Gen Y versus Gen X 3759

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Kamal R. Prasad

This is another one of your over-simplified understandings of reality. I am about 1-3 way through the book "Changing Fortunes: The world's money and the threat to American leadership" by Paul Volker and Toyoo Gyohten (the Japanese counterpart to our Paul Volker). The real situation is more complicated and, from what I read, not even that well understood by the "experts".

Actually, they told me they were paid very close if not exactly what domestics would be paid. And, actually, I had a pretty good idea what everyone who worked on the house was paid and its close to standard for this area of the country. Besides, I did all the contracting for the heat pumps, well, septic and paid standard prices. I did all of the interior painting, installed all of the kitchen, and the kitchen laminate flooring, the porch laminate flooring, and the laminated flooring in the room I am sitting in. I also, cleared the majority of the land for the driveway (about 600 feet), including many trees, and using an electric chainsaw run from batteries (there was no electricity here before we bought the land and it took one year to get it, too). I saved about $25,000 in costs by doing the work I did. I also made all of my own house drawings for "plan review" by our local zoning department. Used a large format printer to print them out.

Again, the situation is not so simple. There is a lot of heterogeneity in thinking and the thinking is different at many levels. It is beyond the scope of this post to review this and I am not an expert on the subject. However, I recognize that we cannot afford to give services to all the poor and uneducated people who come here and can't speak a word of english but they think they can just step ashore and get a car, big salary, health care (quite a few are sick, carry diseases, etc) etc., just by appearing here.