patrick.net

Wages should have been around $13-15 for min wage jobs 12 years ago if you wanted to keep things at early 90s levels.

What's happening is that actual work done by people who are (semi-) skilled from Welders to CNAs and beyond can't be replaced with third world laborers and the boomers are retiring, and it's "Beneath" most Millennials. These are jobs that can't be replaced, they have to be done.

Why be a handyman working for a property manager for $18/hr when you can bill them $50 as a contractor? So they up the wages to get a barely competent, slow guy who knows if they fire him, he'll enjoy unemployment for a few weeks and get another job at $20 later. The ones who want to half-way hustle become contractors.

The "Outsource what we can and what we can't, make 'em pay for all training and churn through 'em" Business strategy of the 90s onwards is no longer viable.

One place corps definitely won't be able to cut is CNAs/MAs/LPNs/RNs - they cut those to the bone in the first decade of this century, any less and the liability risk exceeds the labor savings. Not even a Fed Res Economist could make a case in most states for increasing the beds to workers ratio against even the most pollyanna risk analysis of lawsuit from neglect/tiredness error at this point.

1957, peak boomer, all time record 65 year birthday, is this year, 2022. Tons of workers are dropping out, esp. from physically demanding (overnights, clambering on ladders, crawling into spaces, diving under sinks) jobs. Most suburan-raised Millies were all pushed to college and see blue collar as beneath them. "My Dylan doesn't have an afterschool job, we prefer he concentrate on his studies"

AmericanKulak says

Most suburan-raised Millies were all pushed to college and see blue collar as beneath them.

And these will be the ones living at their parent's house long after graduation. Not the kid's fault for getting a useless major, but the Covid/Putin recession.

HeadSet says

AmericanKulak says

Most suburan-raised Millies were all pushed to college and see blue collar as beneath them.

And these will be the ones living at their parent's house long after graduation. Not the kid's fault for getting a useless major, but the Covid/Putin recession.

I just got into a disagreement with neighbors/friends about someone that came into our friend group a year or two ago. 33. We're all mostly 39-42. Dude still lives at home with mom and dad. He sells roofs..... Says he's making great money. So why are you living with mom and dad?

My take... he's a fucking liar. Rent or buy, why in the flying fuck are you living with your parents? You think you're going to get laid doing that? I want the dude out of our circle of friends. He also sucks ass at volleyball. 33 overweight, limps around like a weakling. So I went off on the group text and apparently people are too soft to call out pussies now, so I was labeled the bad guy. Whatever. They can hate me or dislike me, but it doesn't move me. Kid needs to man up. Your 30 fucking 3. I bought my first home at 22. He's had a decade to figure this out.

WookieMan says

You think you're going to get laid doing that?

Exactly. My boss's son is just like the kid you described - flabby at 30, lives at home, and apparently willing to give up on dating. I cannot fathom how any young man would settle for video games over pussy. For me at that age (as with all other guys I knew), pussy was top billet.

I've never worked anyplace where I had enough to do.

I bet a lot of “quiet quitters” smoke weed or eat pot gummy bears.

Why put in maximum effort for sub-par compensation? And if you perceive the job you have to be lacking in upward mobility, it’s just a job you have to do for the money you need to get by. It’s not a career.

The other thing is that I have worked lots of places that don't give raises. That's highly demotivating.

I will allow that some families get along together so well and like each other so much that the kids staying with the parents isn't such a big deal. They just like it that way.

Guy behind us in tri valley, we used to kind of laugh because he lived with his parents until he was obviously late middle aged, smoked on the porch, have no idea what he did for a living. His parents moved on to other residence, but he kept the house I gather as inheritance. He works on the place and keeps it top notch.

We have either inheritors around us, or rich asians, or struggling asians working like dogs to keep up the inflated price and taxes.

In contrast, I mostly moved away at age of 17 without any mentoring or guidance, and only went back for short stretches or to wash clothes when I was in university the first year. I just didn't want to be there. I had no useful guidance about the world from my parents at all. I think that was common for that generation.

WookieMan says

I just got into a disagreement with neighbors/friends about someone that came into our friend group a year or two ago. 33. We're all mostly 39-42. Dude still lives at home with mom and dad. He sells roofs..... Says he's making great money. So why are you living with mom and dad?

My take... he's a fucking liar. Rent or buy, why in the flying fuck are you living with your parents? You think you're going to get laid doing that? I want the dude out of our circle of friends. He also sucks ass at volleyball. 33 overweight, limps around like a weakling. So I went off on the group text and apparently people are too soft to call out pussies now, so I was labeled the bad guy. Whatever. They can hate me or dislike me, but it doesn't move me. Kid needs to man up. Your 30 fucking 3. I bought my first home at 22. He's had a decade to figure this out.

Yep, TONS of these bro. It's not a thing for the early-mid 80s births, but once you get around 1990 give or take a few years... the percentage explodes

When I was a teen in the early 90s, if you weren't military/family business/working/college and living at home by age 20, you were a loser. We had a few video game skinny fat (nowhere near as fat as today's kids, that's seed oils I suspect) pot smokers living with mom/grandma around age 20, but they were rare and mocked. I won't even get into having Supie Hero and Sci Fi toys, blankets, and dolls past age 13. Some people still saved them at that point, but it was an Ebay/$$$ Collectible thing at that point. Not festooned around the bedroom, basement, or worst of all, cubicle.

That shaming doesn't seem to exist as much.

HeadSet says

Exactly. My boss's son is just like the kid you described - flabby at 30, lives at home, and apparently willing to give up on dating. I cannot fathom how any young man would settle for video games over pussy. For me at that age (as with all other guys I knew), pussy was top billet.

There's hormone disruptors somewhere in the food chain for sure. It's not entirely their fault, I think, though society/peers no longer shaming it early enough is also a factor.

This attitude of "I'll do the miminim" goes against everything I was taught. When your in your 20's and early 30's you should be busting your ass so that you can earn promotions /raises /etc. I still belive that hard work ultimately gets rewarded.

And if your work at a place that underpays you and overworks you? Find a new job. Just don't expect it to happen "instantly". I was stuck in a dead end job and it took me two years to find a new opportunity worth chasing.

Now I'm a "subject matter expert" and "thought leader" in my field. Work is rewarding again AND I get to mentor the next generation and show them the ropes.

At the start of every week I ask myself... How can I do this (my job) better? How can I become more productive? What can I do to be an asset to the company?

If we do have a recession... who do you think will be the first to be laid off? The ones hustling? Or the ones mailing it in?

GreaterNYCDude says

If we do have a recession... who do you think will be the first to be laid off? The ones hustling? Or the ones mailing it in?

The ones with the biggest TC. This is what happened where I worked during the last one.

GreaterNYCDude says

If we do have a recession... who do you think will be the first to be laid off? The ones hustling? Or the ones mailing it in?

The highest paid, by an HR shrew or Beancounter who has no clue as to how to do the core job under review and thus is looking for the biggest cuts to the minimum number.

During the last big financial meltdown the first laid off were:

The useless but fun to have:
Hot babe executive assistants. The Financial Times even had an article about how in Chicago a significant number of these laid-off assistants found jobs as strippers.

The luxuries they can forgo:
Janitorial and Secretary types

I don't understand the concept of quiet quitting.
Of course when you have a shitty job you complain but you don't deliberately fuck up.
Even "good" jobs have drudgery.
No matter what I did I tried to do it well.
I found amusement by trying to make tasks faster by improving the methods.
Sometimes it was using completely different equipment and materials which didn't occur to my coworkers.
15 bucks an hour isn't a lot but if you share rent and don't go to bars and restaurants you can still save some money to invest.

I’m doing an addition on my house. I get jealous watching the framers. Outside, physical activity, working together with a bunch of dudes, accomplishing an important task of building shelter.

Compare that to the “good” job I have. In front of computer, on my ass, dealing with bullshit.

Why people bash the trades I have no idea. I’ll encourage my kids if they have interest.

I was a hapless employee. I made up for moderate to low energy and attention deficit with efficiency, so all my work would get done in short bursts, then boredom would take over and I would sleep in my chair. I never mastered the art of looking busy when I wasn't. I had a front desk girl once who could look like she was busy doing stuff when she wasn't, all day. I could never figure out how she did that.

If a boss overseer came in and saw me sleeping in my chair, the other employees would have to explain that I already got more work done than any of the other bees to get me off the hook. I was high production with an extremely antic work style. Also, being irreverent and not gratuitously kissing ass always worked against me. I got fired quite a bit, which was why I realized I needed to take the risk of going into business for myself again. It terrified me, because I had already done it once and failed spectacularly. I was also a poorly communicative boss and a mediocre business person (I couldn't play the games, I preserved my ethics, found it hard to be purely greedy and could't say what was on my mind, either, so I stayed closed down).

The business was good, however, because it kept me occupied at one thing or another more or less constantly within my limited capacities for work.

It worked out and allowed me financial independence when I sold. I guess you would never call me the master of personnel skills, but my wife working part time in the office kind of made up for it. My intellectual gifts were not always a blessing, but I suppose you could say I had the luck to pull victory out of the jaws of self defeat.

I guess I have been quiet quitting for the last couple years, especially since the pandemic. For a few years I was one of the hot shots at work, but I finally realized I never got anything for going above and beyond. So now I kind of work in short bursts and amuse myself with other things during the day. I've been remote for a decade and while I guess my employer could check up on me, they don't. I'm still producing above average but the corporate politics is what kills me, a meeting at a time. I am actually paid well as I am making 2-3x industry average, but upper management really sucks and is totally woke. I guess I could be happy getting fired, it would give me an excuse to leave Ca finally.

I quit because I hated what I was doing, converting the business's website to run on another employee's horrible and poorly documented javascript framework. It is always a mistake of galactic proportions to make your business dependent on any one employee, and especially on bad code that only that employee knows. I also hated working from home. I like being in the office and seeing people.

On the other hand, I learned a lot more about javascript, and I got paid, so it wasn't a total loss.

I've been really grateful to have the last year and some months to work more on patrick.net and on a private genealogy site. Doesn't make any money, but it's what I really enjoy doing. Would be nice to see more people during the day, so that tempts me to get a job again if I get through my entire patrick.net bug and feature list.

I left my job because my company was evil, what I was doing was evil, and I was disgusted by how many of my colleagues are stupid and as a result, passively evil.

I have spent the last 9 months catching up on what the fuck is going on in the world, and understanding who the actors are in the world.

My conclusion is that if it's on television, it's a lie. Anything called "mainstream media" is propaganda. Any site that censors content means that any content that remains there should be suspect.

I played around with IPFS - it's a disaster, I have worked on TOX - it is also a disaster. I think that the next thing will be decentralized content, and I'm playing with that. It cannot be censored, it cannot be controlled - the problem is that the current offerings have SERIOUS design problems. IFPS allows a website to be shared locally, but it's EXTREMELY slow, and it packs data in only 4K - which is ludicrous today. TOX is a decentralized communication system, but it's buggy as hell, and overly complicated.

So, I'm boning up on security. I've cracked what I thought was something overly complex but isn't - NAT traversal. It's actually quite simple, but descriptions of it take into account insane efforts to defeat it - basically if I send a packet from port 4444 on my machine, there's a 99.9% chance it will be port 4444 on my NAT router, or yours or anybody's. This is never explained, they do NOT want use bypassing servers, but if you spend the time and check enough systems, it's trivial to do.

I'm going to spend the next year making P2P communication possible and maybe, the default. The internet was designed to be a decentralized system, we can bring that back.

The people that understand how this system works are aging, we have to bring back the original intent before we die.

RedStar says

I guess I could be happy getting fired, it would give me an excuse to leave Ca finally.

If you're remote why not now?

just_passing_through says

RedStar says

I guess I could be happy getting fired, it would give me an excuse to leave Ca finally.

If you're remote why not now?

HR won't hear it. Nobody allowed out of NorCal. The wife also went back into nursing part time at a good place that exempted her from the vaxx, so we are saving up quite a bit right now. She gets paid double what nurses in other states do. We took the kids out of public school so we're good for right now, just biding our time and planning. We're still looking for places to move. We have friends in SC, TN and VA so those are next on the list to see. If Boise ever drops I'd love to retire near there, but as far as jobs go we would both have to get vaxxed which is big NO. The healthcare providers in ID are owned by woke Oregon based systems.