What do you want the government to do when your parents decide to abandon civilization and then live out without plumbing in the Oregon wilderness and then your dad abandons the family to do drugs and alcohol? How can you blame “the system” for that?
My wife is also from Oregon. Her grandma was “marry a random truck driver at 14 for a ticket out of town” poor. The guy abandoned the family and drank himself to an early death. And her dad was similarly situated to this guy—my wife lived part of her childhood in a converted barn. Her takeaway from her family history was the opposite: people are often incredibly self destructive and you can’t help those people.
The problem isn’t that lawmakers were never poor. Many were. The problem is that all the ones who were were high-functioning enough to escape poverty. So our systems for helping poor people assume a level of competence and administrative capacity that’s simply beyond the capability of a lot of poor people. For example, a third of uninsured people are actually eligible for Medicaid. Someone in my wife’s family racked up 50,000 in medical bills because they didn’t sign up for Medicaid despite being eligible the whole time.
You can, and you should. We all need a helping hand of a community, and a community to heal. We are social beings. And we carry the responsibility for not helping, too.
“A child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.“
Here are a handful of things that “the system” could change that would have helped the author:
- free or greatly reduced cost of higher education
- replacing means-tested programs like Medicaid with universal versions. Medicare for all, for example, where you don’t have to jump through hoops or even opt in, is better than the dehumanizing system we have in place today. Also removes the barrier to slightly improving one’s life, since you won’t lose your aid after getting a 10% raise or w/e.
- cheaper housing, or public housing (god forbid!)
These are not pipe dreams, these are all things other civilized countries have. I don’t want to live in a world where you have to be either lucky or extraordinary to live a secure, modest life.
> my wife lived part of her childhood in a converted barn.
So did my mom, in Oregon.
Maybe no so ironically, my wife lived on a 2 trailer desert compound on a plot 2 miles from visible city infrastructure and 5 miles from any sort of built structure for most of her childhood.
Human are imperfect. One of the most critical functions of "the system" is to flatten out the consequences of imperfection across all humans in the system. To deny this is to invite the end.
This is deeply ironic, since often it is the people touting "personal responsibility" most loudly who misunderstand the concept most dramatically. They use it as a convenience to make it easy and comfortable to dismiss human suffering, rather than attempting to understand it.
The system should not grind to a halt for a person because they did not fill out some paperwork
That such a trivial thing destines someone to endless debt and health issues is just cruelty. That it doesn't account for terrible parents when they are a constant like gravity itself is nothing more than the result of willfully ignorant politicians parroting tropes of long dead, less educated, and more ignorant politicians
Many politicians are intentionally in on the scam, erecting barriers so they can funnel wealth to rich corporations instead; look at this surplus from cutting education! Of course they don't say where the surplus came from so plainly. Mathematically air tight non-violent eugenics. Nevermind the meat suits engaged in such are useless themselves. Politicians are primarily just that, not also scientists and doctors. Just fuzzy VHS copies of historical story.
The system as a whole can be blamed for ignoring reality and coddling non-contributors. Boomers and GenX did not invent anything we rely on. Art, music, technology...etc etc... are centuries old.
But the contemporary elders act like reality itself is due to their existence. It's such a farcical concept. None of them are owed as none of them gave. They merely took the baton and redipped both ends in their own shit.
>...abandons the family to do drugs and alcohol? How can you blame “the system” for that?
We don't live in a vacuum and there a reasons why people turn to drug use that the system exacerbates. But that is completely irrelevant, because this blog post is a systemic critique, even if it is told through the life story of an individual. To cherry pick one stanza of the entire blog post to dismiss it on the grounds that the father who left is a drug addict is one more example of the delusions or strategies of the moralizing capitalist.
A heartbreaking story about a man's attempt to break out of generational poverty that feels relevant as we consider how AI changes labor and who it empowers.
A lot of us are excited about AI, but economic displacement can cause generations of trauma, and our safety net in the US is wholly inadequate toward that end.
I appreciate what you're saying holistically speaking, but whenever we talk about the societal consequences of AI in the US, I find it insidious that we focus on the inadequacy of our social safety nets. As if to say: Yes, C-suite, all you have to do is support UBI and you are free to obliterate what remains of the middle class in the United States of America.
I totally agree actually, and I think that having ownership over one's labor is extremely important. Without that self-determinism, people do not have the agency to define their lives, and their political actions become limited by their economic realities.
It is a likely outcome that the wealthy class offers the most meager basic income to avoid revolution but not much more than that.
I think we all need to talk about our leverage as a class of people who work for a living, and I'm not seeing nearly enough discussion about it. When Amodei talks about displacement of labor, he doesn't acknowledge how much trauma that economic displacement can cause and how many years that bell can ring.
thank you for sharing this. Too many people around me i see this story in. EU here. I am a lucky one as i get to look at my friends suffer from my temporary comfort. The title could not be more on point.
Are you actually EU? You know we are not one homogeneous state right? There are currently 27 nations, in which policy and circumstance varies between even at a regional level. There is immense poverty in some nations, notably Spain or Italy, but even Germany. I've seen it first hand, its heartbreaking.
Thanks for sharing this chart. I am amazed how Poland has less poverty than Germany. Maybe is East Germany bringing the average down for the entire country? Even then, still very impressive.
I don't disagree with much of what the author wrote here, except for the part about "I'm starving, but I'm vegan so I won't eat SPAM and I won't eat the peanut butter because it is 'processed' and has 'chemicals.'"
Humans are omnivores, veganism is a choice. You don't get to complain about how rough it is when you yourself have chosen to play with hard mode turned on. Obviously if there are health issues that require an altered diet that's a different story, but if that was mentioned I missed it somehow.
Everything else about the story has merit though, the rich are too rich and the US's "safety nets" are awful. Nobody should go bankrupt due to health problems they can't control.
I mean, if it’s eat meat or die you eat meat or die…but being vegan is a basic privilege. Especially because AFAIK vegan foods require less resources per calorie to produce, so would be cheaper except for logistics.
Avoiding hyper-processed food may be smart if it would lead to health problems later. One jar or peanut butter probably isn’t an issue. But at the macro level, countries spend much more on ER treatment than they could on preventative care, like free or subsidized healthy food.
Not sure if you’re straw manning intentionally so I’ll imagine the best: a misreporting of his words. Here they are:
> One winter when my roommate and I both were navigating our latest setbacks, we couldn’t make ends meet and we literally went hungry. There just was no money for food. We would go to the catholic food box donation center and they gave me a box, but I was vegan and the box was full of garbage Spam and Frank and Beans type stuff that I ended up just settting out on the curb. I would rather go hungry than develop health problems from filling up on ultraprocessed hydrogenated oil government peanut butter.
Being hungry isn’t starving, the way being out of breath is different from suffocating.
> Humans are omnivores, veganism is a choice
To understand his choice to not eat the box we might paraphrase him: "humans are natural whole food eater, not UPF eater".
It depends on what "human" definition is used: homo sapiens (biologie)? A poor American (context)?
I grew up in a poor single parent household. I'm doing better than most now. I don't have any more or less moral high ground because of my past as far as what I do now goes. I kinda hate how that stuff like people's past is used like a tool, source of credibility, or weapon/sheild ...
> The weird moral grandstanding against Peanut Butter had to be the strangest part.
I suppose you’re not aware that peanut butter manufacturers (and many other food manufacturers) in the states were allowed to cut their product with partially hydrogenated oil because it’s cheaper and doesn’t go rancid as fast. GRAS strikes again.
Unfortunately partially hydrogenated oil is pretty bad for most humans: raises LDL, lowers HDL, correlates with colon cancer, etc etc.
FDA didn’t ban it until c. 2020.
One of the few things actual nutrition scientists agree with RFK Jr. on.
If you exclude all processed foods with preservatives and say if not for Certified Organic foods you'll just not eat, you don't really come off a struggling.
It's just an absolutely weird thing for the author of focus on.
This was rough to read. No wonder a growing number of people in your country hate immigrants so much.
Although, rationally speaking they are not be the cause of so much misfortune. People should do whatever they can to get ahead. No one should accept poverty. As long as you don’t cut the throat of other innocents, it’s all fine.
One thing I would say is don’t put yourself down - like good things aren’t for you. I wouldn’t frame it as you don’t deserve. Everyone deserves a good life. Deserve takes you down a self destructive path. But because of the circumstance if your birth, you can’t have it - now.
An excellent essay. Very grim but honest and likely resonates with most people on some level.
America has been a cruel place to be poor since day one. I encourage everyone to read Howard Zinn’s ‘A People's History of the United States’ as it shows a more grounded history of this country. The US needs a workforce of starving, ill, desperate people in order to work. That’s how the system was built: on the backs of African slaves and the European poor.
The unspoken rule of this society is that everyone should rely on their family for help and not the government. This is why life is especially cruel for those with little to no family.
Those who embrace and celebrate AI when there’s a chance it could lead to mass unemployment and suffering should take a long hard look in the mirror.
the OP probably is not telling the whole story and must have some kind of drug addiction going on that sucks up all of his wealth, because how do you even end up on a van when you split rent with a girlfriend/roommates?
also the part where he refuses non-vegan food. yikes.
and skateboarding as a hobby sounds great when you are uninsured
A dude makes a series of terrible decisions. Decides to not learn from any them. Then blames society. Okay.
But my early story is eerily similar to his. Expect instead of just my dad dropping out to do drug, so did my mom. I grew up constantly moving between women’s shelters, random peoples couches and storage units.
And while he was in rural Oregon, I was in rural Idaho.
I ditched my parents as soon as I could. I worked basic non-silicon valley tech jobs. Moved from help desk ticket closer to actual IT career. No college, no money or time for it. Did alright.
Yeah life would have been a fuckton easier if I had supportive parents. But I’m in a good place and what I did wasn’t magic or luck. It was simply get basic job. Get shit apartment. Get slightly better job. Repeat.
This dude is deep in incel territory, which you can tell from the incel words he drops throughout his rant.
This dude says he never expected or needed any hand outs but several paragraphs earlier was complaining that the food bank didn’t provide vegan food. Ooohhh Kay. I have a lot of thoughts about both those statements. But dang dude. Maybe if you’re starving you should take any food you can get and deal with the rich people virtue signaling once you can afford to eat.
(To clarify on the above, being vegan is fucking great. It’s good to not kill animals… but you gotta take care of yourself before you take care of a cow.)
Yeah parts of the system are screw up. Yeah some people get a really unfair hand. But this guy was in generally good health, should have had health insurance through these crap jobs he was complaining about for his skateboard thing. (Which is another wtf that shows total lack of risk analysis. Who choses skateboarding as a hobby when you can’t afford a doctor. Jeez. Take up running.)
You, especially as someone who has "been there", nailed it.
And congrats on taking personal responsibility rather than blaming others and society for your bad decisions (and I'm betting that you, like most of us, have made some bad decisions from time to time - but try to learn from them rather than wallow in them).
My first job was Call Center tech support for eMachines (through a random 3rd-party contractor called "Alorica") at a whopping $7.25/hr in 2003.
It had health insurance. Not great insurance, mind you, but insurance. It would cover ER-type emergencies and had something like a $100 co-pay for standard visits. It was basically "don't go to the doctor unless you're actually dying insurance," and if you're in generally good health, like I was, or the author of this article. It's "good enough".
My next job after that was sales-drone at CompUSA for a whole 7.65/hr. But they had slightly better insurance. Then they went out of business. And my job after that was as a phone agent at Delta Airlines, starting at $8.50/hr and rising to $11.77/hr when I left.
It wasn't until 2007 that I got my first real tech-job. And it was still customer service. But it paid $15/hr and had "normal" insurance.
I fully realize the insurance situation is f'ed. And those in less good health get quite screwed. But, this guy... This guy caused himself a lot of his own problems.
I’m probably gonna be downvoted to hell but I was rebutted by the part where the guy just throws away food because it was not vegan (and stopped reading after that). He did mention health issue concerns, so maybe it was on good faith, but AFAIK if you’re hungry, and I mean really hungry, you don’t care. You just eat what you have as long as it is edible.
Amazing the amount of people who hate on him for this part of the story. He didn’t throw away food, he stuck to his morals and didn’t eat it. Hating on a poor person for having dignity? Keep up the good work.
It is because that part does not track at all. It is not healthier to go hungry then to eat that food. It is not "simple life" to ge vegan, it is cranking the complexity and expenses up.
Some part of the story are clear failures of the system. Some parts have nothing to do with the system (moms and dads decision). Some parts are system actually helping, maybe not enough but helping.
And then there were genuinely confusing parts as in someone with a seemingly normal job and three houses feeling like they dont have secure housing.
If someone makes a decision base on wrong information, what’s to blame: the informations he got or his judgement ability?
Two dimensions to interpret this:
- article author judgement on what’s healthy based solely on its personal nutritional knowledge at the moment.
- the judgement of his decision, solely on the details of this post.
IMHO the only fault here is to omit more information he was basing his decision. But reading between the lines: he repeat being "hungry" but never saying "staving". That’s a huge difference: being hungry isn’t a health hasard.
So because of his economic realities he should be pragmatic enough to drop his values?
Can't you see what a slippery slope that is? And in fact, how dangerous that level of economic despair is for a functioning democracy?
It's also not fair, because people who are more fortunate to be born into a well-off family can eat vegan their whole lives.
This person did everything he was supposed to do, stood up for things he believed in, and still was left in the lurch along the way. This is not the American dream, it is a clear indication how arrested social mobility is in the US. The rags-to-riches "Horatio Alger" story has been a myth in the US for quite a well, buoyed by anecdotes that are predicated on luck.
The irony of living in poverty and then owning a house that you list on Airbnb "for extra income". And deluding yourself into the key to financial success is being a bag holder for rich people, yikes.
This guy sounds like another "everything sucks but I got mine and everyone else should figure out how to get theirs". I get the struggle but I didn't really see him demonstrate empathy for others in his situation.
This same story made it to #1 on HN like a year ago and got featured on Forbes/CNBC type sites. I think the author created a new account to argue with people in the comments if that provides any additional context.
I think a lot of people who are eager for The System to die will have a rough reckoning to face when The System dies. In fact, The System doesn't even exist in most of the world in any meaningful way. The majority of the world's population does not live under conditions of great peace and rule of law. And even grasping that concept is alien to the majority of Americans: one of the 3M P100 filter cartridges of which he has two on his mask would provide a family in many places with food for a month.
I'm not saying "be happy for what you have; it could be worse". I'm specifically saying "when you're advocating for what you have to end; go see what it looks like in the world that doesn't have it".
Having moved to the US, I see a lot of people here have this strange Every Man Is An Island mentality combined with a view that Society Has Failed Me. For these people it is actually harder to cram 3 people to a room and just grind it out than to go buy a van and deck it out so you live by yourself and so on. Something I realize is a superpower a lot of successful people have is that they can do the things that are tough for them but nonetheless blockers to their success. They don't indulge their instincts like this (as he finds out after doing it that it doesn't save him much).
People don't like to hear this kind of thing because it seems like punching down. But don't imitate the guys who tried and failed if you want to succeed. Imitate the guys who tried and succeeded. You can look at the ones who failed to see what not to do. There's a lot there of trying to get one over everyone. "I'm going to do X and then I'm set for life" kind of reasoning. If you play that specific game you have to face the fact that loss is possible. It's a gamble. If I just buy the right crypto coin, I'll make it. I'm done. Then you post the loss porn on /r/wallstreetbets or whatever and everyone gives you props and upvote karma or whatever and then what. No money. They forget you. Next guy.
If you read the book Evicted you'll see this. The characters do all sorts of crap. One gets a windfall of a few hundred dollars. Chance to delay rent and eviction for a while. What does she do? "I deserve a treat after all this". When I moved here to the Bay, 3 men to a room, beds against the wall, rice and eggs every day, milk in the morning. Cheap. A few hours at min wage if necessary. I only realized many years later why people say "It's a marathon not a sprint". Neither metaphor made sense to me until I saw the guys who failed. Always with a scheme. "once I pull this one off, I'm done. I've made it". So that's what a sprint looks like. Success for them is 3 houses, one Airbnb'd, one for the mum, one for myself, leveraged 5x 3 times over. Live there by myself. Made it. Grinder. Hustler. Success.
Actually, the majority of people who are successful are the opposite. Did the hard thing. 3 men to a room, rice and eggs, milk in the morning. Not resoundingly successful. No 3 houses. No Airbnb. But kids one rung higher on the ladder. Those kids, 2 to a room, rice and eggs sometimes pork, milk in the morning. Not resoundingly successful. No 3 houses. No Airbnb. But kids one rung higher on the ladder. Those kids, 1 to a room, good food. Other guy sees that "born with a silver spoon in your mouth; born on third base think you hit a homer" etc. etc. Truth? If you're not this one, you have the chance to be the first guy. Your kids be the guy envied by the other guy. But if Every Man Is An Island then you can't do something for the ones who come after. You never step on the ladder. Just scheme at the bottom to invent trampoline to the top. Then complain when you bounce and land on ground instead of top of ladder.
The existence of yet worse systems does not make the American system fair. It is not difficult to picture societies where it is not required to build wealth for 4 generations to achieve moderate economic security. Further, specific measures to reduce systemic poverty in America are feasible without any kind of radical societal collapse.
Many wealthy people remain so despite (rarely, even because of) problems with impulse control or irrational perseverance. Exacerbation of these behaviors by stress is well understood. Why are they considered fatal moral defects only in people of low socioeconomic status?
What do you want the government to do when your parents decide to abandon civilization and then live out without plumbing in the Oregon wilderness and then your dad abandons the family to do drugs and alcohol? How can you blame “the system” for that?
My wife is also from Oregon. Her grandma was “marry a random truck driver at 14 for a ticket out of town” poor. The guy abandoned the family and drank himself to an early death. And her dad was similarly situated to this guy—my wife lived part of her childhood in a converted barn. Her takeaway from her family history was the opposite: people are often incredibly self destructive and you can’t help those people.
The problem isn’t that lawmakers were never poor. Many were. The problem is that all the ones who were were high-functioning enough to escape poverty. So our systems for helping poor people assume a level of competence and administrative capacity that’s simply beyond the capability of a lot of poor people. For example, a third of uninsured people are actually eligible for Medicaid. Someone in my wife’s family racked up 50,000 in medical bills because they didn’t sign up for Medicaid despite being eligible the whole time.
> How can you blame “the system” for that?
You can, and you should. We all need a helping hand of a community, and a community to heal. We are social beings. And we carry the responsibility for not helping, too.
[dead]
Here are a handful of things that “the system” could change that would have helped the author:
- free or greatly reduced cost of higher education
- replacing means-tested programs like Medicaid with universal versions. Medicare for all, for example, where you don’t have to jump through hoops or even opt in, is better than the dehumanizing system we have in place today. Also removes the barrier to slightly improving one’s life, since you won’t lose your aid after getting a 10% raise or w/e.
- cheaper housing, or public housing (god forbid!)
These are not pipe dreams, these are all things other civilized countries have. I don’t want to live in a world where you have to be either lucky or extraordinary to live a secure, modest life.
> my wife lived part of her childhood in a converted barn.
So did my mom, in Oregon.
Maybe no so ironically, my wife lived on a 2 trailer desert compound on a plot 2 miles from visible city infrastructure and 5 miles from any sort of built structure for most of her childhood.
Human are imperfect. One of the most critical functions of "the system" is to flatten out the consequences of imperfection across all humans in the system. To deny this is to invite the end.
Some people don't know what personal responsibility means.
This is deeply ironic, since often it is the people touting "personal responsibility" most loudly who misunderstand the concept most dramatically. They use it as a convenience to make it easy and comfortable to dismiss human suffering, rather than attempting to understand it.
Then when it impacts them directly, they still can’t take any responsibility for anything and it is someone else’s fault.
Which is hilarious, except that these people vote.
The system should not grind to a halt for a person because they did not fill out some paperwork
That such a trivial thing destines someone to endless debt and health issues is just cruelty. That it doesn't account for terrible parents when they are a constant like gravity itself is nothing more than the result of willfully ignorant politicians parroting tropes of long dead, less educated, and more ignorant politicians
Many politicians are intentionally in on the scam, erecting barriers so they can funnel wealth to rich corporations instead; look at this surplus from cutting education! Of course they don't say where the surplus came from so plainly. Mathematically air tight non-violent eugenics. Nevermind the meat suits engaged in such are useless themselves. Politicians are primarily just that, not also scientists and doctors. Just fuzzy VHS copies of historical story.
The system as a whole can be blamed for ignoring reality and coddling non-contributors. Boomers and GenX did not invent anything we rely on. Art, music, technology...etc etc... are centuries old.
But the contemporary elders act like reality itself is due to their existence. It's such a farcical concept. None of them are owed as none of them gave. They merely took the baton and redipped both ends in their own shit.
>...abandons the family to do drugs and alcohol? How can you blame “the system” for that?
We don't live in a vacuum and there a reasons why people turn to drug use that the system exacerbates. But that is completely irrelevant, because this blog post is a systemic critique, even if it is told through the life story of an individual. To cherry pick one stanza of the entire blog post to dismiss it on the grounds that the father who left is a drug addict is one more example of the delusions or strategies of the moralizing capitalist.
A heartbreaking story about a man's attempt to break out of generational poverty that feels relevant as we consider how AI changes labor and who it empowers.
A lot of us are excited about AI, but economic displacement can cause generations of trauma, and our safety net in the US is wholly inadequate toward that end.
I appreciate what you're saying holistically speaking, but whenever we talk about the societal consequences of AI in the US, I find it insidious that we focus on the inadequacy of our social safety nets. As if to say: Yes, C-suite, all you have to do is support UBI and you are free to obliterate what remains of the middle class in the United States of America.
I totally agree actually, and I think that having ownership over one's labor is extremely important. Without that self-determinism, people do not have the agency to define their lives, and their political actions become limited by their economic realities.
It is a likely outcome that the wealthy class offers the most meager basic income to avoid revolution but not much more than that.
I think we all need to talk about our leverage as a class of people who work for a living, and I'm not seeing nearly enough discussion about it. When Amodei talks about displacement of labor, he doesn't acknowledge how much trauma that economic displacement can cause and how many years that bell can ring.
I'm not really sure how this one ends. I'm afraid there will be violence, but I'm much more afraid that there won't be.
I guess they can also do the same without supporting UBI, so there's that..
thank you for sharing this. Too many people around me i see this story in. EU here. I am a lucky one as i get to look at my friends suffer from my temporary comfort. The title could not be more on point.
Are you actually EU? You know we are not one homogeneous state right? There are currently 27 nations, in which policy and circumstance varies between even at a regional level. There is immense poverty in some nations, notably Spain or Italy, but even Germany. I've seen it first hand, its heartbreaking.
https://www.statista.com/chart/30411/share-of-people-at-risk...
/rant
Edit: Why downvote? debate me. Its so childish to suppress comments you do not agree with.
Thanks for sharing this chart. I am amazed how Poland has less poverty than Germany. Maybe is East Germany bringing the average down for the entire country? Even then, still very impressive.
I don't disagree with much of what the author wrote here, except for the part about "I'm starving, but I'm vegan so I won't eat SPAM and I won't eat the peanut butter because it is 'processed' and has 'chemicals.'"
Humans are omnivores, veganism is a choice. You don't get to complain about how rough it is when you yourself have chosen to play with hard mode turned on. Obviously if there are health issues that require an altered diet that's a different story, but if that was mentioned I missed it somehow.
Everything else about the story has merit though, the rich are too rich and the US's "safety nets" are awful. Nobody should go bankrupt due to health problems they can't control.
I mean, if it’s eat meat or die you eat meat or die…but being vegan is a basic privilege. Especially because AFAIK vegan foods require less resources per calorie to produce, so would be cheaper except for logistics.
Avoiding hyper-processed food may be smart if it would lead to health problems later. One jar or peanut butter probably isn’t an issue. But at the macro level, countries spend much more on ER treatment than they could on preventative care, like free or subsidized healthy food.
I looked peanut butter and it's mushed roasted peanuts, sometime with vegetable oil added. Not much hyper processing or weird ingredients there.
Not sure if you’re straw manning intentionally so I’ll imagine the best: a misreporting of his words. Here they are:
> One winter when my roommate and I both were navigating our latest setbacks, we couldn’t make ends meet and we literally went hungry. There just was no money for food. We would go to the catholic food box donation center and they gave me a box, but I was vegan and the box was full of garbage Spam and Frank and Beans type stuff that I ended up just settting out on the curb. I would rather go hungry than develop health problems from filling up on ultraprocessed hydrogenated oil government peanut butter.
Being hungry isn’t starving, the way being out of breath is different from suffocating.
> Humans are omnivores, veganism is a choice
To understand his choice to not eat the box we might paraphrase him: "humans are natural whole food eater, not UPF eater".
It depends on what "human" definition is used: homo sapiens (biologie)? A poor American (context)?
Confusing.
You own 3 houses, including an airbnb and your conclusion is how unfair society is ?
Your doing better than most people. The weird moral grandstanding against Peanut Butter had to be the strangest part.
Anything less than organic whole foods produce is simply barbaric.
This isn't to say the system is good, our criminal justice system is a nightmare of indefinite detentions and human rights abuses.
But I'm not seeing much struggle in this post. OP kept that making weird choices. At a point you need to sort yourself out.
I grew up in a poor single parent household. I'm doing better than most now. I don't have any more or less moral high ground because of my past as far as what I do now goes. I kinda hate how that stuff like people's past is used like a tool, source of credibility, or weapon/sheild ...
Everyone got experiences.
> The weird moral grandstanding against Peanut Butter had to be the strangest part.
I suppose you’re not aware that peanut butter manufacturers (and many other food manufacturers) in the states were allowed to cut their product with partially hydrogenated oil because it’s cheaper and doesn’t go rancid as fast. GRAS strikes again.
Unfortunately partially hydrogenated oil is pretty bad for most humans: raises LDL, lowers HDL, correlates with colon cancer, etc etc.
FDA didn’t ban it until c. 2020.
One of the few things actual nutrition scientists agree with RFK Jr. on.
I'm sure him eating once would of been fine.
If you exclude all processed foods with preservatives and say if not for Certified Organic foods you'll just not eat, you don't really come off a struggling.
It's just an absolutely weird thing for the author of focus on.
It’s a single sentence in a long blog post. You’re the one that’s focused in on it.
And now you’re putting words in the author’s mouth, too. Not much discussion to be had about that.
This was rough to read. No wonder a growing number of people in your country hate immigrants so much.
Although, rationally speaking they are not be the cause of so much misfortune. People should do whatever they can to get ahead. No one should accept poverty. As long as you don’t cut the throat of other innocents, it’s all fine.
One thing I would say is don’t put yourself down - like good things aren’t for you. I wouldn’t frame it as you don’t deserve. Everyone deserves a good life. Deserve takes you down a self destructive path. But because of the circumstance if your birth, you can’t have it - now.
An excellent essay. Very grim but honest and likely resonates with most people on some level.
America has been a cruel place to be poor since day one. I encourage everyone to read Howard Zinn’s ‘A People's History of the United States’ as it shows a more grounded history of this country. The US needs a workforce of starving, ill, desperate people in order to work. That’s how the system was built: on the backs of African slaves and the European poor.
The unspoken rule of this society is that everyone should rely on their family for help and not the government. This is why life is especially cruel for those with little to no family.
Those who embrace and celebrate AI when there’s a chance it could lead to mass unemployment and suffering should take a long hard look in the mirror.
the OP probably is not telling the whole story and must have some kind of drug addiction going on that sucks up all of his wealth, because how do you even end up on a van when you split rent with a girlfriend/roommates? also the part where he refuses non-vegan food. yikes. and skateboarding as a hobby sounds great when you are uninsured
Wow. It’s scary to think this person votes.
A dude makes a series of terrible decisions. Decides to not learn from any them. Then blames society. Okay.
But my early story is eerily similar to his. Expect instead of just my dad dropping out to do drug, so did my mom. I grew up constantly moving between women’s shelters, random peoples couches and storage units.
And while he was in rural Oregon, I was in rural Idaho.
I ditched my parents as soon as I could. I worked basic non-silicon valley tech jobs. Moved from help desk ticket closer to actual IT career. No college, no money or time for it. Did alright.
Yeah life would have been a fuckton easier if I had supportive parents. But I’m in a good place and what I did wasn’t magic or luck. It was simply get basic job. Get shit apartment. Get slightly better job. Repeat.
This dude is deep in incel territory, which you can tell from the incel words he drops throughout his rant.
This dude says he never expected or needed any hand outs but several paragraphs earlier was complaining that the food bank didn’t provide vegan food. Ooohhh Kay. I have a lot of thoughts about both those statements. But dang dude. Maybe if you’re starving you should take any food you can get and deal with the rich people virtue signaling once you can afford to eat.
(To clarify on the above, being vegan is fucking great. It’s good to not kill animals… but you gotta take care of yourself before you take care of a cow.)
Yeah parts of the system are screw up. Yeah some people get a really unfair hand. But this guy was in generally good health, should have had health insurance through these crap jobs he was complaining about for his skateboard thing. (Which is another wtf that shows total lack of risk analysis. Who choses skateboarding as a hobby when you can’t afford a doctor. Jeez. Take up running.)
You, especially as someone who has "been there", nailed it.
And congrats on taking personal responsibility rather than blaming others and society for your bad decisions (and I'm betting that you, like most of us, have made some bad decisions from time to time - but try to learn from them rather than wallow in them).
You were absolutely lucky. And nobody had health insurance at a $10/hr job in 2004
My first job was Call Center tech support for eMachines (through a random 3rd-party contractor called "Alorica") at a whopping $7.25/hr in 2003.
It had health insurance. Not great insurance, mind you, but insurance. It would cover ER-type emergencies and had something like a $100 co-pay for standard visits. It was basically "don't go to the doctor unless you're actually dying insurance," and if you're in generally good health, like I was, or the author of this article. It's "good enough".
My next job after that was sales-drone at CompUSA for a whole 7.65/hr. But they had slightly better insurance. Then they went out of business. And my job after that was as a phone agent at Delta Airlines, starting at $8.50/hr and rising to $11.77/hr when I left.
It wasn't until 2007 that I got my first real tech-job. And it was still customer service. But it paid $15/hr and had "normal" insurance.
I fully realize the insurance situation is f'ed. And those in less good health get quite screwed. But, this guy... This guy caused himself a lot of his own problems.
I’m probably gonna be downvoted to hell but I was rebutted by the part where the guy just throws away food because it was not vegan (and stopped reading after that). He did mention health issue concerns, so maybe it was on good faith, but AFAIK if you’re hungry, and I mean really hungry, you don’t care. You just eat what you have as long as it is edible.
Amazing the amount of people who hate on him for this part of the story. He didn’t throw away food, he stuck to his morals and didn’t eat it. Hating on a poor person for having dignity? Keep up the good work.
> He didn’t throw away food
The literal source text beg to differ. He could have at least given it to someone else in need.
It is because that part does not track at all. It is not healthier to go hungry then to eat that food. It is not "simple life" to ge vegan, it is cranking the complexity and expenses up.
Some part of the story are clear failures of the system. Some parts have nothing to do with the system (moms and dads decision). Some parts are system actually helping, maybe not enough but helping.
And then there were genuinely confusing parts as in someone with a seemingly normal job and three houses feeling like they dont have secure housing.
> someone with a seemingly normal job and three houses feeling like they dont have secure housing
That is a well known symptom of being hard up and then achieving some success.
Your fears don't magically disappear when your circumstances improve.
If someone makes a decision base on wrong information, what’s to blame: the informations he got or his judgement ability?
Two dimensions to interpret this:
- article author judgement on what’s healthy based solely on its personal nutritional knowledge at the moment.
- the judgement of his decision, solely on the details of this post.
IMHO the only fault here is to omit more information he was basing his decision. But reading between the lines: he repeat being "hungry" but never saying "staving". That’s a huge difference: being hungry isn’t a health hasard.
So because of his economic realities he should be pragmatic enough to drop his values?
Can't you see what a slippery slope that is? And in fact, how dangerous that level of economic despair is for a functioning democracy?
It's also not fair, because people who are more fortunate to be born into a well-off family can eat vegan their whole lives.
This person did everything he was supposed to do, stood up for things he believed in, and still was left in the lurch along the way. This is not the American dream, it is a clear indication how arrested social mobility is in the US. The rags-to-riches "Horatio Alger" story has been a myth in the US for quite a well, buoyed by anecdotes that are predicated on luck.
The irony of living in poverty and then owning a house that you list on Airbnb "for extra income". And deluding yourself into the key to financial success is being a bag holder for rich people, yikes.
This guy sounds like another "everything sucks but I got mine and everyone else should figure out how to get theirs". I get the struggle but I didn't really see him demonstrate empathy for others in his situation.
This same story made it to #1 on HN like a year ago and got featured on Forbes/CNBC type sites. I think the author created a new account to argue with people in the comments if that provides any additional context.
Different article I think. Link to his reply to HN comments on that article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977897
Yeah I struggled reading through the whole thing...too much delusion and narcissism for me.
> delusion and narcissism
"internet psychology diagnosis" is unwelcome on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38589525 edit: the ban has nothing to do with how accurate your words might be.
Personally I try to avoid most psych words even in personal conversations because I hate using labels or psych talk with anybody.
I certainly hate anyone applying them to me. And sometimes I just end up avoiding anyone that overuses them.
If really necessary I'll talk about a behaviour (which doesn't make talking any easier, but at least one may avoid judgmental words).
nah he’s right.
You might think it unethical but you have to play the same games the elites play if you want to be free of elites.
I’m surprised he managed to get there though considering he previously mentioned he was unable to build any wealth
The author probably does not understand how radicalizing this text is.
What does that mean?
I think a lot of people who are eager for The System to die will have a rough reckoning to face when The System dies. In fact, The System doesn't even exist in most of the world in any meaningful way. The majority of the world's population does not live under conditions of great peace and rule of law. And even grasping that concept is alien to the majority of Americans: one of the 3M P100 filter cartridges of which he has two on his mask would provide a family in many places with food for a month.
I'm not saying "be happy for what you have; it could be worse". I'm specifically saying "when you're advocating for what you have to end; go see what it looks like in the world that doesn't have it".
Having moved to the US, I see a lot of people here have this strange Every Man Is An Island mentality combined with a view that Society Has Failed Me. For these people it is actually harder to cram 3 people to a room and just grind it out than to go buy a van and deck it out so you live by yourself and so on. Something I realize is a superpower a lot of successful people have is that they can do the things that are tough for them but nonetheless blockers to their success. They don't indulge their instincts like this (as he finds out after doing it that it doesn't save him much).
People don't like to hear this kind of thing because it seems like punching down. But don't imitate the guys who tried and failed if you want to succeed. Imitate the guys who tried and succeeded. You can look at the ones who failed to see what not to do. There's a lot there of trying to get one over everyone. "I'm going to do X and then I'm set for life" kind of reasoning. If you play that specific game you have to face the fact that loss is possible. It's a gamble. If I just buy the right crypto coin, I'll make it. I'm done. Then you post the loss porn on /r/wallstreetbets or whatever and everyone gives you props and upvote karma or whatever and then what. No money. They forget you. Next guy.
If you read the book Evicted you'll see this. The characters do all sorts of crap. One gets a windfall of a few hundred dollars. Chance to delay rent and eviction for a while. What does she do? "I deserve a treat after all this". When I moved here to the Bay, 3 men to a room, beds against the wall, rice and eggs every day, milk in the morning. Cheap. A few hours at min wage if necessary. I only realized many years later why people say "It's a marathon not a sprint". Neither metaphor made sense to me until I saw the guys who failed. Always with a scheme. "once I pull this one off, I'm done. I've made it". So that's what a sprint looks like. Success for them is 3 houses, one Airbnb'd, one for the mum, one for myself, leveraged 5x 3 times over. Live there by myself. Made it. Grinder. Hustler. Success.
Actually, the majority of people who are successful are the opposite. Did the hard thing. 3 men to a room, rice and eggs, milk in the morning. Not resoundingly successful. No 3 houses. No Airbnb. But kids one rung higher on the ladder. Those kids, 2 to a room, rice and eggs sometimes pork, milk in the morning. Not resoundingly successful. No 3 houses. No Airbnb. But kids one rung higher on the ladder. Those kids, 1 to a room, good food. Other guy sees that "born with a silver spoon in your mouth; born on third base think you hit a homer" etc. etc. Truth? If you're not this one, you have the chance to be the first guy. Your kids be the guy envied by the other guy. But if Every Man Is An Island then you can't do something for the ones who come after. You never step on the ladder. Just scheme at the bottom to invent trampoline to the top. Then complain when you bounce and land on ground instead of top of ladder.
The existence of yet worse systems does not make the American system fair. It is not difficult to picture societies where it is not required to build wealth for 4 generations to achieve moderate economic security. Further, specific measures to reduce systemic poverty in America are feasible without any kind of radical societal collapse.
Many wealthy people remain so despite (rarely, even because of) problems with impulse control or irrational perseverance. Exacerbation of these behaviors by stress is well understood. Why are they considered fatal moral defects only in people of low socioeconomic status?
Very well said.