Tootfinder

Learning Multidimensional Urban Poverty Representation with Satellite Imagery
Sungwon Park, Sumin Lee, Jihee Kim, Jae-Gil Lee, Meeyoung Cha, Jeasurk Yang, Donghyun Ahn
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04958 …

Learning Multidimensional Urban Poverty Representation with Satellite Imagery
Recent advances in deep learning have enabled the inference of urban socioeconomic characteristics from satellite imagery. However, models relying solely on urbanization traits often show weak correlations with poverty indicators, as unplanned urban growth can obscure economic disparities and spatial inequalities. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel representation learning framework that captures multidimensional deprivation-related traits from very high-resolution satellite imager…

"SNAP benefits reduced the depth and severity of poverty experienced by recipient households, especially among children, who experience higher poverty rates than the population at large."
But the gop would rather have kids in poverty.
https://www.

"""
Traditional politics of assistance and the repression of unemployment were now called into question. The need for reform became urgent.
Poverty was gradually separated from the old moral confusions. Economic crises had shown that unemployment could not be confused with indolence, as indigence and enforced idleness spread throughout the countryside, to precisely the places that had previously been considered home to the purest and most immediate forms of moral life. This demonstrated that poverty did not solely fall under the order of the fault: ‘Begging is the fruit of poverty, which in turn is the consequence of accidents in the production of the earth or in the output of factories, of a rise in the price of basic foodstuffs, or of growth of the population, etc.’ Indigence became a matter of economics.
But it was not contingent, nor was it destined to be suppressed forever. There would always be a certain quantity of poverty that could never be effaced, a sort of fatal indigence that would accompany all forms of society until the end of time, even in places where all the idle were employed: ‘The only paupers in a well governed state must be those born in indigence, or those who fall into it by accident.’ This backdrop of poverty was somehow inalienable: whether by birth or accident, it formed an inevitable part of society. The state of lack was so firmly entrenched in the destiny of man and the structure of society that for a long time the idea of a state without paupers remained inconceivable: in the thought of philosophers, property, work and indigence were terms linked right up until the nineteenth century.
This portion of poverty was necessary because it could not be suppressed; but it was equally necessary in that it made wealth possible. Because they worked but consumed little, a class of people in need allowed a nation to become rich, to release the value of its fields, colonies and mines, making products that could be sold throughout the world. An impoverished people, in short, was a people that had no poor. Indigence became an indispensable element in the state. It hid the secret but most real life of society. The poor were the seat and the glory of nations. And their noble misery, for which there was no cure, was to be exalted:
«My intention is solely to invite the authorities to turn part of their vigilant attention to considering the portion of the People who suffer … the assistance that we owe them is linked to the honour and prosperity of the Empire, of which the Poor are the firmest bulwark, for no sovereign can maintain and extend his domain without favouring the population, and cultivating the Land, Commerce and the Arts; and the Poor are the necessary agents for the great powers that reveal the true force of a People.»
What we see here is a moral rehabilitation of the figure of the Pauper, bringing about the fundamental economic and social reintegration of his person. Paupers had no place in a mercantilist economy, as they were neither producers nor consumers, and they were idle, vagabond or unemployed, deserving nothing better than confinement, a measure that extracted and exiled them from society. But with the arrival of the industrial economy and its thirst for manpower, paupers were once again a part of the body of the nation.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Criminalizing poverty is cruel and inhumane 😡
1. OPD should never ever cite or arrest someone just for being homeless
2. Before evicting someone from their shelter of last resort, the city should provide an option of a safe place to go, and enough time to move there with their belongings
http…

Oakland could arrest people for being homeless under councilmember’s proposal 
An Oakland councilmember has proposed new encampment rules that would fundamentally alter how the city interacts with people living on the street.

Could? This has been happening for a long, long time. It's not a new phenomenon!
@… - Older Australian women could retire in poverty, new report says http…

Looming crisis for older Australian women who will retire into poverty if no urgent action taken, new report finds
Women’s super balances are disproportionately impacted by events later in life, in addition to childcare duties, which could mean serious financial problems, research from Super Members Council (SMC) has found. 

"""
[…] Paradoxically, the more a population grew, the more precious it became, as it offered a supply of cheap labour, and by lowering costs allowed a greater expansion of production and trade. In this infinitely open labour market, the ‘fundamental price’, which for Turgot meant a subsistence level for workers, and the price determined by supply and demand ended up as the same thing. A country was all the more commercially competitive for having at its disposal the virtual wealth that a large population represented.
Confinement was therefore a clumsy error, and an economic one at that: there was no sense in trying to suppress poverty by taking it out of the economic circuit and providing for a poor population by charitable means. To do that was merely to hide poverty, and suppress an important section of the population, which was always a given wealth. Rather than helping the poor escape their provisionally indigent situation, charity condemned them to it, and dangerously so, by putting a brake on the labour market in a period of crisis. What was required was to palliate the high cost of products with cheaper labour, and to make up for their scarcity by a new industrial and agricultural effort. The only reasonable remedy was to reinsert the population in the circuit of production, being sure to place labour in areas where manpower was most scarce. The use of paupers, vagabonds, exiles and émigrés of any description was one of the secrets of wealth in the competition between nations. […]
Confinement was to be criticised because of the effects it had on the labour market, but also because like all other traditional forms of charity, it constituted a dangerous form of finance. As had been the case in the Middle Ages, the classical era had constantly attempted to look after the needs of the poor by a system of foundations. This implied that a section of the land capital and revenues were out of circulation. In a definitive manner too, as the concern was to avoid the commercialisation of assistance to the poor, so judicial measures had been taken to ensure that this wealth never went back into circulation. But as time passed, their usefulness diminished: the economic situation changed, and so did the nature of poverty.
«Society does not always have the same needs. The nature and distribution of property, the divisions between the different orders of the people, opinions, customs, the occupations of the majority of the population, the climate itself, diseases and all the other accidents of human life are in constant change. New needs come into being, and old ones disappear.» [Turgot, Encyclopédie]
The definitive character of a foundation was in contradiction with the variable and changing nature of the accidental needs to which it was designed to respond. The wealth that it immobilised was never put back into circulation, but more wealth was to be created as new needs appeared. The result was that the proportion of funds and revenues removed from circulation constantly increased, while that of production fell in consequence. The only possible result was increased poverty, and a need for more foundations. The process could continue indefinitely, and the fear was that one day ‘the ever increasing number of foundations might absorb all private funds and all private property’. When closely examined, classical forms of assistance were a cause of poverty, bringing a progressive immobilisation that was like the slow death of productive wealth:
«If all the men who have ever lived had been given a tomb, sooner or later some of those sterile monuments would have been dug up in order to find land to cultivate, and it would have become necessary to stir the ashes of the dead in order to feed the living.» [Turgot, Lettre Š Trudaine sur le Limousin]
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

"Kerala to become first Indian state to eliminate extreme poverty this weekend"
#Kerala has for many years had Communist-led, Left Front governments. Even when I was there in 1980 the lower level of extreme poverty, compared to neighbouring states, was noticeable.

"Poverty ... is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man – it is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour, and without labour there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth" — Patrick Colquhoun, quoted by @…

Criminalizing poverty is cruel and inhumane 😡
1. OPD should never ever cite or arrest someone just for being homeless
2. Before evicting someone from their shelter of last resort, the city should provide an option of a safe place to go, and enough time to move there with their belongings
http…

"Voters are disgusted by what they’re seeing from the right;
-- a political movement so detached from basic humanity that they think hunger, poverty, and suffering are punchlines,"
Michael Cohen wrote.
https://www.rawstory.com/michael-cohen-2674257947/

'Voters are disgusted': Ex-Trump lawyer claims GOP 'imploding' from 'reflexive' cruelty
One of President Donald Trump's former attorneys claimed on Sunday that the GOP appears to be "imploding" ahead of the midterm election because voters are getting sick of the party's "reflexive" cruelty.Michael Cohen, the former attorney for the Trump Organization, wrote in a new Substack essay that...

It's also easy to imagine that Trump is sending his military to Portland. People forget that the military is actually really big and pretty complex.
Most people join the military because they want to get out of poverty. Some people join because they believe in it. A lot of people are just too young to have any kind of politics, but some of them do develop politics in the military... and some of those folks become anarchists.
There are Nazis in the military. It's a big problem. But there are also anarchists who signed up before they developed a critique of the state, and now they're kind of stuck for a few years until they can get out.
It's also worth recognizing that a lot of people join after they graduate. Basic training is like 22 weeks. So, assuming a random selection, there really aren't a lot of folks who would be deploying to PDX who would have joined under Trump. That's just assuming a random selection, and there may be other things at play that I'm not aware of, but the majority of the types of folks who would get deployed now would have joined under Biden.
The troops who will deploy (if they do deploy) may very much not want to be there. These are also not monsters wanting to kill (like Trump wishes them to be). They're kids from nearby towns. That's not awesome, most of Oregon has absolute shit politics. But joining the National Guard doesn't necessarily mean that a person has any politics at all. All of this is worth remembering.

It's absolute insanity that the recruiting arm of the US army is just the violence of poverty.

Louisiana’s child poverty rate increase leads US: study • Louisiana Illuminator
https://lailluminator.com/briefs/louisianas-child-poverty-rate-increase-leads-us-study/

#Capitralism #Activism #Socialism #AntiCapitalism

Oppose criminalizing poverty!
1. Email your CM now:
https://www.oaklandca.gov/Government/City-Council-Leadership/Council-Members
2. Add an eComment:

Multidimensional Poverty Mapping for Small Areas
Soumojit Das, Dilshanie Deepawansa, Partha Lahiri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08898 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Multidimensional Poverty Mapping for Small Areas
Many countries measure poverty based only on income or consumption. However, there is a growing awareness of measuring poverty through multiple dimensions that captures a more reasonable status of poverty. Estimating poverty measure(s) for small geographical areas, commonly referred to as poverty mapping, is challenging due to small or no sample for the small areas. While there is a huge literature available on unidimensional poverty mapping, only a limited effort has been made to address speci…

With all the books unpacked, I finally got to read through Kirsty Mackay's "The Magic Money Tree" about the ongoing cost-of-living crisis and poverty in the UK, and loved the prints that came with it.
As always, she does a great job in combining documentary photography, scrapbooking and relevant texts (e.g. from parliamentary debates). Well worth your time if you can get your hands on it!
#documentaryphotography

“Poverty unserious team” “Trade for Micah parsons”: NFL fans react as Cowboys get shut down on Maxx Crosby and Trey Hendrickson trade calls https://www.sportskeeda.com/nfl/news-poverty-unseriou…

Köyhyyden poistaminen on halvempaa kuin sen ylläpitäminen.
it's cheaper to end poverty than to maintain it. The Social Dividend. An Actuarial Case for Higher Income Support https://mandalapartners.com/uploads/the-social-dividend.pdf

Rowena Brown, Carroll Fife, Charlene Wang, and Ken Houston will be voting at the Public Safety Committee on Wednesday, September 10th at 11am
Just two yes votes will advance these policies criminalizing poverty to the full council on September 15th at 9:30am
h…

Poverty and Perceptions of Electoral Integrity in the U.S
Douglas Cumming, Sofia Johan, Ikenna Uzuegbunam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15343 https://arxiv.or…

Poverty and Perceptions of Electoral Integrity in the U.S
We propose two opposing forces that impact the relation between electoral integrity and poverty. On the one hand, it is more costly to provide electoral integrity in states where there is more poverty due to transaction costs and opportunity costs. On the other hand, extreme levels of poverty attract media scrutiny and greater external monitoring of electoral integrity, giving rise to more demand for electoral integrity. Taken together, we expect electoral integrity to be a U-shaped function of…

I donated to Develop Africa to support students in Sierra Leone.
https://www.developafrica.org/about-develop-africa
"we provide education, child sponsorship, leadership development, workforce empowerment, and more to poverty-stricken African communities. We aid in br…

‘Historic’: How Mexico’s Welfare Policies Helped 13.4 Million People out of Poverty | Portside
https://portside.org/2025-08-20/historic-how-mexicos-welfare-policies-helped-134-million-people-out-poverty

I read the Bill Gates memo and it makes sense to me?! Am I missing something here? Or is the problem that the outrage machine of the far right and anti-climate-change lobby is misconstruing what he is calling for?
He's clearly saying that getting emissions down is still a priority that's already on track! In contrast global health and poverty are issues that appear to be slowing down or on hold and need more focused attention *now*. Therefore we need a shift in funding!

Inflation Erased U.S. Income Gains Last Year (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/census-income-insurance-poverty-2024-31d82ad0
http://www.memeorandum.com/250909/p167#a250909p167

Tyreik Taylor had barely wiped the oil from his hands when the sky behind him lit up.
Fifteen minutes after the 26-year-old drove home, a roar thundered from the plant where he helped mix chemicals for motor oil and had just punched out.
Fire consumed the air, the collapsing metal groaning and liquids hissing as they escaped into the surrounding water, soil, and air.

Black Louisiana Community Coated in Toxic Fallout After Explosion at Oil Plant
“We need help over here and we’re not getting it,” said a resident of the city where 90 percent of kids live in poverty.

TIL Baltimore has been drastically decreasing homicides for the past several years through non-police interventions focused on conflict mediation and treating "root causes of gun violence, such as poverty, mental health, and housing issues"
https://popular.info/p/the-secret-to-b

The secret to Baltimore's extraordinary year
This April, Baltimore saw five homicides.

"Poverty exists, not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich."
- Unknown or Martin M. McLaughlin with the Overseas Development Council. In June of 1980.

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/624
#ExistentialComics

From Drone Imagery to Livability Mapping: AI-powered Environment Perception in Rural China
Weihuan Deng, Yaofu Huang, Luan Chen, Xun Li, Yao Yao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21738

From Drone Imagery to Livability Mapping: AI-powered Environment Perception in Rural China
With the deepening of poverty alleviation and rural revitalization strategies, improving the rural living environment and enhancing the quality of life have become key priorities. Rural livability is a key indicator for measuring the effectiveness of these efforts. Current measurement approaches face significant limitations, as questionnaire-based methods are difficult to scale, while urban-oriented visual perception methods are poorly suited for rural contexts. In this paper, a rural-specific …

yes, that was me on the corner of jackson & stadium holding up my POWER to the PEOPLE sign, flashing peace signs to enthusiastic supporters in passing cars, filled with hope and inspiration from the crowd and the noise
power to the homeless, to the refugees, to the victims of racism and poverty, of oppression and injustice, power to the people right now

Rock on, New Mexico! If we can't unfuck our healthcare system for everyone, at least unfuck it for children.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/09/new-mexico-free-universal-childcare

India, Poverty, and Western Eyes
https://ift.tt/fq5SjBe
updated: Wednesday, August 20, 2025 - 12:36pmfull name / name of organization: American Comparative…
via Input 4 RELCFP https://

Blairism appeared as a "Third Way". Despite some advances on things like early years provision & child poverty, was soon revealed as militaristic Thatcherism lite.
Starmerism appeared as a pragmatic Corbynism, but soon, with hardly any redeeming factors, revealed itself as little better than social fascism 'lite', hand in glove with corporate, planet-wrecking, exploiting and extracting class interests.
History repeated itself, first as farce, then as traged…

I donated to Give Directly https://www.givedirectly.org/
"GiveDirectly is a nonprofit that lets donors like you send money directly to the world's poorest households. In doing so, we aim to accelerate the end of extreme poverty globally."
Give Directly believes is data and facts over wi…

GiveDirectly: Send money to people living in poverty
GiveDirectly allows donors to send money directly to people in poverty with no strings attached. Our approach is guided by rigorous evidence of impact and our values of efficiency, transparency, and respect.

Trends in New Mexico School Districts Serving Low-Income Communities
Uloma E. Nelson, Onyedikachi J. Okeke
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09993 https://arxiv.o…

Trends in New Mexico School Districts Serving Low-Income Communities
This study examines recent enrollment trends and their socioeconomic drivers within New Mexico's public school districts, with a specific focus on those serving low-income communities. Utilizing a mixed-methods geospatial framework, the research integrates longitudinal enrollment data, district poverty metrics from the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE), and neighborhood context from the American Community Survey (ACS) from 2019 to 2023. The analysis reveals that while statewide K-…

It's Word Press Accessibility Day!
A free online conference with global scope and participation.
I just saw a great session on accessibility and the "global south" which refers to a lot of places in rural USA as much as it does to South America and African countries.
Technological disparities including bandwidth, computer power, stable electric supply, and poverty-limited access to technology and software are still huge problems that affect business and societ…

Schedule - WordPress Accessibility Day 2025
See the great talks we have planned for this year!

I donated again to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Due to the dire threats to the USA from the current administration and the Republican party I am double up on my donations to protect us from those threats to our way of life.
https://www.splcenter.org/
We still have so much racism injustice for the …

SPLC | Apathy Is Not An Option
The Southern Poverty Law Center is dedicated to creating a world where Black and Brown communities are represented and respected by our democracy.

“The Maha report is essentially a distraction from the real causes of poor health,”
said Elizabeth Jacobs, professor emerita at the University of Arizona and a founding member of Defend Public Health.
“This administration does not want to address things like poverty and education and access to healthcare.
Instead, they’re distracting the public with information on solutions to problems that don’t actually exist.
When the foundation of your policy is not evidence-based…

India, Poverty, and Western Eyes
https://ift.tt/U8MleSp
updated: Wednesday, August 20, 2025 - 12:36pmfull name / name of organization: American Comparative…
via Input 4 RELCFP https://

From Pixels to Urban Policy-Intelligence: Recovering Legacy Effects of Redlining with a Multimodal LLM
Anthony Howell, Nancy Wu, Sharmistha Bagchi, Yushim Kim, Chayn Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15132

From Pixels to Urban Policy-Intelligence: Recovering Legacy Effects of Redlining with a Multimodal LLM
This paper shows how a multimodal large language model (MLLM) can expand urban measurement capacity and support tracking of place-based policy interventions. Using a structured, reason-then-estimate pipeline on street-view imagery, GPT-4o infers neighborhood poverty and tree canopy, which we embed in a quasi-experimental design evaluating the legacy of 1930s redlining. GPT-4o recovers the expected adverse socio-environmental legacy effects of redlining, with estimates statistically indistinguis…

India, Poverty, and Western Eyes
https://ift.tt/nLKNrsg
updated: Wednesday, August 20, 2025 - 10:04amfull name / name of organization: American Comparative…
via Input 4 RELCFP https://

Rethinking Cost-Sharing Policies: Enhancing Chronic Disease Management for Disadvantaged Populations
Jia Dan, Xu Pai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09223 https://

Rethinking Cost-Sharing Policies: Enhancing Chronic Disease Management for Disadvantaged Populations
The increasing prevalence of chronic diseases poses a significant challenge to global efforts to alleviate poverty, promote health equity, and control healthcare costs. This study adopts a structural approach to explore how patients manage chronic diseases by making trade-offs between inpatient care and ambulatory care outpatient services. Specifically, it investigates whether disadvantaged populations make distinct trade-offs compared to the general population and examines the impact of anti-p…

India, Poverty, and Western Eyes
https://ift.tt/nLKNrsg
updated: Wednesday, August 20, 2025 - 10:04amfull name / name of organization: American Comparative…
via Input 4 RELCFP https://

India, Poverty, and Western Eyes
https://ift.tt/kgbG02H
updated: Wednesday, August 20, 2025 - 12:36pmfull name / name of organization: American Comparative…
via Input 4 RELCFP https://