My JTTS is "Living in the Past."
Everyone should pick a Jethro Tull song and call it their Jethro Tull Theme Song. You don't have to like it most out of their catalog. You don't have to like it at all. You don't even have to like Jethro Tull.
But they have such a large body of work on such a wide variety of subjects that one song they did will likely be synonymous with your life.
Just don't pick "Aqualung."
I also think that if you go from one job to another you should be able to take your experience with you. In most white collar jobs this isn't an issue. When you apply for a job potential employers can look at your resume and see what kind of education and employment you bring with you. You can expect to get paid more than you have been in the past.
If you work blue collar jobs and you are in a union your experience goes with you as well. Once you turn out (become a journeyman) your union can vouch for the fact that you have all the training required to do any job in that field. You can then move to another area and get another job at the same pay scale.
With non union blue collar jobs it has been my experience that it doesn't matter how much experience you have. If you go from one job to another the new employer wants to start you at the bottom of the pay scale. As far as I'm concerned this is the rich robbing from the poor. They are getting experienced workers without paying for it.
I've always been very conservative and the unions usually side with liberals, but in this case I have to come out in favor of unions. It is possible for unions to operate without the criminals, communists and thuggish behavior they have been plagued with in the past. It is up to union laborers to clean up the unions and keep them clean.
Most investors are putting money into investments to make more money. The best usually consider job creation as a worthy byproduct of their investment. The worst either don't care about jobs created or lost, or they seem to revel in job loss, pollution, deforestation etc. that their investments cause.
Capitalism allows either extreme. We are free to choose good or evil. Anticapitalists note the disregard for workers in this system and conclude that the system must be evil if we are allowed to do evil. This is probably how communism and socialism got started.
I propose switching this around. Let's make job creation the number one purpose of our investments. Making more money can take a back seat to it.
The most direct way to do this is through entrepreneurial activity. Starting or buying a business directly creates jobs and the person running it can keep the same workers as long as they want to be employed there. They should get raises and good benefits, and if they go someplace else to work they should be able to take that experience with them. They shouldn't have to start again at the bottom of the pay scale and work their way up again.
The next most direct way of creating good jobs is to buy bonds. These could be corporate bonds issued to fund a specific project or merely a way to finance expansion. They might also be government bonds issued to pay for roads or bridges, or other purposes. Financing through bonds is a good way to create work for union construction workers as well as architects and other white collar workers. These good paying jobs allow the workers who fill them to buy homes and cars, pay for their kids upbringing, and save for retirement.
The third and most indirect way to finance employment is through stocks. This being the most indirect way, it is also the most complex. There are two ways I can think of. One is to purchase IPO's. Just as the company becomes public there is the chance for growth and financing this growth will help it. The second way is to vote, as a shareholder, for better wages and benefits for the workers, lower compensation packages for the upper management and fewer layoffs. There are always disastrous stories in the media about corporations that go out of business or get sold giving a few at the top enormous golden parachutes while the rest of the workers and investors get robbed.
Changing the order of priorities in a portfolio of investments can have a profound effect on the investor. Rather than being a greed driven person who doesn't care about anyone, they can become a more ethical person. They are probably going to live a simpler life and have better relationships. It's not necessary for them to live like paupers or hermits, simply that they put others' lives ahead of their own desire for material wealth.
Obviously there are bad vestments in each of these categories. There are entrepreneurs who only have young people working for them for the simple reason that they presumably won't demand as much money. I knew of a woman who only had part time workers, so she didn't have to pay benefits, but she bought a brand new Cadillac each year. There are a number of jobs I've had since childhood where the people hiring me could have paid me better but obviously didn't for the simple reason that they wanted to keep more money for themselves.
There are bad bonds as well, like the ones that were all the rage in the 80's. They called them junk bonds, and generally they broke up companies, laid off thousands of workers and concentrated all the wealth in them at the very top. Obviously, that's of the opposite of what I want.
There are companies that do something very similar without issuing bonds. They lay off thousands of people the same year that they give gigantic bonuses to their top executives. I often wonder if they really think these two things are going to go unnoticed by the press. Also, my dad once had stock in a company that got sold, and for a couple of weeks there was no trading on that stock. When the negotiation was done the investment was only worth a fifth of its original value and the CEO of the company that got bought took an eight figure bonus. Another case of the rich stealing from the poor.
When I was in my mid-twenties I had a job in West Oakland, California. I thought that it would be a good opportunity to get to know what it was like be of a different skin color than my "normal" pale hue. I assumed it would be just like being white, but with a different skin color. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I asked the shop foreman a few times what this was about, or what that meant. He would go back to the other non-white workers and talk to them for a few minutes, then come back and answer my question. I don't remember any specific questions or answers, but after three years of working there I finally came to realize that there were differences. I didn't know what those differences were, but I started to realize they were there.
A couple of years later I was watching an episode of 21 jump street on TV. This was the original show with Johnny Depp and a very mixed cast. In one episode Depp and the other white guy were talking about racial issues and one said, "don't get me wrong, I get up in the morning every day and look in the mirror and think 'thank God I'm white.'" I thought 'that's not true. We don't think about our skin color at all.'
That's when one piece of the puzzle clicked into place. We white people don't have to think about our skin color. We can be dirt poor and travel all over this country and as long as we stay out of a few neighborhoods we don't have to think about being white. Non-whites, no matter how wealthy they are, seem always to have it in the back of their minds, and I suppose it colors their thoughts a bit. It's as if there's an extra burden they are carrying that white people don't have to carry.
I used to think this was the main difference but I don't know that. I still think it's a major difference.
I should have mentioned that I moved in with my dad after my mom died. He had a stroke a while ago, so he needs someone to watch over him. Of all my brothers and sisters I was the only one without a family of my own, so I was elected to move in and take care of my dad. I'm 52 years old, myself.
We had a Father's day program at church today. My brother's family came over after church and we talked for a few hours. His kids are almost full grown now. They're good kids.
I'm making a list of future blog posts. I think the blog should have a little humor in it, but that the humor shouldn't be so pervasive that everything gets cheapened by it. I haven't yet checked whether any of these posts can be flagged as humorous or serious or whatever. I should know this. After all, I've been blogging off and on for ten years now.
That gives me an idea for a blog entry about previous attempts at blogging. One of my first blogs, now deleted, was an "alien blog", a blog kept by a supposed extraterrestrial. Mine was about a guy who made all kinds of sarcastic remarks about human culture. I wish I still had the notes I kept on it. I could recycle a lot of ideas from it like the one I'm planning on blue jeans and institutionalized rebellion. You'll see that one shortly. The tone of that blog was not really suited for the subject matter, though.
Another idea I had for a blog was a group custodial blog. There's a way to do this with blogger. You set up some people as administrative people and the rest as participants. Since it's a corporate bunch the blog has to conform to certain standards, and I wrote a list of rules, then realized it was a bunch of "no this" and "no that" statements. I rewrote it as a bunch of positive equivalents. There was no interest from the other custodians, though, so I just canceled it.
I wish there was a good way to write a list in blogger's environment and transfer those easily to blog posts.
I wish someone had told me when I was a young man all about diabetes. It seems to throw your metabolism into emergency weight loss mode, and the quickest way to loose weight is to shed muscle. When I first got it I weighed about 320 lbs. I was fat, but I also had a lot of muscle on me. In fact I was strong enough to lift 200 lb air conditioning compressors onto pallets when I worked at a HVAC warehouse. I could lift one end onto a pallet, then go around the other side and pick up the other end and put it on. Anything heavier and I would get the forklift.
A few years later I had a job as a janitor that for some reason was very stressful, and after about a year I suddenly started to lose a lot of weight. I went down to 240 lbs without even trying. I only noticed that my belt got looser and looser and I kept having to cut a new hole in it every few months. After a while I noticed myself getting weaker and I couldn't figure out why. It wasn't till I weighed myself and found I had lost 80 lbs that I realized there was something wrong with my metabolism, got a blood sugar meter and found out about my condition.
I think that if I had known diabetes would make me so weak I would never had allowed it to happen. Everyone I've met who has diabetes says the same thing.
No man wants to be weak. Even the most wimpy guy doesn't want to be weak. If those public service announcements had emphasized this fact I bet most of the men who have diabetes now wouldn't have it.
I just set up blogger on this little nexus 7 my mother gave me for Christmas a year and a half ago. We'll see how it goes.
I had a bad couple of years. First I quit my job as a janitor, which was a good thing. Then I tried to be a truck driver. That was a disaster. Then I had even worse jobs for years. Now I'm permanently disabled. So maybe I'll try writing. I'm setting up this little thing to accept blog entries while I set a schedule for writing science fiction and other stuff.
Maybe something good will come of it...