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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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Otherwise, what is the metric for wealth distribution?

How useful you are to the people with the money to pay you. Which generally implies being willing to take on extra work, or having done a bunch of work yourself for free to build expertise, so that you're useful later. The children of the wealthy are generally considered extreme outliers, who tend to lose the money within a couple generations, and don't really have much of a long-term effect.

Is roofing in the summer as a redhead especially lucrative?

Suffering doesn't buy the boss anything. Working hard may require suffering, but the suffering itself does not have any value, unless the boss is a (literal) sadist, in which case it may provide quite a bit of value. The value is generally in the work, and if you can find a way to do the work without suffering (example: the redhead wearing a wide-brim hat to protect their neck), basically nobody would say you should charge less.