this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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When they started pushing for $15 federal minimum, it should have been $50.
Today, it should be about $150.
At $150/hr, you could afford to buy a an average home with a years pay.
People don't realize how insanely bad it's been getting.
I disagree that we should be paid triple to travel. We should just be paid appropriately. That's all.
Ok, so we have a lot effed up in our system right now and I'm not trying to discount that. But this is like high school economics level stuff when I ask...
Between the lowered supply of creating houses (in that it becomes more expensive to produce a house because everyone is getting paid a hell of a lot more) and the increased demand for housing because everyone has a bigger number in their bank account... Do you really expect that housing prices would just... Stay the same?
I'm also curious when any society at any point in history has been able to sustain decent housing with about a year's worth of wages?
Agreed. My wife and I are doing pretty well and we don't even make anywhere near $150/hr combined. Maybe in the Bay and NYC that wage would make sense but not most places. Making that the minimum wage would just cause a ton of inflation and put most people back at square one.
Maybe not one year, but it looks like a median home in the US in 1965 cost around 6 years of a median income.
In the 1854 book Walden by Thoreau, he gives a pessimistic account of how long it would take to afford a property in a town, that is still less than today:
Although he goes on to describe building his own more remote cabin for $28.
Something is very, very wrong with incomes and housing prices currently that wasn't as bad a problem in the past.
thats a bit out there but in terms of eggs I estimate minimum wage if it was the same when I was young would be somewhere between $45 and $75 per hour. It still amazes me how much money I was paid back then as a high school student.
You're out of your mind if you think a $300k salary for every working citizen is feasible. Paying that out would require $53 trillion, which is more than our GDP.
That's the thing though, the number doesn't matter.
We have people starving and then we have people traveling to the other side of the planet to throw a wedding that could feed millions of people.
Fuck a number, fuck money, eat the rich then we can all eat and live wherever we want.
Sometimes I think about trying to buy a tiny home or a single wide, and then 5 seconds later, I realize that its just not going to fucking happen. That's an insane thought. If we don't start hitting the streets soon, we're all going to lose.
The company is probably going to charge their customers even more for the work you do in your working time.
Someone already pays that money. The workers just don't receive it.
If everybody was self-employed, those are the prices that would be paid.
I agree up to the extent of the numbers. I think $50/hr is feasible if we make drastic changes to our economy. $150/hr simply cannot work with the country's current number of workers and overall productivity.
$150 per hour? I'm in salaried software engineering and barely making a third of that after a promotion.
If what you propose happens, all the prices of everything would skyrocket... It seems good on paper, but it ignores all the greed of capitalism..
For better or worse, (the latter for rich folks...) there "needs" to be tiers of incomes (in Capitalism). Bumping the minimum just bumps the prices. We've already experience it with minimum wage bumps in the US. We don't have an actual solution that works at the moment in the US because minimum wage increases automatically lead to greedier CEOs.
I mean, I agree with a lot of what you said but also we haven't had any federal minimum wage bumps in a decade and a half. States that follow federal minimum wage haven't exactly kept their cost of living frozen.
You have to admit that what you are getting paid is to low though considering what it takes to do what you do. Even doctors and lawyers are not making what they should as the issue is at the extreme top.