We need European pricing where the price is the price. I would go as far as making asking for a tip illegal too. Have restaurants put on their menu that prices include the tip. Raise minimum wage for restaurant workers.
And not just for restaurants, everything, from airline tickets to concert tickets, etc.
OP said “asking for a tip”. If I want to tip a particularly good server experience, everyone should be free to do so. But asking for it, and it comes to mind those places that explicitly stipulate that 10% is minimum mandatory tipping, should be illegal. That’s a hidden fee, not a tip.
People can’t let go of tipping. A few restaurants near me tried it and ended up closing.
Tipping isn’t just a part of culture but it also breaks up the spend for the consumer. You commit to a $15 burger now, then the $3 of tip later. Integrating the tips with the cost makes it seem like everything is more expensive and also makes it not optional for how much you give.
…That’s why people don’t like the service fees, etc. It’s difficult to know, as a consumer, how much you’re actually being asked to spend. If you’re rich, haha who cares? Everybody else has to do this thing called “budgeting.”
Yeah, tipping is pretty messed up. In a lot of states, wait staff are exempt from the minimum wage because they’re expected to treat tips (which are notoriously unreliable) as part of their salary.
Generally, as here in CO, there is still a minimum wage for staff that are regularly tipped, it’s just lower. I believe it’s also (again, as here) generally required that any time the tipping doesn’t make up the difference, companies are required to make it up instead.
That being said, it’s basically a way to advertise much lower prices than they actually charge. Roles that often get tipped tend to make pretty good money, and companies would basically never want to pay that much for those roles (especially when they are used to paying even less than minimum wage).
Weave backed ourselves into a corner for tipping. Restaurants may be convinced to pay a livable wage. But they’re never going to pay the servers what they can actually make in tips.
I was about 5 years into IT, My girlfriend was waiting tables at Ruby Tuesday. Most days she made more than I did. And depending on how bad they ‘adjusted’ their tax claims …
That said, some days she did basically pay to work there.
I suspect if you ask the vast majority of wait staff if they would like to be paid and livable wage or continue a tip-based system they want to stay tip based.
I think that’s very dependent on age. When I was in my early twenties, an inconsistent gig with the potential for high tips was very appealing. When I got into my late twenties/early thirties I moved over to events and catering because they offered a high hourly wage with predictable(ish) hours. If the restaurants pay well enough they’ll be able to find people.
The real problem will be vacation towns. There are some places where most of the restaurants and bars close in the off-season. The staff will work their asses off through the spring and summer, then use their tips to live the rest of the year. For some of these towns, even if the restaurant staff wanted to pick up a job in the off-season, they’d need to drive two hours just to find a part-time gig at Target. I really want tipping to end, but I’m not sure what would happen to these places. The seasonal restaurants could pay more, but I’m not sure they could offer enough to subsidize their staff for half the year.
How’s that any different? You’d get fewer takers for a seasonal job, so shouldn’t pay go up? Just like they now get disproportionate tips, shouldn’t they get a disproportionate living wage?
I’m not sure it will scale properly. Tipping might outpace sales in towns like that, and I’m not really sure what the economics are in maintaining seasonal restaurant. And if there are fewer takers for seasonal jobs, the employers could pay more theoretically, but in the restaurant industry, fewer servers means slower service. Slower service means fewer sales, fewer sales means less profit, and less profit means lower pay. I think places like this would require a UBI program to maintain how they currently operate without tips.
Good for her, but arguably it’s not supposed to be a high paying job. A living wage, sure, but higher than a job that you presumably studied for and required relatively uncommon knowledge seems wrong.
So I guess the answer is no, we wouldn’t expect restaurants to work out how much people get paid in tips and match it, it would be a liveable wage and if the current workers don’t like it they would leave.
I don’t know that your girlfriend getting bankrolled is common across the industry either, tips rely on high traffic and customers with big pockets. Most wait staff don’t brag about how rich they are.
But they’re never going to pay the servers what they can actually make in tips
Im not sure I believe that. I mean, I’ve also known people who said the same things, so clearly there are people who really make out. However I suspect this is highly variable and there are even more just scraping by. I’m sure it greatly depend on the restaurant and the clientele, as well as the actual effort, and I’m sure it highly depends on looks. That 18yr old hottie at the local hot spot may rake it in, but the elderly matron at the local diner works just as hard but with less opportunity
Everyone talks about tips being a reward for good service but tips are almost never proportional to service
Important facts for people that didn’t bother to read the article: it’s $2.1m each, so total is $4.2m. The coverage of the drug was cut on a schedule that was determined in January. The diagnosis of the disease was 5 days after the cut.
The cost isn’t an issue in my mind, but I think good to know how much the parents are in for. Insurance companies exist because of these costs, they should have to cover any treatment that has significantly higher success rates, especially when the lack of coverage will result in death, or other life-long consequences.
The timing and schedule are important as the headline makes it appear this decision was in response to these kids being born with the condition, when in fact, there was no diagnosis at the time of the cut and these kids were still months away from being born when the decision was made.
Final bit, though this wasn’t in the article, the drug is being covered for these kids. It took pressure from the state government apparently, or maybe just all the bad press. Shouldn’t change anyone’s opinion on POS insurers, but it’s at least good news that these kids aren’t condemned to a death sentence.
Insurance companies exist because of these costs, they should have to cover any treatment that has significantly higher success rates, especially when the lack of coverage will result in death, or other life-long consequences.
Yes, they should. But unchecked costs are a big reason why health insurance is so awful right now. We shouldn’t tolerate this price gouging by pharmaceutical companies.
What legitimate reason would there be to price drug like that? Is that what the r&d cost to create it? Greed. Thats where 99.9% of cost issues end up for
Zolgemsma is a modified version of adeno associated virus and has to be grown under specific conditions. It costs $500k-$1m per production.. It’s also a one time injection that functionally cures the person of the disease. There are a couple other options but for comparison, the other therapeutic is Spinraza which is an intermittent intrathecal infusion which is $805,000 for the first year of therapy and $380,000 per year thereafter for the rest of your life.
To be clear, I think we should bear the actual costs of research, development, and manufacture as a society and not profiteer off the sick, but there are some contributory reasons for the price.
yeah this video was helpful to understand the complexity in manufacturing AAVs, namely the raw size of the proteins manufacturers need to create & interweave.
Modern medical research targeting worldwide drug distribution is ridiculously expensive due to legislation in different countries. Gone are the days when a pharmacist could give random shit to the unsuspecting clients to see if they would survive their walk home. And I don’t think you’d want these days to come back.
Not sure how that’s relevant, can you explain a bit more about what you’re thinking? They couldn’t have been diagnosed with a need for the medication at early-stage pregnancy.
Not diagnosed but if there were early indicators of a problem that could fit into a statistical/AI model that they had a large probability of a range of problems.
Because there are very few diseases and conditions that can be detected before birth, and unless they have physical development characteristics (this one doesn’t until after birth) the only way to diagnose them is an invasive procedure that it’s dangerous to the fetus so they are only done when there is a very high suspicion that there is something to detect.
There are a lot of smart hardworking CEOs. But none of them ever seem to get to this level. At some line in the sand CEOs just become idiots playing chess (poorly) from their yachts.
Good leaders that care about their company seem to universally get pushed out at IPO.
well ya, the very nature of the shareholder system demands short term profits, the rug pull has become the industry norm, dismantle the company to make your numbers seem better, inflating value, and sell before it collapses, find your next victim “investment opportunity” and repeat
Once a company is publicly traded it can easily pervert the incentives so that the goal of the CEO becomes to enrich the investors as quickly as possible even at the expense of long term benefit, because stock price and investor satisfaction become the factors contributing most to executive compensation. A CEO who doesn’t care about maximizing their own compensation in favor of employee welfare or company long term success doesn’t keep the support of investors for very long either.
The CEO is just a position that tells everyone that you’ve lied to people, deceived your close ones, pulled off underhanded tactics and more to get to where you are. Now you’re the top of the level shithead who makes money doing fuck all except write or say things for PR clout.
Daniel Ek founded the company. He got to where he’s at by having lots of money. He got that money to found Spotify by being hired into other companies which were acquired. You’re describing “Executive Vice Presidents” that were promoted from within.
At that level of wealth, concepts such as meritocracy (if ever it’s a positive term) are meaningless; let us still tell the fairy tale that capitalism rewards the best of us and not the recommended.
You do have to be hard working to be CEO, there’s just a ton of stuff that needs to be handled around a company at all times. But they are not uniquely smarter or have better decision making skills than other people. A good CEO will understand that they don’t know everything and surround themselves with experts to help them with decision making instead of thinking they know better.
That’s not to say that workers aren’t necessarily equally as hard working, especially when your asshole CEO fires a ton of your coworkers and expects you to pick up the slack.
I heard investors need stocks to forever go up and for that to happen companies need to keep doing things like this. They cant just leave things as they are or something
I am also an investor. If the socks don’t go up I get a rash, shortness of breath and this feeling of inescapable doom. So unless you want to be a murderer I suggest you help me keep the stonks going up.
Not only investors. Everyone needs stocks to forever go up. We’re kind of fucked, because once it becomes apparent that the infinite market growth isn’t possible and we reach a theoretical ceiling of stock market, the world and economy will probably be in serious shit.
I’ve tried looking for some articles or papers about what would actually happen and couldn’t find any, but our society right now is kind of based on that premise, and once it stops it’s going to be a problem. Mostly for the ordinary people, though. And of course, caused entirely by the greedy investors struggling to figure out how to keep milking the cow. Fuck capitalism.
A lot of pensions will be fucked that heavily invested in stocks, but aside from that, the world will be fine. You 100% don’t need stocks in order for companies to thrive. Japan has had a poor stock market for the past 30 years, but there’s still a ton of companies and businesses that do just fine, there. There’s also tons of places in the US as well that aren’t publicly traded. Hobby Lobby, Quik Trip, Valve, SpaceX, Hy-Vee, just to name a few multi billion dollar companies.
The quickly rising stock market also hasn’t always been like it has been since the 1980’s. It went 18 years running more or less completely flat before that, and society didn’t collapse. Nearly two decades of no growth whatsoever.
Basically all 401ks in the US rely on stocks. And basically everyone’s retirement (who doesn’t have a pension, which is fewer and fewer jobs) relies on 401ks.
And if the market goes back to running flat, the 401k’s won’t shrink. They just won’t gain interest. “Oh no”.
Sure, it sucks, but it isn’t the end of the world, and if stocks run flat and 401ks run flat, then inflation should be running flat as well. It could bankrupt some companies and screw some people over if their retirements are not 401ks and are instead in company stock and stock options, but if you took nothing but stock options and didn’t go with a traditional 401k or other savings, than that’s a large risk you took on yourself.
401k’s are federally protected under the Employment Retirement Income Security Act and assure that your contributions are protected right down to the month and no angry creditors or company bankruptcy can go after that money.
That isn’t to say a market crash won’t cause your 401k to go down, but the market won’t “crash” by hitting a ceiling, and most 401ks aren’t just in the US stock market. They’re diversified among foreign and domestic stuff, and not just stock markets, so even a large crash isn’t going to wipe out anyone’s 401k. Just reduce it by maybe 20% or less, depending on options you’ve chosen with your 401k.
That’s exactly right. In fact, they legally have to do what they think will be good for the investors/ stock holders.
It’s one of the reasons why Valve has managed to be a loved company for decades. It’s a private company, so they don’t have to answer for monetarily poor decisions and are free to do what they’d like. It also means things could change if management changes hands.
One day the companies will figure out how to charge infinite money for no product or service. Then capitalism will be satisfied and the game will be won.
I thought this might be the case for insurance companies once self driving cars displace manually driven cars entirely.
Collect all the premiums, pay out very rarely since these systems have the potential to be a lot safer in general than human drivers. Possibly with the exception of Tesla since Musk’s decision to not have Lidar severely constrains their system’s ability to function properly.
The American heritage dictionary definition 1: ^ An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth.
Seems that both fall squarely within the definition of greed.
Obviously, but not overly unless you’re being intentionally obtuse. Making abstract statements kinda requires reducing them to an common element, theme, or dimension. That’s what abstraction and syllogism are all about.
Friendly reminder that a website like OneLook.com compiles dictionaries and thesauruses from all of the major, reputable sources, including the American Heritage Dictionary and Merriam-Webster.
intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food.
Both “I want more” and “I don’t want to share” are a type of greed. Even if the definition is more like needs more of something, not wanting to share feels like a form of needing more time than you need with an object. At least that’s how I’m looking at it.
True. I guess I’m guilty of “I want more” as much as the next guy. But I don’t suffer from the “I don’t want to share” part. If everyone gets more, we all rise up. A good tide lifts all ships.
I wonder what would happen if even just 50% of all women of child bearing age moved out of the states that added these abortion restrictions, that would basically destroy the states population in a few generations.
I wonder what the response would be…
Probably something terrible, and possibly illegal that would still somehow be permitted…
I am just a guy from Scandinavia looking at the US with complete disbelief that this shit happen in the west in this day and age.
To everyone fighting for this to be repealed I wish you all the best, and to all of those in favour of these restrictions, just stop voting, and go away.
The amount of electoral votes per state is adjusted based on its population, but they all get a minimum of 3. So, if enough people left, it would have some effect on the state’s voting power, but once you get to a certain threshold, the weight of each person’s vote actually starts to go up.
Sorta, but that’s not the whole story. We have two legislative bodies, the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the senate, every state gets two senators. In the house, every state gets at least two representatives, plus some amount based on population - california has 52, for instance.
The original idea was to “make sure rural voices were heard”. In practice, it very much has been what you stated - if you’re educated but not rich enough to benefit from republican policies, you flee red states en masse, leaving mostly rich assholes and uneducated chucklefucks who are hurt most by the very people they elect. They then have a massively disproportionate effect on policy versus any joe schmoe in california.
I wasn’t even thinking about that, a 50% reduction in women in child bearing age would absolutely ruin the future population growth of the state, and on an even more basic level, would mean that a lot of men would never find a partner in the state, so they would need to move to other states to find someone, which means even more population loss.
At some point the situation would be so critical that there would be no choice but to change the laws back, and even after that it would take a LONG time for people to get the confidence to move back.
(Sarcasm) Don’t insult the west by lumping the US in with sane respectable nations. (/Sarcasm) The US is a third world country with some lipstick on at this point. We keep hoping to turn things around and put us back on course but. Damn is it exhausting.
I’m in the USA and we’re a garbage country. Don’t get me wrong, there are good areas and good people. But our broken system allows the craziest minority to have an outsized degree of power and they absolutely take advantage of it.
How a state like Wyoming, with fewer than a million people, can get as much say (in the senate) as my state of California is beyond me. We have almost 80x their population, yet they get an equal number of senators. I want a revolution that adjusts their voice to be proportional to their goddamned size.
Did you miss civics class? Having both a senate and a house was a compromise between the smaller and bigger states. Small states could have been railroaded by bigger states with strictly proportional representation. It’s almost like you’re repeating something you heard without thinking about it much…
It’s a stupid compromise to make. It might have made some sense at the time, when society expected them to behave as gentlemen with regard for their honor. Now a much smaller group gets to bully the rest of the country as a result.
There was a time and a reason for a lot of the old ways. We have the technology to make them irrelevant. That being said, I do feel there should be limitations in Federal decisions given the country is huge, and broad sweeping laws can negatively affect lower population areas.
We also have a bunch of basic life shit that absolutely should be Federally decided, and instead of letting people be people and live their lives, we apparently purposely try our hardest to go backwards right now. Many states are literally complicit in murdering women by law, and making it so people of different sexual or biological orientations are no longer people. How the fuck is it 2024 and women and others of various alignments are suddenly not people?
Did you know that the Supreme Court only exists because the “ultra rich” of the founding fathers’ time felt they didn’t have proper representation in government? This was their “check and balance” that let us become a nation.
Do we really need 50 states and territories in this era? If we must have them we could divide and merge based on population similar to the slate article. slate.com/…/if-every-u-s-state-had-the-same-popul…
I am too. There’s a reason I chose a lemmy host outside our borders.
(OK, it was mostly so the government has free reign to accidentally spy on my international traffic because FISA/PATRIOT act are just so cool and down to earth. /s)
Yeah any significant change in gender demographics of an area will cause problems. Too few men will cause some issues but our cultures have developed defenses around this problem thanks to cataclysmic wars happening every few generations. Too few women on the other hand will get real bad real fast especially since this will be a situation of existing misogyny driving women away. Some men will get real violent and those capable of living in either society will flee because they won’t get laid otherwise.
You’d give those states all the electoral votes and senate seats, and they’d apply their laws at the federal level. I’m suspicious that’s their plan. Drive all the liberals out of these conservative states that were at risk of turning blue so they can take their policies federal.
Also if it’s mostly women leaving, that makes it easier to recruit men into armies if they are told it will help them get laid when there’s a huge imbalance. And easier to elect leaders who push male superiority ideas and that women should defer to men.
I bet they’d supercharge enforcement of the laws they’ve been testing - such as intercepting women leaving the state for suspected abortions, or parents suspected of taking children out of the state for gender affirming care
The laws are set up that you could basically set up roadblocks and force a fight through the system to leave the state… Keeping people from leaving is important if you want a fascist state, because they suck and only “true believers” wouldn’t consider moving
That’s why those laws are so terrifying… They don’t have to convict anyone, they can just be used to suppress movement
I have a feeling you’re playing dumb for engagement, because truly no one can be as clueless as this. I suspect everyone else feels the same which is why your question is being ignored. Most of your post history is similarly unaware. There will be no further reply.
Of course. All cops are criminals. Every single cop has at bare minimum been an accomplice and an assaultant. Most are also thieves, murderers, and/or rapists.
Its taking the bastards with you. Or trying to take one at least. A last heroic act is worth a salute at least, if he actually did draw first, or even had a gun.
So your rebuttal is to suggest that they’re violent thugs who kill at the slightest provocation and have no regard for human life or ability to talk shit out?
You seem to have gathered that the murder victim shot at the police. Unless you have another source, you are clearly not reading the linked article. It states that no footage shows that the victim ever shot, or had a gun in possession. States that he had no gun on or around him when they cleared the slumped body. The did however find a (most likely planted) gun in the car later. Do you need a class on reading comprehension or something?
I don’t know this author, but when I see articles like this I always think it’s a reverse Hanlon’s razor. I refuse to believe the people reporting on it are stupid and assume they’re fucking evil.
I said this in another post, but i believe older democrats who dont keep up with the nonsense of politics could very well just see the name Kennedy and vote for him. If we werent in a very red state i would be worried about my grandfather in his 80s doing exactly that.
I’m a woman in Texas and if this has anything positive to come out of it, I hope a lot of the men here who don’t care about women’s reproductive rights will finally wake up to the Christian Nationalism really taking hold here, realize it may impact them, and help to do something about it.
I’m with you, but I can’t imagine any other outcome than an increasingly large group of sexually-frustrated men taking this out on women / men / animals around them. Particularly as other porn sites follow suit.
What’s worse, I imagine this is either by design or a very welcome byproduct. In other words, one step closer to y’all qaeda.
Porn reduces the incident of rape. Combine that with the inability to access abortion. This is going to get worse. If vulnerable people have the ability to leave, they should.
This all sucks, but to be realistic it’s probably not going to change anything for anybody. Pornhub is not the only porn site, there are more options than any human being could ever make use of out there, and plenty of sites will not recognize the laws of TX.
What realistically will happen is the porn consumers will go “oh no Pornhub is down, I’ll have to go to another site” and within 5 minutes they’ll be masturbating with porn from an unblocked site. For all we know, they might even visit lemmynsfw communities, which all do not give a fuck about these laws.
You underestimate the lengths people will go, in order to watch that perfect/favorite video that is now blocked. It’s why the porn industry makes so much money in the first place
When I was in my late teens/early twenties I truly thought that in ten years I’d own a home for sure, with some hard work and dedication.
Ten years later, I don’t even get to buy groceries every week or eat every day. I’ve lost 30 pounds in the last year just from skipping so many meals.
I can’t wait to see what the next ten years holds.
And if one more person tells me I should make sure to invest for retirement… I can’t even feed myself, what you want me to invest? My retirement plan is work until I’m too old/sick/injured and then off myself.
Yeah, maybe if someone told me I should have specced my character for wealth or charisma, instead of creativity or wisdom, I might be enjoying this game more…
It’s really quite easy. Just cut out the avocado toast, stop buying those expensive coffees, and invest that cool $69,000,000 your parents left you from their work on the board of an orphan crushing factory.
The funny thing is that I’ve never had avocado toast and I tried coffee once, hated it, and never tried it again. I can’t drink energy drinks either. Take that, financial columnists!
Sorry, I definitely might come off as rude in this comment, but this line of thought really annoys me. Do you think people are poor simply because they’re too dumb to think “I should spend less money on groceries?” Don’t you think they’ve already considered finding a better-paying job, if such a possibility exists for them? If moving is even an option for them (which is a big if), where do you suggest they get the money to rent a moving truck, as well as the money for a security deposit on a new apartment?
Your comment is about as helpful as asking “Have you tried not being poor?”
Do you think people are poor simply because they’re too dumb to think “I should spend less money on groceries?”
It’s usually spending money poorly, yes. But I don’t blame them, I blame the lack of education on these topics.
If you aren’t even using freely available budgeting options, then I recommend to start there and assess spending.
I very rarely encounter people who complain about money but also have real concrete budget. If I ask it’s usually met with excuses and changing the topic.
If you truly have a genuine budget and still can’t figure out where the money is going, then it’s a more serious chat.
But the absurd frequency you see people posting about how they can’t afford groceries and lo and behold, they’re buying a bunch of overpriced garbage and paying extra for non necessities, it’s bananas.
If you complain about food costs and I find out you don’t know how to break down a whole chicken, I feel a little less bad for you.
If I find out your buying dumb shit, my empathy starts to go down.
I lived with and worked in a poverty stricken industry for many many years, and the constant frequency I saw people complain about money one day, then waste money the next, has gradually over time led me to just assume most people are completely inept when it comes to budgeting.
And I mean, it’s not exactly a required course in high school, so I am not that surprised.
And it’s mostly food, drugs, and alcohol when it comes to wasting money.
That and the “buying little things you dont need thatll end up in the trash” I see often. Fast fashion and all that jazz.
My entire post is about someone who has a job but complains about being unable to afford things.
Also, I missed another group, the “complains about money but never takes shifts” person.
Always saying they don’t make enough, can’t afford stuff, need more shifts, don’t get enough hours, abd yet always are also the person first to ask to be cut early, always trying to get other people to take their shifts, never picking up other people’s shifts, etc
There’s always a few of em at every job. They don’t seem to understand you have to actually work hours to get money, lol.
Over hundreds of folks I’ve worked with at dozens of gigs, I’d say about half of folks have both serious work ethic and responsible spending.
The other half either has shit work ethic, or, shit spending. Or both.
And I worked in a very much revolving door industry so I’ve seen a lot of faces in my time at this point.
The other half that had their shit together, every single one of them that I stayed in touch with over the years later, is now living comfortable in their 30s.
And when the topic comes up about so-and-so who was in the “doesn’t have their shit together” group, it’s either:
“Oh yeah they’re in jail, they did (fucked up thing)”
“Oh yeah, they died” (which still sucks to hear)
“I lost touch, they dropped off the map”
I also largely attribute this issue to undiagnosed mental disorders, and the west’s total lack of caretaking of them.
I’d sat the vast majority of those “doesn’t gave their shit together” folks struck me as having undiagnosed disorders and a total lack of support for it.
Which sucks, unfortunately, and I say that as someone who was in that group for a bit. You have to fight tooth and nail to get help in western capitalism.
Is this absolutely essential to my survival? (ie: groceries, medication, toilet paper, health insurance, etc.)
It often isn’t. I say this as someone who volunteers weekends on such a group (food donations).
It’s very often chasing dopamine hits to compensate for how utterly isolated and desolate they feel. WIthout a support network or community to back them up, the easiest at hand way to compensate is small expenditures on treating themselves to help stave off the doom.
Which add up very fast, because turns out treats aren’t free.
And this can take many forms. Collectibles, fast food, literal treats, energy drinks, coffee, cigarettes, weed, booze, etc.
When you have learned helplessness and truly believe it’s pointless to save money, it becomes trivial to waste it on dozens of little pick me ups.
I’ve seen it endless times. I’ve helped people budget and so often they are shocked to realize they are spending absurd amounts of money on their guilty pleasure.
Let me make this clear, I’ve helped a decent handful of folks unfuck their budget. They had jobs, they rented, they couldn’t figure out why saving money was hard.
We took a look and so much random shit Id be like “do you know you spent $300 at convenience stores this month?” And they’d be like “what? No way, that’s impossible”
But I’d show em and they’d be flabbergasted.
Turns out that red bull and a snack everyday before work, and a treat everyday after work, adds up to a huge hole in the pocket.
And these are people truly in poverty, min wage at best, part time, struggling to pay bills.
Some houses shooting up in price due to various (shitty) factors does not mean every single house has. Only a small portion of them have which has biased the average price up.
If 10% of houses go up x5 in price, the average price will now calculate significantly higher even if the other 90% only change a small bit.
This is a common thing people try and cite. “Yeah but some house skyrocketed in price so that must mean house prices are fucked across the board”
They aren’t, that’s just a fact.
The following are fucked areas:
Major City cores as the west’s renting markets are unhinged atm.
Closer to the core suburbs of tourist destinations for the Airbnb markets
Pockets of speculation areas that are being heavily gentrified.
Properties with land large enough to be potentially capable of being split into 2 smaller properties legally, as a speculation market. (This us why sometimes you see big old spots suddenly skyrocket, they satisfy the conditions to turn into 2 properties which can be lucrative if leveraged by a rental company)
Everything else had been fairly well in lockstep with inflation from what I have seen.
Nice anecdata and all but I bought in 2020 and my place has almost doubled in value already. It’s a run of the mill condo.
The (already high) rent prices have also approximately doubled over the same time span.
Buying in early 2020 was the difference between me easily living here and likely having to move to a cheaper area of the country.
And I’m a debt-free, child-free elder millennial who has a large salary and whose parents paid for my college.
The problem isn’t that they aren’t scraping together enough of their $30k a year to save due to buying too many bon bons, it’s that they gross $30k a year and $15-20k of their net goes to the landlord.
It doesn’t, but you’ll keep believing anything you want no matter what the data says because you’re dug into an anti-reality position.
Rents have gone up rapidly across the country, and that’s after a long period of wage stagnation that didn’t keep up with inflation for three or four decades. But yeah you’re right, I’m well off not because I timed the real estate market and had all of the other advantages I listed, but instead because I didn’t buy avocado toast. 🙄
Except I have bought basically whatever I wanted and from the look of things (e.g. mega yachts and private planes) so have other people who are considerably richer than either of us.
It’s math dude, if your rent is $2k a month and you net $25k a year you aren’t going to be able to save your way out of that hole.
As an aside, people like yourself who told me to move to lower COL areas also provide extremely bad financial advice and pretend it’s universally applicable. Lower COL areas usually also have lower salaries, and you may be able to get a better dinner out in lower COL area, or get a slightly better house or something, but you aren’t going to see the $20-$40k in additional salary you receive in a higher COL area.
if your rent is $2k a month and you net $25k a year you aren’t going to be able to save your way out of that hole.
Better just keep working the same job and renting the same place then, as we know those are absolutes that can’t possibly be changed to fix the problem.
Renting somewhere you can’t afford counts as bad budgeting.
Lower COL areas usually also have lower salaries
If only there was some way to live in one place, and work in another… perhaps even several ways to do that… oh well.
Seriously do people just never move, and stay in shitty jobs and settle with a shit hand?
I moved several times abd changed jobs several times in my 20s as I clawed my way out of poverty. You have to get cool with not staying tied down if you want to do well.
If a place fuckin sucks, sell your shit and move.
If your job sucks, get a better one.
If rent is insane, get roommates.
And if you struggle with getting a job, you either aren’t looking in the right places, you’ve set your standards too high, or you have some deeper rooted issue that’s red flagging your application.
Or you are struggling with systemic racism/sexism/classism/ableism in the domain which of course fuckin sucks, and that one doesn’t have as easy of a solution.
And if you struggle with getting a job, you either aren’t looking in the right places, you’ve set your standards too high, or you have some deeper rooted issue that’s red flagging your application.
I wonder if you’ll sing a different tune after the next rounds of tech layoffs.
“Learn to code, bro” doesn’t hit the same for me in the post EQ economy, and not every job can be done remotely.
The stats are clear that wages for non-c level positions have stagnated, but you’ll keep believing whatever you want despite them.
You also seem to have gone out of your way to step over the point I was making which is that I did everything you’re saying, had no dependents, and had it not been for a little bit of luck in my timing, I too would’ve been in the “can’t afford a house” camp.
A perfect example of this is actually people who stayed in the same exurban area and work similar jobs to the generation before them. I have relatives that are teachers, and former neighbors who are teachers. Wanna guess which generation is barely making ends meet in a shitty little house and which is living fat and rich next to engineering and management neighbors?
I wonder if you’ll sing a different tune after the next rounds of tech layoffs.
I am completely unaffected by this, as I am not clinging to the hulls of sinking ships.
A perfect example of this is actually people who stayed in the same exurban area and work similar jobs to the generation before them. I have relatives that are teachers, and former neighbors who are teachers. Wanna guess which generation is barely making ends meet in a shitty little house and which is living fat and rich next to engineering and management neighbors?
Local internet denizen struggles to grasp that wealth is accrued over time, more news at 11.
If you keep comparing apples to oranges, you’ll never be happy.
Also, to flip it around, if you ask both if those households what budgeting tools they use, do you think you’ll get similar answers?
I’d strongly bet the the folks struggling will go “what do you mean”? And those doing well will go “We use x”
I’d also bet if you open the two households fridges and cupboards you’ll get extremely different results that help shed some light on the situation.
I have so many, so many friends my age that complain about money, then I visit their home abd see their fridge and I instantly think “oh, well, now I see why they are having issues…”
It’s become very difficult to not just assume it’s either budget issues, or a total lack of willing to change location/job. It’s pretty much always one of those two.
The times I’ve seen people complain about it, and then their car has a bunch of fast food wrappers in it is endless. It’s a plague.
And I don’t necessarily blame them. I blame the lack of support networks, schooling, etc, that didn’t teach them how to manage their lives. The wests’ school systems churn kids out like a factory.
It’s not impossible to claw your way out, but a lot if wealthy people 100% want you to think it is so you don’t even try.
Instilling apathy is such a powerful form of control and oppression. Why bother? You can’t do it. Give up. You’ll never afford things. Just keep buying random pick me ups off Amazon instead.
Reminder that the same wealthy individuals that control nearly every source of news and info you consume also are heavily invested in city infrastructure.
The news outlets you consume from have a vested interest in keeping you thinking clawing your way up and out is impossible
I am completely unaffected by this, as I am not clinging to the hulls of sinking ships.
Good for you! 👍
Local internet denizen struggles to grasp that wealth is accrued over time, more news at 11.
They were at their current stages at comparable ages as well. The teachers from the boomer generation were already in their fat pad by the time they were in their 30s. Which I noticed you didn’t even bother guessing, because you knew it already.
The older set was a member of a teacher’s union and the other set (of course) teaches at a charter school.
It’s oranges to oranges and it is not my story. I’m “clinging to the sinking ship” of high tech.
I have so many, so many friends my age that complain about money, then I visit their home abd see their fridge and I instantly think “oh, well, now I see why they are having issues…”
You sound like a lovely, empathetic friend. /s
It’s not impossible to claw your way out, but a lot if wealthy people 100% want you to think it is so you don’t even try.
No, they don’t. They want to tell you to hustle and get your grind set on…in other words they speak very similar lines of bullshit to the plebs as you are here.
The news outlets you consume from have a vested interest in keeping you thinking clawing your way up and out is impossible
Dude, the wealthy people news especially is full of side hustle this and grindset that. They want you to get roped in by business schemes that further enrich them directly. The former head of the department of education was an MLM owner.
Again, I’m doing just fine and dandy. The difference is I have eyes and ears and I use them. You’re only half or a quarter enlightened if you think only racial disparities provide systemic barriers to class mobility in this country. I read a book that was a complete analysis of the meritocracy from the perspective of schooling, employment, etc. that was hundreds of pages long and actually used data to make its arguments. One of its main findings is that the racial gap in education is narrower than the gap caused by wealth disparity. In other words, you’re worse off being a white poor kid in the modern educational system than you are being a rich black kid.
Jobs used to educate their workers. Upward mobility was available for people who had very little education. You could afford a house, two cars, and four kids on a single salary taken home by a person with only a high school diploma.
Sure, maybe it was a mirage, but other countries have been able to make gains on social and class mobility while the US steadily goes the other direction. Then everyone gets told by people like yourself to disbelieve their eyes and ears when they go house hunting and every house is 2x as expensive as it was a half decade earlier.
I dont smoke, I’ve never done drugs, and I drink a few times a year. Have I been guilty of a few frivolous purchases in the past? Sure, but now I literally do not have the money, so I can’t. I just make lists of things I’d like to buy “someday.”
I’ve gone out and bought a $7 rotisserie chicken, a $3 bag of noodles and a $3 bag of carrots, thrown them in a pot with a bunch of garlic, spices and water, slow cooked them for an entire day, then pulled out the chicken, ripped off all the meat, discarded the carcass, and lived for an entire month off that soup. I was sooo sick of chicken noodle soup.
But I shouldn’t have to. Why should I work my ass off for companies who make more and more profits while my rent goes up, food costs more and more, and every other fucking bill goes up, yet if I ask for a raise I’m a lazy millenial?
Oh dear, thought I recognized that name and vibe. You’re not here to repeat this kind of thing again, are you?
Missing the other big factor:
There’s a large quantity of influencers profiting off of doomsaying and convincing millennial they can’t afford homes with bad math and bogus statistics. They churn out clickbait content with unfounded claims, purposefully designed to rile up viewers and drive engagement.
This of course applies to many topics, housing affordability just being one, that turns out drive big engagement by spreading disinformation.
It’s actively profitable to lie on the internet nowadays, so lots of my fellow millennials have an extremely soured and warped perspective of reality, because if you keep getting told lies by enough different random strangers on the internet on a topic you aren’t familiar with, you’ll start to believe it.
Spreading disinformation, especially about serious topics like economics, medicine, politics, religion, etc, needs to be cracked down on more. Posing as a professional online and spreading damaging info on purpose should result in jail time imo.
And if one more person tells me I should make sure to invest for retirement…
My father says this all the time. Every time I tell him I don’t have money he just assumes I’m spending frivolously without acknowledging that cost of living has increased astronomically in recent years, qualifications for employment have gone up, quantity of jobs has gone down, and median income has completely stagnated.
One of my friends solved this by sitting down with her parents and having them ‘help her budget things out’.
Suddenly they shut up about it. And gave her some money. So all it takes with some people is rubbing their faces in it so they can’t pretend prices are the same as they were in the 50s.
I posted in another thread that I have nothing to save for retirement but people chastise me for getting the occasional chai latte or buy Taco Bell for my kid once in a while and I got the response, “what are you going to do about your child’s future?”
Hope we can afford to feed her until (if ever) she can make it on her own?
As if I could put the $20 or so a month on “luxuries” like those into a savings account and become a millionaire by the time I’m 65.
Sorry, but boys-will-be-boys. So we have to ban girls from competing, because we literally cannot continence telling any of our precious little superstars to cut that shit out.
The Constitution says “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” SCOTUS isn’t ignoring the Constitution for once.
Where did I say that we can just ignore the constitution? Hell, I’ve been downvoted to hell on Reddit for suggesting that rights to firearms is restricted for militias…
I couldn’t find a single legitimate reason in that decision to arbitrarily remove the power of the states or the democratic voters to remove a candidate based on very clear strictures in the Constitution, except for the implication that the conservatives would try to use this measure by claiming every valid candidate had somehow committed insurrection.
But conservatives already basically tried to do that with Biden with their “documents” case for more than 2 years now and it didn’t work, they couldn’t make even that relatively insignificant charge stick.
In this case, we have a judgment of a candidate liabile of an insurrection that directly violates the presidential oath of office thay previously took.
You ignored the context of the civil war. It wasn’t about liberals or conservatives. It was about the federal government not allowing former confederate states to elect confederates into federal office. In other words, as determined by SCOTUS, this is the constitution explicitly taking power away from states and delegating it to the federal government. Thereby it is NOT a reserved right of the states and the people
Yep and they just handwaive it. They assert the other sections are held against the states so this must be too. They also assert that only Congress has enforcement power for it despite nothing in the amendment saying so. It says “Congress shall have power…”, not sole power, not the power. There is no exclusionary language to preclude a state’s normal constitutional right to run it’s elections. Instead this adds Congress to the list of bodies that can enforce this.
The remedy for a state running an improper election is also not the supreme court. It is Congress, as laid out in the Constitution they supposedly are experts at enforcing. And yet they keep giving themselves major powers not in Constitution.
You have the most interesting take that I’ve read: Congress shall also have a way to enforce this and not just the States. I kind of wish you had argued that in front of SCOTUS.
Sometimes I wonder if our constitutional interpretation is so twisted because we’ve been going at for so many years. But getting a new one is going to require decades of catch up work by the Democrats. Republicans have been practicing for a Constitutional Convention and actively seek one.
Because the liberal justices are being consistent in their rulings, while the conservatives justices all of a sudden forgot that they think these things should be deferred to the states.
What are you talking about? Citizens United was a 5-4 decision as to the parts everyone is mad about. The 4 dissents were Ginsberg, Kagan, Stevens, and Sotomayor. The liberals concurred with the conservatives as to a disclosure requirement, which, why wouldn’t they? They dissented as to the rest of the opinion. Unsurprisingly with the benefit of hindsight, the only justice who disagreed with the reporting requirements was Thomas.
If the liberals actually gave a fuck about stopping the blatant corruption of the Court they’d have told Obama his primary responsibility in office was filling Court seats, including RBG’s, and expanding it when they had the chance for the express goal of overturning a bought and paid for decision.
They knew from the moment those five voted yes to Citizens United what they were dealing with, and buried their heads in the sand instead. There is a direct quote from Stevens outright stating “Democracy can not function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.”
Instead, they sit and smile at their “colleagues” and murmur quietly about “the reputation of the Court” instead of using their position to call out corruption.
Now, why do you think they aren’t screaming about being in the same room with a travesty like Thomas?
Do you think it’s because they actually respect his legal opinions?
Or are they worried their own finances can’t stand up to scrutiny?
There is such a power disparity between large corporations and normal people or small businesses. A corporation can make a small decision that would devestate a person or small business and it doesn’t affect them at all.
I don’t think this is legal, since it’s a custom order. This is not like a consumer ordering an off the shelf product, it’s more like a verbal contract IMO, but IANAL.
depends on the cancelation clause, usually there would be a time frame before the event they could cancel. There should also be a deposit-especially for events this large…non refundable would have been ideal especially if you need to get materials & OT for staff.
I don’t think you can bring a lawyer to small claims court, to prevent this exact scenario. Tesla might send a manager or nobody. They can’t send their legal team.
Corporation or other legal entity — A corporation or other legal entity (that is not a natural person) can be represented by a regular employee, an officer, or a director; a partnership can be represented by a partner or regular employee of the partnership. The representative may not be an attorney or person whose only job is to represent the party in small claims court.
You can’t sue for the whole amount if you don’t actually deliver the items. Unless the contract specifically states the entire amount is non-refundable.
You don’t have a right to the profit, but you could probably get your costs and labor back. It might be easy. They might not even show up.
I wasn’t even thinking of small claims court since I thought the cap was only a few thousand dollars (depending on location), but that is good to know.
It depends. Somewhere in there she said the rep switched and approved it. I would have definitely asked for something up front. But it can be confusing if you are bounces around between reps.
So if Tesla is stupid enough to order again, she can say Okeydokey I’ll be right on it, and when the delivery is due, she can just say Sorree I’m not gonna deliver anything anyway, have a nice day?
That’s not a viable business environment, and surely there must be regulation to prevent businesses fucking each other off like that.
It shouldn’t be necessary but the lesson here is always get at least half upfront and if the multi-billion dollar corporation protests ask them why they want free stuff. Custom orders should always need at least half payment up front.
From a company like Tesla it shouldn’t be necessary.
I would say the polar opposite of that is true. You should get it from any order, but especially one of this size, and especially from a corporation, and especially one with a reputation of dishonesty like Tesla.
I can’t imagine why they prefer to have their reputation tarnished for this?
You think people are not going to buy a Tesla because they shafted a small business? You have entirely too much faith in the general population.
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