Comment by packetlost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by packetlost | Hacker News Reader

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> Or you could be served divorce papers from your partner and lose a substantial fraction of your net-worth and future income.

This definitely implies a questionable decision.

> Or you ( or a member of your family) could have a debilitating/rare disease and your insurance does not cover all the treatments for it

Sure, there could be rare cataclysmic events that drain you of your financial resources. That's not really on-topic to what the discussion is about though.

> Or you could have been fired and opened your own business and your partners fleeced you out (ask me how I know)

This is 100% a bad decision. Do not take money out of your 401k to start a business.

> Or you live in a country where salaries are below 45 k /y.

Then you likely live in a country where the CoL is significantly lower than in the US and the dynamics of retirement are very different. I'm speaking 100% from an American-centric point of view.

> You have a very naive, simplistic and privileged worldview so I hope for your own sake you never have to leave that cocoon.

I'm sorry my short internet comment on a technology forum is not comprehensive enough to account for all potential scenarios and nuance. I grew up in poverty, and I'm going to do everything I can to prevent myself from ending back up in that situation.

> I grew up in poverty

I grew up in poverty, too. Not the caricature "TV in every room" "fake-poverty" nonsense some use to try to "prove" poor Americans aren't poor, but actual poverty. Like, almost homeless, single-mom skipping meals so me and my brother could eat, exposed to drugs and gun violence, pest-infested inadequate housing, style poverty. In America. I can do the poverty olympics all damn day with anyone here, even those from so-called under-developed nations.

I am...skeptical...of your statement. I'm rich now thanks to an IPO--and my hard work in being in a position to be employed at a successful company. But I recognize that a lot of what you've written there is just...wrong. It's "right" enough in some respects, but just so very wrong in so many ways.

There's definitely different levels of poverty. Rural American poverty is different from urban American poverty, there's different problems. We didn't have pest problems, but one of the houses we lived in had severe mold that caused health problems (so we had to move). We didn't have gun violence or drugs, but we chopped and burned wood from the area to heat our house through the cold winters because we couldn't afford fuel. We didn't go hungry, but only because we got heavily subsidized or free lunches from the school. We had our electricity shut off on several occasions. I was lucky in the sense that we lived within the territory of a decent school district, so I was able to dig a computer out of the school dumpster that only had a failed hard drive, which I fixed and used to teach myself programming (by this point, we could at least afford internet service). It wasn't consistently like that, and not as bad as what you described, but it was absolutely still poverty.

According to him if your partner divorces you it is always a bad decision of yours. If people betrays you it is a bad decision if you get sick it is a bad decision, if you live in Haiti earning 300 USD/month it is fine because COL is lower. Living in hindsight-land, but it is OK since he grew up in "poverty". Totally absent of any sense of perspective of what a normal human life consists of, typical of an upper-middle class able, white, male in IT.

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