Earlier quoted context omitted.
85% of American millionaires are self-made. Source: "The Millionaire Next Door" book.
85% of wizards are educated at Hogwarts. "Harry Potter" book.
Hogwarts isn't even the largest school, that'd be Uagadou.
Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
281–290 of 374 posts
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is even more the case with the legal system. Regular infractions (under-age drinking, recreational drugs, shoplifting) are minor speed bumps for kids in a middle-class family. But for a poor family, they can send people on the wrong track indefinitely.
That is a travesty of our justice system (or maybe any justice system). The more money you have, the better your lawyers, the better deals can be cut. The rich & upper middle-class will probably just get off with a slap on the wrist (if that). The poor & lower-middle class with not so many means and court appointed lawyers get the harshest sentences and are basically used as statistics for your public prosecutors pro…
It's not just the lawyers. It's even much more basic and mundane stuff, like fines and fees.
Say you parked your car in a wrong spot - a mistake that many people make at least once in their life. In US (and many other countries), the fine for that is a fixed amount. For some people it's pretty much chump change, while for the others it can be the difference between paying a different bill late or not.
Yet others can't pay the ticket at all, and then there's a fine for not doing that. If you're poor enough, you can easily rack up thousands of dollars in debt to the government for something as trivial as parking in a wrong spot, or having a broken taillight (which you don't have money to fix).
Then you get an arrest warrant, and that's when court fees and lawyer fees start piling in - on top of everything you've already accrued.
And, of course, because you can't post bail, they lock you up, and by the time you get out (assuming you're lucky with your public defender and do get out), you have probably lost your job. If you're especially unlucky, you may have also lost your rental, and your things have been thrown out onto the street.
Worse yet, some municipalities have learned the rules of that game, and decided that they want a cut. Ferguson is a prominent example, but it is one among many.
http://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-fi...
How do you fix it? Well, insofar as fines are meant to be punitive, you scale them to the income of the person being fined, for example.
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like an interesting experiment. My parents provided neither money, nor knowledge on social structures. Personally, I'd take the money. I can learn social structures, I can't "learn" a giant pile of bootstrap money.
> Personally, I'd take the money. I can learn social structures, I can't "learn" a giant pile of bootstrap money. But if you already know the social structures, you don't need to learn the pile of money. You can just go ask for it!
It very much depends on the society in question. The value of social capital has a different price tag in cash (in a sense of how much real value you can derive by leveraging it) in different places.
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#284Earlier 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 $1M to $2M is almost inevitable. If that were true, I could easily borrow it now and make my way there.
If I were given a interest free million dollar loan it wouldn't be hard to invest it and have two million in a few decades. Compounding interest is the key.
It actually kinda disturbs me in a way how easy it is to make money when you have money.
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#285I 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 flunk…
>all of the other skills that college didn't teach but, are critical to a working professional programmer (git for instance).
Any good CS college program will teach you version control. I learned it in college first day.
(Not specifically git because that didn't exist when I went to college)
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#286I 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 flunk…
Your story is a perfect illustration of "anecdotes are not data", and self-selection bias.
Think about it: the reason why you're telling us the story is that you have succeeded. If you didn't, you probably wouldn't be hanging out here on NH.
And so we have your success story, but we don't know how many people persevered just as much, but didn't succeed because the curve was just too steep for them.
So there's no practical way to gauge your exceptionalism from this story, or derive any practical conclusion from it. Most importantly, we don't know if your success was 90% hard work and 10% luck, or 10% hard work and 90% luck.
(Note, this isn't to imply that you didn't have to work hard. What this means, rather, is whether working as hard as you did guarantees success, or merely buys you a ticket to the lottery, in which you still have a fairly low chance of winning, despite all that hard work. The latter is the "10% hard work and 90% luck" case.)
And it's especially hard to self-evaluate. When you have heavily invested in all that hard work, psychologically, you're that much more likely to attribute your success to it rather than external factors, and you start thinking of it as "inevitable". The reason is that success as a result of hard work fits our notion of fairness (which ethologists say is hard-wired pretty deep on biological level) very well, and so we automatically assume a causative link between the two, on the basis that the world is "inherently fair": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#287Earlier 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…
well... He/she clearly said that:
p(success|rich) > p(success|poor)
and never implied that:
p(success|rich) = 1
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 flunk…
>all of the other skills that college didn't teach but, are critical to a working professional programmer (git for instance). Any good CS college program will teach you version control. I learned it in college first day. (Not specifically git because that didn't exist when I went to college)
Yeah, but you have to pay for good CS college programs, usually. Or spend a lot of effort to find them for cheap or free (and learn enough to be able the good ones from the bad ones first).
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did not agree at all. In my experience it's much easier to make 1 million then it is to invest 1 million and make another million. Also there are many startups that require zero investment capital and if you do not have a family and you minimise your expenses you can leave on very very little. If you do have a family it's more difficult but still possible.
'Its easier to make a million starting from zero than make a million starting with a million' is the essence of what you just said. This is easily the dumbest thing Ive ever heard on this site. Seriously. Can we guild and save this somehow?
Are you talking from your own experience? I am. I made a million dollars and it wasn't easy but it was actually a lot more difficult to invest $1 million and make more money with it. I personally found it a lot more difficult.
I think most people greatly underestimate the difficulty in investing money successfully.
If you are talking about the amount of time invested ... yes of course there is a lot less time spent investing. However if you are talking about the probability of success I would argue It's not as high as you would think to take $1 million and turn it into $2 million.
Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent
#290For a year or so I've been keeping an ad hoc record (a text file!), to the best of my ability, of all my financial losses due to personal mistakes - so, moving out of my old apartment a month late was a 1200$ 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…
Another way of thinking about this is the phrase: it's expensive being poor. If you don't have the excess income to absorb these small mistakes/oversights/misfortunes then there are secondary effects (job loss, civil fines, court fees, etc.) that can destroy you financially. Edit: butchered my phrase
The destruction is emotionally as well. My experience with having no money - the stress was very real.