Minimum Wage Machine dispenses free money at the simple turn of a crank

I like that one.
Yet, you seem to be itching to pick a fight with me over what you think I have said, or what you think I have meant, get that head cannon all nice and fiery.
But it seem like a lot of work, for no material prize, so.

I mean, the part where you suggested poor people shouldn’t get heart transplants was pretty revealing.

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No, he never said that, that’s just your head “cannon” misfiring or something /s

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Still seems better than talking to customers.

I don’t know about the US, but I doubt it’s a big thing. From my experience, only a few organizations realize that fair compensation is an essential ingredient for productive collaboration, and even fewer feel ready to do something about that.

On several occasions I have been hired to facilitate the development of a salary formula, and I found that it’s really helpful to have people talk about what they need, and why, than about skills, productivity or merit.

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For me (and I’m sure others here) I try to respect ALL kinds of labor, not just the supposedly “manly” forms of labor… for instance, I respect the work my uncle does in landscaping and my aunt does in education equally, because they both work hard and contribute their valuable skills to the community. The world is a better place for what they BOTH do, and they BOTH deserve respect. So maybe don’t dump on people who you think are “lazy” for not doing one kind of labor over another?

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Just the opposite. I think things are worse now. Please reread what I wrote before you pop an aneurysm.

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Exactly.

I’ve spoken here before about the fact that my grandfather was a manual laborer – who literally dug ditches for the phone company his entire working life – but he was able to OWN A HOUSE and a car, raise two kids who went to college, and his wife didn’t need to work outside the home just so that the family could make ends meet. That is simply not possible now. Nowhere in the country.

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I’ve dug ditches*, and I’ve pushed pixels. They are each differently satisfying, and each differently exhausting. Whichever of them I’ve done for money at various points of my life, I did the other for fun.

I think the typical ‘knowledge worker’ could learn a lot about life by carrying cinder blocks all day long no matter the weather, and I wish the average landscaper knew how hard it actually is to keep your ass in a chair all day and sort out tangled piles of CSS until the world starts looking like an endless array of nested DIVs.

(*Most of my ‘ditch digging days’ were various forms of construction labor, but there was a nontrivial amount of digging actual ditches and footings. The ‘ditch digging’ I do these days tends toward things like gathering/moving big piles of rocks and miscellaneous fun and/or exciting farm-type labor; but I needed the brevity.)

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Exactly. I’ve laid roofs during the summer, and it’s grueling work, but also quite satisfying. I enjoy physical work, and when you’re laying shingles and get in a groove, it’s a wonderful feeling. It’s even better when you’re working with colleagues and the whole team is in a rhythm and you’re dropping row-after-row of shingles, leapfrogging each other, and finishing a whole apartment building roof in minutes.

The tedious stuff is the set up and clean up. When you’re laying shingle with a pneumatic stapler, you’re in a rhythm - place, POP, POP, POP - it becomes Zen-like. When you get home after 10-12 hours of it, you’re physically drained but, at the same time, you feel great. There are definitely days when I’d trade desk work for that in a heartbeat.

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I’ve done at least some amount of most of the trades, apart from plumbing and actual electrical, but never had the ‘pleasure’ of roofing. I did once get to deshingle stripes into a roof to soften it up for the chainsaw. That was kinda fun, but probably not quite as satisfying.

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