Can’t get over the fact that even food banks are apparently drive-through operations in the US, in what appears to be a suburban wasteland...
And considering that the increase in demand here is exclusively people who had a job until the bottom fell out on the economy, shouldn’t the whole rationale for requiring people to waste time and go through this exercise of very visible shaming be re-evaluated?
As far as
I understand it, it was commonly believed that poor people aren’t capable of handling money and therefore should only get food, not money. That idea was never a good fit with changing unemployment numbers, and these days it’s plainly visible that all these people didn’t suddenly become drug-addicts incapable of holding down a job. So why continue humiliating them?
I do not know why you've been downvoted but I am not sure that queuing up for something is "visible shaming"? If you need something, surely waiting in a queue for it is a logical thing to do? Its intent isn't to shame you, just you have to wait to get it in a line with all of the many other people who want it.
If I had no food, I'd be certain to get in a queue regardless of the "image" it presented. Priorities!
People sometimes die because they fail to mention their drug habits to their anesthesiologists. Pregnant Teenage girls commit suicide because they fear anyone finding out, or die giving birth all by themselves, or bleed out with a coat hangar stuck through their uterus.
Shame is a powerful emotion. It might be related to me being
European that I believe in sparing people such experiences (“dignity” is a big concept here), the stigma itself might be proportionally stronger in the US. Death of a Salesman is all about that, IIRC, and considered a cornerstone of Americana.
I am aware that shame is a powerful emotion, but I am not sure that a drug habit is the same as not having food. Food is something we all need, drugs are not. Food is a mandatory, drugs are optional. If I decide to take up something that is optional, dealing with the repercussions of my choice is part of me choosing to do said action. Food is very different.
I remember Death of a Salesman being about how the father carried on away from home and his son found out, and how he killed himself over the shame of it and how it affected his son. I thought it was more about the repercussions of his selfish actions than being purely about the emotions that he himself felt. If anything, the father was not a figure to be emulated.
In these sad situations, it is clear that there is a flotilla of other individuals who are also sadly in the same situation, so it isn't a "shame" queue that the "non shamed" observers can stand at a distance and deride.
If I was too ashamed/proud to be seen queuing for food (we all do at a checkout in supermarkets anyway?), I would perfectly expect someone to ask me if I considered starving as more important than my presented image. Which would I rather be: embarrassed, or starving?
>As far as I understand it, it was commonly believed that poor people aren’t capable of handling money and therefore should only get food, not money.
Do you know that the most educated people in the country are working hard to make poor people buy stuff they don't need? Who is actually running the advertising business and using the best technology ever invented to increase their profit at all cost? Who's to blame? Maybe be should just stop pushing people under stress to do stupid things and provide them with the best resources to fulfill their need. Money is an excellent medium for that when the game isn't just about blind profits.
I was mocking that idea, not supporting it. The problem always was that it’s really hard to give evidence for what’s basically different ideas about human nature. And that the truth is almost certainly some mixture of circumstances and individual shortcomings. But when unemployment suddenly jumps to maybe 20 or 30%, that uncertainty vanishes, and gone with it is any legitimization for purely punitive policies.
Why? It's quite likely they don't own the cars outright. People were encouraged to take our car loans and have repayments to make, and the US has constructed its cities in such a way that cars are essential.
I agree with you, but ... Vast majority of people don't have enough money or free time that they can "restructure" their life around not having a car, which would involve a house move at least. At the same time they are bombarded by advertising for easy car loans, and feel they have to compete against friends and neighbours with possessions which they cannot afford. They take the easy (and apparently state-sanctioned) way out.
> And you can live without a car, it is about structuring your life better.
While that's certainly holds true for some metro areas, it's certainly not a rule for sprawling US cities built for cars. Opting out of car ownership limits your employment options, social mobility, and so on.
> Because it is stupid. If you can't afford it, do not lease or rent it
A lot of people were being made fun of for not taking 0% loans in order to purchase cars: "it's free money!", they were told, "you'd be stupid not to take free money". It turns out those 0% loans had other hidden costs that many people were not aware of (like the costs of you not being able to service debt once your revenues go to zero).
You clearly haven't got the first clue about how Americans live.
In 90% of America, you need a car. It's not debatable.
This is a country that has spent the last 70 years spreading out on cheap land. Any place outside densely populated, carefully planned coastal areas doesn't have the density to make transit either affordable or reliable. Look at the city centres of places like St Louis or Atlanta; they're essentially glossy towers surrounded by highways - NOBODY lives where they work. Nobody. And they can't because American planners have ever heard the term 'mixed use' when it comes to zoning. It's a disgusting hellhole of urban planning; just a stinking, rotten cesspool of stupid.
> If you can’t afford it, do not lease or rent it.
I agree with you, but the problem is that the bankers aren’t telling this to people and have become over-reliant on subprime consumer debt like this. Uber launched a lease-to-buy program for their drivers so they could nicer cars on the road and then didn’t uphold their promise to attract more riders to Uber Black. Consumers are getting preyed upon so hard in the US and we act like it’s just business and poor people are dumb for a reason.
> And you can live without a car, it is about structuring your life better.
This is such an invalid statement for most Americans, and it’s deeply condescending to boot. There’s simply no viable alternative to car ownership for most Americans, period. If you have (or had) a job that required any sort of commute and you don’t live in a handful of cities with first class public transit (which are pretty much all in the northeast), you could spend up to 2-3 hours commuting each way every day using public transit. That’s just a non-starter for most. Even tech cities like Austin and SF have poor transit options compared to Europe.
I see one old Mercedes in the first photo below the headline and one Camaro in the very bottom photos. The rest look like Ford/GM/Chevy/Toyota, standard automaker labels for the most part. I know I've probably missed a few, but there are very few luxury vehicles in these photos.
Where are all of the high-end cars in these pics? Most look like standard makes and models to me.
Can someone explain this to us on the other side of the Atlantic? I mean, seen from Norway it looks totally insane.
How can such a large proportion of people be so financially insecure that a couple of weeks unemployment means that they are going hungry in the wealthiest country in the world?
It happens when the wealthiest country in the world spends more money on war fighting than the other top 10 military spenders in the world - instead of investing in its own infrastructure and social services, it is spending it on demolishing - and then reconstructing - the infrastructure of sovereign states its politically-powerful religious class have deemed enemies of their ideology.
It happens, because America has not been about the American people for decades. America is mostly focused on the destruction of sovereign states it finds guilty of being un-American in style.
Did everyone just suddenly forget that this is the country that has spent more on destroying sovereign states around the world, in the last 50 years, than any other country in the history of the world?
Wouldn’t the more appropriate metric be military spending as a percentage of government expenditures? The point being made above is that other governments spend on things useful to the populace and not war. I think by pointing at % of GDP another key point is lost: lower taxes than other countries. The US gov’t takes in less as a % if GDP and what it does take in it disproportionately spends on things that do not benefit the average Joe.
Well no, gov spending is not more appropriate than gdp for exactly the reason you mention.
If taxes are lower and hence less money is spent on social support, that has nothing to do with the military.
Still I don’t think that applies much to the USA - I think the total tax burden is comparable in many states. Medica* and SS are also huge parts of the budget.
Fascism and Christianity. Fascism makes it okay to alienate and harm large swaths of the population, creating self-blame amongst the poor; Christianity makes it acceptable to give handouts and second-rate care to people and call it the charity of God.
And yeah, it's fucking insane. But it's also how people want to live, it would seem. It's hard not to look at the voting patterns in the USA and conclude that certain areas do this intentionally.
Figures I found for 2017 say US median household rent is about 1 kUSD and median income about 3.6 kUSD. That doesn't sound too bad to me (seen from Norway where 1 kUSD gets you a one bedroom flat or less) so I presume that there must be important details not revealed in the averages. I got the figures from
Is it that the median figures hide a lot of people earning less and paying more rent? That is, inequality is the problem rather than the averages.
> Can't do much about wages because they are subject to global pressure,
Surely a lot of the low paid workers are in service industries; how are they subject to global pressure? It's not as if a restaurant can employ cheap Vietnamese labour.
Lot's of what we (most other first world countries) take for granted is not present in the US.
Health care insurance for example can eat a good chunk of that 3.6kUSD: the average cost of individual health insurance premiums is $440 for an individual and &1,168 for a family, in 2018 according to eHealth [1]
That makes health insurance behave like a very regressive tax.
In contrast in Germany where they have compulsory insurance it is only 7.6% to 15% of your salary, so something between USD 273 and USD 540 for a family. See https://www.sympat.me/germany-healthcare-insurance/.
Health insurance, student debt and housing eats up the paycheck assuming that you didn't already go bankrupt from some $100k medical bill.
>>It's not as if a restaurant can employ cheap Vietnamese labour.
You'd be surprised, teachers are being imported from the Philippines, lots of migrant labor, service workers are often undocumented, so this depresses wages, of course there's also H1Bs and who knows how many other types of work visas.
Covid-19 is going to strip bare all the niceties that allowed the other 60% of Americans to be oblivious to the financial frailty of the 40%. The next years will be very, very difficult for the country.
Sorry, only 200 people in line? That's a staggering number and looks more like something from 1981, Los Angeles in the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness".
Not something that should happen in our modern world.
...out of half a million. During a time of disruption of services.
Note: all those people could afford gas. So its not just about poverty. Its about timing, shortages etc. Maybe they were all hoping for toilet paper...
'Staggering' is an exaggeration? In cities of a million, a hundred people is maybe expected? Those pictures might qualify as a 'heatmap', meaning they reflect total population more than anything.
And imagine those lines if they were just people. Wouldn't look like much.
Further, what were the lines like two months ago? Has it changed much? 1.5X? 2X? Is that the expected fraction of people with fragile economic situations?
> In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil.
which brings to mind John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath:
> The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
44 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 90.9 ms ] threadAnd considering that the increase in demand here is exclusively people who had a job until the bottom fell out on the economy, shouldn’t the whole rationale for requiring people to waste time and go through this exercise of very visible shaming be re-evaluated?
As far as I understand it, it was commonly believed that poor people aren’t capable of handling money and therefore should only get food, not money. That idea was never a good fit with changing unemployment numbers, and these days it’s plainly visible that all these people didn’t suddenly become drug-addicts incapable of holding down a job. So why continue humiliating them?
If I had no food, I'd be certain to get in a queue regardless of the "image" it presented. Priorities!
Shame is a powerful emotion. It might be related to me being European that I believe in sparing people such experiences (“dignity” is a big concept here), the stigma itself might be proportionally stronger in the US. Death of a Salesman is all about that, IIRC, and considered a cornerstone of Americana.
I remember Death of a Salesman being about how the father carried on away from home and his son found out, and how he killed himself over the shame of it and how it affected his son. I thought it was more about the repercussions of his selfish actions than being purely about the emotions that he himself felt. If anything, the father was not a figure to be emulated.
In these sad situations, it is clear that there is a flotilla of other individuals who are also sadly in the same situation, so it isn't a "shame" queue that the "non shamed" observers can stand at a distance and deride.
If I was too ashamed/proud to be seen queuing for food (we all do at a checkout in supermarkets anyway?), I would perfectly expect someone to ask me if I considered starving as more important than my presented image. Which would I rather be: embarrassed, or starving?
Do you know that the most educated people in the country are working hard to make poor people buy stuff they don't need? Who is actually running the advertising business and using the best technology ever invented to increase their profit at all cost? Who's to blame? Maybe be should just stop pushing people under stress to do stupid things and provide them with the best resources to fulfill their need. Money is an excellent medium for that when the game isn't just about blind profits.
I thought the car pickup was happening because buildings have been closed for social distancing?
give it some time
And you can live without a car, it is about structuring your life better.
While that's certainly holds true for some metro areas, it's certainly not a rule for sprawling US cities built for cars. Opting out of car ownership limits your employment options, social mobility, and so on.
Most people do not have the money to purchase a car outright, even the cheap several thousand dollar ones.
Therefore they rent or lease, and hope this specific scenario never happens.
and get this: they clean them too.
Many Americans make awful decisions around their cars. We had this thread five months ago:
A lot of people were being made fun of for not taking 0% loans in order to purchase cars: "it's free money!", they were told, "you'd be stupid not to take free money". It turns out those 0% loans had other hidden costs that many people were not aware of (like the costs of you not being able to service debt once your revenues go to zero).
I agree with you, but the problem is that the bankers aren’t telling this to people and have become over-reliant on subprime consumer debt like this. Uber launched a lease-to-buy program for their drivers so they could nicer cars on the road and then didn’t uphold their promise to attract more riders to Uber Black. Consumers are getting preyed upon so hard in the US and we act like it’s just business and poor people are dumb for a reason.
> And you can live without a car, it is about structuring your life better.
This is such an invalid statement for most Americans, and it’s deeply condescending to boot. There’s simply no viable alternative to car ownership for most Americans, period. If you have (or had) a job that required any sort of commute and you don’t live in a handful of cities with first class public transit (which are pretty much all in the northeast), you could spend up to 2-3 hours commuting each way every day using public transit. That’s just a non-starter for most. Even tech cities like Austin and SF have poor transit options compared to Europe.
Where are all of the high-end cars in these pics? Most look like standard makes and models to me.
How can such a large proportion of people be so financially insecure that a couple of weeks unemployment means that they are going hungry in the wealthiest country in the world?
It happens, because America has not been about the American people for decades. America is mostly focused on the destruction of sovereign states it finds guilty of being un-American in style.
Did everyone just suddenly forget that this is the country that has spent more on destroying sovereign states around the world, in the last 50 years, than any other country in the history of the world?
If taxes are lower and hence less money is spent on social support, that has nothing to do with the military.
Still I don’t think that applies much to the USA - I think the total tax burden is comparable in many states. Medica* and SS are also huge parts of the budget.
And yeah, it's fucking insane. But it's also how people want to live, it would seem. It's hard not to look at the voting patterns in the USA and conclude that certain areas do this intentionally.
Can't do much about wages because they are subject to global pressure, but we sure could make housing cheaper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
and
https://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/us/
Is it that the median figures hide a lot of people earning less and paying more rent? That is, inequality is the problem rather than the averages.
> Can't do much about wages because they are subject to global pressure,
Surely a lot of the low paid workers are in service industries; how are they subject to global pressure? It's not as if a restaurant can employ cheap Vietnamese labour.
Health care insurance for example can eat a good chunk of that 3.6kUSD: the average cost of individual health insurance premiums is $440 for an individual and &1,168 for a family, in 2018 according to eHealth [1]
1: https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/resources/individual-and-fa...
Ouch!
That makes health insurance behave like a very regressive tax.
In contrast in Germany where they have compulsory insurance it is only 7.6% to 15% of your salary, so something between USD 273 and USD 540 for a family. See https://www.sympat.me/germany-healthcare-insurance/.
>>It's not as if a restaurant can employ cheap Vietnamese labour.
You'd be surprised, teachers are being imported from the Philippines, lots of migrant labor, service workers are often undocumented, so this depresses wages, of course there's also H1Bs and who knows how many other types of work visas.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/05/arizona-teac...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many-americans-...
Covid-19 is going to strip bare all the niceties that allowed the other 60% of Americans to be oblivious to the financial frailty of the 40%. The next years will be very, very difficult for the country.
Or cars make lines look big.
"Minneapolis, Minnesota: Cars line up at a drive-thru food pantry. "
Is only 200 cars by my counting.
I'm sure there is an untold problem, but I'm not big on trickery.
Not something that should happen in our modern world.
Note: all those people could afford gas. So its not just about poverty. Its about timing, shortages etc. Maybe they were all hoping for toilet paper...
We watch the world, seeing what others are doing and what works. Interesting times.
And imagine those lines if they were just people. Wouldn't look like much.
Further, what were the lines like two months ago? Has it changed much? 1.5X? 2X? Is that the expected fraction of people with fragile economic situations?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/business/coronavirus-dest...
> In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil.
which brings to mind John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath:
> The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.