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Comment by carlosjobim | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen "the system" sleeping on the streets, starving, or not having enough clothes?

No matter who or what is to blame, the individual is who is paying the price and who should have the strongest interest to get out of that situation. Which means, if you're staying in that situation for years on end you have to admit to yourself you are doing something which isn't working.

Thats why people have more sympathy for somebody who is poor because they are temporarily down on their luck or born into poverty, and less sympathy for somebody who has been poor as an adult for decades.

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Yes the argument that being poor is some sort of character flaw, while realistically it's just a lack of money, usually inherited from the parents. I would bet that most people who make these arguments (like everyone else) would end up permanently poor if one was to take away their money and networks.

All research (e.g. UBI trials, mirco loan experiments...) have shown that giving someone poor access to money allows them to dramatically improve their situation.

In 2024 over 700k people were homeless in the USA. That's a system failure. If you want to talk about personal failings you have to consider individual circumstances. But 700k being homeless is abjectly just not how a civil society should operate.

Yes, because human mind is famously known for being extraordinarily good at getting out of self-destructive spiraling without external help, and that help is famously known for being provided to everyone who needs it regardless of their economic status. Also, chronic lack of money has absolutely no way to contribute to that occurring in the first place. /s

I get it. Everybody gets it. For some months, even years. But after a decade or so in such a situation, you must arrive at some sort of epiphany, look at your life and say "what the fuck?".

And I don't think anybody is arguing that people shouldn't get help to get back on their feet. Rather that some people refuse to get back on their feet.

No. After a decade the ‘what the fuck’ is just a distant memory. ‘It is what it is’, ‘nothing ever works out’, other kinds of depression just win by default.

Looks like you don't.

Unfortunately hackers made sure that the only reply below written by somebody who has actually been homeless was [flagged] and [dead]. That's the prevailing attitude towards poverty among the intellectuals. "Let's talk about them, not with them."

So I'll reply here, since I can't reply to a [dead]:

> And then what? You're 54 years old. No degree. No work history. Criminal conviction for drug possession. You're mentally ill and unmedicated. You realize for the first time you want to change your life. What's your first move? You have until your lucidity is interrupted by the next bout of mania and paranoid delusions to turn your life around.

You get medication and join the merchant navy as a mess hand. Not only do you get food, a safe bed, medical attention, safety, a salary, and companionship. You also get away from a destructive environment, drugs, threats, and all that shit that made life hell.

> Unfortunately hackers made sure that the only reply below written by somebody who has actually been homeless was [flagged] and [dead].

I't been my experience* that HN folks don't like reality, practicum, and personal experience. They mostly like abstractions and theory.

*See what I did, there?

If you'd be actually experienced, you would realize that there's an autokill filter on HN and the comment in question contains the forbidden M word. Apparently my vouch wasn't enough to resurrect it.

Makes sense (I run showdead=no, so I never saw the original), but that doesn’t make my comment any less accurate. We all see this stuff happen on a regular basis.

A long discussion is going on, with people flinging poo, back and forth, and one comment appears, from someone actually in the industry/organization being discussed, or by someone with very relevant direct experience, and that comment gets immediately dogpiled; often by both sides. It’s happened to me, a couple of times. I’ve learned to just stay out of these shitfests, even if they are embarrassingly offbase.

With this kind of emotionally-charged, nontechnical topic, it’s even worse than things like OS or methodology dogma battles.

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