Maybe your choice is to be hungry rather than go back to a soup kitchen. That's fine, you're entitled to that opinion. But I don't feel that your experience should deprive others of the choice - I know some people who rely on soup kitchens so as not to starve, and they certainly would prefer to have soup kitchens than not.

There are also some excellent ones!

I am aware that quality varies. I did a write up of one that didn't completely suck as a potential model for how things should be done. But I wonder how many soup kitchens you have personally eaten at and how many you thought were excellent and would prefer it to most paid eateries (I mean solely on the basis of the high quality of the experience, not on the basis of it being free).

More importantly, private companies preserve choice (assuming no monopoly). Government provides no choice. My ability to make my own choice is what is most valuable to me.

It's also possible to find a middle ground; food providers could be paid by the government based on how many people they feed, giving the opportunity for competition between providers.

When you start eroding rights on the excuse that someone is too poor to have any right to care about such high minded frivolities as rights, you deprive them of hope of resolving their problems.

but you might value your ability to choose less if you didn't know when your next meal would be.

I am telling you that when I was so poor that I often had no idea when my next meal might be, I valued my own agency -- my right to choose and to make choices -- tremendously. But it looks to me like, overall, most folks here don't want to hear the opinions of someone who actually ate regularly at soup kitchens for a time. They want to say nice things about being generous people who will feed the hungry, and let's not let actual facts get in the way of our pretty ideas that this is always a good thing with no down side.

It is a form of virtue signaling. It is also a form of pity, which is fundamentally disrespectful. You assume you are in a better position than the people of whom you speak to decide for them, while completely dismissing the opinions to the contrary of someone still poor enough that food security is an ongoing question mark.

This seems to be par for the course.

With regard to "virtue signaling", that is a derogatory term used to imply that a person is only promoting an idea to appear good to others, without a genuine care or interest in effecting the change they are promoting. I think we have a fundamental disagreement about what sorts of policies would be effective, and using that term is unnecessarily dismissive.

Using that term mostly indicates that I feel incredibly dismissed most of the time on Hacker News.

This is a new handle, but I am not new here. I have had college classes on, for example, homelessness and public policy. I got myself off the street on my own efforts, not through some program. As best I can tell, I am the only woman who has ever spent any time on the leaderboard of HN.

None of it seems to make any difference. I continue to get no traction. I continue to not get substantive feedback on my projects. I continue to have no connections. My income remains extremely low.

I can't help but feel that sexism and classism are factors and I am just incredibly frustrated. Trying to do something good against long odds, etc begins to seem totally pointless and fruitless. I increasingly understand the very angry feminist types. I don't agree with their approach, but no approach seems to actually work.

You and I do fundamentally disagree. I am not pro UBI. I think that is a polite means to crap all over the have nots and increasingly cut them out of ever more access to money, rights, you name it.

I don't intend to engage further. I don't think this is in any way whatsoever productive. It is yet another exercise in me trying to engage in good faith with someone who seems to fundamentally be incapable of genuinely respecting me. Everything you say is another ever so politely dismissive thing done in accordance with the rules such that me getting offended just makes me look bad in the eyes of everyone here.

I have been facing this sort of thing with, I think, quite a lot of aplomb for more than 8 years, to no avail at all. And I just am not coping well with that fact at the moment.

I am all for food stamps. I wish that were made more readily available. Due to the lengthy and complex application forms, it is hard to apply to the program. I have six years of college and only managed to fill it out successfully because an agency helped me. I lost my food stamps due to a bureaucratic snafu and my attempts to reapply on my own were not successful having to do with barriers for me in the application process.

The EBT card itself is done very well. I would be completely fine with people suggesting we make this program easier to access and also increase the funding by about 50 percent. I don't see any reason why we need to dream up some imaginary American Diner for feeding people instead of making some modest improvements to an already existing program with a proven track record that has already worked out a lot of the bugs.

(When I was first on food stamps, using the EBT card was not as smooth as later. I know from firsthand experience they have worked out some of the bugs to make it work more smoothly than it used to.)

Sorry if this brings up bad memories for you.