The Emotions of Reaction and Socialism?

[Terthna]

If you know where to look, and if you live in the right area so that it's there to find and if you actually have the time to prepare it, and if you have the right cooking implements and don't keep getting them stolen, and if you have the right skills and knowledge. That's a lot of Ifs. I'm there myself having learned a lot about cooking healthy food inexpensively but I don't pretend my specific skillset is universal to all humans. Not everybody has the same opportunities and "well it can be done if all the dice fall the right way" is too often an excuse to look down on people. You can be fabulously wealthy if you get several ifs lined in a row too, that doesn't mean every person who isn't fabulously wealthy just didn't try enough.

So the question becomes; how can we make it so that everyone has access to affordable fresh food, and is capable of preparing it? I'd argue the first step is awareness and education; if more people know what their options are, it could improve things significantly.

 

[LordsFire]

So the question becomes; how can we make it so that everyone has access to affordable fresh food, and is capable of preparing it? I'd argue the first step is awareness and education; if more people know what their options are, it could improve things significantly.

Anyone with the internet and a moderate level of interest can learn the basics of decent cooking. One or a few good cookbooks can substitute for learning off of the internet, and this is all assuming you don't have a family member to learn from in the first place. If you have a stove or oven or hot plate or george foreman or a crockpot, much less all of the above, you can use that learning to be a decent cook.

For over 99.9% of people in America who are not physically disabled, the only thing keeping them from learning, is lack of interest or willingness to do so.

To use Bear Ribs 'dice' analogy, you don't get to roll the dice just once. You can keep rolling them until you get a decent set of results, over the course of months and years of your life.

 

[Bear Ribs]

So the question becomes; how can we make it so that everyone has access to affordable fresh food, and is capable of preparing it? I'd argue the first step is awareness and education; if more people know what their options are, it could improve things significantly.

I'd be inclined to agree, but there's significant other bars to good quality food than just knowing how to cook. I know as I've been in that situation many times clawing my way out of poverty.

As a poor person, you very likely have either family or roommates living with you which makes keeping any portable appliances difficult. I had many crockpots, hotplates, and rice cookers vanish to pawnshops when somebody decided they needed a fix. Thievery is also much more common to poor people than the middle class or wealth and I had lots of utensils stolen along with an entire stove at one point.

Without a car transporting groceries is a real pain. You can't get on a bus with five grocery bags and walking with them is highly difficult as well, so you wind up more likely to either buy McDonald's because it's cheap and doesn't need transportation or only buy a bare minimum of food because getting it home is hard. There's a study on food insecurity here that discusses a number of similar issues, on page 5 it notes that the poor in Melbourne had six times the average difficulty managing to get groceries to their homes compared to the middle class.

Even if you strive to live as clean a life as possible, it won't matter if the neighbors are filthy, their cockroaches will welcome themselves inside your home. This means storing staple foods can lead to nothing but bug-infested waste unless you're able to spend more money keeping everything totally sealed up.

Anyone with the internet and a moderate level of interest can learn the basics of decent cooking. One or a few good cookbooks can substitute for learning off of the internet, and this is all assuming you don't have a family member to learn from in the first place. If you have a stove or oven or hot plate or george foreman or a crockpot, much less all of the above, you can use that learning to be a decent cook.

For over 99.9% of people in America who are not physically disabled, the only thing keeping them from learning, is lack of interest or willingness to do so.

To use Bear Ribs 'dice' analogy, you don't get to roll the dice just once. You can keep rolling them until you get a decent set of results, over the course of months and years of your life.

Not everyone is capable of learning that way. Schools put a lot of effort into combining lectures, text reading, visual aids, projects, and movies because most people have limitations on how they can learn and hitting them from multiple directions is a better way to ensure that at least some of it's retained. A kinesthetic learner can browse the internet all day and learn nothing from it no matter how motivated and hard working they are. Sometimes the dice are loaded and no number of rerolls will help.

 

[LordsFire]

Again, while there is a tiny sliver of people for whom what you're saying is true, the vast majority of people are not mentally disabled and unable to learn from watching, reading, and then trying it for themselves until they get it right.

Bear? Stop infantilizing poor people. It's condescending, demeaning, insulting, and wrong.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Again, while there is a tiny sliver of people for whom what you're saying is true, the vast majority of people are not mentally disabled and unable to learn from watching, reading, and then trying it for themselves until they get it right.

Bear? Stop infantilizing poor people. It's condescending, demeaning, insulting, and wrong.

I offer a counter-suggestion: Stop making unsupported claims. Citation needed. I want to see your numbers for that "tiny sliver" and your sources for that in your next post.

 

[Morphic Tide]

@Bear Ribs, did you not first put forth food insecurity as something caused by systematic and geographic flaws in the economy? If you were the first to make a positive declaration, it is on you to prove that assertion before @LordsFire needs to pull up the disproof of it in detail. Your post on this page offering a link is expressly Australian, a country that's spectacularly arid, has seen food production drop in recent years, and is vastly greater than many others for government influence on the economy.

The United States produces dozens of times the food of Australia, with a population somewhere in the area of 15 times larger. As it pertains to what I assume is LordsFire's point, Australia is a rather considerable outlier for losing food production in recent times.

In particular, the link offers a graph that is specifically based on data from capital cities, the ultra-urban locations where a great deal of transportation complications arise, that shows a 60% increase in indexed food prices over the course of 15 years. In other words, it looks at the worst case scenarios as its only source of data. To a very considerable degree, the data is refuted by "move out of the capitals", because there is a massive array of complications that arise in these big cities.

 

[LordsFire]

I offer a counter-suggestion: Stop making unsupported claims. Citation needed. I want to see your numbers for that "tiny sliver" and your sources for that in your next post.

No. The burden of proof is on you, not me. You have asserted something very extreme, that statistically significant portions of the population are incapable of learning to perform basic tasks. I have asserted that all except for those who are seriously disabled are capable of performing that task.

This is literally a basic life skill. 'Feed yourself.' Literal children can and do perform these tasks. You need strong evidence to prove that large percentages of adults cannot.

 

[Bear Ribs]

@Bear Ribs, did you not first put forth food insecurity as something caused by systematic and geographic flaws in the economy? If you were the first to make a positive declaration, it is on you to prove that assertion before @LordsFire needs to pull up the disproof of it in detail. Your post on this page offering a link is expressly Australian, a country that's spectacularly arid, has seen food production drop in recent years, and is vastly greater than many others for government influence on the economy.

The United States produces dozens of times the food of Australia, with a population somewhere in the area of 15 times larger. As it pertains to what I assume is LordsFire's point, Australia is a rather considerable outlier for losing food production in recent times.

In particular, the link offers a graph that is specifically based on data from capital cities, the ultra-urban locations where a great deal of transportation complications arise, that shows a 60% increase in indexed food prices over the course of 15 years. In other words, it looks at the worst case scenarios as its only source of data. To a very considerable degree, the data is refuted by "move out of the capitals", because there is a massive array of complications that arise in these big cities.

I'm not sure what you're getting at with discussing differences between Australia and the US in agriculture, given that the main fact I used was the (obvious actually) point that it's harder to transport groceries without a car. Are you seriously suggesting that it becomes easier to haul groceries around on a subway in the US than Australia? Or that bus service and subway service are better outside of capital cities than in rural areas?

What I see you doing here is a lot of blowing smoke and trying to hide the main point, that poverty puts additional barriers between a person and food and transport is a major one. You can't actually argue the point that transporting groceries via bus and subway is simple, so you're trying to divert to discuss other aspects of Australia.

No. The burden of proof is on you, not me. You have asserted something very extreme, that statistically significant portions of the population are incapable of learning to perform basic tasks. I have asserted that all except for those who are seriously disabled are capable of performing that task.

This is literally a basic life skill. 'Feed yourself.' Literal children can and do perform these tasks. You need strong evidence to prove that large percentages of adults cannot.

And I already supplied proof, in the form of the study I presented ahead of time that you didn't respond to. You meanwhile are making a patently absurd statement, that something is very easy and even a child can do it, yet a significant chunk of the population simply don't.

Your position relies on three assertions:

1. Anybody except the handicapped can do it, even young children.
2. It would hugely improve their lives to do it.
3. But they don't.

One must ask why they don't do it if it's so easy and would make their lives so much better. You have made the assertion that poor people are simply lazy, and refuse to prove that claim when asked. The claim makes little sense (though the refusal to prove your assertions does, since you are incapable of doing so), the idea that most of the population simply refuse to do something any child could do and would enrich them is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof.

As it is, fortunately I actually do back up my statements, unlike you. Kinesthetic learners? You asserted that they are a "tiny sliver" of the population.

Turns out they're the largest part, exceeding all other groups by a rather significant margin. 22.8% are single Kinesthetic learners, more than any other learning types put together, and 88% are at least partly kinesthetic.

Now, I've given my numbers and I'm the only one presenting any proof in this thread. Your turn. Present your actual facts, as opposed to "I assert this and demand you prove I'm wrong."

 

[Battlegrinder]

You're source there talking about preferences, that doesn't actually prove your case. It's certainly the case that for some people, learning by watching rather than reading is more helpful, but that does not mean that they are incapable of using other methods. I'm very much a person that works best when using written instructions, but my training when I worked at Bojangles was largely via instructional videos and hands on training with other employees, and I did just fine. And I have autism, I am clinically certified as being less capable of learning with methods outside my comfort zone than the average person. If I can do it, I don't see it as very likely that other people don't.

Like, in your worldview, how do you suppose these people take a drivers test, or build a shelf, or operate basic household devices? Was most of the population incapable of performing basic household task before the advent of youtube? Are you seriously arguing that something like this:

Is simply beyond the capabilities of the average person, and that my ability to follow those rules, build my own shelves, and do some basic woodworking, makes me some sort of 5th dimensional hyperbrain?

 

[LordsFire]

I'm not sure what you're getting at with discussing differences between Australia and the US in agriculture, given that the main fact I used was the (obvious actually) point that it's harder to transport groceries without a car. Are you seriously suggesting that it becomes easier to haul groceries around on a subway in the US than Australia? Or that bus service and subway service are better outside of capital cities than in rural areas?

What I see you doing here is a lot of blowing smoke and trying to hide the main point, that poverty puts additional barriers between a person and food and transport is a major one. You can't actually argue the point that transporting groceries via bus and subway is simple, so you're trying to divert to discuss other aspects of Australia.


And I already supplied proof, in the form of the study I presented ahead of time that you didn't respond to. You meanwhile are making a patently absurd statement, that something is very easy and even a child can do it, yet a significant chunk of the population simply don't.

Your position relies on three assertions:

1. Anybody except the handicapped can do it, even young children.
2. It would hugely improve their lives to do it.
3. But they don't.

One must ask why they don't do it if it's so easy and would make their lives so much better. You have made the assertion that poor people are simply lazy, and refuse to prove that claim when asked. The claim makes little sense (though the refusal to prove your assertions does, since you are incapable of doing so), the idea that most of the population simply refuse to do something any child could do and would enrich them is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof.

As it is, fortunately I actually do back up my statements, unlike you. Kinesthetic learners? You asserted that they are a "tiny sliver" of the population.

Turns out they're the largest part, exceeding all other groups by a rather significant margin. 22.8% are single Kinesthetic learners, more than any other learning types put together, and 88% are at least partly kinesthetic.

Now, I've given my numbers and I'm the only one presenting any proof in this thread. Your turn. Present your actual facts, as opposed to "I assert this and demand you prove I'm wrong."

Give me the link to your study. It's not on this thread. Other people addressed it at the time, but I'll go ahead and address it too.

To counter your image there:

1. Preference for different types of learning increases the ease of learning, not makes it possible or impossible altogether. I'm well aware that it's easier to learn through mixed forms of learning, that does not make it impossible not to learn. 'It's harder for me to learn that way' is not the same thing as 'it is impossible for me to learn that way.'

2. This part will be presented as a logical argument:

Assertion A: Sustained effort allows you to overcome even difficult tasks over time.
Assertion B: Basic cooking is not a difficult task, it is a simple task.
Assertion C: If a difficult task can be overcome with time and sustained effort, a simple task can be overcome as well.
Conclusion: As a simple task, it is entirely possible to learn how to cook with time and sustained effort.

Let me give you some basic cooking instructions:

1. Put water in pot.
2. Put pot on stove.
3. Activate stove.
4. Give water time to boil.
5. Put store-bought sauce of preference in microwave to heat up. For maximum ease, use product that comes in glass jar and thus can be microwaved in it.
6. Add noodles.
7. Stir regularly and sample a noodle every few minutes until they have softened to taste.
8. Put colander in sink.
9. Using appropriate hot pads to hold pot, dump water and noodles into colander.
10. Give time to cool to safe temperature.
11. Put noodles and sauce in a bowl.
12. Eat.

What part of this process is impossible for people who are not literally retarded to carry out? This is broken down into more and simpler steps than is strictly necessary. Simple instructions on how to prepare food is included on the packaging for many food products.

3. In order for your argument to be valid, people have to be incapable of learning to follow such simple instructions for themselves. You are basing your position on the idea that a significant swathe of the population is too stupid to take care of themselves.

4. Even though many if not most of these people have been able to pass driver's tests and get licenses. Driving is a much more complicated task with much more immediate and hazardous risks if you screw it up, yet for many poor people in the USA, driving to and from work is a daily task. How is it that they can manage driving, but not basic cooking?

 

[Battlegrinder]

Also, relevant to the thread here:

Fisking the “Stop Telling Poor People to Cook” Doofus, with Special Guest, My Mom

 

[Bear Ribs]

Give me the link to your study. It's not on this thread. Other people addressed it at the time, but I'll go ahead and address it too.

How exactly did @Morphic Tide comment on one of my cited studies if they're not in the thread? It's rather bizarre that you apparently lack the ability to find and click hyperlinks iyou've quoted when you are basing your argument on how easy it is to find things on the internet.

To counter your image there:

1. Preference for different types of learning increases the ease of learning, not makes it possible or impossible altogether. I'm well aware that it's easier to learn through mixed forms of learning, that does not make it impossible not to learn. 'It's harder for me to learn that way' is not the same thing as 'it is impossible for me to learn that way.'

2. This part will be presented as a logical argument:

Assertion A: Sustained effort allows you to overcome even difficult tasks over time.
Assertion B: Basic cooking is not a difficult task, it is a simple task.
Assertion C: If a difficult task can be overcome with time and sustained effort, a simple task can be overcome as well.
Conclusion: As a simple task, it is entirely possible to learn how to cook with time and sustained effort.

Let me give you some basic cooking instructions:

1. Put water in pot.
2. Put pot on stove.
3. Activate stove.
4. Give water time to boil.
5. Put store-bought sauce of preference in microwave to heat up. For maximum ease, use product that comes in glass jar and thus can be microwaved in it.
6. Add noodles.
7. Stir regularly and sample a noodle every few minutes until they have softened to taste.
8. Put colander in sink.
9. Using appropriate hot pads to hold pot, dump water and noodles into colander.
10. Give time to cool to safe temperature.
11. Put noodles and sauce in a bowl.
12. Eat.

What part of this process is impossible for people who are not literally retarded to carry out? This is broken down into more and simpler steps than is strictly necessary. Simple instructions on how to prepare food is included on the packaging for many food products.

3. In order for your argument to be valid, people have to be incapable of learning to follow such simple instructions for themselves. You are basing your position on the idea that a significant swathe of the population is too stupid to take care of themselves.

4. Even though many if not most of these people have been able to pass driver's tests and get licenses. Driving is a much more complicated task with much more immediate and hazardous risks if you screw it up, yet for many poor people in the USA, driving to and from work is a daily task. How is it that they can manage driving, but not basic cooking?

You're source there talking about preferences, that doesn't actually prove your case. It's certainly the case that for some people, learning by watching rather than reading is more helpful, but that does not mean that they are incapable of using other methods. I'm very much a person that works best when using written instructions, but my training when I worked at Bojangles was largely via instructional videos and hands on training with other employees, and I did just fine. And I have autism, I am clinically certified as being less capable of learning with methods outside my comfort zone than the average person. If I can do it, I don't see it as very likely that other people don't.

Like, in your worldview, how do you suppose these people take a drivers test, or build a shelf, or operate basic household devices? Was most of the population incapable of performing basic household task before the advent of youtube? Are you seriously arguing that something like this:

Is simply beyond the capabilities of the average person, and that my ability to follow those rules, build my own shelves, and do some basic woodworking, makes me some sort of 5th dimensional hyperbrain?

Ah, and here I am answering both your posts at once because it shows where your fallacies are and you're both making the same one. Let's go back to the beginning of the argument.

What's stopping you from going to a farmers market?

Boldface added. Poor people do cook spaghetti and hamburger helper, it's just that those are garbage-tier foods which aren't remotely the high-quality prepared meals using fresh ingredients that were discussed earlier.

You've moved the goalposts massively from "poor people can just go to farmer's markets*" to "Make Hamburger Helper." @LordsFire has also shifted the goalposts from "even a child can learn cooking on the internet" to "Okay it's hard for many people but still theoretically possible." So we're making progress.

Aside from the terrible level of argumentation and lack of backing, you've missed the point, yet again. Among many barriers to the poor is the ability to easily transport groceries, I presume you keep painting over this because you can't answer it. It doesn't matter that Hamburger Helper is relatively easy to make if you have trouble getting sacks of groceries home. Further the lack of easy transport means having to make frequent trips for small amounts of groceries, which raises the time, energy, and monetary cost of getting them to higher than McDonald's.

Lastly neither spaghetti nor Hamburger Helper are actually decent cooked meals. They lack vitamins and are full of empty calories and bad nutrition (a serving of Hamburge Helper carries a whopping ~990mg of sodium, 1500 is a day's worth for a typical adult), exactly why you have people who are both malnourished and obese at the same time. Nor does Hamburger Helper save much money, a box runs about 1.24 going off Wal-Mart and ground beef is averaging between 4 and 5 dollars a month right now (trending down a bit). So you're at about five dollars for your Hamburger Helper meal, or about 2.50 per plate. Meanwhile a Big Mac runs about 3.99 so your savings are... extremely slim. You've had to spend what, thirty minutes preparing it? Plus a minimum of thirty minutes to and from the grocery store shopping for it, more likely an hour counting travel times. Then another twenty minutes cleaning dishes. So this "genius" effort is effectively earning about twenty-five cents an hour, for low-quality foods that are actually worse for you than the Big Mac, amazingly enough. At least with the Big Mac you got a thin piece of lettuce, tomato, and a pickle. the Hamburger Helper or Spaghetti doesn't even include that.

The bigger issue is that I feel you've basically re-created the Prosperity Gospel for atheists. The poor are poor because they're just too lazy and stupid to bother cooking spaghetti (which lacks vitamins), even a child can do it but they won't! But you have no explanation for why people don't do these things that are supposedly so easy, cheap, and life-improving, and when you do present things you think they could do, they're clearly worse than the choices poor people are already making.


*As already noted, farmer's markets can't actually supply enough food to handle everybody anyway.

 

[KilroywasNOTHere]

The bigger issue is that I feel you've basically re-created the Prosperity Gospel for atheists. The poor are poor because they're just too lazy and stupid to bother cooking spaghetti (which lacks vitamins), even a child can do it but they won't! But you have no explanation for why people don't do these things that are supposedly so easy, cheap, and life-improving, and when you do present things you think they could do, they're clearly worse than the choices poor people are already making.

except the key difference is that the Prosperity doctrine is based in magical thinking IE wish for something hard enough and tithe hard enough and you'll magically get that washing machine you've always wanted cause God will poof it into existance for you. And yes bear people ARE lazy. You'd be amazed how many so called "poor people" can't seem to afford to pay bills or get decent food, but they have no problem paying for four 1000 dollar Iphones or that 69.99/month hulu live bill. On top of that I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a grocery store & even when produce is on SALE people still go for thee soda's and the snack cakes. Can't afford good food but God knows they can afford just about everything else they want bad enough.

There are very few poor people in america and most of the ones that are either massive drug addicts and/or are mentally ill. For about everyone else, it's a matter of priorities and getting in shape is not a priority for most until either a health scare occurs or they become so disgusted with themselves they can't ignore it.

 

[Bear Ribs]

except the key difference is that the Prosperity doctrine is based in magical thinking IE wish for something hard enough and tithe hard enough and you'll magically get that washing machine you've always wanted cause God will poof it into existance for you. And yes bear people ARE lazy. You'd be amazed how many so called "poor people" can't seem to afford to pay bills or get decent food, but they have no problem paying for four 1000 dollar Iphones or that 69.99/month hulu live bill. On top of that I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a grocery store & even when produce is on SALE people still go for thee soda's and the snack cakes. Can't afford good food but God knows they can afford just about everything else they want bad enough.

There are very few poor people in america and most of the ones that are either massive drug addicts and/or are mentally ill. For about everyone else, it's a matter of priorities and getting in shape is not a priority for most until either a health scare occurs or they become so disgusted with themselves they can't ignore it.

38 Million People is not a small number. And of note, That article shows that 27 million are kept above the poverty line by social security, 8 million by refundable tax credits, and 3 million by Supplemental Nutrition programs. So take away government assistance and the number of poor would approx. double to nearly a quarter of the population.

Further the wishful thinking displayed is magical. People just need to want it bad enough and they'll be able to reach farmer's markets that don't exist in their ghettos, buy food that doesn't exist in sufficient quantities to feed them all, transport it in cars they don't have, etc. prepare it with time they don't have, etc. The act of reading a recipe online is the very least of the barriers to easy high-quality food the poor face but it's the one the magical thinkers concentrate on because it's such an easy strawman to knock down.

 

[KilroywasNOTHere]

38 Million People is not a small number. And of note, That article shows that 27 million are kept above the poverty line by social security, 8 million by refundable tax credits, and 3 million by Supplemental Nutrition programs. So take away government assistance and the number of poor would approx. double to nearly a quarter of the population.

and how many of these people live in democrat run cities or places bogged down by massive government regulation and city gentrification? In short, hows LA/new York/ Chicago doing for you buddy?

no if people want it bad enough, they'll do whatever it takes to get out of that situation even if it means they have to uproot themselves and start over from scratch. My parents worked from dawn to dusk to get where they did to day and my dad even juggled going to school with working. If you want something bad enough you'll put the ACTUAL blood and sweat needed to get it done or you'll die trying. But most people don't want that. It's easier to make someone else pay for it, or live in the same if not worse situation while government signs imaginary decrees about and whispers sweet nothings in your ears about how so much better off you are now with this new law or regulations meanwhile, your still in the ghetto.

 

[Bear Ribs]

and how many of these people live in democrat run cities or places bogged down by massive government regulation and city gentrification?

Whataboutism. When did I say it wasn't the Democrats fault? I've called for less government regulation many times on these forums.

no if people want it bad enough, they'll do whatever it takes to get out of that situation even if it means they have to uproot themselves and start over from scratch. My parents worked from dawn to dusk to get where they did to day and my dad even juggled going to school with working. If you want somthing bad enough you'll put the ACTUAL blood and sweat needed to get it done or you'll die trying. But most people don't want that. It's easier to make someone else pay for it, or live in the same if not worse situation while government signes imaginary decrees about and whispers sweet nothings in your ears about how so much better off you are now with this new law or regulations meanwhile, your still in the ghetto.

Proof? Or are you going to weasel out of actually doing anything besides claiming your opinion is fact like my other debaters in this thread?

 

[LordsFire]

First off, posts have gotten moved from thread to thread. I guess you didn't notice, but whatever study you linked earlier (I think the one about 'food insecurity') is not on this thread. I don't know which thread it's on now, so I asked you to provide the link again, because I assume you still have it somewhere and it would be easy for you to provide.

Second off, you are constructing an insane strawman.

Hamburger helper is still functionally cheaper than regularly eating out, and healthier too. I didn't recommend it myself though, I provided a step-by-step set of instructions for extremely simplistic cooking of pasta. You have failed to prove how someone who has basic mental competency cannot follow such a set of instructions. If you want to claim that pasta is garbage food (it isn't), I can just as easily do the same thing with something you think is healthier, like a simple soup.

Now let's break down a few more of your points:

"Among many barriers to the poor is the ability to easily transport groceries, I presume you keep painting over this because you can't answer it."

1. Carry them in your bloody hands. It's something humanity has been doing for as long as we've existed, it's not that hard.
2. Carry them on the handlebars of a bicycle. A bit trickier, but bicycles can be had for cheap, and it's not too hard to use. Still, I recognize this isn't something everyone can do, but it still covers a significant percentage.
3. Ride a bus. Also not available for everyone, but for those living in mid-to-large cities, busses are often a very affordable option.
4. All of these can be augmented with backpacks, satchel bags, etc, etc, that enhance your effective carrying capacity. I lived for years without a car, and for more than a year of that time I didn't have a friend up to regularly driving me around, so I had to carry my groceries.

I'm not claiming these factors make it easy for everyone to carry groceries, I'm saying they make it manageable for the vast majority of people to get groceries in a reasonable timeframe. Yes, there are some people for whom life really is that hard, but that is a miniscule proportion.


" Further the lack of easy transport means having to make frequent trips for small amounts of groceries, which raises the time, energy, and monetary cost of getting them to higher than McDonald's."

If you live a significant distance from a grocery store, there may be some limited truth to this. But again, this is only actually true of a small number of people. Even if you can't bike, don't have public transport available, and don't live close to a store, you can get a wagon. They aren't that expensive, you can sometimes even find them for super-cheap in garage sales or the like. And of course, there are people who do have friends or family willing to drive them for a big grocery load once a week or so.

Yes, there are some people for whom this is true, but it is an extremely small minority, not even 1% of the full population, much less over 10%.


"Lastly neither spaghetti nor Hamburger Helper are actually decent cooked meals."

Contrary to what food blog fads like to say, Carbs/calories are a needed part of your diet, and if you're actually working a hard, physically demanding job, that's all the truer. Even if that were not true though, carrots are extremely cheap, and are cooked the same basic way.


"You've had to spend what, thirty minutes preparing it? Plus a minimum of thirty minutes to and from the grocery store shopping for it, more likely an hour counting travel times. Then another twenty minutes cleaning dishes. "

Complete bullshit. When I was walking or biking to and from a grocery store, round-trip for one load that would get me meals for 3-10 days would take me perhaps an hour. Let's assume someone in much harder conditions takes two hours, or even four. That's still at least 15 meals when they're not aggressively planning ahead to be much more time-efficient. This is assuming that the grocery store is not somewhere that they can stop at on the way to work.

Still, taking this insanely pessimistic estimation, that's 16 minutes at the grocery store for a meal. Taking the 'soup in a crock pot' efficiency option, it's about 20 minutes of prep for ~5 meals, so that adds 4 more minutes. Let's make a basic meal plan:

Potatoes. 2.47 for 5 pounds. Notably, you can get a 10 pound bag proportionately cheaper.

Carrots. 0.97 for 1 pound. Let's say you get two for your soup.

Onions. 1.64 for 3 pounds. More than I'd want in my soup, but we're talking people desperately poor, so beggars can't be choosers.

Chicken. 18.83 for 10 pounds frozen. At 2$ a pound, it's the 'big money' cost of the meal, though I personally prefer beef, that's about 50% more expensive. We're putting ~3 1/3 pounds in because meat isn't your primary ingredient, so this is good for 3 batches of soup. That gives us about $6.24 for the meal.

Finally, Salt. 3.88 for enough salt to last you for months to a year. Let's round up on the fraction of that cost for this one batch of soup, and say it's. ~25 cents worth.

All together, that's 10.47 for the soup. Speaking from personal experience, you can get all of that into the crock pot in about 30 minutes. Assuming someone is inexperienced, we'll be extremely pessimistic and say one hour. To be specific, that's scrubbing the vegetables, chopping them, chopping the meat, and throwing it all in the crock pot with some water.

A quick google says that about 1 pound of food will make a person feel full, and this reasonably coheres with my own experience eating food, so I'm going to use it as a reasonable approximation for now. This 10.47 $ meal that took 1 hour of actual preparation, comprises about 13 pounds of food, discounting the water mass, and so that's 13 meals.

Even physically infirm people can carry 20-30 lbs of mass fairly easily, so if we assume the insanely pessimistic estimate of 4 hours for a grocery trip, 2 rounds of food preparation like this works, so that's 26 meals divided over 4 hours, or another 9.23 minutes added in. Add in the 60 minutes/13 meals gets you ~14 minutes per meal prep time. 10.47 dollars divided by 13 meals gets us .805 dollars per meal, or 81 cents.

Our net total cost per meal is 81 cents and 14 minutes of work, using insanely pessimistic assumptions about time costs. More realistic time estimates get us to more like 5 minutes of work per meal. Dish cleanup after soup is 1-3 minutes to clean the pot, and seconds to clean the bowl and spoon you ate with.

All of these calculations are done using grade-school level math.

Yes, that soup does not have a fully rounded-out balance of nutrition. Other meals that are also fairly cheap can round that out (and keep you from getting sick to death of chicken soup), and you can get multi-vitamins at 20-30 dollars for over a hundred day's worth of them to cover other concerns.


I have not moved my goalposts. I have not changed my argument. I'm trying to present the same concepts in new ways to get the ideas through to you.

I could go through and list many more meals to make my point, but bluntly put, this one by itself proves my point. It's both cheaper and more time-efficient to cook your own food.

 

[KilroywasNOTHere]

Whataboutism. When did I say it wasn't the Democrats fault? I've called for less government regulation many times on these forums.

Let me take a step back. What the heck are you actually arguing for if not A. More government intervention/regulation or B a turn back of the technological clock? I think you're confusing me and a good chunk of others on this thread.

Proof? Or are you going to weasel out of actually doing anything besides claiming your opinion is fact like my other debaters in this thread?

The great depression is a good example of people moving in an attempt to get a better life and doing some pretty extreme ways to do it.

Migration in the Great Depression

Migration in the Great Depression - The Great Depression is one of the most significant events in all of world history and had a profound impact on the modern world. It began in October of 1929 with the Stock Market Crash and soon expanded as a worldwide

www.historycrunch.com

Also look no further than the flights from cali and new york.

 

[Battlegrinder]

Boldface added. Poor people do cook spaghetti and hamburger helper, it's just that those are garbage-tier foods which aren't remotely the high-quality prepared meals using fresh ingredients that were discussed earlier.

I think you're missing the point a bit. The point of the hamburger helper think is not "this is a great meal that anyone can cook", the point is "look how easy it is too cook this, are you seriously saying it's beyond people's ability to do this?" Which you are conceding they can do. If they can manage this, I don't see how other recipes are beyond them.

Also, you're overstating how unhealthy it is. The worst thing about is the high sodium, which can be an issue for some people, but most people should be fine with going over the limit, and for that aren't fine, the main risk is high blood pressure, not weight gain. It's low on vitamins, yes...but they sell vitamins, a bottle of Once A Day costs like 6 bucks.

Aside from the terrible level of argumentation and lack of backing, you've missed the point, yet again. Among many barriers to the poor is the ability to easily transport groceries, I presume you keep painting over this because you can't answer it. It doesn't matter that Hamburger Helper is relatively easy to make if you have trouble getting sacks of groceries home. Further the lack of easy transport means having to make frequent trips for small amounts of groceries, which raises the time, energy, and monetary cost of getting them to higher than McDonald's.

I didn't miss the point, because it's irrelevant. less than a quarter of poor people lack access to a vehicle, and I assume those that don't still buy and need to transport bulky objects, and are grown adults that can figure out a way to do so. At the very worst, you can just catch a ride with one of your poor neighboors that does have a car.

Nor does Hamburger Helper save much money

Your math is wildly off. A box of hamburger helper+ beef costs, as you said, about $7. That easily makes enough food for 4 people, plus enough leftovers for 3-4 more meals. 8 big macs cost 24 dollars. Cooking at home saves people a massive amount of money.

The bigger issue is that I feel you've basically re-created the Prosperity Gospel for atheists. The poor are poor because they're just too lazy and stupid to bother cooking spaghetti (which lacks vitamins), even a child can do it but they won't! But you have no explanation for why people don't do these things that are supposedly so easy, cheap, and life-improving, and when you do present things you think they could do, they're clearly worse than the choices poor people are already making.

Most people are stupid and lazy, not just the poor. But when you have money, you can ameliorate many of the consequences of stupidity/lazyiness, whereas when you're poor you cannot, and the best way to not be poor is to not do stupid things. There are three basic rules people can follow that substantially shift their odds of avoiding poverty, and a huge number of poor people fail to do so.

 

[Curved_Sw0rd]

I... I don't know how this relates to Neoreaction and Socialism at all.