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Dating in Delhi when you're poor

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Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#111

Post by em-bee »

verall wrote: post #78
em-bee wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: i used the terms middle class and upper class, when i should have used middle income and upper income. middle class and middle income are often mixed up. upper class and upper income less so. old text: well if the definition of middle class ends at 106k income per year then anything above that must be upper class. the problem here is that obviously upper class has a very wide range which skews the perception of…

The upper class doesn't need to work for their money. Of course the line draws different in every location, but the difference between the upper-middle class lawyer and the upper-class lawyer is that the upper-class lawyer could quit and still pass this privelege onto their children.

what often gets mixed up is middle income vs middle class and consequently upper income and upper class.

apparently, middle income and middle class are often used interchangeably even though they don't mean quite the same thing, while arguable upper income and upper class are much more different.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#112

Post by yarky »

paxys wrote: post #101
yarky wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's part of your modelling. If you're interested in the neighborhood's income distribution, then use the neighborhood's data. If you're interested in the world's distribution, then use world data. This depends on how you want to look at the issue, but it comes down to a number yes.

That's my entire point. You need a (number, location) combo to many any reasonable deduction, not just a number.

Sure but that's true about any number, I can't think of any number which adds any value without some context. In statistics, your population is your context and all inference/conclusion depends on the population (local, city, world,etc). For social classes, I'd say the more local the more representative your number, which doesn't mean there isn't a number to represent the middle class.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#113

Post by wahern »

pm90 wrote: post #89
jimbob45 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about building more housing. There is enough housing to house everyone in the US and then some. Homelessness is not just about finding/funding a home. You need food and transportation for a job. If the solution were as simple as throwing money at the homeless, California would have long ago solved their homelessness issue.

> It’s not about building more housing. It actually is. From: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/06/08/1003982733/squ... > By the 1980s, homelessness emerged as a chronic issue. There were many factors, including the federal government deciding to slash the budget for affordable housing. By then the California state government had significantly cut taxes and gutted social programs, including for state-funded men…

> Gov. Gavin Newsom's campaign promise to lead an effort to produce those 3.5 million units.

He is leading an effort. Whether he's spending enough of his own political capital is another question. But one of the problems in California is that the state constitution guarantees municipalities "home rule". That means very little can be accomplished without local cooperation, including local zoning board cooperation. It's like federalism at the state level--the central government can ban practices relatively easily, but it can't force positive action, only coerce through tax revenue incentives, which has its own constitutional restrictions, not to mention political barriers.

California is a NIMBY paradise, legally speaking.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#114

Post by wil421 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #83
sombremesa wrote: post #7

My first thought when reading this was hoping that these types of articles will reduce the comments I see on the internet that try and compare Delhi/Mumbai squalor to LA. Then I read the first comment on this HN thread, which is directly comparing this to Toronto. So either Westerners don't realize that people in these places are making less money in a month than the middle class person can expect to spend in an aver…

Many years ago, I read of a study that measured poverty not in terms of income but with metrics like "How many meals per day do you get?" and "What kind of shelter do you have?" It concluded that less than 1/2 of one percent of Americans were poor by standards in India. When I've repeated that online, on at least one occasion someone who lived in India got mad at me for supposedly promoting negative stereotypes and t…

There’s someone on YouTube I sorta watched from time to time when the pandemic hit. He’s located in Venice beach, German in Venice. He was exposing the homeless issue and lack of government response.

Fast forward to now. The city offered everyone a free place to go and many took it. There were still a lot of people who refused. Now the garbage trucks and police evicted them. The garbage people packed a lot of stuff and put it into storage.

What’s your take? They were offered housing while they get back on their feet and chose not to take it.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#115

Post by OJFord »

chinchilla2020 wrote: post #46
jimbob21 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you actually read that comment about Toronto? He immediately prefaces it by saying it isn't in the same realm, but can relate because he's poor in his area as well. I don't think that YOU realize that it is okay to relate to common feelings without being the most of that thing. The guy from Toronto doesn't have to be the most poor person in the most poor area in order to understand their feelings and talk about h…

He is not gatekeeping being poor. He is pointing out that being poor in Toronto is not the same as being poor in Delhi. You are trying to lump two things together into a category that are not even remotely comparable.

The article isn't even really about absolute squalor though (even if the subjects are destitute it's not about that) - by my reading anyway the focus is more 'trying to do things when you're among the poorest in your city', or, 'dating in Delhi when you're poor'.

I'm not from Delhi nor by any relevant measure poor, so perhaps I'm not allowed an opinion, but having just read the article, and not yet the Toronto comment, I find this thread surprising, and think an anecdote about being in a similar - similarly among the poorest in the city - situation in a different (richer, poorer, no matter) city would gel perfectly with the article.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#116

Post by triceratops »

farmerstan wrote: post #66

I thought Indians largely looked down on dating, although maybe the times have changed in the last 10 years? I have many close Indian friends and they are all married via arranged marriage. I’m pretty sure their American-born children will not marry via arranged marriage though and they have all come to grips with that. I remember talking with one of my friends about arranged marriage and she laughed in my face when…

"Arranged marriage" in an Indian context doesn't necessarily imply "parents tell you who to marry".

In many cases it's essentially parent-involved matchmaking. There may be a professional matchmaker or family astrologer who sources leads. The prospective bride and bridegroom consider multiple or even dozens of options, and discuss their favorites with their parents or other close relatives. The bride/groom visit each other a few times, with families in tow. After they reach an agreement, there's a few months-long engagement. The couple may stay in touch by telephone, social media, video calls, (often chaperoned) in-person visits, and so on. If either person finds a major red-flag during this time, they have the (rarely-used) nuclear option of breaking the engagement.

(Source: I know Indian couples who have "arranged marriages" in the way I described).

> She said compatibility was the most important thing, not love, which I found very interesting.

Isn't that considered important in the West too? Advice such as "you have to agree on money, children, and religion; everything else is negotiable" or "you have to be able to make each other laugh" is thrown out pretty frequently. It's generally understood that relationships have a honeymoon phase, after which compatibility is a major factor in staying together. People who get married young sometimes don't understand this fully.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#117

Post by DoreenMichele »

wil421 wrote: post #114
DoreenMichele wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago, I read of a study that measured poverty not in terms of income but with metrics like "How many meals per day do you get?" and "What kind of shelter do you have?" It concluded that less than 1/2 of one percent of Americans were poor by standards in India. When I've repeated that online, on at least one occasion someone who lived in India got mad at me for supposedly promoting negative stereotypes and t…

There’s someone on YouTube I sorta watched from time to time when the pandemic hit. He’s located in Venice beach, German in Venice. He was exposing the homeless issue and lack of government response. Fast forward to now. The city offered everyone a free place to go and many took it. There were still a lot of people who refused. Now the garbage trucks and police evicted them. The garbage people packed a lot of stuff a…

First, some people took it and some did not. Yet you are trying to suggest we judge all homeless based on those who did not without knowing any further details. Damn them all to hell because some were offered housing and said "no."

A lot of services offered to the homeless are really terrible. I never stayed in a shelter while homeless. They have rules that make it just shy of being a form of prison, they tend to not be safe and they often have serious mold problems, among other things.

They also offered me no option to continue living as a family with my adult sons. Every service I spoke to urged me to take shelter as a single woman and to wait-list my sons for shelter as single adult men. There were zero programs to help us find shelter as a family of three blood relatives who still need each other to make our lives work.

I have done a lot of writing about homelessness and housing issues over the years. I could direct you to several of my blogs if you actually are sincerely interested in my take. I doubt that you are. That's likely a rhetorical device.

I am doing what I can to continue researching the issue, to provide useful information for small communities to use, etc. I don't know how to get traction and I don't know how to adequately monetize my work which makes it difficult to keep writing about it in hopes of other people benefiting because I need to eat and pay rent too. I'm certainly not independently wealthy.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#118

Post by prox »

jp42 wrote: post #50

Whenever there is comparison between something in India and west, almost always its not apples to apples. There are 1.3 billion people, and very wide range of social & economic spectrum, which inherently makes comparison very difficult. for the sake of example - for "X", you will find many many Indians spending vastly more than western people, at the same time you will find millions of Indians who could not even drea…

An Indian man once told me religion is the only unifying part of India. That if that didn’t exist, India would fall apart. Can’t tell of course if that is true.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#119

Post by [deleted] »

yarky wrote: post #85
paxys wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Middle class means different things in different cities, even within the US (and in some cases between cities in a single state). You simply cannot classify someone based on a number alone.

I'm not an expert statistician, but why can't you classify people's economic class based on the quantile their revenue falls in? You can assume a distribution based on the data (probably normally distributed) or go all non-parametric based on empirical quantiles. I don't see how this cannot be easily understood with a number. Sure, you can never predict one observation, but the average in some quantile is quite stand…

[deleted]

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#120

Post by 908B64B197 »

flemhans wrote: post #26
kshacker wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it depends on 1) the local price and 2) the ability of the mother to pay. She may not be able to afford help with an American minimum wage.

In Mumbai, our friends were pretty well off and had a housekeeper who came 2 x 2 hours daily (preparing lunch and dinner, doing laundry, and cleaning around). The housekeeper, being paid pretty well, had her own housekeeper so she could have time for all these housekeeping gigs. The well-off friends had never tried their aircon because it "was not that hot" (35 degrees C) and rummaged around to find the remote. It wa…

> The housekeeper, being paid pretty well, had her own housekeeper so she could have time for all these housekeeping gigs.

Sounds like her housekeeper should get better customers.

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