I think this article starts to touch on a topic area I don't hear much about but am extremely frustrated by: how modern work for a lot of jobs has become de facto indentured servitude. In the "When They Know They've Got You" section, they mention the real challenges of not being able to obtain a lawyer if things truly aren't fair. The average worker can't afford anything without taking on debt. Insurance is a scam in a lot of cases but if a worker is sick it will only hurt the worker not the company a lot of the time. To make matters much worse, the corporations lobby the government and fund all candidates and have seemingly captured the government so no changes are being made. Healthcare, extremely high rent, and things like property tax where failure to pay sends you to prison are used as the means of coercion. If the United States continues on the current political course, nothing will ever change.
>how modern work for a lot of jobs has become de facto indentured servitude...The average worker can't afford anything without taking on debt.
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.
Cynically untrue. Amazon is not even close to bottom of the barrel. And it's clear you haven't paid market rent in a major city since you bought that starter home back in the 90s - 42k is a joke when your rent is close to $2500 and you get no benefits.
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.
So rent a room and/or don’t live in the best part of the city. That’s what I did near Boston a few years ago. My rent was well under $1000. Do people think they’re entitled to private apartments in the most expensive cities in the world?
Boston is actually an amazing example of things the US needs to do to enable affordable living.
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.
Boston and eastern MA are far from affordable. Homeownership in a decent area inside 128 is unattainable without a pretty sizable nest eg (equity or gift from parents).
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.
> Do people think they’re entitled to private apartments in the most expensive cities in the world?
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.
Within a specific, ideal job they always wanted and got without having to make hard tradeoffs somewhere, or do a ton of searching?
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.
It's an entirely solvable problem at the data level.
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.
100% agree. Most cities in the US (not just SF, but definitely SF) are locked in this bizarre ‘you can’t make
it better because you’d stub my toe’ mode that enforces stasis. SF in particular is in this bizarre Byzantine political deadlock where it seems the only thing the city is allowing itself to do is stuff that it knows doesn’t work.
Why is that relevant? The cost of maintaining a reasonable standard of living is what matters, not the amount listed on your paycheck (as long as the latter is >= the former).
If you can’t afford to live in the city where you work then it’s pretty much the definition of “not a living wage.”
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's not the wage that needs to change it would be the prices of housing in the city. This can't change because it's not determined by some governing body. It's called gentrification. It's currently happening to me. I could not afford to buy my house now and I just bought it a few years ago. Of course there still needs to be staff in the area working retail etc. but I haven't seen anyone over 25 in a store near me for over a year.
It’s the natural consequences of policies enacted by many governing bodies. Cities with land use restrictions and onerous zoning restrictions where they are allergic to highways and only build bad public transit run by incompetents, built by corrupt contractors and expensive unions? The prices are substantially the fault of the local governance. This is why people move out of San Francisco and New York and Chicago.
The parking requirement is just a symptom. The problem is everyone with some stupid pet interest tries to use the zoning code or other local laws as a backhanded way of legislating a monetary bar to entry. They don't want triple deckers, they want classy luxury apartments. They don't want a distribution center. They want a white collar office park. They don't want industry and jobs, they want high end retail and dining. But you can't go from suburbia to downtown without the middle steps so of course no meaningful development happens.
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.
Even in cities that don’t require that, rents are still expensive (with the exception of Tokyo where you can rent a 2.5 tatami sized apartment, shared toilet, no central heating, for $300/month).
> Even in cities that don’t require that, rents are still expensive
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 wouldn’t mind living in Tokyo, Houston doesn’t tempt me at all. I assume much of its affordability is related to demand, and the fact that given a lack of zoning it can sprawl forever (also reducing its appeal). I met a homeless person in Seattle from Houston, even the homeless don’t find the city desirable (though it might be due to weather?).
“In the city of New York there were laws
passed to push the private sector out of the SRO business [and eliminate SROs] on the theory that SROs were inhumane. Consequently, people sleep on grates outside.” — George McDonald
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.
I think absentee ownership and zoning laws have a fundamental impact on the availability of housing. It seems outside of governmental concern because their impact is already so normal. It’s normal for rich people to own/rent land they don’t occupy or use in perpetuity. It’s normal to see almost everything zoned for car dependent, single-family housing.
Tomato potato. If you make policy that lowers the cost of living then the living wage goes down and vice versa. I don’t think we’re at all in disagreement.
How? If you can travel back and forth and that makes it work, what is the problem? You can hate it, sure, but, at least where I live, people commute 3+ hours/day to make a nice living while living cheap. What is wrong with that?
The increase in the world’s entropy is not priced into the commuting costs, so it is artificially cheap living. Assuming an inhabitable planet with clean air and water is a goal, then commuting 3 hours would not be cheap.
You are right, but you can stimulate wfh and stimulate companies to spread out more. The fact a lot of people are against that (including here on HN) shows that it's all great, but not in my backyard.
If a city has 1 million jobs but only homes for 800k workers, then you will always have 200k workers who are priced out of homes. Or if you do it the communist way and assign homes with arbitrary price ceilings, you still have 200k people without homes although now it is the 200k most recent immigrants and not the 200k poorest, but the problem is still there.
So what do you suggest we do about that except build more homes?
> 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.
>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.
Yeah, that's kind of how this country markets itself. Being able to afford a home and a family on a regular worker's pay is literally part of "The American Dream."
I've thought a lot about this, esp as someone who was born here and whose parents immigrated here for the American Dream.
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.
Care to expound some more on the differences between living in rural places vs. the Californian life? I've spent most of my time in the suburbs of coastal cities.
The American Dream is not about getting more for less, as in "most luxury for the least amount of effort." It's about having a shot at owning a business without the financial backing of a rich family [0], which is more like "most luxury for an insane amount of effort."
[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.
@Aerosmile I dont know that you need to look at Austria. You can just look at America over time. Mobility is getting harder and there's no real need to pretend it isn't
The US is not a capitalist paradise. We moved a software company from the UK to a US Delaware Corp 2 years ago and it was a major headache involving substantial legal fees, accounting, employee benefits, and taxes. Texas interestingly has been the hardest to deal with--probably our biggest single accounting expense due to what seems to be antiquated tax management on their end.
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.
You're confusing accounting expenses and the cost of running a business. Even personal taxes are a pain the US.
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).
Completely anecdotal, but my maternal grandfather was a first-generation immigrant at the turn of the 20th century, speaking no English, no family, no job - the whole cliché. He did various jobs - fireman, train conductor, court stenographer - none of which would be particularly high-income or high-prestige today. But by the 1960s he had managed to raise 12 children with my grandmother, a stay-at-home mother, and to pay off both a 10-room home in the suburbs of NYC and an 80-acre vacation place in the Catskills.
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.
That's a very different version of the American Dream than what I've always considered it to be. Even as portrayed in movies through rose tinted glasses it's always seemed to be the conjecture that even if you start with nothing, through a lot of hard work, thrift, frugality and determination you can work your way up through the ranks and eventually achieve a good living. They generally make a big deal out of the protagonist living a hard scrabble life while they're working towards their big break.
Seeing it as being guaranteed a home and family on an average workers pay is completely detached from that narrative.
Uh no. The American Dream has been about the ability to work hard to better oneself, and work UP TO that after education or doing something unique (like making their own business work and be profitable). Not that anyone could move here and just get it everything by doing the minimum.
Here's what FDR said about the minimum wage law that was passed in 1933:
> 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.
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.
What is the 'minimum' when every single corporation is working to de-skill jobs so that they can cut wages, limit onboarding etc.
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.
It's literally always been that way. Every business tries to cut costs, or they become unprofitable. Every organization tries to mechanize/create repetitive process where they can to minimize the amount of skilled workers they need as part of it. Every organization tries to skrimp where it can.
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.
Yet you don't see that "gopher" / shopping jobs are alive and well in the very service workers you use today (Uber/eats, "items shipped to your door", etc.)
I hear you on 'always' and say - while strenuously protesting that I am not a luddite - that many jobs required apprenticeship. Some in the US still do and in places like Japan its a requirement. In France you can still make a living as a butcher and if the Great Pottery Throwdown is to be believed you can be a successful scrub nurse or elder care manager in the UK and still own a home and have the wherewithal to be a fantastic potter, in a home pottery studio. (that last bit is tongue in cheek).
Capitalists gonna capitalist.
But they are limited to differing degrees due to policy. Our current state isn't inevitable.
Statutorily for sure. Most don’t require apprenticeships as a part of the job/role fundamentally though. Electricians (classic apprenticeship setup there) for instance could be made through formal trade school + probationary period, and it would likely be even better than it is now. If it works, it works though.
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.
A home, yeah, not a home in downtown metros. My uncle is a teacher and owns two houses in rural Ohio with his wife, kid, and two dogs. Living the American dream.
Pretty much. Not realistic to assume someone comes to the US with nothing and then buy a home in say San Francisco.
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.
A high percentage of homes in San Francisco are literally owned by first-generation immigrants. You can obviously see this just walking around and talking to people.
I don't know when that idea got started, but it seems like my grandparents' generation (The Greatest Generation) enjoyed the greatest benefits of it, then my parents' generation benefited but also inherited their parents' wealth. As a GenX person, I watched my cohort struggle well more than their boomer parents' cohort.
The American dream was effectively denied to my generation and it's only gotten worse for subsequent generations.
I don't know anything about Boston, but where I live in Europe that's not so easy; a lot of properties within commuting distance aren't cheap, either. Sometimes they're even more expensive actually. And living two hours from your workplace isn't cheap either: you pay either public transport costs or fuel for your car, never mind the enormous amount of time you'll spend commuting.
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.
They aren't neccesarily designed that way, it is the reality of democratic local governance that real property owners in a community are naturally going to vote for measures that maximize the value of their property so that they can sell it once the land has a more profitable use than their own. When everyone votes for their own economic interest it tends to make real property more expensive over time.
You're just nitpicking vocabulary. This is exactly what I meant, and I would consider the laws and regulations that result from this process the "design" of a city.
I mostly agree, although are Amazon warehouses in the most expensive cities? My understanding was that they were big and therefore located in spread-out suburban food-deserts poorly served by public transit, where land is cheap and available, and the zoning is lax if you're building an Amazon warehouse and "bringing jobs" but strangely prohibitive if you're thinking of building apartments.
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.
Healthy food like frozen chicken, canned vegetables, potatoes, apples, and eggs are widely available and cheap unless you're in a complete food desert.
It’s been a while for me but i always remember single person apartments (even studios) being relatively more expensive than multi bedroom with roommates. Anytime I wanted to save money that was always the first place i started. In that sense i personally would consider an apartment all to yourself a relative luxury.
If it has been a while for you, then perhaps you were much younger and comfortable sharing a living space with relative strangers. Many people working these crappy jobs are not kids in their teens and twenties. They are middle-aged and these are their careers. Also, the workers we are talking about don't "want to save money", they are perpetually spending every cent they earn to cover costs and debt. It isn't some pit stop on the way to the upper-middle class (though upper-middle class people seem to like to pretend it is).
Sorry, I’m biased because I’ve literally never lived alone. Didn’t even cross my mind that one person’s salary can afford an apartment. When I say an entire studio apartment to yourself an entire studio apartment for you and your roommate or partner.
Renting a room comes with its own logistical nightmares, fwiw. Navigating the entire roomate interview process sucks. More than once I've had friends who deal with roomates have months at a time too stressed to advance their other career goals because roomates stealing their shit, playing loud music, refusing to leave, not paying on time, etc etc. When you don't have "fuck you" money, there is surprisingly little necessary to royally fuck up your plans to get out of the bad situation you're in.
Not that I disagree with you, but when these discussions come up I always see "major city" as the baseline, as if they're the only places in the world that are worth living in.
Likewise, they always take effectively the 0th percentile wages among workers (minimum wage earners), and compare that to the 50th percentile housing units. If 0th percentile earners are expected to be renting the 50th percentile units, who exactly is going to be living in the 40th percentile and below units?
Major cities are where the problem is most obvious. The cities need low skill workers to keep running, and those workers can't afford to live anywhere near those jobs.
What percentage of the world (or even western society) do people immediately move out of their parents homes into their own individual apartments that are nice and close to work?
What percentage work into it?
What percentage is it laughably out of touch for anyone and everyone who isn't top 1% of anything?
That is what folks mean with the unrealistic luxury part.
Typically, folks move in with room mates. Or into communal living (like a dorm). Or in with a girl/boy friend. Or find a job near where they live (not try to live right next to a job). Or any one of many other situations which the poster seems to think are unacceptable, yet very common - and probably the best setup anyway, since it's not like they have any experience living on their own most of the time.
I personally moved out (and in with room mates) when I turned 18, and was working full time before then. This was in a low cost of living, mostly rural area.
The number of folks who can move out of their parents place and have their own individual apartment RIGHT AWAY?
Laughably small, and generally if so it's funded by their parents. It's always been that way.
My first comment was about the high cost of housing causing people with high paying jobs to take on roommates. Policy is a substantial factor in that outcome.
I took your comment as a reply to that topic, I guess I still don't understand what your point was in relation to that.
I also think we can take a look at what drives costs for less expensive housing. My small town is basically allergic to larger apartment buildings, I think probably because the people with control don't want them (vs any good reason). One project got cancelled with people talking, with straight faces, about the historic nature of a post war car dealership building. Another got refused because people were afraid of having low cost housing adjacent to a hypothetical business hotel (a business hotel proposed to be in the middle of a bunch of parking lots, it was ridiculous).
The second one there would have been conveniently located for people filling the low income jobs we are talking about!
My comment is pointing out that people often have room mates, and always have often had room mates. Especially in high cost of living areas. Especially if they are young. Even if they have high paying jobs. A friend of mine is a quite experienced physician, and I've known her for a couple decades. She had room mates as an internist, and for awhile afterwards. It made financial sense.
If your argument is that a meaningful number of people who historically would not have had room mates, now do, not because of a different set of choices they are choosing to make, but rather due to economic situations requiring radically different choices then maybe some data would be useful?
I know a lot of people who are clearly choosing to live in a city who probably don't need to. I know of many people choosing to have room mates because of economics, but would historically likely have made other choices (cohabitating with a boyfriend/girlfriend, moving to a different location, getting a different job, etc.).
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.
Who is paying $2500 a month for rent on minimum wage?
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.
I am anchored at $2500 because I currently pay $1775 / month (just bumped to $1875) for accommodations I moved in to late 2019. To find a similar situation on the open market I would have to pay $2500.
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.
> Amazon is not even close to bottom of the barrel.
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.
> The national median rent was $1,792 last month, up 17% from a year ago, according to a report from Realtor.com. Rent for studio apartments, one bedrooms and two bedrooms all saw double-digit increases over the past year[0].
Very true, but individual income in the US is being discussed.
$15 an hour translates to ~31,200 a year. A household consisting of a married couple or just 2 people living together both earning $15 an hour is $62,400. Pretty close to the median.
Yes, but households by definition don't need to pay two rents, which means if you can afford average rent on $67k, the median household can in fact afford the median rent.
I think you are probably right, median household income likely can afford the median rent. Median rent is ~$1100. After taxes 2 people making $15 an hour are going to bring home $3,900 a month, so after rent that leaves $2,800. Probably a livable amount. To be honest I am not really sure where we were going with this conversation but I agree with all your points :)
> You are approaching this subject as if living in an area where rents are $2500 is a right and not a privilege
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?
Let's assume for the sake of argument that you're right an Amazon warehouses are nearly all located in areas where rents exceed the median by a meaningful amount. So what? Living right next to your employer is as much as right as anything discussed here. Ignore Amazon for a second. There are gas stations in areas like Malibu that have bad traffic and extremely expensive real estate. The people working there are obviously not living anywhere close, and I'm thinking they probably get paid less than Amazon warehouse workers in the same state (and have much worse, if any, benefits).
edit: I just thought it might be fun to calculate and shared my calculation. Sorry it wasn't welcome but I'm outside of the delete window so I'll just remove the numbers and leave this apology.
I work at a FANG, total comp in 300k-400k range, and my rent is less than $2500. Can you tell me why someone making $15/hr needs to rent a place that costs $2500/mo?
This is a good point. My mortgage and escrow on a decent house in a nice suburb and good school zone on the outskirts of a large city is $2300. Spending $2,500 on rent is insane.
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.
I would posit that those people spending $3-$4k a month are making a great deal more than the $15 an hour that this thread is talking about. Living in NYC, London etc is for people that make a vastly above average salary. Anyone choosing to live there on ~35k a year or under is asking for financial distress. Granted it is very hard to move to another city when you are making a low wage as moving is expensive but if you have a job making $15 at McDonalds in NYC, you can get a job at McDonalds making $15 an hour in Alabama or Ohio and enjoy a better cost of living. You wont have all the perks and nice to haves of NYC but a financially sensible person would not be enjoying them on that wage anyway.
No, that's what it costs to live alone, in the middle of a highly desirable city that restricts housing supply via NIMBY zoning. None of these things are things you need to live life. You don't need to live alone, you don't need to live in NYC, and you definitely shouldn't feel obligated to live in a place that refuses to build adequate housing.
Yes, and I would bet that those people you know paying $2500/mo are not earning $15/hr.
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.
Its a bit old now but this article really stuck with me back in the day, it was my primary motivation for escaping the warehouse/agency environment and getting in to tech.
I lost my hobby but that's a small price to pay long term i think.
Amazon is good job though. A shitty job would pay $10 an hour, lack the benefits, and still just get rid of you on a whim. Also, multiply by .8 to get the takehome pay - $15/hr isn't netting 40k without overtime.
> Amazon is a desirable and good job in the low-skill, low-wage world. The only people who think otherwise are rich 6-figure making degree holders.
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.
you're using relative terms to justify an absolute judgement. those jobs can be literally better than 100% of all other jobs available in a particular market segment and it STILL doesn't qualify them as "good" jobs because "good" is a moral qualifier. should people be forced to work jobs as shitty and destructive as Amazon's because the alternatives are either worse jobs or starving on the streets? you're answering that question with yes and using rhetorical sleight of hand to hide the fact.
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"?
Standard of living, living wages, and employee satisfaction are among the most frequently measured and calculated statistics of our time. I’m not your research assistant.
I think Amazon warehouse is a good job for some, and others with no choice. Personally all other things being equal(which they prob aren't but depending on age and situation the other benefits may not matter much) I'd rather work fast food than run around that warehouse like a mad man all day. Lot a fast-food and other places offering 15/hr around me and I live in a relatively low COL city..
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 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.
>For people from other countries wondering about the veracity of these claims
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.
Whoever complains about slavery in the US should look up the 996 working hour system in China (spoiler: 72 hours per week).
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.
You can absolutely try and make things better, but most people have very little perspective. Countless times I’ve seen people say things about how they’d never bring a child into the world because of how bad things are now. They mean global warming, Donald Trump, or whatever happens to be in the current news cycle.
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.
My favorite part about people who use that as justification for not having kids is that they will not have kids. Let them exit the gene pool and the rational people can continue to have children.
You got that backwards. Not having kids requires a lot of rational thinking.
Having kids merely requires drunk sex without anyone being aware of the consequences.
It's entirely rational to think twice about the circumstances before having kids, or more kids.
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.
It means “I would prefer the human race dies off rather than reproduce”. Sure, you can make decisions for your own health and personal reasons. But if you truly decide not to have children because of “global warming” as if the planet gives a fuck (it’s only an issue for humans - the planet will live on for billions of years) then you are saying humans as a species are a cancer that must die off. And I find that totally absurd and illogical.
> It means “I would prefer the human race dies off rather than reproduce”.
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.
That is the whole point of this thread - people who choose not to reproduce because of global warming, Trump, or [insert some society problem] is saying “I’d rather humanity die off than try and let future generations solve the problems I see”. It’s ludicrous.
The part that gets me is the 'modern'. There have been periods where things were somewhat easier in certain regards, but those aren't the norm and were for unsustainable reasons. The US had a nice honeymoon period after WW2 where our position as the world's factory and plentiful natural resources afforded food and housing to be cheap.
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.
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" (rather, them having it worse than those before them). 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!" Let's not forget "young people" still have to live to see their retirement years. 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).
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.
I'm actually not super clear on wat you are saying, but I'll try to respond.
> 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.
It's partly that we (the West, not just Americans) are so rich that we're out of touch with reality. Another way of looking at it is that hardship, which has not only been a part of life since the beginning of humanity but has arguably defined it, has been notably missing recently. So now we have young people complaining about things that would have very recently been appreciated and welcomed. At the same time they're bashing cultural values / norms that are in part responsible for this elimination of hardship.
Euro wages are typically after tax, but you are citing a before tax figure. In California for example where a 15$ wage is reasonable for a "shitty job", that's around 34,000$ take home. You can expect to pay 15,000$ in yearly rent, which leaves you with 19,000$. To get to the Amazon warehouse you work at, you'll have to pay around 5000$ a year on a car, because public transport won't get you there, leaving you with 14,000$. Then you have utilities, food costs, healthcare costs, etc..., and you'll be lucky if you manage to spare 2000-3000$ a year of disposable income.
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.
Although I don't agree completely with OP's point it is true to an extent. I'm in the UK. My US colleagues earn significantly more (for the exact same job), they pay less for accommodation and get much larger accommodations (even living in comparatively large cities), and general cost of living (food, gas, clothes etc.) is less. I'm talking tech here (so not comparing low-skill/earning jobs) but at least in this industry Americans have it pretty good.
Note also that $30k USD (not “42k AUD”) is pre-tax, and take home is more like $25k somewhere like Ohio. And that Amazon warehouse is going to exist near a population center, where CoL is a bit higher, like rent.
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.
US and more socialist EU countries may have similar CPIs, but when we get to talking about education, rent, healthcare, transportation, etc the differences can be stark.
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.
Not to mention people in the US often are just more likely to straight up die from things that should be totally preventable in such a wealthy country, the abnormally high infant and maternal mortality rate in the US being just one example.
This is often measured by researchers. It is called a "cost of living" calculation, and every one of these that I have seen indicates that this isn't the case.
For anyone who has lived in several countries, it should be obvious that direct cost-of-living comparisons rarely make sense. The actual costs depend so much on your income level and life situation that no single number can accurately reflect them.
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.
I dont think this comparison is as relevant as youre presenting it to be - why concern ourselves with the rest of the world when the GP and the linked article are US centric? Furthermore - why would someone struggling and feeling enslaved care one bit about how much harder anyone has it?
The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass had this to say on the subject of wage labor[1]:
> [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"
So what, even if Amazon pays slightly above a minimum living wage, the working conditions are extremely bad (e.g. no adequate toilets, extremely long walking times towards the break room, drivers being forced to piss in bottles, employees being pitted against each other by a relentless algorithm without respect for differences in age, body strength or whatever).
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".
> Americans are just so rich they are out of touch with reality.
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 irony here is that so many Americans will say "I'll move to Canada if things don't get better here." None of them have ever lived in Canada (or any other country), and just assume that things must be better elsewhere.
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).
Yes. Jeff Bezos is an unsung hero and has done more to help the poor than anyone. Without him, there would be massive unemployment and an underclass riddled with social problems like opiate addiction and spousal abuse.
This is the best post in this thread. This is all very much true. One more thing that most Americans don't admit is that people mostly work jobs they have started out in. When I was in shitty jobs, people started out and stayed there. As I move up, I notice that people also started out and stayed there. Anecdotally, the US has much less mobility than what is commonly believed.
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.
What irks me in a position is when I find out the people in higher paying, supposedly more demanding positions are doing less work with less effort/demand. Think like the one hourly with many salary supervisors or similar.
The solution here is to open up the free markets again. This means:
-Right to repair
-Abolish the patent system and non competes
-Drop the IRS and let the government simply print money it needs... This eliminates all tax loopholes and special treatment. Perfectly fair wealth tax.
> Drop the IRS and let the government simply print money it needs
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.
You missing your own point here. The 'needs' of the government aren't determined by the rich but rather the imbeciles elected by the masses. If you want change the people have to demand it but instead they simply advocate for more of the status quo.
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.
> The 'needs' of the government aren't determined by the rich but rather the imbeciles elected by the masses
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.
No matter what system we propose it can’t handle human greed and abuses of power. Bad actors ruin everything.
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.
I would prefer to think he's suggesting that diversity is a representation of cultural background, rather than suggesting that between racially different individuals that have had similar life experiences (upbringing, education etc.) there should be segregation. Agree that the cynical view of the role of measures ensuring diversity in the workplace needs expanding upon though. Perhaps he means that nowadays diversity isn't ensuring equality but rather the quotas can be met in a workplace where the minorities are still discriminated against e.g. in any team there are members who do more work than get credit for and vice versa - perhaps he means there's currently a racial bias at play behind this? I don't know, maybe I'm giving too much benefit of the doubt... or too little.
They will find a way around those laws. I think the end state of the US was described perfectly in Ray Dalio's "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio" video: Namely, the elite will grab as much capital as they can and when the people finally wrestle back control, all that wealth will fly out of the country as it is collapsing. This is probably how they are operating.
I think the patent system could use MAJOR reform, but to abolish it completely would simply allow a larger corporation to bring any novel idea to market cheaper and more widely, crushing any smaller original idea creator in the process.
Patent trolls, on the other hand, who simply patent ideas with no viable or initial product, or even schematic are another thing.
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.
the only thing youbgot right in that comment ia the right to repair.
reform the patent system, revamp the irs but letting the givernment print the moneybit wants to spemd is the era we live in now. when that increase in the money supply grows faster than the economy its called inflation...
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.
Let me give you a concrete non-US, Eastern European (Bulgarian) perspective on the scale of financial and career “shitness” that the majority of individuals, and even a sizable portion of the well-educated go through.
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.
>If the United States continues on the current political course, nothing will ever change.
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.
alexfromapex says >"...Healthcare, extremely high rent, and things like property tax where failure to pay sends you to prison are used as the means of coercion. If the United States continues on the current political course..."<
AFAIK you cannot be sent to prison for not paying property taxes in the USA.
> AFAIK you cannot be sent to prison for not paying property taxes in the USA.
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.
As someone from a very large, impoverished family, this is an easily falsifiable statement...
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.
You usually just get a lein on your property and a sherrif's sale once it builds up such that much. Foreclosure to sale is a lengthy process and at least some states maintain "right of redemption" which allow even a post auction foreclosure to be reversed within nine months.
Tax evasion is a crime and imprisonment is a punishment reserved for criminal activity. Failing to pay property tax is not a crime in itself.
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.
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.
> If the United States continues on the current political course, nothing will ever change.
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.
To call out the woefully common hyperbolic rhetoric of calling having to compare the default natural state of being, having to work to survive as slavery. Take any given natural environment no matter how idylic and stick bands of naked humans in it.
Plus the whole "demand something with zero regard as to the hows of the process and what it would take to maintain it".
> natural state of being, having to work to survive
yes, the natural state of all human beings is to derive value for shareholders. the profit of our masters before all. it's just in our DNA.
to live requires maintenance and upkeep and work. to live together in a society means doing things for one another. but where in that do you derive a natural state in which people produce things so someone else may profit on their work, and keep the greater part of the fruit? people aren't objecting to the notion of necessary labor. they're objecting to being forced - literally, by threat of starving on the streets - by the organization of the society to labor on behalf of others for produce they will never enjoy.
It's a drive by shit-post is why. Nothing to be learned, just some words, poorly thought out. Nothing to respond to, no intellectual engagement possible.
Would have been better if it was never posted in the first place.
>> A meatgrinder job is a job that pays more not because there are fewer people who can do it, but because there are fewer people that will. They have insanely high turnover, because some aspect of the job is so bad that the vast majority of people who try it don’t stay. Maybe it’s long hours that never stop or maybe it’s constant on-call work. Maybe it’s an insane, stress-intensive workload you can’t begin to keep up with.
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.
In the case of LEOs or prosecutors, I think many give up the search for truth and give in to the us-vs-them mentality. The cognitive dissonance and pressure of group dynamics make it almost a certainty.
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.
Defense & prosecution aren't on a search for truth, they are on a search to make the best possible case for & against you, respectively. That's their role in the system. Law enforcement (officers, investigators) I would hope to be on the search for truth.
Yes, as an adversarial system they are to make the best case. However, it still must be truthful.
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.
Purely theoretically, prosecution should search truth. By law, they should follow exculpatory evidence too, give all evidence to defense and few other rules. Not saying they do, in practice they are rewarded for breaking those rules.
They also aren't allowed to hold known incorrect charges against someone when that incorrect charge carries pretrial restrictions that the correct charge does not. In my experience, you are absolutely right that they do not follow these laws/rules. I highly doubt that they added the trooper's name to their Guiglio list even after I provided evidence that the trooper lied in court related to two separate facts.
> Defense & prosecution aren't on a search for truth, they are on a search to make the best possible case for & against you, respectively.
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.
>> our rights were violated as part of a citation.
>> unless there was substantial monetary damages
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.
"I take it that this was not a criminal prosecution that might result in actual jail time."
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.
I've had first-hand experience with this but in the opposite direction. Had a cop cut me a break on a ticket and charge me with a lesser offense than the one I actually committed. When I went to pay the fine (this was a long time ago, before the internet) I was told the ticket hadn't been filed and so there was no fine to pay.
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.
>> Then the magistrate asks me point-blank if I was guilty. I take the fifth.
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.
I was being a little bit glib there. The judge did not literally ask me if I was guilty and I did not literally take the fifth. What she did was ask whether the thing the cop claimed to have seen, which he could not possibly have seen, nonetheless actually happened, and I said I could not remember because it had happened more than a year 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.
I had proof that the cop could not have seen what he claimed to have seen, and that therefore he must be lying about having seen it. I did not have proof that the thing he claimed to have seen did not actually happen.
Yes...I'm confused about OPs story because, as far as I know, you can't just plead the 5th at various parts of a trial where it is not relevant. The judge would generally not move on until you plead something. Or they would hold you in contempt if you refuse to plead guilty/not guilty/alford/nolo contendere etc
Well, it's a magistrate. They tend to not know/follow the laws/rules in my experience. They aren't even required to have a law degree or even pass the Bar. I think in my state they only require 40 hours of training.
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've had first-hand experience with this but in the opposite direction."
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.
Ah, I missed that they didn't charge you on the more serious infraction.
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.
As far as low-skill, high-pay goes, dockworkers unloading ships is up there with meatgrinder jobs. Your team gets paid for each lb / kg unloaded off the ship, and that sum is divided equally over each team member.
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
"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."
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.
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.
Unloading frozen blocks of fish off factory fishing trawlers.
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.
I think the OP already said: dockworkers unloading ships -- that's the industry.
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).
It is not a workout. It is repetitive work, the same motion literally hundreds and thousands of time. You will be injured far sooner than you will get in better shape.
If you want a job where you can be paid to get in shape, join a military reserve force.
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.
Sat down at a bar once and the woman next to me was a pediatric oncologist, basically just crying into her beer about how she wanted to quit. It wasn't just sad-- it was an incredibly interesting conversation that I still remember about a decade later.
I think it is important to have some empathy for surgeons, despite the commonness of arrogance and the mostly absurdly high compensations they receive. Their work is to intentionally mutilate people and their skill is to make it so that the mutilation will improve health. It is an incredibly dissociating job, taking you out of all standard relationships to the body and other people. It takes years, sometimes decades of training to become skilled enough to lead operations, and even short breaks are known to significantly diminish skill and outcomes for patients. The stress level is unfathomable for lay people, and the distance it creates in them from other people is not a sign that they’re assholes but the remnant of the sacrifices they had to make to fulfill our idea of what they have to be. I know not all surgeons are arrogant in the way you and then I have described, but I always feel sad and caring for those people who are wrecked enough by the process to become so socially inept and disconnected from the people around them.
I agree with this 100%. The more a matter of life and death a particular field of medicine is, the more I understand people who work there to be "cold" and "uncaring". Not because they are assholes, the exact opposite. I think people in these fields have to sacrifice a great deal of their humanity to be able to do their job and save lives.
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.
> Pediatric oncology. ... Or criminal defense attorneys/prosecutors.
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.
Please don't equate healthcare workers with law enforcement. Healthcare workers have an astronomically harder job and actually make society a better place.
How many healthcare workers get literally murdered on the job? Anyone that's had been a cop for more than a couple of years will personally know a colleague that was murdered at work. Not to mention the constant number of victims they will encounter. Outside of certain fields most healthcare workers aren't dealing with dead and dieing patients everyday. For many cops in some cities there are multiple fatality call per shift.
I think in terms of difficulty, law enforcement has much more skin in the game- both jobs have to deal with potential guilt from screwing up but if a surgeon misjudges a situation pretty much the worst outcome is that they get sued and in egregious cases lose their job. Whereas in law enforcement you're more likely to have adversarial interactions with armed people, drunk drivers, etc where your own life is in danger.
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.
Law enforcement in the United States is a fairly safe job. Adversarial interactions with armed people and drunk drivers are sadly part of many more jobs, and generally the most dangerous behaviour a cop will engage in is driving.
I have a friend who used to be a cop in Dallas. He's a dentist now.
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?
Just met one and she was the nicest person, just very careful and reserved, used to the toughest decisions.
On the upside kids get cured more frequently than adults.
> A working day surrounded by kids undergoing painful treatments, particularly when you are the person prescribing those treatments, grinds down one's soul.
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?
didn't downvote, but I wonder if you have a study showing the stats. Before I've heard that psychopaths are over-represented in politics, as CEOs, as lawyers, as law enforcement, and as criminals. Now also, evidently, in pediatric oncology?
Oh okay I see. When I said "such professions" I meant all of the ones the parent had mentioned: medicine, lawyers, law enforcement. And like you said CEOs and politicians can be added to the list. I know I read something about surgeons in particular having an overrepresentation of psychopaths, but I don't have them handy. I'd imagine it could be true for pediatric oncologists as well for the same reasons, but I don't have any studies to back that up.
ok understandable, although I think probably everyone jumped to the same conclusion I did as you quoted from the section most pertinent to pediatric oncologists, and I think that was the profession most central to the parent comment.
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.
Death is a virtually unavoidable part of working in medicine. One of the things I've heard over and over again from physicians is dealing with the first handful of deaths during medical school clinical rotations or internship after graduation. There's the second-guessing: what else could I have done to save the person's life? The healthy response seems to be becoming at peace with the fact medicine can't fix everything, accepting that nothing more could have been done given the current state of the field, and that those patients got the best chance they could have had at more meaningful life.
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.
I know a doctor who works in pediatric oncology. (She is a singer in a metal group, too.) And a nurse from the same pediatric oncology department.
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.
Interestingly, 70% of veterans who experience traumatic combat experiences will not have PTSD. 30% of veterans who experience the most severe traumatic combat experiences will not have PTSD.
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.
I remember reading that PTSD rates are influenced a lot by perceived levels of control over the situation. It is not just how violent it was, but also whether you felt helpless.
"That job must be nightmarish for anyone who isn’t a full-blown sociopath."
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.
Are you saying that watching children die from cancer is fun and easy? To me it sounds like a nightmare. It’s obvious that I think that the persons who take that on are bearing a great burden. I don’t fault those that choose to lay it down. Do you?
I didn’t claim that. I claimed it must be nightmarish, by which I obviously meant extremely emotionally taxing. Are you saying most pediatric oncologists aren’t emotionally taxed? The only ones who aren’t must, by definition, be sociopaths. Please try to not be offended by a tautology.
There was a young woman in my high school and University class, she was a bit strange. Extremely bright beyond her years, sociable, and got along well with both the teachers and most of the students.
There was always something a bit off with her though.
From early high-school, as soon as “career” talk got more serious, she had only one job that she claimed she wanted to do, “Pediactric Oncology”. Some of the teachers were also taken aback by her fervor and intensity, but also her consistency.
Last I checked she’s in Med school somewhere prestigious, I’m sure she’ll be a great doctor, and that a lot of children will get the attention they deserve, but something worries me about the whole situation.
Oh no, was a person "a bit strange"? Were they "a bit off"? Think of the children!!!
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.
well sure, but on the other hand you don't know anything about the person under discussion. They are essentially a small very vague figure from fiction given the level of specificity you have for her. They are not having their reputation besmirched or anything, because nobody knows who they are, and thus probably don't require a rousing defense.
I would like to push against the notion that expressing ableist beliefs, as long as they don't affect the actual person who is a target of the ableism, doesn't deserve calling out. These sorts of expressions of opinions interact broadly with the community as a signal of acceptable and unacceptable ways to view people. Expressing this sort of callous willingness to imply someone one doesn't know all that well is dangerous simply because they have behaved some way differently also has the secondary effect of exampling that members of the community here are willing to describe strangers as dangerous if they don't conform to expected behaviors. This signals to nondangerous, different people that they are in danger of being labeled as dangerous, which is stressful for folks who just want to talk popcorn intellectual subject matters on an orange site.
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.
Nope. I know that I was that person on the other end of hopelessly vague casting of suspicion. And I know that a lot of people nod and get suspicious themselves.
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.
This is an ableist viewpoint. For example, if she had a close childhood friend, cousin, family member, or she herself had experience with cancer, that would both cause trauma-based behaviors (such as being "a bit off") as well as explain her hyperfocus into going into pediatric oncology from a young age.
It sounds like you didn't know her very well and still judge her as dangerous.
Speaking of criminal prosecutors, I'm binging Law and Order (the OG). I completely understand it's a dramatization of real life but I never understood how complex the process is and how much they actually lose. You'd think the State/People have the upper hand at every turn and most of the time they do, but the amount of process, discovery and overcoming the reasonable doubt burden on their (relatively) limited budgets is a marvel. I know he's fake but I have a ton of respect for the Jack McCoys of the world.
Prosecutors do a lot of work, but the idea that they lose a lot is questionable. In the federal system, more than 90% of defendants plead guilty, and only around 1% of defendants take a case to trial and ultimately win. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f...
Yes true, I was more thinking when things went to trial. Pleas make up a large share of outcomes. I was just more surprised at how badly things can go wrong in the process which ends up with a dismissal or acquittal; whether that's police process, evidentiary, testimony, etc.
The troubling part is the prime tactic is to get people to plea. One of the methods employed is to massively overcharge where the defendant is looking at say 20 years if they lose at trial vs 5 years if they plea. Most people plea, even if they are innocent. Many prosecutors overcharge even when they have a weak case. It's not justice, it's the system protecting its existence.
Yes and I believe that is death row inmates who's conviction gets a lot of scrutiny. Imagine how many inmates who plead to get a lighter sentence who were facing 20 years for something they didn't do. As far as the government is concerned, a guilty plea is a win, regardless of actual action. They get to show that they deserve their jobs.
"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.
Most defendant can’t even afford a couple hundreds (thousands?) dollar in term of extra resources (this includes non-monetary aspects like their own time) to defend themselves. So no matter how limited the budget of a department is, the State would still outbudget the defendant by several orders of magnitude, so don’t feel too bad for them.
(I don’t disagree with you, just adding a small point)
If you are $120k a year SE and play your cards right, you can sometimes maneuver into a situation where your coworkers aren’t just competent-on-average but actively bright, sometimes brilliant people. At $35k, usually you are trying to identify the one other person in the office who also got unlucky so you can be friends with someone who isn’t getting remarried a month after their fourth divorce.
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.
There's no contradiction between what he says and what you say.
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.
Agreed. And I've also been a part of such systems where the defection on every person's part created a terrible environment over the very smallest of stakes. Most of my favorite people are those you reference but it doesn't make how bad it can get go away and I read the GP as indicating some rather than all.
I had a "shitty job" as a high schooler. I was a janitor at a public elementary school where I'd have to clean the unspeakable things that kids do in the bathrooms and classrooms.
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.
For sure. There are so many people out there who use that "extra" time to take care of siblings or make extra money for the household budget or just deal with the trauma of their day-to-day living.
this is why i think teen summer jobs squander potential. young adults should be learning skills instead of doing shitty jobs, although someone has to do that work.
I could not possibly disagree harder. I started working in 8th grade and worked through high school and college. As my friends partied in college I remembered those shitty jobs and why I was in college, it was 100% a motivator for me to work very hard.
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.
Summer jobs do teach skills. Customer service, working in a team, working independently... you take those things for granted, but a fourteen year old is not usually born with these things.
Those jobs also aren't effective teachers of skills. Some exceptionally engaged employees will pick them up. Most of the rest will pick up the attitude that it doesn't matter if you get fired from one jobby job because you can get hired to do the same thing across the street and then take your original job back once you're fired from the other place and your current manager has left for better opportunities. A strong concern for long-term professional reputation is for white-collar work and independent tradesmen.
That’s an interesting perspective I hadn’t considered. How would you envision nudging “the rest” to pick up skills over their summer, assuming they weren’t working?
The "assuming they weren't working" adds a major wrinkle because my default suggestion would be to get them into better jobs where professionalism and responsibility actually matter.
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).
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).
This was a great read. I think the true value of money is one of HN's biggest bubbles: the average person on here (but not all of us!) jumped right from their undergraduate career to making a six-figure salary in a city with lavish public amenities (by American standards). It's very easy to forget that the average American salary is less than half of that, and even that hides the number of people living well below the poverty line.
to be fair a 30k job in Warsaw or Prague gets you a living standard you get for 100k in SF so that perception has always been skewed. When I for the first time saw what people in SF and America more broadly pay on rent, education, childcare and transport I had a culture shock
The average rent for one bedroom apartment is 2.5k in SF, even in Berlin you're maybe paying 800 bucks.
No kidding, I see people posting pictures on Reddit of street food they bought in European countries like Europe for 1.50 euros that would easily cost 10 bucks + tips in the US.
It depends quite a bit on location too. High COL cities you may as well halve the effective salary compared to generic Northeastern Suburb, even in a place like Princeton.
I presume you're trolling but I much prefer my life to my higher paid US colleagues lives. I don't work a second more than I'm required. I get more holidays. Better parental leave. Can't be fired at will.
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.
Just stating an observation that way more people come to the USA for work than the other direction. This is simply data.
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.
I had the impression people don’t move from the US to Europe because they speak only English. In Berlin I’ve met many that gave up because of the language barriers.
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.
> 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
Yeah safety nets are weak, screw our fellow man, I mean after all everyone on the entire earth is born genetically and socioeconomically tabula rasa, amirite guys? GATTICA GATTICA GATTICA!
That's unfortunately the reality of America, intelligence plus motivation are greatly rewarded. If you want to do anything more than exist on the standard scale it's considerably harder outside of the US.
You stated it in terms of social privilege ("jumped right from their undergraduate career to making a six-figure salary in a city...") but it's just as well intellectual privilege. I have a blue collar background and high school criminal career that looks like any poor person buying $20 scratchers, but after four years working in software I was a 22 year-old making six figures also. It makes it harder to feel sympathy for those struggling: Indeed, repeatedly making wrong decisions has poor outcomes. At 18 it was pretty obvious that in the most basic sense, code = money.
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 makes it harder to feel sympathy for those struggling: Indeed, repeatedly making wrong decisions has poor outcomes. At 18 it was pretty obvious that in the most basic sense, code = money."
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.
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).
That's why I self-deprecatingly concluded with "(aye, there's the rub)". My thinking is irredeemably worldly if not outright myopic. Then there's the futility of "setting an example" -- when I was young and poor, would I listen to or learn from someone like my older self? Doubtful. The exaggerated bravado of a Jay-Z was more meaningful, that is, fuel for meditations.
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 bad as America treats their poor it's far better than any other country truly contemporary to the US. Which is a high bar at any rate. The European social safety nets exist only due to the massive support given by the US over the last 100 years. Same for SK and Japan.
I have no sympathy for those who decided to spend high school smoking weed and screwing around and for those college students deciding to get a useless degree only to end up at Starbucks as a barista.
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.
I know people who are poor and therefore were too poor to have their learning disabilities addressed early on with unsupportive families inflicting childhood trauma which results in them smoking weed as a teenager because there are no structures to support them towards health, but fuck them right? It’s so easy to judge people making seemingly bad decisions. Teenagers are still children whose behaviors are caused by their environments.
Frankly I believe people always make reasonable decisions once you account for their circumstances(this includes the circumstance of being too mentally ill or poorly socialized to make better decisions). If you want people to make better decisions then you must incentivize appropriately.
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.
Given that we don’t consider minors to be “individuals” for legal purposes until they become adults, waiting until they’re adults to assign responsibility seems like a reasonable first blush for a standard.
(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.)
Worked a wide variety of low-skill, low-pay temp jobs during college. Lots of the people I worked with there were juggling multiple gigs, and were sort of locked into that system of work.
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.
"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?"
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.
You just described my first 5 years out of college until I went back to school. You take that "temporary" job to pay the bills, and then you never get that entry level position to break into your industry after your degree and you're SOL and going back to school in the hopes that a master's degree and project portfolio will help you get an entry level position or internship which will translate into finally being able to afford retirement savings, a house, a younger than I am car, or something. I do feel this situation.
Don't get a degree in the arts then? What other industry needs a master's degree and a project portfolio to become unemployed or making $40k in an expensive city?
In December of 2019 it would be hard for everyone since COVID would ramp up, business shut down, and hiring freezes were in affect. It didn’t matter the degree you had.
Geology isn't really "the tech market". Extraction continued at a record pace but exploration stopped almost completely, which is where the degree-expecting jobs are.
There should be a large number of jobs you could take on with a physics degree (although most are more math than actual physics). Any technical role in tech, actuary in insurance cos, quant trading roles, etc. How did you not find a job in 2 years?
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.
There is also the issue that big companies are usually watched more and have regulatory teams making sure they follow rules. I believe in the UK that small businesses are far worse for minimum wage violations.
Small businesses are far worse at all regulatory compliance, because unlike big businesses they can’t afford a compliance department. I see this as more a problem with excessive regulation than small businesses, but reasonable minds can differ.
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.
Small businesses usually can't afford the army of lawyers and lobbyists necessary to make the regulations that favour their company. Meanwhile their bigger competitors more often do. All in all, more regulation often favour bigger players simply because smaller players aren't able to comply for a variety of reasons, usually due to economics at scale, but also because they simply don't have access to, or can't afford proper legal advice. Being fined out of the blue, and not knowing why, is often a result of this, for example, though you can always argue that not practising due diligence may lead to criminal negligence or other such liabilities. There is a way to fight that, though, and that is with business associations and interest groups.
This is something people don't think about when they claim that the skilled trades should be a viable alternative to college education. Most employment in the trades is with small or family owned businesses, where labor laws are rarely enforced. And with family businesses, your prospects hinge on whether you belong to the family or not.
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.
I haven’t largely seen this to be the case. First, as far as regulation, in the US, most trades still have to contend with code and with the local union. So aside from work in truly dismal municipalities, there is a floor to the quality of the job.
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.
I don't doubt one bit that the average small business owner is roughly as shitty as a manager at a large chain.
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.
That being said, some owners are so reprehensible that buying at a mega corp is the better choice. A local business to me was boycotted out of existence after they had a meltdown on Facebook when they were criticized for their support of the fascists that tried to overturn the election on Jan 6.
That’s a pretty extreme case and an exception to the general principle of preferring to buy local. Some local shops are owned by assholes, it’s true, but usually you can just shop somewhere else locally. Almost all big corporations exploit their workers, the environment, or society to a certain degree. Unfortunately there are some things you cannot avoid using big companies for, because they hold a monopoly or technological advantage on the product or service.
IMO, every discussion about small business tyrants and major corporation worker exploitation should come with the disclaimer that small businesses have far far wider variability than major corporations. Harm at scale comes from places like Amazon. The most egregious abuses toward individual employees (in the modern era), however, are almost certainly from the small business side.
Very tangentially, most academics I have met think of themselves as democrat socialists, but run their labs like authoritarian libertarians (sounds a bit like an oxymoron, I know).
In general I've noticed there is surprisingly little correlation between a lot of people's political, religious, and even moral beliefs vs. their personal behaviour.
It is an oxymoron, you're thinking of a military style. It's solidly authoritarian, but commanders in the field have freedom to make certain decisions independently in recognition of the limits of pure top-down command. That freedom is not borne of e.g. recognition of the rights of man as it is in a libertarian state.
Ooh, good article. As somebody who had a bunch of shitty jobs in my youth, I recognize a lot of this.
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.
I love the nuance and "see both sides of the story" tone of the article. We need more of that.
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.
The opening comments resonate with me quite a bit. I’ve been food-stamp and Medicaid poor. My wife has always been upper-middle class. Her idea of tightening her belt is quite a bit different from mine. I think on some level she really can’t believe there are people who simply forgo things that she perceives to be basic necessities. (This is how you get those NY Times articles about people who make, say, $250k year claiming that it’s not that much money, really, once you account for all the spending on basics (private school, two vacations, violin lessons, two new cars, maxing-out the 401ks, etc, etc)).
This piece describes issues I experienced in my younger years. I started working when I was 14 years old learning to build custom cars. By the time I was 18 I was good at it because I paid close attention to the old timers I was learning from. From the very beginning I was paid a flat rate, and because I was good, and fast, I made a good wage, but the work was not full time.
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.
These low paying shitty jobs in developed countries sound quite pleasant compared to what people in third world countries are forced to do. These jobs are what came to my mind as an Indian when I read the title:
India is notorious for paying shit money to people. When I started my first software job in India i was paid less than 4k$ a year, I lived in a slum and worked 60 hour weeks. I obviously did not have to pickup some one else’s shit. And I am not saying that America has a prettier picture but overall being on minimum wage in America/Europe is actually a little better than being on minimum wage in 3rd world / developing nations.
I’m not going to pretend I lived through the hardships of low pay work like the author, but I have some idea of what they mean when they say their is a mental gap between the people who live a low pay life and those who have never had to experience that kind of existence.
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.
I don't agree with this writer on any of these points, it seems like he's trying to come up with some efficient market hypothesis describing how low-level workers are "different" than those of us in tech, when no such thing exists, in fact it's incredibly narcissistic.
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.
Main thing I'd say characterizes the shitty job is that it leads to nowhere. People like to say that it builds character, especially if they dug themselves out, but it doesn't. I also cleaned toilets and bussed tables as a kid, and I can tell you unequivocally it did nothing to get me to where I am today:
- 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.
Some yardsticks for when I think about jobs I once had or that family members have had, compared to the relative comfort of a job (self-employed or otherwise) in technology. Just some things that give me perspective.
- 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?
Many things in life are to some degree what you make of them, but a lot of low skill jobs don't even offer the hope of learning or advancement. This seems like a real situation of despair to me.
This is one of the biggest mistakes we're collectively making right now, intentional or not. Ideally, every job should offer the opportunity to learn more and/or move into better-paid roles eventually-- and even if that's too much to ask, we could still be doing far better than we are.
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.
The rational thing to do with any job is to first figure out what revenue to profit ratio is for the business. If there's a large profit margin and you're getting low pay, demand a raise. If you're refused a raise, talk to the other employees about the situation and then, if they agree, walk in to see the boss and demand a raise together.
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 will say that I would rather pick cans in the ditches (did that as a kid in summer) or dig ditches than do a fast food / customer service job like my brother in his youth. There seems to be a large concentration of entitled a-holes in a food service line or at a store. My one brush with customer service was being the score board kid at a softball tournament. Drunk middle aged softball players cannot count.
I do say my brother was much better prepared to gather software requirements when we both entered our careers.
As a former drug addict with a DWI felony I often wonder what my life would be like if I hadn’t gotten into tech at a young age and somehow managed to graduate from university. At 200k a year in a medium COL city I can just barely afford a house, car, and girlfriend while adding some money to savings every week. I don’t understand how people can live on 45k a year let alone 30k a year
> I don’t understand how people can live on 45k a year let alone 30k a year
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.
Any job that doesn’t holistically build your skill set (antithetical to a career). As in, the money is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If you stock Shampoo on a shelf, and you can’t flip that into something useful, it’s a worthless job.
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.
>It’s better to get paid $0 being in the right field for a bit than actually being paid in the wrong path.
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.
Your guess is wrong then. I’m more of a person that has been at the upside and downside of things. I know what it’s like to just need the paycheck. But I never looked at it like that, it was mostly a paycheck to create the opportunity via stability to evolve another path. In that case, holistically, that dead-end job had a purpose for creating financial groundwork (once upon a time for me it was literally to buy some server hosting or a domain name - yeah, that’s how broke).
Nah being broke isn't being able to afford a domain. It's eating fast food 3 days in a row because your paycheck isn't coming for another three days and the gas bill was $50 higher this month and your kid needed to see the dentist.
You not being able to pay for hosting is a bit difference in scope then not bring able to feed yourself the correct number of calories for multiple days at a time.
A VPS is $5 bucks. I described $5 like an investment. If $5 is as my investment into my future, what was the price of my food? Not exactly Doordash or Extra Value Meals at McDonald’s every night.
Serious question, why didn't you apply that reasoning to what you posted? A lot, probably the vast majority, of users on this site that actively post have had little if any direct experience with what it is like to actually be extremely poor in the United States.
I would urge you to reconsider the group you are talking to. Many many tech people come from immigrants families that were not born into any kind of wealth at all.
Any job is better than no job as far as possibly leading to something better. At minimum, it shows you can show up for work. A surprising number of people cannot do that reliably.
Even with STEM degrees, you're making a bet on the state of the job market in four years. If you can self-teach how to program, the degree is more of a compliance checkbox to get into your first job easier, even if it is directly to do with computers.
Enumerate the STEM jobs that won’t create a life for you.
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.
> Annualized, it was the difference between $28,000 and $36,000 a year. $8,000 might not seem like a huge absolute increase in pay, but for the subject of the story it was almost a 30% raise.
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.
I think these kind of problems exist in a lot of countries; it's certainly similar in the Netherlands too, and has been for quite a long time: if you're a low-income earner you get social housing, rental assistance, health care assistance, and all these things. But then you start earning too much a lot of these things just drop away and you end up paying a lot more.
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.
A simple way to fix the mathematics, so that poorer people aren't effectively in a a 70% marginal tax rate, is to give the low income handouts to everyone, regardless of income. Universal Basic Income is in this vein.
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.
This article focuses on jobs, rather on careers. It’s a sad failing of American education that people are completely detached from the concept of starting and running a business, as well as the career path of learning a trade.
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.
Having worked a variety of skilled and unskilled blue collar jobs before working in software, this article was spot on in many ways. One eerily relatable part was the example about:
>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.
> I’m very admittedly a fragile sort of personality and neither lasted long. But it still took blood-in-the-toilet level stress to get me to quit either job
Describes self as fragile, can hold on to job until pissing blood.
It's practically a condemnation of the readership the extend to which the author has to build a complex network of rhetorical and example based fortification around what are fundamentally simple points that are plain as day and could be discussed frankly and freely among the demographics and employment situations he/she is describing but which the readership has scant if any direct experience working with. It pains me to think about all the writing and re-writing and very specific word choice that must have gone into this.
Sadly, most jobs meet the definition of "shitty". Likely only the top 20% or so of any industrialized country will have people working jobs that could be described as satisfactory and enjoyable. It is a reflection of modern societies, where a significant percentage of their populations are considered disposable trash or the majority of its citizens are dissatisfied with what they must do for a living.
At 22, right out of college, I probably would have done basically anything to get a $40k a year job. I applied literally everywhere I could. Still, after 8 months and thousands of applications, I was working for $13.50/hr as a cook.
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.
Now at 27, I see some of my oldest friends have fallen into the exact trap you're describing. Unmarketable degree combined with minimal college work experience makes for a very limited job market upon graduation. I watched several of them get sucked into similarly low paying and unfulfilling work largely because it was in an office and therefore made it a "real" job.
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.
I had such jobs for four years. Because of low-pay (low-pay due to low-skill), because of odd-schedules, there is no way to get out, without some external help. Basically, people keep these shitty jobs as they need to pay rent, and rent needs that job.
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.
The reason why doing-well-financially people are stressed/complaining is because they live beyond their means. It doesn’t matter how much you make if your lifestyle is more expensive than your income. That’s why you have crazy situations where people making $500k are complaining about how expensive things are and how badly they need to make more money. The key problem is a lack of financial literacy.
My wife and I met working retail many years ago. We both had a string of shit jobs for years and as such, feel tremendously fortunate to be where we are (she’s an accountant and I’m a security engineer).
Reading Team Blind or /r/cscareerquestions makes me want to smack some of these entitled little shits for their pathetic whining. No perspective whatsoever.
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.
Can someone explain to me and maybe to great industrialist Shahbaz Sharif how Pak is supposed to compete with those two countries with a 20% lower literacy rate in comparison?
