I recently talked about coming from a more upper class background than I understood growing up. That hit the front page of Hacker News and some folks felt compelled to argue that I wasn't really upper class if I had student loans.
Someone did point out that social class and income class aren't the same thing and I thanked them for pointing that out and made a few remarks and more minor drama ensued. People are really hung up on the detail of money.
I never know how to talk about my life in that regard. I sometimes don't know what the hell to even think about it.
I've never had all that much money as an adult and my parents didn't really have a lot of money when I was growing up. What I had was rights and access to resources because of it.
My dad and ex husband were career military. One of the things I spent my entire marriage wrestling with was trying to figure out how to explain to people that being a military dependent was different from the way non-military families lived and one of those big differences was that we had access to rights and resources by flashing our ID card without having any cash at all.
I couldn't afford plane tickets for fancy vacations, but when my husband got orders for Germany the military issued me two plane tickets: One for me and one for my infant son.
My own mother who had, herself, been a military wife told me I couldn't afford to move to Germany. I was too poor.
And I was poor. I was a young mom with a baby and not much money and not enough clothes for the weather in Germany.
My mother and sister bought me some clothes or simply gave me some clothes out of their own closet. I got a hand-me-down warm winter coat from my sister before I headed to Germany or I would have been in a world of hurt because I didn't have enough warm clothes, but poor or not, I was going to Germany because the military said so and issued me plane tickets.
Those plane tickets cost money but they weren't worth money to me. I had no right to cash those in and not go to Germany and pocket the money.
They were willing to provide transportation for me and my baby because we were military dependents and my military spouse had orders for Germany. But cashing those tickets in would have constituted fraud.
If I didn't want to go to Germany, I didn't have to. I could have stayed in the states, but I was not entitled to cash out those tickets. Those tickets were for a single purpose: Getting me and my baby to Germany. Period.
Someone on Hacker News once said something like "There is no Scrooge McDuck vault. It's all assets, like physical infrastructure and shares in a company." There was also an episode of some detective show, maybe Columbo, where there was a theif -- I think an art theif -- and he was living a very upper class life. I think he had grown up in a wealthy family and was pretending to be living on his inheritance, but it had run out and he was supporting himself as a theif.
He gets caught in part because he pays his bills on time. Someone in the show makes the observation that people with "old money" -- people who inherited -- are notorious about wanting a discount, paying late, etc. He paid everything promptly and in full without all that because he was trying to look respectable to cover up the fact that he was a theif and it backfired. It marked him as not really "one of them." He stood out for actually having money in a way that people with "old money" don't necessarily really have.
The woman who wrote the book Mayflower Madame talked in the book about how she grew up with the trappings of wealth but no money. They had upper class furniture that they had inherited but they never bought new furniture.
So she came from a culturally upper class background because some past relative had been very upper class and had money and power, but her own family didn't really have money. Yet they had a quality of life that other poor people lacked because they already owned stuff like nice furniture, even though they couldn't possibly replace it with something of similar quality.
That resonated with me. I lived better than most people I knew for most of my life even though I never seemed to have any money.
I had access to college. I ate well. I traveled and had a passport for a lot of years, even though I never had much money.
And maybe that's why this blog exists: Because of that experience that I flashed my military ID and I got medical care or access to other assorted resources even if I was flat broke because money didn't exchange hands.
I didn't need money to get medical care. I had rights.
And this is why I don't like UBI. The reason the US has too much in the way of poverty is because we focus too much on money as the only means to get anything.
This leads to a lack of the right kind of housing to live well on a limited budget, it leads to high overhead for medical care as we add layers of middle men like insurance companies and it leads to situations where you can't get your basic needs met unless you have some relatively high "minimum" amount of money per se.
This is why people make jokes about "living in a third world country: The USA."
Europe handles things more like the American military. Citizens have rights that give them access to resources and its an older culture that has more history and urban fabric.
Europe has been generally more resistent to recent trends to tear down small residential spaces and move to McMansions and the like than the US has been. This has been a disastrous trend and it exists because the Baby Boomers were all "upper class" in the same way I was: Their dad was a veteran of World War II and had rights giving them access to things like housing and college and medical care without having to have much money to bring to the table to make that happen.
So like me, Baby Boomers saw themselves as "commoners" and they were commoners who didn't need an SRO because they were better off than previous generations in real terms in ways and for reasons they didn't fully understand. They didn't know that not all of America lived the way they lived, only the children of the World War II veterans, who tended to become hippies.
The antidote to that is to spread those rights to the rest of the US.
If you have access to medical care just because you need it and are American, this will cut through a LOT of BS currently that is a huge burden for the lower classes, for People of Color who generally have less capital than Whites in this country and for women. Needing medical care while pregnant and having trouble getting it is one of the things that helps create dysfunctional marriages, keep women trapped in abusive relationships and forces men and women both to treat a sexual relationship all too often as a polite form of prositution.
As a child, my mom sewed a lot of my clothes and we had a garden out back and grew some of our own food and dad provided some of our food by hunting. I can also remember going blackberry picking on public land where that was legal and didn't cost us anything.
That kind of lifestyle mostly doesn't exist in the US anymore. If you don't have money to pay for it at a store, you probably can't grow it or hunt it -- unless you are fairly upper class and own a house with a fairly large backyard.
The way we make this new "butterfly economy" work is we expand access to basics like medical care and we make it once again possible to live comfortably without much actual money.
The excess emphasis on a need for money in the US is fueling this increasingly dystopian social fabric where the rich get richer -- even during a pandemic -- and the poor are increasingly out in the street and unable to even get a job adequate to their needs.
Someone did point out that social class and income class aren't the same thing and I thanked them for pointing that out and made a few remarks and more minor drama ensued. People are really hung up on the detail of money.
I never know how to talk about my life in that regard. I sometimes don't know what the hell to even think about it.
I've never had all that much money as an adult and my parents didn't really have a lot of money when I was growing up. What I had was rights and access to resources because of it.
My dad and ex husband were career military. One of the things I spent my entire marriage wrestling with was trying to figure out how to explain to people that being a military dependent was different from the way non-military families lived and one of those big differences was that we had access to rights and resources by flashing our ID card without having any cash at all.
I couldn't afford plane tickets for fancy vacations, but when my husband got orders for Germany the military issued me two plane tickets: One for me and one for my infant son.
My own mother who had, herself, been a military wife told me I couldn't afford to move to Germany. I was too poor.
And I was poor. I was a young mom with a baby and not much money and not enough clothes for the weather in Germany.
My mother and sister bought me some clothes or simply gave me some clothes out of their own closet. I got a hand-me-down warm winter coat from my sister before I headed to Germany or I would have been in a world of hurt because I didn't have enough warm clothes, but poor or not, I was going to Germany because the military said so and issued me plane tickets.
Those plane tickets cost money but they weren't worth money to me. I had no right to cash those in and not go to Germany and pocket the money.
They were willing to provide transportation for me and my baby because we were military dependents and my military spouse had orders for Germany. But cashing those tickets in would have constituted fraud.
If I didn't want to go to Germany, I didn't have to. I could have stayed in the states, but I was not entitled to cash out those tickets. Those tickets were for a single purpose: Getting me and my baby to Germany. Period.
Someone on Hacker News once said something like "There is no Scrooge McDuck vault. It's all assets, like physical infrastructure and shares in a company." There was also an episode of some detective show, maybe Columbo, where there was a theif -- I think an art theif -- and he was living a very upper class life. I think he had grown up in a wealthy family and was pretending to be living on his inheritance, but it had run out and he was supporting himself as a theif.
He gets caught in part because he pays his bills on time. Someone in the show makes the observation that people with "old money" -- people who inherited -- are notorious about wanting a discount, paying late, etc. He paid everything promptly and in full without all that because he was trying to look respectable to cover up the fact that he was a theif and it backfired. It marked him as not really "one of them." He stood out for actually having money in a way that people with "old money" don't necessarily really have.
The woman who wrote the book Mayflower Madame talked in the book about how she grew up with the trappings of wealth but no money. They had upper class furniture that they had inherited but they never bought new furniture.
So she came from a culturally upper class background because some past relative had been very upper class and had money and power, but her own family didn't really have money. Yet they had a quality of life that other poor people lacked because they already owned stuff like nice furniture, even though they couldn't possibly replace it with something of similar quality.
That resonated with me. I lived better than most people I knew for most of my life even though I never seemed to have any money.
I had access to college. I ate well. I traveled and had a passport for a lot of years, even though I never had much money.
And maybe that's why this blog exists: Because of that experience that I flashed my military ID and I got medical care or access to other assorted resources even if I was flat broke because money didn't exchange hands.
I didn't need money to get medical care. I had rights.
And this is why I don't like UBI. The reason the US has too much in the way of poverty is because we focus too much on money as the only means to get anything.
This leads to a lack of the right kind of housing to live well on a limited budget, it leads to high overhead for medical care as we add layers of middle men like insurance companies and it leads to situations where you can't get your basic needs met unless you have some relatively high "minimum" amount of money per se.
This is why people make jokes about "living in a third world country: The USA."
Europe handles things more like the American military. Citizens have rights that give them access to resources and its an older culture that has more history and urban fabric.
Europe has been generally more resistent to recent trends to tear down small residential spaces and move to McMansions and the like than the US has been. This has been a disastrous trend and it exists because the Baby Boomers were all "upper class" in the same way I was: Their dad was a veteran of World War II and had rights giving them access to things like housing and college and medical care without having to have much money to bring to the table to make that happen.
So like me, Baby Boomers saw themselves as "commoners" and they were commoners who didn't need an SRO because they were better off than previous generations in real terms in ways and for reasons they didn't fully understand. They didn't know that not all of America lived the way they lived, only the children of the World War II veterans, who tended to become hippies.
The antidote to that is to spread those rights to the rest of the US.
If you have access to medical care just because you need it and are American, this will cut through a LOT of BS currently that is a huge burden for the lower classes, for People of Color who generally have less capital than Whites in this country and for women. Needing medical care while pregnant and having trouble getting it is one of the things that helps create dysfunctional marriages, keep women trapped in abusive relationships and forces men and women both to treat a sexual relationship all too often as a polite form of prositution.
As a child, my mom sewed a lot of my clothes and we had a garden out back and grew some of our own food and dad provided some of our food by hunting. I can also remember going blackberry picking on public land where that was legal and didn't cost us anything.
That kind of lifestyle mostly doesn't exist in the US anymore. If you don't have money to pay for it at a store, you probably can't grow it or hunt it -- unless you are fairly upper class and own a house with a fairly large backyard.
The way we make this new "butterfly economy" work is we expand access to basics like medical care and we make it once again possible to live comfortably without much actual money.
The excess emphasis on a need for money in the US is fueling this increasingly dystopian social fabric where the rich get richer -- even during a pandemic -- and the poor are increasingly out in the street and unable to even get a job adequate to their needs.