really.

i get more than i need for food.

but, i get half of what i need for shelter.

so, i use the money they give me for food and apply it to shelter....

i'm not concerned about the price of food; food is not too high, it's fine.

i'm concerned about the price of housing. that's where all the money goes.

so, if you want to help poor people, stop obsessing about their diets, and offer more rent-controlled or subsidized housing.

macaroni by itself is just empty sugar, although you'll note it's cheaper to buy it as spaghetti - "kraft dinner" is overpriced, even as a no-name brand.

but, if you take the spaghetti and put vegetables and meat and dairy in it, then it's no longer empty sugar, it's actually quite healthy.

i am a paragon of perfect health, and i spend about $50/week on "groceries" - including things like toilet paper and toothpaste. that's probably around $40 on actual food. a naive extrapolation would be to $120 for three people, but you could save a little in bulk. and, a kid doesn't eat like a grown-up.

i'm the person he's talking about: i budget, i eye bargains, etc.

so, it's an under-estimate, certainly, but perhaps not by as much as some are claiming; $100 is probably not undoable.

and, what do i eat? it's on my vlog channel. daily fruit smoothies and a lot of spaghetti, with eggs every few days.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/09/21/philippe-couillard-grocery-bill_a_23535545/?utm_source=spotim&utm_medium=spotim_recirculation&spotim_referrer=recirculation

i mean, we still have catholic schools in this country.

think about that.

we haven't learned much, have we?

another thing people seem to have their head stuck up their ass about regarding residential schools is the idea that it is somehow unique to indigenous people.

as though the catholic church only abused indigenous children, right?

i'm actually of the opinion that this may have worked out rather splendidly, if we had used secular institutions, instead - that this really isn't about colonialism, per se, as much as it's about the fucking church.

indigenous groups shouldn't see themselves in opposition to french canadians or the irish, or the italians, on some kind of a racial axis. the church did exactly the same thing to all these other kids, too. rather, they should be standing in solidarity with each other, on the side of modernity, and in opposition to religion.

we will have progress when the question is redefined in this way, away from an indigenous grievance against colonialism and towards a general social grievance against religion.

but, again: when you talk to these people, you realize that will never happen, because they're deeply socially and culturally conservative people, to the core of their identity. they don't want to free themselves from the oppression of organized religion, they want to re-establish their own traditional systems of oppression.

i stand with those oppressed by religion - and that means i stand with those oppressed by traditional and indigenous religions, as well.

the system didn't work: they didn't discard their beliefs, and they didn't learn to read. they were just molested by catholic fundamentalists and largely left to languish in their own ignorance.

you don't see white people walking around carrying out witchcraft and sacrificing goats any more, do you? and, the reason is that they were romanized by a structure that beat the ignorance out of them. christianity has created it's own set of problems, but at least white people generally reason out problems using science nowadays, rather than superstition or tradition.

a properly altruistic approach towards the indigenous peoples of this country (and i am one of them.) is to help them get passed the limitations of their own culture, abandon their religion and embrace science. that is what i want for my own people: for us to abandon our ignorance and enter the modern world.

so, the problem with the question is that it is wrong: residential schools were not an effective means of teaching indigenous people how to read, civilizing them or separating them from their ignorance. in order to achieve that desired end point, we need to try something else - something less violent, less authoritarian and less religious.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/09/20/alberta-course-asked-students-about-positives-of-residential-schools_a_23534319/?ncid=other_trending_qeesnbnu0l8&utm_campaign=trending