And there's always the choice of not having personal servants or borderline neo feudal slaves. There is no requirement for hiring a maid once you reach a certain income level. It's not like the government is going to force you to hire someone once your first big paycheck arrives. "Keeping up with the Joneses" is a conscious choice and effort. Especially when "the Joneses", in this case, are a bunch of freaks that hsve personal servants and pay them like crap in a country with horrific poverty.
A long while ago someone tried to convince me to take a job in Singapore on the same basis - get cheap help from whoever the underclass is there and do some white collar coasting. I also recall a similar pitch from the Saudi oil people when I was in university. It's pretty gross. I don't understand how people respond positively to that without vomiting.
whoever the underclass is there (Thai people? Idk) a
I think Filipinas make up most of the most exploited domestic workers in Singapore and elsewhere om SE Asia. Hong Kong has a particularly sordid history of mistreating foreign domestic workers - one of the few ways I will admit that they are indeed "closer to the English".
And when they start being racist toward Filipinos all of a sudden "HongKong is not China" doesn't apply anymore and it's all of our faults. CCP is too soft on HK.
People, like the OP in the twitter post, really don't understand how exchange rates and super exploitation work, and just think you can compare 40K USD income in the US, to 40K USD in the global south. This goes both ways too, many people from the global south want to immigrate to the west thinking that earning dollars or euros is magical even if it's some minimum wage job, without considering how much more expensive everything is there.
The OP is in a superposition of acknowledging that $40k in India is equivalent to hundreds of thousands in the US, and pretending that it's a regular, maybe middle class income
This goes both ways too, many people from the global south want to immigrate to the west thinking that earning dollars or euros is magical even if it's some minimum wage job, without considering how much more expensive everything is there.
True, though many of them also know that the cost of living is higher but they want to live extra frugally and send back their savings to their families at home where an extra $1k a year would actually be transformative.
In India, I have at times seen at restaurants families bringing the nanny along to look after the children while they do fuck all and the nanny always stands or sits at a different table on account of being a servant.
Shit like this is accepted as normal and no one cares. So far I haven't even come across the CPI address this.
Same in South Africa. You can guess the racial demographics involved, which further adds to how terrible it looks and is. I always give the people a death stare from my table. It's bullshit.
Formerly colonised countries do seem to have their cultural and moral norms shaped heavily by colonialism and the class society it has left in its wake. There is a minority but signficant stratum of middle class Uncle/Auntie Toms that revel in inflicting upon the majority slightly softened forms of colonial servitude.
Heard rich(and almost all white) South Africans say the exact same shit when asked about why they didn't immigrate to the west. These people are not ok.
i dont think life in india is that much cheaper than in the US where $40k has you living like a US multimillionaire... ive heard houses there are still like a $100k+. I guess what I'm saying is these servants are probably more like slaves.
Tech pays significantly more than $40k in india (at least in cities like Bengaluru) if levels.fyi is anything to go by. 25th percentile of sr software developers is $38k, 90th % is $108k. So seems like a typical mid-career white collar worker could be making in the $40k+ range? These people are probably a very small % of the overall population though.
If you ignore the servitude, there's actually a point underneath this ghoul's rant, which is that non-Europeans are okay with multi-generational households