I'm absolutely living it up with my 38,000 a year that can barely keep me fed and clothed because of my many medical expenses.
I haven't bought pants in like four years
No she is not, she is one of the just asking questions/making statements from the Rationalist/Lesswrong people. (That weird silicon valley group). She is always like this.
If you don't know about these people they are the Roko Basilisk people, the people who fear that AI will become selfaware and kill us all via magic. They also are obsessed with (racial) IQ. IQ-anon.
I think Aells is smart in a way that is just totally perpendicular to having good takes. Like she's not dumb, she's a dimensional alien intruding on our reality from the bad takes brane.
Yeah she proposed that absolutely flooding the market with AI CP would reduce the need to "manufacture" ACTUAL CP, and as such would keep more kids safe. There's a twisted logic to it, but I don't think the outcome would have been... very cool....
Man it’s lucky that everything in the US costs exactly as much as it does in Uruguay which is the only way this statement wouldn’t be the stupidest god damn thing
How do they get here and think, "yes this point is where I plant my flag!" It's such a weird landing point. It's clear that they have an individual point of view and then build their worldview around it using all manner of fallacies.
Legitimately there are still libs walking around who think class is based entirely on income rather than the relationship to means of production. Good news is there are plenty of urban workers who see through that bullshit, class solidarity isn't doomed.
There was a chart showing countries that, if all global wealth were evened out among the entire population, where people on average would be better or worse off, and the US was the only G20 country where the average citizen was below median global wealth.
The petite bourgeoisie will always be an easier target then the actual holders of wealth, because they tend to be just as ignorant of the issues at hand and are wealthy enough to make it seem like they aren't being adversely impacted by the ultra wealthy.
If you can accept your state, anything can be bliss. The ones who don't know they're ignorant and rage that everyone else must be wrong are as miserable as the people who torture themselves with information.
Brb gonna tell the bank that I’m actually very rich because I’m in the top 5% of global income since people in Africa and SE Asia work in literal slavery for giant corporations. This will get them to approve my mortgage for that $300,000 house
I couldn't agree more with your take on this. It's the same reason we used to go after Monopolies. It's the political power distorting democracy to the point of Oligopoly.
It’s kind of like being dead: you don’t know you’re dead, but others feel the impact. It’s the same with being that dumb. You don’t know you are, but everyone around you does.
Yes and no. It hurts you materially and you get blind-sided a lot - but I think a level of ignorance is necessary to not fall to despair in that situation.
The amount of gas it takes for these cnts to try and gaslight people into thinking they are well off has to have raised the global temperature by 2 degrees in itself
And the LEDs are flashlights of the phones whose owners work for the spirit of getting hired someday by Warren Poppet or whatever. They just run around flashing lights in random people's faces and yell "you are rich because you are not dead yet"
How, I'm not quite understanding. Is that $30,000 yearly? Or bi-weekly? I can tell you, $30,000 yearly doesn't get you anything. I make just about that working in lawn care, and it doesn't allow for buffer to make ends meet. I would be evicted in NYC with a $1,354 bi-weekly pay check.
no they have a point
the rich tend to have sedentary lives, eating fatty foods and marinating in wines, leading to succulent meat
the tender and soft texture of the meat is amazing
Also moves in the same crowd as a bunch of silicon valley techk cultists who have some kind of pull in the tech world for incomprehensible eldritch horror reasons.
Bold of her to say that when she charges 3k an hour for her time (or so I heard from her once on an interview), so she makes a year worth of typical american salary in one long day of hard work.
Yeah that wouldn’t even cover my rent (after tax at least). In a lot of places even 100K or more still comes with financial considerations and real problems - someone with billions of dollars literally has nothing out of their reach, nor will they ever.
No. I think this is a deliberate deflection, trying to push back down.
“The be happy you have what you have” all while never mind what we’re doing over here and over there or that we should all have more joy just some.
Also the reason most Americans are in the top 5% globally is cause in many countries more than half the population lives in abject poverty. Which is fucking horrible and all the more reason we should eat the rich
There is a LOT for be said about the incredible privilege people in rich countries have compared to people who live in countries whose currency is highly devalued. That does not erase their poverty in the society they live in, though.
if you’re struggling to survive and/or working more than you should need to to survive then you’re still struggling, y’know? but I guess you got a tv or whatever
Okay. Stupid question but like in the case where cost of living is higher does it generally mean like living conditions are generally better?
It's like locally determined the poverty line and income still determines living conditions but is 'average' wage earner in higher CPI place better off?
Depends a lot. You can have an extremely expensive area because it is near a business center, but the amount you get paid doesn't adequately keep pace with the local costs of food, housing, bills, etc.
As a person who was born in Brazil and moved to the US: I did an internship where I was earning around a thousand dollars a month (lmao) and needing help from my parents to cover costs. I was definitely living in poverty at the time, despite the money I earned being 5x the value of the BRL.
And conversely, my parents are for sure well off, but their assistance was 5x less effective due to conversion rates. So then you have me, earning a currency that is 5x as valuable living in poverty, getting assistance from people who are locally well off, but whose money is worth 5x less.
Now that I have my degree and an actual job in the US, by Brazilian standards, I am fabulously wealthy, but by US standards, it's a standard "you got a Master's and have a better wage than a person with just a Bachelor's" wage. It's 100% a great wage, but it's not "I'm buying a yacht" rich.
What is it that makes certain very-online liberal circles become obsessed with creating "levels" of oppression to categorize ppl into & judge them on that? It's not a competition
if this person knows a magic spell to snipe the cost of living from cheaper places while still living in more expensive areas then they really should let the rest of us in on it…
I suppose if you never had to pay sky high rent or astronomical food prices, this might look true. Unfortunately the ridiculous cost of living the American worker is saddled with neutralizes all of those "riches."
That's already too charitable as the statistic itself is garbage too
To be part of the *global* 1% you'd need a net worth of over >1 Million USD. No one making 30k is gonna have that, infact the vast majority of the US population isn't near it.
Media literacy has absolutely cratered. Let’s not forget that streaming services frequently tell writers to have characters announce what they’re doing in case the “viewer” is looking at another screen or in an adjacent room cooking or something.
Why stop there? When you consider how many animals, plants, microbials, etc in the world have no money, a "poor" person making 30k is over the 99.9 percentile. So is anyone who has any money. Have a dollar? You're rich! We're all rich! Nothing needs to change you ingrates!
And we are so much wealthier than every single one. What even are we complaining about? Do the ants have universal healthcare and free college? NO! Why should we expect more than ants?
i get the bit and i laughed but i also have autism so did you know there IS actually a species of ant with universal healthcare, that treat eachother with medicine? meet the megaponera ant, they have a saliva that is anti bacterial that they apply to wounded soldiers they carry back to their nest
I didn’t know the specifics but if any species, I figured ants or bees would be the ones that would actually have schools or hospitals for the colony. So it turns out we really should expect at least as much as ants.
Or I could make a career of bein' blue
I could dress in black and read Camus
Smoke clove cigarettes and drink Vermouth
Like I was 17, that would be a scream
The same dumbasses who think Cubans are dirt-poor because its GDP isn't propped up by workers sacrificing 2/3 of their income to landlords and health insurance.
Cut these and other rent-seeking bloodsuckers out of the equation and suddenly you have a six-figure standard of living on $30k/year.
even if those numbers are right, and i bet my left nipple they aren't, it makes no fucking difference if you're wealthy by brazil standards for example because you're NOT LIVING IN BRAZIL
Just to fact check this actual baboon. The wealth inequality in America can be summarized in this picture. The working class here is the 50-90 percentile. 2/3rd of all wealth in America is owned by the top 10%, and almost 1/3rd of that is owned by the top 1%.
So your argument is that Americans who are paid $30k/yr salary should be delighted because they make more than someone who is being actively bombed or someone who is homeless?
Also, this chart is based off of tax payers. So yes wealth and income are the same here. Keep asking irrelevant questions.
Also, what's the bigger purpose of the post in the first place? Defending billionaires paying employees starvation wages because many people make even less than starvation wages? What kinda dumb bootlicking shit is that?
People who don't quite get what rich is. This isn't a bit above average pay. This is the people who are on top, getting tax breaks, who can lose millions and still get a private plane, etc. Just another pseudo-intellectual establishment tool!
Tech is wild. Half my coworkers worship SlateStarCodex like it’s the Rationalist Bible—20,000 words of half-assed philosophy dressed up as groundbreaking because it mentions Bayesian priors. They call it ‘rationalism,’ but it’s just STEM bros cosplaying as moral philosophers & reinventing it badly.
(and regardless, stuff in the U.S. tends to be more expensive than other countries, so you are going to have a rough time if you can’t afford these expenses even if your income is “higher than the rest of the world”)
You do not have a right to earn many times higher wages than the rest of the world for the same labor. The inequality which you oppose also creates that situation. You shouldnt defend and deny this disparity and then claim you are doing so in service of a struggle against the rich.
A real struggle against the rich would dissolve this difference. It is not an epiphenomenal thing or a trick of numbers. There is an actual reality that workers in most of the world are paid only a fraction of what american workers are paid.
i know that’s a true statement, but it is ridiculous to think that someone can’t be poor in the country they live in just because the average income of the country is higher. relative poverty is a thing
i see that is how most people are reading the statement. relative poverty by the way is not super useful, but the point that many Americans are working and poor is quite true.
and I understand that poor Americans are somewhat better off on average than poor people in lower-income countries, and that this wealth disparity indeed has an impact, but that’s not what Aella was saying. she was denying that poor Americans are poor at all, which is idiotic.
No normalization for purchasing power, the number’s wrong to begin with, even if it was right it wouldn’t mean anything except that concentration at the top is so bad you can be at the 95%ile in income and be struggling…
It's not even necessarily about the rich, even, it's more about how the money is made. If a person works for their money, however much that is, then they are proletariat. If a person makes money from owning things, no matter how little, they are bourgeoisie.
Yeah. especially with artists that are hardworking & lucky & end up making a lot of money. That person isn’t (necessarily at least) exploiting the labor of others - and even if they were, “eat the rich” is not really about the guy making 10 times your salary, it’s about the guy making 100,000x
also to add, the guy making x100,000 ur salary doesn't get it via straightforward "income" so using income statistics to compare how rich people are is quite flawed itfp
~1990, NJ's Dem Gov Jim Florio raised taxes on "the rich".
My friend "Al the Communist", who made $35K working for the state was very irked to find that, since he was single, that included him.
"I can't be RICH, I'm a WORKER, and I'm not getting paid enough to be RICH!"
Comments
I haven't bought pants in like four years
Wait
It’d be crazy if that tiny slice controlled something like 50% of the world’s total wealth though.
Look on the bright side: You possess more bullets than most people in the world right now.
Not that it translates well to treating down capitalism, mind you. But still,
This is the most “no-thought” post I’ve ever seen. Class solidarity is doomed if people like this are getting attention online 😭
It only hurts others.
the rich tend to have sedentary lives, eating fatty foods and marinating in wines, leading to succulent meat
the tender and soft texture of the meat is amazing
“The be happy you have what you have” all while never mind what we’re doing over here and over there or that we should all have more joy just some.
Somehow.
It's like locally determined the poverty line and income still determines living conditions but is 'average' wage earner in higher CPI place better off?
Same thing, if you think about it.
To be part of the *global* 1% you'd need a net worth of over >1 Million USD. No one making 30k is gonna have that, infact the vast majority of the US population isn't near it.
Do you have any idea how much matter in the universe isn't? Statistically, all of it. You shouldn't even exist, that's how wealthy you are.
I could dress in black and read Camus
Smoke clove cigarettes and drink Vermouth
Like I was 17, that would be a scream
Cut these and other rent-seeking bloodsuckers out of the equation and suddenly you have a six-figure standard of living on $30k/year.
the cost of living is like
a thing
1. wealth redistribution
2. price controls
after a short transitional period, land reform/land back and reparations could be instituted
I'm to high to do math.
He sucks regardless.
Do you think that wealth and income are the same thing?
Also, this chart is based off of tax payers. So yes wealth and income are the same here. Keep asking irrelevant questions.
It's pretty fucked to describe someone who can't afford transportation, medical care, food, or housing as "rich."
A one bedroom apartment in the Boston area is $30k a year, and that's after tax money.
Bruh. That’s not a bug. That’s a feature.
(from World Inequality Index)
I think alot of things probably hurt for her lol
My friend "Al the Communist", who made $35K working for the state was very irked to find that, since he was single, that included him.
"I can't be RICH, I'm a WORKER, and I'm not getting paid enough to be RICH!"