The hell, dude. Seriously, that post by CheeseDonkey may have been the most misleading summary of an article I’ve seen this week–unless you think that a guy working an average of 17 hour workdays! is overpaid at 133k (which works out to a normal salary of around $51-52k per year, perfectly reasonable for a long-term employee who (according to the cite) takes around 55k in training (thus, you’d want a guy to have incentive to stick around). There were a hell of a lot of stupid excesses described in that article–why’d he have to pick the one that was basically a dude who from the descriptions was working his ass off for the city because (according to the city Director of Emergency Comms) it was cheaper for him to continue to do it while they trained new people than any other solution?
The point is that an anecdote of a single person is completely useless.
Gonzomax’s cite is far more useful than a single, exceptional case.
oh, and sorry - supporting someone’s freedom of speech does NOT mean that we have to shut up when they say something misleading or downright stupid.
So, you don’t actually care about the American worker. That’s makes more sense from all your other posts. You want them to have more power over the big bad people that employ them and give them a paycheck, but not against the millions who come and take their jobs and depress wages for low skilled across whole sectors.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Utopias are a good thing, no?
One man’s utopia is another man’s distopia.
Dense aren’t you. i did not say I support illegal aliens. I said they are coming anyway.
Note, it could be stopped easily, not at the borders but at the work place. Do you think when a guy comes in with shitty paper work, no way to check references and an accent, the employer does not know he is hiring an illegal. Just drill the company with big enough fines so it is not a good financial decision and it will end. If they can get away with hiring illegals, they will. The borders are very long and tough to police. One factory raid could net a bus load.
Hijack though this may be, you’ll find the prevailing liberal opinion rests on two pillars:
- Stopping them at the border is the most investment for the least gain, compared to stopping them from getting jobs due to negligent/malfeasant employers.
- Any immigration-control policy that is not colorblind, REGARDLESS of the relative volume of immigrants of various ethnicities, is prima fascie unacceptable.
Despite the volume of their statements, very few liberals are for unrestricted immigration (probably comparable to the number of conservatives who think it’s okay to murder abortion providers).
Well, my apologies if I had you confused with some of the open borders idiots. Though, while I’m a fan of going after the employers with no mercy, I also advocate more guards, and a wall and a moat and anything else we can think of.
I think you’re WAY off on number 2. There are plenty of open border advocates, even just on these boards. As far as number 1, see my response to gonzomax.
I agree that the race card gets played too frequently in the immigration debate but its really hard to ignore the apparent racism in how these defenders of our borders want to implement laws.
Some people seem to be ready to pay almost any price, go to almost any length to keep Mexicans out of the country. Its like they feel like they are being invaded by poor starving people who are looking for a better life.
WTF? So you’re complaining that a guy that worked 80K in overtime and collected a total of 133K? So his regular pay was 53K?
That wouldn’t bother me too much unless you told me that his pension was going to be keyed off the 133K he earned last year.
We are. I don’t necessarily blame them for wanting to come here, but I really, really want to go to the Playboy Mansion, and have managed to not go down there and try to sneak in. The racism charge is really annoying because it’s so dumb. IF people are going to try to sneak in here, it will most likely be from a country that borders ours. And of those, they are much more likely to come from a country that’s corrupt and offers the people very little. And in OUR case, that’s going to mean people coming from Mexico and points south. And those people just happen to have generally darker skin. It’s an accident that the people we are trying to keep out tend to be brown people.
I think this bears repeating.
It very often is. Or if not the last year, the last three. It’s called “pension spiking”.
As there are plenty of “abortion is murder” advocates on FreeRepublic and other right-leaning boards. I didn’t say that either didn’t exist, just that the noise they generate is out of proportion to their actual number.
As for the wall and moat, I don’t see those as cost-effective in the long run compared to sinking the money we’d spend on that into more aggressive employer enforcement. Walls and moats can be tunneled under or otherwise circumvented, but cutting off the cash flow puts up a nice big wall right in the middle of their motive for coming here in the first place.
The problem is that when policies intended to keep them out key on their race, either in letter or in enforcement, they impinge on US Citizens of that race, many of whom live near the aforementioned border in relatively high proportions. I recognize that it’s a tricky problem, however, I think it’s important to our sense of national identity and values that we not abandon our values (of equal rights for all citizens, in this instance) in order to “protect” them.
I’d be interested to know if overtime counts for pension spiking in that case. I know in the case of my brother’s school district (the only public pension plan I’m highly familiar with) it does not.
I appreciate our values, but they are not there to turn us into idiots just because someone can construe our actions as “RACIST!”. That’s asinine. Stopping illegal from sneaking into the U.S. is going to involve stopping brown people. Get over it. (Directed to anyone in general, not necessarily you.)
In my experience with my friends who are school teachers (and cops and firemen) their pensions are definitely tied to their last year or three at the job. Because of that, the temptation to get those year’s salaries as high as possible is natural. My sister in law (guidance counselor) I don’t think gets any overtime, though. So, it may be the same for your brother.
No, we just don’t like uneducated idiots spewing lies like this everywhere.
I paid my way through college because my mom and dad could barely afford raising a family on an NCO’s wages in the military and part time work. And I got into a competitive PhD program by busting ass, scoring well on objective tests, and by the recommendations of a few professors that knew my work.
It doesn’t take a college degree to be smart and informed. It takes a hell of a lot more than just strong beliefs that can’t stand the light of day.
If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. If you’re going to stay, it’s not just about opinions, it’s about showing the work you did to get there.
I’d rather waft than have my head up my ass being sure my shit don’t stick.
You’re arguing against something I’m not saying: I’m totally in agreement that the majority of illegal immigrants (to my knowledge) are Mexican. If 95% of the people we deport are Mexican, and 95% of illegal immigrants are Mexican, that’s not racist.
I just believe that it’s important, in a “just treatment” sense, that immigration enforcement procedures should not affect legal residents of Hispanic descent at all. I am bothered by any enforcement mechanism that (either by the letter of the law or by the methods/people used to typically enforce it) treats merely “being brown” as a reason for further investigation–exactly the same way as I’d be bothered on a fundamental level by treating “is an employer near the border” as a rationale for plowing through a company’s private files looking for evidence of immigration-related malfeasance.
Oh, I’m not denying pension spiking happens, but I’m doubtful as to whether it can be induced by scooping up overtime shifts every day for a year (as opposed to the traditional method, which is kissing up for a 20% raise in your last two years).
Pension spiking among teachers typically means, in their last three years, taking on as many stipended extra-curriculars as they can handle.
I’ve seen similar production lines in the same company, some unionized, some not. Though the unionized workers had grievances and could appeal disciplinary action, they were treated much more like “cogs” than the non-unionized workers.
How much this is true seems to be in proportion to the number of rules negotiated by the union. Some unions just negotiate wages and benefits, and are otherwise unobtrusive. Others negotiate complex job assignment categories. When managers have to assign tasks not by skill or potential, but rather by union classification, people really are very much more like cogs than less regulated or non-unionized employees.