I think people fail to realize or are just now realizing that the opioid epidemic beginning in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky (as well as on reservations) wasn't an indictment of the character of Appalachians as a distinct cultural group by any means, it was a calculated move to exploit the vulnerable and forgotten: rural populations isolated from the outside world, full of bodies broken in the mines and in pain, few prospects and little hope for anything better. Purdue was pumping hundreds of thousands pills into these little hollers. Just one more corporate entity committing... Can we call it genocide yet? Between this and tens of thousands dead in the mines and from black lung and cancer caused by pollution? Because basic safety would cut into the bottom line and these people are seen as disposable? Just a bunch of backwards yokels who can't speak English right and get what they voted for? Things have happened in this region that make the Flint water crisis look like amateur hour.
Their schools are chronically underfunded because industry owns local governments all the way down to the school boards and sherrifs, that they would pay their fair share of taxes and invested in these communities with that kind of death grip on the region is laughable. I live near a trailer park, it kills me to think there is genius in there and in trailer parks all over the place that goes unrecognized and never developed and allowed to grow to reach its full potential. What's the point of staying in school if all you've ever expected of yourself is working at the gas station because you don't know you can want more for yourself? Because your family is poor, and you need to go to work to help feed your little siblings?
That teenage pregnancy rates are higher is hardly surprising. If you're standing in line at 6 am for Remote Area Medical to get a tooth pulled, it goes without saying you have no access to birth control or abortions. Not that you could even afford the latter anyway.
And so the cycle of systemic rural poverty continues.
Yes and no. "Universal" health care doesn't cover vision, dental, or mental health. In BC, "universal" health care is paid by one's employer. Which is great for people with steady employment, and awful for everybody else.
Wow, that is ugly. Also I happen to hold some pro-choice views so please direct your toxic bile elsewhere.
> There is a metric fton (an SI unit) of research on a wide range of socially beneficial change that happens simply from giving power to women.
Nobody who is the kind of contributor that HN welcomes would take serious issue with this.
That doesn't make your original comment a relevant or constructive contribution to the discussion, which is about poverty in general.
Discussions about just how equality can be achieved across gender and other axes, and how that can lead to benefits to society, are important and worthy discussions.
But they're not simple - if they were, these problems would have been solved long ago.
You might want to check your assumptions about which country I'm from.
> I didnt bring gender into the discussion; the burden of poverty falls disproportionately on women.
This is a rhetorical tactic, not a good-faith mode of discussion.
From the age of your account it looks like you're a new participant on HN.
Fair enough that you're not yet up to speed with how things are done here.
This site is intended for people who want to engage in good-faith discussions, not rhetorical trickery and point-scoring.
I really don't see how lorcan brought gender into the discussion. cmurf did. To me, it looks like you're chewing out the wrong person. (And therefore, I don't think it's a rhetorical tactic for lorcan to say so.)
To lorcan:
The problem with your original comment was that it is technically true, but handwaves away a whole lot of really important detail about how someone's circumstances (e.g., family/community environment and inherited attributes like genetics and innate behaviours) influence one's ability to do that. To your credit, you acknowledged this in a later comment, but the crappy discussion was well on its way by then.
Related to that is it conflates correlation with causation.
Comments like this inevitably set off bad discussions, because that missing detail is what really matters about the topic, so you'll get arguments at cross-purposes, with some people supporting the truthiness of your point, and others trying to point out the gaps, and so it's hard to reach common ground because people are focused on different aspects of the issue.
Anyway, as AnimalMuppet said, this is well past generating more heat than light, so I'm out and I hope others are content to move on too.
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/24/9027195/haskins-sawhill-norms-...
And in the meantime, we should be educating and encouraging them about avoiding making bad decisions. But by removing their agency, you rule out that option as part of the solution. Instead, it seems you would rather hold your breath until "the system" is fixed, than address how to encourage people to make better decisions while also working towards a better system.
People making stupid generalizations that "these 3 rules..." are coming across as deliberately stupid. The world is nuanced. Saying "the way to fix poverty is this one simple thing" is useless. You want to have an actual conversation, that's fine. OP is laying down some bullshit. If he want to come back and refine is statement, great. Let's start the discussion I was instigating.
You want to infer meaning and give his bare bones comment a whole bunch of implied meaning, great. I'm trying to figure out if he's trolling or just being trite and dismissive.