141–150 of 192 posts
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In the future we'll just walk around with silverware and a cup at all times.
Actually you might be onto a new market, creating forks that you bring with you everywhere like a pocket knife.
https://www.amazon.com/Aluminum-Pen-Shape-Stainless-Folding-...
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I would love to see more public bathrooms that are well maintained and genuinely accessible to the homeless. The public library is often the only obvious source for a public bathroom available to absolutely anyone and homeless people are frequently asked to leave the library for various reasons and sometimes banned from it. But way to go to completely miss the point. Disposable plastic bags have myriad other uses, su…
If people need certain necessities to live, the way to help them best is not to provide them a random assortment of free (subsidized) materials without consideration of the negative side effects of the subsidy, but to directly give them money.
Someday never seems to come on such promises.
I was openly homeless on Hacker News for 5.7 years. Plenty of people here are UBI proponents who argued that I of all people should also be a UBI proponent due to my poverty. Such people were not throwing money at me.
I'm old an cynical. If you aren't willing to open your wallet right here, right now and help out poor people you personally know, I am skeptical that "someday" will ever come.
A lot of people on HN make quite good money and routinely espouse a lot of high-minded ideals. You would think of all places, this would be one where someone trying in earnest to make their life work via some kind of online income would most find help to readily solve their financial problems and stop being desperately poor.
I'm no longer homeless, but I still live on under $20k annually. I get treated like a whiner with no real point for using myself as an example in these discussions.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they usually aren't.
I'm incredibly skeptical of such arguments. People on HN expect good, well-written content on the front page of HN all day, every day. They aggressively use ad blockers, actively find ways around pay walls and routinely tell me that writing doesn't deserve to make money and I should get a real job.
Writing is something I am capable of doing, in spite of my handicaps. I have six years of college and I know a lot of stuff and I can be on a computer at home and write.
If well-heeled, high-minded people who regularly come together in large numbers on HN can't be arsed to help me stop being poor, then it seems really extremely unlikely to me that the poor will ever get anything like UBI.
I'm not for UBI. I don't think it works. But, moreover, I don't think it will really happen.
I think talk of UBI is like when so-called friends tell you that if they win the lottery, they will give you half of it. In reality, that's typically a lie. It's an easy thing to say because winning the lottery is so very unlikely.
People actually willing to help are willing to do whatever they can in the here and now, no matter how small. But most of what I hear is promises of someday while I continue to flail and most people react to my flailing by making me feel like I am doing something wrong. I'm an embarrassment. I'm doing something socially inappropriate.
Perhaps I shall just go away at some point and leave HN to the well-heeled, high-minded types who like to talk a good game and do nothing. Then I won't be actively making them look like the hypocrites they so obviously are in most cases.
I'm tired and trying to do some paid work. If I don't return to this discussion, everyone here can just assume that's why.
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And if you're on the go? Eating as a passenger in a car, etc.
If you're able to bring your re-usable bag to a store or pay extra for a new one, perhaps you can also bring your own cutlery when you eat on the go or pay extra for some wooden ones?
Even if it was plastic: at least you'd get a chance to say no. Of all the single use food utensils handed over counters, a considerable fraction isn't even wanted by the customer and only accepted because denying would be extra effort for both sides.
Reading these comments makes me sad, but I am also beginning to understand the opposition to limiting carbon emissions. Introduce an initiative that is "obviously good". I mean, none of the commenters here will be disadvantaged by single-use plastic being banned. It is obviously better for the environment. Whichever way you look at it, it is an improvement on the current state of affairs. And yet, people will moan an…
>It is obviously better for the environment. Except it isn't and plastic is for many uses the best material. Take glass for example. Cons of Glass: It breaks It costs more to ship It is more expensive to recycle Glass takes twice as much energy to produce More pollution is created in the manufacturing, shipping and recycling of glass Glass creates more than 6 times the global warming gases than plastic --------------…
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There's a huge problem with unsorted or poor quality recyling or waste electronics being illegally exported from first world countries [1] and ending up in landfills or just dumped in piles, across the world, fix that first, then move on to something else. Banning tiny amount of single use plastic is low hanging but infinitesimally small fruit however, and the narratives created around it just conveniently distract f…
Why present it as an either or? Why fix one first? Do both.
So why are the EU making a huge deal about the latter and not the former? Sorry but it smacks of greenwashing and narratives to me...
Why no plastic bottles as well? The vast majority of plastic I use is from bottles.
Coke and Pepsi would sooner nuke the EU then allow for plastic bottles to be eliminated. I'm sure between the two of them they produce most of the plastic waste in the world but I'm glad governments are attacking low hanging fruit instead.
If you could build a machine that sterilized the utensils, shredded them, and then 3d printed them. If the machine was the size of a microwave, and cost under $200, you could make a fortune.
They're banning single use plastic only. Other plastic plates are not banned. Given how much it costs in Europe to rent square meters to store stuff I wonder if event companies won't just buy multiple-use plastic plates and just throw them away anyway as it's cheaper than to pay personal to clean them, transport them to containers and then rent the space to store them, secure them etc.
this is exactly what happened with the previous ban single use plastic bags were banned, so now instead people accumulate the more dense multi-use bags under their kitchen sink instead
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If people need certain necessities to live, the way to help them best is not to provide them a random assortment of free (subsidized) materials without consideration of the negative side effects of the subsidy, but to directly give them money.
I keep hearing that. It strikes me as a way to decide now to screw people over on this specific detail on the theory that, someday, there will be UBI and everything will work just fine. Someday never seems to come on such promises. I was openly homeless on Hacker News for 5.7 years. Plenty of people here are UBI proponents who argued that I of all people should also be a UBI proponent due to my poverty. Such people w…
> If you aren't willing to open your wallet right here, right now and help out poor people you personally know, I am skeptical that "someday" will ever come.
I sometimes buy lunch for homeless people in my neighborhood, and have given people blankets and cash before, and donated to charities focused on helping the homeless, but it’s pretty hard as an individual to fully help someone who has lots of problems to find all the help they need and get into a stable comfortable situation, without making it a significant long-term project, and taking on huge amounts of personal responsibility. This is frankly a better job for publicly funded social workers, but I have a ton of admiration for any private citizens willing to take it on.
Myself, I don’t have the spare attention or resources to drive someone to work every day, talk to them every day to make sure they stay on track, put them up in my house, hire them for a permanent job, etc. I have enough trouble just taking care of myself and my own small children. My meager bits of help (one meal, a blanket, a respectful conversation, lending someone a phone for a few minutes, ...) might be appreciated but are hardly life changing.
Some of the homeless people I have talked to had trouble getting a job because they didn’t have a regular place to shower, didn’t have clean unripped clothes, etc., and then had trouble holding down a job once they got one because they had substance abuse problems, didn’t have enough structure in their lives to show up on time every shift, and so on. Of course the biggest and most obvious problem was a lack of housing. Which I really have no fix for. It’s a large-scale social problem which can best be tackled collectively.