Fuck you, pathetic assholes.

I can’t even find a trigger word that would set off the most ham-fisted filter (that’s not on Hathor, anyway). I guess someone’s feeling awfully threatened by me. Really, there is no higher compliment than censorship. Proves you’re doing your job.

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1. How you see life depends on how much money you’re seeing it with

What seems to set apart those at the very top of competitive pursuits from others of roughly equal ability is the degree to which, beginning early in life, they can pursue an arduous practice routine for years and years. And that doggedness depends on emotional traits — enthusiasm and persistence in the face of setbacks — above all else.

This forces me to doubt Goleman’s emotional intelligence. In fact, this is exactly the sort of Unexamined Privilege Episode that always leads me to doubt experts can deliver advice that applies to the planet I live on.

Music is a remarkably expensive talent. Not only are instruments costly (unless you’re a singer), but so are the lessons. And if you’re a child musical prodigy growing up far from a major urban center, you’re extremely unlikely to have access to music teachers of the caliber you need to become Julliard material — at any price. You can have it in you to practice 10 hours a day and bounce back from every rejection with renewed determination, but doing it all with that air violin and that music book for first graders you found at the library isn’t going to cut it.

What always sets everybody apart from everybody else is primarily opportunity. It’s true that the optimism, determination and mental resilience associated with a high emotional IQ help you discern unapparent opportunities someone else in your situation might have missed. But nobody gets every opportunity in their lifetime; a high emotional IQ doesn’t magically cause expensive musical instruments and a great teacher to fall into your lap at the right price. When equal opportunities exist for two people, then and only then can you logically infer that the more successful one is the more able one.

Does Goldman think rural poor children are never musical prodigies? Or does he think there are government satellites watching over us all to make sure talented kids from the wrong side of the tracks get the opportunities they need? Or maybe he just thinks poor people are all so unrefined that their kids could only be talented at sports.

Goleman’s unexamined privilege serves as a fine example of why so many people assume those at the top got there through sheer ability and persistence, and those below them simply didn’t try hard enough. By ignoring the cost factors, they enable themselves to maintain the comfortable belief that every playing field is perfectly level.

Note that I’m not even arguing we need to level the playing field. I’d be very happy if, for a first step, we would just acknowledge as a society that it’s not level, and ability, talent, and persistence aren’t always automatically rewarded proportionately.

Related posts:

1. How you see life depends on how much money you’re seeing it with

But there are two enormous problems with this bill. First, it should’ve been funded by tax dollars, not compulsory consumption of a private service. Second, as far as I can tell, it does nothing to treat the fundamental reason why so many Americans couldn’t get the health care they needed: inflated health care costs.

I said it a while ago, and I’m saying it again: passing a law that forces everyone to buy insurance is universal health care in exactly the same way that passing a law forcing homeless people to buy houses is a solution to the homeless problem. Services should be funded by tax dollars, no matter how politicians worry that will affect their political futures.

Fans of the bill keep handwaving this compulsory purchasing point when I bring it up – “Eh, I’m not sure we have all the details yet” or “Eh, they’ll hand out subsidies” or “Eh, it’s just Republican propaganda.” Or they bring up compulsory car insurance as a counterargument. Well, you can opt out of driving to avoid car insurance, and still get around on public transportation or a bicycle. Driving, after all, is an earned privilege rather than a right. This health insurance deal, on the other hand, you can only opt out of by dying or becoming a citizen of another country. A little bit different, yes?

As to the details, it’s true we don’t have them all yet. But the lawsuits filed against the bill clearly indicate it’s going to force at least some people who don’t want insurance or don’t feel they can afford it to buy insurance anyway.

As to the argument that somehow the government will make insurance affordable to everyone: whenever the government determines who “can’t afford” something it requires, it has always historically chosen some ridiculously low income level  that leaves out a ton of people who are not choosing between insurance or NFL season tickets – they’re choosing between insurance and living in an area where their kids can go to school unarmed. Still, let’s imagine hell freezes over and the government actually picks a sliding scale or something sensible that really does enable everyone to afford coverage. Affordability stops being an issue, but we still have a problem.

What about people who use alternative medicine only? Their treatment and medications or supplements will continue to be 100% uncovered, so they’ll be paying for all their stuff (which ain’t cheap) plus insurance premiums. How is that fair to them? Shouldn’t they be excluded from having to pay? Or maybe there should be some very cheap option for catastrophic hospitalization for them, in case they would consider “traditional” medicine in that situation. (I can never wrap my head around calling up-to-5,000 year old medicine “alternative”, like it’s a college indie single that came out last week, and 100-year-old allopathy “traditional.”)

What about people who have found cheaper, innovative alternatives to insurance, like discount programs or a co-op someone tried to explain to me earlier today where, if I’m following, a group of families fund a sort of collective savings account to help everyone have money on hand when they need it for medical bills? Not only will these folks be forced to give up their brilliant alternatives to ridiculously expensive health care insurance, but the people providing the brilliant alternatives will likely go out of business. Well, I guess that’s what you get for trying to compete with companies the US government tends to bail out when they screw themselves into the ground. You should’ve known it wasn’t really a free market, silly.

And what about people who are in great health and feel their financial picture is better served by putting some money into savings every month for future medical services rather than paying a monthly premium for services they might never need (and carry auto insurance that would cover them in case of an accident)? Are we, the United States of America, seriously telling people, “You mustn’t make thoughtful, intelligent choices with your finances.” Tax these people, and they won’t be happy. But making them change their whole financial approach is just not fair.

I also don’t know of anything in the bill to prevent premiums from going up and up and up, and in fact, everything to encourage continued medical cost increases. That makes this bill, despite its good points, a band-aid solution since skyrocketing medical costs are the reason so many people can’t get good health care. The bill takes away some co-pays and forces insurance companies to treat people they were denying before. Can’t you just see the letter you’ll be getting in a couple of years? “Dear [Insurance Company] Participant: since the government took away some of our money and stuff’s so expensive, we must raise your family’s monthly premium to $2,034. We’re sure you understand, and in any rate it’s not like you can just stop buying insurance, is it? Ha ha, ‘kaythanxbye.” The government’s handing them an unending stream of captive buyers – that’s a price-fixing racket waiting to happen.

What we need, in my opinion, is socialized insurance funded with taxes, free to citizens, with private insurance still an option for those who want it. That would keep private insurance’s fees low and give everyone access to at least some kind of medical care. But we also need to lower the costs of practicing medicine and making drugs. Instead of looking into reducing malpractice suits, for example, we should look into reducing malpractice. Or, you know, what if we replaced punitive damages with equally big government fines that go straight into the coffers of a true universal health care system? I don’t have the expertise to say these suggestions would work, but the point is, there are a lot of potential solutions. Some of them have got to work. To quote “The Simpsons,” right now it’s like “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas.”

Maybe the lawsuits against this bill will get all the right people excluded from having to pay in. But the bill still won’t do anything to stop medical costs from rising. I’m concerned we’re going to be right back where we started a couple of decades into this plan.

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3. Understanding the Treasury’s Bail out plan

Maybe I can make this clearer with an example. Let’s say you grow up in a socioeconomic class that didn’t enjoy the financial security the middle class has. You want to move into the middle class not because you hate the folks from your own class, but because you want and feel you deserve financial security. You eventually get a good job – the kind your parents never had a chance to get – and you’re working amongst middle class folks. Now, they had their parents pay for college and maybe their first home down-payment, so they’re still ahead of you financially as you struggle to pay your college loans alongside the rent, transportation and the “right” clothes for your job. But you’re getting there.

Except, you have to listen to your new-found middle class co-workers talk about poor people and how poor people defeat themselves and there’s nothing anyone can do to help them. Or, less offensively but still boiling down to the same ideas, they say anyone can get rich in this country, and if they don’t, it’s because they’re not trying hard at all. And you find yourself thinking of people you know or knew. People who worked two low-paying jobs because they were damned lucky to be employed at all in their economically devastated region. People whose college plans got cut short by a sick parent needing constant nursing the family could hardly afford to outsource. People who never wasted their money on anything, who lived frugally not because it was “green” but because it was survival. People who fought hard and burned with passion to set up their kids for a slightly less dismal financial experience. People who maybe endured harassment at work and kept their mouths shut for fear of losing a job they couldn’t replace. People who had no one to take them in if they got laid off or moved somewhere else in hopes of finding a job. And you think: applying the stereotype of laziness to these people just flat out contradicts your sense of reality.

But if you say it, your middle class buddies will either reject it flat out, or say you’re too sensitive. They weren’t talking about you, after all. You’re exceptional. Which is to say, you obviously did something brilliant that never occurred to all the people you grew up amongst for three generations.

Except, no. You simply seized an opportunity it took your family multiple generations to build. If the opportunity had gotten built in time for your parent’s generation, they would’ve done the same. If it hadn’t gotten built until you had kids of your own, they would’ve been the ones to Make It. You know you’re not exceptional, at least not in the way they mean it. You know you are simply the product of a whole lot of people working much harder than the middle class could probably endure, just to get one of you out of Going Nowheresville and into something like a nice life.

Only it’s not so nice, if you have to put up with this.

It’s not just a socioeconomic issue, either. Women who lose a lot of weight often find themselves borged into a Skinny Bitchez Club where they get to hear about the lazy disgustingness of fat women. And with race, it needn’t even be a mobility issue: a person of color can be born into a middle or upper class and find herself having to listen to all sorts of stereotypes about people of her color or ethnicity. She shouldn’t take it personally: she’s an exception.

If you’ve had a similar experience, did you ever find a balance? I’m still searching for it.

When you talk in generalizations about a group I have belonged to, you are talking about people I love and know, some of whom I know to be the antithesis of what you say they are – and in some cases, know to be much higher quality creatures than you. Don’t think you can tell me I’m an exception, and that makes it okay. I didn’t reject and abandon the group of people from which I came; I didn’t join your group in order to think poorly of them. I joined your group to get away from your oppression, not become a part of it.

Related posts:

1. Greed and the end of the middle class
2. How you see life depends on how much money you’re seeing it with
3. Privilege means never having to explain why it doesn’t work for Others

All the universal health care plans being yapped about at length by various committees within Congress (I could’ve sworn the Constitution outlined a clear procedure for proposing a bill and then voting on it that did not involve marathon committee circle jerks wherein participants vote amongst themselves and then whine to the press about the results) rely on forcing young, healthy Americans to buy health insurance to fund coverage for older and less healthy Americans.

Dude, if it was that easy, we could fix all our national problems overnight. I mean, c’mon. Next up: U.S. solves homelessness by passing a law that forces American renters to buy homes so we can afford to subsidize rent on apartments for homeless people. See? Problem solved! Because obviously no renter is renting because they can’t afford a home, or because they don’t think owning a home is the right choice in their situation. They’re just being assholes, so we’ve got a fine for that now. And if they can’t pay the mortgage at some point, no problem! They’ll become homeless, and we’ll stick them into subsidized apartments which may or may not be in the school districts they wanted their kids to be in, may or may not be within three hours of where they work, which may or may not be safe and up to standards, it all depends if the housing inspectors are on the take or not.

Yeah, problem solved.

Like homelessness, health care in the U.S. is a complex problem. You’ve got tons of jobs that don’t come with insurance and/or don’t pay well enough for someone to purchase his or her own. You’ve got the huge and ridiculous cost of insurance premiums. You’ve got the rising cost of health care in general. You’ve got the enormous unemployment that comes around every 10 years or so, whenever the big boys’ latest get rich scheme collapses and we end up paying for it. And that’s not even touching issues I’m not really qualified to talk about, like where substance addiction fits into all of this – what gets covered, for whom, and so on. If you don’t come up with something that addresses or eliminates all these issues, it’s a workaround, not a solution.

I do not love taxes, but at least I expect them as a normal function of government, and if you’re going to fund something on a national level, it should be funded through taxes. I really really have a problem with the government telling me I must do business with a private company or else get a huge fine or move to another country. Next thing you know, they’ll be offering me “protection” so long as I just throw all my business to [insert company here].

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1. Compulsory health insurance and no end to inflated medical costs
2. Greed and the end of the middle class
3. If you look Mexican, you’re probably uninsured

It’s hard to detail exactly what changed my mind. The final straw came one day when I thought – really thought – about the fact that the original voters in the US were not just white, male and twenty-one or older – they also had to be landowners. All this time I had been getting taught that our “forefathers” were planning an enlightened democracy and I should forgive them for failing to include women and other races in it because they would’ve gotten there eventually, and what school had generally failed to mention was that even back then, people who didn’t own property were disenfranchised non-entities. This government was always all about the people who owned bits of it – the shareholders, so to speak, in the wealth of the country. It’s like a publicly owned company telling you “We’re really all about you, dear customer” when you know the shareholders don’t give a flying crap about the customer, and they are who the company really has to answer to. It doesn’t even matter how much money you spend buying from the company; it’s about the shareholder’s perception of their stock value, which can be based on anything – including fiction.

Once I looked at things in this light, I never managed to go back. Every once in a while, I find myself thinking maybe the government really is meant to work for everyone and just fails most of the time. Then I watch something such as housing prices soaring uniformly all over the nation over a seven year period – yay for people who own a piece of America! – because the banks are essentially churning the money. Making loans, then turning around and selling those loans so they can’t get stuck with the losses, and then the buyer of the loan sells again – basically, it was a period of lenders playing hot potato with doomed deals, cashing in on them in the short term and hoping they weren’t the ones who got stuck with the losses.

No one’s gotten stuck with those losses yet, by the way. They’re still not on the books. The foreclosures that are losing money for the banks are only the tip of the iceberg. But the government has so far refused to make them record the actual transactions that caused all this. To do so would cause an unpredictable level of havoc – no one knows what those losses will be. I suspect we’d discover something insane, like that the paper value of home loans in the US in 2008 exceeded the actual amount of dollars in circulation, and that would be the end of the US economy as we know it.

I also believe that even if some governments really did start out with the best of intentions toward the people at the bottom of the pyramid, it’s the nature of humans to organize in a pyramid fashion, and no system can thwart that behavior for very long. Ultimately, we revert to instinctive behaviors.

Even in an anarchy, people form pyramidal hierarchies. Look at the lawless Old West – we think of it as chaos, but it was quite structured in the same way a pack of dogs is structured. The leader is the person who’s most lately proven him- or herself as a leader. Because anyone may attempt to take over leadership, it’s much closer to a meritocracy than what we have now (in which college expense bars poor people from the best positions in society and your most important assortment of opportunities is defined by what your parents are able to hand you, yet we maintain the illusion that our choices are the determining factor). When you stop thinking of what we have as a system that needs some fixing and really look at what we’ve got, you see:

• Worthwhile people getting stuck in bad life situations not because of laziness or lack of intelligence/dedication, but because of poor health, bad family situations, or being born into families that couldn’t give them much of a start. In other words, not because of their choices, but because of circumstances beyond their control, some of which society could provide workarounds for, but doesn’t. Because it’s too busy ensuring…
• …the insanely rich getting even more insanely rich at the expense of poor people, and getting rewarded for it out of our tax dollars.
• Different groups receiving different punishments/rewards for the same damn behavior.
• Different groups receiving different opportunities than others, based on such insignificant traits as gender, skin color, etc., rather than on merit.

The distinct advantage anarchy has over any government is simple. In a governed society, laws limit the bahvior of law-abiders, but not criminals. In an anarchy, no one’s behavior is limited. Good people can fight back, and that’s the most powerful deterrent to both crime and aggressive acts of entitlement. You can try to rape me, but I can shoot you for it with no worries I’ll be the one to end up in jail. You can beat your kids, but they can kill you while you sleep. You and your posse can try to keep people like me from eating in your restaurant, but my posse and I can burn your restaurant down. I’m not advocating these violent solutions, though I do think they’re all that some people can understand. Just there mere possibility of good people fighting back is a deterrent. And the possibility of people being assigned positions and accorded respect because they’ve proven themselves must give the privileged nightsweats just thinking about it.

The only meritocracy is anarchy.

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1. Future topics
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3. Universal health care does not mean forcing Americans to buy insurance

As we head into this holiday season, during which many shoppers will have more contact with customer service shop and restaurant employees than at any other time of the year, allow me to clarify a few things.

• Most people who work at shops, restaurants, hotels, non-union grocers, etc., do not get any sort of paid time off. If they’re sick and they stay home, they don’t get paid for those hours/days.
• They are forced by law to take vacation of at least one week per year, but employers are not forced to pay them. Many seek temp work during that “vacation” week because they can’t live without every penny of their normal income.
• They rarely have insurance benefits, and if they do, they almost surely pay far more for it than the average office worker.
• They rarely get 40 hours a week, which means many of them need to work more than one job to make ends meet.
• When the store needs to save money, it cuts employee hours. This means suddenly the 25 hours you were depending on may become 16 – or you may even find yourself with an unexpected week off. Not good if you’re living paycheck to paycheck.
• If you are terminated for any reason – including a layoff through no fault of your own – you don’t get a dime in severance pay or anything else. You’re just out of a job.
• There’s rarely any sort of retirement account for these workers.
• THESE ARE NOT EASY JOBS. I can’t stress this enough - these jobs are stressful, they demand true mult-tasking and lots of skills, and very often expose workers to confrontations with customers in which they are expected to somehow uphold store policy without irritating a customer who wants to cheat the system. If you’re not an asshole, you probably have no idea how “wrong” customers can be – they even engage in verbal abuse and various forms of harassment. And in most of these jobs, management will not back up the employee – they will instead let the customer run rough-shod over store policies, even to the extent of cheating the store, or get away with sexual harassment, and perhaps even demand the employee apologize for not kissing the ass of a customer who wanted to, for example, return an item a dog had clearly chewed to pieces 3 years after it was purchased.
• Retail workers generally make no more than a dollar above minimum wage.
• Restaurant workers generally make better money than retail workers, but still far less than most office workers make (excepting clerical workers, who are also paid dismally, but sometimes get some benefits).
• A disturbing trend in retail in the past 20 years has been not to pay commissions – which would inspire healthy competition, but to count each worker’s sales and give more hours per week to the workers who sell more. This inspires stress and panic as people compete for the right to “keep” their hours. Companies who engage in this are trying to get $50k/year salesperson quality out of workers making $6.
• These workers usually get a store discount, which is just not as great as it sounds when you’re working to pay rent and put food in your mouth.

If you think people on the bottom of the job ladder enjoy the same stuff you do, only with less income, you are deeply mistaken. Please at least give them some respect when you interface with them – they’re not getting much else. And if someone talks about raising minimum wage or other measures that might improve the lot of these workers, you don’t have to agree with their proposals (some of which are bound to be useless), but at least come at the issue with the understanding that there is actually a problem when jobs that weren’t designed to be someone’s sole living have become that for too many people. Understand there are regions where these are the only jobs available to all but a select lucky few; that there are disabled people stuck with these jobs because no office employers will make a few minor adjustments to accommodate them; that there are people stuck in these jobs because they needed to earn a living right out of high school and can’t afford to quit the job to go to college and can’t get a better job without college; and so on.

And surely we can agree that no matter what sort of work a person does, they deserve to be treated like human beings rather than enhancement tools for your shopping/dining/traveling experience.

Related posts:

1. College has become a barrier for smart poor kids
2. Those crappy jobs CEOs couldn’t do to save their lives

ETA: This post is US-centric, and I should have made that clear. How much or little it applies to other countries, I can’t say.

As soon as employers made college a necessity for jobs of any significant income (and even some of shockingly low income, such as “receptionist”) back in the 80s or 90s, college started increasing tuition costs into the stratosphere. The cost for a four year degree at even a modest state school is now, in technical economic terms, fucking ridiculous.

How can I say that, knowing how much college increases (on average) a graduate’s lifelong earnings and so on? Because not every degree has that effect. Many degrees lead to an empty or low-paying job market. What can someone with a degree in history, English, or archeology do besides teach history, English or archeology? (And please don’t say “write books” – authors make well below minimum wage, unless they are among the very, very small minority who make it big.) There are a precious few degrees that actually pay for themselves in earnings: engineering, for one. Even degrees for doctors and lawyers – which can pay for themselves eventually – are getting tougher and tougher to justify, because the initial expense is horrendous, and the period of working for little or no money after school is harsher than it was for previous generations because the cost of living is increasing every year (forcing young graduates into even more debt than the degree did).

For kids whose parents couldn’t afford a college fund, who are completely on their own to pay their way through school, it just doesn’t make economic sense to become a doctor when you could become a nurse with far less expense. It may not even make sense at all to go to college, when you could become an administrative assistant or a carpenter and earn a modest but decent living without tens of thousands (or more) in debt from which you have to recover, and still have hope of promotion to something better. And don’t bring up scholarships – they’re increasingly hard to come by, the competition gets worse every year, and in some fields they’re not available at all.

Now, employer degree lust is not the only reason college costs have risen to the point where smart, poor kids are being left behind, but it is one that could be addressed very quickly without costing anyone a dime. Employers need to get over the idea that a college degree is necessary in every profession. It is not. Just a few decades ago, employers realized that people could pick up, for example, how to do an engineer’s job without having an engineering degree, and they recognized that a certain number of years of job experience were equivalent to a degree.

Employers need to stop thinking “degree=qualification” and instead establish qualifications that can be met in more than one way. For example, a poor smart kid can learn every skill needed to be an editor in a publishing house. Books and textbooks are readily available, and there’s information all over the internet, which can be accessed for free at most libraries, so self-education is very possible. Instead of requiring an English degree, a publishing house could instead require applicants to describe in an essay what they’ve done to train themselves for editing (whether that’s college or self-education). After weeding out the ones who don’t impress, the publishing house would interview applicants and give them an editing assignment to complete on the spot under supervision (to avoid the possibility of cheating). The publishing house would still get quality employees and poor smart people would have a fighting chance for good jobs.

For another example, certain types of engineering are far more complex – even if someone has a remarkable flair for constructing engines from crap they found at the junkyard, there are solid reasons why an employer might want them to learn the math skills and concepts involved in engineering. But is there any reason these skills can’t be learned on the job, if the person passes a math test which indicates the capacity to learn it?

The problem is that employers are too lazy to take on the work of apprenticeship. That duty has been passed onto colleges. And yet, the people who actually work with 23 year olds know apprenticeship still goes on. It has to – no college can anticipate precisely what your company wants its employees to do. Companies imagine they’re avoiding apprenticeship, when they’re not. And I suspect – based on personal observations – what most kids learn in 4 years of college could be compressed into 6 months of apprenticeship.

There are only two fair solutions: the Federal and state governments must find a way to make college degrees available to everyone at every income level, or we must create alternatives to college degrees that allow people to better themselves and have that reflected in their income. Not only does the second one not cost tax payers or anyone else a dime, it makes more sense.

Related posts:

1. Greed and the end of the middle class
2. No, customer service workers do not have it easy
3. Abused kids can’t really sue their parents

I see it differently. I see healthcare as an investment a nation makes in itself. Whether you enable your citizens to get healthy and stay that way through government programs or a regulated free market, we should be appalled that people’s brains and skills are being wasted because they can’t obtain a medicine or therapeutic measure that’s readily available. Who knows what these individuals might accomplish, given the chance? Why do we not want this for our nation?

Because we assume that if they were valuable people, they’d be rich. Pure and simple; that’s what Americans are conditioned to think. Social Darwinism: if you’re worth something, the money gods will shine on you. If the money gods don’t shine on you, you must be mistaken in thinking you have something to contribute.

One that note, I’ve been thinking about those low-paying jobs that most people think a monkey could do until they learn the hard way. The hardest jobs I’ve ever had were waiting tables and being a receptionist at a busy office. These jobs call for true multi-tasking of the sort that studies now recognize the human brain just isn’t capable of: your focus must switch every few seconds, and you need to remember dozens of details at a time. These were the jobs I performed most poorly at, and they were nearly the lowest-paying jobs I ever had. Retail paid even less – while I found it easier than waiting tables and doing reception, that’s only because I never had to do it very long at a stretch. The amount of abuse you put up with from assholes who perceive you as a captive audience to whatever hostility they want to vent is ridiculous for any salary.

Here’s why I say a lot of CEOs couldn’t wait tables to save their lives – an example of what a waiter can go through in just a few minutes of a normal shift:

• You’ve got two new tables at once. You greet the first one, intending to get a drink order and run to the next table. They instead ask you questions about the menu. To which you don’t know the answer. You promise to find out and be right back.
• You greet the next table and get a drink order.
• As you pass one of your other tables, you notice their drinks are running low. Another of your tables stops you and asks for more napkins, a lemon, and another basket of free bread to fill up on so their tab and your tip will be even lower. Another server asks you to check if her order is up when you get back there.
• You go to the kitchen and get everyone’s drinks. You hopefully remember to ask a manager the answer to the menu question, get the napkins, the lemon, the basket of bread, a pitcher to refill the low drinks which you’re pretty sure were regular Coke not diet and check the other server’s order.
• While you’re back there, the manager asks you to restock the salad dressings, and you promise to do that after getting orders from your new tables.
• You come out of the kitchen with a tray loaded with heavy beverages (and the lemon on a little plate, and the napkins) balanced on one arm and a pitcher of cola in the other. You catch the other server’s eye while she’s busy taking an order and shake your head to let her know her order isn’t up yet. You deliver everything…
• …and remember you forgot the bread. You promise to bring it in just a couple of minutes.
• You go to take the first table’s order and they take all the freakin’ day about it. They’ve obviously been chatting the whole time instead of looking at the menu, so now they’re going to peruse the whole damn thing at their leisure while you stand there. If you’re confident you can do it in a friendly way, you let them know it looks like they’re not ready, and you’ll be right back in a minute.
• You take the other table’s order. Fortunately, this goes pretty smoothly.
• On your way back to the first table, you catch another server and ask them to bring bread to the table that wanted it.
• You go back to the first table and they’re ready. It still takes longer than usual because they want to reinvent the menu with all sorts of modifications and substitutions, and ask you diet & nutrition info on 90% of what they’re ordering. But you get through it.
• Another of your tables is ready for its bill now and getting impatient.
• You go to the machine (hopefully a computer, if you’re lucky) and run off the bill for the table that needs it and ask another server to take it to them. You enter the two table orders into the computer next, but get stuck at one point because you don’t know how to enter one of the modifications you’ve never had requested before today and have to find someone who can tell you.
• While looking for someone who can help you, you realize the other server didn’t bring the bread out to the table that wants bread. There goes whatever tip you were likely to get from them. You go fetch the bread while you keep looking for someone to help.

That’s assuming the kitchen is operating perfectly. When it’s not, things can get a whole lot hairier. When your tables are all difficult at the same time, it’s pure and utter hell. What I just described could all happen within 10 minutes or less, easily. I’m not describing the physical impact of the fast walking and heavy carrying that’s involved either.

What are some of the jobs you know of that don’t pay much and are perceived as something “anybody” can do, but actually require skills that a lot of people working at much higher salaries don’t possess?

No related posts.

The above-linked blog entry is basically what Orszag said in testimony, but it’s a lot easier to understand hearing it than reading it. I’ll attempt to sum up, including some snatches I’ve learned from other sources.

Orszag is Director of the Congressional Budget Office. That office accounts for the Congressional budget, and his testimony was intended to help members of the House Finance Committee decide what to do with Paulson’s plan. He didn’t take sides or offer advice, but he was clear on a couple of things: Paulson’s plan provides “nothing” in terms of detail, making it impossible for the CBO to give meaningful estimates of what the plan might cost. He described ways it could cost very little and ways it could end up costing the bigger portion of the $700 billion with no return for tax payers.

The problem Paulson and Congress are seeking to address have to do with assets that are so far divorced from reality it’s a bit like selling non-specific promises. A lot of people are holding “mortgage-backed securities”, which are bundles of random residential and commercial mortgages, some of which will be paid and others defaulted. Because – for reasons that aren’t clear to me, but probably involve a great deal of stupidity – Wall Street firms have bought these securities with no idea who owns which mortgages in them nor which ones are likely to default. Now they need to sell them, only… no one can begin to guess what they’re worth. Their value was previously based on the word of the seller, who had good credibility… until the mortgages he’d brokered started to default.

So suddenly no one wants to lend anyone money, and this threatens to crush the normal flow of business and economy, resulting in not only an inability to get a mortgage or buy a car, for example, but also job losses as businesses can’t function normally.

The solution: we need to find a market value for the securities and/or buy some of these “toxic debts”. The first solution would help fix the liquidity problems – businesses would feel confident about lending again. The second solution would give the businesses capital. The first solution could be done at probably no expense to tax payers if they use a reverse auction process under other specific conditions Orszag describes, because that’s a good way to find a fair market value, which means the government is getting its money’s worth with these purchases and the balance sheet records no gain/loss. The second solution is trickier – and you’ll notice it’s the one Paulson keeps on about – because there’s no real way to tell if we’re getting fair market value for the toxic assets, and the banks will be motivated to get us to overpay. Which seems to be Paulson/Bernanke’s goal – they want to overpay, on the theory that this will give the businesses enough capital to get going again. But since we can’t tell what’s a fair market value, this method would cause us to likely end up subsidizing some businesses that don’t need any help, throwing money at some who can’t possibly recover, and failing to subsidize some that really could’ve done good with that little bit of capital. Orszag described this method as “haphazard.”

It sounds to me like there are ways to make a plan like this work, if you flesh out the details and put the right conditions into it. The fact that Paulson would even ask for a $700 billion blank check to spend any way he sees fit forces me to distrust him and the administration he works for.

And here’s a question: has anyone considered the probability that if we buy some of those securities, we’ll open them up and find they contain mortgages for non-existent properties? That’s the most basic sort of accounting fraud, and with people actually buying these packages with no idea what’s in them, it would be so easy to do. I can’t be the only person to think of it.

Unfortunately, all the Democrats can see is a bill that’s bound to pass, onto which they can tack a few things. Some of the Republicans – the real Republicans, who believe in personal responsibility for businesses as well as individuals – are raising good questions and may vote against the bailout, but they’re outnumbered. As usual, the Democrats are being aggressively useless – posturing for the voters without really thinking through the danger of passing this bill without a hell of a lot more details, and Republican leadership is functioning as counter to its party’s alleged ideals as is humanly possible.

Related posts:

1. Compulsory health insurance and no end to inflated medical costs
2. How to make a free market a tool of oppression