Is there anyone, anyone who reads the phrase "cradle-to-grave employment" and thinks of a corresponding level of "cradle-to-grave performance", as if to earn that security?

No, I think people more often think of unionism, or tenure in academe. Does everyone remember what happened to Detroit?

There was a great passage about the four-day work week in the Iaccoca book. Read paragraphs two and three of this page.

(And somebody let me know if the link doesn't work, you can only load it once so it's hard to test.)

You really are subversive Crid. How can you bring up a turd like Iacoca in one thread and have massive love for GT40s in another. Iacoca gave us the pinto and in my mind that disqualifies taking him seriously on much of anything. And maybe if those union guys were working four days a week instead of five the extra leisure time would have allowed a few of the bums to realize how awful the cars they were making in the seventies truly were and they would have quit making the ugly pigs (I'm only half joking here. Real challenge though, are there even three great American cars in the 70s? 60s it's easy, 70s not so much. A couple of nice trucks but the cars are ugly honking guzzling boats).

And yeah, the link worked.

Wow. If you can mention Iacocca and not the Mustang...

Still, there are people who do not understand that if they PAY fifty grand for a land yacht, that fifty grand is gone. Don't whine to me about not having the $$ for your kid to go to college after that.

It's hard to know even where to start on the Salon piece. After reading it (not very closely, I'll admit), the general impression I got was, "This sucks! Somebody else has to make it nice for me!"

Not that I'm unsympathetic to the student loan deal. For all these years, people have bought into the notion that it's okay to borrow a lot of money to get a degree, and for a lot of kids, it did turn out to be a scam. But it's a scam they could have seen through with some pretty elementary arithmetic (why's the Salon piece complaining about "for profit" colleges anyway?). Nobody forced them to buy into it.

And if you want the government to be even more directly involved in higher education (like those cool other countries do), do you want the government to tell you what kind of education you're qualified for and what school you're allowed to go to? Because other countries do it that way to varying degrees, and it's not hard to see why.

Jon Corzine was unavailable for comment....

The problem is that the risk/reward ration is skewed for the 1%. The 99% take on risk any time they gamble hundreds or thousands of dollars. There is no "risk" for the 1% who are too big to fail, when they gamble billions, tank the economy, and transfer all the downside to the other 99%.

How people on the right can criticize Obama for (Bush's) bank bailouts, but not see they are on the same side as OWS, I don't get. These aren't a bunch of hippies looking for handouts. They want America with a truly level playing field. Is that so crazy?

how convenient for you Franko to ignore most of what OWS is complaining about, and how those supposed 1% even got their wealth...

Over and over, the one thing most OWS complain about is their inability to pay their student loans, because they can't find a job... that's what they want fixed... that's why "O" floated this stupid idea of loan mods, that will help the average student loan holder by, oh, $10 a month.

ooh wee, baby, break out the mac 'n cheese, were living large tonight.

Didija know that the 1% starts at about $350K? Sure that's more income than I am likely ever to make, so? 1%ers often take a lot of risk to make their money, and many of them have lost 1/2 their net worth in the downturn. Am I crying for them? No. But lets be realistic, there are few who have lives without some risk, and many of them are government technocrats.

I don't criticize "O" for Bush's faults, I criticize him for exponentially expanding them, and spending a freaking year fooling with that steaming pile of obamacare rather than working first and foremost on job creation. Instead of massive governemnt expansion.

Here's a hint. Govt. even at it's best is parasitic, it needs Private Sector workers to pay taxes for it to run. If the host dies, it's over.

So why would you make the govt. BIGGER? Why would you BUY car companies? Why would you CONTINUE to make the mistakes about bank bailouts. Oh, wait, what if they're your biggest donors?

It's too late to blame the previoous prez for looking over a cliff, when it is you who decided to jump... or are you saying that this guy is ACTUALLY stupid, and clearly incapable of making good decisions?

By choosing not to register for Selective Service, Parene almost certainly violated federal law. Here is a PDF link to a chart from the Selective Service System showing who is required to register (short version without the PDF: unless you are in the military or incarcerated, if you are a man between the ages of 18 and 25, just about everyone is required to particepate):

http://www.sss.gov/PDFs/WhoMustRegisterChart.pdf

Aber, you heathen, my love for the GT40 is merely sincere; the "mass" of my affection is with its contemporaries from Porsche, the 904/906/907/908/910 and you-know-who.

Offtopic— When the government's victim is young and fertile-looking, even the NYT thinks things are getting out of hand, and will assign a poety-kinda writer to pout about it... Or at least to scratch a few lines of piffle under the photo.

......let us state bluntly that offloading 100% of the blame for your own mountain of debt on a group of Taxpayers who "forced" you to "play by the rules" is more than a little pathetic.

This is what should have been said to the investment banks & AIG in 08. If that was what had happened the article would be point on......considering what actually happened...not so much. That does not mean we should follow one bad desicion with another.

McArdle had a lengthy post a couple of days ago I thought made good sense of many OWSers' beefs:

Read the whole post, but this is a good point:

Occupy Wall Street is mostly the lower elite revolting against the upper elite:

The problem the New Class faces at this point is the psychological and social self-perceptions of a status group that is alienated from traditional labor by its semi-privileged upbringing. It is, for the moment, insistent not just on white-collar work as its birthright and unable to conceive of much else. It does not celebrate the dignity of labor; it conceived of itself as existing to regulate labor. So it has purified itself to the point that not just any white-collar work will do. It has to be, as Michelle Obama instructed people in what now has to be seen as another era, virtuous non-profit or government work. Those attitudes are changing, but only slowly; the university pipelines are still full of people who cannot imagine themselves in any other kind of work, unless it means working for Apple or Google.

That may overstate things a bit; I'm not sure that the OWS people feel that entitled (But perhaps they do. I haven't paid a lot of attention to that coverage (too busy with work and family to do much news consumption)).

The Student Loans that they complain of are merely symptomatic of the deeper issue; that many of these people feel very deeply that they were sold a bill of goods. "Get a degree, any degree, and a middle-class (or better) future shall be yours." Not entirely realistic, but it was the world that a lot of their parents and others who advised them grew up in.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic; for a lot of these young people, circumstances suck. These kids followed bad advice and are stuck with debts they can't discharge in bankruptcy, seeking jobs for which they are ill-prepared in a putrid economy where lots of employers are shipping the jobs they are prepared for overseas. And their peers who went into banking are living large on bonuses paid from banks bailed out by taxpayers.

I'm not sure that the OWS people feel that entitled

Actually, if you look at the arrests from the NY OWS folks, you'll see that they're from households of above average means. They want someone else to pay for their educations in fields that "make them happy". Awesome.

I'd like someone to buy me a house, and a new car. Maybe some cute hookers, while we're at it. And a case of booze. Good stuff, not that rot gut.

What? is that so unreasonable?

And their peers who went into banking are living large on bonuses paid from banks bailed out by taxpayers.

You mean like the $12 million in bonuses being paid by Fannie & Freddie? and Teh Won's bestest buddy on the Street, Goldman-Sachs?

How people on the right can criticize Obama for (Bush's) bank bailouts, but not see they are on the same side as OWS, I don't get. -- franko

People on the right DID criticize Bush's bailouts ... and his prescription drug benefit plan and his profligate spending and his education reforms and even his foreign policy.

Keep in mind, Bush's TARP handouts have mostly been repaid.

Obama's $800 billion "stimulus" is gone forever. The money spent on Cash for Clunkers is gone forever. And we're still waiting on those "shovel ready" projects.

Obama let the Democrats in Congress write the bill and they [predictably] turned it into payback for their political allies and boondoggles for the public employee unions

Much of the money was intended for hiring public employees and teachers. Now that the money has been spent, many of those stimulus-sponsored employees are being laid off since there's no more money with which to pay them - prompting howls from public employee unions for more stimulus money.

Cash for Clunkers (again written by the Democrats in Congress and not by the president) didn't stimulate auto sales and left a gaping supply-side hole in the mid-value used car market.

Obama has been a lousy chief executive. That lack of executive experience is killing him.

He doesn't draft and send carefully crafted proposals to Congress and then work with the members to get it passed.

He demands bills from Congress (as if Congress reports to him) - and signs whatever the Democrats put before him. The bills he has signed so far have been little but pork and political payback - and most have been utterly useless in their stated purpose.

Any and all opposition to his grand plan is "obstruction" and is to be demonized publicly - instead of the more difficult task of working with the opposition to overcome objections and reach a compromise.

If the Democrats finally get a "jobs" bill past the Republicans, it will be nothing more than a public employee hiring subsidy and payback to the unions. Watch for card check to be a last-minute amendment to the "jobs" bill.

These aren't a bunch of hippies looking for handouts. They want America with a truly level playing field.

Yes ... they are.

They don't want a truly level playing field; because they'd lose the game on one.

They want to make as much as an engineer while doing social work. They want to work for a non-profit "saving the world" and have the financial security of a well-heeled stockbroker.

==============================

When you spend tens of thousands of dollars to get an non-rigorous XYZ Studies degree, you don't get the same immediate payoff that a student of engineering or finance gets.

==============================

When you hit the real world (whether graduating from college or high school or trade school or even dropping out of high school), you're selling your skills, experience, and knowledge to the highest bidder.

When you're starting out, you have very few skills and very little relevant experience. So, you're only bargaining chip is whatever knowledge you've picked up so far. A proven ability to learn quickly can help to off-set a lack of knowledge or experience.

Some fields of study convey onto students a good basic-level package of knowledge that enables them to quickly integrate into an employer's operation. Others do not.

==============================

The XYZ Studies majors may not have weighed the costs and benefits of their choices, but Corporate America does weigh the costs and benefits of its choices.

When a country makes hiring unskilled or semi-skilled labor too expensive for the value of the labor received, companies shift production to places where costs are more in line with the value received or adjusts hiring practices accordingly.

If the Occupy crowd really wants jobs, it should tell the government to make it cut a company's costs to hire and train inexperienced new employees by cutting employment costs, red tape, and non- health and safety regulations.

> These kids followed bad advice and are stuck

No no no, a thousand times NO. Christ.

(When people say things like that, when liberals are that stupid, what are they really trying to do? Are they trying to preemptively mark off a little space for their own excuse-making after some future failure?... Are they trying to soften up the room? Are they going to need a forum receptive to excuses like 'I took some bad advice?')

An argument that appears in this and similarly feminine fora every few months is that women's appreciation of their own bodies is clouded by images from the media. Yet in every case, the media being discussed are freely chosen as amusements by these women, whatever their age: If they've filled their heads with foolishness, it's because they wanted to. They were INDULGENT. We shouldn't be patient with them any more than we're patient with a young man who has his understanding of sexuality warped by Playboy or other pornography. When you turn your head away from those distractions, you're supposed to know that the fantasy's over.

Goin' to college? Yeah? Great. Where will the money come from? Welch nails it: These are the first ADULT decisions. They aren't made for us, ever. If you chose the wrong path, yea or nay, don't come cryin'.

See also Meritocracy.

By the way, Minnesota is starving for skilled manufacturing workers.

If the Occupy crowd really wants jobs, it would haul its collective ass to Minnesota.

It is, for the moment, insistent not just on white-collar work as its birthright and unable to conceive of much else. It does not celebrate the dignity of labor; it conceived of itself as existing to regulate labor. So it has purified itself to the point that not just any white-collar work will do. It has to be, as Michelle Obama instructed people in what now has to be seen as another era, virtuous non-profit or government work. Those attitudes are changing, but only slowly; the university pipelines are still full of people who cannot imagine themselves in any other kind of work, unless it means working for Apple or Google.

Excellent point.

Many of them probably grew up with white collar parents and watched as sit-com characters got impossibly cool jobs at unrealistically cool workplaces (to which they rarely went).

They imagined themselves in "save the world" jobs at non-profits or cool technical jobs at a fun start-up or glamorous jobs at fancy periodicals or intellectual jobs like book editor.

They simply can't conceive of themselves working on a factory floor or blue collar job site ... or as an office drudge at a less-than-ubercool company.

You mean like the $12 million in bonuses being paid by Fannie & Freddie? and Teh Won's bestest buddy on the Street, Goldman-Sachs?

Johnson, and later Raines, outright lied to investors, stockholders, and regulators about Fannie's fiancial perfromance and creditworthiness in order to get those bonuses.

And in doing so, he lit the fire that was the housing boom ... and caused the inevitable bust.

No single person bears more responsibility for the economic crisis than does Jim Johnson; and that includes the crooks at Goldman Sachs.

Why isn't an Occupy crowd isn't camped out at each of his several houses?

Actually, Factual Interjection, it was me & not Pareene who didn't register for the Selective Service. And yes, I was aware that I was breaking the law.

Thanks for the link, Amy!

Crid: "If you chose the wrong path, yea or nay, don't come cryin'."

Yeah, but what if the game is rigged? If you lose money in a Ponzi scheme, is it okay to complain about it?

I don't agree with OWS about much of anything (and I think most of their solutions are absolute batshit), but their complaints about student loan debt have some merit.

The amounts of student loan debt, the availability of the loans and their non-dischargeability in bankruptcy all point to collusion by the banks, the Government and the University systems. The complainers are victims of an "education bubble." What annoys me is that they blame one party, the banks, when the more culpable parties are the Government and the Universities.

So, yeah, I sympathize with them, much in the way I sympathize with the victims of the real estate bubble. Yeah, someone bought an overpriced house and can't make the payments so they might lose it. They got screwed over because Government interference rigged the system. But, I am not going to shed one tear for the poor bank that is not going to be paid back, because they have been paid back. And, they were part of the whole scam to begin with!

But, what I would really like to do is get it through their dumb heads is that they got fucked over because the Government meddled in the free market.

Banks would not normally make these sorts of loans. But, the Government promised the banks they would get paid; a banks not going to pass up on a no-risk proposition to make money. Then, when the banks were on board, the Universities figured they could raise their rates (why let free money get away). So, the Government had to increase eligibility amounts, and the schools kept raising their fees. So, yeah, the system was rigged!

The way to fix the system is to get the Government out of it. Too bad they all went to college; they are probably all unteachable at this point.

-Jut

> Yeah, but what if the game is rigged? If you
> lose money in a Ponzi scheme, is it okay to
> complain about it?

It depends on how the shares were sold to you. It depends on whether you thought the world was supposed to be bringing you a life of fulfillment and success (and not just success, but differential success compared to others) without risky toil, courage, or sharp attention to challenging environments.

If the teenage boy thinks his new haircut will bring him the lifelong adoration of fawning Playmates in lingerie, or if the teenage girl thinks the list of "Fifteen Ways To Shine in the Office" from Cosmopolitan is going to spark her career....

Well, my sympathy costs more than that.

> The complainers are victims of an "education
> bubble."

Right. Exactly. You're done. Stop talking. It was a bubble, so they should have known better.

> What annoys me is that they blame one party,
> the banks, when the more culpable parties are
> the Government and the Universities.

And that Mr. Mesmer looked so rakish in his cravat! How could we EVER have resisted him?

"Minnesota is starving for skilled manufacturing workers."

Does Michigan know this?

"Minnesota is starving for skilled manufacturing workers." Conan

Unfortunately, these OWS 'kids' aren't employable, because they are not skilled at anything. How many of them could drive a forklift, or operate heavy machinery? It goes way beyond them not even considering such 'blue-collar' work. They would be at the entry level, essentially like a day laborer to start, IF they could get in that door.

The problem in their head is that in such a job, your learning is meaningless. If you can be inquisitive, and use some insight, those traits will help, but knowing when or even why Caesar crossed the Rubicon, won't help you. Won't help pull parts, relabel them and get them on a skid to go out this afternoon, or figure out why the stamping machine is mangling the blanks.

OTOH, Jut? Student loans are kinda like payday loans. IT's A LOAN. A Big deal. When I took out a student loan, I had heart palpitations, because the very real possibility existed that I wouldn't be able to pay them if I didn't get the right job, or something else went south. If kids or their parents don't take this into account, how is that the banks fault?

Is it anymore the payday loan shops fault that there is one on every corner, or that it takes less foresight and planning than falling off a log to get a bank account?

Predatory lending means that someone has made themselves the PREY. If you don't understand all the loan stuff, you have to ask uncle mickey the ins and outs of getting a loan, and what to watch for.

Here is the thing on student loans. The kids we are talking about were smart enough to get into college. Were they not smart enough to read the fine print? To think about implications?

Can't afford to go to an Ivy League place? OK, find someplace else. Gonna get a degree in underwater basket weaving? Fine, but realize that those kinds of basket weavers don't make much money, and size your life accordingly.

This is sense that parents and grandparents have been spouting as common sense, and I in tern have told my own children this. I agree that the govt. collusion in this is a bad thing, but that is not what is forcing a kid to get a degree that is worthless in the real world and then complain bitterly about how they can't get a job in their field. I know this, I have a degree in history. Unless I wanna teach history, it's only a sheepskin saying I went to school. It wasn't until year later I went back to finish schoolwork as a programmer, that I got the kind of schooling where a company said, 'we have a job for you.' In the meantime I was a photographer, truck driver, forklift guy, shipping mgr...

There is usually only one person in this world you can control and it's you.

Many kingdoms are even smaller than that, including this one.

"When I took out a student loan, I had heart palpitations, because the very real possibility existed that I wouldn't be able to pay them if I didn't get the right job, or something else went south. If kids or their parents don't take this into account, how is that the banks fault?"

If you don't mind me asking, what year was that and how much did you take out in loans? Because way back before 2005, you could discharge private student loans in bankruptcy, and further back than that you could work your way through college.

"Not entirely realistic, but it was the world that a lot of their parents and others who advised them grew up in."

Maybe it should be their "parents and the others who advised them" who should be picking up the financial pieces, then?

A friend of mine manages a golf course. He has a terrible time finding good employees. Good meaning they show up on time, don't miss a bunch of days, Do what needs to be done whether it is counting money, making coffee or filing papers. Most people do not want to start work an hour before dawn. Most people cannot count money accurately and ready a cash drawer. None of the work is hard, but he does require competence. Alas, he rarely finds it. Many prospective employees are all about ego and convenience.

Funny side comment. My son is a senior in high school and already has several job offers for after graduation. He had to make a resume for a class thing and when he showed it to the teacher, the teacher passed it on to a friend of his that was hiring.

The biggest pluses on his resume were his willingness and ability to learn new tasks. He can drive a forklift, a stick shift, run an overhead crane, drive a semi, a tractor, fix hydraulics, brakes and troubleshoot electrical problems and he is competent with two common types of welders and has several years experience welding. Plus, he has had summer jobs and two internships the last three summers and has glowing references.

He's really pleased about the path he is taking.

"The biggest pluses on his resume were..."

Employers are willing to hire people who can do stuff? There's a lesson in there somewhere, and it really shouldn't require a college degree to figure it out.

most people do not want to start work an hour before dawn
Meh. Depends on what the job is. I worked at a Starbucks, and we always had way more applicants than actual ppositions open. But then again, Stabucks is one of very few jobs that don't pay very well but are still acceptable to work at, similar to if apple or google didn't pay well.

JC, it was the 80's, and you totally missed the point...

It doesn't MATTER if it was dischargeable, or whatever, because it was and is a great responsibility. an 8% apr responsibility. 'Course back then you didn't use credit cards for anything except big ticket items, and mostly paid cash or check. The understanding of money then wasn't really relative. If you took out student loans that cost as much as a house, then you didn't buy a house till they were paid.

The thinking now seems to be value relativity. schooling = getting a job, therefore the cost of schooling = the cost of a job. If you can't get that job then the money you paid for schooling should be $0... as if the schooling has no value in itself. ]perhaps it doesn't]

The thing is, you are paying for a product called schooling. What you do after that is your problem AND responsibility.

Obama's $800 billion "stimulus" is gone forever. The money spent on Cash for Clunkers is gone forever. And we're still waiting on those "shovel ready" projects.

There's a big roadwork job happening near work that will help with some of the traffic to the 805. It has big signs up that have huge letters saying how it was possible due to the ARRA. Which is pretty much crap. Sure, they did get a big chunk of cash from it, but this is work that's been planned for years and would've happened anyway. I'm sure they just realized they could use it as an excuse to get a bunch of the stimulus cash and who wouldn't get free cash being offered?

Our company actually kicked in several million too, since we'll benefit from it a lot; and I'm sure it was "development offsets" (aka the required legal bribes) for something we wanted recently.

If you lose money in a Ponzi scheme, is it okay to complain about it?

Most people cannot count money accurately and ready a cash drawer.

SwissArmyD:

There is usually only one person in this world you can control and it's you.

Excellent - I know several grownups who could use this quote....

Gah. I shouldn't post when I'm tired. I completely did not make my point about my friend the golf course manager.

When people apply for an assistant manager/ supervisor job from him, they not only do not have the skills required of the people that want to supervise, they are apparently also unwilling or unable to learn them. They are "too qualified" or something to learn all the various jobs and how to do them well and how to supervise others doing them well.

Lots of people have credentials but very few have any useful skills.