my name is pronounced fisa

  • 2 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
cake
Cake day: May 2nd, 2024

help-circle











  • We both bought during COVID, and only because the rates were so low. Our home prices have gone up, but not crazy (we had to pay extra for property taxes due to the appraised home value though), but I didn’t mean to come off as abused. I’m doing well, and knock on wood whenever I get the chance [edited, spelling incorrect], but I also know I’m on a thin fucking tightrope - due to what I’m about to bring up next.

    However, and this is what caused our discourse, I don’t believe it’s right for jobs like my father’s to just vanish to the other end of the world. That has real life implications for everyone, someone’s family, their mental health; it just messed him up for a while dude. To go back to the main topic of the thread, “Migrants aren’t pushing down wages, its your boss,” while you believe that we may not be promised anything in life (and this is true), what’s the point of upholding this social contract, going to work and producing towards a GDP, towards a country, and doing your fair share; when you can’t even be promised your end of the social contract, the American Dream? At that point, I’m sure my dad would have just made the decision to stay in India instead of coming to the US in 1996.

    In one of my other comments, I talk about how my middle school janitor came to this country (back in like the 70’s or the 80’s), and purchased a house on a Janitor salary. Dude was unionized and was based af. From my experiences today, the American Dream is dying and not the same as what it once was. Whether it be Migrants, companies, the policies that allow for labor to be off-shored; it’s infected and (in my honest opinion), not worth chasing atm. We aren’t a third world country, but we’re not a country that can provide that social contract for its youth. The youth works to enrich the old and rich, kept oppressed by low wages and replaceability (the off-shoring of work), no longer do the youth work to enrich themselves.



  • Wholeheartedly agreed. The existence and ability to just easily off-shore everything and reduce costs, to a business; is like candy to a baby. You don’t blame the candy, or the baby, but you blame the circumstances that lead the candy to the baby. Keeping jobs at home is the only way towards the prosperity of the middle class. We unfortunately have policies that just favor the wealthy class over the middle class, and things like this happen.


  • Real talk, you do understand that most of those places that have cheaper housing will pay me significantly less? I actually took the time to look at NJ (where the average cost of housing in Teaneck NJ is $830k for the same single family 3br home my folks have). A job in Teaneck NJ which is literally what I do pays $65k a year. A mortgage for $830k right now is about $7k a month with current rates, but with the equity I have in my home would probably be around the same $5k a month I’m paying. But I’d be earning almost half my salary. You’re taking this idealized view “oh just move, you’re being selfish if you stay in a HCOL area,” but you aren’t realizing that EVERYONE has been affected. House prices in the suburbs have shot up. Which is okay if wages kept pace, right? But they haven’t.

    Edit: I’m also not old, I’m not even 28



  • aisf*@lemmy.mltoEngineering@lemmy.mlCareer Options - Civil
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 month ago

    I have a degree in Bioengineering and personally didn’t want to go into academia, but would you want to consider that route? There’s tons of applications for coding/data viz in research. Otherwise, ArcGIS/GIS jobs may be the way to go if you like that kind of stuff. Especially city/unionized positions, there’s less of an emphasis on the consumer, the project, and the labor hours worked; and more about just getting a project or job done.


  • Wow. I didn’t think about that. Holy heck. Let me just take my wife, my brother, my parents, and move half way across the map where, the cost of living will be lower but the cost of salary will be exponentially lower; because a stranger on the internet told me to! Shouldn’t take me more than a week to uproot my whole life and move somewhere else. Thanks fam!!! 😀

    (Major /s, if you already haven’t noticed)



  • Super agreed. We used to be a country where a janitor was able to get a house for themselves and their kids, and provide for a family on a single income. I’m basing this off of a real example too lol! My middle school janitor in Queens, NYC is a dope dude. Granted things are different now, the population size is expanding and there is a space/space-to-person ratio crisis, but that can’t mean that engineering apprentices, or technicians, or low-volt electricians have to live making < $50k (explicit examples that I’ve seen in my HCOL area). There once was a gradient for a middle class, now it’s just either high income or broke lol.