Unemployment benefits story (sympathy or sob)

Hmm.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/business/economy/24econ.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

 

Okay. So what?

 

People on welfare have to prove that they've exhausted all other options and assets and have nowhere else to go in order to have the true basics of life.

 

It's a pipe dream to hope to live like an adult, instead of a middle-aged teenager? It's a pipe dream to hope you will, and think you deserve to, have a $35,000-a-year job again?

Well, now I really am depressed.

 

Sucks, doesn't it. Kinda makes you wish we, as voters, had backed up all our big talk about how we were sick of both parties while they were ruining everything in the 80s and 90s by running massive deficits in the face of strong economies.

 

Sad that the 40-hour work week is not enough anymore. When do the riots start?

 

Hopefully never. That'll happen when we're not talking about 'You may have to live in larger family units and eat bologna and cheese a lot' to real hardship on what the global scale of hardship would be. I don't think things will ever get that bad.

 

Say you're a college prof, eh? Who could have guessed?

 

How much are they allowed to make?

 

This thread has made me hungry for a bologna and cheese sandwich.

 

So why isn't this trickling down?

 

Rick, you must rent and not own. You surely have never called a plumber service or appliance service provider to find out its $75 just to get a person to show up to your house, and another $150 to lift a finger, and likely more. That's price gouging, it goes on all the time, and its ridiculous.

YF taking $200 off someone for a 20 minute job is the same. Now, he later equivocated that he had some actual costs built in to that 20 minute job. That's fine. He's making his money off of a business that wants their machine working so they can sell stuff and make their own profit, so that is some further justification. Whatever. But still, for you guys to sit around here and act like there should be no price-gouging regulation, no antitrust regulation, is a couple of centuries behind. Charging someone $600 an hour to fix their coffee machine, which is the impression YF left before he started equivocating, is unconscionable.

Now Rick, I know you are the board Spock and Kanye West style pseudo intellectual, but you have a tendency to wade into stuff you know absolutely nothing about and then act like you have figured it all out by applying your Star Trek logic. You have no idea how silly it makes you look. You and doctorquant both prance around here like you're so knowledgeable, enlightened, and above the fray, and then you resort to petty name calling and insults when someone dare pose an alternative view. So, to both of you, I say: go screw yourselves.

YF, congrats on turning the unemployment thread into an infomercial. Like I said earlier, you have a certain wonder inducing quality I am at a loss to describe that I possess none of. I don't envy it. I don't find it desirable. But I sure as heck can't hate on it, either.