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Homeless Student Is Intel Talent Search Semifinalist
An anonymous reader writes "Samantha Garvey, a senior at Brentwood High School, has managed to become one of the remaining 300 semifinalists in the Intel Science Talent Search this year. Her research focused on mussels and on her discovery that they change the thickness of their shells if a predator such as crabs are introduced. Why is Garvey's achievement so impressive? Because she and her entire family are homeless, and rely on a local homeless shelter. Such a situation would stop many students from being able to focus on studying, let alone a research project, but Garvey has instead used her situation as motivation."
Well done of her to rise up and be counted. Amazingly, despite everything thrown at her by people who would go so far as to condemn her for the social and financial position of her family, she's using it as self-motivation. Has to be cruel to be homeless and one of the National School Lunch Program kids in a world where many children go out of their way (starving effectively) to hide the shame of their family's misfortune.
Any candidates for public office feel like giving her parents some employment or shall we go the usual route, use her as an example the American Dream isn't dead, yet, and then abandon them for the next popular thing on the campaign trail?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
America (I'm addressing you as a whole).
How is it that you allow young people, let alone whole families, to be homeless, to live in "shelters".
WTF is wrong with you people?!
You are supposedly the most powerful nation on earth, the wealthiest, the nation that is spoken to exude opportunity and success from every pore.
And you have whole families, school children, living in homeless shelters.
I don't care how they came to be in the situation, it doesn't matter how that happened, what matters is resolving it, providing the social, housing, and financial support to ensure that every body can call somewhere home.
For every one remarkable individual like this who manages to overcome the adversity, I hate to think how many are dragged down by the circumstance.
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... and an abysmal failure by our society.
Check your premises.
You're modded funny, but it's a serious matter. Remember this next time you decide that the poor and homeless are just bums who got where they are because of their own failings. The fact is any one of us could be there and might one day end up there through no fault of our own. It is by far more likely than it is for us to join the rich crowd.
I hope this helps lift her and her family out of their situation.
Sorry, but I seriously doubt that. A very large percentage of the homeless population are there because they have mental disorders. I'm pretty sure that there's a much larger proportion of people with an IQ of 80 than those who have an IQ of 120
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I seriously doubt that crabs change the thickness of their shells in the presence of predators. Rather, I bet the predators change the kind of shell that is dominant in the population of crabs.
It is likely the case that the predators are more easily able to eat the crabs with thinner shells, thereby increasing the percentage of crabs with thicker shells in the remaining population, and those remaining crabs with thicker shells produce offspring that also have the same kind of shells (or perhaps even thicker shells in a few cases).
Evolution, folks. Variation. Selection.
Your logic is flawed, too. By no means is "becoming rich" guaranteed by "striving".
I think sjames' post takes this concept to it's logical conclusion, which is even if you work very, very hard, you are still more likely to end up homeless than one of the super rich elite these days (although he also implies that both of these results are unlikely, just one more so than the other).
And by the way, I'm now fuckin depressed by you both.
The fix is socialism... But it is a tabu among most US citizens who are brainwashed to believe socialism is here to take your wealthy and forces you under government control where you can not choose who is your doctor or where your kid goes school....
In social society, people take care of each other. They give what they can not use or dont need, to those who have needs. They do what they can with their powers to help others. It is not just you give money or you say "here is your apartment, live there". But that you organize a sponsor who supports you on the beginning. It is that you are teached and helped by people who have experience and wisdom to guide you trough hard times.
It is that when you get sick or accident happens, many others will take small part of your work and carry it trough the time until you have recovered and you return.
Socialism is about teamwork and caring others. It is about to help everyone to be independent and strong person where you don't have needs to harm anyone else.
But people who are independent, strong and work together can not be controlled. They can not be brainwashed, you can not terrorize them to accept greedy people demands and be exposed to such people suggestions.
So the sociopaths who does anything to come politicians or leaders, makes sure that there is no teamwork, independency, smart people, freedom of speech and thinking. They demand competition, they want people to fight, they want people to follow the show on TV while mens behind the curtains does all the planning for them, just to protect small group of greedy sociopaths who wants to control others.
Terrorism is act of terror what a national leaders use to control own people and drive their own (terrorists) needs over their own people. The terrorists is not the one who lives in other country or who builds bombs... The terrorists is the person who works in government or big corporation and use terror and other similar tactics (like FUD).
In US, 1% of people has over 90% of wealth. While 99% needs to live with under 10% of wealth... It simply should not be possible, but it is because greedy people demands and controls that there is competition on markets, that there is competition on schools, that there is competition among people and they make everything with their power so people would not start work together and discuss freely and change opinions freely and that they would take part to topics what greedy people want them to forget or ignore.
It is easy to think about itself that you are great person if you give now and then few dollars to red cross or some other charity. But it is just lying to itself.
Yes, occasionally you'll find a sad story wherever you look, but a vast majority of homeless people are homeless people because they fucked up their shit.
What about their kids?
All this tells me is you've never been outside the US or done any real research. Why? Because there's homeless everywhere. Norway has homeless people. Not speaking in abstract here, I've been there (I have family there).
So, care to try again?
So much for "There but for the grace of God go I" (or whatever method of expressing empathy you care for).
Nope - these days, it's all about lazy, entitlement seeking, dirty, smelly, socialist, thieving, parasitic trash sucking the life out of the economy.
At least - right up to the point at which BigCorp your work for outsources your job and you can't even pay the mortgage on your rather modest home or feed the kids... suddenly, maybe, it occurs then that perhaps some of these folks just maybe weren't just lazy scum.
Check your premises.
He could just be an upper-middle class young adult who still believes that if he works hard enough, he'll one day get to join the 1%. Just wait until he or someone he cares about gets sick and loses their home, or until Bain Capital or similar buys out his business and decides his job could be better done by a coworker working unpaid overtime, or until his life savings get wiped out by some Wall Streeters run amok and leave him with nothing to retire on.
Sadly, for some people it takes experiencing bad luck themselves to realize that the poor aren't poor out of laziness.
There are still too many scamming the system
Who cares? I'd rather ignore the occasional bit of fraud (even if it were as high as 10%) than to inadvertently prevent someone or some family from getting desperately needed help.
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No one ever said becoming rich was guaranteed. Is that the problem you hippies have, you thought that was promised somewhere? Nope. Sometimes people strive, but they suck, and things don't work out. Sometimes, people strike it rich without doing anything. Sometimes, for no reason, people get struck down. That's what happens in a probabilistic universe, and no one has ever worked out how to stop that on a large scale.
Generally speaking, though, you get out what you put in. That's not a flaw of the system just because you've decided you want the high life for middling input.
I suspect people like you, always whining about the "super rich elite," will never get anywhere, because that whining is taking up the energy you could direct into something productive. I've never cried about what other people have, I just worked to put together the things I want. I worked harder than the guy next to me, and it paid off consistently. You don't have to do that, in fact, I welcome you not to. I don't mind not having the competition.
That's not to say some people get things they shouldn't get, but that's not a flaw of "the system," that's a flaw of humanity. Everything would be perfect if we had perfect people, of course, which will never, ever happen, no matter how much you hippies whine about it.
So we must allow the 1% to continue robbing us until we are literally starving to death. Only then can we raise a (feeble, emaciated) fist against them.
Has it occurred to you that the longer we wait to solve the erosion of the middle class, the harder it will be?
Let's turn your question around.
What meritous work do the 1% do to deserve the rapidly increasing and disproportionate chunk of the wealth that they get?
Check your premises.
If you're rich enough, it doesn't matter how badly you fail, you'll be propped up and given every opportunity to fix things.
What do they call a rich family that fails badly enough a few times?
Poor
What about them? I think that homeless shelters are a Good Thing, and certainly so in the case of helping kids who had no choice about the situation they were born into. But let's be real--the kids have the same genetics as their parents. If the parents were losers then odds are the kids are too.
Translation: "Are there no prisons? Are there no poor houses?"
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
I have mixed feelings about stories like this. While I hope that she is able to do something special and help her family, if she does, that only sends the message that any poor person can do so, and that they don't means they are lazy. You find one example of a person who clawed their way out of poverty and all of a sudden the countless others unable to do so are simply lazy.
Like those you can already see in this thread...