11-05-2022, 12:47 PM
(11-04-2022, 11:39 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:(11-04-2022, 10:03 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Retail work is generally the lowest-paying work available. It is unskilled, and not intellectually demanding. If anything, I have observed (I did such work upon graduation from college) that the stupider that one is, the happier one can be if one does it. People who don't fit the pattern of the "Dullard at Dillard's" (a horrid employer that insisted that its retail clerks do cut-throat compete with each other for small privileges) in which people do that work as an alternative to factory work, domestic service, or clerking in an office. People who said things like :I don't want to be a secretary" did exactly that within six months of working at Dillard's. Or if they said that of factory work -- such is what they ended up doing. Such was more demanding intellectually or physically, and that horrid company ended up with lots of "Sad Sack" types. Dillard's hasn't changed much since I was there forty years ago, and it got recognition as one of the Ten Worst Companies to Work For several years ago. Ferocious competition is what one expects in pure selling; sales at a certain level pays more than any other activity for the same level of intellectual competence and work ethic for anyone without an extreme specialization such as a skilled trade, creative activity, or such professions as law, engineering, and medicine. The only good thing about working there was that I got to learn old-fashioned salesmanship, something not taught in college. I found that highly useful as a substitute teacher (I had the wrong college degree, and I love working on children's minds to a desirable end), and more often more useful than anything that I learned while in college classes.
You mistake me. I think the difference in assumption here is that I have never worked for anyone else expecting to like what I do. Any job I've ever had is just something to pay the bills, so I select work that requires the least effort and physical/emotional energy to free up time for my real plans. Put simply: people are only going to pay you for two types of jobs
1) Something that needs to be done that they can't do.
2) Something that needs to be done that they don't want to do.
Never in any period of history has a society been described where the majority of people were passionate about what they did. Although in my case, my position is solitary enough to where I can listen to audiobooks while at work. Helps me get extra financial research in and/or satisfy my compulsively high trait openness. Imo, slavery is more characterized by what your life is like after you get home from work, and your ability to go somewhere else if you work for abusive management.
Obviously all jobs have their downsides. Some downsides including body-wracking pain in work that eventually cripples one. Another is overt danger. Construction and mining have both. Persistent, toxic relationships as a part of the job are another. (Retail is infamous for this; lower-level management is little better than the clerks, and upper management often sees itself as god-like. The salesclerk-customer relationship is itself typically one of command-and-control). For some jobs such as accounting one needs a high tolerance for numbing routine.
Personal reality may be that one cannot afford post-graduate education that allows one the career specialization that fits one's personality. In such cases, success in life is talents that one can never learn in any educational setting, developing a trade through an apprenticeship, starting a shoe-string business that has a high likelihood of failure -- or learning to count one's blessings. If you run out of blessings, start counting again, and start with being thankful that you are not living in Syria or North Korea, and finally with "I wasn't fired today" or I did not have a fatal heart attack or stroke or get run over by "Danny Drunkee".
Much of the problem is that the economic elites concentrate narcissistic personalities. People who have never had the obligation to make sacrifices on behalf of people who treat other people as mere tools, and if somehow living things livestock at best and vermin at worst. The more that our economy goes from competition to crony capitalism, which closely correlates to concentration of economic and political power, the worse things get. America's economic elites increasingly look like the Junkers who dominated German economic life until the end of World War II (they got big profits from their support of Hitler until the Allies bombed their factories to smithereens or confiscated their wealth behind the Iron Curtain), and a Soviet-style nomenklatura of self-selecting administrators in business and even (now) educational hierarchies. Much of what passes as Christianity is little more than a Gospel of Greed melding with pre-modern superstition -- a Calvinist hierarchy (those who Do Well are particularly blessed) with superstition for ignoramuses who believe such junk as young-earth creationism or fall for the pure unreason of Qu Qlux Qlanon or gutter racism.
I have many disagreements with Marxism, but Marxists did get racism right. It is a tool of exploitation and a destruction of human solidarity necessary for economic and moral progress.
Quote: If it is a choice between some illicit activity, hunger, or homelessness (you can share a slum apartment or a run-down trailer with others), then a company like Dillard's isn't all bad. But know that management sees every one of its workers as a lazy moocher who would steal if the opportunity arose. You will be expected to dress like an executive, which is good practice for a responsible position that pays more and does not have an ethos in which all the rules seem to begin with "Suffer for!"
Quote:I see a pattern in at least one retailer. It seems a dreary place to work, and I see its workers going out for smoking breaks. Smoking is a costly waste of meager income and personal health, but it is one good way that one does not end up a destitute old person because one will die before any mandatory age of retirement. Heck, if I were making a million dollars a year I would consider smoking a pointless waste of money and health. If such is one's sole joy in life, then one is in trouble.
OK, one can live sort-of-OK (sharing an awful apartment or trailer if one isn't living with parents).
sort-of-okay is all I can ever expect from a job. Do your duty and go home. Getting the good life requires power, and power means that you either become indispensable to someone else, or build the system yourself. As the latter requires less social hoop jumping and obsequious pandering, that is the route I decided on a long time ago.
A toxic environment at work can hardly fail to pollute the rest of one's life. The best that one can hope for is that one can successfully separate personal life from the jungle of a workplace. As we go from a nation of small shopkeepers and yeoman farmers to the nearly-pure decadence of plantation-like corporate farms, monopolistic gougers, bloated bureaucracies, and rent-seeking profiteers, life gets harder for everyone else. Profit becomes the objective of all human life, even if one can enjoy nothing more from it than what the elites deem necessary to keep us from starving and rebelling. Crappy food, crappy housing, crappy religion, and crappy entertainment allows survival; the ideal for our narcissistic elites would be something similar to slavery in its oppression and inequality but somehow does not violate the 13th Amendment.
In view of the support that our economic elites gave to Donald Trump and that their political stooges go along with (they will find someone similar in ideology if not the same Caligula-like eccentricities to be the Great and Infallible Leader to whom we are expected to honor) someone more adept at establishing a plutocratic tyranny will likely emerge. We will then have a pure command-and-control society that most likely tries to impose its nastiness where such is unwelcome and that implodes militarily. We could end up with an inversion of The Man in the High Castle in which the Germans and Japanese are the good guys, and the leaders from a fascistic America strangle while they dangle after Nuremberg-style trials.
Quote:Quote:avoid junk food altogether. I am on disability and get food aid, and I can have a reasonably-good and varied diet if I stay away from chips, cookies, pastries, candies, fake fruit drinks, and sodas. All of those offer little nutritive value, but the sugar-and-saturated fats "high" is relatively low on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. They all contribute to obesity. Alcoholic beverages do not qualify for food aid, and I rarely get those. I'm not a scratch cook, so I don't make my own lasagna.
For me, it's more that I'm just too selfish to put junk into my body.
Dollar stores are everywhere, and they offer a wide selection of junk food. These are the default retailers for most poor people. Tellingly they no salad greens or fresh fruits or vegetables.
Quote:Quote:I have my suggestion for SNAP: disqualify chips, cookies, pastries, candies, fake fruit drinks, and sodas as eligible items but instead offer eligibility for toilet paper, soap, and detergents that are just as necessary. Issue a cookbook, and require anyone getting food aid to participate in community-college courses in cooking and nutrition. Learn to make your own lasagna; this can be a matter of pride.
Yes!
Of course one would end up disqualifying much of what constitutes "food" at dollar stores.
Quote:Quote: 2. Better teas than sodas. They are actually cheaper than sodas.
Some of the higher grade stuff is pricier, but even then, it's like....twice as expensive as soda for what would be considered luxury in many parts of the world
Do you realize how much sun-brewed tea you can make out of a box of tea bags that costs less than a 12-pack of sodas? A cup of herbal tea is less costly now than a can of soda -- and far healthier.
Quote:Quote:4. If you live in a hick town you will need a car. If you live in a ghetto-like slum and need to commute to the suburbs for the fast-food and retail jobs that the local kids abandon once they get something else, you will need a car to do shift work. Ideally one is paid well enough to do this.
Have done both (well, not lived in the ghetto, but right next to it, and it was the only place I could do my laundry).
As housing becomes more corporate in nature, it becomes more slum-like. It's more profitable, and in a country in which elite power, indulgence, and gain increasingly become what passes as the national objective and great principle, slum apartments become the norm. These places always stunted child development, and it is hardly surprising that the humane values of the New Deal and Fair Deal pushed single-family housing.
One response is to have no children. I may be a bitter old man now but I can at least be glad that I offered no children to toil as near-serfs, to become soulless consumers of schlock entertainment, or to dwell in degrading slums. We are getting the worst of an aristocratic order and Commie-style bureaucracy at the same time, and most people are too scared or deluded to fail to recognize such.
Quote:Quote:5. I know places to go. I live in a farming area, and except for weather at its rawest, little could be more unnatural than farmland. New York City has Central Park; Boston has Boston Commons; Chicago has its lakeshore; all three cities need those or they would be unlivable. "Scary, Indiana" seems to have been built without them, and it shows. The South Side of Chicago seems to lack this, and it shows. I avoid both.
oof, you're from Gary? I lived in Chicago for 3 years, and we heard nothing but nightmare stories
No, I simply read the front page of a story in a local newspaper in Michigan City, Indiana (itself a dump, but not as horrible as "Scary, Indiana".
If Chicago were the biggest city in America instead of New York City, then the state providing the grist of jokes about itself would be Indiana, and not New Jersey.
Quote:Quote:A trip to a zoo, a museum of almost any kind (art, natural science, technology, history, ethnic heritage), or a symphony concert or opera is often a lasting experience. I'll pass on casinos which offer banks of slot machines that offer a mysterious return from what seem like gussied-up soft-drink machines. It's the memories that matter.
Before he died, I got to hear the Russian baritone Dimitri Hvorostovsky life in Chicago. People always talk about how "expensive" opera is, but, like with tea, this is an illusion.
I got a complete, satisfying set of the symphonies of Anton Bruckner for less than $30 from Amazon. com. This isn't for everyone. These works all take at least an hour to perform and to listen to, but if you love the magisterial composition. That's obviously not for people who like their music short and sweet with no elaboration, as in the disposable fare of Top-40 hits.
I find opera an excellent anodyne for loneliness, to put it mildly.
Quote:Quote:I have been to Yosemite National Park, Isle Royale National Park, Petrified Forest National Park, Mammoth Cave National Park, Indiana Dunes National Park, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. All memorable. I can make plugs for Tahquamenon State Park and Pictured Rocks in Michigan, and quite a few state parks in California (redwoods and seashore). All are memorable. I have been to the main art museums in Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, and Toledo.
I'm not nearly as well traveled as you, but at some point I'll have to share some pics from the Ozarks and the Blueridge Parkway. You should share some too.
I'm 66, and I have lived in Michigan, California (for a short time, but my brother lived there and I took trips to see him), and Texas. I can tell you some places that I have never been -- anywhere outside the USA except for the southern tier of Ontario or outside of the polygon that includes Boston, southeastern Virginia, Nashville, Dallas, Houston, San Diego, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Omaha, Dubuque, Madison, and the UP of Michigan. Places in which I have never been include Toronto, New York City (my parents changed the "N" to a "J"), Atlanta, New Orleans, and Minneapolis.
I am not that well traveled.
Quote:Quote:8. Recorded books are for the blind (I do not use the PC equivalent) or for use while taking a long drive. Otherwise -- just borrow books from the library.
The blind and the dyslexic. I am the latter.
I forgot that handicap. As I am on the autistic spectrum, I do not relate to fiction unless it is really, really good.
Quote:Quote:10. Consider yourself lucky. Some work environments are themselves abusive (think of retailing). If you have trustworthy family members and can avoid dealings with sociopathic relatives (I know two certifiable sociopaths and avoid them. One did a huge embezzlement of his employer. Another schmoozes people in the public sector to buy overpriced stuff or services by losing consistently at golf).
Oh I do! I've worked for my fair share of abusive bosses. The most abusive company I worked for was support worker program for mentally handicapped people.
Every company is going to have some level of regimentation and hierarchy just to keep from abusing clients. Mentally-handicapped people are particularly vulnerable.
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Quote:Poverty seems to concentrate bad people due to poor work habits or overall dishonesty too dangerous for paid work. It also exposes one to the reality of an economic hierarchy that supposedly creates prosperity in the presence of gross deprivation. We have people living like sultans and people living as if they were in Hell-holes of the Third World. A city like Chicago is part Dubai and part Caracas. Poverty of experiences is a mark of a lack of education and imagination. Give up the bad habits (if you have them), and you can get some good experiences as alternatives.
Not all poor people are bad, but just about all poor people have to live in proximity to bad people. This is one of my main motivations to make money. I saw some pretty nasty crimes during my time in The Windy City
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Yes -- avoid the South Side except for White Sox games. The North Side of Chicago is Copenhagen, and the South Side is Caracas.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.