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This topic comprises 9 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
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Author
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Topic: "The Living Wage" (coming soon to a Theatre Near You)
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 01-12-2018 03:24 PM
quote: Scott Norwood
Would people really accept a fully automated cinema (perhaps with a manager and a skeleton cleaning staff)? To me, such a place would feel more like riding on a public transit system (not usually a fun experience) than going out for a night of entertainment.
It's been tried: the entrepreneur behind one of the two big low budget airlines in Europe, easyJet, started an "easyCinema" brand in the late 1990s. The idea was that for a rock bottom ticket price, you'd get to see the movie on a big screen, and pretty much nothing more. Booking was to be all online or at automated kiosks, no concessions stands, automated turnstiles to get into the auditoria, sparsely furnished auditoria, etc.
quote: The Guardian, May 28, 2006
Rent rise brings down curtain on easyCinema
Stelios Haji-Ioannou has abandoned an attempt to transform the movie business by opening easyJet-style bright orange "no frills" cinemas with tickets for as little as 20p.
The low-cost business specialist has quietly closed his only EasyCinema, in Milton Keynes, after three years of operation. He is scrapping his "bricks and mortar" strategy in favour of simply offering a nationwide cinema booking website.
Mr Haji-Ioannou has blamed the failure of his outlet on high rents. The site's landowner, UCI, was recently acquired by venture capitalist Terra Firma, which also owns Odeon, and Mr Haji-Ioannou says charges have been pushed up.
"Now that Odeon, who have become both our landlords as well as our competitors, are demanding a totally unrealistic rent we have decided to let them operate the cinema themselves," said Mr Haji-Ioannou in a statement.
The failure is a significant setback for the entrepreneur, who had hoped to create a national cinema chain. Last year he was tipped to buy the landmark Empire cinema in London's Leicester Square.
His plans were initially dogged by opposition from film distributors, which withheld new releases from easyCinema. Some studios were said to be unhappy at the prospect of moviegoers paying such a small amount to see their work.
"As an operating business, it was quite successful," said EasyGroup's director of corporate affairs, James Rothnie. "We've quite a good run of first-run films in the end." But he added: "We're less interested now in the bricks and mortar and more interested in going on line."
EasyCinema's website allows customers to view cinema listings and book movies. It also offers a DVD rental service and is attracting 500,000 hits a month.
Mr Haji-Ioannou has made similar retreats before. His vehicle-hire business, easyCar, originally rented out new Mercedes across Europe, but it is now simply a website allowing customers to book through other rental firms.
The tycoon's attempts to replicate his successful easyJet concept in other industries have met with mixed results. EasyInternet cafés have become a familiar site in cities across Britain and elsewhere. Mr Haji-Ioannou's easyCruise business is rapidly expanding, with four new vessels planned and a new route in the waterways of the Netherlands and Belgium.
But Mr Haji-Ioannou's plan to take on long-distance bus operators such as National Express through a network of minibus routes across Britain appears to have fallen flat. His easyBus discount service was cut back this year to a single route between London and Luton Airport.
He found out exactly what you predicted, which is that audiences don't want a "no frills" experience on an evening out. IMHO, there has to be a happy medium between the easyCinema approach, and not getting much change out of $100 for a couple to have a night at the movies, though.
As an aside, that headline is somewhat ironic: I very much doubt if his cinema had curtains, somehow! Oh well, at least the screen wasn't orange (unless he ran his bulbs well over the warranty hours).
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 01-12-2018 10:09 PM
There is no doubt a good college education can help round out and broaden a person's horizons entering adulthood. Left to one's own devices, without quality general education and some higher education, many will not fully advance beyond the adolescent "concrete operational stage" of cognitive development and advance into the adult "formal operational stage" of thought. That's pretty important, valuable stuff.
Still, at the same time, you have all these universities charging outrageous sums of money for fields of study where the degree one receives in the end is not worth the paper on which it was printed. There really needs to be a value meter applied to this crap. And I don't know which kind of institution of higher learning I despise more: a state-run university that puts more value on its NCAA football team than anything else or a private university that will charge a kid out of high school the price of a fucking mansion for an education that likely won't come close to yielding a postive return on investment.
Me, having a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from a high caliber art school in New York City, I think I'm pretty smart and worldly. But my younger brother, the diesel semi-truck mechanic, is making more money. In the end, what's more important? Being smarter? Or Living Better?
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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!
Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 01-13-2018 12:28 PM
Lyle, like you, I have a degree in Electrical Engineering. I don't see how one could distill that degree down into 2-years because of all of the math, physics, chemistry and other necessary subjects required BEFORE you even touch an EE course (typically, one's first EE course, maybe 2, are in their Sophomore year. The bulk of the Engineering degrees have their particular engineering in years 3 and 4. Between Math and Physics, I saw 90% of the Engineering candidates wash out (that is NOT an exaggeration or even boasting, it was a simple fact of it and the Physics professors told you up front about the typical success rate). It isn't that the courses were necessarily designed to "weed out" as much as people may not think in a manner that is consistent with how Engineering works. Furthermore, the time it takes to take Physics courses tends to drain one. There is typically a lab associated with each course and the homework level/studying is significantly higher than with other courses. My point there is, do you really want to load yourself down with your Core EE courses while going through that? Furthermore, prerequisites typically will preclude you from advancing too fast (need to have enough math knowledge to do some courses). When I was at Maryland, Engineering students were allowed to take more credit hours than the normal full-time student (Maryland has/had a full-student rate where you paid the same price once you got up to something like 9-credit hours). If forget what the limit was but for Engineering it was over 20, which is a HUGE load, if you did it. I read a few years ago that now Maryland has flipped that a bit. Yes, Engineering still can take the large credit load BUT there is a tuition premium because credits required for graduation are higher than for other degrees. I just checked and it would appear that they have dropped the credit requirement down to 120 (I wonder if the specifics are such that while possible, if it is probable that would be the number...I want to say it was more like 140-160 in my day). I do see that they dropped the full-year of Chemistry (with lab) down to a single 3-credit Chemistry for Engineers and I don't see traditional Statics and Dynamics courses in there. General ed is down to 18-credits or less than one per semester.
My view has been pretty consistent on post HS education. Most people should seek it. That does NOT have to mean college. Trade schools are a good place as are good apprenticeship programs. It is true that one thing that most college graduates can demonstrate is that they can complete something! It is a problem that many people have. College, especially the big-gun schools, really don't care if you pass or fail. It is up to you to learn and they are NOT going to spoon feed you. It is like having training wheels on the world. You get assignments that you may like, you may not like but you have a deadline for either turning them in or knowing the information.
For those, like me, that don't really take to school, I HIGHLY recommend Jr. College (aka Community College). Some don't like them because they feel like 13th and 14th grade but what they do, typically, have is smaller classes and professors that really seem to care a LOT more about the teaching part since there is no research there (at least not at the one I attended). Most of the professors have Masters degrees rather than PHD. For me, the percentage of "good" professors to bad was heavily skewed to the good side at Community College and it was flipped at the University of Maryland. It isn't that the professors at Maryland were bad people or didn't know their stuff. By and large they were VERY talented. They just had somewhere else to be other than teaching and some knew they weren't good at conveying knowledge despite being brilliant at it.
Bobby, the measure of a person is not the income they make but in the quality of the job they do. Many people choose (including me) to do things that make them less money but with more satisfaction. The goal has always been to do something you'd do for free but hopefully people will pay you for it anyway.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 01-14-2018 03:22 PM
quote: Scott Norwood
A previous employer of mine did this--they had a job opening for a receptionist/secretary and a college degree was a basic requirement for it. There is nothing that a secretary does that requires a four-year college degree and no reason to exclude applicants who are otherwise competent but lack that qualification, but, for some reason, they did.
Exactly the same thing happened in my wife's workplace (a university department) a few months ago, and it turned out that there was a good reason for it. A controversy was raging, because they wanted to bend the rules, and hire someone who only had a high school diploma, but who everyone involved agreed would be perfect for the job, and whose resume provided a strong case to support that. The diploma in question had been earned in the 1970s. They were eventually able to hire this person, but only after a fight with the internal bureaucracy.
The college degree minimum requirement for secretary/receptionist jobs had been introduced institution-wide (centrally, by HR) after a spate of incidents in which people without them had been hired, and found to lack the literacy and numeracy skills needed to do the job. Basically, they were dealing with people who had graduated from high school, but could not write a coherent sentence, understand figures on a spreadsheet, or handle even moderately complex information in a phone conversation. After this had happened a few times (one of which ended in an unfair dismissal lawsuit and a fat settlement), they introduced a blanket requirement for a college degree for that grade of position, to insure against that happening again.
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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!
Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 01-14-2018 05:33 PM
Again, having an "equivalent" would have sufficed. If a person has been in the workforce with verifiable references to their work experience, you can pretty quickly find out if they have basic communication/math skills. Requring a 4-year degree for a Receptionist/clerical job is likely overkill. A 2-year certificate would more than suffice for that. If other 2-year colleges were like mine, you are going to have college level English and some math requirement too in there (I can't say how much as my curriculum was VERY MATH heavy, ending with Multi-variable Calculus (aka Calc 3) and Differential Equations. Furthermore, upon entering into Community College, they assessed you in both Math and English to see where you really were.
I think requiring a 4-year degree for such jobs is just plain silly. And, quite frankly, may prevent one from attaining the best candidate. What percentage of people go for a 4-year degree with the hopes of attaining such a job? It isn't a matter of putting one down or assigning a class structure but of finding the best fit for a job. You want someone that is competent, sure but you also want someone that is also desiring of the job and is motivated to do it without you constantly having to push them too.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 01-14-2018 08:58 PM
Currently unemployment in the United States is pretty low. Yet our labor participation rate in the work force is still well below what it was before the Great Recession hit during last decade. More Baby Boomers are retiring. The current federal administration wants lots of restriction on immigration. Then there's that strong looming possibility of a baby bust I keep mentioning.
All of those things are going to make it ever more difficult for employers to fill positions they need filled with human beings. They're going to have to relax some of these ridiculous job requirements, such as a secretary or front office rep having a 4 year degree.
Our nation needs to re-think is how it regards employing ex-cons. Right now anyone convicted of a drug crime or non-violent felony is branded for life with those convictions, making it very difficult to find a worthwhile job and be a produtive, tax-paying member of society. The circumstances make true rehabilitation a long shot and chances of re-offending very high. The re-offend part of the equation may mean more crime victims, maybe even victims of violent crime. I think non-violent convicts, particularly ones with few marks on their record, need some kind of path to get their records cleaned. The current situation is great business for the prison industry, but not so great for taxpayers. Quite a few of the 2.2 million in prison certainly deserve to be there. But there is a lot of people cycling through the criminal justice system who could be positive additions to the American labor pool if our criminal justice system worked smarter rather than wasting money doling out little more than ever-lasting vengeance even more minor crimes.
quote: Steve Guttag
Bobby, the measure of a person is not the income they make but in the quality of the job they do. Many people choose (including me) to do things that make them less money but with more satisfaction. The goal has always been to do something you'd do for free but hopefully people will pay you for it anyway.
I enjoy my job; I'm certainly not doing it for the money. Still my field of work can be frustrating. I've seen a lot of the graphic design industry de-professionalized in many ways over the past 20 years. Having a formal degree doesn't mean much anymore, even those schools like my alma mater are charging ridiculous amounts of money for them. I'm very good at my job. So I totally get why so many cities in the US have drafted very restrictive sign codes. I'm as harsh a sign critic as anyone; there's lots of shit-quality design along the streets. Customers often can't tell the difference between good or bad design. Price is all that matters (and quotes between companies are not apples to apples comparisons either). I guess that's the nature of things when you're dealing with something that is subjective like art and graphic design.
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