I've been overworked at many professional technical jobs in different roles before.

I'm paid a great deal more now, and yet I was never more tired or worn out or found it hard to study than when I worked the ovens at the pizza place.

I often work with people who have never worked such jobs. They're upset that they're 'overworked' and spend their time in the fancy break room with all the perks. Many I suspect have no clue.

Not that it's a realistic idea but damn if everyone had experiencing working in the demanding, underpaid, crappy jobs in the service industry, we might be more empathetic and better off as a whole.

Walmart does something interesting for their software development process. Say a developer is working on a warehouse automation system -- that dev. is then trained and works in the warehouse for a month. Same goes for checkout/cashier, or customer service, or whatever. You WORK that job for a month and you'll understand just how trying it can be to struggle with lousy software on top of a sometimes difficult public. You'll know the trouble spots and the workarounds, and can take that education back to a nice safe quiet desk where you can then go on to help solve the problems.

I was constantly asking our designers and PMs to try using our product as a user might. I'd write up little scenarios that I knew our users struggled with and invite people to try them out with our product.

Sadly, I found it impossible to persuade anybody to design for anything except what looks good on a presentation of UX mocks.

But I'll be able to understand their job better and what the software really needs to do to make than more efficient and productive. They'll appreciate that and be more likely to buy in and adapt to the product they'll be using.

That's not your job. Your job is to implement the features you're told to implement.

But the users saw those features and said that is not what they asked for.

So? Why do you care if the project fails? It's not on you if it fails. Just do what the BA's said to do.

Boss, they aren't translating the business needs correctly. We have to rebuild features 2 or 3 or 4 times. Is we could see what they do and talk to them it'd only take once. That's happened a couple times during user acceptance. They said that's not what what we asked for. I said what did you ask for? I coded it right there on the spot and they signed off on the user story.

Go back to work. I'm busy. This isn't a productive conversation.

Imho that's trying to solve a symptom, not the actual problem.

Why does society tolerate &^%$ jobs in the first place? Why not strive to make jobs non-&^%$?

Instead, it somehow has become completely normalized that these kinds of jobs exist, and anybody who doesn't want to work them is considered "too entitled", which all goes back to this notion of "work as a virtue".

And while the idea that this experience might help change something from the desk job, the reality is most people will just be glad to be having their desk job, with a lot having a mindset of "I went through the &^%$ jobs to get here, everybody else should have to suffer like I did!".

We do strive, which is why we have non-shit jobs now. After the advent of agriculture, overwhelming majority of people has worked mundane, tiring, repetitive and straining jobs. It’s only recent increases in technology allowed us to produce immense amounts of wealth, finally allowing huge swaths of population to enjoy light, interesting and fun jobs. We still have lots of shit jobs out there, but don’t worry, we’re working on that.

Service and social jobs are usually those "closest to the base", being in constant contact with people from all walks of life, while at the same time usually the least well paid.

That's a lot of exposure compared to many other jobs, in particular, desk jobs and pretty much most management and executive positions.

Imho the importance of such real in flesh contact to other people, across peer groups, is vastly underestimated these days.

The ever-present social media gives digitally affine people often the misleading idea they can find everybody, with all their issues and opinions, online but from my experience that just holds not true.

There's plenty of people out there that don't even know what Facebook is, as unbelievable as that might sound.

Slowly the org transitions to much higher paid people in these roles across the board.

I think part of it is mgmt types think they save money reducing wages for the most numerous type of employee and it creates a black hole race to the bottom.

High end restaurants have very well paid front of house because they have a financial incentive to perform. Cashiers don't.

Can you point to any point in human history (since the invention of farming) in which a smaller fraction of people worked menial jobs than now?

There are tons and tons of bullshit jobs that don't produce anything valuable, don't fulfill anyones need to have a meaningful life, but somehow keep butts in seats often at keyboards getting paid to justify someone elses jobs existence.

There is a reason why job satisfaction is abysmal, why depression and opioid abuse is rampant, and why those weren't as large problems two centuries ago when people were almost universally subsistence farmers. The labor wasn't easy but it always justified itself to those doing the work (assuming it was your own farm, growing your own food, which was and has always been pretty rare). You knew why it had to be done, something lacking in many modern careers.

E.g. flipping burgers at McDonald's isn't a shitty job because you're flipping burgers; it's a shitty job because you are paid badly, made to work much faster than it's healthy, and the management is shitty to you both personally and structurally, in how they plan the shifts, etc.

I'd argue that any shitty job could have a non-shitty variant with mostly the same tasks and responsibilities, and only the conditions changed. Which leads me to the answer to your question: anywhere between invention of agriculture and the industrial revolution, or perhaps even up to XIX century. Even when people toiled on farms, to then give most of it away to some nobles with swords, at least they weren't micromanaged day-in, day-out by said nobles.

One step up, the corporate managers putting the pressure on the local managers are themselves pressured by market conditions to cut cost and drive efficiency. And who drives those market conditions? You and I, my friend. We like cheap stuff. The consequence is that others suffer.

I worked on a farm throwing hay. It’s literally backbreaking work, but I had an awesome employer who thought about safety and making for a better workplace. If Amazon were running that farm, I’d be crippled by debilitating pain today.

They can be low / lower pay and still be a fairly reasonable place to work with fairly reasonable people to work with.

But, if we accept that work conditions fit some kind of natural distribution / bell curve, it's probably unrealistic to believe there will be no shit jobs.

I simply look at eBay and see the $200-$400 price tags to replace my current machine (10-year old ThinkPad T400) and try not to cry. (This one was given to me by a friend)

I found an 800MHz AMD Duron with 128MB RAM on the side of the road in 2013. Browsing the web on that box was fun, even after maxing out the RAM with everything in the house and getting it up to 320MB.

In 2005 I was running a 66MHz 486DX2 with 8MB of free diskspace (oh and 4MB RAM).

The outlier was the Pentium 4 I used for a bit in 2006 - it had a crippled motherboard that couldn't do DMA to the HDD, only PIO, so the cursor would freeze if anything was accessing the HDD even for a fraction of a second. This was the Firefox 2.x era, so with 512MB of RAM I was mostly staring at "Task Manager (Not Responding)" instead of doing anything useful.

My point with all this: it has taken me about 20 years to realize that my general lack of success at mastering computer science wasn't entirely due to the learning difficulties and other mental health issues preventing me from holding down a traditional job - it was access to sane equipment.

I have had the ABSOLUTE HARDEST TIME EVER (emphasis appropriate and necessary) to FORCE myself to do ANYTHING with computers beyond what I'd describe "theoretical learning". "But what if I start this project and the computer dies tomorrow?????" is what a part of my head sort of screams/cries out anytime I have a new idea (with that many anxious questionmarks).

Unresolvable problem, currently. And an interesting one, too, since if I _could_ start a project, and hold it together, I might actually be able to get somewhere and move up.

...Except for the fact that the disability support I'm currently eligible for only recognizes casual/part time work payment structures, not bulk post-payment consulting/bug-bounty up-front types of remuneration, which is the type of thing I have any confidence in my abilities with. (Since I can cram and do the work in a sprint, then run away and have a break for a million years afterwards.)

So yeah, I am practically disabled because of how my mental health issues are classified, not directly because of the issues themselves (which have an impact but do leave me with some level of functionality which I am unable to effectively use).

That probabbly explains why there are such great free development tools out there too ;)

* empathy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy

* sympathy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathy

Same should apply for software as well imo.

When the Reagan administration changed the regulations around meatpacking to break the unions and ship the industry back to 1910 standards to rural places, none of the principled conservatives were complaining about cheap meat packing and illegal workers who didn’t collect workers compensation or have pesky demands for health insurance.

Likewise, none of the large apple growers around me were too concerned about guest worker visas when they were able to hire on Jamaicans for a few months, house them in onsite dormitories and pay below market rates. They love to bitch about Mexican construction guys though.

When I worked in the mall in the 90s, the struggle of unskilled workers was obvious and sad. At that time, most workers made $4.25, and the barrier to moving up for folks not in college was a car. Getting a $12/hr job as a line cook at Pizza Uno or $15/hr job cleaning offices meant freedom for those people.

If labor standards didn’t allow the abysmal working conditions that only desperate Latin American or other immigrants are willing to take, the market would take care of that problem. Instead of shipping in Apple pickers from 4,000 miles away, you could hire folks 10 miles away and bus them in.

You have this backwards. My point wasn't that immigrants are taking American jobs, it was that Americans are giving them these jobs because Americans are being lazy, soft and cheap.

The immigrant is not at fault. It seems like you're responding to Fox News talking points, not to me. I would suggest doing that on foxnews.com.

At no point did I suggest that better labor standards are a bad idea, but I did observe that anyone who thinks society will eliminate all the jobs Hacker News perceives as shitty is drinking a lot of kool-aid.

Don't blame the American who doesn't want to do back-breaking work for pennies. It's the same everywhere: for example, Finland imports seasonal berry pickers from Thailand.

No sane local wants to work on the rates the market is willing to pay; mechanised agriculture has pushed the prices low enough to make manual agricultural work simply unsustainable. To make local work profitable we'd need to radically raise the product prices or provide subsidies.

These problems can be solved in other ways. A real world solution probably involves some workers getting paid less than they would like, and some businesses paying higher wages than they want to.

The least moral solution is to develop an illegal underclass and deny them human and political rights. This sort of thing is cancerous for a democracy and bears an unsettling resemblance to one of America's original sins, one which I'm sure I don't need to name directly, but which we knew was wrong from day one, and which we spent a lot of blood and treasure to abolish.

I'm not sure how to react to cases where this is true but the seasonal workers still see it as a good source of income. Would the market bear the increased cost? Likely not. Avocados would be imported in the US, and in Finland berries would disappear as an industry ingredient as there are no low-cost countries with climate suitable for cultivation.

Agreed. When I worked retail and waiting jobs, I got grief from both out-of-touch wealthy people, and bitter poor people (although there were also kind people from both of those categories).

- "you were lucky."

- "thank your lucky stars"

- "You got off easy"

- "It's brutal if you have to work such jobs for a long time"

I worked retail, bused tables, and waited for almost 3 years full-time, and I'm certainly not claiming to have only gotten grief from a few people. I never said anything even remotely close to "few people" in my comment. I suggested that there was a trend to the people I got grief from, in agreement to the GP comment. Note: a trend, not an absolute cut-off.

In addition to the comment I was responding to, there are other comments in this thread making similar assertions, so I'm not the outlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717225

Good point, it explains why well-traveled people often end up being insufferable racists.

On the other hand Sony Japan apparently has a policy where new employees fresh out of college (vs employees with previous work experience) are made to work 2 weeks in retail at an electronic store to get a taste of what it's like for actual customers. I ask some employees if they got any thing useful out of the experience. Most said no, it was just like getting hazed.

My local store had a good sale on 12-packs of soda and so I decided to stock up with a dozen packs (I like a variety). I loaded them into my cart upside-down so the barcodes were facing up. The cashier just had to take the hand scanner and zap each one super easy and didn't have to lift any of them. It saved both of us time and effort and the cashier was extremely appreciative.

That said, if I could get a retail job that paid what I make as a dev, I’d definitely consider it. Retail was grueling, but at the same time much less psychological pressure, and much less mentally exhausting.

I always say I’m not going to let my next dev job take over my life, and maintain work/life balance, and things always start out well. But inevitably, pressure builds, I cave, and things get bad again. I realize that I share the blame for this situation, but at the same time, this situation seems to be more common than not among software devs.

I never faced this kind of pressure in retail jobs. Work was grueling and at time abusive, but when the work day was over, I was 100% able to relax and forget about work. I struggle to do that with a software job.

But at the same time, my compensation is considerably higher than most other jobs. So I’m both grateful for my job and yet still wish there were another way. Like a part-time software development job, which seem to be unusually rare.

To some degree, serving the "customer" by cutting labour costs to the bare minimum (as a way to minimize the cost of everything), means we create an awful existence for the people who depend on these jobs for a living. The tyranny of their lives is dictated by a consumer base who constantly demand lower prices and will shop elsewhere to save a dollar or two.

I worked in a supermarket for four years, but it was part time, while I was in High School and in my first year of University. I didn't need the money in the way someone working full time needed it. I was given consistent hours every week.

Working retail for a modest wage (say $25 an hour), with consistent hours would be a really great career for a huge swathe of the population. Lots of people (myself included) enjoy interacting with people all day.

A lot of more traditional professions have a better balance between physical work and mental work (skilled crafts, engineering in the traditional sense, or being a doctor all come to mind). Modern knowledge work doesn't have enough physical movement involved.

I wouldn't like to do it full time, but sometimes I wish I could spend 20% of my time doing something enjoyable but menial like stacking shelves. I think I'd hate doing it full time, but one day a week? Practically sounds like fun!

* not having to cut labor to the minimum as a basic value

* sooo many jobs would be unobjectionable at 8 hours per week. Almost any job.

* professions should be designed to balance physical and mental labor, particularly to offer breaks from painful standing.

I am not with you on:

* Giving people 167% of the average hourly wage for an easy job like retail. As a society, we do not _want_ retail to be a great career. You don't develop the job skills or provide the same value as jobs that are more challenging, and the more valuable things you could have produced are lost. Retail should pay less than other jobs, _because_ it's more fun to interact with people all day than to work at a hot grill.

When you are that poor, you need every hour of work you can get to make rent, buy food etc. You can't take time off to interview for a better job, or to study for a new career. You are stressed from a thousand extra decisions about money that the cushion of a little extra cash could save you. Also you are one emergency or injury or illness away from losing your apartment, or going hungry.

That's why advocates call for a living wage, a wage that people can make enough to live on. If they have the capability to do more, then that gives them a better chance to achieve it.

Though there will still need to be people working retail.

As for how fun it is to interact with people... that definitely depends on who you are and who you are interacting with. If you know someone working retail, ask them how it is.

Broadly, as a society, we want people to have jobs that pay them enough to survive, and with enough margin to do other stuff. Not everything can (or should) tie back to economic value. Otherwise we end up cutting off our noses to spite our own faces, as we focus on the short term rather than the long term health of a wider community.

More than anything, we want to reward diligence, professionalism and effort, in whatever form that might take.

Part of the reason software jobs are nice and comfortable is of course the pay and the agency, both coming from demand exceeding supply. But a big part of it is also, IMO, that it's impossible to tell how much contribution to the bottomline a developer has on a day-to-day, or hour-to-hour basis. When my coworker and I start talking shit on the job, does that contribute positively or negatively to the ultimate productivity? By how much? Nobody can tell, which is why we can get away with it.

Conversely, in retail or fast-food joints, you can track people's contribution to the bottom line at minute resolution. Which is why they're being treated like slave labor.

And everyone needs to shop. Retail isn't just interacting with people all day: You are filing shelves. Sometimes you are a pharmacist or a pharmacy tech. Sometimes you are doing payroll or managing. Sometimes you are ordering product.

You are also cleaning up the shit someone smeared on the wall of the bathroom and the puke the kid left in the isle. There is no real way around that.

Not everyone thinks it is more fun to interact with people all day long. I'd argue that most factory work - lots of which is paid fairly well, comparatively - takes no more intelligence or training or knowledge than retail. In both, once you have experience, you can get another job. Same for call centers... which again, are usually paid better than retail or fast food (yet still treated poorly). I don't know why retail should pay less than these sorts of jobs. Most folks just wind up with retail jobs because that's what they started with and it is hard to get out of the cycle.

I don't like interacting with people but it is way more cushy than the factory work I did for fifteen years. I guess you're right about not taking more intelligence or training, but it takes so much more physical stamina and risk of accident.

Most folks don't do retail for fun. Those that do will also do a number of other part-time jobs for fun or whatever reason. Most folks working retail, though, are doing it to eat and pay rent. Sometimes having a flexible schedule is necessary. A great number of places have chances to move into management, sometimes moving out of poverty wages.

None of this means the folks aren't ambitious or motivated. You simply don't recognise it as such because they are doing what you consider to be a "lower" job or not doing enough to meet your personal criteria.

I will grant you that selling garden soil might be as physically demanding as working in a factory, and miles walked could add up too. But I never woke up in retail wondering if I'd be physically able to continue working my job much longer because of the wear and tear.

There's a reason every rich country got there by manufacturing and not retail, and in part it's that you don't build human capital by sitting in a chair scanning price tags. Manufacturing productivity increases steadily so workers have to become steadily more skillful to keep up. It's also far from a dead-end job, as productivity is easily measured and the cream can rise.

People in retail can be ambitious and talented, but their talents are wasted there. We can't get every ambitious, motivated person out of retail and into the job where they would do the most good just by offering them money, because money isn't everything. But we can avoid screwing things up by _pushing_ those people into jobs where their talents are wasted, by offering them too much money. I've worked lots of mandatory overtime because people wouldn't come work for my employer, so I feel the pain of jobs that need good people but can't get them.

Your response screams, "I've never worked a retail job in my life!!". There's nothing easy about working retail in the United States, and interacting with the majority of retail customers is far from "fun".

I'm a CS student and I've been working at a Panera for about a year now. I love my particular store and the work environment is great; I genuinely look forward to going to work every day. I'll miss my coworkers when I have to quit soon to start my programming career.

That being said, I understand why those jobs could never realistically pay anything near what a good software dev job can. If you could make the same amount of money working a job like that, why would anyone put in the effort to get stressed out as a programmer? It wouldn't make sense.

The solution is to fix dev jobs so they're more balanced and less stressful :)

If I could work the ride op or fast food jobs at my current salary, I'd take them in a heart beat. Hell, I might even take the ride op job for half the salary because the job could sometimes be a lot of fun.

But retail? Hell no. You could offer me double my salary and I'd still hesitate before accepting it. People treat retail employees like utter garbage. We once had a customer berate a cashier to tears, yelling at her and literally calling her an "incompetent stupid bitch", because his credit card was being declined and he was insisting she was just entering his card wrong.

It was a blast.

No complaints, I actually enjoyed the work, but it was exhausting in a way that no office job can compare. The experience also makes me want to throttle folks who have never lifted anything heavier than a pen as I hear them whine about utter trivial things.

I don't, because it is considered rude to throttle one's co-workers.

The urge remains.

Just because your work isn’t as grueling as someone else’s doesn’t mean you don’t get to be unhappy or dissatisfied with it.

Having a wider perspective leads to a greater appreciation for what one has, after all. And that is a good thing.

To get more money you have to pry it from people's hands. You have to have something they can't resist not paying you for. That's it.

The suffering of low minimum wage is supposed to "encourage" people to move up the value chain, as the conservative doctrine goes, but it just doesn't work when all your time and energy is spent surviving.

Another bad thing about those types of jobs is that they can start to warp your mind after a while, to the effect that you start unconsciously considering your superiors / managers as role models, and start trying to 'move up the ladder' because the pay is marginally better, when in reality most of the time the _top_ of the "ladder" at such organizations are compensated less than entry-level positions for in-demand skilled workers --

I've been continuously employed [out of what I _thought_ was necessity] since I was 16, and until I was about 26 the majority of my jobs were in the foodservice / warehouse / gofer / etc hard-work-long-hours-very-low-pay category. If I had to do over again, I would have stayed away from those situations by any means available and used that time to build valuable skills [as I later did], which would almost certainly have resulted in better outcomes, sooner.

Hard work leads to prosperity. That's not the same as equating prosperity to hard work.

Most prosperous people achieved prosperity due to earlier hard work and sacrifice of themselves (or their immediate ancestors.)

Clearly, the 'value chain', as you put it, exists as evidenced by the numerous posts on this thread of describing the previous fast-food-type jobs they held that led them to more 'prosperous' positions (at least, affording enough prosperity to spend time posting messages to the internet instead of digging ditches or flipping burgers.)

Sometimes it does. Other times, it's barely enough to achieve survival.

> Most prosperous people achieved prosperity due to earlier hard work and sacrifice of themselves (or their immediate ancestors.)

Or their distant ancestors. Or due to their -- or their ancestors' -- criminal activities or exploitative behavior or sheer luck.

Every single office job I've had, except my first (which was a data entry job, not programming), has been a lot more stressful a lot more often, and I'm including the job where the first thing my coworkers and I did each morning was play a video game to determine who was going to go pick up coffee (Carcassonne on Xbox Live Arcade, if you're curious, took about 20 minutes).

And this is true whether your folks won the lottery or earned their money through hard work.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/29/study-to-succeed-in-america-...

This part wasn't in your link, I don't believe this is true.

Any guesses on when the people working hard at a fast food restaurant will have prosperity arrive?

Honestly, I only made it out (I was probabbly not going to make it through college due to all the work and my own personality when I was young was NOT ready for college) because I got lucky, had some mild technical skills and the .com era came along and companies wanted warm bodies.

I picked some aged old company and they hired me. That company stuck around for a long enough time to establish a career.

Working pizza ... could easily have kept me down due to that and other challenges.

Now I work in an office. It's nothing to go 4-6 hours without stopping. But of course I can stop and pop out for a coffee or a snack, or lunch whenever I want.

$4 extra an hour would change this woman's life (and a lot of other people like her). $4 extra an hour.. I don't think I'd notice it.

Many of us are SO SO fortunate, we can't even begin to imagine how good we have it.

I worked at gas stations after that, before college, and while it was tiring, nothing at the same level.

I can totally imagine a pizza job would be draining.

At the end of the day you just want a room temperature shower and a cold drink, the mental capacity isn't really there for much else.

This is why I feel so much for those building the stadiums for the next football(/soccer) world cup. What's even worse is they're being worked to death as slaves in all but name.

If you don't have enough downtime/nutrition to recover between shifts you slowly fall apart.

He does have the relative security that comes with having a long term partner that does make a professional salary, but I don't think that diminishes the motivational piece. Not everyone is as ambitious as every one else. Of those that are, not everyone's ambition is pointed in the same direction. Some people just want to rock up at work for 8 hours a day, go home, watch some shit TV that they enjoy and then go to bed. Frankly, that's ok. There's not enough programmer/marketing professional/CEO/Founder roles for everyone to have them.

Hard work is relative and people are working very hard at all salary levels. There are many other constructs which are the true reasons behind how much people earn.

I agree with the Fight for $15... But I think they need to attach this to inflation or somehow as a percentage of the highest incomes in the economy. Otherwise Trump will just keep pressuring the Fed to print more money and $15 will only be worth $5 in today's money.

You guys know that McDonalds manages to run in countries with decent wages as well, right? And that maybe a company with a yearly global profit of over 10 billion dollars might be able to afford giving their employees a livable wage. Hell, just the fact that it`s possible to have a full time job in the US, and still need food stamps should be a massive, red flag about your situation. But for some reason you prefer to (by extension) defend the extremely rich owners of these companies.

So while you can live on a McDonalds income, it's only because your fellow citizens are chipping in. Effectively we are subsidising McDonalds as they can now give you a lower income and get away with it.

I'm not sure if that is the best way to go.

No, before social support networks of the modern mixed economy companies paid worse for basically unskilled jobs. The surplus of people desperate for work meant that if the pay was better than no job but inadequate for survival in the long term, people would still take it, and if the inadequate pay meant they died or became unable to work, well, there were always more people in the surplus labor pool to replace them.

Decreasing the desperate need for employment puts more power in the hands of labor, not capital.

Those subsidies, like the current ones, run deep.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae#Politics_and_the_...

The problem is that all powerful people own properties and they want to keep prices high. Main voters base also owns properties. It's an unsolvable problem.

London. The problem is the same in all large cities/capitals. I was listening on a BBC podcast a couple of years back discussing how the "not living where they work" is the main thing holding them back in progressing with their lives as much/fast as they could.

Especially in London, where near the center you can't get a decent studio for less than 1000-1300 pounds per month (just the rent now add council tax, utilities, etc.). The only way to make it is live on a flat with 3-5-7 more people.

There are some "maps vs rent" for London. I assume you can find some for other cities as well.

https://d36tnp772eyphs.cloudfront.net/blogs/1/2018/05/london...

https://static.homesandproperty.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails...

https://www.thrillist.com/lifestyle/london/london-undergroun...

If you see prices below 1k, it's per week.

And then you go to stand in line at the local wholefoods to buy $2.5 local chocolate croissants and $2 kombuchas from a teller who earns $15/hour.

Tip well, my friends, tip well.

i.e. in the u.s. you get fucked from both ends.

One tiny benefit of these kind of jobs, if you ever need something to do to earn money, they'll most probably hire you.

But it's not a great thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21714138

and

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21715246

Anyone can get ahead, get the American dream! If you're poor, well, you must be lazy or stupid.

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.” -- Vonnegut.

For example, I've been vehicle dwelling and very poor in Silicon Valley for about 10 years as I've been unable to hold a job (ADD/Aspergers/speech impediment). I get called names and dirty looks all the time. I'd like to make some money, but only in a worker-owned co-op because slaving away while others reap the rewards seems like prostitution for nothing.

0. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pull-yourself-up-by-your-boot...

Quite easily when they've spent their entire lives being told poor people are evil. That's American's for you. There's too much of "I've got mine, so fuck anyone else" going on.

Not exactly the picture of a prosperous society.

It's also postulated in a recent book that a primary belief held by supreme court justice Clarence Thomas that the best way to improve the lot of African Americans is to make life as difficult as possible politically for them so they work harder(!) - this aligns his views on a lot of subjects with the conservative side of interpreting the Constitution but he's not really consistent on the latter as much as his belief. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/books/review-enigma-clare...

But what do you mean "would go straight into the landlords pockets". Are you saying that rent would immediately rise to eat the difference if McD increased their salaries?

As for the maneuverability on raising wages, that's what a minimum wage would be for. No need for companies to let the competition ahead of them because they increase the wages - everybody else would have to do the same.

In the case of your example, if all companies increase wages all at the same time, then you end up pretty much in the same spot you started. Goods and services' prices adjust, companies make less profits, rents increase -- i.e. no actual increase in production (or housing) in the economy that might help the poorest the most. Some industries might be able to pass on the wage bill entirely to customers, others will get squeezed and stop investment and entry of new companies. It all depends on elasticities and the studies that we usually see trying to measure that show that shareholders are not the ones that get hit the most.

If we want the poor to be able to afford more appliances, we need to make those appliances cheaper to produce. And to get there we might need many industries paying people very little, so that we can get off the ground somehow. This example is easy to visualize when looking at China or Bangladesh. But even looking at Europe as a whole it is very clear in my mind that countries like Greece or Portugal still need to cover at lot of ground in this manner. Former communist Eastern Europe countries are already surpassing GE and PT by following broadly that scrip. And even UK and Germany would only be bottom five if they were considered US states (in GDP per capita adjusted by purchasing power). And inside the US there is a massive gap between NY and Alabama. And NY itself is plagued by super high rents because we don't build anymore.

It sounds cruel to imply that a $15/h wage for the lady in the article is not going to help her. It will, but in the short run only. It also sounds impolite to mention that many people in her situation managed to turn their lives around out of that kind of precarity. Many will on account of their smarts, resilience or luck, but many will not. For these the only true hope is that we manage to increase the number of companies and productivity of all companies in the economy. So that we end up with very high productivity industries (read, than produce a lot for low prices) such as oil and gas, car industry, food production, appliances industry, hopefully home-building, “subsidizing” the rest through low cost products and competition of all those low wage, and unskilled jobs. Mandating minimum salaries is like chasing a unicorn.

Side note. In the article she mentions that she is trying to save for a car. Cars in the US are much cheaper than in Europe, and if you go to e.g. Argentina you would be surprised by how much a pile to junk is worth in the second hand car market.

Can someone give me an anecdotal example of how this could come to be without some fault in Brown's decision-making process?

For starters, I've always heard that commute time is inversely proportional to career mobility. I made it a rule not to work anywhere farther than half an hour away. And that is the absolute maximum which was necessary when I lived rural area. Currently, I work remote, which has indeed provided more time for further career training.

My mother has worked at the same minimum-wage food joint for almost eight years. She tells me it's because she's "comfortable" and friends with everyone there. Personally, I think it affords her the time and lack of responsibility needed in order to engage in non-moderated drug use. This was certainly the reason she was usually unemployed and unable to provide the most basic resources for me as a child. If I bring up this or her other time-sucking addictions such as mobile gaming / simulated gambling, she becomes very defensive.

Regardless of the reason, comfort breeds complacency. Complacency leads to not making a meaningful change to your career trajectory in a 15-year period. As someone who grew up in relatively abject poverty, most of the positive things in my life have only come from within, due to my determination to succeed despite numerous setbacks. Sometimes I find myself having difficulty empathizing with people who seem reasonably intelligent but have been in the same situation for 10-20 years.

a lot of society's problems come from people in power and/or wealth projecting their anecdotal, perhaps personally bitter experiences (like yours with your mother) onto everyone that isn't making a healthy wage. It's over 40 million people, we are not all like your mother.

Obviously everyone is different. This is why I asked for other points of view for a better sample size.

That doesn't change that I had both parents and teachers who cared about me, educated me, disciplined me, and enabled me to succeed.

> As someone who grew up in relatively abject poverty, most of the positive things in my life have only come from within, due to my determination to succeed despite numerous setbacks.

There is nothing about my success in my adult life that has only come from within. Even my determination isn't mine and mine alone. Everything about my success is down to the opportunities that were afforded to me, to enable me to have that determination and outlook. My parents, my teachers, and my peers throughout my upbringing and adult life have all played a part. Nobody exists in a vacuum.

I am immensely privileged to have had the amount of support I have had. I expect the vast majority of commentators on this board have had similarly privileged lives. The people stuck (either by 'choice' or by 'circumstance') most likely have not.

At the risk of sounding like a <insert pejorative du jour here>, check your privilege, appreciate it for what it is, and try not to look down on those that didn't have the same opportunities that you did.

You're arguing a strawman. You are introducing absolutes into a conversation which was purposefully framed as fluid. For example, I said most of the positive things. Your post is built upon the premise that I believe all positive things in my life came only from within, however you said the word only, not me.

I am immensely privileged to have had the amount of support I have had.

That's great... almost comes off as bragging, but okay...

check your privilege, appreciate it for what it is, and try not to look down on those that didn't have the same opportunities that you did.

...Seriously? You are literally coming from a place of higher privilege and looking down on me. You are projecting your own fortune onto me and consequently expecting the same attitude. I have not had such fortune as you, in fact most people haven't.

I don't need to check my privilege, I am aware of everything I have and wake up every day thankful I don't live in a place like Saudi Arabia. But we aren't talking about Saudi Arabia. We are talking about America, and our conversation about privilege is relative to America. And relative to America, I have lived in abject poverty for most of my life.

I may also have not been sufficiently clear in my messaging. I am talking from the perspective of someone born and raised in a "first world" western developed democracy similar in many ways to the USA (in this instance, the UK).

> I am immensely privileged to have had the amount of support I have had.

The intent here is to drive the point that the support I have received is not financial, and while coming from a financially wealthy family is hugely advantageous to future financial success, there are many other variables in play that are not financial.

When I talk about the support I have, I am recognising the time and effort other people have given me.

Having good parents isn't a right. It's entirely luck of the draw. The same largely applies to your teachers. It really shouldn't, but that's what the situation looks like today. If you're in a good school district, your chances of success are significantly better than if you're not.

I'm not talking about Saudi Arabia, I'm talking about being immensely grateful that not only were my parents incredible, hard working people, who did the best they could with what little they had; and that my teachers, overworked and underpaid, never gave up on me, even when I was a total shit in school, and persevered to ensure that I actually got a good education.

My relative financial poverty during my upbringing doesn't change any of that. I still attribute my success to my upbringing. Not the (lack of) money, and not myself.

And some have neither money or the good upbringing. I was privileged enough to have parents who were able to keep a full-time job (even if it was a minimum wage one) most of my life. However, I would say mine were wildly poor on every other front. In terms of their own education, ability to parent, and most every other front beyond managing a positive bank account balance - they were poor. (Didn't stop my mother from racking up over $10,000 in credit card debt because she didn't know how they worked I guess)

I would align myself with soulofmischief in terms of the view on determination. It was purely my determination more than anything that lead me to getting to where I am now. (Beyond the basics like how I didn't grow in a war torn country where clean water was a scarcity) I've hit pretty much every setback a person in a first world country could give and persevered through it. Sometimes it taking years of incredible pain for any kind of payoff. I wouldn't attribute my success to my upbringing at all and neither would anyone who knows me even a little. Not being in abject poverty probably had some minor benefits for me but considering I had lived near that for the first 8-10 years of my life, I wouldn't consider it a huge amount of consequence. In fact - I thought those years were probably more pleasant than the later years! The only difference from going from near poverty to lower middle class was the age of the house since my parents didn't have any addictions besides nicotine and alcohol. (Alcoholism is ?probably? easier to deal with than an opioid addiction - but I only know the experience of dealing with the former combined with PTSD)

A little quote from a text I recently received: "You are exceptional to be where you are given where you came from. That said, the working class chip on your shoulder will hold you back from achieving what these people can achieve. You gotta get rid of that chip. (It's that chip and the behavior it causes that puts you on the edge of being fired. You aren't behaving the way these one percenters are behaving and they want to punish you for it.)"

My point is this: Don't underestimate determination. Upbringing in all forms is very important but a person with exceptional determination can overcome so much. It doesn't mean that it's fair or that it's even worth it but it's amazing how far someone can get with the refusal to give up. Something that I'd think people here on HN would be all about since this is owned by a startup incubator...

I am either a bargainer, a clueless, or a sociopath (in the context of organization). I will never be a bargainer, life is too short! I'm not clueless and middle management is not for me. Only one path left.

I reached this decision through information like this. Perhaps Ms. Brown needed something similar.

The truth is, I think, nobody perfectly optimizes their prospects. People are people and people like to be in their social groups and compete in their social groups, which puts you on a track to a specific future.

Kids from middle-class families don't have to abandon their social circle to become white-collar workers, they can just be comfortable with their friends and "fail" and become a depressed white-collar worker in a not so cool company with only O.K. salary. There are numerous movies about people on this path.

When kids from an affluent background choose to stay comfortable with their friends, they "fail" and become spoiled brats. Usually portrayed as d-bags who don't live a fulfilling life and simply spend their daddies money on drugs and luxury.

When a kid from a lower-income background chooses to stay comfortable with their friends, they end up just as miserable but they also have survivability issues.

This is why "going to college" is such a monumental part in life: It gives you an option to change social circles and if you still fail, at least you can fail in a bit more comfortable house and car.

I hear that college is inaccessible for many Americans, maybe they should fix that. Equal social comfort opportunity can create a much more just society.

I'm not asking for perfect optimization. Getting out of a minimum wage salary in a 15-year span doesn't require much optimization for most people. So I am asking about the cases where it does.

I hear that college is inaccessible for many Americans, maybe they should fix that. Equal social comfort opportunity can create a much more just society.

Some states offer free tuition. However in the state I grew up in, we had to get scholarships based on scholastic merit.

I worked hard and aced my tests which lead to a full 4-year scholarship along with room and board and an on-campus job, plus I qualified for government aid due to my situation (living on my own since 16 due to homeless parents).

Right before graduation a vindictive teacher changed my final project grade from a 100 to a 0, ignored school policies as well as ignored a doctor's note for excused absences, and the school administration promised they would follow up.

Well, they didn't, and on the day I received my final report card I had an F in a class I should have received a B in, and had to forfeit all of my state scholarship money. I ended up not being able to afford college and was homeless and very sick for a year after high school until I was able to get on my feet and pursue my own education online.

This is an example where working hard was not enough, and I got completely railroaded by a system designed to keep the impoverished as such. If I or a family member could have afforded a lawyer, I would have gotten my grade fixed and been able to attend college.

How are you now ?

1. Brain development of teenagers is not complete.

2. Information available to sub college age kids is not perfect.

If you don't believe in free will, the only question is what combination of mechanics and information serves to produce the observed outcome.

What people choose is how comfortable they would like to be against their odds and people who choose to have nice social lives in their current circle end up staying in this circle.

Each circle have different failure modes, I won't argue that the lady in the article failed in her circle, she just didn't move up in the ladder. Failing in the low-income circle doesn't look like that, failing in that circle is overdosing in a meth den or ending up in jail. She actually seems to be doing fine but probably could have been doing much better if she had chosen to abandon her original social environment.

The life might give you fries but you can refuse that, stay hungry for a bit more and demand nuggets if that's what you want, ignoring your friends rolling their eyes for you being a drama queen. You may have to endure sitting on another table, being left alone by your friends who had their launch and left. This is the price you pay for jumping social circles and eating in a college cafeteria usually eases the pain.

On the other side of the coin, I've seen people who have worked at a small company because nobody else will hire them, the company gets aquired and the old boss retires, and they end up in a cushy situation a the big company. In fact, I've seen this happen multiple times and it was definitely not the master plan of these individuals. It was just a lucky break.

Your tone implies that I don't understand the disparity of the human condition. I lived my entire life very impoverished and at times homeless. I come from a very abusive household and grew up in a rural area with little prospects. I've never caught a break. I saw a way out, computers, and I took it. I was able to pivot to a better career by building skills in my free time.

> I saw a way out, computers, and I took it. I was able to pivot to a better career by building skills in my free time. To be able to pull that off requires a certain amount of natural aptitude that is not a given for most people.

I respect people who have been able to find a way out of tough situations, but I also respect those who keep pushing through tough circumstances even when they haven't been able to find a way out.

As the poet warrior Lil B The BasedGod once stated, "I'd rather be a broke rapper than wash some dishes."

Well, I ignored that advice once because I figured my dish-washing skills were more employable than my street cred, and ended up having to quit that job because I developed carpal tunnel from being overworked. Several years later, I still suffer from the consequences and have to be vary careful not to injure myself at my desk job. I don't think physical or mental burnout gets anyone anywhere good. At least my former boss ended up having to get surgery for carpal tunnel himself sometime later.

This together with a conjecture that in most cases the average person has indeed the possibility of upward mobility. A conjecture that was posed with an invite to hear opposing view.

A discussion of how much we should expect help from outside is important (and I believe soulofmischief would agree), but it is not relevant to how to improve your own life in the situation that help does not exist yet.

Personally I think we should separate the morality issue of being poor/rich from the mechanics of how people become/remain poor.

The anectotal example he is asking for is in the very article we're discussing. Not that she has made no mistakes, but that (as has been stated several times in these comments) such mistakes are extremely punishing when you are this poor.

As for the discussion on societal help, I think it's very relevant, because the very definition of working yourself up from poverty means climbing the societal ladder. As such, the society you're in is intrinsic to improving your situation. It's a fallacy to say that you are completely in control of your own destiny and luck - the society around you is always helping and/or harming your efforts.

Every person has an obligation to themselves to improve their life as best they can, but a society that ensures basic needs are met is the best springboard for being able to do so.

The truth is that you're being way overcritical. Nothing about my post is clear as day, the only comments I made regarding Ms. Brown were in the form of questions. Are you going to help answer those questions or just light me up with your virtue signalling?

It's clear we're approaching this issue from completely different fundamental positions. To me, your question is uninteresting because my underlying belief is that all human beings that live in a society deserve a life where they don't have to worry about fundamental needs, such as food, shelter and hygiene.

I think everyone should receive enough money from their jobs to afford decent, nutritional food, a small apartment, and hygiene articles. Even if they are hard-working or complacent, stupid or intelligent.

We have to learn how we can take personal agency despite hardships, and instill this agency in others, so that we can stand our ground and ensure a better economic outcome for our children.

I can say that one thing which did help me was that even though I grew up impoverished, I still had a few middle-class friends whose relative wealth "rubbed off on me", if you will. And I had a handful of teachers whose participation extended past the obligations of their jobs and who were ready to write letters of recommendations at a moment's notice to any institution and give me space to learn in my own way.

But these bonds were formed with the express intention of networking and while I am thankful for the help I've received from these people, I also recognize that I would have not received this help if I were generally a dick to people around me and didn't seek out friendships with useful people.

If we can discuss these kinds of things and reach a general consensus on what the obstacles are and how to overcome them, this information could be critical to others in their struggle. What information is Ms. Brown missing?

So clearly, everyone can follow that same path, right?

It is a failure on society's part that free career counseling and mentoring isn't mandatory, however as individual agents we must also take personal agency and make up for the shortfalls of society.

Personal agency isn't all that there is. It wasn't the nail's fault that it broke. I bent it and kept hammering it down. I pushed it beyond what it was supposed to be used for. Sure, a different nail would have survived, but in the end it was my fault. A roofing or masonry nails would have probably been able to put up with the abuse (but caused bigger holes), but I was using a drywall nail. Was it the right nail for the job? Eh, in the end it worked out and my picture hasn't fallen down. I mean I don't have any expensive pictures or frames, so I'm still just going to grab whatever nail looks like it will work from my box. But I also have two measuring tapes now.

I didn't go to preschool, but I did go to a local Head Start after qualifying.

I went to 5 kindergartens because I kept getting handed around relatives, and at one point I was even kidnapped by a relative before again being rescued and changed schools. After finally staying in one place for more than a few weeks, teachers saw that I had arithmetic down and put me in a mathathon. I came in second because I was a brat and didn't want to use counting blocks, preferring to rely on mental math. This planted the seed for the person who beat me to become a childhood rival, which helped immensely in my extra-curricular pursuit of education. We were always neck to neck in scores for everything. We each read 2-3 books a week to compete in Accelerated Reader scores. I think having a rival really made a difference in my motivation.

One issue with children is they often lack motivation of any kind, and if you look towards their parents you will see the same thing. The motivation to best my rival was really an internal motivation to prove to myself that I could be great at anything I put my mind to. I don't know where this internal motivation comes from. Is it something that can be consistently instilled in others?

I went to a similarly large number of middle and high schools, bouncing around a lot between family members, my atheism being a point of contention among my relatives. I actually attended both the worst-ranked high school in my state which is often ranked worst in education in the country, so basically one of the worst high schools in the country, and I also attended one of the top dozen elite high schools of the country.

The disparity is indescribable. On the bad end, half of my classes were a revolving door of substitute teachers with no curriculum given to them, the other half were just the teacher yelling over students who were yelling over each other, throwing things, smoking cigarettes, and playing music on their phones in the middle of class. Regular police raids and schoolwide body searches. Massive school board corruption. And I do have sympathy. I want them all to succeed and be happy. The heat map for high test scores very often conspicuously radiated from my position in the classroom.

In the end, it really came down to the desire to learn. I was not allowed to use the computer for anything not school related for most of my childhood (it's the devil's silicon), and so I learned how to hack computers, sideload applications, circumvent firewalls, gain root access, etc. so that I could sneak out in the middle of the night and learn about things that interested me like 3D modeling, graphic design, music, programming, and general web geek culture. After school, my idea of a fun time was hanging out at the library. I even had dates there. My entry into an elite boarding school was entirely merit-based and paid for by the state. The school is open up to anyone in the country however and there are other schools just like it.

If you don't start out with wealthy family or relatives to bail you out of emergencies, unexpected expenses of just a couple hundred dollars are devastating and can take months to recover from. Not to mention all the more subtle network driven benefits like getting your foot in the door somewhere or training in professional culture norms and lessons in navigating bureaucracy

When you work a physically demanding low wage job without that fallback, thinking about anything but survival (literally feeding yourself and loved ones -- sometimes including parents) at the end of the day is unlikely. And the smallest lapses in judgement end up being far more catastrophic.

This was my reality for about a decade. I worked in the San Francisco Bay area in grocery stores and restaurants, and held multiple full time minimum wage jobs concurrently.

I had PTSD from a young age, didn't prioritize my formal education after high school (let alone during school), self medicated with drugs and alcohol. Certainly made bad decisions.

I randomly picked up a trigonometry book in my early 20s, was excited by the fact that, given some agency in how I approached the material I could, in fact, understand it -- and eventually self taught up to calculus before deciding to go back to school. I was accepted to UC Berkeley as a transfer student when I was about 26, transferred and studied pure math... While still working two jobs to survive, dealing with housing insecurity as my landlord started aggressively raising my rent, and figuring out how to best allocate the $300 or so leftover after rent and bills were paid.

So yeah, I ended up dropping out. I spent a couple years coming home from my very physical near min wage jobs exhausted but still stayed up late into the night teaching myself to code by building shit in Python and Node, learning SQL and CS concepts.

Doing this was not the cake walk the manic learn-to-code survival bias narratives on Medium might have you think. It took years and involved significant sacrifice to my health to forgo the sleep that I did, and ultimately my success boiled down to someone taking a chance on me. Now my financial calculus is drastically different. Make no mistake though: if I were much older, had a child, were non-white, non-male, had a more severe disability, or had any more unexpected critical expenses over a few hundred dollars, it's entirely possible I would still be broke and toiling away in kitchens

I was able to change my circumstances, but it took many, many years, and a lot of backtracking whenever circumstances (even plenty beyond my control) shifted.

And it required me to effectively make the best possible decision at all times. One thing I find interesting about your question is the implication that fallibility in someone's decision making process means they deserve poverty, and all the horrible shit that comes with it (like housing and food insecurity, and even bring forced to contend with dangerous conditions during pregnancy).

I am no less fallible in my judgement today than I was when I was broke, the difference is that today I can afford to make bigger mistakes.

Anyway, I hope if anything my story helps you re-evaluate that particular point.

> I am no less fallible in my judgement today than I was when I was broke, the difference is that today I can afford to make bigger mistakes.

Nail on the head. People with money make just as many (if not more) mistakes with their cash than people who are struggling on minimum wage. They just don't feel it the same. Most people posting on HN aren't going to struggle to pay their bills if they go for coffee today, or even everyday this month.

You've really never made 1 bad decision, or 10, in your life?

I have plenty of bad decisions, total screwups even, in my history. Some of them were from being petulant, or naive. Some because I was depressed. Yet I'm a white collar educated professional, I'm part because I made some good decisions, and also because that's the environment I was born into, so I was taught how to succeed in that world.

Why do we expect the poor to be paragons of perfect decision making, when the more privileged can make a normal human level of mistakes and still retain their position?

The implication is that I expect people of reasonable intelligence to do whatever, and I mean whatever, they have to do within ethical boundaries in order to increase their economic opportunities. I don't need a crash course in the history of racial socioeconomic exploitation in the US.

Ask any successful black entrepreneur in the US if they agree with me.

But we're only here to discuss those who are capable, and why it is they might not be taking advantage of upward mobility.

As for your second point: I wasnt aware we're only here for that? That's in any case not my agenda.

That was the discussion my post opened up. So if we're going to discuss anything here together, it's going to be that.

How can you believe in UBI and still believe that it's up to private initiatives to care for those who can't provide for themselves?

UBI does not currently exist, and the only reason it will ever come to exist is if we all take personal agency and revolt against the current status quo maintained by CorpGov.

Until people like Ms. Brown are provided the education and motivation they need in order to fight for a secured future for posterity, these problems will continue to get worse.

It's not easy. It's not fun. It's not ideal. But life and liberty come at a cost, sweat and blood, and if you are not willing to pay those costs or assist others in paying them, you do not necessarily deserve life and liberty.

I'm not talking about daily bad decisions. I'm talking about things like: failing a college course needed for my degree program because of a bout of depression, but having parents who would pay for me to take the class again to pass it. I did that. A lot of people with professional parents have done that.

The poor and the working poor don't have that kind of safety net. The personal consequences of failure are far greater for them, and they experience those consequences at high rates, which one way they can get stuck in the rut of poverty for a long time.

Just last week I had someone explode on me Thanksgiving night and physically assault me for a prolonged period of time, while saying things about my poverty and how I was born in poverty and would die in poverty, and trying to blame me for every bad thing that has happened in my life.

This is a person who has been to jail twice for federal property damage and a DUI, who has had several cars given to him by his parents, and who had to resort to a contract with the military in order to straighten himself out. He couldn't hold a job for the longest time and would steal from everyone around him. His parents have helped him again, and again, and again, while mine were just not there.

When a meth-dealing police officer who often stalked my friends and I planted drugs on me at the scene of an accident, I didn't have parents to back me up. Probably a dozen friends who had a parent that was a lawyer, but no one offered to help. I was railroaded by the system and received the maximum possible incarceration time. It didn't matter that I had witness testimony; I didn't have money.

So I am aware of how a socioeconomic safety net works. I am aware of the classist mentalities which keep these systems in place. If you aren't going to provide meaningful anecdotal data or answer my question, then please refrain from giving me a crash course in socioeconomics like the other couple dozen posters who beat you to the punch.

To me it sounds like you're saying, "why doesn't she live closer to her workplace?" which carries with it a kind of subtext of blame. Reading the article a few possible explanations for her choice come to mind.

The author mentions she lives with her boyfriend's parents. Probably this is the cheapest possible living arrangement available to her. Living closer would probably require her to live independently, which tends to be more expensive. This may be compounded by more expensive rents closer to her place of work, which turns out to be a common problem for the working poor and an age-old cruelty of capitalism: Poor people have higher transportation costs -- both in terms of time and money -- because they can only afford to live far from urban centers where their jobs usually are. It's just one of the many ways the old saying "it's expensive to be poor" turns out to be objectively, measurably true.

It's also totally possible that none of the above applies and the author is not being smart with her money, or may have a drug habit, or may be "complacent". But we certainly shouldn't assume these things about her, because we just don't know her circumstances.

Apologies if this comes across as pedantic, but I think the mistake you may be making is projecting your narrow personal experience of your mother's problems onto a complete stranger, whose circumstances seem quite different than your mother's based on the article (the admittedly limited information we have about the author's situation).

It's heartening to see that you recognize your perspective may stem from your own problems with empathy. The author David Foster Wallace has written much (an understatement) about empathy and awareness, but probably the best short work of his about these subjects is this speech. I still find it to be a really good reminder of all kinds of things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

That was not what happened; an anecdote was offered as an example and other anecdotes were requested as counterexamples.

I'm confused by the tendency of you and other users to call a post which is literally asking for other anecdotes of economic struggle to be projecting and indicative of a narrow mindset. I was simply providing my own data point to start. The very act of asking for other perspectives is not what I would call narrow-minded. This kind of response is why people are afraid to open up to others.

In fact, in this entire reply thread only one user bothered to actually share a story of economic strife, which even acknowledged fault on their part (no one is perfect). Meanwhile, tons of comments criticizing me for my point of view when I am literally asking people to change it. One user even called me sociopathic and then proceeded to offer an even more callous point of view while relating that they do not come from a position of poverty at all.

It's heartening to see that you recognize your perspective may stem from your own problems with empathy.

No, that is not what I said. I do not have problems empathizing with others, and I do not appreciate that extrapolation. This is a very specific situation I have trouble empathizing with. David Foster Wallace was a great author and the world misses him.

I, on the other hand, desire social accolades. The emperor's new clothes are beautiful.

Ie a person in a relationship with someone clearly toxic. Or experiencing domestic abuse. The external answer is ‘leave’, the person doesn’t.

The obese patient - walk, change diet.

The representing twenty year old with third presentation cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome - pretty much every time you smoke pot you are going to experience abdominal pain and vomiting, you cannot smoke! How are you not getting the message!

The person spending 5 hours on a bus to work 2 shifts... ?? Is this a rational choice?

Minimum wage laws are fundamentally a tax on low-margin businesses and the low-wage workers who frequent them. There's a better option available. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). It can ensure that workers take home $15/hour, while also ensuring that the cost is borne by the entire society. Not just a few specific industries and the specific demographics that rely on them.

I haven't qualified for the Earned Income Credit in quite a few years, but I have nonetheless claimed it a number of times. I experienced none of the magical properties you seem to think it has.

You can get a Notice of Withholding to get the credit in your paychecks instead of at the end of the year. I don't know how well it works.

It's clearly possible in theory to get $15,000 on April 15 and $15,000 from McDonald's and live the same lifestyle as someone who makes $30,000 from paychecks. I could manage it easily, it's basic consumption smoothing. Should be able to borrow against the credit if necessary, too, since it's guaranteed.

Depending on the structure of the rest of the tax system and on whether the UBI phases out or not, the effective marginal tax rates can also be quite different, though this part can be massaged to make the two options look identical, I suspect.

But the core of the difference is whether employment is explicitly encouraged (EITC) or not (UBI).

You aren't immune.

Minimum wage laws impact the supply chain that feeds Whole Foods and nice restaurants by increasing the cost of rural labor.

https://www.indeed.com/salaries/farm-worker-Salaries

A quick google will show you that farm workers are well below the $15/hour goal most progressives are touting.

The argument that "society should carry the cost" is based on your opinion that is in error. Society carries the cost of minimum wage increases because we all have to eat. We all have to patronize low margin businesses to some degree (even if it is indirect).

You can argue the EITC is a better "solution" than a minimum wage but if you are trying to ensure $15/hour for people paid $10/hour, you are really talking a negative income tax or UBI. At which point, you are probably better off supporting those proposals instead of pushing the EITC.

Personally, I'm not a fan of subsidizing low margin businesses that from a Capitalist perspective should probably be allowed to die if their workers can't afford to live on what they pay.

I think it’s kind of rich that the same people who are probably working for money losing companies backed by VCs think that small low margin businesses owners don’t deserve to make a living.

> you are really talking a negative income tax or UBI. At which point, you are probably better off supporting those proposals instead of pushing the EITC.

I do support UBI too but it seems like an extreme stretch to say that is easier to sell than EITC. Especially when you consider that EITC already exists today as a federal law, and UBI does not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit

> Personally, I'm not a fan of subsidizing low margin businesses that from a Capitalist perspective should probably be allowed to die if their workers can't afford to live on what they pay.

Allowing McDonalds to hire workers at wages set by supply-and-demand, is the very opposite of a subsidy. Killing off profitable low-margin businesses, will by definition, lower the nation's GDP and tax base. Everyone, especially the workers like the one featured in the article, will be far better off in a world where profitable low-margin businesses aren't killed off by government regulation. It's far more effective to tax McDonalds, as well as every other profitable company, in order to fund the safety net that every citizen deserves.

To do what the person I'm replying to wants, it would be on the scale of UBI/negative income tax. Otherwise, its not the equivalent to $15/hour when they are being paid $10/hour.

Consumers almost certainly have more elastic purchasing preferences for insurance as a group, as they are much more granular. Insurance companies love negotiating with companies, because fewer, larger customers with greater inertia and specially-negotiated deals enable greater price discrimination than a mass-market product compared directly to others. This has further enabled the rise in prices.

I firmly believe that the individual is better-equipped to make his own decisions than any central planner or procurement department. We've messed things up enough with centralization; it's time to shift back to letting consumers make their own choices. Rather than taking even more choice by further centralizing from an oligopoly to a government monopoly, give people a chance to make their own decisions. I picked health insurance as it is a particularly hot topic, but this reasoning applies to many other areas.

[0]: https://fm-static.cnbc.com/awsmedia/chart/2019/8/19/image%20...

[1]: https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2018/10/08/50...

[2]: https://www.insurancejournal.com/app/uploads/2018/10/2018-eh...

You're right, but then we have the employer class generally lobbying against society actually providing these things.