Oh the cold winter mornings of crowding around the open gas oven for heat because my Mom hadn’t turned the furnace on yet. Some years we could get to almost Xmas before she had to pay a heating bill!
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Don’t tell them!
Can you buy something with benefits and sell/return it so you can hide the cash?
He’s got a few articles about being poor, they’re all really good!
If your wife hates it are sure you’re all happy with it? 
I don’t grow enough to share, big city small yards, but I love growing veggies! Its the best!
Mr Pants hates when I rinse out bags to reuse them. I’ve even thought of making a plastic bag drying tree!
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The first thing you need to “be poor” is to have a philosophy of economics to pigeonhole yourself into. If you don’t have such a system, borrow one from a “friend”. For most people, it tends to mean “resource allocation” which basically works like playing musical chairs with a crowd of apes. A game which hinges upon you believing in concepts such as “territory” and “property” which may be pervasive, but are arguably of dubious rationality, and may or not fit with your goals as a person, or your concept of civic duty. Typical of instances of Other People’s Games ™, the clearest way to master them is not to play them. Allowing yourself to be defined in terms of somebody else’s system is a failure to implement your own system. Is this person who people refer to as “rich” really special? Or is it possible that they are just some animal who has funny ideas about their relationship with others, their environment, and inanimate objects? Do you credit their ideas and actions?
The only thing anybody truly “has” is their own self. Who was born and dies with nothing. You are free to negotiate your actions and worth with anyone you meet. If they aren’t interested, it’s probably better to not deal with them, and associate with people who are more compatible with your values. Otherwise, you can do it alone, until you can’t. Only you know what your means and goals truly are. It is probably best to not allow yourself to be implicated in the schemes of others.
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Very true.
I did a form of that for a friend, though more with things than cash, when he fell into hard times for a while. But then, I did not have my back against the wall so the temptation wasn’t there.
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Bringing down the high cost of being poor would benefit everybody, not just the poor. Single payer health care would make for less ambient disease. Cheaper rents would make for fewer people on the street. Investment in social infrastructure would bring the whole nation up.
…but the rich wouldn’t get quite as rich, quite as fast, and being wealthy would mean less if people weren’t punished for their poverty. So the government’s hands are tied, really, there’s nothing they can do to change anything. The only real citizens are the ones with money to spend. Everyone else is a subject, maybe a client at best.
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I get what you’re trying to say here, but I honestly don’t think talking about sailboats is helpful. I think if you’re buying a boat in the first place, you can probably afford to splurge in the first place. Most of the working poor are treading water, going paycheck to paycheck, if they are lucky. You just can’t think about going for quality in just about anything, even basic necessities. There are people who are literally a disaster away from ruin.
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I can’t find it online (and my memory of it isn’t going to be perfect), but there’s a bit in Matt Taibbi’s book where he talks to a woman who gets repeatedly stopped by the police for driving a car without tags (IIRC, she and her family lived in it for some time), car gets towed and the fines/costs are more than the car is worth, and she has to just abandon it. She goes through this cycle something like three times, each time having to buy a cheaper and cheaper car…
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Sigh. I have a plastic bag drying tree!
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That’s just ridiculous!
I love Taibbi, btw. He’s a smart guy, writing important things, in a caustic way.
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And not a very big disaster at that. Something like a “fuel-pump on the car breaking” sized disaster. 
Tangent - Back in the late 80s, I did a spell of work for the DHSS (Welfare Dept.).
Due to a series of fairly major fuck-ups, I hadn’t been paid anything for about 4 months, so I was sofa-surfing (technically homeless) and bludging off the generosity of my mates and my later-to-be wife, so I had a certain empathy with what the folks signing-on were going through and just how much an extra five or ten quid meant.
Turned out that at the time, a benefit overpayment that was under a certain amount and due to a fault of the Dept. was immediately written off without any investigation or repayment needed. During that period, a lot of minor overpayments were made, all just under that cut-off point. My way of saying “fuck you” to the Dept. by giving random folks an unexpected bonus in that fortnight’s giro.
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Looking that up caused me to make sense of a song I’d heard years ago. In The Jams’ track “Rockman Rock” they say “we opened up our giros and we threw them away”. I always assumed this meant gyroscopes - as to say, a part of their navigation systems which they didn’t need anymore. It seemed perplexing. In this context, understanding the word as their dole cheque makes much more sense to me.
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Oops, yeah, forgot to translate that one. Giro = Dole cheque, not 'scope or kebab.
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I thought it was a basic bank account. I guess the connection here is that you can make basic giro transfers from one.
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Yeah, pretty much. The idea being that the National Girobank had branches at every post office, so you would receive your cheque and swap it for cash at your nominated post office and then head down the pub if circumstances allowed.
That way there was no need for a bank account as chances are it would have been overdrawn and this was still an era where plenty of people didn’t have a bank account.
I thought a Giro was a sandwich from New York.
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I think the root in all of these cases is related to turning. The Greek word gyro is a calque of the Turkish word döner (to turn), which refers to the vertical spit. When it comes to banking, the idea is keeping the money circulating in the economy.
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That was an unexpectedly funny typo.
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crapitalism!!!:)
you are my kind of human!!!:)
I use to search bins all around the ports i ve visited along the 7 years i lived as a seagypsy.
Half of the stuff on my boat was from the bins and from things other “sailors” (excuse my"" pompus way but they really dont deserve to be called that).
From walkie talkies to batteries in working order (only maybe low on voltage ,but after a few hours charge ,i kept them for more than 3 years each battery(,from sails to tubes and pipes,from ropes to anchoirs ,i did not have to pay for most of this stuff.Living around marinas and anchorages like in Ibiza in winter ,opens up a lot of possibilities for the not so rich sailor…:)
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