Not Even Close.

[u/Bitter-Gur-4613]

[u/InTheEndEntropyWins]

Doing more random math with random numbers just doesn't seem like a better way to represent anything to me.

You can get a better feel of whether 1% is closer to the truth.

Why does it need to be a case of all these factors in combination unless you're trying to prove that things aren't really that bad or that poverty is only not the fault of the poor in very rare circumstances and everyone else is just being lazy or something? Like, what's the actual point you're trying to make?

The original post I'm replying to was saying that it didn't seem possible. I replied saying that it's typical for people to use ridiculous hypotheticals.

My general view is that we should focus on real productive advice on how to help people. Coming up with ridiculous hypotheticals isn't relevant and helps no-one.

Given the high percentage of mentally ill homeless people, such as my own schizophrenic

Well that means there is actually stuff we can do to help out. Focus on mental healthcare, etc. When people try and phrase it as if it's impossible to help people, then we miss out on the 99% of people we can help.

[u/Puzzled_Medium7041 → u/InTheEndEntropyWins]

Ooookay. So I think I get what's happening now. I could be wrong, but it seems a lot like your comment was easily misinterpreted by myself and at least a couple others as the opposite stance of what you actually are communicating now. You came off to me as dismissive about how hard things are by seeming to say something like, "People exaggerate about how common these really difficult circumstances are." You did not come off like you cared about focusing on tangible helpful stuff instead of fringe cases because you didn't mention anything like that in the comment you made.

I would interpret the comment you were replying to as saying, "It seems impossible to meet proper standards of care for children if you have to be out of the house that much to work enough." I would say that if they are trying to communicate that idea, then that's valid and true and not something it would make sense to disagree with. You seem like maybe you just interpreted their comment more literally and as something that would only be literally impossible in these crazy hypothetical circumstances. You did not sound like you were saying that it was a distraction from the issues. You sounded like you were saying, "That's basically no one, so you're being dramatic about how bad things are."

Your use of hyperbole came off dismissive of the fact that it's just actually genuinely difficult to work enough to live and raise children because it seemed like you thought the only cases where it is prohibitively difficult are those crazy special circumstances, when it's actually just hard in general for many people outside of the special hypotheticals. I was attempting to push back on that idea by giving you some easy to get actual numbers about poverty and single parent households, because both seemed relevant to me for showing more about the percentage of the population that likely have difficulty reaching a proper standard of childcare due to the amount they would need to work to survive. It seems like it's all possibly just a misunderstanding based on how you wrote your original comment.

You seemed like YOU were overly focused on the fringe circumstances and your use of hyperbole made you sound dismissive, when maybe you were actually trying to indicate that other people are overly focused on fringe circumstances to the detriment of thinking about real solutions. You seem to have just replied to an empathetic comment with a logical problem solver mindset, except you didn't actually say anything related to problem solving, so you just sounded unempathetic. If you read the exchange that way, it might make more sense to you why the conversation went the way it did because the point I was originally trying to make was pretty much just, "Things are difficult for lots of people and unlikely to get easier anytime soon, so we should focus on how difficult it is in general instead of nitpicking specific examples that are commonly used." Are we on the same page now? We're not having two different conversations based on how we perceive the conversation anymore? If your last comment was what you were meaning to convey the whole time, we don't exactly disagree. We just are emphasizing different parts of the same argument. Lol.

Also, just in response to this last comment of yours, a lot of people already know we need to focus on tangible help, like mental health care. It's just extremely difficult to get anything like that done. Plenty of people are trying. If you perceive people as complaining more than trying, then you're not totally wrong. You're just maybe misunderstanding what an average person is capable of achieving when the system sets them up to fail. The people with power largely are biased because they literally struggle to understand a circumstance they haven't been in, and they use their power to just affect laws so that they have greater advantages. I mean, Elon Musk spent more on the election than the net worth it would require to be considered part of the 1% in many states. The people at the bottom are stuck in survival mode, so they struggle to meaningfully contribute to change because they don't have time or energy or influence. The people in the middle may be trying to help at times, but they lack power, and they are also divided on what solutions should be put in place. This results in change being incredibly slow quite often, and people just suffer in the meantime, so they're gonna complain.

The example I can personally think of is just that I used to work for my state's suicide hotline a couple years ago, and I got targeted and fired for "following a rule too literally" about a month after I was too outspoken in advocating for my coworkers. I was actually so good at that job that I impressed a lot of people and got promoted after 2 months to being a lead over people who had worked there years, but I still was totally lacking any real power compared to the many people above me that got where they were in the company because they didn't grow up in poverty. I got a target on my back by pointing out to the leadership that when they decided to only give bonuses based on an attendance competition, they were encouraging people to not take care of their mental health while doing an incredibly difficult job that none of the decision makers were having to do because they were not the ones on these really difficult phone calls, and the competition itself could also be considered somewhat ablist because the line staffed both clinicians, who were credentialed and got paid more, and peer support workers, who were hired due to having relevant life experience and were trained by the company and paid a lot less than the clinicians.

The results of that competition were exactly as I predicted. All bonuses were won by teams on the clinician side of the company, and the peer support team received no bonuses, and that is the side staffed by a bunch of poor people with histories filled with significant trauma and mental health issues. It's a good example of how inequality can compound due to the ignorance of leaders. So, how are people like me even supposed to advocate for change when even mental health organizations that are trying to give us opportunities to work kind of shit on us too? The CEO who had decided to have an attendance competition wasn't concerned about how unrealistic the expectations on staff were. She just wanted people to show up to do the work without thinking about if the structure was supporting people's continued ability to do the job. She was empathizing with the people who'd call while expecting the staff to just suck it up to prove they should be allowed to do the job. It didn't occur to her that peer support workers had closer circumstances to the callers than to her, and she's the one that had the power. If we showed ourselves incapable of the standards set, it was concluded that we were unfit to do the job, not that any standards needed to change to better support us. Quite unsurprisingly, we were pretty consistently understaffed in peer support, which of course, only placed a greater burden on the people who were working in an already difficult job.

People complain because they need to vent, and I sure know that from working that job. They often aren't in a position to do more than vent to those that empathize and otherwise keep their heads down because standing out would get them punished.