[HN Gopher] What does "shitty job" mean in the low-skill, low-pa...
___________________________________________________________________
What does "shitty job" mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?
Author : hn-0001
Score : 242 points
Date : 2022-04-17 14:38 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.residentcontrarian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.residentcontrarian.com)
| Tozen wrote:
| 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.
| angarg12 wrote:
| 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 <$20k, paycheck-to-paychek
| job. Now I make > 8 times the median US salary, and still feel
| underpaid.
|
| What I try to convey to people is that I can be grateful and
| privileged, and feel fairly unpaid at the same time.
|
| For the one side, you need to recognize your privilege. People
| who say they can't live on incomes >200k should know life could
| be so much worse.
|
| For the other side, one can still feel underpaid and unfairly
| treated. If colleagues similar to me jumped companies doubling
| their income, that's a signal I'm probably underpaid. And the one
| benefiting from that disparity is not me, but the company taking
| advantage of it.
|
| Bottom line great read for all of those tech worker making 6
| figures and complaining about how crappy their life is.
| foogazi wrote:
| > Bottom line great read for all of those tech worker making 6
| figures and complaining about how crappy their life is.
|
| Complaining is free for everyone - it's when you shut up and
| take action that you can change
| frontman1988 wrote:
| These low paying shitty jobs in developed countries sound quite
| pleasant compared to what people in third world countries are
| forced to do. These jobs are what came to my mind as an Indian
| when I read the title:
|
| https://dw.com/en/india-manual-scavengers-continue-to-remove...
|
| https://thewire.in/labour/manual-scavenging-sanitation-worke...
| chse_cake wrote:
| India is notorious for paying shit money to people. When I
| started my first software job in India i was paid less than 4k$
| 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.
| weakfish wrote:
| "Things are worse somewhere else, therefore we shouldn't
| improve anything here"
| hhlevnjak3 wrote:
| Or put differently, if we can't improve things in a rich
| society, how do we expect it to improve elsewhere.
| erikerikson wrote:
| Or, perhaps, help offer better options everywhere so that
| the tide rises?
| steve76 wrote:
| baybal2 wrote:
| For the interest of HN reader demographics:
|
| 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.
| foogazi wrote:
| > 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.
|
| What's the salary for an experienced assembly line worker in US
| or China ?
| baybal2 wrote:
| selimthegrim wrote:
| 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?
| baybal2 wrote:
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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).
| k__ wrote:
| I always have to think about this when people say "buy more at
| small businesses!"
|
| Most small businesse owners I met were just as shitty as the ones
| of big businesses, they just weren't as smart as them.
| analog31 wrote:
| 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.
| bambataa wrote:
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| I have a few friends that work no-skill jobs and the stories
| they tell me...
| User23 wrote:
| 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.
| kebman wrote:
| 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.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| 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.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Reminds me of the guy who used to own a video rental place and
| would fire his employees before they had worked there long
| enough to accrue benefits.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| 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).
| unapproved4lyfe wrote:
| 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.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| 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.
|
| This includes myself, by the way. But I do try...
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| 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.
| reidjs wrote:
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Certainly. "Buy local" is a decision weight, not a
| categorical principle.
| omegaham wrote:
| This reminds me of a local business owner who, in the span
| of a week,
|
| * made a big rant on his company Facebook page about
| Starbucks and law enforcement, advocating for a boycott
|
| * made another big rant about the local pride parade
|
| * made a rant that was half "woe is me" and half "everyone
| is a sensitive snowflake" after people started boycotting
| his business for his remarks
|
| Unfortunate political views aside, I was tickled by the
| prompt response from the public and his visible confusion
| of "Wait, _I_ can be boycotted?? "
| 3qz wrote:
| Buy local should be about local production and not local
| retail. A lot of small businesses just resell shit they buy
| online
| [deleted]
| kazinator wrote:
| > _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.
|
| https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/low-income-families-...
| Beltalowda wrote:
| 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.
| incanus77 wrote:
| 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?
| crate_barre wrote:
| 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.
|
| All this shit takes vision honestly.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| 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.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| >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.
| foogazi wrote:
| > because such options aren't available to everyone
|
| So ? If it's aplicable to you take it if not seek better
| advice
|
| I love the universal advice police - everything has to be
| available to everyone or else it's useless
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| 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.
| crate_barre wrote:
| 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.
| crate_barre wrote:
| 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).
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| 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.
| crate_barre wrote:
| 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.
|
| Inference.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| 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.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Do you use shampoo?
| crate_barre wrote:
| I've somewhat shifted to the no-shampoo cult.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/NoPoo/
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I would not have guessed that sub's purpose from its name.
| Honestly, it sounds much simpler and quicker to just use
| shampoo.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| 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.
| crate_barre wrote:
| 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.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| 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.
| hamiltonians wrote:
| 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.
| seibelj wrote:
| 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.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| This is exactly why I posted in the first place.
| ip26 wrote:
| 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.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| 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.
| ip26 wrote:
| 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?
| Beltalowda wrote:
| > although someone has to do that work
|
| 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).
| oaiey wrote:
| .. the privilege of a teenager with unlimited time and no
| responsibility.
|
| I get your point but the personal development can only happen
| if the primal needs are covered.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| 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.
| oblib wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| riazrizvi wrote:
| > 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.
| raynforprez wrote:
| I believe it means actually having to do work.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| 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.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| 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.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Have you considered that innocence inspires unparalleled
| actions?
| pjbeam wrote:
| 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.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| 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.
| dionidium wrote:
| 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)).
| plussed_reader wrote:
| It means subsistence at someone else's benefit.
| jenny91 wrote:
| Verbose article with little substance.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| That's because Google gives points for word count.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| 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.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| "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.
| erikerikson wrote:
| ...and truth forbid you call it what it is rather than
| throwing polish on the turd.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| 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.
| Avshalom wrote:
| Then you graduate again in december of 2019 and you lose
| another 2 years to whims of fate.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| 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?
| Avshalom wrote:
| I mean my degrees are physics w/math-minor and geology
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| 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?
| Jcowell wrote:
| 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.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| By June 2020 the tech market was hot again, that's 3
| months of hiring pause, not 2 years like OP said.
| hamiltonians wrote:
| I never had a summer, college, or teen job. Money was never a
| problem and still isn't.
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| raincom wrote:
| 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.
| yegle wrote:
| Can you give us a couple examples on these external help?
|
| Also is there any nonprofit working in this area to provide
| this kind of help?
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| 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.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-
| attribution...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
|
| [3] https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/confronting-
| managerialism-9781...
| softfalcon wrote:
| 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.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> 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.
| aqme28 wrote:
| 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.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I haven't spoken to a lot of doctors, but a lot of nurses I
| know are desperate to leave the field.
|
| The last doctor I spoke to was the most condescending man I
| met in a while, unfortunately, he was also my surgeon.
| kingkawn wrote:
| 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.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| 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.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| 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
|
| Here's a larger trawler - again - sometimes the fish will be
| stacked to the ceiling https://youtu.be/fQEwECzZL_s?t=2739
|
| Unfortunately I can't seem to find any footage of the more
| usual scenario, where the blocks are just piled up at random.
| ResNet wrote:
| > I once got paid almost $1000, in just one day
|
| This is surprisingly high in that I would have assumed it
| would be far more cost-effective for the company to improve
| automation here and bring in more equipment to assist --
| intuitively, even if such equipment would be expensive, it
| couldn't be more expensive than the labor costs.
|
| What industry was this?
| pinko wrote:
| 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).
| TrackerFF wrote:
| 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.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| "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.
| johnqian wrote:
| That actually sounds like a great way to workout while
| getting paid! Do they accept short/temporary/irregular
| stints?
| watwut wrote:
| Great workout ends when biologically convenient and leads
| to less damage on body. These jobs fairly often destroy
| peoples bodies.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| ip26 wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
|
| But, in theory it should be different.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| rtlfe wrote:
| > 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "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.
| lisper wrote:
| 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.
| ryan93 wrote:
| You need to share the actual details
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> 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.
| lisper wrote:
| 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.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| You said you had photographic evidence...were you not
| allowed to introduce it? Why does it matter if you can't
| remember if you have video proof?
| lisper wrote:
| 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.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| 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
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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?).
| giantg2 wrote:
| "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...
| lisper wrote:
| > I think it's the same direction,
|
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| dazc wrote:
| > 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.
| ryan93 wrote:
| What high paying jobs do doctors get that aren in medicine?
| rtlfe wrote:
| There are a lot of jobs in medicine that aren't pediatric
| oncology.
| dazc wrote:
| An oncolgy specialist can get many jobs as a doctor,
| although not as a specialist as such.
|
| Outside of being an actual doctor, many more than a
| recently unemployed warehouse worker.
| rtlfe wrote:
| Aren't legal jobs drying up? I've heard a lot about how it's
| not the golden ticket everybody thought it was 20 years ago.
| User23 wrote:
| > Pediatric oncology.
|
| 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.
| wl wrote:
| 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.
| throwawayHN378 wrote:
| Pretty bold statement to claim most pediatric oncologists are
| sociopaths. You took a big shit on some of the admirable
| people in our society
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
|
| PTSD is complicated.
| trillic wrote:
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Hear hear! It's really easy to paint someone as "a bit
| off" and imply without implying.
|
| It's important when noticing instances of this to request
| further clarification.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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.
| TeaDrunk wrote:
| 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.
| TeaDrunk wrote:
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| > Pediatric oncology
|
| 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.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > 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?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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?
| ModernMech wrote:
| 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.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I was thinking this would be a eusocial use of psychopathy.
| chii wrote:
| > dispassionate decisions.
|
| 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?
| polotics wrote:
| 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.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| > Or any law enforcement.
|
| Please don't equate healthcare workers with law enforcement.
| Healthcare workers have an astronomically harder job and
| actually make society a better place.
| mythrwy wrote:
| 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?
| hattmall wrote:
| 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.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| 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.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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.
| bluquark wrote:
| Prior to 2020, health work was probably safer, but since
| then over eighty thousand health workers have died of Covid
| worldwide: https://www.who.int/news/item/20-10-2021-health-
| and-care-wor...
|
| 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.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| 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.
| brokenodometer wrote:
| 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...
|
| The numbers in state courts may vary, but in NY they are
| similar to the federal system. https://www.law.umich.edu/spec
| ial/exoneration/Documents/New_...
|
| Obviously a guilty plea still requires work, and maybe a lot
| of it. But in terms of outcomes, they rarely lose.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| 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.
| Clubber wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It's estimated 2-10% of the _incarcerated_ population is
| innocent or wrongly convicted.
| Clubber wrote:
| 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.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| "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.
| NhanH wrote:
| 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)
| throwawayHN378 wrote:
| 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
| Beltalowda wrote:
| > 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.
| acomar wrote:
| it's a synonym for "job", in most places. the repetition serves
| to reinforce the point: enforced waged labor is destructive to
| the person.
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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.
| unapproved4lyfe wrote:
| 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).
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| "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.
| unapproved4lyfe wrote:
| 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.
| hattmall wrote:
| 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.
| peterhalburt33 wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| 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).
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| 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.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| 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.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| At what point do you draw the line between individual
| responsibility and blaming the system? When do a person's
| failures become their fault?
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| 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.
| vasco wrote:
| This is a public website, there's no security check for "Is
| american, went to Stanford and lives in SF pulling 100k/yr".
|
| I know plenty of software developers that frequent this site
| and make around 20-30k a year in Europe.
| [deleted]
| ip26 wrote:
| Certainly true, but by a process of self-selection, the
| population of the site does seem _heavily_ skewed.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/FoodPorn/comments/thvk4e/a_cassero
| l...
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That salary seems very low, other than maybe for a junior.
| And even then - maybe. What sort of company pays that in
| 2022?
| jxub wrote:
| Anywhere in Southern or Eastern Europe that's pretty much
| always the case.
| permalac wrote:
| Sometimes I forget that those 6 figure jobs require one living
| in US, then I remember and I'm a bit happier with my not 6
| figures job.
| xwdv wrote:
| This is obviously a dig at quality of life in the US.
|
| However, if you must choose between quality of life or higher
| salary, choose higher salary. Quality of life isn't a liquid
| asset.
|
| Also, in the United States your life is substantially better
| the more money you have.
| _moof wrote:
| _> if you must choose between quality of life or higher
| salary, choose higher salary_
|
| Strongly disagree.
| hattmall wrote:
| Literally probably the dumbest thing you could do. The
| point of money is for quality of life, if you can improve
| it without money that's perfect.
| xwdv wrote:
| Money will buy you a good quality of life anywhere. If
| you settle for built in quality of life somewhere, then
| you are stuck at that location.
| nemo44x wrote:
| If you're smart it's a much better deal to live in the USA.
| It's why you see so many Europeans move here and not the
| other way around.
|
| Europe is better if you're dumb as there are better social
| systems. You can just exist more easily there.
| hattmall wrote:
| 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.
| basisword wrote:
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| 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.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| 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.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| >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.
| heroicdanger wrote:
| giardini wrote:
| 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.
| jetbalsa wrote:
| Some Tax Evasion laws do allow for criminal charges. tends to
| only be charged in extreme cases, but can happen.
| giardini wrote:
| 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.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| Failure to pay eventually sends you to prison one way or
| another when you live in a country with such a
| catastrophically broken social safety net.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| 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.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| How is insurance a scam?
|
| 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.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| 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.
| kebman wrote:
| You're not just having a hunch:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
| ianai wrote:
| 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.
| silexia wrote:
| 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.
| klyrs wrote:
| > 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.
| willnonya wrote:
| 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.
| klyrs wrote:
| > 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.
| rajin444 wrote:
| 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.
| bglazer wrote:
| Are you advocating for ethno-nationalism?
| winnit wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| beebeepka wrote:
| Do you mind explaining your last sentence? I really have
| no idea what are you talking about
| willnonya wrote:
| That's only really true when you have a powerful entity
| like the government stifling competition in favor of
| their preferred actors and cronies.
|
| True competition allows people to choose the actors they
| want, good or bad.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8&t=2147s
| willnonya wrote:
| 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.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
| mrjangles wrote:
| >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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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".
| basisword wrote:
| >> extremely long walking times towards the break room
|
| This is a thing??
| yywwbbn wrote:
| > is setting up shop exclusively in areas with high
| unemployment,
|
| How is that a negative? Would you prefer for those people
| to stay unemployed?
| pphysch wrote:
| 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.
| mrjangles wrote:
| 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.
| jltsiren wrote:
| 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.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Do you mind sharing a link to some data that you feel
| illustrates this? Pretty interesting.
| kopkreotrke4 wrote:
| The 42k AUD a year is equivalent to many professional jobs
| in the EU
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| 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.
| Biologist123 wrote:
| Your argument is all numerator, no denominator.
| aaron_m04 wrote:
| I have heard reports online of people having to use a cane
| after a few years of working in these warehouses.
|
| 15 USD an hour is not so much when it costs you your health
| _and_ there is no proper system of universal healthcare.
| swarnie wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-
| mcclelland-...
| smrtinsert wrote:
| It's nothing without health care. Not to mention time off
| for new parents or much better compensation for being laid
| off etc.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >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.
| abxytg wrote:
| 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.
| kopkreotrke4 wrote:
| What percentage of minimum wage earners live alone? There
| are hundreds of thousands of rooms available for rent on
| Craigslist for under $1000
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| oof, you are out of touch
| kopkreotrke4 wrote:
| Why? Because I know many minimum wage workers who rent
| rooms instead of entire apartments?
| kareemsabri wrote:
| Some poor people have families.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| How does that fit in with the conversation?
| kanwisher wrote:
| When I was mid 20s, I was making six figures in tech and
| had to share an apartment. I can't see why minimum wage
| workers wouldn't also
| maxerickson wrote:
| I mean, it happens, but there's room to discuss whether
| it is a fact of the universe or partly an outcome of
| chosen policies.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| It's not uncommon in the US for parents to more or less
| kick their children out when they turn 18/graduate from
| high school.
|
| It's not the rule, and it's probably less common than it
| used to be.
|
| A few minutes later: "It's not uncommon" is going too
| far. It's certainly not unheard of.
| lazide wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding my comment.
|
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| 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!
| lazide wrote:
| 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.).
| lettergram wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It depends where you live.
| abxytg wrote:
| no doubt
| rnikander wrote:
| 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?
| screye wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| If your job is in that city then yeah kinda.
|
| Workers today are so entitled, demanding _an entire
| studio apartment_ the audacity.
| cloverich wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| standardUser wrote:
| 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).
| [deleted]
| rdiddly wrote:
| 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.
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| 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."
| aerosmile wrote:
| 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.
| diordiderot wrote:
| > literally every other country in the world will fare a
| lot worse in this regard
|
| US is 27th place on economic mobility index soooo....
| pempem wrote:
| @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
| [deleted]
| mepiethree wrote:
| 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.
| diordiderot wrote:
| How many hours did he work to buy the house. How many
| will a new teacher have to work.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| 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.
| pempem wrote:
| 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.
| gurumeditations wrote:
| Same with gays especially, you have to live in a city or
| live in hiding in most places.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| pempem wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| thedailymail wrote:
| 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 cliche. 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.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| 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.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| > _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.
| throwawayHN378 wrote:
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| nameisname wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| 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.
| rtlfe wrote:
| > This can't change because it's not determined by some
| governing body.
|
| It actually is. Rents are expensive because zoning laws
| severely limit density and require lots of car parking.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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).
| rtlfe wrote:
| > 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| In very few places in the US would "no heat and no
| toilet" be acceptable, regardless of price.
| rtlfe wrote:
| No heat seems bad, but I'd bet SROs with shared bathrooms
| would be extremely popular in NYC if they were legal.
|
| I'm not sure what happened to them, but there was a
| startup trying to do this:
| https://www.curbed.com/2021/03/brownstone-shared-
| housing.htm...
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| 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.
| hi_im_miles wrote:
| 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.
| FredPret wrote:
| Landlordship is older than high rent
| tluyben2 wrote:
| 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?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| 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?
| rtlfe wrote:
| > 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.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >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.
| antifa wrote:
| I can't believe people are so detached from reality that
| they feel entitled to live within driving distance of
| their job...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| In Europe, you could easily get that, except the car or
| driving part.
| gruez wrote:
| At half/third of the salary maybe.
| einherjae wrote:
| Still better off if that third actually enabled living
| within driving distance of said job.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| > except the car or driving part
|
| Don't threaten ME with a good time!
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| gsich wrote:
| And have commune add 10 hours of unpaid labor.
| TeaDrunk wrote:
| 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.
| rtlfe wrote:
| > Do people think they're entitled to private apartments
| in the most expensive cities in the world?
|
| If the cities weren't designed to inflate home values to
| enrich people who got in early, then yeah pretty much
| everybody could afford an apartment.
| powerslacker wrote:
| 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.
| rtlfe wrote:
| 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.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Logical fallacy detected: false dichotomy
| oh_sigh wrote:
| 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?
| wonderwonder wrote:
| 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.
| standardUser wrote:
| "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.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| 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.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| 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.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| 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.
| standardUser wrote:
| I did not say it was the floor, obviously, but it is
| literally the average rent, give or take.
| crate_barre wrote:
| Let me shock you by saying in some of these cities groups
| of people easily take out a 2500-3k rental. Either
| families or groups of workers.
| swarnie wrote:
| That comes out to about PS11.50.
|
| In 2016 I was on PS16.82, 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.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| In order to keep the discussion meaningful, please don't
| use extreme numbers as typical examples. This just lowers
| the quality of conversation.
| abxytg wrote:
| 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.
| shitpostbot wrote:
| hn_neverguess wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [0] https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-
| by-yea... [1] https://hiring.amazon.com/why-
| amazon/benefits#/
| jemfinch wrote:
| > 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?
| ModernMech wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| You can't honestly believe this is a helpful comment.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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).
| ctoth wrote:
| > 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].
|
| [0]: https://abc7.com/rent-prices-apartments-cost-of-
| realtorcom/1...
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Why should we expect the _minimum_ wage to afford the
| _median_ rent?
| wonderwonder wrote:
| To be fair, minimum wage is not the $15 an hour that
| Amazon pays, its half that.
| lolinder wrote:
| But $15/hr isn't the median household income either. In
| 2020, the median was $67k.
|
| https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60
| -27...
| wonderwonder wrote:
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| 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 :)
| betwixthewires wrote:
| 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.
| rtlfe wrote:
| 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.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| Avshalom wrote:
| 42k is just above minimum wage in Australia and 15 an hour is
| over double the minimum wage in 20 states in the US.
| newbamboo wrote:
| 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.
| notesinthefield wrote:
| 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?
| hn_neverguess wrote:
| 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.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| "You can't complain because other people have it worse!"
| fallingknife wrote:
| Yeah but you really can't when other people is 95% of
| people
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| 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.
| seibelj wrote:
| 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| 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.
| seibelj wrote:
| 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > 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.
| seibelj wrote:
| 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.
| imtringued wrote:
| 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.
| 3qz wrote:
| > 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.
| rtlfe wrote:
| > Almost everything is more expensive in Canada
|
| Everything except the most expensive things. Paying 20%
| more for cheese is fine when you're saving 95% on
| healthcare.
| hn_neverguess wrote:
| 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).
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I think Canada still comes out ahead... in the US:
|
| * high monthly premiums for healthcare with high
| deductibles (I pay 14k a year with a 5k deductible for each
| person in my family)
|
| * high medication prices (people often buy drugs from
| canada)
|
| * 0 maternity leave (15 weeks max in Canada)
|
| * 0 vacation (2-3 weeks in Canada)
|
| * less accessible child care (Canada is working on building
| out ~$10/day child care, it can easily cost ~$20k a year in
| the US)
|
| * less affordable college tuition
|
| * higher crime rates, higher incarceration rates
|
| * lower minimum wage (canada's is nearly double)
|
| * at-will employment, termination without cause or
| severance (in canada you can be fired easily, but
| reasonable severance is required)
|
| * reduced access to abortion (significantly in some states
| as of late)
| noahtallen wrote:
| 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.
| rurp wrote:
| Comparing income between countries without accounting for
| cost of living is highly misleading.
| basisword wrote:
| 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.
| t-3 wrote:
| 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.
| chefandy wrote:
| The existence of worse doesn't make something _good_.
| t-3 wrote:
| 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.
| chefandy wrote:
| > _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.
| acomar wrote:
| 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.
| whymauri wrote:
| If it's so good, why are they unionizing? But yes, there
| are worse jobs.
|
| Florida min wage was 8.25 before 2021. So nearly half the
| Amazon wage.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I wonder how many Amazon warehouse workers have a degree?
| I guess it's a lot.
| gruez wrote:
| >make something good.
|
| 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"?
| Rapzid wrote:
| 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?
| t-3 wrote:
| > 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 $20/hr while fast food
| is ~10-12.
| hereforphone wrote:
| It's partly that we (the West, not just Americans) are so
| rich that we're out of touch with reality. Another way of
| looking at it is that hardship, which has not only been a
| part of life since the beginning of humanity but has arguably
| defined it, has been notably missing recently. So now we have
| young people complaining about things that would have very
| recently been appreciated and welcomed. At the same time
| they're bashing cultural values / norms that are in part
| responsible for this elimination of hardship.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Euro wages are typically after tax, but you are citing a
| before tax figure. In California for example where a 15$ 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.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| 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.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| 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.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| 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.
| 3qz wrote:
| > modern work for a lot of jobs has become de facto indentured
| servitude
|
| It's slavery as a service
| willnonya wrote:
| 3qz wrote:
| What is the purpose of this comment?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| The purpose, I'm guessing, is to point out that your
| comment was hyperbolic. I share this impression.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| 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".
| acomar wrote:
| > 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.
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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.
| protomyth wrote:
| 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.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Unfortunately, if you pick cans, you quite probably will have
| an a-hole boss, and, unlike an a-hole customer, she will not go
| anywhere.
| protomyth wrote:
| Didn't really have a boss. By and large, I've met more a-hole
| bosses in enterprise than vocational.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| _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.
| ng12 wrote:
| This reeks. There are a lot of good, honest, hardworking people
| out there without Bachelor's degrees.
| Mezzie wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| erikerikson wrote:
| 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.
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