111–113 of 113 posts
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Yes still far preferable. The wage in a restaurant often comes out below minimum wage too anyways.
Can you explain how a salary can come out below minimal wage? Isn't the point of the minimum that it's that, a minimum?
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> it takes under a day to find a "real" job in a restaurant or a bar just by walking around and handing out CVs Have you done this?
Anecdata, but I have seen it happen many times. My cousin came to Toronto for a few months and wanted some under the table income. I was buying some pastries in a bakery I liked around that time, and noticed they had a hiring sign. I told her about it and she was working there a couple days later. A former coworker had a similar story. He got into a fight with his wife because she was spending all day in facebook ins…
In your first example you mentioned a 'she'. From what I've been told from friends in the service industry, that's a plus (even somewhat if you're not considered attractive, but obviously much less so).
In your second example it didn't last, so it's quite possible a number of these "didn't last" experiences lead to doing deliveroo-style work.
Furthermore, I've been shocked by how terrible some people are at 1) considering alternatives to whatever choices they think they have, and 2) doing okay in an interview.
I get the impression lots of people are just not rational actors in these matters, and there are all sorts of hidden factors that can prevent someone from going for the 'better' jobs. I don't have strong opinions on what we should conclude from that, but I am at least inclined to think making the shittiest option as good as possible might be an all-round good thing to pursue.
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That's true to a certain extent, but experience (19th century beginning-of-industrialization) has taught us that the floor (i.e., the equilibrium) is bad enough that we don't want that sort of circumstances. In other words, it turns out that people want to work to eat so badly that they'll put up with working 14-hour days and letting their 10 year old children work in factories that literally kill 10's of them per ye…
So which is better? People not eating, or people working in bad conditions? Keep in mind that early industrialization was mainly subsistence farmers moving into cities to hugely improve their lives. Child labor was the norm, especially on farms, so children working in factories was an improvement. Do you think that accidents didn't happen to kids subsistence farming with their families or starving to death in central…
I take it this was a general rhetorical question and not something you're specifically asking me - but either way, it's irrelevant. The fact is that 'we' (wherever I say 'we' here, I mean 'we as a society') didn't care enough about those children dying in the field or mud huts, but we did care when they started dying in factories (while that may not be 'rational' for a Less Wrong definition of 'rational', experiments on the trolley problem have shown in the past that there might be wide spread ethical intuitions that make this situation 'understandable' - but I digress).
I wasn't stating how things 'ought to be', just 'how things are'. 'How they ought to be' is in this case a trite discussion (at the level and within the means we have here). The OP however asked a facetious or naive question about 'how things are', one for which there is a simple, factual answer.