How Sam and Mattie Made A Movie

Watch the clip, this is awesome.  I heard about Sam and Mattie on the CBS news last night.

Many years ago, Sam and Mattie, who both have Downs Syndrome, met at the Special Olympics.  They became best friends, hanging out with each other continually over the years.  A while back, one of their brothers saw them acting out mock fight scenes in the backyard.  He figured it was a phase the guys were going through.  But after a while, he noticed they kept acting out the same scenes over and over.  He asked them about it.  It turned out that they had written and entire script for a zombie movie, and were acting it out. 

So, with a little help, Sam and Mattie did a Kickstarter campaign, raised $70,000 and actually made their zombie movie, called Spring Break Zombie Massacre.  It'll be coming out soon. 

So... after seeing Sam and Mattie on Conan, tell me again what your excuse is for not trying to do something awesome.

Are 20 Million Americans Just Lazy?

This clip gives a short, concise, but well informed look at youth unemployment around the world. 

When your college offers a "paper or plastic?" seminar, you know the job market is looking bad.

OK, it's not quite that bad yet, but it's getting close.  The over-educated, over-qualified low wage employee has become an archetype in our society.  We've all seen them.  The barrista with a master's degree.  The senior citizen wiping tables at McDonald's after a 40 year career of skilled labor.  The grad student stocking grocery shelves.  For a year or so I've heard people throw out an estimate that there are 30 million unemployed and underemployed people in the U.S..  About a month ago, I actually looked up the best recent numbers I could find.  I came up with a number of at least 20.3 million un and under-employed people in the U.S., and that's a minimum number.  Nobody knows the real number.

So what's going on?  Are 20 million Americans just lazy?  The clip above talks about young people unemployment.  Man, I got EVERY job I ever applied for from age 17 to 28.  I was completely unqualified for most of them.  Hell, I managed a small amusement park at age 18.  Really.  That was starting in the 80's, in a city, Boise, Idaho, that actually had a pretty tight labor market for that time.  What has happened since then that got us in this mess now?  Here are some of the major factors:

Outsourcing- Millions of manufacturing, and some service jobs (like call centers for example) have been moved to other, much cheaper, countries, Mexico and China in particular.  This is the big culprit for the loss of good paying jobs in most people's minds, but it's far form the only one.

Taken by technology- This is the thing that most people gloss over.  Millions of jobs have also been lost or taken over by various forms of technology.  When I was a kid, and my parents drove into a gas station, a grown man would come out, pump the gas, and wash the windows and check the oil while we waited.  Those thousands of jobs were replaced by self-service gas pumps.  I read once that ATM machines now do the work that 800,000 bank tellers used to do.  I don't know if that number is accurate, but it gives us a sense of how those jobs were lost.  

Concentration of wealth- In the 1980's, the now legendary president Ronald Reagan helped push through tax cuts to wealthy Americans and corporations.  The idea was called "trickle down economics," or "Reaganomics" for short.  The idea was that by giving rich people and corporations tax breaks and loopholes, they would build or grow huge businesses that would employ lots of people.  A quick look around will show you that not a whole actually lot trickled down.  What did happen was that many wealthy people became super rich, and now control an incredible share of our nation's wealth.  That small number of people can't possibly spend as much as tens of millions of average Americans could.  In an really simple analogy, much of the U.S. wealth is in huge resevoirs owned by super rich people, but the rivers feeding everyone else have nearly dried up.  Money flows like water in a healthy economy.

Trillions of dollars held offshore- I've heard estimates that 1 to 3 TRILLION dollars are being held in other countries to avoid paying U.S. corporate taxes.  Even with all the loopholes in the tax laws, many major corporations are holding tens of millions of dollars or more in other countries.  No one has figured out a way to get this money back into the U.S..  Keep in mind, a trillion is a thousand billion.  

The Big Transition- This is my name for the period of society we're in right now.  We've left the Industrial Age, where factories in nearly every town and city employed most people.  We're heading towards a new age, called The Information Age, The Digital Age, The Creative Age and similar names, depending who you listen to.  But we're not in that new age yet.  We're in a decades long transition between the two ages, where one revolution after another in technology, communication, and business is surging through society.  Right now there are high paying jobs requiring tech skills and creativity.  Then there are a much larger number of low skill service jobs.  The huge number of good paying mid skilled jobs have disappeared.  The more I look into future trends by the people who study those things, the worse the future job situation looks.

So... again... are 20 million Americans just lazy?  Some are, of course.  But there a many, huge macro forces depleting the job market right now.  Millions of Americans, and hundreds of millions of people worldwide, are caught in really crazy circumstances.

So who's going to create the millions of jobs we need?  Senator Bernie Sanders, in his presidential bid, pushed the issue of putting millions of Americans to work repairing and building infrastructure, like roads and bridges, in the U.S.  This would be great... if the politicians could work together and make it happen.  I'm not holding my breath on that one.  

Professor Richard Florida, economic development specialist and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, says we need to make service jobs higher paying and better jobs.  That would help, too.  But, again, I'm not holding my breath. 

So... who's left to create millions of jobs?  We are.  You and me.  I keep coming back to the same conclusion.  Millions of Americans (and people in other countries) are going to have to create our own jobs.  We just can't wait for other people to do it.  So, no... you're not necessarily lazy because you  don't have a great job.  But you might be fighting a losing battle in a job market with millions of similarly skilled people.  This blog is about finding our best options.   

How I Made $150 Trash Picking

The table in the clip above is similar to the one I'm talking about in this post, except the one I found had much more intricate carving. 

Back in 2006, I could tell that taxi driving was going to keep going downhill as a business, so I tried to escape it.  I had discovered storage unit auctions by accident a couple years before.  This was a while before the TV shows about storage auctions came out.  Oddly, I started in Huntington Beach, California, and I think Daryl who now stars in Storage Wars, was at the first auction I went to.

In any case, I was living in my taxi, and had my own stuff in a storage unit.  I started going to storage auctions and buying the cheaper units, and reselling things, making a bit of money.  One day, driving into my own unit, I passed the dumpster, and there was a big, round table top, and a huge table base nearby.  I didn't think much of it.  The next day, I went to my unit again, and I could tell the table was old, so I checked it out.  It was solid oak, definitely antique, with lots of hand carved details.  But there was some damage to it.  I threw the table top in the back seat, lugged the insanely heavy base into the trunk, and took it from the dumpster to my unit.  I happened to have a disposable camera so I took a few photos and got them developed.

Over the next few days, in the course of driving around in my taxi, I stopped at several antique shops to see what they thought.  The crazy heavy table I found in the trash was solid oak, made in France, and probably made around 1870-1880.  after about three days, a store owner said he'd give me $300 for it.  So I went to my storage unit, loaded it up, and took it to his huge antique shop.  when he saw it, he said, "That's a lot smaller than I thought it was, I'll give you $150."  A lot of people may have been  pissed off.  But I pulled it out of the trash three days earlier, I took the $150 cash and headed back out on the road as a taxi driver.

How did I spot it?  I worked for years as a furniture mover, and I got to know good furniture from bad, so it caught my eye sitting there by the dumpster.  You never know where a good piece will be found.  A lot of people put old furniture out by the dumpster or on the curb.  Like the old saying goes, one person's trash is another person's cash.  Keep an eye out.

Music in the Morning

I doubt most of you have heard of this song.  It's "Sound System" by Operation Ivy, an early ska band.  For those who don't know, ska is a form of music combining punk and reggae that originated in the late 1980's.  This is a song that gets your blood pumping, and it's about listening to music to get you in a better mood.

In late 1991 and early '92, I lived on the living room floor of a tiny apartment on Alabama Street in Huntington Beach, California.  On the couch, a few feet away, slept Bill Grad, BMX racer and industry guy.  In the single bedroom slept one Chris Moeller, a young BMX racer and crazy jumper who ran a small company, called S&M Bikes, out of the garage.  The whole apartment was eight feet wide, long and skinny, which is why we called it the "Winnebago."  Every morning, Chris' girlfriend at the time would step over me on her way out to go to work.  About the same time, Bill would get up and get off to his job.  A couple hours later, Chris would wake up, take a leak, and then crank up the stereo.  That was the official start of the business day for S&M Bikes.  It was music to wake up to, get the blood pumping, shake off a mild hangover, and get ready for another day of selling bikes.  He had a limited selection of music, cassettes (remember those?) of Green Day's "Kerplunk,"  Pegboy's "Strong Reaction," or a compilation tape called "The Big One" which included tracks by Green Day, The Offspring, Clawhammer, Pop Defect, and some other little known bands of the day.

When you're unemployed, or struggling with a job far below your skill level, mornings can be really depressing.  You wake up and think, "Nooooooo! Not the same ol' shit AGAIN!"  Right then is the time to crank up some music to get you moving and into a better mood.  In addition to 90's power punk like Bad Relgion's "Punk Rock Song," and Face to Face's "Disconnected, Boston's "More Than a Feeling," Matisyahu's "King Without a Crown" (live at Stubb's version on You Tube), Amanda Palmer's "Ukulele Anthem," are some of my favorites.  It doesn't matter what you listen to, find that one or two songs that literally get you moving and change your mood.  Once your attitude is in a better place, start thinking of how you're going to improve your situation.  Take the words of this Operation Ivy song to heart:

"Sound system gonna pick me back up... (it's the) one thing I can depend on." 

You are now free to go on with your day.

Really Weird Jobs People Actually Make Money At

There are a lot of weird jobs out there, and quite a few online videos talking about them.  This clip from The Richest is the best one I've seen in a while.  I'll never look at pandas the same way again. 

The Story Of Our Lives

" I went down to look for a job, I had no training, no experience to speak of.  I looked down at the holes in my jeans... and I turned and headed back."
-Mike Ness/Social Distortion, "Story of My Life"

To give you an idea of what the job market is like where I currently live, here's a WFMY News 2 story about the new Cheesecake Factory that opened 8 days ago in Greensboro, North Carolina, about ten miles from me.  7500 people applied for the 255 jobs the restaurant brought.  Any time you have enough people to fill a small city applying for a restaurant job, you know there's a serious jobs issue in the region.  This is right now, October 2016, in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina, eight years after the start of The Great Recession.

A couple nights ago, I saw a national TV news story where a woman interviewed five former steel workers in Ohio.  The steel plant that once employed much of their town, was closed, shuttered, rusting, and decaying.  The once devout Democrats were either voting for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, hoping he would somehow bring their jobs back, or still undecided.  They weren't worried about ISIS, Iraq, or the environment.  They just wanted good jobs, like the ones they held in the steel factory years before.  Near the end of the segment, they showed one of the men at a job retraining class, with rows of computer monitors.  The man was confused by the lessons being taught.

There are a lot of serious issues in the United States right now.  But good jobs are an issue that tens of millions of people have right now.  I'm one of those people.  In my particular situation, it's become apparent that I need to create my own job.  With my age, weight, health issues, work history, and overall situation, there's almost no chance of me finding a good paying job in this area, of Central North Carolina. As I've read about, studied, and looked into the U.S. job market and, I've come to the conclusion that millions of Americans are going to have to create their own jobs to get this country going again.

That's what this blog is about.  What's happening now?  Where did the jobs go?  Why aren't they coming back? And who could possibly create enough jobs to rebuild the American middle class?  I'm going to look into the background of this whole issue.  But more than that, I'm going to look for viable alternatives for YOU and ME to start making a decent living again.  Buckle up, I'm pretty sure it'll be a bumpy ride.