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Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

We're in the middle of the best economy in years. Why would a worker put up with that? Go someplace else. Whole Foods doesn't put stores in small towns. Anyone who works there has plenty of other options.

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Yeah for sure, people living hand to mouth in a hyper competitive low-skill wage job definitely have the luxury of shopping around for better conditions where employers have their pick of any number of people desperate for a job. Totally.

This sarcasm does not move the discussion forward. There’s a number of things a person can do in the U.S to pick up a skill from a trade to medicine. With grants, loans, or any number of free/paid courses.

Also, it is truly impressive to see people work and succeed going from “not very much” to “boy he’s a force”. Just takes effort, go figure.

Yes, it is impressive to see people improving their lives, and we should work towards a society that helps people do that. However, to just write it all off as if "hard work" is the only thing preventing a lot of people from improving their lives is very much blind to the reality that a lot of people are _already_ working very hard, just to stay afloat as is, and there are other factors beyond "hard work" preventing change.

Acquiring a skill takes money (if there's any kind of accreditation) and time. If you're living paycheque-to-paycheque and looking to change employers, chances are you don't have much of either. Not everyone has a safety net.

Which is why having a safety net is so important in society, and therefore, society should subsidize it.

But no such thing exists in America, so that's how do many people get stuck with no options.

> We're in the middle of the best economy in years.

Best economy for whom? The U.S. economy as a whole has expanded greatly since the 1980s, but it's the individuals' economies that matter, and they haven't expanded much.

'best economy in years' i s a meaningless statement.

You should be looking at who the gains from that economy are going to.

There have been umpteen articles how wages have not kept up with inflation. It's a tough sell telling parts of the country that swapped the first black president for man with a less than stellar morality record that this is the best economy in history.

???

Inflation and Trump not having a morality record is kind of given if you can believe CNN and the NY Times...

The rest of your statement requires explanation for my head to wrap around... The phrase frumentarious frippery springs to mind.

>It's a tough sell telling parts of the country that swapped the first black president for man with a less than stellar morality record that this is the best economy in history.

I don't really understand what you're saying, but Obama had a despicable morality record as well. Kill list, 7 wars, drone bombed American citizens with no due process, dropped 26,000 bombs in 2016 alone, tortured people including Chelsea Manning.

> swapped the first black president for man with a less than stellar morality record

This is a weird juxtaposition. You appear to be implying that "first black president" and "less than stellar morality" are moral opposites.

Walking into changing rooms of teenage girls isn't indicative of moral character, or is being the focus of multiple sexual assault allegations.

And if that's just "fake news" given it has been reported in multiple sources, then I suppose I can just call any retort you make as "fake news" as well.

Were you trying to reply to a different comment? Because your response makes absolutely no sense.

> Walking into changing rooms of teenage girls isn't indicative of moral character, or is being the focus of multiple sexual assault allegations.

Congrats on inventing this never-before-seen grammatical construct, though.

Yeah, why work a dead end low paying job? Just go get more money!

We’re in the middle of the best economy and wages still aren’t rising. Monopoly, monopsony, and free market extremism have crushed them for all but the very few.

https://www.epi.org/publication/its-not-just-monopoly-and-mo...

So no, there aren’t really “plenty of options” to get paid or treated better. Just better returns for those already at the top.

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