I am far from comfortable… I think if we don’t find a way to turn things around quickly with non-college educated folks they are going to burn this country down and don’t think I am getting out unscathed, would gladly give up pretty much everything to avoid that happening…
Like I really, really wish they gave us the power to push Biden to the left and save us all, but they didn’t. And now we have to find a way forward through this clusterfuck.
Unfortunately they seem intent on following the R propaganda in the wrong direction and I don’t know how to change that… 10 years ago the “liberal bubble” wasn’t really a thing, people talked different and had different hobbies in the country but that was about it. Now its God, Guns, Country, Trump everywhere, get a random guy telling me he heard AOC advocated eating aborted babies, Creepy Joe, its fucked…
Right, you fled the country because you see the hopelessness of the situation. In a functioning country, we should able to say for example “college education costs are out of control and need to be slashed”… if establishment Ds won’t do it then we will just primary them again and again until it gets done. And then we go down the list fixing each problem the same way.
Why wouldn’t I be all for that, accusing me of being in the pocket of Big College or something like that in my subconscious?
But we have so much bullshit flooding the system from all directions that we are correctly telling you that even that is a pipe dream… again which you acknowledge by fleeing the country…
Because unlike you, I have no ability to flee the country and opt out of capitalism. And I never have nor will ever be in the 1%, maybe that is a you thing, having that ability to step over people to accomplish that…
All I need is a place to live, healthcare and food… and you keep insisting that I want it to be through unfettered capitalism without any evidence other than the fact that I am stuck in this country…
You have options. It’s just harder for you than it is for him, but it’s not impossible. Well, maybe the health care part might be difficult to swing.
To bring it back to AOC, the point of this thread, she said that she felt she was 50-50 to leave politics and do some homesteading. Johnny might resemble her mindset if she reaches the point where she wants to drop out of society.
Some people are more inclined to hustle culture than others. I’m not immune, but I’m much less interested in it than others. What changes need to be made?
They found the price where it was hard to find unskilled workers. It’s the price where being homeless is very slightly worse than working the job. I promise you that the lower end employers who intentionally pay a living wage could be absurdly choosy about who they hired. Costco wasn’t struggling to stay staffed.
They talk about how there’s a shortage of truck drivers and nurses all the time too. IRL there’s a shortage of people willing to do that kind of work for that kind of money.
The labor force participation rate is down quite a lot since the 80’s-90’s and wages at the bottom have declined in real terms pretty drastically (largely because min wage didn’t keep up with inflation and unions stopped being a thing).
I already know all this. Everyone wants to train their way out of poverty with more schooling. Which is good, free higher education is good. But until you pay the people making the coffee and beds enough to live there will be all the issues that come from poverty.
Could not possibly agree enough. The biggest thing UBI will do for this country is give the people who work low skilled jobs the option to say no to their employers. A negotiation where you can’t say no is called begging.
If we’re going to be a capitalist nation at the very least every citizen should be a shareholder in the nation itself… and shareholders get dividends. That income stream is coming from the accumulated hard work that we and our ancestors did to build this nation into a superpower.
That includes being able to say ‘yeah I don’t want to spend a day doing backbreaking labor while being screamed at by Karens for 8.75 an hour… I’ll wait till something better comes up’ and fucking off back to your apartment. That means that if your boss starts sexually harassing you at a larger small town employer you don’t feel like you have to take it because if you resist you’ll get a reputation as a troublemaker with the local employers who golf with your boss. That means a lot of things about what’s wrong with our society won’t be as big of a deal or exist at all.
It’s the power imbalances between the haves and the have nots that bother me more than the material conditions. It’s the fact that one group has to be utterly subservient to the other that makes me wretch. The material conditions are bad too, but the lack of dignity is really what drives my bitterness.
If the UBI was not above the poverty level people would still be forced to work those jobs. It would be better and they would have more flexibility but people still need to do them and they would still be underpaid just subsidized by UBI. Might even lower the pay for those jobs.
Also i dont care for the whole unskilled thing. There are some people in low wage jobs using more of their brain power than white collar paper pushers.
Unfortunately skill in this context means replaceable. I totally agree that nearly everyone who isn’t raised doing farm work sucks at farming. A lot of times ‘low skill’ just means ‘we have too many people who can do that’.
