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Comment by claudiug | Hacker News Reader

we are living in a world where if you are unlucky to have money or a proper job, people will see you as a lazy, cheap, dirty human.

I guess, maybe universal salaries, and free school, medicine will make our societies engage in what is important in life. Be happy, engage with your families and friends.

When I was young, I remember clear, days when I was starving, and so my parents trying and fighting to provide some food. Now, I life my first 30 years of life, and realize that nothing change. We are working for money and dreams that are fake.

In Berlin, capital, you see more people that are searching for food, empty bottles, and are in hartz and people look at them as dead animals. In Berlin, there are east european poor people, that sleep on the bridges, on parks. What they are doing? Ask for money.

Been poor in Germany, I guess is better than in Bulgaria or Romania, but been poor in any country, also ignorant make us damn idiots.

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I guess, maybe universal salaries, and free school, medicine will make our societies engage in what is important in life. Be happy, engage with your families and friends.

From what I have seen, this will also result in hordes of people with tons of free time who have useless degrees who haven't been properly trained to think and aren't armed with basic knowledge about how the world actually works. They will then proceed to engage in social media to manipulate their democratic governments to their advantage and to the detriment of their society's future well being.

This has already been happening, but the amount and degree of free time such people have will be increased dramatically, as will their impact on the political system.

As opposed to what? Employers and business lobby groups presently manipulate society and democratic governments for their own ends, to the detriment of their society's future well being.

Besides which, "useless degrees" seems to be used in this context to mean "Anything I feel doesn't have employment prospects." Those things are not the same as each other.

"useless degrees" seems to be used in this context to mean

Means degrees that don't indicate you learned how to think and how the world actually works. My distinction isn't by discipline. My distinction is by the intellectual ability of the individual holding it.

> In Berlin, capital, you see more people that are searching for food, empty bottles, and are in hartz and people look at them as dead animals.

Context for the bottle thing: Germany has a deposit on bottles that gets refunded in cash when you return a bottle to any supermarket. It's up to €0.25 for plastic bottles which is quite a bit, so some people collect bottles that others have thrown away. (This is also why it's nice to put your bottle next to the bin rather than in it if you're not returning it yourself – saves people the hassle of rummaging around in there.)

I can't personally confirm the "looking at people like they're dead animals" thing, although I do admit that you get a bit jaded when you've been asked for spare change for the third time in a row on the same S-Bahn train.

I'm currently living in Rome and it's pretty much the same here. If you sit outside having a coffee in certain areas people will come by asking for change - you usually see the same people everyday. In the tourist areas you will be approached a million times to buy selfie sticks or other junk by street vendors.

I regularly see people rummaging through rubbish bins to see what they can salvage, and if someone dumps an appliance on the street (this is how they "recycle" here in Italy) things like the motor and cables will be gone in a few hours. The scary thing is a lot of people you see are young people - they've clearly just been failed by the system.

I'm from the UK and lived in London a few years ago ('09 - '11) and I remember seeing a few people begging but they were usually drunkards. I don't remember so many young people, or getting approached to give money as much as here. I wonder how the UK does things differently to Germany and Italy?

The German example above is exaggerated (I live in Berlin myself).

Italy, like most of southern Europe, has a huge problem with youth unemployment that Germany & the UK generally do not share.

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