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Comment by meagain20000 | Hacker News Reader

meagain20000

Meh. Your feelings are hurt boohoo. If you are poor and low status why don't you do something about it instead of whining about it and saying how we are all hurting your feelings. Sure, there are cases where you need outside help to get out of your current situation. Yes people should help if they can. But if I provide you help and you waste it like it is tipically the case than it is on you. It is not my responsibility to make you not poor if you do not take advantage of opportunities when they are given to you.

Many people cause their children to be poor by simply not giving a fuck. By spending all their money on vices and not taking care of themselves or family. Or by simply wasting their youths doing basically nothing productive even when given the opportunity. So you will not make me feel bad with your sob story when a lot of the fault is on poor people themselves, with lots of exceptions of course. Go and cry me a river.

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Yeah. Sorry. You are right. Should have kept my tone civil.

> If you are poor and low status why don't you do something about it

Because the deck is so fundamentally and incontrovertibly stacked against them that they can't? I'd say that this would be obvious except that that itself would be too obvious given your posting history here; I've seen a lot of shitty posts around here, but yours is in the top five of most overtly antisocial and unempathic, ever, full stop.

I stand by everything I said. You should really read my comment again and you will notice that I mention that there are situations where you should provide help. There are people that really do need help And it should be provided.

Being poor myself as a you a young kid, parents that only had elementary education and working their asses off in minimum wage I didn't actually consider myself incapable of doing what I wanted. Like going to college and obtaining a carrer. So I did. Coming from a poor background has given me the insight that that many people in the USA chose a poor lifestile. They may this choice when they were young, in their teens. They wanted to hang out instead of studying. I stiil see it today. Lots of kids in NYC that rather spend all their times with their friends rather than hitting the books are destined for minimum age. And it is not necessarily the parents fault in many cases. I've seen parents yelling at their kids for not taking school seriously so many do care.

Unfortunately, my life experience has made me cynical and so I come out like an asshole for being frank. I will not spend anytime worrying about people that will not help themselves.

Please note that I'm referring about the USA. I cannot speak for other countries but it is probably the same in some cases.

I too came up in poverty. It was extreme for a while. Like wondering about eating type extreme.

Somehow, I have a great memory of my childhood. I've also remained connected to my peers well enough to get some data on this.

The primary data point is luck. I know some really smart peers, who shared my circumstances. They didn't have the same outcome as I did, and my outcome was reasonable. Why?

I got lucky. No joke. Sometimes the right conversation, or job choice can lead to great things. Other times it may not.

There are plenty of driven, smart, capable people out there trapped, or who are stunted as an artifact of the policy.

A "blame yourself" or worse, "blame the parents" type argument simply is not productive.

Now, I'll leave it there.

Consider what we do going forward. These people exist. An awful lot of us aren't making it, and as we don't make it, we get older, and we need stuff. No matter what, unless we just make sure and help them die quickly, or some other crappy irrational thing, they are going to cost us. No free lunches here.

Those costs will fall on those of us who are making it, and for a very large fraction of those of us making it, those costs are going to be notable. May impact life choices type notable.

So the discussion isn't one of blame.

It's all about what we can do to improve the state of things.

The USA provides plenty of help: food stamps, medicaid, rent assistance, financial aid, student loan. I assume you did not grow up in the USA if you had to worry about food. My comments only apply to America.

If you need help take advantge of those services. That is why they exist.

I'm talking here about people that simply do not help themselves and then complain about it as if it was their god given right to live a middle class life without even trying.

Personal responsibility has to be a thing.

Seriously, a poor person in the USA is a rich person compared to any poor person in a third world country. The opportunities here are amazing.

Grew up in the USA.

I'm not opposing personal responsibility at all. Count me as a fan.

We do have opportunity here. I am a product of said opportunity. We also have a near insane cost and risk exposure here, and that has impacted way too many of us.

Way too many of us aren't making it. That's a problem.

Yes, other parts of the world are worse. That is their problem. The US needs provide for its own. [1] Those assistance programs are nice, but they are often diluted, or come with punitive implications. It can be very difficult to escape from many holes people fall into.

Just try getting sick here, or have a family member get sick. We have done a little good with the ACA, but years of building, doing it right, etc... can be undone with grave, lifelong implications through no fault of the person unlucky enough to encounter something like that.

The real dialog isn't to compare the US to the worst, or lesser places. It's about our own potential as a nation. It is also about the longer term implications associated with stunting that potential too.

One of those implications may just be our ongoing ability to help improve the third world, a cause I believe in. In order to do that, we need our own house to be in order first, or it all ends up a mess and unproductive.

That is not good for any of us in the long term, though it may be fantastic for some now.

[1] By that, I mean with appropriate policy, not a nanny state that owns our problems, whatever they may be.

I've been reading through your own comment history and I can honestly say that your posts are among the shittiest simply due to the fact that it's really obvious how hard you are always trying to appear intelligent, but you don't quite hit the mark so it ends up just being a bunch of bothersome noise.

Geez, this isn't Reddit.

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