Re: OT: Why welfare doesn't work!

On Sep 11, 2:38 am, Joerg <notthisjoerg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Sep 10, 1:38 am, Joerg <notthisjoerg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Sep 9, 1:39 am, Jim Thompson <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-I...@My-Web-
Site.com> wrote:
On Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:05:05 -0700, Joerg
<notthisjoerg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Sep 8, 2:37 am, Jim Thompson <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-I...@My-Web-
Site.com> wrote:
On Sat, 6 Sep 2008 23:58:28 -0700 (PDT), bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Sep 7, 5:46 am, Joerg <notthisjoerg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Sep 6, 3:54 pm, "Jon Slaughter" <Jon_Slaugh...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<snip>
Employers preferred to
hire youngsters -because they were cheaper and more biddable, and we
frightened of hiring adults who had had to drop out of work - for
whatever reason - for fear that it might happen again.
Aha!  So that's your excuse ?:-)
No Jim, it isn't my "excuse". I never had to "drop out of work". Dutch
employers don't like hiring people over forty, and get even less
enthusiastic over more elderly applicants. I'm good enough that I
managed to get hired in Venlo when I was 57, but when I lost that job
I was three years older, and I haven't been able to beat the odds
since then.
Do you speak Dutch?
Slowman can only explain why he "lost that job" in Dutch ;-)
I've done it here before. What Haffmans told me was that if they had
kept me for more than three years, I would have become a permanent
employee (under Dutch law, this is automatic), and - equally
automatically - a member of the pension scheme.
Since I had only started working in the Netherlands in 1993 - and only
part-time in the first instance - and could have taken early
retirement as soon as I became a member of the pension scheme, the
pension scheme had set the employer contribution to the scheme as 67%
of my salary, which would have made me a very expensive employee. I
was good, but not that good.
What they seem to have told the unemployment office was that their
market was experiencing a temporary decline - the order book had
shrunk to a year's production,so this was technically true - and they
had retrenched me as a temporary employee (which was a lot easier than
getting rid of a permanent employee).
That's why a workplace that's overly controlled by the government
doesn't work. Business will do anything to get around any real bad laws,
including selective layoffs.

The workplace worked fine. If the laws had been more carefully
drafted, it would have worked marginally better - I was good, but not
irreplaceable.

Worked fine? You were fired. Not for lack of performance but because
some #%^&!! law would have snared your employer and he naturally did not
want to get into that costly snare. I would most certainly not call that
"fine".

The workplace worked fine, not perfectly. There are other things that
can go wrong, and I've seen a few of them.

We had a proposition in California that would mandate health coverage
when you have 20 or more employees, combined with hyper-inflationary
premiums. One reporter asked a promoter of that scheme a simple
question: "How long do you think will it take for a business to hire
their 20th employee?" ... silence.

I guess when that becomes a law we'll see a lot of "independent
subsidiaries" or other forms of divestiture, plus some exodus to Nevada
or Texas.

California stop getting most of the electronics startups when the
house prices went through the roof. My wife knocked back a tenured
postion in Los Angles in the eraly 1980's because we couldn't have
afforded a decent house in a pleasant area - the university involved
suffered so many knock-backs for this reason  that they shortly
afterwards took to offering cheap home loans as part of the package.

Yep, it is expensive doing business in California. But this is where
most of the progress in electronic happens, where you can easily find
the required talent.

Some of the progress. Silicon Valley isn't the only place in the world
(or even the US) where people do good electronics. Silicon Fen (around
Cambridge U.K.) does seem to have a critical mass of electronic and
software talent (and some good molecular biologists, which is becoming
progressively more important).

The last job I had in Cambridge was doing the electronics for a gadget
that used monclonal antibodies to pick up very low levels of
interesting proteins (like those on the surface of the black plague
bacillus).

In the Netherlands you can find quite a few good electronic engineers
around Eindhoven, and there are some hotbeds of activity in France,
Germany and Switzerland. Singapore has spent a lot of money setting up
a similar environment. Even the Japanese can do well - though their
social arrangements don't suit every innovator.

And China is training a lot of electronic engineers these days - their
social arrangements would seem to be even less innovator-friendly than
Japan's, but since their society is changing a lot faster than Japan's
(amd ours) this may no longer be true.
.

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