Home › Forums › Open Discussion › Earth to Hooper, Earth to Hooper! Come in, Hooper!
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January 7, 2011 at 2:58 am #712993
dawsonctParticipantHoop, your GF worked 14+ hours every day, 7 days/week!? She must have been open for three meal services, or was it lunch/dinner/full bar until 2, and she was there the whole time?
As a future restaurateur, I would be curious what she thought her failures were. Bad lease? Location? Concept? That is an almost inconceivable amount of work, whether she was running a one person operation, or had employees.
January 7, 2011 at 3:04 am #712994
dawsonctParticipantI think the best way we can pay for the extra education, BTW, would be to have a National service obligation for all Americans, and those who want to become Americans.
2 years in the military (really, an auxiliary. Those who enter the regular Army out of that get extra benefits), or 2 years of public service.
Might instill a sense of ownership in Americans again; help people see America as something they are PART of.
January 7, 2011 at 3:15 am #712995
Genesee HillParticipantdawsonct:
On a side note, yes, I can also still “smell” the air conditioning on those old Streamliners, such as, the Great Northern Empire Builder, or the Northern Pacific North Coast Limited!
January 7, 2011 at 3:36 am #712996
dawsonctParticipantI love riding on a train. Even the ratty Superliners can’t take away the thrill of a train ride.
I would sure like to see the rolling stock improved immensely, and beds improved to handle much higher speed trains.
The Milwaukee Road had it right too, we should have gone electric. It would be a good idea to start converting back.
January 7, 2011 at 3:42 am #712997
Genesee HillParticipantJanuary 7, 2011 at 3:44 am #712998
JoBParticipantcan we agree on this FUSE petition too?
https://secure3.convio.net/pn/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=671
January 7, 2011 at 3:59 am #712999
JoBParticipanthooper 1961
Young man…
what makes you think a liberal has no idea what it takes to run a business?
I have started enough businesses to both succeed spectacularly and fail miserably.
I know exactly what it takes to run a successful business.
The biggest lesson i learned about business is that you can have all the business sense in the world and run your business into the ground if you forget that the success of your business depends more on the employees who deliver your goods or services than it does on your spectacular management skill or the financial management of your bottom line.
If you don’t get that one right..
it won’t matter how much capital you have
or how many tax breaks you get..
you will ultimately fail.
People whose ultimate goal in business is to make money rarely succeed spectacularly… unless of course all they are doing is juggling money.
You have to be passionate about your business and passionate about your employees in order to succeed…
and it sure helps to genuinely care about people and actually like your customers.
Hard work alone won’t guarantee success.
which.. btw.. is the basic concept you seem to be missing…
there are lots of people who may have worked a lot harder than you have
but who haven’t had your opportunities
and have still failed through no fault of their own.
That doesn’t make them losers.
January 7, 2011 at 5:05 am #713000
dawsonctParticipantJanuary 7, 2011 at 5:19 am #713001
hooper1961Memberbreakfast, lunch and dinner
January 7, 2011 at 6:40 am #713002
RarelyEverParticipanti love a lot of the points a lot of you have been making; i’m originally from germany (moved here when i was 21), and jst wanred to add a couple of observations from a, shall we say, outside point of view:
1. military service (up until most recently) was mandatory in germany, for both sexes; however, one either chose to serve 12 months in the military or 18 months as a social worker. those who chose to serve in civil society got to work closely with the disadvantaged, teaching young people compassion and opening their eyes to a part of society that often gets overlooked. once you get to know someone with perhaps a disability personally, you are much comfortable paying taxes that go towards services that support those in society that need it.
2. i’m sad to say that i feel the political battle has already been lost in this country; in europe, if your government tries to enact legislation to the disadvantage of the general public, said public will strike, as one, in solidarity. this would never be possible here, as the ones that are hurt the most by the government’s decisions are also the ones that cannot afford to walk off their job and lose their pay, even for an hour. the balance of power between government and the people is lost, with the gap ever widening. essentially, the rich become richer, and the poor are more and more disenfranchised.
here, money is power and will more and more often win. the system is designed this way.. one example – elections are not national holidays here, and the people who most need their voices to be heard often don’t have the opportunity to walk away from their job for a few hours to vote.
i know i made a lot of sweeping generalizations, but i ask you to look past my broad and awkward brush strokes and see if you can’t perceive the message behind them.
if i wasn’t typing with one finger on my tiny cell phone i might have done better. :)
January 7, 2011 at 2:18 pm #713003
redblackParticipantyou did just fine, rarely ever, and you’re spot on. americans could learn a lot from germans.
especially the concept of the general strike.
January 7, 2011 at 4:09 pm #713004
JoBParticipantthere it is in a nutshell…
i pasted this article from Mother Jones in another thread… but it is appropriate here too..
the poor literally can’t afford to walk off their jobs here …
and that is the deliberate result of policy…
oh.. and it’s lucrative too.
January 7, 2011 at 4:51 pm #713005
dawsonctParticipantOh yeah, a comfortable and well-educated middle-class is VERY difficult to deceive and mislead.
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Best to ruin the public education system, and send most of the union jobs overseas, so the proletariat can’t afford to protest against the privations being visited upon them, nor will they have the intellectual capacity to understand WHO is doing it to them.
Looks like that Republican Party strategy has been a success.
January 7, 2011 at 5:06 pm #713006
hoffanimalParticipantJOB “sometimes it’s really easy to forget that the majority of those who post here on the forum are in the lucky category”
That’s a rather huge assumption don’t you think, and what is exactly “lucky”?
January 7, 2011 at 5:56 pm #713007
JoBParticipanthoffanimal..
a roof over our head and funds to pay for our ISP.
yes, i do know that there are some who post here on the forum who access the computers at the library.. but for the most part we post from our homes or from our jobs or via our smartphones…
i would say that makes us pretty lucky.
January 9, 2011 at 5:56 pm #713008
redblackParticipantthe funny thing is that we americans perfected the general strike through unionization. then, as dawson pointed out, we got comfortable and lazy, dropped our guard, forgot the struggle that gave us political voice and decent income/wealth, got our pockets picked, and were convinced not to trust our own government – which happens to be one of the best in the history of the universe.
this is the same aristocracy that was running things when the american and french revolutions happened. only now they’ve made it a lot harder to strip them of power – and money – on this continent. and that’s partly thanks to some semblence of democracy, which allowed them to consolidate power and money.
what a paradox.
just remember: if you’re going to strike and maybe riot, don’t burn your own neighborhood down. that makes no sense.
btw, cops and firefighters are union members. they should be on the side of labor in any hypothetical general strike. hearts and minds, people. chat up your public servants whenever possible. they’re your neighbors, and they’re not anyone’s private security force.
well, until xi corporation gets back from iraq, anyway.
January 9, 2011 at 6:13 pm #713009
hooper1961Memberyes unions provided a counter balance. but they also cut their own throats by protecting non productive workers, requiring inefficient work rules and the like.
i still remember being berated while employed by the state inspecting a construction site, the construction worker needed something held in place for a few minutes while he tied some re-bar together, i held it in place for a couple of minutes. and that afternoon i heard from the boss not to do that again, how inefficient is this.
January 9, 2011 at 6:45 pm #713010
dawsonctParticipantYour boss asked you not to donate your services to another entity while you were on the clock!? Weird.
January 9, 2011 at 6:55 pm #713011
hooper1961Memberi was multi-tasking and as a state employee i was serving the public interest by improving the efficiency of delivering a public facilities construction project.
January 9, 2011 at 8:02 pm #713012
redblackParticipanthooper: my union has never protected unproductive workers.
if you don’t pull your weight on a job site; are clumsy, accident prone, or under the influence; aren’t properly trained; etc. then you’re down the road – just like any other sector or the work force.
except for maybe insurance companies. worked for anthem one summer, and i have never seen so many doughnut-eating do-nothing “hey slow down there boy, you don’t gotta do it all right now!” people in all of my life.
January 9, 2011 at 8:08 pm #713013
hooper1961Memberredblack that is good to hear. i also noted that the union workers constructing public works projects worked very hard or they seamed to disappear from the site. the contractor would not keep unproductive workers on the site.
i believe the protections of unproductive workers happens more in the unionized white collar work force (teachers and government employees in particular)
January 9, 2011 at 8:29 pm #713014
miwsParticipantYeah, them lousy, no good lazy teachers, with their under crowded classrooms, plenty of funds available to be sure each of the ten kids in class has a pencil and a Pee-Chee® , and that only put “9-5” into their workday, and that don’t encourage and engage students, and that sit back and take all the credit for anything positive that comes from the students, and never give the students themselves any credit.
Mike
January 9, 2011 at 9:02 pm #713015
redblackParticipantand remember the 80/20 rule, hooper:
80% of people do 20% of the work, and vice versa.
i’ve observed it everywhere i go. some people have stellar work ethic, while others muddle through from task to task – or from job to job. not to say that the latter should be fired, or that they’re lazy, or that they shouldn’t be union members.
it’s just human nature. most of the work force doesn’t get the big picture.
wow, this is one meandering, rudderless thread. i like it. it’s like a conversation or something. :)
January 9, 2011 at 9:11 pm #713016
JoBParticipantyou take a nap and two days disappear…
or perhaps i just suffered another brain fart and there has been no conversation here for two days?
i don’t know if that is a good thing or not
at least i don’t miss the comments i can’t remember
January 10, 2011 at 6:32 am #713017
hooper1961Membermiws – there are incompetent teachers that are not effective that need to be let go. and yes there are great teachers that excel and most teachers that are simply competent. why is it so hard to get rid of the ineffective teachers?
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