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

This is a teenager

pudding.cool

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 868 posts

Re: This is a teenager

#311

Post by aredox »

thegrim33 wrote: post #273
wiz21c wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really surprised that you consider it a "sacrifice" to help others. Because when "others" are doing well, I'm doing better too. Give a job or a good life to anybody and you'll see, they'll just be better. Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to but because they had more hurdles to pass and ultimately were more at risk to fail. And it's not because some made it that it proves th…

You're just being obtuse. The topic is about spending resources in an attempt to achieve a goal. You can't just say "whatever we spend just makes people's lives better so it's worth it". There's a very real cost involved, and a very real effectiveness of spending that cost. To put it to extremes as an example, if we're spending $1 per person to give them a 99% chance of living a better life, that's a much different s…

You're always "spending resources", even when you decide not to spend time and money: in effect, you decide to expend some people's lives.

Is it effective?

Why is it right for you that the starting point should be "we spend nothing", and then "we spend on one action only if it is proven it is effective", and not "we spend everything to help others", and then "we stop spending only if it is proven it is ineffective"?

(And before anyone makes a reverse Godwin point by shouting "communism!", reminder what the taxation rates in Nordic countries are: Denmark 55.56%, Finland 51.25%, Iceland 46.22%, Norway 47.2% and Sweden 57%. And these are not khmer-rouge hellholes where nobody can be rich and people are beaten into submission by an overwhelming state.)

Re: This is a teenager

#312

Post by Misdicorl »

Freebytes wrote: post #228
bsimpson wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested to see this modeled. One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?) I'm curious to see an example scal…

We should not make it more than $1000 per month. Very few would choose to be poor. It would put a lot of pressure on companies to pay decent wages, though.

$1000/month is $12,000/year. Thats far far below poverty levels. It needs to be enough that people can choose to supplement in order to engage with luxury consumption. If people are forced to supplement to just survive, then we need to maintain the minimum wage and a whole host of other weird baggage.

Re: This is a teenager

#313

Post by richardlblair »

anon291 wrote: post #302
richardlblair wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to look at visualizations like this and reflect on the experiences of the individuals living through hardship. Even those who 'make it out' may struggle in ways not fully captured in the data or this visualization. I grew up in a 'high risk environment', and experienced all the adverse experiences with the exception of gun violence (yay Canada). I'm one of the few that 'made it out'. Many of my childhood fr…

Unfortunately a solid number of these things would rely on the moral equivalent of slavery. > Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The people who often don't have the means to easily travel for food have to travel for food. No one wants to work in these neighborhoods because they are invariably awful. At some point the risk of an employee…

My context is Canada where getting killed at work wouldn't been an issue. In the context I'm speaking about it would likely drive opportunity in low income neighborhoods.

Canada also have horrific city planning, so when I say people need to travel far I mean they need to spend up to 3 hours in some major (major for us) cities just to get groceries.

The US is a whole other can of worms, I don't know how to solve those problems. I'm also not as familiar with the nuances.

Re: This is a teenager

#314

Post by swatcoder »

moralestapia wrote: post #279
swatcoder wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, and as someone who's been through it, that's a really disempowering belief for people who have already experienced it or who are currently living through it. Life involves many profound challenges, most of which are unfairly distributed. Learning to overcome the challenges that one faces and turn them into novel opportunities and perspectives is the constructive way of looking at it. There are enough of these c…

I've been through it as well, not as in severe poverty, but definitely to the degree where what you can do in life is very limited and ... >that's a really disempowering belief ... for me at least, it had the complete opposite effect. When you're young and particularly a teenager, you want to do as much cool things as possible (not just fun, but also things like profiling yourself to end up in a good career, make mon…

I appreciate your perspective! But learning to recognize that not all lives can find a path to the same place and that you should stay focused on your own opportunities and wellness, seems a far cry from internalizing that "poverty fucks you up".

In fact, I'd say it's almost the opposite. You don't sound fucked by poverty, honestly. You seem more grounded and capable than many people who had far more privileges, and it sounds like your experiences ended up playing a positive contribution to that even if you wouldn't want to inflict those experiences on anyone else.

Re: This is a teenager

#315

Post by hammock »

imacomputertoo wrote: post #209

The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced. I wish they had shown percentages with the visualization. They choose not to. I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary.…

>The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced.

That conclusion came out of left field for me. He started off saying these certain adverse events affect you in adulthood. So the logical conclusion would be:

Be involved parents, give your kids a quiet place to study, don't have a drug problem as a parent, don't tolerate bullying, don't let your kid fall behind and be held back in school, don't let your kid do things that will get him suspended, don't shoot people in front of kids.

The vast majority of these are about good parenting. I would not describe that as a "collective responsibility," though, rather an individual civic duty.

Re: This is a teenager

#316

Post by anon291 »

ericmcer wrote: post #35

Kind of cool, but the conclusion was completely backwards. The final line of the study was "So he is our collective responsibility. They all are.", but the entire study was about how the home environment affects your outcomes. I guess their conclusion is that if an individual does a bad job raising their kids, it is societies fault.

Yeah, I'm tired of being told that it's all our responsibility, but we get none of the agency. My mother was a teacher in the inner city. There were kids our whole family fell in love with, and frankly, my mother knew what was best for them, and for a few would have been willing to even take them in. But, alas, they had to go home to their abusive parent. I am in no way advocating for forced separation, but it's hard to experience these things first hand and then be told it's all our responsibility.

I mean.. I agree that we are responsible for each other. However, for other things in life I'm responsible for, like my car, my property, and even my government, I am given a direct say. Imagine if you were forced to take responsibility for a car, except you were never allowed to drive it and it was made freely available to every teenage boy at the local high school. What responsibility could you possible have? What does it even mean to say you're responsible for something you have no control over?

A good priest once told me in confession when I confessed feeling upset that I couldn't help the homeless, the destitute, etc, and he properly identified the problem was that there's only one Saviour and I'm not him. And I feel that sagacious advice is applicable here. What are we possibly to do in this situation other than the unthinkable?

Previous progressive movements have indeed advocated for the removal of children in bad environments, and indeed many of these 'worked', but they're highly criticized (rightly, I guess) today.

Re: This is a teenager

#317

Post by richardlblair »

jtriangle wrote: post #303
richardlblair wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to look at visualizations like this and reflect on the experiences of the individuals living through hardship. Even those who 'make it out' may struggle in ways not fully captured in the data or this visualization. I grew up in a 'high risk environment', and experienced all the adverse experiences with the exception of gun violence (yay Canada). I'm one of the few that 'made it out'. Many of my childhood fr…

Not to mention, if you rat on your parents and get yanked into a group home, your experience is very likely the same or worse as it would be at home, and growing up, you know kids who this happened to and more or less have proof as to why you don't talk about it. I certainly saw this happen to people I knew, one of them lived with us for awhile and my folks arranged for her to live with a relative, which allowed them…

I had a lot of what you're talking about in your last paragraph in our Air Cadet program. I was exposed to a lot of different people, both adult volunteers and peers, from different walks of life. It had a really positive impact on my life.

Re: This is a teenager

#318

Post by micromacrofoot »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #79
micromacrofoot wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure who you know that makes $40k and has a foot on a "hedonistic treadmill"

Most everyone I know, of all incomes, are on some form of hedonistic treadmill. Sometimes it is one beer and cigarette to the next, sometimes it's one sailboat and handbag to the next.

There are plenty of pre-industrialized peoples that smoked tobacco, drank alcohol, and did drugs recreationally. Were they too on hedonistic treadmills?

It's funny how Americans love to brag about how they have the freedom to do whatever and pay less tax, but then turn around and treat their poor like fools if they live in any way that doesn't resemble soviet-era russia.

This is the same thing boomers do when they tell millennials to stop eating avocado toast to pay their school loans.

Re: This is a teenager

#319

Post by fragmede »

no-dr-onboard wrote: post #124
RobCat27 wrote: post #14

I like the message, but I feel like this is bad data visualization. The width of each group of people is not the same, so it's somewhat meaningless to visually compare groups without being able to see the raw percentages. For example, the "Many Adverse Experiences" group is stretched to be longer than the other groups so that proportionally fewer people in that group appear to be a larger proportion than the same pro…

The visualization is a good iteration on trying to get complex papers distilled into a digestible format. That was nice. I'm not super sure how I feel about the message though as it operates on a handful of really big presumptions. I'll share my own bias to save everyone the tldr on where I'm coming from: I'm a parent advocate. I think the nuclear family is the backbone to society and that much, if not every, societa…

Question one of the ACE test is

> Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you? or Act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt?

seems pretty clear to me, regardless of if something is considered okay in one culture but not in another, the question is was the experience humiliating, not did X happen, where X could be considered not humiliating in one culture and not in another.

Re: This is a teenager

#320

Post by constantcrying »

wiz21c wrote: post #260
imacomputertoo wrote: post #209

The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced. I wish they had shown percentages with the visualization. They choose not to. I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary.…

I'm really surprised that you consider it a "sacrifice" to help others. Because when "others" are doing well, I'm doing better too. Give a job or a good life to anybody and you'll see, they'll just be better. Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to but because they had more hurdles to pass and ultimately were more at risk to fail. And it's not because some made it that it proves th…

Why? State funded social programs are funded by taxes, I pay money so these programs exist. How would I feel better in any way? I certainly do not.

>Give a job or a good life to anybod

This is beyond the capacity of almost all people. I don't even have any idea what you are thinking of.

>Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to

Simply not true. Being willing, but unable to work is extremely rare. They just do not like the work they would have to do, which I don't begrudge them for I wouldn't do that work either if the state was paying my rent and my food. But pretending that somehow they can't do basic jobs is simply nonsense.

Post reply on HN