
What’s it like to live on less than $2 a day? - Reedx
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Life-on-less-than-2-dollars-a-day
======
dluan
I did this in college for a week as part of a $2 dollar a day challenge for a
student microfinance club. I knew well enough that it was near impossible to
do it accurately in the U.S. where costs are inflated for basic things, and I
also was discounting things like my tiny rent and what not, but I wanted to
just go through it once as an exercise.

I had $14 and I used most of it to stock up on dry beans. I think I ended up
with around one and half meals a day, basically of nothing but beans and rice.
I didn't last the full week.

~~~
mettamage
Could you guys share some strategies? The parent talks about beans. I wonder
what Eyght did.

~~~
proverbialbunny
The holy grail of cheap food is Italian. You can buy a large bag of noodles
for pennies sometimes, and making sauce is cheap, but even pre made canned
sauce is cheap enough to fit the $2 a day challenge. (If not $1 a day
depending on where you shop.)

If you're desperate or just old fashioned, peanut butter goes a long way.
Cheap day old sandwich bread or bagels found at a bakery, and cheese, like
cheddar cheese slices, make $1 a day feasible. Bananas can sometimes be pretty
cheap too.

Likewise, it's super cheap to bake food at home. This is how people ate during
the great depression. They'd make pancakes, waffles, and other sorts of items.
I don't know what the price of Bisquick is because I just make this kind of
thing from scratch when I'm in the mood, but it's mostly the price of milk.
Some items take an egg, but eggs tend to be optional when it comes to
breakfast cooking, especially if you're making Swedish pancakes (so good!) or
crepes or similar.

Then there is the standard:

\- Rice

\- Corn chips and beans

\- Vegetables are cheap, and quite good steamed or as a stir fry.

\- Potatoes. They can be had for cheap, are quite filling, and left over
potatoes from dinner can be used for breakfast. eg, mashed potato biscuits.

\- Chicken can be quite cheap, but you'd be using very little. You can make a
soy chicken, veggy, rice dish on the cheap, for example.

\- And as odd as it sounds, there are a lot of stack foods and dessert foods
you can get in super markets that are filling compared to their cost. Eg,
pretzels or Doritos. A larger bag is around $2 and can be broken up into
multiple meals. Or, eg, at Trader Joe's they have a box of pralines for $2
that can fill one up for a day. These foods can add variety to the cheaper
foods (like rice) by eating a bit a day.

And, possibly the most surprising bit, if you're living it up, at $3 a day:
Trader Joe's has frozen pizzas for $2.95 that are not only quite good, one
pizza fills me up for an entire day. They have tv dinners for $2 or $2.95 too,
but most of the time I'll eat multiple meals a day, so this kind of premade
food comes closer to $4 to $6 a day without necessarily trying to be cheap.
Trader Joe's has good cheap food.

Ultimately, if you want to take on a challenge like this, be prepared to buy
everything in bulk, and be prepared stop eating meat, or eating very little
meat.

edit: Oatmeal and Cream of Wheat. A meal is ~20 cents and it will fill you up.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
_Ultimately, if you want to take on a challenge like this, be prepared to buy
everything in bulk, and be prepared stop eating meat, or eating very little._

Agree on the meat, however: Most folks that are poor simply cannot buy in
bulk. If you are lucky you get paid once a month, but getting paid once a
month also limits how often you can eat fresh vegetables. Canned might be your
only option. If you don't get paid once a month, it doesn't matter if it is
cheaper to buy 12 rolls of toilet paper if you can only afford the 4-pack. Or
you might be able to afford bulk at tax time, but as soon as an emergency
comes up, you can no longer buy bulk.

Not only this, but things like transportation and storage become an issue. You
may or may not have cold storage, freezer space, or containers to store
leftover/bulk food in. You may or may not have a vehicle of any sort to carry
the stuff in. Even if you have transportation, you might not have the money to
use it (or public transportation, if that is a thing where you live).

I'll mention that the unfortunate bit of $2 per day doesn't actually include
only groceries, but other necessities as well. I don't know what the amount is
in the states, but wherever it is, it doesn't leave a lot of room for anything
but the most basic food. No spices. No chips since you can buy beans (or
lentils!) and rice that last for multiple days cheaper than you can buy the
bag of chips.

~~~
proverbialbunny
Most of the foods I mentioned above you can't buy in small quantity. Eg, you
can't buy a single slice of bread.

Bulk here meaning usually 1 weeks worth of food. Small enough the average
person buys in that quantity, including people who are paycheck to paycheck.

>'ll mention that the unfortunate bit of $2 per day doesn't actually include
only groceries, but other necessities as well. I don't know what the amount is
in the states, but wherever it is, it doesn't leave a lot of room for anything
but the most basic food. No spices. No chips since you can buy beans (or
lentils!) and rice that last for multiple days cheaper than you can buy the
bag of chips.

The $2 a day food challenge is just food, nothing else. It's a challenge, not
a hypothetical for someone who is homeless. Food stamps give quite a bit more
than $2 a day.

------
coldtea
This is made to appear like an insight of the lives of those living on less
than $2/day, but if you look closely, the videos have them talk about micro-
loans they get and such, as a covert ad for [1].

Which is OK, I guess, but it's never explicitly mentioned, and the way 5 out
of 6 people in the videos talk about those loans is entirely non-organic.
Those are not some random people making < $2 day, but people selected because
they participated in those loans...

[1] [https://www.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/global-growth-
and...](https://www.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/global-growth-and-
opportunity/financial-services-for-the-poor)

~~~
thatfrenchguy
Of course they are, those shark foundations and companies are really pushing
micro-loans as both life changing and charity, when it’s been a long time
since we’ve known it has really bad effects and is the new cool way to prey on
the poor.

They would helicopter money at people if they really wanted to help them.

~~~
joe_the_user
The parent more or less correct, if speaking a bit loosely. Microfinance has
been a disaster pushed by indeed horrible loan sharks, though the Gates
Foundation isn't by itself such a thing.

"Hundreds Of Suicides In India Linked To Microfinance Organizations":
[https://www.businessinsider.com/hundreds-of-suicides-in-
indi...](https://www.businessinsider.com/hundreds-of-suicides-in-india-linked-
to-microfinance-organizations-2012-2)

Counter point from the Guardian on the whole Gates approach (also linked on
another thread here): "Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be
more wrong"
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-
gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal)

~~~
tim333
The Guardian article is iffy, discussed here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19026201](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19026201)

~~~
joe_the_user
I disagree. In your linked comment, ColdTea's comment is insightful.

Edit: I linked to this article because it makes an informed critique of Gates
but the ultimate point is that all that is being measured by removing "extreme
poverty" is a movement from subsistence (living outside the money economy) to
existence within it. This isn't accomplished by charity and trends for those
within the money economy have not been towards increasing wages.

A move out of subsistence could be good, bad or indifferent, depending on
particular conditions and who interprets the situation. But the big thing is
it's particular (and pretty much inevitable) change, not a general "trend to
the good" and ultimately the question is where those in the money economy get
good and rising wages, something Gates seems to pay zero attention to.

------
luisdfp
>"We asked ourselves why the world had to be like this and what we could do to
help. Our search for answers altered the course of our lives and led us to
start our foundation."

It's a shame but it seems to me like Bill came up with the wrong answer due to
a bad diagnosis of the problem.

If you really want to help these people, your best bet would be to highlight
how rampant corruption affects these countries and how their rulers should be
held accountable for it.

Foreign aid, by itself, will never be enough to solve this problem as long as
there are tyrannical and corrupt regimes.

~~~
PeterisP
Realistically, the only thing that results in a "how their rulers should be
held accountable for it" is a violent change of regime. There universally are
large groups of local people who'd like their corrupt rulers to be
accountable, so you theoretically _could_ support that process by buying and
delivering large quantities of weapons to the opposition of the regime so that
they can (try to) overthrow it and bring justice to the ruling clique. Or,
alternatively, orchestrate an external invasion either by neighboring
countries or USA.

However, is _this_ really what Bill Gates should be trying to implement in
other countries?

~~~
mklarmann
I am impressed how respectfully you make this point. I would advocate strongly
against imperialistic views to solve these problems.

------
H8crilA
It's important to remember that the world has been unbelievably successful at
getting people out of extreme poverty (inflation-adjusted $1.9 per day). We
went from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 0.65 billion in 2018. Ways to go, but it is a
truly amazing achievement of humanity. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the
past 30 years.

[https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-
poverty](https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty)

~~~
peteretep
I think this number is marginally misleading, because a huge amount of that is
China:

> According to the World Bank, more than 850 million people have lifted
> themselves out of extreme poverty as China's poverty rate fell from 88
> percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015

China was not historically poor, and this is a reversion to the mean once
minimal free trade was allowed.

~~~
jngreenlee
It's still a true story...nothing diminishes the significance of this.

~~~
peteretep
The achievement is ... Mao died?

~~~
H8crilA
And probably Deng Xiaoping's re-architecture of China.

Still, what caused the advance does not diminish the success of humanity.
Progress is progress.

~~~
hutzlibu
"Progress is progress. "

It is? Don't you think, there can also be progress in the wrong direction?

------
badrabbit
Something to keep in mind: while exteme poverty is worse than what a 1st world
person could probably imagine,you have to also think about all the nuiances
and costly omplications of first world living that go away in a poor 3rd world
country.

Mandatory health,rent,home owner, car (liability) insurances don't exist.
Housing codes are not that good or not enforced well which means cheap housing
(think huts for example) with no running water,plumbing,extensive electrical
wiring,toilet and more is a lot cheaper than in a developed nation. People
don't use microwaves,dish washers,laundry machines and similar convenient
appliances. Bills are mostly limited to electricity and cellphone. Income tax
is pretty much non-existent for people in extreme poverty. If you survive all
the way to adulthood in extreme poverty you probably havr a well fortified
immune system.

Things also cost what people are willing to pay for them. At least the bare
neccesities will always be affordable to the majority,which means if there is
extensive poverty in a certain area then food,used clothing,etc... Are
affordable (albeit not of good quality).

My point is, a "day in the life" is probably a lot different than you might
think. It's not so much that they struggle to pay rent,good healthcare or
afford food (typical american poverty) but more like if they get sick for
simple curable diseases they just die. Because they make so little,they can't
afford to let the kids go to school at all after a certain age (the kids help)
or even if they can they can't do homework or study with bad housing or
lacking electricity and other tech. In many cases,kids walk really far to get
to school (think 5+ miles). Nutrition is of course horrible.

The type of poverty you would experience in the US is different. You have food
pantrys and emergency medical treatment is always available or at least you
can get to a hospital within a few hours. Public libraries and relatively
great public schools make raising a child a bit easier. In the US
though,housing means a lot of complicated requirements,things cost a lot
more,you feel a lot worse with what you lack which means the mental trauma is
very high which in turn drives many to turn to easily accessible vices and
crime trapping the person in a spiral of misery. Poverty is horrible wherever
it happens and very tragically it persists in the west wearing a different
mask.

Growing up in extreme povery and experiencing it after living in a 3rd world
country are not comparable. When you grow up in a certain environment you
accept certain realities(e.g.: I can't afford a 3rd meal and toilet paper vs I
have to live in my car with my child because I got evicted ).

~~~
Ayesh
I would upvote this +100 if I could!

What you said about growing up in poverty and experiencing it later are super
different things. I grew up in Sri Lanka and while I have not lived in one, we
have small villages in tea estates where 50-100 families have created small
village, all of whom work in the same estate. Even today, they make about $3 a
day, and they have totally different economics to compare with the outside
world. Food exchange is quite common (someone grows one type of vegetables,
and the other, a different type), and costs like transportation and utilities
are not that extreme because they already have a store, a small school, and
even a public water well for drinking, shower, toilets, etc. I am totally
agreeing with your last paragraph saying there are different types of poverty.

------
inamberclad
I'm kinda put off by the production of these videos. It feels like some artsy
vlog or artisan type video, but instead it's highres slowmo shots of someone's
sheet metal hut and the sunlight coming through smoke and dirt while they slog
through another day with nearly nothing to show for it.

I feel like the videographers missed the point by trying to make it pretty.

~~~
tobr
Maybe not surprising when you go to the world’s 2nd richest person, a person
whose net worth keeps increasing by billions per year, to learn what it’s like
to live on nothing.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
What percentage of his time and net worth has Bill Gates given to those in
poverty over the years?

~~~
tobr
You should also ask what percentage of _their_ net worth he has _taken_? He is
getting richer every day.

~~~
pinkfoot
I am pretty sure Gates has taken next to none of Zimbabwe's wealth.

Compared to say how much ZANU-PF has taken.

------
aspaceman
There are so many folks in the comments who seem to be focused on a particular
narrative. There's a lot of comments saying "It's so much better than it used
to be!"

While true, this feels to me like a deflection. It seems to come up any time
inequality is mentioned here. It feels like an excuse.

"yes things may be hard for someone making $2 a day, but they're better now so
it's all ok."

I find it to be a distraction. I don't care if things are better than ancient
times. I think they can improve significantly more, and I'm frustrated by such
short-sighted viewpoints distracting from the point of the article.

~~~
smallgovt
>> I don't care if things are better than ancient times.

The world population living in poverty has decreased from >1.7 billion to 700
million over the past 25 years. So, it's not a comparison to ancient times.
We've made considerable progress in just the past couple decades.

There's still a lot of work to be done, and we should celebrate the progress
made at the same time.

~~~
aspaceman
Why does a decrease in world poverty matter in a thread about living on $2 a
day?

I really don’t care about your stats, make your own post if you wanna talk
about them. My point is that folks like you redirect the topic because you’re
uncomfortable with reality.

I don’t think we’re anywhere close to “celebrating”

~~~
dalbasal
...because it's a thread about people living on $2 per day. Would you say the
trend is irrelevant if it was negative and things were getting worse? How is
talking about poverty trends irrelevant deflection?

I totally disagree with the sentiment that being change oriented means
avoiding positive news.

------
11235813213455
I lived with $0 a day during 2 years (I lived in France, in a small student
room, for about €140/month)

It's sustainable and compatible with a 'normal' life, I found food from:

\- student university restaurants, I asked the permission to collect in the
bread 'trash', most bread was in perfect state. I heard this food was used for
chicken farms

\- end of markets, I was even helping merchants in exchange of their damaged
but perfectly good legumes and fruits. I was coming back with a lot of food.
It's important to eat the most damaged first of course

\- some supermarket bins, where I could find some salad plastic bags, eggs.
There was other kind of food, meat, biscuits, dishes, but I wasn't interested
by those processed foods

If I had $2 per day, I'd buy a huge rice bag periodically, eggs, and damaged
legumes every week at the end of markets

~~~
jgtrosh
I seem to remember there was a polemic about supermarkets locking their bins
from scavengers. Did you have any problem at the time? Was it before or after
there was a change of law?

Just a few more questions out of curiosity from a fellow french student:

How much time a day were you expending in exchange for free food? Did you also
use extreme frugality for other commodities?

What motivated you to to take up this lifestyle? Do you think it would have
been possible to “have family responsibilities” in your situation?

What alternatives seemed available at the time?

~~~
11235813213455
it was about 8 years ago, some supermarkets used bleach, but I never
encountered it, I just went at one place, every now and then, sneaking in
other friendly students and people doing the same

Going at resto-u, it'd take 30mn/1h (I was using a bike), end of markets the
Sunday morning, between 11h and 14h, so about 2-3h. Extreme frugality yes, I
literally paid for nothing else than accommodation

Motivation: I was quite alone, and I suddenly wanted to stop eating all the
junk food I was eating since years (american sandwich, mcdo, pizzas, kebabs,
biscuits, chocolate bars, saucy recipes, I started being disgusted by oily or
buttery things), and at the same time I saw the opportunity to consume all the
wasted food around me, saving money was also a challenge. Obviously it's not
compatible with raising a young child :p

A better alternative would have been to spend a bit of money for food, because
I probably had some deficiencies. Nowadays I'm still frugal, spend around
400-450€/month for food for myself, on the same kind of diet with some good
extra like honey, and still choose damaged fruits and legumes at the
supermarket, as a reflex, and to try to lower their wastage

------
sireat
I have a friend who lives on less than 20 pounds a week in London (while
paying 1500 pounds a month on rent).

How does he do it?

    
    
      *  By using perishable sales at Tesco and other places.
    
      *  By bartering for food
    

I saw him pick up a bag of ripe but fine peaches for 10 pence and a 3-4pounds
of chicken wings for 99 pence. Loaves of bread were 10-20 pence.

This is not easy to do by any means because the competition is fierce. The
scenes are reminiscent of Black Friday insanity in US.

Shows the economic realities of living in London.

Personally, I would rather try to pay less on rent and more for food but that
is not always an option.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
We're out of the woods now it seems [no longer destitute] but the 8pm scrum at
Tesco was always a bit fraught.

It seems like the supermarkets don't have as many deals as much now, I suspect
they donate more to food banks (they can probably write it off at a higher
value than they could sell it?).

Tesco in particular no longer have a "cheap" section, it remains on the
shelves. I'd guess that's so that people will mistakenly buy expiring goods
(netting them a higher sale price, and earlier repeat sale).

All elements of the squeeze on the poor and the widening poverty gap.

------
mappu
This surprised me -

 _> He supports his wife and three children with his income of about 1500
Rwandan francs per day (about USD $1.73)_

My understanding is that raising a child in most developed western countries
is just mind-bogglingly expensive. The purchasing power here has to be wildly
skewed from the actual FRw/USD forex rate.

What does 1500 FRw look like in USD (or EUR or AUD or, ...), not going by the
official forex rate, but normalized for the cost of raising three children?
Like the Big Mac Index but a childcare index.

------
AdrianB1
This is completely misleading, close to lying.

I lived with less than $2 a day. The average salary in the country was less
than $100 and this was in Eastern Europe, not in Africa. What changes the
story completely is that the exchange rate makes all the difference in my
case: we all had a fairly regular life, but the exchange rate was showing a
very dark picture. Yes, we were not able to buy American cars in dollars, but
a local built Renault copy was a few thousands dollars new. All the prices
were extremely low in dollars, but meaningful in local currency. We had not
just the basics (food, electricity, house), but an almost normal life.

25 years later, the average salary is more than 10 times more, in US dollars
only. An iPhone is now 10 times cheaper, but the price structure is more or
less the same and nothing changed, just the exchange rate. The food is 10
times more expensive in dollars, rent is 10 times more, the few things that
are more expensive today in local currency are the ones that are heavily
taxed, like gas and tobacco.

~~~
lunchbar123
Since i live here, I can tell you people living on this salary in Africa are
not living a 'regular' life. They live in shacks and they eat a malnourished
diet, they sometimes tap electricity illegally (and dangerously), they do not
have money for clothing or any sort of improvement. On top of that they have
to deal with things like heightened crime in their areas or the fact that a
bit of bad weather can destroy their houses.

~~~
AdrianB1
Completely agree with you, I did not say anything different. I just said the
currency conversion can make a huge difference. With $2 a day you starve to
death in USA, a burger costs more than that.

~~~
lunchbar123
gotcha

------
neom
I've mentioned this book here before, but I can't stress enough how good it
is.

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America:

[https://www.amazon.com/2-00-Day-Living-Nothing-
America/dp/05...](https://www.amazon.com/2-00-Day-Living-Nothing-
America/dp/054481195X)

~~~
joe_the_user
"..households surviving on virtually no cash income..."

This is talking about people living on less than $2/day _cash income_. Which
is still quite different from trying to get all needs with $2 cash each day,
something that is more or less impossible in the US today. Those without cash
live on hand-outs, soup kitchens and government assistance.

Certainly, US poverty has gotten worse over the last twenty years and is a
serious problem, of course. But it seems like the focus on $2/day in
particular fails to see poverty in any holistic sense.

Counter point from the Guardian on the whole Gates approach: "Bill Gates says
poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong"

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-
gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal)

~~~
neom
It a collection of stories that help build empathy.......

------
jokoon
> More than one billion people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty,
> driven by improvements in health, agriculture, and education.

I don't understand, is the increasing inequality and income concentration a
mirage, a lie, or propaganda?

It would be nice to introduce the concept of relative and absolute wealth. If
you increase the size of the cake, the poor will get more crumbs, and you did
reduce poverty, but it's not really a fair improvement.

I wish Bill Gates would have to guts to do politics. He seems smart but to me
it's never enough.

~~~
atlasunshrugged
I think that's their plan, see this article about their push into lobbying

[https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-melinda-gates-
lob...](https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-melinda-gates-lobbying-
group-2019-6?IR=T)

------
rolph
it can get even worse. i wonder how many people here have had to live on
however many empty beer cans you can collect and cash in in a day.

~~~
watersb
I haven't had to go that far, but for about six months I had a food budget of
less than $2 per day.

If I had needed to pay for housing, health care, everything on $2 I am not
sure how I would do so.

~~~
hanniabu
What did your meals consist of?

~~~
rolph
wild fruits and small game, garden vegetables from purchased and scavenged
seeds, high fat items bought with change.

------
anm89
What a trite concept. The entire world isn't denominated in dollars. I'm
currently in Colombia where I could eat 3 great meals out at a restaurant for
maybe $6(and really a whole lot cheaper than that if my goal was to make due
with less)

Poverty isn't defined by how much american currency you'd get at exchange for
your cost of living.

------
jelliclesfarm
I find the size of the families interesting. You can only stretch the $2 so
much when you have a wife and 3 children to support even if poverty..as a
notion..differs globally.

Poverty is directly correlated to large family size. This is true all over the
world.

------
geraltofrivia
Many people have stopped living on less than $2 a day in the past decades,
according to the article. But does this take inflation into account? Surely
the value of $2 has also dropped in these decades?

~~~
dchest
It does. From the linked World Bank article: "The Bank uses an updated
international poverty line of US $1.90 a day, which incorporates new
information on differences in the cost of living across countries (the PPP
exchange rates). The new line preserves the real purchasing power of the
previous line (of $1.25 a day in 2005 prices) in the world’s poorest
countries."

------
cjlars
Also see the documentary "Living on One Dollar," where a group of US students
try living at the international poverty line for some months in Guatemala.

------
JordanFarmer
Interesting that Bill points out in particular the poverty and hardships of
the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Interesting because it once had 3000
medical facilities and over 300 hospitals. Something like 80% literacy rate
and 60%+ school aged kids attending school. The largest middle class in all of
Africa, slavery was illegal (though that doesn't mean it didn't happen). This
was of course when it was a Belgium colony. There were 80,000 Belgians living
there. There was a massive infrastructure of trains and roads. Many diseases
that kill tens of thousands now had been nearly eradicated through
vaccinations.

Quite a far cry of how life is there now... Belgium was going to transition
away and give the Congo it's independence, but the Congolese people had no
patience for that and began getting violent. This led to a premature departure
with a weak and new Congolese government. What followed was civil war and
complete destruction of all infrastructure and means of living free of
poverty... A sad story for sure. You can't blame the Congolese people for
wanting their independence and certainly the Belgian people didn't treat them
as equals (segregation wasn't the law, but it was a common social practice). I
sure wish things could have worked out better. Though the Congolese people
didn't have autonomy, quality of life was far better.

Be careful what you wish for:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Congo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Congo)

------
swayvil
Believe it or not, you can grow food, hunt squirrels and build a nice lean-to
for zero dollars a day. People forget that.

~~~
13of40
My mother, for the last 30 years or so, has been a log cabin, raise goats,
make Thanksgiving dinner over a propane fire kind of minimalist. Even so, she
told me about this old guy who lived down the road who claimed to live on
something like 8 USD per month. According to him, his secret was that he
absolutely eschewed _all_ vices.

~~~
michaelmrose
Where are you legitimately allowed to live outside?

~~~
13of40
Actually you're allowed to live outside in most of the public land in the
Western US. There are some rules about having to change watersheds every so
often, IIRC, but throwing up a tent and staying in one spot for a few weeks is
completely legitimate.

------
c-smile
The irony: that site does not work in Microsoft Edge browser...

------
ninguem2
How can a country that has people living in such abject poverty justifies
sending a probe to the Moon?

~~~
bildung
I think this is a legimite question! Personally I don't have a clear answer.
Two arguments _for_ a space program country with lots of poverty (like India
or the USA):

* Establishing a high tech industry with programs like this potentially leads to increasing tax revenue for the country, thereby making funds available for fighting poverty.

* It could be used as a point of identification for the population in the country, helping to see oneself as a citizen in a nation, not just a member of a tribe, enlarging the "us" in "us vs. them". This can lead to more empathy towards the poor (as they are now part of "us"), which can pave the way for political changes leading to less poverty. To enable changes in a democratic country, you don't just need the funds, you have to have a political plan that resonates with a big part of the population.

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pbhjpbhj
If there are reasonable answers doesn't that prove it _is_ a legitimate
question?

