Wednesday, January 23, 2008

I'll be here all week

So, I'm gonna start with a disclaimer. I haven't written anything for the public eye since a piece about the birthmark in my eye was published in the 1998 edition of "Dead Center", my high school's literary magazine. I may suck. But, hey, the six of you are getting this for free. (Oh, opening with a blogs are free cliche, man, I suck).

Onward to the Meganity:

Radio Free Megan: Obamanomics: I could only listen to about 5 seconds of the first segment of this. When you open with "Actually, this is my second podcast" you get ignored. How in the hell does an English major fail to realize that when half the words in your sentence are useless, no one wants to "actually" hear you. Actually, Megan, even if I cared what you had to say, you're far too painful to listen to.

Heath Ledger is Dead:

In full:

I'm no cultural critic, and also, not sixteen, so I don't have much to say about this except the banal bewilderment at how much extra-tragic it seems when rich, beautiful, famous people die young. There were pills found near the body, and it happened in the middle of the day, which makes it sound like suicide. Even worse, he had a masseuse scheduled, which makes it sound like a too-successful suicide attempt. But presumably there will be an autopsy.
Paraphrase: Okie first, let me marginalize the career of a recently deceased man. K, now I'm gonna go ahead and make some trite and naive observations about a rich, famous person dying young. Next, it's on to some wild speculation. For my encore, I will state the obvious!

Hey McMegan, if you "don't have much to say about" something, then why in the hell are you torturing us with a blog post about it? Here's something else you can try instead of boring us to tears; it's called "STFU" and is sold all over the place.

Marriage Minded: Megan quotes Bryan Caplan, who says that married men aren't "shirking" cleaning duties because they simply don't desire as clean a house as their wives so naturally don't clean as often. Rather than attacking this for it's absurd stereotyping or lack of any real data, Megan goes into list mode (Cause who needs paragaphs) and says a bunch of stupid crap. WEEEEE!

1) Men who live alone clean less than men with male roommates. This is because your own mess is much less unbearable than mess generated by other people. I assume that Mr. Caplan covers negative externalities at some point in his classes.

They do Megan? I see you're using the Encyclopedia Out-of-Your-Assica again. I don't know if she knows any men that live with other men, but I saw a fair number of houses in college that were completely disgusting despite the fact that there were multiple males living in them. Hell, I've seen those in grad school too. Maybe when you're pushing 47, like Megan, men suddenly start acting differently.

2) Coasean reasoning only holds if you believe that marriage somehow eliminates all transaction costs.

I only look up one unexplained, obscure term per post, and I'm saving that for #3, so I'll just assume that what she says doesn't actually apply to Coasean reasoning much like the following:

3) Mr Caplan seems not to have heard of the tragedy of the commons.
Hey, guess what? Neither have I? You know why? It's because THE SHIT YOU LEARNED GETTING YOUR MBA ISN'T COMMON KNOWLEDGE. That is why you your parents paid someone to teach you that shit. I went and looked it up. Turns out the tragedy of the commons has to do with the allocation of limited resources and not who spends more time cleaning, men or women. Seems like Megan has heard of the tragedy, but doesn't actually know what it means.

4) In most relationships, even keeping a two-person apartment at the level of a bachelor pad seems to be done mostly by the woman, which would seem to indicate that the men are, well, shirking.
There's that voluminous resource that is Megan's ass again. I wish she'd linked to the modern anthropological study about the breakdown of labor commonly required in modern society in order to keep things at a "bachelor pad" level. I'm curious as to their methodology. Did they us the definition of "squeaky clean" as defined in Mr Clean's seminal work on the subject, or did they go with the more controversial paper published under the auspices of the Tide Research Institute?

5) The introduction of kids raises things to an entirely new level of mess, again, usually beaten back mostly by the woman.
Well, if we're gonna go ahead and stereotype our asses off all day, I'm going to have to slap you for giving another man lip and tell you to make me a sandwhich and then finish the damn laundry, Megan. And who said you could wear those shoes?

6) Does Mr Caplan think that "person with the lowest standards wins" should be a general rule for marriage? Can women unilaterally quit their jobs because they're content with a lower standard of living, or spend the retirement fund on shoes because they don't mind spending their golden years in penury?
Tell me Megan; does being this obtuse require special effort on your part or do you actually have this much difficulty fully comprehending your opponents ideas? Bryan is clearly saying that men aren't shirking (which means not doing their fare share) because they believe that the "share" is much smaller and hence so is their portion of it. He isn't making any judgment about what's the proper level of clean to keep a dwelling, you twit. He's simply saying that if two people live together, the one that has a desire for a cleaner house is naturally going to do more cleaning.

Now, seriously, STFU and go make me a sandwhich.

6 comments:

spencer said...

Now see, unlike McMegan, I actually have a degree in economics. Also unlike McMegan, I'm perfectly willing to explain the jargon she likes to toss around, so here goes. The Tragedy of the Commons is an idea that has to do with resources from which other people cannot be excluded - my favorite example is a commercial fishery. Anyone with a boat can go to a commercial fishing ground and pull up a net full of flounder. But since no single person or entity actually *owns* the fishing grounds (they are commonly-held, hence "tragedy of the commons"), nobody has any incentive to invest in their maintenance. In the case of commercial fisheries, what this means is that overfishing is inevitable - because anyone can fish there without paying for the upkeep of the resource - and the fishery becomes barren and useless.

Usually, invoking the Tragedy of the Commons immediately precedes an argument for privatizing a public resource. Especially when people like McMegan do it.

The Coase Theorem has to do with externalities (these are basically impacts of an economic transaction that are felt by people who are not part of the transaction; they can be negative or positive) and transaction costs. Basically, the idea is that when there are negative externalities from some economic transaction, all the people affected by it will be able to come together and arrive at an efficient solution (as long as getting together and bargaining doesn't carry any costs of its own).

Of course, for this to work, there are two necessary factors: first, there should be no transaction costs or any other obstacles to collective bargaining; and second, everyone's property rights must be clearly defined. Since these conditions are often not met, Coase's theorem is often consigned to the realm of theory.

It's this second condition that makes McMegan's invocation of Coase an irrelevant bit of puffery, since property rights in apartments with multiple male roommates are frequently poorly - or at least incompletely - defined. So yeah, she's just trying to play economist and make herself look all smart and shit.

Anyway, hope that helped, since Megan seems to have a vested interest in nobody knowing exactly what she's trying to say . . .

spencer said...

Also, I'd like to note that I'm working strictly from this condensed version of Megan's post. I can't really tolerate more than a few seconds of direct exposure to her posts, so I am forced to rely on the efforts of hardier sorts, like those who run this blog.

So if there are errors in my analysis, they can probably be attributed to the fact that I didn't actually read the original post. Make of that whatever you wish.

NutellaonToast said...

yeah, sounds about right. God, what an idiot

Anonymous said...

She really is terrible. She practically dismisses the tragic death of a young man because "she's not 16" and then later admits she doesn't know jack shit about his career and work. Let me clarify for you Megan: he was an enormously talented and promising actor who received wide critical acclaim for his performances that deliberately shunned teeny-bopper roles starting very early in his career in order to take on more challenging work. I'm sure there were plenty of adolescent girls who found him attractive, but he wasn't exactly David Fucking Cassidy. If you're going to bother to mention someone's death, you might want to do it with a little bit of class. Like Nutella said, the next time you feel like writing about something you don't know anything about, try a dose of STFU.

M. Bouffant said...

Well done Nutella, except for a spelling error. (Fair, not "fare.")Certainly as good as anything I'd crank out. (Except for the...) I'll be back eventually; thanks for taking up some slack for brad. And don't think you'll have to leave when I return full-time.

Thanks to blogger emeritus Spencer as well!!

NutellaonToast said...

I think doing the dishes is payment for sex and hence men's "fare" for riding the love machine. I stand by my post!