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user-inactivated  ·  3081 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Jennifer Lawrence: Why Do I Make Less Than My Male Co‑Stars?

First, I apologize for taking a day to get back to you on this; you ask a very legitimate question and it deserves an answer.

The children's hospital scrapes and begs to get $2 mill a year to help kids with cancer because our health care system sucks. This woman makes enough in a year playing make-believe to run the charity ward for half a decade. If she gets 4/5 of what she expects to make, she will have to pass on a second house in Aspen, or not buy a house in the south of France or whatever these people do with their money. If some of the people I work with get 4/5 of what they expect to earn, they starve. This is not hyperbole as it is a problem for single moms out here to make enough working to pay for child care, school, rent and food. Forcing many of these people to take a pay cut will kick them out into the streets. The actress gets the media, the real people get told to shut up and get back to work.

And now that the relative privation falacy is out of the way, onto the real answer.

Lawrence got screwed, this is without a doubt a real revelation from the leaked Sony emails linked below. There was a literal conspiracy to reduce her compensation. So go to court and fight the bastards; after all you have an Oscar and millions in the bank you can get a lawyer to get this corrected. Why is she crying in public about this as it can only hurt her if she goes to court? If you want to turn this into a social issue, where Americans are not earning enough to live like our parents did, I'm right there with you. The decoupling of wages and productivity is a real thing and it is hurting our economy, real estate values and hurting our heath as well.

I'm on the fence about Sanders but I am really warming up to him. I see these articles, and that shipost from the Guardian on how rich people deserve our sympathy because they are stressed out (I will NOT link it) and I'm starting to tilt more and more toward the Socialist side of the spectrum. It is almost like the wealthy, or at least the wealthy with access to the media, have lost all concept of what it is to live in the "real" world... or maybe they don't care? Or maybe it is just that we don't value work anymore as a society? This Mike Rowe talk nails what I am trying to say. Entertainers make millions and the people who build the things we need to live are treated like they are a problem to be solved. Unions are gutted and retirement ages are increasing because lawyers and accountants are living to 100 while blue collar people like my parents need to be able to call it quits early enough to enjoy at least some of their lives.

I add this line as I got ready for work, and almost came back and deleted it, now I'm glad I left it in place.