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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • the “anonymous” surveys everyone knows are totally trustworthy.

    management and HR will swear up and down they are anonymous. Even on web forums… but the reality is you get a really obvious idea of who said what on what teams because management band together to figure out who would have said something based on their attitude, opinions and perspective.

    You can and will be singled out by management for saying negative things. Managers will be required to address the criticism… by choosing strategies behind closed doors, perhaps after having a “group discussion” where they report what they want their boss to hear to their boss, and then tell said boss what the plan is to change to address things is later. It will not be a change that affects the leader except to show they did something worthy of a performance bonus or a promotion though.

    All results that ask for more pay are basically ignored. They know why the departments with high turnover have high turnover. It’s a decision to keep those workers paid less because there’s no value to paying them more. Usually the highest turnover roles are treated like commodities. Sales person with strong ethics? Fired! Sales person caught doing illegal stuff to get sales? Fired! Sales person who gets away with selling doctors on drugs for unapproved indications? Big bonuses!

    The moment the bosses and the owner decided they wanted to get paid more than the workers was the moment any sense of equity vanished.



  • I pay for a single netflix sub, crunchyroll, and a vpn service.

    After netflix announced ads i’ve been more and more considering dumping them and just focusing on that vpn service. I have paid for years and years of streaming services but I can’t possibly comprehend how prices need to go up again and again, almost always by double digit percentage points. The cost of storage and bandwidth goes down over time, servers get cheaper over time… there’s hardly any first party new media that is worth watching so i’m struggling to understand why i’m paying more.

    The most bizarre thing to me though are people who pay for live TV… why in the world would you ever do that in 2024 with all the better options out there?








  • Yes, but usually they do something that provides value. A mechanic charges you more than their costs, but they are also charging for their expertise and skill.

    Not all jobs are that clear cut though. Most white collar jobs are bullshit (sauce: been working in corporate environments for close to 15 years.)

    Car Salesmen are useless for me. They’re still legally required. They get paid WAY too much to swindle grandparents out of a few thousand dollars per car.

    Real Estate Agents generally do not produce any real value but are again required. 4-5% commissions for selling a home which today in the boston area is a median of over 700k. Don’t try and tell me that $35k of effort goes into creating a listing and doing a showing, and helping someone throw in a bid. It should be a couple thousand at most. Sales here are almost always a weekend of two open houses then offers due on tuesday… and then a P&S is signed on Friday.

    If car salesmen and real estate agents are so valuable, then i’m sure a middleman finding furniture and reposting it on other sites that are more visited than craigslist free section and taking a commission is hardly any more dubious. After all the agents and salesmen in these cases do not create any value - they didn’t build the car or ship it over or really do anything except maybe detail it before delivery, even the paperwork is done by others! Same deal with the agents… they arent the lawyer, mortgage broker, house inspector etc which you still pay yourself out of pocket as closing costs as a buyer.

    Anyway, yeah I totally agree about people needing handouts to get on their feet. I’m very much for housing the homeless and giving basic necessities to all (basic shelter, food, water, basic clothes, internet, electricity, smart phone.) We just aren’t that kind of nation though. We’d rather prop up insurance companies and pharma profits than lift a finger for the homeless. “IGMFY” is the way the US works, mostly.



  • weird, my single mom driving beaters could afford short driving trips (2 hours is short to me.) We did mostly go to a campground that was less than 15 minutes drive away from home though.

    We heavily used food pantries though, literally every single week. No air conditioning, bunny ears on our simple tv, school bus rides to school. We even went a couple years without hot water when our hot water heater broke down just boiling water on the stove.

    Everyone’s experience is different though. Though I was in one of the poorest families in my hometown. None of my aunts, uncles or parents own their own home today and they’re 50s and 60s now. The sacrifices of growing up in a wealthy middle class town will enable me to buy a house. Going to see an open house in 35 minutes!


  • Campgrounds are everywhere and one in under a 2 hour drive is very doable throughout your whole life for a family vacation. You won’t lose access to that.

    Housing costs will swing back. We’re around the point where we were in the last housing market crash. Prices are at the edge of affordability for the middle class. Mortgages are higher than what can be rented. One market course correction and a ton of people lose their houses and the market collapses again.

    They’re doing everything they can to try and stop the collapse but homes are still increasing in price way more quickly than wages. Just a matter of time.


  • People who work full-time jobs used to be middle class. Living wages, affordable housing, yearly vacations, etc.

    When?

    Do you call camping in a campground a “family vacation” ? because that’s as far as my family had growing up in a pensioned job. We never could afford air travel, fancy new TVs, new cars… our house was very basic, we always drove beaters, we spent years without one thing or another to make it work.

    This isn’t the current generation, or the last one, this was even earlier.

    Just trying to understand when this idea that anybody in any job could have the white picket fence and world class quality of life was somehow a reality. I don’t think that’s ever been the case for the poorest full time workers or even the bottom 50%.