Hacker News Reader

Comment by alsetmusic | Hacker News Reader

I spent months repeatedly buying disposable dishes because I couldn’t afford real ones. Ironically, I couldn’t save the meager amount to purchase real dishware because of the perpetual cost of disposable dishes. My brother once told me that he had a similar situation with candles eating into his paycheck when his power had been shut off.

If your current paycheck doesn’t take you far enough to solve the problem, you have to pay for substandard stop-gap solutions in between. This serves to prolong the time it takes to accumulate the capital needed for a permanent solution.

View on HN

This reminds me of how constantly rushing to fill the client tickets and accumulating technical debt eats into a development team's ability to ever address the core problems in their software.

Industryautomation here: It always takes two. One to tackle customers complaining and keeping the system running, one two actually diagnose and fix the problem.

It should have been easy to find very cheap dishes at garage sales, depending on your city, I suppose. Oftentimes, people are basically trying to give things away (especially in last hour or so...)

It's easy to say that when you're well provided for, but one of the recurring themes I've heard from people in poverty is that your thinking literally changes to survival mode. So, I'm with you, in that it seems like there's an easy solution to this particular problem, but when you're scrambling for shelter and food, I can totally see how I wouldn't be able to approach a problem like this from a higher level.

Another element, I suspect, is that washing dishes takes precious time and energy, that an impoverished person probably doesn't have. It's easier to just throw away the dish. I'm not judging. If I stood on my feet for 6-8 hours doing grueling menial labor, I'd be exhausted, too.

I think us here on HN can have a tremendous impact on different levels of poverty if we listen to the struggles of impoverished people, and then use our well-fed, psychologically-safe minds to help brainstorm higher-level solutions.

You're right of course. Sometimes I feel like I can barely get everything in, and I'm living on easy street.

The "Boots Theory of socio-economic unfairness": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Vimes#Boots_theory_of_soci...

Why couldn't you wash the disposable dishes?

I assume the OP means paper plates like you would use for a picnic

OK, then why not buy plastic ones?

I've been so poor I had to sleep behind a dumpster and cover up with a cardboard box and I never found myself just buying paper plates over and over. The dollar tree will sell you a plate for 1 single George Washington. Or just eat out of the pot. Hell, I do that now just to save having to wash a dish. Something tells me this story doesn't add up.

Not even at a thrift store / second hand?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com