Is our economy really going to hell?(OT)

Oh great! How many full time positions exist at any given WalMart?? A dozen??? Maybe two dozen???

JT

Mike Hunter wrote:

snip

in YOUR AREA maybe.. they got in dutch in Chicago cause they were gonna be forced to pay the $10 an hour, and screamed bloody murder.

I got a Walmart 2 miles from me and the service drive folks that do the tire changes etc, get $8 and thats higher than the store folks get.. supposedly, the store managers 'average' pay across the country is 2 grand a week. give or take a bit

--Shiva--

Why do you ask? Are you looking for a job there? I suggest you ask the HR person at WalMart, they will have the answer you seek.

mike hunt

Pay you mom for room and board I guess. Better yet stay in school get some training and look for a job that pays more than one where you simply pack shelves.

If you have a skill you might even try getting one of the new automated machinery technician jobs at McDonalds.. Because of the new minimum wage has made automation cost effective, McDonalds is installing robotic equipment that they have had waiting in the wings, in their stores that will make, wrap, and dispense the food the customer choses buy pressing buttons, much as the person behind the counter now does on the cash register, near a picture of the food on a menu board.

They need people with the skills to maintain the robots. Starting pay is around $26 an hour form what I've read. The new stores require any average of three employees per shift, rather than twenty

mike hunt

someone asked.. and it was posted in todays paper.. the MEDIAN household income in my county is a bit over 30k per year.. this county has a population of between 1/4 and 1/3 million, too the median house price is 122k, as of last year when they did the math

--Shiva--

My counties median household income is $71,000, but most homes cost

snipped-for-privacy@notanywhere.net wrote:

Another off topic post for another off topic thread, but a very interesting one....

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Hey McDonalds took my idea! Really, this process has been going on for a long time, notably including the cotton gin and automated looms.

It seems like reliable automation could result in endless production, and eliminate the advantage that cheap labor nations like China currently have (other than size and ruthlessness I guess). HOWEVER, it is absolutely crucial to get the population growth of low-skilled people under control, in the U.S. and abroad. We need fewer, but more skilled and more disciplined workers, but what we are getting is more unskilled and disinterested people due to the fact that poor people are having many, many more kids than anyone else. Not only that, but they generally (yes I'm generalizing here so shoot me) don't put much energy into raising them, the kids all too often fall into a culture of underage sex and drugs (which often their parents see as normal), which is a self re-inforcing process.

Ok, not like I'm not talking about anything you don't already know right? But this point doesn't seem to be made often, it is very unpopular, and the only people who I see making it in mainstream media are the guys on shows like Tony Brown's Journal because they are pretty much firewalled from any racism charges (which is an oversimplification and a straw-man counterargument of course, but still a potent one).

Another too-infrequently-made-point that is a pretty obvious reality from where I stand- Anti-intellectualism and the conservative-liberal stalemate has allowed us to cede our culture to the regressive, devolved urban culture, with rap music leading the way (and yeah, yeah I know it's not all bad but this crap they play here in the ghetto about killing all white people and so on is what these kids are listening to). The message these urban kids generally get is that it's not ok to be too smart (you're a nerd or in some circles, just too white), that the most important thing in life is to be tough, that you have to fit in and go along to get along. The only mainstream values that seem to penetrate are nationalism/patriotism the value of which is debateable. What's lost? Being a unique individual, thinking of a Better Way, curiousity for it's own sake (cause if you're tough you've already got it all figured out), respect for very high levels of technical knowledge that don't relate to stereo speaker wiring, and so on. Oh yeah and being considerate of other people for the sake of being nice. That's (often literally) a foreign concept to most urban youth. In fact it's contrary to the goal of being tough.

I listen to what young (2-8 year old) urban kids are saying to see what is filtering through their minds. It's not like I have a choice a lot of times because their parent don't appear to discipline them at all and they run around stores and restaurants screaming.. but I digress.. Frequently the parents are speaking spanish and often make it clear in situations that they don't speak english.. but their kids do. Their kids' minds seem to be filled with all kinds of stuff from TV and movies. Catch phrases seem to stick, I wish I can remember some right now but it's always something out of really cheesy TV dialogue. I'll have to pay more attention.

So I think the good news is that if media were to drop the 'it's right for you' multi-culti paradigm and slip back more into a Victorian style 'this is what's right and if you don't do it you're a bad person' mode things would turn around REAL FAST. My specific generation, who grew up in the media environment of the 80s is a good example.. media told us growing up over and over that drugs were very bad, that sex was very dangerous, that the key to happiness was to get married, and guess what- 5-15 years later many of my peers are teetotalers (seems like many more than the generations after and certainly more than the ones before), and went straight into marriage without a promoscious phase.

Ok this is already very long, but I do want to hazard an even more speculative hypothesis: it is my theory that the spread of literacy created by the protestants followed by cheap printed materials created by technology is the essential factor that lay behind the very moralistic focus of Victorian middle and upper classes. Steeped in brow-beating literature, magazines, and newspapers, you got a culture steeped in brow-beating. I mean this in a positive way. What social order we have now is just the remnant of what the Victorians established (if you ask me).

So all we have to do is solve that conservative-liberal cultural stalemate, figure out what we agree on to move our culture forward, pump out the media to support this, and we'll be able to bring these lower class kids (when it comes down to it they're not all that happy with their lot anyway) into the mainstream culturally.. then we'll be in business in way we haven't seen since 1948-1958... Oh yeah but first we have to get poor people to quit having so many kids so we can afford to put all children into very good schools and train them to have the mental ability to fix robot frying machines...

Feel free to email me off-list and tell me why I'm full of crap.

-patrick snipped-for-privacy@patrickhoyt.com

Mike Hunter wrote:

Nope. Wide awake and too smart to bite with crappy bait and lures like this. Jeff ( Fishing in stocked ponds is way too easy ..) Rice

Pat Drnec wrote: