Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

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This one particular student sticks with me. He was in his 60s-70s, and had a burgeoning career in IT/Security in the late 90s, but quit his job to take care of his ailing mother around 2001 or so. He took care of her, living off of her reverse mortgage for 20 years, but now she has passed away, and the term of the reverse mortgage ends soon (or I believe by now has ended) so the bank will be re-posessing his house, his only remaining asset. The guy was not doing well. Even though he was quite smart and had C++ in his distant background, he was making almost zero progress in the course. It soon became clear that he was so drained from working 12-hour days at a Costco warehouse (and doing other similar menial jobs) 6 days a week (and still not making enough to even pay his medical bills) that he wasn't going to be able to make any progress. I repeatedly recommended him for a scholarship (because of his intelligence and skill) but I never heard back, and eventually he dropped off my schedule. I did everything I could to give him what he needed to succeed, but ultimately there was nothing I could do. It haunts me. This country is so fucked.

Yep, that's also because: "Earlier this year researchers at the London School of Economics released a paper titled, “Why Do People Stay Poor?” that illustrated how the lack of initial wealth (and not motivation or talent) is what keeps people in poverty. The researchers tested this by randomly allocating wealth (i.e. livestock) to female villagers in Bangladesh and then waited to see how that wealth transfer would affect their future finances. As their paper states:

[We] find that, if the program pushes individuals above a threshold level of initial assets, then they escape poverty, but, if it does not, they slide back into poverty…Our findings imply that large one-off transfers that enable people to take on more productive occupations can help alleviate persistent poverty.

Their paper clearly illustrates that many poor people stay poor not because of their talent/motivation, but because they are in low-paying jobs that they must work to survive."

More on this here: https://ofdollarsanddata.com/why-do-poor-people-stay-poor/

This is like the escape velocity of wealth.

Same story in most western countries by now, stumble once and you're fucked for life.

And to add insult to injury, people will rather think you deserve it than face the fact that we're all in the same stinking boat.

Not working for twenty years (in the prime time for earning money) is not "stumbling once".

In that case the issue was that he had to stop working to take care of his mother. In most civilized countries, his mother would have sufficient help from government healthcare.

Depending on how sick she was there are such programs in every state. If she needed round the clock care like it sounds, she was sick enough most likely.

He also could probably have declared bankruptcy early and been able to focus more on learning useful skills instead of killing himself trying to pay bills he never could. That is what bankruptcy is for.

But hard to say what was really going on.

Right, learning useful skills while declaring bankruptcy.

Something tells me you've never even come close to walking in those shoes.

The second you stop generating profit, the state starts treating you like a broken toy.

Guess again my friend. Ate old canned food for a very long time while my parents declared bankruptcy as a kid - twice - so we at least had a roof over our head, and wore the same two shirts for years too. My Mom finished a 4 year degree several years afterwards that helped us pull out of the economic collapse of the aerospace industry in the area that had trapped us - and was studying late in the night to do it. While working a very demanding full time job too.

There are methods to avoid being destroyed by situations like this, but some never try or don’t bother to even figure it out. Doesn’t mean it still isn’t hard work, and stressful as hell, but it is there to stop the destruction. Folks have to look and try though.

> my parents

the battle cry of every 20-something laissez faire evangelist

Would you prefer the sob story of the time I had a partner go literally nuts (though she managed to dodged the psych eval for nearly 5 months until THAT got proven) due to COVID related stress and her own negligent actions and their consequences, and then file a series of crazy (and later proved perjury) accusations that locked me out of most of my finances, my home, and all but the property I was able to put on my back with roughly an hours notice - while I ended up single parenting two kids - all for no apparent reason?

Shit sucks sometimes. It's often hard or nearly impossible to cope. Sometimes the terribleness comes from those you loved the most, or least expected it from. Sometimes it comes from a literal random stranger. Life isn't fair, and there is no guarantee - and fundamentally cannot be - that things work out for anyone, no matter how right or wrong their actions.

Sometimes this kills someone directly. Sometimes it just wears them down, sometimes someone can take a direct hit to the face that would kill most others and just smile.

Often the bigger part of the damage or ongoing problems stem from our own inability to face reality, what is going on, and make use of the tools we do have and what we have around us to actually make things better - but that is a problem no one can fix but us. Ultimately, we end up with the consequences of this, deserved or not. There is no magic bullet to solve this either, just hard and uncomfortable work.

There are tools however, and our current society provides a LOT of them. I fully recognize how hard it is to use them during hard times. Probably more than 99% of the posters here. But pretending they don't exist or aren't available is BS as well. Pretending that they don't exist and that is why society is unfair and fucked up because of this is also just wrong and corrosive to society - and people even actually using these tools.

How many people read these posts and actually think there IS no other option and they're permanently fucked, and so never actually take the actions they can to make it better - or even take drastically worse actions that just compound the problem?

A lot more than anyone wants to think about, I can assure you.

Bankruptcy exists. I've seen many people use it (including one close friend) and everyone came out fine at the end. Was it embarrassing for them? Yes. Was it fun? No.

I've always worked my ass off and saved money to avoid the risk, and still barely survived, as I saw how unfun it was as a child and felt many of the effects first hand. But it worked for them to do it, and I knew I had the option if it went even further south.

The whole point of bankruptcy is to get the creditors off your back so you can actually get your life back on track again - like learn a useful skill, or get a new job despite the market being screwed, or not go homeless, or build back a functional life after crippling medical issues and/or debt.

Is it guaranteed that said person will do so? No - there is no way to even attempt to give such a guarantee.

Is it a useful tool someone can use to do so? Yes, you bet.

And if you think I'm 20, lol.

> In most civilized countries, his mother would have sufficient help from government healthcare.

I am in New Zealand, which is fairly civilised, and I think your statement is mostly wrong.

Firstly, I have seen people get some government help, but it is rarely enough. Even with government help and sharing the load with siblings you may still need to help your parents full time.

Secondly, many people choose to look after their parents because they want to, or sometimes they don’t trust that others will give them the same quality of care. Even with high quality private care, I have seen plenty of children dedicate a lot of time to their parents (similarly friends looking after sick friends).

For some children it is acceptable for them to hand parents over to aged care, provided by the state. Many other children choose instead to do as much as they can to help their parents, often because they have experience of the systems and see the reality of overburdened elderly care.

When infirm people have nobody else to help them except government services, their care is sometimes of low quality, although still expensive for the economy to provide. A mature economy with many elderly perhaps doesn’t have enough people to provide the number of dedicated hours needed to support all of their infirm? I did a quick search and it looks like New Zealand spends about 1% of GDP on long term aged health care. That seems surprisingly low to me - although I didn’t look at how much other countries spend. https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=crown+expenditure+%22aged%...

Thanks for the story. The most brutal thing for me about reporting this story was each individual human horror-show. It's such a serious thing to be responsible for attempting to transform the lives of people who need it so desperately. It is what's most noble about Lambda's mission, to me.

Does any country do a decent job of retraining 70 year old men for developer positions? This does not need to be a high priority for a society if the 70 year old can afford a roof of their head and a meal.

I don't think that's the issue. The issue is that the United States provides such a poor safety net for those with health issues that one person's failing health destroys the economic potential of one or more people around them.

From a sheer utilitarian perspective, healthcare and safety nets are positive ROI. Imagine the job-producing startups that don't exist because "how do you pay for insurance?"

It's worse than just lost startup opportunities.

I think healthcare in the US is riddled with ways to "accidentally"* spend the entire accumulation of your wealth, leaving absolutely nothing to the next generation.

Long term care is needed by a lot of folks over the age of 65 (~70% of adults age 65 will require at least partial long term care).

Even "reasonably cheap" care (in my experience, roughly the same quality as living in a college dorm, with a roommate and a meal plan) can easily run 10k/month - or 120k a year.

Of those needing long term care (roughly half of all folks): Men will need that care for an average of ~2 years, women nearly 4 years. 20% will need that care for 5 years or longer.

I watched my parents spend all of their inheritance covering long term care costs for their parents (Alzheimers is a bitch). Once the inheritance was gone, they worked longer than they would have preferred to continue covering those costs (my mother only retired this year when my grandmother died of covid - as horrendous as it sounds, it was almost a blessing).

My personal take is that "single family homes" and "private healthcare" are a literal fucking disaster for long term wealth inequality. That policy combination takes a lot of middle class families and leaves them poor.

* - I personally don't think it's an accident at all, I think it's very, very intentional.

To be fair, long-term care is not just an opportunity to accidentally (from the perspective of the holder, not the system) get rid of one’s accumulated wealth, it is often the motivation for intentionally doing so prematurely, in order to qualify for Medicaid (which pays for the majority of long-term care in the US.) OTOH, for people who don’t have the knowledge or professional advice to do this (which, of course, correlates strongly with having more wealth to start with), it is a trap for accidental wealth drain rather than intentional redistribution, so the poor get generationally poorer, while the better off are also better able to protect generational wealth, both benefiting from programs for the medically indigent.

Every dollar spent on the elderly who had their whole life to prepare is a dollar not spent on a child growing up in poverty who has not yet had a chance.

Families should take care of their own. If nobody is willing to do that for you, you probably aren't deserving.

Well, except it isn’t right? We can and do budget them separately.

Might be more fair to say ‘every tomahawk missle fired randomly at a target at the Middle East is an entire middle class families lifetime income down the tubes’.

It's just as fair in my opinion.

> I think healthcare in the US is riddled with ways to "accidentally"* spend the entire accumulation of your wealth, leaving absolutely nothing to the next generation.

That's not true, the money isn't just lost. The money is passed to the children of the person who extracts the money from the sick people. It's by design.

The money isn't passed on intact though. At the end of the day we pour a huge proportion of our real production - human hours of labour - into prolonging the lives of people who are barely remembering or experiencing anything.

This isn't just a US thing. For example, even though healthcare is nominally free at the point of use here in the UK, that doesn't cover long-term care for the elderly - you will have to pay privately for that out of your wealth to companies of varying degress of sleaziness until you have no more left, at which point the government will hopefully consider picking up the bill. Our current conservative goverment is planning on capping this and it seems fairly controversial.

> my mother only retired this year when my grandmother died of covid - as horrendous as it sounds, it was almost a blessing

I can only imagine the hardships your family endured for this sentence to come out. I'm glad things are working out for you guys and I'm sorry for your loss.

> I think healthcare in the US is riddled with ways to "accidentally"* spend the entire accumulation of your wealth, leaving absolutely nothing to the next generation.

...

> * - I personally don't think it's an accident at all, I think it's very, very intentional.

Its extremely intentional wealth stealing, and it's even worse than just lost generational wealth transfer. Filial responsibility laws mean that your illness and long-term care are your children's financial burden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws .

In the worst cases, people estranged from their parents for decades end up bankrupted. Depending on what state your grandmother lived in - your mother may have been on the hook even if she hadn't chosen to keep working to care for her mom.[1]

The idea that paying for elderly parents' expensive (intentionally or accidentally) care is a choice only applies to people in less than half of the states. These laws make the only choice "pay the provider directly now" or "pay the provider costs and late fees, etc via the courts". So anyone who wants to claim that the people who care for their parents are chosing to do so is claiming wrong - if your parent spends their last days in one of 26 states, the parent is chosing what your wealth is used for.

[1] I hope that didn't come across as suggesting your mom was only making a financial choice, or that she didn't make her choice out of love. I'm sorry you lost your grandmother and I hope your mom enjoys her retirement.

My partners grandmother in Sydney moved into a care home earlier this year as she nears the end of her life. She had to pay over $500,000 upfront which gives her 10 years of care there, and then its a pro-rated amount is refunded upon death.

I can't imagine there are too many people in this world with half a million dollars ready to go.

Why should strangers pay so your family can receive an inheritance? That's basically paying you because your parents were wealthy.

I was agreeing with everything up until the last paragraph. If you had an inheritance to pass on you were already in the wealthy class; letting the rich spend everything they can and more on end of life care reduces wealth inequality (though it's a very poor allocation of society's production IMO).

Can't people choose to refuse medical help?

The only reason I see expenses really causing massive debt is if you choose to accept/request medical procedures you can't pay for.

While it's morbid to consider the idea of just letting yourself die because you don't want to go into debt, it still is a choice... isn't it?

In a whole lot of cases dying is, whether we like it or not "I/we/We[0] don't want to pay for it anymore". I have the experience of pulling the plug on my dad, not for financial reasons, but because it was very clear that he was going to die anyways and it wasn't worth the emotional energy to keep him around (luckily for us, everyone important had time to say their goodbyes and several annoying people had said their goodbyes too [1]). But it also brought into focus to me that we COULD have spent/forced the system to spend millions of dollars in extraordinary resources to keep him alive.

Medical technology is quite advanced these days. Advanced != free. And there's a thing where the longer you try to prolong someone's life the more progressively expensive it becomes, not just from a "price of care" perspective but an "[externalized] cost of care" perspective. Is it worth X carbon dioxide emissions to keep a person on a "level-III dialysis machine"? Is it worth X acres of rainforest to extract an anticancer drug to keep someone's cancer at bay?

Anyways the political divide, in the US, between the left's clueless utopianism and the right's underhanded support of market-distorting profitmongers, has become so farcical that it's impossible to question if humans should have "a general right to have their life extended" even if there are actual, difficult questions to go around.

[0] capital We, as in "the state"

[1] if you ever have the experience of being by the bedside of someone who is dying (n=2 for me), you will see people who come to visit, and have so much pathos, I suspect largely due to their own hangups about death. To be at your best in your role, you will want to shoo them away as quickly as possible.

> The only reason I see expenses really causing massive debt is if you choose to accept/request medical procedures you can't pay for

Have you ever been to a US hospital? They don’t have a menu where you browse treatments and prices. You get your treatment and then later on you get a massive bill

That’s all putting aside the fact that a society allowing people to suffer from treatable illnesses is completely unnecessary and cruel considering that providing free care to everyone is something many countries do successfully

That's false. America has probably the most advanced healthcare in the world. Almost every new treatment is invented and made available there. Other countries don't provide that cutting edge stuff for free, they simply don't provide it at all. I live in New Zealand which has free healthcare but we sometimes hear about people pressuring the government to pay for some expensive new drug, or a dying person using crowdfunding to pay for what the government won't, or complaining they have to spend their own money flying to America for private treatment because no doctor in New Zealand is capable of that special thing. But those are the exceptions that get into the news. Mostly people just die when it's too expensive. Our standard for "treatable illnesses" is lower than the reality of what technology can do.

At the extreme end of diminishing returns, I'd guess that most deaths of elderly people in hospital are preventable because machines to perform the function of failed heart, lungs, kidneys, GI tract, etc. exist. But it's expensive, and countries with socialized healthcare don't pay for it for everyone because they don't have infinite money. My dad died this way when his lungs filled with fluid while in hospital.

>That's false

What part of my comment are you referring to? I can’t really tell from what you wrote

Excuse me. It was this "a society allowing people to suffer from treatable illnesses is completely unnecessary and cruel considering that providing free care to everyone is something many countries do successfully"

I'm saying no country provides free healthcare for all treatable illnesses. And not providing it is necessary because the cost would be too great.

I agree it's cruel though.

not always. you obviously don't get to choose if you're unconscious and someone calls an ambulance for you. or if you get a concussion or injure yourself while intoxicated, you might not be able to fully consent to being taken to the hospital. even DNRs are not always respected.

A friend of mine has terminal cancer and is in a place like this - DNR’s pasted everywhere as the worst fear he has is he’ll get rescucitated and be even worse off.

> While it's morbid to consider the idea of just letting yourself die because you don't want to go into debt, it still is a choice... isn't it?

No. I'm glad I could clear up this very difficult topic for you.

Are you saying medical help is _always_ forced on you?

I understand if you are unconscious, you can't decide, or in a coma. But what if you are lucid and asked by a doctor if you want a procedure or not?

My thought was around those lines: 60/70 year olds shouldn't be struggling to get retrained. They should be able to live the rest of their lives in retirement. Society should take care of their elders. That's where I would start a UBI program if I could.

Sure, if anyone wants to use their time to learn something new that would be a plus for them.

Well, we sort of do. It's called social security. Now, you could argue that social security by itself only supports a pretty spartan lifestyle. But any UBI proposal is probably even less money.

Your social security benefits are calculated based on your 35 highest income years; which includes 0 income years. The guy quit in 2001 in his 40s-50s, so he may only have 20 years of income for SSA benefits.

That said, the formula is a political choice just as the UBI benefits are a political choice. We could give everyone the same SSA benefits regardless of prior income and index the amounts to age instead. UBI and SSA could be the same administration with lower amounts for younger people and higher amounts for retirees.

https://www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/questions-an...

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