A text message exchange with a friend who owns a car wash in a Democrat-run sanctuary city. I asked whether Governors Abbott and DeSantis were sending him a good supply of migrants.
Him: Not yet!
Me: Would be good for your labor costs. What are you paying now?
Him: Average wage is about $22 per hour.
Me: We are informed that $15 is fair.
Him: I can’t get high school kids for $15. I don’t understand how people afford life.
Me: What do they make after tips? I always tip 20% at car wash.
Him: $22 is the average wage with tips. It’s all reported income because 90 percent of tips are credit card. I pay employment taxes on the tip wages. So if you tipped him, I owe taxes on that amount.
Me: Is there a variation in wage depending on skill?
Him: Most people that are full time make $25-29 per hour. High school kids make $19, which is insane. They are useless. College kids even worse. Entitled and can’t solve problems on any level. Wish we had more legal migrants. I would hire them all. White [local] kids = not good workers. We need more migrants. Just legal ones who are willing to work.
Me: I am seeing a good blog post here.
Him: I think another 50 million legal migrants would solve all our issues. The government could continue to pay the elite natives to stay home and print money to pay migrants to do all the work. Of course it would cause housing inflation, but that’s the Ponzi scheme we all benefit from. [“we all” being those rich enough to own homes!]
Related… a tastefully understated vehicle at the local car wash (entire crew from Latinx America):
Also, in the Department of Diversity is Our Strength, “Diversity is important in all industries, but perhaps especially so in supercomputing,” from my former employer Hewlett-Packard:
What did I do for HP, you might ask? Helped in 1982-83 with the first implementation of the Precision Architecture, a RISC processor that eventually morphed into the Intel Itanium server chips (final shipments in July 2021, nearly 40 years after my efforts on a wire wrap prototype).
All vintage, digital EE’s appreciate a good wire wrapping project.
I know that your Moderation Rules frown on comments that simply affirm what you said in the post, but: I love you, Philip. I really mean that, in the best sense possible. You know people everywhere, doing all kinds of interesting things, in a wide cross-section of our country. It’s awesome! Totally awesome! Lol.
So that I don’t entirely flout the Moderation Policy: Here in MA, the Dept. of Housing and Community Development is, er, nudging Plymouth and Kingston to assimilate scores of new people to work at their local car washes and other businesses:
https://www.bostonherald.com/2022/10/27/massachusetts-towns-blindsided-as-migrants-housed-at-hotels-a-heads-up-would-have-been-nice/
“A heads up would have been nice,” Kingston Town Administrator Keith Hickey told the Herald on Thursday, expressing his frustration with state officials from the Department of Housing and Community Development.”
“Last Friday at around 5 p.m., Hickey received a voicemail from a Department of Housing and Community Development representative, alerting him that the state was immediately placing nine individuals in need of emergency housing in a Kingston hotel. Then that number of people jumped to 26 on Saturday, and by Monday morning, it spiked to 107 individuals.
“At the end of the day, we can’t fix that now,” Hickey said of the lack of communication. “We’re just trying to do what we can to provide whatever assistance we can.”
Next generation migration background people will be “bad workers” as well. Then you need even fresher migrants.
In the EU we hear this refrain since 1990. Local workers are bad and too expensive, hence the greed for eastward EU expansion. Yet the standard of living in, e.g., West Germany was higher before and people somehow managed to wash their cars in fully automated self-service locations.
“What did I do for HP, you might ask? Helped in 1982-83 with the first implementation of the Precision Architecture, a RISC processor…” I too had my most interesting job right out of HS.
Good that the owner needs more LSIs, makes me proud.
Didn’t realize the Itanium was a rebranded PA-RISC. Wonder what being done today is going to be influential in 20 years. Every 3 months, the latest fad is obsolete. Now you have to be using artificial images. 3 months ago, you had to be using deepfakes. 9 months ago, you had to be using a metaverse. 12 months ago, you had to be using blockchains.
> Him: I can’t get high school kids for $15. I don’t understand how people afford life.
Here’s what some of the enterprising do: They “side hustle” used vending machines packed with sugary candy, chips and snacks, appealing to obese Americans (and great for incipient diabetics!) then tell all about it on TikTok!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/galleries/article-11362689/Couple-goes-viral-sharing-vending-machine-hack-make-extra-cash.html
“But Davis and her fiancée are not the only ones who have found success in the vending machine business. Marcus Gram, 31, started his own vending machine business back in 2018. It now brings in more than $300,000 a year in profit, he wrote in a column for CNBC. Gram shared how he had been living with his mother in Rochester, New York working a $17-per-hour managerial job hoping to save up enough money to purchase a rental property that could generate passive income. ‘But one day, a new side hustle idea sparked when my friend saw a woman taking cash out of a vending machine’ he said. He then moved to Philadelphia, and bought two machines, making $5,000 in his first year. “
If diversity and immigrant is so good for America and Europe, as our leaders want us to believe, why don’t we see the same in other part of the world? When was the last time a country in Asia, Africa or South America had an immigration issue? Shouldn’t those countries fly-in immigrants to boost their economy and provide diversity to their people?