People in Vancouver are starting to understand that. I've just hired 6 new developers from Vancouver to Kelowna because they couldn't even begin to think about owning a house in Vancouver. I know a friend who is a surgeon, who has an executive for a wife, and their combined income is not enough to get them a mortgage in Vancouver. What. The. Fuck. Vancouver is quickly becoming a ghost town of empty homes bought by foreign investors, and the once rich tech sector is drying up due to the fact that employees can't afford to live there any more. Sure, they can rent, but at costs that are well above the mortgage rates of other areas.
This is why I hate the phrase 'So discouraged they are no longer looking for a job.' It needs to be changed to so lazy they won't even look for a job. OR so entitled they think they're above that job. We're currently facing a labor shortage across the state. My town is one of the many that can't find enough employees. I can get anyone a job. Even if you're a convicted felon I can get you a job that pays well above minimum wage. This is in area where you can buy a decent house for 75k. As a result we sometimes get an overabundance of the child support to 3 different women types, but hey, it's better than the dead beat that doesn't pay it. In North Dakota it's even worse. I get that these locations don't top out on the exciting lifestyle scale, but maybe you should bitch about pay rates, home costs, health care costs, etc after you're already busting your ass. Then you deserve to be heard, not before. I'm sick of these assholes claiming they did everything right, but the system just cheated them. I would bet there's viable employment options nearer to where they already live as well. Oh, and I made only marginally above minimum wage at a position that gave me no benefits when I graduated college. Some mistakes on my end, some bad timing with both the major and economy. If these fuck sticks didn't buy into the idea that the world is going to be handed to them on a silver platter just because they have a degree maybe they'd be working to advance out of their situation instead of being numbed from the shell shock of actually becoming an adult. I do get being pissed off at both student loans and slave wages under the excuse that they're 'stupid' or 'inexperienced', but you have to earn the right to complain because your circumstances might not be as bad as you think if you were doing what you claimed you were doing.
That was a very good article and truly encapsulates the issue we are faced with. To some degree, I agree with her conclusion but when she talks about Globalization and Technology, I tend to disagree at some level. Globalization: I don't think the genie is necessarily out of the bottle here, I think we have done worse than a poor job of protecting our labor force. We are a highly regulated economy and we have done nothing to force a fair trade-off with business for allowing them to offshore their labor and regulatory burdens while pumping up their margins. That needs to be corrected, we need to find some happy medium before they manage to siphon off all remaining wealth from the middle and lower classes. Whether that means huge taxes on companies that off-shore or finding some other way to bring manufacturing back to America, I truly believe it imperative. We cannot survive on all of the BS GDP based around healthcare and Government spending, we need to start making things again. Technology: I agree that no matter what happens with Globalization, we cannot fight technology. With AI on the near horizon and drone technology already here, we need to come to grips with higher unemployment in our current economic environment. We need to either create new industries or accept that current unemployment levels are as good as it gets and the situation will continue to deteriorate as more of the lower skilled jobs are taken over through automation, drones, etc. I really don't see how this can be avoided and am interested to hear other people's ideas on it.
The issue is the minimum is the floor the rest of wage gets based on. And again, fuck the logic behind "we're not supposed to pay you enough for x lifestyle..." I know enough kids who got spat out by their parents without support and that they have a full time job that doesn't allow them to afford a car or an apartment in bum fuck South Carolina where the COL is laughable. A labor shortage is a sign of either a bullshit job, or not enough pay. If you can't hire people in this economy, it's probably the latter. This logic is flawed because the entity that does make up the gap between needs and pay for this stuff is typically the government. How many Wal-Mart employees collect some form of government aid? I'm not advocating a minimum wage just because, I am saying that we have to take better care of our labor across the board, because it is under threats unimagined just twenty years ago. Oh and that pay is what drives our fucking economy in the first place.
Its a result of globalization. The value of domestic labor has been dropping over the past 20 years or so. The response to stopping might be protectionism, which is economic nationalism. Europe isnt close, its already happened. Western Europe outsourced its manufacturing and industrialization to Eastern Europe. It didnt work. Once the labor dried up, Eastern Europeans packed up and went west, now you have a major issue with the uncertainty of the currency. No wonder the UK doesnt want any part of it, they sourced their industrialization to Southeast Asia like we did. Those chickens havent come home to roost yet, and they might not.
Good for him, it sounds like just what was needed: New Mizzou boss gives student protesters tough-love message http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/02/2...testers-tough-love-message.html?intcmp=hplnws
Or, if enough of them come out of their keeping up with the Kardashians - twitter/facebook stupor, we could be faced with a Proletariat-style revolution. If the underclass in America weren't so self-absorbed (before someone freaks out, all Americans are self-absorbed), they would understand that they are NOT and never will be temporarily embarrassed millionaires; they are part of the structurally poor class that is growing. They don't understand just how badly their Government has not only failed them but sold them out to corporations and foreign interests.
I'm not sure if I should put this here, or in the WDT because John Oliver is awesome, but Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption has blessed us with this video:
Seriously? When your alternative to taking that 'bullshit' job and collecting welfare unemployed and/or not making making rent and you still don't take it, it says 3 things about you. 1. Your sense of priorities is fubared. 2. You're a lazy piece of a shit. 3. Despite having never proven anything, nor accomplished anything of value, you think you're above the people who do work those jobs. So you're both a brat and an asshole. The labor shortage in my area that I referred to involves jobs that pay anywhere from $12-15 an hour, with unlimited overtime opportunities if you want to make more (and *gasp* are willing to work for it). Full medical, dental, and matching 401k. It's not an American dream sort of job, but guess what? Entry level shit was NEVER supposed to be that. You work your way into the position you really want. It doesn't just get fucking handed to you. Why does this have to be explained to people these days? That one sentence you wrote about the 'sign' of labor shortages so perfectly sums up the problems with this far left nonsense. Everything is the corporation's fault. Everything is the white cisgender male's fault. If 2 countries are at war always blame the country with superior technology. Fuck everything else. Fuck nuance. Fuck having a holistic perspective. So the promises from politicians get more and more far fetched to get your vote, and we keep trying to slap immediate solutions on problems that take years of work to fix. That is if we can even identify and understand the problems anymore. Isn't it so much easier to just blame the corporate fat cats and pretend all is answered?
Dude. You are talking about a group of people who apparently believe they deserve a trophy for showing up, I guess? It seems like they strongly believe they will leave college and land in their dream job with no hard work or struggle.....straight out of college? If I wasn't willing to leave my hometown, I was looking at a 4 month layoff every year collecting unemployment. This is about character. What are you willing to sacrifice to get where you want to go? I went somewhere that I had to defend my life, nowadays people are just willing to take it as it comes. Fuck 'em, they can starve.
It's unusual, but it's really not that many. Given how hated the guy is I still think he's going to ensure the Republicans lose once he wins the primaries. I hope so at least. This country can be pretty stupid, but that would reset the bar. You think the world had plenty of comedic relief when Bush was president? Just wait until Trump's spent the last three days on the phone yelling at the Mexican prime minister to build a wall to keep the rapists out. I can't imagine what sort of insanely idiotic policies he would enact with the middle east. Here' s a peek at some of his awesome ideas. Do you guys remember when this idiot sued Maher and spent several months, with an actual lawyer, trying to set a legal precedent that a joke made on the air was a binding legal contract? He also kept releasing his birth certificate to prove his wan't the son of an orangutan. Holy fuck. This of course all started because his long history of being an Obama birth truther. I didn't believe this country could get much dumber than almost electing Santorum, but here we are.
This is the one way in which Trump might do some good. Well, his tax policies seem to be better than they are right now, but we'll have to wait and see, or not. But his Middle East policy of staying the hell out is the one way in which he's really different than the other Republicans and really the Democrats too. Hillary is obviously a 100% neocon with regards to the Middle East, and Sanders talks a better game than his voting record backs up.
What is it about his hard line stance on Iran and raping the economies of the countries we have already went to war with convinces you he's going to stay out?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...76783e-db3d-11e5-925f-1d10062cc82d_story.html Not the San Bernardino case, but a New York case, in which the judge sided with Apple. So now the precedent is set, lets hope the California judge uses this.
Obviously it's just talk right now, but he's explicitly said intervening in Libya and Syria was a bad idea and he wouldn't do it. He's also repudiated the Iraq war very strongly. He seems interested in actual negotiations between Israel and Palestine. I don't think he's great on any of those, but he is an improvement over someone like Rubio or Hillary.
A month ago I didnt think Trump would beat either Hillary or Sanders in the election. Now I think if he gets nominated, hes going to win the whole thing. He doesnt have to win all 50 states, he has to win about 2/3 of the 7 swing states. All he has to do is temper is rhetoric a bit and he wins.
Lord help us. But, why? Isn't his rhetoric what got him as the front runner? I'd think he just plow right on.