I mean yes? I feel like thereās an implication that you never quite said that the quality of life for people that are paying that much for child care is better and thatās just not true. I was living far better in a cheap area making far less than I am now in the bay area. This is just the cost of living here. Thereās absurdly wealthy people here and thereās, compatible to the median, absurdly wealthy people in rural areas. This price does not mean theyāre living in luxury, this can easily be them scraping by. This is literally the cost of child care for the middle class in the highest cost markets in the US.
Alright. I donāt really know how to have conversations if we have to couch things in COL gradients. I was specifically responding to this personās sense of astonishment, because itās cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt. And itās - in a mirror kind of way - dehumanizing and damaging for the actually rich (I donāt mean you), that theyāre astonished when they learn the ugly thing, too.
And I mean everything I said, and I said the most important bits right at the top. We go through these versions of life and think they are normal. Your reply to me sounds a lot like you doing exactly that, I dunno what else to say my friend but I wish you well and cheers, sincerely.
I was specifically responding to this personās sense of astonishment
By avoiding COL?
itās cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt
And why is COL going to make people feel anything but better as an explanation? Youāre talking about āugly thingsā too. Youāre stepping around something, I assume inequity, but I donāt see how that is supposed to make anyone feel better than a pretty neutral COL. You make more but you spend more in those areas. That doesnāt seem ugly to me?
We go through these versions of life and think they are normal
I genuinely donāt know what point youāre trying to make. Are you saying different costs of living are inherently bad or inequality is bad? The latter makes sense but doesnāt make sense with your previous statement. It just feels like youāre doing the opposite of comforting the commenterās feelings, it seems youāre trying to apply an interpretation with a very negative connotation when a much more reasonable, simpler, fitting one exists. Like do you think the screenshot is the uber wealthy bragging about how much they spend or someone complaining about the cost?
Iāll agree with you, I donāt think Iāve made my point all that well. That most recent comment youāre replying to here was rushed and did a poor job, thatās my bad!
I didnāt really want to make it about COL at all, and Iāve asked myself why, and I think I take issue with the way it papers over deeper problems sometimes (but to be fair, the opposite thing where people donāt understand COL differences is super frustrating).
I have several issues with it, it turns out, and you may end up rejecting them all, but I did a shit job earlier and you asked what I meant, so here goes. Gonna be long lol, sorry. But yeah, complaining about wealth disparity, not COL, but also COL doesnāt invalidate my complaints, IMO.
Itās my understanding that folks on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder do fare worse, the higher the COL. So while things scale (thatās the idea after all), I donāt think pay scales evenly across compensation ranges. I have to acknowledge that I have no source on this and I may have a shaky basis for that belief. I should probably improve my rigor there. It does look like homelessness is higher, per capita, in larger cities, which seems like at least a very rough proxy for my assertion. So thatās one problem for me, COL doesnāt erase that magnitude or make it more in reach necessarily, for the chronically broke.
Not all goods and services are priced locally. People making high COL wages have inherent advantages over people making low COL wages when paying for anything that isnāt priced locally.
That issue really extends far when you apply it abroad to things like aid that could be given to people for whom even a single dollar a day can be a tangible improvement. Iām placing this separately because we all value the well being of one another differently by proximity, unfortunately, so some folks may accept #2 as a problem and not see #3 as their concern. I do personally try to give what I can charitably, split between local food banks and sort of āmaximizing impact whereverā.
At any rate, folks who feel badly disadvantaged due to these do fit into what I meant by the āversions of lifeā phrasing, but I mostly intended just the chronically broke there. You can be broke enough, basically anywhere in the US, such that roughly everyone you know never uses professional paid childcare, priced moderately or otherwise. So COL only goes but so far for that reason too.
But to be clear, I was thinking of wasteful rich people. We both made an assumption about what kind of people/situation the original content referred to, neither is really more valid than the other. I absolutely understand that COL has big impacts and is sometimes left out. But thereās a lot of nuance to COL, and I donāt really feel I need to make a disclaimer about it to make statements like I did. Itās fine if you disagree.
To reply more in the spirit of my original comment, since I spent a lot of words (probably many more than you wanted to read lol) on your COL angle -
(and actually, I realized after I got a little ways into this, Iām just clarifying my thoughts for my own benefit at this point lol, this is basically me just saying things. Iāma post it, itās Lemmy, why not)
The idea about āversions of life we go through, thinking theyāre normalā -
Thatās important to me. Going totally unreasonable here - I really believe that most people, regardless of background - if you actually exposed them to the true suffering of the very poor, and the true excess of the very rich, most people would understand that none of this is really acceptable, it only seems that way, itās actually deeply wrong. I think most people, if they could really get even just a weeklong glimpse of life in those shoes (both extremes, and one in the middle), nearly every single one - rich, poor, or in the middle - would clamor for abrupt change. I think we can care, we just donāt see.
The opposite of the above, lacking it, is the āā¦thinking itās normalā I meant.
One enormous, but strange, barrier to all of us recognizing that truth is just the simple fact of the way our lives work - through none of our doing, we wind up ensconced in the environment in which we grew up, roughly, from a socioeconomic standpoint. We live our lives in that ālaneā, that āversionā, and we die in the way the people in our āversionsā die, too. This applies across $0 - $Inf.
The barrier Iām describing as strange is that way because itās often very invisible, and - rich or poor - sudden realizations about oneās lived āversionā, and the versions of others - those are jarring, damaging, to whomever experiences them.
We should probably do more of it, though. The jarring forced realizations. Like, a lot more. Luigi Mangione, for instance, I think that dude really understood, and the thing is - most people also understood, they thought what he did was dope. I really wish weād all focus more on what happened there. Do more of it, even.
I mean yes? I feel like thereās an implication that you never quite said that the quality of life for people that are paying that much for child care is better and thatās just not true. I was living far better in a cheap area making far less than I am now in the bay area. This is just the cost of living here. Thereās absurdly wealthy people here and thereās, compatible to the median, absurdly wealthy people in rural areas. This price does not mean theyāre living in luxury, this can easily be them scraping by. This is literally the cost of child care for the middle class in the highest cost markets in the US.
Alright. I donāt really know how to have conversations if we have to couch things in COL gradients. I was specifically responding to this personās sense of astonishment, because itās cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt. And itās - in a mirror kind of way - dehumanizing and damaging for the actually rich (I donāt mean you), that theyāre astonished when they learn the ugly thing, too.
And I mean everything I said, and I said the most important bits right at the top. We go through these versions of life and think they are normal. Your reply to me sounds a lot like you doing exactly that, I dunno what else to say my friend but I wish you well and cheers, sincerely.
By avoiding COL?
And why is COL going to make people feel anything but better as an explanation? Youāre talking about āugly thingsā too. Youāre stepping around something, I assume inequity, but I donāt see how that is supposed to make anyone feel better than a pretty neutral COL. You make more but you spend more in those areas. That doesnāt seem ugly to me?
I genuinely donāt know what point youāre trying to make. Are you saying different costs of living are inherently bad or inequality is bad? The latter makes sense but doesnāt make sense with your previous statement. It just feels like youāre doing the opposite of comforting the commenterās feelings, it seems youāre trying to apply an interpretation with a very negative connotation when a much more reasonable, simpler, fitting one exists. Like do you think the screenshot is the uber wealthy bragging about how much they spend or someone complaining about the cost?
Iāll agree with you, I donāt think Iāve made my point all that well. That most recent comment youāre replying to here was rushed and did a poor job, thatās my bad!
I didnāt really want to make it about COL at all, and Iāve asked myself why, and I think I take issue with the way it papers over deeper problems sometimes (but to be fair, the opposite thing where people donāt understand COL differences is super frustrating).
I have several issues with it, it turns out, and you may end up rejecting them all, but I did a shit job earlier and you asked what I meant, so here goes. Gonna be long lol, sorry. But yeah, complaining about wealth disparity, not COL, but also COL doesnāt invalidate my complaints, IMO.
Itās my understanding that folks on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder do fare worse, the higher the COL. So while things scale (thatās the idea after all), I donāt think pay scales evenly across compensation ranges. I have to acknowledge that I have no source on this and I may have a shaky basis for that belief. I should probably improve my rigor there. It does look like homelessness is higher, per capita, in larger cities, which seems like at least a very rough proxy for my assertion. So thatās one problem for me, COL doesnāt erase that magnitude or make it more in reach necessarily, for the chronically broke.
Not all goods and services are priced locally. People making high COL wages have inherent advantages over people making low COL wages when paying for anything that isnāt priced locally.
That issue really extends far when you apply it abroad to things like aid that could be given to people for whom even a single dollar a day can be a tangible improvement. Iām placing this separately because we all value the well being of one another differently by proximity, unfortunately, so some folks may accept #2 as a problem and not see #3 as their concern. I do personally try to give what I can charitably, split between local food banks and sort of āmaximizing impact whereverā.
At any rate, folks who feel badly disadvantaged due to these do fit into what I meant by the āversions of lifeā phrasing, but I mostly intended just the chronically broke there. You can be broke enough, basically anywhere in the US, such that roughly everyone you know never uses professional paid childcare, priced moderately or otherwise. So COL only goes but so far for that reason too.
But to be clear, I was thinking of wasteful rich people. We both made an assumption about what kind of people/situation the original content referred to, neither is really more valid than the other. I absolutely understand that COL has big impacts and is sometimes left out. But thereās a lot of nuance to COL, and I donāt really feel I need to make a disclaimer about it to make statements like I did. Itās fine if you disagree.
Edit: minor phrasing
To reply more in the spirit of my original comment, since I spent a lot of words (probably many more than you wanted to read lol) on your COL angle -
(and actually, I realized after I got a little ways into this, Iām just clarifying my thoughts for my own benefit at this point lol, this is basically me just saying things. Iāma post it, itās Lemmy, why not)
The idea about āversions of life we go through, thinking theyāre normalā -
Thatās important to me. Going totally unreasonable here - I really believe that most people, regardless of background - if you actually exposed them to the true suffering of the very poor, and the true excess of the very rich, most people would understand that none of this is really acceptable, it only seems that way, itās actually deeply wrong. I think most people, if they could really get even just a weeklong glimpse of life in those shoes (both extremes, and one in the middle), nearly every single one - rich, poor, or in the middle - would clamor for abrupt change. I think we can care, we just donāt see.
The opposite of the above, lacking it, is the āā¦thinking itās normalā I meant.
One enormous, but strange, barrier to all of us recognizing that truth is just the simple fact of the way our lives work - through none of our doing, we wind up ensconced in the environment in which we grew up, roughly, from a socioeconomic standpoint. We live our lives in that ālaneā, that āversionā, and we die in the way the people in our āversionsā die, too. This applies across $0 - $Inf.
The barrier Iām describing as strange is that way because itās often very invisible, and - rich or poor - sudden realizations about oneās lived āversionā, and the versions of others - those are jarring, damaging, to whomever experiences them.
We should probably do more of it, though. The jarring forced realizations. Like, a lot more. Luigi Mangione, for instance, I think that dude really understood, and the thing is - most people also understood, they thought what he did was dope. I really wish weād all focus more on what happened there. Do more of it, even.