Oh well.....

His dementia has lijely progressed to the point where Miller and Vought are actually giving the orders, which are starting to strangle the economy. All Trump cares about are his tariffs and his ability to parade around on the world stage and bully global leaders. He needs to be in long-term care.

Plenty of time for the media to be led by the nose with more outrageous spectacles. Well, at least it gives the media something else to focus on besides this (and the epstein files.)

With 40 mph winds. It did millions of dollars of damage in a few minutes. Repairs took over two years in some cases. A lot of the workers repairing roofs, siding, and windows were Hispanic. If that storm happened this year, repairs would take even longer because of immigration policies.

The answer is paying a decent wage where people can work hard and be in the middle class. Working with your hands every day is great. I loved watching the sun come up every day experiencing the weather changes throughout the year. The feeling of accomplishment when the job was done. The best part which I lost once I had a job with more responsibilities is being able to go home after 8 hours and to not worry about the job. The greedy companies ruined that by cutting costs by creating unrealistic deadlines to save days and then hired cheaper labor with no benefits. They managed to break the Unions hold on construction and the addiction to cheap labor lead to a generation of stagnant or falling wages and a generation of a workforce who don’t think it’s worth it to get dirty. The corporations fueled the out of control immigration but you didn’t have to go all nazi to fix the problems. Just needed better immigration laws and enforcement decent wages to create a bottom up economy. More people means more demand and money circulating throughout the economy. Now money doesn’t circulate it stays in the hands of the rich who are now saving themselves more money by firing people and replacing them with AI and automation. We just watched American towns and even malls die because of shopping online. What does the future look like? Sorry this turned into a rant.

Prefab metal, to store all our junk, and 2 vehicles. The company was scheduling out months in advance. When the team of 4 Hispanic guys got here, (only the leader spoke English), they had it built in a day. Busted their butts from sunrise, to 11:00 that night. We were so impressed. Asked if they wanted to take some breaks. I could make them some sandwiches. "No."

I'm betting there would be zero chance of that happening now.

7 to 7 in Seattle.

They likely didn't ask the owner about quittin' time and wanted to get it done in 1 day.

Why would you think that? We paid for this building months in advance, and had no idea who would actually be building it until they got here. They refused to take breaks. They refused offers of food (they may have had their own, don't know, wasn't supervising.)

Were we supposed to tell them to leave?

BTW--we have a bunch of animals on our little farm. None of them work, (unless you count chickens laying eggs, and dogs barking,) and all of them are fat.

I know how much we depend on immigrant labor. I'm hesitant to interview with any company that uses a lot of immigrant labor because they would be one ICE raid from being shut down.

Drywall, Painting, Rebar, Concrete, Landscaping.

Part of the reason is because they'll generally work for lower pay. Another part is that they work extremely hard for longer hours.

There used to be crews that were Eastern European immigrants. I haven't seen them much on jobsites in the last 10 years.

What I don't see on jobsites are African-Americans. Few and far between. I don't know why. Probably the pay.

The white guys tend to either work directly for the General Contractors, or in specialty disciplines like Metal Cladding. The trades like Plumbing, Electrical, Mechanical that require long apprenticeships: white guys.

But that's where we're at, and Construction escalation is already sky rocketing.

Mandatory construction work requirements for any federal aid of any kind.

Which they will then deny anyway.