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On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

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Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#591

Post by criticaljudge »

xxpor wrote: post #550
criticaljudge wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people quickly tire of it when they have to take care of those lazy people directly. I'm not saying nothing should be done. Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend.

> Just that it is a fallacy to think the government simply has infinite money to spend. They create the money so they literally do. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be deployed wisely of course.

If they print money, they devalue the money people already have, so in the end again it is the people, not "government", who pay.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#592

Post by dragonwriter »

swiley wrote: post #342
cwp wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed this after spending time in developing countries. They are set up much better for being poor. Trivial example: you can go into a pharmacy and buy two aspirin. Some people can't afford 100 at a time, and don't need that many anyway. Or rent: you can get a place to live for only $60/month. There's no running water, but it's clean and dry and it has a lock on the door. The cheapest place you can find in the US…

This is what's ridiculous about much of the zoning and building codes here. People don't want poor people living in sub-optimal housing, so instead they force them to sleep outside or live with abusive people.

> People don't want poor people living in sub-optimal housing, so instead they force them to sleep outside or live with abusive people.

No, mostly people don't want poor people or sub-optimal housing in their neighborhoods, for a variety of financial, perceived safety, and emotional comfort related reasons.

If it was just not wanting poor people to live in suboptimal housing, there'd be a lot greater effort to provide non-sub-optimal housing to poor people. There are definitely people with this concern, but it's not the driver of housing and zoning policy.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#593

Post by EvilEy3 »

syops wrote: post #214
throwaway-0987 wrote: post #174

Throwaway because I don't want my co-workers to know. I was poor. My father left home when I was a kid in middle school. My mom worked part time cleaning houses and left us when she found a new husband. I dropped out of high-school in the 9th grade and went to work. Low paying jobs. I lived with my aunt on the bad side of town. Fast-forward 35 years. Today, I make about 200K per year. I got a GED, went to trade schoo…

I very much enjoyed reading your post. You made a statement that, taken literally, I disagree with and wonder if you care to elaborate more on it. I made it and you can too. It seems to me that luck plays a huge role in each success story like yours. My wife had a similar trajectory and makes quite a bit of money. However, along the way, there were hundreds of decisions made that could have gone the wrong way. She's…

Luck is opportunity + skills. It is not some arcane skill that you're born with or not.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#594

Post by antognini »

mrsuprawsm wrote: post #142
blackshaw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a bunch of things in this article strike me as very American (I'm British). No-one in the UK worries about not being able to afford healthcare if they're poor, nor do they need a car to get to the grocery store in under an hour (unless they live in an isolated home out in the countryside, which probably means they're rich, not poor.) There are many, many places you can live in the UK without needing a car to ge…

>My rental deposit is held in escrow by some third party; I've never heard of anyone not getting their deposit back when they move (unless they did something to deserve it e.g. trashing the place). This is only a relatively recent thing in the UK, introduced about 10 years ago, to tackle the problem described in the original post of landlords running off with tenants deposits. When I was a student ~10 years ago, just…

On paper many states in the US actually have pretty strong protections for tenants for their security deposits. It's not uncommon for states to have fairly strict standards as to the valid reasons a landlord can take money out of a security deposit. If a landlord withholds money for frivolous reasons the tenant can be entitled to double or treble damages. (So if they withhold $1000 for no reason, you can get back that $1000 and an additional $2000 or $3000.)

The main issue is enforcement. If your landlord withholds the deposit, often your only recourse is to sue them (usually in small claims court). This is going to require paying some court fees, maybe on the order of $100 (which you may get back if you win, but you still need to pay them up front). Plus you're going to have to show up in court, which likely means missing work. And obviously you're not going to have a lawyer for this, whereas most landlords will.

When I moved out of my last apartment my landlord withheld $100 because he claimed there was dust on the blinds. (There was not, we specifically dusted the blinds before moving out.) But the only way I could get that money back was to sue them, and it just wasn't worth it for me.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#595

Post by raverbashing »

sigstoat wrote: post #499
relaxing wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living with anyone beats being out on the street. And probably beat being in the foster system.

> Living with anyone beats being out on the street a lot of folks on the street disagree

Some have left unsustainable situations, but some were the a-hole of the situations.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#596

Post by ryandrake »

Terretta wrote: post #295
sethammons wrote: post #129

> You are also more or less forced to learn to do mechanic work. You are forced to do all your own work, unless the landlord will help. I am no longer poor and broke, but I spent roughly my first three decades there. I recall a colleague saying they were redoing their walk way; it blew my mind they paid someone to do it — the concept of paying someone to do something for you is not something I experienced growing up.…

The article touches on this with “don’t by a spatula from Craigslist”. No matter your income, what you’re really doing is trading time for goods and services, the money is just a token. When “doing your own work”, be mindful of the opportunity cost of your time. What’s your rate versus the handyman’s rate? If you fix the porch, are you less able to pick up that overtime shift? This needs to be genuine trade off, not…

The key is whether there is actually opportunity cost. Unless I would otherwise be earning money, the monetary value of my time is zero. Usually, I'd otherwise be screwing around with a hobby, playing video games, or other things that don't earn me money. Therefore, I aim to DIY as much as I can. Paying someone to fix my car or the drain under my sink seems like a ridiculous expense if I can do it myself for free.

If instead I were constantly working on $100/hr contracts/gigs, and fixing something would take actual time out of that work, then I would be more tempted to pay someone $60/hr to do something I could otherwise do myself.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#597

Post by zouhair »

throwaway-0987 wrote: post #174

Throwaway because I don't want my co-workers to know. I was poor. My father left home when I was a kid in middle school. My mom worked part time cleaning houses and left us when she found a new husband. I dropped out of high-school in the 9th grade and went to work. Low paying jobs. I lived with my aunt on the bad side of town. Fast-forward 35 years. Today, I make about 200K per year. I got a GED, went to trade schoo…

> I made it and you can too. Poverty has no color. It impacts everyone. You can't tell just by looking at someone.

You lost me at this conclusion. This is wrong in every sense of the word and perfect case of Survivorship Bias[0]

The point of having societies is so we should not fend for ourselves, especially rich societies. In rich countries there should be no poor people and charity should not exist because it is not needed.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#598

Post by EvilEy3 »

birdyrooster wrote: post #484
sologoub wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has experienced pretty rough times (different from the OP), but doing just fine myself, of course luck has a lot to do with it, but why in the world so many people feel so compelled to belittle the accomplishment of OP climbing out and then encouraging others to at least hope for the same? I’m pretty sure things would be very different today if I didn’t have that hope. Don’t take the hope from people e…

He said poverty doesn’t have a color implying that black people aren’t impoverished because of systemic racism, but because they don’t work hard enough. It’s racist drivel.

What does this have to do with black?

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#599

Post by zouhair »

dahfizz wrote: post #459
whack wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I made it and you can too. Poverty has no color. It impacts everyone. You can't tell just by looking at someone. I love your story. There's also a ton of people who will delight in cherry-picking your story, as justification for not expanding the social safety net. "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy" A few factors to consider: - You had an aunt you could live with - As a yo…

3 of the 5 factors you list boil down to "OP made good decisions and worked hard". I'm not sure how that is a counter argument to "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy". From their description, it doesn't sound like living with his Aunt was a tremendous boon either. I don't mean to argue against a social safety net (free college in this example was certainly a good thing). I jus…

> "OP made good decisions and worked hard"

OP could as easily "made the wrong decisions", it's literally a crapshoot.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#600

Post by woah »

pmiller2 wrote: post #525
huevosabio wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't have an eternally appreciating housing market and affordable housing [0], one has to give. Our current housing market appreciation comes from systematic housing shortage. Rognlie finds out that the increase in return to capital (vs return to labor) observed by Piketty comes largely from the residential real estate sector [1]. It turns out, Henry George was right. We need to tax the value of land such that w…

There is no "systematic housing shortage." There are 59 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the US. [0] Even California has more than 9 empty housing units per homeless person. [ ibid ] --- [0]: https://www.self.inc/info/empty-homes/

This is known as “vacancy trutherism”, and it has about as much truth to it as q-anon. The vacancy rate is in the low single digits, and the less vacancy there is, the less affordable the market is. The vast majority of vacancies are units that are in the process of being rented or sold.

The idea that there is some Illuminati cabal of housing speculators holding vast numbers of units off the market is a crazy fantasy pushed by those who don’t want to face the reality that our society has not built enough housing.

The article you link shows how laughable this concept is. It contains a table of states ordered by their vacancy to homeless ratio. One would expect that the states with the worst housing crises would appear at the top of the list. But California appears at the very bottom of the list, since it has the lowest number of vacancies per homeless people. This would imply that California is doing the best out of all the states on housing!

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