Small, Private Tragedies

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I’ve been looking for a way to write about the small private tragedies, for which we each blame ourselves, but which are in fact part of a system that more and more militates against humanity and — in our place, in our time — particularly against young people, and even more particularly against young males.

And then I was reading Francis’ Turner’s Post yesterday and this jumped out at me:

And this has of course had all sorts of bad effects. As the Forbes article he linked to points out, prior to the 1500 hour rule, pilots typically had about 500 hours when they first sat behind the controls on a commercial flight and they were mentored over the next 1000 or so by more experienced pilots. This system worked just fine, and is in fact the system still used everywhere except the US and commercial airliners do not fall out of the sky on a regular basis. But now, in the US, would-be pilots need 1500 hours before they can start which radically limits the pool of potential applicants and raises the cost because if not military they have pay for that 1500 hours of flight time out of their own pockets.

The problem is that the effects of this rule change take years to be noticed (most of a decade I believe in this case) by anyone outside of a few subject matter experts who get blown off because “it’s for the children” or whatever.

And that, right there is the issue. The rules that are signed with much flourish, and which sound so good on paper, have monstrous effects down the road. And yet, the people raised on the previous set of rules don’t know where this is coming from, and are shocked and surprised, and always, inevitably, attribute the problem to the wrong thing.

Mostly, it gets attributed to “kids these days” but unless you have kids, these days, you don’t know how they are bound. And even if you do, you might not realize it, because all you see is the infantilization of a generation, and not that they, themselves, aren’t the ones doing the infantilizing, but all those “good rules” and regulations and laws are doing it.

I realized about 10 years ago that my son’s generation was about 10 years behind where we were. In their mid twenties they were doing things we did in our teens. It was disconcerting. And even I had no idea why, other than too much regimentation in school, too much of a never end of button counting, and not enough room or freedom to think or be on their own.

Since then…. I’ve seen more. And a lot of the reason they are younger than we were is that the entire world is geared not to let them grow up. I mean, let’s be glad that — unprepared or not — they’re legal adults at 18, or people would be denouncing them for walking alone down the street, without an “adult” at 25.

There’s also… adolescence is in some ways a profoundly unnatural life-stage, and more or less invented in the 20th century. In the past, sure, people were children, and people grew to be adults, but there wasn’t this protracted time period where they were adults in size and at least some ability, but weren’t allowed to be adults: they weren’t allowed to earn or spend, or make their own decisions, for years.

The earn or spend thing is important. Kids used to grow along with their tasks. Read Tudor or colonial memoirs, and you find four year olds looking after cows or horses, or learning Latin, or other unlikely things even for twelve year olds in our time.

Mom went to work at 10 and started getting a salary. It wasn’t much, and 90% of it went to her parents’ budget. But she was working, holding down a job, doing things that were maybe not at adult level, but could lead to it, eventually, if she applied herself. This was normal for her generation. In my own generation, amid the working class, most people went to work at 10. Heck, amid the middle class, most people went to work at 15 or so, after 9th grade. Were they more mature than the rest of us that went all the way to college?

I wouldn’t have thought that at the time, but yes, of course they were. Most of my elementary school classmates were married, with kids by the time my biggest worries were final exams. Of course, with my intellectual pride I looked down on them but now I understand they were managing a very difficult job, which at the time I could not have done.

I always feel stunned and shocked when someone says the kids should be “holding down two jobs like I was at 16” or “working to pay their way through college.” (That last is a giggle as it has two impossibilities. Finding a job that pays enough after college which has a lot of make-work expectations, and making a full-time middle-class salary, which is what college costs these days.) Two Jobs. At 16. The difficulties in giving work to 16 year olds, increasingly restriction of hours, etc. combined with chaotic scheduling in the only unskilled jobs remaining (mostly just retail) means that until recently none of them could find A job. Let alone two. And the recently was during Covid. I haven’t seen so many little 16 year olds cashiering, or serving at tables recently. And that’s because most people I’m seeing are around my age: I guess unemployment is biting hard.

But you know, all these strong rules against “child labor” mean that most kids hit 18 or, if they’re going to college, 22 or — more likely, as most degrees (remember make work?) are taking 6 or 7 years — 24, with absolutely no job experience. Which means their applications aren’t even looked at. Not seriously.

Honestly, almost every young person — particularly young men — I know who found a job, and is doing relatively well, did so through contacts. Through friend of friend. Through knowing someone.

This is a bad sign, because it’s how Portugal functions, and it is not in any way shape or form meritocracy, which in turn contributes to other things falling apart.

But more and more what I’m seeing is young people hitting their mid twenties lost, and doing this, and doing that, and trying this and trying that, and nothing ever gels. To make things worse, they don’t have the habits mom had by 10, because they haven’t been allowed to acquire them.

There was a similar generation — one, while here we’re well into two — in Portugal, where unemployment was so bad (the generation before mine) that most people weren’t “established” on a path till their mid thirties. I’d guess about half of them never got the knack of it: of the day to day of working, fulfilling the work duties, just…. the unglamorous day to day that makes us adults.

It’s particularly hard for boys. What places there are seem to be given to girls. Who also, usually, have better grades — though when I saw their work…. never mind. let’s say there was little difference, but everyone is afraid of discouraging girls, so the Lady’s A is a thing — and therefore on paper look much better.

Meanwhile the boys are quietly drowning.

Note, I’m not speaking for my boys here — they’re doing okay. For their generation, they’re doing amazingly and are almost precocious — but being the mother of boys, I got to know a lot of boys. Oh, girls too, but a larger number of boys. And for some reason our friends who had kids also had a lot of boys. Again, girls too, but a lot of boys.

The boys are drowning. And these are not unmotivated or stupid young men. The whole thing about a lot of brain function being inherited? Our friends aren’t exactly slackers and ne’er do wells. In fact, we often anchored that pole in our group, by virtue of my being a free lancer.

But the boys are spinning in circles well into their thirties, looking for a place to belong, looking for something to do where they add value, where they can be adults.

And here’s the thing: it’s pretty much society wide. Yes, some kids go to trade school early and escape it, but those are the kids turning 18 now, who saw older brothers and cousins and children of family friends be destroyed. But kids five to ten years older, by and large are still spinning.

The scale of it precludes personal failings at the route. It’s more … well… let me see, stuff against under age labor, a lot of illegal immigration, undercutting the bottom wrung of jobs, the de-industrialization of America cutting out the type of jobs available to the young and unskilled, and– well, yes — mandatory minimum wage, making it prohibitive to hire someone who might not work out.

All of these things sound good. But they snowball and they roll, and they make it almost impossible to break into the job market. Now, add in everything designed to give women a leg up, because, you know, we’re all victims of the patriarchy and….

Years — decades later — all of these come home to roost. And they’re not chickens, so no one notices. They quail, maybe. Or sparrows. No one will notice till they obscure the skies, like the sparrows returning.

Instead, each family — and probably each of the young men — thinks of it as a personal failing. ”It’s my fault. I shoulda/coulda/woulda–“

But the game was rigged. It wasn’t their fault.

It’s kind of like, on a smaller front, at one time I realized our washer was running continuously, and yet I was falling behind on laundry. And when my husband complained and asked why I didn’t do laundry, I fell apart. I didn’t cry — I only cry when I want to kill something and can’t — but I fell apart, and started trying to explain that I was always doing laundry, but–

So he went down and looked at the times. Each load, in the low-water washer, was taking 2 hours. And we were a family of four, with two kids in sports and other stuff that caused dirty clothes. It was mathematically impossible for me to catch up with wash. (Yes, we changed our washer. It’s now only one hour, which is still too long, but I have to do extra rinses, because of my skin stuff.) Until he did that, I thought it was a personal failing.

I’m sure there are other instances, where we think we’re failing, but it’s a stupid regulation, an idiot rule, catching up with us. Years or decades later.

Only it shouldn’t cost entire generations. And more importantly, we should be aware it’s not PERSONAL. It is, quite literally, systemic. It’s only our remaining individual responsibility and shame keeping us from realizing it.

In Clifford Simak’s They Walked Like Men, there are aliens buying the Earth. (Now, the money counterfeit, and the ending has two holes you could drive a mac truck through, but never mind those). They are buying it piecemeal by buying houses and businesses. And the people who sell for amazing prices, don’t realize that there’s nothing to buy. That the money they got is literally worthless.

A big turning point in the story is when people realize their old homes are vacant, and just move back in. Just realizing there’s something going on and they’re NOT ALONE is enormously empowering.

To the young people out there: you are not alone. You didn’t do this. You didn’t give up adulthood. It’s not a massive personal failing.

It was done to you. A lot of well intentioned (and some maybe not) rules and regulations, supposed to protect you and be “nice” just met in an utter tsunami of crap to destroy your life.

It’s not your fault. You’re not alone. The game is rigged. But that doesn’t mean you’re not needed. You should in fact show the f*ckers that rigged it a thing or two, by getting around it.

Quickly, before they ban gig work and entrepreneurship. Figure out what you can do and do it, no matter how small or stupid. Then build.

And the rest of you: figure out the people who think it’s all their fault, the broken down Atlases trying to lift the world, and go lend a shoulder and a hand.

And while we’re at it, let’s cut through all the stupid, counterproductive legislation and regulations. In this and in everything else.

With a chainsaw.

196 thoughts on “Small, Private Tragedies”

  1. These days, the aliens would be buying everything by selling cryptocurrency…. which their ships computer can calculate in nanoseconds

  2. It may be too late. C tells me that Biden has issued an executive order making California’s restrictions on freelance work apply nationwide, effective in mid-March. I’m waiting to see what happens to my work then. It may not affect my Canadian client, and it probably won’t affect my game writing; I’m in doubt about my other clients being permitted to give me work.
    This is all part of a war on freelance work supported by labor unions, which want everyone to have a corporate job that can easily be unionized. Labor unions have been dying in the private sector; laws like California’s AB5 are attempts to jolt them back to life.

    1. Some day someone will point out to Biden that Executive Orders only apply to those who report up through the Executive branch to him.

    2. Executive orders don’t work like that. Biden could try that with the contractors the Federal government does business with. But anything beyond that requires laws.

        1. They might. But enforcing it would effectively be impossible in any state that isn’t sympathetic. Also, it would motivate even more people to vote against Biden in November. And if it came up in front of the USSC, even Kagan might reject it as grossly out of bounds.

          But I think if they thought they could push such an all-encompassing thing through as an Executive Order, they would have already done the same with HR1.

          1. Congress could conceivably pass a law with that effect; the Commerce Clause has been stretched that far to apply to quite a few other things the Fed has no business being in. But as you note, even if a divided Congress could pass it, it would cling to Biden like a tapeworm. And unions are no longer all-powerful giants whose members, even the relatively few that are left, will vote as they’re told.

            2. And unions are no longer all-powerful giants whose members, even the relatively few that are left, will vote as they’re told.
              …………………

              Agree. Guaranty the union boss, who has to agree with what the higher up union bosses want and that isn’t guarantied, would have to stand over each and every voting union member to ensure they comply with the “proper” vote. Good luck with that. Unions these days, for all the press they get from the good old days, do not have the respect or power they once did.

            3. People, and apparatus SCOTUS, forgot that the “Commerce Clause” was amended along with the rest of the Constitution in 1791 by the Bill of Rights.

              Yeah. “Forgot”.

              1. Reference? I’m confused (nothing new…).The Commerce Clause, in its entirety:
                (The Congress shall have power)…”To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”.
                The only possible connection to the Bill of Rights is Amendment 10; all the others deal specifically with individual rights. Is that what you were thinking of as a modification, since it mentions the states?

                1. The BoR is not a stand-alone. For example, the 1A limits CC, versus the CC superseding 1A.

                  Every line of the 1787 Constitution, every article, is limited by the Bill of Rights. That is the intended, and very much stated by the authors, purpose of the Bill.

                  A9 and A10 kinda make that explicit.

                  1. OK, but I still don’t see how the BoR limits the CC, except as I noted. A bit more specific?

                    1. You can’t use the CC as an excuse to violate BoR. You can’t regulate speech or the press just because it crosses interstate lines, for instance. Now, mind you, “can’t” in this case means “legitimately”. They do use CC to violate the second on a regular basis and the courts, so far, have allowed it. But it’s not legitimate.

                    2. I agree; using the CC to violate anything in the BoR, including the 1A, is illegitimate. But my point was that there is nothing in the CC which addresses any of the rights in the BoR, including in 1A, and therefore nothing in the BoR restricts activity described in the CC. The CC is about interstate and international commerce, not speech, religion, free assembly or petition of the government with grievances. So the BoR as written doesn’t restrict activity addressed by the CC as written in any way; only government overreach and misapplication of the CC does. The fact that the government uses the CC outside (far outside) its intended scope is irrelevant to any claim that 1A “modifies” the CC; it does no such thing, since 1A doesn’t address interstate or international commerce, which is all the CC addresses. Misapplication of the CC to violate the Constitution is a separate issue from the (lack of) relevance of 1A to the CC.

    3. It’s not too late. In CA these were significantly rowed back. For me all it really affects is comics work. HOWEVER doing this by executive order is absolutely crazy.

      2. You’ll notice that most of us use nicknames, hubby, or first initials, for spouses, or children. Not all. Sarah doesn’t. Don’t know if first initials for significant others started before I joined Sarah’s blogs or not. Not using my old single character tag now because WP got mean and I had to create a sign in on WP to keep participating. User name had to be six characters. Frown. So not using my old tag of “d”. Sarah let me get away with it because she knows my full real name on Facebook. OTOH WP allowed me to use Pepper as my avatar, some good came out of WP shenanigans.

        1. It’s frustrating even without travel. Our planet is large and C is slow. It takes data forever to make it around – and going up-and-over is usually slower, although Starlink is addressing that issue (by making “up” closer).

  3. “Honestly, almost every young person — particularly young men — I know who found a job, and is doing relatively well, did so through contacts. Through friend of friend. Through knowing someone.”

    Sarah, it was working that way for decades, probably before you arrived in this country. This was my personal experience, in the South, from the 1970s on:

    First work experience at 14, mowing lawns for people in the neighborhood, off and on through HS. I got my first “job” at age 22, working at B. Dalton (now we know who’s old) — where the manager had been my gaming DM for a couple of years. Did that for about 18 months; by then, I had gotten my degree…. and a classmate who had also seen me at the store, where I was “the computer guy”, told me I should submit a resume. When I moved to my next two jobs, again, it was because someone I had worked with was there. I’ve worked for my current company for almost 26 years — and I got that job because the guy applying for the position didn’t want the travel involved — and was another college classmate and former colleague.

    It’s been some form of “who you know” as the deciding factor for 50+ years. The problem now is that even if someone knows you, and that you’re competent, they can’t offer you a job unless you check off a diversity box. That’s also been coming on for 50 years, ever since Griggs made it so you could sue a business into bankruptcy if they didn’t. It’s just that now the process is visible, and so are the bad effects. Reversing those will require a radical surgery of the factors that made it possible, and the beneficiaries of those aren’t going to agree peaceably.

    1. Connections were always a shortcut to a job, but not almost the only way.

      I have never gotten a job through a connection, because I am just not networky. But now that is really really bad.

      1. I got my job because my predecessor liked going through the things for the patent he and his then boss developed that he chose to go back to school to become a patent attorney. He told his old professor back at the University of Akron what he was doing. His professor told me (then nearing the end of my senior year in Physics) and I contacted that boss about the opening. Drove over to Indianapolis to interview and here I am, 27 years later.

        1. I graduated, searched (incompetently) for a year, took the Foreign Service exam and flunked (thank God), the state Civil Service exam and the federal Civil Service exam (twice!), then work3d for a temp agency until I got a call for an interview in Orlando. I got the job because I showed up.

          1. Hey. I flunked the CIA exam. LOL (Okay for translation. Turns out I didn’t know enough Portuguese. Yeah. Okay. Mile thick file in Portugal as trouble maker might have had something to do with it.)

          2. I’ve explained to some new hires that nearly half the job is, really, simply showing up. More than I care to think about don’t believe it, as evidenced by them… not showing up. Eventually they get taken off the schedule (they linger there as HR seems to figure as long as they make the schedule all is well…)

      2. THIS. Dan never did either, and me either, honestly. Yah, I did the Mailclerk thing of being as charming as possible, and sending thank you notes.
        That got me as many jobs as it lost me. One of the lost ones they thought I was “too friendly” — I’m not sure what that means.
        BUT I knew no one. And I’ve held 4 conventional jobs. No, wait, 5. Not for long, because writing and kids and moving, but–

      3. The one job I got through connections was a misfired scheme by a serial abuser who used his business to get new victims.

        Since I was 15, my mom drove me to the interview…and scared the guy silly, I was the one gal that he ever did anything compromising near.

        2. Drove home on Leave to visit Mom. Was a few hours early, so stopped at her office to surprise her. Of course I put on my greens with all the bling. Walked in. Receptionist was…. concerned.

          Boss, upon being told who/what was asking for Mom went out the back door fast. Apparently had been… difficult with Mom, and she hadn’t told me.

          That ended. Hard stop. (Grin)

          Mom was out on a sales call, so I went grocery shopping to fill her cabinets as I then ate like a pack of starving wolves.

          Ran into several folks from High School. Again, some were a bit discomforted, for some reason. (Grin)

          All ended well. Mom found another gig, and “boss” settled.

    2. Nods. Mine was a mix of knowing somebody (high school, then after getting laid off in Silicon Valley after 22 years at HP/Agilent) and more traditional means. 50 years ago, a lot of electronics employers would go to University of Redacted and check out the fresh faces. Also, head hunters were active back then. (Second and third jobs post BSEE were through recruiters. The first job was interesting in the Chinese “I have a little list” sense.)

      1. Late ’70s, early ’80s, it was college on campus recruiters, job fairs, and college job boards. We got our first forestry post college jobs off a job board.

        I suspect there was a job board when I graduated June ’89 with the computer science degree, but I was kind of busy with something else (having a baby). Got the first post CS college degree job from newspaper classified. Company I had been working for pre-baby was too small to have to hold my job, and had cut down to 1.5 positions and the part time was down from 20 hours to 8 hours per week instead of cut because they knew I was having a baby. (When I checked on the company in 2016 after retiring? Still ONE employee. Company before them was out of business.)

    4. First ‘real job’ trimming Christmas trees for my doctor at 15. Next real job at the local A&P (dates me). College summer job, highway dept where my Dad worked, also working the Bradford, PA oilfields. Connections help, but if you are a screw-up, you are gone. I wasn’t a screw-up.

      1. Exactly this. If I couldn’t do the work, I’d be gone, AND it would have reflected badly on the people who recommended me.

      2. Son and a number of scouts started working for a local Christmas tree farm, starting Thanksgiving weekend. They could not handle any equipment. They could not touch saws, tree shaker, or tree bailer. They could assist clients to find a tree, pack tree to front desk to pay, to the shaker, then to the bail machine, then to the client car. They also could assist tying a tree to the roof, or down in a pickup. They were paid. Just not directly. All scout pay went into their scout accounts. Scout accounts could be used for anything needed for scouting, or upon earning eagle and leaving, take their account money funds available. At that point, their funds. Arrangement had to do with state’s agricultural underage worker laws (not allowed to). But the scouts could volunteer, and the agricultural family could donate fund to their scouting accounts. Not a troop activity. Scouts had to be vetted. Yes, it was who they knew. Not everyone from the same troop.

        1. Our local scouts aren’t allowed to tie the trees down because of liability laws. sigh

          They are, however, allowed to supply twine.

          Mind you, there was a somewhat hilarious moment when my son was carrying out a tree with the help of me (because the troop that ran the lot, not my son’s troop, had asked for help from other troops and still had a few gaps.) Tree buyer went to pull down the tailgate, and said, “Sorry; I have a deer head in the back.” And he did. Sitting upright and staring at us.

          (Very little blood; I assume they did the prep before getting the taxidermy piece ready. I should note that I wasn’t disturbed but my kid might have been.)

          1. It has been almost 20 years. Suspect more limitations have been imposed. The lot son worked on is long gone. Stopped growing Christmas trees (before Covid, so that wasn’t the problem). There is a troop that used to sell Christmas trees, don’t know if they still do or not. Got so their suppliers needed payment up front. Not that the troop ever shorted them. The troops supplier changed hands and that is the industry standard.

            The other big revenue maker for troops is Christmas tree pickup. The activity netted the troop anywhere from $18 to $26/hour and until we stopped doing it, was going up. That translated to those who participated, scouts and adults, could earn anywhere between $9 to $13/hour worked into their scout accounts. Paid a scouts entire year: Registration, Fuel assessment (allowed any adult to volunteer to drive outings), monthly dues, summer camp, and high adventure week. Could also use their account money toward council contingent Philmont (not enough of appropriated age scouts for troop contingent), and national jamboree. The money actually paid most of son’s entire fees for Philmont and national jamboree, of coarse it took the money in our accounts too but still. Why would we pay for hubby’s Philmont fees or my national jamboree fees that went under volunteer costs for taxes. Better believe the troop worked to get all scouts involved even if their parents couldn’t be bothered to get them to the rally location. Our son knew he was paying for scouts. Can you imagine the scout who keeps being told, even with a camp scholarship, that the family wouldn’t pay for camp, but scout could go because scout was paying for camp not mom (who couldn’t afford), or dad (who likely wouldn’t), but the scout. Plus more than likely as not paid for his own pack and gear needed? Not on our watch if we could help it.

            By reports the Christmas tree pickup revenue has declined. Couple of reasons. To make the kind of money that was being made it has to be worked, hard. Like a business. Don’t just go pickup the trees called in. Knock and ask if they want their tree gone (make sure to send the smallest scout doing the pickups, or a mom – worked every time), no one home or not ready, leave a flier. Maybe 1/3 to half the trees, at least through the first two weekends were not call ins. Troop quit doing that. Second a lot of other non-profit got involved doing this. Other competition is the recycling through garbage companies. Rates Suggested donations of non-profits usually match the recycling. People generally donated more.

    1. I’m reminded regularly that lots of people agree with Heinlein about how much kicking Cassandra deserved.

      1. The thing is, when you do have insider information, often just gained by believing your own lying eyes, and keep it to yourself or only share with a few close associates, you will do just fine. Look at all those politicians who become millionaires on a 1.5k salary for example. People only get beaten up over their fore knowledge when they share it openly with the general public. Just ask Sarah.

      1. “I see nuclearly now, I’ve got the bomb!
        I can remove all obstacles in my way….”
        😎

  5. When Britain ruled the seas important families would get an heir and a backup. Then their third son went to the church, the army, or the navy. Yes, they got their job because of being from families with connections. In some cases they bought it outright. A third son would be sent to sea at 12 or 13 years old. If he did not progress to being able to command at 16 he was generally considered a failure. They faced a hard test by a board of three to be promoted. Note also the common seaman accepted command from such a young person if of a different higher class.
    In the American west a 14 year old could be expected to be gone days riding the fence taking care of his horse and repairing any breaks in the fence. Armed with a rifle and cooking and sleeping rough.
    I always advocate starting your own business. My first was at 11 years old selling worms to the fishermen. 15¢ for tin can full of worms and enough dirt to keep them from crushing each other. The summer I turned 15 (1962) I started detailing cars in people’s driveways. I charged $25 which was very expensive but did a super job. I had more lined up than I could do in a day. I was making more per week than my uncle who had collage and was working for North American Rockwell. An employer has to pay you less than the profit you create even if the job requires little investment in equipment.

      1. Aside from how much a particular officer corps sucks, every successful military organization, at least in the US and in most of western Europe, is actually run at the operational level by the senior NCOs:

        “Officers tell us what to do; we know how.”

        It’s a good division of authority and responsibility, and has worked for centuries. Rome (both versions) probably worked that way.

      2. This is more my old man’s area of interest, but my understanding was their naval officers were merit promotions and, during the Napoleonic era were very competent. However during the naval peace between the Napoleonic wars and the Great War they didn’t have a good way to determine merit and ended up promoting based on other things.

        And during the sail era, their land generals were valued for their loyalty rather than their skill in battle. The idea was someone who’d bought into their commission was less likely to overthrow the crown, and the Royal Navy could handle any existential threats anyways.

        During WWI, the problem was less that they weren’t competent, but rather they were masters of revolt suppression. Everything knew about fighting colonials was completely wrong for fighting a standing army, and they couldn’t figure out why it suddenly wasn’t working.

          1. Sarah, one thing to remember about Naval service during that period: there was an upper limit to how incompetent you could be because the operating environment would kill the truly stupid. Not combat, but just day to day life on a ship.

      3. To a certain extent “sucky officers” seem built into human civilization. To the degree that a civilization produces 1) good NCO equivalents and 2) a leavening of good officers that can actually work, they get awesome militaries.

        Rome as such lasted until the Centurianate and its production system fell apart, then the Legions, then the rest.

        One can argue, and others have, that the real heart and soul of the US Army is Ranger School, not West Point.

        People make some pretty harsh jokes about “Ring Knockers”. Tabbed folks, hardly ever.

    2. My cousins, both sides of the family, worked the farm/ranch, from the time they could work with the stock or farm equipment. One family the ranch is a hobby property. Milked cows, slopped the pig (pigs are not safe), collected free range eggs, made sure the extra calves suckled safely on the one nursing/not-milked cow, loaded and stacked hay, etc. Other cousins ran combine as soon as they were tall enough to reach the controls and see out the front window. For oldest that was 14 (she is still vertically challenged), for her younger brother that was 10, he isn’t vertically challenged). Her children both started driving farm equipment at age 10 (her hubby is tall, both kids are taller than mom). Their son’s children will too, when they are tall enough. Their daughter’s children won’t, because their daughter isn’t involved with the farm. Same reason why uncle couldn’t employ his great-nephew on the farm. We aren’t involved with the farm so son couldn’t legally do farm work for his great-uncle before age 18 (by the time son was 18, they were out of farming, beyond cousin’s hobby farm and they didn’t hire). That is the exception legally, children of working, or hobby, farms and ranches, can work with farm equipment and animals, no one else can until age 18. (New rule since I worked on the hobby farm. OTOH when staying with them during the summer …. cough, horses, cough …. I was family.)

      1. Friday night was at a little out of the restaurant that had recently changed ownership. It was clearly a family business as the (rather young) kids were taking orders, etc. They have some learning to do, but they will do it.

        1. We have that business here. They own the whole complex. Great-great-grandchildren are learning the businesses now. The family runs 3 of the businesses in the complex themselves. Always have. Bowling ally, Pizza “complex” (indoor-mini-golf, lazer-tag, pool-hall, small-childrens-play-complex, arcade-games-ticket-prizes), Sports Bar that shares the kitchen with the Pizza side. The last is the only part that the kids-in-training can’t work in until they are 21. They can serve beer and wine on the Pizza side, they can retrieve drink orders from the bar, at 18, but they can’t work in the Sports Bar.

          We just had a Chinese restaurant close because mom was ready to retire and none of the kids, or grandchildren, who were raised working in the restaurant, wanted to take it over.

          Our favorite Mexican restaurant is family ran. Extended family, not just parents and their children, but their nieces and nephews too.

    3. The Royal Navy, of the age of sail, drilled the everloving dogsnot out of their crews, especially in gunnery. Thus their ability to get hits and to reload were the best in the world, by far.

      The US Navy beat that by deploying “frigates” (ex: USS Constitution) that were faster and more maneuverable than almost any in that class, yet also packing the broadside more like a “ship of the line”. (Better, more rigid hull allowed more gun weight with less bulk.) Captains frequently over-gunned their vessels above their notional rating.

      The modern USN is also a big believer in training and drill. (Avoiding comment on the last decade or two…)

  6. A lot of the regulation changes affect the trucking industry, too. Seems like every few years new changes are proposed, making it more difficult for drivers to make a living,

    1. Kalifornia regulations make it impossible for any truck driver ‘lacking the benefits’ of being in a union to drive trucks into the sea ports. Who’s the largest group of those ‘exploited’ non-union truckers? Independent owner-operators, now effectively banned from the ports.

      I found my current job at a very small business on Craigslist. Wouldn’t be possible today. Craigslist used to have ‘personals’ categories until the government imposed rules making them legally responsible for everything posted on the site. Prostitutes advertised in the ‘personals’ so Craigslist was now an accessory to the ‘crime’. Solution: eliminate the ‘personals’ categories. Prostitutes moved to the ‘part-time jobs’ forum, so they eliminated that one too.
      ———————————
      As long as sex and money exist, they will be exchanged.

      1. The government, like prostitution, is a “sex for money” business. But in the case of government, you are paying them to abstain.

      1. Not really. Truckers spend lots of time thinking. So do your fans. They’re a natural match.

        1. Eh. Probably. Weirdly my earliest short story fans were truckers because — this will tell you how long ago this was — a company that made tapes to be sold in truckstops purchased rights to my short stories published to date — about 64? I think — and made tapes of them.
          I don’t think I was ever supposed to get royalties, or if the company still exists. Anyway, never got royalties, don’t know where the contract went, BUT they paid me a few thousand dollars, which at the time saved me from being homeless. And all my stories were read by a chick with a NYC accent, which still tickles me.
          BUT at that point I started getting a lot of fanmail from truckers. 😀

          1. You have a skill for vivid human characters and respect the working class. If you’re in a job where you spend a lot of time extremely isolated, it’s a good reminder of human contact.

  7. But you know, all these strong rules against “child labor” mean that most kids hit 18 or, if they’re going to college,

    I remember in one of Thomas Sowell’s essays (I’ve read so many I have no idea which one) that child labor laws to protect kids from the hazards of working in coal mines and factories now “protect” them from air conditioned offices and filing papers.

    1. And that’s been going on for a while. In the late 60s, I got a job at the local hardware store. Would have been a few months short of my 17th birthday, but I had to get a ‘work permit’. No big deal, and there was some physical labor (Cutting/threading pipe, house-to-house deliveries, and dealing with a couple of big fertilizer shipments. The bigger one took all day over Christmas break.) Can’t recall if there was a physical. If so, it was minor, done by the family doctor (who moonlighted as medico for the HS football games).

      I was surprised to need a physical exam (at the city board of health) and yet another work permit when I interned at a steel company at 18-going on 19. This was primarily office work, though I had to carry tools to mark steel in the warehouse on very rare occasions. Still, this was a job where ties were required, sport coats were advised, and lifting anything heavier than a few pounds wasn’t done. That test included a blood draw, if memory serves. (This was before mandatory drug screening, so not sure what they were looking for. At least it was red. 🙂 )

      OTOH, the last internship (was 20) skipped the permit hoo-ha. Different county and lacking the big city bureaucracy where the steel job was.

  8. Almost all of my jobs were gained through contacts, ones I created as part of job-seeking.

    Example: Interviewed with company X / subcompany 5. Receptionist was helpful. We chatted while I waited. Came back the next day to drop off my thank-you letter. Brought some cookies for her and “to share with others who were helpful”. Led to my current 20+ year IT gig.

    That interaction, in several ways, came up later and helped me get the job. Maybe 5% did a thank-you. I was the only person who was charming (to clear ‘minions’) and (quite honestly) schmoozed anyone as ‘important’.

    A prior job, I flat out “infiltrated” a job fair for “degreed engineers only” (I wasn’t, not at all) just to make contact with a (BigCorp) HR person. She was blown away by my sheer audacity getting in past several layers of “filter”, and able to address her by name in greeting. Response: “How did you even get in here? (more omitted) You know what? I have -just- the place in mind for you. Let me have another copy of your resume to give them. You’ll fit in with that bunch just fine.” It was a “fab tech” job for college. Later, it turned into my first full-time IT gig, and a career.

    Don’t try to too hard teach young men to “fit in”. (especially “Odds”) Teach them to succeed over obstacles, to seek obstacles to defeat. Know you -can- overcome obstacles. Learn the “game” rules and how to take advantage of them. Know when to be -audatious-, and when to sneak.

    Once I learned -that- (Thank you Benning School for Bad Boys), my successes began to pile up. When I was trying to “fit in” I got -boned-. I later realized, sadly -way- late, that men fit in to groups of success or fail. And if you get comfortable with “fail” or even “well I tried”, you will stay there.

    “Mom taught me “the little engine that could” and “it is OK to fail if you tried your best”. Guess which one got me my Blue Rope? Got me the current status at work where multiple people call me “-The- Senior enginer”, despite any number of other “bosses” being right there?

    I dont “fit in”, anywhere. I am Odd. I never will “fit in”. But now I know how to earn peer respect. -Much- better.

    1. Never got a job that way. But it reminds me of a place I got rejected by twice. The first time, I applied and got an e-mailed rejection. But the e-mail didn’t include any information about who sent it. So I checked the header information to find out who sent it, and then sent an e-mail to that person providing thanks for the response, and mentioning that if I hadn’t checked the header I wouldn’t have known who sent the e-mail.

      Some months later I unknowingly applied for another opening at the same office. This time I got an interview (though I ultimately wasn’t picked for the job). I’ve often wondered whether my earlier response had anything to do with my getting the interview.

  11. I hope that this dire situation is changed for the better, by the time that Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson, is old enough to make a difference. But my daughter and I are both determined that he will have some kind of job at 16. I had one by then, and my daughter was working summers as a lifeguard as soon as it was legal for her to work in Texas.
    It means so much for a kid of that age to have some of the trappings of being adult – like a paying job.

    1. Yes. You don’t acquire responsibility and a sense of duty from clear air. Sure, you can train them, but it’s standing on their own two feet and KNOWING they can make it that makes them adult.

      1. “…but it’s standing on their own two feet and KNOWING they can make it that makes them adult.”

        Which is one more reason why the Cthulhu Cultists of Marx, the Devils of Davos, etc., want to erase that “KNOWING they can make it” part for us all, and crave it so very desperately and dearly…

  12. It is interesting to me that I just read a couple of “related” articles this morning while eating my cereal:
    https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/mike-rowe-four-year-degrees-no-longer-resonate-pride-theyre-shameful
    And…
    https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/advice-boomer-gen-z-get-job-keep-it

    In my 70’s now I still remember that connections helped getting a job but, for me, it was of secondary importance. Yeah, the lawn mowing job was because the lady knew my Mom and the job at the burger joint was because my buddy knew they needed help. That’s it – in my professional/adult post college employment it was all on what I could put on the table and I didn’t know anyone.

    My worst/last big job search for the last job prior to retirement found me being looked at for the position because of my weird background and prior job experience. The offers I got and the job I eventually took were all because of me being the right sort of odd fit at the time. I don’t remember any time that having a connection actually helped me get a job.

    1. Yep. Technically my last job for someone — writing comics — came to me. But other than that, I got them on cold application. TWICE without seeing anything asking for someone, just…. I needed a job and sent a resume to all likely hiring people.

  13. “I always feel stunned and shocked when someone says the kids should be “holding down two jobs like I was at 16” or “working to pay their way through college.””

    I always feel stunned and shocked when someone touts college as the only way someone can become successful. About half of all students admitted to college complete a degree within SIX YEARS, and most of the rest just quit with a mountain of debt. Modern colleges and universities are mostly in it for the money, and don’t really care diddly-squat about their students (except a few poster children). The whole university system needs a colossal enema. In the meantime, kids–especially young men–would be better off learning a trade, where the training is frequently financed by the employer.

    Don’t even get me started on degrees in XYZ Studies, that’s scammery at a whole ‘nother level.

    1. Today’s colleges are in it for the government money and the virtue signaling. Students are tolerated as a necessary evil.
      ———————————
      Not everybody should go to college. Some folks, you send ’em to college and you just wind up with an educated idiot.

        1. Of course they’re Educated! Just ask ’em! And the college will confirm that they are indeed Educated!, and colleges are the Authorities on Education, right? Just because their Education! doesn’t give them the ability to actually do anything useful…
          ———————————
          They’re the Experts! They only sound stupid to you because you’re not as Educated as they are.

    2. 50 years ago, it was expected that one could get a BS degree in engineering (most fields, there were a couple of outliers–forget which ones) in 4 years. The people going for an MSEE usually expected to get it done in a couple of semesters.

      OTOH, I got my MSEE at a private college in Silicon Valley. (Finished Dec 1990). Though the school said they did a programming course in C, from Jan 1987 to the last quarter, they never offered the class. (This was part time, and the school had 7AM-9AM MS level engineering classes for people like me.) I finally settled on Pascal–a course “almost entirely but not completely” a waste of time. (h/t Douglas Adams).

      (I finally took a C course, offered through a U of Cali extension. Still use it, though most of the bit of code I write now is in Perl–learned that on my own. I’m a dinosaur and proud of it…)

      1. Only place I got actual programming language classes was in community college or seminars. C and later C++ were seminars. University computer classes were: “Here is the skill set being learned. Here is the tool set you will be using this term.” (Schema, Modula 2, and early SQL/C++.) Neither were in depth learning of the tool, though the dedicated community college classes did more. Seminars I didn’t request until I had the top layers tackled and needed help with deeper concepts. Mostly “Why in the H*LL can’t I get this to work!” Only to discover it wasn’t something I was doing wrong, or it was, but not entirely. The problem was the information I was getting was wrong, but I didn’t know enough to know that, and, early on, I didn’t have anyone at work to ask.

      2. These days there are so many required things off the credit hours, it’s almost impossible. GRANTED my close-in sample is a real genius (like, real genius) which means he has extraordinary difficulties doing anything normally, but still? It’s very, very, very difficult. ON PURPOSE because there’s a bunch of fees for just being enrolled they can collect.

        1. Mid ’70s for my Forestry Management degree one could get it in 12 quarters (4 years) and work summers. But you were taking average 17 hours / quarter. 204 paid credit hours, plus 6 months working in forestry field, required to graduate. 15 hours per term was considered stringent. Difficult to do quarter after quarter, especially starting junior year when you had labs that were 3 to 5 hours long and not on campus. At least we had labs with our lectures. Most school of forestry’s required their forestry students to go to summer school for lab camps (including the ones in Washington and California). Go McDonald and Starker Forests! I made it in 14 quarters, if you count the quarter I took off to work 6 months one summer (not required all at once, could do it in two summers. I needed a car. Couldn’t get enough for school and a car in 3 months. Getting a dog too, wasn’t the brightest, in hindsight – no I will never ever admit it to mom. Besides grandma’s fault. But, first “baby”.)

          Note. I paid $1900 freshman year. Tuition, fees, books, room and board (dorm). Sophomore year, $2100 (off campus quad apartment). Junior year (hard to tell, this is the 2 quarter + car + dog, year), commuted from Eugene, wreaked car, got new car. Don’t think I paid over $4000/year, for school. I had a little under $10k in loans to pay back in school loans (at $30/month for 10 years. Hubby’s was $19/quarter for 10 years.) Note, part of my summer wages had to pay for room and board, for me and the dog, where I worked too. (Yes, if paying attention we paid off these loans as I was going back to school, but no new loans. Fully paid off before son was born mid-’89,)

          ’82 – ’85: community college. Didn’t find tuition and fees particularly high. Didn’t count room and board, as sunk costs. Technically living “at home” because we owned the home.

          Late ’80s: Technically ’86 to ’89 but started with one class a term. Cost per hour seemed stiff, but not full time, that is a complaint. Right? Besides was getting paid back by employer until they left the area. Then I started full time, 12 hours/term. The $1000 – $1200, just tuition, was a shock. Remember, my first year 14 years before, everything was < $2k!

          Okay. Now fast forward to the first year for son’s freshman year ’07 – ’08 …. $20,000 for everything. My freshman year, 24 years, prior was 9.5% of what we paid our son’s freshman year. Same state university, different program, same type living/board. It is too depressing to know exactly what we paid (us, him, some scholarship dribbles, some coming in, as in “oh good books can be paid for”). Pretty sure did not get away with < $100,000 since he took 5 years because of class scheduling shenanigans. We got off light.

          None of us had to take remedial classes before we could start in on our programs, unlike a lot of students, even then. By reports, worse now. Don’t think that doesn’t add to the butcher bill costs?

          These days there are so many required things off the credit hours, it’s almost impossible.
          …………………

          100% Son was never able to work while taking classes. His class and lab hours were scattered making it impossible to blocked out work hours. I worked during school terms, even if I did get lucky and work weekends for the school of forestry forest manager. But I started out working fast food, nights and weekends (was so lucky I didn’t get killed, seriously. I rode a bike, after midnight.) Even worked during community college (not a lot and tutoring, so does that really count?) Started the second 4 year degree working full time (one class a term, remember, that was “lunch”), finished working two 10 hour days / week, (eventually down to two 4 hour days as work cuts were triggered the last quarter. Also easiest quarter because only one class and no lab work.)

          1. My nearest brother (two years older, who went to the same college) did “workshare”, which in this case meant working for the school cafeteria. It actually paid off in that he made it to head student manager and learned how to properly time a meal for large numbers of people, which came in handy in weird places.

            I had more scholarships, and so I was able to get away with piece work for the school newspaper, a fixed amount per image, published weekly. (And of COURSE they would leave their requests until the last minute, and some of them were absurd, like “We need a graphic on abortion. Make it neutral.º” I got very, very fast.)

            ºThat was not the worst one. The worst one was “We need an image for this. We have pictures but we can’t use them.” Foolish me, I asked why and they showed me. The pictures were of the murders in El Salvador of some priests and their assistants (for an anniversary). The weirdest part was that these were your typical drugstore pictures like you used to get, in an envelope like they were normal things. I never did find out how they got those pictures, and I’m not sure I want to know.

    3. half of all students admitted to college complete a degree within SIX YEARS
      …………………….

      Our son, and all his cousins (jury is out on last one) on my side, took 5 years. Don’t know what the girls, of middle sister, debt is like (for reason I suspect “paid off” if they had any, cough, grandmother’s estate). Youngest sister, their state had the option allowed them to buy college credits at, then ’90s costs. Doesn’t mean they didn’t have expenses for room/board/books, while higher by the time their oldest left for college, not the exponential climb of tuition, exception of fee gouging. Then the two oldest got sports scholarships that helped with the strain for the youngest (soon to finish up in a year, after a term abroad at school in Spain, I think).

      For our son, he had 3 required classes he had to take for his last “5th” year. Two he could get that fall. The 3rd? Could not get until spring. It was not offered! No substitute. I call fraud. OTOH he was able to pick up some classes he wanted but otherwise wasn’t able to take. It worked out for him that way, but it torpedoed other ambitions.

      Required classes should be not only offered more than one term, but they should be offered multiple sessions that term. Fourth year senors should have guarantied access. None of this “I can get the lecture but not the required lab BS”, which means can’t get the class. Only exception (we had a couple at the school of forestry) should be no class limit. (Arial Photography was only offered fall term. Dendrology was only offered winter term. Both were self paced labs. Took tests on units when ready. Had a year to complete before “Incomplete” officially became “Dropped”. During the term officially offered there were labs, to attend for help. Other options, just more difficult to schedule for help the other terms. Unit tests were offered all year, fewer in summer sessions.)

        1. The scheduling insanity was something I noticed as a high school junior for the UC system, which is part of what led to me going to college out of state. And scholarships actually made an out-of-state private college less expensive for me than in-state public college.

          Which I completed in four years (and which fact definitely had an effect on my choice of major when I switched… the scholarships were for four years only. Figure out those pre-reqs and GET IT DONE.)

          Incidentally, that private college was about 4000 undergrads at the time (6000 now.) THEY never had problems making sure required classes were available. Funny, that.

          1. Yeah. Son had an offer of that. Georgia Tech. Turned down without telling us, because he was 16 and didn’t want to move away.
            This might have been a grave mistake. Sigh. No, it was. If he’d told us, we’d have moved with him. For four years, and maybe for good.
            But– Shrug. Water under the bridge. It is what it is. As is, he’s using none of his college, and profoundly happy with what he’s doing, even if working too much — like he takes after his parents.

            1. We didn’t have the option to move with son if he’d gone to the private school in Arizona (I forget the name). Dad’s job isn’t done anywhere near Arizona. I think son didn’t want to move that far away either. He never said.

              “Technically” he could have commuted to Oregon State. We are on the north end of Eugene, only 35 miles south of Corvallis and OSU (a good 90 minutes, drive to park. Not like it is 60+ MPH the entire way, whether one goes 99w, 99e, Peoria Rd, or I-5. There are a few speed traps.) Know of people in double/co OSU/UofO programs that have done the commute one way or the other, but generally not every day. I did this commute for two terms and paid a (relative minor) price for it (I was damn lucky). Hwy 99, either east or west, or the commutes from I-5 west to the university, can be dangerous. Haven’t improved over the last 50 years at all.

          2. Son had a chance to go to private school in Arizona. We told him we’d swing it (somehow). 50% tuition scholarship. Problem? That meant $25k Tuition left. Still had to pay for lodging, food, books, fees, get the car down there. Limited trips home or us go south, not to mention flight lesson fees (given the college in question, part of the package). Plus the school didn’t have the program he thought he wanted starting out. Had the program he ultimately earned. Then too he also had a scholarship for the program he went to, to start. Just didn’t keep it all 4 years, because he changed majors. (How hard could it be to change from Chemical Engineering to Chemistry? OMG they made it difficult.)

      2. My daughter bailed on getting an associates through the GI Bill, through a local JC with a plan to transfer to A&M, for that very reason. They kept changing the requirements, and scheduling required classes that were impossible to get into – and she finally concluded that it was all a scheme to milk the GI Bill for all it was worth.
        She went into real estate, where at least the required continuing courses to maintain a license are easy enough to schedule.

        1. Yep. It was the requirements and scheduling that bit younger son badly. He tried to test out of those, because he’d had EQUIVALENT before, and was told he couldn’t. So….

    4. You are absolutely correct. My problem with the advice you quote is that there are no jobs that can cover the yawning bills from college. And college has so much make-work that you can’t do it in normal time either.

      1. The only reason I was able to go to college to finish my degree (initially) was that my parents were willing to pay for classes. And they were in the evening (I had a full-time job) and I was too crazy to care.
        Except for ONE class. Only held in the Spring semester. Only in the afternoon, so I couldn’t get there from work. And there was a “work-around” option, but there were so many roadblocks that I couldn’t finish my degree program.
        When I went back in ’22, I finished in one semester by a combination of scheduling the classes for two days a week (for my commute), I had a part-time internship that paid (that became my copywriting job that I lost…just before Christmas), and one class was on Zoom and I could literally sleep through it.
        All for a degree that most companies that is being “replaced” by ChatGPT, because you don’t need Technical Writers!

        1. “All for a degree that most companies that is being “replaced” by ChatGPT, because you don’t need Technical Writers!”

          Oh boy. Won’t they be surprised.

          1. Yea, they will be. And they’ll figure out a new way to make the mess even larger, because every “writing” job that I’ve found in last year is “we want you be able to do a whole lot of other stuff, but we need a writer. And we’ll pay you a writer’s salary, not an engineer or such salary (which is usually more).”

            1. Come on ‘author in charge’ and ‘B. Durbin’, how is anyone going to know? Are technical manuals are ever read? Do we know of anyone who does, besides us? Even the people in your own companies customer support department? Or even the other programmers you left documents for when you retired? Is it going to be any worse than non-tech writers where English is their second language (our hostess exempted). Dreamers.

                1. Oh agree that human tech writers can write good manuals (even if the Japanese to English translations often make me say “huh?” Yea to pictures!) But the AI manuals (for software, anyway)? I swear people do not read them. I’ve got stories. But it comes down to “they never took the cellophane wrapper off. Bit harder to prove these days as printed documentation is rare. I guess one could check to see if they installed it. (My prior post was a bit of sarcasm. Should have tagged it.)

                  I read help if I get stuck. But if I’m writing support, they are getting a lot of information with pictures and diagrams. Starts with “I don’t know what I am doing wrong. Here is what I did.” Doesn’t mean I didn’t miss something (rare, but it happens).

    5. I always feel stunned and shocked when someone touts college as the only way someone can become successful.

      Well, that’s how anyone intelligent does it.

      :shoves snoot further in air:

      And of course the cost doesn’t matter, there are CONNECTIONS for that, and haven’t your parents been saving for your college since you were born?

      Oh, you’re going to do something, besides college? I love taking a travel year!
      Oh, no, you’re going to work? But you’re WASTING YOUR POTENTIAL!

      /ends paraphrasing, gags

      as is, I got out of the Navy after two fulfilled hitches before most of the folks in my class had graduated college, largely because of creative college games with scheduling required classes, or discovering new requirements, or credits expiring, or….

      I halfway tried to actually USE all those lovely credits I got in the Navy, it’s amazing how many colleges functionally disallowed most of them, in spite of being required by law to accept them.

      2. Ah, yes, the “…creative college games,” strong evidence that the schools are in it for the money, NOT your education. Back in The Day, many of my undergrads were military retirees or junior enlisted men; I always advised them to nail down a degree ASAP so that whole “we won’t take your transferred credits” scam didn’t bite them in the butt.

        Got a chuckle from “I love taking a travel year!” How about 4? Hook up with your crazy Uncle Sam, who’ll give you an allowance, 3 hots and a cot, and snappy new, if ill-fitting, clothes. And possibly the chance to (1) travel to far-off exotic lands, (2) meet new and interesting people, and (3) kill them.

        1. The “meet interesting people and kill them” line made folks concerned, so I told folks I became a sailor to work on air planes in the desert.

          The bluescreens were AWESOME.

    6. The “tin knockers” who installed my first data center duct work made more than some of our well-established IT engineers. And we pay way above average.

      Skilled trades are a path to prosperity. “Studies degrees” is a path to debt peonage and serfdom.

  14. Nowadays, when I meet someone who has “it,” I tell them not to look for a career-ish job.

    If they’re ambitious at all, I tell them to either become a freelancer of some sort, to start their own “real” company, or some combination of both.

    The biggest block for most youngsters is that whole “show up to work on time and actually be productive by yourself” thing. They’ve been educated to be team players, to the exclusion of self-reliance, and some of them are literally incapable of doing anything at all when solo.

    This doesn’t mean they’re actually working together, though. If you send one off to do a task, two more will follow him and sit there watching (or fiddling with their phone, or making calls) while he does it. After the one person finishes, they all come back together and take mutual credit – and the one who did the work doesn’t seem to mind.

    Somehow, a bunch of the most productive young people have been conditioned to never take solo credit for their own actual work. Which is, as far as I’m concerned, a setup for a plot from a dystopian novel…

    1. a bunch of the most productive young people have been conditioned to never take solo credit for their own actual work.
      …………………..

      Not our son. We taught him better than that. We taught him to give credit where it is due. But take credit for what you did and point out (politely) what others didn’t do and what you tried, or not (some people, why bother?), to do to include them. Whether he followed through in all aspects of his college career, IDK. I have no way of knowing (mr. communication he isn’t, NOMB so not told). His working career, for reasons, I suspect he has and does.

    2. I can testify they’ve been INDOCTRINATED TO BE TEAM PLAYERS. We had to forcefully order teachers to stop doing this to our kids. And the answer was “but the future is all team work” to which we answered “like hell it is” and brought in the data as to why they were wrong.
      But part of it is the show-up-on-time, put up with annoying boss thing is …. learned by working.

      1. But part of it is the show-up-on-time, put up with annoying boss thing is …. learned by working.
        …………………

        Plus (yes annoying boss thing, just in detail):

        “Even if you are right, you are wrong.”

        “Do it my way.” Even if is wrong.

        “You still will get blamed even if you do it my way, and it is wrong.”

        the answer was “but the future is all team work”
        ……………………….

        News to me. Major news to me. Nearest I came is “we work for the same company, and (maybe) same department – ‘team’.” In 50 years (since HS graduation.)

        to which we answered “like hell it is” and brought in the data as to why they were wrong.
        ………………

        Eh. We just laughed at them. Seriously. Team work at my husband’s job too easily got you put in jail. Granted, it is a job that mostly, not completely, is going away. But can’t be the only example.

  15. The Leftroids have defined ‘Whiteness!’ as everything that has ever led to success in our society. Learning, work, responsibility, self-discipline, speaking ‘common English’, all are denounced as the Eeevul trappings of White Supremacy! Never mind that these characteristics are necessary for anyone to succeed at life, they’re RRRAAACISSST!!! and must be destroyed.
    ———————————
    Government can’t turn failure into success, but it sure can turn success into failure.

    2. I see now that Alcoholics Anonymous must be raaaaacist because fewer blacks and hispanics use it. That and How Dare They invoke a higher power. Sigh. (Stacey McCain: you must use 5 ‘a’s in Raaaaacist.)

      Overeaters Anonymous is where the AA/NA/GA/FAFO people go when they’ve indulged in too many doughnuts at meetings…

  16. Yeah . . . At nearly 30, I’m still doing part-time work. Part of it’s my health, part of it’s that I’m a raging introvert, and part of it’s that I’ve seen the path that other people slightly older than me take traditionally, and it didn’t appeal. Also, I have goals that are pretty far out of the norm.
    I’m not credentialed, but I live right next to a college; I know that ‘education’ and ‘credentials’ are a scam for 90% of people. Most of ’em think I’m college educated just because I have a large vocabulary. I get my knowledge the old-fashioned way, autodidactically, and avoid debt like the plague.
    My dad went to college for precisely as many semesters as it took to go through all their welding/machining programs – they had no trade schools in those days. He actually helped found the welding program for the local trade school, because he wanted young people to learn skills, not dither their lives away in college. He always says that he ‘finished’ school, and that’s what I’ve taken to saying too.
    I hate regulations. They make life miserable, and the older I get the more I chafe against restrictions.

  17. Personal experience, the Young Relatives do much better if you don’t subject them to High School and public school. Once they get to university they’re big enough to figure out the bullsh1t on their own. Mostly.

    However, currently there is NO WAY a kid can afford to put themselves through school. They either live with the Parental Units, or a relative, or Parental Units buy/rent them a place and pay for the school as well. Work your way through school? Impossible. Not happening.

    “Why not, Phantom you old geezer?! Didn’t you work your way through school?”

    Sure I did. In the 1970s, when tuition was $600 a year, and I lived at home with my -crazy- parents (which was frankly scarring, I’d have been better off living in a car) and rode a $500 motorcycle, and paid $0.50 a gallon for gas. Yeah, summer job covered that.

    Now? $4k a semester. $2k a month for a bachelor apartment, but you can’t find one because they all have families of 4 living in them. $900,000 to $1.2 MILLION dollars to buy a one-bedroom condo. $1.39/quart for gas this week, that’s ~$5.60/gallon and down ten cents a quart from a couple weeks ago.

    No kid in this world is going to cover that with a summer job. Not even strippers make that kind of money. (Consider that strippers used to be the highest paid young women in the country. Makes your head hurt.) Oh, and no stripper jobs, believe it or not. Covid killed all that.

    So, why is this happening? Because since we old people were kids, the steady increase in corruption and graft (aka regulation) in government has driven -all- the productive industrial companies off-shore. Nobody makes -anything- in Canada anymore. You can’t. It’s literally impossible.

    Special for the Lefties, a recent example: weed. Starting around 2013, it became legal to sell Cannabis for medical purposes. Many extremely well funded (Tens of millions of dollars) companies started up making medical cannabis.

    Which is the same as growing tomatoes, not to put too fine a point on it. The most expensive and heavily regulated tomatoes in the world, baby. The regulator tells you which hand to use when you pick the tomato. That is not an exaggeration. Facilities for growing medical cannabis are -ludicrously- overbuilt. It is ridiculous, honestly.

    The IPOs for these companies were -huge-. Immense. Initial investors made billions. Billions!

    2018, the government legalized weed and a huge explosion of effort expanded the industry. Billions were invested.

    And now, 2024, six measly years later, the cannabis industry is in ruins. Billions were lost.

    -Billions!- of dollars. Lost. Gone! Because why? Because the guys with the $50 million dollar greenhouse are “competing” against unregulated “criminals” who grow in a field and don’t get taxed or inspected. That’s why.

    Many former cannabis operations in Southern Ontario are now growing tomatoes and lettuce instead. No, I’m not kidding. They are.

    So there you go. The Government of Canada created and destroyed an entire industry in under ten years. Insiders got STINKING rich, I’m talking different coloured Lamborghini for every day of the week kind of rich. Regular investors got crushed. Take a look at Tilray’s stock chart. What’s going to happen next is more regulation, and as soon as they can the still-surviving weed companies will off-shore their production to someplace they can make a buck doing it. Probably Mexico, at a guess. A single thousand acre farm in Mexico could -easily- supply the whole weed industry in Canada. No problem.

    Canada used to produce steel, cars, trains, tractors, textiles, aircraft, machine tools, pipe, cable… everything.

    Now we import. Everything. From China, India, Vietnam, etc. My tractor says New Holland, which is an American brand, but it was made in India. There are zero companies making small tractors in Canada, to my knowledge. Mayyyybe John Deere, but I bet they import their small tractors from India.

    “Shut up Phantom, get with the times old man! Learn to code!”

    Yeah, about that. Currently there are two industries still holding on in Canada. High tech computer stuff, and real estate speculation. One of those is looking at replacing pretty much all its production staff with ChatGPT. The other, house-flipping, is now the only relatively safe investment in this country. I say relatively, because the government is actively trying to crush home-owners using interest rate hikes and tax hikes.

    Holding cash is not an option because inflation is 4%. (It’s actually more than that, but we’ll pretend the official number is right-ish.)

    So you’re looking at a country where ALL THE MONEY is tied up in houses. And where they allowed ONE MILLION unskilled immigrants from third world countries to come in the last year, looking at another million in 2024. But you can’t build a new house, because Reasons. (aka graft, corruption, aka regulations.)

    Which is all kind of different to what it was when I was coming up, to put it mildly, and why your kid can’t get through school without Mom and Dad anymore. I can barely get by myself, and I’m a highly privileged Great White Male.

    1. Not to mention, the Canadian government (in)famously lost $millions selling pot. Something your average petty criminal can get right.
      ———————————
      If a business tries something and it doesn’t work, they either stop doing it or they will go broke. If the government tries something that doesn’t work, they just keep shoveling our money into it forever.

    3. Yeah. So, here …. State university, because the kids thought it would be cheaper, and living at home. 14k to 20k per semester, (Granted both of them took some graduate courses because of their crazy path, but….)
      Most years I was working to pay that, which meant each of them still took loans for the other half. Worked for one of them. The other one is working in a field totally unrelated to his college. And very happy with it, so, knocks on head. BUT you know?

      1. Crap, that’s ridiculous! I graduated (BSEE) from Hopkins (Whiting School of Engineering) in ’86, and my final semester was the highest I’d ever paid. At ~$135/credit hour. Since a degree was ~140 credits, and since most of the time it was under (sometimes well under, like $35-$50) $100/credit hour, my entire 9 years of night school (half time, working full time at Giant Defense Contractor) cost less than one semester at the rate you paid. And I thought I was paying too much! Sheeesh… 😦

        1. Yeah, I know. Dan and I came through at the same time, and Dan paid his tuition (and living expenses with a part time job.) I had free tuition because my grades were high enough (Portugal) but I paid most of my living expenses (It’s complicated. I lived at home. It’s cultural. BUT I paid food, transportation and mostly clothing, except for what mom gave me as gifts. Oh, and I paid books.) BUT you know, all of that was tops, adjusted for what it would cost in the US, maybe 5k a year?
          Yeah. I paid it from several part time jobs.

        2. Yep. My BS days were 1970-74 and if I actually had to pay tuition (got a waiver for U of Redacted as a sort of scholarship grant), it would have been $500 a semester. Fees usually ran 50-120 a semester, (building fund, health care, and “misc”). Books $100-150, and dorm room&food was another $500. There was another location of U of R that was within commute distance from home, but I preferred the main campus.

          Fast forward to 1987-90 and part time at the local private college. Tuition ran $1000/quarter for two courses (4 hours per week). Books ran from spendy to OMG, though the best instructor I had didn’t use a text. His notes were like gold. And free. The good news was that work subsidized the costs, once I got my grades. (Had to be better than awful. A B- or C was necessary. Struggled in one set of two math courses, but did well enough to get paid.)

          1. Yep, my experience was much the same. GDC (previously noted) reimbursed for an grade higher than a D; good thing, with my consistent C’s in Calculus and DE :-). I started in ’76 and graduated in ’86; would have been a year earlier for the 4-1/2-year EE degree, but hair-on-fire panic about engineer staffing for a very lucrative contract (I was already working as an engineer from ’76 on) meant I lost a semester and a half in, IIRC, ’80 or ’81. Worked out OK, although my wife wasn’t exactly thrilled about the additional time I spent in school.

          2. My first BS was ’74 – ’79, AA ’83 – ’85, and second BS ’86 to ’89. I agree books went up horribly from ’70s to late ’80s. But then my texts went from University printings (inexpensive even for ’70s) to text book publisher in late ’80s, even if the text book were written by the professors giving the classes. So, yes, very cringe worthy difference.

            OTOH the difference between text book costs from the late ’80s to the late ’00s, when son was taking classes, wasn’t quite as bad. It is like they hit a limit they couldn’t go over. Instead they started instituting a new model. Instead of buying your book you rented an online digital model. End of the quarter it was gone. If same book was used for the next in class sequence (which a lot of my Chemistry, Botany, etc., classes did, don’t know about son’s class series), you have to re-rent the book (or did then, it has been 12 years since he graduated). Told son we’d buy the books he wanted, he could sell them back, or not. If the digital books had an option to be for sale, he could have gone digital. But nope. Can’t have that.

            This is one of the books we still have two copies of. Yellow cover version:

            Dr. Bell was my advisor. Had both Dr. Bell and Dr. Dilworth as professors.

        3. In ten years at Flat State U, in-state grad school tuition went from $100 per hour to $1200 per hour. Books remained consistent at $300-$400 semester.

      2. There is a difference between fun to study, fun to start out doing, and fun to do the rest of my life. Sometimes take the wrong trail to get to the correct trail. As long as he makes a living that will pay off the debt incurred without strangling him. Is happy. (And he stays away from the financial shenanigans these predatory bait and switch the idiots pull. Seriously. It was BS in the ’80s, it is BS now.)

        Our son is happy with what he is doing and proud of the work results. He still prowls job boards, but refuses to move to Portland, California, Seattle, or back east, where the big shop jobs appear to be now.

    1. Consider that those tractors cost $50,000 to $300,000 each.

      Reminds me of a joke: Yuppie gets BMW stuck in a ditch. Presently a farmer rolls down the road on his tractor and offers to pull it out.

      Yuppie: “I’m not sure I want you pulling my $40,000 BMW with that thing.”

      Farmer: “Reckon you could be right. Not sure I want to pull your $40,000 BMW with my $100,000 tractor, either.”

  19. One other issue you didn’t mention is the idea that minimum wage should be a ‘living wage’ to allow someone to support a family.

    that chops off a few bottom rungs of the ladder as well.

    not to mention demoralizing those who worked hard to get jobs just above this new minimum wage, only to see almost all their gains vanish, while still having the additional responsibilities.

    2. Discussion between two leftists:

      “So what has been the major result of the increased minimum wage?”
      “Higher unemployment and more people on welfare.”
      “So then it’s working as intended? Good.” 😡

      1. 3rd line should be “Then we need to raise it higher!”
        ———————————
        It is not within the power of any government to increase the value of unskilled labor, only to raise its cost.

  20. I remember from my youth that colleges had classes on basket weaving even back then. The exception to that slam was if you were an archeological student, then yes basket weaving made sense. Knowing when such baskets were made and where and how they were made is part of your job. But that wasn’t why most students took the class. They took the class to fulfill some arbitrary rule on you had to have such a class to get your degree. That has now expanded to cover all sorts of crap that has nothing to do with getting the degree in your chosen field. The basket weaving professor was no doubt the daughter or son of a tenured professor trying to make sure his wayward offspring had a job, that has expanded to all the other crap that cycles through colleges, to the point now where I saw one report from an SEC School that said there was one administrative person for every student. Most of it is incestuous hires, you hire my kid, I’ll hire your kid. Same in business as well.
    But now the money is tight and guess what, they are starting to eliminate most of the dead wood jobs. The problems will not come from the illegals beyond being the morons Biden has imported. They are ignorant of how america works and why america works, most who are actual families want to learn and do work, and are trying to learn, they are not the problem. No the problem will come from all those pampered liberal stooges who suddenly find themselves unemployed and on the street with a meaningless degree and no shot at getting another cushy job again. They mostly live in liberal cities, so there is that. That is one of the reasons I think most of the upheaval will come to to those on the left, they are the least prepared and most reliant on big daddy government to save them. the only problem is they now see big daddy government is quite insane, at least the Democrats who lead their cities are. Interesting times indeed.

      1. Oh I agree, and so did all the Poles and other displaced people after WWII, The Italians when they first immigrated, etc. although they did do it legally. They still were stuck for a generation in the manual labor jobs, their children moved up the ladder. The majority of the others will weed themselves out along with the bad actors coming across. There are a lot coming because they want to be americans, not just gang bangers and revolutionaries. The hard part will be keeping the good ones and sending the scum back. Most of the younger males are probably of the migrant worker variety and will follow the work, but those families they want to be Americans. Fine with me, we can deport a liberal family for everyone we let in…sarc.

        1. The problem is we don’t have a lot of manual labor available, partly through off-shoring, etc. and it tends to go to illegals, “under the table” because regulations are prohibitive. And it leaves American-born kids, or simply adults with low schools without a way to climb up.

    2. At the college I went to, the ceramics professor was annoyed that students would try to take the intro course for an “easy A” and decided that to pass the course, you had to learn about the physics and chemistry of firing ceramics as well as a big dose of art history, not just smushing clay around.

      I mean, it’s not like those are unreasonable demands, not by a long shot. Useful skills for anyone who wanted to continue, for sure.

        2. He did. He looked like an Iowa farmer, hardly surprising since he’d grown up on a farm in Iowa, and the series of pots he was working on when I was taking classes from him were 10-14 feet tall (thrown and fired in segments), small at the bottom, large at the top, and made to look like tornados.

          He also had them installed at art galleries so they’d lean over you, after his first jar was mistakenly installed that way and he realized how cool that was.

          Great professor, very specific about how stupidity could kill or severely damage you with ceramics (no first-term students allowed in the clay mixing room for reasons). Also sung the praises of Bag Balm and similar milking-related hand lotions for dealing with clay-dried skin.

          1. Oh, and one of my semesters, he asked to keep the tallest piece I’d made, a pit-fired bottle… for his miniatures collection. (It was about six inches tall.)

            I did not have much upper body strength in college.

  21. I wouldn’t have thought that at the time, but yes, of course they were. Most of my elementary school classmates were married, with kids by the time my biggest worries were final exams. 

    :has the vapors:

    But, but, getting married before you’re nearly 30 is HORRABAD and will RUIN YOUR LIFE!!!!!

    You’re supposed to start having full on sex by about 14 and then keep going until some random hookup is magically your soul mate. >.>

    1. But it’s not coddling. No, it really isn’t. Kids’ friends are likely right ‘uns and were FIGHTING to grow up and there was nowhere to start. A lot of them got depressed and gave up.
      This is not coddling. This is ABUSE.

      1. It’s “coddling” if you want to distract from the abuse. Change the word, you change the focus and can say “kids these days” with (apparent) impunity. But it is indeed DECADES of abuse coming home to roost.

      2. I think you’re in furious agreement with the authors!

        They argue that a parenting and educational philosophy that took hold was “Anything that doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.” Kids must be protected from any disappointment or failure, or else it will harm their delicate psyche! Hence the “coddling” in the book’s title.

        The book argues, like you do, that this is an absolutely horrible philosophy, because it keeps kids from growing up. Because they always have carefully-managed playdates, they never learn how to have disagreements with their friends and resolve them. They don’t learn how to be independent.

        1. But it wasn’t TRUE. No, I’m not in agreement. By the time my kids were in school — 30 and 28 for perspective — the kids were REQUIRED to do all sorts of things, usually things they COULDN’T neurologically do, like keep track of dates for months without reminders, in elementary.
          BUT 99% of it was arbitrary, useless, and provided tons of opportunities to fail, but none to EVER be independent of their parents.
          After learning to be really OBEDIENT (yeah, mine didn’t, and we backed them up because…. checks…. I’m still myself.) they hit the job market, and unless your parents had connections, even a BS or an MA did nothing.
          Younger son’s friends, most now in their early thirties (he tends to have older friends) are NOW starting to find “beginning jobs” after failing and failing and failing.
          There is a reason the suicide crisis is real!

          1. Ah, good point. I think they do miss the “you must do the endless number of stupid pointless tasks that we insist you do” part of the culture.

            1. And it’s actually very tough on the kids. It’s designed to make them fail. I mean, if it were a conspiracy, it preps the parents not to be alarmed when the kid can’t find a job. it’s like “Well, he fails so often.”
              If you don’t know development milestones this makes sense.
              And btw, girls develop faster than boys, so by middle school they’re “outperforming” boys in things that have no relevance to any job, but are “required” by the schools. To be fair, I think that’s designed. So girls can “win.”

              1. I don’t think it’s designed so girls can win at all. That assigns them a level of planning they don’t actually possess. I think it’s because seat work is more fitted to females and most educators are female and it makes their job easier to deal with girls.

                I say this as a homeschooling mother of 4 boys and current middle school librarian and technology person.

                The boys who do well in school these days are the lazy ones who don’t act up, don’t cause trouble and probably won’t be high achievers in life. Because sitting still while someone drones on at you is not a job skill in any career that doesn’t involve endless meetings. So count the majority of skilled men out.

                There’s a reason shop class was heavily male dominated. Most girls didn’t want to damage their nails.

            2. We helped our son get around all the “you must do the endless number of stupid pointless tasks that we insist you do” for HS. Probably closed those loop holes. Needed 100 volunteer hours? He had over a hundred hours just on his Eagle project alone. Not counting all the HS years he was in scouting. Filed off the scouting labels. None of the school’s business (school administrator that verified the hours knew, her son was working on his Eagle, she chuckled. Pretty sure she stole borrowed the idea too. Note, does not work if they earn Eagle before HS.) Didn’t work for everything, but got rid of 95% of pointless tasks, for school items off the list that way. Far as I was concerned the point was to make them aware of giving back, not to make them resent giving back, by volunteering. Which by actually having to do the work twice, when the hours done were already over maximum required? 100% would have. Same with any other item that was pulled from other activities not targeted originally for the school’s list. Point was to show how he’d already done this and that. To concentrate on anything missing. Play their rules, by your higher standard rules.

          2. I’ve been railing about this since the 90s. School is set for girls’ strengths. Sitting still and being agreeable. Group projects. Essays where emotion is needed, not logic. Games with no winners. All books about relationships, no adventures. No physical activity (OK, not my kind of girl, the average girl) The boys are treated as deficient girls, and told over and over that there is something wrong with them. Then comes the teenage years where the boys check out, either drop out, start drinking and drugs or just stop trying. The drug and suicide problems are all started in elementary when teacher says Johnny is doing everything wrong.

            1. Which we countered in the mid-’90s by making sure that if son wasn’t getting the correct attention at school, we made sure he understood the work from school. Then made sure he got the attention for what he earned out of school. Scouts, and Jr. Ranger programs with the national parks and monuments. Sure the kids can’t fail if the kids do the work and the rangers (most anyway) make sure it was done by the kid. Other things too.

      3. I think the title was imposed by the publishers. As I recall the authors wanted to name it something along the lines of “Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions”

        Ref: Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest
        https://www.afterbabel.com/p/mental-health-liberal-girls

        From Lukianoff’s perspective the uni’s aren’t coddling: they are imposing misery under the guise of safetism.

        I like the original title way better.

    2. Maybe just insert “swaddling” for “coddling” — bound up too “safely” (but fashionably) neat-and-tight to ever do much but squirm.

      Yack. (Words, even / especially profane words, fail me here.)

  23. And On a positive note, it is reported by the AP, that 2,600 some odd journalists have lost their jobs since Joe Biden became president. Well since they more than likely voted for Joe Biden, I don’t see the problem. Karma Bitches?

    Maybe they can learn to code…..

    2. As the Bee observed (sorry, the Reader can’t find the link) journalists recoil in horror from coding because it is binary.

      2. The Bee also had a story, ‘Will call people Racist for food’ a sign held by a supposed laid off journalist.

    3. No. NO. No. There are more than enough coders. Sure, I am out of the business of coding. But I’m sticking up for those who want to finish out their careers coding, not be forced out before they want to move out on their own. People like Dan. 🙂

  24. Dealing with work, money, and a career has become the newest issue between Dad and I.

    Dad isn’t happy that I don’t have a “real job” and that he’s proud that he was able to get ready to retire at my age.
    (Of course, he knew what he wanted to do when he was fifteen, became a cop, and got a pension through the City of Oakland. And him and the OPOA had to sue the city at least twice because the City failed to make sure the pension fund had enough money in it. Lost once because the judge said “you’re right, but the city has a better case.”)
    My current job is “part time” because we’re a startup and we’re still in the building-out phase. I’m still getting paid, mind you.
    He wants me to get something like a job with the State of California or a county job.
    …I’ve seen the people that work at the jobs that I’d get. I don’t have any time in grade, so any position would be a starting one. And the jobs I could apply for…nobody would believe me when I say, “the building was on fire when I got here.”
    He wants my sister to start moving up the job ladder with the State of California-the problem is that any new job would probably require her to work either in San Francisco or Sacramento-and she couldn’t afford to commute or move to either of them. Especially on a State salary at any new position she’d take.
    Job-hunting for me when I lost my copywriting job was a disaster until I got this job-the only job I got barely kept me for two months before letting me go because “you just don’t fit in.”

    I wanted to be an adult…but I never figured out how in this particular area of the world.
    I could never figure out how to be an adult like my father-which is better than half of the “adults” out there in the world, easily.

  25. “There’s also… adolescence is in some ways a profoundly unnatural life-stage, and more or less invented in the 20th century.”

    Yes. And would likely be incomprehensible to people of earlier times; note the Grand Master paintings of young couples already moving up and onward — at maybe 15 or 16 or even younger, he’s a journeyman or whatever, well started on the ladder.

    Similarly for our “generations” unified vertically by time of birth, not horizontally by current age. Remember “Ring around the Rosie” etc., if you’re lucky/anachronistic (/old?) enough to know that? It traces (as many here will know) back to the Great Plagues, as memorialized in the culture of an ever-changing population Of A Certain (young) Age…

  26. Off topic, but can anyone provide a little advice about a medical / financial situation I am falling into? I’ve had to stay home and not work for 2 weeks (so far) due to vertigo and related symptoms and while doctors are trying to get approval to do things like MRI my neck and head for possible neurological stuff, no money is coming in.

    (I’ve been working as a part-time school bus monitor for special-needs preschoolers (and also was starting training to learn to drive a bus) but obviously its not safe for me to be responsible for the safety of others right now.)

    Family can’t support me (apart from food and shelter) and I already owe them a bunch from last year. But its the bills that are going to be a problem while doctors figure out if I can improve or not and return to work.

    Go throw myself at Social Services and see if there’s some kind of short-term help available, set up a crowdfunding or something? Any input would he useful. Thank you.

    1. Have you/they ruled out BPPV (aka BPV) as a cause of the vertigo? Lots of info online including videos on maneuvers you can do to alleviate it, that shouldn’t hurt you if it isn’t that. Not a doctor, speaking only from personal experience.

  27. File for short term (state) disability? I worked in healthcare in California so don’t know how other states handle this. But if you have already been off work for two weeks, I think in CA you are eligible after three. Your doctor can file for you. Also, I think you have to have been employed for a certain amount of time; and I don’t know about part-time work. However, if you work enough to qualify for health insurance benefits your employer should be paying disability insurance as well.

    If you are self employed you have to have been paying into the state disability pool, or this won’t work. Good luck.

  28. Been there, done that… Thankfully, several years ago.

    FIRST – start the process with your Social Services. Even the best (least worst?) of them will take quite a while to move it through the system; they are no good for short-term help. Since you don’t know how long this is going to last, you need to get it going, though.

    SECOND – the medical part. Frequently, if you can show that the process to get State help has been started, they will hold off on demanding payment, and may discount it. (More likely if they are a religiously affiliated hospital/clinic.)

    THIRD – contact your local St. Vincent de Paul. They are not ONLY for Catholics. They can provide that short-term help, or have contacts with other organizations that are able. (Usually tied in quite well with the local food bank, but you apparently at least have that covered already with family.)

    FOURTH (although maybe FIRST, come to think of it) – try to keep calm! One day at a time, one thing at a time. Believe that this will pass, and you will come out stronger in the end. Possibly with less hair from jumping through all of the hoops, but still stronger.

    FIFTH – only if the medical and job loss turns out to be a long-term, expensive deal, look at crowd funding. ANY money you might get from that would interfere with the other things, and DOESN’T come in right away.

    1. What I forgot the first time…

      In my wife’s school district, there is a fund that they all contribute to through a payroll deduction, to provide emergency help to the employees. Now, I don’t know whether yours has the same thing or not – and couldn’t even tell you how to access the one in my wife’s district, we’ve thankfully never had to find out.

      But the principal (or school secretary, more likely) at your school will know about it. Get in touch with them.

  29. Pingback: Adolescence is “a profoundly unnatural life-stage” « Quotulatiousness

  31. …and now Biden(‘s ventriloquists) just slapped a ban on natural gas exports from Texas. “For the Environment!” they bleat. “Glowbull Wormening!!”

    Couldn’t possibly be a political stunt to punish Texas for trying to do the job the Biden* Regime refuses to do, naw, no way. The job they are mandated to do by the Constitution.

    Just when you thought you’d witnessed Peak Evil Stupid, they have to go and crank it up to 11.
    ———————————
    Science does not change from day to day depending on political expediency.

      1. But does he have the power? Until the Second Coming, that’s the determining factor.

        (We know he has the power to try, even if he can’t succeed.)

    3. I’m not sure that Texas companies would care more than the recipients of that gas. It’s rather difficult to reroute gas “shipments” because they flow through pipelines. Natural gas is not a fungible commodity – even between suppliers.

      1. There are no pipelines across the Atlantic. Look up Liquified Natural Gas Tankers, and the port facilities needed to load them. That’s what Biden is blocking.

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