Almost feels like my brain is broken or some shit.
I’m looking at the pricing of houses in my area and comparing it to my salary, and how the actual fuck is anyone affording a house these days? We’re talking almost half a million for a house that takes <2 days to build and is practically an irl copy and paste of some of the homes down the street. What the actual fuck. It seems like I’m the only one (though I know I’m not) who sees how this is completely at odds with everything I learned about the world.
Also, so salaries. How the fuck are they determined? Because it certainly isn’t the result of how much actual work you do, I’m making nearly six figures and I do jack shit yet I’m supposed to just be OK with how morally repugnant that is, as if I’m not also a piece upholding the same utterly corrupt system as well?
Fuck if I know, I try to say this shit to people irl and they just tell me that the world’s not fair blah blah blah. Yeah homie, “not fair” is quite possibly the biggest understatement ever.
I very much understand what people say when they say that money is not real. Feel free to grill my complete ignorance of Econ too if you wish, maybe it’s just something I’ll never understand
I'll do the usual plug for the book "Bullshit jobs" since no one else has. It talks a lot about the reasons why nothing makes sense.
I feel like I'm losing my mind at work. I feel burnt out despite not really accomplishing anything material. I was just talking with someone who does real work and they talked about how nice it can feel to come home physically exhausted and not have to worry about the shit that will be there next shift. Grass is always greener, but "the more useful your job is the less you're paid" is a very reliable rule when applied inside an industry, and pretty good in general.
Read it a few months ago, and now I’m almost convinced that I shouldn’t have 🙃
The part about “moral envy” has really been fucking with me lately
now I’m almost convinced that I shouldn’t have 🙃
same brother same.
If i were more more capable of dishonesty and being a grifter I'm sure I could use that knowledge to squeeze some more, but I just want to put in some labor and get paid fairly (where homes aren't millions of dollars). More importantly I want that for everyone else.
Fuck that, squeeze. You’re not taking from fellow workers you’re taking from the shareholders. You should be complaining about your pay as often as possible. That shit compounds
Edit: and if you’re young get a new job every 2 years like clockwork
I know, I go in to meetings with the biggest impostor syndrome and come out realizing I was the only one who knew what I was talking about. Swear to god feels like we're playing with dolls sometimes, only instead of having fun I'm trying not to lose it.
It’s its own special kind of hell. Especially when you’re relatively young and you’re just like welp, only 40 years to go.
unfortunately we have created a society where everyone works. You need two people making a 100k to own property. I agree I do jack shit and I feel like I can't save much. And since we both work the weekends just turn into catching up on cleaning. Free time has plummeted. I'm happy to have a house but man I'm burnt out.
If we are all gonna work i need a 4 day or 3 day work week man.
!!!! I try to tell this to people too and they tell me I’m anxious/getting ahead of myself.
truly incomprehensible to me. My dad was the only one working while I was growing up and he as somehow able to provide for myself as well as my other siblings.
It’s almost gotten to a point where I cannot talk about these things because it quickly becomes a conversation about my “inability to adapt” or whatever other bullshit
my mother is a liberal, who mirrors the online chuds for all LGBTQ-related issues, but she did say something very clever to me when I was growing up that still sticks with me. She made the point that the liberal freedoms, such as the right to assembly, right to "free" speech, right to protest and freedom of religion are all very nice, but outside of the West/Europe, they don't really hold much sway, since people in most other places are way more interested in the right to live in their house, and right to clean drinking water, and this was one of the reasons why people from poor countries who moved to europe would often be at odds with the governments here, since "our" governments don't care to enforce any such rights, and instead focus only on the negative rights rather than positive ones.
If we are all gonna work i need a 4 day or 3 day work week man.
3 days, <= 20 hours
How in the hell do I get one of those corporate jobs making almost triple my salary for way less effort? Because I'm looking at the same houses and they're even further away from affordable on my shit wages
Look up if there are Community Land Trusts in your area, it's legit the only reason I was able to get my family into a house in Seattle and out of the nightmare rent extortion. Houses are sold at cost, you just agree to sell for the same to the next homeowner, plus some built in equity % for each year lived in the the house to cover upkeep.
Probably won't help OP as he is making too much to qualify for the program. One of the reasons we should be expanding these kind of programs is the increase accessibility so the qualifications can be expanded to more people.
Fucking preach!! We are we fucking sold this idea that if you major in STEM, you’ll just gradually climb your way to the top (as if there aren’t C suites still in the company who should’ve retired decades ago but still want more wealth/power).
I bet fucking Econ 101 didn’t account for that variable. Maybe that means we should make the slightest effort to try to implement some kind of constraint 🤔
Like, holy shit dude. Congrats, your yearly salary is probably as much as I‘ll make in 10. I think you can hire a financial advisor at this point and retire comfortably.
I'm a stem professional. One year senior management told us we had done a good job bringing a new technology to market and that the company was making good earnings per share but that we would nevertheless not get a bonus. Later on, a board member was blessing us with his presence and told us about his art car collection. Fucking art cars, worth a few hundred grand a pop and he had a dozen. I rode a fucking bike to work and rented a 700 sqft apartment. That dumb fucking asshole, I hope his dick rots off.
How fucked is it that my first thought was “oh wow half a million, he must live somewhere with cheap house prices.” Of course it’s not cheap in the abstract, just a sign of how monumentally insane home prices have got in high demand urban and suburban areas. My FIL is selling her house and the ask price is $1.5 million. We’re talking about a modest, 2 bedroom (with an attic that could be used as an extra bedroom but due to the layout can’t be listed as such) house, not some glorious mansion.
And with interest rates now back up due to the Fed trying to tame inflation by beating down the working class again, the sort of people who used to be able to just barely afford those mortgages can’t now. And like you said, we’re not talking minimum wage earners or entry level white collar workers, we’re talking households making 2-3 times the nation median household income can’t afford to buy a house.
I think this is part of the reason millennials and zoomers are having fewer kids, besides the cost and starting families latter in life due to those costs. We know how fucked everything is and that it’s likely going to get more fucked, so if we want our kids to have the best chance possible we have to maximize resources per kid which means fewer of them. Effectively, we have to put all our eggs in one basket because we have so few of them.
Honestly, this is one of the only places I can go to sorta check my sanity. I get that we live in an endless age of information and every “bad thing” is at your fingertips blah blah, but what about when the bad things show up at your front door.
It’s as if people act like “the information age” isn’t literally an illustration of things happening to people living in the world.
It’s like a bad movie where the whole town isn’t concerned about the killer until people in the city start dying. And even that isn’t an apt comparison because the killer is here and no one gives a fuck (idk might be a huge stretch but that’s where my brain went for some reason)
Not to cut myself on this edge, but it feels like Donnie Darko where
spoiler
It turns out the preacher is a criminal predator but everyone keeps supporting him and refusing to believe the stark evidence
It’s right up in our faces how fucked up the system is right now, but so many people willfully deny it because they’re uncomfortable with the implications in acknowledging it.
Damn you just gave me a whole new perspective
The fucked up system is right in our face to a degree never before seen in history (arguable but hopefully you catch my drift). I don’t know if this is too hyperbolic but I feel imprisoned in a way. And if I feel imprisoned having to be babysat by my laptop, I can’t even comprehend how others feel
And all I can do now is shout into an online void about how everything sucks and continues to get worse
There's been decades of fucking around, and we're due for some weeks of finding out.
And meanwhile the reactionaries will blame the lack of kids on soybeans and Jewish space lasers
my shitty ancient doublewide on like 0.3 acre surrounded by industrial zoning is worth over 150k and i paid about what a used truck goes for now 5 years ago
i have done no renovation work and only let it degrade further.
makes no sense
we should all invest in your doublewide until that stonk goes to the moon
supposedly if they were built after 1990 they tend to appreciate since comprehensive federal regulations dropped that led to better built manufactured homes.
mine is like 1994. the interior is totally stock and shit but the previous owner did put a new roof on, new HVAC, and other essential work.
but yeah sometimes you get lucky. no joke found this thing in a classified ad being offloaded by a rent to own company. but you are right unless you are willing to risk getting scammed there's no way to get a house for under 60k like that. legit thought we were going to get murdered when we went to see the address lol
Re: Salaries
Salaries are quite literally a social construct- there is no objective "correct salary" for any job, it's a constant game where the companies pay as little as possible to keep you around and you have to fight for any raise (which they will then pretend is all you deserve).
You could always use your ample downtime to commit time "theft" if you work at home and aren't subjected to dystopian af surveillance by your employer.
That’s what I’m doing right now 😌
But it is extremely dumb because I sorta have to be by on my computer on standby, otherwise I’d be out doing shit that actually helps people
Remote work is both a blessing and a curse
Remote work is both a blessing and a curse
yah its a fuck. I try and get out do stuff anyhow. connectivity with laptops and smartphones is such that you kinda can just go as long as you can interrupt it with work at any time, and you get any relevant work notifications on your phone.
I rent a 2 bed attic. You can't fit 2 people in the kitchen. You have to crouch in the shower. It's cold as shit.
To buy it would cost 400k.
Salaries are determined by as little as porky thinks he can get away with and sometimes a statutory minimum.
Housing prices are determined by financial speculation.
But porky pays him nearly 6 figures not because it's as little as he can get away with
It is as little as he can get away with at the moment and he's hard at work to decrease that number by making it cheaper to buy the relevant labor commodity - the laborer with a particular skillset that porky needs for production. Hence the heavy-handed push for bootcamps and STEM education, for example, to decrease the price of labor for programming and data stuff. In reality, this is an attempt to increase the size of the relevant labor pool so he can pay them as little as he pays everyone else. This is also what capitalist media call a "labor shortage". In reality, it's that porky doesn't want to pay enough for labor so he wants to instead will try to increase the supply and have some propaganda to cover it. Offshore. Bring in new exploitable labor, ideally as some kind of vulnerable economic underclass. Crush unions. You know the drill. It's 200 years old.
This thinking underestimates the ideological role of treats. You need enough of the population of the imperial core to not question things too closely which you do by buying them off a little bit. OP is being paid 85k with the hopes they will be a right-wing Democrat and not a class-concious socialist.
Porky doesn't do that, generally. And almost never intentionally as its own goal. If he did, then SocDemery would work. Imperial core workers are bought off, but this is an effect of the system porky helped build under capitalism. Namely, imperialism premised on technological advantage in the core, unequal exchange to get cheap commodities into the core, and a war economy that placed industry in the core. These all built up relative wages for the non-marginalized groups in the core. At the time, this often meant unionized jobs, and as you mention, there were scraps thrown out to stimy socialist politics like the New Deal (though porky usually prefers cops and prisons over higher wages).
That's not the whole picture, of course. While unequal exchange initially looked like the previous eurocolonial scheme of extracting raw goods from superexploited labor in the global south, capitalist pressures started to offload more and more industrial production to the periphery (we can see China doing well at taking advantage of this). This is where treats come from. But it didn't happen because porky wanted to buy off imperial core workers that were threatening to be too socialist, it happened because the colonial strategy changed. Under that strategy, rather than having core workers produce and consume their own goods, they'd largely be imported. So then where do the relatively higher wages in the imperial core come from? Aside from cheaper consumer imports increasing the apparent size of one's paycheck, the answer is, more or less, finance capital and the government throwing around fictional investments to keep everything else running in the imperial core. Everyone works service jobs. The ones paid the most are those that maintain technological advantage and are heavily financialized, like tech. Financialized industries are just about establishing monopolies, so really they are non-productive in intent and usually outcome, e.g. Doordash just taking over the "delivery guy" job as a monopoly. Or Amazon. These strategies make an industry flush with cash relative to its ability to establish monopolies (or to promise monopolies while they fight with each other) and fighting over the limited workers that can build the tech, so they get higher wages. Porky wants them to be less limited, hence my previous comment's point.
In turn, finance capital is propped up by imperialism, and particularly the position of the dollar in trade. Government spending is premised on the same thing. And of course, imperial core workers were provided little pieces of the financial speculation game but not because porky wanted them to be bought off, but because porky wanted his own piece of the action and it ended up working as an incentive for the larger population. Things like skyrocketing housing values and tying retirement to the stock market. Porky maintains land speculation because it makes him money, often through monopoly, but (white) homeowners benefit from it. Porky wants to gamble with and/or take your money on the stock market but in tying workers' retirements to it has made it easier to convince them that "the economy" is stocks and they need to pump those values to do well personally.
There's also a lot to say about anticommunist economic planning but my comment is already too long lol.
Anyways, OP is paid $85k because that's what porky can get away with. Porky doesn't care about OP's politics so long as they're not unionizing the shop or creating other large costs. Porky wants to fire OP and replace them with a worker paid $50k but there's nobody easily available who can do OP's job in the imperial core for that little money. Porky isn't going to train someone from a lower wage because they (correctly) think they'll just leave for the $85k job of their competitor. They'd much rather see the wider supply increase as this doesn't provide their competitors with an advantage, so they offload to public education. This is also why bootcamps give preferential hiring access to their sponsors - they'd otherwise be subsidizing their competitors.
Anyways fuck porky communism will win.
wages have a function of instilling loyalty but desperation is much preferred. who gets the 'i hope you don't turn that education on us' wage is still decided by the labor market, not self interest. they'd of kept paying teachers well if they were thinking of anything besides bottom lines
Just off the top of my head:
-"House Flipping" culture
-Short-term rentals and AirBnb
-"Professional Landlordism"
-Corporate residential landholding
-Rabid boomer landowners who lose their minds when any rise in property tax gets mentioned, which results in artificially inflated property valuations
-No rent control
Obviously the REAL answer is Capitalism, but the above phenomena create ripple effects across the whole housing market, which is something that the r*dditors always overlook when they quote stats that say "corporate ownership of residential properties only represent a small fraction of the market." Yeah, maybe they do, but even that small fraction ripples out to housing precarity for millions of people.
Every time they do that, I always ask myself "Are these anglos aware that they're acting out their own stereotypes about Jews?" if I didn't know any better, I would think that they were all doing an antisemitic minstrel show, but nope, this is their actual values at work that they will always blame on Jews whenever.
Every accusation a confession.
This is the point that Marx was making in his Jewish question essay, that all of the stereotypes of Jews were just the bourgeois projecting their own fucked up behaviors under capitalism onto a scapegoat. Of course he approaches it by accepting the initial premises of antisemitism as a rhetorical way to prove how ridiculous it is, so some of the statements seem a little iffy out of context
Yeah, it's like the inverse of how libs operate as Thomas Frank describes them in Listen, Liberal.
"For Daniel Gross, writing in 2000, it all came down to 'arrogant' capital versus 'humble' capital - meaning that selfish and stuck-up investment bankers were republicans while modest and unpretentious ones were democrats. For the journalist David Callahan (among other things) a matter of the 'dirty rich' versus the 'clean rich'."
Just swap Mr. Gross' words (fitting name) here with 'democrat' when you see 'republican', 'liberal' when you see 'conservative', and vice versa. Boom, you now have broken down fascism's core tenants.
To be honest, I think a lot of the above are very minor reasons compared to just the effective cartel between landlords and property developers - If poor people had any meaningful mechanisms to own or build their own houses at or near cost, the rest wouldn't matter at all. But I guess I also admit that I'm edging very close to just 'the answer is capitalism'.
Yeah, maybe they do, but even that small fraction ripples out to housing precarity for millions of people.
And if it didn't, they'd buy a bigger slice to make damn sure of the ripples.
The university swears to you that "90% of their classes have less than 15 students". Meanwhile, most of the remaining 10% are lecture halls of 120+ students, bumping up the lecture hall's share of the average student's experience to over half.
Same thing with apartment buildings.
Economics isn’t really a fucking science it’s more of a social contract on how we all work together and decide to distribute wealth creation we could all be paying each other in blowjobs if we wanted to
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-Om2rzpC9I
Pretty interesting video where an economics professor kinda guilty confesses that he took part in a political project that was designed to rip off the average American and neuter anything that was left of the civil state.
That was my weird fucking rant
We’re talking almost half a million for a house
My first thought was "only half a mil?"
My brain is mostly wormAlso yeah the less valuable work you do the more money you make.
500K for a manufactured home. Takes less than two days to build
It’s all a cheap joke man I want off this ride
Also, just the natural result of completely normalizing the phrase “life’s not fair”
People pretty much gave the bourgeois clearance to wreck havoc beyond comprehension on the planet because “life’s not fair” I guess 🤪
As if it were a tenant in some dogma of capitalism
Life inherently isn’t fair. But you know what society and government can be used to do…? Mitigate that unfairness
Are you saying the people with power should use said power to marginally improve things?
Preposterous
Also, just the natural result of completely normalizing the phrase “life’s not fair”
Nah, the real natural result of that is carbon-negative pork harvests
It's the other way around.
The more money you make in your position, the less valuable work falls on you to do.
so salaries. How the fuck are they determined
Not sure how yours is determined because I don't know what you do, but in software there are contractors that charge exorbitant prices to do like the most basic programming task. So if a company pays a developer a salary, they don't have to do very much to make it extremely worth the while of the business. Like if someone makes 80-100k per year and develops like an api layer using cloud services, maybe a few months work, it's already more than paid for itself. Anything else they work on that year, or doing tech support work, is basically free. I have a friend who writes yaml configs for azure services and makes incredible amounts of money, but works very little. But like you say, you have to always be by the computer. So even though the pay is high the work is still exploitative.
I’m a salaried SQL developer but here’s where the guilt comes in. I don’t “develop” anything. I parse a script that someone else wrote decades ago and tweak it to work for certain scenarios.
lmao a lot of people are referencing bullshit jobs in this thread, and this answer is like the epitome of a bullshit job. Sounds like I might be a duct taper if I’m remembering right?
It gets difficult though because I’ve talked to some programmers who fucking grind so maybe I’m just an extreme outlier.
SQL developer who does fucking nothing solidarity, comrade!
if my company knew how many on the clock naps i have i'd be fucked, but theres legit nothing to do lol
How the fuck are [salaries] determined?
If you actually want to know, corporations are in a bit of a bind because (in the US) they need to be compliant with discrimination law (pay people somewhat equally for the same work) and pay competitively with other companies, but it is illegal to cooperate with other companies to share salary data (because they could act like a cartel to depress wages if enough companies were in cahoots).
So they need to set salary ranges that they actually follow and make sure similar employees are paid similarly and that any protected class isn't paid too little compared to others, and also pay similarly to other companies- but without getting data from those companies.
So, corporations submit salary data to consultants who anonymize and aggregate the data and send it back out to all the companies who submit data. There are like 4 main data vendors in the industry, and pretty much all Fortune 500 (and many more) use them.
Now, here's the interesting part. Most companies have a strategy whereby they aim to pay at about the 50th percentile for most jobs in most places (with some exceptions, paying more or less for some jobs depending on what the company decides is important - maybe they pay above market average for engineers or sales or whatever if that's important to them making money). So, if most companies are paying at this average rate for most jobs in a given industry, the average for each job gets narrower each year until it converges, and most jobs get paid about the same range at one company as at any other (within the same industry). So it's "basically" a price-fixing/cartel scheme but with extra steps. It does reduce variability, which could be good, but it may also depress wages somewhat, which would be bad.
