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Ask Slashdot: Hungry Students, How Common?
Gud (78635) points to this story in the Washington Post about students
having trouble with paying for both food and school. "I recall a number of these experiences from my time as grad student. I remember choosing between eating, living in bad neighborhoods, putting gas in the car, etc. Me and my fellow students still refer to ourselves as the 'starving grad students.' Today we laugh about these experiences because we all got good jobs that lifted us out of poverty, but not everyone is that fortunate. I wonder how many students are having hard time concentrating on their studies due to worrying where the next meal comes from. In the article I found the attitude of collage admins to the idea of meal plan point sharing, telling as how little they care about anything else but soak students & parents for fees and pester them later on with requests for donations. Last year I did the college tour for my first child, after reading the article, some of the comments I heard on that tour started making more sense. Like 'During exams you go to the dining hall in the morning, eat and study all day for one swipe' or 'One student is doing study on what happens when you live only on Ramen noodles!'
How common is 'food insecurity in college or high school'? What tricks can you share with current students?"
How common is 'food insecurity in college or high school'? What tricks can you share with current students?"
Feed me!
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
...because no one wants to tell you about those, of course not - who wants to admit they didn't make it after all of those hardships?
I took an education in Animation, very VERY expensive, cost me a HUGE fortune (which I took up a loan for, and worked in a computer store to pay off), did I end up working for Disney? No. Despite winning TWO FILM AWARDS - I still didn't get a job with Pixar or the likes, why? Did I suck? No - I just didn't have the right connections, and I didn't even understand how important it is to have the right connections, and NOT to piss off the wrong people.
I spent the next 10 years paying of my study debts, I'm finally free. But I don't regret anything, if I didn't do it - I'd spend the rest of my life wondering how things would have turned out if I did it, if I really just took the plunge and went for it. Well - I did...and it didn't turn out as I expect it.
But you know what? Everything you learn in life - you'll eventually get some use out of, I use my former education to work in advertising, using my animation skills in a technical sense, earning my living that way. Nothing is ever 100% black & white.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
nobody is forcing you to attend an expensive university or college. There's community college and also trade schools which don't cost as much. Many of us don't fall victim to the social brainwashing either. Myself I'm a lead architect developer, been doing this for years, without any educational background. Do I have enough money to get a degree now? Sure. Would I? Maybe for business, other than that, no. Point being, work yourself up, then attend college. Nobody is forcing you to keep working at dead end jobs, I've seen plenty of positions where companies want those who push themselves to the next level and want to learn.
Sure, the 'best' schools are there, but who cares if you're walking the edge of malnutrition in order to pay for class, gas, and books? Emigrate to an actual civilized country instead of a pretend one.
... 80% of you in the US are competing over 5% of the money in the economy, you guys have no idea how unequal your society has become and you keep voting for more of getting screwed.
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
If someone still owns a car and has a place to live they are not poor. I have know students so poor that they are homeless.
I recently graduated from gradschool in computer engineering. I had a $30k per year stipend on top of my tuition remission (18 credits per year totaling $25k ). Lived in a 1200 sq. ft. 2 bed/2 bath apartment for 5 years. If you're starving during grad school you're probably in the humanities or doing it wrong.
It's part of the Tao of graduate school.
I cheated by marrying while I was a grad student. While my wife didn't have that great of a job we had food. After I finished my PhD I supported her graduate studies, an MLIS.
In my College orientation class they had a handy handout on inexpensive, nutritious meals. It was very useful. This should be SOP in all colleges.
The article talks about "Stigmas about seeking help" but only focuses on undergrad and the students' internalized stigmas with the school being super helpful. That has not been my personal experience with graduate TAs and RAs. A close grad student friend worked out that his stipend was so low that he (and all other similarly paid grad students int he department) qualified for food stamps. He jokingly told one of the other grad students when he was within earshot of a professor, and got called into a meeting with the department head threatening retribution if he "made the department look bad" by applying for food stamps.
I don't know if there were any real teeth in that threat but grad students can't exactly rock the boat too much if they hope to get the all-important recommendation for post-doc work.
...if you don't have the means and/or resources necessary to live comfortably during that period AND you're not willing to make the sacrifices necessary otherwise - then don't go.
Seriously, wtf is up with people thinking that they should get everything they want all the time?
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In the 60s I found I could get just expiring beef and freeze it. I also found restaurant supply place that would sell me bulk sizes of frozen vegges and I would freeze portions. The local Safeway would sometimes give me bread that was going to be trashed. I guess I was lucky that my unfurnished apartment did come with a freezer. Then I was able to furnish my apartment with gifts from the University and tenants moving out that did not want stuff. When my money ran out I found professors that would step in for a helping hand. Rich undergrads would sometimes pay me for help with math, I would wander the undergrad library and ask students that looked frustrated. Ah, the good old days...
But it sounds like an absurd example of a false economy: Even at relatively cheap schools, the cost of running a student through is nontrivial. It seems like complete insanity to waste expensive instructional time on somebody who can't concentrate properly for want of a few dollars worth of calories. Nobody's interests are well served by that.
Whatever money you have, it stretches a whole lot further if you opt for cooking your own meals rather than relying on convenience food. I realize Britain isn't USA but one pound per day goes a long way to keeping you fed if you know how to cook - and I'm not talking pasta 7 days a week either.
If you join up with other students and buy in bulk, you can probably do better than I did.
If you are unfortunate to live of commie states like USA or North Korea, don't be surprise you will be starving.
USA spends enormous amounts of money on military and security forces. Everyone arriving in USA will be stunned by STASI style of living. Police and security present is strong. Public demonstrations are prohibited in Washington D.C. political dissidents put in jail or landfill.
USA has the worst records against journalism. Forget press freedom. Official propaganda tubes like Fox News or CNN rules the airways.
Expect another school district to be closed to divert fund to another F-16 or more bombs. Regime don't care about 60 millions of starving Americans guns are more important.
A starving student with a car?! I think we've isolated the problem.
I finished my CS PhD about 10 years ago at a top-20 US university. My first year I was not paid, but after I hooked onto an advisor later, I received an RA or TA position for $23k/year, and in my last few years, I received a fellowship for about $40k/year.
That first year was horrible. I recall eating spaghetti and ketchup, and I distinctly remember having to ask one of my rich friends for a $500 loan just to pay my rent one month. That was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life, and it really shaped my financial planning. Now, 10 years later, although I'm making well over $150k/year, I keep my expenses very low like I'm still a grad student, and I always have at least 6 months' expenses in short-term accounts.
NCAA Approves Unlimited Athlete Meals After Hungry
I don't know about other states, but in Virginia you can go to community college and then get a guaranteed transfer to a 4 year state university if you have at least a 3.0 upon graduation. If you live near Virginia and your state schools are subpar, then all you have to do is move to the town where you want to start, declare residency and apply after one year to the community college to get in state tuition. Want to go out of state and find it a burden to pay $25k/year instead of deferred gratification of one year for less than $5k-$7k/year? Only got yourself to blame. It's not fair, but I doubt most of the world's poor would cry a single tear for you due to your inability to wait one year to save $15-$20k/year.
That means things like learning how to manage your money: learning what is a necessary and unnecessary expense, learning how to shop for bargains, learning how to do things for yourself in order to save money (e.g. cooking), learning tricks to reduces bills (e.g. heating), learning how to share resources, and so forth.
I've seen many students complain about how poor they are. Yet they were spending money like their parents were spending money, which was fine for the parents because they had a lifetime to establish themselves financially (e.g. good paying job, accrued assets). Worse yet, some were spending money like they were still living with their parents (i.e. they didn't cut back on the discretionary expenses since leaving home).
Yeah, losing the luxuries suck. On the other hand, most students would be able to provide themselves with the necessities and lead a happy life without those luxuries.
I was squeaking by in undergrad, working various part time jobs to pay the bills. I took longer than most to finish my BS but made it through without having to take out any student loans.
For grad school I was a married man, which helped. I was also given a tuition waiver and a $20k stipend which also helped. I knew plenty of people who did OK on the stipend living alone as well; not great but a tolerable existence. After all, the stipend is intentionally kept on the meager side to encourage you to get out of grad school.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I subsisted on Ramen and chicken pot pies because they were cheap (4/1$ for Ramen, 2/1$ for chicken pot pies). Even the cheapest dollar meal at the local fast food didn't have as many calories. But, no, I didn't worry about food all that much.
First thing is to learn to cook. It's generally cheaper to buy family portions and make your own than to buy individual meals. For example, a bag of rice is $10, but can act as bulk in many meals such as fried rice, chicken & rice, steamed rice with butter & onions.. Yeah, doesn't sound too appetizing, but it can be. Fried rice, for example, is easy to make. For about 20$ worth of ingredients, you can have 10 meals. Just need rice, an egg or two, onions, salami/pepperoni, etc.. You can buy a pack of miso for around $4. Add firm tofu ($3) or chicken chunks ($4) and dried seaweed ($3) and you can make soup for 10 people. Buying a bulk pack of 50 tacos will set you back around $10; add a couple pounds of beef (10$), lettuce (2$), cheese ($5), etc., and you can feed 10 people for $50 or so.
Next, use coupons and shop of two-for-one days. You can easily save 50% of your bill just by using coupons and shopping on the right days. Avoid individual meal items such as can soda and even White Castle burgers.
You can also show up at friends/relatives around dinner time but use that only as a last resort unless you're really tight with them. Make friends with someone who works at a pizza shop. I knew a guy in college who would take leftovers from the restaurant. At a Denny's, for example, he'd order a coffee. When people were about to leave he'd run up and ask if he could have their leftovers. Bizarre, but he saved a few bucks. He's also gotten pretty wealthy since those days so I guess it paid off. I figure that one day he'll find a way to end up in jail just so he could get a free meal and bunk. :/
Oh, and forget about corned beef. Back in my day it was cheap, around $1.50 a can. Now it's close to $6 a can. I remember many days eating corned beef and cabbage, corned beef and scrambled eggs, steamed corned beef, corned beef sandwiches. No more.
It's like Dave Ramsey says: if you're broke, then eat "beans and rice, rice and beans." It's easy and cheap, even in a dorm.
1. Rice cookers are like $10-20. Get one with a steamer tray. It doesn't have a burner and can't start a fire, so tell your RA to fuck off.
2. Buy rice at the Asian store. It'll cost $1/lb for good Jasmine rice (brown rice only, you'll need the nutrients). (You don't have an Asian store? My ass. Or try the Mexican store. You don't have a Mexican store, either? Shut the fuck up and stop lying. Open your eyebulbs; they're everywhere.)
3. Buy bullion cubes and/or soup base (it comes in a jar) for flavor. You can get that stuff cheap at the Asian store.
4. Buy beans in a can from Save-a-Lot/Aldi/cheapo-store. I like navy beans and fava beans. There're a few dozen other kinds. Get what's cheap. One can a day, minimum.
5. Put the rice, soup base/bullion/soup mix and water in the rice cooker and press the button. Add the beans when it's done. Enjoy.
6. If you're feeling rich, chicken or sausage or burger patties go in the steamer tray.
7. The Asian store will also have cheap noodles that the rice cooker will cook just fine. Cheaper than ramen. (You still need the beans, or you'll eventually get something nasty like beri-beri.)
8. Oatmeal and raisins make a good, fast breakfast. (Add sugar packets and creamers from wherever other people get coffee.)
9. You'll also need to add some vitamin C every once in while to prevent scurvy. Any fruit or fruit juice will do. Tea made from fresh pine needles (actual pine trees only) will do in a pinch. I like raisins, apples, bananas, and oranges, which are all usually cheap enough.
You can actually live on that stuff for months at a time without dying. The soup base/bullion and occasional noodles and meat will keep you from committing suicide.
Gas vs. food? You have a car?
Your real problem is the prospect once you get your (graduate/doctoral) degrees. There are too many of yous, not enough posts to absorb you, even for you in STEM fields, never mind humanities.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
From which college did they graduate where such poor grammar is taught?
There are far less dorms and cheap nearby apartments than there are students. And tuition itself, before even touching the costs of living, can cover the wages of a full time burger-flipper.
I'm pretty sure Europeans are more worried about the US starting the next war.
The thing Europeans like best about the US military is all the coin we drop having bases there. Unless you count Serbia, where the US military is about as welcome as a bladder infection.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you can't make ends meet, I suppose you'll have to cut something, or you'll get stuck in debt.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Here in Germany we have many features of the Soviet Union: Excellent, free Education, social safety net, universal healthcare,...
But you know what ? Our economy sometimes sucks DONKEY BALLS and people with that great education don't get ANY job for years. "Generation Praktikum" (Generation Intern) is a very real thing here. People worked in corpos from 2002 to 2005, did not get a cent for that, as it was "intern". Or they were completely unemployed with a PHD in chemistry.
I work as a software engineer with a CS degree and I know my shit. I can just so afford a wife and two kids and a very small car. As in "barely". My reserves are at something like 1000 Euros.
And that is in the supposed "heartland" of German auto manufacturing. You know, where they INVENTED that car thing.
So, be careful what kind of socialism you yearn for.
We live in a time of unprecedented abundance. Never before in the history of mankind has food been so plentiful and so cheap. Past generations worried about famine. We worry about the "obesity epidemic".
The whole point of education is to learn how to solve problems. If you cannot figure out how to feed yourself in a time of such great abundance, then maybe you are not college material.
So if I just show up in a European country, they'll let me go to university for free? Hint: No they won't.
My sister went to Europe for her PhD. She didn't end up paying... because she got a generous scholarship. That also was what allowed her to get the visa to go. She didn't just show up and walk in to a university for free.
Same way it would have worked in the US or Canada, actually. If she had been accepted to a program with a generous scholarship, well it would have been free.
How presumptuous. Do you really believe that we're so woefully unaware that this is likely the first time we've heard of it?
And we're the only country with peace an freedom an stuff! And that in t'other countries folks work 20 hours a day to support soshalism! How can it possibly be otherwise? FOX NEWS AND SARAH PALIN AND SEAN HANNITY WOULD NEVER EVER LIE TO ME!
s/less/fewer/
The US crotch's spawn, in the form of their military, would be annihilated by the receptionist at the first European armed forces base that they wandered into, thinking they would be welcomed as a 'bail out'.
The main attraction of the US Marines as a force to defeat, is the tremendous amount of nutrition to be gained from their corpses once cannibalism becomes an option.
I went to graduate school at a state university from '98-'00 and I did it with minimal student loans.
I was (am) in the National Guard (no education benefits, just the paycheck) and I always had another part-time job. The first year as a Graduate Assistant was teaching a introductory computer class and after that as a part-time employee for a state department on campus. My car was 10 years old, had well over 100,00 miles, was mechanically sound and had been paid off for several years. I lived in my friend's basement for cheap rent and it was far from the lap of luxury. Somehow I still managed to have a pretty hot girlfriend. Yeah, I know... bring on the jokes about basement and girlfriend.
My first job after graduating paid less than $40k and I was debt free within 5 years.
The point is that it is possible to live on little if you have prepared for it and manage what you do have right.
During university I lived at my parents. All I had to pay was about 700 Euros twice a year and that money included the ticket to ride the train and streetcar to campus. :).
When I got my degree and moved out to work in another city, I immediately lost 20kg
right now. But wages have been in decline for 30 years. A little mis management is one thing (Mitt Rhomney was famously so broke at one point he had to sell the stocks his dad gave him to make ends meet :P ), but we're getting to the point where it's impossible to "work your way through college".
For one thing, when we say "Wages Adjusted for Inflation" we mean inflation as a whole, but the cost of food and shelter (what college kids spend most of their money on, jokes about Ramen & Natty Lite aside) have gone up much faster than inflation. The sort of job you can hold while in College is gonna pay $8-$15 an hour depending on where you live. I know ppl at that income level working part time because the economy sucks and they made mistakes. They're not making it, and somehow I doubt the added expense/stress of school would help them, especially after they graduate with $150k in loans... If you're one of those super humans that doesn't need sleep and can go to class and the work 8 hours then spend 8 hours doing homework you might make it. Everyone else will just drop out. The consoles tell you this when you apply, and a lot of the big majors (Math, CS, MIS, Medical) won't take you if you're working full time.
What sucks is we're so much more productive, you'd think we'd be working less. But why the hell would we give anything to anyone if they didn't "work" for it?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
from my work-study job. I'd buy a loaf of bread, peanut butter,
jelly and milk and gorge myself when the money came around.
This was in the 1970s though.
Grad school was historically and is supposed to be the sort of thing not everyone does. It is for people who are really interested in a field, who want to start doing some original research (under the umbrella of a professor's overall research) and so on. The sort of thing only for those that are truly interested in pursuing the subject more deeply and pushing the boundaries.
Also most fields don't require graduate degrees. There are some that do (like lawyers), though usually they require a PhD or other advanced degree after it (like professors, medical doctors, etc). However for most an undergraduate degree is all they are after.
However where I work, I see a ton of students that go in to grad school that are hoop jumpers. They see it as the next thing, that will get them a better job. They aren't that interested in the work, and don't have a particularly good understanding of it. They take comprehensive exams instead of doing a thesis, and so on. They try and use more time in school to make up for a lack of talent.
So, if you are thinking of grad school, and it'll be any kind of financial hardship ask yourself: Why am I going? If it is because your field requires it, then ok no problem. Gotta do what you gotta do. If it is because you really love the field and you want to go to a higher level, that's good too, but just understand it'll be a pain financially. If it is "because I'll get a better job," then no, stop right there. That's not a reason to go to grad school, particularly if it is going to be a problem financially. It probably will NOT get you a better job, and will just give you more debt.
Here in Germany we already have a flood of engineers and CS students. But nobody seems to like to do the physical jobs like painting wooden window frames and plumbing.
But you know what ? Plumbers make as much money per hour here as freelance C++ developers.
So the middle class got the "get academic and be rich" message, We actually get poorer from an oversupply of academics and an undersupply of craftsmen.
Gain a few 100 before you start and you'll burn it off in no time while you're starving to death. Well I was already overweight but I burned it off fast to live in a so so area closer to everything.
In high school it should be a nonexistent problem whether they can afford it or not it should be provided. College that's different you're grown and shit is not easy all the time. It's sad that it has to be like that but it just is and mass greed will keep it like that :( I doubt we'll see a change in our lifetime or even our children's children.
How unfortunate that these people are forced at gun point to go to grad school and live like this. Where can I donate money to these deprived individuals? I mean, the people who put grad school on hold for a few years so they could get a decent job to cover the expenses of grad school have everything handed to them. I can't imagine how bad they have it.
The thing Europeans like best about the US military is all the coin we drop having bases there.
Part of the Post-WWII ecosystem, yes.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
yep, I too knew many students who would claim to be really poor, but very very few were actually too poor to eat - just too poor at budgeting and prioritising to be able to do so. Funnily enough, that was exactly what my mother told me student life would be like before I went - and exactly what I'll be telling my kids.
"choosing between eating, living in bad neighbourhoods, putting gas in car"
QED.
You're a student, live in a student neighbourhood. Of course it will be bad - it's full of f***ing students! So it's full of teenagers freshly free from parental control having all-night parties, trashing the accommodation and treating any yard/garden/street outside as a rubbish dump/emergency latrine/alfresco sex area (these uses not temporally or spatially exclusive), etc. etc. If you can't sleep at night then go into the lab/faculty/library (i.e. go to "work") at night, and sleep in the day, when the loud party crowd do. That's student life, you're a student, live with it. Lather, rinse, repeat until sick of academia, then leave get a proper job, car, house in the suburbs, and talk about how students make an area such a s***hole... (whilst thinking about the wife + 2.4 kids + mortgage + bills + bills + bills and secretly wishing you were back there).
You have a car ? You're a rich student - at least in my day (car pretty much meant fat daddy wallet or trust fund or both). If you can afford to buy, maintain and insure (as a student age driver!) a car, then you can afford to eat. Period. You have simply chosen to prioritise other things over eating.
Prioritising and budgeting for independent living ought to be a key life skill that a student learns when they go away to college - sadly, it often wasn't in my day and seems it still isn't now. Plus ca change.
Well, it's anecdotal, but when I was in college my parents paid for one of those meal cards... so I could go to any of the college dining halls I wanted to and I couldn't blow the money on beer (I definitely would have!) This worked great when I was in the dorms. I was always skinny and actually started to gain some weight. But after I started having to pay the dorm fees, they were REALLY expensive compared to basically anything off campus that was easily quadruple the size of a dorm room. So I moved to an apartment. Now the dining halls were 3 miles away. So I basically always didn't get breakfast, but I'd get lunch... and I'd get dinner maybe, depending on my schedule. During the summer I had no reason to go on campus other than to eat. So I'd hide what I could in my coat and smuggle it out to re-heat later.
I was never going to "starve" as, if I really needed it I'd walk the 3miles, but it was still a major distraction.
"What sucks is we're so much more productive, you'd think we'd be working less. But why the hell would we give anything to anyone if they didn't 'work' for it?"
If inheriting property is a legitimate idea, what about all of humanity inheriting our collective know how and so being entitled to some of the fruits of our global productivity? ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization.
One way to implement that:
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'm pretty sure Europeans are more worried about the US starting the next war.
I'm pretty sure that Russia has fixed that problem for the Europeans able to make a reasoned judgment that might have actually believed that. The ones that still believe that tend more towards viewing the world with a constant filter applied and it will take an actual occupation or perhaps bombing to adjust it.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
No beer.
No cigs
No pot
No cell phone
No tv.
Should be able to eat now.
To many people are going to college that should not be there when they can be in a trades / tech school / apprenticeship setting that can be quicker / tech real job skills. Also we to cut out the underwater basket weaving classes.
Most of Western Europe views the military essentially as a jobs program with minimal standards, not as a necessary part of protecting the nation. They assume the US will bail them out if a problem happens. So far they have been right, but that might be changing.
When I was a student, I discovered that if you restricted your diet to grains, vegetables, eggs and cheap cheese, you could get through a week very cheaply. Crock pots were your friends.
When I was in school, the Hare Krishnas were still a thing. Free vegetarian dinner every Sunday (We called it "Sunday dinner at Uncle Harry's"). Hilarious mockery thrown in as an extra added bonus. They may be loonies, but the food was awesome.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
http://therightstuff.biz/2014/04/14/liberty-without-agency-food-insecurity-in-college/
In an ongoing crusade to distract us from our total lack of self or cultural identity, the West now comes to face the latest crisis-that-isn’t: food insecurity.
For someone who struggles to make $50 a week for provisions, Paul’s attire is pretty trendy. I wager that jacket could secure him a few weeks of “nutritional food,” alone.
As an American I grew up watching commercials where fat white women begged for donations to feed some African warlord starving African children. Images of emaciated children convey “insecurity” a lot better than a picture of a well-groomed, feminine white boy with Beatles haircut and cat lady glasses.
Inventing “food insecurity” and presenting me instances of people whining about their right to food porn while earning a BA in Advanced Adolescence does nothing to make me feel less apathetic to a westerner unable to prioritize.
In fact, I feel downright hostile at the underlying suggestion that I must provide something so basic to someone who is supposedly accomplished enough to earn a degree in higher education. Why are you there if you can’t feed yourself? What value can you offer the economy when you apparently fail to accomplish the most basic survival strategies? What can we expect these people to add to society when they spend the first two to three decades of their life begging for entitlements and avoiding hardship? Can we seriously expect a piece of paper to deprogram a lifetime of parasitism and narcissism?
Joe Bradley and the whiny children WaPo present us a Liberal society facing Diminishing Returns. A world of ever-lowering standards to accommodate impossible and unchallenged ideals, we are fast becoming incapable of dealing with reality. Joe and numerous others can no longer separate rights from responsibilities, cause from effect. This is how simple hardship that accompanies poor choices and life in general can become an issue of social justice. This is also how a society destroys itself.
Give up the car., beer, and cigarettes, not necessarily in that order. Cheap pizza is surprisingly high calorie and fatty so the glucose lift is quite long, so scrounged party pizza can keep you going a *long* time.
I left home at 16 and became an emancipated minor. College was not cheap, and I had to take a 2 year break in the middle due to poverty. But I scrimped, saved, ate ramen, lived on party food, and did work that covered meals while working. I was working full time until the last term of my senior year, when I had to focus on thesis. And yes, I was often *hungry*. Working at that rate, I was packing away 2500 calories a day and still hungry.
And oh, yes, I'm an insulin dependent diabetic. Juggling *that* against erratic meals and sleep and overwork was a nightmare.
I bet the only ones posting in here are going to champion how they made it, and how they, in fact, didn't starve, and how great they are.
College was the worst years of my life. All the stress and starvation just made me a very angry person. I still see that I am right, that there is literally no remorse or accommodation for someone trying to focus on studying and learning instead of "get a job you worthless piece of garbage".
These are the two options for those coming from very poor parents in a small town (and being white, ugly, male, and peasant clothing):
1) work menial service job and waste away.
2) work menial service job and go to college (and starve).
I am not trying to troll. I can just see the writing on the wall with no sympathy:
1) Why have __ when you should be eating food? You need to prioritize better. No sorry, need car to get to menial service job, remember?
2) Some bullcrap story from the 1990's or earlier that somehow supposed to be equivalent to the last 16 years of economic hell.
3) I made it by doing _ . You should follow this winning formula. Absent differences in city, luck, personality and circumstances.
4) All that starvation was good for you.
5) That you didn't make it was all your own fault.
6) Spoiled children... blah blah blah.
7) Some euro-centric view of the world that is only intended to bash the United States.
That the smart people on here won't come up with actual solutions (technological or otherwise) is not going to be surprising. Yes I made it, yes I graduated, but then it was a year without a job in the field. And all the stress and bad eating wrecked my digestive system. Also took a thin person and made him fat, with an affinity for gobbling up any extra calories and anything free.
They love to hear stories like this. That is what their kind loves to hear. They don't like the poor or people interested in learning so this is a double-bonus for them.
Hungry students. How common.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
http://frugalliving.about.com/...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
Leafy greens especially are really important to preventing many diseases. Cabbage is a fairly cheap one. You can steam the cabbage while cooking the rice. Dandelions are a terrific source of healthy greens (if they have not been sprayed with weedkiller etc.). It's crazy that people have been taught to hate healthy Dandelions.
Our stainless steel "Miracle" rice cooker with a steamer attachment was one of our best kitchen investments ($70) as it does not have Teflon as most rice cookers do, but we worked up to it from cheaper Teflon ones.
Without good food, the mind and body can go into a downward spiral of low energy and depression -- thus a cycle of poverty. Hunter/gathers are more than 100 different types of food over the course of a year. Getting calories in not enough -- you need micronutrients too, and that means a diversity of foods -- but they don't have to be expensive foods.
Of course, so many sick care schemes (Medicaid, Medicare, "health" insurance) will pay for expensive drugs and surgeries but won;t pay for good food to avoid drugs and surgeries. It doesn't help that stressed-out people tend to bulk up on calories as an ages old survival mechanism, not knowing where the next meal may be coming from. This is all made worse by US farm policy:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes....
"Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that weâ(TM)re supposed to eat less of."
Watch out for additives in bullion that might cause headaches and such. Lots of bad headaches could make it hard to keep a job or graduate from college.
Beans are also cheaper to buy dried than canned -- except you need to know how to prepare them and have a place to cook them and the electricity or gas too cook them, which together may not be possible for many students.
People need a healthy source of fat, too -- something lacking in what you outline. The brain is mostly fat, so it is no wonder on low fat (or poor fat) diets that people can get messed up mentally. Nuts can be one, but they tend to be expensive and they may be lacking in Omegas 3s. Eggs might be a good cheap choice of fat including some Omega-3s for many people; some other sources:
http://www.self.com/blogs/flas...
Eating vegetarian in general is healthier and cheaper. So is buying the right things in bulk, maybe splitting big purchases with others.
We also got a lot of value from a $100 blender to do smoothies from frozen fruit -- but that is beyond very cheap (although still cheaper and much healthier than a carton of ice cream).
Still, something like a "basic income" may be a needed as a general solution to poverty. The problem with a lot of frugal advice is that it forces people to take on various risks (like health risks of lack of vegetables, or safety risk of a cheap car, or assault risk in a bad neighborhood, and so on). Or it entails doing a lot of time consuming things that prevent more productive activities. Your advice though is very time-saving and practical, which is why I like it (except for quibbles on some of the above points as far as long-term living).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I am the guy who used the Soviet Union as a point of reference. These people really tried to create a "more just" society and so do many socialists around the world. We have lots and lots of those in Germany and other Nations in the area.
I tried to explain the downsides of socialism:
The leaden atmosphere of "you cannot get a job, and of course never one useful to your chemistry PHD" is badly depressing. I assume you simply cannot imagine what is going on in some of the super-socialist nations east of the Ural mountains. In Spain, an entire generation of youngsters can't get a job because they have socialist laws which prohibit the firing of any employee. The effect is: nobody will be hired if possible at any cost.
Here in Germany it is not as bad as Spain, but we are not far from that. We have tons of socialist policies and the middle class is destroyed (by means of 40 or 50% taxes on payroll) in the process of paying for it.
Now, I don't want to praise New York capitalism here - I believe many of them are socialists too, who want to (somehow) make everybody earn the 500K dollar Goldmann Sachs wage. Many of them are just a bunch of thieves.
BUT, that does not mean the "fix" is in socialism. The Soviet Union and now also Germany prove that too much socialism depresses everybody. What use is your degree if you cannot find a job because the taxman has killed the economy ???
Finally, couldn't you become a non-academic respected worker, craftsman or the like ? Are those jobs only "menial" ?
I am not sure you understand my message, but it was certainly not meant to unduly influence a U.S. discussion. Rather, I think my observations are universal and apply to Russia as much as they apply to China and Germany.
Got me all the way through grad school. ;)
What is the point in talking about carting 20 pound bags of flour and rice from harbor freight foods when contrasted /w college costs food expenditures represent a rounding error?
I understand colleges *think* they need massive sums of money to pay professors who generally have no clue how to "teach", feed pet research projects, keep the lights and grounds up..etc.. Yet at it's core education is you sitting down and memorizing and or figuring out material yourself.
Interactive computer programs provide better outcomes at virtually no cost v feeding an industry where costs have reached laughably disgusting heights.
I fail to understand why people en-masse continue to tolerate what amounts to antiquated institutionalized extortion.
First, suggestions (aka what I ate):
Oatmeal, peanut butter sandwiches (especially with bananas or home-made jam), and the cheapest organ meat you can find. Ground beef heart can make a decent meatloaf, in a pinch.
(I got that from the "Meats Laboratory" at Chico, which is a slaughterhouse run by the university to train students.)
Now, observations:
Yes, it can be a problem.
I ended up spending around $10/week, for about the cheapest food I could get.
Most of the money I used to pay for a university education was from work I did in the meanwhile for $8.15/hr, so it's not impossible to work your way through.
The biggest thing is to find a place to stay that's close enough and cheap enough. I was working at the university farm and staying there as well, for ~$150/month. If I'd had to pay the $500+ that would be more typical, I don't think it would have worked.
Before we worry about the problem of whether or not students can afford to eat we need to deal with the problem of poor children not being able to go to college.
Info sessions and hack-a-tons for food. Career fairs or campus organizations for free t-shirts. Every campus has something. It's time to join some clubs and meet people.
You don't really spend a lot of time working with EU military, do you?
I had my share of work with various armies of this planet. Including Russian, various European countries and of course US. Without wanting to start a flame war, but if the average US soldier is about as motivated, trained and bright as the people I had to deal with, waiting for the US to bail the EU out is NOT really something that I'd consider a sound strategy...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
west of ural of course.
I teach at several community colleges here in Texas. My students are mostly lower-income, mostly first-generation-to-college, and mostly unemployed.
The biggest problem is that they have transportation problems. A blown transmission, or a wreck can cause them to miss several weeks of school. This can lead to them dropping my class.
Single moms get so much government help, that they are not at a greater disadvantage than single people without kids.
I went to a small state college for two years that only had a dining hall. The food was horrible. I only had one other option which was delivery from a pizza/fast food joint. I could have gone out but the weather was either freezing cold or snow/ice was everywhere. Lukily I transfered to a bigger school out west where weather wasn't an issue and good food was accessible on/off campus.
Just to clarify, how do student loans work in the US?
In the UK, they're provided by the government, and they don't work like conventional loans. They come directly out of your salary, and only once you start earning a certain amount. Even then, the amount scales depending on how much you earn, to the point where you may never even finish paying it (if you hit age 50 it just gets dropped completely).
Whilst admittedly I still live at home, I can afford a car with literally thousands to spare, and have never met anyone personally who has financial issues relating to being a student.
Based on all of the comments I'm reading here, my assumption is that in the US, student loans work more like conventional bank loans, where repayments are a fixed amount regardless of earnings?
In a lot of the EU, students from other EU countries don't have to pay tuition fees. Foreign students? Not so lucky, and language doesn't matter. If you aren't from the EU you pay increased fees. For example in Sweden you pay about 15,000 EUR/year for a science degree. In terms of language, you have to already demonstrate a proficiency in English and Swedish just to be able to get in.
Also all of this assumes you can get a visa and get admitted. People from other EU nations, no problem, you can live and work anywhere in the EU, that is a big part of what the treaty means. Non-EU individuals have to get a student visa, the requirements of which vary.
And of course none of that deals with the cost of food, housing, transport, etc. You are on your own for that, barring a scholarship.
This is a subject I have more than a passing familiarity with, as my sister is currently working on her PhD in Europe (at two universities, one in the EU one outside of it). She got a generous grant that pays all her tuition, living expenses, and even some extra but that isn't what all students get. It wasn't as though she just walked in and said "I'd like to go to school here," and they said "Certainly, please come for free!"
Also she even had an easier in than many: She and I hold Canadian citizenships. Canada is a commonwealth country and England is in the EU so that makes a lot of the visa shit way easier than it would be for an American, not that it wasn't still a big production.
It is exceedingly narrow-minded to suggest that an American should just "Emigrate to an actual civilized country instead of a pretend one," for school, as though such a thing were trivial to do and people only did not out of ignorance (not to mention the misplaced cultural supremacy of the statement). No, it turns out that you can't just graduate from an American highschool and say "Well screw the US, I'm off to Europe!" and walk in and go to school for free.
...if they can't afford to go to school, and eat, perhaps they need to go to a cheaper school, or not take so many hours, something. THEY are solely responsible for THEIR decisions
Well they got us into TWO world wars, so we can do WW III and WW IV and just be EVEN.
Discarded pizza boxes are a good source of cheese.
Are you certain that you know what's happening in Ukraine and why?
You are welcome on my lawn.
You use words the way hillbillies use corn cobs.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Choose a cheaper college in a cheaper town.
I used to joke that you had to supplement your Ramen with pop tarts but I checked the nutrition information on those recently and they also have 0% of your RDA of vitamin C. So, I guess you're down to foraging for rose hips or something. And if you're lucky maybe you can kill a squirrel with one of your textbooks...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Who will come to sneer about how others have made choice's that make them poor?
I'm just askin'
Don't parents help? If college costs $150000 for 4 years, don't American parents help? I am genuinely curious about this. Also, why not halve the costs by staying at home and finding a college close by for 4 years, and then leaving home? This question isn't on topic, but I'd really like to hear some Americans comment on why parents don't help with costs.
If hunger is a problem, first thing that should be done is get rid of the smartphones. Then make cheap food, like roman soup. The biggest problem is many students have very bad money skills.
Smart phone? Drop it.
What car you driving? If you have a loan your paying on a car, buy a cheap used car instead.
Don't eat out.
Dose not just apply to students, but people in this country feel entitled to what they have, and that results in hunger and debt.
"Me and my fellow students..."
A grad student? You must be proud of your first degree; your mastery of English is perfect.
How did you fare in college? You might look into the proper use of To/Too/Two.
I''m just saying...
The Russian armies continuing to mass on Ukraine's borders?
Russian special forces and intelligence agents infiltrating Ukraine and instigating insurrection and incidents?
The Russians violating the Open Skies treaty to deny Western and US compliance inspection over-flights of Russia to hide their activity?
The UN finding that the Crimean election wasn't quite as free as claimed?
Putin admitting that the "little green men" in Crimea were, "surprise! surprise!," Russian soldiers after all?
Jews being told they must "register" in an area of Ukraine controlled by Russian separatists? which echoes the problems Russia has with National Socialists?
Russia taking up the "anti-fascist" fight after "defeating fascism" in Poland in 1939 (splitting it with the Germans), "defeating fascism" in Finland in 1940 (annexing Finnish territory), "defeating fascism" in Georgia in 2008 (taking territory from it), and now volunteering to "defeat fascism" in Ukraine despite the fact that Russia seems to be unable to defeat fascism at home?
That momentum is building in Ukraine's legislature for rearming with nuclear weapons which will ironically be accepting Putin's advice offered on Syria?
Ironically, the notion of reacquiring nuclear weapons as a security guarantee is a position publicly advocated by Putin himself: "If you cannot count on international law, then you must find other ways to ensure your security. ... This is logical: If you have the bomb, no one will touch you." -- Is Ukraine about to go nuclear again?
Most Ukrainians are neither loyal Russians nor fascists
Putin has promoted the notion that ethnic Russians were in danger. There has never been evidence for this unless you count as brutal repression a failed attempt to revive an old law making Ukrainian the sole language for court hearings and government forms. Putin calls for greater autonomy for the south and east of Ukraine, and more rights for Russian-speakers, while doing all he can to obstruct elections that would bring them back into the political process.
No doubt there is more. Do you have an inside scoop? Is it, as I fear, that the US is at fault?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I'm in grad school right now.
1) I know grad students who are struggling financially
There are at least two people in my program (of about 100 total) who I know personally who are struggling to make ends meet. Their families aren't well off and our program doesn't have funding. They're getting along OK, but they have to live very very tightly, skipping any extra curricular activities, not buying text books, and budgeting both money and food.
I assume that others may be struggling and I don't know it.
2) More of us miss out on things so we don't have to starve
A good number of us work full time or more to pay for things. I've had to not participate in school events both social and scholastic, including guest speakers and class outings. It is very difficult to see a teacher during office hours since I'm supposed to be at work.
I'm not missing out on food, but if food were available I might be able to work less and be more involved.
https://www.facebook.com/digitizeicm -- Show your support for the digitization of the Iron County Miner newspaper archiv
Goes a very long way. The Texas A&M abandoned abattoir in the basement of the Range Science dept. had large non-functioning meat lockers that graduate students lived in. (The Range Science graduate stipends for TAs would not have covered half of a one-bedroom apartment rent at the time, not matter how bad the neighborhood)
The funny thing is, I'm hearing the exact opposite complaint coming from some of the people with many years of actual work experience in their fields. They're saying that recently, the college grads with a B.S. or Masters in the field are getting hired over those with real experience.
I don't know? Personally, I suspect the REAL issue is just a high unemployment rate overall. We're all stuck in a "buyer's market" when it comes to those doing the hiring, so expectations and requirements are very high, and opportunity to get hired is low. No matter where you're at on the education and/or skills ladder, it's difficult to get hired right now. So people begin tossing out accusations, trying to explain why they can't get jobs.
I've worked in I.T. for over 25 years myself, and yet I don't have a degree. (I'm one of those people with "some college", meaning a few classes shy of an Associates' degree.) I've *definitely* encountered my share of jobs I was passed over for because someone really considered the degree of prime importance. Yet I don't think my track record for employment is really any worse than my counterparts who did have the 4 year degrees. Yeah, some of them earned $20K - $50K/yr. more than I did, especially during the dot-com boom era.... but in the long-haul? A lot of them lost those high-paying jobs when budget cuts or corporate mergers came around and they had to accept less to get back into the ranks of the employed. Others just got burnt out on I.T. completely and changed careers.
Meanwhile, I don't have all the college debt they had to pay off, and since my salary has been relatively steady for the last decade or more, I didn't get so caught up in the thing of moving to a more expensive area, buying a large house, etc. -- only to have to give it all up when times got rough.
There's a key difference though between the "old guys" like myself and people trying to get a start in I.T. today. I think most of us who lived and breathed computers in the 80's really got into it when it was still a hobbyist's world. Corporate America wasn't even really looking at home computers as more than a passing fad, or something to just "keep an eye on, in case it eventually became useful". When you bought a computer ,you got a 200-300 page manual you had to read, cover to cover, to learn how to make it work. You might have shared knowledge with a few friends you made who owned the same machine, or joined some computer club in town. But all in all, you had to be really motivated to learn it, hands-on. Otherwise, why even waste time with it? My college courses in anything resembling I.T. were largely a joke. Either I knew way more than the professors did, or the courses went in depth on something I didn't know much about because truthfully, it DIDN'T MATTER in the grand scheme of I.T.
These days, I think colleges have figured out much more about what people actually need to know to be successful in I.T. -- and you actually *can* take classes and learn really useful material. At the same time, I see a lot of younger people who seem to be just as "into computers" as I was growing up, but they focus on much different things; social media, web sites, mobile device apps, and MMORPGs that can really suck up a LOT of one's time. It's all pretty cool and entertaining stuff -- but won't translate that well to a career doing network or systems administration, working as a PC support specialist, or systems analyst.
Potatoes are 10 cents a pound here.
"Learning to live poor" is the most education that people get in college. They have money... they just don't know how to manage it properly.
Yep, pretty much this. Students should learn to get by the same way adults do. Make a damn budget and stick to it (granted, this is getting rare among adults too). But do that math and get creative stretching your bucks.
Found a handful of dependable roommates and rented rickety 100-year old houses with them, which were a lot cheaper than apartments and university housing. We took turns cooking for everyone. We ate well. We'd do a grocery run once a week and shop carefully... fresh or frozen meat that was under $3/lb., lots of pasta, rice, veggies, etc.. Drank tap water, mixed with that frozen juice from concentrate when we wanted something fancier. I pretty much stuck to ~$40 a week for groceries (in 2000 money), and maybe augmented that once or twice a week with trips to one of those heaping Chinese "any two or three" stir fry takeout places for $3-$5 per meal. Plus, I would volunteer to staff the ASME coffee shop in the morning while doing homework, which was good for a bagel or two per sitting. And of course stake out the extracurricular activities that had free pizza.
spelling these days is so overrated
This might be reason #232 for implementing Universal Basic Income. How may people are not able to show what they are capable of at critical times in their lives effectively wasting the person as an asset to society?
How many great students not only don't have enough food but then leave school in pursuit of sufficient nutrition?
I couldn't afford more than a semester of college. I couldn't get loans. I couldn't get grants. I worked my ass on from HS on. I have been homeless, I have worried about when the next time I would find food is. I still found time to volunteer, and help others, and give up my first fruits.
I have no sympathy for you all. I rarely hire people with degrees, they tend to be the biggest whiners and excuse makers.
If people worry about being able to have food on the table while studying, they are likely living in some backwater, 3rd world country, and probably do not have internet access to read your question or post a reply.
Meanwhile, in the modern, 1st-world, western countries, social policies and government-supported education (put in place to ensure the well-being and future of those countries) ensure that people are able to follow higher education, while having a place to live and food to eat.
(snarky?)
The problem is that those in charge in the EU will sit on their collective hands and do absolutely nothing until any problem has become so massive that they are dependent on US military assistance in order to hope to survive.
This was true with WWI and WWII, they sat and watched while Russia invaded Georgia, and now after promising to protect Ukraine if it gave up it's nuclear arsenal, they are sitting and watching Russia toy with it too. Well, siting and watching is cutting it a little thin, they had "words" for them and I think the current commander in chief used his inside voice while not allow some people from Russia to go outside for recess.
You are right, it is not a sound strategy. But it will be reality as history has shown us. It will be a reality as Europe doesn't invest much in their military compared to potential threats. Russia likely has more rusted out equipment that can be put into use than all of Europe combined has available if you leave the US out of the equation. I think right now the EU has about 1.5 million active troops with about 400,000 being capable of immediate deployment where Russia is sitting on about 2 million reserve troops and 1.1 million active duty troops. Of that, roughly 700,000 are ready for immediate deployment.
Of course the US is winding down it's military- or so some of our leaders claim. So this sitting around naval gazing while Russia rapes the fields and pillages the women of European countries might be even worse of a strategy of any of them expects the US to bail them out again.
At University you usually know that things are going to be tight so can plan to an extent, and have time to find the cheapest vegetables of the week.
Starting a new job you have extra expenses and if that first pay gets delayed it can really suck. I had to live off fried cabbage with chilli flakes for a couple of weeks due to such a delay, and had another near crisis when a combination of a nine week delay in pay and an expectation that I would buy IT equipment to be reimbursed later cleaned out my savings. It's difficult to be civil with accounts people when you have purchased a fucking photocopier for them out of your own savings and they do not see any reason to pay it outside of when they normally do that each month, despite their original lie that it would be paid back the next day. Threatening to quit when you are owed money and have no resources to take legal action to recover it does not look like a good move when there is some hope that waiting will produce results. Both those are traps for new players. It's hard to tell people to fuck off when it's early enough that you can be dismissed with little consequence.
Being a contractor can suck more than being a student until you've got a bit of work behind you. Being a postgrad relying on being paid for teaching work and having that payment delayed a long time also sucks - been there too, more than three months delay with one batch of work and most of it tied up in tax for a year due to accountancy errors.
If more people train in a profession than there are job positions what do you think happens?
Surely you can work that one out.
For an added bonus consider looking for work as a recent graduate at the same time when the job market is flooded with a lot of experienced people due to layoffs, and those experienced people are willing to take the same wages as a recent graduate.
If you consider it numerically you may be able to work it out despite an apparent sheltered life and lack of empathy.
Lazy HR by keyword sorting is the culprit. Also remember that many HR folk have no way of recognising the difference between experience and bullshit so they will take a bit of paper with the right words on it from a degree mill over experience or anything with slightly different words.
I just about lived on lentils and rice to get through engineering school, which wasn't all that bad because lentils are fairly nutritionally complete and could be thrown into the slowcooker when I got up in the morning... fulltime school and work didn't leave much time for cooking. My last year as an undergraduate I finally applied for food stamps so that I could afford meat, which felt great because I tend to get anemic without it. It felt pretty good to pay my taxes my first year out, because even the state income tax on a six-figure salary wiped out what I felt I owed back to the state that gave me food stamps in school.
Lots of people here have commented about ways to eat cheaply, and it can be done nutritionally as well, but you have to learn how to do it and many students fail to strategize. It seems like they expect that if they do as they're told in class then everything else should just fall together.
Even if they get a big paycheck when they leave college, they end up adding on consumer debt to their student debt because they never sit down to have an honest look at their resources and make a plan. ("Look at all this income, I can get a house/new car/eat out all the time etc." instead of "Look at all the interest these loans are accruing.") Then if they get laid off, life falls apart, like the friend that ended up living on my couch last summer being depressed because unemployment benefits didn't let her keep up her newly inflated lifestyle and even a halfway decent degree only gets your foot in the door. The earlier someone learns to strategize, the less vulnerable they'll be the rest of their life.
My college charged so much for housing, it was significantly cheaper to live 12 months in an off-campus rental a 20 minute walk away than to live on-campus and get kicked out every holiday and summer. I mean thousands of dollars less, and you get a full 12-month rental to boot.
Off-campus means you have a stove. Get yourself a $3 pot with a lid. Put in 2 cups of rice, 4 cups of water, 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil, and 1 teaspoon of salt. Cover and bring to a boil (approximately 6-15 minutes depending on stove) and then simmer for 15 minutes or so. (Rotate the pot every few minutes to keep it from burning.) Let the rice cool down for an hour or two, and you can put it into a gallon-size zip-lock bag and keep it in the fridge. Makes enough rice for 4-10 meals, depending on how hungry you are. The oil makes you feel full afterwards. Keeps for about a week. Clean the pot with a little vinegar if the rice-stains bother you. Overall cost is next to nothing, in terms of money and time. Rice forms the base for a wide range of healthy inexpensive meals. Frozen veggies are dirt cheap, and you can just toss a handful of them in.
A microwave will help for reheating. If you check out your local colleges around May or June, you'll find a number of bargains for microwaves, fridges, tvs, furniture, computers, etc from folks who don't want to haul it home for the summer, or take it with them when they graduate.
Another approach is bread. I have a friend who does that. Forget the bread machines. A handful of ingredients mixed together in pot/bowl, let rise, and baked in the oven will feed you quite nicely. Things like flour and sugar are dirt cheap at your local megamart. A single 5lb bag will feed you for a month.
Or canned meats. They're a little more expensive. But a $2 can of chicken, mixed with the rice, or spread on the bread, perhaps mixed with a little sloppy joe sauce if you're feeling rich, will feed you quite nicely. It's expensive, but cheap compared to a $7 meal at McDonalds.
Study how folks live in third world countries. It will help you to survive here.
Your familiarity with hillbillies may exceed mine.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Check bulletin boards for group meetings, companies doing recruiting presentations and see if they have food. I sat through a lot of boring meetings and presentations as a grad student in payment for free eats. A little searching can find a number with food, and offering to help cleanup afterward often scores leftovers. Some organizations routinely provide food as well, the student paper, for example, always had pizza when putting an edition to bed. Join them, not only do you get to eat but have fun and learn something as well. Volunteering to help at events with food is another way to eat free.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I had a money problem, and I sure as hell wasn't going to give up drinking beer. So instead, I rolled the food budget into the beer budget. For years, I lived on a twelve-pack and a bag of potato chips every day--right around five bucks a day back in the late '80s.
Eventually I turned into an alcoholic, amounted to nothing, spent about a decade trying to undo the mistakes I made, and now I worry about food money without any beer money at all. So great, I made it nearly half a century living on beer for 20 of those years, but I've also lived in poverty for most of that time. Soon, no diet and no amount of money will save my short, Hobbesian life.
I see one of my fans got mod points again. How special and democratic of you.
As we already have too many folks begging for change how about we get smart and really beg for change. That is to say let's get real and admit that we nee to do a basic change in the way the economy works. The old ideas and methods do not fit into modern realities at all. A redistribution of wealth is in order as well as the simple fact that we will have less and less jobs available every year. That spells disaster as we clearly will have more and more people available every year. Here is a demonstration of why the economic model does not work now. Picture seven hundred coal miners per shift going down into the mine and producing coal. Now picture modern mining equipment being delivered and instead of seven hundred workers only twelve are now on each shift to produce even more coal than the seven hundred men used to do. But here is the snag. The price of coal keeps going up and up. Coal is less affordable despite getting rid of almost all of the workers. Then we start to understand just how severe the effects of burning coal really are and we start to restrict the use of coal sharply. Meanwhile we flood the labor markets with ever more immigrants seeking work. But other effects kick in. In the bad old days a man could go catch a fish if he was short on food. But almost no fish in W. Virginia or Kentucky are at all safe to eat because coal has left heavy metals in almost 100% of the rivers, streams and ponds in those states. Meanwhile we really don't want the public to be aware that crops also pick up those nasty pollutants and if the water is not fit to drink chances are the tomato or corn or spinach grown on that land is also unfit for food. Then we turn around and feed that stuff to beef, to chickens or make pellets to feed fish on fish farms. After all who will really blow the whistle on pollutants in the food supply?
It's not necessarily laziness but another symptom of the oversupply of labour. When there's a 100+ applications for every position, it's impossible to evaluate them without resorting to data mining techniques. And at that point, if your application is not Search Engine Optimized, for example if you lack a diploma, sucks to be you.
The underlaying problem is that our current economic model, and our model of employment as its subset, is based on the needs of the Industrial Era, which is ending. Capitalism is breaking down just like Feudalism before it, and whatever will replace it hasn't emerged into the mainstream yet. The question is: how long and painful will the transition be this time around?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The problem is that many EU countries are dependent on Russian oil and gas. US military can't solve that problem.
Of course, Russia is also dependent on EU buying said resources. A disruption of trade would, at the very least, topple Putin. He's counting on EU being unwilling to take the pain, but it's becoming increasingly clear he's trying to rebuild Soviet Empire. Sooner or later he'll miscalculate, and at that point it's a question whether he can gets removed from power before starting another (world?) war as a desperation move.
But no, Russia cannot win a war with the EU. EU has 3.5 times as much population and almost 8 times as large economy. Even with all the inefficiency inherent in coordinating multiple independent militaries, it could only end in Russian defeat or nuclear escalation.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
When I was in college I considered my "food insecurity" part of the price of admission to higher paying world of being a college graduate, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. A little sacrifice on the way to achievement develops character. Also, most college students are straight out of high school and if left to their own devices will eat out or consume fast food constantly rather than learning to cook (which costs a fraction of prepared food). Lack of funds is a forcing function that teaches them how to make their own food. Now that I have kids in college I continue the tradition. I provide enough that they are in no risk of starvation, but they don't have enough to buy Starbucks. Ramen noodles go a long way. Eventually they get sick of ramen and start branching out to other food.
I lived fairly poor through my undergraduate days. The single most helpful thing I did was take a job working at the campus cinema. It paid just above minimum wage, and was maybe 8 hours per week / two nights total. But you know what it did - it gave me a weekly income to afford food. I was not forced to live on a noodles/bean/rice diet. I ate healthy for less than $2/day (that exact number has gone up since I was an undergrad, but you get the idea). Rent/utilities/etc. came out of student loans.
Two shifts a week is doable of a typical 60-70 hour grad student life. If you are one of these extreme cases where you are consistently doing 80+ hours, switch advisors.
That really applies for management, and has also been going on since the dot-com boom.
Literally during that period, big tech industries like Microsoft would hire Degree students straight out of college that had never worked in the industry. I chalk a lot of the US industries failures and many more of Microsoft's failings down to these young bucks mismanaging things into the ground.
I had this problem when I first started college. You can work at best part time while going to school full time, and have to crowd into an apartment to be able to afford it, and often we'd be counting out change to make rent, which left very little for food. You haven't lived until you've dined on boiled rice and ketchup packets because that's all you had in the kitchen.
I don't know how it is now, but I tried for food stamps at the time, and ran into a catch-22: You couldn't qualify if you shared a cooking area with roommates, but if you were well off enough to live by yourself, you were too well off to qualify.
A partial solution for me, since I had to work anyway, was to get a job in the food industry. I worked in a restaurant, which included one meal during my shift, so at worst I was guaranteed one meal a day three or four days a week. Later I got a job at a supermarket which gave discounts and other food related benefits to employees. For instance, they sometimes overbought on whole hams for the holidays, and employees were allowed to buy them at a reduced price, with free slicing and packaging. I loaded up my freezer and had ham... for a long... time... Moreover, working at the store puts you first in line for loss leaders, freight-damaged, and discontinued items. (And I know that's a misuse of "loss leader", but the store allowed it.)
Other issues to be cognizant of besides mere starvation are nutrition and food poisoning. The first because of the tendency to eat the same thing over and over, and the second because you may be too distracted to remember to put food back in the fridge, and too hungry not to eat it anyway.
Part of the problem, I think, is that college kids are young and often fresh out of home, and don't often have the life experiences to foresee what their needs are going to be and arrange to be in a place where those needs can be met. There's a tendency to live in the moment, not think ahead, and that causes "the moment" to often include boiled rice and ketchup packets.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
That assumption is: "equality is good."
Universal good is a difficult concept by itself. Equality is a concept of mathematics, not the more complex nature of reality.
I'd rather have us pick good people and hand them lots of money so they can do even better things with their new power.
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely," you might say. To which I respond: only if you assume people are identical. Many can handle power, but not all.
Futurist Traditionalism
Learning to make do and do well enough on damned little is part of what you're supposed to learn in life. If you didn't learn it before, you'll learn it in college. Being thrifty all around, reusing and repurposing, cooking your own meals because it costs a fraction of what it does to eat out. These are valuable life lessons that will serve you in good stead when things don't go entirely swimmingly later on.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"Me and my fellow students still refer to ourselves as the 'starving grad students.' "
A grad student who never learned the difference between I and me. Another education wasted.
Soylent for all students! Problem solved.
I mean this was common long before I went to college, which was over 10 years ago now. (High school, not so much, unless your family is poor).
Yes, if may be impossible to "work your way through college" if you go to an expensive school. But if you pick a decent major, you can pay for an expensive school with a half-way decent job you'll get once you graduate.
I'm a pretty good example because I made a lot of mistakes. I took longer than I should have to graduate, I took out a private (high interest) loan to cover part of my balance, which I delayed paying off (costing me more interest!), I went to an expensive graduate school too, which further delayed me making payments.
But...
1. Everyone in the US can get government loans at relatively low interest rates
2. There are cheap schools (community colleges, state schools) that most people can get into and possibly work their way through without loans.
3. If you take a decent major, you will usually get a decent job.
the people in the biggest trouble are those who mess up and drop-out half way through with thousands in loans they have to pay back and no degree to show for it.
Still, I think it it's better not to work full time, and just take the loans so that you can actually concentrate on class. Also, of course, make a point of studying and getting good grades in high-school instead of goofing off all the time so that you'll be able to get a scholarship somewhere.
And.. who graduates with $150k in loans? nobody I know has that much for just regular college. Even counting graduate school I don't have that much (granted I paid most of that in cash from my salary). I know one girl who owed $80K and I considered that quite a lot.
I'm not even close to rich, probably median pay or below for my profession, but I have no problem paying off my loans. (I wish I could pay them off faster because I don't like making banks rich, but...)
Eating ramen for a few years was worth it...
complaint coming from some of the people with many years of actual work experience in their fields. They're saying that recently, the college grads with a B.S. or Masters in the field are getting hired over those with real experience.
Today's college grads are better trained at accepting a much lower wage than professionals with years of experience.
Why would you have expected the EU to go to the aid of Georgia? For one, Georgia already was ineligible to join NATO because it lacked full control over the territory it claimed (Abkhazia having been de facto independent since the 1990s), so it had no guarantees as a part of a defensive alliance. Two, the Russians were seizing a single province that had already expressed discontent with being part of Georgia, and it was not threatening the survival of Georgia in general as an independent state. Three, as countries where the army is mainly seen as defensive, projecting force into the faraway Caucasus is probably not something they've ceaselessly drilled on. Fourth, the broad population here does not care much about Georgia, it is just too far away and while Georgia is in fact culturally remarkably "European", most people in the EU don't know that.
The same point about lack of broad public support holds for Ukraine too. I live in a EU country bordering on Ukraine and there is zero passion about protecting Ukrainians from aggression. They are seen as belonging to a very different cultural sphere from the EU nations of Central Europe. Furthermore, many EU residents simply feel that they lack an understanding of the "complicated" ethnic relations in the area and so can't judge the rightness or wrongness of the situation.
Europeans would probably be happy if Ukraine turned westward, but many years would have to go by before Ukraine was considered "one of us" enough to go to war to protect.
Long-term malnutrition was basically the biggest factor leading to me dropping out of grad school. I survived my undergrad on achievement scholarships, summer research positions and grading mostly, and by my last year I was about $1000 short, from which 500$ came out of my food budget and the other $500 from tuition. By the end of the year I didn't know if I would even graduate or not because I couldn't pay tuition, but ultimately the university waived the remainder of the fee. I had received a nice grant for my master's too, $17,500 a year where I had been surviving on about $15,000, but that summer was fairly brutal. I had no access to a proper kitchen, and about $35 a week for food, which meant two meals a day, one of which was instant noodles and the other a salad bar from the school cafeteria. I would have been financially set for grad school, but I was in such poor shape that everything fell apart after just a few months. It took me about four years to recover physically and financially from the continued state of poverty which ensued.
I was making $15/hour at my part time internship during school, which was barely enough to cover my expenses. So I sold a little weed on the side, which more than doubled my income with little time commitment. Then I got too big and careless and got raided after several years, but that was by time I had a salaried job which could pay my legal fees. Can't say it's for everyone, but it kept me from living the life of the "Staving college student" and certainly kept things interesting.
I lived with one of those once. Funny thing is, there was a really high turnover of people there. Some left without saying anything or even packing their things.
He always blamed it on my BO.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I agree with your sentiment. I did actually do what you said working my way through college and taking a full time job at night, sleeping roughly 20 minutes a day on weekdays and about 10 hours on the weekends. I don't recommend it though, my skin changed color and you live in a perpetual state of constantly being unsharp. Fight Club had it right about feeling like a copy of a copy. Never been called super human before, but I have enjoyed being a legend in my own mind.
I had access to neither loans nor parental support in college. For a while I was in a co-op program, which was good & allowed me to support myself during school terms, but I had to leave it. After that, I worked multiple part-time jobs on & off campus while going to school full-time, & was always worried about paying the rent, eating, etc. I worked pretty much full-time, went to school full-time, no other life, which was fine, as I was living with my boyfriend. Things I learned: 1) Combine time & effort as much as possible. I worked in the main campus library, & did most of the research for papers (mostly for electives) right after work, before heading home. I also lived in a very inexpensive co-op housing complex, where tenants had to do 1 hour/week of labor, and in return rents were about half the cost of other apartments, and I worked one Saturday afternoon a month for a food co-op in exchange for a staff discount on food purchased there, which wasn't a lot, but helped with bulk goods. 2) Take jobs that offer more than just the pay. I waited tables in a beer-and-pizza/pasta joint, right next to the Engineering school, which at the time had about 800 students - about 3 of them female. Drinking age was 19 (Canada). I'm a decent-looking female, & I did well on tips. I was also permitted to eat 1 meal at work after a shift, and to take home leftovers from the pizza & pasta lunch buffet or any delivery orders with mistakes. My boyfriend & I ate a lot of cold/leftover pizza, leftover pasta, etc. A lot of students took jobs in restaurants because of meals & tips. Between that & the co-op apartment, living near campus (which cut down transportation costs), & picking up things like serving as a subject in psychology experiments with lots of quizzes for $25 a pop, I managed most of the time. The rent was late with some regularity, life was stressful, & meals were not always the most nutritious - but I survived.