Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a lot more sympathetic toward the latter myopia.

A lot of blue collar people can't imagine what they'd do if they could no longer get a job in their current industry. Severance is meager, pensions are drying up, and retraining assistance (if they'd even accept it) is virtually nonexistent. When faced with "progress" making your way of life and standard of living untenable, that gets really really really scary. I'd challenge you to remain entirely rational if your job -- no, your entire industry -- went away, the bank decided to foreclose on your house (which is now worthless anyway, because there are no jobs where you live), you were unable to feed your family, and you didn't even have the money to move somewhere else where prospects were better.

On the other hand, we have a ton of tech people around here who, because of their privilege, are unable to put themselves into anyone else's shoes, even for a minute. It's basic empathy, and seems to be in short supply sometimes.

>A lot of blue collar people can't imagine what they'd do if they could no longer get a job in their current industry.

I work in tech. I can't imagine what I would do if I could no longer get a job in our industry. My wife left biotech and has struggled to find work.

Weirdly enough, we live in a city in Massachusetts, so the entire local, state, and federal government apparatus doesn't get mobilized to help us, because we're second-class citizens nowadays.

As a fellow tech worker in MA, I'm curious what you mean. Can you elaborate on your "second class citizens" statement?

I was referring to Massachusetts voters and urban voters being "second-class": we can support X at essentially arbitrarily high levels of support, but the more rural states and regions of the country get more voice than us in the federal government. So when certain rural people want economic policy rewritten to "save their jobs", a whole party shifts its dominant ideology to accommodate them, even if it's not actually a good idea for everyone. However, when we (urban, coastal) want our lifestyles or preferences accommodated by policy, we're not only out of luck, we get insulted for our efforts.

Don't coastal urban voters, particularly if they're white, skew relatively wealthy compared to their rural counterparts though?

On the one hand I agree that bad policy is still bad even if it does end up saving some jobs, but it seems the economy is already so tilted in favor of white coastal urban voters that I find it somewhat hard to sympathize.

>we get insulted for our efforts.

While this is certainly disappointing, it is so prevalent on both sides I can't take it seriously unless you're willing to call out similar denigration of the rural poor by coastal urbanites.

>On the one hand I agree that bad policy is still bad even if it does end up saving some jobs, but it seems the economy is already so tilted in favor of white coastal urban voters that I find it somewhat hard to sympathize.

The economy is tilted in favor of white coastal urban voters. The government is tilted in favor of white rural landlocked voters. All voters skew more relatively wealthy than non-voters, and indeed neither of our political parties tilt in favor of non-wealthy non-white people.

>While this is certainly disappointing, it is so prevalent on both sides I can't take it seriously unless you're willing to call out similar denigration of the rural poor by coastal urbanites.

While I do call that out, I think there's a difference: one kind of denigration comes from the permanent minority party, and the other comes from the permanently dominant party. I cannot name one time in my life when the Republican Party and its base of rural white landlocked relatively wealthy people did not set the national agenda, and I'm 27 years old.

Even when they "lost" elections, in the theoretical sense of no longer holding majorities, they used various procedural tactics to maintain their chokehold over the actual mechanisms of policymaking.

So as much as the economy has inflicted horrible suffering on that base, those rural white landlocked voters still maintain the actual power. They've been supporting policies that hurt people like them, but as they tell it, those are their moral values and their notion of dignity -- if people suffer, so be it.

when did hard work suddenly become "privilege"

"Hard work" is utterly orthogonal to what your comment's parent is describing. The kind of "hard work" that many blue collar people do would leave most programmers crying in pain and frustration before the first day is out.

On the whole, people whose job perks include the fully-staffed, all-day gourmet cafeterias, paid gym memberships (if not on-site gyms and massage therapists!), and six figure salaries for sitting in meetings, thinking kinda hard, and then tapping away at a keyboard for a bit (yes, I'm being reductive; so are you) have exactly fuck-all grounds to call out anyone else about "hard work".

Of course, there's also the "drop your average blue collar worker into my job and they'd be fired within the week, if not the day"... Not to say I wouldn't be fired within the day at their job, just saying that both kinds of jobs are demanding. (Yes, yes, you could probably train them to do my job, but I could work out to build the strength to do theirs).

Considering IT is my 3rd career, Meat Cutting and Welding being a prior I am not sure you understand my perspective of hard work.

I worked my way into IT and it was hard work.

How is this privileged ?

How is this privileged ?

Exactly. It isn't. That you think your efforts are what was being described when the post up-thread mentioned "privilege" shows how poorly you understand the concept.

Thing is... everyone has the "privilege" to bust their ass and do what i did

It isn't easy but it is possible. Pretending it isn't is for lazy people.

And yes... ask me what ghetto I climbed out of ;)

Not disagreeing with you in the slightest, and genuinely kinda baffled as to how you might think I was. What you seem to be missing (or ignoring), however, is that some people have a tougher climb than others, through no fault of their own. (Race, gender, disability, whatever.)

The things that you, personally, don't have to contend with on that climb are what's meant by your "privilege." Not how hard you worked. Not what you've earned, and managed to leverage that into subsequently, but the things that you have no control over, and about which other people have stories and judgements and whatever, which can — and do — materially alter the set of opportunities you'll experience your life — or, rather, they would, if you were subject to them. But you aren't, so you have that "privilege".

(Yes, I think it's a shitty name for the concept. But if you can just detach yourself from feeling like it's somehow "your fault" that you have these privileges, and look with more open eyes, you'll see that there's actually a real, demonstrable, even measurable phenomenon there, however strongly you might want to disagree with the verbiage.)

No-one's pretending these things aren't possible, so that's a nice straw-man you're building there. But apparently plenty of people are pretending that these things are exactly as hard for someone else with a different life and circumstances as it was for themselves — and that's not only demonstrably false, it's (IMO) disturbingly ignorant.

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