[Nowhere Man]

Love the pic of your cat, I have one that will be 18 in August, she is small for a cat, only a little over 5 pounds so people still think she is a kitten or at least 1 or 2 plus hse is very active.

If I had the time, I'd love to take some pictures of the Pittsburgh area where job loss has affected us too.



Pansy: b: 8-19-1987 -

[Aliska]

I love your picture of Pansy. Thanks for sharing. She doesn't look that tiny, a very pretty little cat. Lucy used to weigh over 12 pounds and has lost half her body weight the last couple of years. I've had her checked over at great expense for one visit and some tests and they couldn't find anything wrong with her that was treatable, liver and kidney levels were a little high.

Job loss is probably much worse in Pittsburgh. I wish you had time to do a photo essay as I'm not real good at that sort of thing.

One thing I was thinking I shouldn't have posted my pictures here for a number of reasons. It's the people I dealt with in those places I miss. I used to kid around with them except at the cafeteria. Now I'll probably never see most of them again.

They've just built tons more restaurants further out, and a chain grocery store came in to replace all that. All those pictures were of LOCAL businesses that started (and ended now here). Replacement businesses have corporate headquarters elsewhere and so flows the profits. Some gets cycled back into the community through employee paychecks.

A worse blow to the community was the loss of our far better-paying farm implement manufacturing jobs. One by one they shut down, at least five fairly large employers. Young men could get their high school diploma one day and walk into any number of those places the next day, get an entry level job that paid a living wage, get rapidly promoted if they kept their noses to the grindstone, marry and raise families on their pay. That's pretty much history now. Not all of them were union shops.

I'm not sure why all that happened, and will see if I can find out. Some of it I did blame in my own mind on the unions, but I think there was more to it than just that.

Why do some corporations have two-tiered systems anyway? Salaried employees never unionize. Not all of them are that highly paid. Some are very well paid for not a whole lot of skills or training. Why is that, do you know?

Why is there so much antipathy for unions? In the 1800's after the industrial revolution, employees worked horrible hours at low pay right here in America. That's probably why they were started.