On Sunday, August 9, 2020 at 2:31:47 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Sun, 9 Aug 2020 06:14:40 +0100, Bod wrote:

On 09/08/2020 06:07, Bod wrote:
On 09/08/2020 06:06, wrote:
On Sun, 9 Aug 2020 05:34:06 +0100, Bod wrote:

'Without fixes for infrastructure, education, health care and
government, the U.S. will resemble a developing nation in a few
decades'.

The U.S.s decline started with little things that people got used to.
Americans drove past empty construction sites and didnt even think
about why the workers werent working, then wondered why roads and
buildings took so long to finish.
They got used to avoiding hospitals because of the unpredictable and
enormous bills theyd receive. They paid 6% real-estate commissions,
never realizing that Australians were paying 2%. They grumbled about
high taxes and high health-insurance premiums and potholed roads, but
rarely imagined what it would be like to live in a system that worked
better.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/ar...ut-in-the-open


Agree/disagree.....Opinions?

Other than the inaccuracies I suppose it is OK.
Maybe Mikey should spend more time in Flyover land.
I called my village about a pot hole in the road, they were out there
the next day, cut out about 5 feet of road, edge to edge, fixed the
drain pipe that caused it and repaved it 3 days later when the
concrete on the pipe had set.
RE commissions are typically 3-3.5%.
Construction is booming here, even during the Covid.
I agree the health insurance is high but the government is making that
worse, not better and the lawyers are a big part of the problem.

Fair enough.

What about the Rust Belt? Seems pretty grim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt#:~:text="Rust%20Belt"%20is%20an%20inform al,industrial%20decline%20starting%20around%201980 .&text=Rust%20refers%20to%20the%20deindustrializat ion,its%20once-powerful%20industrial%20sector.

There is a reason they call it the rust belt. We shipped most of our
manufacturing offshore or to right to work states and those bloated
union salaries are not competitive anymore. Car companies are not
going to pay a high school graduate line worker $80k a year to do some
menial task several hundred times a day when a Mexican, a guy in
Tennessee or a robot can do it much cheaper.
I was reading the other day that you can't even blame the Mexican or
the Hillbilly for most of the decline, it is the robots.

Sadly that's about it. The other thing that drove companies to move jobs
away from unions was the work rules that destroyed productivity. Like
requiring two men for a one man job. I remember when I used to go into
Bell Labs with some gear on one of those small, folding little luggage
carts. I couldn't continue to wheel it behind me in the building,
the engineer had to call a "porter". Even if Trump could bring jobs
back, they aren't going to be the jobs of the 60s and 70s. On the other
hand, if you get educated, learn a needed skill, like repairing robots,
then you can still earn a decent living.