Originally Posted by
kfahmi
And your assumptions, and putting words into my mouth, are equally amazing.
I understood full well what I was getting into. I don't depend on this job to pay my bills. So I'm not complaining about the pay. I'm simply asking why the system is the way it is. Because it's an archaic set of rules that in no way corresponds with how the vast majority of modern compensation agreements are structured.
You keep parroting that, yet continually fail to see the connection, and thus the answer to your own question. Not aiming this singularly at you, but people like you are effectively the reason pay is the way it is. We call this: price inelasticity of supply. Put in other words, when elastic players do not make black,
they exit stage. Pay goes up. When inelastic players do not make black, they subsidize their pursuit in order to remain in the market. Pay stays down. This is rational behavior when it comes to attaining medical care; it is not rational when it comes to getting your jollies off playing jet pilot. Reference Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. In the more egregious cases, it results in threats to public safety, aka Colgan 3407.
--break break--
I don't find the whole "
..because one day you'll earn 240/credit and work 10 days" argument particularly persuasive in undergoing a decade-long regional airline economic internship, when normalized for how protracted that timeline is in the context of an adult's working and filial life, not to mention medical outcomes as a function of age. I don't need 240K at 55 with a big COL-adjusted goose egg between 25-40. I need 120K at 30 for 25. Time value of money is off the charts higher for the latter case; if we account for non-economic opportunity costs then even more so.
Heavily protracted exponential compensation models are horrible for quality of life. Divorces are made of such calls for economic monastic life. . Making it to the upper middle class income past 45, marrying a 15-junior trophy wife and having dependents at 50 is a big joke. Life laughs at you. Most traditional jobs tend to be logarithmic in compensation, which falls more in line with human life. But as long as there are pilots who do not hinge their livelihood on their vocation, you'll never be able to leverage for a better structured compensation model. To put it colloquially: this ---t shouldn't be a hobby, yo.