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This is a teenager

pudding.cool

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Re: This is a teenager

#581

Post by noisy_boy »

brailsafe wrote: post #568
refulgentis wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Certainly not a bad thing to do, but just giving them some books is not going to make them like the better off kids in all of the other (highly correlated) ways that they're different From personal experience, I can absolutely vouch for that. 35, came from nowhere with nothing, absentee parents, out of house by 15. Dropped out of college, waited tables, did a startup, sold it, worked for 7 years at Google, now I'm…

Up front, I have no intention of trying to detract from any of those accomplishments, because you've obviously been grinding pretty hard for a while and admire the tenacity you must have had as a kid and the progression you've seemed to follow. I do however find it under-discussed how many subsequent dice rolls have to at least partially work out for that tenacity, and those little shifts, to be a compounding positiv…

> My last job title was Software Engineer II, but really I'm just a generalist that keeps failing upward, and I don't know whether if I were to double-down and specialize more, go deeper, or pivot out completely, I'd be able to do that well; it's a bit of a constant existential crisis.

As a generalist that still has the title Software Engineer after over 25 years of experience, I think I am able to empathize. I think, if you are a generalist and, like me, if you like "laying the pipes" to connect things end-to-end and see the satisfaction of having built the entire thing, embrace it. You should be proud that you can build a complete application though OS infra to database to backend services to frontend UIs and provide the glue of scripts as needed, all by yourself (not shitting on working in a team setting, just knowing that you could). I treat that as a badge of honor. Sure, I can't get super deep into one of these verticals, but then I'm a "builder" and I like the feeling it brings.

Re: This is a teenager

#582

Post by chrischen »

slily wrote: post #549
Aeolun wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess what we learn from this is that not everyone is as enterprising as you? While on some level I’d say that, of course you can do it if you want to. There’s many people for whom that is just too much of a leap, and it feels unfair to say they don’t deserve happiness just because they can’t make themselves seek it.

[flagged]

The whole point of this study is to show that a well off person can do the bare minimum and a disadvantaged person could be doing way more than minimum, and the disadvantaged person will end up being disparaged as must have been doing the bare minimum.

Re: This is a teenager

#583

Post by komali2 »

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.…

> And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice

If we bring back wealth taxes "we" probably wouldn't have to sacrifice much if anything (not sure if your net worth is > 20 million)

Re: This is a teenager

#584

Post by komali2 »

kryogen1c wrote: post #576
Aeolun wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess what we learn from this is that not everyone is as enterprising as you? While on some level I’d say that, of course you can do it if you want to. There’s many people for whom that is just too much of a leap, and it feels unfair to say they don’t deserve happiness just because they can’t make themselves seek it.

> unfair to say they don’t deserve happiness just because they can’t make themselves seek it. You and I have very different ideas about what's fair.

Really? Do you think it's fair that some kids will be able to command historic levels of political and capital power by being born and never need to work, most kids will need to work at this point it seems until death, some kids will achieve "needing to work until death" status by working harder than anyone else while being hungry and housing insecure, and many kids will simply live and die in squalor whether they work or not?

Considering we seem to be discussing the USA, the richest nation in human history, this seems very unfair to me. It seems to me at minimum we should easily be able to remove squalor conditions no matter how little someone works.

Re: This is a teenager

#585

Post by OccamsMirror »

6510 wrote: post #490
gentleman11 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you say the problem is social class and poverty, and not having available role models to show how adult life actually works, you’ll get flamed and trolled. If you say the problem is racial issues, you’ll get upvotes. I’ll just sit here and await my downvotes now

The pattern I've noticed is that the poor and the poorly educated have no career expectations from their kids. If the kids with wealthy and/or highly educated parents showed up at home with just one poor grade all hell broke lose. Grounded for 6 months, allowance cuts, no more TV or video games etc One kept his kid at home during the holidays to tutor him himself, screaming 90% of the time. The other parents would lo…

> screaming 90% of the time.

Well isn't that just awesome parenting.

Re: This is a teenager

#586

Post by [deleted] »

gfiorav wrote: post #532
ciupicri wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about USA? What safety nets are available in the US? P.S. It's just a question. Not everyone lives in the US. Heck, maybe the OP was even talking about another country, say Denmark.

It doesn't shock me that there's anti-US propaganda. It shocks me that people on this site routinely fall for it.

[deleted]

Re: This is a teenager

#587

Post by komali2 »

noisy_boy wrote: post #574
Aeolun wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I wasn’t necessarily trying to imply anything about OP’s post. Just that what worked for him might not work for many others. I’m still happy to hear he did ;)

I think I agree on your take. Mental strength in people in adverse conditions is not the rule, it is the exception. Most won't have enough of it to overcome the difficulties and will instead fall prey to easy traps like drugs etc. It is easy for most of us, who have managed well enough to be commenting here which probably implies a baseline amount of mental strength, to take the shining examples and think that these…

A lot of cozy people underestimate the willpower challenge of poverty.

I meet so many tech bros that victim blame. "the mom working two jobs has at least an hour at night. She can use that time to take free coding classes, teach herself to code, upskill and get a high paying programming job. It's not easy but it's possible." Some variation of that said to me so many times. "my family grew up poor and I figured it out! My dad came to this country with five dollars in his pocket etc etc."

I think one or two were telling the truth from all angles. Most were telling the truth as they knew it, but didn't realize that the fact that their parents were able to afford a house in the good school district already gave them a significant leg up, or other random privileges they have over others.

But what everyone seems to overestimate is their own willpower when they aren't just working many hours - which many of us on this forum are used to from startup life - but working for those hours for 7$ or less per hour, while facing humiliation and depredation every day at however many jobs being worked (by customers, by managers), looking to the future and seeing nothing but this 7$ an hour, watching your meagre savings always get nuked at just the right moment by a blown head gasket or the landlord raising rent or the kid needing unexpected school supplies because they forgot their backpack at the bus stop or whatever else.

The psychological burden of a hopeless situation is enormous. I wish I could help more people understand that and empathize with people in these situations. In the richest country on earth I don't understand why we tolerate people having to live like that, out of some cultish dedication to nonexistent meritocracy.

Re: This is a teenager

#588

Post by BobbyJo »

komali2 wrote: post #584
kryogen1c wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unfair to say they don’t deserve happiness just because they can’t make themselves seek it. You and I have very different ideas about what's fair.

Really? Do you think it's fair that some kids will be able to command historic levels of political and capital power by being born and never need to work, most kids will need to work at this point it seems until death, some kids will achieve "needing to work until death" status by working harder than anyone else while being hungry and housing insecure, and many kids will simply live and die in squalor whether they wo…

well... that's a completely different point than the one they were disagreeing with, no?

Re: This is a teenager

#589

Post by [deleted] »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #24
bumby wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related, and equally hard to cover online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39978774 ("HN: Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend the abortion-crime hypothesis") https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/04/08/steven-le... | https://archive.today/m3zl0 ("Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend a finding made famous by “Freakonomics”")

[deleted]

Re: This is a teenager

#590

Post by latency-guy2 »

nurple wrote: post #365
hammock wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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'…

Do you realize that having the time and resources for those things is a privilege that many in poverty don't have?

Those in poverty do have that time. Number of hours worked increases with wealth. Share of people working more than one job has fell since the 90s, and never exceeded 7%. Average commute time (one way) has been 20 - 30 minutes since the 90s.

You're pushing rhetoric, not reality. Which is fine, but I won't let you lie.

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