This much is unfortunately very true. Ever since the civil rights movement it has become politically incorrect to talk about keeping the n*****s down, but that won't keep some people from trying anyway. So the racists have just gotten used to saying "poor people" to actually mean "black people", which is why unfortunately the more cynical and fraud-fearing political element in our society (the Republicans, based a lot on southern and rural communities with histories of racial bigotry) tends to ideologically oppose the entire concept of welfare instead of trying to figure out how to make it work. Democrats might be too trusting (and also too ideological) to make it work right, but they're usually the only ones trying.

It's one thing to make observations like you have. It's another thing completely to solve problems based on those observations. How do you expect to get people to stop having children they can't afford? Somebody who can barely afford to keep themselves in a home and not hungry usually doesn't "choose" to have a child. It happens by accident. What are you going to do about it? Go hand out free condoms?

Further, an "unquenchable drive to improve oneself" is a great character trait that most people don't have. What is going to give somebody that kind of drive? The belief that you can lift yourself out of poverty is actually statistically very unlikely, and human beings are surprisingly good at perceiving obvious trends like that. The people with that kind of drive are actually ignoring the reality of their situation and believing something that hasn't been true for anyone around them - that they can actually climb the social ladder and make a better life for their future. And just think about the logical leaps one has to make from "work really hard to improve my situation" to "send out hundreds of job applications and hope that one of these benevolent corporate overlords will by some mistake share their wealth with me for anything, anything at all that I am willing to do at this point". Dealing with the job market in this country is so far removed from anything that our animal instincts can recognize as contributing to our survival that it just beats most of us down into depressed wage slaves.

That sounds like a great way to waste taxpayer money for the benefit of the few people with enough capital to live off their investments (in this case real estate) and exert their influence on local politics. Building and maintaining an apartment complex, especially one with no need to collect rent, would be a lot cheaper than paying for the rent and multiple landlord overhead of the multitude of apartment complexes around. Most cities need more low income housing too, because low- to middle-income renters are being priced out of the market all over the country (although in San Francisco they have it pretty bad and they have a scapegoat).

Where's the will for our government to do its job the best way possible? Is it just a cynical given now that the only way we can do good anymore is if a special interest gets their cut?

Does not affect Drupal 6. Not sure about Drupal 8, but if you're concerned about the security of your website run on beta releases you're doing it wrong.

Tip to moderators: There is no mod category "Sad". The best response is to ignore it, because then those who can recognize a completely unmoderated post will appreciate the metahumor.

Do they know how?

How many teenagers (or emotionally immature adults) do you know that would decline sex if there wasn't a condom handy?

Tell that to your penis or uterus. I'm sure it will stop trying once it realizes you haven't earned it yet.

Isn't that the same thing as subsidizing the millions of excess children who have bum parents?

Then become a foster parent. Or were you kidding when you volunteered to take on all that responsibility?

It's not racist to observe that African Americans are much more likely to be impoverished than whites. That's a fact. What is racist is to suggest they somehow deserve it.

Well, my 2-year-old certainly can't take care of himself. If I were unemployed and homeless, I definitely could not provide him with the same quality of education or prepare him to afford to take care of himself any better than I could. And then he would grow up without learning how not to be unemployed and homeless and have his own 2-year-old he couldn't prepare for society. Your college degrees may not give you the income you deserve for them, but you underestimate yourself. You can read and write, you can probably do basic arithmetic and algebra, and you probably believe you are at least capable of making a middle class income and contributing to society. Ask an inner city high school teacher sometime how many of their students are at least that capable, and what is life like at home for those who are not.

If other posts here on Slashdot are any indication, "Mr. Councilman" is just as likely to lose political points by supporting the poor.

You can pay taxes to give the poor public housing and opportunities to train for work (like having access to Wikipedia et al). Or you can pay taxes to arrest the poor when they start stealing the things they can't afford (like food), pay taxes to clean up the dead bodies from drug overdose and gang violence, and pay taxes for the grand public housing scheme known as our overcrowded prison system. Or you can pay taxes and your immortal soul to round them all up and kill them every few generations (and hope you don't get rounded up when this happens). You may think for some idiotic reason that being nice is morally the wrong thing to do, but being an asshole may just cost you more in taxes than it does to give the poor the same entitlements you got from your parents.

Who said anything about a modem or a router? We're not talking single family homes here; we're talking apartment buildings. Give them ethernet plugs in the walls and hide the routers. Even better, just put up a wireless network and hide the routers. If the whole building is getting free internet, why in hell would anybody try to put a modem in every individual apartment?

We Are All Confident Idiots...In America.

I would like to thank you, TsuruchiBrian, for engaging with me in a thoughtful discussion about the second amendment to the US Constitution. I think we've both made good points, and perhaps come to a meaningful conclusion. I do not wish to rebut your argument; I am only posting now to say two things:

1. 1. I am defining militia as a citizen-operated organization that is registered with the government. That registration would enable the government to regulate the safety and security of its armory, and possibly other concerns. With those regulations in place, some classes of weapon which would be too dangerous for individual citizens to acquire (especially those classes of weapon which the authors of the constitution could not even imagine) could be made available to those militia. But this is only an idea not directly supported by the constitution; it's my attempt to reimagine the full purpose of the 2nd amendment (allowing citizens to form paramilitary groups to keep the government from overstepping its bounds) to still be reasonable in a world full of such previously unimaginable destruction.
2. 2. Once again, thank you for the all-too-rare opportunity for intelligent conversation on the internet. This is a complicated issue that deserves to be discussed, and by discussing it I think we have revealed flaws in each others' arguments that we would not have considered ourselves. I believe this makes our democracy stronger. Thank you. Let us hope this kind of discussion is not so rare in the future.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank TsuruchiBrian for engaging with me in a thoughtful discussion about the role of gun ownership in our country and what various levels of government are or are not authorized to do. This is a serious issue with many nuances, most of them directly impacting life or death situations. People die every day from both gun violence and from government oppression; we happen to live in a country where the former is more common, but that does not mean I am oblivious to the dangers of overly restricting the rights of the people.

The US Constitution is a living document which has been interpreted in many different ways by many different people in many different generations. We the people of the United States of America are obliged to discuss and debate its role and meaning in our society with every new generation, lest we fail to understand its purpose and its moral and just application. To reduce any aspect of the constitution to such blacks and whites as you have done, beastofburden, is to preclude any meaningful understanding of the foundation of our society. Ultimately, such antagonism and partisanship will lead us into an era where our opinions are dictated by the political elite who have for their own purposes spent enormous resources to convince us that one way or another is not just the right way, but the only way. I pray we do not find ourselves in such a future.

It is not prohibited, and state governments can do whatever the hell they want as long as it isn't explicitly prohibited. The federal government can probably get away with it as well because of interstate commerce.

Registered state militia does not have to mean government. A militia is by definition a very local group, and I would expect to see them form at the town level, or in large cities at the district level. Militias, then, could have anybody they want based solely on the desires of the local people in charge (and who that is would ideally depend on local democracy). With possible exceptions for violent felons and the mentally unstable, which would go along with reasonable safety and security regulations to make sure, among other things, that the militia armory is appropriately secured from theft.

I think that everything I have said is consistent with the United States government having meaningful restrictions on how it can infringe upon the right to bear arms and the right to free expression. But "meaningful restriction" does not mean "total restriction". The 2nd amendment was written with an explicit purpose, it is my belief that any restriction on gun ownership and use may be constitutional as long as it is still possible to form a well-regulated militia with meaningful self-defensive force.