A lot of people in education seem to be aware that "can't do cheaply" means "can't do".

FTFY. We don't give our schools enough money to buy paper. What makes you think the old people in Whitebread Acres, USA are going to stand for the schools getting more money so they can do the testing you're talking about, when there are marble bannisters in the Senior Center that need refurbishing? I mean, they're scratched.

If you buy your house at $200k, and then it depreciates to $150k, and that's all you can sell it for, then you lose $50,000 on the deal.

While it hasn't progressed to the lawsuit stage, Cosco gets all kinds of abuse from the rich folks for paying their people a living wage instead of the sandpaper-dildo treatment retail employees usually get. They won't get away with that for long, I bet.

I hate my job because that is the natural order of things. If you like your job you're not getting paid enough. If your boss knows you're happy in your job he will use it against you to either squeeze more work out of you or not give you as big a raise.

I don't start my own business because I like to eat and my family likes to have a place to live. I would find a better job except a string of total shit jobs has left me so bitter that nobody wants me around.

But if your wages don't keep up with CPI, you're going to lose your good employees to better-paying companies, while a disproportionate share of your applicants will be bad employees who quit or were fired from their former job (because the better ones take one look at your wages and shop elsewhere).

So I can never quit a job? Great. Good to know that if I leave this job I can never have another one. And people don't care about good vs. bad, they care about CHEAP.

That management philosophy may work at low-end jobs where the quality of the employee doesn't really matter. But any employer whose company does anything more than menial labor knows that the employees are the company, and will try to get good employees.

Tell that to my employer. We make enterprise-class CAD software. We have an installed base in the millions. There are a great number of talented programmers and designers here. My last raise was 2.5%. In a year when revenues were up 30%. I had a "meets expectations" review. The most I could have gotten for a top review was 3%. I'm calling bullshit. Again, nobody wants "good" employees, they want "ok" employees that they can work to death and then hire some other warm body to replace them.

You have a very distorted view of how to run a business if you think lowering costs (wages) is the only or even primary motivation of an employer.

For profit companies exist to .. well, make profit. You make profit by increasing revenues and decreasing costs. Payroll is a big cost. It is imperative, then, for payroll to be as low as you can possibly get away with. And if you're a publicly traded company, if your stockholders decide you're paying your people too much, you can get sued out of existence.

You'll find out pretty quickly that low wages = low performing employees, and will leave you stuck with low-end clients and low-end jobs.

So? As long as your costs are low, you can still make money off other peoples' hard work. That's the REAL American dream, get rich by fucking over your employees.

The trick isn't just to flat-out minimize cost. It's to minimize costs in ways that have the least impact on productivity - i.e. make the company more efficient to operate, not just cheaper to operate.

No, you make the company more efficient by lowering quality and making your people all do the work of three while paying them 50% below market. Since cheap is more important than good, you will have an advantage over your competitors that don't fuck over their employees quite as much as they really should. Eventually your market share gives you leverage, and you jack up your prices, make a bazillion dollars, sell your company for millions, and retire. Bonus: Most of your employees will probably be laid off, so you get one last poke before you go.

Market pressures would soon have the entire teaching staff of the college replaced with the cheapest options available. I don't want my kid's professors to be chosen soley on the basis of how little the college can pay them.

I'm not so fool to think that employees don't talk behind my back about such things.

And that's the difference. Most employers don't care if you talk about them behind their backs, except when they fire you for it.

We have the smallest house that is viable for our situation. It's not a matter of a bigger house further out vs. a smaller house closer in. It's a matter of this being the biggest house we can afford. We do not have an option to move closer. The house is already 1200 sq ft on a 6500 sq ft lot. There are four of us. It's technically 2br/1ba but it's more like 1.5br (it's a very small bedroom). It was the last house under $200k we could find, period. Moving closer would either cost us six figures more or buying a paper shack. Even the land would be $300-400k before there was a house on it.

I would save at most $1000 a year on my car expenses. Maybe even less depending on how much they hike my insurance premiums for living closer to the city.

Well now I know ONE place that doesn't insult their employees with a "raise" that doesn't even cover the cost of living...

It takes me 10 minutes to get to the interstate on the other side of town. Then an hour driving to the city. More with traffic. It's about 40 miles. Right now (1123 EDT) Google says it would take 58 minutes. At 0800 it would probably be closer to 90.

Anyplace that's more convenient is far more expensive. My house would probably be 1.5-2x as expensive anyplace that fits what you're describing.

You want professors to be fired for refusing to fudge research data to make the results more valuable to the college? Or for giving the dean's son a fair grade? Or any of a million bullshit reasons that would have a terminal chilling effect on higher education?

I'm not saying tenure is 100% awesome, but it allows for a diversity of opinions in what is essentially a business in "non-profit educational" form. I don't know about you, but I don't want my kid to spend $250,000 (by the time he gets there) on an education that is really just propaganda intended to make the administration more money, instead of valuable information that will be useful to him.

Plasma from the Big Bang didn't cool down enough for matter to form for some time.

lol u mad

Because I bought a house in a community that was as close to the city as I could without selling a kidney. I have two children in the school system. I would lose $50,000 if I sold my house due to the state of the market.

I am not going to relocate for a job. It is way too easy to get fired (or have your job inexplicably "eliminated") and find yourself in a new place with no network and no family support.

Not everyone is single and 23. I'm sure some asshole is going to chime in and tell me that it's my own fault for choosing to have a family, and that I deserve whatever misery I get for my "bad" decision. Then they'll go back to watching Japanese scat porn in their mother's basement.

Well, you'd think so. Try living near enough to an urban center so that recruiters/HR think that you can commute in, but in reality that's a 2 hour trip for everything except driving and paying a fortune for parking (and even then is probably closer to 90 minutes with traffic). Once they find out you're not willing to make that trip 5 days, or (holy shit) you want to work REMOTE, you stop getting called or getting your applications looked at.

Originally I was taking the approach that I'm a valuable asset and I should be able to ask for a better situation than what I have now (asking for more money, work from home/remote, not working with assholes, etc). What I found was that, in general, employers don't like it when you ask for stuff. What they want is people who will take what they are given and smile. So now I don't mention any of that in the interview process. It's a giant waste of time, to find out that, while they do want to hire you, they want to give you half your current salary and will write you up for not having your ass in the seat at 0830 and only leaving when your boss thinks you should leave (which is always more than 8 hours, but they don't tell you that), but that's the only way to get the offer in the first place, and then you can negotiate for what you want. Or, they'll tell you the offer is final, and everyone's wasted their time.

The way we hire people is fucked up. Over-entitled employers still think the pressures of supply and demand don't apply to them, and they insist that they still have the FSM-given right to treat their workers like shit; that extends to the hiring process. It's not that you're a valuable asset to the company, it's that you cost the company money and therefore are a terrible person. Then companies wonder why they can't keep good talent. It has to be greedy lazy employees! Yeah, that's it! They're all lazy and greedy! Couldn't be the fact that we treat them like shit at all!