You’re dodging the consequences of your own claims so quickly that all I see is a blur of denial.

You started from a position of arrogance and ignorance. You cited GDP as if billionaires and their ever larger share of the total GDP take don’t matter and that poverty in other countries than your own simply can not exist in a way you understand because that shiny GDP number says otherwise.

You said that both increasing wages and any sort of UBI are wrong. You gave no real justification except “you got yours.”

Arguing with you further is like wrestling a pig in shit.

Enjoy rolling in the shit and oinking in it. Win a last word game if you must, because there is nothing to your argument but “you got yours” and blatant ignorance about the rest of the world.

I’m sorry

You’re not, but you should be.

I assumed bad faith questioning and goalpost moving, and that’s exactly what I got from you because your arguments have nothing to stand on. You wanted to narrow in on some pedantic Reddit-tier bullshit because your failure to understand that GDP has massive blindspots as an actual measure of how most people live in any given country.

Again, your arrogance and ignorance (by your own admission) about how other nations are going, all to justify unlivable wages for people doing essential but underpaid and underappreciated jobs, is quite frankly monstrous and you’ve provided nothing to justify that status quo but your own arrogance and your own ignorance.

You got yours. Congratulations. The status quo isn’t supported well by smug arrogant people like you stanning for it with nothing to offer but statements of “I got mine.” That’s a good thing, because the status quo is shit and is failing far more people in the world right now than it is benefiting.

Can you please quote where I did that?

Smug status quo liberals like you phrase their bad faith questions like that all the time, but just in case you will surprise me, here.

In Germany you are never one paycheck away from being homeless unless you’re actively wasting money. As said before, 800€ is more than enough to live alone in an apartment. And you make more than double that (in the worst case).

As cited above, the GDP per capita in Germany doubles every few years.

How many times more do you think it has to be doubled until you and your friends deem themselves wealthy.

They never will. Because you, too, define wealth as being able to look down on others (in your social environment).

A large part of the world’s population would consider themselves extremely wealthy if they had even near the income of a German worker earning minimum wage.

On a global scale, German minimum wage workers are very, very wealthy.

The only reason you’d ever consider German minimum wage to be too little is if you’re used to extreme excess, if you’ve lived in a hyper wealthy environment all your life.

You’re so used to extreme wealth, that you deem slightly less extreme wealth to be poverty. You consider it to be poverty, because the people surrounding you are even wealthier. You consider it poverty, because you can not look down on them.

You are obnoxiously ignorant of living situations outside of your own to the point that you prescribe maintaining the status quo to people you don’t know that don’t live anywhere near you do. You made the extraordinary claims, not me.

Maybe US capitalism is shit. But it can work well without UBI (as proven by, you guessed it, Germany).

Again, your ignorance is showing, paired once again with your arrogance. It is not working for most other people and no amount of being smug about you getting yours changes that for most other people.

Further, what about the status quo makes you so happy about people being paid less than a sustainable living to scrub toilets and pick fruit? Why is that so necessary to you? Well, besides you having a disgustingly privileged point of view where people toiling for almost nothing is cool and good because GLORIOUS GERMANY.

I am indeed ignorant about the United States.

No shit. And you were making vast and bold status quo warrior declarations upon a foundation of that ignorance.

This may surprise you

It only surprises me that you came here and made those claims with that much ignorance to begin with. I made no such claims about Germany, but you certainly did about the United States, again, in support of your enthusiasm for the status quo.

As long as we haven’t fully automated it, people will have to scrub toilets and pick fruits in any econonic system. What you wish for is for them to not be poor. Which they aren’t (in Germany).

And according to your smug status quo advocacy, those people getting any more pay or being treated with any more dignity is bad because… Germany is so glorious to you. Which somehow justifies the status quo worldwide.

Are you claiming that people’s actual wealth has not gone up in the past 50 years?

It is far from evenly distributed and is steeply tilted by the staggering increase of wealth in the billionaire class.

If you bent down and talked to someone sleeping in the street (as the rate of homelessness now rises here), told them how their wealth has gone up, actually, with a probably smug look on your face, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get spat on.

I don’t have detailed knowledge of the US economy, which is why I keep using Germany as an example.

You only have arrogant presumptions about rich the United States ostensibly is, while ignoring that a tiny percentage of the population actually benefits from those riches and the rest experience staggeringly higher cost of living, especially for things like medical care and housing.

In Germany you are never one paycheck away from being homeless unless you’re actively wasting money. As said before, 800€ is more than enough to live alone in an apartment. And you make more than double that (in the worst case).

Again, you’ve admitted your ignorance about the United States there, and the situation of hundreds of millions of people that live in it that are not functionally wealthy in a material way that they actually experience.

And once again, “the current system” is failing those people and no amount of being smugly content with a status quo that is unsustainably bad for people in the United States that scrub toilets, drive ambulances, or provide CNA services to hospital patients does those people any good.

I think you base your entire life off of your political beliefs

Your pretenses that you do not are the political beliefs that you base your life off of, with blinders on.

It isn’t that hard to understand.

It is for you. You’re that firmly and deeply rectally and cranially inverted, and this all started because of your whining about others having “politics” that you don’t want to see.

Oh, so you’re one of those smug (ethno)nationaist chuds that think that people in the United States that are one missed paycheck from homelessness, or are already homeless and are in physical decline from exposure and preventable illness are actually spoiled because some numbers on a screen say that that homeless person is actually a recipient of extreme wealth due to location while completely ignoring cost of living expenses because it doesn’t fit the numbers you want.

You’re way too far up your own ass to argue with, and you probably have goosestepping lessons to keep up with for the big plans you and yours have for your glorious fatherland in the future.

Most jobs are not fulfilling and would never be done voluntarily (at a relevant scale).

What is your glorious German superiority proposal for those “not fulfilling” jobs, then? Slavery? The US prison system might excite and thrill you if you look into it.

What is “enough”?

You’re demanding an exact boundary while offering nothing in return but an avalanche of vague imprecise claims with no sources cited.

You can not pay people “enough”. People do not care about their individual wealth. They only care about how wealthy they are compared to others.

The majority of people can never be wealthy, because people only consider themselves wealthy if they have someone (or rather many) to look down upon.

Speak for yourself and only yourself. You don’t speak for me. You don’t speak for the people I call friends. You only speak for a narrow “keeping up with the Joneses” sort of American asshole that is actually getting a bit rarer as boomers slowly die off and not enough young people echo that ideology to sustain it.

Save your “all human beings are exactly the same way, therefore capitalism good” naturalistic bullshit claims for and for that matter save your bootlicking apologia for there, too.

Lastly, what are you arguing for? That it’s cool and good to underpay people that do the most unpleasant (and in many cases, most important for society’s ongoing functioning) tasks because of some biotruthy sophistry about how no amount of pay would be enough therefore underpaying them is good? Or extending your argument to its conclusion, if it’s just “how much compared to everyone else” that matters, you are seriously arguing for everyone to get paid less if they aren’t in some exclusive very special secret club of very special elite people (that you probably include yourself into)? Fuck that.

the internet police will come if you don’t arbitrarily swap out some letters

The Very Mature Adult Police may come and get upset if you don’t say sufficient uncensored fuckshits in your posts though.

Getting worked up because someone didn’t say the Vincent Adultman fuckshit words is kind of cringe.

That means yet another generation of perfectly viable devices thrown into landfills because planned obsolescence and Must Have New Thing mental conditioning.

You don’t want to collect trash off the streets? Well, looks like our city will look like shit forever. You don’t want to work as a cashier? Well, looks like our supermarkets will remain closed.

Every time I read this I just hear loud licking sounds.

How about paying those people enough that they want to do those jobs?

I just continued an exhausting comment chain from a “vote blue no matter who” Bidenite liberal who had nothing else to argue but “harm reduction.”

WHERE IS IT BEING REDUCED?

WHERE?

I’ve tried about half of those and liked two of them. I’m sort of fine with missing what keeps flowing out of the P R E S T I G E T V slop vats at this point.

What I’m saying is sometimes you don’t know what you want. I don’t really believe in leagues. I believe in finding someone who makes you happy. And when you’re happy, you stop caring what other people think.

The “objective/10” mindset for measuring living, breathing, thinking, feeling human beings is poison, agreed.

The clown does stand out in that picture, so that’s something.

Negative and positive influence is very real from entertainment, no matter how some people deny it.

Trek has by and large been a positive influence on a lot of people.

Sure.

Those same people could also accept criticism of all of the above (regarding D&D, I won’t just accept criticism of the game system, I will join in and rant for hours about what a hot mess 4th Edition was) without tying it to their identities to the point of getting enraged when consumer products (or the means used to make them) are criticized as if it is an attack on themselves.

There isn’t much worth responding to in your wall of label-dodging sophistry.

Politics exist, “bullshit” to you or not. Almost everything imaginable has political context and connections even if you plug your ears and make loud noises.

I’m sorry but

You’re not sorry. Spare me the Reddit cliches.

I don’t believe you made this comment in good faith at all

I don’t think you’re willing to leave your bubble and see that the world is larger and more intersectionally connected than your selfish whining about how the world other people inhabit isn’t as comfortably easy for you to ignore anymore.

I do see value in harm reduction

Categorically, regarding the still-open concentration camps across the southern border, the murderously neglectful lack of a meaningful covid response, the expanded oil drilling and permissive retention of the previous regime’s planet-burning deregulation policies and the tax cuts and kickbacks to the rick being maintained, harm is not being reduced at this point.