Unless, of course, there’s no difference. In the online world, that’s largely the case. You could make 10 times as much as I do, and it wouldn’t change the nature of our interaction. On the other hand, in the real world I might feel differently as the visible trappings of wealth you display separate us by class.
These features trickle down. ABS and airbags have been widely available in all cars for 10 years now. Air conditioning and other comforts have been standard for a long time.
Of course the wealthy get these features first. They’re early adopters and pay a premium for them. This is a good thing. It stimulates develop of new products that eventually trickle down to everyone.
But you know what? You’ve put your finger on another benefit of modern cars: They last longer. If the poor can only afford 10 year old cars, the 10 year old car they can buy today will be MUCH better than a 10 year old car they could have purchased 20 years ago. Hell, I drive a 2003 Ford Escape, and I have no desire to buy new because the difference between new cars and mine are just not that stark - not enough to warrant a big car payment. My vehicle looks and drives like new. Of course, I take the time to maintain it.
On the other hand, if you drove a 10 year old car in the 70’s, 80’s or 90’s you were probably driving a rusted wreck - especially if the vehicle started life as an economy car. Those old Chevettes and Vegas and K-Cars were lucky to make it 10 years - or in some cases even 5 years. Today, we’re surrounded by 10 year old cars that look new. Chalk it up to tighter tolerances, better materials, advances in rustproofing and paint, yada yada. All of which benefits the poor more than the rich, because the rich can always afford to dump worn vehicles while the poor can’t.
If you live your life mostly online, the fact that you live in a hovel doesn’t matter as much to your overall standard of living, because the things you can do and see are not affected by your living quarters.
But if you do live in a hovel, isn’t it great that there’s an entire world of social interaction out there that you can participate in where no one has to know where you live? Or for that matter, what color your skin is? Doesn’t that make your life better?
Not all jobs for poor people are service jobs. But there are jobs that can be done online by unskilled people. Call center work and telemarketing come to mind. I would concede that there aren’t many such jobs right now. But for those people on the margin who have managed to find work they can do from home, it makes a world of difference.
But speaking of service work - even little things like online banking or online access to government services can be a big quality of life improvement for people who can’t travel easily, such as single mothers. I grew up in a family with a single mother and with no car. Do you know how hard it was for her to even go grocery shopping? She had to pack her kids up on a bloody bus and haul us across town to the grocery store and back. Sometimes trying to carry as much as we could on the bus, or other times splurging to pay for delivery service if we just couldn’t carry it. It was an all-day affair, and with a couple of squalling infants in tow it had to be absolutely exhausting for her. The same pattern would be repeated if she had to go to the bank to cash her cheque, or go to a government office or buy clothes or do anything else that couldn’t be done at home.
Today, a lot of that can be done online. My mother would have killed for that.
Oh, you’re right. The poor don’t purchase anything at all. They live on hopes and dreams that progressives will save them from living in a cave in a state of raw nature.
There are options for non-card payment. I believe you can deposit money with PayPal and then use it for many online transactions. You’re really reaching here.
My mother could NEVER have gone to any sort of college with small children at home, while pulling down a job. Had the internet existed then, she could have studied at home. I’m not sure you really understand the problems poor people face if you think that expanding community colleges is equivalent to or better than online education for many of them.
Really? So now it’s Harvard or MIT or nothing? This says a lot about how you’re choosing to debate here - or your perception of the poor. I was thinking more along the lines of online training in a specific skill that employers might be looking for, or getting a GED online if you dropped out of school. You can take online courses in all sorts of things that you might be able to leverage into a real-world job or at least improve your resume so you have a better chance of getting a job.
Why don’t you look up the rapid rise of home schooling? Not long ago, the vast majority of home schooling was done for religious reasons, but now more parents are citing toxic school environments (drugs, violence, poor teaching, etc) as reasons for home schooling. The internet is a key part of this.
My own kid is doing grade 11 math at home, because his school’s math teacher for the section he would have been in is completely useless and has a terrible record for kids dropping the class because they can’t learn. Right now he’s watching a free set of lectures online from the Khan Academy. If you’d like to brush up, they’re here.
For a smart but poor kid forced to go to a drug and gang infested inner city school with a bunch of lousy teachers and a 50% drop out rate, these kinds of resources are invaluable. They’re also invaluable to someone who dropped out of school and is trying to rectify that mistake.
I never said it makes up for it - I said it is a factor that is improving the lives of poor people. You always go for the extreme interpretation so you can refute it.
And let’s not kid ourselves that the poor are starving in America. As for rats, I don’t know. But the poor in America are not destitute - the poverty line is double the world annual income and damned near the median income of some developed nations. The poor in America generally get enough to eat, although their choices are limited. They generally have a decent roof over their heads, access to the internet, cell phones, TVs, dishwashers, automatic washing machines, and the other basic trappings of life we take for granted. That doesn’t mean they are happy or that they’re not experiencing hardship and frustration, but let’s not exaggerate.
Then it’s a good thing I never claimed anything of the sort, so you can put your strawman away and snuff out the match.
I’m well aware of the problems the poor face. As I said, I’ve been there. I’ve lived in a house with no central heat and no indoor plumbing. Don’t tell me about poverty until you’ve had to walk out to the outhouse in a Saskatchewan winter, or had to hike water from an outside well so you could prime the kitchen pump and hand-pump enough water to fill the array of rusty kettles we used to heat our bathwater. And don’t sneer at television as a lifestyle improvement when your other entertainment options are just about zero because you have no money and no place to go. The day we got our color TV was a huge event in our family. Had the internet existed then, it would have made life on a poor farm much more bearable.
The point is not that the internet makes the problems of the poor go away. The point was simply that the internet is a quality of life improvement that doesn’t show up in the poverty statistics.
