John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

This. Shame means you're not as desperate as some.

I have a computer programmer brother (I'm a programmer too, but indie, operating my own small business). When my car finally died, he helped me with a down payment on a much newer car: as a direct result I'm paying hundreds or even thousands less on constantly fixing the old one. Whether he minds doesn't change how much that helps. (for the record, he doesn't like that I still have a car payment, but that was my call: given the situation, I was adamant that I'd (a) also be heavily invested in the vehicle and (b) get something so current that it'd be some time before it got broken-down)

My brother's not going to be comfortable with the situation because so long as there's still a car payment, it could be repossessed if I went 'double-super-uber-poor' and didn't pay it. That's fine, I've never failed a payment or bill in twenty years, and the benefit is well worth it.

I would point out that 'if any well-off person cares about you even a little bit' is not what we're talking about. Rich people will look away in a heartbeat if they only care a 'little bit'. That's no lifeline, and don't act like it is. But if you have someone seriously close to you, you may very well have to trade some of the ease of your relationship for an exchange. The tipoff is if the rich person is actively reminding you they can bail you out of things, and if they perceive it as YOUR pride/shame that's getting in the way.

Then if you do let 'em help you, you have to maintain boundaries and handle things in a defined way or you could damage the relationship. It's the equivalent of 'hey I left my wallet at home can you get my double grande ultra coffee that's eight bucks' only in the hundreds or thousands. You don't want to get into a 'now this is what we always do' situation. The signaling is important.

I run a Patreon as my primary income, and I'm up to around the top 3% sitewide (top 50 in games/tech). I recently had what was clearly a well-off guy bump the whole Patreon up to the next goal, $800 a month, because he liked it (it was the 'begin open sourcing plugins, one by one' goal).

It was an $80 jump, 10% of the whole Patreon all by himself, and the risk was that he'd dial it back as more people came in so the goal stayed but eventually he'd be out, goal achieved early. That would cause every new person joining at say $1, to feel as if they had accomplished nothing.

As soon as I began talking to him and asking him to please dial it back and not be 10% of the goal all by himself, he expressed polite hurt… and quit the site entirely. I couldn't send my final wall-o-text explaining why I'd asked him this mean thing, and the $800 goal evaporated, leaving a bunch of excited celebrating patrons sitting there wondering what had happened.

Be careful about assuming that, if you know or can interest rich people, you therefore have a lifeline. They can be as fickle as poor people, but they're able to swing amounts of resources that will make or break you, so you might even want to entirely avoid courting rich people. The worst situation you can possibly be in is depending on a number of rich people and offending them somehow: I much prefer running my Patreon centered around small donors, and having statistical noise soak up minor issues.

A rich person is just as capable of ditching you over minor issues, but in doing so, can cripple you at a stroke. You're still poor if you only have the sympathy of a rich person or two.

Nearly all schools say that. The result is that, before you are old enough to vote or drink, you are encouraged to take on a debt larger than the total amount of money your parents have ever made in five years, a debt which is not subject to bankruptcy laws.

If you make it out the other side of college with a bachelor's degree in a STEM field and an average job, it will still take you 21 years to pay it off.

https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/10/07/stude...

If you don't feel that you can reasonably make a bet of that magnitude because your entire prior history tells you that it won't work -- that's entirely rational.

But college costs are completely unreasonable...

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/08/us/colleges-tuition-outrun...

... and have been getting worse for the last 30 years.

Not many, no. People in America are concerned that Trump is going to order an attack on NK, which will end up with the destruction of Seoul and the Chinese army moving in to newly-unified Korea for peacekeeping.

Reminds me of an article about a girl receiving fines from a girl with similar name. Turns out the other one received fines too. It's big mess.

I would like to see basic income treated as a sort of 'trickle-up' scheme, ensuring two things:

1) eliminate poverty, wherever the cost of living isn't over-inflated. I'm okay with 'SV has to robotize everything because no humans can afford to work menial jobs there, so they move away', but we're looking at a world where no humans can afford to be other than rich, anywhere.

2) guarantee a customer base for anyone and everyone who does choose to start a business or enterprise. I have studied my own sole-proprietorship business over more than a decade, and my prosperity has been TIGHTLY linked to the FED labor share of income. To put it bluntly, as my business is not in the FIRE sector, I do well when 'people have money to spend', and when they don't it's like trying to squeeze water from a stone.

We do not have a capitalist economy without a broad consumer class, and in the era of the FIRE sector and automation, without something like a basic income we don't have a consumer class at all, and everything dries up from the roots up. Playing games with financial instruments can only mask this for a very short time.

Basic income isn't just a social justice thing: it's the only way a free-market capitalist system can continue to be the 'blind arbiter' of what goods and services prevail. Either you switch over to a centrally governed assigner of who does what work, or you continue to have a free market through feeding it with money at the consumer level, literally paying people to function as your 'free market' and thus not having to give that function to the government (public or private).

The time where this system naturally turned business employment into wages producing a social class system that was stable, was back when worker efficiency was orders of magnitude less than it is now. That was when humans had to do sums on paper, dig ditches with shovels, to get anything done! It's still within living memory of some older humans.

Those days are gone. There will never be a class system in a modern automated, mechanized, solar-powered world, that can support a capitalist free market, without basic income. I would stake my life on that proposition.