Now my husband is an old man - but he would never admit two Mexican men could do what he couldn't.
Now some people in this country think they are above manual labor and don't allow their children to do it either. That is a pity. I wonder if anyone realizes how many young people have put themselves through college working at McDonalds, or doing manual labor? A lot.
Another aspect of all this cheap labor for agriculture - there is and will be very little need for advances in mechanical answers to farm labor. Why buy an expensive machine - when you can have your employees subsidized by the taxpayers.
I would have paid your husband $40 to dig out those roots. I would have paid you that also. I doubt either of you could have done it, but it would have been great fun to watch you try. There is something to be said for entertainment value.
It would have been even more fun to have have blown them up.
Los Angeles is home to multimillionaire movie execs and billionaire developers. When it comes to the overall value of its goods and services, L.A. County does better than Switzerland, Sweden or Austria. It is also the poverty capital of the nation.
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An estimated 811,000 residents work off the books as day laborers or nannies, earning substandard wages and no benefits. Almost 2 million people -- more than in any other metropolitan area -- eke out an existence on less than $18,100 a year, the federally defined poverty level for a family of four. The burden is even greater in this area, topped only by New York City and San Francisco in cost of living.
In a time when lack of education increasingly means a life of poverty, 30% of county residents over 25 have never finished high school. Among the 36% who are foreign-born in L.A. County, many are immigrants from Latin American countries with low levels of education.