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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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While I love a good bashing of smug Europeans I do think comparing the two land masses as a whole doesn’t make a ton of sense. IMO you need to get to the level of comparing finance employees in NYC vs London or a tech employee in Berlin vs SF.

The variety of people/lifestyles in both places is so vast that comparing averages doesn’t do it justice.

For example most of the European complaints about the US (healthcare, crime, weight generally speaking, food quality, no PTO) simply don’t apply if you are a high earner/have wealth. I’d imagine there are similar blind spots about Europe that Americans miss when comparing averages.

By American standards you don’t have to be that high an earner to dodge those issues, either.

Absolutely, and there are a staggering number of high paying jobs in this country. Travel nurses can pull in $150-200k here and that’s a very attainable job.

And yet the median household income is not even half of the lower bound of that estimate.

The median nurse salary is slightly above the median household income.

Presumably there are reasons people are leaving this supposedly "very attainable" money on the table.

One component of this is that US households are highly degenerate. We have insane levels of single parenting, and old-age divorcees relative to Europe, which does a lot for the median household income. For example, if you restrict yourself to households of married parents with children, the median jumps from $70k to $100k. We also have huge underclass which pulls the median down substantially.

Well yeah, travel nursing is what it sounds like- plenty of people are willing to take a lower but still perfectly respectable salary in exchange for not living on the road.

Of course, some people prefer pornhub and PlayStation, but if your willing to work there are tons of higher paying jobs that don’t take a ton of effort to get. Travel nursing & big 4 accounting come to mind as attainable 4 year degrees for most of the population.

Some people don’t want to chase the $$$’s but that doesn’t mean it’s not an attainable option.

"some people"

Presumably the median person isn't a lazy bum and would like the 40% pay raise from just being a regular nurse (without any travel, decent working conditions and ironclad employment security) would earn them. I don't think this is as attainable as you think. The median salary is probably what it is for a reason.

Just saw a post on Reddit about a bartender at a dive bar in Seattle making $65/hour (mostly tips) and I believe him. Assuming he can pull 30 hours/week, this would put him around 95th percentile of French workers and with fewer hours worked even.

Money really does grow on trees here on the West Coast. Business minded? You can charge $200 for 90 minutes of "mobile detailing" which basically means vacuuming and washing someone's car. Get 20 appointments per week and that's 200k a year, which is nearly 1 percenter wages in France.

making $65/hour (mostly tips)

There's the rub, though: it's dependent on tipping culture. If you're making up someone's wages by tipping however much percentage, then you're not really getting the 'cheap price' for drinks, meals, whatever.

I don't know if people are starting to resent it, or the gradual upward creep (it was 15%, now it's 20% or whatever next) of expected acceptable tips. I do think if people are finding that discretionary spending has to be tightened, they're not going to tip as well or maybe even at all.

But it's different over here; tips are a voluntary thing, not expected to be priced in as part of your going out. Although a lot of places are starting to include "service charges" which again, you're never sure if they do share that with the staff or the owners just keep it as profit.

Call me too proud for my own good if you like, but if I wasn't so butthurt at the very notion of going from being a doctor to a nurse, I'd consider that.

The hours are quite bad and the work is onerous, but money is also money. In the UK, doctors have to do nursing tasks that even their Indian brethren think is an utter waste of their time or talent, so the delta isn't that big. At least they don't have to empty bedpans.

American nurses are too highly paid to be changing bedpans- that’s a CNA with 6 weeks training, often company paid for.

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