Comment by zwkrt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zwkrt | Hacker News Reader

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You’re not stupid you’ve just never had to deal with a real actual problem in your life.

Unemployment is a cause of or certainly concomitant with having very high stress and a very poor outlook on the future. In a town like Bessemer the thought process is something like “I don’t have a job, I’m not going to get one, I have no money, and this situation is not going to change.” And it’s not just you thinking this, you see your friends and family having the same problems. You reach out for help but after a while the good graces of others run out. So do unemployment checks.

After a few months you get evicted, so no one else will rent to you, and you are either homeless or at least not in control of your living situation. A slum lord may be involved. The food bank (which was already not a great source of food) is now useless since you need a kitchen to make most of the raw supplies they hand out.

The stress and pressure to take care of ones self and ones family under these conditions often leads so serious mental health issues, drug use, and domestic violence. For some it leads to other crimes like stealing, mostly stealing food or stealing things to buy food and drugs. You see your friends falling victim to these issues, getting arrested, dying of exposure, or losing themselves to mental illness. Prospects don’t look good.

No way out either. In a literal sense. There's no national program for helping people relocate to areas where they can have a meaningful job, a home that's affordable to OWN, and hopefully also community as a result. I'm NOT saying it should be forced, I'm saying it should be an option.

No national program to build where people are, either. Which is a shame, because we're the country that built the Interstate Highway System, and a national rail system before it. The truth is that the hyper-local nature of our politics leads to disparity as much as it does prosperity, and the two often go hand-in-hand. There are too many rich towns filled with professionals and managers with a nearby slum that supplies all of the menial and service labor, but we're probably not ready to talk about what the remedy to that looks like, and I'm not certain we ever will be.

I imagine that we'll continue to try everything that doesn't involve privileged rich, mostly white, people making the slightest concession to allow for deplorables to do more than merely exist. As a reminder we've tried: eugenics, bullshit wars on drugs, shipping people to other states, etc.

A good first step is a country wide housing, healthcare, food, and job guarantee. If bezos zuck musk gates etc can be billionaires we can provide a minimal standard of living for everyone. I'm open to considering any research that says doing so is impossible, but I doubt any such research exists.

There have been plenty of attempts to do so...but if you thought cache invalidation was a hard problem, welcome to sociology.

One of the most infamous is/was New York City's SOTA program [1], which attempted to relocate and provide one year's rent for people from NYC's shelters. They basically shipped families and individuals out of state to other cities, hoping they'd find a job and affordable housing there. NYC is an economic powerhouse if you're credentialed and high enough on the treadmill to make it work, but not an area you want to start out with nothing; you can imagine that someone had the bright idea that there are cheap houses and entry-level manufacturing jobs in other growing cities, someone homeless and jobless might have a better chance of integrating into society than panhandling on Wall St.

The program met with outrage from the destination cities whenever anyone (utterly broke, with a history of homelessness, with no local family or connections...the program worked for some but did not for others) ended up in trouble and the locals found out they'd come from NYC. Turns out a lot of people would rather have their bright and bustling new-money "innovation hubs" and "tech corridors" unsullied by undesirables from dying cities.

It's one thing to turn a saloon and general store into a quaint Old West ghost town when the gold mine runs out. It's another to turn dying cities that once had populations of millions working in bustling industries of rail, coal, steel, or automotive manufacturing (like Bessemer, named after the inventor of the Bessemer steel converter, or other cities like St Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, Flint, Dayton, etc.) into not just the current Rust Belt cities but an enormous ghost metropolis.

1: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/hra/help/sota.page

New York is very far from the place I envisioned such a program operating. I was thinking about helping nature or farms reclaim remote and sparsely populated areas that no longer work in an era of specialization.

Actually this is such a simple thing to implement and also would be wonderful to test out.

Subsidize 2 luggages and a 1-way bus ticket per household member, to anyone that wants to move to a new location. No questions asked. You can do it X amount of times in your life, and anyone with income below (a multiple of poverty rate here) qualifies. That's it.

> you’ve just never had to deal with a real actual problem in your life

I don't follow how you made that assumption about OP of the comment

You wouldn’t ask that question if you had.

But that's still rudely assuming that there is only one kind of " real actual problem in your life", meaning = problem with money and/or unemployment.

Is having to make a decision to take your child off life support a "real actual problem in your life"? How about being told that your visa won't be renewed and you have to leave your entire life, job, friends and family behind and move somewhere else? Is that a "real actual problem in your life"? How about a cancer diagnosis? A cheating spouse?

Not all "real actual problems" in life have to be related to money - you can have plenty of it and still be in an extremely difficult and distressing situation in your life, which won't naturally lead to increase in violence(cancer diagnosis is probably one of the worst events you can have in your life and yet I cannot imagine it's corellated to increase in violence rates at all). I frankly also find the attitude of the previous poster to be condescening and jugemental.

No, the parameters of the discussion was “real actual problem” meaning = “problems that put someone in a position where committing violent crime is preferable to the alternative.” It’s reasonable to assume OP’s intent was not to imply all other problems aren’t real.

And frankly, you don’t have to have experienced anything remotely similar to understand how economic desperation leads to crime, it just requires a capacity for, and willingness to employ empathy.

On the other hand, “Cancer patient goes on crime spree to pay for chemo” sounds like it could be a very funny film, in the hands of the right writer.

Meh; a bit patronizing but I get the point he was trying to make quickly and succinctly - problems are relative; somebody who's been close to a desperate situation WILL have much more of an intuitive/experiential understanding of the issue, options, temptations, emotions, constraints involved.

(noting there's a difference between "I'm a student living with parents, I'd like a job but can't get one so I'm unemployed" and "I have 3 kids and a sickly partner and I'm overdue on rent and I'm unemployed and I have no social/family safety net")

I wouldn't call it "not having a real actual problem" - again, it's relative and so on; but a charitable read as "never been on brink of famine/poverty" may be a good interpretation?

Agree with you. Real hard time starts when you lose REAL hope about future.

I think you may be projecting here. There are millionaires living in Bessemer. Bessemer is right next to down town Birmingham, Hoover, Homewood, Fultondale, Gardendale, Chelsea and a not too long drive from Tuscaloosa. There is so much money here for most industries. The cost of living in the GBA isn’t much at all especially north on I65. Also, while it is true Bessemer is more or less impoverished in the city it has some really beautiful outskirts. People who live there absolutely do not have to work there.

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