Comment by michannne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michannne | Hacker News Reader

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Ah man, you are just like me, except I'm the opposite skin color. Violence in ghettos knows no bounds, I can't recall how many times as a kid I've had to look the other way or keep my mouth shut so as to not get killed. At a certain point you realize the only way to succeed in life is to leave.

I also was inspired by developers like John Carmack and Chris Sawyer, and fortunately my dad had a Compaq Presario in those days, so I took a love for programming early. I can remember having to haul a bookbag full of programming books from the local library, through the ghetto to our apartment, nervous day that was.

I don't people really understand how much different it is living in the ghetto vs living in a middle-class area. It is night and day, and anyone can attest that once you make it out you never want to return if you can help it, and most fail to appreciate the incredible difficulty of "fixing" an area like that or even helping someone who refuses to leave

Just in response to both of you. I feel you!

I went through similar things. I do alright now but my brother stayed on the same line and things aren't so good there.

If there is one difference I can point at, it was my friends and girlfriends (and now wife) that are the causative factor in my direction. They pushed me to be more than the sum of my past and circumstances. My brother's friends just held him in place. I was lucky.

Same with me! My relationships pushed me to go higher, put myself in a better place, while my brother had friends who kept him down, some months back I heard a family member had to stay in jail over a weekend for doing something his friends told him were okay.

It's absolutely, crushingly, depressing seeing how far you've come up, vs how others are staying down and the incredibly thin line of circumstance that seperates you both.

> It's absolutely, crushingly, depressing seeing how far you've come up, vs how others are staying down and the incredibly thin line of circumstance that seperates you both.

I hear you! this hits home hard with me. It is truly sad to see your family "stuck" in the same circumstances but at the same time I also think is very motivating to know that you "broke" the cycle from your family's "unlucky" past circumstances.

My family was poor but thankfully we lived more rural than anything, which is a little different than city-poor. My biggest problem growing up was the psychological abuse my mom would dish out to pretty much anyone who looked at her. When I was young I thought it was cool, in a rebellious way. It took me a while to realize she was actually the black sheep of the family. She had worked herself a serious alcohol addiction, diabetes, lung disease, and burned just about every bridge she's made. Seeing her in a helpless state and realizing that I wasn't really headed for anything better, I glued my eyes to my first CS textbook until the ideas made sense.

To both of you: seems like you were still born in the US or some western nation. I would take beatings and ghetto over war any day.

The American ghettos / projects are a solvable issue. It baffles me how such a relatively easy problem (compared to middle eastern wars) is so hard to fix for the richest economy on earth. Can you tell me why it is difficult to fix the projects and ghettos?

It is like a nicotine addiction. I am sure from the outside looking in you think it is easy for someone to quit smoking, but they have built their lifestyle around it and it's convenience and comfort it provides to them, it is very hard for them to let go. It is the same with a ghetto, many people living in them want those places to stay the same. They have built up a life around the society norms and don't want it to change. It is hard to fix something when it desires to stay broken.

Meanwhile, a war just needs to end. The structure can always be rebuilt. The culture may not be the same as it was when it started, but it won't be in disarray forever, and the people in a warzone usually want the war to end.

Blaming the people in the ghetto for the problems of the ghetto is a common refrain of those who seek to deny the material conditions and motivations that created the ghetto in the first place. This train of thought leads to the justification of various cutbacks and reductions in social aid programs (exacerbating the situation), as the presumed beneficiaries of such programs are deemed lazy, morally unworthy, and lacking the desire to change their ways.

Changing this perception is key to making progress on this and related issues of class and resource distribution. There's heaps of research out on the positive difference a slight increase in resources can make in terms of human development.

What? I literally grew up in the ghetto, I can say from firsthand experience there is no lack of opportunity preventing anyone from moving up out of the ghetto. The only thing holding me back were others who wanted to stay in the ghetto.

I never said anything about laziness or unworthiness, don't lump my experience or comments with some other group you have imagined.

And lastly, I will not change my perception on anything. I have first-hand experience of having my life threatened because I was on the wrong side of the street at the wrong time, or I declined to do something for someone who couldn't take no for an answer, or I simply walked a certain way. These experiences won't be diluted so that you can co-opt them to influence others on your ideology.

I wasn't assuming you did say anything about those things; I was merely saying that others commonly do so, and do in fact frequently lump those together with "they have opportunities, but don't want to take them" in a way that harms the communities like the one you grew up in, while being quite ignorant of the policy, available resources, and conditions in general.

I am honestly glad you made it out, by the way. I'm not so presumptuous to think that a comment here would "change your perception" or "co-opt" anyone to serve my "ideology."

Not sure why you'd think your personal experience is representative of the average experience -- decades of social science research suggest the contrary.

What does the social science research say in precise terms?

Are you sure it doesn't just say that external factors created or create pressures against taking extant opportunities, rather than those opportunities don't exist in the first place?

The last two points you made really struck me simply because I really think they nail these problems on the head quite succinctly. Wars are terrible, destructive and complicated, but they tend to end pretty quickly (few exceptions aside) because the people involved in their absolute majority don't want the disruption war brings to an otherwise comfortable (if imperfect) normal state of existence. The project "warzones" of large urban areas are themselves the comfortable state of existence for millions of their inhabitants. And thus no matter their their nastiness and miseries, just as you mentioned, attempts at positive external change are in a way analogous to war actually, because like war, they're the external and mostly imposed disruptions despite their good intentions. No amount of money and resources being thrown at urban blight will easily change things without bearing this in mind. This is not to say that resources for improving ghetto life should be cut off, but how they're attempted needs to seriously be reconsidered.

Because, as has been shown time and time again, throwing money at a problem doesn't solve it.

The problem to solve in both is the same: rebuilding families and cultivating a culture that values long term growth.

Have you seen popular culture these days? Neither of those things are in vogue.

Really not a good sign for our long-term growth potential.

Hmm. The whole country is developing a ghetto mindset? I could maybe agree with that.

It's dividing into "gangs". (With colors, even!)

Strong families are in short supply.

The culture doesn't value long-term growth (either human or economic). It's all short-term fix, or entertainment to help you ignore the problem.

Drug dealers destroy a lot of lives (looking at you, Purdue Pharma).

People don't trust cops.

It seems like there may be more to this. Anything I'm missing?

Then what's the easy solution?

Because I'm willing to bet it's a world hunger solution: "Just give everyone food!"

Simple to say, difficult to do.

Is that a difficult solution? Western countries could end world hunger[1] for something between what we spend on alternative medicine[2] and what we spend on food that we throw away[3]. Of course, there are some difficulties like lack of infrastructure needed to get aid to everyone who needs it, but those seem hardly insurmountable. Companies seem to be able to reach the most remote regions of the world when it comes to things like producing coffee; I don't see why it should be impossible to feed everyone.

The main difficulty, as far as I can tell, is that most people are reluctant to pay to feed even the people that they share the streets with, let alone people in the third world. But I don't think you can really call a problem "difficult" if the only reason you haven't done it is because you choose not to.

[1] https://hungermath.wordpress.com/2013/12/08/how-much-would-i...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/americans-spend-3...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/22/americas-165-billion-food-wa...

So your solution. In so many words. Is to just give everyone food.

And then you handwave away the infrastructure necessary to do so.

You literally did the thing I called out.

Well, that’s just the thing - the ghettos _are_ the solution. The problem was lack of affordable housing, so the government mandated affordable housing. The result was ghettos, since everybody who had nowhere else to go ended up there.

I remember a discussion with someone who lived in a French equivalent (perhaps not as bad), at the time those were being constructed (from the 50' to the 70'). At the time, people who started living there were happy, because the alternative were shantytown/slums. Of course it didn't last, but I found it interesting to see this viewpoint.

They probably worked well for 10 years. The ghettos in France are pretty bad right now too. Maybe what was missing was reinvestment in these areas, the development of services and building out the community. London and the UK have experimented with transitioning council flats to owner occupied for example. Gentrification maybe too?

From what I've heard, such areas have received and continue to receive public money, but it doesn't look like it's working. Or I am wrong and such money don't exist/go elsewhere (grafts, corruption, public money waste or just area that aren't too bad). Or the places where it's working aren't those we're hearing about (the squeaky wheel get the grease and all that).

There's a lot of racial animus that compounds that - inner-city ghettos generally tend to be non-white thanks to red-lining and white-flight in the past, and the present disdain for "welfare queens" in the political zeitgeist, since Reagan.

This is also why today we want mixed use housing and affordable housing together with market rate housing.

> Can you tell me why it is difficult to fix the projects and ghettos?

Because “the projects and ghettos” aren't a statement of a problem, and to the extent that there is an agreement that there are problems around those things, there is not consensus on what the problem is, much less the solution, and the lack of consensus is not only about empirical fact, but includes a fundamental clash of ideological principles.

This is correct. Everyone pretty much agrees that these areas are a symptom of a problem. Nobody agrees on what that problem even is.

Further, various factions (there are more than two) seem to believe that the problem is exacerbated by what other factions believe to be a proto-mitigation. E.g. see discussion of rent control -- some people believe that rent control keeps people out of public housing, others believe that rent control forces people into public housing, still others believe that rent control has nothing to do with it.

Your comment is ignorant. The issue is not easy to fix. This sounds like me saying, well get rid of religion in the Middle East it will fix the wars, but that is ignorant.

Projects/ghettos are not simple to solve. It is a pretty complex problem.

The richest economy doesn't actually want to solve the problem.

> Ah man, you are just like me, except I'm the opposite skin color.

That sentence is one of the coolest and most hopeful things I've read in a while. When people can see the "other" as "just like me", despite the obvious difference, then maybe we can break down some of the walls that divide us.

Omg the good vibes I feel when I hear the words Compaq Presario.

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