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A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews

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Re: A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews

#101

Post by Swizec »

Mz wrote: post #52
Swizec wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: why don't you charge enough for your freelance work so you wouldn't be homeless?

When I work, I often make more than $20/hour. Not always, but often. But I am not always able to put in the hours, due in part to my health problems and in part to logistical issues from being homeless. I also have trouble promoting myself, in part because I am homeless so people online don't take me seriously, but in part because I am a woman, so a lot of people didn't want to take me seriously even when I had an ap…

Thanks for clarifying and congratulations on paying off your student loan!

If I may offer one piece of advice that worked well for me when I was starting out in freelancing: "On the internet nobody knows you're a dog". You don't have to tell people that you're homeless, if you think that diminishes your chances of getting a freelance gig.

In my experience, for a lot of things that would harm my chances at getting gigs, people never asked. So I didn't say anything myself either. They often come up in the course of normal conversation later once you already have a relationship with the client, but by then they no longer care.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

Re: A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews

#102

Post by Mz »

zem wrote: post #100
Mz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, no, let's not fuck that. The way to help people get off the street is to help them access paid work instead of begging and instead of charity. Charity does not buy one a middle class lifestyle. You get that by working for it. Why is this so very hard for so many people to comprehend?

i believe the narrative that everyone has to work for a living, and that the way to help everyone obtain the basic necessities of life is to somehow create jobs for them, is an increasingly dangerous fallacy. there is simply less and less need for everyone to be working in order to produce enough to support everyone, and the ideal producer/consumer ratio is only falling with every increase in automation. if we weren'…

I very, very strongly disagree with this. In the last Industrial Revolution, they introduced the 40 hour work week. We need the burden of work to be lighter for all people. But we all still need access to the option to work. Accepting that jobs will simply vanish and those who don't already have massive amounts of wealth will just get a UBI is a horrendous dystopian nightmare.

If we can all work 20 hours a week and adequately support ourselves, awesome. But the current position is that the 99 percent have no inherent right to access the means to create wealth. They are merely mouths to feed, consumers who can add nothing. This is incredibly problematic and I dearly hope we get a clue before natural consequences inform us catastrophically that this simply does not work.

Re: A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews

#103

Post by [deleted] »

Swizec wrote: post #101
Mz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I work, I often make more than $20/hour. Not always, but often. But I am not always able to put in the hours, due in part to my health problems and in part to logistical issues from being homeless. I also have trouble promoting myself, in part because I am homeless so people online don't take me seriously, but in part because I am a woman, so a lot of people didn't want to take me seriously even when I had an ap…

Thanks for clarifying and congratulations on paying off your student loan! If I may offer one piece of advice that worked well for me when I was starting out in freelancing: "On the internet nobody knows you're a dog". You don't have to tell people that you're homeless, if you think that diminishes your chances of getting a freelance gig. In my experience, for a lot of things that would harm my chances at getting gig…

[deleted]

Re: A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews

#104

Post by Mz »

Swizec wrote: post #101
Mz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I work, I often make more than $20/hour. Not always, but often. But I am not always able to put in the hours, due in part to my health problems and in part to logistical issues from being homeless. I also have trouble promoting myself, in part because I am homeless so people online don't take me seriously, but in part because I am a woman, so a lot of people didn't want to take me seriously even when I had an ap…

Thanks for clarifying and congratulations on paying off your student loan! If I may offer one piece of advice that worked well for me when I was starting out in freelancing: "On the internet nobody knows you're a dog". You don't have to tell people that you're homeless, if you think that diminishes your chances of getting a freelance gig. In my experience, for a lot of things that would harm my chances at getting gig…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14590353

Re: A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews

#105

Post by peterwwillis »

Banthum wrote: post #50
bmpafa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a critical point, thanks for making it. The mythology that all failure is a function of bad work ethic, etc., is a huge barrier to meaningful progress on poverty alleviation. Anyone interested in reading more on this topic, I rec. this book. It's about people who are near-homeless, not fully homeless, but it's one of the best things I've read on the topic. The author lived with the subjects for several years…

I doubt anyone thinks all failure is a result of bad work ethic. Of course much is due to mental illness, disability, etc. But a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic. Some of the places in the USA with the highest underemployment are also places where employers are offering decent unskilled jobs and can't find enough workers. The worker gets hired, shows up for a few days, and then starts just not com…

> a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic

Even if you had proof (you don't) that bad work ethic makes up a "huge" (not clearly defined) proportion of poverty (it doesn't), the symptom is not the stem.

Poverty stems from poverty, and a lack of a support structure to help impoverished people become "upwardly mobile". This is easy to see, and easy to prove, as most people in poverty simply do not have access to enough resources to overcome poverty. Work ethic often doesn't even factor into it because simply being able to work is a big problem, not a lack of will.

> the wealthy and the poor both have to make changes to end poverty. [..] It's not up to a rich savior class to come and fix the dirty people from the outside.

It's up to the whole society. In the US, the issue is systemic. If the people willed it, their elected representatives could simply pass laws to put the support structures in place to end poverty as we know it in 10 years.

Over half of our national budget is spent on a military that loses nonsense wars in broken countries. We imprison more people than the two other biggest imprisoning countries combined. We don't care for our poor. We don't care for our veterans. We don't care for our mentally ill or drug addicts. We don't care for black people, trans people, women, etc. We just don't care.

We don't need a wealthy elite to fix our problems. We need to join the rest of the developed world in giving a shit about our people at all.

Re: A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews

#106

Post by [deleted] »

Banthum wrote: post #80
dwaltrip wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had a thought that much of the difficulty lies in the murky zone between the following views: 1) "This person is struggling, and part of the problem is their work ethic and poor executive functioning." and 2) "This is a moral failing and thus we can't help them too much, as they will take advantage of it." I think some people automatically associate the second idea with people who express the first, when in re…

Eh, more like: 3) "This person is struggling, we can't help them in ways that are too paternalistic or agency-denying, because that will ultimately just end up harming them". E.g. You wouldn't tell your child that his economic outcomes are completely unconnected to his own choices or work ethic. If a kid has trouble at a task, we don't just tell them that the task is stacked against them and that they can do nothing…

[deleted]

Re: A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews

#107

Post by thex10 »

Banthum wrote: post #50
bmpafa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a critical point, thanks for making it. The mythology that all failure is a function of bad work ethic, etc., is a huge barrier to meaningful progress on poverty alleviation. Anyone interested in reading more on this topic, I rec. this book. It's about people who are near-homeless, not fully homeless, but it's one of the best things I've read on the topic. The author lived with the subjects for several years…

I doubt anyone thinks all failure is a result of bad work ethic. Of course much is due to mental illness, disability, etc. But a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic. Some of the places in the USA with the highest underemployment are also places where employers are offering decent unskilled jobs and can't find enough workers. The worker gets hired, shows up for a few days, and then starts just not com…

> But a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic.

Been burned by your underpaid workers' flakiness much? Citation, please.

> In the end the wealthy and the poor both have to make changes to end poverty. It's a team effort. It's not up to a rich savior class to come and fix the dirty people from the outside.

Is anyone saying this? My impression is that most poor people want jobs, and are begging political figures to come Bring Jobs! How do you interpret that as poor work ethic?

(Meanwhile, I'm eyerolling at the "the dirty people" comment. Are you trying to virtue signal your superiority over those people here?)

Re: A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews

#108

Post by derefr »

dwaltrip wrote: post #64
chillacy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame this is getting downvoted because it's not really inflammatory or even untrue. I think it's fair to say that this topic is complex enough that both this comment and the parent comment are true (which is that poverty is a function of both factors that can be controlled and factors that cannot be controlled).

I just had a thought that much of the difficulty lies in the murky zone between the following views: 1) "This person is struggling, and part of the problem is their work ethic and poor executive functioning." and 2) "This is a moral failing and thus we can't help them too much, as they will take advantage of it." I think some people automatically associate the second idea with people who express the first, when in re…

You know, the spectrum you lay out is probably correct regarding people's claimed viewpoints... but somehow the results of (1) in particular never seem to line up with the claims it makes.

(1) and (2) form the sort of classical belief spectrum on the value of social-welfare programs. (2) just doesn't support these programs, for the reasons stated above. But (1), although supporting such programs generally, doesn't seem to support the kind of programs that would properly line up with their professed beliefs.

If the problem with a lot of homeless people is that they have "poor work ethic"... well, we've medicalized that, it's called ADHD and you can throw medications at it. But there are no social-welfare programs to get homeless people into psychiatrist's offices where they can be given free Vyvanse samples.

Instead, such programs seemingly only ever consist of 1. paying the homeless person's basic living costs—through free housing, or free meals; or 2. giving the homeless the opportunity to work and job skills training to potentially begin earn money for themselves.

Programs in the first category might indeed help people who are stuck in a temporary rut, and just need the details of "where food will come from" and "where they will sleep at night" handled for them until they escape it. People who are homeless because they are in the depths of a major depressive episode might find value in these, for example.

But the programs in the second category seem to serve nobody effectively. If you don't have any work ethic, teaching you how to do some particular job isn't going to make you start doing it; nor is lining up interviews; nor is even shoving you forcibly into employment.

The people who have some level of work-ethic escape homelessness eventually whether they receive any social assistance or not. The people who have a persistent lack of work-ethic will not escape homelessness no matter how many "free things"-style and "work opportunity"-style solutions you throw at them.

Those claims sound oddly more like what people on the (1) side of the argument claim, doesn't it? But this is the "steel-manned" version of (2): that people who fail to attempt to gain employment do not do so because they're irredeemably flawed; but rather because they need solutions to a work-ethic problem they're having, before any solutions to their poverty problem would have any potential to stick.

Re: A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews

#109

Post by kelnos »

Banthum wrote: post #71
mjevans wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting if social research looked in to /why/ that was the case. Is there some ongoing problem disrupting these people's lives? Other family or social obligations that interfere with the hours the employer desires? Maybe a different shift (working hours during the day/night) would be better aligned with their biorhythms; it might require placement in a different job. I for one, know that I don't funct…

I'm sure there are extenuating circumstances in many cases, yes. Why is it so unacceptable to think that they are simply humans, like you and me, with agency and power over their own choices, with responsibility for the outcomes of their choices, who are simply choosing to do a thing that you and I believe to be a really bad choices? A pattern of such choices is labeled "bad work ethic" but at the end of the day, bad…

I'm sure for some small percentage of homeless/poor people, you're right in that they've made bad choices and that's how they've ended up there.

But if you're suggesting that this phenomenon is somehow common, then you need to back that up, since it flies in the face of prevailing research on the subject.

Re: A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews

#110

Post by gpawl »

logicallee wrote: post #47
Mz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

someone who has the intelligence and work ethic to do this probably wasn't going to be homeless for long. And capacity. Many people on the street have serious health problems or other obstacles to productivity. I lack neither intelligence nor a work ethic, but I do have health problems. I have been homeless 5.5 years, though I blog, do freelance work, etc. Edit: You also need opportunity. Being homeless can be a huge…

>I have been homeless 5.5 years This is a huge personal revelation. I have happened to be in touch with the parent poster via HN and they are simply an intelligent, thoughtful, person with important and good opinions on whatever topics they write about. I hope you resolve your issues with housing soon. As you write, you have a lot of capacity for high-level work.

FYI, Mz has been here sharing her perspective on homelessness for several years:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+mz+ho...

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