LOL this is such a typical HN reply. "Just get room mates". Come on, the solution is to pay people so they can live a decent life and have a family if they want to.
Why would it be my employers obligation to pay me what I think I need because I want luxuries (like a $1600 apartment by myself)?
The typical HN reply may be trying to help figure out a problem like “if I only have X dollars how can I maximize.”
Reality is that unskilled labor doesn’t get everything they want. Fortunately, they get everything they need. A better example would be healthcare, but I think Amazon’s fulfillment center workers have pretty good insurance.
We are not morally obligated to ensure that every single entry-level, unskilled job pays enough for a middle class lifestyle, regardless of mistakes made prior.
The solution is to not work long-term in an entry-level, unskilled job.
Would you please not take HN threads into ideological flamewar, regardless of how wrong other people are or how strongly you feel? It's off-topic and destructive here, and against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
A society absolutely does have a moral obligation to:
- provide its citizens with opportunities and freedom to move around (education, social lifts, basic safety net) and
- make sure those who could not use these opportunities for some well-justified reason (disabled people, elderly) do not die of hunger or cold
Giving everyone a lifestyle they want is not one of these obligations.
Is society providing education? Social lifts? a basic safety net? do we protect people from hunger and cold? In the United States, we don't even have a functioning political system that provides real options and opportunities. The political system has been captured by capitalists and serves their interests while disregarding the needs of the populace.
You’re quite right about a moral obligation, I agree with that. But the obligation is not to provide a middle class lifestyle. The obligation is for basic needs and opportunity.
Society does provide homes, thankfully, in the US. But we don’t provide them to individuals making $40k/year.
In the US, society does not provide homes. Nor does it provide health care. Nor does it provide access to higher education. Nor does it provide a safety net.
The US certainly does provide homes (HUD [0]) and health care (Medicaid/medicare) and higher education (state university system).
I think there’s a fair argument about the quality of the safety net, but the US does at least spend a lot of money on the basic needs you just called out. They are typically for the poor, disabled, and/or elderly.
> That is _not_ a solution, and this is an incredibly naive and classist take on why people people work in unskilled positions.
Care to elaborate? Many of us held minimum wage positions for some period of time before gathering the skills / tools / time to move on to something better.
> A society absolutely does have a moral obligation to its citizenry, otherwise what is the point of it?
A citizenry has moral obligations to its society. Demanding handouts for minimal contribution does not create a strong society.
> A man must bend his knee to the oligarchs and the state and get crumbs in return? This is what I meant by classist conspiracy theories and capitalist bootlicking. HN needs to wake the fuck up.
I can hurl insults and straw-man opposing views, too. I don't think it benefits anyone, though.
> Care to elaborate? Many of us held minimum wage positions for some period of time before gathering the skills / tools / time to move on to something better.
So did I, but I don't regard someone a failure who deserves misery if they did not 'gather necessary skills'. There are a lot of reasons why someone might not be able to move past minimum wage work in life, not all of them their fault. Even if it is and they threw away every opportunity they ever had does that mean they deserve a lifetime of hardship?
> A citizenry has moral obligations to its society. Demanding handouts for minimal contribution does not create a strong society.
Our society provides trillions to oligarchs like Bezos. If we're OK with that then we should be OK with giving more to those who need it most even if they dont work "hard enough".
> So did I, but I don't regard someone a failure who deserves misery if they did not 'gather necessary skills'.
Back to the straw-manning, I suppose. I never made those claims.
> There are a lot of reasons why someone might not be able to move past minimum wage work in life, not all of them their fault. Even if it is and they threw away every opportunity they ever had does that mean they deserve a lifetime of hardship?
Nobody deserves a lifetime of hardship, but that doesn't morally obligate others to provide a middle class lifestyle for them.
> Our society provides trillions to oligarchs like Bezos. If we're OK with that then we should be OK with giving more to those who need it most even if they dont work "hard enough".
Nobody questions your ability to give as much as you'd like. It becomes questionable when you start trying to enforce this "morality" on others, but I think you know that, and that's why you frame it the way you did.
> Back to the straw-manning, I suppose. I never made those claims.
Not overtly no. You just heavily implied that anyone working for minimum wage or even simply earning less than you are has somehow lived a life of bad decisions and moral inferiority.
> Come on, the solution is to pay people so they can live a decent life and have a family if they want to.
That's not up for a company to decide, they don't control all the prices and sentiments that determine what is and isn't "decent to live". They can decide what they can pay to hire an extra worker and make more money as a result. If they don't believe they'll make more money as a result, then there's no hire.
I’m really interested in what you think the job of market systems is. And to whom they are trying to serve.
It seems odd that capitalism would have such a duty to humanity because it’s like saying “art has failed humanity.” Or “this screwdriver has failed breakfast.”
Capitalism is a system created by humans, presumably for the benefit of humans. If it doesn't do a very good job of making the lives of humans better then it could be considered a failure.
As we're seeing now, wealth and income inequality are at terrible levels. Wage stagnation has been hurting the middle class. Housing is becoming increasingly expensive as jobs centralize on cities. Gentrification pushes out the working class.
We have climate change bearing down on us, the effects of which are already being seen through mass migration, fires, hurricanes, and other disasters. Meanwhile the fossil fuel industry would have us believe there are "two sides" to this argument so that they can continue to profit instead of adapting and doing the right thing. The first to feel it certainly won't be those of us making several hundred thousand dollars per year and looking down on those living paycheck to paycheck. It'll be those living paycheck to paycheck who feel it first.
Neither artists nor bartenders have the power over humanity that capitalists do.
They're occasionally the largest company in the world, headed by the richest man in the world. I'm sure they can find the money somewhere to pay their employees a decent wage.
Ahhh, the "XYZ is a billion dollar company!!1! they can afford to pay $x to their employees" argument.
Guys, i suggest looking at some of these companies balance sheets. In many cases (Walmarts, McDonalds...) even a small 5% pay raise for all employees would eat every single penny of profits.
>Guys, i suggest looking at some of these companies balance sheets. In many cases (Walmarts, McDonalds...) even a small 5% pay raise for all employees would eat every single penny of profits.
Is this the conclusion you reached after reading Amazon's balance sheets? If so, would you mind sharing your research?
I've actually looked at it, taking all $3 billion of Amazon's 2017 profit and dividing it among its 500,000 employees adds up to 6000$.
To be fair though, they aren't making money on fulfillment really, they're cross-subsidizing it with their more profitable segments which also do not require that many workers. In that sense it isn't comparable with Wal-Mart and McDonalds.
I used to work in warehouses, years ago. Even $1000 would have meant an extra trip to the dentist that year and maybe some new clothes more than once per 2 years.
It can be 'good' in a very perverse sense, i.e. good enough to undermine and destroy other companies that DO choose to pay their employees enough to live.
This is unhelpful, but that's the way things work at the moment, and it's very well understood by aggregate investment capital.
So then you get a second sense: good enough to sustain huge amounts of investment capital from people who correctly perceive that it will destroy other companies that choose to pay their employees enough to live.
I was on basic health insurance(paid by myself) and it was mandatory for immigrants. I never had to visit the doctors, so unsure of the details of coverage.
Could you have raised a child on that salary? In the long term? How would you have paid for college? Could you break the cycle of poverty in your family without saving for your child's college education?
That works only if you assume that all of the current spending is completely necessary and cannot be reduced. Or that internal processes can never change. Neither of those are true though.
It's a shame this idea has gone out of fashion. The concept once came straight from FDR's mouth: if your business cannot afford to pay a living wage to its workers, then it should not be permitted to exist. We should not consider it a viable business, and neither should the law.
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's against the site guidelines. Regardless of which ideology you're battling for or against, we ban accounts that do this, because it destroys the intellectual curiosity HN exists for.
quick summary of the acronyms... STUN/TURN/ICE are all related to NAT traversal (ie. when you are behind a router or firewall of some kind and your computer's IP is different from your public IP). The reason you need this is because UDP is not connection-based like TCP. So STUN is a service that helps your computer find its public IP. ICE is a protocol for finding and reporting peer candidates (after they've learned their public IPs via STUN) so they can establish a peer-to-peer connection. TURN is when you reflect the connection off a public server instead of establishing a peer-to-peer connection.
SDP is session description...basically information on what media formats and other things each client will accept.
RTP is how the media (or other data) packets are framed
RTCP is out of band reporting for things like packet loss and other info so that each side can adjust media properties
The nice thing about WebRTC is it takes care most of this stuff for you. If you're always connecting to a server with a public IP you'll just need a few things:
1) WebRTC server that can accept media data (like janus or aiortc)
2) Some signalling mechanism, Websockets work well for this
3) you _may_ need a STUN server, google has stun servers available but you could also use coturn for this.
The rest you shouldn't need to worry as much about because webrtc handles it all under the hood
The massive amount of money basically sits in an investment account and generates dividends to live off of. That's what people are talking about. In order to have a salary they're used to they need like 20-30x the cash in the bank to generate it (preferably a bit extra to keep up with inflation too). Otherwise if you weren't using it to do that presumably you'd eventually run out of money and have to go back to work (except now you're old and 30 years out of date)
Oh I know, but it seems like I encounter a mindset here that you need six figures forever just to not be destitute. A few days ago a guy posted he had eight million post-tax from an exit and folks were calling it barely enough to retire. Even if you could only keep up with inflation that ought to last 150+ years. Particularly with a paid off house.
Well there's the problem right there. Your salary should be higher than your cost of living because you're actively trying to save for retirement. Once you're actually retired you shouldn't need as much.
Yes. What has become clear to me in this discussion is that some people, when talking about being "comfortable", are talking about maintaining a much more lavish lifestyle, funded by passive income, than many people like myself, are used to or feel that they need. For many, comfort is simply feeling like they aren't at risk of starving or becoming homeless. That's the definition I'm working with, but it's clear to me that others are talking about something different, as you have articulated in your comment. Thank you.
I think one of the disconnections here is that you are talking about extra cash (over what you currently earn), whereas rgbrenner (and probably others) are talking about all income.
And I think they have a point: $100k is a lot of money, but what if you got sick and couldn't work anymore, ever? Wouldn't you be at the risk of starving or becoming homeless if you had to stretch that over 30 or 40 years?
> I think one of the disconnections here is that you are talking about extra cash (over what you currently earn), whereas rgbrenner (and probably others) are talking about all income.
Agreed.
> And I think they have a point: $100k is a lot of money, but what if you got sick and couldn't work anymore, ever?
That's a fair point. I don't really worry too much about getting sick and never being able to work again ever. I think some of this comes down to the level of risk that each individual is content to live with. If I had children or a family, perhaps I would be a lot more worried.
Nice site. This isn't the first visa site like it i've seen, but they all focus on travel visas it seems. I suppose that's the low-hanging fruit.
What would be interesting to see are work visas, entrepreneur/freelance visas, working holiday visas, and so on. Obviously a much more complicated ask but that is what I have not yet seen from a site.
Main reason being this: If you want to travel somewhere you can pretty much go on government websites (either yours or theirs) and see what the visa requirements are. If you're looking to relocate to another country but perhaps don't have a good idea where you want to (or can) relocate to or how, it can be a steep hill to climb. Having something with a bit of a hint as to where to start looking would be nice for people I think.
