As an example: my parents bought used Dodge/Plymouth/Chrysler products and my brothers first used Jeep wound up being a hot mess that caused a large blast radius. I purchase the cheapest 'new' vehicle that fits my needs [0] and only bought one used car (as a backup for all the fun accidents my ex-wife got into.)
As another more painful example: My first few years in the workforce alongside student loan debt, then alongside the 2008 crash, on top of my adolescent observations an helping my now-ex-wife through college, caused me to wait way way way to long to start contributing to my future retirement.
Semi-positive counterpoints:
1. I buy stuff that lasts, it takes more research and sometimes more up front but as I get older it saves me more and more money compared to people who live in a more disposable culture. I'm not afraid to shop/wait for deals and I make sure to think about every major purchase I make. I take good care of stuff I own.
2. I've been able to learn how to fix a -lot- of stuff (working at a bike shop helped) and it has both saved me money and save waste in general.
3. I can fit all of my mementos -and- important stuff including work desk (aside from bed/couch/etc) in a portable storage unit if needed.
[0] - Except the WRX, that was a 'my life is in a terrible spot but I survived a year'. OTOH I got a base model with only a couple options and it was <30k before taxes.
> part of the reason why obesity is counter intuitively common among people who suffer from food insecurity.
Bigger elephant in that room is the nutritional content provided to people in that category as well as access to that nutrition.
In my area it is a school policy that a kid would not be denied food even if they had no money in their account - and every place I lived had organizations that would eagerly step up to address such a problem if and when it manifested.
For what it is worth, during COVID and a few years after, in my state every kid got free lunch in school regardless of their income.
I met the teacher following a photograph who tried to document the opioid epidemic, crica 2018 (we were young and naive, video is probably the only communication medium that's worth anything when you're independent, photography is harder), while I kayaked/hiked/rafted/climbed everywhere I could for the two month I was there. I think she work for a magazine now. And I'm still convinced West Virginia is only lacking a huge lake or a sea to be the best place on earth.
it is very uncommon to have children go hungry in America, because food is plentiful, and numerous charitable organizations would eagerly step in.
Bad parenting may happen everywhere in the world.
For some brownie points, googling seems to indicate that Germany has a hunger crisis:
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/09/world/germany-food-b...
That teacher's support might be vital to a hungry 8yo whose parents can't/won't/don't fill out the form?
For those people, the $2 a day that school lunch costs (or even 50 cents for reduced price lunch) is literally too much money, because it is. So those kids go hungry. I knew plenty of those kids that all of you are insisting don't exist (for some reason) and no, the existing welfare is just not enough, even in an extremely low cost of living area, in a state with significant state level aid.
Most working class families qualify for free or reduced price lunches. If you're at or below 130% of the poverty line your kids get free lunch. At or below 185% of the poverty line gets kids a reduced price lunch. How many children a family has is part of this calculation; the poverty line is set higher for larger families. This program spends something like 5 billion dollars a year giving lunches to tens of millions of kids. It's not a niche thing few qualify for. There are many schools where virtually every student is in the program.
Furthermore, schools will not allow kids to skip lunch. They are given lunch whether or not they have money and the matter is settled with their parents later. The few times I tried to skip lunch in school it turned into huge dramas and food was given to me even though I had chosen to not eat it.
That's 17 million HOUSEHOLDS that struggled to provide food and 6.8 million HOUSEHOLDS that had to skip meals. I wouldn't call that rare.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=107...
People say this as if we don't have direct statistics about how hungry poor americans are.
Maybe your ASSERTION that poor people should have enough food because "it's cheap" isn't right and you should investigate that.
"Some folks did a study with 900 people. They found the same correlation that the original study did. But when they controlled for household income, they found most of the correlation disappeared."
So original study didn't control for income. If the original study claimed it across all incomes, and then it mostly went away when others controlled for income, then the delayed gratification strong correlation wasn't really for all incomes, right?
> More simply: people who grow up hungry learn to eat whenever they can because being hungry is awful
> It doesn’t even need to generalize. This is just a basic food security thing and is part of the reason why obesity is counter intuitively common among people who suffer from food insecurity.
Share the study that backs your assertions. If you don't have a study then everything you've claimed has no scientific basis.
> Share the study that backs your assertions. If you don't have a study then everything you've claimed has no scientific basis.
How about “that sounds interesting, could you cite a source?”
0. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/26/1208760...
I was hungry as a child and teenager. This involved things such as not having any food prepared for school, and not having money to buy something myself. Yes, we had dinner, and no, I wasn't starving to death or rail thin. But I was also hungry.
Many people are both food insecure AND fat because food insecurity drives people to eat as much as they can because of the fear of being hungry later.
> Low food security—Households reduced the quality, variety, and desirability of their diets, but the quantity of food intake and normal eating patterns were not substantially disrupted. [1]
In other words, by new definitions, if you ever reduce the quality, variety, or even desirability of your food throughout the year, you are considered food insecure.
EDIT: It looks like I'm not allowed to post in this thread anymore. I am quoting the USDA website. Nothing is cherry-picked. I've added a citation.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
Rather than appealing to some unnamed source’s cherry picked definition, you would do better to look at an actual study of food security and see how it was defined. Because a very small amount of common sense suggests to me it’s not what you’re saying.
It doesn’t even need to generalize. This is just a basic food security thing and is part of the reason why obesity is counter intuitively common among people who suffer from food insecurity.