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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

#861

Post by burntoutfire »

sershe wrote: post #859
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…

Interesting, I have two conflicting feelings about this. On one hand I agree with you and I am super paranoid about being poor. On the other hand, one thing that I definitely learned from growing up poor (I like the original article say "it’s very small (think ~900 sqft)", cause I had stable housing when I was growing up and it was 600sqft for 3-4 people ;)) is how little you need to be happy. In college, when we wer…

> As long as I have 150sqft of housing, some food and an internet connection I will be fine. I like to think about that every time I'm afraid of losing my current level of privilege.

I tend to agree, but I also need a couple of things on top of that:

- the place needs to be relatively quiet (no asshole neighbors on the other side of the wall, or a busy street)

- I need to have an access to relatively peaceful area for walks, preferably green

- I need to live in an area that's not depressing because it's decrepit or filled with aggressive idiots

- I need friends in a distance that makes seeing them often not a nuisance

Take away any of the above and I'm not doing too well long-term. Also, I suspect most people in the world are missing at least one thing from my list.

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

#862

Post by sethammons »

carapace wrote: post #699
sethammons wrote: post #163

Queue my first truck. My uncle gave it to me. S-15. The bench seat didn’t lock, it slid forward and back when breaking or accelerating. Hard left hand turn and the keys would fly from the ignition and land on tue floorboard of the passenger seat (this did not turn off the truck). During the same hard left, some electrical thing would connect or un-short and my radio would temporarily turn on until the end of the turn…

( s/Queue/Cue/ )

Thanks

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

#864

Post by myself248 »

aembleton wrote: post #202
lastofthemojito wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really curious to see how electric cars work for the poor (maybe 25 years from now, not presently). One of the big selling points of electric cars is simplicity - with far fewer moving parts, less can go wrong and you can hopefully expect a car to last longer. That's the hope anyways, but the big maintenance item in an electric car is the battery, and of course that's an expensive thing to replace. Will folks be…

The downside is needing somewhere to charge them. The poor don't tend to live in houses that you can easily plug an EV into. They'll have to go somewhere else to charge up, that will charge a premium.

That's the main reason I'm so excited for EVs with useful amounts of solar panels on top. Adding 5-10 miles of range per day is enough to cover a lot of people's commutes, especially those who live apartments that're more likely to be closer to the city. (Folks in sprawling suburbia likely have longer commutes, but also have a place to plug in and charge.)

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

#865

Post by EliRivers »

danaris wrote: post #426
dalbasal wrote: post #303

His point on housing is so important, and its adjacent to a lot of other poverty-related issues. It's one of the reasons advocates for the poor often seem to speak a different language to their opposition. If you live in median-and-above-land, you think of all costs existing on a spectrum. Fancy dinners for $100 on one end. Rice and beans for pennies at the other. This is true for clothes, smartphones, furniture... l…

> Ireland has/had a whole literary genre of stories about miserable poverty-stricken childhoods. They paint a very vivid picture. If you compare it to poverty today, besides being less harsh, it's quite different. They had housing. It was basic, often insecure, but they did have housing. > Food was scarce. That's no longer the case. Stuff though... they had no stuff. No bed, no mugs, no shoes, no pencils. Getting the…

Related; I've heard people say that some group can't be refugees because they arrived with a mobile phone in their pocket.

Yeah, that Huawei phone is all the protection you need from a roving paramilitary kill squad intent on murdering everyone in your village.

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

#866

Post by ncmncm »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #832
sorisos wrote: post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we already have a culture that exaggerates this aspect. Tried-but-failed stories do not sell very well. Not everyone can be successful and pretending this is case makes people that feeling left out blame them self (or maybe immigrants). I am not advocating a "entirely random" view, just a more nuanced and perhaps more realistic one. Also, I do not think humans will ever stop struggling to achieve things in li…

I think our impressions are colored about by our different observations of those around us, and this conversation is probably colored by our definitions of success. This thread kicked off with someone who escaped poverty and made it to the middle class. I am not talking about the fetishization of the hyper-rich. I do think that with persistence, hard work, and an average allocation of luck most people are capable of…

Sad to say, $200k is not middle class. $300k is the line, nowadays. Very few of us are middle class, in the sense that our grandparents could be even on a regular wage. That is, there is essentially no middle class in the US anymore. Income is distributed strictly bimodally.

None of this is accidental: it is the consequence of a specific program started about 1970, outlined in the Powell Memorandum, to grab control of the levers of power. Perhaps the most important factor was using military-grade propaganda methods to get the poorer half of voters voting against their own interests. It has been running for 50 years now, and has been a roaring success.

Kids come out of college now saddled with decades of crushing debt, facing homelessness after one medical or legal hiccup; scared voters are easily manipulated. Half the nation actually voted for an out-and-out con man--twice!--pretending to represent them while doing everything imaginable to grind them down further. Meanwhile the opposition has been forced to pray to the same gods, and depend on hedge funds to finance a half-hearted alternative that has to use a vocabulary created by the propaganda machine.

The amount of money generated by the US economy has gone up and up and up since 1945, but the amount collected by regular people--the less-than-99%-ers--leveled off in 1975. All the rest has gone straight to the pockets of those at the very top, even minting billionaires left and right. Make no mistake, we could all be fantastically better off given pretty small policy changes.

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

#867

Post by bradleyjg »

skohan wrote: post #835
whimsicalism wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

21st century is: we're turning everything into a market, far fewer easy but well-paid jobs, if older people had to actually face the brunt of it they would lose their homes. People who can't handle technology don't have a chance nowadays.

I feel like this concept of turning everything into a market has much more downside than we would like to believe. It's often sold as democratization: i.e. "anyone can just go on youtube and be a content creator now - you don't need a production company as a middleman!" But the thing about markets is they are great for the winners, and terrible for the losers. And one of the effects of technology is that it allows sc…

The theory of it is good—-the more efficiently the human race can produce goods and services the better. If ten people can provide the entire world’s stand up comedy needs that frees up all those other people to do other valuable things. The issues are: 1) distributional (i.e. wealth gap) and 2) people get value out of the work itself and not just the compensation.

Although we fight a lot about #1, #2 strikes me as a thornier problem.

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

#868

Post by collyw »

musingsole wrote: post #396
collyw wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where are the stories about people born into poverty, still in poverty, and not likely to be anything but poor for the rest of their lives? Thomas Sowell says that it's actually a pretty small percentage of people like that. Most poor people are young and most rich people are old. Young people become older and the vast majority work their way up the pay scale to some extent.

Seems like the thing to put some numbers on. If that perpetually poor narrative is only true for 1% of Americans, that's a population bigger than my hometown being forever mischaracterized and unrepresented. Ignoring the realities of others' lives is how we got rising fascism. I doubt many are comforted in knowing they're a statistical minority.

He does. I tried to find it on youtube, but there are a lot of Sowell clips.

>Ignoring the realities of others' lives is how we got rising fascism.

Not sure where that comes from.

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

#869

Post by theriddlr »

notauser wrote: post #36
carmen_sandiego wrote: post #5

As another ex-poor person: some of this is OK and some of it doesn't really ring true. E.g. > That’s the drop-off you experience at the lower price levels - there’s nothing between “This is a tiny but acceptable apartment” and “Slum apartments in stab-ville”. I don't think this is true, and why would it be? Unless you're in an area where the housing market is cliffed for some legislative or regulatory reason. But mos…

There is definitely non-linear pricing in the London housing market as one example. When I was last looking - Studio apartments and one bed room apartments rented for similar amounts, and so did two beds and three beds. But the price jump from one bed to two bed was much larger than any of the other jumps. You can speculate on many reasons why this might be the case (smallest size apartment for a family in the city,…

It's a maximum of two unrelated households (a household can consist of couple or single person) in a property unless the landlord has an HMO (Housing of Multiple Occupation license).

So a 3+ bedroom property still houses a maximum of 2 couples.

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

#870

Post by cwp »

bagacrap wrote: post #717
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…

Not a great example. In the US, you can buy small quantities of drugs (or soap or whatever) in the travel section of a CVS, or in a dollar store. Usually this is held up as an example of the difficulty of being poor though (not a boon to the poor), since the unit price is, of course, higher.

The case I'm thinking of is informal. The pharmacist keeps a blister pack of pills behind the counter and will tear off as many as you want and sell them individually. The unit price is probably higher, but not exorbitant. It's probably against the rules, but the pharmacist deals with poor people all the time, and he isn't trying to gouge them.

And I think it's the perfect example. What good is a better unit price if you can't afford to buy in bulk anyway? If you're poor and you have a headache it's better to pay 25¢ for two aspirin than $10 for 100. Part of being poor is steeply discounting the future. The other 98 aspirin might take care of headaches for the next two years, but a lot can go wrong in in that time, and that $9.75 is money you need today.

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