>For whatever reason positive news tends not to play well on HN, even if it’s factual.
People on HN are very good and detecting when someone is trying to blow sunshine up their ass.
Take, for example, the second part of this tweet:
>Very poor households (< $25K) shrunk from 24.7% to 18.1% (number rose slightly)
That is an abject failure of an economy if I even saw one. 18.1% of households in the most embarrassingly rich country in the history of the planet are living in abject poverty? Even with what you can do with poverty wages nowadays, that fucking sucks.
By no means are 18.1% of the population living in "abject" poverty. They're living in what the US government classifies as poverty, but in the majority of these cases they still have a home, have food, have electricity, etc.
I'm not saying that they're living comfy lives, but when you throw around terms like "abject povery" you're really discrediting people who are actually living in abject poverty.
What are your plans to get the rate below 1%? What would you have done differently that wouldn't have wrecked the economy?
Ah, I love this game. It's the same one that the super-rich use to convince people barely scraping by -- or anyone who hasn't read Barbara Ehrenreich -- that you should zoom out far enough so that your situation is compared to literal kids with literal flies on their eyeballs. Your life ain't that bad, why you complainin'?
The fact is, this country could fund universal childcare, universal healthcare and universal education from K-16 and not 'wreck the economy.' All it would take is doing what every other industrialized first-world country has done... and done better, with less resources.
And don't worry, the people who you think are actually living in abject poverty aren't reading on HN on a Monday afternoon, so my discredit of their situation will go largely ignored.
I was just correcting your misusage of the term. Everything else you've said has come from you projecting your beliefs onto the discussion.
I also think your perception of social aid in some other countries is wildly distorted. These benefits often come with the side effects of significantly higher taxes and subpar offerings. There's a reason why the US harbors the majority of the worlds prestigious universities and has the best patient outcomes of any medical system in the world.
Of course I agree that things could be improved, they always could. But it's not as trivial as you'd like it to be.
The U.S. was by far the leading global agricultural exporter in 2020 with exports valued at $147.9 billion. [0]
And it's not like it's hard to get the food from where it's grown to where it's needed. The US has a navigable waterway system that is smack dab in the middle of both where the food is grown and where it is eaten by the most people. That's not a coincidence.[1]
I'm not playing semantic games about whether the households experiencing food insecurity are 'working poor' 'abject poor' or 'totally fucked poor'. It doesn't matter what you call it, it's a problem that we can solve in this country.
Your first point is mostly just misleading. Yeah, we export a lot of food. We also import a lot of food. $147B for 2020, so almost dollar for dollar the same. It varies.
Your second point is way off. Food moves crazy distances. The last mile is critically important. The direct path from farm to table is pretty much irrelevant and you couldn't possibly use the waterways to solve this problem effectively in its entirety. People don't want to eat a ton of raw corn and soy.
Hunger is a problem, but it's a hard problem. Cost and nutrition and logistics do a weird dance. Many (most?) people suffering from food insecurity are also obese.
It's literally not a problem that the government can solve, because the government classifies people to whom it provides food as 'food insecure'. If the government provided unlimited credit for all those people to spend on food, they would still be classified 'food insecure.'
Malnutrition death rate in the US is something like 1 per 100,000 per year. It's likely a large fraction of those are mentally ill people or neglected children.
While even in 1 in 100,000 is sad, the idea 10% of America is even close to starving is a fictional reality designed to deceive.
> Based on self-reported data from 12 states, one in three food insecure adults are also obese. Furthermore, food insecurity and obesity were found be associated in the general population and many population subgroups, especially women. These findings corroborate the relationship between food insecurity and obesity found in previous research. Although the association between obesity and food insecurity found in this study was cross-sectional, contributing factors to obesity and food insecurity suggest a need to address the importance of increasing access to affordable healthy foods for all adults.
The study you cite shows that "food insecurity" is associated with obesity. Not that it causes obesity.
Study uses questions like: “How often in the past 12 months would you say you were worried or stressed about having enough money to buy nutritious meals?”
By design, this study causes obese people who eat up their food supplies to be more likely to be captured by the study than their less consumptive counterparts, even with equal amount of available food.
I would expect someone who shovels enough food in their mouth to be obese to be the kind of person to spend more than needed for meals (or to end the meal with less spare reserve food), causing them to stress about their overspending. It's not much surprise an obese person shoveling down food is more worried about overspending than the skinny person not shoveling down their hatch until they are the size of Oklahoma. Eating 4000 calories of even the cheapest food like rice and beans costs more than eating 2000 calories worth rice and beans; of course the blimp-sized person eating the 4000 calories of rice and beans is going to stress more about the cost than the person eating 2000 calories of rice and beans.
Put another way, it makes sense to me a food insecure person might say "I will buy 4000 calories worth of rice and beans instead of 2000 calories worth of rice and beans because I am food insecure, then I will save the difference in case food is inaccessible later." An obese person will then eat all 4000 calories and stress about being out of money, and become "food insecure" via this study by answering they're worried. Whereas the skinny person is not gonna stress as much, because they still have 2000 calories worth of rice and beans after their meal is done, and thus be less likely to be classified "food insecure" by the question of this study. That is, the study is designed to capture the obese person as being more food insecure even when they have same food availability of the less obese person.
Wow, that's a hot take. Not only are you blaming the fat people for being fat, you're also implying their preference for food is a causal factor in them being less financially stable?
People who are food insecure are poor. Poor people eat shitty food, binge eat more commonly when presented the opportunity, and likely suffer from more stress / malnutrition.
Food insecurity doesn't mean you're constantly underfed. It just means you can't generally know where your next meal is going to come from. Hunger sucks. It's not tough to see how that could cause you to eat more.
Veggies are not cheap. Rice and beans aren't particularly healthy. People in poverty lack money, but they also lack time, cooking equipment, and food storage equipment. You tend to get a lot of food with high carbs and salt and sugar and nothing else. Perhaps you don't really know what your poor contacts eat, or they're just not representative. This is well studied.
Veggies are not cheap. Rice and beans aren't particularly healthy.
Veggies are dirt cheap. Sure, pre-sliced baby carrots in star shapes aren't cheap, but the poor shouldn't buy those.
You should tell the 80% of the world population that lives off beans and rice as staple foods. They tend to have a lot less obesity and live longer than Americans. And we're comparing it to unhealthy food - how on earth is rice and beans "not particularly healthy" compared to potato chips and fast food?
Amazing how the poor of America eat worse than the really poor in the rest of the world. And amazingly they have the time, equipment (a pot!) and storage (fridge) to make it work.
Sounds more like a lack of life skills and poor choices more than anything.
It is well studied that healthy foods tend to cost more. Vegetables are not dirt cheap. And are especially not dirt cheap per calorie. Worth nothing that rice and beans are not a vegetable as that seems to be a weird fork in your argument
The correlation between poverty levels and obesity are also well studied and are not uniquely american. Although the trends don't hold for developing countries where the poor are often on their feet all day.
> Amazing how the poor of America eat worse than the really poor in the rest of the world. And amazingly they have the time, equipment (a pot!) and storage (fridge) to make it work.
It is rent, wealth inequality, spread out urban planning leading to single dollar trees being the only available grocer, commute times, social support structures, corn subsidies, and a myriad of other factors that make this a very complicated issue.
But sure, let's just blame the poor for being stupid. I'm sure you'd be just fine making $7.25 an hour.
>The correlation between poverty levels and obesity are also well studied and are not uniquely american. Although the trends don't hold for developing countries where the poor are often on their feet all day.
Is it possible the kind of self-discipline needed to prevent yourself from over-eating is more heartily rewarded economically in the US than in some of the particularly impoverished nations where only a tiny fraction escape poverty? I don't know, but it's worth noting the causative direction could influence going from obesity to poverty, poverty to obesity, neither, or even merely correlative dependent variables caused by some other 3rd stimulus.
No. And again, not uniquely american but rather common to pretty much all developed countries. Rural poor individuals are typically doing hard labor all day. Urban poor individuals are typically sitting in a chair.
Aside from grossly misdefining poverty by the U.S definition as "abject poverty" (it isn't even close and most certainly abject poverty doesn't apply to 18% of the U.S. population), your argument here boils down to. This factual accounting of a reduction in poverty doesn't fit with my completely arbitrary ideal of how much reduction I want to see by now, so it's "blowing sunshine up my ass". Huh?
As another reply here said, By all means, explain how you'd make poverty stand at 1%. Also explain what system you'd have that's so much better if you like.
Basic point. It's easy but disingenuous to compare the real world's changes with those of our limitless notions of the ideal. The valid thing is to compare something now to how it was previously for genuine perspective.
If your threat model includes nation state intervention, a 5 Euro VPN isn't going to help you. In fact, no VPN is going to help you. The best you can get is probably Tor + Tails, but even then you better be looking over your shoulder.
That's not necessarily true. A lot of state surveillance comes through having backdoor or legal access to lots of services. Many VPNs have been tested in court on whether they actually have information on you to disclose, and some even have independent audits to verify that such information is not even kept.
At best, you can hope to make surveilling you more expensive or more inconvenient. But if Snowden taught us anything, it's that whatever you needed to do to get yourself tangled up in the 5/14 eyes trip-wire, you've already done, long ago, and continue to do.
VPNs don't mean shit. You're leaking data everywhere you go. Browser fingerprinting, WiFi/BT signals, cell tower signals, GPS. If you own a smart phone and a credit card you're already fucked.
Let's not confuse things for people by making them think if they plop a 5 Euro VPN between them and their yahoo! email account that this does anything at all to deter state level actors.
VPNs are good for a few things:
(1) Evading state-sponsored censorship (which uses technology minted in good old Silicon Valley) -- where the state doesn't really care unless you're really bothering them
(2) Marginally disrupting the pan-opticon that is surveillance capitalism by mixing the signals a bit, where your ISP can't sell you out to data brokers. But even then... DNS leaks, etc still happen and still fuck with the plan.
(3) Maybe not getting scooped up as badly in the state dragnet, and maybe not being accused of something you actually didn't have anything to do with.
But brother, if you think you're gonna be the next Ross Ulbrich with your Mullvad VPN, then you better be memorizing your recipe for toilet wine because you're gonna land in a fed pen.
Mate, I don't know if you realize this, but most people here just want to hide due to minor privacy concerns, not a plan to overthrow the government or some shit. Of course if the FBI is after you, no, Mullvad won't protect you. But in the more realistic scenario that Disney might be after you, would Mullvad be a liability or not, that is the question.
That is true but not relevant to my question of whether Mullvad's data retention policies have been tested in court. One uses a commercial VPN to pirate HBO, not dodge the alphabet boys.
That's not a compelling reason to buy or continue to own a Tesla.
The fantasy that BEVs are 'much simpler' than ICE vehicles has confused a lot of people. The reality is that the complex electronics, battery management systems etc can only be worked on by Tesla techs with access to DRM protected diagnostics and restricted access online workshop manuals. All modern vehicles, whether ICE, hybrid or BEV are incredibly complex so fewer and fewer people can or want to work on them.
This is a huge problem going forward for everyone. We need to get back to the VW Beetle/Golf etc era where it was possible for even a knowledgable owner could perform major repairs on the vehicle they own, and which were bread and butter for local mechanic shops
> That's not a compelling reason to buy or continue to own a Tesla.
Well sure. It’s just the state of the world. I’d expect a Tesla owner to be someone who can handle repairs having to be re-done. They are luxury cars, after all.
For reference, I’ve owned several Teslas and none of them have been at the level of fit and finish appropriate for their price. All of them have needed some finicky part or another fixed under warranty.
The cars, though… they’re just so much fun to drive that all of that doesn’t really matter to me.
I don’t agree that is a huge problem going forward for everyone. I think it’s something that will work itself out given the incentives that Tesla has to get their act together. And it’s not really a problem for the vast majority of owners, who have other options for transport while their car is repaired.
Teslas are not Corollas. Teslas are not “EVs for the Everyman” no matter what Elon says.
I’m not interested in picking up a wrench and working on my own car. I don’t mind that Tesla is sending out newbies to work on cars because I’ll just keep taking it back until I’m satisfied. But, you also couldn’t pay me to go to a traditional dealership.
Maybe MkIVs ruined me, that's where most of my experience is.
Please never say "back to the VW" and "Beetle" in the same sentence. They're shoehorned together in the worst of ways.
If we're going to go back to the Beetle era where it was easy to work on, I think you have to go back pretty far. That's probably too old for most people.
Completely different than a Golf or Jetta the same years, which usually allows you to get to whatever you'd like. If not, at least the service position let's you yank the engine quick.
The original air cooled Beetle was super simple to work on. Once you had done it a few times, you could pull the engine, rebuild it, and reinstall it in an afternoon (assuming you had parts already on hand).
There has to be something going on with Amazon's pricing model when the paperback of the book you linked is $500.
I'm thinking back really hard, but I don't know if I've ever looked around a 50's/60's Beetle more than a quick glance. If they built a new electric car as cheap and easy as those supposedly were to work on, I'd be very interested.
Since High Sierra (released 2017), their documentation points to the App Store installer links instead of to DMGs [1]. It’s still possible to create a DMG installer for newer versions using createinstallmedia on the command line after downloading the installer to a Mac.
> Some might call it inhumane. But, it provides rehabilitation for those willing to seek care, it provides safety for those who've 'fallen on hard times' and makes the difficult decision to socially-isolate the small but dangerous minority within them.
Quoting you for emphasis. The “compassionate” version of addressing homelessness by Seattle and SF is anything but. Put another way: if I were mentally ill, homeless, and endangering myself and others on the street… I wouldn’t want to be left to my own devices, to OD. I’d hope that someone in my life would step up and actually help me through it, even when that help was hard, even when it meant putting me in an uncomfortable place like institutionalization.
People on HN are very good and detecting when someone is trying to blow sunshine up their ass.
Take, for example, the second part of this tweet:
>Very poor households (< $25K) shrunk from 24.7% to 18.1% (number rose slightly)
That is an abject failure of an economy if I even saw one. 18.1% of households in the most embarrassingly rich country in the history of the planet are living in abject poverty? Even with what you can do with poverty wages nowadays, that fucking sucks.
This rate should be <1%.