Good looks are a function of 1) Genetics, 2) Effort, and 3) Money -- pick two.
Like, if you ain't naturally gifted it takes a bunch of time and cash (clothes, gym membership, makeup, expensive haircuts, etc.) to compensate -- but you can. Lord knows I'm a walking, talking ogre but can pull it off by putting in the effort.
But lots of effort requires the time and ability to invest the energy -- which implies money -- and then there is the literal 3) Money, which aside from clothes and makeup is also things like plastic surgery, teeth whitening, etc.
And that is in the infamous anti-worker US; though I think you meant unenforceable (the companies wouldn't be able to use the legal system to enforce them)
In the rest of the world Steve Jobs / Apple would have been in a bigger trouble just from the start of the emails.
Fine print: Said regimes may or may not have been the result of us sending military and weapons to kill any and all possible human rights movements and keep slave labor going.
In countries like the US that is generally not something many software engineers can afford. In South Africa, as an engineer that is more affordable and more seem to have them from what I've seen.
It's pretty common among middle or upper-middle class software engineers, at least based on the number of my coworkers who employ such services. Biweekly cleaning and gardening might run you $100 a week, or significantly less if you can cut out the middleman by hiring a cleaner directly instead of going through an agency (they can charge $40+ an hour and often pay their illegal immigrant employees under $15).
The average domestic worker in South Africa makes $16 a day and a little bit more for gardening. The domestic will come and clean the house, wash your clothes, iron etc. and put in a full days worth of work. The gardener will spend a full day weeding, mowing etc. etc..
You will not get anything close to that for $100 a week in the US even with an illegal immigrant.
Sure, but the median software engineer in South Africa is making around $20k USD (https://www.payscale.com/research/ZA/Job=Software_Engineer/S...) compared to around $90k in the US. Multiply that $16 by 4.5 and you're at $72, or $9/hour for a full day of work. Do a comparison based on percentage of salary, and the difference is smaller than you would think. It just seems ridiculously cheap in nominal terms.
I'm not criticizing you. It's just part of the difference in standard of living. In the US, only the rich can afford a domestic worker, because it would cost up-words of $200 a day. In South Africa it is a fraction of that cost even if you are paying above market rates.
What is a domestic servant? Is the guy delivering my food a domestic servant? The guy driving me around in a Uber? How is that different from the guy mowing your lawn?
> A civil society doesn't let its income gaps get large enough that the idea of domestic servants makes sense.
Well then the masses at the bottom of the income gap should start voting for someone other than who they've been voting for, for the last 30 years.
You can't blame the higher-income people for this - they have been trying to change the government by voting for someone else, but the the low-income people you are feeling so sorry for refuse to vote otherwise.
The "civil" society you seek can't happen while the masses are still voting the same corrupt government into power in every single election.
The poor masses have voted opposition parties in at municipal level a few times now. It's just a matter of time before the ANC's vote share drops below 50%. The real question is where those votes are going to go instead.
The Democratic Alliance looked like it was going to pick up the votes of disaffected black voters, but instead it seems like its leadership decided to pay more attention to Western culture wars (Helen Zille going on about "wokeness" etc) and to protect its right flank from being eroded by Afrikaner nationalists after the 2019 election, rather than courting the centre.
Cyril Ramaphosa's personal popularity helped the ANC in 2019, but it was also used by the DA as an opportunity to shaft Mmusi Maimane, who could have been a viable potential leader in SA.
Can't blame the voters if the politicians leave them with a dearth of choice.
You can only blame the voters if the politicians leave them with a dearth of choice. If a society can't produce a single reasonable leader it's usually no coincidence. Cultural values matter and some societies are inherently more corrupt (e.g. Arab and African societies, as can be seen by the constant stream of corrupt leaders they produce)
