Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers. Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.
-------------------------------- It’s been pretty busy around here (what else is new?) this week, including a quick trip to one of those other states that included taking the marketing intern that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago to lunch. She’s pretty awesome...sharp as a tack, cute as a button, a little wide-eyed and excited to do anything we let her do. And, for my own entertainment, she was just as terrified as I was hoping she would be when she got the invite:-). Anyway, this is kind of a PG-13 column, I think. It seems sort of risque. We start with Daryl and a music question, which gets me thinking about engineering careers, obviously. Ron needs a financial advisor, and I don’t think he is looking in the right place. We have two anonymous questions...one from an actually anonymous person that sort of irritates me, and another from someone I know who just wants to remain anonymous. The first involves a discussion of making out with other girls, so you have that going for you (and the weird excitement that half of you just felt is kinda the whole point of the question.) Then Ron has another question that he asked when he had a different name, which is like a daily occurrence! This one is about strippers. And finally, TJWFW has a Disney Princess question, which is right in my wheelhouse! Submitted by: Daryl Is your favorite song by Boston “More than a Feeling” Alex? I have deep emotional attachments to two cities, both of which unfortunately have really terrible eponymous bands. I’ll maybe tackle Chicago some other day, but this answer is going to be long as it is. Boston is overly-produced shlock from that weird late 70’s time when all the good early Rock and Roll had been written, and a whole bunch of pop bands were trying to run the same ideas through a new amplifier in hopes of finding commercial success. I mean, the landscape was bad enough that KISS were huge stars. Really, there is a bunch of great stuff from 1972-1975, including canonical entries from The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, The Allman Brothers and some others. But then, until The Clash and Talking Heads showed up, there is like a barren desert of really blah music, with just a couple of little oases from those same people (and I like Springsteen more than most of you do, and Queen was only kind of awful.) It was this vapid landscape that allowed people like Boston and Billy Joel and Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles to seem like they were, you know, actually good. OK, that’s unfair...they are all good, they were just not THAT good. But...I have discovered a really interesting factoid that leads to an interesting question. Tom Scholz founded Boston while he was a student at MIT, from where he graduated with bachelors and masters degrees. I am having trouble finding data on lifetime earnings of students from different graduate schools, but I think we can all agree on one basic assumption: people with graduate degrees from MIT are highly employable. It has a legitimate claim to being the single “best” (if such a thing can really be designated) institution of higher learning in the entire world, and its graduates are paid as such {Side note...you wanna troll a Harvard graduate? Tell him “Harvard, that’s really awesome. I mean, that’s like the second-best school in Cambridge!”} In 2016, the median starting salary of MIT graduate students, as reported by the career office, was $130,000. That doesn’t include any non-salary compensation (like, for example, stock options at tech companies). It also likely under-measures real compensation, since any entrepreneurs who create their own jobs start with no salary, bringing the median down. Further, we can probably assume that their salaries and other compensation rise faster than most workers after they have left school. These are not normal people...they are both smarter and work harder than the average worker, and they are endowed with the skills, connections and reputations to maximize the value of their own innovation. They have better access to startup capital to grow their innovations as businesses than would an equally talented engineer from a much lesser school. My non-controversial thesis, therefore, is that the average MIT Masters degree holder can expect to make a lot of money throughout his or her lifetime. They are very solidly 1%ers. And beyond that, there is a not-insignificant subset that makes extraordinarily large sums of money as founders or early employees of (mostly technology) companies that they drive to great successes. All of which gets me to my question. We think of rock stars as being rich, and Tom Scholz founded a band that sold 75 million records and toured the world for 40 years. But, is it possible that he made less money than he would have made by simply pursuing the normal career of an MIT Graduate degree holder? The answer is that he probably didn’t...I am pretty confident that his earnings are above the median...but, the very fact that there is a "probably" in there speaks to exactly what a special place MIT is. Put another way, what portion of his fellow graduates in the early 1970’s earned more money than he did over the course of their working careers? I don’t know exactly what that number is, but it is not a trivial portion. And I am not suggesting that Scholz would rather have spent his life working as an engineer at Polaroid (where he did work) and any subsequent tech companies...just pointing out that, well, people with graduate degrees from MIT are really, really smart. It is entirely possible that Scholz shows up at reunions and find a portion of his classmates thinking “Wow, Tom really could been something if he just put his mind to it.” Submitted by: Chick-fil-A compels you! Should I use David Hogg as my financial advisor? First of all, it is likely illegal for David Hogg to offer any kind of financial advice in exchange for compensation, as I highly doubt that he is licensed by any reputable licensing board to render those services for money. He’d have to have passed his relevant FINRA examinations, or one of the related professional exams that exempt one from such tests. Seeing as he is having trouble getting into community college, passing the CFA seems unlikely. So, just on a legal basis, I’d say no. Never mind that 18 year olds should never be trusted with advice on anything other than possibly music and fashion (and, you know, he is a sharp enough dresser for a South Florida slacker), he’s not even a particularly bright 18 year old. He’s clearly not much of a student, and his common sense genes seem to be kind of lacking, too. Although, given Hogg’s ability to generate coverage of things that David Hogg says, and the alarming degree to which adults are willing to listen to the ideas for which he received a C+ on an essay in his remedial English class, it is likely worth paying attention to comments he makes about publicly traded companies. It is at least 50/50 whether his comments hurt those companies or correlate with a run-up in that company’s stock price...but there could well be a pattern! No, you should rely on a seasoned professional, preferably one who comes to you recommended by a trustworthy source who is already a client. That person should offer a straightforward fee arrangement, and should communicate clearly and take the time to understand your goals and life situation. It is also not a bad idea to double check any advice he or she gives you with a good public source (CNN Money Essentials if a great one) and ask questions about anything that seems weird. 99.5% of Americans do not have super complicated financial concerns that need elaborate or esoteric solutions, but it’s also not so easy that many people can’t benefit from a professional. Or, you know, you could #AskAlex! Submitted by: Anonymous Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” is 10 years old today, which I am sure you celebrated with plenty of cake. But have you ever kissed a girl? And did you like it? I was surprised to see that this song was only 10 years old. It seems a lot older than that, although I am not sure why...usually the opposite happens with songs, they are all suddenly really old even though they seem like they were out like three years previous. I think it is maybe because it was pre-kids, and everything pre-kids seems like it was a really long time ago. I mean, not to make myself feel really old, but I guess it sort of was… I am also going to take just a moment to recognize Katy Perry’s one truly monumental contribution to American culture: Waking Up in Vegas, the infectious, hilarious anthem of every single person who has ever gone on anything of a bender in Las Vegas. If that song doesn’t make you nostalgic for absolute train wrecks of incredibly expensive, vodka-soaked weekends full of all kinds of terrible, terrible decisions and way more naked people than you care to admit to, then, well maybe you have never had one of those weekends. Anyway, this seems like kind of a personal question, no? I mean...if you are going to ask questions like this, you could at least be willing to put your own name to it. It comes across with a little bit of a peep show creepiness this way...like you want me to dance for you and tell you dirty stories but you are ashamed to let me see who you are. Speaking of...what’s the male fascination with girls making out with each other? You guys all turn into sixth graders who just discovered their boners at the thought of two pretty girls kissing. I had a good male friend once postulate that, on the standard 10-point scale, any girl who is above a 5 gains a point and a half if she fools around with other girls. I’ve suggested that to a large number of other guys who all basically agree with the premise, even if they would offer minor alterations to the formula. Any girl who has been in college in the last 20 years can tell you how easy it is to get some evolutionarily challenged idiot frat boy to buy drinks for you if you kiss your friends in a bar, and some strippers will tell you that focusing on the women in the audience when they dance is both less gross AND often leads to better tips than focusing on the guys handing out that money. There are huge volumes of lesbian porn, almost all of which is intended to appeal to men (and almost all of which is wholly removed from the realities of lesbian sex...really, ask one some time). There is at least one major star (Jenna Jameson) who ONLY does lesbian porn. There is virtually no male-male porn that is aimed at women. To be fair, there is not much porn aimed at women at all, largely because women are emotionally and morally superior beings who have evolved past the basal urges to watch terrible, awkward sex between gross, broken people. It’s, well, I dunno, it’s a little weird. Clearly there is no evolutionary purpose to this in the same way that most sexual desires are driven. And there is no gender-swapped parallel...we may find gay guys to be good dressers and fun, non-threatening friends, but women don’t fantasize about guys having gay sex. While a lot of gay guys are hot, it is because they generally keep themselves in better shape and spend more time trying to look good that straight guys do...which is sort of the opposite of many lesbians. {Yes, the previous sentence contains gross generalizations with tons and tons of exceptions. I know. You don’t need to tell me about your ugly gay friend Paco or your hot lesbian friend Judith.} Which is a long-winded way of saying that I am not answering that question in this forum. Not that I am above talking about sex, or my own sex life. Or even that I wouldn’t answer it in private, or maybe even here if someone was willing to put their name behind the question. Heck, a bunch of you probably already know the answer because the subject has come up at some point or another offline. But, I dunno, as an anonymous question, it comes across as kinda skeevy. Unrelated but fun...one time, within the same month, two gay friends asked if I would be their surrogate and two lesbian friends asked my husband if he would be their donor. Pretty interesting month in the Baldwin household...lol. And did you ever see the Modern Family episode when Claire and Mitch get hammered and decide that she would donate an egg for Mitch and Cam to have a baby? Well, a fertility doctor once told my sister-in-law (my husband’s twin) and her wife that she had another patient whose twin brother was their donor in the same situation. And no, we did not get drunk enough to make that seem like a good idea... My guy and I will have been dating almost a year by the time we are ready to move in. and by that point we will have only physically seen each other for 4 days. even though this may not be right for other people - we aren't completely insane doing it this way? Well, it’s not not insane... I’m kidding! It’s somewhat out of the norm, and it brings certain risks to the table, but I don’t think it is a really big deal. I always think of relationship commitments under the heading of “how hard would this be to undo if we broke up?” And frankly, if the worst happens and living together makes you realize that you don’t like each other that much, then one of you moves out and you move on and it’s not a big deal. Sure, maybe you have a lease that is bigger than either of your wants to keep by yourself, and you either need to break it or one of you needs to get a roommate, and neither of those is ideal (by the way, don’t be the only signatory on the lease) but they are also not the end of the world. This fits in with Alex’s unified theory of relationship steps. Understanding that people go at whatever pace they want, and that most of our cultural history puts these things in a different order, I firmly believe that you should proceed through your major relationship stages according to that same principle: in reverse order of the difficulty of undoing them. Which is why you should live together before you get married. What happens if you get married and THEN realize you can’t live together? You either have to be miserable, or you have to go through the legal process of getting divorced...it would save a lot of time and money to live in sin for a bit and learn that ahead of time. It is also why you shouldn’t buy a house together before you are married. Once you have committed to joint ownership of an asset like that, and likely signed a joint mortgage, you sort of have to go through the divorce process anyway: you need to reach a settlement to dispose of and re-register both the asset and the liability. You may as well have the framework of a legal marriage through which to do that. It is also why kids should always come last: once you have kids, you can't be done with each other, you are attached for life. In fact, should you find yourself pregnant (or with a pregnant girlfriend) you oughta think about getting married before the baby comes regardless of your intentions otherwise. There are legal benefits associated with marriage that may come in handy in certain emergency situations, and for the partner (usually the woman) who shoulders most of the child raising responsibilities, there are asset and income protections that come out of a divorce that do not come out of breaking up with your boyfriend. Like, if you quit your promising career to raise children for six years, a divorce is much more likely to recognize the earnings potential that you gave away than simply breaking up would. So, coming from someone who doesn’t think that moving in together is actually a huge deal, I don’t find the lack of actually spending that much time together to be that crazy. I also don’t think you would get much out of living separately while you dated in a more traditional sense. When one of you relocates to be near the other, he or she isn’t going to have any other friends or social life, which means you will find yourself more or less living together from day one. But...a little practical advice here. If you have been together for a year and only physically seen each other for four days, there is going to be a lot of built up tension. You are also going to have doors that lock, windows that close, lots of free time and all of the fun that comes from the novelty of a new physical relationship. You’re gonna be naked. A lot. Together. And if you’re not careful, you’re gonna end up pregnant...so pretty please, with sugar on top, get yourself on the pill long before he moves in. It’s in everyone’s best interest! Submitted by: The Handmaid’s Tail Dear Alex: With all of your talk recently about Stormy Daniels stripping and Cardi B, I'm thinking about stripping for some extra cash. What hard-earned advice can you provide from your extensive sex trade experience? Well, I don’t actually have any hard-earned advice because I don’t have any first hand experience as a worker in any kind of sex trade. My adorableness is free, it’s my brain that you need to pay for;-). But, I have some close friends who danced a little bit, some less close friends who danced a lot, and I even know at least two girls who have worked as escorts...so, I think I can give you some stripping lessons. First of all, be a chick, cuz I don’t think men make the same kind of money stripping that women do. Unless you count Channing Tatum, I guess, but that was sort of indirect. Second, try and stay sober. It’s a job, and while it might not be like any other job, it would behoove more girls (I say girls because most are women, but there are certainly men, too) to treat it that way. There is a lot of pressure coming from a lot of directions on dancers to be impaired while working, but I think you’re better off avoiding it. Customers want to buy them drinks, their bosses want them to consume because they think it makes for better dancers (it makes them do stupider things, which are often things that make skeevy strip club patrons come back and pay more money for), and honestly, a lot of girls just want to be a little bit out of it to calm their nerves. I don’t care who you are, how hot you are, or how confident you are...standing on a stage, under bright lights and taking your clothes off to be inspected at very, very close range by people who are paying money for the privilege is going to make you nervous. I get a little nervous appearing before a room full of people with my clothes on, I can’t imagine doing it naked. So, the idea of having a couple drinks, or blowing a quick line beforehand to build your confidence makes a lot of sense. But, it leads to bad decisions, it leads to wasting large amounts of the money that should be the real purpose of doing the job in the first place, and it reinforces the basic premise that you are somehow dirty and wrong and should be ashamed of what you are doing. Along the same lines: go home when you are done. Don’t go out with your new work friends after work to unwind. Almost all dancers dance because it is lucrative and it is a good way to make a lot of (possibly tax-free) money in a relatively short amount of time. You will never, ever regret putting that money towards something useful, be it a house, an education, another business or whatever. I have never met an old woman who thought “Gee, I sure wish I got to strip for a living longer than I did!” but you will find plenty of ex-strippers who would like to be able to go back and do it with a better understanding of personal financial responsibility. And don’t put up with any shit from anyone. Drunken strip club patrons are going to try and get away with stuff, and they very often come from a place of thinking that you are beneath them or somehow obligated to give them something more than they paid for. You may even get pressure from the owners or managers to put up with that, or even advice from the other dancers that you are better off letting him push the boundaries of your professional interaction (which likely vary by municipality and establishment). Don’t. And don’t ever think that you are not better than that. The customers are there to pay for a service, and as long as they are respectful and pleasant, you should deliver the service as well as you possibly can. But you are the in-demand party in this engagement, not him. It is why you are the one being paid. If it is not a customer you feel good about, then move on to another one...there are more desperate horny guys than there are women willing to dance naked for them. Some people will try and tell you that the way to earn repeat customers and bigger tips is by letting the customers wander into the gray area of appropriateness. They’re wrong (or they are right, but it is the wrong kind of customer). They will keep coming back if you make them feel like you are engaged and friendly and that you want to listen to whatever shit they want to tell you that your don’t actually want to listen to. The tips go to the girls that make the guys feel valued, not the ones who let them get handsy. Too many of them will think that they are entitled, and will look down upon you and your profession enough to think that this sort of behavior is warranted...you should never lose sight of the fact that he is the loser who spent $20 to get into a club that allows him to drink $11 Bud Lights just for the privilege of looking at you naked. You’re being paid to be there...what is his excuse? This, to get off on a tangent, is a part of what bothers me about the Stormy Daniels story. Everyone, friend and foe alike, can’t help but refer to her as a porn star (unless it is “stripper and porn star”) and is clearly using the term as a pejorative. Yea, she has sex on camera for money, or she dances naked for money. If you think that is somehow a judgement on her character that reflects more negatively than, say, the people who pay for the videos or pay to watch her strip...well, you have some priority problems. There are all kinds of jobs that young men do for which they are paid handsomely solely because the work is gross or dangerous of miserable or otherwise undesirable. Commercial fishing, logging, mining...every one of them will pay a high school graduate with no specific skills a very healthy wage in exchange for beating the ever-living shit out of him for a while. Stripping is less physically dangerous, but the economics are the same: you are getting paid because you are willing to do a job that provides real value but which a relatively small number of people are willing to do. Submitted by: TJWFW It's a little early for #AskAlex and the doctor is not usually in until Friday, but I'm asking both @VerumVulnero1 and @JesseKellyDC anyway. Sexiest Disney princess? Disney Princesses have evolved quite a bit, pretty much in line with our views of the role of women in society. I mean, other than still considering “princess” to be, like, an occupation. The three original Disney Princesses were Snow White, Cinderella and Aurora, all of whom were similar in that they basically sat around looking pretty while other people did stuff. Usually that meant princes, who were always the real heroes of the stories, or possibly Dwarfs. Speaking of, here are the Dwarfs, ranked:
In addition to doing nothing, these princesses were all pretty modest. We know that Snow White is the fairest of them all, but she sure doesn’t like to show off her figure. Puffy sleeves, high collar, shapeless skirt...it’s not a flattering look. Same goes for Sleeping Beauty: she is a little bustier in her fitted dress, but she still has sleeves and a dress you could hide seven dwarfs under. Aurora also had a weirdly masculine jawline. Cinderella? She’s wearing a peasant girls dress for most of the movie, which puts her at a disadvantage...but once she dresses up, she is the best looking of the three Classical princesses. The problem with all three is that they have boring, kinda featureless faces. Snow White barely even has a nose! From there, we skip ahead a bunch of years to the next generation of Princesses, starting with Ariel, a giant-eyed ginger sexpot who is like one step up from Japanese fetish porn. She’s half naked, but that just comes across as trying too hard. Also, I have a hard time ranking the attractiveness of other species. From there we move to Belle, who has a lot of the demureness and over-dressedness (gloves?!) of the Classic Princesses, but has started to develop facial features and a hair color that isn’t one of the cartoony primary colors of her predecessors. Next comes Jasmine, who has...ankles, which is a big step forward. She is also the first princess willing to use her sexuality to her advantage, which sends some obviously mixed messages. But, we have lost the interesting characteristics of Belle and are back to the noseless, large-eyed cartoon look. Pocahontas is kind of a hot little number in her own way. She’s got a skirt that sits halfway up her thigh and a strapless top. And she’s got great legs. I’m a little weirded out by the sharp angles of her chin and the continuing lack of a nose, though...that is going to be a problem. Mulan is like a slightly evolved Mr. Magoo, complete with the slanted eyes that tell us “Hey, this is a Chinaperson!” Weird eyebrows, and they didn’t do her any favors, wardrobe-wise, either. She should have been given at least one scene in that dress that the girl in Utah appropriated from her. There is nothing of note in the modern princesses. Tiana is basically post-slipper Cinderella with dark skin. Rapunzel and Merida both have super distracting hair issues that I can’t get past, although they are likely pretty cute in their own quirky ways if they got that taken care of. So, if I am dealing only with movie princesses, I would say that Belle is the hottest, followed by Cinderella and Tiana. However...if I am allowed to skip past the movies and use Disney Channel characters, then I am going to note that Elena of Avalor is way hotter than a 16 year old princess on a kids show should be. She’s not all that different from the earlier Disney Princesses, but she is a whole lot more active and her princesship seems to include some real administrative responsibilities, so she wears her hotness better. Chicks with swords, man... ----------------- Alex’s random old song of the week Since I kinda trashed music from the late 70’s up above, I thought “Maybe I will pull a song from 40 years ago that isn’t terrible”. The problem is that the top 40 from this week in 1978 is hilariously bad...Night Fever, If I Can’t Have You, Can’t Smile Without You...it’s like we gave @annealexander the keys to the national iPod for a week. But, at #15 that week, a song that I can get behind. It’s the very best of disco (unless we count the stuff the Rolling Stones made on Some Girls): Burn, Baby Burn...it’s The Trammps, and Disco Inferno.
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