Hatin on The Man
The New York Times offers a troika of bad-news stories for those who subscribe to authoritarianism, for all ages:
Colleges Say SAT Mistakes May Affect Scholarships
Retraining Laid-Off Workers, but for What?
As Parents Age, Baby Boomers and Business Struggle to Cope
The first article describes a set of particularly nasty side effects of the College Board’s recent “oopsie†with SAT scores. The second is a stark picture of what typically happens to many laid-off workers, serving a contradiction to the way most Americans were taught to think about (un)employment and education. The third reports how most full-time employers in our society are mismanaging the needs of workers to care for their ailing parents - and how workers are being placed in increasingly awful situations, pitting their work responsibilities and benefits against their families’ medical needs.
I’ve always made it a point to say that self-employment is really the only way to go if you want to be happy and successful. If you want to be miserable, conflicted, marginalized, undervalued, and submissive, then you will find that and more in a typical Corporate America weasel job. I’m not saying that a full-time job is an unacceptable situation for most people; on the contrary, there are many benefits to having one. But those benefits are not what most people think they are… and for most people, the way they conduct their careers causes them to get the least value out of their jobs.
A similar trend exists in higher education, one of the most completely fucked up institutions in our society. Most people go to college for the wrong reasons, miss out on better opportunities to achieve their goals in choosing a typical undergrad education, and wind up paying obscene, unnecessary amounts of money on the whole thing. In this light, it’s even more tragic that the College Board shits their pants with a massive grading-error issue and causes students to lose opportunities for scholarships. So now these students will pay even more to become highly skilled and overqualified for the McJobs that they’ll end up in, as detailed in the second article.
I mean, is there a way to tell some of these high school kids to keep their $100,000 (plus SAT and application fees!) and collect 5% interest on it? Then it’s not so bad if you’re only working for $12/hr - you’ll be making the equivalent of $2.50 more per hour. That’s a 25% raise right off the bat for NOT going to college! Then, after two years, even at a McJob you’ll be making more money from salary - so then use your bankroll to put a down-payment on a $300k house and make 20% a year in equity gains. At the age of 25, you’ll have a job paying $45k a year, a gross worth of $600k in real estate equity, and $300k net worth. Meanwhile, the college grad will have their 45k/yr, a job in which their degree has no value, and a rented apartment in a rat-infested section of town.
The third article is the best, though. Parents not dying quickly enough? Does your father shit his pants every day and your mother finds herself wandering in traffic without a clue? Get back to work, motherfucker! Can’t slack on those TPS reports even if the people who GAVE YOU LIFE are suffering somewhere because you hired a cheap illegal immigrant nurse to care for them (that’s all you could afford) and she’s fucking clueless on how to handle elderly patients. Don’t worry, you won’t be thinking of your parents’ bedsores too much, because you live in fear every day that your union is going to fuck around too much, or your manager will finally snap, or the company will be bought by aggressive equity trust companies (representing foreign investment interests) and you’ll be out of a job when that happens. Sucks to get laid off from a job you’re overqualified for, by a manager who’s not nearly as intelligent or skilled as you are, eh?
(There are ways around this, of course. I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.)