I feel like half these problems would be fixed if everyone woke up and unionized. Corpos would have no leverage left.
Boomers built an economy based around raping the wealth and futures of their children, to fund their retirement.
They consistently voted for politicians and policies that would benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else, in basically every economic sector.
Of course they don’t pay their orderlies well either.
That would mean their 401ks wouldn’t go up by as much.
Only now that the most grotesque frontman conceivable is helming the logical conclusion of their mindset turned into policy, are they starting to regret it all.
The pathological narccisist gerontacry society.
Healthcare is the only sector with actual job growth now.
Everything else is collapsing.
The turned the entire country into basically a big retirement home supercomplex that you can’t opt out of.
For the paycheck thing: the daycare takes the parent’s entire paycheck because daycare is so expensive because the working class hasn’t gotten a raise in almost 20 years. Providers need the second job because inflation is so high because people are getting what they voted for.
A job that requires wiping bums at any age should be very well paid.
There was a nurse in my province who killed eight nursing home residents at her job. She just enjoyed doing it. What a tragedy, to have someone use their power over you to kill you when you are most vulnerable.
My friend was the director of a daycare, and she’s leaving because she works 60 hour weeks, has no help from above, and her pay is literally canceled out by sending her kids to camp over the summer. And obviously they won’t pay her more. And she’s the head of the daycare. It’s insane.
It’s because private equity capitalists took over daycares, nursing homes, funeral services, and veterinary clinics. They’re leeches on even the most indispensable aspects of society.
i work in a nursing home, but im afraid i’ll not be able to afford to die in one.
All this boils down to is that there is nothing more expensive than first-world human labor. Without a doubt, nursing homes are increasingly run by sleazy profiteers, but the reason you can’t easily do better (i.e. find a high-quality nursing home) is because it’s simply expensive to employ enough people, who have sufficient skill and work ethic, to give the elderly care.
Yes, PE in healthcare is destroying the country in every imaginable way. The answer in this case is more complicated than get the for profit companies out of nursing homes, which is necessary but not sufficient to solve the problem. The scariest thought is that there may be no good solution.
nursing homes could literally drain the elderly of their blood and sell it for extra income and they wouldnt be that much worse morally. Not all of them obviously, but I have heard horrible things about how some treat elderly.
What’s not to understand? The owning class owns the facilities and sets both the prices and the wages, and they will do this in the way that maximally benefits themselves, i.e., maximizes profits. It’s a really, really basic feature of capitalism (yes, also whatever super duper special unicorn flavor of capitalism you think works better than “crony” capitalism).
It’s a rhetorical device I forgot the name of. If I say “I don’t understand X”, that will have one of two effects on most people: either they also don’t know, realise that and hopefully get curious, or they do and know the point I’m aiming for. If they offer that explanation, it creates a Socratic approach to making an argument: Framing it as an explanation of a question the rest of the audience is hopefully also curious about.
You explanation is the second part of the argument.
So, I know of the existence of this rhetorical device, but I’ve been around enough people who operate in a theoretical framework where this statement cannot be taken as anything other than genuine, namely that of capitalist realism. This has two implications:
- the original tweet could’ve been written with this mindset (which, I should add, is the dominant mindset, btw), and should be taken at face value
- many of the readers will have this mindset, and will not have the theoretical tools on their belt to appreciate it for the rhetorical device it is, much less take advantage of it and learn something (they might walk away with anything ranging from “huh that is weird” to “it’s those darned republicans/democrats”)
In either case, making an explanation (there’s more than one) explicit is useful, if only to open up space for people to disagree with the explanation. (In fact I’d be willing to bet that the person who wrote the tweet disagrees with my explanation, specifically the part involving flavors of capitalism. I bet they’re advocating for something like the nordic model.)
- the original tweet could’ve been written with this mindset (which, I should add, is the dominant mindset, btw), and should be taken at face value
- many of the readers will have this mindset, and will not have the theoretical tools on their belt to appreciate it for the rhetorical device it is, much less take advantage of it and learn something (they might walk away with anything ranging from “huh that is weird” to “it’s those darned republicans/democrats”)
Those are good points I didn’t consider.
On the first, I tend to lean towards assuming the best of people where possible, mostly because it helps stave off defeatism. That doesn’t make it likely, just less depressing.
On the second, I genuinely didn’t see that angle. Thanks for pointing it out. They don’t need to appreciate it as rhetorical device (and in fact, it may be more effective if they’re not conscious of it), but if it leads them to make up their own conclusions to reinforce existing assumptions, instead of being curious and open-minded, that would indeed miss the mark.
I guess to some degree, it’ll be a “shotgun” approach to hopefully get some people curious, even if you’ll never get everyone. I’m not sure a more direct statement of facts would have gotten the others either.
In either case, making an explanation (there’s more than one) explicit is useful, if only to open up space for people to disagree with the explanation.
That’s the conclusion I was aiming for, yes. In thr context of the device, the question is a setup and framing for the answer. By “prompting” for it, it seems less like preaching (which may turn people away) and more like a “genuine” and natural conversation. Interviews are occasionally framed in a similar way, but with an open question on the internet, it may seem less “staged” if that makes sense?
(I’m not sure those are the best words to describe it, but I can’t put my finger on the nuances so I’ll just call it a vocab/language barrier)
In fact I’d be willing to bet that the person who wrote the tweet disagrees with my explanation, specifically the part involving flavors of capitalism. I bet they’re advocating for something like the nordic model.
The Nordic model tends to be idealised to some degree. I understand how it would look like a significant improvement over some other forms, particularly the US, and I’ll freely admit I’m also subject to bias, but it can’t cure all the problems baked into the system.
From the glimpses I’ve caught, it doesn’t seem to solve all social issues either. The specific example I’ve heard of is racism, but I didn’t do a thorough investigation about other effects. Then again, I’m not sure I have a good solution on hand to effectively shift cultural stances like that either.
What, you think either of you matter? They don’t give a fuck about you.
If you can afford it, it will be exactly that expensive.
When government of my country passed a bill that gives monthly payouts of X per child to parents who both work and have at least one child, all daycare centers in the country raised their prices by X next month citing inflation.
Supply and demand do not set the price, when people have no choice but to buy anyway.
It’s still super scummy for them to raise the prices after a bill passed to help struggling families went into effect
Funny thing: countries where govt cap what can be billed and a min bar on the quality of service and salaries (tied to inflation) fare better than countries where a sum of money is paid out or a sliding scale based on family income is used
For daycare at least, ours and most others in our city got bought out by one company. Even daycares no explicitly renamed after the company fall under its umbrella.
They raise rates 8% per year and added two new annual fees. Yet they struggle with teacher retention because they don’t pay them hardly anything but charged us $3k/monthf or two kids full time.
Holy shit that’s too much. You could basically hire someone from a foreign country to live in your house full time and nanny your kids for that much.
I agree. Unfortunately my wife works in a job that requires time to vest retirement benefits and she didn’t want to miss out on 8 years time. I mean, she also makes more than the cost of daycare but it does eat up most of her check.
Submit to market and die
What’s funny in a sad-not-haha way, is that labor for caretaking of small human beings is the enormous untenable driving cost here.
Parents can’t afford the rates, daycares can’t afford living wages for the caretakers. This is an endeavor, like many, that the Hand of the Market™ is OBVIOUSLY unsuitable for solving.
The “funny” part: Parents would gladly do this job for free as they have for centuries and millennia. This problem was already solved, and wouldn’t be an issue if every member of the household wasn’t forced into full-time 40+ hour work plus hunting for side-hustles, and being taken away from their loved ones for most of their waking friggin lives, just to survive.
How many generations deep are we now? Where so many kids spend so long in daycare from infancy that they never even get to form a decent bond with their own parents? How healthy is that, for anybody, much less larger society?
“Parenting as a Service” is peak capitalistic hellscape…
Edit: spelling
The irony is that this causes birth rates to plummet, which eliminates the future workforce for the very companies forcing childcare to be untenable. One of the major contradictions of capitalism is that it does not reproduce its own labor force. I guess the resolution is to replace human workers with AI.
no we just need to import workers from outside the environment.
well we have that situation in germany right now where supposedly daycare is good because it allows women to work more hours (full time instead of half time)
it’s … let me tell you, it’s a shitshow. i have come to understand that the internet is largely a propaganda apparatus. they install the thought in you that a certain way of seeing things is “normal”, because everybody sees it that way. in other words, the other bots or paid influencers (idk which one) that the algorithm then pushes sothat everybody sees it.
you got 1 crazy person saying things like “actually, we should all work more, i like it, it’s fun” and you know what, they can say that. anyways, that’s 1 person in 1000. then the algorithm pushes it on everybody’s front page sothat now everybody thinks “ah, that’s a normal thing to think”. and since most people follow group-think, that’s now society’s opinion.
internet exists to cause a shift in public opinion by astroturfing. the illusion that the thought comes from within society organically.
WHO guidelines say children should stay with mother until 3 to bond and go to childcare from 3 to get social skills. But germany only pays up for like 1 yr and even that only limited. Grandparents have to work until they are barely fit enough to help too.
Makes you wonder, with all those technical advances we have, why we work more and more having worse living conditions down the drain.
the illusion that the thought comes from within society organically.
Hmm so I both agree and disagree with you here. Hustle culture arises from societal things here such as hyperindividualism, Puritan work ethic and toxic masculinity that grifters package and push (where I agree with you). But it’s metastasizing from us to you all so it seems alien.
My wife is starting her own home daycare Monday for many of the reasons you listed. Almost a decade at a YMCA run Montessori, ~18/hr.
And the poor kids! The caregivers are all burnt out by terrible management and shit pay, have no motivation to provide anything beyond the necessities, and God bless them, at least a few spend their own money on supplies to at least try and enrich the time the kids spend there.
I’m really proud of her, taking a huge step into somewhat unknown water. I know the kids she cares for are going to get so much more value from her, here in her space, on her terms, than they ever would have at the center.
My wife is starting her own home daycare Monday for many of the reasons you listed. Almost a decade at a YMCA run Montessori, ~18/hr.
good luck. the regulatory hurdles are not fun, but regulations are written in blood. they don’t go to the trouble of setting regs unless someone had been seriously harmed.
If you want to keep her employees (if she has any) happy, don’t push the limits of the caregiver:child ratios. I’m not sure what [the amount of money you want to have saved up so your business doesn’t fail] in early childhood education is, but a good rule of thumb is start with 2 years worth of expenses saved as most businesses take at least that long to break even. Restaurants, 5 years.
[BOILERPLATE CYA WARNING]
i did accounting for 25 years and virtually all of my clients were small businesses and their owners, so while this is arguably professional advice, it is not tailored to your specific situation. it is general advice and not intended for you to rely on. if you want advice tailored to you and your situation that is intended for you to rely on, hire an accounting consultant.
“Parenting as a Service” is peak capitalistic hellscape…
bullshit
these are some strong opinions right there without much substance
i called my childcare guardians “comrade teacher” and i gladly pay half of my salary for a childcare in the “capitalist dream” now. neither has anything to do with the real reasons why we have childcare nor why it is expensive somewhere or free somewhere else.
childcare enables parents to do more with their life than just have kids and as such is good both for parents and for the society in general. it also enables children to access early childhood education and community that their parents wouldn’t be able to provide otherwise so - if done right - is also great for the kids.
but of course, as with everything with life, things can be messed up by the people. parents or teachers can screw up in many different ways or even the whole childcare might be organised for an entirely wrong reason… that doesn’t mean childcare is a bad idea in general.
childcare enables parents to do more with their life than just have kids and as such is good both for parents and for the society in general. it also enables children to access early childhood education and community that their parents wouldn’t be able to provide otherwise so - if done right - is also great for the kids.
WAIT HOLD ON I GOTTA SHOW THIS TO MY WIFE (teaches kinder) she’s gonna love you
“Can’t afford to pay a living wage” means “I can’t afford a yacht if I pay you”
More like “my yacht would be slightly smaller if I pay you”.
“My second yacht would be slightly smaller if I pay you”
