Industrial Toll

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES - TRAILER

PHOTOG ED BURTYNSKY DISCUSSES DOC (VID)

CORE 77 AUDIO INTERVIEW

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES - FULL LENGTH VID

Yakuza Journo

Meet Jake Adelstein, a Jewish Reporter Who Thinks Like an Japanese Gangster
I was a very typical American when I started on this beat. I'd say I'd be somewhere and I wouldn't, I was late for appointments... To me those are typical American traits — sloppy, forgetful, doesn't honor their word, and doesn't remember the favors that have been done to them. Over time, I've learned that if you say to one of these people, yeah I'll call you, then you better call them. Every time you say you'll do something, you do it, and you build credibility with these people. I'm willing to accept their codes of behavior and live by them. [...]
_____________________________________________

12-Step Sex

How Sex Addiction is Treated

Pirate Economies

The World's Most Corrupt Countries

Generations

Generations: The History of Amerca's Future, 1584-2069

Be Happy

QUOTES
Success-related happiness is a very short term state.

You have to treat acute suffering before you treat lack of happiness...you put the biggest fire out first.

Neutral (state of the brain), generally speaking, is mildly exploratory, mildly positive...if your basic needs are met and you're satiated, you're going to be mildly curious about your surrounding.

We're too focused on happy...We want the outcome but we don't wish to undergo the process for getting there.

The root to happiness is to be maximally resposive to everything that happens in your life - the good, the bad, the blah - the everything.

Why do we need to be this ideal? No one is perfect.

There are lots of pathologies associated with excessive positive emotion. Mania, for example, is a disease of positive emotion.

Cocaine is unhealthy happy.

People can adapt to environments that are incresingly stressful so that after awhile they can live and survive within those environments.

We can train ourselves to be more present in the moment.

It's a notion that's dying that the brain is set in stone after a certain time.

Stimuli that indicate you're making progress produce positive emotions.

Mindfulness can bring their attention back to the present and help them see the beauty and value of things that are immediately in front of them and that's not trivial.

People are very fragile.

Our nervous systems are tilted to protect us.

There are people that need meds...but they're not everything.

We're starting to see this type of mindfulness practices and contemplative practices being put into the curriculum of K through 12 and it's inevitable now that we're going to start using this type of therapy as a way of developing the mental muscle.

You don't want to limit the options that are available to people who are suffering.

The advantage to the mindfulness training is that it's a non-drug option and because it involves learning it's likely to be more permanent. Also the probability that it's going to produce negative side effects is very low which is something you can't necessarily say about medications.

Play is great.

The Deficit

US Debt [wikipedia.org]

David Leonhardt of The New York Times

America's Sea of Red Ink Was Years in the Making
by David Leonhardt
[The New York Times - Jne.09]

There are two basic truths about the enormous deficits that the federal government will run in the coming years.

The first is that President Obama’s agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested.

The New York Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, with the aim of understanding how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II. This debt will constrain the country’s choices for years and could end up doing serious economic damage if foreign lenders become unwilling to finance it.

Mr. Obama — responding to recent signs of skittishness among those lenders — met with 40 members of Congress at the White House on Tuesday and called for the re-enactment of pay-as-you-go rules, requiring Congress to pay for any new programs it passes.

The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years.

You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. It’s a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs and changed economists’ assumptions about how much in taxes the government would collect in future years.

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

If the analysis is extended further into the future, well beyond 2012, the Obama agenda accounts for only a slightly higher share of the projected deficits.

How can that be? Some of his proposals, like a plan to put a price on carbon emissions, don’t cost the government any money. Others would be partly offset by proposed tax increases on the affluent and spending cuts. Congressional and White House aides agree that no large new programs, like an expansion of health insurance, are likely to pass unless they are paid for.

Alan Auerbach, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of a widely cited study on the dangers of the current deficits, describes the situation like so: “Bush behaved incredibly irresponsibly for eight years. On the one hand, it might seem unfair for people to blame Obama for not fixing it. On the other hand, he’s not fixing it.”

“And,” he added, “not fixing it is, in a sense, making it worse.”

When challenged about the deficit, Mr. Obama and his advisers generally start talking about health care. “There is no way you can put the nation on a sound fiscal course without wringing inefficiencies out of health care,” Peter Orszag, the White House budget director, told me.

Outside economists agree. The Medicare budget really is the linchpin of deficit reduction. But there are two problems with leaving the discussion there.

First, even if a health overhaul does pass, it may not include the tough measures needed to bring down spending. Ultimately, the only way to do so is to take money from doctors, drug makers and insurers, and it isn’t clear whether Mr. Obama and Congress have the stomach for that fight. So far, they have focused on ideas like preventive care that would do little to cut costs.

Second, even serious health care reform won’t be enough. Obama advisers acknowledge as much. They say that changes to the system would probably have a big effect on health spending starting in five or 10 years. The national debt, however, will grow dangerously large much sooner.

Mr. Orszag says the president is committed to a deficit equal to no more than 3 percent of gross domestic product within five to 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office projects a deficit of at least 4 percent for most of the next decade. Even that may turn out to be optimistic, since the government usually ends up spending more than it says it will. So Mr. Obama isn’t on course to meet his target.

But Congressional Republicans aren’t, either. Judd Gregg recently held up a chart on the Senate floor showing that Mr. Obama would increase the deficit — but failed to mention that much of the increase stemmed from extending Bush policies. In fact, unlike Mr. Obama, Republicans favor extending all the Bush tax cuts, which will send the deficit higher.

Republican leaders in the House, meanwhile, announced a plan last week to cut spending by $75 billion a year. But they made specific suggestions adding up to meager $5 billion. The remaining $70 billion was left vague. “The G.O.P. is not serious about cutting down spending,” the conservative Cato Institute concluded.

What, then, will happen?

“Things will get worse gradually,” Mr. Auerbach predicts, “unless they get worse quickly.” Either a solution will be put off, or foreign lenders, spooked by the rising debt, will send interest rates higher and create a crisis.

The solution, though, is no mystery. It will involve some combination of tax increases and spending cuts. And it won’t be limited to pay-as-you-go rules, tax increases on somebody else, or a crackdown on waste, fraud and abuse. Your taxes will probably go up, and some government programs you favor will become less generous.

That is the legacy of our trillion-dollar deficits. Erasing them will be one of the great political issues of the coming decade.

E-mail: Leonhardt@nytimes.com

COMMENTS
Allocating blame is interesting media churning, but we need a credible game plan...and that is the essence of the President's responsibility. I know you love the guy, but when is the heat going to be applied?

No mention of the defense budget. Don't we all wonder why European countries can afford such generous social benefits? Because we're paying for their defense.
There's a huge chunk of savings to be had if we could just stop playing World Policeman. Of course defense company lobbyists will never let that happen.

I'm pretty certain that any type of 'meaningful' healthcare reform is going to take a lot more than a quick technical fix.
How about starting things off by deprogramming all the physicians out there who have built up some ridiculous sense of entitlement?

Republicans do not want to acknowledge their role over the last decade in creating this fiscal mess. If you look at states with Republican governors and legislatures you would see that they are performing worse than their democratic counterparts as well. Florida, Nevada, California and Georgia lead the nation in bankruptcies, foreclosures and unemployment. And they have one thing in common: Republican governors.

Maybe it's time to start questioning why the US spends more on "defense" than all the other countries of the world COMBINED. Are we really so threatened everywhere, by everyone, that we need over 700 military bases around the world? Are billion dollar bombers really needed to defeat a bunch of guys living in caves (al Qaeda)? Or has "defense" become the biggest welfare program of all, always looking for new enemies to justify its existence?
Maybe if we only had maybe 400 military bases around the world and a few less high tech systems we could afford to provide basic healthcare for all our citizens for free. Just a thought.

Its frequently asked, " When will the foreigners decide to stop funding our debt?". At which point we will be on our own and forced to live with the decisions we have made.
But here's another one: At what point will the next generation say ' I am not funding the baby boomers retirement'? Or 'I am not having my kids pay for someone else's retirement'?

The reason we are fighting wars in three different countries and bailing out billionaires all the while being broke is not because of the right or left; it is because of the right AND left! As long America continues to mindlessly categorize itself politically as either a Republican or Democrat nothing of true substance will change. Bankers will continue getting bailouts, the poor will be the sacrificial lambs of our military while Lockheed and the like rake in record profits, and the rest of us will watch as our government robs us blind by funding the aforementioned.

It was Herbert Hoover who said: "You know, the only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They're too damn greedy."

I guess Republicans are not the fiscal conservatives they claim to be considering they controlled both houses of Congress most of the Bush years.
__________________________________________

A Conversation About the Growing Fiscal Deficit
QUOTES
NOT to put too nice a word on it, the long-term prospects just look horrendous, just terrible. And we’re going to have to make some major fiscal adjustments so that those projections never come true.

THE very large deficits we’re running in the short run are going to bring the long
run closer to us a lot faster than we had thought.

IF we don’t act very soon, the capital markets are going to make us act.

IT turns out those Clinton era forecasts were just too optimistic.

THERE isn’t much stomach among either members of Congress or, quite frankly, the
American public, I don’t think, for this kind of serious deficit reduction.

BOTH Democrats and Republicans in Congress have rejected relatively small
attempts to raise revenue coming from the White House. And so, Congress seems even less serious about this than the administration does.

THEY were taking little baby steps, and Congress was saying, no, no, no, we like this program too much.

THE real way to reform health care is to put stuff in place that says, you know what, these services you’re providing aren’t actually making people healthier. We’re going to stop paying for them.

WHEN you see Republicans in Congress holding up charts saying that Obama would increase the deficit by this huge amount, what they’re often not saying is that most of the increase in that deficit is in policies that Republicans themselves support.

THE kind of deficit that you see year to year doesn’t fully capture the extent of this problem.

HE (Obama) sort of backed himself into a corner with this whole notion that he will not raise taxes for people making less than $250,000 a year, which is a huge portion of the population, and that’s going to make it very hard to raise taxes in a way that will help pay for these Medicare and Social Security promises.

THE real conundrum we face is, by the time they finally realize that we need to do something about the problem, the time to do something about the problem will have passed. We’ll then be in a crisis, and our options will be limited and the changes we make will be very painful.

I THINK it’s the politics more than the economics that is keeping them from acting on it (the deficit).

WE don’t want to actually have tax increases or large spending cuts now. But start laying the ground work for these things to occur, starting in a few years. There is certainly nothing wrong with that. I think that would actually have a positive effect on the state of the economy right now.

Two Tiers

Hurricane Katrina survivors_Aug. 05
(nationalgeographic.com)


My White Privilege by Naomi Klein
NOW Magazine - Dec. 06
(Excerpt)

I get sent to a ritzy hospital with no patients while poor New Orleans is left to die

I was in New Orleans during the flood with Avi Lewis, my husband, and my friend Andrew Stern. We were driving in a rental car, and we kept getting lost because all the streets were flooded. Andy started thinking he was in a video game, a post-apocalyptic environment, weaving the car around the debris. Then we realized it was five minutes to 6, and 6 o'clock was curfew.

We got into a collision. We spun out and drove right through the stoplight, which wasn't working because there was no electricity. We went through a wrought iron gate and landed in an independent coffee store, kitty-corner to a Starbucks. And someone said, "Did you want to hit the Starbucks?"

The other car was a cop car, and that's how we found out we were in the South. Andy was arrested, Avi was face down on the ground, being warned what happens when you hit a cop in the state of Louisiana.

I was strapped to a gurney in an ambulance, trying to convince the driver to please not take me to a hospital, because I'd been watching the news and seeing these images of what hospitals were like during the flood.

Charity Hospital had no electricity, and incredibly courageous health care workers were trying to keep their patients alive, watching helicopters airlift everybody but them. It's the only hospital that provides emergency services to the poor in New Orleans - or provided. They haven't reopened Charity Hospital, along with many public schools.

I'd seen the awful images and actually gone to one of these clinics where it was like Dante's Inferno, with elderly people falling out of wheelchairs and no one helping them. I was terrified about where they were going to take me.

So I was negotiating with the ambulance driver. I had a concussion and kept slipping in and out of consciousness. "Just drop me off at a corner - you know, I'll walk. No problem."

The next thing I knew, I was at, from what I could tell, a spa. Called the Ochsner Hospital, it's apparently quite a famous private hospital. That's where they decided to take us because we're white. I was in a private room in three minutes flat.

I was cared for by three nurses, a senior doctor and a medical intern. I have never in my life received such attentive care, nor have I seen anyone in my family get such attentive health care. This was in the middle of the largest natural and humanitarian disaster in American history.

The doctors were playing cards in the middle of this hospital, protected by an army of private security who were there, as they said, to keep the junkies out. I couldn't get out because it was past curfew, so after I got a few stitches I tried to interview the staff. I asked my intern, this young guy in his 20s, if he worked the hurricane, and he said, "No, thank god, I wasn't on duty. I actually live in the suburbs."
"Did you go to any of the shelters?" I wasn't trying to be a bitch, I just assumed that someone who'd just learned how to be a doctor would want to help.
He looked at me, confused. It actually hadn't even occurred to him to go to one of the shelters. Just as it hadn't occurred to any of the doctors and nurses in the hospital that, instead of staying in their fortress, dealing with three or four patients, they could be out there.

What we saw with Katrina was an apartheid state where the wealthy unite, where those with credit cards got into cars, drove and checked themselves into motels. This is a two-tier system. They had already accepted the idea that some lives are worth more. And once you do that in your health care system, you are mentally prepared to do that in a major disaster.

It's a heardening of hearts that's required on a daily basis to run a luxury hospital in a city like New Orleans. It's the same heardening of hearts that let people be abandoned on their rooftops by their country.

We Did Not Hate You

NOW Magazine (Jan. 1 - 7, 2009)
It was easy to miss, since the world's attention was focused elsewhere, but this week's aerial attack on Gaza is actually the culmination of a two-month-long assault by Israeli forces that started with the choking off of humanitarian aid and basic supplies to the Strip after ceasefire talks broke off. Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants have been reduced to bare survival ever since. An excerpt on the worsening situation from Amnesty International's December 5 report:

Most mills have shut down because they have little or no grain. People long deprived of many food items now cannot even find bread at times. Families never know if they will have food for their children. When people do have food, they generally have no gas or electricity with which to cook it.
Shortages of fuel, electricity and spare parts are causing water and sanitation infrastructure and other crucial services to deteriorate a bit more every day. Eighty per cent of the wells are now only functioning at reduced capacity, and water supply is only available for a few hours every few days.
Shortages of chlorine increase the risk of water-borne diseases. Routine blackouts disrupt every aspect of life for everyone.
Hospitals are struggling to power life-saving machinery. Patients in need of medical treatment unavailable in Gaza are often denied passage out of Gaza. Scores of people have died in the past year when they could have been saved.
Targeting civilians can never be justified, no matter what the reason.

QUOTE
We did not hate you. We did not want to harm you. We wanted to protect our family, our children.
-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert / Cease-fire press conference / Jan. 17 - 09

Conflict in Gaza: Day 21

State Sanctioned Pedophilia

8-Year-Old Girl Not Old Enough to Divorce Husband, 58

A Saudi court has ruled that an 8-year-old girl who is married to a 58-year-old man cannot divorce her husband until she is older.
After the girl's father married her off for a £5,000 dowry, the girl's mother, who is separated from her husband, filed for divorce on behalf of her daughter. "The judge has dismissed the plea because she does not have the right to file such a case, and ordered that the plea should be filed by the girl herself when she reaches puberty," said lawyer Abdullah Jtili. Relatives say the father and husband have a verbal agreement that the marriage will not be consummated until the girl turns 18, and she still lives with her mother.

COMMENT: I'm glad she lives with mom, and it's oh-so-nice that dad and the husband have a verbal agreement, but I suspect when push-come-to-shove, if the hubby wants that marriage consummated, he'll do it, verbal agreement or no. This stinks. -NefariousNewt

8-Year-Old...

"She doesn't know yet that she has been married," lawyer Jtili said then of the girl who was about to begin her fourth year at primary school.
Saudi Court...

Dear friends, our lives are too dark for you to even imagine. Scores of young girls are too timid to deny the wishes of their parents and too often marry men who are of an advanced age to be grandfathers. Once legally bound, these young girls feel as though they have no choice but to do this man’s bidding. They leap to fulfil his every wish. In the dark of their bedrooms, they have sexual intercourse with men whom they fear! The thought of such pitiful lives lived in perpetual dread is too much to even imagine. The physical attacks women in Arabia endure are accompanied by mental abuse.

From an early age, female children come to realize that their lives pale in comparison with that of male children. This is a cruel existence, even if there is no physical abuse. To always feel that your status is undesirable creates a distressing sadness in our young women. If you ever have occasion to witness the behavior of an Arab women, most likely you will notice that they will respond in a bashful, hesitate manner. This is a direct result from their childhood lessons that their thoughts, dreams and wishes do not matter.

Even in my own family, a family that rules the land, there are women who are beaten and sexually assaulted by the men who are responsible for their well-being. This happens frequently, even though in my religion it is forbidden for a man to behave in the manner too many Saudi men believe is their God given right. Letter from a Saudi Princess

Gawker Layoff Stories

(gawker.com)


Nov.6-08
I once worked for a newspaper that was nuking the bureau I worked in. We were taken out to lunch and when we returned the managing editor was waiting for us. One by one, we walked into the office to hear our fate (I was retained, but sent to a crappy place, hastening my departure.) Prick that he was, the managing editor gave each of us (15 people) six minutes of time, so that he could leave in 90 minutes and beat rush-hour traffic. -DaeSu
>Whoa, did your boss actually time that? -DakotaCadiots
>Yes, he did. He had his watch propped up against a stack of files so he could keep track of the time, and 90 minutes later --having told more than half the staff that they "no longer fit on the team," he was in his BMW and gone. -DaeSu

2002: I walked into my office late one morning (I had been to the dentist) and a coworker tells me that the director had called everyone to an immediate meeting by the front door. He informed them that people would be laid off that day. I was one of the unlucky ones, and had to hand over my key card and clear out my desk that day.
Even the poor guy who had worked there for 10 years and whose office was stocked with plants and books was asked to leave that day.
Director: We need you to leave today.
Poor Guy: Well, that's not very compassionate. And you know how volatile this business is. Why don't you consider that one day you could be working for me?
I still love this guy for saying that. -Squirrelwars

Nov.3-08
My boss didn't know how to save anything into different folders, so it all went into her "Annie's Stuff" folder on the shared drive. I had access, so I spent many merry months reading her Christmas letters, letters to an ex-baby daddy, and the performance reviews of my coworkers. One day I saw a new file with "Sylvia Fired.doc" on it. The dismissal form she'd filled out was full of misspellings and grammatical errors—I spent my last few hours at work copyediting my own dismissal letter. It was the most fulfilling project I took on during my time there. -Anon.

Oct.30-08
At my pre-ordained weekly meeting with my supervisor I was told I was being let go because the company was "going in a different direction". That direction, however, was not eliminating my position, but rather giving it to the intern who just graduated two weeks prior. I assume that move is saving them some salary payout and increasing their eye-candy quotient. -Anon.

Oct.29-08
My husband got laid off unexpectedly—on his birthday, no less. He had been traveling for work for two straight weeks, then they made him sit through a full day of bullshit meetings that were supposed to continue into a company dinner that night. They dropped the ax right before he was set to leave for the restaurant.

Again, on his birthday, after he'd been away for over two weeks. I had sent his birthday cards to his office because I knew that he would get them before he would see me. They wouldn't let him go through his mail to get them. He was allowed to take only the personal photographs from his office and then was forced to sign a form that stated that they did not owe him any money — even though they owed him all his expenses from his two weeks on the road. It took three months and we finally just got that check.

There were a few other layoffs earlier this year, and those people got more in their severance packages. However the company must have realized that they were losing money at an alarming pace so they cut the severance packages drastically... To top it off, he was unable to sell his stock in the company because the timing of his layoff was during a "blackout period." He probably would have only made like a dollar a share. Now, the company's stock is trading at fifty cents a share and so there is nothing of value to sell anymore anyway.

Some consolation: The assholes who are in charge don't stand to make any money on their stock options barring a miracle buyout, which would probably never happen because the place is such a mess and the people who are now in charge are completely incompetent.

If you print this, please keep it anonymous... unless it's after Friday when the severance package runs out. Then we can say whatever we want about those DICKS. -Anon.

Nov.20-08
May I vent?
I just had to lay off one of my favorite staff members. I've let people go before, but because they sucked at their job. Today, for the first time, I had to take someone I find talented, smart and generally entertaining because our clients are leaving in droves.
How did this happen? When did I cross the line from rank-and-file to management? It happened quietly and so subtly that I never really noticed it. But it crystallized for me today.
I'm sorry anonymous staff guy. Sorry to do this before the holidays, and sorry that our clients suck at running their businesses enough that I had to let you go.
Note: not looking for sympathy from anyone here, since I'm still getting paid (for now, anyway). But I know how much traffic these posts are getting and just hope that someone knows that at least one management person hates this shit as much as you do for getting shafted. -Larry Bird Flu
> I think my boss enjoyed it when she laid me off Tuesday morning. She was so cold I got a brainfreeze. -GregorMendel

Nov.24-08
Thread: Surely there must be such a thing as workers' rights? Why didn't they get notice? Do they get a severance package? -Vivien Smith-Smythe-Smith
Let's Use One of These Hot Blondes

My favorite story was a few years ago and involved Mercedes Benz. They scheduled a group of managers for an off-site "conference" at a local hotel/conference center. When the victims were seated an HR persons told them they had been fired and to go straight home. Their offices would be cleared out and their personal stuff sent to them. -Weegee's bored
>I knew layoffs were coming when all of a sudden half of us didn't have network access. -it takes a lot to laugh

With reference to corporations' access to legally restricted, confidential personnel files, such as insurance companies, company consultants and HIPAA. Oh, yes, certainly. Firms never break the law to save pennies or their ass, whether in times of crisis or prosperity. Is anyone familiar with what took place at humans-are-our-most-valued-asset..., progressive culture word speak giant Hewlett-Packard? They tapped phones and surveilled their own people. Where corporations, especially their balance sheets, are concerned, company policy or legal obstacles generally do not prevent them from infringing on individuals' privacy. Yes the perps at HP eventually got caught, but how many firms get away with it? To think this doesn't happen often is naive. -JillianParis

Nov.26-08
Thread: When bosses do shit like this, don't they worry that eventually someone is going to snap and do something really, really bad in the office?...-drunkexpatwriter

Thread: All these layoff stories are heartbreaking. But at least we live in the Land of the Free, right? Free to enter the workforce with $100k in student loan debt. Free to remain shackled to a job because your kids need the health care benefits. Free from awful pushy unions. Free from socialized medicine....-Baroness
Laid Off Just in Time for the Holidays

Dec.05-08
First off, this is the first time this has ever happened to me so my heart grows colder each day.
I was laid off this week from a large company and most of the points made here are true, except I would like to not think of myself as the dead weight amongst the ones that were let go.
Being the last hired they thought it would be easier to let me go instead of one of the 2 useless people they are keeping. There's a good chance that it had to do with me getting paid a higher rate than them, who knows.
All I know is that I tried hard to stay out of a corporate entity but it seems as though they own your ass one way or another.
My anxiety from a job loss is magnified greatly because of both the current economic state as well as right before 2 major holidays which make job hunting hard.
I'm beginning to understand why people dive off bridges! -Cheap Shot
>@Cheap Shot: The sting is bad at first, but it gets better! Also, try to take some time for yourself--especially if you've been working crazy hours and haven't had time to do so recently. And be creative in looking for new jobs--I totally sent my resume to local, fun places (like wine shops and cheese shops) if for no other reason than to get resume feedback and to get the feeling that I'm putting myself out there.
And keep in mind that usually, being laid off is a long-term blessing because you may be given one of the few lifeboats ahead of a monstrous Titanic-like sinking. -bellethellama

Jan. 24-09
It's true, and it's horrible. I work in a bookstore and we've seen a complete and total marked dip in sales and there are times when we can go an hour or more without anyone buying anything, or seeing a customer at all.
Only so many times you can shelve a book. :/ We're all screwed, huh? -Eldritch

My company is one of those companies that's profitable and getting moreso, but still laying people off pretty much just because everybody else is. They're basically using the recession as an excuse to cut staff and freeze salaries. I just had my evaluation and even though I'm underpaid by about 25% and asked for a larger raise (before the recession really hit), I was told the company couldn't afford it. This even though the company is profitable, we'd just laid off a bunch of people and everybody who remained was being asked to do a ton more work. I got the classic "we'll have to do more with less" line - yes, my boss actually said this to me! He may as well have given me the "it's not you, it's me" speech - I mean Jesus Christ, talk about cliches.
Literally that *same day*, my department had a meeting where my boss solicited ideas for what we could do with an extra $20,000 per month that we had had added to our budget.
Needless to say, morale is pretty goddamn low at my company, and NOBODY wants to work for these a-holes. -badasscat
Workers: Just Sit Quietly and Wait to be Laid Off

Keyword: Layoffs

Perspective is Everything

Leading Church Bodies of America - 2000
(incredimazing.com)

Click on map to enlarge.

Perspective is Everything

(incredimazing.com)