Hacker News Reader

> - kids: if you can't afford them, use a condom (yes, that's harsh, but that is something that really beats my understanding, people already living on the edge that decide to have one, two or even more children)

I totally agree. If you only make $9/hr, maybe you shouldn't have kids. If we ever get around to controlling reproduction in the US, income level seems like a great place to start to me. (The game also tried to make me feel like a bad parent because I 'let' my kid get teased for eating free lunch and 'risk my child going hungry'. Where's the "Eat your damn food and mock people who have to pay if they try to mock you" option? Also I didn't pay $15 for a field trip which forced them to stay at the school that day when I know kids at my elementary got their field trip fees waived.)

"kids: if you can't afford them, use a condom"

It is totally possible to predict when you'll become poor and therefore decide not to have kids. It beats me why do people ever get poor when life is just a sequence of such obvious decisions.

I'm talking about those situations where you are already poor and decide to have kids anyway.

I personally know a number of people who are on social welfare and planning having a second or even third child. I find this is extremely irresponsible. They can barely afford the children they already have and want to get the state to pay for more? I'd much rather my taxes went to schools and hospitals and better public transport than for paying for these peoples stupid decisions. What kind of life will that child have?

If you cannot afford it, do not have children. I can totally understand if you had the children before you, eg, lost your job or whatever. Things happen, situations change. The problem is the people who don't already have children. Also, if you cannot afford it, you need to be extra careful not to have an "accidental" pregnancy.

If people on welfare stopped at 2 or 3 kids we and they wouldn't have any financial problems with it.

This generation's moonshot public works project should be a low cost reversible renewable year-long sterilization technology.

Also, harsh as seems, it would help if newborns on welfare were taken to orphanages and treated well there instead of generating funds for their genetic ancestors.

> This generation's moonshot public works project should be a low cost reversible renewable year-long sterilization technology.

At least for women, that already exists (IUD, implanon). The problem is, for any medical technology there's side effects, and people still need to consent to it.

Sometimes birth control fails! Like it did with me and my girlfriend a few months ago. My poor ass is now job hunting!

Time to grow up!

Congratulations are in order anyway, so here are mine, and I really hope that you get that job. My children were all planned and even if I did fall on hard times (twice) in the intermediate the fact that we cut down to the bone as soon as trouble hit helped us survive. Things that don't kill you will make you stronger.

If you can't take that risk: Abstinence (or just different sex practices), abortion, adoption or tough if out.

My capitalist instincts would suggest another option: sell the child to a wealthy couple who can't bear their own.

You can try that, but the market for that is probably very strange. For example, I can imagine that demand goes up with price, because no one wants a cheap child. And for some combinations of properties of the child you'll probably have to charge less than nothing (i.e. pay the adopters).

Of course, someone who really believes in the market would harvest the child for organs. (Sarcasm implied.)

Quite true. My daughter is the failure case for condoms combined with birth control and a wife who was told "you can't have babies." I'm just glad it happened two months after we got married instead of for the 3 years we shacked up previously.

Good luck, boss!

Sage advice, and yes it IS possible to follow (and I know it is too late for you now but here it is anyway): 1. Do not have sex if you do not want a baby. 2. Do not get married unless you can support a baby.

Life finds a way!

Make a solid investment in her, and she'll pay you back with interest.

Still: congratulations! Babies are great.

Many ancient religious proscriptions have their basis in correlations to healthy living. There really are reasons to consider abstaining from pork and sex before marriage.

Anyway, everyone's life is half chance. Make the best of it and enjoy the ride.

Having children makes people happy. As in deep, deep happy. It's really not as mysterious as some make it out to be.

This is generally not true: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/06/28/having-kids.... Although it does seem to be true that most people think having kids will make them much happier.

Seems to counter itself with a statement like: "Parents still report feeling a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives than those who've never had kids."

Obviously if one equates happiness to lower amounts of worries and responsibilities than sure.. But that seems kind of.... superficial?

Note: I am not in anyway saying that those who choose to not have kids are superficial, it is their choice -- just as it was mine to have a kid.

kids: if you can't afford them, use a condom

Agreed.

The game background implies the player had a good job, could afford kids, but fell on hard times after cranking out some pups.

The player was pretty dumb not to have more than a thousand dollars in savings at the start of the month, then.

The player had been unemployed for a while, benefits ran out, savings depleted.

Where the player went wrong was letting things get so desperate that choices were limited.

So the game screws you over before you begin. It's like a car racing simulator where you start out three feet from a wall, travelling at 120mph. And every time you crash, the game tells you that this just goes to prove that driving is dangerous.

Or like playing QWOP and concluding that running is hard.

"cell phone: don't get one if you can't afford it (ditto for a regular phone)"

This is kind of a tricky thing, right? Phone access is still essential for job hunting, and payphones aren't terribly common anymore either. Borrowing a friend's phone is sometimes possible, but for getting a callback? Not so much.

Same thing goes for internet access (which, of the two, I think would probably be a better investment once a job is secured). Even so, low-wage jobs are often very dependent on scheduling and thus require a phone to get updated about shift changes.

(note also that yes, you can get net access from unsecured wireless networks [increasingly shunned due to piracy and access concerns] and public libraries [which may not be convenient to get to])

Simply not getting a phone (generalize to point of contact if desired) is not really a good option.

You can get a prepaid phone. Without a monthly contract a phone really only costs as much as you use it.

If you're only using your phone for job calls, this should be fairly cheap.

The per-minute rates are generally high (on the order of $0.30/min) and the prepaid time generally expires (in 10-30 days for low-dollar loadings). If you are actively searching for work, you need to have enough time loaded to handle a telephone interview and to be put on hold from time to time. Once that's covered, you need to top up the time at regular intervals in order to avoid losing what you've already paid for -- and that leads to a non-refundable "savings account" with your provider. Prepaid is not significantly cheaper than a low-end contract, and can be more expensive.

Your job choices here were waiter, warehouse worker, and office temp.

Who gets a telephone interview for any of those things?

At least I know that no warehouse job I ever worked required a telephone interview.

Based on the ignorance of your statements, I would have to guess that you're either of an upper middle class background with very little exposure to poverty or that you have an overt political agenda.

I'm really trying to see the intellectual validity of your statements. I'm really trying to understand if you truly believe what you're saying. Would you actually make those same decisions?

Sorry, this isn't against you. I just see these type of comments often, and they only seem to make sense to me, in some abstract 'know-it-all' 'hindsight 20-20' sort of way, as if all of these life decisions are black and white and obvious.

You're very funny, and you have no clue what you're talking about.

I would suggest that, perhaps, he has much more of a clue than you'd like to admit. Maybe not about you specifically, but I too have noticed that, in the general case, those who lecture the truly poor have never been truly poor, or in many cases even mostly poor, at all. Full disclosure: I was once one of those assholes.

.

I, personally, have never been in a state of poverty. I've been very lucky. I was lucky to be born male and white in a country (and a state within it) where there were opportunities available to me. I was lucky to be born to parents who were reasonably educated but had enough discipline to take care of a kid (my father did, anyway). And I was lucky that a number of my own decisions, foolish in retrospect but in all seriousness a good idea at the time, did not come back to bite me in the ass.

I would suggest that, when talking about how people should not make those decisions, perhaps you could entertain the idea that they see no alternative. I've certainly been guilty of this before, both politically when in a certain libertarian phase (I got better) and in my professional life, when I drove myself to frustration wondering why person X did this thing that I instantly realized was stupid. Perhaps no alternative is within their view. (Even if you've been there, surely there's the possibility that you have certain advantages, in being able to see "the big picture", that others lack?)

Sure, there's no doubt some of the lazy "welfare queens" that the American right likes to demonize; I'm sure some exist. But I have come to something of an understanding in my own life that those in poverty are much more likely to encounter Morton's forks than others, and I find it more difficult than I did during that libertarian phase to self-righteously castigate such folks for making bad decisions when they have few, if any, good choices to make.

.

From your other posts, it seems like you're not one of the people who's born on third base and thinks they hit a triple, but a lot of folks who write as you do are indeed those people--and the simple fact that you're able to do what you do, to have ended up in a position where you can perform the mental gymnastics necessary to be a (I assume, good) programmer, that maybe, despite whatever else, you weren't exactly birthed in the batter's box.

Just something to think about.