Occupy Wall Street

Discussion in 'Political Discussions' started by ryoder, Oct 5, 2011.

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  1. BobbyJim

    BobbyJim New Member

    Is this more evidence that guidance counselors should have some years of industry experience before being allowed to guide students?:naughty:
     
  2. Jonathan Whatley

    Jonathan Whatley Well-Known Member

    Now, according to an Internet report, somebody apparently working from the Chicago Board of Trade thought it was a good idea to throw hundreds of McDonald's job applications out the office window, in the general direction of Occupy Chicago protesters.

    How does someone get to the point where this seems like a good idea?

    "I have a few hundred papers to distribute. I don't feel like handing them out or setting up a stand like everyone else. I think I'll throw them all out the window. If people don't graciously pick them up and fill them out for the chance to submit them to McDonald's, I'll assure myself they must be lazy and entitled."

    "I'll starkly disobey obvious black-letter littering laws. But I'll tell myself the people picking up my trash are the public nuisance."

    "I'll do all this in a way in which I take no public responsibility whatsoever for my action. But the people down below, now, they've got a problem taking responsibility for themselves."

    If you're thinking, dear reader, "a brief distraction in the air and few hundred pieces of litter; small price to pay for free expression" - I pretty much agree! If we're not setting up a double standard where the Occupy protesters don't get the same sympathetic discretion for their protest as this guy gets for his counter-protest.
     
  3. raristud

    raristud Member

    I wonder if OWS will do an office space printer smash in response. :scratchchin:

    [ORIGINAL] Office Space Fax Machine Scene in HD - YouTube
     
  4. Jonathan Whatley

    Jonathan Whatley Well-Known Member

    I know now what I'm going to do to claw my way out of poverty.

    I'm going to use a broad religious exemption somewhere to found the Puritan University.

    Our one subject offering will be an unprecedented set of FIVE-degree joint degree programs in Ministry, Social Work, Counseling, Economics and Public Policy.

    Our graduates will be ready to perform at the highest levels in all five fields at once.

    Someone has a problem that could be ameliorated with money?

    Trust a Puritan graduate to know just how to stuff a job application, from McDonald's, in their face.

    That on its own must at least be worth a bachelor's, in all five subjects.

    Advanced techniques at the master's and doctoral levels will include Subway and Walmart applications, and helpful accounts of how the speaker, an armed forces veteran, or both, overcame some adversity.

    Bruce and Cory and BobbyJim and half this board will fill my coffers with money, which I'll know I earned through my own hard work!

    We'll be as successful in higher education as this model is in Pre-K.

    Puritan University. We are the predestined. Suck it up whiners. Hippies get off our lawn.™
     
  5. Jonathan Whatley

    Jonathan Whatley Well-Known Member

    Guess we could also offer a degree in Engineering Management, since getting a job at McDonald's is scalable to problems of any size.
     
  6. BobbyJim

    BobbyJim New Member

     
  7. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    Working at McDonald's is the first step to getting a Bachelor's degree. Degree Maps - excelsior.edu

    Also, McDonald's tends to hire many (most?) of it's mid-level managers from within. There is opportunity for advancement for the people who are most loyal and capable, which is more than can be said for many other jobs that are destined to be dead end :Flush:
     
  8. raristud

    raristud Member

  9. Jonathan Whatley

    Jonathan Whatley Well-Known Member

    Puritan University represents the American Dream. People of all faiths or no faith at all are at least sort of fully welcome.

    You must accept a statement of faith in our Calvinist work ethic - that people are to valued by, and that the world will fully reward them for, their personal hard work alone.

    …Now if this seems like a reading of Luther and Calvin kind of completely reversed from what they were actually talking about themselves, well. Like I said, American Dream. Suck it up whiners. Hippies get off our lawn.™
     
  10. Jonathan Whatley

    Jonathan Whatley Well-Known Member

    Isn't this kind of wonderful?

    Occupy Nashville, Republican students find common ground (Nicole Young, The Tennesseean, November 4, 2011)

    Video at the link!
     
  11. BobbyJim

    BobbyJim New Member

    Is the tide changing for OWS?

    “Next, the protesters’ trump card was reexamined. Previously, at any mention of the First Amendment, OWS’s opponents would scatter. Yesterday evening, the issue was discussed seriously. There is no right of “occupation” included in the Bill of Rights, nor does a desire to protest accord a right to take over private property, or disregard the laws of the land. They couldn’t march into Barnes & Noble and take it over for a month with impunity. At the October 20 community-board meeting, the city’s elected representatives were blindly fawning over Occupy Wall Street’s claims to be exercising their rights. Now there is talk also of responsibilities, and it is very much welcome.

    It is obvious to anyone who has spent time down in Zuccotti Park that “the law” is not of paramount concern to those in the commune. OWS’s sophomoric representatives will pay lip service to diffuse discussions about community relations and compliance with the law, but they broadly presume their cause to be above it. Those who consider themselves the vanguard of the revolution are, entirely logically given that conceit, unconcerned with the niceties of the society whose institutions they consider it imperative they overthrow, and those who regard the commune as a microcosmic blueprint for a brave new world respond to all questions by referring to their own “institutions.” “

    Is the Tide Turning for OWS? - Charles C. W. Cooke - National Review Online
     
  12. Abner

    Abner Well-Known Member

    Jonathon,

    Excellent video/movie review. In short, this video is absolute crap. Clownishly grotesque in epic proportions.

    Abner :smile:




     
  13. Jonathan Whatley

    Jonathan Whatley Well-Known Member

    Remember that giant national job fair McDonald's held a few months ago? They initially advertised for 50 000 jobs, then hired for 62 000.

    After about one million people applied, according to reports. Meaning something like 95% of applicants were rejected.

    Getting a job at McDonald's is absolutely wonderful for some people in some situations. A helpful survival thing for some others. But not nearly as scalable as people might think.

    It's Harder To Get A Job At McDonald's Than It Is To Get Into Harvard (their headline, not mine), (Joe Weisenthal, Business Insider, April 28, 2011)
     
  14. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    Perhaps for a management job, but the McDonald's directly across from my place of employment constantly has the "help wanted" notices out. If you're willing to flip burgers and sling french fries, there are jobs out there....you just have to swallow your pride, admit that the $100K 18th Century French Art History degree wasn't such a great idea, and apply.

    Before everything went online (including job applications), I used to carry a bunch of job applications from various fast-food places with me, and when I encountered a layabout collecting welfare who complained there were no jobs available, I would present them with several job applications. To the best of my knowledge, none of them ever submitted any of the applications.
     
  15. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    You make a lot of assumptions. Maybe your McDonald's was hiring, but mine never was when I was young and unemployed. If only you knew how many applications I filled out, how many resumés I sent out, how many times I simply barged into a place and asked for an interview on the spot. I did everything I could think of and it took me about 8 months to find a job doing anything anywhere... and even then, it was for only about 15 hours a week at minimum wage. It was my only job for about another 5 months before I finally got hired for seasonal work at a retail store for a month whose hours let me keep both jobs for the time (I'm not sure if you can really imagine how happy I was to have a second job!) but still several more months before I FINALLY got hired completely on a whim when I randomly ran into an old coworker who told me that his current employer was hiring and then gave me an absolutely brilliant reference to his boss.

    Yes, I took it the 15 hour job, but guess what Bruce, it did more harm than good. You can criticize other people for not taking the kind of job that I did, but hey, maybe they are just smarter than I am. My little job of a few hours per day made it very difficult for me to schedule an interview for another company. Sure, I kept sending my resumés out and kept barging into places and making phone calls by the boatload, but between the awkward hours and the travel time to various locations, I was basically doomed.

    So was I a lazy loser for not being able to magically materialize jobs on the spot when I needed one? How many of the people you criticize are not as lucky as I was when I bumped into someone who was willing to help me?
     
  16. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    God, but this one's getting old. Does anyone seriously believe that studying the liberal arts has meaningfully impacted the unemployment rate, or that this describes a majority of young people starting their careers these days with a significant level of student debt? There are plenty of people who majored in professional studies whose degrees are, for lack of a better term, underwater.

    As I said before, both sides need to stop wasting energy mocking the other, and start focusing on common problems.
     
  17. Jonathan Whatley

    Jonathan Whatley Well-Known Member

    The president of the Berklee College of Music has a letter to parents of prospective students on the site of that famous contemporary music school.

    A Letter from the President to Parents of Prospective Students (Roger H. Brown, Berklee College of Music)

    We can all think of similar sets of applications for a serious, intensive, high-level and successful study of visual art.

    Okay, more direct applications for studio art come to mind much more quickly, but lots of art history people also bring studio skills. And there's that degree's next cognate over the other way, history. And where was it that degree in Bruce's example had its particular focus in? In French art history? Could a degree in French art history have included a serious grounding in the language French? Very likely. Scratch the surface and there could be all sorts of marketable and current angles and applications even to this example of a relatively unmarketable degree.

    And yet, there are serious structural problems getting people to good and suitable jobs that extend to candidates with degrees in some of the generally hot fields, older workers with years of transferable experience, immigrants with years of international experience, etc., etc.
     
  18. Abner

    Abner Well-Known Member

  19. farmboy

    farmboy Member

    Yours too? :headache:
     
  20. farmboy

    farmboy Member

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