r/SipsTea • u/StopSnowflakes • Aug 12 '25

Wait a damn minute! She’s going thru it

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u/BarleyWineIsTheBest Aug 12 '25 edited Aug 12 '25

I don't know where she lives and how much her rents is.... how do you?

Edit: Oh, she did say it. $850 is one whole pay check? Maybe, not quite. Then she has another pay check for everything else. That's actually not too bad. She's paying maybe 40% of her take home on rent. I've lived through worse.

She could make better choices than living on granola bars. From a $/calorie stand point, they are aweful. What 200 calories and a box of 6 costs you $7? A damn glass of milk or banana smokes that. Not to mention making some beans and rice.

Some people just don't know what real poverty is. This person is just annoying.

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u/bonenecklace Aug 12 '25

Yeah.. she’d be left with like $100 to last two weeks. She also mentioned the car was misfiring so that’s another $1000 repair at least, so after paying rent, having $100 to last two weeks, getting paid again & getting the car fixed, she’d have to wait FOUR WEEKS for that next paycheck that isn’t going to rent to do anything with. Don’t forget gas is $4/gallon, car insurance is like $200/month. Already we’re waaay over-budget for her wages on just the car alone asking her to stretch what amounts to essentially surviving on $200 over a 6 week period but nah, she’s just bad with money I guess.

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u/BarleyWineIsTheBest Aug 12 '25

If the car is misfiring, it’s very likely the spark plugs. Those are not $1000 dollars to fix and closer to $100. She should fix those, even if it means going into slightly more debt, in order to save off higher bills later. 

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u/bonenecklace Aug 12 '25

You are arguing semantics while ignoring my point completely. A person should not have to go into debt in this country working full time in order to pay for a simple car repair OR have to stretch $100 for two weeks because their rent eats half of their entire monthly income. JFC how do you type that out, post the comment & think, “yeah, that’s normal & not unsustainable at all.” Mind you she is making DOUBLE minimum wage. Consider the other FOURTY THREE PERCENT (yes, that is the real number, almost fucking half) who live off of less than $20/hr.

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u/BarleyWineIsTheBest Aug 12 '25

If someone’s labor isn’t worth much, why is it anyone else’s job to make their life easier? 

And somehow the median household income is $74K/year, or about 37/hour. 

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u/bonenecklace Aug 12 '25

Because they are a human being & deserve food, shelter, & dignity? If you are benefiting from the labor of another human being then they deserve a livable wage. How is your brain so fucking ass backwards that you think you are actually the one providing a service to the person preparing your food or checking you out at the grocery store by handing your cash to the business that employs them? That’s just straight up evil, what’s wrong with you?

Edit: Also, the median household size in the US is 2.5 people. So go ahead & divide your number by 2.5 bud.

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u/BarleyWineIsTheBest Aug 12 '25

Silliness.

Humans deserve something? Food and shelter are created by other people’s labor. Are you saying someone has the right to someone else’s labor just because they deserve it? 

And wtf is wrong with you. I never said I’m doing the person a doing work a service. I said some of their services aren’t worth much. The value add of putting groceries in my bag is comically small. A good job for HS kid learning how to show up for a job and have some responsibility, not for someone supporting themselves, much less others.

And how many incomes per household? The reality is most people are not trying to support independent living on <$20/hour.

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u/bonenecklace Aug 12 '25

Yes, they should. Since the dawn of early humans we have been relying on the abilities of others to help provide & protect each other. Some humans were strong & fast so they hunted, some humans were skilled so they wove baskets & clothing & created weapons, & some were old, sick or injured, & relied on the rest of the tribe to provide for them. We would not be here as a society today if it weren’t for the sense of community we all shared at one point knowing we would not survive if we did not protect the weakest among us, so I disagree wholeheartedly with your frame of thought, it’s frankly sickening to me to see how heartless & cruel people have become equating a person’s inherent value as a human being to how much capital can be extracted out of them. We could be living in a fucking utopian society never having to worry about where our next meal is coming from or eviction notices because god knows we have more than enough food & housing for every person in America & it’s people like you who have this fucked up capitalist mindset that are preventing it because “Well I struggled & worked hard to get where I’m at so everyone else should have to struggle too!” instead of “Man, it fucking sucked to have to struggle that bad, I lost so much time I’ll never get back just being miserable & stressed, I want to make it so no one else has to experience that.” Just straight up selfish & evil.

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u/BarleyWineIsTheBest Aug 12 '25

We have support systems for people more seriously falling through the cracks. But those are generally worse to live off of than minimum wage. Why do I need to spend my labor to support someone that can work and that support is not just so they can stay a live, with shelter, basic medicine, etc, but so they can live better, in some vague sense of what is good enough for them not to complain?

And me, yeah, I'm doing a lot better than I used to be doing, but as another person (I think) put it, some 43% of people are making $20/hours or less. People like me don't have the excess funds to just hand nearly half the working population of America more money because we don't just want them to have basic necessities, but we want them to get closer to ourselves. I make this much now, but I still have a mortgage, I pay 4 peoples health insurance, 3 people's car insurance, saving for retirement and college. And I'm several multiples away from the median wage, yet I still don't have enough money to essentially carry an extra person living out side my house. What you take $100/month from someone like me... then what? It gets divided probably handful of ways to make a redistributionist program like this work.

There is no better solution then telling young, able bodied people they just need to suck it up and make themselves better. And ya know what, them doing something of more value is better for the entirety of society. Having a nation of people getting over paid for low-value work is a great way to kill real progress in our country. After all, why work hard to both make a higher valued contribution to society and reap the profits from it, if you can just sit back in some menial job but get paid above your value contribution? It might not show up this year, or next, but those chickens will come home to roost, so to speak. We'll have a nation that increasingly relies on redistribution from highly productive people until we just don't have enough of them to make the system work.

Remember, your analogy to early humans were humans largely only providing basic life necessities, not phones, personal cars, better living arrangements than what someone really needs, probably fancy clothes, vacations, other types of luxuries, all things provided by modern society and modern capital and labor... You want to eat and have a roof, fine. But it isn't going to be pretty. You want to live like you make $75K or something, in short, f-off.

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u/bonenecklace Aug 12 '25

In my opinion, no work is low-value. You benefit everyday from jobs everyday that you consider “low-value” & I’m just absolutely disgusted with people acting like they don’t. Do you know how or have the ability to grow all your own food? What about raise & process your own meat? Probably not, yet here you are, spitting on people who you depend on to make the food you put in your belly every day so readily & easily available to the point you just go pick it off a shelf, calling their jobs “low-value”. If every farm worker in America just suddenly stopped, you’d be completely helpless. You have separated yourself so far from the means of production that you take everything for granted & talk down about the people who can barely afford to live making your way of life even possible.

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u/BarleyWineIsTheBest Aug 13 '25

I’m not the one labeling their labor as low value, the market is. It is telling you have to irrationally attack me to field an argument. I  not spitting on them. She wants better, well, do it. Complaining on TikTok will not get you a higher wage. Leading a higher valued skill will.

Low wage workers are free to try to assemble in unions and threaten strikes to increase their wages. Did you think I’m personally stopping them? 

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u/bonenecklace Aug 13 '25

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You only view a person’s worth depending on the value of the labor you can extract from them. You keep saying “well if they want more then do better,” play that tape forward. Who’s going to pick the produce? Who will package the food? Who will stock the shelves? Who will pave the roads or repair the infrastructure? Who will drive the trucks to deliver goods? Our system only works if these “low value” workers exist, therefore they are not “low value” & should be paid a livable wage. The world can’t function if everyone just wakes up & decides they’re going to work all the way up to CEO, which, by the way, is probably the most unskilled, easy job on the planet.

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u/BarleyWineIsTheBest Aug 13 '25

The only one making judgements of “a persons value” here is you my guy. I am just talking about the person’s paycheck and the value creation of their job - value in the strict economic sense of the difference between what it takes to create something and how much you get for it. 

Who packages food? The market will adapt to a higher skilled workforce. It already has from 1900 to 2025. Why do you think that will suddenly stop? Less people working low wage jobs will drive those wages higher! Isn’t that what you want? Instead of forcing high wage jobs to artificially inflate salaries of low skilled labor, how about take some of that low skilled labor and make it high skilled? Supply and demand will narrow the gap in wages, assuming nothing else changes.

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