Yeah, that’s some good stuff there. Spoken like someone that gives exactly no shits about people.
Well, according to your previous posts, as long as they don’t come to the US, they can tough it out in those poor places, because they should be shot if they travel here illegally.
Nice, but there should be a follow up meme of the penalty, and maybe a way to do an instant replay.
But still, thank you. I always appreciate it when refs make the right call.
We should start charging him 20 dollars every time he proclaims echo chamber before stomping away. We could probably use the money to give some poor kids something special, call it a charity.
What a cliche. You came in here intent only on teaching us a lesson. It didn’t quite go the way you expected so you threaten to take your ball and go home. I call your bluff. Stop engaging.
Guap seems to be coming at this from a completely different perspective which i understand but don’t think is an accurate description of the actual problem.
What he is hearing is that the government is going to give you something for free, and now we’re complaining about it. Like, i’m starving and someone hands me a bag of pennies, and i throw the pennies back at them and yell “Give me real money!”
The perspective of everyone on the forum is that the government is already providing better support than a bag of pennies right now, but he thinks that you should grateful whether you get a debit card or a bag of pennies, because there are starving children in China, but everyone is telling him it would actually cost more to haul around giant bags of pennies to everyone, but he’s stuck on the being ungrateful bit and is mad that people are turning down free things.
I mean… yes.
But his original point is still a strawman. He’s arguing a position that doesn’t exist and hasn’t in over half a century. Then, when people point that out, he moves the goal posts and insults everyone.
He literally asked why people felt the way they did, as if he didn’t read anything above him. Others replied anyway, which he completely ignored of cousre. Then he asks why everyone is so riled up about it, it’s not as if we know anyone on SNAP or on government assistance, and people reply, yes and actually some of us have been on it… doesn’t care. Then he decides well since I can’t argue with poor people in the USA, i’ll just grab some other country and compare their poor which will guarantee me the win! Then the response is, but we’re not talking about food vs no food, we’re talking about a program that is actually pretty darn efficient and meets it’s goals, goals he knows nothing about, and then bam, going home with his toy, echo chamber, promises to never come back again.
I still think that some sort of co-op system to get boxes of free food from local producers to people would be beneficial. We’ve talked before about how some inner cities apparently don’t have access to grocery stores and stuff, so getting healthy fresh food to people who can’t afford to get it would be a good thing.
Yep my local farmer bud is mad about this box thing. But getting him and his buddies together to send fresh food to people who need it would make him very happy.
As an FYI, SNAP has now expanded to farmer’s markets (not all, as each needs certification, but it’s a growing number). Thats said, food deserts do still exist.
Our local farmers have food delivery programs, and they take EBT; I don’t mean just one farm, it’s a group of farmers, ranchers, so you can get a box of honey, eggs, meat in addition to seasonal fruits and vegetables at regular intervals.
And yes, you can also shop the local farmer markets with the card, when they’re around. They start around March I think.
Thanks for the info. I was thinking I would tell my bud (he runs a market) but lo and behold he already has that set up. I figured he would, he’s an intelligent and compassionate dude.
The Onion, coming in with the hot take per usual:
Bullshit.
You have no fucking earthly idea how SNAP works.
Lotta farmer’s markets in north St. Louis, west Chicago and west Philly are there?
In the “now it can be told” department…
When I was 46 years old, I experienced real unemployment for the first time. I had savings, sure. I had unemployment benefits too, for a while. But as things stretched out, I started to worry.
I’d worked in restaurants for 25 years. It was cheap and easy access to good, fresh food that whole time. And I quickly discovered that food can be a huge expense that accrues daily. You gotta eat.
And so as I was laying out budgeting as unemployment was running out, I moved things into categories. Fixed expenses, like rent, insurance, utilities. Variable necessary expenses, like transportation. And then food. Food was a huge variable expense, and it worried me greatly, going from spending so little on food to having to spend a decent amount just to get the cheapest fresh fruit or canned veggies from a supermarket.
And so I looked into SNAP. Not because I needed it right then, but because I wanted to know what would be involved, and what the process was, and everything else just in case. And what I discovered is that SNAP isn’t free money or free food or hassle free anything. It’s a pain in the ass beyond anything I was either expecting, or had ever experienced. The steps made applying for a loan seem like child’s play. It’s an incredibly intrusive process that involves all sorts of background checking to prove your (lack of) income and (lack of) assets. What I rapidly determined was that if you apply for SNAP, pretty much everyone in your sphere of relationships is going to know about it. They’re going to contact family. They’re going to contact previous employers. They’re going to humiliate the shit out of you to determine that you really need this government assistance, especially if they think you’re even slightly borderline with regards to need for SNAP. The entire process is going to demoralize you, because the process is set up to discourage people from abusing it from the outset. And then they’re going to hassle you continually to prove that you still need it week over week and month over month.
And I also determined that even if I were dead broke, with zero assets and income, that I’d be able to get all of about $120 per month for groceries for myself as a single. Tops.
When I see people talk about SNAP being some easy way to cadge free no-hassle food for the poors, it kind of pisses me off, honestly. If you’re legit living off SNAP, you’re eating a lot of canned, off-brand vegetables, a shitload of ramen and cheap soup bought by the case. And that’s if you’re trying to eat “healthy”. For most folks in that dire situation, it’s simply necessity to consume calories to live off of. And so they’re buying cheap calories to subsist on…which is why the problem with the poor and noticing how heavyset some of the folks in that demographic are isn’t one of food education at all. It’s food necessity. You’ve got four bucks for food. Quick: gonna buy four apples with that and enjoy the 400 calories they provide? Or are you gonna buy some off-brand cake mix for a buck, an egg for a buck, and some oil and make cake? 4,000 calories there. Which one’s going to feed you for two days? (That, of course, is surmising that you’re living someplace with access to a stove. Lots of poor folks aren’t.) It’s a terrible way of life and diet. It’s existentially terrifying.
(Oh, and you know who gets boxes of food shipped to them by the government in the manner described by Trump? The poor and indigent who live on Native American reservations. Go ahead and ask them about how nice their diets are.)
I have some experience with this.
The thing is… a substantial number of people is in fact too stupid to take care of themselves and it’s a number far higher than you might think. Most of these people are indeed found among the poor because being stupid with money inevitably leads to poverty, but there are plenty who have medium to high incomes and still manage to end up in the red every month because they cannot control their spending.
The municipality here used to withhold money from social security to pay for living space/utilities for certain poor families. This system worked. A decade ago, however, the exact sentiment you’re expressing took over and the city stopped doing this, just letting people have the money instead.
This led to more missed rent (and subsequent evictions), more people being cut off from utilities and more drug abuse.
So yeah… it may be condescending if you’re someone who ended up in poverty due to no fault of your own, but is that really worse than giving money to people who have proven they cannot handle it? And no, I’m not saying that being poor qualifies as such proof.
It is really aggravating knowing folks who have enough but who end up in the red every month.
I’d be fine with a social safety net program which allows folks who are frugal to live work-free, but those who lack it don’t get that much benefit. I’d have sympathy for the mentally ill/those with a reason to go in the red though, but some folks are just stupid. I work with some.