Comment by ryanmercer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanmercer | Hacker News Reader

Their title is... ehhhh, I initially thought "oh a bunch of kids with heavy student loan debt for their liberal arts degrees are finding out adulating is hard" but in reality it is:

(paraphrasing) my step-father was arrested for a DUI, can't prove citizenship, and my mom needs money to drive to another state to visit him in custody (/)

This isn't novel, I've been hit up dozens of times on the street outside of shows, at gas pumps, in parking lots etc. This is just people hoping to hit a larger audience by soliciting twitter. You used to find Jains (or at least similarly dressed individuals) outside of airports begging for money.

And then this...

>Fans of “The Bachelor” sent contestant Becca Kufrin wine money on Venmo after she was dumped on national television, and more than 3,000 people sent a 23-year-old college student beer money after he held up a sign with his Venmo handle on the “College GameDay” telecast.

... one is just fans blurring the lines of what is appropriate and the other is just a guy hoping to get lucky and presumably making at least 3000 dollars for holding up a sign. What?!

Maybe I should walk around with a sign "Will likely have to work til I die, no one wants to give a GED holder a decent wage, only need 700k to retire, @ryancarlmercer", maybe I should stop maintaining an emergency fund and eating beans 10 meals a week to stretch funds.

Well, yea, this is why implementing social welfare and safety nets is far better done at the government level, where you have accountability and a justice system.

An attractive person holding a clever, written-in-English sign, at a football game that cost them 100$ (or whatever) to attend, garners 3000$ for beer. The ugly, dirty, illiterate homeless person that stands outside of a train station gets 5$ for food.

Unfairness can exist at the bureaucratic level (shit like judges being tired and being less lenient towards the evening, or just plain and simple sexism and racism in the justice system), but it's far better than "marketplace of begging for welfare."

Falls in line with using GoFundMe for medical bills, the better the story/narrative the more viral the funding:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/01/the-perverse-l...

Similarly why a robust welfare state is preferable to charity. Charitable giving is free to discriminate and there's no mechanism to try and move it towards those who most need it.

Do you think welfare state actually distributes funds to whoever needs them? They are giving funds away to everyone who can check x boxes on a form, no one in the government ever verifies if the person actually needs the money, like a charity would do.

Like some charities would do.

If you give charity to someone on gofundme, what charity ever verifies if the person actually needs the money?

You verify it when you select where to give your money. Otherwise they are forcefully taken from you and distributed, and the most you can say about it is filling a ballot every two years.

I find it hard to see how a charity would be able to see into people's lives enough to make that decision, compared to the state which can and does prosecute if you lie on the form.

> can and does prosecute if you lie on the form

The government has no incentive to reduce or even investigate this type of fraud. Enforcement is selective at best.

I implied there are mechanisms in a welfare state that can be used to try to move resources to where they are needed most.

There are no mechanisms whatsoever to force Bob the billionaire to do a god damn thing with his own money, other than to give the billionaire more tax breaks.

I also used to work in certification for government benefits, and I can assure you there are, in many cases, safeguards and verification.

These issues aren't solved with "social welfare and safety nets", that's just throwing good money after bad. I'm totally fine with a kick-ass safety net for people who are actually in poverty, aka have trouble funding their basic needs despite very serious, sometimes strenuous efforts. But someone who is advertising their Venmo ID online is almost certainly not poor in this legitimate sense. Spending more money than you earn, and then on vapid things like social media, etc. has nothing to do with poverty.

Exactly, that's the point. The government is much better positioned to distinguish between genuine need vs. boredom and a clever pitch that the Venmo-using public at large.

The idea that people asking for donations online are deservedly poor because they spend too much money on social media is probably the oddest thing I've heard all year.

Social media costs $0. Venmo costs $0. Internet access costs under $50/month, and is one of the most valuable purchases anyone can make in modern society.

The social media account costs $0. If you actually want to play at being a social media "influencer" online and reaching strangers to a non-trivial extent, you'll definitely be looking at some real costs.

How do you figure?

I'm not sure about other states but in California, there is the LifeLine program[1] to provide free cell phones to those in need.

[1] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/lifeline/

What you should take away from this article is "community members help each other out with money, the Internet makes communities bigger".

For the Bachelorette, I would assume that most of the donaters were young women that have experienced being dumped - the focus being the "community" (or perhaps it would be better to say population) of young women. It's not just random strangers donating.

This reminds me strongly of this YouTube video where an adjunct professor who's popular in the Magic TCG community asks for money for support, and gets quite a lot of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/35pjuq/tolarian_c...

The larger themes are:

1. Community has always supported people in times of need, more so than government services.

2. The Internet had created distance amount community members

3. Use of the Internet for funds like this (or for Gofundme, etc.) is bringing that back, though with strangers

4. Shifting attitudes and values on whether this is acceptable

5. One Millennial is now setting aside funds for direct contributions. I would not be surprised if that trend continues.

6. Continued pressure on Millennials to make ends meet with access to new technology has been leading to this.

7. Disadvantaged groups and their economic struggles are becoming more visible, along with means for the community to help.

The larger theme is

"Technology makes it easier for individuals to beg strangers for money".

I can't open social media without seeing kickstarter/indiegogo this, gofundme that, need money quick, can someone paypal/venmo me money for thing, etc. Then a day, week, month later you see pictures of their brand new cabinets or of their vacation or they are hitting people up for money again for something else because people gave last time so now they expect regular handouts.

Instead of getting creative, people now just go "hey, stranger, you have it better than me, give me your hard earned money!"

I'm having trouble figuring what you're actually saying here.

Do you not like that people can beg? Or that they have to at all?

>I'm having trouble figuring what you're actually saying here.

I'm saying the internet, specifically social media and payment apps/crowd funding sites, allow people to unabashedly give their (true or otherwise) sob story and beg complete strangers for money, I imagine the vast majority of people on sites like gofundme would hesitate to even phone family for financial assistance and I suspect nearly all of the people begging on social media simply wouldn't ask if they had to walk up to random strangers in person and ask.

Keep in mind, I say this while my nephew currently has a gofundme trying to raise 260,000 USD (!!!) for his mother for some experimental, questionable (cryotherapy for her kidney cancer, when it's usually used for skin cancer for example), cancer treatment in China.

I think these sites/methods serve a useful purpose, I think however trying to get gas money to give to your mother to go see your undocumented step-father in another state because he was drink driving and is likely to be deported or remain incarcerated... or hitting people up for beer money... is not a valid use of such sites/methods.

> gas money to give to your mother to go see your undocumented step-father in another state because he was drink driving and is likely to be deported or remain incarcerated... [...] is not a valid use of such sites/methods.

Why not?

> Instead of getting creative, people now just go "hey, stranger, you have it better than me, give me your hard earned money!"

This isn't new. This is the basis of some rather infamous socio-economic systems which have resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.

Didn't think I'd see panhandlers get equated to Nazis today.

I think yakshaving_jgt meant communism. Or socialism? Hard to tell since all the major systems have killed a lot of people.

Maybe. Equating panhandlers to Stalin is just as weird, though.

It's more like deKulakisation.

Either way, it's pretty damn weird to try to connect begging for money with mass slaughter.

Also straight up ignoring the millions of people who die under capitalism.

Found the Commie.

Please don't do this here.

I’m a little confused why I would be flagged when most of my comment history is on topic, and it seems most of the comment history of the account I was replying to is political and divisive.

Two reasons. One is that it was you who first swerved onto a generic ideological tangent, which was the original sin of this subthread.

The other is simply that we don't see all the comments—there are far too many. It's understandable that people want us to be consistent and even-handed, but that's not fully possible. It's also not fully necessary, since someone else violating the site guidelines doesn't make it ok for you to do so. (You can get pulled over for speeding even though others were going faster—which of course they usually are.) But I've taken a look at the other comments now, and did some additional moderation.

Ok, I think that's reasonable.

Thank you for clarifying.

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. Doing that is against the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it because it destroys the curiosity that HN exists for. Could you please stop posting like this? Also, please don't post in the flamewar style generally.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

But that is creative, utilizing a medium/tools outside its usual purpose.

I think both of these themes are equally true. Informal (and formal) community organizations have long supported those they feel are most in need, and people have long begged strangers for money. The internet simply makes it easier to do both.

Citation needed for #1

> Community has always supported people in times of need

Sure, if you are the right gender, race, and religion.

The third definition of community from dictionary.com:

a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists

A prerequisite for finding community support is to be a member of one. There are many communities. The commonality and social bonds between members form the basis of trust and the expectation of reciprocity.

When people perceive that their resources are simply being expropriated to benefit people they have nothing in common with, may never meet, and certainly cannot expect reciprocal investment from, they tend to withdraw from voluntary participation. Without that participation, communities simply die.

It's true that some communities have a larger pool of resources to share than others. But consider this before you condemn a synagogue for helping out a local Jewish family with money that could have gone to taxes to help someone arguably more in need.

It's sad that not everyone has a home, but the solution is not to demolish the entire block and apportion to each person an equal share of lumber.

There was a local pan-handling couple who was outted on local TV for "scamming people". They were seen shopping at expensive grocery stores and driving with their car. Apparently begging was just their job and made more than a few hundred dollars a day.

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