What's going on Canada?
🍁 Meta
🗺️ Provinces / Territories
🏙️ Cities / Regions
🏒 Sports
Hockey
Football (NFL)
unknownFootball (CFL)
unknownBaseball
unknownBasketball
unknownSoccer
unknown💻 Universities
💵 Finance / Shopping
🗣️ Politics
🍁 Social & Culture
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:
Say whatever you want about her spending habits but $35k for a vet tech job is fucking criminal. Why are we paying essentially minimum wage for an extremely high stress job that requires at least two years of schooling??
I feel like jobs like these are passion jobs. Or employers feel like if it’s something you’re passionate about and care about, then you should be willing to do it for less.
For example, had a few friends work for the Canucks. I’m pretty sure the family who owns Canuck’s are billionaires, but because the people who work there are passionate about the sport and the team, they get away with below living wages for the privilege of just being around.
Obviously not the same, but… yeh. We under pay people who care and feel indebted to their clients and the work they love.
Game developers seem to get paid very little for something that's very difficult.
At the root i think passion among a great many people for (games, animals, hockey), leads to an oversupply of talent, which leads to depressed wages.
When I was in college for a CS degree, just about every single classmate I asked said they were planning on going into game dev, when you have entire graduating classes all gunning for the same positions in a relatively niche field, you can pay peanuts and still fill roles
Ah good example! I’m hoping that unions help our game developer friends.
ITT: Crabs in a bucket arguing about how "You could totally climb that wall if you weren't spending so much on avocado toast!" while the water pot next to them starts to boil.
I would like to understand what you are saying.
The "crabs in a bucket" idea refers to:
The analogous theory in human behavior is that members of a group will attempt to reduce the self-confidence of any member who achieves success beyond the others, out of envy, jealousy, resentment, spite, conspiracy, or competitive feelings, to halt their progress.
How does it apply here? She is not "achieving success beyond the others" and we are not trying to stop her from doing so. Quite the opposite! We are trying to help people who find themselves in a similar position make the best out off the budget they have so that they can make ends meet like we do.
In other words, we are crabs who have gotten out of the debt bucket and are trying to help others come out as well.
The other analogy you seem to be alluding to is the "frog in a pot":
The boiling frog is an apologue describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.
What I can tell you from experience is that during periods of hardship, the ability to adapt makes a huge difference and puts you in a much better position mentally and financially when things inevitably get better. Because this too shall pass.
They are referring to the people in this thread are debating about her spending habits without looking at the bigger picture.
We are the crabs.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
She relies on a personal line of credit for unexpected expenses, whether it’s a broken appliance, car repairs or veterinary care for her cats.
In 2013, her parents bought her a 1,200-square-foot semi-detached two-bedroom house in a small Ontario city, a university town.
They have also previously paid off her credit card debt, bought her a used Honda CRV, covered a kitchen renovation and helped with other expenses.
At her job, Caitlyn handles everything from drawing blood, performing X-rays and giving injections to answering phones, doing paperwork and cleaning the office space.
“I think the old-school principle is if you go to school and you get good grades and then you go to post-secondary education … the thought process was then you live comfortably,” she said.
She rarely eats out, makes her coffee at home and has cut back on ordering in and drinking alcohol.
The original article contains 770 words, the summary contains 145 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Really? What do her bills look like? Is she ordering DoorDash for every meal?
Give me a free house and car, and I could easily live on half that much money.
EDIT: Here's what the article says. This looks like a pretty random budget, and the house was not free as the headline suggests.
Her typical monthly expenses:
Investments: $0
Savings: $0
Pensions: $0
Taxes: $415 in monthly tax deductions
Household: $2,175
Mortgage: $1,162.70
Utilities: $233
Hydro: $165
Internet: $135
Property tax: $216
Property insurance: $184
Phone bill: $80
Transportation: $384
Car repairs: $50
Car insurance: $184
Gas: $150
Food and drink (total): $520
Groceries: $400
Eating out: $60
Coffee/tea: $20
Alcohol: $40
Miscellaneous (dental, clothing, other shopping, nails, hair, spa etc) - $680
Her cats: $350 (food, meds and litter)
Haircuts/cosmetics: $150
Prescriptions: $100
Dental: $0 this year
Clothing: $50
Apps: $30
Vacations: $0
Hobbies/recreation: $0
Maybe you agree with this, but where's the fat? Is a vet not allowed to have pets? It's still a barebones budget.
And the thing to realize about high stress professional jobs is that you have to eat out more and make use of services to save time and energy. It's a tough demanding job, especially for the pay. There's a reason why vets have amongst the highest suicide rates of any profession.
Vet techs too (family member manages a vet hospital) with the suicide risk.
There are so many frustrated, worried people coming in who don't understand the vet is busy doing so much with so few staff and the reason your appointment has been bumped is because the vet is gone, either left the city, the profession or this plane of existence. All too often the last option, and everyone's working through the fall-out.
And vets largely don't see people unless during the exam with an animal; the rest of the time its vet-techs or reception/admin staff. And people lose their metric shit at appointment changes, bad news, or even the bill (because it's always high; get insurance, kids). Admins and techs take the full Karen tornado, which while understandable is still not justifiable. Not cool.
So they shed a customer and sometimes they lose staff too. And they're no longer losing the slackers who don't care about animals: they're losing the animal nuts whose hearts used to be in it. Sometimes those people leave this life as well. It's that bad, that often, for that long.
So yeah, they blow off a lot of steam and leverage those social peer bonds, and I don't see that pressure valve here. You're either gonna spend money on frivolity, psyche sessions, or worse. So those numbers need to be higher for the short term.
$135 for Internet and $80 for mobile is criminal. I pay $130/month for internet, but that's for high speed fiber, because I work from home as a software engineer. I also only pay $35/month for mobile after switching to Virgin because Telus' prices are insane.
I miss living in California and paying $20/month for Google Fi.
