sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
Suddenly I cannot remember the color of your eyes
Or the things we said as we stood together for the last time
User ID: 636
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
22hr ago
Indeed. The kinds of people complacent enough to be okay living a 1920s existence today are probably pretty contemptible.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
22hr ago
I think this is mostly slang among Brits of Caribbean extraction (see "London multicultural English").
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
23hr ago
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
23hr ago
Well, of course you don't get to take your 2020s level of wealth into the 1920s time machine. That was never part of the deal.
the lack of middle/upper class takers doesn't tell you much about its desirability.
IME a significant portion of the UMC/UC is comfortable with, shall we say, questionable tax practices (dubious business write-offs, under the table nannies, etc). I don't think it's their acute sense of honor that keeps them from doing this.
Since you mentioned the upper class, let's look at this the other way. You can withdraw 40k a year from a 1M principal indefinitely. Certainly you can live better on 40k a year than the median 1920s person, and it won't take decades to save up 1M on a high income especially if you are already practicing for your 1920s lifestyle. Yet basically no high earners do this outside of FIRE weirdos. There's just not that much demand to live like you're in the 1920s. People would rather live in the 2020s and work 40 hours a week.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
You need to provide evidence that you are working full time to apply for jobs, or they’ll cut you off.
I am sure that many unscrupulous individuals find a way to spend less than forty hours a week looking for a job.
And you need to be genuinely poor or they’ll tell you to live off your savings.
Naturally.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
Is scarcity really still so much that people need to work 40 hours a week for the system, the same as a century ago? Probably not. You're probably getting ripped off.
You can probably get a 1920s level of existence by going on the dole and working zero hours a week. I mean, better, because you can still post on the motte when you're on the dole. Not a lot of takers though, relatively speaking.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
That money should be reserved for the highest types of people
Such as, for example, yourself?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
one count of the production of a knife.
Do you need a loicense to sharpen metal in Ireland or is this "production" in the sense of "brandishing"?
You don't have to go into Marxism to protect your True Self. You can also go into crackpot science.
I know a certain person. Reasonably smart, has a PhD. He's always had a bit of a chip on his shoulder, but the years have not been kind. He sees people much smarter meet with professional success and status while not seeing a path to it himself. But he knows that while he may not be "quantitatively" as smart as the people at the top, he's much better at "making connections" (aka schizo daydreaming). He knows that all of academia is fake, a charade where people blindly parrot whatever the boss believes which is why a free thinker such as himself could never get ahead. But he knows that he deserves to get ahead, that he deserves to be on top and to have everyone (including, of course, Father) admit that they were wrong and he was right.
His current project is a new model for fundamental physics. You see, the reason he can't conceptualize quantum mechanics or whatever isn't because he doesn't have the chops but because it's bullshit and the lemmings in academia just eat it up. He's getting close. He's got a small following, mostly senile boomers and lumpenproles, but it's growing. His true self is coming into being. Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the academy.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
I also get more out of many investments than I put in, I'm still entitled to it.
You're entitled to those because you own the investment vehicle.
government should not renege on promises if it can be helped.
It can't be helped without cannibalizing the ~entire economy for Medicare and SS.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
We already have a PvP zone. It's called Washington.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
Bodily integrity? Maybe if you think that photographs steal your soul.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
I simply mean that 80% of Americans work in the service sector. They aren't manufacturing physical goods. They're not drilling for oil. They're not raising crops. They're not framing houses. They're making marketing campaigns for clients. They're writing B2B SaaS platforms. They're providing healthcare. Etc.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
Sure. Unfortunately, cutting off the spigot that keeps grandma alive isn't popular with grandma or her kids, for the most part. Personally, I'm 100% in favor of Medicare death panels. I suspect it's a minority position though.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
Most Americans are already employed in servicing other people directly! I don't think that most Americans would be working a menial job if they had to walk around rather than sit at a desk to do what it is they do.
The vast majority of actual job growth has been menial healthcare jobs.
Debatable. There's 400k more RNs than there were ten years ago. I'd say being an RN is no more menial than being an onsite product marketer.
I do work in the service sector in a way I suppose, but I mostly do onsite product marketing. Depends on how you define "service."
I think it's pretty unambiguous. Do you grow crops? Do you extract resources from the earth? Do you produce any physical goods?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
The question is not whether X% are menial or not. The question is whether marginal new healthcare jobs are more menial than the marginal new non healthcare job. My contention is that it isn't.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
Did I imply that healthcare employment is solely due to orthopedic surgeons?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
For comparison, the rest of FAANG make more than $500k of profits per employee and have been for a long time.
It's going to take you a long time to become a centimillionaire at 500k a year.
Amazon has to many people in comparison
Amazon has a large staff of directly employed warehouse personnel. Other FAANG companies do not; in fact, the literal janitors are not actually on the payroll, they are contractors.
even here, $50k extra per year makes a significant difference for the janitor.
My contention isn't that income wouldn't increase for the lowest paid employees under this scheme, it's obvious that it would. My contention is that it's impossible for the CEO to be a billionaire if he's only earning 3x what the janitor makes unless the janitor is a centimillionaire, which is impossible.
Maybe makes it more obvious that Bezos only got there by exploiting a large number of workers.
It's difficult to explain how paying people market wages is exploitation, but ymmv depending on the amount of ressentiment in the target audience.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
they're also extremely menial
The healthcare sector includes everything from asswipers to orthopedic surgeons to pharma r&d. Not all of these are menial.
service focused
Sure, but you already work in the service sector, along with 80% of Americans.
there's also the fact that young people are already being taxed a huge proportion of their income going to elders.
This is indeed bad, but one must hope the present levels of spending will prove unsustainable with a bigger dependency ratio.
So you're being taxed so you can get the money recycled back to you serving as a servant basically to old people you don't know.
Anybody on the receiving end of the $7T of government spending (including, for example, highly paid Amazon engineers) is also in this situation. I'd rather the government did and spent less, but it's hardly an apocalyptic scenario.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
That, combined with the fact that close to 18% of the economy is now in healthcare, has got me a bit depressed on the economy.
Healthcare jobs are, uh, real jobs and as a society gets richer the demand for healthcare increases.
If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society?
One of these things is not like the others. Do you propose simply killing the boomers? If not, somebody's got to take care of them, and we haven't hit peak boomer retirement yet.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
I'm not going to bother doing the math on this over the course of Amazon's existence, but last year their net income was $78B which is $50k per employee. Companies usually reinvest much of the income into themselves rather than take it as profit.
The whole discussion is why we are still working as much as in 1920.
It does, though. You just can't do it with significant wealth. The point is what it takes to get a 1920s level of existence today. It doesn't take 40 hours of work a week.
It's not about your life or mine. You are the one who brought up the upper class. My point is that people who can amass 1M in savings in a reasonable timeframe almost never quit the rat race and live on 40k a year in perpetuity. That tells you something about the demand for such a lifestyle.
Vulnerable to what, exactly?
Sure. The best version of A is I get paid $1M a year to make art at a leisurely pace. Everything else is a "shitty version" of that. if you want 2020s living standards, you gotta work like the average 2020s citizen. Can we not conclude anything from the fact that nobody takes the 1920s material conditions gambit in return for limitless free time? I think we can.
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