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Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy the community has had to come together to create rag-tag tools like this to patch up what is supposed to be a trillion dollar search engine that should be the pinnacle of human civilization. But then I remember it's the same sort of crazy whereby the richest country in the world has homeless people, child hunger, and decaying infrastructure :/

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It’s not a lack of resources it’s a lack of will. You can’t force parents to use the food programs. Hell around where I live you can’t stop the parents from stealing from their kids to buy drugs. Send a coat home with a kid on Friday, Monday they show up with no coat.

Political will, yes, but if you think people aren't willing to receive help and all the resources we need are there you are so misguided my friend. We can't even fund student lunches in many states. The primary problem across the board is lack of committing resources. Similarly child allowance tax credit was literally lifting people out of poverty but we don't have the political will to renew it.

People accept help when you give it. This why quite embarrassingly one third of GoFundMe campaigns are to fund medical expenses that wouldn't even have happened with a decent healthcare system. Don't come to me with this argument when literally millions of people are resorting to begging on GoFundMe.

If a child goes home with a coat and comes back without it, they probably have bills and a financial situation at home so dire that they sold the coat.

How is a family of four making $25k/yr supposed to deal with a $120k medical bill when they lack health insurance because this gig economy and the 3 shift jobs they work don't provide it?

There is no good reason a kid should go hungry in the US. Federal, state, school, charity food programs make it possible for every kid to eat. But a parent who would steal his kids coat to pay his medical bills (your scenario not mine or likely anyone else's), is the kind of parent who doesn't care enough about their kid to sign up and participate in these programs. You should hang out on r/teachers some time and get a glimpse into what teachers are seeing these days.

It isn't a good argument for why you shouldn't give out resources. Even if parents are going to "steal" the funds, as you say, you are still giving them that much more overhead, and research shows the vast, vast majority of people aren't going to behave like you describe (educate yourself, consume some real leftist content)

Your counter argument would be more persuasive if you provided proof instead of what seems like just another opinion.

I think these are two completely separate issues and patching them together is a lot more about spinning a narrative than addressing them

Could you elaborate a little on the similarities you see between SEO spam and child hunger?

In capitalism rich/powerful entities don't necessarily have incentives to make the world (or even their own direct neigbourhood) a better place, and most big entities act only based on their incentives, not based on morals and ethics.

They however have strong incentives to invest all available resources into their own survival, prolong their own life and/or earn more money.

Depending on how the managment is in turn incentivised they will typically also prefer short term success over decisions that would make more sense long term — e.g. short term a search engine saves money by not spending a ton of money on quality when they are in a monopolist position, while in the long term it fould bite them.

Both are unnecessary and confusing to see when set against the massive success of their creators.

In both scenarios you have a massive entity with near-infinite resources acting like it's so underfunded it can't take care of it's own shit.

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