Here it is, nearly the end of the year and I'm just thankful to still be employed as an engineer.
Been working most of this year on a 32 hour work week (with subsequent 20% less gross even though I wind up actually putting in over 40 hours). My medical insurance contributions have increased. I'm spending more time doing the jobs of people that were laid off. I've been with this company since
1982 and helped it to grow. Now trying to keep it from withering.
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
I really think it's the only solution, otherwise we become a communist society... just as Obama envisions. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Well - I'd like to correct your anti-Obama screed just a tad. The U.S. Congress are the ones who are fiddling while the rest of the United States suffers.
You are ignorant. Thus, when the burn is done, you will have no means of support. When you try to thieve, you will be shot. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
-- | James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at
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| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
On a sunny day (Fri, 14 Dec 2012 11:26:03 -0500) it happened "Oppie" wrote in :
mm I got a letter from my pension fund they are cutting my pension by 7% because they no longer meet governement requirements for capital. And they will do it again next year if they still not meet requirements.
So, been looking for a nice yard (found one actualy) to sail to the Bahamas and drink nice cool drinks and watch hula girls while the world ends on December 21 2012 as the Maya calender then ends. So nothing to worry about, but just to make sure I stocked up my lab and am getting ready to climb the barricades (again).
Actually, what you are experiencing will become the new norm, and it is a good thing. It is a natural consequence of automation and robotics and computer control that workers will become more productive, meaning that the same amount of work can be done by fewer people, and the double whammy is that the world continues to produce more people. This is to a large extent caused by our estimation of wealth by purely material standards, and our
"Puritan work ethic" makes it seem "sinful" to be idle and enjoy free time and recreation. We have been trained to need expensive and disposable entertainment and communication "toys" to keep ourselves occupied and "out of trouble". And our accepted paradigm of having two wage earners per family, as well as the increasing number of single parent households, has also diminished the number of jobs available.
We, as an advanced civilization, have advanced far beyond what is necessary to keep ourselves supplied with our basic necessities of clean air, potable water, healthy foods, shelter, and security, in roughly that order. Thoreau said, ?The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation", and it is probably even more true now than it was then. We really do not need all the expensive material items that we strive to amass over our lifetimes, especially when they are for individual use rather than shared among many. The "rugged individualist" is not really a lofty goal, and instead we need to embrace cooperation and sharing and interpersonal (and intercultural) communication on a genuine face-to-face basis. Our technology was supposed to free us from being slaves to toiling for our means of sustenance, but materialistic capitalism thrives on increasing consumption, and many of us have been programmed to want ever more things as status symbols and conspicuous evidence of our vain perception of wealth and prosperity.
Most of us can easily survive on 20% less. So if we would adopt a 4 day
32 hour work week, our 8% unemployment rate would suddenly transform into a
12% demand to fill the vacuum. If 10% of our population would change their lifestyles to include sharing living space and expenses with another person, their needs would diminish and it would actually be a healthier social condition. But we may need to wean ourselves off of our concept of individualism and isolation created and reinforced by excessive reliance on electronic communication and entertainment, and instead adopt lifestyles
involving closer relationships with other people and the natural world.
Jim is as out-of-touch-with-reality as James Arthur. Deficit-funded Keynesian stimulus spending is - and has been - what kept you out of a rerun of the Great Depression. Balancing the budget would dump you back in recession, which is not what most people want. People with ample cash reserves might think differently - in a recession they can buy up companies that are going to the wall for a lot less than they'd pay if the economy was expanding - but for the rest of us an economy that is working below capacity is not a nice place to work or find work.
Jim is obviously the ignoramus here. The deficit funding is staving off the burn - and does seem to be getting the economy back to normal, if slower than we'd like. What he seems to want is a return to 1933.
What a bizarre delusion. In so far as the US is currently run by an oligarchy who concentrate on enriching themselves while passing on the bare minimum of the benefits of economic growth to the rest of society, the US does look rather like Russia and China. The income distribution in the US is highly unequal, with a Gini index of 40.8%, between Russia - at 40.1% and China at 42.5%.
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Presumably Obama would like to see it become more civilised - more like Germany at 28.3%. Not so much because the population would become happier - he's been re-elected, and can't be re-elected again - but because the economy would do better making his retirement better funded.
Driving home tonight I was thinking how we screwed up shipping all the manufacturing jobs off to china. We lived high on the hog for a while on the cheap labor. But to parapharse H. Ford (I think) "Who buys our cars?"
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