firstplacelast

Why is the idea of a meritocracy pushed in the US? For the same reasons.

If you can convince the people who are getting fleeced that their situation is because they haven’t worked hard enough, they won’t struggle when you steal the coat off their back.

How is this different than real life?

If you're that concerned you should vote to increase taxe the wealthy. Hell, vote to tax wealth itself.

Then you won't need to worry about things like this as much.

Rich people are only rich because poor people aren't willing to kill themselves in large numbers.

The best thing any individual can do to reduce inequality is to only contribute to institutions that do not exacerbate inequality.

Is the median wage at your company less than the wage required to buy the cheapest home within a 2 hour commute of your office? You're likely exacerbating inequality every single day.

Are one or more people at the top of your company working on buying their next Ferrari or second/third home? You'renliklwy exacerbating inequality every day.

If poor people were more willing to die than to contribute to the same companies and people that fuck them over and the middle class was more willing to work for themselves instead of contributing to greedy corporations all for a mediocre home, then we would have much more equal power structures in this country.

Every single person in this country is responsible for the way it is. Being at the bottom isn't an excuse to fall in line and do exactly what your masters tell you everyday.

I mean an attending physician is someone with 4+ years of work experience and they get paid bank at that point, but they're salaries tend not to grow a ton after that fact.

Kind of seems about right to me.

Software engineers are shooting themselves in the foot. When you live in a society built around greed, it is imperative that you push to collect as much of the value you create.

Unions can be extremely helpful. SWE would be the perfect people to build new custom solutions for unions to get around many of the negative externalities caused by unions.

However, people don't want to unionize while they still have leverage. When software engineers are finally ready to unionize, they're going to have way less leverage and get much worse deals.

Thanks for this. Every time unions are mentioned people want to turn it into a black/white issue and won't allow for shades of grey.

Unions can be great for workers. They can also fuck up markets and/or workers. What's wrong with taking the good and improving the bad for unions in the 21st century?

That's literally what 99% of the start-ups in Silicon Valley are doing in various verticals.

The black/white thinking when it comes to discussion of unions always feels like people have more of an agenda to push that being interested in any meaningful discussion.