charlesu

In your case, it won't. You would be better off renting and investing the extra $2k in assets that are productive rather than speculative. This should be obvious, but the West as a whole has bought into the housing as a form of wealth and can't let the music stop now without ruining millions of lives.

Housing as a form of generational wealth is a trick that works for the population as a whole for a generation or two. The majority of rentals come from regular people who bought long before you and have significantly lower mortgages or no mortgages at all, or large firms who have access to lower rates and more accounting tricks like depreciation. In either case, what they can afford to accept as rents is a lot less than what you can afford to accept as rent. The best you can hope for is significant appreciation or significant rent increases in the face of stagnant wages. High demand markets like NYC and SF can sustain ever increasing prices for a long time, but most markets cannot.

You’re not underpaid but you could make more by switching companies. Some companies simply pay more than others for the same role, level, and responsibilities because they’re engineering driven or better funded or more successful or operate at greater scale/profitability.

Any hot tech startup or FANG company or newish enterprise SaaS (Snowflake) or previous unicorn (AirBnB, Lyft) can pay those numbers total compensation for a SWE with 4+ years experience. Apply to all of them and see what you can get.

Who said these people aren’t working? I see a lot of people retraining, pivoting, and taking care of others. That’s work. Just because it doesn’t pay doesn’t mean it isn’t work or valuable. Being a stay at home parent doesn’t pay, but it’s clearly valuable.

Employment is a means to an end: basic survival. We do it because we’re forced to by forced scarcity. There may be virtue in work, but there’s no inherent virtue in employment.

Why would you need to label someone by their ethnicity in daily life? This stuff really only comes up in two situations:

1. Forms where the person in question just fills it in themselves (generally the option is Black/African anyway)

2. Discussions about groups of people in which case the labels are descriptive and fairly easy to navigate.

I’m not reducing anyone’s ethnicity because Black one ethnicity and Igbo is another.

So Blacks aren’t a “real people”? Is your actual argument that African-Americans don’t exist as a distinct ethnic group? If that’s your argument you should say so.

Black when capitalized doesn’t refer to a race. It refers to an ethnicity. It’s not a retcon to capitalize ethnicities. We’ve been capitalizing ethnicities for a while now.

Black is an overloaded term. It’s a race and an ethnicity. If you were to write about black people in Africa, it would be nonsensical to capitalize it because black doesn’t communicate any shared identity in that context. The right granularity is national, ethnic, or tribal.

But Black is a cultural identity in the context of the United States. Blacks, or African-Americans, are ethnically distinct and have shared history, culture, and language. In 1840, almost all blacks in America were slaves. In 1950, almost all blacks were descendants of slaves. At either time, almost all of them would have spoken English as their first language. At either time, most would have been born in the American South. Most importantly, at either time would have identified with each other on the basis of those shared traits.

Whites, on the other hand, are comprised of distinct ethnic groups and had their own communities throughout American history. Go to any major American city and you’ll find neighborhoods that are historically Italian, Irish, or German.

It’s common to capitalize ethnicities and Black is an ethnicity in the United States. White is considered a race. Is your issue that Black is capitalized or that white is not capitalized?

I’ll go back to the office when they give me my own four walls and a door.

Because the alternative is to starve?

You can take advantage of people when they’re in dire straits. That’s not indicative of some greater truth about the price of labor but a fact of exploitation.