I'd say that in most circumstances, it's rude. I've found that if I'm having a conversation with a very close friend or someone in my industry, it can sometimes be appropriate to vaguely discuss these types of things if it's relevant to the conversation. Most days though, people who are wanting to benchmark salaries for a particular job would just look on glassdoor or maybe do an internet search.
Overall, it's not really anyone's business to ask or know how much someone else makes unless they freely volunteer the information. Rule of thumb should be - when in doubt, don't ask.
Is it rude - yes.
shoudl it be rude - no.
Will i ask anyway - yes. If you find it rude its your own problem. and i find the whole idea of hiding your earnings silly. yes, because not knowing how much you earn will certainly make decisions based on your actions much more grounded. For example if a person refuses to go to certain place because he cant afford it, but is afraid to say it because "its rude" then you will just think he does not want to, where if he told you you may even pay for him. in the end both parties loose.
I earn 400 euros a month.
Bro. Great minds think alike. I totally took million merits to be an analogy for Charlie Brookers career too, no one else has ever agreed with me on that though.
I also presumed that the one with the cartoon dog was based on Boris Johnson. Or rather the fact people vote for Boris/Like him for the same reasons they like a cartoon character. Not in any way because they approve of his governing or policies, just because he's a funny character. Brooker said something similar to this in one of his guardian articles way back a few years.
Robopimp (as I call the episode because of the obligatory sex scene) was probably my least favorite. I found the voice on the phone/the messages to be something which could feesably happen with our current level of tech, which made me think "this could be now" and i was terrified. Then the robot comes along and i was like "Oh... suspension of disbelief gone, this isnt realistic". I think it was jarring because it went from "this could be now" to "this is silly".
Flipside my favorite ever is the memory recorder one. Thing is, even though that's not realistic with current tech it STARTS OFF with the device. So I'm not thinking "this is now" im thinking "this could be ten years time". I know it sounds silly but that let me suspend disbelief through the whole thing and absolutely love it unlike Robopimp which halfway through made me feel jarred.
I dunno, Robopimp had the most chilling ending out of any of them in my eyes. It was somehow creepier than
"We will punish you ever day until you die, turn it into sport and you will go through this every day, you will be terrified every day forever. Your guilt is immaterial. You cannot remember the crime you have committed. That does not matter.
Also this is a giant metaphor for passive society and reality TV."
what with the whole... yeah. Just that ending. It was... The best ending in my eyes. Also the premise is believable, up until the robot, but if that had been cut out you would not have the wonderful spiral into insanity on the same levels. But its... So fucking creepy. The voice. The idea that our online presence can be turned into a person. Hell, the amount of questions it raises is almost infinite.
And I love the Boris thing because its... Horrible, but I could see myself doing it. And I am a labour man. But if I lived in London, I would have voted for him to be mayor cause he is pretty good at it. I just wished he would declare himself independent. Did you know he used to be a liberal before going mad with an attempt to get power?
Yeah, you heard me.
The weird thing about the memory recorder episode is I could not help thinking "I would love that." I am a self-confessed technophile. Half of me goes "HOLY SHIT GOOGLE GLASSES ARE TERRIFYING." the other half goes "IF I HAD THE MONEY, WOULD WANT.", I love technology. I love every aspect of it. That episode did raise some interesting questions though.
I mean, I naturally sometimes think of my first girlfriend. That is normal, right? Everyone who has ever been in love probably does it sometimes. And of course, my mind will wander to the highlights (The good AND the shitty bits) and some of those highlights are, well, sex. Naturally. Now does that make me a bad person? Does the mind occasionally wandering back to sex you had a few years go (Oh god. 5 years ago. Fuck I feel old.) make you a bad person?
I mean, if I found out a friend of mine was fantasizing about fucking my girlfriend, I would be creeped out and just a little bit... Scared, and maybe angry. Is it any different? Does the fact that I do remember those occasions rather vividly speak badly about me? Am I wrong because I still have the "Highlight Reel" of the most romantic occasions of my life?
Am I no better than the creeper in that episode simply because I do not want to forget these moments? Does it make it better that she is dead? Does it make it FAR worse? Does someone have a right to know someone elses memory? Would the world be worse off if we could play back our own memories to notice the things we did not notice the first time around, the slight pause before an "I love you" or are we far better as we are now, flawed, forgetting the things our brain wants us to forget. Does our world need to be based in fantasy for us to survive?
Fuck I love black Mirror. I fucking love good sci-fi. Good sci-fi combined with mind-shattering satire, social commentary and fucking dystopias in general is... Scarring.
By the way, to anyone who is reading this and going "Man, I should really watch this Black Mirror thing, it sounds AWESOME!" please do not watch it alone. If you do, watch it after a nice meal and in a well lit room. The first episode can really fuck with your head. Its all creepily believable. And it can be soul crushing. Some people I have introduced it too have gone "Fucking hell [redacted], that was one of the most amazing things I have ever watched." Others have asked me why I would do that to them. Why I would make them watch something so fucked up.
Its worth watching. I would also advise tracking down everything Brooker has ever produced and consuming it.
Sorry, that is not how interaction works. I would also find it rude of you to shove your cock in my face. Sure, if you did it, you would find out if I liked cock and that could be the start of a beautiful relationship, sure you could have nothing wrong with shoving your cock in my face, but if I find your actions rude, you have reason to believe I will find your actions rude and then you do that thing which you think I will find rude, that is not just my problem. Its your problem as well. You chose to be rude.
and i find the whole idea of hiding your earnings silly.
Lots of things humans do are silly. Hiding your social worth, or disagreeing that you should be rated upon how much you earn, is not that silly. Not really.
yes, because not knowing how much you earn will certainly make decisions based on your actions much more grounded. For example if a person refuses to go to certain place because he cant afford it, but is afraid to say it because "its rude" then you will just think he does not want to, where if he told you you may even pay for him. in the end both parties loose.
I earn 400 euros a month.
You know, I can tell you I cannot afford to go somewhere without ever disclosing my earnings. Infact, I have done it multiple times. You can find out I do not want to go somewhere because I find it too expensive without knowing if I earn 5 dollars a year, 300,000 dollars a year or if I have spiralled into more debt than you can imagine. How much I am earning does not matter. My willingess to pay for things and how much I earn are two separate factors.
Hell, if you know I earn, say, 100,000 dollars a year and then I say "I am sorry, I cannot afford that" thanks to knowing how much I earn you might think I am a tight arse. Then you will think less of me because based on your understanding, I should be wealthy!
Yet imagine I have a huge mortgage and student debts to pay off. Oh, and an ex partner who has my kid that I am paying for. And my car, I never paid that off, I actually got the loan for it and the house when I was on 150,000 a year. In comparison to your 400 euros a month, I am incredibly poor. But you would think, what with all the money I am raking in with my salary, that I am wealthy. I would then be expected to pay for you, because I know you are earning less than me.
Better to not ask and just do whatever. How much money you earn is of very little consequence. What you do with your money and how much you earn are two different things. Nobody knows precisely how poor, or rich, I am. Bar perhaps my ex partner. And that is how it should be.
Me and some other bloke are currently having a pretty awesome discussion about something that we both love. We do not need to know how much either of us are earning to have this discussion. I am not ever going to ask how much he earns, nor will he ask me. It does not matter.
I understand that asking how much a person earns is rude (after all, they could not be doing as well as they would like), but asking someone about their politics or religion is tantamount to asking for their opinion on something. I am suspicious of people who won't discuss their politics or religion, because it often means they have a good reason to be ashamed of them.
Your analogies of why we don't let people know our incomes are spot on, and the fact that you own nice things, or appear to have a lot of expenditure is neither here nor there!
Also... I totally agree with you on the social acceptability front. If it is considered rude, and someone asks anyway, first I would take it on the chin and think they may not know. I would gently brush it off, but not submit. If they persist because they somehow think that they are above social norms and that what they do isn't rude because they consider it not to be then they would receive a justifiable 'fuck off' and a stiff cold shoulder, mirroring their arrogant attitude.
Finally... I am also a fan of Black Mirror! Although I am at a disadvantage as I have only seen the first series. The second came out whilst I was in the Middle East, and I never got round to watching it! Is it on Netflix/4OD?
I found the memory machine one very close to home. I lost my last relationship after 4 years to a bout of jealousy brought on by work related stress. Watching how the characters in that acted, and comparing it to how I would have acted if we had that tech was rather scary. Brooker does a fantastic job of making abstract ideas incredibly realistic, focusing on the human interaction! (Something that British drama and TV seems to do the best. Realistic emotion and character interactions. Part of the reason I like to watch British films so much. I watched Fish Tank recently, which was about a chavvy girl with attitude problems trying to get out of her shitty life. The characters were really good!)
Germany here and it depends on the situation.
Out of the Blue ... Yes that's really rude.
But it can be okay. For example when i was in what would be highschool in america i had a job on the side. Sometimes some of my friends were looking for a job so they asked me how much i made, so they could decide if they want to do that too.
It would be pretty rude with a regular job. I mean it's not anyones business how much you make.
I'm from North Eastern America and it is pretty rude.
The area I'm from has a large range of economic classes. My town has people who are absolutely rolling in it and people who rely on welfare to get by and everything in between.
Therefore, unless its specifically important in context, its rude to ask. How much you make shouldn't matter; it should be who you are as a person.
If the subject of work comes up then it's not too rude as it's part of the conversation. If you walk into a bar and some friends see you with a new handheld and just ask you how much you make it can be a bit rude. Then again I think talking to somebody without taking your sunglasses or hat off is very rude, but a lot of people to it to me anyways...
It's just a number really. I've never run into someone with some evil plan when they ask me how much I make. It's usually just curiosity about a particular job.
As a side note don't youtubers and people like that have to be very discreet with their earnings or big bad Google will get after them?
It isn't a rude question, per se, but it's a personal question. The rules for when it's rude to ask a personal question are the same for all personal questions, man. How is this worth three pages of thread?
In the United States in the Northeast it's considered rude. So take that what you will.
I've only ever asked close friends or family members that question.
Well literally everyone I've told I got a job asked me what the salary was, so either everyone I know is very rude or not all of Britain feels that way.
Your analogies of why we don't let people know our incomes are spot on, and the fact that you own nice things, or appear to have a lot of expenditure is neither here nor there!
Also... I totally agree with you on the social acceptability front. If it is considered rude, and someone asks anyway, first I would take it on the chin and think they may not know. I would gently brush it off, but not submit. If they persist because they somehow think that they are above social norms and that what they do isn't rude because they consider it not to be then they would receive a justifiable 'fuck off' and a stiff cold shoulder, mirroring their arrogant attitude.
Finally... I am also a fan of Black Mirror! Although I am at a disadvantage as I have only seen the first series. The second came out whilst I was in the Middle East, and I never got round to watching it! Is it on Netflix/4OD?
I found the memory machine one very close to home. I lost my last relationship after 4 years to a bout of jealousy brought on by work related stress. Watching how the characters in that acted, and comparing it to how I would have acted if we had that tech was rather scary. Brooker does a fantastic job of making abstract ideas incredibly realistic, focusing on the human interaction! (Something that British drama and TV seems to do the best. Realistic emotion and character interactions. Part of the reason I like to watch British films so much. I watched Fish Tank recently, which was about a chavvy girl with attitude problems trying to get out of her shitty life. The characters were really good!)
Its all on 4oD last I checked. I would check for you but in a bout of pure creepiness...
I can't, cause I am currently in the Middle East.
Black Mirror is fucking wonderful. British Drama is fucking wonderful. Now, I am not saying that we do it better than anyone else. But I am saying that we do it particularly well, with things like Black Mirror and Sherlock as shining examples of how to do things. I have seen poor British dramas though. Let us not forget the promising, yet fucking stupid, Utopia (Was dating a biologist at the time who pointed out that if you caused a quarter of the human race to become infertile you would cause population growth to arrest. If you caused as many as was being indicated to go infertile, you would cause an extinction event.) or the travesty that was Merlin. We do make mistakes. They might be good looking mistakes but still, they are mistakes.
I wouldn't say it's always rude. I think it's closer to bad form. Rudeness has intent behind it. It's bad form because it might put the person being asked in an awkward position of feeling either inferior at how little they make or like they are boasting.
Context is important here as others have said. If the intent is to make the other person feel awkward then it is rude (as it is for all questions). If it's an honest question born from a genuine interest without agenda then it's just bad form. In the case of the latter people shouldn't be getting upset or offended if they don't want to answer.
I never quite understood what is supposed to be rude about it, unless you have a really shitty job and don't want others to know. It's one thing in TB's case where, as he pointed out, he can't disclose that kind of information because of various reasons but if you've got an average occupation what's the big deal?
Being British, I'll offer some possible answers.
I'd stress that it isn't seen as rude in the context of, say, an employment discussion with friends, or if you're asking for advice about the profession, but if it were something you asked on first meeting with someone you might be seen as kind of an arse.
That's because asking someone about their pay kind of implies that you'll judge them on how much they make (or at least that it factors into your judgement). If you wouldn't then why ask?
Not to mention that income is something of a social dick-measuring contest, in which someone is inevitably going to come out worse. Genuinely[footnote]I say genuinely to distinguish between taking the piss in a friendly way, and actually trying to socially profit at someone else's expense[/footnote] making someone look bad (even if it rebounds upon yourself) isn't really something to do to people you don't know that well. We're more self-deprecating under those kinds of circumstances.
Lastly, because the aftermath of class conflict is still kind of a big deal in the UK, as embarrassing as that is. Someone's income, and thus their class, is a touchy subject.
An analogy is tough when it comes to class issues... the closest I can come up with is that it's kind of like race in the US (though nowhere near as extreme).
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Although I am at a disadvantage as I have only seen the first series. The second came out whilst I was in the Middle East, and I never got round to watching it! Is it on Netflix/4OD?
