chat

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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).

Econ is just capitalism’s state religion

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 worm

Also yeah the less valuable work you do the more money you make.

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.

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.

well there's always a silver lining. Remote work, making more than the median household income after only 4 years - can't be sniffed at.

in my country, they call such people the 'squeezed middle'. And to be frank, and no offence intended to your good self, they need squeezing like a lemon, since its the only way their interests (material, not proclaimed interests) are going to start aligning with the majority, the masses.

in any case, I expect you'll probably have to move somewhere cheaper or 'undesirable' - which will likely 'gentrify' the area, forcing those already there out, in the usual cycle.

MFW Porky's so picky I am now considering fucking grad school JUST so maybe, just maybe, I can finally have some pork give me the permission to work for them for 40k a year. My childhood hyped me up to think I would do something special only to find out that I'm just useless surplus population.

In a more just system, porky would be threatened with jail time and be forced to give people jobs. You know, hold up his end of the bargain of being a job creator rather than a gatekeeper.

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