When did calling PS4 players “console peasants” become acceptable?

[demonette]

I have a Master's degree and a state geologist's license, and it still took me a year post-grad school to find a job in my field. In that time, I worked at a grocery store gas station which thankfully had a union attached. I met a lot of great coworkers, people who are essentially trapped by these sorts of undercompensated service industry jobs. I saw firsthand how the employer fought the union, tooth and nail, to even take away the meek wages and benefits we already had, let alone consider paying their workers a living wage for the region we were situated in. How they tried to cut out higher paying jobs (why pay for professional meatcutters at $22/hour when you can make "courtesy clerks" do any job in the store for over $10 less?) and automate as much as they could (ripped out nearly all the non-"self service" lines. Union did a poll of customers, found they preferred manned lines, they took that to the employer and the employer sneered "they'll get used to it").

A year isn't that long, compared to your claim of "being stuck" which would imply a period of time much longer than that. I don't say this lightly; it also took me a while of working an unrelated job, while working on projects on the side on my own time, before I got into a program relevant to my career. You haven't really explained why said people in your example aren't working on non menial skills.

[Gaethan_Tessula]

A year isn't that long, compared to your claim of "being stuck" which would imply a period of time much longer than that. I don't say this lightly; it also took me a while of working an unrelated job, while working on projects on the side on my own time, before I got into a program relevant to my career. You haven't really explained why said people in your example aren't working on non menial skills.

Wasn't referring to myself when I said stuck. On the contrary, I had every expectation I'd eventually find something I actually wanted to do, which I did. But I come from a heavily privileged position: cheap rent because living with relatives, no student debt, born into upper-middle class to begin with, white male that can pass for straight, etc. etc.

Anyways, some of my coworkers had been in other industries, esp. the older men, but got laid off, the jobs they used to work just don't exist anymore (automation, outsourcing), and they don't have the time or resources to start over at age 50+. For the younger people, many of them lack the money to pursue higher education or even trade school. Their families didn't have it for them, and we're past the days when you can work full time at minimum wage to put yourself through college, let alone the part time that'd make doing both at once reasonable. When your crappy wage barely pays enough to get by, being told for save up for any kind of tuition seems disingenuous when it'll take years to get to the point where you can start. Oh, there's student loans, but I've got plenty of other horror stories about those. Rent, medical expenses, insurance, food, taxes, it all stretches the budget very thin when you're given so little and that makes it hard to invest in anything that will get you OUT.

Get promoted? Enjoy that $1/hour raise for being PIC. If you're manager, you get a whole extra $4/hour!

Even if you do eventually make the move to being paid, say, double to triple min-wage, you're still under or breaking even with where minimum wage should have been if it'd kept up with inflation and cost of living increases.

And that's all a distraction anyways. Min-wage jobs are real jobs. They provide labor and time that generates a benefit for someone else, either their employer and/or a customer. They deserve a living wage, anyone working more specialized jobs should be paid well above that, and no one should be paid the obscene amounts the executive class currently make. Attempts to belittle the work they do are attempts to dehumanize them and create a facade of "justice" that blames the victims of systemic inequity rather than the system itself and those that profit most from it.

This is the last I'll say on the matter. This is a FF14 forum and I probably shouldn't have taken this thread in such a tangent to begin with, and also I don't personally have the time to fully argue my position to my satisfaction (esp. since it's on the wrong sort of forum for it to really make an impact).