I am intelligent AND I went to college (yep, those are different things). I can't get hired for anything even remotely decent. Virtually every job posting seems to require that you previously held the exact same job, when the reality is that 9 out of 10 people can perform 9 out of 10 jobs if you give them maybe a week to acclimate. When employers ask who your previous employers were, or what college you went to, or for your LinkedIn profile, they are basically asking discriminatory questions that amount to: Were your parents rich and fantastic? Did those fantastic parents enable you to go to Stanford? Did you manage to avoid significant life setbacks? Were you given all sorts of unearned advantages of birth that snowballed into your unicorn-like suitability for this role?
People who were born rich and/or went to Stanford don't need favors. I despair that this little blip of stimulus-enabled employee power we've had in the recent past was far too progressive for this dumpster fire of a country. McDonald's starts people in Denmark at something like $22 an hour. I fantasize about American labor laws that would throw sand in the engine of inequality, like, if an applicant can pass a basic aptitude test and you don't hire them your CEO gets, uh, to go on a version of reverse Squid Game with CEOs pitted against each other. Musk vs Bezos for real.
Most work is meaningless at absolute best. One's life shouldn't be spent earning a slave wage while enriching a corporation that despoils the earth. The hours of your life, as Sam Harris would say, are the ultimate non-renewable resource. The minimum wage should be $30 an hour. Employers should be strongly encouraged to hire people who are underqualified, and maybe some sort of tax incentive could be useful here, like, the Hire Average People Act of 2022.
Better yet, let's get the UBI flowing by taxing all these billionaires who shouldn't exist. Most work is slavery by another name that wastes lives and the planet.