Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens when everyone chooses the same good school?
What happens when everyone wants to buy a particular car or a particular phone?
You wait two weeks while they make some more.
Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
101–110 of 374 posts
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, now you can forgive yourself and be proud of what you've accomplished and will continue to.
I find the opposite - I'm deeply ashamed about growing up in poverty and rarely admit it. When it comes up, I find it creates distance between myself and my co workers. They get uncomfortable and I always feel like they think I am judging them somehow. I don't seem poor anymore: thousands of dollars on dental care, I dress OK, I have a fairly polished accent now. I don't talk to most of my family. My old friends live…
As a I mentioned above, please consider therapy. It's not perfect, but you deserve to find some happiness. There may be some groups where you can find people with similar backgrounds, such as drug-survivors (al-anon etc).
Also, time may heal. I'm old enough that my unhappy adolescence now feels like a dream, even though there are some lasting effects.
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I knew someone who was so aggressively proud of their success, having founded and grown a successful business. He'd talk your ear off about how people like him were the ones adding value to society and how unsuccessful people are just lazy and don't try hard enough or don't take enough risks, or are just deadbeats, and how successful, hard working people are punished with taxes--you know, the standard soapbox speech.…
> Going from $0 to $1M is almost impossible--going from $1M to $2M is almost inevitable. I know plenty of people who inherited money and blew it all. Very, very few people, even children from ''rich'' families, have an ''infinite money cushion''. People who come from poverty or communities rampant with discrimination often times have to work harder for opportunities. But hard work is hard work, and there is fierce co…
It depends on where one lives. Where I currently live, it takes about $25M in wealth just to get out of middle class and into lower upper class. And, to get into the true upper class requires maybe $500M to a billion. And, at that level, it is effectively infinite money (like > $250k a day in passive income, at the lowest level).
-4 in less than 30 minutes. that's a record for me. I must have said something controversial. So, glad that I could help :-)
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#104This article had me in tears. I grew up so poor I often didn't have shoes and wore dollar-store flip flops in the winter. Deadbeat dad, opiate addict mother. I was shuffled constantly from relative to relative, friend's house to friend's house. I had some very supportive teachers, including one who paid for my AP tests and SATs. I got an offer to a university in the UC system. Life was looking up! In the last semeste…
Have you read 'Into the Magic Shop'?
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fuuuuck dude.. You elaborated more eloquently than I ever could have. Reality: I've been making more than $200K USD since I was about 27 Mentality: I'm one day away from being homeless. I've been in therapy for 5 years but I've never touched this thought process yet. I think I need to.
>Mentality: I'm one day away from being homeless. Exactly that. A while ago, I had to move. I just collapsed. It brought back too much about being kicked out over and over again. And yet, I can't seem to stop moving. I've lived in four states and two countries and I'm only 25. I think after being homeless so long I am just eternally homeless.
I'm forcing myself to accept that I deserve good things, so I got an amazing apartment downtown in my city that has an incredible view. The plan is to renovate this apartment and make it a home.
The mentality was so bad that for the last 15 years, I didn't even have a bed. I would just sleep on the floor.
Last year, by fluke, I ended up in a place where I had a regular bed. It was foreign to me.
All kinds of fucked up.
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#106For a year or so I've been keeping an ad hoc record (a text file!), to the best of my ability, of all my financial losses due to personal mistakes - so, moving out of my old apartment a month late was a 1200$ mistake, and dropping and breaking my phone was a 200$ one. I'm also trying to keep track of very risky behavior that didn't become an actual financial loss: driving in NYC during the blizzard last year didn't a…
I call this my 'idiot expense' account, after this Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=Idiot+Expense
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#107I wish I could remember where I read this, but I once heard it explained to me as this: It's easy to deride the journey of the rich college student: 80-hour internships at Goldman Sachs, unpaid positions in government, etc. But, the things that are done by successful people are hard, as hard as walking a tightrope. The difference is that rich students walk this tightrope over a bed of pillows. Poor students walk it o…
Respectfully, this is kinda BS.
Your average American kid has already won a genetic lottery. Being born and raised in America is already great.
I grew up the kid of immigrant parents from an African country and I am an immigrant myself at 5 years old. I have a great job at a major well known tech company in a technical programming position.
I'm not the kid that got straight A's. I was the smart fuckup. I almost flunked out of high school. I dropped out of college. I could barely program worth a damn out of college. It was hard work learning not only how to program but, all of the other skills that college didn't teach but, are critical to a working professional programmer (git for instance).
Now, I'll argue there weren't a bed of nails. There were a bed of pillows. I had to move back in with my parents multiple times through my twenties. I thought back then that I was walking over a pit of spikes but, it turns out I wasn't.
Today is much different than even a decade ago, so much more than a generation ago.
You can teach yourself how to program. You can work a minium wage job while you teach yourself. You can't do it in LA, SF, NYC but, you can live in the parts of the US that no one talks about and learn.
It takes time and dedication but, one can do it.
I fully financially supported my brother for two years and he didn't learn or do really anything with that time other than barely pass a bad coding bootcamp and then struggle to find a job with that inadequate education.
The greater difference is the person and their perseverance than economic circumstances. As a poor person who made it by screwing up again and again and again and again. Unless I have astronomical luck, I really don't think it's that hard.
Seriously, if you have the intelligence to program, you should be able to find a minimum wage job or what I did, work nights doing security. I learned programming (reading programming books and coding) while I watched warehouses, trucking depots and the gate at gated communities. It was still a fuckton of hard work but, the hard part was the programming not figuring out how I was going to feed myself.
Maybe I'm somehow this unicorn of blind exceptionalism but, while I felt depressed and that it was hard at the time, it doesn't feel that hard now. I just kept working and it was more of less inevitable. Even today, I keep telling my brother that if he keeps working at it, it will eventually work.
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Internalized fear of abandonment, shame, and undervaluing of self-worth... Takes years of work to undo, even after you've made it. My story is similar to the parent comment - not as severe, but close. I'm doing well now, but I suffer deeply from impostor syndrome and am constantly waiting to be fired, or cast out or sent back to the bread line, even though, rationally, I know that these are not likely, or even possib…
I'd love to talk to people in a similar situation. I just feel very out of place all the time. Imposter Syndrome is not quite right, but close enough.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, it sounds like. You have my sympathies.
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#109I wish I could remember where I read this, but I once heard it explained to me as this: It's easy to deride the journey of the rich college student: 80-hour internships at Goldman Sachs, unpaid positions in government, etc. But, the things that are done by successful people are hard, as hard as walking a tightrope. The difference is that rich students walk this tightrope over a bed of pillows. Poor students walk it o…
It's too easy to generalize this as a lack of money problem. Certainly lack of money is a factor, but so is attitude and character. There are plenty of examples of people from lower income backgrounds rising above their backgrounds even with setbacks along the way because they persevered through difficulties. There are also plenty of examples of people who failed and squandered lots of opportunities. There's an eleme…
Yes, there are tales. But that's all they are: Tales. They're not statistically significant. And you can have all the "attitude and character" in the world, but if you've got a family to feed and shelter, most people are going to take the rational course of action and get a job so they can provide for that family, rather than take the riskier path.
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's too easy to generalize this as a lack of money problem. Certainly lack of money is a factor, but so is attitude and character. There are plenty of examples of people from lower income backgrounds rising above their backgrounds even with setbacks along the way because they persevered through difficulties. There are also plenty of examples of people who failed and squandered lots of opportunities. There's an eleme…
Yes, there are tales. But that's all they are: Tales. They're not statistically significant. And you can have all the "attitude and character" in the world, but if you've got a family to feed and shelter, most people are going to take the rational course of action and get a job so they can provide for that family, rather than take the riskier path.
As I've posted before, my old minister used to say "We can have all of the morals we can afford"