No, it’s common sense and logic. If you have X amount of money it’s unrealistic to expect to be able to afford something that is 5X in value (or insert whatever values that are going to exceed your monthly income to debt ratio). It’d be like going camping for a week and by the end of day 3 you have eaten all your food…and then complaining it was “warfare” when a fellow camper offered you food in exchange for doing the dishes or gathering firewood. And clifyt never said the antidote to poverty was self-control, just that it is possible it could be an underlying factor in it’s cause.
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I’m able to tell the difference between a well kept older car, and a one that is only a year or two old. A 10 year old car can look newish if taken care of, but the physical form and body is dated.
I’m currently in a 13 year old car with 170+K miles on it, so I am all for trying to make something last.
As someone who grew up on gov. cheese and was a victim of along term unemployment and underemployment for many years, I am familiar with being poor. I just started a job a few weeks ago where I finally view myself as “doing ok”. I’m not judging anyone. But the fact remains being poor isn’t black and white. People can be a victim of circumstance beyond their control, and they can also be victims of their own poor choices. For example while I didn’t have a VCR, cable, or even a color TV for a long while growing up, my parents had beer and cigarettes.
Back to my original example, yeah, when I volunteered to do a “good deed” on Thanksgiving, I was pretty surprised that the people I delivered often had cars much newer than my 16 yr old 86 Caprice, had satellite dishes when I didn’t have cable, and had TVs much larger than mine. Though in a “bad” neighborhood they appeared to be doing a lot better than me. Not all of them, some of them were very grateful and appreciative. A few acted like I was bothering them. YMMV.
ETA - from my experience a lot of poor people do a bad job of keeping what they have nice. It’s noted how we were poor, but weren’t “poor white trash” with the rusted cars an couches in the yard.
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Which is what he actually said!
Emphasis mine. Apparently the ones who swarmed at him for the first sentence did not read the rest of the paragraph.
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…Because DRM always works out well for the idiots that try to “protect” their “property” with it. If this becomes widespread I give it two years (max) before someone starts selling a $150 gadget that disables it entirely. If the loansharks/credit companies start depending on it to protect their revenue streams instead of relying on human decency and adding value to the product, I give them another decade before they cease to exist entirely.
Say what you like about the internet, but the more widespread it becomes, the greater the class-equaliser it is.
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Sorry that you feel this way. Again, I understand why the delayed gratification isn’t there. Understanding why some folks have it and some do is key to understanding why the poor remain poor. If you are born into a society that is treated as disposable, the overly-simplistic explanation is that it will create delayed gratification from the beginning. This has been shown in study after study (something that I haven’t looked up since grad school a decade ago, so believe me or don’t).
People want to look at the reality as racist, or classist,or otherwise. However, I personally think something needs to be done to fix this and we can’t fix what we don’t understand. Its one of the reasons I remain poor working to get kids through education, where as my friends that went to school with me make on average twice as much as I do. However, you read what you want to read and make assumptions that you don’t understand and judge others. My comment wasn’t one of judgement…it was one that reflects the reality of the population. And knowing this, I know that I can use this knowledge to help students that would have been told in the past that they were just lazy and skipped over for someone that didn’t come from an environment that had these traits.
So what are you doing to help humanity?
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Personally I like your train of thought, but in my experience the negative outcome rarely motivates a future change in the individual. If anything it might increase the energy spent trying to out smart the system instead of simply not getting into that situation again.
I think you can easily expand this to things like weight loss. A few people have the mental fortitude to make changes and stick with it, while a lot of people need an external force (or motivation/guidance) to create a change for enough time to become habit.
This is definitely something that needs to be regulated. You’ve heard the stories, but the amount of sleaze that exists in the auto sales industry is incredible.
The used car industry constantly baits & switches, adds unexplained fees, changes interest rates, and generally exploit the customer every way they can. The very most profitable customer they can find is one that puts down a large down payment, does in-house financing, and gets repo’d in six months so they can sell it all over again.
I’ve purchased two used vehicles in the past two years - both that I researched and found just what I wanted at the price I wanted. At one dealership (with a good reputation locally) I went into inquire about a $13,000 truck on the lot, filled out the paperwork, and they proceeded to approve me for a $23,000 truck. They insisted they couldn’t finance the cheaper one, refused to tell me the overall cost of the more expensive one, and just reassured me that the payment was still less then $X per month, and could I please give them the down payment so they could finish the paperwork and have me on the road? I used my phone, while sitting in their office, to find the price of the truck online, calculate their horrible loan rate, and then I walked out the door.
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I’m not saying the poor have a ‘natural tendency’, I’m saying the shitholes that society puts the in creates this. I that any clearer?
Beyond this, it has been shown with services like phones – the poor learn to regulate their minutes and are much more responsible with these minutes than others. Hell, the best thing I ever did was drop to a plan that only has 250 minutes a month. Going over these limits causes it to be gone to you.
As for if this could help them, I’m saying that first of all, it allows more cars to be sold to the poor, however I have no clue of APR or other things that could hurt them by this statement, and noting that as it becomes something that can’t be escaped as in the past, it might be a tool to help them in much the same way the phones help.
I could be wrong. I don’t know. All I know is society puts poor people in a shithole, they make it easy for them to lose everything, and this causes them to focus on more short term goals as opposed to long term.
And that, dear children, is why a smartphone is DEFINITELY NOT a luxury item.
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That you are right. If there’s one item, just one item you must own to live in today’s society, it’s a smartphone.
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Yeah, I had a lot of trouble parsing that paragraph for whatever reason. I thought that might be what they were getting at, but wasn’t sure.
And thats why I mentioned the underground economy popping up to defeat this. I know in my youth, I was a part of this economy and I found ways to ‘help’ people get around the rules. I was a phone phreak back then, and I use to run software that would randomly find calling card numbers, and would sell these to folks like immigrants that needed to call back home (or at least this was a good chunk of my clients). $5 for a guaranteed number that I wasn’t going to sell to someone else. Wasn’t much, but it was still far cheaper than legitimately paying for it (especially as I had a reputation for actually keeping my word on not selling multiples to others, and as such, some numbers may actually work for a few weeks at a time).
A lot of people look for ways to cheat the system…and when it is easy to do so, a lot of people do so. If they can’t get around it, people tend to go legit quicker.
Who knows…I’m pretty much being called a racist / classist in this thread, so I’m pretty much done! Thank you for your response.
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Its dangerous to go alone… Here, take this:
(Watch out! It may or may not start beeping)
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You’ve made things clearer, although my rereading of your original comment has also clarified things. I apologize for my misunderstanding.
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When you don’t have options, and you need a car to get to work, to take your father to his dialysis appointment or to take your kids to school, then you don’t say ‘fuck it, I’ll take the bus, or walk.’ The fact is you don’t have options. There isn’t a cheaper car, there isn’t anyone you can trust, you need a car. There’s this guy, who is willing to sell you one. He acts like he is your friend. He offers to touch up your loan application just a little, so you get approved for the loan to buy that reliable car you need. You fall for it, because you need that car, and you don’t really know any better, and you probably don’t have any real understanding of what your monthly payments will be. But you didn’t figure out how much to budget each month for gas, and you can’t afford the minimum insurance, but you didn’t think that far ahead. So three months later, you have to decide whether to pay the monthly for the car, or put gas in it so you can use the car you so desparately need. Welcome to life in America for the lower class. Watch, as people with money squeeze just a little bit more out of them.
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It’d be like talked into going camping for a week with a certain amount of food by a camping promoter who you trust implicitly because you’re a total camping n00b and they know all about camping right they’re the expert why would they steer you wrong they said it was enough food and by the end of day 3 you have eaten all your food and the camping promoter says fk you declare bankrupty you b*h also we’re telling everybody where you are camping.
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I don’t think studies are the way to go when evaluating subjective opinions.
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When we get self-driving cars, I’m not going to own a car anymore.
When I need to go somewhere, I’ll call Robo Cab™
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Except those purchases are probably driven (!) by EULA-like contracts with 80 pages of legalese that would be impenetrable to everyone but contract lawyers. Also, your comment smacks of the same victim-shaming thing people said post-housing crash while ignoring the fact that the banks were practically handing out mortgages like they were candy.
It’s yet another sad way that companies have monetized some small portion of a good or service in order to control the good or service almost entirely. 21st century ownership is turning out to be a bit of a farce.
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If you have a manual transmission in your car you can push start it and take off that way. At least with some of the older models of interlocks.
