Alas, and contrary to what others are saying, being from a working class background is an obstacle. If you would have had a legacy admission to Harvard (which you could have then most hip-ly dropped out of) and had a bunch of frat brothers with VC dads, it would have been a different story and everybody here knows it.
Escaping from the working class is a matter of luck, not hard work, and that's a brute fact of reality. So don't beat yourself up about it, its not your fault.
Whether you want to keep rolling the dice is up to you. Eventually, you would figure it out if you keep trying. And eventually you would flip 4 heads in a row if you keep trying. But it might take decades, literally decades.
Escaping from the working class is a matter of luck, not hard work, and that's a brute fact of reality.
Bullshit.
It may be harder, but it's certainly not about luck. I went to a shitty state school (not even the flagship) in Arkansas. While I was a "frat boy" unless I'm interested in managing a cracker barrel they are of little help.
Instead I worked my ass off to develop meaningful skills. Then I intentionally found work with incredibly smart people who could help me. It may have taken me longer to reach my goals than someone with a Ivy League pedigree I was absolutely able to do it. No luck involved.
I absolutely believe that anyone else can do the same. I see it every single day.
Hopefully, the company will only take additional money if it can be used to make everybody's stake more valuable. So even though you have a smaller percentage of the pie, it will be a bigger pie and you'll get more pie.
The Republican Party needs to kick out these guys who lie about how bad things would be if the U.S. were late on its sovereign debt payments. They are in the same category as the birthers. You can't have crazies in your party. They just cause the sane people to leave, then one day you wake up and the crazies are the majority of your party, and then you are in real trouble.
"debt limit denial" is only a small part of the problem. The other half is the expectation that 1) threatening something that hurts the country(which he admits) is a good thing if you can pass your political program and 2) the other party will simply fold and its members will pass your program
1 simply denies that the opposing party should be able to represent itself in the democratic process but 2 is simply bizarre. No one is going to help their opponents pass their agenda on the basis that if they don't the other party will cause the economy to collapse. If that worked, the Soviet Union would have threatened to start a nuclear war anytime they wanted something and would expect the United States to back down.
The line of reasoning that validates such a tactic is just totally bizarre. Even if you can get some type of leverage over the other party you will never get enough concessions to justify the economic damage. Economic damage occurs in the present while entitlement spending cuts occur in the future. Even if the economic damage is minimal it seems quite a stretch to assume that statutory changes today are the only way to stop a future congress from overspending. This hypothetical future congress would be perfectly capable of cutting spending on its own.
Because the treasury probably doesn't have the statutory authority to withhold payments to appropriated programs. Even if it did, that would mean cutting social security or medicare payments while waiting for an interest payment. So you are certainly hurting people who are depending on those programs(a political nightmare) in the expectation that there will be no debt limit raise. If you think that missing an interest payment will be a catastrophe you paradoxically have no incentive to order these social programs cut to make an interest payment because no one would be so irresponsible as to allow that to happen.
I didn't feel the article really refuted the problem of gerrymandering. The Ted Cruz and Cravaack/Nolan shifts weren't cited as examples of where gerrymandering failed to produce the desired result. Gerrymandering might not be a problem when viewed in the context of a single legislative session but the lasting impact will be felt over many sessions.
But the article does make good points of self selected voting districts resulting from people moving in and out of communities.
Is this pretty much the market speaking and saying that Wal-Mart has a crumby business? Especially factoring in that a lot of people couldn't even work there without government subsidies in the form of food stamps, etc.
I don't get this "subsidy" argument. Bob pays $200 for his rent, and $150 for groceries. He applied for a job at Costco and was turned down, but Walmart offered him a job so he took it.
Without government benefits, he couldn't afford his rent and he couldn't afford his groceries. Without his job at Walmart, he'd be eligible for even more benefits. But somehow it's Walmart that's being subsidized, and not his grocer or his landlord? Not to mention Costco, who's paying him $0, while Walmart pays him something, at least.
> Without his job at Walmart, he'd be eligible for even more benefits
This is false. The biggest government benefit that someone employed at Walmart gets is the EITC, the _Earned_ income tax credit. For a person earning 20k with family of 4, the EITC would be near 5k, or a quarter of the salary. If the person was not working, the government (usually) does not pays anyone 25k for non working. Moreover, without the $5k EITC, it would not be economically feasible for this person to work at Walmart, and Walmart would have to simply pay its worker more to at least find people who can eat enough. The government is absolutely subsidizing Walmart in tune of $3-4k per worker.
Also, the threshold for "find people who can eat enough" is far below $25k (proof: Mexicans eat enough with a GDP/capita of $16k, and Mexico is a fairly rich nation).
if not for government programs, nobody would work at Walmart
they would literally not be able to afford to work there, so they wouldn't even accept the job if offered because it wouldn't pay their expenses since the opportunity cost would be too great
a few retirees or people living with parents would work there, but not enough to fill out their work force
this is because wages for unskilled labor tend to approach the minimum you have to pay for people to live
and since the government is footing the bill to reduce that minimum to very little, Walmart can get away with paying very little
if government decided to take away all benefits for people currently employed, Walmart would have to raise their wages because the workers would quit in droves to sit on welfare instead
Again, if not for government programs Bob could not afford the groceries he buys. Shouldn't you be demanding that every grocery store that accepts food stamps lower their prices because they're being "subsidized"?
And if Walmart is relying on under-paying what its employees are worth, why don't those employees find jobs elsewhere? At worst, it's the government's fault for incentivizing them not to with benefits that drop off faster than their earnings grow.
#1 No. But you wouldn't have made a mistake by staying either. Who you are is what choices you make, and what commitments you keep. Whatever choice you made would have been the right choice for the person you would have become.
#2. Just remember cash paramount. You can go years with little profit, or even no profit. You cannot last one day without cash. Your first consideration is bringing new streams of cash in.
Using your web design/development experience, start a blog relating to reviewing tile quality, articles about color suggestions based on room color or size, etc.
Find out what you can from your dad about best practices in installation and maintenance on tile and other options for floorting, etc. and offer advice to do-it-yourselfers.
Start an email newsletter, slowly, slowly build up an audience, and offer a way for potential customers to contact you for work.
People trust hiring someone who exhibits more authority in their niche.
After building up a blog, you can also look to use websites like ServiceMagic (now HomeAdvisor) to find projects. My dad has used this site many times to hire contractors and has always had a good experience.
Really like the idea!Funny thing is I always advised people to do this when I worked at a web hosting company but somehow never actually got my own father to implement this in his business...time to practice what I once preached.
The constitution is a great piece of paper, but there's only so much a piece of paper will do for you. Every generation must fight for freedom in its own way. Its not like some Don Lepre get rich scheme were you automatically get liberty delivered to your P.O. box every month.
All due respect, but I think the Judge is missing the point here. Its kind of like saying "I can carve a turkey, therefore any high-schooler could do open-heart surgery".
Sure, its easy to check whether an integer is in a range. But THEN what do you do? Return 0? Throw an exception? How does the result of this little function combine with thousands of others to form a coherent and productive API? Of course, as system architects, we can decompose the large, complex problem into smaller problems, and repeat the process until the sub-tasks are trivial. But then for the Judge to look at one of the results of this process and declare the whole thing trivial is really a monumental misunderstanding of what goes into creating a world-class API.
Escaping from the working class is a matter of luck, not hard work, and that's a brute fact of reality. So don't beat yourself up about it, its not your fault.
Whether you want to keep rolling the dice is up to you. Eventually, you would figure it out if you keep trying. And eventually you would flip 4 heads in a row if you keep trying. But it might take decades, literally decades.