371–380 of 546 posts
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"$x is a 'good wage'" has always been a simple and loaded statement, but with the media highlighting economic inequality (esp. around tech and silicon valley) for so long, news & people now commonly discuss cost-of-living with wages and now look at the net value as the talking point.
It's not a loaded statement. No one is making you live a the place with the highest cost of living in the US.
> They earn too much to qualify for state healthcare, but not enough to afford the health insurance offered by their employer. They frequently struggle to find enough money for basics like food and clothes for their children. Victor recently borrowed money from his mother to hold a birthday party for one of his daughters, and from a friend to pay for a dentist appointment. They might want to look into not being marri…
> but not enough to afford the health insurance offered by their employer. This is what is wrong with health care in the US. How can this not be considered a serious flaw in the way the system is currently structured?
It is, quite widely.
The problem is that the two main camps on what should be done instead each think the other proposal is even worse than the currently broken state.
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>There's this "respect" part My experiences as an on site contract worker don't always line up with that. I do get your point in cases where companies are misclassifying actual workers as contract help. I think we just disagree that this is the case here. It seems obvious to me that they are employees of the food service company, and should be. Fwiw, I have been a low paid factory worker in the past. It's not a matte…
My experiences as an on site contract worker don't always line up with that. You keep getting back to your experience as an on-site, and highly paid (compared to most folks) tech worker. The whole point of the original article is the experience of low-paid, contract service workers is vastly different. It seems obvious to me that they are employees of the food service company, and should be. Whether they should or sh…
Yes, because you implied it came with respect. It doesn't always.
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What you describe is called fraud, and the anti-poor people in this country would go after them for it, just like they went after "welfare queens" and the like.
How is getting divorced to maximize tax avoidance or get government services even remotely fraud? Is there a statute on that? You can obviously avoid marriage in the first place, in order to maximize services or avoid taxes.
No, you really can't. Do you seriously think the state is going to pay out more benefits to parents solely because they haven't signed a marriage certificate?
You _can_ absolutely qualify for more benefits if the other parent is unable or unwilling to contribute financially and the state is unable to coerce them to do so. But the state goes after the other parent first.
Part of the reason these programs are so harmful is that they provide incentives for the father to stay away from the children. Staying around to raise the children makes it a lot easier for the state to A) find him and B) make the case that he's the father or has taken on a fatherly role and is therefore responsible for paying for them.
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Rents are rising at 5-10% a year in the south bay, and if you don't live in mountain view you don't have renters protections. There is no end in sight for cost of living stabilization for the bottom end of the market without large supply growth and/or rent control policies being enacted. Facebook could solve the problem this year by issuing a broad based 10% raise for all of their contract workers, but they would nee…
You can also invest in improving public transit and shoring up what you already have - for example, BART and systems like it could be used to link areas more effectively/reliably. In talking with some friends in the Bay Area, all feel that East Bay is just too risky with problems BART has been facing in reliability, but all love the less congested feel of say Moraga or Walnut Creek. The article focuses on the fact th…
There's simply no affordable place within an hour of the city. That's not just because of bad public transportation - that's because of poor housing policy.
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Sorry for having to be "that guy" but they're living in Menlo Park for crying out loud! I'd love to live in Menlo Park too, but I can't afford it, so instead I live 2 hours away and commute to work like everyone else. In the Bay Area, living close to work is pretty much a luxury for the rich.
Sorry, you commute two hours EACH WAY EVERY DAY? Nothing is worth that. I'd expect serious money for putting up with that, and at that point, you could just afford to live closer.
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That's how capitalism and meritocracy work unfortunately.
That's how human morality works unfortunately. capitalism: "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state." meritocracy: "government or the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their ability." morality: "principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior." Here's how I th…
> Capitalism is the use of markets as the primary method of resource allocation within a society.
http://www.americanteeth.org/2015/06/21/why-i-m-a-capitalist...
I lost a game of Go to the guy who wrote this. He's a total socialist, but he _gets it_. Capitalism is just using markets, and when he and I use that word we just mean that. But when many progessive-types use that word, they mean all of the perceived evils and unjustice that coming along with that system.
They own a dyson fan and a projector in the picture, and possibly more expensive gadgets off-screen. It's just sad that when people are not willing to work hard enough through school and end up in shitty jobs that pay less -- then complaining about the undesirable outcome. Suck it up and take an online coding class or something. Time to build some cafeteria robots so they will at least complain on someone else's turf…