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Comment by 24gttghh | Hacker News Reader

> She lit a home-rolled cigarette and, getting to work with a mattock, tried to ignore the weather. She had lately been telling herself that she had to stop taking these risks. They were more than an hour from the nearest hospital, and what if she had another heart attack?

Yeah...she seems to be ignoring the heart-attack risk she is pumping into her lungs while she says that. I get that it's an addiction that is hard to kick, but come on. If you've already had quintuple bypass surgery, maybe it's time to give up smoking?

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I can relate to this sentiment, but you've got take into account the whole story:

- Failing health, already has nearly died. - No safety net. - Risks life every time this voyage is made. - Doesn't have access to many resources.

Here you have someone who doesn't have (what appears to be) working plumbing. Doesn't even have a _kitchen_ (just a hot pad). No assets or finances to speak of. Likely no support network. On top of all of that you want them to tackle a nearly impossible task of giving up addiction? I'll note that many many people with all the resources in the world cannot break addiction, let alone someone with nearly no resources.

Definitely not wise for her to continue with her habits as they are. But given the amount of stress and pressure, along with impending doom, some semblance of mercy should be exercised. It's not like she already doesn't have other major problems requiring her attention

I view smoking as a kind of break from life. It has a calming effect. Many people smoked during my deployments to Iraq for the same reason - it calms you and allows a simple break otherwise not found. I don't smoke as the smell gives me a terrible headache but I understand the reasoning - particularly when life is hard.

> "I view smoking as a kind of break from life. It has a calming effect. Many people smoked during my deployments to Iraq for the same reason - it calms you and allows a simple break otherwise not found. .."

I found this to be the same reason why many of my fellow shipmates smoked during my time in the Navy. It was a kind of pre-watch "bonding" session of sorts...We'd smoke our cigs, grab a quick bite from the galley, then relieve the watch...our pre-watch smoke was a kind of "shoot-the-shit" before we had to be serious and formal operators.

Smokin' and Jokin'. About the only part of the service I miss.

I did air traffic control at Balad. At that time it was considered one of the most complex and busiest air-spaces in the world, paraphrased from the president of O'Hare. Obviously, we didn't see combat or deal with life altering experiences but it was balls to the wall intense for 8 hours a day. At the time I even smoked a few Camels during breaks. Certainly a way to bond with a fellow controller during a break.

Thank you for your service. I did some time at good ol JBB in 08-09.

This is when I first started smoking. First I was bumming here and there, then in order to not feel like a bum I bought a pack and slowly the pack would disappear faster and faster... I smoked for four years (At peak a pack a day) and gave it up cold turkey. Lots of wasted money.

I was there a year prior in the fall of 07. I rarely smoked, at most 1 - 3 a day and usually just when controlling - sometimes I didn't cause I hate the after smell.

Glad you were able to quit! Aside from health, the money certainly adds up.

Smoking does not actually have calming effects. It only relieves the feeling of withdrawal cause by smoking in the first place.

This kind of sentiment is exactly why more liberals need to read more articles like this one. If you've never lived that life, it's easy to sit back and proclaim for someone else how much better things might be for them if only they didn't do things the way they do. It makes it easy to dismiss their problems as entirely their own fault while we get to feel good about giving out some solid advice.

Those cigarettes and that beer is what keeps her going every month. They are likely her only real source of meager happiness.

She doesn't have Netflix. Internet. Literally, a toilet to piss into. She doesn't smoke them because she's addicted, she smokes them because they make her life, for a short term, a little tiny bit better.

Y'ever notice how, the poorer people are, the worse their habits are? How they tend to eat more junk food, exercise less, spend more money on trivial things? Yeah, that's why. Healthy living is a luxury and an awful lot of folks have forgotten about that.

If we were honest, we'd find it very difficult to properly condemn the spending habits of the poor. I spent $20 on breakfast today for goodness sakes - that's probably more discretionary income than a lot of these folks have for a month. But that $20 of mine isn't really going to be missed, because I have a job that pays me an order of magnitude more than these folks earn. $700 a month to live on? That's what, 2 weeks rent for a single room in San Francisco.

At a root level, living brings on a level of expenses. It varies from place to place, but no matter how frugal you are, there are some expenses you simply can't run from. Once you've passed that level, it's easy to save.

I hate to be the bearer of reality, but...

This kind of sentiment is exactly why more [conservatives] need to read more articles like [some other expose about being poor, but in the city instead]. If you've never lived that life, it's easy to sit back and proclaim for someone else how much better things might be for them if only they didn't do things the way they do. It makes it easy to dismiss their problems as entirely their own fault while we get to feel good about giving out some solid advice.

Those cigarettes and that beer is what keeps her going every month. They are likely her only real source of meager happiness.

Smoking makes you feel better in the short term because your body is jonesing for that nicotine, and dopamine gets released when you give your body the nicotine. Then you don't smoke, and you feel shitty until the next nicotine hit. You give a poor justification for an addiction, and the happiness is merely a result of the feedback loop of nicotine > dopamine > no nicotine > dopamine crash > nicotine > dopamine > etc. I'm bastardizing the chemical reactions, but you get the idea.

I'm pretty sure medical science would say she is smoking because she's addicted.

If she didn't smoke, she would be less likely to die of a fucking heart attack so she could actually work and be actually healthy. I'm not shitting on all poor people making poor decisions, just this lady who has at least one easily solvable problem (smoking while being a heart surgery survivor).

Healthy living is not a luxury. Not drinking soda/eating junk food every day and walking are quite free if I recall...

Can you please stop? The problem with this line of commenting is that it's predictable, reductionist, and uncivil—not a good combination for Hacker News.

The parent comment is neither uncivil nor needlessly reductionistic. And why exactly does predictability constitute a demerit?

Ok, then. Try it.

For the next six months, give yourself just $10 a day after basic expenses (rent, utilities), and be grateful that you've got that much. Your $10/day budget will have to buy you gas, food, entertainment, and anything else you want to spend money on beyond only the most basic of necessities. Your gym membership will need to come out of that budget, too.

I've lived on a budget like this one. I know a few other folks on HN have similar backgrounds. That's why I tend to participate in threads like this one, because there are an astounding number of people that come out of the woodwork claiming that they understand a complex situation better than the people living in it.

I'm not ignorant of the science and biochemistry behind nicotine use. I'm telling you that the only things that people like this really have are cigarettes, booze, and junk food (and heroin or meth, depending on the region), and you want to take those things away from them too, and for their own good in your opinion.

> I'm pretty sure medical science would say she is smoking because she's addicted.

Maybe. How many cigarettes a week would be needed for that assessment? Because I'm pretty sure she's not nursing a pack-a-day habit.

I suspect that avoiding heavy labor is just as likely to reduce her heart attack chances. For that matter, a healthy balanced diet would likely do even more to help.

And where is she supposed to work? Let's see, poor education, limited access to bathing facilities, history of health problems, well into the age range where the college educated tech industry folks on HN complain about ageism and the difficulty of getting hired. Oh, and in a region of the country that's suffered from massive job and industry loss. I'm sure things will improve as soon as she stops smoking.

> Not drinking soda/eating junk food every day and walking are quite free if I recall...

Even if we ignore for a moment that healthy food can be more expensive than soda and junk food, you have to take into account the necessary time investment. Those things take more time and time is money.

One might reasonably argue that someone on disability payments should have more time than money, but habits like smoking and eating junk food were probably acquired when they were not on disability and needed to work as hard and as long as possible to make ends meet. No time for healthy cooking and exercise.

Don't forget economies of scale (or lack thereof). Many of these folks are in small towns shopping in small stores and paying high prices.

If I have the storage space and cash, I can buy a 20 pound bag of rice on sale for $7 or less and use it over time - or I can go to Costco and get a 50 pound bag and maybe even make a little money dividing it up and selling it to my neighbors. If I'm living in a tiny shack with $1.50 to spend, I can instead pay $1+ for a pound bag of rice. A lot of other staples are like that - if you can get a little bit ahead just for a little while it can start a cycle that lets you keep getting a little bit better off as time goes by. That'll last until the emergency, which will put you right back down there gathering roots for $0.20/your. Oh, and the emergency that started this for some folks is birth, and there's no place they can even get to that has bulk items like that to start with.

I will explain if you care to listen. Imagine you have no energy and are in pain all the time. A cup of coffee or a cigarette gives you a TINY respite. A few hours of feeling LESS worse. Then like all addictions you need more or you feel even worse. Suddenly it takes 5 cups of coffee a day just to not feel sicker and nobody wants to feel sicker when everything else about their life is horrible.

Now extrapolate that to pain pills, sleeping pills, risky behavior of any sort. When you live day to day and have no safety any pleasure or escape has an immense draw. There is also an element to "who cares I am screwed anyway" that we face every single day. In the end you are judging people on some sterile, elevated point of view and it's not real life.

This is probably the last post I will make lest I be accused of spamming...and I am probably wasting my breath...but I want to put a human face on this.

I am middle aged. I was strong and healthy and worked multiple jobs serving the community. I paid taxes and believed that if I needed help it would be there. I was ruined by unneeded and poorly done surgery I was scared into having and since then everything had rotted and faded as systems failed me and people turned on me. I live in severe pain daily with no healthcare beyond an income based primary care clinic for once or twice a year nonsense. I live trapped in the middle of nowhere with no public transport with the last people who will offer a bed and they did so to lord it over others and resent me daily. My meager partial pension covers my food and medication and the big expenses like a CT scan or surgery I have put off for years are ignored. I eat Walmart branded canned goods and cheap fresh stuff. I don't even have a computer anymore as mine and the backup from when I had a life gave up. Once someone donated an old one to me but it had issues and cost too much to fix. I use an external HD on a borrowed laptop I have irregular access to just to get online and have some exposure to the outside world. BTW the internet here is 1mpbs and irregular so add that to the mess. Imagine thinking daily of ending your life or deciding to run away to a cheaper place knowing it will be a dead end too sooner than later but you have no other hopes.

Now...if you read all that. Imagine living that way. With nothing but scraps. Imagine seeing no hope. Imagine years go by losing more and more. Now imagine how buying some junk food or a beer or a lottery ticket or some other "waste of money" brings you just a tiny little escape or joy or moment to not suffer and hate everything. Imagine when you DO that people jump all over you judging you and making you feel worse. I don't know if you even can truly imagine living like that...but I hope you do and reconsider. We are human beings and not abstract objects. We want lives as much as you do. Please consider this next time you encounter this topic or someone you are put off by...despite what you probably think it could be you next.

Thank you for posting all of these.

I am well off by most standards, and though I've made quite a few good decisions, there is no doubt that luck played, by far, the biggest part.

The one positive thing I have to say to you is this: I hear you, and quite a few others hear you too, though we may well be a minority. We know that the foolish, smug attitudes displayed by many are largely attributes of genetic and environmental history.

The only advise I can give you is straightforward: life will always be surprising, often in bad, but sometimes in good ways. It's virtually impossible to know what's coming up. So hang in there, if only to play the entire game that is, though unknown, before you.

If you can, drop me a line (email in profile) - if nothing else I may be able to hook you up with an old but functional laptop or two.

This article makes plain that she, and everyone she knows are, economically speaking, dead-men walking. And there is a certain dignity offering someone a smoke before they accept their doom.

The question that plagues me is: can I give her a job? What could this woman do, online or off, that would be valuable to society? Is Mechanical Turk, marketed to the rural poor, a solution?

This is why West Virginia, North Dakota, Nevada, and other low-education states are magnets for call centers coming back onshore.

They may be dumb as a brick in American terms, but they're able to function at a higher level than the average Indian call center employee, at a comparable salary, and they have the right accents.

Need AFFORDABLE internet connections first.

The call center can afford an internet connection; it's cheaper than the people they'd be hiring.

Really?

A T-1 around that area is almost $700/mo.

A 100Mbps symmetric connection is several thousand dollars per month.

Minumum wage in the US is $7.25/hr. In West Virginia specifically it's $8.75/hr.

That means that a full-time minimum-wage employee in West Virginia costs about $1460/month (assuming they get paid for 50 weeks a year and take 2 weeks of unpaid vacation; if they get paid for 40 hours every week, that's $1517/month). That's just for their salary. Employers also have to pay half of the FICA tax (7.65%), unemployment taxes (several percent, typically; no idea what it's like in West Virginia), provide the actual space to work, etc.

So you can get 2 T-1 lines easily for the cost of a single minimum-wage employee. Assuming your "several thousand dollars" is less than $10k, that corresponds to about 5 minimum-wage employees.

And maybe, just maybe, there might be an incentive structure that involves wages above minimum wage for people who do a good job.

So, why would anybody want a call center in WV if bandwidth and minimum wage are more expensive than Florida, for instance?

...and all employees would pay state income tax

How do the real estate prices compare?

But yes, in general the answer may be that they wouldn't put such a thing in WV.

Three seconds of Googling shows you're oh so wrong.

Oh so wrong about what, exactly?

A call center will spend $700/month on toilet paper. It's no big deal.

On 24 employees?

In spite of hold times, most call centers are hundreds and hundreds of people, operating 24 hours a day. Not sure where you get 24 people.

You assume they have the resources to do online work, like an internet connection capable of doing so and the capital to get that connection before doing the work. Also a computer or phone capable of doing the work.

Not sure why you got a downvote, because those are excellent points. However, I'm assuming the hopeful case where we can think of something valuable, in which case the capital cost of equipment and operational cost of connectivity would be an easy sell.

For example, would you accept this woman as a remote personal digital assistance, willing to pay for her phone, internet, and an extra $100/mo to do stuff for you? What is the quality of the work you might expect? What sorts of work would she do? Answer the phone? Argue with your credit card company? Keep an eye on your projects? Are people that capable really hiding in the countryside?

How would she connecto to the internet?

Super expensive LTE or satellite connection, or overpriced Shentel cablemodem, or DSL, where upload will be less than 1Mbps.

I bet a lot of them could make crafts that could be sold online, if there were someone there with a computer & internet to do the actual selling, and perhaps to purchase materials.

In some cases, they'd be preserving authentic folk art.

Hmmm. Smoking is more cost-effective than eating in many parts of the USA. Plenty of research exists as well on the self-medication benefits of nicotine use (ADHD, depression, etc.)

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