The Sam Vimes boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness
The Sam Vimes boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness
108The reason the rich are rich is that they extract value from others' work. Everything else is just a bonus.
34"Some stay dry and others feel the pain" (Tay Zonday)
22While this is true for the differences between upper-middle-class and middle-class and poverty which is a lets say 5 or 10 times difference in income, it is not true for the ultra wealthy who are in a completely different league and earn 1000 or 1million times as much.
9Discworld never got to the point of having billionaires.
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Came here to say exactly this!
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Isn't that the chocolate rain guy?
59Yeah, that's him. I was curious and looked him up a while back. Tay get really open about speaking for economic and social justice. He's more or less always been that way. Chocolate Rain, is, IIRC, a song about the realities and struggles of being black in America.
65Chocolate Rain, is, IIRC, a song about the realities and struggles of being black in America.
Very obviously so, read the lyrics sometime.
20Speaking of Tay, my Youtube feed recently dropped me a RayWilliamJohnson video. What a rebrand, holy.
It was almost a culture shock.
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He moves away from the mic to breathe, then spits truth.
35I think it literally is the Chocolate Rain guy.
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"It's expensive being poor"
56Sam Vimes has some of the most based lines in the history of fiction
26youregodsdamnright.gif
11"Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life."
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Even grocery stores in poor neighborhoods charge more
23"Grocery stores"
Buddy of mine is going through a divorce. Wife crashed his car the day she told him about her affair. Selling their house now, he's in it (carless) and going through a divorce.
The choices for grocery shopping in less than an hour walk from his house are a Family Dollar and a Cumberland Farms (a gas station). And they are both literally uphill both ways.
How the fuck can people be healthy on that?
His house isn't even far out in the boonies. It's maybe like a quarter mile off a main road. My house is way worse for that. I don't even think I could buy food within a walkable distance. Maybe eggs and milk from a backyard farmers but that's it.
13Ah yes your comment represents the convergence of suburbanhell and capitalisthell!
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Yeah they charge more, have less variety, and have fewer sales (discounts). A friend of mine did a (unpublished for an undergraduate course) study on it and the differences between stores even a half mile away are just crazy.
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Ay, isn't that the chocolate rain guy??
18yeah he's pretty cool.
7Exactly what I was thinking of, glad the fame and money didn't change him!
4great song
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All of these are related to medical expenses. It’s still expensive to be poor in a country with free health care, but America takes it to a whole new level by having the risk of medical issues fall on the individual.
17Im required to have health insurance, but health insurance costs me so much I can't actually afford to use it.
And despite struggling to put food on the table every week I make 'too much' to qualify for any assistance.
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Something as simple as having a decent size fridge with a freezer or not is the difference between being able to buy larger quantities of food cheaper per Kg, buying cheaper frozen ingredients or preparing extra food and freezing some for later and not being able to do so hence spending more money on food.
Also there are several other kinds of things were having the money to buy them in larger quantities yields a lot of savings versus having to buy them in smaller quantities with what little money one has available.
Just like beyond a certain point wealth is self-sustainable and it's almost impossible to fall down from there unless one is a moron (and even then, one has to be extraordinarilly so and also unlucky), below a certain point poverty is self-sustainable because one doesn't have the money needed to be able to access cheaper options to fullfil basic needs.
Even at higher wealth levels there are all sorts of feedback cycles that stop people from climbing the ladded or which push them down unless they're high enough in it: for example, healthcare costs in countries without Universal Healthcare or the tuition of Higher Education (a gatekeeper for many opportunities) in countries without decent free or cheap Public Higher Education.
The System is rigged.
17Being poor is expensive.
Can’t pay all the bills? Pay the important ones, let the others incur late fees. Pay more on top of the regular bill next time because you couldn’t pay on time.
16Overdraft because you literally don't have any money? That'll be more money please.
12That shit is infuriating, especially the stupid large fees of $25-35. Just like you said, have no money and they charge you a relatively huge amount in return.
That’s fucking disgusting.
8I switched banks because of this, from a local credit union to an online only bank. I hate that I had to, but the random online bank treats me better and charges me less
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There's a whole book about this: # Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.
13I remember someone on here talking about how they had a college/uni class on how being poor hurts you in a perpetually massive magnititude of horrible ways. They described it so well
11Don't have enough income to get approved for a rewards credit card? Pay at least 2 percent more for all purchases than those who do.
10Poverty doesn't charge simple interest, it charges generational compound interest.
8When I first entered the workforce I had several beater cars. One thing I always try to save for these days is new tires because I’ll never forget how much money I lost trying to make it in used tires.
In 2015 you could get 4 used tires for about $160. I would spend that every couple months because I couldn’t afford new and they would constantly get nails in them.
When I finally was able to afford a car with less than 50k miles on it and it came with new tires I’m pretty sure they lasted me well over 2 years. You can save thousands by having $600
8That is essentially the car version of the Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
-Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett
6The only way I've made used tires work is to put in a lot more leg work - pick a part salvage lots would sell them for like $20-25 ea in the past, and you can pick some good ones with good tread.
EDIT: just checked current prices, it looks like you can get a tire for $25, tire and a wheel would be about $40 ea. Putting a tire on a wheel without the right equipment is very difficult though, maybe some shops will do it for you as a service?
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Isn't that the guy you sings Chocolate Rain?
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