Younger workers everywhere

[FlyerInHi]

[quote=no_such_reality]That’s really a red herring.

The problem isn’t an occasional listening to the advertisements, Casinos or the infrequent donut.

The real problem is the expectations for long hours, sedentary work, minimal vacation and coupled with greater demands for out of school activities to counter the stripped schools and an out of whack food system where 80% of the food in the grocery store is engineered to push our biological triggers and a subsidies system that makes the worst food for us the most affordable.

If you weren’t here at the right time, stepping off that wage slave treadmill of death isn’t easy, nor is it a sure thing.[/quote]

Yeah, that’s pretty much it. And loneliness and isolation (not having friends other than the nuclear family).

I know a divorced retired guy… He has a good pension so it’s not like he lack means. But he has no good friends in the same town. He lives in a hoarder house, eats junk food at all hours (never proper meals at set times). Takes all kinds of crazy meds. The meds are the crutches because insurance pays for them. Such a great customer for Big Pharma.

[bearishgurl]

[quote=FlyerInHi]BG, corporations get to kids when they are healthy. Just watch European TV (or travel). Over there, teenagers and millenials are skinny and look younger. Over here, our kids are pudgy. There are social and scientific reasons for that . . . . [/quote]Uhh, yeah. The fact that a frap at Starbucks (typical “after-school snack”) has 500-1000 calories, depending on size, isn’t helping these kids. And curly fries at Carl’s Jr and all the other fast food offerings today (incl bags of “Takis” from the corner grocery store) did not exist when I was growing up. Nor could we get an extra $5-$20 day to spend on junk food until our parent(s) got home from work. (I was lucky if I got 35 cents in the morning to buy a school lunch or if there was even the “right” groceries in my house to pack a sack lunch in the mornings when I was in HS :-0) When we came home from school in the afternoons, we snacked on carrot and celery sticks, peanut butter and saltine crackers and NONE of us were overweight, ever. Of course, we played outside after doing homework instead of sitting around texting on iphones the rest of the day.

[quote=no_such_reality]The real problem is the expectations for long hours, sedentary work, minimal vacation and coupled with greater demands for out of school activities to counter the stripped schools and an out of whack food system where 80% of the food in the grocery store is engineered to push our biological triggers and a subsidies system that makes the worst food for us the most affordable…[/quote]

I think today’s workforce is required to put in LESS facetime at their jobs that we or our parents had to when raising a family. It is now common to telecommute one or more days per week. Also, “sick leave” has now been combined with annual leave in a lot of workplaces so the worker doesn’t have to have a “legitimate excuse” to call in sick and thus has more workdays to take off to do what they need to do with no questions asked. And a parent now has so much more choice in the grocery store to choose from to feed their families. If they “choose” to buy junk food, they had other choices at the store but consciously “chose” what they chose to buy there.

I agree that over the last 15 years, especially, that the public school curriculum in CA has been stripped (of mainly art, music and PE classes). But your kid can still avail themselves of extracurricular music and sports in the public school system. Although these after-school activities do cost a little (instrument rental, bus fare for transport to games, competitions, uniform accessories, etc) a parent today doesn’t have to “pay extra” for “private” programs. My kids’ HS had multiple AP offerings and even an IB program but they weren’t interested in them but did participate in music and athletic extra-curricular activities. If your kid takes advantage of the AP offerings their HS offers and tests out of them, this will give them a HUGE leg up to get accepted into university.

Besides possibly paying a few hundred for a 6-8 week SAT study group led by a professional in the field, I see no reason to spend Big Bucks on other “academic enrichment” courses if your kid’s HS has at least 6 AP offerings. I also don’t see the need to spend Big Bucks on private HS if the public HS in your kid’s attendance area is rated at least an “8” and the money spent on private HS will come from the kid’s proposed college fund. We all know that HS is what you make it, regardless if other students in your kid’s HS drop out. A parent spending Big Bucks on grades 1-8 for “academic enrichment” is also wasting money if that money should have been directed to the kid’s college fund, instead, IMO. (No one really knows how much college will cost 6-12 years from now.)

I repeat that College Admissions Boards DON’T CARE ONE IOTA about anything that happened before 9th grade!

I also feel that homeschooled HS “graduates” (who never set foot inside a public or private HS) are at a disadvantage during the CA public university application process because there is no real “proof” that the applicant actually met the A-G entrance requirements, or more importantly, that whichever family member (parent?) “taught” them over the years was actually competent or ever even graduated from HS themselves! It’s akin to the fox watching the henhouse. I’ve seen some amazingly ignorant non-HS graduates attempt to “homeschool” their MS and HS kids and I feel so sorry for those kids that they are not allowed to join their neighborhood pals down at their local public school due to their closed-minded parent(s) irrational “fears.” I have the highest regard for public school teachers, especially in CA where the standards to obtain a public school teaching credential are very rigorous compared to other states.

Anyway, it seems to me that NSR is just making excuses here why today’s parents are so “rushed” in their daily lives that they feel they must “succumb” to grocery-store marketing tactics to buy convenience food and junk food to feed their families.

How about taking 3-4 hours on Sunday afternoon to cook up more nutritious meals and freeze in portions to serve during the week? That’s what I used to do and I worked FT during the week. (With two people, this might only take 2-2.5 hrs.)

[FlyerInHi]

I like Justin Trudeau. Too bad Sanders is not like that. Young people would love him. He would win.

[njtosd]

[quote=bearishgurl][quote=yamashi] . . . I also question your last statement about your ability to pass the bar exam. I’m sure their are very good paralegals, but you can’t compare that to someone that has been practicing. I also hope that you didn’t tell that to people when you interviewed with them. It probably would be akin to a bookkeeper saying they could pass the CPA exam because they’ve been doing journal entries for 30 years.[/quote]H@ll, no. I would never say that in an interview and it wouldn’t help me, anyway cuz I would be applying for a paralegal job with no upward mobility to an attorney position. As it should be.

You can’t compare the work of a paralegal to a “bookkeeper making journal entries.” Paralegals actually do all the work attorneys do except depose witnesses, negotiate settlements and explain their terms to the party(s) and appear before the court. Often when an attorney goes into court to argue a motion, a paralegal wrote the motion and filed it and served it after the attorney looked it over and signed it. If a paralegal’s attorney trusts their research skills and the paralegal provided them with the cases they will be arguing with good notes and possible objections, they’re not going to spend hours (and $100(0)’s of their client’s money) “researching the paralegal’s research.” Ditto for trial prep, deposition prep and witness prep.

Umm, paralegals are frequently the invisible “grunt-worker attorneys” in the back room doing all the work and the “real (licensed) attorney” is in the front room taking all the credit for it.

As it should be :=)[/quote]

I’ve never seen what you describe – however, I have always practiced IP Law, which is relatively specialized. What you say may be true for run of the mill personal injury, residential real estate, etc. but in our office paralegals kept (thousands of boxes of) documents in order, maintained exhibits and deposition transcripts, and did other very useful tasks but not one ever wrote a brief, memo or anything that was filed with the court. If I’m paying a lawyer I expect a lawyer to do the work.

[bearishgurl]

[quote=njtosd][quote=bearishgurl][quote=yamashi] . . . I also question your last statement about your ability to pass the bar exam. I’m sure their are very good paralegals, but you can’t compare that to someone that has been practicing. I also hope that you didn’t tell that to people when you interviewed with them. It probably would be akin to a bookkeeper saying they could pass the CPA exam because they’ve been doing journal entries for 30 years.[/quote]H@ll, no. I would never say that in an interview and it wouldn’t help me, anyway cuz I would be applying for a paralegal job with no upward mobility to an attorney position. As it should be.

You can’t compare the work of a paralegal to a “bookkeeper making journal entries.” Paralegals actually do all the work attorneys do except depose witnesses, negotiate settlements and explain their terms to the party(s) and appear before the court. Often when an attorney goes into court to argue a motion, a paralegal wrote the motion and filed it and served it after the attorney looked it over and signed it. If a paralegal’s attorney trusts their research skills and the paralegal provided them with the cases they will be arguing with good notes and possible objections, they’re not going to spend hours (and $100(0)’s of their client’s money) “researching the paralegal’s research.” Ditto for trial prep, deposition prep and witness prep.

Umm, paralegals are frequently the invisible “grunt-worker attorneys” in the back room doing all the work and the “real (licensed) attorney” is in the front room taking all the credit for it.

As it should be :=)[/quote]

I’ve never seen what you describe – however, I have always practiced IP Law, which is relatively specialized. What you say may be true for run of the mill personal injury, residential real estate, etc. but in our office paralegals kept (thousands of boxes of) documents in order, maintained exhibits and deposition transcripts, and did other very useful tasks but not one ever wrote a brief, memo or anything that was filed with the court. If I’m paying a lawyer I expect a lawyer to do the work.[/quote]nj, I believe IP law is a very specialized niche which doesn’t operate the same way as do civil lit cases which are filed in state court. I have no experience in that field.

[njtosd]

BG – I’ve asked you this before (and you should know it from legal writing …). You should never purport to quote someone unless your quote is identical in every way to what was originally said. If you change anything (like adding italics) you must make it clear that emphasis was added by you. I did not find the portion that you italicized to be more important than other parts of what I wrote. The importance was added by you.

[bearishgurl]

[quote=njtosd]BG – I’ve asked you this before (and you should know it from legal writing …). You should never purport to quote someone unless your quote is identical in every way to what was originally said. If you change anything (like adding italics) you must make it clear that emphasis was added by you. I did not find the portion that you italicized to be more important than other parts of what I wrote. The importance was added by you.[/quote]I italicized that portion of your latest post because that was the portion I was responding to … specifically, the duties of a paralegal. They’re not exactly the same in every field of law. I have seen ads for IP paralegals and the job duties described are nothing that I am familiar with.

I should have just quoted that section only of your post and not the entirely of your post. Sorry for any confusion.

[Author]

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