little_old_man

They don't even have burger flippers at places like MacDonald's and Burger King. They have burger microwavers because all of the burgers are cooked on a conveyor belt cooker and then put aside for hours until an order comes in then they nuke it. At least Wendy's still cooks them on a griddle when you order them.

I hate you leadfinger. We're having a garage sale and it sucks.

Maybe where you are Sammy, but out here people are buying hybrid cars like crazy. So many that the state "says" it's losing tens of millions in gas taxes. There is even some talk out here about taxing people on the number of miles they drive in addition to the highest gas taxes in the nation. We also have a new gas tax starting next year that will raise gas somewhere between .40 cents and 1.25 a gallon. I'm glad I don't have to commute. Also don't forget that when gas prices get really high, we all pay a lot more for consumer goods because of the high cost of trucking goods to us. Yes a lot of people suck it up and pay more for gas and even buy bigger cars, but when the cost of everything we consume costs more it hurts everybody in the wallet.

It's the boom town mentality Logan. The same principal applied here in California during the gold rush. When you have thousands of people all showing up at once doing the same kind of work and making decent money, they can afford to pay more. The people who really got rich during the gold rush opened restaurants to feed the miners expensive meals and hardware stores to sell them tools at greatly inflated prices. The fast food chains in that area have to pay more to attract people that don't want to work in the oil fields and it will stay like that as long as there is a good job market.

The way I see it, the jobs that created the middle class from just after WWII until the late 70's are for the most part gone. The middle class was built on manufacturing jobs, and we simply don't manufacture anything anymore. At least not enough to employ a large segment of the population. This has slowly been happening since the late 70's and the huge housing bubble in large part created by the dot.com boom in the 90's then the beginning of our current great recession in 2001 was the end of the good old days. What we are all seeing now is our future and it will not get better. Those who are smart enough and can afford to go to college might do better in the long run, but I am seeing way too many kids who just spent 4 years in college and can't find work. Even in formerly high paying fields like law or medicine, there is no guarantee you will find a good job in your field. About the only exception is computer science or engineering, everything else is almost a waste of time. Before I retired from insurance a few years ago I employed 3 people with masters degrees in various subjects, and they were all making $11 an hour inputting insurance apps for me. A couple of them had close to $100,000 in school loans and no way to pay them back. What a fucking waste of time and money. When I graduated high school in 78 about a third of graduating students went to trade schools because they knew they would have jobs when they finished. Now it seems they either go to college and hope they can find a job after they're done, or they go to work for a minimum wage job and hope to find something better with no real plan. Both of my grandfathers were machinists and never made more than $10,000 a year in their lives, but both of them owned homes, raised families and retired with over $300k (plus pensions) in the bank for their retirement. Now things are automated, and jobs like those almost don't exist any longer. Manufacturers finally figured out that the combination of high union wages and the huge pensions with lifetime medical coverage were no longer sustainable, and they moved manufacturing overseas instead of going out of business. All of the former high paying manufacturing jobs like steel, textiles, printing, furniture, lumber are all gone. We ship the raw materials to China or someplace else cheap so they can make our materials into consumer goods and ship them back to us. What a horse shit way to do business. It's not just an American problem, it's worldwide. Tens of thousands of Hispanics flood across our border every year because they can't make enough working in their home countries to feed their families. Those who stay wind up working for drug cartels to sell to the American public. The Middle East and Africa are exploding with violence because there are millions of young men who can't find work and have nothing better to do than go to a mosque to learn how all of their problems are the fault of western society. Western and Eastern Europe are having employment problems of their own. China is riding high for now but at some point their bubble will burst and there will be major upheaval with their population. If history has taught us anything it is that when things get as bad economically as they are now all over the world, governments are overthrown and wars happen. I don't have a warm fuzzy feeling about our future and fear for the coming generations. Raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour will only be putting a very small bandage on a very big wound. I eat fast food on occasion and it's already getting to be more expensive than it's worth. A single burger and a medium drink at Wendy's is about $8 and medium roast beef sandwich and a medium drink at Arby's is about the same price. If it gets any closer to $10 for a drive through lunch, you'll see people not eating there any longer and those people who fought so hard for a pay increase will no longer have jobs.

For the last time, NO I don't know where the closest free clinic is to your place in San Jose.

It was copy and pasted from someplace else DJ. Johnny is actually 94.

I don't know Billy, the last couple of times I was on Oahu there were still a lot of angry locals around, especially on the north shore. Signs in their yards with not terribly nice things to say about tourists. Can't say that I blame them, we did steal it from them after all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4menkDCMAU

"SSDs" Glad I opened this. I thought it was about venereal disease.

Me no like. Look like poopoo.

FU JOHNNY! Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

I'll bet he gets all freaky with his wife or girlfriend.

Fast food restaurants are and have always been stepping stone jobs to make money while in school or until you find a better job. They were never meant to be a career with good pay, although people now seem to think those jobs should be careers.

The last time I was in Florida about 10 years ago we were swimming in an indoor pool with a screened in enclosure and getting eaten alive by no-seeums. Tiny little fucking bugs that you literally could not see. The next day we were playing golf at TPC and a swarm of bugs I think they called yellow flies descended on us and just started biting the hell out of everybody. We all hopped in our golf carts and headed back to the clubhouse. That same day my brother hit a ball on the edge of a water hole and was trying to get it with a club when a 3 foot gator let him know that wasn't a good idea.

Congrats UK. You dodged a bullet this time.

Don't forget that even if a member of congress serves a single 2 year term, they get lifetime medical and a full pension. They also get free housing, a staff, and if they don't feel they are making enough money they get to vote themselves a raise. If you want to take corruption out of politics, don't pay them and make it illegal for them to profit from any contacts while on the job. Then you'll see people running for office who truly care about helping the country.

I love Florida but more than anything else I hate all the fucking BUGS.

All he got was a couple packs of smokes and he "peeled" out of there.

Just about every place in the world has predators of some kind. If it's not gators, then it's snakes, or killer bees, or any number of things that can kill people. The area where I live near San Francisco is called the red triangle, and about 40% of all of the shark attacks in the US happen here. I've seen them from boats while fishing and saw many big sharks when I used to SCUBA dive in the area.

Hxtr has been doing worse for a very long time. Think Eric Cartman and the alien radar dish coming out of his ass.

We have just short of 40 million in California alone. That's 39.5 million too many.

I think Hxtr has been looking for one of those for his vibrator.

Oh snap.

I like it, but I really feel that if you want to portray the essence of being part of the XI family, there needs to be some boobage showing.