What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
residentcontrarian.com
residentcontrarian.com
Anyway, I went off topic - don't want to detract from the parent point - you can work 10 hrs a day and not be able to afford anything and barely have a chance to progress because you are ground down by "real life^tm". Tech and MDs are definitely a special little island.
When the government's "needs" are determined by the rich, what happens to the money that gets printed? That's how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Simplify the tax code, eliminate loopholes, raise tax rates on extreme wealth & income, and fund the IRS to investigate major tax fraud (instead of the nickle&dime shit they go after today). This isn't about funding the government; it's about retooling the government to work for everybody and not just its richest citizens.
Simplifying the tax code is a valid idea. Targeting the 'rich' and ramping up tax fraud witch hunts, not so much.
Historically if you want to collect more taxes you lower tax rates and get an increase in compliance. A flat rate is the fairest approach, setting an income threshold or a negative income tax to offset taxes for the poorest citizens provides the progressive aspect.
Your understanding of the elections in the US is hopelessly naive, especially after Citizens United opened the floodgates for unlimited, anonymous donations to political campaigns. Politicians do the bidding of the people who give them the most money. Elections are typically between two candidates who wear colors of different gangs, but have been paid off by the same companies. Voting forces a choice between candidates; donating and lobbying allows the rich to get their policies in place regardless of who wins.
We need to figure out how to build high trust societies with a shared culture. There’s a reason large corporations are pushing diversity so hard - it keeps abuses like those described above possible.
True competition allows people to choose the actors they want, good or bad.
Patent trolls, on the other hand, who simply patent ideas with no viable or initial product, or even schematic are another thing.
The proper path is to reduce rhe size and scope of governwmnt so that it needs toboukl less of the existing money supply out of the economy though taxes.
That a a horrible idea. Simply printing money with nothing to remove it again is a horrible fiscal policy you end up with run away inflation as each dollar you print lowers the value of each dollar. The value of money ends up decreasing faster than pay rates and you hurt the poor more as the rich will just pull their financial assets out into more stable economies the middle and lower class will loose.
You see national level taxes aren't there to fund the federal government in a modern economy. they are mean to remove excess cash from the economy. The government funds it self by borrowing and the printing money to pay it back with interest. This what bonds and like assets are. Why barrow rather than just print and pay, it about having good credit and showing the rest of the world dollar is stable by pay off our debt.
It’s slavery as a service
For people from other countries wondering about the veracity of these claims, let's take an example: The typical shitty job everyone on here complains about is working at an amazon warehouse. This is a job people with no skills take on. They pay 15 USD an hour. In other currencies that is 42k a year AUD or 2390 Euros a month. (the cost of living is roughly the same in these places).
I'll leave you to decide whether this is "slavery" and whether they "can't afford anything" or whether Americans are just so rich they are out of touch with reality.
Yes, people in US earn more and get taxed less. But they also spend a lot, lot more on necessities via shadowy cost structures like student loans and insurance and >$1,000 ambulance rides.
Let's take Finland, the UK, and the US as examples, as they are the countries I'm most familiar with. At $30k/year (individual income), the US is much more expensive than the other two, mostly due to things like healthcare, childcare, education, unemployment, sick/parental leaves, and pensions. The UK might be a bit more expensive than Finland.
At $100k/year, the cost of living is more or less similar in all three countries. The weight of benefits and subsidized services is lower, because they take a smaller fraction of your income. The US may still be more expensive if you have kids, but it can also be cheaper if you don't have them and are never going to get then. The UK may also be a bit cheaper than Finland due to lower taxes.
At $200k/year, the US is the cheapest country and Finland is the most expensive one, primarily due to taxes.
15 USD an hour is not so much when it costs you your health _and_ there is no proper system of universal healthcare.
I lost my hobby but that's a small price to pay long term i think.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-...
[0] A lot of recent discussion centers on how many of the most successful US entrepreneurs come from privileged backgrounds, but you should not lose sight of the fact that literally every other country in the world will fare a lot worse in this regard. Many things are broken in the US, but no other place on Earth has lower barriers to starting your own LLC and hiring your first employee.
US is 27th place on economic mobility index soooo....
It was a lot easier doing business in the UK. We had relatively low accounting overhead, the laws were not hard to follow, and we didn't have to deal with having employees and customers sprinkled over a dozen state jurisdictions.
We're fortunate to work in a growing and lucrative market, but it's not all peaches and cream.
So, yes, doing your own corporate taxes in the US is likely not a good idea, especially if you hire people across several states. But the cost of an accountant is a minuscule cost compared to paying X% more across your entire payroll (not to mention other aspects).
The American Dream is typically "come to the US with nothing and build a comfortable life, no matter who you are". I still think that's possible. Guaranteed? Of course not.
They've done great. We lived in a rural area. It was possible because one of them came highly skilled and solicited to immigrate.
That being said I shudder when I hear "just move to rural blah blah blah". My life was horrible there. I was considered black, egytian, non-english speaking, to come from a family of savages or royalty or witchcraft depending on the speaker.
This whole "move to a rural place" really doesn't seem open to the non-white growing majority. Its certainly nothing like the Californian life I live now where I still cannot afford a home but can enjoy Mexican, Indian, Ethiopian, Korean, and american culture in a form of acceptance that was fully closed to me growing up.
Seeing it as being guaranteed a home and family on an average workers pay is completely detached from that narrative.
We all work on or adjacent to embedded software for robots to replace people in these jobs so that they can go on to be 'free' to have a higher skill job doing....no one ever seems to know what. Except maintaining said robots.
I literally never worked for a company with an onboarding or training process until I got to a FAANG. At that point I had been in industry full time for ~ 13 years, and worked at everything from startups to established 200+ employee companies.
Everyone has been worried about 'automation' nuking the jobs since I was born, and outsourcing killing all industry too. First it was Japan that was going to own the world though. Then Outsourcing to India. Then China. And they had impacts. But somehow, everyone who is useful keeps working, and everyone actually seems better off. Hell, the 'maintain the robots as the only jobs left' was a 90's thing with worries about car manufacturing automation.
Back then, a lot of jobs were things like secretaries, gophers (task runners)/delivery workers, retail shopping workers, postal workers, etc. Now people use email and write their own documents, uber or ubereats what they want, have things shipped to their door. Quality of life is dramatically higher in every objective way I can see.
And if anything, there are waaaaay more jobs now, and people seem to be doing better everywhere. But they seem to hate everything and everyone way more, and FEEL poorer.
Capitalists gonna capitalist.
But they are limited to differing degrees due to policy. Our current state isn't inevitable.
Generally, It’s a means of locking in stasis in a particular field in general, or restricting competition to the ‘have’s’, just like the old Guild setup before that. Still very much a thing for MD’s in the US.
There is a reason why France in particular is notorious for not getting anything done.
German’s do it too of course, but in their own way which is focused more on results, so it tends to be less sclerotic and more productive.
It’s always a trade off - more protectionism, or more churn/chaos/competition. If they can provide good labor protections while maintaining economic growth enough to ‘lift the tide’ overall, hard to fault them. It’s easy to go so far that it strangles the economy and locks everyone into a pointlessly inefficient setup in favor of the protected classes though. (And they won’t necessarily be rich protected classes either).
Europe’s tide hasn’t been rising very rapidly for awhile, and many EU countries are clearly insolvent overall (Greece, Italy, etc), so we’ll see how long they can sustain it.
And housing wise - to be somewhat on topic - very unlikely those Nurses in the UK are doing so in London.
> It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.
> By business I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
And that had an inflation adjusted earning potential of $4.81/hr (approx, in 2021)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...
If you think working and living conditions are worse now than they were in 1933, I'd love some concrete examples.
I'm not saying things couldn't be better. I'm saying that most people talking about this seem to be completely devoid of context about life at all, and most proposed solutions just come across as strong arguments that they have no clue about the world at all, or why anything is the way it is.
Which is a solid vote in the column of 'changes proposed won't accomplish the stated goals, and will cause way more problems'. In my experience, anyway.
In my experience one of the biggest issues is that no one reports companies doing shitty things, and the labor orgs in the gov'ts get away with ignoring shitty things, because no one holds any politicians accountable on labor issues because most of the population is super complacent about everything.
Hell, Amazon and a number of other companies are super blatant about their ACTIVELY ILLEGAL ANTI-LABOR ORGANIZING, and not a peep seems to be coming from the appropriate labor departments.
And since everyone is super complacent (barely any protests even), then of course nobody cares. Because nobody is making them care.
If everyone really feels so badly about it, make it known by making them feel badly about it. Instead everyone seems to go back to candy crush after posting complaints online about how terrible things are.
The American dream was effectively denied to my generation and it's only gotten worse for subsequent generations.
The heroic labor of immigrants notwithstanding, I strongly doubt that would be possible for a fresh-off-the-boater today. I told my 20-something kids about it and they just laughed, like hearing about someone who stumbled across a pot of gold or a magic goose in a fairytale. I can't say I blame them.
Yes, they do. Read any thread on a vaguely left-leaning subreddit that even starts approaching discussions of renting, or landlords, or landlord-tenant relations, and you'll get flooded with comments so detached from reality it will stun you.
Like are we really at the point where we’re totally fine with people commuting an hour one way every workday to a shitty minimum wage job instead of just building affordable modest housing reserved for people working in the city.
It actually is. Rents are expensive because zoning laws severely limit density and require lots of car parking.
Maybe you've got some good examples from other countries, but here in the US the only major city with reasonable zoning is Houston which has quite affordable homes.
I'm not sure what happened to them, but there was a startup trying to do this: https://www.curbed.com/2021/03/brownstone-shared-housing.htm...
SROs, residential hotels, boarding houses and the like were all banned in the 1950s (and the surviving ones dismantled through the 1980s), a loss of about 100,000 units of affordable housing.
Consider this lovely e-book for further reading: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49...
Or this lovely Simon and Garfunkel song about the NYC homeless on the streets of SoHo, contemporary to that era. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCVnPIE3juc
If we just respected property owner's rights to do as they see fit we wouldn't have these problems or not nearly to the same extent.
So what do you suggest we do about that except build more homes?
Why are you trying to make this complicated? Just get rid of density caps so that developers build more apartments. Problem solved with zero cost to taxpayers.
Because "better a thousand rental units go un-built than let one slum lord construct a substandard basement apartment" or some other garbage like that.
Basically people keep trying to set a quality floor that society mostly isn't rich enough to afford and most land can't be developed enough to justify then acts surprised when the actual densification that happens is only a slow trickle.
This is what folks are talking about. Expecting things to just fall into place 'just because' without having to do the legwork to actually make/find something workable.
We know where the employers and residential zones are. We could put together a model to minimize average commute time.
The problem is that we need to have a grand "rehoming" moment to deliver it. The day where everyone gets assigned a new residence in accordance with the optimization scheme. A day that would doubtless be deferred to long past the heat-death of the universe in endless court challenges by those who ended up on the losing side of the deal in some way.
In a way, the fact we still have powerful regimes which aren't tied down to "rule of law", and specifically the "property rights as sacred" segment of it gives me hope; I'd expect to see this day occur in Beijing long before it happened in San Francisco.
Don't threaten ME with a good time!
Workers today are so entitled, demanding an entire studio apartment the audacity.
Anyway just penciling out the math, a $15/hr wage ($31K/yr) puts you in the 12% federal tax bracket and the 4% California (for example) state tax bracket. So your take-home would be $15/hr x 2080 hrs/yr x (1 - 0.12 - 0.04) = $26.2K/yr. So at that point rent ($1K/mo = $12K/year) is a good 45% of your take-home pay, and you've got $14.2K left to pay food, utilities, transportation, and (hopefully not) healthcare. It can be done. Each thing tends to trade off with other things. For example, to avoid healthcare expenses you'll want to stay healthy, eating healthy food for example. But healthy food is expensive, and probably not located close by your shitty part of town, so you'll be either driving (expensive and to be avoided) or spending extra time on public transit, or risking a catastrophic healthcare expense by biking there (in America anyway), or just eating the regular ol' cheap food. Also, do not take on any dependents. Like I said, it can be done.
Consider a place like London. It's bloody huge, and much of it is quite expensive. At the end of the day, London is going to need people staffing grocery stores, and cleaners, and that kind of thing. Not the entire population can be software devs or whatnot working from home, and you can't push them all outside of London.
If the cities weren't designed to inflate home values to enrich people who got in early, then yeah pretty much everybody could afford an apartment.
The expansive public transport network allows you to live far from the city without incurring huge commute times. That paired with the density means that car ownership is discouraged, which takes away another expense. Lastly, the city continues building multi-family middle housing in the city outskirts which keeps housing availability high.
High density and walking/public space culture comes with many other advantages. High footraffic means restaurants can run low-margin, high-volume food that poor can afford. The public spaces mean that restaurants can operate low-overhead businesses out of food trucks and holes in the wall.
Speaking if public spaces, they've generally (idk how, it is more localized there) managed to avoid the violent homelessness problem of the other major cities. Violent homelessness disproportionally affects poor people as they are more reliant on public spaces and safety in numbers. This has helped the city avoid an SF/Portland/Seattle-esque deterioration of entire neighborhoods.
Most American cities don't have any of these pros, which leads to skyrocketing costs associated with city living.
The public transit system is insufficient. The Commuter Rail is infrequent, slow and often unreliable. The entire system needs to be electrified for RER service but that’s probably twenty years away if we are lucky.
And the homeless have just been concentrated into one shantytown at Mass and Cass.
My praise for Boston was in comparison to absolutely shambolically run cities in the rest of the US. In comparison to some well-run global cities, (Greater) Boston still has ways to go.
> Mass and Cass
Yep, Methadone Mile is the uncomfortable compromise between liberal: "don't evict the homeless" versus the moderate: "keep our neighborhoods safe" agendas. It keeps the rest of Boston relatively aggressive-homeless free, but the addicts and local residents are worse off.
> entire system needs to be electrified
At times, it is jarring to see the US do worse than 3rd world countries. The mind-boggling cost of any infrastructure in the US is really holding the country back.
In 2016 I was on £16.82, I had to share a house with four other adult housemates and had no prospect of owning a property within a 10 mile radius, it's only gotten worse since. God knows how any unskilled people doing these jobs are supposed to live with any dignity.
I am surely in an outlier market so your point stands, I'm just speaking from where I sit, not trying to muddy the waters with hyperbole.
What would you define as the bottom of the barrel then? There has to be a sensible threshold that delineates between 1) "I encountered a lot of bad luck but I am motivated and want to get myself out of this situation and 2) I simply don't care. Most of the physically able that fall under 1) can get a job at an Amazon warehouse. For those in poor health, I will agree that the US is no match for other countries.
> 42k is a joke when your rent is close to $2500
You are approaching this subject as if living in an area where rents are $2500 is a right and not a privilege (the median rent in the US is $1,104 [0]). You might be shocked to hear that even in the most socialist countries in the world, there are gated neighborhoods and areas that are off limits to the poor (I experienced this first-hand living in a country that's often used as a socialist success story). I understand that not living in high-income areas leads to bad schools and a ton of other factors, but this is not a US-only phenomenon. Taking the necessary steps to remove the variations in rent is a strong step towards full-blown communism, which comes with its own set of downsides.
> and you get no benefits.
Nonsense, Amazon has surprisingly good benefits [1]. I am all for bashing Amazon's various horrible practices (eg: launching white-label brands that steal data from their own customers, total disregard for trademarks in their paid search bidding, etc), but when it comes to benefits, it will be hard to find a warehouse job with better perks.
[0] https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-yea... [1] https://hiring.amazon.com/why-amazon/benefits#/
And you're approaching this subject as if Amazon warehouses are uniformly distributed throughout the country, such that median rents _matter_. They aren't, and they don't. Amazon warehouses are typically just outside of (or even within) population centers, where rents exceed median, often substantially.
How far should a person commute for a $15/hr warehouse job? How far _can_ they commute?
[0]: https://abc7.com/rent-prices-apartments-cost-of-realtorcom/1...
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...
You can get a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment where I live in a decent low crime location for $700-$1000. There’s an Amazon wear house up the street. It’s a city >250k people.
People around here make $40k on average and still go to sports games, bars, dancing, etc.
It depends where you live.
That's not normal, but it is simply what it costs to live in NYC or SF or London. I know tons of people who pay north of $2,500/month for decent (not fancy) apartments in central neighborhoods of those cities. And $3-$4k/month is very common for a single person.
And no, it is not simply what it costs to live in NYC, unless you think you absolutely must live in Manhattan below 96th st. This is like saying the cost of a car is $65,000, because the only car I accept is a BMW X5. Ok, if that is your standard, then yes a car will cost you $65k. But there are cars available for much cheaper, that will fulfill all the important roles that one looks for in a car.
In Australia (where that $43k is from), the median rent for a 2 bedroom unit is $436 a week - $1700 a month. Very affordable with housemates or a partner also on minimum wage. In cheaper suburbs or 1 bedroom units, this is cheaper again.
So incredible that I'd find an authority on that right here in the HN comment section! Please tell me more about my opinion!
It's pretty close but I don't have a six figure salary and don't have a degree (but am getting one part time while I work.) 80% of my friends are grown adults working in the service industry, retail, and driving jobs with a few working in upper-level clerical jobs. My wife works in retail. Folks at work— mostly developers— are the exception rather than the rule in my life.
Not one single person I've spoken to about it considers working in a wage or independent contractor job at Amazon desirable. I know a few people that did work there and they quit because if you want to run yourself ragged under authoritarian management, at least UPS/a paving crew/a bar will compensate you well for it and probably give you decent career prospects.
Where I live, the $15/hr Amazon starts at is less than any McDonalds franchise pays entry-level openers and closers, less than you make as a prep cook, less than what you make working at CVS or Walgreens, less than what you make as a rideshare driver/delivery person. A impossibly cheap studio apartment— we're talking 200 square feet, probably not legal, in a crappy neighborhood— would take a minimum 70% of your take-home pay without considering health insurance or anything else besides taxes that might get deducted from your paycheck.
The estimated take-home is about 1/3 of the area's calculated AMI— the federal poverty level. You're so far into what constitutes low-income for public housing that the numbers on the city chart don't even go below 30%.
You're making the same exact mistake you're accusing people of here of making. There's a whole world happening outside of your own sphere of experience. No surer way to be consistently meaningfully wrong than assume nobody else knows what they're talking about.
Florida min wage was 8.25 before 2021. So nearly half the Amazon wage.
What does make something good, then? The top level comment implies that having to work at all is indentured servitude. Does that mean any sort of work to sustain oneself is not "good"?
I wonder how many people here saying Amazon warehouse is a good job just because it pays 15/hr have actually worked there along with other jobs paying similar or better?
I have never even made $15 an hour. Also, in my area (also pretty cheap CoL), they pay $20/hr while fast food is ~10-12.
Given that the social security system in the US (and to be fair, even in Europe) is pretty lacking and Amazon (as well as Walmart) is setting up shop exclusively in areas with high unemployment, it can very well be said that people have the free choice to work at Amazon instead of another employer that treats their workers better, so yes it is perfectly valid to call it "de facto indentured servitude".
How is that a negative? Would you prefer for those people to stay unemployed?
This is a thing??
Why compare ourselves to China and not to a place like Argentina or wherever they take mid-day naps during weekdays? Because you don't want to fall behind in the global economic race. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, there are going to be fewer and fewer protections for the local industries. For example, back in the 20th century it was possible to ban imports of various foreign goods, because those same products could be manufactured anywhere. But we're increasingly getting to the point where there are only 2 or 3 options for most of the tech products (mobile phones, computer operating systems, anything AI-related). In 20-50 years from now, things are only going to get worse. As a first-world country, you might still have a chance to be a relevant exporter in the mid and late 21st century, which will hopefully pay for the cost of importing everything else you can't manufacture locally. But you won't get there with siestas.
We’re living in the very best time to be human so far. It wasn’t long ago that the world was living under the constant threat of global nuclear annihilation, before that two world wars, before that constant illness, famines, and other wars, etc. Long before that, just struggling to get enough food and shelter to survive.
The same goes for current working conditions/life. Some things are worse than 20 years ago but some are better.
For one thing, micro-plastics weren't in the brains and bloodstream of past populations. That said, doubtful anyone hesitant to have kids is under the delusion everything was always better in the past. I certainly wasn't when the time came to make those decisions.
Who is saying this?!
Regardless, there are 8 billion humans from a population pool that may have at times dropped to as few as a few hundred. So risk of human extinction is far less than the (very real) risk of making lives of future generations much shittier.
It’s this one. As a Canadian, I can’t take anything they say seriously about their housing “crisis” or cost of living. Almost everything is more expensive in Canada and most jobs pay a lot less, but things are still not really that bad, so I know that the Americans just like to complain.
The only way it’s possible for an American to struggle financially is if they do it on purpose.
The Greatest Generation was exceptionally patriotic, and I always assumed it had to do with living in a country that suffered much less industrial damage in WWII than other countries (which enabled a great standard of living while everyone else was still rebuilding). But I am starting to wonder how much of this has to do with just simply having spent a couple of years abroad and getting to witness first-hand how dysfunctional most other places are (during and in-between wars).
* high monthly premiums for healthcare with high deductibles (I pay 14k a year with a 5k deductible for each person in my family)
* high medication prices (people often buy drugs from canada)
* 0 maternity leave (15 weeks max in Canada)
* 0 vacation (2-3 weeks in Canada)
* less accessible child care (Canada is working on building out ~$10/day child care, it can easily cost ~$20k a year in the US)
* less affordable college tuition
* higher crime rates, higher incarceration rates
* lower minimum wage (canada’s is nearly double)
* at-will employment, termination without cause or severance (in canada you can be fired easily, but reasonable severance is required)
* reduced access to abortion (significantly in some states as of late)
Everything except the most expensive things. Paying 20% more for cheese is fine when you're saving 95% on healthcare.
But I really need to reject what you’re saying about the “bottom wage.” $15/hr is not the lowest, it’s actually on the very high end of the lowest income salaries:
> Of those individuals with income who were older than 15 years of age, approximately 50% had incomes below $30,000
This isn’t 50% of low income jobs. 50% of all workers make less than what you say is a “normal” low skill wage.
Minimum wage in the US is $7.25/hr. Anecdotally, when I was starting out a few years ago, I was paid minimum wage at a college IT job. Most restaurants (outside of HCOL cities) are going to start around minimum wage or slightly higher.
Let’s also look at one of the biggest employers in country, Walmart. It’s not going to start you anywhere close to $15/hr. Say you get lucky and get a whopping $12/hr. That’s $24k/yr, or $21k net. Monthly rent in the cheapest CoL places in the US is going to be like $500. That’s $6k/yr. So your total income after paying rent, at an extremely common low skill job, is $15k/yr, or $1200/mo.
You can cover these types of essential expenses with $1200/mo?
- Food
- Car and gas (there is not public transit to take you to Walmart in Ohio.)
- Utilities, such as electric, water, trash, and internet.
- A basic phone plan.
- Health care. (think about what percent of $1200 a premium could be.)
- Any kind of savings, including retirement?
It is certainly possible to live extremely frugally, assuming no children, no existing debt (such as college), no vacations or travel, no big expenses, etc. It is certainly not possible to cover emergencies (like a medical one or your cheap car breaking down). I also question if you’ll ever save anything towards changing your future, like a retirement plan or better education.
The bigger question is why the fuck, in one of the richest and most successful economies in the world, do a huge number of the participants in that economy — again, 50% make under $15/hr — have to make a wage which doesn’t enable them to be at least a little bit comfortable?
And they don’t get any kind of meaningful protection against bad situations, like medical problems. Walmart isn’t going to pay you to be on an extended leave. It’s not going to be common to have any kind of retirement plan other than social security. It’s rare to have good health care plans at this salary.
It is going to be challenging, in this forum, to gain empathy, because most of us are likely in the top 10% of earners. But I don’t see a way to look at this situation and think it’s good for our society.
I don't think GP is out of touch with reality as much as sensationalizing what is going on. Given the trend of the housing market and wages across the entire west, it could be closer to reality quite soon.
Rather, Average Joe is struggling with things that realistically, he shouldn't be struggling with given our global wealth. Comfort level of money has risen far above median wage. If you're not sitting on wealth yet, anything below that isn't going to feel comfortable for a myriad of reasons. Individuals can work around that and build up the wealth, but that won't make the road itself any more comfortable.
Not to mention the majority of actions individuals can perform involve less spending, and every time that happens, politicians, economists and the news will quickly throw out a panic article how the economy is doomed if people don't start spending more quickly.
Young people look around and think things are harder now than they've ever been and it's simply not true. My mom didn't have it easy, hell, my grandpa who was born in the great depression and got to be an adult through the 50's didn't have it easy.
Houses and food may have been cheaper relative to other things, but people put in way more hours of way shittier work, at least my family certainly did.
Nor is it very fruitful to have this measuring contest when it is evident several things have gotten worse for no other reason than greed.
> You'd actually have to accumulate everything before being able to make an absolute statement such as "Young people look around and think things are harder now than they've ever been and it's simply not true"
That's not an absolute. I did not say "All young people". I said "Young people". There are definitely young people who believe the US, and some the western world in general, is on some wild decline from a golden age where everyone with an entry level job owned a house at 25. Just look at Reddit (assuming it isn't trolls astroturfing that is).
> I don't know how people can make this statement in such absolute terms, while at best their arguments are "well Y is worse, but X is better!"
I'm actually not sure what you're saying here.
> Let's not forget "young people" still have to live to see their retirement years.
Here too. Are you pointing out young people need to save for retirement? That isn't new. My grandfather was employed his entire adult life and only one of his (out of 6 or 7) jobs came with a pension (which he didn't get). Likewise with my mother.
No one in my extended family, old or middle aged, has a pension, and very few have significant savings.
> At least for someone outside the US, I don't expect to see most of my taxes funding the elderly's retirement returned by future generations (nor do I want that, for that matter).
It's not really feasible even if we wanted it. And it shouldn't be necessary. That is a very long, very separate conversation though, as my the point of my comment lies elsewhere.
> Nor is it very fruitful to have this measuring contest when it is evident several things have gotten worse for no other reason than greed.
This was the intent of statement actually. Calling work indentured servitude is drawing a comparison with the human rights dark ages which isn't apt.
And of course, this is Amazon, so at least you get some form of insurance. Many are less fortunate.
It is preferable to live as middle class in a third-world country (GDP per capita ~4000$/year) than as someone with a shitty job in the USA, having lived the former.
> [E]xperience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other
From Wikipedia[1]:
> Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market: "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper"
Change is the only thing that is a guarantee. Maybe it will collapse when some other nation comes along and outruns some future instance of the US that is completely tired and broken. Or maybe they will turn the ship around.
AFAIK you cannot be sent to prison for not paying property taxes in the USA.
If someone is charged with tax evasion they are charged with something other than merely owning property and not paying taxes. They are charged with some specific criminal act.
Taxation OTOH is a civil, not a criminal, matter. If someone doesn't pay their property tax then, in the worst case, control/ownership of the property is taken by the relevant authorities, the property sold and the taxes paid to the extent possible.
I mean, being poor sucks, and it does make you more likely to commit crime, but talking about it like it's an inevitability is inaccurate and not in good faith.
However, you can lose your property if you don't pay property taxes. (If you're late, the interest can be significant AND it gets treated like property tax for the purpose of "lose your property".)
Moreover, the "lose your property" process pretty much guarantees that you'll lose much of the equity that you had in said property.
Our political course is set by our media, because it's hard (and getting harder) to find information otherwise. Right now the media is concerned with hating Russia (for the seventh year in a row), a nonexistent crime wave, and that unapproved information remains too available. If you think the US has any other problems other than made up ones, you're out of luck.
And no one goes to jail for failure to pay property tax, unless there is some kind of egregious fraud involved. The tax authorities just put a lien on the property, and then seize it to sell at auction.
From my privileged position as a remotely working software engineer for a western company who resides in a middle-sized town, I am able to observe the daily hurdles and fears of my friends and relatives earning 10x less for a lot more stress and sweating. The typical clerical office job pays you something in the range of 350 to 450 euros. Renting a small, badly furnished and badly isolated communist-era flat costs you around 150 euros. Food isn’t cheap compared to the West and you would need at least 200 euros a month. Many working adults prefer to live under one roof with their parents in order to make ends meet. Starting a family is a risky affair. Dysfunctional families with 1 member working abroad in a wealthier EU country are quite common. That member often comes for a visit to attend a relative’s funeral or for Christmas. Most people drive a 20 year-old banger just to be able to go to work and it eats their full income. Just know this when complaining about your Walmart or Amazon US job.
This is underappreciated by the well-off: the very possibility of a counterparty being able to afford a lawyer raises the floor of illegality.
If you and the people around you couldn't ever afford a lawyer... that floor lowers drastically.
I have a few lawyer friends who volunteer at various legal aid organizations. Their most numerous cases? Landlords doing obviously-illegal things.
But without legal representation, who's to stop them? Or, to be fair to law-abiding small-scale landlords, the opposite situation with bad tenants?
Access to the law isn't just a "nice to have". It's a pillar of not-ripping-each-others-throats-out society.
Pediatric oncology. Extremely high skill/pay. Very prestigious. But most will leave within a few years. A working day surrounded by kids undergoing painful treatments, particularly when you are the person prescribing those treatments, grinds down one's soul. Or criminal defense attorneys/prosecutors. Or any law enforcement. To survive such jobs you mush develop a skin so think that to outsiders you appear inhumane.
That job must be nightmarish for anyone who isn’t a full-blown sociopath. I’m not a particularly empathetic person and I couldn’t start that job let alone stay in it for years.
Edit: > One of the attractions of pediatrics is, surprisingly enough…
This is the opposite of surprising. I imagine one of the appeals of pediatrics is significantly fewer of your patients die. That’s why pediatric oncology is particularly striking, it’s dealing with high numbers of deaths in a cohort where they are otherwise quite rare.
It seems especially ugly to see that here on HN. I grew up as the "a bit strange" person in a small midwestern town. It sucked. it wasn't until I got the fuck out and got into tech that I got to be around other nerdy, non-neurotypical people like myself that I finally felt like I could breathe.
If you have a complaint about somebody, fine, make it in clear and precise terms. But this scary-scary vagueness looks to me like standard-issue neurotypical bigotry.
It’s important when noticing instances of this to request further clarification.
It's similar to eg. why lgbtqia+ people have distinct memories about feeling unsafe in communities where "smear the queer" is a recess schoolyard game.
I'm not concerned about the woman in question. I'm concerned about everybody else who gets treated poorly because they're "a bit strange". And because of that, I'm concerned every time I hear that sort of "different equals scary" talk, as it normalized poor treatment of perfectly good people.
It sounds like you didn't know her very well and still judge her as dangerous.
Neither is a sociopath and both told me that as of today, the job is much more rewarding than even 20 years ago. Most of their little patients leave the hospital in remission and deaths have steadily gone down during their careers. It is almost sacrilegious to say that aloud, but childhood cancer seems to be inching towards a "mostly solved problem" status. Contemporary long term survival of kids diagnosed with cancer is hovering around 80 per cent.
Human beings are very resilient. Or at the least, there is a sub-population of us who are that way.
I like to think of myself as being in that sub-population because I have few triggers despite experiences that others might call traumatic: violent home invasion, car crash and roll over, nearly being run over by train.
PTSD is complicated.
One of the attractions of pediatrics is, surprisingly enough, that there's less death as kids tend to bounce back from the kinds of things that would kill adults.
Why do you have to be a sociopath, if you have the guts to help people, who need help? Even or especially if they are children? Sociopaths would do it for the money and prestige. A doctor with empathy mainly to save those that can be saved and ease the suffering of those that cannot. No need to insult or stigmatize them, because they can do, what you cannot imagine.
I fault those, who say anyone capable of doing a emotional hard job, must be a sociopath.
This is why psychopaths are overrepresented in such professions. I guess it makes it easier to cut into people, and to make dispassionate decisions.
edit: are the downvotes because you think I'm implying this is a bad thing? Am I wrong?
if they are able to make choices dispassionately that is objectively best for the patient, then it makes them good doctors. The only problem is how does one judge whether they made the decision in the best interest of the patient, when normally, this judgement is based on a proxy metric like sympathy?
The numbers in state courts may vary, but in NY they are similar to the federal system. https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/New_...
Obviously a guilty plea still requires work, and maybe a lot of it. But in terms of outcomes, they rarely lose.
Right, but this is the result of:
1. Selection bias (prosecutors only prosecute a case they have a great chance of winning).
2. Negotiation (prosecutors will charge for lesser crimes than those they believe were committed, in order to gain agreement to a plea deal).
The percentage alone doesn't tell you much about how hard it is to gain a conviction. It tells you a lot about how willing prosecutors are to prosecute a case that they may not be able to win.
(I don’t disagree with you, just adding a small point)
The last doctor I spoke to was the most condescending man I met in a while, unfortunately, he was also my surgeon.
What we don't see are the undoubtedly countless cases where their pour every last drop of their will to save a person, and it just fails and the patient dies. Through no fault of the doctor. Imagine having to carry that burden. To always question whether the person who was put in your care died because you could've done better.
In fact, I think this is an unimaginable burden to carry. I certainly wouldn't be able to do it. I'd break long before that. For this reason alone, these people will always have my very highest regard.
Not detracting from the point but, in either case, this person is not going to be on the breadline as a consequence of quitting his/her job. They will get a similalrly high paying and high prestige job the next day.
Outside of being an actual doctor, many more than a recently unemployed warehouse worker.
So the faster and more ships your team can unload, the more you're paid. That's the incentive.
I once got paid almost $1000, in just one day - but that day was 20 hours long, and you're pretty much beat to a pulp afterwards.
We had people come in, and leave before lunch. No pay in the world would keep them there.
Edit, for the curious - I tried to look up some footage of what it looks like:
This clip shows a nice and modern trawler, the unloading requires little manpower. See those long brown blocks on the palets? Those would be around 40-50 kgs / 90 - 110 lbs. https://youtu.be/Qi7VNBOJetA?t=115
This is more on par with what you'd usually see - the rooms would be stack to the ceiling with frozen packet/blocks. Those blocks are around 20 kgs / 45 lbs each. https://youtu.be/e7u-X8XR1hs?t=543
Here's a larger trawler - again - sometimes the fish will be stacked to the ceiling https://youtu.be/fQEwECzZL_s?t=2739
Unfortunately I can't seem to find any footage of the more usual scenario, where the blocks are just piled up at random.
This is surprisingly high in that I would have assumed it would be far more cost-effective for the company to improve automation here and bring in more equipment to assist — intuitively, even if such equipment would be expensive, it couldn't be more expensive than the labor costs.
What industry was this?
And to the extent that the cargo isn't containerized (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't), automation is harder than it sounds here: sequencing, unstacking, moving, and re-stacking irregularly-shaped, imbalanced, fragile, and dissimilarly-packaged objects requires lots of experience and judgement or things go awry very fast, and one mistake can cost a ton of time to deal with when something falls over, gets punctured, or gets in the way.
This is also true of movers (as in house movers). It's harder than it looks, at least to do well -- many cheaper companies write contracts such that they can screw up and customers have no recourse, which changes the economics a bit -- but the first-rate movers are expensive for a reason. Unless you're incredibly careful (which often implies going more slowly), bodies get wrecked and objects get broken.
As an aside, one proxy for a first-rate moving company is them having front-line employees who have been on the job for 5+ years. It's basically impossible for companies that cut corners because no one survives that long. Firms like Gentle Giant out of Boston (I have no stake in the company, I just know them well)) have a stable of long-term employees, many of them athletes, because they're incentivized to do a good job while not hurting themselves. And they're expensive (but not necessarily more expensive than cut-rate firms if you factor in the risk of damage, and/or the likelihood of being fairly reimbursed if something is damaged).
In short, these trawlers catch the fish (by trawling the ocean floor), produce the fish onboard (fish fillets), pack the product (in 25 and 50 kg blocks), and store them in large freezing rooms. Then when the capacity is full, they dock, and the product is unloaded. Usually some company offers this loading/unloading service. The product was the either placed in freezing warehouse, or loaded directly onto trucks.
The trawlers we unloaded, would usually carry 300 - 500 metric tons of fish. When I worked, we'd get around $0.03 pr kg fish unloaded, so a 300 metric tonne assignment would result in $9000 split on 10-15 people. Some days we'd unload 500-700 metric ton. That would be very long days - but the work had to be done, as the there were ships standing in queue.
The main problem with automation is that all the ships look a bit different, and there are so many edge cases there. Sometimes the blocks are frozen together, and you'll have to use a crowbar to get them loose. Sometimes the blocks have shifted due to rough seas. It can be a fucking mess, other times it's nice and straightforward.
The largest boats do have conveyer belt, so the longshoremen are just throwing blocks on the belt, and the other crew is on land putting said blocks onto pallets. But 9 out of 10 times, there's a crew in the freezer loading blocks onto pallets, and then the pallets are brought up from the ship, and sorted on land. People work surprisingly fast.
As for the vessels, it's just a cost of doing business.
If you want a job where you can be paid to get in shape, join a military reserve force.
Yah $1000 for one day is deceiving, how many days after that one day of work are you totally useless because your body is still recovering? I think you have to factor in the broader dip in quality of life that happens when you work 20 hours straight when you look at that paycheck of $1000.
There is huge power in law enforcement and prosecutorial discretion. Yes, some parts of the job have to be strict for safety purposes. There are many other parts that don't.
I've had prosecutors and police know that our rights were violated as part of a citation. They did not care. Cop lied multiple times in court and was caught. IAD merely gave them a warning. The LT of the troop made a bunch of BS excuses - either he's actually that stupid or he's lying too. Filed a complaint about an incompetent magistrate whow also violated due process rights - judicial board doesn't care. Prosecutor instructed the court not to talk to us which prevented us from securing remote accommodations for our witness - the Bar didn't care. Civil rights lawyer said our rights were violated, but unless there was substantial monetary damages, the system doesn't care and would likely see it as frivolous.
Nobody cares. Nobody protects your rights. If nobody can enforce your rights, do you even have them at all? All the trooper/prosecutor/magistrate/judge had to do, was drop/throw out the case. They had the discretion, and even the responsibility, to do that. Their mentality was the problem. We were guilty in their mind because if we were not, that would make them participants in a broken and unjust system.
But, in theory it should be different.
The trooper didn't care about the truth. He lied in court... twice. We mentioned a third party witness at the scene - they never questioned them. There was no statutory definition of a term. The dictionaries had only one open ended definition for the term. We wrote to the state agency that is the authority in that area to see what guidance they have on the activity - they said it's legal (even if they didn't, the rule of strict construction requires ambiguity to be favorable to the defense). The people in the system didn't care. The trooper also knew that the other party committed a crime, but declined to charge them. What a one sided system... again, truth doesn't matter when they treat you as guilty until proven innocent.
The most important things prosecution does are: decide who to prosecute, decide when to ask for bail, decide what sentence to ask for. This all has a lot more to do with societal values than making a strong case.
I take it that this was not a criminal prosecution that might result in actual jail time. Was it a minor traffic offense? Part of the "thick skin" i mentioned above is a pragmatism re the "rights" of individuals in minor cases. Highschool teaches us that every trial is the same, that beyond-reasonable-doubt, perjury and and all the rights apply to everyone in ever case. The reality is that absolute respect for such things is a limited resource. Impeach every cop with less-than-perfect testimony in a traffic case and you won't have any cops left to testify in murder cases. Give every drunk driving charge a full jury trial and the economy would stop as every able body would spend more time sitting in the jury box than working. Functioning within the system means working within those realities. Ideology dies a quick death when faced with the staggering number of charges brought each day.
Criminal summary offense (dog off leash) which carries the possibility of up to 90 days in jail. Instead of charging the off leash offense, they wrote the charge for a dangerous dog. This incorrect charge carried with it pretrial restrictions only found under that charge (dog could not leave our property, etc).
"Part of the "thick skin" i mentioned above is a pragmatism re the "rights" of individuals in minor cases."
There is no such exception for ignoring rights simply because they feel it's pragmatic.
If they feel minor case isn't worth the effort to properly pursue, then it shouldn't be worth their time to pursue it at all. When you screw over enough people, there won't be any left to support the system.
"Give every drunk driving charge a full jury trial and the economy would stop as every able body would spend more time sitting in the jury box than working."
Um... they do have that right. The states fixed this, not by desecrating their rights, but by creating alternative and less severe programs like ARD.
"Impeach ever cop with less-than-perfect testimony in a traffic case and you won't have any cops left to testify in murder cases."
We aren't talking about less than perfect. We're talking about lies, or consistently making false claims (unreliable). For example, if the cop tells me he's going to amend the charge because he made a mistake 10 minutes before court, and then tells the judge he's amending it because he's cutting us a break... that's pretty egregious that he wants to hide his mistake to influence the court.
Fast forward a year and I get a court summons for this ticket. At this point I'm annoyed enough to fight it so I take it to trial. I argue that because a year has gone by, my Constitutional right to a speedy trial has been violated. This actually makes the judge (actually a "magistrate" -- still not sure what the difference is) look something up in a book before denying my motion with no explanation. Then the cop blatantly lies on the stand and says that he saw something that he could not possibly have seen. I have photographic evidence that proves that he could not possibly have seen what he claims to have seen. He is clearly lying to fulfill the statutory requirement for finding me guilty of this offense. Then the magistrate asks me point-blank if I was guilty. I take the fifth. Magistrate proclaims "the court will be finding you guilty". I pay the fine, enroll in traffic school, and proceed with my privileged-rich-white-guy life.
It's a pretty fucked up system even when you are on the non-shitty end of the stick.
That's not the fifth. Pleading not guilty isn't considered a statement or an admission of anything. Nor can it be held against you in any way. We don't double down by charging every guilty party with "perjury" because they lost. That was done away with centuries ago.
It was a very weird situation from a moral point of view because on the one hand, finding me guilty was not supported by the evidence, but on the other hand, letting me get off scot-free would have been even more unjust because the fact of the matter is that I did commit a fairly serious moving violation, and the only reason we were in court at all was that the cop decided to cut be a break and then took a long time to do the paperwork.
Based on their other comment it sounds like they said they didn't remember when asked by the magistrate if they committed the act, which isn't the same as invoking the fifth. Thwy also said they were able to prove the officer couldn't have witnessed the act they were testifying about. Then the magistrate found them guilty (based on false testimony?).
I think it's the same direction, unless I'm missing something.
Magistrates don't have to have a law degree nor pass the Bar. They tend to be very incompetent considering that they are the ones deciding the initial hearing for misdemeanors and felonies (although most of the time they deal with more minor things).
I asked a magistrate to dismiss a case with prejudice, and he thought I was calling him prejudice...
Yeah, it depends on how you look at it. I was thinking about this:
> I've had prosecutors and police know that our rights were violated as part of a citation. They did not care.
In my case it's, "I had a cop decide not to cite me for violations of the law that I actually committed, only to turn around and railroad me for a less serious violation that he could not possibly have known whether I actually committed or not."
My point was just that net-net the system worked to my benefit despite the fact that my ostensible rights were violated.
I've only seen it go the one way in my experiences. It just seems so odd to me that a system with such power has such limited controls/protections, and such common mistakes and abuses.
My father in law does this, in a developing country no less. Bless his soul, he's a very kind man. But it's incredibly taxing. Not just the treatments but there are many cases where children die and there's nothing you can do about it. And it doesn't stop, even when he's on vacation, he has patient's families calling/texting him.
I've been at dinner where someone will walk over and say something like "you saved my brother/daughter/sister/son's life." Or sometimes my wife and I will meet someone who will recognize she's his daughter and day the same. Hopefully that makes it worth it.
Please don't equate healthcare workers with law enforcement. Healthcare workers have an astronomically harder job and actually make society a better place.
He says he makes many times the money with much less stress. Being in law enforcement in this climate seems like a pretty rough job to me. And that's not to excuse bad law enforcement behavior (of which there is plenty) either.
"Actually make society a better place". << What do you suppose your world would look like with no enforcement of any laws?
Based on my (definitely incomplete so feel free to fill in any blanks I have!) knowledge of places that don't have formal law enforcement, it's impossible to make a good faith argument that they're better places because of it.
If the world is unlucky enough to experience another pandemic someday, health workers will be expected to risk their lives once again during the period where no vaccines or good treatments exist.
This can't be understated. Sometimes I've been in my successful dev bubble for so long that I forgot my low level preprofessional job interactions. It was miserable. Not because the bosses treated people badly, but because there was literally no kind of incentive that could get a lot of my colleagues to be any better. They only responded to the whip.
My mother is a hardworking, intelligent person (good and honest? Eh...) without a college degree. She'd probably be identified as the person GP would bond with as having gotten unlucky; her parents wouldn't let her go to school for engineering since she was a girl/she had to run away due to being abused, which stuck her in low level jobs. Then she tried to get an associate's in ultrasound technology but the economy crashed and she couldn't cast her net widely enough to make use of it.
Which is its own issue: Even if you meet people who are competent in those positions, they also tend to be very cynical and pessimistic + burnt out. That type of relationship can also be poison, but at the same time the only thing keeping you sane. It's hard.
While it was a literal "shitty" job, anyone could do it for the $10/hr. I saw that it was a dead-end though. I would be looking at my twenty-something year old boss and wanting much more for myself than the fun job he had. I saw that I could make a positive out of a negative.
I would work my ass off to give myself an extra hour each day after I locked up the school to then learn how to code online and did all of my lagging coursework on the computer we had in the janitor office/closet.
Looking back now after being part of a successful startup and working for big tech for the last 6 years, I believe this "shitty" job is one of the big reasons I made it. I think we underestimate the privilege that certain jobs can give us. I think it's especially important that you have enough time to work on your personal development in someway at any job. Sometimes you have to make that time for yourself somehow even if there are risks of being terminated.
Also it helps to have a job where nobody else is around and all people care about is the job gets done each day.
I get your point but the personal development can only happen if the primal needs are covered.
At least as far as teamwork (and possibly independent work) is concerned, sports or marching band are the first two summer opportunities to come to mind. However, that still leaves out customer service (and the effectiveness of that actually being picked up by most teenage employees is debatable, at best).
My son is treated like a prince but he’s going to scoop ice cream and sell pizza slices or he isn’t getting an iota of help from me. You don’t understand the world unless you work those jobs.
I think this is the real crux of the matter: not everyone has the aptitude or interest to be a programmer or whatnot, and that's perfectly fine!
The whole "lift yourself out of poverty by learning X" is not necessarily bad advice – it's good advice actually, and I did it myself – but when you're talking about society as a whole it's missing the point that: ... even if everyone learns all the skills in the world, we're still going to need people at grocery stores, and support agents, and warehouse workers, and that kind of thing.
So no matter which way, we still need to have a conversation about how to organize things so that everyone has a reasonably fair living wage (as well as what "fair" and "living wage" are, exactly).
However, if you must choose between quality of life or higher salary, choose higher salary. Quality of life isn’t a liquid asset.
Also, in the United States your life is substantially better the more money you have.
Strongly disagree.
Europe is better if you’re dumb as there are better social systems. You can just exist more easily there.
Also requiring help from the welfare state has nothing to do with a persons intelligence. Sometimes there are massive recessions + unemployment...or global pandemics. Shit happens and when it does knowing that I'll be taken care of is worth a lot.
Your feelings are anecdotal. My anecdotal evidence comes from my European friends here, sone from the greatest of social safety nets. The money is so insanely good here and they want to earn it.
On the other side, I have friends regretting their move to the US - citing a workaholic culture, high living costs, lot of cars and shopping, no safety, etc.
Lol this isn’t true. These are things you’ve been told that simply aren’t necessarily true. People work similarly to euros. Professionals get paid significantly more, get as much or more time off, and essentially get free healthcare if you understood our model. But let’s spin it a bit:
Things may cost more relative to the euro because the dollar has been so strong. We make much more income so things cost a bit more. Owning a car is awesome. Shopping is awesome. Only some sort of weird propaganda would convince someone that having freedom of travel and the ability to buy things is bad. No safety? You’re the guys with WW3 on your doorstep. Our entire culture is built on seeing the critical mistakes of Europe over the last 400 years and not repeating them.
As for language barriers - why aren’t Americans flocking to London? It’s a far more important city than Berlin. It’s because the living is inferior to here if you can earn a living. Less pay, small houses, less to do, bad weather, etc. Fun to visit though
Traveling and learning new languages may help to see things from another perspective.
It's not the poverty that makes it hard to relate, it's that they seem to almost live by instinct and emotion. I wish them well but don't know what's wrong in their heads or have the slightest idea of how to durably improve their lot, apart from setting an example of worldly rationality (aye, there's the rub).
It's not the poverty that makes it hard to relate, it's that they seem to almost live by instinct and emotion. I wish them well but don't know what's wrong in their heads or have the slightest idea of how to durably improve their lot, apart from setting an example of worldly rationality (aye, there's the rub). "
You have a LOT of work to do on emotional intelligence and having empathy for others bud. I am sure you worked really hard to get where you are and that you are also an intelligent person, but you obviously have some massive blindspots about how cruel society is and about how your own struggle through life has stunted your capacity to feel empathy for others.
Even if you were right and other people were struggling because they kept making wrong decisions when they simply could have made the right decisions, do you want to live in a society that treats these people with an intense degree of cruelty? What is the point of you being rewarded for making all the right choices when all around you people who aren't as smart or hard working as you are being utterly ground to pieces by the society you live in? Sure if you develop a sense of distance from the suffering of those people I suppose you can sleep good at night but that is doing a damage to your soul (in a vague meaning here, not implying religion necessarily) by numbing your capacity to connect with the rest of humanity.
So, away from rationality and towards Romanticism? In any case, I contend that our smug, enlightened "emotionally intelligent" society wears no clothes as far as treatment of the poor is concerned. It looks a lot more emotional than intelligent.
As someone who has been privileged to be naturally inclined towards the more lucrative parts of STEM, I still don’t want to see a society which rewards people like me in a vastly outsized way, while being indifferent or punitive to others whose interests or abilities or life experiences landed them outside a handful of in-demand professions. It’s very easy to attribute success to the choices we make, but so much of it is out of our control (where we live, what our society values, what advantages and disadvantages we inherit).
I know people who were _actually_ poor and had to drop out of high school to support their family. Those same people worked their ass off to go to community college and transfer to a better school and ended up successful. The idea that we should tax successful people like that to prop up leeches is just fundamentally wrong to me.
Bitterness and finger pointing are easy cognitive shortcuts using the just world fallacy. I’ve decided not to use easy logical fallacies to simplify the behavior model of other human beings.
(More flippantly: we all know kids are stupid, even the smart ones. We also all understand, intuitively, that strong support systems are some of the best predictors for social and economic success in children. It doesn’t make any sense to sentence future adults to lives of indigence and poverty because someone else hasn’t given them the support they require.)
I know plenty of software developers that frequent this site and make around 20-30k a year in Europe.
The average rent for one bedroom apartment is 2.5k in SF, even in Berlin you're maybe paying 800 bucks.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FoodPorn/comments/thvk4e/a_casserol...
The point was about the average reader, and I think that holds. But I don’t actually have statistics to support that.
By the time I graduated, it was mostly temp firms that handled the recruitment - and FYI, they absolutely follow the "hire fast, fire fast" mantra. So while you could land work the next day, you could just as easily get fired from the same gig 2 hours into work. That's how fast it went.
This is turn made people stick around shitty gigs, if they knew that meant job security for the next 3-6 months. And once you start turning down other gigs, you might not get called up again, ever again. It's not that you're implicitly getting "blackballed", but rather that by the time you're calling back for work, they've gotten N new candidates working, and ready to go.
And the worst part? These gigs do next to nothing for your resume. I worked with college graduates stuck in such positions, graduates with decent and hard degrees. One year turns into two, two into three, three into five...and before they know it, they've worked these shitty gigs long enough that their degrees start to lose value. But you gotta pay rent each and every month, so what can you do?
For some more meat to this story - my least favorite gigs, which I consider stereotypical "shitty jobs" in this segment of jobs:
1. Warehouse worker for huge transportation corporation: 12 hour shifts, extremely high tempo, employees pretty much throwing every parcel that can be thrown, to work faster. If the supervisor caught you slipping for even 2 minutes during that shift, you could be removed from that job. Shit pay. No wonder people receive broken packages, when the warehouse workers are throwing them like basketballs.
2. Construction helper. You're just carrying stuff up and down stairs, all day long. That's it. Imagine carrying bags of cement up 5 floors, for 10-12 hours. Again, bottom bucket pay, and you'll be constantly monitored.
3. Roofer hand/helper. Same as 2, but you'll be spending your time on a roof, often time just getting stuff up there. I once spent the whole month of February shoveling a warehouse roof, that's all I did for 8 hours a day.
Of course I say this assuming you're based in the US - the European job market for technical people is much, much worse than the US.
For another: physics/math isn't a stepping stone to technical roles. Physics from ivy league/new ivy is. A B.A. in English from brown is closer to a quant job than a physics degree from New Mexico Tech is. Hell at least NMT is, in the non austerity days, a path into a defense lab. There's half a dozen of state schools (in new mexico alone) offering STEM degrees that most people don't even know are schools.
Its not only this, its also the fact that the way your employer abuses you begins to over time subconsciously convince you that this is normal and that you deserve this kind of treatment. This is one of the great tragedies of how unnecessarily cruel modern work is in the US for most people, it forms people into the smallest version of themselves possible. This has happened to me and countless people I have known and you can say "well just snap out of it, make your life better" but when you face a job that grinds you down everyday that isn't necessarily a psychological regime a lot of people can escape. It is similar (but not equivalent, I am not trying to down play abuse here) to the way that from the outside it looks absurd how people get trapped in abusive relationships with partners.
Most small businesse owners I met were just as shitty as the ones of big businesses, they just weren't as smart as them.
And yes I’m a strong proponent of worker’s rights, it just sucks that being a small employer is a kafkaesque nightmare. I know one who was recently fined for paying his employees too much because they happened to be migrant workers.
But I don't think that undermines the core motivation behind "buy local": all else being equal, buying local is still a way to improve the resilience and diversity of your local economy. We shouldn't let the fact that managment/ownership appears to be generally morally corrosive taunt us away from doing something that's otherwise just.
* made a big rant on his company Facebook page about Starbucks and law enforcement, advocating for a boycott
* made another big rant about the local pride parade
* made a rant that was half "woe is me" and half "everyone is a sensitive snowflake" after people started boycotting his business for his remarks
Unfortunate political views aside, I was tickled by the prompt response from the public and his visible confusion of "Wait, I can be boycotted??"
It also means people might be more willing to go into those trades if they were ensured of better labor law enforcement, health care, safety net, and so forth.
Second, there is at least a legible path for new entrants with reasonable starting pay.
Third, there actually are a number of decent companies, and nepotism doesn’t necessarily mean getting screwed over, just a need to advance elsewhere.
Fourth, there is a viable freelance path in many trades, or at least the ability to make oneself a biddable item (play residental vs. commercial, alternate between multiple trades, hourly vs. project-based, etc.)
Fifth, where there is significant activism for the trades there are people and organizations trying hard to improve the experience and results.
This includes myself, by the way. But I do try...
One thing he doesn't quite name here, though, is trauma and recovery. Decades of cushy software jobs has given me opportunities to heal. I have my shit much more together now, and wouldn't have happened without that healing. Sanity is a luxury good.
So it's this part that troubles me:
> on average low-skill workers are worse in a lot of ways than high-skilled people
I think this is partly correct, but it treats worse-ness as an intrinsic of the person, not a consequence of the circumstances. It's a good example of the fundamental attribution error. [1] It's also a good example of why playing around with E-Prime [2] can be such a useful cognitive tool; avoiding intrinsics can clarify thinking.
As he noted, shitty jobs caused physical illness. But they also break and stunt people in non-physical ways. Treating people like an underclass is a good way to create an underclass. Not just in the workers themselves, but in the children of the workers. The various ACE studies make clear the ongoing cost of childhood trauma, some of which is caused and all of which is worsened by poverty and economic instability.
And from the story in the footnote, that's quite clearly what some people want. That manager didn't regret fucking all those people over. She gloried in it. Managerialism [3] is the modern, socially acceptable form of feudalism. There are plenty of people who only feel good if they have it better than somebody else. We let that continue at our peril.
[1] https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
[3] https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/confronting-managerialism-9781...
The first half of my career was in a <$20k, paycheck-to-paychek job. Now I make > 8 times the median US salary, and still feel underpaid.
What I try to convey to people is that I can be grateful and privileged, and feel fairly unpaid at the same time.
For the one side, you need to recognize your privilege. People who say they can't live on incomes >200k should know life could be so much worse.
For the other side, one can still feel underpaid and unfairly treated. If colleagues similar to me jumped companies doubling their income, that's a signal I'm probably underpaid. And the one benefiting from that disparity is not me, but the company taking advantage of it.
Bottom line great read for all of those tech worker making 6 figures and complaining about how crappy their life is.
Complaining is free for everyone - it’s when you shut up and take action that you can change
When there was no work I'd take an hourly wage job. If the job was doing custom car or body work, because I was young I was told I had to prove I could do the work, and promised that if I did prove that I'd get a raise, but the raises never came, I got excuses instead.
In all of those cases the person I was working for made a lot of money off of my work, but just couldn't bring themselves to keep their promise of paying me what I was worth after I'd proved I could do the work.
Everyone of those cheapskates despised me for demanding they keep their word and pay me a journeyman's wage, and despised me for quitting.
I got real good at quitting. I'd wait until they bid a job to do custom metal work and took a down payment and then I'd demand they keep their word. But their greed was far more powerful than their sense of their situation. In two of those cases I later found out they were spending the money I was making them on cocaine. Looking back, I think there were probably others that did the same. I called those "the blizzard years" In most of them they went out of business because they took on a job they didn't have the skills to complete and/or snorted all the money.
https://dw.com/en/india-manual-scavengers-continue-to-remove...
https://thewire.in/labour/manual-scavenging-sanitation-worke...
I grew up in a well off household, but my Dad did one thing that in my opinion, made me very different from my brother. My Dad made me work, while my little brother always got to stay home and play video games as long as his grades were good.
My Dad was strict about money and demanded I needed to get a job if I wanted to buy things as a teenager.
My uncle was high up on a golf course and got me a job essentially working under the table for less than minimum wage. He was a nice man, but his kids who helped run the place must not have liked me very much. I got put in janitorial duty cleaning all manner of filth at the pro shop. All the jobs no one else would bother doing, I did it, cause I wasn’t going to make my parents who helped me get the job look bad. Cleaning the toilets was the worst, people do unspeakable things in public restrooms.
When I saw opportunities to get into software development as work instead, I took it. I was working a software job by the time I was 17 and still in high school. I didn’t want to clean up shit anymore.
I say this as context of me doing this low pay job as compared to my brother, who stayed home and was showered with gifts.
At the end of the day, I’m married with my own home, I make good money and provide for my family.
My brother has never worked more than a summer position his entire life, is highly educated, but completely unemployable. He constantly thinks the world is too hard and difficult and that working would be “too much” for his sensibilities.
He’s married to a woman now who does one of the author’s described high turn over jobs that are incredibly stressful/undesirable while he stays at home and lets her care for them both. They have no kids so my brother stays home and plays more and more video games.
People who live the “good life” are completely unaware of the reality many folks live to make ends meet and the troubles they go through for it. In my mind, I got a taste of what life can be like if you’re “nearer” the bottom. The dichotomy between my brother and I is very shocking to me.
My first job was making $7 an hour at Best Buy, then Staples, then a local company for a few years. Now in the mid 6-figures in tech. The thing about all my former co-workers was the vast majority of them were normal and intelligent people. In fact they were a lot less 'oddball' types than half the people I've worked with who want to tell me about a Soylent diet or how they were enlightened by taking recreational drugs in Peru for the 15th time.
The reason people are high earners a combination of Luck + Supply and Demand + Right place at the right time. Grit plays a part too, but not in the sense of pulling all-nighters or working yourself to death. Grit means being in more "right places" at more "right times", working hard on skills that have ROI, and increasing the chances you get lucky.
- I had less time to do things I actually wanted to do, like studying.
- Didn't make me better at coding, how could it?
- It didn't teach me anything about finance, how could it?
- Didn't make me better at "time management" and other pseudoskills. Yes they are pseudoskills, people throw them in the conversation to pretend you are getting something.
You know what makes people good at their job? Doing their job. This is why you run into the people he mentions, they are ok at some other thing but they are spending their time doing a shitty job instead. They are running to stand still, and then running some more to leap off the treadmill. This is also why plenty of not-particularly-bright kids grow up to grab the prestigious jobs. They didn't have to do shitty work for no pay, they used their comfy middle class upbringing to connect with the right entry-level roles, and took it from there.
So then you get people who somehow manage to do it. They work at McDonald's flipping burgers during the day, and then they somehow learn how to reverse a linked list at night, and lo and behold it pays off and they get a job at Google. Everyone points at them as says "look, it can be done".
Don't be fooled. If you do two jobs (flipping burgers and learning to code) you are putting everything on the line in for a better future. If you get run over by a car, you will be lying on your deathbed thinking "why didn't I go out with my friends instead of memorizing quicksort". If you make it, think of all the disillusioned people who gave up whatever little free time they had for a dream that almost never comes true.
This is of course if you think of jobs as a pure money thing. If you like doing algo stuff (I like it a lot somehow), maybe you don't see it as a second job and you actually get some kind of satisfaction from it, which is what I'd hope for most people.
But for shitty jobs, most people simply do not think they are satisfying. They are exactly what we should work on automating out of existence.
- Does someone come in to do it, or does your job involve you taking your turn to clean the toilet and bathroom?
- Are you required to wear a name tag? Does this affect the perceived power dynamic in your day to day interactions? To wear a work uniform? To take home and clean your own work uniforms?
- Are you likely to get physically injured at work? Would you lose the ability to work or get pushed out of the schedule if this happened?
- Do you definitely or essentially need a vehicle to do your job — your own vehicle — operated and maintained at your expense, without which your job would be in jeopardy?
- Are there elements of your job that are undeniably hazardous to your health, but which you must not complain about to keep your job?
I showed a lot of promise in a field I was interested in early in life, but there was nowhere to go to level up in it without going back to college (which I couldn't afford either the time or the money for). Now I'm staring down a dead end at middle age with no idea what's next, other than that both my pay and my workload will be miserable compared with what I should be capable of.
One apprenticeship at the right place & time would have dramatically changed my life, and I'd be contributing to the economy on a whole different level.
When all the entry level jobs are dead ends, everybody loses.
As companies get larger this gets more difficult and retaliation becomes more common and you get layers of middle managers between owners and workers. That's why there's this big push to unionize at Amazon, it's the only way they can get pay comparable to that of auto workers before neoliberal globalization and moving the factories from the Rust Belt to Mexico. (In today's economy, that would be $30 / hr entry or so).
I do say my brother was much better prepared to gather software requirements when we both entered our careers.
At these kind of wages you get quite a bit of government assistance: medicaid, social housing, food stamps, all sorts of tax credits, etc.
The US does have a social welfare state. Whether it's "good enough" is something I'll leave up to the reader, and it certainly does seem a confusing hodgepodge of different federal and state programs, but it does exist.
It's the same in much of Europe really; if you earn minimum wage you simply cannot survive without the social welfare programs.
It’s better to get paid $0 being in the right field for a bit than actually being paid in the wrong path. It’s negative money unless you are using it to pivot into the right path via education.
Which brings me to an aside, College for many people is a good example of a dead-end job. Not only did you not get paid, but someone also took your money wasting your time down a trail that many people pivot out of (your Classics majors that switch to Dev, congrats on paying to be led astray for 4 years).
But software can also be a dead end job if you chased the money and went off the trail of the path you should have kept investing in.
All this shit takes vision honestly.
I am going to make the guess that you either have a lot of money right now or have an amazing support system to help you because such options aren't available to everyone who is making sure their food budget is correct down to the penny.
Inference.
So ? If it’s aplicable to you take it if not seek better advice
I love the universal advice police - everything has to be available to everyone or else it’s useless
Go. To. Medical. School.
Stop thinking a Bachelors in STEM is enough. It’s a not a bet. The literally moronic other majors half of you pick is a bet. I’ve seen all of your resumes and there is literally totally dumbfounded major choices.
In fact, I’ll go as far as to say web development will create less of a life for you long term than most other STEMs. People in serious STEM majors just don’t want to put the work into post-bachelors education and cop out. We all know this.
In Canada, if you're poor like this, you might take home just 40 cents home on every extra dollar earned. This is due to paying extra taxes, while losing tax benefits at the same time.
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/low-income-families-...
This is why we should maybe rethink the way we do a lot of this social security; right now it's a lot of complex pushing around of money to compensate for the fact that people just don't earn enough money to actually make ends meet, which developed over the decades as a solution for this problem and then that problem and such, and we've ended up with a rather crazy system where private companies are effectively subsidized by the state so they can keep their wages low. I don't have any solutions as it's all pretty complex and far outside of my expertise, but it's pretty bonkers.
I'd also fix other things. Instead of having "non-refundable tax credits" that operate at the lowest bracket, people should just be able to write reasonable expenses right off their income.
People in the trades are doing pretty well, though. Carpentry, plumbing, electrical, general handyman, landscaping, automotive repair, welding, truck driving… these are all highly lucrative fields that don’t require a college degree (though many require some trade schooling and/or apprenticeship). There’s a desperate shortage of people in all of these areas, partly because high schools push kids to go to college rather than trade schools.
Regarding the notion of soul-killing jobs such as the author described, it’s always been this way. Imagine the dreary life of a factory worker around 1900 or so, compelled to labor 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. And if you lose an arm, or fall in a vat of chemicals… tough for you. Or a farm laborer, working in blazing heat many hours a day, or a textile worker, seated at a machine, sewing buttons 60 hours a week.
Life has always been hard. The difference today is that people want and demand a much higher degree of comfort and autonomy in their lives than ever before, and are far more vocal about it.
>someone who isn’t getting remarried a month after their fourth divorce.
At a past job I heard that a recently married coworker had used a drive through chapel for the service. I was pretty surprised and asked him about it. His memorable reply was to shrug and say, "Well when it's your third time you mostly just want to get through it quickly".
As it happens I ran into the couple five or six years later, after having left the company, and they were still together and seemed happy.
Describes self as fragile, can hold on to job until pissing blood.
This forced me to rethink my strategy, and I decided to take a program in CS, which changed everything for me.
I often think about how my life would have been if I had got one of those jobs that I applied for. Most were low level admin work for corporations with terrible reputations. Likely I wouldn’t have been able to go back to school (working in a kitchen from 5pm-1am means you can take classes in the day). I would have made just enough to live, but I couldn’t have advanced past a certain point. My friends who got these jobs either left them to go back to school, or got cost-of-living wage increases and are now “senior <low-level-administrator>“ people.
It’s a trap. One that I was set and willing to fall in, had I been slightly more competent.
Any tips on how to to encourage them to bite the bullet and change industries, ideally into tech? I firmly believe that anyone with an above average IQ can make it as _some_ type of tech worker, even if it's something as simple as spinning up Wordpress sites.
In 2001, I was making $8 per hr in Cali, worked there for 1.5 years, jumped to another sh!tty job that paid $12 per hr in 2003, stayed there for 3.5 years. Then a friend I met online offered a way out: a guarantee job with some training.
Yes, when you work in sh1tty jobs, even $2 per hr more means a lot.
Also is there any nonprofit working in this area to provide this kind of help?
Reading Team Blind or /r/cscareerquestions makes me want to smack some of these entitled little shits for their pathetic whining. No perspective whatsoever.
Enough said.
The salary of experienced assembly line worker in South China has passed that of USA's central states few years ago, just before the CoVID.
For places like Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Pakistan, working in a factory is quite a dream job, and a ticket to the middle class living. People who poo on "sweatshops" in Asia hardly realise that these sweatshops are better than 90% of all jobs there.
I worked for companies who did manufacturing setup for Yadea in Vietnam, FairElectronics, and Walton in Bangladesh. Their HRs have a meter thick pile of resumes they work with every month.
What’s the salary for an experienced assembly line worker in US or China ?