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Comment by 123yawaworht456 | Hacker News Reader

I don't spit at the people who do those jobs, I spit at the people who think those jobs are 'amazing opportunities'.

Caregiving is an amazing opportunity. It is life-changing for the person receiving the care. It is fulfilling and soul-affirming for the person delivering the care.

If people agreed with your view that it's an "amazing opportunity" then nursing homes wouldn't be catastrophically understaffed.

Of course that doesn't take away from anyone's enjoyment of that line of work, it is truly important, but it's not something that the vast majority of people see as an "amazing opportunity".

Nursing homes are understaffed because they're for-profit entities looking for $15/hr labor.

This. Caring for people is great. Being in poverty while doing almost anything sucks.

America is great at underpaying and overworking almost everyone for almost everything. America is really only good if you're a decamillionaire or better. In general, it tends (YMMV) better to be in Europe for poorer/average folks who get much more value and protections while paying more taxes.

Um yes, precisely. They're not good opportunities for people to make a living. Did you reply to the wrong person or just stating the obvious?

The person you replied to said

>> Caregiving is an amazing opportunity. It is life-changing for the person receiving the care. It is fulfilling and soul-affirming for the person delivering the care.

That the market doesn't pay well for the work is immaterial to its value.

If you're agreeing to everything they said, and only disagreeing that it pays well: yes.

You're changing the subject, the point of contention was whether it's "an amazing opportunity", not whether the work is valuable.

You’re defining opportunity in strictly monetary terms?

Yes? That's what makes something a broadly recognized "good opportunity" in our current economic system that you can base public policy around. Everything else is just variable personal preference.

People don't leave their home countries and entire lives behind because they're looking for the "opportunity" of nursing a foreigner for a pittance. They do it because they want to make good money and provide for their families.

Around 20% of US elder care facilities will close around 2027 because of the Medicaid cuts that pay for long term care of many to pay for the tax cuts for the rich. It was cynically set to take effect after the midterm elections so people wouldn't realize what was happening.

For the people in countries that still have a high birth rate, they usually are amazing opportunities. Wealthy countries are a lot richer than poor ones, and people will take jobs we scorn.

Unfortunately, we also scorn the people who would want to do them. We set very low immigration limits, and we pay the people who do those jobs (even native ones) very poorly.

So these jobs are simultaneously "amazing opportunities" and "abusive".

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