91–100 of 295 posts
Dating is so depressing, and it sounds even more soul crushing under these conditions.
I disagree. It is the best thing they have in their lives. Also, you don't really need money to be happy. I used to have no money at all when I was young and still had great time with girls.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 stand…
Are you calculating this quantile with respect to their neighbors' revenue? The rest of the city? County? State? Country? Or the entire world? You will get a different answer for each of them.
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 t…
I think that's just it: trying to promote better cross cultural understanding. That's something I tried with the GP here, but I could probably write up an article to be linked to in such discussions.
> metrics like "How many meals per day do you get?" and "What kind of shelter do you have?"
I think this is a good thought, a focus on qualitative differences in lived experience using quantifiable metrics. With that approach you're less likely to offend rather than inform. Might be best to skip the "less than 1/2 of one percent of Americans were poor by standards in India" since it seems to suggest that American poverty isn't "real" poverty.
I would even go so far as to say that communicating the cultural context is far more important than underlining the economics, the former of which TFA is attempting to do.
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.
Neither of those guys seemed mentally ill, but if my own country is anything to go by, a lot of these people have serious mental issues to deal with, and sitting them in a flat isn't gonna solve the underlying issues.
One of my best friends is a social worker for re-integration of homeless people, and getting them a flat is actually the very first step. A particularly illuminating example he told me about is that he often has problems with landlords, because the people he is trying to house do not shit in the toilet, but will do so in the hallway or somewhere else on the property.
There's a lot of work necessary from social workers, psychologists and doctors to help people who were homeless for a longer preiod of time, and it has to be a longterm commitment.
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…
And that's all the person you were replying to was saying. You can have things in common to talk about, and also have things that are so different you can't even comprehend them.
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.
In some sense, you are correct. We've torn down about a million SROs and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build Missing Middle Housing in mixed use, walkable neighborhoods.
This is a primary root cause of lack of affordable housing in the US. You need a car to get anywhere from the suburbs and it drives up the baseline cost of housing.
There are myriad other issues with our housing policies, but no it not just enough to build more housing, though studies show simply building more helps. It's also about building the right kind and we aren't doing that which is helping fuel various trends, such as living in RVs, the Tiny House movement and other alternatives people are pursuing in the face of cities simply not creating the kind of housing they need.
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…
Being in poverty but of a high caste in India, is pretty-standard "absolute poverty."
Meanwhile, being well-off but of a low caste in India, is more like being a recently-freed black slave in the ante-bellum southern US.
That experience is really nothing like absolute or relative poverty. It's its own kind of horrible. (It's an orthogonal poverty, one could say.)
It does lead to a vicious cycle that connects it to absolute/relative poverty, though, since having no societal respectability means people aren't willing to offer you any opportunities to better your situation, because they think badly of you and expect you to squander them.
But I would say it is nevertheless best to think of a low-caste homeless person in Delhi as having three distinct problems: relative poverty, absolute poverty, and poverty of societal-respectability.
I would note that, while a regular homeless person in Toronto might not know anything about the sheer inhumanity of being of a low caste in India, a drug-addicted homeless person working as a prostitute to feed their addiction would actually understand it somewhat. In both cases, for example, if someone in these groups gets murdered or otherwise wronged, the police don't even bother to investigate — so they have no access to justice. The low-caste homeless in Delhi and the crack-addicted streetwalker in Toronto would see the same looks on people's faces, and understand them to mean the same thing.
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…
I think there’s a little more nuance to what happened in echo park. Echo Park lake has always had some homeless people living there, but it was nowhere close to 200 prepandemic. There was also some attempt to relocate everyone, it’s the city of LA so obviously no one really trusted them. But it’s weird to me see a public park that’s meant to be used by everyone taken over and then when it’s taken back. LA is destroyi…
That's what a majority of urban poor in India live on - public/unclaimed land (i.e. informal housing). They're not counted as homeless as a result, unlike in LA.
That's how LA can appear to have a comparatively larger homeless population, even if it's a lot smaller in reality.
In India this type of housing is illegal and can be destroyed by the government, but that rarely happens because the situation can be leveraged for votes (there's a lot of poor people).
Yay democracy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 stand…
> based on the quantile their revenue falls in Are you calculating this quantile with respect to their neighbors' revenue? The rest of the city? County? State? Country? Or the entire world? You will get a different answer for each of them.
This depends on how you want to look at the issue, but it comes down to a number yes.
I thought Indians largely looked down on dating, although maybe the times have changed in the last 10 years? I have many close Indian friends and they are all married via arranged marriage. I’m pretty sure their American-born children will not marry via arranged marriage though and they have all come to grips with that. I remember talking with one of my friends about arranged marriage and she laughed in my face when…
Literally only place where the importance of compatibility is considered odd is HN. Here, compatibility and matching is never mentioned in debated about relationships. Everywhere else, it is considered important.