Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dating in Delhi when you're poor

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 295 posts

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#81

Post by kbenson »

paxys wrote: post #44
ajmurmann wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's also other issues, such as people claiming there's more homeless in LA than in Delhi, not realizing that a lot of effectively homeless people in India aren't classified as such - it'd be like saying you're not homeless in LA if you have a tent or a sleeping bag Sorry, I really cannot avoid going on a tangent because of this. We seem to talk quite differently about informal housing if it's in the US or west…

The one in Portland has a couple dozen people living in it and has existed for maybe a year. It is routinely cleaned up/moved to different locations as well, hence a "camp". The population of a single slum in Mumbai (Dharavi) is over a million and has existed since the 1800s. Are you really concerned that they don't receive the same international attention?

I think the point being made is less about international attention, and how we (as in U.S. citizens) see our own poor compared to the poor other places. The impression, which I think has some truth to it, is that often our own poor are viewed much more unfavorably than we view the poor in other places. When it's the poor across the world, they get our sympathy, but when they're in our backyard we just want them gone.

It's not about which one is the greater humanitarian problem, it's about the hypocrisy.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#82

Post by benjiweber »

em-bee wrote: post #56
chrisseaton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok... but this still isn't even within orders of magnitude of 'upper class', is it?

EDIT: i used the terms middle class and upper class, when i should have used middle income and upper income. middle class and middle income are often mixed up. upper class and upper income less so. old text: well if the definition of middle class ends at 106k income per year then anything above that must be upper class. the problem here is that obviously upper class has a very wide range which skews the perception of…

Upper class means different things in different cultures. In UK more of an association with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landed_gentry than a level of income.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#83

Post by DoreenMichele »

sombremesa wrote: post #7

My first thought when reading this was hoping that these types of articles will reduce the comments I see on the internet that try and compare Delhi/Mumbai squalor to LA. Then I read the first comment on this HN thread, which is directly comparing this to Toronto. So either Westerners don't realize that people in these places are making less money in a month than the middle class person can expect to spend in an aver…

Many years ago, I read of a study that measured poverty not in terms of income but with metrics like "How many meals per day do you get?" and "What kind of shelter do you have?" It concluded that less than 1/2 of one percent of Americans were poor by standards in India.

When I've repeated that online, on at least one occasion someone who lived in India got mad at me for supposedly promoting negative stereotypes and told me my info was out of date. They seemed outraged.

I spent some years homeless in America. I'm still quite poor and frustrated with that fact.

I don't know what the solution is for trying to promote better cross cultural understanding. I try to focus on how to get the word out in the US that lack of appropriate housing supply is a primary root cause of homelessness in this country. It's shocking how many people insist that lack of affordable housing has nothing to do with homelessness and homeless people are all just crazies and junkies who don't want to get better.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#84

Post by macjohnmcc »

aerovistae wrote: post #77
justicezyx wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Indian people are suffering way more than than their western counterparts. The homeless in US lives a considerably better life than Indian homeless. This is not justifying one or the other. But if one always start with humanity as one's subject of discussion, than there probably is no meaningful progress to be made at all.

Can you explain how it's better in the US? Seems to me like it's pretty hard to get worse than sleeping on the pavement and eating out of the trash.

I'd say that it being your life from birth to death is worse and your parents and grandparents likely suffering the same back who knows how far.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#85

Post by yarky »

paxys wrote: post #35
em-bee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i would not consider someone who can spend $100 on average in an afternoon to be middle class.

Middle class means different things in different cities, even within the US (and in some cases between cities in a single state). You simply cannot classify someone based on a number alone.

I'm not an expert statistician, but why can't you classify people's economic class based on the quantile their revenue falls in? You can assume a distribution based on the data (probably normally distributed) or go all non-parametric based on empirical quantiles.

I don't see how this cannot be easily understood with a number. Sure, you can never predict one observation, but the average in some quantile is quite standard modelling.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#86

Post by bingidingi »

kbenson wrote: post #81
paxys wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one in Portland has a couple dozen people living in it and has existed for maybe a year. It is routinely cleaned up/moved to different locations as well, hence a "camp". The population of a single slum in Mumbai (Dharavi) is over a million and has existed since the 1800s. Are you really concerned that they don't receive the same international attention?

I think the point being made is less about international attention, and how we (as in U.S. citizens) see our own poor compared to the poor other places. The impression, which I think has some truth to it, is that often our own poor are viewed much more unfavorably than we view the poor in other places. When it's the poor across the world, they get our sympathy, but when they're in our backyard we just want them gone.…

it might go back to the american superiority complex; african and asian homeless people are different and distant enough to make us feel good about ourselves (poor foreigners), american homeless are “like us” so they shouldn’t have an excuse (just get a job like i did)

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#87

Post by beiller »

sombremesa wrote: post #80
derefr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two distinct experiences being discussed here: the experience of living in absolute poverty; and the experience of being down-and-out in a city you can't afford the cost-of-living of (i.e. "relative" poverty — the kind you could in theory get away from by "moving somewhere cheaper", but where for various reasons people don't tend to do that.) Both the poor person in Toronto and the poor person in Delhi are…

> But the homeless person in Delhi will still commisserate with the homeless person in Toronto Perhaps, but it's worth pointing out that these experiences are qualitatively different. In India, being poor (especially if you're a certain caste) is tantamount to being non-human. You can be jailed, raped, mistreated, killed without consequence. Even the middle class is afforded little human dignity, the underclass have…

I do agree with the broader point that they are not comparable, but one interesting caveat with Toronto is that come winter time, you're dead due to extreme cold and being homeless.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#88

Post by geodel »

chrisseaton wrote: post #33
em-bee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i expect spending here to mean cash you spend while enjoying your free time outside. from that 6000 you need to subtract rent/mortgage, and any other living expenses. if you then still have enough money that you can go out and spend $100 in an afternoon on average, then you are no longer middle class i would say. the "problem" here is the average. sure, a middle class income can afford to spend $100 in an afternoon o…

> then you are no longer middle class i would say Well what are they then? You can't seriously claim that having just $100 a day of disposable income makes you part of the upper class?

Well I will call them Lower-Upper-Middle class.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#89

Post by pm90 »

jimbob45 wrote: post #79
cheriot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In America, slums and informal housing is destroyed by the city government. See LA's Echo Park for a recent example https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-protesters-clash-sweep-echo... We have 350m people, 0.5m homeless and lack the political will to build more housing. They are expected to stay out of sight or the municipality will destroy their shelter and often trash their belongings. Humanity is more cost effective, b…

It’s not about building more housing. There is enough housing to house everyone in the US and then some. Homelessness is not just about finding/funding a home. You need food and transportation for a job. If the solution were as simple as throwing money at the homeless, California would have long ago solved their homelessness issue.

> It’s not about building more housing.

It actually is. From: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/06/08/1003982733/squ...

> By the 1980s, homelessness emerged as a chronic issue. There were many factors, including the federal government deciding to slash the budget for affordable housing. By then the California state government had significantly cut taxes and gutted social programs, including for state-funded mental institutions, resulting in thousands of people with mental illnesses and other difficulties struggling to make it on their own.

> Yet the core reason for the crisis boils down to supply and demand for housing. As regions like the San Francisco Bay Area became magnets for highly paid professionals in the computer-driven economy, they failed to build enough new units to keep up with demand.

> A 2016 study by McKinsey Global Institute estimated that California needs 3.5 million new housing units by 2025 to deal with its chronic housing shortage. Yet new housing construction has only slowed since then, despite Gov. Gavin Newsom's campaign promise to lead an effort to produce those 3.5 million units. Even before the pandemic wrought havoc on the construction business, California was constructing only about 100,000 new homes per year, way below the minimum 180,000 per year that analysts say the state desperately needs.

Re: Dating in Delhi when you're poor

#90

Post by markdown »

chinchilla2020 wrote: post #46
jimbob21 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you actually read that comment about Toronto? He immediately prefaces it by saying it isn't in the same realm, but can relate because he's poor in his area as well. I don't think that YOU realize that it is okay to relate to common feelings without being the most of that thing. The guy from Toronto doesn't have to be the most poor person in the most poor area in order to understand their feelings and talk about h…

He is not gatekeeping being poor. He is pointing out that being poor in Toronto is not the same as being poor in Delhi. You are trying to lump two things together into a category that are not even remotely comparable.

Probably worse in Toronto where you could have food in your hands but die from the cold.
Post reply on HN