What's with the demeaning sarcasm? No one - except you - said that building software and getting aids are the only two options. I'm sure you can see what he intended - there are many, many other options, starting with a low-skill low-wage job.

I responded with sarcasm because I'm sick of comments like the parent.

Whenever anyone brings up the possibility of creating a proper safety net in the US, or if anyone just mentions that, hey, there are some people in our country living in unbelievably shitty conditions--there's always someone ready to say "no, they deserve it, they're just lazy."

It boggles my fucking mind that someone on HN, who's probably pretty well-educated, who's probably living comfortably on a cushy tech job, could say with a straight face that poor people, as an aggregate, are lazy leeches who would rather get AIDS than get work as dishwashers.

A nontrivial fraction of people who read this article respond with scorn for the people involved, rather than concern about the system that puts people in these positions. That squashes any possibility of political or social change.

Look at some of the other comments in this thread--"why don't they just get jobs?" Willful ignorance at its worst.

Great you went from infantile mockery to grossly misrepresenting my argument. I suppose that's progress. I'm not sure where to begin with this.

Poor people aren't lazy. But someone who would rather contract aids than work IS a worthless lazy leech.

So am I to believe that you think all educated people working in the tech industry hold far left views? That is naive beyond description.

Your argument is that

>[the people in the article] would quite literally rather die a slow painful death than work and support themselves

And that argument is stupid. I don't care if you call yourself a conservative, people will call you out if you say something stupid. My point wasn't that you should be a liberal, my point is that you're smart enough to know better.

You keep saying these people would rather have AIDS than work. You're naive for thinking that they have the option to work; they would rather have AIDS than starve in a gutter.

Perhaps I never had a choice to make any other argument because I was underprivileged and I couldn't figure out how to ride the bus to get to the library to read about just how underprivileged other people can be. Calling my argument stupid in such a situation would be a lack of your ability to check your own 'sociology' privilege.

All I'm saying is that you should think about what's more likely--that people would rather get AIDS than work, or that work isn't always easy/possible to find.

I'm not implying they should go get funding. but They COULD move to a less expensive city and get a regular job.

There's a big difference between a poor person and someone who thinks contracting a fatal disease is a better approach than finding a job and actually supporting themselves.

But hey, if someone has resigned themselves to leech off society under any circumstance maybe having them contract a fatal disease willingly is simply natural selection at work.

Sure, because there are loads of jobs going unfilled right now for poor black men, right? All they have to do is just go get one.

It looks like they need waiters on Mount Desert Island:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/08/13/friends-of-aca...

There's ALWAYS a job available if you're willing to accept a low enough wage and relocate. No matter who you are. Maybe not right where you're at now.

Surely you're not implying that getting AIDS is in any way a good idea.

Yeah. Actually, from that guy's perspective, given the actual situation, it is. He'll be sick, but he'll have a home and food, for as long as he lives - and if he was homeless, he might have died sooner than he will now, with AIDS but housed.

Either way, getting a stable living situation after you haven't had one is a tremendous relief.

I've lived in a poor neighborhood before. If you haven't, and clearly you haven't, then you have no freaking idea. I've never been that poor, because for me, you're right, there's always a job; I'm educated and white. But for this guy and for a lot of other people I've known personally, this simply IS NOT TRUE.

Even your blithe assumption he can relocate is naive. His situation might be worse than a dog's in a shelter, but at least he understands it. He knows the people, and may even have some family - even if his family hates him, they're still his people! You think this uneducated black man whose job history consists of getting fucked for cash is just going to pick up and move to North Carolina and get a nice Webdev gig surrounded by a bunch of strangers?

How about we take this the other way around. I'm assuming you're white. Let's say you relocate to the depths of Harlem or maybe the south side projects in Chicago, rent a place, and start going door to door looking for work. Is that something you can imagine working out well?

But be that as it may, there's not ALWAYS a job available if you're willing to accept a low enough wage and relocate. The fact that you believe this already means you simply have no expertise in being disadvantaged.

I have lived in poor neighborhoods. For a period of a few weeks I was unemployed, Because I had been a student I was ineligible for unemployment benefits and living in the woods in a tent. I went out and got a job washing dishes and got on my feet. Moved on to a bus boy gig. Then got a job doing tech support and paid my own way through school that was almost 10 years ago now.

So please don't come to me and tell me I have no idea what it's like to work my way up from rock bottom.

Willing to accept a low enough wage? There's a hard floor on that in most countries. Even ignoring minimum wage, there's a minimum amount of management overhead involved in having an employee, especially a low-wage, low-skill employee, and the value produced by a worker must at least overcome that even if he is to be worth hiring for free.

Willing to relocate? How about able to relocate? Moving to a distant land is a non-trivial exercise.

I seriously don't get your attitude in this thread. You're basically declaring that various serious problems in society are not, in fact, problems at all. According to you, as best I can tell, every single poor or homeless person out there has no obstacles to getting out of their predicament if they just did some obvious things like find employment. This leads me to ask: why do these people exist at all, then? Nobody wants to be poor, so if they can get out of it so easily, why are they still poor?

This is one of those instances where the mere existence of a problem indicates that it's hard to solve, while you're blithely proclaiming it to be trivial.

My attitude comes from the experience of living in a tent in the woods with no money then finding a job washing dishes and working my way up.

I'd wager you had a great deal of mental capital that you're not taking into account.

Yes but I didn't need it to wash dishes.

I doubt that.

Doubt it all you want but until you go DO it you don't have a leg to stand on.

I'm sure you've never been in precisely the same situation as the guys you're criticizing, so where's your leg to stand on?

Being able to reason about such things the way you do is, in itself, a privilege.

So I should check my "ability to reason" privilege. Got it.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Could you elaborate?

Maybe i should've used the term 'advantage' then. I simply wanted to point out that the ability to choose/reason is in itself very much something you 'inherit', rather than some innate skill that we all have equally.

'COULD' is a complicated concept. It's something I struggle with too, when I watch movies like 'City of God', where mostly I ask myself 'why the hell don't these kids leave the city. or the country.'

Or The Wire where a kid who 'got out' decides to come back.

There are many factors that play a role in the options we have, and the strongest factors have nothing to do with what's objectively best.

Psychologically speaking, it's a bit dangerous (and too easy) to say that poor people should just stop living their poor lifestyles and leave their poor friends and poor family for a world totally unknown to them. This is also true for addicts, or homeless people. I've come to know quite a few of both, and if anything I've started to respect the difficulty of their situation.

I read several years ago about a woman living in Northern Virginia who was considered a mild "success" story because she was able to get on a bus and ride about 2 miles to her job at McDonald's. She and her family had lived in the same neighborhood for a few generations within walking distance of schools, church, clinic, shopping, social services building, etc. None of them had ever left the neighborhood for anything, let alone a job. Learning that leaving the neighborhood as she did was a significant accomplishment for her - given her history/background - was a real jolt to my worldview.

Provincialism is like a massive invisible wall. The people on either side of it generally can't even fathom what it's like to be on the other side of that wall, but they don't even know it's there.

I spent several years growing up in small-town Wisconsin. The idea of moving to another place is just unfathomable to a lot of people who live in a place like that. Not just hard, like, oh, that would cost a lot of money and be a lot of work, but unfathomable, the way buying a house on Mars would be.

So much of our outlook is driven by our experience and we don't even realize it unless we encounter the right circumstances. If you grew up in one little area and that's all you know and that's all anybody you know has ever known, then leaving it is a big deal. Some people will pull it off, but many others simply won't be capable.

Agreed it's tough. I've never seen any of those movies but after living downtown in a city with about 400k people I've known a few addicts and homeless people. The vast majority had no intention of getting on the right track and would steal from anyone the second the opportunity presented itself. I think it's important to help the people who genuinely want to get on the right track.

But I have no sympathy for someone who thinks contracting AIDS is a way to improve their lot in life.

1) Leaving the city means leaving the safety net of begging for money and food. 2) Would you hire a homeless man who just moved to your small town and is starting to suffer from withdrawal, has no place to live, and has no means of reliably getting to work? for any job?

There's a world of separation between the jobless and the homeless. No amount of willpower can bridge that divide, only fortune.

Bullshit. Almost every sizable city has programs and facilities for the homeless who actually want to improve their lives. They can get Cell phones for a dollar a month, and a place to stay while they get on their feet. The only rules are they have to TRY and kick whatever habit has already destroyed their life.