CEO raises minimum wage to $70000, takes $70000 wage himself until profits are met.

[babe]

I grew up in kearns. There was this guy with some sort of cognitive disability that fixed bikes and sold them. He was always riding around with an extra bike to sell to kids. We liked him because he could hit a hook shot from anywhere, and he would show us pictures of him "practicing" with the Jazz. I bet fishonjazz probably remembers this guy too, being from kearns.

I used to do a showoff gig on the playground, standing any three kids who'd play me a little street ball on the halfcourt. I won impressively, even against players on the school team. Coach wanted me to try out. I didn't, for reasons that were essentially a personal realization that I could not play on a team. I couldn't keep track of very many things happening. I was good at hook shots, but even better at hard drives away from the basket/hook shot combos. With one player between me and the basket, and two trying to cover the possible angles going out, I always had my "lane", and I always hit the shot.

On a team, I would never see an open man, or know when a pass was coming my way. . . .

I did pretty good on the long shots, too.

 

[babe]

I got your VM, been way busy.. will call back.

Now, I'm away from there. "There" is where the number is, so if you leave a message there. . .. well, wait a couple of days and I'll get it.

will likely be going through St. George sometime soon.

 

[franklin]

I think that is great that you ivercame adversity to be a successful person and an upstanding citizen.

What adversity? I didn't overcome anything. It's all personal perspective and I've never seen myself as some victim of bad circumstance I had to fight out of.

I probably should have said that I see a different reality from the one you see, not that you are out of touch. I understand that you are a hard worker, and have a thoroughly american success story. I truly respect that.

The differences I see are that I can not imagine a scenario where a college student can take a full time course load, perform well, and make $30k annually. I also do not know a single person from my cohort of college graduates who started at more than $50k annually after completing a four year degree. I have a pretty good cross section of friends in varied fields, including engineering, healthcare, education, business, and so forth. My view of reality is that for recent college graduates, it is a very competitive workforce, and for one to stand out, it takes experience, which is difficult to get when you don't have experience to begin with.

The average college graduate in Utah makes about $42,000, or at least that's what is reported. Sure, hard working individuals can move up, but I personally have not seen a lot of people in their first 5 years of a career make significantly more than that. Even a few mechanical and civil engineer friends that I have had to get a masters degree before making over $50k.

I agree with your sentiment that hard workers can stand out, but I disagree with how easy you seem to think it is to make a lot of money. That may be due to my personal and family experiences, and I am sure it is to a certain extent. I also did not mean to offend you with my comment about you being out of touch with reality, and should have worded it differently.

Yeah, you don't make as much starting out. It goes without saying that that's the way it should be. I get where you are coming from. Most people don't know how to look for a good job but I guarantee anyone here can make a minimum of $60k annually after 3-4 years given they have a high school diploma. If anyone wants a good job they should look into the municipalities or muni-like industries and big production facilities. Fed-ex & UPS will start you about 60k, lineman for powerplants will make over $80k after apprenticeship (plus a **** ton of overtime available), you can sit on your *** in a chair watching computer screens at the power plants for $36/hr, the refinery workers are clearing 6 figures easily, water plant jobs aren't the best but they pay the bills and you can advance to over $60k plus a full pension with a 4 year degree, the local mining jobs pay plenty and if you want $150k/yr you can go to more remote regions to work for only 6 months per year, Procter and Gamble only promotes from within and you have to start at the bottom but you'll be hard pressed to find an employee who doesn't love the company, similar with Nucor, whose employees were making about $85k before the 2008 crash and over $60k after, the natural gas compressor stations and upstream and downstream counterparts pay very well, garbage dumps can be good jobs for those with a little motivation, locomotive engineers make a lot of money, human resources management can make $100k in Salt Lake City, RN's make plenty and can work all the overtime they want, auto mechanics at mid-teir dealerships like Cadillac were making over $100k a decade ago, truck drivers are in demand, IT is in high demand.

There are jobs at the municipality or municipality like companies for pretty much any non-lib arts degree and they all pay plenty.

As far as not making $30k while going to college goes. I was making $25k a decade ago but I did take 18 months extra to finish. My co-workers with kids just entering college are all making around $18/hr or working seasonal jobs that pay plenty. Sure, some may have to live at home or with relatives for a couple years but that's not exactly a bad thing.

 

[Deleted member 848]

I won't speak for him. But let's ask, as I might be wrong too.

Dalabro, is the US a terrible place to live? Absolutely subpar in all sense of the word?

Gosh no-- depends on who you are, but as a Muslim immigrant, America is among the best. Doesn't mean there isn't tremendous room for improvement though. However, this whole idea of 'improvement' is so distasteful to most Americans it's actually ridiculous-- especially when you're using other nations as a case study of how this improvement could manifest.

 

[Deleted member 848]

That's basically the problem with every one of these dramatic, fear mongering 'look over there, that country is so much better because <insert random statistic here>. Most of them fall flat on their face in a matter of a few moments of reflection.

You can take the infant mortality rate for example. We needed to fix things because every year Cuba comes out with an incredibly low figure for an impoverished country. Well, dig just a bit deeper and you find Cuban-Americans also have a low infant mortality rate and Cuba is an outlier in how much it spends on healthcare (with obvious impoverishing effects elsewhere). They like to point to Japan's 2% rate, America needs to be like Japan. But do they ever mention that the Japanese abort pretty much every baby conceived out of wedlock? In 1980 something there were a total of something like 18 births to mothers 15 and under. That's insanely low. They also never mention the chronically high peripartum morbidity rates of 3 times the USA, or the sever lack of neonatal physicians and nurses at birthing hospitals (neither do the Canadians for that matter). Our healthcare system is expensive because we take care of people and believe in treating employees fairly. Japan under-staffs and overworks their medical staff to the bones.

These things rarely make it into the discussion. Instead it's look I have a statistic so you're monolithic, narrow-minded, dogmatic ideologue.

Japan is boosting their expenditure on health care costs due to the (8% of GDP I think it was) causing hospitals to go bankrupt-- however, you fail to acknowledge that they've ramped up their spending, hospitals are back in the green, and yet they're still spending orders of magnitude less than the US.

Does Germany have any of the problems that you've mentioned?

 

[Deleted member 848]

1. Cut our millitary and let the world fall apart.

Who is saying we need to cut military?

2. Cut our corporate tax rate to Germany's level and watch US companies gobble up the economies of Germany, Japan, Italy, France, UK, etc. They fall apart.

Not sure what cutting corporate tax rates to 29.8% has to do with anything here. Still, your point reminds me of an interesting article I came across recently-- consider the following:

The United States may soon wind up with a distinction that makes business leaders cringe — the highest corporate tax rate in the world.

Topping out at 35 percent, America’s official corporate income tax rate trails that of only Japan, at 39.5 percent, which has said it plans to lower its rate. It is nearly triple Ireland’s and 10 percentage points higher than in Denmark, Austria or China. To help companies here stay competitive, many executives say, Congress should lower it.

But by taking advantage of myriad breaks and loopholes that other countries generally do not offer, United States corporations pay only slightly more on average than their counterparts in other industrial countries. And some American corporations use aggressive strategies to pay less — often far less — than their competitors abroad and at home. A Government Accountability Office study released in 2008 found that 55 percent of United States companies paid no federal income taxes during at least one year in a seven-year period it studied.

Well, there go your plans for worldwide domination. Go ahead and like THIS post, PKBro.

3. Treat our healthcare workers like overworked dogs. Pay then little to nothing and let the lines from under-staffing flow out the doors.

Your use of 2006 Japan as the only example of different health care system that the US could emulate is perplexing, and narrow-minded. Tens of other health care systems that treat workers justly & provide universal coverage to all of their citizens.

4. Engaging currency war and other modern mercantilistic wars on Germany, Japan, and China to even the playing field. The export dependent nations always lose those battles.

We can do it like the rest of the world but we have higher moral ideals than pegging happiness to wealth while forgetting all that really matters.

babe-esque mythical rambling that is 100% out of touch with reality. In a society that revolves around money, money is needed to live happily. After a certain extent, increasing amounts of money has no impact-- but some money is needed. Unfortunately, America's income inequality problem leaves vast portions of the population with no money, while not bothering taxing the rich who don't need th money.

 

[VINYLONE]

Curious. Why is income inequality something that should be addressed?

I don't think it should but I also think the clearing mechanisms that have been developed in our systems need to be applied across the board.

 

[jimmy eat jazz]

Life outside of college changes most perspectives. It's also why those who are career academia are kinda out of touch with reality.

As someone who spend many years in academics, and who, I dare say, knows far more academics that you, I can say that this assertion is pure BS.

 

[Beer]

As someone who spend many years in academics, and who, I dare say, knows far more academics that you, I can say that this assertion is pure BS.

You sound like you may be a bit biased ....

 

[RandyForRubio]

As someone who spend many years in academics, and who, I dare say, knows far more academics that you, I can say that this assertion is pure BS.

Don't ya think you're a bit biased?

I get the feeling you don't like me btw.

Anyways, based on my experience in school, and with the people I know (and yes, I do work with those in academia on a very regular occasion), most of them are people who think their very small-scale studies are proof that they could work on a large scale with no thought process towards the labor, or other various factors involved because they've never had to deal with them. Obviously there are good people in academia, I just think there's a fair amount who haven't experienced the workplace outside of a university, and are a good bit clueless when it comes to real life.

 

[NAOS]

Don't ya think you're a bit biased?

I get the feeling you don't like me btw.

Anyways, based on my experience in school, and with the people I know (and yes, I do work with those in academia on a very regular occasion), most of them are people who think their very small-scale studies are proof that they could work on a large scale with no thought process towards the labor, or other various factors involved because they've never had to deal with them. Obviously there are good people in academia, I just think there's a fair amount who haven't experienced the workplace outside of a university, and are a good bit clueless when it comes to real life.

The biggest sign that you don't know what you're talking about is the way you're addressing "academia" as a general thing. There is a huge difference between departments. For example, the difference between someone who is an expert in econometrics is going to be a verrrrry different professional than an expert in anthropology who is a verrry different professional than someone with a PhD in Social Work. There is absolutely NO WAY to generalize about "academia" and "academics" in one categorical generalization. Sorry. You're wrong.

 

[jimmy eat jazz]

I think more localized governments is a good idea on paper. I wish it were closer to reality, but, generally speaking, local governments are even more corrupted and corruptible than larger bodies.

On top of that, states often have a very poor record of supporting civil rights and liberties. If I'm a member of a traditionally marginalized social group (e.g., black, gay, female), my biggest fear would be states rights run amuck. In states, or local governments, it is much easier for factions to capture politics (for example, evangelical Christians, or closer to home, Mormons) and then use this power to advance their interests and/or to oppress those in opposing factions or out groups.

While there are many virtues to state/local government, there are also many vices, same for national government. The assumption common on the right that state/local government is inherently superior to the big, bad evil national government is naive.

Personally, I am very, very glad that the decisions related to constitutional rights are not left up to states to decide.