And importantly people who are wealthy don’t actually spend their own money. They take out credit secured by their assets, for example stocks and so on, and then spend what they want from that credit. As long as the line goes up or at least not far down they are good to go. That said, if their assets lose too much value too quickly they can end up absolutely ruined because the bank will call them on their asset. This was a real risk with the purchase of twitter by Musky Taint, he had a stake in Tesla and when the value of Tesla dropped he almost reached a point where he would have had to sell off stock for cash which would have dropped the value of the stock further, leading to a crash in the stock. The same applies to his other assets, SpaceX and so on, they are all a house of cards which hold the value of the others up.

On top of all of this much of the value of those companies is built from government grants, loans, and contracts. SpaceX has secured contracts which bolster the stock value because they are safe bets, even if no money has changed hands. Tesla had cheaper cars than they should have due to grants from federal and state programs for electric cars.

If you want an example of living off the government teat Musky Taint is a clear winner.

Correct, there is a meaningful difference between jobs with more or less time required to reach a high degree of competence, no argument there. The major issue is labeling something as low skill. Working in customer service requires skills around managing angry customers, managing time, following up issues, using complex ordering systems, handling payments and issues with payments, and all sorts of similar stuff. The emotional labour of working in direct customer service is high skill and high difficulty. Just because there is not a university degree in handling those situations doesn’t mean it is low skill, it is just not a skill we recognise and pay for.

The issue from my end is why do we ask whether a job is skilled or unskilled when thinking about pay rates? If a job needs to be done then someone should be paid to do it. If we label is as low skill we are justifying paying them less. This is wrong in a bunch ofbeays and ends up hurting lots of people.

I am reminded of the intelligence and genetics debate. People can talk all day about how you would design a study to tease out the difference between two populations in terms of intelligence while controlling for all other factors and how to reduce bias and so on, but the question keeps coming up. Why do we want this answer? What benefit would ranking the races for intelligence have? What societal changes would be informed by this research? In my opinion the question is not a good one, we should instead be looking more at how to support the development of any child to have their innate intelligence come to full growth without interference from things like stress and poverty. Knowing that people from one group or another have a theoretically slightly higher or lower ceiling won’t help actually improve outcomes for people, it will just help racists sound legitimate, and in the same way ranking the jobs will just help capitalists pay people less for the same work.

Since the Galaxy S8 I’ve never wanted a phone without water resistance as a requirement. I have ADHD and I frequently get caught in the rain, spill stuff on myself, and honestly just enjoy using my phone in the bath. I did all those things with my original HTC Dream, aka the G1, which was the original Android phone and I loved it, but the fear of getting it wet was a drain. Modern phones are capable of resisting water to an insane degree, and my current main phone is a Pixel 6 Pro which can go into the shower without a problem.

Now headphones on the other hand are not great for water resistance. My solution was to buy a few pairs of crappy TWS headphones and just accept that they won’t last forever in my use case. So far they have lasted well over a year and I actually have two pairs going so I can switch them over when they run out of charge. I would prefer something waterproof but I haven’t found anything that actually performs at a level worthy of the price, so this solution will do for now.

No disrespect meant, but the term unskilled in actually part of corporate propaganda. If someone who starts working there today is not as good at it as someone who has worked there for 2 years then there are skills which take time to acquire and thus it is a skilled job. Unskilled labour is an invention of capitalists who want to pay as little as possible and will use whatever weasle words they can to convince other workers that either they are better than the unskilled or that they themselves are unskilled and replaceable.

In Australia you would be looking at minimum wage under the Restaurant Industry Award 2020. Under this award you can be one of three types of employee, a full time worker, a part time worker, or casual.

A full time employee is defined as

An employee who is engaged to work an average of 38 ordinary hours per week over a period of no more than 4 weeks is a full-time employee.

A part time employee is defined as

A part-time employee is an employee who: (a) is engaged to work at least 8 and fewer than 38 ordinary hours per week (or, if the employer operates a roster, an average of at least 8 and fewer than 38 hours per week over the roster cycle); and (b) has reasonably predictable hours of work.

If you don’t meet either of those you are a casual employee, which means less guarantees and protections but a higher pay rate.

If you are a casual you get paid 25% more than full time and have a maximum of 38 hours in a week, averaged over 4 weeks, and a maximum of 12 hours on any day.

A casual employee must also be engaged for at least 2 hours per instance of work, so you can’t have single hour shifts here and there, it must be 2 hours minimum.

If a casual works over 38 hours in a week they are to be paid overtime rates, and breaks are still required for casual workers with penalties (increased pay rates) for situations where breaks are not possible.

The base rate is $26.44 Australian so $18.69 USD. The casual will earn 25% more per hour, so $33.05 AUD or $23.37 USD. This is the minimum for a casual server at a restaurant or similar venue. The casual does not get leave or similar but gets paid more, the part or full time workers get leave and regular hours with the lower pay rate.

We don’t do tipping here. The very rate occasion someone does it is generally seen as showy and a little gross. We sometimes have a tip jar at the counter which is split between all staff on a shift, but usually people only drop a bit of change in there and most people pay by card anyway.

You absolutely can’t live here and buy a house on that income. You can survive on it if you are living with other people, but living on your own is not really an option at that pay rate. Also we don’t have to pay for medical insurance here, we have Medicare which is actually really good, and we also don’t have to pay for school for kids, the fees are optional and you can say no. It isn’t perfect, there are tonnes of issues, but it is better than the US system of paying as little as possible and relying on the kindness of strangers and social obligation to keep people alive.

If someone serves me food and my food needs to cost a little more for them to be able to actually live a dignified life I am happy to pay that. Instead corporations find every way of cheating workers out of the fruits of their labour to increase profit. Nobody should live in poverty and without dignity, working or not, and no work is below respect, excluding exploitation of others. I personally think they should be paid more than they are by a significant margin, maybe 50% more, maybe more than that. If we raise the floor we raise everyone above them and live in a society without abject poverty, win win in my book.

There are other suggestions, but I would recommend a different approach. Use a standard epub and something like KoReader or Librera FD. If she wants to read a bible she probably has a strong preference about which one. Using a bible app will lock her to whichever that app supports, but using an epub allows her to use the correct version for her.

It also allows her to build skills using her religious text which can transfer to other books. Lots of people enjoy books beyond their central text but still around it, think study guides, history, religious studies, and so on, but also books completely unrelated. Being as she is having trouble with malware you could solve multiple problems in one go and also give her some fun, interesting books alongside things that scratch the religious itch while building skills and reducing the chance of scamming and malware.