How many people took a pay cut?

In 2010 inflation was around 1.6%. If your benefit costs like healthcare went up you need to add that percentage to the inflation rate. So 1.6% + your benefit cost % increase = x %. If your pay did not go up over that x%, you took a pay cut. Seems most every year, most people are taking a pay cut.

Company x says times are tough and they can not afford health care costs so they are cutting benefits and increasing the amount employees need to pay. They are also cutting 401k matching contributions. Oh and by the way, raises have to be very small because times are tough. Now you say, well if the company is struggling/losing money, OK, i will do my thing for the company and help out.

But...what if Company X reports year end results and ends with billions in profits? Seems odd the company is shitting all over its employees doesn't it?

Flat Tax

As it stands now, taxes are not paid fairly...in more ways than one. Why do you pay more taxes because you make more? Everyone should pay the same tax rate. Period. There should be no deductions, no rebates, no refunds, no nothing. You pay taxes and that is it. Period.

Think of how much the government would save by not having to process all those tax returns. In addition, think how much more money the government would take in due to rich people actually paying taxes, not to mention not having refunds. Such a simple solution to our tax problems.

Social Security Wage Base

Why is there a cap on the amount of Social Security taxes the government takes out? This is a blatant tax break for the wealthy.

Hibernate sucks

I am so frustrated using Hibernate. Spring JDBC is so much easier and it actually WORKS! In Hibernate, a simple OneToMany relationship does not work. I have a simple parent child relationship. Say a box which can contain other boxes. If i try to load all the boxes which do not contain other boxes, i get a List of Box Objects which duplicate entries because it is returning a row for each contained box.

To work around this bug, which no one on the Hibernate forums even will respond to my request for help, i have to set the children to load lazily then manually iterate over the parent boxes to load the children. How stupid.

The next bit of fun was moving a object out of a Collection on one Object to another. What is a simple SQL statement turned into a two day Google and hacking to make work right.

This is in addition to having to work around with all the proprietary mappings and HQL nonsense. Why use this stuff when SQL exists, is very simple to use, and extremely robust? In the end, you write your "complex" queries yourself via the mentioned proprietary HQL or even gasp...SQL from Hibernate.

If i did not need Hibernate Search on this project i would ditch Hibernate in a second in favor of Spring JDBC.