Mass-mailing can have a neutral, helpful tone that allows people to shift the focus off themselves, and judge others. That gets the speaker out of the hot seat.
I was, mostly, citing a problem. Education systems are easier to fix, except politicians don't want to--if you go from 40% success to 85% success, you get 100% media coverage on the 15% of students failing, and their parents claiming your new education system fucked them all up.
So, how are you going to get companies to pay for employee training?
Like this:
You can go to a school and learn to weld.
There are 1.5 million Welders. Businesses need 1.7 million Welders. They need to hire 200,000 Welders.
Rich people don't become Welders.
Middle-class people have jobs already.
Adults coming out of middle-class households have no way to independently afford a vocational education as a Welder.
Businesses requiring Welders can't find applicants. They're facing an inability to acquire talent, choking off their growth and diminishing their profits. They face the immediate threat of a competitor somehow finding additional staff to expand across the market demand, overstepping them, capturing their market, expanding their brand, potentially reducing the legitimacy of their business as they struggle to meet contracts and deadlines while their competitor is always able to say yes to every technically reasonable demand, thus threatening their business with collapse.
They really, really need welders if they're not going to lose profits and experience a massive tumbling of stock price and loss of shareholder value; but welders aren't going to come out of nowhere. Nobody who actually wants to be a welder can really afford to train themselves.
What a pity...
Welding may be a poor example, as it's moderately niche and cheap--welding school costs, what, $15,000 in total? On the other hand, most companies hard-up for welders are quite aware that welding is a niche--people aren't going to college in droves to become certified welders--and so will pay a hobbyist with an interest in a career in welding to go to school. I've known quite a few welders and electricians that got in that way, even so far as BGE hiring a new electrician, paying their salary, and sending them off to school for a full year without giving them any work--you get a paycheck, you get free school, and you get no actual job to perform--before sticking them in an apprenticeship where someone can keep an eye on the new fish.
It's quite a different landscape than IT. It's fairly uncommon, but far from unheard of, for a welder's job security to fail largely by way of his boss being a dick, him constantly telling his boss to fuck off and die in a fire, then eventually spitting in his boss's face and walking off the job to go find someone who's not a bloody cocksucker to work for. I wouldn't bet my career on that, but it happens often enough, and typically because the boss in question wants to stroke his ego and display authority, and is afraid of firing a good technician and having trouble filling the gap (thus looking like an incompetent assclown in front of everyone); in IT, you're practically begging daily to keep your privilege of serfdom.
I don't want to bring the tyrannical guilds back; nor do I want to legitimize their evil cousins, the trade unions. I would like, however, for the individual to have, within all career paths, the type of personal power that a trade union carries, without swearing fealty to the fiefdom of the guild or union. That means pressing the knife into the palm of the businesses on all fronts, just enough to extract a wince of pain, so they work to produce a workforce--and work to maintain that workforce in an earnest attempt to keep pressure off that blade.
There is one other argument I could make, although it's fairly uncivil; you'll forgive me that, I'm sure.
how are you going to get companies to pay for employee training?
If they don't, then, obviously, they don't need to. Either employees can pay for training themselves anyway, or they have no need of the excessive labor force we're building. Your question begs the question of why should they pay for employee training, which only has one answer: it provides an advantage over not doing so. That advantage would only be manifest in the need for labor, without which we achieve nothing by sending anyone to learn any sort of vocation.
In other words: you asked a silly question. The logical argument in that manner is a tad uncivil, as I've said.
I'm not talking about people stealing to buy food. That, as far as I know, doesn't happen very much.
I was highlighting the counterpoint, the need for welfare. With modern welfare, 49.1 million Americans still go without adequate food; we have 320 million Americans, meaning a full 15% frequently struggle to find enough to eat. This is a very real problem, the solving of which has very real benefits; your concerns are simply the supposed side-effects of solving this problem.
I'm talking about gross child abuse, negligence, or general violence in and around the home, or having additional children in a "home" that's already damaging children on a daily basis.
That's all stuff you can't really do much about without good, strong social policy. Back in the 50s, we still had PSAs and stuff, pushing our moral agenda on society; today, we do none of that, which means we don't show people what we think a good household looks like.
If only the state sent out pamphlets and video and announcements on good parenting, attacking solid issues like maximizing cohesion between parents and children so your kids don't piss you off so much by acting like little motherfuckers, or improving their academic performance so their teachers stop fucking calling you all the damn time, or keeping them engaged in a positive social atmosphere so the police stop coming to your house and charging you fines, we might encourage little changes that give big effects.
At the very least, we could make parents more self-conscious about the judgment of their peers about their parenting.
I've been working on educational policies which should sharply reduce these problems in the next generation. I took a prior position of modifying school districts based on local need; while I don't retract that position, I think we can safely de-emphasize it, as I've determined the strategies which most help those students in the poorest districts also greatly improve the academic performance of those students in the most financially secure districts.
Most of the stuff I'd want to implement to bring students in poor, black, inner-city ghettos would raise students in white upper-middle-class suburbs up to a higher standard, as well, most likely elevating both in total to the same level of performance--the poor by a much larger degree from where they start, of course, due to the factors you cite. I believe it's environment, and not breeding; I simply wish to transfer the advantages of a better environment to all students.
All of this, of course, would require one to two generations to catch on. Those students already past the early grades would miss this benefit, and grow up status quo; those students entering would become the new parents, 30 years later, mixing their kids with half a generation of kids living in educationally-disadvantaged households, themselves receiving the same remedy as the new generation of parents. It won't fix everything, but it should help immensely.
You realize, of course, that all this--the new welfare system, the new education system, and so forth--is really the most effective way to destroy America, right? Can you imagine the repercussions of a truly free population, of every human being set on the firm ground of extremely rough survival and the maximum utility of their brains? Either of those is dangerous; combine the ability to fall back to an unpleasant but survivable position with the full knowledge and skill of employing the brain as a powerful tool to its maximum potential and you have the most tactically-dangerous threat any country has ever faced. America has shaped itself around a core of exploiting the desperate and stupid; that will one day prove impossible. Forever.
I immediately thought the corollary: how incompetent are you if you can't stage a meaningful investigation without accessing the contents of an endpoint storage device? You can certainly pull records of who texted and called who how frequently and for how long from the phone company. You can establish a list of contacts, draw relationship maps, and perform legwork investigation. You know, walk around talking to people.
It just says to me they don't care about their jobs. We have investigators looking for a silver bullet. "We found a guy texted that he's gonna kill this dude for fucking his daughter! Obvious confession! Hang him!" No evidence that he followed through, except that the guy is dead. Motive and means, ladies and gentlemen. Give him the chair.
This is like when they walked into a burned-out house in Texas, looked at the floor, said, "Look, these burn patterns mean accelerant, meaning arson," and then arrested the man of the house for murdering his wife and kid because he had gotten in a fight and left a few hours before the fire. Then, 10 years later, an incendiary scientist looked at the pictures and evidence and said, "This is all crap. All this shit the investigators claim are well-known myths perpetuated by people who have no fucking clue what they're doing. Also having an Iron Maiden poster and a tattoo of a skull on your arm doesn't make you a satanist and a murderer." They looked for the blinding evidence of arson, looked for who was there an hour ago and pissed off, and identified him as guilty... except none of the evidence was actually relevant to anything.
If she'd asked her security and programming teams what they thought, they would have told her exactly what they had already posted on their customer-facing pages. She doesn't need to know anything about programming; she needs to have a CRO to find out what problems and opportunities this can cause for the company (risks), and other staff to find out the actual implications, and a head for recognizing how this pragmatically impacts her business. All of that non-technical information bluntly tells her to thank everyone for their help and then shut her fat fucking mouth.
It's not that. I'm not discussing the validity of a need for a college degree to succeed at employment; I'm discussing the behavior of markets.
The system of supporting college degrees per individual--student loans or free college--means employers only need to plan out a year or two ahead, set budget, and then demand a flood of hundreds of applications in the 2 months leading up to urgent need. Chickens scratching at barren ground, begging for whatever bits of fragmented grain they can find. Your marketable value is nothing; you are a tool to be picked, used, thrown off if you don't fit comfortably in the hand, and purchased or rented for as little as possible. If your skills become obsolete, you're replaced--else you go out yourself and append new skills, working full time PLUS college while some new student only goes to college once to get the summary course of the same effort as your initial single effort.
I've worked for businesses whose HR instigates a policy of paying around the 25th percentile for all labor, and rolling the revolving door to get rid of crap labor. Poor benefits, low salaries, 30-40 applications per cycle, and spend a year or three building each department on the backs of people underpaid by $20k/year. The strategy works quite well as of these last decades.
Each business can see, plainly, their markets, their competition, their strategies, their current growth, and their predicted growth. Knowing these things for a few years out is part of running a business. Aggregating this across markets is speculative, carrying much higher risks; likewise, predicting what everyone else will do is even harder. That means businesses can reliably build a precisely-tailored workforce, while individuals in charge of their own development can only oversupply at their own expense.
Removing the ability for individually-driven vocational training--and college is really just career training with embellishment (yes, you must know Chemistry and Biology to be a computer programmer, somehow)--means businesses suffer first. The businesses have no option: should they fail to train a new workforce, they won't accomplish their strategies, and a competitor will destroy them by building a solid workforce. Likewise, as they develop an employee, that employee becomes an asset: it's favorable to keep and extend the employee, providing new training, rather than to try to find a replacement. Employees become valuable and important.
100 individuals who go to college and come out hunting for 10 jobs means 90 individuals with no jobs, and 10 desperately clinging to whatever they can scrape up; 100 individuals facing 10 jobs with no qualified competition means those businesses must select 10 individuals, pay them, employ them, train them, and pay for their formal education, and so the individuals are no worse off. Businesses have a distinctly different position between these as well: those of the first group are replaceable; those of the second aren't, unless you're prepared to build new stock through large investments of time, effort, and the risk of hiring lazy and useless employees whom aren't recognized as such until they've spent several months simply not taking to training.
Who makes out better when the Government initiates a plan to give every individual the capacity to put himself through college: the individual or the business? Oh, it doesn't matter if both benefit--in fact, that would distinctly create wealth, costing less (in taxes, hardship, and labor) and providing more (benefit to all individuals in aggregate and all businesses in aggregate). In point of fact, however, the individual *suffers* while the business *benefits*; and the benefit in aggregate to businesses is outweighed by the hardship in aggregate to the individual, thus destroying wealth, destroying personal freedom, and destroying personal wealth. This business with public college isn't simply expensive and wasteful spending, as some dull-minded conservatives may conclude; it is, as a more li
I'm the only one on this planet who can know that much about everything, and carrying that much information is driving me insane--I imagine this is why there aren't many others around like this. So much rolls around in my brain it spontaneously generates textbooks of new information, which I can't encode fast enough. I have no social life, I'm obsessed with collecting more information, and my ability to regulate my sanity--what's left of it--is faltering on and off.
I've analyzed it all and determined nothing in my fragments of educational policies tends to cause this, so it should be safe to fix up the school systems with proper early-grade-school goals. They'll all have better mental management than I do, anyway, and should be able to keep social cohesion and all those human emotional things going even better, along with the mass improvement in intellect.
You don't need to go that far to make good decisions. You really don't. You can't be a finance guy, a market guy, an IT guy, an IT security guy, a programmer, a database engineer, a lawyer, an HR professional, a rocket engineer, and a damned politician all rolled into one. At the same time, a carpenter uses tools; a carpenter isn't each and every one of those tools himself, and only needs to understand when and how to apply them.
It's still fun to be a complete and total information burn-out. I'm hoping I can last 20-30 more years; after that, I might hurt someone, but I probably won't have the capacity to care anymore.
I have considered running for a congress seat due to a desire to effect tax policies. Once I'm out of policies, it's time to move on; that may mean down, to capitalize on city council positions for more complex initiatives--notably, education.
I could stay high up and attempt to restore the power of the individual worker, but I doubt I could gain popular support--and, thus, moral authorization--of the voting base to tear down any and all government support of self-driven college education. People are quite so attached to this sense of moral freedom to train themselves into a vocation that they wish to sell themselves into slavery for it, trading away all of their humanity in favor of being cheap tools to be used and discarded based on the fancy of their employer, rather than quite expensive and important tools which their employers must maintain properly. It doesn't help that the position of an individual predicting the market for such tools is untenable, and inevitably leads to oversupply of labor, which is why 74% of STEM degree holders work in non-STEM jobs (despite people claiming CompSci degree workers in "healthcare" means they're working in computer network engineering for a hospital--that's a STEM job--and not as a clerk managing documents and paperwork).
I like to think one day I'll enact policies to give every single individual worker the bargaining power of a trade union; the truth is I have the right policies, but I'll never have the political support. Given a 1 pound silver bar in one hand and a 1 pound Hershey bar in the other, people would probably take the Hershey bar over a useless block of metal.
The problem is that income doesn't actually equate to people choosing to raise children properly. To not abuse them, do drugs while they're pregnant, make sure they go to school, and what not.
Can't do much about that through financial policy; you need direct social policy for that.
I just see GMI as a subsidy for breeding criminality into a greater and greater portion of the population.
This is why I reject the prospect of paying a cash benefit for having children in your household. An EBT system doesn't relieve a parent of an expense when they have children; it provides funds to offset the new expense. Granted, the same problem arises: the EBT must allow for mismanagement (waste of food) and market fluctuations, meaning people can buy food and feed themselves *and* their kids, opening their budget a bit; and I only recognize that impact as smaller than simply forking over a cash benefit, wholly restricted to the size of the basic food costs. Still, it is no more risk than we carry now; and we must do something for the general welfare in such cases.
The fact of the matter is people have two great imperatives: providing for themselves and providing for their children. It is an abuse to call the lawless behavior of a person whose children are starving "criminal", because what the fuck do you expect a person to do? They will do anything they can to feed themselves, to ensure their own life and safety; many persons will step in to protect children in general; and even so, a great many people will cut *other* families's children's throats by their own hands if it will protect their own starving children.
These are fortunate facts of life, as, annoying as they may be to reason, they produce the social infrastructure which allows humans to accomplish great things. Without these impulses and imperatives, all humans would be casual criminals, ready to lie, cheat, steal, and murder at will for the simple pleasure of improving their own lot by a tiny margin. Without the impulse to form gradually stronger social groups--nations, communities, interest groups, allies, friends, and family--we would see the routine exploitation of everyone, up to and including a high incidence of fathers routinely raping their daughters (and their friends) the moment puberty sets in.
Given that in consideration, you must recognize that pressures placed upon a person's survival or the well-being of his children breed socially destructive behavior not unlike crime, behavior which we can only labor to call crime by denying our own moral imperatives. For all your observations--which, I suspect, are confounded by many things, between circumstance and common distorted thinking--you cannot deny the effect desperation for survival of self and kin have on an individual.
They don't need to know anything about security and programming; they need to know about management. Managers should come ask the technical people how this impacts their business in a practical sense, not go whining about whatever throws them into a purely-emotional fit of pearl-clutching. That's what makes a VP or CEO competent: the ability to survey their business and identify how every significant factor impacts their strategies.
We and the blackhat hacker network can find our own vulnerabilities. We will protect you on our own schedule. If you are stabbed, control the bleeding as best you can; if you are shot, try to walk it off.
All of these problems, while annoying, are minimal. Unemployment is currently 5.3%; while of course 3% deciding simply to not work will have severe economic effects, a sufficiently small number will be less likely to cause dearth of employment in whole markets. That is to say: were we faced with 5.3% unemployment, 0.3% of which is just people who are satisfied with next to nothing but survival, we wouldn't find New York, Baltimore, or San Francisco completely devoid of hirable labor, and so would only transfer jobs to people who are seeking work. If we faced 5.3% unemployment and 4% had decided that jobs are for chumps... well, we may have some trouble in the labor market.
Predictably, people want more. I made, under unemployment income, a wage of equivalently $10.50/hr--$420 per month. Were I to take a wage of $10.75/hr working for Federal Express, I would essentially work for 40 hours per week at a wage of 25 cents--not working, I had made $10.50, and now, working, I make $10.75. While I do want more than unemployment... I'm not working for a quarter an hour.
By the same token, my Citizen's Dividend--not simply a guaranteed minimum income, which may draw away when you cross that minimum on your own means (e.g. if unemployment, above, would continue to pay me $2.50/hr if I got an $8/hr job at McDonalds)--keeps paying when you're Warren Buffet, with no increase or reduction. If someone were willing to pay $5/hr, well, that's $5/hr more than I have now, isn't it? Capsules and glorified hotel rooms are spartan living quarters, after all; and we all wish to live as kings, vacationing in our mountain retreats for the three-day memorial weekend once per year to demonstrate how rugged we are without actually having to live like the cretins at Sparta... or was it the Spartans at Crete?
As to your question, then, I see people refusing to work if you try to compensate them $2/hr for hard labor. They may accept $4/hr or $6/hr or whatever to lounge around in an air conditioned room operating a cash register and smiling at idiots; they probably won't take $6/hr to do grunt labor shoveling heavy gravel across an open field in the burning hot sun for 10 hours per day, because fuck you, pay me. I see them commanding more negotiating power, but not foregoing work; thus I see the repeal of minimum wage as a way to avoid published standards of fairness (shoveling rocks is a minimum-wage job, after all... isn't minimum wage "fair"? This is one of the most powerful negotiating tactics available), driving wages closer to fair--down in many cases of light, low-stress, comfortable tasks, up in cases of strenuous and dangerous labor.
To go further, into secondary effects, statistics claim 92% of female prostitutes protest they would get out of prostitution if only they had enough money to live and work. I don't believe this for a second; I do believe they got into prostitution due to desperate need for survival. I entreat you imagine the next generation of women without that driving need, and how it would impact their likelihood to sell themselves as a commodity. The statistics claim 40% of New York prostitutes start as children, with the average age of prostitution beginning at 14--which means a lot of 12-year-old hookers on the streets somewhere.
The blacks need as much food as whites and asians; I'm not sure about Mexicans, since they're so small. In any case, you can't very well point at blacks and claim welfare abuse and shit when they get exactly the same monthly deposit a middle-class white man gets. Someone, once, asked me what specific steps I took to address racial inequality in my plan; I spent several long seconds confused at the
Less secret and more that people don't listen. Politicians want a token to get votes; everyone else wants humanitarian efforts--meaning they want funding backed by carbon credits or whatnot, they want to give everyone $4000 for every child they birth, and they want to pay people enough money to live *comfortably* (i.e. $20,000 per person) so that nobody has to work anymore. I've had so many arguments with people who imagine everything will go exactly the way they want, while I'm here slimming down risks and designing systems that can't possibly fail because failure only means success in a different way--or, at the absolute worst, minor butthurt as things become slightly worse due to such things as people (and businesses) not actually caring about making a profit.
Anyway, it's just a vanilla Citizen's Dividend. The absolute simple explanation is an expansion of Social Security to cover everyone over age 18, natural-born, resident, American citizen. The total payout over a lifetime is such that saving each deposit until retirement nets you the average Social Security income for the rest of your life; more importantly, I've computed the profitable market prices for housing (rent), food, clothing, utilities, and so forth, and scaled it appropriately to the single individual. In 2013, that's actually under $600/month--it's actually *well* under $600/month, but I've scaled everything to risk coverage, padding up $224/mo rent to $300/mo, padding up $35/mo food (largely beans and rice, with chicken 2-3 days per week, plus some cheap vegetables) to $100/mo, and so forth. There's an 8% pad on top the whole lot (I would prefer 15%).
It's entirely flat income tax funded, with a 17% fixed target. Over time, total income increases, and so it tracks inflation; but total buying power also increases (wealth increases--I'm writing an economic paper on this, which means I actually have to read up on economics), so the quality-of-life and the stability of the dividend increases for each year beyond 2013. I'm much more comfortable at the 2018 implementation timeline than I am at 2013. Obviously, some misguided plans to fund by carbon taxes will fall flat when people start mass moving to renewables--the people proposing such plans are hoping for exactly that change, yet have not considered the money needed to support the poor will vanish as their goals are met; they won't fucking listen to me.
The target plan is all natural-born, resident, American citizens over the age of 18. This avoids a gold rush influx of immigration for free money, while ensuring anyone neither living in America (and under taxation) nor deployed in America's military is ineligible for benefits. A lot of people want to give $4,000 per child as well; this is a bad idea. To provide an income per child adequate for the welfare of the child, you must figure out what most (e.g. 99.7%) families require to raise a child to 17, and provide that. Besides the obvious ups and downs of costs during life (and hand-me-down clothes for that second and so forth child), that means the great majority of families get more money than they need--meaning popping out welfare babies is profitable. I suggest instead a risk control of simply letting states scale down their welfare systems until they're just providing food stamps, unemployment, and HUD vouchers to immigrants and families; but people are vehement about thinking of teh chlidren.
I also want to repeal minimum wage. This plus moving OASDI to an income tax funding a dividend reduces the cost of labor dramatically: although individuals have strong negotiating power and can simply not work, they already have life and livelihood coming to them regardless; wages are additional. They can accept wages justly compensating them for their work, without first thinking about the desperation to live; these wages, often, will be smaller, but not so small as to constitute an unacceptable and unfair exchange between parties. Reducing labor costs causes the cycle of wealth to accelerate, and also slo
This was actually a big part of the public mind way back when. Hell, Koreans still print that people who suffocated in their sleep happened to be next to an electric fan at the time....
I'm actually disturbed people's first reaction to anything strange is to assume they're surrounded by pedophiles. The terrorist thing is bad, too; unfortunately, I've seen the media and government cramming that propaganda down our throats, so I'm not surprised.
I've already developed a superior welfare system for America that would terminate poverty and permanently baseline our economic growth somewhere about where it sat during the 90s, with all that rapid growth from computers uncorking all production bottlenecks. I wonder if Finland, Norway, or some other rich countries have the economic basis to successfully implement such a system; in America, it reached cost-parity with our current system in 2013 (I projected all the way back to 1950, which is hilarious: 1.5% of our total individual and business income went to welfare back then, while my system would have cost 120%-135%; in 2013, the numbers were 17.2% and 17%).
I don't imagine you could rubber-stamp my system across the globe, but I also can't imagine what differing risks would impact various countries. I've made my system generically stable, but I'm American and only have America as the generic model.
My Citizen's Dividend plan has the following eligibility: all natural-born, resident, American citizens over the age of 18 receive the full Dividend.
If you weren't born here, you don't get it. This prevents an influx of gold-digging first-generation immigrants from coming to America for the free money.
If you aren't living in America, its territories, its military bases, its naval ships, or in active military deployment, you're not resident and you don't get shit. You left the country; we'll pay you to come back.
Kids don't get shit, either.
The primary risk control of the second-generation risks is a vestigial legacy welfare system: although unemployment, HUD vouchers, and food stamps mainly go away (and Social Security effectively expands), a tiny portion of those state-run welfare systems (probably consolidated into a single department, since even die hard bureaucrats aren't that ridiculous) remains running to provide welfare services to immigrants and families. This avoids paying everyone $4000 per year per child, which would have to be more money than 99% of families strictly need per child, meaning 99% of families have more spending money if they pop out welfare babies; the legacy systems hand out shit like EBT, so you can buy your kid food while we don't give you extra money for video games and drugs.
Why pay your citizens when they're not resident? If they're not resident, you shouldn't tax them; if you're not taxing their income--that is, if they both have income *and* aren't subjected to taxation--why are you providing them benefits? I write the social contract quite fragile, so you don't get benefit even if you're taxed *if* you just moved here from elsewhere, and so you don't get benefit if you leave the reach of taxes. That's harsh for some, but stabilizes the system for the vast majority; your country isn't 1/4 first-generation immigrants and half your citizens don't live outside the country (and you wouldn't have the tax basis to pay them all a welfare benefit if they did).
Leaving your country is a risk. You follow it when the opportunity risk is bigger than the threat risk.
Slashdot Mirror
Mass-mailing can have a neutral, helpful tone that allows people to shift the focus off themselves, and judge others. That gets the speaker out of the hot seat.
I was, mostly, citing a problem. Education systems are easier to fix, except politicians don't want to--if you go from 40% success to 85% success, you get 100% media coverage on the 15% of students failing, and their parents claiming your new education system fucked them all up.
To break your shit. Kali is the goddess of destruction.
So, how are you going to get companies to pay for employee training?
Like this:
You can go to a school and learn to weld.
There are 1.5 million Welders. Businesses need 1.7 million Welders. They need to hire 200,000 Welders.
Rich people don't become Welders.
Middle-class people have jobs already.
Adults coming out of middle-class households have no way to independently afford a vocational education as a Welder.
Businesses requiring Welders can't find applicants. They're facing an inability to acquire talent, choking off their growth and diminishing their profits. They face the immediate threat of a competitor somehow finding additional staff to expand across the market demand, overstepping them, capturing their market, expanding their brand, potentially reducing the legitimacy of their business as they struggle to meet contracts and deadlines while their competitor is always able to say yes to every technically reasonable demand, thus threatening their business with collapse.
They really, really need welders if they're not going to lose profits and experience a massive tumbling of stock price and loss of shareholder value; but welders aren't going to come out of nowhere. Nobody who actually wants to be a welder can really afford to train themselves.
What a pity...
Welding may be a poor example, as it's moderately niche and cheap--welding school costs, what, $15,000 in total? On the other hand, most companies hard-up for welders are quite aware that welding is a niche--people aren't going to college in droves to become certified welders--and so will pay a hobbyist with an interest in a career in welding to go to school. I've known quite a few welders and electricians that got in that way, even so far as BGE hiring a new electrician, paying their salary, and sending them off to school for a full year without giving them any work--you get a paycheck, you get free school, and you get no actual job to perform--before sticking them in an apprenticeship where someone can keep an eye on the new fish.
It's quite a different landscape than IT. It's fairly uncommon, but far from unheard of, for a welder's job security to fail largely by way of his boss being a dick, him constantly telling his boss to fuck off and die in a fire, then eventually spitting in his boss's face and walking off the job to go find someone who's not a bloody cocksucker to work for. I wouldn't bet my career on that, but it happens often enough, and typically because the boss in question wants to stroke his ego and display authority, and is afraid of firing a good technician and having trouble filling the gap (thus looking like an incompetent assclown in front of everyone); in IT, you're practically begging daily to keep your privilege of serfdom.
I don't want to bring the tyrannical guilds back; nor do I want to legitimize their evil cousins, the trade unions. I would like, however, for the individual to have, within all career paths, the type of personal power that a trade union carries, without swearing fealty to the fiefdom of the guild or union. That means pressing the knife into the palm of the businesses on all fronts, just enough to extract a wince of pain, so they work to produce a workforce--and work to maintain that workforce in an earnest attempt to keep pressure off that blade.
There is one other argument I could make, although it's fairly uncivil; you'll forgive me that, I'm sure.
how are you going to get companies to pay for employee training?
If they don't, then, obviously, they don't need to. Either employees can pay for training themselves anyway, or they have no need of the excessive labor force we're building. Your question begs the question of why should they pay for employee training, which only has one answer: it provides an advantage over not doing so. That advantage would only be manifest in the need for labor, without which we achieve nothing by sending anyone to learn any sort of vocation.
In other words: you asked a silly question. The logical argument in that manner is a tad uncivil, as I've said.
I'm not talking about people stealing to buy food. That, as far as I know, doesn't happen very much.
I was highlighting the counterpoint, the need for welfare. With modern welfare, 49.1 million Americans still go without adequate food; we have 320 million Americans, meaning a full 15% frequently struggle to find enough to eat. This is a very real problem, the solving of which has very real benefits; your concerns are simply the supposed side-effects of solving this problem.
I'm talking about gross child abuse, negligence, or general violence in and around the home, or having additional children in a "home" that's already damaging children on a daily basis.
That's all stuff you can't really do much about without good, strong social policy. Back in the 50s, we still had PSAs and stuff, pushing our moral agenda on society; today, we do none of that, which means we don't show people what we think a good household looks like.
If only the state sent out pamphlets and video and announcements on good parenting, attacking solid issues like maximizing cohesion between parents and children so your kids don't piss you off so much by acting like little motherfuckers, or improving their academic performance so their teachers stop fucking calling you all the damn time, or keeping them engaged in a positive social atmosphere so the police stop coming to your house and charging you fines, we might encourage little changes that give big effects.
At the very least, we could make parents more self-conscious about the judgment of their peers about their parenting.
I've been working on educational policies which should sharply reduce these problems in the next generation. I took a prior position of modifying school districts based on local need; while I don't retract that position, I think we can safely de-emphasize it, as I've determined the strategies which most help those students in the poorest districts also greatly improve the academic performance of those students in the most financially secure districts.
Most of the stuff I'd want to implement to bring students in poor, black, inner-city ghettos would raise students in white upper-middle-class suburbs up to a higher standard, as well, most likely elevating both in total to the same level of performance--the poor by a much larger degree from where they start, of course, due to the factors you cite. I believe it's environment, and not breeding; I simply wish to transfer the advantages of a better environment to all students.
All of this, of course, would require one to two generations to catch on. Those students already past the early grades would miss this benefit, and grow up status quo; those students entering would become the new parents, 30 years later, mixing their kids with half a generation of kids living in educationally-disadvantaged households, themselves receiving the same remedy as the new generation of parents. It won't fix everything, but it should help immensely.
You realize, of course, that all this--the new welfare system, the new education system, and so forth--is really the most effective way to destroy America, right? Can you imagine the repercussions of a truly free population, of every human being set on the firm ground of extremely rough survival and the maximum utility of their brains? Either of those is dangerous; combine the ability to fall back to an unpleasant but survivable position with the full knowledge and skill of employing the brain as a powerful tool to its maximum potential and you have the most tactically-dangerous threat any country has ever faced. America has shaped itself around a core of exploiting the desperate and stupid; that will one day prove impossible. Forever.
I immediately thought the corollary: how incompetent are you if you can't stage a meaningful investigation without accessing the contents of an endpoint storage device? You can certainly pull records of who texted and called who how frequently and for how long from the phone company. You can establish a list of contacts, draw relationship maps, and perform legwork investigation. You know, walk around talking to people.
It just says to me they don't care about their jobs. We have investigators looking for a silver bullet. "We found a guy texted that he's gonna kill this dude for fucking his daughter! Obvious confession! Hang him!" No evidence that he followed through, except that the guy is dead. Motive and means, ladies and gentlemen. Give him the chair.
This is like when they walked into a burned-out house in Texas, looked at the floor, said, "Look, these burn patterns mean accelerant, meaning arson," and then arrested the man of the house for murdering his wife and kid because he had gotten in a fight and left a few hours before the fire. Then, 10 years later, an incendiary scientist looked at the pictures and evidence and said, "This is all crap. All this shit the investigators claim are well-known myths perpetuated by people who have no fucking clue what they're doing. Also having an Iron Maiden poster and a tattoo of a skull on your arm doesn't make you a satanist and a murderer." They looked for the blinding evidence of arson, looked for who was there an hour ago and pissed off, and identified him as guilty... except none of the evidence was actually relevant to anything.
Not everyone is HP.
If she'd asked her security and programming teams what they thought, they would have told her exactly what they had already posted on their customer-facing pages. She doesn't need to know anything about programming; she needs to have a CRO to find out what problems and opportunities this can cause for the company (risks), and other staff to find out the actual implications, and a head for recognizing how this pragmatically impacts her business. All of that non-technical information bluntly tells her to thank everyone for their help and then shut her fat fucking mouth.
It's not that. I'm not discussing the validity of a need for a college degree to succeed at employment; I'm discussing the behavior of markets.
The system of supporting college degrees per individual--student loans or free college--means employers only need to plan out a year or two ahead, set budget, and then demand a flood of hundreds of applications in the 2 months leading up to urgent need. Chickens scratching at barren ground, begging for whatever bits of fragmented grain they can find. Your marketable value is nothing; you are a tool to be picked, used, thrown off if you don't fit comfortably in the hand, and purchased or rented for as little as possible. If your skills become obsolete, you're replaced--else you go out yourself and append new skills, working full time PLUS college while some new student only goes to college once to get the summary course of the same effort as your initial single effort.
I've worked for businesses whose HR instigates a policy of paying around the 25th percentile for all labor, and rolling the revolving door to get rid of crap labor. Poor benefits, low salaries, 30-40 applications per cycle, and spend a year or three building each department on the backs of people underpaid by $20k/year. The strategy works quite well as of these last decades.
Each business can see, plainly, their markets, their competition, their strategies, their current growth, and their predicted growth. Knowing these things for a few years out is part of running a business. Aggregating this across markets is speculative, carrying much higher risks; likewise, predicting what everyone else will do is even harder. That means businesses can reliably build a precisely-tailored workforce, while individuals in charge of their own development can only oversupply at their own expense.
Removing the ability for individually-driven vocational training--and college is really just career training with embellishment (yes, you must know Chemistry and Biology to be a computer programmer, somehow)--means businesses suffer first. The businesses have no option: should they fail to train a new workforce, they won't accomplish their strategies, and a competitor will destroy them by building a solid workforce. Likewise, as they develop an employee, that employee becomes an asset: it's favorable to keep and extend the employee, providing new training, rather than to try to find a replacement. Employees become valuable and important.
100 individuals who go to college and come out hunting for 10 jobs means 90 individuals with no jobs, and 10 desperately clinging to whatever they can scrape up; 100 individuals facing 10 jobs with no qualified competition means those businesses must select 10 individuals, pay them, employ them, train them, and pay for their formal education, and so the individuals are no worse off. Businesses have a distinctly different position between these as well: those of the first group are replaceable; those of the second aren't, unless you're prepared to build new stock through large investments of time, effort, and the risk of hiring lazy and useless employees whom aren't recognized as such until they've spent several months simply not taking to training.
Who makes out better when the Government initiates a plan to give every individual the capacity to put himself through college: the individual or the business? Oh, it doesn't matter if both benefit--in fact, that would distinctly create wealth, costing less (in taxes, hardship, and labor) and providing more (benefit to all individuals in aggregate and all businesses in aggregate). In point of fact, however, the individual *suffers* while the business *benefits*; and the benefit in aggregate to businesses is outweighed by the hardship in aggregate to the individual, thus destroying wealth, destroying personal freedom, and destroying personal wealth. This business with public college isn't simply expensive and wasteful spending, as some dull-minded conservatives may conclude; it is, as a more li
I'm the only one on this planet who can know that much about everything, and carrying that much information is driving me insane--I imagine this is why there aren't many others around like this. So much rolls around in my brain it spontaneously generates textbooks of new information, which I can't encode fast enough. I have no social life, I'm obsessed with collecting more information, and my ability to regulate my sanity--what's left of it--is faltering on and off.
I've analyzed it all and determined nothing in my fragments of educational policies tends to cause this, so it should be safe to fix up the school systems with proper early-grade-school goals. They'll all have better mental management than I do, anyway, and should be able to keep social cohesion and all those human emotional things going even better, along with the mass improvement in intellect.
You don't need to go that far to make good decisions. You really don't. You can't be a finance guy, a market guy, an IT guy, an IT security guy, a programmer, a database engineer, a lawyer, an HR professional, a rocket engineer, and a damned politician all rolled into one. At the same time, a carpenter uses tools; a carpenter isn't each and every one of those tools himself, and only needs to understand when and how to apply them.
It's still fun to be a complete and total information burn-out. I'm hoping I can last 20-30 more years; after that, I might hurt someone, but I probably won't have the capacity to care anymore.
I've written a patch for capitalism that fixes that.
I have considered running for a congress seat due to a desire to effect tax policies. Once I'm out of policies, it's time to move on; that may mean down, to capitalize on city council positions for more complex initiatives--notably, education.
I could stay high up and attempt to restore the power of the individual worker, but I doubt I could gain popular support--and, thus, moral authorization--of the voting base to tear down any and all government support of self-driven college education. People are quite so attached to this sense of moral freedom to train themselves into a vocation that they wish to sell themselves into slavery for it, trading away all of their humanity in favor of being cheap tools to be used and discarded based on the fancy of their employer, rather than quite expensive and important tools which their employers must maintain properly. It doesn't help that the position of an individual predicting the market for such tools is untenable, and inevitably leads to oversupply of labor, which is why 74% of STEM degree holders work in non-STEM jobs (despite people claiming CompSci degree workers in "healthcare" means they're working in computer network engineering for a hospital--that's a STEM job--and not as a clerk managing documents and paperwork).
I like to think one day I'll enact policies to give every single individual worker the bargaining power of a trade union; the truth is I have the right policies, but I'll never have the political support. Given a 1 pound silver bar in one hand and a 1 pound Hershey bar in the other, people would probably take the Hershey bar over a useless block of metal.
The problem is that income doesn't actually equate to people choosing to raise children properly. To not abuse them, do drugs while they're pregnant, make sure they go to school, and what not.
Can't do much about that through financial policy; you need direct social policy for that.
I just see GMI as a subsidy for breeding criminality into a greater and greater portion of the population.
This is why I reject the prospect of paying a cash benefit for having children in your household. An EBT system doesn't relieve a parent of an expense when they have children; it provides funds to offset the new expense. Granted, the same problem arises: the EBT must allow for mismanagement (waste of food) and market fluctuations, meaning people can buy food and feed themselves *and* their kids, opening their budget a bit; and I only recognize that impact as smaller than simply forking over a cash benefit, wholly restricted to the size of the basic food costs. Still, it is no more risk than we carry now; and we must do something for the general welfare in such cases.
The fact of the matter is people have two great imperatives: providing for themselves and providing for their children. It is an abuse to call the lawless behavior of a person whose children are starving "criminal", because what the fuck do you expect a person to do? They will do anything they can to feed themselves, to ensure their own life and safety; many persons will step in to protect children in general; and even so, a great many people will cut *other* families's children's throats by their own hands if it will protect their own starving children.
These are fortunate facts of life, as, annoying as they may be to reason, they produce the social infrastructure which allows humans to accomplish great things. Without these impulses and imperatives, all humans would be casual criminals, ready to lie, cheat, steal, and murder at will for the simple pleasure of improving their own lot by a tiny margin. Without the impulse to form gradually stronger social groups--nations, communities, interest groups, allies, friends, and family--we would see the routine exploitation of everyone, up to and including a high incidence of fathers routinely raping their daughters (and their friends) the moment puberty sets in.
Given that in consideration, you must recognize that pressures placed upon a person's survival or the well-being of his children breed socially destructive behavior not unlike crime, behavior which we can only labor to call crime by denying our own moral imperatives. For all your observations--which, I suspect, are confounded by many things, between circumstance and common distorted thinking--you cannot deny the effect desperation for survival of self and kin have on an individual.
Hiring competent CEOs would obviously save money.
They don't need to know anything about security and programming; they need to know about management. Managers should come ask the technical people how this impacts their business in a practical sense, not go whining about whatever throws them into a purely-emotional fit of pearl-clutching. That's what makes a VP or CEO competent: the ability to survey their business and identify how every significant factor impacts their strategies.
We and the blackhat hacker network can find our own vulnerabilities. We will protect you on our own schedule. If you are stabbed, control the bleeding as best you can; if you are shot, try to walk it off.
I made, under unemployment income, a wage of equivalently $10.50/hr--$420 per month.
Per week. Holy fuck.
If you're asking if people will decide to take the easy life, the answer is the obvious yes. People chose to steal, to prostitute, and to knowingly market pseudoscientific bullshit to con people out of their money.
All of these problems, while annoying, are minimal. Unemployment is currently 5.3%; while of course 3% deciding simply to not work will have severe economic effects, a sufficiently small number will be less likely to cause dearth of employment in whole markets. That is to say: were we faced with 5.3% unemployment, 0.3% of which is just people who are satisfied with next to nothing but survival, we wouldn't find New York, Baltimore, or San Francisco completely devoid of hirable labor, and so would only transfer jobs to people who are seeking work. If we faced 5.3% unemployment and 4% had decided that jobs are for chumps... well, we may have some trouble in the labor market.
Predictably, people want more. I made, under unemployment income, a wage of equivalently $10.50/hr--$420 per month. Were I to take a wage of $10.75/hr working for Federal Express, I would essentially work for 40 hours per week at a wage of 25 cents--not working, I had made $10.50, and now, working, I make $10.75. While I do want more than unemployment ... I'm not working for a quarter an hour.
By the same token, my Citizen's Dividend--not simply a guaranteed minimum income, which may draw away when you cross that minimum on your own means (e.g. if unemployment, above, would continue to pay me $2.50/hr if I got an $8/hr job at McDonalds)--keeps paying when you're Warren Buffet, with no increase or reduction. If someone were willing to pay $5/hr, well, that's $5/hr more than I have now, isn't it? Capsules and glorified hotel rooms are spartan living quarters, after all; and we all wish to live as kings, vacationing in our mountain retreats for the three-day memorial weekend once per year to demonstrate how rugged we are without actually having to live like the cretins at Sparta... or was it the Spartans at Crete?
As to your question, then, I see people refusing to work if you try to compensate them $2/hr for hard labor. They may accept $4/hr or $6/hr or whatever to lounge around in an air conditioned room operating a cash register and smiling at idiots; they probably won't take $6/hr to do grunt labor shoveling heavy gravel across an open field in the burning hot sun for 10 hours per day, because fuck you, pay me. I see them commanding more negotiating power, but not foregoing work; thus I see the repeal of minimum wage as a way to avoid published standards of fairness (shoveling rocks is a minimum-wage job, after all... isn't minimum wage "fair"? This is one of the most powerful negotiating tactics available), driving wages closer to fair--down in many cases of light, low-stress, comfortable tasks, up in cases of strenuous and dangerous labor.
To go further, into secondary effects, statistics claim 92% of female prostitutes protest they would get out of prostitution if only they had enough money to live and work. I don't believe this for a second; I do believe they got into prostitution due to desperate need for survival. I entreat you imagine the next generation of women without that driving need, and how it would impact their likelihood to sell themselves as a commodity. The statistics claim 40% of New York prostitutes start as children, with the average age of prostitution beginning at 14--which means a lot of 12-year-old hookers on the streets somewhere.
The blacks need as much food as whites and asians; I'm not sure about Mexicans, since they're so small. In any case, you can't very well point at blacks and claim welfare abuse and shit when they get exactly the same monthly deposit a middle-class white man gets. Someone, once, asked me what specific steps I took to address racial inequality in my plan; I spent several long seconds confused at the
Less secret and more that people don't listen. Politicians want a token to get votes; everyone else wants humanitarian efforts--meaning they want funding backed by carbon credits or whatnot, they want to give everyone $4000 for every child they birth, and they want to pay people enough money to live *comfortably* (i.e. $20,000 per person) so that nobody has to work anymore. I've had so many arguments with people who imagine everything will go exactly the way they want, while I'm here slimming down risks and designing systems that can't possibly fail because failure only means success in a different way--or, at the absolute worst, minor butthurt as things become slightly worse due to such things as people (and businesses) not actually caring about making a profit.
Anyway, it's just a vanilla Citizen's Dividend. The absolute simple explanation is an expansion of Social Security to cover everyone over age 18, natural-born, resident, American citizen. The total payout over a lifetime is such that saving each deposit until retirement nets you the average Social Security income for the rest of your life; more importantly, I've computed the profitable market prices for housing (rent), food, clothing, utilities, and so forth, and scaled it appropriately to the single individual. In 2013, that's actually under $600/month--it's actually *well* under $600/month, but I've scaled everything to risk coverage, padding up $224/mo rent to $300/mo, padding up $35/mo food (largely beans and rice, with chicken 2-3 days per week, plus some cheap vegetables) to $100/mo, and so forth. There's an 8% pad on top the whole lot (I would prefer 15%).
It's entirely flat income tax funded, with a 17% fixed target. Over time, total income increases, and so it tracks inflation; but total buying power also increases (wealth increases--I'm writing an economic paper on this, which means I actually have to read up on economics), so the quality-of-life and the stability of the dividend increases for each year beyond 2013. I'm much more comfortable at the 2018 implementation timeline than I am at 2013. Obviously, some misguided plans to fund by carbon taxes will fall flat when people start mass moving to renewables--the people proposing such plans are hoping for exactly that change, yet have not considered the money needed to support the poor will vanish as their goals are met; they won't fucking listen to me.
The target plan is all natural-born, resident, American citizens over the age of 18. This avoids a gold rush influx of immigration for free money, while ensuring anyone neither living in America (and under taxation) nor deployed in America's military is ineligible for benefits. A lot of people want to give $4,000 per child as well; this is a bad idea. To provide an income per child adequate for the welfare of the child, you must figure out what most (e.g. 99.7%) families require to raise a child to 17, and provide that. Besides the obvious ups and downs of costs during life (and hand-me-down clothes for that second and so forth child), that means the great majority of families get more money than they need--meaning popping out welfare babies is profitable. I suggest instead a risk control of simply letting states scale down their welfare systems until they're just providing food stamps, unemployment, and HUD vouchers to immigrants and families; but people are vehement about thinking of teh chlidren.
I also want to repeal minimum wage. This plus moving OASDI to an income tax funding a dividend reduces the cost of labor dramatically: although individuals have strong negotiating power and can simply not work, they already have life and livelihood coming to them regardless; wages are additional. They can accept wages justly compensating them for their work, without first thinking about the desperation to live; these wages, often, will be smaller, but not so small as to constitute an unacceptable and unfair exchange between parties. Reducing labor costs causes the cycle of wealth to accelerate, and also slo
Yes, but, being younger, their most redeeming characteristics may in fact be that they're so young as to be flexible enough to un-brainwash.
http://www.christianmediaresea...
This was actually a big part of the public mind way back when. Hell, Koreans still print that people who suffocated in their sleep happened to be next to an electric fan at the time....
Fun fact: The most redeeming characteristic of Boko Haram's leadership is its vulnerability to bullets.
I'm actually disturbed people's first reaction to anything strange is to assume they're surrounded by pedophiles. The terrorist thing is bad, too; unfortunately, I've seen the media and government cramming that propaganda down our throats, so I'm not surprised.
They said that about credit cards, which now even carry a chip.
I've already developed a superior welfare system for America that would terminate poverty and permanently baseline our economic growth somewhere about where it sat during the 90s, with all that rapid growth from computers uncorking all production bottlenecks. I wonder if Finland, Norway, or some other rich countries have the economic basis to successfully implement such a system; in America, it reached cost-parity with our current system in 2013 (I projected all the way back to 1950, which is hilarious: 1.5% of our total individual and business income went to welfare back then, while my system would have cost 120%-135%; in 2013, the numbers were 17.2% and 17%).
I don't imagine you could rubber-stamp my system across the globe, but I also can't imagine what differing risks would impact various countries. I've made my system generically stable, but I'm American and only have America as the generic model.
My Citizen's Dividend plan has the following eligibility: all natural-born, resident, American citizens over the age of 18 receive the full Dividend.
If you weren't born here, you don't get it. This prevents an influx of gold-digging first-generation immigrants from coming to America for the free money.
If you aren't living in America, its territories, its military bases, its naval ships, or in active military deployment, you're not resident and you don't get shit. You left the country; we'll pay you to come back.
Kids don't get shit, either.
The primary risk control of the second-generation risks is a vestigial legacy welfare system: although unemployment, HUD vouchers, and food stamps mainly go away (and Social Security effectively expands), a tiny portion of those state-run welfare systems (probably consolidated into a single department, since even die hard bureaucrats aren't that ridiculous) remains running to provide welfare services to immigrants and families. This avoids paying everyone $4000 per year per child, which would have to be more money than 99% of families strictly need per child, meaning 99% of families have more spending money if they pop out welfare babies; the legacy systems hand out shit like EBT, so you can buy your kid food while we don't give you extra money for video games and drugs.
Why pay your citizens when they're not resident? If they're not resident, you shouldn't tax them; if you're not taxing their income--that is, if they both have income *and* aren't subjected to taxation--why are you providing them benefits? I write the social contract quite fragile, so you don't get benefit even if you're taxed *if* you just moved here from elsewhere, and so you don't get benefit if you leave the reach of taxes. That's harsh for some, but stabilizes the system for the vast majority; your country isn't 1/4 first-generation immigrants and half your citizens don't live outside the country (and you wouldn't have the tax basis to pay them all a welfare benefit if they did).
Leaving your country is a risk. You follow it when the opportunity risk is bigger than the threat risk.