined forces with the National Restaurant Association and the Grocery Manufacturers Association to launch Americans Against Food Taxes, a coalition of 110 state and local groups.

-- "Soda Makers: Don't Tax Our Soft Drinks," USAT, Aug 16, 09

The sad thing is, this whole "the government wants to tax your fun!" sales pitch will be far more effective that the real reason why one might be opposed to a beverage- or junk-food tax: Because it's a regressive tax that disproportionately soaks the poor.

I don't know whether I'm being especially pissy today or especially realistic when I think that nobody will bother to get exercised over unfair taxation, but everyone wants to make sure nobody makes them pay more for their fun.

Follow the money ... out of the 'burbs?

I spent a little over week in the Northern Virginia 'burbs last month, ping-ponging between Lorton (where my infirm mother is currently living) and Stafford (where her working kitchen and washer/dryer combo are currently living). I would be lying if I didn't cop to a bit of culture shock. I spent most of my visit overwhelmed by consumer overabundance and spatial vastness.