https://cds.bie.edu/

Clean modern buildings, desks, air conditioning, running water, very nice. You were fooled by that photo into making a bigger assumption about the full school and situation.

OP may have misunderstood the context but I think it's a stretch to say they were intentionally fooled.

One thing I can tell you that the whole situation up there is contentious and complicated between the tribes, the states and the feds where one could support any argument as there isn't some standard "Rez Life" one can point at.

I mean, I used to have this one friend who grew up (and still had family) on a part of the reservation which was completely surrounded by the other tribe and her and my other friends (from the other tribe, don't quite remember which was which here) would get into some serious arguments at the bar over the issue where we'd have to separate them before it came to fisticuffs.

The real world isn't TV. Not everything is a grand conspiracy.

But these phone companies just give unfettered access to their networks to the various TLAs and everybody ignores the fact that they are not providing the cell service they are contractually obligated to.

These days satellite would be cheaper in any case.

Thanks for finding that.

https://navajotimes.com/edu/hill-becomes-makeshift-classroom...

Look at the photo (linked to elsewhere in this thread).

If it's anything like some of the parts of the big rez I've been to, the nearest school is probably three hours away over sand/dirt roads. The teacher teaches remotely to children spread over a thousand square miles.

it doesn't help that it's in practice illegal to be in such poverty.

Which TBH I think is way less than it used to be, but feels like it's more because so much more stuff involves law and government than it did 50yr ago.

"we're not blind to it, half of us are sick of paying for it for multiple generations, accruing interest. we're paying for poor people from 20 years ago still. let them sink, let them go away. its a test, they failed it."

Here, "go away" is a euphemism for "die from exposure".

20 years ago we had a worldwide financial crises caused by the capricious whims of the richest people in this country, they caused massive amounts of damage, destroyed people's lives and livelihoods, kicked them out on the street, and it's framed as "paying for poor people".

I rarely hear people that grew up fairly middle class and "made it" looking back at the poor as someone holding them back in this same manner.

or, are currently benefiting, but they're just getting what's owed to them, unlike all the other moochers taking handouts

So far as I know, every single UBI trial has had consistently positive outcomes. People get jobs, get training, get a roof over their heads.

Giving people money does in fact give people more choices, and helps make the poor less poor.

But only six of the listed pilots mention the results.

1970s NIT pilots: no noticeable improvements.

Mincome: significant reduction in hospitalization. Slight decrease in work?

Tribal profit sharing: better homelife for children, parents on the booze less.

Madhya Pradesh: great success.

Netherlands: increased employment slightly, not health.

Finland: improved health slightly, not employment (employment was the goal).

So, I don't know. I suppose it helps, but mostly in Madhya Pradesh.

You're right of course. The problem is that such institution no longer exist in North America.

Not saying anyone’s a Bad Person for this, but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything. You can’t fix people without at least their partnership, and generally it’s substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation. “Bitter pills to swallow” as the meme goes but anyone who doesn’t admit this is kidding themself.

> Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks.

No, most people do not.

I am aware of classic triad of "malignantly antisocial personality + substance abuse + criminal record" that makes people stay on the streets.

But a lot of people end up on the streets simply because they were already only one notch above financial destitution and so all of their friends and family.

Lose a job + get sick in body or mind, even temporarily = game over. "Friends and family" who are also financially vulnerable would ruthlessly shed the load of extra mouth to feed, much less to house.

Eventually your job search keeps turning up "no" because they don't like the answers to "can you explain this gap on your resume?" and they really don't like the answer to "do you have a permanent residence" or "do you have any drug-related convictions?"

Hopefully you find a job before you've exhausted the good will of all your friends. And pray to GOD it doesn't happen again because the next time around, each one will have an excuse as to why they can't host you. "Oh sorry, we've got our inlaws, try X, Y, Z"... who are also "unable" to host.

So then your car is your home. If you're lucky enough to have one. But the point is "just have friends" isn't a solution.

Yeah, a couple weeks and then what? Couch-surfing is a form of homelessness, and the membrane between sleeping on a couch and sleeping on the street can be very thin, especially when your health makes it unlikely you'll find work in the near future. Something as simple as a concussion can stop you from working for months.

> but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything

I hear this argument a lot, and I find it baffling. What's your proposal here? That we all wag our fingers at homeless people? The people with agency who can fix their situations on their own already did—in fact, they course-corrected long before they slid into poverty or homelessness in the first place. If they had agency, they wouldn't be in this situation.

There is no proposal, and that's the point.

That's why I dredged up the dead comment in the first place stating it plainly "let them sink, let them go away." At least that poster was honest about the end game.

Lot of other posters here on HN seem to feel the same way but they're rationalizing it with "well, they deserve it after all". It's their fault "because they’ve burned every bridge." It's their fault because "most people have a dozen friends". It's their fault because "substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation."

And if we don't agree with this assessment, it's we who are not serious. But left unstated is: their way just ends up leaving this vulnerable population to die, and they really don't have a problem with that, because according to them, it's their own damn fault.

I believe the latest solution to homelessness proffered in the public sphere was from Brian Kilmeade, who said "involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill 'em." A final solution if you will.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fox-news-brian-kilmeade-apologi...

Then they need to start supporting themselves. Or at least not strew needles all over the friend’s living room and pawn their valuables to buy more meth.

Most of those friends would settle for just the latter for several months, but the worst cases 100% got kicked out of even family members’ homes for that kind of thing and that’s why they’re on the street.

10 trillion dollars of welfare, free houses, cash, whatever, is not enough to fix addicts who don’t have an insane amount of willpower. Which most people just don’t have. Drugs are mostly the problem. Most non-addicts sleep in their cars and rely on friends for a month or two and get their shit together. “Homelessness” numbers always conflate both kinds: the lost causes and the temporarily homeless.

Sure, but it's the system's fault, and we can point at the people who are keeping the system the way it is. The system is what it does, and what it does is syphon money from everyone else and pumps it upward to a few individuals. That's not an accident, people are responsible for that, they like the way it works, and they're intent on keeping it that way.

Remember, in this system you get paid money for having money and you get charged a fee if you don't have enough. You get taxed more for working with capital than for owning capital. You pay more the less you buy. People always say "The hardest million was the first million". This is by design!

> You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.

Maybe, but we refuse to fund those because they're too expensive to operate.

The magic of the system is that there's enough trickle down to motivate the petite-bourgeois (I hate Marx, but I'll be darned if he didn't enumerate some good economic tiers) to make them keep the system running.

Your media talking heads peddling division, your 200k+/yr software engineers implementing extractive algorithms to make the gig economy tick, etc, etc, etc.

No matter who or what is to blame, the individual is who is paying the price and who should have the strongest interest to get out of that situation. Which means, if you're staying in that situation for years on end you have to admit to yourself you are doing something which isn't working.

Thats why people have more sympathy for somebody who is poor because they are temporarily down on their luck or born into poverty, and less sympathy for somebody who has been poor as an adult for decades.

All research (e.g. UBI trials, mirco loan experiments...) have shown that giving someone poor access to money allows them to dramatically improve their situation.

And I don't think anybody is arguing that people shouldn't get help to get back on their feet. Rather that some people refuse to get back on their feet.

So I'll reply here, since I can't reply to a [dead]:

> And then what? You're 54 years old. No degree. No work history. Criminal conviction for drug possession. You're mentally ill and unmedicated. You realize for the first time you want to change your life. What's your first move? You have until your lucidity is interrupted by the next bout of mania and paranoid delusions to turn your life around.

You get medication and join the merchant navy as a mess hand. Not only do you get food, a safe bed, medical attention, safety, a salary, and companionship. You also get away from a destructive environment, drugs, threats, and all that shit that made life hell.

I't been my experience* that HN folks don't like reality, practicum, and personal experience. They mostly like abstractions and theory.

*See what I did, there?

A long discussion is going on, with people flinging poo, back and forth, and one comment appears, from someone actually in the industry/organization being discussed, or by someone with very relevant direct experience, and that comment gets immediately dogpiled; often by both sides. It’s happened to me, a couple of times. I’ve learned to just stay out of these shitfests, even if they are embarrassingly offbase.

With this kind of emotionally-charged, nontechnical topic, it’s even worse than things like OS or methodology dogma battles.

We used to have those in the US. Things are better for the poor now without them - a few do freeze to death in the streets today, most do not, while the abuse of those old institutions did hit most. The people who need institutions are also those least able to advocate for themselves if they are abused.

I don't like the current answer, but it could be worse and if you want something better you need to explain how it won't descend into worse. I don't have any ideas myself.

Wanting people to die because they are poor, losing complete touch of why we humans even develop what we do: to the betterment of us all, to enrich all of our lives, to make the lives of future humans better. There's no other point to it, the absurd individualism is a disease, I'd much rather eradicate those from our lineage than the less fortunate, for a better future for humanity.

I cannot find a citation for a number that large of people who do not have access to electricity in the USA, would you happen to have one?

> In 2020, 34 million U.S. households (27% of all U.S. households) reported difficulty paying energy bills or reported that they had kept their home at an unsafe temperature because of energy cost concerns.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=51979

Another site claims:

> The shutoffs epidemic is growing. Households had their power cut more 1.5 million times in the first 10 months of 2022 (the most recent data available), a 29% increase since the same period last year. In that same period, households were also disconnected from gas more than 380,000 times, a 76% increase over 2021.

https://energyandpolicy.org/utility-disconnections-in-the-un...

When it comes to plumbing, there are households that literally don't even have access to it:

> According to American Community Survey (ACS) data from the Census Bureau, 522,752 US households lacked complete plumbing access in 2021. Of these households, 347,943 didn’t have a bath or a shower, 419,971 lacked hot or cold running water, and 246,884 had neither.

https://usafacts.org/articles/us-households-with-plumbing-po...

> Nationwide, the United States has made great strides in improving water and sewerage access since the 1970s, when 3.5 million households lacked indoor running water and a flush toilet. Still, in 2021, more than half a million US households (1,100,000 people) lacked running water in their homes

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-024-00180-z

This is just not true. America has many problems but access to electricity/running water simply is not one of them.

Municipality would rather some house be vacated (perhaps based on a "poor people drain services, kick-em out" policy posture) so when a storm takes out your utility pole guess who isn't getting a new meter drop until they bring their shit up to current code at a non-starter price... and oh look here it's illegal to live in a house without electricity. I guess that means someone's getting evicted, what a shame...

Where are these people? Probably the largest concentration of such people are on the various Native American reservations (I believe ~15% of the Navajo Reservation lacks running water). The hinterlands of Alaska also likely has a high number of these houses.

I lived for a month in a dorm in China quite a few years ago, where they had running water for an hour every other day. Hot water for tea was delivered in a thermos every morning. Nobody had "heated water insecurity". Everyone knew exactly how it worked, and they all showered two or three to a shower. I couldn't bring myself to do that, so I showered after they were all done, usually in cold water. The problem was very clearly lack of hot water, not "insecurity".

I mentored a kid for a few years whose family occasionally couldn't afford meals, so they had "fend for yourself night", where he had to figure out how to get a meal on his own. His problem was not "food insecurity", his problem was that he was hungry. Any "food insecurity" he might have had was distinctly downstream from his lack of food, and would have been entirely eliminated with regular meals.

You are disconnected from reality.

I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both.

I'll take the word of what I've personally seen with my own eyes over someone who created an HN account three minutes ago.

> I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both.

But can you provide us with a source other than your own eyes for the "millions of people" you claim to be living in such conditions?

The claim is not that literally 100% of Americans have electricity/running water. It's that there are not "millions" of Americans without them.

I went to school with kids who didn't have winter jackets. In Northern Maine. I studied with kids who didn't have any food to eat, almost ever. My mother taught kids that were kicked out and homeless at like 16. One child was named after a beer. Entire classrooms worth of kids being "raised" only by an impoverished grandparent who wasn't able to leave the house and couldn't really do anything and had only minimal social security checks for income.

There was a family that lived in a 10ft by 10ft shack and had 6 kids and basically nothing else to their name. One daughter was hit by a dump truck getting off the school bus and died.

My own family was impoverished for a long time. Sometimes the only food left in the house was old flour with bugs in it. The mental toll it took on my mother is still clear and evident, and I myself still have deep "scarcity mindset" behavior, and our situation wasn't even that bad. We technically were above the poverty line. We had a home that was clean and well built and very cheap ($400 a month mortgage). My mother had an education and a career, and my dad's employer was in control of making his child support payments, so they were always on time. My mom was really smart and extremely good at stretching money and playing the games required to cover your bills when you literally make less money than it takes every month to be legally alive, like making friends with the telecom neighbor who will set you up with free cable for a bit out of pity. Her job in government ensured we had good health insurance and visits to doctors. We had much wealthier family who kept us clothed with truckfulls of handmedown clothes from the previous decade. She had great credit and could manage credit cards very well.

It almost killed her a bunch of times though. Once when I was 12, she called my dad to come get me because she couldn't get herself out of bed and was bawling and openly talking about suicide. She couldn't really afford therapy and the local therapists in bumbfuck nowhere aren't good at their job anyway. Turns out there's a medically important distinction between "Therapist" and "Psychologist" and in the 90s neither was equipped to handle "Undiagnosed neurodivergent driven to the very end of their wits and surviving exclusively on adrenaline".

Yet there are people on this very board insistent that people do not starve in America (before Trump decided we didn't need to report on it and thus killed the program tracking it, it regularly reported millions and millions of American children literally go hungry. Free lunch and breakfast programs reliably improve grades and education outcomes still because children are hungry)

There are people who insist it is cultural or based on making bad choices.

These people are gross.

Even better, the Trump administration canceled [1] an attempt to right that wrong, citing that it was “DEI.”

0: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sanitation-open-sewers-black-...

1: https://apnews.com/article/justice-department-environmental-...

Normally the plumbing runs underground but those people have a trench solution likely because they added a bunch of trailers to the property and more lines were out. There's probably some weird government rules at play here. Like they don't want to dig pipes into the ground because screwing with their grandfathered in lagoon would be "state problems" level illegal whereas right now it's "municipality problems" level illegal and the latter doesn't wanna stomp them with the jackboot for obvious political reasons.

The clean water act and it's knock on rules really act as a huge impediment to "it won't make it compliant, but it will make it a hell of a lot better" fixes in cases like this.

The original agreement under the Biden admin, which to be clear, the President doesn't personally oversee these kinds of agreements, this is sort of all within the DOJ, but the original agreement doesn't even require them to build the sewers. It literally just requires them to run a public health campaign and not issue fines.

Whatever the dollar number is, it's likely some insane punitive number (hundreds to thousands per day) that nobody could ever pay and never will actually be enforced, it's basically just a threat and you wind up going to court over it in the end or you fix it and they drop it or fine you a reasonable amount (thank the 8th amendment).

This sounds like a standoff situation. Municipality wants trailer park to pay for its own sewer. Trailer park can't afford it. Municipality fines them. Trailer park gives them the bird because they're so poor they're basically judgement proof. Municipality doesn't push the issue because if they take it and kick them all out then they will pick up the tab for remediating, etc, etc.

What should have happened in the original agreement is that the fed pays for the sewers at a very cheap rate and the municipality does the work and owns it for eg 10-20 years.

That's actually a really common agreement. I don't know why DOJ had such a derp moment here and instead demanded billboards about health risks for people who don't have the money for basic medical care much less exploratory lab testing.

There are many unflagged, un-downvoted posts on this forum that criticize Trump, my own included.