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I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

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Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#211

Post by lotsofpulp »

firefoxd wrote: post #33

One thing that has been accentuated over the past few decades is the idea that you are responsible for your success. When you were poor, lacked means, or didn't have a good job, it was because the god of fortune didn't smile on you. Only the fortunate experienced success. Now only losers are broke and live in crap towns, and winners drive expensive cars. With this idea in mind, calling it crap towns becomes an attack…

I feel like the opposite has been accentuated for around 15+ years now, especially after the 2008 recession.

The 1990s/2000s felt like "you make your own luck", but since I got out of college, it seems the 90% luck / 10% effort idea is the mainstream (including "who you know is more important than what you know"). Maybe it is just me growing up, or maybe it's the proliferation of access to data due to the internet, such as opportunityatlas.org

I wonder if the increased acceptance of this fact can cause a type of societal malaise.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#212

Post by lotsofpulp »

mschuster91 wrote: post #172
jimnotgym wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a very British take. Constant worry about the value of something you don't want to sell. Thinking about your home as a financial investment, rather than a...home.

> Thinking about your home as a financial investment, rather than a...home. Sadly, the way all Western economies have devolved over the last decades, real estate equity is the only form of wealth that at least some part of the 99% has for retirement.

Broad market index funds have performed spectacularly over the last few decades, and far more than 1% have them (or could have had them) for retirement. It has been the standard recommendation since I graduated college in the early 2000s.

Of course, many people prefer to invest in extra big and luxurious houses/cars/vacations/restaurants/alcohol/coffee/etc out and I would even throw in educations with low ROI, rather than broad market index funds.

This is specifically about those who had been earning money in the ~1980 to ~2010 period, for the vast majority, their house should not have been the only equity.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#213

Post by Biganon »

There's one thing I honestly don't understand about this post and the comments here.

NOWHERE does the author, or the people commenting here, mention the reason why such a book might be deemed "offensive". Of course it's easy to repell the criticism if you don't address the reasons in it ! But to me, it feels weird and classist to make a book about shitty places in a country. Aren't they often simply... poor ? Is it OK to laugh at the lower class ? The "shavs" ?

I don't know much about the UK but I feel like such a book in France would cause an uproar. Of course concrete suburbs are ugly as fuck ! Of course small towns in northern France, hit by unemployment, are often quite sad and grey and depressing ! But is it okay for people who don't live there to publish a book saying "lol look at how these people live" ? Sounds like the definition of punching down, to me.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#214

Post by mschuster91 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #212
mschuster91 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thinking about your home as a financial investment, rather than a...home. Sadly, the way all Western economies have devolved over the last decades, real estate equity is the only form of wealth that at least some part of the 99% has for retirement.

Broad market index funds have performed spectacularly over the last few decades, and far more than 1% have them (or could have had them) for retirement. It has been the standard recommendation since I graduated college in the early 2000s. Of course, many people prefer to invest in extra big and luxurious houses/cars/vacations/restaurants/alcohol/coffee/etc out and I would even throw in educations with low ROI, rather…

> Of course, many people prefer to invest in extra big and luxurious houses/cars/vacations/restaurants/alcohol/coffee/etc out and I would even throw in educations with low ROI, rather than broad market index funds.

The problem is, index funds have no inherent value, they (just like all stocks and other financial derivatives/instruments) are effectively a paper with one or another form of "IOU" written on it. Economic crashes, wars, tariffs, morons in politics, whatever, there are tons of ways massive amounts of value can be straight up destroyed in a matter of days.

A house however? As long as it's reasonably well built, come what may, you still have a roof over your head. No one's gonna come and kick you out of it. And that's inherent value.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#215

Post by vladvasiliu »

jll29 wrote: post #178
JimDabell wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I was going to say. Back then, a book like this would have been perceived as the UK making fun of itself. Now it’s perceived as being cruel to those less fortunate. I think it’s worth putting into context that the economy was doing great in the era this book was first published and huge progress was being made with things like homelessness, inequality, and poverty. It felt like the country had turned a c…

Good point re: facts versus story. One problem may be that the UK is very London-centric in a way that is markably different from France being Paris-centric. Just my perception (and I know London much better than Paris) is that in France, if you are not in Paris you are seen as "living in the 'province'", but politicians still fight for farmers there etc. In contrast, in the UK, on the surface there is the appearance…

Meh. As someone who's in the opposite situation (familiar with France and not with the UK), I get the feeling that what you're saying applies here, too.

It's funny you should talk about farmers. Yes, politicians say they'll move mountains for them. Yet, in practice, farmers are still barely making ends meet. And we also have the EU on top, which is run by bureaucrats even more removed from the actual "bas peuple". Just look at the whole situation with the Mercosur treaty.

Politicians keep yapping about how ICE cars are the devil and should be banned. After all, you can take a bike or ride the metro, right? It's not like anybody lives outside Paris or its close "satellites". It's very easy when you don't even have an idea how much a ticket costs, since you're carted around by police escort on the people's dime.

We've also had a push for "decentralization", with all kinds of hilariously bad results.

I don't know about Portsmouth nor Blackpool, but I ride around France a fair bit, and outside the biggest cities, many small towns have empty, run-down centers, with mayors fighting to get stores and whatnot back. But people simply move out for lack of jobs.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#216

Post by thechao »

barry-cotter wrote: post #204
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as with so many modern issues, the housing problem was largely created by Thatcher - her Right to Buy policy.

Right to Buy does not explain why the same trend is visible all over the Anglosphere, from Dublin, Ireland, to Wellington, New Zealand, to Sydney, Australia, to Vancouver, Canada. The people don’t want housing built near them and the politicians listened. Lower supply than demand for decades leads to steadily rising prices. If you want to see the alternative look to Tokyo, Austin or Seattle. Build so much housing tha…

Austin? I thought my house was outrageously overpriced in 2014 when I bought it — compared to every other major city in Texas it was 2x/ft. It's tripled in "value" since then; new builds are quadruple. The rest of Texas is only up ~50% in the same period.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#217

Post by amanaplanacanal »

urbandw311er wrote: post #177
fallous wrote: post #68

If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in a cursed timeline. Additionally if you think there are two kinds of jokes: those that were once funny and those that were never funny, then I suggest that your jokes were at best lazy. The human condition is pretty constant throughout the ages and those jokes that are aimed at such universal exper…

This is, unfortunately, the world that we live in right now. There are stand-up comedians who privately admit it’s almost impossible to do their jobs any more because of the faux outrage.

But there are other stand-up comedians who don't have that problem and are wildly successful. I wonder what the difference is?

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#218

Post by calcifer »

gnfargbl wrote: post #201
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as with so many modern issues, the housing problem was largely created by Thatcher - her Right to Buy policy.

I couldn't disagree more! I think the housing cost issue is pure supply and demand, we have a country which doesn't like to permit building and an increasing population due to (legal) immigration. I will bash Maggie all day, for her refusal to effectively manage industrial decline in Britain, for her boneheaded belief that a top-ranking economy could exist solely on services, and, most of all, for her idiotic squande…

> The problem is that we didn't replace the social housing lost to RtB.

We didn't fail that - Councils wanted to build more social housing with RtB and Thatcher viciously destroyed those programs. She created RtB not because it was a "forward-looking policy aimed to reward people for work" but because she hated the social security apparatus and wanted to destroy it. And she was never covert nor apologetic about it.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#219

Post by Chris2048 »

karlgkk wrote: post #81
svat wrote: post #15

Loved the fact that this post didn't go where I expected it to (or at least, didn't remain there). That a book like this probably wouldn't be published today, or would be less popular today, is a point that has been made many times by many people, about many different books, TV shows, jokes, etc. But the author actually moves on from there; the observation is that even in his own opinion , the same joke isn't funny t…

Often when someone, especially a comedian, complains about “political correctness”, what they actually mean is: nobody is laughing at the same joke I told 20 years ago Sensibilities change. The sense of what is and isn’t punching down changes. Even the appetite for punching down changes. People who whine about “PC” always pretend like it’s the death of comedy or speech or whatever, and yet… there are younger people b…

> Sensibilities change

If people are literally calling the police, they aren't changing, they are being suppressed/punished.

> they’re just not getting the laughs they think they’re entitled to

Why are the comedians 'entitled' rather than the people who go to their show and complain?

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#220

Post by Chris2048 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #41
mvdtnz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That author on Slough, > Ricky Gervais encapsulated its brutalist new town grim with ‘The Office’ before giving up and writing lame punching-down anti-woke “gags” for the educationally subnormal That's a very strange reading on Gervais' post-The Office career. After The Office he did things like Extras, a sitcom about extras on TV and film sets, Derek, an emotional series about a well-meaning care worker who thinks i…

There’s also his standup career of being extra atheist as if the world has never seen a famous lapsed Christian Brit

> lapsed Christian Brit

I don't think he is a lapsed Christian though?

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