“seemingly no way to bring these costs down”
well becca suffers from capitalist realism, that’s for sure. she can’t imagine a world that isn’t capitalism, she thinks all of these prices are some natural phenomenon decided by “the market”, as if the market is being controlled by some mysterious force, rather than by, you know, capitalists.
When Adam Smith talked about the “invisible hand of the free market,” he was being literal. Like Jesus, Santa, and the Easter Bunny all come down from heaven each night and move the price tags around at grocery stores.
Libs and reactionaries still hold this belief, though they’ve separated it from God and religion. Now they think of it as some sort of naturally occurring force, like gravity.
According to the Clergy / Economists, there is an all-knowing, all-powerful God / Market that rewards the good and punishes the bad.
If you are poor and suffering, you must have angered God / The Market.
If you are rich, you must have pleased God / The Market.
No government can or should attempt to control God / The Market.
God / The Market is a fickle, unknowable, unpredictable beast that might occasionally destroy your entire hometown, but that must still be your fault somehow.
Being angry at God / The Market is like being angry at the weather, or gravity.
You can’t expect anything from God / The Market - you are entitled to nothing from the power on high.
You can pray, you can beg, you can hope - but you are entitled and rude if you expect anything good from God / The Market.
it wasnt walmart that raised the prices. you can thank mother nature for that. and now she’s flooding the whole south eastern US!! this is why i support mom and pop oil companies in their valiant crusade against to so-called “environment” (prison is also an environment, so you put two and two together)
Conservatism is getting what you asked for and then complaining about it.
RIP Murray Bookchin you’d fucking hate twitter
Every time a person asks this question and concludes the problem isn’t capitalism a
gets his top hat and monocleThis also happens with schools. Teachers have to buy basic school supplies for students, but adminstration congratulates itself for building another fucking stadium.
I can’t help but even wonder if those stadiums actually turn a profit?
Regardless, my rural yeehaw high school was a fine point of all of this. My dad kept pointing out how loaded the superintendent and administration was while the school itself was low quality and practically falling apart. There was even this stench of “we suck and we’re proud of it!”
If that shit wasn’t profitable, then it is a sad display of what this country values: us children of poor families may get to engage in some sports until we’re 18 and then it’s off to some backbreaking blue-collar job, or a retail job that’s minimum wage or a buck above if you’re lucky. If you go to college there’s a good chance that porky ain’t in the hiring mood and you get mocked for your arrogance in trying to do social mobility.
And if it is profitable, why the hell would they want to invest in academics or their teachers? They don’t make the superintendent money and after all this country tries to predetermine us rural folk into trades or military. The propaganda that porky is “all set” with college level professionals is all part of the war on education.
I can’t help but even wonder if those stadiums actually turn a profit
They don’t but I don’t think it matters. We shouldn’t care if school facilities turn a profit bc that’s the logic used to cut funding for the arts. A properly maintained stadium is actually good bc sports are good for community and they could be used for a lot of things besides just football games or whatever.
The problem is we live under capitalism so the stadiums are overly expensive, contain a bunch of unnecessary bullshit like luxury box amenities (more of a college thing) and are built way too often.
I can’t help but even wonder if those stadiums actually turn a profit?
They don’t, even if sometimes the administration ghouls will make that promise toward credulous parents (whose property taxes pay for that shit, mostly) and toward faculty (often with the most condescending language in bulletins about how we “all need to tighten our belts” to the amount of the cost of the stadium).
It was that way in the college I went to as well. Administration got themselves a massive administration-only expansion to their own recreation center and some pretentious flex architecture to the campus and turned the library (the LIBRARY at a fucking UNIVERSITY I might add) into a pompous and LOUD coffee shop with some books on the walls used as DECORATION.
my college did the same thing but they sold it to the alumni association by saying it was gonna at least be a local coffee shop. It was for 2 years until the university raised the rent on the local shop so they could put in a Starbucks lol
The university system is a fuck and nothing made me hate it more than attending it.
I enjoyed college life for the most part, but the peonage of the “adjunct” system was unjust and you can see the weariness and precarity in the instructors’ eyes, though the handful of older tenured “fuck you, got mine” types certainly seemed to enjoy their little perches.
Two, just two, of my tenured professors were actually amazing and were full comrades, up to and including on-the-street cred for being there for key Civil Rights skirmishes.
I know it’s not the real answer but I just pretend it’s necessary for the sports to bring in the big bucks to fund the massively inflated coach salaries in a giant “chicken and egg” scam where each side of the equation justifies the cost of the other side as part of the same huge fucking scam
As someone from outside the US I’ve always found it baffling that not only does Yankee universities have official sports teams, those teams are also professional teams with huge money involved.
When I went to university, the athletic high point of the year was student unions doing a beer race in inflatable boats on the campus pond.
One time, my university put on a massive prop-laden and super expensive “homecoming party” for some very important millionaire sportsball coach, with many buildings on campus decorated garishly to tickle his narcissism. This happened the same year that budget cuts were actively fucking over students with tuition hikes and the like.
Unfortunately, Rebecca’s first answer for this problem is going to be gay jews.
this person was grown in a lab to miss the point
https://xcancel.com/AntiCommieBecca/status/1840216516090048904
comes to understand that all gender is performative, realises that conservatives are the most gender obsessed performers,
doubles down on transphobia by telling men to stop acting like trans rights activists
tbh shes probably a grifter, too smart to be genuine.
CHUDs when they once again, as always, get everything that they wanted.
Post a link coward, I want to see how she reconciles this without any systemic criticism.
I stole the picture from Twitter, but here you go, I dug it up for you
https://xcancel.com/AntiCommieBecca/status/1839853521023447506
CW misogyny
spoiler
The anticommunist dude telling her that mothers who work outside the home are losers reminds me of the article a bit ago about women in the white supremacist movement being upset about misogyny from their male counterparts.
tl;dr “Unregulated capitalism and bloated middle management”
“Regulated capitalism is good and sustainable” and other lies you can tell yourself
Never ask what unregulated capitalism and regulated capitalism have in common
(Hint: it’s the capitalism)
Go damn, can these chuds leave at least a little bit of space for satire. Stealing jobs from hardworking hexbear shitposters, smh my dickhead
I love that the replier’s first thought is about bringing costs down rather than bringing that caregiver’s salaries up lol.
To be fair neither is the answer.
of course, start with SuperFreakonomics
Bullshit Jobs by
is also delving into this question.Right, can’t be understated that the professional staff infrastructure digs deep into the profit margins. I’m thinking of tutoring companies, they charge something like $60-100/hr for private tutoring and pay their tutors in the $10-20/hr range. The justification is basically that the admin side and advertising/client acquisition costs money. Which is true, but how many people do you need to put up facebook marketplace ads and issue receipts to clients? Like how many fake jobs are you supporting to suck away up to 90% of the hourly wage.
I used to work for one of those companies pre-covid. I was making $15 an hour, mostly because it was easy to have someone else schedule students for me. Then they decided that tutors would just be given a list of clients and be expected to schedule appointments on their own. Having that list was literally the only difference between just doing the whole job on my own and they just gave it to me and expected to still take a cut. I spent the next week explaining the situation to my clients and letting them know that 1) I was about to quit and 2) I would be willing to continue working with their student for significantly less than they were already paying the tutoring company. I proposed that we met halfway between my previous wage and the company’s previous rate. That’s when I found out how much they were being charged and they found out how little of that I was getting. My boss was profiting $85 for every hour I spent tutoring. Every client was shocked that I was making minimum wage when they were having trouble affording me. I didn’t feel right even charging them the ~60 that was halfway, so I offered $45.
Anyway, I ended up poaching literally every single one of my clients because it turns out most people enjoy saving $60 every week. Cushiest and easiest job I ever had. Four clients and about an hour, hour and a half of driving every day. I’d show up to a house and the SAH parent would have some snacks. I’d help the kid make it through high school, pocket what’s closer to $60 of today’s money, and leave for the next one. I went from struggling financially to saving money for the first time working less than 30 hours per week because my boss wanted me to do more of his job.
(Also if anyone is interested in tutoring, I haven’t tutored since covid but I’d be happy to answer questions for anyone that lives within driving distance of a bougie suburb that also would like to make $45/hr, not clickbait)
I used to tutor when I was in grad school, to undergrads. I charged around $45/hour tutoring upper year engineering courses. I only recently found out how much the tutoring companies were charging high schoolers and was like holy fuck I could’ve had so much more disposable income during grad school.
I’m seriously considering shifting back to tutoring. Like even with time spent of finding clients and chasing down payments I imagine it’s possible to make a good living. The main issue I haven’t gamed out how taxes factor in (specifically sales taxes and pension payments). I imagine tutoring full time isn’t something I can get away doing for cash and not repoting on my income tax.
I never paid taxes on cash, but I did on anything with a paper trail
It’s definitely still possible to make a living tutoring, but the big challenge is your working hours. Kids are in school here until 2-3 and noone wants to schedule tutoring after 7:00, which means you only can get a few students in per day. I ended up taking a part time job for the mornings and tutoring in the evenings, but if you can crack the case on midday tutoring you’d be set up. If you have somewhere in public you can meet students, that cuts down on drive time between session to fit more in, too. I always met at their house which meant 15 or so minutes of driving between appointments.
A friend of mine was at a small business tyrant’s tutoring company, and they made him sign a contract saying that he was an independent contractor with a non-compete clause. Obviously illegal and contradictory but it still made it hard for him to keep his clients when he decided to stop being exploited.
Oh, I would definitely advise not to tell one’s boss that you’re about to be their competitor. I’m fortunate enough that my boss was enough of a spacy dumbass that I genuinely don’t think he put it together that me leaving and my clients leaving were connected. For anyone planning something similar: part of a tutor’s job is to build a connection with the students and parents they’re working with, so it’s not unusual for a client to walk when their tutor isn’t available. People aren’t coming to tutoring because they love your boss.
Teaching
to my undergrads again this quarter, hopefully it sticks with some of them.Rest in power comrade tt
some books
good luck getting her to read das kapital lolololol
She should start with Value, Price, and Profit. In fact, it’s not gonna be optional. We’re gonna read it to her.
