“We freak out about the Trillions of dollars in debt our country faces. What about the TRILLION DOLLARs plus in debt college kids are facing ?
The point of the numbers is that getting a student loan is easy. Too easy.
You know who knows that the money is easy better than anyone ? The schools that are taking that student loan money in tuition. Which is exactly why they have no problems raising costs for tuition each and every year.
Why wouldn’t they act in the same manner as real estate agents acted during the housing bubble? Raise prices and easy money will be there to pay your price. Good business, right ? Until its not.
The President has introduced programs that try to reward schools that don’t raise tuition and costs. They won’t work. Right now there is a never ending supply of buyers. Students who can’t get jobs or who think that by going to college they enhance their chances to get a job. Its the collegiate equivalent of flipping houses. You borrow as much money as you can for the best school you can get into and afford and then you “flip” that education for the great job you are going to get when you graduate.
Except those great jobs aren’t always there. I don’t think any college kid took on tens of thousands of dollars in debt with the expectation they would get a job working for minimum wage against tips.”
“When people talk of gift economies, often they talk about them as a replacement for the market economy. But gift economies and market economies have operated side-by-side for much of history. Child care, until recently, was exclusively a gift economy — neighbors would babysit one another’s kids. The creative arts and science have historically been gift economies, and to a large extent they still are. And today, free, open-source software sits alongside ad-supported and paid software.
To me, the most interesting examples of gift economies are when they exist alongside money economies within the same organization. I think this points to where the world is headed. Craigslist doesn’t charge for any of its services other than job postings. Google places advertisements on a small fraction of its result pages. Both companies understand that gifting most of their services leads to short-term costs, but long-term viability. But to think about it this way doesn’t do justice to the real story.
The real story is that their founders thought of the gift first, and the means of supporting it second.”
Food is culture and one of the amazing things about participating in food culture through our work at Kitchensurfing is getting a front-row seat to how that culture is changing around the world.
One of the things we’re starting to see a lot of is extremely talented chefs that learn classical technique, work in a fancy restaurant for a bit, but ultimately want to take their craft and apply it to traditional food that is near and dear to them. In Berlin, we were connected to a pop up restaurant with revolving chefs that is based on exactly that. Mother’s Mother is run by Kavita Meelu and here’s how she described it:
Mother’s Mother is a dinner club that celebrates Mother’s and Grandmother’s food from around the world. Every meal is created by a new chef and pays hommage to one single Mother.
Zeina Talhouni was the Mother’s Mother chef for the Kitchensurfing team in Berlin. Zeina grew up in the UK, became a high-powered lawyer working in Tokyo, and decided to leave the corporate world for culinary school in Paris. She’s in a rotation at a 3-star Michelin restaurant, but for her Mother’s Mother dinner, she paid homage to her Jordanian grandmother by re-imagining classic dishes and lightening them up. It was delicious, it wasn’t precious, it was the future.
Berlin is pretty great, but I’m missing some pretty fantastic things happening back at the home office.
Artichoke soup amuse w/ fried Sicilian lentils & currants @kitchensurfing #thecheekychef (Taken with Instagram at Kitchensurfing HQ)
“Alan had a culturally rich perspective just waiting to be harvested,” Mr. Rabbito said. “I don’t like the phrase ‘reinvent yourself.’ I think what really happened is that when Alan got to England, whatever he found there allowed him to discover who he already was.”
Alan Feuer, The Secret Life of a Society Man
People have always gone about reinventing themselves in the mode that they think is true to them—and sometimes that brings up a lot of questions about their authenticity as people. This is a great story of that, but my real interest in reading this kind of thing is to think about culture more generally. It used to be that if you were into a sub-genre of culture (like being a Punk), you dressed that way and advertised yourself—partly as a way of telling the world to fuck off and partly as a way of finding your own people.
The web has changed all that and the idea of identity—that you can participate in a dozen fringe cultures through the web while leading a completely homogenous existence to the casual observer. There’s something amazing and sad about it at the same time.
Eli “Paperboy” Reed - Come and Get It
This is the new Brooklyn. via stephen and phillip
On eating your own dog food as an entrepreneur: having an amazing Kitchensurfing chef cook a Greek Easter brunch for you and ten friends with the following menu:
Best part: getting to hang out for many hours and not get kicked out of a restaurant, having a price per head that’s cheaper than going out to brunch, and having almost no clean up.
The Wind Map, a beautiful project showing wind speed across the United States, built by Hint.fm (Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg).
This makes me want to take my sailing to the sky.
“There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky.”
George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral
via kevin slavin
“Daylight pours through the elaborate window ironwork onto natural woods and restrained bric-a-brac. Famous young actors eat breakfast over scripts. At night, neighbors stop at tables and chat about the children. Everyone fills up on farm-to-table Northern Italian.
Rucola reflects Boerum Hill’s platonic ideal of itself; it’s full of rootsy Brooklyn good taste… and you might agree that Rucola does what a neighborhood restaurant should: make local life feel good enough that you want to live nearby.”
“Mr. Bloomberg spoke about the difficulties of leading a city into the future amid a political culture that is often focused on the short term.
The mayor noted that technology, despite its benefits, can add new pitfalls to an already grueling process. “Social media is going to make it even more difficult to make long-term investments” in cities, Mr. Bloomberg said.
“We are basically having a referendum on every single thing that we do every day,” he said. “And it’s very hard for people to stand up to that and say, ‘No, no, this is what we’re going to do,’ when there’s constant criticism, and an election process that you have to look forward to and face periodically.”
