I think a big part of job satisfaction (or life satisfaction, if you're fortunate enough to not have a job dominate your life) is the feeling (delusional or not) of control. Do you get to do what you want to do because you want to do it, or are you doing something because other people are jerking you around telling you what to, when to, where to, and how to? A huge component of this is attitude, but it also helps to have the people who effectively control you not be insensitive clods.
For some people, serving the general public is torture, others feel that the opportunity to serve paying customers is a blessing.
Even people who don't have or need a job can feel dissatisfied with life because neighbors, government, or whoever set what they feel are arbitrary or unfair restrictions on their activities (what do you mean I need approval from the Architectural Committee to build my storage building!!?!)
I'm just happy if my "upline" don't change their minds about what I should be doing too often.
Living in California is not a good one if you want to have any money left after taxes.
FTFY.
There are places where you can rent a 2 bedroom apartment for 500 a month.
Hell, in a lot of the Midwest you can rent a nice 2 bedroom house for that.
Less pollution and traffic, too:D
I looked at starting a windmill farm in Western Nebraska along about 2002 - if I had only bought the land then, I would have made a killing selling the land back to corn farmers when the ethanol fuel thing took off, but I digress... The things that really put me off the whole venture were: a) I didn't really want to live in Western Nebraska, mostly because b) getting into / out of Western Nebraska is a big PITA (fly to hub, change planes and fly to regional, then drive 3-4 hours...) which leads to c) visiting Western Nebraska on a regular basis to manage operations would have been a major pain.
There's no traffic because nobody wants to be there.
There's no "pollution" because nobody is there.
I think the basic reason that nobody is there is because the place (in relative terms) sucks. Tons of wind (good if you're a windmill owner), crazy temperature swings, lots of dry and dusty, no ocean.... I'm not saying that the place isn't God's gift to some people, it surely is a bountiful land with its own beauty, but it seems that a whole lot of people who have been somewhere else (besides the rural midwest), choose to stay somewhere else rather than returning.
That, and Monsanto has sucked any remaining speck of joy out of being an independent farmer.
However, having thoroughly bashed the cherished home of millions of corn-fed Americans, I've got to say that leaving California and going some place like Texas makes a whole lot of financial sense - just stay away from Houston, far far away, yes- pollution is a bad thing.
He's already demonstrated that he "can", which means he's ineligible to teach.
True this. However, at one point I planned to move the family to a rural area and partially address the lack of technical high school education by teaching there myself. Keys to this plan were:
a) reduced cost of living in the rural area b) large savings account from life in the big city c) a high tolerance for illiteracy
this is a town where the waitresses have never seen the word "Croissant" before in their life (yes, they have a Wal-Mart, but that doesn't mean that the townsfolk study the frozen foods aisle and actually learn from what's in it.)
With your existing education, you should be able to start substitute teaching and get a feel for whether or not it's a life you want to pursue for awhile. I'd recommend (based on two parents who taught high school) at least a full year of testing the waters before making a major commitment to the teaching path. By that time, if you like it, the people in the school system should know and like you well enough to give you a good shot at a permanent position. Be sure to check up on whatever B.S. C.E. (bullshit continuing education) requirements will have to be met before you can be honored with a high stress, low pay job teaching a room full of ignorant, arrogant, hormone imbalanced people who are not yet answerable to the adult criminal justice system.
In a twisted sense, "Peak Oil" is a continuation of the Cold War. If we weren't raping the hell out of all the fossil fuels, some other nations would be, and then they'd roll over us with tanks, or whatever else, and we wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
As long as we keep building the hell out of infrastructure and capacity to move men, material and munitions fast, and produce them fast too, we're safe.
Petrochemical and Coal extraction are also corporate welfare, they are allowed to rape the land and sea and have no capacity to restore the damage they have done within the next 100 years, at any price.
(FWIW I live in the UK where consumer-oriented prices *are* usually quoted with VAT (i.e. sales tax) included and prefer it that way- but that's because we have uniform VAT across the country. I understand why the US doesn't include it.)
IMHO, the U.S. doesn't include it because of an in your face "Don't blame me for these prices it's the damn tax man that's making me charge this," attitude.
Personally, I find a store that charges me $2 (net, inclusive of tax) for an item that's labeled as $2 on the shelf far more attractive than one that has a shelf tag that reads $1.83 and charges $1.96 at the register, or $2.01 at the branch downtown because of the special taxing district. In the U.S. these stores are very rare.
While this sounds nice and neat, this isn't actually constitutional. The document permits the national government to provide incentives for states to implement federal policy but it can't compel them to give up their power to implement sales taxes where permitted by state constitutions.
I propose an Amendment to end the farce of incentive vs. compulsory central policy making. All the Feds have to do to make a policy effectively compulsory is withhold all federal funding from a State for non-compliance, and since the Federalis tax so heavily and spend so heavily in all states, they could turn New York into the economic equivalent of Mississippi in about 3 years if they chose to.
Witness: the Federally imposed legal drinking age of 21 - tied to highway funding.
Perhaps the US could use all the money it saves by dropping the penny from circulation to help fund education in math and sciences (and by that I mean actual math and science, not stuff like creationism).
Funding isn't the fundamental problem with U.S. education, although Fundamentalism is a big one....
Until the first hurricane blows through and puts your island paradise under 20 feet of water...
As long as the desert island isn't just a sand-pile, anchor the nuke securely and pour enough concrete so it doesn't care if it gets pounded by waves for a few hours.
Cleanup and rebuilding after the hurricane will be considerably easier with abundant electrical energy available.
Use of credit and debit cards is a complete red herring. It's happening. Already I think of anybody in the checkout line using cash or (shudder) check as a complete loser. I happen to think these dopes should be forced to use their own, much slower line. But this issue does not affect the above measures at all.
Lately I've been encountering more and more "counter culture" cash users - including people who make and accept payment through the mail with cash only, and not just the Kefir Lady and local Farmer's market.
Not saying that cash or credit are either inherently good or bad, Vive la difference... I do hope we can continue to choose.
500 mile car trip (gas cost only) 25 gallons at $0.36/gallon -> $9
Yes, there has been inflation, but it was not unreasonable for an 8 year old to carry around a $10 bill in 1972... what would you think of an 8 year old carrying around $100 today?
I've been having a disconnect lately with the price of gasoline. I will agonize over a $50 tech gadget purchase that I might make once every 3 months, searching for that last $5 discount, comparing competing products, etc. Then, I'll take a weekend trip and toss $85 of fuel in the vehicle, it's just.... wrong. I grew up in the '70s when travel by automobile was nearly free, the relevant cost was time more than money. Maybe 120mpg hybrids will bring those days back for awhile.
My point on the tangible is that people, as a big messy impossible to characterize group, do tend to accurately abstract the value of a (steady valued) coin you can hold more readily than they do numbers on a credit card slip, or coupons, or travel mile points.... In the U.S. we don't trade coins over $0.25 in value on any regular basis... I think we'd have better money management by people overall if there were coins up to $10 in regular circulation - you know, something you could actually pay a whole bar tab with.
...if your concern is holdings that won't wax and wane with the money markets, why not purchase commodities like gold or silver?
It's not really my concern, but, looking at the "value" of gold from 1975 to the present, I'd rather keep my savings in an imaginary construct like the U.S. dollar invested in a mix of index funds and bond issues. When that system collapses, everyone scrambles to prop it back up again, when the value of gold stagnates and declines in real terms for decades at a time, the world yawns.
We also ditched $1 and $2 paper currency for $1 and $2 coins. That was also a good move in getting rid of those ratty dollar bills. The US cold easily do the same thing as you already have $1 coins in circulation. About the only people who will notice a change are the strippers who will now have use their coin slots.
The dollar coin in the U.S. has been a red headed bastard stepchild of the currency, rarely used and considered stranger than a $2 bill.
I think we should put out $2, $5 and even $10 coinage, but most of the U.S. seems to be moving to a plastic-credit based currency, with all the attendant privacy and fraud issues, as well as being managed by the private sector instead of the government. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? I'd say: yes.
Tangible money interacts with the human animal differently than abstract mathematical concepts.
Coins are the most tangible money, paper is more abstract, especially U.S. paper money that is all basically the same except for the numbers on it. Checks and credit cards are even more abstract - so much so that many people really can't handle them properly.
Back in the day when a quarter would actually buy something worthwhile, if you tossed a quarter to somebody, they got a different visceral reaction than if they saw a penny coming. Paper, too, caused a different reaction because it was all inherently more valuable than coin. A coin more naturally "feels" like something you can instinctively trade or equate with other tangible objects of value. It takes many years of playing "The Price is Right" before most people get that same relationship with abstract prices, and again, some never really do.
I don't think that a penny should cost $0.01 to produce, but I do think that there is real value in tangible coins that paper and credit cards lack.
In most Euro-countries, prices are rounded to the nearest 5-cent number, 1- and 2-cent coins are quite rare. Why even bother producing coins that are worth more as a material than as a coin?
In most Euro-countries, people don't consider mathematical ability a sign of social awkwardness, as opposed to the U.S....
I haven't seen it - but what about those statistics are incorrect? Up to about 1880 (I guess that's 130 years ago) way over 80% of the population worked on farms. Now, according to the BLS, about 2 million people work in agriculture and about 138 million are in non-agricultural work.
Nothing is wrong with the statistics, but the efficiency part is.... questionable. Look at how chickens were raised 50 years ago, and how it's done today. It's clearly a step back for the chickens, and the people who work directly with them, but even if you don't care about that, at some level, even though the meat and eggs aren't killing us outright with disease or malnutrition, it can't be an improvement in overall quality of the food product - unless all you care about is price, calories per dollar.
The changes at the bottom end of the beef/chicken/pork/grain/fruit/vegetable chain have repercussions all the way up. It makes what used to be "normal quality" food a steep premium product today.
If you really want to support an artist, support the artist when he or she is still alive
...
Just like those who pays hundreds of millions for paintings painted by dead painters.
Who's benefiting?
The painters who are already long dead?
Great sentiment, but you're attempting to ignore human nature which has clearly demonstrated across the centuries that dead artists are worth more to the buying public than live ones.
Sony, on the other hand, is finely tuned to this fact and responded in coldly capitalistic fashion, raising the price of the commodity they control in response to its increased market value. If you want to live in a "free market," this is one example of how that plays out when a non-person is maximizing shareholder value.
Sure, lots of potentially vocal people will be upset, but that's unlikely to affect the bottom line as much as the price increase will.
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I think a big part of job satisfaction (or life satisfaction, if you're fortunate enough to not have a job dominate your life) is the feeling (delusional or not) of control. Do you get to do what you want to do because you want to do it, or are you doing something because other people are jerking you around telling you what to, when to, where to, and how to? A huge component of this is attitude, but it also helps to have the people who effectively control you not be insensitive clods.
For some people, serving the general public is torture, others feel that the opportunity to serve paying customers is a blessing.
Even people who don't have or need a job can feel dissatisfied with life because neighbors, government, or whoever set what they feel are arbitrary or unfair restrictions on their activities (what do you mean I need approval from the Architectural Committee to build my storage building!!?!)
I'm just happy if my "upline" don't change their minds about what I should be doing too often.
Living in California is not a good one if you want to have any money left after taxes.
FTFY.
There are places where you can rent a 2 bedroom apartment for 500 a month.
Hell, in a lot of the Midwest you can rent a nice 2 bedroom house for that.
Less pollution and traffic, too :D
I looked at starting a windmill farm in Western Nebraska along about 2002 - if I had only bought the land then, I would have made a killing selling the land back to corn farmers when the ethanol fuel thing took off, but I digress... The things that really put me off the whole venture were: a) I didn't really want to live in Western Nebraska, mostly because b) getting into / out of Western Nebraska is a big PITA (fly to hub, change planes and fly to regional, then drive 3-4 hours...) which leads to c) visiting Western Nebraska on a regular basis to manage operations would have been a major pain.
There's no traffic because nobody wants to be there.
There's no "pollution" because nobody is there.
I think the basic reason that nobody is there is because the place (in relative terms) sucks. Tons of wind (good if you're a windmill owner), crazy temperature swings, lots of dry and dusty, no ocean.... I'm not saying that the place isn't God's gift to some people, it surely is a bountiful land with its own beauty, but it seems that a whole lot of people who have been somewhere else (besides the rural midwest), choose to stay somewhere else rather than returning.
That, and Monsanto has sucked any remaining speck of joy out of being an independent farmer.
However, having thoroughly bashed the cherished home of millions of corn-fed Americans, I've got to say that leaving California and going some place like Texas makes a whole lot of financial sense - just stay away from Houston, far far away, yes- pollution is a bad thing.
He's already demonstrated that he "can", which means he's ineligible to teach.
True this. However, at one point I planned to move the family to a rural area and partially address the lack of technical high school education by teaching there myself. Keys to this plan were:
a) reduced cost of living in the rural area
b) large savings account from life in the big city
c) a high tolerance for illiteracy
this is a town where the waitresses have never seen the word "Croissant" before in their life (yes, they have a Wal-Mart, but that doesn't mean that the townsfolk study the frozen foods aisle and actually learn from what's in it.)
With your existing education, you should be able to start substitute teaching and get a feel for whether or not it's a life you want to pursue for awhile. I'd recommend (based on two parents who taught high school) at least a full year of testing the waters before making a major commitment to the teaching path. By that time, if you like it, the people in the school system should know and like you well enough to give you a good shot at a permanent position. Be sure to check up on whatever B.S. C.E. (bullshit continuing education) requirements will have to be met before you can be honored with a high stress, low pay job teaching a room full of ignorant, arrogant, hormone imbalanced people who are not yet answerable to the adult criminal justice system.
It can be very rewarding, for some people.
In a twisted sense, "Peak Oil" is a continuation of the Cold War. If we weren't raping the hell out of all the fossil fuels, some other nations would be, and then they'd roll over us with tanks, or whatever else, and we wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
As long as we keep building the hell out of infrastructure and capacity to move men, material and munitions fast, and produce them fast too, we're safe.
Penny store? And, things could still be bundled 6 for a penny...
I was in Denmark in the last days of their "penny" back in 1989ish... it was a cute little thing, maybe 5mm in diameter.
Petrochemical and Coal extraction are also corporate welfare, they are allowed to rape the land and sea and have no capacity to restore the damage they have done within the next 100 years, at any price.
The problem with nuclear power anywhere in the world is this mentality.
The Germans have tons of coal fired plants, too.
(FWIW I live in the UK where consumer-oriented prices *are* usually quoted with VAT (i.e. sales tax) included and prefer it that way- but that's because we have uniform VAT across the country. I understand why the US doesn't include it.)
IMHO, the U.S. doesn't include it because of an in your face "Don't blame me for these prices it's the damn tax man that's making me charge this," attitude.
Personally, I find a store that charges me $2 (net, inclusive of tax) for an item that's labeled as $2 on the shelf far more attractive than one that has a shelf tag that reads $1.83 and charges $1.96 at the register, or $2.01 at the branch downtown because of the special taxing district. In the U.S. these stores are very rare.
While this sounds nice and neat, this isn't actually constitutional. The document permits the national government to provide incentives for states to implement federal policy but it can't compel them to give up their power to implement sales taxes where permitted by state constitutions.
I propose an Amendment to end the farce of incentive vs. compulsory central policy making. All the Feds have to do to make a policy effectively compulsory is withhold all federal funding from a State for non-compliance, and since the Federalis tax so heavily and spend so heavily in all states, they could turn New York into the economic equivalent of Mississippi in about 3 years if they chose to.
Witness: the Federally imposed legal drinking age of 21 - tied to highway funding.
Perhaps the US could use all the money it saves by dropping the penny from circulation to help fund education in math and sciences (and by that I mean actual math and science, not stuff like creationism).
Funding isn't the fundamental problem with U.S. education, although Fundamentalism is a big one....
Until the first hurricane blows through and puts your island paradise under 20 feet of water...
As long as the desert island isn't just a sand-pile, anchor the nuke securely and pour enough concrete so it doesn't care if it gets pounded by waves for a few hours.
Cleanup and rebuilding after the hurricane will be considerably easier with abundant electrical energy available.
Give me one of these and a desert island... run a desalination plant and turn it into a little paradise.
Use of credit and debit cards is a complete red herring. It's happening. Already I think of anybody in the checkout line using cash or (shudder) check as a complete loser. I happen to think these dopes should be forced to use their own, much slower line. But this issue does not affect the above measures at all.
Lately I've been encountering more and more "counter culture" cash users - including people who make and accept payment through the mail with cash only, and not just the Kefir Lady and local Farmer's market.
Not saying that cash or credit are either inherently good or bad, Vive la difference... I do hope we can continue to choose.
In 1972, prices that mattered _to me_:
Can of soda from a vending machine: $0.25
Portable cassette recorder: $40
500 mile car trip (gas cost only) 25 gallons at $0.36/gallon -> $9
Yes, there has been inflation, but it was not unreasonable for an 8 year old to carry around a $10 bill in 1972... what would you think of an 8 year old carrying around $100 today?
I've been having a disconnect lately with the price of gasoline. I will agonize over a $50 tech gadget purchase that I might make once every 3 months, searching for that last $5 discount, comparing competing products, etc. Then, I'll take a weekend trip and toss $85 of fuel in the vehicle, it's just.... wrong. I grew up in the '70s when travel by automobile was nearly free, the relevant cost was time more than money. Maybe 120mpg hybrids will bring those days back for awhile.
My point on the tangible is that people, as a big messy impossible to characterize group, do tend to accurately abstract the value of a (steady valued) coin you can hold more readily than they do numbers on a credit card slip, or coupons, or travel mile points.... In the U.S. we don't trade coins over $0.25 in value on any regular basis... I think we'd have better money management by people overall if there were coins up to $10 in regular circulation - you know, something you could actually pay a whole bar tab with.
...if your concern is holdings that won't wax and wane with the money markets, why not purchase commodities like gold or silver?
It's not really my concern, but, looking at the "value" of gold from 1975 to the present, I'd rather keep my savings in an imaginary construct like the U.S. dollar invested in a mix of index funds and bond issues. When that system collapses, everyone scrambles to prop it back up again, when the value of gold stagnates and declines in real terms for decades at a time, the world yawns.
We also ditched $1 and $2 paper currency for $1 and $2 coins. That was also a good move in getting rid of those ratty dollar bills. The US cold easily do the same thing as you already have $1 coins in circulation. About the only people who will notice a change are the strippers who will now have use their coin slots.
The dollar coin in the U.S. has been a red headed bastard stepchild of the currency, rarely used and considered stranger than a $2 bill.
I think we should put out $2, $5 and even $10 coinage, but most of the U.S. seems to be moving to a plastic-credit based currency, with all the attendant privacy and fraud issues, as well as being managed by the private sector instead of the government. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? I'd say: yes.
Except how would that work with the rest of the world?
Prices in the UK would still remain the same as they are now, so they too would have to divide their currency in the same way.
Otherwise a leather jacket in the US might be $1, but £100 in the UK.
I don't see a problem with that, that same leather jacket is 10,000 yen in Japan.
Tangible money interacts with the human animal differently than abstract mathematical concepts.
Coins are the most tangible money, paper is more abstract, especially U.S. paper money that is all basically the same except for the numbers on it. Checks and credit cards are even more abstract - so much so that many people really can't handle them properly.
Back in the day when a quarter would actually buy something worthwhile, if you tossed a quarter to somebody, they got a different visceral reaction than if they saw a penny coming. Paper, too, caused a different reaction because it was all inherently more valuable than coin. A coin more naturally "feels" like something you can instinctively trade or equate with other tangible objects of value. It takes many years of playing "The Price is Right" before most people get that same relationship with abstract prices, and again, some never really do.
I don't think that a penny should cost $0.01 to produce, but I do think that there is real value in tangible coins that paper and credit cards lack.
In most Euro-countries, prices are rounded to the nearest 5-cent number, 1- and 2-cent coins are quite rare. Why even bother producing coins that are worth more as a material than as a coin?
In most Euro-countries, people don't consider mathematical ability a sign of social awkwardness, as opposed to the U.S....
Drop the minimum wage to 8 cents an hour and divide all current cash value by 100.
Think of it: 1c hamburgers, lunch for a dime and leave a 2c tip, and your average American home for $1000.
Also, any transaction dealing with a $100 bill or higher will have to be reported....
I haven't seen it - but what about those statistics are incorrect? Up to about 1880 (I guess that's 130 years ago) way over 80% of the population worked on farms. Now, according to the BLS, about 2 million people work in agriculture and about 138 million are in non-agricultural work.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t08.htm
Nothing is wrong with the statistics, but the efficiency part is.... questionable. Look at how chickens were raised 50 years ago, and how it's done today. It's clearly a step back for the chickens, and the people who work directly with them, but even if you don't care about that, at some level, even though the meat and eggs aren't killing us outright with disease or malnutrition, it can't be an improvement in overall quality of the food product - unless all you care about is price, calories per dollar.
The changes at the bottom end of the beef/chicken/pork/grain/fruit/vegetable chain have repercussions all the way up. It makes what used to be "normal quality" food a steep premium product today.
If you really want to support an artist, support the artist when he or she is still alive
Just like those who pays hundreds of millions for paintings painted by dead painters.
Who's benefiting?
The painters who are already long dead?
Great sentiment, but you're attempting to ignore human nature which has clearly demonstrated across the centuries that dead artists are worth more to the buying public than live ones.
Sony, on the other hand, is finely tuned to this fact and responded in coldly capitalistic fashion, raising the price of the commodity they control in response to its increased market value. If you want to live in a "free market," this is one example of how that plays out when a non-person is maximizing shareholder value.
Sure, lots of potentially vocal people will be upset, but that's unlikely to affect the bottom line as much as the price increase will.