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Evidence it can be done when so many foolishly insist it can't. The excuses made are disheartening to downright sickening.
It's really hard to feel sorry for the victim, "woe is me" mentality. My DH and I started with nothing. Our first apartment in Chicago was such a hovel that it only heated up to 59 degrees in Chicago's winters. We were really poor then. We're not now. And there are millions more just like us who have similar experiences. If acquiring wealth were so hard, how have so many of us been able to do so? 80% of US millionaires are first-generation wealthy.
And out of your millions like you there are 290,000,000 trying to make it to your level. The point isn't to say one can't be successful if they just follow your ideal model of how to be successful(just another form of ignoring the real issue) But to bring some reality that for every millionaire there are thousands who are following the same model of success and are not reaching the same levels.
You get a second job so you can do that? The only person that stands in the way of you doing something is yourself.
??? ??? ??? ???
I have no car and no license to drive. Getting to and from my workplace takes one hour each way. I also have numerous weekday medical appointments, which with travel time, consume 15 normal business hours per week. This gets in the way of conventional SHIFT jobs, as my schedule doesn't fit into conventional 9-5 jobs, and transportation issues conflict with many swing and graveyard shifts. (I didn't apply for a great janitor job at Intel because I had no way to get home at the end of the shift when buses stopped running.)
Work I can do at home can be done any time, so there are no time constraints there, so that is what I'm trying to do.
Theres a great saying i like, "one can be hardworking, ambitious and not make bad choices. But without opportunity(capital) one is an ambitious, hardworking and responsible poor or impoverished person."
No argument that one has to make good choices and be hardworking to succeed. But this is just one key to a two lock system. This is what is often forgotten in these discussions.
There is a restaurant joke going around:
Q: What's the difference between a restaurant owner and a sous chef?
Our capitalistic society couldn't function if everyone was middle class or rich. You can't have a capitalist society without a lower class. Further our society couldn't function with 300,000,000 millionaires. This is the flaw of conservative thinking "im successful why can you be thinking" or poverty or welfare would end if everyone wasn't lazy. It wouldn't be a capitalist country without the lower class or welfare class.
I have no car and no license to drive. Getting to and from my workplace takes one hour each way. I also have numerous weekday medical appointments, which with travel time, consume 15 normal business hours per week. This gets in the way of conventional SHIFT jobs, as my schedule doesn't fit into conventional 9-5 jobs, and transportation issues conflict with many swing and graveyard shifts. (I didn't apply for a great janitor job at Intel because I had no way to get home at the end of the shift when buses stopped running.)
Work I can do at home can be done any time, so there are no time constraints there, so that is what I'm trying to do.
Then get a license to drive and find a new dam job..
Location: Just transplanted to FL from the N GA mountains
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hawaiian by heart
Our capitalistic society couldn't function if everyone was middle class or rich. You can't have a capitalist society without a lower class. Further our society couldn't function with 300,000,000 millionaires. This is the flaw of conservative thinking "Im successful why can you be thinking" or poverty or welfare would end if everyone wasn't lazy. It wouldn't be a capitalist country without the lower class or welfare class.
The problem is that it is now "cool" to be poor and to be full of outrage for the rich guy. It's easier to set behind a computer screen and get the masses all riled up than to get up off your butt and do something about it. It is easier to take the handouts and not try is it not? And we've never truly "defined" rich. Oh we all know the Zuckerberg's, the Gate's and the Walton's are rich, but Joe Blow and his wife down the street are the ones who are closest to the outrage. Those of us who have made it out of that "poor" category, yet are not rich are the ones who get hit the hardest. I don't think there is a one of us who hates the poor because their poor.... everyone needs a little help sometimes. But what we do dislike....immensely.. are the excuses and the idea that someone is owed just merely because they exist. I didn't bring em into this world, and I sure don't have to pay for them. It's hard enough just keeping my family afloat.
How so? I got fired from a job (bad attitude, I got tired of doing other's undone work at a minimum wage sweatshop), could no longer afford rent, had to move. With time running out, I moved into a $650 room ($150 per week, $100 deposit) at the last minute. (This room had previously been advertised three weeks earlier, but I rejected it the first time as insanely overpriced. Turns out that desperate people WILL pay $150 a week to keep a roof over their head.) That was a 5BR house owned by a couple with a husband in failing health; they had refinanced to pay his huge medical bills and slept on recliners in the living room while renting out all 5 bedrooms to 7 people (two couples). Hubby died several months later, with his disability income gone, the subprime mortgage payments could no longer be met, and with a long-running delinquency, the home was soon foreclosed and everyone had to move...
Which put me into the forced/distress move mode again, where the only room I could afford was in a house with four others and an unemployed construction worker. (At the time, local construction was pretty much dead, with a downtown tower in progress brought to an abrupt halt for lack of continued financing.)
Six weeks after I moved in, the laid off construction worker went to a bar, picked up a woman who had just gotten out of drug rehab, and returned home with her. (He doesn't go to bars to drink, he goes to bars to pick up women and to gamble on the video poker machines. He considers bars entirely too expensive for drinking.) Since she had just gotten out of rehab, she needed a place to crash, so she moved right in with the drunk, who is the guy to whom I pay rent.
Then they proceeded to get up in the morning, start drinking, and then start fighting by dinner time, resulting about 3x a week in her voluntary or forced noisy departure. Along the way they both picked up several police calls and two domestic violence arrests each. The drunk ended up with a charge that stuck, and with probation and mandated anger management classes. The drunk also was kicked out of the house for a few weeks when a woman resident filed a restraining order on him. (The owner/landlord made a rare appearance to toss out the drunk.) Well the drunk asked for a hearing, the restraining order was dismissed, the drunk triumphantly returned to the house immediately following the hearing, and the woman was gone the next day.
The drunk and his girlfriend continued to fight for three years before she left him. (They got back together a year after she left, but then she died with a needle in her arm.)
So he went to another bar and came home with another woman and they've been on and off with a lot of fighting and restraining orders. (He files them against her and she has gone to jail a few times for violating them.) When they are 'off' he mopes around the house all day (going out interferes with his drinking) and intermittently blows up in anger.
As the drunk has advanced down the slope of alcoholism, he has leaned more and more on others to enable and fund his lifestyle. At first he was charging enough room rent to live in the house for free, then upped the rent as desired; now he charges $500/mo , lives for free, and pockets some Benjamins. He used up all 99 weeks of unemployment without having to actually look for a job, then got a partial VA disability benefit, then discovered SS disability pays better. In a few months it will convert to SS retirement benefits plus his union pension kicks in, so he has never worked a day as long as I have lived here and he will never again have to work a day the rest of his life.
So yeah, the situation is bull **** but the facts are not.
I get you but what gets me going is everytime we discuss this issue it always leads to the lazy or person who gets handouts is the poor person or welfare person, like this character defect of laziness is a class only thing? You get garbage about this because you feed into this. The corporations, government and investors are also robbing the middle class taxpayers. Whats sad is tomorrow we could close the foodstamp program and the taxes saved per month by individual taxpayers would be nothing more then the cost of a few starbuck lattes. You and others have taken just one expense to taxpayers and made this aguement that the world would come back to normal if we get rid of poor lazy, accepting handouts people. Whats even more ugly is it isn't laziness or people just getting handouts that makes you angry but its only poor and welfare people that do this that make the right angry.
All one has to do is read the threads to see what i say is true.
And out of your millions like you there are 290,000,000 trying to make it to your level.
Not necessairly. Some want more, some want the same, and others are happy with less. And many aren't even trying at all.
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