When Private Sector Siloing Is Bad For The Economy, And Workers…
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Developing a silo sector business model is a great way to differentiate and build a niche clientele. I started a business in 2000 called NicheAgency; I owned the website address as well, then years later I developed an even more niche specific business. My competition was similar businesses, neither business model was holding any worker back. The job-applicants-seeking-work industry is another story; while not the only obstruction, they are unwittingly thwarting the employment of many millions of Americans.
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Though those siloed employment shops, or wider, but still siloed giants like LinkedIn, are not to blame. No person or company is. Neither is this dilemma something I could blame solely on laissez faire capitalism. That said, the situation should change; actually it must change for the nation to advance. The United States will not keep up economically with massive populations like China, and longer term India, without being more nimble, and strategic in our jobs development.
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Our catch-as-catch-can hiring firms, and matching-employers-with-job-applicants technology, miss about as many as they help. Yet if that patchwork was the only problem, there may have been a decent workaround solution. That is not the case.
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Neither does government cover the remainder; many unemployed, and those who stopped seeking a job, are completely missed by both. Discrimination in the form of racism, sexism, ageism, and ableism has not been overcome by either government, or the private sector. Private firms cannot tackle such societal issues in most situations, especially if government is failing to consistently and successfully enforce the laws surrounding hiring, and during employment.
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Containing a problem, or developing a solution, is difficult when there are multiple outlets to track and discipline. Siloing workers into various groupings, wherever the profit is for private firms, requires that many job-applicants will be left out. The slicing and dicing up of niches continually changes the dynamic for those who are put on the outside.
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While some new groups may be absorbed, the constant reorganizing never helps the unemployed who are always left on the outside. Though a private firm may increase its customer base and/or profits, they are only reorganizing on a set-in-stone table of profit margins, and platform models. No organization will effectively help persons who fall outside of these business models for a variety of reasons with many of those elements out of their control, or enabled by deep-rooted blind spots.
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Government, Private, Partnerships, Or Other?
Government can subsidize private companies to work with the outside groups, but these endeavors are captured, to a large extent, by current societal expectations, and a need to pocket as much as possible from the subsidization fee. For example, if the cost in time, money resources, and creativity to employ — in some viable fashion — every possible person is $X, and the firm also gets a fee of the same amount $X, the project is already a failure. Yet the private firm will burn up the money for months, or years before the government program is ended or revamped. That is a problem that follows many public/private partnerships.
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Realize that the $X fee is an unknown amount. That is because the maximum, nor minimum cost of doing business, or achieving success, can be determined legitimately, or honestly by either party: governments or private firms. So the firm is always going to overshoot, as their costs may rise, etc. And/or the private firms will keep their costs lower to make sure their profit is as high as they want it. No matter which option(s) they choose to run their job-finding business, they either ruin their business, or screw the job-applicant, and/or the government in some way. Their profits maybe could be somewhat lower, but they cannot charge less than what it costs, or do more than what they have charged.
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Any size economic or hiring firm business disruption could also doom a fixed fee. The need for extra fees to improve the process, would likely be derailed by the government. Fixed costs require a selection limitation. Once costs are fixed, only certain job applicants will be allowed in the model. These traps require firms to avoid taking on the employment issues they cannot solve. Even if all of my theories about costs and profits are invalid, there is still the problem of siloing.
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Just so you know, I do not have a government is bad ideology lurking in my reasoning. However, I do have some government is lagging antennae. First, the government is our government, We The People. If it does not seem to be so, then it may be due to its lagging, and/or our lack of participation. While our bureaucracy has never worked perfectly, and is often given a near impossible challenge without the proper funds or undulating directives from Congress, their services can also worsen, or agencies can lag more than usual.
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To keep current daily, total employment constant, meaning everyone who can work at nearly 100%, the totality of jobs investment must tap into the entire populous. The 100% does not count the seriously retired, and those in a job or career transition lasting a few days to over a year. On the other hand, investing in a small group of the unemployed can be very inexpensive to very expensive per person, depending on their needs. Spreading the cost out to everyone, if the actual goal is to employ everyone, is less costly per person than splitting them up between competing firms.
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Competing firms will always slice and dice into a silo of specific profit margins and platform models. The online website platform where job applicants sign up can help a great majority of potential workers with a low, per applicant rate, assessed to the purchaser of the service, usually the employer seeking employees. Government websites can also do the same at a relatively low cost. Any other applicant services would incur more costs. Whereas a boutique, headhunting firm can reach out personally to individuals in a certain small talent pool, and charge very high fees, and still be beneficial to the clientele it serves. Of course, there are many variations in between, and off line applications and postings, online ads and such.
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This massive endeavor occurs all the time: 24-7-365. Yet many Americans still never get jobs, or only very low paying jobs. Others are passed over for mundane reasons, some require finding-a-job training, or general and specific skill updates, or need confidence boosting. A final group gets shafted, harmed, or discriminated against before or during their employment. Whatever is happening due to negative factors is never undone in any consistent manner by the government or private sector because of short term, ineffectual oversight, and lack of constant improvements.
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Since not everyone is abused in the same way, and unions have shrunk significantly, job applicants and employees are hardly ever able to get support in the moment it is needed. And because of Lilly Ledbetter, we know that even the Supreme Court only plays the humanity card when it is the corporate-humanity-hood. The highest court has been critically subsumed by political money power.
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Therefore, job applicants and workers are left to fend for themselves individually, while a mega-wealth-led government, and its corporate cronies, are joined in massive support by powerful entities all the way up to the Supreme Court. The system is financially, purposely, and aggressively stacked against the individual worker.
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How our current system abuses job-seekers and workers is multifaceted. Those who are not directly harmed by employers, other employees, politicians, or the courts, often miss out due to occurrences never seen, known, or fully understood because of systemic abuses. The abuses, very minor to major, can come from racism, sexism, ableism, and ageism, or in how the hiring system is, or is not, deployed.
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Reversing the stacking done by larger forces, requires a much larger, countervailing force. The difficulties in moving another direction come from these three sources. 1) Employers. 2) Private hiring firms. 3) Government.
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Employers would be wary of government having too much control over their hiring practices, coercing them to comply to regulations and laws in old and new ways. Hiring firms will not want to give up their businesses, no matter the benefits to their clientele: job applicants and American workers overall. Businesses must protect their turf. Many government or centralized control worries, or accusations of collectivism are conservative tropes, but still these pathetically weak-on-evidence attacks seem to have a lot of political power.
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The first two, employers and hiring firms, do not necessarily have unfounded concerns. It is not wholly improbable that their wariness of government interference in business has a basis in fact. However, many firms manage to make enough profits to pay owners, shareholders, and workers a decent wage with a government watching out for citizens, and employees in a responsible manner. Overreaching government is a problem only when it is a real problem. Industries that exaggerate the effects of government interference, are a constant foil to proper, rigorous cost/benefit reviews, or citizen-approved regulations, are also part of the problem.
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The worries of state control and accusations by industries about nefarious infiltrating isms stirs up the pot to confuse the issues. Then the sycophant, political, pundit class gins up the propaganda to separate Americans into factionalized, warring camps. Corporate ethics dissolve, as the profit-ends justify the lying-means. Shaving off a few percent in profit to afford the general public greater benefits becomes in these fervent fever dreams, Anti-The-American Way. And if some industries were greatly curtailed or ended due to climate work or other regulations, any loss in jobs today will become more jobs* somewhere else here tomorrow. *Also read further to find out why.
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Private firms are facilitators for the “free” market elite rather than for workers and citizens. There is no way to make private hiring firms advocates for every potential worker. Secondly, they will never manage the interests of citizens and workers equally. Private firms provide the widest or narrowest silo that their respective industries or constituent base demand. As the size of the economy and/or its robustness grows, so do the number and size of hiring firms increase. If the unemployment numbers grow, the hiring firms decrease in size or numbers. This inverse problem is the bane of the unemployed, and all taxpayers, especially in mass-layoff events.
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Basically, the government subsidizes industry when the economy collapses in many ways, and tangentially the hiring industry. However, the bureaucracy is left holding the bag for the preponderance of long-term unemployed, hard-to employ, and the mass of laid off workers after a crash. Much societal instability is fostered, and a spike in workers unprepared for their next job occurs, due to these predicaments. Private firms will never pick up the finding-jobs slack in a crash or during normal times, no matter what government throws at them.
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Stretching Mind, And Scope For A New Solution.
The only way to correct these discrepancies, inadequacies, conflicts, and oversights is to stretch out in every direction the solution scope. While it would be a jarring transition for those involved in the private hiring firm industry, workers, job seekers, employers, and the nation overall will be vastly improved and pleased by such a transition. Of course, hiring firm employees would find similar, or better jobs quickly through the new system, proposed below. Strip away all the bureaucratic and state run worries, and replace them with a We The People system with all the advancements available today, working at a much higher speed than, and parallel to, the current government structure. Think of it as a true public endeavor.
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The U.S. Constitution was developed by wealthy, white male, business owners, and slave holders. The welfare of workers, poor white men, persons of color, and all other genders were not specifically protected by it. While much jurisprudence, and a few amendments in 200 years have increased the rights and protections for most Americans, the tendency to keep workers and the average citizen at a lower peg continues. Corporate personhood is a prime example. Wealth, the color of a person’s skin, and gender also still matter more in various ways, for various reasons.
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By having private firms takeover the profitable portions of the hiring industry, and leaving the remainder to government, there is little likelihood for overall improvement. If education was at a high level in every area of the nation, via similar funding for every student, the private firms would be competing for a higher percentage of Americans. And maybe a change would be less needed.
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Though the numbers may never reach 100%, probably 85% or less, because as the more highly educated population increased, higher profits would likely be sought. Why? The spectrum may be narrowed further, even as more Americans gain degrees. For example, only those with higher college grade point averages are added rather than just those with college degrees. That said, there will be no educational advances for the foreseeable future due to our current aristocratic constitutional constructs, particularly states’ rights, preventing a national funding strategy.
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Therefore, we must start with an advanced jobs-finding system that never narrows its clientele. I call the concept a Jobs Development Platform. The states’ rights restrictions are overcome as every worker’s future is provided greater protection, and powerful products to supercharge their job potential. Only with a nationwide platform where every worker in America is automatically a shareholder can we achieve the goals that procure a better future, and fully protect worker rights for the long term.
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Whatever some Americans think were, or are, the flaws of labor unions, they formed a power pillar that encouraged corporations to accede to their demands. Conversely, the JDP is less confrontational since it is a parallel system, and not vested in collective bargaining. Current union members may see this as a flaw, or weakness, yet the countervailing power of the JDP is achieved in a different manner.
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First, automatically making every worker nationwide a member provides a larger power differential in numbers than any organizing could ever do. Second, membership requires no dues, political or otherwise. Third, there is no limiting membership aspects: fast food to managerial workers, rural or urban, and any other is welcome. Fourth, the services provided are advanced to the extreme, practically automating workers into their next job, never falling behind again. Lastly, the next job is better, higher paying, includes health insurance, and constant training and educational upgrades if needed or desired.
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Status Quo’s Dangerous Holding Pattern.
Americans are stuck. We have myths and weak theories on economics. The loudest promoted and most prevalent ideas today revolve around the natural laws of “free” markets, or some such nonsense. The scare quotes around the word “free” and the italicized term natural law both are subject to many interpretations, which automatically make them suspect. The basis to prove these ideas are vast and profuse, yet thin and broadly unsubstantiated. They say too much, exactly prove very little.
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For my purposes here, it is the supposed agelessness, and lack of specificity the theory produces. In the end, we must trust their truth on what the ancients said, where we base very few things on anymore, let alone all of one area of study, except maybe religious studies. The exaggeration meter may be pegging out on my diatribe, yet the way many “free” market proponents shout down any talk of other economic structures, and related elements, also gives me a profound sense that their preeminent ideas are actually full of shit.
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Does the general idea of “free” markets make sense? Sure. That being said, the specifics and instances of its value is subject to a number of restraints including yours or my desired structure of society. Democracies accommodate the “free” market differently than a dictatorship does. How you and I want our democracy to function, as to citizens, workers and the business side matters as well. Believing in trickle down my leg, fill up my shoe economics, rather than actually beneficial to all workers and citizens is another.
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A truism is that viable businesses are paramount to a successful economy. The equal and opposite truism is that amenable workers are necessary to a successful economy. Achieving a consistently, very successful economy requires something more. That is much greater worker satisfaction than the old world “free” market, weak theory offered. This is when workers were little more than checkers on a checkerboard for ty-goons like Andrew Carnegie and Chainsaw Al. Not much has changed, except that wages have stagnated or dropped for pushed-off-the-radar workers, as the wealth of CEOs and corporation founders have grown astronomically.
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Society has also become more vital to work outcomes. Citizens must not be run over as before, yet they are. Massively costly wars, worldwide market crashes, and pollution including from CO2 cripple society, citizens’ lives, and the future of workers. Individual businesses or even entire industries will not, do not, or cannot take these huge matters into account to any extent that will change our trajectory. This lack of consistent and unified interest by the business world as well as its purposeful stalling and obfuscation, and the accompanying dangerously inverted inertia, pushes our nation and the world towards a cliff.
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Traditional “free” market sophistry has no solutions, except more of the same, no matter where it takes workers and society in the meantime. Their markets are supposedly flexible, but that is an insidious smokescreen and a lie. This happens when Republicans make government irrelevant, or worse for workers. Not only have governments always had a say in markets, the ability of any one, or 100 businesses, to change the course of long term, inertia is infinitesimally insignificant. Business invention and innovation are mostly minor players in society. Political power is a different story.
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Case in point is the last forty plus years. Think of the “free” market as the small rockets on a spaceship that move it side to side, up or down, backward or forward at a relatively slow speed. A very necessary catalyst, but not the main thrust. Society and citizens are the rockets that lift everything off the ground, and speed it towards the stars. If society is not on the side of “free” markets, they cease to work. The major rockets need to fire first to give the minor rockets a chance to be used. That is why Republicans have been infiltrating government, Congress, the courts, and the bureaucracy with their ideology to weaken workers, since at least the late 1970s. Their efforts against unions, and the worker in general, created the dangerously inverted inertia we are stuck in.
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These inflexible “free” market ideas cannot be implemented until a political party has enough control over society via government structures. Additionally, Republican stagnant and stale ideas about government, and society’s relationship to economics, would not be accepted by Americans without their long-game lies, and constant obfuscation in many realms. What staunch fiscal conservatives and libertarians take as their actual dogma is unpalatable to over 90% of Americans. Their rigid, selfish, greediness is a lesion on the world. Specific areas of science, most government, a lot of small “d” democratic progress, and much of secular society must be denigrated to hold to the line they have drawn. Written in the red blood they drain from each life prematurely lost every couple minutes due to pollution, and lack of health insurance, and the obscene, greedy green of wealth hoarding that steals everyday from millions of Americans, their liberty and pursuit of happiness.
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Each of the four areas of government noted in the above list that Republicans have harped on, harangued, and howled about for the last four decades, was done strategically to pull in the disparate groups who otherwise would not have gone along with their economic strip mining, and mountain topping ideas. The hyped issues used to draw in those disparate groups include:
Abortion is why church should not be separate from state; the poor are lazy, climate crisis denial is science; hate government unless it does our wealth building bidding; states’ rights rivals a United States; gay marriage puts in jeopardy our strict, patriarch Leviticus Shariah marriages; the E.R.A. and gender rights scares the Schlafly off Phyllis; we white supremacists know Rosa would stay seated for reverse racism; secularist lions persecute christians, etc.
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More specifically, most of those ideas were manufactured, or at least pumped to a much higher volume, merely to keep non-greed grifting Republicans from noticing the greed bilking group’s main reason for being, politically empowered wealth engorgement. This relatively small band of a money bingeing, white brotherhood is purposely blind to those their actions hurt, and have belched their bullshit bilge and bile on the public until much of it stuck like a barnacle.
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Their plan has gone far beyond “free” markets, which have become less “free” than they were before. Today’s massive corporations, duopolies, monopolies, oligopolies, too big to fail banks, etc. lack any relation to competitive markets. Do we have so many billionaires because workers are getting a fair shake? Is the environment made better when a polluting industry can buy multiple state and federal, senate and house seats?
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These uncompetitive factors, money in politics problems, and the limiting issue of siloing jobs development combine to put workers, and citizens into a vise grip of choices with narrowing avenues of improvement. Big business is not looking out for us on the job, at our homes, or for our future or our planet. The private sector is ill-equipped to make the necessary changes. Unless a wider and better path is plowed and prepared to create more advantages for workers and citizens, society will seize up, as seas rise over us, and everything else burns down.
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Few Americans are against a person making money or businesses making profits. Most of us strive to work conscientiously, protect and provide for our families, improve our community, and generally make the world a better place. Though we may go about it differently, and have different expectations of success. Even most CEOs and billionaires may truly believe their impact on society is beneficial. The problem is not what is perceived, but what is truly happening to workers, citizens, society, and the environment.
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Making society fit an old version of itself is unworkable. Society should improve along with profits and wealth, not left in old, failing fairytale dust. Livable wages are not some liberal wishlist item, and universal health insurance is not some socialist agenda item. They are the foundation of an advanced society, not millions of Americans living in subsistence conditions. End the simpleton excuses and remorseless responses, like what we have is better than most humans in other places on earth, or we are all living better than our ancestors lived. Please; grow up.
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A natural law “free” markets example: Americans with failing physical, oral, and mental health due to lack of basic preventive care must shorten their life expectancy until the Gates Foundation has provided the third world enough mosquito nets. I guess, paying all his Microsoft workers a living wage was never an option, so they could afford health care, and spread their own extra funds around. Gates’ and other billionaires are mixed up priorities flame outs.
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Societal investment in education and training has been missing the mark nationwide due to systemic racism and states’ rights nonsense, north and south. Science denial just to avoid cleaning up the environment and preventing planetary ecosystem collapse? These are not liberals asking for the moon. These are real problems we keep avoiding to please who, why, for what? Reducing investment in basic science, helps us how? How long does a nation lead when it disinvests in the long term, ignores science when it suits the agenda for a few to plunder profits for the short term, and constantly punishes its poor people?
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Run The Benevolent Dictator Out Of Town.
Since the above problems will continue to be off the table for the foreseeable future in the private sector, it makes sense for workers and citizens to take the lead in making those changes. The only path to those ends is gaining the power to structure our future. An advanced jobs development platform offers that level of strategic and political power. Otherwise, we can rely on the benevolent dictator corporation or billionaire to all of a sudden change their negative view of us, and upgrade our value to them.
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Maybe there are good benevolent dictators within our private sector, but they are few, and hard to identify as ever being consistently benevolent to workers. Business owners are not anymore inherently good or bad than workers are. The insidious part is the pressure wealth places on them that is perverted by the financial community, and the current ethos of business success that requires the subjugation of workers. Their world becomes smaller, and they see less. Their workers become distant, and they see the worker’s pain less. In this cloud-nine wealth realm, their advisors have trained them to think as the “it was all my doing” cohort, who have been trained by the previous cohort, and so on.
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To place themselves outside this realm is very uncomfortable. Call it the junior high peer pressure of the wealthy. Yes, they cower as their higher ups, the more wealthy or long-lived wealthy, bully or look down on them. The higher ups are afraid of their ignorance of others, so they must push down the new ones. This is done in all sorts of ways, but no matter how it is done, it is still junior high peer pressure weaknesses. Justifying your immense and selfish wealth is a great sport, Andrew Carnegie wrote a sadly popular book about it.
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You must steal from your employees to show how great a philanthropist you are. When you see other billionaires writing such books, and sycophant politicians, business owners, and such drooling over them, you realize how fixed the game is for workers. The inefficiency and arrogance of their philanthropy was explained perfectly by Anand Giridharadas in Winners Take All.
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The Gates Foundation does it by bypassing Microsoft workers, noted above. The Waltons do it by giving to other causes as workers have food drives to raise funds for their own food needs. The DeVos family gives millions to charter schools that work against public schools but are no better and often worse, while Amway scammed its way to its billions through a pyramid scheme. Neither DeVos, Mark Zuckerberg, or even LeBron James can do much to improve schools on a scattershot type plan. Innovation is not the key to curing the great mass of educational issues; the key is consistent quality and continuity.
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The Rich Asshole: Nature Versus Nurture.
Again becoming rich does not automatically make you a selfish asshole. However, once your head is up in the wealth cloud, all kinds of internal and external forces come to bear. Those who grow up poor and become wealthy are not immune. The idea that you did it all yourself has been promoted forever, and now it is pumped directly into our veins via nearly every kind of media, more so if your heart is inclined to that specific pumping type of media. And there are the same percentage of natural assholes from every socio-economic group.
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Therefore, we are talking an inculcated trend, where asshole nurture is very powerful that results from influence, and lack of contact with others not like you. The faster your business rises, the more likely you will not catch on that you are losing track of pushed-off-the-radar worker reality. If you are from an upper income household, you likely have had even less contact with pushed-off-the-radar workers. If you have always been in the top grades cohort, maybe you are more likely to look down on people, and not understand why they cannot just work hard like you, and make it. Finally, whether poor or wealthy, if luck was on your side more than most pre-business successes, you may not fully recognize who, and what helped you get where, and how.
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While someday the wealthy may change their ways, is not the issue. Workers can only control what they can control. My amateur, psychological profiling of the wealthy above shows how America got in this divergence of reality trap. To dig ourselves out requires more than hard work or more education, it requires an organization to compete with the immense wealth industry, and the assholes that lead the charge to demean and discontinue the value of workers.
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If Mark Zuckerberg has $100 million to throw away on a short term, at best, slightly helpful school funding idea, you understand the power differential that workers are up against. There is no simple, throw a switch way to get this done, but the We The People, Jobs Development Platform(JDP), is worth taking a deeper dive into. Private firms have had their try, and the internet rather than simplifying things, often complicated the matter. People are not inanimate sellable products.
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The Conclusion.
The job-finding process is very personal, confusing, abusive, and intrusive for millions of Americans because our outreach is very ineffective. Like sending out food trucks as a meal-on-wheels, and expecting every elderly or disabled person to amble out to the trucks merely because it is much more convenient than getting to, and into a restaurant. A comprehensive system for every kind of job seeker and worker that covers all the bases, yet flexible enough to grow and shrink to fit to the current needs of the employed and unemployed. Much of its service is focused on facilitating to independent institutions when available, rather than providing training and education directly to workers, and such.
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It is not anti-business since the JDP provides comprehensive services to facilitate business startups. Competitive businesses are the secondary focus of the system, but not monopolistic businesses, billionaires, and other threats to workers. Job applicants choose their jobs. This blinded selection ends all forms of hiring discrimination. Their skills and competency for doing the job is verified and guaranteed by the JDP. Health insurance, counseling services, and legal help are provided. It also facilitates rental housing, home purchases, and loans from local banks to prevent discrimination.
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The Jobs Development Platform will have a robust online system with live help online and off depending on a worker’s needs and situation. Working together on this system makes it possible to get every worker the best job their skills, and hard work can attain. For a truly merit based system, every worker must have the same platform to start from. Yes, we have different drives, talents, learning styles, deficits, wealth statuses, goals, and peculiarities, but those should not keep us from starting on a similar platform in every other way.
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My oldest sister has cerebral palsy. She had a job for almost two decades, then had a minor injury that kept her from continuing work. Having her go through our current mess, and the potential for her finding a job when she cannot get around very well, is very disheartening. She can work, but how does she find work when she is also living in a small town?
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The JDP would be instantaneous in finding every job applicant the best job possible in their area, whether they needed training, other education, or not. These are not make-work jobs. As to people with disabilities, and when needed, the JDP would work with other companies to develop accessible online work, and other, or its own skunkworks would design jobs from scratch, build, and launch companies, and co-ops around these ideas.
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Companies will be clamoring for the workers from the Jobs Development Platform because the focus is on helping workers and citizens to help themselves be better workers, and citizens. The theory driving the JDP is that there are many someones somewhere in the nation that can help solve every problem, or develop any idea any company has, an help make the JDP significantly better. And the JDP can match them up. It is a nationwide system that encourages collaboration, yet also welcomes those whose only focus is finding the best career path.
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With the Jobs Development Platform we can transform the nation in many positive ways. While it may seem like a utopian vision to some, it has been over 200 years since we tried something really new in a constructive manner. Great ideas are only possible when enough people work together for a good, sound cause. With the future of work upon us, as other nations are making huge strides, let us not allow everyone else and the future to pass us by.
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by Richard The Chwalek.
Get my book for more on the JDP, entire WTP system, or read a previous article, such as…
Does the U.S. “resemble” the Early Middle Ages from the standpoint of a church and nobles led state and economy? A 21st…richard-the-chwalek.medium.com
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