Bob16: HeadLikeOrange: I have a client base of high-tech, B2B companies, and at least 2/3 of them are hiring and having trouble finding help. My company is also having trouble finding good candidates.

Right, right.

I find that completely believable since it's a well known fact that it's impossible to lie on the internet.

It's true. Maybe it's regional, maybe it's the high-tech industry or the handful of verticals I work in, but it's true. In fact, go ahead and Google some high-tech, IT-ish, B2B services ("data protection", "virtualization", "crm"), click on a few, and I'll be you'll find that most have career opportunities on their websites.

Pants full of macaroni!!: Efficiency and progress is ours once more.....

Jane Fonda says it's OK!

Do they ever have stories like that where the people didn't make poor choices? In this case, they were given shelter and then kicked out for not following the house rules.

Contrabulous Flabtraption: I Said: Contrabulous Flabtraption: Well, let's imagine a world where abortion isn't illegal - you know, like ours. Do you then still support people having children who can't provide for them?

I'd prefer that they didn't but I'd still support social programs to take care of those children.



Well which is it? Do you support discouraging those who are ill-prepared from having children or do you support encouraging them to do by offering tax-payer funded safety nets for their poor decisions?

- - -

The biggest problem with this argument lies with President Barack Obama himself and what he has accomplished in his life. He went from being a prospective recedivist (I don't believe that, but it is a stereotype of black men) to President of the United States. That means that, in some small way, America is still the land of opportunity. When you think of recedivist and the problems they bring with them no matter where they go, don't you think of someone who really shouldn't have been born? The argument of being able to support a child properly is complete BS. That boy or girl born in a trailer with holes in the floor could be your next President one day. I am tempted to call people who make this argument of being able to properly support a child as being unpatriotic, and possibly a closet communist.

Magnanimous_J: what makes you think the rich guys who own these things are going to let you use them?

The alternative is death at the hands of a mob.

Todays youth.... the lost generation

/not 1920

Pick: Boy, for "poor people" those folks sure are fat. If you look at pictures during the Great Depression, you could tell folks really really had a hard time finding a meal. They were ALL quite skinny. Not in this day and age. Look at all the tub 'o lards in the checkout line with food stamps and WIC cards. Going hungry for a couple of months might do them some good.

To be fair the WIC and food stamp programs are seriously farked up. They can buy whatever pre-packaged and frozen foods they want, but there is a limit on what you can buy when it comes to meats, dairy, vegetables, and fruits. I was in line behind one mom who had two gallons of milk, bananas, grapes, apples, two fryer chickens, fish, two blocks of cheese, dry beans, rice, some pop, bottled water, some chips, mac n' cheese, soup, and generally unhealthy snack stuff. The lady at the counter made her put back a gallon of milk, a block of cheese, one of the chickens, (they aren't allowed to double up) all of the fish (not covered at all), removed three bananas from the bunch and took half the grapes out (over the weight limit for those items), and took away the bottled water. The mom was pretty ticked about the fruit, so the clerk told her she could go get some canned fruit instead. All the snack food was A-ok. The clerk said anything with a shelf life was covered, which is usually processed junk food.

I'm not saying at all that the people using these programs are all trying to eat healthy, but I would like to see less junk food covered and increase the allowances on perishables like fruit and vegetables.

hailin: FTFA:

Anything to help pay the bills, which come to about $7,000 a month, including some $4,000 in mortgage payments.

WTH do they spend $3,000 a month on?! My husband and I spend about $1,000 a month for the two of us and that includes gas, utilities, food, shopping, entertainment, etc. We sure don't need handouts from the food bank or any equivalent program.

6 people? I'd expect them to spend $1000 a month just on food.

However, I find it shocking that they would pay $4000 a month on mortgage payments. That's an $800,000 house.

You know, when I started the article, I felt for them, but as I went...

On the morning Veronica was to be released from the hospital, Jonathan, who would sometimes take off for days, asked for a divorce.
They didn't stay long. After a dispute with staff over house rules, the family moved

It sounds like the guy has issues getting along with people.

Jonathan recently spotted his old computer at the pawnshop and made a down payment. ... He is now applying for grocery store and telemarketing jobs.

Why would you make a down payment without having a stream of income with which to make subsequent payments?

EditorialSpace: That means that, in some small way, America is still the land of opportunity.

The exception proves the rule, it does not become it.

ameeriklane: Do they ever have stories like that where the people didn't make poor choices? In this case, they were given shelter and then kicked out for not following the house rules.

They do; but it normally involves a serious medical condition and a legal battle with an insurance company.

Many households would have a tough time, financially, dealing with cancer and the death of a spouse. And if there is any snag with the insurance, all but the most wealthy would be broke.

It's been a long downhill slide since 2006 and it was tilting about 4 years prior to that for me.

I am 57 and was recently asked to leave my apartment because I hadn't paid rent for 3 months. I now reside in the back room of my shop. I am not really "homeless" but I now use the words "showers at the Y" to describe my situation. (PS the mens locker-room at the Easton MD Y is disgusting)

If not for the kindness of a few friends, I would be in worse shape. As odd as my situation is I really pity the folks with kids in similar situations.

I am scared.
I live in a small town and I already know that my situation is a regular topic in the circles I used to belong to.

I am a small blip on the screen. My situation is nothing compared to others in similar situations. This economy and the government that I still hope to do something is possibly not going to help.


Look around you and notice the guy that was normally at all the fundraisers and helping others out. He's not there anymore. He's too embarrassed to be seen in public.

Once again I am being maudlin and sad. I want things to be better.

/feel free to mock now

//holy shiat! A customer walked in! second one today!

thanks to an earlier rant on this same topic, a nice person sponsored me to the Total Fark side of this site "thanks?" (that was an attempt at humor) also to the kind person that offered a gift of a paypal donation... I appreciate it more than you know, I let it sit for a few days and hopefully you will send it to another person that you choose. It made my feel very lucky

Occam's Chainsaw: Philip J. Fry: What happens as efficiency continues eliminating jobs without new ones being created?

You either get increasing socialism, as the cost of providing the bottom rungs of Maslow's hierarchy become realistic functions of societal governance, or you get increasing poverty and desperation, followed by violence and unrest.

Philip J. Fry: Serfdom Revolution here we come!

Fix'd. When we no longer even have lives of faux-plenty, we'll start wanting it. And we're such a powderkeg that we won't need to want it all that badly.

You also need to consider that the reality of the post WW2 era allowed for unprecedented "individualism" to thrive. Humans historically are a communal species. One of the reasons were so ill informed are easily manipulated is that we don't interact with one another quite as much. The rise in the "fark YOU I GOT MINE" mentality is due to the fact that the middle class can afford to isolate themselves from one another.

The poorer they get, the more communal they have to be to survive (as you saw in the article). At some point, it's going to rebound in the other direction towards an over abundance of socialist ideology which is just as bad as this ideological free market capitalism. Just like the boom and bust of the economy, our ideological swings seem to be just as violent.

Omg why do these I its keep producing children!

Coelacanth: Don't you forget that there have been ongoing protests on Wall Street for over five days now!

PEACEFUL FEMALE PROTESTORS PENNED IN THE STREET AND MACED! Link (new window)

Cops turn Violent, NYPD drag girl across the street.Link (new window)

COP KNEEL ON THROAT Link (new window)

The problem with those protests are that the protestors always seem to lose focus -- they turn it into a big statement against police brutality and totally forget the whole reason they were there in the first place.

Stay on task and show up dressed nicely. Leave your stupid drums and dreadlocks at home and people will begin to pay attention.

I read all three stories. Poor, poor Petersens. "But in the last three years, he has made just $70,000 on real estate transactions, most of it on a single deal. Many months he made nothing." Maybe, juuuuust maybe, he's expecting to make too much off his deals. And the Tuckers, only $3600 a month? Then I note that all these people live in California, one of those places with the "Liberal Stronghold Surcharge". $375,000 house? Mine cost less than a third of that. Of course, they could all live in NYC, where an efficiency apartment costs $375,000. But it would all work out the same. They try to indoctrinate you into the mentality that providing entitlements is beneficial to the "general welfare". What it actually is is buying votes at the expense of the future. When hard times come, and they always do, there is nothing to fall back on, because your liberal politicians have spent the excess buying votes, and both parties' politicians have failed to replenish the reserve. Conservatives, by lucrative tax schemes for their rich friends; Liberals, through entitlement programs like the Earned Income Credit, which enable anybody with a kid to get a certain amount for each child in free money added to their tax return, whether they even paid taxes or not.

The Longs obviously weren't that much in need if they turned down housing "because of a dispute with staff over house rules". "A recent parking ticket nearly reduced Equllia to tears."... but it didn't "reduce" her to parking where she was supposed to. No, she felt "entitled" to park where she pleased.

And the same thing is playing out the whole world over. Entire continents are going bankrupt. Note that it's the ones with the largest proportions of non-productive "entitled" citizens that are in the worst shape, and then go ahead and convince yourself that our own problems are because of military spending. If only there were more money to keep even more people out of work!

Cortez the Killer: Pick: Boy, for "poor people" those folks sure are fat. If you look at pictures during the Great Depression, you could tell folks really really had a hard time finding a meal. They were ALL quite skinny. Not in this day and age. Look at all the tub 'o lards in the checkout line with food stamps and WIC cards. Going hungry for a couple of months might do them some good.

I'm thinking the type of labor being done in the Great Depression compared to today's service jobs, along with the highly processed foods that are now the norm could be the difference. It is easier to be fat these days when you're poor because the cheapest food is the worst thing for your wasteline/health.

Maybe I'm shopping at the wrong place but fruits and vegetables in general seem to be cheaper or the same as any packaged crap. An apple and an cucumber would be cheaper to buy than a bag of econo-sized Cheetos, and much better for the person. Maybe the fact is; it's cheaper to buy bad food that can instantly be opened, crammed into once's face, and satisifies a bunch of mental wants based on the chemicals in it than it is to buy good food for poor people.

ameeriklane: Do they ever have stories like that where the people didn't make poor choices? In this case, they were given shelter and then kicked out for not following the house rules.

I often wonder the same thing. I have no doubt at all there are many Americans in dreadful financial circumstances these days through no fault of their own ... why does the media ignore them, and always focus on the Americans who are poor because they turned "bad decision-making" into a career?

Anecdote (though I have no link because my local paper only keeps stories online for 30 days): two years ago my local (Connecticut) paper did a story about a charity called "Warm the Children," which buys coats and other cold-weather gear for poor kids. And the case study they chose to write about -- I'm not making this up -- was a never-married woman who quit her job at McDonald's after she got pregnant with her ninth kid. That woman and her kids weren't poor because the economy sucks or the safety net has too many holes in it; they're poor because the woman is a cataclysmic idiot who refuses to learn from her mistakes, and is trying to support a family of TEN with a no-skills job that doesn't even pay enough for ONE person.

(And, sure enough, when that story made the paper, almost every online commenter said something like "Well, I WAS going to donate to this charity, but in light of the irresponsible behavior it apparently promotes ....")

this is what happens when you abandon protectionist policies. How the hell can we expect our "cheap" labor to compete with other nations' "cheap" labor?

serpent_sky: Rincewind53: I want to echo everyone here. fark the poor. I travel exclusively in my yacht to discourage any contact with them.

Some of them can swim, so I use my personal lear jet, because as far as I know, none of them can fly. Much, much more assurance I will be safe from actually laying eyes on one of the poor for even a moment.

Then you miss out on the fun of having your servants whack them with oars.

My wife works in healthcare, I think she is good for the foreseeable future. My job is safe for 5-10 years by my estimates, yet I still worry sometimes about ending up like one of these families. I know guys with jobs that are not safe at all yet they support a wife and multiple kids. I have no idea how they sleep at night.

Bob16: I Said: I thought it was more closely linked to economic status/education. Higher economic status/education: less kids. Independent of race.
If you look at the history of white birth rates in this country you can see that the baby boom took place during the golden age of capitalism when a high school drop out could fairly easily get himself a job that would support a family.

That was an exception to the rule. Women were still "housewives" and regardless of the number of children, they stayed home with them. It was just as easy to have five kids as one.

Nowadays, the economic burden of having even one kid is felt a lot more. Worldwide, all you have to do is educate the women, and birthrates start plummeting. It's been demonstrated several times.

I see everyone on Fark is quick to blame politicians, legislation, and big business. Sure, all of them made things more difficult. But what I see here is a series of poor personal choices and/or, most of all, an unwillingness to adjust living standards. Taxing the rich is a solution for another problem, not these people's problems.

Keep Republicans and their Democratic enablers away from the levers of power.

This is why we're all Farked: the children are running things into the ground.



Howzabout we cut that 54%-of-the-federal-budget (i.e., "defense") down to a more manageable 5%*? What are we afraid of, Sri Lanka?

*AND require that any future wars be soley funded via special sales + income tax line item. Every receipt you get will say,

War tax (10%): $3.98

and your 1040 will have a nice line that will say,

Add gross income line AA to capital gains amount line DD and multiply by 10%. Enter your WAR TAX amount on line JJ (note, you must pay this tax even if you owe no other amount).

I could be replaced by a shell script. Hell, I've half considered writing the script myself so that I can dick around on the internet all day. The only thing saving me now is that the beancounters haven't yet run the numbers on automation.

I Said: Nice thread. Only people with money should have babies. Good to know.

-Abortion is wrong
-Medical care is a privilege, not a right, and you need to pay for it
-Don't have babies if you're poor because you can't afford it

Basically: Poor people should abstain from sex and quite frankly if they'd have the good sense to just die we wouldn't have all these pesky taxes that keep society afloat.

That should be the new GOP slogan.

Yes? It already is?

Chuckus: Top Drawer of you Chumly. I've thought of doing something like that, but then my latest concubine suggested I was getting "soft". However, Kudos to your efforts.

You let them speak to you?

liverleef: My wife works in healthcare, I think she is good for the foreseeable future. My job is safe for 5-10 years by my estimates, yet I still worry sometimes about ending up like one of these families. I know guys with jobs that are not safe at all yet they support a wife and multiple kids. I have no idea how they sleep at night.

Booze. Lots of booze.

/just guessing

Chuckus: At some point, it's going to rebound in the other direction towards an over abundance of socialist ideology which is just as bad as this ideological free market capitalism.

I'm not seeing how we could get to an overabundance of socialist ideology. We'd have to have multiple decades of some pretty hardcore socialism just to get back to the zero point. Our attention span simply isn't that long.

liverleef: I have no idea how they sleep at night.

Liquor and pills, same as the rest of us.

Depression and anxiety are skyrocketing because we're not wired to deal with the world we've been thrust into. And as going back to before is less and less viable an option, I genuinely don't know how we're going to adapt to it.

From TFA: Jonathan was thrilled when he found a job doing event security, but the work was sporadic. Other employers turned him down. He thought it might have to do with the tattoos covering his arms, a relic of his music industry days. When a young boy admired them in the hallway, he snapped: "I regret every single one."

Um, y'know, even though you can't afford laser tattoo removal right now, you CAN wear a long-sleeved shirt to hide your tattoos. Have you tried wearing long sleeves to any of these job interviews?

Advice: Long's, spend some time not breeding. Peterson's, live within your means, sorry, didn't read the last one.

The Jami Turman Fan Club: 6 people? I'd expect them to spend $1000 a month just on food.

However, I find it shocking that they would pay $4000 a month on mortgage payments. That's an $800,000 house.

You apparently didn't read the rest of the article, there were three different families they profiles. I was commenting on the one family with the $400k house and two kids.

liverleef: My wife works in healthcare, I think she is good for the foreseeable future. My job is safe for 5-10 years by my estimates, yet I still worry sometimes about ending up like one of these families. I know guys with jobs that are not safe at all yet they support a wife and multiple kids. I have no idea how they sleep at night.

Sleep? When is there time for sleep when working a second or third entry level job to make ends met?

slc11082: Omg why do these I its keep producing children!

Because your reading comprehension skills are inadequate.

This is why you need to pay attention in school, Bub.

32oz High Life: Coelacanth: Don't you forget that there have been ongoing protests on Wall Street for over five days now!

PEACEFUL FEMALE PROTESTORS PENNED IN THE STREET AND MACED! Link (new window)

Cops turn Violent, NYPD drag girl across the street.Link (new window)

COP KNEEL ON THROAT Link (new window)

The problem with those protests are that the protestors always seem to lose focus -- they turn it into a big statement against police brutality and totally forget the whole reason they were there in the first place.

Stay on task and show up dressed nicely. Leave your stupid drums and dreadlocks at home and people will begin to pay attention.

I agree. I call this the Star Trek Convention Syndrome where the most colorful people get all of attention.

At most cons, newspeople overlook the real world scientists and technicians sitting in the corners who want to talk about how Star Trek inspired them to become scientists and technicians, and instead focus on the 500 pound man dressed as Mr. Spock.

But there still are ongoing protests for our collective benefit and we should support them.

Flatulent_Flea: Income for Mrs. Flea and I in 2005:
$100K

Income in 2011:
$50K

I guess it was all those bad choices.


What kind of work did each of you do? Why the big drop?

/just curious

After a dispute with staff over house rules, the family moved to an L.A. Family Housing transitional facility in North Hollywood.

Um, if you are a guest at someones house, you do as they ask. When you have your own house, you get to make the rules.

Occam's Chainsaw: Depression and anxiety are skyrocketing because we're not wired to deal with the world we've been thrust into. And as going back to before is less and less viable an option, I genuinely don't know how we're going to adapt to it.

Lots of death and suffering, of course. Just like all the other times of graduated and swift change. Followed by another Golden Age that starts the cycle of ebb and flow all over again.

I take a strange comfort in that.

Coelacanth

True on all counts.

Also, I think I might borrow that phrase from you...

All_Farked_Up: Sleep? When is there time for sleep when working a second or third entry level job to make ends met?

When is there time anymore to support our culture? Or to raise our kids so they don't turn into coldblooded criminals? Or to mow the farking grass?

safetycap: *AND require that any future wars be soley funded via special sales + income tax line item. Every receipt you get will say,

War tax (10%): $3.98

and your 1040 will have a nice line that will say,

Add gross income line AA to capital gains amount line DD and multiply by 10%. Enter your WAR TAX amount on line JJ (note, you must pay this tax even if you owe no other amount).

Perfect. Flat 10% no matter what your income is. That'll get people off their asses. It won't stop the wars, but more people will be standing, and that's a good thing.

Flatulent_Flea: I guess it was all those bad choices.

Can we assume that you and yours are being careful to not make mistakes that would compound your situation?

Let them eat cake...

/the cake is a lie

Divine: Taxing the rich is a solution for another problem, not these people's problems.

On the short? No. On the long? Most definitely. Improving and repairing infrastructure, firming up the social safety net, and providing quality educational opportunities are exactly what help people in these kinds of situations. If the money never gets back into the hands of the marginal and poor, it never gets moving again, and demand never increases. That increased demand is the difference between Douchebag McGee recording awful rap for people of poor taste to buy with their discretionary funds, and him soliciting hand-outs.

Contrabulous Flabtraption: I Said: Contrabulous Flabtraption: Well, let's imagine a world where abortion isn't illegal - you know, like ours. Do you then still support people having children who can't provide for them?

I'd prefer that they didn't but I'd still support social programs to take care of those children.



Well which is it? Do you support discouraging those who are ill-prepared from having children or do you support encouraging them to do by offering tax-payer funded safety nets for their poor decisions?

The problem with this is that the kid didn't make the decision, but he or she gets to starve in the gutter too. Besides, returning to 18th-century social welfare policies inevitably leads to an unacceptable quality of life, not just for poor people, but for everyone. Perhaps people who advocate that should pay more attention to the French Revolution, or even more recent history in places like Colombia.