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John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

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Re: John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

#161

Post by roryisok »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #34

Being rich is having a car. Even a scooter. Being rich is being able to visit your family. Being rich is having insurance. Being rich is paying for a monthly phone subscription. Being rich is hot lunches. Being rich is risking losing your job in order to negotiate a better contract with your boss. Being rich is considering having children at all. Being rich is buying alcohol. Being rich is looking at house prices. Be…

> Being rich is worrying about North Korea instead of looking forward to blissful oblivion

Are people in America actually worried that NK is going to nuke anyone? Kim Jong Un knows if he ever fires one of those, it's game over for him. They're a big-ass bargaining chip. Threatening to fire them is the only reason he has them at all. He'll never actually do it.

Re: John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

#162

Post by Grustaf »

Inconel wrote: post #160
Grustaf wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but I think most people would agree that the problem is not that the law is enforced for poor people, but that sometimes rich people can get away with breaking the law.

That is true but I think there are also times when it isn't so much a problem of rich people necessarily getting away with breaking the law, although obviously this happens as well, as much as specifically targeting laws or the enforcement of laws that disproportionally effect poorer communities. Another issue for me is that things like fines obviously carry a punitive function, people break a law and you want to pun…

At the same time, fines are surely the most bening of all the things that hit poor people harder, since unlike rent or tuition fees they are entirely avoidable.

Re: John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

#163

Post by jondubois »

>> Being poor is wondering if your well-off sibling is lying when he says he doesn’t mind when you ask for help.

That's not real poverty. If any well-off person cares about you even a little bit then you are not poor because you have an emergency lifeline.

A real poor person won't hesitate to beg for money, especially from a family member (easier than begging on the streets).

Re: John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

#164

Post by bryanrasmussen »

gerbal wrote: post #133
philovivero wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the inventory of my life. I remember those months as a kid when the cupboards were bare, and so I'd just shrug and go to bed without dinner. Thank goodness for government-sponsored low-income lunch program. That was my only meal many days. Naturally I was surprised when recently I got informed I have white privilege by a bunch of spoiled children who've never known a day of hardship in their lives. I'm…

You do have white privilege. White privilege isn't being treated better because of your race, it's not being treated worse. White privilege is not remembering the last time you were pulled over for nothing. White privilege is not being afraid of the police. White privilege is getting let off with a warning. White privilege is expecting to be judged on your merits. White privilege is getting the benefit of the doubt.…

the problem with the word privilege is that well it catches people who were in many ways not privileged, and those people are probably going through life with pretty big chips on their shoulders about how they were screwed over by their environment. Reminding them that hey you could have had it worse is like when rich people tell poor people hey in generations past you couldn't have a big screen TV so don't worry, be happy.

In the context of the white privilege list you give I match 2, although I would add another two which is that while I can certainly remember all the times I was pulled over for nothing and while I might have been hassled for hours with a dozen cops threatening me before being let go I was let go at the end and not killed - these things are really part of the white privilege which I have.

But I spend more time going around being pissed off about all the times I was pulled over for nothing and not thanking my lucky stars I was white and got to stay alive, which is why I don't feel like I had it that great and your hectoring tone of course makes me mad because 'remembering the last time you got pulled over for nothing', yeah I remember the first time, pretty much was one of the defining moments of my life really. thanks for the reminder. I remember the times in between that and the last time. I remember the last time, had to stand in the snow for a couple hours which I was walking through to get to my parent's house to have the only food I would have that day. But the food was gone by the time I got home.

I realize I have a benefit in being white, I just had a lot of other disadvantages that most of the other people I was around didn't.

Re: John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

#165

Post by emodendroket »

jondubois wrote: post #163

>> Being poor is wondering if your well-off sibling is lying when he says he doesn’t mind when you ask for help. That's not real poverty. If any well-off person cares about you even a little bit then you are not poor because you have an emergency lifeline. A real poor person won't hesitate to beg for money, especially from a family member (easier than begging on the streets).

Until they're tired of giving you money and you don't have a lifeline anymore.

Re: John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

#166

Post by celticninja »

gerbal wrote: post #133
philovivero wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the inventory of my life. I remember those months as a kid when the cupboards were bare, and so I'd just shrug and go to bed without dinner. Thank goodness for government-sponsored low-income lunch program. That was my only meal many days. Naturally I was surprised when recently I got informed I have white privilege by a bunch of spoiled children who've never known a day of hardship in their lives. I'm…

You do have white privilege. White privilege isn't being treated better because of your race, it's not being treated worse. White privilege is not remembering the last time you were pulled over for nothing. White privilege is not being afraid of the police. White privilege is getting let off with a warning. White privilege is expecting to be judged on your merits. White privilege is getting the benefit of the doubt.…

The thing that annoys me about white privilege is that it is such a US centric thing. You can be poor and discriminated against as a white person by other white people just because you happen to live on the other side of a secterian split. All these things apply in those situations and you don't need to have black or brown skin to experience them. The common factors are being discriminated against and being poor.

Re: John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

#167

Post by ivanhoe »

Inconel wrote: post #152
gerbal wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do have white privilege. White privilege isn't being treated better because of your race, it's not being treated worse. White privilege is not remembering the last time you were pulled over for nothing. White privilege is not being afraid of the police. White privilege is getting let off with a warning. White privilege is expecting to be judged on your merits. White privilege is getting the benefit of the doubt.…

Those are all valid points but as I tried to address in another comment, it becomes more nuanced when you try and account for various different privileges intersecting. The problem with your point scale for me is that it's fairly simplistic. White privilege might be starting at 0 but as soon as you introduce some other disadvantage, say growing up in an abusive home, you're very quickly in the negative. The same of c…

Also worth noting, this really only applies to people living in US, and to some extent Western Europe. Lots of people in Eastern and Central Europe are white, but far less privileged in terms of the chances given, living conditions and personal freedom compared to pretty much any American citizen regardless of skin color. To each his own problems always seem the biggest & hardest, but it's important to stay aware of the wider perspective...

Re: John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

#168

Post by emodendroket »

gerbal wrote: post #133
philovivero wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the inventory of my life. I remember those months as a kid when the cupboards were bare, and so I'd just shrug and go to bed without dinner. Thank goodness for government-sponsored low-income lunch program. That was my only meal many days. Naturally I was surprised when recently I got informed I have white privilege by a bunch of spoiled children who've never known a day of hardship in their lives. I'm…

You do have white privilege. White privilege isn't being treated better because of your race, it's not being treated worse. White privilege is not remembering the last time you were pulled over for nothing. White privilege is not being afraid of the police. White privilege is getting let off with a warning. White privilege is expecting to be judged on your merits. White privilege is getting the benefit of the doubt.…

I don't want to minimize racial discrimination, but telling poor people about their white privilege seems not all that different from conservative finger-wagging about how American poverty isn't "real" poverty.

Also, even if you only looked at white people American police shootings are at a much higher rate than comparable countries.

Re: John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

#169

Post by adamkruszewski »

chasing wrote: post #59
gragas wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Being rich is risking losing your job in order to negotiate a better contract with your boss If you have a 9-to-5, you're probably not rich.

The average household income in the US -- one of the wealthiest countries in the world -- is, like, $55k/yr. If you've got some 9-to-5 job pulling down $80k/yr with no kids or dependencies, you're rich to a lot of people.

Remember hearing Dave Ramsey (who probably got it from someone else) saying that when your money makes more than you do, you're officialy rich. There might be something to it.

Re: John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

#170

Post by SimonPStevens »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #113
amagumori wrote: post #57

for anyone who has grown up poor or working class, how do i claw my way out of this? i come from a single parent household, my mom is an elementary school teacher with 4 kids in an expensive city. she barely makes ends meet and cannot support me. i was homeless and addicted to drugs for most of my teenage years, before getting sober and going to college, but dropping out after 2 years - my mom's child support put me…

> so i try to work on things like a compiler and a real-time rendering engine Even unfinished this sounds like a cut above the average entry level dev. Make sure these projects are on github or whatever so people can see the code, even unfinished, it's good to see the progression. Apply for a dozen junior dev jobs and see what happens. You'll probably get a bunch of rejections, but if you can write coherently and tal…

I missed the edit window, but the post got me thinking, so I came back to add this.

My first dev job was straight out of uni. No prior work experience, and no open source work to share. I had a 2000 line final year project written in c++ and that was it.

I think may 1% of the graduates had any open source contributions. Most were like me.

If you consider that these will be the people you are competing against for a entry level role. Your projects are a huge thing if you open source them, even unfinished. Just demonstrate an understanding of some CS concepts, algorithms, code design, etc and you'll be competitive at the very least.

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