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Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

I'd add the general lack of a social safety net, at least compared to Europe. All those people can actually become homeless.

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Sorry, I edited in that bit just now. But yeah, I agree with you. Hell, I work in tech and do okay, and yet the thought crosses my mind that things could go off the rails quickly. If I get sick, even my relatively good insurance means lots of out of pocket costs. Plus I can't work then, so I'll live on a fraction of my income since I have decent disability coverage. I'll be able to keep a roof over my head, but probably not a lot beyond that, which negatively affects my family - particularly my child, given skyrocketing education costs.

It's a weird place when you think about it. And yet most days I accept this as normal.

yep - I second this. There's definitely a lurking thought about what'd happen if you're sick they find something or what happens if your landlord decides he doesn't want to rent your apartment any more, and now you have to move to a new neighborhood that's 30 minutes further away from work and less safe, or, god forbid if I had kids, in a worse district, etc. etc.

I've been working at a high level for 15 years now and I feel like I'm just barely making it out of the swamp. I have no psychological safety because a single bad decision or an incident of bad luck could completely derail my life.

> And yet most days I accept this as normal.

That is not a symptom, but the problem. People can normalize anything. You could normalize living like a medieval peasant - many people did. Smart people know they can just keep doing something and eventually others will accept it to a degree.

You deserve better.

Don't most US cities have social services that provide shelter, food and other assistance?

[How nice that this is getting downvoted. It's a legit question. I have family members who are social workers and know these services exist, and it seems like it's most cities, but don't know for sure, hence the question mark.]

Its hard enough to convince a friend to take unemployment checks, let alone go to a shelter or pull out a food-stamp debit card.

There's a toxic culture in the USA that looks down upon welfare. For those people, welfare doesn't exist, even if they find themselves in that environment. And since they've convinced themselves that they'll never take welfare, they expect others to follow by their own rules.

This culture leads to a particular anti-welfare voting pattern.

You say that, but as someone from bright red Louisiana, you will find that the loudest anti-welfare ranters are the same people who are first in line for every government handout after a natural disaster.

The loudest "anti" voices tend to be those who engage in the very thing they advocate against. It's so common there must be a term in psychology for it.

There is. It's called "projection."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

True, but in many ways I am more afraid of living in a shelter than on the street, or more realistically, in my car. In your car at least you have some sense of ownership, safety, and personal space. In a shelter you are potentially surrounded by mentally ill unstable drug addicts. It makes sense that many people refuse to use shelters.

This is coming from someone who has never lived in a shelter, so I may be wrong, but it's definitely my fear and a source of motivation when working not-great jobs.

If you mean homeless shelters, yes, but they're horrible and most homeless (or underhoused) people would rather live in a tent than go there. The justifications given are usually assault, thievery, and not being able to bring any personal possessions. I can understand why someone wouldn't want to stay in a shelter if it meant leaving all of their belongings unattended (if you're homeless you probably don't have a storage space or a friend's garage).

Most of them are overcrowded and often over capacity. People wait in line before they open and are sometimes turned away when they're full.

Most US cities have a policy of buying homeless people one way tickets to another city, and if they do provide homeless shelters, they are often full, underfunded, and have issues that make using them difficult

This is only partially true. There is no “policy” aim any city do do this.

What does happen is that charity groups like catholic churches or st vincent de paul will buy homeless and runaways one-way tickets, but only if they have a verifiable destination.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvg7ba/instead-of-helping-ho...

has examples of several cities that do this, not just charity groups

lol

You might want to look up the homeless rates in the EU...

I just did and it seems generally lower than the USA in quite a few countries. When you look state by state and country by country it becomes clear it's highly localized to certain urban areas. Plus there seems to be a difference in reporting (Germany for instance counts hundreds of thousands of asylum seeking refugees).

Is anyone really that surprised? The United States were built exactly by the folks who wanted to opt out of the overbearing, coddling European system, and it shows.

But that European system was built long after the US became independent?

Yeah. The truth is literally the exact opposite of what they said - early puritan settlers left for America specifically because they wanted to be controlling and overbearing and the European states they set off from were less and less welcoming to this kind of thing.

Perhaps. I contend that the main waves of immigration in the 18-20th centuries consisted of opportunists well above average.

There is more to it than the post-war social-democratic systems in Western Europe. Going back centuries there was never a way to up and move to an uncontrolled space and start anew like on the American continent. The entire European continent was under tight control by whatever authority there was whether church or feudal, with restrictions on movement, residence, and labor.

But Americans aren't educated outside of stem

> And it shows

what's the homeless rate in Sweden ? Netherlands? France? I'll leave out Germany since thats a little unfair.

That does not even seem close to being true. I think more accurately it was a reaction against an established aristocratic and monarchial system that wouldn't share power with a new growing colonial upper class. Don't think the English were codling the peasants much back then.

Ok, overbearing before WW2, coddling after, then? :-) Either way the effect was to drive the more ambitious layer out which I think seeded a very skewed culture relative to their origin.

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