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Being poor vs. being broke

blog.ctms.me

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Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#231

Post by metalforever »

zarl wrote: post #163
reaperducer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes. Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards. There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes. I'm always reminded of a photograph from a few years ago in the Navajo Times showing a handful of children sit…

> There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes. This is just not true. America has many problems but access to electricity/running water simply is not one of them.

I know people without running water in their house right now in America . In fact I know multiple families in this situation .

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#232

Post by jandrewrogers »

zarl wrote: post #163
reaperducer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes. Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards. There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes. I'm always reminded of a photograph from a few years ago in the Navajo Times showing a handful of children sit…

> There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes. This is just not true. America has many problems but access to electricity/running water simply is not one of them.

The US still has some really remote backwaters. Not too many but you can find them if you know where to look.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#233

Post by posix86 »

Travelling to a 3rd world country with genuinely poor people can help, a bit. When you see the houses genuinely poor people live in, it purs things into perspective. Being in appartment where the roof... is broken. And you have no way to fix it. No way. There's cold coming inside, mold on the walls, no real kitchen, no real bed, "living room"?? Lol. You grow up not getting a proper education, your parents have worked tirelessly for years, as you probably will. Having a dream - during the entire life!! - of just travelling to a first world country, just ONCE, just to see it. And never even approachikg savings to be able to do that. And you, the 1st world country, walk past, and complain about the hotel staff being rude.

You work work work, no break ever, hardly an improvement. You come home, no food, no money. No food, no money. And nobody to ask for food, or money. Nobody. You're hungry, and there's that. Tomorrow maybe.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#234

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

wagwang wrote: post #133
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…

My parents grew up poor in manner that is more extreme than anything OP described in the post and they always remind me that its just hard work and grit.

That, and an environmnet that allows folks "from the wrong side of the tracks," to get ahead.

For all its faults, the US is just such a place. I suspect that many other nations are starting to improve.

At one time, the UK was a nation that you couldn't get ahead, unless you were of a certain class. I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays. You can hear lots of cockney accents in Harrods.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#236

Post by potato3732842 »

pixl97 wrote: post #129
potato3732842 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're getting at what I was hinting at. It's not the literal distance between houses (or lack thereof) that cause this. It's the people and what they think and how they act.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#237

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

potato3732842 wrote: post #197
ModernMech wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's nobody's fault Sure, but it's the system's fault, and we can point at the people who are keeping the system the way it is. The system is what it does, and what it does is syphon money from everyone else and pumps it upward to a few individuals. That's not an accident, people are responsible for that, they like the way it works, and they're intent on keeping it that way. Remember, in this system you get paid mo…

If it only pumped the money to a few individuals someone would've pushed those individuals off a cliff and seized power by now. The magic of the system is that there's enough trickle down to motivate the petite-bourgeois (I hate Marx, but I'll be darned if he didn't enumerate some good economic tiers) to make them keep the system running. Your media talking heads peddling division, your 200k+/yr software engineers im…

It looks like the times are changing thanks to AI, so we'll see what happens when the petite-bourgeoisie stop being quite so bougie.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#238

Post by Terr_ »

JohnMakin wrote: post #103
barbazoo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I’d say a large percentage of americans do. It’s burned into the cultural mindset at a very young age.

Culture is important, but it's widespread enough that there's probably a biological basis. Humans are wired to hate the idea of "good/bad things just happen", we're always creating stories about causation even when they might not be very accurate stories.

Consider how a game of flipping a coin seems to draw everyone—even people who took probability and statistics classes—into imagining "hot streaks" or "now I'm overdue for the other one."

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#239

Post by erikerikson »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #6
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…

I was unconvinced he was writing about his current state, but a prior state / maybe his family background.

And people they work with and know

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#240

Post by ModernMech »

potato3732842 wrote: post #197
ModernMech wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's nobody's fault Sure, but it's the system's fault, and we can point at the people who are keeping the system the way it is. The system is what it does, and what it does is syphon money from everyone else and pumps it upward to a few individuals. That's not an accident, people are responsible for that, they like the way it works, and they're intent on keeping it that way. Remember, in this system you get paid mo…

If it only pumped the money to a few individuals someone would've pushed those individuals off a cliff and seized power by now. The magic of the system is that there's enough trickle down to motivate the petite-bourgeois (I hate Marx, but I'll be darned if he didn't enumerate some good economic tiers) to make them keep the system running. Your media talking heads peddling division, your 200k+/yr software engineers im…

If that were true, the Vice President wouldn't be trying to convince us that housing costs are high because of illegal immigration.
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