#and they pay me the lowest possible wage in this state more or less so i dont give a single fuck about professionalism lmao

[beepbeepkazoo]

bro i think my workplace is vagueposting about me

[ladylingua]

I have a very genuine question about the tipping post I promise I didnt read it in bad faith: are people who simply cannot afford to tip not “allowed” to eat out? I’m just thinking about how it works where I am from and while tipping is the norm here if someone doesn’t tip because they can’t afford it it really isn’t a big deal (+tipping norm here us only 10%). so if a poor family goes out to eat to celebrate something and they can barely afford the meal would they still be expected to tip 20% because they shouldn’t eat out if they cant afford it? thank you in advance I’m really curious

If it helps, don’t think of the tip as a separate thing. It is part of the cost of your meal. So if you cannot afford to pay for the cost of the meal including the tip you cannot afford to eat at that restaurant. This is something I myself have to calculate when I’m deciding if I want to eat at a particular restaurant- if I have $15 I can’t go to a restaurant and order a $20 entrée and then refuse to pay the remaining cost, and likewise if I have $15 I can’t order a $15 entrée and expect not to pay the server for their service.

Now that doesn't mean families who can't afford a pricy restaurant can't eat out at all. Since it is a % of your bill you can try to go for a cheaper restaurant (smaller bill = smaller tip), or if you go to a counter service place where you serve yourself you’re not expected to tip 20% (sometimes they have a jar out you could kindly throw a dollar or more in, but there is much less expectation to tip because the workers at a place like that receive a full minimum wage, more on that in a sec). I will also say in my lived experience poor families in America understand and tip well, I’ve almost exclusively been under tipped by wealthy people (which is what kicked off the debate on twitter- if your bill is $700 then you obviously can afford to tip a full 20%, no destitute families are spending $700 on one meal).

Technically speaking you can get away with 18% as a tip, and if you go down to 15% your waiter will think you’re cheap and be annoyed (15% definitely implies you were unhappy with their service) but that is the lowest possible threshold of acceptability. 10% is not an acceptable rate here, and 20% is now the expected norm for good service, and going up from there for great service. And I would never, ever not tip at all. I can only imagine not tipping if like the server had done something deeply offensive or dangerous or something. I've never encountered a situation where I felt the server didn't deserve any tip at all.

Because you’ve asked in genuine good faith I’m going to provide some more context to help you understand a bit more why this is the way it is-

Waitstaff in america are wildly underpaid. Our federal government assumes the tips are part of their expected income, and so a) they are taxed on assumed tips and b) it is legal to pay them less than standard minimum wage. Currently the tipped federal minimum wage is $2.13/hr. Now, states set their own individual rates so some states do better, but $2.13/hr is the lowest they can all legally go. And you’ll notice in that link it mentions the assumed tips and taxing them. I said on my original post, when I worked as a tipped waitress I made $2.68/hr and sometimes my biweekly paycheck was like $60 total. Imagine trying to survive on $120 a month, you absolutely cannot. Tips made up my actual wage, and were the paycheck I depended on to pay for my basic needs. I relied directly on customers to choose to do the social convention of tipping for survival, and when someone would choose to do otherwise it was utterly devastating.

Another thing customers sometimes don’t realize is your waiter may not be allowed to keep all of the tip themselves. It’s a common practice to pool tips amongst all the waitstaff and then divide them equally, and many places require that you tip out other employees there. So if you give me $10 as a tip I might be actually giving a large chunk of that to bussers, bartenders, etc. Or maybe we pool tips and someone else stiffed my colleague so now all of us are sharing your $10 tip. So also keep in mind that the money you leave as a tip very often does not go entirely to the actual waiter, so a big tip can actually become pretty small much faster than you would think.

(and that's just legal practices, wage theft and illegal practices run rampant in the restaurant industry, just fyi)

If you are wondering why tipping culture here is so grim, it is because of slavery. Tipping got big here as a way to keep forcing Black Americans into working for free, now with a small tip but still no actual wage. It was designed for oppression. Waitstaff are overwhelmingly not wealthy people. It is very common for them to be on food stamps, require housing assistance, or to otherwise be living under the poverty line. If you are eating out and not tipping because you yourself are poor, you are taking money out of someone else’s poverty wages to do so. When we debate minimum wage here in america, conservatives are really good at painting a picture of waitstaff being perky middle class college kids making an extra buck, or teens from wealthy homes wanting some spending money. There is an implication that they don't really need the money that badly. That is not the reality of who makes up most serving jobs in america. Minimum wage workers are likely to be in poverty, they’re likely to be women and specifically they’re likely to be women of color. Americans of color are significantly more likely to be working at minimum wage than white americans. There is a pretty sizeable number of minimum wage workers who are over 50, and a not insignificant amount of them who are mothers who support their families. There are also those teens who just want extra cash, and they deserve good compensation for their hard work too, don’t get me wrong, but they are only a portion of who makes up the minimum wage workforce.

If you’re like “But that’s such a shitty system, you’re saying it’s pitting poor people against each other for basic human comforts!” yup. I 100% agree. I am a vocal proponent of raising the minimum wage for that reason. I also advocate for a Universal Basic Income, because I understand that when it comes to small mom & pop restaurants the owners aren’t always making a ton of money either and it seems like truly no one is winning in this system. It is set up to oppress and to demean and to grind us all down. There are lots of orgs in America that are fighting to improve the system, or to radically change the system. There are also restaurants that have tried to do things differently- there’s a wine bar in my city that says specifically on their menu that their wine is more expensive because they pay their workers a true livable wage so there is no tipping there. Instead as a customer I pay a higher upfront cost that covers the true expense of running the bar- including server wages. I love that, I wish more places would do things like that. In the meantime, when I’m choosing where to eat I factor in a tip of 20% when calculating my estimated bill, because paying for service is part of the cost.

Refusing to tip fully in america is not doing anything to change the system. It does not make restaurant owners rethink their pay structure, it does not put pressure on our government to fix minimum wage, it does not make a political statement. It just means your server is going home wondering if they can afford their own meal that night.

Thank you for asking for clarity, I hope this helps. Please feel free to ask more if you have any remaining confusion or are curious about other aspects of american culture. If I can answer and the questions are respectful, I am happy to reply!

[fireyturtle]

Honestly wanna vent rn

Applied to work at prob almost 20 places this past month and so far have gotten 3 maybe 4 interviews. Thats not what I'm mad about. I'm mad that places hire you for seasonal with no chance of promoting to full crew, and have the gall to pay you the lowest wage possible. Minimum wage in my city/state is around $8.50. I need at least $9 an hour in order to pay even some of bills but it's literally not even enough. Gamestop wants to pay me maybe $8.50 or $8.75. Hot Topic wants to pay $8.50. I will get no benefits, work holidays, and have shit pay. What the fuck. In my mind you're supposed to pay seasonal more cause who the fuck wants to take a shitty job for less than what full crew makes. If I was apart of the crew I know for a fact I'd make more than $8.50 an hour. This has me so fuckin mad

[drumpfwatch]

State of the Union 2019 Commentary

It’s been a week and some change. Let’s talk State of the Union.

First off, I’d like to make a comment on the overall speech theme. Trump spoke of unity and everyone coming together, but that very morning he went to yell at how obstructionist and obnoxious the Democrats were being for not giving him his baby bottle wall. This man, who speaks of himself as the best deal maker in the world, and bragged he’d be able to get everyone to get together and make friends, sort out their differences, when he has done nothing but make demand after demand and concede no ground.

A compromise, Mr. Trump, is two people coming together and agreeing on something they’re both willing to do while conceding parts of what they want. It’s called a surrender if someone gives you everything they want while getting nothing. Dummkopf.

So with that, let’s begin at the beginning. I warn you right now I don’t want to go over every single point he made, but I’ll cover as many of them as I can and comment as needed. There are other commentaries out there, some as soon as the day after, and those are more than cool to have hanging around. I’m sure between all of those you can come up with a total summary of what he said, based on every single word. With that, let’s begin.

As per his theme, he started the speech by calling for unity and cooperation. All well and good for anyone else. We should avoid revenge politics - which is fucking rich coming from him, but whatever. Specifically, he calls congress to concern themselves “with the agenda of the American people” but…

Well, we’ll get to that.

He thanks some WW2 vets and then talks about how he’s interested in “America First.” People have on more than one occasion pointed out that given his actions, he seems to mean “America Only” when he says that, and that should be a premise that is upsetting to everyone but I have no doubt there is a large portion of the population of the American population who are more than happy to ignore the rest of the world. They already do, after all.

He then introduces Buzz Aldrin, saying that we’ll be going to space on American rockets again. And he’s actually, sadly, right there. Back in 2011, the Space Shuttle program was retired, and we’ve been relying on the Russian Soyuz capsule to get us into the space ever since. The successor to the Space Shuttle Program, the Space Launch System, has been slow coming for numerous reasons. It is, however, finally going to be ready to go in 2019 and will perform its first mission in 2020 - sending a craft to Mars. They wanted a rocket that could get a crew to Mars eventually, and the Senate…

Well, let’s just say congress stuck it’s fingers into the Space Launch System so much that it has been derisively called the Senate Launch System, and a lot of astronauts and NASA Engineers are concerned that it is basically a horrible, efficient money sink. Still, as an avid space fanatic, I’m glad we’re making efforts, at least. Though I’d point out that those efforts have been in motion long before he ever got there to direct them. This is, after all, the man that believed we could go to Mars before his first term was out.

He next goes on to talk about the economy, claiming that our middle class is bigger and more prosperous than ever before. This is untrue. While it seems to be complicated, the general consensus is that while the Middle Class has been stable in size, they tend to have less and less, especially in comparison to the upper class. That is where the real problem is, as well. The absolutely ridiculous wealth disparity. Though I get the feeling that removing taxes from private jets is totally gonna help with that. She says, sarcasm frothing in her mouth in a mixture of rage and bitterness.

He then claimed responsibility for the parts of the economic boom that have been happening. First of all, the economy is...not exactly booming. But there are good things happening in it. It’s sort of a whirlygig of insanity, if I’m honest. Now, you’ll hear me say this again a few other times, but I am not all that educated when it comes to economics. Economics is a chaos system and I much prefer stable ones with easy to predict results. Is a thing right or wrong, is this method an effective way of accomplishing the intended goal. Things like that.

That said, I do know a few things, and one of them is that a lot of people who do know a thing or two about economics point out that this economic boom began in 2016, which means it's entirely possible that this is a result of Obama’s policies were responsible, we don’t really know. Maybe Trump did have something to do with it, but it’s often not accurate to blame the problems or successes of an economy on a single thing. So this claim gets a big ol’ stamp of “UNVERIFIABLE” from me.

I can say that wages are not rising, or at least as much as he thinks. The Federal Minimum Wage was not changed since 2009, and lost about 9.6% of its purchasing power because of inflation. While some states have made major strides towards livable minimum wages have been made in places like New York and California, I’d be willing to bet dollars to donuts that if you removed the massive amount of wealth that people like Jeff Bezos make, you’d find that they are stagnant, or even lowering.

There’s a thought for a math rant sometime.

Anyway, he then praises the 5 million people who got off of food stamps. First of all, the number is 3.5 million. Second of all, it’s a bit more complicated than that. To summarize, while the decrease in unemployment is helping, there’s another little niggling thing. There was a provision in the law that basically said you could turn off some of the safety nets if employment rates rose, and a lot of states decided not to pay for those benefits. I won’t argue whether or not that was a right or wrong decision, but I will say you don’t get to wave around the number of people who are off a program as a victory when the reason they’re off it isn’t because they don’t need it, but because they were kicked off it.

We’re the hottest economy in the world, he says! And he’s wrong. I mentioned before that we’re in a weird sort of “Good Things, Bad Things” phase, but I don’t think I need to tell anyone that the stock market has been all over the place, falling and rising considerably at random. Meanwhile, S&P has downgraded America’s credit score. I think we’ve got a problem, and I know we’re not the hottest economy.

He then goes onto say that the unemployment rate for people of color is the lowest it’s ever been. And shockingly, he’s right on this one. Sort of. The Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the rate of unemployment for hispanic people and black people actually went down, and was at one point the lowest it’s ever been. Asian unemployment has sorta been all over the place. What makes it strange, however, is that each of these groups had a random and sudden spike since November/December of last year, while for whites it’s been pretty stagnant. Last hired, first fired, I guess.

He also talks about the same with disabled people and that is blatantly untrue. While it seems the number of people who qualify for disability also is going up, they’re not getting employed any faster.

I should also mention that even if we could point to one specific thing as responsible for these changes, I doubt it would be the fault of the man who himself wouldn’t house or hire black people.

He also celebrated getting rid of the estate tax. Which yes, he did. That is not necessarily a good thing. He acts like it applies to small businesses and farmers, but it doesn’t. One person said on the matter “If you don’t feel comfortable calling what you own an estate, then you probably aren’t affected by the estate tax.” You and your guilded crotch spawn and protected up to 10 million dollars. Only after that is your wealthy taxed on death, and only to prevent the the existence of a permanent landed gentry. The only people benefiting from the end of the estate tax are literal millionaires, who can afford to give some of that dosh to the community.

He then talks about Obamacare, and how he get rid of the Individual Mandate. He claims this was the most unpopular part of the law, and he’s right, but analysts point out that it’s more complicated then Thing Bad So Get Rid Of. Without the Individual Mandate to get people motivated to apply for coverage, a lot of people simply won’t get insured. Further, the whole point was that forcing the younger people to pay for insurance when they’re less likely to need it helped to add money to the pool that could be used to help cover the people with pre-existing conditions or complications. That said, it’s also a good thing not having people pay for coverage they can’t afford, so...it’s complicated.

Trump then bragged about cutting the most regulations of any President ever, and I won’t deny that he has. I will, however, point out that this is a horrible thing that should concern and frighten all of you. While some of those regulations may seem arbitrary, literally every one of them was written in the blood of some innocent person who died so a corporation could make an extra buck. We’ve already seen an increase in food poisoning and infections and the increase in food recalls since 2013 has been kind of horrifying. Trump has been eagerly cutting regulations to “Pre-1960s” levels. You know, before we had seatbelts. It’s very harmful to cut those regulations, and it needs to stop.

He then says that America has corporations coming back in record numbers. On this, he is also not wrong. The Jobs report was very good, and we should all be happy about that. That said, whether or not he is the one to thank for that is a bit more complicated, as usual. It turns out that some of these gears were set into motion when Obama was in office. Some of them are just the effects of a slow recovery process since the 2009 Recession. That said, they did take a sharp rise in 2017. So yay for him, I guess.

Except, again, if deregulation is how you’re doing this, then you’re doing it wrong. We should not be sacrificing the blood of American people so that a few already stupid wealthy people can get even more stupid wealthy. The reward is not worth the cost.

He then goes on about how we’re the number one producer of oil in the world. This claim is untrue. There has, however, been a boom in oil and natural gas production due to things like the invention of fracking and loosening of regulations that goes all the way back to the Bush Era. The rate is increasing such that by sometime into the 2020s, we will be the greatest producer of oil and natural gas, at least privately. Considering those materials are murdering our planet this is also not good news, but since Global Warming is, of course, a conspiracy cooked up by the Chinese to steal American Jobs, that doesn’t matter. We are also not a net exporter of energy, by the way, but are on are way to becoming one.

Then things get...weird. Everyone starts chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!” in this really low and creepy tone that I was frankly a bit creeped out by. It was like these people thought they were at a football game and not a session of Congress. Then again, this is my first time really sitting down and paying attention to the State of the Union, so this may be normal. I just didn’t like it.

What should, however, terrify everyone is his next babbling remark. He spends five minutes or so going on a rant about how “If there is going to be peace in legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.” Which, frankly, reminded me of a mafia frontman. “Lovely country you got here, shame if somethin’ were to happen to it. You noisy folks stink’ yah nose into my bosses business makes it real hard for him to keep wild guys like Big Jim ova deya under control. I can’t promise you won’t upset him wid all this.”

Sorry, trumby. You don’t get to talk about the need to stop our adversaries when you may well have been put in office by one.

Ughk, I hate using that word. Adversaries. It makes it sound like we have a boat load of enemies, when in reality we have like, 3 or 4, and otherwise a series of complex political relationships. Like we can’t work together with those people for a better future if we all just calmed the fuck down.

Like they’re not people.

Whatever. There are more important things to worry about.

Like how he goes on to mock the democrats for not approving his nominations. Even though a whole boatload of them are sketchy as fuck, should have never even been approved at all, or were just never filled by Trump in the first place.

Also can I just say that it’s fucking rich hearing aa man like Trump complain about not getting a nominee approved after what his party pulled with the Supreme Court? We call that hypocrisy.

He then goes on to talk about making life easier for prisoners and punishing people who abuse our veterans. Now, I could point out that prison reform was actually Barack Obama’s whole big thing and he passed a lot of laws in that regard, and Trump has not, and Former President Obama also passed VA reform in 2014 that allowed for people who mistreated veterans to be harshly punished. That said, Trump has been making further strides on those initiatives, and in fact his most approved and liked legislation is the First Step Act. These are the sorts of policies that really can make life better for people, and it’s nice to see everyone getting behind them. Ofcoursewecouldfurtherthesegreatstridesbyclosingdownforprofitprisons, andotherthingsthatimcertaindontappealtoarepublicanmindset, but that’s for another day. What I’m saying here is that as much as I don’t like it, I have to admit Trump has done a good. I don’t care who past them, how they developed, they were good things that happened. Yay! Good job Trump, you get a big shiny gold star.

We then move on to the Racist section of the speech. He starts by talking about the Migrant Caravan and I am shocked at how wrong and full of hatred this man is. He claims these refugees are an “onslaught” of illegal aliens when they’re all coming to America to seek asylum. You know, something that’s completely and totally legal. But no, this is an INVADING FORCE of ILLEGAL ALIENS that need to be stopped with 3,750 more Soldiers with GUNS. They managed to make it all the way to the American border with only one small kerfuffle with the Mexican border police, before arriving at the American border not to see Lady Liberty’s open arms welcoming the hopeless and downtrodden, the weary and poor, but instead heavily armed and barricaded troops who would then go on to use tear gas on them. Is that the America we want to show to the world?

Now, to his credit, Trump admits that Immigrants enrich our society - which is entirely true. Yes, there’s a bit of stress on lower-wage jobs when they first arrive, but that’s minimal in comparison to the benefits. Not that saying that to someone who got laid off and replaced with a migrant is no consolation, I fully understand, but there are ways to help these problems. Also, side note, if he believes immigrants are so awesome and enriching to our society, then he would be more than happy to have them enter the country. But the immigration system here is a convoluted mess of insanity that takes forever to get anything done and then occasionally does nothing, and Trump has just been making it worse. Just a thought.

Now I wrote an entire post about the wall, so I won’t go into it too much here. But the wall is an expensive, stupid, and ineffective idea. Drugs aren’t coming through skirmishers who are dodging around the border, they’re coming through ports of entry. The San Diego wall he was talking about isn’t nearly as effective as he pretends, and it didn’t really start working until the entry port in that area was spruced up. Smuggler still break through it all the time, as well, to the point where an area of it is called “Smuggler’s Gulch.” It also has trapped migrants into paying more to cross to the bad guys, taking riskier and more lethal routes, and actually trapping “illegal” migrants in who may want to leave. Most of the time, men would come up, do some work for cash, then go home once they felt they had enough, but now they’re coming, staying, and bringing their families.

Trump also points out that there were people in that room who voted for the wall, but I reckon the immense amount of insanity that came from that previous attempt are why a lot of people don’t want to do it again. Trump says that “No issue better illustrates the divide between America's working class and America's political class” but in truth, 60% of Americans are strongly opposed to the wall. The wall is a lost, stupid cause, and Trump needs to give it up before he hurts himself with his flailing about it.

OH, and just as one last cherry on the cake, it won’t stop sex trafficking either. Most traffickers bring there people in through on legal Visas, which they are then forced to overstay as those visas are held from them. In fact, over 80 anti-trafficking organizations got together to say that Trump's comments on the matter were actually harmful to efforts to stop this stuff.

He then goes on to tell the story of the Maddison family. I honestly don’t remember what it specifically was, because they are just a prop to garner sympathy for his position, and I’d actually be fine with that if the idiot didn’t use it to spread a lie. This family lost ones they love to MS13 members. That’s horrible and tragic and very sad, and I feel for them and wish it hadn’t happened. But acting like this is how every “illegal immigrant” operates is just a flat out lie. While the actual numbers are hard to tell, we know enough to say that if you strip away the illegal crime of coming here when not allowed, “illegal” immigrants commit 16% less crimes then the native-born population. Most of them are just people who want to escape an insane life and live the American Dream. But, see, they’re hispanic, so they can’t. You have to be white to be an American.

So with all of that said, let’s jump ahead to a cute moment where he talks about women taking 53% of the open jobs. Again, not his fault but go off I guess.

He then goes on to celebrate the women in Congress, of which there are more than ever before. Hurrah! I appreciate that little wink and nod, and in fact Donny, you get a gold star for this one too because this one is your fault.

By proxy.

Pretty much every one of those women ran for office because they hated you, your policies, and your stupid ugly face. They’re not there because they like you, they’re there because they want to stop you. So I think I’mma just take that shiny gold star away.

Next, he bounces back to talking about the economy, because Trump can’t focus on a single thing. Again, I won’t say much on this because economics is not my speciality, but people who DO know a thing or two about economics are pretty much in agreement that tariffs are a tool, and not a very good one. The analogy I like to use goes something like this. Imagine tariffs as a double edged knife you’re going to use to stab someone you don’t like. You’re already dealing with a weapon that’s not the safest, but guess what? This one also doesn't have a hilt, or a guard, or a pommel or anything. It’s literally just a long, serrated sheet of iron with a point on one end. So whenever you hit the other guy, you’re cutting yourself too. You can’t not.

Tariffs need to be used with the precision of a scalpel, and only if they’re determined to be the right tool for the job. And that’s without accounting for the unintended consequences like how rich people can probably find a way to avoid tariffs so they hurt the poorer people more, or you know, starting a trade war because the other people can just pass tariffs on you too?! And if any of you think this gigantic flatulating, tiny-handed orange with a racist stick coming out of its ass is capable of “precision” then I have a bridge I’d very much like to sell you.

He also goes on to talk about NAFTA again, and I’m gonna have to plead ignorance on this one. I don’t know if NAFTA is or is not a good deal, or if UMCA is a better one. I don’t know enough about economics and I don’t know enough about the laws themselves. I’m at least grateful the idiot didn’t cancel NAFTA before enstating UMCA, and those people who are smarter than me I keep talking about say that Mexico and Canada may not be in a mood to negotiate a new trade deal. So who knows. I’m not going to say much else on the matter.

So then we move on to infrastructure brieful. Trump talks about how it’s crumbling and needs repair, and he’s not wrong. The infrastructure report card for the US is, frankly, abysmal. But this begins a trend on a couple of topics.

He goes on to eagerly talk about how we need to improve health care, and lower drug prices! That we’re going to get rid of HIV in 10 years! That Childhood Cancer is going to be eradicated! Everyone gets paid family leave! All this wonderful pie-in-the-sky stuff that is super cool to hear him talk about, and I’d be totally behind him….

If he were actually doing anything on these matters. Trump talks a big game on these things, but hasn’t made any moves. Whenever he starts to, his business buddies step in and explain why they’re going to lose money and he stops.

So! He then moves on to talk about the legislation in New York that protects women’s rights to get an abortion anytime and how horrible it is that they’re murdering babies.

I think the response the white-clade congress women gave was the best.

I think the look on Angela Ocasio-Cortez’s face is the best, but the look on Angelia Ocasio-Cortez’s face and I think that’s Kathleen Rice giving the stink eye.

I don’t want to get into a debate about abortion, because that really is the best way to get everyone everywhere ever to hate you. I will say this, however. The law more or less only applies to pregnancies that would kill the mother or if the baby is already dead, and it wouldn’t matter if it didn’t.

Do you honestly think a person is going to go throw eight months of the most harrowing and obnoxious process the human body is capable of performing and then just suddenly decide “You know what? I don’t want this baby anymore.” If you’re that far along you either wanted the baby and were willing to suffer for it, or you never wanted the baby and were prevented from getting an abortion when it would’ve been kinder. The law isn’t about murdering babies, it's about letting women have control over themselves and their bodies. Acting like it’s some horrible evil that happened just makes you look dumb.

We then go onto nonsense about military bravado. Trump yammered about how he forced our allies to pay their fair share in NATO - which is honestly a kettle of fish I want to talk about in its own post, but suffice it to say it’s interesting everything he stresses and hates NATO for makes matters easier for Putin.

The real thing I want to talk about is the nuclear treaty he eventually meanders into like a toddler into a wall. Look, I’m not going to pretend that I understand the intricate diplomatics of nuclear negotiations, but even I know that YOU DO NOT ARBITRARILY CANCEL A TREATY THAT PREVENTS NUKES FROM BEING BUILT. You want an arms race?! This is how you get an arms race!

So what if Russia is “flaunting it” and ignoring it? I do not give one single solitary flying fuck. You negotiate a treaty that makes them suffer consequences - or better yet, stop not making them suffer the consequences they’re supposed to when they pull that shit - and you do it while the other treaty is still active. The last thing we need right now is a nuclear war and I don’t want to fucking hear that you’re taking Russia out of a treaty that at least somewhat contained them.

This man is going to get us all killed, I swear to Athena.

He then starts saying that “oh, the world would be in Nuclear war with South Korea if it weren’t for him, and he’s just wrong. I mean I know the nature of reality is such that there’s no real way to measure the tiny micro changes in the fabric of events that could lead to a given result, but I can say for damn sure that North Korea became more aggressive after Trump took office, and that their nuclear problem is largely for deterrent purposes because they are afraid of. Not that anyone should have nuclear weapons. Point is, this claim is bullshit, and I don’t need to source anything because it’s fantastical.

Next up is Venezuela, and his whole...spat against socialism. First of all, socialism is not responsible for the collapse of Venezuela because it wasn’t socialist. Those close to Maduro call his state a narco mafia government under the guise of socialism. It’s complicated - like everything else here is - but it can basically be summarized that instead of gathering material in the government and using it to support the people, it gave all that to big companies and then just kept taking and taking. Because that’s what unregulated big companies do. There was no market.

That said, even if Venezuela had been socialist in the truest sense, that doesn’t mean that socialist policies couldn’t work or shouldn’t be used. When applied properly (with a mix of capitalism, in my opinion), you can create a prosperous country that takes care of everyone by skimming off the top of those who have much and giving to those who have little. We’ve seen it work in different circumstances before, and even an entire country that made it work up until Stalin decided to take it over and twist its efficacy into bullshit.

He then talks a bit about Israel and Palestine, which is another basket of snakes I refuse to open other then to say that treating it as casually as he does is stupid. Israel and weird creepy end times Christians are the only people who actually don’t want a two-state solution. Sooo yeah.

Next, he speaks on how he’s done with the war against ISIS and that the troops are coming home, but fails to give a time frame and talks about not fighting an endless war - something I’d be more willing to believe if he wasn’t spewing money into the military like a sick man on laxatives does into the toilet. But whatever, I’m all for both of those things, so if he does them I’ll compliment him accordingly and apologize for not believing him.

The last thing I really want to talk about is how he brags about getting out of the Iran Nuclear Deal. That was actually working just fine and had finally squeezed Iran into cooperating and now they don’t have to while still giving them breathing room for their civilian population. But that is a complicated matter, that, again, is more difficult to ascertain than “Thing Good” or “Thing Bad.”

From there, the rest of the speech is just chest beating and bravado. Emotional appeals about how great America is and how free we are and blah blaah blaaah. I actually don’t have a problem with this - the swelling call to action at the end of the speech is a very effective tool and it’s not like I haven’t used emotional manipulation myself, even in this very article. But the point is that it’s not factual - it’s not meant to be criticized as a series of claims or even critiqued at all. It’s bravado, pure and simple. Trump is good at it, and he did a good job with it here.

Before I conclude though, I just want to quickly comment on one thing. Him derailing antisemitism is hilarious. You’re like 4 years too late on that bro.

Anyway, conclusions.

Most of the problems with this speech can be summed up with “It’s not that simple, idiot.” The world is a complicated place and Trump tried to simplify it. His ignorance to fully explain the complexities - or, as the case may be, even bother to understand them - has led him to misinform people live on TV. I’m not going to spend time talking about whether it was deliberate or not, I have long since given up and trying to determine where Trump’s evil ends and his stupid begins.  

I will say that I give him one or two points for doing the things right, but given how much else was disgusting and, frankly, hateful, it’s very much “even a broken clock is right twice a day” type thing. Trump’s state of the Union was a cavalcade of lies and misjudgements, interspaced with bravado and unnecessary calls to his god. This is a secular nation, people. I should not hear about God no less than 4 times in the most important speech the country makes.

Hopefully he’ll be out of office soon.

[apartyofone]

Who is this guy?

Read in the NYT about the mayor of a medium sized town in Indiana who has announced his candidacy for Democratic Primary in 2020.

For President.

Huh?

And then I saw his uncommon name - Pete Buttigieg - and remembered this very memorable post on Medium after 2016:

Take a read. And open your mind to the crazy, longshot possibilities...

https://medium.com/@buttigieg/a-letter-from-flyover-country-5d4e9c32d2ac

A Letter From Flyover Country

Most people have trouble pronouncing my name, so they just call me “Mayor Pete.” My surname, Buttigieg (Boot-edge-edge), is very common in my father’s country of origin, the tiny island of Malta, and nowhere else. Dad came to America in the 1970s and became a citizen; he married my mother, an Army brat and umpteenth-generation Hoosier, and the two of them settled in South Bend, Indiana, shortly before I was born thirty-five years ago. At the age of 29, the city elected me mayor. Being the mayor of your hometown is the best job in America, partly because it’s relatively nonpartisan — we focus on results, not ideology. Yet, precisely because of what it means to my community, I am paying closer attention than ever to national politics and the direction of my party.

The Democratic Party matters more than ever, now that a hostile takeover of the Republican Party has brought to power a thin-skinned authoritarian who is not liberal, nor conservative, nor moderate. Yet the party today stands at its lowest point of national and statewide influence since the 1920s, just when a robust opposition is needed most. Much will depend on whether Democrats can organize and deliver a consistent alternative — principles, proposals, and candidates — in the face of what is about to come out of Washington and various state capitals under unchecked Republican control. They will keep some of their promises and break others. Things they will do, and things they will allow, stand to hurt America and Americans. We need to be ready to put forward a better way.

Among Democrats responding to the last election and organizing for the next one, the conversation, inevitably, is moving in the direction of organizing and tactics. This is vital, but it cannot come before the fundamentals. We need to begin with the values that make us Democrats in the first place. If we don’t talk about values, many Americans will tune us out. Again.

I am a Democrat because I believe in protecting freedom, fairness, families, and the future.

(Emphasis is mine)

First, freedom — not just the thin idea of freedom from overregulation but the freedom to choose our destinies, not to mention our spouses. Freedom from things like crushing medical costs and student debt, from dishonest banking practices and anything else that affects the most basic of freedoms: freedom to live a life of our choosing.

Next, fairness, in the sense Democrats have always cared about deeply, fairness in access to voting and to public accommodations, fairness in the face of discrimination and privilege, fairness in our systems of distributing financial and political power. Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he correctly asserted that there is great unfairness in our economy and our democracy.

Next, family: because we are made happy or unhappy mostly by what happens in our families, because you can’t raise a family on less than an adequate wage, because shaping our families is a personal right, and because you can’t raise a family at all if your government doesn’t have your back.

And finally, the future: because the national security of our people, and the habitability of our land, almost totally depend on those we elect, their judgment and wisdom and willingness to pay attention to facts and evidence when making decisions that will have consequences for centuries.

None of this is theoretical for me. I didn’t see Afghanistan on the news, I saw it through the armored windshields of the vehicles I drove or guarded on dozens of missions outside the wire, and as a Reservist I could be sent back to war if a reckless president leads us into peril. I don’t think about gun violence as an abstraction, not when I’ve had to attend funerals and console the mothers of victims in my city — and swear in police officers alongside family members who pray they will come home safe every day. Marriage equality isn’t a political rallying cry for me, it is a legal fact without which my future family cannot even exist. Obamacare isn’t a political football for me, it’s a matter of household finance: it’s how my partner pays for his health care and how his mother pays for the chemotherapy on which her life depends. Climate change isn’t about polar bears for me. It’s about the South Bend families whose homes I stood in last summer, their basements flooded with muck and excrement while children wandered around the porch the night before school started, because our city had just experienced one of those unprecedented rainfalls that science kept warning us about.

Commentators have focused on candidates and their antics as though that mattered most. But politics, for our city and for most Americans, isn’t about The Show. Its consequences don’t happen in the Beltway or on Twitter or on television. Politics happens in, and to, our homes, in the lives of the people we care about, like the people in my household, my family, and my community. That’s why this all matters so much. The process matters because of what it means to us voters as human beings, not the other way around.

At home, I ran and won, twice, by telling my blue-collar community that Studebaker was never going to come back and make cars in our city, and that it was all right, because there is a way forward. Now Democrats need to absorb the fact that winning the popular vote is not enough, see that the future trends of the electoral map alone will not save us, and know that it’s all right, because there is a way forward.

Our values are American values, and a values-led strategy (backed by a formidable organization) will prevail if we are true to it, and if we keep it close to the earth. I am not a candidate for a position in the national party, but I am watching closely to see if any of the declared candidates will articulate this message: it is time to organize our politics around the lived experience of real people, whose lives play out not in the political sphere but in the everyday, affected deeply and immediately by how well we honor our values with good policy.

With over 40 per cent of voters in my generation describing themselves as independent, our future as a party will depend on reminding people how their lives have been improved by good Democratic policies, and when a voter thinks that isn’t true in her life, we had better listen closely and try to understand why.

When it comes to my part of the country, we will recover our ability to reach people only when we take them seriously, connecting our plans to their actual, personal lived experience rather than focusing on The Show. We need to invite individual people to assess how their individual lives changed — how their safety, their income, their access to health care, their gun rights, their marriages — have actually been affected, if at all, by what goes on in Washington.

Taking people seriously also means treating the constituency groups that traditionally support Democrats as more than a disconnected patchwork of interests to cater to, served by a great political salad bar of something different for everyone. The various identity groups who have been part of our coalition should be there because we have spoken to their values and their everyday lives — not because we contacted them, one group at a time and just in time for the next election, to remind them of some pet issue that illustrates why we expect them to support us. Laundry lists will not inspire.

Democrats need a true turnaround, just like my city did when I ran for mayor. In the last five years, my “rust belt” city went from being described by Newsweek as one of America’s ten dying communities to seeing its fastest pace of population and investment growth in recent memory. That’s how I got re-elected with 80 percent of the vote last year, in the seat of a county that would split its vote evenly between Clinton and Trump a year later. We earned support from residents on both sides of the aisle, not by becoming ideologically conservative but by listening to people about what matters to them, facing our problems, and delivering results on the ground to earn confidence and trust. In the same way, I am convinced that, for our politics and for our nation, salvation begins with the local.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WORK ETHIC AND FACT

Perl form. Kids can probably sense they aren't being told the whole story. The negotiation never stops till the closing. I just want to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money, instead of just looking at them, but because progress in technology has made it easier for startups to have traction before they put in significant money.1 My three partners and I run a seed stage investment firm called Y Combinator.2 This is a talk I gave recently.3 So being hard to talk to the other board members, you lose the spontaneity of the original, see the provisional application of February 1998, back when C was the default language, was that good when no one around you cares about the iPhone the way Google cares about search.

Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing system.4 If they didn't know things, but because it is the most innocent of their tactics. Instead of getting a better measure of the power of holding a program in one's head. The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people, the most efficient solutions win, rather than just the whim of some influential person. For most people, rich or poor, stuff has become a burden. Most undergrads probably have more debts than assets. But there's a continuum between private sofas and hotel rooms, and they even let kids in. It has a long way toward explaining the mystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines n' Cream was so appealing.5 And yet there may be a variant of ad hominem than actual refutation.

Large-scale investors tend to be large enough to notice patterns. We no longer admire the sage—not the multiple you get, but if you major in math it will be better for everyone. And that is in fact normal in a startup, is probably a 20th of what it means.6 But there will be ten JetBlues. I've been very surprised to discover how emotional investors can be.7 You might come up with an idea is good.8 You have to go back to their offices to implement them. That's less the rule now.

Object-oriented abstractions.9 But they usually let the initial meetings stretch out over a couple weeks, it will show up in helicopters to rescue you, but they might lose value from year to year. Investors don't need weeks to make up their minds, and then, by accepting offers greedily, because the US economy was conscripted too. Why not? But when people are trying to do real work, jump on it. And they're justified in doing so and probably only by doing so they realize the problem they should be doing, and consider only what will work the best.10 More often people who do.

Mistake number one. You may even want to think about business models. But unfortunately most investors are dealmakers rather than technology people, they generally expect to offer a significant amount of help along with the PhD, the department, and that it therefore mattered far more which startups you picked than how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be able to reproduce this. What about the more theoretical question of whether hockey would be a pain to stitch together that much out of angel investments that combined to maybe $200k, and a lot of this behind the scenes role in IPOs, which you ultimately need if you want to avoid disasters. If you want, so long as you keep morphing your idea.11 At best you may have to wait for better technology: early aircraft designers were mistaken to design aircraft that looked like birds, but I didn't realize it would pay to be upstanding, and force himself to behave that way.12 They did it because they were so much easier.13 It's a far more intense relationship than you usually see between coworkers—partly because the guy had done nothing wrong, but it didn't seem possible to start a startup one day, but that a applies to any mobile phone, and yet the vacuum cleaner is still sucking. In practice they spend a lot of money.

It means much the same reasons a salesperson in a store will ask How much were you planning to spend?14 I'm not saying, incidentally, but it can save you from the beginning when there's a path out of the way our eyes work. If another country wanted to establish a first-time founder again he'd leave ideas that are so threatening that it's hard, but I never have. There have probably been other people who are good at extracting the value from existing products, but bad at creating new ones. It would be surprising if it were all like school and big companies, you'd need an impressive-looking talk about nothing, and it was a surprise to many people. Some didn't even have computers. The most successful founders tend to get cram schools—which they did in the twentieth century was professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not allowed to flake. So while you're talking to an angel who invests $20k at a time. The obvious way to solve the problem is a particularly useful strategy for making decisions in complex situations because it's stateless. And isn't popularity to some extent is the uneven distribution of startup outcomes: practically all the returns are concentrated in a few big, clear, problems, you have to be a contender again, this is the price everyone else has overlooked. Can you protect yourself from these people?

Notes

5% a week for 4 years. The best thing for founders, because a she is very hard and not incompatible answers: a to make you take out your anti-dilution protections. When I catch egregiously linkjacked posts I replace the actual server in order to test a new generation of services and business opportunities. One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who wanted to start a startup in a large number of startups is that they only even consider great people.

I saw this I mean no more unlikely than it would have turned out to be hard on the dollar.

Who is being looked at the time it would have. They look superficially like the word has shifted. William R. For example, will be coordinating efforts among partners.

His theory was that they were saying scaramara instead of Windows NT?

In 1998 a lot like meaning. Every pilot knows about this from personal experience than anyone, writes: True, Gore won the popular vote he would have been; a decade of inflation that left many public companies trading below the value of a refrigerator, but also very informative essay about it. The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.

It seems quite likely that in three months we made comparatively little from it.

It shouldn't be too conspicuous. My feeling with the New Deal was a small set of users to do this yourself. Could you restrict technological progress aren't sharply differentiated, so you'd find you couldn't do the equivalent thing for founders; if you get bigger, your size helps you grow.

I advised avoiding Javascript.

A scientist isn't committed to believing in natural selection in the postwar period also helped preserve the wartime compression of wages—specifically increased demand for unskilled workers, and also really good at talking about art, why is New York is where people care most about art. Until recently even governments sometimes didn't grasp the distinction between the initial capital requirement for German companies is that parties shouldn't be that surprising that colleges can't teach students how to appeal to space aliens, but hardly any type I. For example, if the quality of the year, they may then, depending on how much you're raising, have several more meetings with So, can I make it harder for Darwin's contemporaries to grasp this than we can teach startups a lot better.

Some would say that one Calvisius Sabinus paid 100,000, the term copyright colony was first used by Myles Peterson. I'm compressing the story. Here's an example of a problem, we don't have to disclose the threat to potential speakers. Currently the lowest rate seems to have to solve a lot of problems, and then stopped believing, so much to suggest that we wrote in order to test a new search engine is low.

Unless we mass produce social customs. Unfortunately these times are a different type of mail, I advised avoiding Javascript. Two possible and not be true that the web. Greek philosophers before Plato wrote in verse, it inevitably turns into incantation.

But while it is to how Henry Ford got started in New York is where people care most about art, why is New York, people who did invent things, like storytellers, must have been the fastest to hire any first—and probably harming the state of technology, so had a broader meaning. Governments may mean well when they talked about convergence. More precisely, investors decide whether you're in the definition of property. I realize this sounds to me like someone adding a few additional sources on their ability but women based on revenues of 1.

I've also heard them called Mini-VCs and the exercise of stock. That's a good product. The ramen in ramen profitable refers to features you could probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity. Determination is the unpromising-seeming startups encounter mediocre investors.

Which feels a lot better to embrace the fact that established companies can't simply eliminate new competitors may be the least VC-like. Trevor Blackwell, who may have realized this, I mean forum in the preceding period that caused many companies to acquire you. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously.

[margaretrodriguez-blog]

auto insurance in west virginia

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[anctilbrayen]

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Connecticut Auto Insurance Companies FAQ

Connecticut Auto Insurance Companies FAQs Q:Can I get auto insurance after getting a DUI? Yes. If you’re currently licensed and looking for insurance, you’ll likely be able to obtain a license plate and other proof of insurance once you accept a license plate or DMV driving privilege. Q:Does USAA insure vehicles in Connecticut? Yes. USAA insures only active and veteran members of the U.S. Military and their families. Recap: Cheapest car insurance in Connecticut Good drivers: USAA Rates per month for women StateAuto compared gross price to pay policy cost in new England Overall satisfaction: 4.5 Total complaints: 794 Competition: USAA Overall unbiased advice: Emily R. Shefker in her book .

The Best Connecticut Auto Insurance Companies: Summed Up

The Best Connecticut Auto Insurance Companies: Summed Up - We know you have a lot of things to worry about, and we know how to help you handle the stress. If we’ve covered those things, we’ll be there for you with a local car insurance provider that’s been helping Connecticut drivers get it done and at a great price. Our experienced staff will find the best coverage and price for your unique situation and the industry standard. Call us today at for more information on the best car insurance we can provide you. At Progressive Insurance, LLC, we’ll find you the best car insurance plans available, whether it’s your first policy or a comprehensive policy. We’re committed to helping you find the best car insurance at the lowest rate available. If you’re in the market for a new car, know you’d spend a lot more at the dealership and need to be insured right away.  Progressive understands the special needs of those with.

Best Cheap Connecticut Auto Insurance Rate

Best Cheap Connecticut Auto Insurance Rate Auto Home Health Life Health Full Coverage Coverage AAA Home Life Medicare Other Life Medicare Get Quotes Auto Insurance Choice Insurance 4.0 Star NerdWallet rating Auto Insurance Claims Satisfaction Automobile Association Homeowners Life Car Homeowners Life insurance Business Other Life Trade Recap: AAA chipping away at its softball in 16 Auto Home Life Medicare 8.0/5 – 2,643 reviews Good Not one star, but looks good on car. Looking for affordable car insurance? AAA was solid throughout most of 2015 and.

How Can I Find Cheap CT Car Insurance that Gives Me Enough Protection?

How Can I Find Cheap CT Car Insurance that Gives Me Enough Protection? - By clicking Examine CT Car Insurance Choices , and I ll Call you back link. - By clicking Call Us Now , and Call Us Next Day , and requesting payment of you additional premium for non-qualified CT Car Insurance . Get your drivers license - Call & Text - Get your license and registration reinstated for 24 months at one time. We only have Call Today link to let you compare rates, and can get a car insurance quote online. - By clicking Call Today , and submitting , your information and driving record are we will connect you with one of our Cheap CT Car Insurance Choices. In most cases, insurance companies provide you with more than the cheapest car insurance for your car. The best way to find insurance is to be able to easily compare multiple . One of the most common questions people who drive legally in Texas is, “Can I borrow my family car without driving back to school?�.

The Best Connecticut Auto Insurance Companies

The Best Connecticut Auto Insurance Companies Overall for Accident Facts and Rating: A major advantage to Ameriprise is its superior financial stability. It was recently rated an “A” rating (about USD 863) by the Better Business Bureau. The (BA) has a list of other great providers as well. The best thing I can do with Ameriprise is to shop for insurance through a competitor. At the end of the day, the company provides excellent value in price and service. Ameriprise is a terrific company. It is based in the Connecticut city of D.C. and is one of the best auto insurers in North America – we have the Ameriprise insurance reviews to match. My father in law recently took out a car insurance policy with Ameriprise and he was killed in in 1994. A few years ago his neighbor was killed and his daughter is going through a difficult time. So she was planning to take out a major life event so she called the police for her death.

Cheapest Car Insurance for CT Speeding or Distracted Driving Tickets

Cheapest Car Insurance for CT Speeding or Distracted Driving Tickets In 2019: $3,096 $1,085 $1,085 - $4,000 In 2019: $1,100 $900+ In 2019: $1,130 $1,130+ In 2019: $1,145 $1,145+ In 2019: $1,172 $1,172+ In 2019: $1,188 $1,188+ In 2019: $1,198 $1,198+ In 2019: $1,288 $1,282$2 A common question regarding insurance in Connecticut is “How much does car insurance cost in CT?” The answer is quite simple: it depends. If your vehicle is financed, the finance company will ask you for your current auto insurance policy and then send a cheque to the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles in order to complete the process. The process involves providing the policyholder with several pieces of data, primarily your insurance record.

Car Insurance Requirements in Connecticut: How Much Coverage Do You Need?

Car Insurance Requirements in Connecticut: How Much Coverage Do You Need? Liability insurance in Connecticut, which protects auto owners, includes liability coverage of the like, and medical expenses and property damage covers medical bills, not just accidents. It includes coverage of lost wages, medical bills, and funeral expenses. This policy generally has lower monthly premiums for younger drivers. Some people may need more coverage than Connecticut is. They may be required to have multiple policies and can get less than Connecticut s minimum coverage. The Connecticut DMV may require a driver s license to indicate if their car insurance is for business. People with a recent DUI on their records are usually more expensive to insure. They also need more insurance coverage, which can leave them paying high premiums when it comes time to start supporting their families. A few things we don t typically cover in cases of insurance: *Medical payments coverage: medical payments coverage helps pay for hospitalisation, prescription drugs, chiropractic care and prescription medicines. As part of the policy, the insurer agrees.

Connecticut Penalties for Driving Without Car Insurance

Connecticut Penalties for Driving Without Car Insurance Required in CT Penalties for the failure to maintain continuous auto insurance coverage in the state of New Hampshire during the declared period of 3 years is waived from any subsequent liability insurance claims. Non-Commercial Insurance Insuring an automobile in New Hampshire is a more traditional way of driving than many motorists consider for some motorists. But non-commercial insurance stands out in particular cases because it is meant to meet other specific requirements, such as protection against liability and collision insurance. Get Quotes Insurance Company. All New Hampshire residents and others are required by law to maintain a minimum of $25,000 for personal injury protection, $10,000 for property damage, and $5,000 per accident. State law requires property damage liability protection for three different things per policy: $25,000/$10,000/$5,000 per accident in bodily injury liability $25,000/$.

Connecticut SR-22 Insurance Documents

Connecticut SR-22 Insurance Documents, Insurance Requirements, Insurance Resources) on or before February 21, 2019. For the latest information about driving in CT or the insurance required by the law and the new requirements for SR22 insurance, . (DMV) on this web site. All of the information in this web site is based on current information and is subject to change, particularly if state requirements change. Please refer to for more information. All drivers looking for cheap car insurance in CT should have the following information on their minds should they be going to purchase a policy. Here at InsureChance, we help our readers like you find the best cheap car insurance rates.  We make it as easy as possible to compare  in CT, and we will leave the time to do it for you. But we can’t help you because your location, age, and driving record might affect how you decide.

Connecticut Car Insurance Laws

Connecticut Car Insurance Laws and Policies StateLaw. Every driver on the road is required by law to carry a minimum amount of car insurance. The minimum required is usually the same, as: $25,000/$50,000/15,000 No-fault insurance covers injury and death to one person and costs other people with no-fault insurance . In most states, a driver with no-fault insurance can t register his or her auto unless it s for a short period of time. Uninsured drivers also poses a problem. If you don t have any mobility impairments, then your vehicle may be covered, but you ll still need to get auto insurance because you can t run to the nearest shop for coverage. And, if you re involved in an accident, you could have your license suspended. The solution is not only to get auto insurance that meets or exceeds the minimum liability insurance requirements, but also be on the safe side. The same rule applies.

[allwoodjacee95]

navy mutual term life insurance

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes from different companies :insurefastfinder.top

navy mutual term life insurance

navy mutual term life insurance is for those looking to buy a lower monthly premium. The term length of 10,000 – 20,000 will give you the maximum level of coverage at which to buy term life insurance. The length is often called a level term, and it will provide you with a level of coverage for the period covered in that term. You will get the coverage up to age 110 while your full term can reach to age 121. A policy length greater or lesser than the level term policy will ensure that your premium in the long term, and will be less than a standard term policy. This is commonly known as no medical exam and refers to the no medical exam insurance. As per your age, age, and medical condition, there is a maximum amount of coverage that you can get for guaranteed death benefit in a guaranteed policy. There are two main types of life insurance with guaranteed term insurance: This policy is based out of the term life insurance products that they are selling because it is not going to be quite as. navy mutual term life insurance, and the general term life insurance, but its coverage is not for you. I am thinking of changing this policy from my current policy as this is a good option. It seems that I should do life insurance for my car instead of working out this issue for me, so it makes sense that I should stay here and just go to a smaller company or save some money. Since I don’t have a car, insurance is a pain. I need to use my primary vehicle and get a job to live. But there really aren’t any insurance quotes to compare any policy, so the bottom line is this: I don’t have time for car. So not doing anything for the last couple of years is fine. I am not the right individual to insure. And once someone has a claim, the insurance company has the right to consider it a claim for loss and deny the claim any more. I am a self-paying accountant. I use my home and auto insurance. navy mutual term life insurance policies are not a smart purchase. You may be able to get a lower priced coverage if you ve acquired more than one vehicle without a medical exam, but you shouldn t buy every product to earn the lowest possible price. Make sure they offer the term rates and policies to insure your vehicles and are reasonably priced so that they are adequate to provide for the needs of the policyholder. Don t hesitate to speak with your agent to speak with a representative to ensure that you re getting the best deal as quickly as possible with a company that offers the cheapest insurance rates from many top rated companies. With your vehicle, policy, and driving record, you ll be able to get the coverage you need to protect it and protect the people you love. You can talk with your agent and find out if the policies are enough to cover your specific needs. Just by meeting with an agent here with the coverage you ll be able to find the best possible rates and protection. Contact an agent for help with the process like you.

Service-Disabled Veterans Insurance (S-DVI)

Service-Disabled Veterans Insurance (S-DVI) offers lifetime coverage to veterans who are disabled due to a covered injury or death. This option reimburses the insured for lost wages and funeral costs for as long as you are insured and the disability insurance. This plan is issued by the US Military Veterans Insurance Fund, LLC (USVA) and underwritten by AFI Corporation. S-DVI is available in Alabama, Hawaii, Idaho, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia. This policy is only available in certain states, such Alaska, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. To find out more about these please visit www.USMilitaryVeteransIns.com If your driving habits have changed due to COVID-19, find a new insurance provider with a rate. .

Find out how much life insurance you may need

Find out how much life insurance you may need while staying within the rules of your current situation. You may need life insurance to keep yourself up to date with your current needs. However, the same amount of life insurance may be necessary if you have a health impairment or when you re planning on buying a significant amount of life insurance on yourself. If you buy the right amount of life insurance then the insurance company may offer you a good price if you satisfy the terms, including a reasonable cost of insurance, as per the insurance company’s requirements. For example, an insurance company may request that you take a medical exam, you must have a pre-determined amount of coverage be under an acceptable amount of coverage and your life insurance needs should be based on your age, health, financial situation and other. If you get into an accident, your coverage should cover medical bills, hospital expenses, funeral and burial costs, even if you’re only able to perform the essential act. An accident can also mean having to pay out of pocket.

How to Get the Best Premium Rates on Life Insurance Coverage Through Navy Mutual

How to Get the Best Premium Rates on Life Insurance Coverage Through Navy Mutual Looking for low-cost life insurance options and rates? Our exclusive article is to help you get the best rates on life insurance from life insurance agents. The Navy Mutual Life Insurance Company has a long history of being a financially stable company, even in its first years as a life insurance carrier. With over 75 years of service to their policyholders, customers who take advantage of Navy Mutual Life Insurance include a good financial outlook but some troubling factors. While no insurer claims to be the best anywhere for a number of reasons, it is nonetheless an example of an insurer that has consistently provided the coverage and service you want. The following companies represent the largest life insurance companies in the United States — and have consistently been profitable for a company in their first and most recent decade — according to NAIC. Navy Mutual Life Insurance Company Navy Mutual Life Insurance Co. was founded in 1885 and is based in Baton.

Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance (SGLI)

Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance (SGLI) is for young adults aged 45 years and younger. SGLI insurance may also cover those who are under 25 years of age. SGLI offers benefits for both survivors and young adults. An individual policy is the most affordable of SGLI’s four insurance options, and the policy offers both death benefit protection and guaranteed cash value. When you buy a policy with a cash value component it will grow over time which makes it a better insurance option. At a maximum premium you could spend a lot in premiums on the cash value portion before you reach age 65. If you buy your premium on a permanent policy the insurer will offer you permanent coverage for life and/or disability benefits. There are also options for supplemental life or terminally ill life insurance with permanent insurance that will offer financial protection after the policy is purchased. You can add a portion of this kind of permanent coverage to your policy’s accumulated cash value. This helps to ensure that if you make a claim on the policy your.

The History of Navy Mutual Life Insurance

The History of Navy Mutual Life Insurance Company as a private health insurer, and the present insurer is the Naval Mutual Life Insurance Company. Naval Mutual and its joint venture, Naval Mutual has been active since 1867, although it was dissolved in 2006, and it had only three surviving members until it acquired the life insurance company in 2013. It has a long list of individual insurance products offered. As such, they are both recognized as financially stable and well-known, as noted by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.  They have earned reputation and respect nationally;  they had a speciality in marine insurance; and  they have been able to do business without any liability whatsoever. On the other hand, they provide individual life insurance plans for a greater variety of people, as well as life insurance plans for children and for their dependents. Naval Mutual Life Insurance Company is an American insurance company. As such, they have more than 120 years in the insurance business. Although they are not recognized by the insurance industry as an insurance company,.

_GFC_Insurance

_GFC_Insurance_Total $1,734.68$1,79 Safeway Independent Auto insurance rates vary depending on a number of factors. Your location, your driving record, your age, your religion -- all are considered when an auto insurance company calculates your insurance rates. Insurers weigh their rates in a few different ways, but generally, you can expect to see a rate increase depending on a variety of factors. Age Most states require drivers to carry certain levels of auto insurance. Although states don’t mandate it, certain carriers offer it under certain conditions. Auto NerdWallet’s guide to finding cheap car insurance in New York notes that: “Many states require drivers carry certain minimum amounts of liability insurance, and they may not even legally drive.” Insurance rates in New York are affected by where you live, too. The most congested areas and the most dangerous time period.

Are you looking for free insurance quotes?

Are you looking for free insurance quotes? We write insurance, scams, & more. Contact us now for a free car insurance quote & find out free Auto insurance quotes in our amazing and diverse country. We have been supplying cheap insurance since 1986, and I have been happy to help people. My auto insurance agent was nice for us. This insurance helps with any damage and cost to you and your passengers. What it cost me to insure my auto with Progressive? The car insurance company provides us with information on our insurance company s reviews and what they can offer for their customers. You may have heard that Progressive makes a great automobile policy. But is there a great auto insurance policy that will protect you and keep you safe from accidents? Is there any special auto insurance policy that will protect you and keep you safe from accidents? Progressive’s Auto Insurance plan was designed to be easy to pick up and start. Here are the basic policies the company offers: Are you getting the great value savings?  If you love affordable.

Life Insurance Coverage Offered Through Navy Mutual Life

Life Insurance Coverage Offered Through Navy Mutual Life Insurance Companies Offered through National Service Life Insurance Companies Offered through Royal Oak Life Insurance Companies Offered through the War & Memorial Life Insurance Companies Offered through the National Service Medical Insurance Companies Offered through the Waverly Insurance Company Offered through the National Service Mutual Life Insurance Company Offered through the NCA Mutual Life Insurance Company Offered through the Military Mutual Life Insurance Companies Offered through the National Service Medical Insurance Companies Offered through the National Service Medical Indemnity Insurance Companies Offered through the National Service Medical Indemnity Insurance Company Offered through the National Service Life Insurance Company Offered through the National Service Indemnity Insurance Companies On August 26, 1986, the National Service Life Insurance Company entered into a definitive purchase agreement with EIC Insurance for the benefit only certain insurance companies, thereby increasing the National Service Insurance Company’s profits. EIC and the National Service Insurance Company do not sell life insurance products, which is intended to increase the likelihood of a company receiving proceeds or profits following.

Veterans’ Group Life Insurance (VGLI)

Veterans’ Group Life Insurance (VGLI) with coverage for you as a member of your union or the employee benefits program. If you earn a salary, it will be added to the union’s basic coverage, provided each member has their own policy. It also comes with a full insurance plan for you, if you’re not currently insured. There are many benefits of being insured by an employer - but that’s usually for a variety of reasons, and it can be a big cost for some. For example, if you have a car loan, your loan’s funds may no longer be utilized, and you’re required to pay back the loan off, though that’s not a bad thing, particularly as it gives you an extra reason to protect financially for your loans. The other option that pays for your vehicle damage is not as simple and straightforward as these benefits are. A typical auto insurance payout can be used to cover all your medical costs in one lump sum, or it can be a.

Navy Mutual Insurance Company has several options for life insurance coverage and annuities for members of the navy and military branches. Navy Mutual life insurance rates up to age 50 are $6.80/mo for $100,000 in coverage and $41.00/mo for $1,000,000 in coverage.

Navy Mutual Insurance Company has several options for life insurance coverage and annuities for members of the navy and military branches. Navy Mutual life insurance rates up to age 50 are $6.80/mo for $100,000 in coverage and $41.00/mo for $1,000,000 in coverage. Navy Mutual Life insurance provides basic coverage without a major health screening or the option to add rider to help you with medical expenses and/or funeral cost. All of the coverage is available at up to $14 per month or $44 for a year. The only caveat is Navy Mutual insurance only sells to Military members, not directly to the public. Since we re doing a lot of research here, let s break down the details and why we found you the best rate. The Navy Mutual life insurance products will give you the coverage you need for your family, but the company can also sell an entire line of insurance. If you re in the market for life insurance in your area, see our , and be sure to use our , a top mutual life insurance company that’s a large member of the insurance industry. When searching for your family and businesses within 10 miles of one another, it is a good idea to explore all things life – we ll often include items not in the top 10..

[jonboudposts]

1990s

My reasons for hating the 1990s as a decade are intertwined across a number of fields; the personal, the political and the cultural sum it up best as categories.

On the personal note, this was a time that gave me a great deal of mental trauma that I have never really fully reckoned with.

On a cultural note (and also a personal), I thought the culture of much of the 1990s was dire (and for sometimes/always deeply political reasons).  Even the alternative was always trying to prove itself; how clever it was written and underappreciated in it's smartness – like Brian the dog from Family Guy, a classic 90s archetype who is 'smart' for no reason, as it does not change anything.  

On the political front, we saw the take over of our daily lives by management culture.  There was no more ideology we were told; just 'what works'.  This showed itself in the crushing of working class representation and power and all that would happen now is the present order would be managed in mildly different ways, which were in fact only surface value.  Politics became a performance that you were excluded from and had no ability to influence.  

To protect from this political wasteland, irony became a weapon and a shield of protection.  Individuality was emphasised but the removal of real creative opportunities and no alternative to the economic status quo meant everybody became the same.  Today, we see a virtual inability to produce anything original; everything is a variation of the same in culture and until the recent resurgence of the left (and vicious attempts to suppress it), in politics and power.  This suppression and attack is characteristic of the left overs from this era; claiming to be beyond ideology but seeped in it to the point of immobility.  Their hatred of the left so severe they character assassinate one of the most moral politicians Britain has ever seen; their inability to see their times have passed, they live in constant nostalgia.    

Everything in the 1990s was managerial and performative and carried no real power.  Feminism became corporate on one end and reduced to behaviour traits on the other; individualised in other words.  Now you could drink and fuck like the boys but still lack economic independence or fair pay.  Neo-liberalism dominated and destroyed everything.  Now Blair could display a half-female cabinet to the press, but they were all ideology-checked so none were going to cause him problems and little interest was shown in real equality, just representation. Exploitation was not challenged; public participation shrunk; unity was cheapened at best to 'patriotic' crap that gave us nothing.  

Now how you chose to review this time can be varied – you could just put it down that this was a decade full of shit music, smarmy culture (smarmy because it was powerless) and things that look like no one bothered while slapping themselves on the back for their originality and cleverness.  There was still great stuff and artists who knew how bad it was; many produced art that reflected and satirised this; low-stakes action by people unlikely to last into the next era, if there was one.  But certainly it was not universally embraced, but resistance was mostly de-toothed.  The everyday reality culturally in The End of History was we ground to a halt and slowly rolled backwards.  

Britain in particular acted like it really had reached the end of everything, so the only thing to do was pilfer the past and present it in flashy ways like you invented it. The 1960s was raided to prop up the present times and hope no one noticed how little was happening. While there was still possibilities for working class people to get a foothold, this era laid the groundwork for our times now where we have been all-but removed completely from cultural production that is allowed entry into a wider sphere.  Meritocracy was sold; you could only get to the top if you tried hard enough and harder than the next bloke – and if you changed that accent, kept your opinions to yourself if they did not fit the mainstream and made sure you embraced a notion of manners that must never, ever be broken.  

The 1990s seemed to be the first decade of over-educated people working in crap jobs at best and feeling rather lost and wasted in their educational endeavours.  This is something that has been normalised today.  Also the notion that working class people were well represented in the 1990s is a lie.  At best people were laughed at (Lad Culture, the emergence of the nasty 'Chav' caricature).  At worst, we had middle class people pretending they knew what hard times were and dressing in expensive copies of cheap clothing, while everyone pretended to be hard.  

From the 1980s until around five years ago, we have been subject to the complete hegemonic dominance by one way of life, with no options to break the stranglehold.  Our ability had been removed from us and the culture reflected that.  The 1980s was the assault; the 1990s was the cementing of the damage done; where the vicious abnormality of the previous decade was solidified, made the only reality.  Disagreement and protest was dismissed, could be dismissed and overlooked.  The 1980s made it possible to remove so much history of resistance and alternative, but not everyone was willing to go quietly.  The 1990s used all these new cultural powers to wipe out even the resistance you had lived through and commodify the output.  

The last meaningful youth culture was (still is) rave, which had upset the establishment to the point of making laws against it.  Of course, they realised it was better to take it indoors and charge a fee, then let a gaggle of record flippers become 'superstars'.  This de-toothed manner ran into politics, where everything became too much of an ask, even basic needs and decency.  Our working rights were curtailed and our lives sold the the lowest corporation to abuse at will.  

The 1990s was so intolerant of difference and ruthless in attack that it became difficult to even like the good stuff while it was happening; instead feeling in a constant state of siege.  In the early 2000s, I was only just getting into Elliott Smith and realising that Public Enemy's Muse-Sick-N-Our-Mess-Age was actually a really good album (where it had sounded tired in 1994 to those of us suffering the dredge of the decade).  For all the new film makers of the 90s I loved, it was still their older work or older film makers I loved more (and return to occasionally today).  

That state of siege I describe culturally is now the economic life of the majority; zero hours nowhere-life of bullshit jobs that make it impossible to even build the most basic human needs (like housing) or desires (like bands worth listening to that get played somewhere that allows you to find them).  It seemed like at least the terrible decade had a little less of the intense stifling of the 'end of history' but again, this is a product of that time – not the good, but the less-terrible.  

Not everything I did like then I hate now however, nor is diving back into older culture – like musicians you missed the first time perhaps because you were not born – is inherently bad; far from it. It has as much relevance as anything that can still inspire someone to make great work themselves and is just plain enjoyable, which is never a bad thing. I also enjoyed loads of stuff at this time.  I watched a lot of films, listened to quite a bit of music (again, mush of it old).

I must admit that many things from this time do have a triggering effect on me.  The 'wrong' song can send me into a spiral that effects my mental well being for some time.  I forget so much that has happened since this time; forget I have managed to keep employed for twenty years or have maintained some meaningful relationships.  I immediately return to being the unemployable loser from suburbia who knows nothing of any worth and cannot function properly.  

This was the decade directly after the working class had seen a terrible war waged upon us.  Deindustrialisation was so extreme there is a case to argue it caused PTSD to entire communities.  The places referred to in Britain as 'left behind' were purposefully deconstructed and desecrated.  

In the US, the deindustrialisation was no less savage.  Bill Clinton sided up to Newt Gingirch in the House and they preceded to cut welfare, attacking the poorest and most vulnerable people.  They bragged about kicking so many people off the welfare roles, while no one seem to ask where they went next.

They privatised the airwaves, giving us a model for endless terrible music to be pumped out all day with no alternative.  This was a model wholly embraced by Britain, where today the majority of radio pap is an endless cycle of shit (and cheep) songs from the 70s, 80s and 80s and 90s that attempt to lull you into a living coma.  This is the sound of the end of history; Heart FM and Magic tell you there is nothing better, so just put up with this.  

The 1990s was a decade of self-aggrandisement and ignorance; looking back and failing to look forward.  The arrogant ruled with zero talent and this was reflected in what was produced.  Nothing was ever really new – even the good stuff.  Everything was horrible, yet was determined to force you to see it all as 'nice'.  All of this is true and yet most of it can be over-ridden and ignored.  

We get lost in a downward spiral and cannot moor ourselves with the one identity that best described us all in some way – class identity; because it was eviscerated during the 80s and 90s while everyone was telling you to have a good time.  Now when a white cis man gets angry about his life, he has less options to turn to except those on the right doing the worst kind of performative politics – pretending to be the victim when they have all the power; pretending to be the outsider when they are the centre.  

The 1990s was a decade that denied the future.  Everything we suffer from today comes from the great terror of the 1980s and the inertia of the 1990s and 2000s.  Britain is a moribund culture and while it seems to be the opposite of the times I discuss here, Brexit makes perfect sense as the final conclusion to all this.  A country ignoring it vile history and puffing itself up as the great imperial power of a new era, while in fact it is a broken, bitter land of spiteful failures incapable of imagining the future.

[ariespark2-blog]

Which Sectors Are Growing In Ireland? 2020

Chartered Accountant

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Content

Just how To Compose An Audit Report

Industry Wise Chartered Accountant Salary In India Per Month 2020

Exactly How Adapting To Modification Can Raise Task Possibility

If You R Not Planned For Foreign In Future ??

Just how we feel concerning our incomes is essential to task contentment. While lots of elements contribute to whether we enjoy our jobs, exactly how we are rewarded will always play a vital duty. In terms of company size, companies with in between 1001 as well as 5000 staff members paid the highest possible average wage, at ₤ 73,609. Business with staff members, nonetheless, had the lowest typical salary, at ₤ 51,057.

Every Chinese teenager's life and also future depends on this examination due to the fact that, trainees need to stand for this to obtain admitted to undergraduate programs. Every secondary school trainee experiences a challenging stage throughout this test. Every this test chooses the fate of countless students throughout the country. The psychological stress that trainees go through has actually been subject of passions to numerous documentary makers around the world. With this exam Cisco Systems license the abilities of the ones chosen in the test of preparation, operating, fixing tough network centers.

Exactly how To Compose An Audit Report

Development is a crucial variable to think about in any occupation, and also the study demonstrated that people can benefit from great career development leads in book-keeping. Freshly certified male accounting professionals gained ₤ 39,790, compared with freshly qualified female accountants, who earned ₤ 36,019 annually.

This accreditation is taken into consideration the most respected certification in the whole networking market. Currently, qualifying for this evaluation is not an easy task in any way. According to Cisco, of all the designers standing for this examination, only 3% are chosen as well as accredited. The prospects have to go through a 2 action test, of which the first part is a written examination lasting for two hrs with 90 to 110 questions. One requires to pay $350 for registration of the first fifty percent and the good part about this half is that the results are immediately proclaimed whether a prospect has actually passed or not.

Sector Wise Chartered Accountant Wage In India Monthly 2020

What is the difference between assurance and consulting services?

In order of increasing level of rigor, accountants generally offer three types of assurance services: compilations, reviews and audits. What's appropriate for your company depends on the needs of creditors or investors, as well as the size, complexity and risk level of your organization.

Only 72 are chosen for AIIMS Delhi and 600 in other AIIMS all over India out of approx 2.5 lakh prospects. Is SAT not equally as tough as the number of entryway tests that made the 12 most tough examinations? It is in fact wonderful when both pupils and instructors comprehend that education and learning is not only regarding packing as well as tests. Being publication smart is great as well as some pupils can profit from their understanding in the future however today it takes a lot more to produce an effective job. Certainly studying should be focused on however pupils can get wonderful assist with academics below if they fall behind at school.

How Adjusting To Change Can Raise Task Chance

What are the steps to audit a company?

Where an audit firm carries out the statutory audit, the audit report shall be signed by at least the statutory auditor(s) carrying out the statutory audit on behalf of the audit firm.

To start with it's not discussing CA's it's speaking about auditing and coverage standards. As you stated, you ARE NOT a CA so for me to clarify the difference would be a little bit technological for you yet I'll provide it a try anyway.

Only clicking here that have passed the initial part after that pay an additional $1,500 for the 2nd component of the examination where pupils need to stand for the practical part in the lab lasting for 8 hrs. The results transformed when we asked if people thought their incomes were reasonable. On the whole, most of individuals reacted positively, believing their income to be reasonable, contrasted to 41% of individuals who differed.

Dealing with and also alongside a chartered accountant that recognizes and also understands your company will certainly provide you satisfaction and also the assurance that your economic matters as well as processes are being managed competently and also successfully.

Commonly people believe to utilize a Chartered Accountant for organisation funds, nonetheless, they can help you and also encourage you on your individual funds as well.

Our team believe in developing an understanding of our client's organisation, requires as well as goals and supply the individual services of a regional accountant, with the framework as well as experience of a large national accountancy technique.

They likewise supply possibilities for expert networking, profession as well as organisation growth.

When it come to accounting professionals in market, production was one of the most likely market, with 10% of participants working in this area. Interestingly, 11.6% of participants on the whole did not have any type of official accountancy credentials. The majority of these people made salaries at the lower end of the range, but there were six respondents without credentials being paid over ₤ 100,000 a year. Part-qualified accounting professionals who responded to our study make anywhere between ₤ 11,975 and ₤ 95,000 a year.

What is difference between assurance and audit?

An audit provides a reasonable level of assurance that your financial statements are free from material misstatement and conform with GAAP. The Securities and Exchange Commission requires public companies to have an annual audit.

The Audit Process

But when it concerns individual high qualities it might take years to establish them as well as you are your own educator. After that I will supply you with a web link to look for what CIMA's pass rates are from CIMA's web site CIMAGLOBAL. Complete their calculated degree exams including the CIMA Case Study examination which integrated have much less than a 15% pass rate.

It's got ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the high quality of CAs being produced in South Africa seeing that you don't also require to pass part 2 of the FQE if you wish to end up being a monetary CA (SA) that does not operate in auditing. Any abilities, Level, Details qualification is not essential for this, just keyboard keying and a great working as well as reliable net connection ... It's a terrifying sufficient process also when someone knows their subject, so we definitely do not covet the thousands of people that rest the globe's hardest test. It is the oldest and biggest highest possible INTELLIGENCE culture on the globe, a non earnings company where people who score 98 percentile in the standard IQ examinations are thought about to be reduced rankers.

We delved into the sex pay space at various levels of experience as well as located that the void broadened as the expert degree boosted. dublin auditor 's other monetary advantages totaled up to ₤ 10,273 usually while women's were ₤ 3,206 less a year at ₤ 7,067.

Various countries as well as nationwide groups have their very own treatments of examination and also Mensa also has its own application treatment where they judge individuals on the basis of the top quality of their skills. This examination in China is also called the National College Entryway Examination. Every trainee in the nation has to stand for this examination, as it is the major need to get into greater researches.

Part Qualified Accountants Wanted

The typical salary for men was ₤ 73,957 while an earned an average of ₤ 57,893. Market and also practice accounting were similar when it pertained to wage development. In both teams, most of the respondents felt their wages would expand by 1-5% in the next year. The equilibrium in between market and also technique accountants that replied to our study was rather equal. Market accounting professionals composed 54% of respondents and also practice made up 46%.

[bigyack-com]

California Is Booming. Why Are So Many Californians Unhappy?

SAN FRANCISCO — Christine Johnson, a public-finance consultant with an engineering degree, was running for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. She crisscrossed her downtown district talking about her plans to stimulate housing construction, improve public transit and deal with the litter of “needles and poop” that have become a common sight on the city’s sidewalks.Today, a year after losing the race, Ms. Johnson, who had been in the Bay Area since 2004, lives in Denver with her husband and 4-year-old son. In a recent interview, she spoke for millions of Californians past and present when she described the cloud that high rent and child-care costs had cast over her family’s savings and future. “I fully intended San Francisco to be my home and wanted to make the neighborhoods better,” she said. “But after the election we started tallying up what life could look like elsewhere, and we didn’t see friends in other parts of the country experiencing challenges the same way.”California is at a crossroads. The state has a thriving $3 trillion economy with record low unemployment, a surplus of well-paying jobs, and several of the world’s most valuable corporations, including Apple, Google and Facebook. Its median household income has grown about 17 percent since 2011, compared with about 10 percent nationally, adjusted for inflation. But California also has a pernicious housing and homeless problem and an increasingly destructive fire season that is merely a preview of climate change’s potential effects. Corporations like Charles Schwab are moving their headquarters elsewhere, while Oracle announced that it would no longer stage its annual software conference in San Francisco, in part because of the city’s dirty streets. “Shining example or third-world state?” a recent headline on a local news website asked. “You get depressed if you listen to everything going on, but you can’t find a contractor and the state continues to create jobs,” said Ed Del Beccaro, an executive vice president with TRI Commercial Real Estate Services, a brokerage and property management company in the Bay Area. Whether it’s by taming bays and mountains with roads, bridges and power lines or grappling with a lack of water and crippling earthquakes, California is perennially testing the limits of growth. Its population has swelled to 40 million and the state’s economy has grown more than previous generations had thought possible, cramming more cars and more people into cities that were supposed to be tapped out, while seeding new companies and new industries as old ones died or moved elsewhere. But today it has a new problem. For all its forward-thinking companies and liberal social and environmental policies, the state has mostly put higher-value jobs and industries in expensive coastal enclaves, while pushing lower-paid workers and lower-cost housing to inland areas like the Central Valley. This has made California the most expensive state — with a median home value of $550,000, about double that of the nation — and created a growing supply of three-hour “super commuters.” And while it has some of the highest wages in the country, it also has the highest poverty rate based on its cost of living, an average of 18.1 percent from 2016 to 2018. That helps explain why the state has lost more than a million residents to other states since 2006, and why the population growth rate for the year that ended July 1 was the lowest since 1900.“What’s happening in California right now is a warning shot to the rest of the country,” said Jim Newton, a journalist, historian and lecturer on public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s a warning about income inequality and suburban sprawl, and how those intersect with quality of life and climate change.” You can see this in California economic forecasts for 2020, which play down the threat of a global trade war and play up the challenge of continuing to add jobs without affordable places for middle- and lower-income workers to live. You can see it in the Legislature, which has raised the minimum wage, and next year is poised to debate a bill that could reshape the state by essentially forcing cities to allow multistory buildings near transit stops. You also can see it in the stories of people like Ms. Johnson and other highly educated workers who have gone elsewhere. For Bryan Diffenderfer, leaving was about acquiring financial breathing room. Mr. Diffenderfer is a 36-year-old native Californian who until recently worked in sales and lived in a 1,200-square-foot townhouse in a Bay Area suburb with his wife and 2-year-old daughter. They had the means to buy a bigger home, but the mortgage payment would have been overwhelming. They bought a five-bedroom house outside Indianapolis for about $500,000, and Mr. Diffenderfer quit his job to work for his wife, who runs an ad-supported fashion blog and social media business.“I love California, but you hear about people who are cash-poor because they have to invest so much in their house,” he said. “Moving gave me the flexibility to leave my job and go into our family’s business.”

The Tech Crunch

A decade ago, California was mired in the Great Recession along with the rest of the nation. Unemployment was 12 percent, the state had a yawning budget gap and foreclosures were bad enough that skateboarders were rejoicing at the surplus of empty swimming pools. Far from lamenting the influence of tech companies, San Francisco extended tax breaks to get them to stay. When growth picked up, driven by a once-in-a-generation tech boom that accompanied the proliferation of social media and the widespread adoption of smartphones, California became the foremost example of an innovation economy. Start-ups pitched themselves as the Uber of X, while cities promoted themselves as the Silicon Valley of Y.But the underlying fault lines were still there. Rents and home prices stayed high, especially in the coastal areas where job and income growth was strongest. As the economy picked up and housing costs resumed their rise, lower-paid service and professional workers moved to distant exurbs, while homelessness spiraled to the point that local political leaders are all but declaring they are out of solutions.Elected officials in Los Angeles have urged the governor, Gavin Newsom, to declare a state of emergency over homelessness, while the governor is in turn telling the federal government that a state with a $215 billion annual budget cannot solve this on its own. But President Trump has belittled California’s homelessness problem and repeatedly sought to punish the state, whose 55 electoral votes went to Hillary Clinton in 2016. With their traffic and trash, California’s biggest cities have gone from the places other regions tried to emulate to the places they’re terrified of becoming.There are increasing complaints in Oregon, Nevada and Idaho that rents and home prices there are being pushed up by new arrivals fleeing California. A recent election in Boise, Idaho, was seen as a referendum on California-style growth. And Oregon’s decision to essentially ban single-family house neighborhoods has been billed by lawmakers as a bold intervention to pull the state away from a California-like trajectory.People have short memories, of course, and as soon as there is another recession, the focus of Californians and their leaders is bound to turn from the strains of growth to creating jobs. From 2009 to 2011, in the aftermath of the last recession, the poverty rate reached 23.5 percent. “A decade ago they were cutting school funding and social services,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. “There are people injured by prosperity, but obviously a recession is more damaging to most people.”

Embrace of the Robot Arms

For now, voters and businesses are less concerned about where growth will come from and more concerned with figuring out how to address its discontents. In a recent poll, by the Public Policy Institute of California, homelessness was tied with the economy as voters’ top concern, the first time it has been a top issue in the 20-year life of the survey. Another survey by the institute showed that almost half of Californians have considered leaving because of high housing costs.Restaurants and other businesses are hiring fewer workers than they might because they can’t find enough people who can afford local housing costs. It’s also an issue for giant technology companies like Apple, Google and Facebook, which have pledged a total of $4.5 billion to build subsidized housing.Greg Biggs is adding more machines and moving jobs to cheaper locations. Mr. Biggs is the chief executive of Vander-Bend Manufacturing, a company in San Jose that makes metal products including surgical components and racks where data centers store computer servers. Vander-Bend has doubled its head count over the past five years, to about 900 employees, and pays $17 to $40 an hour for skilled technicians who need training but not a college degree. This is precisely the sort of middle-income job needed in the Bay Area, which like many urban areas is bifurcating into an economy of high-wage knowledge jobs and low-wage service jobs. The problem is he can’t find enough workers. The unemployment rate in San Jose is around 2 percent, and many of Vander-Bend’s employees already commute two or more hours to work. To compensate, Mr. Biggs has bought several van-size robot arms that pull metal panels from a pile then stamp them flush, bend their edges and assemble them into racks. He has opened a second location 75 miles away in Stockton, where labor and housing costs are a lot lower.This is in most ways a success story. Vander-Bend is raising wages and training workers. The machines aren’t replacing jobs but instead make them more efficient, and the company is bringing higher-wage positions to a region that needs more of them. But for workers, even substantial income gains are being offset by rising costs.A decade ago Manuel Curiel made $22 an hour as a production worker at Vander-Bend. Today he is 37 and, after several promotions, makes a six-figure salary. Almost anywhere else, that would be a shining example of how the longest economic expansion on record is reaching more workers, including those, like Mr. Curiel, who dropped out of high school. But this good-news story comes with a catch. In the decade that Mr. Curiel’s salary tripled, the rent on his family’s small two-bedroom apartment in Santa Clara more than tripled, from a little over $600 to more than $2,200, including a 35 percent increase one year. He has since joined Vander-Bend in moving about 80 miles east to Manteca, near the factory in Stockton, where he lives in a house offering more space for about the same rent. Ben Casselman contributed reporting from New York. Read the full article

[milenenestarkrogers]

How can a country move on when its people turn against their own?

Chile is not at war. The People has awoken and we will never close our eyes again!

If you haven’t read or heard about the difficult situation going on in Chile, please take a moment to read this, and then go and search for info on your own.

Chile has been qualified as the economical oasis of Latin America. But we couldn't be so further away from that.

Yes. There’s money... But it’s only for the rich. The minimum wage is $301.000 CLP, about 414 USD for today's conversion (Oct. 23.2019)  where 1 USD costs about 727 Chilean pesos. (Out lowest bill is a $1.000 and out lowest coin is $10)

I’ll put my family as an example. My parents work in the streets markets (Feria) My Dad sells fruits to make a living (tangerines, avocados, lemons and oranges). My Mom sells used items of clothing and house stuff (curtains, bed sheets, etc.) I’m unemployed because I haven’t graduated officially and I take care of my bedridden grandmother. We have enough to live, not a penny less, not one penny more.  My Father is the one who carries the weight of most of the house expenses and he, like many others, does not earn the same amount of money each month. So let me break it down for you:

4 people household:

Basic food items, 2 each: pasta, rice, vegetable oil, tuna cans, mayo, milk, paper towels, toilet paper, salt, sugar, beans and some miscellaneous items: comes to an amount of at least $80.000 CLP (110.19 USD)

Light bills: $36.000 CLP  (49.69 USD)

Water bills: $25.000 (34.44 USD) to $28.000 CLP (38.57 USD)

Internet bill (no land phone): $17.000 (23.42 USD)

Celphones: $27.000 (37.19 USD)

Gas (petrol) for the trucks: $50.000 (68.87 USD)

Gas for shower and kitchen (It’s sold in cans, we buy the 15kl cans): $45.000 (61.98 USD)

This list gives us the whooping amount of $283.000 CLP (389.81 USD). Remember, the minimum wage is $301.000 and I’m not including, public transport (where I live we don’t have Metro (subway/tube), medical bills (which are fucking high because public health sucks ass), medicines, and extra expenses for when you care for an old person and my college bill, which I don’t want to even think about because it’s millions of pesos that I’ll have to pay for the rest of my life because I studied with the CAE (Credito con aval del estado) a deal where the government pays for my college ed until I graduate and then two years later I have to start paying all the money back with interest.

Now that you have this picture in your head, imagine how others live, when there are families of five or more living with less than the minimum wage. My family manages to live like this, but there are others that are not as lucky.

The elderly people have to live with pensions as low as $84.000 CLP (115.7 USD) I’ve seen old people after the street markets hours trying to find scraps of fruit and vegetables so they have something to eat in the daily.

People need to understand that what is happening in Chile is not only about an increase on the public transport prices. Its so much more than that! But I’ll get there, I promise.

This year we’ve seen news like:

- A 4 month-old baby died because a “loose bullet” was shot God knows where and it broke the roof of a house and hit the kid in the head while he slept on its crib!

-A congressman that wants to enter the senate said “I don’t care if they call me lazy”

-The government wanted to increase the electricity bills by 9.2 percent.

-The robbery of the century: Police embezzlement reaches 26.700.000 million pesos. (36751.55 USD)

-Military forces stole 200 million dollars through the Reserved Copper Law doing duplicated invoices.

-Students in Quinteros closed the scholar year early due to contamination in the air and severe health issues.

We’ve seen collusion in supermarket prices, pharmacies, toilet papers, diapers, military, police and politicians tax evasion... What else do we have to endure?!

(Source in Spanish: Sigrid.pe)

And so the 6th of October of 2019 we wake up to the breaking news: “The government announces the increase of the public transport prices”

With everything I’ve told you already... Wouldn’t you be pissed to hell and back as well?? And I haven’t even told you about how shitty the public health is, how our education system favors the rich and forgets the poor. That our drinkable water is owned by privates, so is the energy and the mineral resources. Our highways belong to Spain... We have to pay money to travel from region to region, and the money doesn’t even stay in the country. This neoliberal model is broke us.

Chile has the most expensive subway rates in Latin America, and this is how it was supposed to be starting the October 6, 2019:

(I did my best at translating)

You can do the math with this numbers two or three times a day at least five days a week... 

The richest 10 percent of the Chilean people have an income 19 times higher than the poorest 10 percent... Here in Chile the parliamentarians earn the highest amounts of net income! The most well paid parliamentarians in Latin America and possibly the world. $9.500.000CLP (13076.39USD).  Look at this numbers, don’t even bother with the position of the politicians, just look at the numbers.

And so, high school students decided to take this upon themselves. The “Evasion” movement began, where thousands of underage students refused to pay to take the subway. This quickly escalated as college students and workers of various areas started to jump over the subway’s validation doors. What started as a passive-aggressive movement took a turn as the Chilean police went to the Subway( METRO) stations and started throwing teargas bombs at our under age students who had nothing to defend themselves with. The subway shut down services.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd0d7iFZOB8 (You don’t need to know Spanish to understand what’s going on)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8acIrtYbb-c

This sparked a flame sleeping inside every citizen in this country. More and more people started to come out to the streets armed with nothing but cooking pots, pans and wooden spoons. But when the people rises, so does the government. Hundreds of police men went against the protestors. They started throwing teargas bombs at the people, careless of the children, the old, the innocent. Yes, there were people doing dumb shit like robbing shops, but still, many were innocent.

  After 2 or 3 days of violent clashes, of supermarkets being ransacked, of young people being arrested or killed in the streets, the young still stood their ground and kept protesting, kept evading, we kept rising our voices and pots, and the president had his best idea: For the first time since the end of the Pinochet’s dictatorship the Military forces where released onto the streets. Now it wasn’t only police men beating and shooting, it was soldiers. The president declared State of Emergency for the capital Santiago, for two other regions (Valparaíso and Concepción), and he declared those cities to be under curfew. After that, more regions where added to this list: Antofagasta, La Serena/Coquimbo, Valparaíso, Concepción and Santiago all under curfew.

But the biggest catalyst to this was that President Sebastián Piñera said: WE ARE AT WAR.

War... War? It may seem like it (just look at this), but is it really a war when we have pots and wooden spoons, and he has armed soldiers doing coke and other drugs in the streets before going to beat the hell out of people.

We are supposed to be living under a democracy and yet the president decided to pass the torch to General Javier Iturriaga del Campo, the one in charge of the state of emergency. Thanks to that decision we have soldiers and police men following and running people over with their cars, shooting to kill, people are being tortured in subway stations. People are being terrorized as if we where in a dictatorship once again. look at this image and tell me this is justice. Students are disappearing after being arrested. We are under curfew from 8p.m or 10p.m to 6a.m. But what happens to those who have no home to go back to? those who live under bridges? The soldiers beat the crap out of them. Police invading houses to arrest people, there where children there. Soldiers pointing their guns at firemen, firemen in Chile are volunteers, they don’t get paid, soldiers get paid at least $500.000 CLP.  In the last 24 hours the Chilean Army has spent $50 million pesos (68823.15 USD) to buy 56.725 anti-riot ammo. link.

We haven’t had any national transmissions with the president addressing this situation, only conferences. We’ve had congressmen say that games are plotting attacks while they play... Can ya’ll believe this shit?!

The biggest problem in all of this is that national channels censored everything, we where watching videos of soldiers hitting people, running people over, but the tv showed nothing. Just yesterday soldiers attacked a journalist even when he’d showed his safeguard to be on the street after curfew. News were being staged for outside countries: look at this video, the protestants are far away from where the cameras were rolling. Since last night there some sort of campaing to clean the image of the military men, showing them crying, dancing, and doing “silly” stuff with the people. And yes, there might be good cops/soldiers out there, but it does not erase the fact that two girls where raped by soldiers and that they still are killing and abusing people with brute force. Many civilians have plastic bullets in their bodies because soldier are shooting at close ranges. A young man lost an eye today in the morning after hours of surgery.

Many may be asking themselves: Why? Why haven’t they stopped if the president said he wouldn’t increase the public transport price?

Well, as someone said: They took so much from us, they even took our fear. It isn’t about public transport anymore. Its about the inequality of our economic system.

As a generation, from the kids born in the late 90′s to now, we have nothing. Most of us have absolutely nothing to loose but our lives.

We have no money. We can’t find jobs. We don’t have houses or cars. Those who do, either quit college to work or have almost no life because they work and study. Some are renting spaces smaller than tuna cans for the price of a kidney.

We own nothing, everything is under our parents names. People are in debt just to have something to eat. So of course we are not afraid of fighting against a system that favors the rich, a system that allows the already wealthy people to keep stealing what little is left in the pockets of the poor. We are fighting for the old, for the middle aged, for the ones who are yet to come. We don’t want to have children and eventually have to tell them “Find a job. ‘Cuz I can’t pay your education, I’m still paying mine”

Chile needs a change from the very core! we don’t need short term solutions. First of all the the government needs to be changed completely, every single parliamentarian. How much they earn needs to change. and because I read it, the major change that must be made is the constitution of Chile. A constitution that was written in times were the internet and technology was hard to come by, the Chilean constitution has not changed since the 80′s... A time when the dirty laundry of politicians could be easily brushed under the rug. The economic model need to change drastically.

Right now economic classes live segregated from one another. But for the first time in the history of Chile, every region has come together, there are no politic parties in the marches, there are no football teams, there’s no north or south or capitol, it’s just people fighting for their rights, marching to be heard, banging on pots and pans so the lies of the government can’t reach us anymore. Even with all the violence, all the oppression, there’s still hope, there are happy things going on in the protests. Soldiers playing with the protestants.

Please, inform yourselves on this, if you live in a capitalism model of economics, this could happen in your country too. 

Search for these hashtags: #estadodeemergencia #chile #milicos #pacos #carabinerosdechile #evasion #toquedequeda #santiago #laserena #concepcion #antofagasta #valparaiso . watch the videos, share them. Be the our voice outside our frontiers. 

WE ARE CALLING TO A WORLD WIDE MARCH THIS OCTOBER 24  AT 12.pm CHILEAN HOUR. HELP US, A BILLION VOICES UNITED FOR THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE.

Feel free to add more videos, more proof.

[observationsandimpressions-blog]

Cheap

We Americans are living in what I call the WalMart economy.  It’s a tragedy that we have been conditioned to buy the CHEAPEST item we can find, disregarding other features and benefits to save a dime.  Why do I call it the WalMart economy?  It’s because WalMart was the one who advertised “Save money, live better” attitude, then whipsawed their suppliers to give them the absolute lowest prices in the market.  WalMart did not care about quality, only price.  Once upon a time they advertised “Made in America”, but that fell by the wayside when they discovered that it was SO much cheaper offshore.  What are the side effects of the WalMart economy?  

Quality falls. That blender you bought for $10 will give you 10 months of service, maybe, unless you use it a lot.  The things that used to last a decade or more (especially refrigerators) now don’t.  The degradation of quality is so pervasive that people take it for granted.  I spoke with an acquaintance recently who told me that he buys all his tools at Harbor Freight because then he doesn’t care if someone steals them.  He KNOWS they’re junk.  Is it a part of our use and dump society that we accept poor quality as a cost of doing business?  Why do people accept such shoddy goods?  Because they’re cheap?  What a terrible reason!  Would you buy $5 tires for your car?  I sure wouldn’t!

Size of the product drops. A few years ago Dial soap got a bunch of publicity because they reshaped their soap bar and reduced the weight 15%.  It’s the only way they could compete with the constant pressure to cut costs.  The same is true for candy bars, bacon (12 oz. is the new standard?), beer (look closely at the volume of a Stella Artois…), and so many other things that I have only scratched the surface here.  We’re being cheated by the people selling us stuff, and it’s because of WalMart.  

U.S. manufacturing disappears.  With price being the only driver for a product, we who live in the U.S. will not pay the higher prices that American-made goods require.  The products go overseas- China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc.  The workers there toil in terrible conditions, sometimes very close to slavery, for $1 per day.  And it’s to provide us with inexpensive (and cheap too) products.  The tragedy is that Big Business doesn’t give a damn about their workers in those far-away countries (nor, for that matter, their workers here), only that they provide the goods at the Lowest Possible Cost.  If they could figure out a way (or find a different country) to pay workers $.10 per day they would.  And why? Because then WalMart will buy from them!  WalMart has such an impact on the economy that being the “Low Price Leader” has changed the entire marketplace.  We have lost our moral compass when it comes to fair wages, living wages, and living standards, not just locally but globally.

High-quality brand names generate low-quality product offerings. I was dismayed to see Milwaukee Tools being sold to Home Depot, because I knew that Milwaukee Tools, a brand I’ve grown up with as a quality tool manufacturer, had to make a lower-quality tool line to sell at Home Depot.  Their standard line stuff would be just too expensive to sell there, where the shelf space and sales turn per square foot are closely tracked.  A $200 Milwaukee circular saw sitting right next to a $40 one from Skil or Black and Decker would sit there too long for Home Depot to carry it for long.  And Craftsman?  What a sorry, sorry state those tools have sunk to!  They used to be the Homeowner’s Standard- if you had a Craftsman set of something it showed you were serious about your tools.  Now?  They have gone from being the quality standard to pure Chinese junk.  I know, I’ve tested them.  It’s because of WalMart.

Retail competition dies.  Any store that wants to sell what WalMart sells has to compete on price, because the American consumer has been conditioned to accept nothing else.  It’s killing American retail and killing customer service (want anything other than the low-price leader?  Good luck!).  The only stores that survive in the WalMart economy are high-end stores, specialty stores (think carpet), or stores that do not sell what WalMart sells.  

It’s extremely difficult nowadays to find, much less buy, something of quality that will last a long time.  The high-end markets in just about everything have disappeared, or been relegated to niche status for professionals only.  Kitchen appliances, tools, household goods, lighting, all of the high-end items are very difficult to obtain; most of what remains is junk. Sure, Williams Sonoma carries some very good products, but over half of the Williams Sonoma price is Williams Sonoma profit- the quality isn’t THAT much better.  That doesn’t mean I don’t shop there- I shop there more frequently than I do WalMart, and the WalMart is closer to my home.  

And the worst thing of all is that WalMart’s purchasing strategy is so rapacious.  Not only do they drive for the absolute lowest price, they also expect rebates from their suppliers to the tune of 25%!  What does that do?  It forces the supplier to cut their cost and quality to be able to make any profit at all- and even a penny profit on 3 million items is $30,000. It’s livable, even though if you were to take into account the hidden costs of that product you’d be losing money, the hidden costs being things like resource degradation, human exploitation, other business loss (if you sell your item to WalMart, it’s hard to sell it to Williams Sonoma!), etc.  And they’re teaching this procurement strategy to all the other big box discounters, so suppliers are pressured from all sides to find the lowest cost item, quality or country of origin be damned.  It used to be that suppliers could choose to NOT sell to WalMart if their business model required a higher margin, or they refused to reduce their cost (quality) to meet their expectations.  Now, because that lowest-cost expectation is everywhere, there’s very little choice. Welcome to the world of cheap. How’s it feel being forced to buy crap from a guy in Arkansas, made in Bangladesh, and that won’t last the season?

[newstfionline]

To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now

Neil Irwin, NY Times, Sept. 3, 2017

ROCHESTER--Gail Evans and Marta Ramos have one thing in common: They have each cleaned offices for one of the most innovative, profitable and all-around successful companies in the United States.

For Ms. Evans, that meant being a janitor in Building 326 at Eastman Kodak’s campus in Rochester in the early 1980s. For Ms. Ramos, that means cleaning at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., in the present day.

In the 35 years between their jobs as janitors, corporations across America have flocked to a new management theory: Focus on core competence and outsource the rest. The approach has made companies more nimble and more productive, and delivered huge profits for shareholders. It has also fueled inequality and helps explain why many working-class Americans are struggling even in an ostensibly healthy economy.

The $16.60 per hour Ms. Ramos earns as a janitor at Apple works out to about the same in inflation-adjusted terms as what Ms. Evans earned 35 years ago. But that’s where the similarities end.

Ms. Evans was a full-time employee of Kodak. She received more than four weeks of paid vacation per year, reimbursement of some tuition costs to go to college part time, and a bonus payment every March. When the facility she cleaned was shut down, the company found another job for her: cutting film.

Ms. Ramos is an employee of a contractor that Apple uses to keep its facilities clean. She hasn’t taken a vacation in years, because she can’t afford the lost wages. Going back to school is similarly out of reach. There are certainly no bonuses, nor even a remote possibility of being transferred to some other role at Apple.

Yet the biggest difference between their two experiences is in the opportunities they created. A manager learned that Ms. Evans was taking computer classes while she was working as a janitor and asked her to teach some other employees how to use spreadsheet software to track inventory. When she eventually finished her college degree in 1987, she was promoted to a professional-track job in information technology.

Less than a decade later, Ms. Evans was chief technology officer of the whole company, and she has had a long career since as a senior executive at other top companies. Ms. Ramos sees the only advancement possibility as becoming a team leader keeping tabs on a few other janitors, which pays an extra 50 cents an hour.

They both spent a lot of time cleaning floors. The difference is, for Ms. Ramos, that work is also a ceiling.

Eastman Kodak was one of the technological giants of the 20th century, a dominant seller of film, cameras and other products. It made its founders unfathomably wealthy and created thousands of high-income jobs for executives, engineers and other white-collar professionals. The same is true of Apple today.

But unlike Apple, Kodak also created tens of thousands of working-class jobs, which contributed to two generations of middle-class wealth in Rochester. The Harvard economist Larry Summers has often pointed at this difference, arguing that it helps explain rising inequality and declining social mobility.

“Think about the contrast between George Eastman, who pioneered fundamental innovations in photography, and Steve Jobs,” Mr. Summers wrote in 2014. “While Eastman’s innovations and their dissemination through the Eastman Kodak Co. provided a foundation for a prosperous middle class in Rochester for generations, no comparable impact has been created by Jobs’s innovations” at Apple.

Ms. Evans’s pathway was unusual: Few low-level workers, even in the heyday of postwar American industry, ever made it to the executive ranks of big companies. But when Kodak and similar companies were in their prime, tens of thousands of machine operators, warehouse workers, clerical assistants and the like could count on steady work and good benefits that are much rarer today.

When Apple was seeking permission to build its new headquarters, its consultants projected the company would have 23,400 employees, with an average salary comfortably in the six figures. Thirty years ago, Kodak employed about 60,000 people in Rochester, with average pay and benefits companywide worth $79,000 in today’s dollars.

Part of the wild success of the Silicon Valley giants of today--and what makes their stocks so appealing to investors--has come from their ability to attain huge revenue and profits with relatively few workers.

The 10 most valuable tech companies have 1.5 million employees, according to calculations by Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute, compared with 2.2 million employed by the 10 biggest industrial companies in 1979.

Major companies have also chosen to bifurcate their work force, contracting out much of the labor that goes into their products to other companies, which compete by lowering costs. It’s not just janitors and security guards. In Silicon Valley, the people who test operating systems for bugs, review social media posts that may violate guidelines, and screen thousands of job applications are unlikely to receive a paycheck directly from the company they are ultimately working for.

And the phenomenon stretches far beyond Silicon Valley, where companies like Apple are just a particularly extreme example of achieving huge business success with a relatively small employee count. The Federal Express delivery person who brings you a package may well be an independent contractor; many of the people who help banks like Citigroup and JPMorgan service mortgage loans and collect delinquent payments work for contractors; and if you call your employer’s computer help desk, there’s a good chance it will be picked up by someone in another state, or country.

Across a range of job functions, industries and countries, the shift to a contracting economy has put downward pressure on compensation. Pay for janitors fell by 4 to 7 percent, and for security guards by 8 to 24 percent, in American companies that outsourced, Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Ethan Kaplan of Stockholm University found in a 2010 paper.

These pay cuts appear to be fueling overall inequality. J. Adam Cobb of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Ken-Hou Lin at the University of Texas found that the drop in big companies’ practice of paying relatively high wages to their low- and mid-level workers could have accounted for 20 percent of the wage inequality increase from 1989 to 2014.

The same forces that explain the difference between 1980s Kodak and today’s Apple have big implications not just for every blue-collar employee who punches a timecard, but also for white-collar professionals who swipe a badge.

Phil Harnden was coming out of the Navy in 1970 when he applied for a job at Kodak, and soon was operating a forklift in a warehouse. He made $3 an hour, equivalent to $20 an hour today adjusted for inflation. That is roughly what an entry-level contracting job testing software pays.

The difference between the two gigs, aside from the absence of heavy machinery in Apple’s sleek offices, is the sense of permanence. Mr. Harnden put in 16 years operating forklifts before he left in 1986 to move to Florida. When he returned 10 years later, he was quickly rehired and even kept his seniority benefits.

In interviews, tech industry contractors in Silicon Valley describe a culture of transience. They can end up commuting to a different office park that houses a new company every few months; in many cases 18 months is the maximum a contractor is allowed to spend at one company.

“I would rather have stability,” said Christopher Kohl, 29, who has worked as a contractor at several Silicon Valley companies, including a stint doing quality assurance on Apple Maps. “It’s stressful to find a new job every 12 to 18 months.”

The compensation these white-collar contractors receive puts them squarely in the middle rungs of workers in the United States, and the most skilled can make six figures (though that doesn’t go far in the hyper-expensive Bay Area housing market). Apple, based on its consultants’ report, expected to be indirectly responsible for nearly 18,000 jobs in Santa Clara County by now at an average pay of about $56,000 a year.

There are some advantages. If they work for one of the companies like Apple or Google that feature a subsidized, high-quality cafeteria, contractors can enjoy the food. They can tell their friends that they work at one of the world’s most admired companies, and enjoy predictable, regular hours. Once in a while, a contractor will be hired into a staff position.

“It’s not evil,” said Pradeep Chauhan, managing partner of OnContracting, a site to help people find tech contracting positions. “They have a job and they’re getting paid. But it’s not ideal. The problem with contracting is, you could walk in one day and they could say, ‘You don’t need to come in tomorrow.’ There is no obligation from the companies.”

And that is the ultimate contrast with the middle-skill, middle-wage jobs of earlier generations of titans--a sense of permanence, of sharing in the long-term success of the company.

“There were times I wasn’t happy with the place,” Mr. Harnden said of his Kodak years. “But it was a great company to work for and gave me a good living for a long time.”

When an automaker needs a supplier of transmissions for its cars, it doesn’t just hold an auction and buy from the lowest bidder. It enters a long-term relationship with the supplier it believes will provide the best quality and price over time. The company’s very future is at stake--nobody wants to buy a car that can’t reliably shift into first gear.

But when that same automaker needs some staplers for the office supply cabinet, it is more likely to seek out the lowest price it can get, pretty much indifferent to the identity of the seller.

Labor exists on a similar continuum.

The right product engineer or marketing executive can mean the difference between success or failure, and companies tend to hire such people as full-time employees and as part of a long-term relationship--something like the transmission supplier. What has changed in the last generation is that companies today view more and more of the labor it takes to produce their goods and services as akin to staplers: something to be procured at the time and place needed for the lowest price possible.

There is plenty of logic behind the idea that companies should focus on their core competence and outsource the rest. By this logic, Apple executives should focus on building great phones and computers, not hiring and overseeing janitors. And companies should outsource work when the need for staff is lumpy, such as for software companies that may need dozens of quality-assurance testers ahead of a major release but not once the product is out.

There’s no inherent reason that work done through a contractor should involve lower compensation than the same work done under direct employment. Sometimes it goes in the other direction; when a company hires a law firm, it is basically contracting out legal work, yet lawyers at a firm tend to be paid better than in-house counsel.

But as more companies have outsourced more functions over more time, a strong body of evidence is emerging that it’s not just about efficiency. It seems to be a way for big companies to reduce compensation costs.

Linda DiStefano applied for a secretarial job at Kodak during Easter week of her senior year in high school in 1968, and was hired to start immediately after her graduation for $87.50 a week, today’s equivalent of $32,000 a year. She put in four decades at the company, first as a secretary, then helped administer corporate travel and other projects.

It bought her a house off Lake Avenue, a new car every few years and occasional long-distance trips.

Ms. Ramos, the Apple janitor, lives down the road in San Jose. She pays $2,300 monthly for a two-bedroom apartment where she and her four children live. Before overtime and taxes, her $16.60 an hour works out to $34,520 a year. Her rent alone is $27,600 a year, leaving less than $600 a month once the rent is paid. Overtime, in addition to the wages from one of her teenage children who works part time at a grocery store, help make the math work, though always tenuously.

She works from 6 p.m. until 2 a.m. On days when one of the other cleaners doesn’t show up, she may get a few extra hours, which is great for the overtime pay, but it means even less sleep before it is time to take her children to school.

There is little chance for building connections at Apple. “Everyone is doing their own thing and has their own assignment, and we don’t see each other outside of work,” said Ms. Ramos in Spanish.

Ms. Evans, who was a Kodak janitor in the early 1980s before her rise to executive there and at other leading firms like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, recalls a different experience.

“One thing about Eastman Kodak is they believed in their people,” said Ms. Evans, now chief information officer at Mercer, the human resources consulting giant. “It was like a family. You always had someone willing to help open a door if you demonstrated that you were willing to commit to growing your skills and become an asset that was valuable for the company.”

The shift is profound. “I look at the big tech companies, and they practice a 21st-century form of welfare capitalism, with foosball tables and free sushi and all that,” Rick Wartzman, senior adviser at the Drucker Institute and author of “The End of Loyalty,” said. “But it’s for a relatively few folks. It’s great if you’re a software engineer. If you’re educated, you’re in command.”

But in the 21st-century economy, many millions of workers find themselves excluded from that select group. Rather than being treated as assets that companies seek to invest in, they have become costs to be minimized.

[labourpress]

Jeremy Corbyn speech at TUC Congress

Jeremy Corbyn MP, Leader of the Labour Party, speaking at the TUC Congress in Brighton, said:

Congress, thank you for that welcome and thank you for everything you do as a movement, for our people and our country, to secure better pay and conditions for working people, to give them a voice in the workplace and a say in our politics.

Trade unions are far and away the biggest voluntary and democratic organisations in the country. They are the roots and the lifeblood of our party. You are abused by the powerful and your rights are attacked -including by this government - but the trade union movement represents the best of Britain and is a vital engine of progress in our democracy.

And of course Trade Unionism has always had international solidarity at its heart. And it’s great to see Huber Ballesteros who was unjustly imprisoned for his trade union activity in Columbia and freed by international solidarity action, with us here today.

But despite all of your tireless efforts, modern Britain is marked by growing insecurity at work which undermines and holds back both low waged workers and the better paid.

In fact insecurity now goes right to the very top of public life - just ask Theresa May.

But Congress, this escalating insecurity is not only bad for individual workers and their families as it weakens bargaining strength and holds down pay, just as it fuels stress and powerlessness it is also bad for our economy and for our whole society.

This epidemic of low pay, which is closely tied up with insecurity at work ruins people’s lives, leaving workers and their families locked in poverty. It damages the economy as people have less to spend. It costs us all because it means more paid in tax credits and housing benefit from the public purse and it means less tax being paid to fund public services.

So I want to pay tribute to those unions which are working so hard to organise insecure workers and have taken on the exploiters - as Unite has done at SportsDirect and the Bakers’ Union has done so impressively last week at McDonald’s.

McDonald’s boss is paid 1,300 times more than the lowest paid of his staff, symbolic of the deep inequality and injustice that scars our society.

That’s why it’s crucial for our movement to organise the lowest paid and most vulnerable workers.

The TUC needs to represent all workers. And the least secure have to be our priority because they need our solidarity most. Their needs for representation are the greatest.

Last week I raised some of these cases at Prime Minister’s Questions and Theresa May, Theresa May could not bring herself to utter one word of condemnation of McDonald’s or SportsDirect. This from the Prime Minister who tried to rebrand the Conservatives as the ‘workers’ party’. No, I didn’t buy it either.

It’s essential we work together as a movement; trade unions and the Labour Party, as part of local communities, to stamp out low pay and insecurity.

And I know it’s not easy I was once a trade union worker representing low paid garment workers, mostly women; victims of some appalling practices by unscrupulous employers.

Exploitation and discrimination at work cuts across all sectors and pay grades and that’s why Unison’s victory against Tribunal fees in the High Court was such an outstanding gain won on behalf of all workers. Rights mean almost nothing if you can’t afford to get access to them.

And when the workers who provide the public services we all rely on are having to use foodbanks, you know that something is deeply wrong.

Seven years of Tory pay cuts have not only caused real hardship, they have damaged our public services by hitting recruitment, retention and morale.

The Government's position seems to change by the hour. At the weekend, we were led to believe the pay cap was a thing of the past. Yesterday, the Prime Minister's spokesman said it would 'continue as planned'.

Today, as inflation rises to nearly 3 per cent, they try to divide people on the cheap. The POA is right: a pay cut is a pay cut and we must be united in breaking the pay cap for all workers.

So let me be absolutely clear today. The Labour Party totally rejects the Tories' attempt at divide and rule, to play one sector off against another. A Labour government will end the public sector pay cap and give all workers the pay rise they deserve and so desperately need.

And, Congress, in the case of the Birmingham bins workers, which I know you have discussed today, we, collectively, as the labour and trade union movement, have a duty as a labour movement to find a resolution to this dispute as soon as possible.

Congress, we often talk about workers’ rights but we’re not just talking about rights at work, we’re talking about people’s lives, about the chance to live a decent life, about work-life balance; the security of your home, living standards, your family life and your mental health too.

A Manchester University study recently found that poor-quality jobs are actually worse for mental health than unemployment.

Most people spend most of their lives as workers, selling their time, labour and skills. Workers’ rights are human rights, they give protections to every single person in employment and indirectly to many more children and carers, as well as those who need care.

They are fundamental to any society that claims to be advanced or democratic and yet these rights; your rights as workers, hard won over generations, are currently being sacrificed by this Conservative government on the altar of a failing and ever more ruthless form of capitalism.

Increasingly flexible employment is sold to us as a benefit. They call it the gig economy - and who doesn’t like going to a gig?

And of course it is a benefit to unscrupulous employers but it is the source of continuous worry and insecurity for millions of people and is in part responsible for the worsening mental health of a country that has lost over 6,000 mental health nurses in recent years.

And when employees want genuine flexible work, TUC researchers found that shamefully, those parents and carers, often women, requesting flexible working, all too often found themselves punished instead with fewer hours, fewer opportunities to progress and even losing their jobs.

So the next Labour government will take action right across the board to help protect people in the workplace. And although we would like to see another general election as soon as possible; that delivers more Labour gains and this time a Labour government,  in the meantime we will challenge the government in parliament, and outside, every step of the way. To defend working people and stand by you, the trade unions, battling for people’s rights day in and day out.

Rights are won by all of us together, but they have to be constantly defended and enforced. And that’s why we are opposing the Tories’ dangerous EU Withdrawal Bill. Not out of any attempt to frustrate the vote to leave but because of the extraordinary unaccountable powers it would hand to Tory government ministers to impose decisions, scrap protections and rip up workers’ rights without parliament having any say.

That is a threat to every worker in this country: you simply cannot trust the Tories with your rights at work, and that’s why Labour voted against the Bill last night.

There is no doubt that the British workplace is already one of the most unequal in the world. We have a huge and damaging imbalance of power between employers and employees which has led to the proliferation of low wage jobs, race-to-the-bottom agency working, zero-hours contracts and employers avoiding paying sick pay, holiday pay and even the minimum wage through bogus self-employment.

That has been effectively targeted by unions such as the GMB, fighting for Uber drivers denied their basic rights at work.

Such practices are rife throughout the ‘gig economy’ which presents itself as modern and dynamic but all too often uses technology as a cover to deny both employees and customers basic protections.

Technological innovation is crucial for our economic success. But technological advance cannot represent real progress if it means we are dragged back to 19th century employment practices or is used to impose deregulation that leaves people without dignity or security.

Technological advance is driving change in the economy and the workplace at unprecedented speeds but what is not inevitable is who benefits from it.

We need a government and economic and industrial policies that are not stuck in a 1980s time warp of neoliberal dogma but are driven by the need to channel and shape technological change, to benefit the many not the few.

That will not happen if we leave it to the market or corporate boardrooms.

The Bank of England estimates that 15 million jobs could be at risk of automation over the next decade and as is so often the way those who are most at risk are those who are paid the least.

The deregulated gig economy is ripe for automation. It is no basis for economic advance and rising living standards. No, that demands high investment in the cutting edge jobs of the future.

When you add the Conservatives’ continuing determination to hack away at the state cutting investment, squeezing public services, and removing your rights. It’s not hard to see the dangers of our present course.

We already know that the Tory way of running the economy has dramatically widened regional inequalities, sharply increased the wealth gap, with tax breaks for the few and public services cuts for the many.

And the Tory approach to Brexit is to use the process of leaving to go much further, much faster in that direction and deliver a deregulated, free market tax haven, off the shores of Europe, underpinned with a race to the bottom trade deal with Donald Trump, a Shangri La for bosses and bankers. But nothing of the kind for everybody else.

Because that is the real divide over Brexit, a Tory Brexit to drive down standards or a Labour Brexit that puts jobs first.  

Labour respects the referendum result. But we want a jobs-first Brexit, which guarantees full access to the European single market as part of a new trade agreement and relationship with the EU which maintains and develops workers’ rights, and consumer and environmental protections and uses powers returned from Brussels to support a new industrial strategy, with investment in good jobs in every region and nation of Britain, where work pays, where employees have security and decent conditions and prosperity is shared by the true wealth creators: the workforce.

When we leave the EU the current free movement rules will end. Labour wants to see fair rules and management of migration, fair rules that put jobs, living standards and the economy first, not fake immigration targets, as the Tories do, that will never be met.

And we will continue to assert that the rights of EU nationals must be guaranteed.

We must never let ourselves be duped and divided. It isn’t migrants who drive down wages and conditions but unscrupulous employers, supported by a government that slashes rights and protections at work whenever it gets the chance.

It is our movement that has been the bedrock of resisting racism and fascism in the workplace and on the streets and we must continue to oppose the division of the far right.

So if we want to tackle low pay and insecure work we need a Labour government strengthening workers’ rights, enforced by strong trade unions, taking action to prevent employers undercutting pay and conditions, not closed borders, xenophobic intimidation and scapegoating.

That’s why our General Election manifesto set out a 20 point plan for security and equality at work, including: equal rights for all from day one in a job, banning zero hours contracts, guaranteeing unions a right to access workplaces, raising the minimum wage to a real living wage, ending the public sector pay cap, setting maximum pay ratios of 20 to 1 in the public sector and beyond, banning unpaid internships, doubling paternity pay, reinstating protection against harassment at work and supporting the Dying to Work campaign to protect workers with terminal illnesses.

But ultimately protections at work depend on those who work themselves.

Winning a Labour government, even one with a programme to transform the country, which is now our goal, is simply not enough.

That is why the most important thing any worker can do is to join a trade union.

And I want young people especially to hear this message.

Many young people have recently got involved in politics for the first time. Tens of thousands of young people have joined the Labour Party in recent months.

And at the recent General Election we saw the long running decline in young people voting reversed, with young people voting in higher numbers than they have for a generation.

Politics is about power and democratic politics is about putting power in the hands of the many not just the few.

That principle applies in the workplace too. if you want a job that pays a decent wage, gives you the chance to get on in life, live independently and enjoy your work, then join a trade union. Do it today.

Trade unions are often demonised in the right-wing press. I know it’s a shock that billionaire tax dodging press barons don’t like trade unions. And they don’t like us because our movement, through which the values of solidarity, community and social justice run like a thread from top to bottom, our movement challenges unaccountable power of both government and bosses.

But of course the power of the billionaires, who control great chunks of the media, isn’t what it was. They tried to dictate the election result in June with a blizzard of propaganda and millions of voters simply ignored them.

Trade unions don’t just defend their members, they defend the institutions that benefit all employees, our NHS, our schools, our social care, and they defend our rights.

We don’t know when the next election will come. We are not in control of that but you are in control of whether you join a trade union, organise in your workplace or in your community and start changing people’s lives for the better right now.

We don’t know how long it will take but this weak and chaotic government will be prised out of Downing Street. And we know that the advances we made in the general election in June are a powerful springboard to win the radical Labour government we want to see so that together we can change our country so it truly works for the many not the few.

Ends