"Someone has to clean the toilets"

Padawanbater2 said:

To say it's as simple as "just work harder" takes away from the argument. I know people who have spent their entire working careers working much harder than more financially successful people. How do you account for that in this magic all encompassing plan to just "work harder"? The point of the thread is to prove to you people that that is simply not how it works. If all the toilet cleaners simply "worked harder", who would clean the toilets? In our economic system, someone will always have to do the dirty low wage jobs, regardless of how hard they work.

I would say being a janitor or plumber is just as hard as anything else

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The most successful people, however you want to measure, often aren't the objective best. They're not the smartest, the best decision makers, or the hardest workers. In reality, a lot of the most successful people are really just the best self-promoters and credit takers. They make the right friends, they're the best bullshitters, and they overstate their role in things that other people were actually responsible for. They get ahead despite the fact that they don't objectively deserve to be there.

UncleBuck said:

*couldn't have

that's basic grammar, and i doubt there is anyone in any law school anywhere in the nation who also makes that basic mistake. most 5th graders don't make that mistake.

and you talked about how you stole certain things from your parents, while leaving much more valuable items behind.

so excuse me if i remain unconvinced of your totally cool story, sistah.

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Having edited lawyer work, they make mistakes like that all the time. And I'm talking lawyers, not law students. Having edited PhD work, I was shocked to find their mistakes were even worse.

Here's a little secret about both: in a lot of professional places (law firms, government agencies, other office environments) they pay other people to do the editing and ensure its perfect. Maybe you just don't realize this.

Padawanbater2 said:

This is the face of poverty. This is unacceptable. Full time Americans should not be subject to poverty. Working wages for full time employees should, at the bare fucking minimum, pay for their bills. I'm not even asking for food for fucks sake! Just bills! Basic shit to survive, shelter. I have a friend who rented an "apartment" in the bay area, I visited him and I could literally touch wall to wall north to south, east to west, barely enough room for this 6'2" guy to fucking sleep in for $700/month! How is this shit fucking legal?

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I would point out that a lot of people make the mistake of living in places they cannot possibly afford. They volunteer for such terrible conditions because they want to be in a particular place or they don't want to leave a particular place. If people refused to live in such places for such low wages, the wages for jobs that are truly essential--probably almost all of them--would necessarily rise, because the rich people dependent on their services wouldn't stop demanding them.

tokeprep said:

Your personal experience and the policies of your childhood school district are not necessarily reflective of any other place in the United States. There are fifty states and thousands of school districts. You are one person out of millions who came from entirely different places and had entirely different experiences.

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The whole South sir.
There are 50 states? What? My edumacation has fail me know. Mees thought ders wuz fiddy.

This entirely different place, and different experience negates the point, as intended.

Here is your olive branch....make some tea with it?

BigNBushy said:

I'm not even convinced "couldn't of" is incorrect. I've read that all my life.

Either way, being southern, i put emphasis on syllables differently than you do.

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If I may indulge a moment of grammar fascism -
"couldn't of" has two difficulties. The first, lesser one is the contraction of "could not".
The second, greater one revolves around the observation of verb structure. You need the auxiliary verb "have" to build a correct instance of the passive aspect. "Of" is a phonetic stand-in, but it's understood that if one is writing grammatically sound sentences, "have" is the intended correct form for which the misappropriated preposition is standing in.
Finally, "stole" is, while a widely-used regionalism, not a strictly permissible substitute for the participle "stolen".

Ordinarily i do not indulge my passion for grammar and syntax. It's something of a bottomless rabbit hole, and I have no need to feed that particular facet of my muffin-topped ego.

But since I'm interpreting your post as a question as to correctness ... in this instance I am loosing my reins to hold forth upon this topic.
While I know what you mean with "couldn't of stole", the single correct formulation is "could not have stolen". Back to a cheeseburger, The Hunt for Red October and a 24 of Sierra Nevada "Torpedo" for this bear.

Topped with an onion slice?

Couldn't of is definitely incorrect. As a fellow southerner, the contracted have does sound like of, but it is in fact have. Hence the spelling contraction of words like should've.

I hate grammar nazis. Especially ones that cannot use correct grammar themselves. I'm not the greatest at it, but I don't plan on correcting anybody's sentence structure if I can help it.

I think this is appropo: