Apple Goes On A Hiring Spree In China

[jtuck004]

26. Exactly. If one reads through the history from about 1865 to the 1920ish era

there was a large movement for workers to own the factories, the mines - actually have a stake in the decision making. But with the help of the governments, including federal, state, and local, and the AFL, business was successful in beating that back. When the reforms of the 1930's were enacted, many workers stopped pursuing self-determination and let others make their decisions for them, and that gave us what we have today.

Interestingly, business got a great boost from the Russians. As the movement toward the Revolution built, they sent people here to organize. But they were remarkably ineffective, because people didn't want socialism, they wanted self-determination. Business, however, was able to tie the socialists, and later communists, to the real labor movement, and with almost no effort being made to distinguish them from that, the Mother Jones, Haywoods, etc got crushed or killed.

The Mondragon Cooperatives aren't socialist, they own what they do, and I find it interesting that amid all this global strife and economic loss, their employment rates have stayed consistently better than that of Spain as a whole, and they have not had to lay off a single person in the past 8 years. They shift hours, move unproductive resources to productive uses, etc. They have their own colleges, hospitals, and an extremely profitable bank.

If people could organize in such a fashion, and push toward those things which they were working towards back then, we might have a chance. But even with examples like Mondragon, Americans seem more willing to starve than work with each other, with the reward that a pitiful few get the only real motivation not to..

I don't understand it, but I've watched it for nearly 60 years now. Incredible that we don't HAVE to live like this, but we do...

So I am working toward some network stuff, database, trying to work towards cloud-based things, but also keeping a hand in desktop networks,because, as you pointed out, knowing Cisco, etc, just isn't a way to secure a future any more, and I may have to have something that people will pay me to do for another who knows how many years