Subject:
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Re: How many things need to stack up before we throw this jerk out?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 17 Jul 2003 03:32:08 GMT
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Viewed:
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562 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Larry Pieniazek wrote:
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How badly do you want out of your situation? McDonalds is hiring. Seriously.
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No, they’re not. In most cases menial work like that is available part-time
only so that the employer can avoid granting an employee much by way of the
benefits that usually go to full-time workers only. Plus, how do you
realistically explain to a future employer that you couldn’t get work in your
“actual” field when things pick up again? O yeah, you are that worker that isn’t
actually worth anything in your chosen field. I seriously know very few people
that consider themselves programmers just because they know HTML or something
like that. Lot’s of experienced people out of work and SOL in the Bay Area.
And they paid for their educations too -- in many cases out of work and in debt,
extravagantly. These would be experts in database administration, programmers,
GUI developers, etc, etc, etc.
And for numerous places like Winco foods, Walmart, and even Starbucks (to
discuss more common labor a little further), there’s all kinds of weird,
underhanded stuff they do besides just avoid giving you benefits. Easy enough to
google this stuff, and I’ll admit no first-hand knowledge here.
And I think you are missing the bigger picture here anyhow. Dave!’s example was
not as bad as it actually is in real life. A lot of the scenarios bandied
around are falsely hopeful in that they often fail to include real life issues
and the myriad of hidden expenses of routine american life that will crop up. A
single old car can be enough to destroy the picture of someone who is barely
making it to one of someone that is perpetually in debt. It is all too easy for
this to happen to people.
Again, continuing from elsewhere in this thread, it’s the tragedy of the gap
between being a have and a have-not -- I insist that people nowadays, unlike a
few generations earlier, cannot easily make anything of their financial
circumstances as menial laborers.
I know people that are quite wealthy now where the origins of their income are
the father acting as breadwinner working as a full-time employee as a
maintenance worker for a department store. No doubt they lived frugally, but
somehow they could afford college for their children, to buy several homes, etc.
Circumstances are different now -- you just cannot get the same fidelity either
from emploer or employee, and you cannot stretch a laborers pay into a new home
in the Bay Area any longer. The window of opportunity for that version of the
american dream is now closed. One of the last times I went to Kmart and Home
Depot they were intiating programs for cashier-less payment -- you run your own
stuff through the scanner, you bag your own goods, and then pay the machine with
either cash or plastic. They check your receipt on the way out.
This is what our technology has got us -- a world in which your services are no
longer required. This isn’t a bad sci-fi novel or TV show, we are going to start
having riots begun by those that cannot feed or shelter themselves -- it’s
coming!
BTW, I have the same immigrant story I can tell, Lar -- my father washed dishes
in New York city when he didn’t speak any English.
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Things are tougher now than they were then. But a lot of that is due
precisely to large government (and the oligopoly/welfarequeenism it seems
to foster), the very thing we’re debating, ne?
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I think I have to disagree. The real reason is basically theft. God knows we
don’t really have anything benefitting the population at large -- I mean,
where’s that national healthcare program that might justify our paying taxes
like a socialist country? Nowhere, right? So where does it all go, where’s our
money? They take it from you and give to McDonald’s for foreign advertising, or
in a non-bid deal with Halliburton. Stuff like that, hundreds of such examples
await our investigation.
In my view, it is precisely the side that argues for less taxes that is placing
our future further and further into debt. You know, when that check for the war
gets laid down on the table you will not hear me competing with anyone else to
pay the bill. You will still be calculating the tip when you realize that
Hop-Frog has left the building and left you paying for the evenings festivities.
Dine and ditch. Die in debt. Let the state bury me.
The question is: am I joking, or is that the actual sum financial planning of
many americans? Are they deadbeats by nature, or creatures of circumstance? And
anyway, we have to bless them as they pass -- they consume just as they were
told to do.
-- Hop-Frog
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