Stupid expenditures

I thought for a long time that pretty much nothing could surprise me with the way money is spent and funds are distributed. We have been in a world economic disaster for a few years now. People are losing their homes, health care keeps going up, fuel prices are being driven in many cases by speculators (manipulators), the average salary when adjusted for inflation has been falling for the last 10 years or so and with all of this going on someone not only funded this project but they had the guts to then publicize it right now.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11718029
I don't know about anyone else but bringing back the pillory sounds pretty good right now as a lesson for whatever idiot approved this.

Today's economy

So we are told the economy is coming back. For those that invest I suppose it is to a degree but the stockholders to a great degree contributed to the problems we have. Yes it was the banks and investment companies that created those idiotic investment vehicles that crashed and burned but that was as an answer to the investors that are never happy with the income they are getting.

Investors are putting their money at risk and are certainly entitled to expect a return on that investment but most investors today are looking for a guarantee. You can get a guarantee by going with bonds and very safe investments but not high rates of returns. If you want a high rate of return then a RISK is involved because high rates of returns are acquired by investing in things that are new and not proven for the most part.

Corporations are very much at fault too because they allow themselves to be coerced into making foolish decisions based on the investors. Everyone wants to know what kind of return they are going to get right now rather than what the outlook is long term.

We have all seen stories recently where stocks for companies tumbled because the increase in profits was not as high as expected. There was indeed an increase in profits, in some cases very nice increases but it was not enough so they sold off the stock and caused it to tank.

Investors are their own worst nightmares creating self-fulfilling prophecies. If companies had the common sense and the guts to do the right thing we would not be in nearly as bad a shape as we are.

Look at incomes for employees. In an awful lot of companies the employees are not paid enough to actually be able to afford the product being sold. Some companies do offer steep discounts to employees and in some cases free services but that is not helpful. Incomes have been actually falling in general for some time. I realize that incomes can not continuously go up dramatically although many CEOs and stock holders do feel the same way.

We need to step back a bit in time to when the middle class started to become a reality because if the middle class goes away those who are making a ton of money are going to be very, very unhappy because who will buy the products and services that are giving them their income.

Henry Ford was absolutely demonized by other manufacturing leaders when he decided to pay his workers 5 or 6 dollars a day telling him it would ruin them. He told them he was paying that much because anyone that wanted to buy one of his cars needed to make that much. His philosophy was also to make the best possible product, for the lowest possible price, while paying the best possible salary.

Now what many companies do is the exact opposite. They provide a product or service that is just barely good enough to prevent them from being lynched while paying the lowest possible wages.

I have no problem with companies making a profit, but there really should be some common sense. Any CEO that runs a company in great prosperity deserves a very nice salary but things have gotten a bit rediculous. There are CEOs of companies that make in some cases almost 1000 times as much as the rank and file within the company and then they wonder why people get upset.

Washington seems to be much the same. Our legislators in Washington make around $175,000 dollars a year with the best health care and a full pension for not doing a whole awful lot. It is also obvious to anyone with a brain that they cater to the corporations rather than their constituents for the most part because if they didn't then companies would have no incentive to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying. And who among us has the ability to set our own salaries and benefits?

I am not advocating socialism or communism or anything else in particular. I want common sense and a sense of reality to be brought to the halls of power both in government and in business.

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Corporations

Has it occured to anyone that most large corporations are now becoming the Robber Barons of old? It was disregard for the workers and pay rates that were not capable of sustaining a realistic way of life that brought the unions to power.

I am not advocating unions because I have been a union member and, at least in the case of the place I was working at the time, the union did nothing but take dues. That being said I can see a revolt of workers coming. The problem with this is that the corporations will just thumb their noses at us and offshore the work.

I am not making a rant against outsourcing because there is absolutely a legitimate use for it.

What I see coming is that the CEOs of the large corporations are making this country backslide into a developing nation again. We were at one time the greatest nation on earth and everyone wanted to live here so they could have the American Dream.

The American Dream now is the ability to be able to put food on the table and a roof over your families head. Not too many people are looking at the old dream of a house with a yard and several children because no one can afford it anymore.

Does anyone at all besides me see a problem when the CEO of a company makes over 1000 times what the front line workers that do all the work are paid?

I certainly see an issue there and hopefully enough people to make a difference also see a problem.

I am truly not pushing socialism but there needs to be a point where people start to stand up and say "Wait a minute. That is just not right!'

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Job Hopes

So I have an interview on Wednesday for a new position with the company. It appears that the position is a lateral move rather than a promotion but it would give me Monday through Friday with more or less daylight hours. That would allow me to find a second job to make some extra. My current hours are fine and I have never really cared what hours I work but the mid shift type of hours I work right now are not very conducive to part time jobs with the hours I have left.

I have some very high hopes for this position so if anyone wants to cross their fingers for me and wish me luck it would be greatly appreciated.

Here’s Hoping

I found out today that I have an interview for a new position at my new job. The position is one that would allow me to more fully utilize my talents and from what I have heard, will also give a shift that would better align with my goal of getting a second job to help out the bills. My current shift is mid-shift which makes finding a part time job rather awkward due to the hours that I work.

I really do need this because I am very, very close to losing my home if I can't find a way to increase my income. Please wish me luck.

Employment

So I am looking for some freelance writing or editing jobs at the moment to help make some extra money and perhaps lead into another career or an additional career. While I have no formal writing or journalism training I can do better than a lot of the crap you find on the web or hear on TV or the radio in my sleep.

I consider the schooling I had in the 60s and 70s to be far superior to much of what passes for education nowadays. It also helps that I read vociferously and always have.

I apologize to anyone that this may offend but how many of you read the news article about the particle accelerator in Cern having released a Balrog and were able to immediately recognize it as the subterranean creature from the Lord of the Rings trilogy?

Reading is a very important art that I fear is being lost. I worked with a young man a number of years ago that extra-ordinarily proud of the fact that he had never read an entire book.

Please do not let the world come to this. Read something!

My thoughts for today

It looks as though I finally have a routine that will let me post here much more regularly. I will try to update once a day at least. I may miss a few here and there but I will do my utmost to keep up to date.

I have been thinking very strongly about perhaps starting a consulting business. Anyone that has ever had to make a call to a large corporation for help will have run into those representatives who seem to have but one goal in life and that is to get you off the phones as quickly as possible whether the problem is fixed or not.

Please remember when calling in that the attitude that you notice is really driven by the company and not the rep in most cases. Corporations set goals for call times that can vary by business type but I have seen companies where you were expected to handle as many as 20 or more calls an hour and other companies that are a bit more realistic but I have never seen a company dealing with the consumer directly that allows you to be on a call for more than about 15 minutes before management will be hounding you to get off the call.

Most of this is driven by the companies going out of their way to pay as little as possible and still get living and breathing bodies on the phone. Remember also that in this field over the last few years the starting salaries have gone down all over and down dramatically in some cases.

My goal is to try and show companies that the better you treat both your employees and you customer the better off the company will be and the more profitable it will be in the future. The problem is that no one is willing to look at anything beyond the current quarter and have lost site of any long term goals.

Henry Ford had the right idea when he started his company. His idea was that you make the best possible product, for the lowest possible cost while paying the highest possible wages. We have now perverted that to selling the lowest quality that anyone is willing to buy while charges as much as we can get anyone to pay for it while paying the lowest possible wages.

I have absolutely no problem with making a profit. That is why people go into business. However, when you see any company where the CEO makes more than 1000 times what his lowest paid employee makes then that is a company that has no regards whatsoever for either the employees or for the customer.

 

Stay away from these companies when you can!!!

Job woes

If anyone wonders why the average income for people has dropped in this country over the last ten years I can tell you it is because of the way most large corporations handle things. The last job I had was in a call center for a major telephone company in the United States.

I started a phone representative taking calls from customers with technical problems handling them one at a time. I then moved on to handling 10 customers at a time through a chat program that they had. From there I became a Quality Assurance representative making sure that the contacts were handled appropriately and in a timely fashion. From there I became a coach responsible for working with the representatives to make sure that things were done correctly and working one on one with the representatives to get them any additional training they needed as well as putting together improvement goals for them. While I did get a yearly raise (not very large most of the time) all of those jobs were considered lateral moves which means that even though each position had substantially increased responsibilities, those responsibilities were apparently not important enough to warrant an actual promotion which of course would have resulted in additional pay.

Due to the company being purchased I am now working for 35% less than I was before at another company. Hopefully this company handles things a bit differently but we shall see.

Is Spring Here?

It has been gorgeous here for the last day or so after all that rain. Perhaps spring is finally here. Not a real bad winter as far as temperatures go but the snow was pretty brutal. 2 storms about 5 days apart dropped around 50 inches of snow between them.

Just outside for a bit and actually pretty nice at 1:15 in the morning. Around 45 degrees and almost no wind at all. A very nice night.

I put the house up for sale this past weekend because with the new job I can no longer afford it. Hopefully we find a buyer before the bank forecloses on it.

Weather Blues

So we have the second day of rain. It is very blustery and cold along with pretty steady rain that makes for a pretty miserable time. I will say that I am grateful for the fact that the temperatures have come up. If it was still as cold as it was a few weeks ago this would be something like 30 or 40 inches of snow and I have had quite enough snow for a while.

I also got to put my house up for sale because I can no longer afford to live here with the pay cut I needed to take to get out of a job position that I am certain is going to be eliminated at some point based on the behavior of some of the supervisory and management staff.

Efficiency???

It was an interesting day today. I have been fighting a bout of bronchitis which is slowly but surely getting better. My doctor had electronically transmitted a prescription to a CVS pharmacy near my work so I could pick it up on the way. I arrived at the pharmacy an hour and a quarter after the prescription was sent only to find that I still had to go to the order drop off. I guess they need to make sure I really am coming even though the doctor sent the prescription here and for me to get it elsewhere would require that the prescription be transferred.

I then got to watch a pharmacy with 9 people behind the counter getting in each other's way. 1 person would be faster than the 9 of them were.

Someone tell me in what way this is faster? We pay more so everyone can upgrade to computer s and then they completely ignore the fact that computers can make things so much faster and more efficient.

Corporations so desperately need to have someone, ANYONE, with a bit of common sense to oversee this kind of thing. I suspect that this company upgraded to computers to be able to comply with some regulation somewhere but are only giving lip service to the intent.

 

What a day!

Common sense in action?

Finally we see what I consider to be some common sense. Barack Obama has finally started pushing for Nuclear Power Plants and it is something that should have been done years ago. We need to have more power available to make it a bit more affordable.

I am not at all a big fan of government regulation but we can see with the removing of the rate caps why we had them in some places and why we should put them back. Power companies are utilities that have historically always paid dividends to their stockholders. The fact that they were able to pay dividends means that they were making a profit. It may not have been huge profit but they were not losing money. Now the rate caps come off because "competition" will control the costs.

The very first thing we heard when the rate cap removal was announced in this area was that our electric bills would be going up by anywhere from 30% to 70%. That tells me that competition is not exactly alive and well. It says that the power company executives and boards of directors are out there dancing a jig and saying "WooHoo now we can charge as much as we want" we all know that there truly is no competition because, while in many places you can indeed choose the company that generates your electricity it is the same old company that has to transmit it to your home and now that rate caps are gone they can charge whatever they want for the transmission fees because they are the ones that own the lines.

Enjoy your heat and light while you can because the rate cape removal also means that those poor souls who have lost their jobs will get to freeze to death as well because this change also means it is no longer illegal for the power company to turn off the power in mid-winter.

I would never say that you should not pay your bills because if you use something you need to pay for it but killing off those that are falling behind on their bills may not be the best PR campaign.

Winter is still here

Obviously winter is still here since it is only February but we have had so much snow over the last week that it seems as though winter is here forever. We are expecting even more snow tomorrow and no one really seems to be willing to give any kind of hard estimate as to the amount of snowfall expected. Where I live we have had 53 inches of snow in the last week. Today's snow fall will range anywhere from a dusting to 10 inches or more depending on the source you look at.

I understand that in many areas of the world 53 inches is not uncommon but for this area to have that much in such a short period of time is actually pretty rare so no one was really prepared. And of course when it snows you get every idiot around that considers themselves immortal out driving around in their cars.

Tonight is a good example. I was on my way home and I had some one behind me that was giving plenty of lead time most of the way but every time I got to an area where drifting snow had made the road pretty dangerous they immediately came right up and rode my ass the whole way through the area. At one point this person was so damned close to me that I was not able to see his headlights in the mirror. Where are the police when that kind of thing is happening??

Snow, Snow and More Snow

I live in the Northeast of the United States in Pennsylvania. The weather patterns this year have being causing us a few problems. In the last 2 snow storms both in less than a week we have accumulated over 50 inches of snow where I live. My biggest problem here is not with the snow itself (although I could do with a bit less) but with the way people handle it. We get snow of some kind every single year, and year after year everyone seems to forget entirely how to drive in it.

I would like to put forward a few simple rules that may help a lot.

1. If you are afraid or nervous about driving in the snow. DON"T GO OUT IN IT!!!
   
2. Having a big SUV does not in any way make you invincible. That 4-wheel drive will get you going in just about any weather but it doesn't stop you one damned bit faster than any other vehicle on the road and it probably takes longer for you to stop since an SUV tends to be a lot heavier than a regular car.
   
3. In this area of the world we are not in the middle of nowhere. It is not necessary to stock up like you are going on a several month long safari. All you need is enough for a few days. (For those of you that live in temperate climates, if you go into a grocery store a few hours before a snow storm you will see absolute panic and in many cases you will not find a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk to be had.)
   

Please read the above and if you can't abide by them then you really have no business living anywhere that it might even flurry a little bit.

We are expected to get a bit more snow on Monday so I expect the mania to set in on Sunday with folks emptying grocery store shelves with no regard for those others that might like to be able to eat a little as well.

My apologies

I have been remiss in posting to this site over the last several months but the problems have passed and I will be posting regularly again. If you wish my thoughts on any particular situation I would be happy to do so. I am 50 years old and have led a pretty full life and have many experiences from which I can pull advice and give my opinion on things.