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Comment by tofflos | Hacker News Reader

The pictures are both dramatic and strange. Why are there so many people with cars that need food assistance?

Because public transit is a joke for most Americans. It’s simply not possible to have a job without a car in the vast majority of America.

But those don’t look like cheap cars. No one is perfect, but still it looks like some people set the wrong priorities between saving money and buying status symbols

That’s definitely true, but can you blame them? They’ve been psychologically assaulted and bombarded from all digital directions to buy those symbols. It’s not like Facebook and YouTube are showing ads that encourage people to save their money.

This goes way back than Facebook and YouTube though, I recommend watching Adam Curtis' "The Century of the Self" [0] if you haven't yet and are interested in how we ended up with modern consumerism.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

Yes I can. People still have the ability to make choices for themselves. Facebook Ads aren’t mind control, people still have free will.

Loan companies only give you access to cars that have a reliable resale value. Since Americans basically buy nothing but pickup trucks or SUVs you can only get loans for SUVs and trucks.

That's completely inaccurate. Considering the instant depreciation once you drive off the lot, loans are dependent far more on your credit history/income level than linked to any specific style of car.

Almost all of those vehicles are from the standard automaker labels, very few luxury vehicles in those pictures.

I see one Dodge Charger in the bottom picture, which is a little sportier, and I’m sure I missed a few others, but otherwise I completely disagree with your observation. I’m not sure what you expect poor people to drive if not GM/Ford/Toyota, etc.

Do they all need to be late (2016+) models, though? It seems like most of them are.

When half the Fortune 500 apparently need a bailout three weeks after this hits, it might be time to adjust expectations of individual preparedness to be more in line with observed reality.

There might also be a gap between what people realistically prepared for and what happened. I'm not entirely sure, for example, if a family with both parents employed in (what used to be considered) stable jobs should have foreseen the possibility of losing both jobs at the exact same time?

In the end, this is a numbers game: you can blame the individual up to a point. But when some double-digit percentage fails to abide by your standards of personal responsibility, you have to accept the sometimes flawed nature of humanity and try to work with it instead of insisting on futile efforts to change individual people.

It's both dificult and rare to store months worth of food.

Most people have an average of 3-4 years worth of car. Ownership runs 7-8 years, or a mean of 3.5 - 4 years remaining ownership.

People run out of food long before they run out of car.

Because there is a shortage of food, and a glut of cars

For a normal family, if you no longer need to commute to work, car ownership is significantly less expensive than your grocery bill.

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