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Jesus, your comment and the other replies just straight up reek of privilege/ignorance. What you're suggesting is obviously the pragmatic choice - obviously, i

• drstewart 9y ago
  They also wouldn't have imagined that not making everything disposable and plastic would be a bad idea and yet here we are. Not everything is better because it happened in the past. God forbid you have to be a little bit more mindful of wanton consumption than people were in $CURRENT_YEAR - 50. Calling a country third world because you can't throw away tons of disposable diapers... now that's a low standard, or just ridiculously privileged.
  • croon 9y ago
    This has nothing to do with the argument, at all.
    • drstewart 9y ago
      It completely does. Why are cloth diapers third world? Why are disposables seen as so superior that they should be had at a discount? They should be expensive to account for their environmental cost. Just because they didn't care about that in the 50s doesn't mean anything. So yeah, it's incredibly relevant.
      • croon 9y ago
        The discussion was about how something that almost every parent uses, relating to one of the most basic human functions, could be outside of the purchasing power of an inhabitant of a major developed country. I don't disagree with a discussion on how we externalize costs in cell phones, take out food containers, packaging for toilet paper, or whatever else. But however reasonable that discussion is, it was besides the point of this discussion.
      • s4vi0r 9y ago
        No, you entirely missed the point. Cloth being better is something else entirely, nor was I suggesting that disposable diapers be discounted with taxpayer money. The point was "Why does the poor in the richest country in the world have to worry about something as inane as affording diapers in 2018?" I agree that people should use cloth - but the response to "Hey, this poor person can't even really afford to buy diapers!" shouldn't be "wow that damn government making her dependent on welfare bux, shes so dumb she doesn't even know about cloth too!". It just reeks of being completely out of touch with the poor experience in America. Maternity leave isn't really a thing for someone like her - should she maybe be working an extra job or two to afford better diapers? Even if she doesn't, how do you know she has the time to deal with changing and washing cloth diapers? Being a stay at home mom doesn't exactly work as well as it did in the 50s or 60s, and she doesn't have a husband working for a tech company or whatever who can support a family on a single salary.
        • chrissnell 9y ago
          Let's be clear and honest about this article: there was no second job for her to work because she quit her first job before the baby was even born to go on assistance. Your argument doesn't hold water with me. My mom worked when she was pregnant with me and went right back to work after I was born. My wife, a physical therapist with a physically demanding job, worked until the very day both of our sons were born and then went back to work four weeks later. The girl in this story did none of that. Again, I don't blame her--the system practically invited her to do this.
  • hennsen 9y ago
    You are right about consumption and throwaway society issues. At the same time, i dont believe the reason people can’t afford diapers is that they are expensive to protect the environment... plus creating lots of trash shouldn’t be a privilege for some - it should be prohibited for all.
    • pas 9y ago
      It should be priced. If you are full vegan, and recyle everything for years, and never travel, so your environmental load is minimal, you should be able to afford a year of time saving with a baby, by using disposable diapers. And maybe it could be price adjusted for income, so everyone should do the same effort for the environment.
      • hennsen 9y ago
        There definitely should a price system that also encompasses the health/environmental/social damage a product brings over its full production and lifecycle! That would generally reward people so much for the good things you mentioned that they still could afgord the one bad thing...
• joaomacp 9y ago
  Nothing is guaranteed when we are born into this world. Nature is out to get us, and it's survival of the fittest. People who are born into wealth have it way easier, but they can still lose it all and go broke. Then they'll adapt and try to overcome it, and the ones that can adapt survive. Just like nature's always been.
• bkovacev 9y ago
  Your comment is completely contradictory. You say the OP's comment reeks of privilege/ignorance, but you go ahead and expect government privilege in $CURRENY_YEAR. The OP was commenting that certain people leech and do not want to find a job and help themselves, but rather want more help from the government. I grew up with cloth diapers not because my family was poor, but just simply because it was a better choice for us at the time. My Family grew up in the 50-60s with cloth diapers, because other types of diapers weren't available. I don't see that cloth diapers are a poor-people's choice. Why is that so "third world"? Is it bellow some "level" you think should exist - that my friend is the privilege/ignorance you were smelling in other comments.
  • rokhayakebe 9y ago
    The OP was commenting that certain people leech and do not want to find a job and help themselves, but rather want more help from the government. I do not see how you got that from OP. Your sentence is very loaded. You are reading this with your own filters, it seems. What I got from OP is the government is not helping people become self reliant. Instead it is helping them financially, but also hurting them long term by impeding their ability to learn ways to lift up.
    • bkovacev 9y ago
      I don't blame this woman. I'm not pissed at her. I'm pissed, however, at the politicians who have created this dependency web to trap people like this woman and ensure that there will always be a need for do-gooder politicians. unless, of course, you have a system that encourages dependence on public assistance and actually ends up hurting a woman's self-sufficiency and puts her little boy at a high risk of being helpless and dependent, too. By having the government helping them more, they fail to become self-reliant, thus get used to leeching and are expecting from the government to help them. You have people purposely living on food stamps and government help, even though they're capable of finding work. If you're not aware of this you might want to check your filters as well.
      • thanksgiving 9y ago
• cwhatididtheir 9y ago
  Triggered! I am a little shocked you found the comment so infuriating. I think the original comment proved that there is a perfectly satisfiable diaper solution that even poor Americans can easily afford. It seems reasonable that there should be innovation in the industry so that people of all income levels can be satisfied. If $1,000/year is not a burden to your family, then you should have the option to purchase a better, more convenient diaper for your child if the demand is high enough for the market to support it. I do agree with you that it is absolutely unreasonable in this day and age for a child to go without diapers or their other basic needs fully satisfied. But I think the original comment was pointing out that there are perfectly reasonable alternatives. Also, if you find yourself having to say "I'm not even a communist or anything," it might be time to recalibrate.
• rukittenme 9y ago
  I'm really tired of hearing the argument "we're the richest country on Earth and "X" still happens!" Of course "X" still happens. "X" is lower on our priorities list than other more pressing issues. Are diapers really the cross we're going to die on now? We spend ~$3tn helping people every year (federal, state, and local). I think its safe to assume the "richest country on Earth" is trying.
  • arnoooooo 9y ago
    We can at least discuss how the 3tn are allocated, and yes, lament that what we consider the bare minimum is not met in some cases.
    • rukittenme 9y ago
      Yes of course but that's not the argument I'm responding too. I'm responding to the idea that "there's always more in the piggy bank". For an example of the mentality please reference aninhumer's response to me.
  • aninhumer 9y ago
    More pressing issues like building yachts for rich people to make sure they're still "incentivised" to produce wealth?
• nbdev 9y ago
  You're the one who sounds privileged. OP sounds like they know what it's like to live within their means, and grow up with a strong character. You just want to make entitled leeches.
• eljimmy 9y ago
  You seem to think first world means everyone is happy, content, and without struggle. No country such as that has ever existed. The common concept of first world is so misconstrued by people who live in it that those from second and third world countries would ridicule you for your comment. Perspective, don't forget it.
  • sanbor 9y ago
    It would bebizarre If you would be billionaire and your brother don't have enough money for diapers. A month of diapers would cost the same than Whole Foods fancy meal. That's how bizarre this things looks. I live in Argentina, not first world by any means, and we have a lots welfare programs.
  • Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    No, but there's a lot that the US (which, remember, is THE RICHEST AND MOST POWERFUL COUNTRY IN THE WORLD (caps for the people in the back)) can do as a country to improve the basic standards of living. Basic things like affordable health care for everyone (and free health care for those that can't afford it), education and equal opportunities for everyone (so that kids whose parents are poor can still go to university if they have that drive / intelligence - I'm saying that because I had that opportunity), etc. The cost of disposable nappies is not the issue here. Neither is happiness or contentness. It's being the richest country in the world while 13.5% of its population is living below the poverty line, while people are literally dying on the streets due to being neglected by both the government, their neighbours, and a lack of acceptable health care. With the poor staying poor due to no social mobility, access to education, or normal jobs that don't involve having to scrounge the bottom of the barrel looking for e.g. passengers to drive around.
    • ComputerGuru 9y ago
      “It's being the richest country in the world while 13.5% of its population is living below the poverty line,“ I don’t want to get into the political or moral issues, but I just want to point out that this is almost a non sequitur. The USA’s dominance is relative to other countries, but the poverty line is intra-USA. The single poorest person in the USA could be richer than everyone outside it and there could still very well be a poverty line - and people below it - in the USA.
• toomanybeersies 9y ago
  My parents used cloth nappies with my oldest brother in 1990, we weren't poor, and we lived in a developed nation. Disposable nappies are horrible for the environment.
  • hycaria 9y ago
    But people are lazy. A child is work seemingly very few people are willing to put into.
• avar 9y ago
  > Do you think that back in the 50s and 60s > when your parents or grandparents were > buying the first mass produced disposable > diapers, they would have expected 60 years > later people would be forced to go back to > washable cloth diapers because they couldn't > afford regular diapers? I tried looking up the real price of diapers since the 50s until modern day, and the only thing I could find suggests that this statement is outlandishly inaccurate. Here's a document that quotes prices from the 50s in the US[1]: [...]Prices typically ran above—sometimes well above—ten cents per diaper, while cloth diapers sold for 1-2 cents each and diaper services typically charged 3-5 cents per diaper. According to http://www.usinflationcalculator.com http://www.usinflationcalculator.com 10 cents per diaper in Today's money would be $1.03. I don't live in the US (although I do buy diapers), but looking at Amazon for even small packages you've got prices like $15 for a 40-pack of Pampers, which is $0.40 per diaper. It looks like you can easily get that price down to half of that if you buy bigger packages, buy non-brand etc. So I think you can tell your grandparents in the 50s that accounting for the price of soap etc. their grandchildren are going to live in a country where disposable diapers are as cheap as cloth diapers. That doesn't sound so bad. 1. https://www.edana.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/seven-decades-of-disposable-diapers.pdf?sfvrsn=2 https://www.edana.org/docs/default-source/default-document-l...
  • rusk 9y ago
    ... their grandchildren are going to live in a country where disposable diapers are as cheap as cloth diapers. That doesn't sound so bad. I'm going to regret sticking my head over the parapet on this one but ... You're making the argument that it's great that diapers are a quarter of the price that they were, and isn't that great. But we're speaking in the context of how the poor can't even afford them at that price. I've no stake in this argument. The dynamic of poverty and privilege is a topic that demands robust discussion. But I couldn't let such an obvious contradiction slip by ...
    • avar 9y ago
      No, I'm not trying to make that argument. There's certainly people today that have kids and can't afford diapers in first-world countries even if they were say 1/4 of current prices. I'm specifically responding to a part of the GPs comment that seems to be claiming that things have been getting worse since the 50s. Which is not to say that anyone being unable to afford diapers can't be considered unacceptable, or that you could argue that social policies should be changed to amend that problem. But it doesn't help anyone if the discussion isn't factually based. As far as I can tell poverty has been going down since the 50s[1] (with some bumps), and more generally, if you would present anyone in the 50s struggling to raise kids at their income level to swap with someone in 2018 at proportionally the same income level they'd take that swap in a heartbeat. All of which is not to say that thing can't get even better, but there's no way to set sensible social policy for the future if we don't look at the data showing where we've already been, and what current trends are. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
• GrumpyNl 9y ago
  Hm, can i afford a child, can i raise a child? Should i have a child.
• ComputerGuru 9y ago
  Wow, struck a nerve, did he? Please keep this vitriol and personal attacks off of HN. OP was polite and posted a well-reasoned response. You making personal attacks out of ignorance that may not even hold true in the OP’s case is just petty.
• nailer 9y ago
  I'm from a first world country and grew up (in the 80s) woth washable diapers. Surely the privilege is expecting everyone deserves cheap disposable products?
  • rusk 9y ago
    That's one way of looking at it. Another is that the privilege is having time and energy with which to apply to cleaning diapers. We're increasingly time-poor these days, in particular when we're working multiple jobs to make ends meet.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• chrissnell 9y ago
  I never wore disposable diapers; my mom raised me in cloth diapers. They were two young parents, trying to get my dad's little one-room bicycle shop off the ground in a time of 25+% interest rates. I'm sure that scrubbing my shit out of cloth diapers wasn't fun but my mom did it. Please, spare me the privilege argument. I've been so poor as a kid that I walked to my grandmother's house to ask for food. I've been so poor that I shared all-you-can-drink small size sodas at Taco Bell to make it to pay day. When you're poor and motivated, you do what you have to do.