Comment Re:"austerity" (Score 1) 273
Actually what the article notes is pretty much my own observation too, having lived around "poor" neighborhoods -- they lived better than I did, drove newer vehicles, ate more junk food, owned more shit, etc.
Actually what the article notes is pretty much my own observation too, having lived around "poor" neighborhoods -- they lived better than I did, drove newer vehicles, ate more junk food, owned more shit, etc.
A pound of hamburger, some macaroni, tomato sauce...
It may not be fine dining, but it can be done.
Yeah, I didn't figure a person should bathe in it, or use it as room freshener!
The point is, when the media cries "poverty", the average person doesn't think "car, house, microwave, satellite TV, computer, nice things of various sorts-see list" which are now more the norm than not. The average person thinks "falling-down tenement with leaky roof and no electric or plumbing and infested with rats and cockroaches" and the tenant-farmer shacks of the 1920s.
Even given the hand-to-mouth financial aspect, there's a difference in mindset between being poor, and having no money. Give $5 to a "poor" person and they buy a meal at McDonald's. Give $5 to someone with no money, and they buy a week's worth of groceries.
My family all grew up with no money. Compared to most people, we had nothing. But we were *never* "poor".
That's not entirely a bad idea, but let's be fair -- extend it to everyone. This shouldn't be any hardship if you're already in the wage class where you spend most of what you make just to live.
The upside is that there'd probably be a lot more discretionary spending, which in turn would boost a lot of industries. Particularly if you get a consideration for buying domestic products, where they exist.
The downside is that it might negatively impact investment, but I'm not entirely sure that'd be a bad thing, as methinks some of the boom-and-bust of recent years stemmed from too much venture capital burning a hole in some accountant's pocket.
What we now call "poor" is what was called "middle class" or even "well off" a couple generations ago.
I did wonder, but at the time didn't see anything about it. However, I haven't found anything else that can replace it for certain applications.
Those look like the tasty kind, too
Where I lived in the desert, those woulda been runts. The harvester ants run 1/3' to 1/2". No good to eat, tho... all crunch and no taste.
They did keep the yard weeded, tho.
Actually, it woulda been my homework in the '60s, sonny.
Conversely I've found the best bait to attract ants is -- dead ants. Squish a few and pretty soon you've got lots of ants. (I use this trick when I find some of the tasty kind and feel a yen for fried ants. Our cold-climate American ants are too puny to be worth the bother unless you've got a whole lot of 'em.)
My method of killing fire ants:
Put two tablespoons of diazinon granules on top of the hill.
Next day the entire colony is dead.
I was astonished.
[And people wonder why I went around buying up all the diazinon I could find when it was taken off the market.]
So is the right to own and drive a car worth some 35,000 lives every year?
How about the right to see a doctor, which results in, by some estimates, over 100,000 deaths a year from doctors' mistakes?
Good points. Might be boiled down to "Laws exist to punish everyone for the sins of a few."
Change, or just that our sample size (er, length) is too small to know what the variances normally are?
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
