All sound advice, but coming across the extra capital to invest, much less in your 20’s, is a harder prospect than it sounds for most people these days.

I’m not sure if you can get fractionals of SPY or VTI, but $300-500 a paycheck or even a month of money you can’t use on the moment is a hard ask for much of the working class.

It’s less like “Stop the avocado toast and lattés and netflix” and more “If you stopped buying a new graphics card every month you could afford stonks that will be mature when you are elderly.”

Lol like, we aren’t living in luxury and frivolous with our money in the first place, it usually poofs away into food and rent these days. (And gas and the car, if you aren’t in one of VERY few places that are walk and bike friendly.)

But for people who have it. This is a sound strategy. On that note, I have a relative who’s got very few expenses, often broke…and they’re constantly buying new full-priced releases on Steam. This degree of resource mismanagement vexes me so. Lol

Omg you knocked it out of the park with this one. Everything is such a race to the bottom in this system.

It’s always about competitive undercutting, and what’s the most ruthless cold-blooded calculations one can get away with, and this Type A disease of being obsessed with zero-sum conflict to reveal who’s the absolute best of everything.

“Why can’t we just chill and it’ll get there when it gets there?”

“What?! Look at (for example) China! Do you see them chilling? No! They normalized 12 hour shift burnout before us, this will increase their production 3%, and then undercut us by 12% and steal all our business and we’re screwed! So we need to squeeze our people harder to beat them!”

“…And then they’ll squeeze their people harder…so…?”

“…”

“…”

“This might be a good time to inform you we expect you to train the new overseas team before we’ll surprise ambush-fire your entire department.”

…Repeat the above but for undocumented immigrant labor…then maybe child labor…then probably right back around to slavery again…

“Oh no we all agreed this would be so bad for humanity, but gee, the competition did it and we wanna stay competitive so…”

Man seriously why can’t we all just be doing our own thing lol…

Fantastic thought-provoking points here. You’re right, that’s something I had kinda forgotten about when I wrote before:

Helping-professionals are (ideally) in those professions to help people, so their employers essentially hold patients/clients/students up as shields.

You’re right, to change things would require a cultural shift that sees providers as “people” rather than “services.” But generally it would be an extremely difficult PR war to sell to the people who require such services.

The soulless bosses are basically comic book villains: They know heroes will put themselves at considerable risk for the greater good, but won’t risk the harming of innocents…

…so the greedy ownership class hides behind those innocents and, what’s worse, trains them to accept such a low standard that any action that would drop that standard would turn the peoples’ anger against the heroes who already sacrifice so much to help them.

I hate not knowing what to do past understanding what’s so wrong. :(

Click was SO GOOD.

But I’m still a little mad at the betrayal by the marketing, making it seem super silly and goofy, leaving my young self unprepared for an emotional gut-punch. Lol

It effectively did what it set out to do though, being a modern fable about where our priorities in life ultimately lead us. I think of it often, especially the way it portrays the trap of career-worship, and when I catch myself wishing time away.

That silly movie had so much heart it might have actually shaped my young worldview a bit. Lol

Movie was based.

Reminds me of that “I am 12 years old and what is this” meme lol

What about The Cobbler? That one was unexpectedly charming.

Either that or a know-it-all tryhard personality who’s hustling everywhere across the entire platform, solely interested in raking in spam-money. See: Quora

So true. “Progress” seems to be defined as an arbitrary jagged line that can never ever seem to be high enough. What’s the point then? 🤔

I think like in many helping professions we have a majority of very idealistic people who don’t negotiate very well.

Maybe that’s exactly what we need: A training course for helping professions that teaches them to ruthlessly negotiate fair terms against capitalists.

“Do a job that you love and that’ll substitute as half your pay! 😁”

$50 per call but you can bet the patient is being billed $5k minimum for the ride, probably pocketed by insurance agencies or the hospital execs.

I can’t understand how people are EMTs and why there haven’t been riots over this, but God bless them.

It creates:

• Statistically, a constantly desperate hand-to-mouth workforce that must depend on employers to sustain their existence.
• Armed forces signup incentives.
• Easily-swayed consumers of products and services. (Run by those with access to nepotism and/or education, naturally.)
• And easily manipulated voters.

Underfunding education and having people basically born into debt isn’t a neglectful oversight, it’s a deliberate strategy.

Perhaps you misunderstand.

The hours are very high and the classroom time is only a small part of it.

The billed hours are extraordinarily low. :D

Warm and fuzzy feelings of inspiring the next generation are supposed to stand-in for actual wages in the USA.

Also better have plans to fill in that summer gap. I’m sure it’s not fun vaycay time for teachers like it is for a lot of the students.

Which is crazy, because it widely depends on the district.

You could be in rurals-ville, FlyoverState, USA and make a pittance. (Oh plus BTW, the excitement of torches and pitchforks coming for you, your staff, and your collection. Politicians also attempting to undermine the entire institution of libraries for strategic mob-outrage points. Ah, perks!)

Or in some urban areas that are well-funded, librarians and especially branch managers are paid stupidly well. Their jobs mostly being general management duties, listening to the complaints of the insane and unreasonable, tresspassing the insane and unreasonable, and answering “Do you work here? Where’s the bathroom?” Of course, that’s when they’re not stuck in pointless meetings.

Lots of stress sometimes. But BMs make low six-figures. I imagine there’s worse jobs.

But it’s one of those things where a spot usually opens up only if someone moves, retires, or expires.

It was “Great Scott!” but the DeLorean smashed through the second “t” in the past. 🌲🌲

Agreed with every word.

On a national level we’re reaping the tainted harvest wrought by years of cultivating an uneducated populace.

They make for great desperate-workers, emotionally swayed voters, readily-motivated armed forces, and well-trained consumers, but making higher education an increasingly lofty privilege while also undermining it at every turn for politics is totally coming back to bite us.

Instead of being seen as the wealth of our nation, people are seen as another commodity product for corporations to buy and sell. (Readily evident at the defunding and disrespect towards arts and social sciences.)

Now when there’s a “shortage” of educated workers, they just import them from wherever’s cheapest.

…And tons of our college funding still goes to the football teams. To entertain and profit off the uneducated masses.

Well that’s about the system in the USA or some third world countries.

And boy, are we feeling it. Infrastructure crumbling. Crime, unemployment, homelessness on the rise. Everybody is stupid. But check out our new super-carrier! /s

Man I wish I had some positive note to end this with but I’m just frustrated, and a lot of me wishes to just escape. Lol.

I’ve grown rather cynical of corp-speak lately, and I’ve heard this line before.

Whether said overtly or not, at least nowadays I’d be willing to bet a degree is used as a positive indicator that the candidate is likely in debt, will do anything for a job, and therefore will stick around and put up with almost anything for less wages, because they lack leverage.

They’re therefore cheaper to hire than an independent individual that might exercise their freedom to leave if they’re not treated with respect.

This might also explain why folks with high level degrees are constantly called “overqualified” and ghosted.

Ah, Elementary through Highschool teaches you to be an employee.

Higher education is being sold dreams and taking on debt to learn to be a better employee. Sounds about right.

I teach myself new complex skills all the time, but I imagine I’m still written off a ton because I didn’t pay for at least the four year license to learn to learn. Lol

(I want to emphasize I’m being playfully sarcastic about our clown world society and not attacking you, you are very correct about needing to understand before one critiques!)

Makes me wonder if anyone remembers me for something random like this.

In a wild turn of events, I was going through my replies and remembered you from a future comment, for kindly encouraging me when I described my ADHD struggle with keeping my comments brief online!

So, I guarantee I’m not the only one who remembers you for a good word. :)

Yeah this makes a lot of sense, thank you for elaborating!

I think I understand the idea: Plan things out, have backup plans, have some sense, and one should be fine. You can’t just expect to get a friendly rescue within the hour.

I think this is common here in North America too, for instance, people get into trouble because they treat a National Park like a theme park, and underestimate the realities of the wilderness.

They won’t have maps, or enough water, or will try to pet a buffalo, or poke around in caves, or snap selfies dangerously close to the edge of the Grand Canyon. It’s insane how little they consider the dangers of the wild.