[QUOTE=Wesley Clark;12794299, to Dangerosa]
I admire your self-efficacy and internal locus of control.
[/QUOTE]
'rosa takes it a step further. She, and certain other Dopers, have what we might call an infernal locus of control: You can take 110 per cent of the responsibility for everything in your life or you can go to hell.
Wesley, I’m not asking that anyone take personal responsibility for the environment. I’m asking that they take personal responsibility for UNDERSTANDING the environment and not sit on their hands waiting for someone else to fix their problems.
I can’t take personal responsibility for the environment either. Far as I know it, none of the Dopers sit on the Fed Board and control U.S. monetary policy. None of us run the World Bank. So we do what we can do. I’m not terribly fond of spitting into the wind, myself. Seems like I just spit on myself.
And Doug, that seems to be mighty personal for this forum. Would you like to go up and reread what I’ve done for others in the past few years rather than letting them go to hell? Or would you like to just continue to whine and assume you have some clue who I am and blame me because you are angry that the world doesn’t work in the way you’d like it to? Would you like to compare “humanitarian” credentials? - I can do it on volunteer hours if you think that’s more fair than financial contributions to people less fortunate. Or would you like to have a rational discussion?
Sorry 'rosa, I have no desire to get into a dickwaving match with you, or indeed, to question your own personal generosity. You seem singularly generous - over and above, in fact - to people whose misfortune you can acknowledge.
But you do imply very strongly that anyone who wants to take that ethic of generosity beyond a personal level - community organizing, grassroots, netroots, etc. - is a whiner and a nonrealist, and AFAYC, can, more or less, go to hell. That is what I mean by the somewhat satiric phrase “infernal locus of control.”
I don’t mean to imply that - I have a number of friends who are grassroots and community organizers professionally. I respect what they do a whole lot and spend time and energy supporting them. I have friends who work for women’s organizations, work with Somali immigrants, work for environmental organizations, international human rights law, addiction, arts organizations, teaching kids science, GLBT rights, and poverty.
Now, what are YOU doing? Because you are right, I have very little patience with complaining without some effort to back it up. Maybe when you spend New Years Eve with a guy who spent his year trying human rights cases in international court and a woman trying to get services out to citizens of a near bankrupt city and you yourself put forth a lot of time and money toward trying to help, you do loose patience with people who say “no one is doing enough” who apparently have a bucketload of excuses on why they aren’t doing anything.
*I am NOT going to dickwave with you. *
You can’t take what I say on its own merits without wanting to impeach the source? Fine. I can’t control that.
If it gives you any moral ground to stand on, you can say I’m a trust-fund slacker misanthrope with mental health issues, who probably needs his face kicked in by life but can’t own up to it because it’s happened before and he’s sick to death of it. You’d be mostly right.
Proffered because it’s relevant and might be of interest: Skilled Labor Shortage Frustrates Employers.
Uh-huh - except they want people already fully trained and experienced. The US gutted its trade schools over the past few decades in the push to send EVERYONE to college. That’s why so many of those guys are over 50 - the next potential crop of machinists were steered elsewhere.
I’ve looked into do such work, as I can tolerate heat and manual labor, but I am continually told that I am too old for apprenticeship programs. I am told that since I already have a college degree I am ineligible for worker retraining programs. I can take out a loan for a four year college but not for a trade school.
We really need to re-think some of these age limits, some of these program profiles, and some other aspects of the retraining concept. Sure, I could scrimp and scrape and MAYBE come up with the money to train myself… but a little help would sure get me on my way sooner, and get some employer a new person sooner.
And no, for a lot of this stuff you can’t simply study on the internet at home - for these sorts of jobs you have to practice the trade to develop the needed skills in some cases. In other instances you need some sort of certification to get hired - no matter how hard you self-study if you don’t have that piece of paper you ain’t nuthin’
Yeah, that’s exactly what I said. :rolleyes:
Your father sounds like a particularly bright man. Probably, what, at least in the 90th percentile, IQ-wise? And he sounds like a very educated man, driven, and ambitious, self-confident man. That’s probably why you’re so smart and high-achieving.
Now if I were a 55-year-old laid off secretary, how is your father’s story going to motivate me? Am I supposed to go back to school and become an engineer, study metalurgy and ceramics, and learn how to invent things so I can become a big-time consultant too? Is your story supposed to inspire me to go to the library and read up on, what? Algebra? Because that’s as far as I got in school, since I never went to college. I need algebra to get into college, right? I’ll need college so I can become that big-time engineer by the time I’m 60.
I don’t mean to be all snarky. I know what you’re saying. I really do. And I think your father is a testament to the power of hard work and the beauty of natural, liberated talent. I never said people in their fifties and sixties were too feeble or elderly to do anything, but thanks anyway for sharing that story. My point, which apparently went right over your head, is that it is much harder for people in their 50s and 60s to compete in this economy, especially with the “retrain, retrain, RETRAIN” refrain being crammed down their throats. Do you really think a 55-year old receptionist is going to be able to retrain herself to be an engineer who can outsource her skills to India? Or the second grade teacher, with two kids at home, who just got pink-slipped. Is she supposed to take one of those jobs teaching English in China or some such place, while still supporting her family back at home? What kind of business could she start, just a few years fresh out of teacher’s college? She can tutor slow kids with their reading, but that won’t even pay the light bill!
People keep saying retrain or start up your own business, as if neither of these things cost money or carry with them significant risks, let alone the intelligence, talent, and good luck you must have to pull them off. I think that’s why many people are getting so frustrated. Not everyone is as smart and talented as your dad, and it’s too late for them to become that smart and talented. That doesn’t make them feeble or “elderly”. That just means they trusted their skills would last a lifetime and not become obsolete. The question isn’t “How do we motivate these people to retrain?” The question is, “What kinds of jobs can be created for these people to do with the skill set they already have?”
I do see people doing their thing and it does give me hope. Just the other day I saw a young woman with a cart, selling cupcakes for $2. Don’t know how well she’s been making out. But she’s been out there for a month, I’ve been told, so it can’t be that bad. Maybe if governments were more open with giving out street vendor licenses, you’d find more people like her doing that and at least eeking out some kind of self-sufficiency. We can become a society of street vendors, selling everything from cupcakes to decorated flower pots (a hobby of mine). Let’s hope rent prices drop so folks can have affordable housing close to the city.
WSJ had a similar story earlier this week that several blogs had a field day with (example). This CBS article isn’t as egregious, but it’s still misleading. You’re meant to read it and go “Oh, see, there are jobs, wtf?!”, but high unemployment nationwide says nothing about the labor situation in a particular city or region. Locally, workers may have more bargaining power than these employers assume, given the high national unemployment rate.
The machine shop owner in the story is offering $13 to $18 an hour for workers and seems mystified that she’s having trouble finding any. First of all, $13 an hour full time for 50 weeks is $26,000. That’s not a whole lot of money for work that may be semi-skilled, and there’s no way she’s going to be able to attract workers outside of a relatively small geographic area to take the risk of uprooting themselves and taking a job that they can be laid off from at any time. Her solution? According to the article, “she’s had to resort to paying people to learn on the job.” She’s had to “resort to” training a younger worker to learn the job. This is indicative of how business thinks in this country. Not only do they expect to take advantage of workers with lowball wages, they expect them to know the job and be able to hit the ground running. Instead of considering that her offer of employment sucks, she wonders if “maybe the work’s too hard.” I want to shake her and say “Listen, bitch, either the work is complicated enough that the work merits a higher wage, or it’s simple enough that you ought to have no problem training a reasonably intelligent person how to perform it.”
How many machine shops have you run recently?
Maybe $13 to $18 is the practical limit she can pay before she can’t sell the parts at a profit. Small machine shops are under enormous pressure right now to keep costs down. It doesn’t do you any good to hire someone whose labour rate means you’re selling parts at a loss.
Practically employers are unlikely to hire someone middle aged for something the person has never done before, even if the person has training. Also, training costs money. Finally, there are five people looking for every job opening that exists. Employers would rather hire someone who currently does the job the employer is hiring for. In this economy they can find that person.
What is frustrating about this problem is that politically it is not considered to be a problem. There is no political movement of the unemployed and the underemployed. The political movement is the Tea Party. Their goal is to keep the government from doing anything to help the unemployed.
I think monstro meant “professional” just in the sense of decently paid white collar job that would be filled by someone with a bachelor degree in engineering, rather than an actual PE.
I run a small machine shop and yeah 13-18 bucks is just going to get you a button pusher and part changer on machine shop. This would mean the guy can’t read a print, or use measuring tools,can’t program, figure out how to start a job etc. Basically you set up the program have him push the start button while he stands around til it is finished and then switches the finished part for a new blank. this is the kind of job my niece does when she needs some spending money.Warehouse workers and forklift drivers make about that or more around here. Somebody with experience would laugh at that wage. I wish they would mention the city or what type of machining they are doing. If it is simple stuff then yeah that wage would be okay, maybe. Precision instrument work no way.
This doesn’t only go for manufacturing jobs. Even before the crash Computerworld ran an interview with a CIO who was complaining about not being able to find anybody, and how the schools were doing a terrible job in training. But he wanted people who know his applications and who didn’t need to come up to speed. Schools reasonably don’t teach this, since anything they do teach will be obsolete in five years.
It is very telling that the person in the article thinks it is an imposition not to find people with the skills she needs right off, as if the world has an obligation to train people for her. You need to invest in people as well as machinery.
I was working in 1983. In 1983 most people (outside of the oil patch) did not own houses underwater. Most people did not enter the recession deeply in debt - the government didn’t either. State governments weren’t going bankrupt because of tax cutting pressure.
Plus, when jobs came back they came back here. It is expensive to lay people off, and companies often resist doing it in order to send jobs overseas because of bad press (not that it doesn’t happen.) But if you have already cut payrolls, and want to start hiring, doing it overseas can be very attractive. Back then, perhaps more of the jobs Dangerosa’s company is creating would reduce our unemployment rate, not India’s.
Most people today don’t own houses underwater and the U.S. government debt was soaring in 1983. The recessions are a lot more similar than you seem to believe.
Again, you can argue that in some ways this one’s worse, but it’s essentially similar to 1983-1984, and not at all like the Depression (or any number of really horrible crashes that happened frequently prior to World War I.)
Sometimes. Sometimes they didn’t.
Honestly, the rose coloured glasses people put on when looking at the past can be amazing things. In the time you claim the “jobs came back here,” people were absolutely, thoroughly panicked about the jobs going to Japan. The rise of the Japanese car industry was a matter of significant national concern because all the jobs were going to those wily Japanese. The rise of the Japanese electronics industry was being felt as well. This was a common fear from the 1970s right through the 1980s and even into the 1990s.
Almost exactly the same rhetoric and fears that have now been transferred to China and India. It’s weird how similar it is, even down to the protectionist propaganda and rhetoric…they just call it ‘globalization’ and ‘off-shoring’ now, but the code words simply mean the same thing in the end.
-XT
I sold a house in Louisiana in 1980, just before the bottom fell out (but not before interest rates soared, so I had to finance the buyer.) However the problem was limited to a small section of the country - there was no issue at all in NJ. This is the first time the drop was across the entire country. I was misleading in saying most, but the problem now is far more significant than then. And I do agree it is nowhere near as bad as the Depression, not the least because we do at least have a social safety net and protection against bank runs.
Working in a high tech job then, I saw lots of videos and reports on Japan. I was right in the middle of the Japanese initiated quality revolution, which began when Japanese companies asked American suppliers why their parts sucked so badly. There was a worry about them out-competing us, but it was a company vs company thing. No American company outsourced to Japan in any significant way, so if the business came back, and hiring came back, it came back here. There was a lot of concern about jobs moving from the North to the South though.
Not at all similar. With Japan, we worried about how they could do things better than we could, how the “made in Japan” slogan which used to mean cheap junk now meant quality. If they sold some stuff more cheaply then we did, it was because they manufactured them more efficiently. It was a quality challenge that US companies actually met pretty well. How to compete against companies which can pay workers a tenth of what you can is a totally different challenge.
We are hardly in awe of the quality of goods manufactured in China.