We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

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Diogenes
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Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by Diogenes »

Tipping Point Reached : More Welfare Recipients Than Workers In The US

There were 108,592,000 people in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2011 who were recipients of one or more means-tested government benefit programs, the Census Bureau said in data released this week. Meanwhile, according to the Census Bureau, there were 101,716,000 people who worked full-time year round in 2011. That included both private-sector and government workers.

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013 ... in-the-us/
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

Stubby
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Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by Stubby »

Yes you are doomed.
we are at 20% and growing
we are coming for you.
The internet will be your downfall.
:twisted: :twisted: :twisted: :twisted:
Buahahahahaaaaaah
Everything is bullshit unless proven otherwise. -A.C. Beddoe

Diogenes
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Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 3:33 pm

Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by Diogenes »

Pensions Will Go Away In The Apocalypse

Back in the 80’s, we should have endured a prolonged period of shortage and misery, extending out from Carter’s years well into Reagan’s. That period of misery would have reset the balance. It would have hardened amygdalae. It would have beaten into people an irritation with the idea of welfare, government waste, and entitlement. It would have imbued the very concept of resources with value, to each individual. Once that was done, government would have run more efficiently, and that would have pushed off any threat to economic stability.

http://www.anonymousconservative.com/bl ... pocalypse/
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

williatw
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Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by williatw »

Diogenes wrote:Pensions Will Go Away In The Apocalypse


From a link in your posted link:

Image

Look like the federal government will have to foot the bill...more deficit spending, more national debt. SS (and especially Medicare) are even bigger problems. Hoping Trump wins and he does what he says and brings back those manufacturing jobs; we could use the high wage tax payers.

williatw
Posts: 1912
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Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by williatw »

And its not just factory jobs:



ZUCKED UP: Why Silicon Valley Is Scared to Death of Trump Part 1



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California’s high-tech business wizards like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are in full freak-out mode over Donald Trump, and the key to understanding why lies in the H-1B visa program. As a recent L.A. Times story titled “Donald Trump has done the unthinkable: Unite Silicon Valley” reports:

Ambitious start-up CEOs who swore off talking politics for fear of offending investors are enlisting in campaigns to discredit Trump. Longtime valley Republican stalwarts who have voted for every GOP nominee for decades say they can’t do it this year. The libertarian-minded innovators who just want to get government out of their way have less faith in Trump than they do in even Hillary Clinton, the Democrat with big plans to grow the bureaucracy.

“At least Clinton is not going to go in and burn the place down,” said Reed Galen, a GOP consultant who advises tech companies. “But Trump comes in, and God knows what happens.”

What’s wrong with Silicon Valley? Why the fear of the pro-business Donald Trump, and why is the California GOP establishment joining in the scrum?

Just follow the money.

For years, President Obama and the comprehensive immigration reform crowd has distracted the American public masterfully, getting people to focus on low-wage workers and ignore the more perilous drag on our economy; the devastating impact of immigration policy on the middle and upper-middle class due to guest worker programs that have led to stagnant wages and massive American job losses.

Both Democrat and Republican advocates of comprehensive immigration reform were happy to let both citizens and pundits focus on the problems at our southern border. When President Obama announced his executive action on immigration, he focused on the “bedmakers and fruit pickers” that he claimed were doing jobs Americans didn’t want to do.

Obama’s messaging wizards kept the frame of the debate on low skill, low wage workers. Abracadabra: it worked. Both liberals and conservatives were debating immigration after his address, and opinions flew on the issue of the millions of mostly Mexican and Central American immigrants who would now be able to work legally under Obama’s executive action and how these low-wage workers would impact the economy.

There’s no doubt that the issue of border security and low-skilled workers is important, but they were being used as a focal point of the immigration debate for a self-serving reason.

If Americans started focusing on the impact of guest worker programs like H-1B, the results would be bad for both Democrats and Republicans, costing them both the trust of voters and millions in lobbying money.

Then along came Donald Trump, backed by immigration experts like Sen. Jeff Sessions. Suddenly, the H1-B issue became a focus. The public interest began lighting up the phones at SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily morning radio show, and the more the public learned, the angrier they became.

There’s a lot to be angry about. The H-1B program has caused massive layoffs of American workers and over a decade of wage stagnation. More infuriating is that the victims of H-1B are Americans who played by the rules, got an education in a growing field, and thought they’d have a career future.


There have been bipartisan reasons to keep the public in the dark about H-1B and keep them focused on low-wage workers.

If you want to see what’s really going on with immigration policy, look at the cash.

Take a look at a list of the top lobbyists on the issue of immigration and it’s a high-tech wonderland. Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, Qualcomm, Motorola, Google, and, of course, Facebook are all the household names that are spending millions of dollars to influence politicians on immigration.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/05/2 ... mp-part-1/

Diogenes
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Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by Diogenes »

There have been bipartisan reasons to keep the public in the dark about H-1B and keep them focused on low-wage workers.

This has been an issue on the edge of my Radar, but I know quite a few people who claim to have been affected by low cost foreign workers taking their jobs.


Back in the 1980s and 1990s, "Free Trade" was sold as beneficial to the nation. There were arguments in favor of it and opposed to it. Patrick Buchanan (a persona non grata in many circles) made the most cognizant argument against it that I have heard.


He said (and I paraphrase) Free Trade with countries which do not have our wage, pollution or safety standards, is unfair to American companies that have to live under these requirements.


That seems reasonable to me. I have been seeing "free trade" increase the power and influence of what has become international corporations, and making them less accountable to what ought to be their civic responsibilities. Companies have ceased being "American" and ceased to show any concern regarding the well being of their own Nation. They hide from accountability by use of foreign lands and foreign laws, and they have become a power unto themselves.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

williatw
Posts: 1912
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Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by williatw »

Diogenes wrote:There have been bipartisan reasons to keep the public in the dark about H-1B and keep them focused on low-wage workers. This has been an issue on the edge of my Radar, but I know quite a few people who claim to have been affected by low cost foreign workers taking their jobs.



Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder

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Technology workers from Abbott Laboratories gathered in April at a North Chicago bar after the company laid off about 150 of them. Credit Joshua Lott for The New York Times


LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. — American corporations are under new scrutiny from federal lawmakers after well-publicized episodes in which the companies laid off American workers and gave the jobs to foreigners on temporary visas.

But while corporate executives have been outspoken in defending their labor practices before Congress and the public, the American workers who lost jobs to global outsourcing companies have been largely silent.

Until recently. Now some of the workers who were displaced are starting to speak out, despite severance agreements prohibiting them from criticizing their former employers.

Marco Peña was among about 150 technology workers who were laid off in April by Abbott Laboratories, a global health care conglomerate with headquarters here. They handed in their badges and computer passwords, and turned over their work to a company based in India. But Mr. Peña, who had worked at Abbott for 12 years, said he had decided not to sign the agreement that was given to all departing employees, which included a nondisparagement clause.

Mr. Peña said his choice cost him at least $10,000 in severance pay. But on an April evening after he walked out of Abbott’s tree-lined campus here for the last time, he spent a few hours in a local bar at a gathering organized by technology worker advocates, speaking his mind about a job he had loved and lost.

“I just didn’t feel right about signing,” Mr. Peña said. “The clauses were pretty blanket. I felt like they were eroding my rights.”

Leading members of Congress from both major parties have questioned the nondisparagement agreements, which are commonly used by corporations but can prohibit ousted workers from raising complaints about what they see as a misuse of temporary visas. Lawmakers, including Richard Durbin of Illinois, the second-highest-ranking Senate Democrat, and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, have proposed revisions to visa laws to include measures allowing former employees to contest their layoffs.
have heard from workers who are fearful of retaliation,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. “They are told they can say whatever they want, except they can’t say anything negative about being fired.”

Lawyers said the paragraph Mr. Peña and other workers object to in their separation agreements is routine in final contracts with employees who are paid severance as they leave, whether they were laid off or resigned voluntarily.

“It’s a very, very common practice,” said Sheena R. Hamilton, an employment lawyer at Dowd Bennett in St. Louis who represents companies in workplace cases. “I’ve never recommended a settlement that didn’t have a clause like that.”
According to federal rules, temporary visas known as H-1Bs are for foreigners with “a body of specialized knowledge” not readily available in the labor market. The visas should be granted only when they will not undercut the wages or “adversely affect the working conditions” of Americans.

But in the past five years, through loopholes in the rules, tens of thousands of American workers have been replaced by foreigners on H-1B and other temporary visas, according to Prof. Hal Salzman, a labor force expert at Rutgers University.
In March, two Americans who had been laid off in 2014 by a New England power company, Eversource Energy, spoke at a news conference in Hartford even though they had signed nondisparagement agreements. Craig Diangelo, 63, and Judy Konopka, 56, said most of the 220 people facing dismissal had been required as part of their severance to train Indian immigrants with H-1B and other visas.

In a protest, departing employees posted American flags outside their cubicles. As they left, they took the flags down. Mr. Diangelo took a photograph of the flags in his final days at the utility. At the time, he and Ms. Konopka spoke with reporters, including from The New York Times, but they did not want to be quoted, even without their names.

Notice the NYT article doesn't see fit to even mention how Trump is showcasing this issue; yes they fear and hate Trump greatly.



http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/us/la ... .html?_r=0

Tom Ligon
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Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by Tom Ligon »

Is this the same Trump who has hired illegal aliens on his construction projects, buys endorsements from Trump University students he's scammed, and removes the credentials of newspapers who have published exposes of his real estate swindles? The one who proves you can fool some of the people all of the time?

I can't, in good conscience, vote for either of these crooks.

Which is why we are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say! Throw them all out and start over.

williatw
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Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by williatw »

Tom Ligon wrote:Is this the same Trump who has hired illegal aliens on his construction projects, buys endorsements from Trump University students he's scammed, and removes the credentials of newspapers who have published exposes of his real estate swindles? The one who proves you can fool some of the people all of the time? I can't, in good conscience, vote for either of these crooks.

Well who better to fix it than a businessman who by his own admission made full use of the corrupted system? He would know the ends and outs of it well; far better than most, just like when Roosevelt put Joe Kennedy Senior in charge of fixing the stock market. By all accounts he did a good job of reforming it.


Kennedy's first major involvement in a national political campaign was his support in 1932 for Franklin D. Roosevelt's bid for the Presidency. He donated, loaned, and raised a substantial amount of money for the campaign. Roosevelt rewarded him with an appointment as the inaugural Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Kennedy had hoped for a Cabinet post, such as Secretary of the Treasury. After Franklin Roosevelt called Joe to Washington, D.C. to clean up the securities industry, somebody asked FDR why he had tapped such a crook. "Takes one to catch one," replied Roosevelt.[34]
Kennedy's reforming work as SEC Chairman was widely praised on all sides, as investors realized the SEC was protecting their interests. His knowledge of the financial markets equipped him to identify areas requiring the attention of regulators. One of the crucial reforms was the requirement for companies to regularly file financial statements with the SEC, which broke what some saw as an information monopoly maintained by the Morgan banking family. He left the SEC in 1935 to take over the Maritime Commission, which built on his wartime experience in running a major shipyard.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P. ... .931935.29

Diogenes
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Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by Diogenes »

[quote="Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire" by Samuel Dill"]
“In this chapter we shall try to discover the more deep-seated causes which, far more than the violent intrusion of the German invaders, produced the collapse of society which is known as the fall of the Empire of the West. A careful study of the [Theodosian] Code will correct many a popular and antiquated misconception of that great event. It will reveal the fact that, long before the invasions of the reign of Honorius, the fabric of Roman society and administration was honeycombed by moral and economic vices, which made the belief in the eternity of Rome a vain delusion. The municipal system, once the great glory of Roman organising power, had in the fourth century fallen almost into ruin. The governing class of the municipalities, called curiales, on whom the burdens of the Empire had been accumulated, were diminishing in number, and in the ability to bear an ever-increasing load of obligations. At the same time, the upper class were increasing in wealth and power, partly from natural economic causes, partly from a determined effort to evade their proper share of the imperial imposts, and to absorb and reduce to dependence their unfortunate neighbours. In this selfish policy they were aided by the tyranny and venality of the officials of the treasury, whose exactions, chicanery, and corrupt favouritism seem to have become more shameless and cruel in proportion to the weakness of their victims and the difficulties of the times. And while the aristocratic class were becoming more selfish, and the civil service more oppressive and corrupt, the central government was growing feebler. It saw the evils which were imperilling the stability of society, and making provincial administration a synonym for organised brigandage. Its enactments abound with full and accurate descriptions of these disorders, and fierce threats of punishment against the criminals. But the endless repetition of commands, which were constantly being disobeyed, was the surest sign of impotence.The decay of the middle class, the aggrandisement of the aristocracy, and the defiant tyranny and venality of the tax-gatherer—these are the ominous facts to which almost every page of the later Code bears witness.” [/quote]
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

paperburn1
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Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by paperburn1 »

I have a slightly different take but the outcome will be the same. With the G 20 conference and all of the other economic conferences that are going on this seems to be a predecessor to a one world economy. Unfortunately because there is only so much gross global domestic product the only way to achieve this goal will be to lower the wages of the more wealthy countries to raise the wages of the poorer countries. This is going to have direct economic effects on 95% of the population. This coupled with the automation of jobs and workforce has been resulting in a diversion of income versus productivity which has been stable and matching all the way up until the 1970s. At this point the introduction of gross automation has caused a diversions between productivity and wages. The final outcome will be the ultrarich will become more rich the ultra-poor will become even more poor and the rest of us in the middle will find ourselves living at a lower standard of living than what we have become accustomed. Those in United States and other developed countries will find himself/herself most hardest hit. This is because our standard of living is extremely high compared to the rest of the world.

http://www.eoionline.org/blog/x-marks-t ... -dig-here/

Image
I am not a nuclear physicist, but play one on the internet.

paperburn1
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Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by paperburn1 »

I read this and just scared the hell out of myself.
Mice and men
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/th ... _medium=am
I am not a nuclear physicist, but play one on the internet.

choff
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Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by choff »

paperburn1 wrote:I read this and just scared the hell out of myself.
Mice and men
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/th ... _medium=am
Are we not men.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR3KTg3jhFk
CHoff

Diogenes
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Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by Diogenes »

paperburn1 wrote:I read this and just scared the hell out of myself.
Mice and men
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/th ... _medium=am


I've long known about this. I see parallels between overcrowded Urban mice society and Urban Overcrowded human society.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

MSimon
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Re: We are Doomed! DOOOOOMMED I say!

Post by MSimon »

Well H1Bs are not the only thing that worries pharmaceutical companies.
Pharma Company Funding Anti-Pot Fight Worried About Losing Business, Filings Show

Pharmaceutical executives who recently made a major donation to an anti-marijuana legalization campaign claimed they were doing so out of concern for the safety of children — but their investor filings reveal that pot poses a direct threat to their plans to cash in on a synthetic cannabis product they have developed.

On August 31, Insys Therapeutics Inc. donated $500,000 to Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, becoming the single largest donor to the group leading the charge to defeat a ballot measure in Arizona to legalize marijuana.

The drug company, which currently markets a fast-acting version of the deadly painkiller fentanyl, assured local news reporters that they had the public interest in mind when making the hefty donation. A spokesperson told the Arizona Republic that Insys opposes the legalization measure, Prop. 205, “because it fails to protect the safety of Arizona’s citizens, and particularly its children.”

A Washington Post story on Friday noted the potential self-interest involved in Insys’s donation.

Investor filings examined by The Intercept confirm the obvious.

Insys is currently developing a product called the Dronabinol Oral Solution, a drug that uses a synthetic version of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to alleviate chemotherapy-caused nausea and vomiting. In an early filing related to the dronabinol drug, assessing market concerns and competition, Insys filed a disclosure statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission stating plainly that legal marijuana is a direct threat to their product line:

https://theintercept.com/2016/09/12/pha ... marijuana/
There is more Opioid use down in states with medical marijuana

And they have something else to worry about in terms of effectiveness. Medical marijuana and 'the entourage effect' - Dr. Sanjay Gupta - Their drug concoction may not work as well as whole plant cannabis.

Serves them right for backing Obamacare.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

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