Yo, stupid rickman! Think three times before spouting your current prejudices. Some of the recently reported situations are 30 years or more in the past. That does not make them any less valid at the time. Read the post, worked two jobs, lived off one and saved the other; do you still see a problem coming up with a down payment?
BTW i have lived with negative net monthly income in the early to mid
1980s for a few years running (about $360 weekly income and $410+ outgo). But i would not quit college to get my BSEE. That would have saved me about $150/m.
Did you ever want anything bad enough that you would not let anything stand in your way of _earning_ it? I was that way with my BSEE.
Correction: "free-rider" is a ironic pejorative popularized in the US recently, as a rationalization for Obamacare. Nancy Pelosi, etc.
Specifically, the complaint was that "free-riders" were increasing the cost of insurance, ironic because >90% of Obamacare's first crop of moochers are either subsidized, or free.
When I worked two minimum wage jobs I lived off one and saved *all* of the rest. Doing that, one can easily save a down payment on a house, if it were even demanded (which presently it is not).
I was a kid. I rented a room in a house, and drove a motorcycle. It was cheap.
It's not my goal to teach an unteachable student what's already easily inferred from my earlier figures.
That's $6.28 per person a day for food. It's stupid.
That's higher than the median U.S. household income. Ergo, the millions of extant median U.S. households aren't possible.
I wrote them down. I still have the notebooks, recording every single item I purchased, every can of beans, etc. I was on my own, under-age, and of extremely modest means, so I wanted to make the most of what I got.
That life-lesson served me infinitely well ever since.
$3/hr at one, and $3.25/hr at the other.
Most minimum-wage jobs lead to promotions and more pay, and mine were no exception. I quit one over working conditions, which I could afford to do because I'd saved, then was hired back at higher pay and better conditions. When that happened--after a couple years IIRC--I quit the other job and only worked one, for roughly the same total pay as before.
I had no other money and no other goods or patron, yet saved for the university, never borrowed from anyone, and bought used Porsche. Since the total money in that closed system increased over time, no further accounting is necessary to prove I was over-unity.
None of this matters to your niggling nit-picking. I'm spending roughly $10k a year today, which means I could break even on ~$6/hr after taxes working just forty hours a week. Reading books, learning, drawing and cooking isn't expensive. It's fun, and really easy.
Because I make more, I can work a lot less, like Dear Presidente says I should.(*)
(*) In truth I work a great deal. I like it. But mostly not for money right now. Most goes into notebooks, for future times and more friendly regimes. Lots of really cool stuff.
20% of American households today have no one working, no job of any kind. In households where someone holds any sort of job, even minimum wage, the poverty rate is minimal.
I'm doing it, have always done it (except for a spell in California living by the beach, where housing costs blew it {my other costs and habits didn't change}), and I'm doing it now.
But, thanks for telling me I can't think or count.
P.S. You might want to Google "voluntary simplicity" for a philosophy and a cohort that do likewise, or, better, read Thoreau. Not everyone believes mass consumption is the road to happiness. You'll get some pointers, too.
You've demanded an accounting to refute your statement that $15/hr is unlivable. You asked for "weeds."
Living simply isn't complicated. You're making it complicated, which makes it expensive, at which point it's not simple. That's a self-fulfilling prophesy, also called chasing one's tail.
nt heads were making somewhat less than $10 an hour. My first engineering job after college was $3 an hour.
You asked the question. I just answered it. The gas company was giving te enagers a summer job. They did not expect them to live on what they made.
ly
I never said most people can do well on minimum wage. There are lots of pe ople that can't manage on $80,000 a year. But it is possible to live on th e minimum wage.
nd another job. They generally only last about six months. If you can not find work in six months you are likely to never get a job. That is not pl easant, but it is pretty much the way it is.
It is a fact, jack. Employers just do not hire people that have been out of work for six months or more. The only exception that I can think of is a young woman that got a degree in something that was not in much demand, and when she could not find a job, went back to school and got a masters in Mechanical Engineering. Can you think of any exceptions?
To reiterate an earlier point, the fact that I'd saved gave me, after a time, the ability to walk away: negotiating power vs. a quasi-tyrannical chieftain (mostly unintended, but terrorizing to we the other, miserable employees).
I would not have been able to do that with Barack Obama redistributing more of my paycheck for my putative benefit. Barack Obama's loving hand would've trapped me in poverty handily, and had me on welfare to compensate (if he had his way). That's an obnoxious, incompetent, patronizing, messed-up world view IMHO. YMMV.
It really should not matter that they had been out of work for a long time. Why they had not been able to find a job for so long might matter. An e xample is someone I know that got laid off. He got laid off because he had a problem with management. Whatever they did was wrong as far as he was c oncerned. So although he was a decent engineer, management put him at the bottom of the performance stack. And when anyone contacted his former supe rvisor, they got told that he had a bad attitude. The fact that he did not try to find a job until his unemployment benefits were about to run out did not help.
Some employers let others do their screening for them. If you have not found a job for a long time they figure there must be something wrong with you rather than look for themselves.
For their own reasons, neither had been looking for a job. When they were ready, they started looking. Both are good, so it didn't take them long to find one.
I like the idea of people being independent, having other paths in life beyond the standard grind. People like that tend to have more ideas. My problem is to find them and keep them.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Businesses can't hire scabs to replace strikers. Employees can work elsewhere. The differences are endless.
Lefties whine about that, too. They want it both ways. They want government to guarantee their incomes but think it evil for government to subsidize employers.
Exactly why I moved to a "right to work" state. More important than even "right to work" is "at will" employment.
Exactly. "If you're not happy, there's the door." The employee always has that option. The employer should too.
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