Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair • Hacker News Board

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#231

Post by rfc » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 6:30 PM UTC

okreallywtf wrote: post #170

rfc wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. 1,000x. Some of the most successful folks I know went into trade, became "masters of their domains", and then bridge their skills with business to create their own businesses. As an example: A friend from back home got into boring right out of high school. 20 years later, he runs one of the most successful directional boring companies in the region and is a multi-multi millionaire. He was told in high school th…

Do you think that this result is available to everyone willing to work hard? If you come out of high-school and don't achieve this level of success did you fail or are people this outliers? We should try to make a path for success at all levels of education provided you are willing to work for it and not put all our hopes on high-performers and or lucky people.

I'm sure I'll get down voted for this comment but yes, I actually do think this result is available to everyone willing to work hard but not the only reason.

The town I grew up in was very polarizing. We had both extreme wealth and extreme poor. As a retrospective, we had very equal opportunities from all income brackets. There were wealthy kids who had huge success but many others who fizzled out and didn't do anything. Some ended up with extensive criminal records.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, some of the extremely poor kids I grew up with could barely afford ramen as a family. Some ended up drug dealing and in jail, others ended up with massive success.

There were a few key attributes that I think determined success vs. failure for all wealth brackets. We had some very key teachers in shop classes who encouraged folks who didn't think they could go to college to specialize in trade skills. Those who took it seriously and worked hard at it are largely stable or well off. Those who didn't fizzled out.

Obviously this is all anecdotal as it was one graduating class in one city in one state. However, in my own experience the desire to work hard dictates much of the success of an individual. It would be foolish to say that it is the ONLY thing contributing to success but I believe that it is a large portion of it.

Also, that word "lucky" drives me nuts but I'll save that for another time :)

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#232

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 6:31 PM UTC

_rpd wrote: post #89

gerbilly wrote: post #63

> “He just saw his life as not what he wanted it to be, and he didn’t know how to get it there,” said Sue Johnson, who lay next to her son’s corpse for an hour. It made my heart sink to read this sentence. Edit: Highlighted the part that made me sad. You never get over the death of a child.

It's heartbreaking. > “He just saw his life as not what he wanted it to be, and he didn’t know how to get it there” I think though, that this is a near universal aspect of the human condition.

Indeed. I don't know anyone whose life is where they want it to be. Certainly not me.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#233

Post by kalmari » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 6:33 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #157

kalmari wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its very strange to. i never saw it as a child nor expeirienced it but when i got older in america every one seems to be about race and other things that can differentiate in one way or another.

Possibly because many people have looked at the social narratives that they grew up with and concluded that they did not accurately reflect their experience of the world.

true but still why race issues i grew up with many different cultural backgrounds and ethnicities never had issues nor today. is it about misunderstandings or learned and/or brought up that way or trully just the news.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#234

Post by anigbrowl » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 6:33 PM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #199

anigbrowl wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently you think that anything other than being at the peak of one's profession is a 'stupid job.' There are large numbers of jobs that depend on people being diligent rather than innovative, and those jobs are certainly easier to automate, but that does not make them stupid jobs. Stop devaluing hard work just because some people choose predictability over risk.

> Apparently you think that anything other than being at the peak of one's profession is a 'stupid job.' [...] Stop devaluing hard work just because some people choose predictability over risk. The "stupid job" was what the kid himself called his employment making wooden pallets. It wasn't a job in sports or cooking and I nowhere implied that I agreed with his assessment. If he had been hard at work and passionate ab…

I still reject the idea that someone who is interested and good at cooking should be discouraged from it because they're likely to end up in a 'stupid job,' as you aver. I'd be more cautious about encouraging someone to pursue it now that kitchen automation is on the horizon, but aspiring to be a chef or run a diner or some other food-related employment used to be a perfectly valid career choice.

Every job can theoretically be automated away. Yesterday I was thinking about someone I knew who specialized in detecting detecting cancer on biopsy slides (I forget the technical term for her job). Last time I saw that person was 15 years ago and I was musing on the fact that her job as she described it then may well have been taken over by machine learning since, or will be soon if not. Did her teachers and family do her a terrible disservice by not telling her to get into a line of work that would be harder to automate? Probably not.

I'm arguing that we need a different approach as a society to choosing jobs based on an assumption of remorselessly increasing technological efficiency and cutthroat competition. This hyper-Darwinian approach to employment, productivity, and economic decision-making is reducing the quality of life for an increasingly large number of people, and at some point they are going to get tired of holding up the pyramid from which more fortunate people self-righteously piss down upon them.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#235

Post by anigbrowl » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 6:39 PM UTC

kalmari wrote: post #233

anigbrowl wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly because many people have looked at the social narratives that they grew up with and concluded that they did not accurately reflect their experience of the world.

true but still why race issues i grew up with many different cultural backgrounds and ethnicities never had issues nor today. is it about misunderstandings or learned and/or brought up that way or trully just the news.

I'm having some trouble parsing your sentence, and do I don't know anything about when/where you grew up that would allow me discuss this in context. This doesn't seem like the place to do a review of the history of race relations in the US, which is a large and complex subject.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#236

Post by jdmichal » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 6:41 PM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #18

“America is not a great place for people with only a high school degree, and I don’t think that’s going to get better anytime soon,” said Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize-winning Princeton University economist. Coming from a Princeton egghead that's not a surprising point of view. It seems very typical for those with education to look down upon the less-educated. The truth is, US high schools miserably fail the non-colleg…

Germany has a split education system, where only college-bound students attend what we would call "high school" in the US. Others attend what are essentially trade schools, with strong industry ties and apprenticeship programs.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#237

Post by creaghpatr » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 6:43 PM UTC

posguy wrote: post #124

nostrademons wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, capital holders are complaining all the time as well. There are very few places to put money now with a decent return. Savings accounts pay roughly 0%. Bonds are at inflation, or sometimes less. The S&P 500's P/E is at 25, which is historically very high, implies a rate of return of about 4%, and makes the risk of a correction significant. Real estate is inefficient; property prices are so high that th…

Savings accounts are basically a negative return due to inflation, even if your credit union will do 1.25%, inflation is still 1.6% to 1.7%. We need to mobilize this capital back into the economy, rather than letting it languish in the financial markets, guarded jealously by a handful of people. The economic stimulus it would provide could easily help kickstart and sustain waves of growth and development, though we s…

I think most people in the middle class or lower have debt rather than savings so they directly benefit from inflation (while also being directly hit by inflation in terms of purchasing power)

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#238

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 6:44 PM UTC

petra wrote: post #184

nostrademons wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, capital holders are complaining all the time as well. There are very few places to put money now with a decent return. Savings accounts pay roughly 0%. Bonds are at inflation, or sometimes less. The S&P 500's P/E is at 25, which is historically very high, implies a rate of return of about 4%, and makes the risk of a correction significant. Real estate is inefficient; property prices are so high that th…

>> big innovation deficit. >> not enough fundamental research going on to generate new technological opportunities. And on the other hand, the news is full of items about technologies with large market impact, in almost every industry, and a lot of new technological building blocks. Some of it is crap, but still. >> We see this in the returns to innovation .. rareness of those returns. Maybe this is because of more i…

I think we're seeing faster innovation in certain areas (software, mostly), but much slower in others (material science, medicine, sensors, transportation). Remember that line in The Graduate (1967) - "I want to say one word to you: Plastics." You get a new Javascript framework every 6 months, but the last major materials to gain consumer adoption were carbon fiber & titanium in the 80s.

The post-war years saw rapid consumer adoption of lots of technologies initially developed in the 20s and 30s but forced into rapid adoption by WW2: radar, sonar, aviation, refrigeration, antibiotics, nuclear energy, microwaves, air conditioners, interstate highways, computers, aluminum, plastics, synthetic rubber, rocketry, and then later the offshoots of rocketry & computers (GPS, software, and the Internet). That last wave is petering out now.

There is evidence that a huge new wave is incubating now, with 3D printing, drones, telecommuting, cheap satellite launches, mesh networking, solar and wind energy, and more far-out technologies like carbon nanotubes, memristors, and solid-state batteries. But all of these technologies will need sustained R&D expenditures to get to a robustness & price point level that makes them suitable for consumer applications.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#239

Post by chrshawkes » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 6:44 PM UTC

exhilaration wrote: post #166

Animats wrote: post #141

From the article: “America is not a great place for people with only a high school degree, and I don’t think that’s going to get better anytime soon." That's it. It just doesn't take that many people to make all the stuff. Erie, PA isn't going to come back. The mantra used to be that people would be employed in "services". But services are more automated, too. Services done at some fixed location are rapidly being au…

> * Stock picking in an Amazon warehouse - robots taking over. I just wanted to offer a data point here, my buddy worked at the Amazon warehouse in Breinigsville PA a few months back and said he never saw a robot. Reading Hacker News I would have thought that Amazon had their robots widely deployed but that doesn't seem to be the case.

they outsource plenty of jobs to India though.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#240

Post by devnullmonkey » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 6:45 PM UTC

irrational wrote: post #6

I worry about this for my oldest son. He has dyspraxia and apraxia. In practice that means he has difficulty with memory (at 15 he still doesn't know his multiplication tables) and putting things in order (such as speaking - you have to put phonemes, words, sentences together in order to speak). But, he doesn't look like he has a disability and he doesn't speak much so people don't readily realize he doesn't talk lik…

Welders in my area can make > 100k easy. Houston area. Lots of work, not enough qualified welders.