Subsidies don't seem so bad. (If done right, they'll have to figure that out.) Even if they don't solve the whole problem immediately.
The brain changes over time, so subsidies or other solutions could still have an impact.
In the past, pre-internet most of these people couldn't live like this, they'd be forced out of their homes from boredom, but with the internet that's just no longer true.
The only way to fix it is to fix peoples self esteem, but these are likely the last people in the world who'd willingly go to something like therapy, I can't imagine subsidies are really going to help.
What they need is more money in the bank and perhaps access to counseling services. (That's the best I can come up with, at any rate.)
It seems like more of a matching problem than anything else.
Correct. You did not factor in alcoholics who do not show up for AA meetings. Not all alcoholics are the same.
A solution isn't bad because it's incomplete.
Certainly discussing my anxiety with other people that had the same issue gave me a great perspective.
I am an alcoholic that didn’t go to meetings. Now I do.
So yes I do know both sides.
Kindly find someone else to shit and punch down on, thanks.
I'm glad it worked for you but no where did I shit on AA or going to AA. You and everyone else really got this all wrong.
edit might as well postt he rest of this: I merely pointed out that there are those who DONT GO. My friends sister is dead at 45 from drinking. Went to AA once said it was a joke and never went back, tried therapy didn't keep up. Family friends step daughter died at 37 from organ failure from heavy constant drinking. She never had any desire to seek help as if on a suicide mission. Lord knows those families tried to get them help. (Never mind the locals at the bar I knew who drank themselves to death in their 50's/60's with their pension money.
So excuse me if I pointed out that no, AA isn't or doesn't work for everyone. Many simply don't go for whatever reason.
And I am intimately familiar with mental illness and addiction both personally and surrounded by it via family and friends. So don't think I misunderstand the op, you or your path's to recovery.
I was in high school with a basically non-existent budget when I first found this site, I'd trust someone here who says "Yeah, I'm not financially stable" - seems like the average income here is no longer relevant at that point.
There are for sure poor people in the world, but most of them are not reading HN.
When you are in high school or college you are financially secure (baring bad luck - an accident could cause significant brain damage at any time...) since we trust you will finish your education and get a job. We also trust that in high school your family is feeding you, and in college you can get plenty of student loans (too many really, but that is a different subject). You don't have a lot of money to work with, but is not financially insecure, just a known low point in life.
I am trying to get the VMs feature of aidev.codes out (also a bit of a reskin) since hundreds of people signed up for the website builder and tried it but only three people were willing to pay a dollar or more and about one other submitted a bug report. Credit purchases currently disabled because it was mainly used by one guy to test credit cards. Also everyone seemed to want to build complex applications with backend code. So I ran out of money and couldn't really market it and decided to just focus on the ability to generate and host back end code on GPT-4 powered VMs. This is basically working in the dev version, but still some bugs and other things to do, and haven't been able to focus on it the last month (although making progress bit by bit) because I have been busy doing low paying contracts from Upwork and reddit to pay rent (I did not have time for an extended search to pick up a high paying contract and got these within days which I consider an achievement).
So I built a program that automatically writes queries on the fly for an MS ADX database, and optionally will generate arbitrary graphs, based on a user question. And now another system that integrates Slack and document question answering with semantic search (using llamaindex/gpt-index). Both for $1000 or less and within one or two weeks.
I believe that a competitive rate for these tasks would be more like ten times that much, in some markets. But for Upwork and reddit, it's closer to what I billed if you want to be able to pick something up fast. Also I would rather make these my own businesses if I was not desperate for the cash to pay rent/bills.
All it takes to continue being poor is to start being poor and need to pick up work fast. Or just not have a friend to seed your startup. Or maybe my whole problem in life is just making ugly websites by hand instead of using a template.
I actually think I am probably doing it wrong because I see people with less technical skill and integrity focusing on raising money instead of solving problems and having all of their needs easily met.
At the moment I am just sort of praying that the guy from Reddit doesn't turn out to be a crook or something and actually pays me the rest of what he owes. Which I don't really think he is but he really should acknowledge messages faster on Slack.
But it was your decision to not go for as much money as you could.