Phligm Phlagm 2

[philmophlegm]

You don't need this laptop.

Trying to understand the EU's actions against Apple and the Republic of Ireland.

It's not shocking that professional employers judge applicants for client-facing roles partly on their appearance and their dress. What is shocking is that not only do state schools not teach this stuff, they sometimes don’t like it when

Comments

[beckyc]

How much disposable income is poverty?!?

That's... Wow.

(Though good luck to anyone trying to find rent that low for a family house around here)

[philmophlegm]

To be fair, you live in one of the most expensive places on the planet. But yes, if anti-poverty campaigners want to be taken seriously, they need to avoid defining poverty as "richer than I am".

[andrewducker]

The JSRF thing is fascinating. Because what it seems to tell us is that the "Minimum Income Standards" that people, on average, think that everyone should have are actually unattainable for large chunks of the population, and therefore (presumably) a lot of middle-income/class people have no idea what many people's lives are like.

(Either that or they're answering with "_my_ minimum standard is x" and ignoring that many people will never get to that point.)

[philmophlegm]

It's reminiscent of those newspaper stories you occasionally see (because they tend to go viral) where a couple with a six figure combined salary complain that they are poor and don't have enough money to pay for [INSERT LUXURY ITEM*].

* Where LUXURY ITEM is anything from school fees for their four children (or for that matter, just feeding four children), fancy holidays, new BMW, fancy clothes, gym membership, large house in the nice part of town, yadda yadda yadda.

[wellinghall]

I reas an article around ten years ago from soneone who had been on a poverty action group with various politicians. Tony Blair had been to a meeting, and reportedly couldn't believe figures for mean & median incomes they had been given - really couldn't believe them, and was musing on what sort of error could have given rise to them.