211–220 of 632 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why hasn't the market solved this problem? Maybe "the market" is not a good tool to solve inequality.
Solving inequality goes against everything in nature. The market is as close to an evolutionary natural state as we can get.
America is a country of huge wealth. Wealthy in natural resources, capital equipment, labor ... fucking everything. And yet we have such terrible poverty. When I read stories about poor people in America, always there is lurking just below the surface the key element of scarcity. Not food. Not transportation. Not clothing. Not even, surprisingly, health care. The missing factor in all these broken lives is the simple…
Because we don't just provide things to people because they are struggling or starving. They have to be literally dying, or appear to be in medical distress, and then we send a fire truck as a first responder, and then they go to the emergency room because we waited until they were dying to provide care, and then we rack up unpayable bills that raise health care prices.
I mean, we create the conditions that cause homelessness, and then literally criminalize the homeless. If that doesn't tell you how little of a shit we give about people in distress, I don't know what will.
America is a land of plenty only for people that already have plenty.
America is a country of huge wealth. Wealthy in natural resources, capital equipment, labor ... fucking everything. And yet we have such terrible poverty. When I read stories about poor people in America, always there is lurking just below the surface the key element of scarcity. Not food. Not transportation. Not clothing. Not even, surprisingly, health care. The missing factor in all these broken lives is the simple…
> Why hasn't the market solved this problem? The market did solve the problem and then we blew it by undermining the family unit so we have people dependent on the state with no significant family support. > Believe it or not, its not impossible to manufacture a living space in a factory and assemble it on site in a day, to provide extremely well made and affordable housing structures. The soviets tried this approach…
Seems like a paper from a young student who needs to get his 3000 wordcount.
It just bloats the article and makes it difficult to get the information out of it.
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I absolutely could've. My college offered student loans to me as a means of paying for my education but if I had $0 to my name upon hitting 18, my life would've been radically different. As I mentioned in another comment a lot of that money went towards helping my family with FAFSA supplementing my school costs. I was effectively responsible for supporting my entire family and given my other health/mental issues at t…
Right, but had you graduated with that debt, you would have been able to pay it off due to the salary you'd earn with your CS degree, right?
Why do these articles always start with a story about a person? I see this in nearly all articles from american news papers. It's strange. Seems like a paper from a young student who needs to get his 3000 wordcount. It just bloats the article and makes it difficult to get the information out of it.
I think it's great, it shows there's always a human side to trends and large statistics.
> Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not. But not having 3 kids when you cannot afford having them might be. That is the issue nobody likes to address. For driving a car you have to have driving license, for owning a gun you have to have some kind of permit, to made new human being you can just go ahead. No matter if you can raise it. Would she be better of not having them? Might be,…
So: only the wealthy should have children. Got it.
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It seems like you're lamenting what is basically an immutable biological trait without proposing any solutions. I don't think this adds much to the discussion.
> ... without proposing any solutions... While I don't necessarily agree with everything the poster is saying--implying that someone is only allowed to discuss topics in which they have a readily available solution would likely ruin most discussion on the internet and it would certainly put a damper on scientific work the world over.
But whether the "enlightenment project" benefits from simply making complaints is a valid question. I still think the answer is no, or at least that if you're going to make a complaint, your position is improved by proposing a solution for discussion. I concede that it might be possible to make an effective and evidence-based counterargument, but are there meaningful social movements which have been based solely on complaining about stuff with no action platform?
Why do these articles always start with a story about a person? I see this in nearly all articles from american news papers. It's strange. Seems like a paper from a young student who needs to get his 3000 wordcount. It just bloats the article and makes it difficult to get the information out of it.
People are humans, they relate to individual stories more than raw statistics. I think it's great, it shows there's always a human side to trends and large statistics.
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> Where people wind up is very much a consequence of their choices. True. But we also have lots of studies showing that the best of the lowest socioeconomic class almost never do better than the laziest of the uppermost socioeconomic class.
So why do penniless immigrants keep coming here? Do they know something poor people in America don't, or are they simply misinformed?
From https://www.wola.org/analysis/fact-sheet-united-states-immig...
"While the total number of migrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border is near its lowest level since the early 1970s, the number of apprehended unaccompanied children and families is again on the rise after a dramatic drop in the months following Trump’s inauguration.
This is a vulnerable population who, for the most part, are deliberately seeking out U.S. border security authorities and asking for protection. Affirmative requests for asylum of individuals from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have increased by 25 percent in fiscal year 2017 compared to 2016.
These people are fleeing for a reason. As White House Chief of Staff John Kelley once put it, the mass migration of children from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border primarily consists of “[parents that] are trying to save their children.” The countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are facing unparalleled levels of violent crime, with El Salvador and Honduras ranking among the top five most violent countries in the world."