A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
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Do we have data on how much free time and external costs the poor have been burdened with over time?
I could see it going either way (and this is presumably monstrously tricky to account fairly). My lived experience is that many folks have things they'd prefer to do than organizing (I'm looking at phones and social media), over and above the impositions on their lives. But I'd like to know that I'm wrong.
Not exactly the tweet, but dropping this again here because of the title.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.
This might not apply anymore though since it seems capitalism found out about it and companies realized they could make the $50 boots as trash as the $10 boots and the rich wouldn’t think twice about throwing them out at the same rate so the two options now are spending $10 a year or $50 a year on boots
Waiting for buses and other public transport especially. In college I had no car and continued working a part time job that I previously borrowed my parents' car to commute to. My options were: spending an hour and a half to commute taking a bus with a reasonable schedule but I'd have to walk over a mile alongside a busy road to my job, or spend three hours to commute due to how two route schedules matched up to drop me off at the entrance to the shopping center.
Each of those options was one way, and this was before smart phones. I wasn't getting anything done in that time besides listening to music and maybe reading a book while on the bus itself.
And then I learned that on Saturdays, over half the time the bus just didn't fucking show up at the stop where I got on, and the support phone line would just fucking lie about it.
Plus, if I had a vehicle, the commute would have been only 20 minutes in bad traffic.
Will say, the regular distance power walking helped keep me in great shape though.
I wonder how infrastructure would change if companies were required to reimburse valid claims of mileage or time spent (not the bus/train fare, but paying your wage for the time spent to get to work).
This could be a fantastic idea, and maybe a hammer blow to the "return to office" bullshit.
Sure, I'll go into the office. Pay me 25% more to account for the travel time.
I had a job 2.5 miles from my apartment. There is a bus stop on the corner of my apartment, there is a bus stop next to the job. According to the website it was 3 hours to commute by bus to get there...
Same with being disabled, growing up I thought disabled people just got helped by everyone in society with everything. Turns out most of the time it's "do what you were doing before except harder."
Or if you're too mentally ill and in so much pain that working is hard but society deems you worthless
This is what I point out whenever someone tries to tell me, "The only fair thing in life is everyone gets 24 hours in a day."
That doesn't mean shit when someone with a private jet can be on a different continent in hours.
"We all have the same 24 hours in a day"
I fucking hate that saying so much. I've started telling people just because you and everyone else at the marathon might have the same 23 miles to go, when 9/10 of you are shackled to a heavy steel ball, and at least half are dragging 2 or 3, then that distance means fuck all.
Being poor is super expensive. When you don't have enough money in your bank account they'll charge you a monthly fee. When you're too poor to have an account, you have to go to a check cashing place and pay to get paid. Too poor to have awesome credit? You have to pay higher interest fees and larger deposits.
When you’re too poor to have an account, you have to go to a check cashing place and pay to get paid.
Use that check to open a bank account. Virtually every bank will give you a free account if you deposit your paycheck with them.
That's not true if you have bad enough credit or are a migrant worker. There's an entire check cashing industry based on taking advantage of people who can't get bank accounts and charging outrageous fees.
That’s not true if you have bad enough credit
Many banks specifically offer services to people with bad credit and bad banking histories. Here is a Forbes article about them with a list of ones they recommend. And another article if you aren't convinced.
There’s an entire check cashing industry based on taking advantage of people who can’t get bank accounts and charging outrageous fees.
There is an industry around this because people keep spreading misinformation about not being able to get a bank account if you have bad credit; resulting in people not looking into getting a bank account. Stop spreading misinformation, it hurts people.
The other thing is how expensive being poor is. Laundry is like 3 dollars a load last I checked. Buy cheap shoes, expect them to last 6 months max. There are food options if you have time to cook but combined with the original poster you won't and you don't have transportation so delivery is only option...
$3 a load? Whoa.
It takes about $17 for a single load at the laundromats near me, both washing and drying. Going once a week, that's over $800 a year.
Which is one reason I've started washing clothes in a 5-gallon (about 19 liters) bucket at home. It sucks, but it saves me money and I get a work out from it. I'd like to get a small machine, but where I live it wouldn't be safe to have packages sitting outside all day and I try to avoid big box stores, so I feel pretty screwed.
Poverty is more expensive than anything any millionaire or billionaire could buy. Fuck the rich.
The biggest punishment you could enact on those monsters is to knock them all the way down to working class.
They couldn't cut it in the real world, with a real job. They'd lose their mind having to respect anyone else.
Who knows, it could even possibly reform them.
I’ve known people to be on hold for 6-8 hours for multiple days with the local food stamp office without being able to get in touch with anyone. At one point the automatic message when you called was ‘too many people are calling, hang up.’
Fun napkin math fact: If we divvied up the top... 5 wealthiest billionaires net worth... that'd get every living man, woman, and child on earth a cool $250 ish.
Sure - its not very much but it certainly does make you think. What if...
The idea of wealth redistribution is in stripping power from the very rich. If you are rich, you influence politics in a way that benefits you by not caring about others.
The problem with Bill Gates' poly vaccine in Africa is not in the fact that it didn't save children, in fact it did. The problem is that measles takes more children's lives in Africa by an order of magnitude and measles vaccination would've saved much more.
Now add to the picture the recent decisions: internet surveillance (age verification), ignoring the Paris agreement, data centers built everywhere. I guess a lot of people would oppose these, but their voices are not heard.
I mentioned this a moment ago as a different reply but your observations are all examples of a feedback loop perpetuating itself. Its certainly correctable. This isnt the first time it happened nor will it be the last. Its a product of some of the uglier parts of the human condition.
Absolute power corrupts - and those in power will not only seek to keep that power bit increase it. They consolidate it. Less people with power: less opposition. But this has diminishing returns... and has reset trap baked in. How? Numbers. Power moves people. As you concentrate power - you have less people to move and more people opposing that movement.
1 billionaire, 8 billion people. What do you do to maintain that power? Surveillance. Draconian rules. Control the narrative and paint yourself as necessary. The power dynamic is reaching a tipping point. Unrelated: I recall there seems to be an uptick in bunkers being built by the ultra wealthy. Puzzling.
Sound familiar? It should. History is littered with example after example.
The system breaks in the same way - every time. These aren't deitites - they aren't special. They are just another meat bag running on 80% lizard-brain firmware that is purely focused on ITS survival alone. In the end these twats engineer their own destruction. Now, while the all for one trait certainly is consistent in its consolidation of power: it still consistently maintains its loss record to the group. I'd like to think of that as an immune response to a foreign entity. In a weird way that sorta gives me hope.
The time theft has a far reach. I’ve worked with kids who’ve gone inpatient for mental health, acting out in school, etc. Why? Because mom isn’t there. It’s not willful neglect. It’s neglect through not neglecting her motherly duties by working 2-3 jobs to keep the lights on and shoes on her child’s feet.
Time is a key reason we need to be paid more, have a much higher minimum wage, though it isn’t often mentioned.
That's it right there. The politicians are always rambling "We need jobs."
No. We need money, which might come from decent jobs.
"Jobs for jobs' sake" is how we have mental health crises from countless practically-parentless households because everybody's desperately, constantly working in needlessly stressful conditions.
Jobs are why most of us have no meaningful connections shortly after our highest level of schooling, because everyone's on wacky schedules and has no time for anyone but the shallowest relationships with whomever they happen to be stuck working with.
Jobs gave us broken homes and skyrocketing suicide rates.
Jobs can shove right off, for all they've taken from us, and our "bosses" can be sunk into the deep right along with 'em.
I was fortunate. We were considered poor but not so poor that mom wasn’t home with us. Thrift clothes and homemade clothes (a very cheap option in the 80s) got us teased mercilessly, but the parents were present.
There have been articles lately about the young generations aging faster. It’s always been noteworthy in medicine. People, on the worst case scenarios, looking 60 when they’re 40. Not from outdoor life but just hard life. Given the overt stress the younger gen’s are under on all sides it fits.
The SiFi movie "In Time" staring Justin Timberlake is meh quality wise, but the premise is really interesting... That the currency of that universe is the time someone has left to live. They do an interesting job playing with how wealth inequality changes behavior of people with and without time to spare
Waiting for busses isn't a poverty problem, it's a policy problem.
It's both.
In fact, poverty itself is a policy choice of forced deprivation.
It's a poverty problem because you don't have a choice but to rely on policy. That's what all of those listed things are illustrating.
Hunting for cheaper insurance instead of getting the best coverage, waiting an hour for a bus instead of calling an Uber, searching multiple flyers for the best grocery prices and coupons instead of ordering takeout. These are all "frugal" when you have the money to do otherwise.
It's poverty when you need to do those things or you just can't afford to do them.
I see your point, well put.
I'm entirely in favor of raising the foundation of the social fabric, it just bugs me when busses are portrayed poorly when they're underfunded, and made to seem as if they're only a poverty choice. That is the exact sort of thinking in my city, and the bus service has suffered for decades because of it.
I wish folks would see busses as superior to personal automobiles, and they would be funded accordingly.
I'm entirely in favor of raising the foundation of the social fabric, it just bugs me when busses are portrayed poorly when they're underfunded, and made to seem as if they're only a poverty choice.
It's probably by design to stigmatize charity and public policy, and brew the sort of hyperindividualized culture that sees no problem with policies that range from "inadequate" to "truly inhumane."
It's true "thinking buses are for poor people" could lead to underfunded buses. But that leads to questions about why underfunding resources for the needy is some people's default presumption.
Literally why wealthy people pay exorbitant amounts of money to save time. It's one thing they can't buy back once it's spent.
Another thing about being poor is that once you get a bit of money its like pouring water onto a desert because of all the deferred things. Clothes, car repairs and tires, debt, dentist, medical care, shoes. The hole people get in is deeper than it looks. A few thousand can evaporate disappointingly quickly.
I didnt file taxes one year with my kid as a dependent. So I filed two years at the same time. Got back $8K. 8 fucking K. The most money still to this day, I ever had at once. The govt took $3 for my deafaulted, unfinished degree, student loans ($1500 loan, I paid back in total via my tax returns $7500).
So I had $5K left. I used to to move near a friend who had an apt opening near him, it was the same price, but knocked 40 mins off my morning commute to work/daycare and the place was better insulated for heating costs. I didnt waste any money except for paint. The new apartment had orange and PINK walls. orange and pink, oye, I left the orange, but painted the pink, green. Moved and repaired my shitbox car, I think I bought good work shoes too.
all the money was gone in about a month.
For the laundry stuff, this is a cheap solution for your day to day stuff: a washer spinner that you hang-dry your clothes. Doesn’t help much with heavy stuff like bed sheets, but it'll do for day-to-day stuff.
