[Newfie]

In the USA you are a slave not because you can't survive on 35 hours pay, you can't afford the health insurance.

I took a sabbatical last summer, had to pay health insurance out of pocket,

$2,450/month. No per existing conditions, me, wife, and daughter.

That is slavery in the USA.

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AgentR11', ' ')when enough people are dumped from employer provided plans, and paying their fine, they will demand the government provide "real" insurance.

[Lore]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'I')n the USA you are a slave not because you can't survive on 35 hours pay, you can't afford the health insurance.

I took a sabbatical last summer, had to pay health insurance out of pocket,

$2,450/month. No per existing conditions, me, wife, and daughter.

That is slavery in the USA.

[cephalotus]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'I')n the USA you are a slave not because you can't survive on 35 hours pay, you can't afford the health insurance.

I took a sabbatical last summer, had to pay health insurance out of pocket,

$2,450/month. No per existing conditions, me, wife, and daughter.

That is slavery in the USA.

[Newfie]

Then, in the USA, you would be challenged with giving up your high pay full time job.

Many folks here take lesser jobs simply because they provide benefits.

[Tanada]

As a long term unemployed person I can tell you that around here, in the Great Lake States, very few positions are being offered that exceed the 30 hour cut off for mandatory health insurance. Nearly all jobs posted are 28 hours per week with no hope of ever being 40 hour per week jobs. The few 40 hour per week jobs I see posted are one way or another Government jobs and unless you are a veteran or some other special classification it is hard to get one of those. I fully support the idea of Veterans who voluntarily risked life and limb for my freedom getting first dibs on government jobs, but in Ohio double dipping is rampant in the Toledo area. They mention it every election cycle on the radio, the Mayor of Toledo is a retired Fire Chief drawing his full retirement benefit plus his full benefit as Mayor. The same thing goes on in many departments of city and local government, a senior executive 'retires' and starts drawing benefits, then is hired back in to replace themselves on the payroll by other senior executives who have already managed the same maneuver. This not only gives them a double income draining government coffers, it keeps them in their job for life preventing anyone from moving up in the ranks and making openings at the bottom for younger employees to get into Government service. For what a double dipper gets paid for getting their old job back while retired you could hire two fresh faced and eager young fire fighters, police officers or paramedics. This system is broken in a very bad way. If you drive around the country roads off of the main drag you will discover closed or missing bridges due to infrastructure decay all over Michigan and Ohio. I really thought a lot of this stuff would get fixed under the big stimulus spending that was dumped into projects for the last five years, but instead of repairing or replacing bridges on tertiary roads they spent it all to put up big electronic display boards on I-75 to tell you if you were in a traffic jam or not. All those so called Improvements soak up a lot of money for retrofitting into the highways with new infrastructure including traffic camera's and display boards and computer networks to operate them, power supplies to operate them and maintenance crews to keep them in working order. But they are flashy and politically desirable because massive numbers of commuters see them every day and people living further from the express ways learn routes to avoid the missing or closed infrastructure segments. A few years of avoiding a certain route and you don't even realize after a while that you are traveling a round about fashion because of bad infrastructure.

[Timo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'A')s a long term unemployed person I can tell you that around here, in the Great Lake States, very few positions are being offered that exceed the 30 hour cut off for mandatory health insurance. Nearly all jobs posted are 28 hours per week with no hope of ever being 40 hour per week jobs. The few 40 hour per week jobs I see posted are one way or another Government jobs and unless you are a veteran or some other special classification it is hard to get one of those. I fully support the idea of Veterans who voluntarily risked life and limb for my freedom getting first dibs on government jobs, but in Ohio double dipping is rampant in the Toledo area. They mention it every election cycle on the radio, the Mayor of Toledo is a retired Fire Chief drawing his full retirement benefit plus his full benefit as Mayor. The same thing goes on in many departments of city and local government, a senior executive 'retires' and starts drawing benefits, then is hired back in to replace themselves on the payroll by other senior executives who have already managed the same maneuver. This not only gives them a double income draining government coffers, it keeps them in their job for life preventing anyone from moving up in the ranks and making openings at the bottom for younger employees to get into Government service. For what a double dipper gets paid for getting their old job back while retired you could hire two fresh faced and eager young fire fighters, police officers or paramedics. This system is broken in a very bad way. If you drive around the country roads off of the main drag you will discover closed or missing bridges due to infrastructure decay all over Michigan and Ohio. I really thought a lot of this stuff would get fixed under the big stimulus spending that was dumped into projects for the last five years, but instead of repairing or replacing bridges on tertiary roads they spent it all to put up big electronic display boards on I-75 to tell you if you were in a traffic jam or not. All those so called Improvements soak up a lot of money for retrofitting into the highways with new infrastructure including traffic camera's and display boards and computer networks to operate them, power supplies to operate them and maintenance crews to keep them in working order. But they are flashy and politically desirable because massive numbers of commuters see them every day and people living further from the express ways learn routes to avoid the missing or closed infrastructure segments. A few years of avoiding a certain route and you don't even realize after a while that you are traveling a round about fashion because of bad infrastructure.

[Tanada]

I try not to be too hard on the Engineers, after all they are designing at the demands of their employers just like the rest of us do our jobs. In their case that employer is almost always a government at some level when were are talking about road and bridge styles of engineering. They probably have so many layers of rules that navigating the rules takes more work than the actual design process itself. It could be something as simple as a road bridge with a pedestrian path has to have extremely strong barriers between the two paths making it cheaper to just build a separate structure for the pedestrians.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Novus', 'W')hen one can only use the straw man is means you have no argument or no refuting the logic. It is like the person who says raise the minimum wage to $1 million every time the workers dare to ask for 50 cents. It is mindless rytoric and nothing more.


Those with no solutions can spout nonsense all they want but the Math doesn't lie.

30 million 40 hour jobs becomes 34.28 million 35 hour jobs. That is a gain 4,280,000 jobs just by changing this one law.


The MATH doesn't lie.

[Newfie]

Timo,

Your suffering from an over exposure to CIVIL engineers, who are (after all) just guys who wanted to be Electrical but couldn't pass muster!

As an Electrical, in transit, I'll bet you and I could spend more than a few hours swapping horror stories.

One of my favorite quips, which has gained some steam around the office is, "We don't deal in logic, we deal in transit."

[Newfie]

Tanda,

Just a quickie as I'm at work. And I am a blessed person, part time with full time benefits! Still I bitch.

Anyway, this all presumes that we are actually doing something useful. My strong argument is that the vast majority of us (self included - as you note almost all Engineers are on the government dole - workfare) are NOT doing useful work.

My favorite targets are medical insurance clerks and TSA (Thousands Standing Around) but you can expand the list to include nearly all of us.

Almost our entire "service' industry is made of folks doing no useful work. Most of our military, not useful. Government employment: city, state, federal - 80% waste.

A few years ago I did some productivity studies using an industrial questionnaire. I got paid to do it. What I found was that the internal organizations were so weakly organized that the 'maintenance forces' would have gotten as much work done if they had NO management what-so-ever. I see this time and again.

In 1982 (?) I took over a maintenance organization with 5 workers. It was tough, but we got through. Last week I met a guy who I hired back then. They now have 17 folks, doing the same work, just getting by.

This whole employment thing is a scam. It is really just a way of dispersing out money that is created by a very few individuals.

We would all really be a lot better off, in the long run, if we could learn to just be OK with ourselves as we are, and not mucking things up by "doing something."

[Timo]

I feel compelled to make note of two words in one of Tanada's reply, just a couple posts above, and that is the words "human resource." Every government and sizeable company has a full-fledged department to deal with human resources. Think about that. OIl is a resource that is traded as a commodity. Gold, ditto. Silver, dirt, sulphur, water, beef, corn, basically anything that can be mined, grown or sold is considered a resource. Humans have become a resource just like any other physical resource, and the thing about human resources, along with everry other resource you can think of, is that a human resource is disposable and replaceable. If your oil isn't light enough, you replace it with an upgrade to sweet light crude. If your clerk isn't productive enough, that clerk can be replaced for a more productive model, just like he was a cog in a machine. As employees of Government or Company X, we're institutionally considered and treated as a replaceable commodity, and it's in everyone's best economic interests to do more with less, so humans get the squeeze for the sake of someone else's dollar. I know this is just a rant, and i have no alternatives to suggest as an improvement, but still, it pisses me off to be categorically denied any sense of human dignity by my employer, just like i was a widget.

[Newfie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')OYERS: What do you see happening to the idea of dignity to human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?

ASIMOV: It's going to destroy it all. I use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom, go to the bathroom any time you want, and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And this to my way is ideal. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person
believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up, you have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren't you through yet, and so on.

And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.

[dsula]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Timo', '&')quot;human resource."

[AgentR11]

Timo... if you don't want to be a widget, don't be. But there is a price to be paid for not being a widget.

The widget can be replaced of course. The widget can also leave and do something else without hard feelings or harm to those left behind.

A non-widget with no ethics of course could reap the benefits without the cost, but that is not something I could be.

[Newfie]

Wasn't that the meta plot of the first Matrix?

[Loki]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'T')hat mean you also just cut the employees vacation time by 13% per year.

[vision-master]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Timo', 'I') feel compelled to make note of two words in one of Tanada's reply, just a couple posts above, and that is the words "human resource." Every government and sizeable company has a full-fledged department to deal with human resources. Think about that. OIl is a resource that is traded as a commodity. Gold, ditto. Silver, dirt, sulphur, water, beef, corn, basically anything that can be mined, grown or sold is considered a resource. Humans have become a resource just like any other physical resource, and the thing about human resources, along with everry other resource you can think of, is that a human resource is disposable and replaceable. If your oil isn't light enough, you replace it with an upgrade to sweet light crude. If your clerk isn't productive enough, that clerk can be replaced for a more productive model, just like he was a cog in a machine. As employees of Government or Company X, we're institutionally considered and treated as a replaceable commodity, and it's in everyone's best economic interests to do more with less, so humans get the squeeze for the sake of someone else's dollar. I know this is just a rant, and i have no alternatives to suggest as an improvement, but still, it pisses me off to be categorically denied any sense of human dignity by my employer, just like i was a widget.

[vision-master]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Loki', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'T')hat mean you also just cut the employees vacation time by 13% per year.

[AgentR11]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vision-master', 'Y')ou have no future, the time will come when you will be unable to do your present work, you will have nothing. Reality will hit hard.