Comment on Just think about it

Joncash2@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  This is based on the fallacy that people deserve to be rich because they are more skilled and work harder. In most cases this is not true. Most just use money to make more money. They don’t actually produce anything useful for humanity.

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  • Joncash2@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    You understand that is a skill in and of itself. Which is why so many day traders end up going bankrupt. To be able to actually consistently make money off of money isn’t magical, it doesn’t happen automatically. If it did everyone would be far wealthier.

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    • Dasus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      To be able to actually consistently make money off of money isn’t magical, it doesn’t happen automatically

      Ever heard of interest? Savings accounts?

      Say you just have 100 million sitting in a bank account. The average national savings account interest rate (and you’d get a much better one with 100 million) is 0.42 APY.

      So you’d get $420,000 in interest every year.

      If it did everyone would be far wealthier.

      No, the rich would be richer. It’s expensive to make money, but very simple if you have a lot of it. Those without the capacity will keep getting poorer. You can shift the margins by taking more risks, obviously, but you can just make moneys for free when you already have enough for everything you need.

      And hmm how is the trend going?

      oxfam.org/…/ten-richest-men-double-their-fortunes…

      Oh, right.

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      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        The average national savings account interest rate (and you’d get a much better one with 100 million) is 0.42 APY.

        Treasury Notes are 10x that rate. This mostly just illustrates how scammy and cheap your average bank has grown.

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      • Joncash2@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Sure they increased their money during the pandemic. People were acting like idiots buying homes and good when they really really shouldn’t have. It’s also true the rich prey on this. Go try to get 100 million in an interest bank account and see what happens, it’s actually harder to leave that kind of money in interest accounts because of how FINRA regulations work. Your money would literally not be insured. You wouldn’t know these things because you just hear other poor people talk about it.

        Thus, the real crux of the problem. The poor don’t even understand well enough what’s happening to make a good argument. Between the wanna be rich poor people who talk about unskilled labor as if you just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and the poor who hate the rich, no one actually understands how it all works. And it all WORKS BECAUSE you don’t understand. If the poor didn’t respond the way they did during the pandemic, the rich wouldn’t have been able to hoover up all their money. Who’s taking the 22% loans, who’s buying houses they can’t afford on 30+ year mortgages at 8%. All of those actions make the rich richer. You want to stop the rich? Stop wasting your money. But even if you can, the rest won’t and the money will keep funneling up. Thus the real problem. But no one wants to change their life style. Instead they’ll go out and buy expensive handbags and other luxury items on lay away. You can’t stop the rich as long as everyone participates in capitalism.

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    • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Which is why so many day traders end up going bankrupt.
      Well yeah, so do most of the gamblers, but some miraculously don’t, but we don’t believe that playing rulelts is a skill now. Incidentally, moat of the people who consistently gamble but don’t go bankrupt are people who have more money than it’s possible to lose in one sitting.
      Playing stonks follows exactly the same logic.

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      • Joncash2@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Actually you make a great point. Which is why there’s professional poker, where gamblers can literally make a living. Understanding the difference between being a professional and being able to consistently make money and where to go to do it, is part of the skill I’m talking about. Thanks!

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    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Which is why so many day traders end up going bankrupt.

      Bankruptcy is a tool for discharging debt, not a metric for business failure.

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  • bradd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I agree with your point that not all rich people deserve or have earned it but I think most people have, just based on personal experience and attention to this detail.

    Look at the number of CEOs in the US it’s actually a pretty low number, I think <300K. Most people around and below CEO will need to compete in some way and most people serving coffee actually wouldn’t want to be competing in these positions anyway.

    I recently thought, if we paid people based on a persons importance in society so many things would be turned upside down. Example, day care workers are very important to a childs well being and education and are paid so little. If you paid them much better it would create incentives and competition for those positions. The smarter more driven people who would not have considered the position at such a low wage would be drawn in and as a result the quality of education would improve. That same dynamic applied anywhere else would have the same effect.

    Without an enforced rule like this, people who “deserve” more money might take jobs that don’t pay well, think education or research. You end up with open positions around CEOs, upper and middle management, that need to be filled that don’t require skills as much as say available and experience doing specific things like scheduling.

    I say all of this as a boots-on-the-ground senior engineer who refuses to take a management role, could make more money by doing less and have people being me coffee.

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• cdf12345@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  You’re missing the point. I don’t think most people have a problem saying there are different levels of skill based employment. Does designing a skyscraper take more skill than managing the lunch rush at a McDonald’s? Probably, but by saying working in fast food is an unskilled trade is propaganda to keep wages for those jobs low.

  There is a definite skill for handling noon at a McDonald’s. Maybe it’s different than doing high level math for engineering but it’s not unskilled.

  That’s where the issue is for most people that don’t like the punching down at “unskilled workers”

  This is the same argument I have with my parents when they say that “unskilled workers” have jobs and not careers. And they use that as a justification for not paying them a living wage, “it’s not supposed to be a job forever” is usually the answer I get.

  If you contribute 40 hours of labor to the country’s GDP, you should expect to be able to have shelter, food and medical care. That’s not asking a lot.

  Creating a class of full time employees below that basic level is disgusting.

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  • Dasus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Does designing a skyscraper take more skill than managing the lunch rush at a McDonald’s?

    I feel like it’d honestly be hard to compare, because it’s such a vastly different skillset/task.

    It’s like the differences between writing a technical manual and wrangling a clowder of cats on crack.

    With enough education, care and time, anyone could probably achieve the first (even if you suck at it, you can just do it again until it’s acceptable, there’s no rush), but even attempting the second takes a certain…je ne sais quoi.

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  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    If you contribute 40 hours of labor to the country’s GDP, you should expect to be able to have shelter, food and medical care. That’s not asking a lot.

    That’s 1000% true, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are jobs you can do from walking in off the street with an hour or two of training, and there are jobs that you need more training/background/skills to do.

    All full time work should provide enough for a basic standard of living. But arguing that there isn’t a difference in required skill between stocking shelves in an Amazon warehouse and say, diagnosing and treating cancer is absurd.

    That’s going to significantly undermine your argument with a lot of people.

    ---

    As far as your parents go, historically a lot of those jobs were populated primarily by high school students or people trying to make some side cash, and it wasn’t as hard to find employment in a more stable “career” job. The economy worked in a way where having dead end “starter” jobs still “worked”.

    They just probably aren’t as aware of the fact that more and more people are getting stuck in those jobs due to no fault of their own. The idea is truly and utterly alien to them if they haven’t had to navigate job hunting since they started their “career” job.

    The idea that people who didn’t make poor life choices are trying to survive off working at McDonalds doesn’t mesh with their understanding of how the world works. The idea that someone working at Walmart full time can’t afford to live without government assistance doesn’t seem real.

    The last time they had to directly deal with that sort of stuff, no one was trying to survive that way because you could much more easily move to a job you could survive on if you just put in a small amount of effort. It might have been another shitty job, but options were there if you just looked. Not too long ago you could survive off Walmart.

    All you can really do is to keep insisting that times have changed. Jobs aren’t just waiting for someone to ask to speak to the manager, and pay has not kept pace with costs of stuff increasing.

    Trying to argue that a fry cook deserves to be paid as much as a skilled position will always be a non-starter.

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    • faythofdragons@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      historically a lot of those jobs were populated primarily by high school students

      TIL McDonalds didn’t used to be open during the day because the majority of its workforce was in school.

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      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Awesome! I can put another hole in my “nitpick of minor detail that doesn’t change the main point” punch card. Two more and I get a free icecream!

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  • Joncash2@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    That’s just not true. Resources are split based on value of work regardless of the actual skill involved. The whole unskilled labor argument is nonsense to begin with as you point out, everything is a skill. If any rich person is complaining about unskilled labor, I’d assume they’re complaining that the skill of the employee doesn’t produce the results required so the person is unskilled, not that the job itself is unskilled. For example, a rich person complaining that the unskilled labor at McDonald’s isn’t a complaint that the job requires no skill, just that either the company didn’t train the person right or the person is unable to attain the skills necessary. After all, if they did everything properly, they wouldn’t be complaining about unskilled labor to begin with.

    Obviously, that isn’t going to stand true for every instance of unskilled labor. But what it seems to me is that you’re confusing the rich with the poor. People like your parents complain about unskilled labor because they don’t understand what the rich are saying. I see that a lot. But that’s like using people who don’t understand rocket science complaining about solar flares affecting rocket ships. It’s a massive misunderstanding between the scientists who are talking about solar flares and the common man who doesn’t understand.

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    • cdf12345@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      The mere continued use of the phrase “unskilled work” is undermining your stance. No work is unskilled.

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      • Joncash2@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Did you read what I wrote? I said when applying the term unskilled labor, it is applied to those who literally don’t have the skill and screwed up the product. Not that there’s work that doesn’t require skill. Or are you just trolling?

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• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  If I’m a construction worker who spent decades perfecting my skills so I get promoted to management

  Tell me you’ve never worked construction without telling me you’ve never worked construction.

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• bradd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  This is actually correct. I will say that these higher-ups are unreasonably dumb though. I work with a lot of them. It’s like they traded low IQ skills like wiping their ass with “high IQ” skills like being marketed to and going to conventions to find out how to generate synergy.

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