jokersarewild

Happy birthday, ya geezer

I work at one of the local Wal-Mart Supercenters, and I see people who've never worked a day in their lives come in and spend their food stamps on sh t you can barely consider "food", besides that it's edible (cookies, snack cakes, etc). It's bullshit, and it's annoying. And yes, Unemployment is ridiculous. We keep hiring new people, and I see new people in places I've shopped at/ate at/etc. Jobs are out there. And of the ones desperate to find a job, what I've seen/heard from some is that they get more money on Unemployment than they would working at like McDonalds or something. So they stay on Unemployment. And then the economy dies. Also, California is far too liberal for its own good

I guess ya never heard of the 1st Amendment. I wasn't speaking legally. He has the right to call them all of bunch of cocksuckers, if he so chose. I was saying his complaints would be asinine because he made many times his salary in bonuses, an amount that is itself asinine. But what can you do, eh? People that are on food stamps are bums. Case closed. I don't agree with that, but it's not a factual point that can be proved or disproved, so we're at a stalemate.

I guess ya never heard of the 1st Amendment. I wasn't speaking legally. He has the right to call them all of bunch of cocksuckers, if he so chose. I was saying his complaints would be asinine because he made many times his salary in bonuses, an amount that is itself asinine. But what can you do, eh?

I was curious, to those of you who have used both systems, why do you like or dislike them?

Happy Birthday. Get smashed

Well yeah. She sounded good at the time to some people, but it's like with many decisions you'll make in your life: Something sounds good (eating all of the ice cream you can) but after you start realizing what the outcome would be (vomiting), it just seems like a really bad idea. And yes, I just equated voting for Palin to eating until you puke. --- To Snafu: It all depends on how he plays it. If he can work the media by being more sensationalist than the Right, then he'll get that second term. It's all about making people think the Right wants them to be unhealthy or some such nonsense. I wouldn't say Obama has lost just yet, my friend. Anybody got bets for who will win the 2012 election? I have $1 on Obama. --- To TJ: If the Right can make that known more than whatever message Obama plans on getting out, then Obama will lose. It's all about who can make the most sensationalist journalistic spoutings. The Right would have to remind the American people over, and over, and over again about how Obama lied to us. They would have to get louder and louder each time, probably stopping just short of "Oh, and Obama eats babies, too! Ha!" Simply put, the loudest guy in the shouting match wins.

I did not. I will rewatch it and get back to ya.

My point was, Hugo, that if you get 11 million dollars in bonuses, you have 0 right to complain that the people under you get food stamps because they can't afford to eat.

Wow, the Tea Partyers toward the end are fucking idiots. Also, I do agree with pretty much everything the guy said. The last two or three minutes are really spot on. However, I'm not 100% sure what the union protests in Wisconsin entailed, so I can't agree nor disagree on that part.

Let us take the CEO of McDonald's who made 18 million one year. He has 1.5 million employees under him. Divide his salary by the number of employees and you get 12 dollars. It is quite easy to justify his salary. You didn't justify his salary. You gave me a number the CEO doesn't control divided by his income. It was actually probably the most ridiculous "justification" of anything I've ever seen. You did absolutely nothing for your argument. Tell me what he DOES. I'm talking about what he DOES. If he PERSONALLY leads those 1.5 million employees each day, has massive conference calls with the stores each day to give them pep talks, etc, etc, then he deserves his salary. THAT is justification. http://www.steverrobbins.com/articles/ceojob#part1 Looking at that, we can see that CEO means you do alot for the company. Or are supposed to. Anyway, looking at what they do, the actual amount of work they put in isn't worth even 18 million. 7 figure salary? Maybe. Higher 6 figure salary? Most definitely. After all, what they do affects the whole company. They deserve to be well paid. But we're joking ourselves if we can say with a straight face 18 million dollars a year is how much they "earn". That's beyond "well paid", and far beyond "comfortable". Now, I looked up your "18 million" assertion. Know what his "base salary" was for that year? 1.4 million dollars. Now THAT number sounds about right. If you run a company (especially a large company like McDonalds), you should get around that for the work you put in. You know what the rest was? "Performance bonuses". So he "earned" about 8 times his "base salary"? I'm glad McDonald's is doing well, but Jesus. That seems a little excessive. And how much in "performance bonuses" did those lower than him get? The trickle-down of these bonuses stops somewhere, probably just shy of the people actually serving the food. But I'm sure if you cut those bonuses down, you could pay those who actually interact with the customers on a personal level a little bit more to work with. An employee who has fewer financial worries is a happier employee!

I'm mildly envious!

Oil companies and the like pay well because their business plan doesn't involve screwing the little guy to get their cash. I do believe that you shouldn't get paid as much as the people with more skills (there would be no reason to improve and do better otherwise), but the people getting many millions in salaries simply can't be worth what they're getting paid. If you started the company, sure, why not? If you actually built the damn thing from the ground up, you deserve every penny you get (I believe that Sam Walton earned every damn penny he and his offspring will ever receive). But when you look at what certain people actually DO for a company, vs. how much they get paid, you start seeing things not add up properly. Also, anybody who complains about paying taxes because of food stamps or partial unemployment, etc, while believing those in fast food/retail/whatever deserve to be poor AND has the power to change that (i.e. the higher ups of a company) is a moron. I'm not saying the people on the lower end of these companies deserve 100k a year salaries. To be plain honest, they are jobs anybody can do. But these people do need to eat and pay bills, etc. They should be able to afford food/enough gas to get to work/power/heat/etc on what they make. I think that's fair. Companies really run on the little people, and the little people tend to run a better company if they're less stressed about bills and the like. They should have to budget. One of the complaints that Phreak had not too long ago was that the amount of food stamps given where he lives is dramatically more than the family size he quoted needs. That's a huge load of bullshit. Having a small amount of money means you have to budget, not that the government gets to heap on loads more for food than you can healthily eat. It comes down to this: Either pay increased wages, or pay the taxes. It's really that simple. Making people too poor to eat should not be how a business is run.

It's because TJ is stuck in his conservative mindset that poor people are bad because they didn't make themselves independently wealthy with good business plans and such. Mind you, that "independent wealth" is ALWAYS made by working said poor people like slaves for meager wages so they have more to line their pockets with. But why help them? TJ doesn't feel he should be financially responsible for these people, even though he supports crushing them under his boot to make money. TJ can go on and on about handouts all he wants, but you know why they want these "handouts"? Because the richest 1% of Americans hold like 70% of all of the money in the country, or something like that. When you can have people that run a company making multiple millions in a year, while the people on the bottom make 15,000 a year OR LESS, it's plain fucking unethical. Don't give me some bullshit diatribe about how they "worked for it". f you. There is NO AMOUNT OF WORK THOSE ASSHOLES PUT IN TO EARN MILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR. Spread that out to the employees so they have livable wages and don't NEED food stamps and SSI. Being the cause of the problem, while calling out the problem and doing nothing to fix it, is bullshit. If companies paid us what we are actually WORTH to them, instead of the lowest amount they can legally get away with, then you would see a lot changing in this country. Instead, the poor get poorly paid to hold the ladder while the rich get ricocheted to the top of it. In short, TJ hates the poor because he thinks he's a better person than they are for having more money than them. You'll never get an answer, Phreak. Besides euthanizing them. He's probably all for that.

Son of a bitch, it's 1984, but for modern times!