I know someone who immigrated from a former communist country. She talked how they lived in extreme poverty and now despite having great job and substantial savings, she pretty much lives the way she learned.
For instance cooking the same food her parents used to cook from whatever they managed to find, only wearing used clothing.
When her phone was stolen and she had to buy a new one, she literaly cried for a week thinking that for the lost money she could have food for months.
The bad side is that I remember she berated her then boyfriend because he bought potatoes in the store that had them 20p (like a quarter in the US) more expensive than the one little farther from her place. Can you imagine being screamed at for 20p? He eventually left her and needed to attend therapy.
Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life
51–60 of 478 posts
Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Could you explain what you mean? Sure. I realize I waste a lot of time in supermarkets, shops or online stores, browsing/walking around and comparing prices just to penny pinch on low value things, when the savings I would make would have no meaningful impact on my yearly net worth, but the time and mental energy wasted browsing/walking around comparing prices could have better return on investment if used on other…
> the time and mental energy wasted comparing prices could have better return on investment if used on other things like learning a new skill, meeting a friend, reading a book Maybe. Actual cost savings are observable now, with very high probability. Maybe that book or skill is useless; in other words, there's a broad distribution on possible outcomes. Who actually measures this stuff to assess ROI? It's not obvious…
Correct, this is what I’ve observed too. It’s stunning to me that the big tech companies - Amazon comes to mind - aren’t writing colleges big checks in exchange for “produce us people who can function in real life teams”.
Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life
#53Being poor in general, during your childhood, scars you for life. It makes you penny wise and pound foolish, adverse to taking risks in your career and investments, can destroy your confidence in yourself, while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Habits that even after you remove poverty from your live, you still feel the the anxiety and triggers in your head.
I frequently encounter people and family with obvious issues arising from childhood, and 95% of the time their parents were poor as kids and thats where it all comes from. On one hand these people are a pain to deal with, but in most cases its not their fault either.
What makes them a pain to deal with?
I work with ultra-privileged people who by all accounts are “well adjusted” and I find them harder to deal with than people I grew up with from home. Many of them have no history of and don’t understand trauma, and as a result they’re unempathetic to what the literal majority of people experience.
Edited for clarity
Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly fuck the medical system, young people don't care. Housing is what's really getting us. Some days I feel like driving up to McLean and burning banks down. EDIT: I'm out of comment quota but dymk I'm so tired of hearing that, here's my reply: Oh fuck off. I make six figures and work remotely. My family lives in a rural part of a small state and I can't afford a house within driving distance of them. EDIT2: Ass…
What... I don't know if you realize this but plenty of young folks need healthcare. Ultimately, we can do both (fixing healthcare and housing). But honestly more countries have solved healthcare than housing.
Maybe "plenty" need healthcare but all of them need housing. This sounds like some boomer whining about their issues and pretending to care about millennials.
Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life
#55Notable that the gas price doubled in 3 years. We’re almost at that point today.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=e...
Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life
#56I worked in a grocery store in the late '90s, and the older customers (who grew up in the Great Depression) always carried penny pouches, because they remembered a time when one had to keep track of cents to survive. This is how I know that, even if we miraculously fixed our medical system tomorrow and outlawed private health insurance by a constitutional amendment, we'll still have, thirty years from now, 60-year-ol…
Honestly fuck the medical system, young people don't care. Housing is what's really getting us. Some days I feel like driving up to McLean and burning banks down. EDIT: I'm out of comment quota but dymk I'm so tired of hearing that, here's my reply: Oh fuck off. I make six figures and work remotely. My family lives in a rural part of a small state and I can't afford a house within driving distance of them. EDIT2: Ass…
I’m a very well off millennial. My fiancé and I both have high paying tech jobs. We easily make the income of multiple families.
That being said we are strained to buy a 3-bedroom house like that of my single Mother who only has a high school education to her name.
Given our success, we don’t have the “burn it all down” mentality but I fear it building in many of my friends and totally understand the sentiment of this being a #1 problem for younger generations.
Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly fuck the medical system, young people don't care. Housing is what's really getting us. Some days I feel like driving up to McLean and burning banks down. EDIT: I'm out of comment quota but dymk I'm so tired of hearing that, here's my reply: Oh fuck off. I make six figures and work remotely. My family lives in a rural part of a small state and I can't afford a house within driving distance of them. EDIT2: Ass…
I’m a very well off millennial. My fiancé and I both have high paying tech jobs. We easily make the income of multiple families. That being said we are strained to buy a 3-bedroom house like that of my single Mother who only has a high school education to her name. Given our success, we don’t have the “burn it all down” mentality but I fear it building in many of my friends and totally understand the sentiment of thi…
At least you have a partner. If you're on your own you're absolutely fucked. Not only are you alone but everyone else is out to get you. When we have the crunch in the near future I could see me and my peers torching things.
I don't even worry about this anymore; I look forward to it.
Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life
#58It's more that abundance in formative years spoils you for life.
Debateable. The reason rich kids turn into such pieces of shit isn't material abundance (since, after all, anyone born before ~1990 in the middle class also experienced material abundance) but the unearned high social status and the impunity that comes with it. Deprivation and poverty, on the other hand, fuck people up severely--often, through no fault of their own--and there's tons of empirical evidence showing this…
Huh? Social status is relative, that is, defined by some kind of difference in a characteristic over which there is some competition (like wealth, looks, connections, fame, etc.). So how do you get that rich kid status without reference to material abundance?
Remember, most people are comparatively poor: the wealth histogram is heavily skewed toward zero and with a wide tail toward infinity.
It's impossible for everyone to be relatively wealthy and relatively high status. It is possible for everyone to have absolute wealth (or at least income) beyond a fixed absolute level, yet still widely disparate status.
Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
What... I don't know if you realize this but plenty of young folks need healthcare. Ultimately, we can do both (fixing healthcare and housing). But honestly more countries have solved healthcare than housing.
Maybe "plenty" need healthcare but all of them need housing. This sounds like some boomer whining about their issues and pretending to care about millennials.
Me or the article? No need to go on the attack btw, I was pointing out the privilege / falsehood rooted in saying young folks don't need healthcare.
I stand by my statement, healthcare is much easier to solve (we have examples of places doing it right). AND we can try to tackle both.
Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life
#60Yeah, we don't just burn gas driving everywhere. "Scar consumption" as a phrase assumes that consumption in the American style is a healthy activity to begin with, and this outcome is damaging or ugly. "Permanently reduce consumption" would be more worthy of an academic setting, that title is clickbaity. Perhaps some will overdo avoidance of something because of fear of expense. Better than masses overdoing from buil…
Plus, a lot of that gas consumption is spent commuting, which makes people miserable. Murdering the daily commute is a good thing Covid-19 did, although I don't expect it to last long (WFH-ers will get fewer promotions, despite working harder, and eventually RTO fetishists will rule the roost). Very few people want to "consume gas". They want to be able to live decently and have meaningful jobs. Unfortunately, in tod…
> You don't want to know how much time I spent deciding whether to use the more conventional hyphenization ("shit-ass-load") or the version with better cadence.
It’s not a question of “cadence” but of grammar. “Shit-ass“ is an adjective modifying the noun “load”. Your choice is grammatically correct.