> She tried to insist that my offer to point her in the direction of gig work was unhelpful as she had some minimum income requirements to pay her student loans etc. Someone who is homeless and has no possession is poor. Someone who has nothing and debts is poorer than that. Don't get into debts as an individual. Just don't. Debt can be a tool for businesses, countries, can be part of an investment plan, you take ins…
> But that whole "I'll get a loan to get a degree" is a tool for servitude. US really needs to get out of that. You might be surprised to learn that the average student loan balance on graduation in the US is about $30k. That is actually a bit less than the average price of a new car sold last year, which is about $37k. That is not a life-crushing amount of debt. It represents 4 years of college education for the pri…
You are taking a loan assuming:
- You will graduate
- Your diploma will get you a high paying job
If either of these assumptions fail, you are back to square one, poorer than someone who own nothing.
In a different thread someone recommended charging a small fee for new accounts to prevent abuse. Dang responded that its important for everyone to be able to participate. Between his response and this article I reflected quite a bit about the nine years I have spent on this site, the various weird and mostly wonderful interactions I've had with the community, and the way it has shaped my career and therefore my life…
Unfortunately it is not true in general that the reason accounts are being banned is incivility. Censorship of unwanted opinions is very much real on this site.
There is a flag in your profile called "showdead" that you can turn on to see the comments that have been deleted. There might be some minimum karma requirement for this, I'm not sure.
But I've had it on for a while now and I usually read a few of the dead comments. I see a lot of incivility, inanity, very little in the way of a politely expressed, well-thought out but unpopular opinion.
I tried to read this article, I really did. I tried to read the comments and to be emphatic. I really tried. I just do not feel pitty or any empathy towards anyone in the comments, or the author. I think I am emphatic towards the people I love because I actually deeply love my partner of many years, and my parents. But somehow the idea of homelessness disgusts me: I do not feel any positive emotion towards people who have experienced it, or are experiencing it. Maybe it is my upbringing: I did not grow up in a developed Western country (although I live in one one) but a developing country, where everyone is struggling to some degree, so the homeless there to me always seemed like they are homeless due to their own bad choices. The ones that beg are truly repulsive and I have my own experience of why I will never give them money: when I was a little kid I saw a drug addict begging and I stopped to give him cash out of pity. When I took out my wallet he became aggressive and wanted not only to take what I gave him but all my money. I was very scared, it was dark and late, and people around pretended nothing was happening and would have let him do it if I didnt board a randomly arriving bus! This lesson taught me that no one will help you in bad situations, bad people want to hurt you, and people who stop you for money want to scam you and exploit your naive pity. I was also mugged, twice, arround the same time by teenage boys who threatened my life both times. So I really cannot understand how people can feel empathy towards the not-well-off, especially as I myself was poor as my parents were struggling at the time and yet they didnt steal or beg or do dodgy things while the drug addict and those teenagers did. So either I am a psychopath, or everyone here truly is a Western naive person who has no idea how the world works even if they were homeless (to me being homeless in a Western country is something my brain cannot understand given that most such countries in Europe have wellfare states). Can someone help me understand? I am not trying to start a flamewar, I just want to know how can my opinion be so vastly different? Am I missing something here?
When people say "most wealthy nation" they mean GDP, not per-capita. America's wide discrepancy between those two is usually the point.
But GDP is most certainly not a measure of wealth, and not doing it per capita makes no sense. https://www.britannica.com/topic/gross-domestic-product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth Edit: GDP is more like income than wealth, and not per-capita makes no sense because the expense of welfare programs would be on a per-person basis.
I think the rationale for ignoring per-capita is that you're talking about the wealth of a "single entity", the US. And, well, yeah... ok, I guess (ignoring the fact that, as you point out, GDP is more like income than money in the bank).
I agree that looking at it that way is meaningless for the purposes of figuring out whose populace is the financially healthiest, but... that's what people do, for some reason.
> She tried to insist that my offer to point her in the direction of gig work was unhelpful as she had some minimum income requirements to pay her student loans etc. Someone who is homeless and has no possession is poor. Someone who has nothing and debts is poorer than that. Don't get into debts as an individual. Just don't. Debt can be a tool for businesses, countries, can be part of an investment plan, you take ins…
> But that whole "I'll get a loan to get a degree" is a tool for servitude. US really needs to get out of that. You might be surprised to learn that the average student loan balance on graduation in the US is about $30k. That is actually a bit less than the average price of a new car sold last year, which is about $37k. That is not a life-crushing amount of debt. It represents 4 years of college education for the pri…
You can declare bankruptcy on the car loan. You can't on the student loan. Because of this, before you take out a car loan, the bank actually checks on how likely you are to pay it back. They don't loan you a $30k to buy a new Camry if you're 17 years old making minimum wage. They will happily loan you that much and more to go college even if you are, because they know you'll just be in debt forever no matter what.
We could fix the college loan problem practically overnight by making the loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. Lenders would be on the hook for the risk they're assuming, as they should be. Universities would have to lower tuition because there wouldn't be an endless firehouse of money pointed at them to pay whatever they want. It would fix a lot.
Homelessness breaks my heart. If there's a more poignant indicator of how bad inequality has got, I don't know what it is. In London as in any big city you see homelessness existing next to massive, opulent, hugely flaunted wealth. It's an appalling indicator of how capitalism doesn't "trickle down" but sticks exactly where it is.
I haven't seen Metafilter get described as 'toxic' before. Although I guess toxic things can happen anywhere if moderation systems fail or don't engage in time.
Under the medically justified urgency of covid, Victoria took a significant number of homeless rough sleeping people (as they are called here in australia) into some kind of housing. Queensland did the same using surplus student purpose built dense housing. I'm not going to pretend this "solved the problems" but I am told a number of the less intractable cases got put into a better situation,simply having secure shel…
In San Francisco I believe we've been housing some homeless people in hotels (which have been otherwise empty due to COVID). From what I understand, the funding for that is drying up very soon, which is really unfortunate. Supposedly the plan is to get people into more permanent housing, but I can't see how that's going to happen on such a short time scale, so I expect that sadly many of the people in hotels now will end up back on the street.
Since you mention that some people in your area have managed to get themselves into a better situation just because they'd been housed for a bit, I wonder if that's true for any number of people here. But I'm also afraid that any gains will be quickly erased with our new lockdown that's going into effect Sunday night (which essentially winds us back to March with most businesses closed0, which could take away any newly-found jobs.
You can't give free housing to the unfortunate and at the same time increase rent on the workers. Workers need to see homeless people every day so they can feel better off and scared to end up like them. Everything else is bad for real estate investors.
The motivations of moneyed interests are obvious. But the contempt the working and middle classes have for the poor is something I'll never understand. I've often been obliged to pay for something I've seen others acquire freely and I say good for them. I wouldn't exchange places with them for a moment. It seems the pettiest of all things to begrudge someone whose life is a disater, even in the rare cases when it is…
"...socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
Under the medically justified urgency of covid, Victoria took a significant number of homeless rough sleeping people (as they are called here in australia) into some kind of housing. Queensland did the same using surplus student purpose built dense housing. I'm not going to pretend this "solved the problems" but I am told a number of the less intractable cases got put into a better situation,simply having secure shel…
Homelessness exists because the landlords and business people prefer it. Homelessness is a demonstrated threat of what not paying the rent and having a job will do to you. If you remove that dire threat, the housing market and job market becomes far more competitive for the workers and the owner class is disadvantaged. In the US, we have many more vacant houses than we have homeless people. The market system is incap…
That's an interesting theory. I think there are competing interests, though. Landlords and businesses generally won't want homeless people in their areas, though, because their presence alone will decrease property values and rent (landlords), and drive away customers (businesses). But for what you suggest to work, homeless people need to be visible.
Do you have any data on this? This doesn't really pass the smell test for me, even though it potentially sounds like a satisfying explanation of part of the problem.