Ever since I've moved to North America from Europe, I've noticed that a ton of people like to proudly proclaim how they make comparatively good money, solid 6 figures. Many of them doing things that, intuitively, don't sound like they'd earn that much, e.g., trades, but also things like sales etc.

Upon further questioning, it almost inevitably comes up that these people work way more than 40 hours per week.

While they may actually earn, say, 150k a year, in a debate where salaries are being compared, it makes no sense to treat them as a 150k earner, since they work extra hours. This doesn't even take into account working through holidays, while sick, and not taking time off, but that's just extra math people won't feel like doing anyway, so normalizing to a 40h workweek should be enough.

*edit:

Clearly I got the right subreddit for this. Now, just something that most people seem to have missed:

I specifically wrote that I'm talking about "a debate where salaries are being compared". Unless you want to compare apples and lettuce, you should be comparing at a standardized number of hours. Taxes, how much hits your bank account etc. is pretty much irrelevant for what I'm saying.

Also, I'm not judging anyone for choosing to work extra/fewer hours. That's your (hopefully voluntary) decision, obviously. But the point stands that if you work 50% more time than me and end up with 50% more money, when we're comparing, you're making the same amount I am, you're just working more. If I decided to work 50% more, I'd get the same amount in my bank account. In other words, you're not better paid, you work more.

Title is a little dramatic but I just don’t think they do any actual valuable work. I think my main issue is with how we buy/sell homes. It’s an incredibly complex thing for something that at its core is not complex at all, creating a “need” for realtors who can actually understand all the nonsense that goes into buying a house, besides that I can’t think of a single thing they do that’s actually “work” besides telling you to get trendier kitchen cabinets (because obviously everyone who’s selling their house can afford to do an entire renovation to fit the realtors standards). It’s just silly to me.

“No Child Left Behind”, or “Every Student Succeeds Act” as it is now called, seems to still allow for very low thresholds and standards for kids to move forward to the level of education when they are, to put it bluntly, not at that level of progression.

Seeing these young adults struggle with basic math and spelling that should have started in early elementary curriculums yet somehow they made it through another five or six grades of schooling and “graduated” in some cases is doing the said child no favors.

It's not even about crazy sentence structure or formulaic math, but rather the girl at the drive-thru that reads off the total of $4.75, I give her $20.75 which causes her to have a mini-stroke and somehow I get back $17 back at the first window, which she then comes to the second window and says she made a mistake only to give me $2 more. Then there are the folks that send out the emails or texts with five simple words misspelled and using the incorrect variant of words like their, there, and they're.