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Even as a leftist, this feels like a very silly take. It’s not the spot making anything, it’s like any other resource.
The blight of parking spots all over is definitely an issue, but a property “making” money doesn’t seem like a great argument. Am I being dumb on this?
Am I being dumb on this?
Yes.
The property is making more than twice minimum wage simply by existing as nothing more than a parking space. I'm on disability and I get less than minimum wage. The idea that a parking spot in my city gets paid more than I do is depressing as hell.
There is a significant difference between land having value and hourly income off of that land. Especially when the only thing done to the land is paving it flat and staying empty.
Then there's the issue that these staggering amounts of parking lots bring in all this money for a company that often has nothing to do with the city. So some guy is just leasing land to let people rent it per hour and giving no real money back to the city. It's pure business but doesn't help the city in any way. Meanwhile the city has a catastrophic lack of affordable housing.
If you can't see why it's fucked up that a single tiny slice of undeveloped land is making more than someone on minimum wage then I'm not sure you're that left leaning.
Who is paying $27/hour just for a flat paved section of land? These people are parking and then what… sitting there?
Or are they paying $27/hour for what’s near that land, and for the convenience of parking near other resources.
You’re going to a Toronto maple leafs game and you’re smart enough to not live in the city, you have a couple choices.
Park at yorkdale and take the subway, or try to find a place to park near the arena.
Or you can park further away and pay less and walk if you don’t waste too much time in traffic getting downtown.
You need to pay a lot to park at the airport too, catch your plane, go on your vacation and then have the convenience of getting right in your car and driving home, not trying to arrange someone to come pick you up and drop you off.
If you have to say that you are the king, then you are not the king. GOT (don't remember which one)
Leftist are the king
Leftist are the king
tfw you have to guillotine yourself 😞
Bc of treachery from the rights 🫣
Downtown Toronto people just call themselves leftists. They're actually super conservative and love the status quo. Downtown is just a bunch of wealthy, young champagne liberals who have no fucking clue what life is like for those of us who didn't get a leg up from our parents, and who's liberalism ends the moment they have to sacrifice anything to help someone on the rung below them
You're clearly never been near the St. Lawrence, or Reagent park. Both downtown areas, both predominantly filled with not-wealthy immigrants. Fuck off with your stereotyping, you know shit about downtown TO.
Typical attitude. I mean you can gentrify an immigrant area, keep a few around to make you feel liberal and still get to tell people to fuck off cause they don't agree with your view. In truth it's the downtown people who don't realize that the world exists North of bloor and treat everyone outside that bubble like you talk to me.
A few? Once again, have you ever actually been here? Spend some time in St. Lawrence, or Regent Park, or Homewood, or Bleaker, or Beverly, or any of a multitude of lower wealth downtown areas.
I'm talking to you sternly because you spouted complete bullshit about a large and diverse population of people, most of whom are far from wealthy.
Dudes from Thunder Bay, just ignore him
That land is providing a valuable service to people and you do not provide a valuable service to people aside from your consumption.
I'm not sure how this doesn't make sense to you.
Permanently Deleted
typical of a Conservative
I'm not a Conservative, and I don't hate you lol
I'm going on what you said, yourself.
Whatever you say conservative
Lmao I too am incapable of clicking on post histories
What makes you think it’s ‘simply existing’? It’s providing a rare and valuable service to people who value the service.
There isn’t a lot of parking in Toronto.
If you think a person should make more for doing less, you’re way out of touch with reality. Even under communism the government expects you to be at least somewhat useful.
I don’t know where this idea came from that a person just simply existing entitles them to a certain income given to them by other people who are actually providing enough value that they can subsidize your lack of value.
Just be useful, it’s society. If no one was useful we’d all be fucked. What makes you so special that you can be supported by everyone else?
Just be useful, it’s society.
There are a lot of people dissatisfied with the quality of the type of work they do. Most people talk openly about how they do just enough work to meet whatever productivity goal they have and avoid doing anything else, and it isn’t because they don’t want to be useful to society, it’s because if they do, they will have even more useless busy work to be responsible for until they can’t keep up at which point they are replaced by the next try hard hopeful.
It’s one of the few things I enjoyed about kitchen work, you are making a tangible good that is useful inherently and can create a positive impact on people both physically and emotionally.
Compare that to the call center work I used to do. I waited for a computer to beep me at which point I improvised as close to a script as possible to sell people Bank of America Privacy Assist Premier. Do a quick search about the lawsuit they underwent, we were encouraged to take anything vaguely affirmative and sign them up for a service that provided no benefit. You know what I got when I beat quota? A higher quota average for everyone. You know what I got when I couldn’t because obvious scam was obvious? Let go for the day.
It was incentivized to sell just enough for your quota, then waste as much time on a single call as possible to avoid having to con more elderly people and raise the quota for every worker.
The interview sections of the movie office space highlights and satirizes this feeling. Everyone desperate trying to inflate their importance or stroke the right ego to keep their inherently useless job to ensure systemic violence wasn’t perpetrated against them in the form of homelessness.
The crux of the conflict in the movie hinged on that absurdity when the protagonist and his friends try to create a virus to siphon money from the company since they were getting shit canned for superfluous reasons anyway.
Their jobs werent useless. Literally no one in office space has a useless job - that's also part of the joke with the Bobs.
Maybe I’m misremembering the context of it, Milton literally had a job so useless they didn’t realize they had fired him and forgot to take him off the payroll. There was also that “what would you say you do here?” Interaction, the best he could come up with was he deals with the customers so the engineers don’t have to, when questioned about how he takes info from the costumer, he insists the Secretary does that, at which point they ask him what he actually does then. He ends up so frustrated at the questioning and not having a good answer that he emphatically decries himself a people person in a very unpersonable manner.
The "what would ya say you do here" bit is a play on the real-life situation of defending a job to people that sounds stupid on the surface but has value. In reality, that person works in customer relationships.
Milton isn't unimportant, they just treat him like shit. I've been a Milton, and am willing to bet most people have felt that way.
Bob Slydell : What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customer and bring them down to the software engineers? Tom Smykowski : Yes, yes that's right. Bob Porter : Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the software people? Tom Smykowski : Well, I'll tell you why, because, engineers are not good at dealing with customers. Bob Slydell : So you physically take the specs from the customer? Tom Smykowski : Well... No. My secretary does that, or they're faxed. Bob Porter : So then you must physically bring them to the software people? Tom Smykowski : Well... No…. Ah sometimes. Bob Slydell : What would you say you do here?
Seems like he never even talks to the customers let alone handles customer relations. Best case scenario he translates customer specs that someone else takes down for him into the format the software engineers will prefer to read, but if that was the case why not say that instead of making yourself appear to be a useless middleman?
Don't quote the old magic at me, witch, I was there when it was written.
I have Office Space memorized. You not understanding that this dude imploded when asked about his job, while the actual waste in the company is the amount of leadership overhead that exists off-screen ("I have 8 different bosses, Bob") is leading to your confusion about the intent of this scene.
I mean, on one hand, it's not meant to be an in-depth economic essay on the unfairness of modern capitalism, so there is an element of silliness to it.
On the other hand, it highlights the very real fact that labor and human life are horrendously undervalued by our current system, which expresses value in monetary terms, to the point where even a very small and relatively unimproved amount of land only slightly larger than a human being garners a higher price than actual human input that makes our society run on the most basic level.
To be sure it’s apples to oranges imo. But, I think, an analogy can be drawn.
Maybe a more accurate way to think about it is that the parking space is worth more to the owner of that company than I am to my current boss at 22.50 us dollars per hour.
And that feels more like apples to apples.
But only because there is an actual limited and finite number of parking spots in any given area… unfortunately the less specialized a position is the greater number of people there are to take it… and with 8+ billion people on the earth odds are good you can be relatively easily replaced even at higher skill level jobs…
And FTR I am not justifying the poor wages of the working class (i.e. almost everyone who isn’t a boomer or a “rich” person)… but this comparison is a little foolish and fails at making the point the OP wanted to make… we’re stuck in Capitalism. Supply and demand. There can be no more parking spaces in certain places but we’re constantly making new people…
There are a limited number of people who can exist within working distance of any given space - doubly so in developed countries. The distinction is not so different as it seems at first. Supply and demand is constrained by physical realities - there is a reason why there was a great movement in the 1950s to increase the mobility of labor - because labor, even unskilled labor, is still immensely valuable in the right place. That there are more people in Bumfuck, Alabama, doesn't matter one whit to Toronto, Canada. That there is an (effectively) infinite amount of food that can be coaxed from the ground doesn't make food worthless - time, space, and demand all give it worth.
The issue is, labor is generally in a very poor negotiating position considering our needs as human beings and our limited resources with which we can sustain ourselves, whereas commodities and capital are generally owned by the rich, who have much more leverage to bargain with each other.
The supply of unskilled labor vastly outstrips the demand for it, which keeps prices on unskilled labor low
So you say, but just think back to several months ago, when all anyone could talk about was the labor shortages in the US and the ever present tagline "Nobody wants to work anymore". So forgive me if I don't really believe you that supply vastly outstrips demand.
As a general statement, that might be the common conception. But the truth of the matter is, no matter how much supply of labor there is, and no matter how much demand there is for labor, if the conditions aren't actually desirable, the labor is not going to work for any price someone with an ego sets. People seem to forget that when you're talking about supply and demand that there are lower bounds. Even basic theories like supply and demand do break down when they get too distant from the reality it is supposed to be modelling.
It showcases the difference between owners and workers.
A worker is a full person, with all of the different qualities that involves as the tweet mentions. And to earn money they have to put their body and mind to use. Using their energy and will.
An owner has to own a piece of land.. which earns them over double that of what the worker earns. And that's literally it. Society rewards the owner for this.
It makes the system sound so broken.
It's a joke. It's not a serious statement.