Most people here are probably familiar with Nickle and Dimed. It's Barbara Ehrenreich's book where she tries to show the real working conditions of people in the worst jobs in the country by doing those jobs with them and living off their wages.

The book is great and it's worth a read if you have no experiences with that kind of labor.

A libertarian decided to refute the book with his own book where he emulated Barbara, and that's what this thread is about.

Enter Adam Shepherd's "Scratch Beginnings".

On interviews Shepherd maintained that his book was 'completely apolitical' and 'not motivated by partisanship.'

These interviews were with Glenn Beck, Hannity, and other Fox anchors of course.

What's most interesting about Adam Shephard's book though is that his premise is basically the greatest demonstration of privilege ever.

Honestly, colleges should issue his book to students to demonstrate the value of their degree.

Here's how Shephard's book worked:

Why he kept the gym bag empty instead of putting the tarp and sleeping bag in there, nobody knows, but what is immediately obvious is that his image of the working poor is that of a vagrant in the 30s, which is already showing his mindset a bit.

The objective is simple: Homeless to having a place to live, with a furniture and 2500 dollars in cash, so that he can start a business or go to school.

Alarm bells should be ringing in every persons head already.

Even a working poor person who gets 2500 bucks won't have enough to attend school without working full time and a 2500 dollar capital start up business is basically doomed to fail short of a sole proprietor contractor.

Let's take his premise at face value.

He, as a white male college student, set the bar so we need to evaluate it from that perspective.

He has a counter to that, he says he will not use any of his contacts, his credit history, and will just say he has a HS degree.

Now some things should again raise some flags.

He is a white blonde blue eyed man who's fit, and despite 'not using his college degree', he thinks the value of the degree is literally the paper you present to an employer, and not sounding or thinking like an educated person.

Also, it shouldn't slip by that he not only presumes a high school degree was successfully attained, but that his high school wasn't considerably better at educating than others.

But there's only so much he can be expected to do to live out this economic revenge fantasy.

Now there's another conservative reactionary point here: Adam doesn't have a child, and he in interviews had remarked on how useful that was but just wraps it up as 'smart people do not get pregnant or have kids before their mid 20s'.

Again, the ability to be well educated and not be subject to the social conditions of poverty, but expecting that somehow dropping to 25 bucks is the real measure is just breathtaking.

In a way it's almost a 'class only' analysis of poverty some on the left have, v. superficial.

Notice that his 'audience' are all basically people who don't qualify for what he did at all. It's people drowning in debt, with children, etc.

The moment he assumes his role, he instantly remarks on hating 'fellow' homeless and poor people.

So the first thing he does when he steps off the train is he tries to befriend a homeless lady by buying her a half of a 40. Later he has beggars ask him for cash, and he gets racist.

Now it's not explicitly stated, but I'm pretty sure he's writing a black guy here.

And then he goes full Liam Neeson.

Not from Taken, but from that interview lol.

Less than two hours into this experiment this guy is just ready to start beating the shit out of black people and he has zero qualms about it.

I can't emphasize that in his own words he goes from wanting to learn from these homeless people to get friends who will know how to survive to wanting to start a racial holy war within like 2 hours.

He spends his bus ride waxing poetic wanting to return to a better time, specifically a slave plantation:

It's important to understand that Obama's existence enraged some whites and really gave them license (in their eyes) to go full racist, but that prior people were just openly racist all the time, it just wasn't seen as racist unless they said "I hate black people" over and over

Wasn't seen as racist to lots of white people that is. Other people absolutely knew it was racist but they were basically had zero cultural backing to make the claim because it was always about 'intentions' and 'they didn't say they hate black people, just a SPECIFIC culture'

White people basically had full license to just talk about this shit in these horrifying terms from a cultural/political stand point and unless you were like "I'm David Duke" you could pull it off with zero consequences.

The first major display of privilege comes out.

Despite others being kept out of the homeless shelter because of it's schedule, the police officer he meets basically makes an exception for him, and this is undoubtedly because he realizes this dude is not 'homeless homeless'

As portrayed Adam is trying to pretend it's because he said 'yessir' to the cop while speaking to them, and that is true insofar as had he been an asshole to the cop they would have just ignored him, but at the end of the day he was like "Oh this is just a lost clean white dude"

Here he is, shocked to find out that the audience for oreintation in a homeless shelter is not 23 year old healthy and degreed white men.

Imagine fucking knowing this dude and how exhausting this shit would be

IMMEDIATELY wanting to exterminate everyone in the shelter lol

I hate 'tone' as a general concept, I'm a content first kinda guy, but the tone of this is just dripping with 'Wow royal treatment for the homeless, I will indulge due to my station however these ruffians should be on bread and water'

God bless those volunteers.

Again, the delighted tone is fucking terrible.

There's a difference between vacationing somewhere and living there, and this dude is clearly vacationing.

Again, this is how you know the guy went to a high school that served the top 10% economically, that he's never seen real poverty of any kind, he literally doesn't understand labor or capitalism at all on the ground level.

This guy is accidentally summing up marx without realizing it, and there's not once in this entire book where he's like "Huh, I wonder if all the systems here that exist do so in part to ensure there's always excess unused labor to keep labor prices lower and help business?"

"How many bags of garbage could it be Michael? 9, 10 pounds?

Again, none of this is surprising to anyone who's acquainted with shit work.

Guess what, sometimes you also just don't get paid, and your employer just refuses and says 'sue me'.

Wild, I know!

Just gonna point out how hilarious it is the island is called James Island.

Just a reminder, this guys sales pitch is that he's not doing this for 'politics' or 'partisanship', but here he is whining about a cigarette settlement which was extremely vogue at the time for the right.

Up until this point he's been a dick, but this is the moment that his poverty tourism really pisses me off.

This guy is now becoming a manager on site by trying to become a pace horse to make the lives of people who HAVE to use LaborReady to survive significantly worse.

At the end of the day this guy doesn't even have student loans at like 23, these people can't make a phone call and leave this life they're living, all he's doing is hating them as human beings and making their already shitty lives worse.

This guy is so infuriating that he's somehow less sympathetic than the management here because all he's doing is judging them for 'allowing' people to work at a slow pace and getting mad that he justifies that by saying he worked like that too back in the day.

And not to get all marxist, but why does he detest this manager as much as the workers?

It's because he views himself as part of the ownership class. A bad manager of his capital is just as troublesome as a bad employee, they're ruining HIS earnings generated by their work.

Someone has to build the buildings you live in man.

The advice was clearly 'don't befriend homeless poor people, you're a rich white kid who will get taken advantage of' but this guy took it as 'do not make a single friend'.

This is why rich people have college frats for the record, the kind of upbringing that trains you for the ownership class also makes you woefully unprepared to be a normal human being categorically.

unrelated to the next part, this is his fake background story, and it's amazing how this weasel who was trying to force literal day laborers to work faster just out of a desire to prove to himself how 'hard' he works is now 'fully' one of 'them' in his mind.

Two options here:

1) He doesn't know who the real Eazy E is and just put this out there or the guy he's talking about lied about his nickname to show how lame he was or

2) He does know who Eazy is and just said 'fuck it, my audience won't realize I made this person up'.

For the next few pages he waxes poetic about the support structure was for the shelter, from free medical care, to free lawyers, free everything.

I've helped one of the most ambitious shelters that had degrees of this, but he's a moron who thinks "Ah, problems solved!"

A free lawyer helps but they can't clear every debt, especially criminal legal debt/child support/leins, etc

Free doctors help, but most conditions are chronic and it stops being 'free' once you leave the shelter/have full time work, which incentivizing you to stay.

The irony is all these services stop the moment you're just a full time working poor person because of people like Adam Shephard who think once you're working full time you're set.

I got TB tested in the 90's because they were testing kids as a requirement in areas which had exposure to it.

Shephard and I are roughly the same age.

Again, the idea of a TB test is foreign external thing to this guy rather than a thing loads of people have to deal with.

This starts as a description of a good program that should be expanded and ends in a cum town sketch written out.

Side Note: Municipal bus systems are not all that expensive, they mostly charge fares because there's so many homeless people that if it was free the buses would just be full of homeless people in the air conditioning all day since we've made them chilling in cool places illegal.

You'd think the answer was just "Have the city build a bunch of free housing to accommodate them" but that'd piss off regional developers, and regional developers are the most important political faction irt local politics in every city in America.

That means yours too.

Here he is whining about the poor being given crab legs, a true crime

This is a real thing, local grocers in many states have liability exemption laws allowing them to toss 'day of' products to shelters and what not instead of letting them expire, sometimes that means good shit.

Also, take note that he's completely forgotten about the first group of homeless people he met who scared him away. He hasn't thought about what was happening irt that once.

Keep in mind Erlenreich's book was designed to explain the workplace conditions and living standards that the working poor were in, explicitely.

Her book wasn't about being homeless it was about being 'almost' homeless and stuck in permanent manual labor.

Meanwhile:

This guy is doing the dozens and imagining himself in dancing with wolves, becoming one of the noble savages.

Here he is delighted to realize he's watching his first bootlegged movie ever, but still unable to hold back his desire to remind people it's 'illegal'.

Ownermindset BAY BEE

If I was at a murder trial for his partner killing him because he wouldn't knock off the 'let's do more work!' shit to try and squeeze day laborers who management isn't even trying to squeeze, I'd be like Chapelle in the Celebrity Jury selection sketch screaming "NOT GUILTY"

Bro, that manager probably used to be in the same shit position you are, they're probably tossing everyone on site a bone as well as ensuring no one passes out from heat stroke, stop being a fucking narc.

Okay, so your blood is going to boil.

He implies that he narcs on Ken and is delighted that Ken, who showed him and the guys a bit of humanity, is getting fired.

Again, the cutesy delighted language here is infuriating because he's an imposter who can leave any time and to him this is just a migrant worker fantasy camp. (Pretty sure I'm stealing that from PFTompkins)

The first time I fell for this I was 15, and honestly it was naïve of me to get caught off guard even then.

I can't imagine being 23 and falling for this lol.

For those of us fortunate to not know, if someone contracts you for work the easiest way to squeeze the most out of you is to promise a meal when you're done if you finish fast enough, and then accuse you of a crime immediately hoping to accuse you of stealing so they don't pay.

tldr: She calls security, he gets mad about not getting a meal so he grabs a handful of turkey from their cheese and meat tray and runs away, fantasizing that he should have just grabbed the whole tray.

I gotta say, I doubt he's a good enough writer to be intentionally this racist, but talking about the 'ghettoes' of south charleston and a 'master plan' within the same two sentences is an interesting touch

OOF the delighted tone is just wrecking havoc on my blood pressure here.

He's complaining that the poor are going to church and enjoying their sunday instead of shoveling literal shit.

Gonna page @megan_e_riley for this part about Libraries interactions with the homeless, either people pretending or otherwise.

The next section is about the wonders of plasma donation, and I'm going to skip it just because his upbeat attitude with it just makes me want to swallow a grenade.

Here's him waxing poetic about Goodwill.

Once again, something 'cutesy' to the rich but vital to the poor.

The answer for actually poor people, is people who are richer who don't want employees that look poor, especially if they're not white.

The most believable part of the entire book is that the DJ in Charleston he was hooking up with later on was repelled by him as a human being and not what he was wearing.

The homeless guys are getting tired of his bullshit and literally job searching for him so he can stop narcing on all their day labor gigs lol

So there it is, the job that gets him out of homelessness?

Moving furniture for (fellow) well off people.

Do you think Adam ever wondered "Hey, maybe rich people paying movers wouldn't let a guy who 'looks' actually homeless into their home with all their expensive shit?"

Here's the first time he sees crack. It's a real treat how fucking lame he is about it.

There are like 2 pages prior where he waxes poetic about how all his friendships at the homeless shelter are real because no one has anything material to offer anyone else, and then he IMMEDIATELY wishes to have his friend arrested

This guys response to living for the first week as a homeless man is "But like, we all have problems man, some of us are CEOs and our vice is fucking too many admin assistants, some of us do crack, we're all the same."

Yeah man, fuck those people who want to ease their pain.

He gets the moving job by bugging the GM and telling him that he'll remove a currently paid worker by working for free. He's literally trying to scab people who aren't even on strike.

It's absolutely infuriating.

For a side note, I don't think people realize how many struggles unions had to fight for to try and combat the idea that your employer should be monitoring your personal life.

I know it's coming back now, but people fought long and hard to stop that explicitly.

The 'lie' that Ford 'paid his workers so much 'so they could buy cars' was so thoroughly believed people forgot the real reason for the high pay was union fights, no one wanted to work for him, and Ford required that his goons search your private home for 'vice' and 'sin'.

Here's them talking about it in about as positive a spin as you can make for it lol: https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/109833/

Taking a not-so-brief intermission.

We're halfway through the book.

Alright back to it.

We're now at the Chapter where Adam is befriending fellows at the moving company and working with them.

And wouldn't you know it he's kind of a psycho.

Compare these two excerpts:

From "This other guy is a control freak" to "HOW DARE YOU LITTER IN MY VAN" in 3.4 seconds.

Adam now signs up for Food Stamps, making fun of how easy it was:

Republicans aren't nearly as infuriated by food stamps as they were back then, but it was a massive annoyance to them that poor people could in theory buy crab or steak with it.

Adam breaks his toe while moving a ladies stuff from a 3rd story apartment, and for the first time in the book begins questioning what other people must do in this same situation who aren't as fortunate as him.

And then he says "Oh well life ain't fair just be positive!'

The core of his thesis revolves around people who aren't as fortunate as him, and the moment he begins to really contemplate what they would do because he literally had NOTHING to do for several weeks while he waits to heal but think, his conclusion is just 'doesn't matter'.

Adam finally heals, returns to work, and is preparing to move into his apartment with a roommate which he's either on purpose or through happenstance describing as if it's a version of him dying.

He writes his bus driver a farewell note.

Adam buys his truck, pulling a stunt I just have a LOT of trouble seeing a POC get away with for a thousand dollar truck.

I want people to take a moment and realize that this 23 year old whining about how irresponsible every homeless drifter was, who wasn't driving in college, had NINE speeding tickets to his name, earning a TENTH while he was playing hobo.

Also, the most positive impact he probably had for his entire existence playing day laborer fantasy camp, is that he was wearing Daisy Dukes the entire time and people got to clown on him.

Okay, this is possibly the most psychotic thing to me in the book.

I was a mason, and the idea of being a mover or mason or any other kind of physical job and then wanting to lift weights on the weekend is fucking absurd to me lol.

My arms looked like popeyes, what is his DEAL.

The same roommate he was fighting with over wasting electricity knocked the shit out of him lol

It's even funnier because he started the fight by grabbing and throwing his own roommate lol.

So now we're coming to the conclusion. Congrats for staying this long, the pay off is spectacular.

So let's go over Adam's INITIAL requirements:

1 year out to accomplish the following:

Now if you're physically reading this book, you'd very quickly realize it's only about 8 months in out of 12, but the physical book itself is almost done.

What's happening?!

So, just take a moment, breathe deep.

Imagine why he had to end his book 3 months early.

Think real shitty, imagine the worst possible reason.

Too bad, it's worse than that.

THIS MOTHERFUCKER SPENT NINE MONTHS PLAY ACTING HOBO TO PROVE THE AMERICAN DREAM IS ALIVE WHILE BOTH HIS PARENTS WERE ACTIVELY DYING OF CANCER

I want you to take that in.

This is a 23 year old grad who decided he needed to prove something as moronic as "The American Dream is Alive" over just spending his last year with his mom.

On top of that, he hadn't even considered extra college grad income might have helped.

Reality has hit, mom's cancer is deadly and dad is too cancer riddled to help.

So in the end he gives a sobering take about how his ability to leave is a function of privilege that many poor people lack, and he's lucky because an ACTUAL poor person would be fucked.

lol jk he declares victory 3 months early because he had 5k in savings, not taking into account that poor people would have blown thousands of dollars in that year had they been in his position with a dying mother and a need to cover bills/travel/etc

In his mind his mom getting super cancer was not part of this simulation.

Poor people's moms don't get cancer.

Poor people never have to max out credit to pay bills while living with their dying relatives, or paying to fly their equally poor families to their bedsides/funerals.

Capitalism can never fail, it can only be failed.

Blood for the blood god.

The End.

PS:

In case you were wondering what the guy is up to, he does the inspirational speaker/consultant thing as far as I can tell, and he has a brand called 'Practice Empathy'.

Don't fuck with him because nothing good will come from it, just enjoy this weird ride we took together.

Also, I have no idea how his mother or father turned out.

The end DOES include an appeal for people to volunteer for the homeless and poor which is honestly better than I'd hope.

Here is one of his fox news appearances.