Remember that farming is not yet a perfect science. Many aspects of weather can ruin a crop of [insert ethanol-producing plant here], such as drought, flood, hail, tornado, hurricane, wind, and fire. Pests can destroy crops (hence the popularity of insecticide), and as well as other unwanted plants (hence the herbicide). Crops need maintenance and attention as much as anything else. While the demand for a crop may be constant, nature makes sure that the supply fluctuates.
I think some people get the idea that farming is easy: you just drop some seeds in the ground and a year later you cut down the plant and go collect your cash. It isn't as simple as that. (Some people think parenting is the same way - just drop your seed and wait for your welfare check to come in.) Anybody who's had a garden can tell you that there's a lot more to it.
Not all land funded by CRP is in delicate, high risk areas. Some small farmers put their land into CRP because the government gives them a check regardless of whether it's a wet year or a dry year, and they can go to work in town, and get paid regularly regardless of crop conditions. It'd probably be impossible to determine how much CRP land is in high risk areas, and how much could be farmed normally.
I agree that it's interesting as well. It would be nice to know if there are downsides to producing or using Butanol, such as waste product. The ButylFuel LLC page suggests feeding some to livestock and spreading the rest over farm fields to decompose naturally. That presumes that the production method allows it to decompose naturally without side effects, and I get the feeling ButylFuel LLC is more interested in testing their product than testing the waste produced by their product.
It's certainly worth investigating. I'd mod you informative if I had points... and if I hadn't already joined in the discussion earlier.
The entire corn plant can be pretty efficient at making feed for cattle. If you're a dairy farmer or beef cattle farmer, the stalk is generally used for feed as well, where the plant is trimmed at the ground and chopped up to make silage, a moist feed product. Silage is every part of the corn plant except the root and the lowest 8" of stalk, including the ears & kernels, and it's harvested earlier in the year before the plant dries out (think of eating corn on the cob/sweet corn). When you look at a farm and see the tall silo next to the barn, that's where silage is stored through to the next harvesting season.
If you're a cash crop farmer (where the majority of corn would come from used for making food & ethanol), you're only interested in the dry kernels of corn because it's the easiest to store, transport, and sell. In that case, then yes, the stalk, husk, and cob are waste products and mostly comprised of cellulose. I don't know if it's a different kind of cellulose than switchgrass, however, but I'd bet they're similar.
This means that the kernels of corn could go back to being used for food supplies and the "waste product" of stalk and husks could be used for ethanol. The problem then becomes determining a standard unit of measure (probably weight, but moisture content would need to be factored in) for sale, standard way of compacting the waste product (perhaps chopped up into chaff), and methods of transportation (could be done with end-dump trailers). Commodities work based on a value assigned to a standard product that falls into one category or another, and as far as I know, there's no corn-waste commodity yet.
Because of harvesting techniques, corn is restricted to growing in rows and grasses are not, so that might be a factor in how much switchgrass vs. corn-waste can be produced per acre. Another factor is how much nitrogen both take out of the ground. I know there was some talk about needing to fertilize with nitrogen, but only the best soils can be used to grow corn year after year, without crop rotation. I don't know about switchgrass' nutrient requirements regarding crop rotation.
I think that's a really neat idea. Modular screens. Imagine a laptop with two screens, one that you do your viewing on, one that you do your typing on, and when you want to watch movies, you "open" the laptop all the way (180 degree angle), twist it 90 degrees, and now it becomes a larger monitor for watching movies.
It would need a hinging mechanism to allow the two screens to sit next to each other, virtually pixel against pixel, which might be tough. However, with the direction OLEDs are going, there could be a flexible plastic LED joint between the two screens to allow uninterrupted transitions.
I like that Apple remote. That not only looks slick, but could be really functional as well.
The toast thing, while creative, isn't as "useful," per se, but it certainly is biodegradable. Then we'll be having moral discussions about feeding starving nations vs. Post-it Toast, similar to the 'Corn: Ethanol vs. Food' discussion now. But, if you feel creative, you can make one yourself!
My Dell Latitude D820 has a DB-9 RS232 com port. That's one of the main reasons my work purchased it - I need to connect to PLCs and other 90s-technology devices with com ports, and I've found that USB converters don't always function like they're supposed to. However, with packet radio, do you need more than just a transmit/receive pair? You might be able to get by with a USB converter. (All that I know about packet radio you could fit on a postage stamp.)
Interesting to note that this seems to be one of the channels that the Writer's Guild of America terms "New Media", and correct me if I'm wrong, but the main reason they're striking is about getting residuals from that. I had read somewhere that the movie studios were/are unable to put a market share on it because it's too new to determine an interest level. Guess we'll see what kind of interest level there is.
I know, when I think of the South Pole, I imagine a flat expanse of ice and snow only a few hundred feet above sea level. Apparently, the guy in TFA says they're at 12,000 feet.
I don't think had an intended lifespan of 30 years - it had an intended lifespan of long enough to be able to photograph and take readings on the gas giants, as part of the original Grand Tour. Anything after that has been a bonus.
Uh... yeah. Thanks for explaining that to... somebody. I kinda already knew that. Reread my post and note my comments on people's skin resistance, not having meters to measure the high voltage, and playing with magnetos.
I have a hard time believing that DC "feels better" than AC. In grade school, I had a 6-volt car coil from a Model A Ford that I would bring into class as a "shocking machine." Everybody would hold hands in a big circle, with the person starting the circle holding the coil wire, and the person at the end of the circle holding the coil casing.
People liked 6 volts of AC being applied to the primary side of the coil better than they liked a 6 volt battery. Perhaps it has to do with the way the magnetic field collapsed on DC vs. just being a transformer with AC (I never had any equipment to take secondary winding voltage measurements using different power sources).
I've never been shocked with 120 volts of DC; I don't know where I'd accidentally come into contact with that unless I hooked up a bridge rectifier directly to an AC outlet. I have gotten a couple of zings in the past, and I think people's discomfort with it is related to their skin's resistance.
For instance, my father witnessed an old guy he knew take the one of the plug wires off of a running tractor, and the tractor would run rough. He'd hold the wire in one hand, and touch the spark plug with the other hand, and the tractor would run smooth. I've never seen it done, but I've messed around with magnetos enough to know they hurt like a bitch.
Actually, there was a Popular Science article written in the early 1940's about exactly the same thing - wireless power transmission. The article has a scientist holding a lit fluorescent bulb in his hands with no wires attached. After reading the article, it becomes very obvious what they've discovered - put a fluorescent bulb near a microwave radio transmitter and you can light the bulb. It just wasn't efficient - running a 10KW transmitter to light a 40 watt bulb. Not to mention the side effects of turning your house into a huge microwave.
This MIT article about "tuning" to the resonant frequency makes total sense, and picks up where they left off in the 40's.
In addition, you can harvest the electricity already in the air, thanks to your local AM radio station: Know the principle of how a crystal radio works? Then just add a bunch more germanium diodes between an aerial and the ground, and you can pull out enough juice to charge a supercap.
I second that. Someone had tried to take $2800 out of my bank account via PayPal, lucky for me I don't have that much money, and the bank didn't pay it (but assessed me a $34 insufficient funds fee).
When I logged onto PayPal, they had all the red flags up, and required me to prove my identity and change my password, yaddah yaddah yaddah. Several days later, it came thru AGAIN, and I found a number for PayPal and gave them a call. Turns out that if my bank denies the transaction, they'll try again, just like with a check or any other purchase.
I thought my password (8 digits) was pretty good, as it was not a word and included numbers, but apparently, it wasn't. Now it's 20 digits long. My bank also made the suggestion that I get a new checking account, as those numbers may be out there as well. I think it's a good point, and I'll have to do that pretty quick.
It's not from phishing, as I can easily see which e-mails are truly from PayPal and which ones aren't. The phishing mails are full of typos, spelling errors, and repeat sentences with different information. They've gotta be done by someone who isn't fluent in the English language. It's actually pretty funny reading material. What's not so funny is that those horribly-done phishing e-mails actually fool some people. Sad state of affairs we have in the education of the country, if you ask me.
But don't forget the little things. Your folks didn't have answering machines, radio alarm clocks, DVD players/CD players/Tivo, Glade plug-ins, and so on. Also, with your computer comes the monitor, the printer, the cable modem (maybe), speakers... anything that has a "wall wart" transformer takes electricity, regardless of whether or not it's "on". TVs and monitors today are always siphoning several watts because they're in "stand-by mode" whether you realize it or not. TVs have been doing this since they went away from the actual switch interrupting power, the switch that clicks and stays in one position (e.g. prior to remotes).
You really start to notice how things were different when you look at the amount of outlets in an old house, and try to live in today's world using 6 duplex outlets in 6 rooms. Power strips and ground-lifting adapters for older ungrounded outlets become second nature in older houses.
You can say that you don't contribute to it because you don't use Glade plug-ins or have wall-warts everywhere... but that doesn't mean all of your neighbors haven't. It's just become part of society... electricity made our lives easier, right? Heh. My great-uncle tells me that it takes a lot of labor to fix that labor-saving equipment when it breaks. Sometimes I think he's more right than he knows.
This article caught my eye because I recently had my PayPal account hacked, and someone tried to withdraw (coincidentally?) $2800. I don't have $2800, so my bank denied the transaction and charged me $35. I immediately logged on to PayPal and they had put up a bunch of verification hoops to jump through, which I gladly did.
I'm pretty savvy when it comes to phishing, I always hover over questionable links to see where the HTML leads to, and some of the phishing e-mails I get purporting to be PayPal are laughable, rather than laudable. Spelling errors, typos, repeat sentences with different information... I swear, the majority of phishers are complete idiots, and couldn't hold a job at McDonalds if they tried.
But that really says something about the intelligence of some of those recipients, since some people DO fall for the e-mails.
FYI, I changed my PayPal password from an 8-digit to a 20-digit, but my bank made the good suggestion that I change bank accounts as well, since that information might not be secure now, either.
My bad. I presumed some things, so I'll take the kick in the nuts. I read:
Fuck you, I GREW UP in poverty. Not the kind of ridiculous poverty that you reference, but no shoes or clothes for school, lights going out, crap in a bucket cause the toilets don't work poverty. Government cheese and foodstamps poverty.
I also read:
ALL WHILE LIVING IN ABJECT, TIN TRAILER, HOLES IN THE FLOOR, NO HEALTH INSURANCE POVERTY.
I did not read anything in your first post about
She MOVED TO the area so she could go to school and work. Likewise, only in your second post did I read
SHE MOVED TO THE LOCATION FOR THE JOBS AND SCHOOL[.] I presumed that you already lived somewhere, since moving was not mentioned in your first post. My bad, I'm glad you got out; I know people who haven't, and probably won't.
Someone else made a comment earlier about moving to a better place:
I think that it's pretty small minded to not consider moving when you're unemployed and looking for a new job. Yes it sucks, but such is life. You shouldn't be sitting on welfare when there's a job shortage elsewhere.
There's always shortages in some job market; either location or skillwise. There's lots of programs to help get you skills in most of those careers, and moving doesn't have to be that expensive.
To which my reply was, "I guess that depends on if you're moving just yourself, or your family as well. Moving to a better job market is pretty risky if you don't have a guaranteed job in that market. Good job markets have a higher standard-of-living: rent, groceries, etc. are more expensive. That extra living expense takes its toll in the two weeks (or more) it might take to get a job and receive that first paycheck." But I'm sure you and your family have been there, done that. It's just that some people don't get it, or can't forsee it because they've only thought it through, and experiencing it is NOT the same as thinking about it.
I must say, I really respect the fire you have for telling people how it is from your experiences. You're right, there's a lot of people out there who think they understand how bad it must be to be poor, and then there are those who are/were actually poor. It's two completely different groups of people, and they're just splitting farther and farther apart.
I guess that depends on if you're moving just yourself, or your family as well. Moving to a better job market is pretty risky if you don't have a guaranteed job in that market. Good job markets have a higher standard-of-living: rent, groceries, etc. are more expensive. That extra living expense takes its toll in the two weeks (or more) it might take to get a job and receive that first paycheck.
Who said anything about welfare? I never knew anybody on welfare, they were too proud to go on welfare. Where I was raised, a family earns respect by being poor and NOT going on welfare, but such is the idiosyncrasies of the welfare system: The people that need it don't want it, and the people who really don't need it, take it.
I hope you realize how lucky you are to live in an area where those jobs and the education for those jobs are available. You're right, a person can work their way out of poverty provided:
A. They have the desire to, and
B. They have something available to work up to.
Your mother was lucky to be located in a job market where RNs are needed.
I don't think he ever made the claim that it was impossible to work out of the situation, he's simply refuting the GP's argument that "people can just go to classes and work their way up the ladder if they don't want to work at Wal-Mart." It doesn't work like that because in a lot of job markets, the only thing available for employment is Wal-Mart. How did you get the money to become a certified nursing assistant? Did you work at a job to pay for your classes?
I understand where you come from, because I grew up on Malt-o-meal cereal and powdered milk. It's what our family could afford, but there weren't many jobs where I lived - a $9/hr. job was considered good money. $9/hr. barely pays for standard living expenses, let alone college costs. Even some community colleges are prohibitively expensive at that rate. But when there's only $9/hr. jobs around your area, what good is a college education?
No, I see his point. Show me another retailer who prices their goods for the low and lower-middle classes, pays what Wal-Mart does, and employs the lower-class workers from one coast to the other, and I'll show you a direct competitor to Wal-Mart. Trouble is, there isn't one. K-mart is close, but they don't have anything close to the coverage that Wal-Mart has.
Wal-Mart doesn't have direct competition. They have local competition from smaller retailers in different portions of the country. Either retailers don't want to associate with the cheap shit Made In China, or they can't afford to. Wal-Mart basically sub-contracts manufacturers for their crap, and they can because they're huge. Discount in bulk. Mom & Pop stores can't compete, because they don't need/can't sell 10 million Beanie Baby Sharpies. They could sell 10000, but it would cost them 40% more to manufacture and ship than it would Wal-Mart.
Put a direct competitor in every town that's got a Wal-Mart, and you'll start to see Wal-Mart change their game when it comes to pay scales and health insurance - they'd have to use that as a competitive edge for needed workers.
Issue 1: If everyone went to college and technical school, there wouldn't be anybody to serve you McDonalds hamburgers. That, or you'd be paying $18.95 for a Number 2.
Issue 2: People value family as well. Perhaps they'd like to live near their family, which happens to live in a rural area. Doctorate degrees don't mean shit when the only jobs in a 50-mile radius of their family involves Wal-Mart, pumping gas, or fast-food. Just because someone is educated doesn't mean that jobs magically appear in their area of the country. And, it gets expensive to move your ass somewhere else. Relocating stipends are given on a company-by-company basis, so you can't guarantee it to the new graduate, either.
Getting a better job is a great way out of it - if there are better jobs to get. It's pretty small-minded to think that every locale in the US has a shortage of workers, and that there are jobs to be had everywhere. There's a reason why you cannot pump your own gas in Oregon - originally it was brought in as a "safety measure", but in Oregon's current economy, it ensures there will always be X number of jobs in the state. Seriously, take a drive through some lumber ghost towns - the only thing keeping the town alive is the Wal-Mart. Sweet Home, Oregon didn't want a Wal-Mart in their town; next-door Lebanon welcomed it, and now the people from Sweet Home commute to Lebanon to buy and work at the Wal-Mart.
I presume you live where there are jobs to be had for the plucking.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that farming is not yet a perfect science. Many aspects of weather can ruin a crop of [insert ethanol-producing plant here], such as drought, flood, hail, tornado, hurricane, wind, and fire. Pests can destroy crops (hence the popularity of insecticide), and as well as other unwanted plants (hence the herbicide). Crops need maintenance and attention as much as anything else. While the demand for a crop may be constant, nature makes sure that the supply fluctuates.
I think some people get the idea that farming is easy: you just drop some seeds in the ground and a year later you cut down the plant and go collect your cash. It isn't as simple as that. (Some people think parenting is the same way - just drop your seed and wait for your welfare check to come in.) Anybody who's had a garden can tell you that there's a lot more to it.
Not all land funded by CRP is in delicate, high risk areas. Some small farmers put their land into CRP because the government gives them a check regardless of whether it's a wet year or a dry year, and they can go to work in town, and get paid regularly regardless of crop conditions. It'd probably be impossible to determine how much CRP land is in high risk areas, and how much could be farmed normally.
I agree that it's interesting as well. It would be nice to know if there are downsides to producing or using Butanol, such as waste product. The ButylFuel LLC page suggests feeding some to livestock and spreading the rest over farm fields to decompose naturally. That presumes that the production method allows it to decompose naturally without side effects, and I get the feeling ButylFuel LLC is more interested in testing their product than testing the waste produced by their product.
It's certainly worth investigating. I'd mod you informative if I had points... and if I hadn't already joined in the discussion earlier.
The entire corn plant can be pretty efficient at making feed for cattle. If you're a dairy farmer or beef cattle farmer, the stalk is generally used for feed as well, where the plant is trimmed at the ground and chopped up to make silage, a moist feed product. Silage is every part of the corn plant except the root and the lowest 8" of stalk, including the ears & kernels, and it's harvested earlier in the year before the plant dries out (think of eating corn on the cob/sweet corn). When you look at a farm and see the tall silo next to the barn, that's where silage is stored through to the next harvesting season.
If you're a cash crop farmer (where the majority of corn would come from used for making food & ethanol), you're only interested in the dry kernels of corn because it's the easiest to store, transport, and sell. In that case, then yes, the stalk, husk, and cob are waste products and mostly comprised of cellulose. I don't know if it's a different kind of cellulose than switchgrass, however, but I'd bet they're similar.
This means that the kernels of corn could go back to being used for food supplies and the "waste product" of stalk and husks could be used for ethanol. The problem then becomes determining a standard unit of measure (probably weight, but moisture content would need to be factored in) for sale, standard way of compacting the waste product (perhaps chopped up into chaff), and methods of transportation (could be done with end-dump trailers). Commodities work based on a value assigned to a standard product that falls into one category or another, and as far as I know, there's no corn-waste commodity yet.
Because of harvesting techniques, corn is restricted to growing in rows and grasses are not, so that might be a factor in how much switchgrass vs. corn-waste can be produced per acre. Another factor is how much nitrogen both take out of the ground. I know there was some talk about needing to fertilize with nitrogen, but only the best soils can be used to grow corn year after year, without crop rotation. I don't know about switchgrass' nutrient requirements regarding crop rotation.
Good call on that.
... which would inspire those in SC, and if he were to win that one as well, Florida voters would be more inclined to vote for him.So, are you saying that the majority of voters are sheeple, and wait to see who other sheeple are voting for prior to casting their vote?
Personally, I can't imagine myself ever following the sheeple herd like that.
I do know people who would vote like that, however, the more I think about it. Scary. What's the point of choice in an election, again?
I think that's a really neat idea. Modular screens. Imagine a laptop with two screens, one that you do your viewing on, one that you do your typing on, and when you want to watch movies, you "open" the laptop all the way (180 degree angle), twist it 90 degrees, and now it becomes a larger monitor for watching movies.
It would need a hinging mechanism to allow the two screens to sit next to each other, virtually pixel against pixel, which might be tough. However, with the direction OLEDs are going, there could be a flexible plastic LED joint between the two screens to allow uninterrupted transitions.
I like that Apple remote. That not only looks slick, but could be really functional as well.
The toast thing, while creative, isn't as "useful," per se, but it certainly is biodegradable. Then we'll be having moral discussions about feeding starving nations vs. Post-it Toast, similar to the 'Corn: Ethanol vs. Food' discussion now. But, if you feel creative, you can make one yourself!
Huh. I thought it was from "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids," when they're trying to whistle for Quark.
My Dell Latitude D820 has a DB-9 RS232 com port. That's one of the main reasons my work purchased it - I need to connect to PLCs and other 90s-technology devices with com ports, and I've found that USB converters don't always function like they're supposed to. However, with packet radio, do you need more than just a transmit/receive pair? You might be able to get by with a USB converter. (All that I know about packet radio you could fit on a postage stamp.)
Doubling my dating? Doubling zero is still zero.
Interesting to note that this seems to be one of the channels that the Writer's Guild of America terms "New Media", and correct me if I'm wrong, but the main reason they're striking is about getting residuals from that. I had read somewhere that the movie studios were/are unable to put a market share on it because it's too new to determine an interest level. Guess we'll see what kind of interest level there is.
I know, when I think of the South Pole, I imagine a flat expanse of ice and snow only a few hundred feet above sea level. Apparently, the guy in TFA says they're at 12,000 feet.
I don't think had an intended lifespan of 30 years - it had an intended lifespan of long enough to be able to photograph and take readings on the gas giants, as part of the original Grand Tour. Anything after that has been a bonus.
Uh... yeah. Thanks for explaining that to... somebody. I kinda already knew that. Reread my post and note my comments on people's skin resistance, not having meters to measure the high voltage, and playing with magnetos.
Dude, $10 plus shipping will get you a used 872 mercury rectifier from Antique Electronic Supply - http://www.tubesandmore.com/
That is, if what you're really interested in is the glow. If you want to change AC to DC at 2500 amps... well... good luck with that.
I have a hard time believing that DC "feels better" than AC. In grade school, I had a 6-volt car coil from a Model A Ford that I would bring into class as a "shocking machine." Everybody would hold hands in a big circle, with the person starting the circle holding the coil wire, and the person at the end of the circle holding the coil casing.
People liked 6 volts of AC being applied to the primary side of the coil better than they liked a 6 volt battery. Perhaps it has to do with the way the magnetic field collapsed on DC vs. just being a transformer with AC (I never had any equipment to take secondary winding voltage measurements using different power sources).
I've never been shocked with 120 volts of DC; I don't know where I'd accidentally come into contact with that unless I hooked up a bridge rectifier directly to an AC outlet. I have gotten a couple of zings in the past, and I think people's discomfort with it is related to their skin's resistance.
For instance, my father witnessed an old guy he knew take the one of the plug wires off of a running tractor, and the tractor would run rough. He'd hold the wire in one hand, and touch the spark plug with the other hand, and the tractor would run smooth. I've never seen it done, but I've messed around with magnetos enough to know they hurt like a bitch.
Actually, there was a Popular Science article written in the early 1940's about exactly the same thing - wireless power transmission. The article has a scientist holding a lit fluorescent bulb in his hands with no wires attached. After reading the article, it becomes very obvious what they've discovered - put a fluorescent bulb near a microwave radio transmitter and you can light the bulb. It just wasn't efficient - running a 10KW transmitter to light a 40 watt bulb. Not to mention the side effects of turning your house into a huge microwave.
This MIT article about "tuning" to the resonant frequency makes total sense, and picks up where they left off in the 40's.
In addition, you can harvest the electricity already in the air, thanks to your local AM radio station: Know the principle of how a crystal radio works? Then just add a bunch more germanium diodes between an aerial and the ground, and you can pull out enough juice to charge a supercap.
When I logged onto PayPal, they had all the red flags up, and required me to prove my identity and change my password, yaddah yaddah yaddah. Several days later, it came thru AGAIN, and I found a number for PayPal and gave them a call. Turns out that if my bank denies the transaction, they'll try again, just like with a check or any other purchase.
I thought my password (8 digits) was pretty good, as it was not a word and included numbers, but apparently, it wasn't. Now it's 20 digits long. My bank also made the suggestion that I get a new checking account, as those numbers may be out there as well. I think it's a good point, and I'll have to do that pretty quick.
It's not from phishing, as I can easily see which e-mails are truly from PayPal and which ones aren't. The phishing mails are full of typos, spelling errors, and repeat sentences with different information. They've gotta be done by someone who isn't fluent in the English language. It's actually pretty funny reading material. What's not so funny is that those horribly-done phishing e-mails actually fool some people. Sad state of affairs we have in the education of the country, if you ask me.
-Dave
You really start to notice how things were different when you look at the amount of outlets in an old house, and try to live in today's world using 6 duplex outlets in 6 rooms. Power strips and ground-lifting adapters for older ungrounded outlets become second nature in older houses.
You can say that you don't contribute to it because you don't use Glade plug-ins or have wall-warts everywhere... but that doesn't mean all of your neighbors haven't. It's just become part of society... electricity made our lives easier, right? Heh. My great-uncle tells me that it takes a lot of labor to fix that labor-saving equipment when it breaks. Sometimes I think he's more right than he knows.
-Dave
I'm pretty savvy when it comes to phishing, I always hover over questionable links to see where the HTML leads to, and some of the phishing e-mails I get purporting to be PayPal are laughable, rather than laudable. Spelling errors, typos, repeat sentences with different information... I swear, the majority of phishers are complete idiots, and couldn't hold a job at McDonalds if they tried.
But that really says something about the intelligence of some of those recipients, since some people DO fall for the e-mails.
FYI, I changed my PayPal password from an 8-digit to a 20-digit, but my bank made the good suggestion that I change bank accounts as well, since that information might not be secure now, either.
I also read:
ALL WHILE LIVING IN ABJECT, TIN TRAILER, HOLES IN THE FLOOR, NO HEALTH INSURANCE POVERTY.I did not read anything in your first post about
She MOVED TO the area so she could go to school and work. Likewise, only in your second post did I read SHE MOVED TO THE LOCATION FOR THE JOBS AND SCHOOL[.] I presumed that you already lived somewhere, since moving was not mentioned in your first post. My bad, I'm glad you got out; I know people who haven't, and probably won't.Someone else made a comment earlier about moving to a better place:
I think that it's pretty small minded to not consider moving when you're unemployed and looking for a new job. Yes it sucks, but such is life. You shouldn't be sitting on welfare when there's a job shortage elsewhere. There's always shortages in some job market; either location or skillwise. There's lots of programs to help get you skills in most of those careers, and moving doesn't have to be that expensive.To which my reply was, "I guess that depends on if you're moving just yourself, or your family as well. Moving to a better job market is pretty risky if you don't have a guaranteed job in that market. Good job markets have a higher standard-of-living: rent, groceries, etc. are more expensive. That extra living expense takes its toll in the two weeks (or more) it might take to get a job and receive that first paycheck." But I'm sure you and your family have been there, done that. It's just that some people don't get it, or can't forsee it because they've only thought it through, and experiencing it is NOT the same as thinking about it.
I must say, I really respect the fire you have for telling people how it is from your experiences. You're right, there's a lot of people out there who think they understand how bad it must be to be poor, and then there are those who are/were actually poor. It's two completely different groups of people, and they're just splitting farther and farther apart.
Who said anything about welfare? I never knew anybody on welfare, they were too proud to go on welfare. Where I was raised, a family earns respect by being poor and NOT going on welfare, but such is the idiosyncrasies of the welfare system: The people that need it don't want it, and the people who really don't need it, take it.
A. They have the desire to, and
B. They have something available to work up to.
Your mother was lucky to be located in a job market where RNs are needed.
I don't think he ever made the claim that it was impossible to work out of the situation, he's simply refuting the GP's argument that "people can just go to classes and work their way up the ladder if they don't want to work at Wal-Mart." It doesn't work like that because in a lot of job markets, the only thing available for employment is Wal-Mart. How did you get the money to become a certified nursing assistant? Did you work at a job to pay for your classes?
I understand where you come from, because I grew up on Malt-o-meal cereal and powdered milk. It's what our family could afford, but there weren't many jobs where I lived - a $9/hr. job was considered good money. $9/hr. barely pays for standard living expenses, let alone college costs. Even some community colleges are prohibitively expensive at that rate. But when there's only $9/hr. jobs around your area, what good is a college education?
Just my opinion from my experiences.
Wal-Mart doesn't have direct competition. They have local competition from smaller retailers in different portions of the country. Either retailers don't want to associate with the cheap shit Made In China, or they can't afford to. Wal-Mart basically sub-contracts manufacturers for their crap, and they can because they're huge. Discount in bulk. Mom & Pop stores can't compete, because they don't need/can't sell 10 million Beanie Baby Sharpies. They could sell 10000, but it would cost them 40% more to manufacture and ship than it would Wal-Mart.
Put a direct competitor in every town that's got a Wal-Mart, and you'll start to see Wal-Mart change their game when it comes to pay scales and health insurance - they'd have to use that as a competitive edge for needed workers.
Issue 2: People value family as well. Perhaps they'd like to live near their family, which happens to live in a rural area. Doctorate degrees don't mean shit when the only jobs in a 50-mile radius of their family involves Wal-Mart, pumping gas, or fast-food. Just because someone is educated doesn't mean that jobs magically appear in their area of the country. And, it gets expensive to move your ass somewhere else. Relocating stipends are given on a company-by-company basis, so you can't guarantee it to the new graduate, either.
I presume you live where there are jobs to be had for the plucking.