631–640 of 732 posts
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Oh really? Where? How can you tell they're reckless or lazy and not (e.g.) disabled?
It's pretty easy to see when someone spends money like an idiot
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…
As others have said “Happiness = Reality - Expectations.”
For the Pakistani or Mexican man coming from poverty stricken, crime riddled, violent places in the world to America that’s a major step up in quality of life. Whereas I, an American, making $150k per year as a software engineer literally cannot afford a house within two counties of my mother because the costs of housing in those areas are so sky high that I would have to squeeze my wife and three children into a small 2/2 condo in a rough part of town. This would effectively revert me back to the standard of living my poor immigrant grandparents had when they came to America.
In any case I work remote and instead live in a reasonable home in a moderate income area instead so I’m just fine. But that right there is a large part of modern generational bitterness among the youth. Even those that on paper have made it often haven’t.
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Hah! Yeah, the bonobo/chimp contrast shows it’s not an inevitability. We just optimized for the wrong equilibrium.
The difference between bonobos and chimps are genetics and not culture, you can't train chimps to live like bonobos and vice versa. Us humans still has the genes that made us conquer and enslave the whole world, every single human culture that has ever existed enslave and murder animals, as we needed to do that to survive. You ain't gonna change those genes, so we just have to do the best we can with the genes we hav…
Understanding poverty starts with empathy. People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that. It's not that simple! You can't just mind your way out of poverty! This isn't a math problem.
> People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that. I have never even considered people thinking like that. Is that real? Early in life I realized that the biggest factor of how you end up seems to be luck, where you're born, what's in your genes, how did parents raise you. Later in life I realized that most of the rest is mental health which you also don't have the greatest influence over the first 2 dec…
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 ;)
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I don't think you've even thought about this for 30 seconds. > If it could easily fetch more money, it would have been bid higher than £50. Have you ever been to one of these auctions? I haven't. If I want a used vehicle, I go to a trusted dealership. Few people attend auctions, hence demand is low, hence prices are low. When there's no incentive to sell something for what it's worth, the seller will put in less effo…
The point is that, before the bike was collected and put up for auction, the debtor could have sold the bike to pay the debts. Then, once the bike was put up for auction, buyers could have bid on it if it was really worth more. Multiple people in this story had a financial incentive to profit from the bike, yet no one did. The only evidence we have of the bike's value is OP's claim. Does it not seem more likely that…
…so clearly the bike was worth more to them than its cash value.
Again: They probably needed that bike for work. Losing their job will easily cost them more than $400.
> yet no one did.
The bailiff did, and the buyer did, and they were the only parties with agency in the situation. Doesn't surprise me.
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Sounds like the optimism rhetoric of Steven Pinker. I suggest you read up on the numerous criticisms of his work. Most of the optimism is based on a ridiculously low global poverty line conjured out of thin air, and other nonsense like GDP.
What you're saying is nonsense. I don't even know who Steven Pinker is. Poverty two hundred years ago was way worse than poverty today in most of the world -- this is a self-evident fact to anyone with even a passing knowledge of history. No running water, no water mains, no sewers -- these things meant death from cholera and other diseases for many children, and that's just for starters.
It's interesting how many comments here are knee jerk annoyance at this blogpost, which in my mind does a good job outlining two different financial situations and how flippant suggested solutions for escaping poverty don't make sense. The fact that many of us here have so much compared to others in our community however you define it is disturbing and not helpful information for our day to day lives so we do what we…
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…
Understanding poverty starts with empathy. People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that. It's not that simple! You can't just mind your way out of poverty! This isn't a math problem.
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…
However, you need a car to get to Costco, which you don't have, so now you're looking at riding the bus there. But you just worked two back-to-back 8 hour shits, and you're a zombie so that's not happening. Besides, $20 is a stretch, you really might need that $15 to cover a few meals until your next paycheck if you can't get enough hours this month.
So, you have to pay $5 for what should be a $1 roll of TP.
Now imagine that for everything - food, rent, everything.
To quote a song, "having money is not everything, not having it is"