Someone with no money must survive with short term thinking: hunt and kill a wombat on the savanna or something. From there you work your way away from short term thinking; you might have enough to get through the week already, so the threat of starvation is more long term. Eventually with enough in the bank you have nearly no urgency; you could conceivably mishandle your bonds when they mature in twenty years or something. But with enough money, literally the only risk is short term thinking and immediacy. Bending over to pick up a penny is not going to even be considered.
If my ship ever really comes in and docks at the harbor I’m going to remember to keep my wallet full of cash, so I can stop and get that strawberry ice cream cone without worrying about the long term consequences, which are all I would have left.
The author should have AI set up a simple deployment to EC2 and Azure and make an endless series of semantically meaningless AI companies with web sites and submit them everywhere. The web sites should also do this themselves.
Local copper thieves that were busted stealing telco lines... they were just looking to make a quick buck regardless of legality or care for the impact it had on other people. They're more like tech company CEOs, really.
And these thieves were already well cared for in a healthy society with all sorts of opportunities available to them regardless of social status, skin color, and mental heath?
Crime goes down when the gap between the rich and the poor goes down.
Some people can't stomach the idea that some individuals can be blamed for their own bad behavior, so this lie that all crime must be society's fault is the only way they can avoid rethinking their worldview.
I believe that most people are good, but others do not have good character. They are the ones who ruin things for everyone else. They even ruin things for the people who are "good but victims of bad luck." By refusing to deal harshly with the bad actors (e.g. by locking them up), we create a world where you can't really trust anyone, including those who are just down on their luck but have integrity.
Right, why didn't everyone just get good education, dental care, and healthcare, get a car when they're 16, have their parents help them go to college and work for a VC and get rich. Just can't understand it. Truly, an enigma.
This is what nobody wants to admit, whether it's nature or nurture doesn't matter because you're not in control of either of them. You were born into so and so of a family, and they brought you up with such and such care and values.
The idea that you've been "force of willing" it through your whole life since infancy and are therefore solely accountable for your outcome is absurd. We know that at some level and yet still can't help taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others for their failings.
This site is so fuckin out of touch with the average American I can help but get pissed off after a few beers on the weekend. The tech stuff is good, but the social/political stuff here drives me nuts.
> This site is so fuckin out of touch with the average American I can help but get pissed off after a few beers on the weekend. The tech stuff is good, but the social/political stuff here drives me nuts.
A lot of people on this site have no concept of what it is like to grow up unprivileged (they think they do, but to them that means growing up merely upper middle class as opposed to ridiculously wealthy) but as bad as it can be sometimes it has actually gotten a bit better in recent years.
There used to be an even higher concentration of ultra-libertarian "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" posters who clearly never had to do that themselves to anywhere near the extent they believed they had.
A lot of people on this site grew up lower middle class or below and benefited from the generosity of a lot of other people. But they leveraged that generosity into an education and a skill set that improved their economic security. Then they see schools that provide 3 meals a day to every single student, food stamps, WIC, CHIPS, etc. and think that anybody with any gumption at all could achieve what they achieved even easier.
Some people here interact frequently with youth who are completely unmotivated to pull themselves up because they aren't really down. They have food, shelter, a $1200 cell phone with a $75/month data plan, an XBox, a $3k wardrobe, and free taxi service. And nobody is teaching them that all of this luxury comes at a cost.
So sometimes it is hard to see the kid in real difficulty. The kid with the $80 discarded phone on the $25/month plan. The kid with the difficulty processing math that isn't just the lazy excuse of all the other students. The kid with no internet at home. The kid trying to look after a younger sibling--not raise them, just helping them survive. The child in desperate isolation. These folks get lost in the sea of people pretending to have a hard life. And the pretenders can slip down into the reality without people noticing.
Yes. It's hard to see the bottom clearly after you've climbed some distance. And sometimes you can never see the steeper mountain face that is not the one you climbed. And its easy to get sick of listening to the belly aching. But try volunteering for an after-school club and recognize that the youth in that program are often already in a home life that gives them a life advantage. Not necessarily because of wealth (but maybe), but mostly because of culture. They have caregivers that provide a culture beyond living off of handouts. They might receive a handout, but they are going to use it as an investment to build a better future.
Some of the people on this site recognize the difference between engorging and investing. Sometimes they mistake people who don't invest as people who engorge. It's an understandable mistake.
The disconnect I see a lot between where I stand, and your average 2026 "proud Democrat" is this: They believe humans are perfectible, and therefore that the plan should be to keep transferring resources, from those who work to those who don't, until such time as we achieve full "equity" of outcomes. So if any people are poor or committing crime, it must mean we just aren't giving them enough.
I question both the wisdom of increasing the tax burden on the workers past a certain point, and whether the goal of getting every disadvantaged person to a successful life is even remotely achievable anyway.
The above is admittedly probably (?) a strawman in that I guess (?) most Democrats today would not be foolish enough to believe 100.00% equity is possible, that every last person in the country can be gotten to "great" quality of life - even with ruinous amounts of welfare expenditure. If that is a strawman, then the only actual debate here is what percentage of people is an acceptable amount to be given up on, to be left where they are, with society telling them "You'll have to do some of the work yourself before you'll get further help."
Also, importantly, it would be nice to make sure we are working with the same set of data. If one side says fine, 2% of people being quite poor is fine, then let's be honest about what the line is, how many are below it, and very importantly how numerous is the actual cohort who is staying there -- it's fine with me if we have 4% in poverty at any given time if half of them are only temporarily poor, and are using the existing resources to get their lives back on track. Even if you believe humans are perfectible, it's unreasonable to expect that no one will ever even temporarily get into a jam.
I don't think the average American sympathizes with random shitheads, bro. romanticizing thieves into some kind of noble morally grey antiheroes wronged by the society and struggling to feed their kids is a uniquely bohemian delusion. 9 times out of 10 they're junkie lowlives who would amount to nothing with all the opportunity in the world.
wanna bet that in a few days there will be a follow up with mugshots and short bios of the perpetrators, and each one will turn out to be a worthless fuck with a long rap sheet?
> I don't think the average American sympathizes with random shitheads, bro. romanticizing thieves into some kind of noble morally grey antiheroes wronged by the society and struggling to feed their kids is a uniquely bohemian delusion.
The concept of a "luxury belief" makes a lot more sense of it. Believing that thieves aren't just scumbags is like driving a Porsche, it's a way to signal to other people who've never had to struggle in their life that you're one of them.
> I don't think the average American sympathizes with random shitheads, bro.
As a gross generalization, they don't. But not because they don't understand being poor, but because there are various powerful groups that benefit from pitting the lower class against themselves.
But "poor people" aren't a monolithic group with an absolutist view on the issue. There's a nuanced understanding of low level crimes in impoverished communities. People are much more likely to be pissed at a crackhead that stole their neighbors stuff, than a mother stealing food from a chain store.
I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. If you run the math, there's not many places in the US that a mother can raise a child on a minimum wage job without relying heavily on assistance.
don't move the goalpost. "raising" is expensive, sure, but that was not what I replied to, I replied to the image you tried to evoke with "mother stealing food from a chain store", and I'm telling you that it doesn't make any sense. US wages - even the minimum wage - are incredibly high compared to your very low prices of food. "share of household income spent on food" is a common metric, and it is very low in the US.
"mother stealing food from a chain store" is what people far removed from poverty think poor people do.
Moving the goalpost? Every household has expenses other than food.
People who resort to theft don't allocate the theft proportionally to each of their expense categories. They do it based on opportunity. If you're $50 short at the end of the month, you can't retroactively take it out of the rent check you sent at the beginning of the month.
> "mother stealing food from a chain store" is what people far removed from poverty think poor people do.
Rich neighborhoods don't lock up the baby formula.
Reminds me of seeing posts from my local police department where baby formula was being stolen -- in quantity -- not by mothers, but by garden-variety criminal dudes, who resell it because it's valuable. It's also, believe it or not, a popular choice as the inactive ingredient to cut drugs.
The Internet commenters who cheer "Yeah, mama, you stick it to Grocery Chain! Feed them babies!" really want this narrative to be true, but it just isn't.
Actual poor moms with hungry babies and kids have entire government programs dedicated to help them that are easy to get, called WIC and SNAP.
I'm well aware that people with drug issues exist -- that doesn't mean that there are zero poor people who struggle to afford food.
SNAP and WIC are great but there are gaps (and they are getting bigger as congress has further restricted them and this administration have started dismantling them administratively)
> taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others
Do you think it's more Fundamental Attribution Error [0] (not exercising empathy or an incomplete view of others' problems) or more Just World Fallacy [1] (believing the universe works a certain way)?
Realistically, if these are the minimum conditions to reduce this kind of low-gain amplified damage, then I suspect that most people will rapidly conclude that the cost-benefit leans in the direction of immediately severing these people from the rest of society. Since the cost to deliver a sequence of events like you describe to everyone is extraordinary (and realistically unavailable even to the richest nations today) a more feasible solution is incarceration of people for a first offense for a sufficiently long time that they are simply not present to commit the crime again.
If it isn't, your solution is interesting because it's already been tried. The United States has one of (maybe actually?) the highest incarceration rates on Earth. We've spent decades locking up enormous numbers of people, often for nonviolent offenses, tearing parents away from their kids, destroying employment prospects, and creating exactly the kind of instability that feeds more crime. There's people in prison serving decades for fuckin weed. Yet somehow your conclusion is that we haven't imprisoned enough people for long enough.
What jumps out is how quickly you write people off. You look at poverty, addiction, untreated mental illness, failing schools, broken communities, and a criminal justice system with a well-documented history of racial disparities, and your answer is basically: "Sounds expensive. Put them in a cage."
The really wild part is calling that the practical option. Education costs money, healthcare costs money, treatment costs money, rehabilitation costs money. But decades of policing, courts, prisons, lost productivity, broken families, and repeat incarceration are apparently the cheap, sensible alternative.
If this isn't sarcasm, you are a disgusting ghoul. There's a name for people like this that we hung in the 40s. Sorry HN, but I just can't with this shit anymore.
These people who steal copper and whatnot used to be day laborer ditch digger types but "certain people" decided that the sorts of businesses that employ that kind of labor need to jump through hoops (for various reasons with various degrees of legitimacy) that make it not worth it.
Your company is laying people off because they need something to do. They’re goalless in the extreme and relying on big talk and big action about the latest fad. You don’t have leaders, you have owners.
You must look around and see the lack of men, and force yourself to become one.
> You must look around and see the lack of men, and force yourself to become one.
As a man I need you to expand on this because I'm trying to imagine what concrete actions you think "a man" would do in this circumstance, and of the things I've come up with the only one I think I'm allowed to say on this forum is "quit and find a new job."
What do you mean, allowed to say on this forum? Who is around to stop you from saying what you mean? Is this some kind of dramatic display of your secondary status? What responsibility for you are you asking me to take?
This forum is ran by my fellow man, dang, who expects a certain level of decorum and discretion, and it would be ungentlemanly to act otherwise. A Real Man knows to keep his cards close to his chest. It's a violation of the Bro Code to say some stuff out loud, my dude.
> What responsibility for you are you asking me to take?
I'm asking you to explain what actions you think OP, as a Man, should take in this situation. Quit (quietly or loudly)? Refuse and get fired? Something else?
Your username and comment is soaked with a certain kind of negativity as you demand I take responsibility for my comment. Do you see that? I advise the blog author to do the opposite. I want him to look around and become the exact person that he looks at as an authority that stands tall and takes responsibility for their identity and their actions. He’ll meet resistance from people who can complain endlessly but never
help or stop to think, but also much support from people who do help and need a strong and stable person. That’s what I recommend.
I think parent commenter is using "men" in a manner similar to mensch, as in "a person of integrity and honor" [1]. In other words, "look around and notice nobody is taking responsibility, and choose to be the person who lifts others up." Or something.
It's a weird way to phrase it, in my opinion, especially in this era where we are generally avoiding ambiguously gendered collective nouns... but I'm pretty sure that's the gist. Or, at least, it's how I read it.
"Men" is colloquially used here to mean "decent people", "strong people", "principled people", etc. It's a generic positive description ("Be a man", "Man up").
Younger generations might bristle at this use of the word, and that's fine, but try to give the benefit of the doubt (in fact, it's a rule on HN).
As an older generation man, I've tried to understand the touchiness here. This is dangerous territory, so I hope you try to read my intent here, even if the packaging is not as strong as I want it to be.
The best analogy I can come up with is the smurf village: Every smurf has an identity, describing a bunch of mannerism. Baker smurf, strong smurf, joke smurf ... The smurfette is both the only adult female and a separate identity. Her existence in a children's story serves to demonstrate to young humans how the female identity is supposed to work.
I think the smurf village echos a deep human archetype. A man is someone who can choose his identity. He is unbound. A woman is a man with an already fixed identity. She can't choose to be e.g. a baker as primary identity, her choice is made already.
While simplified, there is some truth in this worldview, and people, especially woman, are correct to protest teaching this archetype to new generations.
In the same way, the poster above uses 'Be a man' to probably mean something like: 'Be brave enough to choose a new identity'. Which is a valid message, but needs an implied ([*] woman are also men here) when this archetype is considered.
Thanks for the well written response. It should be pointed out that Smurfs reproduce in the manner of spores and their gender is just a matter of children’s entertainment.
Extremely online people find the sweet contention in everything and act accordingly.
As for the [*] I did assume that the target was male because of the content of the writing. But if they were female they are presumably going to be no more or less able to discern the value.
Giving the benefit of the doubt can only come after one understands what was said. Case in point, asking someone to clarify should be assumed to be a good faith question that comes from a place of ignorance. (And to your credit you did indeed provide an explanation.)
If it wasn't simple, there would be more lines of code to implement the same idea. As it is, he might have had to spend an hour understanding one line to understand that idea (1 line/hr slow), as opposed to spending an hour reading a hundred lines of code (100 line/hr fast) for the same result.
I always hate when authors waffle around instead of just getting to it.
Why couldn't:
> Today, in weird C code tricks, I want to show you a small example from Git’s source code.
> Recently, I was poking around the Git source when a directory name caught my eye, it was named “compiler-tricks”. I thought, “This is a promising name, let’s see what’s inside of it”.
> Inside this directory, there was a file called not-constant.c, and the whole file contained just this:
Have been:
> In the land of weird C code, there's an example in Git's not-constant.c:
The entire article is exhausting. So many "so why this" and "to understand this, x". Could have gotten the entire point across in perhaps 10% of the space.
It's the televisionization of the Internet. You should imagine it as a guy walking down a beach as the camera follows him looking sincerely and speaking to alleviate your loneliness and then there will be a shampoo ad!
That reminds me of an old project that I want to say was called "methbusters" that was a recut of the original mythbusters in which they cut all of the repetitions that came after every commercial break. Final product was something like 5 minutes an episode.
If my ship ever really comes in and docks at the harbor I’m going to remember to keep my wallet full of cash, so I can stop and get that strawberry ice cream cone without worrying about the long term consequences, which are all I would have left.
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