4 ms·

I presume you live or have lived in India? In that case, consider yourself that the people targeted for this earn less than Rs. 25 per day - that is the officia

I presume you live or have lived in India? In that case, consider yourself that the people targeted for this earn less than Rs. 25 per day - that is the official poverty line in India. Please consider yourself what you would be able to afford to buy and eat and that price. For yourself and 2 children. If you live in India please attempt to go to a store and buy food for the same price and see what you get. Thanks!

kamaal 14y ago
Hmmm, I actually come from a pretty poor financial background. What helped me rise is self esteem to never accept help and learn to be strong instead. In fact right from the beginning I've refused scholarships. I purposefully turned down the option of reservation for my engineering course though I was perfectly eligible for it. My dad always says if you let people be strong they will be strong. Let them be weak and they will be weak. What these people need is not free stuff and reservations. They just need to be shown how to be strong and work their way out of the problem.
- vacri 14y ago
  Who will be showing them?
- hashpipe 14y ago
  It's strange that you refused a scholarship - who knows where that money went (another needy student or another scam). Plus, turning down a reservation only means that you made sure that someone less deserving (via reservation) got an engineering seat over a more deserving one (a general student who otherwise would have ranked just enough to get admitted). While your intent is good, I think you are letting your ego do the talking - dishing out theories over practicals. Practicality beats the st out of theory any given day. Try telling the farmer who hasn't eaten for a week to stand up and be strong - I bet he can't stand (quite literally).
  - ams6110 14y ago
    Any time someone gives you something you then have to dance to their tune. Do it on your own and you call the shots.
    - hashpipe 14y ago
      True. But only in theory. Practically impossible for anybody to call the shots every time.
- TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
  You sound like my Republican parents. They turned down food stamps when I was an infant, purely due to pride. That, and my dad wasn't even getting paid regularly by his employer. They were living on $10000/yr back in '82. But "It made them better people". addendum: I should also add that when I was born in '81, I required craniofacial surgery to the cost of $18000. They were required to make payments on this, to avoid garnishment.
  - jebblue 14y ago
    Your parents and the OP are wise.
    - TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
      I'm taking handouts for my education. I'm also on foodstamps to make sure I can eat healthy foods as I learn. When I am done with my educational program (draftsman, and then mechanical engineering), I will be able to support myself and others via taxes. I am seeking to better myself so I can be a productive member of US society. Is what I am doing wrong?
      - genwin 14y ago
        It's not wrong. Yet if the handouts and food stamps weren't available you can bet your education would cost less. Free stuff enables you and others to pay more, which promotes inflation. In the same vein, easily procurable student loans have made tuition soar.
        ryanac 14y ago
        Yes it might "cost less", but I wonder, he also gets food stamps, do you think (in this case) less would some how be affordable for him? In reality without the handout tuition might cost less, but he still wouldn't be able to afford it and now he would have no alternatives to getting an education when he's clearly motivated. Interested in any thoughts on this.
- amitagrawal 14y ago
  If you come from a poor financial background, wouldn't it be good financial (and common) sense to accept the scholarship? And as hashpipe rightly said, by turning down your reservation seat you probably let a less deserving (mark wise) reservation candidate over a more deserving candidate who probably won't even receive a scholarship let alone the seat. I would even go as far to say that you perfectly gamed the broken reservation system.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- potatolicious 14y ago
  > "My dad always says if you let people be strong they will be strong. Let them be weak and they will be weak." This is one of the most stereotypical fallbacks of those who have "made it". It leads naturally to the conclusion that those who are weak are so out of their own accord, which is a laughably false statement. It is not a position that is hard to understand - assigning moral blame to those less fortunate can be a defense mechanism against the hopeless and helpless injustice we see everywhere. > "What helped me rise is self esteem to never accept help and learn to be strong instead." This is nice rhetoric and a feel-good platitude, no better than believing in "the power of the self" or such motivational-speaker BS. A hallmark of meaningless rhetoric is an inability to generate specificity. I've noticed in your other posts in this thread that this is the case. There are a lot of technically true, but ultimately useless statements. Examples: > "If we help boost agriculture productivity and work on our economy most people will be able to buy food." How? I think we can all agree that if the economy was booming these people would have work and be able to buy food at fair market value - but you make it sound like "working on our economy" is trivial, or even possible in the short term. Along your logic, if we can just perfect cold fusion and supply free energy to everyone poverty would cease to exist! The devil, as usual, is in the details. > "This indicates they are not earning enough. So fixing that makes more sense than fixing problems in the free food program." Again, you're technically correct, but you've conveniently missed the how. The Income Problem is the most fundamentally difficult problem facing governments of our era, particularly in poor countries like India. So unless you have some groundbreaking insight into how this can happen, the statement is empty.
  - kamaal 14y ago
    Can you please make a point without passing personal remarks? Besides you can give every reason under the sun why working hard may not yield to results. Or you can try working hard and see for the results yourself. There will be failures, misfires and hits off target. But with a little trying eventually a person will make it.
    - potatolicious 14y ago
      So far as I'm aware I haven't attacked you personally - my post is entirely focused on your argument and statements. > "Besides you can give every reason under the sun why working hard may not yield to results. Or you can try working hard and see for the results yourself." Again, an empty statement unless accompanied by specifics. It's easy to ask "why don't these people just try hard work?", but the specifics get, naturally, much more complicated. - What is the realism behind expecting hard, industrious work from a demographic of people who can't even reach caloric break-even each day? How realistic is it to expect severely malnourished and starving people to bootstrap themselves? This strikes me like finding a person who's been stuck at the bottom of a well for days, tossing a rope ladder down, and wondering why they're not climbing. The answer is simple: they have passed the threshold where they can help themselves, but they are not yet past the threshold where they cannot be helped by an outside force. > "There will be failures, misfires and hits off target." The consequences of which is quite severe. When we try something and fail, our feelings get hurt, we might lose some money, and maybe we get to pull our belts in a bit tighter for a while. When the already starving fail, they die. I don't think it's extreme to say that we shouldn't experiment with social policy on the potential deaths of tens of millions. And this is actually a salient point - subsidy and direct-aid programs like this are never meant as a permanent solution to anything. Nobody is dumb enough to believe this. These programs buy time to find a systemic solution - because it's better to keep these people hobbling along while we try to fix the larger systemic issues that perpetuate their poverty, than to simply let them all die while we tinker with the knobs and switches. > "But with a little trying eventually a person will make it." Reality does not support your argument, even in first-world nations. Despite the stereotypes, the USA is full of industrious, hard-working people who have not made it. The entire world is full of industrious, hard-working people who have not made it. And this is why I think your argument is typical. In order to reconcile your world view (that enough hard work means success) with reality (the vast, vast majority of the world is unsuccessful), one must make the assumption that those who haven't made it have not worked hard enough. This is a sadly typical view that's as vindictive as it is false.
- mikeash 14y ago
  That's a conveniently self-fulfilling attitude. People just need to be shown how to be strong. If they still fail, it's because they didn't learn the lesson properly. No, there's a whole range of factors that play into an individual's economic situation, and skill, intelligence, and "strength" is not the entirety of it. "They just need to be shown how to be strong" is a convenient line that solves absolutely nothing.
sillysaurus 14y ago
Context: 25 Rs per day is $0.44 or 0.35 euros. It's hard to imagine a way to survive on two quarters ($0.50) per day. The minimum price for pretty much any quantity of food or drink around here is about $0.79. That doesn't get you very far, and certainly not a whole day. Suddenly I have a wonderful appreciation for how lucky we are to be born in a context that allowed us to learn to become programmers (and also to make money from it).
- intended 14y ago
  Check out http://rs100aday.com http://rs100aday.com. 2 guys tried to actually live on those amounts and logged everything. It's really a fascinating experiment and some of the hacks they had to come up with to manage calorific intake were quite stark. On top of that they describe how they were managing hygiene, transportation and the other necessities of life. And then they tried to live on rs 32 a day.

kamaal 14y ago

Hmmm, I actually come from a pretty poor financial background. What helped me rise is self esteem to never accept help and learn to be strong instead. In fact right from the beginning I've refused scholarships. I purposefully turned down the option of reservation for my engineering course though I was perfectly eligible for it. My dad always says if you let people be strong they will be strong. Let them be weak and they will be weak. What these people need is not free stuff and reservations. They just need to be shown how to be strong and work their way out of the problem.

vacri 14y ago
Who will be showing them?
hashpipe 14y ago
It's strange that you refused a scholarship - who knows where that money went (another needy student or another scam). Plus, turning down a reservation only means that you made sure that someone less deserving (via reservation) got an engineering seat over a more deserving one (a general student who otherwise would have ranked just enough to get admitted). While your intent is good, I think you are letting your ego do the talking - dishing out theories over practicals. Practicality beats the st out of theory any given day. Try telling the farmer who hasn't eaten for a week to stand up and be strong - I bet he can't stand (quite literally).
- ams6110 14y ago
  Any time someone gives you something you then have to dance to their tune. Do it on your own and you call the shots.
  - hashpipe 14y ago
    True. But only in theory. Practically impossible for anybody to call the shots every time.
TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
You sound like my Republican parents. They turned down food stamps when I was an infant, purely due to pride. That, and my dad wasn't even getting paid regularly by his employer. They were living on $10000/yr back in '82. But "It made them better people". addendum: I should also add that when I was born in '81, I required craniofacial surgery to the cost of $18000. They were required to make payments on this, to avoid garnishment.
- jebblue 14y ago
  Your parents and the OP are wise.
  - TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
    I'm taking handouts for my education. I'm also on foodstamps to make sure I can eat healthy foods as I learn. When I am done with my educational program (draftsman, and then mechanical engineering), I will be able to support myself and others via taxes. I am seeking to better myself so I can be a productive member of US society. Is what I am doing wrong?
    - genwin 14y ago
      It's not wrong. Yet if the handouts and food stamps weren't available you can bet your education would cost less. Free stuff enables you and others to pay more, which promotes inflation. In the same vein, easily procurable student loans have made tuition soar.
      - ryanac 14y ago
        Yes it might "cost less", but I wonder, he also gets food stamps, do you think (in this case) less would some how be affordable for him? In reality without the handout tuition might cost less, but he still wouldn't be able to afford it and now he would have no alternatives to getting an education when he's clearly motivated. Interested in any thoughts on this.
amitagrawal 14y ago
If you come from a poor financial background, wouldn't it be good financial (and common) sense to accept the scholarship? And as hashpipe rightly said, by turning down your reservation seat you probably let a less deserving (mark wise) reservation candidate over a more deserving candidate who probably won't even receive a scholarship let alone the seat. I would even go as far to say that you perfectly gamed the broken reservation system.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
potatolicious 14y ago
> "My dad always says if you let people be strong they will be strong. Let them be weak and they will be weak." This is one of the most stereotypical fallbacks of those who have "made it". It leads naturally to the conclusion that those who are weak are so out of their own accord, which is a laughably false statement. It is not a position that is hard to understand - assigning moral blame to those less fortunate can be a defense mechanism against the hopeless and helpless injustice we see everywhere. > "What helped me rise is self esteem to never accept help and learn to be strong instead." This is nice rhetoric and a feel-good platitude, no better than believing in "the power of the self" or such motivational-speaker BS. A hallmark of meaningless rhetoric is an inability to generate specificity. I've noticed in your other posts in this thread that this is the case. There are a lot of technically true, but ultimately useless statements. Examples: > "If we help boost agriculture productivity and work on our economy most people will be able to buy food." How? I think we can all agree that if the economy was booming these people would have work and be able to buy food at fair market value - but you make it sound like "working on our economy" is trivial, or even possible in the short term. Along your logic, if we can just perfect cold fusion and supply free energy to everyone poverty would cease to exist! The devil, as usual, is in the details. > "This indicates they are not earning enough. So fixing that makes more sense than fixing problems in the free food program." Again, you're technically correct, but you've conveniently missed the how. The Income Problem is the most fundamentally difficult problem facing governments of our era, particularly in poor countries like India. So unless you have some groundbreaking insight into how this can happen, the statement is empty.
- kamaal 14y ago
  Can you please make a point without passing personal remarks? Besides you can give every reason under the sun why working hard may not yield to results. Or you can try working hard and see for the results yourself. There will be failures, misfires and hits off target. But with a little trying eventually a person will make it.
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    So far as I'm aware I haven't attacked you personally - my post is entirely focused on your argument and statements. > "Besides you can give every reason under the sun why working hard may not yield to results. Or you can try working hard and see for the results yourself." Again, an empty statement unless accompanied by specifics. It's easy to ask "why don't these people just try hard work?", but the specifics get, naturally, much more complicated. - What is the realism behind expecting hard, industrious work from a demographic of people who can't even reach caloric break-even each day? How realistic is it to expect severely malnourished and starving people to bootstrap themselves? This strikes me like finding a person who's been stuck at the bottom of a well for days, tossing a rope ladder down, and wondering why they're not climbing. The answer is simple: they have passed the threshold where they can help themselves, but they are not yet past the threshold where they cannot be helped by an outside force. > "There will be failures, misfires and hits off target." The consequences of which is quite severe. When we try something and fail, our feelings get hurt, we might lose some money, and maybe we get to pull our belts in a bit tighter for a while. When the already starving fail, they die. I don't think it's extreme to say that we shouldn't experiment with social policy on the potential deaths of tens of millions. And this is actually a salient point - subsidy and direct-aid programs like this are never meant as a permanent solution to anything. Nobody is dumb enough to believe this. These programs buy time to find a systemic solution - because it's better to keep these people hobbling along while we try to fix the larger systemic issues that perpetuate their poverty, than to simply let them all die while we tinker with the knobs and switches. > "But with a little trying eventually a person will make it." Reality does not support your argument, even in first-world nations. Despite the stereotypes, the USA is full of industrious, hard-working people who have not made it. The entire world is full of industrious, hard-working people who have not made it. And this is why I think your argument is typical. In order to reconcile your world view (that enough hard work means success) with reality (the vast, vast majority of the world is unsuccessful), one must make the assumption that those who haven't made it have not worked hard enough. This is a sadly typical view that's as vindictive as it is false.
mikeash 14y ago
That's a conveniently self-fulfilling attitude. People just need to be shown how to be strong. If they still fail, it's because they didn't learn the lesson properly. No, there's a whole range of factors that play into an individual's economic situation, and skill, intelligence, and "strength" is not the entirety of it. "They just need to be shown how to be strong" is a convenient line that solves absolutely nothing.

sillysaurus 14y ago

Context: 25 Rs per day is $0.44 or 0.35 euros. It's hard to imagine a way to survive on two quarters ($0.50) per day. The minimum price for pretty much any quantity of food or drink around here is about $0.79. That doesn't get you very far, and certainly not a whole day. Suddenly I have a wonderful appreciation for how lucky we are to be born in a context that allowed us to learn to become programmers (and also to make money from it).

intended 14y ago
Check out http://rs100aday.com http://rs100aday.com. 2 guys tried to actually live on those amounts and logged everything. It's really a fascinating experiment and some of the hacks they had to come up with to manage calorific intake were quite stark. On top of that they describe how they were managing hygiene, transportation and the other necessities of life. And then they tried to live on rs 32 a day.