Favorite poverty symbols!

[Brandon]

Citations?  Please feel free to provide links and references.

Forty-five years of life.

That's merely anecdotal and not backed up by any other citations or data (unlike that I've posted).  Now, do you have any real citations for data that's not ancedotal?

[hbelkins]

Meanwhile, I am missing two stacks of recordable Blu-ray discs that I ordered from Amazon last fall and that never arrived.  The presumption has to be that they were stolen somewhere along the delivery chain, probably from our mailbox.

Or it's possible that they could have met with somewhat of a more tragic demise and were destroyed in a vehicle fire, wreck, etc. I've heard numerous reports of mail and parcel vehicles running into these troubles. Did you get a tracking number with the order that could be traced? (I'm presuming that if you did, you would have already ran the number to see where the last place the package was scanned was.)

And earlier this week we spent about an hour and a half setting up a new checking account because we had two checks, tendered in payment of bills, stolen from our mailbox.  The envelopes containing the checks in question were sitting in the mailbox, red flag up, for less than an hour, and I discovered the red flag still up, mailbox door open, and checks gone literally only 30 seconds before the letter carrier stopped by with the mail.  Our local news has reported that postal employees have been finding gum (clearly designed to intercept envelopes containing payment instruments) at blue letterboxes around town.

Not sure what gum would do or how it would be used in these mailbox heists. Also surprised that Tim hasn't jumped all over the gum reference.

When people are so hard up that they are willing to tamper with the US mail to a degree that is unprecedented locally--committing multiple federal offenses in the process--is this the sign of a healthy economy?

I'm going to guess it's either a sign of boredom/lack of morals/greed/laziness or someone looking to feed their drug habit. Just about every burglary or robbery in my area can be traced to someone looking for cash to buy pills or meth.

[MantyMadTown]

I'm not sure how much the economy is booming even in STEM.  I majored in computer science with intent on a career in IT, only to find that nobody would even give me an interview.  I ended up taking a programming job that didn't work out (since I'm not as good at programming, and thought I'd be a network/system administrator anyways, so that's what my focus was on in college), and later ended up here in a job in a completely different field.  I probably should have thought about web development (which I could actually do with more experience) or GIS (which I hadn't even heard of because what little GIS Clarkson has is confined to the civil engineering program for some reason), if I had been smarter.

Granted, it probably doesn't help that I'm not interested in dealing with metro areas above a certain size (not willing to deal with the high cost of living and horrible traffic) or outside a day's drive to Rochester, NY (even Albany can feel far away since three and a half hours of Thruway each way, 7+ times per year, gets old fast).  Originally I even had "not outside Wegmans territory" as a criteria, but that one didn't work out.

It's unfortunate that US companies don't do true entry-level hiring any more.  Even "entry level" jobs require lots of experience and networking to get, since businesses won't train any more, and applying for job postings online is basically futile.

I was actually thinking about going to my local technical college so I could prepare myself for a degree in IT/networking, but I chose to pursue a 4 year degree in computer science instead. About a year down the road I figured out that my school's computer science program was oriented on programming/software development and not much on IT, so I couldn't really do anything related to what I wanted to do. That's what made me want to pursue something more related to transportation. I tried to go into civil engineering but that was too tough for me so now I'm going into GIS.

[Scott5114]

And earlier this week we spent about an hour and a half setting up a new checking account because we had two checks, tendered in payment of bills, stolen from our mailbox.  The envelopes containing the checks in question were sitting in the mailbox, red flag up, for less than an hour, and I discovered the red flag still up, mailbox door open, and checks gone literally only 30 seconds before the letter carrier stopped by with the mail.  Our local news has reported that postal employees have been finding gum (clearly designed to intercept envelopes containing payment instruments) at blue letterboxes around town.

Not sure what gum would do or how it would be used in these mailbox heists. Also surprised that Tim hasn't jumped all over the gum reference.

The gum would be placed in the slot of a blue USPS drop box (not a home mail box) so that as envelopes are deposited in the slot, they stick in place rather than dropping into the box. That would allow someone to come by later and pull the envelope back out of the box.

[Jordanes]

I seriously want to dump my iPhone 5c and go back to a landline.

[Desert Man]

I was a child in the 1980s, but my parents weren't yuppies (my father worked in a fire dept., my mother as a matron in local sheriff until I was 3 years old), then they divorced when I was 7 and I grew up with a single mother. I grew up in a lower-to-middle class town (Indio Cal.) not far from higher-income, largely retirement and tourist attraction places like Palm Desert and Palm Springs. Can't drive while in high school, No house of my own until I hit my early 30s, no internet until age 17, no cell phone until age 22, and Im now 38 raising my 3 kids in a lifestyle similar to my childhood in this millennia: the great recession in 2008-09 smack between New Years day 2000 and the current boom time in 2018.

[CtrlAltDel]

Employment can be difficult to find even with a good degree in a hard STEM field like math or physics.

Well, when people say “STEM,” more often than not they really mean “TE.”

Being in the STEM fields, I notice it quite acutely.  They're good jobs, pay well, yet getting kids interested in engineering or science seems to be a lot tougher than interesting them in majoring in some liberal arts bullshit.

Such an attitude is common among STEM people, and I’ve never really understood it. Is there something about these disciplines that encourages this type of thinking? Or that attracts a certain type of personality? It can’t just be a question of the ease of finding work post-study, since, as others have pointed out, it isn’t necessarily easy to get a job in a STEM field.

[Big John]

Employment can be difficult to find even with a good degree in a hard STEM field like math or physics.

Well, when people say "STEM,"  more often than not they really mean "TE."

Being in the STEM fields, I notice it quite acutely.  They're good jobs, pay well, yet getting kids interested in engineering or science seems to be a lot tougher than interesting them in majoring in some liberal arts bullshit.

Such an attitude is common among STEM people, and I've never really understood it. Is there something about these disciplines that encourages this type of thinking? Or that attracts a certain type of personality? It can't just be a question of the ease of finding work post-study, since, as others have pointed out, it isn't necessarily easy to get a job in a STEM field.

I can personally attest that finding employment in the STEM field is far from easy, especially with Autism.

[mgk920]

Hard to fathom an economic situation so bad that literally you fear poverty past the age where it would really matter anymore with accumulated savings.

I can actually imagine it.

We're talking a time where there was no such thing as programs like Social Security or FDIC.  Literally you could have a small fortune in the bank that would suddenly disappear when your bank went under.  That's how things like stuff dollars in tin cans and mattresses get started.  Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe the unemployment level has even gotten close to the levels of the Great Depression in any recent recession.

One thing that I recall in recent discussions is that the official unemployment rate in the 1930s was what we now call the 'workforce non-participation rate' (inverse of the percentage of all able-bodied adults who are actually in the work force and working), whereas today's (since at least the 1950s or so) 'unemployment rate' figure does not include able-bodied adults who have given up and stopped looking for work.

Mike

[US71]

Hard to fathom an economic situation so bad that literally you fear poverty past the age where it would really matter anymore with accumulated savings.

I can actually imagine it.

We're talking a time where there was no such thing as programs like Social Security or FDIC.  Literally you could have a small fortune in the bank that would suddenly disappear when your bank went under.  That's how things like stuff dollars in tin cans and mattresses get started.  Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe the unemployment level has even gotten close to the levels of the Great Depression in any recent recession.

One thing that I recall in recent discussions is that the official unemployment rate in the 1930s was what we now call the 'workforce non-participation rate' (inverse of the percentage of all able-bodied adults who are actually in the work force and working), whereas today's (since at least the 1950s or so) 'unemployment rate' figure does not include able-bodied adults who have given up and stopped looking for work.

Mike

That was during the Reagan administration, I believe.