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Being poor vs. being broke

blog.ctms.me

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Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#411

Post by pbalau »

neuralRiot wrote: post #398
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent years getting over the idea of saving some half broken thing because “I might need a part from that later”

As an electronic tech I find myself hoarding discarded devices because sometimes I need some part and ordering means paying shipping and 4 day (if I am lucky) waiting to get a part that costs cents just to probably find out that I need more parts.

When I was younger, I've spent an entire summer working here and there, with the explicit goal to buy an 8MB stick of ram, so I can play Quake. Got the biggest ballacking from my dad about "wasting" all that moneis. Since then, storage and memory, the only things I'm actively trying to save.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#412

Post by acuozzo »

gnarlouse wrote: post #167

Another point the author doesn't make but probably should is the home economics of DIY: A solo person gets 24h a day, just like everybody else. Ideally 8 are spent asleep. Another 8 (minimum) are probably spent working. That leaves a person 8 hours to do their whole life. It eats away at personal time, it bleeds into work and sleep, often by interrupting or occluding the ability to do either.

> It eats away at personal time, it bleeds into work and sleep

And, most significantly, eats away at time which could be allocated for retraining/career-advancement.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#413

Post by kmoser »

pixl97 wrote: post #229
rsyring wrote: post #2

https://blog.ctms.me/about/ It would appear from the about page and the article that he has the requisite skills to earn an income that should move him out of the "poor" category: - auto mechanic - digital tech - landscaping I'm not trying to dismiss the difficult realities associated with being poor. But if you have the skills to make more money and bring your family out of the "poor" category, why wouldn't you do t…

>landscaping You're not going to make any money in this unless you have a ton of tools. Working for someone else with the tools generally doesn't pay crap. Also in the US it is/was common to use undeclared immigrant labor for these kinds of jobs.

Also, I imagine if you live in the middle of nowhere, landscaping skills would be all but useless. You need to be within reasonable distance of enough people willing to pay you a living wage.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#414

Post by cluckindan »

tome wrote: post #250
dugidugout wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is anyone assuming this? It was the GP of this chain who was providing this assumption. The OP was commenting on the condition of being poor and the meaningful difference between the commonly experienced condition of being "broke". This entire digression is likely a reflection of what motivated OP to put this post together.

I don't know, but it seems that rsyring and cluckindan are both assuming it, and at odds about a counterfactual.

I’m just pointing out the other is assuming it.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#415

Post by cluckindan »

nyeah wrote: post #155
cluckindan wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's an obvious conclusion to draw when folks seem to be unaware of the content of the article. But you're not supposed to say it.

I don’t want to live in a world where anything resembling wilful ignorance of systemic inequality is propagated uncontested. Chalk it up to wilful ignorance if you must.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#417

Post by jibe »

nightpool wrote: post #208
jibe wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation actually looks like. https://cds.bie.edu/ Clean modern buildings, desks, air conditioning, running water, very nice. You were fooled by that photo into making a bigger assumption about the full school and situation.

The story that photograph is from is about distance learning enforced by the COVID pandemic. https://navajotimes.com/edu/hill-becomes-makeshift-classroom... . The family does not have internet access, and while they were issued a laptop and mobile hotspot, it only gets signal from the top of that hill. OP may have misunderstood the context but I think it's a stretch to say they were intentionally fooled.

What I meant was they fooled themselves. They had negative assumptions about how Native Americans live and are treated, then they see a photo of a dirt pit, and even though it is completely implausible, assume it is a school. It is so far off reality it is notable.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#418

Post by 9rx »

simoncion wrote: post #401
9rx wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too. Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself. If you include the input of many other people building things like a tractor you could also grow enough of your own food from the ground to exceed your normal caloric requirements without much trouble, but you're a long way from doing it from scratch at that point. Unless, li…

> Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself. One guy can totally make butter, lard, and harvest fatty meat by themselves. While it's far easier with help, it's not as if you're asking the fellow to -say- change the orbit of the sun. Fat people and high-calorie foods substantially predate modern industry.

> One guy can totally make butter, lard, and harvest fatty meat by themselves.

Theoretically it is possible that one person could, on their own, produce enough calories with cattle to feed around two people. So in a vacuum it is true that you could gain excessive weight.

But it still isn't actually possible in reality. The time commitment to produce that much is expansive. There isn't enough time in the day for you and you alone to both produce it and also eat it to excess. If you cut down on your time commitment to the animals so that you can focus on eating, then your caloric production plummets.

That is, of course, much easier to pull off with the modern tools we have, but then you're back to requiring the help of many people. Those tools don't magically appear out of nowhere.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#419

Post by bluGill »

msm_ wrote: post #246
carlosjobim wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess because the ratio of people complaining about poverty is 10 000 to 1 compared to people who give solutions to poverty. There are solutions to poverty, which the individual person can follow, but nobody wants to talk about those. It has always amazed me, because poverty is hell. Who wouldn't want to get out of that, and who wouldn't want his fellow brother to get out of that? I could talk about it here, but I…

Occam's razor. Either: * There are solutions to poverty, which the individual person can follow, but (even though poverty is hell) people ignore them and prefer to stay poor * The solutions to poverty you think about actually aren't. The money-deprived people already know about them and (having much more knowledge about poor people's world) know they don't work. Since you - like almost everyone here - are a smart per…

There are solutions to poverty and the majority of people do follow them successfully. However there are always people getting into poverty and so there is always poverty. Worse there are people who cannot follow the solutions we have to poverty - this is a small minority, but it is the ones that are hardest to deal with.

There are also a tiny number (less than 1 in 1000) who have a lot of wealth but choose to live in poverty because that is freedom. If you look close you see they are the ones who have a warm coat and working heat in their tent. This is not poverty, but they try to be counted in your poverty numbers because it helps them. When you have wealth living in poverty is not that bad. (the above is a story a homeless man told me this week while I was helping out at our local food shelf. The homeless man is in poverty and I get the impression his divorce settlement is the problem and as soon as his kids are out of school he plans on getting a real job)

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#420

Post by badpun »

bashmelek wrote: post #292
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #15

I like this guy’s backstory[0]. I grew up in Africa. The poverty I saw, as a child, was foundational in my own personal development. There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes. I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success). They believe that poverty is probably the single biggest problem in the world, to…

I live comfortably in the United States. I consider myself middle class. I worry about my job and increasing costs. But I’m okay. I do feel like that we really could end global poverty if we tried, and that people like me ought to contribute.

Poverty is usually (always?) result of politics. I.e. in poor countries you have a highly dysfunctional system and elites which profiting off it. So the only way to to help is to instigate some kind of coup, eliminate warlords etc. But then how do you guarantee that whoever replaces them would be better?
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