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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

I imagine this author has never been to a soup kitchen. One experience with your typical soup kitchen should cure anyone of the notion that this is a good idea.

The food is appalling. The service is terrible. If your stuff gets stolen while you eat because they insisted you leave it elsewhere, not their problem. They assume they know what is best for you, never mind they have no idea what your diagnosis is and no idea about the doctor ordered dietary restrictions that go with it. So the assumption is both flat out wrong and monstrously insulting.

I would literally rather fast for a day or so than ever go back to a soup kitchen. That is not hyperbole. I have made that exact choice on a number of occasions while dirt poor.

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I think you're being too harsh. Sure, there are a number of poorly run soup kitchens. There are also some excellent ones! And even the poorly run soup kitchens ostensibly do good - they certainly use the money that funds them more efficiently than most other enterprises, and they of course provide food to the hungry.

Maybe your choice is to be hungry rather than go back to a soup kitchen. That's fine, you're entitled to that opinion. But I don't feel that your experience should deprive others of the choice - I know some people who rely on soup kitchens so as not to starve, and they certainly would prefer to have soup kitchens than not.

You are reading in things I did not say and rebutting ideas I did not promote. My statement contains zero suggestion that existing (charitable) programs should be shut down. It only rebuts the suggestion that we need some government run "free food" program of the sort described in the article.

There are also some excellent ones!

I am aware that quality varies. I did a write up of one that didn't completely suck as a potential model for how things should be done. But I wonder how many soup kitchens you have personally eaten at and how many you thought were excellent and would prefer it to most paid eateries (I mean solely on the basis of the high quality of the experience, not on the basis of it being free).

Like any government program, or anything really, it could be operated well or poorly. We can examine what about the proposal might make it hard to implement properly, such as the wide variety of dietary restrictions as well as peoples' personal tastes and the fact that food for many people is a central part of their family and culture. Maybe that means such a program should focus more on the raw ingredients than delivering prepared food. I'm not sure because some soup kitchens are bad, we should discount all publicly funded food. For one, it does in fact feed lots of people today via free school lunch programs.

The difference is that when a private program is run badly, it goes bankrupt and is closed. When a public program is run badly, it keeps going on forever.

I think this is a bit naive. Badly run corporations find ways to keep themselves alive, it's not like owners and shareholders look at a bad situation and just say "Oh well, we tried" and go home. I think there's a strong case to be made that shareholders should be much more willing to just close up shop and cut their losses when the world changes around them, but that's not how people work.

You are of course right, but it is nevertheless mostly true, and in this case mostly true happens to be sufficient. Evolution works despite the fact that unfit animals don't always die.

More importantly, private companies preserve choice (assuming no monopoly). Government provides no choice. My ability to make my own choice is what is most valuable to me.

I don't mean to be too harsh, but you might value your ability to choose less if you didn't know when your next meal would be.

I was homeless for a long time. Valuing my agency above all else helped me solve my problems and get off the street.

When you start eroding rights on the excuse that someone is too poor to have any right to care about such high minded frivolities as rights, you deprive them of hope of resolving their problems.

I don't think anyone here is talking about taking away anyone's rights. The implication above was that government providing free food might lead to less choice as government crowds out business, but not removing someone's "right" to choose. The tradeoff between more choice in food and people starving doesn't seem to be much of a tradeoff. There's plenty of room for a middle ground.

My comments are in regards to your statement here:

but you might value your ability to choose less if you didn't know when your next meal would be.

I am telling you that when I was so poor that I often had no idea when my next meal might be, I valued my own agency -- my right to choose and to make choices -- tremendously. But it looks to me like, overall, most folks here don't want to hear the opinions of someone who actually ate regularly at soup kitchens for a time. They want to say nice things about being generous people who will feed the hungry, and let's not let actual facts get in the way of our pretty ideas that this is always a good thing with no down side.

It is a form of virtue signaling. It is also a form of pity, which is fundamentally disrespectful. You assume you are in a better position than the people of whom you speak to decide for them, while completely dismissing the opinions to the contrary of someone still poor enough that food security is an ongoing question mark.

This seems to be par for the course.

While I value your experience and perspective, I don't believe you speak for all people who are food insecure. There is lots of evidence, given the success of food banks, meals on wheels and other programs, that many would welcome this type of universal free food. You also assume that I am somehow in favor of paternalistic policies and against the agency of poor people, when that is not at all the intent of my comment and does not reflect my personal beliefs. I am personally strongly in favor of a universal basic income and other approaches that enable people who do not earn wages or have other sources of income to make the best decisions for themselves. I also think this is a good idea. I think there are a lot of different ways to improve the quality of life of a lot of people, and I don't think just giving away food to everyone (rather than means-testing the program or something) is particularly paternalistic or highly choice-limiting.

With regard to "virtue signaling", that is a derogatory term used to imply that a person is only promoting an idea to appear good to others, without a genuine care or interest in effecting the change they are promoting. I think we have a fundamental disagreement about what sorts of policies would be effective, and using that term is unnecessarily dismissive.

I think we have a fundamental disagreement about what sorts of policies would be effective, and using that term is unnecessarily dismissive.

Using that term mostly indicates that I feel incredibly dismissed most of the time on Hacker News.

This is a new handle, but I am not new here. I have had college classes on, for example, homelessness and public policy. I got myself off the street on my own efforts, not through some program. As best I can tell, I am the only woman who has ever spent any time on the leaderboard of HN.

None of it seems to make any difference. I continue to get no traction. I continue to not get substantive feedback on my projects. I continue to have no connections. My income remains extremely low.

I can't help but feel that sexism and classism are factors and I am just incredibly frustrated. Trying to do something good against long odds, etc begins to seem totally pointless and fruitless. I increasingly understand the very angry feminist types. I don't agree with their approach, but no approach seems to actually work.

You and I do fundamentally disagree. I am not pro UBI. I think that is a polite means to crap all over the have nots and increasingly cut them out of ever more access to money, rights, you name it.

I don't intend to engage further. I don't think this is in any way whatsoever productive. It is yet another exercise in me trying to engage in good faith with someone who seems to fundamentally be incapable of genuinely respecting me. Everything you say is another ever so politely dismissive thing done in accordance with the rules such that me getting offended just makes me look bad in the eyes of everyone here.

I have been facing this sort of thing with, I think, quite a lot of aplomb for more than 8 years, to no avail at all. And I just am not coping well with that fact at the moment.

I know lots of situations where horribly inefficient companies continue to operate, and I know of situations where poorly run public programs have been stopped, either because of public pressure (because governments are accountable to their voters), or just because the administrators realised that they could do more effective things with the money.

It's also possible to find a middle ground; food providers could be paid by the government based on how many people they feed, giving the opportunity for competition between providers.

we should (not) discount all publicly funded food.

I am all for food stamps. I wish that were made more readily available. Due to the lengthy and complex application forms, it is hard to apply to the program. I have six years of college and only managed to fill it out successfully because an agency helped me. I lost my food stamps due to a bureaucratic snafu and my attempts to reapply on my own were not successful having to do with barriers for me in the application process.

The EBT card itself is done very well. I would be completely fine with people suggesting we make this program easier to access and also increase the funding by about 50 percent. I don't see any reason why we need to dream up some imaginary American Diner for feeding people instead of making some modest improvements to an already existing program with a proven track record that has already worked out a lot of the bugs.

(When I was first on food stamps, using the EBT card was not as smooth as later. I know from firsthand experience they have worked out some of the bugs to make it work more smoothly than it used to.)

I believe this is mostly a matter of funding. I would expect soup kitchens to be governed mostly by poor funding. I don't think their goal is the balanced diet that the author envisions. Then again, public schools are also governed by their funding. I'm sure a lot of people would have preferred not to go to public school either.

Sorry if this brings up bad memories for you.

And, don't forget about your experience at the DMV or the INS, or the IRS or any other government service.

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