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Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

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Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#191

Post by tomcam »

nugget wrote: post #131
__jal wrote: post #87

I found myself nodding along the whole article. First, let me say that I am happy where I ended up. I'm successful, enjoy my work, and when I compare my personal income with our family income when I was growing up, it is an absurd multiple. We were a very poor family in a poor part of the South. I went to a top-10 small private university on a full ride, felt completely alienated and never quite figured out how to fu…

I've known deca-millionaire trust fund kids who ended up broke (or dead). I've known immigrants who started with nothing and ended up fantastically independently wealthy. And the vast, vast majority of people who settle somewhere near the middle. What nobody teaches you is: it's all about luck. Below that, the fine print: the harder you work and the more you sacrifice, the luckier you will get. ''If only'' works both…

    it's all about luck
Bullshit. Luck sure goes a long way, but so do working very, very hard and smart and making course corrections and constantly doing things people say will fail.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#193

Post by haberman »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #170
haberman wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "PG made his point poorly" you mean "PG didn't communicate in a way that was misunderstanding-proof", I can agree with you. Inequality is an emotionally-charged subject that is prone to misunderstanding. I think PG underestimated how thoroughly the intellectual basis of his argument would be missed once he uttered the words "I've been helping to increase economic inequality." Most of the critiques of PG accuse…

the problem with PGs essay was that it is full of strawmen and non sequiturs made up by him. For example, the sentence you just described. Let's attack poverty - what does that mean in practice? in practice, that means spending money on solutions to poverty, ala Sweden. Where does that money come from? from taxes. So, the conversation about raising taxes on the wealthy ( or "attacking wealth" as he says ), outside of…

> PG made it sound as if the conversation is about attacking wealth for its own sake, which nobody but the fringe is having

Let us test this claim.

I Googled "inequality in the us" and clicked the first several results. If your claim is true, these will only discuss attacking poverty, and not attacking wealth. (I am assuming that top Google hits do not constitute "the fringe").

The first result is: "20 Facts About U.S. Inequality that Everyone Should Know from The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality." (http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/cgi-bin/facts.php). The first two "facts" concern wage inequality and CEO pay, neither of which say anything a priori about poverty. Many of the other "facts" on the page do address poverty more directly.

The Wikipedia page on Income Inequality is next (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...). It primarily discusses actual inequality, mentioning poverty only in one specific section. One of the policy proposals it describes is one of a maximum wage, which has nothing to do with decreasing poverty.

The third result is a Salon.com piece, "35 soul-crushing facts about American income inequality" (http://www.salon.com/2015/07/15/35_soul_crushing_facts_about...). Many of them are again facts that do not say anything about poverty, like "The poorest half of the Earth’s population owns 1% of the Earth’s wealth. The richest 1% of the Earth’s population owns 46% of the Earth’s wealth." Facts like these are directly pitting the poor against the rich, without saying anything about whether the lower earners actually have their needs met and/or have social mobility.

So I disagree that this is a "strawman." I think a core part of the conversation about inequality is that is it horrifying how much the rich have compared with everyone else. That is the attitude that PG is arguing against.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#194

Post by tomcam »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #160
Htsthbjig wrote: post #83

I believe this man is confusing lots of things. I had lived in China for more than 5 years, Boston, Japan or Korea for more than 9 months each. In my opinion, minimizing conflict has nothing to do with being poor, and a lot with being Chinese educated. On the contrary, I volunteer helping poor kids like Spanish gypsies or Subsaharan African and they(and their parents) are ultra confident, and spontaneous. Being open…

Minimizing conflict is just one minor tangential point in his essay. The main thing, which I think you might have missed, is the insane pressure of being poor and having no fallback and constantly worrying about money. I do think that since he hasn't been not poor growing up, he doesn't realize that the opposite state in many ways can have its own detrimental effects on motivation

Nailed it. Source: have successful self-made career and Asian family.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#195

Post by dang »

marincounty wrote: post #183

I looked through your past posts, and you are legit! I liked to that you went to a community college. I too screwed up in high school. I didn't even know why people were taking another test--the SAT. That said, I cleaned up my act in my senior year, but it was too late. Everything, and a lot more, that I missed in high school, I made up for in two semesters at community college. If anyone in high school is reading th…

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10956322 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#196

Post by [deleted] »

ScottBurson wrote: post #187
[deleted] wrote: post #180

[deleted]

Yes, and we can find someone who had it even worse than you did, and still made good. Envy is something I've struggled with myself, so don't think I'm talking down to you when I tell you that you have to let it go. Your life is good now and can still get much better. And even those who seem to have had a lot more privileges than you may have also had difficulties you don't know about. Rich parents too can be alcoholi…

[deleted]

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#197

Post by dang »

zobzu wrote: post #186

People feeling sorry for themselves because they're not male and white from a place with food are annoying. The world isn't fair, and it's not because Joe Smith had an okay childhood and is now making about 100k/year in a city that asks 3k/mo just to sleep there. If you wanna make a difference, it's the wrong level to look at. I'm a white male. I made everything I have. I started with no food or place to live. I got…

> People feeling sorry for themselves because they're not male and white from a place with food are annoying.

This breaks the HN guidelines: it is both a personal attack (since you're talking about the OP) and gratuitously negative. Please do not post comments like this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#199

Post by tbrownaw »

NhanH wrote: post #166
brandmeyer wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading about a topic involving social interaction can definitely serve as a first step to raise awareness of why you're socially awkward. I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that the Good Guy Greg and Good Girl Gina image macros were a source of basic social enlightenment for me. Once your eyes have been opened you can start to improve yourself by paying attention to those interactions when they happen.

"Socially awkward" seems to be a loaded term in your use case. If you are "socially shy", then yes reading would help. But in the case you're not socially awkward in your natural environment (ie you just lived in a different culture), the nuisances are impossible to learn unless you encountered it. Just think of it as a different culture, no East Asian will come to the US without fucking up something small or big a f…

impossible to learn unless you encountered it

Why? How can there be such a thing? What is there that prevents someone from recording what they encountered and learned, and passing that knowledge on to others?

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