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What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

residentcontrarian.com

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Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#361
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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…

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.

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Because I know many minimum wage workers who rent rooms instead of entire apartments?

Some poor people have families.

How does that fit in with the conversation?

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> literally every other country in the world will fare a lot worse in this regard US is 27th place on economic mobility index soooo....

[deleted]

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 the…

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 successfu…

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.

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#365

> 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…

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.

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 successfu…

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 t…

At what point do you draw the line between individual responsibility and blaming the system? When do a person's failures become their fault?

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> literally every other country in the world will fare a lot worse in this regard US is 27th place on economic mobility index soooo....

@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

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#369
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

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.

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.

Re: What does “shitty job” mean in the low-skill, low-pay world?

#370
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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