solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2d ago
The race-based charts just line up in the traditional poverty order. I dunno if there was ever any possibility of it being otherwise.
Yeah, Hale County Alabama having a working-age disability rate of 25% (It looks like that's dropped to 20% since that article was written.) sounds scandalous until you consider that it's mostly a dying rural area, the sort of place that doesn't even have a Walmart to be a greeter at. Especially in the crappy job market of the early 2010s, a fifty-something country bumpkin with no education and occupational experience limited to blue collar work that they're aged or injured out of is pretty close to unemployable anywhere within a reasonable commute of the area. Tuscaloosa is 30-60 minutes north depending on which side of the county you're in, and that's pretty much it. Good luck competing with a bunch of underemployed college graduates!
It's also worth noting that the gig economy was very much in its infancy at the time of this article's publication in 2013. Commuting 30-60 minutes to Tuscaloosa (The only city within an hour of Hale County, which itself is so rural that it doesn't have a Walmart or pizza delivery.) to drive for Uber or Doordash is a superior alternative to SSDI, but Uber didn't operate in Tuscaloosa until 2016 and Doordash didn't get into gear until a few years after that.
Relating to your point about wages, the labor market being much tighter than it was in 2013 means that managers hiring for the sort of light retail job suited for a lamed blue collar worker have much less room to be picky.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4d ago
IMO it's the confluence of several things:
For one, the pre-2010s Democratic Party were far more beholden to private sector organized labor and high school educated voters in general, and that group tends to be skeptical of immigration be it for cultural or economic reasons. For all his Millennial fans, Obama won in '08 because high school educated white Midwesterners (He won Indiana!) liked him. Since then, thanks to Millennials being the most educated generation in history, the college educated (who tend to be pro-immigration) are far more powerful in intra-Democratic party politics than was the case in the 90s and 2000s. The pro-immigration lobby has also arguably changed from mostly being a pro-business project (hence Bernie's quip about open borders being a Koch brothers policy, which is literally true if one reads the 1980 Libertarian Party platform) to being a project spearheaded by educated immigrants and second-generation children of immigrants themselves.
Relatedly, the fusionists (a bunch of highly educated/cosmopolitan northeasterners along with the pro-business lobby) lost control of the GOP to the populists (Trump has personality, yes, but his platform is largely cribbed from Pat Buchanan minus the hoe scaring social conservatism, nominating ACB aside.) representing the high school educated. The GOP aren't so much the party of big business at this point (Nationally, anyway; this is less the case at the state level.) as small/medium business owners, whose interests concerning immigration are more mixed (Some use illegal labor, yes, but others are irritated with having to compete with illegal labor. See also: free trade.).
IMO an underrated cause for polarization on both sides is internet media making the issue more visible and mobilization easier. It's true, yes, that post-2000 immigration has spread far beyond the traditional locales of border states and major coastal cities, but there's also the media factor. On one hand, we're seeing things from the right like truckers using social media to lobby for English proficiency requirements and crackdowns on non-domiciled CDLs on the back of several high profile fatal accidents involving immigrant truck drivers (I have no idea if anyone's actually quantified whether or not foreign drivers who can't speak/read English crash more.). On the other, enforcement of immigration laws has never been overly pleasant, but it's never been easier to capture the anguish of the unfortunate migrant being deported, akin to viral incidents of police brutality in general.
Finally, there's the obvious answer that immigration has become more contentious for the simple reason that the foreign born population is at or near historic highs. The last time we were where we are now in that regard we got the first red scare and the height of the second Klan.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5d ago
Eh, George Wallace didn't get prosecuted, and defying immigration enforcement has infinitely more elite buy-in than resisting civil rights, enough to smooth over any degree to which Newsom is less shrewd at playing the game (The stand at the schoolhouse door was more carefully scripted LARP than real resistance.). Performative (save for the not so performative 1860s) displays in the name of states' rights have been a feature of Democratic Party politicking for more or less the entire history of the party.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
6d ago
Work that should and could be done in weeks takes months
Coming from a history of working for small businesses to my first "real" salaried job at a large company I'm presently going crazy dealing with this. I'm current in "training" three weeks into the job and I've done next to nothing (My signature accomplishment so far has been performing a BIOS update on a coworker's laptop which just happened to fix his docking problem, sparing him a potentially weeks-long computer outage.). IT is either snowed over with work, incompetent, or just not a priority because their onboarding program doesn't exist and response time on tickets is glacial and requires escalating up the chain to get even basic shit done.
I was issued a company laptop without being told the username and password to log into it (had to call IT for that). The instructions for setting up the company phone didn't totally work and I had to figure it out myself (I'm a talented or at least "willing to Google it and try" or "capable of installing and using an easy Linux distro" user at best. I'm a car guy, not a computer guy.). It took me three weeks, multiple tickets, and multiple conversations with bosses to get the login to the dispatch software I'm supposed to use. I still don't have a login to the company intranet (Allegedly HR never created the account on their end.) and my email account is getting the wrong terminal's mail.
Call me crazy, but this is stuff that should've been done on day one, or week one at most. I should've been issued my devices with a piece of paper that had the relevant login credentials included and accounts already set up. My previous employer was a bunch of clowns that had their company phones shut off for a week due to non-payment and even they were capable of this. I'm assured that this is perfectly normal for the company, it's frustrating but par for the course, I'm not expected to actually contribute for a few months, and so on but I can't shake the fear that I'm totally wasting time in which I should be learning how to do my job and thus am going to wind up being thrown into the fire with little other than knowing the right people to call for help (because I've really spent most of my time hobnobbing and doing my best to present myself as eager to learn and do in lieu of actually doing anything) while I learn things on my own the hard way, under fire with expectations once the honeymoon period wears off.
I suppose the better way to put it is that Walmart is the only hypermarket chain that is efficient enough to survive in mediocre redneck towns (A "fucked up redneck town" is one that doesn't have a Walmart.), so they wind up associated with them.
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