…you can’t afford it. Likewise, if you’re wondering if you’re in the 1%, you’re probably not. I’ve been wondering who the 1% are.
Thank you Suzy Khimm of the Washington Post for publishing a definition:
“Taken literally, the top 1 percent of American households had a minimum income of $516,633 in 2010 — a figure that includes wages, government transfers and money from capital gains, dividends and other investment income.”
Put another way, top 1% is all incomes >$516,632, and the average household annual income in the top 1% is actually $1.5 million. For the bottom 80%, the current household worth (that’s EVERYTHING kids, not annual income) is about $62,000. That’s a pretty impressive, gilded age style gap.
But let’s take one of those $62K all-in house holds. Let’s assign them $58K annual income – meaning they are doing better than most of that 80% group. Let’s say they have a small house with a prime mortgage they can afford, one child, and health insurance through Dad’s job at Rubik’s Cube factory. Then lets say the primary breadwinner (Dad) comes down with leukemia. He has what he needs – a job, and health coverage, so while he’s not wealthy he should be fine, right?
Maybe.
IF he has money set aside for his deductibles -
IF he doesn’t need any new/unapproved (and yes, insurers often don’t cover even mainstream treatments) treatment -
IF his employer is large enough (50+ employees) to offer short term disability (don’t bet on it, only fruits and nerds still like Rubik’s Cubes) -
Then, assuming he’s curable, he might be ok. But given his income bracket, it’s not terribly likely that all three of those things are true. And if even just one isn’t true – he’s fucked. He’s going to spend every dime the family has trying to be treated and will develop tens of thousands of dollars of debt (sorry about college kiddo) – debt that he may face unemployed you realize-, or he’s going to man up like this guy and die – arguably leaving his family in even worse straights.
What do you think it was, fundamentally, that this guy did wrong?
Didn’t save enough? Didn’t work hard enough in school and afterwards to earn a better wage? Had a family he couldn’t afford? Are you sure he did those things wrong? If he did, is it possible his thinking was something like this:
“I work hard. I know I will always work hard. Even if I have to work three jobs to support my family I’m going to do it. We’re going to save so Greta can go to a great college and then one day be Attorney General in either an Eastern-seaboard state, or a thought-provoking police procedural on HBO.”
This silly vignette is meant as a non-targeted response to a lot of opinion that I’ve absorbed from conversations and internet reading about Occupy Wall Street and the 99%. What I’ve encountered lately boils down to: those lazy complainers just don’t want to WORK.
I am here to tell you, we’ve been telling unemployed people in depressed economies that the problem is their laziness for quite some time now – this is not a new phenomena. And strangely, making it their fault doesn’t magic up jobs. (I’ll try to put together a longer, cited post about perceived laziness of indigents in the Great Depression. Or maybe I’ll just post The Grapes of Wrath.)
I think most of us think we work hard. I think some of us flatter ourselves, a bit. If I spend 12 hours a day at my fancy computer arbitraging clicks* (for example) I’m not sure that’s work in the same class as a nurse on an eighteen hour shift in urban emergency ward.
But at any rate, I think the idea that we will always be able to work hard is a myth. What happens if you can’t work? At 9%+ unemployment (13% if you’re luck enough to live in Michigan or California!) maybe there isn’t a job for you. Or, maybe you’re 68 years old and trying to convince some 34 year old kid hiring manager to take a chance on you.
And are you sure that couldn’t happen to you?
On the other hand, if you really ARE in the 1%, you’ve probably nothing to worry about.
*I am making fun of my job as an online marketer.
photo by shirtoid: http://shirtoid.com/16299/dont-panic-and-carry-a-towel/
Things that bother me about Irene:
1. Yeah, I heard that was a category 4 headed for Taiwan. i hope it misses them. I’m callous, I’m distracted by my concern for my more immediate neighbor…
2. NYC! Home of my heart! NYC makes civilization worthwhile as far as I’m concerned. Now this: http://yfrog.com/mfhkauj
3. #2 really bothers me because this whole thing felt like friggin’ french toast hysteria and even now, I’m not particularly interested in being worried. But I am a little worried about NYC and I resent that, Irene, I really do. NYC is (literally) built on a rock and you’re a passing, glorified low pressure system. F you.
4. Dear CNN, there are not 4 million people in NYC. There are 11. It goes to 11.
Irene’s eye arrives NYC 11 a.m. tomorrow, at which point we’ll have the leading edge up here in Boston. I expect it will be fine.
Good news!
First, we brewed a new bitter, the bitter I had always wanted. A simple, low-weight grain brew with light hops. No crystal, minimal hops. The recipe:
7 lbs Maris Otter malt
1.5 oz Fuggle hops for bittering
0.5 oz Fuggle hops
We did a single step infusion mash, and measured an O.G. 1.048 before we pitched the yeast. Conversion was super fast, occurring over 72 hours, probably because we used two packets of Safale Whitbread style yeast.
The result was great. It’s light, it’s clean, it’s malty and just a hint of sweet. The only question I have is whether there’s more residual sugar present than we think – though the beer is relatively low alcohol at 4.5% ABV, it packs the kind of punch that I associate with sweet drinks. I’m looking for a way to measure that.
And now…drumroll….we have a proper kegerator! Arrived last Tuesday. Jonah got it hooked and running that evening.
From Larry Summers, last week:
“…the President’s economic team advised that there was essentially no danger of excessive fiscal stimulus in 2009. I joked … that worrying about overdoing fiscal policy was like my losing too much weight and becoming anorexic — a conceivable possibility, but very far from the dominant risk.” Read more, though why would you.
From Larry Summers, 2009:
“The memo to Obama, however, detailed only two packages: a five-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar stimulus and an eight-hundred-and-ninety-billion-dollar stimulus. Summers did not include Romer’s $1.2-trillion projection. The memo argued that the stimulus should not be used to fill the entire output gap; rather, it was “an insurance package against catastrophic failure.” At the meeting, according to one participant, “there was no serious discussion to going above a trillion dollars.”
Also, from Boston to The President’s Council of Economic Advisers: If you *wanted* to send a little stimulus this way I’ve got a bankrupt MBTA and 50% increase in childhood malnutrition for ya. I think we could spend that money super fast. Jerks.
This is a sad story.
But first, the recipe for the Extra Special Bitter.
We’d had some great luck with the previous porter and pale ale, and wanted something even lighter for the hot month of July. So in mid June, we did a little reading, visited the Home Brew Emporium and put this recipe together for our own ESB:
7 lbs. British 2 Row malt
1 lb. Flaked barley
.5 lb. Briess Crystal 10
2 oz. Fuggles hops for bittering
2 oz. Kent Golding hops for finishing
Thames Valley yeast
The brew went smoothly; we were pleased with the sweetness and balance of the wort. Given the great extraction that we’d gotten on our previous two brews (both producing 7% – 8% alcohol beers) we were concerned that the beer would be too hot for a bitter, and too hot for us to enjoy as a session beer. We found ourselves with about five gallons of wort with an original gravity of 1.057. To reduce the potential alcohol, we added another gallon of water and brought the OG down to 1.048. All in all, a clean brew and we were pretty pleased.
She fermented for about two weeks, and then we kegged her:
We tasted the beer that night, a couple hours after kegging. The beer tasted great – good malt flavor, nice hops, and light alcohol (if not as light as I would have liked). The final gravity was 1.010 making for a 5% ABV beer.
Then: tragedy. Jonah went to the basement to pull some beer the following night. He found a puddle outside the keg fridge. We discovered that the keg fridge had frozen, blowing the seal between the keg and the tap – with the gas on. The gas had forced all the beer out of the keg, onto the cellar floor, where it had been absorbed into the poorly-sealed concrete.
We were pretty heart broken.
Thus, we sent a good chunk of change on a proper kergerator which is due to deliver early next week. We we’re brewing a replacement bitter. And we’re throwing out the old keg-fridge.
Brewing an American Porter.
A nice beer, though not the one we're brewing.
Grain Mix:
9 lbs us 2 row
1/2 lb chocolate malt
1/2 lb roasted barley
1/2 lb flaked oats
1/2 lb brown malt
Yeast: Wyeast 1-56
Hops: 2 Oz Fuggles 1 Oz Goldings (for bittering and flavoring)
Popped the yeast at about 10:30 this morning. Began heating the water for the mash at about 11:15.
Mash:
15.3 quarts of water raised to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, turned off heat and let cool briefly before adding grain. Cooled to about 154 degrees with the grain. As the temp dropped, we heated another 15 quarts of water for the sparge – up to over 190 degrees Fahrenheit. We dallied too long and the mash temp dropped below 150 – so we took some time to bring that back up to 154 for some more “sitting”. By 1:30, we were re-heating the mash to 168 degrees Farenheit to stall enzyme action and clarify the mash before the sparge.
Jonah and the mash.
Sparge
Jonah rinsed the brew-bucket and set it up with the drain tube. We ladled the mash tun into the bucket and let it settle – then began testing the drain. After draining a couple quarts, we could tell there was good clarity to the mash-liquid and we began the full-sparge back into the kettle.
The sparge set-up.
Emily scooping spent grain.
Dumping the grain
The wort is the liquid that is drained from the grain in the sparge; when the drain is complete we put the wort back on the stove and bring it up to a boil. After we put the boil on, and drained the last of the wort from the mash, we are left with a big bucket of grain. I transfered the spent grain to a garbage bag in scoops. It’s a little tedious, but we’ve had minor disasters trying to dump the spent grain into the garbage all at once .
Boil, Setting up the Carboy
As soon as the wort reaches a boil we added two hop bags: one with 1/2 ounce Fuggles hops + 1/2 ounce Goldings Hops, one with 1 ounce Fuggles hops. The boil goes for 60 minutes. During that time, Jonah sanitized the carboy.
****
Resuming this post three months later; the porter was fantastic. Jonah has since renamed it an oatmeal stout, and I think that’s correct. It is rich, just a touch sweet, and with a hint of nice roasted grain flavor from the roasted malt. OG was 1.080 and FG 1.020 which means 8% apparent ABV. Jonah and I doubt this, the beer did not taste that hot, nor did we think it was particularly drunk-making. Still, we repeated the OG and FG measurements and they came out the same each time so…
Inspired by The Missus’s weekly ‘Short List of Reasons to Live‘ post. My own take. ”Things That Will Make it a Little More Possible to be Pleased to be Getting up on Monday Morning”. Because g-d – I really do Hate Mondays.
1. Bi-monthly staff meeting! Not sure this is really a reason to get up in the morning, but I bet it could be interesting.
2. Dinner at Bondir, for Brad N.’s birthday
3. Steve Walther Orchestra concert at PA’s Lounge
4. *Possibly* getting Alliance Express to finally replace our dated, ugly, about to give way oil tank
5. State of the Union Address
All in all, that’s a pretty crappy list. This exercise may not be repeated.
