OMG! Guys! Seriously, this is just fucking great! I mean, I don't know whether to write an entire novel based on this post or just create what may be the most hilarious Megan shorter ever. Oh, wait, the latter is much much less work.
Short Megan McArdle:
Kick 'Em When They're Down:
Usually I laud the free market when it fucks people in the ass. However -- having almost been denied an iPhone and embarrassed in front of the rest of the Juice Box Mafia by a credit check -- I'm going to say that employers who perform credit checks on their potential employees are horrible, horrible people. People who have bad credit might sometimes be idiots that can't keep track of their lives and diddle around from job to job until they find something for which having extreme ADD is not a liability, but sometimes they're just regular Jane's like me.
OK, that was a long shorter, but fuck if that post isn't an instant classic.
Posts
15 comments:
But most of the people I know with awful credit histories have rather more understandable explanations: a divorce. An unexpected illness.
But--I thought medical bills weren't a major cause of divorce! Megan said so.
argh, I mean bandruptcy
Bandruptcy--you said it. I've been in several bands that broke up.
I was going to reprint the same quote, Susan. "Most of the people I know," etc. Note, however, that in the first post linked to, she refers to the guy "who made the mistake of working in construction."
Thus: her friends' financial problems are "understandable." The problems of an unemployed carpenter stem from his having "made a mistake."
Her friend's divorce = an act of God.
Construction worker unemployed because of the malfeasance of financial and real estate institutions = their mistake.
Christ, what a cunt.
LOL. I needed more coffee.
I think she's actually trying to say that the construction worker is like her friends, overtaken by events. Her writing's so bad it's very hard to tell, and she has a habit of alternately faking concern and showing rank callousness about the same things, depending how much criticism she's getting.
And evidently I still need more coffee since I'm leaving out words.
And rickm wins a shiny new internet.
Susan,
alternately faking concern and showing rank callousness about the same things
Habit? I submit it's her entire shtick. She believes that's what journalism and journalistic neutrality and balance are all about.
Just to mention her mad econoblogger skillz yesterday:
The unemployment rate dropped 200 basis points, from 9.6% to 9.4%
linking to a report showing 9.5 to 9.4, 10 basis points.
As always, her fans were unpeturbed.
Downpuppy,
I know nothing about economics, except for what I remember about supply and demand and simple things I learned in the class I had to take to graduate from college. I'm clueless. I'm not ashamed of this, because I don't go around the internet acting like I know what I'm talking about. Megan does.
My point being, I think that's why she has "fans." They're people like me who don't even know what "basis points" are, let alone that Megan's got her figures wrong. Rather than explain her argument in prosaic terms for the widest possible audience to understand, she uses econ-insider vocabulary so that, to the lay people, she superficially appears to know what she is talking about. It's always the real economists, or others who understand these terms, that come around and explain to me just how full of shit she is.
I appreciate it.
I'm just a CPA, with a lot of mostly forgotten math background. So my role is to check her numbers.
It's fun, especially when somebody listens. Or even better, when Megan freaks.
Sorry to double comment, but I hadn't read Megan's post before and now...just...WOW.
She passed the "Foriegn [sic] Service Exam"? Really? I have a very, very hard time believing that anyone who cannot even take the time to spell the word "foreign" correctly managed to pass that test. I considered taking it years ago. The sample tests I got to prepare had questions like "What is the second largest export of Uzbekistan?" on it. It's incredibly difficult and you have to memorize a lot of information. There are universities that offer major programs that specialize in nothing except learning how to pass that test. And that's just the written part. There's an oral test that follows - if you pass the written test - that's even harder. I've corresponded with a guy who made it to the oral test and he was flabbergasted by the experience. And that's not even touching on the second and third language requirements. I can't imagine anyone going through the effort and then not entering the field as a career. Then again, we're talking about a woman who earned a business degree, yet takes clerk jobs at disaster construction sites (thanks, Daddy!) and writes for pennies at the Atlantic, so what do I know?
Unless Daddy had cronies that fast tracked her into the FS, there is no bloody way she passed that exam. She's proven time and time again with her writing that she's just too damn lazy to put up the effort.
It's called the "Foreign Service Officer Test." So, like always, no one knows what Megan's talking about, or what test she took--but agreed she didn't pass the test we're talking about.
And why can't a professional writer use spell check?
Informally, nobody I ever dealt with called it "The Foreign Service Officer Test," even though that's how it's formally described on paper. But you do have a good point. I've spoken to people in other countries where joining their version of the same diplomacy program was as easy as showing up and declaring your interest. So maybe she passed the foreign service exam in New Zealand or something.
cp,
fwiw, I took our version of the exam couple of years ago and it was pretty much as you described it - a whole lot of questions on 5th grade geography, some on history, a bunch of them on UN and a lot on the European Union and its institutions. Apparently I passed the first phase, but I was so discouraged by the test and all the other participants (mostly political science majors, ugh) that I didn't show up for the interview. A good decision, imho.
Now back to Megan. Let's say she really did pass the exam. What about language requirements? I don't seem to recall her ever mentioning speaking another language - and knowing Megan, if she did speak one or God forbid two, she would remind us of that fact in every other post.
C'est une certitude.
I knew I remembered her saying something about never reading Camus in English, presumably to insist she's only read him in French.
The guy she had that conversation with shows up in the comments.
Post a Comment