He/she is writing from a point of view of superiority - “look, this is what they’re lacking, they can’t afford a Rs.8000 dinner”. To a billionaire, my software engineer life will look miserable - “They have to go eat at Panera and Olive Garden. For their employer, a nice dineout costs $5000.”

Can we stop looking down on people because they cannot afford what’s normal for us? I agree about the freedom and social parts here, so let’s focus on that. Most of the article seems to be written to evoke shock and awe from a middle-class person - look what they can’t afford! Lets focus on their social struggles instead of what they can or cannot afford.

Objectively, their life does kinda suck. The woman is living in a slum and cleaning houses for a living, earning very little for a lot of exhausting labor. The man is doing little better. They have to be creative in finding places to just hang out with each other, which is really the foundation for any relationship.

This isn't a judgement call on their relative economic status; life is just more difficult for them. I didn't feel the author was looking down on them as much as pointing out the obscene difference in ease of living between the upper and lower classes.

However, look at the following:

“She’s the first woman from her family who makes her own money.”

To her, that might be an amazing success. Getting out of your default path and making it on your own is a big thing. Why do we need to emphasize that she can’t afford to eat at a Zomato restaurant? Is that a minimum bar for life being good?

I agree with your point that they do have a lack of freedom and a lot of societal issues. Also basic facilities. Those should obviously be called out and kudos to the journalists for this.

I’m mainly commenting on the author’s choice of contrasting it with luxury brands:

> “I don’t really want any expensive gifts, or to go to big restaurants. These things are superficial,” said Anuradha, who said she likes watching romance movies and is a big Shah Rukh Khan fan.

Kudos to her, she doesn’t consider those important, then why does the author keep calling out luxuries she doesn’t have? Malls, expensive restaurants, Zomato, Tinder.

Sadly in Indian soceity, these luxury items are given too much importance in determining your “class”. In the US (and many less rich countries), take a look at articles on poverty. They focus on problems and solutions, not on brands they can’t afford.

What you described traces its roots in sensationalism, which is useful to catch people's attention (or so the piece becomes memorable for them).

As a soceity, we are always seeking to lower the cost of obtaining stimuli and qualia[1]. Combining this with the fact that people's lives become ever more complex, the cost of attention increases. Among the masses, short-attention span is now the norm.

Therefore it is important to practise mindfulness. And this is why I believe psychedelics and meditation are fundemental for us to transition into a more sensible soceity.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28020031

Would I trade places with them? No, I was content with my life. But would these folks swap with me? Based on how happy they are with each other, I'd guess not.

or maybe not, since upper classes will swiftly deal with it and go back to being miserable about their first world problems

I don’t think this paints the full picture but I believe this is at least partially due to differences in regional identities even within the class. India has multiple major languages, several castes and sub-castes (reference to this has been made in the article). This makes class solidarity much harder among the lower classes, who also have difficulty in accessing good education.

The upper classes on the other hand all speak English or Hindi. They can communicate with one another. Their easier access to education and frequent contact with people from other regions of the country makes them care less about those divisions. There is much more class solidarity in the upper classes.

A lot of factors come into play there. Protesting and political engagement require a lot of time and energy. Many of the poorest people need to spend huge amounts of both just to survive to day to day.

Their health is often poor, they may not be as well educated, they're exhausted from back-breaking physical labor and from living in constant stress. It'd seem hard to expect people in that situation to organize a grassroots movement let alone an army.

Even if someone had the time, the energy, the physical and mental well-being to fight for change, and they could do all the work involved in determining exactly who it is that needs overthrowing, how to best set about doing that, and what should be done if they somehow succeed, they then still have to convince others who are lost in their own struggles for survival to abandon what little they've managed to secure for themselves and join them.

That's already a lot of overcome and doesn't even get into the countless ways people are conditioned to feel helpless, powerless, inadequate, responsible for their own suffering, or divided and intentionally pitted against each other or at least some "other" who can be blamed for their problems.

Then of course, even if they do manage to overcome all of that, they're still up against an enemy with vast amounts of resources and power. The only thing they've got going for them are their numbers and that they don't have all that much to lose.

It's amazing to me that revolts happen at all really.

It'd probably go a lot easier if it didn't start from the bottom. Get the declining middle classes involved or some sympathetic members of the upper class and it's another story entirely.

Unfortunately, the same dynamic applies at the national/international level and can often be seen in attitudes between "developed" and "developing" nations.

Some anecdotal evidence I've observed when visiting the homes of the lower wage workers in Delhi:-

1.) If they have a proper brick and mortar house, even on rent, they consider themselves successful. They do a very good job of maintaining their local colonies, even better than some of the upper class areas.

2.) The people in the above situation were often adamant about sending their kids to school, and in some cases, even private schools.

3.) They use most of the electronics we use, just cheaper versions. TVs, fridges, even a laptop in one household.

4.) The biggest differentiator between a happy lower income household and a dysfunctional one was alcohol and drug abuse.

5.) The "bad" ones are usually counseled by neighbors and members of the community, and if that was to no avail, later ostracized. There was always a support mechanism in place for the (nearly always female) victim so that she could continue living in the community.

In all of the above cases, we see that their lives mirror ours, or in some cases, they've had to adapt unique social systems despite the challenges, which ultimately seem to be better than the ones we upper class folks seem to have.

yeah, but so what? the comparison is not holding.

poverty is not a lifestyle.

I think perhaps you got the wrong thing from this article.

Even in 2021 (article is from 2017) this is an exaggeration. You can have dinner for 2 at a five-star hotel in Delhi for less than half that amount, unless you're splurging on the drinks.

I actually went and pulled up the menu for one of the restaurants at the Taj Palace, a place I know well, and an app and entree picked at random came to $73, easily crossing the $125 mark for two without dessert or any beverages.

0. https://www.eazydiner.com/delhi-ncr/machan-the-taj-mahal-hot...

0. https://www.zomato.com/ncr/21-gun-salute-sector-29

1. https://www.haldiram.com/about

https://www.tajhotels.com/content/dam/luxury/hotels/taj-pala...

Obviously, I realize you have a lot more experience with a wide variety of places, I was just making a comment that the contention from the article is at least plausible.

In countries like India with 1/10th to 1/25th the percapita income such social restrictions are a necessity.

Are they, really? Do you have a source? I'm willing to bet the suffering these social restrictions put on young women and men in general is several times that faced by the outliers you're conveniently pointing to. Also willing to bet these cases of teen moms and alcoholic parents will be much more prevalent among the poorer classes in India than in the west in general.

So this falls on the society, so you get social restrictions.

Reading this breaks my heart. In a few weeks India beings an year-long celebration to mark the country’s 75th Independence Day. And yet people feel discriminated because the don’t speak English.

And something I heard years back. Kids were not allowed into another school where a competition was being held. Why...because they were in dhotis and not in uniform. The only problem, that was their school uniform.

The Wiki page on "gotra" suggests they "only" have to go back seven generations (I don't know any of my ancestors beyond five generations and the father of one of my great-grandfathers was never known; would that be scandalous in India?), which seems to imply extreme complication. If each female ancestor has her own unique gotra, in seven generations there would be 64 gotras. Unless there are thousands of gotras, it must be very common for a prospective bride and groom to overlap. Little wonder that arranged marriages are common.

The traditional practice was for Brahmins to declare their exact line of descent alongside the gotra, by naming five noteworthy ancestors (pravara rishis), starting from the top level saptarishi ancestor gotra(one of seven). Some of the saptarishis famously didn't get along, and their descendants are considered incompatible matches for marriage. When considering a marriage alliance from a family with the same top level saptarishi gotra, it was considered acceptable if at least three of the five pravara rishis were different, ie, a distant branch of the family. As families lost their traditions, people identified their nodal pravara rishi as the gotra, which is how most people today know them. In addition, in ancient times the custom was for non-brahmins to state the gotra & lineage of their family priest when performing religious rituals, and ended up adopting them.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/jp2011115

> Some of the saptarishis famously didn't get along, and their descendants are considered incompatible matches for marriage.

I suppose this is different in Southern clans.

This was true in the southern clans as well. The practice of lineage splitting is well documented. As for the concept of gotra incompatibility, its something your astrologer might bring up, and not something well known among the general public.

The brahmin communities have a handful of gothras as I understand it (7 or 8, depending on who you ask).

The relationship matrix is resolved by only tracking a single side of the family tree and making first cousins who are able to marry each other without complication on this topic. So it doesn't directly fix the inbreeding within insular communities, though that was its intention.

My father-in-law spent quite some time investigating this, as my clan is matrilineal in ancestry (still very patriarchal, just brother-sister family unit instead of husband-wife) with a history of cross-marriages from patrilineal men for treaties/allies.

Completely pointless pedigree certificate, felt like I was being picked for breeding instead of an equal partnership.

A dive into this sort of discrimination almost left me wondering why something with political eugenics didn't come out of India. Fears which I still have for the 2040s seeing the CAA and NRC.

There are other “rules” as well. But it really depends on the region and community.

There are some communities (for eg. Nairs) who traditionally have matrilineal systems.

So no generic rules for all of India.

This is all gradually breaking down with urbanization. So it’s not some sort of static thing either.

To give an anecdote, a friend's cousin is a partner at a consulting firm in Delhi, yet I was surprised to find out that their live-in help was paid 12k INR a month. It's not about them being stingy, it's just the market rate (or in this case, above market).

Then I read the first comment on this HN thread, which is directly comparing this to Toronto.

So either Westerners don't realize that people in these places are making less money in a month than the middle class person can expect to spend in an average afternoon, or there is some intermediate step of "let me compare this to what I know" that is happening. It's not really enough...you should experience it for yourself (there's also other issues, such as people claiming there's more homeless in LA than in Delhi, not realizing that a lot of effectively homeless people in India aren't classified as such - it'd be like saying you're not homeless in LA if you have a tent or a sleeping bag).

Reminds me of learning a new language, where beginners try to formulate thoughts in their native tongue and produce a direct translation, whereas those who are fluent can skip that step completely.

When I've repeated that online, on at least one occasion someone who lived in India got mad at me for supposedly promoting negative stereotypes and told me my info was out of date. They seemed outraged.

I spent some years homeless in America. I'm still quite poor and frustrated with that fact.

I don't know what the solution is for trying to promote better cross cultural understanding. I try to focus on how to get the word out in the US that lack of appropriate housing supply is a primary root cause of homelessness in this country. It's shocking how many people insist that lack of affordable housing has nothing to do with homelessness and homeless people are all just crazies and junkies who don't want to get better.

Even though the poor and lower middle class make abjectly low amounts of money, the upper middle class and the rich actually make money comparable to most developed countries. This is reflected in the real estate prices (Chennai, the fourth largest city, has prices comparable to Brooklyn). I can make 200k UsD a year and call myself upper middle class and no one will bat an eye.

While you can kinda isolate yourself from the real poverty, you’re never fully shielded from it. You will see people struggling if you live in India. Then, the only way you can convince yourself you’re not an evil person is by playing some Mental gymnastics. Thus you have people who refuse to accept how outrageous the wealth disparity in India is. Combine this with this misplaced cultural pride that seems comparatively excessive here, and you get people who become belligerent if you mention most Indians are poorer than dirt.

Does benefiting from severe inequality imply amorality? I don't see any inherent contradiction between personal financial success and supporting policies intended to uplift the poor (similarly to how some uber-wealthy in America publicly advocate for more progressive taxation).

Those narratives aren't necessarily entirely wrong, and I don't see those people as particularly evil, they just might have a few blind spots. For instance, they might not realize that even though they worked hard for their success, they also had a lot of second chances when they failed and they might not have had some of the roadblocks to success that others had, such as serious health problems, or a bad family situation, or prejudice, or violence, or lack of education, or lack of leisure time.

I've never been to Delhi, so this is just based on my own observation of people in the United States. I assume this is probably one of those aspects of human nature that are more-or-less the same everywhere.

That there are X million people you cant help even if you do all you can doesn't undermine the fact that if you make hundreds of thousands of dollars you could change the lives of many forever with not much of a lifestyle hit for yourself.

What do policies have to do with anything?

I can't tell if this is a serious question. Policies are how we effect change at scale. Relying on countless people to each independently make the decision to follow your particular moral values isn't a practical solution for addressing inequality throughout the entire country of India.

> any >=middle-class person who doesn't donate the majority of their wealth to charity is "evil"?

That is pretty much Peter Singer's position (who incidentally is Australian, and it appears the person you're replying to may be also), who is if nothing else at least providing serious and cogent arguments for such a position. You may disagree, but he argues fairly respectably, IMO.

I'm a bit on the fence on that one, but I think there's something to be said for the fact that there is at least some immorality happening if a person worth 100.000$ walks past someone worth 0$ and doesn't help them out at least a little.

If you're curious about this line of reasoning, here's a nice introduction: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/giving...

So true. People have very wrong expectation when "hiring poor Indians." India been a player in software development field for decades. People there know well how do they pay people in the US, not to say that most higher education in India automatically assumes some passable English.

The upper part of India society lives with one leg in the Western world, others not so much.

Mumbai may pass some times to a glass skyscraper city of the West, but drive 100km out of the city, and the reality will hit you like a truck.

I think that's just it: trying to promote better cross cultural understanding. That's something I tried with the GP here, but I could probably write up an article to be linked to in such discussions.

> metrics like "How many meals per day do you get?" and "What kind of shelter do you have?"

I think this is a good thought, a focus on qualitative differences in lived experience using quantifiable metrics. With that approach you're less likely to offend rather than inform. Might be best to skip the "less than 1/2 of one percent of Americans were poor by standards in India" since it seems to suggest that American poverty isn't "real" poverty.

I would even go so far as to say that communicating the cultural context is far more important than underlining the economics, the former of which TFA is attempting to do.

I lived in the same country. I used the same currency. I spoke the same language. Yet my life was not like that of civilians I knew and their underlying assumptions and mine that informed our decisions just did not match up to such a degree that I eventually stopped trying to explain my life choices even to people quite close to me who simply did not get the context and that their decision-making matrix and mine were largely unrelated.

I wish you luck in trying to figure out how to do this.

To explain poverty to a middle class Californian, frame it in culture terms that are familiar, but which still reach the same class of emotional experience you want them to understand.

e.g.

Have you ever gone shopping at The Gap for jeans with a bunch of pals, and they take forever to decide which 12 pairs of jeans they're going to get, but you only take like 20 minutes because you can only afford 4 pairs? You know how that feels?

They'll catch on.

She was probably just worried sick about me because the stats for civilian Americans is abysmal. I think it's something like one third of men don't pay at all and one third only make partial payments, which routinely leaves women and their children in a real pickle. It can take months or years to get legal remedy, garnish his wages and get back payments -- if you get them at all.

But it doesn't work that way in the military. If he had stiffed me, I would have written his commanding officer and his wages would have been garnished post haste, much more quickly than what you typically see in the civilian world.

My friend apparently thought I was some naive little ninny who just didn't understand the cold, cruel world because I had such a sheltered existence as a homemaker. And that wasn't it at all. The rules were just different for me and I was in no danger of being left out in the cold like she was likely imagining was about to happen to me given how common that is in the civilian version of America.

The landlords quit their shit and cut a deal.

If you were a military spouse, you may have had a job, but rarely a career. You move at the whim of your spouse's job (every few years) to places you don't control. You generally don't get to pick your neighbors or even your friends - you just adapt to the situation that constantly changes.

Spouses of military members that go on unaccompanied tours have it even worse. They are at home alone, often for months at a time. My anecdotal observations of Navy spouses, for example, was that cheating was a standard practice - not because the marriage was necessarily bad, but because they were so lonely. This is based on limited exposure (I was Air Force, both as a brat and active duty), so may not be as universally true as I observed.

This can all sound horrible, but it really wasn't. Just different. Different enough that sometimes it is hard to explain.

It has its own government-run housing authority, its own government-run medical system, you don't always know where you will end up on your next tour, you may not be allowed to quit and leave the military when you would normally expect to under some circumstances, etc.

Perfect description, which I find hilarious. It's the best large-scale example of socialism that actually works. But the Right won't admit it and the Left thinks it's hell.

So superficial analyses may just not be very recognizable to the population, because of very different value systems and nuances.

I guess it's something that's as ingrained in the Indian psyche as turmeric is in Indian cuisine.

Were it necessary to cover the subtle nuances of Eastern and Western culture, it would be hard to get anywhere with prose. I think it's sufficient to convey enough information to demonstrate that the value systems and lived experiences are fundamentally different.

The goal is not to "level the playing field" in terms of where people are coming from, but to foster more meaningful discussions by explicitly taking context into account.

Prose is what's needed to communicate effectively. Tables and charts simply can't do that by themselves. Even they need a legend and labels to be useful.

Fast forward to now. The city offered everyone a free place to go and many took it. There were still a lot of people who refused. Now the garbage trucks and police evicted them. The garbage people packed a lot of stuff and put it into storage.

What’s your take? They were offered housing while they get back on their feet and chose not to take it.

A lot of services offered to the homeless are really terrible. I never stayed in a shelter while homeless. They have rules that make it just shy of being a form of prison, they tend to not be safe and they often have serious mold problems, among other things.

They also offered me no option to continue living as a family with my adult sons. Every service I spoke to urged me to take shelter as a single woman and to wait-list my sons for shelter as single adult men. There were zero programs to help us find shelter as a family of three blood relatives who still need each other to make our lives work.

I have done a lot of writing about homelessness and housing issues over the years. I could direct you to several of my blogs if you actually are sincerely interested in my take. I doubt that you are. That's likely a rhetorical device.

I am doing what I can to continue researching the issue, to provide useful information for small communities to use, etc. I don't know how to get traction and I don't know how to adequately monetize my work which makes it difficult to keep writing about it in hopes of other people benefiting because I need to eat and pay rent too. I'm certainly not independently wealthy.

These topics are of interest to me.

They were offered housing while they get back on their feet and chose not to take it.

It's full of implicit accusation that the homeless are difficult, uncooperative, causing their own problems and you can't help them because they are irrational pains in the butt.

I interpreted it that way in part because many homeless services are so bad they help keep the problem alive rather than helping to solve it.

As just one example: Most homeless people have serious health issues. It's an underlying cause of their financial problems and a barrier to employment.

But if you go to a soup kitchen, you are exposed to other sick people, plus cigarette smoke and marijuana smoke. I eventually quit going to soup kitchens and just worked at finding other ways to keep myself fed because my health issues are my number one problem making my life not work, so anything that makes it harder for me to take care of my health is a very serious problem.

I think we should lower the barrier to food stamps in the US. It's a good program that allows you to access food from normal middle class venues which are actually clean etc. I think we should do all we can to cut the bureaucratic costs and as much as humanly possible say "If you want food stamps, here you go" without asking people to prove they need them.

But I don't expect anything like that will ever happen. Talk of UBI appears to be code for "And now rich people can say Shut up. You are getting a check, you ingrate." rather than a genuine attempt to give meaningful relief to poor Americans.

Cutting a check is an easy answer to a hard problem, so likely won't solve anything.

I've listed my blogs elsewhere in another comment if you genuinely want to know more about what I think about homelessness, housing issues and community development.

I concede that distributing the checks may be difficult to those without stable mailing addresses. Then it may help to for example allow distribution in cash at the local post office.

The pandemic stimulus checks appear to have had a tremendous impact in reducing poverty, see https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-government-program-cu..., at least based on the studies there. I don’t know what the path is for this becoming regular policy, but the proposed child tax credit is projected to greatly decrease child poverty (although it has its own problems, it’s tough to get people to understand it exists and how to use it).

It amounts to the latest version of putting homeless people on a bus and shipping them elsewhere so they stop being a local problem.

If rent is lower, it is probably because services are less available. If you need those services, such as specialized health care, telling you "Here's a check. Move someplace where it covers rent." is essentially a big fat fuck you.

We have torn down more than a million SROs and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build new Missing Middle Housing in mixed use, walkable neighborhoods. So you not only need to cover a high rent, you also need to have a car which is another huge expense and another big fat fuck you if you simply can't drive for some reason (as is true for me -- I am handicapped and no longer drive).

If we pass UBI, I believe it will only get harder to convince people to build SROs and Missing Middle Housing and walkable neighborhoods. That would be an important part of actually solving things.

We also need universal healthcare coverage in the US. Medical expenses are another huge hardship in the US.

If it were possible to find cheap housing, live without a car and get medical care without it being a hardship, that would make it possible to live on very little and then most people could make their lives work even if they only worked part-time. Currently, if you can't work full-time at a well paid job with benefits, you can't make your life work and we aren't creating enough jobs of that sort. We are increasingly moving to gig work which would be fine if you didn't need a job with good benefits to get medical care and if you could find a cheap place where living without a car really worked and you mostly can't arrange that in the US.

Throwing money at the problem doesn't fix those systemic issues and likely just makes people in power feel like they did something and don't have to feel guilty while they shirk on dealing with resolving the hard problems because actually fixing anything is hard work and painful and no one wants to actually do that if they can find an easy out like "I cut you check. Stop bothering me."

I simply meant 1) it seems like a good solution for replacing food stamps, and it seems like you dropped this point entirely. I also think 2) it can be helpful in a wider sense. It is certainly easier to give people basic income checks than to rearchitect the entirety of American society away from cars, employer-based healthcare, and suburbia. While I agree with you that we perhaps should be on this more effective path, such a radical reorganization would take decades and massive political will that just isn’t there yet. Not even the New Deal, Great Society, or Eisenhower highway programs reached anything near this scope. UBI is something that has already had a test shot, and the data shows it has had a huge effect in reducing poverty during the pandemic. Unless I’m missing something big, it seems like a good way to start.

I'm all for doing more for families with dependent children. You didn't ask me about that. You asked me why I think UBI doesn't work. I answered that.

My reply is not argumentative at all. It's just a reply to a question I was asked. That's all it is.

EDIT: And of course I also don’t want to burden you with endless questioning. If you have written about this I would be happy to read links. You just have a lot of websites and a lot of content so it is difficult for me to find your writing on this particular topic.

Historically, when you inject money into a system without increasing availability of goods and services, the result is inflation. If you start giving people UBI as a regular thing, the value of those checks will promptly go down due to inflation.

All welfare programs have a long history of failing to keep up with inflation. Even food stamps tend to last only about three weeks out of the month. I see no reason to believe UBI would somehow magically escape this pattern.

Making college loans readily available didn't fix things. It didn't mean that everyone had equal access to a college degree and now ordinary people could readily pursue the career of their dreams. Instead, it resulted in tuition skyrocketing and students having trouble getting a professional job with which to pay off their student loans, so people are waiting tables, putting off marriage, putting off homeownership, putting of having kids, putting off their lives to try to pay their loans.

I see no reason to think UBI would somehow go differently. I read that they tried something somewhere and the result was the landlords just raised rent and it didn't provide real relief for poor people. It just enriched the landlords.

Two-thirds of lottery winners are bankrupt within five years and they are at dramatically increased risk of being murdered, among myriad other terrible fates. The money doesn't solve their problems. They trade poor people problems for rich people problems and they don't have rich people coping skills. It often has very ugly results.

If, instead, you give people access to food and medical care and you make smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods where it's possible to live cheaply, then people can manage their problems and make their choices and find a path forward. People aren't likely to eat ten times what they need just because you are willing to pay for it. People aren't likely to get ten times as many x-rays and surgeries as they need just because you won't bill them for it.

Covering basic needs and guaranteeing you can eat and see a doctor is fundamentally different from cutting a check and telling people to spend it any way they want. It's an important form of social safety net that helps when things go wrong and isn't as readily abusable as cash is whether through innocent mistake, ignorance or even willful irresponsibility.

If you go nuts and spend like crazy and can still eat, well you might survive long enough to learn better. If you piss away all your UBI and then people say "Nope. No food stamps. We ended that program to fund UBI. Go starve." you've got a serious problem and so does society.

I only asked the question because I wanted your input from your experience. Most of the people who didn’t want to leave were in various stages of addiction and alcoholism. Addiction is something I know about from my life. Not a fan of UBI. I worked endless hours in the Restaurant industry until I was 27 and got into IT and software development. Not trying to compare to your situation.

Food stamps and health care assistance should absolutely be raised. I have family who struggle with both costs.

Thank you for your blogs and your time.

Best.

You are early, a good writer - and were able to convey the feeling of frustration and helplessness whilst maintaining your dignity.

Could you perchance share the links to your blogposts on here?

I'm sure there are many on here who would like to help in some way if they can.

The sidebar links out to other things by me:

Write Pay, Pocket Puter, The Genevieve Files, What Helps The Homeless, San Diego Homeless Survival Guide, r/GigWorks

I also run r/CitizenPlanners and I'm the author or Eclogiselle.com and Project: SRO and The Butterfly Economy

http://www.eclogiselle.com/

http://projectsro.blogspot.com

http://butterflyeconomy.blogspot.com/

Things don't get updated as frequently as I would like in part because I don't have traction, so I don't get the kind of feedback I need to help me figure out what to talk about and because I don't get enough from tips and Patreon to focus on these projects instead of on trying to come up with enough money to survive, but I have done a lot of writing over the years.

That list is not comprehensive. It's just stuff that has more than a few posts and most of that stuff is still being actively developed, just slowly.

If you are, say, addicted to drugs, and your options are 'Live in sober housing' and 'Live in a tent', is it that surprising that #2 is more appealing?

And before someone suggest 'They should just stop using drugs'. I'd also like to point out that we don't have a miracle cure for addiction, and that there are millions of upper and upper-middle class people with every service and support network, both professional and personal, who are unable to deal with their drug problems. What chance does someone sleeping rough, with nobody in their lives who gives two shits about them, have?

I have no trouble believing that.

Same thing with the software industry really.

Source control has been mainstream since the 90's, build pipeline, automation and so on. But there are still shops around where they'll look at you funny for suggesting using git, that swear copy-pasting executables in a GUI is an ok way to upgrade and where the versions of languages used are at least old enough to have a legal drink. Not a lot, but they still exist. You won't find any overlap with what's going on in SV over there.

Sorry, I really cannot avoid going on a tangent because of this.

We seem to talk quite differently about informal housing if it's in the US or west vs. in a poorer country. We have non-profits push for sanitation in "slums" to improve health outcomes. Yet nobody is pushing for bathroom access or garbage removal in "homeless camps". I recently read about a homeless camp in a park in Oregon where the inhabitants cut down trees for materials and fire wood. When does it become a slum and we start treating it like we'd expect poorer countries to treat their slums?

We have 350m people, 0.5m homeless and lack the political will to build more housing. They are expected to stay out of sight or the municipality will destroy their shelter and often trash their belongings.

Humanity is more cost effective, but doesn't allow us to moralize https://scoop.me/housing-first-finland-homelessness/

/rant

That's what a majority of urban poor in India live on - public/unclaimed land (i.e. informal housing). They're not counted as homeless as a result, unlike in LA.

That's how LA can appear to have a comparatively larger homeless population, even if it's a lot smaller in reality.

In India this type of housing is illegal and can be destroyed by the government, but that rarely happens because the situation can be leveraged for votes (there's a lot of poor people).

Yay democracy.

Here are a few facts: some of these slums are 100+ yrs old. A lot of them have "permanent" homes, something lot harder to uproot than tents. And lastly, if the government attempted to destroy them, it won't be just poor people, almost entire society will be outraged. Something similar happened here in Dhaka.

There's a massive difference hidden in that statement alone. Here the politicians just assume those people aren't voting.

This is not justifying one or the other. But if one always start with humanity as one's subject of discussion, than there probably is no meaningful progress to be made at all.

Homelessness is not just about finding/funding a home. You need food and transportation for a job. If the solution were as simple as throwing money at the homeless, California would have long ago solved their homelessness issue.

Neither of those guys seemed mentally ill, but if my own country is anything to go by, a lot of these people have serious mental issues to deal with, and sitting them in a flat isn't gonna solve the underlying issues.

One of my best friends is a social worker for re-integration of homeless people, and getting them a flat is actually the very first step. A particularly illuminating example he told me about is that he often has problems with landlords, because the people he is trying to house do not shit in the toilet, but will do so in the hallway or somewhere else on the property.

There's a lot of work necessary from social workers, psychologists and doctors to help people who were homeless for a longer preiod of time, and it has to be a longterm commitment.

Most homeless I have known whom are homeless just want a piece of land, with a outhouse, and maybe some fire pits so they can cook.

They want a piece of land where cops don't ticket, or get harassed.

Homelessness is just going to get worse. It's time to open up available federal, state, and local land, to free camping.

I've given up on housing. It's too expensive, and comes with too many rules.

Most of these guys just want to pitch a tent, and live the rest of their short lives out with a bit of false dignity.

And the drug use?

I once heard a homeless guy say, if you had to crawl into Scothbroom, after a day of being harassed by cops, and looking for food; you might want a stiff drink too. Let's not forget about the amount of self-medicating going on either.

(I know it's easy to throw your hands up, and lump all of them together. They are all very different. There are some professional beggars out there too. I've noticed a lot of foreigners working sympathy beg. Foreigners with jobs. Every American homeless person I know would never think about begging if they had a roof over their heads.)

[1] https://nlchp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Homeless_Stats_...

In some sense, you are correct. We've torn down about a million SROs and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build Missing Middle Housing in mixed use, walkable neighborhoods.

This is a primary root cause of lack of affordable housing in the US. You need a car to get anywhere from the suburbs and it drives up the baseline cost of housing.

There are myriad other issues with our housing policies, but no it not just enough to build more housing, though studies show simply building more helps. It's also about building the right kind and we aren't doing that which is helping fuel various trends, such as living in RVs, the Tiny House movement and other alternatives people are pursuing in the face of cities simply not creating the kind of housing they need.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

https://missingmiddlehousing.com/

It actually is. From: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/06/08/1003982733/squ...

> By the 1980s, homelessness emerged as a chronic issue. There were many factors, including the federal government deciding to slash the budget for affordable housing. By then the California state government had significantly cut taxes and gutted social programs, including for state-funded mental institutions, resulting in thousands of people with mental illnesses and other difficulties struggling to make it on their own.

> Yet the core reason for the crisis boils down to supply and demand for housing. As regions like the San Francisco Bay Area became magnets for highly paid professionals in the computer-driven economy, they failed to build enough new units to keep up with demand.

> A 2016 study by McKinsey Global Institute estimated that California needs 3.5 million new housing units by 2025 to deal with its chronic housing shortage. Yet new housing construction has only slowed since then, despite Gov. Gavin Newsom's campaign promise to lead an effort to produce those 3.5 million units. Even before the pandemic wrought havoc on the construction business, California was constructing only about 100,000 new homes per year, way below the minimum 180,000 per year that analysts say the state desperately needs.

He is leading an effort. Whether he's spending enough of his own political capital is another question. But one of the problems in California is that the state constitution guarantees municipalities "home rule". That means very little can be accomplished without local cooperation, including local zoning board cooperation. It's like federalism at the state level--the central government can ban practices relatively easily, but it can't force positive action, only coerce through tax revenue incentives, which has its own constitutional restrictions, not to mention political barriers.

California is a NIMBY paradise, legally speaking.

100%

However the state has and can overrule cities. First ADUs were legalized and next, if SB9 passes, duplexes. It's baby steps, but it's possible and probably the only way forward.

Now you have this toxic brew of people with mental issues, drug addicts, people with family issues, and economic issues all feeding into each other.

Housing is then only a start. Also, any city that gives homeless more services than other areas just attracts more homeless.

It is monstrously expensive. Look at what SF is spending and watch what happens when the COVID-19 funds and state IPO windfall run dry.

Both the left and the right are at fault. Some of these people need to be institutionalized. Cities need to be cleaned up. Housing should be provided. Shipping homeless to other cities is not cool.

No city is probably willing to pay what it truly costs. It is probably roughly how much we pay for the criminal justice system.

https://nicic.gov/assign-library-item-package-accordion/stat...

$146K per person for the criminal justice system and then multiply it by 2 or 3 for social services, mental health services, drug treatment, etc…

Roughly 250 billion a year. You need to make the underlying institutions more efficient but institutional capture has already occurred. In other words, in a few years it is more likely to be 500 billion a year and the problem would be just as bad.

Of course if you wanted to turn around the criminal justice system as well, then you immediately jump into the trillions.

It's not about which one is the greater humanitarian problem, it's about the hypocrisy.

Though also, much of that recognition comes from the fact that people in a “homeless camp” don’t tend to think of their living arrangement as permanent or the space they occupy as theirs by right; whereas the people living in a slum, do.

If you live in a camp and you’re offered public housing, you’ll usually take it, because the camp wasn’t where you wanted to be.

If you’re living in a slum, you might hold out for city to just improve the slum, because your dwelling in the slum is your home, for better or for worse.

This is where things like the “container house” movement come into play: that demand is mostly driven by people who think of a slum as their permanent home, who want options for improving their dwelling in that slum into something they can be proud of.

I don't think that YOU realize that it is okay to relate to common feelings without being the most of that thing. The guy from Toronto doesn't have to be the most poor person in the most poor area in order to understand their feelings and talk about his.

You're gatekeeping being poor. What a weird thing to be elitist about.

You are trying to lump two things together into a category that are not even remotely comparable.

Both the poor person in Toronto and the poor person in Delhi are in relative poverty, and have the lived experiences of relative poverty in common.

And also, the lived experiences of relative poverty are usually what someone means when they talk about "being poor." If you live in Dubai and make $50k/yr, but that doesn't even get you a crappy apartment two hours away from work, so you have to sleep in your car; and all your money is going to paying for groceries in a city that has to import all its food, and for car insurance that costs more than your car, so you don't have any savings — then you're poor, by most people's definition!

But of course, only the homeless person in Delhi experiences absolute poverty. They have two problems: relative poverty, and absolute poverty.

But the homeless person in Delhi will still commisserate with the homeless person in Toronto over the lived experiences and troubles that come from relative poverty — a problem they both share — even if the homeless person in Toronto doesn't know anything about what living with absolute poverty is like. They both still get their meagre possessions stolen if they stop watching them for a few minutes. They both sleep rough and have to actively think about how to not die when there's a heat wave or a cold spell. They both probably have a fungal infection somewhere on their bodies from their clothes being damp all the dang time. Etc.

Perhaps, but it's worth pointing out that these experiences are qualitatively different.

In India, being poor (especially if you're a certain caste) is tantamount to being non-human. You can be jailed, raped, mistreated, killed without consequence. Even the middle class is afforded little human dignity, the underclass have no real hope. The homeless in Toronto can still get some government services without bribery.

On top of that, there's the whole matter of caste which won't go away even if you win the lottery.

Someone else here is saying that dating poor in Switzerland is the same as in Delhi...that comes across as unbelievably tone deaf. Perhaps they missed the part in TFA where this couple has to date far away from the home. You can get beaten up or killed for being seen with the "wrong person" (in this case same gotra), and it does happen - quite often.

So it's not as simple as absolute and relative poverty in my opinion (though that is a good thought and is definitely part of it).

Risking another bad analogy, I would perhaps compare it to being the lowest class of worker in a Walmart versus being at the bottom of the org chart in Netflix. You can both commiserate on how bad your managers are, but your lived experiences are not remotely the same.

Being in poverty but of a high caste in India, is pretty-standard "absolute poverty."

Meanwhile, being well-off but of a low caste in India, is more like being a recently-freed black slave in the ante-bellum southern US.

That experience is really nothing like absolute or relative poverty. It's its own kind of horrible. (It's an orthogonal poverty, one could say.)

It does lead to a vicious cycle that connects it to absolute/relative poverty, though, since having no societal respectability means people aren't willing to offer you any opportunities to better your situation, because they think badly of you and expect you to squander them.

But I would say it is nevertheless best to think of a low-caste homeless person in Delhi as having three distinct problems: relative poverty, absolute poverty, and poverty of societal-respectability.

I would note that, while a regular homeless person in Toronto might not know anything about the sheer inhumanity of being of a low caste in India, a drug-addicted homeless person working as a prostitute to feed their addiction would actually understand it somewhat. In both cases, for example, if someone in these groups gets murdered or otherwise wronged, the police don't even bother to investigate — so they have no access to justice. The low-caste homeless in Delhi and the crack-addicted streetwalker in Toronto would see the same looks on people's faces, and understand them to mean the same thing.

And if this were to be the complete picture, why can't it express the sheer inhumanity of being of a low caste in India?

Take the case of a "drug-addicted homeless person working as a prostitute to feed their addiction" in Toronto - this person arrived here by their own choices (some amount of agency), but you can be born into that situation (with the awareness that your children will follow the same path) in India. [0]

You can't worry about societal respectability when you have no basic human dignity. Perhaps that is a fourth kind of poverty.

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/11/28/the-indian-cas...

It is this kind of robust but respectful exchange of viewpoints, that keeps me coming back to HN (and unfortunately, spending hours on the site!)

And that's all the person you were replying to was saying. You can have things in common to talk about, and also have things that are so different you can't even comprehend them.

Killed or raped, probably not.

The policeman on the scene summoned the watchman of the gated community and physically assaulted him (drawing blood), accusing him of having been negligent.

You can bet there was not a single consequence of this. The watchman was one of the underclass, and this is just what's expected.

I can't claim to know why things are like this, but there's rarely any justice for anyone in India, unless you're one of the elite or ultrarich. The judicial system is in shambles and the poor are just not afforded much humanity.

What do you think these people could do? Here is an example of what happens when the people try to change things in a "democracy" [0].

As a bonus, here are some choice videos of Indian politics (the second one is relevant to the story in footnote):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAOUmnSs5VA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5s4quyO2W0

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020–2021_Indian_farmers'_prot...

In my home country, they stormed the parliament and burned parts of it because the wrong party gained power (by fraudulent votes). If they were killing low class people, there would be riots, bombings and murders all around.

I live in Bangladesh, now, and I don't think we're much improvement over India (except the caste problem). I once witnessed the aftermath of a policeman beaten by public because he assaulted a shopkeeper. So while people doesn't have much legal recourse, they aren't exactly powerless either.

Similarly rich & powerful evade justice, but I wouldn't go as far as saying "there's rarely any justice for anyone". The state may fail to provide justice, but people find their ways, and that sort of keeps the worst impulses of the powerful in check.

Why wouldn't they be comparable? They can be compared easily. You're comparing them right now.

I'm not from Delhi nor by any relevant measure poor, so perhaps I'm not allowed an opinion, but having just read the article, and not yet the Toronto comment, I find this thread surprising, and think an anecdote about being in a similar - similarly among the poorest in the city - situation in a different (richer, poorer, no matter) city would gel perfectly with the article.

I did. Now that you have that information, perhaps you can actually read what I wrote.

> will reduce the comments I see on the internet that try and compare Delhi/Mumbai squalor to LA

You want to reduce comments comparing your city's poorness to another city's poorness.

> It's not really enough...you should experience it for yourself

You're saying I can't talk about poor areas I know about because they're not as poor as your city. That's gatekeeping being poor, plain as day. But more than that, it totally shuts down all conversation about why your city might be so poor. What is happening in your advanced poor city that isn't happening in other cities?

Not exactly. My bad, perhaps I should've provided an example of the kind of comment I'm talking about. I can't be arsed to go find that comment right now but it's about this video:

https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/video-of-man-eating-animal-...

The comment I'm talking about begins with (iirc) "The same thing is happening in LA..."

I don't know what chip you have on your shoulder about this "gatekeeping" but I wish you luck and hope that these things aren't happening in your cities, but of course you have the freedom to say that they are regardless.

I want to add something: I'm just against saying that these things are the same. I'm not saying anything about better or worse or that poverty isn't poverty. Given a choice I might rather be the average homeless person in India as opposed to LA, because at least I wouldn't be as likely to be there due to crippling addictions or mental illness.

That's why I compared it to languages, I don't think one established language is objectively better or worse than another, but direct translations rarely work well.

Anyone can get a minimum wage job and earn a relatively high living in the US. In the third world, you can work your ass off, be incredibly successful, and still live in squalor.

In many parts of the world that mobile phone will require substantial budgeting over several months to afford.

It's probably worth noting that "easily" probably doesn't belong in there for a lot of people.

This is a really good read, if you're interested https://residentcontrarian.substack.com/p/on-the-experience-...

> But nearly half of the city’s population lives in slums without basic services and facilities like drinking water, garbage disposal or a proper drainage system.

I actually have no idea what you're talking about, because I didn't mention any amount of money at all.

You are making a comparison between two sums of money (the amount middle class people spend in an afternoon, and the amount poor people make in a month).

Obviously I misinterpreted who the middle class people were, but I doubt I'm the only one. I thought you meant middle class Westerners.

https://yourstory.com/2018/03/exactly-indias-middle-class-an...

The well-off friends had never tried their aircon because it "was not that hot" (35 degrees C) and rummaged around to find the remote. It was so hot, I couldn't imagine that they just accepted it.

Sounds like her housekeeper should get better customers.

My comment was actually not about your comment specifically, but about making these comparisons without the appropriate cultural context taken into account. I'm not passing a moral judgement or saying it's inappropriate, I'm just expressing a desire to have these comparisons be more meaningful by explicitly acknowledging the context.

I have an issue with making a direct comparison as in "X phenomena is the same as Y phenomena", because it glosses over a LOT when you compare countries like India and America.

I don't see how this cannot be easily understood with a number. Sure, you can never predict one observation, but the average in some quantile is quite standard modelling.

Are you calculating this quantile with respect to their neighbors' revenue? The rest of the city? County? State? Country? Or the entire world? You will get a different answer for each of them.

This depends on how you want to look at the issue, but it comes down to a number yes.

the "problem" here is the average. sure, a middle class income can afford to spend $100 in an afternoon once in a while. but unless you limit your discretionary spending to only these afternoons, you'll spend money on other things too. hobbies, travel, etc. if after all that you still can afford $100 every afternoon (even if only on weekends that's already $800 a month), you got to earn enough that you simply never worry about money.

Well what are they then?

You can't seriously claim that having just $100 a day of disposable income makes you part of the upper class?

money for discretionary spending is not the same as disposable income.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/disposableincome.asp defines disposable income as net income, that means after taxes but before living expenses.

https://www.investopedia.com/insights/americas-slowly-disapp... defines middle class in the US as a disposable income from 35k to 106k a year.

if you spend all your discretionary money on going out with your friends and not on any other hobbies, traveling, gifts, etc, then maybe you can spend $100 every weekend afternoon.

middle class and middle income are often mixed up. upper class and upper income less so.

old text:

well if the definition of middle class ends at 106k income per year then anything above that must be upper class. the problem here is that obviously upper class has a very wide range which skews the perception of what makes upper class.

of course definitions are just that. the reality is not so clear cut.

apparently, middle income and middle class are often used interchangeably even though they don't mean quite the same thing, while arguable upper income and upper class are much more different.

And most such employees still will save most of their income rather than wastefully splurge it on $100 meals.

That's why I ask people to cite sources often, or listen to their personal stories, so I can learn more.

> [...] Reminds me of learning a new language, where beginners try to formulate thoughts in their native tongue and produce a direct translation, whereas those who are fluent can skip that step completely.

Immigrant brown man living in Toronto here. I don't have any dating life. Because dating a brown man is stigmatized, thanks to racism and media representation. My upper-middle class white therapist couldn't believe that I am at the bottom tier in the dating market.

So it's not just some language or cultural barrier. People have hard times understanding the predicaments of people from lower socio-economic strata even when they live in the same city and speak same language.

What did your therapist think was the real issue?

Canada should provide its youth an opportunity to visit a third-world community. Every G7 nation should be giving their citizens that experience. It would make a big difference to how our future plays out.

The slums in USA are exactly the opposite. The slum dwellers are scary to even look at. They don't work and they are anti social. They disturb the society.

The slums are happening in USA, despite plenty of jobs, government programs and NGOs trying to help them.

I am not one country is better than the other. simply pointing out the differences.

Article such as this are written to make Americans feel good about themselves at the cost of others, while providing absolutely no solution or help to those suffering.

so, either you should help or just shutup.

> Marrying within the “gotra” is one of the primary reasons for recurring “honour killing” of lovers in India

I hope not, because it is such a weird upper-caste nit-pick.

> they talk about their lives and walk around the park, or eat aloo-chaat or golgappas at a roadside stall

That is such a still frame of the middle class life in Delhi from the 90s. My partner's been dragging me to Green park and AIIMS to revisit places which has stayed running for 25 years.

The 2012 Nirbhaya case had a chilling effect on this for young couples, which is why the trend moved away from being outside and into malls with security cameras.

I wasn’t familiar with it but remembered after reading the below link. Warning, it’s horrific.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Delhi_gang_rape_and_mur...

But to be fair, it's not just the news media that's afflicted by this disease, bollywood is no better.

Honor killing is a real occurrence but not over gotra-incest.

Only some Hindus (often castiest / religious fundamentalists) believe that a sexual relationship within the same gotra is incest. And it is that mindset that leads to honour killing in the name of gotra. And they do happen. But you are right that they often aren't the major catalyst for honour killing, even if many demand a ban on same-gotra marriage:

    Will such so-called “honour killings” stop if the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 is amended to prohibit marriages within the same gotra? Unlikely. That may be the most publicised of the demands and threats issued by the Khap Mahapanchayat — a congregation of caste Panchayats from Jat strongholds in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan — in Kurukshetra on April 13, and subsequently elsewhere. But it was not the only one. They have also reportedly called for a ban on marriages within the same village and contiguous villages, as well as de-recognition of temple weddings uniting runaway couples.

This has even been challenged in court and marriage within the same gotra has been ruled legal in India even before independence:

    Same-gotra marriages were declared legally valid by the Bombay High Court as far back as in 1945 in the Madhavrao vs. Raghavendrarao case involving a Deshastha Brahmin couple. Two reputed judges — Harilal Kania (who became the first Chief Justice of independent India) and P.B. Gajendragadkar (who went on to become the Chief Justice of India in the 1960s) — examined several court verdicts, consulted the writings of leading experts and quoted from Hindu scriptures in their ruling on whether a 'sagotra' (same-gotra) marriage was valid under Hindu law/custom. They concluded that it was.

The consumerist culture doesn't help my confidence with women either. That Bruno Mars song "That's What I like" is literally just 3.5 minutes of him explaining how he seduces women by buying them lots of very expensive things. I couldn't even compete with a walmart middle manager at that game.

This weekend I’m going to change that, for the first time since covid started we’ll go for a hike in a park.

I'm a developer and make in mid-six figures, and whenever i see a $125 bill including tips, i start to feel like "oh, this is pricey".

Rich people buffets in the city cost $20 for 2. The most expensive buffets on New years Ev, in the city cost like 80$ for 2.

Strikingly, transportation is cheap. No need to own a car/get expensive Uber rides. And street food is plenty and delicious. Simple dating is much easier for everyone in the spectrum.

Societal issues on the other hand are still not up to the other modern 50% of the country.

> far too many people around for you to stick out of the crowd (you just need to be a few train/bus stops away from familiar locations).

Except that everyone seems to be extremely nosy, are part of extended clans, so it feels incredibly suffocating. You feel like you're always being watched, even if that seems silly (it happens often enough to cause concern but not 100% of the time).

In liberal/Western countries, dating is so much easier. You can meet with anyone over coffee/drinks, hang out anywhere, make out in public, whatever.

I'm sure many indians do the same and instead of going to super duper restaurant, they adjust based on their income level and do something else instead.

But I do remember that disjunction; it's normal, expected, to spend what amounts to a week or a month of my income on a night out. Being gay, the pressure to hide, to go for a date some place far away from home, somewhere you can hopefully blend in, or somewhere private, and where you won't attraction the attention of jeers, usually just jeers but sometimes you worry you'll have to run. Even the bit about McDonald's being too expensive. It is. It's a luxury, though most of us, myself included, tend not to think of it as such. Until you have $80 in your account and a whole week ahead and he wants to get a burger for dinner. $25 is a lot of money suddenly. It's an interesting experience when your friends decide to go out for dinner and your concern with where to go is which location has a menu option with a decent ratio for calories per $ and if the water is free.

I too found poetry to be worth far more than it cost. Trees can be a gift. As can parks. And settings. Many intangible things can be gifts. And it is an art to be learned and practiced, just like the art of selecting and giving physical gifts. And of physical gifts, I discovered long ago that it truly is the thought that counts. Oh, yes, someone will love something that is of monetary value or expensive. But I have received many gifts worth some real money, but the ones where the gift was the thought are the ones I tend to still have. A card when I wasn't expecting one. I still have the thoroughly wrecked chew-toy for my dog gotten by one particular friend who is now gone.

Maybe as a result of our smaller class gap, there is one thing that doesn't ring so true to me. "The girls also don’t have that many expectations." Not here. The boys had big expectations. It's easier to jump over the class gap if you're young and attractive, at least for a while, and pursue the material in exchange for the material, so to speak. I did it too; who doesn't want to go away for the weekend; go out for drinks and not count out the coins?

McDonalds is a luxury for most people, even in Toronto. It's just cheaper than most other restaurants, and people don't/can't care about how it impacts their finances. Looking at the amount of food/$ is something most people do, even in Toronto. You aren't special for thinking that.

IMO without meaningful context comparison between west & India is pointless.

You are just making it more complicated. When you talk about X, that X applies to majority of the population.

When someone says India is poor country because majority of the people are poor saying India has millions of rich people is not a valid argument.

And life goes on, and little change is made. Many nations are so unfortunate to live in a poor society, with not so many chances of getting better.

So different from my experience in the US

Expensive dinners for first dates are actually pretty tacky and many women will consider it a red flag/try hard.

You can click, talk, walk, dance, and kiss for free... anywhere and everywhere.

Besides, dinner and coffee interview dates are too formal and boring.. zzz.

I don't agree with this. Most people aren't comfortable opening up right away on their first interaction with someone they don't know very well. A lot of people also suffer from anxiety issues which can make it difficult for them to open up right away. Coffee/Drinks help to alleviate that somewhat as they're stimulants/social lubricants. Dinner? not so much, it just makes you full and sleepy.

Also, you don't really need money to be happy. I used to have no money at all when I was young and still had great time with girls.