Jersey Girl wrote:I didn't even know Norton was closed.
The flight line is still there, but the AFB is long gone. They tried to turn it into a major cargo plane destination, but with little success. Now it is mostly used by the US Forest Service to fill up planes with water/fire suppressant when we have fires close by.
Wow, I looked it up and apparently the final closing was 1995.
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
Chinese Proverb
The CCC wrote:I've first moved to San Bernardino in 1960. Norton AFB was a hub of government investment in Aerospace, and the largest employer in the area. It declined significantly after Norton closed down, and it's tax base evaporated.
What ward did you belong to? Who gave you your PB?
Don't take life so seriously in that " sooner or later we are just old men in funny clothes" "Tom 'T-Bone' Wolk"
Hrm. I think what's being missed or not wanting to acknowledge is it takes an incredibly brainwashed person to believe that working hard leads to wealth. If that were the case, we would have a lot of millionaire construction workers and waitresses. The richest people on this Earth do not work hard. They earn money in their sleep through investments. The idea that working hard leads to wealth is the greatest propaganda the ruling class has ever pounded into the heads of the proletariat because now these people willingly work themselves to death just to make the resource owners richer.
If anything, hard work and wealth are negatively correlated.
I think people are opting out because there's little point to opting in. Half those people chilling out don't see the point of busting their asses so a proprietor can earn the fruits of the worker's labors. What does the worker get these days? $1200 rent for a one bed room? Rent and utilities can easily consume the average worker's salary, and then what? They're basically working for someone else just so they can go home and night to a place to sleep? Seriously, what's the motivation? What happens when they need dental care? Their teeth rot out. What happens if they need medical care? They die because preventative care is out of reach. BUT GODDAMN THEY SHOULD HAVE A GREAT ATTITUDE ABOUT WORKING TWO PART-TIME JOBS WITH NO BENEFITS AND NO SAFETY NET.
You couple that economic reality in which we're living AND, if you make a mistake here or there you're virtually condemned to a life of poverty, it's no wonder these people not don't see a way out, but the upside is such a small gradation better that working themselves to death just to get to that little step isn't worth it. And until people fundamentally shift their views on wealth and resource distribution we're going to see the problem continue to exasperate unless we take drastic action.
I guess I just have a hard time seeing how people who are the most oppressed supporting the people who have the most to gain keeping the population cycled in obvious self-defeating thinking and behavior. On a practical level if we want clean streets we need to hire more people to clean them. That costs money. If we want trashed picked up we need to hire more trash collectors. If we want to beautify our towns and cities we need to hire more landscapers and artists. We need massive infrastructure upgrades. Let's train and hire these people. Let's build massive high rise filled micro units so people have a place to go. We hire them to do the job. It takes money. We get the cities and lives we collectively deserve. We can live in a dystopian nightmare, which is what is literally unfolding before us right now, or we can build a society where workers have a reason to work and people who have resources still get to drive nice cars and live in beautiful houses, but they're not allowed to have Screw you money because we, for some odd reason, think that's just peachy.
- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
I think you are conflating "hard work" and "manual labor". No one gets rich working for someone else doing manual labor. You need to start your own business to have a shot at it.
And I can tell you very few people under 50 are making millions in their sleep while their investments compound. Most people with money today worked their asses (lots of time, lots of brain power, probably very little manual labor) while they were younger and after being successful in whatever field they chose, and now have money to invest.
But your comment "If anything, hard work and wealth are negatively correlated" only makes sense if you change it to manual labor. Go ask your liberal friend Warren Buffet if he ever "worked hard". Even that liberal would kick you in the teeth for even considering such a thing for a nano second. He would probably even declaim, "This mentality is what is wrong with America!"
“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.”
Black Moclips wrote:I think you are conflating "hard work" and "manual labor". No one gets rich working for someone else doing manual labor. You need to start your own business to have a shot at it.
And I can tell you very few people under 50 are making millions in their sleep while their investments compound. Most people with money today worked their asses (lots of time, lots of brain power, probably very little manual labor) while they were younger and after being successful in whatever field they chose, and now have money to invest.
But your comment "If anything, hard work and wealth are negatively correlated" only makes sense if you change it to manual labor. Go ask your liberal friend Warren Buffet if he ever "worked hard". Even that liberal would kick you in the teeth for even considering such a thing for a nano second. He would probably even declaim, "This mentality is what is wrong with America!"
Well, most of my observation just comes from anecdotal evidence. I grew up in a small business home. My parents easily put in 70+ hours a week just to eek (<- that's on purpose, by the way) out a living. I was fortunate enough to have had exposure to that life and game planned my endgame a bit so I can do what I do now. While not wealthy, I was deliberate and figured out some things early on and I'm comfortable which suits my lifestyle. But that doesn't happen in a vacuum. My dad had a masters in Economics and was able to give some good advice while not living it. I took it and ran with it. I'm only Liberal-Socialist now because, pragmatically, it's the best way forward for everyone, even those with money.
- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:A high school graduate shoveling coal used to be able to buy a house; now, software engineers are sharing apartments.
That's an odd statement. I know many software engineers (programmers, network engineers, IT guys etc.), and they are all supporting their families quite well. Are you referring to the young software engineers in the Silicon Valley who have chosen to live in the most expensive housing markets in the country in order to try and gain access to certain opportunities? Because that's not the experience of the typical software engineer (and any of those apartment-sharers could no doubt move to any reasonably-priced city in the country and get a good job and buy a house but they choose not to).
I agree there is a massive housing shortage in some parts of the country and other problems with the real estate market that , but the idea that things were much better in "the good ol' days" leaves out many key factors. If we wanted to create the economic conditions that would allow someone "shoveling coal" to afford a house, it wouldn't work to the advantage of all "coal shovelers".
Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:A high school graduate shoveling coal used to be able to buy a house; now, software engineers are sharing apartments.
That's an odd statement. I know many software engineers (programmers, network engineers, IT guys etc.), and they are all supporting their families quite well. Are you referring to the young software engineers in the Silicon Valley who have chosen to live in the most expensive housing markets in the country in order to try and gain access to certain opportunities? Because that's not the experience of the typical software engineer (and any of those apartment-sharers could no doubt move to any reasonably-priced city in the country and get a good job and buy a house but they choose not to).
I agree there is a massive housing shortage in some parts of the country and other problems with the real estate market that , but the idea that things were much better in "the good ol' days" leaves out many key factors. If we wanted to create the economic conditions that would allow someone "shoveling coal" to afford a house, it wouldn't work to the advantage of all "coal shovelers".
I mean, you can misconstrue an obvious rhetorical device if you like. I'm clearly talking about this:
Zander Dejah, 25, pays $1,900 a month rent to live in a downtown San Francisco house with at least 40 other people, many of whom sleep in bunk beds.
... [his real estate] company runs nine communal properties, three of which are in San Francisco. The others are in Austin, Texas, and Oakland, California.
- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
There's no sugarcoating the bad news," Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Wednesday in reaction to a new count that found Los Angeles County’s homeless population has soared 23% over last year.
I don't know if they have the data, but it would seem to be important to find out if the homeless increase was from people formerly living in housing in Los Angeles losing that housing and going to the streets, or homeless from other parts of the state and country migrating to Los Angeles? Because Los Angeles voters just approved $5 Billion in funding for homeless programs, so it's entirely possible that homeless from outside the area decided Los Angeles was a good place to be.
It's also a little disingenuous to blame homelessness on high housing costs, because even with the high costs, rental vacancies are extremely low:
So people are living in the available housing (which is different than the stories of New York where there are tons of vacant buildings with thousands of empty units). The high prices are indicative of a housing shortage, so that's the problem that needs to be solved. Either more people need to move out of the city, or the city needs to build more units. There are simply too many people.