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> claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner

I once spent an hour listening to a drunk woman telling me how broke she was. The gist was that she wanted to build a 50 horse stable but could only afford one big enough for a dozen horses. She owned about half of Anaheim. She told this to me as she sat across my desk at her condo, which was my post as a near minimum wage security guard. My money angst was probably less than hers.

Well, presumably you didn't have a debilitating horse addiction.

(It is fascinating to me, though, how these "I'm broke due to [completely bonkers lifestyle expense]" things span almost all income levels. From "decent salary but has four cars for no obviously explicable reason" to crippling horse addictions, for some people there just seems to be no income level at which they will not screw up their finances.)

I read this book about Michael Jackson called "Untouchable" that detailed how he was $500 million in debt at the time of his death in 2009 due to crazy spending habits. He would walk into an antiques warehouse and buy the entire floor, then rent storage space to hold his new purchases because he had no room in his properties. He also had a 130 person personal staff.

His income was $25 million a year but his spending was at $50 million a year.

https://www.reddit.com/r/interesting/comments/1fc6wsc/michae...

“Crippling horse addiction” has so many meanings even in context. From heroin to animal cruelty to gambling to horse dancing. Wonderful phrase, I tip my hat to you.

Horse expenses are bonkers. I wish all my enemies get into horse stuff as a hobby. I used to work for a boss who made $5 million a year and he would get into SCREAMING fights with his wife in the office over the phone about how they couldn't afford to fly the horses to Europe for her to compete in horse dressage competitions. I'd be working away three doors down and in the hallway he'd be hollering from his office, "LINDAAAA!!!!! WE CAN'T AFFORD IT!!!!!"

He was making $5 million a year and he was MISERABLE. Those stupid horse expenses completely drained his life and finances to the detriment of everything else, he was one of the most unhappy people I've ever encountered in life.

> I used to work for a boss who made $5 million a year and he would get into SCREAMING fights with his wife in the office over the phone about how they couldn't afford to fly the horses to Europe for her to compete in horse dressage competitions.

Something I hold as a truth in life is that the neither money nor what it's spent on is the issue when it comes to spouses screaming at each other about what they can afford.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

I think a lot of it is comparison, too. He was jealous of the guy who made $20 million a year and took netjets everywhere. That guy was jealous of the guy who was a billionaire and had his own private jet. They all wanted to be the next rung up the ladder!

Kind of sad, really. They could probably save quite a lot of money in the long run by spending a few quid on a psychologist (assuming the horses could spare it).

> I wish all my enemies get into horse stuff as a hobby

that, or golf

You don't really need to be ferrying quarter million dollar horses to Europe to enjoy having horses. If you're not in an HCOL area, and not doing anything remotely fancy, you should be able to keep a horse for around $1k/month if you have a few grand buffer for vet emergencies, and you're not buying a lot of tack, equipment or supplies. You need to be into horses for their personalities, though, and willing to take on older/rescue cases, and not have fantasies of Olympic competition.

Today's Wired is a shadow of its former self. I don't know what happened. But it's sad.

This article honestly read like some random blog post from the author.

I work in the television industry, so does my spouse. We both have gotten offers by recruiters from services like this. While this author's experience is hard to relate to in many ways, their description of the economic situation is not far off. There is enormous pain right now in the television industry, particularly for the below the line workers. This stems from a myriad of factors in confluence. A very incomplete list: (1) the ongoing mergers of media companies and the downstream effects this has on decision makers on the buyer/network side of things, (2) the destabilization of television economics due to the long term effects of internet video (streamers and independent content creators alike), (3) a cultural mood shift within the consumer consensus of quality and the downstream effects on a consumer's willingness to participate as a consumer at all. Thats a lot of huge pieces on the board moving in ways that were hard to imagine in the not so distant past.

My point in outlining this is to scratch the surface and paint a picture on the systemic damage to this ecosystem and as a result you have people who have been working in a collaborative video workforce who no longer are able to find work. I've seen probably 75% of my colleagues and peers move on to other pastures, parlaying their skills into other careers, often starting in fields where your entry level positions are typically held by people 10, maybe 20 years younger. And of course, some have it easier than others. The AI training gigs come at an extremely opportune time (for them) and typically offer very tantalizing wages (in the form of an AI generated message from a LinkedIn recruiter who only replies with a link to the company's registration page). And if you're months without work and you use some of that unwanted free time to think introspectively about the offer, its easy to walk away with a sense that, eventually, the right talent will meet the right training method and produce the software package that actually kills your employable skillset. Its a horrible feeling. Its a scary feeling. Its a feeling of being on the wrong side of a window that is in the process of closing.

So while you may find it easy to lose sympathy for this particular writer, I would implore you not to lose sympathy for the broader class within and to not lose sight of where this article sits in context to the bigger story. Without a shadow of a doubt, her experience is the norm within the industry right now. I think it is worthy of recognition because what is happening will come for many other fields/areas of expertise in the future. What you describe as one person's bumbling misadventure rhymes quite a bit with other people's struggle to make ends meet in a rapidly evolving/devolving market.

The TV industry has always been a beast to work in. Is it worse now? Or just a different kind of bad?

> $150 house cleaner

To clarify, in the OP that's $150 flat rate per cleaning, not per hour. If you've tried to hire a housecleaner recently, that seems a bit below average (depending on the apartment). It's not an extravagance - you'd have to spend more time doing it yourself, which takes you away from buidling up your paying work and future.

Prices are going up everywhere, and the contemporary business theory is to maximize extraction from the customer, not to compete (on price, for example). Uber-wealthy capitalists do it; I'm happy for the housecleaners doing it. Not only do I not mind them getting the money, but they have to pay all their rising bills just like everyone else.

$150/cleaning is a perfectly reasonable rate for a housekeeper, but the fact remains, broke people can't afford that. Broke people can't afford servants. Broke people either do it themselves or live in a dirty house.

The OP also said they had $14 in their bank account. This whole thing seems like a not uncommon pattern in our society: shaming poor people for not living acetic lives, as if they should suffer to qualify as the 'good' kind of poor.

> shaming poor people for not living acetic lives, as if they should suffer to qualify as the 'good' kind of poor.

You're missing the point that if she wasn't spending $600/month on house cleaning, she wouldn't have only $14 left in her bank account.

Going without a house cleaner is not an ascetic lifestyle. This is getting silly.

> $600/month

The article doesn't say it's weekly. Some people I know with housecleaners are do it monthly.

Look, I've been broke. I've been "figure out how to make a rotisserie chicken feed us for a week" broke. I've been "counting literal pennies to figure out which groceries you can buy" broke. This isn't shaming someone for spending money on candy or soda, or even a cell phone or a flat screen TV.

I even agree that $150 a month is not exactly extravagance, but unless you are disabled, hiring a housekeeper is a major luxury. It's a recurring cost, be it $150/week or $150/month, that can easily be eliminated, and anyone who has been poor would not think twice about eliminating it when things get tight.

And the point isn't that this person is or isn't the "right" kind of poor. It's that they come off as someone cosplaying poverty, and it undermines the premise of the whole article.

> cosplaying poverty

Again, they have $14 in their bank account.

If you are paying a cleaner any amount of money to clean your personal space then you're not strapped for cash.

> It's not an extravagance - you'd have to spend more time doing it yourself, which takes you away from buidling up your paying work and future.

In the context of someone complaining about their $14 bank account balance and their job paying $32 per hour that isn't giving them enough work, spending $600 per month on a housecleaner is an extravagance.

> $600 per month

The article doesn't say it's weekly. Some people I know with housecleaners are do it monthly.

seems you missed/misread this paragraph:

> AI training wasn’t on my radar until a comment in an unofficial Writers Guild of America Facebook group caught my attention. The page was filled with posts from unemployed writers struggling with debt and panicking about their income, begging for tips and ideas and survival strategies: “I am stressed and anxiety-ridden … simply trying to breathe” … “ISO food bank/pantry info” … “Hey, so what kind of part-time jobs are you all getting?” I’ve been working for this AI training company called Mercor, one woman typed in the comments. They’re paying 150 an hour for writers. It’s easy money.

See also a comment below from someone who, unlike you (or I), actually works in the Hollywood industry.

> bounced between claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner

this isn't what the article says at all -- she was not both broke and hiring a house cleaner

if you don't like the article, just say so, but don't skim read and then misrepresent what the author said

> one person’s bumbling misadventure

you missed a lot of what was written

I mean this is the K-shaped economy. A swath of workers + capital owners with infinite leverage, and another swath of workers still simply exchanging 1 hour of labor, for an hour of results with very little rent to be extracted. The lucky ones have union protection (with its own problems), but the rest are just this lady writ large.

Hasn’t it always been this way though? Hollywood has long been the canonical example of how a tiny fraction get rich and famous, and everyone else is waiting tables while they hope for the big break that never comes.

And further, isn’t the evidence that low income workers have seen their real wages rise over the last few years?

Not actors but there was a class of craftspeople that made a good California living doing things from costumes to vfx. Then jobs moved first to Albuquerque then overseas.