mbperrin
mbperrin's JournalI teach kids to work effectively. Employers purposely give false information on how to succeed so
that THEY can succeed, but not you, the worker.
1) Competition is destructive in the workplace or the classroom.
2) Cooperation is far more productive.
3) Identify and shed free riders.
I prefer micro enterprises, high in skill, low in physical resources, and unable to be replicated by corporations effectively.
Just working hard is not enough:
1) Who's putting on roofing in 120 degree heat in the summer here in west Texas? Are they working hard? Yep. Will they ever become wealthy or even mildly prosperous doing it? Nope.
2) Who's building the highways?
3) Who's picking the produce?
As many as you like. Nobody on the Forbes list is there because they worked hard.
Next, realize what money is - a claim for goods and services. So every time you pay a fee or interest or other charge, you are giving up some of your rights to goods and services to someone else - whomever you paid those extras to.
Leverage your money yourself:
Tired of paying nearly a dollar a can for canned vegetables at the grocery store? No farmer's markets in our area, so 20 families in a 3 block radius went in on a wholesaler license and buy our own direct. It's unloaded at one of the houses and split up, once a month. Cost? About 60 cents a can for the very same brands and sizes. Savings? Your money for food goes nearly twice as far.
Don't buy a car and make payments. Find out what the payments will be on the car you want and make them to yourself, every month, just like you would if you financed it. In 3 years, 4 years, pay cash. You will have the car, and the interest you would have paid will still be in the bank. Want a new car every couple of years? Just keep making those same payments, use the residual from the first and trade-in on the vehicle. You can always drive a new car with no danger or repossession. Can't make those payments to yourself? Then you couldn't make them to GMAC either, so you have lost nothing.
Plenty more, but you get the notion. I'm sure that you and I are on the same page. We want people to use their efforts intelligently. Good deals are good for both sides of the deal, and that's what the current money grubbers have deliberately left out.
Child labor is WHY people are hungry.
The more people in a given labor force, the lower wages are.
Your niece's instructor is a victim of the bastardization of the field of economics which has been ongoing since the mid-1970s. He or she have never read the source documents for the field.
Profits are not a goal of an economic system, period.
Adam Smith, the founder of modern economic thought, wrote The Wealth of Nations, where he examined the reasons a country was poor or rich. He found that production of goods makes a country wealthy.
He points out that the first thing business people do when they meet anywhere, parties or just on the street, is to begin figuring how to cheat consumers to make more money for themselves. To this end, he discourages the meeting of business people and thinks that the corporation should not be allowed to exist as a form of business. Profit should be just enough to prevent the merchant from going out of business. Production should be maximized, and then jobs and incomes are maximized as well.
Before the 70s, the classic American business model was find a place where people need your stuff and locate a branch there. But during the 70s and continuing today, is this perverse notion that business does not have to accept things as they are, but are free to create their own reality. So you stop going where people are, and make people move, instead. That big promotion now means leaving here to go to the big city, where you are cut off from your family and friends, your natural economic support system.
Maybe your uncle the mechanic would work on your car at home for just the parts, your dad the accountant did the whole family's taxes and so on. That's how I grew up, with grandmother babysitting us while mother shopped and so on. Your earned dollars went further, because when you moved away and needed brakes, go to the brake shop and pay full price, same for child care, and anything else you need. Now you need two people working in the household to have the same things you used to get with one. Business continues to squeeze, until now you have mom and dad and kids working as well. Nearly all my high school senior students work, and not for pocket money - they are paying their insurance, clothes, car payment in some cases, as well as chipping in for general family support. Now you have 3 or more people working for what one used to provide.
Overseas and small child continues the scam - now you can get 7 or 8 or 9 people to work for what one used to get.
Now they're trying to get it done over here to make the global pool of labor even larger and wages even lower.
All in the name of profits.
Production, not profits, is the goal of economics. The rest is a race to the bottom, and I so inform my students, and give them strategies to opt out of the current game to their own benefit and that of their families.
The more people who work for less and less, the less and less they can buy, including food. Too many workers spells hunger, and that's where we're at. A huge increase in poverty in the world's richest country, and it won't get better by putting 7 year olds to work.
Continuous improvement on scores is impossible, For example, I scored 800 out of 800
on the math portion of the SAT many years ago. Under this proposal, no teacher would want me as a student, because I can no longer show an increase in test performance.
The same will happen at the other end of the scale, with the special education students who are very low, but are taught living skills, yet are still in the testing pool.
Teachers will shop for the following students: Capable, but tested poorly due to environmental factors, like a family tragedy during testing week. These will be at a premium, because they will show the greatest improvement with little effort.
The whole thing is predicated on teachers having control of all aspects of a student's life, which is simply not the case. I see my high school students for 245 minutes a week, or about 2-1/2% of their weekly time. They have other classes, families of various sorts, jobs in many cases, and all the other claptrap and developmental issues which follow 16 and 17 year olds.
High stakes testing makes education competitive. It is cooperative. The whole testing schema is wrong-headed, but officials like it because it's easy to get a magic number to make decisions with. It's lazy.
Okay, now you are being purposefully obtuse and insulting as well. 4,000 people are nothing to you?
Amazing. You cannot handle being completely wrong about something, such as the suggestion that a battery was only for momentary fluctuations or for just a few minutes.
The idea that technology has not only moved on, but is commercially feasible, is anathema to you. Whatever ax you have to grind, you at least could read the information supplied, or provide evidence to the contrary. You have done neither.
You have called names, you have insulted, you have now disputed whether an incorporated town of 4,000 people even counts as a city. So I will wish you and your little helpers the holiday you deserve, as well as my sincere wish that you get everything you deserve in life, and quickly.
Meanwhile, I believe that I'll just enjoy my 6.6 cents electrical rate of wind generated power and let those who wish to pay triple and swim in their own waste.
Merry Christmas.
As long as ordinary people have to work to get money in order to lay claims to goods and services
and as long as we allow the "financial services industry" to create money for nothing in order to lay claims to goods and services, there will be hard-working poor people who will never have any security in their life and who will live shortened lives, and then there will be game-players on the "right side" who waste enough for ten lifetimes.
Corporations must be killed, along with all their financial clap-trap, and production, not "profits" made the goal of the economy.
Nothing new or radical here. Adam Smith said the same in 1776.
Your post is spot-on: community colleges serve as a gateway for further study, as a terminal
training spot for all sorts of jobs, including oilfield safety in our area.
I teach in the public schools here, and I have a master's in education, but I took a non-certificate course of study in paint and body so that my dad (who was a paint and body guy for 40 years) and I could spend time restoring several project vehicles of his, including a 1952 Jag Mark VII, a TR3, a Hillman station wagon, and a BMW Isetta. Great enjoyment for him and me in the last decade of his life.
I took a series of woodworking courses at the same JC, and I have enjoyed restoring antique furniture ever since, including an 1850s rolltop teacher's desk, an 1830s fainting couch, a full dining set of 12 chairs and a 10' table with both leaves inserted.
I never graduated from any of those programs and never intended to. Literally hundreds of my own students have started there taking their basics before transferring to a four year school elsewhere.
As usual, the greedy mucks at the Chamber are grabbing all the cash they can while wiping their butts with the work of decent people.
The silliest claim by Torrance is that creative people don't have "time" to be courteous.
Interesting justification by a narcissist excusing themselves from societal norms.
I've been in the classroom 3 decades and have had thousands of creative souls come through here. I teach "regular" kids, yes, those souls that aren't in AP or IB or AVID or SpecEd, those that are warehoused into spaces while all the "important" groups are being agonized over.
How about:
The economics class that raised $450 ($15 each from 30 kids) and opened an online trading account and turned it into $6300 in 10 weeks during a stock market game? That one got me written up for allowing the students to gamble at school.
The entrepreneurs who talked teachers into giving them homework passes and then resold them to their fellow students? That one got me written up for "subverting school policies on late work."
The group of government students who sent 47 of their fellows to a school board meeting and who followed procedures to speak out individually against a district transfer policy? That one got me written up for contributing to a negative atmosphere at school.
The study group who ordered a small Chinese buffet for 10 every Wednesday delivered to my class while they worked? That one got me written up for violating the Food Services monopoly on eating on-campus.
This year, our Christmas door entry was titled "137 reasons we couldn't get our door decorated" and was covered with 3x5 cards with excuses in bright holiday colors. Some of my favorites: "I suddenly got allergic to that - cough - cough"; I thought it was tomorrow"; "You have no authority to question me"; "I was making hotpockets"; "This wasn't for a grade." Fun and many students and staff stopped by and read it until they were late to class. We were disqualified because we didn't have a holiday theme.
I now have students in the medical field, two studying at the London School, several restaurant owners, several landlords, and many who have their own families and whose children I now have the pleasure of teaching.
TEACHERS don't like creative students? BULLSHIT. ADMINISTRATORS don't like creative anything, that's what.
Thank GAWD we're not letting families buy these things at their real market prices!
That would be allowing ordinary people to live in housing they could afford and someday own free and clear, and that, my friends, is pure terrorism. That's what those Islamic fanatics want.
Thank GAWD we have moneychangers EQUITY FIRMS looking out for us!
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Member since: 2003 before July 6thNumber of posts: 7,672
