Working Hard? 1140
Two related stories about working hard in the U.S.: U.S. workers are granted less (and take less) vacation time than workers in other industrialized nations. And if that wasn't enough, changes to the overtime laws will eliminate overtime pay for many workers.
Learned Professionals? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it just me or does it seem like almost everything Dubya does is intended to lower the quality of life for the average American?
capitalists love it (Score:2, Insightful)
the less you get paid, the more you work.
the more you work, the less vacation you get.
the rich get richer, and you.. well.. you're still working hand-to-mouth.
Don't like it? (Score:4, Insightful)
You can all bitch and moan all you like about no vacation time, not enough overtime pay, etc, but the more you take, the more you'll end up paying.
The only way you'll get ahead is to start contracting for yourself. But that's scary and risky!
Guess what... running a business is too. That's why they get compensated so much if they're successful.
No Overtime No Vacation (Score:5, Insightful)
Avarice, treachery, greed, lying, gluttony, cheating and petty office politics have become their own justification in the average workplace. Unless you "fit in," you will eventually be fired. In order to fit in, you must:
1) Do exactly as you are told: no more, no less.
2) Accept every lunch and meeting invitation
3) Reply enthusiastically to every e-mail, especially if it has a colorful signature.
4) Agree, even when the people you are agreeing with are wrong.
5) Never offer an opinion, or attempt to think about your job or the company.
The educations of an entire generation are being destroyed in the rush to below-average mediocrity.
Only the very few companies actually accomplish anything truly innovative. The rest simply exist, like tree moss, consuming resources and producing very little. This better get fixed, because this process is called "eating your own seedcorn."
Someday, hope will be born of something other than a business case.
Management doesn't get overtime anyway... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this important? Because I don't get overtime at all, and haven't for the past 10 years. Last week I worked 4 days out of 5 0800 (8am) - 2300 (11pm). Will I get a dime more on my paycheck? No. Do I have the satisfaction of knowing that I helped get a major project up and running? Yep. Will I have a job at the end of the year? Probably.
Who is getting layed off in my company? Not 'management' (at least not the techy ones); we know too much, and are willing to work until our fingers bleed...tough luck if you can't keep up or don't have useful skills.
Just a fact of life. Of course I'm probably going to die before I'm 65 to a massive aneurism...
Re:Don't like it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gonna Backfire (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Learned Professionals? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you own a petrochemical plant and need to drop a few hundred barrels of waste into a nearby river be sure to line some pockets and the regulations will relax, letting you kill everybody downstream slowly.
If you happpen to be a single mother working 2 or 3 jobs at minimum wage then you don't get tax breaks because you make too little, your federally-funded daycare gets cut back, you drink water that was just polluted upstream and can't say anything about it, then you get spied on because you could be a terrorist just because you have a friend named Abdul.
Re:People work harder in the U.S.? (Score:4, Insightful)
Taking away overtime is just a slap in the face to every employee in that: If every worker out there puts in his/her all for their employer, and receives no benefit from it, where exactly is the motivation to continue to work hard?
Re:Democrats....Repubs (Score:3, Insightful)
If I disagree with the Dems on an issue then I disagree with them. I'm not just going to let something as retarted as "party loyalty" keep progress from progressing
Thankfully, though, we have lots of people that love doing that in D.C. right now for us
3.3% of the data is good enough for me! (Score:1, Insightful)
According to the EPI study, which used Labor Department and General Accounting Office data about worker pay and qualifications, the total effect of the three changes is to exclude at least 8.025 million workers from overtime -- and probably more, the study said, since the EPI only looked at 78 of the 257 "white collar" occupations identified by the Labor Department.
[/quote]
So, the EPI looked at only 3.3% (257 / 78) of the facts and came up with this doom and gloom proclimation?
What about the rest of the stats from the Labor Dept and GAO? Don't you think they would have an impact on the figures? It doesn't matter if the results would further prove their point or not. They didn't consider all the facts.
Vacation vs burnout? (Score:5, Insightful)
When will American compaines understand that having their workers take acations is good for the company. People who take time off, do more effecent work. It like the recent studies that show once workers start putting in more hours their productivity can increase to about 10 hours a day but an office worker that is doing 12 hr days less productive than when they were doing 8 hour days since they spend so much work time doing other things.
It will be interesting to see what happens in New Zealand. Its my understanding that they used to have a European model for holiday time but have recently removed some of thouse requirements so they are more like the US model. Maybe that explains why at least 50% of their labor pool is in Australia.
I've currently have 34.5 unused vacation days. Over the next year, I'll collect 20 more. I think its time for a round the world trip.
Re:Learned Professionals? (Score:5, Insightful)
Progressive tax doesn't necessarily help anyone. If you had a flat tax with no exemptions, everyone would pay less, except the rich, who currently get out of tons of taxes via loopholes, and corporations, which also currently get out of tons of taxes via loopholes. Of course, that means that many goods and services would cost more, but there's no sense in me paying for goods and services that you use. Food and medical services would remain untaxed.
And I'm on CMSP (Medi-Cal for people over a certain age) so it's not like I'm against all social services. But you do realize that this actually lowers the bar so that someone who went to ITT is now considered a learned professional (quite a joke if I've ever heard one) which means that they won't be getting the overtime they need to pay off their tuition loans... and I doubt the ITT loans are on terms as generous as the Subsidized Stafford Loan which I have used to pay for my expenses in community college.
The fact remains that we are punishing people for seeking additional training. Meanwhile, in California (where most of these technical people and jobs are) Davis' budget is about to cripple the Community Colleges all over, and the State Colleges and Unis are constantly raising tuition rather than expanding. They could expand and take more students, or they can simply sit around at their current size, raise tuition...
The result? Ever-greater stratification of society. A greater separation between the rich and the poor. The upper middle class becomes the lower middle class, the lower class continues to suffer, and the rich only get richer. Do you really think that the majority of people who are currently on TANF, Medi-Cal (and similar programs), Food Stamps and so on would rather collect that shit and live in poverty than have a good job and support themselves? There are always bad eggs but in general, that's not the way people think.
Ummm...... (Score:3, Insightful)
I spend a lot of time in Italy and they don't work that hard, probably less productive than us lazy Americans. Now the thing is, jobs are hard as hell to find over there, and those with them got them through connections most likely and not performance. So what motivation do they have to actually bust their butt? (And let's not even get started on the government jobs there. oh boy....)
Now Italians, however, put more focus in their life on enjoying and living life (work to live; NOT live to work). So that no matter how crappy a job they have, they make time for family/friends and are reasonably happy.
Plus, pretty much almost everyone goes away during the month of August for a couple weeks at least. August 15 is a national holiday for the workers where NOTHING is open (oh, and the highways aren't built to handle the traffic they get, so enjoy the sweltering heat in the bumper-to-bumper)
So yeah, socialism has overrun much of Europe, but on an average person basis, your average mainland Europeaner is happier than his/her American counterpart.
Can't say I blame them for enjoying life.. I know I really don't like the ratrace here, which is why I try to summer there whenever I can.
My $0.02
Not as bad as it seems (Score:4, Insightful)
What these statistics measure is the amount of vacation people are entitled to by theirwork contracts, not the amount of vacation they actually take. Having worked both in Europe and the US, I am aware that even so Europeans get much more vacation, but the approach to it is much more regulated than in the US. Here, it's enough to ask the boss who gives his approval, in most companies I worked for or had friends working for. In Europe, you need to fill an application, and due to the amount of vacation for everyone, the management must carefully balance when to award a vacation to a particular worker. I personally prefer the US approach...
Another thing to take into account is what this hard work gets the country. Because of so much work and overtime, American workers are the most productive in the world. Cut this productivity by 20%, and you automatically increase the variable cost for a product by 20%. Legislate vacation time, and everything will become more expensive, the foreign trade deficit worsens, the dollar devaluates and everything will become even more expensive. True, we work hard, but our hard work reflects in the low product prices and high standard of living.
Work Smart... (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Work long hours initially to set up automation.
2. Let automation do the work. --- this is the working smart part
3. Browse Slashdot and react when the blinkin' lights go off.
4. Profit.
They pay me the big bucks to set up systems so that one person can do the work of 10. If they want me to 'look busy', I just pop open a perl script and point them to it, and ask, "do you know what that is? Do you know what that does?". That is usually when they leave...
Granted, I do spend periods during the year when I am working my butt off - but, once I get into an operational mode things quiet down.
Is it worth it? (Score:5, Insightful)
But not anymore. I grew up and got out of that rat race. Work/jobs basically are an agreement where you trade your time for money. I realized that by passing up on upgrading my machine every 12 months and buying all of the cds and movies I wanted, instead eating in more than going out, and driving an older car I could live quite well working only part time.
So what do I do with all of this free time?
I spend it with my family, I go backpacking, skiing, etc. I indulge in hobbies in everything from laser light shows to weaving. I donate time to non-profits like the local farmer's market, church groups, Habitat for Humanity, the Community Farm Aliance, and local theatres.
Living on less is far more rewarding the getting caught up in life as a consumer where the only dominant more or social value is work more to buy more.
Opt out!
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason Americans have to work more than the rest of the world is because they are less productive. If you were in Japan, I doubt you could sit at a desk for 8 hours and really only be coding for 5. In North America most companies let you get away with that, and then try and make up for the lack of productivity by forcing people to work longer hours... So 8 hours in the US = about 5 hours in the rest of the world.
I much rather work for 12 hours a day, than work hard for 8. You guys just don't know when to quit complaining!
I know you just should be flamed, but I'll bite...
As far as I know the americans work just as efficient as people in the rest of the world. Where you base your numbers on Japanese, I'll base my ideas on the Dutch. Most of my friends in Holland do not work nearly as long OR efficient as the people I am around here in America. Then again, they get rewarded pretty much for that effort (no where near as much as I am). Overtime isn't big in Holland either, but is rewarded. Here overtime isn't rewarded directly, but check the difference in pay between the top-hard working engineers vs the bottom of the pile at the same company. I know that at my company there is as much as a 2x difference in salaries between the hard-workers and the slackers. I'll admit that this isn't always very well balanced.
As far as slacking for 12 hours vs working efficient for 8, well...I'll take the hard work any time. Getting bored and wasting your time is one of the worst things that you can do to yourself. This is where the real issue lies, how come the americans all work so hard, yet don't have the imagination to take time of and do fun things with their hard earned money? Really, here is where we can learn from the Dutch and the rest of the world.
Re:Hmmmmmm I wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
US vs French vacation packages (Score:5, Insightful)
In the US, after 6 years in the company I was entitled to 18 days off. Each day you are sick is decounted on your vacation days. I only got a handfull of 'US Holidays' free vacation days (New year, Memorial day, Independance day, Thanksgiving and Christmas). That's it. And that's considered fairly generous.
In France it doesn't matter how long you've been in the company, we all get the same package:25 days of vacations plus another 12 days of RTT (you cannot cumulate those RTT with regular vacations days, and you can't take more than 5 consecutive RTTs). In addition there is a mountain of free 'French Holiday': New Year, Easter Monday, Labor Day, WWII veterans' day, Ascension, Whit Monday, Bastille day, Assumption, All Saints' Day, WWI Veteran day, Christmas. 11!
Total?
Us: A grand total of 23 days off.
France: 48 days off.
Guess where I choose to live?
Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
Overtime = overtime
I'm sure a little bit of overtime is less than another worker cost-wise.
But I realize you are just explaining their viewpoint so I'm trying to not slam you for saying it.
Yes, I know, "tell that to Dubya."
Re:Not working hard enough. (Score:5, Insightful)
Vacations are good though, but you have to think of it this way, you should have a job you actually WANT to do, and you wont have a problem working 12 hours a day. Of course if you work at Mc Donalds you'll hate working 12 hours a day.
BZZZT. Wrong answer.
I have a job for one reason: to pay the bills. If I'm looking for something I want to do, I'll spend time at home (or maybe at Lake Powell) with my wife and kids. 12 hours a day seriously detracts from that. Therefore, 12 hours a day is out of the question.
Re:Learned Professionals? (Score:0, Insightful)
If someone knows more then they are less likely to get overtime. Of course the reason why is that they get paid more in the first place. I don't know about you, but I'd rather get paid more per hour and not work any overtime than get paid less and work 10 hours a day just to get the same paycheck in the end.
Lee
Get rid of overtime? (Score:3, Insightful)
In all seriousness, I work harder than a gynecologist. I put in so many overtime hours that my employer is forced to give me comp time.
Yes, I'm on salary and yes I am already ineligible for overtime because of my pay scale. However, the laws that are currently in place enable me able to say, "Hey - enough is enough and this is too much." Fortunately I am in the enviable position where the company would likely fold if I were to leave.
If they were to relax the laws of overtime - there would be nothing stopping some unscrupulous employers from taking full advantage of their employees.
try not to share the wealth. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's nice for you, I'm glad you are happy with your life. Some of us, however, want the satisfaction of seeing our children grow up and have other intersts. So while you voluteer to bust your ass, please don't think that's normal and that you should force everone else into your lifestyle. One day, when the non-technical managers decide to screw you in some kind of SCO like blaze of bullshit and stock manipulation, you might have regrets.
Slave driving is a bad sign. Some fields really are competitive like this. Most are not and an honest day's work brings an honest day's profits. Management that tries to squeze normal occumpations to frenzies like this are simply greedy. If your management is willing to screw you, the stockholders and cutomers are next and it's time to go.
Re:People work harder in the U.S.? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Liberalism != (Communism || Socialism) (Score:5, Insightful)
As has been said many times -- it only takes twenty years for liberal to become a conservative, even without changing a single idea. The whole *point* of liberalism is to be avant garde. Adam Smith, believe it or not, was a *radical*. Being a Smith fan today is just as silly as being an Velvet Underground fan today -- what was once outrageous is just old hat today. Heck, even the conservative economists at the University of Chicago don't totally subscribe to the idea of the free market anymore. And Marx is over 100 years out of date, btw.
Re:Liberalism != (Communism || Socialism) (Score:3, Insightful)
That would be like a hacker calling themselves a script kiddie.
Re:And in Europe ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Learned Professionals? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not just you, but sometimes I think it might as well be. The repubs - with passive acquiescence from the dems, I'm sorry to say - have been trying to feudalize society for years. Sometimes through legislation, sometimes through more subtle changes in rules and procedures, but always to the same end. That's why they like to keep their working-class constituency (!) drunk on other things, like religion (as always), war, flag-burning (!!), xenophobia, and the petty advantages that some other working stiff is getting.
If everyone who is getting it up the butt by the Republican Party (which is legal in Texas now, by the way) were to open their eyes for just a day, it would hardly last until the next election.
Re:If you have the inspiration... (Score:2, Insightful)
I do own my own company, and it is not for the faint hearted.
Hard work is not the same as working longer. (Score:2, Insightful)
There's a difference, hard work is expected during your 40 hours, then you go home and do the family thing.
Overtime, is taking from your family time and giving you a higher pay in trade for that.
When you look at it, it's basically a slap in the face, saying "Your not worth jack to us, why should we pay you more for messing with your life?". If you pull an 80 hour week, you should get more than 2 normal weeks worth of pay since your outside life is being taken.
I guess you never had to do a real job and push pencils or keys all day. Any schmoe can come in and type for 18 hours, now go and install 70 servers in a day. Tell me how your arms and back feel now that you have been mounting 60pound machines onto racks all day and have had a chance to stretch and strain every single muscle and ligament in your back, shoulders, and arms. Any job requiring heavy lifting is as bad.
Not all jobs are working the ticket booth at the theatre or phone service. Plenty of them are quite physical, some downright abusive.
BTW I'm up to hour 76 this week, and I have a nice shift tomorrow, lifting those 70 pound servers onto a banch, configuring them and putting them back. Not to mention moving the carts we keep them on, which probably weight as much as an old vw bug. Have fun with your desk work chap.
I rate this troll's attempt a 12/100. You can do better...
A tale of two jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yeah, those student loans... all $60k worth of them.
"Make an investment in your future" they tell you. "You'll be worth so much more money" they tell you. I drive a 15 year old car with 200k miles on it, live in a dumpy three bedroom house in the ghetto with two other technical "professionals," and have a very hard time making ends meet on what's left of my biweekly pittance.
What I've learned from the last 10 or so years of my life is that a) a college degree isn't worth it - as it will only be used to prove that you're capable of training your replacements from India and b) get a job because you enjoy it, not because it pays well. It's amazing how much I sit in my cubicle teaching the three guys from Bangalore how to do my job, looking forward to making my seven bucks at the bike shop.
Re:Learned Professionals? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's funny. Po' people don't get big tax breaks because they don't pay much tax. Duh! You should to be complaining that they don't get big enough handouts of _my_ tax dollars.
Re:hardly working (Score:1, Insightful)
Basically welfare bashing is just a stealth cover for racism. Blame the poor and minorities for high taxes. Federal spending on welfare is absolutely TINY. Wanna see where the taxes really go? Here's a hint: Wars ain't free.
As for the unemployed people, well you think those people are unemployed by choice? They wanted to get laid off? Get real.
Have YOU seen the Welfare numbers? Have YOU seen the unemployment numbers? I seriously doubt it.
Many Occupations Expect Performance, Not Hours (Score:3, Insightful)
However, many occupations exist where performance counts more than just putting in hours. Millions of these jobs exist in the U.S. -- in the traditional professions, in new professions, in the government and military, etc. It has been my experience that people in these jobs routinely work 50-70 weeks per week.
Re:hardly working (Score:4, Insightful)
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if there's a correlation?
What's the story here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Java coders are the same way. I'm all about making it easier to write good software, garbage collection and clean syntax rules. Nothing against java or the people who use it but I'm just amazed at how many of these guys call themselves software engineers and have no idea what is actually happening in the system on with the hardware. I was working with a team working on a tomcat based JSP web application, the question came up, why does this app need 512MB of RAM and a 800Mhz Pentium-III to run slowly with only 2 clients attached? We need it to work with at least 20 clients attached. Does that strike anyone as a little heavy? (It just reads a few tables from a SQL database and formats them in to html, not even fancy shit yet... it's practically serving up static HTML) silence, has anyone done any performance work? How about memory consumption, how can we improve it? silence. Do we need to rewrite this using a different technology? Panic! "Maybe if we bump it up to a dual or quad processor machine with 2GB of RAM...
I'm not a superstar. I did well at a good university, there is a lot more that I don't know than I do, I've only got about 15 years of professional experience, but there are a shit load of people who know next to nothing, and they are trying to draw down $70k, $80k, $100K a year and the job simply doesn't get done with that kind of talent flooding the workplace.
I can count the number of top notch professionals I've worked with. I care about my craft, I'm always learning and like to keep current and know about things, there just more people who like to play video games and surf the web and somehow equate that to being a professional tech worker. 10 years ago there was a lot more talent amongst the people in this biz, I looked up to people I worked with knowing I could learn from them. Now I'm just floored by the kids we bring in, they want the money, they want the sexy work, they just can't do it and they think that they can.
So why do we work long hours? Well now the teams are twice as big if not bigger than they were in the 80's and early 90's, the expenses are higher, the costs are higher, we have to produce more. The talent is dilluted. The expectation is there but there isn't the talent to deliver on it. Result? Fewer people can actually do the work, you'll be damned if they will stand by and let you cut out after a rough 6 hours or web browsing. We're working dumber. People do shit manually. People write code that get's rewritten because they can't read their own damn perl. People do things the only ways they know how and then they get redone completely because the web based calendar system takes the biggest computer in the client's office to serve up 2 calendars at a time... I hope 4 of the 50 employees don't want to see the vacation schedule too close to the same time.
Maybe I'm getting too old for it but the people in this biz aren't as good as they were as a whole, there are just more of them and they make a lot more money. You do the math, why don't we get overtime pay?
Re:Wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
In Europe there is gold at the end of rainbow! (Score:1, Insightful)
In Europe, you need to fill an application, and due to the amount of vacation for everyone, the management must carefully balance when to award a vacation to a particular worker. I personally prefer the US approach...
This is total fiction. I'm an American who's lived and worked most of his life in Europe, so I know what I'm talking about when I say this is bull.
We don't have a set amount of paid sickdays. If we get sick, we go see a doctor on company insurance, get a diagnosis, and just take paid leave for as many days as the doctor prescribes. If you work for a company which doesn't take extra group health insurance for employees (very rare, never personally seen such a tech company) you just go to a public hospital where you might have to wait in line for two hours in non-emergency cases, but the treatment is completely free.The way you count vacation days here is a bit funny. The start of the vacation count period is somewhere in March, and from there on, you get 2,5 days of paid vacation per month. I usually take one month of vacation straight in June, and divide the rest for little spring and fall breaks.
Oh yeah, and the employers have to pay a special compensation when I get back from the holidays, the amount of 50% of my vacation salary. In addition to all this, none of the people I know have ever been shot, or even shot at. The country is that peaceful. People in general are very intelligent, there are virtually no civil lawsuits (none of my friends or acquaintances have ever been sued for anything) and everyone speaks English.Research says otherwise... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm, I found this [psu.edu] which states that "overtime leads to an average drop in worker productivity of about 15 percent for work weeks exceeding 40 hours." from the Penn State College of Engineering.
Increased time at work != increased output.
-> Increased time at work != cheaper output.
-> Decreased time at work != more expensive output.
~Tetravus
Re:The problem is people take jobs just for the mo (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with everything you replied too? Your assuming that people in lower wage jobs don't like thier job. Actually, my brother-in-law likes his job very much and is very good at it (he's a grocery manager). He has pretty good hours too, he's up at 3am and back home by noon ot have the rest of the day to do the things he enjoyes in life (golf, woodworking etc.). He makes about $60-75K a year and has a great house and three kids. A very typical American if you ask me.
Your assumption that people in blue-collar jobs are miserable. You forget, people actually like to do these jobs and enjoy it.
Not everything is high-tech, and not everything is geek related. When you buy a gallon of milk, remember how that milk got to the store and got priced. Someone had to do it, last time I checked the 2.4.20 kernel couldn't actually move mile from a dairy to a store (yet).
Re:The problem is people take jobs just for the mo (Score:3, Insightful)
If your brother likes his job whys he complain?
and he makes good money
Well i guess some people do enjoy flipping burgers and selling shoes.
Re:Jobs dont have to be enjoyable. (Score:5, Insightful)
I appreciate your idealism, but very few people in the world, including the hard-working Japanese, take their jobs that seriously. It's just human nature. Many people are motivated by the fear of being unemployed.
What you experience in America also does not hold for the rest of the world. When I lived in Germany, it was common to see or hear about worker strikes on TV, both in and outside of Germany. Firemen, sanitation workers, you name it. And the public supported them (Cologne went for two weeks without a trash pickup. It was nasty.)
Not everybody views work as their life. For some people, it's family. For others, it's about experiencing the world. What you get paid for is not necessarily your life's work; sometimes, you find your life's work in a hobby, even though nobody pays you for it.
There just isn't enough room in the limelight for everyone to be remembered for the profound contributions they made to society - and it's also unlikely that a grocery clerk's contributions were that profound. If you want to have a profound sense of satisfaction for your time wasted on earth as a grocery clerk, then more power to you.
Life is about the little moments. A sunset enjoyed with loved ones while camping out at the local lake can be a far more profound and beautiful experience in a couple of hours than you'll ever find in stocking the peas on aisle four for the next twenty years.
Re:No Overtime No Vacation (Score:3, Insightful)
Five years ago I started working for the classic American tech firm. Started by an engineer, invented its field, remained at %50+ marketshare in the field for over fifteen years, and universally loved by the customer. We were the innovators. Then we got bought out by a competitor when the founder decided to retire.
So I now work for Siemens. A European company. I miss the good old days of greedy American capitalism. We're still a tech firm, but we're run by the marketing department who is making technical engineering decisions. A VP made the official statement that the company will no longer innovate, but instead repackage old products forever. The CEO routinely yells at us oldtimer non-Siemens types at every quarterly meeting. "You guys just don't know how to cooperate!" After two rounds of layoffs he sees that our morale still hasn't improved, so we are now told to train our own replacements in their new engineering center in Bangalore India.
Everything I know about evil corporations I learned from the Europeans.
Re:Democrats....Repubs (Score:5, Insightful)
Adam Smith was a naive economic and political theorist who overestimated human goodness, and underestimated human greed when he wrote The Wealth of Nations, aka, the capitalist manifesto. Capitalism is an economic theory, not a religion. Those who have made it a religion, and made the 7 deadly sins virtues, are destroying society.
Re:hardly working (Score:5, Insightful)
there are 2080 hours in a work year (40/week). you mean to tell me, that for a mere $0.36 an hour that i work, i can ensure a social safety net that catches people ebfore they crash into oblivion?
damn, where do i sign up?
Re:Liberalism != (Communism || Socialism) (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The problem is people take jobs just for the mo (Score:3, Insightful)
So 60-75k is not "good money"?
--Joey
Get over it!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:hardly working (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 3.3 percent of Americans are dependent on welfare.
Have you seen the unemployment numbers?
About 6 percent.
And let's go back to your opening statement:
I'm willing to bet that there is a small percentage in this country "working hard" and shouldering the economy while the rest of the nation "rests and relaxes".
You'd lose that bet. You're not basing this on any actual knowledge or experience, you're just making huge assumptions because by God you have to feel superior to everyone. So your insecurity and paranoia leads you to suspect that somehow you're getting a raw deal, that you're supporting some massive army of lazy, unemployed welfare recipients, a horde that exists only in your delusions.
There are people receiving welfare who work full time, at jobs you wouldn't last a day in, doing backbreaking work that you couldn't possibly imagine.
So show a little humility. As much as you'd like to believe it, you're not some square-jawed Ayn Rand hero supporting ungrateful parasites. The vast majority of the rest of us work just hard as you do; the only difference is most of the rest of us have a little freaking compassion and empathy. We know that we're all in this together, and if the guy down the road lost his job and needs to feed his family, then hell yes I'm willing to give up some of my paycheck to keep them off the streets. If you don't like it, then you can protest with your vote. If you can't change things with your vote, then you can emigrate. You can find a nice little country with no government. But be careful, true anarchies do exist in this world, but they're not very pleasant places to live.
Re:Get over it!! (Score:3, Insightful)
"wondersparrow", you crack me up. So, your motto is: like your job, or pretend to like it, no matter what it is or how much you are paid? I should like to see the tight smile on your face if you ever worked for $5.50 an hour.
Mr, the highest expression of unique human qualities is not happily slaving away in the service industry 80 hours a week for $5.00 an hour and slapping yourself on the back for your "work ethic".
The point is: Virtually everyone wants time to do something of what makes us HUMAN, quite apart from WORKER BEES or ants!!! Ok, Mr. "wondersparrow"? And you won't get the chance doing that in the service industry. ("The get another job," wondersparrow retorts:))
It seems to be that you might, perhaps, be the most spectacular success of the propagandists who run human resources departments. In some places, they gather their (underpaid) employees in the morning and make them utter the various clarion calls --- With a smile on their (workers) faces.
Funny how close this sort of thing is to what one imagines might have been a local village C.P. meeting in China -- During the cultural revolution. heh, heh heh.
Re:US vs French vacation packages (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:hardly working (Score:2, Insightful)
Great quote!
Is this to help the economy? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Once employers are not required to pay for overtime work, they will schedule more of it," the study said.
Which mean they'll be able to lay off some employees... Since when unemployment is a good thing for the economy?
Is there something I don't understand?
Re:Learned Professionals? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe I'm just an idiot, but I'm having a hard time making complete sense of that document.
One thing I did notice is that footnote 1 says that "The number of returns with negative adjusted gross income, i.e., returns with an adjusted gross deficit, and the corresponding amounts for adjusted gross deficit, were excluded from Table 1. By excluding deficit returns, alternative minimum tax reported on some of these returns was also excluded. For Tax Year 2000, there were 5,714 returns with no adjusted gross income that reported income tax, mostly alternative minimum tax, totaling $100.6 million." I might have a spurious comma, the text was pretty small. :P
That means that those 5,714 returns averaged (assuming my math is correct) $17,605.88 in tax each, which is an alternative minimum tax. I'm interested how much money you have to pick up before your minimum tax is almost eighteen grand. Of course, 5,714 returns is not a very large number out of the some 300 million people in the U S of A. Moving on, the IRS will tell you "New IRS Report Shows Income and Taxes Surged in 2000; Alternative Minimum Tax Jumped [irs.gov]". An interesting document High-Income Tax Returns for 2000 [irs.gov] (PDF) has this interesting paragraph within it:
Or, read backwards (assuming I'm even reading it correctly forwards), nearly 40% of taxpayers whose adjusted income is over $200,000 completely avoided taxes on some 20% of their income. Around 3.1% of them avoided paying taxes on 50% of their actual income. Paying 30% on 50% of your income, for example, means you're paying only 15% on your income, right? The same document also shows that the primary reason for reduced income tax liability is Tax-exempt interest, accounting for 52.5% of the returns counted.
Incidentally, the top 400 tax returns [irs.gov] averaged a tax rate of 22.29 percent. So I guess I really am full of shit. Carry on. However, based on figures I dredged up above, I do maintain that there's something to what I say, it just doesn't work as strongly as I thought it did. I guess I'll retire in shame, like I did on the Bose issue. :P
Re:Learned Professionals? (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, about Dubya and welfare for the ownership class?
Re:And in Europe ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Americans are working much harder than other people in the industrialized world, yet our standard of living is only equal or lower. We're working harder and getting less.
Re:Working Hard? (Score:3, Insightful)
You have the kind of class envy we need more of. Unfortunately, we have too much of the "I'm not rich, so you should not be permitted to be rich either," variety.
Re:hardly working (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, a huge part of the social welfare money is for SSI which is paid for by the person's social security dollars, which even the poorest pay. Also, it the housing assistance, considering how it really is used, benefits property owners as much as or more than the poor who qualify.
If we simply eliminated corporate welfare, we could cut taxes by 50% for those between 27k and 55k, and eliminate taxes entirely for those making less than 27k, including regressive payroll taxes. Hmm, choices choices...
Re:Despite this... (Score:2, Insightful)
I would have to state, though, that the US average of 6% is hardly far from the 7.2% average of the major European nations. Also, unemployment in the US is a far harsher experience, with little if any support. I would happily take an extra percent in the unemployment rate if I could be sure that my family would not starve, and that non-emergency/preventative medical care was available.
I am light. (Score:1, Insightful)
I disagree. The profound things in life come from who we are inside shining out. Not the labels (grocery clerk) that society has stuck on our outsides. To say that profound is a matter of were you are, instead of who you are is to forget a simple light can burn bright, day or night. I have known many men. Rich and poor. Downtrodden and upbeat. A face full of sneer, a wrinkle lining a smile. None of us know the future, and a simple act freely given can be far more profound than we may ever know[1]. So putting cans on the shelf, or speaking in front of a crowd, be humble of spirit, kind of words, an courageous of conviction. For profound is not a boisterous affair, but a quiet one. And in it's peace we may yet know it's guiding hand.
[1]It's a wonderful life made that very point.
Pretty fucking funny... (Score:1, Insightful)
# 1,385,000 soldiers died
# 361,000 were declared missing
# 4,200,000 were wounded
10% of the active population and 3,5% of the total population died on the battlefields. As a comparison, if this were to happen now in the United States, the number of casualties would reach 10 million.
There would also be 680,000 widows and 760,000 orphans. Throughout Europe, the number of crippled soldiers amounted to 6,500,000.
Between 1914 and 1918, the drops in births in France is estimated at 1 million.
Regarding WWII, between 1939 (when war was declared by France and the United Kingdom) and 1940, 120,000 soldiers died, not to mention the number of French citizens who died as war prisoners, forced laborers, deported civilians or in acts of resistence against the Nazis during the German Occupation. The amount of suffering occasioned by WWII in France is impossible to assess and should not be forgotten.
Embassy of France in the U.S. - March 18, 2003
Re:Learned Professionals? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does a person making a million bucks a year consume tremendously more than the average person? If I spend $100 in groceries a week, I'm subjected to an 8.75% sales tax here. That's a "whopping" $8.75, but that's almost $90 in 10 weeks, $500/year (on an income of say $30k). Say a millionaire spends $200/week in groceries. Sure, he pays $1k/year in sales taxes, but percentage-wise, who's paying more for what? And, for big-ticket items, chances are he can afford to go to a tax-free or lower-tax rate state for his purchase and bring it back, call it a business trip and write those travel expenses off as a business expense. That's not a luxury many of us have.
While I'm pretty anti-tax around the board (rich or poor, forced taxation is a form of slavery), it just irks me to hear people say "rich people pay more than you!". Of course they pay more than me, and they still live 10x better than I do. I think it's similar to the 10 million dollar/year CEO whose business is run into the ground. People like to say "See! he's out of a job, too!" WEll, asshole, with 10 million bucks in the bank, i'm sure ends are still getting met like a motherfucker. Poor bastard might have to sell back his private jet and settle for a prop-cessna.
Unions are even worse (Score:3, Insightful)
Unions have a bad habit of discouraging merit. It doesn't matter if you have useful skills, or if you're a better employee than the others; all that matters is your seniority. This is why there are absolutely horrid teachers who are getting paid more than everyone else, because they've been there 40 years (oh, and you can't fire them either, unless they do something completely blatant like molest children: union says so).
Overwork killed a coworker of mine (Score:2, Insightful)
He was a real nice guy, young (early 40's?) with a 12-year old kid. I saw him keep up that schedule for about 3 years when a coworker told me that Ron had died of a heart attack.
Sure there were other factors, (like his extra 40 pounds) but he was active and into white-water rafting, kayaking, camping with his kid, etc., so I know he was no couch potato either. But he's the only one I ever knew that worked so hard for so long, and the only person I've known that died of a heart attack so young.
Just remember -- you may work-work-work for the glory of your company and maybe a bigger paycheck too, but is NOT A LIFE and might even take yours.
Re:And in Europe ... (Score:3, Insightful)
You pay for it one way or another, just with the system of taxation rather than private insurance the poor get treated too.
Re:Management doesn't get overtime anyway... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not in the best interest of a project manager to have his workers break down of exhaustion a few days before the deadline. In fact, if the project manager hires someone like you at all, it would be with great unease and you probably won't get the really important assignments, because you can't be trusted to survive this self-exploitation indefinitely. From the perspective of the business owner (I am one), I have more than enough troubles to worry about. Having my employees break down in the midst of an important assignment is not one of them.
Excessive hacker types like that are great for hacker parties and open source projects, where it does not matter in the real life. But in the end you burn out and I have never seen anyone who could keep his productivity up all the time. These people stend to stay in the company just as long (or some even stay progressively longer) but get less and less work done, because they are constantly fatigued.
Trust me, it's better for you, for the company, for your family AND for your boss if you just work normal hours. Competent project managers will actually prefer it if you spend less time at work as long as you get your stuff done. Dependability is more important than "I'll show 'em" self annihilation.
Re:You deserve very little of it (Score:1, Insightful)
I came from a family with a total household income of around $20k. My father worked on a plantation for $9/hr after 15 years with the company. We only made $20k/yr because when he came home from work we farmed on our own for extra income.
The public school here is grossly underfunded.
Oh yeah, and my mom lost her family business because she developed a brain tumor, and the cost of treatment has left my family saddled in horrendous debt--aside from that already acrued due to the hurricanes which destroyed our house... twice.
I worked in the fields after school and on the weekends, and studied extra material on my own at night. I got active in local politics and worked hard on extracurricular projects. I help to found several student organizations at the high school which still exist today and got myself elected senior class president.
Now I go to an Ivy league college.
My father told me that he ended up where he is now because of the choices he made. He left the city because he felt that his priority in life was to raise his family in a safe environment. You can't control where you start out in life, but in the great nation of the USA (and most other western countries) you sure as hell get to choose where you end up.
Sure, I had to work harder to get where I am than most of the other students, but that gives me no right to take anything of theirs. The rich get to keep their wealth for the same reason we don't shoplift from the mom-and-pop grocery store in town--we respect and protect by law personal property rights. Perhaps that rich brat didn't do anything to earn his inheritance, but his parents have the right to dispose of their estate in any legal manner they see fit.
"trickle-down" economics is the justification given for government regulations that solely benefit the rich, not the reason for allowing the rich to dispose of their wealth as they see fit.
Looting the rich with the sole justification that they are rich and someone else is poor is a fucking disgusting idea.
Remember, in the USA you have the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps someone should lend a helping hand to people like your hypothetical struggling single parent, but said parent has no right to demand anything of anyone (except, perhaps, the other person(s) sharing responsibility for bringing the children into the world).
Re:And in Europe ... (Score:1, Insightful)
So (Score:1, Insightful)
You missed a point... a very big point. (Score:4, Insightful)
Your existence is very probably it seems, the result of the carrying on of blind natural forces which operate without purpose and without interest in or care for what is produced.
You obviously don't have children. That is such an uneducated statement about parents I choose to not even respond to it.
If you are going to quote "forces which operate without purpose and without interest," may I suggest the poor in the USA. They don't care about their kids, and it shows. The rest of us (especially immigrants that grew up in crappy countries where you had to bribe to get government employees to approve necessity paperwork, police forces are on a for hire basis, or where flush toilets are a luxury, or where you slept at night fearing the next of an endless string of insurgency groups wanted to kill you because of your ethnicity, shall I go on?) are busting our collective asses to get it all done and get to work.
I am a news photographer in Nashville, TN. A city that has the highest per capita earnings in the USA for a city over one million. People live well out here. Still, every time I go to "the ghetto" I see people out sitting on their porches and talking all day during the week. THEY ARE NOT WORKING. I am working. This is my sixth day in a row. I have five deadlines. They are doing NOTHING. Don't give me crap about not enough jobs around in America. No one just up and deserves 45,000 and a company car.
I hate it when politicians call the ghetto "working class neighborhoods." That is predicated on the idea that they are working. They are not. They are just sucking up to lazy ass voters.
I understand the new labor laws stink. But, entitlement is not what America is about. And yes, you're right about the schools. Who is to blame for this? WE ARE. We care more about roads than schools. We care about convenience store zoning more than schools. WE ELECTED THESE BASTARDS. Now we have to lay in the filth they give us.
Do not call people "the working poor." Just because they are poor doesn't mean they are busting their ass to get a job, or want one. Some carry two jobs. I understand those are the breaks. I have carried two jobs while at a university myself. I got out, though.
Those people need to get off of their asses.
And don't tell me that they "don't know how to work," or have never been taught that work is important.
That talk is just as much an insult to me as it is to them. You're calling them too naturally stupid, and me too naturally entitled.
Re:Working Hard? (Score:3, Insightful)
Teacher unions are the structure that work very hard to maintain that sad record of poor achievement. The good teachers don't get rewarded sufficiently, the bad teachers don't get moved out to something more appropriate to their talents (fruit picking perhaps?), and the entire system is bureaucratized and rigid.
The Archdiocese of NY offered to take over the 5 worst schools in NYC and turn them around over 5 years while keeping all the kids and doing it for less money. Who blocked this plan? The AFT was horrified and stopped it. They can't stand the idea that they will be visibly demonstrated to be incompetent and damn the kids if that's what it takes to hide their results.
Qualitatively better vacations, but not in the US (Score:3, Insightful)
Do the numbers. If you have 10 or 15 days, then
- You keep 2 or 3 in reserve for illness or emergencies
- You use up 3-4 for the obligatory visiting one set of relatives.
- If your company is anal you use up 3-4 just to have some long weekends each year, or to stretch out time near holidays. (vs. some companies which let you work longer days for a few days to make up for it)
- You have one trip to Hawaii or Disneyland...
- That's it, you've used up your vacation time.
A proper exploration vacation, where you spend 2-3 weeks in one country or learning one new skill (cooking classes in Provence, learning Spanish by being in Spain, a 2 week Japan Rail Pass for exploring the top castles of Japan) is right out. Only semi-sarcastically would I say "Of cource Europeans know more about the US than Americans know about Europe: Europeans actually have time to visit the US."