Work Reform

Waiting for buses and other public transport especially. In college I had no car and continued working a part time job that I previously borrowed my parents' car to commute to. My options were: spending an hour and a half to commute taking a bus with a reasonable schedule but I'd have to walk over a mile alongside a busy road to my job, or spend three hours to commute due to how two route schedules matched up to drop me off at the entrance to the shopping center.

Each of those options was one way, and this was before smart phones. I wasn't getting anything done in that time besides listening to music and maybe reading a book while on the bus itself.

And then I learned that on Saturdays, over half the time the bus just didn't fucking show up at the stop where I got on, and the support phone line would just fucking lie about it.

Plus, if I had a vehicle, the commute would have been only 20 minutes in bad traffic.

Will say, the regular distance power walking helped keep me in great shape though.

Same with being disabled, growing up I thought disabled people just got helped by everyone in society with everything. Turns out most of the time it's "do what you were doing before except harder."

This is what I point out whenever someone tries to tell me, "The only fair thing in life is everyone gets 24 hours in a day."

That doesn't mean shit when someone with a private jet can be on a different continent in hours.

You know what’s also wild?

Paying Elon Musk for a blue checkmark.

Being poor is super expensive. When you don't have enough money in your bank account they'll charge you a monthly fee. When you're too poor to have an account, you have to go to a check cashing place and pay to get paid. Too poor to have awesome credit? You have to pay higher interest fees and larger deposits.

I’ve known people to be on hold for 6-8 hours for multiple days with the local food stamp office without being able to get in touch with anyone. At one point the automatic message when you called was ‘too many people are calling, hang up.’

The other thing is how expensive being poor is. Laundry is like 3 dollars a load last I checked. Buy cheap shoes, expect them to last 6 months max. There are food options if you have time to cook but combined with the original poster you won't and you don't have transportation so delivery is only option...

Poverty is more expensive than anything any millionaire or billionaire could buy. Fuck the rich.

The time theft has a far reach. I’ve worked with kids who’ve gone inpatient for mental health, acting out in school, etc. Why? Because mom isn’t there. It’s not willful neglect. It’s neglect through not neglecting her motherly duties by working 2-3 jobs to keep the lights on and shoes on her child’s feet.

Time is a key reason we need to be paid more, have a much higher minimum wage, though it isn’t often mentioned.

Not exactly the tweet, but dropping this again here because of the title.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.

The SiFi movie "In Time" staring Justin Timberlake is meh quality wise, but the premise is really interesting... That the currency of that universe is the time someone has left to live. They do an interesting job playing with how wealth inequality changes behavior of people with and without time to spare

Time poverty is a totally real and utterly overlooked hindrance

Fun napkin math fact: If we divvied up the top... 5 wealthiest billionaires net worth... that'd get every living man, woman, and child on earth a cool $250 ish.

Sure - its not very much but it certainly does make you think. What if...

It really is time we figure out how to level the playing field.

Another thing about being poor is that once you get a bit of money its like pouring water onto a desert because of all the deferred things. Clothes, car repairs and tires, debt, dentist, medical care, shoes. The hole people get in is deeper than it looks. A few thousand can evaporate disappointingly quickly.

Waiting for busses isn't a poverty problem, it's a policy problem.

That's a marker of the upwardly mobile. At some point they reach a threshold of wealth where they can be paying other people for their time.

Those who stay poor might look at them like they're spending money recklessly to pay for the help. They don't realize the financial crossover that's happening.

I feel this. I need to send out resumes but more than half my time is doing other things and this list is I would say a pretty decent list of what sucks up the time. Whats funny is our society has all this potential labor but we rather it go to waste and atriphy.

Much of it is a deliberate business strategy. The lower priced options waste more time to deter those able to afford more expensive alternatives from using them.

I'm going to just say whole I fully agree with the sentiment, Transit needs to not be looked at as a part of poverty. Alot of cities have transit used by all walks of life.