The money, or a lot of it, actually still goes to the bankers. In all likelihood the buyer had to take out a sizable mortgage to pay you that money, which means they are now collecting interest on the loan while getting the property as collateral. Then, unless you stuck that money under your mattress they are also very likely making money by leveraging your deposit, or by selling you investment devices backed by the mortgage they made to buy your property.
The pay may not be top notch but depending on where you live it can still be very good. And I don't know of any large employers offering the kind of time off that Civil Service gets. You quickly get to earning six hours of leave every two weeks, and eventually get to eight hours. Everyone also gets four hours of sick leave per pay period.
I think a lot of that hangs on the sense of accomplishment people have with their work and so pride comes into it. To me though getting a ton of money through pure unadulterated luck is very different. In the case of luck it's obvious to everyone that you didn't work for it and so sharing the reward of that luck is easier to accept.
Have you ever taken apart a bare bones washer or dryer? The most difficult part of the entire procedure is getting the cabinet open. For the washer it was the pump that was leaking. There were two bolts holding it in place and two pipe clamps to release. My wife actually applied a temporary fix using a hot glue gun while we waited for the part to be delivered, which held for several weeks. Paying someone to repair a washer like that is the equivalent of taking your desktop computer into the PC shop to replace a seized case fan.
The dryer was actually easier to work on as the back opened up. The problem was obvious enough as it was blowing unheated air. So I checked the Ohms on the heating coil and determined it had burned out. Again replacing it was as easy as removing a few screws and plugging in the new part.
Anyways my whole point was that by purchasing a less expensive set of machines I saved money in pretty much every way possible. They were cheaper to purchase upfront, cheaper to maintain and repair, and thus far lasted longer than the more expensive options. The only way they aren't cheaper is in operating costs, and while those values get touted a lot in advertising the actual numbers will vary with the cost of your utilities.
$70 an hour isn't what that kind of expertise or intelligence costs. That amount is covering all kinds of other business expenses and probably not coming in 40+ hours a week. Regardless you can be sure that the repair guy himself isn't getting that kind of pay.
I've observed this myself with my Washer and Dryer set. When I bought them I wasn't quite broke but I definitely couldn't afford to spend a lot on them. So I bought a pretty generic no frills Whirlpool set for under $500. That was over a decade ago now. I've had to disassemble and repair each machine once in the last year or two. Both times though I was able to figure out the problem pretty quickly and easily. Ordering the parts was a little sketchy, with one shop losing my order for a couple weeks. But in both cases the cost to fix them was under $60. Most of my friends and family that have spent $1k or more on washer dryer sets have ended up with more frequent and expensive breakdowns. My parents for instance have a very pricey washing machine which they've had for five years. So far that thing has required two repairs, one of which was a processor chip of some sort that cost more than my washing machine.
I don't think they intended handing their friends paychecks. The way I took it, and I would do it, would be to actually give my friends/relatives an equal share of the wealth, such that all are equals. I have a number of siblings but very few friends, any kind of significant lottery win could be split equally among them and result in a huge change in quality of life for all.
Before refrigeration you'd likely be stuck eating mostly the same things over and over again in cycles based on the season. Refrigeration opens up more diversity because you can eat all kinds of stuff out of season, and from other parts of the world. Of course that added diversity though is purely potential, people don't have to eat those different things, and many probably just stick to what they like best.
Most ebooks sold by amazon aren't downloaded in a DRM'd format. And I hope you're joking about the difficulty of getting ebooks from other sources, Project Gutenberg has tons of stuff and many publishers seem to have stores. I just use the USB cable that came with my Paperwhite to connect it to my computer and then drag and drop my ebook files to the ereader. I would presume that most other ereaders work in the same fashion.
My Paperwhite works very well without an internal light, although it does have one, and the battery duration is measured in weeks. Thus far I haven't bought many DRM'd ebooks so that hasn't been an issue. There is a huge amount of material out there that is available without DRM. And you can always strip the DRM if you really want to, although that is obviously a step you don't have to take with a hard copy.
Well there is the argument that we shouldn't be fighting a war there to begin with. The summary is very misleading though, and obviously with a negative bias.
JSOC does seem to be more ethically rigorous about how it conducts drone strikes than the CIA. The CIA were the ones doing signature strikes after all, and double taps to catch first responders if memory serves.
The military is hardly any better. The USAF requires requals once every couple years, and even then the accuracy requirement is laughably low.
The problem is that ammunition is just plain expensive. Last time I bought pistol rounds, 15 years ago, it was pricey and I can't imagine it's any cheaper today. When I thought about building an M4 the ammo was around $1 a shot.
That will depend entirely on who you get checking inventory and such. I knew a guy that was in a lot of hot water until they figured out that his "missing" rifle round was never actually given to him.
And it's not just firearms and ammunition that are tightly controlled on military bases. Enlisted folks living in dormitories weren't allowed to keep pretty much any kind of weapon including metal practice swords or decorative knives. I remember one guy almost getting locked up because he was carrying a rather small expanding baton in his pocket coming back on base one night.
Nonsense! Fried okra is pretty good. Fried green tomatoes can be even better. Jalapeno poppers go well with hot wings, as does celery sticks. I'd eat fried pickles with just about anything, and don't even get me started thinking about fried wickles.
We don't actually fry much of anything in my house, though I get fried chicken from the deli on occasion. But we do steamed veggies with just about every meal and the kids generally love it. We usually toss the vegetables with a thin pat of butter and a little salt and pepper. Sometimes my daughter will decide she doesn't like one of the vegetables in the mix for a week or so then she moves on to something else.
I'm not diametrically opposed to having specialized schools for children that actually need a completely different environment to function or survive. Some of my relatives actually run a small private school supplying that market and part of their focus is teaching their students to cope with normal social interaction.
That said the way my city handles the whole situation is atrocious. Starting at the kindergarten level the schools are separated into normal and magnet schools. At the elementary level about 25% of the normal schools are good or okay. At the middle school level, there is one in the entire city that isn't horrible, it isn't good or great, it just isn't horrible. At the high school level none of the normal schools are tolerable. The graduation rate, even including the magnet schools is in the high 60's, and that is after improving noticeably in the last decade.
The magnet schools can only take so many kids each year. So even if a child tests well enough to get in they have to get picked in a lottery to get accepted. Current students automatically stay at the magnet school of course and so you only get a few openings in each grade per year. To make it even more fun the magnet schools specialize in different curriculum even at the elementary level. So not only does your kid have to luck out in a huge way to just get accepted to one of these schools, but you have to pick a specialty for your kindergartener, when it's commonly accepted that most young adults haven't a clue regarding what they want to do in life.
What this basically means is that in a few years if my kid hasn't won the lottery I'll have to move my family. And even if my first kid wins, the second kid means the deadline just shifts a few years. The only other option is private school and since tuition is actually higher than my mortgage that isn't much of an option.
Meanwhile the school board and local politicians are seemingly satisfied with the situation. If you complain about the poor quality in the normal schools you get directed to the magnet schools and their lottery. They invest laughably small amounts of money into the schools and hold up the magnet schools as gleaming gems, ignoring the festering normal schools. And honestly it's not even the fact they are consigning the vast majority of gifted kids to normal schools that pisses me off. What gets my goat is that they are writing off all of the kids that don't go to magnet schools, normal and gifted alike. No kid deserves being treated like that. Magnet schools are essentially their excuse for not putting any effort or resources into the normal schools.
That is basically a thousand plus kids a year my city alone is prepping to be future tenants in our nations private prison system.
History already answered this question. It doesn't happen overnight, and it might even take a generation, but immigrants in huge numbers have been successfully integrated before in the USA. Ellis Island is a popular tourist spot because many Americans are direct descendants of people who passed through there at some point. I'm descended from people who arrived as part of British colonization, Scottish cattle rustlers, French Terror refugees, some Germans, and if you believe family folk lore a couple Native American Indians. And that's just the stuff I can recall off the top of my head.
I agree with the idea that we don't want our country filled with lots of little subdivided groups that refuse to associate and mingle. And I don't have any easy solutions for making immigrants 'assimilate' as you call it. But I can tell you for sure that by stigmatizing immigrants and freaking out about it in general we only encourage immigrant groups to close in on themselves and avoid cultural mingling. If we're afraid of our culture changing as a result of immigration, we'll just have to get over it. Culture is always changing and trying to crystallize it is a hopeless and fruitless endeavor.
Where I'm at the gifted program is a series of completely separate schools. And of course they don't have room for all of the qualifying children. To determine who gets in they have a lottery, and the losers are stuck in the normal schools that are frankly speaking of abominable quality. I would much rather they eliminate the special schools and just improve the normal schools, have advanced classes for the kids who qualify for them. As it is now the normal schools are pretty much left to rot while the special schools get held up as gems of the community.
Crime is crime, the numbers might go up with large influxes of people. But they will still likely stay at historically very low rates. We hear a lot more about crime today than in times past simply because we live in a more connected world and so are exposed to sensational news from all corners of the world. Crime rates have a lot of room to grow again before they impact the average person noticeably.
I never presumed that having more open borders and immigration policy would lead to less people immigrating, why would you even imagine that? Immigration is good, I would be very happy to see a lot more immigration in the USA. If you open the borders and hand out green cards to all interested parties then you've eliminate the largest motivation for illegally crossing the border, and hence being an illegal alien. I've never heard of an immigrant that wanted to be here illegally rather than legally, being illegal is simply the most practical option for most of them.
Illegal aliens hurt job prospects for unskilled natives because they have little to no recourse when offered wages below the legal requirements. By legalizing immigration those workers can demand they be paid the legal minimum, and so you actually hand the advantage back to the native because they already speak the language. The applicable communities also benefit since those workers can be paid above the table and have taxes collected. Since there will be a larger pool of laborers to draw from obviously jobs could get a littler harder to find. That said, most of the jobs that have been created since the 2008 economic mess have been in the unskilled labor bracket.
I've never smoked, drank, sniffed, snorted, or consumed in any fashion anything that is legally prohibited in the USA. I've also never consumed alcoholic beverages or tobacco products. I've never experimented with anything that has ended up eventually being banned or restricted. I do so for my own personal beliefs, those same beliefs though demand that I not tell others what they can or can't consume so long as it doesn't victimize another. Alcohol prohibition failed and was eventually repealed, and the war on drugs is similarly a losing proposition and simply a waste of resources and human potential. I only brought it up because aside from illegal immigration drug smuggling is probably the biggest driver of illegal border crossings.
In many jurisdictions you are actually required by law to remove snow and ice from the roof of your car before driving it. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone getting a citation for it though except in cases where it caused some other incident like an accident.
Immigration is a positive net affect for a country the vast majority of the time. Illegal immigration is a problem in the USA only because our politicians insist on keeping it that way. I've known people who where here in the USA for more than a dozen years legally trying to get permanent papers before finally getting it. If we killed the pointless war on drugs and simply issued social security numbers to those that asked in a timely manner illegal border crossings would be a thing of the past.
The problem with using a clock at sea, as opposed to on land, was that the constant and highly varied movement of the ship disrupted the clockwork mechanisms of the day. So yes, you still needed an accurate clock to use this same method on land, but engineering a clock for such use on land was already accomplished.
I would say that our treatment of veterans, as a society, has improved but still has a long way to go. Within the military its self there are some pretty major problems. The army actually created special units to try and help vets where they could get specialized treatment and either be rehabilitated or medically separated. Instead some commanders placed over those units have taken it as license to kick out as many troops as they can through chapter 10 discharges. That specific type of discharge leaves a veteran high and dry when it comes to trying to get help. I read an excellent series of articles about it awhile back, http://cdn.csgazette.biz/soldi...
One of my friends came back from a deployment pretty messed up mentally and emotionally. He luckily separated honorably, but then couldn't get any help getting treatment until the VA made a decision on his claim which took more than 18 months. That may not be a horribly long time but it was enough for him to land in jail and have his wife divorce him and try to take their kids. Luckily he got a decision from the VA shortly after getting out of jail and was able to get treatment in time to not be totally shafted in the divorce and retain some level of custody or visitation with his kids. If he had been chapter 10'd he would likely be homeless and destitute at this point.
US Federal employees have actually been contributing to SSI in the same manner as everyone else since the 1980's when the change was made from CSRS to FERS.
Under FERS federal employees contribute to SSI, a pension plan, and a 401k'ish system called TSP. SSI is the same for them as for everyone else. The TSP is a professionally managed fund that gives a number of options for picking risk vs reward and is basically identical to a good 401k with very low management fees. The pension plan requires minimal input from the employee and eventually pays up to 1.1% per year of service of high three pay, provided they have enough years of service to qualify at all and wait until retirement age to start getting checks.
A big part of the poverty problem in the USA is that it is self perpetuating. While it is possible to claw your way out of poverty, circumstances are arranged to hinder rather than enable movement in that direction.
Salt Lake City I believe actually made the news recently because they have drastically reduced their homeless problems by simply providing individual housing to the homeless. They have shown that it is actually cheaper to fix the problem at its root than to treat the dozens of symptoms. I don't care if it enables someone to waste their life doing nothing productive, so long as it is cheaper and less troublesome to the rest of society.
Hunger is an excellent motivator but it doesn't demand that it be satisfied legally. And currently there simply are not as many jobs as there are job seekers. If you consign those unemployed people to a death of starvation I guarantee you many of them will find a way to get fed, which will cost you more than simply ensuring that they are fed three times a day.
Slashdot Mirror
The money, or a lot of it, actually still goes to the bankers. In all likelihood the buyer had to take out a sizable mortgage to pay you that money, which means they are now collecting interest on the loan while getting the property as collateral. Then, unless you stuck that money under your mattress they are also very likely making money by leveraging your deposit, or by selling you investment devices backed by the mortgage they made to buy your property.
The pay may not be top notch but depending on where you live it can still be very good. And I don't know of any large employers offering the kind of time off that Civil Service gets. You quickly get to earning six hours of leave every two weeks, and eventually get to eight hours. Everyone also gets four hours of sick leave per pay period.
I think a lot of that hangs on the sense of accomplishment people have with their work and so pride comes into it. To me though getting a ton of money through pure unadulterated luck is very different. In the case of luck it's obvious to everyone that you didn't work for it and so sharing the reward of that luck is easier to accept.
Have you ever taken apart a bare bones washer or dryer? The most difficult part of the entire procedure is getting the cabinet open. For the washer it was the pump that was leaking. There were two bolts holding it in place and two pipe clamps to release. My wife actually applied a temporary fix using a hot glue gun while we waited for the part to be delivered, which held for several weeks. Paying someone to repair a washer like that is the equivalent of taking your desktop computer into the PC shop to replace a seized case fan.
The dryer was actually easier to work on as the back opened up. The problem was obvious enough as it was blowing unheated air. So I checked the Ohms on the heating coil and determined it had burned out. Again replacing it was as easy as removing a few screws and plugging in the new part.
Anyways my whole point was that by purchasing a less expensive set of machines I saved money in pretty much every way possible. They were cheaper to purchase upfront, cheaper to maintain and repair, and thus far lasted longer than the more expensive options. The only way they aren't cheaper is in operating costs, and while those values get touted a lot in advertising the actual numbers will vary with the cost of your utilities.
$70 an hour isn't what that kind of expertise or intelligence costs. That amount is covering all kinds of other business expenses and probably not coming in 40+ hours a week. Regardless you can be sure that the repair guy himself isn't getting that kind of pay.
I've observed this myself with my Washer and Dryer set. When I bought them I wasn't quite broke but I definitely couldn't afford to spend a lot on them. So I bought a pretty generic no frills Whirlpool set for under $500. That was over a decade ago now. I've had to disassemble and repair each machine once in the last year or two. Both times though I was able to figure out the problem pretty quickly and easily. Ordering the parts was a little sketchy, with one shop losing my order for a couple weeks. But in both cases the cost to fix them was under $60. Most of my friends and family that have spent $1k or more on washer dryer sets have ended up with more frequent and expensive breakdowns. My parents for instance have a very pricey washing machine which they've had for five years. So far that thing has required two repairs, one of which was a processor chip of some sort that cost more than my washing machine.
I don't think they intended handing their friends paychecks. The way I took it, and I would do it, would be to actually give my friends/relatives an equal share of the wealth, such that all are equals. I have a number of siblings but very few friends, any kind of significant lottery win could be split equally among them and result in a huge change in quality of life for all.
Diversity, only kinda.
Before refrigeration you'd likely be stuck eating mostly the same things over and over again in cycles based on the season. Refrigeration opens up more diversity because you can eat all kinds of stuff out of season, and from other parts of the world. Of course that added diversity though is purely potential, people don't have to eat those different things, and many probably just stick to what they like best.
Most ebooks sold by amazon aren't downloaded in a DRM'd format. And I hope you're joking about the difficulty of getting ebooks from other sources, Project Gutenberg has tons of stuff and many publishers seem to have stores. I just use the USB cable that came with my Paperwhite to connect it to my computer and then drag and drop my ebook files to the ereader. I would presume that most other ereaders work in the same fashion.
My Paperwhite works very well without an internal light, although it does have one, and the battery duration is measured in weeks. Thus far I haven't bought many DRM'd ebooks so that hasn't been an issue. There is a huge amount of material out there that is available without DRM. And you can always strip the DRM if you really want to, although that is obviously a step you don't have to take with a hard copy.
Well there is the argument that we shouldn't be fighting a war there to begin with. The summary is very misleading though, and obviously with a negative bias.
JSOC does seem to be more ethically rigorous about how it conducts drone strikes than the CIA. The CIA were the ones doing signature strikes after all, and double taps to catch first responders if memory serves.
Although it should be noted that current US Federal law explicitly identifies all able bodied men in a pretty wide age range as being in the militia.
But yes, the 2nd amendment is worded that way meaning that in order to raise a militia you need an at least partially armed and experience populace.
The military is hardly any better. The USAF requires requals once every couple years, and even then the accuracy requirement is laughably low.
The problem is that ammunition is just plain expensive. Last time I bought pistol rounds, 15 years ago, it was pricey and I can't imagine it's any cheaper today. When I thought about building an M4 the ammo was around $1 a shot.
That will depend entirely on who you get checking inventory and such. I knew a guy that was in a lot of hot water until they figured out that his "missing" rifle round was never actually given to him.
And it's not just firearms and ammunition that are tightly controlled on military bases. Enlisted folks living in dormitories weren't allowed to keep pretty much any kind of weapon including metal practice swords or decorative knives. I remember one guy almost getting locked up because he was carrying a rather small expanding baton in his pocket coming back on base one night.
Because they're amazingly tasty.
I suppose I should have capitalized it, but Wickles aren't my invention.
http://www.amazon.com/Wickles-...
"And no, veggies don't pair with fried foods."
Nonsense! Fried okra is pretty good. Fried green tomatoes can be even better. Jalapeno poppers go well with hot wings, as does celery sticks. I'd eat fried pickles with just about anything, and don't even get me started thinking about fried wickles.
We don't actually fry much of anything in my house, though I get fried chicken from the deli on occasion. But we do steamed veggies with just about every meal and the kids generally love it. We usually toss the vegetables with a thin pat of butter and a little salt and pepper. Sometimes my daughter will decide she doesn't like one of the vegetables in the mix for a week or so then she moves on to something else.
I'm not diametrically opposed to having specialized schools for children that actually need a completely different environment to function or survive. Some of my relatives actually run a small private school supplying that market and part of their focus is teaching their students to cope with normal social interaction.
That said the way my city handles the whole situation is atrocious. Starting at the kindergarten level the schools are separated into normal and magnet schools. At the elementary level about 25% of the normal schools are good or okay. At the middle school level, there is one in the entire city that isn't horrible, it isn't good or great, it just isn't horrible. At the high school level none of the normal schools are tolerable. The graduation rate, even including the magnet schools is in the high 60's, and that is after improving noticeably in the last decade.
The magnet schools can only take so many kids each year. So even if a child tests well enough to get in they have to get picked in a lottery to get accepted. Current students automatically stay at the magnet school of course and so you only get a few openings in each grade per year. To make it even more fun the magnet schools specialize in different curriculum even at the elementary level. So not only does your kid have to luck out in a huge way to just get accepted to one of these schools, but you have to pick a specialty for your kindergartener, when it's commonly accepted that most young adults haven't a clue regarding what they want to do in life.
What this basically means is that in a few years if my kid hasn't won the lottery I'll have to move my family. And even if my first kid wins, the second kid means the deadline just shifts a few years. The only other option is private school and since tuition is actually higher than my mortgage that isn't much of an option.
Meanwhile the school board and local politicians are seemingly satisfied with the situation. If you complain about the poor quality in the normal schools you get directed to the magnet schools and their lottery. They invest laughably small amounts of money into the schools and hold up the magnet schools as gleaming gems, ignoring the festering normal schools. And honestly it's not even the fact they are consigning the vast majority of gifted kids to normal schools that pisses me off. What gets my goat is that they are writing off all of the kids that don't go to magnet schools, normal and gifted alike. No kid deserves being treated like that. Magnet schools are essentially their excuse for not putting any effort or resources into the normal schools.
That is basically a thousand plus kids a year my city alone is prepping to be future tenants in our nations private prison system.
History already answered this question. It doesn't happen overnight, and it might even take a generation, but immigrants in huge numbers have been successfully integrated before in the USA. Ellis Island is a popular tourist spot because many Americans are direct descendants of people who passed through there at some point. I'm descended from people who arrived as part of British colonization, Scottish cattle rustlers, French Terror refugees, some Germans, and if you believe family folk lore a couple Native American Indians. And that's just the stuff I can recall off the top of my head.
I agree with the idea that we don't want our country filled with lots of little subdivided groups that refuse to associate and mingle. And I don't have any easy solutions for making immigrants 'assimilate' as you call it. But I can tell you for sure that by stigmatizing immigrants and freaking out about it in general we only encourage immigrant groups to close in on themselves and avoid cultural mingling. If we're afraid of our culture changing as a result of immigration, we'll just have to get over it. Culture is always changing and trying to crystallize it is a hopeless and fruitless endeavor.
Where I'm at the gifted program is a series of completely separate schools. And of course they don't have room for all of the qualifying children. To determine who gets in they have a lottery, and the losers are stuck in the normal schools that are frankly speaking of abominable quality. I would much rather they eliminate the special schools and just improve the normal schools, have advanced classes for the kids who qualify for them. As it is now the normal schools are pretty much left to rot while the special schools get held up as gems of the community.
Crime is crime, the numbers might go up with large influxes of people. But they will still likely stay at historically very low rates. We hear a lot more about crime today than in times past simply because we live in a more connected world and so are exposed to sensational news from all corners of the world. Crime rates have a lot of room to grow again before they impact the average person noticeably.
I never presumed that having more open borders and immigration policy would lead to less people immigrating, why would you even imagine that? Immigration is good, I would be very happy to see a lot more immigration in the USA. If you open the borders and hand out green cards to all interested parties then you've eliminate the largest motivation for illegally crossing the border, and hence being an illegal alien. I've never heard of an immigrant that wanted to be here illegally rather than legally, being illegal is simply the most practical option for most of them.
Illegal aliens hurt job prospects for unskilled natives because they have little to no recourse when offered wages below the legal requirements. By legalizing immigration those workers can demand they be paid the legal minimum, and so you actually hand the advantage back to the native because they already speak the language. The applicable communities also benefit since those workers can be paid above the table and have taxes collected. Since there will be a larger pool of laborers to draw from obviously jobs could get a littler harder to find. That said, most of the jobs that have been created since the 2008 economic mess have been in the unskilled labor bracket.
I've never smoked, drank, sniffed, snorted, or consumed in any fashion anything that is legally prohibited in the USA. I've also never consumed alcoholic beverages or tobacco products. I've never experimented with anything that has ended up eventually being banned or restricted. I do so for my own personal beliefs, those same beliefs though demand that I not tell others what they can or can't consume so long as it doesn't victimize another. Alcohol prohibition failed and was eventually repealed, and the war on drugs is similarly a losing proposition and simply a waste of resources and human potential. I only brought it up because aside from illegal immigration drug smuggling is probably the biggest driver of illegal border crossings.
In many jurisdictions you are actually required by law to remove snow and ice from the roof of your car before driving it. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone getting a citation for it though except in cases where it caused some other incident like an accident.
Oh, what a bunch of bullshit.
Immigration is a positive net affect for a country the vast majority of the time. Illegal immigration is a problem in the USA only because our politicians insist on keeping it that way. I've known people who where here in the USA for more than a dozen years legally trying to get permanent papers before finally getting it. If we killed the pointless war on drugs and simply issued social security numbers to those that asked in a timely manner illegal border crossings would be a thing of the past.
The problem with using a clock at sea, as opposed to on land, was that the constant and highly varied movement of the ship disrupted the clockwork mechanisms of the day. So yes, you still needed an accurate clock to use this same method on land, but engineering a clock for such use on land was already accomplished.
I would say that our treatment of veterans, as a society, has improved but still has a long way to go. Within the military its self there are some pretty major problems. The army actually created special units to try and help vets where they could get specialized treatment and either be rehabilitated or medically separated. Instead some commanders placed over those units have taken it as license to kick out as many troops as they can through chapter 10 discharges. That specific type of discharge leaves a veteran high and dry when it comes to trying to get help. I read an excellent series of articles about it awhile back, http://cdn.csgazette.biz/soldi...
One of my friends came back from a deployment pretty messed up mentally and emotionally. He luckily separated honorably, but then couldn't get any help getting treatment until the VA made a decision on his claim which took more than 18 months. That may not be a horribly long time but it was enough for him to land in jail and have his wife divorce him and try to take their kids. Luckily he got a decision from the VA shortly after getting out of jail and was able to get treatment in time to not be totally shafted in the divorce and retain some level of custody or visitation with his kids. If he had been chapter 10'd he would likely be homeless and destitute at this point.
US Federal employees have actually been contributing to SSI in the same manner as everyone else since the 1980's when the change was made from CSRS to FERS.
Under FERS federal employees contribute to SSI, a pension plan, and a 401k'ish system called TSP. SSI is the same for them as for everyone else. The TSP is a professionally managed fund that gives a number of options for picking risk vs reward and is basically identical to a good 401k with very low management fees. The pension plan requires minimal input from the employee and eventually pays up to 1.1% per year of service of high three pay, provided they have enough years of service to qualify at all and wait until retirement age to start getting checks.
A big part of the poverty problem in the USA is that it is self perpetuating. While it is possible to claw your way out of poverty, circumstances are arranged to hinder rather than enable movement in that direction.
Salt Lake City I believe actually made the news recently because they have drastically reduced their homeless problems by simply providing individual housing to the homeless. They have shown that it is actually cheaper to fix the problem at its root than to treat the dozens of symptoms. I don't care if it enables someone to waste their life doing nothing productive, so long as it is cheaper and less troublesome to the rest of society.
Hunger is an excellent motivator but it doesn't demand that it be satisfied legally. And currently there simply are not as many jobs as there are job seekers. If you consign those unemployed people to a death of starvation I guarantee you many of them will find a way to get fed, which will cost you more than simply ensuring that they are fed three times a day.