If you type a lot, you will eventually set your teres major, teres minor, serratus major and/or your lattisimus into spasm.
You might spend $300 on a special keyboard- but
a) it's really expensive. b) it still forces you to hold your arms pretty close to your sides.
Try this
Laptop on the left, main monitor in the middle, possible third monitor on the right.
A cheap small keyboard on the left. ($10 at best buy or frys). A regular size keyboard on the right (so your cursor keys are where you expect).
Mouse wherever you like it.
Try starting with the keyboards at least 8" apart. It takes under 2 minutes to get used to this set up. The right hand only uses the right side of the right keyboard. The left hand only uses the left side of the left keyboard.
Turn the keyboards til the match the natural angle of your hands. You may also tilt the keyboards slightly by kicking up or down the legs and placing various thicknesses of yellow sticky pads under them. You can also tilt them so the inside or outside edge is higher ( so you don't have to turn your hand inwards to flatten it which puts torque on your forearm).
You will find your hands close to two feet apart (thumb to thumb)-- your muscles will not spasm. You will have less wrist carpal tunnel and less forearm tendinitis.
So satellite maps are suddenly illegal. Google cars and planes are suddenly illegal.
It's an interesting point-- we used to have privacy in our back yards and now we don't.
But this is really about protecting corporations so only the government can show the corporations are polluting or otherwise breaking the law. If the government chooses not to pursue, then the corporation can continue breaking the law, earning high profits and making campaign donations.
Remember your boss has a boss and that boss has a boss and so on. And the real decision about the total workload was made somewhere way up the chain.
Your boss can be a prick about it or they can do the best they can but ultimately there is along chain of "deliver or be fired" and that can apply to the entire organization. If your organization can't deliver the work and another one can, then your company will choose them. And other organizations lie and temporarily sprint to give a false impression they can do more than they really can.
When the big boss asks "how long to do this huge project" and one group says 5 week and your group says "no way- this is at least a 9 week project", the work goes to the other group and then they plead special circumstances for taking 9 weeks. Maybe even one of them gets fired or moved around.
I've been involved with hundreds of projects as a manager at this point and here is what works for me. Get people's estimates and then record their actuals. It becomes clear very quickly who overestimates and who underestimates. Some people always say 40 and it turns out to be 80. Others say 40 and it turns out to be 20.
It's not just lying on the people's part. They are just over or under confident. But you can very rapidly establish a baseline which is reasonably useful and accurate for each person within a half dozen projects.
As far as estimating projects- the big bosses usually have a deadline in mind but prefer reliability over accuracy. Sure --- you MIGHT be able to do it in 7 weeks but if you can 99% likely do it in 12 weeks, that's usually preferable because once they tell the customer 12 weeks, you face a loss of business if you miss the deadline.
Anyway back to the main point-- in an ideal world- once I do determine your actual capacity then I back it off by a project or two and give push back to the bosses by asking which project they want to drop when they want to add something early. My manager probably does the same thing tho I've had a couple who seemed to say yes to everything (it's how you get promoted i guess).
Now this is going to sound odd- but working you at the right level, you may actually have more fun as a worker. Your skills will be hotter because you are working on more stuff. You are less bored. I can nominate you for more recognition awards (if you like them and are not embarrassed) You'll always have some water cooler and slashdot time and bill paying time.
Management doesn't care about the coding quality of the work- they care if it passes the regression testing. They don't care if the next project will take longer. I came to hate SOX because they don't approve refactoring and you have to explain every coding change to them and they only approve code exactly to the project. When I was a programmer I was a natural maintenance programmer and code polisher so I see the value of those activities.
However, IT has become a hellhole at most companies because they are not backing off after discovering capacity, they work you on holidays, they work you nights and weekends. I retired this january. I've spent a couple months chilling, playing games, reading game of thrones. I'm going to need to find something to do as I only just turned 52. I may do massage therapy or teach english over seas. I have enough money to last me until age 90 and my estimated death age is 82.
I've thought about writing some rpg utilities on my android for personal use. It would be nice to code for fun again. It's been about 8 years since I was able to code for fun.
So if you live at one location and sleep at another occasionally, you can get dinged? Sounds terrible. Sounds like the policies are killing people as much as a shortage of fuel.
It's a mix. Some are here just for cash to send home and they seasonally go back to mexico. It would be like if I could go work in arabia for $250k and housing was $10000 a month but by sharing with 4 other guys I could lower it to $2500 a month.
Well the environmentalists did bring us from a situation where you choked on the air and the rivers were dead.
These days, the air seems clear here but I read that it is terrible in north dakota (poisoned) and frakking is ruining the water supply in several locations.
This is why I prefer written material to video material.
Video is painfully slow.
Now- if it automatically created an agenda- you could scan the agenda and then select an area for greater detail and if you got down to the part you really wanted to see, then you could go to video.
Roommate situations are cheaper than living alone.
As recently as 80 years ago we used to have more people in the same space. Today, in my area, mexican immigrants live 12+ per house. It saves them money.
If you are freezing to death, you might consider sharing a house together each night and spending your days in your own house.
I have a room mate now. It saves me a couple hundred bucks a month.
Are you perhaps over reacting or maybe being just a TEENY bit "entitled" here?
Some people can work effectively more than 40 hours per week. Some people can work effectively for 60 hours a week.
So some companies would prefer to only have those employees who can work effectively 60 hours a week and to eliminate anyone who can only work effectively 40 hours a week.
Effective hours per week is a bell curve like any other trait.
What gets me is that some people apparently PREFER to work 60 hours a week over having a life.
Okay, so I'm forced to give you another project. You complete it successfully and you complete the rest of your assigned work.
Hmmm. But you said you were fully loaded... yet you somehow did another project without anything failing.
Now we get really crazy conditions and i give you three more projects and you finish all of them successfully on top of your regular workload.
Heck, we could do this infinately!
But then at five extra projects you start failing. Now I have an indication that I've truly reached your capacity. You are failing.
But wait, you are working on seven projects and everyone else on the team is doing ten projects. Are you fully loaded or not?
You could be failing due to lack of training, because your daughter is sick, you are breaking up with your husband, you are disengaged because I didn't nominate you for a "star award", or one of the projects is really harder than we expected, or you are just failing intentionally to hold down the workload because you like spending two hours a day on slashdot and taking long walks in the woods around your house.
It amazes me how no one comments on the part above how some remote workers are effective and do a good job and others are not. At least two lit into me over the remote worker who no one could ever reach without a 15 minute plus delay while ignoring the fact that my comment about both kinds of remote workers shows that when a remote worker works, I notice it.
The ultimate metric is work. If you need 10 projects a month and everyone is producing 10 projects a month and one person is doing 5 projects a month then something is wrong. So you dig in and try to find out what it is.
You're right. As a manager it's my job to cheerlead, keep a close track of work and work blockages, to develop a good idea of who overestimates projects and who underestimates projects, who will work late when needed, and how you can reward each person as individuals for work well done to motivate them.
Some want recognition- some absolutely do NOT want recognition except privately between you and then- some want gift cards- some do the math and thing gift cards are stupid- some like a couple hours off - others find that to be of no value.
So.. some workers are good- and some workers are indeed really bad. Forced ranking forces you to get rid of them but otherwise they just get moved around and do less than everyone else. Fortunately, most of them are just in the wrong slot or have a problem which can be addressed to bring them back to good status.
To be fair... it should be "fuel poverty and a decision to not share living spaces and fuel costs during cold times".
I.e., if four poor seniors slept in the same building at night, their fuel costs would be 25% (probably less due to body heat- each person is like a 100 watt light bulb).
There is a difference between your not reaching out to the rest of the team and your being completely unresponsive to the team, management and any efforts to reach you (phone, cell phone, im, email).
It is incumbent on remote workers to be reachable if they want to maintain the privilege of working remotely.
And when you are literally working 7am to 7pm AT work including working through lunch because they bring food to your desk, then your real work hours are more like 14.
And if you stay til 7:30 or 8:00 to wrap something up it's worse. And if they call you in on saturday until you meet the step goal, it's worse. And if they call you in on sunday until you meet the step goal, it's worse.
Now that I know what I know, if a company every tries that on me again, I'll walk out the day they declare mandatory 7 to 7's. It already means they don't respect you and just view you as a battery to use up and toss aside.
You are literally giving up your life for them. Even if they were paying you 200k a year, that's one healthy year of your life gone so consider it carefully.
Yup. We had multiple deaths on the project. And multiple folks with cancer. And multiple heart attacks.
They didn't care. They were planning all along to lay everyone off and replace them with Infosys after two years. And they did just that on the originally scheduled project completion date even tho the project was only 5% completed.
But even at a rational place-- as long as people are making deadlines and delivering working code, you are not failing.
When people start to miss deadlines and produce poor quality code they have "started failing".
At that point, you look at the workload.
If four people are working on two hundred hours of projects each and each is failing on one project out of that work while working over time already, then you know you've over-scheduled them. Reprioritize the work and remove one project each.
If three are doing just fine without over time and one is failing with overtime, then you give them training or you realize one project is worse than you thought or you replace them because they suck.
But you can't just ASK people because some will always say they can handle more (even when they can't ) and some will always say they can't handle more when they are really working at 50% capacity.
Wow... so many anonymous cowards in this discussion.
This is inherently true. You can't know for sure if they are really failing or not.
The "best" workers kill themselves working 60 hours a week to reach the company stretch goals and do whatever it takes to succeed even if it literally kills them.
I've seen "best" workers work til they had black eyes from lack of sleep to meet completely unreasonable goals while smarter workers who didn't do that were fired or left for other companies.
But unless they were failing... then upper management iterated and set EVEN MORE aggressive goals for the next work cycle. Because people hadn't failed yet.
ONLY when people failed did upper management change. And that was after firing some people and threatening people and cheerleading people and offering relatively minor bonuses and forcing people to work weekends.
Then they would pull people in and say, "you guys are great-- really hard workers, and you know... we realize that the schedule isn't realistic. So we are going to let it fall back for 4 weeks. Everyone rejuice and then we're going to hit it hard again... because you guys are the best workers in the world and we know we actually have to hold you back from overworking!"
And the ENTIRE time, they were planning on laying everyone off and replacing them with infosys. Multiple people died, several heart attacks, multiple folks with cancer during the project. The reality is, this kind of stress and workload is shortening your telemeres measurably and reducing your lifespan. This is why you need to avoid being in a position where you have to work however they want you to or lose everything.
Almost every time you reached out to this person, there was a 15+ minute delay before they responded.
This includes IM, Calling on the phone, email. This includes everyone on the team, including the managers.
Sure-- any one is occasionally going to be away from their desk. But this was constant.
And they were getting much less work done than the rest of the team.
Really- we should have just let them go. It was irritating to the rest of the people who were working that this person got a pass because they were a remote worker.
Yea, I did some research on this and china and france's baby booms were bigger and went on longer than the U.S.
You know... from 2001-2009, social security recipients increased from 28m to 33m.
In 2010 to 2011 alone, the number increased from 33m to 38m.
Now- that's WAY over the birth rates back in 1945-1950 would have predicted.
I think when the supreme court eviscerated age discrimination protection, they set up a lot more people to be forced on social security before age 66/67.
If you can't find a job due to age discrimination-- then you have to take social security early.
Also- as the leading edge boomers are dying, a lot of back edge boomers are being freed to retire. I.e., the 50 year old boomers who have saved up $200k and paid off their houses suddenly find themselves with $500k and no debt when their parents die. You no longer need a full time income at that point and can retire. You can't take social security yet.
One other thing-- if you expect to die by 82, it's wiser to take your social security earlier anyway. Your total benefits will be higher AND your inheritance passed on to your kids will be higher. Only if you expect to live past 82 does it make sense to delay taking it for the 8% increases.
Listen, if you told the pentagon- we are cutting 10%. You decide where.
A few bad programs might be retained (generals personal favorites) but a lot of bad programs would be cut.
But congress decides. The pentagon tried cutting the laser plane multiple times and congress insisted that it be continued because a powerful congressman had jobs depending on it.
So we need to cut 10% but probably a lot of bad programs will be retained and a few good ones will be cut.
Firstly, I'm not "always" assuming it's hereditary.
I listed several other non-hereditary causes for low fertility. I'd also include the work hours people have to work these days and the constant stress they are under.
I'm not assuming that "sometimes" it's hereditary because out of about 100 people i know closely, I know a some couples who have low fertility problems that are hereditary.
By spending lots of money, they had kids. Their kids will look normal but are likely to be "drones" with hereditary low fertility.
At some point we'll either find a gene therapy that works and we'll fix it. Or we'll run out of money and the birth rate will drop faster and the cultures not using artificial means will outbreed us and supplant us. And high breeding isn't good either- because we are probably at least 2x the global population that is sustainable.
Why stare out the window when you can write a book, create a D&D universe, update your facebook entries on your smart phone, talk stocks with your informal work based investment club, patrol the snackbars for cake, and pay bills.
We had that policy... and it was regularly abused by upper management scheduling fridays for meetings since they knew there wouldn't be a meeting that day.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a 10.1" I can't even conceive of trying to get by on a 7".
The 10.1" works well as a netflix TV at night, a video game console anywhere, a web browser, and a book reader.
Maybe for young people- but at 50, I need a 10" ish screen.
I am considering the new 9.7" size of my current tablet becuase it's only $200 AND has a memory slot on the keyboard instead of the tablet.
If you type a lot, you will eventually set your teres major, teres minor, serratus major and/or your lattisimus into spasm.
You might spend $300 on a special keyboard- but
a) it's really expensive.
b) it still forces you to hold your arms pretty close to your sides.
Try this
Laptop on the left, main monitor in the middle, possible third monitor on the right.
A cheap small keyboard on the left. ($10 at best buy or frys).
A regular size keyboard on the right (so your cursor keys are where you expect).
Mouse wherever you like it.
Try starting with the keyboards at least 8" apart. It takes under 2 minutes to get used to this set up. The right hand only uses the right side of the right keyboard. The left hand only uses the left side of the left keyboard.
Turn the keyboards til the match the natural angle of your hands.
You may also tilt the keyboards slightly by kicking up or down the legs and placing various thicknesses of yellow sticky pads under them. You can also tilt them so the inside or outside edge is higher ( so you don't have to turn your hand inwards to flatten it which puts torque on your forearm).
You will find your hands close to two feet apart (thumb to thumb)-- your muscles will not spasm. You will have less wrist carpal tunnel and less forearm tendinitis.
Hope this helps!
So satellite maps are suddenly illegal.
Google cars and planes are suddenly illegal.
It's an interesting point-- we used to have privacy in our back yards and now we don't.
But this is really about protecting corporations so only the government can show the corporations are polluting or otherwise breaking the law. If the government chooses not to pursue, then the corporation can continue breaking the law, earning high profits and making campaign donations.
Good concepts.
Remember your boss has a boss and that boss has a boss and so on. And the real decision about the total workload was made somewhere way up the chain.
Your boss can be a prick about it or they can do the best they can but ultimately there is along chain of "deliver or be fired" and that can apply to the entire organization. If your organization can't deliver the work and another one can, then your company will choose them. And other organizations lie and temporarily sprint to give a false impression they can do more than they really can.
When the big boss asks "how long to do this huge project" and one group says 5 week and your group says "no way- this is at least a 9 week project", the work goes to the other group and then they plead special circumstances for taking 9 weeks. Maybe even one of them gets fired or moved around.
I've been involved with hundreds of projects as a manager at this point and here is what works for me. Get people's estimates and then record their actuals. It becomes clear very quickly who overestimates and who underestimates. Some people always say 40 and it turns out to be 80. Others say 40 and it turns out to be 20.
It's not just lying on the people's part. They are just over or under confident. But you can very rapidly establish a baseline which is reasonably useful and accurate for each person within a half dozen projects.
As far as estimating projects- the big bosses usually have a deadline in mind but prefer reliability over accuracy. Sure --- you MIGHT be able to do it in 7 weeks but if you can 99% likely do it in 12 weeks, that's usually preferable because once they tell the customer 12 weeks, you face a loss of business if you miss the deadline.
Anyway back to the main point-- in an ideal world- once I do determine your actual capacity then I back it off by a project or two and give push back to the bosses by asking which project they want to drop when they want to add something early. My manager probably does the same thing tho I've had a couple who seemed to say yes to everything (it's how you get promoted i guess).
Now this is going to sound odd- but working you at the right level, you may actually have more fun as a worker. Your skills will be hotter because you are working on more stuff. You are less bored. I can nominate you for more recognition awards (if you like them and are not embarrassed) You'll always have some water cooler and slashdot time and bill paying time.
Management doesn't care about the coding quality of the work- they care if it passes the regression testing. They don't care if the next project will take longer. I came to hate SOX because they don't approve refactoring and you have to explain every coding change to them and they only approve code exactly to the project. When I was a programmer I was a natural maintenance programmer and code polisher so I see the value of those activities.
However, IT has become a hellhole at most companies because they are not backing off after discovering capacity, they work you on holidays, they work you nights and weekends. I retired this january. I've spent a couple months chilling, playing games, reading game of thrones. I'm going to need to find something to do as I only just turned 52. I may do massage therapy or teach english over seas. I have enough money to last me until age 90 and my estimated death age is 82.
I've thought about writing some rpg utilities on my android for personal use. It would be nice to code for fun again. It's been about 8 years since I was able to code for fun.
So if you live at one location and sleep at another occasionally, you can get dinged? Sounds terrible. Sounds like the policies are killing people as much as a shortage of fuel.
It's a mix. Some are here just for cash to send home and they seasonally go back to mexico. It would be like if I could go work in arabia for $250k and housing was $10000 a month but by sharing with 4 other guys I could lower it to $2500 a month.
Well the environmentalists did bring us from a situation where you choked on the air and the rivers were dead.
These days, the air seems clear here but I read that it is terrible in north dakota (poisoned) and frakking is ruining the water supply in several locations.
This is why I prefer written material to video material.
Video is painfully slow.
Now- if it automatically created an agenda- you could scan the agenda and then select an area for greater detail and if you got down to the part you really wanted to see, then you could go to video.
Ah! So you make sure your entire life is spent engaged in some kind of porn.
Problem solved.
Roommate situations are cheaper than living alone.
As recently as 80 years ago we used to have more people in the same space.
Today, in my area, mexican immigrants live 12+ per house. It saves them money.
If you are freezing to death, you might consider sharing a house together each night and spending your days in your own house.
I have a room mate now. It saves me a couple hundred bucks a month.
Are you perhaps over reacting or maybe being just a TEENY bit "entitled" here?
Couldn't agree with you more
BUT
Some people can work effectively more than 40 hours per week. Some people can work effectively for 60 hours a week.
So some companies would prefer to only have those employees who can work effectively 60 hours a week and to eliminate anyone who can only work effectively 40 hours a week.
Effective hours per week is a bell curve like any other trait.
What gets me is that some people apparently PREFER to work 60 hours a week over having a life.
Thanks,
What I'm saying is this.
I ask you if you are fully loaded.
You say, "yes, I can't handle any more work."
Is that true or false?
Okay, so I'm forced to give you another project. You complete it successfully and you complete the rest of your assigned work.
Hmmm. But you said you were fully loaded... yet you somehow did another project without anything failing.
Now we get really crazy conditions and i give you three more projects and you finish all of them successfully on top of your regular workload.
Heck, we could do this infinately!
But then at five extra projects you start failing. Now I have an indication that I've truly reached your capacity. You are failing.
But wait, you are working on seven projects and everyone else on the team is doing ten projects. Are you fully loaded or not?
You could be failing due to lack of training, because your daughter is sick, you are breaking up with your husband, you are disengaged because I didn't nominate you for a "star award", or one of the projects is really harder than we expected, or you are just failing intentionally to hold down the workload because you like spending two hours a day on slashdot and taking long walks in the woods around your house.
It amazes me how no one comments on the part above how some remote workers are effective and do a good job and others are not. At least two lit into me over the remote worker who no one could ever reach without a 15 minute plus delay while ignoring the fact that my comment about both kinds of remote workers shows that when a remote worker works, I notice it.
The ultimate metric is work. If you need 10 projects a month and everyone is producing 10 projects a month and one person is doing 5 projects a month then something is wrong. So you dig in and try to find out what it is.
You're right. As a manager it's my job to cheerlead, keep a close track of work and work blockages, to develop a good idea of who overestimates projects and who underestimates projects, who will work late when needed, and how you can reward each person as individuals for work well done to motivate them.
Some want recognition- some absolutely do NOT want recognition except privately between you and then- some want gift cards- some do the math and thing gift cards are stupid- some like a couple hours off - others find that to be of no value.
So.. some workers are good- and some workers are indeed really bad. Forced ranking forces you to get rid of them but otherwise they just get moved around and do less than everyone else. Fortunately, most of them are just in the wrong slot or have a problem which can be addressed to bring them back to good status.
To be fair... it should be "fuel poverty and a decision to not share living spaces and fuel costs during cold times".
I.e., if four poor seniors slept in the same building at night, their fuel costs would be 25% (probably less due to body heat- each person is like a 100 watt light bulb).
There is a difference between your not reaching out to the rest of the team and your being completely unresponsive to the team, management and any efforts to reach you (phone, cell phone, im, email).
It is incumbent on remote workers to be reachable if they want to maintain the privilege of working remotely.
And when you are literally working 7am to 7pm AT work including working through lunch because they bring food to your desk, then your real work hours are more like 14.
And if you stay til 7:30 or 8:00 to wrap something up it's worse.
And if they call you in on saturday until you meet the step goal, it's worse.
And if they call you in on sunday until you meet the step goal, it's worse.
Now that I know what I know, if a company every tries that on me again, I'll walk out the day they declare mandatory 7 to 7's. It already means they don't respect you and just view you as a battery to use up and toss aside.
You are literally giving up your life for them. Even if they were paying you 200k a year, that's one healthy year of your life gone so consider it carefully.
Crap location == most of the united states.
With additional laws for computer people.
There is no amount of hours (even 24 hour shifts) which is not legal for computer people in the U.S.
They can order you to work a 12 hour shift after a 12 hour shift and fire you if you don't do it. It's really bad.
Yup. We had multiple deaths on the project. And multiple folks with cancer. And multiple heart attacks.
They didn't care. They were planning all along to lay everyone off and replace them with Infosys after two years. And they did just that on the originally scheduled project completion date even tho the project was only 5% completed.
But even at a rational place-- as long as people are making deadlines and delivering working code, you are not failing.
When people start to miss deadlines and produce poor quality code they have "started failing".
At that point, you look at the workload.
If four people are working on two hundred hours of projects each and each is failing on one project out of that work while working over time already, then you know you've over-scheduled them. Reprioritize the work and remove one project each.
If three are doing just fine without over time and one is failing with overtime, then you give them training or you realize one project is worse than you thought or you replace them because they suck.
But you can't just ASK people because some will always say they can handle more (even when they can't ) and some will always say they can't handle more when they are really working at 50% capacity.
Wow... so many anonymous cowards in this discussion.
This is inherently true. You can't know for sure if they are really failing or not.
The "best" workers kill themselves working 60 hours a week to reach the company stretch goals and do whatever it takes to succeed even if it literally kills them.
I've seen "best" workers work til they had black eyes from lack of sleep to meet completely unreasonable goals while smarter workers who didn't do that were fired or left for other companies.
But unless they were failing... then upper management iterated and set EVEN MORE aggressive goals for the next work cycle. Because people hadn't failed yet.
ONLY when people failed did upper management change. And that was after firing some people and threatening people and cheerleading people and offering relatively minor bonuses and forcing people to work weekends.
Then they would pull people in and say, "you guys are great-- really hard workers, and you know... we realize that the schedule isn't realistic. So we are going to let it fall back for 4 weeks. Everyone rejuice and then we're going to hit it hard again... because you guys are the best workers in the world and we know we actually have to hold you back from overworking!"
And the ENTIRE time, they were planning on laying everyone off and replacing them with infosys. Multiple people died, several heart attacks, multiple folks with cancer during the project. The reality is, this kind of stress and workload is shortening your telemeres measurably and reducing your lifespan. This is why you need to avoid being in a position where you have to work however they want you to or lose everything.
I think you misunderstood my comment.
Almost every time you reached out to this person, there was a 15+ minute delay before they responded.
This includes IM, Calling on the phone, email. This includes everyone on the team, including the managers.
Sure-- any one is occasionally going to be away from their desk. But this was constant.
And they were getting much less work done than the rest of the team.
Really- we should have just let them go. It was irritating to the rest of the people who were working that this person got a pass because they were a remote worker.
I can say from experience... you collect more dollars.
It's easy to verify. Go to Social Security Site and sign up.
Observe your contributed amounts.
Then, download the PIA calculator and observe your benefit. The numbers are not close.
However- the real problem is not poor people (who collect really low benefits) but the wealthy people who
a) live 5 years longer on average.
b) collect the maximum benefit.
A lot of social security does make sense when you consider inflation however.
A dollar collected in 1990 was worth more than a dollar in benefits 30 years later.
For comparison-- since 1970- houses have gone up over 1000%. And so have bread, gasoline, sugar, and just about every other commodity.
So presumably... workers in 2030 will be making $21 an hour for minimum wage and the $26000 benefit SS benefits will be below poverty level.
Yea, I did some research on this and china and france's baby booms were bigger and went on longer than the U.S.
You know... from 2001-2009, social security recipients increased from 28m to 33m.
In 2010 to 2011 alone, the number increased from 33m to 38m.
Now- that's WAY over the birth rates back in 1945-1950 would have predicted.
I think when the supreme court eviscerated age discrimination protection, they set up a lot more people to be forced on social security before age 66/67.
If you can't find a job due to age discrimination-- then you have to take social security early.
Also- as the leading edge boomers are dying, a lot of back edge boomers are being freed to retire. I.e., the 50 year old boomers who have saved up $200k and paid off their houses suddenly find themselves with $500k and no debt when their parents die. You no longer need a full time income at that point and can retire. You can't take social security yet.
One other thing-- if you expect to die by 82, it's wiser to take your social security earlier anyway. Your total benefits will be higher AND your inheritance passed on to your kids will be higher. Only if you expect to live past 82 does it make sense to delay taking it for the 8% increases.
Oh, you mean like private insurance companies do already.
Gotcha.
Listen, if you told the pentagon- we are cutting 10%. You decide where.
A few bad programs might be retained (generals personal favorites) but a lot of bad programs would be cut.
But congress decides. The pentagon tried cutting the laser plane multiple times and congress insisted that it be continued because a powerful congressman had jobs depending on it.
So we need to cut 10% but probably a lot of bad programs will be retained and a few good ones will be cut.
Firstly, I'm not "always" assuming it's hereditary.
I listed several other non-hereditary causes for low fertility. I'd also include the work hours people have to work these days and the constant stress they are under.
I'm not assuming that "sometimes" it's hereditary because out of about 100 people i know closely, I know a some couples who have low fertility problems that are hereditary.
By spending lots of money, they had kids. Their kids will look normal but are likely to be "drones" with hereditary low fertility.
At some point we'll either find a gene therapy that works and we'll fix it. Or we'll run out of money and the birth rate will drop faster and the cultures not using artificial means will outbreed us and supplant us. And high breeding isn't good either- because we are probably at least 2x the global population that is sustainable.
Why stare out the window when you can write a book, create a D&D universe, update your facebook entries on your smart phone, talk stocks with your informal work based investment club, patrol the snackbars for cake, and pay bills.
We had that policy... and it was regularly abused by upper management scheduling fridays for meetings since they knew there wouldn't be a meeting that day.
And you were required to attend in person.