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Vice Blog

THE TORONTO STAR IS BITING OUR SHIT

In 2004 we conducted a selfless, philanthropic social experiment that we called Bumfights to Survive. For the piece we walked around New York handing out pre-paid Hillary Duff credit cards to drifters and street urchins like it weren't no thang. We then followed the bums around as they bought boring stuff like food, clothes, and Metrocards, instead of tons of smack and booze like we had hypothesized.

Jump ahead six years later, and the Toronto Star runs a story on Saturday that was basically the exact same thing, except with regular Visa gift cards instead of hilarious Hillary Duff ones.

The other small difference is that the Star didn't follow their vagrants around. They let them wander off alone, with instructions to please bring the card back when they were done with it.

I guess they got all excited about the inherent goodness of people or whatever after they read that one story a couple weeks ago about the drunk lady who gave her credit card to a bum. So they decided to see if street people in Toronto have the same moral compass as ours do here in New York.

The results are pretty mixed. Two people returned the reporter guy's card, while three ran off. I guess the moral of this whole story is if you want to give a homeless person a credit card, you are probably too stupid to have a credit card. Also, we were giving homeless people credit cards, like, wayyy before those schmucks at the Toronto Star.