‘nuff said

So everyone is ok if they can use their credit card for a treat after a long week of work? (or looking for work?)

Applebees is a rip off.  I took the boys to 99 for lunch yesterday and it was much cheaper, even if this Boston area place seems to have been invaded by White Spot in an international decorating incident.  I suspect that if Applebees is hopping, then people are just not hiring babysitters and going to nicer places, and going there instead.

Instastupid is ignoring the slowdown nationally with chains like Applebees, which have been shuttering redundant locations right and left.  Notice how McDonalds is improving its offerings and diningroom decor?  Other burger places, too?  That’s because people are shifting down.

Classic Will Rodgers bit:

Rodgers, parodying President Herbert Hoover:
“This country, as a whole, is prosperous.
I did not say the whole country is prosperous. But, as a whole, this country is still prosperous.”

(in own voice):
Now, everybody knows a hole is not supposed to be prosperous…

I’m sure Hermès is just as busy as normal too, as well as Chanel, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Christian Dior.

I can’t speak for any of those companies (obviously), but smaller businesses that provide ‘icing on the cake’ goods and services are already feeling the heat here in New York.  A coworker of mine was thinking about buying a particularly fancy new bike, spent a few weeks test-riding different brands, put in an order with wherever it is people buy mega-spendy bicycles in Manhattan, the whole nine.  Then she looked at a calendar and a weather report and realized that September/October is a really stupid time of year to buy a bike in the northeastern US (We’re having our third straight day of rain right now, and in another 6 weeks it’ll be time for winter coats).  When she called the bike shop to cancel the order, he was worried that she worked for Lehman Brothers.  He’d had 10 orders cancelled that week by folks who work in the financial services sector.

Eleven special orders of $1000+ bikes is a big chunk of change for a small specialty business.

People here in New York are definitely cutting back already, and I have to say I’m concerned about all the businesses that get their bread and butter selling luxury items to wealthy finance types.  Holiday retail here in New York does not look good this year.

I think Instapundit is confusing the term “neurological” with the term “psychosomatic”.  Neurological problems tend to be more confusing, more expensive, and harder to recover from than issues with muscle and sinew.  Ironically enough, psychosomatic symptoms are no less real than symptoms caused by an acknowledged medical condition.  The person suffering from them is just as sick.

Just wanted to point out the obvious errors in that analogy.

Recession, depression, crisis, crash, panic…whatever. The capitalist system enters one of these downturns every damn decade like clockwork ever since it formed in the early 19th century (and before it developed its current industrial form, there were more erratically timed “bubbles” and so on going back into the 17th century). Their severity, the time it takes to recover, and degree to which it does recover, not to mention who benefits the most during the upswings, all vary on a longer and more erratic generational cycle. But this is the heartbeat of anarchic capitalism, which after all the vaunted ballyhooing of the wonderfulness of prices as “signals” and so forth trotted out by eclectic apologist mainstream economists over the centuries, still has no way of feeling out long-term structural rationality but periodic failures that winnow out the bad—and much of the good with it.

The terminology is part of an ideological game of shifting goalposts as each generation of nominally responsible leadership scrambles in panic to avoid being tarred with the brush of the previous collapse. Nossir, this ain’t no depression, it’s an, um, uh…a recession, that’s it! Oops, they said that last time, oh well, it’s ummm…round and round it goes as inevitably as the collapse itself. The point is not to face the reality that these collapses are inevitable and predictable, no matter what sort of regulation there is short of pretty much eliminating market anarchy itself, which can’t be done without a huge social revolution replacing the egotism of private property in the means of production with some form of rational planning. Which we have learned is hardly guaranteed to result in a good economy—what remains uncertain and therefore hopeful is whether planning can indeed be done in the interests of the common people. But what is certain is that without it, the crashes under whatever name will continue.

If we accept that private property in the means of production is inevitable, we ought to be designing the system so that the majority on the bottom, who enjoy the least benefit of the upswings, suffer the least instead of the most in the downswings. But that is part of the “cleansing” mechanism of the crash, keeping us proles from getting too uppity and thus guaranteeing profits to the owners, so even that sort of amelioration is rightly seen as dangerous and subversive by the owners.

And I believe that any set of regulation and oversight that effectively protected us ordinary working folk wound amount to an effective framework for rational planning that would render the capitalist class superfluous in good times as well as bad; it would be a gentle rather than sudden transition to democratic socialism, under whatever name.

That’s why it is unthinkable in conventional wisdom to go there, that’s why so many repressive measures are orchestrated against such thoughts, and that’s why there is all this ideological fan dance of names and labels—to keep ordinary people, and our ruling class individuals, no matter how well-intentioned, from thinking clearly about what sort of system we persist in navigating blind.

All very good comments. However…

As evil as the system is, or is perceived to be, the unfortunate reality is that the time of SHTF is possibly here. Or as the various collapse conspiracy sites abbreviate TEOTWAWKI.

It will interesting to see how the Left or Right Blogosphere responds to scenes of $50/lb for a bag of rice,
assuming that the electricity is still on for the Internet to function.

I can only assume the Survivalists are at a near state of joy, seeing their long feared (or hoped for) scenario come to reality.

Well, you see, people are going to chain restuarants on Saturday nights.  And some dude with a hauling business somewhere is doing well.

Dumb. Instapundit is, among others, ironclad proof that eliminating the study of logic from our school curricula was a bad idea.

If the crisis continues, the holiday / Christmas season is going to be unbearable, as retailers try to coerce stressed-out middle-class people to shop with money they don’t have. “You WILL buy this hideous, overpriced Christmas sweater and a tower of heart-attack-inducing sugary treats in OCTOBER!”

Sorry about the caps, but that’s what they’ll do.

I also foresee an increase in spam.

The problem we’ve got is more neurological.

I do think it is important to note Reynolds’ attitude. He apparently believes people who are worried about the economy are idiots.

The problem we’ve got is more neurological.

For that matter—when ever has there been an economic crisis in capitalism that has not been “neurological”? When has there ever been not enough people willing to work, or a lack of foodstuffs (in the world, that is—what would a “distribution crisis” be but “neurological”, or no steel, or something like that? The very defining characteristic of capitalist crises is that people starve because they are thrown out of work and can’t get jobs—while the very same factories and fields they used to work in stand idle, and the notion that there just isn’t any demand is laughable on the face of it with all this destitution. There is a lack of effective demand, meaning that the hungry just don’t have any money, and the people who do have money are terrified to invest any of it lest it fail to return to them without a reliable profit attached.

The fish rots from the top down—that’s where what passes for a brain is.

Neurological indeed.

I understand that repo men are doing really well too.

Sure the problem is neurological - it is called DENIAL.

Well who cares if you have a neurological problem - your brain isn’t REAL.

Insty’s waiting for the posthumanist day all neurological problems will be banished, and also hot fembot sex.