Thursday, May 21, 2009

Sucks to be poor

I only read the first page of this, the high cost of poverty, ran outta time and I want to read it later.

Basically it's showing how the poor get fucked over and over again.
By

2 comments:

PersonalFailure said...

yeah, we do.

and, yes, it totally does suck to be poor.

May 21, 2009 4:51 PM
The Vicar said...

Ah, yes, nothing new here. Terry Pratchett mentioned the "Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness"* in a book published in 1993, and it wasn't original then, either.

*The quotation comes from Men at Arms, and runs as follows (grrr! why is the "blockquote" tag not allowed?):

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. 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. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

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.

May 22, 2009 11:17 AM

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