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Comment by Seattle3503 | Hacker News Reader

There are many options to get fed in America, even if you don't have money. Here [1] is a list of food banks in SF.

[1] https://food-banks.org/assistance/san_francisco_ca.html

And yet people still go hungry. It's a lot easier to feed yourself if you have money. Also not everybody has 5 and a half hours to wait in line.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/S-F-hunge...

Are you saying that homeless and vagrants are too busy and it's much less time consuming to simply steal? Is that really a moral argument? You're that concerned about the productive time of homeless people?

See my answer above. As for my argument above that about comparative morality, it's more complex and nuanced, but it boils down to the idea of agency and praxis, and the responsibility of those who have everything they need.

Also a large number of people receiving food aid are neither homeless nor vagrants, but the working poor.

In good faith, is the proposal here that long lines at food banks morally justify stealing?

No, I was responding to the idea that the existence at food banks means nobody needs to go hungry.

But I do think folks here have a lot of illusions about the nature of poverty and who is poor that they've gathered mostly by vague cultural osmosis and conservative propagated myths, not by working with or for poor folks, talking to those who do, academic studies (either doing, or reading), or even watching documentaries.

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