6402

Actually, he is way better off than he was in 1990s, and median wage growth (even if you believe in the accuracy of the statistics) is just one factor.

The big problem is that both parties for a long time, have been telling people of the good old days. In ways best capture by Stphanie Coontz’s book “The way we never were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.”

Take those vaunted Detroit autoworker jobs that everybody pines over. At is peak the UAW had 1.9 million members or about 1% the work force. Yes, its true that the wage they paid that enabled a person without a college education to live the America. But let us not forget the years it took to earn enough seniority so that you weren’t constantly furloughed in the constant factory shutdowns. Sure it great to make $30/hour but if you only work 4 months out of the year not so great.

But let’s stop the BS talk about these being good jobs. They were they were noisy, physically hard, repetitive jobs that killed people by the thousands and injured them by the tens of thousand. Not the carpal tunnel injuries for today call center workers, or coffee burn by Starbuck workers. These wonderful factories polluted our air, and our water. A generation ago we had 100 Flints each year. I suspect most of us have played SimCity, these wonderful jobs were the ones you placed on the edge of the maps so the pollution will spill out over to the next region.

This article in Politico is what somebody should be telling the voters.
Sorry, Drumpf, America Can’t Be Great Again

6403

Cripes, what kind of a reality distortion field do you have to live in to blame the Trump phenomenon on Obama? #smh

6404

Age is the big thing. It’s just too late to do something else. You can’t learn another trade, if you wanted to. You can’t afford to move, if you wanted to.

6405

This is Bobby Jindal. He ran Louisiana into the ground with his fantasy budgets and Norquistian tax cuts and then term-limited out, leaving Democrats to clean up his mess…similar, I assume, to what will happen to Kansas. He’s truly a fucking idiot.

6406

Please. My father immigrated to this country when he was 41, with essentially no money. He went to trade school and worked in the electronics assembly industry.

What he didn’t do was sit around and lament others stealing all the jobs. Trump is certainly less of a practical solution than going to learn a trade.

To be clear, I’m not saying it is easy. But it is no easier for the Mexican immigrant who faces language and cultural barriers. To fallback on nativism and buying into a fascist demagogue as the solution is ridiculous.

6407

Yeah, seriously, why can’t they learn a trade ?
They just want to be able to benefit from their whiteness. But that’s too bad.

6408

Immigrants have the luxury of being mobile. They can move where the jobs are.

But it is no easier for the Mexican immigrant who faces language and cultural barriers.

A young Mexican immigrant would have an easier time finding a job than an older white male. That Mexican immigrant will probably have friends and family where he’s moving, and he’ll be working in a trade where Spanish the dominant language. It might be on a farm, or in a kitchen, but everyone will speak Spanish. He also has few, if any, obligations which will enable him to accept lower paying work then the older white male who presumably has a family to support.

6409

And the primary driver of workplace safety since then? OSHA. That’s right – big government and regulation :)

I also doubt that automotive jobs “killed people by the thousands.” In 1971, the year that OSHA was founded, there were 14,000 workers killed on the job. Factory work has dangers, but it’s not even close to the most dangerous occupation in America. Mining, fishing, construction, driving a truck and many others are ahead.

Not that it matters. As others have pointed out, manufacturing is already coming back to the US. But not jobs, unless you’re a robot repairman ;)

6410

41 is one thing, 55 and over is something else entirely. Just sayin’. We’ve got a guy in the office (25 year + veteran of the company) whose work is being sent to an Indian subsidiary, and he’s right around 55 (I’m turning 55 in less than a month). It’s going to take the Indian guys a good year at least to get up to speed if not more, but try telling the bean counters that. It sucks and is complete bullshit. This guy of whom I spoke will probably end up working at Home Depot for 12 bucks/hour if he’s lucky, since he doesn’t have a B.A. (not that that gets you much these days).* I’m sure he’s been making more than twice that + benefits given his seniority and skills/experience.

*If he’s REALLY lucky the company will realize its mistake and hire him back as a contractor through an agency (and be limited to an 18 month contract, and have the agency take a third of what the company would be paying, because reasons).

Just to be clear: THIS IS IN NO WAY meant to be an endorsement of that buffoon Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant garbage, but rather a general indictment of Corporate America’s frankly indecent treatment of loyal employees sometimes.

6411

Don’t these two kinda cancel each other out?

6412

I used to work on a farm for man we called el gordo borracho. I was the only gringo on a crew of 50, which meant learning a lot of (very filthy) Spanish very quickly. The season started in March and ran through late August. A couple of the guys actually lived in the area but most floated into town when the season began, and they left when things wound down in the fall. Some moved south to work, others headed back to Mexico. When they were here, they lived in a local trailer park. Usually eight or ten people to at trailer. Everyone had family, usually cousins, who worked one state over. Some had family working outside of DC, others had family down in North Carolina. Everyone had family out in California though. It made for a very effective networking tool. If our season ended early, there was always someone they could call.

It was an interesting experience, you went through your whole day talking and thinking in Spanish. When you got off work, you’d go to the country store - and that conversation was probably in Spanish as well. If you went out to eat, you probably went to a Peruvian, El Salvadorian, or Mexican restaurant - where you spoke Spanish.

There was also this amazing illegal cafe, hidden away in an apple orchard. Lord that place was heaven. It was only open on Friday and Saturday, and only when the sun was down. The host made the most amazing carnitas, and his wife’s corn tortilla were spot on. You could sit there all night, right by the fire, eating carnitas and drinking dollar beers. There was an incident with some trafficante though and I had to stop going.

Bit of a downer.

6413

The luxury? If you mean by virtue of being willing to head somewhere with nothing but the clothes on their backs (with their family in tow), then yeah. What’s stopping the white guy from making the same sacrifice?

Frankly, you’re attempt to paint the picture of the American as more disadvantaged is silly. The Mexican does have a couple of significant advatsnges: namely perspective and desperation.

6414

Exactly, the only advantage he had is a lack of a sense of entitlement.

6415

The people I knew were all migrants, legal or illegal, rather than refugees.

So people always had a car, it was the first thing they bought. The first one was always a beater sedan, and the second one was almost always a pickup truck. When they got real money saved up, they get something new. Red was far away the most popular color.

Most were single, but there were a few married ones. The bulk kept their children back in Mexico where the family was. Only the permanent residents, the legals, had their children with them.

The refugees I know now, and we employ quite a few people from the International Rescue Committee, always have families. That isn’t a big issue for the middle class refugees, they get over the hump pretty quickly. The social capital they had at home tends to transfer, and they find a way to do something lucrative. The peasants, they end up working low paying jobs and living in little ethnic communities in town. Those individuals tend to tread water and invest what they can in their children. They’ll never do great, but their children might be able to better themselves. That’s the hope at least.

Your question though, why can’t these Americans just pickup stakes and move? Turn it around for a moment, why do only some people leave places like Burma to become refugees in the west? Why don’t all Cubans leave for America, and a sure thing? People have elderly parents to take care of, they have ties to the land, they don’t want to leave their culture behind. They might have children in school, they might have a home that they own, or other physical investments. Leaving that behind, it isn’t easy.

If I had to choose I’d much rather be a twenty year old Mexican immigrant (with enough documentation to get me across the border) than to be a 45 year old white male, with a family, in an economically depressed community.

The Mexican community would just be way healthier for one. Two, you’d have a much better future. You aren’t earning a ton, for an American, but your cost of living is super low and you can buy an amazing ranch back home with your savings.

6416

If only … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_cLMqfwNL4

6417

This is sad. In many cases its a foolish short-sighted view of corporate managers, in some case reducing costs is the only way to stay in business, and if companies don’t do that they go out of business. It would be nice if the companies that had paternalistic instincts and looked at the long-term were rewarded with higher profits, stock prices, and bigger market share. However, life isn’t fair and that doesn’t always happen.

But I think the story we hear is that these kinds of practice are some 21st-century phenomenon, and globalization, outsourcing, and immigration are somehow to blame and life was wonderful for our parents who worked for benevolent bosses. The reality is reducing cost is the essence of capitalism and find cheaper ways to the same thing has been going on for hundreds of years in companies.

In fact turning 55 was a scary time for my dad’s generation. For the ~40% who were covered by pensions, many required you to work for 10 years before you got anything. For many others, you needed to be 55 before you got anything. So companies had a strong incentive to replace 54-year-old with 24-year-old, cause not only did the 24-year-old make less, plus it made the pension fund a stronger with one less beneficiary. It was a common occurrence and know it happened when the pharmaceutical company my dad worked for got taken over by Bristol Meyers. At the end of the day, I’m not sure by replaced by Indian worker is much worse than being replaced with a 24-year-old.

In many ways your friend is better off, he probably had access to a 401K career which did not exist 40 years ago, and nowadays older workers are a protected class some companies tend to be more generous with severance packages. It might have been easier for a 55-year-old to find a good job in the 70s, but I doubt it was easy.

6418

Yet these young immigrants you speak of have had to give up all that and move.

You seem to have experience of the human drama of immigration in the receiving end of the border. I suggest you experience the other end, and see how most kids (really most, some Mexican communities have more than 80% of the males spend some years in the US illegally) have to go 4-5 years without seeing their fathers because they are working on the US. And no mater that they are young, most male immigrants do leave families behind (not being able to support the family being the main reason to take the step). At least in the town I was at.

When they come back they can feel like strangers to their own family. Taking your kids with you is much easier to withstand, but crossing the border is hard/dangerous enough that you are not going to send your kids that way. You seem to be confusing choice with desperation.

6419



This is from the Trustee’s court filing:

Alpha Natural Resources, Inc. … filed the KEIP Motion requesting, inter alia, authority to pay 15 of its most highly compensated executives bonuses totaling over $11.9 Million in 2016. Alpha seeks this relief while at the same time incurring more than $1.3 Billion in losses for 2015. Alpha seeks this relief while at the same time seeking to cut off the health and life insurance benefits to some 1,200 rank-and-file retirees because it claims it desperately needs to save $3 Million a year. Alpha seeks this relief after demonstrating to this Court that it is so hopelessly insolvent that its shareholders have no chance of seeing any return on their investments into the companies.

According to Alpha, these executives need these bonuses as an incentive to do the very jobs they were hired to do, that they are already highly compensated for with generous salaries, and which their fiduciary duties already compel them to do. Such bonuses cannot be justified under the facts and circumstances of this case.

Spoiler: The executives got their bonuses.

And to tie this into the election - conjecture on why The Donald isn’t releasing his tax returns: Real estate developers are allowed to deduct from their personal income tax filings depreciation on their real estate holdings. That’s right: Very wealthy real estate developers in the US can essentially live tax free. Bet that won’t be changing in Trump the populist tax plan.

6420

MIT build a Trump twitter bot. You seriously can’t tell the difference.

6421

I dunno (about the bot). It seems to be a better speller than Trump.