Excuse me, Permalink, I didn't think words like
that particular gerund were supposed to be used
on the Internet.---Still, I don't have a h--l of a lot of
respect for college degrees. I decided not to be
conned into going to a four-year college. Instead,
I have been repeatedly conned into taking tech
courses, which don't get me a job. A machine
shop course in the same complex with my old
high school, which purported to teach milling
machine, drill press, and lathe; there was no
milling machine, I don't remember anything a-
bout a drill press, and I got only one crack at
the lathe. I passed that course, however, for
what it was worth (zero). Plus a keypunch course, which never got me a keypunch job
(by the way, when you take a course, make
sure it isn't in running a soon-to-be obsolete
machine); and an IST100 computer course,
which I passed, but which did not enable me to
do Word, Excel, or anything of that nature (it
may have been because I was relying on a
second-hand book I bought from a fellow stud-
dent). Of course, there is that Radioman course
in the Navy, which is worth zero for getting a
civilian job. I just want to go back and get re-
venge on the people who forced education
down my throat when I was a kid.

I agree completely, we haven't talked to most of them since the funeral. They are all pissed that money is being spent on his care... but none are stepping up or volunteering either. One of them actually took the job, it lasted for 3 weeks before she quit.

I have been in this exact situation.

My suggestion is to minimize time spent with the potential heirs. It's better to politely decline to talk moochers than to try to interact with them and reform them, at least if they're this bad. My thought is to take time whenever possible to get away from the family clown car, i.e. little vacations with no discussion of it. This goat rodeo is actually a common scenario with estates.
http://gustafsonlegal.blogspot.com/2014/...

The irrational behavior over the estate is a recapitulation of childhood disputes. Unless the people involved want to go to therapy or something, nothing good will come from it. It'll get you thinking negatively and spoil positive things going on. Very limited but cordial contact is best, IMHO.

Yes, bureaucratic interventionism, in the form of massive taxes and regulations, is chasing our wealth, jobs, creativity, new & old businesses out of the country ... or out of existence.

And the Statists' solution: even more bureaucratic interventionism.

Absolutely brilliant!

In this case... its a bad case of "hopeless to try". She has been doing a mix of couch-surfing in people's living rooms while claiming to be an addict, or an alcoholic, (and more) trying to get on some county-sponsored treatment program so she can get "transitional housing" - but then suddenly shocked that they wouldn't let her keep her 2 poodles with her that she uses her EBT card to buy organic dog food for.

It's really quite amazing. I broke down and agreed to let her say here the last 9 months of her college years so she could finish and the deal was, she go into the military afterward. With 3 or 4 months to go, I was telling her "you better go see the recruiter, it can take 6 months"... and she basically responded by eating a tub of ice cream every day so she couldn't meet the weight standards and then pretty much didn't have any intention of moving (until my wife kicked her out on the deadline).

The common thread I always see (and I actually ask it when I interview people), my wife and I are each the oldest in our families, we had to take care of the younger ones while our parents worked and very quickly had to enter the workforce ourselves. My wife's first job was actually in the fields in California at 7 years old with her parents in the summer to help earn money for tuition for the parochial school she went to.

She's also the trustee of her parents estate, and has begun selling real estate off recently to pay for her father's care (Parkinson's / mid-stage dementia / strokes). The younger ones are crying foul that the family's rental properties are "their father's legacy"... and no acknowledgement that when he is taking in $5000 a month basically, and going through $8500 a month in caregiver expenses, and down to around $60,000 in cash, something has to be done... (the maintenance on a rental house can suck that up quickly with a roof or heating/air issue and these are all old houses/duplexes).

None of the younger ones have ever seen the real legacy of their father - he came to America with a 6th grade education, put each of his 6 kids through private school and most have a college degree and a profession (civil engineering, construction management, etc.). With the exception of the 2 or 3 oldest ones that worked in the fields when they were young, the youngest ones have only looked at their parents like an ATM machine. One of them is a civil engineer and hit up his father every November like clockwork for the last 12 years for a loan for Christmas presents. He makes $150,000 a year, but would soak his $60,000 elderly father for a loan that he would rarely (if ever) pay back in full.

My younger siblings are not nearly that bad, but they all didn't see a reason with "always" letting my parents pay at dinner into their adulthood, heck, my brother has 4 kids and if he and his wife join my mom for dinner, he's always to let her pay (for herself and the 6 of them). Very odd.

So in interviews, I always ask if they have brothers or sisters... and if they do, are they the oldest, middle, or youngest.

“If I didn't have a job for a week, I figured out what kind of business I could start and create something for myself.”
Amazingly, you can make as much 1099 and business income as you want and still collecting unemployment. At one point I was making $4,000/mo in business income, not counting investment income, but I was still open to a high-paying W-2 job if I could find one. I told them this, and they said was allowed to collect the $1500/mo benefit. I took it. Then I started making $15k/mo, and I told them I couldn't honestly say I would take a W-2 job if I found one, so I indicated that on the form. (Some months I make zero; I'm not rich.) They were surprised I was so honest, and said if I ever was interested in W-2 work again, I could tell them and the benefits would start coming again.

“I have a sister-in-law that has an environmental studies degree (akin to underwater basket weaving), is 29, and has never actually had a job before. All she has ever done was be the Easter bunny or Santa's little helper for seasonal photography crap in the mall.”

These people are difficult to deal with. Kudos for trying. The best bet is to get her talking about her dream work. Maybe it's something with acting or studying the environment. To get that dream, the first step might be working in fast food, or maybe it's sweeping the floors at an environmental engineering company or a company that produces ad videos. Maybe some of the people she meets with think of her a peon, but if she thinks of herself as a hardworking problem-solver, someone who she meets, probably someone in the industry she's interested in, will see that. Even if they don't the energy she gets from doing something will be helpful when she goes into an interview for a dream job.

All this is hard to do when. It may be two years to her dream job, which feels like forever when you're doing a crap job. When I did this, some days I'd have visions of growing old doing the crap job. That's an illusion though. You couldn't stay in the same job, even a crap job, for years even you wanted to, if you're aggressively trying new things.

When I see people like her, though, I think maybe they have a depression problem or maybe they're lazy. You can't make them excited to try something new.

'tho the State has made the passage to the surf & back rather dangerously rocky and littered with
Draconian regulations and oppressive taxes.

EXACTLY.

Business schools & MBA programs don't teach how to be an entrepreneur and build a solid business. They train MANAGERS to fit into already-existing slots.

Hmmm. Good points. I couldn't agree more with not fathoming sitting around for weeks on end collecting gov't (somebody else's labor) $$.

You were dismissing someone's comments offhand for supporting Net Neutrality. Then you dismissed criticism of Net Neutrality offhand. It appears you just dismiss either side offhand, with no explanation. My question is why you dismiss both sides.

I probably didn't word that the best - there are plenty of problems with education management / delivery in the US... What I meant to convey was that 'education' wasn't the crisis that leading to the lack of opportunity for the kids coming out into the workforce.

The problem is the shift that happened somewhere, probably with the huge success of the economy in the 90s, that hard work and self-reliance were no longer important, or even talked about in school... All you needed was your degree and your problems are solved. Probably about the time that it was decided that having 'winners' and 'losers' isn't 'fair' to people that are trying really hard (but still suck at what they are doing).

When I was in school, in the 70's/80's, I grew up in the midwest, and basically, if your parents were farmers (self-employed) or government employees, you were pretty well-off. For everyone else, if you didn't own the place you were working at, you made minimum wage or barely above it. There was no such thing as a 'well paying' W2 job. So everyone I know either went into the military, went to college, both (as I did) or both and started a business besides that because having a lot of experience and an education, but still fixing copiers or something for minimum wage was a waste of time - you had to own the copier dealership or whatever.

The other huge learning experience of running your own business, is managing the money... you realize very quickly that a landslide of revenue today, is not an indicator of what will be there tomorrow, so even if you make a ton of cash above your budget, you never go out and blow it because you still have to make payroll next week and the week after, whether or not you make your numbers those weeks - if you don't have it, you are cashing out a credit card or a home equity line or something. "I don't have it" isn't an option that the employees or the government are willing to accept.

If I didn't have a job for a week, I figured out what kind of business I could start and create something for myself.

I can't fathom sitting at home on my @ss for 110 weeks of unemployment or whatever.

I have a sister-in-law that has an environmental studies degree (akin to underwater basket weaving), is 29, and has never actually had a job before. All she has ever done was be the Easter bunny or Santa's little helper for seasonal photography crap in the mall. She applies for every government job opening she can find, and truthfully, thats probably the max that her work ethic could muster anyway, but is seemingly dismayed that no one calls her for an interview (because at 29, living at home with mom & dad, and never having a job before... yeah... I can paint a pretty good mental picture too).

I've told her 1000 times to go get a McDonalds job, and figure out how to get up in the morning for it, then start working on looking for something else. She can't possibly imagine doing something as menial as that... oh well, whatever. Not my problem. Her parents are in their 70's and in poor health, I'm fine with kicking her out of the house and selling it when they die, she can get whatever her cut is and advice to drive to North Dakota and get a job in the oil fields or something, but whenever that cash in her hand is gone, she's homeless.

Amen. The whole problem is that our culture views getting a "degree" from an institution of higher learning as a necessity, when in reality there are millions of critical jobs that need interns (or more commonly "apprentices") instead! Those apprentices learned the real skills of the job as they trained with their employers and became "journeymen" and eventually "masters".

I really think all the computer trades ought to go this way. Technology moves way too fast for an academic atmosphere to be effective, and employers don't want a geek with no practical experience except as a help-desk tech in the first place, which is an "apprentice" by any other name!

Amen. The US has the highest corporate tax rate in the world - and that was true even before the ACA.

Why do you think there is all the talk from Obama about repatriotization of money? It's a red herring to avoid the real problem: corporate taxes. And the reality is that corporate taxes are a farce anyway - they just get passed along to the consumer ultimately or they impose unnecessary barriers to certain types of businesses.

I'd like to see all corporate taxes disappear.

Can you make a coherent statement or question?

The Internet was not invented the promise of Net Neutrality, it was created by the US military on fault tolerance for military communication should a nuke strike the mainland.This is why its distributed so thoroughly and why NO GOVERNMENT should control it.

Have you changed your position to support Net Neutrality? Do you say, contrary to what I say, that people will NOT "find a way to get the packets to people who want them"?

BS from an Obama supporter.

Probably too many, Herb. I quit my 'first real job' in industry when I got bored, though other than bored, I wasn't unhappy. I had lots of great friends there.

Oh, and at my farewell party in June or so of 1978, with something like 30 or 40 attendees (a bit larger than our whole department's population) their going-away gift to me was a "Who Is John Galt" t-shirt, which I still have!
:)))))))))

The US dollar only became a fiat currency when the shenanigans that created the 'Federal Reserve' took control of the money supply.

I have come to the realisation that the Moslem threat has become such an extreme issue is because they are effectively being employed as an army against the people wanting to maintain their lives of freedom.

"internet was invented on the premise of neutrality
I am undecided on this issue. I really don't want to go back to the old days of having gate keepers to content. OTOH, I wonder if content gate-keepers are gone for good no matter what. Suppose NN goes away. What happens then? Do media companies effectively block startups and dissenting opinions? Or do people just plug into networks that agree to pass all traffic? Is it really the hardware which allows those packets to be forwarded easily that brought us the information age? (I'm a hardware engineer, so I'm biased in favor of hardware). If so, let them forward whatever packets they want or don't want. People will find a way to get the packets to people want them.

There is hope Dean, it's just that all those tender seedlings are overshadowed by the special interest groups competing for control of the state; intent on using the state's massive machine of propaganda and force to shout/shut down opinions that threaten to disrupt their profits.

" it is a basic principle for promoting business competition. When you dial a phone number, you expect equal quality of service irrespective of which business you call."
I am not arguing either way on Net Neutrality, BUT what you describe about the plain old telephone service (POTS) is going away. POTS will be gone in a few years. The era of NEBS dictating that a teenager's call to a friend gets the same "five nines" as a 911 center is disappearing.

"New technologies such as 3D printing and the growing Internet of Things are a huge tidal wave of prosperity about to break. Surf's up folks. Grab your boards and paddle out!! "
Yes!

That. is what you define. as entry level???

Jan