Not necessarily. Basic food is zero-rated for VAT, and if you qualify you can get council tax reduction. For example, I get a 25% council tax discount. If you're unemployed with no income, you may genuinely pay very little direct tax, it depends on circumstances.
I have poor friends, they spend more on Netflix, Gym, Starbucks, IPhones, steam games etc then me, and they are poor for atleast last 10-20 years. I almost never have any of these and I have given them that classic suggestions like the cancelling the gym membership that he/she rarely or never uses, and it doesnt work, they keep spending money on garbage with money they don't have.
In the terminology of the article - which I enjoyed and recommend that you read when you get time - these friends of yours are not 'poor', they are 'broke'.
article says broke for temporary, these people poor 10-20 years. that doesnt sounds like temporary. they get government or familiy support, and rarely work short term here and there.
I see this all the time in developed countries. The “poor” in a place like America are different from the poor elsewhere. Often times, the poor in America are just people making bad decisions, living beyond their means. You see it in the places they choose to live in, the cars they own, the number of children they have, etc.
All those things add up to a couple hundred a month, let's be extreme and say it's $1,000 USD/month. That amount will never move you up in the socioeconomic ladder. You're two-three orders of magnitude away(!).
"But it adds up" could argue the midwit, "why don't you just get a job that pays you more", "just invest", "why didn't you buy bitcoin in 2010", "why don't you just buy the winning lottery ticket". I wrote all those in order of increasing stupidity. Not aimed at you @merth, it's just stuff that I've actually heard.
Nobody who is wealthy these days got there by skipping Starbucks and instead throwing that dollar in a jar. Nobody.
You need to cross a threshold of (income/purchasing power) to be able to start building things that matter. It's extremely difficult these days because the denominator there is almost zero.
As TFA states, people who have not experienced poverty have ZERO idea of what it is like.
Your argument holds even less ground. Yeah let's not save ~$12,000 a year since it'll never help. Instead say woe and stay in the same bucket and beg for handouts since there's no 12k in safeguards. If you're living from paycheck to paycheck due to your own spending habits it's a personal issue as well. As someone previously commented, it's about reducing expenses while making money. It isn't going to immediately lift you out. But it will eventually.
> Yeah let's not save ~$12,000 a year since it'll never help.
It's true that it may not help a lot if you're "missing $40,000 a year, every year, forever" which apparently is the article's definition of poor. Unfortunately we're not told what they would need such an amount of additional money for exactly.
On the other hand, maybe going from "missing $40,000 a year" to "missing $28,000 a year" is enough to not be poor anymore? It's difficult to understand the author's idea of the boundary between being poor and not being poor.
Being able to save money for an emergency fund is the first step towards financial and life stability if you're poor. So, yes, cutting out extraneous expenditures does add up, even if it doesn't directly make you move up the socioeconomic ladder.
Saving that $1000 or even $100/month means you might be able to get your car fixed when you need it, which might be the difference between keeping your job and getting fired/forced to quit. It can mean eating dinner every night, giving you better mental clarity and better sleep quality which can improve every part of your next day.
I think, "poor" is bigger than what the author wrote(ie that poor people have already cut out every extraneous expenditure). For every class, there are people with good financial hygiene and people with poor financial hygiene.
I grew up in an ultra rural part of Pennsylvania. I honestly thought my life was pretty good, and I had great parents and a great school with teachers who cared. My parents were(/are) great, but I later found out my school was ranked D- in the state. I think my parents didn't have huge earnings potential, but were really good at saving. So, my thoughts come directly from my life. A grade school friend of mine came home one day and told his parents that his little sister lost her retainer at school, and his parents were wailing and moaning for literally days over the $150 replacement. Meanwhile, my little brother did the same exact thing a few months earlier and my parents were able to deal with the issue, even though my mom and dad worked the exact same jobs as my friends parents.
My first job out of college I earned more than both of my parents combined and I felt pretty guilty about it for a while. Then I started earning 10x what they made while doodling on a computer all day, and the work:money conception lost all meaning to me.
> You need to cross a threshold of (income/purchasing power) to be able to start building things that matter. It's extremely difficult these days because the denominator there is almost zero.
I agree, but you should do both I think, increase your income and decrease your expenses.
> We invent machines to free ourselves from labour
That's a very romantic view.
The development, production and use of machines to replace labour is driven by employers to produce more efficiently, to gain an edge and make more money.
I would hope that people realize that money in itself is merely digits on a computer and that the real power of this stuff belongs to the people since the AI inherited and learned from us.
I know that's a simplification but we uphold this contract that controls us. The people get to decide how this plays out and as much as I'm hopeful we excel into a world that is more like star trek, that skips over the ugly transition that could succeed or fail to get us there.
But we aren't that far off of a replicator if our AI models become so advanced in an atomic compute world they can rearrange atoms into new forms. It seemed fiction before but within reach of humanity should we not destroy ourselves.
Our moral and political development severely lags our technological development. I have very little confidence that it will ever catch up. Looking back over the post-WW2 era, we have seen improvements (civil rights, recognition of past injustices, expansion of medical care in many countries) but also serious systemic regressions (failure to take climate change seriously, retreat to parochial revenge-based politics, failure to adequately fund society's needs, capture of politics and law by elites).
My main concern about AI is not any kind of extinction scenario but just the basic fact that we are not prepared to address the likely externalities that result from it because we're just historically terrible at addressing externalities.
Average hours worked is more or less monotonically decreasing since the start of the industrial revolution, so in the long run we are slowly freeing ourselves. But in the short run, people keep working because a) machines usually are complementary to labour (there are still coal miners today, they are just way more productive) and b) even if some jobs are completely eliminated by machines (ice making, for example), that only "solves" that narrow field. The ice farmers can (and did) reenter the labour market and find something else to do.
> Average hours worked is more or less monotonically decreasing since the start of the industrial revolution
Although that is true when comparing the start of the Industrial revolution and now, people worked less hours before the Industrial revolution [1]. Comparing the hours of work per year in England between the 17th century and the 19th century, there has been an increase of 80%. Most interestingly, the real average weekly wages over the same time period have slightly decreased, while the GDP has increased by 50%.
No, on average people in 1600s England (who were overwhelmingly peasants) worked almost all daylight hours, 6 days a week - perhaps 3000 hours a year. It's simply not possible for the hours worked to have increased a further 80% from that baseline.
Also most labour was not wage labour in the 17th century, so you need to be careful looking at wages. Especially comparing the the 19th century since there was a vast expansion of wage labour.
Are average hours worked decreasing because we have more abundance and less need to work, or are they decreasing because the distribution of work is changing?
I find it hard to accept your claim because at the start of the industrial revolution there were far fewer women in the formal labor market than there are today.
Well there were also barely any men in the formal labour market. Most people were peasants working their family farm + sharecropping on estates of the landed gentry. But that doesn't mean they weren't working hard - both sexes worked well over 3000 hours per year, to barely scrape by.
Because we invent machines not to free ourselves from labor (inventing machines is a huge amount of labor by itself), but to overcome the greed of the workers.
Because of these "digital footprint checks" now nobody can truly say what they want online. Either you have to put on a fake persona or just go completely silent. It’s self-censorship in disguise. Dead Internet Theory confirmed.
Occasionally I shed a username and start a new one.
The admins here seem not to mind as long as I'm not voting more than once or ban evading, and the same goes for most sites.
I used to be really into comedy -- it's perfectly possible to have a persona that doesn't tie back to you, but you need to be diligent -- separate email, phone number etc.
I mean, I dunno. I attached my name to these things because these are opinions I do really hold. I could have easily done this under a pseudonym, but I didn't, and if I am going to attach my name to it (or an alias easily tied to m), then I can't really get upset that people associate these opinions to me.
Some of these opinions are ones I don't really hold anymore so deleting isn't a big deal. I will admit that some of the ones I am deleting upset me because I still do think that way.
This kind of response shows humility and self-awareness. I have no doubt you'll do great after a tidy up. Not an empty affirmation. Good luck stranger.
I didnt read the article but how you do is, you should create new column without deleting the old one, and your code should be updated to use the new column, once you phase out the old version of the code, you backfill data from old column to new one, and delete the old column.
Or you rewrite queries on the fly with ProxySQL or similar to use the new column name, and then deploy the new code. Can even insert a momentary pause at the proxy layer so no queries hitting the old name sneak through while you do the rename.
This method doesn’t work as well with distributed DBs, but to be fair they’re a terrible idea for most use cases.
i'm not the person you replied but if wages lag furhter, how rents going up? it should go down since there is noone to be able to pay higher rents. they have no choice but either convince homeowner or downgrade. and Group A(rich + upper-middle) won't rent since they have enough wealth to buy a house, they may upgrade and cause inflation in luxury houses/goods.
Rent can continue to go up as long as there is room (literally physical space) in whatever housing is still on the market. Ten years ago you might have been able to afford your own apartment. Now you need three roommates. Soon you'll need seven, and then fifteen, and that can just keep going up as long as that number of bodies can be crammed into the same lodgings.
Some people might argue that wealth concentrated in the top 1% is a net benefit if you look at it as one big pool of resources. But will the remaining 99% actually see any of that benefit? Or will the 1% simply tighten their grip, keeping the rest dependent on their “generosity”?
I think because they don't get any dividend to trigger income tax, instead they get a loan against their shares and spend that and roll over the debt to infinity.
I feel like this is a myth people share without ever looking into. You service the debt with income that you make and pay tax on the income you service the debt with
They do not need to service debt using taxable income, they can roll it over indefinitely or until death, at which point the tax obligation disappears due to the stepped-up basis (capital gains reset on death)
Bro, this is HN. Most of us here know at least one person who does this. It seemed pretty popular with the early Facebook folks. So this talking point that this is a myth isn't going to work here.
Well by all means educate me, do these people just not make payments on the loan? Take out another loan to pay the first one? I just don't see how taking out loans prevents you from paying taxes on income, assuming you have to make payments with some income somewhere.
If they need 10 million for a house they take out a loan against their stock for the purchase. They then only pay tax on the income to service that loan, not the entire 10 million.
If they gain more on the 10 million still in stock than the interest on the loan the numbers benefited them. They effectively have 20 million in assets working for them for the modest debt services and without a tax haircut. In the other case they would have half the assets working for them plus would have had to pay 2 million to get those assets.
Meta is up 240% in the last five years. Which is better, not paying modest debt service and paying 2 million taxes AND missing a 240% gain on 12 million (home cost plus taxes), or keeping the 10 million working for you (and the 2 million you didn't pay to taxes) and gaining 240% on it?
Investors pouring money, its probably impossible to go out of business, at least for the big ones, until investors realise this is wrong hill to die on.
