>If you came from a family that did pretty well financially, went to college and then immediately started to do pretty well yourself, it’s hard to get any kind of context for what life is like at lower income levels.
I would have gone further and said most of the advice given about any topic people who haven't lived it is crap and shouldn't be listened do. Some yuppie with an engineering job has zero useful advice when it comes to telling a forklift driver how to get ahead. Someone who manages a $100 restaurant in downtown NYC is going to have little useful advice for a truck-stop diner owner.
> is that it’s usually assumed that the quality of things has a pretty linear association to the price.
They assume it because they have enough money to insulate them from having any good reason to tell the difference. How often have you heard something like "I've only replaced the gears in my Kithenaid mixer 3x and the frame on my Tacoma 4x" and then the people saying it turn around and defend those things as worth the price premium as though doing so isn't lunacy with a side of stockholm syndrome. At a certain point you can afford to get ripped off. It's like a form of conspicuous consumption where instead of being overt you pretend to be hapless.
>That’s the drop-off you experience at the lower price levels - there’s nothing between “This is a tiny but acceptable apartment” and “Slum apartments in stab-ville”.
Author neglects to mention that through personal behavior you can largely avoid being affected by the worst parts of stabville and that when you know you can do so at little cost the extra $300/mo for "peace of mind" is kind of hard to justify and you need to use "but kids" type logic to do so.
>I am always consistently shocked by how little people living at a decent-to-great income level fear their cars... (I'm not gonna bother quoting the full paragraph)
The author should have rounded out this paragraph with "eventually you accrue enough tools and experience you don't need to worry about anything anymore because you understand the mechanical state of your car" and a lecture about how a car's utility lets you save money. Try buying used appliances or furniture CL with a bus pass. It just doesn't work. If it's a legitimately good deal you couldn't get it in the time it takes to arrange a rental.
>I think this is a fairly accurate way to look at pay, but it applies to other aspects of the job. If you got sick more often....(once again, not gonna quote the whole thing).
This is very much a two way street. If you're the guy on your shift who saves the line manager a whole lot of pain in the butt (e.g. transportation arrangements make it trivial for you to show up early as needed) they're gonna wink and nod and let you get away with some off the books allowances because they know that you can get another McJob elsewhere just as easily as they can replace you and that your replacement likely won't have whatever value-add you do.