I live in Pittsburgh and I can tell you it's still like that - which is convenient when you want to get rid of things. I had some scrap aluminum that I put out with the trash the night before pick up and it was gone before I had walked back to the house. A guy pulled up in a Subaru Forrester and grabbed it. He asked me if he could have the wooden crate that I had also thrown out. I said sure. He asked me if I had any more scrap metal. I said not today, but I've got a 500 pound cast-iron tub that I need to get rid of soon.
Last year I bought a fixer-upper house last year on a bike trail and river in a small town outside of Pittsburgh ($40k - still possible here). I got in touch with the town secretary to discuss getting a dumpster for a while and she volunteered "I know a good scrapper". I called him and he and his son came and cleared out several hundred pounds of metal stuff that wasn't going to be part of my house renovations.
> Last year I bought a fixer-upper house last year on a bike trail and river in a small town outside of Pittsburgh ($40k - still possible here)
On a slightly related question if you don't mind answering, were you able to get homeowners insurance with flood coverage for it? What's your relative level of risk from the river? And what are you paying if you did get coverage?
But you can get general homeowners insurance sans flood coverage? Does the lack of flood coverage also not cover events like municipal sewer (reverse flow) floods?
I've periodically looked at real estate in some similar "$40k for a whole house?" rust belt towns, but only as a place where I might want to live in part time for a very quiet remote work environment. None of them look like a place where I would ever want to have to engage with the local economy to find a local job in the region.
That's basically the situation for me in Saltsburg PA. But it's just 30 mins from bigger suburbs with good employment opportunities. I'd retire there. The folks are super nice.
For now it's a "therapy project" house for me. I go and work on the house and then go biking or kayaking. It's 150 years old and one of the few brick houses from that era.
Edit: Yes. I will be able to get insurance sans flood. The issue is that Fema doesn't often update flood maps.
I'm not who you asked, but I moved to Pittsburgh for a job, figuring I would earn money for a few years then move to real city. That was over thirty years ago. Turns out, I love the place.
Pittsburgh has most of the benefits of a larger city without most of the problems. Its infrastructure is in many ways over-provisioned, being built for past industry and a larger population (but the maintenance burden is catching up). Its unusually hilly and berivered geography has allowed its neighborhoods to escape homogenization and retain their individual ethnic characters. And the setting, with rivers, bridges, trails, forests, is beautiful. Plus the airport recently got overhauled to meet the region’s actual needs, making it way more convenient.
Oh, if you're in to sports, Pittsburgh has some great teams and a great fan base.
Speaking of over provisioned, you'll also find some very affordable housing there relative to the jobs available. So you could work at Google/Meta/Amazon/apple and have a 30 minute commute to work and pay $600k for a large house in a nice neighborhood on a nice sized plot of land, when the the best you could do is $2.2m for a less nice house in the bay area
Like many non-natives, I moved back because spouses parents were here. It is a very friendly city and I have like a dozen close friends and we go and explore regularly. Bike and brews is a favorite. Or run then coffee.
Is much less affordable now compared to 10 years ago. But there are still lots of fixer-uppers still.
> I went down with them, to supervise, but was quickly roped into the heavy lifting.
If you ever find yourself in a situation like this, politely bow out. As I suspect the author would advise.
It's an easy -- even likely -- way for someone to get an adversely life-changing injury.
Besides the good writing, it was easy to visualize that playing out, because I've seen it before.
Also, don't let anyone do a risky thing like this on your property, unless you know they're both capable professionals, and that they have sufficient insurance covering anything that could plausibly go very bad.
I’ve had a perpetual back injury because my small business owner boss had his tech support people move a piano of his while on the clock. Then he has a doctor buddy of his look at it and try to tell me I have hepatitis. Which multiple follow ups proved I didn’t. Don’t do labor outside of what’s expected for the position.
Wow, I didn't realize how much I missed blog posts like this. Is there any way we can get the version of the Internet where people posted like this on their personal blogs back? It's the reason sites like hacker news came to exist, you couldn't just scroll social media to find stuff, you had to sort of stumble upon (that used to be a website too, didn't it?) stuff like this and pass it around word of mouth. It was awesome.
Man I miss StumbleUpon so much. That was such a glorious internet time for me. Found so many interesting and weird corners of the internet. I’ve been trying hard to avoid the centralized internet. That button to just send me to random places would be so nice.
I feel like you gotta be the change you want to see though. The small indie web, which never really went away I think, seems to be on the rise again. I know I’ve been enjoying clicking through all sorts of small personal sites people have running.
I'm ordinarily loathe to post a link to reddit, but here is a very recent example of copper scrapping on an entire cargo ship that's been abandoned by its crew (it took a hit from some kind of munition) in the hormuz area:
Being poor has zero correlation with being “lazy”.
Being poor is highly correlated with having little to no access to financial “leverage” so it’s very difficult to earn any sort of non-linear return on capital.
Additionally, the vast majority of your capital is solely the current market price of your individual labor.
> Being poor has zero correlation with being “lazy”.
This doesn't sound right. If that were literally true, and the level of industriousness didn't affect prosperity at all, why would anyone bother to work?
This is a dishonest take predicated on bucketing everyone who isn't rolling in it from investmet income as "poor"
You won't be "live in an inner ring suburb, shop at whole foods, and peddle ivory tower takes on HN" level rich by working. But with a little care in avoiding big money sinks you can have stable access to basically all the necessities plus some, own your own home and eventually retire. See for example most construction industry professions.
A friend was a property manager in Sacramento. His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copper, that currently pays ~$5/lb. If people are really working this hard for steel at $0.04/lb, then transformers and air conditioners will have to be installed in vaults.
My GF works with energy infrastructure in Colombia and they have lots of issues with people stealing copper, I didn't verify her claim but she said despite not having natural sources of copper Colombia had significant export volume of copper, pretty much all stolen. Her company has launched multiple investigations and unveiled gangs and networks repeatedly.
> His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copper
It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables. They've been found to steal, too, heavy road grate if they were of any value: which created actual serious accidents (where a car's tire falls into the hole).
Regarding the electrical cables for trains, one solution is, slowly , replace them with cables with basically the same properties but 1/10th the copper.
Other funky solutions have been implemented: chemical sprays with a composition that is watermark and that cannot easily be removed. So when caught the thieves cannot deny because for x weeks the watermark stays, invisible and harmless, on their skin.
One question of course is: what does society think we should do with thieves who create road accidents and who render trains inoperable?
> It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables.
Even worse. Sometimes, the dumb fucks think something has copper in it, but actually it's fiber... once two copper thieves simultaneously took out the primary and secondary fiber for the GSM-R network, leading to a complete standstill in Northern Germany [1]. (Personally: given the timing, I think it was Russian throwaway agents, and I do not believe that "copper thieves" cover story for a single second)
The scrap price is what you get for bringing scrap copper to a recycler.
Not an expert, but I assume $5/lb is the peak value for dropping off nearly perfect condition copper. Not sure how much they’re actually getting for stripped copper wire.
I would also think that unscrupulous scrap buyers would offer a lower price for copper which has obviously been stolen or stripped from public works, since they are taking on more risk by buying it.
NH rolls like this too and I didn’t understand it for a decade after moving up to my wife’s territory from … Rhode Island. There was a time in the nineties where the whole economy here ran on used cars on the side of the road. One of the reasons I have not fixed my alcoholism, beyond the obvious, is there is a retired Mainer who depends on my empties as best I can tell. Who am I to stop drinking if some company will pay me too much to write code? We are all part of a larger system.
It's never about money. It's a life style, belief system, social group or community that drives that kind of passion. It happens everywhere, all the time with everyone. It's about how they feel about what they do. When they were successful in moving the furnace out, they get a feeling that is 1000 times more precious than the value of that piece.
Fun excercise: look up some prices for various popular types of plastic (pellets, $/tonne), and compare with common metals like steel, stainless, alu, copper etc. Next, wonder why no scrapper bothers to collect plastic waste. It's out there, for free, in any amount you want!
Hint: it's the recycling process (and cost of the steps involved) that would get you. Plastics' low density doesn't help either.
He says it’s a journal entry from around 2006, but adding 2006 to the title feels slightly out of place to me in this case because this tweet in 2026 is publishing a journal entry that was from what I gather not previously published. (Assuming that when he says journal he is referring to hand written journals he has been keeping.)
So it seems to me that authored year is 2006 and publication year is 2026. And usually when you guys or the users put the year in the title, it has to do with year of first publication.
But I am probably overthinking it or I have an incomplete impression of how to interpret what you and others mean when you put the year in the title :p
I used to scrap to make an extra buck, it was super fun. I did it for about half a year as my primary income. That was wicked fun, and exhausting. I’ve never been anywhere near that strong at any point in my life, before or after and did not work out once. Did not pay tech wages, but if you’re Smart about it and not unlucky, or if you’re just lucky, you can make a fair bit more than people here seem to expect. I’m back mostly to doing it here or there, mostly for fun, when an interesting opportunity presents itself.
Every scrapper is different. How they source, tracking yards or private buyers, how much they strip down what items (how do they value their time, with a modifier of how much they enjoy it). I’m sure it varies a lot geographically. I enjoy scrapping retired public/municipal electrical infrastructure/equipment municipal very enjoyable, and if you ask around enough you’ll find auctions or even towns willing to let you do their dirty work.
Apologize for not engaging with the post directly but holy fuck can people stop using Twitter as a long form blogging platform. I don't want a full screen pop up telling me to sign in or a persistent bottom bar telling me to open the tweet in the app or a reply section mostly hidden unless I log in. I can't even use reader mode because somehow the paragraph breaks all goes missing and the whole thing merges into one didn’t wall of text. Not to mention your post may or may not end up entirely behind a login gate depending on Twitter's temperament of the day.
Please just put it on an old, boring web log. At this point I'll even accept substack.
> I don't want a full screen pop up telling me to sign in or a persistent bottom bar telling me to open the tweet in the app or a reply section mostly hidden unless I log in.
I really don't want to support a man who has killed so many people and advocates so aggressively for white supremacy and the elimination of trans people.
One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
I know lots of folks without a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out, and not one single one, is "lazy." In fact, a few have more than one (difficult) job.
I am old enough to see a few of them getting into the back nine, with no cushion.
I'm extremely grateful for what I have.
[EDIT] Added "many" because it's more appropriate, and short-circuits the implied "all."
Yeah, most people probably underestimate the effect that several things have on where they end up in life: education, self discipline, hard work, making good decisions, persistence, and, especially, chance. If you screw up majorly on any the factors under your control, you dramatically reduce your chances of “the good life.” But, even if you do all of them right, you are still at the mercy of chance. Get born in the wrong year or at the wrong place or into the wrong family or with the wrong genetics and that's all it takes to set you up for a hard life.
The tragedy is that we could have a society that gives people more opportunities to escape the downward pull of chance gone wrong early in life. Maybe someday we'll get there.
I really wanted to be a journalist when I was young, but then the PC era began and I became sort of addicted to computers and developed my first commercial website at a very young age.
I remember making more money than most people in my family (not a high bar, really) when I was working as a 20-year-old developer.
That led people in my family to think I was some sort of brilliant young man, but that bar was easily cleared (and still is) by pretty much anyone who had an interest in computers and applied themselves to pursue a career in the field.
My life would have been very different if I'd had a few more years to pursue journalism, which was already a very difficult field back then.
I wanted to be a professional artist, when I was younger[0]. I found out that even a mediocre programmer made more than even a relatively successful artist, and I enjoyed coding, so I stuck with that.
I also think that we should have mercy for people who’ve made mistakes. People who’ve willingly done dumb things, especially when they were young.
I feel this way because I did dumb things when I was young, and I’m sure you did too dear reader, and at least for me, I was lucky that those dumb things didn’t end in catastrophe.
It’s like it’s human nature to forget the dumb things you did if you were lucky enough to escape the consequences, and look down on those who weren’t so lucky.
> I also think that we should have mercy for people who’ve made mistakes.
Yes. When people make mistakes, they sometimes fall into holes that are hard to climb out of. It is in society’s interest to place ladders in these holes so that these unfortunate people can climb out and become productive members of society.
Instead, we have self-interested parties who have figured out how to extract rents from keeping people trapped in holes. Some of these parties are preventing ladders from being built. Others are destroying existing ladders. Others still are even inventing deeper, stickier holes—crypto scams, ubiquitous gambling, addictive gas-station drugs, dopamine-hit apps—to trap even greater numbers of their fellow human beings.
When a society allows the suffering of others to become a profitable business model, good things rarely follow.
This whole thing is one of those fruitless arguments about a badly defined notion of "most people".
For instance the scope of the "especially chance" assertion has strange effects. Does "get born in the wrong year" include 300,000 years of human history? In that case chance has very little effect. You're overwhelming likely to grow up using stone tools, with a 1 in 3 chance of also having access to pottery.
But that would be silly and obviously wasn't the intended question. The intended question is one that's closer to home, a question that we care about. But how much closer to which home, and what exactly is the scope of the question? It can be made less about luck by filtering out the unlucky from the scope.
Wrong year as in landing on a giant generational recession at the time period in life when people usually accelerate or maybe a world wide pandemic landing in your formative years.
Wrong year is a much smaller time scale. An example more close to home on this site, you/me just missed the free money cash days of the fango mango tech companies. Sure, there are still some of those jobs but far fewer with where interest rates are at.
I used to think a wrong year was maybe 1:80 but at 50, I've seen some unpleasant shit every decade.
I keep thinking about some odd-ball numerology weirdo I met on a trip in GG park about cycles of the universe and prime number harmony.
In the real world there are just boom/bust cycles, make hay while the sun shines. IME you'll be part of 8 cycles, 5 of which you can control a small part of.
For the vast majority of higher-level jobs you need certifications, not knowledge. There are very few jobs that you can get by simply demonstrating that you know something.
The reason people pay $100k for a year of college education most certainly isn’t the lectures, which you can often find on YouTube these days.
Most of life is luck, with regards to success and economic prosperity. We’ve built a system that ignores that for the benefit of a privileged few, using fairy tales around exceptionalism and faux meritocracy. We should build socioeconomic systems where luck is less a component for survival and living a good life, imho. I think we’re on our way there (support of democratic socialism and their candidates is at record highs, mostly around the young, and the old age out at a rate of 2M per year 55+ [higher support of capitalism because they were lucky under it]), but it’s going to take another decade or two to see the improvements (political cycles, electorate turnover, policy implementation lag, etc.)
Yes and no. I can think of easily three decision or inflection points in my life where if i went left instead of right, id be a multi millionaire. I can think of even more where my life direction would have been radically different.
Luck plays a huge part on where you start and land but no one is totally unlucky. Luck strikes everyone across all starting points.
What i have seen with my loved ones that struggle is that they have had many lucky breaks and somehow keep squandering them in a sad self fulfilling prophecy. Success begets success and failure begets failure. Both cycles are reversible.
Keep in mind “success” is not rich/famous but financially stable.
You must be joking. Democratic Socialism is just Socialism with a prettier name. Socialism does not work, full stop, unless you're in the group at the top controlling the strings. Don't point at the nordic countries, they have far less progressive taxation policies that the US when you factor VAT in.
I thought it was more like, if it doesn’t work it’s socialism, if it does work it’s not socialism? This is why Norway is at the same time called not socialism (because it works) and socialism (because conservatives don’t want us to even try adopting what works in Norway).
Luck is just as important even with perfect economic equality. It’s just that economic luck gets replaced by luck of genetics, luck of immaterial circumstances, etc.
I have always found the assumption strange that one is somehow preferable to the other, but most people seem to believe that, so maybe one day they’ll get what they’re asking for and then find out that it’s not what they wanted after all.
The pervasive myth that hard work == wealth needs to die. Every people I have met in my life wanted to have a shot at a decent life and would have put the necessary work for a decent wage.
The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.
The myth is so pervasive because it's propagated by people with more wealth against people with less of it, and the conflict of interest prevents anyone from giving it up.
Everyone wants to feel better about themselves and the easiest way is to look down on someone who has less. Less "whatever" really, people always find something that they think makes them better, money is just the obvious choice because society slowly associated money with success. It doesn't matter if the wealth came from their parents, or luck, they can still pretend it makes them better.
It's one of those situations where everyone's in on it. The poor really haven't much else to go on and they'll take this little boost in their standing, the rich are tempted to think they so much better than most other people. Everyone in between sits somewhere on that scale.
I think it's easy to see: (1) A simplified variation of it is true (namely, that if effort1 > effort2 then outcome(env, effort1) >= outcome(env, effort2) for any fixed environment env); (2) It flatters those who have achieved high outcomes, regardless of how much effort they put in.
Hard work is often necessary but not sufficient. You can work very hard moving a pile of sand with a pair of tweezers but you’re not going to get wealthy doing that.
The people who simply think that because they worked hard wealth should just come to them are going to remain confused until they figure out that what you work on is also important.
There are a lot of factors to getting wealthy. Most of them are out of your control. Hard work happens to be one that is in your control. Its not like you can choose to be born to different parents or a different place.
But its still not magic. It doesn't guarantee anything. Worst of all its useless if the work is directed to the wrong ends.
How about hard work + courage ? Without ability to take risk and potential failure it is very difficult to change your economic level. It is very naive to think that doing the same thing everyday will somehow change your economic level.
> The pervasive myth that hard work == wealth needs to die.
The purpose of the concept is to push kids from a young age to be industrious. You are much less likely to become wealthy if you sit around doing the bare minimum.
Putting in an significant effort isn't a guarantee, but it does increase your chances from whatever the baseline is given your context.
The concept doesn't claim that wealthy people all worked hard; everyone knows you can be wealthy without having worked at all, such as through inheritance or the lottery!
You mischaracterized my argument, people aren't "lazy" by default. Most people that walks the earth wants to explore, create and socialize. But you seem to imply that kids would otherwise "sit around and do the bare minimum" if not pushed from a young age to be industrious. This is ludicrous.
There are way more empirical evidence that luck plays a much bigger role in wealth creation than effort.
> There are way more empirical evidence that luck plays a much bigger role in wealth creation than effort.
my point isn't that when you put in effort you WILL create wealth. my point also isn't that luck plays a bigger role than effort (though, there's no empirical evidence for that assertion). my point also isn't that if you're poorer you didn't put in effort.
my point is: when you put in effort, you increase the surface area for luck.
put differently: if you don't think putting in effort increases your chances and it is mostly luck, why put in effort at all? luck will just find your door, after all, and if it doesn't, oh well.
And that's why this concept (your "myth") has value and should not die.
> I don't understand why you can't see my argument for what it is: People work hard on their own merit.
I see. You're saying people either work hard or don't (from within), rather than what their parents or teachers or peers say.
Hard to argue with that.
At the same time, I am glad my parents instilled in me being a hard worker in whatever I chose because I am pretty confident it has made a huge difference in my success.
I would not concede that some people aren’t lazy, however.
Persistent poverty is usually a byproduct of poor impulse control. That will quickly undo any compounding created by hard work.
No other factor comes close to being as predictive of whether or not someone in the US gets out of poverty as impulse control. I've seen it in every poor community I lived in.
There is no satisfactory way to address this reality. Impulse control is significantly innate. Attempts to improve it have limited success in the best cases. Someone with no impulse control will squander or lose resources given to them, whether through their own hard work or handouts. See also: lottery winners. It is a very deep local minima.
> Persistent poverty is usually a byproduct of poor impulse control.
Go visit a brick factory in Pakistan. The laborers are extremely poor and no amount of "work harder" effort on their individual part (they already work hard as fuck, six days a week) is going to lift them out of that life. Telling them they're poor because they have poor impulse control is one of the most ridiculous things I've read today.
In that case I would be very interested to see the parent commenter expand on why they have formed the opinion that persons living in poverty in the US (based on their first hand experiences) have poor impulse control but people in other locations do not.
I think the most reasonable answer is that first world countries provide access to many opportunities that do not exist elsewhere. People can and do lift themselves from poverty with these opportunities.
Nobody can "impulse control" their way out of a situation where income is 100 and necessary expenses are 102. Sure there are things in their control but, thinking poor people are just wasting their money is a stereotype that need to die.
Assume everyone is as rational as you. How could you lift yourself from that upsidedown situation? Bootstraps?
Poor people absolutely are wasting money but it doesn’t matter. I did it, everyone does it. The “wasting money” argument is hyper-analytical and not a productive accounting of human behavior. Almost no one in the US is literally negative on resources from all sources versus necessary expenses.
Around 10-15% of US households are living at the edge of their income. That is per the US Federal Reserve and BLS. This doesn’t account for the widely available government subsidies[0] for people in these income brackets.
Even in the worst cases, there is significant economic slack. Almost the entire time I lived below the poverty line I was usually able to save significant money in that context. So could have almost all of the poor people I knew. The exceptions always seemed to be old people living off Social Security. But they have their own safety nets.
I want proper support for people in poverty. That requires an objective accounting of the nature of their poverty that far too many people are incurious about. Everyone wants to make this way more complicated than it needs to be.
[0] A variety of subpopulations legitimately fall through the cracks and are excluded from significant government support. I was in those cracks.
It is really obvious that many people worried about the poor in the US know nothing at all about the actual poor in the US.
Valid hypothesis, but I suspect that cause and effect may be reversed.
When you don't have much, and opportunity is fleeting, you tend to grab and implement, quickly.
If you get a windfall, but don't have a bank account, you spend it quickly. Hanging onto it, could actually be very dangerous, or at least, increase the likelihood of having it taken away.
More than this, in a risky, unstable environment, taking what you can get when you can get it is the right evolutionary strategy. Genetics doesn't know what sort of world you are going to be born into so it has developed a limited number of plans. One of those plans is "control your impulses" and another is "get what you can and get out". They both work well in certain scenarios, and suffer in others.
> If something goes wrong in this process—the overwhelmingly most likely one is that the payer doesn’t have the funds to cover the check (NSF, or “insufficient funds”), but the check being fraudulent or unauthorized is also possible—that wrongness may not be discovered before money “moves” to your bank. And so that payment can be recalled from your bank to the bank the check is drawn on. This will likely result in the bank attempting to recall the money from your account.
> And so by presenting your check, which you think is substantially terminating a transaction, you are actually creating a new credit extension with your bank. They are extremely aware that you just asked them to advance you money, even if you are not aware that you did that. They already partially underwrote this extension of credit; that is why you were not shooed out of the building when you originally asked for a checking account.
The article is about depositing a check as an extension of credit; not spending via check. This creates a creditworthiness requirement that is in practice one of the most common reasons for someone to not have access to a bank account.
I'm open to this correlation. But I wonder about causality. Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential. Breaking the cycle of poverty is difficult, but I'm not an expert on where the best investments to solve this problem would be.
> But I wonder about causality. Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential.
There's fairly good statistics that a large portion of the people living in a cycle of poverty and drug addiction in Vancouver's downtown eastside suffer from a number of documented risk factors:
a) fetal alcohol syndrome
b) documented abuse by parents at an early age, or became wards of the state and entered foster care system, were not placed with any family members
c) drug/alcohol abuse by parents
d) molested by parents, relatives, "friends" of parents at an early age
If the parents have poor impulse control then the children often do as well. This is a selection effect; children growing up in poverty often inherit a significant contributor to their parents' persistent poverty.
People who are incidentally in poverty usually have children that aren't. I grew up in pretty abject poverty and saw this pattern over and over again too. My parents didn't have poor impulse control, it was circumstantial. All of my siblings were able to grind their way to a successful life despite having the deck stacked against them -- and none of them work in tech.
It is extremely frustrating. I have persistently poor friends who are unambiguously above average in both intelligence and work ethic, and with great personalities. Yet despite that, they constantly sabotage their future with poor impulse control. With good impulse control they'd be solidly middle class at a minimum.
I don't know how to fix the above situation. I've tried many times. They can't really explain why they make the stupid decisions they do, it just kind of happens.
I also wonder if its rational behaviour at the end of the day. If you don't have anything to your name, why delay gratification? Its not like you'll get benefits of delaying, and you may very well suffer a loss if you wait. I think you have to have a certain amount of wealth before the types of behaviours that actually make you wealthy make sense in the average case.
The original marshmallow test fails for this reason, but also it's true that poor impulse control makes it harder to break out of situations that do not reward delayed gratification.
> Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential.
But that’s just another correlation without a proof of causation.
There’s no clear definition of what causation is. You can invoke the tired “correlation doesn’t imply causation” any time you want, but the same quip disqualifies any alternative causation mechanism you propose, unless you serve up an actual criterion for distinguishing the two along with it. Asserting that one seems more plausible than the other isn’t enough.
You can have really stupid parents who ingrain suboptimal behavior patterns and interests to you. Things like poor eating, attitudes and beliefs about work and what’s possible, abuse, poor ways of coping with stress and conflict. Throw into that a hopeless environment with no immediate opportunities, bad peer group, and early pregnancies and you have a recipe for disaster
Usually? Dude, you're implying that most impoverished people deserve it without providing a shred of evidence. You saw it, huh? Sorry, idk what you saw, but your anecdotes are no basis for making such a sweeping and important claim about one of the most complex problems humanity faces.
How about growing up in a neighborhood and environment where there isn't negative influence and impulses around you to begin with?
For your example, people in poor environments have more liquor stores, convenience stores, etc. If you are rich you have more positive influence around you and less to impulse control against.
Want to test your argument? Try to live in a strip club and tell me if you can control your impulses as a male (or if you are a female, whatever is your temptation equivalent). Since you believe your control in that situation is 100% innnate and cannot be changed, then you have squandered all your resources. However you and I can see thats silly, why would anyone choose to live so close to temptation and negative influence? But isn't your argument saying you shouldn't bother to control that since you'd just fall to poverty anyway.
There's also been a number of studies done on what constitutes a "food desert" in the United States, where people don't have nearby access to a proper grocery store, just small convenience stores (and things like a strip mall with convenience store, liquor store, vape shop, etc). And as it correlates with obesity and health issues caused by an unhealthy diet.
Ah, hadn't realized it had been studied. Nice find.
Growing up with an immigrant family and parents who didn't have the opportunity I did to change environments and control the food around me (either by location, and proximity of nearby stores, and also whats physically in my home) I notice how much my "impulse" control simply changes based on whats around me.
When I am in their home space, the unhealthy diet and health issues abound.
Being poor is a lot of work, as is very well documented. When you have more money you can offload some (or in extreme cases pretty much all) of the labor.
Wrapping an interrogation in a polite "just to clarify" and demanding point estimates and error bounds on a generalization is weaponized pedantry designed to derail the thread into an impossible burden of proof.
(1) just to clarify isn’t meant to be polite, I’m trying to get GP to clarify his belief
(2) I don’t care about citations - I want GP to clarify his belief
(3) GP is using something similar to a Motte and Bailey to make a generalized statement about a group of people. They can argue against all wealthy people and retreat to “I didn’t mean all” with any argument that lands, without sacrificing the castle. This is a commonly used tactic when making generalizations about racial and social groups.
It is fair to question the framing "many wealthy think the poor are lazy" because what the audience actually hears is "the majority of the wealthy think the poor are lazy (and other people don't think that)" because otherwise the sentence wouldn't have singled out the wealthy.
Is it really the majority? And if it is, is that belief limited to the wealthy or do the middle class also think that? What do the poor think?
I like the transition from “I have an issue with what you said” to “I have an issue with what I imagine you said” after getting clarification
That aside the statement was fine as written. For example it takes deliberate and active misunderstanding to twist the statement “people eat meat” into “there aren’t any vegetarians”
Hang on, no, imagine if someone said "people eat meat" and it was the core part of an argument that people need a minimum of 2 acres of farmland to support their food consumption. It would be important to point out that vegetarians and vegans need less than an acre.
The context matters and blanket statements can be misleading in certain contexts.
> and it was the core part of an argument that people need a minimum of 2 acres of farmland
Then we would be in an entirely different thread talking about something else? I was pointing out that trying to use “I refuse to understand what I read” as a dunk doesn’t really work. If you’re trying to say “What if I invent imaginary circumstances where I am right and you are wrong?” then yeah, I’d be helpless in that situation
Well, no, because in this case the difference between "many", "most", and "all" was unclear and was being used for rhetorical effect to support a contentious point.
You can't just make a broad assertion in support of your views and then complain "oh, I only meant a more narrow version" when people say it's too broad.
Similarly, if someone made an unclear point about meat consumption in support of their argument then it would and should be called out.
No to what? No, if somebody was making a totally different argument we wouldn’t be having a different conversation? Or no that I wouldn’t be proven wrong in your hypothetical where I’m wrong?
>You can't just make a broad assertion in support of your views and then complain "oh, I only meant a more narrow version" when people say it's too broad.
Lmao I’d ask what you mean by “you can’t clarify stuff” but
If there was really nothing wrong with the original phrasing about rich people, then there's also nothing wrong with GP's phrasing about poor people. The usages are exactly parallel.
Talk to the immigrants - a lot of them came to the US with only a few thousand $$$ in the bank or even less. They are not multimillionaires, but a lot of them got from zero to high-paying programmer jobs.
Granted, there is a healthy dose of luck and talent involved, but saying that the only way to get rich is to have rich parents is a lazy and wrong take.
Here’s the thing about the immigrant pulled-up-by-bootstraps story: immigration is expensive. When you hear about someone coming to North America with “only a few thousand dollars in their pocket”, you have to remember that by time they’ve landed, they’ve already sunk likely tens of thousands of dollars into getting the paperwork to get here (unless they already had a job lined up, which generally means educated).
Many not-poor people I know in Canada wouldn’t have the means to immigrate elsewhere without saving up for a few years at way above minimum wage. Education and skill are going to make them more desirable immigration candidates than, say, someone who barely graduated high school. It’s really not an apples-to-apples comparison at all.
I’m a software engineer, and my job is so easy for the pay it’s ridiculous. I assure you, I do not work 5-10x harder than the guys who just installed my fence.
Can you do their work if there is a nobody to help ? Can they do your work if there is nobody to help ? You are underestimating the amount of time/energy spent in developing the skill.
In my lived experience, the majority of poverty is the inability to delay gratification. Whether you want to attribute that to personal failings or to other things is a separate question
Most likely you're seeing the causality in the wrong direction - poverty creates a strong incentive to go for immediate benefits rather than absorb the risk of one that is delayed.
> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
I've noticed the same thing over my life (I'm almost 53) and by and large the well-off people who assume the poor are lazy are among the laziest, most useless nepobaby piles of shit I've met.
It is like they themselves had an easy road to success thanks to having well off, well connected parents and assume people significantly poorer must be even lazier than they are because their own success wasn't very hard to achieve, oblivious to the fact that the poor people they are looking down on started in a very different starting position than they did.
And to be clear, I'm not saying all wealthy people are lazy, some have worked legitimately hard for their success, and I'm not saying some poor people aren't lazy, of course you'll find examples of both. But there are tons of extremely hard working poor people, and tons of extremely lazy wealthy people who make absurd amounts of money doing very "bullshit" jobs.
This is basic psychology: being rich for no apparent reason causes cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is annoying/painful. So rather than change beliefs to see one's self as very lucky, in most cases the brain re-works reality to provide a rational explanation: the rich person worked hard/is smarter, etc.
There's four quadrants, lazy, works hard on one axis, and poor and rich on the other axis. Of those four quadrants, people exist in all four of them and it's stupid to pretend otherwise. That means that not pretending lazy poor don't exist, nor that rich hardworking people also exist. I know lazy poor people that aren't lazy so much as have severe mental health problems related to being poor, but also know rich people who could have fucked off to the beach forever by now but they keep working for some reason.
Why do I bring this up? Am I nitpicking? (yes) Until such time that there are no poor people, claiming there are no lazy poor people just gets people that actually know lazy poor people to tune out anyone's dreams of UBI because I'm not paying taxes on income I earn through me working, so that everyone else can be lazy and not work. It's as simple as that. Yes we can point to systemic and racially moviated biases that lead to unequal outcomes, but that isn't convincing on why my tax dollars should go to lazy poor people who refuse to work or even go to the EBT office to. I'm all for my tax dollars going to hard working poor people, and especially to their health care because a cancer or diabetes diagnosis should not bankrupt anyone, but the rest is hard to swallow.
Your tax dollars go to all kinds of things far worse than helping people survive. The Protestant work ethic cannot die soon enough. Never once have I cared if someone is "lazy". A rich person may work very hard exploiting others, that's far worse than not working at all.
I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.
But the Protestant work ethic is good! There are hard-working people who are still poor, but there are very few situations where you, or anyone else, will be better off being lazy instead of working. (Hard manual labor that harms you permanently in some way, like old coal miners, is probably the biggest exception.)
In the counterfactual, where these hard-working poor people are lazy instead, they aren't suddenly rich or even the same as they are now. They're almost certainly worse off.
I was raised with a strong work ethic. Do I believe that working hard is the only reason I am where I am now? No, of course not. But if I didn't work hard my life would be worse in every way imaginable! Regardless of how lucky or unlucky your life is, having a solid work ethic will always always always make you happier. Work is not inherently 'bad' in some way, and neither is having to work to live and to learn and to have a good life.
I don't agree, it's a one way ticket to exploitation. All of the richest people I know (and I mean really rich, like over $100M in net worth) are from rich families and have inherited their wealth. Most are lazy but the ones that "work hard" produce exploitation at scale to further enrich themselves at the expense of their workers.
> I was raised with a strong work ethic
Most Americans are raised like this, which is why they are so easy to exploit and why they are against basic social safety nets and other things that are generally good for society.
The fact is other than inheritance, the easiest way (and really only way) to make a lot of money is to talk well. Talk well and get as close to rich people as you can, then talk some more. Is that "hard work"? It's wasting your life for sure, but it doesn't compare to pouring concrete.
I recommend everyone read this and try not to end up "clueless" as it really is the worst option of the bunch:
A significant chunk of the "defense" spending is VA. Interest kind of shouldn't count? It's the cost of borrowing for our past spending on, you guessed it, mostly social programs.
Defense spending used to be a higher percentage of our budget than now, so if anything you should assign more of that to the debt.
About 16% of the spending is straight up defense spending and about 5% is the VA. I personally think it’s crazy to severe them and wish the va was part of the DoD. But people can disagree.
You only get to a majority by doing two misleading things… blaming the national debt on entitlements instead of general fund deficits, and counting Social Security (which is funded by its own payroll taxes) as a welfare program.
The actual means-tested safety net (Medicaid, food assistance, SSI, housing) is only around 15% to 20% of federal spending.
Social security is a welfare program. As is Medicare. They are odd regressive forms of them but they are tax funded welfare programs full stop.
As for fund deficits there are basically 4 things the federal government pays for, social security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military. Everything else is noise or interest. So when accounting for the debt load of that interest it only makes sense to assign some part of it to those 4 things.
Stop repeatedly changing definitions and accounting rules until the desired conclusion becomes true. It's tiresome.
In U.S. policy terminology, Social Security and Medicare are social insurance programs. Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, and housing assistance are means tested safety net programs.
Yes, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense make up a majority of federal spending. But your conclusion only works by relabeling Social Security and Medicare as welfare, dismissing the rest of government as noise, and then assigning an arbitrary share of decades of accumulated interest expense to those programs.
Your last move is especially egregious. Federal debt reflects the cumulative gap between all federal spending and all federal revenue over time. You can't figure out what caused it by looking at today's largest spending categories.
Social Security's current shortfall is primarily the result of a demographic imbalance Congress has known about for decades and repeatedly declined to fully address. That makes it particularly silly to retroactively assign some arbitrary share of the rest of the federal government's accumulated debt to Social Security.
The accurate way to talk about this is that Social Security and the major health programs are a very large share of federal spending. "The social safety net is most of the budget" is a conclusion manufactured by your definitions.
Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages.
I've worked in both tech and construction. Never seen a tech worker go home and come back with the soles of their shoes resoled overnight because they didn't have a better option for work tomorrow.
Is that the best option? Generally no, it's probably not worth your time to do things that you don't specialize in. But at some point, you run out of hours to profit from the things you specialize in, and you still need something, so you figure it out. You do your oil changes, and fix your shoes and repair things even when they would generally considered 'totaled'. You miss work or at least hours on days when your late model car doesn't start. You take care of your own house repairs and yardwork, if your lucky enough to own something your landlord's yard and maintenance work more likely. And this is all off hours stuff because that's the option you have.
I've worked so much less in tech, yeah the hours can be long and oncall sucks. But I end up being able to redirect all my effort into the thing I'm specialized in and that I get paid the most to do. Which means I can pay to have my boots resoled, or just buy new ones, I take my (newer cars that always start) to the dealer every 6 months. I can pay a premium for delivery of food and staples, I can hire help around the house for anything from lawn care to tree trimming to roof repairs.
When I left the trades, 50 hours was generally required and 60 was becoming the norm. I'm not working any more in tech at work, but I work a lot lest to have a better life outside of work. It's just night and day.
And there are jobs where you’re paid >$200k and work 20-30 hours per week. I have friends doing that right now. When I was at Google I earned $350k and my boss literally told me I could stop working for 12 months and still get paid if I wanted to. I chose to quit instead to go somewhere where I’d learn more.
That is kind of the expected outcome of capitalism - the more value you provide the harder it is to replace you and the easier it is for you to leverage that for better working conditions.
If you'll excuse the dehumanizing metaphor, you probably treat your valuable possessions a lot better than your cheap possessions too. Capitalism makes possessions out of all of us.
You might be misunderstanding what is meant by "lazy". I don't think it's such a difficult perspective to understand.
What if your wealth was created by self-employment and building up a business? When you see so many talented and hard working people rejecting all of their available opportunities to do so, what word would you use? Ignorance? Arrogance? I can't think of any positive word. At least "lazy" implies they're still waiting for a lower risk moment to pounce.
This is how most of the wealth in the USA was built, so I don't think it's offensive. It's the prevailing culture.
It only makes sense that fetuses which choose to be born into blue collar families in the wrong zip code are more likely to continue to make poor decisions for the rest of their lives. You just can't trust people with such a poor history of judgement. Unless they're C-Suite.
I'm trying hard to make your post make any sense at all..
I guess you believe everyone gets the same starting point and same opportunities? How did you come to believe such a thing? Have you looked around to see what society is like?
I'm not saying that; I'm saying that people can make decisions with very different outcomes even if they started out the same, and vice-versa. But if you're already brainwashed with socialist ideology, then obviously you can't see that...
conversely, people can make the same decisions in the same-ish environment, with very different outcomes. it sounds like you discount the effect of luck in timing, or geography, or acquaintance, which are wildly different from just making intellectually robust decisions.
> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
If they aren't physically lazy, they're unambitious or refuse to attempt nominally mentally difficult things (like math) and that is mental laziness. Poverty isn't random.
I don't think he's mocking at all - the Pittsburgh scrapping culture is fascinating. (I've lived here for 20+ years now). I throw stuff on the curb all the time and like magic, it disappears before trash day. I've also picked up a bunch of stuff from neighbors - office chairs, desks, a really nice stash of PVC pipe I used to build a grey water system for my washing machine, etc. it's like a weird little no-internet freecycle. Everyone just knows it often works and goes along with it. There are people who focus on higher value items, people who grab metals, you name it
He certainly wasn’t when he wrote this, and I don’t see how you’d read this as mocking. He was a crust punk living in a squat, fixing it up with scrap lumber he salvaged from pallets. His financial position was not so different from the scrappers when writing this story.
I live in Pittsburgh and I can tell you it's still like that - which is convenient when you want to get rid of things. I had some scrap aluminum that I put out with the trash the night before pick up and it was gone before I had walked back to the house. A guy pulled up in a Subaru Forrester and grabbed it. He asked me if he could have the wooden crate that I had also thrown out. I said sure. He asked me if I had any more scrap metal. I said not today, but I've got a 500 pound cast-iron tub that I need to get rid of soon.
Last year I bought a fixer-upper house last year on a bike trail and river in a small town outside of Pittsburgh ($40k - still possible here). I got in touch with the town secretary to discuss getting a dumpster for a while and she volunteered "I know a good scrapper". I called him and he and his son came and cleared out several hundred pounds of metal stuff that wasn't going to be part of my house renovations.
> Last year I bought a fixer-upper house last year on a bike trail and river in a small town outside of Pittsburgh ($40k - still possible here)
On a slightly related question if you don't mind answering, were you able to get homeowners insurance with flood coverage for it? What's your relative level of risk from the river? And what are you paying if you did get coverage?
Can't get flood insurance. Nor can I get a mortgage. But there's been no flood since the big one in 1936. They built 2 dams.
But you can get general homeowners insurance sans flood coverage? Does the lack of flood coverage also not cover events like municipal sewer (reverse flow) floods?
I've periodically looked at real estate in some similar "$40k for a whole house?" rust belt towns, but only as a place where I might want to live in part time for a very quiet remote work environment. None of them look like a place where I would ever want to have to engage with the local economy to find a local job in the region.
That's basically the situation for me in Saltsburg PA. But it's just 30 mins from bigger suburbs with good employment opportunities. I'd retire there. The folks are super nice.
For now it's a "therapy project" house for me. I go and work on the house and then go biking or kayaking. It's 150 years old and one of the few brick houses from that era.
Edit: Yes. I will be able to get insurance sans flood. The issue is that Fema doesn't often update flood maps.
When a house can’t be financialized it can be much, much, cheaper.
How do you like Pittsburgh? What are some pros and cons?
I spent a day there a couple years ago and it seemed like a really cool lil city that was surprisingly affordable.
I'm not who you asked, but I moved to Pittsburgh for a job, figuring I would earn money for a few years then move to real city. That was over thirty years ago. Turns out, I love the place.
Pittsburgh has most of the benefits of a larger city without most of the problems. Its infrastructure is in many ways over-provisioned, being built for past industry and a larger population (but the maintenance burden is catching up). Its unusually hilly and berivered geography has allowed its neighborhoods to escape homogenization and retain their individual ethnic characters. And the setting, with rivers, bridges, trails, forests, is beautiful. Plus the airport recently got overhauled to meet the region’s actual needs, making it way more convenient.
Oh, if you're in to sports, Pittsburgh has some great teams and a great fan base.
Yeah, I like the ’Burgh.
We'll have to get a HN in PGH club going haha
Pittsburgh's distinct neighborhoods are truly its greatest asset.
Speaking of over provisioned, you'll also find some very affordable housing there relative to the jobs available. So you could work at Google/Meta/Amazon/apple and have a 30 minute commute to work and pay $600k for a large house in a nice neighborhood on a nice sized plot of land, when the the best you could do is $2.2m for a less nice house in the bay area
Well, sure if you're using the California coast as your pricing benchmark...
Heh, $600k still sounds like a lot to me! Talk about a bubble.
Like many non-natives, I moved back because spouses parents were here. It is a very friendly city and I have like a dozen close friends and we go and explore regularly. Bike and brews is a favorite. Or run then coffee.
Is much less affordable now compared to 10 years ago. But there are still lots of fixer-uppers still.
> I went down with them, to supervise, but was quickly roped into the heavy lifting.
If you ever find yourself in a situation like this, politely bow out. As I suspect the author would advise.
It's an easy -- even likely -- way for someone to get an adversely life-changing injury.
Besides the good writing, it was easy to visualize that playing out, because I've seen it before.
Also, don't let anyone do a risky thing like this on your property, unless you know they're both capable professionals, and that they have sufficient insurance covering anything that could plausibly go very bad.
I’ve had a perpetual back injury because my small business owner boss had his tech support people move a piano of his while on the clock. Then he has a doctor buddy of his look at it and try to tell me I have hepatitis. Which multiple follow ups proved I didn’t. Don’t do labor outside of what’s expected for the position.
Wow, I didn't realize how much I missed blog posts like this. Is there any way we can get the version of the Internet where people posted like this on their personal blogs back? It's the reason sites like hacker news came to exist, you couldn't just scroll social media to find stuff, you had to sort of stumble upon (that used to be a website too, didn't it?) stuff like this and pass it around word of mouth. It was awesome.
Here you go: https://moxie.org/stories.html
Man I miss StumbleUpon so much. That was such a glorious internet time for me. Found so many interesting and weird corners of the internet. I’ve been trying hard to avoid the centralized internet. That button to just send me to random places would be so nice.
I feel like you gotta be the change you want to see though. The small indie web, which never really went away I think, seems to be on the rise again. I know I’ve been enjoying clicking through all sorts of small personal sites people have running.
I am not affiliated with them beyond deciding to host my thoughts from adolescence with them in the dial-up days, but Diaryland.com is still a thing.
I'm ordinarily loathe to post a link to reddit, but here is a very recent example of copper scrapping on an entire cargo ship that's been abandoned by its crew (it took a hit from some kind of munition) in the hormuz area:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SeaEmploy/comments/1vum7fj/the_foot...
It's a little bit like the scene in the movie Lord of War where an entire cargo airplane is reduced to its skeleton.
more details on the ship in question: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=cma+cgm+s...
Being poor has zero correlation with being “lazy”.
Being poor is highly correlated with having little to no access to financial “leverage” so it’s very difficult to earn any sort of non-linear return on capital.
Additionally, the vast majority of your capital is solely the current market price of your individual labor.
> Being poor has zero correlation with being “lazy”.
This doesn't sound right. If that were literally true, and the level of industriousness didn't affect prosperity at all, why would anyone bother to work?
This is a dishonest take predicated on bucketing everyone who isn't rolling in it from investmet income as "poor"
You won't be "live in an inner ring suburb, shop at whole foods, and peddle ivory tower takes on HN" level rich by working. But with a little care in avoiding big money sinks you can have stable access to basically all the necessities plus some, own your own home and eventually retire. See for example most construction industry professions.
well that and the claustrophobia and the sugars
A friend was a property manager in Sacramento. His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copper, that currently pays ~$5/lb. If people are really working this hard for steel at $0.04/lb, then transformers and air conditioners will have to be installed in vaults.
My GF works with energy infrastructure in Colombia and they have lots of issues with people stealing copper, I didn't verify her claim but she said despite not having natural sources of copper Colombia had significant export volume of copper, pretty much all stolen. Her company has launched multiple investigations and unveiled gangs and networks repeatedly.
> His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copper
It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables. They've been found to steal, too, heavy road grate if they were of any value: which created actual serious accidents (where a car's tire falls into the hole).
Regarding the electrical cables for trains, one solution is, slowly , replace them with cables with basically the same properties but 1/10th the copper.
Other funky solutions have been implemented: chemical sprays with a composition that is watermark and that cannot easily be removed. So when caught the thieves cannot deny because for x weeks the watermark stays, invisible and harmless, on their skin.
One question of course is: what does society think we should do with thieves who create road accidents and who render trains inoperable?
> One question of course is: what does society think we should do with thieves who create road accidents and who render trains inoperable?
They should be liable for consequential damages.
Death.
Make me late to the airport will ya?
We should raise their standard of living so they don't turn to theft
I've had trains cancelled due to copper theft from rail infrastructure in suburban Australia, which has a very high standard of living.
For some residents sure, clearly not for all in the area
European countries generally have a fairly generous social safety net.
And yet they still have poor and strained people
> It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables.
Even worse. Sometimes, the dumb fucks think something has copper in it, but actually it's fiber... once two copper thieves simultaneously took out the primary and secondary fiber for the GSM-R network, leading to a complete standstill in Northern Germany [1]. (Personally: given the timing, I think it was Russian throwaway agents, and I do not believe that "copper thieves" cover story for a single second)
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM-R-Ausfall_bei_der_Deutsche...
trains arent really useful in the US on purpose
Trains in the US are super useful…for freight. Pretty much worthless for passengers in most cases. Canada and Australia are similar.
Europe puts people in trains and freight in semi-trailers. China and Japan are more like this.
India dedicates its rail network 100% to passengers and also 100% to freight. Somehow it works.
> ~$5/lb
Copper sells over $6 per pound these days: https://www.kitco.com/price/base-metals/copper
I’d say $6 is == ~$5
The scrap price is what you get for bringing scrap copper to a recycler.
Not an expert, but I assume $5/lb is the peak value for dropping off nearly perfect condition copper. Not sure how much they’re actually getting for stripped copper wire.
I would also think that unscrupulous scrap buyers would offer a lower price for copper which has obviously been stolen or stripped from public works, since they are taking on more risk by buying it.
NH rolls like this too and I didn’t understand it for a decade after moving up to my wife’s territory from … Rhode Island. There was a time in the nineties where the whole economy here ran on used cars on the side of the road. One of the reasons I have not fixed my alcoholism, beyond the obvious, is there is a retired Mainer who depends on my empties as best I can tell. Who am I to stop drinking if some company will pay me too much to write code? We are all part of a larger system.
Sorry, meant lager.
> "FOUR CENTS A POUND."
It's never about money. It's a life style, belief system, social group or community that drives that kind of passion. It happens everywhere, all the time with everyone. It's about how they feel about what they do. When they were successful in moving the furnace out, they get a feeling that is 1000 times more precious than the value of that piece.
Fun excercise: look up some prices for various popular types of plastic (pellets, $/tonne), and compare with common metals like steel, stainless, alu, copper etc. Next, wonder why no scrapper bothers to collect plastic waste. It's out there, for free, in any amount you want!
Hint: it's the recycling process (and cost of the steps involved) that would get you. Plastics' low density doesn't help either.
Note that this post was written twenty years ago, in 2006 - it just wasn’t published until now.
Thanks! Year added above.
He says it’s a journal entry from around 2006, but adding 2006 to the title feels slightly out of place to me in this case because this tweet in 2026 is publishing a journal entry that was from what I gather not previously published. (Assuming that when he says journal he is referring to hand written journals he has been keeping.)
So it seems to me that authored year is 2006 and publication year is 2026. And usually when you guys or the users put the year in the title, it has to do with year of first publication.
But I am probably overthinking it or I have an incomplete impression of how to interpret what you and others mean when you put the year in the title :p
Kind of an aside, but I’m genuinely surprised Moxie is still on Xitter. Feels misaligned.
I used to scrap to make an extra buck, it was super fun. I did it for about half a year as my primary income. That was wicked fun, and exhausting. I’ve never been anywhere near that strong at any point in my life, before or after and did not work out once. Did not pay tech wages, but if you’re Smart about it and not unlucky, or if you’re just lucky, you can make a fair bit more than people here seem to expect. I’m back mostly to doing it here or there, mostly for fun, when an interesting opportunity presents itself.
Every scrapper is different. How they source, tracking yards or private buyers, how much they strip down what items (how do they value their time, with a modifier of how much they enjoy it). I’m sure it varies a lot geographically. I enjoy scrapping retired public/municipal electrical infrastructure/equipment municipal very enjoyable, and if you ask around enough you’ll find auctions or even towns willing to let you do their dirty work.
Always be scrapping.
We have them in Chicago, too. Call streets and san when you got something too big to fit in the can? Nah.
Also nearly got a job in Pittsburgh this summer…
Reminds me a bit of some of Dave Secretary’s TIME FOR SOME STORIES.
Ok ok ok
Apologize for not engaging with the post directly but holy fuck can people stop using Twitter as a long form blogging platform. I don't want a full screen pop up telling me to sign in or a persistent bottom bar telling me to open the tweet in the app or a reply section mostly hidden unless I log in. I can't even use reader mode because somehow the paragraph breaks all goes missing and the whole thing merges into one didn’t wall of text. Not to mention your post may or may not end up entirely behind a login gate depending on Twitter's temperament of the day.
Please just put it on an old, boring web log. At this point I'll even accept substack.
Be nice, maybe this person isn't very tech-savvy and doesn't know how to setup their own blog?
It's not like they are the highly technical founder of a very successful, privacy-focused messaging app....
I agree, but it is what it is.
I work around it with LibRedirect [1]. In my case, I run it in Firefox. I only use for Reddit and Twitter, but it supports many more services.
[1] https://libredirect.manerakai.com
He also posted it on a public blogging platform - https://xcancel.com/moxie/status/2091218652133732491
People there still behave the same though
Firefox and other browsers have extensions to automatically redirect to other sites that show things with less clutter like xcancel.
> I don't want a full screen pop up telling me to sign in or a persistent bottom bar telling me to open the tweet in the app or a reply section mostly hidden unless I log in.
make an x account then?
no
I really don't want to support a man who has killed so many people and advocates so aggressively for white supremacy and the elimination of trans people.
One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
I know lots of folks without a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out, and not one single one, is "lazy." In fact, a few have more than one (difficult) job.
I am old enough to see a few of them getting into the back nine, with no cushion.
I'm extremely grateful for what I have.
[EDIT] Added "many" because it's more appropriate, and short-circuits the implied "all."
Yeah, most people probably underestimate the effect that several things have on where they end up in life: education, self discipline, hard work, making good decisions, persistence, and, especially, chance. If you screw up majorly on any the factors under your control, you dramatically reduce your chances of “the good life.” But, even if you do all of them right, you are still at the mercy of chance. Get born in the wrong year or at the wrong place or into the wrong family or with the wrong genetics and that's all it takes to set you up for a hard life.
The tragedy is that we could have a society that gives people more opportunities to escape the downward pull of chance gone wrong early in life. Maybe someday we'll get there.
I really wanted to be a journalist when I was young, but then the PC era began and I became sort of addicted to computers and developed my first commercial website at a very young age.
I remember making more money than most people in my family (not a high bar, really) when I was working as a 20-year-old developer.
That led people in my family to think I was some sort of brilliant young man, but that bar was easily cleared (and still is) by pretty much anyone who had an interest in computers and applied themselves to pursue a career in the field.
My life would have been very different if I'd had a few more years to pursue journalism, which was already a very difficult field back then.
Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi.
I wanted to be a professional artist, when I was younger[0]. I found out that even a mediocre programmer made more than even a relatively successful artist, and I enjoyed coding, so I stuck with that.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886
I also think that we should have mercy for people who’ve made mistakes. People who’ve willingly done dumb things, especially when they were young.
I feel this way because I did dumb things when I was young, and I’m sure you did too dear reader, and at least for me, I was lucky that those dumb things didn’t end in catastrophe.
It’s like it’s human nature to forget the dumb things you did if you were lucky enough to escape the consequences, and look down on those who weren’t so lucky.
> I also think that we should have mercy for people who’ve made mistakes.
Yes. When people make mistakes, they sometimes fall into holes that are hard to climb out of. It is in society’s interest to place ladders in these holes so that these unfortunate people can climb out and become productive members of society.
Instead, we have self-interested parties who have figured out how to extract rents from keeping people trapped in holes. Some of these parties are preventing ladders from being built. Others are destroying existing ladders. Others still are even inventing deeper, stickier holes—crypto scams, ubiquitous gambling, addictive gas-station drugs, dopamine-hit apps—to trap even greater numbers of their fellow human beings.
When a society allows the suffering of others to become a profitable business model, good things rarely follow.
Amen.
Source: Did really dumb things, when I was younger.
This whole thing is one of those fruitless arguments about a badly defined notion of "most people".
For instance the scope of the "especially chance" assertion has strange effects. Does "get born in the wrong year" include 300,000 years of human history? In that case chance has very little effect. You're overwhelming likely to grow up using stone tools, with a 1 in 3 chance of also having access to pottery.
But that would be silly and obviously wasn't the intended question. The intended question is one that's closer to home, a question that we care about. But how much closer to which home, and what exactly is the scope of the question? It can be made less about luck by filtering out the unlucky from the scope.
Wrong year as in landing on a giant generational recession at the time period in life when people usually accelerate or maybe a world wide pandemic landing in your formative years.
Wrong year is a much smaller time scale. An example more close to home on this site, you/me just missed the free money cash days of the fango mango tech companies. Sure, there are still some of those jobs but far fewer with where interest rates are at.
I used to think a wrong year was maybe 1:80 but at 50, I've seen some unpleasant shit every decade.
I keep thinking about some odd-ball numerology weirdo I met on a trip in GG park about cycles of the universe and prime number harmony.
In the real world there are just boom/bust cycles, make hay while the sun shines. IME you'll be part of 8 cycles, 5 of which you can control a small part of.
> education
eh, i kinda disagree on this. in the era of information being so abundant there's so much you can learn on your own.
sure you won't become a surgeon but there are so many other things you can learn and get a job.
and this is true even without having AI in the picture.
I disagree. Education is about culture and not access. Even when books were rare, families that valued education (even more rare) would do better.
Learning about the world gives you an edge, full stop. Cultures that highly value education, surprise surprise, are far more wealthy.
Today, it is almost harder to learn because of how noisy and manipulative the world is today.
For the vast majority of higher-level jobs you need certifications, not knowledge. There are very few jobs that you can get by simply demonstrating that you know something.
The reason people pay $100k for a year of college education most certainly isn’t the lectures, which you can often find on YouTube these days.
Most of life is luck, with regards to success and economic prosperity. We’ve built a system that ignores that for the benefit of a privileged few, using fairy tales around exceptionalism and faux meritocracy. We should build socioeconomic systems where luck is less a component for survival and living a good life, imho. I think we’re on our way there (support of democratic socialism and their candidates is at record highs, mostly around the young, and the old age out at a rate of 2M per year 55+ [higher support of capitalism because they were lucky under it]), but it’s going to take another decade or two to see the improvements (political cycles, electorate turnover, policy implementation lag, etc.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 (citations)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027462 (citations)
Yes and no. I can think of easily three decision or inflection points in my life where if i went left instead of right, id be a multi millionaire. I can think of even more where my life direction would have been radically different.
Luck plays a huge part on where you start and land but no one is totally unlucky. Luck strikes everyone across all starting points.
What i have seen with my loved ones that struggle is that they have had many lucky breaks and somehow keep squandering them in a sad self fulfilling prophecy. Success begets success and failure begets failure. Both cycles are reversible.
Keep in mind “success” is not rich/famous but financially stable.
You must be joking. Democratic Socialism is just Socialism with a prettier name. Socialism does not work, full stop, unless you're in the group at the top controlling the strings. Don't point at the nordic countries, they have far less progressive taxation policies that the US when you factor VAT in.
I thought it was more like, if it doesn’t work it’s socialism, if it does work it’s not socialism? This is why Norway is at the same time called not socialism (because it works) and socialism (because conservatives don’t want us to even try adopting what works in Norway).
Worked just fine when the US had a much higher tax rate. We just bring back the higher tax rates. Easy peasy.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcRRTC0ETlS/
Luck is just as important even with perfect economic equality. It’s just that economic luck gets replaced by luck of genetics, luck of immaterial circumstances, etc.
I have always found the assumption strange that one is somehow preferable to the other, but most people seem to believe that, so maybe one day they’ll get what they’re asking for and then find out that it’s not what they wanted after all.
The pervasive myth that hard work == wealth needs to die. Every people I have met in my life wanted to have a shot at a decent life and would have put the necessary work for a decent wage.
The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.
The myth is so pervasive because it's propagated by people with more wealth against people with less of it, and the conflict of interest prevents anyone from giving it up.
Everyone wants to feel better about themselves and the easiest way is to look down on someone who has less. Less "whatever" really, people always find something that they think makes them better, money is just the obvious choice because society slowly associated money with success. It doesn't matter if the wealth came from their parents, or luck, they can still pretend it makes them better.
It's one of those situations where everyone's in on it. The poor really haven't much else to go on and they'll take this little boost in their standing, the rich are tempted to think they so much better than most other people. Everyone in between sits somewhere on that scale.
I think it’s self evidently true that hard work is not equal to wealth and I don’t know how that meme became a thing.
You can exert extreme effort in unproductive directions and provide marginal, even extremely negative, value.
You can work extremely hard, all day every day, and accomplish nothing.
Gulags aren’t known for their wealth or value generation. They’re known for their labor input.
> I don’t know how that meme became a thing.
I think it's easy to see: (1) A simplified variation of it is true (namely, that if effort1 > effort2 then outcome(env, effort1) >= outcome(env, effort2) for any fixed environment env); (2) It flatters those who have achieved high outcomes, regardless of how much effort they put in.
Well some gulags produced heavy industries, now owned by oligarchs.
Hard work is often necessary but not sufficient. You can work very hard moving a pile of sand with a pair of tweezers but you’re not going to get wealthy doing that.
The people who simply think that because they worked hard wealth should just come to them are going to remain confused until they figure out that what you work on is also important.
There are a lot of factors to getting wealthy. Most of them are out of your control. Hard work happens to be one that is in your control. Its not like you can choose to be born to different parents or a different place.
But its still not magic. It doesn't guarantee anything. Worst of all its useless if the work is directed to the wrong ends.
How about hard work + courage ? Without ability to take risk and potential failure it is very difficult to change your economic level. It is very naive to think that doing the same thing everyday will somehow change your economic level.
> The pervasive myth that hard work == wealth needs to die.
The purpose of the concept is to push kids from a young age to be industrious. You are much less likely to become wealthy if you sit around doing the bare minimum.
Putting in an significant effort isn't a guarantee, but it does increase your chances from whatever the baseline is given your context.
The concept doesn't claim that wealthy people all worked hard; everyone knows you can be wealthy without having worked at all, such as through inheritance or the lottery!
You mischaracterized my argument, people aren't "lazy" by default. Most people that walks the earth wants to explore, create and socialize. But you seem to imply that kids would otherwise "sit around and do the bare minimum" if not pushed from a young age to be industrious. This is ludicrous.
There are way more empirical evidence that luck plays a much bigger role in wealth creation than effort.
> There are way more empirical evidence that luck plays a much bigger role in wealth creation than effort.
my point isn't that when you put in effort you WILL create wealth. my point also isn't that luck plays a bigger role than effort (though, there's no empirical evidence for that assertion). my point also isn't that if you're poorer you didn't put in effort.
my point is: when you put in effort, you increase the surface area for luck.
put differently: if you don't think putting in effort increases your chances and it is mostly luck, why put in effort at all? luck will just find your door, after all, and if it doesn't, oh well.
And that's why this concept (your "myth") has value and should not die.
I don't understand why you can't see my argument for what it is: People work hard on their own merit.
Wealth generation is not a meaningful driver, that's why people choose career with very low income trajectory, have hobbies, etc.
Calling people lazy is reductive and pejorative. People aren't inherently lazy.
> I don't understand why you can't see my argument for what it is: People work hard on their own merit.
I see. You're saying people either work hard or don't (from within), rather than what their parents or teachers or peers say.
Hard to argue with that.
At the same time, I am glad my parents instilled in me being a hard worker in whatever I chose because I am pretty confident it has made a huge difference in my success.
I would not concede that some people aren’t lazy, however.
Persistent poverty is usually a byproduct of poor impulse control. That will quickly undo any compounding created by hard work.
No other factor comes close to being as predictive of whether or not someone in the US gets out of poverty as impulse control. I've seen it in every poor community I lived in.
There is no satisfactory way to address this reality. Impulse control is significantly innate. Attempts to improve it have limited success in the best cases. Someone with no impulse control will squander or lose resources given to them, whether through their own hard work or handouts. See also: lottery winners. It is a very deep local minima.
> Persistent poverty is usually a byproduct of poor impulse control.
Go visit a brick factory in Pakistan. The laborers are extremely poor and no amount of "work harder" effort on their individual part (they already work hard as fuck, six days a week) is going to lift them out of that life. Telling them they're poor because they have poor impulse control is one of the most ridiculous things I've read today.
The parent was obviously referring to 1st world countries
In that case I would be very interested to see the parent commenter expand on why they have formed the opinion that persons living in poverty in the US (based on their first hand experiences) have poor impulse control but people in other locations do not.
I think the most reasonable answer is that first world countries provide access to many opportunities that do not exist elsewhere. People can and do lift themselves from poverty with these opportunities.
Nobody can "impulse control" their way out of a situation where income is 100 and necessary expenses are 102. Sure there are things in their control but, thinking poor people are just wasting their money is a stereotype that need to die.
Assume everyone is as rational as you. How could you lift yourself from that upsidedown situation? Bootstraps?
Poor people absolutely are wasting money but it doesn’t matter. I did it, everyone does it. The “wasting money” argument is hyper-analytical and not a productive accounting of human behavior. Almost no one in the US is literally negative on resources from all sources versus necessary expenses.
Around 10-15% of US households are living at the edge of their income. That is per the US Federal Reserve and BLS. This doesn’t account for the widely available government subsidies[0] for people in these income brackets.
Even in the worst cases, there is significant economic slack. Almost the entire time I lived below the poverty line I was usually able to save significant money in that context. So could have almost all of the poor people I knew. The exceptions always seemed to be old people living off Social Security. But they have their own safety nets.
I want proper support for people in poverty. That requires an objective accounting of the nature of their poverty that far too many people are incurious about. Everyone wants to make this way more complicated than it needs to be.
[0] A variety of subpopulations legitimately fall through the cracks and are excluded from significant government support. I was in those cracks.
It is really obvious that many people worried about the poor in the US know nothing at all about the actual poor in the US.
What do you think would actually help, instead of what those well intentioned but naive people think?
Valid hypothesis, but I suspect that cause and effect may be reversed.
When you don't have much, and opportunity is fleeting, you tend to grab and implement, quickly.
If you get a windfall, but don't have a bank account, you spend it quickly. Hanging onto it, could actually be very dangerous, or at least, increase the likelihood of having it taken away.
More than this, in a risky, unstable environment, taking what you can get when you can get it is the right evolutionary strategy. Genetics doesn't know what sort of world you are going to be born into so it has developed a limited number of plans. One of those plans is "control your impulses" and another is "get what you can and get out". They both work well in certain scenarios, and suffer in others.
It sounds like you think people lack long term planning if they are poor. But it's ease to understand how long term thinking is the dominant strategy.
>but don't have a bank account
Plenty of bank accounts are free to open. That's not an excuse.
Nope. Didn't say that.
Many poor folks think decades ahead, but they tend to be rather fatalistic.
When I lived in Africa, I was profoundly affected by the poverty I witnessed, and also, by the integrity and kindness of many very poor people.
Also, many bank accounts require things like state ID, credit-worthiness, etc., that are hard for poor folks to get.
>state ID
This is not required if the person is a minor. And acquiring one is cheap.
>credit-worthiness
No bank will require the user to be credit worthy for a basic checking account.
I recommend reading https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-business-of-check..., particularly the section "Depositing a check requires an extension of credit":
> If something goes wrong in this process—the overwhelmingly most likely one is that the payer doesn’t have the funds to cover the check (NSF, or “insufficient funds”), but the check being fraudulent or unauthorized is also possible—that wrongness may not be discovered before money “moves” to your bank. And so that payment can be recalled from your bank to the bank the check is drawn on. This will likely result in the bank attempting to recall the money from your account.
> And so by presenting your check, which you think is substantially terminating a transaction, you are actually creating a new credit extension with your bank. They are extremely aware that you just asked them to advance you money, even if you are not aware that you did that. They already partially underwrote this extension of credit; that is why you were not shooed out of the building when you originally asked for a checking account.
Checking accounts are nowadays spent via debit cards which can deny transactions if they go over the limit. The name is a historical artifact.
The article is about depositing a check as an extension of credit; not spending via check. This creates a creditworthiness requirement that is in practice one of the most common reasons for someone to not have access to a bank account.
I'm open to this correlation. But I wonder about causality. Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential. Breaking the cycle of poverty is difficult, but I'm not an expert on where the best investments to solve this problem would be.
> But I wonder about causality. Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential.
There's fairly good statistics that a large portion of the people living in a cycle of poverty and drug addiction in Vancouver's downtown eastside suffer from a number of documented risk factors:
a) fetal alcohol syndrome
b) documented abuse by parents at an early age, or became wards of the state and entered foster care system, were not placed with any family members
c) drug/alcohol abuse by parents
d) molested by parents, relatives, "friends" of parents at an early age
If the parents have poor impulse control then the children often do as well. This is a selection effect; children growing up in poverty often inherit a significant contributor to their parents' persistent poverty.
People who are incidentally in poverty usually have children that aren't. I grew up in pretty abject poverty and saw this pattern over and over again too. My parents didn't have poor impulse control, it was circumstantial. All of my siblings were able to grind their way to a successful life despite having the deck stacked against them -- and none of them work in tech.
It is extremely frustrating. I have persistently poor friends who are unambiguously above average in both intelligence and work ethic, and with great personalities. Yet despite that, they constantly sabotage their future with poor impulse control. With good impulse control they'd be solidly middle class at a minimum.
I don't know how to fix the above situation. I've tried many times. They can't really explain why they make the stupid decisions they do, it just kind of happens.
I also wonder if its rational behaviour at the end of the day. If you don't have anything to your name, why delay gratification? Its not like you'll get benefits of delaying, and you may very well suffer a loss if you wait. I think you have to have a certain amount of wealth before the types of behaviours that actually make you wealthy make sense in the average case.
It's rational within a really crappy local maximum.
The original marshmallow test fails for this reason, but also it's true that poor impulse control makes it harder to break out of situations that do not reward delayed gratification.
> Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential.
But that’s just another correlation without a proof of causation.
There’s no clear definition of what causation is. You can invoke the tired “correlation doesn’t imply causation” any time you want, but the same quip disqualifies any alternative causation mechanism you propose, unless you serve up an actual criterion for distinguishing the two along with it. Asserting that one seems more plausible than the other isn’t enough.
You can have really stupid parents who ingrain suboptimal behavior patterns and interests to you. Things like poor eating, attitudes and beliefs about work and what’s possible, abuse, poor ways of coping with stress and conflict. Throw into that a hopeless environment with no immediate opportunities, bad peer group, and early pregnancies and you have a recipe for disaster
Usually? Dude, you're implying that most impoverished people deserve it without providing a shred of evidence. You saw it, huh? Sorry, idk what you saw, but your anecdotes are no basis for making such a sweeping and important claim about one of the most complex problems humanity faces.
> You saw it, huh?
I lived it in many locales and cultures for a large fraction of my life. Anecdotal but very good anecdotes.
So did I. And I've arrived to opposing conclusions. What makes your anecdotes more valuable or correct than mine?
How about growing up in a neighborhood and environment where there isn't negative influence and impulses around you to begin with?
For your example, people in poor environments have more liquor stores, convenience stores, etc. If you are rich you have more positive influence around you and less to impulse control against.
Want to test your argument? Try to live in a strip club and tell me if you can control your impulses as a male (or if you are a female, whatever is your temptation equivalent). Since you believe your control in that situation is 100% innnate and cannot be changed, then you have squandered all your resources. However you and I can see thats silly, why would anyone choose to live so close to temptation and negative influence? But isn't your argument saying you shouldn't bother to control that since you'd just fall to poverty anyway.
There's also been a number of studies done on what constitutes a "food desert" in the United States, where people don't have nearby access to a proper grocery store, just small convenience stores (and things like a strip mall with convenience store, liquor store, vape shop, etc). And as it correlates with obesity and health issues caused by an unhealthy diet.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=US+low+in...
Ah, hadn't realized it had been studied. Nice find.
Growing up with an immigrant family and parents who didn't have the opportunity I did to change environments and control the food around me (either by location, and proximity of nearby stores, and also whats physically in my home) I notice how much my "impulse" control simply changes based on whats around me.
When I am in their home space, the unhealthy diet and health issues abound.
>people in poor environments have more liquor stores, convenience stores, etc
Because of demand?
Or because of a lack of people who have no bigger problems than a proposed liquor store?
The answer is obvious to anyone who follows local politics.
You create demand by putting options next to you.
No options, or the friction of pursuing them is too high? You have a fraction of the demand.
Being poor is a lot of work, as is very well documented. When you have more money you can offload some (or in extreme cases pretty much all) of the labor.
> convenient fiction that wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"
just like all poor people aren't lazy, so too all wealthy people don't think this.
Never said they did. Interesting read of what I wrote…
You wrote wealthy people tell themselves that poor people are lazy.
Yes, I did. There’s a word that was inserted into what I actually wrote.
Just to clarify. What percentage of wealthy people do you believe think this?
Is 10% too high of an estimate for wealthy people that believe this? 50%? 75%? 90%?
Where would you throw the dart of your estimate and how wide do you think your error bounds are?
This is textbook sealioning!
Wrapping an interrogation in a polite "just to clarify" and demanding point estimates and error bounds on a generalization is weaponized pedantry designed to derail the thread into an impossible burden of proof.
(1) just to clarify isn’t meant to be polite, I’m trying to get GP to clarify his belief
(2) I don’t care about citations - I want GP to clarify his belief
(3) GP is using something similar to a Motte and Bailey to make a generalized statement about a group of people. They can argue against all wealthy people and retreat to “I didn’t mean all” with any argument that lands, without sacrificing the castle. This is a commonly used tactic when making generalizations about racial and social groups.
It is fair to question the framing "many wealthy think the poor are lazy" because what the audience actually hears is "the majority of the wealthy think the poor are lazy (and other people don't think that)" because otherwise the sentence wouldn't have singled out the wealthy.
Is it really the majority? And if it is, is that belief limited to the wealthy or do the middle class also think that? What do the poor think?
By that logic, it is then accurate to say poor people are lazy.
Sure. Knock yourself out. I won’t lose any sleep over it.
I like the transition from “I have an issue with what you said” to “I have an issue with what I imagine you said” after getting clarification
That aside the statement was fine as written. For example it takes deliberate and active misunderstanding to twist the statement “people eat meat” into “there aren’t any vegetarians”
Hang on, no, imagine if someone said "people eat meat" and it was the core part of an argument that people need a minimum of 2 acres of farmland to support their food consumption. It would be important to point out that vegetarians and vegans need less than an acre.
The context matters and blanket statements can be misleading in certain contexts.
> and it was the core part of an argument that people need a minimum of 2 acres of farmland
Then we would be in an entirely different thread talking about something else? I was pointing out that trying to use “I refuse to understand what I read” as a dunk doesn’t really work. If you’re trying to say “What if I invent imaginary circumstances where I am right and you are wrong?” then yeah, I’d be helpless in that situation
Well, no, because in this case the difference between "many", "most", and "all" was unclear and was being used for rhetorical effect to support a contentious point.
You can't just make a broad assertion in support of your views and then complain "oh, I only meant a more narrow version" when people say it's too broad.
Similarly, if someone made an unclear point about meat consumption in support of their argument then it would and should be called out.
> Well, no
No to what? No, if somebody was making a totally different argument we wouldn’t be having a different conversation? Or no that I wouldn’t be proven wrong in your hypothetical where I’m wrong?
>You can't just make a broad assertion in support of your views and then complain "oh, I only meant a more narrow version" when people say it's too broad.
Lmao I’d ask what you mean by “you can’t clarify stuff” but
If there was really nothing wrong with the original phrasing about rich people, then there's also nothing wrong with GP's phrasing about poor people. The usages are exactly parallel.
he wrote "many" wealthy people, not all.
To be fair, I added that, after being called on it. It was a fair point, but I also didn't mean "all," so I just clarified the meaning.
Some people just have a several hundred year head start on others.
Talk to the immigrants - a lot of them came to the US with only a few thousand $$$ in the bank or even less. They are not multimillionaires, but a lot of them got from zero to high-paying programmer jobs.
Granted, there is a healthy dose of luck and talent involved, but saying that the only way to get rich is to have rich parents is a lazy and wrong take.
Here’s the thing about the immigrant pulled-up-by-bootstraps story: immigration is expensive. When you hear about someone coming to North America with “only a few thousand dollars in their pocket”, you have to remember that by time they’ve landed, they’ve already sunk likely tens of thousands of dollars into getting the paperwork to get here (unless they already had a job lined up, which generally means educated).
Many not-poor people I know in Canada wouldn’t have the means to immigrate elsewhere without saving up for a few years at way above minimum wage. Education and skill are going to make them more desirable immigration candidates than, say, someone who barely graduated high school. It’s really not an apples-to-apples comparison at all.
I’m a software engineer, and my job is so easy for the pay it’s ridiculous. I assure you, I do not work 5-10x harder than the guys who just installed my fence.
Can you do their work if there is a nobody to help ? Can they do your work if there is nobody to help ? You are underestimating the amount of time/energy spent in developing the skill.
Some exceptional people can close the gap, most can't.
Unfortunately it's the "right" take in an echo-chamber of entitled leftists.
Ah, so you're jealous of the inheritance generation currently enshittifying everything? What word would you use to describe them? "Lazy"?
In my lived experience, the majority of poverty is the inability to delay gratification. Whether you want to attribute that to personal failings or to other things is a separate question
Most likely you're seeing the causality in the wrong direction - poverty creates a strong incentive to go for immediate benefits rather than absorb the risk of one that is delayed.
That is a fairly sterile reading of the situation. It’s hard to explain to those who haven’t been close to it.
It’s like how defaulting to invest in a 401k creates massive improvements for savings for the population with a 401k
There are those who will frivolously spend money that could pay an electricity bill, then end up without power.
> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
I've noticed the same thing over my life (I'm almost 53) and by and large the well-off people who assume the poor are lazy are among the laziest, most useless nepobaby piles of shit I've met.
It is like they themselves had an easy road to success thanks to having well off, well connected parents and assume people significantly poorer must be even lazier than they are because their own success wasn't very hard to achieve, oblivious to the fact that the poor people they are looking down on started in a very different starting position than they did.
And to be clear, I'm not saying all wealthy people are lazy, some have worked legitimately hard for their success, and I'm not saying some poor people aren't lazy, of course you'll find examples of both. But there are tons of extremely hard working poor people, and tons of extremely lazy wealthy people who make absurd amounts of money doing very "bullshit" jobs.
This is basic psychology: being rich for no apparent reason causes cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is annoying/painful. So rather than change beliefs to see one's self as very lucky, in most cases the brain re-works reality to provide a rational explanation: the rich person worked hard/is smarter, etc.
Also prosperity evangelism.
There's four quadrants, lazy, works hard on one axis, and poor and rich on the other axis. Of those four quadrants, people exist in all four of them and it's stupid to pretend otherwise. That means that not pretending lazy poor don't exist, nor that rich hardworking people also exist. I know lazy poor people that aren't lazy so much as have severe mental health problems related to being poor, but also know rich people who could have fucked off to the beach forever by now but they keep working for some reason.
Why do I bring this up? Am I nitpicking? (yes) Until such time that there are no poor people, claiming there are no lazy poor people just gets people that actually know lazy poor people to tune out anyone's dreams of UBI because I'm not paying taxes on income I earn through me working, so that everyone else can be lazy and not work. It's as simple as that. Yes we can point to systemic and racially moviated biases that lead to unequal outcomes, but that isn't convincing on why my tax dollars should go to lazy poor people who refuse to work or even go to the EBT office to. I'm all for my tax dollars going to hard working poor people, and especially to their health care because a cancer or diabetes diagnosis should not bankrupt anyone, but the rest is hard to swallow.
Your tax dollars go to all kinds of things far worse than helping people survive. The Protestant work ethic cannot die soon enough. Never once have I cared if someone is "lazy". A rich person may work very hard exploiting others, that's far worse than not working at all.
I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.
But the Protestant work ethic is good! There are hard-working people who are still poor, but there are very few situations where you, or anyone else, will be better off being lazy instead of working. (Hard manual labor that harms you permanently in some way, like old coal miners, is probably the biggest exception.)
In the counterfactual, where these hard-working poor people are lazy instead, they aren't suddenly rich or even the same as they are now. They're almost certainly worse off.
I was raised with a strong work ethic. Do I believe that working hard is the only reason I am where I am now? No, of course not. But if I didn't work hard my life would be worse in every way imaginable! Regardless of how lucky or unlucky your life is, having a solid work ethic will always always always make you happier. Work is not inherently 'bad' in some way, and neither is having to work to live and to learn and to have a good life.
> But the Protestant work ethic is good!
I don't agree, it's a one way ticket to exploitation. All of the richest people I know (and I mean really rich, like over $100M in net worth) are from rich families and have inherited their wealth. Most are lazy but the ones that "work hard" produce exploitation at scale to further enrich themselves at the expense of their workers.
> I was raised with a strong work ethic
Most Americans are raised like this, which is why they are so easy to exploit and why they are against basic social safety nets and other things that are generally good for society.
The fact is other than inheritance, the easiest way (and really only way) to make a lot of money is to talk well. Talk well and get as close to rich people as you can, then talk some more. Is that "hard work"? It's wasting your life for sure, but it doesn't compare to pouring concrete.
I recommend everyone read this and try not to end up "clueless" as it really is the worst option of the bunch:
https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
> But the Protestant work ethic is good!
No, it’s not. The Protestant work ethic is what causes people to come into work when they’re sick, spreading illness to others.
Something like 90% of my tax dollars go to social security net programs.
Not if you're in the US. Social security is ~22% https://govbase.com/blog/where-your-tax-dollars-go
More than 50% of us federal spending is in social security, Medicare and Medicaid and it’s debt service.
You’d have to be counting pretty far afield things to get up to 90% but it’s easy to get to “a majority”.
A significant chunk of the "defense" spending is VA. Interest kind of shouldn't count? It's the cost of borrowing for our past spending on, you guessed it, mostly social programs.
Defense spending used to be a higher percentage of our budget than now, so if anything you should assign more of that to the debt.
About 16% of the spending is straight up defense spending and about 5% is the VA. I personally think it’s crazy to severe them and wish the va was part of the DoD. But people can disagree.
And CHIP, and SNAP. Whatever. You can certainly say social safety net spending isn't exactly 90%. But it's, you know, most of it.
You only get to a majority by doing two misleading things… blaming the national debt on entitlements instead of general fund deficits, and counting Social Security (which is funded by its own payroll taxes) as a welfare program.
The actual means-tested safety net (Medicaid, food assistance, SSI, housing) is only around 15% to 20% of federal spending.
Social security is a welfare program. As is Medicare. They are odd regressive forms of them but they are tax funded welfare programs full stop.
As for fund deficits there are basically 4 things the federal government pays for, social security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military. Everything else is noise or interest. So when accounting for the debt load of that interest it only makes sense to assign some part of it to those 4 things.
Stop repeatedly changing definitions and accounting rules until the desired conclusion becomes true. It's tiresome.
In U.S. policy terminology, Social Security and Medicare are social insurance programs. Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, and housing assistance are means tested safety net programs.
Yes, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense make up a majority of federal spending. But your conclusion only works by relabeling Social Security and Medicare as welfare, dismissing the rest of government as noise, and then assigning an arbitrary share of decades of accumulated interest expense to those programs.
Your last move is especially egregious. Federal debt reflects the cumulative gap between all federal spending and all federal revenue over time. You can't figure out what caused it by looking at today's largest spending categories.
Social Security's current shortfall is primarily the result of a demographic imbalance Congress has known about for decades and repeatedly declined to fully address. That makes it particularly silly to retroactively assign some arbitrary share of the rest of the federal government's accumulated debt to Social Security.
The accurate way to talk about this is that Social Security and the major health programs are a very large share of federal spending. "The social safety net is most of the budget" is a conclusion manufactured by your definitions.
Social safety net programs* (obviously).
Not 90%[0].
Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages.
[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
The more money I’ve been paid the less hard I’ve had to work. Across my friends this seems to be a pretty strong trend.
I've worked in both tech and construction. Never seen a tech worker go home and come back with the soles of their shoes resoled overnight because they didn't have a better option for work tomorrow.
Is that the best option? Generally no, it's probably not worth your time to do things that you don't specialize in. But at some point, you run out of hours to profit from the things you specialize in, and you still need something, so you figure it out. You do your oil changes, and fix your shoes and repair things even when they would generally considered 'totaled'. You miss work or at least hours on days when your late model car doesn't start. You take care of your own house repairs and yardwork, if your lucky enough to own something your landlord's yard and maintenance work more likely. And this is all off hours stuff because that's the option you have.
I've worked so much less in tech, yeah the hours can be long and oncall sucks. But I end up being able to redirect all my effort into the thing I'm specialized in and that I get paid the most to do. Which means I can pay to have my boots resoled, or just buy new ones, I take my (newer cars that always start) to the dealer every 6 months. I can pay a premium for delivery of food and staples, I can hire help around the house for anything from lawn care to tree trimming to roof repairs.
When I left the trades, 50 hours was generally required and 60 was becoming the norm. I'm not working any more in tech at work, but I work a lot lest to have a better life outside of work. It's just night and day.
And there are jobs where you’re paid >$200k and work 20-30 hours per week. I have friends doing that right now. When I was at Google I earned $350k and my boss literally told me I could stop working for 12 months and still get paid if I wanted to. I chose to quit instead to go somewhere where I’d learn more.
That is kind of the expected outcome of capitalism - the more value you provide the harder it is to replace you and the easier it is for you to leverage that for better working conditions.
If you'll excuse the dehumanizing metaphor, you probably treat your valuable possessions a lot better than your cheap possessions too. Capitalism makes possessions out of all of us.
You might be misunderstanding what is meant by "lazy". I don't think it's such a difficult perspective to understand.
What if your wealth was created by self-employment and building up a business? When you see so many talented and hard working people rejecting all of their available opportunities to do so, what word would you use? Ignorance? Arrogance? I can't think of any positive word. At least "lazy" implies they're still waiting for a lower risk moment to pounce.
This is how most of the wealth in the USA was built, so I don't think it's offensive. It's the prevailing culture.
Not lazy, smart -> Likely to become a millionaire
Not lazy, not smart -> Will probably make ends meet, but not a millionaire
Lazy, samrt -> Toss-up. Can either make it far or end up broke
Lazy, not smart -> Likely to be broke
Not factual
You are going to have a rude awakening if you get a bit unlucky.
It's not "lazy"; it's "made the wrong choices"... which I suppose you could call "intellectually lazy".
It only makes sense that fetuses which choose to be born into blue collar families in the wrong zip code are more likely to continue to make poor decisions for the rest of their lives. You just can't trust people with such a poor history of judgement. Unless they're C-Suite.
I'm trying hard to make your post make any sense at all..
I guess you believe everyone gets the same starting point and same opportunities? How did you come to believe such a thing? Have you looked around to see what society is like?
I'm not saying that; I'm saying that people can make decisions with very different outcomes even if they started out the same, and vice-versa. But if you're already brainwashed with socialist ideology, then obviously you can't see that...
conversely, people can make the same decisions in the same-ish environment, with very different outcomes. it sounds like you discount the effect of luck in timing, or geography, or acquaintance, which are wildly different from just making intellectually robust decisions.
Or… were never given a choice/opportunity…
> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
If they aren't physically lazy, they're unambitious or refuse to attempt nominally mentally difficult things (like math) and that is mental laziness. Poverty isn't random.
> Poverty isn't random.
Now you're just trolling. Be nice.
Making neutral statements in concordance with reality is the nicest thing you can do for a reader.
https://xcancel.com/moxie/status/2091218652133732491
Thanks! Link added to toptext.
[stub for offtopicness]
Rich guy mocks his hometown
I don't think he's mocking at all - the Pittsburgh scrapping culture is fascinating. (I've lived here for 20+ years now). I throw stuff on the curb all the time and like magic, it disappears before trash day. I've also picked up a bunch of stuff from neighbors - office chairs, desks, a really nice stash of PVC pipe I used to build a grey water system for my washing machine, etc. it's like a weird little no-internet freecycle. Everyone just knows it often works and goes along with it. There are people who focus on higher value items, people who grab metals, you name it
Many hometowns are mockable, even if someone from them eventually becomes rich and talks about what it was like there publicly.
He certainly wasn’t when he wrote this, and I don’t see how you’d read this as mocking. He was a crust punk living in a squat, fixing it up with scrap lumber he salvaged from pallets. His financial position was not so different from the scrappers when writing this story.
I fear FIFTEEN CENTS A POUND is going to become a new vocal stim I will spam 50 times a day.
I known exactly what you mean. Drives me up the wall to see these stupid shibboleths ping pong around.