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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26256 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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there must always be sewage janitors working on minimum wage

Or there could be sewage janitors making extremely good wages, sufficiently socially respected for their sacrifice to assuage the struggle of the work.

This has literally never happened. Plumbers, earning good wages to work with their hands, don’t get a lot of social respect- you think the janitors working with their hands at half the skill level are going to be respected and paid well?

The problem is also the solution, in this case: if anyone can do your job in a society where some subsection of people are known to be trash, nobody will give you the time of day. But if everyone is excellent, then even the lowest are worthy of everyone's respect.

I'm not talking about any communist bologna, more like how the medieval meritocracy of denmark has transitioned so that the gal taking your order at McDonalds is beautiful and friendly

Edit for PS: I went to Alaska once for a few days many moons ago and the hotel maid was like a Danish McDonald's worker, blew my mind

An interesting result of an economy where everyone is equally talented is that the least enjoyable jobs pay the best. People actually have to choose to do those jobs rather than being stuck with them because they're not smart enough to be engineers or whatever.

Even within engineering, the "enjoyable" jobs are known for lower pay and worse work-life balance: most game development houses and places like SpaceX are notoriously bad for this.

They don't want you to know this, but the guy working for a defense contractor filling out TPS reports (or programming in COBOL or whatever) is getting paid a lot, and gets to go home at 5:00 every day.

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