<story><title>Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless</title><url>https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/ruined-my-life-after-going-all-in-on-amazon-a-merchant-says-he-lost-everything-20201028-p5697l.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DoreenMichele</author><text>Yeah, you know, when people keep saying &amp;quot;You aren&amp;#x27;t as far from being homeless as you imagine you are&amp;quot; this is what they mean. Just because &lt;i&gt;your&lt;/i&gt; life has not come unraveled overnight doesn&amp;#x27;t mean it can&amp;#x27;t for reasons beyond your control having nothing to do with personal virtues or lack thereof.&lt;p&gt;We really need to get universal health care in the US, among other things, to limit how far people can fall when something crazy happens. We are making it far too easy to fall and far too hard to come back from it and this is why we also see headlines about how society is coming unraveled and the like.&lt;p&gt;Please don&amp;#x27;t see this as some bizarre statistical outlier. Many homeless people were solidly middle class at one time and then things came apart and we are terrible about actively making it unnecessarily harder than it should be to get back on their feet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baja_blast</author><text>This is especially true for people who do not have a family to fallback on. Imagine what would happen if a brilliant engineer in his late 20s, single, but parents have passed away and had no family. Now imagine one day he gets in an accident and all a sudden he is no longer brilliant, loses his job and all a sudden he can&amp;#x27;t pay his medical expenses.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon destroys $1.5m of sellers inventory – now homeless</title><url>https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/ruined-my-life-after-going-all-in-on-amazon-a-merchant-says-he-lost-everything-20201028-p5697l.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DoreenMichele</author><text>Yeah, you know, when people keep saying &amp;quot;You aren&amp;#x27;t as far from being homeless as you imagine you are&amp;quot; this is what they mean. Just because &lt;i&gt;your&lt;/i&gt; life has not come unraveled overnight doesn&amp;#x27;t mean it can&amp;#x27;t for reasons beyond your control having nothing to do with personal virtues or lack thereof.&lt;p&gt;We really need to get universal health care in the US, among other things, to limit how far people can fall when something crazy happens. We are making it far too easy to fall and far too hard to come back from it and this is why we also see headlines about how society is coming unraveled and the like.&lt;p&gt;Please don&amp;#x27;t see this as some bizarre statistical outlier. Many homeless people were solidly middle class at one time and then things came apart and we are terrible about actively making it unnecessarily harder than it should be to get back on their feet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>torgian</author><text>Not just health care, but income as well.&lt;p&gt;Now, I live in a third world country, and have had cancer scares and other medical checkups that only cost me a few hundred US dollars vs. the tens of thousands that _would_ have cost me if I had lived in the US.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m probably never going back, partially because of this. I make a good living. Better than I would be back in the States.</text></comment>