Quote (AspenSniper @ Apr 21 2017 12:09pm)

I literally just moved and aside from the $110 uhaul bill (for their largest truck available) it was $23.87 for the initiation fee of the electric bill, and no charge for the gas or water. Time/wages is totally unfair. Stay up til midnight a couple nights and pack. I didn't take a day off work to move and it sucked, but oh well I didn't want to lose the money.

Round up and call it $150. Give a legitimate reason someone couldn't save $150 over the course of say, 2 years, to eventually get out of the crappy inner city they're in. I live in Maryland and I know how far out the buses go in Baltimore and the metro in DC. You can get out of Southeast DC or West Baltimore and to a more rural area for the same cost and if you can/want, use section 8 to assist. It's not even privilege, that's just facts. Add up the dollars and tell me why it isn't possible from a quantitative sense.



I'm aware of the value of money and how it differs in different communities. $100 to me holds much less value than to someone jobless in an inner city. My argument is that if you know the inner city is extremely dangerous for you and your children, could you save $5-10/month for 2 years and have the money to move? There are many municipalities that offer moving/relocation assistance at the expense of the state/municipality as well. Governments don't want people to take entitlements forever, so they offer programs and assistance to get people back on their feet.

Just as Surfpunk says, I get into these debates a lot with the "same tired points" but the only comebacks I ever see are like "you're just privileged, you don't know" or "institutionalized racism" or some crap. No one ever has facts to back it up that speak to the dollars required to improve your situation.

Quote (Surfpunk @ Apr 21 2017 12:51pm)

You don't see it, because you haven't lived it. For a great many people, even $5-10 a month is too much to set aside. It's awfully easy to judge how other people should do things when you've absolutely no experience in their shoes. And Time/wages is completely fair, because if you're someone working a low-end job, barely making enough to make ends meet, and don't have any vacation or other paid time off to use, then a couple days of lost wages is a huge hit to your bottom line. I grew up in a ghetto in south Minneapolis. We didn't have a lot growing up. And even then, we didn't have it as bad as many of the people in our neighborhood.

Quote (Surfpunk @ Apr 21 2017 12:40pm)

He does this about once a month...posts some silly thread about race and poverty, gets shown the light (so to speak), acknowledges as much, then comes back a month later with a similar thread, making the same tired points.

Quote (AspenSniper @ Apr 21 2017 01:27pm)

Anecdotal over and over. The typical "you haven't lived it and thus you don't know." I didn't grow up in a ghetto, but my parents certainly didn't have any money to pay for my college or car or insurance or any entitled shit like that. I haven't worked less than 40 hours a week since I was 15, so I do know what hard work for a little amount of money is, albeit not to the same extent as an inner city ghetto of course.

Let's get real for a moment too and I'll drop an anecdotal "teens in the ghetto still have iphones" line. If people truly wanted to get out, they could get out. Most of the people I grew up with wanted to live in rural cities like Emmitsburg, MD or Thurmont, MD, or Cumberland, MD or Taneytown, MD and didn't understand why someone would waste their time moving to Baltimore or DC. I'd get teased for being smart or studying hard, or wanting to go to college. Again, not to the same extent as inner city ghettos, and I certainly am not blind to the difference. I'm just saying, people can be their own worst enemy. I had nothing more than these idiots who now live in bumfuck making bumfuck broke as fuck, and yet now I make 6 figures and all my hometown friends scratch their heads wondering what "luck" I had that made me so special.

Quote (Surfpunk @ Apr 21 2017 01:33pm)

I'll bet you didn't have a "black" name on your resume.

Quote (AspenSniper @ Apr 21 2017 01:37pm)

Okay I read chapter 6 of Freakonomics too. I'm literally in an office right now with 5 people around me, 4 black, 1 Hispanic and me. Dayvonne, Laquitta, Josh, Amare and Luis. All of us are in similar roles and bring in 6 figure salaries. I know the backgrounds of all of them except one and they all grew up poor as fuck, 1 of them coming here from Nigeria like 8 years ago. It's not about race.

Quote (AspenSniper @ Apr 21 2017 03:07pm)

Okay I read chapter 6 of Freakonomics too. I'm literally in an office right now with 5 people around me, 4 black, 1 Hispanic and me. Dayvonne, Laquitta, Josh, Amare and Luis. All of us are in similar roles and bring in 6 figure salaries. I know the backgrounds of all of them except one and they all grew up poor as fuck, 1 of them coming here from Nigeria like 8 years ago. It's not about race.

Quote (AspenSniper @ Apr 21 2017 12:37pm)

Okay I read chapter 6 of Freakonomics too. I'm literally in an office right now with 5 people around me, 4 black, 1 Hispanic and me. Dayvonne, Laquitta, Josh, Amare and Luis. All of us are in similar roles and bring in 6 figure salaries. I know the backgrounds of all of them except one and they all grew up poor as fuck, 1 of them coming here from Nigeria like 8 years ago. It's not about race.

Quote (Thor123422 @ Apr 21 2017 02:31pm)

Survivorship bias in action

Quote (AspenSniper @ Apr 21 2017 02:45pm)

I definitely don't get the "no choice but to live in the ghetto urban city" argument. For kicks I just pulled up Zillow. You can get a 1 BR in Parkside, a not as shitty area as West Baltimore for literally the same price as a 1 BR in the shittiest of shit areas in West Baltimore City. Still has access to the same public transit except you don't have to risk getting your face blown off when you walk down the street there. How would it be so difficult to move 3 miles away for a significantly better life? I am happy to learn, just tell me factual reasons why that can't be done. If you want an even nicer area with top rated schools, go 30 miles out for the same price, not an impossible commute, though it adds the cost of a car if you don't already have one, but you'll make back your money because the average person living in a major city spends more than someone in a rural area, which I guess I can find a stat to back that up if you want to factcheck me on it.

I'm just saying if you care about getting your kid a good education and out of the ghetto, there are options from what I can see just taking one city as an example. I want to understand why I am wrong in this thinking.



Okay fair enough, I'm just giving a simple example from where I'm sitting. Is it so hard to believe that if some people from the same environment can "make it" others can too? To believe they aren't doomed because they were raised by a single parent in a shit city? Or is this the "just because Morgan Freeman says it doesn't mean everyone can pull themselves up from their bootstraps" time to quote?