Sorry. Just saw your second post.
As long as* Imaintain an iron grasp of the electoral process and guarantee I don’t pay my share of a progressive tax this shouldn’t affect me!
Charity actually makes everyone feel better, right?!? I know I felt great at my $10,000/plate opera fundraiser!
Oh silly, haven’t you heard of gated communities and private security? who cares if the poors all kill eachother and steal eachothers stuff!
But if they are are mostly dirty immigrants and non-whites, then I can just just tell myself that they aren’t real Americans, and if they would just leave, true, prosperous America would thrive again! Poof, I just did!
*as long as, in this case, defined as the time it takes for the guillotines come out…
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For many years, that’s what I did. Small one-room studio, no car, no health insurance, no furniture purchases (dumpster diving, etc.), clothes from second-hand stores. Didn’t actually have a bed until my 30s when my grandpa died and I got his bedroom set.
The ONLY way this was possible was living in major cities with public transportation. And even then, as you say, all it takes is one emergency and…it all goes to hell in a handbasket.
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My bed is a loaner, I’m almost thirty, and more fortunate than most. Although Obamacare means I can now afford the bottom-of-the-barrel high-deductible state-subsidized insurance that is so complicated to apply for and keep that it’s barely worth it.
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Except me 
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Well, you’re not a THING, now are you? 
I’m pretty sure it’s all three of those things are the problem.
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That’s the thing with averages, you can’t compare the average wage with a specific example of housing pricing, only with the average.
Some housing will be well below the average, some will be above the average, as will pay, the key insight here is this:
If you add up all the money paid to minimum wage workers, it will not be enough to afford a 1 bedroom apartment for everybody. That’s what the average tells you.
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It doesn’t really work to argue using FDR, because most free-marketeers think he was practically Karl Marx for daring to stand up to business with the New Deal – showing that he cared about poor people is just confirming it. This sort of thing only works if you can find somebody like Reagan or similar saying something uncharacteristically generous towards the poor.
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But the fact is not everbody needs to have a “skill”. As demonized as “unskilled labor” is, an awful lot of useful jobs are unskilled. And not every skilled job is useful. Many such jobs in the financial sector are actually worse than useless, despite being lucrative.
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I understand that. I have no problems understanding the data that is presented, and it’s troubling. But the Vox headline is inaccurate, because the Vox headline does nothing to indicate “in the average”, etc.
Many people will see the headline and just start repeating it as a talking point without reading further to understand that it’s averages. My beef is simply with the inaccurate, sensationalist headline. It’s certainly a broader problem with media in general, but for whatever reason this particular headline has bothered me more than usual since I saw it originally a few days ago.
And what counts as a skill? I mean yeah as a sysadmin there is a lot of knowledge in it but skill? maybe in the odd script and what I previously did, server OS installs 95% of the time now is pretty much a robot does it and any junior admin can double check the monitoring and backups post install and dollars to donuts 5 years from now that will be scripted. Which leaves only things like 10 physical server clusters that need a lot of fiddly custom post OS configuration and that was a maybe once a year build.
So now I am with an application support group that has remote servers that need care and feeding because the app does not play over a WAN and I already see from the vendor that problem will be worked in the future and we won’t have a NAS/ESXcluster/switch/etc in a rack at the remote sites will also go away and I imagine updates to the application will also take away a lot of the fiddly issues of working with it as well. So then move on to something else?
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So…given that these jobs still need to be done, your recommendation is a permanent quasi-indentured tenement class? If the solution is giving everyone opportunities to rise to the “skilled” labor pool, who will your tenement class be? teenagers? the mentally challenged? prisoners? prisoners of war? slaves?
That is unless you’re suggesting that every person split their day between skilled/intellectual work, manual labor, politics and pursuit of passions…but that would make you a dirty marxist, which something in your tone tells me you’re not.
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This bears repeating. Some people seem to be offended by the idea of their garbage collector making a decent living, yet nobody wants to live in a place filled with garbage.
If it’s a job worth having someone do for you then it’s a job worth paying them for.
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But you didn’t. did you?
Didn’t what?
I read the headline, thought “that headline can’t possibly be accurate” then read the article and realized it wasn’t because it was misrepresenting average state data.
Lots of people don’t go that far. I’ve seen several people on my facebook feed already linking and talking about it as if the headline is the truth.
Ok, we are now fully of the rails and off topic. So let me offer an olive branch and acknowledge your point as valid.
You’re right, the headline should be better.
Now on to the conversation about minimum wage being fucked up.And some levity because I’m not deliberately trying to be a jerk.
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True - good point.
As they used to say in East Germany, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”
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Then the headline did exactly what a headline is supposed to do. It made you read the article.
Headlines are the original clickbait. They aren’t the whole story and never have been. They are often punchy and there to challenge you to read beyond.
Any problem you have with the headline is your problem.
The post you’re responding to made me think of Dirty Jobs. There are a lot of people working very hard at jobs they develop the skills for by DOING THE JOB.
In fact, my dad always talks about how going to college as a prerequisite for going into business is a new phenomenon. If you weren’t training for a profession, you left high school and went straight to work, where you learned on the job and moved up as your skills improved. That was as true for business as it was for blue-collar jobs.
(Apologies in advance: the center video on the home page appears to be auto-start.)
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