There’s an amazing amount of negative emotion going around here for a person who not only started a blog to try and make cash, but then honestly reported it, only to have the hammer come down on her. We have created a system that pays more to not work or not even try, and punish those who make extra effort instead of rewarding them for it.
While many people could find work if they were willing to relocate, I don't think most posters here have experienced being overqualified for a position, and that is fueling this ignorance. No manager at McDonalds is going to hire her. He is fully aware that she is going to jump ship as soon as a real job pops up, and then he has to hire and train someone else. He also does not want someone more qualified than he is, to make him look bad, or threaten his position. He does not want someone who is going to analyze how things are run, form opinions, and spread them. He wants robot burger makers who will stay there forever, be clean, and not late.
Fast food is also the type of mindless repetitive work that is much more stressful on an educated mind than it is for people of lower intellect and knowledge. I'm not saying that out of hubris, in fact I consider it a burden. My dog is a lot happier than I am most of the time, and most people I know. Mongoloids are a happy bunch in general as long as their basic needs are met.
Just as rape can leave a scar in the mind which never heals after though the physical wounds are gone, an active inquisitive mind which is aware of its potential and the banality of its existence is a form of torture in and of itself. You can "sack-up" for a while, and I think you can learn something from _any_ job, but after a while it will stagnate and start having adverse negative psychological effects on some. Those jobs are intended to be transient and stop-gap, not career day goals for retirement.
Also, everyone can't be like everyone else. Not everyone has an Iron will. That is the beauty of the human condition and that which makes meeting others and sharing ideas worth the effort. Like a wild horse that is broken, some people can snap and never come back from it. Some things cant be unseen, and some events cannot be forgotten. There is no single "right" way to be when it comes to the human condition, it's biologically, socially, and philosophically impossible.
Even a total nut job can stumble upon a valuable idea, and that might be his only contribution to society in his whole life, but if the idea is important enough, it just might be worth it.
I live with constant explosions, gore, violence and death. Then I forward videos to decision makers from captured militants which contain gruesome Islamic-Death-Cult media files and rantings about Allah. Then I go have lunch.
Swap me with Einstein and he might have withdrawn into a hermit state and never made a contribution to Science. Swap me with Caligula and I might be having more fun.
That being said, I'm from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, and I decided that it wasn't the place for me to thrive professionally. I joined the Army, went around the world a few times, got married a notch or two above my station to a lovely girl from Finland, and am currently sitting in Afghanistan as I write this, as a civilian this time around. She is in Iraq wearing a uniform.
I make more than anyone in my family, but I didn’t forget where I was from, and I didn’t forget that the best way to have money is to not spend it. The national savings level plummeted since the 80s, and that coupled with the credit bubble left a lot of people over extended.
I had a plan, and 95% of it has worked very well for me. I also had backup plans, and then tertiary backups. This lawyers plan did not work, but she's trying.
It's hard to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, because you view the world from different eyes, but it should be easy to at least admit that things aren’t always so black and white. We live in a world with varying shades of gray.
Lastly, it's really funny to hear people talk about others balking about their "tax money" helping others. No one is an island, and I pay more in taxes than most people make in a year; I also put my arse on the line for it, but that's my call to make. Everyone wants to whine about bailing someone out. But you forget that your apples come from Washington State. Your purchased goods come from ports in California, Louisiana, and the Eastern Seaboard.
So when your bailing out Katrina victims, you’re really bailing yourself out; just because you aren’t able to draw a direct line between their contributions to these United States and your own tax dollars does not mean there is no link, it just means that this "perfect union" we are striving for is a spiders web of massive proportions, and oversimplifications of complicated issues is not helping matters. It’s not the helping that people dislike, it’s how poorly we manage to execute everything and the waste that comes with it. Most of our politicians are born of nepotism and aren’t really qualified to do anything but win popularity contests (that’s what we call elections).
In Norway, their government is not allowed to run a deficit. They can only spend what they have, and are required to save a certain amount per year for emergencies. They also have socialized most services, have much higher education rates, lower STD and teen pregnancy rates, and pay out $1600 a month for perpetual unemployment. They decided that human misery should not be turned into a dollar sign. Guess what? Less than 2% of people use their unemployment there. Norway just invested about $350B in OUR country because they expect their investment to go up when we recover.
They also treat drugs as a medical problem instead of a law enforcement problem, and their prisons aren’t full of non-violent offenders. A surprising amount of "druggies" are trying to self medicate because they've never had access to proper medical care, and it's proven that keeping someone off the streets (even by paying their rent) is, in total, WAY cheaper than letting them go down the rabbit hole and end up living in a box. I want cost effective plans, not “moral” absolutes which might make you feel better, but the math proves ineffective.
With prisons paying 38k per prisoner, I think a major rethink of how we operate is in order, because it would only cost 14k per year for the average persons rent, and we save a lot more by keeping those kids in school and out of soup kitchens. Future productivity needs to be taken into account.
I’m not making a case for that system here, as Americans would abuse it to death, but am suggesting that implementation is more important than ideology in many cases. Our polarized socio-industrial-government complex makes fertile ground for each side to make an initiative, and have the other side either not fund it or regulate it to death in an attempt to prove that they were right and that get another vote.
Simply taxing pot would solve so many problems, yet people resist it because of their personal aversion to its use. It's a ton safer for everyone than alcohol, and no one is making you use it. It would erase the black market which funds crime, and make quality control and education available so people know what their getting into.
Giving things forbidden fruit status and denying information, be it birth control or recreational chemicals, is not a solution. It's simply the lesser of two evils, since their not going anywhere. Ever wonder why we have tax “brackets” and not a floating point system?
Ever wonder why we don’t just tax businesses and purchases instead of income itself? Tracking 8 million businesses is a lot easier than making every worker try and figure out what they owe, year after year. It’s a zero sum game, with artificial markets and people producing 0 net gain at the IRS.
Once people realize that just because they decide that an opinion, option, choice, or decision is not right for them and their family is not cause to prevent others from making that decision for themselves, we will be a lot better off.
So instead of complaining about this lawyer trying to *gasp* turn a buck and work somewhere near her ability level (lets not forget that at your next interview, telling them you currently work at McDonalds is NOT going to get you hired), why not turn your flaming ire at the companies that have gotten “to big to fail” and the people that enable them.
This “recession” is actually capitalism self correcting itself after years of artificially inflated profits because companies thing that they can make infinite gains instead of being happy with a stable, responsible growth rate – and be willing to focus elsewhere when a market is saturated instead of trying to get subsidies and tax credits to further gorge themselves like a mouse on an orgasm button.
Corporate welfare costs way more than individual welfare, so if you got this far, congratulations, and FLAME ON!
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