[jla]

The first rule is "Life is not fair — get used to it." The fourth one is "You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself." That is followed directly by "Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping — they called it opportunity."

Young people? I talk like this to ADULT liberals.

...and no, they don't quite get it either.

[BookmanTheJanitor]

here are Sykes 11 rules:


1 Life is not fair; get used to it.

2 The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

3 You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school You won't be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.

4 If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.

5 Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger-flipping; they called it opportunity.

6 If you screw up, it's not your parents' fault so don't whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.

7 Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning your room, and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. So before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

8 Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades, they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.

9 Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

10 Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

11 Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

[WackyKat]

Otherwise, many young Indians will have earned the jobs that Americans could fill if they were willing to put in the effort required to do the job properly.

Indians, Chinese ,Malaysians, Mexicans, "earn the job" because they are willing(or are forced) to work for one-tenth, one-twentieth, or one-fiftieth, of American wages, with no benefits, and no safety or health regulations.

To blame "lazy" American workers for multinationals moving jobs to the Third World is sickening.

[RightOnGOP]

bump for later.

[RightOnGOP]

bump for later.

[Physicist]

Here's a moment of insight I had as a graduate student.

I was no stranger to hard work, doing tough, dirty, minimum-wage construction testing during my summers off, but I saw one guy who took it to the next level. He was a staff physicist on the project I was working on, not a professor, but a fairly senior guy who'd been a Ph.D. particle physicist for a good five or ten years. He had a nice car, a lovely house, and a bunch of pre-teen sons. He was smart, athletic, hard-working--he had it going on at every level.

So one year I'm christmas shopping on a Saturday, and there he is, working the register! He rings me up with a big, friendly smile amid the holiday chaos. I ask him what's going on, and he tells me that, around the holidays, every retailer needs help. You can get a part-time job just for asking, and the hours when they need help are the hours when most people aren't working. The money's not great, but it's more than enough to pay for a very merry Christmas.

I'll bet he did the work of half a dozen teenagers, too.

Once my kids are old enough that I'm not needed as a supplemental mom on the weekends, I expect to do the same.

[Age of Reason]

Too many young Americans have no understanding of the American work ethic.

Can you blame them?

Seems to me America has no respect for the work ethic, either.

And it's no wonder; after all, America holds lotteries that award tens of millions to people who do not earn it.

Which makes it official: the American work ethic is not respected by American government.

A fine example for the kids.

[God is good]

"Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping — they called it opportunity."

Not! Go out and find a real job, or get an education and then get a real job. Flipping burgers gets you nothing.

[LiteKeeper]

SITREP - WORLDVIEW - ECONOMICS

[Mygirlsmom]

Good to see Charlie getting credit for his great insights. I seem to remember him saying that he often gets emails forwarded to him from people saying,

"Charlie, take a look at these cool 11 rules that Bill Gates came up with!"

[CodeMonkey]

You know what is the rule which everyone forgets: do what you enjoy that lets you live a decently comfortable life.

[Pagey]

I took care of a neighbors yard (thoroughly I might add) once a week and thought $10.00 a month was alot of money in 1975 when I was 9 years old. After 6 months, I finally realized that there was a whole lot more I wanted out of life and have worked my ___ off ever since, just so I can have what I want and travel where and when I want. IMHO You can't give someone the drive to succeed,it has to come from w/in the person themselves. I know people who have spent 8-10-12 years of their lives being the perpetual student,who simply don't have the drive to get out and make it happen because they're lazy. I can proudly say I haven't seen them in years either. Imagine my amazement when one of them actually had the audacity to call me for a job. LOL Unfortunately for them, I don't employ people who are or were my friends (or thought they were) at any time, and I sleep just fine!

[Zeroisanumber]

Yep, the younger generation is going to hell in a handbasket. Also, when I was a kid the snow was a lot deeper, and I walked five miles uphill both ways to sit in an unheated schoolhouse. For a summer job, I picked rocks out of a corn field 18-hours a day before I came home to help my father pull tree stumps out of our bean field for the other 8 hours of the day.

Goddarn kids don't know what REAL work is!

[Lady Jag]

Bump for the truth.