771–780 of 817 posts
>> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because people kept bragging their bodily purity based on what they would not eat or drink, and I could only feel pity for them. Is it common to use "bragging" in this way?
YM without an "about" or similar? Not very common IME, but seeing it now is probably a harbinger of more to come. Feels congruent with "because [something]" (without an "of" in between).
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And have you thought about finding out who your maids and drivers are? Talking to them about their lives? No interest in learning who they are? What they like? When they have birthday? If you have a bad day, for whatever reason, you think they couldn't relate to having a bad day?
I know who they are, of course. And birthday and their sons and daughters birthdays. That's how we give gifts. We know who they are and where they are as well - we wouldn't hire them without knowing that. They couldn't relate - my bad day would be related to losing a few points on a foreign exam or if my favorite restaurant was overbooked.
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> but they will generally cost you more money than driving a new Corolla or Civic OK. Sorry. Your comment annoyed me enough to look up my actual expenses which I've been logging since late 2007, as opposed to hypotheticals. Between then and now, I've spent $6247 on maintenance and repairs of my cars. Note this includes standard stuff like oil changes and tire replacements. That's about $480 a year. If I extrapolate a…
Please don't apologize and please don't be annoyed. Like I told "sokoloff", I was you. I get it. "In this house we buy used cars for cash and drive them until the wheels come off." So of course I enjoy this topic. Let's look at your numbers. Say you bought two new Civics around 2003 for $28K total. Your maintenance & repairs should not be any higher for a new Civic than for any used car I can imagine. Let's assume ga…
> That's another $139/year over 18 years or $12/month
> Yeah, that's not nothing, but it's not the TONS OF MONEY that always gets mentioned in these discussions.
It's not tons of money, but as you said, it's not nothing. Saving over $50/mo is definitely very significant for me (I must have grown up poor). As I do keep track of all my finances, I know that most of my savings come from saving $50/mo here and $50/mo there.
And I was poor for many of those years - I was a grad student.
A few other points:
You quoted 28K for 2 baseline Corollas/Civic. It's a bit more than that since the $14K is 2003 prices. I bought my second car in 2011. The lowest Civic was $16.6K then. And if you get the LX (which I did get, albeit an older model), it would be $18.5K
> Note we are also not considering that you could have kept the new cars on the road a few years longer.
The counterpoint is that with used cars, you can change them every 7 or so years and still be cheaper. This way you have more variety.
Finally, there is a bit of cherry picking: You used new Corollas and Civics as your benchmark. As someone who has owned both a 2003 Civic and a 2003 Accord, there's a world of a difference when it comes to comfort - I always needed extra back support in the Civic and it still caused back pain. I never needed it in an Accord.
With older cars, the price difference between a Civic and an Accord is $1.5K max (similar for Corolla vs Camry). So if you add $3K to my total, your equivalent would be about $10K new, as 2003 Camrys/Accords sold for $20K vs $15K. That's another $32/mo.
> Your wife's repair and maintenance costs look more in line with average than yours. Does she put a lot more miles on her car than you put on yours? I do agree that if you put a lot fewer miles per year on a car than average, a used car starts looking like a much better deal (see below).
I think it's just that newer cars are costlier to repair/maintain.
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What I find so fascinating about this article is how it conveys the anxiety of being poor in America. How you're always one "bad luck" event from falling down a socio-economic peg, and recovering from that is so hard. Other places around the world, you're poor, but so's everyone else and you're all in it together.
"What's more, the poor in other countries know that they are living in poor countries. They know that not only they but just about everyone is on the edge of starvation. The poor in the United States, on the other hand, are daily told on all sides that the United States is rich and wonderful. Movies and television constantly show them what happy lives other people are leading. The poor and hopeless are made to feel a…
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A family member has told me a story of her poor childhood in the thirties in rural Poland. During springs, their family had to steal rotten potatoes from other people's fields and eat weeds to survive. THAT's being poor. What the original article describes sounds more like a anxiety over a risk of falling into poverty, than actual poverty.
What you're describing sounds like "destitute", not poor.
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Yea I mostly agree. For example not greeting cleaning lady has nothing to do with being rich or poor. It is just manners and some of us do it and some don't.
Manners? I don't say hi to the cleaning staff for the same reason I don't say hi to most people I see in the office: I don't know them. If I did, then I would say hi. Do others greet every single person they see in the building?
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Have you heard of intergenerational wealth, which is one of the issues described in the OP article? Then, have you further heard of redlining, Jim Crow, slavery, sharecropping, lynchings, hiring discrimination, justice system discrimination, police discrimination, urban ghettoization, locally-funded school districts based on local property taxes, code switching speech, cultural discrimination on styles of dress and h…
What does that have to do with welfare being a good idea? You're straw-manning.
It's a direct answer to "Also, please explain why impoverished minority communities have not vastly improved regardless of the constantly increasing money tossed into welfare programs."
Food assistance, subsidized housing, and monthly cash payments are only really short-term stabilizing tools. For that they can be useful, but those systems are not designed or equipped to vastly improve the wealth and self-reliance of impoverished communities.
The key word in "impoverished minority communities" is "communities". Good schools, grocery stores, street maintenance, good transit, good jobs within driving distance, fair lending (and honestly lending practices designed to fix the damage of generations of unfair lending), vocational training, job placement assistance, enforcement of building codes on landlord-owned buildings, stable utility infrastructure including broadband Internet, and other things stable, wealthier communities take for granted are necessary to have a stable, flourishing community population.
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IMHO, once you have child(ren) , the value of a senior role is questionable, especially since as you point out , more hours are expected which makes it not a real raise (besides "stealing" from quality time with your kid(s) ). Senior roles to me can be a poison chalice, more stress. IMHO when one feels a failure for not being a senior, one might need to emotionally detach, and disconnect self-worth from their job tit…
That's pretty much how I see it. Except the company's policies do not state any change to the required hours. I feel this is a deceptive employer practice (one of several I've seen). The bigger issue is that I can't see myself continuing to work here until I'm able to "retire". The work is shit. I've heard many managers will look to fire people or drive them out if they are moving up. I need the job to support my fam…
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> Intelligence is not completely due to genetics as you are suggesting and has to do more with socio-economic conditions This goes against all of the scientific literature we have. Intelligence is determined by genetics. It can be artificially lowered via poor socio-economic conditions, but it mostly cannot be lifted by higher socio economic conditions. In laymans terms, a traumatic life can make a child who was othe…
If everyone could reach their genetic limits we'd run into a lot less problems.