Everything, All the Time

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

This is a sort of follow-up to Atlas JUGGLED.

I’ve been thinking of a lot of things, partly because I’m buried under stuff and new stuff keeps coming up.  For instance, I woke up with the beginning of Bowl of Red in my head – this is very bad, since before I do it I have to do Darkship Revenge and finish Through Fire.  The thing is, the novels arrive when they’re supposed to and pay no attention to the fact I’ve been sick and everything is late.  Like part of my brain doesn’t talk with the other part.

Which is par for the course, and explains this nagging feeling I have, like I’m the world’s laziest person.  Objectively, I roll out of bed and do this blog (Okay, later today, because I was doing… stuff around the house that couldn’t wait.) Then I write fiction as long as the brain holds out.  Then I write non fic, then if I have any spoons left, (which is rare) I work on getting stuff ready for publication.

This includes going over old novels that have reverted – right now that is The Magical British Empire, which is printed and waiting line by line re-edit, so I can keep some of the editing I liked, but well, change its slant vis a vis Western civilization a little.  This is going to be difficult, and I won’t lie and say all the PC stuff was the fault of the editing.  A lot of it was, particularly the way it was emphasized, but a lot of it was my doing from the beginning, because I was working with the old system, I knew an adventure book in exotic locales would only sell with a certain slant, and I wanted to keep publishing, and the kids needed shoes – and clothes.

But now I can do it the way I want to, so it needs to be gone over very carefully.  (BTW, the way I want to is not necessarily an absolution of what the Western Powers did in Africa (or other places) King Leopold will never be one of my favorite people. (Though our worst export to developing countries has been Marxism.  It links right in with tribalism, and it has made a right mess of those lands.))

So, anyway, those books – approaching goat-gagger size, are printed and waiting line-by-line.  I have Musketeer’s Apprentice back and ready to go over edits, to hopefully put up at the end of this week. I’ve finished both the cover and interiors workshop – and truly owe Dean (Smith) a write up on it for PJM – and I need to figure out this “create space thing” at some point.  Because the sales on books still available in paper (they are allowed to sell out of stock) and particularly the really old ones, are much slower.  My idea is that a paper edition will get them de-linked from the old Berkley editions.  We shall see. Time for that is not on the horizon till maybe January, because (always) the books for Baen come first.

Which is a problem, since I’m being attacked by books that are NOT Baen (mysteries, mostly.) And I’ve promised fans of the musketeer mysteries a new one for Christmas, and don’t think I’ll make it.

Oh, yeah, look at that description of my day and consider that into that also fits laundry, the minimal house cleaning required so my allergies don’t kick up (which is not immaculate, but it’s pretty close by today’s standards) dealing with cat, family and own illnesses, doing laundry, and research.

This is not, though it might sound like it, the equivalent of what my grandma (who had no other vices) used to do when I visited.  She used to give me a litany of everything she’d done that day.  She felt a need to tell you everything she’d done that day, to prove how hard she’d worked.

That is not what I’m doing, but it might be related to why she did it (or why I suspect she did it.)

Before I knew her she used to run a business out of the house, and of course, look after the house, raise the kids (granddad worked abroad for most of her child-rearing years, so she was on her own with three boys and a girl) cook, clean, and look after the little home-farm (it was that, though divided among four or five plots we either owned or “had the right to” cultivate) which provided wine and some fruit, and vegetables, and eggs for the entire family.

When I knew her, she had dropped the business and ‘retired’ into doing everything else.

I think the reason she gave me the laundry list – so to put it – of what she’d done that day was that she always felt like she hadn’t done enough.

Which is how I feel.  I feel like the world’s worst slacker, because there’s always stuff I haven’t done (since I was doing other stuff.)

I was talking about this with older son, who is taking more hours in college than a sane person would take, doing Ninja nun, writing two novels, learning Russian, volunteering at the hospital, and keeping up at least a little (not much, this semester) of the house cleaning.  Plus driving crazy me to the zoo when I miss the animals (though not this week, because he’s having finals.)  He was telling me how lazy he was…

I told him he wasn’t lazy, he was overcommitted, which FEELS lazy from the inside, because you’re never doing as much as you “feel” you should be doing.

But that brings us to something that’s sort of been bothering me at the back of my mind.

I’ve talked before about how we’re going to a world/model where everyone works for himself, though he might be a contractor for a dozen employers.

This is not Obamacare’s fault, though that crappy law is bringing it about much faster than it would otherwise, and therefore bringing us on a collision course with a model most people aren’t prepared for.

And that brings us to something I hadn’t given much thought to.  I thought, you know, the transition would be gradual and over twenty years or so.  My kids are taking on old enough professions that they’ll mostly have to work on the site of the job (Robert almost for sure, though there’s remote controlled stuff…  Marsh… who knows?) but most people their age won’t, I think, have “real jobs” where they have to be on site, and work at one thing only for more than ten or so years of their working lives.  (Note, I say most, not all.  Like my kids’ wished-for professions, a lot of work has to be done in person – but not the majority, and not for the majority of people.)

And I thought the transition would be better for most people – I still think so.  It will free up people from having to live in a particular place, and it will allow most people more time with their families.  I think when the transition is completed – and I don’t expect to see that, though stupid laws and all, well… — barbaric institutions like daycare, where you give in your infants to be raised by strangers according to outdated models of education, will be if not a thing of the past, at least things “that happen to other people.”  Most people will end up raising their own kids, and that’s a good thing.  As is the ability to change careers or do more than one thing, if you feel the need.

All of which is good, but here’s the rub.

There are really slackers.  And they’re not necessarily lazy.  They’re just people who need to be told what to do and when.  (And no, I don’t mean politically.  I mean in terms of work.)

When I first started looking at want ads in the US, I came across this expression that puzzled me “Must be self starter.”  Dan had to explain it to me.

Well, I don’t feel like a self starter, but I’ve been working as a contractor and ultimately for myself for the last 12 years (counting only the time I’ve been paid) and even though the last five years have been a mess for deadlines, in general I deliver (enough to get paid and make a living) and I’ve started the indie thing on the side, so I guess I am.

But here’s the thing – a lot of people aren’t.

Whenever I talk about a future where people mostly work for themselves, I get people yelling at me that I’m being racist, sexist, (not homophobic yet, but I’m sure it’s coming) and IQist.  (Why they lump the first two with the last, I don’t know.)  They tell me some people are too… communitarian, or too docile (ah, they don’t know the women I do) or too stupid to work for themselves.

Poppycock on that.  Where I grew up most women were EXPECTED to run a business out of the house.  Taking a job in a factory was an admission of failure.  And most people did run productive businesses out of the home, as well as the duties of a pre-industrial housewife, which always included some small scale farming and fabrication.  (Yes, I grew up in a very backward place.  Deal.)

Most human beings, throughout most of history have worked for themselves – and done enough to survive.  (Well, the ones who left descendants.)

And IQ has nothing to do with it.  I know several people who would test very badly in IQ who can do things that I can’t.  Lately with the economic crisis, there is one working class neighborhood near us where signs have started appearing on the side of residential houses “Haircuts” and “I repair small appliances” and “call me for your car trouble.”  (BTW that’s a discussion for another time, but regulations are tamping down a lot of that, which means they’re making the economic crisis worse.  And not all governmental regulations.  Neighborhood covenants can be worse.)

And I know several high IQ people who just do what they absolutely have to do and not one step further.

In the industrial age, where you worked under a supervisor and clocked in and out, this might limit their upward mobility: they would never go to a job where they didn’t have someone watching them/making sure they clocked in.  BUT they survived.  And they could do very well.

But what happens when most jobs – particularly for people who work with their minds – are “make it yourself, from scratch and bits”?  What happens when part of your job is creating your job?

What happens to all the people who are not self-starters?  They might be gifted, talented, brilliant, but they won’t work unless they have a structure that makes them do so.

And in a world of relative abundance (still) they’re never going to have to come to a situation where they need to work or starve.  And even if they do, they might NOT know how.

There is a type of mind that looks at a kitchen with dishes piled everywhere, rolls up its sleeves and goes “I’ll start cleaning here, and stop when it’s all done.”  Then there’s a type of mind that looks at it, doesn’t know where to start and becomes paralyzed.

The same applies to the real world, but on stilts, because sometimes what needs to/can be done is not immediately obvious.  It takes a type of mind to see it.

What seems to already be happening is that those who are “self starters” are doing three and four jobs, and keep coming up with new ones.  The ones who aren’t, are either unemployed or holding on to their one job by their fingernails, and bewildered on what they’d do if it goes away.

These are not lazy people (well, not all of them) they just don’t come up with things to do out of the blue.

We don’t even know how many of them there are.  There are probably fewer in the US than elsewhere, simply because we tend to roll up our sleeves and say “let’s get her done.”

But we know, almost for sure, there’s more of them than us.  The hundred plus years of the industrial model allowed them to grow and prosper too.  People who followed orders well could make a very decent living.  Showing up on time and doing what you were told was a survival skill.

There will still be some jobs like that, but not for the majority of people – and Obamacare is hurtling us towards a future where jobs means something completely different (the process started with the temp jobs in the eighties, to be fair.  And yes, a lot of it was even then pushed by government regulation.)  It means “temporary, contract, task-oriented, to be finished, and then another started up.  A lot of my generation has already gone through this, most of our working life, but it’s been “one employer, and then another” not… “I do the job in my own time, at my own pace, to employer specifications, either alone or while doing other jobs, and then I look for another, and another.”

A lot of us, who apparently despite ourselves are “self starters” are going to be doing the Atlas Juggled dance, with more than we can fit into a day.  Sometimes we might even be happy with it. (Once the kids are out of the house –? – and my work there diminishes, I should have an easier time, myself.)

But what about all the non-self-starters?  A lot of them genuinely won’t do well.

The left is worried about a future that excludes low IQ.  I think they are, as usual, full of it.  And they flatter themselves that they’re high-iq.

But there are people, IQ not mattering, who simply can’t adapt to a “find your own work, do your won thing, create your own job” world.

The lefts approach to the people they think are too dumb to survive is to create ever more lavish welfare.

Is ours going to be the same?  I don’t think it can be. Even with technology, there’s a minimum number of people who need to be working very hard to keep society going.  Confiscate their rewards, and you’re going to end up with them breaking early (In my experience Atlas can’t shrug.  He doesn’t know how.  But he can break.  And does) and having to be supported.  And even then, even if this weren’t so, there’s a minimum number of producers needed to support the others.

We’re nowhere near it, but this very bad law is hurtling us towards that future.

I don’t have an answer.  I don’t know what to do about the people who are not motivated to find their niche in this do-it-yourself world.  I don’t think the left’s “give them make work and welfare” works very well even now, and I think it will break down big time as “traditional jobs” become scarcer.

But I don’t know what to do about it.

To pick up on the title of the post, with another song – This could be heaven, or it could be hell.  And it will undoubtedly be both at once.

People used to make their own work, their own survival.  Those who couldn’t, didn’t survive.  Then came a way of earning your living that required you do do as told and do just so much and no more (in a way probably back to the agricultural revolution.)  There were  greater rewards and greater risks for trying to do it on your own, but it wasn’t mandatory.  Then in the twentieth century “jobs” became interchangeable with sinecures provided you did a minimum.  And if you didn’t, in the late twentieth century, the state would take care of you.

That was the blue model, which works well enough provided that the producers are more than the takers by some amount (I don’t know how much, though declining life standards could mean we’re already on the down slope.)

The blue model is collapsing, but what comes next?

 

 

160 thoughts on “Everything, All the Time”

  1. I think the survivability of the transition depends largely on how it happens. As you said, for much of history people did for themselves or they died. I believe most folks can still get in touch with that mindset, if given time/opportunity/freedom to do so. Not sure how much of that we’ll have.

    Thing is, I struggle with this myself, these days. Not because I’m not a self-starter per se (I’ve got several irons in the fire, and plans for several more, and glimmerings of a few past that), but because in many ways our system impedes it. You touched on this. Regulation, from wherever it may come, represents a barrier to entry that must be overcome. That usually entails a fairly high cost. So, you start with the small stuff, and try to tuck some back to pay down on the next larger project.

    In order for most folks to get back to being able to get things done on their own, there has to be enough security over time to re-learn some old lessons. Which means we have to hold the center as long as we can. And there must be enough freedom for people to pursue their own path. That means hacking regulations and law back to malum in se and chunking a lot of malum prohibitum.

    And it means pushing the culture in the right direction. Respect and prestige are frequently tied up in the absurd, right now. But that doesn’t keep people from needing respect and prestige. We have to recognize the perversity of our incentives and fix them.

    Or it’s lunch-time, my brain is foggy, and I’m full of it. One of those.

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    2. Regulation can be a killer.

      I’m kind of half self-starter. I can figure out what might be needed, and I can figure out ways to do it. But even the thought of red tape freezes me right up. There are so damn many things you have to figure out if you try to become your own employer that I just can’t deal with that. I have had ideas of how I might make at least some money by myself, but especially anything which includes going out and doing something, well, like cleaning somebody’s house for them, any kinds of service jobs, and you’d have to fill all kinds of forms and get all kinds of permits and preferably be able to prove that you have some sort of education for it already (experience cleaning your own home does not count) and so on. Waiters and other food service people need all kinds of ‘passes’ proving that they know what they are doing – and that means knowing what is the accepted way of doing those, no getting creative here – and are healthy. And so on. And if you start doing something you will then need to fight with all those forms all the time, not just in the beginning. And half of the questions on them don’t even make any sense, and lots of times none of the alternatives given for the ‘check the right alternative’ parts really quite fits…

      Producing something like stories is, thank heaven, at least right now easier. And at least with this I can start producing, and even start making some money before I need to start dealing with the rules and regulations part all that much, and even if I start earning something it will be mostly just the tax people. That I can handle. Maybe. I keep hoping that if this will start to produce some profits it would produce enough that I can hire somebody else to fight the red tape for me, and that is one of the bigger reasons why I do daydream of becoming really rich with this, I do not need fancy cars or faraway vacations that badly but I am really terrified of having to deal with the bureaucrats by myself.

      And there is this too – most of my generation, here, has been taught from childhood to doing things only the ‘right’ way, not any old way we might be able to figure out by ourselves, never mind whether those ways might work or not, and the right way is what some higher authority tells us, so you need to get those instructions first. Daring to show some initiative before you had been told how to do something tended to lead to trouble back when were in school, and that habit of waiting what to do before doing anything easily continues into adulthood. And it can also lead to rigidity, people keep doing things the way they were taught, and only the way they were taught.

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      1. And if you start doing something you will then need to fight with all those forms all the time, not just in the beginning. And half of the questions on them don’t even make any sense, and lots of times none of the alternatives given for the ‘check the right alternative’ parts really quite fits…

        One thing I’ve learned over time is that the more forms there are, the more likely they are to be filed & forgotten, rather than consistently followed up on. Just like the Soviet Union produced WAY more recordings of phone taps than anyone could possibly have listened to, bureaucracies tend to produce WAY more paperwork than they could possibly check on.

        Not that I would ever recommend that someone, say, invent some sort of educational history of getting training for cleaning houses when their actual training consists of doing it for ten years (and knowing more about it than the notional “education” would have given them). Why, that would be lying to bureaucrats who’d never find out. Which is clearly the most heinous evil that one could ever commit.

        But for the many people for whom the very idea of lying to bureaucrats would never occur to them… yeah, regulations can be utterly strangling. And none of the bureaucrats who are responsible for strangling the economy ever realize this. I really don’t know how to make them realize it, either, short of “solutions” I really, truly don’t want to encourage.

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        1. So you’re saying that you won’t help bankroll my research in breeding bureaucrat-sensitive dragons? Even if all the dragons do is have allergic reactions that make bureaucrats take up other lines of work until a minimal level of bureaucratic functionality is achieved?

          Yeah, I’m typing while exhausted. Why?

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    3. My worry is that the gov’t will make it much more painful… I’ve looked into money makers from home. All those I can do are illegal….. make hot lunches and deliver them to the office, bake cookies, make a “send a care package to the troops!” page where I fill it with goodies and sell it at a slight mark-up to folks who want to feel good….

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      1. Yeah, my fear as well. The .gov can still hamper us in far too many ways. So I keep looking for better paths.

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      2. Some people, mean-spirtted, cynical, suspicious people, think that the government doesn’t want you working except for a paycheck. A paycheck which is monitored easily and with taxes deducted, “benefits” provided and independence quashed.

        There is a name for such deeply constricted souls who dare doubt the beneficence of our governing class, but I shan’t be the one to drop it.

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          1. Silly fox. You probably think dissent is patriotic, too.

            You also probably think:

            I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic, and we should stand up and say, “We are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration!”
            HRC 04/28/03

            Curiously, only 20 months earlier that same person had said

            We will also stand united behind our President as he and his advisors plan the necessary actions to demonstrate America’s resolve and commitment. Not only to seek out and exact punishment on the perpetrators, but to make very clear that not only those who harbor terrorists, but those who in any way aid or comfort them whatsoever will now face the wrath of our country. And I hope that that message has gotten through to everywhere it needs to be heard. You are either with America in our time of need or you are not.
            HRC 09/12/01

            and

            Every nation has to either be with us, or against us. Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price.
            HRC 09/13/01

            Damn, but I wonder what this country would be like if we had an honest media. I was only seeking that first quote but man-o-man, it turns out that George W Bush wasn’t the one saying “you’re either with us or against us.”

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            2. Damn, but I wonder what this country would be like if we had an honest media.

              Confused. People like stories, and have been fed BS for so long they either like it, or assume it’s all BS.

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            3. Silly fox. You probably think dissent is patriotic, too.

              Belatedly:
              F NO!!!!!

              That’s contrarian. Wrong sibling for that, the reason my brother and I don’t fight is because we’d blow stuff up…. Sticking to principles can be patriotic, disagreeing to tweak people is… well, puerile.

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              1. Just in case there were any doubt: I used my prior comment to snark at certain two- triple-faced politicians who know their words have no significance beyond the immediate moment and who orate speak in the confidence that the memory hole will open wide as need be when those expressed positions become inoperable inconvenient.

                Other politicians, of a particular orientation, can count on being held culpable for things they never said and never would say. It is almost as if there were a bias in the American media, but that is impossible, following as they do in the illustrious tradition of the Pulitzer-winning journalist Walter Duranty.

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                1. Oops – no slur of Foxfier was intended. Meant to make that clear but got distracted by urgent need to employ mouthwash after discussing the MSM.

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                  1. Second time I’ve seen that posted (first time was at Ace HQ). I only watched it once the first time, and that was 2-3 weeks ago — and yet even though I haven’t clicked “play” on the link you posted, it’s still running through my head as I type this. Thank you for the earworm. In revenge, I shall just say this:

                    They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard!

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          2. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

            ― David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”

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        2. Many government ciphers, having lived all their lives on a steady paycheck from a job they can’t lose, have no imagination or empathy.

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  2. Frankly, in this economy, I think the ones who are going to make it in the long run are already gone (from traditional industries like the big publishing houses, that is).

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  3. I don’t find either of your two approaches to, say, the kitchen piled with dishes satisfactory. What I prefer is to take a big task, and define one part of it that’s manageable—in the kitchen, say, do enough dishes to fill the dishrack. Then I stop, and go do something else—say, copy edit two sections of a journal article. Breaking it up that way makes me less likely to say, “Oh, that’s too huge a job, I can’t take it on now.”

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    1. The thing is, that’s a skill that needs to be learned by most people. It’s very uncomfortable, especially with younger generations who are used to having the illusion of complete knowledge and connectivity with the world.

      I’ve told a few of my soldiers who were thinking about trying to go to OCS that the goal is to determine, “Can you make a decision and run with it? It doesn’t have to be a good decision, they’ll teach you that later. You just have to be able to look at the situation, pick a starting point, and go. Most of the time your plan will go to hell very quickly, at which point you’ll start all over again.”

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      1. Bernard Shaw says, in Heartbreak House, that the captain who is up on deck setting a course is not a drunken captain, however much rum he has in him. The captain who lies in his bunk and won’t take the helm is the drunken captain, even if he hasn’t touched a drop.

        Heinlein makes a somewhat similar point in Starship Troopers, when Juan Rico is being asked about his readiness to lead a platoon, I think.

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  4. I think that this will be a large part of our future. I don’t know if we’ll have a collapse or a war or what… But things will change greatly because of what you’ve mentioned joined by what can’t go on won’t.

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  5. Where do we fall if we like to let the dishes pile up until Saturday and then clean the whole house in one fell swoop?

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        1. I had a swollen foop but the doctor said it was nothing to worry about, gave me an ointment for it and eventually it went away.

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  6. I don’t have an answer. I don’t know what to do about the people who are not motivated to find their niche in this do-it-yourself world. I don’t think the left’s “give them make work and welfare” works very well even now, and I think it will break down big time as “traditional jobs” become scarcer.

    But I don’t know what to do about it.

    I do. I know exactly what to do about it. We talk about work. We talk about it as a good thing, as an ennobling thing. We talk about it as something that uplifts, encourages, and inspires. We talk about the value of a job well done, and of doing our best.

    Work is a blessing, not a curse, and it’s high time that was brought back into focus.

    In particular, we emphasize that with our children. Everything I know about work, I got from my Dad. I’m nowhere near the hard worker he is, but he certainly did try to emphasize to me the need for it, the good that comes from it, and not just the part where the job is done and you have X (finished piece of machinery, a harvest, a paycheck), but the good that comes while you are doing it.

    And we demonstrate the truth of that principle by living it in our own lives. (Mostly talking to myself here – get better about doing it, focus, engage, MOVE)

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      1. First, you can’t allow yourself to think like that. “What If” is fantastic for wargaming and fiction writing. But we (I) cannot allow it to stop us (me) from pushing forward and doing what we (I) can. (Sorry, but writing this is crystallizing some things for me, and I’m writing it more for myself than any of you.)

        For a while now, I have been convinced that the US is moving towards massive, job-killing, asset-destroying inflation – so what’s the point? It has been paralyzing, dream-killing, and made me generally not very much fun to be around. Reading this post, and having respond to it tells me one thing – Talk like that comes from my fear. And while fear has a time and place, this is not that place, and this is not that time.

        We have time. We have enough time. We have just enough time. We don’t have to reach everyone. Just the ones we can reach. You’ll reach people I can’t. I will reach people you can’t. We all reach out to who we can. And the way we reach out will be different. But we can all reach someone.

        And we’re not alone in this. You’re not the only one talking about work and thinking about work. Your example and my dad’s example helps me. My example helps my kid. Her example helps her friends. Maybe we try pointing it out every so often – that work is a good thing, something to be desired and pursued. That our lives are more full and more satisfying with work, when we are working, than without it.

        We are about to turn a corner in a MASSIVE way. Don’t ask me why or how, but it’s coming. I can feel it, like the humming of a train rail before you see the smoke or hear the whistle. Like the smell of snow before the first flake falls. Change, yes. BIG change. Incredible, wonderful, awful, terrifying change. But the other side will be good.

        And remember that in the end, we (Hard-working, liberty-minded Odds) win, they (vile progs and statists) lose.

        At the end of The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond leaves that letter with the timeless advice, “Wait, and Hope!” We have merely to add one word to that – something Edmond did himself in the Chateau d’If.

        Work, Wait, and Hope!

        (Wait, where am I? And how did I get on this soapbox?)

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        1. ^^This!!^^

          Stay up on that box, man. Don’t mind me. What? The jack? Pay no mind. I’m just jacking your box up a little (okay, a lot) higher. Helps the voice project.

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          1. “I’m nowhere near the hard worker he is,”

            *chuckle* Not so fast there, my friend. While most of us (even those with egos so big its a wonder they get through the door) feel the same, it just ain’t so.

            Have you ever read “The Jungle” by David Drake? It’s sort of an homage to an older Harry Kuettner short, but that’s neither here nor there. Throughout the whole book, the characters are thinking to themselves, “I’m worthless, but this guy here, he’s a *god!*” There’s a bit of that, and some more of the fear talking, in saying “I’m not worthy!” I know, because I do it, too.

            To someone else, you’re an example. To a child, to steal from Dave Freer, you’re a *giant!* Talking yourself down may be useful at times to prevent a swelled head, but that’s not the case here. In our own lives, to our own ideals, we always fall short. The pursuit of perfection and all that. *grin*

            Stand tall, good sir. You, too, Miss Sarah, I see you trying to sneak away! Eamon, don’t make me come over there. The work of the nation needs us all. Being a good example, treating others with respect, working hard whether there’s a deadline approaching or not, and not quitting ’til the jobs done (metaphorically speaking- *don’t* work yourself to death), these things are not hidden.

            I think more and more people are waking up to the realization that the work to be done is infinite, and that is the best news of all. There’s always something we can do. The standards we aspire to are great, but we still strive for them, and this makes us mighty. We live the dream that others yearn for, and yet we always have the drive to do more, be more. That’s what makes us who we are.

            Being a part of what makes this country great is an awesome and humbling thing. Don’t let the accomplishments of those who came before slow you down. Keep your chin up. When you’ve built something, fixed something, done a job and done it well, there’s a satisfaction to be found in saying “I did that.” It’s addictive. It makes you want to do *more.*

            Pardon me, sir, let me give you a hand with that jack…

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      2. There won’t be enough time to teach everyone self reliance. Or even many, too much inertia in the school system.

        At some point, it’s going to come down to “Tough Love.”

        The “Doers” step aside, and the “Can’ts” and “Won’ts” will crash and burn . . . and have to figure it all out for themselves. We’ve gotten into a horrible spoiled mindset of “Mommy (Uncle Sam) will kiss it and make it better.” Well, time to grow up. And it’s going to be painful for a lot of people.

        And our lifestyles . . . Apartment dwellers might have a patio tomato and a pepper bush on their tiny balcony, but a real garden and chickens? Nope. So that sort of partial self reliance is going to be hard to come by. Let’s not even talk about McMansions with two feet between you and your neighbor and sunny spots impossible to find.

        Not going to be pretty. The longer it takes to get there, the more people will be running internet Indies. The quicker it comes, the less time the Government has to run up debt and debase the currency. Flip a coin.

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        1. I’m going to guess, right off, that of the people who’ve been habituated to working in industry, there are many who can transition to working for themselves – but aren’t sure how. How to find new things to do, promote yourself to get the job, etc…skills needed much more on the outside than inside industry/office environments.

          And I’ll also guess: writers like you, who do it almost automatically, can include bits and pieces of the process and attitude needed in your writing, so that over time the necessary memes get picked up by the people who need to learn them. And that will help more than you’ll ever know.

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      1. Incidentally, I’m glad you produced exactly the right comment to prompt me to post that. Mike Rowe is telling it to the world, and he’s going to be in D.C. with about 400,000 other people talking about it.

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        1. That is a point being made by John Ratzenberger, and made very well. Unfortunately, too many see him and think “Cliff Claven” rather than attending to what he is saying.


          John Ratzenberger ‘Cheers’ the American Worker
          by Jeanette Mulvey, BusinessNewsDaily Managing Editor | May 06, 2012 06:50am ET
          When John Ratzenberger heads to work on a movie set, it’s not the other actors that have him star struck. Instead, he’s impressed by all the work that goes into making his job possible.

          “I’m aware of the people that built the sets and the people that made the technology for the lens on the camera,” said Ratzenberger, best known for his role as mail man Cliff Clavin on “Cheers.” “I appreciate the truck drivers who brought all the stuff there. Without them, I wouldn’t have a job.”

          Ratzenberger’s appreciation for the importance of laborers of all sorts has taken his career in a totally new direction.

          In addition to his work as a performer – he’s been in every Pixar movie ever made – he’s now the entrepreneur behind an innovative new business concept aimed at addressing the shortage of skilled labor in the United States.

          The program, called M.O.S.T., which stands for Mobile Outreach Skills Training, provides on-site training to workers to prepare them for skilled labor jobs.

          RTWT

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          1. “Unfortunately, too many see him and think “Cliff Claven” rather than attending to what he is saying.”

            Yet he played such an important part in the Rebellion!

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        1. I hadn’t seen it, and I disagree slightly with some of them (for example, I DO believe there is such a thing as a “bad job”, but they’re not as common as people make them out to be), but overall, I like it, especially the one that says, “I do not “follow my passion.” I bring it with me. I believe that any job can be done with passion and enthusiasm.”

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        3. Er can you sign if you only do 8 out of 9? I have a credit card and I bought my house with a mortgage.

          I don’t whine at work. I sometimes whine to my husband.

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          1. 7 out of 9. That’s my rule. You agree with 7 out of 9, we can figure the two out. Not saying anyone has to sign (or should), but it’s interesting that I’m getting this from a lot of different sources the last couple weeks.

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            1. I’ve long been partial to NY Mayor Ed Koch’s formulation: ”If you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist.”

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                    3. Ah, she’s 5’8– which, if I remember right, is rather short for Star Trek. (the lady who plays Kira is about the same height, and looked tiny because all the guys are well over six foot and tend to be built like fridges. I still adore the scene where Kira backs Garak across the room, growing and poking him in the chest. I’ve LIVED that!)

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  7. I bet there are a lot of young people in the welfare crowd with get up and go who would support themselves and make a good living if there weren’t unions and regulations standing in their way. A kid buys a cheap used car, makes up a sign for the roof and starts driving people around for some cash — AHHHHH! Gypsy Cab! EVIL! Cornrow braiding salons — the stylist laws forbid that. I’ve run into folks selling tamales and evading the public health Nazis. If some collapse stops the government from harrassing folks doing their own thing, a lot of people might be better off.

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      1. There is quite a bit more of that going on than most think. It may well be a part of why the collapse isn’t any worse.

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        1. Yep, I had a family member telling me today about a new friend of hers. Who had been telling her about someone who used to work for her because she was illegal and couldn’t get a real job, but since has gotten her green card and now works in town, but is hopefully going to come work for my family members friend for a couple weeks during her busy season. My family members take? “I’m so happy X won’t not do something just because it is against the law.”

          Now I’m not condoning hiring illegals (although I worked alongside of quite a few of them when I was younger, I have never hired any) but when bureaucratic red tape gets to thick it spawns attitudes like my family members. Which helps to broaden peoples horizon’s, if they have to do something outside the ‘right’ way because of regulations, it stretches their mind, and the experiences they learn there will help them work towards being self-starters and ‘doing what needs to be done.’

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          1. Sometimes the right thing to do ain’t legal, and to do right you have to work around the rules (think “guidelines”). There’s some out there that by-Bog *want* to be legal, do right, and follow the law, but the system works against them.

            Bringing those kind of people to the right side of the law is the kind of immigration reform I can respect, and support. I see outright amnesty is just another load of problems, even though it would definitely help a few that bloody well deserve a leg up.

            For grey market stuff, I find that when the economy is good, that side tends to dry up. Why work around, when you can make more money the other way? Also, hard to take side jobs when you’re working 83 hrs a week… Not that I haven’t done that, but it was for charity.

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            1. Yep, you will always have some grey economy, because there will always be those who just have to ‘get away’ with something. They like to push boundaries and just get a thrill out of doing something they aren’t supposed to. When a major portion of your economy goes grey however, you have a problem… or at least the government does, which in other words means you have problem called government.

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  8. Currently temp service agencies exist primarily due to regulations that make it too expensive to hire temps direct. On the other hand they can provide the central direction and sales for those that cannot do it themselves. This may be an answer to the problem that you posed.

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    1. That is something I thought too. One service which will be needed, help those people who don’t manage to do it themselves to find work. Since most of them will probably be unable to pay for that service when they need it, maybe work it kind of like the original version of literary agents, they do something for you and their pay is some percentage of your wages for some time after they have found that job for you.

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      1. That’s called a placement agency or a hiring agency. There used to be tons of them, and most temp agencies also do placement (usually temp to hire, sometimes as a straight hiring agency).

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        1. Labor Ready.

          And I’m not recommending them, at one time they were a good seasonal stock (buy their stock in February, sell around August to September, doubled or tripled every between those times, for a lot of years) but I worked for an outfit who hired a temporary summer help from them. Turns out he was an escaped con, driving a stolen car, with false ID. After he stole a company vehicle, drove it to Colorado, was handing out business cards and running a con game collecting deposits for work in the bosses name (who incidentally wasn’t licensed to work in Colorado) and then drove the company vehicle (with company name and phone number on the side) onto a car lot, took another vehicle for a test drive and never came back, stuff kinda hit the fan. When the boss confronted the local Labor Ready office it turns out that the guaranteed background check they ran, they only bothered to run instate… even though the drivers license the employee provided was from Georgia.

          I kind of got snowed by the con (who incidentally was in prison for running con games) I caught a ride with him in his car one day and made some offhand comment about his stereo. He blew it off as some cheap one he picked up for not much of nothing from somebody. I happened to have just put an identical one in my rig, and new it was a top of the line, expensive, new model. I didn’t say much, just figured the stereo was hot (assuming he bought it from somebody and knew it was hot) I didn’t think the whole car was hot. After all he had drove it clear across the country! The South Carolina plates (stolen off a different vehicle, turns out) and the Georgia drivers license should have given me a clue, though.

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  9. That “gypsy cab” thing goes way back, “The Altar at Midnight” by Kornbluth has the hero accuse gypsy cabdrivers of rolling drunken customers. Don’t know how much of that was fact and how much Yellow Cab propaganda.

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    1. At least here it does happen, but it’s rare. If the gypsies could work in plain sight it would probably be even rarer, as it is both the cabs and the customers are already breaking laws, so the customer is rather less likely to go to police, and the drivers are perhaps a bit more likely to be people who are more likely to break more rules than just that one.

      I have some personal experience, by the way. If you are sitting in your car in downtown around the time the bars close, and all the legal cabs are occupied and the lines to them are huge it’s almost inevitable somebody will come and ask if you could drive them somewhere. And some of those people can be damn persistent (and one can start feeling sorry for them too, like if it’s some very young lone woman). Just a couple of times, though, and those were a long time ago.

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  10. Thank you for the thoughts about “lazy” and “over-committed”.

    I’m not a self-starter. I’m old enough to have learned to do it anyway. I’ve learned to be self-propelled, self-starting… I’ll *find* something to do and work well unsupervised. But my most *comfortable* place is one where there are clearly defined tasks with clearly defined end-states.

    I helped my dad shingle his house, when my kids were toddlers. My dad didn’t understand why I wanted to do that. My mom understood. Watching toddlers is so open-ended. You work so hard with no clearly defined end-state. A roof has a clearly defined end-state and clearly defined tasks. I’ll work my butt off, work really really hard. But because I’m not a “self-starter” I feel like I’m lazy. I FEEL like I’m really lazy. But I’m not.

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    1. Amen to the “watching kids has no defined task end.” I feel so accomplished when I do something that ISN’T watching the kids, because it’s a defined task. Like painting the hallway.

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        1. Oh c’mon — you’re overlooking those warm moments when they spontaneously blurt out “I wuv you” as they hug you, pressing their dirt, jelly and let’s-not-think-about-it smeared faces and hands into your best long skirt!

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          1. I don’t wear skirts, unless I’m so pregnant that nothing else fits…

            Besides, my Duchess is now in the starting to talk stage, and good feedback is “thad’d be BAAAAD!!!” or “thad’d be GOOD!” (The thinks she thinks are good or bad are rather amusing…)

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            1. (The thinks she thinks are good or bad are rather amusing…)

              So, share! Don’t leave us all in suspense like that, you evil woman! :-D

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              1. So much is situation….
                Imagine going through your day, with most of what you say (ie, “We’re going out now!”) being responded to with either “Thad’d be baaaaad!” or “Thad’d be GOOOOOOD!“, about halfway randomly.

                And if you say “What?”, you’ve got about a fifty percent chance of her switching what she said, then giving you a huge, gold-haired, rose-lipped, cream skinned grin… or a duck-faced pout. Totally cracks me up, and she knows it.

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            2. My sister is collecting the sayings of her younger daughter’s older son. Here’s an example:

              Jaden: I don’t know what language I am supposed to play this movie in?
              Me: We speak English.
              Jaden: No we don’t. We speak Kentucky and that’s not an option.

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    2. The natural “end state” of watching toddlers is when you have them in bed and asleep for the night. By midafternoon on a rainy Saturday, that can seem a long way off.

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  11. This is a scary post for two reasons:

    1.) It’s dead on. I just had this conversation with a co-worker last week. There is no loyalty anymore. When an employer feels free to terminate employees whenever it needs to cost ut the employees are going to feel that it’s OK to leave whenever they can get a better deal

    2.) Outside of writing, where I like to THINK I have a marketable skill, I have nothing to offer as far as starting my own business. My specialty is in communicating with other people and that only works if someone pays me to do it. That’s not to say that I’m lazy at anything but housework although I am a slob as both my mother and me ex-wife can attest.I work two jobs and 70+ hours a week but those are both for employers. If we go back to an entrepreneur based economy I’m screwed and so are most of the people I know.

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    1. #2 worries me as well. I can maintain and repair the computers in a school, provided I have spare parts. I can drop a system board into a workstation, but I can’t make or repair the board. I could cobble together a functional network, but couldn’t repair a switch to save my life. I, too, have irons in the fire, but let me make an inch of headway on any of ’em, and another family/workplace/personal emergency makes me drop everything else for a month and I have to start over from scratch. I could probably accomplish more if I started telling certain people to pound sand, but that job pays the bills and I sometimes need help from the friends/family myself. Oddly enough, I think I could do a creditable job teaching. After 11 years as support staff in the public school system, I think I’ve observed teachers long enough to know what not to do. Unfortunately, I do NOT believe I could hack it as a public school teacher — I’d be fired or in jail within a week.

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        1. With all the surface mount components these days, my hard won through-hole component desoldering/resoldering skills are not of much use anymore.
          Not to mention my vi-editing, buggy whip reweaving and bronze sword resharpening skills.

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            1. I have read news reports that there is a real boom in leather foundation garments, restraints, whips and, oh, some forty-seven other shades of usage.

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          2. Your desoldering/resoldering skills can still be used on ham radios and CBs. I also find soldering a handy technique for areas where the more extreme heat of welding isn’t feasible.

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          3. Oh, I still use my vi-editing skills. The vi editor (or, more accurately, Vim) can be surprisingly productive as a programming environment with the right set of plugins. Google “Vim config of champions” to get you started, then use his Vim config as a baseline to tweak and get your own. I didn’t listen to the people who said “Don’t use someone else’s .vimrc, write your own” and I’m glad I didn’t — I’m now far more productive than I was with barebones Vim, or for that matter with a “conventional” IDE like Eclipse.

            To all the non-geeks for whom the above paragraph was wizardly gobbledegook, sorry about that. That’s what computer wizards, after all — we study volumes of arcane lore technical manuals, to learn the right magical incantations commands to make our familiars laptops do what we want them to do.

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            2. I think one of my coworkers uses Vi, and the other uses eMacs. Since I’m a Windows guy, I use Notepad++ when I am writing something in Perl or doing an XML config file. Otherwise, I use the Visual Studio DEV environment for doing C# or Visual Basic (yeah, I know how lame I am. No need to repeat it. :-) )

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    2. Jim McCoy, aren’t you doing foodservice stuff now? That translates in odd ways to all sorts of other work. You’re screwed right now because of cultural expectations about what a given experience prepares you for, and how few people understand what experience actually translates into.

      Folks who’ve never done it have no concept, and tend to be condescending. I’ve got two words for ’em. They’re not polite words.

      You work well under pressure, with tight deadlines, in a demanding environment. You know how to organize multiple related processes and tune your work habits for the greatest efficiency. You’re able to work with, and coordinate with, multiple, frequently clashing, personalities and get the job done. You’re familiar with the notion that your ‘job description’ is a vague suggestion of what will actually be necessary to put money in your pocket. You know how to master your initial emotional response to just about anything, and are able to endure the unwanted, undeserved and unacceptable without resorting to obscene amounts of violence.

      I’m not blowing smoke and fairy dust, here. I’ve got experience across more than one high pressure field, and foodservice tests people. Most folks don’t cut it, they walk. Skills are just that, skills. Things you learn on the job to get the job done. Mindset…that’s worth gold.

      An entrepreneur based economy does not mean every man for himself. Entrepreneurs don’t get things done all by their lonesome. They need folks working with them that can…well, that can do all those things I listed above. And if the culture shifts (as it must) then folks are going to start figuring out the real value of work experience and stop paying attention to the supposed value of a “I majored in beer” degree.

      Regarding point 1: Really, that’s the way it ought to be. Feels a little harsh, but everybody is better for it when done right.

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      1. Eamon’s right in his analysis of your skillset, Jim. And communications translates to marketing and sales. Hook up with a rising entrepreneur with a good product, and you could help them and yourself prosper.

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      2. Yes, this gives me hope. I’m not the entrepreneurial “type,” but I am a hell of a right-hand-man. I think child-rearing also builds unacknowledged skills in somewhat the way you describe for food service.

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    3. Scary thing: your point about loyalty dovetails with a career-advice article I saw on LinkedIn not long ago. That author made it out to be a good thing that employees show no loyalty to the employer, because that loyalty won’t be reciprocated, and advocated for a culture in which everybody is constantly on the hunt for their next job. Frankly, that feels downright pathological from where I stand. Then again, most members of the Western culture seem to be doing essentially that same thing in their romantic lives, so why not in their employment, too?

      On the gripping hand, that attitude both reflects and exacerbates the loss of societal trust that helps speed us into collapse.

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      1. Trust is a two-way street, and if an organization shows by its behavior that it’s not an appropriate place to put your trust, then putting your trust in that organization anyway through some sense of not wishing to fray social fabric is (putting this as gently as I can) foolish and naive.

        And I don’t know that I buy that “most” members of Western Civ are looking for the BBD (Bigger Better Deal) in their romantic lives. Maybe that’s naivete on my part, or maybe it’s the immersion in my own particular sub-culture, but I am reminded that matters of the heart are fundamentally different from matters of the wallet / employment.

        Maybe we have a generation that’s been watching too much MTV / CWTV / Whatever The Network We Should Be Disparaging Today Is… but that just makes it more important for those of us who care to shift the culture as much as we can in our homes and families, and then reach out to others in our circle of influence from that strong base.

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      2. It’s been the culture in IT for most of the time my husband has been in it. Because we have family and other pursuits, he ISN’T always on the hunt. But he’s paid for that.

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  12. Among the current self-starters, there’s a split. The people (like my husband) who work for a few corporate clients, and those (like us writers) who work (sell) to the multitudes. If an economic downturn (or stupid government regulations) negatively impacts corporations, one type of self-employed gets hurt. The “multitude” Indy will be impacted according to the overall impact on the national, and possibly international finances. But even so, some people will prosper, and an Indie can change product to appeal to the successful. And build up inventory for future sales, as they scrape through this downturn.

    Ah! For a crystal ball. That works. The smartest thing to do is probably to try to get into Sarah’s position, with a foot in both camps. And think Indie in several very different industries.

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  13. There’s a type of mind that looks at a dirty kitchen piled with dirty but fine bone china and stag handled steak knives then throws it all into the dishwasher pot scrubber cycle too.

    To avoid the risks of such things in the workplace Boeing once went to great lengths training employees to stand around wearing Boeing gloves – hands in their pockets – rather than pitch in to do work they weren’t both trained on and currently certified for. Much of the time this was appropriate and safer for all concerned – better not to do unauthorized work and rework on Boeing products. But often this was something between a mindset and an excuse – I can’t do anything like read or write a note on the Windows computer because I’m only trained on Unix and besides I’d have to stack the monitor on a couple of phone books to get it up to eyelevel. Everybody knows all work stops until modifications are ergonomically certified.

    No continuity in the workplace makes every team or work group an ad hoc group that will never work together again (at least as precisely the same team on the same or very similar task) – iterated games people play are played quite differently from one off interactions.

    Some early equivalent of Google glasses with a shop manual loaded was once going to make it easy for each of us to be self-starting as our own auto mechanic and plumber to obsolete those hands on jobs too. Maybe that combined with some variation of Google’s ask an expert or an AI at least to start is the wave of the future getting started on a new or overwhelming task – at least as far out as I can see –

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    1. “No continuity in the workplace makes every team or work group an ad hoc group that will never work together again (at least as precisely the same team on the same or very similar task) – iterated games people play are played quite differently from one off interactions.”

      This is the joy my current employer is going through. When I started there, teams were built and organized around a project, and sometimes you had a team that had a half-idle expert in technology X and another team that couldn’t find anyone to handle X.

      So we reorganized to a “service model”, and now the primary determinant of how much time gets allocated to a project from the various “service” groups is how visible it is to senior management.

      Supposedly, in a few months our project will be “done” and the project will change to “maintenance mode”. The guy who works with our customer will be reassigned. The testers will be reassigned. Some of the programmers will be reassigned. The ones left will have to deal with a nation-wide rollout on an express schedule (my last project took four, five years to roll out across the entire company; this one they’re pushing for 18 months) and the normal support work. The ones moving on will have to build whole new team relationships.

      Whee! Fun!

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      1. “Supposedly, in a few months our project will be “done” and the project will change to “maintenance mode”. The guy who works with our customer will be reassigned. The testers will be reassigned. Some of the programmers will be reassigned. The ones left will have to deal with a nation-wide rollout on an express schedule (my last project took four, five years to roll out across the entire company; this one they’re pushing for 18 months) and the normal support work. The ones moving on will have to build whole new team relationships”

        You’re working on the healthcare website?

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  14. Regarding being a self-starter, I’m kind of in between. I need a definite goal, or else I will spin my wheels. I simply can’t see what kinds of things need similar solutions often enough to make it worthwhile to pursue doing them.

    For example, I’ve created any number of things for difficulties that I run into myself, then see essentially the same thing on the market later, making someone tons of money. I never realized other people would have the same need.

    What I am is a problem solver. But I need someone else to present me with the problem to solve. If I could figure out how to put that out there in a way that would get me work, I would be fine.

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    1. Number one is the way things should be. It still bares repeating and an acknowledgment that even doing the right thing can have consequences not to your liking.

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  15. A major source of the problem with the non-starters is that it is a learned condition. Our schools are designed to produce cogs for an industrial society, good union members who will do what they are told (and only that), vote how they’re told and not ask awkward questions about how their taxes and dues are “invested.”

    Until the pedagogy is changed the culture will remain — one reason that home education is such a threat to those who like their society “orderly.”

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    1. Well, we’re up to the second, possibly third generation of teachers who have been trained not to reason (i.e. no exposure to the scientific method, the laws of logic and grammar, and so on), and they are teaching students not to ask questions, since the teachers don’t know how to answer them and/or are afraid to. I see it in the school, although there are a few students (usually two per class, sometimes more) who are always asking, poking, learning new things, and making mischief if not channeled. The trick is to channel them without alienating them (or the rest of the class, for that matter).

      I’d love to see home ec and shop reintroduced, if only for survival skills. I doubt this particular school would do it (cost of facilities, health department problems with kitchen [see above]) but we really need to bring vo-tech back so even (especially?) the college-bound kids learn how to do something with their hands, and learn the feeling of pride in accomplishment.

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  16. I know that I can self-start, but I also know that I just don’t have the spoons to do enough to support my hubby and me. I can either clean the house or write. I just don’t have the energy to do much more. Sad but true. I wonder how many people are in my situation?

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    1. A bunch of us who are aging and getting close to retiring or have already retired. IMO, Social Security will be among the last of the Government programs to close. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be some serious cutbacks before they shut it down.

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  17. I really don’t know what to make of this. I’ve never watched the show, Daughtorial Unit having long since outgrown such fare before the show came on, and the first para quoted sounds suspiciously anti-employer (perhaps pro self-employment?) but, well, read for yourself:

    … In an episode to air Nov. 11, the hardworking sea sponge is fired from his job at the Krusty Krab in the undersea city of Bikini Bottom after his boss figures out he can save “a whole nickel” from his payroll.

    One day later, SpongeBob is already a disheveled, wrinkled, unshaven beggar, and his friend Patrick is determined to show him the ways of “glorious unemployment,” which includes free stuff and lots of spare time….

    But at a no-charge, all-you-can eat meal, SpongeBob has an epiphany: “Unemployment may be fun for you, but I need to get a job,” he tells Patrick. At that moment, he’s instantly transformed into a sparkly clean, enthusiastic and energetic sponge again.

    From ‘SpongeBob’ Critiques Welfare State, Embraces Self-Sufficiency.

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  18. ” but most people their age won’t, I think, have “real jobs” where they have to be on site, and work at one thing only for more than ten or so years of their working lives. (Note, I say most, not all. Like my kids’ wished-for professions, a lot of work has to be done in person – but not the majority, and not for the majority of people.)”

    I think you are overstating this. While I’ll agree more and more jobs will become ‘remote’ jobs that you can do from home, or wherever else you might be. I believe it will be a very long time before that reaches a majority, particularly if the economy tanks. A lot of those jobs will either dry up or at least shrink severely in a crash, take an accountant for example, when things get tight people will be struggling to find work (or working under the table) accountants have jobs for two main reasons, 1) people are making enough money they don’t want to put up with the headache of figuring out their own accounts and/or dealing with the regulation nightmare. So they hire someone else to do it. (kind of like how a successful horse breeder hires a flunky to clean stalls, because they are making enough money they don’t have to or want to shovel crap half the day, so they pay someone to do it) 2)People are busy enough and making enough money that it is cheaper to pay an accountant to do their accounts while they go out and earn more per hour than they are paying the accountant. Neither of these will be true for the majority of people in a crash, struggling to make ends meet, and failing to find enough work to keep them busy all the time, they will shovel out their accounts themselves, because as much as they hate to do it, they can’t afford to hire someone else to do so.

    The physical jobs that require onsite work will also tighten their belts, but to a lesser degree. While we have the technology (or are close to having it) to do remote surgery, or run a backhoe and dig out a foundation, while sitting in our underwear in our parents basement, I suspect it will be a long time (more than most of our lifetimes) before the cost and availability of such technology make it become the norm.

    I see the number of people becoming entreprenuers going through the roof, and a steady rise in people doing non-site specific work. Unlike the self-employment trend I don’t see the non-site specific workers becoming a majority for a long time, if ever.

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    1. I think you’re right. For a long time, the cost benefits of centralized manufacturing for many, many things will remain.

      Take cabinetmaking, for example. While this is one of the easier things to do independently, the costs are much higher, because there’s not enough volume to justify installing the kinds of equipment that will do sawing, drilling, routing, etc. automatically, with humans to monitor and troubleshoot. There are tons of other examples.

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  19. So the problem I fear we are going to face is that the eddicashunal establishment has been getting more successful at killing the ability for graduates of their indoctrination to make their own choices or decisions. And/or the desire to try something new. And/or the ability to plan something and do it without being spoonfed the template of how to make the plan…

    In other words we moving back to people working in small organizations and loose semi-permanent confederations with others just as the teachers figure out how to kill all the native human ability to handle such a role

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  20. I think that particularly bold and practical people are going to decide that what’s euphemistically called the “cash economy” isn’t just for shysters anymore.

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  21. “Once the kids are out of the house –? – and my work there diminishes, I should have an easier time, myself.”

    This has been my experience with sending my boy off to school … even though he spends most of his time at home in his room or basement on the computer, the house stays ever so much cleaner without him home. Boggles my mind, actually. Hang in there!

    “Then there’s a type of mind that looks at it, doesn’t know where to start and becomes paralyzed.”

    Either that or they don’t even see it. I have an extremely close relative who I was trying to talk into helping my elderly parents with leaf-raking last Fall … took the longest time to get the concept across because this person just didn’t see it, as in wasn’t even aware of the need/concept because they have always lived in an apartment complex where all that kind of thing is done by a service … I hate confrontations and butt-kicking, but it had to be done to get my Mom the help she needed. I live 1700 miles away from Mom, or I would have been there and not even given a thought to that relative’s help … Daughters of Martha, Unite!

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  22. I am weird. Maybe a half-starter, or a natural starter who’s just too disorganized. You are right, it is not laziness. I cursed myself with that title too long before I nearly worked myself to death accomplishing nothing but keeping busy. It’s an organization thing. All of my gifts turn out to be things that entities don’t hire for, but individuals do. So I have to learn how to craft my own framework for success. In the past, people just inherited it from the family business.

    Doing this is slow and painful, and it feels like I’m accomplishing nothing. But… there are tools. Yes, things like Scrivener help, because they have an underlying structure, that I can extend into my life and work flow.

    One thing I excelled at in an office was finding structure and extending it and using it to the company’s benefit, not just my own project. What I sucked at was office politics. That turned out to outweigh how ever many millions I saved my company. I’m hoping that means that when I work for myself, I can generate enough to make the effort worth it, and help Husband feed the family– and savor the benefits of not having to interpret what’s-her-nose’s political move to block me from anticipated advancement.

    So as long as your non-self starter realizes they have to fill in for what they don’t get from a standard job, and they are stubborn, it should work. Eventually. Hunger is quite an incentive. When actions have consequences, people learn faster.

    A lot of this non-starter stuff is adaptation to the environment. As a child I was wholly a self-starter. But I kept getting punished for that. I wanted to be a good girl. I did not have the sense to rebel against it because it meant less work. HA! Unlearning those habits is much harder work than actually being punished.

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    1. One advantage of working for yourself is that you are king in office politics. Of course you’re usually king of a particularly small and week country, so you have to not antagonize kings of the neighboring countries that you have to trade with in order to survive, at the same time convincing them it is a better deal to trade with you than with that other country over there, and definitely more profitable and less hassle to trade with you than to conquer you and take over. But dealing with a few kings who are generally looking mainly at their bottom line and will only backstab you if they feel they will get a concrete gain from it is easier than dealing with the multitudes.

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  23. Just so what we all know what happens when the Progressives hit bottom:
    A communist horror story:

    If things go bad, most of us will be able to survive, if they let us. But will the Progressives not try to control if we let them.

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  24. My self-starter burnt out a few years ago. I still learn new things in my field, but can’t bring myself to grind on personal projects as much as I used to. And, frankly, I’m getting less interested in learning new things (in my field) because there’s so little interest from others in applying any of it.

    Which is REALLY, REALLY bad, because I work in IT.

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  25. OT, but I found out today that my county commissioner really dislikes being called a Marxist, and will hang up on you when you do so. Which really isn’t the way to solicit my vote come the next election, but I suspect he already knew he had lost that.

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    2. I take it he has no apparent problem with being a Marxist, just with being called out on it?

      This is a not uncommon problem. I notice very few conservatives complaining about the label; you never hear one say “No, I’m a regressive!”

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      1. Typology of American Political Nomenclature (proposed):

        Marxists CLAIM TO BE Progressives
        Progressives CLAIM TO BE Liberals
        Liberals CLAIM TO BE Moderates
        Moderates CLAIM TO BE Conservatives
        Conservatives CLAIM TO BE Conservatives
        Fascists are anyone to the Right of your group

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          1. I think the two have crossbred the last few years, to inject some hybrid vigor in both lines. Seems to be working too, the snoot nosed purebreds of other stripes are just trying to use it as an excuse to keep not only the crossbreds, but the purebred libertarians and conservatives out of the registry.

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          2. I really need to get my stuff ironed out… I think there’s a split in the Libertarian folks, between the ones that accept the whatever-the-freak-big-theory thing where folks don’t have an inherent worth because they’re people, they’ve got “value,” and the folks who are more “No, people have worth. And that’s why you sometimes have to kill them.”

            …

            Phrasing is supposed to be darkly amusing.

            I’m still busy being freaked out by someone I know to be fairly OK talking about the morality of saving drowning toddlers in terms of “well, they have potential value of their lives having X output for themselves…..” and then justifying it in part because if “just” being a person gave you worth, then how could you kill Adolph Hitler? The idea of duty/responsibility/inborn demands just didn’t compute….

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            1. I think the majority of “Libertarians” are just kidding themselves, that few if any really have the conviction of their principles. A few certainly do, but the majority of them just seem pretentious and infantile, acting out a philosophical position they have not thought through and don’t really stand for when push comes to shove.

              Of course, that is probably true of most people whatever their claimed political tilts.

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              1. True, but I was trying to ignore the folks who just call themselves Libertarian while being Dems or Socialists or Random Potheads.

                I know there are thinking Libertarian Catholics, so the relative worth of a person thing can’t be inherent, but then again I finally figured out the gap listening to Rand fanboys defending her…..

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                  2. Indeed. Libertarian philosophy is no more centralized than:
                    Republicanism
                    Conservatism
                    Christianity
                    Islam
                    Judaism
                    Climate Science
                    Football Fans

                    Ayn Rand was a utilitarian misanthrope who wrote down some interesting ideas. Rand appeals to certain types of people at certain times in their lives, not because they’re misanthropes, but because it gives them a ‘rational’ philosophical structure to free them from all the ‘caring’ folks fouling up their lives.

                    I’d still take a Randian libertarian over a ‘caring’ progressive, myself.

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                    1. Rand’s philosophy was mostly a revolt from Marx, and its central precepts were about inverting Marxian ones. . . it has a certain charm to those who have to fight the Marxists. Being simple is always an aid.

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            2. “and then justifying it in part because if “just” being a person gave you worth, then how could you kill Adolph Hitler?”

              Next time someone feeds you that line, explain to them that Hitler was a horse with a broken leg, he used to have worth, but broke his leg and lost his worth. He can’t be fixed or rehabilitated, and if left loose he will keep screaming and trying to hobble after the other horses, likely spooking them and causing them run off a bluff trying to get away from him. The best you can do now is make glue out of him.

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              1. I didn’t put it quite that way– to easy for them to pull an equivocation– but basically pointed out that I’d kill him because he has inherent worth, and chose to behave otherwise.

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          3. Well, some libertarians can’t. They are the ones who think that if only we imposed a minarchist state, utopia will ensue. There will be no problems about deadbeats who keep themselves intentionally judgement proof, there will be no issues about abused children, and people’s petty spite will not cause nasty problems.

            “They constantly try to escape
            From the darkness outside and within
            By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”

            Or, in others, they prefer the Gods of the Marketplace.

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              1. Mary, again, there are many flavors of minarchist. What you describe is more “anarchist.” You bet your bottom dollar I don’t approve of the federal government sticking its nose in things like child care. Local governments, where we can keep a closer eye on them, I’m more lenient with.

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                1. I’m more lenient with.

                  There’s a compelling philosophy of citizenship vis a vis government buried in that little phrase.

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                2. Because mommy government (and anarchist) types seem to have a problem with the concept:

                  One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.
                  http://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-6-number-4/principle-subsidiarity

                  Not only can we keep a closer eye on local government but the upper levels need to be independent enough that they
                  offer a court of appeal, able to rein in the locals when an out of control prosecutor starts seeing (for example) child abuse cults in every day care center. Or when the local power structure turns a blind eye to crimes against certain types of people.

                  But when New Yorkers commence to imposing their definitions of salsa on Texans we are dealing with a form of internal cultural imperialism that is not to be tolerated.

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                3. Anarchist means NO government. None of the problems I described are in the least hindered by an minarchist government.

                  The abused child problem arises even with people specially charged to look out for children, because those people are only human. And there are indeed libertarians who maintain that all decisions are the parents’ to make.

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                  1. Re: parents making decisions. I’d be perfectly happy to start from that premise and ask you to justify, in detail, EVERY exception.

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  26. Given modern employment these days is nothing but a popularity contest — most people only get jobs because “a friend recommended him”; and god help you if you have no friends to use as references [cough] — I suspect “indie employment” is only going to be necessary for those of us who the mainstream has deliberately kicked to the curb.

    As for what one eventually does with that employment: All I ever wanted to do was go auto racing. One can track my progress towards being of legal age to do so by the closure of racetracks in the area I was living at the time (L.A. Basin); such that by the time I could, I would have needed to move to Texas in order to be near a racetrack, and to North Carolina in order to be near the epicenter of racing in the US. (Oh, and this was also the time when Jeff Gordon came along, and suddenly it was expected that a kid would have been racing since age 5; so not only did I get fucked over by physical location, I also got fucked over by timing. And you wonder why I Do Not Believe In Your Gods?)

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    1. I don’t know what kind of employment you’ve been doing, but only once (out of 30 or more jobs) have I ever been hired because I “knew someone”. And that was the hottest, dirtiest job I have ever had, so getting it that way really didn’t have a lot to recommend it.

      And, while I can’t quite call your racetrack closures, let alone raise, I’ll still ante up 5 business closures during the time I worked for them, or within a few months after leaving.

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      1. I have gotten jobs because I knew someone, but it was generally along the lines of, “hire him, he is a hard worker.” Or, “you like those, here is the number of the guy I got them from.” Word of mouth is the most reliable advertising, it is up to you though whether it is good advertising or the “don’t hire him, all he will do is whine and make excuses for why he is two weeks late and it is still done half-arsed.”

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    2. Stipulating your assertion that “modern employment these days is nothing but a popularity contest” — why might that be so? In a barely breathing economy the regulatory cost of taking on an unknown worker becomes very high. (I trust that any schedule of impediments to qualifying new hires and discharging unqualified hires would be deemed superfluous and incomplete.) When the demand for labor is high, costs of taking on new workers is low and costs of dismissing non-workers slight companies will readily hire people from the open labor market. Yet when even so minimal a check as a criminal background investigation is attacked by our DOJ as presumptively racist is it any wonder that informal references become critical?

      It ain’t as if employers can be confident that people walking in off the street can even show up on time according to a schedule, much less do sufficient work to cover their cost.

      Your “reasons” for disbelieving in any Gods are irrational non-sequiter. Who are you and what have you done for any God that you feel entitled to having your desires given consideration? Hell, Jesus (to pick one) flat out said that following Him would N-O-T make you popular. Classic double-bind you’ve created: if you received that which you appear to think yourself entitled you would surely not thank any God for your blessings, and you childishly throw a snit because you get what you ask for — nothing.

      Atheism is a faith no more logical than any theism.

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      1. Your “reasons” for disbelieving in any Gods are irrational non-sequiter. Who are you and what have you done for any God that you feel entitled to having your desires given consideration? Hell, Jesus (to pick one) flat out said that following Him would N-O-T make you popular.

        When God the Son doesn’t get what He wants– and in fact gets tortured to death in spite of His desire that bitter cup be taken from Him– not getting what you want is a reason to disbelieve?

        You want shitty, I’m a damn good calibration technician. I’m meticulous, dedicated, small hands, the whole nine yards– I can’t get hired because 1) I won’t work 60-80 hour weeks, and 2) I’m a female Navy vet, and thus too high a risk for resume padding. I’d be glad to do some “fill the gap” work, but it won’t happen, and I won’t sacrifice my kids to get a paycheck. Yeah, it sucks that I’m screwed because someone else behaved badly, but that’s humanity in a nutshell.

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