Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 346 posts

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#311

Post by curun1r »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #307
curun1r wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're the one calling out people for lack of compassion towards the poor people in the article. Who's to say that they haven't decided to focus on the immigrants in their own states over the plight of the poor in those other states. There's limits to everything, right? Why are you the only one that gets to draw the line between those who do and those who don't deserve pity? Why are you the one that gets to decide th…

> Why are you the only one that gets to draw the line between those who do and those who don't deserve pity? All humans deserve pity. A country has limited resources, and must collectively decide (by its citizenry) how those resources are spent. Citizenship entitles you to a vote. That's democracy! > Why are you the one that gets to decide that citizens of a state that voted for the treatment they're receiving are mo…

What I meant by citizenship being artificial is that I, a citizen, do not owe a greater allegiance to other citizens above non-citizens. Of course citizenship has its implications in the ability to vote, work legally and such. But its membership does not create an "us" that's in opposition to the non-citizen "them." If we're going to get tribal, I'm far more aligned with foreigners who share my worldview than I am with most Americans. I don't feel a greater tug on my heartstrings when reading the article we're discussing than I do when I read about the refugee crisis in Syria. I know more Syrians than I know people from West Virginia.

It's like the difference between coworkers and friends. Coworkers are people you're grouped with for convenience sake. But you don't need to share any close bond with them. Friends are people you choose to associate with and for whom you care deeply. Coworkers can also be friends, but they don't have to be. My fellow citizens are like my coworkers. Many illegal aliens are like my friends. If I were to suggest to you that you should prioritize your coworkers above your friends, you'd react in much the same way that I'm reacting here when you tell me I should prioritize citizens over non-citizens.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#312

Post by hestipod »

marak830 wrote: post #192
marak830 wrote: post #181

(edit: I finished it,as I should have the first time. Not that i change my point of view though) I couldn't finish the article, not because it was too heartbreaking, but because of the stupidity of the author. ..."went to the already-crowded Dollar Store and Dollar General and bought dog food, dog treats, Slim Jims, three six-packs of Milwaukee’s Best, pruners for digging roots and a backpack to carry it all." I have…

So to the downvoters, do you actually have a logical response, or just a knee jerk reaction? I have been there, I grew up not knowing where each meal was coming from. I have lived next to and interacted with people who can't make logical decisions about what to do. I have seen people pull themselves from there, to actually attain something worthwhile, (I'd like to believe I am one of those people), and I have seen an…

So what about those of us, who are despite common belief the majority, who are in between? Those too old or broken or indebted to work like a 14yo and hope for a future? Those who lost everything after doing what you did and building a life. Those of us who WANT to better ourselves and be independent but cannot get the support to do so? What do you expect US to do? You are falling victim to survivorship bias and victim blaming when you say "I did it and know others who have therefore anyone can". Do you really think I would CHOOSE to live like this if I had an alternative? You need to believe it's all bored, lazy people so you can hold on to your point of view and feel safe yourself. You are afraid and you take it out on those suffering. I have seen this over and over. Any "discussion" people with such views ever have is full of blame and assumption.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#313

Post by bbradley406 »

marak830 wrote: post #221
sulam wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you've never been truly poor. Speaking as someone who was raised extremely poor and took a while to get out of it even as an adult, you really have to have been there to understand the mindset. There are many factors that go into it, some of which are structural (when you're 51 yrs old earning https://newrepublic.com/article/89377/poverty-escape-psychol... ) As far as the do…

I have been there. I grew up in that situation and crawled out of it. I struggled for everything I have, and I saw many people who said it was too hard. For those, I have zero sympathy. There is no reason to buy beer or cigarettes. They are just a crutch. I have seen my father brought down by that, as well as cousins, sisters and brothers. If the aforementioned 51yo was living by themselves ? I could almost see their…

If it happened to that many of your relatives, maybe there was a reason?

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#314

Post by fallingfrog »

mmirate wrote: post #201
fallingfrog wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, you should really think about your usage of that word "evaluate". These are people, but you're talking about them in the language that a master might use to discuss the value of a slave- as in, how many dollars do they bring in. What's the value of a bedtime story read to a child? We are all going to die man, life is not about money and profit. Go outside and breathe the fresh air and rethink your life.

The world is indifferent to people's existence. People will only ever mean something if they accomplish something, not because they're people. Why should I, or anyone, see differently? > What's the value of 1 bedtime story read to a child? Well, if we could perform a large study, starting during the participants' childhood, with half the children read X bedtime stories and the other half read X -1, and could somehow…

Wow.

You seem so confident in your assessment of the value of a bedtime story. I think it's called the dunning-Kruger effect.

Have you ever read a bedtime story to a child?

Life is a beautiful, fleeting thing that can be treasured or squandered. You can't use all that profit to buy it back once it's gone.

Someday, you will understand this.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#315

Post by Noos »

forkandwait wrote: post #24

So why can't we invest enough time and money in these people to make them engineers and technicians? Then they might be able to start shops that make and distribute the tourist trinkets mentioned by another poster. Why is the only solution that a large company that someone else creates moves in and provides low skill jobs?

Imagine if you as a programmer suddenly woke up at age 30 to find programming as a career was dead due to AI. The government is willing to invest time and money...into you retraining as a professional juggler, in the hope you would start your own street performing job, because the wave of the future is tourist performances.

Juggling was the farthest thing from your mind growing up, and you aren't particularly talented or skilled in manual dexterity. So for you to try to be one, you need to put in a LOT of effort, and it may be for something that you aren't good at, and will lose the few permanent positions as a employed juggler to some kid at age 20 who has made juggling his whole life and has the talent for it. You might also need to accept that you might be a contract juggler even if you do manage to retrain, and that it might all be wasted because you might be too old to be hired, or that they taught you to juggle pins when you needed to constantly update your repertoire and juggle chainsaws.

This is what retraining for STEM looks like for someone who has never considered it. Most programmers never really get that they in essence like juggling, and that's what enabled them to do their career...there is so much winnowing out even at the college level that STEM has selected for people who not only like STEM and have a lot of talent for it, they willing spend their off time working on STEM related stuff, often for free. If you don't have that powerful motivation from a young age, and need to learn or retrain for it, it's a lot grimmer, even if you are intelligent or successful in other areas. I use juggling because for most people, it's probably about as hard to be a professional at as computing is for non-STEM inclined.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#316

Post by wahern »

jrs95 wrote: post #269
ocb wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of psychopath-filled nightmare land do you live in?

Columbus, OH lol I suppose I'm probably just unlucky, but you can't deny that the odds of this stuff happening goes way up in an urban area.

Apparently forcible rape is _less_ common in big cities:

  http://victimsofcrime.org/docs/default-source/ncvrw2015/2015ncvrw_stats_urbanrural.pdf?sfvrsn=2
But the arrest rate of perpetrators is much greater in the city. Unless I'm reading it wrong. Per the note, the two graphs aren't directly comparable.

EDIT: Seems that Alaskans are incredibly rapey:

http://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/Publications_NSVRC_...

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#317

Post by mmirate »

fallingfrog wrote: post #314
mmirate wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is indifferent to people's existence. People will only ever mean something if they accomplish something, not because they're people. Why should I, or anyone, see differently? > What's the value of 1 bedtime story read to a child? Well, if we could perform a large study, starting during the participants' childhood, with half the children read X bedtime stories and the other half read X -1, and could somehow…

Wow. You seem so confident in your assessment of the value of a bedtime story. I think it's called the dunning-Kruger effect. Have you ever read a bedtime story to a child? Life is a beautiful, fleeting thing that can be treasured or squandered. You can't use all that profit to buy it back once it's gone. Someday, you will understand this.

> You seem so confident in your assessment of the value of a bedtime story. I think it's called the dunning-Kruger effect.

I wouldn't infer "so confident" from ... hmm, what phrase did I use? ... "slightly-educated". Now, I'm sorry if that diction earlier was unclear.

So let me clarify. No layperson should ever assign nontrivial confidence to their prior-expectation assessment of a question whose true answer unequivocally requires decades of research to find ... and I am no different from any other layperson in this regard.

> Have you ever read a bedtime story to a child?

Hell no. I do not yet possess even close to enough resources to support a family, let alone raise a child. Certainly you do not take me for an irresponsible fool.

But doing that wouldn't help answer the question of what is one bedtime story worth. Indeed, any single person's entire lifetime isn't long enough for that one person to get enough data points for something even resembling a confident answer.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#318

Post by lancewiggs »

occultist_throw wrote: post #256
hestipod wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how 99% of people are. I wouldn't have believed it until I became a victim. Even people who claim to love you and you have known for life. In the end people care about themselves and if you challenge their just-world view by suffering in front of them, or make them feel bad or guilty, they attack. The sad part is for those people nothing will change it but being forced into despair themselves and then it's to…

> This is how 99% of people are. I wouldn't have believed it until I became a victim. Even people who claim to love you and you have known for life. I used to be a republican. Or Libertarian. Blame my parents, as I do. They're dyed-in-the-wool republicans/christians, where if you have bad happen, you must have deserved it. So they dont help because you should be able to rescue yourself. One of their most shameful mom…

Capitalism does not require a lack of empathy- quite the reverse. Good capitalists help every stakeholder, from paying everybody well to providing great, safe, products and excellent returns. The US system is sickening sometimes.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#319

Post by dragonwriter »

Noos wrote: post #315
forkandwait wrote: post #24

So why can't we invest enough time and money in these people to make them engineers and technicians? Then they might be able to start shops that make and distribute the tourist trinkets mentioned by another poster. Why is the only solution that a large company that someone else creates moves in and provides low skill jobs?

Imagine if you as a programmer suddenly woke up at age 30 to find programming as a career was dead due to AI. The government is willing to invest time and money...into you retraining as a professional juggler, in the hope you would start your own street performing job, because the wave of the future is tourist performances. Juggling was the farthest thing from your mind growing up, and you aren't particularly talente…

> STEM has selected for people who not only like STEM and have a lot of talent for it, they willing spend their off time working on STEM related stuff, often for free.

No, that's not true of STEM in general, and actually AFAICT not particularly true of programming outside of the startup scene and top tech firms; the spare-time programmer is much less common, AFAICT, in the legions of programmer outside of those places, and the parallel phenomenon is no more common in non-programming STEM fields than in non-STEM fields.

Re: After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

#320

Post by alexanderstears »

rbanffy wrote: post #302
alexanderstears wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask them whether they'd prefer UBI or the current system assuming both cost the same.

I did. It's a principle thing. That odd notion that if you can't feed yourself you don't deserve to be fed.

They might have fooled you with that answer but that doesn't address the question.
Post reply on HN