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Comment by __s | Hacker News Reader

People who can afford to socially distance & tend to be more educated & are most likely to be able to work remotely are more likely to socially distance

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And can afford food couriers for dinners.

Eh. I'm still on microwave dishes. It's been a while since I ordered food.

You...could be...healthier?

I could be a lot healthier in many ways.

That's probably true for 99% of us?

There is nothing unhealthy about microwaved dishes.

In fact, frozen food, a primary candidate for the microwave, may be just as good as fresh food, sometimes better depending on the process and on how fresh the "fresh" food is. Also microwaving is actually a healthy way of cooking things.

It all depends on what you put inside your microwave. Healthy food is healthy, junk food is junk, but the microwave has nothing to do with it.

This is true for at least a lot of frozen food, but doesn't speak to the distribution of available microwaved dishes.

As you say healthy food is healthy, but there may not be a lot of it available in your local freezer aisle. Or there may, depends where you live and shop I suspect.

Yes but doesn't preparing the food require at least a semblance of a kitchen? I mean you need a fridge, a sink, a countertop and all the utensils. Adding a real stovetop/oven combo doesn't take up that much space.

So...what?

Ordering in is probably just as bad unless you really go out of your way to order healthy.

Or a functional kitchen. It's one of the major factors for me in a dwelling. I used to have to make myself a loaf of soda bread as my only food for the week in my "kitchen" that was a stove and a sink in the corner of a room. Now that I'm a little more established I have a kitchen that my partner and I can both move about freely while we work on a meal and it never ceases to feel like we somehow cheated to gain such a luxury.

So food can increase qualitatively in more way than one when you have more resources behind you! And it's certainly not a fact that's lost on people who are struggling

That doesn't track entirely because the behaviors they're talking about are wearing masks and staying 6ft away from people. Both behaviors cost nothing.

It could be a second order effect - the less wealthy you are, the more often you are required to not social distance (due to living situation and work etc) so in the times you can, there's less pressure or desire to.

That would seem to be a reasonable reaction. If people with jobs that don't really allow for social distancing were also the people the most worried about the virus, they would be under a great deal of psychological stress that they can't really do anything about. From a evolutionary standpoint it would make sense that the people most able to act around a threat are also the most worried about it.

Poorer folks in New York City have drastically less space available for...pretty much everything.

Even in relatively spaced-out areas, this is true. If you go to Central Park, you'll find that the density of people on an average day is far higher at (say) Harlem Meer than it is further south. There are simply more people who are sharing the same recreation space that is within X miles of the place they are living.

Central Park is actually a silly example, because it's far better than most other parts of New York. Go to Fort Washington Park on an average sunny weekend, and the density of people is dramatically higher than Riverside Park, further south. And that's just recreation...poorer people have less time for that than rich people do. Go to Flushing, and people are cheek-to-jowl at pretty much all times, even though there's a big empty park right next door.

> And that's just recreation...poorer people have less time for that than rich people do.

At least in the US, the poor have significantly more leisure time than the rich.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-fre...

I couldn’t get the information out of the article, but I would think conflating the working poor with the non-working poor makes that statistic unfair towards the working poor (and, because there are relatively more non-working poor, more unfair than conflating the working rich with the non-working rich)

Even if the working rich work more hours than the working poor, the situation might be reversed when one includes commute time from and to, and between jobs.

when you're grabbing gas station coffee for your pre-dawn bus commute to a job multiple hours away. distancing requires both time and space that you do not have. moreover it requires the social cachet to choose to be the odd man out in a peer group that has been doing high-risk close proximity labor for the entire stretch of the pandemic. this generates broader complacency since you either already got it or you're fucked anyway because if your roomie gets it you're gonna get it and if you didn't get it by now then it must not have been a big deal so why single yourself out?

You can't perform the no-cost behavior of wearing a mask without, you know, _having_ a mask, which is not necessarily free.

> Both behaviors cost nothing.

This is not true for the latter. Many people, especially some with little means, have little practical ability to maintain social distance.

They cost nothing in the same way that exercising and cutting out junk food costs nothing8.

Though I will grant you that wearing a mask does cost less nothing*.

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