Working Until You Die

It’s either I do something that I really love or take over the world - still figuring it out. (;

I’m gonna have loans to pay after school so that’s another stress (any tips would be nice, so I can get out of the work till u die cycle sooner than later).

Pay as much of your principal amount as possible first, then the interest. You can negotiate this with them sometimes.
Also try to apply for a grant that will help pay it off for you.
 
Pay as much of your principal amount as possible first, then the interest. You can negotiate this with them sometimes.
Also try to apply for a grant that will help pay it off for you.

Is there grants you can apply to after school? Or do you mean currently?

I’m trying to pay it off in five years or less- I have about 42,000 I owe so hopefully it’s possible.

Maybe I’ll start gambling…
 
Is there grants you can apply to after school? Or do you mean currently?

Both, there are many you can apply for after graduation.
There are various organizations out there willing to help pay it back.
Sometimes an employer will help as well but that'll depend on what you're up to.

40-50k is for sure possible but may take a bit depending.
Always pay more than the minimum as well.
Ask for raises frequently, with the argument of needing to pay it off.
Try to negotiate on a lower interest rate on the loan.
 
Both, there are many you can apply for after graduation.
There are various organizations out there willing to help pay it back.
Sometimes an employer will help as well but that'll depend on what you're up to.

40-50k is for sure possible but may take a bit depending.
Always pay more than the minimum as well.
Ask for raises frequently, with the argument of needing to pay it off.
Try to negotiate on a lower interest rate on the loan.

I will, thank you for the help.
 
It’s either I do something that I really love or take over the world - still figuring it out. (;

I’m gonna have loans to pay after school so that’s another stress (any tips would be nice, so I can get out of the work till u die cycle sooner than later).
Taking over something to implement positive change, no matter the situation, should be done by someone with a life experience of the subject and an understanding of why things are as they are. It's a great way to garner their attention. Taking control must be understood by those involved, who must have patience and wait without selfish thoughts. Sometimes we have had control all along, just allowing people to show their true selves.

Taking a worldwide problem and finding a better way for it to be dealt with usually happens when the men at the helm steer toward themselves rather than what was intended from the beginning. People have mere human frailties, and we must understand this. Others create the need for getting things back on track, not ourselves. They must realize they brought this on their own selves. We are called to step in. It is not really our own decision.
Maybe red lines were crossed: maybe not. All we must do is what we are lead to do, and wait on the timing to present itself. Others do not wish to wait, so they must learn to wait.

We can be expected to do as they wish, but it is no longer their call. They had their turn. A giver is much different than a taker. Many people and organizations implement change in a positive format. We must not bring a remembrance of old things, but focus on the new. We must not bring guilt, but focus on our deeds, as we must not leave bitterness behind on the trail. When they understand better, they may even offer to help. There are those who might can never help. We are here to make things better for everyone.

As per loans, can they be changed from their source? Can better interest rates be sought? Maybe a lower interest rate would help people with school loans. If we cannot forgive, we should be able to at least be helped to make things easier. Insurance on the school loans interests me. Why? Insurance has a maximum out-of-pocket. Maybe there should be a maximum amount of interest students can be charged for school loans? When it is met, payments must be made monthly on the principle or the interest starts accruing all over again? These are not loans for houses, vehicles, boats: pleasure. These are loans for knowledge, and we send them out into the world with few jobs to be had. This may include the banks as our friends trying to help us find work. So many different thoughts could be on the table, especially thoughts that would eschew goodness.

These are not business loans These are people trying to survive to help make the world a better place. Children must be educated. Young adults must continue to learn. Programs to foment laziness we do not need. We must somehow garnish new helpers to help student loan recovery, not cause them stress and worry. Why should we only want government help? We can do this without them.
 
Is there grants you can apply to after school? Or do you mean currently?

I’m trying to pay it off in five years or less- I have about 42,000 I owe so hopefully it’s possible.

Maybe I’ll start gambling…
Do you and have you been paying a fixed interest rate? What kind of interest are you being charged?
 
This video reminded of the discussion here. And this was ten yrs ago!

Great video.

The only thing I would add to this topic, to enrichen the discussion on such an important issue, is more emphasis on the specific defining factors of wealth stats. Although "wealth" is broadly defined as taking all the tangible and intangible assets of an individual and subtracting the debts and liabilities. It's really not that simple of a comparison when the official stats alone factor net worth based on "household" ownership, values based on capital acquisition, bank account records, taxable income, etc. If a household, or small population of households, own a majority share of assets for the largest and most powerful corporations in the world, well then of course there is going to be a massive wealth gap. It's a socio-economic system that treats corporations "as people", takes advantage of tax breaks and mass right offs, leaves plenty of room to manipulate currency values, enforce arbitrary and even cruel regulations and policies for inflating property values, using capital as a not only a means for fulfilling wasteful lusts and greeds but as a weapon for covert socio-economic oppression and control. It's "wonderful! *Bigly!* People can believe what they want and do whatever they want as long as they can keep moving the capital...but I digress...I just wanted to share this because I thought it could be relevant and maybe of interest to someone?
It's a summary of main features and definitions of household concepts officially used by the The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD). I also attached the full document.
img_2023_08_31_01_06_34.jpg
 

Attachments

Great video.

The only thing I would add to this topic, to enrichen the discussion on such an important issue, is more emphasis on the specific defining factors of wealth stats. Although "wealth" is broadly defined as taking all the tangible and intangible assets of an individual and subtracting the debts and liabilities. It's really not that simple of a comparison when the official stats alone factor net worth based on "household" ownership, values based on capital acquisition, bank account records, taxable income, etc. If a household, or small population of households, own a majority share of assets for the largest and most powerful corporations in the world, well then of course there is going to be a massive wealth gap. It's a socio-economic system that treats corporations "as people", takes advantage of tax breaks and mass right offs, leaves plenty of room to manipulate currency values, enforce arbitrary and even cruel regulations and policies for inflating property values, using capital as a not only a means for fulfilling wasteful lusts and greeds but as a weapon for covert socio-economic oppression and control. It's "wonderful! *Bigly!* People can believe what they want and do whatever they want as long as they can keep moving the capital...but I digress...I just wanted to share this because I thought it could be relevant and maybe of interest to someone?
It's a summary of main features and definitions of household concepts officially used by the The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD). I also attached the full document.
View attachment 92483
Great resource! Thank you for this.
 
As a corporate owner twice, they are also treated as businesses; not as people. Gas and truck usage is deductible, but far more is used to run the corporation than a household. On our buildings, we are allowed to depreciate them down to nothing. I wouldn't want that done to my house. I love it, as rebuilding spends money in the public domain often, helping small businesses to have insurance and spreading some of the money. Thus, the corporation can start depreciating again. Same with equipment like forklifts. When they lose those nice tax deductions, they rebuild. This helps everyone. Buy more delivery trucks. Helps our economy. We have some contracts where we must use minority contracts. Did a job for a Native American once. Another bidder told him he would beat the lowest bid after bidding. We had the best bids on two bids, and he gave the work to us. He told us about the other bidder, but said we won fair and square and he liked our business ethics better.

There are always dishonest people. It is our job to locate them and leave them out. It can be done. Had a customer tell us once, our competition always bought him personally a bottle of his favorite scotch when he gave the work to them. He would have been fired had the entity known about that. Instead, I told him to enjoy his bribe and just walked away with my bid. Now, when a large government entity always gives the work to the same people.
Sometimes those businesses are better than anyone else with service, supply, quality control, and paperwork. Our gov may end up paying out more, but let's just use an anomaly: Less planes fall out of the sky. Tales of what we are doing do not surface in the media or show up in other governments' hands.

A corporation doing business with gov has to, on many occasions, produce certified payrolls, certified proofs of insurances, and insure their workers are safe and sober. This helps everyone, as nobody will be paid cash or not have workers' compensation. Yes, sometimes a contractor we use as a subcontractor did not know how to do payroll, did not understand the proper insurances they needed; we helped them to get the proper insurance and sometimes had to do their payroll. It costs more to do things the proper way. They never had a payroll. Never had insurance. We would help them to be someone with all the proper credentials. All corporations are not bad guys with all the luck. The write-offs have positive aspects down the road.

I'd rather not discuss those abusing the system. In my own personal experiences, it was the minority contractors that stretched limits, submitted for payment work they had not done yet, and proved it. However, entities would
not force the issues. Many went unchecked because nobody would keep them honest. I did, but to no avail. I had one entity procure funds over budget to pay me, because the minority had already applied and spent the money.
I would have kicked them off the job and went to court with them. Wonder if the courts would have just looked the other way. There's a big difference in giving a minority chances, and in what all they do to abuse it.
 
Do you and have you been paying a fixed interest rate? What kind of interest are you being charged?
Not exactly sure.
I do know that I have a couple of no-interest loans, subsidized, and non- subsidized loans.
Rest of them are grants.
 
I have been exploring the idea that maybe retirement is an outdated concept and we should culturally encourage people not to retire at all.

Retirement itself is a recent concept, from my understanding, it came about in reaction to some Marxist/socialist ideas, it was a bit of a compromise. For most of human history, people "worked" until they died. I am always confused by people's disdain for the idea of working, since working is really just a means to ensure we can eat and have a place to sleep which is what all living creatures have to do. The problem is more being alive and having to satisfy needs then the work system. I think the human work system is pretty cool- you can go to a grocery store in most countries and decide what to eat by using a piece of plastic that represents the labor you have contributed.

Provided there is less labor intensive jobs for people 70+ years old, I think we could benefit from the wisdom and skills a person accumulates over that lifetime of labor. With less young people being born we need to have a stronger older labor force. I don't plan to retire, I will continue to work until I can no longer work and it doesn't make feel upset the way it seems to make others upset. I think it's wonderful to keep busy and provide value to my society.
 
I am with you @slant I think the problems are more to do with unreasonable expectations and poor/unfair pay.
We need more jobs that humans actually want to do and can do easily/comfortably for whatever age bracket they are in.
And when work becomes impossible, those individuals should be cared for appropriately.
 
I have been exploring the idea that maybe retirement is an outdated concept and we should culturally encourage people not to retire at all.


I disagree. Maybe you will see a different perspective when you're older (which will happen so fast that it will feel like tomorrow.) Most people become disabled at some point in their lives, usually when they are older. A lot of jobs are hard on the body. The mind changes as we age, too. There is a big shift in how our brains work at about age forty, and after that, hormonal changes and other physical changes in the body change brain functions, too, so many people are not well-suited for jobs they once had anymore. I do not mean Alzheimer's or other illnesses, though that is a related topic.

People get fired as they age because they can no longer perform the marathon sessions of fast-paced brain work because the brain naturally evolves into a more community-oriented, teacher, and philosophical mode as we age. Not everyone can be a teacher, though.

On top of this, physical issues like lack of mobility, arthritis, even eyesight, and hearing can contribute to no longer being able to do a job well.

Our country does not have the health and wellness support to sustain a healthy, older work-force. We keep idiotically refusing to have "universal" healthcare and insurance companies won't pay for a lot of preventative medicine. It's like never putting oil in your car and expecting to be able to drive it on a flat tire.

There is also a lack of work-life balance in the United States and a lack of respect for any needs outside of work. We do not receive the health benefits, personal time, wellness time, new parent leave (for both parents), or vacation time that citizens in some other countries receive. We are expected to give everything to our employers.

It's really easy to say we should work all our lives when those jobs are in cushy offices, teaching, or in some laboratories and other romanticized professions where older people don't want to retire, but the majority of people work some kind of labor. Keep in mind, too, that AI is taking over a lot of tech jobs and creative jobs that older citizens would excel at and, while there will be fewer jobs in general due to tech advancements, the majority of the jobs that are left are labor or service-oriented. These are jobs a high percentage of young people can do, but they wear out the body over the decades. They're also not mentally fulfilling. Ask anyone who packs boxes for Amazon. It isn't a job people want to work all their lives.

We need to be more community-oriented and respect and accept all stages of life, roles, and contributions.
 
We keep idiotically refusing to have "universal" healthcare
To be fair, it must be really difficult to figure out and implement, because only 32 of 33 industrialized nations have done it so far.

Fuck This,
Ian
 

I disagree. Maybe you will see a different perspective when you're older (which will happen so fast that it will feel like tomorrow.) Most people become disabled at some point in their lives, usually when they are older. A lot of jobs are hard on the body. The mind changes as we age, too. There is a big shift in how our brains work at about age forty, and after that, hormonal changes and other physical changes in the body change brain functions, too, so many people are not well-suited for jobs they once had anymore. I do not mean Alzheimer's or other illnesses, though that is a related topic.

People get fired as they age because they can no longer perform the marathon sessions of fast-paced brain work because the brain naturally evolves into a more community-oriented, teacher, and philosophical mode as we age. Not everyone can be a teacher, though.

On top of this, physical issues like lack of mobility, arthritis, even eyesight, and hearing can contribute to no longer being able to do a job well.

Our country does not have the health and wellness support to sustain a healthy, older work-force. We keep idiotically refusing to have "universal" healthcare and insurance companies won't pay for a lot of preventative medicine. It's like never putting oil in your car and expecting to be able to drive it on a flat tire.

There is also a lack of work-life balance in the United States and a lack of respect for any needs outside of work. We do not receive the health benefits, personal time, wellness time, new parent leave (for both parents), or vacation time that citizens in some other countries receive. We are expected to give everything to our employers.

It's really easy to say we should work all our lives when those jobs are in cushy offices, teaching, or in some laboratories and other romanticized professions where older people don't want to retire, but the majority of people work some kind of labor. Keep in mind, too, that AI is taking over a lot of tech jobs and creative jobs that older citizens would excel at and, while there will be fewer jobs in general due to tech advancements, the majority of the jobs that are left are labor or service-oriented. These are jobs a high percentage of young people can do, but they wear out the body over the decades. They're also not mentally fulfilling. Ask anyone who packs boxes for Amazon. It isn't a job people want to work all their lives.

We need to be more community-oriented and respect and accept all stages of life, roles, and contributions.
I suppose I didn't make that clear- as people reach about 60 or so years old they will need to be transitioned to less physically intensive labor. My hope is that people will be in good enough health to continue to work.

The reality is likely that we will have an obese, Alzheimer's riddled 60+ population that takes up the majority of the countries of resources while young people pay more and more taxes and live a lower and lower quality of life attempting to keep our aging society on life support. It's really quite an ugly situation.

Retirement homes can be very atrocious places. Many people there no longer have even basic awareness of their surroundings and we are merely keeping alive a body. I also have hope that modern medicine can address mental issues like AD to enable people to care for themselves and work for longer.

Additionally, medicine has enabled people to be in much better health for longer in the past. I remember my great grandparents suffered from hunching backs as early as their 70s; my current grandparents, baby boomers, are the first generation to be born with minerals and vitamins put in milk, cereal and bread their entire lives. People are much healthier these days.

I think we have a social responsibility to be as healthy as we possibly can be for as long as we can. This society is not going to work if most people cannot work, if most people want to spend 20 years of their life unproductive (remember, most people don't begin working until 18 so the pool of workers starts to get really small). Yes, some people will not be able to work- but the goal needs to be to make that percentage as low as possible. Otherwise this economy is not sustainable. If people think the quality of living is bad now, imagine what it will be like in the next 15 years as the work population shrinks smaller and smaller.

But, I'm hopeful that automation might make it possible to close the gap in productivity. If that were to happen, I'm not sure I would be so dead set on people not being allowed to retire. I just think given the current economic conditions and demographics, for practicality's sake, we have to be realistic: we can't afford for people to retire. You do raise good points. I worry that people will not be physically and mentally fit to continue to work. This is a huge problem that needs to be solved.
 
I suppose I didn't make that clear- as people reach about 60 or so years old they will need to be transitioned to less physically intensive labor. My hope is that people will be in good enough health to continue to work.

Half my point was that natural and healthy changes in the brain prevent people from excelling mentally at the same jobs they excelled at when young. Having a less physical job is not the only hurdle to jump. There aren't that many jobs in American culture that are well-suited for mature minds. Teaching is certainly one, but we can't all be teachers.

Some research also shows that people who do not change their lives to honor their mature way of thinking as they age die unhappy with how they lived their lives no matter how successful they were during their years before they turned forty.
The reality is likely that we will have an obese, Alzheimer's riddled 60+ population that takes up the majority of the countries of resources while young people pay more and more taxes and live a lower and lower quality of life attempting to keep our aging society on life support. It's really quite an ugly situation.

Yes, that is what happens when one generation is huge and the one after it is small, and our policies supporting big businesses and corporations instead of the citizens catch up with us.

Retirement homes can be very atrocious places. Many people there no longer have even basic awareness of their surroundings and we are merely keeping alive a body. I also have hope that modern medicine can address mental issues like AD to enable people to care for themselves and work for longer.

Yes, nursing homes are terrible. Millies should be working on changing this now because they have the numbers to change their futures in these nursing homes.
While I hope modern medicine is able to improve people's lives, doing it only so they can work sounds... Orwellian. Honestly, if the only reason to be alive is to work for somebody as a cog in a machine, the suicide rate will skyrocket.

What are we supposed to do with the old people? Make Soylent Green?

Additionally, medicine has enabled people to be in much better health for longer in the past. I remember my great grandparents suffered from hunching backs as early as their 70s; my current grandparents, baby boomers, are the first generation to be born with minerals and vitamins put in milk, cereal and bread their entire lives. People are much healthier these days.

This is true of the Boomers, but since health care has become less accessible due to cost and changes in insurance, younger generations such as Gen X and Millennials are less healthy than Boomers were at the same age. Gen X also earns far less and struggles with employment and poverty more than Boomers did. There aren't enough places to work that provide a living wage, let alone places for older people to work.


I think we have a social responsibility to be as healthy as we possibly can be for as long as we can. This society is not going to work if most people cannot work, if most people want to spend 20 years of their life unproductive (remember, most people don't begin working until 18 so the pool of workers starts to get really small). Yes, some people will not be able to work- but the goal needs to be to make that percentage as low as possible. Otherwise this economy is not sustainable. If people think the quality of living is bad now, imagine what it will be like in the next 15 years as the work population shrinks smaller and smaller.

Society likely will not keep functioning the way it currently does, but that is due to many factors, not simply because the comrades can't or won't work until they're seventy-five or eighty.
But, I'm hopeful that automation might make it possible to close the gap in productivity. If that were to happen, I'm not sure I would be so dead set on people not being allowed to retire. I just think given the current economic conditions and demographics, for practicality's sake, we have to be realistic: we can't afford for people to retire. You do raise good points. I worry that people will not be physically and mentally fit to continue to work. This is a huge problem that needs to be solved.

The problem that needs to be solved starts with changes in our government and in capitalism, not in making old people work. All the advances in quality of life that you mention are needed, yes, but it is a much bigger picture than simply patching old people up so they can work until they die.
 
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