I read about “Bison attacks/gores tourists at Yellowstone” where the headline seems to imply the animal is dangerous.
Then I read the first few paragraphs “The tourist was 3 feet away to take a selfie”
Darwin Award winner v. infinity.
I have a hard time dredging up sympathy for the people whining about not being able to pay student loan debts when (usually buried deep in the story) we discover the poor debtor has $500,000 in debt for a naturopathic doctorate and an acupunture Master’s degree and can’t open her own business (not a word about what work she does). Or the political staffer who can’t afford $1100 per month in student loan payments because that’s half her monthly rent.
Especially when these articles are more akin to campaign ads for any particular candidate promising to cancel all student loans.
Hmmm?
It’s fairly clear that racism came first (as in, “hey, these black kids were up to something, what the hell, let’s stick them with the rape, too”) and then came the forced confessions.
As to what you say about Michael Jackson, well, that’s kind of the way child molesters work, isn’t it?
I haven’t read the articles you mention, and maybe you’re just not summarizing them well, but nothing I read in your post would lose me at all.
Smokes in Tennessee are about the cheapest in the country.
It’s tough to quit. It really is. This wouldn’t lose me.
Come now. I understand how hard it is to quit smoking, but when your kids cannot be fed because of your habit? That should be enough motivation.
Or, failing that, you should at least have enough sense after you go to a reporter about how you can’t feed your kids to hide any luxury items when the reporter is around.
I mean, what if she was shooting heroin in the picture? Would you say that drug abuse is a hard addiction to break so no harm there?
Not to mention that if they botched the job so badly the first time around, is it really a good idea to stick them with twice the number of children, and all of this when they’re elderly and presumably not at their peak capabilities?
5.10/pack. 43rd out of 51
I don’t know if this counts, but I read this article today and kinda felt this way, but for a different reason. This was a topic I hadn’t heard anything about, but the more I read in the article the more I could tell the author wrote it with the sole purpose of saying “this is the correct thing and anyone who disagrees is either old, stupid or…gasp…republican”. Now, The Ringer isn’t an unbiased site by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s target demographic is young, hip millennials, but for a generally smart website, this upset me that they couldn’t present the topic and let me, the reader decide.
I’ve encountered a number of these types of articles. It seems there should be a French word to describe them - blatant attempts at sympathy that use a suspect subject.
But, stepping away from the arguable “poor people should spend their limited money they way I think they should!” trap, the ones I react to were a regular feature I saw for a while that was in the Business Section.
They would take a middle class couple and help out with a household budget or retirement planning. It was always useful information, and the recommendations were often “tough but fair”, in a sense that a reasonable person could see what needed to be done but gosh, sometimes people just can’t seem to take the right steps. Sometimes there would be a “6 months later” epilogue describing the couples success / failure at adopting the recommendations. The ones who didn’t change / couldn’t change (“but we really love to travel and go out to eat!”) got the withering glance from me.
I guess I have more sympathy for the poor, as I believe that there are systemic barriers to moving up the economic ladder, whereas people with resources who get into trouble get less sympathy from me. In principle it doesn’t make sense - all should be equal, but hey, I’m only human.
This was from years ago during the worst of the recession, but it was a story about how even people who have a ton of money can have problems. It was about a family that inherited something like 30 million dollars and lost all of it within a decade.
Then they went over their purchases. Multiple cars that cost 6 figures each. A racehorse that cost something like $350,000. Those people were just irresponsible.
This is why, generally, articles titled “Here’s why you don’t want to win the lottery” absolutely fail to convince any of their readers. These stories will go into depth about why such-and-such a lottery winner got $100 million in the Powerball but then went broke not long thereafter, but every single reader reads it thinking, “He blew it because of horrific decision-making, I won’t be like that.”
Foster care stipends, perhaps?
(dons flameproof suit)
Stories about allegedly clean heroin addicts, especially those who claim they were forced into addiction after their oral surgeon prescribed 15 Percocets after their wisdom teeth removal, that kind of thing.
I don’t see anything in your post that indicates that this woman couldn’t afford to feed her kids *because *she smoked. Maybe she couldn’t afford to feed her kids *and *she smoked, but as far as I can tell, your claim that her kids cannot be fed because of her habit is just your assumption. Maybe she spends a buck a day on smokes. Maybe more, maybe less.
Don’t know anything about this. What “luxury items”?
Yeah, cigarettes and heroin are exactly the same thing. And cost the same amount of money, too. :rolleyes:
I have heard all my life that nicotine is harder to kick than any other drug, including heroin, and not because you can buy it almost anywhere. I’m sure each case is YMMV.
No doubt. My point was that suggesting that a poor mother who smokes cigarettes is in anyway comparable to a mother who’s shooting heroin is, well, unsupported.
There are a fair number of British articles where people are quoted as complaining about their council flats. If I understand correctly, that’s the equivalent to section-8 housing here, i.e. paid for mostly by the government. There are a lot of articles complaining about their apartments being too hot during a heatwave, that they need a bigger apartment because they’re pregnant with babies 8 & 9 or 10, demand a new apartment because the current one is haunted…and I generally am left feeling like their problems are self-inflicted or silly rather than much sympathy.
Social housing is the best term in the UK, since it includes council housing and housing associations and there’s been increasing alignment between the two over the last twenty years.
It is not paid for by the government. Tenants can apply for their rent to be paid by the government (local council) but so can private tenants. A large percentage of social housing was gifted to the government decades ago by philanthropists - there are no mortgage payments, and the council owns the land.
I’m going to go through each link.
The first one: Family's anger at council flat without enough windows to cope with heatwave | Metro News
They have two young children, one of whom has a heart defect, and the mother has a health problem. Most of the windows don’t open much. UK buildings do not have aircon as standard. Newbuilds like hers are not well built and can get very hot. There has been a real problem with heat in London in the last few years and asking for windows that open is not a big deal.
The family clearly agreed to stand there with their shirts off to show how hot it was, but that’s not how appearing shirtless is going to appear.
The mother of seven? She is not a council tenant:
In this case, the council arranged for temporary accommodation from a private landlord to try and meet their housing needs until a permanent home could be found.
Honestly, yeah, she should stop making babies, because we’re not talking three or four kids - she has a problem. But she is not the sort of tenant you’re talking about. She’s asking to be one.
The woman who claims her home is haunted by a ghost called Nigel? Crazy lady. Or somebody paid by the Sun, where this was originally posted (as noted in the article), to make up something to get a few hundred. No name was even mentioned. Does she even exist? The Sun is very, very, very much not a trustworthy source. Her existence is about as certain as a ghost called “Nigel.”
So you have one tenant with a valid complaint, one person who isn’t a council tenant, and one person who may not even exist.
Can you get foster care payments for your own grandchildren? I guess this varies a lot. I mean, I’m posting from the UK, and you can’t here, but the laws between the states seem to vary so much that I generally assume I have no idea unless I’ve already looked it up for some reason.
You can in the US - but it’s really a foster home with similar requirements and supervision as unrelated foster homes. If a grandparent is unofficially caring for grandchildren or gets legal custody/guardianship through the courts, it’s not foster care and they won’t receive foster care funds. *
- They still might receives public assistance , but that is typically a lower payment than foster care . In the late 70s to 80s there were a number of lawsuits about relatives being precluded from being foster parents/getting lower stipends, and now in many (if not all states) kinship foster homes get the same funding as non-relative foster homes.