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Its tricky to feel sympathy w/ the lady in this article. She's part of the most benefitted generation, the "hardships" shown are induced by her own choices (exp

• x5n1 11y ago
  It's not tricky at all. The government eats that $300 dollars for nothing, you could easily index those fines depending on how much money people actually have. But then you can't overtax the underclass with policing. I live in Canada, you know how much the police harasses me? Not at all. The expensive dinner is three meals, which comes out to around $7/meal; not really that expensive. America has a huge underclass made by shitty government policies that favor corporate interest and complexes like the military industrial complex or the prison industrial complex at the price of its people. It's as simple as that. And they individualize all of those bad policies and make individuals pay for it, as if it's their fault. It's not.
  • hockeybias 11y ago
    Actually it is not as simple as that. You are over-simplifying.
• rdlecler1 11y ago
  It sounds like you have never been poor. Poverty and misfortune wears you down. A moment of weakness is inevitable. Moreover financial stress has shown to significantly reduce effective IQ.
  • MrZongle2 11y ago
    Exceeding the speed limit isn't exclusive to the poor and downtrodden. Should fines for breaking the law be different for different incomes? Edit: for those of you saying 'yes': who decides what is "fair"?
    • caskance 11y ago
      Why not? They are in some countries, like Finland. It seems to work OK.
    • samd 11y ago
      Absolutely. How is it just to punish one person with financial catastrophe while another with mild inconvenience for the same crime?
    • zer00eyz 11y ago
      In some places it is: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland-home-of-the-103000-speeding-ticket/387484/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland-...
    • klodolph 11y ago
      What is the purpose of the fine? Is it to discourage people from breaking the law, is it to recover damages, or is it to make income for the government?
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • scottwhudson 11y ago
      This is already being done in places like Finland, where speeding tickets are calculated as a percentage of income. This makes a lot of sense given the simple fact that $300 means very different things to different people. If the goal of a fine is deter law-breaking activity, why not use a system that incentivizes everyone equally?
    • tomjen3 11y ago
      Nah it is pretty much a universal crime. And I actually think it would be correct to fine different people different amounts - say 10 minutes of income for every mile above the limit, up to a max of some percentage (say 20%) over the limit. That way you have the minimum necessary fine to make it not worth speeding without it being so that rich people can speed with impunity.
• kafkaesq 11y ago
  $300 is beyond exorbitant for a speeding ticket. It's vindictive and exploitive.
  • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    ...and totally, completely avoidable.
    • deleted 11y ago
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  • nikdaheratik 11y ago
    IIRC, she was able to talk them down to $65 anyways, but she lost a days work so it was still a big loss.
• skolos 11y ago
  It's even trickier if you consider that she lost her house in 2008. How?! She is in her seventies, the house should have been long paid out. So this means she borrowed heavily against the house equity and spent all that money. I do feel sorry for her problems right now, but I sympathize more with people who were prudent not to risk their house to pay for expensive toys (Smart car).
  • sliverstorm 11y ago
    If you read the article, it sounds like rent hikes in the mobile home park she lived in made her unit unsellable.
• gist 11y ago
  > Its tricky to feel sympathy w/ the lady in this article. ... > and by world standards she's won the lottery to even be alive and living comfortably at her age" Why does that need to be trotted out whenever a story about someone's misfortune or bad circumstances is written about? It would be nice if people could just be happy with what they have because they aren't living somewhere else, under worse conditions, but unfortunately that is not the way the majority of people think and in fact it wouldn't necessarily be healthy if they did. [1] I don't wake up in the morning (and don't know anyone who does) and think "wow I am so lucky to have a job and to earn a decent income that slow driver in front of me shouldn't annoy me so much!". If I get a meal that was expensive but was "bad" in a restaurant I don't think "thats fine at least I am alive and can afford to eat here how lucky am I". You compare yourself to your peers and what your expectations are growing up and what you experience. Of course life for anyone alive today is better than almost anytime in human history but people's baseline is today and where they are not another time period or where someone is living in a third world country. [1] Because for only one reason it would also prevent people from striving and trying to make their life better in some way.
  • refurb 11y ago
    You compare yourself to your peers and what your expectations are growing up and what you experience. Life is much easier if you don't have that mindset. I, in fact, do wake up every morning thankful for what I have, even if it's not as much as my neighbor.
    • gist 11y ago
      > Life is much easier if you don't have that mindset. Why? Striving for something is actually fun for some people. (Unless I am not getting your point exactly.)
      • refurb 11y ago
        Oh I'm certainly striving to make my own life better. I just don't use other people as a gauge as to whether or not I've "made it".
• sliverstorm 11y ago
  There's also a theme: Should she go to the dentist, or take a guided tour of buildings designed by her favorite architect, Frank Lloyd Wright? Each cost $100. She picked Frank Lloyd Wright. Her teeth could wait... The biggest blow came in 2013 when she faced $8,000 in charges for emergency dental work and rig repairs.
• tosseraccount 11y ago
  "most benefitted generation"? Is there a website that does the accounting for this? Do you have a link? [ Serious question, has anyone done an analysis. I keep hearing "boomer ripoffs" but I'd like an impartial analysis. Also, I don't think the 80 year old in the article is a "boomer"; more likely she's a "boomer's" mother. ]
• harrumph 11y ago
  The cost of going 8MPH over the speed limit being pegged at a week's income is not anything any person chooses. It is imposed, as well as being brutal. These backdoor taxes on the poor exist for only one reason: concentrations of wealth work very successfully at avoiding most taxation.
  • maerF0x0 11y ago
    The choice to drive, the choice to speed are what I was talking about.
    • harrumph 11y ago
      She LIVES on the road. There is no "choice" to drive in her case. And with municipalities steadily losing revenue (see corporate tax avoidance above) signage is commonly foregone, making it far from a settled issue as to knowledge of speed limits. The word "choice" belongs in different situations than this.
• Eridrus 11y ago
  I have mixed feelings too; She clearly had some significant misfortune with the housing bubble, and the US' incentives for people to buy homes is partly responsible, but financially she received a 20k windfall, gets social security, earns enough to not get food stamps, buys organic because she has some beliefs about non-organic food and the reason she is 50k in the hole is because she decided to buy a motor home. So it sounds like she would be fine if she decided to spend her life/money differently, but she's set on spending money on things she can't really afford, so we get this article... I'm all for basic income, redistribution of wealth, etc, but I don't think we have enough resources to finance everyone's aspirations via taxation.
• gwern 11y ago
  > are induced by her own choices (expensive dinner, speeding ticket) The point of the quoting of the speeds ("43 mph in a 35-mph") was to point out that the ticket she got was part of the trend of local American governments of turning traffic enforcement into unchecked taxation and exploitation of poor people by abusing traffic rules to the hilt to hand out as many bogus tickets as possible in order to turn a profit. This has come up many times on HN. In this case, it sounds like it was part of a speed trap where a sign is put up to lower the speed on a very short stretch of road by 10mph or so and then a cop can sit there and harvest the traffic; there's one of these where I live, and it makes me furious because aside from being transparently bogus a highly regressive tax/revenue trick, it actually makes everyone less safe because the flow of traffic along that road is always faster than the dip section and if everyone complied with it and braked, that would endanger people and encourage rear-endings. Similar to the abuse of red-light cameras.
• vinceguidry 11y ago
  Every time I read stories like this, I think of dozens of things, little things, that people can do to improve their situation, one thing at a time. First off, the speeding ticket. You're in an RV, how do you go 15 over the limit? Doesn't make sense to me. You're wasting gas and painting a big red target on your back for the cops. If I were in her situation, I'd have already trained myself to keep to the speed limit no matter what. It's possible, don't tell me it isn't. Even more possible in an RV with limited acceleration. I found it harder to speed in my 20 year old truck than I did to not speed. Second, the busted water pump. With all the time she had on her hands, surely she could have done some research in the library on how to repair these things and done it herself as opposed to spending hundreds / thousands on paying someone to do it for her. There was no rush, she was able to take her time finding someone, why not take that same time to save even more money? I say these things because I used to be really hard up for money and resources, and I was able to get resourceful in return. The human brain is amazing, it finds a way. You just have to listen to it and be willing to try stuff out that's outside your comfort zone. For me this kind of resourcefulness is never too far from my mind, as comfortable as my dev lifestyle is right now, if economic circumstances forced me onto the street, I'd work out a way to thrive pretty quick, I simply cannot abide the slow degradation of self-worth that other people in these sorts of situations seem to experience. But the more I think about it, the more I realize she's already being as resourceful as she can. It's a reminder that deep down, people really do differ vastly in ability, and that we need to be compassionate and generous to those caught in nasty situations with no way to pull themselves out. But at the same time we need to encourage the kind of inventiveness and resourcefulness that made America great. Times are tough, but we can be tougher.
  • 1024core 11y ago
    > You're in an RV, how do you go 15 over the limit? She was doing 43 in 35, or just 8mph over the limit. That's not impossible.
• nadezhda18 11y ago
  I agree with you. I was surprised to read she could afford to pay $25 for a meal! In her broke situation, she should be mastering the art of cooking! Then these $25 would last her for a week or longer, not for 3 meals. Maybe I do sound judgmental, but I grew up in USSR right before it got collapsed, and I remember how our family tried to survive :-|