We live in the richest country on planet earth and we eliminated child hunger here during COVID only to roll it back.
It's not even 1.5% of the budget currently. Compare this to our military adventurism budget.
Every $1 invested in SNAP generates $1.80 in economic activity, right now.
Children need food to grow up and be 'productive', even if you don't see value in human life and are captial-maxxing; This is an important program for creating excess productivity. The same is true of well funded public schools. A well-fed and educated populous is optimal by every public metric.
I doubt you are an actual member of the bourgeoisie, so I must conclude you just enjoy a starving and undereducated mass of parents and children you look down upon for their poor moral character?
Adults need food to be 'productive' as well. Adults that are not afraid that they are going to starve commit fewer crimes.
You want to 'save' some money? Eliminate means testing entirely and give every American have a baseline EBT card food budget per person in the household. No special virtuous food categories to make sure the poor know they are being watched. Just a monthly cash infusion spendable at all grocers.
This way, walmart and other mega-corps won't be able to scam the government by creating positions that force their workers onto these means tested programs and lock them there.
Your implication that people when not given free food will starve and that your parent commenter wants people to starve is clear manipulation.
People using food stamps in the US often work full-time jobs making insufficient living wages from highly profitable companies like Walmart
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
I imagine they probably have a better inherent understanding of real-world food production style work effort than the majority of those of us who post to sites like HN.
I wouldn't be so sure of that on HN. (Also noting you're using the Marxist definition rather than the default dictionary definition, which is "middle class".)
A well-paid tech employee with a non-trivial amount of company stock is, strictly speaking, an "owner of the means of production". Even if you want to quibble with that, their interests are certainly well-aligned with that group - to the point that you generally won't hear a peep out of them as things get more and more dystopian, because of what Upton Sinclair observed, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
> I must conclude you just enjoy a starving and undereducated mass of parents and children you look down upon for their poor moral character?
It's much simpler than that. It's pure, unadulterated "I got mine and you ain't touchin' it". There's no real thinking that goes beyond that purely selfish position. The consequences aren't seriously considered, they're just taken as part of the natural order. Any causal connection is denied, rationalized by accusations of laziness, inferiority, etc.
I was using Marx's definition, and I am a member of that class, so defined.
My existing wealth and ongoing income of seven figures is derived almost entirely from capital accumulation.
I am knowingly and actively betraying my immediate class interest, here and elsewhere, because I'd rather my wealth increase more modestly to ensure we all live in vibrant society.
I do think it is foolish for salaried white collar workers not to see what is coming and begin unionization efforts; Their interests are ever more misaligned with capital with every year that passes.
'welfare queens' etc...
If you didn't notice this sleight of hand in the original comment, that means he did his work correctly.
His conclusion is that things should not be free and open, as a rule, because they won't generate money, attention, or respect if they are free.
He included food stamps in the middle of his list. This choice is not neutral.
The comment invites you to reframe your understanding of food stamps so as to later justify its dissolution as a result 'human nature'.
Food stamps are not intended to function like the other products he listed. Food stamps are not intended to generate respect or direct revenue.
Yet, he said that someone using the 'max' monthly budget of $300 for food, when making less that $26000, is part of the 'natural disrespect' continuum. Tell me, would you consider $300 a month on food excessive and disrespectful where you live? $3.30 per meal, 3 times a day for 30.5 days?
The whole structure of his 'disrespect' argument is a lie to begin with. People on food stamps do respect the value of being able to feed their families.
Most Americans I've met see their need for food stamps as a moral stain. They want so badly to overcome their 'failure' by working even harder. Many will take second or third jobs with tenuous protections, and have their wages stolen ($2600 per person, on average, almost as much as food stamps pays).
Either way, productivity goes up, inflation marches on, wages stay the same, and I'm the only one getting richer.
Anywho that is why I replied in the manner I did, because the subtext was clearly hidden well enough for many people to need it pointed out.
You are not immune to propaganda, doubly so for the propaganda you don't notice.
Have you considered channeling that energy into advocacy or volunteerism? I feel you'd like that.
In any case, his reply didn't even address the main point and was very condescending. I respect the troll o7
I know a few people who had to make use of food banks and were grateful at the time for the donations of others. They now try to donate what they can as payback.
This extends into the world of work as well. Employers that don't pay well tend to treat their employees poorly.
The entitlement is truly real at times. I think that sometimes I can be part of that entitlement too but I think I try to be respectful usually and say my concerns if I have any.
This sort of becomes a circular because VPS at the very least do indicate support and good quality/atleast decent quality hardware. A server too cheap and too overprovisioned with steal factor (Like Contabo) is universally hated by people. But these are the same people who will take deals if they are the cheapest across the board (myself included at times, I have got an idle netcup vps for a few months for 10$ simply out of curiosity but I do think that's 10$ worth spent to get the idea of a public facing ipv4 but yea)
So a lot of summer hosts/ deadpools (Scam-type) take on this opportunity and what they do is rent hardware for a month or year from other providers with large specs and split it into small chunks and give yearly, triannually, lifetime deals which can be too good to be true.
Turns out that they are, as usually sme sort of scam type stuff happens after a year or two or three.
This also makes it hard for new providers to try to prove their worth at times too if they are legit all within a market which is very price competitive.
For Steve Jobs it was not about respect or value, that's the lie. It was about greed.
As for value extraction, have a look at this article and weep: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Harvard-study-Open-source-has-a...
OTOH this also shows the huge potential FOSS has, if it manages to only slightly shift that balance in their favor.
Its weird to be all evo psych about this either way IMO, free as in gratis has only been situationaly possible at all for very short time of human history. All armchair philosophy needs to take it into account! As soon as you recognize that, we're forced to question such pat appeals to nature or what not, and drawn necessarily to consider how systems make humans one way or another.
Put another way, this position is incredibly fatalistic, as well as kinda sad and lonely to my ears.
Citation needed. You're describing a particular tendency, not some absolute property of human psychology. It's also a behavior that's greatly affected by social construction. In the US, the attitude you're describing is much more prevalent than in some other countries, because of cultural biases.