To be fair, it was a rural Southern University. And I actually only remember taking maybe 1 lit class there since I came in with AP lit credit. I could have been correct and typed "at which I played football", but I tend to type like I talk. Judging by your sig, you'll also love the fact that up until a few years before I attended the school it was affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.
I have 15% going to a 401k (it includes matching from my company) but, even in a dual-income household, with mortgage and student loan payments we can't afford to put anything more towards retirement.
Is she putting 15% of her income into a 401K or IRA too?
If so, then you're not doing too badly if starting out this young.
No. Her old job gave her a Roth, but she left that job for another one that paid a little less, but was closer to our house and actually offered a week of paid vacation. Every couple months she will put a couple hundred dollars into savings but that's it. I do all the 401k investment. Her paychecks are mostly earmarked for the mortgage.
There's no reason that ESPN couldn't be the go-to source of high quality online streams of sporting events, along with very lucrative ways of monetizing them, if they'd actually thought about this a few years ago.
My university (which I played football at) was the first Division II school to have full streaming rights with ESPN. For the last 2 seasons all home football games were streamed on ESPN, as were events from several other sports. There is no reason why ESPN couldn't do this for hundreds of other schools. Especially since filming and broadcasting/play-by-play duties are handled by the school's regular broadcast staff. Instead of having 8 different cable channels (plus all those alternate channels) that people rarely watch except in certain seasons (but still jacks up channel rates), invest that money in streaming. They can work deals with cable providers to put the WatchESPN app on the boxes like Comcast already does with Netflix and people can still watch their favorite games or sports on their TV. Or on their phone, or tablet, or computer. They have the infrastructure. They need to use it.
So basically if you are rich already you can invest and make money. I thought that went without saying.
Rich or, as I said, lucky. These days you don't get rich or make a lot of money just working. You can make enough to be comfortable (which I readily admit I am in this camp), but you have no real way to actually make money. I'm a reasonably intelligent person (and have been acknowledged as such both throughout school and by my coworkers), but my intelligence is geared more towards the acquisition and application of information. I'm not wired for inventive or entrepreneurial endeavors, which is just about how you get wealthy these days. There are other careers I could have chosen which would have led towards wealth and which, had I known I could have done, I would have pursued. But unfortunately we go through life with incomplete information. Those who are my age that happened to choose that path are just now entering the possibility of real wealth. Honestly, my goal in life now is to make enough money so that my wife can be a stay at home (or at least work part time) mom without affecting our quality of life and try to save up enough for retirement (what will help is that my grandparents have a decent amount of land and assets that my parents will inherit that will be further passed down to my sister and I). But again, that last part is luck. If I was really lucky, my grandparents would have bought $1000 worth Apple stock back in the 80s (and then forgot about because Apple went without paying dividends for so long) instead of only $100. Would have turned that $20k payout (since the stocks split a couple times) into $200k. They probably would have paid off my student loans from that, with plenty to spare.
What's depressing to me that, of the 5 other people in my immediate workgroup, who do the exact same job that I do(all of them also 20-30 years older than me), 4 of them have company pensions and will get to draw Social Security plus whatever whatever they've saved for retirement. The other will get his retirement and social security. I will probably just get my 401k.
The interesting statistic that I read recently was that the largest increase in the stock market happens right before the crash.
So, you're missing out on a lot of gains waiting for the crash.
Sure, you make all those gains, but, since like you say, timing the market is a fool's errand, unless you get lucky and pull out at the right time, you lose those gains along with everyone else.
Plus, as they say, timing the market is a fool's errand. Just buy now and ride out the bumps. On a long enough term, you'll mostly always come out good (except for a few occasions in history).
If you play long enough, the house always wins. When you play craps there's no problem riding a hot shooter, but if you are joining the game late in the streak, you might be better off just playing the pass line until he craps out. You won't win big, but you won't lose big either. Better to save your money for the next shooter.
That's true, but in the beginning it ran on a fairly significant surplus. Rather than holding on to that surplus (or even taking some of that surplus and converting it to interest-earning instruments) it was earmarked as funding for other projects and policies. It could have remained solvent for much longer, but at this point it's turned into little more than a government run Ponzi scheme. The initial investors (boomers) get their promised returns and their money back while the newest investors (my generation) won't get anything out of it.
The problem is that you don't make money by investing unless you can control your risk and make decisions from an understanding of how businesses work. This is a very specific skill set that is as complicated as programming. If you have someone else make the decisions for you, you are not getting a very big piece of the pie.
There are 2 easy ways to make big money investing. 1 is HFT. The market on that is kind of locked down, the little guy doesn't really stand a chance to get in on that unless you buy stock in HFT firms. The second is to just put enough in so that your small piece of the pie(to use your metaphor) is still a pretty big piece. That's kind of my point: unless you are smart enough (in the right way, there are plenty of smart/intelligent people that can't play the market) or are lucky enough (get in on an IPO, fall into the right job, chose the right parents), you get stuck working a job not "creating" them, and therefore don't even really get the chance to play the game.
Everyone knows that these days you don't make money actually working in a job. If you want to make money you have to invest. If they paid workers decent wages then all these companies wouldn't be able to post perpetually increasing profits which means that their stock value tanks. And if stock values tank, how are all those decent, hardworking, real Americans going to take care of their families if they can't get money from the stock markets? Because they certainly can't make any money working in a real job. Companies no longer exist to provide services for customers and jobs for employees. They exist to drive income to shareholders through dividends or profits derived from stock trading. That's why you have all these unicorns and tech companies with massive valuations with no clear plan to profitability or long-term stability: that's not their purpose. They just need to keep the stocks flowing and the Dow going up.
When did companies exist to provide jobs for employees?
Anyways, investment has replaced pension and retirement. If you don't invest, then you're working till the day you die. Instead of letting the company or city handle the investment, you handle it yourself now. So, the burden of investment is now on you.
I have 15% going to a 401k (it includes matching from my company) but, even in a dual-income household, with mortgage and student loan payments we can't afford to put anything more towards retirement. We put a little bit into savings each month but that's it. And the sad thing is, with the combined income of me and my wife (and including overtime, profit sharing, bonuses, etc) we will make almost $100k this year. My wife brought over a decent amount of savings when we got married, but I'm afraid to invest any of if because I know that this giant stack of Jenga blocks we call a stock market is going to come crashing down sooner rather than later (when it does I'll shift funds to index stocks and ride the recovery). The marketing and advertising bubble will pop. The Twitter sale debacle is a harbinger of what's to come as people realize that marketing data and ad revenue aren't enough to keep a business afloat (hear the rumblings about Twitter adding paid subscriptions?) As incomes remain at best stagnant, disposable income drops as cost of living increases, meaning that marketing data gets less and less valuable. One of the pillars the stock market is built upon is confidence. As these large, popular companies go further and further in the red, people will start to panic. Wall Street might want to look into licensing those FoxConn suicide nets, or at least hand out free hardhats to pedestrians walking below.
Keep the next generation impoverished so they don't get too uppity/powerful.
It's really more "How do I keep my gravy train rolling so I can live the lifestyle I'm accustomed to" rather than "Screw the next guy". The early baby boomers pissed away the Social Security surplus through wasteful spending, while the rest of the generation have so much money tied up in stocks/401k/retirement that the only way to keep their money is to keep the stock market going up and up. In order to do this wages have to go down so that profits can go up (since other costs can only be reduced so much, and prices can only be raised so much), leaving new workers (younger generations) holding the bag.
Everyone knows that these days you don't make money actually working in a job. If you want to make money you have to invest. If they paid workers decent wages then all these companies wouldn't be able to post perpetually increasing profits which means that their stock value tanks. And if stock values tank, how are all those decent, hardworking, real Americans going to take care of their families if they can't get money from the stock markets? Because they certainly can't make any money working in a real job. Companies no longer exist to provide services for customers and jobs for employees. They exist to drive income to shareholders through dividends or profits derived from stock trading. That's why you have all these unicorns and tech companies with massive valuations with no clear plan to profitability or long-term stability: that's not their purpose. They just need to keep the stocks flowing and the Dow going up.
Aaaaaaand he was a Muslim convert. What's your point? That if we hadn't imported tons of Islam he would still have converted?
Quite possibly. There is this thing called the Internet, you know.
So to circumvent the spreading of Islamic danger, we should control every form of communication? I see where this is going.
Nope, I'm saying you will never be able to stop extremism, and fascist acts such as destroying personal privacy and xenophobic/nationalistic acts such as barring all immigrants from a single specific category won't work and will end up hurting, not helping your society in the long run.
Me and my wife have different tastes in movies, so we can rarely find one that we can both agree to go watch in theaters. If we do go to a theater to see a movie, we go to one of the new types of theaters that serve food and drinks at the seats, which means it's an easy $40-50. I'm already paying for premium movies channels on cable, have access to Netflix, and there are Redboxes all over the place we can use too. There is simply no incentive in most cases to see a movie in theaters anymore.
So far though during the campaign and in the first part of the administration, Ivanka has taken on most of the roles traditionally held by the first lady. Especially since she is in DC and Melania is in NY. Everything pretty much indicates that Ivanka is closer to Trump than Melania is, so it would kind of make sense.
Scotland just voted to have a post-Brexit independence referendum. Without Scotland, there is no UK. Just the greater Welsh Hegemony.
Well it would get interesting as the EU doesn't let new entrants in on legacy deals. It's the euro, Schengen, full package if Scotland wants to rejoin. Which would mean they'd have to leave the pound and put real border control on the UK border.
But Scotland isn't a new entrant. They are already members of the EU, albeit through association with Great Britain. If Scotland votes for independence the EU can just interpret that not as the UK leaving and Scotland applying as a new member, but England leaving while Scotland retains it's current membership. And if England gets the treatment and outcome that most people outside the "leave" campaign believe they will get, Srotland will have no problem going along with the Euro, Schengen, etc. Scotland on the euro will be a much stronger currency than England on the pound.
The Scots will not be allowed to join the EU because existing member states do not want to encourage their own separatist movements.
This isn't a separatist situation, however. In fact, allowing Scotland in would validate the EU because it shows people wanting to be EU members. This is a case of EU members wanting remain EU members. It might cause an issue if say, Spain ever tried to leave the EU but Catalonia wanted to stay as members, but you aren't going to see much support for separatist groups splitting off from a current EU member to create a new EU member state.
This is the only method member states have of telling the EU it's doing it wrong: leaving.
This isn't England taking their ball and going home. This is England slashing the ball up with a knife and breaking their own legs. The EU will find a new ball (probably one with a Scottish accent) and keep playing while England is stuck in bed with a broken leg for 6 months.
Josh Gates already went looking for the Tasmanian tiger, and if he can't find it no one can.
Seriously though, they did have some interesting photos that do lend credence to the idea that there are still some out there. It's not impossible, and certainly more likely to be found than bigfoot, loch ness, etc. It's possible a small enough breeding population could keep the species alive without being detected
The issue isn't really that jobs as a whole are being lost, it's that certain types of jobs are being lost. High paying, low skilled jobs are going away, replaced by a few low paying, low skilled jobs and a few high paying, high skilled jobs. Gone are the days where you can graduate (or drop out of) high school and walk right into a job on an assembly line or manufacturing floor and make enough money to support a single-income family as well as a pension for retirement. Now most of the jobs in that factory floor are cleaning up after the robots (low-paying and low skilled) or programming/maintaining/designing the robots (high skilled-even if just going to technical schools to learn maintenance- and high paying). And to play off the example from the summary: cranes replaced dockworkers and added jobs for engineers and financiers, but how many dockworkers can turn into engineers? There are a lot of people that either can't or won't be able to transition from the jobs that are lost to the ones that are created, and they make up a sizable and motivated voter base which has led to our current political mess. Trying to placate them with policies that "promote" jobs will hold back the progress of the country as well as possibly damage the country itself when you remove environmental protections in the name of job creation (that really won't add many jobs anyway, but it increase corporate profits and makes a good sound bite to those out of work).
I see one solution to increasing automation of our workforce: a combination of make-work and retraining programs. Everyone admits our infrastructure is old and sucks, right? Take all these out of work low skilled workers and after a month or two training, set them to work repairing roads and bridges, or digging ditches and laying down fiber (all under supervision of engineers, foremen, and already trained/skilled workers). They work at those jobs 2-3 days a week, and spend the other 2-3 days getting retrained to do other jobs like electrical, hvac, skilled construction work, cooking, administrative work, etc. Those that can't pass retraining classes can stay on road work/digging crews, or try their luck at retail, working the counter at Starbucks/McDonalds, or try for other low skill jobs. Those physically unable to do manual work can be put to work doing back office support like filing, administrative, etc, also while receiving training to hopefully move on and do those jobs at other companies. This way you've killed 2 birds with 1 stone: you've provided jobs and retrained workers for positions in demand or that can't be easily automated, and you've repaired a lot of the US infrastructure. Sure, it's a borderline Communist idea these days, but those jobs that are gone aren't coming back, so these kinds of jobs are all that will be left. But the political cost to do so would be too big, and let's face it, Trump has shown that playing to out of work blue-collar workers is a good path into the White House so there's no incentive to actually help them, only to appear to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, it was a rural Southern University. And I actually only remember taking maybe 1 lit class there since I came in with AP lit credit. I could have been correct and typed "at which I played football", but I tend to type like I talk. Judging by your sig, you'll also love the fact that up until a few years before I attended the school it was affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.
Hey at least they give the score of baseball games, hockey fans don't even get that.
How do they score ice boxing matches? It it kind of like football? 6 points if you knock someone out, with 1 point added for every tooth they lose?
Is she putting 15% of her income into a 401K or IRA too?
If so, then you're not doing too badly if starting out this young.
No. Her old job gave her a Roth, but she left that job for another one that paid a little less, but was closer to our house and actually offered a week of paid vacation. Every couple months she will put a couple hundred dollars into savings but that's it. I do all the 401k investment. Her paychecks are mostly earmarked for the mortgage.
They should have seen this coming years ago.
There's no reason that ESPN couldn't be the go-to source of high quality online streams of sporting events, along with very lucrative ways of monetizing them, if they'd actually thought about this a few years ago.
My university (which I played football at) was the first Division II school to have full streaming rights with ESPN. For the last 2 seasons all home football games were streamed on ESPN, as were events from several other sports. There is no reason why ESPN couldn't do this for hundreds of other schools. Especially since filming and broadcasting/play-by-play duties are handled by the school's regular broadcast staff. Instead of having 8 different cable channels (plus all those alternate channels) that people rarely watch except in certain seasons (but still jacks up channel rates), invest that money in streaming. They can work deals with cable providers to put the WatchESPN app on the boxes like Comcast already does with Netflix and people can still watch their favorite games or sports on their TV. Or on their phone, or tablet, or computer. They have the infrastructure. They need to use it.
So basically if you are rich already you can invest and make money. I thought that went without saying.
Rich or, as I said, lucky. These days you don't get rich or make a lot of money just working. You can make enough to be comfortable (which I readily admit I am in this camp), but you have no real way to actually make money. I'm a reasonably intelligent person (and have been acknowledged as such both throughout school and by my coworkers), but my intelligence is geared more towards the acquisition and application of information. I'm not wired for inventive or entrepreneurial endeavors, which is just about how you get wealthy these days. There are other careers I could have chosen which would have led towards wealth and which, had I known I could have done, I would have pursued. But unfortunately we go through life with incomplete information. Those who are my age that happened to choose that path are just now entering the possibility of real wealth. Honestly, my goal in life now is to make enough money so that my wife can be a stay at home (or at least work part time) mom without affecting our quality of life and try to save up enough for retirement (what will help is that my grandparents have a decent amount of land and assets that my parents will inherit that will be further passed down to my sister and I). But again, that last part is luck. If I was really lucky, my grandparents would have bought $1000 worth Apple stock back in the 80s (and then forgot about because Apple went without paying dividends for so long) instead of only $100. Would have turned that $20k payout (since the stocks split a couple times) into $200k. They probably would have paid off my student loans from that, with plenty to spare.
But their companies promised them those pensions!
What's depressing to me that, of the 5 other people in my immediate workgroup, who do the exact same job that I do(all of them also 20-30 years older than me), 4 of them have company pensions and will get to draw Social Security plus whatever whatever they've saved for retirement. The other will get his retirement and social security. I will probably just get my 401k.
The interesting statistic that I read recently was that the largest increase in the stock market happens right before the crash.
So, you're missing out on a lot of gains waiting for the crash.
Sure, you make all those gains, but, since like you say, timing the market is a fool's errand, unless you get lucky and pull out at the right time, you lose those gains along with everyone else.
Plus, as they say, timing the market is a fool's errand. Just buy now and ride out the bumps. On a long enough term, you'll mostly always come out good (except for a few occasions in history).
If you play long enough, the house always wins. When you play craps there's no problem riding a hot shooter, but if you are joining the game late in the streak, you might be better off just playing the pass line until he craps out. You won't win big, but you won't lose big either. Better to save your money for the next shooter.
That's true, but in the beginning it ran on a fairly significant surplus. Rather than holding on to that surplus (or even taking some of that surplus and converting it to interest-earning instruments) it was earmarked as funding for other projects and policies. It could have remained solvent for much longer, but at this point it's turned into little more than a government run Ponzi scheme. The initial investors (boomers) get their promised returns and their money back while the newest investors (my generation) won't get anything out of it.
The problem is that you don't make money by investing unless you can control your risk and make decisions from an understanding of how businesses work. This is a very specific skill set that is as complicated as programming. If you have someone else make the decisions for you, you are not getting a very big piece of the pie.
There are 2 easy ways to make big money investing. 1 is HFT. The market on that is kind of locked down, the little guy doesn't really stand a chance to get in on that unless you buy stock in HFT firms. The second is to just put enough in so that your small piece of the pie(to use your metaphor) is still a pretty big piece. That's kind of my point: unless you are smart enough (in the right way, there are plenty of smart/intelligent people that can't play the market) or are lucky enough (get in on an IPO, fall into the right job, chose the right parents), you get stuck working a job not "creating" them, and therefore don't even really get the chance to play the game.
Everyone knows that these days you don't make money actually working in a job. If you want to make money you have to invest. If they paid workers decent wages then all these companies wouldn't be able to post perpetually increasing profits which means that their stock value tanks. And if stock values tank, how are all those decent, hardworking, real Americans going to take care of their families if they can't get money from the stock markets? Because they certainly can't make any money working in a real job. Companies no longer exist to provide services for customers and jobs for employees. They exist to drive income to shareholders through dividends or profits derived from stock trading. That's why you have all these unicorns and tech companies with massive valuations with no clear plan to profitability or long-term stability: that's not their purpose. They just need to keep the stocks flowing and the Dow going up.
When did companies exist to provide jobs for employees?
Anyways, investment has replaced pension and retirement. If you don't invest, then you're working till the day you die. Instead of letting the company or city handle the investment, you handle it yourself now. So, the burden of investment is now on you.
I have 15% going to a 401k (it includes matching from my company) but, even in a dual-income household, with mortgage and student loan payments we can't afford to put anything more towards retirement. We put a little bit into savings each month but that's it. And the sad thing is, with the combined income of me and my wife (and including overtime, profit sharing, bonuses, etc) we will make almost $100k this year. My wife brought over a decent amount of savings when we got married, but I'm afraid to invest any of if because I know that this giant stack of Jenga blocks we call a stock market is going to come crashing down sooner rather than later (when it does I'll shift funds to index stocks and ride the recovery). The marketing and advertising bubble will pop. The Twitter sale debacle is a harbinger of what's to come as people realize that marketing data and ad revenue aren't enough to keep a business afloat (hear the rumblings about Twitter adding paid subscriptions?) As incomes remain at best stagnant, disposable income drops as cost of living increases, meaning that marketing data gets less and less valuable. One of the pillars the stock market is built upon is confidence. As these large, popular companies go further and further in the red, people will start to panic. Wall Street might want to look into licensing those FoxConn suicide nets, or at least hand out free hardhats to pedestrians walking below.
Keep the next generation impoverished so they don't get too uppity/powerful.
It's really more "How do I keep my gravy train rolling so I can live the lifestyle I'm accustomed to" rather than "Screw the next guy". The early baby boomers pissed away the Social Security surplus through wasteful spending, while the rest of the generation have so much money tied up in stocks/401k/retirement that the only way to keep their money is to keep the stock market going up and up. In order to do this wages have to go down so that profits can go up (since other costs can only be reduced so much, and prices can only be raised so much), leaving new workers (younger generations) holding the bag.
Everyone knows that these days you don't make money actually working in a job. If you want to make money you have to invest. If they paid workers decent wages then all these companies wouldn't be able to post perpetually increasing profits which means that their stock value tanks. And if stock values tank, how are all those decent, hardworking, real Americans going to take care of their families if they can't get money from the stock markets? Because they certainly can't make any money working in a real job. Companies no longer exist to provide services for customers and jobs for employees. They exist to drive income to shareholders through dividends or profits derived from stock trading. That's why you have all these unicorns and tech companies with massive valuations with no clear plan to profitability or long-term stability: that's not their purpose. They just need to keep the stocks flowing and the Dow going up.
Aaaaaaand he was a Muslim convert. What's your point? That if we hadn't imported tons of Islam he would still have converted?
Quite possibly. There is this thing called the Internet, you know.
So to circumvent the spreading of Islamic danger, we should control every form of communication? I see where this is going.
Nope, I'm saying you will never be able to stop extremism, and fascist acts such as destroying personal privacy and xenophobic/nationalistic acts such as barring all immigrants from a single specific category won't work and will end up hurting, not helping your society in the long run.
Aaaaaaand he was a Muslim convert. What's your point? That if we hadn't imported tons of Islam he would still have converted?
Quite possibly. There is this thing called the Internet, you know.
Yeah, or how about just cutting down on the vast number of Muslims who immigrate every year?
You mean like the latest attacker who ran over those people and stabbed the police officer to death? Oh, wait, he was born in England....
Me and my wife have different tastes in movies, so we can rarely find one that we can both agree to go watch in theaters. If we do go to a theater to see a movie, we go to one of the new types of theaters that serve food and drinks at the seats, which means it's an easy $40-50. I'm already paying for premium movies channels on cable, have access to Netflix, and there are Redboxes all over the place we can use too. There is simply no incentive in most cases to see a movie in theaters anymore.
So far though during the campaign and in the first part of the administration, Ivanka has taken on most of the roles traditionally held by the first lady. Especially since she is in DC and Melania is in NY. Everything pretty much indicates that Ivanka is closer to Trump than Melania is, so it would kind of make sense.
That explains why my iPhone was always overheating!
Scotland just voted to have a post-Brexit independence referendum. Without Scotland, there is no UK. Just the greater Welsh Hegemony.
Well it would get interesting as the EU doesn't let new entrants in on legacy deals. It's the euro, Schengen, full package if Scotland wants to rejoin. Which would mean they'd have to leave the pound and put real border control on the UK border.
But Scotland isn't a new entrant. They are already members of the EU, albeit through association with Great Britain. If Scotland votes for independence the EU can just interpret that not as the UK leaving and Scotland applying as a new member, but England leaving while Scotland retains it's current membership. And if England gets the treatment and outcome that most people outside the "leave" campaign believe they will get, Srotland will have no problem going along with the Euro, Schengen, etc. Scotland on the euro will be a much stronger currency than England on the pound.
The Scots will not be allowed to join the EU because existing member states do not want to encourage their own separatist movements.
This isn't a separatist situation, however. In fact, allowing Scotland in would validate the EU because it shows people wanting to be EU members. This is a case of EU members wanting remain EU members. It might cause an issue if say, Spain ever tried to leave the EU but Catalonia wanted to stay as members, but you aren't going to see much support for separatist groups splitting off from a current EU member to create a new EU member state.
This is the only method member states have of telling the EU it's doing it wrong: leaving.
This isn't England taking their ball and going home. This is England slashing the ball up with a knife and breaking their own legs. The EU will find a new ball (probably one with a Scottish accent) and keep playing while England is stuck in bed with a broken leg for 6 months.
Josh Gates already went looking for the Tasmanian tiger, and if he can't find it no one can.
Seriously though, they did have some interesting photos that do lend credence to the idea that there are still some out there. It's not impossible, and certainly more likely to be found than bigfoot, loch ness, etc. It's possible a small enough breeding population could keep the species alive without being detected
The issue isn't really that jobs as a whole are being lost, it's that certain types of jobs are being lost. High paying, low skilled jobs are going away, replaced by a few low paying, low skilled jobs and a few high paying, high skilled jobs. Gone are the days where you can graduate (or drop out of) high school and walk right into a job on an assembly line or manufacturing floor and make enough money to support a single-income family as well as a pension for retirement. Now most of the jobs in that factory floor are cleaning up after the robots (low-paying and low skilled) or programming/maintaining/designing the robots (high skilled-even if just going to technical schools to learn maintenance- and high paying). And to play off the example from the summary: cranes replaced dockworkers and added jobs for engineers and financiers, but how many dockworkers can turn into engineers? There are a lot of people that either can't or won't be able to transition from the jobs that are lost to the ones that are created, and they make up a sizable and motivated voter base which has led to our current political mess. Trying to placate them with policies that "promote" jobs will hold back the progress of the country as well as possibly damage the country itself when you remove environmental protections in the name of job creation (that really won't add many jobs anyway, but it increase corporate profits and makes a good sound bite to those out of work).
I see one solution to increasing automation of our workforce: a combination of make-work and retraining programs. Everyone admits our infrastructure is old and sucks, right? Take all these out of work low skilled workers and after a month or two training, set them to work repairing roads and bridges, or digging ditches and laying down fiber (all under supervision of engineers, foremen, and already trained/skilled workers). They work at those jobs 2-3 days a week, and spend the other 2-3 days getting retrained to do other jobs like electrical, hvac, skilled construction work, cooking, administrative work, etc. Those that can't pass retraining classes can stay on road work/digging crews, or try their luck at retail, working the counter at Starbucks/McDonalds, or try for other low skill jobs. Those physically unable to do manual work can be put to work doing back office support like filing, administrative, etc, also while receiving training to hopefully move on and do those jobs at other companies. This way you've killed 2 birds with 1 stone: you've provided jobs and retrained workers for positions in demand or that can't be easily automated, and you've repaired a lot of the US infrastructure. Sure, it's a borderline Communist idea these days, but those jobs that are gone aren't coming back, so these kinds of jobs are all that will be left. But the political cost to do so would be too big, and let's face it, Trump has shown that playing to out of work blue-collar workers is a good path into the White House so there's no incentive to actually help them, only to appear to do so.
I score my golf game by my best hole and the number of balls I lose.
A par and 2 is a _great_ round of golf.
Take your score and divide by the number of balls lost. As long as you are under par (or got a beer cart girl's number) you've had a good day.
it is the grass that suffers.
Well, to be fair, every golfer should know to repair their divots.