Easier said than done without a link to the destination country.Quote:
Originally Posted by Summer
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Easier said than done without a link to the destination country.Quote:
Originally Posted by Summer
Jesus Christ you boot licking moron, grinding is a lifestyle affectation not an inherent means to succes. Celebrating it is just a virtue signal that you are an assholeQuote:
Originally Posted by californiagrown
the lesson from “dentists only make money when they are pulling teeth” isn’t pull more teeth, dentist
Statistically, your success has very little to do with you being smarter, harder working, more talented or any thing "better" than anyone else. Good job being born a white male to a middle-class family in America! WAY TO GO! YAY!Quote:
Originally Posted by californiagrown
Seriously. What's the difference between a kid from a poor family getting a job at McDonald's after high school because he doesn't know any better thats what everyone else does and working his 40 hours a week plus some if he needs more money for something... oh and pretty soon if he knocks up his girlfriend she won't be able to get an abortion so when he realizes he could go to school or something he won't be able to because he will have mouths other than his own to feed...
Or you. You get out of high school and go to college Iike you always knew you would. You're not worried about where you will live or what you will eat.
You are a good solider, though. You study hard. GOOD JOB BEING SUCH A HARD WORKER! You even study instead of going skiing sometimes.
Maybe you even work part time alongside the dude above, but if you get sick, injured, work conflicts with school, or the boss is a big dick you can just quit because that just means your kinda broke, not homeless because you can't pay rent.
GOODJOB working so hard when you graduate college! Way above fast-food guy.
The problem is that the baseline is too low. Everyone who can show up and do mediocre work at whatever job they can get should be able to afford a mediocre place to live, food, healthcare and be able to save a little money.
Have you ever seen Mexican immigrants work? Those mfos work fucking hard. Way the fuck harder than you.
Did you know CNAs, you know the people caring for your parents in nursing homes dont make much over minimum wage? That's fucking hard. They are wiping asses. What kind of life do you think the person wiping your moms ass deserves?
Anyone slinging pizzas for 40 hours deserves a very large Star wars themed bong the very least.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mustonen
And I'm lazy and entitled...soo...where can I sign up? I mean I have to work, but I could sure do without.
your sweeping generalizations are mostly wrong in regards to myself, but thats cool. I don't blame you for taking your angst out on an internet stranger. You do what you need to in order to get through the day.Quote:
Originally Posted by mb6f50
Please expand upon what you mean by "Everyone who can show up and do mediocre work at whatever job they can get should be able to afford a mediocre place to live, food, healthcare and be able to save a little money." Id like to hear specifics of what you think qualifies as mediocre, and if you think anything beyond food, shelter, healthcare, and a little savings are "deserved"? Mostly, because i generally agree. But, from what i see, most of society thinks they deserve faaaaaar more than those things.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mustonen
So what is boast-worthy? Is anything? is anything worth being proud of, or is every success just a gift that must have come easy to you?
I completely agree that any full time job should allow a worker a “living wage”.
That being said even though a full 1/2 of people are below average most folks assume they are above.
Bingo.Quote:
Originally Posted by Peruvian
Attachment 420301
I have a few thoughts on this:
1. If you call out antiwork but don't call out Amazon and others actively suppressing things like unions - you're a hypocrite bootlicker. In a healthy economics system, there should be healthy tension between labor and capital owners to ensure efficient and equitable distribution of value. Our current state is way too tilted to capital at the moment, which is where a lot of frustration comes from.
2. Corporations are corporations, not people. They don't need defending. They're an unfeeling, unthinking entity. If they don't have systems implemented to detect and correct people not doing their work, that's on them, not the worker. Shitty management is everywhere, and people exploiting that as opposed to shitty managers exploiting employee goodwill is 100% fair play. Don't like it? Suck it up, buttercup, this is competitive capitalism.
3. We all need to push for better regulatory enforcement. As many have said, most things are legitimate wage theft, rewriting of time cards and other explicitly disallowed actions that companies get away with because regulatory agencies and methods have been so gutted by regulatory capture and lobbying.
Most of society just wants a basic fucking life - it doesn't need to be extravagant but it also doesn't need to be work / eat / sleep and that's it, either. The bar has been lowered so far over the past few decades. There is so much wealth in this country and you have people fighting for scraps - it's pathetic. Cost of living vs. wages and the growth chart tells pretty much the entire story.Quote:
Originally Posted by californiagrown
People also have trouble acknowledging the impact of circumstances because it bruises their little bootstrap egos. I've been extremely successful and I'll be the first to admit that it was far easier to get there in part due to my white middle class upbringing and then some luck along the way. Sure, I made good decisions along the way as well and worked hard but I'm not such a narcissistic prick that I can't acknowledge those advantages and good fortune. I don't look down on someone flipping burgers, they have the same right to a good life as well, one where they aren't afraid to go to the doctor because even with health insurance they can't afford the premiums. America has devolved into a fucking scam.
How many people in this thread are pretending to WFH, spending a soft “40” on zoom calls and slack chats?
Sent from my iPhone using TGR Forums
America is one big MLM company. But what do I know, I'm wearing flip flops at an office today. Soft 40 sounds more like a hard 15.
I once watched a 12 hour bridge deck pour that kicked off at midnight and thought to myself “wow, I’m glad I worked hard so I don’t have to do that”.Quote:
Originally Posted by nickwm21
(That’s sarcasm in case you didn’t catch it)
This is kinda gets to the heart of the problem:
”Abstract
This paper quantifies employer market power in US manufacturing and how it has changed over time. Using administrative data, we estimate plant-level markdowns—the ratio between a plant's marginal revenue product of labor and its wage. We find most manufacturing plants operate in a monopsonistic environment, with an average markdown of 1.53, implying a worker earning only 65 cents on the marginal dollar generated. To investigate long-term trends for the entire sector, we propose a novel, theoretically grounded measure for the aggregate markdown. We find that it decreased between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, but has been sharply increasing since.”
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20200025
This is looking specifically at manufacturing, but it’s certainly not limited to it.
What do you think Executives do? Also, tying direct work hours is a bit of a misnomer in a lot of thought-driven industries. One productive hour could eclipse thousands of non-productive ones from an outcome perspective. To paraphrase - there is not necessarily a linear relationship between hours worked and value created in many roles.Quote:
Originally Posted by nickwm21
Here is an easy one:
What quality of life should a worker at a meat packing plant have after being deemed “essential” and required to work in close conditions with little mitigations for CoVID?
Should they be able to afford a car, a home, a new fridge, retirement savings?
They are “essential” after all.
Antiwork makes me shrug. Yes, there are asshole employers out there abusing minimum wage employees. They shouldn't do that and those folks should be called to the carpet. The employees should also be looking upwards to better opportunities as well. Minimum wage jobs were never intended to be careers, they are skill and resume builders that teach folks how to be an employee. Interns and apprentices. If you're in your mid 30's and only working for minimum wage, that's on you 100%. There is nothing that life could have dealt you that I haven't seen someone from the laborers union rise up and overcome something far, far worse. Born in a poor community? That sucks. Meet Jose, his home was burnt to the ground and he walked from El Salvador to the U.S. as a child with the clothes on his back and no education. Upon arriving in the US, he got C's and D's though middle and high school, becoming the most educated member of his family. He can work because of Obama's DREAM policy, but lives in constant fear that his status will be pulled as the government still hasn't figured out a path to citizenship and he will be deported to a nation where he hasn't set foot in since he was 12 years old. He makes $160k/year because he shows up and works as a union carpenter, is one of the best, and does the OT. The fuck is your excuse again?
With a high school education, a bit of personal drive, and the ability to show up for work 5 days a week for 8 hours, you can make 100k/year in California working in the trades once you reach Journeyman at age 22. With vacation, pension, and all the rest.
But swinging a hammer or running an excavator is dirty hard work. It's called work because it's not vacation.
Essential, or valuable? There are a shitton of tiny rubber o-rings in my life that are essential. But, i dont think they should cost more than $0.05 because they are a dime-a-dozen (don't do that math...).Quote:
Originally Posted by oldnew_guy
To answer your question, I think a low tier worker at a meatpacking plant should be able to afford a beater car, an older fridge, a small home in an "affordable area" and should receive a pension and SS along with universal healthcare.
The folks on the pour crew made more money that night than 97% of the folks that post on antiwork do in a week. Without a college education or english being their first language.Quote:
Originally Posted by oldnew_guy
The government deemed them essential during lockdowns. Not valuable, essential to the continued functioning of our economy and society.Quote:
Originally Posted by californiagrown
At my R&D former job I could feel all the strands of thought kinda percolating in my head during most waking hours. This lead to some breakthroughs (for lack of a better word) as I was walking the dog at 10 am or taking a shower at 7 pm after a mtb ride. Really hard to quantify how many hours I worked per week but the flexibility was awesome & appreciated…one of the reasons I always try to be kind toward frontline workers in the service industry.Quote:
Originally Posted by schuss
Well for starters, a path to citizenship would be nice. So many of them don’t have basic workers rights because of the threat of ICE hanging over them.Quote:
Originally Posted by oldnew_guy
I think a large part of the "problem" is the assumption that in the back in the day no one faced adversity.
Wage theft is by far the biggest form of theft and it’s not punishable in criminal courts. If your employer steals $1000 from you (a human) via wage theft you can try to sue them (or the gov’t labor agency can try), but you steal $1000 from your employer (a non-human entity) you can go to jail.Quote:
Originally Posted by schuss
As a society, I think we should celebrate hard work and effort. I also think we should celebrate intelligence and learning and health and wealth. We shouldn’t be a dick about any of them, because you have less to do with any of them than you seem to think.Quote:
Originally Posted by californiagrown
Why do we think a 40 hour workweek is the standard? Because most people are capable of putting in that effort. I used to be able to pull 80 hour weeks for months and months. That was before kids and getting older. I just can’t do it now on any kind of repetitive basis, partially because I’m older, partially because I have other obligations, partially because it just isn’t worth it to me anymore.
It’s a continuum. At this point I’m in the 50-60 hour range. But if I’m on the 20 hours/week of sustained effort continuum (lots of people who “work” 40 hours/week are actually putting in more like 15-20, you know who you are), but am still a net positive to the economy at that level of contribution, shouldn’t I be able to do so without starving?
This is also true. I work a soft 20 on average if I'm being honest, but I'd also say I work smarter not harder (I own a piece of the company so I'm comfortable with this). I've done very little tangible work the past few months other than strategic thinking and approach (aside from answering questions and giving guidance to my team), but in that process I did manage to onboard the largest client we've ever had in 15 years and as a result everyone at our company got nice quarterly bonuses due to that revenue. I can only do this because of 20+ years of experience in my industry, but none-the-less I respect the hell out of those who are grinding it out and doing "real" work.Quote:
Originally Posted by schuss
wow just here to post in this thread
woke up tried to get to work realized I have no motivation and hate my job
trying to get my end of month invoicing done now I'm motivated that I'm hitting the 120k billable mark and checking in on my friends at tgr
plan on retiring around 50 or at least getting a shitty job with no worries and working part time at 50
I'll be dead by 55
the truth is I'll still be here at 52 raking in the dough from these titans of industry traveling in my 200k van 8 weeks of the year
life is a bitch
the hardest thing I'll do today besides filling an office chair with fart juice is making sure maryjanerottencrotches ice maker is making premo ice
drywallers are drywalling a house fielding a few phone calls from people who are angry with me
Unless you enjoy a cynical world view , you have to mix in some R/FIRE with your R/antiwork time.
reddit is a bigger cesspool than this place
wait its right up there with facebook "look I went on an adventure and this is what I had for lunch today" "whats my algorithm"
no shitQuote:
Originally Posted by paulster2626
I just interviewed with Mercy Hospital in Baltimore to join their IT staff. It didn't go well
IT Director: Tell me about yourself
db: database professional for over twenty years - 12 in healthcare. I write ETL routines and manage data loads to data warehouses in ambulatory and acute care environments and I have billing and HL7 experience
IT Director: Why do you want to work here
db:I am excited to learn Epic Kaboodle, Clarity and Coghito and Healthy Planet
I am excited to drive the cost of healthcare down by giving case workers the tools and information they need to manage at risk patients. I think the cost of healthcare is an existential risk to americans.
so what I didn't say is that Mercy is a great place to work and I knew that is what they wanted to hear - and well from my research - it isn't
It Director: You seem to move around a lot and we want you to stay more than a year.
db: I am sure I will stay more than two years and some of the shortness of my tenures can be explained by contracting,
IT Director: Why do you want to leave your current team
db - to learn Kaboodle etc.
IT Direcor: We are looking for someone to stay
db: Would you like to discuss an employment contract? - In no way shape or form do I want to be a part of this team
IT Director: No we aren't thinking that
db: Yeah - I didn't think so. your recruiter reached out to me - I work on a great team. I want to learn epic as the capstone to my career in healthcare
needless to say the job didn't go forward
at my current position that I was being asked to leave, the interview process was positive and all about where the team was going and what we where going to go and that they wanted me
this job interview was about me making stuff up to make them feel good and critiquing my job history. If things went south they would fire me in a heart beat. reading their glassdoor employee comments was chilling
they wonder why the job has been open for over three months
Yep, in my experience most of the people whining about "the great resignation" or other trends just work for shitty companies or are shitty managers. Given remote work spreading, there's more opportunity, so if you can't compete, you're dead. I put up an experienced professional position and got over 1600 applicants in a week and a half. As I've interviewed some, by far the thing that most grabs people is my team and organizational focus on personal development and the level of empowerment or choice I give my staff. This stuff isn't that hard either, as you generally get 10x more productivity out of people over time if you can align them to the stuff they're most interested in and provide at least a modicum of support for them maturing their skills. If the team is foundationally underwater all the time, that's a management failure that management needs to fix, not for your employees to just burn themselves up trying to cover for leadership that's asleep at the wheel as ultimately when bonuses get distributed for the extra work done with the lower level of expense, very little will likely be allocated to those who actually made it happen.
A couple decades ago I saw a housing price exhibit at the state fair in Sacramento. At the time, the average Sacramento house cost 10 years of the average wage. Several decades earlier the average Sacramento house cost twice the average wage. Since then, housing costs have risen a lot, and wages have stagnated. Sacramento is an average US city, nothing special that drives housing costs or suppresses wages.
So I will posit that the "not getting by" part of antiwork is heavily influenced by housing costs. If wages had kept up, life would be more affordable. Corporations wouldn't be able to force shitty work conditions on expendable employees trying to make rent/mortgage. I think unions and fear of communism both helped the worker get a piece of the pie. Now the corps can get away with a few dog food nuggets and keep all the pie for themselves.
I'd estimate that 95% of the problem comes down to housing and healthcare costs. Plenty of economists have done studies showing that universal health care would lead to a massive uptick in the economy, with more people no longer afraid to start new businesses, having more spending money, etc. A lot of health admin paper pushers would lose their jobs but so what?
I am familiar with that line of work. Not sure it's 97%. But I do know some folks on the ports that make 6 figure salaries, have an insanely good pension and healthcare benefits that in most cases have just a GED or HS diploma. Maybe a year of vocational training at best. Can work whatever hours and whenever they choose. I can't think of too many jobs where you can sit in a truck and surf the internet while your crew works and make $250k/year. And when the fish are biting throw a line out in Elliot Bay and catch salmon while being on the clock.Quote:
Originally Posted by Not DJSapp
Random "How it was"
In my peak earning year, 1980, with an AAS I made about $250k net on $300k gross in commissions in todays dollars. I worked 35, 4 day weeks/year. Using pen and paper, most small businesses were able to under report cash income and over report expenses and make more than a CPA working the books. I pity the small restaurant owner today who isn't getting 50%+ of his income in cash like my friend. He had a 6 table restaurant, drove a Porsche, paid alimony to 2 ladies and played golf 5 days a week. When I asked him how he pulled it off he said "A restaurant needs 2 cooks to be successful. One to cook the food and one to cook the books."
And teachers got to write off school supplies. That's gone.
The Koch Brothers funded study agrees.Quote:
Originally Posted by TahoeJ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyC4grL-Uag
Yep. Eliminating the waste that is hospital billing and health insurance (in general) would be massive. Also, not having entrepreneurship be primarily the domain of rich kids would probably mean a lot more businesses and effective solutions in the marketplace. I think there was some stat like 70%+ of funded tech startups came from just 7 universities (mostly Ivies or tech "Ivies").Quote:
Originally Posted by TahoeJ
And let’s not forget this isn’t about a handful of people who hit the lottery and get $100k+ jobs working with a GED. This is about society in aggregate and how it works for most people.
On average, would you say people have the same quality of life with a high school diploma as they did in 1990? I’d say hell no. In my small town growing up there weren’t many college graduates but people with HS diplomas could work 40 hours a week at grocery stores, auto parts stores, restaurants, etc and still afford to live. Now those jobs are considered “entry level” and jerks like a bunch of you think it’s just for kids to get some work experience before going to college or some shit.
“But now people should know they need a college education! A HS diploma doesn’t mean anything?”
Really!? Because that’s how we got into the student loan crisis (nearly $2T in debt there). And you jokers are telling the people that took out loans (because there’s no way most jobs in college can pay tuition plus room nowadays) that they should have planned ahead better and maybe not gone to college! Even with a degree, your average college educated job doesn’t have the buying power it used to.
“What about the trades?! People should go make big money in the trades!!”
Traditionally the trades have been great places to break your body while also not getting paid that well on average. Of course the lucky ones got into union jobs or opened their own shops but the erosion of worker protections and unions sort of shit canned that for most people. Now, there’s finally a shift in wages for trades but it’s been a long time coming.
Yeah, it just feels like the top has blown off for the wealthy and the bottom has fallen out for the rest.
I'm from a fairly privileged lower middle class family and feel some unease about the future, can't imagine what it's like without that support. I guess i feel like I'm treading water with a bit of effort, but can see how many just feel like they're being sucked under.