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The Poor Waste More Time On Digital Entertainment
New submitter polyphydont writes "Children of parents with low social status are less able to resist the temptations of technological entertainment, a fact that impedes their education and adds to the obstacles such children face in obtaining financial comfort later in life. As explained in the article, poor parents and their children often waste both their time and money on heavily marketed entertainment systems. Such families often accumulate PCs, gaming consoles and smart phones, but use them only for nonconstructive activities."
Waste and spend are two entirely different things.
Anyone who thinks they have all the answers deserves derision. Sounds like s/he's got it figured out, IMO.
I've observed that many affluent people spend great deals of cash on sporting goods, expensive hobbies, and out-of-home entertainment.
It's not like they're all buying computers and then using them for productivity.... it's just that a great deal of more productive, healthy, or useful activities are still much more expensive than cheap TVs, cheap computers, and cheap video games.
It's not like the rich people stare at the wall all day instead of playing video games.
Seriously - while the ghetto dad is playing with his $200 XBox, the rich dads are riding $2000 bikes with $3000 worth of shiny spandex.
People have different degrees of impulse control. The ones with good control of their impulses tend to do better then the ones with poor control of their impulses.
On NPR they were talking about the Marshmallow test. Where kids were place in front of a plate with a Marshmallow on it. They were told you can eat that Marshmallow now, however if you wait for 15 minutes you can have two.
They tracked the children threw adulthood. The ones who waited to get two on the average achieved more then the ones who just took one right away.
When you spend money on the quick fix you are trading off time for the long term goal.
If this is a genetic trait, or a learned trait is up to interpretation, however it comes down to, if you grow up in a family who is poor because the parents lack impulse control, then either genetically or as a learned habit it will be passed to the next generation, who will then live in poverty.
It isn't about how hard they work, some work very hard, much harder then the rest of us, it isn't that their are stupid either, some of them are very intelligent. However if you cannot control your impulse to buy the quick fix, you will not be saving up for higher value things.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Most children just use their bikes to ride about on. One of my friends from school saved up to buy a really good racing bike, then spent all his time taking it apart and building better bits using his dad's workshop.
Now he builds racing bikes professionally, and you *cannot* afford one.
You get all kinds of geeks, everywhere.
Anarchism is as related to socialism as it is to any other totally unrelated political ideology.
"So if you don't give any answers and instead just bitch about everyone ELSE'S answers, then you don't deserve derision?"
Not when the purpose of commenting is itself, to deride something worthy of derision.
And since when does "having an answer" make a fucking bit of difference? Newt Gingrich wants to KILL drug dealers.
That's fucking stupid. Does not forwarding a solution myself make it any less stupid? Nope.
I can't ever recall anyone asking for this information for any other reason than to use it to smear someone.
You don't need to know because it doesn't matter, you WANT to know because you think you can then go "AHA YOU SUPPORT TEAM BLUE YOU'RE A _____" or "I KNEW IT, YOU SUPPORT TEAM RED, YOU ARE A _______"
You want to know because it will allow you to avoid addressing the actual issues, and frankly, YOU and those like YOU are what's wrong with politics in this country.
It's entirely possible to address his position without knowing anything else about him.
The US maintained a libertarian economic policy from the end of Reconstruction through 1913. A time period that coincided with the greatest period of economic growth ever seen in history, creating the first universal middle class in history.
"Universal middle class"? Where the hell did you get that tripe from? The Gilded Age was an age marked by robber barons who hoarded wealth at a rate that is almost incomprehensible today. Do you have any wealth or income statistics from that age (they conveniently start at the end of the era you covet) that would back up your assertion?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
The guy was making the valid statement that a corporation can not force you to do anything.
I think 100,000 well-armed Pinkerton Detectives would disagree. And by "disagree" I mean "bust you upside your head with a fucking baseball bat if you defied the company that hired them as its private army."
nor can they send armed police to toss me in jail
Who's going to stop them, the government that you got rid of because you don't like paying taxes?
No company has that power..... only government.
No, the only thing STOPPING the companies from having that power is government.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?