It's the economy

An interesting mix of articles I read recently.

First off is a New York Times article about farm living:

The Agriculture Department came out with its Census of Agriculture last week, and the headline was that the number of farms increased by 4 percent from 2002 to 2007, with most of the new farms being small, part-time operations.

A closer look at the numbers shows that American farming is becoming a story of extremes: of really big farms and really small ones. Consider that about 900,000 of the nation’s 2.2 million farms generated $2,500 or less in sales in 2007.

By contrast, 5 percent of total farms, about 125,000 operations, accounted for 75 percent of agricultural production.

It seems with the nation's farm policies that one is either small or big, big, big.I am in the small farm category. But that's ok. This national slowdown/recession isn't affecting me much. After all, if you don't have much to start with...


The next articles I read from Forbes and the New York Times are on how these tough economic times on Wall Street are hard on gold digging women.

Will The Recession End Gold Digging?

It looks like the economic downturn is producing a dating downturn too. At least this is true in financial centers like New York, where an unhealthily intimate bond between mating and money has persisted down the decades.

It’s the Economy, Girlfriend

Dawn Spinner Davis, 26, a beauty writer, said the downward-trending graphs began to make sense when the man she married on Nov. 1, a 28-year-old private wealth manager, stopped playing golf, once his passion. “One of his best friends told me that my job is now to keep him calm and keep him from dying at the age of 35,” Ms. Davis said. “It’s not what I signed up for.”

Once it was seen as a blessing in certain circles to have a wealthy, powerful partner who would leave you alone with the credit card while he was busy brokering deals. Now, many Wall Street wives, girlfriends and, increasingly, exes, are living the curse of cutbacks in nanny hours and reservations at Masa or Megu. And that credit card? Canceled.

Some women in the group said the men in their lives had gone from being aloof and unattainable to unattractively needy and clinging. Others complained of being ignored — one, who called herself A.P., wrote on the blog that three weeks had passed without her boyfriend “asking a single question” about her life. Another wrote, fearfully, that her beau had told her to make a list of their favorite New York restaurants before the bad market forced a move to the Midwest.

“Next time you are stressing over some finance guy, remember that he is just a math-club nerd,” one woman wrote after recounting a breakup. “This recession just bought everyone an extra two years of the single life.”