OT: Why there are no new jobs?

I don't understand why most shoes still have laces. They are ancient technology, inconvenient and unreliable closures.

For a while, serious brands, like Adidas, made good Velcro shoes, but they don't any more.

I replace laces with Yankz, permanent elastic things like tiny bungee cords. They can come untied too, so I tie-wrap them once the tension is adjusted right. Makes every shoe into a slip-on.

California. Baby-sitting a few kids in your house is considered "starting a day-care center." Try it. Without a license. And inspection. Background check. Fire Marshall. Etc.

It is. Your alternative is that some existing business should hire someone, which is the same thing, one level deferred. You keep wanting other people to solve your problems for you, and then you're angry at them for it.

Public assistance for workers promotes poverty by driving down wages. And once wages are low, the worker's trapped (unless they work extra hard, but most don't). So yes, the State did that.

Yours.

Cheers, James Arthur.

One must remember that probably everyone participating in and reading this NG is well above average in terms of intelligence, education, privilege, and work ethic. Some of those might be possible to improve, but they are subject to the realities of where and how people (must) live, who they must associate with, and access to resources such as free education, job counseling, substance abuse treatment, health care, transportation, etc. Even with all that, it is increasingly difficult for someone of average intelligence and ability to obtain and hold a "good" job that pays well enough to support a family, or even the individual.

Mitt Romney was so out of touch that he claimed that anyone could just "borrow money from their parents", as he did, to obtain an education or buy a home or start a business. But many parents are absent, dysfunctional, or struggling, so that is not a realistic idea.

We have also not touched on the very basic problem of the failed "war on drugs" and the fact that it has made criminals and (short) lifetime addicts out of people who might otherwise be productive, or at least only a minimal burden on society due to public assistance, rather than the much greater cost of incarceration. And once that happens, that person becomes essentially unemployable except for the most menial jobs, where there is a lot of competition for the meager crumbs that remain.

I'm sure there are some errors and debatable points in my assertions, and I may be looking at the worst scenarios, which probably do not (yet) apply to the majority of people. But there are growing numbers of people who are caught in the dungeons of the Capitalistic system, and many of the mechanisms that helped them in the early 20th century no longer apply today.

Paul

What are those mechanisms?

One advantage they have is their bureaucrats. They're pretty powerful, their peoples compliant, so if things need chopping, they eventually get chopped.

But for Pete's sake, Germany's barely big as Arizona, and everyone's elbow- to-elbow next to each other. Sweden's a model for, maybe, Los Angeles, or another big U.S. city (except our federal gov't wouldn't allow a city the needed latitude).

If someone wants to tout Europe as proving centralized socialism's success, they need to show how wonderfully well Greece has been managed from Brussels, not cherry-pick happy, homogeneous countries with DIFFERENT systems, each and every one.

Yup. No one can, not efficiently. Especially a place as big, and with such diverse people, resources, and terrain as the U.S.

Like Detroit, California's coasting on the generations that deposited all those entrepreneurs. Outside of those oases, watch out.

Cheers, James

They're adjustable, cheap, and replaceable.

Velcro isn't all that reliable. The hooks weaken.

Replaceable is a good thing for an unreliable gadget. But replacement isn't cheap.

Velcro is way more adjustable than laces.

All my velcro shoes wore out, but the velcro part never did.

Really, shoelaces are barbaric. Right up there with neckties.

A buck is expensive?

Not at all. Lacing goes farther down the tongue. I haven't found a Velcro pair of shoes I could get my feet in. Without laces I'd go barefoot. ;-)

I don't have Velcro shoes but every other Velcro widget where the Velcro regularly gets cycled, the Velcro dies long before the widget. Either the hooks weaken or the loops tear out.

Neckties don't hold the head on.

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Not if you can afford a good lawyer. Handy-man and help are job description s, and if somebody chooses to employ you part-time in any of these capaciti es, they may get charged for not filling in all the paper-work and withhold ing tax from your pay, but you won't. You may get into trouble if you take your pay in cash - as many do - and don't declare enough of it to the tax a uthorities, which has been known to happen. But that's tax evasion - which even James Arthur recognises as a crime (provided that it happened after 17

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When viewed through James Arthur's rose-tinted spectacles. The safety is re al, but James Arthur (like Bastiat before him) chooses not to notice that h is taxes pay for that safety, and a lot more besides.

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The sort of people who try to start up their own businesses tend to share J ames Arthur's slightly unrealistic ideas about how society works, and how s ociety ought to work. If they are really good at what they do - or merely a s competent as Jim Thompson - this doesn't cost them very much, but unreali stic ideas can be fatally expensive if you are also being unrealistic about whatever it is you are trying to sell.

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Baby-sitting a few kinds in your own home is starting a day-care centre. No body gets excited about it until one of the homes burns down and a few babi es get incinerated. Then the authorities crack down, and parents get more c areful - for a while.

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The US state may have done that - minimum wage rates in the USA are astonis hingly low. In Scandinavia and Germany the policies you find ineffective an d counter-productive are implemented by people who want them to work - and, surprise, surprise - they do work.

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James Arthur does have a philosophy, It's not one that any sane person woul d adopt, but it keeps him in with his friends in the Tea Party.

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I've been wearing elastic-sided boots for pretty much my entire adult life. That's a pretty ancient technology, but modern materials make it work bett er than it did when my grandparents first bought shares in R.M.Williams, wh o still make the boots I wear. There weren't many shares, and they got sold when my grandmother died, back in the 1980s.

There is only one reason why shoe makers don't sell velcro laces... because people didn't buy them. :)

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That's a depressing thought.

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The Scandinavian and German model is to pay out enough in welfare to make s ure that the rising generation is well enough fed and housed to take advant age of a good universal education system which eventually spits out well-tr ained and useful workers. Technological advance being what it is, many of t hese workers have to be retrained for different work at some point in their careers, and the welfare system coughs up for that too.

It's expensive - Scandinavians and Germans pay out more of their income in tax than do Americans - but the economy thrives, the standard of living is high and life expectancies beat the US into a cocked hat.

In the process Germany has soaked up some 4 million residents of Turkish de scent (in a population of some 80 million). Assimilation hasn't been perfec t, but keeping the former East Germans happy hasn't been all that easy eith er.

James Arthur will probably argue that "passing for German" is easier than " passing for white", neglecting the telling fact that the bastard children o f coloured US servicemen born in Germany during the post-WW2 occupation did better in Germany than the legitimate children of the same men born a litt le later in the US.

That arch-lefty, Bismark, stuck Germany with a social welfare system that a ctually works, and which has been copied all over Europe. The Greeks neglec ted to collect the taxes required to pay for it, which has created problems for them, and the British didn't copy it very well, because it wasn't inve nted in the UK, and Margaret Thatcher did her best to dismantle what had be en copied, but even the Brits do better than the US on social welfare.

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Germany and Scandinavia don't try to run the economy from the centre - they are happy to let the free market direct resources where they are needed.

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Germany has four million ex-Turkish exguest-workers in a population of 80 m illion. They've all come since the 1950's. US diversity goes back to befor e the war of independence, and the US has been consistently rotten at treat ing it's minorities well, which is why they are still poorly assimilated.

John Larkin wants to claim a major US failure as an excuse for ignoring the example of people who are doing better. Odd logic,but right-wing nitwits s pecialise in that.

Really? It's the US that has been running negative balance of trade since R eagan was in power. Germany's balance of trade seems to be equally reliably positive.

Bits of Europe are in trouble, notably the Greeks who have a long establish ed national tradition of tax evasion which none of their governments has be en willing to tackle. If you don''t collect enough of the national income i n taxes, you can't pay for the super-structure of a modern state.

The US is in the same kind of trouble, but legal tax avoidance via loophole s lobbied into irrelevant legislation is the US way, and thus nothing to wo rry about.

It is absurd. I don't think I'm competent to plan an economy - and as I've frequently said, I'm quite sure that nobody is. I do think I've got the rig ht to point out that the Germans and Scandinavians are running their econom ies on principles that James Arthur (and John Larkin) don't like, and those economies are working rather better than the US economy.

spells out some of the less obvious ways in which the US system is failing it's constituents.

ore unequal since Reagan came to power, and much as Obama would like to rev erse the trend (as Clinton did, to some extent) the Republican majority blo cks pretty much every move.

What policies? This is the kind of empty rhetorical flourish that John Lark in may have learned from James Arthur. James Arthur can usually back up his silly claims with equally silly - but authoritative sounding - work from r ight-wing nitwit academics, but one has to suspect that John Larkin is chan neling the Murdoch media.

The kind of people who describe "the USA, and California in particular" as "fine-tuned job-killing machines" always seem to want to hire people for lo wer wages with no job security to work in dangerous places with dangerous m aterials without any expensive - employer-provided - protection.

They aren't actually complaining that the state is killing jobs, but rather than they are having to pay more for labour than they would like to.

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n Germany and Scandinavia don't try to run the economy from the centre - th ey are happy to let the free market direct resources where they are needed.

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Greece hasn't been managed from Brussels. If it were, Greece would be colle cting the taxes it's citizens owe. Sadly, no Greek politician is willing to wear the political unpopularity that would come from getting the Greek tax collection system working properly. Cherry-picking the Greeks as an an exa mple of Europe's problems is absurd. Everybody else pays most of their taxe s.

As I've argued for years. Only Larkin would be silly enough to put up such a strawman argument.

Nobody is advocating a centrally planned economy. What is advocated is an a dministration that collects more in taxes than the US does, and spends more of it on health, education and welfare, as the Scandinavian and German gov ernments do.

more unequal since Reagan came to power, and much as Obama would like to r everse the trend (as Clinton did, to some extent) the Republican majority b locks pretty much every move.

James Arthur is no more willing to specify what the "policies" are than was John Larkin.

What can be relied on is that anybody who talks about "fine-tuned job killi ng machines" wants to hire workers cheaper than they can at the moment, and is too short-sighted to realise that having a stock of healthy, educated a nd trained - or trainable - workers costs money that comes from taxpayers ( in today's world).

The Germans and the Scandinavians are collecting the taxes that pay for the creation and maintenance of an effective work force. Some states of the US are now spendin g more on keeping non-workers in prison than they are spen ding on educating potential workers.

That really is absurd.

Bill Sloman argues against central-planning...

...then advocates central-planning in his next sentence,

than the US does

and compounds it by errors of fact--

We already spend more per capita on health care (as you've complained so often) and education. We've also more than doubled real spending since the 1960's, with no change in results.

You've beclowned yourself. Again.

John was right. It's not worth responding to you.

Cheers, James Arthur

Sloman is the major catalyst for endless, crude, off-topic, hundreds-of-posts insult threads. Please ignore him.

He savors these miserable episodes. Don't feed him.

He fails the Turing test. But the good news is that we can recreate him if ever need be.

While Do Generate troll. Download reply. While not end_of(post) Extract proper names. Consult insult table. Append insult. Repeat Loop

Bill's immortal.

Cheers, James

Most don't. But they also generally do not accommodate them by mandating bilingual signage everywhere which is something I'll never understand in the US.

I am an immigrant myself and not in my wildest imagination would I ever think that the US is "required" to accommodate my native tongue.

Bilingual education like the leftists here want to re-introduce is a level higher on the stupidity scale. That is the perfect recipe to create 2nd class citizens who will have problems in the workforce because their language skills aren't up to snuff. This guy really knew why: