Hacker News Reader

Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

Egyptians and Tunisians knew very well what they wanted. What do these people want is indeed unclear to me. Abolish the banks and give all the money to them? Hang all the rich people? Equality of the income? How would that look like? And how many of them are just too lazy to do something and would prefer not to do anything but will still be entitled to some benefits? A lot of those "99%" posters can be summarized by "I took a bunch of dumb decisions, then I took some credit for stuff I did not need, and now I am screwed". Who knew!

View on HN

This seems a bit too condescending to me.

It's very easy to point to a dictator and lay the blame on him. The violence and injustice perpetrated by a dictator is easy to identify.

If you have a complex system where injustice is not generated by a single individual, but rather by the interplay of many different actions, or even generated by the structure of the system itself, this is much harder to identify.

You'll note that people in Egypt got rid of Mubarak, but they're not entirely happy about the current state of affairs either.

The problem with economic violence is that while the issues are understandable and can be explained, they are hard to boil down to a short slogan.

The hardest thing with the united states is we've built a system that is complex and there is no one person who screwed everything up.

Example:

  People have high student loans 
  because college is expensive
  because more people want to go
  and can get loans from the government
  so colleges can charge higher prices

The greatest thing with the United States is we've built a system that is complex and there is no one way things have to be done.

Example: free Ivy-League education available at http://ocw.mit.edu for the self-motivated.

My wife & I have 5 nontrivial degrees between us, at a cost of under $100k and no debt. A little creativity and flexibility got us a long way.

Supply and demand. People are willing to pay high prices for education in exchange for credit-card-easy access, so colleges are willing to charge it. Dig & negotiate a bit, be flexible, and the price comes in a lot lower.

Its not about the knowledge.

Its about the fact that many decent jobs won't accept any applicants without a degree. Yes you can get all of that knowledge but what proof do you have?

By the way im a CS grad with a job

Im just saying this as someone who is frustrated with people all ways using the strawmen of free online education which only recently became prevalent and the fact that they fell into circumstances that allowed them to either not need college or go for cheap.

The story my generation was sold as kids is that you go to college and then you get a good job.

Somewhere along the way that contract was broken... that is part of what this protest is about

There was no contract. There was prosperity, which comes in cycles. Status quo is not a guarantee. Welcome to the real world, kid - there's no Tooth Fairy either.

You can get the education, or at least well under way with it, for free before committing to an expensive certification process. I had the basics of computer engineering down (and that long before free online education - get thee hence to the library!) before shelling out lots of cash for certification. Lacking certification, you can create proof via a portfolio. Lacking openings, you can create one (this IS the reason for ycombinator.com, ya know).

And no, getting the degree isn't assurance of work. When I came out with a respectable CE degree, the market was way down and I had to do tech support for 1.5 years, and got that gig much because my personal education efforts gave me a foot in the door pre-graduation.

This protest is indeed about something broken: the failure of education to tell kids that nobody owes you anything (despite the demands for free food/clothing/shelter/education/debt/entertainment), that having a degree doesn't guarantee a job (improves odds, but no assurance), and that living wages cannot be just legislated/declared into existence. Sorry, not everyone is going to tell you everything you need to know, including how harsh the real world can be. Nobody said there was a "get degree = get job" contract.

If those protesters would quit yelling at strawmen and decided to pool their talents and technology (enough laptops & smartphones to do it) to create marketable goods/services, they'd have the jobs they're demanding. They sure have the time & opportunity & resources right now.

The protesters know very well what they want also. It is only the media who is unclear for very understandable reasons because this has only started. They are not asking to abolish the banks, but the Glass ceiling to be re-instated, they are asking for more equality of course, the graph for example that was posted here on HN a while ago showed clearly that while the country grew, wages did not, after 1970s, or, after the Regan Thatcer market prevails let the jungle rule.

I do not know how many of them are lazy. I would not think many since it takes quite a lot of work to organize what they have and keep pushing forward. Many of them simply can not find a job and find themselves in a spiral without any help because of temporary difficulties. We have had plenty of posts here on HN just how poor people are trapped into poverty. Banks get money, little people get kicked out.

Anyway, maybe you should visit their websites and read what they want.

Thanks for the reply. I must admit, I am not from the USA so I did not follow all this really closely, but if there was a clear representation of the demands, I surely missed it.

I assume you mean the Glass–Steagall Act.

I keep seeing this idea of 'asking for more equality' and I have no idea what that means. Equality of what? pay? opportunity?

Forced redistribution of money to equalize incomes would be an unmitigated disaster so I can only hope that isn't their actual demand.

Anyway, the protesters and their supporters need to refine their message a bit.

I see those attractive young people protesting, and I can't help but wish for equality of appearance. Why should I be stuck with this body, when all of those people flaunt -- or worse, ignore -- their beauty?

Seriously, it's ironic that the same set of people who claim that "material possessions aren't important, it's the people that matter" are the ones who find money so important that they've got to redistribute what others have earned. But they don't give attention to the myriad other ways in which some people are better-advantaged than others.

> Forced redistribution of money to equalize incomes would be an unmitigated disaster

Not really. A different balance of taxation would be a form of redistribution of income (and indeed would be interpreted as 'forced' by some). Would that be an unmitigated disaster? Well, it needs checking in the detail, but one suspects that such different tax profiles and hence 'redistribution' existed at various times in the USA's past: the 1960s probably, for example. That is unlikely to be called a period of disaster: it was one of growth and creativity, was it not? If all that happened was going to the moon and inventing the internet, you would have to call it pretty good.

Not really.

I'm sorry, but I simply can't take you seriously.

you don't understand that the very definition of a tax incorporates the idea of 'force' (hint if it is optional, it isn't a tax)

you are confusiong redistribution and/or progressive tax structure with 'equal incomes'

you claim without any evidence that the 1960s represented a time when this redistribution was implemented

My comment was about the ambiguity of 'equality' without any clarification or context and about the dangers of promulgating 'equal incomes' via forced redistribution.

I do not want to live in a world where any individual effort made to raise my income above the average results in the government grabbing my wallet and giving it to someone making no effort at all.

>Anyway, maybe you should visit their websites and read what they want.

From what I've seen from the posts all over the internet, it runs the entire political spectrum from the very progressive liberal/socialist(tax the rich, end wars, socialized medicine) to the very libertarian(end the federal reserve, go back to the gold standard). There is also a lot of anti-globalization stuff in there, as well. That's on top of the anti-corporate greed goals(which are what I assume the entire thing started about, but quite frankly, I'm not sure anymore).

The problem for me, even as a liberal, is that a lot of the demands are either impossible(removing the fed) or so unspecific(there is a lot of talk about "personal liberty") that they could mean anything to everyone that it's hard to state that I support them or am against them.

Well, when you're raised and told you HAVE to go to college, a lot of will she loans for it. Or they'll assume they'll have their job for a long time, and buy a car/house, or have a kid. A bunch of dumb decisions? Not necessarily. Sometimes life just happens.

As for what they want, they want to feel like they have opportunities. I genuinely do think it's a discontent that's risen from feeling like their voice carries little/no weight in society, politics included, and that the control is in the hands of those with wealth. It's your garden variety populist uprising, only from the American middle class, so expect to see less blood and more coffee.

  > A bunch of dumb decisions? Not necessarily.
  > Sometimes life just happens.

No doubt about that. However I'd argue, that some of those 99% could have it differently if they wished so.

Oh absolutely! And I'm sure many are the lazy freeloaders that are easily imagined. But I think honest mistakes count for much of it. Of course, that could well be wishful thinking!

I think the people now in Wall Street are doing exactly that. :)

Not all change for the better comes about by buckling down and getting a second job.

> A bunch of dumb decisions? Not necessarily. Sometimes life just happens.

"If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT." — Frank Zappa

Reply on news.ycombinator.com