11 ms·

Yes. It is true that some people just need to live within their means. But for people who are poor in the traditional sense, the cash flow is just too low. Ther

by tibbar 5y ago

Yes. It is true that some people just need to live within their means. But for people who are poor in the traditional sense, the cash flow is just too low. There’s no way to live well on that income. Finding ways to save cash isn’t really an endgame, other than perhaps tactically preventing going bankrupt from an extra medical expense, etc. What you need is more income. The most reliable vehicle to this is to go to college and make plans to go into a healthcare/engineering/accounting etc career, but that’s a really hard plan to pivot to at a certain point in life.

MaximumYComb 5y ago
I started my pivot from a trade background into tech by going to university when I was 30. I'm 36 now and about to graduate while I've also been working in the field now for over two years. I've done this while being a single father to two young children (they were 1 and 3 when I started night univeristy). It was certainly not easy. I nearly burnt out hard multiple times.
vmception 5y ago
> but that’s a really hard plan to pivot to at a certain point in life. or while the cash flow is just too low at any point in life
whatshisface 5y ago
There's something seriously wrong with a society where nobody can live comfortably without a white-collar job while at the same time there's no way we would survive if we were all accountants.
- tibbar 5y ago
  I agree. How do you see us fixing this? Maybe universal basic income? Over the last century we've eliminated many of the positions in agriculture and manufacturing that were traditionally considered good blue collar jobs. Automation on that front is only going to increase. Obviously the gig jobs - Uber, Lyft, DoorDash - are a really poor substitute...
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    Here are some solutions I can think of. No telling if any would work, these are just conversation starters. 1. Socialism. I don't need to describe this because you've already heard of it. :) 2. Extremely general insurance. You don't know how successful you're going to be before you're born, so you have insurance policies for lifetime income. If we can insure against the treatment costs of cystic fibrosis (parent's insurance covers dependents, then they get their own insurance when they grow up) then we can insure against the costs incurred by being born with an IQ less than 160 in an economy that's out to get you if you so much as blink. Is having 159 IQ a pathological deficiency? Well, pathology is relative to your environment. ;) 3. By fixing our existing system. Maybe all of these pointless wars, intelligence agency black budgets and the dead weight overhead incurred by structuring government projects to allocate funding according to the influence of representative districts, adds up and costs us in a way that puts the lower income 50% underwater first. Maybe there's enough to go around, but we're wasting it.
    - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
      #1
- treis 5y ago
  Plenty of blue collar jobs pay enough to live comfortably
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    A society consisting exclusively of highly specialized welders and accountants can't operate either. We do actually need someone to deliver packages for example. The jobs that don't pay a living wage are oftentimes more essential than some that do.
    - strken 5y ago
      Do we need someone to deliver packages? If last mile package delivery was a skilled profession that earned workers $200k a year, more people would choose to walk/drive/bus to the depot. There's no point streamlining a process at a cost of e.g. $35k/year if you can pay someone $30k/year to do it.
      - gruez 5y ago
        >Do we need someone to deliver packages? If last mile package delivery was a skilled profession that earned workers $200k a year, more people would choose to walk/drive/bus to the depot. Do we need someone to farm food for us? If farming was a skilled profession that earned workers $200k a year, more people would choose to grow their own vegetable garden.
        tibbar 5y ago
        And then you might decide to pay some one to help you in your vegetable garden part time, and before you know it...
        strken 5y ago
        The point here is that jobs are elastic and can be automated or shuffled around, we just choose not to do so because we don't value the time of the worker enough. When you get a package delivered for $2 instead of $3 you're implicitly putting a lower value on the time of someone else. We will always need someone to deliver packages. However, maybe we do not need someone to deliver a package of rice from Amazon for an unlivably low wage to a recipient who could have just gone to the supermarket. The same thing applies to the agricultural industry, which abuses immigrant labourers doing backbreaking work for low pay to provide you cheaper luxury goods. Maybe if strawberries reflected a livable wage you'd choose to eat more easily harvestable crops, like apples.
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  "It's the [housing] economy stupid" If we actually built an abundance of housing, where it would cease to be a vehicle to park stores of wealth, where there is no musical chairs competition to outcompete each other for the basic security of shelter, the deflationary cost savings that would percolate through the economy would be absolutely immense. I'm talking about even chipping away at the cost of education and healthcare immensely, because of how much of the cost goes into indirectly paying the housing of the huge amount of workers in those industry. In the world of mass housing at the cost of construction, everything is cheap, and we live with much more abundance.
  - pirate787 5y ago
    Its immigration policy too-- the 50 million or so foreign born living in the US today have overwhelmed our housing production.
    - mateo411 5y ago
      Yes, that's true. But we also need them to build the housing.
      - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
        Why??? Why not just pay a living wage to American citizens?
  - d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
    At some point you're just hitting the raw material cost of roof+walls+insulation+labor built to code which--for a pretty basic structure--can easily be $120k no matter the location. Even if land was free this would still be unattainable for many under-homed people.
    - reducesuffering 5y ago
      That's why I pointed to "mass housing at the cost of construction." $120k is the realm of minimums for SFH. For a bare necessities 432 Park Avenue[0], we should be able to do 3,000 residences within 85 stories of 800 sqft. apartments, at 50k per, amortized over 30 years and even cheaper after they're used. The Soviet Union couldn't give their people a lot but they could at least make some housing. 432 Park Ave's current prices are due to luxury amenities, Manhattan land, and inadequate housing supply. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue
brightball 5y ago
I was helping a hard working kid with some financial education and told him essentially the same thing. He simply needed to make more money. He was making $13 / hour at the time and I helped him line up an interview with a guy who was ready to hire him doing the same thing for $25 / hour + professional training. He ghosted me and the interviewer. I’d been working with him for MONTHS to help get his life straightened out. I still have no idea why he did it.
- monkeydreams 5y ago
  I've been that guy. There are any numbers of reasons for this. Shame, low confidence in meeting yours (and everyone else's) expectations, inability to imagine a better future (which leads to unimaginable cognitive load as you act in ways your brain finds torturous without any sense that it will ever improve), etc, etc. Typical people are all, pretty much, the same. Non-typical folk are different in their own ways. There is no single path to getting someone back up on their feet. This is one reason why anti-poverty campaigns - particularly the "mutual obligation" style of welfare - fail.
  - brightball 5y ago
    That makes some sense to me.
- djokkataja 5y ago
  Is it possible it was a cultural thing? This is reading a ton into small details and generalizing a lot but... You mentioned you were helping him "get his life straightened out"; maybe he felt like it was going to pull him away from the friends that he'd grown up with? Kind of a difference of subcultures: one subculture that's poor and that values loyalty to friends over most other things (money comes and goes) vs a subculture that values career and money over most other things. (Not that these values are necessarily always mutually exclusive... but sometimes it can be uncomfortable to straddle the gap.) The other thing that makes me wonder if it's a cultural gap is that you mentioned he was going to be able to make twice as much as he was making before for doing the same thing. If it's the same work as before, what's the difference if not cultural? Learning to talk a certain way about the things you do, use more professional language, present yourself a certain way, and ditch the people you work with if you can earn more money doing the same thing. Then he's eroding his value for loyalty by learning to bullshit the people he work with on a regular basis, because he's acting in a way that's not how he normally acts, and he's established a precedent that he's willing to ditch his new coworkers for an entirely different batch if he can make more money by doing so. He might look at that and look at the friends and/or community he already has and decide he doesn't like where that path might lead him. That could also explain why he ghosted you. He might feel ashamed because he feels that he owes you for genuinely trying to help him. But how can he repay you except by accepting your help? And explaining where he's coming from would only lead to an ugly conflict or you convincing him that he's irrational and should just take the job -- but he's already decided he doesn't want to go that route. If he cuts all conflict, nukes it from orbit, then he can get on with his life however he wants to.

by tibbar 5y ago

MaximumYComb 5y ago

I started my pivot from a trade background into tech by going to university when I was 30. I'm 36 now and about to graduate while I've also been working in the field now for over two years. I've done this while being a single father to two young children (they were 1 and 3 when I started night univeristy). It was certainly not easy. I nearly burnt out hard multiple times.

vmception 5y ago

> but that’s a really hard plan to pivot to at a certain point in life. or while the cash flow is just too low at any point in life

whatshisface 5y ago

There's something seriously wrong with a society where nobody can live comfortably without a white-collar job while at the same time there's no way we would survive if we were all accountants.

tibbar 5y ago
I agree. How do you see us fixing this? Maybe universal basic income? Over the last century we've eliminated many of the positions in agriculture and manufacturing that were traditionally considered good blue collar jobs. Automation on that front is only going to increase. Obviously the gig jobs - Uber, Lyft, DoorDash - are a really poor substitute...
- whatshisface 5y ago
  Here are some solutions I can think of. No telling if any would work, these are just conversation starters. 1. Socialism. I don't need to describe this because you've already heard of it. :) 2. Extremely general insurance. You don't know how successful you're going to be before you're born, so you have insurance policies for lifetime income. If we can insure against the treatment costs of cystic fibrosis (parent's insurance covers dependents, then they get their own insurance when they grow up) then we can insure against the costs incurred by being born with an IQ less than 160 in an economy that's out to get you if you so much as blink. Is having 159 IQ a pathological deficiency? Well, pathology is relative to your environment. ;) 3. By fixing our existing system. Maybe all of these pointless wars, intelligence agency black budgets and the dead weight overhead incurred by structuring government projects to allocate funding according to the influence of representative districts, adds up and costs us in a way that puts the lower income 50% underwater first. Maybe there's enough to go around, but we're wasting it.
  - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
    #1
treis 5y ago
Plenty of blue collar jobs pay enough to live comfortably
- whatshisface 5y ago
  A society consisting exclusively of highly specialized welders and accountants can't operate either. We do actually need someone to deliver packages for example. The jobs that don't pay a living wage are oftentimes more essential than some that do.
  - strken 5y ago
    Do we need someone to deliver packages? If last mile package delivery was a skilled profession that earned workers $200k a year, more people would choose to walk/drive/bus to the depot. There's no point streamlining a process at a cost of e.g. $35k/year if you can pay someone $30k/year to do it.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >Do we need someone to deliver packages? If last mile package delivery was a skilled profession that earned workers $200k a year, more people would choose to walk/drive/bus to the depot. Do we need someone to farm food for us? If farming was a skilled profession that earned workers $200k a year, more people would choose to grow their own vegetable garden.
      - tibbar 5y ago
        And then you might decide to pay some one to help you in your vegetable garden part time, and before you know it...
      - strken 5y ago
        The point here is that jobs are elastic and can be automated or shuffled around, we just choose not to do so because we don't value the time of the worker enough. When you get a package delivered for $2 instead of $3 you're implicitly putting a lower value on the time of someone else. We will always need someone to deliver packages. However, maybe we do not need someone to deliver a package of rice from Amazon for an unlivably low wage to a recipient who could have just gone to the supermarket. The same thing applies to the agricultural industry, which abuses immigrant labourers doing backbreaking work for low pay to provide you cheaper luxury goods. Maybe if strawberries reflected a livable wage you'd choose to eat more easily harvestable crops, like apples.
reducesuffering 5y ago
"It's the [housing] economy stupid" If we actually built an abundance of housing, where it would cease to be a vehicle to park stores of wealth, where there is no musical chairs competition to outcompete each other for the basic security of shelter, the deflationary cost savings that would percolate through the economy would be absolutely immense. I'm talking about even chipping away at the cost of education and healthcare immensely, because of how much of the cost goes into indirectly paying the housing of the huge amount of workers in those industry. In the world of mass housing at the cost of construction, everything is cheap, and we live with much more abundance.
- pirate787 5y ago
  Its immigration policy too-- the 50 million or so foreign born living in the US today have overwhelmed our housing production.
  - mateo411 5y ago
    Yes, that's true. But we also need them to build the housing.
    - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
      Why??? Why not just pay a living wage to American citizens?
- d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
  At some point you're just hitting the raw material cost of roof+walls+insulation+labor built to code which--for a pretty basic structure--can easily be $120k no matter the location. Even if land was free this would still be unattainable for many under-homed people.
  - reducesuffering 5y ago
    That's why I pointed to "mass housing at the cost of construction." $120k is the realm of minimums for SFH. For a bare necessities 432 Park Avenue[0], we should be able to do 3,000 residences within 85 stories of 800 sqft. apartments, at 50k per, amortized over 30 years and even cheaper after they're used. The Soviet Union couldn't give their people a lot but they could at least make some housing. 432 Park Ave's current prices are due to luxury amenities, Manhattan land, and inadequate housing supply. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue

brightball 5y ago

I was helping a hard working kid with some financial education and told him essentially the same thing. He simply needed to make more money. He was making $13 / hour at the time and I helped him line up an interview with a guy who was ready to hire him doing the same thing for $25 / hour + professional training. He ghosted me and the interviewer. I’d been working with him for MONTHS to help get his life straightened out. I still have no idea why he did it.

monkeydreams 5y ago
I've been that guy. There are any numbers of reasons for this. Shame, low confidence in meeting yours (and everyone else's) expectations, inability to imagine a better future (which leads to unimaginable cognitive load as you act in ways your brain finds torturous without any sense that it will ever improve), etc, etc. Typical people are all, pretty much, the same. Non-typical folk are different in their own ways. There is no single path to getting someone back up on their feet. This is one reason why anti-poverty campaigns - particularly the "mutual obligation" style of welfare - fail.
- brightball 5y ago
  That makes some sense to me.
djokkataja 5y ago
Is it possible it was a cultural thing? This is reading a ton into small details and generalizing a lot but... You mentioned you were helping him "get his life straightened out"; maybe he felt like it was going to pull him away from the friends that he'd grown up with? Kind of a difference of subcultures: one subculture that's poor and that values loyalty to friends over most other things (money comes and goes) vs a subculture that values career and money over most other things. (Not that these values are necessarily always mutually exclusive... but sometimes it can be uncomfortable to straddle the gap.) The other thing that makes me wonder if it's a cultural gap is that you mentioned he was going to be able to make twice as much as he was making before for doing the same thing. If it's the same work as before, what's the difference if not cultural? Learning to talk a certain way about the things you do, use more professional language, present yourself a certain way, and ditch the people you work with if you can earn more money doing the same thing. Then he's eroding his value for loyalty by learning to bullshit the people he work with on a regular basis, because he's acting in a way that's not how he normally acts, and he's established a precedent that he's willing to ditch his new coworkers for an entirely different batch if he can make more money by doing so. He might look at that and look at the friends and/or community he already has and decide he doesn't like where that path might lead him. That could also explain why he ghosted you. He might feel ashamed because he feels that he owes you for genuinely trying to help him. But how can he repay you except by accepting your help? And explaining where he's coming from would only lead to an ugly conflict or you convincing him that he's irrational and should just take the job -- but he's already decided he doesn't want to go that route. If he cuts all conflict, nukes it from orbit, then he can get on with his life however he wants to.