How poverty changes your mindset • Hacker News Board

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#161

Post by soheil » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 3:58 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #45

bojackstorkman wrote: post #30

I love how when this comes up, it's people either saying "Here was my experience when I was poor in the past." or "Here is what I think about economics or the wording of this article." Don't get me wrong, I know what website I'm on. But in all seriousness, is there room for currently poor people in this discussion?

I was homeless for nearly 6 years. I got off the street last September. I am still quite poor. In fact, my bank account currently has zero in it and I don't get paid again until the 1st. I fairly frequently give my opinions on HN about poverty, homelessness, housing, women's issues and the negative impact being female has on my earned income. I try to be judicious and not do it too often. Testifying from firsthand ex…

Not saying you are or not but using the fact that one is poor cannot be used as a vehicle to receive more attention, that does not make you privileged or entitled to having a positive reception of your opinions.

Critical thinking is paramount to any argument to be made, if an argument is weak or else lacks fundamental building blocks required for reasoning through it to a conclusion, no amount of "I've been there take my word" should give it any weight.

If we're doing social experiments and not reason-based arguments then perhaps there is room for evidence-based arguments, but this forum not being such scientific lab I hesitate to accept such arguments.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#162

Post by throway808state » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 4:03 AM UTC

aswanson wrote: post #152

kraig911 wrote: post #69

I hate seeing people's comments on stories around this topic. I grew up in poverty and food stamps from time to time. My dad was a roughneck and when the oil bust happened in the 80's there was a time we lived out of our car -- my whole family. here was literally nothing to do in the oil patch during that bust. There was literally no work. But people don't understand true hopelessness. My dad did everything he could…

Sentiments like these are why I can't Fuck with libertarians. Even though I never experienced as much, I know there but through the grace of God go I. And I don't believe in god.

Libertarians want less government, many of them also want basic income, and some (such as myself) want socialized medicine.

I want more sharing, and fewer of the hapless fools who pretend to govern.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#163

Post by jjeaff » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 4:04 AM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #144

ams6110 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The work they do is of low value because almost anybody can do it. Morally they may not deserve to be poor, but nobody is going to pay them a lot of money to perform that work.

That shows that pure free market solutions won’t fix it, but that seems pretty obvious already.

That's not true. Burger flippers aren't low paid because it is easy, thry are low paid because the supply of people willing to do the work is too high. If other, better opportunities become available for a large number of those employees, wages will go up.

Look at Walmart, they aren't raising wages out of the goodness of their hearts, they need to raise wages to keep good employees. (and probably a little PR and politics too)

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#164

Post by scarface74 » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 4:05 AM UTC

MrLeap wrote: post #154

scarface74 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get the aversion to lambda. A lambda function is just a regular function that takes in a few parameters and outputs something. I always separate out the lambda interface from the main logic. Lambda is just another interface for business logic. Correctly structured, it is pretty easy to convert the core of your code to use any interface - a command line, pub sub, rest APIs etc.

This is what I see when I look at lambda: Lambda is just nodejs but different. It's an ec2 server running nodejs at a discount if you preform a special AWS dance. What use is that to me over just writing nodejs? Nodejs as it is can run unmodified on Azure, AWS, digitalocean and a ton of other providers. lambda invites a work moat to migration. Maybe you use it in a way that doesn't entangle you. Guaranteeing that tak…

You just said it- the advantage is the discount. I don't have to pay for EC2 instances to sit idle and lambda is more finely grained than EC2 based auto scaling.

It really doesn't take any more discipline to separate out your Lambda interface from your code logic than it dors not to have business logic in your controller. I treat the lambda interface method like I would treat a controller. My business modules don't know anything about lambda - just like they don't know anything about http for REST services.

For us, to move from lambda, it would be a matter of putting all of our lambda functions in one big solution and creating the appropriate REST endpoints.

Our consuming code wouldn't change at all for lambdas triggered by http. We use Consul + Fabio for service discovery and URL lookups. We would just change the service registrations.

We have a few message based triggers, but all of our messaging is abstracted into a library. We have a hybrid lambda, raw executable system. When an "event" is triggered it either triggers a real SQS message or the method submits a job to run on one of our app servers using Hashicorp's Nomad (what to do for an event is configured in Consul). I chose Nomad because it gave us the flexibility of not having to use Docker containers but we can when we need to.

I would love to move to AWS Fargate so we could have serverless longer running processes with Docker containers.

I'm the dev lead so I see most code that gets put into production. I try to both tie us to AWS services as tightly as possible and put facades over the services to allow portability.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#165

Post by bojackstorkman » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 4:06 AM UTC

pitaj wrote: post #153

bojackstorkman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a followup, I am a Real Poor! I am self taught, underemployed (I make less than $200 per month in the USA), and have pretty much been the poorest person in the room for my whole life. I eat exclusively off of foodstamps. I am uninsured and partially disabled. I have been able to pay rent for the past few months by working off the books for a couple places, and cashing in on a very limited amount of goodwill that I…

1. What is your background? 2. What is your disability? 3. Do you have access to the internet? 4. Are you on disability? 5. You say you're self taught, in what? 6. What careers have you tried? 7. Do you have family or friends? 7. Are you depressed?

No problem!

1. This is kind of open ended, so I'll give it a shot. Both of my parents were janitors. I went to a private school in middle school on a work scholarship (we had to drive an hour each way, open and close the school every day). I dropped out of high school and have a few community college credits.

2. PTSD unrelated to anything I would care to discuss on HN.

3. ?

4. No. I have applied multiple times over the past six years, but long periods of being uninsured makes people wary of making any decision based off of medical data.

5. When I was 14, I founded and ran a hosting company, so I learned how to use PuTTY, maintain PHP installations, run cPanel, etc. I guess you can say I am "Okay with computers"

6. I have worked in construction, customer service, and sales across a few different industries, but all for very short periods of time. This relates to my disability.

7. I do have a small group of friends that I am very thankful for, but not to the extent that it doesn't scare me when it is snowing outside.

8. I would love to know how my answer to this matters to your estimation.

Edited for a typo.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#166

Post by chaostheory » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 4:07 AM UTC

alsetmusic wrote: post #143

chaostheory wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I see people screaming and walking down the streets talking to themselves, I see people that need love If they're talking to themselves, they need more than that. They probably need to be cared for in a mental institution. Unfortunately the overall national trend has been funding cuts, with the irony being that it doesn't save money overall; since the costs are just shifted over to hospitals and other emergenc…

> If they're talking to themselves, they need more than that. They probably need to be cared for in a mental institution. Bullshit. There are many people capable of losing touch with reality who live normal lives thanks to medication.

Yes those people probably have homes, jobs, and a family and friends support network. With the homeless, they are missing more than one of those things, if not all of them. Is it even possible to have a prescription when you don't have a mailing address?

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#167

Post by DoreenMichele » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 4:09 AM UTC

soheil wrote: post #161

DoreenMichele wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was homeless for nearly 6 years. I got off the street last September. I am still quite poor. In fact, my bank account currently has zero in it and I don't get paid again until the 1st. I fairly frequently give my opinions on HN about poverty, homelessness, housing, women's issues and the negative impact being female has on my earned income. I try to be judicious and not do it too often. Testifying from firsthand ex…

Not saying you are or not but using the fact that one is poor cannot be used as a vehicle to receive more attention, that does not make you privileged or entitled to having a positive reception of your opinions. Critical thinking is paramount to any argument to be made, if an argument is weak or else lacks fundamental building blocks required for reasoning through it to a conclusion, no amount of "I've been there tak…

using the fact that one is poor cannot be used as a vehicle to receive more attention, that does not make you privileged or entitled to having a positive reception of your opinions.

I often get insane amounts of attention. This has long been true and I have spent many years trying to figure out how to open my mouth in public without it being a train wreck waiting to happen.

Part of the problem is that when someone is a demographic outlier or otherwise special case, other people give it a great deal of attention. Then that gets interpreted as the person intentionally derailing the discussion, making it about them, etc.

It is really common for people to completely ignore whatever point I am trying to make so they can talk about me and for me to wind up trying hard to combat that and possibly just finally say "I'm done here" and stop replying. When I do that, the people focusing on me swear it is all my fault, I was going out of my way to make it about me, etc.

I post as openly female here. It is common for that fact to become the focus of discussion and I am often told that if I did not want people to talk about it, I should not have mentioned my gender at all. The burden winds up being hung on me to anticipate the reactions of everyone else and to go out of my way to avoid mentioning anything that might get weird reactions.

It is an excessive and unrealistic burden to hang on me and it is the essence of sexism, classism, etc.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#168

Post by nine_k » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 4:09 AM UTC

braderhart wrote: post #105

autokad wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i grew up poor, and it was frustrating to see the stupid mistakes my family and people around me would make over, and over, and over. then people like the researchers in this article say infuriating things like 'their bad decisions are just because they are cognitively tired, and actually many of them could be even considered shrewd!" being cognitively tired does play a role, but more so because they are cognitively…

I resonate the feeling and agree that people need to also take responsibility, however I see people all the time making poor choices, and it isn't just poor people. If you're down on your luck, that $6 coffee ritual may be not sound so bad at the moment. Someone who is exhausted, and probably malnourished (surprisingly common in America), will say to themselves... I'm craving a delicious coffee and hopefully it'll gi…

You're exactly describing how an irrational spending is hard to shake off, even at the moment when you need every dime.

Rational thinking under stress is hard. It can be a trap, and often is.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#169

Post by ntsplnkv2 » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 4:11 AM UTC

autokad wrote: post #48

redm wrote: post #15

I'm sure how people deal with stress and difficult situations varies from person to person. My personal story and 2-cents: When I was 17 I went through a period of near destitute. I was living on my own, my father had passed away, and I had dropped out of school. Yet, I found myself with some very good jobs, such as GE Capital, a big Oil and Gas companies IT department, etc. Regardless of the opportunity, my arroganc…

i grew up poor, and it was frustrating to see the stupid mistakes my family and people around me would make over, and over, and over. then people like the researchers in this article say infuriating things like 'their bad decisions are just because they are cognitively tired, and actually many of them could be even considered shrewd!" being cognitively tired does play a role, but more so because they are cognitively…

> but more so because they are cognitively lazy.

Do you have any data, studies, or real references as to why this is, or do you simply call them lazy to feel better about yourself?

You've clearly outlined a trend-are we really to believe that the poor are simply more cognitively lazy than every other population? That is why they are poor? Quite the claim.

Re: How poverty changes your mindset

#170

Post by Lazare » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 4:12 AM UTC

> US lawmakers have expressed frustration when investments such as welfare programs don’t pull people out of poverty.

Most US welfare spending is explicitly excluded from measures of poverty; if you're measuring "the values of X excluding Y", increasing Y isn't going to move the needle.

"The U.S. Census Bureau determines poverty status by comparing pre-tax cash income against a threshold..."

American anti-poverty measures overwhelmingly take the form of tax credits (eg, the EITC program), food stamps (SNAP), housing vouchers (section 8 vouchers), and health care (eg, Medicaid). All four are excluded when looking at pre-tax cash incomes. For good or ill, we don't give the poor cash.

I know that's not really the point of the article, but it was a bit jarring.