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What is gravity?
(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Working in neuroscience of consciousness field I feel him deeply. Although 57k sounds amazing to a Europoor
You can basically half American salary numbers because we have to pay for a lot of stuff that Europeans usually don't need to pay for. $57k in America is struggling if you live in a city. Anything below $40k is one car repair away from being financially ruined.
You guys have cars while being poor? Sorry but seems stupid to me
We don't have public transit, so we need cars... It's part of what makes us poor...
Death to America
Welcome to our country that has utterly failed to invest in public transit outside of a few major cities, such that we must be dependent on cars. Love it here.
Wow your country really does hate its people huh
Very much so.
You are correct. We are forced to have them though. There's no mass transit and everything is two hours away on foot. Most new cars now are $40k unless you get like a base Sentra but the median income is only $60k.
What are we considering in vs out of city? Does in city mean just downtown, within city limits, within metro area? And what are we considering a city - 300k population?
Less than 30 minute commute, if it's less than that the price of housing goes up ~20% for each 5 minutes you would save.
57k sounds nice until you realize that 1200 go to your health plan and you still need to copay hundreds every time something comes up.
American salaries are also always presented as gross income before taxes instead if net income after taxes like in Europe.
we also do gross before taxes in Germany. 57k before taxes is still a solid salary in many areas of Germany. Some MINT and Financelords might want to disagree with that, but it is in the top 15% of salaries. At that Level you pay about 5,1k taxes, 5,3k pension and 4,6k for health, 1,3k eldercare and 750 unemployment insurance. (all mandatory)
That seems quite a lot at first, but for instance unemployment pays 60% of your net income up to a year qfter loosing a job, health insurance also covers all children until they are 25 or earn more than 500€/month.
It only sounds like a lot of taxes to us Americans that don't actually do the math... I'm making almost 60kUSD so it's a very real comparison for me. Like your 4.6k healthcare tax is my 14.4k pay cut (mandatory healthcare coverage for full time employees paid for by the owner @1,200/month for me) Your 5k general tax is higher than my 3.6k income tax, but everything else offsets that by such a large margin that arguing against it is laughable.
Thing is we also pay a ton of of pocket when we go to the doctor too.
I wish we had a number to use like your 4.6k but for America so in our arguments for universal healthcare we could show just how much more we really pay...
Sorry for all the edits, I remember as I reread lol
If i remeber correctly the US could cut its healthcare costs in half by switching to an universal healthcare system, while granting healthcare to everyone.
A not insignificant amount of money goes towards administrative pay for all the middlemen involved...
Everyone has to get their slice of the... (Checks notes) necessary medical treatment of human beings... Ughh...
but how would the middlemen line their pockets?
57k gross is a bangin' income in Italy, at that level you pay about 35-40% in taxes if you have no deductibles etc, which means net 2631€/month, about twice the average.
You could work alone and support a stay-at-home wife
Really? I had no idea. It turns out I make a lot more money than I thought.
The biggest lesson from neuroscience: Most psychology is BS and the entire field is little better than pseudoscience.
I think this is a very incorrect take. I don't think neuroscience has been able to make a single claim against psychology yet, nor any real and predictable claims at all which place it above psychology in application or correctness. Psychology of course has problems, and I'm very open to discussions of issues with methods and shit. But don't act like neuroscience has much of anything to say about it. They're entirely tangential fields with one at the experiential level and the other at the technical/non-experience level. Common mistake of thinking you know too much from the meme
Both fields are rubbish but neuroscientists are more insufferable
Really? What psychology has been disproven by neuroscience? Are psyc people resisting it or are they working together? Considering how much psyc has changed the world and helped people I think the idea that it's BS is a little strange.
we don't understand the brain very well, psych is somewhere between leeches and luminiferous aether.
if it was more well understood then people won't need to go to 15 fucking different therapists before finding one that helps (if you're lucky), antidepressants would do better than batters do at baseball, you wouldn't need to try dozens of different medications to find one that works (if you're lucky), and they'd take effect more quickly.
Capitalism doesn't put money into social sciences so social sciences are leeches and humour theory pseudoscience. It's unknowable, because the money just isn't there. The free market had decided.
There is money in psychology, but it's all put into making people act more normal. This can be good and useful for some people, many people need aderall to comfortably live, and it's good to stabilize depression, but these being driven by profit means often the underlying problem isn't fixed(in the cases this is possible) and society remains ableist(for issues that are endemic). Other social sciences can be kind of a crapshoot. Many anthropologists are doing very good, important, meaningful work. But not all. Archeology is a land of contrast, and sociology is good when not practiced by privileged westoids.
The only real money in psychology is from marketing and advertising.
You cannot tell me there isn't money in drugs.
Tbh I feel like that's more a fault of capitalism than a shortcoming unique to psychology.
i mean, (some) painkillers, muscle relaxers, and lots of other drugs work pretty fucken good. we don't have a great understanding of general anesthesia but all that stuff works most of the time in a way that is simply not the case with brain stuff..
Consciousness is complex in a way that isn't effectively modeled by insurance-mediated healthcare and science, which overemphasizes quantitative variables in a field that's profoundly qualitative. Not to mention the obsession with the individual, ignoring the systems that individuals exist within.
cool i just want to not feel shitty all the time and i felt like this when i had a stable financial situation and a partner so i know it's not exclusively because of capitalism, which means the psych field needs to step up its shit, not just help build the guillotines.
It's not that every psychological problem is directly due to capitalism (though many are directly or indirectly) it's that capitalist psychology mostly cares about profitable treatments, whether they're effective or not. I'm inclined to think some form of talk therapy or psychoanalysis may be more helpful to a lot of people than solely symptom-based treatment. But who can afford to go to therapy for years?
Even from the pharmaceutical side, we're mostly just tweaking the mechanisms of consciousness without necessarily addressing or understanding the holistic structure, so the best we can hope for is trying various meds until one sort of works. But most of us can't afford to spend years trying a new med every few months, with all the turbulence and uncertainty that goes along with it.
Cbt, dbt and the like are somewhat useful at treating certain symptoms, but generally fail to address root causes. And the way they're often applied, they seem more intent on teaching people to accept their treatment under capitalism than anything.
Damn I should have been a psychologist. I'm great at BS.
You could have even gotten a BS in psychology