Hacker News Reader

Comment by jnovek | Hacker News Reader

There is so much context here that you’re missing — have you ever been poor before?

Everyone in my wife’s family grew up poor and many still are. My wife lived in a converted barn for part of her childhood.

Regardless, the data is the data! Only 10% of parents on SNAP work full time.

Data without context is not useful.

  Data (alone) = Noise
  Data + Context = Information
  Experimentation + Error = Experience
  Information + Experience = Knowledge
  Knowledge + Humility = Wisdom

What do you call the injection of ideological excuses into data?

Not sure, since that's not what we were discussing.

You mean like bending SNAP data to somehow fit your picture of what poor people are like?

Or making wild generalizations about how men in Oregon only work in farming and fishing when those industries actually only comprise less than 10% or the workforce.

I don't think folk should bother debating with this user, I don't think they're conversing in good faith.

It seems like the entirety of his experience of Oregon is within a 10 mile radius of Coos Bay.

You, personally, haven’t been poor, though, so you you don’t know what it’s like to have to balance all the things a poor person does as an adult. Your confidence that you can speak on this topic because your wife was poor as a child comes from a perspective of massive privilege.

If you had been poor as an adult, you’d know that it’s very difficult to stay on SNAP if you have any income. It incentivizes not working if you want to feed your family.

You mention people who aren’t on disability — well, it’s very hard to get on disability. Go find a social worker and ask. They’ll tell you stories about people living on the streets with diagnosed schizophrenia having to stand in front of a judge for an appeal because SSDI was rejected twice.

What percentage of people who are on SNAP actually disabled and unable to work, I wonder? It’s far high than the number of people who actually receive SSDI.

This is why I ask if you’ve been poor — the devil is in the details on these programs and you are confidently misinterpreting those details.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com