Three free meals available daily for any New Yorker

For example, a comment in one of these postings on HN was talking about how the manufacture of essential supplies was continuing and robust (even I've made a similar comment some time ago). But... ok... how much of the logistics capacity, the capacity of hauling those essential products from the factory to the final buyer is being impacted? And it's not just trailer cubic feet availability that's at issue... it's are those containers available in the right place at the right time? Greater cubic feet available for essential products in fewer overall containers is still a potential major problem. I have to think that a fair portion of the common carriers are dependent on a mix of "essential" and "non-essential" goods for their business and that some of these common carriers are marginal even during the "good times". Fewer trucks/trains/drivers/etc, mean that getting a truck scheduled to a loading dock on a timely basis is harder, even if available cubic feet for essential goods has risen. If my speculation holds, manufacture of essential goods will be robust, but there will still be shortages at the stores and for buyers simply because shutting down the non-essential has reduced available containers and the bottleneck has shifted to inventory logistics. I can repeat this sort of thing for many different parts of the economy; I went to get a replacement part for a computer keyboard... the company's website said they were closed under county order as a non-essential business.... yet food producers still need to use their computers to ensure they can monitor available shelf-life, etc.

When we see broad pronouncements from politicians and bureaucrats talking about not shutting down essential businesses, I wonder if they appreciate how interconnected the modern economy is and that it doesn't simply break down into "essential" and "non-essential". Perhaps this sort of thing is why I so distrust those that would embrace economic central planning.

> According to multiple health and safety organizations worldwide, including the CDC, the USDA, and the European Food safety Authority, there is currently no evidence that COVID-19 has spread through food or food packaging. Previous coronavirus epidemics likewise showed no evidence of having been spread through food or packaging

https://www.seriouseats.com/2020/03/food-safety-and-coronavi...

This is not enough.

This isn't a matter of a specific little bit of math inside a bigger ball of math or highly custom machine that needs nuance.

This is a literal effect we have on other humans by letting them go underfed.

Why do we need more nuance in the rules around apportionment in the well walked context of "people got to eat"?

This is just asinine at this point in human society. Especially with a much more educated society that can argue cogently around it sitting on their hands wanking their custom theories, tacitly enabling this.

Society needs to focus on stable support of our shared human needs first, stores of usable foods, basic products, etc.

It does not need to enable everyone's imagined pipe dreams, and emotional castle building, to become literally true. That's romanticized emotional ideology the others don't have to enable. Free speech does not mean you get what you're asking for.

When you're hording toilet paper and flour, but shelves are full of garbage caffeine tricks, sodas, "craft beer", sugar bomb cereal, you know your society has jumped the shark.

More importantly, there’s something wrong when a society is organized and operated in such a way that people have to rely on private charities and religious organizations to be fed. That’s a signal of social failure—especially when food is abundant. I’d suggest a more nuanced conversation should focus on the ways in which offloading a problem to charitable organizations enables people to ignore the problem by means of letting them feel good about themselves for donating time/supplies—which wouldn’t be needed if we ensured the problem didn’t exist in the first place.

57bn / 40m = $1425

$1425 / 365 = $3.90

While that's doable, it's really not a lot.

We have plenty of food, but we've turned a large portion of it into unhealthy crap.

My experience with homelessness and lgbt issues taught me that relying on the charity of others, and not a formal social safety net, will only drive marginalized people further to the margins. Relying on someone else wanting to feel good about themselves to get what you need to survive isn't a good model.

Also, a lot of needy children get their primary meals at school.

I agree, sadly; I have actually been focused on mitigating the losses inherit in the Supply Chain itself, as on a solely Calorie basis we could easily feed the entire population, and is for the most part already at a post-scarcity level despite all the turmoil with Factory Farming and especially State subsidies that distort the commercial aspects of Agriculture (see last paragraph).

This underscores the 'what and why' better than anything I've seen so far and what can lead to Dairy Farmers being asked to dump milk to maintain prices via artificial scarcity:

> The dairy industry’s woes signal broader problems in the global food supply chain, according to farmers, agricultural economists and food distributors. The dairy business got hit harder and earlier than other agricultural commodities because the products are highly perishable - milk can’t be frozen, like meat, or stuck in a silo, like grain.

Other food sectors, however, are also seeing disruptions worldwide as travel restrictions are limiting the workforce needed to plant, harvest and distribute fruits and vegetables, and a shortage of refrigerated containers and truck drivers have slowed the shipment of staples such as meat and grains in some places.

Leedle could likely sell his milk if he could get it to market. Dairy products in grocery stores have been in high demand as consumers stay home during the pandemic, though panic buying may be slowing. Earlier this week, a local market told Leedle’s wife she could buy only two dairy products total per shopping trip as retailers nationwide ration many high-demand products.

Dairy cooperatives oversee milk marketing for all of their members and handle shipping logistics. Leedle said he will be paid for the milk he and other farmers are dumping, but the payments for all cooperative members will take a hit from the lost revenues.

Without the profit incentive, we have seen time and again, far more severe disruptions to the food supply (USSR, Venezuela, DPRK). Capitalism does not provide for everyone, but it does an excellent job of providing for the vast majority of people. Charity and welfare programs are a good supplement to that, but profit itself is an immensely powerful and useful tool to keep people fed.

According to NYC:

> Starting today, 3 free meals will be available for ALL New Yorkers in more than 400 Meal Hubs, Mon-Fri: http://schools.nyc.gov/freemeals.

Since it's being run by the Department of Education, the pickup locations will probably be at public schools (the same as when the program used to be only for school children).

Perhaps, but also it might be just annoying enough so that everybody who really needs the food is able to get it, and people who can afford food don't take it. If that works effectively, we're saving a lot of administrative costs and reducing barriers to entry compared to food stamps where you have to convince the government that you need it.

Not only should people get 'free food' but someone else should have to deliver it to them as well so that they have 'equality'?

We can apply creativity to solving the world's problems without resorting to the slippery slope fallacy of the abandonment of capitalism completely.

Not every social experiment is a one-way door that cannot be tweaked, improved or abandoned. We need to be less cynical and be willing to experiment more without so much fear.

The very consideration of the 'Nordic Model' is almost absurd because it ignores the other 80% of the situation which is the social fabric that's not part of the political system.

New York has 23% of the population functionally illiterate and there's a perfect correlation between literacy and success and health in every domain. So that would be a really good place to start.

And there are a zillion obviously unfair things in the US that could be fixed.

So much low-hanging fruit before a comparative basis is even needed.

People don't often die of starvation in the United States. I don't have exact numbers, but if you exclude people who have eating disorders, I'm sure it's insignificant compared to almost every other cause of death. But, malnutrition is certainly a problem, and that problem gets worse when you have people who literally don't know where their next meal is coming from.

That means that people are obese but at the same time essentially starving to death from lack of nutrients. Which causes more food cravings that people are able to attempt to satiate only with more food with poor nutritive value.

> More than 38 million people are living in poverty in America. In 2019, most families living in poverty earn less than $25,750 per year.

> More than 37 million people struggle with hunger in the United States, including more than 11 million children.

Median household savings discluding a house, at retirement age, is just barely $100k (that is, enough to support retirement income above social security of a wopping ~$5k/year).

People have learned to be wary I think of nutritional "studies" but it's taking them longer to catch on to the farcical nature of modern psychology. Which really IMO hasn't come that far from psychoanalysis of a few decades ago.

And how could it? All of psychology is based on subjective, non-experimental, non-verifiable, non-reproducable data.

We're watching all of our institutions collapse because it turns out not only are they (and individuals in our society) excessively interdependent, but they're also houses of cards...

https://www.sfusd.edu/services/health-wellness/nutrition-sch...

Now would be a good time to ramp up deployment of such a program if it was already consumer-ready, but testing? No.

This is a bad time to try drone drops.

I’ve always felt that’s a very reductive view of humanity. Boiling us down to simple automatons that only seek to eat and reproduce, nothing more. I would hope the vibrancy of human civilisation would be enough to show that isn’t true.

Unfortunately people that seem to have little faith in humanity, alway believe that they, and their peers, are special and that the rest of humanity is a lost cause. That always makes me a little sad.

For example, some people might learn to play one or more instruments; others might become gardeners; others painters, tinkerers, makers, hackers (as in builders), cooks, and so on. I don't believe most people would just sit on their asses and do nothing. Some people really enjoy business and trade, and they would probably just work on creating some kind of business that they enjoyed (like procuring and selling high quality lamps!... and eventually designing their own).

We know that people tend to work harder at something they care about. So if we all got to work on things we cared about instead of what was available or what paid (or paid best), it's fathomable that society might have a higher and higher quality output.

It's impossible to know since we can't really test it, but I like to imagine that scenario.

It’s perfectly fair we say that we should provide everyone with their basic needs as a safety net that prevents people from starving. Then building on top of that to give people the support they need to better themselves and reduce the need to rely on outside support.

Sure some people will abuse the system. But condemning the majority just to punish the minority feels a little petty.

Because there are many in and out of government that don't want the government to do its job, so that they can point at ineffective government and say "look, a private company [like mine wink wink nudge nudge] could do so much better than that."

Have you noticed that it is only American government (outside of dictatorships) that is highly despised by most of its citizens? Where is this anger from European, Canadian, Asian, South American citizens towards their governments? Could it be that those countries have a functional government that, despite failing in some areas, overall exceeds in providing basic necessities (i.e. healthcare) to its populace?

The idea that government will always fail is itself an unspoken assumption you are making. It doesn't have to be that way. We could have an efficient government if we wanted - the first step is to believe it's possible, like it has been possible in 100+ other countries.

Do you really think everybody hates NASA? The National Park system, or your local/state parks)? Libraries and Museums? Weather and tide forecasts (which depend heavily on NOAA)? The NSF and NIH are world-renowned for the scope and quality of research they support. Food, drugs, cars, highways, and airplanes are all relatively safe.

Most of the government stuff is effective enough that people don't even think about it. The big tragedy of the current administration is that it's injected political chaos that characterizes some hot-button issues into the rest.

And if we do believe you are an amoral monster, which I do not, what does that say about what we believe about people worse than you?

If you are near our best, which you probably are, how else can we hope to help people than by leveraging government? It should be quite clear to everyone that personal donations do not even come close to covering need.

It also shows the conflict of wanting to keep as many people employed/working as possible while also wanting to keep people quarantined.

Additionally quite a few working people aren't paying income tax. When you can deduct 13k from your income each year, not many people working for a supermarket are paying income taxes for example. Example, Amazon and VW are creating high revenue in Austria and Germany yet their taxation is laughable. Maybe we shouldn't look that hard at income tax to support UBI

The middle class will be taxed more and you'll have a bottom rung getting free money, essentially.

The first two $1,200 checks from the government is the start of this.

No, a border wall will remain an ineffective boondoggle that serves only vanity even with a UBI.

> You cant give away money for free and NOT have strong borders.

First, a UBI is defined as lacking means or behavior testing, that doesn't mean that the universe of recipients isn't either just adult citizens or adults who are either citizens or lawful permanent residents. The higher UBI with either of those recipient pools, the less economically attractive illegal immigration is, especially if UBI replaces or reduces (say, by $1/hr for every $2000/yr of UBI) minimum wage, thereby reducing the attractiveness of under the table sub-minimum wage labor.

Second, even if UBI wasn't a tool for stronger borders and did make illegal immigration more attractive, it wouldn't magically change the fact that the border wall isn't a tool for strong borders.

So, it sounds like anyone that shows up can get food.

Not a New Yorker, was through war when I was a kid, speaking from experience.