Being poor is growing up between the trailer park and the dump.
Being poor is skipping homework to help repair the $600 car so dad can make it to work tomorrow.
Being poor is your mother crying over a $100 invoice for the dental service you just received for the first time in living memory.
Being poor is quitting junior college early, because your Pell Grant ran out, and a $12.15/hr opportunity is over double your fast-food wage.
Being poor is never going back.
Being poor is 3-years-old glasses and squinting from the front row.
Being poor is _definitely_ going to put some money in the savings account next month.
Being poor is getting pulled over just for your car and hair looking ratty.
Being poor is 2 nights in jail because of a clerical error.
Being poor is realizing years later that you still live like you're poor.
Being poor is reading about VCs and ICOs and funding rounds on HN and thinking how huge an improvement just a tiny, tiny fraction of that money could make in your life.
Thank you for the inventory of my life. I remember those months as a kid when the cupboards were bare, and so I'd just shrug and go to bed without dinner. Thank goodness for government-sponsored low-income lunch program. That was my only meal many days.
Naturally I was surprised when recently I got informed I have white privilege by a bunch of spoiled children who've never known a day of hardship in their lives.
I'm not terribly enamoured with the Silicon Valley political atmosphere these days.
I am also white, and I also grew up poor. I agree that many (though far from all) of the college students who talk about socioeconomic inequality are spoiled brats.
However, you have misunderstood what "white privilege" means: it's not that your life has been easy, it's that the same situations would have been even harder if you had not been white.
White privilege and class privilege often get conflate in this country. I guess in part because our society has historically been very divided by race and in part because Americans are uncomfortable with the idea of class.
If you're white, you have white privilege, but you don't necessarily have class privilege. Class privilege isn't just about money either. If you grow up without much money, but to highly cultured and educated parents, you still have some class privilege.
Don't think for a minute that our white privilege isn't the major reason we can reflect on having been poor, rather than continuing to live that reality.
> Being poor is reading about VCs and ICOs and funding rounds on HN and thinking how huge an improvement just a tiny, tiny fraction of that money could make in your life.
This is what living in the SV for 6 years made me forget.
Speed trap as fund-raiser > clerical error lost paid ticket > license suspended > road block as fund-raiser > zero-tolerance "suspended license == go to jail" > impounded car, $1200 bond, and jail time "waiting on the judge to post bond."
Over in Alameda County, within sight of the Silicon Valley unicorns, people have been incorrectly arrested, jailed, and even ordered to register as sex offenders because of software used by the courts:
Didn't go to jail but I did have a warrant out for my arrest because the community service officer didn't turn in my paperwork. $200 down the drain plus having to lose a half a day of work, drive to another city (30 min) as well deal with a crying parent on the phone that I hadn't told about what had happened (because it was so dumb - setting off fireworks).
Going through it all, since it ended ok, was good. I was 20 and learned even more to 1) not trust cops, 2) the courts are fallible and 3) it's more f-cked up for other people than a white kid in college (which I was but sat through a lot of other cases that day and the previous time there).
You need to talk to someone who grew up in the DDR or the CCCP to get some perspective (although I bet people from the so called third world would have quite something to add, too!). I am a little better as I grew up in socialist Hungary.
Some memories that this article brought up: off-brand toys? You couldn't even buy LEGO until like 1982 for Hungarian forints. A few shops for diplomats sold it for hard currency which was impossible to get.
$800 cars? Comrade, you need to wait 5-10 years for a car and it's made out of paper and plastic. And it is literally incapable of going above 60 miles per hour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant
Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away. - man, I got a root canal done without painkillers because they ran out of painkillers.
Being poor is Goodwill underwear. - our undershirts looked like gray rags because you couldn't get whitening detergent for years. It was a fluke that didn't get corrected until the next five year plan.
air conditioning. --- HAHAHAHAHA try living in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict one of these, oven in the summer, too hot in the winter because the central heating is cranked up the wazzoo and you can't do shit about it.
Yes, there's degrees of poor ... poor all the way down.
This struck a chord with me:
Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger’s trash.
I've been poor enough in my life that dumpster diving was appealing and I'm glad I'm not now, but at least in my scenario there was a dumpster to dive into.
I spent some time by Lake Malawi there a couple of years ago and they don't even have dumpsters. Bottle-caps, and waste-paper from the (foreign aid funded) health clinic are valuable raw materials for whatever local craft industries there are. Being poor means these dodgy strangers showing up and splashing money around and who then start making inappropriate advances on the children.
But even along the lake they are privileged by having access to water and whatever tourism industry there is.
Away from the lake, being poor means not having clothes. Being poor means a minor injury is a death sentence.
Some of our philanthropist billionaires get some flack for the manner and means by which they distribute their aid, but a friend of mine working as a pharmacist there would just say "thank god for Bill Gates".
I grew up in the USSR. And then early Russia (the country was recovering from the USSR wreckage, even more painful).
The "$800 car" bit made me smile too.
PS. Now, when I live in a nice EU town, own a somewhat successful software company, and my #1 mission is so my kids never, NEVER EVER, _EVEN IN THEIR DREAMS_ have a tiny glimpse of that life.
Я с тобой согласен, товарищ! That's the mission indeed.
I fucking started a school in Hungary to give a better education to my (well, my brother's, details) little ones. Hungarian education didn't change enough from thirty years ago.
- Lying about where you grew up
- Being ashamed of free school lunch
- Being embarrassed and made fun of for wearing the same sorts of clothes every day
- Not wearing a coat in winter because you are embarrassed wearing the same coat for years
- Only ordering an appetizer over lunch at a job interview
- The soles of my $10 sneakers came off in P.E.
- Not playing any of the video games your coworkers played growing up
- Being extremely conservative with a little money once you have it, buying the cheapest ice cream, beans, etc...
- No prom, school dances, girl friends, etc... even the poor girls don't like you
- Only considering the public university since private ones meant taking loans as much as your parents made in a year and even though your test scores are higher than the average at MIT
- One family vacation in all the years growing up
- Inferiority complex
- Limited ambitions
- Feeling you don't belong
- Gaps in knowledge
- Too much willingness to take up hardship
On the other hand,
- Making your own food from raw ingredients: hamburgers, pizza, french fries, etc...
- Being amazed by foods that you were never aware of: pho, sushi, stromboli, bagels, sausages on a grill
- Approaching new places and people with naivety
- All knowledge gained and learned is well learnt and mostly self learnt
I'm curious about the MIT thing. In the 70's, when I applied around, MIT and other top schools made it clear that if you were qualified to go there and accepted, they'd find a way to get the bill paid with some combination of scholarships, loans, and work.
Nearly all schools say that. The result is that, before you are old enough to vote or drink, you are encouraged to take on a debt larger than the total amount of money your parents have ever made in five years, a debt which is not subject to bankruptcy laws.
If you make it out the other side of college with a bachelor's degree in a STEM field and an average job, it will still take you 21 years to pay it off.
If you don't feel that you can reasonably make a bet of that magnitude because your entire prior history tells you that it won't work -- that's entirely rational.
>> Being rich is considering having children at all.
This is it. I lost track on how many of my friends/peers/colleagues don't have children, because they live from paycheck to paycheck and simply cannot afford it, even if they wanted to. And this is in germany mind you, where you have a relativeley robust social security net...
Being rich I having enough money/income to not need to work.
In between is the middle class. There are middle class people who can afford to buy some of the stuff rich people buy, but if they lose their job they’ll be broke in a month or two.
You don't have to be independently wealthy to be rich. Most middle-class people are neither poor nor rich, though they'll usually tell you that they're poor as fuck if the topic of money comes up. Very few of them have any perspective on where their income lies with respect to the median, and what a median lifestyle provides.
I agree with what you have posted. An interesting point though is that poor women become pregnant at a rate far greater than that of their wealthy peers. Pregnancy rates and especially unplanned rates are far higher in 3rd world countries than in first world.
In the US this holds true as well due to a large incidence of unplanned pregnancies among the poor. Your point about the rich considering having children is apt as children are often planned by the wealthy.
I am not passing judgement on either side of the wealth divide but I think it is an interesting study.
> Being rich is worrying about North Korea instead of looking forward to blissful oblivion
Are people in America actually worried that NK is going to nuke anyone? Kim Jong Un knows if he ever fires one of those, it's game over for him. They're a big-ass bargaining chip. Threatening to fire them is the only reason he has them at all. He'll never actually do it.
Not many, no. People in America are concerned that Trump is going to order an attack on NK, which will end up with the destruction of Seoul and the Chinese army moving in to newly-unified Korea for peacekeeping.
I grew up in poverty and am legally blind. It was incredibly difficult to find any way of making any money at all. Seriously, it was very difficult just to get a $5.15/hr minimum wage job in Montana.
The strongest emotion I have felt to this day is the feeling that I would never get out of being poor.
To this day my nightmares are about losing my job, blowing through my emergency fund and not being able to find another job.
To this day, I don't buy beef at the grocery store. I can't bring myself to do it outside a special occasion. (Not saying I spend my money entirely wisely but that has stuck with me for some reason.)
I grew up living this, we hardly had money to eat, but success came relatively easy after high school by simply trying really hard. I applied for hundreds of programming jobs and interviewed at tens of companies before landing my first gig where I worked my ass off and proved myself, within five years being the lead developer there before leaving for greener pastures.
I had taught myself on computers we had been donated first QBasic and later PHP. I am certainly lucky, but part of me is resentful at my mother in particular for how easy it seems to be to not live in poverty. I am so confused about the topic and honestly find myself angry at myself for my own thoughts. It's really hard to explain. I don't mean to or want to judge anyone but it's difficult. It's a touchy anxiety ridden topic for me.
I don't know. I feel like programming was the one way out for me. Not everyone can program, and for me, if it wasn't programming I don't think I would have thought of anything else that bring me above barely subsistence.
Seems like survivor bias to me. To this day I still find out some stuff about how I grew up that I didn't know at the time; maybe your mum had other concerns she didn't bother to share with you...?
I've definitely felt this sort of emotion before, but it doesn't seem all that difficult to explain to me. Consider how easily von Neumann was able to solve problems that even his genius-level peers considered extremely difficult. Of course things that seem intractable to one person might seem obvious/trivial to someone with vastly higher intelligence. Not saying that von Neumann:his peers :: you:your mom, but I imagine this phenomenon is at least partially to blame.
Readit News
Being poor is growing up between the trailer park and the dump.
Being poor is skipping homework to help repair the $600 car so dad can make it to work tomorrow.
Being poor is your mother crying over a $100 invoice for the dental service you just received for the first time in living memory.
Being poor is quitting junior college early, because your Pell Grant ran out, and a $12.15/hr opportunity is over double your fast-food wage.
Being poor is never going back.
Being poor is 3-years-old glasses and squinting from the front row.
Being poor is _definitely_ going to put some money in the savings account next month.
Being poor is getting pulled over just for your car and hair looking ratty.
Being poor is 2 nights in jail because of a clerical error.
Being poor is realizing years later that you still live like you're poor.
Being poor is reading about VCs and ICOs and funding rounds on HN and thinking how huge an improvement just a tiny, tiny fraction of that money could make in your life.
Naturally I was surprised when recently I got informed I have white privilege by a bunch of spoiled children who've never known a day of hardship in their lives.
I'm not terribly enamoured with the Silicon Valley political atmosphere these days.
However, you have misunderstood what "white privilege" means: it's not that your life has been easy, it's that the same situations would have been even harder if you had not been white.
White privilege is not remembering the last time you were pulled over for nothing.
White privilege is not being afraid of the police.
White privilege is getting let off with a warning.
White privilege is expecting to be judged on your merits.
White privilege is getting the benefit of the doubt.
White privilege is having a family that got to use the GI bill.
White privilege is having a family that was able to build a little bit of generational wealth from government housing policy.
White privilege is thinking racism is over.
White privilege is starting at 0 when the rich kids start at 50 and black kids start at -15.
If you're white, you have white privilege, but you don't necessarily have class privilege. Class privilege isn't just about money either. If you grow up without much money, but to highly cultured and educated parents, you still have some class privilege.
Long term I think his article on being poor may be longer lasting and more influential than anything else he does - with the possible exception of taping bacon to a cat. http://whatever.scalzi.com/about/the-canonical-bacon-page/
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This is what living in the SV for 6 years made me forget.
Tell us more
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/court-software-g...
This is "move fast and break things" taken to its ultimate logical conclusion.
Going through it all, since it ended ok, was good. I was 20 and learned even more to 1) not trust cops, 2) the courts are fallible and 3) it's more f-cked up for other people than a white kid in college (which I was but sat through a lot of other cases that day and the previous time there).
You need to talk to someone who grew up in the DDR or the CCCP to get some perspective (although I bet people from the so called third world would have quite something to add, too!). I am a little better as I grew up in socialist Hungary.
Some memories that this article brought up: off-brand toys? You couldn't even buy LEGO until like 1982 for Hungarian forints. A few shops for diplomats sold it for hard currency which was impossible to get.
$800 cars? Comrade, you need to wait 5-10 years for a car and it's made out of paper and plastic. And it is literally incapable of going above 60 miles per hour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant
Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away. - man, I got a root canal done without painkillers because they ran out of painkillers.
Being poor is Goodwill underwear. - our undershirts looked like gray rags because you couldn't get whitening detergent for years. It was a fluke that didn't get corrected until the next five year plan.
air conditioning. --- HAHAHAHAHA try living in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict one of these, oven in the summer, too hot in the winter because the central heating is cranked up the wazzoo and you can't do shit about it.
This struck a chord with me:
Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger’s trash.
I've been poor enough in my life that dumpster diving was appealing and I'm glad I'm not now, but at least in my scenario there was a dumpster to dive into.
I spent some time by Lake Malawi there a couple of years ago and they don't even have dumpsters. Bottle-caps, and waste-paper from the (foreign aid funded) health clinic are valuable raw materials for whatever local craft industries there are. Being poor means these dodgy strangers showing up and splashing money around and who then start making inappropriate advances on the children.
But even along the lake they are privileged by having access to water and whatever tourism industry there is.
Away from the lake, being poor means not having clothes. Being poor means a minor injury is a death sentence.
Some of our philanthropist billionaires get some flack for the manner and means by which they distribute their aid, but a friend of mine working as a pharmacist there would just say "thank god for Bill Gates".
I grew up in the USSR. And then early Russia (the country was recovering from the USSR wreckage, even more painful).
The "$800 car" bit made me smile too.
PS. Now, when I live in a nice EU town, own a somewhat successful software company, and my #1 mission is so my kids never, NEVER EVER, _EVEN IN THEIR DREAMS_ have a tiny glimpse of that life.
I fucking started a school in Hungary to give a better education to my (well, my brother's, details) little ones. Hungarian education didn't change enough from thirty years ago.
On the other hand, - Making your own food from raw ingredients: hamburgers, pizza, french fries, etc... - Being amazed by foods that you were never aware of: pho, sushi, stromboli, bagels, sausages on a grill - Approaching new places and people with naivety - All knowledge gained and learned is well learnt and mostly self learnt
If you make it out the other side of college with a bachelor's degree in a STEM field and an average job, it will still take you 21 years to pay it off.
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/10/07/stude...
If you don't feel that you can reasonably make a bet of that magnitude because your entire prior history tells you that it won't work -- that's entirely rational.
But college costs are completely unreasonable...
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/08/us/colleges-tuition-outrun...
... and have been getting worse for the last 30 years.
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Being poor is being happy to get a single snickers candy bar for Christmas (well it was New Years for me).
Being poor is skipping school prom and class foto because you don't have money to pay for nice clothes.
Being poor is having to listen to asshole relative who gave you their old clothes or furniture how you "owe them" every family gathering.
Being poor is not going to any family gatherings to avoid asshole rich relatives who flaunt their wealth in your face.
Being poor is always being under constant stress and worry. A worry those who are not poor will never understand.
Being rich is being able to visit your family.
Being rich is having insurance.
Being rich is paying for a monthly phone subscription.
Being rich is hot lunches.
Being rich is risking losing your job in order to negotiate a better contract with your boss.
Being rich is considering having children at all.
Being rich is buying alcohol.
Being rich is looking at house prices.
Being rich is saving money for the future.
Being rich is paying for a haircut.
Being rich is renting a house with a kitchen.
Being rich is making plans more than a few weeks ahead.
Being rich is worrying about North Korea instead of looking forward to blissful oblivion.
This is it. I lost track on how many of my friends/peers/colleagues don't have children, because they live from paycheck to paycheck and simply cannot afford it, even if they wanted to. And this is in germany mind you, where you have a relativeley robust social security net...
Being rich I having enough money/income to not need to work.
In between is the middle class. There are middle class people who can afford to buy some of the stuff rich people buy, but if they lose their job they’ll be broke in a month or two.
When I was a kid, I assumed if you had a house you were rich and if you had one with stairs, holy Moses you were rolling in it.
Travel circumscribed by how far you can walk.
Being ashamed that your mother sewed up holes in her clothes.
Holes in the ceiling with water coming out of them.
No health insurance.
Being lucky to take one bath a week. Giving yourself washcloth baths.
Saving water by flushing the toilet with saved bath water.
In the US this holds true as well due to a large incidence of unplanned pregnancies among the poor. Your point about the rich considering having children is apt as children are often planned by the wealthy.
I am not passing judgement on either side of the wealth divide but I think it is an interesting study.
A very interesting read: https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2011/disparities-uni...
Are people in America actually worried that NK is going to nuke anyone? Kim Jong Un knows if he ever fires one of those, it's game over for him. They're a big-ass bargaining chip. Threatening to fire them is the only reason he has them at all. He'll never actually do it.
There is a negative correlation between financial wealth and birth rate worldwide.
If you have a 9-to-5, you're probably not rich.
If you've got some 9-to-5 job pulling down $80k/yr with no kids or dependencies, you're rich to a lot of people.
The strongest emotion I have felt to this day is the feeling that I would never get out of being poor.
To this day my nightmares are about losing my job, blowing through my emergency fund and not being able to find another job.
To this day, I don't buy beef at the grocery store. I can't bring myself to do it outside a special occasion. (Not saying I spend my money entirely wisely but that has stuck with me for some reason.)
I had taught myself on computers we had been donated first QBasic and later PHP. I am certainly lucky, but part of me is resentful at my mother in particular for how easy it seems to be to not live in poverty. I am so confused about the topic and honestly find myself angry at myself for my own thoughts. It's really hard to explain. I don't mean to or want to judge anyone but it's difficult. It's a touchy anxiety ridden topic for me.
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