The people that are truly rich, monstrously rich, are the psychopathic business(wo)men who could afford to backstab and abuse anyone or anything in their path.
How many of these truly rich backstabbing people that you are labeling do you actually KNOW? Lets say business income over $1M/yr or networth over $100M?
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Out of the blackness and stench of the engulfing swamp emerged a shimmering figure. Only the splattered armor and ichor-stained sword hinted at the unfathomable evil the knight had just laid waste.
Ultra wealthy people aren't psychopaths. Most of them are utterly detached from the consequences of their actions and intensely career focused, as well as inordinately powerful within their own businesses to the point of being difficult for anyone who isn't on their level to interact with.
This lack of feedback is a big problem with modern businesses, to the point that the people leading them can steer them astray and suffer no consequences or very limited consequences, and corrective actions can only occur when politics are fluid rather than ossified. This kind of power is bad for the business, it's bad for the employees, it's bad for the shareholders, and it's only good for its rivals.
This lack of feedback is a big problem with modern businesses, to the point that the people leading them can steer them astray and suffer no consequences or very limited consequences, and corrective actions can only occur when politics are fluid rather than ossified.
I find this to be less of an issue with the people at the top and more of an issue with the people between the ones at the top and the average worker. It's not that the CEO doesn't care it's that your boss's boss has a power trip and wants to show he can control everything to deliver the numbers so he can keep his golden chute too.
Politics have nothing to do with it unless you are one of those who thinks the government should be controlling production.
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Out of the blackness and stench of the engulfing swamp emerged a shimmering figure. Only the splattered armor and ichor-stained sword hinted at the unfathomable evil the knight had just laid waste.
I find this to be less of an issue with the people at the top and more of an issue with the people between the ones at the top and the average worker. It's not that the CEO doesn't care it's that your boss's boss has a power trip and wants to show he can control everything to deliver the numbers so he can keep his golden chute too.
Politics have nothing to do with it unless you are one of those who thinks the government should be controlling production.
I mean office politics. The problem is that large businesses in the US have been extremely coddled politically and organizationally, and many of these guys don't have any skin in the game or feel responsibility for those that work for them. Meanwhile smaller businesses have to play by a byzantine rulebook that needs serious revision.
Maybe people should be more responsible and consider establishing a career so that they can support children before actually having kids.
Or a woman is married for nine years, has two kids and for one of many reasons her marriage ends. Now she has two kids and no job skills because before getting married at the age of 17 she attended 25 different schools and could barely read when she dropped out of the HS. All that's her fault, what a lazy woman. The presumptuousness of this comment is unbearable.
Is every kid put in a position where they are going to be contemplating how to pay for future kids? I did this as teenager and I was one of the few. When a kid grows up in poverty guess what...they usually stay in poverty. In all honesty, there needs to be people that do menial tasks. Someone has to do it. If you are one of those people, that does mean the cost of living should be so high compared to your income?
As for the person who only makes $12,000, I think he/she should put more effort in making more money either by starting own business (like Jeffbcrandall) or move to a place where higher paying jobs are available. Opportunities are out there. Depending on education and work experience some people just have to work harder than others to get it.
Start a business? Is that a serious comment? I don't even know where to begin here. I just don't think you get it. These are kids that are being raised having absolutely no encouragement to achieve anything outside of a high school diploma, and a lot of times not even that. I agree that people that are living off welfare and not attempting to find a job need to have their aid cut.
That's not the issue. Most of the people that accept assistance are doing so because they need to pay the bills and their job pays too little. Is the solution for them to work more? Spend less time with their family? Work and go to school? Who pays for the school? Can you get approved for loans and if not do you have a co-signer? If you scored a 13 on the ACT whose fault is that?
And still we are left with the fact someone has to do the menial tasks that pay nothing. What would happen to this country's economy if every McDonald's worker quit and enrolled in college? Following in their example all the fast food workers quit, all the cashiers quit, no one is working at the gas stations ect ect. Are these menial jobs necessary? Can this country operate with out them? If they are necessary then people shouldn't be punished for working at a factory.
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Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great
property down payments can be expensive. when it's more than 3x your yearly salary, it's going to be near impossible to rise above your current economic situation.
Or a woman is married for nine years, has two kids and for one of many reasons her marriage ends. Now she has two kids and no job skills because before getting married at the age of 17 she attended 25 different schools and could barely read when she dropped out of the HS. All that's her fault, what a lazy woman. The presumptuousness of this comment is unbearable.
Is every kid put in a position where they are going to be contemplating how to pay for future kids? I did this as teenager and I was one of the few. When a kid grows up in poverty guess what...they usually stay in poverty. In all honesty, there needs to be people that do menial tasks. Someone has to do it. If you are one of those people, that does mean the cost of living should be so high compared to your income?
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Not only do I believe that people should be more responsible and consider establishing a career so that they can support children before actually having kids. I also believe people should establish a career and be mentally mature before getting married.
When people are able to do this then their kids will not be raised in poverty or their marriage result in divorce. I'm almost certain there's a correlation between the percentage of divorces in marriages to the age and education level of the parties envolved.
The later you get married the more likely you are able to establish your career and eduction first resulting in the reduced number of divorces.
Hope this comment doesn't end with the same results that that one did.
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And, for now, good bye everyone, this is my board suicide at least for the next 6 months. Thank you everyone for a wonderful, interesting environment to post and read in. No time to post anymore with recent positive, but time consuming, changes in my life. Good luck and best wishes to all.
Not only do I believe that people should be more responsible and consider establishing a career so that they can support children before actually having kids. I also believe people should establish a career and be mentally mature before getting married.
Hard to do that when your biological clock is ticking, and your prime reproduction years are when you are still climbing the corporate ladder.
It is, and it isn't. on the one hand, sure its an upper class individual saying something thats being taken as dismissive and derogatory toward the lower class by the lower class, but on the other hand, her statements do provide legitimate advice on upward mobility.
It may suck that you need to do that to move up, and htat may be something that should change, but you can't argue that it is what is required to move up in the social statuses.
On the other hand, its not even remotely similar in that the "let them eat cake" statement was a complete dismissal of their plight and showed a fundamental misunderstanding of what the problem was.
This is hard to do for the woman because most companies don't want to hire them if they so much as faintly consider having children one day. Maternity leave is also not overly common.
Never mind the general issues with "establishing a career" regardless of gender.
You do realize that your post implies that most companies only hire post-menopausal women?
Not only do I believe that people should be more responsible and consider establishing a career so that they can support children before actually having kids. I also believe people should establish a career and be mentally mature before getting married.
When people are able to do this then their kids will not be raised in poverty or their marriage result in divorce. I'm almost certain there's a correlation between the percentage of divorces in marriages to the age and education level of the parties envolved.
The later you get married the more likely you are able to establish your career and eduction first resulting in the reduced number of divorces.
Personal responsibility is a huge thing that Ive seen more and more from my personal experiences from people Ive known that is simply falling by the wayside. There are always going to be circumstances that are going to restrict what choices people have to some extent, but at the same time choices will always exist which will have better short term or long term benefits to them to the person.
I have a friend Ive known now for 15 years now, my oldest friend at this point. His life as a kid was supremely messed up for reasons I wont get into here, and he never really had the proper structure and family umbrella to end up in a good place upon nearing graduation (high school). Inevitably I sort of took it upon myself to help him out here or there to try to help bring some stability to his life to help him be able to build off of that. Due to some poor choices, and some situations that were simply outside of his control, he ended up accumulating $5,000 in debt to me, which was an accumulation of my attempts to prop him up to give him a chance to stabilize, find a decent job, and be able to help him build some long-term success. (Ive always been more about the hand up rather than hand out method, which is why I always made it clear that the money had to be paid back.) After some time, and him honestly wanting and willing to not only pay me back but also letting me control his money so that way he could budget it to be able to pay for what he needed while also being able to pay off his debts, a couple years later, he had been steadily paying me off, and finally found the better job he had been looking for and qiuckly finished paying me off.
If not for my intervention and support, I dont know where he would be right now, I can certainly imagine it wouldnt be in a good place which he has admitted more than once. Inevitably sometimes there are simply circumstances beyond people's control that dont put them in the position they need to be able to succeed later on in life, unless they have at least a little help by someone who cares to give them the boost they need to be given a chance to succeed. These days, after several other bad luck situations, he found himself without a job, while I was finding myself with the need for someone to help me keep up with my card business, so as it turned out, the situation he was in managed to help the both of us. I pay him based on how much work he actually does (the more work completed, the more money he makes, another effort on my part to instill the benefits of hard work, which I knew he was capable of.) And a year later, its worked out quite well, and hes in a position now to where hes back out in the job market and looks likely he will be getting a decent job again here soon, with a willingness on his part to continue to work on my stuff while doing so, which I think goes to show how much he wants to claw his way back up and get himself to a better long-term stable situation for himself.
On the flip side, I had a reasonably solid family life growing up, I had the support of my parents, even though we never really had much money, I never really felt myself wanting as far as that goes, in large part because I was brought up with the ideal of needs being more important that wants. I was brought up with saving and couponing and buy on sale mentality, and it worked out well as I even from the age of 7, would typically only spend small amounts of my small allowance and the like on things I was "investing" in (sports cards at the time which I bought at 10 cents on the dollar), and then saving the rest. My efforts of working my tail off in school, saving my money, and the idea of "investing" with my entertainment budget, ended up being what helped me graduate as valedictorian of my high school, build the magic collection that eventually turned from a part-time ebay side-business into the $250k+ in sales I do now with the shop and online sales, and helped me earn my degree in psychology along with added business classes which give me a backup plan should magic ever go by the wayside and which help me to make my card business as good as it can be.
Not everyone is lucky enough to have a good friend, or have a stable enough family life to give them the chance to build something as I did, so I dont expect that everyone is going to be able to just pull themselves out of whatever poor life as a child they may have had and be able to turn things around as easily as some may think it should be. Hard work, regardless, still matters a great deal towards this. Its not the only thing, but a willingness to work hard, and sacrifice in order to build something for yourself will and does help many people get out of these poor situations. Will those people ever be "rich" or "wealthy"? Thats of course a tough one. Some people can certainly accomplish this, however many will simply work hard, and stabilize at a level of income that accomplishes what they need for themselves and their family, and while they may never be rich, they will have enough money to cover everything they need and be able to save for retirement at least a little while doing so.
Sorry for the lengthy story, but I felt it was relevant to the discussion at hand, and helps to give a couple different perspectives on the same issue and some related thoughts from myself on the realities of some things.
Hard to do that when your biological clock is ticking, and your prime reproduction years are when you are still climbing the corporate ladder.
I'm refering to people who get married between 20-25 as opposed to those who get married after 28. Your biological clock is really not ticking so much at 28-30.
There's also a difference between climbing a corporate ladder vs maintaining a stable job. This has much do to with priorities and work/life balance. You can maintain a stable job and have a family.
Also I want to comment on JeffBCrandall's comment. Parenting/guidance is the most important part of a person's development and future success. The material wealth of the parents are secondary. That's why it is extremely important to take the time to make sure that both partners are mentally ready to be in a marriage and to have kids.
Also I want to comment on JeffBCrandall's comment. Parenting/guidance is the most important part of a person's development and future success. The material wealth of the parents are secondary. That's why it is extremely important to take the time to make sure that both partners are mentally ready to be in a marriage and to have kids.
And if they aren't?
I used to have this exact opinion when I was young. I came from poverty and now had a great job and a college education. If I grew up in rusted out trailers in rusted out trailer parks why couldn't everyone? Well, I had some advantages a lot of people don't have:
1. The influence of an extremely hard working mother
2. The financial support of a middle class father.
3. A natural interest in school, particularly in math and science.
4. I understood at a young age that most of the people around me were doing it wrong.
My mother, despite needing financial aid, worked as much as she could, as hard as she could until her hands could no longer assemble plastic Toys any longer. My father had a decent job and credit score that allowed him to co-sign my student loans (I still make a mortgage payment in student loans 9 years later). I realized how different this was from most of kids I grew up with much later in life.
All of this aside, one thing has not been addressed:
Are labor jobs necessary in this country?
1. Can we continue our way of life without someone to do the work most people don't want to do?
2. If these jobs are necessary, and our way of life would crumble without them, is it just to punish people with financial instability because they take these jobs?
3. Should we encourage every person working a minimum wage job to quit and try to find a better job?
4. What would happen to our economy if this (3) happened?
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great
2. If these jobs are necessary, and our way of life would crumble without them, is it just to punish people with financial instability because they take these jobs?
It is not just to punish people for taking those jobs. The problem, and where we start to diverge, is that it isn't a punishment. Is it a bad situation? Sure. But it's not a punishment.
Again, I don't think you'll actually get much disagreement that people doing these jobs diligently should be able to make a living wage. I think you'll also find that in the few instances where these jobs are not volatile (IE school janitorial services are always needed, and can't be axed for the most part) the job does not provide financial instability.
3. Should we encourage every person working a minimum wage job to quit and try to find a better job?
No, we shoudl encourage every person working a minimum wage job to try and find a better job then quit. The other order is completely stupid and makes no sense.
The answer is, of course, yes. I don't think you'll find anyone disagreeing with that, so we move on to the next part.
No. So, those jobs need to be filled. I sense we are in agreement thus far.
It is not just to punish people for taking those jobs. The problem, and where we start to diverge, is that it isn't a punishment. Is it a bad situation? Sure. But it's not a punishment.
Again, I don't think you'll actually get much disagreement that people doing these jobs diligently should be able to make a living wage. I think you'll also find that in the few instances where these jobs are not volatile (IE school janitorial services are always needed, and can't be axed for the most part) the job does not provide financial instability
No, we shoudl encourage every person working a minimum wage job to try and find a better job then quit. The other order is completely stupid and makes no sense.
It would grind to a halt, fire, famine, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
If, however, people are sensible and don't quite the jobs they have until they actually have a better job it's a much less bleak outlook.
My point, and I'm sure you didn't miss it, is that everyone can not, at any time, all have good jobs. For capitalism to function there has to be a lower class. That's not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of people wouldn't mind being able to put in a good days labor everyday and go home. The problem is that companies are not distributing the wealth of the company back down the line to the workers.
On top of that many of these types of jobs don't offer health care (another symptom of greed). These families are one paycheck or one health crisis away from financial ruin (medical bills are the number one reason for bankruptcy in this country). Given how much money companies like Wal-Mart make every year there is no reason to treat their employees like this. Particularly considering the fact that we NEED people to work these jobs.
No, we should encourage every person working a minimum wage job to try and find a better job then quit. The other order is completely stupid and makes no sense.
And still, this can only happen to fast. There is a bottle neck for well paying jobs. If that bottle neck opens, the same job pays less because more people can do it. And when a person finds a better paying job someone has to fill the position he was in before, or the company fails (if this happens on a large scale).
Doesn't the fact that a company needs labor jobs to succeed show that we can not eliminate the lower class? Since the solution is not as simple as "get an education" what is the solution? Maybe the solution is for no one person to have XXX billions of dollars.
There is still this misconception that poor people are lazy. That everyone on welfare is worthless, and it's just not true generally speaking. There are people that are simply lazy and don't want to work. I think they are the exception, not the rule.
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great
I haven't slogged through the thread, but in a nutshell, I just wrote this off like I do the remarkably arrogant and out-of-touch things that come out of Donald's Trump's mouth, and others. These people inherit huge sums of money and benefit from expensive private educations and a network of connections to essentially, in the case of Trump, gamble with huge sums of other people's/taxpayers money and feed their own egos. Humility is something stereotypically lacking in these heir's and heiress's to huge amounts of "old money." In their minds, it's all legitimately earned and the byproduct of sheer hard work and genius. Or life is just a complete joke, nothing left to do but be completely vapid and bask in the light of flimsy celebrity culture (Paris Hilton and a bunch of you know who's that we're all embarrassed to even know about to begin with.) To their parents and grandparents, however, who EARNED the majority of the wealth and grew up in a more austere culture and times, to the Andrew Carnegie's who saw more than money and wanted their souls to live on through public works and the arts, money is merely a part of a grander scheme of things. Even so-called robber barons actually had to make money building real industry and infrastructure... tell that to these clowns and their endless ponzi schemes, reality TV shows, and failed casino ventures....
I know this isn't exactly related to this particular Aussie heiress, but it's indicative of that cycle of degradation that happens when wealth passes from its more fitting creators down the line to more egotistical heirs and heiresses. Not even the slightest thought of, "Hey, this is really easy for me to say. I'm already rich and privileged beyond the imagination of the average middle class person." The nerve of some people... you'd think that their education would teach them a thing or two about the scope of an economic climate.
One thing about cheap labor: It exists because there is a buyer and a seller. It's like the matrix really. Only some are ready to come out of it.
For instance, if I told you that all you had to do was meet 5 new people a day and offer to introduce me to them. I would train you to sell them products and services they need and in many cases were already buying. You would get paid for this training until you were producing on your own. When you got really good at it I would likely put you in charge of training people who were just getting started meeting their 5 people a day and I would pay you $100k-200k per year to train these people.
I can think of a bunch of different businesses (almost all of them sales related) that basically work like that to get new clients. Some of them "meet 5 people" might mean cold call 100. Some of them might mean generate and follow up on 50 internet leads. In my case it happens to be "book 1 seminar a week", but the truth is that I have to call and visit people or I don't get paid.
I can't just sit in my office and say.. "yep booking seminars today" while posting on MTGS and expect to get paid (like I did at my old job).
I used to manage a restaurant and hire minimum wage employees. I told every one of them, "you tell me what you want and I'll tell you what to do to get it. If you want 30-40 hours a week, punch the clock take your check and forget this place, then train on this this and this and do it well. If you want to be a manager one day, train on this this and this, do it well and learn how to train people".
I quit worrying about the ones I couldn't save, the ones who called in because they had a hangover or because we scheduled them on Friday night and they wanted to party. I couldn't help the ones who constantly gave people attitude when they needed correction, the ones who complained about their 15 hours a week but 3 of those hours were texting in the back room.
Hard work isn't the only secret, but failure to work hard is a great way to ensure failure.
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Out of the blackness and stench of the engulfing swamp emerged a shimmering figure. Only the splattered armor and ichor-stained sword hinted at the unfathomable evil the knight had just laid waste.
Yes, but I feel as if someone like you actually has anecdotal evidence that clearly demonstrates that you not only worked in a small business, but also tried to help other people improve their lives and learn those life lessons ( that is, essentially, that maturity and working hard come hand in hand, moderation in partying/alcohol instead of overindulgence, seeking mentors and making the connections you need to move up in salary, and so on)
These truths are self evident to some, learned the hard way by others, and never learned by many. Laced with other critical words, "class warfare," "anti-business attitude," it has a totally different tone than an upper middle class (I'm just assuming here) person who is employing management skills vs. an heiress who, unsurprisingly, instead relies on glib anecdotes , "[the stories of her two grandfathers and three of her wealthy friends, who all started at the bottom and worked their way to the top]," without so much as a drop of self-awareness of the massive difference between this and taking the reins of an already staggering fortune, and building upon it. It sounds more like a screed against policies that may threaten the little bubble that her inherited wealth has created for her. And it lacks a critical element of her DOING anything to help other people achieve this beside empty criticism of the working class. Totally different than coming to terms with a particular worker who just, "doesn't get it," and isn't worth your time anymore.
These kinds of arguments are somewhat robbed of credibility when the person making them can be described as an "heiress" but, just for the sake of argument, how would we react if this comment had come from somebody genuinely self-made?
They'd still be completely wrong. There's too much luck involved to say that it's someone's fault for not becoming rich.
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We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.
These kinds of arguments are somewhat robbed of credibility when the person making them can be described as an "heiress" but, just for the sake of argument, how would we react if this comment had come from somebody genuinely self-made?
It is far more telling that these comments haven't come from self made individuals. When someone like Warren Buffett, or Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or the founder of Vanguard and UPS tells me the reason people aren't rich is because of their drinking and socializing, hey, maybe they've got something. But they don't come from these people - it's the blue blooded second generation rich who say **** like this.
There's a difference between "rich" which is what folks hear when someone says "Unequal distribution of wealth!" and "financially secure". People aren't asking to be millionaires. They want financial security and the ability to feather their nests. People in the US are working harder than ever, and doing more work than ever, and profits are incredibly high, and compensation has been stagnant for 20 years. Saying "Hey, where's my piece of the pie?" is entirely fair.
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How many of these truly rich backstabbing people that you are labeling do you actually KNOW? Lets say business income over $1M/yr or networth over $100M?
This lack of feedback is a big problem with modern businesses, to the point that the people leading them can steer them astray and suffer no consequences or very limited consequences, and corrective actions can only occur when politics are fluid rather than ossified. This kind of power is bad for the business, it's bad for the employees, it's bad for the shareholders, and it's only good for its rivals.
I find this to be less of an issue with the people at the top and more of an issue with the people between the ones at the top and the average worker. It's not that the CEO doesn't care it's that your boss's boss has a power trip and wants to show he can control everything to deliver the numbers so he can keep his golden chute too.
Politics have nothing to do with it unless you are one of those who thinks the government should be controlling production.
I mean office politics. The problem is that large businesses in the US have been extremely coddled politically and organizationally, and many of these guys don't have any skin in the game or feel responsibility for those that work for them. Meanwhile smaller businesses have to play by a byzantine rulebook that needs serious revision.
Or a woman is married for nine years, has two kids and for one of many reasons her marriage ends. Now she has two kids and no job skills because before getting married at the age of 17 she attended 25 different schools and could barely read when she dropped out of the HS. All that's her fault, what a lazy woman. The presumptuousness of this comment is unbearable.
Is every kid put in a position where they are going to be contemplating how to pay for future kids? I did this as teenager and I was one of the few. When a kid grows up in poverty guess what...they usually stay in poverty. In all honesty, there needs to be people that do menial tasks. Someone has to do it. If you are one of those people, that does mean the cost of living should be so high compared to your income?
Start a business? Is that a serious comment? I don't even know where to begin here. I just don't think you get it. These are kids that are being raised having absolutely no encouragement to achieve anything outside of a high school diploma, and a lot of times not even that. I agree that people that are living off welfare and not attempting to find a job need to have their aid cut.
That's not the issue. Most of the people that accept assistance are doing so because they need to pay the bills and their job pays too little. Is the solution for them to work more? Spend less time with their family? Work and go to school? Who pays for the school? Can you get approved for loans and if not do you have a co-signer? If you scored a 13 on the ACT whose fault is that?
And still we are left with the fact someone has to do the menial tasks that pay nothing. What would happen to this country's economy if every McDonald's worker quit and enrolled in college? Following in their example all the fast food workers quit, all the cashiers quit, no one is working at the gas stations ect ect. Are these menial jobs necessary? Can this country operate with out them? If they are necessary then people shouldn't be punished for working at a factory.
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great
property down payments can be expensive. when it's more than 3x your yearly salary, it's going to be near impossible to rise above your current economic situation.
Not only do I believe that people should be more responsible and consider establishing a career so that they can support children before actually having kids. I also believe people should establish a career and be mentally mature before getting married.
When people are able to do this then their kids will not be raised in poverty or their marriage result in divorce. I'm almost certain there's a correlation between the percentage of divorces in marriages to the age and education level of the parties envolved.
The later you get married the more likely you are able to establish your career and eduction first resulting in the reduced number of divorces.
Hope this comment doesn't end with the same results that that one did.
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And, for now, good bye everyone, this is my board suicide at least for the next 6 months. Thank you everyone for a wonderful, interesting environment to post and read in. No time to post anymore with recent positive, but time consuming, changes in my life. Good luck and best wishes to all.
It is, and it isn't. on the one hand, sure its an upper class individual saying something thats being taken as dismissive and derogatory toward the lower class by the lower class, but on the other hand, her statements do provide legitimate advice on upward mobility.
It may suck that you need to do that to move up, and htat may be something that should change, but you can't argue that it is what is required to move up in the social statuses.
On the other hand, its not even remotely similar in that the "let them eat cake" statement was a complete dismissal of their plight and showed a fundamental misunderstanding of what the problem was.
You do realize that your post implies that most companies only hire post-menopausal women?
Personal responsibility is a huge thing that Ive seen more and more from my personal experiences from people Ive known that is simply falling by the wayside. There are always going to be circumstances that are going to restrict what choices people have to some extent, but at the same time choices will always exist which will have better short term or long term benefits to them to the person.
I have a friend Ive known now for 15 years now, my oldest friend at this point. His life as a kid was supremely messed up for reasons I wont get into here, and he never really had the proper structure and family umbrella to end up in a good place upon nearing graduation (high school). Inevitably I sort of took it upon myself to help him out here or there to try to help bring some stability to his life to help him be able to build off of that. Due to some poor choices, and some situations that were simply outside of his control, he ended up accumulating $5,000 in debt to me, which was an accumulation of my attempts to prop him up to give him a chance to stabilize, find a decent job, and be able to help him build some long-term success. (Ive always been more about the hand up rather than hand out method, which is why I always made it clear that the money had to be paid back.) After some time, and him honestly wanting and willing to not only pay me back but also letting me control his money so that way he could budget it to be able to pay for what he needed while also being able to pay off his debts, a couple years later, he had been steadily paying me off, and finally found the better job he had been looking for and qiuckly finished paying me off.
If not for my intervention and support, I dont know where he would be right now, I can certainly imagine it wouldnt be in a good place which he has admitted more than once. Inevitably sometimes there are simply circumstances beyond people's control that dont put them in the position they need to be able to succeed later on in life, unless they have at least a little help by someone who cares to give them the boost they need to be given a chance to succeed. These days, after several other bad luck situations, he found himself without a job, while I was finding myself with the need for someone to help me keep up with my card business, so as it turned out, the situation he was in managed to help the both of us. I pay him based on how much work he actually does (the more work completed, the more money he makes, another effort on my part to instill the benefits of hard work, which I knew he was capable of.) And a year later, its worked out quite well, and hes in a position now to where hes back out in the job market and looks likely he will be getting a decent job again here soon, with a willingness on his part to continue to work on my stuff while doing so, which I think goes to show how much he wants to claw his way back up and get himself to a better long-term stable situation for himself.
On the flip side, I had a reasonably solid family life growing up, I had the support of my parents, even though we never really had much money, I never really felt myself wanting as far as that goes, in large part because I was brought up with the ideal of needs being more important that wants. I was brought up with saving and couponing and buy on sale mentality, and it worked out well as I even from the age of 7, would typically only spend small amounts of my small allowance and the like on things I was "investing" in (sports cards at the time which I bought at 10 cents on the dollar), and then saving the rest. My efforts of working my tail off in school, saving my money, and the idea of "investing" with my entertainment budget, ended up being what helped me graduate as valedictorian of my high school, build the magic collection that eventually turned from a part-time ebay side-business into the $250k+ in sales I do now with the shop and online sales, and helped me earn my degree in psychology along with added business classes which give me a backup plan should magic ever go by the wayside and which help me to make my card business as good as it can be.
Not everyone is lucky enough to have a good friend, or have a stable enough family life to give them the chance to build something as I did, so I dont expect that everyone is going to be able to just pull themselves out of whatever poor life as a child they may have had and be able to turn things around as easily as some may think it should be. Hard work, regardless, still matters a great deal towards this. Its not the only thing, but a willingness to work hard, and sacrifice in order to build something for yourself will and does help many people get out of these poor situations. Will those people ever be "rich" or "wealthy"? Thats of course a tough one. Some people can certainly accomplish this, however many will simply work hard, and stabilize at a level of income that accomplishes what they need for themselves and their family, and while they may never be rich, they will have enough money to cover everything they need and be able to save for retirement at least a little while doing so.
Sorry for the lengthy story, but I felt it was relevant to the discussion at hand, and helps to give a couple different perspectives on the same issue and some related thoughts from myself on the realities of some things.
I'm refering to people who get married between 20-25 as opposed to those who get married after 28. Your biological clock is really not ticking so much at 28-30.
There's also a difference between climbing a corporate ladder vs maintaining a stable job. This has much do to with priorities and work/life balance. You can maintain a stable job and have a family.
Also I want to comment on JeffBCrandall's comment. Parenting/guidance is the most important part of a person's development and future success. The material wealth of the parents are secondary. That's why it is extremely important to take the time to make sure that both partners are mentally ready to be in a marriage and to have kids.
And if they aren't?
I used to have this exact opinion when I was young. I came from poverty and now had a great job and a college education. If I grew up in rusted out trailers in rusted out trailer parks why couldn't everyone? Well, I had some advantages a lot of people don't have:
1. The influence of an extremely hard working mother
2. The financial support of a middle class father.
3. A natural interest in school, particularly in math and science.
4. I understood at a young age that most of the people around me were doing it wrong.
My mother, despite needing financial aid, worked as much as she could, as hard as she could until her hands could no longer assemble plastic Toys any longer. My father had a decent job and credit score that allowed him to co-sign my student loans (I still make a mortgage payment in student loans 9 years later). I realized how different this was from most of kids I grew up with much later in life.
All of this aside, one thing has not been addressed:
Are labor jobs necessary in this country?
1. Can we continue our way of life without someone to do the work most people don't want to do?
2. If these jobs are necessary, and our way of life would crumble without them, is it just to punish people with financial instability because they take these jobs?
3. Should we encourage every person working a minimum wage job to quit and try to find a better job?
4. What would happen to our economy if this (3) happened?
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great
The answer is, of course, yes. I don't think you'll find anyone disagreeing with that, so we move on to the next part.
No. So, those jobs need to be filled. I sense we are in agreement thus far.
It is not just to punish people for taking those jobs. The problem, and where we start to diverge, is that it isn't a punishment. Is it a bad situation? Sure. But it's not a punishment.
Again, I don't think you'll actually get much disagreement that people doing these jobs diligently should be able to make a living wage. I think you'll also find that in the few instances where these jobs are not volatile (IE school janitorial services are always needed, and can't be axed for the most part) the job does not provide financial instability.
No, we shoudl encourage every person working a minimum wage job to try and find a better job then quit. The other order is completely stupid and makes no sense.
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It would grind to a halt, fire, famine, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
If, however, people are sensible and don't quite the jobs they have until they actually have a better job it's a much less bleak outlook.
My point, and I'm sure you didn't miss it, is that everyone can not, at any time, all have good jobs. For capitalism to function there has to be a lower class. That's not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of people wouldn't mind being able to put in a good days labor everyday and go home. The problem is that companies are not distributing the wealth of the company back down the line to the workers.
On top of that many of these types of jobs don't offer health care (another symptom of greed). These families are one paycheck or one health crisis away from financial ruin (medical bills are the number one reason for bankruptcy in this country). Given how much money companies like Wal-Mart make every year there is no reason to treat their employees like this. Particularly considering the fact that we NEED people to work these jobs.
And still, this can only happen to fast. There is a bottle neck for well paying jobs. If that bottle neck opens, the same job pays less because more people can do it. And when a person finds a better paying job someone has to fill the position he was in before, or the company fails (if this happens on a large scale).
Doesn't the fact that a company needs labor jobs to succeed show that we can not eliminate the lower class? Since the solution is not as simple as "get an education" what is the solution? Maybe the solution is for no one person to have XXX billions of dollars.
There is still this misconception that poor people are lazy. That everyone on welfare is worthless, and it's just not true generally speaking. There are people that are simply lazy and don't want to work. I think they are the exception, not the rule.
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great
I know this isn't exactly related to this particular Aussie heiress, but it's indicative of that cycle of degradation that happens when wealth passes from its more fitting creators down the line to more egotistical heirs and heiresses. Not even the slightest thought of, "Hey, this is really easy for me to say. I'm already rich and privileged beyond the imagination of the average middle class person." The nerve of some people... you'd think that their education would teach them a thing or two about the scope of an economic climate.
For instance, if I told you that all you had to do was meet 5 new people a day and offer to introduce me to them. I would train you to sell them products and services they need and in many cases were already buying. You would get paid for this training until you were producing on your own. When you got really good at it I would likely put you in charge of training people who were just getting started meeting their 5 people a day and I would pay you $100k-200k per year to train these people.
I can think of a bunch of different businesses (almost all of them sales related) that basically work like that to get new clients. Some of them "meet 5 people" might mean cold call 100. Some of them might mean generate and follow up on 50 internet leads. In my case it happens to be "book 1 seminar a week", but the truth is that I have to call and visit people or I don't get paid.
I can't just sit in my office and say.. "yep booking seminars today" while posting on MTGS and expect to get paid (like I did at my old job).
I used to manage a restaurant and hire minimum wage employees. I told every one of them, "you tell me what you want and I'll tell you what to do to get it. If you want 30-40 hours a week, punch the clock take your check and forget this place, then train on this this and this and do it well. If you want to be a manager one day, train on this this and this, do it well and learn how to train people".
I quit worrying about the ones I couldn't save, the ones who called in because they had a hangover or because we scheduled them on Friday night and they wanted to party. I couldn't help the ones who constantly gave people attitude when they needed correction, the ones who complained about their 15 hours a week but 3 of those hours were texting in the back room.
Hard work isn't the only secret, but failure to work hard is a great way to ensure failure.
These truths are self evident to some, learned the hard way by others, and never learned by many. Laced with other critical words, "class warfare," "anti-business attitude," it has a totally different tone than an upper middle class (I'm just assuming here) person who is employing management skills vs. an heiress who, unsurprisingly, instead relies on glib anecdotes , "[the stories of her two grandfathers and three of her wealthy friends, who all started at the bottom and worked their way to the top]," without so much as a drop of self-awareness of the massive difference between this and taking the reins of an already staggering fortune, and building upon it. It sounds more like a screed against policies that may threaten the little bubble that her inherited wealth has created for her. And it lacks a critical element of her DOING anything to help other people achieve this beside empty criticism of the working class. Totally different than coming to terms with a particular worker who just, "doesn't get it," and isn't worth your time anymore.
They'd still be completely wrong. There's too much luck involved to say that it's someone's fault for not becoming rich.
It is far more telling that these comments haven't come from self made individuals. When someone like Warren Buffett, or Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or the founder of Vanguard and UPS tells me the reason people aren't rich is because of their drinking and socializing, hey, maybe they've got something. But they don't come from these people - it's the blue blooded second generation rich who say **** like this.
There's a difference between "rich" which is what folks hear when someone says "Unequal distribution of wealth!" and "financially secure". People aren't asking to be millionaires. They want financial security and the ability to feather their nests. People in the US are working harder than ever, and doing more work than ever, and profits are incredibly high, and compensation has been stagnant for 20 years. Saying "Hey, where's my piece of the pie?" is entirely fair.