John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005) | Hacker News Reader

John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

whatever.scalzi.com

262 pointsbrudgers237 comments

I lived this.

Being poor is growing up between the trailer park and the dump.

Being poor is skipping homework to help repair the $600 car so dad can make it to work tomorrow.

Being poor is your mother crying over a $100 invoice for the dental service you just received for the first time in living memory.

Being poor is quitting junior college early, because your Pell Grant ran out, and a $12.15/hr opportunity is over double your fast-food wage.

Being poor is never going back.

Being poor is 3-years-old glasses and squinting from the front row.

Being poor is _definitely_ going to put some money in the savings account next month.

Being poor is getting pulled over just for your car and hair looking ratty.

Being poor is 2 nights in jail because of a clerical error.

Being poor is realizing years later that you still live like you're poor.

Being poor is reading about VCs and ICOs and funding rounds on HN and thinking how huge an improvement just a tiny, tiny fraction of that money could make in your life.

Thank you for the inventory of my life. I remember those months as a kid when the cupboards were bare, and so I'd just shrug and go to bed without dinner. Thank goodness for government-sponsored low-income lunch program. That was my only meal many days.

Naturally I was surprised when recently I got informed I have white privilege by a bunch of spoiled children who've never known a day of hardship in their lives.

I'm not terribly enamoured with the Silicon Valley political atmosphere these days.

I am also white, and I also grew up poor. I agree that many (though far from all) of the college students who talk about socioeconomic inequality are spoiled brats.

However, you have misunderstood what "white privilege" means: it's not that your life has been easy, it's that the same situations would have been even harder if you had not been white.

In theory that's what it was originally intended to mean, but these days there seem to be an awful lot of people who think it does mean that if you're white your life has been easy and you brought every hardship on yourself. For instance, this tweet was doing the rounds a few days ago: "Imagine sucking so fucking bad that being a white guy is hard for you?"[1]. 26,000 retweets, no ambiguity whatsoever, no real pushback or criticism of it that I saw at least on the left.

[1] https://twitter.com/mikeyfrecks/status/896362940634472449

One sarcastic tweet from a random nobody is not a bellweather of leftist discourse. That's a weak joke, not social commentary.

Of (overly pedantic) note: It's actually "bellwether".

A wether is a castrated ram. (Like a steer, speaking bovinely.) In a flock, a wether would be outfitted with a bell to serve as the lead sheep and herald the flock's motions, which is where we get the modern-day term.

You do have white privilege. White privilege isn't being treated better because of your race, it's not being treated worse.

White privilege is not remembering the last time you were pulled over for nothing.

White privilege is not being afraid of the police.

White privilege is getting let off with a warning.

White privilege is expecting to be judged on your merits.

White privilege is getting the benefit of the doubt.

White privilege is having a family that got to use the GI bill.

White privilege is having a family that was able to build a little bit of generational wealth from government housing policy.

White privilege is thinking racism is over.

White privilege is starting at 0 when the rich kids start at 50 and black kids start at -15.

You overestimate the power of white privilege. It is real, but not as pervasive as you make it out to be.

I do remember the last time I was pulled over for nothing. I do remember being afraid of the police. I do remember not being let off with a warning.

Looking like a scruffy redneck will get you that treatment in some rich suburbs. The big advantage of being white is that it is much easier to camouflage yourself as an upstanding member of the middle class.

It is pointless to engage racists in a reasonable discussion.

That's the sad part, that the discussion is shut down with repeatable phrases. Additionally many of the people who repeat these phrases grew up in a life of privilege.

Even worse, I think if they travelled the world a bit they'd see that racism against white people does exist and that they are perpetuating it in their own way.

On the other hand the world could do a bit better with equal opportunity and the income gap, but that has very little to do with just being white.

I don't want to minimize racial discrimination, but telling poor people about their white privilege seems not all that different from conservative finger-wagging about how American poverty isn't "real" poverty.

Also, even if you only looked at white people American police shootings are at a much higher rate than comparable countries.

White privilege is a bad term. Trevor Noah once said that in South Africa, they call it the "black tax," which I think is a much better term. It's not a benefit that's conferred onto white people, it's a cost that imposed on non-white people.

Isn't this a glass half full/half empty situation? Why the cost imposed on non-whites doesn't get to be called a benefit on whites since they are exempt from payment? I know I'm arguing semantics, but it is interesting the change in nomenclature.

Technically speaking, yes. But the emotional resonance is very different. If you don't believe me, try telling a libertarian that there is no real difference between giving someone a tax break and a subsidy and see how willing they are to even entertain your argument.

"It's not race, it's poverty!" is a pretty well discussed idea in philosophy circles. The concept is called "Intersectionality", and you may want to read up on it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality).

I agree that there are a ton of liberals going around protecting their wealth by trying to get people to focus solely on racism. These people indeed have a lot in common with conservatives.

However, just because those people exist, doesn't mean that one should take the diametric opposite position to them, and basically claim that race is an insignificant factor compared to poverty. That would be wildly ignorant as well. Plenty of poor white people enjoy advantages that even the richest minorities don't (eg: societal role models). Same applies to gender, and to sexuality.

Privilege is not a moral judgement. It is a sociological concept. Without the word “privilege”, a different word, or a longer phrase, will have to be used. Ultimately, the concept of privilege is a tool for good, intended to help bring people up. Republican finger-wagging, on the other hand, is used to maintain the status quo.

Privilege and class-blind racial discourse is also frequently trotted out in service of the status quo. Let's not kid ourselves.

'Racial superiority' is also a 'sociological concept'. I hope you'll start to see the issue there.

Er, not at all? Racial superiority is not a concept in any reputable subfield of sociology. Privilege is not someone’s misguided opinion, but a concept founded on years of research.

I am disturbed by this false equivalence.

the problem with the word privilege is that well it catches people who were in many ways not privileged, and those people are probably going through life with pretty big chips on their shoulders about how they were screwed over by their environment. Reminding them that hey you could have had it worse is like when rich people tell poor people hey in generations past you couldn't have a big screen TV so don't worry, be happy.

In the context of the white privilege list you give I match 2, although I would add another two which is that while I can certainly remember all the times I was pulled over for nothing and while I might have been hassled for hours with a dozen cops threatening me before being let go I was let go at the end and not killed - these things are really part of the white privilege which I have.

But I spend more time going around being pissed off about all the times I was pulled over for nothing and not thanking my lucky stars I was white and got to stay alive, which is why I don't feel like I had it that great and your hectoring tone of course makes me mad because 'remembering the last time you got pulled over for nothing', yeah I remember the first time, pretty much was one of the defining moments of my life really. thanks for the reminder. I remember the times in between that and the last time. I remember the last time, had to stand in the snow for a couple hours which I was walking through to get to my parent's house to have the only food I would have that day. But the food was gone by the time I got home.

I realize I have a benefit in being white, I just had a lot of other disadvantages that most of the other people I was around didn't.

Those are all valid points but as I tried to address in another comment, it becomes more nuanced when you try and account for various different privileges intersecting. The problem with your point scale for me is that it's fairly simplistic. White privilege might be starting at 0 but as soon as you introduce some other disadvantage, say growing up in an abusive home, you're very quickly in the negative. The same of course holds true for a non-white kid that's already starting in the negative, of course if on the other hand this non-white kid grows up in a stable middle class family with access to a quality education and a safe environment, they can very quickly accrue far more points on the privilege scale than some poverty stricken white male. This is the crux of the problem for me in this debate. I absolutely believe that white privilege does exist, and we shouldn't shy away from confronting it's effects, but we also shouldn't so singularly focus on it that we neglect the many other ways people, even white people, can be disadvantaged through no fault of their own.

From a more pragmatic stand point, I think we need to be more nuanced in framing these issues because it can be rather easy to alienate those who might otherwise be receptive to the goals of a more just and egalitarian society when you don't take the totality of their experiences into account. Again, taking my own experiences into consideration, I usually fluctuate between minor annoyance and outright dismissal when someone who grew up in a stable two parent household that stressed the importance of education, attended decent schools where they didn't have to fear for their safety on a daily basis, lived in neighborhoods where straying farther than 20 feet from your front door didn't mean you where going to get jumped, got to go to college with a bunch of kids from similarly privileged backgrounds and now makes $180k in SV, wants to lecture others about privilege.

Also, I don't want to be dismissive of your list, and I definitely want to be careful in making assumptions about your background, but some of those things sound more like middle class white privilege than plain old white privilege. I know some poor white folk, I grew up around them on my family's first stop when immigrating to this country, and they tend to be afraid of the police, for good reason, and don't usually get let off with a warning.

Also worth noting, this really only applies to people living in US, and to some extent Western Europe. Lots of people in Eastern and Central Europe are white, but far less privileged in terms of the chances given, living conditions and personal freedom compared to pretty much any American citizen regardless of skin color. To each his own problems always seem the biggest & hardest, but it's important to stay aware of the wider perspective...

The thing that annoys me about white privilege is that it is such a US centric thing. You can be poor and discriminated against as a white person by other white people just because you happen to live on the other side of a secterian split. All these things apply in those situations and you don't need to have black or brown skin to experience them. The common factors are being discriminated against and being poor.

>White privilege is not being afraid of the police.

Ian Murdoch, RIP.

"White privilege is not being afraid of the police"

Where is that happening? Everyone should be afraid of the police, everywhere, as authority, their word is over yours.

It's sad that many of these points are true. Its just as sad to me that many are not. In your anger, you are overreaching.

White privilege is the lowest difficulty setting in the game we play.

White privilege and class privilege often get conflate in this country. I guess in part because our society has historically been very divided by race and in part because Americans are uncomfortable with the idea of class.

If you're white, you have white privilege, but you don't necessarily have class privilege. Class privilege isn't just about money either. If you grow up without much money, but to highly cultured and educated parents, you still have some class privilege.

Thanks for the distinction! I know plenty of non-white persons who have lots of class privilege. It's worth far more than racial privilege.

Don't think for a minute that our white privilege isn't the major reason we can reflect on having been poor, rather than continuing to live that reality.

While I think it's a very good idea to take stock of one's privileges relative to others, and how these privileges impact the outcomes of our lives, I'm a big proponent of the notion that privilege lies on a spectrum, it isn't binary. The distinction isn't between those with privilege and those without, but instead between different levels of privilege. Certainly whiteness, in a white dominated society, is one example of privilege that gives you a head ups, all else being equal, but usually all else isn't equal. I think it can often be a mistake to focus on white privilege being the major reason for an outcome when it was most likely the result of a number of intersecting privileges, whiteness being one of them, but not necessarily the most important.

I also think the parent comment does address something important, namely that while many people may not be particularly comfortable with introspection or the notion of privilege, there are likely many who would be more receptive to these ideas if the people labelling them privileged, often along rather one dimensional attributes without taking in to consideration areas in which they are decidedly underprivileged, didn't hail from some of the most privileged demographics in the US.

Posters in this thread have shared a number of feelings that hit very close to home regarding my own experience growing up impoverished in this country, and I make a very conscious effort to try and remain aware of the incredible number of unearned privileges and good fortune that I've been the recipient of, but even someone like me often can't help but recoil when I hear some of the most privileged people in SV, and consequently probably the country and world, so confidently label and denigrate others as privileged.

One of the reasons I was so impressed by this piece was that the author didn't mention any sort of identity, other than just being poor. Anyone who is poor, who has been poor, can identity with some or all of what was written here.

Perspective is always important when considering any subject. The subject of "white privilege" when it comes to the debate over poverty and power is often misguided, just like any blanket judgements made based on race. The fact that the oligarchs who have ruled the world for centuries are virtually all white means little to nothing to the millions of poor white people that have, in many cases, been destitute for generations.

A good friend of mine, who happens to be white, was born in a very bad neighborhood in Queens, New York to two poor, white parents. He went to school in one of the worst schools in New York. His father pumped gas and his mother was unemployed, spending her time with him and his two siblings. Both of his parents came from a poor family, neither of them had attended college. When he was 14, his mother died of a treatable disease because they couldn't afford health insurance. After that, he took care of his sister and brother after he got home from his afterschool job. When he was 23 his father was shot and killed during a robbery at the gas station. 50 years old now, no education, he scrapes out a living working at a gas station himself, barely able to afford the rent on his rented, basement room.

Poverty doesn't discriminate. Many if not most Americans in 2017 are in or near poverty themselves, with no savings, one crisis away from homelessness or bankruptcy. Those trying to make it a racial issue are distracting from the very real problem we face.

> Anyone who is poor, who has been poor, can identity with some or all of what was written here.

This is something I only thought about after moving away from where I grew up. Poorer white people would moan about black people and Mexicans all day but I wish I had pointed out to them that they're all poor together and have more in common than they do with the rich people they love to watch on TV.

What would happen to your friend if he was ill for a while and couldn't work?

[NB I'm not from the US]

He would likely become homeless and possibly end up living on my couch.

>I'm a big proponent of the notion that privilege lies on a spectrum, it isn't binary.

Agreed, and my genetic combination of healthy, cis, hetero, white, and male put me on the "more privileged" end of that spectrum.

Recognizing privilege in oneself leads to recognizing it—and the desire to have it at least acknowledged—in others. It also empowers me to leverage that privilege to benefit others who don't share it. As an example, I think Tim Cook does a great job of this at Apple.

Framing it as linear/just a spectrum leads to the "oppression Olympics" of people thinking that having white privilege means their, say, poor or abusive upbringing "doesn't count", like the originator of this subthread. However, this is wrong, because having privileges is multidimensional, there's so many axes upon which one can have (varying levels of!) privilege or disadvantage.

There's a lot of nuance that often gets lost or forgotten in people's knee-jerk reactions to being told/reminded of their privileges: often one understandably thinks about all the ways in which one still had to struggle, rather than recognising that there were ways in which one didn't.

Comments like these are one of the causes of radicalization of young white males on the Internet.

Interestingly, Scalzi has also written about this in a way targeted at tech folks: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...

Long term I think his article on being poor may be longer lasting and more influential than anything else he does - with the possible exception of taping bacon to a cat. http://whatever.scalzi.com/about/the-canonical-bacon-page/

> Being poor is reading about VCs and ICOs and funding rounds on HN and thinking how huge an improvement just a tiny, tiny fraction of that money could make in your life.

This is what living in the SV for 6 years made me forget.

Upvoted for hitting way too close to home.

> Being poor is 2 nights in jail because of a clerical error

Tell us more

Speed trap as fund-raiser > clerical error lost paid ticket > license suspended > road block as fund-raiser > zero-tolerance "suspended license == go to jail" > impounded car, $1200 bond, and jail time "waiting on the judge to post bond."

Man, virtually the exact same thing happened to me: forgot to renew my license plate; got a ticket; paid the ticket; clerical error lost paid ticket; license suspended; suspension notice was never delivered (postal strike); got pulled over (suspended license puts your license plate on the "must stop" list); went to court.

The key is what happens next. As an employed software engineer with no priors, I could negotiate. There are many things they can charge you with and it is completely at their whim which one you will get. I apologised profusely in my nice suit and walked away with a (small for me) fine. Other people in virtually the same situation got nailed to the wall. You didn't want to be one of those people arguing how unfair it was to be pulled in to court when you never got a suspension notice.

Of course, they suspended my license again without telling me. Got the notice a month(!) later. I gave up driving after that. Since then I've driven a car maybe 4 times in the last 12 years.

This is way more common than people realize. Simple traffic violations spiral out of control for a lot of lower income people and they end up with felonies. It's a huge criminal justice issue.

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.

Speeding is always illegal, and not just for poor people. So is driving without a license. Do you believe those laws are unjust and/or targeting poor people?

The laws don't affect the rich and the poor in the same way.

A poor person with a suspended license cannot afford the cab ride to work and are thus forced to choose between either not going to work, losing their job and watching their children starve or taking the risk and driving. A relatively well off person just catches a cab or an uber.

An arrested poor person in jail waits days to weeks for a below average attorney to be appointed for them who will more often than not encourage them to accept a plea deal because their attorney has limited time and has to meet with 12 more poor clients today. A wealthy person has an aggressive attorney who will get to work immediately on getting their client out on bond and fighting the charges.

A poor person goes to prison. A wealthy person gets probation and is found to struggle from affluenza or a light sentence because of their "youth and clean record".

After getting out of prison a poor person struggles to find work and is stuck in a cycle. A rich person goes to a nice dinner.

Our legal system is a machine powered by the lives of the poor and the money of the wealthy.

> The laws don't affect the rich and the poor in the same way.

To paraphrase an excellent line: The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges and steal bread.

The laws don't have to be unjust for the enforcement to be biased and discriminatory. Even when the enforcement is unbiased, and that's a pretty big if, the consequences aren't nearly the same for the poor as they are for the rich.

Sure, but I think most people would agree that the problem is not that the law is enforced for poor people, but that sometimes rich people can get away with breaking the law.

That is true but I think there are also times when it isn't so much a problem of rich people necessarily getting away with breaking the law, although obviously this happens as well, as much as specifically targeting laws or the enforcement of laws that disproportionally effect poorer communities.

Another issue for me is that things like fines obviously carry a punitive function, people break a law and you want to punish them financially and deter the future behavior. When it comes to something like jail time, the rich and the poor are punished the same, again assuming an unbiased justice system. Six months in jail is more or less the same whether you're rich or poor. On the other hand, the punitive effects of a fine vary greatly based on your wealth. A $300 speeding ticket might be a lesson in the importance of obeying traffic laws and a minor annoyance if you're middle class. On the other hand, if you're living off of $1100 per month, that could be the difference between being able to make rent or not. It isn't that the poor should get away with breaking traffic laws, traffic deaths are a huge issue so they definitely shouldn't, but the punitive effects of the fine shouldn't be so vastly different based on income. I believe some countries, I seem to remember it being some Nordic countries, base fines off of income levels.

At the same time, fines are surely the most bening of all the things that hit poor people harder, since unlike rent or tuition fees they are entirely avoidable.

Speedtrap officers don't have to pull you over for just speeding.

A law that could target poor people is driving with expired tags. There are people who do this for reasons other than "just not getting around to it".

"clerical error lost paid ticket"

Sounds like they paid their fine and then got caught in the system as the result of a clerical error?

Yes, and that is unfortunate, but it was preceded, and followed, by breaking the law.

It's not "unfortunate" it's an example of how a clerical error that would be an inconvenience somewhere where public transport is good or if you have enough money to pay for taxis becomes nearly catastrophic if you are poor.

He made a mistake, paid his fine and that should have been that.

> He made a mistake, paid his fine and that should have been that.

Exactly. It's not like I even made a choice to drive with a suspended license. This was nearly 20 years ago now, and it happened in a tiny no-red-light town with no computer system. The ticket was for 61 in a 55 on a downhill grade. The dead-tree paperwork that confirmed that I had paid got lost, they had the wrong address on file, and I never found out my license was suspended. Cut to 2 years later and a different blink-and-you-miss it town that happens to be on a border bottleneck is running their weekly roadblock while I happen to pass through, and next thing I know it's "Step out of the car and put your hands behind your back."

Sorry, it wasn't clear to me that you were not aware of the suspended license.

I still think that you can't complain about getting the initial fine, regardless of the size of the town where you broke the law. I also don't see how this is really connected with being poor.

If you're arguing that many speed limits are set to low I'm totally with you, but that's a separate question.

I'm not even arguing that they're too low, I'm arguing that they should not be used as a fund-raiser.

The particular section of highway I'm talking about is about a half-mile long, on a downhill grade, and changes down 10mph.

The cops sit in the middle and ticket people as they're decelerating. It's a racket, plain and simple.

Shit, do you really think that people who get speeding tickets deserve jail time? You understand that the punishment should be proportional to the crime, right?

Where did you get that from?

It's a reasonable reading of your comments. Perhaps you communicated poorly? Browsing the thread, I am far from the only person who read you this way.

You should get a fine for speeding, and jailtime might be appropriate for driving without a license. The problem here is that it seems the offender had not been told about the suspension, thats very unfortunate but not a feature of the justice system. And the clerical error could have affected Bill Gates too.

When the fine isn't based on your income it does unfairly target poor people.

Over in Alameda County, within sight of the Silicon Valley unicorns, people have been incorrectly arrested, jailed, and even ordered to register as sex offenders because of software used by the courts:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/court-software-g...

This is "move fast and break things" taken to its ultimate logical conclusion.

Didn't go to jail but I did have a warrant out for my arrest because the community service officer didn't turn in my paperwork. $200 down the drain plus having to lose a half a day of work, drive to another city (30 min) as well deal with a crying parent on the phone that I hadn't told about what had happened (because it was so dumb - setting off fireworks).

Going through it all, since it ended ok, was good. I was 20 and learned even more to 1) not trust cops, 2) the courts are fallible and 3) it's more f-cked up for other people than a white kid in college (which I was but sat through a lot of other cases that day and the previous time there).

This needs a retitle of "Being poor in the USA".

You need to talk to someone who grew up in the DDR or the CCCP to get some perspective (although I bet people from the so called third world would have quite something to add, too!). I am a little better as I grew up in socialist Hungary.

Some memories that this article brought up: off-brand toys? You couldn't even buy LEGO until like 1982 for Hungarian forints. A few shops for diplomats sold it for hard currency which was impossible to get.

$800 cars? Comrade, you need to wait 5-10 years for a car and it's made out of paper and plastic. And it is literally incapable of going above 60 miles per hour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away. - man, I got a root canal done without painkillers because they ran out of painkillers.

Being poor is Goodwill underwear. - our undershirts looked like gray rags because you couldn't get whitening detergent for years. It was a fluke that didn't get corrected until the next five year plan.

air conditioning. --- HAHAHAHAHA try living in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict one of these, oven in the summer, too hot in the winter because the central heating is cranked up the wazzoo and you can't do shit about it.

Yes, there's degrees of poor ... poor all the way down.

This struck a chord with me:

Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger’s trash.

I've been poor enough in my life that dumpster diving was appealing and I'm glad I'm not now, but at least in my scenario there was a dumpster to dive into.

I spent some time by Lake Malawi there a couple of years ago and they don't even have dumpsters. Bottle-caps, and waste-paper from the (foreign aid funded) health clinic are valuable raw materials for whatever local craft industries there are. Being poor means these dodgy strangers showing up and splashing money around and who then start making inappropriate advances on the children.

But even along the lake they are privileged by having access to water and whatever tourism industry there is.

Away from the lake, being poor means not having clothes. Being poor means a minor injury is a death sentence.

Some of our philanthropist billionaires get some flack for the manner and means by which they distribute their aid, but a friend of mine working as a pharmacist there would just say "thank god for Bill Gates".

This isn’t a competition. This is supposed to give those who are less poor some perspective. So for you, this article is not so useful.

Maybe parent just used that remark as a way of breaking ice and sharing their story?

Thank you for writing this.

I grew up in the USSR. And then early Russia (the country was recovering from the USSR wreckage, even more painful).

The "$800 car" bit made me smile too.

PS. Now, when I live in a nice EU town, own a somewhat successful software company, and my #1 mission is so my kids never, NEVER EVER, _EVEN IN THEIR DREAMS_ have a tiny glimpse of that life.

Я с тобой согласен, товарищ! That's the mission indeed.

I fucking started a school in Hungary to give a better education to my (well, my brother's, details) little ones. Hungarian education didn't change enough from thirty years ago.

- Lying about where you grew up - Being ashamed of free school lunch - Being embarrassed and made fun of for wearing the same sorts of clothes every day - Not wearing a coat in winter because you are embarrassed wearing the same coat for years - Only ordering an appetizer over lunch at a job interview - The soles of my $10 sneakers came off in P.E. - Not playing any of the video games your coworkers played growing up - Being extremely conservative with a little money once you have it, buying the cheapest ice cream, beans, etc... - No prom, school dances, girl friends, etc... even the poor girls don't like you - Only considering the public university since private ones meant taking loans as much as your parents made in a year and even though your test scores are higher than the average at MIT - One family vacation in all the years growing up - Inferiority complex - Limited ambitions - Feeling you don't belong - Gaps in knowledge - Too much willingness to take up hardship

On the other hand, - Making your own food from raw ingredients: hamburgers, pizza, french fries, etc... - Being amazed by foods that you were never aware of: pho, sushi, stromboli, bagels, sausages on a grill - Approaching new places and people with naivety - All knowledge gained and learned is well learnt and mostly self learnt

I'm curious about the MIT thing. In the 70's, when I applied around, MIT and other top schools made it clear that if you were qualified to go there and accepted, they'd find a way to get the bill paid with some combination of scholarships, loans, and work.

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.

Private schools with huge endowments actually do cover tuition for people with lower incomes. For example, Princeton covers 100% of tuition and room & board for family income below $65,000:

https://admission.princeton.edu/cost-aid/how-princetons-aid-...

MIT doesn't lay the income levels out so clearly but has a similar program:

http://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-financial-aid/types-of-aid/...

Public schools with huge endowments are getting in on the game:

https://record.umich.edu/articles/u-m-unveils-tuition-guaran...

They started doing that relatively recently. Back then, it was a small grant, a job, and a large loan. Software didn't start outpacing other engineering professions' pay till the web boom. That was hindsight since I had the faintest clue what a major was.

Choosing a major that results in a job versus one based on interests.

Another decision was not to go to graduate school right afterwards. Poignant memory was of a professor asking if I was going to graduate school after I did well in a graduate school level course and saying no.

> Choosing a major that results in a job versus one based on interests.

When I attended Caltech in the 70s, it was commonplace for people in AY (Astronomy) to double major. When asked, the reason was always "AY for fun, and ME/EE/Whatever for a job."

I very much tilted my choice of classes towards what I thought would be most advantageous for my anticipated career. It never occurred to me that I was being deprived. It was just common sense.

Ironically, my career wound up in a field that had little to do with my studies :-)

> a debt which is not subject to bankruptcy laws

...and is completely forgiven if you die, make 25 years worth of payments (10 if you're in public interest), are permanently disabled; is only required to be repaid to the extent you have discretionary income and haven't asked to put in forbearance; and is at an extremely low, tax-deductible interest rate, not secured by any assets.

The 21 years cited in the article was for the average college graduate. If you're an MIT graduate in a STEM field, you are well above average. The person I replied to stated he was more than qualified to get into MIT, so I presume he'd have graduated above MIT average in a STEM field, which is not a disadvantaged position to be in.

Being poor is watching your mother cry because there isn't enough money for food.

Being poor is being happy to get a single snickers candy bar for Christmas (well it was New Years for me).

Being poor is skipping school prom and class foto because you don't have money to pay for nice clothes.

Being poor is having to listen to asshole relative who gave you their old clothes or furniture how you "owe them" every family gathering.

Being poor is not going to any family gatherings to avoid asshole rich relatives who flaunt their wealth in your face.

Being poor is always being under constant stress and worry. A worry those who are not poor will never understand.

Being rich is having a car. Even a scooter.

Being rich is being able to visit your family.

Being rich is having insurance.

Being rich is paying for a monthly phone subscription.

Being rich is hot lunches.

Being rich is risking losing your job in order to negotiate a better contract with your boss.

Being rich is considering having children at all.

Being rich is buying alcohol.

Being rich is looking at house prices.

Being rich is saving money for the future.

Being rich is paying for a haircut.

Being rich is renting a house with a kitchen.

Being rich is making plans more than a few weeks ahead.

Being rich is worrying about North Korea instead of looking forward to blissful oblivion.

>> Being rich is considering having children at all.

This is it. I lost track on how many of my friends/peers/colleagues don't have children, because they live from paycheck to paycheck and simply cannot afford it, even if they wanted to. And this is in germany mind you, where you have a relativeley robust social security net...

Not being poor is not the same as being rich.

Being rich I having enough money/income to not need to work.

In between is the middle class. There are middle class people who can afford to buy some of the stuff rich people buy, but if they lose their job they’ll be broke in a month or two.

When you're poor, everyone else looks rich.

When I was a kid, I assumed if you had a house you were rich and if you had one with stairs, holy Moses you were rolling in it.

Ohhh, ok, I got it now. I took it literally and completely missed the point. Stupid me.

You don't have to be independently wealthy to be rich. Most middle-class people are neither poor nor rich, though they'll usually tell you that they're poor as fuck if the topic of money comes up. Very few of them have any perspective on where their income lies with respect to the median, and what a median lifestyle provides.

Yup, haircuts given by mother or sister and then even after a little money, trying to give yourself a haircut. Not knowing how to ask for a haircut.

Travel circumscribed by how far you can walk.

Being ashamed that your mother sewed up holes in her clothes.

Holes in the ceiling with water coming out of them.

No health insurance.

Being lucky to take one bath a week. Giving yourself washcloth baths.

Saving water by flushing the toilet with saved bath water.

I agree with what you have posted. An interesting point though is that poor women become pregnant at a rate far greater than that of their wealthy peers. Pregnancy rates and especially unplanned rates are far higher in 3rd world countries than in first world.

In the US this holds true as well due to a large incidence of unplanned pregnancies among the poor. Your point about the rich considering having children is apt as children are often planned by the wealthy.

I am not passing judgement on either side of the wealth divide but I think it is an interesting study.

A very interesting read: https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2011/disparities-uni...

> Being rich is worrying about North Korea instead of looking forward to blissful oblivion

Are people in America actually worried that NK is going to nuke anyone? Kim Jong Un knows if he ever fires one of those, it's game over for him. They're a big-ass bargaining chip. Threatening to fire them is the only reason he has them at all. He'll never actually do it.

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.

OK, I'm worried about that too. But like the nukes, the artillery pointed at Seoul is also a bargaining chip. If they start firing, its game over for them.

But I take your point that the idiot in the blond wig could start firing first

>> Being rich is considering having children at all.

There is a negative correlation between financial wealth and birth rate worldwide.

>Being rich is risking losing your job in order to negotiate a better contract with your boss

If you have a 9-to-5, you're probably not rich.

The average household income in the US -- one of the wealthiest countries in the world -- is, like, $55k/yr.

If you've got some 9-to-5 job pulling down $80k/yr with no kids or dependencies, you're rich to a lot of people.

Being rich is having enough capital to escape the trap of wage slavery that is a 9-to-5. It is really hard to fathom the idea of money working for you instead of you working for money when $15/hour sounds like a lot of money though so I understand where "a lot of people" are coming from. However, raising the highest marginal income tax rates isn't raising taxes on the rich. It is raising taxes on the upper middle class - the most highly paid of the wage slaves.

The Micawber principle (from David Copperfield) comes to mind here: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery." 20 shillings to a pound, 12 pence to a shilling, so the difference between happiness and misery is a single shilling (or 1/20 of a pound).

Remember hearing Dave Ramsey (who probably got it from someone else) saying that when your money makes more than you do, you're officialy rich. There might be something to it.

You obviously missed the point of the GP

Yeah, didn't read it. Came straight to the comments to see all the righteous, selfless technocrats on HN tonight.

You're basically trolling this thread. Would please not do that, and please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? We're hoping for a higher quality of discussion than that, and need all the help we can get.

I grew up in poverty and am legally blind. It was incredibly difficult to find any way of making any money at all. Seriously, it was very difficult just to get a $5.15/hr minimum wage job in Montana.

The strongest emotion I have felt to this day is the feeling that I would never get out of being poor.

To this day my nightmares are about losing my job, blowing through my emergency fund and not being able to find another job.

To this day, I don't buy beef at the grocery store. I can't bring myself to do it outside a special occasion. (Not saying I spend my money entirely wisely but that has stuck with me for some reason.)

Don't you get SSI or something for being blind?

Yes, $500/mo is quite difficult to live on, even in Montana. And as soon as you start making any money, the support is rapidly withdrawn.

> "as soon as you start making any money, the support is rapidly withdrawn"

This is a valid criticism of income-based charity...there is little incentive to get over that initial hump.

It would be fine if the government could discover there's such a thing as continuous curves.

I grew up living this, we hardly had money to eat, but success came relatively easy after high school by simply trying really hard. I applied for hundreds of programming jobs and interviewed at tens of companies before landing my first gig where I worked my ass off and proved myself, within five years being the lead developer there before leaving for greener pastures.

I had taught myself on computers we had been donated first QBasic and later PHP. I am certainly lucky, but part of me is resentful at my mother in particular for how easy it seems to be to not live in poverty. I am so confused about the topic and honestly find myself angry at myself for my own thoughts. It's really hard to explain. I don't mean to or want to judge anyone but it's difficult. It's a touchy anxiety ridden topic for me.

I don't know. I feel like programming was the one way out for me. Not everyone can program, and for me, if it wasn't programming I don't think I would have thought of anything else that bring me above barely subsistence.

This is one of the most interesting comments I've seen on HN in a while.

Seems like survivor bias to me. To this day I still find out some stuff about how I grew up that I didn't know at the time; maybe your mum had other concerns she didn't bother to share with you...?

I've definitely felt this sort of emotion before, but it doesn't seem all that difficult to explain to me. Consider how easily von Neumann was able to solve problems that even his genius-level peers considered extremely difficult. Of course things that seem intractable to one person might seem obvious/trivial to someone with vastly higher intelligence. Not saying that von Neumann:his peers :: you:your mom, but I imagine this phenomenon is at least partially to blame.

I didn't realize he wrote this after Hurricane Katrina. He posted a follow-up in 2015: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/09/03/being-poor-ten-years-o...

A lot of people who have never been poor just think "oh, well, to stop being poor you just need to X, then Y, then Z." But they don't understand the implications, or the difficulty. Not spending money on anything you absolutely don't need is psychologically crushing, especially when that includes everything from dental care to replacement shoes. Finding the energy to continue advancing your employment and to work at disheartening jobs is also brutal. Imagine working at a place that treats you poorly but if you quit you might end up homeless. That takes a toll. And somehow you have to both endure such things while also protecting and nourishing the hope of a better future that makes it possible to put in the tremendous effort to work towards that future.

Meanwhile, the whole world is trying to take advantage of you in innumerable ways. Trying to force you to work off the clock for free (wage theft). Trying to charge you ridiculous interest rates on short term loans. And then you have to pay extra for things because you're poor. Some things you only buy when you're forced to in an emergency, so you can't buy them on sale or shop around. Other things you can't buy in bulk because you can't afford to. You can't buy stuff that lasts. Etc.

Not to mention all of the financial tools you dont have access to because of no/poor credit.

I remember what an incredible feeling it was when I finally worked my up to a rewards card. This magical thing that effectively makes everything I buy 1.5% cheeper. It felt like some sort of cheatcode for life. I remember then being so pissed off that I was able to have this as a rich person getting marginally richer, but not when I was poor.

Oddly, I hate rewards cards because I feel like it's one more thing to keep track of.

I run a small business where I code stuff for a living, and have to continually be thinking up new stuff to survive. It's tough to weigh the value of a rewards card versus the mental bandwidth of managing a set of 'optimal buying locations' associated with rewards systems.

That said, I completely understand your feelings on the matter. When you can't do a thing, and then you're allowed to and it's giving you a discount of some sort, it's a huge help. I have a car payment that's less than I was paying on repairs on the old car I had. There was a time when I wouldn't have been allowed to enter into such an agreement.

Indeed. Technically I have a lower net worth now than when I was poor because I have a significant amount of debt (I bought a new-ish car recently, for example). But going into debt to buy things just isn't an option when you're poor, other than taking a payday loan at usurious rates.

Thanks for posting.

"Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor." hit me hard. I didn't grow up poor, but I can understand this sentiment. It's unfortunate that so many people don't take the time to think about societal conditions before placing "blame" on the disadvantaged.

That line is definitely true. After getting into a decent and safe living world, I ran into a situation. I was given advice on how to deal with it, and I swore I was talking to aliens. It really gave me pause and showed me the brutal reality of how different our worlds are. When I told others about the advice, they looked at me and said "wasn't that obvious to you?" Well, no it wasn't.

In my experience, getting out of poor is a multi-pronged deal. Getting out is 1/10th of the battle; the hardest part is not falling back in. It's like being dropped into the ocean with a canoe, while everyone around you is in steamboats.

What was the situation, and the advice, expand please.

This is probably the #1 reason that we don't help the poor enough. It's the belief that the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor.

for anyone who has grown up poor or working class, how do i claw my way out of this? i come from a single parent household, my mom is an elementary school teacher with 4 kids in an expensive city. she barely makes ends meet and cannot support me. i was homeless and addicted to drugs for most of my teenage years, before getting sober and going to college, but dropping out after 2 years - my mom's child support put me just outside of qualifying for financial aid, despite the fact that she could still barely afford food and rent, so my only option was living at home and taking out 5-6 figures of loans. i didn't want to be a financial burden on my mom by living at home, so i dropped out and kept working as a bike messenger. as an aside, my mom is in astronomical debt from a lengthy divorce process with my father, who physically abused me, my siblings, and my mom, tried to kill both me and my mom at different points in time, then successfully put my mom in 6 figures of legal debt by drawing out the divorce process as long as possible.

flash forward to now - i'm still a full-time bike messenger. i barely pay the rent for my tiny SRO i share with my girlfriend. my biggest goal in life is to get a job as a programmer to support my mom and siblings. i've been teaching myself computer science for years now, and i know i would succeed if i could get a job programming. i just don't know how i get there from here. being a bike messenger (a real one, not a postmate / uber eats person) is extremely physically demanding. i'm mentally and physically exhausted after work. i don't have enough time or energy outside of work to complete any of the projects i start, with the hope of having something to show to a company. i feel like a simple CRUD app is too easy of a project to show my skill to an employer, so i try to work on things like a compiler and a real-time rendering engine, but these are huge projects, and i don't have enough free time to finish them in any reasonable time frame. i'm confident in my programming skill, but my resume is a list of working-class jobs in machine shops and courier companies. any advice would be seriously appreciated.

(hopefully this doesn't read as too melodramatic or anything, it wasn't meant to be. i know i'm still a lot luckier than most.)

* In Boston at least, there are programming-related interest groups meeting most weekday evenings. Most with free pizza. (http://www.bugc.org/ - but it's been buggy this week, and is currently missing groups).

So one is paid dinner, to network with programmers at local companies, at a place where hiring managers congregate to look for people. ^.^

* Skill levels in industry are diverse. The lower bound is low. SV is atypical.

"so i try to work on things like a compiler and a real-time rendering engine". That is very not lower bound. That's professional development. Get a job first. Learn, and then move on - industry turnover rates are high.

One thing notably absent from your narrative, is a report of repeated job rejections. Instead of adding features to yourself, put yourself on the market - you may already have achieved Minimum Viable Product<ctrl-delete>Programmerness. And even if not, you'll get a better feel for market fit, and for what might need to be improved. Time to release.

* Put something on github. Even if it's small. Even if it's unfinished - software almost never is. Include a test. There are people looking for programming jobs who can't write a coherent paragraph of code. Or English. Clarify that you are not them.

But perhaps set out to obtain at least one rejection first. It'd seem a pity to self-fund fiddling on github, if you could already be being paid for it.

Do a CRUD app. Try to make few features, but finish it. If you want to do more later or other projects thats fine, but finish something because it's good for you and for potential employers. Be able to talk about at least one 'thoughful' interaction in the app. If you have interest in the other areas you mentioned, keep learning about those too - they're worth it, but likely small investments over a longer time period of pay off (they will likely pay off if you keep at it).

I'll mention this as a long shot too, the machine shops and courier companies give you an interesting exposure to something that many direct-to-college software engineers may rarely see. Talk about programming to people there too, you may find out there is software you could write to solve problems for those types of shops.

The important thing is not the odds of any one thing, it's that you keep rolling the dice on things that can improve your lot. So good luck and keep your chin up!

My main advice would be to caution that most of the advice you're going to get is pretty hit-and-miss; even if some of us have done smart things to improve our life, we usually also got lucky along the way, which can be hard to replicate.

A critical turning point in my life was joining a web comic's forum in '01, which led to an IRC chat room which was eventually distilled down to a dozen-ish people around my age who were all interested in programming, among other things. I got an interview for my first real job through a friend made in that chat room.

Which is why my other advice is to "network", by which I mean, "make friends on the internet". The sad truth is that knowing the right people matters. Some people inherit a great network, the people their parents know, some people get a network by going to college or joining a fraternity. Not having a good network is something that really holds you back, way more than not having a perfect resume. But the internet gives you at least a chance to find some people you would otherwise never meet, make friends, and if you're lucky, they're good programmers at companies that are hiring, and they'll feel comfortable saying, "Hey, I know this person, they're not an asshole and they seem to know their stuff", and you'll have a shot. Not having a degree or an impressive resume will hurt you, but a lot of start ups have trouble finding good programmers and won't care as long as you can do the work.

My personal estimate (after 11 years of professional fullstack web development) is that about 80% of web development is doing some variations of CRUD screens. Create that CRUD app, publish it on github and let the possible employers know that you can do at least the 80% of the daily tasks. With a github repo and a project on your cv, you'll be in the top 5% candidates that don't have any work experience. There's a much bigger need in the market for devs who can do CRUD apps than for devs who can architect and implement rendering engines.

Change jobs. There are jobs that pay similarly to a bike messenger, or maybe even more, but are less demanding, like a night shift security agent at auto dealerships. You could even take your laptop with you and work on your projects.

> so i try to work on things like a compiler and a real-time rendering engine

Even unfinished this sounds like a cut above the average entry level dev. Make sure these projects are on github or whatever so people can see the code, even unfinished, it's good to see the progression.

Apply for a dozen junior dev jobs and see what happens. You'll probably get a bunch of rejections, but if you can write coherently and talk clearly you've got a chance.

And even if you don't get one you will probably discover something about what it is you are missing that businesses want and you can work on that specifically.

I missed the edit window, but the post got me thinking, so I came back to add this.

My first dev job was straight out of uni. No prior work experience, and no open source work to share. I had a 2000 line final year project written in c++ and that was it.

I think may 1% of the graduates had any open source contributions. Most were like me.

If you consider that these will be the people you are competing against for a entry level role. Your projects are a huge thing if you open source them, even unfinished. Just demonstrate an understanding of some CS concepts, algorithms, code design, etc and you'll be competitive at the very least.

Don't be afraid to submit crud apps, far more businesses need them than need real time rendering engines. Happy to talk more, email is in my profile

drop me a line. email in profile. I don't know if I can help at all, but will try.

Don't give up. Don't give in, to despair or otherwise. There's a better world out there for you, it exists, and nobody can make it disappear (or take it away from you because of your family, your past, or whatever). I don't want to overpromise as I'm short on time as well, but ping me and I will try to help.

This is what you need to do. Find someone to guide you and follow through the advice. I already did something similar for my friend who used to work in a music shop.

Avoid debt like the plague. It already reared its ugly head twice in the first paragraph.

When you look at the crap out there that ruins people, most of it is finance (rent-a-center, subprime mtg, payday loans, easy-credit car loans, student loans, etc), and it's a death-spiral.

Hey, I come from a similar background.

> i'm mentally and physically exhausted after work.

Most people would say "then get a different job", and I think they're not wrong, but I also think you can cheat. I don't know shit about being a bike messenger, but maybe you can grab an hour or two a day to build a sample website or a mobile app. Pretty much everything I learned I learned while I was supposed to be doing something else.

Also practice interviewing and coding interview tests. If you're good at those you'll get a job in a couple months, if you're bad it might take years.

> i feel like a simple CRUD app is too easy of a project to show my skill to an employer, so i try to work on things like a compiler and a real-time rendering engine, but these are huge projects, and i don't have enough free time to finish them in any reasonable time frame.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that you're on one side of the wall and you need to prove yourself, and that on the other side of the wall are a lot of people doing serious software engineering. The majority of people I've worked with are self taught -- as in they don't have a CS degree and figured it out on their own in one way or another. Exactly zero of them have written compilers or rendering engines, and I'd be surprised if they would even know where to start.

This is not to say they're shitty software engineers at all; I've worked with some terrifyingly smart people. But we're all just making it up.

That's the most important advice I can give to you, and it took me a long time to learn it. You're already good enough; put in the time, cheat and lie or whatever if you have to, and get what's yours.

You can perhaps bridge the gap between courier and salaried software developer by freelancing. I'd be happy to help you get started. My email is in my profile.

I've known people in third world countries who've been kicked off their land by the government, been forced to demolish their own homes--by hand!--on the way out, and were barred by law from ever stepping foot on said land again. All because developers wanted the land more and could make...millions for everyone. When that happens, you lose everything, your life is reset to be _at bottom_, and every day is a struggle to get off the bottom rung.

I've been with people so poor that when their friends had some beers they'd drink so much they'd pass out in a public park and be robbed of everything--by their friends--even their flip flops--and they'd wake up at noon the next day and wander barefoot home--whereever that is--with nothing.

I've seen people so poor they'd steal a bucket with a hole in it, they'd steal a dog trap to make a chicken coop. Forget about cars or bicycles...they'd steal a T-shirt or a lighter.

And they are not less moral or more moral, that's their life--screwed over in an endless cycle, locked into a futile struggle with the system that just does not let them make forward progress, always huffing it by foot or by bus because no car, and the bike has a flat.

From the bottom they look up; there are no rungs of the ladder to climb up, there are only superhuman leaps.

Being poor is living in an illegal cellar flat.

Being poor is wiping off the mold from your shoes before putting them on.

Being poor is buying second hand - unironically.

Being poor is working harder than your peers.

Being poor is not being able to fully relax, ever.

Being poor is a chip on your shoulder, that never goes away.

Being poor is a voice, deep within, saying nothing lasts, it is all an illusion, tomorrow you're back in the cellar.

Being poor never goes away. Being poor is being angry.

Minus the illegal flat(we had a dilapidated house), I could have written this exact thing.

I hope you got out like I did.

I did. But the thing deep within never goes away.

Being poor is very nearly a crime in this country.

We could all be much, much happier if the forces that run this country stopped making people ashamed to be poor.

What are you talking about? Which "force that run this country" shames anyone that is poor?

Reagan gutted social services to keep entirely imaginary "welfare queens" from getting a free ride. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/welfare...

Jeb Bush, plausible presidential candidate, wrote a piece called "Restoration of Shame" arguing that the problem with America is that welfare recipients and single parents aren't ashamed enough. http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/06/12/jeb_bush_sha...

The current president doesn't want poor people in his Cabinet. http://us.blastingnews.com/news/2017/06/donald-trump-shames-...

America has some of the worst public healthcare in the western world, despite spending more per capita on healthcare than any other nation in the world. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-healthcare-comparison-20...

And this is what all that does to poor people. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/12/food-s...

America would rather throw money away than see it go to anyone who doesn't "deserve" it.

Clinton also apparently played a large role in killing off welfare in the US too: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/welfare-reform-bill-hilla... There are some theories that this, and the other ways he screwed the poor and working-class, helped do in his wife's presidential bid.

How about the faction of the Republican party that has the gall to call Social Security and Medicare "entitlement" programs and then act like people who rely on them (after paying a lifetime of taxes in) should feel like they are taking advantage of everyone else?

Look, it ain't just the Republicans you identify that screw the poor. Democrats are in some ways worse because unlike Republicans they pretend to care (sometimes).

The Democrats' candidate for president was offering Republican style market-based crap like tax breaks for profit sharing and work programs for low cost loans. She didn't even touch on poverty with anything concrete: just words.

Their president from 2008-2016 has as his signature achievement a health care bill that promoted subsidizing private insurers using poor people as the mechanism to do so! The little for poor people in ACA came from things like Medicaid expansion (grossly insufficient) and Independent Bernie Sanders' community health center funding add-ons.

The one before him, in the mid 90s, screwed the poor with welfare reform. Don't tell me how much the Republicans hate the poor. We know. I just wish people who point it out would spend as much time pointing out how badly Democrats do it, too.

It really burns me up when people play this card. As if being poor in this country weren't about catching shit or being ignored by everyone in power. Including democrats.

You should think that the two are related.

If, for instance, most people here are interested not in helping the poor but in changing the balance of power ... that would result in exactly the behavior you're describing.

It has been a feature of the last 15 years or so that so-called "leftists" are electing laissez-faire leaders and

1) see no problem there

2) attack people who criticize this (usually, of course, because they are leftists)

I commend you calling out that neither the democrat party, nor any Clinton, can be called leftist by any reasonable measure. In fact, at least on rhetoric, I would argue that Trump was actually to the left of Clinton.

Being poor is the party that cares about you the most capitulating to the fat-cat capitalists to get any shred of improvement passed.

Do you really think single-payer healthcare (versus the individual mandate in ObamaCare) was ever going to pass in the US? Obama literally adopted a Republican proposal for how to improve healthcare coverage, and the Republicans have spent every year since railing against it.

As someone who's pretty far to the left, I don't see how a (fiscally) far-left candidate/party would make any progress in the US. The centre is just so damn skewed towards "individual responsibility" and other bullshit that voters apparently love.

We were one vote away from having a public option in Obamacare, which is what many of the people who aren't fully versed in healthcare jargon are really thinking of when they say "single payer". All it would have taken was for Joe Lieberman or any one Republican senator to allow it and most of the "single-payer" proponents would have been satisfied.

There's a difference between realistic pragmatism and covert antagonism. Due to subversion of various sociopolitical systems in this country, it would be very difficult for the left to win majority power without making tactical tradeoffs. Democrats have been boxed into a corner and are doing what they can to get out. There is an argument to be made for unabashed ideology as an alternative means of propagation, and we started seeing that play out with Sanders vs. Clinton last year.

They are entitlement programs, because you're entitled to them. The problem isn't the word entitlement, it's that they think it's welfare.

I don't think its accurate at all. Which senator or congress-person said/implied this? I've never heard for anyone saying that people that have paid a lifetime of taxes, are taking advantage of everyone else, just because they receive Social Security and Medicare benefits. I have heard of people complaining about those that misuse the system, but certainly never about those that have paid a "lifetime of taxes."

Have any specific quotes in mind?

I find that unlikely, since the Republican party tends to be the preferred party of people collecting Social Security.

Being poor is deciding that it’s all right to base a relationship on shelter.

I sleep in a tent. I have turned down such offers.

I am literally homeless, yet can't identify with a lot that is in this article. This likely explains 90% of my social friction.

> I sleep in a tent. I have turned down such offers.

If you have children, and you're a single parent (typically a single mother), then that might not be something you can turn down without a significant reason.

My statement was in no way whatsoever a criticism of anyone else's choices.

(Also: I have a significant reason. I don't know why you would assume that I do not.)

congrats on being an unempathetic ubermensch. I'm sure that's worth a lot.

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines.

Being lower middle class is using a HN throwaway account because risking to be linked to this purge doesn't help at all.

Being lower middle class is 4.5h of daily commute to public college (despite having best grades in your high-school) while being told all the time that you're a priviliged.

Being lower middle class is your friend suggesting to use his adress on your CV.

Being lower middle class is hiding your hometown from your coworkers and having them smirking and condescending when one day you can't evite anymore and show it on Gmaps/street view and regretting that you didn't show a random location.

Being lower middle class is being ashame of bringing friends home.

Being lower middle class is having friends scaried of coming to your place.

Being lower middle class is saving all pennies you can because you are terrified of getting poor.

Being lower middle class is that place where nobody helps you with anything. You're too rich to get help from state, and too poor to have any easy money like rents, interests, whatever. Being next to the poverty threshold it's a terrible place to be.

Being lower middle class is to know that a friend, to be able to get some state money during college, pretended to live with a grandmother without his parents help and regretting not having done the same.

I'm fairly certain I'm not poor but a few of these apply to me.

Not enough room for all the people in the house. Driving an $800 car - although it works very reliably - maybe it is $1200 US. Living next to the freeway - well a 5 lane highway and a many many lane motorway around the corner.

It is incredibly hard to break the cycle when living from paycheck to paycheck unfortunately.

Because it is common to use the term "the poor" when talking about poverty, it is easy to miss episodic poverty. Between 2009 and 2011, thirty one point eight percent of Americans were below the poverty line at some point. [1]

[1]: https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/01/07/nearl...

The "funny" thing is people who aren't poor but who have experienced one or more of these things once or twice tend to sort of double down on the "being poor is people wondering why you chose to be" item. They don't "get it" long or hard enough to understand how for most it's not a choice.

Being poor means getting taken advantage of and being pushed around.

Being poor means being powerless in almost any and every situation, transaction, and interaction.

I don't see it mentioned and it may be a little dated by now, but Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickle and Dimed is a very good read on this topic.

One thing that I believe is on that list that may escape a lot of folks: "Being poor is knowing EXACTLY how much everything costs."

Edit: Wups, didn't remember that that was how it starts

I had no idea he had a blog. For those who aren't aware: he's a very entertaining sci-fi writer, if not necessarily as cerebral as others.

Both John Scalzi and Charles Stross have been blogging since before they were called "blogs" :)

Charlie is even a regular here, user cstross.

FWIW, I find Charlie's blog [1] more interesting, because his schtick of taking random ideas and mashing them together to see what sticks makes him come up with insightful perspectives.

Also as an ex-programmer (and ex-pharmacist), he speaks our language ;)

[1] http://www.accelerando.org

I thought the canonical location for Charlie's blog was Antipope: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/ although Accelerando redirects there.

(as for why that name: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/antipope.html)

Also, for those who want to sample his writing https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51964.Old_Man_s_War is a very good read.

He was blogging for years before getting his fiction in print. IIRC, his first novel (Agent to the Stars) was published on his blog. He's a great writer, yeah. :)

I read this and feel lucky.

I want to help people who feel this way but do not want to make them feel like they owe anything in return, or that they are different because they need help. I don't know how to do this. I give money to charities but sometimes that feels very classist, some times I feel like I do it to make me feel better, rather than actually help people. I give food to foodbanks but I don't give enough. I want to volunteer somewhere but I tell myself I don't have time, but I probably do.

I guess the best thing I can do is raise my kids to not judge people on how much money they have, and to talk to people they think need help.

Find a local charity you can and give money to them. It will be more helpful and your dollars will go directly to benefit the people around you.

Being poor is trying to hide the finances from the kids but seeing the stress in their faces anyway.

Being poor is this year's shoes are last year's gym shoes. (Good thing they stretched out.)

Being poor is choosing between the doctor and the heat.

Barring a few instances, feeling of being poor is similar in a developed economy vs a developing one. I'm experiencing this in a South Asian country-

Being poor is falling in a debt-trap no matter how financially disciplined you are.

Being poor is calculating your income & expenditures everyday and dreaming you would break even in the next month for sure.

Being poor is trying to avoid the worst days your loved ones have seen.

Being poor is going to work even if you feel sick.

Being poor is not knowing why you are so poor.

This should be named “Being poor in the USA”. The amount of priveledge bestowed upon you by winning a passport lottery, which provides you with the access to a multitude of opportunities available to you is unprecedented.

From a perspective of someone born in a much poorer country this sounds like a birth-right priveledge taken for granted.

Many of the psychological issues can be overcome by not giving a flying fuck about what others think about you.

My father died when I was 17 years old and my brother was 18 years old. My mother became an alcoholic and for the next 5 or 6 years I saw her sober less than 10 times. There were days in a row when we didn't had what to eat. She prioritized alcohol, cigarettes and coffee over food.

We were so poor that my brother got ill of tuberculosis from the lack of food. I was luckier because I used to eat at my ex girlfriend (present wife). The clothes I got were usually gifts received from my girlfriend. I was wearing the same pants months in a row, daily, until they got holes in them.

But I don't remember being stressed about what others thought about me and that made my whole adolescence beautiful. I wasn't even aware that somebody would notice that I wore the same clothes every day. Until one day a girl in my high school told me "these are some nice pants that you have, too bad that you're wearing only those". It hurt me, but I got over it fast thinking "how does this concerns you anyway?" and kept wearing them, because I didn't had others. And my main teacher once told me "you look good wearing other colors than black". While the black shirts were the only ones I got, until I received that light colored one. And I took that as a compliment - she just told me that I was looking good after all.

The positive part of being extremely poor for about 7 years is that I got really fed up with poorness and I do my best to never going back.

Fast forward 15 years after finishing high school, I am a software developer with 11 years experience, working remotely for a US company and I think my earnings put me somewhere in the top 1% earners in Romania. Since I started to work for this company, I didn't took a single vacation (with a few exceptions of 1-2 days off), because I feel it's the opportunity of my life time and I want to make as much as possible out of it. While I got 9-to-5 jobs I always tried to learn new things and had side projects and I was somehow baffled why the majority of my programmer colleagues weren't interested in something similar.

So, there are positive things in anything if we really try to find them. And a positive attitude makes the difference between feeling miserable and feeling ... normal, or even being happy. I think that my years of poorness increased my motivation and desire to succeed in life drastically, but it's definitely not an experience I would encourage someone to try.

But I don't remember being stressed about what others thought about me and that made my whole adolescence beautiful.

One thing that you fail to acknowledge is that in rich countries smart poor guys don't get girlfriends. In East Europe being poor is/was considered normal, and as such, getting a GF in that situation is much easier and it will make wonders to your self-estime. This will hardly ever happen in the western rich world: I was luckier because I used to eat at my ex girlfriend (present wife).

I think that my years of poorness increased my motivation and desire to succeed in life drastically

No, it didn't. You just hit a jackpot: niche IT for a foreign company. Probably the best you can get worldwide (as an employee).

Living in a very poor country and having seen Egypt (Cairo), I shrug off when US people talk about poverty.

There is poverty as finding hardship in life and there is fighting for survival in a literal sense. Poverty in the US is hardship of life. The US still has accessible infrastructure and job market to help an average person get on his feet.

Also, I find poverty to be related to your parents. If your parents are poor and then just go out of their way to have 6 children, well, their output is going to be divided by 6 and so you'll be shit poor.

Poverty is a byproduct of culture and nature. Stupid religious cultures (as well as nature) will push poor people to multiply to guarantee survival. Since the probability of survival of their offspring is weak, it might help to have lots of them.

This makes matter worse (lots of poor people themselves multiplying). Rich people having little offspring seem to help and accentuate the problem (make the few rich people fewer and the lot of poor more).

Related (and IMHO better):

5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor, May 27, 2011: (http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about-...)

The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor, January 19, 2012: (http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-devel...)

4 Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People, February 21, 2013: (http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never-...)

Kids Who Grew Up Poor Share Realities Their Rich Friends Just Didn't Understand

http://www.knowable.com/a/kids-who-grew-up-poor-share-realit...

For some reason, it's the dentistry that always hits me. As a society, we can't get it together enough to fix people's fucking teeth? Instead, we end up with this sort of thing (this one is more than just teeth) - http://thefederalist.com/2017/08/02/thousands-visit-free-cli... - like some kind of fucking end times collapsed society.

Don't know why that's my trigger.

Holbrook’s is 420. The stranger holds up her card: 158. She places it in Holbrook’s hand and takes the higher number in exchange, explaining that she wants Holbrook and her baby to get in before she does. Holbrook doesn’t know what to say. The old lady mixes back into the crowd.

Wow this cuts like a knife. I've never been poor, but this hurts to imagine, especially with two little kids at home that rely on me. What is the best way to help this, what charities/activities?

I'm a fan of finding your local food pantry and helping out / donating there.

Most always need volunteers. Depending on the place, it can either be more effective to donate money or food. Some places have affiliations with larger collecting centers which just charge the individual pantry handling (usually something like $0.10 / lb) for food; if a place doesn't, they might prefer food donations because otherwise shopping is one more thing a volunteer needs to find time for, and they won't get a particularly better value than you.

If you want to shop for a food pantry, it's best if you ask them what they're currently short on, but in general it will be your proteins and fruits, because both tend to be more expensive than the vegetables and carbs, and a lot of people donating to food pantries are giving what little they can. You'll mostly end up giving a lot of a few good staples that are reasonably priced - tuna, canned chicken, apple sauce, peaches - but if you throw in a little variety every now and again (spam, blueberries) you'll really make someone's day, who's been eating the same damn thing for longer than they can remember.

Dried beans are cheap but not very popular, because they're a bit more time consuming to prepare. Don't donate cranberry sauce, every food pantry has a shelf full of it. Large packages of food (20 lb bags of rice) are tricky; they're usually cheaper, but then the pantry has to repackage it, which is more work, less appealing, and introduces more risk of food contamination. Buy generic canned vegetables, but name brand cereal. Being poor is no-name cereal from a plastic bag, and you'll make some kid's week if they get to eat actual Cheerios for breakfast, but no one cares what label is on their can of green beans.

If the food pantry near you is well stocked on food, you can load them up with personal hygiene supplies - toilet paper and toothbrushes, but also deodorant, laundry detergent, feminine products, and diapers. Most places will also give out pet food; that is usually safe to buy a 50 lb bag of, because people are happier to take a gallon ziploc of dog food.

> Most always need volunteers. Depending on the place, it can either be more effective to donate money or food.

It should be noted that some charities are drowning in unskilled labour, and that folks shouldn't take it personally if they're turned away. Help in some other way, like you say, with money or food.

A friend of mine offered to volunteer at a nearby charity and was miffed that they turned her away since she had no management experience; they had plenty of hands, but really needed folks with organisational skills to manage them.

Yeah, food pantries especially are bespoke operations, and you really just have to find one near you and talk to them to find out what they want or need. Some will be territorial and not want non-eg-church-members volunteering, others will be thrilled to have community involvement. Some won't need volunteers for distribution, but will be glad to have younger labor to help with food pickup - picking up a literal ton of food and carrying it up stairs is a lot of work. Some places might not need help right now but will in a different season, as volunteer schedules change. They might also need help of varieties beyond the obvious - management, like you said, or accounting or network-building (eg, finding other sources of donations, like groceries or farm co-ops) or web development/social media management.

Even if they don't need more volunteers on the regular, most places won't mind if you join a couple of shifts, just to get a feel for how they operate.

Ultimately, you just have to find a place and start talking.

Money, if possible. Food banks can turn money into food more efficiently than you or me. If you are interested in donating food, consider donating 'high value' food such as a case of peanut butter: especially families with hungry children will value peanut butter as a food shelf item. It's typically rationed.

"Basic income" would go a long way.

People will try to work to make their lives better, whether they're "poor" and "rich". Not needing to worry about food and shelter would make life much easier.

And I mean "basic income" for everybody. Not just citizens. Even immigrants. "For the widow, the orphan, the foreigner." - Deuteronomy 10:18, Zechariah 7:10, Matthew 25:31-46

I like how you turn a voluntary charitable contribution into forcing other people to pay. If you aren't poor, you should already be making contributions to the poor since you have such high moral standards.

That would be the most efficient mechanism for ensuring the money is re-spent, locally, supporting local small businesses and entrepreneurs. Starving people really never have Swiss bank accounts, and rarely outsource. Whatever your morals, and whatever the morals of 'the poor' as you see them, there is a pragmatic argument here that is absolutely worth forcing people to pay, much like you're forced to pay taxes: you're directly subsidizing people who are almost compelled to spend their money inside their local communities, allowing others who are more enterprising to prosper.

That's just math. Your moral feelings may have to take a back seat to pragmatism, here.

Yeah exactly. The not-poor should already be making contributions to the poor. Maybe we should have an elected body to manage the collection and distribution of these contributions. We could make it income related so those who can are able to contribute more. It could be universal so there's already a safety net there if people lose their jobs or become ill without paperwork or delays, also so that no one is poorer for accepting work. Seems reasonable.

We are all in this world together and some of us do make those contributions.

You are just angry we want you to contribute at all and I feel bad for you. It must hurt going through life thinking no one cares if you suffer or die.

I'm angry you want to force me to contribute - you douche. I've been contributing to the poor my whole life

Lol :)

And so you get angry at people on the internet that suggests it should be mandatory.

(Assuming you are in the US) America could use a fix for our healthcare system and our lack of affordable housing. It would be better to work on such issues than donating to charity. "Charity case" is an insult for a reason. If you really care about poor people, you work towards building a society in which ordinary people can get their needs met without relying on charity. Having a modest income should not so totally exclude people from having a life.

Supporting affordable housing, transit and healthcare.

Top three things we struggled with.

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.

Being poor is working 2 jobs so you don't have time to write blogposts

Being poor is not being able to afford your own domain name

Am I doing this right?

I wanted to know what it was like reading these lists without qualifications, so I interlaced a "rich" and a "poor" list.

https://gist.github.com/ablakey/1cf9c03edf4b38c1646f17f8e0b5...

Another great piece of writing about US poverty is Chris Offutt's "Trash Food": http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/550-trash-food

The high ER "tail latencies" effect almost everyone in the US, UK, etc, at least everyone that's not hyper-rich enough to proactively retain dedicated private doctor(s) with high-end private facilities that can handle everything that a good ER can.

>School with no air conditioning. But schools are closed in the hottest months of summer, whats the point?

that was hard reading.

> Being poor is knowing you really shouldn’t spend that buck on a Lotto ticket.

That's being smart, not being poor.

It's okay not to understand what the writer means here. But is it okay to have read the article looking for a detail that you can use to try and feel superior?

This is a problem the poor everywhere face. Those with wealth looking to reassure themselves about their moral and intellectual right to their position.

>> Being poor is wondering if your well-off sibling is lying when he says he doesn’t mind when you ask for help.

That's not real poverty. If any well-off person cares about you even a little bit then you are not poor because you have an emergency lifeline.

A real poor person won't hesitate to beg for money, especially from a family member (easier than begging on the streets).

Until they're tired of giving you money and you don't have a lifeline anymore.

And that is literally the long and the short of it ;)

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.

Being poor must in part be not knowing how not to be poor or having felonies or depression holding you back. I failed out of college and barely scraped one month of rent for an apartment. I got a shit job working the dock in a light bulb warehouse. I made friends with the truck driver who picked up orders who told me about an opening on their better paying dock. After half a year my hard work caught the eye of HR who put me through driving school. And a few months later I was making $45k/year driving trucks and working the dock. I had rough times and missed a day or two of food every once in a while, But working your way up in trades is doable and straightforward. After paying back my $18k in school debt and seeing much of the country while driving, I went back to the cheapest college I could find and got a degree, from which it was all downhill from there.

So, you got some tremendous help at a very key point and you were able to use that momentum to continue doing well for yourself. Now, imagine you are so poor that you need some help to move up in the world, but that help never arrives. How long would you have done that shit job if the truck driver didn't point you somewhere better. Or, how about if you weren't able to scrape up anything after that one month of rent and were thrown out on the street? I'm not saying you were the luckiest guy on the planet to get that help. Most people could count on some good fortune. But someone considerably more unfortunate than you may not have had that experience, or perhaps they had shitty situations happen to them, at a point when they were most vulnerable. Don't discount those things that you didn't have control over that helped you get somewhere, and recognize that someone may not have been that fortunate. Regardless, I hope you paid it forward.

Tremendous help my ass. I was sending out resumes all the time. I spent every break going over the help wanted adds in the paper. I made minimum wage, busting my ass in a mercury contaminated sweltering hellhole. Then I did the same thing on a freight dock, for a $1/more. And the reason I got "lucky" is I ran in between docks. I moved freight as fast as I could. I showed up on time. And I still spent my free time looking at the help wanted ads. If I wouldn't have gotten lucky there, I'd have gotten lucky somewhere else. Roll the dice enough and you win. Plus I had a strict budget, which kept me focused. Not many truck drivers pay off their $18K in student loans in 2.5 years, of which nearly a year was spent at minimum wage.

I applaud you for your success. I can relate, having found success in a career for which I am self-trained.

However, I don't use my personal anecdote to generalize that others should have the same abilities to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and just _not be poor_. Knowledge isn't enough, economical and educational opportunities are not distributed equally. This is an issue of conditions that precedes an individual's life.

It isn't rocket science to be middle class in America. Over my 2.5 years as a truck driver, every single person working the dock with a clean driving record and no recent felonies was put through the in house driving school, instantly becoming middle class with decent benefits. The only trick is finding a field where there isn't a massive oversupply of available help. Everyone would prefer serving coffee over roofing a house, but only one of those jobs leads to running a crew in a few months of hard, timely work.

After many decades of serious empirical analysis of poverty by tens of thousands of researchers in hundreds of research institutions in dozens of countries worldwide, I find it hard to believe people still trot out personal anecdotes as if they mean anything.

The roots of poverty are pretty well-known (and have nothing to do with self-chosen ignorance or indolence, regardless of the claims of these variants of Victorian-era propaganda). The effects of different political policies on poverty rates, from the most corrupt and least competent (the US) to the opposite pole (Nordic nations) have been understood for many years.

This anecdote is as relevant to poverty as war-stories of magical 'alternative' cancer therapies are to the effects of real medicine.

You got lucky.

You didn't have kids, you never got sick, you never had a relative get sick and require your help, you never got evicted, you never got arrested. You managed to find a job that required no experience that you could work but paid well. Those jobs are much rarer than they used to be. You were favored by management because they liked you (imagine if you were too different from them for that to happen).

Your success touched a nerve. Lots of people making excuses for how lucky you are, and how lucky others aren't.

It's been known for millennia that "luck" is actually being ready for opportunity and then acting decisively when presented with opportunities. Preparation and action is what seperates winners from losers. You cant help losers win, you can only buy them time.

My parents were small farmers in the 80s when it was "get big or get out". I remember a lot of kids in my 20-person grade level had shoes that were falling apart, myself included. Grandpa died in 94 and my dad tried to keep the farm going by himself but could only last 2 years before the farm went broke. He left home and trained to be a truck driver. He drove over the road for 2 weeks at a time, when he was home he'd sleep, then go back out. My parents declared personal bankruptcy and the bank took their property and we were evicted in April 1999. We moved not far away, my parents needed a co-signer. My grandmother lived in the same house as us because they couldn't afford to move her double wide trailer. My parents slept on a pull-out couch for a year. Nobody gave them hand-outs. Life began slowly to turn around soon after.

You do what you have to do. And in the meantime you get ready for the next move. America is the land of opportunity, don't forget that.

Some land of opportunity. You can help people win. Your distinction between winners and losers is arbitrary. At a different degree of adversity the line falls at a different point in the population. If you turn up the heat you would eventually fall on the losers side of the line. If you extend a hand and help your fellow man a lot more of them will end up on the right side of the line. Open your mind instead of your mouth.

What you call 'losers' I call 'my customers'. Why would I want to sell only to people who 'win'? Doing that means scorning perfectly good customers, and very likely perfectly good people.

Just because people aren't as brutally committed as you or I doesn't make them bad people. I would argue that we are the bad people, and they are more likely to be the good. We are driven, ruthless obsessives (well, me, anyway) and that's why we look so saintly to our socioeconomic system, but everyone clawing their way to the top of this heavily-clawed system of business savagery is by definition a lot meaner than the regular person.

And when we triumph, it's on top of a huge pile of nice regular people who couldn't or wouldn't fight as hard or as dirty. And I see that reflected all across society, with a disturbing lack of exceptions.

Love the losers. They're your customers, your userbase, plus it's good business sense. Try HARDER to help the losers, because if you mean to be a winner, you will have to be standing on top of them all, and you had best not be too heavy or unpleasant a burden ;)

My wife works for a LTL trucking company; no drivers there make anywhere near $45,000 a year. Most of them make around 2/3 of that, even with overtime. So yeah, I too think you got damned lucky.

Congratulations, just don't think that everybody can bad as lucky as you.

Or an unfortunately timed eviction because you were the victim of a crime and called the police and your landlord evicts anyone involved in a police incident. Or an ill-timed sickness that causes you to miss work and thus your job. Or a problem child or family member needing your time, forcing you to choose between them and continued minimum wage employment. Or any of a hundred other causes that are just shit luck or bad timing.

Are you a baby boomer? You sound like a baby boomer. You're basically saying, "I don't see why all these poor people don't just get a good job."

I have a friend who's here illegally. Last year he billed his largest customer $160K for concrete work. He stays so busy he never has time for anything. He has more odds stacked against him than any american who isn't sick, and he makes more profit on a 3 day job than most people make all month.

But first he spent nearly a decade working for a construction company learning the ropes and working his way up to #2. Then he quit to be his own #1.

How many americans griping about their minimum wage coffee job want to shovel concrete, dig holes, and do beautiful work for 8 years?

Please do inequality and why someone becomes Walter white

Being poor is reading about this James Damore Google issue and realizing:

> They fired the guy so everyone would feel better. And then of course they're making it worse by kicking the guy when he's down.

Yep, had that done to me. I HATE EVERY ONE OF YOU !

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