[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV4grZ_Lw5s]America's Broken Dreams - Documentary - The new American poor: The Middle Class - YouTube[/ame]
America's Broken Dreams - Documentary - The new American poor: the middle class
- Thread starter Wicked Ice
- Start date
The guy at about 5:00 in. That's like 3rd world living -- except they're fat. 3rd world people don't generally weight 250lbs.
Just skimmed through the whole video, and the majority of them are fat pigs. Don't eat 8kgs of food a day, and maybe you'll be able to afford rent somewhere decent, and maybe you'll even have the energy to do something decent with your life.
99% of America doesn't know what real poverty is. Go visit the slums in the hills of Tegucigalpa, Honduras or Port-au-Prince, Haiti and then tell me you're poor. Fucking faggots.
There is a reason many poor people in the US are fat. Calories do not equal nutrition. Cheap food has no nutrients but tons of calories, leaving the body to crave nutrients and easily becoming addicted to the sugars that are easily available. Blaming poor people for eating too much is pure ignorance.
Nutrition costs a lot of money unless you grow it yourself.
I'm a firm believer in something I heard many years ago.
"The best way to help the poor is to NOT become one of them yourself."
It sounds simple & selfish on the surface, but there is much truth in it.
"The best way to help the poor is to NOT become one of them yourself."
It sounds simple & selfish on the surface, but there is much truth in it.
The typical poor person in the US lives better than kings in times past. Why don't they haul their asses to a place like North Dakota where the unemployment rate is really low? There has to be some correlation between obesity and stupidity.
Only issue with that is I've been living in Thailand for the past several years, and the majority of the service workers you see (waitresses, security guards, clerks, etc.) live off around $400/month. In contrast, I spend about $3000/month for a basic life, so $400 is fuck all. Yet, they're not fat. They're actually all quite slim and good looking, with nice clean skin. Plus, they also all seem quite happy about the fact they're alive.
I've actually gained weight in the past month, which is good, because I lost too much while I was sick. So I'm probably around 150lbs now, and I'm now considered fat in these parts. And I'm still a world away from the people in that Youtube vid.
You guys are being too hard on them.
Regarding food, the cheapest way to eat in the US is shitty food that makes you fat. Being able to eat nutritiously at the same rate requires a certain volume, which isn't feasible on $50 we week and without a place to store them.
When I was 17 I lived on ~$25 of food a week. I did it by drinking a 2 liter of Mt Dew per day, a totinos pizza ($.25), and a MCchicken sand which at MC Donalds on lunch break (and I'm a fucking vegetarian). Occasionally I'd buy a 6 pack of Mac n Cheese. I had no where to store anything that could spoil, and no money to build a volume of proper food.
I made it out because when I turned 18 I got a credit card, bought a car with it,managed to steal just under $800, moved to a place with an easier job market, and a free roof (a friends parents let me live with them for a month). (I've never told any one that before fyi).
Also, I made it out because I came from a family with a reasonable amount of money. Not much, but because they were secure I knew computers, and I knew how to dev. I also took my computer when I left home. If I hadn't had that knowledge and such a important asset, I have no idea how I'd have ended up.
By the time I was 19 I pulled in upper 5 figures, and at 20 I was pulling 6 figures, and kept climbing. This is a -direct- result of having dev knowledge when I left home.
Give these people a break. A lot of them were trained to believe they have to follow the rules to make it, they can't know they are wrong and that following the rules is a dead end with, at best, retirement in the casket.
If it helps, image that, (just pretend) through a series of events outside your control you found yourself evicted with $20, no job, and two kids to support. No family, no friends willing to help you out.
What would you do? I'm sure you all have big internet balls, but the reality is, it's fucking tough and sometimes no matter how hard you try, it's just not going to happen.
If I were down that far again, I'd hope people would give me the benefit of the doubt, so I try to do the same.
-- edit
A lot of people on this board that do well are completely unemployable, and have no skills outside whatever it is they are currently doing. It's naive to think you couldn't end up like this through a, if you'll forgive the term, twist of fate.
If I couldn't dev anymore (and putting aside current savings and minor assets), I'd probably have to go into construction or some other low barrier manual job for a long while until I could put enough scratch together to make something else happen. What about you?
Regarding food, the cheapest way to eat in the US is shitty food that makes you fat. Being able to eat nutritiously at the same rate requires a certain volume, which isn't feasible on $50 we week and without a place to store them.
When I was 17 I lived on ~$25 of food a week. I did it by drinking a 2 liter of Mt Dew per day, a totinos pizza ($.25), and a MCchicken sand which at MC Donalds on lunch break (and I'm a fucking vegetarian). Occasionally I'd buy a 6 pack of Mac n Cheese. I had no where to store anything that could spoil, and no money to build a volume of proper food.
I made it out because when I turned 18 I got a credit card, bought a car with it,managed to steal just under $800, moved to a place with an easier job market, and a free roof (a friends parents let me live with them for a month). (I've never told any one that before fyi).
Also, I made it out because I came from a family with a reasonable amount of money. Not much, but because they were secure I knew computers, and I knew how to dev. I also took my computer when I left home. If I hadn't had that knowledge and such a important asset, I have no idea how I'd have ended up.
By the time I was 19 I pulled in upper 5 figures, and at 20 I was pulling 6 figures, and kept climbing. This is a -direct- result of having dev knowledge when I left home.
Give these people a break. A lot of them were trained to believe they have to follow the rules to make it, they can't know they are wrong and that following the rules is a dead end with, at best, retirement in the casket.
If it helps, image that, (just pretend) through a series of events outside your control you found yourself evicted with $20, no job, and two kids to support. No family, no friends willing to help you out.
What would you do? I'm sure you all have big internet balls, but the reality is, it's fucking tough and sometimes no matter how hard you try, it's just not going to happen.
If I were down that far again, I'd hope people would give me the benefit of the doubt, so I try to do the same.
-- edit
A lot of people on this board that do well are completely unemployable, and have no skills outside whatever it is they are currently doing. It's naive to think you couldn't end up like this through a, if you'll forgive the term, twist of fate.
If I couldn't dev anymore (and putting aside current savings and minor assets), I'd probably have to go into construction or some other low barrier manual job for a long while until I could put enough scratch together to make something else happen. What about you?
Come on, you can't tell me being poor is a valid excuse for being fat. That's retarded.
If anything, it's the other way around. They're poor because their fat and lazy.
I was wondering that myself, but you notice on one of the motel signs near the beginning charging $150 bucks a week which is about or maybe even slightly less than most basic apartments in the US. The big thing that makes them ideal for these people is that there is no up front down payment needed when signing a lease on an apartment and there definitely is no credit-check.
Easy entry. Take the one in the show.
It's $150 to move in and get a roof, which totals $600-ish per month (months being 30-31 days).
Contrast to a apartment that is $600 per month you need $600 upfront, plus deposit, plus last month, making your move in $1800 (!).
Shelling out $150 up front is much more feasible.
I stopped watching documentaries. All of them.
They stopped being quasi-objective journalism (if they ever were) and now are basically propaganda promoting some point of view under the guise of being informative and investigative.
Documentaries, TED, it's all consumer intellectualism.
They stopped being quasi-objective journalism (if they ever were) and now are basically propaganda promoting some point of view under the guise of being informative and investigative.
Documentaries, TED, it's all consumer intellectualism.