I fairly frequently give my opinions on HN about poverty, homelessness, housing, women's issues and the negative impact being female has on my earned income.
I try to be judicious and not do it too often. Testifying from firsthand experience often turns into a pile on of people pretending to care and pretending to want to help while mostly virtue signaling, doing nothing for me and dragging my name through the mud by insinuating that I somehow must have made poor choices and it must be all my fault, never mind the larger societal forces under discussion.
I often worry that if I speak up too much, I will eventually be banned for disruptive behavior, never mind that I feel that a lot of the problem behaviors are due to how other people choose to react to me. When enough people pile on with problematic replies I can eventually get frustrated and lose my cool and then I feel like that will all be blamed on me and an excuse to say I am just badly behaved. I get a lot of downvotes and flags when I finally lose my cool. This tends to not happen to people talking at me like I am not really a victim of circumstances, I just am stupid, incompetent and not trying hard enough.
I try to then give it a rest for a while and avoid such topics because I would prefer to not wind up rate limited, banned or otherwise penalized for daring to be the token poor person giving my two cents. Privileged people tend to have no idea how to help me. They tend to say really shitty things to me. They often want me to shut up because I make them uncomfortable.
I am pretty thick skinned, well educated and come from a much more privileged background than I realized for most of my life. Most poor people are not going to stick their neck out like that. They are too vulnerable and can't afford more trouble and are very well aware that expecting rich people to be genuinely respectful and caring towards them is simply a bridge too far.
It generally works better overall for the formerly poor to try to cast a little light on such subjects. It is much less of a shitshow.
Edit: Your Karma given your account is only 3 days old is quite contradicting of your views of HN
I have been here 8.5 years. I just recently changed my name cuz reasons.
Overall, I get pretty well received. That doesn't mean I don't stress about it, etc. I am at times characterized by commenters as just having a chip on my shoulder about one thing or another and simply harping on it. So it isn't just me being paranoid. My concerns are based on observations of how others perceive me at times.
To be clear, it is not a criticism of the mods. They have been incredible. But I have been thrown off (or run off) of other sites. It would just be easier to remove me than to tell everyone else they need to figure out how to behave better towards me.
Are you OK? Do you need some financial support? Can you afford to eat? I can offer to buy food and have it delivered to you, or a near by shop (or something) if need be.
I find the entire thing annoying in the extreme because I have a Patreon account to help fund my blogging and I completely suck at promoting that. I also do freelance writing and resume editing and I can't get traction with that.
I sincerely appreciate it anytime anyone actually kicks a few bucks my way when I am in crisis. But I would much prefer that people take me seriously, fund my Patreon and/or hire me for paid writing so that bitching about my shit life on the internet can stop being one of my more lucrative skills.
> I sincerely appreciate it anytime anyone actually kicks a few bucks my way when I am in crisis. But I would much prefer that people take me seriously, fund my Patreon and/or hire me for paid writing so that bitching about my shit life on the internet can stop being one of my more lucrative skills.
I have no idea who you are. I've never heard of you. I've never seen your blog, YouTube channel, Twitch streaming account, or whatever else it is you have. I didn't read your profile or historical comments here in Hacker News to try and track you down or identify you because...
> People genuinely looking to help have zero problem finding my PayPal account or emailing me.
... I'm not going to run around the Internet looking for you.
I think I was well within my rights to offer you assistance using the most direct communication means that was available to me at the time of offering it: the comment box directly under your post. I made a safe assumption, in my opinion, that this would (and it did) reach you directly and now I'm being hosed down in public for trying to care about another human being.
I don't care about magical karma points. I'm 33 years old: I don't have the time, energy or the f--ks to give with regards to some magical Internet points that amount to sweet F/A.
I'm being sincere in my offer and it still stands. I'll email you to get further details from you about how you might want the money, if any, being sent.
Good luck.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions." It isn't enough to mean well. Some ways of handling things simply do not work well.
I only want people to see the human in the suffering. The helpers are human too but are in a position of power and also have a more stable life and ability to cope. When I was working and being yelled at and unappreciated by people in severe distress I worked to never take it personally and did my very best for them. It was never about me..they had simply lost their ability to cope and needed help back to normality. It's terrifying to think about but can happen to anyone, any time.
I've got nothing for or against either poster, but so many assumptions were made about someone who may have been just trying to help. Why is that fair? Why try to help anyone if you're gonna get treated like that?
It puts me in an incredibly awkward position because there is absolutely no good way for me to respond to it. If I publicly say yes and they actually help, there is a danger that this will become a running theme on the site. This would be a serious problem for me and for the moderators.
It's an inherently disrespectful way to handle the problem. The lack of real respect is one of the things that keeps certain classes of people trapped in poverty.
I have been commenting on my poverty on this site for years. I get lots of compliments on my writing here. I also get consistently told that trying to make a middle class income from my writing is a batshit insane deluded unrealistic desire.
If people genuinely respected me and genuinely cared, they could help me figure out how to turn my writing skill into a middle class income. I am not asking for charity here. I am asking to be taken seriously as someone who has a valuable skill that I would like to make a career out of. I can get no traction on finding a means to turn that into a middle class income. I have zero desire for my participation here to turn into some circus of me begging for money publicly. I see that as counter to my goal to get taken seriously and establish a career.
I also see that as a development that the mods would be fools to not ban me over. I have spent time as a moderator. That's a shitshow I would not tolerate in a community under my care.
Consider video. It's out pacing written material by a long shot and fast becoming how people consume knowledge. Not everyone is suited for it, but it's worth considering. The systems in place for publishing video content are also better and have a much bigger reach (without any work)
Open discussion will not necessarily reinforce anything, people have the ability to draw their own conclusions. Personally I would rather that OP stated their opinion explicitly.
Also I actually don't know what the stereotype was that was being implied.
I think that welfare in the US is about philanthropy, charity and "good will", and not about "social rights" as in Europe.
And that comment showed exactly that attitude: the guy is kinda confused on why that woman refuses his "good will". She is asking for rights, he is offering "good will".
In my opinion, her answer created a cognitive dissonance in his mind, and that's why he answers back so angrily. I find that attitude to social welfare super American.
I think that the American approach to welfare has ethical and practical limits. Welfare based on philanthropy and good will is not an efficient welfare: it won’t change much. It also adds a moral dimension that (imho) shouldn't be there…
Sorry for the late answer!
More importantly, people like us need sustainable situations, not a wad of cash that will be gone with next month's expenses and leave us right back where we were. We need to be helped get a base under our feet to grow from as the muddy pit we live in just keeps collapsing, we also need to "learn how to fish" as the saying goes and be reintegrated into the whole. Not have scraps of fish thrown at us, no matter how well meaning the thrower is.
And goodness forbid you need more than the bare essentials, like a car, home, etc.
And it's like, hello? 2+2=4. Can you not see how these issues are related? Geez.
* My apologies to the generous souls who have compassionately given me money at times so I could eat. But the reality is I would not need such gifts if I had enough regular income, but all efforts to establish an earned income fall on deaf ears.
I would rather be at the beach, but instead I'm stuck here in an office.
Critical thinking is paramount to any argument to be made, if an argument is weak or else lacks fundamental building blocks required for reasoning through it to a conclusion, no amount of "I've been there take my word" should give it any weight.
If we're doing social experiments and not reason-based arguments then perhaps there is room for evidence-based arguments, but this forum not being such scientific lab I hesitate to accept such arguments.
I often get insane amounts of attention. This has long been true and I have spent many years trying to figure out how to open my mouth in public without it being a train wreck waiting to happen.
Part of the problem is that when someone is a demographic outlier or otherwise special case, other people give it a great deal of attention. Then that gets interpreted as the person intentionally derailing the discussion, making it about them, etc.
It is really common for people to completely ignore whatever point I am trying to make so they can talk about me and for me to wind up trying hard to combat that and possibly just finally say "I'm done here" and stop replying. When I do that, the people focusing on me swear it is all my fault, I was going out of my way to make it about me, etc.
I post as openly female here. It is common for that fact to become the focus of discussion and I am often told that if I did not want people to talk about it, I should not have mentioned my gender at all. The burden winds up being hung on me to anticipate the reactions of everyone else and to go out of my way to avoid mentioning anything that might get weird reactions.
It is an excessive and unrealistic burden to hang on me and it is the essence of sexism, classism, etc.
In this case, what speech is privileged over the rest? I read the article, her post, your post, and so on. I will continue to do so.
If your issue is with tone, great! Tone is an important discussion to have!
I did a bachelors in a social science at a cheap non-elite state school, so most people will say I deserve a life of crushing poverty. I suppose that's possible. I did try to make myself relevant to the economy by doing a coding bootcamp, and an associates in design, and put apps into the iOS and Android appstores. Of course I would have rather done a masters, but that is about as realistic as buying a house at this point.
Everyone says they can't find programmers, but I have yet to see one job that I meet the on-paper requirements to even apply to, and I'm willing to relocate anywhere in the country (obviously I can't afford property or a family) Even if I did get an interview I'm sure I won't do well answering trick questions about data structures on a white board anyways.
Other than the constant stress, being impoverished for so long has definitely given me a negative attitude. I know, you guys went through the same thing that time you had to sleep on your buddies couch after you finished your MBA at Stanford and Goldman Sachs didn't have an opening, but for some reason I'm just not handling it as well.
Anyway, I'm just going to keep writing apps and pushing them out to the appstore, and maybe one day one of them will make enough money to poke my head out above the poverty level. See you then.
It's extremely difficult to fill those positions because people looking for their first tech job don't want to start off in QA, and they'd rather just be unemployed for months or years instead. There's not enough experienced people to go around if you don't want to overpay significantly to poach them.
They pay very well, easily on par with developer positions in many cases. Average where I live for entry level seems to be over $70k, and I've seen postings for $200k+ for people with experience.
You could probably spend a week or two messing around with UI Automation and XCTest (if you don't already use them) and be more qualified than most of the people applying to those positions with prior QA experience but no prior iOS experience.
Your point about the difference between being on a couch after a high value MBA vs being on the couch --full stop, end of sentence-- being a total chasm is totally correct.
I think that it is interesting that another poster posited that poverty is truly informed by hopelessness, with the implication that HN readers can't be hopeless. The idea that the concept of poverty is definable only by those far enough away from it to say "That is another group of people than I am in." is problematic in my view.
That is the whole point: no one in this situation has either of these things. That is the group of people Sen. Hatch thinks does not deserve financial help.
So is there anything we can do? Protesting, running for public office etc makes the most sense but I am not built for it. What is the second best thing that an individual with a few dollars and few hours a week to spare do to help?
We have a culture that is trained against this group of people; trained against helping each other succeed, against promoting others' individual liberty. I don't have a one-size-fits-all solution, and that seems to be the only kind this culture will accept.
I think an important first step is empathy: understand how people feel stuck and why. Understand that the bare necessities are not enough. Understand the heightened stress that comes with this situation: inability to take risks, inability to recover from failed ventures, etc.
The next step is sympathy. Sympathy is closely related to empathy, but there is an important distinction: the difference between comprehension and understanding.
After that, I really don't know. I haven't ever been in a situation where I have the capital to significantly change another person's situation. Because I have never had the perspective, I don't see a solution. That is probably the most frustrating part of the problem: not knowing how someone can help you.
Sure, I could beg for food and rent, but that wouldn't be enough to be independent. In our society, it's difficult to ask for even the bare necessities, let alone ask for things like a car, enough capital to move to the city, out of state, or even out of country.
Some see debt as a solution: Get a student loan and an education, and then get into a better situation. But that assumes that college education is well suited for everyone, which is simply untrue. Loans require judgment by lenders; and if the path that you are most passionate about does not explicitly follow the "normal" routine - school, internship, temp job, career, etc. - those who lend money are likely to deny you your dreams.
The most frustrating thing to me is that because I don't have a perfect solution, the entire subject gets dropped. Solutions are found with effort and progress, not simply stumbled upon.
I’ve for long pondered how I could set up a 100 studio apartment complex with some counselors, training materials, and a supportive non profit. It seems doable.
okay, how would that work? Unless one is really rich, where do we find the money to run such a place?
If such a place exists, I can see myself going there to teach, help organize etc. But I don't know what more I can do, given my own limited resources.
It’s endemic, everyone interviewing no one hiring, waiting for unicorns with beards and sock hats. Don’t take it personally.
(assuming you haven't already been doing that)
My advice is to pick a niche other than the one everyone and their mom is doing.
Basic mobile apps are simply not a niche.
I eat exclusively off of foodstamps. I am uninsured and partially disabled. I have been able to pay rent for the past few months by working off the books for a couple places, and cashing in on a very limited amount of goodwill that I accumulated in my youth. I have no reason to believe that this will last into the future, or even rent for March.
Anyway, if you have any questions, ask away!
As an aside, I am not great at Angry Birds.
Edited for clarity and typos.
2. What is your disability?
3. Do you have access to the internet?
4. Are you on disability?
5. You say you're self taught, in what?
6. What careers have you tried?
7. Do you have family or friends?
7. Are you depressed?
1. This is kind of open ended, so I'll give it a shot. Both of my parents were janitors. I went to a private school in middle school on a work scholarship (we had to drive an hour each way, open and close the school every day). I dropped out of high school and have a few community college credits.
2. PTSD unrelated to anything I would care to discuss on HN.
3. ?
4. No. I have applied multiple times over the past six years, but long periods of being uninsured makes people wary of making any decision based off of medical data.
5. When I was 14, I founded and ran a hosting company, so I learned how to use PuTTY, maintain PHP installations, run cPanel, etc. I guess you can say I am "Okay with computers"
6. I have worked in construction, customer service, and sales across a few different industries, but all for very short periods of time. This relates to my disability.
7. I do have a small group of friends that I am very thankful for, but not to the extent that it doesn't scare me when it is snowing outside.
8. I would love to know how my answer to this matters to your estimation.
Edited for a typo.
My e-mail is in my profile.
PS: Chances aren't in our favour but are you by any chance living in Australia?
Culturally this is happening in a number of areas. Victimhood has become such a powerful status to claim that we increasingly refuse to listen to so-called 'privileged' voice, regardless of how solid their advice may be.
My wife's brother drives all over the state looking for work, then once he finds a job he has to expect be laid off any day. On a recent job one of his team members stole something and didn't confess so the foreman fired the whole team. He pays child support for kids he doesn't see often and getting laid off can set him back months.
I have cousins who made dumb decisions when young and now have criminal records. A childhood friend reached out to me asking for money because his wife became addicted to heroin, ruined him financially and emotionally, and left him for another guy, taking his daughter with her. He had to spend a ton of money he didn't have on the court battle to get his daughter back from his heroin-addicted wife. Some of my best friends in high school were gifted but had great difficulty focusing on schoolwork and ended up coping with drug cocktails and are now working part time minimum wage jobs. I also know some dumb people who simply made bad choices and ended up putting themselves in holes they can't dig themselves out of. And they aren't even minorities, which are so statistically differentiated from white communities that when I build market models I have to remove ethnicity as an explanatory factor because it predicts nearly everything on its own and I don't want to reinforce stereotypes or abstracted discrimination among my customers.
On the other side, I know a wealthy international businessman who takes risks that would land anyone else in jail, like speeding around the city while driving drunk/high and crashing into a parked car. He broke his neck doing that but still drives drunk. For my wife's family that would have become a life crushing healthcare debt and at minimum a significant amount of time off work if not a life of disability, but for him it was a nuisance. He pays his workers under the table and his daughter just won a medal in the winter Olympics.
I work with several wealthy people who are working solely to make more money or have something to do. That's great but none of them have no understanding of the life of a poor person in this country, and they make assetions on how things should work based on how it impacts them and based on opinions they've heard from even wealthier people. I am related to people who have worked hard to become wealthy, and that is again great but now they claim anyone who is poor is lazy when that is not the case. They donate to causes that espouse the same.
I work in the real estate space so I also encounter a lot of lazy wealthy people who don't want to do any work but feel entitled to money because a piece of paper says they own a property. Legally and through market forces they usually are though they usually don't add any real value to society.
I've personally experienced both sides and my opinion is the poor need more help, whether that means education, healthcare, legal expenses, or just a voice in discussion. Successful people have their voice and are capable of amplifying it to the point where it reaches every voter in the US with little effort. The stories of millions of poor and working class are lost in the noise every day. It's not victimhood to describe your problems and explain why a certain ideology or policy will impact your life negatively. The wealthy in this country so often overlook real issues at lower levels that generally they will impact the lives of the poor whether they intend it or not. People are resilient, adaptable, and hard-working but sometimes they have a boot on their head keeping them dow and need help getting it off.
Also personally, I feel fortunate to have have lived and worked among many income classes in my life. I'm young, smart, hungry, skilled and effective so there is a high probability that I'll never have to worry about money again. I feel obliged to do what I can to change the balance of wealthy in this country to something that reduces suffering on a broad scale. I am working to get to the point where I can do that full time.
Here is an article:
http://www.economist.com/node/988818
And a video on it:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2016/06/24/mormon-...
Find a meeting house. Just tell a bishop you need help and he'll hook you up:
When poor people get things for "free" (like charity, I hate charity) they actually pay with pride and dignity.
Give me basic income, and I will feel no loss of dignity.
Make me stand in a line for a few hours (what's the problem wasting my time, if I am unemployed anyway, right?), fill out a ton of paperwork, send me back to collect signatures from my former employers that I really did work for them three years ago (because everyone deserves to be told that I have a problem now, especially my former employers), and so on... then I will consider not eating for a few weeks a more dignified option.
Without going into too much detail: I am exactly one semester away from a degree in the natural sciences but can no longer afford to attend classes - I am a single father with 3 children (two of which live with me) and I pay child support every month to my ex-wife who makes ~$80K per annum. I played her way through graduate school but she left and we divorced very soon after she finished school.
I am almost 40 years old and I have been looking for a steady job for months...but imagine trying to convince someone to hire you for a job with the schedule restrictions that come with having multiple children in a lackluster economy.
I could go on but the message here is simply that poverty can easily be a self-perpetuating condition that becomes extraordinarily difficult to extract oneself from. It often seems like I am caught between multiple Catch-22 situations like some sort of 6-dimensional Chinese finger-trap.The amount of inertia that the self-perpetuating condition, as you aptly put it, is staggering to many that aren't actively experiencing it.
It is difficult to know what aspects of being poor are seen as urgent --or even actionable at all-- by others. Communicating this is complicated, and I haven't been satisfied by the general discourse on the subject, personally.
Yeah, you're right on the time management part for sure. I was the most efficient with my time during that period of my life than I've ever been. Basically work, class, study in library, repeat. It's not that bad, people are capable of more if they choose to. Best time of my life. It doesn't get better for sure. I've worked like a slave since then, with zero intellectual stimulation as I had at school other than what I seek out on sites like HN.
My advice is to stop school, work a bit, save up, then finish off that last semester class by class while working.
I worked 30 hours a week while going to college, not because I had a wife or kids, but because no one was helping me and I had to pay rent/bills on top of the loans.
The author of the original article is probably not currently poor, and yet she is writing about it. Do you see this as a problem too?
Considering my response has already gotten one "Well you're obviously not poor if you read this", and another asking for clarification of my opinions on non-poor people, I guess this wasn't the place to make that point. Sorry.
But what does this mean? Unless someone is specifically arguing that poor people should not comment, how is anyone not "making room for" the perspectives of poor people?
If you are really feeling hopeless you don't turn to HN for news on the latest programming frameworks.
Like I said, I know what website I am on.
I'm not sure where your second criterion comes from. I don't think "poverty" excludes anyone who aspires to someday leave poverty.
I thought some more about part of your earlier post:
> If you are really feeling hopeless you don't turn to HN for news on the latest programming frameworks.
This really doesn't make sense. I've known at least one desperately poor and depressed person who found escape and satisfaction in scavenging and programming discarded hardware. There's no reason people in poverty can't be hackers. Arguably they've got more motivation to hack than people who can just buy the latest widgets off-the-shelf.
Maybe you should double-check those usernames.
Don't get me wrong, I know what website I'm on.
But in all seriousness, is there room for currently poor people in this discussion?