I get enough hassles crossing the border for work, and your country frankly scares the shit out of me.
And, really, driving for 12 hours so I can go to a gaming convention? I love you guys, but not that much. If I were going to go down that way, it wouldn't be for Marcon.
My country scare the shit of me. I was in Ottawa earlier this month. Going in easy and the young man at booth was pleasant and helpful. The return was also easy, but the older man at the US booth radiated surl in epic amounts and had the demeanor of someone looking for an excuse.
Next time I head north, I may not leave once I get there.
I am so, so hoping that Canada still thinks my mother is a citizen, which would make me a dual citizen, and thus eligible to work in Canada or other Commonwealth countries without having to jump through hoops.
See, a little bit of me is sympathetic. Then one of the examples of how poor she is drives a Jeep Cherokee, which by UK standards would be described as "gas guzzler" at the lower end. And a commute that long would make me move, I've done that more than once.
And, of course, that assumes that you can do so without your spouse winding up *equally far from work in the other direction*. Because, frankly, you *both* have to be working when you're making $240/wk if either of you wants your children to eat occasionally.
I'll bet she didn't buy it new. If you're buying a used car, especially out in hicksville, you have to settle for what people are selling in your price range.
Also, moving is expensive. Poverty or near-poverty tends to force people to be penny-wise, pound-foolish. If she can't scrape up first-last-and-security for a new apartment, she can't afford to move somewhere that would save her money in the long run.
Like I said, UK standards and cultural relativity—ownership of large truck/cars like Jeeps is rare over here, and reserved for genuine agricultural types and the very wealthy until recently, the cheap 2nd hand market is dominated by small to medium reasonably efficient cars (I've never owned a car above 1450cc). And moving is easier as it's normally only 1 months deposit up front not first and last, etc.
I like reading this sort of story as it gives me a whole different perspective on things—it's not her fault US culture went for jeeps and trucks as a norm, but it did and now the poorest (as usual) suffer.
"it's not her fault US culture went for jeeps and trucks as a norm, but it did and now the poorest (as usual) suffer."
Aye. The car-buying options we po' folk largely reflect the tastes of the rich folk eight to fifteen years earlier, and as a culture there've been some bad-decision trends. More on that below...
> it's normally only 1 months deposit up front not first and last
Huh. You mean if you move in on January 1st, all you pay is the rent for January, and you just pay February's at the start of February, and so forth? What's the grace period like for late rent? (I don't know what it's like in the States; in Ontario you've got to give at least a week's notice and occasionally two before evicting someone for non-payment.)
When you sign for a property, you're asked to give a security deposit within X days and you pay the first months rent when you move in. Last I moved my deposit on the old place covered my remaining rent on the notice, so I had the money I would have paid in rent for the new place. Very little money to find.
Normally rent is due on the 1st and you get kicked out on the 14th if you haven't paid, but it's been a long time since I had to worry about that (rent was regularly late at my last place but never in a scary way).
First and last month's rent is basically the same here, except that instead of a security deposit (which can be... whatever amount it is, I guess) the money you put up is a month's rent.
This means that if you move out at the end of December, you don't have to pay December rent, but you do have to pay some-nebulous-month's rent plus January rent. If your new rent is no more than your old, there's (practically speaking) no change. But you still need to actually give notice, find a place, pay moving costs...
What kadath said. I got lucky with one car, in that when I got it was about twelve years after the peak of good-gas-mileage in regular cars, so it was hitting the "give away to a friend instead of trying to sell it" point at just the right time. Even that was more expensive than any of the hybrids or modern ultra-economy cars, of course, but I'm a starving-artist who has to hit up my mother for help with the electric bill, so buying anything new and trendy like that just ain't gonna happen. After a drunk in a stolen car wiped out mine (and a few other parked cars on my street), I was without wheels for a year (I'm in the city, so that's not as bad as it could be, but it's was still rough). Now I've got another hand-me-down car ... and "beggars can't be choosers" (especially when I'm already limited to things that I can stuff a double bass into), so I'm in a 1994 Minivan that gets as much as 26 on the highway if the weather is favourable and I'm really really careful of my driving style (20-22 is a more reasonable range for most highway trips), and more like 10 mpg in the city. Keeping it fueled is going to hurt.
But it's that or nothing. I cannot possibly come up with the thousands of dollars it would cost to buy a vehicle that would, yes, Save Me A Shitload Of Money In The Long Run, but I can, at least some of the time, come up with five bucks here and there to buy a gallon-and-a-half of gas at a time. And I'm a musician, so in addition to the difficulty of grocery shopping by bus for a person with a chronic pain condition (hey, it's do-able some of the time, and not even really unpleasant on my best days (and I can feel I'm doing the right thing for the environment), but I don't have enough of those days ... and some trips, I need to buy cat litter, which is no fun to lug all the way home) if I can't drive, I can't get to gigs, which means not having the money for groceries and certainly not saving up anything for eventually buying that expensive but long-term-economical hybrid I'd love to get.
If I had my choice of what kind of car to drive, it'd be different. Being poor, I do not have as much choice. And some of the cars I've had in the past were the sorts that looked kind of pricey for a poor person to have acquired, but most of them fell into my lap long after their blue-book value had gotten too low to be worth the trouble of selling.
Note also that the most convenient/shortest-commute housing is, in general, also more expensive than the houses farther out in commuter-land. That's why so many people who work in DC are now commuting from Baltimore or West Virginia: it's where they can afford housing. (In some cases that means "afford it at all"; in other cases it means "afford housing that isn't too tiny, falling apart, or in a scary neighbourhood".)
You've seen the rant (okay, more of a musing) by one of Terry Pratchet's characters, about how rich people spend far less on footwear than poor people beause they can afford to buy boots that last longer and thus aren't replacing them as often, haven't you? It's a concise explanation of one of the frustrating -- and paradoxical-seeming from the outside -- hurdles the poor face. (There are others, of course, but that one's both relevant here and has that convenient description to refer to...)
In the meantime, I've gone from routinely getting 27 mpg combined city/highway, to getting 10 mpg on errands and about 15 mpg averaged, in a time when gas prices are the highest I've faced, and it's not about what decisions I made or what my priorities are; it's because a drunken idiot in a stolen car wrecked mine in the middle of the night, and nothing as efficient as what I used to drive is available any more in reliable enough condition for a musician to count on and able to pass a state inspection for the amount of money the insurance company gave me for my old car. So I've got some sympathy for someone driving an old gas guzzler they need to eke as much life out of as possible because they can't afford to replace it.
Vimes, in Guards Guards. Bear in mind while we're talking this stuff that I'm making less than her, and cost of living over here is higher, plus fuel prices higher again. But I work from home (deliberate choice) and have got rid of my car (again, deliberate choice), partially because where I've just moved to has good bus/train routes to 5 major(ish) cities.
The difference, as I said above, is very very cultural, we have a small car culture over here, and my cheap runabouts that I used to own would do many many more MPG, even taking into account larger gallons, etc. Jeeps are rare, partially due to small roads, higher taxes, much more expensive fuel (SRSLY, it's taxed through the roof over here, again, deliberately), etc.
Different countries, different outlooks, different results. In an energy price peak, we end up better off by a long way, but until recently our economy wasn't nearly as good. Doing better now, but that's also getting hurt, too interdependent.
Thanks for the reminder of which character/which book.
As you said, there's a cultural difference. For the poorest of us still well-off enough to even think about a car, it manifests as a difference in circumstances more than a difference in values, but values (of the culture as a whole) have definitely played a large role in the creation of the circumstances. (Note that geography has also been a significant factor, however.)
In a "peak oil" scenario, the US is going to suffer terribly.
In many cities around the world, (part of) the point of living in a city is not needing a car. In some, AFAICT, a car is really a liability. Alas, in the US, that is not the general pattern. Oh, we have mass transit in many places, but it doesn't generally work as well for getting around (although some systems are pretty good at the specific task of getting commuters living and working in 'typical' locations into and out of the city if they work not-too-unusual hours -- and there are some US cities where mass transit is genuinely useful for getting around within the city, not just for getting into and out of the city).
There are a whole clutch of chicken-or-egg problems here, too many to try to tease out in an LJ comment, but to start out: in some parts of the US, geography makes mass transit or not-travelling especially difficult; in some places the geography wouldn't be a problem if development over that geography hadn't been so heavily influenced by car-culture, and the USian car culture has been heavily influenced by the geography, so we've got situations that are far more car-dependent than they ought to be partly because of the existence of other places that would be car-dependent regardless. *sigh* (And that's even before you factor in deliberate cultural engineering to create more demand for cars for the benefit of those who make them or make parts for them (which in turn brings up the whole bit about convincing cities to replace streetcars with buses...))
And on top of the not-really-fuckups and the okay-humans-fuck-up-sometimes fuckups, we have the headscratchers resulting from quirks of the "American psyche" (which phrase I think we can use here if we're talking about a sort of gestalt of US communities and cultures and subcultures, not trying to describe "how a typical American thinks" -- there are aspects of the latter that come into play, but we have to be much more careful how we ascribe those) such as the "bigger is better" race toward less fuel-efficient vehicles that we seem to have been caught up in until very recently. (Note what I said before about there having been a period in the ... late 1980s/early 1990s I think ... when typical fuel economy of cars using the commonplace technology of the day (i.e., no hybrids) was far higher than it is today -- a counterintuitive pattern to me.)
Anyhow, there are a bunch of cities (and suburbs) which would be more efficient if the culture had been different when they were built, but now even if huge numbers of us make the appropriate mental shifts, it'll take terribly long to fix beause the cities are already built ... so we're still stuck -- at least those of us without the resources to find or invent better options by choosing only the least car-dependent places to move to -- with many of us living in environments where getting by without a car is a huge obstacle to, well, pretty much everything except sitting on your front steps drinking a '40 of malt liquor.
(And don't get me started on the whole rant about how long ago the US should have started making greater use of telecommuting -- as a techie, before I became disabled, the unreadiness for telecommuting was a big annoyance to me. But the folks described in that article are all working the kinds of jobs that can't be done by telecommuting anyhow.)
Uh, this is embarassingly disjointed, I fear. I haven't been feeling well, and my grogginess is definitely affecting the organization of my thoughts and words. I hope you can make some sense of my attempt.
Anyhow, yes, part of it (a significant part) is cultural, not so much in the mindsets of the folks in that article as in the development of the environment they were born into; yes, the cultural differences matter a whole hell of a lot in the outcomes (and in understanding the different situations); and yes, there are places where cities function much better as cities than here. (Toronto is an example within sane road-trip distance of me, so I needn't even look all the way across the pond, if I feel lazy.)
I stand corrected (as in, I went to check), page 35 of the Corgi ppb print. I recall it as being a very early intro to "how Sam thinks", I forget that Guards Guards is more Carrot/the city, but then I lost my copy, so one of the few Pratchett's that we haven't got many multiples of.
> You've seen the rant (okay, more of a musing) by one of Terry > Pratchet's characters, about how rich people spend far less on > footwear than poor people beause they can afford to buy boots that > last longer and thus aren't replacing them as often, haven't you?
The Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness, from Men at Arms. Decent Guards book, although I prefer Feet of Clay.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-25 06:55 pm (UTC)Srsly though there are large portions of the state which have no real sources of income. Mansfield springs to mind.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-25 06:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-25 07:01 pm (UTC)On a separate note entirely. Marcon?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-25 07:05 pm (UTC)I get enough hassles crossing the border for work, and your country frankly scares the shit out of me.
And, really, driving for 12 hours so I can go to a gaming convention? I love you guys, but not that much. If I were going to go down that way, it wouldn't be for Marcon.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-25 07:14 pm (UTC)Sad as you both are really cool...But I can't say I'm surprised.
Once we get our passports and retinal scans we will make the drive up to visit the great white north
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-25 07:17 pm (UTC)> make the drive up to visit the great white north
Who-hoooo!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-25 07:51 pm (UTC)Next time I head north, I may not leave once I get there.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-26 01:30 pm (UTC)Bus drivers and staff on our side of the border; pleasant, polite, occasionally chatty (had great conversation w/one about authors).
Bus drivers and train station ticket-sellers and staff on the other side--everyone just seemed so *pissed*. Yelling and snapping and everything.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-25 08:05 pm (UTC)I am so, so hoping that Canada still thinks my mother is a citizen, which would make me a dual citizen, and thus eligible to work in Canada or other Commonwealth countries without having to jump through hoops.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-25 07:59 pm (UTC)Cultural relativity is a wonderful thing, innit.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-25 08:05 pm (UTC)And, of course, that assumes that you can do so without your spouse winding up *equally far from work in the other direction*. Because, frankly, you *both* have to be working when you're making $240/wk if either of you wants your children to eat occasionally.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-25 08:09 pm (UTC)Also, moving is expensive. Poverty or near-poverty tends to force people to be penny-wise, pound-foolish. If she can't scrape up first-last-and-security for a new apartment, she can't afford to move somewhere that would save her money in the long run.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-25 10:10 pm (UTC)I like reading this sort of story as it gives me a whole different perspective on things—it's not her fault US culture went for jeeps and trucks as a norm, but it did and now the poorest (as usual) suffer.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-25 10:19 pm (UTC)Aye. The car-buying options we po' folk largely reflect the tastes of the rich folk eight to fifteen years earlier, and as a culture there've been some bad-decision trends. More on that below...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-26 01:33 pm (UTC)Huh. You mean if you move in on January 1st, all you pay is the rent for January, and you just pay February's at the start of February, and so forth? What's the grace period like for late rent? (I don't know what it's like in the States; in Ontario you've got to give at least a week's notice and occasionally two before evicting someone for non-payment.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-26 02:08 pm (UTC)Normally rent is due on the 1st and you get kicked out on the 14th if you haven't paid, but it's been a long time since I had to worry about that (rent was regularly late at my last place but never in a scary way).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-26 02:33 pm (UTC)This means that if you move out at the end of December, you don't have to pay December rent, but you do have to pay some-nebulous-month's rent plus January rent. If your new rent is no more than your old, there's (practically speaking) no change. But you still need to actually give notice, find a place, pay moving costs...
About that gas guzzler
Date: 2008-03-25 09:46 pm (UTC)But it's that or nothing. I cannot possibly come up with the thousands of dollars it would cost to buy a vehicle that would, yes, Save Me A Shitload Of Money In The Long Run, but I can, at least some of the time, come up with five bucks here and there to buy a gallon-and-a-half of gas at a time. And I'm a musician, so in addition to the difficulty of grocery shopping by bus for a person with a chronic pain condition (hey, it's do-able some of the time, and not even really unpleasant on my best days (and I can feel I'm doing the right thing for the environment), but I don't have enough of those days ... and some trips, I need to buy cat litter, which is no fun to lug all the way home) if I can't drive, I can't get to gigs, which means not having the money for groceries and certainly not saving up anything for eventually buying that expensive but long-term-economical hybrid I'd love to get.
If I had my choice of what kind of car to drive, it'd be different. Being poor, I do not have as much choice. And some of the cars I've had in the past were the sorts that looked kind of pricey for a poor person to have acquired, but most of them fell into my lap long after their blue-book value had gotten too low to be worth the trouble of selling.
Note also that the most convenient/shortest-commute housing is, in general, also more expensive than the houses farther out in commuter-land. That's why so many people who work in DC are now commuting from Baltimore or West Virginia: it's where they can afford housing. (In some cases that means "afford it at all"; in other cases it means "afford housing that isn't too tiny, falling apart, or in a scary neighbourhood".)
You've seen the rant (okay, more of a musing) by one of Terry Pratchet's characters, about how rich people spend far less on footwear than poor people beause they can afford to buy boots that last longer and thus aren't replacing them as often, haven't you? It's a concise explanation of one of the frustrating -- and paradoxical-seeming from the outside -- hurdles the poor face. (There are others, of course, but that one's both relevant here and has that convenient description to refer to...)
In the meantime, I've gone from routinely getting 27 mpg combined city/highway, to getting 10 mpg on errands and about 15 mpg averaged, in a time when gas prices are the highest I've faced, and it's not about what decisions I made or what my priorities are; it's because a drunken idiot in a stolen car wrecked mine in the middle of the night, and nothing as efficient as what I used to drive is available any more in reliable enough condition for a musician to count on and able to pass a state inspection for the amount of money the insurance company gave me for my old car. So I've got some sympathy for someone driving an old gas guzzler they need to eke as much life out of as possible because they can't afford to replace it.
Re: About that gas guzzler
Date: 2008-03-25 10:16 pm (UTC)Vimes, in Guards Guards. Bear in mind while we're talking this stuff that I'm making less than her, and cost of living over here is higher, plus fuel prices higher again. But I work from home (deliberate choice) and have got rid of my car (again, deliberate choice), partially because where I've just moved to has good bus/train routes to 5 major(ish) cities.
The difference, as I said above, is very very cultural, we have a small car culture over here, and my cheap runabouts that I used to own would do many many more MPG, even taking into account larger gallons, etc. Jeeps are rare, partially due to small roads, higher taxes, much more expensive fuel (SRSLY, it's taxed through the roof over here, again, deliberately), etc.
Different countries, different outlooks, different results. In an energy price peak, we end up better off by a long way, but until recently our economy wasn't nearly as good. Doing better now, but that's also getting hurt, too interdependent.
Re: About that gas guzzler
Date: 2008-03-25 10:50 pm (UTC)As you said, there's a cultural difference. For the poorest of us still well-off enough to even think about a car, it manifests as a difference in circumstances more than a difference in values, but values (of the culture as a whole) have definitely played a large role in the creation of the circumstances. (Note that geography has also been a significant factor, however.)
In a "peak oil" scenario, the US is going to suffer terribly.
In many cities around the world, (part of) the point of living in a city is not needing a car. In some, AFAICT, a car is really a liability. Alas, in the US, that is not the general pattern. Oh, we have mass transit in many places, but it doesn't generally work as well for getting around (although some systems are pretty good at the specific task of getting commuters living and working in 'typical' locations into and out of the city if they work not-too-unusual hours -- and there are some US cities where mass transit is genuinely useful for getting around within the city, not just for getting into and out of the city).
There are a whole clutch of chicken-or-egg problems here, too many to try to tease out in an LJ comment, but to start out: in some parts of the US, geography makes mass transit or not-travelling especially difficult; in some places the geography wouldn't be a problem if development over that geography hadn't been so heavily influenced by car-culture, and the USian car culture has been heavily influenced by the geography, so we've got situations that are far more car-dependent than they ought to be partly because of the existence of other places that would be car-dependent regardless. *sigh* (And that's even before you factor in deliberate cultural engineering to create more demand for cars for the benefit of those who make them or make parts for them (which in turn brings up the whole bit about convincing cities to replace streetcars with buses...))
And on top of the not-really-fuckups and the okay-humans-fuck-up-sometimes fuckups, we have the headscratchers resulting from quirks of the "American psyche" (which phrase I think we can use here if we're talking about a sort of gestalt of US communities and cultures and subcultures, not trying to describe "how a typical American thinks" -- there are aspects of the latter that come into play, but we have to be much more careful how we ascribe those) such as the "bigger is better" race toward less fuel-efficient vehicles that we seem to have been caught up in until very recently. (Note what I said before about there having been a period in the ... late 1980s/early 1990s I think ... when typical fuel economy of cars using the commonplace technology of the day (i.e., no hybrids) was far higher than it is today -- a counterintuitive pattern to me.)
Anyhow, there are a bunch of cities (and suburbs) which would be more efficient if the culture had been different when they were built, but now even if huge numbers of us make the appropriate mental shifts, it'll take terribly long to fix beause the cities are already built ... so we're still stuck -- at least those of us without the resources to find or invent better options by choosing only the least car-dependent places to move to -- with many of us living in environments where getting by without a car is a huge obstacle to, well, pretty much everything except sitting on your front steps drinking a '40 of malt liquor.
(And don't get me started on the whole rant about how long ago the US should have started making greater use of telecommuting -- as a techie, before I became disabled, the unreadiness for telecommuting was a big annoyance to me. But the folks described in that article are all working the kinds of jobs that can't be done by telecommuting anyhow.)
Uh, this is embarassingly disjointed, I fear. I haven't been feeling well, and my grogginess is definitely affecting the organization of my thoughts and words. I hope you can make some sense of my attempt.
Re: About that gas guzzler
Date: 2008-03-25 10:51 pm (UTC)(Geek tangent)
Date: 2008-03-26 01:41 pm (UTC)Re: (Geek tangent)
Date: 2008-03-26 02:05 pm (UTC)Re: About that gas guzzler
Date: 2008-03-26 01:40 pm (UTC)> Pratchet's characters, about how rich people spend far less on
> footwear than poor people beause they can afford to buy boots that
> last longer and thus aren't replacing them as often, haven't you?
The Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness, from Men at Arms. Decent Guards book, although I prefer Feet of Clay.