My husband has a Mike Rowe habit. Normally this doesn’t affect me at all, even though we share an office. If I’m writing, I put headphones on and do writing, which is fine.
However, sometimes I’m doing non-word-things, like redoing covers or fixing typesetting issues, or whatever. Which means I don’t have the headphones on.
Normally I also don’t pay any attention to whatever is going on in Mike Rowe’s world.
Note in general he’s either fairly anodyne or says things I largely agree with. I mean being a a writer in a time when breaking in and staying employed demanded a lot of money involved a lot of work. And having written things that I had not the slightest interest in, so I know to bring my passion along, etc.
In fact, I agree with most of the SWEAT pledge. Most? Well….
Take rule 9:
Sigh. He’s missing one very important thing. Well, two. One of them is emblematic of the biggest issue I have with a repeated theme in his talks where they touch on our outsourcing to China. The other, the “library cards are free” thing it just makes me giggle and wonder if he was preserved in amber.
So, we’ll go after the first one, first, then continue to the other which will roll us into the reason I’m writing this post. (Because he annoyed me THAT much and here, at According to Hoyt we believe in punching UP because punching DOWN is for suckers.)
So, the library cards are indeed free, Mr. Rowe. They are also largely useless. Your not revising that point on the pledge makes me wonder if you’ve gone into a library in the last … 20 years?
Because not only do libraries increasingly not have any books, but the books are increasingly not useful at all. I say this as a writer who used to use the library extensively for research and then suddenly 20 years ago found it less useful, and then eventually — six years ago? — couldn’t find anything to do real research on. Craft books, sure. Videos, sure. Music, sure. I hear some places lend out kitchen equipment and tools. But books? Useful books for an education? Pah.
While an internet connection isn’t free, you’re more likely to find useful things to learn, from household repair to how to build things on youtube. And if you’re careful an internet connection can be free.
The second issue I have with that part of the pledge is more directly related to the follow up — though the fact he seems to be TOTALLY out of touch with the times and common people’s lives (like those who have gone to libraries) also comes into it — is that he doesn’t quite seem to connect with the fact that most people who pay for an “education” aren’t paying to LEARN. They’re paying for a certificate. Because without the magic sheep’s skin, you can’t get a job, even as a clerk.
Okay, now to roll into the part that made me furious: twice!
The first time I heard him say this, he was talking about this was on his just talking about how we’re too dependent on H1B visas — agreed. ABSOLUTELY agreed — and then he smoothly slides into how the problem is that Americans don’t want to work, so we absolutely need all these H1Bs and illegals.
As proof he comes up with various surveys; how many young men have given up on even finding work. AND brings up Obama’s “shovel ready jobs” and then says, straight up that this failed because no one wanted to or was ready to do the work.
At that time, I was doing something under time pressure and I yelled at bit about how “I was alive at that time, Mike. That’s not WHAT HAPPENED!” but I let it go, on the understanding that everyone is allowed to be stupid once.
Then yesterday I was doing some needed graphics work, and too sick to do writing, Dan had a program on where a guest was exposing the true horrors of China, from slave labor camps, to transplants that take organs of living political prisoners, to–
And again, Mike Rowe comes out with how he talks to all these people who are contracting jobs to China, and while he deplores this, it’s not entirely their fault, because Americans JUST don’t want to work. Look at Obama’s shovel ready jobs, and how he got no takers, so his stimulus did not work, because Americans are unprepared to work, and complete layabouts. (my term, but it was implied in what he was saying.)
This is when I hit the roof. And I said I was going to write about it. I don’t care if he never reads it, but I’m sick and tired of this meme.
I honestly don’t understand how he doesn’t know that Obama’s “shovel ready” jobs were vaporware. Everyone even vaguely aware at the time KNEW that.
Fact Check: Joe Biden Repeats False Claim About ‘Shovel-ready’ Jobs.
Quote from article:
CLAIM: The Obama-Biden administration provided “shovel-ready” jobs in the 2009 “stimulus” that Joe Biden managed.
VERDICT: FALSE. Even President Barack Obama himself admitted that the “shovel-ready” jobs did not really exist.
More on the Shovel Ready Jobs scam here: Why Obama’s Stimulus Failed: A Case Study of Silver Spring, Maryland.
More here. (Man, I miss this Jonah Goldberg.)
And pardon me for Reason, again, but this has a good point: The Reason That Shovel Ready Stimulus Didn’t Work Is That There Wasn’t Any Stimulus.
This was found on a cursory look through the internet. I remember other issues with “shovel ready” including that apparently it couldn’t exclude… pin collar jobs.
In other words, Obama scam that doesn’t say anything about Americans interest in working.
For THAT I’ll point out to 2019, before the lockdowns, when the economy was heating up. People who had been “out of the job market” for various reasons, from people who had criminal records, to people very young and very old were suddenly working. We all saw them, at restaurants and grocery stores, and pretty much everywhere.
Why? Because there were jobs, the job market was tight and employers weren’t being picky.
Then of course, we got the open border, and people that can easily be used and abused at will and can’t complain, and we’re back to “Americans” Particularly males, somehow. “Just want to play games in their parents’ basements.”
Well, while I understand that every generation has layabouts, and that complaining about the young has been the pasttime of old people since there have been people (the theory is that all the screaming increases their circulation and substitutes for exercise) I’ve had enough of this abusive myth.
Americans, even young Americans, aren’t lazier or less prepared than anyone else. As horrible as our education is, people keep learning anyway. Ten years out of school, unless captured by the diploma factories, people have acquired skills. And most people — not the idiots talking about how much work is bad because capitalism — are willing to and want to work. As proven by the hot labor market at the end of 2019. By the fact that Americans have voted three times for the guy who promised jobs, not handouts, and frankly by getting out there and looking around.
So, why do companies “need” to contract to China or get H1B Visas?
Frankly because companies want to get work cheaper and they want to be able to have very stupid managers.
Stupid managers? Sure. Managers who want to set schedule by computer and notify workers at the last minute, which makes it impossible for people to work two jobs or even have time off for medical appointments or school. Stupid managers? Sure. Managers who insist people have to come into the office to do work that’s easily and more cheaply done from home. Stupid managers? Sure. Managers who prefer to hire illegals at wages too low to live off of, but can do it because the border is open and the government is giving welfare and health care to illegals.
All of this is objectively stupid. It’s short term gain for long term pain. None of it is sustainable, and while it produces a bump on the profit line, overtime it destroys industries, the country and, yeah, people.
So faced with impossible situations some people — particularly young men who have been abused and marginalized from kindergarten on — give up. “Staying in the basement and playing games” is fairly typical depression behavior.
And then the abusers turn around and say “but we have to contract with the slavers and sellers of human parts. If we don’t no one will do the work.”
It’s time to stop repeating their lies.
You want to yell at the young? Do. They dress funny. Their music is weird. And they keep telling me there’s certain words I shouldn’t use because they are “offensive.” Which means they’re also namby pamby. (Ah!)
But do not pile on on the side of the abusers who are trying to justify their abuses.
Americans — young and old — want to work. And are a more creative and hungry work force than any abroad. No, not the slaves of China, and not the imported and often rather desperate workforce they brought here.
Americans will step up and work, if the jobs are there, and if companies don’t have cheats that allow them to exploit people.
The whole “But we don’t have a TRAINED workforce” is nonsense too. Education in China is not what we’d call education. And most people are objectively less educated. Yes, kids picked to show off certain skills are better. I for one remember the Soviet and East German athletes and how good they were. Because that’s all they did, and they were raised for show. Grow up.
Now, can Americans work as cheaply as enslaved political prisoners or literally indentured servants in China?
Well, no.
On the other hand, they won’t install back-door switches on our infrastructure critical hardware. They won’t sell our trade secrets. And they (probably) won’t go to war with the country.
This doesn’t mean companies can’t get the work done cheaply. It’s time to bite the bullet and invest in automation. More than time.
And it’s time for management that doesn’t eat the seed corn and does invest in the future.
It’s time, in other words, to enable Americans to work and stop selling them vaporware and guilt.
And Mike Rowe as many good things as he says and does should be ashamed for propagating the myth that you can’t find good workers in America, and for aiding and abetting abusers and sucky managers.
According To Hoyt 
Swap “China” for “India” and you have the situation in technology jobs in 2025. Although China also gets a lot of them out west. Here in the Southeast, it’s almost all India with a smattering of Pakistan. But your post still applies.
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And it’s been going on a LOT longer than most people are aware of.
Anyone remember the “8A minority set aside” program? Where if your business was headed up by a “minority” (Woman, or POC including Indian), you got automatic preference for government procurement? Went through IT in the 90s. By 2000, someone figured out that they could use that position to start importing H1Bs, and the people of pallor doing the actual work couldn’t say anything, because the whole setup was built around scamming the government.
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Philippines too. They tend to speak better English, and while they are a bit more expensive than Indians, it’s still only about 20% of the cost of an American or European.
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Good point on the Americans working issue Sarah. I think the issue of Mike’s Perception issue is grounded on the liberal lies we are all immersed in.
He had a show called dirty jobs that was very popular with some groups, in which he did the hardest, dirtiest jobs he could find along side other Americans who did those jobs… Jobs no other Americans would do…
But the narrative he was raised with is go get a degree and work as a high level professional, so he is pushing trade schools, and the higher Ed cult, rather than true learning.
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Shameless plugging of a piece I did on libraries, because they are darn well worth saving and the advice applies to non-fiction books as well as fiction (if you can’t find the book you want at the library you can request they buy it – make your tax dollars actually work for you!): https://open.substack.com/pub/upstreamreviews/p/independent-authors-books-at-the?r=1jzuql&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
As for the rest: yes. Shovel ready my backside. We knew dang well at the time that was a lie, but there was nothing we could do about it, so we voted in the guy who dang well got us jobs. Then they put Biden in and we had four years of extra pain. You want depressing? THAT was depressing, especially in the last two years.
Deregulate everything, lower taxes, and let us work. We’re Americans – we are born wanting to work, many of us. And we’ve been held at the strangulation point for over a decade to keep us down, so of course a lot of us are going to give up. What else do you expect of abused people?
Get off our backs already so we can show you how much we want to work!
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“Deregulate everything, lower taxes, and let us work.”
Your arrow is definitely in the bullseye! Every one of Obama’s supposed ‘shovel ready’ jobs was met with the requirement for an environmental impact report, that a NAGO (Non-Accountable Government Agency) would then sue at the behest of and with the collaboration of the most radically anti-progress members of the regulating agency. Then the court would ‘negotiate’ a consent decree that codified everything the radicals wanted, and the regulating agency would roll over and play dead.
“See, we were forced to do nothing by the courts–which we bribed to order us to do nothing. Of course we collected fat salaries and fees for as long as we could drag it out. That’s what we meant by shovel ready jobs. They pay us to shovel the bullshit, and we give lavish parties to celebrate our virtue.”
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But make sure that “deregulate everything” and “let us work” includes a nearly-complete abandonment of the “credential culture” and a return to actual education, with tho only careers/jobs requiring a college degree being those which actually need 2-4 (or more) years of classroom education. And IMHO that does not include most medical practitioners, engineers or other “professionals”. Research, yes. General practical jobs in most fields, including specialized ones? No.
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Actually all that is required is overturning a Supreme Court decision from the 60’s IIRC. I can’t recall the name of the decision, but it ruled that employers could be sued for Civil Rights violations if they administered aptitude tests. Hence, they outsourced the credentialing to the Universities. Of course now those degrees are totally meaningless, but the Supreme Court’s evil presumption that any test for employment that results in a non-representative outcome based on race/sex or other prohibited discriminatory class is presumptively illegal. See my post on the craziness for air traffic controllers: https://frank-hood.com/2025/02/08/do-you-expect-me-to-fly-no-mr-bond-i-expect-you-to-dei/.
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Now that outsourcing to the universities has gotten them nowhere, they are outsourcing to temp agencies, temp to hire, and if they have to, “downsizing”.
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Here in California, that also means that the full-time employees don’t get the benefits that they would otherwise be required to receive under state laws. And before someone brings up the cost of those to employers (and that they would likely be coming out of the employee’s paycheck in the form of less pay), the amount of money that employers pay to “temp” agencies is a huge percentage of the employee’s salary.
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But the company can let go an employee anytime within those 6 months with no fuss no pain. Any reason, no reason. Just tell the temp agency that individual is no longer needed.
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6 months?
Heh.
Placement company contracts are typically “two months to perpetual”, without actually bringing you onboard the company that you’re contracted out to. The employer has a couple of months to figure out whether they like you, and then you’re kept on as a perpetual contract employee if they do.
Or the job might just be two months, and the employer has the option (which will probably not be exercised) to bring you onboard as a regular employee.
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It varies. I was hired from contractor in my latest job.
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I believe you may be thinking of the Duke Power case and its progeny, which not only outsourced everything to universities, but is also the point of entry into the legal system of the whole disparate impact framework that is at the core of the racial and identity group Marxism at the heart of Critical Race Theory.
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Thank you. That one and Baker v. Carr will go down in history as terrible overreach with disastrous consequences.
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Griggs v. Duke Power (1971). Even if the intention to discriminate isn’t present, a company can’t use testing that might bias hiring one way or another, unless that testing is directly related to the job to be done (like having a lineman apprentice climb a power pole, and pass a test about electrical safety).
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/
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Yes, and it’s almost impossible to write a test, no matter how relevant, that doesn’t result in some accepted ‘minority’ being statistically disadvantaged in the results even if only from fewer of the approved minority taking the test to begin with. Even if the test is perfect, the activists and the courts have kept moving the ball in an endless shell game that any sorting of competence will now get you sanctioned by the courts that kept whittling away at what could be legally considered relevant. So, of course, it was easier to just give up and outsource the sorting to colleges.
One instance I saw personally was the Post Office in the 70’s. A friend in college recommended I take the test, so I could work over Christmas break. It was a highly relevant test of skills for remembering addresses and sorting. It was scored on a 1-100 basis. If you were a veteran, you got a 10 point bonus. If you were a disabled veteran, you got a 20 point bonus. All that seemed reasonable, and I agreed with it. The problem came when the government decided that psychiatric problems counted as a disability. So, if you were mentally unstable and had been trained with firearms, you got 20 free points on a hundred point test. If you’re old enough, you remember the reason for the phrase ‘going postal’. That outcome seemed inevitable to me.
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And who was deciding “mentally unstable”? The same people who wrote articles like this one: “Conservatism as a Mental Illness | Psychology Today”
The link has been paywalled, but this was from June 2012. Not a new phenomenon, claiming someone’s crazy based on something other than actual problem.
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Found a commentary blog archive quoting the blog article.
It was from during the really big push against the idea that God could be in any manner involved in the physical world, so the first half of the page is
See if I can get the IMAX level projection to post as a quote…..
Odd how beating a guy bloody for selling shirts of your opposition isn’t anti-social or angry…
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Didn’t have a test. But the USFS worked on a point system. Including the add on points for veterans (acceptable), presume disabled veteran added points too, but field personnel depending on type of disability could be a problem (no elevators in the woods). Then degree, general forestry experience, specific USFS experience, added points. The scores weren’t published. I had an application in, but we got hired for non-USFS timber work before anything came of it (pay matching USFS district manager pay, a whole lot better than USFS starting. Pay, ultimately didn’t keep up with governmental raises, of hubby’s 30+ year career, but the first decade or so, not bad.)
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I think for most people the desire to work has to be discovered. You get your first job and earn your first paycheck and a sense of accomplishment and pride wakes up. “I earned this” is a path to accomplishment and real self esteem. So young people who “don’t want to work” have not had that introduction to work yet (excepting the truly lazy in every generation). The main obstacles to the discovery of the benefits of work are crazy high minimum wages (which keep teenagers from finding jobs) and parents who make it possible for the kids not to work.
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I’m impressed, in a negative way, by the effort some people put into working the system so they don’t work-work. A job is for suckers, according to them, so they spend hours and hours doing everything they can to sponge off of every possible charity and sympathetic individual around. Talk about a work ethic, but one misdirected, IMHO.
NOTE: I’m not counting the people who simply prefer to spend as much time as they can drunk, stoned, or self-medicating for whatever problem led them to be on the streets.
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Wasn’t it Heinlein who had the story of the lazy man?
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The Man Who Was Too Lazy To Fail, in Time Enough For Love.
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But he worked smart and hard so he could be lazier later in life. I know a few retired folks that did basically the same.
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The world is divided into 4 groups.
Visionaries, who see what is not as if it is.
Bean counters, who count beans.
Salesmen, who know what you need, and sell you what they have.
Parasites, who work very hard at doing nothing.
This explains much,
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The Reader believes there is a fifth group – symbolized by this guy in Nebraska. https://xkcd.com/2347/
Or perhaps by ‘The Sons of Martha’.
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Key and Peele –
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If you were raised on a successful farm, you learned real quick how to work, since nobody was allowed to slack or skate.
Then you spend your life wondering WTF is wrong with the lazy 50% of the people in the office/city/etc…
Maybe agency wasn’t trained in at an early age? Maybe no entry level opportunities? Culture?
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Do you know how hard it is for a kid to get a job these days? Paper routes are gone, because so few people get a physical paper that the routes require a car. Babysitting is not a thing, since they want you to be trained in CPR and pediatric first aid, and pretty much anyone under 16 is Right Out because of Reasons. Mowing the lawn? As if.
And what about when you’re 15? So many restrictions for W-2 jobs that most employers won’t even consider it. 16? Minimum wage has gone up to the point where *adults* are having trouble getting work, who will hire a teen?
There isn’t much out there for the years leading up to majority, and younger has nothing.
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Yep. this.
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Let me tell you: the parents part is bullshit. unless you count “Not throwing them out to go on welfare.”
The point being they don’t LET kids work till 18 and then jobs have been nigh impossible to come by, except retail and those are…. well…. almost impossible to keep due to stupid management games. (And there will be a post on that too.)
The desire to work MIGHT (I don’t think so. Little kids want to help) be acquired, but the desire to be on your own isn’t. BUT we forbid that. Then yell people aren’t working. Cool beans. For our next trick we’ll cut off people’s legs then insist they can’t run because they’re lazy.
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Relatedly, the continuing decline of family-owned or in-home economic activity means that a larger portion of child labor is not ‘helping dad out with the hogs’ and largely exempted, but regulated like a 1900 factory, even if you’re slinging coffee.
Cars and insurance are the first example that comes to mind – you frequently cannot drive commercial, rent a car, deliver food, use the company car – until you’re 25!
Meanwhile the immigrant taxi (now Uber or even semi) driver who speaks no English is such a tired trope at this point that Douglas Adams satirized it in the 1980s.
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Which reminds me –
I’m seeing a number of posts on X by people who are outraged – OUTRAGED! – that the feds are conducting spot tests to determine whether commercial truck drivers can read English.
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Hope that cuts down on the number of foreign drivers cutting holes in their semis so they don’t need to pull over to use the bathroom….
(Yes, that really happened. It was out West. The truck was pulled into a shop and NONE of the mechanics would touch it, because all the nasty was still in the hole that the foreign driver had cut in the truck to use the bathroom without pulling over. Do not want to be one of the people who was driving the roads after he had been through.)
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IT has always been the law that CDL holders had to be able to read and speak English. In the early teens it was close to a 1/3 of the tickets written. Then in 2014/15, DOT just stopped enforcing it. Somehow they all magically passed their tests too (which should of course only be in English) and no more tickets were written. There were millions of CDL’s given out in the past few years to people who can neither speak nor read English. All Trump did was say “enforce the damn law”.
Oregon (for example) went from like 1200 non citizen CDL’s (which shouldn’t even be a thing) to over a million. (which is simply ridiculous, there are only about 8 million CDL holders in the US). Just like everything else, ti’s all fraud and grift.
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As someone who does DOT driver medical exams as a large part of her living, it’s about f@#king time. At least most of my Hispanic drivers have enough English to read signs and get by. Trying to do an exam in Cantonese through a translator on a guy who’s been driving for a decade and still can’t manage basic greetings was fun though.
And no, we can’t document on the medical that they speak no English, that’s supposed to have been figured out by the examiner when they took the test, I just assure the govt that they’re unlikely to drop dead on the road. My theory, with the Asian guys at least, is that some third party takes the test under their name.
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Nobody is going to pay a 16, 17 or 18 year old $15/hour + for an entry level job, unless the job itself is highly illegal and they are getting paid off the books anyway (drug courier anyone). The true minimum wage is always zero.
Aside from the whole conversion of colleges from places of learning to Marxist indoctrination centers, the entire culture regarding the relationship between employment and education has become one of credentialism. Whether one has the knowledge or skills to do a particular job is irrelevant. Only the existence of lack thereof of the “credential” granted by the State or its agents matters.
It shows yet again that the people imposing these requirements have no understanding of how the real world works.
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They don’t care how the real world works. They will force reality to conform to their notions of virtue, no matter what it costs everybody else. If the whole world goes down in flames, well, that’s the world’s problem.
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Cool, now explain why the other 42 states aren’t hiring them, too, and how a 48 year old who can’t show up on time is so massively superior for the same price.
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…for an update from modern times, some of the more desperate locations in my area — hiring for minimum wage– are advertising that they will consider someone under 18 for employment.
Only one of them is in a place where I’d want my daughter to be, mind you, and then in daylight hours…..
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*Raises paw, waves it furiously* I know I know! “Shovel ready” probably goes back to the WPA/PWA/CCC/EIEIO, because … the federal government, on certain projects, refused to teach Americans how to use heavy equipment so that people had to use picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, mule-drawn scrapers and the like. Why? So more people would have work and (in some places*coughNMcough* but not all) kick “donations” back to the political machine in the state.
There are heated letters from one agency (Army Corps of Engineers) to another agency (insert alphabet here) about Mexican nationals being brought in to run the bulldozers and other things, while Americans were restricted to hand tools or animal power. It wasn’t efficient (ACoE), but that wasn’t the point. The point was to show how many men were working (Alphabet Agencies).
It was a joke, albeit a dark one, when the federal.gov announced that the perpetual construction zone that is I-25 through Raton Pass and Trinidad, CO would be a TiGhAR project, because the work has been ongoing since Eisenhower, and will continue until the second coming of [$DEITY$].
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Library cards are free, but public libraries are not research institution. You have to go to a university library for that.
However, they are still useful to researchers. At least they are for me, due to the magic of interlibrary loan. While I get many of my sources through digital libraries now available (including archive.org, where you can find a lot of stuff), there are books unavailable digitally, and impossible to get through abebooks. (At least, not without paying an exorbitant amount.)
For those I have to go to ILL. Generally I can find the book in a library somewhere through Worldcat. Then I go make an ILL request at my public library. And generally get it.
We are talking about some real odd stuff. Examples: The World War II memoir of a Philippine Army Air Corps officer published (in English) in Manila. A book about German surface raiders in WWII written by a participant and published by an obscure printing house. A complete technical description of the Atlanta-class cruisers, including schematics – again a small house publisher. A book detailing the aircraft wrecked on the India-China run (the Hump) in WWII.
All of these were obtained over the last year. All contained make-or-break information for the book I was writing at the time. Yeah, I prefer researching from my home office, but when it comes down to make-or-break, the public library is the D-ring I pull.
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Not every university allows you to do research there without academic credentials, or a letter from one of the on-campus departments, or an appointment with the Special Collections staff, or “yes.” I have no problem with some security, but some places take it a wee bit far.
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And my local libraries won’t do interlibrary loan. Argh.
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I hear this a lot around here, in farm country Canada. “Whitey Won’t Work” is an often repeated condemnation.
I used to think that was true, since you never see a White kid working at Timmies slinging coffee. But then I found out that the actual reason is that those franchises hire temporary foreign workers, aka “students”, under the table, at illegally low wages.
So the actual situation is that Whitey won’t work for nothing.
Whereas the government has imported several million “foreign students” who will. https://www.business-standard.com/finance/personal-finance/canada-cracks-down-on-foreign-worker-exploitation-new-rules-from-sept-26-124082700265_1.html
That’s who is delivering DoorDash in Toronto these days (and spitting in your food.) The last Go train to Brampton leaves at around 11pm, and most nights it is completely full of “foreign students” and their e-bikes and scooters, heading back to their illegal flops in Brampton because even an illegal flop in Toronto costs more than they make. There was an article in the Toronto Sun about this in the last year or so, people complaining they couldn’t get on the train because of all the e-bikes.
So yeah, Mike Rowe missed the boat on that one, big time. But to be fair, who would think the President of the USA would announce $800 billion Shovel Ready Jobs! and the whole thing is a lie? Not even I thought that at the time. I just thought they were stupid.
But I do -now-. I see it all day, every day here in Canada. Short term gain for long term pain. Kids -dying- to get a job doing -anything- so they can at least eat, but they can’t because 35 year old “foreign students” are getting hired under the table for half the legal rate to do the work cheaper. So they live in Mom’s basement and play Call of Duty, because that’s all there is to do.
Go to trade school and learn welding? WHY?! If they do all that, they STILL WON’T GET A JOB because the company is hiring unlicensed “foreign students” under the table for cash, to work in illegal job sites, doing un-inspected and off-the-books work, so the company can dodge the taxes. If they hire a White kid the inspectors will come sniffing around and shut them down.
Work retail? Retail is all money laundering these days. No shoppers, empty stores, five “foreign student” store clerks in every store, sitting and looking at their phones.
We are being stealth-pillaged. That’s the long and the short of it.
America woke up and smelled the house burning, Canada is still fast asleep. As usual. F-in’ Normies, too stupid to come in out of the rain, standing looking up with their mouths open until they drown.
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That would be everyone.
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That would be everyone who’s paying attention. Not just regurgitating the latest fashionable slogans. Anybody with eyes and a brain could see that 0bama was just as much of an empty suit as Biden, spouting platitudes composed by somebody else.
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In fairness to all those wooden-headed Normies out there, still not paying attention, I must say that it took me a long time to understand that the #Liberals were just plain stealing the money with the gun registry. They were. But I thought it was just that one thing, and most departments were proper.
And I saw them steal the money again with the windmills and solar, and with legalizing weed (oh my ghod did they steal money there…) and a few other things, and I thought the rot had spread, but that surely, most departments were proper.
But then there was Covid, and we saw them all lie, for three years, at the cost of people’s lives. And every single department lied, didn’t care whose rights they trampled or who they killed. They terrified the entire country, deliberately, and they did it so hard there are STILL people wearing masks, driving alone in their cars.
So now that I’ve had my nose rubbed in it, I finally understand that no, NONE of the departments are proper, every single f-ing thing they do is to generate an opportunity to steal, and I suspect I still am not down to the core of it.
Nobody wants to believe that their own elected government is replacing them with third world peasants. But that is what they’re doing. That is AT BEST what they’re doing. It could actually be uglier than that.
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When those 3rd world peasants start getting uppity, with notions that they’ve got rights or some such thing, the ‘Progressives!’ will replace them with a new batch of 3rd world peasants from shitholes even more backward than the ones they got these from.
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Be tough to find one more backward than, for instance, the one Ilhan’s “constituents” came from.
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And when AI automates 50% of the jobs, it will be even worse. Except that it won’t be just the much demonized single young white male getting cut.
When they aren’t taking meth or fentanyl. And this is how the “farm workers” have been coping. There won’t be mass employment fields to transition into. Look at what was seen in Appalachia, and what’s being seen in the Rust Belt for a free preview.
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I’m as big a techie science fiction nerd as the next guy, but I strongly, strongly doubt it is going to be “AI” meaning LLMs that automate all those restaurant/farm/unskilled labor jobs.
An illegal is always, always going to be cheaper than a robot. Two hots and a cot, that’s maybe $80 bucks a day. Feed them and make them find their own cot, that’s even cheaper. That’s how it is in India.
What will happen is that legit businesses that pay taxes will be replaced by some guy with a hibachi grilling mystery-meat hotdogs on every street corner. The popular ones will have an umbrella. You know, the “vibrant street culture” that Lefties admire so much when they visit poverty in the third world, before they fly home to their Tesla and big air conditioned house.
Frankly, I think we would be lucky to see all those jobs automated. At least it would mean there’s economic activity in Canada, somebody to buy what the robots make.
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The bad drives out the good.
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C4C
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Ok, agree with everything except the bit on libraries. Sure they have “aged out” for the original use and doing “research” in a classic sense. However, (here comes the ‘but’ argument) They are a treasure trove of information, ideas and tools if you want.
I go into the local libraries and dig into the stacks for the old school writers when I am reading fiction – and there is a ton of that on the shelves. As for research – I can find old computer references, old cookbooks and gardening and … well, you get the idea. There is also a large amount of current publications for many trades and technical topics.
It’s also a place for computer access and the whole internet and the staff will help with projects if you get stymied on your own. You get to have meetings there, you find a bunch of community activities there of like minded folks on many topics as well. All the local information on county, city, school district, businesses and the like are there. Want to figure out some property issues? You can do that with the tools at the library.
Also it can be a huge hub for intelligence gathering and learning about your community, neighborhood and local conditions. Don’t count the library out – just think about it from different perspectives and leverage the resources it provides.
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You’re very lucky.
Your library hasn’t got rid of every book more than 5 years old AND it’s not full of homeless people.
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Yes, yes I am. That’s the advantage of living in the ‘flyover’ Midwest (Iowa) and having reasonable people, for the most part, running the government/political show.
I escaped Minnesota just over 12 years ago and still feel like some one from East Germany making it to the West.
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We can belong to our city library, for a fee … It isn’t free. Actually less for us to just go buy access than what those paying city taxes pay for the library to get their “free” library card.
FWIW, we won’t pay the fee. Parking sucks. It is a mecca daytime flop house for the homeless.
Regarding the under 18 year olds getting a job. 100% a problem.
Son worked less than 18, but he did it through scouting. Organizations that supported scouting youth, paid going rates, no taxes taken, because the pay check went into their scouting accounts. Bonus, that money was noted, unlike other fund raising earnings, if scout quit scouting the money made from these businesses went to the youth quitting. (Other fund raising moneys left in the account only went to the scout if they earned Eagle, money left over after paying summer camp, dues, annual registrations, any new personal equipment, clothing, etc., used in scouting. Translation – no capital outlay by parents if the scout fully participated in fund raisers.)
In addition try having a college student getting jobs when they go away for college and are only home seasonally for a few months? Not that the kid didn’t “work”, he did. Painted grandma’s and our house one summer. One summer he spent (hand) splitting our and grandparents winter firewood, not an insignificant amount. Pay was a bit skimpy. Two summers he did get paid because he had a summer internship (through his partial scholarship, but just one summer, dang it), and another he went to ROTC Air Force Boot Camp (did not ultimately contract, can thank Obama’s program cuts for that). His work did catch the eyes of recruiters locally … One was a neighbor’s brother who saw the kid working, the other was a scouter from the troop, granted nothing came of either as both were scrambling for their jobs in the end as their companies were bought out for the IP and patents, but they recognized work ethic.
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The travesty of the modern library is that it became fashionable to “refresh” the resources every few years. The SLC County library had amazing troves of decades old books, now I don’t think I could find a book that hasn’t been purchased in the last ten years at any branch.
If I want to find older books I have to run to the University of Utah library, which is a real pleasure to get lost in the stacks of, but which a lot less convenient to use.
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The mixed blessing of a library “refreshing” their resources is that they sell the discards cheap. My problem is not cost, but where to put anything I find interesting or that may be useful.
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This. ^
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Yes, this hit my local libraries between 5-10 years ago. Before that they had all the Charlotte MacLeod mysteries on the shelf. After? GONE.
One of many losses.
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I totally agree on the Iibraries having few to no useful books on actual work.
HOWEVER, our libraries DO have Internet stations. For free. Cardholders may use them only for an hour a day, but it IS free.
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As long as you can evict the homeless watching p*rn, that is.,
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THIS.
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And the less than mentally there who’ve been left there for the library to babysit. Argh.
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and some allow more time. And if they’re not full of homeless, it works. Yes, sure.
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Here’s one example of Stupid Government Tricks:
The owner/manager of the rental house next door is building two more duplexes in the back yard for a total of 5 rental units. There are a lot of hoops to jump through, but I’m going to concentrate on just one issue: parking. See, there’s A Law that a certain number of parking spaces have to be provided for each unit. There’s enough room on the property for 3 spaces or so, but Teh Law requires 5 or more.
Teh Law has an exception — if there’s no room for parking spaces, you don’t have to provide any. So there will be 5 tenants and no parking spaces. Teh Law does not allow any options other than 5 spaces, or none. Any sensible person could see that 3 spaces are better than none, but that would require the government to be sensible. Fat chance.
They even had to jackhammer up the perfectly good existing driveway and pour a new one that’s too narrow for cars. Because if the driveway was wide enough, they’d have to provide the 5 required parking spaces. Now nobody can park in the driveway, either.
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I am reminded of the summer camp I used to work at, which had to build a new medical lodge. (They didn’t have one for the FOUR summers I worked there; they had a tent.) Because they were going to be building a fire access road in (think four-wheel drive), they had to provide and mark an ADA parking space.
So they put the sign up next to a flattish space next to the ramp in, because what else are you going to do?
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Build a wheelchair ramp on a trail cabin that can only be reached by hiking 7 miles up a mountain?
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Build a wheelchair accessible bathroom on the SECOND floor of a fire hall that has no elevator.
Yes they did. Station 1, Hamilton Ontario.
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Did they put wheelchair lifts in the fire trucks, too? So ‘differently abled’ people can go put out burning buildings?
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No, but they did try to hire a bunch of women too small to drag the hoses out of the truck.
I think that was quietly crushed behind closed doors, but I couldn’t swear to it.
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The ramp was there in case we had to walk anyone up (which is, in fact, something that can happen.) But yeah, it was a mile of bad road to get to a camp with rocky trails, so no, not ADA appropriate.
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Been sitting here, going over all of the young people I know (for values of young — since I’m pushing seventy, only two more years to go, even adults in their forties seem young to me), and I can’t think of any in our family who aren’t working at least part-time (except my youngest daughter, who is one hundred percent disabled from birth); most have full-time jobs. Several (maybe most) have been working since they were old enough to get a job. That’s not to say that my family circle of a couple dozen is a sufficient sample to compare with, but, shrugs, they are who I know. Now, they may not be doing the kind of work they’d like to have, maybe not what they went to school to learn how to do. But they ARE working.
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I guess we lucked out on libraries.
We have internet stations, free fast WiFi, training rooms, meeting rooms, study rooms, plenty of chairs and tables, reference books, large assortment of books on most subjects elementary to college level, biography, history and fiction, up-to-date technology books, GED classes, huge numbers of up-to-date references for licensing and certification, books/music on tape/CD, training classes on DVD, large number of movies and a Hacker/Craft area. Not to mention the digital resources avaliable online or inter-library loan.
Plus if you have a cheap computer and internet you have access to an extremely amount of courses, books, training and information on line.
Except for corporate mandated courses and direct job experince, most of my training/education since college has been self directed made available through libraries or the internet. Motivation to self study and do personal projects has enable me to get jobs that paid the bills+ over the last three decades.
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I cut my first cricut designs at the Maker Space in the city library when I first got into binding/casing books a year or two back. I don’t think I’ve been back since buying my own second hand cricut, though if the nephews get serious about wanting to 3D print some pieces for their WH40K armies, I may have to dig out the library card and go back to the Maker Space. Last book I bought from their used book store was maybe a year before that, a hardcover multi-Poirot which included Cards on the Table, ABC Murders, Death on the Nile and something not very memorable.
They’re on the Libby ebook borrowing app, so if I want to read something really banal and commonplace, like, I dunno, Wheel of Time, or Nero Wolfe, or Miss Marple, I don’t have to spend money on Amazon.
This was the place that introduced me to the Old Man in the Corner 40+ years ago, Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer 30+ years ago, and Hindi/Tamil/Telugu films (along with NaNoWriMo) 15+ years ago. Due to NaNoWriMo, it bears a share in the blame for my novel writing. I wouldn’t say the city library has become completely useless to me, but it’s certainly not the Elysian Field it was when I was a tween/early teen reading my way through Orczy.
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“We can’t get anyone to work for us,” say the people who cannot figure out basic scheduling, do not bother to actually read the resumes, and who are advertising in a location that is not near them without any kind of moving benefits.
And that’s besides the folks who can’t hire Americans because Americans occasionally report it when they’re the victim of illegal acts.
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AND Corporate picked a screening software that screens out people without certain boxes checked.
That’s always fun. Especially when the local hiring manager has no idea and your kid asks why the application got rejected and the manager never saw any applications.
Then there was the experiment my kid ran where if he checked ‘decline to state’ on race he didn’t get an interview, if he checked ‘African American’ he did. Fast food companies. But they aren’t supposed to use that information in hiring decisions.
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And once again, it is demonstrated that the actual law as enforced or not bears no resemblance to what’s written down / shown on websites / etc.
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Companies for all positions using temp services to hire permanent employees via 6 months temp to hire. Even professional jobs. When being head hunted, the managers worked with son on his resume and application. Son then gave these people copies, took original to temp agency being used. The managers then had the temp agency specifically pull son’s resume and application to send over (these were the companies that evaporated). Son’s post college jobs, same process, only it was co-workers getting bonus money if someone they recommended was hired past the 6 months “trial period”. Hint, the only way anyone got a job was to go through the temp agency, and the temp agency was not sending people out to companies. Companies were specifically requesting applicants!
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It’s about cheap labor. Brother is a million-mile plus trucker. Until Biden opened the borders, he almost had to guard against being kidnapped off the street. Now, he can’t find a job. Why?
Because he won’t forge his logs to violate hours of service limits (evidently, they actually ask that at interviews now). Because he won’t work for what the illegals will, and he won’t abide the treatment given the illegals. Yes, they’re even aware of the higher accident/incident rate, which they compensate for by running 20 year old trucks, each one of which is working for a different shell corporation that they spent $2000 setting up – so all they lose is the truck, and their liability is limited to that POS truck. Always a fresh (mostly illegal) sucker in line.
Persecuting the illegals won’t change this – always a fresh sucker in line, for whom it’s better than farming bad soil in Ecuador. It won’t change until we come down on the companies doing it (and not just in trucking) by making it cost-ineffective and bearing personal consequences for those manages.
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Has he reported this to anyone, state or Federal?
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Hon? They’re in California.
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If the truck does get taken in judgement, it will be sold at auction where the same company, or another one just like it, will pick it up for peanuts and run the same scam all over again.
Speaking of Kalifornia, this is where they banned all truckers lacking the ‘benefits’ of union membership from the ports. Most of those non-union truckers were independent truck owner-operators. Self-employed. Who exactly would the unions be ‘protecting’ them from? Sounds like another kind of ‘protection’ racket to me.
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Self driving trucks and AI controlled forklifts. They won’t complain. What happens to the humans is not a priority.
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I’ve been running elogs for most of the last twenty firve years or so. Driving for thirty. IMHO someone pushing for me to risk my life for freight (at last more than normal traffic risks) isn’t worth working for.
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There are ‘Abundance Progressives’ that want US industrial policy without all the usual carve-outs. Their thinking seems to be that you can’t pay for progressive goals unless jobs exist, so create those first. A lot I’d disagree with, but displaying some thought for the effects of policy.
Regarding deregulation – I’m in favor. I’d like to see coherent US industrial policy explained and promoted. This is anathema to certain types of libertarian. But we don’t live in a no policy world – in the absence of a change in US policy, we operate under Chinese industrial policy instead.
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From what I’m seeing, and in my own experience, it’s not that American’s don’t want to work, it’s that we don’t want to be exploited. Big difference.
We don’t want to be treated like subhuman pieces of garbage because we happen to be working behind a counter or other entry-level job.
We want our so-called leadership (managers and corporate) to actually have our back and not force us into Kobayashi Maru exercises every single day (customer demands we do something that violates policy. If we do what they ask, we get written up for breaking policy, but if we don’t do what they want then they complain to management, management gives them what they want, and we get written up for poor customer service).
We want to not have to face harassment and/or retaliation from the same so-called leadership for daring to take the PTO/Sick Time that our employers theoretically provide.
We want schedules that are actually realistic and not health-endangering (close at midnight and then turn around and open at 5 AM, anyone?)
We don’t want COL and merit-based raises denied because “the company is struggling” while the aforementioned so-called leadership brags about their bonuses.
And switching gears, the same allegedly well-meaning adults who constantly berated us growing up for not doing well in school because “if you don’t get good grades then you won’t get into a good college and if you don’t get into a good college then you’ll have to spend the rest of your life flipping burgers,” then turned around and berated us for “being too good to get a job flipping burgers” when the $60k a year jobs with a company car that they promised would be waiting for us when we graduated college turned out to be non existent.
And let’s not even get into how damn near impossible it is to even find a job these days. When I got laid off when The Unspecified Virus of Unknown Origin hit in 2020, I didn’t even bother looking for the first month because nobody was hiring. After that, I was sending out at least two applications a week for the next five months. You know how many responses I got? Two. One of which turned into my current job, the other an insulting waste of time. Same thing happened the last time I was out of work, sent out dozens of applications, got a single solitary interview for what turned out to be the most horrific job I’ve ever worked. I’d rather starve to death in a cardboard box under a highway overpass than go back to a situation like that.
But please, do tell me about how Americans are “lazy” and “don’t want to work.”
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Oh, forgot one: we want so-called leadership to stop coddling and covering for their “favorite” and/or the “protected” employees while punishing the competent ones for their failings and for not doing their jobs on top of our own (with no extra pay, of course).
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Friend of mine inherited an “untouchable” who had, apparently by being, um, widely amorous, ended up with kompromat on a senior exec, and/or enough history to be able to claim “retaliation” if anything was done to her, and thus was exempt from actually having to do much in her job, or pay any attention to whichever manager was stuck with her in their group. Eventually one of the periodic-downturn big layoffs was able to include her with enough retaliation-deniability that she was finally gone, but that period was extremely frustrating for my friend.
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I was “blessed” with working with two “untouchables” back when I worked in The Supermarket. Not sure what the first one did to earn his status, but once his probationary period ended he called out every. Single. Shift. For. Four. Months. Straight. And the only shifts he was available for were closing shifts, which f***ed over our other closer because our manager (who was actually decent) couldn’t change his schedule due to his “restricted availability” and we couldn’t schedule someone else in his slot because then we’d have “too many hours on that shift” or some such BS. Found out that he’d transferred from one department to another in the store for over a year, repeating this same BS. Corporate finally had to persuade him to leave since it “wasn’t fair to him” that he was holding down a job and not getting paid for it.
Second untouchable was a trifecta of untouchability: female, minority, and…I’ll say “non-Western religion” and let you fill in the blank. She was an excellent worker…until the day her probationary period ended. Then she did as little as possible. She worked part-time, 5 hours a day, which meant she got a single 15 minute break. But she’d take two half-hour breaks and an hour-long lunch. Which she’d deliberately delay taking in order to screw over everyone else’s breaks and meals. Then she started coming in fifteen minutes after her shift was scheduled to start and clock out fifteen minutes before it ended. She claimed it was because she’d miss the bus if she stuck to her hours, so rather than firing her, HR adjusted her scheduled hours to reflect the times she was actually coming in and leaving…which sparked a massive public screaming match and threats of a lawsuit, until HR explained they did it specifically so she wouldn’t get in trouble, and she wasn’t getting paid for the time she was clocked out anyway, which she accepted…and then promptly started clocking in fifteen minutes before and clocking out fifteen minutes after her new start and end times.
So for her theoretically five-hour shift, she’d spend maybe one hour behind the counter. But the only thing she’d do would be pretend to sweep the floors or clean the slicers. She’d only ever wait on customers if said customer was the same trifecta as her, then she’d spend her entire shift chatting their ear off. Oh, and if you told her to do anything, from help a customer to change her gloves before handling food to please take her break because it was her turn, she’d immediately drop what she was doing and run to HR and report the rest of us for harassing her because she was female, minority, and/or non-Western religion.
Everyone loathed her, from her colleagues to management to HR, but there was absolutely nothing anyone could to about it. Until she screwed herself over.
One day, I come into work and she’s not there. No surprise; she hasn’t been there for a week, which wasn’t unusual (she also liked to take “vacations” and somehow never exhausted her theoretically-tiny amount of PTO), but she wasn’t on the schedule anymore either. I asked the department manager if she was okay, but was told that” [Name] is no longer employed by [Company]. Don’t ask why, I am not at liberty to discuss it.” Nobody knew what happened until her “friends” came into the store a few weeks later and spilled the beans. She’d gotten pregnant (which we’d known; she’d told us a week or so prior to her disappearing) and then decided she was going on maternity leave. Only she didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t file FMLA paperwork with HR, didn’t call the department, nothing. Just decided to not show up. And when she was inevitably let go for Voluntary Job Abandonment, she tried to sue the company for discrimination, retaliation, and unlawful termination. Apparently that was her schtick; get a job, work just long enough pass probation and collect benefits, then freeload while claiming discrimination until her latest baby-daddy got her pregnant, then go on “maternity leave” and threaten to sue if her employer fired her. Except this time she tried it with a large multi-state corporation with an army of lawyers and a mountain of receipts. Supposedly her lawsuit didn’t survive the first preliminary court hearing because, like I said, she’d never filed any paperwork or told anyone why she wasn’t coming in.
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Only two applications a week? I was putting out five to ten a day in the search for my current job. I figured I sent out about a thousand applications in total for the search.
Fortunately, despite being a souless international megacorp, I am insulated from the silliness by having a remarkably good boss.
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I thought 2/week was a bit light too.
OTOH I only put out one application in Jan. 1990, for the job I got in ’90. More than a few a week April ’96 – July ’96 for the job starting Aug ’96 (had to prove to the county “dislocated timber workers program” (timber company, I still qualified, even tho not working in the woods) that they could pay for “skills updating” (like they were going to pay me to go back to school, again … NOT. Seminars, yes. Got two, and getting one of those certificates was the key to the next job.)
Now the resumes and applications that went out Aug ’02 through Jan ’04, I saturated the Eugene/Springfield, and commutable towns (including state government in Salem), more than once. Even some hoping to be able to remote work. Moving was not an option. I’m still getting inquiries from the Linked In account I setup back then, and I’ve noted on the account that I’m retired and not looking (was worthless when I was looking).
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This. The last time I did job search, I tried to send out one a DAY. At least.
And yeah, the NUMBERS. Over a hundred applications for a dozen interviews. A dozen interviews for ONE job offer….at minimum wage, doing “in-home care” which translates to scutwork and wiping up other people’s literal feces.
Of course I took it. I am fond of eating and paying rent, y’know, that kind of thing.
But that was in a supposedly better economy. I no longer work, but that job search is vivid in my memory.
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In my defense, at the time Proposal Writer openings were pretty scarce, and most of the openings were really looking for engineers with lots of experience in the field who could do their engineer job and write proposals on the side. I learned pretty quickly to not waste my time with those ones. And I was also working on a novel.
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Three a week is the quota here, and the weeks where that’s a struggle get me applying to some odd jobs.
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Yep. All of this.
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Tech companies started hiring job lots of those inexpensive H1B indentured servants before I landed my first semiconductor industry job back in ‘88, and as some of those stayed employed after they got their green card and moved up the engineering ladder, eventually they became managers and directors and VP – and those were the hardest slave driver managers I have ever seen of the H1B indentures reporting to them. But that’s pretty much the only engineers they hired, from wherever they came from, as they moved up the ladder, making entire departments foreign monocultures.
And between “way cheaper” and “not from where the rest of us are from” any U.S.-born engineer walking in for an interview somehow never got the offer.
Roughly the same thing happened at startups, where talented people hired who they knew for their new companies, they hired the cheapest good engineers they could get with the emphasis on cheap, and then ran classic startup sweatshops.
So Mike Rowe is not speaking from any knowledge of Tech world.
If he was saying “no American wants to work for a subpar wages with few to no increases while chained at the same desk for some period of years” I would agree.
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Yep. This. The problem is not just loading up on foreign workers, the problem is that once they get into management THEY ONLY HIRE THEIR OWN. And the DEI types let them do it in a way they would never allow White American managers to do. If you ever needed proof to show the real outcome and purpose of DEI, this is it.
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And the corporate types have been at this a long time according to my coworker who is into family ancestry stuff. Some of his ancestors started out as Differently Religious Celts, of one flavor or another, who realized that the WASPs had Other Plans for the farmland and there was no point in being tenant farmers any longer. So, they went to one of the industrial parts of England and learned to be miners. A generation or two later, they got offered significant money to come to America and do the hard, dangerous, extra-skilled part of starting new mines, sinking new shafts, putting up framework and supports. And then once the mine were established, the owners brought in cheaper, less-skilled Italian and Eastern European labor to work it, and coworker’s ancestors again had to find something else to do.
Was it more complicated than his family lore indicates? Probably; the history of industrial scale mining in this country is written pretty exclusively from one very specific perspective that you really have to work at to read around, and I’ve never felt the need to dig into it as deeply as it would need to get at the truth. But the parallels to current developments struck me.
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Being trapped in a part of the country where jobs are not to be had does not help. After I STUPIDLY came back from my college’s Term in China and graduated, I was trapped in the Midwest right during the height of the 1980s recession, in a small town a long way from any metro areas. People whined “Why don’t you just move?” Well—in the first place, I had no idea where to go or what to apply for (I wasn’t on campus my last year of school, and in any case, my college has very poor placement services), and in the second place, galavanting costs money, of which I had little or none. After a few years of under- or unemployment, I might as well have had “DAMAGED GOODS” tattooed on my forehead.
After a few hundred or so rebuffs, with no explanation of “why” provided, I submit that anybody at all would be discouraged and give up. Being white and male at a time when employers were under strong government pressure to hire women and members of politically-favored minorities did not help.
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Funny. Didn’t find it to be an advantage to be female at either of my career choices. Guess I was lucky that the employers wanted competent employees. (I mean it is possible that they were just relieved I was a competent female, but nothing obvious to me. FYI, I don’t check any of the other boxes.)
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You weren’t dishonest enough to properly work the system.
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LOL
Not sure how I’d have gone about that. Besides too much work to figure out how.
What few few examples I’ve heard of, don’t know of any personally, they work harder gaming the system than if they’d just done the dang work.
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Well, you could have been working a project and padding your expense reports to the tune of $500 a week, taking unscheduled layovers in fairly expensive spots claiming “travel delays”, and not showing up about 25%. Then when your PM starts assembling the documentation to fire you, file a “hostile work environment” charge, then have HR drop the expense issue because she could claim “retaliation” and probably win given the jurisdictions (Alberta and Massachusetts).
“Hostile environment” is responsible for at least as much damage as “disparate impact”, and was a majority of the reason #MeToo was so effective.
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Um. No. Never did that type of project or travel.
Well, once. But that was the two seminars paid by the timber dislocated workers process. They paid the seminars and mileage. Wags hands whether the mileage applied since I flew instead of drove from Eugene to San Fransisco. OTOH (back then) the mileage paid not only the two round trip flights (out Sunday, home Friday night), but 3 nights of the hotels, back to back weeks. Believe it or not, it was less expensive (since we were paying), to not stay that one Friday and Saturday night (besides that weekend was the when the resume went out for the job I got!).
Hubby was on the road “out of assigned area”, occasionally. But his company didn’t pay expenses. Paid mileage, and per diem. He could make money on the per diem. Especially the weeks when he was stationed in far North area (Randle), and sent for fill in to the Eugene area, and got paid daily per diem and he was living at home, plus paid the mileage to drive down for that week, and back when had to go back, for driving miles he would have driven anyway. Following the rules to the letter. Even questioned filing it, but office and supervisor said 100%, that is the rule. Okay.
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Oh, and re hiring stuff, here’s a thing: AI voice screening interviews.
https://www.hr-brew.com/stories/2025/03/31/ai-powered-interviewing-startup-aims-to-improve-hiring-outcomes-and-the-candidate-experience-with-new-tech
Given what happened everywhere else, how long until there’s AI voice surrogates to help get you a job, so interviews are like those videos of hotel booking scheduling calls where it’s really their AI talking to your AI.
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There is a basic good idea in there. The idea that you can have AIs mass call all of the applicants and conduct interviews means that there could potentially be less “instant circular filing” of 99% of the applicants because the screening software didn’t get tripped properly by the resume.
On the other hand, it might just move where the “instant circular filing” of 99% of the applicants takes place in the process.
The idea that they mention of AIs on each side going back and forth is not something I want to see, though.
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I want to get a new job and in between all of the various levels of BS that are involved…
…you cannot believe my frustration.
Oh, and “AI” is probably going to devour most of the jobs that I’m qualified to do, because it “can” do research and writing and creative “things”. (NO IT CAN’T!)
You see the temptation of just burning it all down…because that might be the only way to start things up again.
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There is no need to burn it all down — they’re running the engine of the economy without oil or coolant. Eventually it will seize up, crack the block and break the crankshaft.
And the ‘Progressive!’ idiots that caused it will sit around going “Durrr, why did that happen? We did all the Politically Correct Things!”
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I don’t want to have to clean up somebody else’s mess by the time we reach that point.
I want THEM to handle things so that when it’s time, I can get started as soon as possible.
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No. They’ll scream, ” It’s Trump’s fault! It’s the evil Republicans’ fault! Wreckers! Speculators! Enemies of the People!”
And try to parlay that into permanent power.
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And they’ve literally stated as much. A crisis needs to be created to justify the changes that they want, and the easiest way to create a crisis is to wreck everything within reach.
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The Reader wishes they weren’t using Atlas Shrugged as a user manual.
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Re female orientated female HR: Thing have changed, then. Back in the day the most “active in-company daters” were the women in HR, basically as no matter what they got up to, there was nobody to report them to.
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It was an open secret at two places I worked-
Quite a few women that were working in HR were there to snag a C-suite husband or at least start a C-suite affair of some kind.
Or they had plans to make their own little version of Friends or those kinds of office sitcoms to their personal desires.
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The gedanken I use for ‘training’/credentials is the test of whether I can imagine a PhD that correlates in no way to any real economic utility.
(Sorta obvious, PhDs are defined in terms of allegedly new knowledge, not other things.)
Not, unemployed and unemployable people who happen to have PhDs.
A PhD program whose content, experiences, and training do not in any way improve that specific person, where purely economic concerns are considered. With more of a focus on evaluating the worth of the technical skills which are officially what that sort of program is good at teaching people to do.
PhD programs are extremely individual. The outcomes are extremely individual.
From the outside, a dissertation is a bit of an estimator for that specific credential, but for most questions it is entirely illrelevant. (IE, I have for long understood that someone who makes a point of telling you about their PhD in a common/ordinary sort of conversation may have nothing positive or persuasive to say for themselves. The mere fact of having a PhD degree is weak evidence for everything, except for having that degree. And given allegations about fraud rate, there may be a bunch of people who are officially credentialled, but have not actually done the work to a meaningful level.)
Anyway, so I can imagine someone getting a PhD in barbering, and also effectively being incompetent at cutting hair.
So I see training and qualification as having some very open questions, that are not settled, and that should not be handled with the rote fixed formula of ‘get a degree’.
Degrees may have been a fine professional credential fifty years ago.
The public of the future has every right to decide that it might not think that degrees are good enough, going forward.
Anyway, the massive confouding factor is that I tend to identify as being incompetent, beginner level, or entry level. I figure that if I was trained, and if I actually got value from that training, it may have more or less been an accident on the part of everyone involved. So my methodology suggests that either I am blackpilled, emotional, and extremely prone to delusion, or that I am trying to accomplish an inhuman level of skepticism towards ‘what I actually know’, a super human level of caution in how I think.
I am very crazy, I am possibly very intelligent (1), and I make some diagnostic mistakes when I try to evaluate myself, and when I try to evaluate others.
Let the jury be composed of anyone who cares. People are in no way obligated to care, or to have an opinion.
If I make anyone care about how generally effective and accurate I am, that could go quite poorly for me. (This partly motivated by the basic fact that I have not slept well recently, and have been getting some raving in. )
(1) I have trouble telling, I’m not entirely sure what intelligence is, and whether it is important is a bit unclear to me.
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The Reader believes that no one understands all facets of human ‘intelligence’ but that they are all important – it is the only resource we have.
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You might want to reconsider these:
in light of this:
https://twitchy.com/justmindy/2025/05/30/it-specialist-accused-of-sharing-classified-information-n2413592
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FYI, the Jonah Goldberg link is broken.
https://nypost.com/2010/10/16/a-shovel-unready-prez/
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“So, the library cards are indeed free, Mr. Rowe. They are also largely useless. Your not revising that point on the pledge makes me wonder if you’ve gone into a library in the last … 20 years?”
-I hit right here and had to argh even before reading the rest of the post. Because yes. Yes so much.
Since, oh, at least 6 years ago? I can’t even find good romances to read in the library, or cookbooks, much less the kind of reference/research material I need for books!
*Insert Stitch’s argh about being trapped on an island with no major cities….*
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Colorado Springs got bad, and it’s a major city.
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These facts are probably connected.
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I got a library card for my local library and even the main library was just…disappointing. Far too many librarians that want to be in a Big City Library and stock books to the same standard.
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One local librarian was glad I checked out Manly Wade Wellman’s works because it would help keep them longer
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I’m very happy with our local library, because it’s a county system. In effect, it’s a library with 30+ branches, and interlibrary loan as simple as putting in a request for a book. They’ll notify you when it comes in.
Which means that no, our local branch doesn’t have a Romance section, or a very large SF section, but if I want to read a Georgette Heyer, or a complete series of which my branch has only one book, I can request it and it shows up.
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Job market? For the last 10 months I have been trying to find work. Now, my age (63), my autism, and my rather specialized experience all work against me. I get that. But, damn it, I’ve been trying.
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11 months and 64. I can math. I really can. I promise.
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Ouch. It was bad enough when I was looking at 46 …
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Stupid managers YES.
There’s no reason, in a predictable “someone has to do this every day at these hours” job, that people can’t know their schedule on a week-to-week basis. NO REASON.
…Which is one reason I’m looking for other jobs, because this sucketh.
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My last retail job, that was actually a point the hiring manager made. “Your schedule will not be consistent day-to-day, but it will be the same every week. We’ll talk with you before we change it.”
Damn, I miss Borders. (This is before the “sudden” part of the decline, and my managers were part of the holding action.)
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I work in IT for my company. Or more accurately, I work in IT for the company that I’m contracted out to. For convenience sake (because this stuff can get confusing), I’ll refer to them as my employer.
A while back (before I started here), IT at my employer was contracted out to one of the Indian H1B farms. If you pay any attention to that sort of thing, you’ve likely heard of this particular H1B farm. One of the reasons why you’ve heard of them is because they were recently convicted of fraud involving H1B visas (nothing to do with work at my employer, afaik). Now the funny thing is, even though I work in IT at my employer, my contractor isn’t that H1B farm that is responsible for all of the IT.
See, it turns out that the H1B farm was doing an absolutely horrible jobs with certain aspects of the IT role (according to what I’ve heard through the rumor mill). So apparently they were arm-twisted into sub-contracting part of the IT role out to a different placement agency, and that placement agency is the one that brought me in.
Yeah, the H1B visa guys are great…. /sarcasm
As an example of the kinds of crap I have to deal with…
Someone came in for assistance yesterday with a particular issue. It was an easy issue to fix, and I resolved it with little effort. Then I told him that in the future, he could call the help desk for assistance with it instead of coming in, as they can take care of it too. He told me that he *had* called the help desk, and they had sent him to me.
Uh huh…
After he left, I pulled up the ticket that the service desk had created for his issue. Fortunately whoever created the ticket hadn’t automatically closed it after sending the user to me (which sometimes happens, even though it’s not supposed to). But in some respects, what happened was even worse. Instead of assigning the new ticket to my group, the ticket had been assigned to a completely different and unrelated group that isn’t expected to work on the sort of issue that the user was having.
Yes, we are getting *top* prospects through the H1B system, doing jobs that Americans just aren’t able to do!
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My last job their was no dedicated “support” personnel/department. Instead the programmers did client support. (Not as bad as it sounds, while there were days one wanted to take the phone and pitch it, most days few to no calls.) The worst clients to support? Were the clients that required all the users to go through their IT. Or the user could call direct, but any installation solution had to go through their IT. Either way resulted in a call, have a solution, send it out, send out notifications to their IT. Get another call that “not fixed”. Check ticket system and “surprise”, solution not installed yet. Some relief came when an extra add on “support option” was made available where our IT (or depending on urgency) we installed it. But that required access to client server IT sanctum. All the clients who used off site IT contractors signed on as soon as it was anounced. Some of the larger clients who had interior IT (who were the worse) didn’t. The other advantage the new support option did is if we needed snapshot data we could go get it immediately (or ask our IT) and not wait for their IT to do it (easier to watch paint dry).
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The last place I worked, they had about a 90% or better Latin work force (in central Iowa!) and pulled some things that shocked me. They’d give us Thanksgiving or Christmas Day off—and then expected us to come in on a Saturday to make up the lost day. I don’t think they’d have tried that on an American-born work force. They let on that they were careful that all their employees were legally allowed to work in the US, but I have my doubts.
I’m normally not a friend of unions, but I reflected while I was there that this situation was all but screaming for a union. Of course, if they were illegals or of dubious legality at best, they wouldn’t dare try any such thing. One reason employers love illegals is that they can get away with whatever shenanigans they please.
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Yeah. I don’t particularly like unions. But the threat of a union *must* exist because people – employers, in this case – are people.
Unfortunately, once the reason for the union’s existence has been resolved, the union seldom likes to go away peacefully. And in fact, in many states joining the union for certain jobs is required by state law.
Also, don’t get me started on public sector employee unions…
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We belonged to a single employer union when we first started working. In fact hubby was his entire career. That job it made sense. Union covered one job category, one. Different levels based on years of service, plus trainee (trainee, < 5 years – junior, I-forget-label, > 10 years – senor). When the union was forced to join a larger union (the restrictive changes to single employer pensions) he was not particularly happy. Resigned, but not happy. Their dues went from just compensating union leadership, and members, for work lost due to union business, to paying salary for a “liaison”, who no longer worked the job, and contributing to the salaries for the larger union. Their smaller union leadership never received salaries and worked the job. They also lost the ability to directly oversee the pension funds. Being on the pension board (3 union members, 3 management, and two financial advisors), that didn’t make him happy either. They also oversaw the 401(k) options, which they didn’t have to give up.
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Unions are the direct ancestors of many of these problems.
Even if that were not the case, a “union” is a particular social technology which is rooted in and depends on a particular set of communications and industrial technologies. All of which are obsolete and have been for decades.
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A lot of the issues with unions could be fixed by removing the labor monopoly status–can’t require people to join them, and can’t be the only labor provider for entire industries.
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I also wish to offer a bit of a defense on the part of smaller libraries. The one with which I am most familiar is a small town (not city) library. Maybe three thousand square feet, but I doubt it. Annual book budget of about one U.S. dollar per resident. That can be supplemented by the sale of donated books, or ones weeded out.
I know older books are kept if people take them out, but if something hasn’t moved in four or five years that space is valuable. If it’s local stuff it might go to the historical society, but who else is going to want to store it?
They will get stuff for the local homeschoolers, if they ask, and if there’s money for it. But when the local schools have a summer reading list they don’t bother to ask if the libraries in the local ILL pool have /A/ copy of the book, never mind dozens.
If you want better library resources you need to push local government to fund them better.
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Once upon a time, libraries were not dependent on the government, and the vagaries of political fashion. They were private organizations, supported by donations. They served the people, rather than the politicians and bureaucrats.
We need less government control of the libraries, not more. The government f*ks up everything it touches. Just look around you.
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I know. My mother ran a Carnegie donated library up north. But the private money’s not going to them any more, but to flashier stuff the rich can brag about. Books are so last millenium.
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something to keep in mind about those shovel-ready jobs
there were prisoners in the CA penal system who were up for parole and had served their term
the then-AG slowboated processing their paperwork because CA needed their labor for these jobs
bonus to anyone who can tell us who the CA AG was….
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Kommie-lah
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Whenever someone says, “Doing the work Americans won’t do”, I always add (sometimes in my mind, sometimes out loud), “At that price.” That’s really the secret. H1B visas are given out so freely because the corporations that bring in the workers using the program have cracked the code for how to write a request for a worker under that program, and hit all the right notes so they are approved as a matter of course. They work at what they see as wages far above what they would get in the home country, but which don’t cover all the costs here in the good ol’ USA. Because they are tied to the company that hired them, they are like the Indentured servants of three hundred years ago, the H1B visa hires are insourcing the function, at a lower wage than if you had to hire them on the free market
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Briefly – there are great libraries and crappy libraries, so if yours is not great, my condolences, but to say libraries are useless for learning is inaccurate.
One way we can judge how/if Americans want to work is to look at the labor force participation rate, which still hasn’t recovered from the pandemic. There’s a non-zero chance that’s driving some of Rowe’s rhetoric.
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That is utter bullshit ma’am
First the libraries: over five cities, and talking to a bunch of other people, a good library is rare enough that few have seen one in the last ten years.
As for the labor participation — are you out of your tiny mind?
Have you not read the reports of factories and stores and restaurants hiring exclusively illegals?
Do you think they do that because Americans won’t apply? What are you? A researcher for Rowe?
They do that because they get to pay next to nothing and treat people like cattle. And no, Americans CAN’T work in those circumstances, even if they wanted to due to regulations.
YEARS ago a young lady told me antifa was young people trying to get THE ONLY JOB THAT WOULD PAY THEM.
This remains true.
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There is also a lot of “job ghosting” going on. Both directions.
Companies hiring, but either the employee doesn’t show up on the first day, or abandons the job within days or weeks. This one we’ve met employees grousing that they were scheduled enough hours that they were losing benefits because they’d make too much.
Then there are companies that perpetually has “hiring” signs up, but they really aren’t. I suspect there is a financial gain behind this one.
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“I suspect there is a financial gain behind this one.”
One of the common H1B scams is put up a job listing such that you don’t get any candidates, and then turn to the Feds and say “See, we looked and no one responded. We need more H1bs.”
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Yep. Big time.
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“No one responded that qualified.” Sure, because the requirement was 3 years experience with tools that just released, wasn’t even available for beta for the 3 years.
“No one responded who weren’t willing to relocate.” Because company isn’t willing to pay relocation fees.
Know of at least one Phd, job requires Phd, who is retiring officially the Friday before back to in office work mandate hits (that and he’ll be over full SS qualified). Cousin-in-law. When he took the job he did do the weekend commute, and they had a small apartment or he might have been using their RV (IDK). Closest job available to her parents who needed (still need) at least hers, assistance. So, residence near her parents, and he was commuting weekly. Then 2020 hit, and he works from their residence. Yes, it is a federal government job, or adjacent anyway.
Working from home office is probably the only “good thing” that came out of 2020. I know people disagree. I know President Trump disagrees. He can. If someone isn’t being productive from their home office, if they are taking advantage from their home office, then they are going to take advantage in the office, and they are not going to be any more productive in the office (better be tracking key strokes, monitoring calls, and all that super spy stuff). Fire their asses. (But!!!! Meetings!!!! Collaborations!!!! Hallway discussions!!!! Overhearing something and pointing something out!!!! Office gossip!!!! First 3 are waste of time. If your opinion wasn’t asked for, in writing, then it isn’t going to be paid attention to, no matter how many times “I told you so” in the past has happened. The last? Less competition?) My 2¢ (given pennies are now defunct, not worth a lot … maybe need to up that to “my 5¢”?)
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THIS.
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The dynamics of actively discussing are different than throwing about emails. Brainstorming is easier
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Not in my experience. YMMV.
I rarely worked in the same office as anyone I was doing work for, for over 30 years. Go meet with them once, write up a sketched plan, send it, meet with them to go over it (read it? Please.) Develop, deliver, tweak, and write up documentation. Done. Not even meetups at the last job. Seriously went days without talking to anyone in the office. Phone calls with clients, sure. Even then it was “send me pictures via email, works better”. Job between these two jobs it was “give me the list of new specifications needed to support the new hardware”. Okay that job, at least until the end, the engineering team went out to lunch together (which as I understand is unusual? It was not a thing done in the company engineering group that bought us, even though one of our engineer’s husband, who worked in that group, would sometimes join us.) But no work discussions.
This was the crew that when we went to lunch one day, we walked in, I walked over to a family, pulled the youngest from her high chair, and went to sit down. Her parents were fine with this. She was fine with this. Her sisters were fine with this. The looks on most my co-workers, OTOH, was priceless. The other woman engineer, for all that I hadn’t been working with them very long, clued in quickly, the others not far behind. But the initial reaction … Hugs and kisses, and my nieces, sister and BIL, were headed out.
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What, you didn’t have problems that needed thrashing out?
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Yes.
Once in my 30+ career was it advantageous to actually sit down with someone and “hash out”. Yes, being onsite to insure nothing was left out (trust me a PIA because push back was “don’t need that”, for reasons. Except my push back was “required for XYZ clients, already in use.” With followup glares. But got included.) Onsite was definitely required, once, in 12 years (over 15 years ago)!Today? Shared screen and remote conference call would work.
Otherwise, no one to thrash them out with, except – Me, Myself, and I. Even in the early days of the internet, went to look for how hints on how someone had handled solutions that I could try and maybe tweak. More the answer was “Um, no …. OTOH what if?” Even the software I took over and any untraceable problems that the management’s response was “call original contract developer”. Sounds good, right? The answer, every single time was: “Oh. Pulled it off the internet, hooked it in, and made it work.” WTH??? Or why after the first deconstruct there was added screens of comment as to structure, how, why, and changes to make it work right all the time and not 80% of the time. Even comments on why the algorithm was deliberately broken to make it work correctly for one specific situation.
OTOH this did bite others later. Hey:
Second time was when I got riffed just before final bankruptcy. Same problem, on two different software. Not that the second didn’t have brilliant remaining coders (embedded C OS coders, something I definitely wasn’t trained on), they did (but the class C++ UI OOP, not so much).
Even the job I retired from. Lets just say, I’ve been told, that I have a identifiable programming style, I despise cut and paste, and take reuse and class structures seriously.
Given half a chance, I will (would, because retired) rewrite, so the next time there aren’t 3 (or more) programs that have to be changed (unless involved interface change, huge no-no) because a common code section changed. Apparently not everyone does.
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All of this.
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I don’t know who told you to look at labor force participation rate, but they were trying to F with you.
Because what your chart tells you is that in spite of the Boomers retiring– and living to leave the labor force, even though the oldest are in their 80s– we have as many people working or looking for work as in the late 70s.
You know, when Latchkey Kids became a thing? Because women with small children were “in the labor force”?
*********
Chiming in on libraries, add another half dozen (technically seven, but two functioned as one) in Washington state, two in El Paso, and four in Iowa. Mixture of large and small localities.
Of those, two weren’t worthless, although only one was actively dangerous/unfit to have a child walk around without a direct escort. That is with making a safe location a priority, and not selecting for public school systems.
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This only goes to the 70s, but gives a visual on the demographic change.
Unless the folks over 65 are in an institution, they’re not counted.
Oh, and might look at when folks were deinstitutionalized, too.
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Pardon, unless the folks are in an institution, they are counted, but are largely retired– that is, not participating in the workforce.
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Here in Illinois, library cards are not free. If you live in the town that has the library, you pay a library tax, and can thereby get a card. If you live in the county outside the town, you must pay the average amount of library tax paid by those who do live in town in order to get a card. That fee is well over $200 for the year.
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Varies by county in Oregon. Lane County it is by city. Eugene has a city library. If my household wants a Library card, being unincorporated county only, we have to pay the *same cost, just voluntarily. At that if you have a child in either 4J (Eugene), or Bethel (used to be surrounding farm country, but now serves those new Eugene neighborhoods) school districts, the household can get a library card for free (did not know this ’90s and ’00s when our son was in school. OTOH might be new-ish in the last decade or so.)
(*) Library fee isn’t per thousand taxable property value, it is a fixed annual fee. Difference for city addresses is it isn’t a voluntary annual fee. Use it or don’t. Still pay.
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