Most of America is packed into just 5 cities...

[pezar]

I read that a couple years ago. When kids graduate from college they go to one of just FIVE specialized cities, depending on which avenue they want to pursue. New York for finance, Washington DC for government, Los Angeles for entertainment, San Francisco for high tech, and I believe the fifth city was Houston, Texas for energy/oil.

These five cities have vast surpluses of college graduates, something like 50% of the people have advanced degrees. Once there, kids pack into apartments, living much like they did when they were college students, and working 100/hr weeks in order to "make it big". Very few do. In tech especially, there's a tendency to pay people in stock options rather than in actual money. During the tech boom, everybody was promised vast wealth from stocks. The vast wealth never really materialized. Everybody woke up one day to find that the boom was no more, along with their stock options, and they were really no better off for having "lived the dream".

During the Wall Street boom, kids got massive paychecks, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and blew it all on drugs and partying. The boom ended, and everybody headed to Buenos Aires, Argentina, of all places, to party on on the backs of the third world. "BsAs" is incredibly violent, and the kids were stripped clean of all their cash, then booted out, back to America poorer and still hooked on dope. Anybody else think this is the definition of insanity, that millions of bright young minds are blowing away their lives where their less gifted classmates rot back home, and everybody ends up no better off except for a handful of financiers who are pulling the strings?

So many kids have so little meaning in their lives, they take drugs to fill the emptiness, they take drugs until their brains blow out and they end up as crazy as Britney Spears (ever wonder what starting meth at 14 does to your brain? Look at her) but without the cash or caring family. Instead, they're Charlie Sheen, spiraling right into an early grave. CM was trying to send us a message, the message that it doesn't have to be this way. That's the message he was trying to tell Ron, hey living a boring life is a waste, get out and LIVE, and that's the message he would want to send to the doped out college students who party their lives away, and then pack three into a studio in SF's Tenderloin and all do dope and work too hard for too little pay, and then when everything cracks up they're all toast.

Hey guys, life doesn't have to be like this. I wonder how many university students read ITW with a book in one hand and a joint in the other, and then go to class and spew out the "correct" opinions that are predigested for them by their teachers, and get their massively inflated "A" and then forget all about it. Hey guys, think for yourselves while you still have brain cells left, and LISTEN to what CM is trying to tell you! Life doesn't have to be this way.

[SteveSalmon]

~SS