A daily dose of odds and sods, some interesting, some bizarre, some funny, some thought provoking items which I have stumbled across the web. All to be taken with a grain of daily salt!!
This was an interesting article. I know you are 1 - 1.5 years away from looking for a job, and you being in Oxford is pretty much guaranteed to get you a job, but good lessons to be learnt. The networks are very important, get your name out there, have a good set of people, write articles which people read, know people and collect favours :)
Love
Baba
Three-quarters of American job switchers don’t find their new role, it finds them, according to a new study by the Federal Bank Reserve of San Francisco.
Rather than going through the standard search-and-apply protocol, the majority of new hires seem to find their way in through professional networks, word-of-mouth referrals or after being approached by headhunters.
Less than 25% of people in employment when they switched actively looked for jobs and even two-thirds of the unemployed relied on “informal contacts” to land their new role.
While this might be good news for people who hate trawling through job ads, it can be disheartening for those that are new the industry or don’t have a strong network of contacts.
That said, if you’re anxious to make the leap and no obvious leg-up presents itself, you still need to be looking for a job. The study found that people who actively searched were 10 times more likely to find work than those that didn’t.
I'm not impressed by Saudi Arabia son. Besides the absolutely rampant racism and religious fundamentalism, the terrorism problem is big here. Then again what do you expect? I have seen the university syllabus and have interviewed Saudis and worked with them. The syllabus of most of the Saudi universities is shit. Teachers are shite. Atrocious. For a rich country to have such shitty university is a travesty. With some honourable exceptions, they are spectacularly unsuited for modern life. Professional middle class jobs or vocational jobs are simply out of the question. Entrepreneurship is minuscule. So what can you do with quarter of a million Saudis who enter the job market? Some wrenching changes are in train. And unfortunately you and I will see a large proportion of these young Saudis swelling the ranks of the jehadis.
This will cause us problems. And the steps the Saudis are taking by embarking on two wars is very bad. A giant country like USA finds it difficult to wage war properly. Saudi Arabia will pay very heavily for its Yemeni and Syrian mistakes. And us as well.
Saudi men leaving a mosque in Riyadh last year. For decades, the royal family has used the kingdom's immense oil wealth to lavish benefits on its people, including free education and medical care, generous energy subsidies and well-paid government jobs. Tomas Munita for The New York Times
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — In pressed white robes and clutching crisp résumés, young Saudi men packed a massive hall at a university in the capital city this month to wait in long lines to pitch themselves to employers.
It was one of three job fairs in Riyadh in two weeks, and the high attendance was fueled in part by fear among the younger generation of what a future of cheap oil will mean in a country where oil is everything.
For decades, the royal family has used the kingdom's immense oil wealth to lavish benefits on its people, including free education and medical care, generous energy subsidies and well-paid (and often undemanding) government jobs. No one paid taxes, and if political rights were not part of the equation, that was fine with most people.
But the drop in oil prices to below $30 a barrel from more than $100 a barrel in June 2014 means that the old math no longer works. Low oil prices have knocked a chunk out of the government budget and now pose a threat to the unwritten social contract that has long underpinned life in the kingdom, the Arab world's largest economy and a key American ally.
There are two ways of looking at this problem son. Well three ways. When you and Diya were born, I didn't have parental leave. And mamma didn't work so the question of leave didn't exist. But if fathers leave was available, then I would have loved to take it. Spend more time with you. When you have your kids, son, make sure you take the full amount. Don't worry about the future son. Or career. The time you spend with your new born baby and your wife is so precious that it will keep on giving you happiness through your entire life time. Secondly, there's the USA situation. I find it very strange that USA doesn't do it and it's not mandatory like in other countries. Very strange. Then again there's no demographic pressure either. Their birth rates are good. But the republicans are a dying breed anyway so entropy will take care of the nay Sayers.
Thirdly as an economist, you will know that this has a cost. Paid parental leave means that the company gets hit twice. First with the loss of the mother's time and then the cost of maternity cover or if the role isn't covered, then lack of productivity. This, when aggregated, means there is a cost of this. Sometimes it can be handled. Sometimes it can't and ends up being very painful. So the studies that this article talks about say there's no impact. Or they couldn't measure it. Or they were able to manage the impact. Finally remember that the unmarried people in the office have started to complain. Why should they bear the cost of somebody who is taking a lifestyle choice? It's a fair question. Difficult decisions son. When you will become a manager, you'll have to deal with these questions. Missing you. And remembering the bestest day in my life when you were placed in my arms :) Love you Baba The Real War on Families: Why the U.S. Needs Paid Leave Now http://inthesetimes.com/article/18151/the-real-war-on-families (via Instapaper) Each one of these women went back to work less than two months after giving birth due to the financial toll of unpaid maternity leave. (Kate Milford)
Benrahou had to attend to another crisis: she was the mother of a very sick baby, and her carefully constructed paid maternity leave had disintegrated.
Leigh Benrahou began laying plans to have a second child almost as soon as she had her first, a daughter named Johara, in 2011. Benrahou, 32, wanted to time the next birth so that when she returned to work, her mother, who works at an elementary school and has summers off, could babysit. Most importantly, Benrahou wanted to spend as much time as she could with her new baby while also keeping her relatively new job as the registrar at a small college.
While her husband, Rachid, 38, earns enough at a carpet cleaning company to cover their mortgage and food, without her paycheck they'd be forced to live close to the bone. And if she quit her job, Benrahou, who has a masters in nonprofit management, would take a big step backward in what she hoped would be a long career in higher education.
So Benrahou, who has wavy dark blond hair, blue eyes and a tendency to smile even through difficult moments, set about what may be the least romantic aspect of family planning in the United States: figuring out how to maximize time with a newborn while staying solvent, employed and, ideally, sane.
Only in America
Most people are aware that Americans have a raw deal when it comes to maternity leave. Perhaps they've heard about Sweden, with its drool-inducing 16 months of paid parental leave, or Finland, where, after about 9 months of paid leave, the mother or father can take—or split—additional paid "child care leave" until the child's third birthday.
But most Americans don't realize quite how out of step we are. It's not just wealthy, social democratic Nordic countries that make us look bad. With the exception of a few small countries like Papua New Guinea and Suriname, every other nation in the world—rich or poor—now requires paid maternity leave.
Paid parental leave frees mothers and fathers from choosing between their careers and time with their infants. For women, still most often the primary caregivers of young children, this results in higher employment rates, which in turn translates to lower poverty rates among mothers and their children.
Research shows that paid leave can also be a matter of life and death for children. By charting the correlation between death rates and paid leave in 16 European countries, Christopher Ruhm, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, found that a 50-week extension in paid leave was associated with a 20 percent dip in infant deaths. (The biggest drop was in deaths of babies between 1 month and 1 year old, though mortality of children between 1 and 5 years also decreased as paid leave went up.)
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 13 percent of U.S. workers have access to any form of paid family leave, which includes parental leave and other time off to care for a family member. The highest-paid workers are most likely to have it, according to BLS numbers, with more than 1 in 5 of the top 10 percent of earners getting paid family leave, compared to 1 in 20 in the bottom quartile. Unionized workers are more likely to get benefits than nonunionized workers.
What do the rest of American women do without a law that guarantees this basic support? Some new mothers who don't get paid leave quit their jobs, which can leave them desperate for income and have serious consequences in terms of work opportunities and lifetime earnings. Others may choose not to have children (though it's impossible to definitively quantify how the difficulty of integrating work and childbirth factors into those decisions). And some try to stitch together their own paid leaves through accumulated vacation time and personal days, or through independently purchased insurance policies.
The best-laid plans
Though her employer doesn't offer paid leave, Benrahou figured she'd create her own, taking time away from work through the Family and Medical Leave Act, which entitles new parents to up to 12 weeks off, unpaid. She knew all about the law's loopholes—that, for instance, it only applies to workplaces that have at least 50 employees. Hers did; she wouldn't have taken the job if it hadn't. She knew, too, that she had to have worked for her employer for at least 12 months to qualify. That part was trickier.
She had started her job in February 2014, which meant that she wouldn't qualify until the following February. She counted back nine months from then and got to May, but then, to be safe, tacked on another two months in case the baby came early, so: July. That's when she and Rachid would start trying for a second.
Then there was money. Reluctant to lose 12 weeks of income, Benrahou decided to opt into her employer's disability insurance policy, paying roughly $40 a month into the plan so she could receive 60 percent of her salary for up to six weeks of her maternity leave, plus an additional $1,000 toward the cost of her hospital stay. She would also save up her two weeks of annual paid vacation time.
Numbers crunched and policy purchased, Benrahou went off birth control on schedule in July and became pregnant within a month. But her carefully laid plans started to go awry in her 20th week, when she was diagnosed with placenta previa, which can result in early delivery. Despite some bleeding and cramping, and several brief hospital stays that used up her sick days, Benrahou stuck to her plan, working as much as possible after her diagnosis in order to save her precious vacation time. But, in late December, her water broke. Though her due date was April 1, Leigh Benrahou gave birth by C-section on Christmas Eve—too soon to qualify for FMLA leave or any payoff from her disability insurance.
Ramzi Benrahou was born at 26 weeks and just over 2 pounds. Knowing that 20 percent of babies born at his gestational age don't survive, Leigh spent the first hours after the delivery singularly focused on her tiny son's survival. He needed oxygen, since his lungs weren't fully developed. And, when he was whisked away for medical attention, Benrahou had to attend to another crisis: She was the mother of a very sick baby, and her carefully constructed paid maternity leave had disintegrated. So, freshly stitched up and still groggy from anesthesia, she spread out her medical fact sheets, insurance policy papers and lists of phone numbers on her hospital bed and began to grapple with her new reality. Though her college was on winter break, which put off her return by about a week, Benrahou realized she'd have to go back to work when classes resumed on January 6, less than two weeks after giving birth.
Less than a month
Like Benrahou, most U.S. women end up returning to work sooner than they'd like—sometimes just weeks or days after having a baby. Just how soon they're going back is difficult to determine. We know that most employers don't offer paid leave, but no federal agency collects regular statistics on how much post-childbirth time off, paid or unpaid, women are actually taking.
Census data on employment patterns among first-time mothers show that between 2005 and 2007, more than half who worked during their pregnancy were back on the job within three months of giving birth. A 2008 study by the Department of Health and Human Services' Maternal and Child Health Bureau, meanwhile, found that the average length of maternity leave, when taken, was 10 weeks. But more recent data is scarce, even though the recession left many women living on razorthin margins, ratcheting up the pressure to rush back to work after giving birth.
How are new mothers faring in today's age of austerity? Data analyzed for In These Times by Abt Associates, a research and evaluation company, provides a window into these experiences. Abt went back to a 2012 survey it conducted for the Department of Labor of 2,852 employees who had taken family or medical leave in the last year, looking specifically at the 93 women who took time off work to care for a new baby.
Nearly 12 percent of those women took off only a week or less. Another 11 percent took between one and two weeks off. That means that about 23 percent—nearly 1 in 4—of the women interviewed were back at work within two weeks of having a child.
The educational divide between those who took shorter and relatively longer leaves is striking: 80 percent of college graduates took at least six weeks off to care for a new baby, but only 54 percent of women without college degrees did so.
Pumping in the parking lot
What's it like to be back on the job in the first weeks after having a baby?
For Natasha Long, who was back three weeks after her third child, Jayden, was born in 2012, the worst part was missing out on bonding time with her son.
Long, who was 29 at the time, was determined to make sure Jayden got breast milk. But the factory where she worked, ACCO Office Supplies in Booneville, Mississippi, didn't have a lactation room. So when she was on breaks, she had to run out to her truck. She sat in the cab, worried that someone might see her, and pumped, while tears rolled down her face and over the plastic suction cups attached to her breasts.
Long cried because she wanted to be holding her baby rather than sitting in the parking lot of a factory in her old Yukon Denali. But exhaustion clearly also played a role in her emotional state. Her job was simple—to place stickers with the company logo on the bottom right-hand corner of plastic binders and then box up the binders. But the shifts were long—from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.—and she put in four or five a week. Because the factory was an hour's drive from her home in Okalona, Mississippi, Long had only 10 hours left in the day to do everything else, including tend to her three children, spend time with Jayden's father, and sleep. By the time she got back in the evening, her children, who were being looked after by her father during the day, were on their way to bed. To pump breast milk before leaving for work, she had to get up at 4 a.m.
After just a few days of this crazed schedule, Long began to develop strange symptoms, including a headache that never seemed to go away and a choking sensation that left her feeling breathless. She started biting her fingernails to the quick—something she'd never done before—and crying a lot. "I felt like I was alone," says Long. "I wanted to fall off the face of the earth." Long had never been depressed. But when she went to the doctor, he surmised that her physical symptoms were rooted in her mental state, which was itself rooted in her schedule. When her doctor said he thought she was depressed, Long worried that if child welfare authorities found out, they might take her children away. She had seen other people's children put in foster care. But when her doctor prescribed her antidepressants, she took them.
Long is not the only one to suffer emotionally from a quick return to work. Research has shown that longer maternity leaves, whether paid or unpaid, are associated with a decline in depressive symptoms, a reduction in the likelihood of severe depression, and an improvement in overall maternal health, according to a working paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research. One national study of 1,762 mothers found that a one-week increase in maternity leave was associated with a 5 to 6 percent reduction in depressive symptoms from six to 24 months after birth. Another found that women who took less than eight weeks of paid leave experienced more depression than those who had longer leaves and were in worse health overall. Mothers who work more than 40 hours a week, as Long was, were more likely to be depressed than those who worked 40 hours or less, according to a study by Child Trends, a research center.
Women who go back sooner also tend to breastfeed less, which cuts into the benefits breast milk confers, including better immunity and lower rates of childhood obesity, allergies and sudden infant death syndrome. It was only through heroic efforts that Long was able to breastfeed Jayden until he was 1.
Shorter maternity leaves may also have a negative effect on the development of early motor and social skills and even, later, on vocabulary, according to several studies. So far, Jayden, 3, hasn't shown signs of missing any developmental milestones. What nags at Long is the thought that her absence in those first few months might have affected their relationship. He refuses to call her "mama," and although there's no research to indicate this would be a result of failed early bonding, she still fears that's the reason.
Too busy to fight
For low-income women, the lack of paid maternity leave is just one of many missing supports to help them stay afloat while bringing new life into the world. By the time Jayden was born, pregnancy had already put Long in a perilous financial situation. She was on bed rest for the last four and a half months of her pregnancy. Big Dollar, where she worked at the time, didn't fire her for not coming in—but it didn't pay her, either. So Long filed for public assistance, which required her to attend classes. Though Mississippi is supposed to exempt people who are physically unable to take such classes, and Long's doctor had warned her to stay off her feet, she says she was denied benefits when she didn't attend.
Family members pitched in to pay for her groceries and rent while she was unable to work, but by the time Jayden was born (healthy, at 37 weeks), Long knew she had reached the limit of their generosity. When she went back to work at the dollar store, they offered her only reduced hours. It wasn't enough to repay her debts, so she went to an employment agency, made no mention of her days-old baby, and got her job at ACCO.
Other social supports are glaringly absent for U.S. mothers, especially poor ones, who fill waiting lists for scarce subsidized childcare spots and underfunded early education classes. In comparison, Sweden and Denmark spend roughly 10 times what we do on childcare per person.
Without adequate options or support, low-income workers, who are more likely to live paycheck to paycheck and less likely to have access to any type of leave, often have little choice but to power through. As our data confirm—and as finances dictate—less educated women, who tend to have lower-paying jobs, are likely to take less time off after having children. Often, that means not just going back to work early, but going back to very long work hours, very early.
Raven Osborne, for instance, a 22-year-old single mother in Tupelo, Mississippi, went back to work just one week after her first child, Kylan, now 2, was born in August 2013. In addition to being a full-time college student, Osborne was waitressing full-time at IHOP, but her earnings—tips plus a base salary of $2.13 an hour—weren't enough to cover her rent, car payments and daycare costs. Perhaps ironically, her tips were much higher—sometimes more than $100 a shift—when she was visibly pregnant. But once she had the child, they went down again, so Osborne added a few overnight shifts at Texaco when Kylan was four weeks old, leaving the baby with his grandmother. Working upwards of 60 hours each week, the new mother barely saw her son, except when she got home from work, when she often fell asleep holding him. She could have taken unpaid leave from IHOP but chose not to because she needed the pay.
This winter, Osborne returned to work four weeks after her second child, Anthony, was born. Now she's working full-time at a debt collection agency on top of several shifts at the nearby Coles supermarket.
"I don't like asking for help" is how Osborne explains the frantic pace she's kept up during her first year-and-a-half of motherhood. Her mother pitches in by watching the kids when she can, though she, too, has two full-time jobs—one at Walmart and another as an aide at a retirement community.
Clearly, women with low earnings are the least likely to have a financial cushion that allows them to forgo a paycheck. But it's not only those on the bottom of the pay scale who can't afford to take unpaid leave. More than 2.5 million employees need time off from work to care for themselves or another but can't afford to take it, according to a 2012 study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Tracy Malloy-Curtis, a fundraiser at a nonprofit in New York City, could have taken more time off, unpaid but with job security, after she had a baby a few years back. ("It's a civil rights organization," she explains, though she doesn't want to name it because she still works in the field.) Instead, Malloy-Curtis, who is 43, married, and the primary breadwinner in her family, went back five and a half weeks after having a son—and a complicated C-section—for fear she otherwise could not afford to pay her mortgage and cover the other basic costs of her life.
"Physically, I was a wreck," she says. An infection around her C-section wound hadn't yet healed when she went back to work. "I was still bleeding, my incision wasn't closed." Pus dripped down her leg under her work clothes.
Those who do take leave may find themselves penalized afterward. Jackie Wheeler took six weeks of paid maternity leave after her son, Enzo, was born in 2011. Wheeler, who lives in Westminster, Colo., was working at the front desk of a local branch of Chase Bank. Though her son had severe medical problems as a result of being born early, Wheeler had intended to go back to her job. Before giving birth, she says, she had even been talking with her boss about interviewing for an assistant manager position. "I saw myself as moving along in the company," she says.
But after she returned to work and Enzo was released from the hospital, she took another six weeks of leave. At that point, her boss told her he thought it was best that she resign—if he didn't fill her position right away, he said, corporate headquarters would eliminate it. And Wheeler was too overwhelmed at the time to challenge him.
The birth of hope
While, in the United States, the lack of time off can too often turn new motherhood into a distressing ordeal, most other cultures treat this immediate post-natal period as a sacred time, when both the new mother and baby receive help and special attention. Throughout history and all over the world, people have tended to carve out a minimum of at least six weeks in which women are exempt from responsibilities other than child care, according to Malin Eberhard-Gran, a Norwegian public health scholar who has compiled a cross-cultural comparison of post-natal practices.
In some Muslim traditions, new mothers spend the first 40 days after birth in their mothers' homes, for instance. Many Latin American cultures also bracket during the same period, known as la cuarantena (from the Spanish word for "forty"), and exempt women from work responsibilities. In some other countries, women are granted special treatment for even longer. Traditionally, women in Japan and India go to their mothers' homes for several months after giving birth. And today, by law, the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—democracies with market economies—provide an average of more than a year of paid leave.
Here in the United States, advocates have been fighting for a century to get new parents just a few weeks off with pay. But the tide may be turning. In 2002, California became the first state to pass a paid family leave law, which provides workers who need to care for a new baby with 55 percent of their usual weekly pay, to a limit of $1,104 for up to six weeks. New Jersey passed a similar law in 2008. And in 2013, Rhode Island granted workers up to four weeks off with pay for "family care," including care of a new baby. Despite dire warnings from business interests, most employers in New Jersey and California (where programs have been in effect long enough to be studied) haven't found that paid leave has hurt productivity, profitability or turnover. (Full disclosure: I was a co-author of the New Jersey study).
The Obama administration is attempting to build momentum for paid sick leave, one of the main ways women piece together paid maternity leave. In the 2015 State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to send him a bill guaranteeing U.S. workers seven days of paid sick leave—but in early August, Senate Republicans blocked a Democrat-sponsored bill to do so. In the meantime, Obama has an executive order in the works that will extend a week of paid sick leave to all federal contractors, and his adminstration has issued $1.25 million in grants to study how paid leave programs can be developed in states. Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who has been outspoken on the issue, has spearheaded a #leadonleave campaign, in which he and White House aide Valerie Jarrett travel the country to boost local paid leave policies.
But, so far, even a Democratic administration committed to the issue hasn't been enough to overcome resistance to it. When bills have been debated in states, Republicans have been so vehement that paid leave is bad for business and a "job killer" that legislation at a federal level has been assumed to be a no-go. And, at least until very recently, congressional Republicans have mostly scoffed at Democratic efforts. But for the first time, a bill proposed by Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) this spring that would provide benefits for workers who take time off to care for a new baby or sick family member was met with a counterproposal from Republicans, which would allow hourly workers to put overtime toward paid leave.
The issue is also clearly gaining ground in certain states, where at least ten family leave proposals have been introduced since March. Though Republican presidential candidates have had little to say about the issue, Democratic contenders Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have both come out as strong proponents of paid leave. While Sanders has been more specific about his plan, calling for 12 weeks off, with pay, both are making a moral case to which there is no politically sound retort: Families need paid time off to take care of their new babies. Men, women and children will gain from this basic human dignity.
Barreling ahead
After three months, Leigh Benrahou only has a blurry recollection of her first weeks back at work just days after her premature son was born. "I remember walking really slow and wearing stretch pants and just making it happen," she says hazily. She spent those early days cutting a path between the college; the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), where Ramzi spent four months and underwent two stomach surgeries; her 3-year-old daughter's daycare center; and her home, where, despite her exhaustion, she found it difficult to sleep.
At work, Benrahou tended to the needs of her students, whose questions about enrollment requirements and course changes occasionally provided distraction from her own, far graver problems. But mostly it was surreal—and painful—to be there. Climbing stairs was difficult because of her recent surgery. And pretty much every time she closed the door to pump breast milk, she wound up crying. Harder still was being away from her tiny baby, whose health was still so uncertain. Every time she got a call from the hospital when she was at work—and there were many—her stomach clutched.
"They say it's like being on a roller coaster, [having a child] in the NICU," says Benrahou. "But a roller coaster is fun. I wanted to throw up all the time."
Benrahou didn't throw up, though. Instead, like so many other American women, she barreled ahead, doing her best to both take care of her newborn and remain employed. Though she never got to take leave when and how she had planned, she was recently able to take 12 weeks off through the FMLA under the category of caring for a sick relative—in this case, her infant son. And now the woman who so painstakingly planned her family's future doesn't know what's ahead. Ramzi's long-term prognosis is unclear; he's still on oxygen and has a feeding tube. About a quarter of babies born at 26 weeks go on to have lasting disabilities.
Benrahou's hope is to keep working. And mostly she remains upbeat. But sometimes she can't help but wonder whether Ramzi's early birth was preventable; and whether continuing to work after her diagnosis so she could make the best of her miniscule amount of time off brought about Ramzi's early delivery. It certainly wasn't the way she planned it. This article was supported by the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting.
Now here's something that both you and I will face son. I've got about 50% of my life left. You have about 80-85% of your life left. You will most probably see in the next century. I'll be with you till about 2050 or so.
What kind of society will we be living in? Where will be the jobs? Where is the money? Which country will be safe to work and raise your children?
In particular son, two questions for you. What kind of job or work should you do? And what kind of financial security should you aim for? You are already saving and investing in blue chip companies so that's very good. One thing which you need to start thinking about is to be an entrepreneur and generate money. That is a good thing to do. You already have the skills and will be a good aspect to pick up.
Jobs are plenty but high paying intellectual roles are going to be rarer and rarer. Competition higher and higher. Disruption more and more.
I do agree that the growth rates are going to be depressed for many years if not at least 2 decades at least. Why? Because that's how long it will take to get the debt problem under control at a minimum. Our population productivity sucks. Supply of most inputs is constrained. The emerging markets and OECD countries have frankly bought as many fridges cars and smartphones. That's not going to move the dial that much. So growth will be constrained.
So aim to get yourself where the driver is efficiency. Where you can make things at a lower cost. When revenues cannot grow then you go after productivity growth and cost reductions.
Keep this in mind son. Take advantage of it. And keep an eye out on opportunities to make money and gain experience. Keep fighting son.
For all of measurable human history up until the year 1750, nothing happened that mattered. This isn’t to say history was stagnant, or that life was only grim and blank, but the well-being of average people did not perceptibly improve. All of the wars, literature, love affairs, and religious schisms, the schemes for empire-making and ocean-crossing and simple profit and freedom, the entire human theater of ambition and deceit and redemption took place on a scale too small to register, too minor to much improve the lot of ordinary human beings. In England before the middle of the eighteenth century, where industrialization first began, the pace of progress was so slow that it took 350 years for a family to double its standard of living. In Sweden, during a similar 200-year period, there was essentially no improvement at all. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the state of technology and the luxury and quality of life afforded the average individual were little better than they had been two millennia earlier, in ancient Rome.
Then two things happened that did matter, and they were so grand that they dwarfed everything that had come before and encompassed most everything that has come since: the first industrial revolution, beginning in 1750 or so in the north of England, and the second industrial revolution, beginning around 1870 and created mostly in this country. That the second industrial revolution happened just as the first had begun to dissipate was an incredible stroke of good luck. It meant that during the whole modern era from 1750 onward—which contains, not coincidentally, the full life span of the United States—human well-being accelerated at a rate that could barely have been contemplated before. Instead of permanent stagnation, growth became so rapid and so seemingly automatic that by the fifties and sixties the average American would roughly double his or her parents’ standard of living. In the space of a single generation, for most everybody, life was getting twice as good.
At some point in the late sixties or early seventies, this great acceleration began to taper off. The shift was modest at first, and it was concealed in the hectic up-and-down of yearly data. But if you examine the growth data since the early seventies, and if you are mathematically astute enough to fit a curve to it, you can see a clear trend: The rate at which life is improving here, on the frontier of human well-being, has slowed.
It's sooooo easy to grow the state son. Nobody will complain as everybody pays for that and somebody else will worry about it. You either manage the beast or somebody else will force you to do this. The leviathan that is the state has to be kept under control. And the best time to do this is when there are boom times. Otherwise you will have to do during bust times.
Read and weep son. Your taxes are going to Greece to fix this issue.
Antonis Manitakis has the most thankless job in Greece. Tasked with slashing the grotesquely bloated public sector, he is hounded by troika officials, reviled by his countrymen and afraid of cutting too deep.
Appearances are deceiving on Klafthmonos Square in downtown Athens. Three imposing bronze statues, the “Monument to National Reconciliation,” shimmer in the bright spring sunshine. But demonstrators at the base of the monument bring to mind the original purpose of the square, the name of which translates into “Lamentation Square.” Until 1911, when the Greek constitution guaranteed all civil servants jobs for life, government bureaucrats who had been let go after a change in government used to come to the square to publicly express their outrage.
Yesterday I was chairing the finance committee at a charity. Which is an animal shelter. We help abandoned and abused animals, train vet surgeons etc etc. Very nice place.
But one of the things that we were talking about was how do we help our staff members. The basic problem is that people cannot survive in London on minimum wages. At about £15000 per year, after taxes, it's impossible to live. Their money runs out about the 22nd of every month. And then it becomes a nightmare. Like it's described here in the article.
Kids, being poor is very bad. Having had gone through this, it's soul destroying. Specially if you have children. Yes you may ask why have children when you're poor and cannot afford them but human nature and sex does that. Be that as it may, the human behaviour of people changes when they are poor. Very differently kids. But we've got to help them kids. That's the mark of civilised people that we help others who are unfortunately in a worse situation than us.
London is more expensive than rest of the country so minimum wage doesn't work. So we are going to pay our staff at minimum wage an increase to what's called as a living wage. It will impact our delivery. It's a difficult decision as every pound we spend on staff has to be taken away from an animal. But it has to be done. We have to think holistically. Animals wouldn't be treated well if we have an underpaid hungry staff member. Yes. Hunger happens here in the uk kids. You've never experienced it and I promise you never will as long as I am alive but it's a very corrosive feeling.
Read this article kids. And think about how you can help the more unfortunate members in our society. And what can we do as citizens to make sure that we avoid this problem in the first place.
WOONSOCKET, R.I. – The economy of Woonsocket was about to stir to life. Delivery trucks were moving down river roads, and stores were extending their hours. The bus company was warning riders to anticipate “heavy traffic.” A community bank, soon to experience a surge in deposits, was rolling a message across its electronic marquee on the night of Feb. 28: “Happy shopping! Enjoy the 1st.”
In the heart of downtown, Miguel Pichardo, 53, watched three trucks jockey for position at the loading dock of his family-run International Meat Market. For most of the month, his business operated as a humble milk-and-eggs corner store, but now 3,000 pounds of product were scheduled for delivery in the next few hours. He wiped the front counter and smoothed the edges of a sign posted near his register. “Yes! We take Food Stamps, SNAP, EBT!”
“Today, we fill the store up with everything,” he said. “Tomorrow, we sell it all.”
At precisely one second after midnight, on March 1, Woonsocket would experience its monthly financial windfall — nearly $2 million from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. Federal money would be electronically transferred to the broke residents of a nearly bankrupt town, where it would flow first into grocery stores and then on to food companies, employees and banks, beginning the monthly cycle that has helped Woonsocket survive.
Three years into an economic recovery, this is the lasting scar of collapse: a federal program that began as a last resort for a few million hungry people has grown into an economic lifeline for entire towns. Spending on SNAP has doubled in the past four years and tripled in the past decade, surpassing $78 billion last year. A record 47 million Americans receive the benefit — including 13,752 in Woonsocket, one-third of the town’s population, where the first of each month now reveals twin shortcomings of the U.S. economy:
So many people are forced to rely on government support.
The government is forced to support so many people.
Note the point being made by the chap who says that he should've applied for internships son. And also look at the competition, 135 applications for every position. I get weekly requests to meet at least 2-4 students every week and do try to meet them. Even with an internship it's challenging. By the time you graduate son, the banking industry will be even more competitive and shrunken. So next year, besides you having fun, do try to get an internship. Start looking for these roles son. Otherwise you'll have regrets. Like this chap did. It's very very corrosive son. Avoid. Plan ahead. Be slightly paranoid. Remember you judge yourself with what you think you've done while others judge you by what you're done. Let me know if I can help in any way. Love Baba
The hard graft of finding a graduate job in the City of London -- By Emma Jacobs -- Two Londoners with degrees in Maths took a novel approach to the jobseekers’ market by touting for work in a public square….
Competition for graduate- level jobs is fierce. According to figures released by the Office for National Statistics last month, almost half the UK’s new graduates are working in non-graduate jobs. Forty-seven per cent of those who had finished their degree in the past five years were working in roles such as sales assistants and care workers. Recent analysis by the Financial Times showed that people who graduated this year are earning 12 per cent less than their counterparts before the financial crash.
Typically, positions at investment banks or fund managers are highly contested. These industries receive 135 applications per job, according to the Association of Graduate Recruiters…..However, they believe that it was perhaps a mistake not to have applied for internships when still students. “I wanted to focus on my degree. I got the chance to study in Hong Kong for a year and I wanted to do well,” says 23-year-old Mr Abbas.
While considerable concern has emerged about the links between religion and economic growth, little is actually known about how religion and social class impact the decision making of individuals. Using institutional theory and social dominance theory, this paper examines the influence of religion and social class on individuals' occupational choices. Based on a large-scale database from India, this paper finds that while some religions are relatively conducive to self-employment, some others have a negative impact on self-employment choices. Furthermore, individuals belonging to social classes that are lower in the social hierarchy are less likely to be self-employed. The role of both religion and social class in influencing the likelihood of choosing self-employment suggests an important link between religion, social class, and occupational decision-making.
Highlights
• We examine the role of religion and social class on occupational choice.
• We find that religions like Islam and Jainism are more favorable for self-employment.
• We find that Hindus are less likely to be self-employed compared to others.
• Individuals belonging to social classes lower in the social hierarchy are least likely to be self-employed.
The following regression models are estimated to link occupational choice with religion and social class:
While India is rich in diverse religions, some of them, such as Islam and Jainism, are more conducive to self-employment. The institutional profile associated with Islam strongly supports entrepreneurial activity. For example, Islamic banking models, based on the Koranic principles of risk sharing (Khan, 1996), may encourage even risk-averse Muslims to become self-employed. In Jainism, principles of self-reliance and benevolence to business (Caillat, 1987) give rise to an institutional profile that is conducive to self-employment. By contrast, Hinduism inhibits self-employment by shaping an institutional profile that is not conducive to self-employment choices. The normative pressures on Hindus to choose occupations based on the caste of their birth (Hutton, 1946), and the cognitive beliefs that do not support proactively changing thestatus quo ( Singer, 1966 and Tripathi, 1992) may discourage self-employment in Hinduism.
Although Christianity is associated with an institutional profile that is conducive to self-employment, it does not have a positive effect on self-employment in the Indian context. This result may be attributed to the large number of individuals from the Hindu backward classes converting to Christianity (Henderson, 2002). Thus, the estimated effect of the Christian religion in India shows the mixed effects of prior learning and new beliefs particularly with regard to the normative and cognitive dimensions of the two religions. The estimated effects of Buddhism and Sikhism show that the followers of these two religions are not different from Hindus when it comes to their self-employment choices. These results are attributable to the close relationship that Buddhism and Sikhism have with Hinduism. The founders of both the religions were Hindus and, Buddhism, in particular, shares many of the Hindu values and beliefs (
Maybe as public policy, the Indian government may want the Hindus to convert to Jainism. Or Islam. But as the example of Christianity shows, this will not work as despite conversions to another religion, they are still not being self employed.
Poverty is hugely distressing son. It destroys your dignity, there is no love and you become the worst of the worst. Having lived though serious poverty which included your parents crying about money or rather the lack of it, it's not something that I would care to repeat.
You never know what may happen so always have emergency cash and good savings. I keep on telling you, save a third of your salary son. Cut down on outgoings. It may mean a few less luxuries or entertainment but as you can see from me, having fun doesn't mean you need to spend money.
See what happened to this family. Or families. Washed up in a hotel. But they will get out. That is what's creditable. They are fighting. And that's impressive Kannu.
Love
Baba
From the outside, it is hard to know that people live in the Ramada Inn. The parking lot is always empty. The hotel sits facing a wide suburban boulevard called Kipling Street, just off Interstate 70 in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. The interchange where Kipling meets the freeway is packed mornings and evenings with daily commuters going to or coming from Denver and with skiers heading west into the Rockies. Hotels dot I-70 as it cuts through the 764-square-mile stretch of suburbia that runs from the city into the mountains, but at the intersection with Kipling is a cluster of seven budget-savers that travel websites warn tourists away from. The hotels advertise low prices—ranging from $36 to $89 a night—on neon signs next to gigantic flags that whip in the Front Range wind. Most offer even lower weekly or monthly rates. The Ramada is farther from the frontage road than the other hotels and is harder to notice, with its plain yellow stucco and dimly lit red sign.
Inside the lobby, which has wide windows and a clear view of a long, low mountain called Table Top and the snowy peaks beyond, are plenty of clues that the Ramada is more than just a hotel. Off the lobby sit two sets of washers and dryers that each take a dollar in quarters, and on weekends families use one of the bellhop carts kept in a back hall to roll out baskets of dirty laundry. In the late afternoon, schoolchildren do their homework on the dozen tables where guests have breakfast. Residents sit at the two computers with Internet connections. They wander around in sock-clad feet and chat with whomever they run into.
At any given time, roughly 20 to 40 guests are staying long term. Since they pay by the week, they call themselves “weeklies.” To score the cheap rates, $210 for individuals and slightly more for families, they must pay in advance. Residents sign a form that lists the activities that could get them kicked out (mostly involving drugs) and warns that they won’t get reimbursed if they leave early, no exceptions. Some families stay only for a few weeks, some for months, giving the hotel the feeling of a dormitory. A rotating cast of front-desk clerks sells candy and rations towels and washcloths. Though some of the clerks are kind and helpful, the guests think of them as enforcers, and the clerks tend to treat the weeklies less as customers than as undergraduates stealing toilet paper and sneaking in hot plates.
Its an indication of how technology is changing our lives when Google data can help give some fascinating insights into unemployment. Here’s the paper.
According to the rising “Google econometrics” literature, Google queries may help predict economic activity. The aim of our paper is to test if these data can enhance predictions for youth unemployment in France. As we have on the one hand weekly series on web search queries and on the other hand monthly series on unemployment for the 15 to 24-year-olds, we use the unobserved components approach in order to exploit all available information. Our model is estimated with a modified version of the Kalman filter taking into account the twofold issues of non-stationarity and multiple frequencies in our data. We find that including Google data improves unemployment predictions relatively to a competing model without search data queries
Don't want to go too deep into the paper, you wouldn't be interested in my views of Kalman filtering, but the idea of “nowcasting” and “Google econometrics” is very interesting and new, no?
I tried Google econometrics out with a bank name. Here’s what the results show
Fascinating eh? Google searches rose steadily, peaked when the crisis was really hitting its peak and then slowly came down and has plateaued.
where are the searches coming from?
how curious. UK I can understand but from Mexico, India, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia?
Forget the esoteric discussions about statistics…This is what is extremely worrisome
“….others have been arguing for a long time that incarceration is by now a modal event in the life-course for young black men. Black men are more likely to go prison than complete college or serve in the military, and black, male, high-school dropouts are more likely to spend a year in prison than to get married. “
What kind of a society are we bring up? In 30 years time, what will these people and their children do? And its worse
… incarceration is so common in some sociodemographic groups that there are few comparable individuals in the population who have not experienced incarceration. The ubiquity of incarceration among low-skill black men undercuts research designs that require comparison groups to isolate the effects of incarceration from other factors like race, low education, or living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. A significant body of causally oriented research uses quasi-experimental designs … that compare the outcomes of inmates or former inmates with similarly-situated individuals who have not been to prison or jail. There is no valid comparison group for many of America’s inmates exactly because incarceration now inheres in whole sociodemographic groups ..
What are we talking about here? that there is nothing we can do? because they simply do not know any other way of living?
Its a similar discussion about the hundreds of thousands of families here in the UK where nobody has EVER done a bit of job. What kind of kids will come out of these families? There are QUARTER OF A MILLION kids in these families. What is the upbringing they are getting?
More I read about the educational system here in the UK, the more I worry. Why is being clever and intelligent considered to be bad? I quote from this story about why girls don't take up Physics.
For the past two decades, female students have accounted for only one-fifth of those taking the subject at A-level. It is the fourth most popular subject for boys, yet slips to 19th in the rankings for girls. According to a recent study by the Institute of Physics, using information provided by the National Pupil Database, 49% of state co-educational schools in England did not send any girls to study physics at A-level in 2011. By contrast, girls were almost two and a half times more likely to take the subject at A-level if they were at a single-sex school – a finding that suggests there might be an ingrained cultural perception in co-educational establishments that physics is somehow "not for girls".
This is sad indeed. The problem is those little shits (boys!)
So what are the girls saying?
"It's not cool to be clever at the moment, especially as a girl," adds Williams. "Boys don't mind being thought of as geeks, but girls do. I do English lit as well, and I'm the only one in the class who also takes physics. Everyone in the class was kind of like, 'You do physics?'" She curls her lip in disgust. "But we're good because we've got a whole group of friends [doing physics as well]."
These school kids are stupid, seriously stupid. Who will be earning more and having more fun? the idiots or the smarts? Why would you not look up to the smarts?
So what can one do?
The importance of a supportive network of friends taking the same subject is key. But it is also, as Alice points out, a question of seeing more positive role models on television and in schools. Although there are prominent male presenters in popular science – Brian Cox,David Attenborough – there are hardly any female counterparts. And when female scientists do make it on to the pages of newspapers, or into television studios, the way they are presented can be extremely patronising. A 2010 paper by academics at the University of Cardiff examined 51 interviews with scientists, eight of whom were women, pulled from a sample of 12 UK national papers in 2006. Half of the profiles of the women referred to their clothing, physique or hairstyle, compared with 21% of the profiles of men. The male scientists interviewed were often used to signal gravitas, while women were more likely to be said to make science "accessible" or "sexy".
<sighs> here we go again…But the article ends with a spot of brightness
And yet there are signs that the culture is changing. It's not just the clever young women I meet at Lampton who signal the dissolution of previously entrenched ideas, but also those physicists currently working in postgraduate fields. Aki Matsushima, a 26-year-old studying for a PhD in quantum physics at Imperial College, London, insists that the lifestyle of a research scientist "is very flexible and actually accommodating, and in that respect it can be really good for women who have other responsibilities, like childcare. There's been a lot of encouragement and funding to get more women in, and once you're in there's no discrimination. In fact, there's lots of encouragement."
However, Matsushima acknowledges that the lack of female professors is a problem. She, like Donald, attended an all-girl school and then chose to attend a single-sex college at Cambridge. "I knew the course was going to be all men," she explains, "so I applied to a women's college so I could hang out with girls as well." But once Matsushima had made it into the male-dominated world of physics, she found it was – and continues to be – an extremely fair environment, with no gender discrimination.
"Maybe at lunchtime you're hanging out with a load of guys talking about computer games, but that's about it," she says. This year, Matsushima was a finalist in the BBC's Masterchef and came into contact with some professional chefs who told her she would have to work "twice as hard" to make it as a woman. "In cooking, there is a kind of discrimination internally," she says. "That hasn't happened to me in physics."
We need more of this, more women stepping up and the organisations being gender neutral. It is not easy. Over the past 10 odd years, ever since I got into a situation that I would be hiring, I have encouraged the recruitment agencies and HR folks to send more women into the mix. It has been a struggle. For the front office roles, for the sales roles, there is a dearth of good women but it is getting better. For example, right now, my team has a balanced gender ratio, and believe you me, it took a shed load of effort. The pressure to pick the first half way decent candidate (who usually is male) is huge due to business pressures. So to delay hiring, to reach out into the women networks, to insist that for every 2 male cv’s I get, I need a female cv. It slows down the process hugely…
This is a very important article which talks about low paid jobs. This situation exists in pretty much every developed country. Who will do the jobs like plucking tomatoes? Cleaning toilets? Sorting out fish? Packing cabbages? These are the lowest paid jobs around and the question is, where do you get these people from when the native born don't want to do these? And while the first generation is happy to do those jobs, their second and third generation don't want to. See Germany with Turkish immigrants, England with Pakistani immigrants, and USA with their Hispanic immigrants. The rise of nativist right wing anti immigration wings is a direct consequence of policies like this.
But you cannot pay high wages there. The product or service gets priced out of the market. So what do you do? Not easy to answer son.
I think it's a combination, wages have to rise if supply of labour is constrained, basic economics. On the other hand, when immigrants aren't integrated or made welcome, like Turks and Pakistanis and Jamaicans, they turn into bigger problems.
Skinning, gutting, and cutting up catfish is not easy or pleasant work. No one knows this better than Randy Rhodes, president of Harvest Select, which has a processing plant in impoverished Uniontown, Ala. For years, Rhodes has had trouble finding Americans willing to grab a knife and stand 10 or more hours a day in a cold, wet room for minimum wage and skimpy benefits.
Most of his employees are Guatemalan. Or they were, until Alabama enacted an immigration law in September that requires police to question people they suspect might be in the U.S. illegally and punish businesses that hire them. The law, known as HB56, is intended to scare off undocumented workers, and in that regard it’s been a success. It’s also driven away legal immigrants who feared being harassed.
Rhodes arrived at work on Sept. 29, the day the law went into effect, to discover many of his employees missing. Panicked, he drove an hour and a half north to Tuscaloosa, where many of the immigrants who worked for him lived. Rhodes, who doesn’t speak Spanish, struggled to get across how much he needed them. He urged his workers to come back. Only a handful did. “We couldn’t explain to them that some of the things they were scared of weren’t going to happen,” Rhodes says. “I wanted them to see that I was their friend, and that we were trying to do the right thing.”
His ex-employees joined an exodus of thousands of immigrant field hands, hotel housekeepers, dishwashers, chicken plant employees, and construction workers who have fled Alabama for other states. Like Rhodes, many employers who lost workers followed federal requirements—some even used the E-Verify system—and only found out their workers were illegal when they disappeared.
An interesting article son. Something that you need to read carefully about your career prospects. Keep on thinking if you skills and abilities can be replaced by a computer. Do and pick a career which requires things which a computer cannot do. Manage ambiguity. Need imagination. Think differently. Sales. Change management. Inventing new things.
AN APOCRYPHAL tale is told about Henry Ford II showing Walter Reuther, the veteran leader of the United Automobile Workers, around a newly automated car plant. “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues,” gibed the boss of Ford Motor Company. Without skipping a beat, Reuther replied, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”Whether the exchange was true or not is irrelevant. The point was that any increase in productivity required a corresponding increase in the number of consumers capable of buying the product. The original Henry Ford, committed to raising productivity and lowering prices remorselessly, appreciated this profoundly—and insisted on paying his workers twice the going rate, so they could afford to buy his cars. For the company, there was an added bonus. By offering an unprecedented $5 a day in 1914, he caused the best tool-makers and machinists in America to flock to Ford. The know-how they brought boosted production efficiency still further and made Ford cars ever more affordable. With its ingenious Model T, Ford became the first car company in the world to bring motoring to the masses.
Economists see this as a classic example of how advancing technology, in the form of automation and innovation, increases productivity. This, in turn, causes prices to fall, demand to rise, more workers to be hired, and the economy to grow. Such thinking has been one of the tenets of economics since the early 1800s, when hosiery and lace-makers in Nottingham—inspired by Ned Ludd, a legendary hero of the English proletariat—smashed the mechanical knitting looms being introduced at the time for fear of losing their jobs.
Check this article out. What I didnt realise was this assertion
The old -- and repeatedly discredited -- game of citing women's incomes as some percentage of men's incomes is being played once again, as part of the "war on women" theme.
Since women average fewer hours of work per year, and fewer years of consecutive full-time employment than men, among other differences, comparisons of male and female annual earnings are comparisons of apples and oranges, as various female economists have pointed out. Read Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute or Professor Claudia Goldin of Harvard, for example.
When you compare women and men in the same occupations with the same skills, education, hours of work, and many other factors that go into determining pay, the differences in incomes shrink to the vanishing point -- and, in some cases, the women earn more than comparable men.
Now this came as a surprise to me, I always thought that women were being paid much lower compared to men, but to hear that once you control for these other factors, there is no difference.
Hmmm. I wonder if this will raise the proverbial shit storm or will simply be ignored when inconvenient facts emerge?
This was very amusing, specially since my little girl has decided to change her career objective from being a doctor to a banker, specially as she thinks doctors work too long hours.
Most Sleep-Deprived
6h57m
Home Health Aides
7h
Lawyer
7h1m
Police Officers
7h2m
Physicians, Paramedics
7h3m
Economists
7h3m
Social Workers
7h3m
Computer Programmers
7h5m
Financial Analysts
7h7m
Plant Operators
7h8m
Secretaries
What on earth are economists doing up so late? And not sleeping? Rest I can understand. And yes, secretaries do get hammered by their bosses at all times and days, they get called up at midnight from irate bosses who are unable to find their backsides.
This article shows very clearly why its the state which is the problem which is evidenced by high unemployment and other social ills. I quote
I could hire 12 people with €760 net salary, but I don't. I'll tell you why. You could work for my service provider company in a nice office. It's not telemarketing, it's not a scam. You would do serious work that requires high skills, 8 hours a day, weekdays only. I would employ you legally, I would pay your taxes and social security. I could give such a job to a dozen people, but I will not, and here I'll explain why.
I wouldn't hire a woman.
The reason is very simple: women give birth to children. I don't have the right to ask if she wanted to. If I had the right, and she answered, she could deliberately deceive me or she could change her mind.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have any problem with women giving birth to children. That's how I was born and that's how my child was born. I wouldn't hire a woman because when she gets pregnant, she goes for 3 years maternity leave, during which I can't fire her. If she wants two children, the vacation is 6 years long.
Of course, work has to be done, so I would have to hire somebody who works instead of her while she is whiling away her long holiday years. But not only couldn't I fire her while she's away, I couldn't fire her when she comes back either. So I would have to fire the one who's been working instead of her the whole time. When a woman comes back from maternity leave, I would be legally forced to increase her salary to the present level in her position. Also, I would be required to give out her normal vacation days, that she accumulated during her maternity leave. When she finally comes back to work, she would start with 2-4 months of fully paid vacation.
I wouldn't hire people over 50 either.
Not that I have any problem with the most experienced professionals. I wouldn't hire them, because they are soon in the protected age. And then I would be trapped with them, similar to the trap with employing women. You can't fire people in the protected age, so I would have to pay the salary and its total cost even if he or she doesn't work well, or at least up to acceptable standards. I couldn't fire the protected employee, but someone would have to do the job right; so I would have to hire another person. It's all right with me if they're protected, but then I won't hire them.
I would only hire 25-50 years old men.
They're also risky to hire. Since I don't have the right to fire them, if for any reason (I don't have enough income, or I don't like how they work) I want to. There's a high risk that they will go to court, and there's a high chance they will win. But this risk I would be prepared to handle.
Go read the full thing, its horribly fascinating and diabolically convincing.
How much does the state takes away from your salary. Read and weep.
Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.
First you create a society that strictly segregates women from men. The idea that women can interface with men is so shocking that they have men selling undies to women. Then finally somebody with one working brain cell figures out that this isn't working. So what do they do? They forbid any man from selling to women. And given that this blithering society forces women into nursing, teaching or stuck within the 4 walls of their home, 28,000 women line up to take up sales jobs.
Then the ministry hires hundreds of inspectors. The stores have to hire male security guards to ensure that only women go into the store. heh. So now we have male inspectors and male security guards checking lingerie shops. Talk about stupidity piling on top of stupidity. I love these guys, its like a whole country fit for a Darwin award. And the best part is that their ideology and philosophy is spreading. More More, we need more of this.
While in another part of this wonderful world, the government has run a series of campaigns targeting fortune tellers, mannequins and cigarette vendors. I quote:
Police sources told …142 fortune tellers were forced to sign an agreement at the Ministry of Interior pledging that they would not practice their craft. As well as predicting the future, fortune tellers sell amulets for protection and are sometimes called on to solve personal or family problems.
Heh, I betcha they didnt predict that, eh?
And strangely enough,
owners of taxi firms have been warned not to allow any former security officers to work as drivers, police officers said.
Eh? why? what?
I just love reading these kinds of news item. WTF or Facepalm doesnt do justice, its just sitting back and watching this parade of idiocy pass you by while you crack peanuts and throw at these muppets.
AN APOCRYPHAL tale is told about Henry Ford II showing Walter Reuther, the veteran leader of the United Automobile Workers, around a newly automated car plant. “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues,” gibed the boss of Ford Motor Company. Without skipping a beat, Reuther replied, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”Whether the exchange was true or not is irrelevant. The point was that any increase in productivity required a corresponding increase in the number of consumers capable of buying the product. The original Henry Ford, committed to raising productivity and lowering prices remorselessly, appreciated this profoundly—and insisted on paying his workers twice the going rate, so they could afford to buy his cars.
