So let me get this straight, in Monopoly if you give one player more money to start out it’s “unfair” but if you do it in real life it’s “capitalism”?
You know what, I’m going to tell you guys a story.
In my Sociology class a few semesters ago, our prof had us break off into groups and, much to our naive joy, began distributing Monopoly boards! We had no idea what was going on but yay! Games! Of course, once our group, and a number of others, got the board we began to work at setting up and distributing the money…
until suddenly our prof told us to put the money down and pick up the dice.
“Roll the dice and sort yourselves from highest to lowest,” our teacher commanded. "Now, the highest number is the upper class. The next one is upper middle class. The next two or three are middle class. The last person is in poverty.“
Well, as the person who rolled a two this was startling and not wholly welcome news.
From that point the game changed entirely. We had to hand out the money so that the “upper class” had this fucking mountain, and then less for upper middle, even less for middle, and I didn’t get any triple digit bills. We would all collect different amounts from passing go as well.
The biggest change though? Going to jail. Upper class didn’t. Period. Upper middle class could go but they only had to stay for one turn or they could immediately pay their way out. Middle class had some pretty easy guidelines for when they could pay to get out. As lower class, it was really easy for me to wind up in jail and REALLY hard to get out. But since I was working with so little money when everyone else had so much I was in jail all the time because there was no “game over”. If I couldn’t pay I had to go to jail for a certain period of time. I had to take out loans with interest I could never pay back just to get out only to wind up back in it again, rolling dice turn after turn hoping to be able to get out.
It was simultaneously the most enlightening and most awful game I had ever played. I was bored and frustrated and a little terrified about it all. And it wasn’t only me. I would never win, I sort of accepted this, but it was amazing how the middle classes reacted as well. They were stressed. Because they were always that close to either being able to one-up the upper class or from crashing into poverty with me. They had to fight constantly just to stay in the middle.
(I should also mention that the upper class player in one group felt so bad for the lower income players that they ended up overhauling their entire game and creating a “socialist” society instead. I’m not sure how our teacher felt about that one.)
Worth stressing this is entirely in the spirit of the original designer’s aims for Monopoly.
Monopoly’s original form of The Landlord Game which was explicitly designed to teach people about the unfairness of rent systems. To quote from the wikipedia entry, just as it’s the easiest source to hand…
Magie designed the game to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences”.[2] She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed byHenry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.
When the usual suspects start making “don’t bring politics into games” noises, I roll my eyes pretty hard. They have no idea of the history of the form.
And then the Parker Brothers pushed her out and stole the game thereby demonstrating exactly what capitalism is
It’s an extremely popular opinion among middle and upper class white people.
Also, aside from this completely uneducated reasoning as to why minimum wage was created…
I can guarantee that there are tens of thousands of teenagers who have to pay bills and help support their families or are the only financial supporter to their family.
not to mention, if minimum wage was meant solely for high school students how would the business survive when students are in school?? are they only supposed to be open on the weekend? this “unpopular opinion” makes no sense.
Unpopular fact: in the 70s a minimum wage worker could pay for college with a summer job.
Unpopular fact: minimum wage was conceived to be the minimum amount of money a person would need to support themselves and their families when working 40 hours per week.
Unpopular fact: minimum wage was created because working men and women in this nation fought–figuratively in the negotiating room and literally in the streets–for a fair working wage, with sweat and blood and tears and death.
Unpopular fact: military service personnel are not the only people who have fought and died for your rights as American: labor leaders and common workers laid down their lives so that you could have a 40 hour work week instead of 80 hours; so you could have a 2 day weekend instead of none; so you could have lunch and bathroom breaks instead of going hungry and shitting your pants,; so you could have a three day weekend in September.
Capitalism would NEVER dole out basic human decency without literal human sacrifice.
Additional unpopular fact: the minimum wage jobs “meant for highschoolers” require as much effort, dedication, and skill as the “big boy/girl jobs” that are supposedly worthy of higher wages. Minimum wage jobs can entail customer service, resource and supply management, staff coordination, multitasking, adherence to strict health and safety regulations, physical and mental endurance, extended hours, high intensity rush periods, and unpredictable situations of any stripe. Treating jobs like they’re worthy of less compensation because the worker wears a plastic nametag instead of a tailored suit is classism and labor devaluation at its most insidious.
Also just because someone is a teenager doesn’t mean their labour doesn’t have value? They are doing the same work but you can pay them less.
so because the bar exam is in the swanky part of boston, I had to get a hotel room in the swanky part of boston, because if I did I got a discount
and holy jesus it’s the twilight zone of rich people
this is the room service menu. guess how much a bowl of cereal costs. like, not fancy cereal, I mean a bowl of unadulterated cheerios.
…
whatever you guessed, you were wrong, it’s ten fucking dollars
oh but maybe you want something even less interesting. oatmeal’s like, what, 50 cents a bag?
JUST KIDDING IT’S ALSO TEN BUCKS
do you want something with protein? how about eggs? okay, that can be a little expensive, there’s egg shortage and labor’s involved and look, whatever number you’re guessing in your head, it’s NOT HIGH ENOUGH
oh but it’s fancy because it has ~woodland mushrooms~
do you want to know how much a glass of milk costs? GUESS HOW MUCH A GLASS OF FUCKING MILK COSTS. I’LL WAIT.
FUCKING SEVEN DOLLARS. do you know how much that is? right now, a gallon of milk is like three dollars at walmart. I could buy TWO GALLONS OF MILK AND A GLASS TO DRINK IT WITH for the price of this shit.
I finally understand this gif. this is how rich people actually think. holy fuck.
an awful lot of people reblogging this seem to think that I’ve somehow gone almost 25 years on this earth without going to a restaurant or staying in a hotel, and I would just like to clarify that
1. I have.
2. That’s how I know that it was hilariously overpriced, even accounting for the service charge (which, btw, ended up making everything about a dollar more than what it would have cost if I got the same food in the hotel restaurant. mea culpa, the actual price of a glass of milk was fucking six dollars.)
note that I never actually paid for this, because I never ate the hotel food at all; I ended up eating a lot of granola bars to avoid spending more money than I had to, on account of all the surrounding restaurants being equally pricey.
You can really tell who’s never experienced poverty and food insecurity when it comes to discussions around food costs and how unhealthy food is cheaper. Some fucker always comes in with the price of like… lettuce or… apples. And it’s like yeah bitch but can you work an 11 hour shift after eating some salad and an apple!?! Find me something cheaper, and more filling than the broke ass staples of boxed mac and cheese, hot dogs, noodles, bread, beans, and rice. I’ll wait.
It also ignores the mental toll that poverty takes like maybe your home made veggie filled recipe isn’t crazy expensive but it also involves prep time and cooking time and organization in terms of fresh food that a lotta poor people can’t manage.
Not to mention if you can only afford to get to the store once every couple weeks via bus or cab then you can’t keep fresh veg on deck.
But ya know.. poor people are just dumb and lazy.
People reblogging this with “actually you can do this super labour intensive prep and only buy bulk which means more money on grocery day and all this storage space you defs have when you’re poor” and it’s like……… did you read this at all
And all the “well actually” replies on this post operate from the assumption poor people haven’t thought of these things…. or don’t know any of these things or are too lazy which I mean was my original point and people just continue to prove it …..
I say it all the time but I’ll say it again .
This one quote from a book about a turn of the century poor family : “only the rich can afford to be thrifty.”
Seriously like something ppl don’t under stand: to save money for the long run, you gotta have disposable income and time.
Let me introduce you to the Sam Vimes Theory of Economic Injustice:
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
Got $100 that you can spend on grocery day? You can afford to buy nutritious bulk items that can be eaten little by little throughout the week, with enough leftover to store in your pantry until a recipe calls for it. You have the option of using up ingredients from last week, because they’re still sitting around, so you can build a pretty huge collection of foods and options to choose from.
Honey, flour, sesame seeds, quinoa, coconut oil, butter, chickpeas: It’s all good! You can make some bangin’ dinners just from those pantry foods alone!
Only got $40? You have to buy single servings, and all-in-one packages that will be eaten every day until they’re all gone, just in time for your next shopping trip. Nothing is going to be saved, no extra ingredients can be afforded, and you’re consuming everything that you immediately buy. No mustard, no cooking oil, no salt or pepper, no vinegar: You can’t afford them, since you need filling and satisfying food food each week, so these pantry items keep getting pushed to the side. And it’s not like you can cook any sort of impressive recipe without this stuff, so it looks like you’re stuck with processed foods until you get some extra cash and manage to restock your fridge.
It’s a cycle that you get stuck in, for better or for worse.
“Money can’t buy you happiness” is propaganda from rich people to convince the poor to be satisfied with less.
Delicious, finally some good fucking food.
they’ve actually studied this, and there is a measurable point up to which money basically does buy happiness, and then past that point it stops
a billionaire is not guaranteed to be any happier than a millionaire, but both those people are almost guaranteed to be happier than someone living in poverty
(the “point” turns out to be “the time at which you have enough money that all your needs can be met without anxiety and you have some amount of money left over to do things like pursue passions, give back to the community, and do other emotionally fulfilling things.” what a shocker!)
Money buys security, free time, disposable income for leisure products, service, foods, and events.
So yes…it does actually buy happiness. It incidentally also purchases health care, and fulfill the hierarchy of needs which tend to contribute to most people’s ill health due to stress levels…
Wealthy students at my school leave behind tons of shit when they go home for the summer (I’m talking appliances, food, furniture, $$expensive shit$$). We’re allowed to donate our belongings to goodwill at the end of the year, but honestly a lot of students just leave their stuff in their rooms because they don’t care what happens to it.
We have an amazing housekeeping staff who keep our buildings clean and running. They also DONT MAKE A LIVING WAGE. Students are trying to get the school to up their pay, but nothing has happened so far. These staff members are barely scraping by, lots of them have multiple jobs, and they struggle to even get food on the table.
Now, the housekeepers clean up the buildings at the end of the year of course, so they obviously come across all of this leftover stuff. They are expected by the school to put it ALL in the donation bins. Even though these workers don’t have enough money for food and bedding, they get none of it. This last week a worker tried to take hone a fridge that a student left behind, something they would not be able to afford on their salary. Guess what?
They got fired.
Wealth disparities at elite colleges don’t just exist amongst some of the students. Staff are greatly under appreciated and under paid. Pay attention to your housekeepers and facilities and groundskeepers and dining staff. Thank them as often as possible. Fight for them to have a living wage. Help them however you can. Treat them with some fucking respect.
I got quite a bit of stuff when I was in college by taking perfectly great/ like new stuff that wealthy kids had left behind. It is crazy how poverty is criminalized.
Can we PLEASE remove the stigma for blue collar work in America?
“You don’t wanna be a garbage collector when you grow up, do you?”
$34,000 a year, no college needed?
God forbid you take an honest job $7,000 above Michigan’s average cost of living line.
“You don’t wanna be a ditch digger.”
Bitch, I was making $15 an hour, post tax, doing exactly that, the fuck is wrong with it? (Other than it was physically exhausting.)
We need to help America, as a whole, understand that college is not, and should not be he only option, and that there is NO SHAME in trade school or even getting a career right out of high school.
I, personally, know plumbers making $80,000+ a year. Better than most 4 year degree workers.
We need plumbers, janitors, truck-drivers, garbage collectors, machinists, to keep this nation running smoothly. And they deserve respect for what they do.
Miss me with your classist bullshit.
“You cannot demand services and then degrade those who provide those services.”
Not sure who said that it but it has always stuck with me because hell it is so true.
wupacing 