I live in Pittsburgh and I can tell you it's still like that - which is convenient when you want to get rid of things. I had some scrap aluminum that I put out with the trash the night before pick up and it was gone before I had walked back to the house. A guy pulled up in a Subaru Forrester and grabbed it. He asked me if he could have the wooden crate that I had also thrown out. I said sure. He asked me if I had any more scrap metal. I said not today, but I've got a 500 pound cast-iron tub that I need to get rid of soon.
Last year I bought a fixer-upper house last year on a bike trail and river in a small town outside of Pittsburgh ($40k - still possible here). I got in touch with the town secretary to discuss getting a dumpster for a while and she volunteered "I know a good scrapper". I called him and he and his son came and cleared out several hundred pounds of metal stuff that wasn't going to be part of my house renovations.
> Last year I bought a fixer-upper house last year on a bike trail and river in a small town outside of Pittsburgh ($40k - still possible here)
On a slightly related question if you don't mind answering, were you able to get homeowners insurance with flood coverage for it? What's your relative level of risk from the river? And what are you paying if you did get coverage?
But you can get general homeowners insurance sans flood coverage? Does the lack of flood coverage also not cover events like municipal sewer (reverse flow) floods?
I've periodically looked at real estate in some similar "$40k for a whole house?" rust belt towns, but only as a place where I might want to live in part time for a very quiet remote work environment. None of them look like a place where I would ever want to have to engage with the local economy to find a local job in the region.
That's basically the situation for me in Saltsburg PA. But it's just 30 mins from bigger suburbs with good employment opportunities. I'd retire there. The folks are super nice.
For now it's a "therapy project" house for me. I go and work on the house and then go biking or kayaking. It's 150 years old and one of the few brick houses from that era.
I'm not who you asked, but I moved to Pittsburgh for a job, figuring I would earn money for a few years then move to real city. That was over thirty years ago. Turns out, I love the place.
Pittsburgh has most of the benefits of a larger city without most of the problems. Its infrastructure is in many ways over-provisioned, being built for past industry and a larger population (but the maintenance burden is catching up). Its unusually hilly and berivered geography has allowed its neighborhoods to escape homogenization and retain their individual ethnic characters. And the setting, with rivers, bridges, trails, forests, is beautiful. Plus the airport recently got overhauled to meet the region’s actual needs, making it way more convenient.
Oh, if you're in to sports, Pittsburgh has some great teams and a great fan base.
Like many non-natives, I moved back because spouses parents were here. It is a very friendly city and I have like a dozen close friends and we go and explore regularly. Bike and brews is a favorite. Or run then coffee.
Is much less affordable now compared to 10 years ago. But there are still lots of fixer-uppers still.
> I went down with them, to supervise, but was quickly roped into the heavy lifting.
If you ever find yourself in a situation like this, politely bow out. As I suspect the author would advise.
It's an easy -- even likely -- way for someone to get an adversely life-changing injury.
Besides the good writing, it was easy to visualize that playing out, because I've seen it before.
Also, don't let anyone do a risky thing like this on your property, unless you know they're both capable professionals, and that they have sufficient insurance covering anything that could plausibly go very bad.
I’ve had a perpetual back injury because my small business owner boss had his tech support people move a piano of his while on the clock. Then he has a doctor buddy of his look at it and try to tell me I have hepatitis. Which multiple follow ups proved I didn’t. Don’t do labor outside of what’s expected for the position.
I'm ordinarily loathe to post a link to reddit, but here is a very recent example of copper scrapping on an entire cargo ship that's been abandoned by its crew (it took a hit from some kind of munition) in the hormuz area:
Being poor has zero correlation with being “lazy”.
Being poor is highly correlated with having little to no access to financial “leverage” so it’s very difficult to earn any sort of non-linear return on capital.
Additionally, the vast majority of your capital is solely the current market price of your individual labor.
Wow, I didn't realize how much I missed blog posts like this. Is there any way we can get the version of the Internet where people posted like this on their personal blogs back? It's the reason sites like hacker news came to exist, you couldn't just scroll social media to find stuff, you had to sort of stumble upon (that used to be a website too, didn't it?) stuff like this and pass it around word of mouth. It was awesome.
Man I miss StumbleUpon so much. That was such a glorious internet time for me. Found so many interesting and weird corners of the internet. I’ve been trying hard to avoid the centralized internet. That button to just send me to random places would be so nice.
I feel like you gotta be the change you want to see though. The small indie web, which never really went away I think, seems to be on the rise again. I know I’ve been enjoying clicking through all sorts of small personal sites people have running.
1. I don't believe you. Or at best, they're A/Bing you and letting you read a tiny modicum of content before forcing you to login. Actually, I'll donate $250 to a charity of your choice if you show me you on x.com mobile browser, logged out, and then load that link. *Any charity you want.*
2. I never said that. Weird that you would feel the need to put words in my mouth. Why might that be?
The first image is what I see when I visit the page; the second when I dismiss the dialog. The third image is what happens when you take a screenshot of a web page on iOS and save "Full Page", which is why you don't see Chrome's UI or the iOS status bar.
I dislike X and normally use xcancel instead of giving them traffic.
But what you said is not my experience with x.com on mobile the few times I’ve accidentally visited a link from it.
It will show the first post in the thread and some nag popups, but it will let me read it if it’s all in the first post in the thread and not split up across a bunch of posts.
Here is a screen recording from my phone where I visit the Twitter.com link from this thread. The video link expires is 2 days.
A friend was a property manager in Sacramento. His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copper, that currently pays ~$5/lb. If people are really working this hard for steel at $0.04/lb, then transformers and air conditioners will have to be installed in vaults.
My GF works with energy infrastructure in Colombia and they have lots of issues with people stealing copper, I didn't verify her claim but she said despite not having natural sources of copper Colombia had significant export volume of copper, pretty much all stolen. Her company has launched multiple investigations and unveiled gangs and networks repeatedly.
> His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copper
It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables. They've been found to steal, too, heavy road grate if they were of any value: which created actual serious accidents (where a car's tire falls into the hole).
Regarding the electrical cables for trains, one solution is, slowly , replace them with cables with basically the same properties but 1/10th the copper.
Other funky solutions have been implemented: chemical sprays with a composition that is watermark and that cannot easily be removed. So when caught the thieves cannot deny because for x weeks the watermark stays, invisible and harmless, on their skin.
One question of course is: what does society think we should do with thieves who create road accidents and who render trains inoperable?
> It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables.
Even worse. Sometimes, the dumb fucks think something has copper in it, but actually it's fiber... once two copper thieves simultaneously took out the primary and secondary fiber for the GSM-R network, leading to a complete standstill in Northern Germany [1]. (Personally: given the timing, I think it was Russian throwaway agents, and I do not believe that "copper thieves" cover story for a single second)
The scrap price is what you get for bringing scrap copper to a recycler.
Not an expert, but I assume $5/lb is the peak value for dropping off nearly perfect condition copper. Not sure how much they’re actually getting for stripped copper wire.
I would also think that unscrupulous scrap buyers would offer a lower price for copper which has obviously been stolen or stripped from public works, since they are taking on more risk by buying it.
I used to scrap to make an extra buck, it was super fun. I did it for about half a year as my primary income. That was wicked fun, and exhausting. I’ve never been anywhere near that strong at any point in my life, before or after and did not work out once. Did not pay tech wages, but if you’re Smart about it and not unlucky, or if you’re just lucky, you can make a fair bit more than people here seem to expect. I’m back mostly to doing it here or there, mostly for fun, when an interesting opportunity presents itself.
Every scrapper is different. How they source, tracking yards or private buyers, how much they strip down what items (how do they value their time, with a modifier of how much they enjoy it). I’m sure it varies a lot geographically. I enjoy scrapping retired public/municipal electrical infrastructure/equipment municipal very enjoyable, and if you ask around enough you’ll find auctions or even towns willing to let you do their dirty work.
Apologize for not engaging with the post directly but holy fuck can people stop using Twitter as a long form blogging platform. I don't want a full screen pop up telling me to sign in or a persistent bottom bar telling me to open the tweet in the app or a reply section mostly hidden unless I log in. I can't even use reader mode because somehow the paragraph breaks all goes missing and the whole thing merges into one didn’t wall of text. Not to mention your post may or may not end up entirely behind a login gate depending on Twitter's temperament of the day.
Please just put it on an old, boring web log. At this point I'll even accept substack.
> I don't want a full screen pop up telling me to sign in or a persistent bottom bar telling me to open the tweet in the app or a reply section mostly hidden unless I log in.
I really don't want to support a man who has killed so many people and advocates so aggressively for white supremacy and the elimination of trans people.
One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
I know lots of folks without a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out, and not one single one, is "lazy." In fact, a few have more than one (difficult) job.
I am old enough to see a few of them getting into the back nine, with no cushion.
I'm extremely grateful for what I have.
[EDIT] Added "many" because it's more appropriate, and short-circuits the implied "all."
Yeah, most people probably underestimate the effect that several things have on where they end up in life: education, self discipline, hard work, making good decisions, persistence, and, especially, chance. If you screw up majorly on any the factors under your control, you dramatically reduce your chances of “the good life.” But, even if you do all of them right, you are still at the mercy of chance. Get born in the wrong year or at the wrong place or into the wrong family or with the wrong genetics and that's all it takes to set you up for a hard life.
The tragedy is that we could have a society that gives people more opportunities to escape the downward pull of chance gone wrong early in life. Maybe someday we'll get there.
I really wanted to be a journalist when I was young, but then the PC era began and I became sort of addicted to computers and developed my first commercial website at a very young age.
I remember making more money than most people in my family (not a high bar, really) when I was working as a 20-year-old developer.
That led people in my family to think I was some sort of brilliant young man, but that bar was easily cleared (and still is) by pretty much anyone who had an interest in computers and applied themselves to pursue a career in the field.
My life would have been very different if I'd had a few more years to pursue journalism, which was already a very difficult field back then.
I wanted to be a professional artist, when I was younger[0]. I found out that even a mediocre programmer made more than even a relatively successful artist, and I enjoyed coding, so I stuck with that.
I also think that we should have mercy for people who’ve made mistakes. People who’ve willingly done dumb things, especially when they were young.
I feel this way because I did dumb things when I was young, and I’m sure you did too dear reader, and at least for me, I was lucky that those dumb things didn’t end in catastrophe.
It’s like it’s human nature to forget the dumb things you did if you were lucky enough to escape the consequences, and look down on those who weren’t so lucky.
This whole thing is one of those fruitless arguments about a badly defined notion of "most people".
For instance the scope of the "especially chance" assertion has strange effects. Does "get born in the wrong year" include 300,000 years of human history? In that case chance has very little effect. You're overwhelming likely to grow up using stone tools, with a 1 in 3 chance of also having access to pottery.
But that would be silly and obviously wasn't the intended question. The intended question is one that's closer to home, a question that we care about. But how much closer to which home, and what exactly is the scope of the question? It can be made less about luck by filtering out the unlucky from the scope.
Wrong year as in landing on a giant generational recession at the time period in life when people usually accelerate or maybe a world wide pandemic landing in your formative years.
Wrong year is a much smaller time scale. An example more close to home on this site, you/me just missed the free money cash days of the fango mango tech companies. Sure, there are still some of those jobs but far fewer with where interest rates are at.
I used to think a wrong year was maybe 1:80 but at 50, I've seen some unpleasant shit every decade.
I keep thinking about some odd-ball numerology weirdo I met on a trip in GG park about cycles of the universe and prime number harmony.
In the real world there are just boom/bust cycles, make hay while the sun shines. IME you'll be part of 8 cycles, 5 of which you can control a small part of.
For the vast majority of higher-level jobs you need certifications, not knowledge. There are very few jobs that you can get by simply demonstrating that you know something.
The reason people pay $100k for a year of college education most certainly isn’t the lectures, which you can often find on YouTube these days.
Most of life is luck, with regards to success and economic prosperity. We’ve built a system that ignores that for the benefit of a privileged few, using fairy tales around exceptionalism and faux meritocracy. We should build socioeconomic systems where luck is less a component for survival and living a good life, imho. I think we’re on our way there (support of democratic socialism and their candidates is at record highs, mostly around the young, and the old age out at a rate of 2M per year 55+ [higher support of capitalism because they were lucky under it]), but it’s going to take another decade or two to see the improvements (political cycles, electorate turnover, policy implementation lag, etc.)
You must be joking. Democratic Socialism is just Socialism with a prettier name. Socialism does not work, full stop, unless you're in the group at the top controlling the strings. Don't point at the nordic countries, they have far less progressive taxation policies that the US when you factor VAT in.
I thought it was more like, if it doesn’t work it’s socialism, if it does work it’s not socialism? This is why Norway is at the same time called not socialism (because it works) and socialism (because conservatives don’t want us to even try adopting what works in Norway).
Yes and no. I can think of easily three decision or inflection points in my life where if i went left instead of right, id be a multi millionaire. I can think of even more where my life direction would have been radically different.
Luck plays a huge part on where you start and land but no one is totally unlucky. Luck strikes everyone across all starting points.
What i have seen with my loved ones that struggle is that they have had many lucky breaks and somehow keep squandering them in a sad self fulfilling prophecy. Success begets success and failure begets failure. Both cycles are reversible.
Keep in mind “success” is not rich/famous but financially stable.
Luck is just as important even with perfect economic equality. It’s just that economic luck gets replaced by luck of genetics, luck of immaterial circumstances, etc.
I have always found the assumption strange that one is somehow preferable to the other, but most people seem to believe that, so maybe one day they’ll get what they’re asking for and then find out that it’s not what they wanted after all.
Persistent poverty is usually a byproduct of poor impulse control. That will quickly undo any compounding created by hard work.
No other factor comes close to being as predictive of whether or not someone in the US gets out of poverty as impulse control. I've seen it in every poor community I lived in.
There is no satisfactory way to address this reality. Impulse control is significantly innate. Attempts to improve it have limited success in the best cases. Someone with no impulse control will squander or lose resources given to them, whether through their own hard work or handouts. See also: lottery winners. It is a very deep local minima.
> Persistent poverty is usually a byproduct of poor impulse control.
Go visit a brick factory in Pakistan. The laborers are extremely poor and no amount of "work harder" effort on their individual part (they already work hard as fuck, six days a week) is going to lift them out of that life. Telling them they're poor because they have poor impulse control is one of the most ridiculous things I've read today.
In that case I would be very interested to see the parent commenter expand on why they have formed the opinion that persons living in poverty in the US (based on their first hand experiences) have poor impulse control but people in other locations do not.
Nobody can "impulse control" their way out of a situation where income is 100 and necessary expenses are 102. Sure there are things in their control but, thinking poor people are just wasting their money is a stereotype that need to die.
Assume everyone is as rational as you. How could you lift yourself from that upsidedown situation? Bootstraps?
Valid hypothesis, but I suspect that cause and effect may be reversed.
When you don't have much, and opportunity is fleeting, you tend to grab and implement, quickly.
If you get a windfall, but don't have a bank account, you spend it quickly. Hanging onto it, could actually be very dangerous, or at least, increase the likelihood of having it taken away.
More than this, in a risky, unstable environment, taking what you can get when you can get it is the right evolutionary strategy. Genetics doesn't know what sort of world you are going to be born into so it has developed a limited number of plans. One of those plans is "control your impulses" and another is "get what you can and get out". They both work well in certain scenarios, and suffer in others.
I'm open to this correlation. But I wonder about causality. Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential. Breaking the cycle of poverty is difficult, but I'm not an expert on where the best investments to solve this problem would be.
If the parents have poor impulse control then the children often do as well. This is a selection effect; children growing up in poverty often inherit a significant contributor to their parents' persistent poverty.
People who are incidentally in poverty usually have children that aren't. I grew up in pretty abject poverty and saw this pattern over and over again too. My parents didn't have poor impulse control, it was circumstantial. All of my siblings were able to grind their way to a successful life despite having the deck stacked against them -- and none of them work in tech.
It is extremely frustrating. I have persistently poor friends who are unambiguously above average in both intelligence and work ethic, and with great personalities. Yet despite that, they constantly sabotage their future with poor impulse control. With good impulse control they'd be solidly middle class at a minimum.
I don't know how to fix the above situation. I've tried many times. They can't really explain why they make the stupid decisions they do, it just kind of happens.
> But I wonder about causality. Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential.
There's fairly good statistics that a large portion of the people living in a cycle of poverty and drug addiction in Vancouver's downtown eastside suffer from a number of documented risk factors:
a) fetal alcohol syndrome
b) documented abuse by parents at an early age, or became wards of the state and entered foster care system, were not placed with any family members
c) drug/alcohol abuse by parents
d) molested by parents, relatives, "friends" of parents at an early age
I also wonder if its rational behaviour at the end of the day. If you don't have anything to your name, why delay gratification? Its not like you'll get benefits of delaying, and you may very well suffer a loss if you wait. I think you have to have a certain amount of wealth before the types of behaviours that actually make you wealthy make sense in the average case.
The original marshmallow test fails for this reason, but also it's true that poor impulse control makes it harder to break out of situations that do not reward delayed gratification.
> Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential.
But that’s just another correlation without a proof of causation.
There’s no clear definition of what causation is. You can invoke the tired “correlation doesn’t imply causation” any time you want, but the same quip disqualifies any alternative causation mechanism you propose, unless you serve up an actual criterion for distinguishing the two along with it. Asserting that one seems more plausible than the other isn’t enough.
You can have really stupid parents who ingrain suboptimal behavior patterns and interests to you. Things like poor eating, attitudes and beliefs about work and what’s possible, abuse, poor ways of coping with stress and conflict. Throw into that a hopeless environment with no immediate opportunities, bad peer group, and early pregnancies and you have a recipe for disaster
How about growing up in a neighborhood and environment where there isn't negative influence and impulses around you to begin with?
For your example, people in poor environments have more liquor stores, convenience stores, etc. If you are rich you have more positive influence around you and less to impulse control against.
Want to test your argument? Try to live in a strip club and tell me if you can control your impulses as a male (or if you are a female, whatever is your temptation equivalent). Since you believe your control in that situation is 100% innnate and cannot be changed, then you have squandered all your resources. However you and I can see thats silly, why would anyone choose to live so close to temptation and negative influence? But isn't your argument saying you shouldn't bother to control that since you'd just fall to poverty anyway.
There's also been a number of studies done on what constitutes a "food desert" in the United States, where people don't have nearby access to a proper grocery store, just small convenience stores (and things like a strip mall with convenience store, liquor store, vape shop, etc). And as it correlates with obesity and health issues caused by an unhealthy diet.
Usually? Dude, you're implying that most impoverished people deserve it without providing a shred of evidence. You saw it, huh? Sorry, idk what you saw, but your anecdotes are no basis for making such a sweeping and important claim about one of the most complex problems humanity faces.
The pervasive myth that hard work == wealth needs to die. Every people I have met in my life wanted to have a shot at a decent life and would have put the necessary work for a decent wage.
The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.
The myth is so pervasive because it's propagated by people with more wealth against people with less of it, and the conflict of interest prevents anyone from giving it up.
Everyone wants to feel better about themselves and the easiest way is to look down on someone who has less. Less "whatever" really, people always find something that they think makes them better, money is just the obvious choice because society slowly associated money with success. It doesn't matter if the wealth came from their parents, or luck, they can still pretend it makes them better.
It's one of those situations where everyone's in on it. The poor really haven't much else to go on and they'll take this little boost in their standing, the rich are tempted to think they so much better than most other people. Everyone in between sits somewhere on that scale.
I think it's easy to see: (1) A simplified variation of it is true (namely, that if effort1 > effort2 then outcome(env, effort1) >= outcome(env, effort2) for any fixed environment env); (2) It flatters those who have achieved high outcomes, regardless of how much effort they put in.
Hard work is often necessary but not sufficient. You can work very hard moving a pile of sand with a pair of tweezers but you’re not going to get wealthy doing that.
The people who simply think that because they worked hard wealth should just come to them are going to remain confused until they figure out that what you work on is also important.
There are a lot of factors to getting wealthy. Most of them are out of your control. Hard work happens to be one that is in your control. Its not like you can choose to be born to different parents or a different place.
But its still not magic. It doesn't guarantee anything. Worst of all its useless if the work is directed to the wrong ends.
How about hard work + courage ? Without ability to take risk and potential failure it is very difficult to change your economic level. It is very naive to think that doing the same thing everyday will somehow change your economic level.
Being poor is a lot of work, as is very well documented. When you have more money you can offload some (or in extreme cases pretty much all) of the labor.
I like the transition from “I have an issue with what you said” to “I have an issue with what I imagine you said” after getting clarification
That aside the statement was fine as written. For example it takes deliberate and active misunderstanding to twist the statement “people eat meat” into “there aren’t any vegetarians”
Hang on, no, imagine if someone said "people eat meat" and it was the core part of an argument that people need a minimum of 2 acres of farmland to support their food consumption. It would be important to point out that vegetarians and vegans need less than an acre.
The context matters and blanket statements can be misleading in certain contexts.
> and it was the core part of an argument that people need a minimum of 2 acres of farmland
Then we would be in an entirely different thread talking about something else? I was pointing out that trying to use “I refuse to understand what I read” as a dunk doesn’t really work. If you’re trying to say “What if I invent imaginary circumstances where I am right and you are wrong?” then yeah, I’d be helpless in that situation
If there was really nothing wrong with the original phrasing about rich people, then there's also nothing wrong with GP's phrasing about poor people. The usages are exactly parallel.
In my lived experience, the majority of poverty is the inability to delay gratification. Whether you want to attribute that to personal failings or to other things is a separate question
Most likely you're seeing the causality in the wrong direction - poverty creates a strong incentive to go for immediate benefits rather than absorb the risk of one that is delayed.
Talk to the immigrants - a lot of them came to the US with only a few thousand $$$ in the bank or even less. They are not multimillionaires, but a lot of them got from zero to high-paying programmer jobs.
Granted, there is a healthy dose of luck and talent involved, but saying that the only way to get rich is to have rich parents is a lazy and wrong take.
Here’s the thing about the immigrant pulled-up-by-bootstraps story: immigration is expensive. When you hear about someone coming to North America with “only a few thousand dollars in their pocket”, you have to remember that by time they’ve landed, they’ve already sunk likely tens of thousands of dollars into getting the paperwork to get here (unless they already had a job lined up, which generally means educated).
Many not-poor people I know in Canada wouldn’t have the means to immigrate elsewhere without saving up for a few years at way above minimum wage. Education and skill are going to make them more desirable immigration candidates than, say, someone who barely graduated high school. It’s really not an apples-to-apples comparison at all.
I’m a software engineer, and my job is so easy for the pay it’s ridiculous. I assure you, I do not work 5-10x harder than the guys who just installed my fence.
Can you do their work if there is a nobody to help ? Can they do your work if there is nobody to help ? You are underestimating the amount of time/energy spent in developing the skill.
> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
I've noticed the same thing over my life (I'm almost 53) and by and large the well-off people who assume the poor are lazy are among the laziest, most useless nepobaby piles of shit I've met.
It is like they themselves had an easy road to success thanks to having well off, well connected parents and assume people significantly poorer must be even lazier than they are because their own success wasn't very hard to achieve, oblivious to the fact that the poor people they are looking down on started in a very different starting position than they did.
And to be clear, I'm not saying all wealthy people are lazy, some have worked legitimately hard for their success, and I'm not saying some poor people aren't lazy, of course you'll find examples of both. But there are tons of extremely hard working poor people, and tons of extremely lazy wealthy people who make absurd amounts of money doing very "bullshit" jobs.
This is basic psychology: being rich for no apparent reason causes cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is annoying/painful. So rather than change beliefs to see one's self as very lucky, in most cases the brain re-works reality to provide a rational explanation: the rich person worked hard/is smarter, etc.
I've worked in both tech and construction. Never seen a tech worker go home and come back with the soles of their shoes resoled overnight because they didn't have a better option for work tomorrow.
Is that the best option? Generally no, it's probably not worth your time to do things that you don't specialize in. But at some point, you run out of hours to profit from the things you specialize in, and you still need something, so you figure it out. You do your oil changes, and fix your shoes and repair things even when they would generally considered 'totaled'. You miss work or at least hours on days when your late model car doesn't start. You take care of your own house repairs and yardwork, if your lucky enough to own something your landlord's yard and maintenance work more likely. And this is all off hours stuff because that's the option you have.
I've worked so much less in tech, yeah the hours can be long and oncall sucks. But I end up being able to redirect all my effort into the thing I'm specialized in and that I get paid the most to do. Which means I can pay to have my boots resoled, or just buy new ones, I take my (newer cars that always start) to the dealer every 6 months. I can pay a premium for delivery of food and staples, I can hire help around the house for anything from lawn care to tree trimming to roof repairs.
When I left the trades, 50 hours was generally required and 60 was becoming the norm. I'm not working any more in tech at work, but I work a lot lest to have a better life outside of work. It's just night and day.
And there are jobs where you’re paid >$200k and work 20-30 hours per week. I have friends doing that right now. When I was at Google I earned $350k and my boss literally told me I could stop working for 12 months and still get paid if I wanted to. I chose to quit instead to go somewhere where I’d learn more.
That is kind of the expected outcome of capitalism - the more value you provide the harder it is to replace you and the easier it is for you to leverage that for better working conditions.
If you'll excuse the dehumanizing metaphor, you probably treat your valuable possessions a lot better than your cheap possessions too. Capitalism makes possessions out of all of us.
There's four quadrants, lazy, works hard on one axis, and poor and rich on the other axis. Of those four quadrants, people exist in all four of them and it's stupid to pretend otherwise. That means that not pretending lazy poor don't exist, nor that rich hardworking people also exist. I know lazy poor people that aren't lazy so much as have severe mental health problems related to being poor, but also know rich people who could have fucked off to the beach forever by now but they keep working for some reason.
Why do I bring this up? Am I nitpicking? (yes) Until such time that there are no poor people, claiming there are no lazy poor people just gets people that actually know lazy poor people to tune out anyone's dreams of UBI because I'm not paying taxes on income I earn through me working, so that everyone else can be lazy and not work. It's as simple as that. Yes we can point to systemic and racially moviated biases that lead to unequal outcomes, but that isn't convincing on why my tax dollars should go to lazy poor people who refuse to work or even go to the EBT office to. I'm all for my tax dollars going to hard working poor people, and especially to their health care because a cancer or diabetes diagnosis should not bankrupt anyone, but the rest is hard to swallow.
Your tax dollars go to all kinds of things far worse than helping people survive. The Protestant work ethic cannot die soon enough. Never once have I cared if someone is "lazy". A rich person may work very hard exploiting others, that's far worse than not working at all.
I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.
But the Protestant work ethic is good! There are hard-working people who are still poor, but there are very few situations where you, or anyone else, will be better off being lazy instead of working. (Hard manual labor that harms you permanently in some way, like old coal miners, is probably the biggest exception.)
In the counterfactual, where these hard-working poor people are lazy instead, they aren't suddenly rich or even the same as they are now. They're almost certainly worse off.
I was raised with a strong work ethic. Do I believe that working hard is the only reason I am where I am now? No, of course not. But if I didn't work hard my life would be worse in every way imaginable! Regardless of how lucky or unlucky your life is, having a solid work ethic will always always always make you happier. Work is not inherently 'bad' in some way, and neither is having to work to live and to learn and to have a good life.
I don't agree, it's a one way ticket to exploitation. All of the richest people I know (and I mean really rich, like over $100M in net worth) are from rich families and have inherited their wealth. Most are lazy but the ones that "work hard" produce exploitation at scale to further enrich themselves at the expense of their workers.
> I was raised with a strong work ethic
Most Americans are raised like this, which is why they are so easy to exploit and why they are against basic social safety nets and other things that are generally good for society.
The fact is other than inheritance, the easiest way (and really only way) to make a lot of money is to talk well. Talk well and get as close to rich people as you can, then talk some more. Is that "hard work"? It's wasting your life for sure, but it doesn't compare to pouring concrete.
I recommend everyone read this and try not to end up "clueless" as it really is the worst option of the bunch:
You only get to a majority by doing two misleading things… blaming the national debt on entitlements instead of general fund deficits, and counting Social Security (which is funded by its own payroll taxes) as a welfare program.
The actual means-tested safety net (Medicaid, food assistance, SSI, housing) is only around 15% to 20% of federal spending.
Social security is a welfare program. As is Medicare. They are odd regressive forms of them but they are tax funded welfare programs full stop.
As for fund deficits there are basically 4 things the federal government pays for, social security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military. Everything else is noise or interest. So when accounting for the debt load of that interest it only makes sense to assign some part of it to those 4 things.
Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages.
You might be misunderstanding what is meant by "lazy". I don't think it's such a difficult perspective to understand.
What if your wealth was created by self-employment and building up a business? When you see so many talented and hard working people rejecting all of their available opportunities to do so, what word would you use? Ignorance? Arrogance? I can't think of any positive word. At least "lazy" implies they're still waiting for a lower risk moment to pounce.
This is how most of the wealth in the USA was built, so I don't think it's offensive. It's the prevailing culture.
I'm trying hard to make your post make any sense at all..
I guess you believe everyone gets the same starting point and same opportunities? How did you come to believe such a thing? Have you looked around to see what society is like?
I'm not saying that; I'm saying that people can make decisions with very different outcomes even if they started out the same, and vice-versa. But if you're already brainwashed with socialist ideology, then obviously you can't see that...
conversely, people can make the same decisions in the same-ish environment, with very different outcomes. it sounds like you discount the effect of luck in timing, or geography, or acquaintance, which are wildly different from just making intellectually robust decisions.
It only makes sense that fetuses which choose to be born into blue collar families in the wrong zip code are more likely to continue to make poor decisions for the rest of their lives. You just can't trust people with such a poor history of judgement. Unless they're C-Suite.
> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
If they aren't physically lazy, they're unambitious or refuse to attempt nominally mentally difficult things (like math) and that is mental laziness. Poverty isn't random.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I understand the partisan juxtaposition of "X" and Moxie Marlinspike, and the partisan appeal of commenting on it, but to me it is a tangential annoyance.
I usually agree, but X has been pretty terrible as a medium. Not sure how OP meant it, obviously.
I'd created an account a year or so ago just to be able to view posts that pop up here. 3 months later I was banned for inauthentic activity, whatever that means. I googled and apparently that happened to a huge swath of people this year.
That was fine, I could still read posts. But now it gates me on wanting my biometrics for verification. Now clicking any link, including the above, asks me to submit biometrics. Assuming I'm not the unluckiest human alive, this feels like a terrible way to share content.
I'm curious what cesspool you mean, because i can see cutting edge true hardcore science publication announcements on X better than elsewhere.
i ask because i evidently have tuned my account parameters somehow way the heck better than you experience.
I _do_ still see what look like rage-bait nonsense that people post for clicks, totally unrelated to medicine or biology, so i block or mute that nonsense. I'm guessing that's part of the cesspool but you may see different stuff.
Why do you think Moxie Marlinspike is not the type of person that would stay on this cesspool of a network that is X? From what I've seen I'd have been very surprised to see him anywhere else.
It is ironic that the founder of maybe the most popular privacy-conscious IM app is actively contributing to his and his followers' data being harvested on X though.
He certainly wasn’t when he wrote this, and I don’t see how you’d read this as mocking. He was a crust punk living in a squat, fixing it up with scrap lumber he salvaged from pallets. His financial position was not so different from the scrappers when writing this story.
Last year I bought a fixer-upper house last year on a bike trail and river in a small town outside of Pittsburgh ($40k - still possible here). I got in touch with the town secretary to discuss getting a dumpster for a while and she volunteered "I know a good scrapper". I called him and he and his son came and cleared out several hundred pounds of metal stuff that wasn't going to be part of my house renovations.
On a slightly related question if you don't mind answering, were you able to get homeowners insurance with flood coverage for it? What's your relative level of risk from the river? And what are you paying if you did get coverage?
I've periodically looked at real estate in some similar "$40k for a whole house?" rust belt towns, but only as a place where I might want to live in part time for a very quiet remote work environment. None of them look like a place where I would ever want to have to engage with the local economy to find a local job in the region.
For now it's a "therapy project" house for me. I go and work on the house and then go biking or kayaking. It's 150 years old and one of the few brick houses from that era.
I spent a day there a couple years ago and it seemed like a really cool lil city that was surprisingly affordable.
Pittsburgh has most of the benefits of a larger city without most of the problems. Its infrastructure is in many ways over-provisioned, being built for past industry and a larger population (but the maintenance burden is catching up). Its unusually hilly and berivered geography has allowed its neighborhoods to escape homogenization and retain their individual ethnic characters. And the setting, with rivers, bridges, trails, forests, is beautiful. Plus the airport recently got overhauled to meet the region’s actual needs, making it way more convenient.
Oh, if you're in to sports, Pittsburgh has some great teams and a great fan base.
Yeah, I like the ’Burgh.
Is much less affordable now compared to 10 years ago. But there are still lots of fixer-uppers still.
If you ever find yourself in a situation like this, politely bow out. As I suspect the author would advise.
It's an easy -- even likely -- way for someone to get an adversely life-changing injury.
Besides the good writing, it was easy to visualize that playing out, because I've seen it before.
Also, don't let anyone do a risky thing like this on your property, unless you know they're both capable professionals, and that they have sufficient insurance covering anything that could plausibly go very bad.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SeaEmploy/comments/1vum7fj/the_foot...
It's a little bit like the scene in the movie Lord of War where an entire cargo airplane is reduced to its skeleton.
more details on the ship in question: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=cma+cgm+s...
Being poor is highly correlated with having little to no access to financial “leverage” so it’s very difficult to earn any sort of non-linear return on capital.
Additionally, the vast majority of your capital is solely the current market price of your individual labor.
I feel like you gotta be the change you want to see though. The small indie web, which never really went away I think, seems to be on the rise again. I know I’ve been enjoying clicking through all sorts of small personal sites people have running.
https://xcancel.com/moxie/status/2091218652133732491
Glad I'm not the only one.
what's the issue here ????
Are those of you on X really this out of touch?
That you personally can’t read it doesn’t imply that everyone else here is a horrible person.
2. I never said that. Weird that you would feel the need to put words in my mouth. Why might that be?
GOD I LOVE HN, I CANT REPLY NOW. WHY DO I BOTHER? Since I can't reply, and I was wrong: https://files.catbox.moe/kksyqz.png
Sure.
https://waltergr.com/misc/hn-scrap-on-x/1.png
https://waltergr.com/misc/hn-scrap-on-x/2.png
https://waltergr.com/misc/hn-scrap-on-x/3.png
The first image is what I see when I visit the page; the second when I dismiss the dialog. The third image is what happens when you take a screenshot of a web page on iOS and save "Full Page", which is why you don't see Chrome's UI or the iOS status bar.
> *Any charity you want.*
I choose Habitat for Humanity.
Edit: Good on ya for following through!
But what you said is not my experience with x.com on mobile the few times I’ve accidentally visited a link from it.
It will show the first post in the thread and some nag popups, but it will let me read it if it’s all in the first post in the thread and not split up across a bunch of posts.
Here is a screen recording from my phone where I visit the Twitter.com link from this thread. The video link expires is 2 days.
https://streamable.com/5bvhdz
The whole text Marlin wrote is in the first post in the thread and therefore fully readable without logging in.
Donate to one of the following:
- https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/donate/
- https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/
- https://immigrantjustice.org/ways-to-help/
I got https://i.imgur.com/JCeLEgG.png which is readable.
Then I enabled mobile browser using devtools and got https://i.imgur.com/ryJk07p.png which is unreadable.
I think mobile vs desktop was the central confusion. Mobile is broken logged out. Desktop works ok.
https://www.alzinfo.org/donate/donation_form/, in memory of Terry Pratchett.
https://imgur.com/a/w8HYdgz
I (still) like the EFF.
I'm able to read it while logged out - and if I wasn't, there's xcancel.com, and others.
You're not doing yourself any favours.
It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables. They've been found to steal, too, heavy road grate if they were of any value: which created actual serious accidents (where a car's tire falls into the hole).
Regarding the electrical cables for trains, one solution is, slowly , replace them with cables with basically the same properties but 1/10th the copper.
Other funky solutions have been implemented: chemical sprays with a composition that is watermark and that cannot easily be removed. So when caught the thieves cannot deny because for x weeks the watermark stays, invisible and harmless, on their skin.
One question of course is: what does society think we should do with thieves who create road accidents and who render trains inoperable?
They should be liable for consequential damages.
Make me late to the airport will ya?
Even worse. Sometimes, the dumb fucks think something has copper in it, but actually it's fiber... once two copper thieves simultaneously took out the primary and secondary fiber for the GSM-R network, leading to a complete standstill in Northern Germany [1]. (Personally: given the timing, I think it was Russian throwaway agents, and I do not believe that "copper thieves" cover story for a single second)
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM-R-Ausfall_bei_der_Deutsche...
Europe puts people in trains and freight in semi-trailers. China and Japan are more like this.
India dedicates its rail network 100% to passengers and also 100% to freight. Somehow it works.
Copper sells over $6 per pound these days: https://www.kitco.com/price/base-metals/copper
Not an expert, but I assume $5/lb is the peak value for dropping off nearly perfect condition copper. Not sure how much they’re actually getting for stripped copper wire.
Every scrapper is different. How they source, tracking yards or private buyers, how much they strip down what items (how do they value their time, with a modifier of how much they enjoy it). I’m sure it varies a lot geographically. I enjoy scrapping retired public/municipal electrical infrastructure/equipment municipal very enjoyable, and if you ask around enough you’ll find auctions or even towns willing to let you do their dirty work.
Always be scrapping.
Also nearly got a job in Pittsburgh this summer…
Please just put it on an old, boring web log. At this point I'll even accept substack.
People there still behave the same though
It's not like they are the highly technical founder of a very successful, privacy-focused messaging app....
make an x account then?
I know lots of folks without a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out, and not one single one, is "lazy." In fact, a few have more than one (difficult) job.
I am old enough to see a few of them getting into the back nine, with no cushion.
I'm extremely grateful for what I have.
[EDIT] Added "many" because it's more appropriate, and short-circuits the implied "all."
The tragedy is that we could have a society that gives people more opportunities to escape the downward pull of chance gone wrong early in life. Maybe someday we'll get there.
I remember making more money than most people in my family (not a high bar, really) when I was working as a 20-year-old developer.
That led people in my family to think I was some sort of brilliant young man, but that bar was easily cleared (and still is) by pretty much anyone who had an interest in computers and applied themselves to pursue a career in the field.
My life would have been very different if I'd had a few more years to pursue journalism, which was already a very difficult field back then.
Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886
I feel this way because I did dumb things when I was young, and I’m sure you did too dear reader, and at least for me, I was lucky that those dumb things didn’t end in catastrophe.
It’s like it’s human nature to forget the dumb things you did if you were lucky enough to escape the consequences, and look down on those who weren’t so lucky.
Source: Did really dumb things, when I was younger.
For instance the scope of the "especially chance" assertion has strange effects. Does "get born in the wrong year" include 300,000 years of human history? In that case chance has very little effect. You're overwhelming likely to grow up using stone tools, with a 1 in 3 chance of also having access to pottery.
But that would be silly and obviously wasn't the intended question. The intended question is one that's closer to home, a question that we care about. But how much closer to which home, and what exactly is the scope of the question? It can be made less about luck by filtering out the unlucky from the scope.
Wrong year is a much smaller time scale. An example more close to home on this site, you/me just missed the free money cash days of the fango mango tech companies. Sure, there are still some of those jobs but far fewer with where interest rates are at.
I keep thinking about some odd-ball numerology weirdo I met on a trip in GG park about cycles of the universe and prime number harmony.
In the real world there are just boom/bust cycles, make hay while the sun shines. IME you'll be part of 8 cycles, 5 of which you can control a small part of.
eh, i kinda disagree on this. in the era of information being so abundant there's so much you can learn on your own.
sure you won't become a surgeon but there are so many other things you can learn and get a job.
and this is true even without having AI in the picture.
Learning about the world gives you an edge, full stop. Cultures that highly value education, surprise surprise, are far more wealthy.
Today, it is almost harder to learn because of how noisy and manipulative the world is today.
The reason people pay $100k for a year of college education most certainly isn’t the lectures, which you can often find on YouTube these days.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 (citations)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027462 (citations)
Luck plays a huge part on where you start and land but no one is totally unlucky. Luck strikes everyone across all starting points.
What i have seen with my loved ones that struggle is that they have had many lucky breaks and somehow keep squandering them in a sad self fulfilling prophecy. Success begets success and failure begets failure. Both cycles are reversible.
Keep in mind “success” is not rich/famous but financially stable.
I have always found the assumption strange that one is somehow preferable to the other, but most people seem to believe that, so maybe one day they’ll get what they’re asking for and then find out that it’s not what they wanted after all.
No other factor comes close to being as predictive of whether or not someone in the US gets out of poverty as impulse control. I've seen it in every poor community I lived in.
There is no satisfactory way to address this reality. Impulse control is significantly innate. Attempts to improve it have limited success in the best cases. Someone with no impulse control will squander or lose resources given to them, whether through their own hard work or handouts. See also: lottery winners. It is a very deep local minima.
Go visit a brick factory in Pakistan. The laborers are extremely poor and no amount of "work harder" effort on their individual part (they already work hard as fuck, six days a week) is going to lift them out of that life. Telling them they're poor because they have poor impulse control is one of the most ridiculous things I've read today.
Assume everyone is as rational as you. How could you lift yourself from that upsidedown situation? Bootstraps?
When you don't have much, and opportunity is fleeting, you tend to grab and implement, quickly.
If you get a windfall, but don't have a bank account, you spend it quickly. Hanging onto it, could actually be very dangerous, or at least, increase the likelihood of having it taken away.
>but don't have a bank account
Plenty of bank accounts are free to open. That's not an excuse.
Many poor folks think decades ahead, but they tend to be rather fatalistic.
When I lived in Africa, I was profoundly affected by the poverty I witnessed, and also, by the integrity and kindness of many very poor people.
Also, many bank accounts require things like state ID, credit-worthiness, etc., that are hard for poor folks to get.
This is not required if the person is a minor. And acquiring one is cheap.
>credit-worthiness
No bank will require the user to be credit worthy for a basic checking account.
People who are incidentally in poverty usually have children that aren't. I grew up in pretty abject poverty and saw this pattern over and over again too. My parents didn't have poor impulse control, it was circumstantial. All of my siblings were able to grind their way to a successful life despite having the deck stacked against them -- and none of them work in tech.
It is extremely frustrating. I have persistently poor friends who are unambiguously above average in both intelligence and work ethic, and with great personalities. Yet despite that, they constantly sabotage their future with poor impulse control. With good impulse control they'd be solidly middle class at a minimum.
I don't know how to fix the above situation. I've tried many times. They can't really explain why they make the stupid decisions they do, it just kind of happens.
There's fairly good statistics that a large portion of the people living in a cycle of poverty and drug addiction in Vancouver's downtown eastside suffer from a number of documented risk factors:
a) fetal alcohol syndrome
b) documented abuse by parents at an early age, or became wards of the state and entered foster care system, were not placed with any family members
c) drug/alcohol abuse by parents
d) molested by parents, relatives, "friends" of parents at an early age
But that’s just another correlation without a proof of causation.
There’s no clear definition of what causation is. You can invoke the tired “correlation doesn’t imply causation” any time you want, but the same quip disqualifies any alternative causation mechanism you propose, unless you serve up an actual criterion for distinguishing the two along with it. Asserting that one seems more plausible than the other isn’t enough.
For your example, people in poor environments have more liquor stores, convenience stores, etc. If you are rich you have more positive influence around you and less to impulse control against.
Want to test your argument? Try to live in a strip club and tell me if you can control your impulses as a male (or if you are a female, whatever is your temptation equivalent). Since you believe your control in that situation is 100% innnate and cannot be changed, then you have squandered all your resources. However you and I can see thats silly, why would anyone choose to live so close to temptation and negative influence? But isn't your argument saying you shouldn't bother to control that since you'd just fall to poverty anyway.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=US+low+in...
I lived it in many locales and cultures for a large fraction of my life. Anecdotal but very good anecdotes.
The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.
Everyone wants to feel better about themselves and the easiest way is to look down on someone who has less. Less "whatever" really, people always find something that they think makes them better, money is just the obvious choice because society slowly associated money with success. It doesn't matter if the wealth came from their parents, or luck, they can still pretend it makes them better.
It's one of those situations where everyone's in on it. The poor really haven't much else to go on and they'll take this little boost in their standing, the rich are tempted to think they so much better than most other people. Everyone in between sits somewhere on that scale.
You can exert extreme effort in unproductive directions and provide marginal, even extremely negative, value.
You can work extremely hard, all day every day, and accomplish nothing.
Gulags aren’t known for their wealth or value generation. They’re known for their labor input.
I think it's easy to see: (1) A simplified variation of it is true (namely, that if effort1 > effort2 then outcome(env, effort1) >= outcome(env, effort2) for any fixed environment env); (2) It flatters those who have achieved high outcomes, regardless of how much effort they put in.
The people who simply think that because they worked hard wealth should just come to them are going to remain confused until they figure out that what you work on is also important.
But its still not magic. It doesn't guarantee anything. Worst of all its useless if the work is directed to the wrong ends.
just like all poor people aren't lazy, so too all wealthy people don't think this.
Is 10% too high of an estimate for wealthy people that believe this? 50%? 75%? 90%?
Where would you throw the dart of your estimate and how wide do you think your error bounds are?
That aside the statement was fine as written. For example it takes deliberate and active misunderstanding to twist the statement “people eat meat” into “there aren’t any vegetarians”
The context matters and blanket statements can be misleading in certain contexts.
Then we would be in an entirely different thread talking about something else? I was pointing out that trying to use “I refuse to understand what I read” as a dunk doesn’t really work. If you’re trying to say “What if I invent imaginary circumstances where I am right and you are wrong?” then yeah, I’d be helpless in that situation
Granted, there is a healthy dose of luck and talent involved, but saying that the only way to get rich is to have rich parents is a lazy and wrong take.
Many not-poor people I know in Canada wouldn’t have the means to immigrate elsewhere without saving up for a few years at way above minimum wage. Education and skill are going to make them more desirable immigration candidates than, say, someone who barely graduated high school. It’s really not an apples-to-apples comparison at all.
I've noticed the same thing over my life (I'm almost 53) and by and large the well-off people who assume the poor are lazy are among the laziest, most useless nepobaby piles of shit I've met.
It is like they themselves had an easy road to success thanks to having well off, well connected parents and assume people significantly poorer must be even lazier than they are because their own success wasn't very hard to achieve, oblivious to the fact that the poor people they are looking down on started in a very different starting position than they did.
And to be clear, I'm not saying all wealthy people are lazy, some have worked legitimately hard for their success, and I'm not saying some poor people aren't lazy, of course you'll find examples of both. But there are tons of extremely hard working poor people, and tons of extremely lazy wealthy people who make absurd amounts of money doing very "bullshit" jobs.
Is that the best option? Generally no, it's probably not worth your time to do things that you don't specialize in. But at some point, you run out of hours to profit from the things you specialize in, and you still need something, so you figure it out. You do your oil changes, and fix your shoes and repair things even when they would generally considered 'totaled'. You miss work or at least hours on days when your late model car doesn't start. You take care of your own house repairs and yardwork, if your lucky enough to own something your landlord's yard and maintenance work more likely. And this is all off hours stuff because that's the option you have.
I've worked so much less in tech, yeah the hours can be long and oncall sucks. But I end up being able to redirect all my effort into the thing I'm specialized in and that I get paid the most to do. Which means I can pay to have my boots resoled, or just buy new ones, I take my (newer cars that always start) to the dealer every 6 months. I can pay a premium for delivery of food and staples, I can hire help around the house for anything from lawn care to tree trimming to roof repairs.
When I left the trades, 50 hours was generally required and 60 was becoming the norm. I'm not working any more in tech at work, but I work a lot lest to have a better life outside of work. It's just night and day.
If you'll excuse the dehumanizing metaphor, you probably treat your valuable possessions a lot better than your cheap possessions too. Capitalism makes possessions out of all of us.
Why do I bring this up? Am I nitpicking? (yes) Until such time that there are no poor people, claiming there are no lazy poor people just gets people that actually know lazy poor people to tune out anyone's dreams of UBI because I'm not paying taxes on income I earn through me working, so that everyone else can be lazy and not work. It's as simple as that. Yes we can point to systemic and racially moviated biases that lead to unequal outcomes, but that isn't convincing on why my tax dollars should go to lazy poor people who refuse to work or even go to the EBT office to. I'm all for my tax dollars going to hard working poor people, and especially to their health care because a cancer or diabetes diagnosis should not bankrupt anyone, but the rest is hard to swallow.
I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.
In the counterfactual, where these hard-working poor people are lazy instead, they aren't suddenly rich or even the same as they are now. They're almost certainly worse off.
I was raised with a strong work ethic. Do I believe that working hard is the only reason I am where I am now? No, of course not. But if I didn't work hard my life would be worse in every way imaginable! Regardless of how lucky or unlucky your life is, having a solid work ethic will always always always make you happier. Work is not inherently 'bad' in some way, and neither is having to work to live and to learn and to have a good life.
I don't agree, it's a one way ticket to exploitation. All of the richest people I know (and I mean really rich, like over $100M in net worth) are from rich families and have inherited their wealth. Most are lazy but the ones that "work hard" produce exploitation at scale to further enrich themselves at the expense of their workers.
> I was raised with a strong work ethic
Most Americans are raised like this, which is why they are so easy to exploit and why they are against basic social safety nets and other things that are generally good for society.
The fact is other than inheritance, the easiest way (and really only way) to make a lot of money is to talk well. Talk well and get as close to rich people as you can, then talk some more. Is that "hard work"? It's wasting your life for sure, but it doesn't compare to pouring concrete.
I recommend everyone read this and try not to end up "clueless" as it really is the worst option of the bunch:
https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
No, it’s not. The Protestant work ethic is what causes people to come into work when they’re sick, spreading illness to others.
You’d have to be counting pretty far afield things to get up to 90% but it’s easy to get to “a majority”.
The actual means-tested safety net (Medicaid, food assistance, SSI, housing) is only around 15% to 20% of federal spending.
As for fund deficits there are basically 4 things the federal government pays for, social security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military. Everything else is noise or interest. So when accounting for the debt load of that interest it only makes sense to assign some part of it to those 4 things.
Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages.
[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
What if your wealth was created by self-employment and building up a business? When you see so many talented and hard working people rejecting all of their available opportunities to do so, what word would you use? Ignorance? Arrogance? I can't think of any positive word. At least "lazy" implies they're still waiting for a lower risk moment to pounce.
This is how most of the wealth in the USA was built, so I don't think it's offensive. It's the prevailing culture.
Not lazy, not smart -> Will probably make ends meet, but not a millionaire
Lazy, samrt -> Toss-up. Can either make it far or end up broke
Lazy, not smart -> Likely to be broke
I guess you believe everyone gets the same starting point and same opportunities? How did you come to believe such a thing? Have you looked around to see what society is like?
If they aren't physically lazy, they're unambitious or refuse to attempt nominally mentally difficult things (like math) and that is mental laziness. Poverty isn't random.
Now you're just trolling. Be nice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Picking:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I understand the partisan juxtaposition of "X" and Moxie Marlinspike, and the partisan appeal of commenting on it, but to me it is a tangential annoyance.
I'd created an account a year or so ago just to be able to view posts that pop up here. 3 months later I was banned for inauthentic activity, whatever that means. I googled and apparently that happened to a huge swath of people this year.
That was fine, I could still read posts. But now it gates me on wanting my biometrics for verification. Now clicking any link, including the above, asks me to submit biometrics. Assuming I'm not the unluckiest human alive, this feels like a terrible way to share content.
i ask because i evidently have tuned my account parameters somehow way the heck better than you experience.
I _do_ still see what look like rage-bait nonsense that people post for clicks, totally unrelated to medicine or biology, so i block or mute that nonsense. I'm guessing that's part of the cesspool but you may see different stuff.
It is ironic that the founder of maybe the most popular privacy-conscious IM app is actively contributing to his and his followers' data being harvested on X though.