No they cant. Everyone fits into the "would" category at some point. lol at the idea of people starving on principle.

You don't have a leg up on the competition if you are not a native speaker, also the good paying jobs don't care if you speak Spanish. The only sectors that care about your Spanish is McD's and construction, and cooking jobs. All pay less than living wages. There is little to no financial incentive to speak Spanish.

I actually thought this is what Obama had in mind when I voted for him.

the lazy vs the unlazy?
the old vs the young?
the desperate vs the not so desperate

although i agree with you...i also agree with the spirit of what he said. With that mindset its unlikely he'd ever need it.

You don't have a good handle on the word "rude" at all. You were rude and aggressive to Katy and then got called on it. It's not rude to call someone on stepping over the line. It's rude to step over the line. Bad place to play the victim card.

I don't see why you would think that a fair extrapolation. You're one guy working for one company.

I don't doubt it. The companies I have worked with have gone through similar problems, but mostly with bogus sexual harassment claims. Some have half the female employees deciding to file claims just out of revenge for getting fired, or just laid off, or even if they like the place fine -- it's just a way to get extra cash and to hell with the ex-employer. The insurance company will pay regardless of merit, and raise the rates on the employer. So the employer gets screwed from both sides. People suck, what can I say.

On the other hand, it's not like plenty of supervisors and company owners don't make a habit of doing crooked things and mistreating their employees either ....

It's not the fact that people are portrayed as sometimes being scum that I object to so much as when it is made to sound like only certain categories of them are, and within that category, all of them. This is when I know someone's thinking has gone off the rail.

Sometimes, and for some people. It certainly is cumbersome, and I don't appreciate having a tight deadline, or that the forms aren't the most easy to decipher in the world. I'm sure many people with poor English, especially, get quite flustered by them and don't even respond when they should because they just get paralyzed by confusion and doubt.

I just called 12 collection agencies about a job in collections. 3 went out of business. One place was hiring but she wasn't sure what position. Two places told me to send a resume in 2 to 4 weeks, and they both will only take people with experience. Does this help at all with illustrating how my world is different?

Just want to say for the record that I haven't taken anything that anyone's said in this thread personally. I like to try to understand other poster's perspectives. Pretty interesting conversation imo. Overall, I think everyone's been remarkably polite and straightforward. Hope there have been no hard feelings. I love all of you

I was hoping, but I figured it would never come to pass. You can't fix a problem unless you admit it, and you can't admit it unless you share a reality with your opponents that would allow you to focus on the real problems and potential solutions. If you're being painted as a demon by the opposition, all that comes out of your mouth is hellspeak and there is no chance of dialogue or understanding.

Right now nobody wants to do anything hard and risk taking the blame for it. The right's tactics are just to do everything possible to make sure Obama is a one-term president and can list nothing amongst his accomplishments. And the democrats are cowardly and just as beholden to big business as the republicans are anyway, so we're just going to keep treading water until the inevitable next disaster. When it happens, again nobody in charge will take the blame.

I just hope the next one doesn't wind up changing the constitution too much. I've grown kind of fond of it. But maybe I'll be too busy scrabbling for food to care.



Maybe simpler. The employed vs the unemployed?

Sort of. I mean if the spirit of what he said was "there is a varying degree of self-reliance and pride and luck and circumstance" among human beings, then I will agree. But I am frustrated by people who think that the world is a digital place, and group people into "yes" or "no" categories for the ease of lazy thinking. There are NOT "two kinds of people, the lazy and the not" or anything even close to that. There is a wide range of people, aligned in analog fashion along a spectrum, that is influenced by personality, environment and circumstance. There is no non-arbitrary line of "people who would live on the dole" and "people who wouldnt." Everyone has their own line.

I do not think it is helpful to try to group people into categories for moral judgment. It is not productive to think of people on unemployment as lazy, or dependent, or scheming, or gaming the system. Its far more helpful to just consider the actual results and incentives that certain policies create, and weigh the costs and benefits. The spirit of what he was saying seems, to me, to directly work against this.

Really what 12 did you call? I find it very hard to believe that an industry that boasts practically a 100% turnover rate every year has 12 places not hiring in the same city.... and if this is actually the case then its highly isolated. there are far more positions then there are qualified people. I gaurantee if you actually did call then you could call back in a week and get a different answer. My shop was relatively small and we lost 5 people a week at least on avergae. We were never NOT hiring.

If you're doing this to actually get a job i'll help you Dave... seriously.

If you're doing this to just prove your point then you have too much time on your hands...and apparently so do i.

Maybe it's not fair, I make no claims of knowing anything about statistics and I did preface my comment with the fact that it was personal opinion.

Absolutely, I didn't mean for my message to come off as a general defense of employers, being in HR I definitely see the bad side of employers just as much as the bad side of employees.


This is actually the most important thing that I didn't even mention, there are probably somewhere out there very very many people for whom English is not their first language that are legitimately owed benefits but are not receiving them because they are too intimidated to try to deal with the system. That sucks because as long as they're handing out money, it may as well be to everybody who is eligible.

The other 6 places hired you?

And in 15 minutes you managed to find at least one place that was hiring and 2 places that are taking resumes? Are you sure you are proving the point you think you are?

Secretaries too. Those are often minimum wage jobs though, and minimum wage is unlivable, or close enough, in many large cities.

Important to this issue though is that it takes years to learn a language, much less have anything approaching true fluency in it. And that plenty of communities don't really have that much of a Spanish-speaking population. So while knowing Spanish is nice enough, learning it is hardly a solution for unemployed people. Unless we plan on paying them unemployment benefits for three or four years, among other expenses necessary to learn that language and find a place to put it to use.

The other 7 weren't hiring. Yeah, I took the day off today, not by choice. If they were hiring, I would do it for kicks, why not?

They ought to put you and me in charge, Blarg. We'd get some stuff done. Of course it would be a little socialist but you and I know they would eat it up.

It always cracks me up to hear people who collect social security and Medicare bemoaning the socialism of America.

too funny.

call back in a week....if you come back then and say they still arent hiring i'll know you're lying. No agency in the world thats over 50 people is immune to collections turnover...absolutely none.

myguess is that you're exaggerating or the places you called were small shops and probably not what i was talking about.

Call NCO....im pretty sure they have an office in LA and i know they're hiring.

I think it's fine for me to pay the taxes to give people acess to free ESL classes. They're the ones who want to stay herw, and oddly, Americans are far more tolerant of a worker speaking poor English than Spanish-speaking immigrants is of me screwing up their language. It's a very strange double-standard. Also, if I have to satisfy all the foreign language speakers at a critical opportunistic threshhold to satisfy everyone, I also have to learn, Manderin, Canotnese, Veitnamese, Thai, Tagalog, Japanese, Korean, and Russian. It is far more economic to have everyone speak a common language than ask the majority population to compensate for all the minority-speakers' needs.

I think its fine for you to pay the taxes for that too.

Ok fine heres the question then...if making yourself more marketable, moving to a better job market, making sacrifices and starting over in another field are all out of the question then what exactly is your plan?

I as well... i am a lot less opinionated on immigration other than to say i welcome it.

I collected UI in California for 25 weeks after being laid off. I got my present job through a temp agency just one week shy of my benefits expiring.

I can't afford my COBRA $1600/mo bill and individual health insurance programs in Cali charge nearly as much for a family of four. But, I'm working, so that makes me better off than many around here (Sacramento area).

I couldn't say whether it made me lazy or not. I'm inherently lazy. I do what I need to do to support my family, though. I work in IT, you apply for those jobs online. I applied for dozens of jobs. I would have applied for hundreds, had there been that many openings. I went on a handful of interviews, took my present job immediately when it was offered.

UI was half what I was making. My wife was (is) a stay-at-home mom. She started applying for jobs, nothing. No recent experience or skills, don'tcha know.

I don't feel one bit bad about accepting benefits. We couldn't have lived on what I did accept, I cashed in my 401k to make ends meet.

The federal government stood by, ignored repeated warnings about what was going on while Wall Street traders ruined the entire world economy. The oversight agencies, such as the SEC, did nothing.

So, wtf, why should I feel guilty. Frankly, had I been sharp enough to game the system, I probably would have gamed it. I just collected what I was legally allowed, kept looking for work and finally found some.

I think in my case the system worked the way it was designed to. We still don't have health insurance - if something catastrophic happens to one of us, I'll take advantage of another system and file bankruptcy so quickly the paper will scorch.

One thing I notice is the shame has largely been taken out of these systems. In front of whom should I feel ashamed? Government bureaucrats? People walking away from their upside-down home loans? Criminally corrupt derivative traders?

I did talk to my wife about moving. We looked seriously at it. Denver, Houston are two areas that weren't crushed - at least to the extent Northern California has been. We had no money to move with, I was wondering how I would pay for getting to these areas to try to look for work. Luckily I found a job at home.

The system is in place for a reason. Look at old Depression-era photos of soup kitchen lines. The old movies about kids riding the freight cars. Why shouldn't we take steps to ensure that a situation like that doesn't happen again?

I'm not a big advocate of government spending on social programs. But in the case of the current recession, government allowed it to happen. Given the vast amounts of money they waste on bull****, they can throw some at families impacted by the results of their ****up.

Who should be blamed? If any one name should be thrown out, I'll take Alan Greenspan. Even if the Fed is not really a government agency.

(edit to clear up a point that I get no benefits working my temp contract, so I'm still 'underemployed' imo but making a decent hourly wage)

Spot on IMO.

No, I just thought it firmly supported mine.

Why quote me then, as if in answer? Oh well.

If you subsidize something, you get more of it. In this case, we are subsidizing unemployment and look what is happening....people aren't going back to work. Sure, a lot of companies aren't hiring yet - although in the last ISM manuf survey 60% of companies said they planned to hire - I know people that haven't gone back to work because they are collecting unemployment. I don't know when enough is enough but I think after 2+ years, something has to change. Slowly reduce the benefit to give the prospective worker MORE incentive to find a job? Something.