Political Discussion

RenegadeMonster said:
When you are talking about young adults or college age people. 15k is nothing. Many have that many.

For older people like you and me. 15 is a mind blowing number. For teenagers these days it's easy peasy to accomplish.
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Wow, 15k seems like a lot of people but I can’t say that I really know any teenagers myself. A bit out of my element. If you average person has 15,000 and you can convince 10% of them to give you $3 a month that’s certainly better than a summer job.
 
Twentytwo said:
Man has empathy I’ll say that.
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Yep, I'd agree. And yet this pic is all over Twitter with - "This is what weakness looks like"
I am finally done with Twitter I think. The fun things and sports info posts are too few and far between compared to all the nasty people I see.
Even Instagram, my last bastion of social media fun, is getting that way too. Do people need to tell me how they feel about this, this and that on EVERY format? Can't you post a pic of your vacation or puppy and walk away?
 
I was reading through a discussion about why restaurants are having so much trouble finding help right now. And something caught my eye.

There are a lot of people who are against increases in minimum wages that say if they want to make more money they should learn some better skills. The thing is, many of restaurant workers actually had college degrees. A good portion of restaurant and foodservice workers are actually young adults early in their careers with college degrees who are unable to find work at higher paying jobs because the jobs simply aren't available / being created by our economy in the numbers need to hire everyone with the proper skills.

Then Covid-19 hit and we saw a record number of Boomers retire opening up a whole lot of positions that require college degrees and pay more. This is one of the reasons restaurants are having trouble finding help right now. Their pool of potential job applicants has shrunk because many of them have been able to find jobs to put their skills to use and make more money.

Simply put, restaurant / food service jobs don't pay enough to attract workers. If the workers have skills and jobs are available where they can make more money of course the workers are going to choose the jobs where they can make more money.

A former restaurant manager chimed into the discussion and said that restaurants can afford to pay their staff a lot more without having to raise prices or go out of business. They have huge profit margins. The issue is they are greedy and don't want to decrease their profit margins. They are always looking for ways to grow their profit margins. Most restaurant where business is good could afford to pay staff $20 an hour + tips and still turn a higher profit margin than they did in the 70s and 80s. But over the last 40 years the minimum wage for restaurant workers has barely raised compared to menu prices and profits. But asking corporations or owners to to cut back the profit margin they are banking on is sacrilegious. For most it's out of the question and never going to happen. The'll blame that 50¢ increase in minimum wage for inflation and pass on the buck to the consumer.

In no way is it true that raising minimum wage will put restaurants out of business unless the business itself is already on the brink of going out of business. In which case the issue isn't wage increases. It's that either the business is not being run properly or in it's current format can't attract business.
 
ranbalam said:
Yep, I'd agree. And yet this pic is all over Twitter with - "This is what weakness looks like"
I am finally done with Twitter I think. The fun things and sports info posts are too few and far between compared to all the nasty people I see.
Even Instagram, my last bastion of social media fun, is getting that way too. Do people need to tell me how they feel about this, this and that on EVERY format? Can't you post a pic of your vacation or puppy and walk away?
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Yeah, I am a fan of empathy. It’s takes much more strength to show genuine caring than to act like a bully.
 
TenderLovingKiller® said:
Yeah, I am a fan of empathy. It’s takes much more strength to show genuine caring than to act like a bully.
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Has the pullout been a complete shitshow? Yep. Does Biden wish he would probably done things a little differently? Yes. Would this be an unbelievable dangerous mission regardless who was President with possible U.S. Casualties. Yep. Should have we have been there in the first place? Probably not. I applaud the fact that Biden is trying to get us out of there. We cannot simply stay in every place that has bad actors. We have been in two wars in the last 20 years and accomplished very little and in some cases made it much worse. America has got to get out the business of Nation building, just not very good at it. I feel horribly for the troops that lost their lives yesterday.
 
I'm really not as sure on the restaurant thing.

My gut says to me that in most areas there's just too many eateries and cost of living otherwise is too high and that explains a lot of the issues we're seeing. I agree with RM that I think the minimum wage thing in many areas is BS. There are McDonald's up here now offering 15+ an hour and I believe most wait staff in trafficked restaurants will not be affected by a min wage increase since a lot of people are incentivized to keep the tipping structure. However, I don't know if that's the issue right now, we have restaurants offering above local min wage consistently, and even good workplaces are having trouble finding PT staff. I think it's just a matter that fewer people are willing to do the kind of work restaurants have historically asked for.

I also don't think this is an irrational reaction. I don't think it's just "it pays too little", I think it's also "this is a thankless job without advancement I want to do that destroys my ability to enjoy weekends/nights". This isn't unique to food service* but is emblematic of it. Like, honestly, unless you are uniquely suited to being a great bartender/waiter and can make a LOT in tips, there's no real reason to go work at a food service venue over even retail at this point, because at least in retail you could hypothetically move around, have a more flexible schedule, etc. Once you add in the anecdotal reports of customers being worse/ruder to the people who are left, it just keeps adding up.

Like, I'm sure if a restaurant around here said "$20 an hour for servers and cooks" they'd get people, but I don't think people are staying away purely due to pay. I also don't think this is immediately fixable without some real pain and places shutting down due to it. There was a local article here about a Greek pizza place that was a sympathy piece over not having employees and needing to reduce hours, and sadly most of what I thought was "well, that's one less pizza place when we have 60 others in a 10 mile radius...". It's saturation, and at some point the number of people willing to make pizzas in a sweltering kitchen on their nights and weekends dries up.

Edit: So for funsies, I took a look at MIT's living wage calculator. They say Manchester, NH, where I live is viable on 30k pre-tax, which if $576.00 per week. At 40 a week, that's still $14.40 or so an hour, ignoring that a lot of restaurants won't be giving 40 a week by design or necessity. Great, so that's below most independent eateries already. But they assume that housing is 9.6k per year ($800) and I think finding even a studio apartment for that now is near impossible. Transportation at 4k or so is low unless you don't have a car payment (in Manchester you largely need a car especially if you work in the restaurant industry), etc. Medical is listed at 3k, but most people working these jobs aren't insured through the job, so that's risky as hell. I don't think a $15 min wage moves that needle personally up here. If I were a bread-winner, I'm not stepping foot in an uninsured food service job unless I HAVE to, and even then $10-$15 an hour would be real hard to justify as there's a non-zero chance I could make my own hustle for a bit with that time.
 
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AnthonyI said:
Joe isn't perfect, but I believe him when he shows empathy................it's better than this ass hat. Keep in mind, he's speaking to Boy Scouts.
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Twentytwo said:
Has the pullout been a complete shitshow? Yep. Does Biden wish he would probably done things a little differently? Yes. Would this be an unbelievable dangerous mission regardless who was President with possible U.S. Casualties. Yep. Should have we have been there in the first place? Probably not. I applaud the fact that Biden is trying to get us out of there. We cannot simply stay in every place that has bad actors. We have been in two wars in the last 20 years and accomplished very little and in some cases made it much worse. America has got to get out the business of Nation building, just not very good at it. I feel horribly for the troops that lost their lives yesterday.
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The media is allowing the Right to paint Biden as a weak leader who is responsible for everything bad that is happening in Afghanistan right now. These are the same people who got us into this conflict to begin with.

Also, there is no such thing as an orderly collapse of a government. Takeovers are bloody and chaotic. I hope everyone that wants out can get out but the transition was never going to be seamless.
 
TenderLovingKiller® said:
Also, there is no such thing as an orderly collapse of a government. Takeovers are bloody and chaotic.
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Exactly, not only is there plenty of blame to go around, but I think I remember Psaki throwing just this notion back in Doocy's face a few days ago when he tossed out another "got ya" attempt at a question, lol.
 
The Fed today announced plans to start winding down covid stimulus.

Balancing the threat of Covid with the ongoing economic recovery, Powell suggested the Fed, which has been buying $120 billion worth of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities every month since the height of the pandemic to support the economy, will start pumping the brakes on those asset purchases before the end of the year.
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0% interests rates are likely to end by the end of the year as well.
 
AnthonyI said:
Exactly, not only is there plenty of blame to go around, but I think I remember Psaki throwing just this notion back in Doocy's face a few days ago when he tossed out another "got ya" attempt at a question, lol.
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Hell least the Biden Administration does press briefings every day. How often did the Trump administration do them? And when they did do them, it was usually an hours worth of lying.
 
AnthonyI said:
Exactly, not only is there plenty of blame to go around, but I think I remember Psaki throwing just this notion back in Doocy's face a few days ago when he tossed out another "got ya" attempt at a question, lol.
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That fuckin’ guy, he’s goddamn Steve Doocey’s from Fox & Friends son. Talk about nepotism at its worst. He’s not even good at his “gotcha” questioning Psaki smokes him every time. His questions are just regurgitations of Fox New chyrons.
 
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TenderLovingKiller® said:
That fuckin’ guy, he’s goddamn Steve Doocey’s from Fox & Friends son. Talk about nepotism at its worse. He’s not even good at his “gotcha” questioning Psaki smokes him every time. His questions are just regurgitations of Fox New chyrons.
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Oh I know who he is, I'm pretty sure everyone knows who he is judging by the eye-rolling that's ever present in the reporters around him, lol. I do wish Psaki would stick around though, I can't imagine a replacement that can even come close to the way she presents herself.
 
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