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This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

thelastpsychiatrist.com

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Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#101

Post by SHOwnsYou »

ShardPhoenix wrote: post #93
SHOwnsYou wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be nice to have a life so luxurious you can't stomach working a dead end job for 2 months. It is interesting to me the different notions of pride people have. I would lose all my pride if I had to take out loans to survive. It seems you would lose your pride if you ever had to take something less than you thought you were worth. It has been impressed upon me my entire life that self sufficiency is the greates…

Your brand of macho bullshit is pretty tiresome.

I can assure you there is no macho bullshit here, it is just confidence in myself.

If you'd like to have more of a discussion rather than some name calling, I'd love to talk about it.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#102

Post by SHOwnsYou »

randallsquared wrote: post #96
SHOwnsYou wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be nice to have a life so luxurious you can't stomach working a dead end job for 2 months. It is interesting to me the different notions of pride people have. I would lose all my pride if I had to take out loans to survive. It seems you would lose your pride if you ever had to take something less than you thought you were worth. It has been impressed upon me my entire life that self sufficiency is the greates…

rather than your own hard work. Grow some balls, stomach your problems, and power through it. That's always worked for me, but it's never been something I could do by settling for less, as you were initially advocating. I always had to shoot for more. Another thing that worries me, however, is that I know a lot of people who worked at least as hard as I did, and are still stuck in that $10/hr job. Who've made the lea…

It's not settling for less.

Look at it like a basic negotiation. You suggest a proposition, if it gets declined, you keep coming back with propositions more in the favor of the other party until they accept.

That is how I view it. I can't get a job that pays 60k right now, so I'll take this job at McDonalds that pays 20k. Meanwhile, I will continue to work my ass off to find a 60k job and prove to the hiring manager that I am the person that will benefit them the most.

The difference between people that work hard and have something and people that work hard and don't have something is a combination of desire, drive, and confidence. As I stated before. You obviously have a mountain of heart.

THAT IS WHY IT'S YOU AND NOT THEM.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#103

Post by elblanco »

nroach wrote: post #19
yalurker wrote: post #13

Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless. From the article: "Were you smarter at 21 post college than your Dad was at 21? And whatever the difference, was it worth the $50k-$200k he paid to get you it?" Yes. Yes I was smarter. And I didn't pay 200k because I went to a state school. I graduated a wholly different person with a completely different world-view and a ton of appli…

I agree. However, another route would be to take a sum equal to your 1st year college tuition, and use that to seed a bootstrapped startup. Take a year, $20-50k, and see what you can build. If you fail, you still have (ostensibly) three years of college funding left to go, and you can probably pay off that 4th year through hard work by the time you graduate. When you graduate, you have the degree and a really interes…

My first year of college education was probably about $2000. I'm not sure I could have done much more than pay a couple months rent with that.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#104

Post by rick888 »

cma wrote: post #95
rick888 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Europe, on the whole, balances lower individual buying power and higher unemployment against taking substantially better care of its citizens," "lower individual buying power" means much higher taxes and less freedom with your money. Right now, the unemployment rate in most European countries is almost the same as it is in the US: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&...

>>"lower individual buying power" means much higher taxes and less freedom with your money. Higher taxes don't necessarily mean less freedom with your money; a collective good that a group largely (or even unanimously) in favor of purchasing might go unpurchased due to the free rider problem. See Mancur Olson's "The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups"

"Higher taxes don't necessarily mean less freedom with your money; a collective good that a group largely (or even unanimously) in favor of purchasing might go unpurchased due to the free rider problem."

When you are taxed, that money may or may not go toward something you want to purchase (and many times, the people in the middle and upper classes are paying for programs that they will never use). That money is gone and you have that much less to spend, save, or invest.

You also don't really have a say in where it's spent.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#105

Post by randallsquared »

SHOwnsYou wrote: post #102
randallsquared wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rather than your own hard work. Grow some balls, stomach your problems, and power through it. That's always worked for me, but it's never been something I could do by settling for less, as you were initially advocating. I always had to shoot for more. Another thing that worries me, however, is that I know a lot of people who worked at least as hard as I did, and are still stuck in that $10/hr job. Who've made the lea…

It's not settling for less. Look at it like a basic negotiation. You suggest a proposition, if it gets declined, you keep coming back with propositions more in the favor of the other party until they accept. That is how I view it. I can't get a job that pays 60k right now, so I'll take this job at McDonalds that pays 20k. Meanwhile, I will continue to work my ass off to find a 60k job and prove to the hiring manager…

The difference between people that work hard and have something and people that work hard and don't have something is a combination of desire, drive, and confidence.

There's certainly something to that. For me, though, it was psychologically difficult, to say the least, to hold the confidence and drive to make something of myself, while doing a good job at manufacturing refrigerators or operating a cash register. Given the large number of folk who never seem to get out of those dead-end service jobs, I think there may well be a lot of people like me. :)

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#106

Post by rick888 »

jwhitlark wrote: post #80
rick888 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think the fact that we're seeing a lot of articles, stories, and publications revolving around the thoughts of college becoming useless and the importance of starting businesses says something about the way our culture is changing, and perhaps waking up." When I was 19, 20, and 21, I didn't see the importance of college. Now that I'm 29 (with a bachelor's degree), I do. I suspect that many of these articles are wr…

I certainly think that education is important. I think the problem lately is people have been valuing formal education over life experience. College is not the only life experience, nor in my opinion, is it the most important one. Life is not a checklist!

"I certainly think that education is important. I think the problem lately is people have been valuing formal education over life experience. College is not the only life experience, nor in my opinion, is it the most important one."

College can't replace life experience. But, many of the articles I have seen go in the opposite direction and say that college is useless.

To some it may be useless, but you will only get something out of it if you put in the effort.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#107

Post by randallsquared »

SHOwnsYou wrote: post #100
randallsquared wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be nice to have a life so luxurious you can't stomach working a dead end job for 2 months. Wow. This is exactly the opposite of what I meant to convey. It seems you would lose your pride if you ever had to take something less than you thought you were worth. What's pride got to do with this? It's not about pride, or self-respect, or honor, or any of that. It's about a pervasive feeling of helplessness, of fee…

I want to start by saying that what you wrote in the first paragraphs is very raw. I like it a lot. I was serious when I said I was interested to know. I used to be extremely introverted. I thought I was smarter than everyone else (not saying you're like this), and pretty much was happy doing my own little thing. Then I got my first job. I had to go out and talk to a lot of people. Even though it was usually small ta…

It is puzzling to me that you feel better about yourself living off of loans playing video games than working at a dead end job.

Oh, if I'd thought I was living off of loans, I'd have been doomed, sure. Instead, I was just temporarily borrowing some money until things improved. That turned out to be true, and those people got paid back. The whole point was to live as though I were about to get a job paying what I'd been making, which helped enormously in believing that I was going to, which helped me stay optimistic over the months until I actually did, which meant I kept trying at an optimum sustained level, and that I could smile and joke when talking with recruiters and interviewers, rather than saying the minimum required to get off the phone in the expectation that it wouldn't matter anyway, etc.

But enough of my life history, eh? :)

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#108

Post by SHOwnsYou »

randallsquared wrote: post #107
SHOwnsYou wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to start by saying that what you wrote in the first paragraphs is very raw. I like it a lot. I was serious when I said I was interested to know. I used to be extremely introverted. I thought I was smarter than everyone else (not saying you're like this), and pretty much was happy doing my own little thing. Then I got my first job. I had to go out and talk to a lot of people. Even though it was usually small ta…

It is puzzling to me that you feel better about yourself living off of loans playing video games than working at a dead end job. Oh, if I'd thought I was living off of loans, I'd have been doomed, sure. Instead, I was just temporarily borrowing some money until things improved. That turned out to be true, and those people got paid back. The whole point was to live as though I were about to get a job paying what I'd b…

I am very interested in your life history.

What I get from this post is that you have to delude yourself into thinking something that isn't true to not lose hope.

That is a very dangerous way to think. If you don't accept reality, you are losing out. Not just on what is actually happening, but it is how to build confidence in yourself. "I am in a terrible situation, but by my ability to think of my feet and provide for myself when I needed it, I am very capable." There are a lot of important self actualizations that occur when all hope is lost.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#109

Post by potatolicious »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #59
cynicalkane wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rather bothered by all the people knocking liberal arts degrees, in this and other threads. I did go to a school with a reputation for having a hard liberal arts core education, and it turned out to be a great decision. (In retrospect, I now wish I had gone to a different school, but the one I chose wasn't bad at all.) It's hard to explain why it's good to be able to think about these things, but it's hard to exp…

Just a reminder but Hard Science degrees also make you take some general education requirements, for instance my Computer Science degree came with courses such as: * 4 Semesters of Latin * Chinese Mythology * History * Linguistics * Entomology * Sociology * Macro Economics

Not always. I went through an engineering degree and took exactly two non-engineering courses in my 4.5 years - and that was only because I loaded one of them on as an extra credit (damn near killed myself doing it too).

The way the college system works today, the "well roundedness" aspects are disappearing, and quickly. Don't blame the schools, blame ourselves - we're the ones balking at paying top-dollar for a hard science degree and then being forced to take "useless" liberal arts courses.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#110

Post by william42 »

Tycho wrote: post #99
kkshin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would personally find it a sad, sad day if enrollment in liberal arts rapidly declined. People that major in liberal arts bring great joys to our world. Film, music, art, dance, and great books are all things that truly enhance life, and honestly, is also the cultural force that makes the United States so great. One of my biggest regrets of my collegiate education was not making a conscious effort to expand my curr…

how many great filmmakers went to film school, though?

Most of them.
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