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Original post by markm I'm glad Halifax's new game-industrialist's profile still indicates he is, after all, just an American, not a Haligonian. Maybe we'll get to see whether Halifax really can have a positive effect upon people. :)

Clearly I am a horrible person. I'll make sure the next time I put food in the buckets for the food pantry I put a note on it telling them to find me and slap me in the face for being so horrible.

If only the salvation army knew before hand they would have pushed me over instead of giving me a tootsie roll for the money I put in their collection.

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Original post by LessBread Where does the notion that just getting by isn't good enough come from?

Mostly from here. Once again, it is obviously enough for the vast majority of people and I have no problem with that. I do have a problem with people complaining about their lot in life and not taking any action to correct it.

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What about the wreckage of their lives? Can the damage be contained?

I'm not recommending getting rid of all of societies safety nets. I'm just concerned that the more expansive they are, the more dishonest people will be able to leech off the system. I have benefited from some of these safety nets and I am glad they are there for others.

For instance, during my wife's pregnancy I went from making $24,000 / year to $36,000 / year and we qualified for Medicaid. The majority of the Dr. visits and the actual birth cost us very little out of pocket. My son qualified for well child checkups for a year. That would have been a huge burden on us had we not received it.

What I do have a problem with are things like the unemployment extension. The fact that you can collect unemployment for nearly two years is ridiculous and ripe for abuse. Would there be a problem with requiring community service or volunteering on some approved projects in order to qualify for benefits? Is 10 to 20 hours of community service / volunteer work too much to ask for? How about requiring them to be in some sort of vocational training program if they want to continue receiving unemployment? How many people would be on unemployment to the full 99 weeks if they had to work for it?

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Original post by tstrimp Quote: What about the wreckage of their lives? Can the damage be contained? I'm not recommending getting rid of all of societies safety nets. I'm just concerned that the more expansive they are, the more dishonest people will be able to leech off the system. I have benefited from some of these safety nets and I am glad they are there for others. For instance, during my wife's pregnancy I went from making $24,000 / year to $36,000 / year and we qualified for Medicaid. The majority of the Dr. visits and the actual birth cost us very little out of pocket. My son qualified for well child checkups for a year. That would have been a huge burden on us had we not received it. What I do have a problem with are things like the unemployment extension. The fact that you can collect unemployment for nearly two years is ridiculous and ripe for abuse. Would there be a problem with requiring community service or volunteering on some approved projects in order to qualify for benefits? Is 10 to 20 hours of community service / volunteer work too much to ask for? How about requiring them to be in some sort of vocational training program if they want to continue receiving unemployment? How many people would be on unemployment to the full 99 weeks if they had to work for it?

I have no problem with people performing public works to get something like unemployment insurance. But that's essentially what the stimulus package was. Regardless of how you feel about that measure or others, these are expensive investments, even when they yield positive social results. Who's going to pay for it in the meantime?

Things like vocational training are great, but extremely hard to target effectively. If you want to pursue a path like this, it's only worthwhile when people develop skills that will be relevant to the labor market. What if the courses the government (or a private company) offers turn out to not be in demand? What do you do with someone who flunks the course? And what about the fact that time people spend engaged in volunteer work/vocational training is time that they can't spend looking for work?

I understand frustration with leeches, I really do. But they're always going to be there, regardless of the system put in place. You can minimize both the number of leeches while at the same time minimizing the number of people who truly need help that receive it, but is that better for society than helping more who need it and also funding somewhat more leeches?

And it's hard to draw bright line determining who's a leech and who isn't. In your example, you took an opportunity to use a Medicaid program despite the fact that you were working, and above the poverty line. You could almost certainly have purchased insurance on your own (expensive though it would be), chosen more suitable insurance from your employer, or used your vaunted free-market labor elasticity to move to another job that offered better pay and/or benefits. I don't consider people in your situation to be leeches at all, although some certainly would. Where do you think a good place to draw the line between rightful recipient and mooch would be?

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Original post by tstrimp I don't think it is anything like that at all. I grew up in a poor family in a poor town. I worked my way out of it and so did my parents. My father did it by becoming a long haul truck driver and being gone for weeks at a time. He had an exemplary driving record and was offered a position to teach at the trucking school for the company he worked for. My mom was mostly a low income office drone but she always did above and beyond what the job required. Eventually that paid off when her work was noticed by the owner of the company and she was promoted to manage the office she worked at.

Your assumption is others haven't tried.


Let me rephrase the issue at hand. You made it. You are a success.

Do you care about anyone but yourself and immediate family? And with that I don't mean writing a cheque to Red Cross or ticking off the charity field on tax return form.

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I've hired four programmers in the last six months (and fired two) and it is amazing how many terrible developers are out there.

Yes, there are.

Did you do something to change that? Did you offer to train them? To help them understand? To teach them better techniques? Or were you just maximizing the cost revenue field in quarterly report spreadsheet?

Did you start in-company academy that exposes juniors to these technologies? Have you tried to teach them different techniques, from patterns to ADTs and beyond? Have you established university-related courses that brings corporate insight to students? Do you offer internships? Do you sponsor initiatives? Do you provide laboratories/hardware for people who might need them or would want to explore them?

Have you tried to even identify who truly has no affinity and who might be merely inexperienced or not have been given the opportunity? Or considered that surprisingly many people just need to be given an honest chance.

But there is a shadow side. It's also absurdly easy to just keep exploiting same people for bigger profit margins.



What now? When will you transcend the "career" and becomes something more? Why are you content at just getting by? Why do you lack the motivation and ambition?

People have a certain reach. Maybe you have just reached yours. But there is always more. And many will settle for less. That does not make others superior or inferior. But one thing is certain - given honest opportunity, people will always surprise you at how far they can go. Most just never get it. And to improve society, one must first solve this problem.

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Original post by tstrimp What I do have a problem with are things like the unemployment extension. The fact that you can collect unemployment for nearly two years is ridiculous and ripe for abuse. Would there be a problem with requiring community service or volunteering on some approved projects in order to qualify for benefits? Is 10 to 20 hours of community service / volunteer work too much to ask for? How about requiring them to be in some sort of vocational training program if they want to continue receiving unemployment? How many people would be on unemployment to the full 99 weeks if they had to work for it?

Yeah, see, this I do agree with; when I was unemployed in the UK for a while a few years ago now, I ended up doing something kinda like this.

The details are fuzzy in my head as it has been over 5 years, but at the time I seem to recall that you could claim for 6 months at which point you went on a week long course to learn "computer skills" and then had to do some other training "thing" to keep getting cash. I think community work was an option as well, however I got out before that became an issue.

My only issue with such things is they tend to be 'one size fits all' setups.

For example, the course for 'computer skills' was nothing but a waste of time and money for me to be on as I had skills far beyond what they were teaching and my time would have been better served at home polishing my own skills further in order to get myself a job (something the job Centres over here couldn't help me with as they didn't cover much in the way of technology/programming based work).

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Original post by phantom The details are fuzzy in my head as it has been over 5 years, but at the time I seem to recall that you could claim for 6 months at which point you went on a week long course to learn "computer skills" and then had to do some other training "thing" to keep getting cash. I think community work was an option as well, however I got out before that became an issue.

While this is honest attempt, it doesn't solve the problem. This type of deals, as you experienced yourself, are aimed as providing corporate world with minimally trained cheap labor. They teach minimal manual skills - and programming is also one of them.


Why not develop people? How about supporting art? Many people are talented artists but don't even know it. What about self-expression?

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For example, the course for 'computer skills' was nothing but a waste of time and money for me to be on as I had skills far beyond what they were teaching and my time would have been better served at home polishing my own skills further in order to get myself a job

Computer skills are generic, one just needs to be given an opportunity. Given a computer, shown the way - the motivated ones will do the same as you, they always have - computer science and IT are barely 10-15 year old courses.

But in other fields barriers to entry are not that low. The reason others don't get a chance is because those fields do not have immediate monetization.

But that too is changing, albeit in a non-ideal way. Look at photography - anyone today is given the chance to have their photo featured in National Geographic. Most people just don't know it. Writers are being given the opportunity to write editorials for respected magazines and publications. A woman created multi-billion best-selling franchise, while her gender alone would have prevented her from being published not so long ago.

And that is what is missing. There is still too much emphasis on immediate employability for almost exclusively minimum wage jobs for sole purpose of remaining competitive with off-shore labor with no true career path. So people wander from one domain to another, permanently remaining unskilled labor. Biggest employer in the world for past several years: Temp agencies.

Saying people aren't fitting into this precise model that government offers isn't a solution. The support they offer is intended to solve precisely that problem, to allow people to improve themselves. But in most cases the form of this support is inappropriate.

Financial indiscipline - is anyone offering to actually help solve it? Yelling at people for wasting money is counter-productive. Why don't they aspire to do more? Important question - why? Perhaps they had but failed one too many times. Perhaps they don't even know there is something more? Perhaps they've never been beyond their block and don't know there is a world out there. Or perhaps they're simply doing one tiny thing wrong every time and everyone is too polite or opportunistic to show them how to change it.

None of these are silly issues and people aren't stupid be definition. Most really don't know what their options are. They never had the chance to learn there is more or at least something different. And this applies to all, from person living in a trailer and right up to Old Money Hedge Fund CEO.

Breadth of mind is not correlated to social status, although money makes it easier to improve on it.

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Original post by Khaiy And what about the fact that time people spend engaged in volunteer work/vocational training is time that they can't spend looking for work?

You honestly think the people who have spent a year or more on unemployment are spending a considerable amount of time and effort in finding a job?

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You could almost certainly have purchased insurance on your own (expensive though it would be), chosen more suitable insurance from your employer, or used your vaunted free-market labor elasticity to move to another job that offered better pay and/or benefits.

I did change jobs during the pregnancy, and got insurance. However a 3rd trimester pregnancy is definitely a pre-existing condition.

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Original post by phantom For example, the course for 'computer skills' was nothing but a waste of time and money for me to be on as I had skills far beyond what they were teaching and my time would have been better served at home polishing my own skills further in order to get myself a job (something the job Centres over here couldn't help me with as they didn't cover much in the way of technology/programming based work).

Since you had the skills, would you really be unemployed for 6 months?

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Original post by Antheus Your assumption is others haven't tried.

I don't assume that at all. Of course it takes persistence, most people don't succeed on their first try. The most difficult part I had in getting a programming job was getting an interview. I had to make it past the resume screeners which almost immediately rules out any large company. I applied to smaller companies and spent time working on my resume and tailored cover letters to specific companies to encourage the screener to read them. Eventually I got an interview at a small ISP looking for a PHP and an ASP developer. I was able to convince them during the interview that I knew how to program through problem solving and writing code.

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Did you do something to change that? Did you offer to train them? To help them understand? To teach them better techniques? Or were you just maximizing the cost revenue field in quarterly report spreadsheet?

Yes and no. We have two junior programmers who are paired with senior programmers as mentors. These junior programmers were the few who actually showed a passion for software development and explored it on their own, not just as part of their job. I would never hire someone who can't be bothered to do any learning on their own.

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What now? When will you transcend the "career" and becomes something more? Why are you content at just getting by? Why do you lack the motivation and ambition?

I don't. I plan on running my own software development company within five years. I'm not done with this company because there is still a lot of room for financial and personal growth. I run the entire IT department and effectively control the technological direction of the company. In my off time I still spend a considerable amount of time staying up to date on the latest and greatest from Microsoft and I'm learning more about time and people management.

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Original post by tstrimp Since you had the skills, would you really be unemployed for 6 months?

Yes. There are millions of skilled people who are unemployed simply because there isn't enough work to do.

And I mean skilled. There are also tens of millions of unemployed less skilled people. And at least a billion of minimally qualified manual labor.

The reason these people don't get the jobs is because HR and recruitment agencies filter on buzzwords, not qualifications. The other reason is that their network of contacts might no longer be sufficient. This is typically made worse when people relocate a lot since it removes most of their existing network simply due to geographic proximity.

Current HR rules also forbid employing unemployed people. If you are unemployed or self employed, your resume will be filtered out. Precisely for this reason - if you were competent, you would not be unemployed. In other words - once you lose your job (company is sold and you fired after consolidation) you are unemployable. Not because it makes sense, but because that is a policy. Violating it means the HR person would get fired. Even if you get a recommendation or are brought in through back door - legal department will not allow HR to print out a contract. It's a policy.

And complete mobility matters only for certain types of IT-related positions and high-level management. Other jobs do not involve relocation - that is a privilege. Almost everyone else is limited to their geographic location.

And there are tens of millions of people who are underemployed. Underemployment is worse than unemployment, since it eliminates the jobs for less-qualified candidates. And people in such positions will leave at first opportunity, meaning company will not invest into their training and they will be treated as temps, thereby eliminating their skill advantage by not engaging them into long-term or high-impact positions nor consider them for promotions or other forms of career development.