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I'm the author.

I'm disabled and the primary provider for my family of three, which includes two disabled sons. I absolutely didn't want to be poor. I'm still poor and I hate every minute of it. I wish desperately that I had more money and I am doing all in my power to resolve my problems and this has been true for years.

"First world problem" or not, being homeless in a first world country is still a very real problem. Among other things, people who are homeless die at much younger ages on average than people who are housed.

People who experience homelessness have an average life expectancy of around 50 years of age, almost 20 years lower than housed populations.

https://nationalhomeless.org/category/mortality/

So homelessness is literally killing people. I do what I can to provide useful information, both for those on the street/at risk of homelessness and for those interested in finding effective solutions. My knowledge comes from first-hand experience -- having spent nearly six years homeless -- as well as formal education on the topic of homelessness.

For the record, I'm a woman. So I'm a "ma'am," not a "sir," if you want to know the correct term with which to express your contempt while pretending to be respectful.

I am not discounting the fact that you have problems in your life. I know what it means to be poor because I have been poor in a 3rd world country.

>> People who experience homelessness have an average life expectancy of around 50 years of age, almost 20 years lower than housed populations

There are kids literally dying because they don't have access to healthcare.

>> formal education on the topic of homelessness

There are millions if not billions of people who can't read or write their names.

I am not blaming you for your situation, life can be difficult sometimes and it literally sucks to be in that position despite of all your efforts. I can empathize with your situation but I simply cannot agree with certain parts of the article.

I dunno why your being so harsh. It's not a competition on who who had the most dreadful circumstances. FYI, the average life expectancy in Papua New Guinea is 64. Homelessness, even in a first world country, is objectively a bad situation to be in regardless.

I am thankful to the author for sharing her reality with me. I appreciate her lucidity which is a huge asset I think.

>> Ultimately, I concluded that being able to choose wasn't really about money per se but was about maneuvering room. Yes, having sufficient resources helps, but making choices in life and exercising free will is not directly related to how much or how little money a person has. It helps if you have some confidence you won't starve or otherwise experience catastrophe, but that isn't about money per se.

I am not being harsh just highlighting the fact that there are a lot of implicit assumptions being made in the article wherein most of the population of the world in poor countries simply don't have the freedom to do so.

The piece states pretty early on that it was being written for a forum I run on Reddit called Gig Works. It is aimed primarily at Americans looking for alternative work arrangements and at people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in the US because they are twice exceptional or have other barriers to regular employment.

It promotes the idea that not only can beggars be choosers, they need to be if they are ever to resolve their problems. This was a theme of my first homeless blog that was written while I was in actual fact homeless. (I'm not currently.)

I've been on Hacker News for eleven years, so some people recognize my name and know some of my back story. A previous version of this article, which is no longer available to the public, did surprisingly well a few years ago. Since it is no longer available, I reposted the updated version because I figured it might be of some interest to some people here.

I have two sons who tend to be pretty literal and as children they would say things like "You are too heavy for me to pick up -- unless we are in water or if we were on the moon...etc." Most people aren't that literal and I gave plenty of contextual cues in the piece as to whom I am trying to speak to.

You are rebutting a phantom argument where, in your mind, I am speaking to people who literally cannot read my words due to a combination of lack of internet access and lack of literacy and lack of knowledge of the English language. Most people don't think that's a reasonable argument to make since it's a pretty obvious fact that my blog post isn't being written with the idea that those people will be reading the piece and taking any advice from me.

About a third of Americans have not paid their rent/mortgage this month. There is a global pandemic on and articles are predicting that upwards of 20 million Americans will be evicted between now and September.

It may not be anything you care about because there are people in worse straits, but it's a very big problem for the US currently.

I'm in no position to help illiterate people in third world countries who have no internet access. I am in a position to help Americans who find themselves in dire straits all of a sudden due to a global pandemic or due to personal factors unrelated to the pandemic.

Those are the kinds of people I hope to reach. There is zero intent to lecture illiterate people in third world countries who lack internet access. That is so far outside of my intentions, that it "goes without saying." So it wasn't said.

> It promotes the idea that not only can beggars be choosers, they need to be if they are ever to resolve their problems.

I wish you had said this directly in the article because I had a tough time figuring out your point.

Thank you. That's good feedback.

Here's some more:

> if you want to know the correct term with which to express your contempt while pretending to be respectful.

I didn't hear any contempt at all in what they were saying. Nothing like it. I was disappointed to read that, as you usually stay respectful, but that crosses way over the line well into Please don't do this on HN territory.

It's not exactly an implicit assumption. The message was only intended for those who can receive it. Otherwise we get into a weird situation in which humans are trying to communicate with jellyfish through waves and light patterns to get them out of poverty. The message clearly wasn't meant to save every single living being from poverty.

I find it very easy to understand where parent commenter is coming from. Even though this may not be obvious, this is very much a competition. A competition for attention, for emotional support, or simply for validation. And when you've experienced the neglect, being ignored by society and generally the experience of homelessness or any other terrible circumstances, and see someone with better circumstances getting support and help, it should naturally lead to a feeling of anger, unfairness (whether conscious or not).

This is what's happening here. Also, all the comments complaining of "whataboutism", "not true scotsman" and so on show a profound lack of empathy with this commenter. You're complaining that this commenter is not showing empathy to OP, when no-one is showing any empathy to his (or other people's) harsher circumstances.

You must be misunderstanding the nature of poverty if you think so. Someone with better circumstances is by definition getting better support and help than someone with worse circumstances otherwise their circumstances would not be better. The more help you get the richer you are and there is no upper bound to that but if you don't get enough help that's when you are poor. I like the literacy example. Someone who learned to read and write at a school received more help than someone who didn't go to school. Now extend this to high school, university and all the job experience you got during your career. Someone who has gotten more help is not always deserving less help, especially if they can use that help to support themselves and free up or contribute resources to help others.

If you think this is a zero sum game then diverting that attention to someone else will not solve poverty. One person will become poorer, the other will become less poor. The "real" loser is one who believes in zero sum thinking.

What would Doreen have to do or say to satisfy you?

Jus to be clear:

No one is suggesting children dying of a combination of malaria and protein energy malnutrition just need to surf reddit and gather coupons.

So what is it, exactly, you’re taking issue with?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23948028

Even in a first world country: 1. Be homeless. 2. Have diarrhea 3. Try finding a bathroom. Don't forget that many people in populated cities are going to take one look at you and prejudices are going to shoot up.

Now throw in Covid.

Welcome to hell.

Being homeless is excruciating no matter the country.

Thanks so much for the article.

I won’t get into it, but I have life experience that allows me to understand where you are coming from.

Thanks for sharing a unique perspective, here.

Thank you for writing. Please don't be offended by what I am going to say.

So, what you write about yourself is only proving gp's point. Amount of social support you receive is on par with 1-st world countries. Which of course doesn't mean you are not poor and your situation isn't tough. In most ways, you are not priveleged.

It is just another dimension of poor that gp is talking about. Where watermelon is not a cost-effective measure, but a luxury.

Sounded strange and offensive, but your perspective sure sounds strange to others.

I'm not offended. I will note their remark was edited after I replied and I have no idea if you saw the original. My remark was not edited.

Sometimes, if you don't see the exchange "live" as it happens, you don't really know what people were reacting to and when people edit their own comments and don't annotate the edits as such, it can cause replies to come across weirdly and make no sense to people reading the comments later.

I feel like initial responses understood why I replied the way I did and later replies didn't. I can't help but suspect the unannotated edits are a factor in that shift.

I've hardly slept. I'm trying to step away from this discussion because I feel I've said plenty and there's probably little upside but lots of downside to me continuing to react to things on too little sleep etc.

Before I read Doreen’s sibling comment, it seemed pretty clear to me the context within which the article was written.

Of course she isn’t talking about solving global poverty, she’s talking about being poor in the USA, with access to services.

If everyone had to constantly preface everything they said with the context within which they were about to say it, that would swiftly get tiring.

I figure there's probably a name for this sort of comment (which appears a lot on Hacker News). Would it be "relative privation"?

One-upper?

>To access Reddit you first need a device AND an internet connection AND you need to be literate.

That's an incredibly low barrier. Homeless people are merely people without homes. Compare the cost of a smartphone and mobile internet to how much you would have to spend on rent to cease being homeless. Let's be extremely reckless and just get an iPhone Xs plan for $60 per month including 20GB worth of data. Even the most expensive option is basically less than 10% of my rent. It's easy to find a prepaid smartphone for $200-$300 that will be equally useful as the iPhone, last you at least 6 years and you can charge the balance up by going to a retail store where you can simply pay with cash.

Although I agree that literacy is priceless it's probably not 100% required with a modern smartphone. You can probably use voice commands and watch videos and listen to podcasts.

>This doesn't even touch the surface of what real problems most of the world in poor countries face.

Poor countries only have themselves to blame. The real problem they face is primarily the result of government incompetence or corruption and conflicts between countries. In a globalized world prosperity is coming to everyone that is embracing it.

Slums are the result of the poor showing their willpower to pull themselves out of their misery but they are usually prevented by government policy to make their dreams come true. Tent cities in San Francisco are truly worthy of being called slums because their root cause is exactly the same.

I personally think your argumentation is weird. (Don't feel bad about this) You classify homelessness in the US (or any other developed country) as a "First World Problem" because it does not compare to "true poverty" experienced in "truly poor" countries. The implication is that we should be glad that poverty in the US is this "insignificant" but therein lies the paradox. If it's truly insignificant then why should homelessness/poverty as we know it exist at all? People somehow think that the poor should suffer as if they have received a punishment that they badly deserved but yet the poor should also feel good about themselves because it could be even worse. All of this is merely a justification to not help anyone. What you are doing is the same thing you accuse the author of doing. The author isn't thinking about people poorer than her but what about you? Are you thinking about people poorer than you (such as the author)? No, you aren't, not even after reading one article from a poor person.

This is some weird "whataboutism".

This so much. It felt so weird that this person was talking about poverty and blogging/reading on the internet at the same time.

Few poor people in the third world would know what blogging even is, forget about even wasting precious resources like time, money for a smartphone and an internet connection just to read/write some ideas which few are ever going to read and you won’t be making anything out of.

This feels like being written by a person who knows that she’s writing for people who like to think about the idea of poverty living, but haven’t experienced it much first or even second-hand, only knowing about it from the news or glossy donation pamphlets.

While I don't disagree the 'real' poor can choose the alternative and agree with GP, I think you also have a very fatalistic view of 3rd world poor. I have family living in the '3rd world' and even there the poor have phones. Sure they are 20 dollars, 10 year old models running android 5.0 or something, but they still check facebook and whatever. They aren't probably blogging but they also read websites/blogs

Have you been to Africa? Or even rural India? The fact that you have access to HN means that:

1. You are able to afford to connect to HN

2. Are privileged enough to be able to read it

3. Your family also has the ability to do 1 if not 2

And let's assume for a minute they do have phones and an internet connection, which in itself is an egregious assumption(the real poor are the ones who don't even have phones). What are they going to do with their phones if they are unable to read half if not most of the internet?

I fail to see the point you're trying to make. This post was written by a homeless person in a "first world" country so the target audience is people in those countries. Nobody is obligating whomsoever you consider "third world" to read or follow her advice...

Not rural india but africa yes. Family there. Not all countries are bad, but I saw some that are quite horrible. Saw people 'bathing' in puddles in the street as to not pay for water. Saw slums where 6-7 live to a zero-bedroom 'house' (I wouldn't call that a house in most parts of the world). Family works with local schools and institutions to make sure kids have food.

But I can say, even in those situations, most has a cheap-ass phone with internet. Sure, not 5g to watch HD movies or whatnot, but they could talk with people and go to facebook

As for rural india, it seems they have more internet users than urban india: https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/internet-usage-in-r...

This smacks of some kind of

No True Poor Scotsman.

If you expect one lone blogger to address the entire gamut of poor at every scale up to and including global poverty...

Your going to be disappointed.

You might want to give steelmanning a spin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Steelmanning

Try responding to the strongest possible interpretation of what someone says.

I do agree with you on that aspect; in fact the proliferation of cheap smartphones and providers like Jio means that a lot of people are able to get their hands on actually decent hardware and a good internet connection if it is in their reach. Which is a great thing! In fact most of the tips mentioned is pretty much what a lot of people do in 3wc too, just replace Reddit with WhatsApp groups.

The issue here is that this is being given as advice, when a lot of this is standard operating procedure which comes semi-automatically for most people in this situation (this I do know, because you need hustle to even survive poverty in a third world country). Most people have multiple jobs by default; it’s not a discussion of if you can leave your day job here, it’s about how many jobs you can cram in a day, and that too without even the possibility of “maneuverability”. A mobile phone and an internet connection in such a situation is a rather significant investment even if it is widely available; it’s not something you can just get without thinking too much, which is what I feel the post reads like. While yes, the internet connections have become so good that you can watch YouTube videos for entertainment, few will be doing that without checking their daily limit caps first, and do it only when there’s nothing else to do. If you’re thinking of blogging/videos, you’re already thinking of it as an investment, if at all you reach that point. And this comes only when a person has escaped poverty, and has at least some sense of stability.

Add to it the plugs of Hacker News and Patreon at the bottom, and things start feeling very dissonant. Which is why I wrote about the potential target audience of the post.

It doesn't feel that weird to me, but there's a reason her blog would resonate with me in particular.

I was homeless myself, briefly, half a lifetime ago. I ended up dedicating my life to coding free and open-source audio DSP software, which I do to this day under the name 'airwindows'.

Part of my motivation for this choice is a determination to give functional tools to a community that may have artistic ability and the ability to learn audio production skills, but can't come up with the money to do this using cutting-edge hardware. CPU cycles are impossibly cheap, ESPECIALLY if you are able to do functional work on 'last year's' computers, which is why I take pains to code stuff that doesn't require current computer systems (particularly significant on Mac OSX, which deprecates stuff like mad to render older systems nonfunctional).

In my opinion, you should be able to not only blog, but do a professional grade mix on a digital audio workstation using only a cast-off semi-working laptop from years ago that somebody no longer needed. Your bottleneck would be monitoring: professional quality speakers and amplification are harder to come by that way, but even then modern advances in class D amplification and a bit of ingenuity go a long way (I run a subwoofer where the speaker part was insanely cheap, because I used cardboard builders tubes for enclosures, capped on both ends by inexpensive woofers, and doubled for more cone area)

With intelligence and effort it is more than possible to break the link between access to capital, and potential performance. You can compete on the grounds of ability and quality and increasingly remove access to capital as a gatekeeping mechanism.

If you don't do that, one might conclude that poor people are lower quality and not capable of worthwhile things.

One resource that my work does NOT address is mental attitude: I can make a person think, 'I now have the tools to pursue audio production' by giving the tools, but I can't make a person think, 'I can step back and think about life and the world I'm in, outside the narrow lens of capitalist status seeking'. It's nice that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Google employees and trust fund kids can view life outside the immediate struggle to not die: I think that's very civilized and laudable, in a way it's the whole point of being human. This blog about 'FU, Money' is an alternate path to the same goal.