The sight of a kid in public housing with an iPad...

8 months ago | 29 notes

The sight of a kid in public housing with an iPad doesn’t offend me. Actually it gives me hope. So many poor people have no access to the digital world. They fall behind in school because of it. They miss the opportunity to apply for certain jobs. Yes an iPad is an expensive gadget, but we can’t deny its usefulness. As computers go, an iPad comes cheaper than most laptops and desktops.

Photo of boy in public housing with an iPad prompts debate over what the poor should have: Jarvis DeBerry | NOLA.com (via alackof-color)

Don’t be outraged that a poor kid has a $700 ipad he can read and make music and draw and edit videos and develop all sorts of skills on, be outraged at how many poor adults (almost certainly some of whom among his neighbors) spend twice that in a year on things like cigarettes, lottery tickets and alcohol. Poverty has a systemic component, but if your parents are investing in giving you the means to satisfy your curiosity constantly, that’s money well spent. Are people who are outraged by that not satisfied unless they see footage of poor people making minimum wage by running on treadmills in a warehouse 12 hours a day to provide electricity to the cattle prod Mitt Romney uses to train his dancing horse or what?

(via raptoravatar)

Don’t be outraged that the kid has an iPad, be outraged that median wages have fallen substantially in forty years, disproportionately hitting those without much education.

(chart from the Hamilton Project, via Ezra Klein)

Good points above on the usefulness of an iPad for kids in circumstances that don’t lend themselves to economic opportunity or technological skill development. Also, a big fuck you to people who want to tell poor people what to do with the little money they have. They’re not the ones you need to criticize and legislate against.

(via jhermann)

Jesus fucking Christ. Can you imagine what kind of a piece of shit you have to be to be reading a newspaper article about poor people in New Orleans worrying about their health problems and the only thing you notice is that a boy in the picture is using an iPad? Not only do you notice it, this somehow seems wrong to you? Not only does it seem wrong to you, it seems so wrong that you feel the need to EMAIL THE NEWSPAPER to complain, hoping that, I don’t know, the photographer’s going to go down there and take the iPad away?!

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

There’s always a weird transition when the prices of previous-years’ luxury items are marked down enough for lower classes to purchase them, but what kind of an asshole views this as a bad thing?!

This isn’t the only time that it’s happened. Remember when Fox Business did a whole segment on how poor people can buy flat screen TVs now so I guess they’re no longer poor? (I tried to find the exact clip but, apparently, this has happened multiple times so here’s just the most recent one)