[imiric]

> Every human who is suffering deserves compassion, but should we deprioritise those who are suffering partially because of their own choices?

Opening the discussion about who is more worthy of assistance is a slippery slope towards some people not getting it due to personal biases and politics of those in power.

Poor life choices can be consequences of poor upbringing, mental health, or simply bad luck. People can be helped in different ways to avoid making those mistakes. Reform is possible, but it starts with a society and government that cares for all of its people, and doesn't marginalize some as lower-class citizens.

[znpy]

> Poor life choices can be consequences of poor upbringing, mental health, or simply bad luck.

You forget stupidity and ignorance. Sometimes people make poor life choices because they're stupid or ignorant (or both).

Yeah sure poor life choices can be consequences of poor upbringing, mental health, or simply bad luck, but that's not always the case.

Regarding this specific piece of writing and as a tech person myself, i wonder: why does this person not have some safety net savings?

Having worked in the highest-paying city (San Francisco) in the highest paying state (California) in the richest nation (USA)... Why didn't this guy build his own safety net?

[mettamage]

And is capable enough to be (1) wealthy and (2) distribute that wealth so that everyone is wealthy enough. Especially (2) is hard. Norway seems to be the only country having some actual demonstrable skill at it.

When Covid came to Europe, we saw on the news how Italy was hit and what doctors had to do.

Long story short: young people lived, old people died. Because doctors faced the awful decision of whom to put on life support.

In the Covid case there's a genuine moment of lack of resources (good luck training enough doctors to help, even in a utopia it wouldn't be possible). Unfortunately, since many countries are bad at distributing their own resources enough such that no one is poor, we're basically in a Covid-like situation when it comes to homeless people.

And I'm saying this as a Dutch person. As I have one family member who didn't eat for 2 weeks, fainted, got found, etc. Granted, this person doesn't want to deal with bureaucracy and is quite stubborn, among other things. But still, even in a country that has "socialism" this stuff happens. And we're not as socialistic as one might think: Polish people that come here to perform labor do so in quite awful circumstances, to the point that when they lose a finger or a thumb they get reimbursed like 300 to 500 euro's IIRC. I watched it from some Dutch documentary (probably Nieuwsuur).

Countries are just incredibly bad at resource (re)distribution.