Maybe that's true where you live. I left home at 16, spent ten years homeless and hitchhiking, am told I'm quite good at what I do, and have spent the last 3 y

Maybe that's true where you live. I left home at 16, spent ten years homeless and hitchhiking, am told I'm quite good at what I do, and have spent the last 3 years or so exerting the herculean effort required to rise through poverty. I currently live half on a couch of some good people I know, and half in the office of the web shop I work in. I have never had government assistance. I wouldn't have known where to find it, nor been in a situation to be given it in most cases. As far as handouts go, when you are zilch-zero-nada poor, at least in the US, there are a lot of things in life that will be higher on your priority list than either figuring out that they're there, or going through the process of acquiring them, keeping them, and then becoming self-sufficient. In many places in the US, government handouts are a joke. I'm not going to try to go into detail, but I can tell you that I know a lot of people whose reason for being dirt poor is not so glaringly obvious as the ones you know, and a fair amount of people who aren't poor because they had the luck to be born to the right people in the right place at the right time, regardless of their work ethic. I've been thinking a lot about socio-economic disparity amongst technically competent people a lot lately, I should probably try to gather my thoughts more cohesively.