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Being poor vs. being broke

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Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#521

Post by cryptonector »

corobo wrote: post #352
dijit wrote: post #125

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…

> 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 Yup! Bank gave me an overdraft when I was 16. At 37 I'm still in debt connected to that first bit of "free" money. I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care. They can write me off as a minor loss when I kick it haha

> I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care.

You're a sysadmin and what not -- how can that be?

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#522

Post by eulgro »

quesera wrote: post #458
eulgro wrote: post #192

I have trouble understanding how someone really can be poor. I spend about 30% of what one makes earning minimum wage full time. I live a frugal lifestyle, but I still feel like most people would consider my lifestyle normal and comfortable enough. If I really needed to, I could probably get by on 10-15% of the minimum wage. In other words, earning the minimum wage, I could make 6-10 persons live on my salary. This i…

> I could probably get by on 10-15% of the minimum wage Your math might be wrong here. Federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr, so if you have a FT job, that's $14.5K/yr, or $1200/mo. 10% of that is $1450/yr, or $120/mo.

I live in Canada. Minimum wage is 16$/hr where I live, that gives around 32k$/yr. At 3200$/yr 10% might be stretch, but I could probably make it work without relying too much on social services. It wouldn't be comfortable, but I would survive.

For example working in a place where I can get some free food, 500$ for food is manageable. 2400$ rent/services (e.g. rural areas with roommates) and 300$ misc. Always walk for transportation. Yes, it's a stretch.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#523

Post by abnercoimbre »

dwedge wrote: post #364
dijit wrote: post #125

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…

> 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. As a teenager I worked at a bailiffs in the office typing up the paperwork. One case that stuck was me was where the debtor owed somewhere around £400…

HN folks ought to watch Good Fortune ft. Keanu Reeves [0]. Still out in theaters.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKWndx83RwQ

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#524

Post by dotnet00 »

antonymoose wrote: post #392
wredcoll wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This definitely comes up a lot and I've never found a satisfactory way to get through to these people that you can both work hard and be lucky. The ultimate point is to get people to empathize with others, it's easy, especially in the general american culture, to treat being poor as a moral failure.

The problem is the world isn’t clean, statistics aren’t clean, it’s all mosaic. You can have noble, moral poors and rich. You can have absolute dirt bags both rich and poor. I grew up in a take of two households, with parents divorced at a young age. Father grows up in a picture perfect well-to-do family and ends up a classic party-hard drug addled dirt bag. He died last year living alone, homeless in a tent off an i…

Of course it's possible for poverty to be a moral failure, but I think the point is to not be so quick to pass judgement on people you barely know.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#525

Post by seattle_spring »

mgraczyk wrote: post #498

Why is it that the 50 year old Pakistani man who just moved here and doesn't speak English seems to be doing so much better than "poor" Americans who complain online all the time. Or the 23 year old dishwasher from Mexico who speaks no English and stopped going to school at age 13 with two kids he's supporting in a small apartment Sure they struggle but they seem to do a lot better than a lot of the 25 year old colle…

I've seen the sentiment several times right here on HN that $250k is "basically poverty" in San Francisco. It's unbelievable to me how out of touch and spoiled one would have to be to reach that conclusion.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#526

Post by abnercoimbre »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #509
pigpag wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all poverty is created equal. Some people had good financial discipline and still fell into poverty due to business catastrophes, accidents or health problems. We need better systems to provide shields for those people, be it bankruptcy laws, universal insurance or healthcare. Others live in unhabitable environments that can never sustain a viable economy. Until humanity finds technologies to address those enviro…

I’d say 99% of the poor are in the first two categories. So I don’t really care if the third category gets some stuff too if it means we help everyone else.

Agreed. I was nodding along with the GP right up until their ending statement, yikes.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#527

Post by mgraczyk »

el_memorioso wrote: post #519
mgraczyk wrote: post #498

Why is it that the 50 year old Pakistani man who just moved here and doesn't speak English seems to be doing so much better than "poor" Americans who complain online all the time. Or the 23 year old dishwasher from Mexico who speaks no English and stopped going to school at age 13 with two kids he's supporting in a small apartment Sure they struggle but they seem to do a lot better than a lot of the 25 year old colle…

It's good you put "poor" in scare quotes. The truly poor are not complaining online all the time because they don't have the time and/or money to be bitching online. You seemed to have missed one of the primary points of the article.

No I agree with that point in the article. The people I meet who complain are not standing in line at the food bank

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#528

Post by grigri907 »

magicalist wrote: post #222
monero-xmr wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m wealthy but I wasnt always. When I was 22 through 30 I didn’t take a single vacation that wasn’t driving to a long weekend. My wife and I both pulled 60 to 70 hour weeks for our entire 20s (I still do). No one “deserves” free time. If you don’t want to work 70 hours a week and want to watch Netflix instead, go for it, but don’t bitch to me

> No one “deserves” free time Careful. It sounds an awful lot like you feel you "deserve" to be wealthy from your hard work, but in reality it was the type of work you were doing that got you there, because there are a whole lot of people working 60 to 70 hour weeks decades out of their 20s and will never be secure monetarily. (leaving aside the pricklier philosophical aspect that a particular type of work being valu…

This is an excellent point. Especially because we often ascribe morality to hard work.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#529

Post by jancsika »

mgraczyk wrote: post #498

Why is it that the 50 year old Pakistani man who just moved here and doesn't speak English seems to be doing so much better than "poor" Americans who complain online all the time. Or the 23 year old dishwasher from Mexico who speaks no English and stopped going to school at age 13 with two kids he's supporting in a small apartment Sure they struggle but they seem to do a lot better than a lot of the 25 year old colle…

> Why is it that the 50 year old Pakistani man who just moved here and doesn't speak English seems to be doing so much better than "poor" Americans who complain online all the time.

Because it was an immigration policy that selected for that Pakistani gentleman to be in your general vicinity at that moment. But it was something more akin to Math.rand() that chose the American.

If your purpose were to post the same complaint about someone drawn at random from Pakistan, you could try using Math.rand() to pick (on) one of them, too.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#530

Post by arp242 »

antisthenes wrote: post #227
janalsncm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luck really can’t be overstated imo. I was genuinely just lucky to be interested in computer programming as a teenager. I wasn’t thinking about careers, I just wanted to make games. If my interest was basketball my life would have been very different.

You were lucky to have the genetics that allowed you to have cognitive capabilities to understand computers and programming. Many people don't and never will. There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke. Ranting about this is just ranting about human nature. Life isn't fair, s…

> There is always a bottom % of people who are under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society. That doesn't mean they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke.

The only reason people like you or me can sit on their lazy arses typing for a living is because there's a small army of people that take care of things like food and other boring tasks. The people keeping the Tesco running. The drivers delivering stuff there. The distribution centre. The farmers. The people building roads. The people maintaining roads. People maintaining water. People maintaining electricity. People maintaining gas.

All of that is just to keep the local supermarket running. I probably forgot some. It expands even more if you include other things.

A lot of this is what is generally known as "low skilled labour". But it's all needed. It's all contributing. I did this kind of work until my 20s and I definitely had a share of coworkers who were dumb, for lack of a better term. Most were not, but some were, a few to the point of being clinically handicapped. But they were all contributing.

Without them one couldn't make privileged elitist statements on internet forums being derisive of an entire class of people. Snobby comments like this is why people hate "the elite".

People don't need your compassion or help. They need a roughly fair system where working a full-time job gives you a decent standard of living. Lets start with that. And I'm not even going to start how the entire post stinks of eugenics. The only way to eliminate poverty is to genetically engineer out the people you been too dumb to exist? Really?

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