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Being poor vs. being broke

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Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#451

Post by [deleted] »

bombcar wrote: post #424
DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people should have Amazon prime because it doubles as fast delivery, and zero other streaming services. Staying in is always going to be cheaper than going out so some entertainment at home is a good idea.

Poor people shouldn't be buying shit on Amazon, nor should they be spending money on Prime. They'd be better off with DVDs from the library. The problem is the same as with dieting; we do know what we need to do but the willpower required is quite high. And the world is engineered to make it hard, because they want to separate us from what money we do have.

[deleted]

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#452

Post by ToucanLoucan »

tstrimple wrote: post #376
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That, and an environmnet that allows folks "from the wrong side of the tracks," to get ahead. Vast swathes of this country look no better than the developing nations Sarah McLaughlin would go to to sing sad music and hold little kids to beg people for money in television ads. Like I don't think you're wrong necessarily but at the same time, it really, really matters which tracks you're on the wrong side of.

You're not wrong. We routinely ignore things like this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low... > The average income is just $18,046 (£13,850) a year, and almost a third of the population live below the official US poverty line. The most elementary waste disposal infrastructure is often non-existent. > Some 73% of residents included in the Baylor survey reported that they had been exposed to r…

Yup. Also: everyone reading this, celebrate that Flint, Michigan finally has water that's clean by Federal standards after just over ELEVEN. FUCKING. YEARS. That's right, America, land of opportunity, the wealthiest country on the face of the Earth (at time of comment), needed just over eleven years to get one city's inhabitants water that wasn't full to the tits with lead.

That's not NO lead, mind you, it's just now below the levels where the feds were willing to say it was a legitimate crisis. With a nod to who the feds are right now, and with a second nod to that's just at the supply line level, fuck knows how many homes still have lead pipes leeching into the taps.

Shocking absolutely no one who pays one damn bit of attention to this sort of thing: yes, Flint, Michigan is majority black.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#453

Post by treis »

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's a clear 3rd option where the poor are self destructive shit heads.

IMHO this is one of those areas where lots of things can be true. If you're sick or catch bad breaks then yep poverty is a grinding cycle. If you're not then the American Dream is still alive. But the "American Dream" always kinda sucked. In that you never got a ton of luxuries and it was all somewhat precarious.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#454

Post by washadjeffmad »

mghackerlady wrote: post #357
washadjeffmad wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'blank in the firing squad' technique of snacking is a pretty typical girl thing. Eating cookies? Perfectly fine. Eating an entire bag of cookies? Gross. Unthinkable. But how many cookies is really fine to eat? The safest best is not to know, either by breaking them into uncountable pieces or leaving some in the bag for someone else to finish (meaning, you ate less than a bag of cookies and are safe).

I do it to avoid being blamed, I don't know what you're on about. I've never cared that much about the semantics of how many cookies I ate (then again, I'm on hacker news so I might not be the best representation of the female populace)

I tend to do the cookie baking, so it'd be a little silly for me to be mad over someone eating them.

And for what it's worth, no one deserves blame for their cookie habits.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#455

Post by dijit »

danans wrote: post #441
corobo wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 If you have never earned above 0 at age 37, that suggests that you have a personal situation that actually prevents you from working, not so different from a disabled person might face. Just as tragic is the fact that people who do work full time and earn very little also end up in similar debt spirals. In benevolent societies such people might end…

it’s not terribly uncommon even in the UK to be generationally unemployable.

Homelife being bad = bad grades

bad grades = no support for further education

no basic (or further) education = disadvantage in entry jobs

no experience in entry jobs = red flag for employers (even for other entry level jobs in future where better educated folks fresh from school are also applying).

The larger the gap, the bigger the red flag.

I was in this trap, I just struck a particular lottery that the thing I love most (computers) was a booming industry which had no formal education requirements.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#456

Post by netsharc »

dotnet00 wrote: post #141
netsharc wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think an aspect of a lot of those luckier kids is that they think being told they were lucky invalidates the hard work they feel they did, turning it into a nonsensical contest of comparing apples to oranges. My siblings have a similar complaint when my Dad essentially implies that they were lucky in having the successes they have had. They do still somewhat understand what he means, but they dislike it because the…

This makes me wonder if being told I was a smart kid (instead of "Good job kid!") wasn't such a bad thing after all. (Educators say tell kids "Good job!" instead of "You're so smart!", because the kids will fear losing that status and then not dare try hard problems).

I always think I'm lucky I was born with a pretty good brain.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#457

Post by wat10000 »

msandford wrote: post #444
wat10000 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I poked around their blog some more out of curiosity and I can't figure out what his situation is. In a year-old article about burnout and vacation, he mentions burning out from a job in marketing, and ends by saying therapy isn't an option because he lives under the poverty line and can't even afford to get vital blood work done. Maybe this hit so hard that it actually made him unable to do more remunerative work. B…

"I could stop being poor, I just don't like the tradeoff." I feel like this is an ugly truth, but still a truth. It's also very ugly. For some people there's no tradeoff on how much they have to suffer to get some financial security because they already have it. Some people have to suffer a bit but quickly hit escape velocity. Some people never stop suffering. It's terrible. I think Dave Ramsey has many annoying qual…

It's one of those difficult topics that people like to take to extremes.

Many poor people are in difficult situations with no clear way out. They're already working the best paying job they can find, as much as they can, and doing as much as they can to advance. Learning new skills requires time and energy they don't have.

Some are poor by choice. They could put in more hours, get a second job, or learn new skills, and escape the trap. But they don't want to. This might be "lazy," or it might be "prioritizes family time," or whatever.

But as soon as you say that some people are really stuck no matter how hard they try to get out, it's taken as saying nobody can ever get out of it. And if you say that some people can get out of it and don't, it's taken as saying every poor person is just lazy.

What's curious about this post is that it seems like a pretty good insider description of being completely stuck, except the author isn't.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#458

Post by quesera »

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.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#459

Post by 9rx »

simoncion wrote: post #404
9rx wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The particular urban subset that you speak of that is also literally named as such is still within the urban set, so that's clearly not it.

It's true that the word 'urban' is a substring match for the word 'suburban'. You're right about that.

Correct, but irrelevant. Suburban is a subset of urban, not the other way around — originally referring to the portion of an urban area found outside of the wall.

The physical walls aren't often found anymore, but the term still refers to an urban area that surrounds where a wall might have been placed historically.

Re: Being poor vs. being broke

#460

Post by losvedir »

mg41 wrote: post #448
losvedir wrote: post #431

I'm privileged to have never had to worry about this, growing up comfortably middle to upper middle class. With that said, I have a perpetual point of confusion here, likely due to my own blindspots and something I don't want to ask in person because it's not nice: is it an issue of budgeting? Take someone who makes $15/hr and someone who makes $16/hr. Both are poor. Both live paycheck to paycheck, have no savings, e…

They didn't earn the exact amount of money they needed—they didn't have enough money to meet their expenses more likely. And likewise one therefore can't save and buy better stuff. And thus the cycle of poverty continues.

> they didn't have enough money to meet their expenses more likely

What does this mean, exactly? I think that's the core of my question, and something I don't understand since I lack the experience. If someone can live like this for, say, 10 years then in some sense it is meeting their expenses exactly.

I understand a situation of accumulating debt - that's a state that's not in equilibrium. But a lot of poor people can't really obtain credit, I believe.

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