In your case, it won't. You would be better off renting and investing the extra $2k in assets that are productive rather than speculative. This should be obvious, but the West as a whole has bought into the housing as a form of wealth and can't let the music stop now without ruining millions of lives.
Housing as a form of generational wealth is a trick that works for the population as a whole for a generation or two. The majority of rentals come from regular people who bought long before you and have significantly lower mortgages or no mortgages at all, or large firms who have access to lower rates and more accounting tricks like depreciation. In either case, what they can afford to accept as rents is a lot less than what you can afford to accept as rent. The best you can hope for is significant appreciation or significant rent increases in the face of stagnant wages. High demand markets like NYC and SF can sustain ever increasing prices for a long time, but most markets cannot.
You’re not underpaid but you could make more by switching companies. Some companies simply pay more than others for the same role, level, and responsibilities because they’re engineering driven or better funded or more successful or operate at greater scale/profitability.
Any hot tech startup or FANG company or newish enterprise SaaS (Snowflake) or previous unicorn (AirBnB, Lyft) can pay those numbers total compensation for a SWE with 4+ years experience. Apply to all of them and see what you can get.
Who said these people aren’t working? I see a lot of people retraining, pivoting, and taking care of others. That’s work. Just because it doesn’t pay doesn’t mean it isn’t work or valuable. Being a stay at home parent doesn’t pay, but it’s clearly valuable.
Employment is a means to an end: basic survival. We do it because we’re forced to by forced scarcity. There may be virtue in work, but there’s no inherent virtue in employment.
Black when capitalized doesn’t refer to a race.
It refers to an ethnicity. It’s not a retcon to capitalize ethnicities. We’ve been capitalizing ethnicities for a while now.
Black is an overloaded term. It’s a race and an ethnicity. If you were to write about black people in Africa, it would be nonsensical to capitalize it because black doesn’t communicate any shared identity in that context. The right granularity is national, ethnic, or tribal.
But Black is a cultural identity in the context of the United States. Blacks, or African-Americans, are ethnically distinct and have shared history, culture, and language. In 1840, almost all blacks in America were slaves. In 1950, almost all blacks were descendants of slaves. At either time, almost all of them would have spoken English as their first language. At either time, most would have been born in the American South. Most importantly, at either time would have identified with each other on the basis of those shared traits.
Whites, on the other hand, are comprised of distinct ethnic groups and had their own communities throughout American history. Go to any major American city and you’ll find neighborhoods that are historically Italian, Irish, or German.
I disagree fundamentally with your take because I approach this subject academically instead of in pop culture terms. Both blacks and whites have distinct ethnic groups that are more granular. Just as whites are ethnically English, Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, etc., blacks are ethnically Akan, Cuban, Caribbean, Abyssian, Fulani, Zulu, Oromo, and more.
Let’s bring in an academic to this discussion.
Someone already linked the AP guidelines, but I’ll quote an actual professor with a background in this kind of stuff.
Here’s quote from an article written by John McWhorter, a prominent Black conservative who happens to be a professor of English and linguistics at Stanford the subject[1]:
“But what about the black business districts that thrived across the country after slavery was abolished? What about Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright and Thurgood Marshall, none born in Africa and all deeply American people? And while we're on Marshall, what about the civil rights revolution, a moral awakening that we gave to ourselves and the nation.”
“My roots trace back to working-class Black people - Americans, not foreigners - and I'm proud of it. I am John Hamilton McWhorter the Fifth. Four men with my name and appearance, doing their best in a segregated America, came before me. They and their dearest are the heritage that I can feel in my heart, and they knew the sidewalks of Philadelphia and Atlanta, not Sierra Leone.”
“So, we will have a name for ourselves - and it should be Black. "Colored" and "Negro" had their good points but carry a whiff of Plessy vs. Ferguson and Bull Connor about them, so we will let them lie. "Black" isn't perfect, but no term is.”
Are you better qualified to say whether Black should or shouldn’t be capitalized than a Black English and linguistics professor at Stanford? Is your take more academic than his? And if so on what basis? Because it doesn’t seem to be based context or history or what Black people call or have called themselves.
My claim and one his claims is simple: there is a culturally distinct group within America that is called African-American and Black and that the B should be capitalized. Whether The better is Black or African-American is up for debate but only within the African-American community. It’s our right to determine what the proper term is. In the meantime, the consensus is that you should capitalize the B in Black when referring to black Americans who descended from black slaves in America.
Feels like it would be very weird to ask someone if they are a recent immigrant (there are millions of African Americans who immigrated to the USA post 1965 or are children of those immigrants) or an ADOS to decide whether you should label them “Black” or “black”.
I’ll say whatever someone prefers though. Capitalizing “w” in white is a bit creepy to me though and has echoes of promoting the idea that all “whites” are the same.
2. Usually the discussion or writing would not be limited to ADOS. I’ve very rarely seen writers attempt to divide the community like that. As I said though, I’m fine with capitalizing it if that community wants it.
You could make a lot of the same statements about “whites” becoming one community in america. That said I don’t think capitalizing the W looks good, it’s weird and seems like something a white supremacist would do.
Your take isn't informed, as the reasoning behind the change, as explained by the editorial teams I linked above, and which has been debated academically, is an explicit counter to your primary argument.
So Blacks aren’t a “real people”? Is your actual argument that African-Americans don’t exist as a distinct ethnic group? If that’s your argument you should say so.
You are misrepresenting my position. My comment was to the effect that they are real people and that you are trying to reduce and dismiss their ethnicities.
It’s common to capitalize ethnicities and Black is an ethnicity in the United States. White is considered a race. Is your issue that Black is capitalized or that white is not capitalized?
You can take advantage of people when they’re in dire straits. That’s not indicative of some greater truth about the price of labor but a fact of exploitation.
Just because they would be better off with it doesn’t mean it’s not exploitative. The problem is the lack of non exploitative alternatives. You can argue a life of exploitation is better than starving to death but I’d say even that is up for debate.
No. This is a blatant lie that keeps being repeated without thought.
The reason people work at amazon warehouses is because they don't have other choice. For many there simply are no other jobs that pay or treat you better.
It's not my fault the kids skipping class, having fun and making jokes during teacher's lessons are now paid less than me.
If that's how you think people become poor and desperate, I can only surmise that you've never had anything bad happen to you ever.
Never got sick. Never had a family member hurt. Never been the victim of crime. Never fallen on a wet floor. Never had a house fire. Never had your car break down. You always had plenty of food, plenty of money, plenty of infrastructure near you. Never had to worry about the condition of your home, or whether you'd even have a home tomorrow. Someone else paid for your education, your transportation, your entire life when you were growing up.
Consider yourself blessed. And please never run for office.
Yes, life has hardships, but please do not tell me they are the ones controlling its course and your choices don't matter.
For hardships you can buy insurance with money or time (family, friends, various organisations) but your choices are entirely your responsibility and there is no way to insure yourself against making the wrong ones.
If it really is just a matter of the effort one puts into education, then answer this. If everyone studied with the same exact amount of effort, would we have a world without waitresses, warehouse workers, low wage jobs?
Obviously not. This society relies entirely on the fact that a good portion of the population can be blackmailed into doing the bad jobs, while the other small portion enjoys the fruits.
If nobody could be forced to take shitty jobs, how would most of the current industries exist?
> would we have a world without waitresses, warehouse workers, low wage jobs?
The latter is impossible to answer since "low wage" is relative, much like if everyone had millions of $ for every $ they owned, the currency would simply devalue.
That said, in a nation full of skilled, competent workers, the nation would be more productive overall (more "fruits" to go around), and more competitive abroad - so it's not a zero-sum game in that sense.
> waitresses, warehouse workers
I couldn't care less if waitressing disappeared, I prefer self-serve places; what value is lost?
If no-one wanted to be paid low wages to work in warehouses, either a) warehouse worker wages would go up, or b) an alternative solution would be found, or c) the business is no longer viable and collapses.
> can be blackmailed into doing the bad jobs
and even the people with good jobs probably wouldn't work if they weren't paid. In that sense are they blackmailed too?
> If nobody could be forced to take shitty jobs, how would most of the current industries exist?
By paying more for those jobs, or replacing them.
Alternatively, by those industries not existing.
Do you think most industry cannot exist but for the subsidy of paying low wage
Can you give me an example of a healthy industry were the most critical workers are low paid?
The fewer people interested in taking those "shitty jobs", the more they would get paid. Then the jobs would cease to be shitty.
This is what we should push for, not artificially and undeservedly reward those jobs more and thus trap ever more people into them.
My grandmother was illiterate. That condemned her to a hard life of struggle and hard work. But she stayed on my father's ass to study. My father stayed on my ass and I am staying on my children's. The lesson was so strong, three generations are benefiting.
I fully agree that education is fundamental for everyone to have, but not simply to allow everyone to have a good job. Just because it would make society so much better for everyone.
For this reason I'm also convinced that every single kid should have access to the same high quality education, independently from how much their family pushes them to it.
I'm also convinced that people should have the chance to get back on studies at a later point in life, because it's a delusion to think that every kid will understand the need for education in their teenage years.
You are forgetting defaults and motivations in humans. By default, my kids would spend all day playing Minecraft. They do not have the motivation to do anything else.
I have to stay on their ass and push them to study. I am motivated to do that because I know how crappy low-level jobs are (I had one). Otherwise my default would be to let them do whatever they want. I love them!
A society which removes the motivation for its members to better themselves is a failed society.
You got some reasons. But the picture as a whole is different. Many can't make enough money to take care of their loved ones. Many are not lucky to have a grandma that pushed their dad to study. Also one doesn't need to be burned by fire to know it's dangerous.
Yes and as a society we should increase the number of such "grandmother events", not to remove the very reason mine existed in the first place. A society without competitiveness will fail.
And I don't know a better way to teach most people that fire is dangerous than a controlled burn...
What jobs have natural job security? Either you’re protected by a union, a professional association, or having a rare and valuable skill set. The unions have been busted, professional associations are exclusive by their nature and most people definitionally do not have rare and marketable skills. As a result, an increasingly large fraction of jobs are gig work, part-time, or on contract. That includes work in law and software engineering. Precarity is the natural state of an unregulated, de-unionized job market and it is not a bug but a feature. It has little to do with our public schools.
Housing as a form of generational wealth is a trick that works for the population as a whole for a generation or two. The majority of rentals come from regular people who bought long before you and have significantly lower mortgages or no mortgages at all, or large firms who have access to lower rates and more accounting tricks like depreciation. In either case, what they can afford to accept as rents is a lot less than what you can afford to accept as rent. The best you can hope for is significant appreciation or significant rent increases in the face of stagnant wages. High demand markets like NYC and SF can sustain ever increasing prices for a long time, but most markets cannot.