First of all, thanks to Bobby for joining our intrepid band here. Fresh blood is a good thing. I admire Bobby’s pluck and the energy he brings. Now for the other side of the coin …
You are a snob — in a twisted kind of way. Your hero worship of ‘the common working man’ waxes lame and Leninist. Being lame is well … lame! So is being a Leninist. I hope you get the picture.
I have worked construction doing both Carpentry and HVAC. I have dug ditches. I currently work as an engineer in front of a computer doing something you call woman’s work. In short, kiss my behind. I studied long and hard to earn the skills I use today precisely because, having actually done manual labor, I found nothing romantic, overtly manly, or ennobling about doing manual labor. I found it hard, and boring. I also realized any moron could dig a ditch or wield a mop (did that as well). For me, carpentry was interesting, as a hobby.
I look back on my efforts to get the engineering degree as one of the three most difficult things I have ever done. Four years of sustained effort, working into the wee hours. You ridicule this? You are a ignorant. Try getting healthy by going to a plumber when you need a doctor. Try getting your teeth worked on by a stone mason, or a barber. Try getting a job from a janitor or a cashier.
As for the pay, why should a guy wielding a mop get paid as much as a guy who can design factory machines, cars, aircraft or piping systems? Please answer that. Can you?
The rarer the item the more it costs on the open market. Precious stones cost more than glass because glass is easy to get, and plentiful. Finding a ruby is hard work because it is rare. The skill required to wield a mop is common, a Doctor is rare. A pro-caliber ball player is rarer still. The salaries reflect this.
Frankly, I have a question for you, “Why do you think a cashier should be paid minimum wage, as defined by some politician in Washington?” Considering your apparent disdain for Washington, I imagine this answer will be interesting to say the least.
As for your ridiculous assertion that raising minimum wage helps workers or the economy, every time it is raised unemployment goes up, or the rate of hiring decreases, or both. How is this a good thing? Please explain how your greatly self-vaunted experience has lead to a conclusion 180 degrees out of phase with the historical track record of raising the minimum wage?
In the future, kindly refrain from calling me and others cowards or trying to threaten us. First of all, you look like an idiot when you do that. Second of all, none of us are scared by your threats, you only look like a sociopath. Furthermore, what would you do if one of us called you out? Hmmmm?
One last thing. Waxing scatological, or couching your diatribes in the ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ does little to further your case. Getting frustrated because we all don’t bow down and hail your ‘wisdom’ does not help you, it only makes you look weak and even more pathetic than you would look otherwise.
Good time for a worst jobs thread.
I helped build the sound barriers on 495, which was godawful hard work but sort of fun at the time. Jackhammers are cool.
Washing dishes and pots from age 14-16 at El Palacio in Rose Hill was not so bad because I got all the Mexican food I could eat. In retrospect, quite the poetic justice, there.
During summers in college in FL I helped clean up for a construction company that specialized in moving houses. We got to haul away all the trash. In a non-air conditioned pickup truck. During the heat of the day. In summer. In southwest Florida. Our boss and company owner was Rick Doblin, who later became world famous as the founder of MAPS. (Google him). And we were not even given any psychedelics while on the job.
I cleaned the bathrooms and moved boxes at Garfinkels for over a year before it went under. At least they were very nice bathrooms.
Altogether, I worked in all sorts of menial jobs for about fifteen years, including at restaurants, both front and back of the house, for over six years, because of having family to support, before I got my first real job at the age of 29. (While writing movie reviews for beer money on evenings and weekends) Never once did I spit in anyone’s food. On the plus side, I made a fortune one day at the Ritz in Naples when a hurricane hit and the only thing the guests in the hotel could order were hamburgers, and alcohol. They tipped out the wazoo.
But as Jacob said, that was all stuff that largely anyone who was not afraid to work could do. And anyone did. Thus the pay was overall piddling. If I had stuck with that “manly” work, it’s likely neither of my daughters would have gone to college or even had health insurance. It was not until I spent many, many hours learning stuff that not everyone was willing to learn, and which people were willing to pay a lot more to someone informed enough to do those tasks. The idea that digging ditches or waiting tables should pay as much as designing a computer network or building an educational program is nonsense.
I get the sense that Fontaine has not read Atlas Shrugged.
Me too, bussed tables and part time work in a bowling alley to make ends meet. At a young age I realized that life had more to offer, and I busted my hump to get there. Went back to school, after hitting the books on my own time to allow me to CLEP out of may prereqs. While I was going to school, my job demanded about 60 hours a week. Worst work week I ever had was 107 hours. Felt like crap afterward, but when the overtime pay hit..
For the last 20 years have pretty much sat at a computer all day. Is it easier than digging a ditch ? Not by a long shot !
I seriously doubt that BF can find a single cashier earning minimum wage. Ditto for many trade workers.
I got working papers when I was 14, and got a job washing dishes at an Italian restaurant, what a mess. Would get home at 1am, looking like I had been in an operating room.
I also think ol Fontaine has not read ‘The Fountainhead’ either. Great movie. I wonder if anyone here can name the leading actor.
I once logged 108 hours moving furniture!
You must have missed my comment on Jacks blog titled Stimulus Insanity –
“Good article. You’re learning. But I don’t see why you think paying workers more money will not result in more production. Our best minds have been running to Wall Street to make big easy money without thought or consideration to how they make it instead of becoming engineers and scientists.”
Carpentry in this country is nothing but fast food building designed to send money to the fat cats on Wall Street, for what reason, obviously they don’t even know what to do with how much they skim off the top of everyone else’s efforts. I’m talking about tax collectors, lawyers, accountants, bankers, politicians, lobbyists, bureaucrats at all levels of society and even a whole lot of managers. And them I am not talking about anyone either. I don’t have an ideology, I have a vision like you have never seen before. But first I gotta get my foot in the door to show it to you so I gotta talk your lingo until you understand how to listen to mine.
And you’re wrong, a cashier or burger flopper should be paid as much as an engineer, its just that an engineer should be paid a lot more than they are, obviously because everyone is getting their ass kicked these days where if we had more money instead of the shit pieces that walked off with it all, we could even survive this bullshit.
If you were digging a ditch for the TashMahal or a great pyramid, and paid a royal fee for it, you would be proud. Look at this way. What if I told you I had a product that could give us clean energy, like coal, but it would be too expensive to make a profit from doing it that way. There are plenty of available technologies like that and most would evolve to be profitable if we just started using them. But let’s say that these technologies could be used paying employees running the plant very good salaries, there just wouldn’t be any left over for Wall Street. The way it is now, it could never happen because the only people that would benefit would be the people that work to make it happen and their customers.
That’s bullshit and the people who run the financial system know it. They make enough money off of us to make things work but they refuse to. They don’t want clean and responsible technologies because they make money selling medical products to people consuming their pollutants. They don’t want cars that give good mileage because they want to sell dangerous fuels that make people sick. They don’t want to sell cars that don’t need repairs, or toasters or microwaves that never need replacing because they want to make money doing nothing.
They want nothing but power and control over the people out here trying to produce a world to live a wonderful quality of life in that everyone can take part in enjoying and benefiting from while we venture out to conquer space, science, and eternity. But then they already have total power and control over us though money, they just don’t have any idea what to do with it because the type of people who go after the kind of positions they have aren’t right in the head, their sick perverted weird people who want power so they can get away with going to other countries to fuck little boys in the ass and stupid shit like that, like priests.
They are just another side of the priest type personality but they have a lust for power also, like we see in the ones who get caught so we know there are many more like them while the ones who aren’t like that know who is but don’t have the nuts to stand up and do anything about it. These are the types of people that play us like we are pieces on a game board. They are royalty and I will be damned if I understand why you defend them.
Tell me this, why the hell should a banker make billions and an engineer only make whatever an engineer makes? Why doesn’t a banker just earn a paycheck and leave our money alone. It doesn’t take money to build industry, it takes human effort. Money is just a logistics tool that needs to be available when and where it is needed. The market, and I mean an economy run by and for the people, would take care of the rest if we the people are reasonably responsible and honest, or transparent.
If we evolved to look at it more from this perspective, anyone who tried to cheat it would know the consequences would likely be handled behind an old barn down a country dirt road. The more level the playing field of life is, the less likely anyone will want to step out of line and fuck it up. And those that are going to do it anyway would know it would be the last thing they ever did so even they would bite their tongue while keeping it out of a young boys pants. I mean that’s really where the problem is isn’t it, thousands of years of men fucking boys in the ass and making them insane. I mean you don’t think this Catholic priest thing started and ended recently do you?
Do you know the history of Greece and Rome or how the Catholic Church came about? My God so many men in this world have fallen prey to being raped by men who themselves were raped as boys that it is no wonder men are so fucking insane. And woman and little girls have had it worse, they just don’t have the power to go out and fuck the world over when their heart are broken like men do. I know, I know, I can hear everyone now getting ready to rake me over the coals for this one. But these are the types of issues we need to settle before anything will work.
Like look at the gays saying they were born that way issue. That’s total bullshit. But then heterosexuals weren’t born this way either. We’re born wild animals who have instincts to tell us when the prime time to mate is where we go into seasonal heats and then forget about sex altogether until next year. But since we have domesticated ourselves to the point we can control our environment year round to the benefit of our offspring in any season, we stay in heat from puberty on.
Animals don’t have sex, they are too busy surviving, all except us, the one fucking animal who has intelligence who has driven himself sexually insane with his technologies and cultures. But everyone argues about gay marriage and homosexuality and all this other bullshit like it matters. We get boners a lot, so fucking what, stop trying to run from the fucking thing, go into the bathroom, pound it on the wall a few times and leave the thinking out of it.
We have issues that are more complex than they appear on the surface that we need to learn how to evolve to look at the bigger picture of instead of wasting decade after decade debating bullshit. Most of our problems can solve themselves if we just start weeding through the bullshit. And most of that can be done using common sense. But we gotta get the insanity levels down a few notches first which means we have to address some of these embarrassing issues with a hands on approach.
And we need to take a serious look at history and religion in order to settle these God damn fucking wars between all these morons over bullshit they don’t even understand the truth about. My God the world could come to an end tomorrow over some Jew Muslim argument that a few scholars could set the world straight on tonight where both sides would realize neither one is who they think they are. And even if their leaders know the truth and only fight because that is how they make a living and stay in power, if the people who they inspire to do their bidding knew the truth, it sure would make it hard for them to take us all so close to the edge of our survival.
I mean you do know that Israel has nuclear weapons and is run by religious fanatics don’t you? The other side just doesn’t have them, not that we know about, or it would be all over. But Israel having them is not a confidence inspiring part of the equation. But we just let it all fester without making both of them face the reality of religion, or the Catholic church and Christian zealots all over the world either. There’s mountains of this kind of bullshit out there that no one in this country wants to talk about and it is all coming back to bite us in the ass for ignoring it. But I can assure you of one thing, if Bobby Fontaine ever has his way, it is all we are going to talk about until there is nothing left to be said
Priceless! ROFL!
Another fun game, insert “I” for all the “They”s. . . Good times.
kevin,
you are enjoying all this way, way too much. have you gotten into the patients meds again?
I am frankly glad if for nothing else to be providing this entertainment to our man in Colorado.
And for maximum sheer entertainment value, our heretofore local parlor-leftist
http://thecrackup.blogspot.com/2009/01/glad-tidings-part-3.html
Oh my
http://thecrackup.blogspot.com/search/label/Tom
Has kids, owns a house in the suburbs, and wants to stick it to the man. Hysterical.
I need butter for my popcorn
Totally different. Besides, which nerve did I touch?
“Has kids, owns a house in the suburbs, and wants to stick it to the man.”
C’mon, really? No wonder you two are locked in mortal battle. Can there only be ONE of you? Certainly you two can coexist.
BF, on the other hand, is a character unto himself.
You did not touch any nerves, muchacho. Like you say, mortal battle.
I get the sense that Fontaine has not read Atlas Shrugged.
Bingo !
Having been a truck driver, Iron worker and carpenter I have a deep appreciation for those who work with their hands building America.
Fontaine’s poor imitation of one of Lenin’s fist pounding speeches does little too advance the collective admiration of your local plumber.
I get the sense he has not read The Wealth of Nations, either. He has no excuse, either — he has no job, so he can read all he wants, and it’s all online.
He can go to the Fairfax County Public Library and check out Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics. It is available at 21 different branches.
I’ve read every book that you point out, most of them 25 years ago when they were relevant. Ideological solutions to problems, including the economy, especially the economy, which includes everything mankind thought it knew about how to run one based on belief systems rather than common sense, are no longer part of the equation of the future. Some things that were argued in the past worked but not exactly the way it was predicted. Some things didn’t work at all. Some ideas that worked came from the other side of the tracks, some from the north side of town. Some things worked in the East. Others failed.
I think everywhere you look at what was being said 50 years ago, you will find that some things worked while most did not or simply became irrelevant. But the experiment is over, the statistics and reports are in. So it’s time to regroup and become educated about reality so we can ready ourselves, and young people who might actually take us seriously, about what we learned from it all. My sense is that most of you don’t think the game is over, that the election hasn’t ended, that the last millennium isn’t over, that things aren’t changing so fast that months go by like years while you still want to adhere to policies designed for a time when things were slow and comforting.
I mean Ann Rand and Adam Smith, what century are you living in? I can see sticking with principles to the bitter end but brother let me tell you, this is it, the bullshit is over, it is time to start to digest what we learned. I mean haven’t you been itching to put this era behind us so we can open up all the lessons we learned and put them to good use. I mean I can see you being bitter that a Democrat gets to walk us into a time of new ways to look into the future. But it has to be done by someone and it has to be done now. It is going to happen or it is all going to come to an end.
You can deny it all you want but everyday makes it look more and more like you are deluding yourselves in a serious way, and I mean the whole conservative right wing. I am not a lefty. I don’t want to see you chase everyone over to the side of the isle. I want to see new and bold idea come along that we can regroup around. I have some but wouldn’t mind one bit if you can top them. But you have nothing but a belief that you can collectively insult your way back into power. It is just not going to happen.
Obama is cool and collected which is what got him elected over McCain and Palins ranting. That’s it. Neither one of them had anything of substance to say. Times are such that Obama can’t fail because everyone is trying to fix this country and make it work. So whatever happens, if we survive, he will be credited with it whether or not he had anything to do with it happening or not.
So one thing will be sure come next election season, being polite and considerate is what will get people elected in the future while insulting new ideas pretending like you know something better without saying what won’t even deserve a nomination. That shit will never fly again, its over, deal with it.
You had 8 years of Bush. You had your chance. There has to be a winner and a loser or there would be no contest. But Obama seems to be wanting to be considerate of both sides of the coin as if he realizes that this time the game is different where we just need to put the pieces of the puzzle back together even though they are a bit mangled up and a lot of them have been lost.
It’s time fellas, the game is over. It’s time to clean up our rooms so we can get new toys and start to play something another game altogether. I mean you have no new ideas and won’t allow them either, that is your solution to all the problems facing the world. Good luck with that one, you’re going to need it desperately to put out the flames on your already burning sinking ship that still has lifeboats on it but you refuse to admit that you are sitting waste high in sea water so you will likely be drowning before you realize you could have bailed out instead of going down with the ship taking a lot of innocent people with you.
This is how it is supposed to work. I offer an idea. Then you can counter with yours. But simply throwing out dead authors as your way of saying you are smarter than me, so much more intelligent that you don’t even have to have any thoughts of your own to win a debate with me, just doesn’t work anymore. Either come in this blog having done your homework or keep your trap shut because you are just wasted Joe’s bandwidth by making this page longer. Please try fellas, I know it is hard.
It’s like with jerking off. Sometimes the thoughts don’t want to go where you want them to go and you find yourselves thinking about things you try your best to forget about. But if you don’t give up, if you just keep smacking your head against the wall long enough, an idea will come to you that is all your own. It might not be a good one. It might even make you feel a bit like a faggot when telling anyone what it is. But you gotta start somewhere or you will never get that thing up and working again. So pull your balls up, tighten your belt, and let’s have a real debate.
Exactly! So why do you expect your ideological solutions to be any better? My “ideology” is for the government NOT to run the economy.
The Wealth of Nations is no more out of date than Newton’s Principia. Smith’s tome articulates the theoretical laws of Economics as the Principia articulates the theoretical laws of Physics.
Governments repeatedly try to work contrary to those laws, and, as you said, they have failed every time. So here’s an idea — get the government out of it.
Dedicated to Bobby F:
Leaves are falling all around,
Its time I was on my way.
Thanks to you, Im much obliged
For such a pleasant stay.
But now its time for me to go,
The autumn moon lights my way.
For now I smell the rain,
And with it pain,
And its headed my way.
Ah, sometimes I grow so tired,
But I know Ive got one thing I got to do,
Ramble on,
And nows the time, the time is now
To sing my song.
Im goin round the world,
I got to find my girl, on my way.
Ive been this way ten years to the day, ramble on,
Gotta find the queen of all my dreams.
Got no time to for spreadin roots,
The time has come to be gone.
And tho our health we drank a thousand times,
Its time to ramble on.
Ramble on,
And nows the time, the time is now
To sing my song.
Im goin round the world,
I got to find my girl, on my way.
Ive been this way ten years to the day, ramble on,
Gotta find the queen of all my dreams.
I aint tellin no lie.
Mines a tale that cant be told,
My freedom I hold dear;
How years ago in days of old
When magic filled the air,
Twas in the darkest depths of mordor
I met a girl so fair,
But gollum, and the evil one crept up
And slipped away with her.
Her, her….yea.
Aint nothing I can do, no.
Ramble on,
And nows the time, the time is now
To sing my song.
Im goin round the world,
I got to find my girl, on my way.
Ive been this way ten years to the day, ramble on,
Gotta find the queen of all my dreams.
Gonna ramble on, sing my song
Gotta keep-a-searchin for my baby…
Gonna work my way, round the world
I cant stop this feelin in my heart
Gotta keep searchin for my baby
I cant find my bluebird!
Id listen to my bluebird sing but I cant find my blue bird
A-keep-a ramblin baby…
Cool, thanks sweetheart.
“Carpentry in this country is nothing but fast food building designed to send money to the fat cats on Wall Street, for what reason, obviously they don’t even know what to do with how much they skim off the top of everyone else’s efforts.”
You ignorant piece of uninformed garbage. You’re so freekin’ smart, you don’t need any allowance of native intelligence capacity, do you?
What a dumbass. THIS carpenter would gladly pull your lower lip over the back of your skull for such ignorance.