Hacker News Reader

Comment by notyourday | Hacker News Reader

There's an element of luck involved in absolutely everything.

Not specifically to you but this conversation is highly interesting because it demonstrates the two different attitudes - one from the person you were replying to and one from pretty much everyone else.

In software engineering it is the attitude of people who come up with a solution to their problem as compared to the attitude of the people who are complaining that the solution is not general enough and therefore should not be considered a solution.

View on HN

To me, this conversation represents the two classes.

One guy is living life probably pulling in upwards of $150,000 a year (or living in a lower cost of living place with six figures income). Simply budgeting well will cover all these things. And another thinks that "budgeting" means you don't get to eat on Mondays so you can keep on bills.

Person 1: Life is easier if you budget properly

Person 2: But what if you're a diabetic blind one legged cancer patient?

Being a low income contract worker is not equivalent to being a diabetic blind one legged cancer patient. There are literally millions of them.

This discussion is not a comparison between a low income contract job and a job as a neurosurgeon. It's a comparison between a low income contract job and the type of "traditional" job that same worker might be qualified for.

Buying your own workman's comp is 0.0075% of your salary in my state ($0.75 per $100 in salary). Disability insurance is $30/mo for $50k salary, so if you're making $30k/yr then disability will be even less. You can make a budget, avoid consumer debt, and save an emergency fund at virtually any level of income. The median national income is $32k/yr for a single person. Sure, a lot of people making that kind of money also have bad personal finance habits. But the idea that it's impossible to live a decent life on the kind of income that half of all single people in the country are making is hyperbole.

Your numbers seem unrealistically low for the types of jobs that low income contract workers usually have. For a job like software development where very few types of injuries are likely to occur on the job and where very few types of injuries would prevent you from performing the job the rates are low. For a higher risk job, like driving the rates will be higher. For instance, in Florida a driver's worker's comp will cost almost ten times the number you stated[1].

[1] https://www.floridawc.com/workerscompensation/policy/rates/

For the majority of those jobs you're going to be making more money, too. Take, for example, construction work. Sure, your disability, workman's comp, etc. is going to be higher than if you're working a desk job. But at the same time the going rate for a random illegal immigrant you pick up at Home Depot around here is $20/hr.

I guess I'm person 2? I think that's not really what I was saying.

Here's my personal experience - I had a single parent who always worked and always had health insurance through her employer. In her 50s she got hurt and couldn't work much (no cobra, no money either) and lost her insurance. She worked in retail for a while. Then she got cancer and died. Maybe if she'd had more frequent checkups it might have been caught earlier? Maybe less stress would have helped? Who knows. I think if we had national health insurance or health insurance you can't lose, then a lot of people wouldn't face this problem, it would help in the aggregate. She never got to 65, so she didn't jump onto the safe medicare.

So you're saying even working for a company (retail) she was at least no better or worse off than if she'd been a consultant who couldn't afford health insurance on her own.

Whether or not there are improvements to be made to our healthcare system is an entirely different discussion than whether or not an average, able bodied person could reasonably go out on their own without another person working in the home to back them up financially. Of course it would be better/easier to have a support system with another worker in the house. Of course it would be better if you had easier access to healthcare. I would never suggest otherwise.

Also, I'm sorry for your loss. My mother is a cancer survivor and it's just a shit situation all the way through.

That's a really interesting comment. I had taken it a little differently.

It feels to me that our minds have been atrophied by generations of being told that we can't do anything. Forget budgeting a small business, we can't even budget for our own family. Someone else, be it the government or our employer, has to provide some universal solution to all my problems like saving for retirement or being able to buy an antibiotic for my kid. So someone presents a solution, and rather than being able to take that, adjust it to our individual needs, our psyche is so weak that we just sit back and try to figure out all the ways we can avoid taking agency in our own lives, we need big brother to solve it for us.

Ultimately it's perhaps the same thing though. In your scenario people want to pick apart the solution so they can return back to deciding that their employer or the government has to provide a solution for them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com