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I didn't get from the article that she was saying "poor me" just info as to why she used the food pantry.
I personally don't care if people use food pantries or soup kitchens. I support one near me in NJ, and I support City Harvest, which as you probably know rescues and redistributes food in the city rather than let it get thrown out.
We have enough food in this country to feed everybody, so let 'em eat, criminal, crippled, crazy or just plain poor. If someone takes food that they don't need, let karma get 'em.
she didn’t have to say poor me ..the fact this article is about a working women who cleans homes and has to use a food pantry says it all .
the fact is most of us here couldn’t afford a good life in greenwich but would be smart enough to stop trying if it resulted in having to go to a food pantry.
would the article make sense to you if it read that she insisted on living in beverly hills and cleans houses for a living and has to go to food pantries to afford to eat ?
i doubt most of us here wouldnt say that was a poor decision.
average income in greenwich is 265k but that doesn’t mean it even buys a middle class lifestyle as a home is in the millions
tell me she lives in yonkers , port chester which by the way looks like peru , i passed thru there , mount vernon or the southwest end of new rochelle and i would have some sympathy.
it’s pretty funny how the person selecting this article as ammunition didn’t know how actually silly the story is
Last edited by mathjak107; 12-24-2023 at 02:29 PM..
It’s always hilarious when one of CD’s Noble poor climbs on their high horse and deigns to lecture the rest of us. You have NO idea what some of us have been through.
I don’t talk about this a lot, because it’s really nobody’s business, and it’s rarely relevant to the discussions that I participate in on CD. But you’ve thrown down the gauntlet, so here goes. . .
Do a Google search on “Guayaquil Slums.” Check out the images. Pay special attention to pictures of the shacks made from split bamboo, sitting on top of stilts over a tidal estuary that serves as an open sewer for much of a city of millions. I VOLUNTARILY lived there for two years. I lived on approximately $150/month, with much of that going to rent a shack so filled with rats, snakes, and spiders that you wouldn’t set foot in it. You wouldn’t even walk down the street where I lived and worked. You’d be too terrified (with good reason) to do so. After paying rent, what little money was left over went to what was generally one meal a day. Usually a bowl of rice, with a fried egg on top. An occasional chicken leg, maybe a couple small slices of plantain. Other days, a small bowl of chicken foot soup. Food poisoning was a common occurrence. I’ve had amoebic dysentery multiple times. Trichuris trichiura, and a whole host of other parasites that left me ravaged, and I still suffer the effects of that today. When I went to Ecuador, I was 6’3”, 200 pounds. When I came home, I weighed 145. And I didn’t go down there as a lardass with a bunch of fat to lose. I was an athlete, with a body fat percentage of approximately 15%. No, I didn’t lose fat, I lost lean muscle mass. Tell us about the time that you lost more than 25% of your body weight, almost entirely in the form of lean muscle mass. I’ll wait. . .
You can’t even imagine what I’ve been through, and what my journey has entailed. Just sit back and enjoy your taxpayer funded, parasitic existence, but don’t you DARE ever try to lecture me again, about what the American poor go through. I’ve won that competition handily. . .
I'll lecture you any time I feel you need it. You went through no "poor" competition. You just told us you CHOSE what you did, which meant you could have walked out of it at any time you CHOSE to. Do you think poverty is a game for rich people to play at just so they can prove something?
Many people don't have the choice of walking out of poverty. What would you have done if you had been born there and there had been no better place for you to escape to at the end of two years?
all that matters is your own story not straw people .
we can all speak in terms of the abstract situation but at the end of the day it’s our own situation and story that matters.
but i can almost guarantee that two people in the same exact situation will have two different outcomes with one doing better then the other and finding that way while the other finds that excuse.
my project buddies are a perfect example .
we came from similar economic backgrounds with the same family incomes , same education level and lived similar lives in the same projects .
i wanted a way out , they did not ….i worked towards a eventual career , they did not , i saved all i could and learned to invest early on , they did not .
now our outcomes are opposite as they are still working low end jobs , financially struggling in the same projects and i am comfortably retired , with the ability to still use my skills to earn in two days more then they earn in a week.
poor decision making and choices can start very early on and snow ball thru life
Last edited by mathjak107; 12-25-2023 at 01:58 AM..
But you don't know whether those are "poor decisions" or something else, like depression or abusive parents...you realize that there's been studies done that have even found people not considered "good looking" by others have less confidence, do worse in school, are not promoted as often, and often don't do as well in life. Sometimes it's not the big things that take you down.
The other thing you said "poor decision making and choices can start very early on and snow ball thru life" can be very true, especially if the person making the initial poor decision has no idea it's a poor decision and then, when it's discovered it's a poor decision, is given very little idea of how to get out of that poor decision and how to keep from making more of them.
Financial problems start early and snowball throughout life as well, and once they're rolling down the hill, it's hard to stop them and start over the right way, especially if you don't know what the right way actually is. Sure, you can learn about it as you grow older, but by that time you're already so deep in the hole learning doesn't do much for you.
And people don't learn things by osmosis. They mostly have to be taught. What happens to kids today who aren't taught anything about finances, and start with a bad financial error before they're even 20? More to the point, is it fair to measure the kid whose parents know about 401Ks, stock options, and savings to the kid whose parents neither know nor care about these things and have never taught their kids anything about them?
I'm not saying that people with gumption aren't usually the ones that get ahead. But they don't always get ahead and the people who don't have gumption may not have it for a specific reason. And everyone makes mistakes. You wouldn't like to be called out for the rest of your life for making a mistake and neither does anyone else. But when people are called out on it, and then it's reinforced that the one mistake they made is apparently a forever one that will keep them down the rest of their lives, and because of it they're considered to be trashy unmotivated people - well, that in itself could make someone give up. Life can do a bang up job of beating you down even without financial mistakes.
But you don't know whether those are "poor decisions" or something else, like depression or abusive parents...you realize that there's been studies done that have even found people not considered "good looking" by others have less confidence, do worse in school, are not promoted as often, and often don't do as well in life. Sometimes it's not the big things that take you down.
The other thing you said "poor decision making and choices can start very early on and snow ball thru life" can be very true, especially if the person making the initial poor decision has no idea it's a poor decision and then, when it's discovered it's a poor decision, is given very little idea of how to get out of that poor decision and how to keep from making more of them.
Financial problems start early and snowball throughout life as well, and once they're rolling down the hill, it's hard to stop them and start over the right way, especially if you don't know what the right way actually is. Sure, you can learn about it as you grow older, but by that time you're already so deep in the hole learning doesn't do much for you.
And people don't learn things by osmosis. They mostly have to be taught. What happens to kids today who aren't taught anything about finances, and start with a bad financial error before they're even 20? More to the point, is it fair to measure the kid whose parents know about 401Ks, stock options, and savings to the kid whose parents neither know nor care about these things and have never taught their kids anything about them?
I'm not saying that people with gumption aren't usually the ones that get ahead. But they don't always get ahead and the people who don't have gumption may not have it for a specific reason. And everyone makes mistakes. You wouldn't like to be called out for the rest of your life for making a mistake and neither does anyone else. But when people are called out on it, and then it's reinforced that the one mistake they made is apparently a forever one that will keep them down the rest of their lives, and because of it they're considered to be trashy unmotivated people - well, that in itself could make someone give up. Life can do a bang up job of beating you down even without financial mistakes.
all straw people arguments.
if you don’t know their history and the decisions they made you don’t know the real deal
children out of wedlock , poor decisions about who they marry , lack of making good career decisions or even poor decisions about having different insurances are at the root of many financial horror stories..
even education isn’t an obstacle as money is made by being creative and doing what others can’t or won’t do for themselves .
our sceptic guy in pa had a grade school education and a multi million dollar company doing what others wouldn’t .
my buddy who didn’t even get out of high school and had a prison record had a great business cleaning out estates and finding great things of value .
they even featured a show about him called brian the fortune seller
Last edited by mathjak107; 12-25-2023 at 12:42 PM..
I also want to say that, sometimes, the decisions you make that other people think are poor decisions can't be decided until the end result is in. Those are called "taking risks" and buying stocks and bonds, buying a house, choosing to go to college, those are all risks we take, gambling that the end result will be a positive one.
In this country, all sorts of people take the same risks and yet, when they have positive results, that is, they don't go broke or they can find a good paying job, then we consider that what they did was an acceptable risk and a good decision. But when the results are less than stellar, like the job market tanks and there's no good job for that degree or a job loss causes a home foreclosure, we then say the very same decision was a bad one.
I think we have to get out of this mindset because I think we're all confusing "decision" with "gamble". There's a big difference between the two and the results of a gamble are never predictable.
I chose to take a chance and buy land and live in a trailer, hoping I could save money and move up, as it were. If I had fallen ill, or had an unexpected car bill, or anything else, that would have made it a bad decision. But I've now done pretty much what I set out to do and now everyone thinks I made a good decision. But the decision I made didn't dictate whether it was good or bad. It's the results that did that. And in the end, I really didn't make any decision at all. But I sure made a big gamble. And I could just as easily have lost as won, no matter how much gumption and determination I had.
I also want to say that, sometimes, the decisions you make that other people think are poor decisions can't be decided until the end result is in. Those are called "taking risks" and buying stocks and bonds, buying a house, choosing to go to college, those are all risks we take, gambling that the end result will be a positive one.
In this country, all sorts of people take the same risks and yet, when they have positive results, that is, they don't go broke or they can find a good paying job, then we consider that what they did was an acceptable risk and a good decision. But when the results are less than stellar, like the job market tanks and there's no good job for that degree or a job loss causes a home foreclosure, we then say the very same decision was a bad one.
I think we have to get out of this mindset because I think we're all confusing "decision" with "gamble". There's a big difference between the two and the results of a gamble are never predictable.
I chose to take a chance and buy land and live in a trailer, hoping I could save money and move up, as it were. If I had fallen ill, or had an unexpected car bill, or anything else, that would have made it a bad decision. But I've now done pretty much what I set out to do and now everyone thinks I made a good decision. But the decision I made didn't dictate whether it was good or bad. It's the results that did that. And in the end, I really didn't make any decision at all. But I sure made a big gamble. And I could just as easily have lost as won, no matter how much gumption and determination I had.
life is a gamble
we just try to put the odds on our side by making as good and as informed decisions as we can .
in fact most successful people dont fall in to success , they fail into success because they have the want and drive and creativity to succeed and if one door closes they try another.
most people are not like that , and doing nothing about their situation is far easier then taking control and fixing it and they either won’t or can’t take control
if you don’t know their history and the decisions they made you don’t know the real deal
Quote:
Originally Posted by mathjak107
life is a gamble
we just try to put the odds on our side by making as good and as informed decisions as we can .
in fact most successful people dont fall in to success , they fail into success because they have the want and drive and creativity to succeed and if one door closes they try another
Exactly what I'm saying. You're saying people with determination get ahead. I'm saying you have no idea why some people have determination and others don't. The drive to succeed can be beat out of a kid when they're in high school. But not knowing why a person doesn't care if he succeeds or not shouldn't be a reason to run them down.
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