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This is Real, That's Not

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Re: This is Real, That's Not

#241

Post by jelliclesfarm »

michaelt wrote: post #210
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand now that ‘social safety net’ means welfare programs. When I came to this country many years ago, I had a completely diff understanding of what ’social safety net’ meant... to me..how I understood it by my lived experience..it was the social/security net family/friends hold so that if you were unfortunate enough to fall, someone will catch you. Maybe it’s different in India now. But my generation remember…

> it was the social/security net family/friends hold so that if you were unfortunate enough to fall, someone will catch you. I've no doubt that, for every person who ends up rough sleeping in the US there are 1000 who move back in with their parents. Or sleep on a friend's couch. Or get gifted a few hundred bucks from a loved one to tide them over. Or move in with a partner when otherwise they wouldn't have. But ther…

Right. But they have welfare programs to fall back on. Every homeless person on the streets of SF is cut a welfare check by the govt courtesy of the tax payers. There is no such thing in India.

Perhaps the problem is that there IS a govt welfare program. The complaint currently is that what’s being done is not enough. The truth is that it will never be enough. The govt and tax payers can shovel mountains of dollars into the maw of the problem and it will never be enough.

The way American welfare programs are designed is like sticking a band aid for cancer and hoping rosy health will return.

If we stop relying on govt, perhaps our tribal instincts to care for each other will return ...perhaps it will finally dawn on us that we rely on our kith and kin...that we come from other people like us and it was not the govt that birthed us.

Re: This is Real, That's Not

#242

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

kaitai wrote: post #211
timeeater wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

But that's the thing -- I'm a woman in tech. How am I political? I'm just a sack of cells like you. Are you a political topic? To get back to the parent posters, that's why I keep coming back to HN despite the unfortunately-now-expected friction of, well, comments like the one above me. (And timeeater, to be really clear, I don't care your position on feminism or socialism. The friction is that you label me talking a…

You aren't political, but your identity is, just as everyone else's identity is.

Paul Graham's post[1] on identity describes it much better than I could here.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

Re: This is Real, That's Not

#243

Post by OJFord »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #222
headmelted wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK loans are actually a good deal if you really understand them, which students here inevitably don’t. It makes demanding government to pay for tuition here pretty abhorrent imho. I know a lot of working class/blue-collar families here, and talking with them, it really becomes clear how incredibly selfish and unreasonable it is to expect their taxes to buy someone wealthier than them an education that they themse…

What £ of tax would the working class family contribute towards university education (assuming you accept this paradigm of tax and spend)? Back of envelope calculation suggests income tax collected from a median family would be £50 per year. Meanwhile, I know plenty of working class/blue-collar families who believe that debt is an unmanageable risk that they should reject if at all possible. Their children take that…

> Back of envelope calculation suggests income tax collected from a median family would be £50 per year.

Back of envelope calculation is definitely wrong.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, I'm just saying that £50 figure is definitely not right, without doing any calculation. (OK sure - 50/0.2 = £250 taxed at basic rate above personal allowance. Which this year I think is £12k5, and median household income is surely above £12k75.)

Re: This is Real, That's Not

#244

Post by OJFord »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #109
henrikschroder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And secondly, the author points she is "upper class"? How can upper class family or individual ever need to borrow loans and also not have assets? In the US, economic class and social class are often used interchangeably, which is wrong. Social classes are cultures, and while ever-increasing amounts of money are needed to perform the rites and shibboleths of the classes, you can still be upper class while being dir…

In the US, economic class and social class are often used interchangeably, which is wrong. Social classes are cultures Thank you for saying that. While my late father had more money at one time than I really understood as a child, my mother's "upper class expectations" referenced in this piece are mostly not about money per se. They are rooted in the fact that her mother came from a low level noble family (my mother…

> my mother's ideas of "proper" attire are somewhat like the dress codes of British Royalty that you read about in gossip rags. (Not too much skin showing, no cleavage on display, don't let your bra straps show, etc.)

This is an even more bizarre comment than TFA to me. Your idea of 'upper class' and the royal family is... curious. You certainly don't have to be royal not to want to wear (or your daughter to wear) a tracksuit with cash and a phone hanging out of visible 'under'wear..!

Re: This is Real, That's Not

#245

Post by dragonwriter »

michaelt wrote: post #217
dragonwriter wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think you're truly economically "upper class" if you have to worry about student loans. If you have to worry about student loans, you probably aren't even middle class (petit bourgeois) even if you are middle or substantially higher income; people with student loan concerns are, almost by definition, members of the proletarian intelligentsia—knowledge-workers, often relatively well paid compared to the rest…

Under this definition, presumably a house flipper doing all their own decorating would be petit bourgeois (applying their own labor to their own capital), while a senior manager earning $500,000/year at Google would be proleteriat (selling their labor for wages)?

> Under this definition, presumably a house flipper doing all their own decorating would be petit bourgeois

In the economic analysis on which the traditional class distinctions are based, the homes owned transitorily by a flipper would seem to be (well, aside from the land component, which is also not capital) a very expensive raw material, not really capital (they aren't tools used in the course of producing goods for sale.) So this is certainly a point where there could be different opinions, but, sure, that's probably arguably correct.

> while a senior manager earning $500,000/year at Google would be proleteriat (selling their labor for wages)?

A senior manager earning $500,000/yr at Google is likely investing quite a bit of that, and likely has been during the series of highly-paid jobs they had prior to becoming a senior manager, and very often would fit the alternate petit bourgeois pattern discussed in the parenthetical in GP, where a significant fraction of their gains are from ownership (indirectly through financial instruments) of capital, though they also have significant income from selling labor. But, sure, it's possible for them to just be a highly paid member of the proletarian intelligentsia.

Re: This is Real, That's Not

#246

Post by smallnamespace »

dakial1 wrote: post #168
vecinu wrote: post #78

I hope my comment doesn't sound tone-deaf or ignorant but this is something I have thought about for a while. As I was watching @lisper's movie "grace of god"[1] and heard the phrase "convince myself that it could never happen to me" (becoming homeless), I started thinking, is this a more American-centric problem? What I mean by that is, can the lack of a social safety net in the US cause a much higher rate of homele…

This is exactly my thought while I was reading the text. I live in Brazil and while we certainly have homeless and poverty here, this specific situation of someone with skill and education becoming homeless is something ultra rare, to te point that I never saw, hears or read of anyone in this situation. Even very modest people earning little money are able to get a roof over their heads. The usual case of homelessnes…

> healthy and sane people living in the streets for some time and most of the time the justification is indebtness

There is a strong selection bias here: homeless people who are addicts or suffer from mental health issues are significantly less likely to be on a computer writing interesting articles of their experience.

I volunteered at a soup kitchen in SF a number of years ago. At the orientation meeting, the director said nearly all homeless fit into one of these categories:

1. Mentally ill

2. Addicted to drugs

3. Veterans (Gulf War, Vietnam)

4. Down-on-their-luck families (debt, sudden medical bills, lost job, eviction, etc.)

He said #4 category was the smallest, and these families typically got out of the situation within a year or two at most. A 'Pursuit of Happyness' type situation.

The other problems are much less tractable. The distribution of time spent on the streets was strongly bimodal: people were either on the streets for <2 years, or for decades.

Re: This is Real, That's Not

#247

Post by lisper »

ahmedalsudani wrote: post #158
lisper wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If actually interacting with with homeless people takes you too far outside your comfort zone, I spent two years trying to get a homeless person off the street and made a movie about it: http://graceofgodmovie.com/ So you can just watch that.

It’s a wonderful movie about a difficult topic. Great job. Thank you for making it and for sharing it here—I watched it based on this recommendation, and it was well worth the watch.

Thank you! If you wouldn't mind leaving a review, I would really appreciate it.

Re: This is Real, That's Not

#248

Post by turbinerneiter »

syshum wrote: post #226
DubiousPusher wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The motivations of moneyed interests are obvious. But the contempt the working and middle classes have for the poor is something I'll never understand. I've often been obliged to pay for something I've seen others acquire freely and I say good for them. I wouldn't exchange places with them for a moment. It seems the pettiest of all things to begrudge someone whose life is a disater, even in the rare cases when it is…

>>But the contempt the working and middle classes have for the poor is something I'll never understand. Really? Should be fairly easy to understand, for a Middle Class Family that is living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to save for retirement, the kids collage fund, maybe help pay for a aging parent, save for home repair, and provide daily expenses seeing a good chunk of their earnings being stolen errr "taxed" aw…

Taxation is only theft in the US, in the rest of the world you get something for it (health care, free education).

Re: This is Real, That's Not

#249

Post by Snild »

kzrdude wrote: post #153
riffraff wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while not the norm, there are places in Europe where student loans are relatively common, e.g. Norway[0] and Sweden[1]. Just mentioning because I was very surprised when I discovered it, and it offers an interesting alternative on how student loans could work. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_Norway [1] https://www.collegefinancinggroup.com/student-loan-repayment...

And here (Sweden, Norway) the student loan is used for living costs: rent, food, books, and nothing goes to the university.

...meaning they end up pretty small: my debt was about 250 000 SEK -- very roughly $25k -- after 5 years of university. Combined with the monthly stipend that everyone gets, I was "self-supporting"; my parents didn't have to (and wouldn't have been able to) pay any money out of pocket for my education or living expenses during that time. And now I pay around $1k total on that loan every year. I could pay it off faster, but the terms are so good that I'd rather use it to lower my mortgage, or invest it.

Thanks to this system, I got the opportunity to do what I wanted, and society gets another well-paid software engineer that can pay lots of taxes. Win-win!

(Edit: corrected debt from 300 000 SEK to 250 000 after checking)

Re: This is Real, That's Not

#250

Post by arrow7000 »

OJFord wrote: post #244
DoreenMichele wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, economic class and social class are often used interchangeably, which is wrong. Social classes are cultures Thank you for saying that. While my late father had more money at one time than I really understood as a child, my mother's "upper class expectations" referenced in this piece are mostly not about money per se. They are rooted in the fact that her mother came from a low level noble family (my mother…

> my mother's ideas of "proper" attire are somewhat like the dress codes of British Royalty that you read about in gossip rags. (Not too much skin showing, no cleavage on display, don't let your bra straps show, etc.) This is an even more bizarre comment than TFA to me. Your idea of 'upper class' and the royal family is... curious. You certainly don't have to be royal not to want to wear (or your daughter to wear) a…

These dress codes are necessary, but not sufficient, for being a member of the upper class.
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