In my job, I get exposed to the owners of plumbing, construction, and other blue collar industries. From what I've seen, their houses are huge, their spouses are gorgeous, and they live in regions where they get to have an incredible quality of life.
The owner of a construction company told me once that he makes a 15% profit per year, and he charges far less than the competition because he would feel slimy taking more.
Tradesmen that can run a business and aren’t in the auto mechanics space, the oil industry, or working (vs supervising) in construction seem to do so well.
Those three are caveats based on anecdotal evidence on industry trends and manual labor injury risks.
Americans tend to speak their minds more freely than others. Just in general, we tend to speak what's on our mind, and that can create some discomfort and confusion. When I run design meetings, I really have to call on engineers who are non-Americans to speak up, otherwise, they won't add their contributions. Now, it might be language barrier, or cultural upbringing, but I saw this in Europeans as well as Asians.
This cultural issue with management tends to bring up "whiteness", but most middle management in Finance/Tech are older white males, many of them are totally awesome, but majority of them lack cultural understandings and "offshoring" can create massive frictions.
The American culture may have worked in an in office environment where you have a lot of body language and non verbal cues to recognize that the "confrontational" behavior is actually supposed to lead to positive results. Besides, meeting in an office, and getting lunch with your colleagues nearly every working day and going for happy hour every week or so means that your relationship isn't defined by the confrontational experiences. How well will it work in a "remote first" environment where you rarely/never meet your colleagues outside the work environment and don't have non verbal cues, and your confrontational behavior simply make teammates uncomfortable isn't clear yet.
On the other hand, organizations are well aware of certain cultures being non confrontational, and have done a lot of work in actually helping them speak their mind without being confrontational. Pre-pandemic when I became a manager, my company provided me with a ton of training on structuring meetings and brainstorming sessions in a way that encourages everyone to participate.
There's a very good argument to be made that in a remote first environment the "confrontational" culture would lose out, whereas the "non-confrontational" culture, which can easily be worked around through a variety of management techniques, will work much better.
I think the same culture would pervade anyone who is 2gen and greater American. Unless someone is 0-gen or 1-gen, they become Americanized (as any immigrant to a new country would become localized after 2 gens elsewhere). So unless they are recent immigrants or the children of those recent immigrants, even if they are not white, they would be culturally American.
On a side note, I think 1st gen have it the hardest of all. 0-gen know their standing and know they are newcomers with foreign customs. 1-gen often are in the middle and aren't sure where they belong culturally, here, or there. 2-gen usually don't have any such ambivalence.
Uber tried to compensate this independent contractor when they had no legal reason to do so. The contractors assume all legal risk when they work as an independent contractor, which is why many contractors in other industries often form an LLC so their assets are shielded from liability.
On top of this, NDAs are common in arbitration. They were under no legal requirement to sign.
Plus, compensating drivers a ton for carjacking creates perverse incentives. It would be trivial for a driver's buddy to "carjack" them on camera and seek a payout from it.
Suicide is ultimately executed by an individual who makes the choice to do so. Obfuscating or minimizing that fact and refusing to shame it will remove social pressure preventing and dissuading that act.
Shame and fear of my father finding my body is what prevented me from doing it years ago.
What worries me is that the stagnant wages have been caused by globalization making our labor relatively unattractive compared to the rest of the world. This will only make our labor more unattractive, accelerating the loss of our dwindling manufacturing base.
This exactly. The U.S. economy doesn’t exist in a competition-free vacuum. This “solution” would hurt those at the left side of the income/wealth distribution the most, but would hurt all of the U.S. to some degree.
Or they have looked at charts like this, understand why the US is to the right but have no reason to think (and plenty of domestic research on per-working-hour productivity to support) that the factors that create the overall trend line apply to the US:
This attack could be considered terrorism, but not the pipeline attack. Terrorism is the act or threat of violence to further political goals. There was nothing political about the pipeline attacks, it was just a ransomware company looking for a payout.
I agree, not sure why you're downvoted.
Ironically enough the most famous sponsored attack on infra with the actual goal of damaging infrastructure was Stuxnet a joint Israel/American op
It was remarkable how quickly U.S. media accepted the "it wasn't terrorism" line after years of going on about how the Russians are the most comically evil superterrorist masterminds who are destroying the fabric of blah blah.
I mean, it can both be true that it wasn't terrorism, and that the mainstream media was wrong by blaming everything on russian superterrorist masterminds. We both know that media narratives don't have to be fully cromulent.
I personally don't care whether it was or wasn't terrorism. Either way, you and I are never going to know (barring a Russian whistleblower). I was just commenting on the bizarre and coordinated behavior of the U.S. media.
See also the Notre Dame fire in 2019. Immediately the media "decided" that it was a simple accident rather than arson or even something else like a small meteorite that could have been easily lost in the wreckage.
As an IT security professional, depending on virus total and other sites is a pretty horrible idea. It's trivial to use msfvenom to encrypt a trojan and get it executed on a system, at least for a while until it gets recognized by some cloud platform.
In rural areas, it's normal to just go in the woods and shoot. I grew up with guns, practiced quite frequently, and have never been to an actual range.
For sure, but most of the population is now urban including large numbers of new gun owners.
The nearest place to the Bay Area for example, where you can shoot on public land legally is neither easy to find, nor anywhere near where most people live.
Only because there aren’t many gun shops. Buying guns in california is not hard. If you have adequate ID and know the most basic elements of gun safety, you can just walk into a gun shop and buy one. You can’t take it home for 10 days, but that’s a different matter.
I would bet that 90% of the California population is within one hour of a gun store. Handguns and rifles are legal and easy to buy if you don't have a criminal record.
The owner of a construction company told me once that he makes a 15% profit per year, and he charges far less than the competition because he would feel slimy taking more.