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Being poor vs. being broke

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Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#121

Post by netsharc »

pixl97 wrote: post #94
netsharc wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too many people buy the American dream of "If you just work hard enough, you'll be successful.". If you believe this, then you'd have to believe the opposite: "If you're poor and unsucessful, that means you didn't work hard enough, you must be lazy.". And too many trust-fund kids or kids from rich parents who could afford to send them to expensive schools (or rich enough to live in a district with a well-funded schoo…

>If you're poor and unsucessful, that means you didn't work hard enough, you must be lazy.". Calvinism. Your poor because you're bad. Interestingly enough Calvinism serves as a lot of the basis for what became Capitalism.

Yeah... and the basis of how to Make America Great Again: make the poor's lives miserable and they'll be forced to work hard. They'll be successful, problem solved! If they stay poor, that must mean they're still lazy, let them rot!

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#122

Post by rckt »

This is kind of a good way to understand that people who never really struggled in life aren't able to understand, step into struggling's person's shoes. It's simply an unknown concept for them. Everyone's values, perspective, actions are dictated by the past experience. I made my way from a poor country to a western-European wealthy one. And the question that amuses me is "So, how do you like here?". I fucking LOVE it here. People don't even understand that I can compare these nice streets to an absolute shithole. And they either have never lived abroad or just been to some neighboring countries. And they talk about food, views, sea, whatever. Oh man, they don't understand that just going outside is already a nice experience for me. Going to a doctor, using public transport, taking my kid to a nice school. Ha! I just tell them that yeah, it's nice, I like it. But there's a huge gap between our concepts of nice places.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#123

Post by stackedinserter »

umvi wrote: post #36

It's way more nuanced than this. Ultimately poverty comes down to an individual's ability to be self-sustaining. Take a software engineer, take away their house, job, and all of their money so they are homeless and have literally nothing ("broke"): how quickly can they reach a stable self-sustaining state again? Probably pretty quickly: - Ask family for help (they are anchored in a higher place to help bootstrap you…

What stopped the baltimore kid from getting any valuable/marketable skills? Why did he drop school? In the end, it's a sum of all their little personal decisions. Sure, family and environment play their important role, but it's still personal fault.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#124

Post by sgarland »

As a child, I went from firmly middle-class (dad was a firefighter in San Diego, CA) to pretty damn poor (we moved to the middle of nowhere in Nebraska). I joined the U.S. Navy, and got a B.S. while I was in, then an M.S. in SWE afterwards on the government’s dime thanks to the GI Bill. I did the latter while working nights. I now make more money than I ever thought would be possible.

I said all of that to say, I am a poster child for “I crawled my way out of poverty, so you can too,” and I hate that sentiment. Even though I know that I did in fact work hard to get to where I am, I know plenty of people who work way harder than I ever have, and who have very little. It’s not that they’re blowing their money, it’s that their skill sets don’t pay nearly as lucratively as tech. Very little comes close.

If you have never been poor (or at least were raised poor) yourself, you cannot possibly understand what it’s like, and you should probably not be giving advice to those who are.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#125

Post by dijit »

Even this does a poor job of explaining being poor.

The constant open loop on everything you own, terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else; the constant churn of second-hand (and cheap/disposable) things that are already close to death before they come into your possession and- crucially: the crushing weight of knowing that any financial roadbump is existential.

As the author mentions, a £50 fine might as well be £50,000- its unpayable, and leads to a sort of doom-spiral of lending to avoid worse consequences. Easily you can end up in unmanageable debt, in rare cases prison, its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.

It’s hard to convey this, and what it does to your mentality- I am now built mentally to think quite fiscally conservative and do not take debts or put savings into investments like my peers. I am well off but a fraction of what I could have been had I not has this mentality.

You have to live it to understand it, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, its a tarpit and getting out of it without someone handing you a branch (and if you no longer have the strength to pull yourself out) then you’ll be stuck in it forever.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#126

Post by trinix912 »

renewiltord wrote: post #23

Sure. That’s the theory. Then I read the book Evicted and I understood. One of the people gets a small windfall. Enough to stop the treadmill. What she does is buy something nice for herself because she “deserves a treat”. Also the sums of money here are humongous. Someone is net -$40k? They need $40k more per year to not be poor? That is the British median income. So this shortfall in money a person needs to be not…

> This shows how poor Europeans are compared to Americans. Some half of them are in this comparative state of misery.

If you completely ignore cost of living and public services, then maaaybe, but still quite a stretch ;)

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#127

Post by sgarland »

cowpig wrote: post #112
sgarland wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are Americans who have open sewage in their yards [0], because their counties are predominantly Black or Latino, and their state deprioritizes any infrastructure work. It’s structural racism. Even better, the Trump administration canceled [1] an attempt to right that wrong, citing that it was “DEI.” 0: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sanitation-open-sewers-black-... 1: https://apnews.com/article/justice-departme…

[flagged]

I do not care.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#128

Post by merth »

J_McQuade wrote: post #118
merth wrote: post #12

I have poor friends, they spend more on Netflix, Gym, Starbucks, IPhones, steam games etc then me, and they are poor for atleast last 10-20 years. I almost never have any of these and I have given them that classic suggestions like the cancelling the gym membership that he/she rarely or never uses, and it doesnt work, they keep spending money on garbage with money they don't have.

In the terminology of the article - which I enjoyed and recommend that you read when you get time - these friends of yours are not 'poor', they are 'broke'.

article says broke for temporary, these people poor 10-20 years. that doesnt sounds like temporary. they get government or familiy support, and rarely work short term here and there.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#129

Post by pixl97 »

potato3732842 wrote: post #91
lubujackson wrote: post #33

"Poor" is why razor blades are behind a glass case at Walgreens. Because people steal razor blades, not (just) to use, but to sell at a discount to other poor people. There is also the interesting situation of "newly poor" people getting crushed much faster than people who have been poor a long time. There are community safety nets that bubble up from everyone being cornered all the time. You don't go to the mechanic…

I know it makes a nice clean narrative that's especially appealing to the kind of people who would be in these comments but it probably wasn't suburbs that did this. That sort of community existed and probably still exits the most in places where the population is the least dense. I'm not gonna speculate on what other things could have been more responsible but I have my suspicions.

>That sort of community existed and probably still exits the most in places where the population is the least dense.

I think you misunderstand suburbanism... In those places where the population is not dense the number of people that move commonly is not that high. Again, neighborhoods tend to have longer and deeper roots.

Suburbia has little to no community these days.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#130

Post by kgwgk »

energy123 wrote: post #26
dukeofdoom wrote: post #7

It's also owning lower quality goods, that plague you by breaking all the time. So the maintenance cost (time and energy) is quite high. It's almost better not to have things when you're poor, because the things you have are just a big headache. I think it's also that increasingly working people are living in old houses that were never built properly, and now have lots of problems. And even new things you buy, are ju…

I've heard it described that being poor is expensive. The poorer you are the more expensive it is. Being poor in a poor country is the most expensive. You can't just buy coffee, you can only afford a sachet of coffee. So per gram you're paying double. You can't afford medical care, so the condition gets worse and thus more expensive to do something about. You're in debt most of the time, which is expensive. You have…

> You can't just buy coffee, you can only afford a sachet of coffee.

Imagine if they tried to do without coffee until they saved a few dollars for a can. It could take years!

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