Regarding the hamburger thing--you might be getting enough calories, but you'll be missing out on a lot of important vitamins and minerals that are only availab

Regarding the hamburger thing--you might be getting enough calories, but you'll be missing out on a lot of important vitamins and minerals that are only available in fruits and vegetables, which tend to be expensive. Vitamin supplements have not been shown to increase health, which is probably because 1. Nutrition is so complicated, we do not 100% know yet what people need to be eating to be healthy, and 2. just because you're eating a vitamin, doesn't mean it's being presented to your body in a way that it can be biochemically processed. A simple example is calcium--if you're deficient in vitamin D, your body won't store it in your bones and you'll just piss it out instead. Eating properly is a difficult skill that even many highly-educated people haven't mastered. And if you're eating like shit, which poor people are forced to do, it'll be that much harder to make intelligent decisions about your budget, let alone learn how to code. Your brain will not be operating at full capacity when you're feeding it shit. Regarding your point about the bus--public transit is often quite bad in the United States. There might not even be any public transit available. Okay, fine, so you think someone poor should just move? What makes you think they have enough money saved up to move? As for organizing with the other "poor"...here's a fun answer about one hacker's encounter while living in a neighborhood full of those "poor" people: http://www.quora.com/Crime/What-should-you-do-if-someone-puts-a-gun-to-your-head/answer/Felix-Chan http://www.quora.com/Crime/What-should-you-do-if-someone-put... Also, as for the people living off of $2 a day...come on, their standard of living is much lower. If you're a subsistence farmer, you're also growing your own food and you don't need the intermediary of McDonald's. You are your own boss. Poor people in more developed countries don't have the option of growing their own healthy food. And considering how even the middle class can fall through no fault of their own, your continued insistence that anyone can make it out of poverty just through personal grit and determination sounds woefully, overly optimistic: http://articles.cnn.com/2009-06-05/health/bankruptcy.medical.bills_1_medical-bills-bankruptcies-health-insurance?_s=PM:HEALTH http://articles.cnn.com/2009-06-05/health/bankruptcy.medical... My biggest problem with your answer is that you think "poor" people know better. I'm convinced that if I ever became poor I would work my way out of it, as my father did, but I had some damn good role models growing up who taught me the importance of financial responsibility and independence. I know what to do. Many people not only do NOT know what to do, they don't even know they're ignorant. I think they could use a little help.