5 ms·

I'm also bemused by the lack of understanding and empathy in this thread. For all the social righteousness spouted by HN as a whole, this is disappointing to wi

I'm also bemused by the lack of understanding and empathy in this thread. For all the social righteousness spouted by HN as a whole, this is disappointing to witness

byEngineer 12y ago
I think it comes from all the Political Correctness that many of us in the Western World have to adjust to or face employment termination, scrutiny, social insulation. I will tell you just this: I'm disappointed that "poor" can't pick up a sofa from the street for free. That's what I did when I was poor. Living in a Brooklyn basement with roaches on minimal wage, straight from the plane, barely speaking English. These guys aren't poor. Poor don't buy new $1,500 sofas. Heck, right know with kid and wife and combined income close to $200k I don't have $1,500 sofa as there are better ways to spend (invest) money. My sofa is from Ikea, got it in 2007 for about $1,000. They are stupid.
- _broody 12y ago
  The matter is not just about one couple engaging in 'stupid' economically self-destructive behavior. The question is why is the issue so widespread? Why are these RTB businesses making such a killing exploiting a behavior that has become increasingly massive in the 7 years since the recession started? What is so screwed up in American society that the lower class families which should be saving up and making careful purchasing decisions to improve their lot in life, are instead throwing themselves at the wolves' mouths?
  - byEngineer 12y ago
    They have no family to rely upon and maybe borrow money from or get other help from them - because cultural marxism destroyed family. They don't have society that will laugh in their face when they do something as stupid as this - so they won't do it again - because political correctness doesn't allow us to criticize them in a harsh manner. PC being - of course - a construct of cultural marxism. Instead they have a culture where being poor is something to brag about. Everybody is supposed to do something about their wrong choices - from Mr. President to the Middle Class. It's not their fault. It is our fault. The Capitalist society fault - cultural marxism at works again. Maybe if we all here just laughed loud enough so other poor could hear it, maybe then it would be just unacceptable for them to do stupid things like this. Maybe, if they knew the society will not care if they waste $4k, they would be much more cautious. Maybe, other poor, need an example, so they don't do stuff like that. Maybe strong families, churches - shouldn't have been targeted for destruction. Because maybe they could help them. Where I'm coming from we have this saying: communism is all about fixing problems that it created in the first place. And this story above is a classic example.
    - muuh-gnu 12y ago
      > Where I'm coming from we have this saying: communism is all about fixing problems that it created in the first place. As you will observe, HN is throughly infected with the communist delusion, commonly observed with atheist intelectuals. People like us, who escaped communist shitholes, after having to witness how it degenerates whole societies like a cancer and therefore being allergic to the false "but but but we have to help!" siren call, will be attacked by the infected often for merely loudly pronouncing the word "communism", which the rabid marxists are trying to cover up like the plague. After escaping to the west precisely to escape the social trainwrecks caused by the communist fallacy, it is so sad having to watch the new home going down the same damn way as if they didnt have basically the rest of the planet as a cautionary tale.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
Joeboy 12y ago
I find it hard to empathize because I just have no experience of whatever phenomenon is making these people go out and spend thousands of dollars on tat. I don't understand it any more than I understand rich people spending millions on shinier tat when they could be investing it in the search for an ebola vaccine. I can sympathize because clearly they're getting a shitty deal out of life, and I'm aware of various possible explanations as to why somebody with no money might want to buy expensive goods, but I can't really do empathy because the phenomenon is basically mysterious and counterintuitive to me.
mbillie1 12y ago
This thread is indeed alarmingly close to becoming a parody of itself: "Why don't poor people just make more money?"
- brandonmenc 12y ago
  No, people are saying, "why don't these people just spend less money."
  - billmalarky 12y ago
    I would bet that there is a good answer for that besides the simple one that they are "just shitty people" that many are jumping to though. For example, maybe they don't think much about the future because they feel they have no good future regardless. So they take the hit to ease a little bit of the struggle. My point is that I suspect a lot of the "haters," so to speak, in this thread have never experienced hopelessness in their lives before.
cheald 12y ago
You're not considering that some of us may have actually been/are poor. My frustration at people throw their paycheck-to-paycheck earnings at Rent-a-centers isn't "oh, look at the stupid poors", it's "I've been there, and I know that you can get a $1500 couch for $50 cash if you are willing to get up at 5 AM on Saturday mornings and go hit garage sales." The article's presentation of "These people have no options except to be horrifically exploited" is wrong at best, maybe even dishonest. No matter how much money you make, spending beyond your means because you have to have luxuries you really can't afford is a bad financial play. I feel a lot of empathy for people who get caught in the RAC trap. They're digging themselves into a hole that they'll never escape from, and that's genuinely sad. But it's a fixable problem! They aren't victims of their circumstances, they're victims of their own consumerism. At the end of the day, each of us is responsible for what we choose to spend our earnings on, and if you choose to spend all your expendable income on instant gratification, that's your choice, and you get to own the consequences of that choice.
- Delmania 12y ago
  How similar was your situation? Did you have a family you needed to support? A full time job?
  - MrZongle2 12y ago
    Wait, are you implying that the parent poster wasn't poor enough to appreciate the situation?
    - MadManE 12y ago
      This sounds like the kind of situation you would see on r/TumblrInAction. . . .
  - cheald 12y ago
    You realize that no matter how I answer this question, someone will say "Oh, you weren't as poor as X", and thus claim that I'm not qualified to empathize, right? I had a family and was self-employed, which meant no guarantee of stable income and self-employment insurance, plus self-employment taxes. My take home covered rent, food, and basic utilities - usually. We certainly couldn't afford new furniture or appliances. We ate at a 10-year-old kitchen table that cost $100 from a grocery store with 4 chairs, which were literally falling apart from use. My couch was second-hand from a garage sale. My car was a used one that I learned to repair myself because I couldn't afford to pay a mechanic to fix it for me. I could have "afforded" to rent furniture. I even looked at it at one point, did the math on it, and nope'd right out of there. My wife wasn't happy at all - she'd been campaigning for new furniture for a long time - but it was the right financial choice. I'm in a much more stable financial situation now, but my kitchen table is a used one that my wife and I stripped, sanded, and refinished ourselves. My entertainment center we got from some friends who were moving and didn't have room for it. My TV I picked up on the curb, and it cost me $35 for a new DLP bulb. My coffee table I got for $20 at a furniture outlet store. I still have the garage sale couch.
georgemcbay 12y ago
HN does have a pretty clear libertarian bent, so I'm not surprised to see many expressing the idea that the responsibility lies 100% with the people doing the renting. The situation is a lot more nuanced for me: yes, the people doing the renting do have some responsibility for this, but: 1) I don't see responsibility-shifting as justification for scummy business practices. If what you do as a business is fundamentally scummy (even if legal) then you're a scumbag, period, and deserve to be called out and taunted (and, if it were up to me, regulated out of business). The people running these rent-to-own companies (like most payday loan places, underhanded adware software pushers, etc) are scumbags and I wish the worst kind of bad karma on them, though sadly I don't actually believe in karma. 2) I don't fully understand how someone could have a total lack of empathy for the renters here, though I'm not surprised to see it. If this were a story about some startup founder who just as stupidly maxed all of his personal credit on some startup (ignoring the obvious math of how likely he is to fail, not entirely different from how some are blaming these renters for ignoring the math), there would be a lot more sympathy here, I think, due to relatability (mere exposure effect). Bad decisions are not something only poor people make, they just happen to pay a much higher (normalized) price for bad financial decisions than the rest of us because they are already so close to having nothing.
- MadManE 12y ago
  Bad decisions make people poor. Being poor doesn't cause you to make bad decisions.
  - henrikgs 12y ago
    Except it probably does. There are a lot of research suggesting that being poor is stressful and mentally draining, rendering you more likely to make poor decisions.
  - kwhitefoot 12y ago
    Of course it does. In many cases you end up with no way to make the good decisions effective. I've never been what you might call seriously poor but I was unemployed for a few months after university and while the state did pay me a small benefit and I am not a big spender I quickly reached a point where I couldn't afford to put petrol in my car (a very frugal Mini) and not long afterward could not afford bus fares. This constrains your life decisions like eating healthy food can be impossible to make not because you can't afford the food but because you cannot make the journey to the shop, buying a USD 50 dollar sofa can be can be difficult because you can't afford the fuel to travel around town looking for the bargain. Of course all these things can be done but they require a greater degree of organization of the poor than it requires of someone who already has all that he needs to just decide to buy something with money that doesn't matter. If you have a minimum wage job you will inevitably be more stressed and stress leads to bad decisions.
Strang 12y ago
This may be wildly off-topic, but I think this kind of disconnect is caused by a modern conflation of the concepts of "society" and "government". I think society should be against these businesses. I think government should leave them be.

I'm also bemused by the lack of understanding and empathy in this thread. For all the social righteousness spouted by HN as a whole, this is disappointing to witness

byEngineer 12y ago

I think it comes from all the Political Correctness that many of us in the Western World have to adjust to or face employment termination, scrutiny, social insulation. I will tell you just this: I'm disappointed that "poor" can't pick up a sofa from the street for free. That's what I did when I was poor. Living in a Brooklyn basement with roaches on minimal wage, straight from the plane, barely speaking English. These guys aren't poor. Poor don't buy new $1,500 sofas. Heck, right know with kid and wife and combined income close to $200k I don't have $1,500 sofa as there are better ways to spend (invest) money. My sofa is from Ikea, got it in 2007 for about $1,000. They are stupid.

_broody 12y ago
The matter is not just about one couple engaging in 'stupid' economically self-destructive behavior. The question is why is the issue so widespread? Why are these RTB businesses making such a killing exploiting a behavior that has become increasingly massive in the 7 years since the recession started? What is so screwed up in American society that the lower class families which should be saving up and making careful purchasing decisions to improve their lot in life, are instead throwing themselves at the wolves' mouths?
- byEngineer 12y ago
  They have no family to rely upon and maybe borrow money from or get other help from them - because cultural marxism destroyed family. They don't have society that will laugh in their face when they do something as stupid as this - so they won't do it again - because political correctness doesn't allow us to criticize them in a harsh manner. PC being - of course - a construct of cultural marxism. Instead they have a culture where being poor is something to brag about. Everybody is supposed to do something about their wrong choices - from Mr. President to the Middle Class. It's not their fault. It is our fault. The Capitalist society fault - cultural marxism at works again. Maybe if we all here just laughed loud enough so other poor could hear it, maybe then it would be just unacceptable for them to do stupid things like this. Maybe, if they knew the society will not care if they waste $4k, they would be much more cautious. Maybe, other poor, need an example, so they don't do stuff like that. Maybe strong families, churches - shouldn't have been targeted for destruction. Because maybe they could help them. Where I'm coming from we have this saying: communism is all about fixing problems that it created in the first place. And this story above is a classic example.
  - muuh-gnu 12y ago
    > Where I'm coming from we have this saying: communism is all about fixing problems that it created in the first place. As you will observe, HN is throughly infected with the communist delusion, commonly observed with atheist intelectuals. People like us, who escaped communist shitholes, after having to witness how it degenerates whole societies like a cancer and therefore being allergic to the false "but but but we have to help!" siren call, will be attacked by the infected often for merely loudly pronouncing the word "communism", which the rabid marxists are trying to cover up like the plague. After escaping to the west precisely to escape the social trainwrecks caused by the communist fallacy, it is so sad having to watch the new home going down the same damn way as if they didnt have basically the rest of the planet as a cautionary tale.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

Joeboy 12y ago

I find it hard to empathize because I just have no experience of whatever phenomenon is making these people go out and spend thousands of dollars on tat. I don't understand it any more than I understand rich people spending millions on shinier tat when they could be investing it in the search for an ebola vaccine. I can sympathize because clearly they're getting a shitty deal out of life, and I'm aware of various possible explanations as to why somebody with no money might want to buy expensive goods, but I can't really do empathy because the phenomenon is basically mysterious and counterintuitive to me.

mbillie1 12y ago

This thread is indeed alarmingly close to becoming a parody of itself: "Why don't poor people just make more money?"

brandonmenc 12y ago
No, people are saying, "why don't these people just spend less money."
- billmalarky 12y ago
  I would bet that there is a good answer for that besides the simple one that they are "just shitty people" that many are jumping to though. For example, maybe they don't think much about the future because they feel they have no good future regardless. So they take the hit to ease a little bit of the struggle. My point is that I suspect a lot of the "haters," so to speak, in this thread have never experienced hopelessness in their lives before.

cheald 12y ago

You're not considering that some of us may have actually been/are poor. My frustration at people throw their paycheck-to-paycheck earnings at Rent-a-centers isn't "oh, look at the stupid poors", it's "I've been there, and I know that you can get a $1500 couch for $50 cash if you are willing to get up at 5 AM on Saturday mornings and go hit garage sales." The article's presentation of "These people have no options except to be horrifically exploited" is wrong at best, maybe even dishonest. No matter how much money you make, spending beyond your means because you have to have luxuries you really can't afford is a bad financial play. I feel a lot of empathy for people who get caught in the RAC trap. They're digging themselves into a hole that they'll never escape from, and that's genuinely sad. But it's a fixable problem! They aren't victims of their circumstances, they're victims of their own consumerism. At the end of the day, each of us is responsible for what we choose to spend our earnings on, and if you choose to spend all your expendable income on instant gratification, that's your choice, and you get to own the consequences of that choice.

Delmania 12y ago
How similar was your situation? Did you have a family you needed to support? A full time job?
- MrZongle2 12y ago
  Wait, are you implying that the parent poster wasn't poor enough to appreciate the situation?
  - MadManE 12y ago
    This sounds like the kind of situation you would see on r/TumblrInAction. . . .
- cheald 12y ago
  You realize that no matter how I answer this question, someone will say "Oh, you weren't as poor as X", and thus claim that I'm not qualified to empathize, right? I had a family and was self-employed, which meant no guarantee of stable income and self-employment insurance, plus self-employment taxes. My take home covered rent, food, and basic utilities - usually. We certainly couldn't afford new furniture or appliances. We ate at a 10-year-old kitchen table that cost $100 from a grocery store with 4 chairs, which were literally falling apart from use. My couch was second-hand from a garage sale. My car was a used one that I learned to repair myself because I couldn't afford to pay a mechanic to fix it for me. I could have "afforded" to rent furniture. I even looked at it at one point, did the math on it, and nope'd right out of there. My wife wasn't happy at all - she'd been campaigning for new furniture for a long time - but it was the right financial choice. I'm in a much more stable financial situation now, but my kitchen table is a used one that my wife and I stripped, sanded, and refinished ourselves. My entertainment center we got from some friends who were moving and didn't have room for it. My TV I picked up on the curb, and it cost me $35 for a new DLP bulb. My coffee table I got for $20 at a furniture outlet store. I still have the garage sale couch.

georgemcbay 12y ago

HN does have a pretty clear libertarian bent, so I'm not surprised to see many expressing the idea that the responsibility lies 100% with the people doing the renting. The situation is a lot more nuanced for me: yes, the people doing the renting do have some responsibility for this, but: 1) I don't see responsibility-shifting as justification for scummy business practices. If what you do as a business is fundamentally scummy (even if legal) then you're a scumbag, period, and deserve to be called out and taunted (and, if it were up to me, regulated out of business). The people running these rent-to-own companies (like most payday loan places, underhanded adware software pushers, etc) are scumbags and I wish the worst kind of bad karma on them, though sadly I don't actually believe in karma. 2) I don't fully understand how someone could have a total lack of empathy for the renters here, though I'm not surprised to see it. If this were a story about some startup founder who just as stupidly maxed all of his personal credit on some startup (ignoring the obvious math of how likely he is to fail, not entirely different from how some are blaming these renters for ignoring the math), there would be a lot more sympathy here, I think, due to relatability (mere exposure effect). Bad decisions are not something only poor people make, they just happen to pay a much higher (normalized) price for bad financial decisions than the rest of us because they are already so close to having nothing.

MadManE 12y ago
Bad decisions make people poor. Being poor doesn't cause you to make bad decisions.
- henrikgs 12y ago
  Except it probably does. There are a lot of research suggesting that being poor is stressful and mentally draining, rendering you more likely to make poor decisions.
- kwhitefoot 12y ago
  Of course it does. In many cases you end up with no way to make the good decisions effective. I've never been what you might call seriously poor but I was unemployed for a few months after university and while the state did pay me a small benefit and I am not a big spender I quickly reached a point where I couldn't afford to put petrol in my car (a very frugal Mini) and not long afterward could not afford bus fares. This constrains your life decisions like eating healthy food can be impossible to make not because you can't afford the food but because you cannot make the journey to the shop, buying a USD 50 dollar sofa can be can be difficult because you can't afford the fuel to travel around town looking for the bargain. Of course all these things can be done but they require a greater degree of organization of the poor than it requires of someone who already has all that he needs to just decide to buy something with money that doesn't matter. If you have a minimum wage job you will inevitably be more stressed and stress leads to bad decisions.

Strang 12y ago

This may be wildly off-topic, but I think this kind of disconnect is caused by a modern conflation of the concepts of "society" and "government". I think society should be against these businesses. I think government should leave them be.