this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
33 points (85.1% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36152 readers
1050 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I've been looking through some US and EU labor data and I have started to wonder why don't more of the working poor join local mutual aid groups instead of staying at their likely shitty jobs or relying on charities?

This is a study on the labour distribution in the US among the working poor

On table 4 it shows that there are about 5,812,000 people that are classified as working poor ( Its says number in thousands so I multiplied the number given by 1000) and that alot of those jobs are in essential services like making food or providing support to others.

Similar diversity is show in the EU as well

So if most of these people decided to stop working at their current job and instead bring that those skills to a mutual aid network wouldn't they still get most of the resources they need because other specialists would be there to help them and also live a generally more happy life?

Also the reason why I am saying instead of charities is because charities become less effective the more people request from them because they have limited resources to share and also mainly supported by wealthy people that can unilaterally give and take away support.

Whilst mutual aid networks can take the diversity that more people joining the network gives them and use it to offer more services to other people in that community.

This seems like a no brainer so what am I missing?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Whilst mutual aid networks can take the diversity that more people joining the network gives them and use it to offer more services to other people in that community.

at least in the US, and from the experience of watching that happen, the problem is there's more people that focus on the "aid" part and forget the "mutual" part. This causes the people who were reciprocating to leave because the returns were largely unequal, leading to an over-all deterioration of the services that could be provided by the group- which in turn leads to fewer people joining in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This seems like it can be fixed by making it so that before you get aid you have to join the mutual aid network first and secondly making it public knowledge what requests each individual member has contributed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Not really. Now you’re giving unequal reciprocation to the people that run it. Nobody is going to join if they can’t get help but have to provide it first.

Especially people with more specialized skill sets.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So how do you determine if someone has contributed enough to receive something in return? What about people who cannot meet that demand, because of sickness and/or disability or other reasons?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It would be up to the individual that wants to support the request not necessarily the group. If there is someone that is known to not be able to provide something because they are sick I'd assume there would still be some people that would want to help them. Also people with disabilities aren't helpless and can still be useful to a community. So where they can't in help in one way they can help in another.

Edit: are to aren't

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I’d assume

That's the thing, your view of humanity is rather idealistic. Most people are too cynical to assume that other people will help them out of the goodness of their heart. Not to mention that there are loads of people who indeed WOULDN'T help simply because someone else needs help.

Also people with disabilities aren’t helpless and can still be useful to a community

Obviously. But "making it public knowledge what requests each individual member has contributed" will inevitably lead to scrutiny of people who don't contribute as much as others. That's where you'd need to decide whether this person (who seems to be receiving more than they're giving) actually cannot do more than they're doing or whether they're abusing the system.