How so? They hadn't scheduled me for any hours beyond that first day when I showed up for that day. They took forever to hire me (this was back in the 90s), so long that I was able to get hired by someone else in the time it took them to get me through their stupid training.
I met my obligations to them. If they hadn't taken so long to hire me maybe I would have stayed there, but I was given an offer from a company who was going to give me a better base pay while RadioShack was heavily on commission.
Really that is the only question I have left. I guess Sears is staying afloat by the fact that they own most of their real estate and can use it as collateral. RadioShack by comparison has really nothing to offer any more to keep the doors open. Even as stupid as the decisions made by RadioShack top brass have been, they are nothing compared to the rampaging stupidity and arrogance that is Sears CEO Eddie Lampert.
I worked at a local RadioShack for a few hours once. I had gone through their training (which I had to go to a different suburb for), had store orientation, then by the time my first day came up I had a job offer somewhere else. It so happened that first day was the only day they put me on the schedule - presumably with plans to arrange the rest of my schedule at the conclusion of that day - and so I worked through my day and said thanks but no thanks, I have another job offer elsewhere.
The Challenger is a lot of things, but unless you're comparing it to an aircraft carrier I don't think "tiny" is a good adjective for it. Part of why it needs an 808 HP engine is because it weighs ~400 pounds more than the Ford Mustang that it competes against in the same class.
Trump's administration is on a fast track down the drain. We'll likely see a new POTUS before year's end at this rate. For those who fear that Pence could end up as the POTUS to finish off the term, it is hard to see Trump passing on the chance to be so vindictive on his way out as to take him down as well.
he United States Department of Energy activated its emergency teams to the Hanford Site.
Thankfully our POTUS appointed a highly qualified and intelligent person with n political agenda to lead the Department of Energy, so we know this will be handled in the safest and most intelligent manner possible.
If the jobs you can get in an area won't cover your minimum living expenses and savings simultaneously, then you need to change the equation. Either look for employment somewhere where you can live cheaper or learn a skill or trade that can command higher pay.
That is exactly why people move to the city. More jobs, better jobs, better pay. People living beyond the suburbs are being replaced by machines and other mechanisms that result in sub-livable wages at rates faster than those in the cities. At any location on this planet though there is a cost of living, and when people can't meet that, they have to make a decision. And if people are only meeting that cost of living, they aren't going to be able to save any money.
This isn't about art history majors graduating college and wondering why they can't find jobs. There are plenty of people who pursued education and training in more marketable fields who then find there is still adequate competition for the path they prepared for that they aren't able to bring in enough money to put anything into retirement until they are at least into their mid-30s. It's also about the fact that "get up and move" isn't as straightforward as it sounds for many people. Even young people with zero dependents still need transportation to get to wherever they are going to move to, and if they are moving across national boundaries they need the proper documentation to do so.
Have some people failed the economy for various crap choices of their own? Certainly. However an even larger number of people have been failed by the economy. Every day more people wake up and realize "holy shit, I'm in my 40s and I have zero dollars saved for retirement - my best hope is to die at work now". Many of these people never had a chance, in spite of what they were told in high school.
My number for median income came from a different wikidpedia page: Personal_income_in_the_United_States. But $28k is close enough that the difference isn't really relevant.
A difference of $2k is huge in that realm of income; we're talking about roughly 8% of the total pre-tax income. You also have not addressed the fact that people in that income bracket tend to pay ~30-35% in taxes between federal and state, so if they are puling in $30k pre-tax they are closer to $20k after taxes. If they are spending $1k per month on housing that leaves them with less than $8k for everything else for the year.
Even sprawling metropolitan areas like Los Angeles have them within ~60 miles from the city center and that's ignoring low cost areas within the city.
A 60 mile commute is not reasonable for most people, especially those of limited income. If you are making $30k or less, the odds of you having reliable transportation that can do 120 miles / day is very low. On top of that most jobs that pay that little have little to no stability or worker support, so if the employee's car breaks down once on their way to work now they likely have a car needing repair and they are out of a job.
And yes, compound interest favors saving when you're younger. That's a damn good reason to start saving as soon as you have income, not an excuse for delaying retirement.
Again, you are making a huge sweeping assumption that people are pulling in enough money to be able to saving money when they are younger. Very few people are actually in that situation right out of college or high school, for the reasons I just laid out above.
The cost of basic needs (food, water, basic shelter) are a fraction of the median personal income (~$30,000/yr)
First of all, the median personal income is below $30k for the country, and some places it is below that by quite a bit. The national median is closer to $28k per person. However there are many many different costs of living distributed throughout the country, and within any given community your own cost of living is influenced by who you live with, how far you travel to work, the transportation infrastructure, etc. There are plenty of places in this country where an individual cannot save money if they are living alone on $30k, in fact they are likely accumulating substantial debt at that wage - particularly once you deduct the taxes they pay on their income.
You are also overlooking the fact that compound interest favors those who can save money at at earlier time in their lives. Few workers can save money towards retirement before their mid-late 30s any more, and at that point it is almost too late unless they plan to work until they are 80.
If you actually read the comments here on this site you would know that what you have said is simply not true. For every comment from a liberal - or "collectivist" as you call them - there are 5 comments from a free market fascist such as yourself. Ever stop to think about why your karma is in the shitter? I can see your comment history, and it's all right there in front of us. You have shit karma not because of what you say - which would generally be moderated up on this site - but because of how you say it. When you expend more energy into attacking other people personally than on actually expressing an opinion (or even better yet putting out facts to support an opinion) you will see your karma here take a corresponding nose-dive.
But if this site is not conservative enough for you, I'm sure the folks over at townhall, breitbart, powerline, foxnews, and pajamas would love to hear from you. You could go whine to them about how "oppressed" you are here and they'll offer you sympathy.
Good luck using the round only in that way. I don't know that they are toxic enough to kill you on their own without a gun, which costs vastly more than just a few cents.
For the overwhelming majority of people in this country, retirement plans will be best summarized as "hope to die at work". Few people are making enough money beyond their needs to be able to save money towards retirement.
I've seen more vigorous debates amongst kids on tee-ball teams. Hoping for a vigorous debate on an issue like UBI in the conservative echo chamber that this place has become is as logical as picking up a crow feather on the street and hoping to use it to fly to the moon. There are so few commenters left here - and so little variation in thought and opinion - that I'm not sure we can even have a meaningful debate on emacs vs vi any more.
And based on actuarial data, he can expect to live about 15 more years.
Not at his weight. We don't know his actual height but we do know he's obese. Obesity at his age is just as detrimental - if not more so - as obesity at a younger age.
Keep in mind: he's never smoked, he doesn't drink and he has the best healthcare money can buy
So he won't die of lung cancer or liver cirrhosis. That doesn't mean much. We know that the rest of his health report is full of lies - and that as he signed a form claiming it to be truthful he blatantly lied under oath to the American people - so it's impossible to know what else is wrong with him. He's coming on 71 years old, which is up there. The current life expectancy in the US is around 76.6 for males, but he was born in 1946 when the number was 64.4 for men.
As for healthcare, it is not clear he is actually making good use of it. Just like in business he clearly likes to surround himself with people who will tell him what he wants to hear, rather than what he should hear. The comments from his physician on his evaluation are quite possibly enough to warrant a malpractice suit. His doctor should tell him to lose at least 50 pounds, if not more. Ever see footage of Trump exercising or eating something healthy? Me neither.
I'm not sure why some coward tagged your post overrated. I happen to disagree with several parts of what you said, but the overrated tag is unwarranted here (as it is in most cases).
The Clinton Administration was prosperous, had a great economy
For the rich. Workers got the shaft, hard, when Clinton picked up the Reagan/Bush free trade law and ran with it.
While the rich saw their wealth accelerate greatly under the Clinton Administration, the poor made better gains under the Clinton Administration than under almost any other of the past several decades. I can tell you that during that time my own wage was the furthest it had ever been from the federal or state minimum wage prior to when I completed graduate school. For some time I had a retail job where I was pulling about twice the minimum wage; now around 20 years later people in that same retail job are working it for about the same wage I made back then.
shitty service jobs paying a fraction of what a good unionized factory worker would make
You're absolutely right that the unions lost ground under Clinton. However they lost less ground under Clinton than under Reagan, either Bush, or Obama. Is that weak tea? Absolutely. It's easy to get the unions to yield when things are prosperous, and easy to strong-arm them into yielding when things are not. We've also had an overwhelming message of how terrible organized labor is (after all, who wants a 5 day work week, paid vacation, sick leave, or worker safety?) that makes it easy for the government to help big business disarm the unions.
Democrats voted in overwhelming numbers for a full out Socialist over Clinton.
No, they did not. First of all, it is an oversimplification to call Sanders a "full out Socialist". He has many significant socialist leanings but he diverges from the common platform in several ways. More significantly though, the primaries and caucuses were won by Hillary. Even if the superdelegates didn't exist, even if we ignore the state lines and just take the straight votes, even if we stand on our head when we count the ballots, she still won the nomination in the vote tally. Was it close? Yes, it was really quite close. Arguably it was close enough that it forced her to change some parts of her platform to bring the Sanders supporters in to support her, but that wasn't enough to win the election in November.
Were democrats trying to keep her out of the white house, as you claim? I have yet to meet anyone who voted in a democratic primary or caucus who went there to vote against someone. By comparison there were huge numbers of people - on both sides - who went out on election day and primarily cast a ballot against someone.
Personally I'm hoping that when Trump gets impeached or resigns, we find that Pence is tied in to the machine substantially enough to warrant his resignation as well. Just because we almost never see them in the same room doesn't mean Pence doesn't know what's going on; he is vastly more informed on how DC works than is Trump (although the same could be said for the couch in the Oval Office).
Hopefully it will trigger a crisis substantial enough to trigger a special federal election, otherwise the next in line is Paul Ryan which would not be good for the country either.
Sanders has done orders of magnitude more volume of honest work than Trump. Trump was born with more than a silver spoon in his mouth, he had the whole fucking dining set. He didn't only benefit from the enormous loan that his father gave him, but also from his father's connections to the dodgiest lawyers in all of NYC - who were happy to defend him to the end for the right price.
Eight years? Yeah, right. Trump will be lucky to make two. If he doesn't force congress to impeach him, or resign on his own, his "incredible" health will certainly fail him. He makes Newt Gingrich look like Richard Simmons.
Trump got in to office by being lucky enough to run against Hillary Clinton. A huge part of the GOP electorate would vote for a ticket of Kim Jong-Un with Mahmood Ahmedinejad just to keep someone named Clinton out of the white house. Any republican other than Trump would have wiped the floor with her; he was just such an atrociously awful example of a human being that there were people who had second thoughts or just simply stayed home.
Now that said, any democrat who wasn't named Clinton would have wiped the floor with Trump. Sanders would have annihilated him - indeed he polls better with self-identified conservatives than does Trump - as would any of a number of other people. Hell Jimmy Carter could have beaten him if he could have been talked into running.
We don't ordinarily allow criticism of a republican on the front page here; could this be from someone who is trying to get us to like Mike Pence in case he ascends to POTUS after Trump resigns?
You have some good points and there is room for argument on the danger of a voice-only phone call in the car. To be clear I'm not calling it an inherently safe thing to do but rather I am arguing that there are ways to make it more safe.
However what I was really after with this is that a phone call is one of the least dangerous things you can do with a phone while driving. A phone call does not require the user to look away from the road once it is initiated as there is nothing important to see. If the phone is set up hands-free it also does not require the user to take their hands off the steering wheel. However dealing with SMS or social media on the phone while driving does require this.
So would it be safer for people to just not use the phone at all while driving? Sure. Can we expect them to do that? No. If we could even just get them to stop doing the most inherently dangerous activities - that no reasonable person should ever expect to be able to safely do while driving - that would be a huge improvement.
Once a phone call is initiated it poses little or no risk as it continues. If I start a phone call while I'm at a stop light and continue with it I'm really not posing any additional danger to anyone. By comparison taking your eyes off the road to read and write a text message is inherently dangerous any time you are attempting to drive while doing so.
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How so? They hadn't scheduled me for any hours beyond that first day when I showed up for that day. They took forever to hire me (this was back in the 90s), so long that I was able to get hired by someone else in the time it took them to get me through their stupid training.
I met my obligations to them. If they hadn't taken so long to hire me maybe I would have stayed there, but I was given an offer from a company who was going to give me a better base pay while RadioShack was heavily on commission.
Really that is the only question I have left. I guess Sears is staying afloat by the fact that they own most of their real estate and can use it as collateral. RadioShack by comparison has really nothing to offer any more to keep the doors open. Even as stupid as the decisions made by RadioShack top brass have been, they are nothing compared to the rampaging stupidity and arrogance that is Sears CEO Eddie Lampert.
I worked at a local RadioShack for a few hours once. I had gone through their training (which I had to go to a different suburb for), had store orientation, then by the time my first day came up I had a job offer somewhere else. It so happened that first day was the only day they put me on the schedule - presumably with plans to arrange the rest of my schedule at the conclusion of that day - and so I worked through my day and said thanks but no thanks, I have another job offer elsewhere.
Pfft. I don't need an NTFS bug for that, it happens on its own.
The Challenger is a lot of things, but unless you're comparing it to an aircraft carrier I don't think "tiny" is a good adjective for it. Part of why it needs an 808 HP engine is because it weighs ~400 pounds more than the Ford Mustang that it competes against in the same class.
Trump's administration is on a fast track down the drain. We'll likely see a new POTUS before year's end at this rate. For those who fear that Pence could end up as the POTUS to finish off the term, it is hard to see Trump passing on the chance to be so vindictive on his way out as to take him down as well.
he United States Department of Energy activated its emergency teams to the Hanford Site.
Thankfully our POTUS appointed a highly qualified and intelligent person with n political agenda to lead the Department of Energy, so we know this will be handled in the safest and most intelligent manner possible.
After all, the American voters are all the boss of the POTUS. I can tell you he really stresses the hell out of me.
If the jobs you can get in an area won't cover your minimum living expenses and savings simultaneously, then you need to change the equation. Either look for employment somewhere where you can live cheaper or learn a skill or trade that can command higher pay.
That is exactly why people move to the city. More jobs, better jobs, better pay. People living beyond the suburbs are being replaced by machines and other mechanisms that result in sub-livable wages at rates faster than those in the cities. At any location on this planet though there is a cost of living, and when people can't meet that, they have to make a decision. And if people are only meeting that cost of living, they aren't going to be able to save any money.
This isn't about art history majors graduating college and wondering why they can't find jobs. There are plenty of people who pursued education and training in more marketable fields who then find there is still adequate competition for the path they prepared for that they aren't able to bring in enough money to put anything into retirement until they are at least into their mid-30s. It's also about the fact that "get up and move" isn't as straightforward as it sounds for many people. Even young people with zero dependents still need transportation to get to wherever they are going to move to, and if they are moving across national boundaries they need the proper documentation to do so.
Have some people failed the economy for various crap choices of their own? Certainly. However an even larger number of people have been failed by the economy. Every day more people wake up and realize "holy shit, I'm in my 40s and I have zero dollars saved for retirement - my best hope is to die at work now". Many of these people never had a chance, in spite of what they were told in high school.
My number for median income came from a different wikidpedia page: Personal_income_in_the_United_States. But $28k is close enough that the difference isn't really relevant.
A difference of $2k is huge in that realm of income; we're talking about roughly 8% of the total pre-tax income. You also have not addressed the fact that people in that income bracket tend to pay ~30-35% in taxes between federal and state, so if they are puling in $30k pre-tax they are closer to $20k after taxes. If they are spending $1k per month on housing that leaves them with less than $8k for everything else for the year.
Even sprawling metropolitan areas like Los Angeles have them within ~60 miles from the city center and that's ignoring low cost areas within the city.
A 60 mile commute is not reasonable for most people, especially those of limited income. If you are making $30k or less, the odds of you having reliable transportation that can do 120 miles / day is very low. On top of that most jobs that pay that little have little to no stability or worker support, so if the employee's car breaks down once on their way to work now they likely have a car needing repair and they are out of a job.
And yes, compound interest favors saving when you're younger. That's a damn good reason to start saving as soon as you have income, not an excuse for delaying retirement.
Again, you are making a huge sweeping assumption that people are pulling in enough money to be able to saving money when they are younger. Very few people are actually in that situation right out of college or high school, for the reasons I just laid out above.
The cost of basic needs (food, water, basic shelter) are a fraction of the median personal income (~$30,000/yr)
First of all, the median personal income is below $30k for the country, and some places it is below that by quite a bit. The national median is closer to $28k per person. However there are many many different costs of living distributed throughout the country, and within any given community your own cost of living is influenced by who you live with, how far you travel to work, the transportation infrastructure, etc. There are plenty of places in this country where an individual cannot save money if they are living alone on $30k, in fact they are likely accumulating substantial debt at that wage - particularly once you deduct the taxes they pay on their income.
You are also overlooking the fact that compound interest favors those who can save money at at earlier time in their lives. Few workers can save money towards retirement before their mid-late 30s any more, and at that point it is almost too late unless they plan to work until they are 80.
If you actually read the comments here on this site you would know that what you have said is simply not true. For every comment from a liberal - or "collectivist" as you call them - there are 5 comments from a free market fascist such as yourself. Ever stop to think about why your karma is in the shitter? I can see your comment history, and it's all right there in front of us. You have shit karma not because of what you say - which would generally be moderated up on this site - but because of how you say it. When you expend more energy into attacking other people personally than on actually expressing an opinion (or even better yet putting out facts to support an opinion) you will see your karma here take a corresponding nose-dive.
But if this site is not conservative enough for you, I'm sure the folks over at townhall, breitbart, powerline, foxnews, and pajamas would love to hear from you. You could go whine to them about how "oppressed" you are here and they'll offer you sympathy.
Good luck using the round only in that way. I don't know that they are toxic enough to kill you on their own without a gun, which costs vastly more than just a few cents.
For the overwhelming majority of people in this country, retirement plans will be best summarized as "hope to die at work". Few people are making enough money beyond their needs to be able to save money towards retirement.
I've seen more vigorous debates amongst kids on tee-ball teams. Hoping for a vigorous debate on an issue like UBI in the conservative echo chamber that this place has become is as logical as picking up a crow feather on the street and hoping to use it to fly to the moon. There are so few commenters left here - and so little variation in thought and opinion - that I'm not sure we can even have a meaningful debate on emacs vs vi any more.
And based on actuarial data, he can expect to live about 15 more years.
Not at his weight. We don't know his actual height but we do know he's obese. Obesity at his age is just as detrimental - if not more so - as obesity at a younger age.
Keep in mind: he's never smoked, he doesn't drink and he has the best healthcare money can buy
So he won't die of lung cancer or liver cirrhosis. That doesn't mean much. We know that the rest of his health report is full of lies - and that as he signed a form claiming it to be truthful he blatantly lied under oath to the American people - so it's impossible to know what else is wrong with him. He's coming on 71 years old, which is up there. The current life expectancy in the US is around 76.6 for males, but he was born in 1946 when the number was 64.4 for men.
As for healthcare, it is not clear he is actually making good use of it. Just like in business he clearly likes to surround himself with people who will tell him what he wants to hear, rather than what he should hear. The comments from his physician on his evaluation are quite possibly enough to warrant a malpractice suit. His doctor should tell him to lose at least 50 pounds, if not more. Ever see footage of Trump exercising or eating something healthy? Me neither.
The Clinton Administration was prosperous, had a great economy
For the rich. Workers got the shaft, hard, when Clinton picked up the Reagan/Bush free trade law and ran with it.
While the rich saw their wealth accelerate greatly under the Clinton Administration, the poor made better gains under the Clinton Administration than under almost any other of the past several decades. I can tell you that during that time my own wage was the furthest it had ever been from the federal or state minimum wage prior to when I completed graduate school. For some time I had a retail job where I was pulling about twice the minimum wage; now around 20 years later people in that same retail job are working it for about the same wage I made back then.
shitty service jobs paying a fraction of what a good unionized factory worker would make
You're absolutely right that the unions lost ground under Clinton. However they lost less ground under Clinton than under Reagan, either Bush, or Obama. Is that weak tea? Absolutely. It's easy to get the unions to yield when things are prosperous, and easy to strong-arm them into yielding when things are not. We've also had an overwhelming message of how terrible organized labor is (after all, who wants a 5 day work week, paid vacation, sick leave, or worker safety?) that makes it easy for the government to help big business disarm the unions.
Democrats voted in overwhelming numbers for a full out Socialist over Clinton.
No, they did not. First of all, it is an oversimplification to call Sanders a "full out Socialist". He has many significant socialist leanings but he diverges from the common platform in several ways. More significantly though, the primaries and caucuses were won by Hillary. Even if the superdelegates didn't exist, even if we ignore the state lines and just take the straight votes, even if we stand on our head when we count the ballots, she still won the nomination in the vote tally. Was it close? Yes, it was really quite close. Arguably it was close enough that it forced her to change some parts of her platform to bring the Sanders supporters in to support her, but that wasn't enough to win the election in November.
Were democrats trying to keep her out of the white house, as you claim? I have yet to meet anyone who voted in a democratic primary or caucus who went there to vote against someone. By comparison there were huge numbers of people - on both sides - who went out on election day and primarily cast a ballot against someone.
Personally I'm hoping that when Trump gets impeached or resigns, we find that Pence is tied in to the machine substantially enough to warrant his resignation as well. Just because we almost never see them in the same room doesn't mean Pence doesn't know what's going on; he is vastly more informed on how DC works than is Trump (although the same could be said for the couch in the Oval Office).
Hopefully it will trigger a crisis substantial enough to trigger a special federal election, otherwise the next in line is Paul Ryan which would not be good for the country either.
Sanders has done orders of magnitude more volume of honest work than Trump. Trump was born with more than a silver spoon in his mouth, he had the whole fucking dining set. He didn't only benefit from the enormous loan that his father gave him, but also from his father's connections to the dodgiest lawyers in all of NYC - who were happy to defend him to the end for the right price.
Eight years? Yeah, right. Trump will be lucky to make two. If he doesn't force congress to impeach him, or resign on his own, his "incredible" health will certainly fail him. He makes Newt Gingrich look like Richard Simmons.
Trump got in to office by being lucky enough to run against Hillary Clinton. A huge part of the GOP electorate would vote for a ticket of Kim Jong-Un with Mahmood Ahmedinejad just to keep someone named Clinton out of the white house. Any republican other than Trump would have wiped the floor with her; he was just such an atrociously awful example of a human being that there were people who had second thoughts or just simply stayed home.
Now that said, any democrat who wasn't named Clinton would have wiped the floor with Trump. Sanders would have annihilated him - indeed he polls better with self-identified conservatives than does Trump - as would any of a number of other people. Hell Jimmy Carter could have beaten him if he could have been talked into running.
We don't ordinarily allow criticism of a republican on the front page here; could this be from someone who is trying to get us to like Mike Pence in case he ascends to POTUS after Trump resigns?
You have some good points and there is room for argument on the danger of a voice-only phone call in the car. To be clear I'm not calling it an inherently safe thing to do but rather I am arguing that there are ways to make it more safe.
However what I was really after with this is that a phone call is one of the least dangerous things you can do with a phone while driving. A phone call does not require the user to look away from the road once it is initiated as there is nothing important to see. If the phone is set up hands-free it also does not require the user to take their hands off the steering wheel. However dealing with SMS or social media on the phone while driving does require this.
So would it be safer for people to just not use the phone at all while driving? Sure. Can we expect them to do that? No. If we could even just get them to stop doing the most inherently dangerous activities - that no reasonable person should ever expect to be able to safely do while driving - that would be a huge improvement.
Once a phone call is initiated it poses little or no risk as it continues. If I start a phone call while I'm at a stop light and continue with it I'm really not posing any additional danger to anyone. By comparison taking your eyes off the road to read and write a text message is inherently dangerous any time you are attempting to drive while doing so.