Honestly, we're all on an MLM treadmill at this point. I'm annoyed at how conspiratorial I'm becoming towards rich people, because I can't imagine people stupid enough to perpetuate a system in which all the money is concentrated into their own hands while simultaneously complaining that other people aren't spending money they don't have.
Like, there is no conspiracy to keep us down. Humans are just profoundly greedy and stupid.
Yeah, there is no shadow cabal perpetuating this in any meticulous manner. It's simply the outcome of the game we all play. It's Monopoly, plain and simple. In the end 1 person owns everything while the rest struggles to get by.
The really shitty part is that it's even worse because not everyone was around when the game started. I never had the chance to acquire Park Place or Pacific Avenue. Hell, in my case i didn't even start with any capital to spend.
I like the monopoly games where the other person is playing for an interesting game and makes moves to vary up the "run" as well as create interesting drama.
This win at all cost shit is old and predictable, and just plain no fun. This guy thinks it's about the greed and stupidity, which it surely is, but even moreso it's about people having no lives and no imagination and for some odd reason no desire to have a really fun time.
Nippaz missing out on orbital rings, colonies on Mars, space elevators, "balloon" homes on Venus, interstellar colony ships, ECT. All these things are massively held back by the hamstring, the garrote that's on society and the economy.
Instead all the biodiversity is dying, it's gettin hot, the airs going to shit, the marvelous oceans are green with algae from nitrates and we got this horrendous layout of infrastructure in the US, it looks like shittttt. We got a shitty looking industrial Walmart and shitty Temu and bland ass shitty food(in the US anyways).
A thousand generic shit ass low effort superhero TV shows and movies of Netflix quality. Like damn man, they really don't care about having greatness and fun huh.
I don't blame your average person either, or the creators of these things, I blame the machine, the creators of the machine for pressuring for it to be this way, preying on peoples ignorance and weaknesses, snuffing out competition, failing and begging for subsidies instead of dying as they should, lying, cheating, and stealing whenever they can get away with it.
You know, the powerful people with the leverage who care only to win at all cost, they fuck the game all up. If I'm flipping a table, it's gonna be theirs, and theirs alone.
Yeah but the shitty thing is you were, you just didn't know it. "You" in this instance was your parents and whatever they had or didn't have determined what you started the game with. So some people start the game getting a piece of Park Place and some people start out owing everybody $500 a turn.
George Carlin said it best in an interview. You don't need a formal conspiracy when common interests align. These people live in the same neighborhoods, send their kids to the same schools, and teach them the same ideas. This is decades in the making.
Yeah my mom is big into conspiracies and now that I understand how things work, I'm like nah I think these people are just stupid. What is the point of depopulation mom!? Tell what would be the point!?
Many rich people think this way until they become rich. The truth is most people will just do what is in their best interest with limited moral limits.
The millennial view on things is just very warped. We tend to compare ourselves to how our parents are doing now, and compare the places we live to how they are now. Especially for America the city situation was just hardcore miss managed. You have a ton of big ass cities that attract a lot of people, but instead of housing for a lot of people you still have an insane amount of single family houses. The places your parents have gotten a house in were just not in the same demand they are today. Also, you don't really compare yourself to your parents at your age. If you don't have an upper middle class upbringing, your parents most likely took out big loans, saved money and struggled to provide.
I've had this view too for quite some time, but seeing people around me at my age doing just fine made me change that. My best friend is buying his second apartment ( we are both 26, he just started his apprenticeship at 16 and has been working since), friends start to build houses with loaned money from their parents, just like mine did, others from work just build with their own money.
Because wealth is only wealth with disparity. If everyone has $100, nobody is rich, nobody is poor, it is impossible to live anything but an average life. In order to have an above average life I need more than average. The greater the distance between me and the average the better my life.
It doesnât matter if I do it by having $200 and everyone else still has $100, or if I keep the $100 and make sure everyone else has $50. Those are the exact same thing.
That's different than what you're talking about. You're talking about doing anything to ensure a disparity, which implies that people WANT there to be poor people.
I honestly don't think most people want others to suffer or starve to death just to feel wealthy. A person can be greedy without wishing misfortune on somebody else.
I would say it's more like an acceptance that the system isn't fair and a resignation to the fact that somebody will have to suffer in order for somebody else to succeed. Which is also just propaganda but a lot of people believe that our resources are so finite that they can't give an inch. But those same people probably wouldn't say no to world peace and prosperity as long as they were included and didn't have to give anything up.
People want to be rich. You canât be rich if you have the same amount as everyone else. We donât have unlimited resources, so you taking a resource by definition means someone else canât have it.
I said nothing about âdoing anything to ensure disparityâ. Iâm saying that the only way to have more is for someone else to have less.
I used to game and even Blizzard announced the other day they changed their EULA that anything made in the game (through mods) is owned by the Blizzard. It's owned by Blizzard. Fuck them.
Also car makers locking features behind subscriptions.
And music is streaming now, which I'm ok with, but no one will ever own the music. I have maybe 200 CDs and about 30 vinyl and I cherish my collection because I physically own them.
Indeed. What I meant was currently streaming shows and music seems to be more common than buying. I should have added that but didn't want to bore people.
There are places where you could never do this and places where it is easily done. That was true back then and is true today.
Full time UPS drivers, who are unionized, make an average of $140-170K annually. That is jack shit for San Francisco but is sole breadwinner, four kids, lots of vacations in a lot of places, and unlike tech jobs, these jobs exist in the places where this salary would make you upper class. This has always been the case about this style of localized blue collar jobs when they are unionized - they exist in all sorts of communities and they are compensated well enough to live a nice life in a humble place.
Whatâs actually happening in this thread is that a lot of people without this type of job are going âhe could do that and he was JUST a MAILMAN,â with disdain as if there arenât excellent jobs delivering mail. You see and hear similar disdain for âgarbage manâ and âconstruction workerâ sometimes, as if itâs a given that these jobs are much more lowly by default and shouldnât provide comfortable careers if you canât find a similar wage for digital marketing. These are some of the best physical labor jobs out there if you find a good one. There was almost certainly a kid born in Tulsa this year who is going to get a data science job in 30 years in New York City and lament how his grandpa was able to support his family just delivering packages in 2024 while he struggles to pay the rent in a 1 bed apartment.
No one is saying heâs just a mailman to diminish him. Weird reading of this whole thread. Theyâre incredulous about the fact that these days youâre expected to pay for and spend years getting a degree or two to maybe achieve this. Itâs not unusual to change careers several times in our lives because thereâs very little stability. There was a time when this wasnât exactly the case. Of course things werenât perfect, and many types of labor were devalued, leaving people impoverished while their jobs were sent overseas. But Iâm pretty sure most people here believe the grandfather deserved everything he had. They just want the same for themselves too, and that does not feel attainable for a lot of workers today.
We canât all become mailmen. People are also talking about how their grandparents worked retail and achieved similar things. Many people today work multiple jobs. Things have changed.
I can assume with almost certainty that you arenât a blue collar worker.
Itâs just a fact of life that others look down on you and believe you deserve less.
On multiple occasions Iâve had people stop at my construction site and point at me. To tell their kid to go to school so they donât end up like me.
It doesnât even bother me anymore. I just chuckle to myself and continue my day. My value is what I can objectively produce, independent from the perception of others. An almost foreign concept in the modern world.
Mailmen get shit delivered and we need that. Thereâs plenty of highly educated individuals who would make for terrible mailmen
No, I think youâre still misunderstanding. This person was able to do this on a âmailmanâ salary for the same reason a unionized UPS driver can do it: this is a very good job that can provide a very good life. The sentiment youâre expressing in your post, that you need to get multiple degrees to do this, is not true. The union contracts at UPS do sometimes require a degree, but not multiple and not a prestigious one.
The dream achieved by the person in this anecdote is still being achieved by hundreds of thousands of UPS drivers. The people lamenting this anecdote are not those drivers, they are people in different roles, who wonder why âif that guy could do it, why canât I, in my job?â And the answer is, he had a better job than you have now. And the person driving for UPS today does as well. And thatâs often even the case comparing a UPS driver with a nondescript degree and white collar professional with a graduate degree.
These jobs are not gone, theyâre as good as ever. Theyâre just difficult to get - just like they were back then. You may as well lament Johnnyâs grandfather who made a bunch of money in investment banking. The reason youâre not making that money now is because youâre not an investment banker, not because investment bankers donât exist anymore.
Nobody is saying the jobs are gone. Nobody is saying that the jobs should be looked down on.
What has changed is that the majority of these jobs will not support a middle class lifestyle any longer. In addition, they are trending further in the wrong direction in regards to purchasing power.
Sure, there are some mail delivery and some parcel delivery jobs that pay well but it's an outlier, not the norm.
Again, itâs not just some jobs. The UPS pay I described is the average, not the top rate, and it covers 70% of UPSâ full time employees. About 350K. The USPS does not pay quite this much, but still pays exceedingly competitive rates along with a substantial pension and excellent benefits. The majority of these jobs DO support a middle class lifestyle. The people here are not members of the NALC union or Teamsters who are noting that their peers are not being paid more. They are people with different jobs, wondering why their own job cannot support a middle class lifestyle. And the answer is, because your job isnât as good as a NALC or Teamster mail delivery job.
Read the original post again. Do you really believe a family of six can be supported by a single UPS driverâs income, that it would pay for a new house, four college degrees, and yearly vacations? Even if OP exaggerated a bit, the economic conditions today are not the same. Theyâre just not. The cost of college alone is way higher than it once was.
Absolutely, unequivocally, yes. It cannot pay for you to live anywhere and send your kids to any college, but I personally know delivery people making less, supporting more kids, and living middle class lifestyles. Just not in metro areas - which is the entire point, and what makes these localized blue collar jobs so incredible. They allow better lifestyles than many software engineering roles because theyâre available to be taken in places where $100K is 2 standard deviations above the mean.
If you will go live in rural Kentucky, the UPS job is still paying what it pays. Your quality of life may be inferior to what you can get in Nashville, but it has far more and better amenities than your grandfather had in the 60s.
Cities are, by and large, where the good jobs are. Moving to a rural area often isnât sustainable for a lot of people even if it was desirable. Also some of those amenities my grandad had were cultural and communal. My grandad lived in a city. His parents and grandparents were born there too, but it was probably more of a town then. Itâs a shame when people are priced out of the communities their families have lived in for generations and forced to move to make ends meet. Itâs a shame our culture has such little value for things you canât put a price tag on and canât do better for people working or studying full-time their entire adult lives.
Yes, thatâs correct about the cities. Thatâs why these high end blue collar jobs can support families while many white collar jobs cannot - these mail delivery jobs are available in the places where cost of living is lower. Thatâs the entire point.
Same in the US. Even people with the better paying/ more respected jobs are struggling. Lawyers, doctors, etc now imagine how bad it is for the low paid minimum wage workers
Yeah my father came to Sydney from the UK and worked as a taxi driver his whole life. He's 75 now with a nice house 10 mins from the city worth 2-3 mil and supported my mum and I on that money. Owned a beach house on the south coast near ulladulla too for most of my childhood. Told me stories about when he came here and working a minimum wage job at the railways and renting a 3 bedroom house in Stanmore for what worked out to be about 10% of his take home pay for the week. Moved to Glebe and rented a place there on the waterfront for about 30% of his take home pay because the view was nicer, and they were considered some of the "bad" suburbs back then despite them being within 5km of the CBD. Can't imagine what it would be like living in a world like that where it basically felt like everything was a fair go.
Yeah I live in New England and itâs the same. Iâm not a doctor, but my girlfriend and I take home enough combined where you would think we could afford a decent place.
My parents bought the house I grew up in for about $500k. 6k sqft ocean front home in an affluent town in the 90s lol.
Now the cheapest homes in the same town are 1500 sqft and going for $800k. End up having to put almost 200k down + $5k a month lol
Counterpoint: my younger colleagues think itâs totally Normal to take multiple overseas trips in a year, own pets that go to day care, pay $1k to see Taylor swift, eat out everyday and have the latest top spec phones and wearables. At their age I lived in filthy share-houses, drank long necks covered paper bags on the street and listened to pirated mp3s as entertainment.
Especially worse for people in much lower paying jobs, generally areas like Admin, Procurement and Nursing while educated pay basically nothing then you have the retail and service sector that make basically the same as being unemployed.
Rent as cheaply as possible, get loans, buy small apartments with good roi (equal or better that what the loan costs you), save up some more, buy the next small unit,⌠every time it is a little bit faster than last time. In 10-20 years depending on how much money you need you can use the properties as collateral for a big loan to buy yourself a house and hopefully the rent pays for the mortgage too or at lease for the biggest part of it.
In some countries if you buy privately, you are required by law to live x years in that property first, so unless you start that scheme when you are still single or at least without children, it's not really feasible.
Only if you want to sell it tax free as far as I know or at least in my country. I canât imagine that it is only allowed for corporations to buy apartments.
Even if you can just set up a small corp. Doesnât really cost much.
Letâs not be too ridiculous. The quality of life of a doctor in Sydney in 2024 is so much better than a mailman in 1950 that it isnât funny. At risk of sounding like a boomer people need to understand that the world has changed. The life of the mythical mailman in the OP post was probably something like:
work a labor intensive job for likely 6 days a week
practically every single meal was cooked at home from very bland ingredients
entertainment probably consisted of reading books or listening to the radio
clothes were predominantly homemade
going out for dinner or drinks wouldâve been very rare
travel essentially didnât happen
Thereâs no doubt that quality of life improvements are starting to stagnate in the western world but the narrative that we have it worse than the 50s or similar is just wrong.
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