Many food banks around the country are turning people away after running out of food. In that kind of context, I think $100 to the food bank likely does more good than $100 directly to individuals.

I know I’ve posted this at least 3 times now: My local food bank won’t accept cash donations

If I have $500 to donate, giving 25 people $20 each is gonna take a bunch of overhead in the searching and matching. Plus the logistics of actually being in the same place at the same time to hand over cash.

It look me less than 30 minutes to hand out $400 with $20 to a car to those in line at the food bank. Another time it did take a bit longer at about 40 minutes. Another time yet, it was again about 30 minutes. It was after the third time the food bank asked me to stop giving out cash to those in line. I respect their mission so I stopped. I’m looking for more ways to give directly. For a newly divorced mother of two small children I bought an old car and fixed it up for her with brand new tires and a tune up. I started this thread asking about how to identify those that need their groceries paid for. If you have more ideas about directly giving to those that need it, please share them. Please don’t just tell me to donate to another charity.

The beauty of the food bank is that it knocks out an expense for almost anyone who uses it, leaving them more cash to buy a tank of gas or school supplies or medication. Everyone needs food. Someone who needs more money for gas can get that if their grocery bill is reduced by $20. Money is fungible, so addressing the most fundamental needs ends up solving that problem of double coincidence that you’re alluding to.

I don’t understand why you keep presenting this as an “either/or” scenario. I’m fully in favor of food banks. I’m also in favor of giving cash directly to those that need it. If they already have food from the food bank, more food from the food bank won’t fill the gas tank. We need both food bank, and cash to those that need it.

But there is still a huge role to be played by nonprofit organizations, especially in meeting the foundational needs like food, water, shelter, and medical care.

I agree with you on this. Keep doing what you’re doing.

In that way, it’s still more efficient to give to cost-effective charities because meeting that need can still result in more cash in that needy person’s pocket.

This statement ignores two issues:

1. Identification of cost-effective strategies requires time and energy (and likely transportation requirement) from both donors and service recipients. Those at the bottom end of the economic spectrum usually have all of those things in short supply.
2. Your statement also assumes that there exists locally a cost-effective charity that serves every need of life of those in need.

I appreciate you’re trying to take the macro approach and on paper its not wrong. In practice the limits of my donation ability isn’t going to move the needle on a city wide or nationwide approach. However, if I can put $20 in someone’s hand’s they can immediately address an urgent need or stave off an urgent need with $20 of mitigation. I don’t know of a charity that’s going to put $20 of gas in their car so they can continue to make it to work on time so they keep their job. I don’t know of a charity that will get them $20 worth of school fees so their kids can continue to get educated.

There’s no wrong way to donate that I can think of. Keep doing what you’re doing to help. I’ll keep doing my way too. Both of us are working on the same goal of helping others. We’re just going at it from different directions.

Also, I would ultimately prefer my donations to go directly to the people that need it without administrative overhead shaving off percentages.

The fact is, the larger food nonprofits can effectively feed people for cheaper than individuals can achieve on their own. Much of it comes from scale, and some of it comes from being able to manage supply chains to intercept what would be waste from distributors, retailers, etc.

I have two issues with your reply:

1. I’d love to give cash directly to my local food bank. They don’t accept cash donations, only credit card, personal checks, or ACH transfers. I also believe that food banks are likely better stewards of donations rather than giant charities with multiple layers of administration such as the United Way. I would love it if the food bank would allow me to walk in and hand them my cash.

2. Your response is solving only for the food problem. I fully agree that the food bank is a great solution with bulk buying and known logistics for collecting, buying, and dispensing food, but not all problems those in need have are food problems. If I give a $20 bill to someone, yes, they could “inefficiently” buy food with it. Or maybe they’ll get food from the food bank and they have more pressing needs that the food bank doesn’t solve like paying for medication, rent, or school supplies for their kids. Whatever the need is, I trust the person in need to spend the cash I give them as they know their needs better than anyone else. Frankly, I find others deciding on how those in need should spend money to be incredibly dismissive and condescending. These folks in need are just like us in every regard, except they don’t have as much money. We are equals in every way except life has given me enough money and them not enough. They are no worse than the rest of us on how they spend money. I can’t know their needs better than they do. I give cash directly to the person that needs it because I trust them to know how to spend it better than anyone else.

You’re better off donating that money to a local food bank. Some stores around here also have pre-bagged meals that you can buy for them to donate to those in need, but the food bank will be able to stretch your money further.

I do that too, but the local largest food bank has conditions that don’t make it preferable for monetary donation. I would really prefer anonymous donations, and that isn’t easily possible with my food bank. They do not accept cash. Also, I would ultimately prefer my donations to go directly to the people that need it without administrative overhead shaving off percentages.

On multiple occasions I went to the food bank and handed out cash to patrons that were in line waiting for food. No strings, no obligations, just give them a friendly wave and hand them bills before moving on to the next car. I know people are in need if they’re at the food bank, and I trust they know how to spend the cash better than I do, so I give cash. The food bank asked me to stop doing that.

If I’m at the grocery store and I want to pay for someone else’s groceries, what are clues I could see indicating that they are deeply in need?

Is this Jack Lang going to give the “proud boys” their Brownshirts, or will they be required to provide their own?

When each letter is in a different number, I can understand, but what about “TIPS”, both P and S are on 7, so it’d be 8477?

You got it!

I can see not wanting immigration. I can understand how that is something people might genuinely want. I don’t personally agree with it but i can understand it.

I can’t understand not wanting immigration. As economies develop the local population has fewer children. This leaves a nation with a declining birth rate which results in a negative replacement rate. This means more people are dying everyday (usually from old age) than are being born to replace them in the population. At this point a nation has three choices:

• Do nothing. As time advances, this means the nation dies because its people simply die off. Realistically, as soon as the population drops low enough, the country will be invaded and taken by another country. The result, the original nation ceases to exist. This is the path that Japan and South Korea are on which both have negative replacement rates and very restrictive immigration rules.
• Force your population to give birth. This is what Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu did starting in 1967 with Decree 770. Abortion was made illegal. Birth Control was made illegal (sound familiar for the USA these days?). Women were made to visit state hospitals monthly to monitor for pregnancy. Once pregnant, the secret police would track expectant mothers to make sure she carried to term or faced the threat of law. Material mortality skyrocketed. Orphan populations skyrocketed because unwanted children were being forced to be born to parents that didn’t want children. This lead to a spike in child mortality.
• Immigration. Allow others to enter your nation to keep the population stable or slightly growing to make up for the shortfall in birth rate from the domestic population. Canada does this successfully. To-date, this has also been the path the USA has been on, and has been able to buck the trend of a declining population currently being faced but much of the rest of the highly developed economy nations. Under trump, that is reversing, which means we’re going to be choosing #1 or #2 on this list soon.

Given those three choices, immigration sounds like is an awesome choice! I can’t understand why anyone would want a different choice.

I don’t even know anyone on any side that is against deporting illegal immigrants.

Hi! Nice to meet you. Now you know at least one that is.

Lets put the humanitarian argument aside right now, as I don’t think that would resonate with you. I’d much prefer a sane immigration system in the USA exist where there is a clear path to citizenship for the many people that come to our borders willing to do the jobs in our economy that Americans won’t do, that our economy and society depend on. Since we don’t have that sane immigration system, the undocumented immigrants that are here, and doing the work, while paying taxes into systems they can’t derive social benefits from are doing us a great service in propping us up.

Even the most cold-hearted economic conservative should recognize deporting these folks and their families is going to blow a giant hole in our labor force, skyrocketing prices, and destroying our economy. Even the Republican President Reagan in 1986 saw this and granted amnesty to decades of undocumented immigrants that had arrived before 1982. source

So whats your plan for all the jobs and services that undocumented people are doing today that go undone if you get your way?

The left begins at socialism.

If you’re talking about the political spectrum I would think the extreme far left would begin at anarchism and eventually graduate to socialism as you move farther right.

The scary part of this one is that previously, we had administrations that, while still being right-of-center (yes ML, I know), had at least enough sense to prop things up well enough to recover.

I’ll admit I haven’t cataloged all financial crises in American history, but I can’t think of any right-of-center administrations that have cleaned up a things for a recovery. Perhaps only exception might be the Oil Crisis under Carter, and the recovery under Reagan. Great depression, Black Monday, Great Recession, COVID recession, all happened under right-of-center Presidents and recovered under left-of-center Presidents.

I started another point-by-point rebuttable about my individual disagreements with your arguments, but I think we’re just too far away from one another for more meaningful discussion on this. Thank you for your discussion up to this point though.

Edit: I should have lead with this, but I’ll add it now after-the-fact. I really appreciate you taking the time to response and share your views and data. Even though I don’t necessarily agree with it. I want to thank you for talking.

Capitalists in the US, facing internal market saturation and steadily falling rates of profit, have had to expand outward, leveraging a strong overseas military to keep the global south under their thumb.

My point is that capitalism isn’t the only system susceptible to this. All governments in human history have fallen to a version of this if they rise to any substantial size.

The empire of Japan did the same thing for the same reason causing their start of WWII in the late 1930s. In China the Qing Dynasty collapsed in the 1910s under the weight of its expansion. Rome did the same with collapse in 98AD to 117AD. The Aztec empire fell because of contact with European explorers, but the Aztec society was certainly based upon strict social hierarchies mirroring much of Europe with an aristocracy on one side and serfdom on the other.

It isn’t about “discovering” new systems. History is not progressed by people randomly discovering new ideas, but is a gradual material process, and the ideas that rise and fall are secondary to that and support that process. Liberalism arose because of capitalism’s rise and need for ideological justification.

I disagree. We haven’t found a stable system yet, so more exploration, discovery, evolution (whichever euphemism you want to insert here) is needed to arrive at something stable for humanity. The alternative is we just accept we get a few generations or tens of generations before society falls and we rinse and repeat.

As for socialism, the easiest answer is the PRC.

That… was not was I was expecting as your exemplar of socialism.

This century is going to be marked by China’s undisputed rise. As they continue to develop, market mechanics will continue to be phased out

I’m not so sure about that. First, China has a lot going for it to reach what you’re describing. I don’t dispute that. However, there’s been a shortcoming I’ve observed of China’s path to growth over the last 50 years that I don’t see called out. They’ve reach market mature and economic success far faster than a nation like the USA given the same amount of time. They have been, and still are, on a speedrun of national growth. However, this means they’ve had multiple generations robbed of “the good times” during growth were the growth slower.

Compared against the rise of the middle class in the USA post-WWII we’ve had 3 or 4 generations gain wealth, education, health care and raise families of their own with good paying jobs and readily available resources. In the USA we have grandparents or even great-grandparents that can tell us about the national poverty of living through the Great Depression, and how that shaped their choices (and those of their line). In China, its many times, the parents that lived through that subsistence poverty and their (now middle aged adult) children are the first generation to experience a middle class lifestyle and resources. Two to three generations of generational wealth building simply didn’t occur in China because they’re moving and developing so fast. The problem with this is, the boom times of manufacturing wealth have already started to decline in 大陆. Commodity manufacturing is already shifting out of China to other nations in the global south. Vietnam, Cambodia, India, and others are getting new manufacturing work that was previously going to China.

China has some giant problems looming in the next 50 year. Its population decline (as a result of state-enforced controls of birth) overcorrected and set up China to possibly be worse off that South Korea or even Japan in the decades ahead. source

China is a large net importer of both energy and food. All of these things together give me doubts China will be a long term stable society.

Other countries, like Cuba, manage to maintain higher quality of life metrics despite being under intense embargo than peer countries.

Cuba has done decently given its circumstances, but its historically another authoritarian regime. Further, much of Cuba’s progress might be attributable to artificial support from the Soviet Union to maintain its ally so close to its largest opponent.

The USSR had, in its time, the most rapid improvements in economic growth and quality of life in history.

…for those allowed to live.

None of these countries have been perfect utopias, or anything,

Dismissing Stalin’s purges and the Holodomor against Ukraine, much less the brutal repression of culture in Eastern Europe is doing a disservice to your argument of not being “perfect utopias”. The Soviet Union was as much an empire as the USA was in its expansion into other nations and suppression the local populace for exploitation.

but all have surpassed the inherent unsustainability of capitalism.

The Soviet Union was both born decades to centuries after other modern capitalist nations, and collapsed before them doesn’t really lend credence to your statement here about surpassing unsustainability.

To circle back to my main point. I’m not saying the USA has this figured out. I could write pages on what we’re doing wrong and how its leading to our decline. I’m saying nobody in the world in recorded human history has figured out how to have a sustainable system of governance. All systems are exploiting another to sustain themselves, and when that exploited group is exhausted a cycle of exploitation repeats or the nation collapses.

If you live long enough, you’ve been through a number of bubbles. For me thats:

• Black Monday (1987)
• Dot com bubble (2000) which also bled into 9/11 economics impacts
• Great Recession (2008)
• COVID (2020)

The next bubble will just be another. Economy will slow, value of most assets will drop. Jobs will be lost, homes foreclosed on…and then the recovery will begin again. We’ll look in the mirror shocked we survived it then in a few years we’ll completely forget about it and be terrified of the next bubble.

So, prepare by living within you means, take care of yourself and your loved ones, and just be ready to weather the next storm. We’ll get through that one too.

Imperialism, however, is self-defeating, and the rate of profit is lowering while there aren’t really new markets to plunder anymore. This causes crisis.

Potentially yes, but empires can last for hundreds or thousands of years. Democracy is relatively young by comparison, and we’re already seeing large cracks in it in the USA, one of the older democracies.

The point being: humanity hasn’t yet found a long term stable form of government.

It’s not particularly outlandish to orient the economy around collectivized production and distribution based on need, rather than profit. Socialist countries already exist, and achieve good results compared to peer countries. They require working class organization, which is a difficult but possible process.

I’m interested in your perspective on this. Which socialist country are you using as an example of what you describe above?

“Just use Flatpak.”

“But that will use 2GB when a system package will use 34MB. Yeah, I hate that something that should be small is using 2GB of space.”

“The space consumption isn’t my preference either, but I’d rather be using the app than fighting dependencies. I wish you luck with your dependency chain then.”

Both of these two cases are why Flatpaks are so attractive.

Oh shit! I can’t believe it took me this long to figure out that MAGA means: Make Argentina Great Again

TIL: god loves tooth decay /s