• he/him

Coder, pun perpetrator
Grumpiness elemental
Hyperbole abuser


Tools programmer
Writer-wannabe
Did translations once upon a time
I contain multitudes


(TurfsterNTE off Twitter)


Trans rights
Black lives matter


Be excellent to each other


UE4/5 Plugins on Itch
nte.itch.io/

NireBryce
@NireBryce

thinking about how the US uses a shell game, where by privatizing all the social goods provided most other places, they can point to high salaries and high productive value and claim we're a rich country, which is true, but leave out that after every expense you have to have as like, a human who exists, I know people with low-ish 6 figure salaries who are living paycheck to paycheck thanks to previous debt or medical problems or etc

so GDP and money changing hands looks high but is largely meaningless because half of it would have been public services in any other country


NireBryce
@NireBryce

It's even more interesting because parts of China kinda did the opposite of this. Subsidizing housing and healthcare let them artificially deflate wages to attract american business investments in manufacturing and tooling, and, especially, patents. It still reduced quality of life, but not nearly as much as if the wages were that low in the US way of doing things.

and then once the US was reliant on them as a manufacturing base, having moved most of their manufacturing there, China started slackening some of those and raising wages.

every "trade war" with China is the US having shot itself in the foot while falling for the bait and then getting really upset at how obvious it was in retrospect. CIA must be too busy dropping LSD and micromanaging horrifying dictators to write accurate reports.


Turfster
@Turfster

yeah a lot of people here still have the "I would be making X times as much in the US" mentality, and then I have to tell them "and you'd blow all of that on one hospital visit, instead of paying less than the price of a good lunch like you do here"


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

damn that's a really interesting observation. i guess this is like... what. is this pivot by china analogous to shooting themselves in the foot so they can net a bunch of wage cash from foreign (american) businesses? or is this effectively and sneakily equivalent to putting tariffs on labor as if it was an export* (and also shooting themselves in the foot ig) and then shrugging and beling like "idk man you said this is normal for developing nations or whatever"

*i was originally thinking like regular tariffs but then i realized it's more like this? it's kind of fucked either way but i wonder if there's no real analog that would be a) practically enforceable and b) not seen as basically an act of war

in reply to @Turfster's post:

and that's a 300$ ER bill on top of paying for the insurance already, who pays the other like 20k or whatever numberwang they choose in the billing department. if the insurance deigns to. there's nearly no rent control, and there's no transit so affordable places require a car, etc etc. it's absurd how our gov keeps being able to spin it like it's riches when a lot of countries can get way more luxuries on minimum or even "liveable" wages here.

the tech wages haven't even kept up with rents anywhere near tech offices. the precarity is creeping to the upper middle class, it's so surreal to see them struggle even more because they aren't used to it...