On 2013-04-30 06:32, irossall wrote:
It is very easy to live on $1.50 a day for 5 days in the comfort of your home.

If you want to see what the real world feels like do this in an environment that is new to you. Go to a city or town that you have never been to and spend five days with just the clothes you are wearing and no cash in your pockets. Just do this for 5 days and experience what it is like to really be without. See how other's look at you and how some will treat you. It is a sobering experience.
Leave your cell phone at home and do not communicate with Family or Friends.
Iven

On 2013-04-29 21:36, landmark wrote:
"We are the World?" .

Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity.

Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors.

Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again.

On 2013-04-30 12:34, tommy wrote:
Were there any poor people before we had money?