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to whoever responded with:

"But anyways. Like most of us, I am also very fortunate to be in tech, and have a passion for programming. But I do not pretend that my good fortune some how means I work or harder or am smarter than other people in our society.",

but then deleted their comment:

you really should repost it. it captures my feelings too and i wanted to thank you for putting them into words.

again and again, i encounter people in my circles of well-employed colleagues who do not realize how lucky they are to have interests coinciding with aptitudes coinciding with particular economic demands in their productive years.

and it makes them sickeningly self congratulatory.

"But I do not pretend that my good fortune some how means I work or harder or am smarter than other people in our society"

What a defeatist attitude. I do work harder and smarter than other people in our society. My work and success reflects this.

"and it makes them sickeningly self congratulatory."

It's sickening that you would equate having a good job with mostly luck. Winning the lottery is pure luck.

I chose to get involved in the tech industry. If I would have been in any other time, I would have chosen a different industry and most likely been successful. Less than 1% of it has to do with luck. If I would have just sat here and done nothing, my career wouldn't have fallen into my lap and my skill set wouldn't have suddenly appeared.

Anybody can be successful.

Just like those workers who saw that housing was booming in 2004 and decided to join that industry, eh?

Of course, tech bubbles never exist, so that's an imperfect analogy.

You must be an odd person if you have equal aptitudes and passion for a huge range of things, and can choose them based solely on current economic demand. Few to no people I know in tech are like that, though. I'd be into hacker culture if the field was full of shit jobs; the way some people live and breathe music and can't imagine doing anything else, others can't imagine not doing something that involves hacking technology. It's just sugar on top that there's all this money floating around in the field too.

I mean, I got hooked on computers when I was 6 or 7, from Logo. I'm pretty sure I didn't get hooked due to my great foresight and economic responsibility. It was just interesting. Other people get hooked on other things, whether it's math or music. I'm fortunate that my thing pays well, but I don't think that makes me better than them. Makes my life easier, sure, but for exogenous reasons.

I don't think it's uncorrelated with merit, but I do think the correlation is very inconsistent. I know brilliant mathematicians with much poorer incomes, for example (pure math doesn't pay well... despite its long-term usefulness, it's hard to capture the value / monetize it).

I started programming because I was fascinated by computers. It wasn't until years later that I found out it was a lucrative job. It sounds like your recommendation would be for everyone to chase money regardless of their passions. You have to admit that people who are passionate about things that pay well get a better deal in that situation. There are a lot of things that are worthwhile that are not well rewarded economically. If all of the artists and idealists disappeared and we were only left with money-chasers, the world would be that much poorer.

Also, regarding success: hard work and intelligence matter a lot, but so does opportunity. Have a look at Gladwell's Outliers for an interesting analysis of this.

Plus, there's the negative effect of having our market flooded with people who go into programming "because that's where the money is".

I'm as critical as anyone when people decide to get liberal arts degrees without at least working on other skills on the side, but let's not be so naive to think that if a CS degree was the new liberal arts degree, that we wouldn't be having the same exact problem in society.

Only we (people on HN) would probably be making much less money.

I agree with that as well. One subset of this is "The MBA Effect" where managers who are also engineers are replaced by profesional managers. This is what leads to things like trying to compete on lowest costs rather than building the best product. Steve Jobs was a great leader in the technology area, precisely because his vision wasn't about money. It was about excellence.

As for causes of economic distribution: liberals tends to emphasize the role of circumstances and conservatives tend to emphasize the role of individual effort. The error, however, is to become blinded to half the equation because it flatters the ego or is politically expedient. For instance, the successful who only see their own virtue at work (Wallstreet?), or the unsuccessful who only see the context and not their own failures (the "victim mentality").

I sometimes wonder what a bizarro-world hacker culture would be like. What if tech didn't pay well at all, and there was a lot of social pressure to get a "real job" and a "real degree", like Political Science or English Literature, instead of wasting your time getting a worthless CS degree?

It'd probably be less pleasant in a lot of ways, but the people still in tech would probably be an interesting group.

I sometimes wonder what a bizarro-world hacker culture would be like. What if tech didn't pay well at all

It would be like the early 1990s, or living in North Dakota.

"It sounds like your recommendation would be for everyone to chase money regardless of their passions."

If you don't think about the money at some point, then don't complain when you can't find a job. It's not your job to chase money and it's not society's job to pay you for something that's worthless.

"You have to admit that people who are passionate about things that pay well get a better deal in that situation."

You can make money with almost any passion, you just need to be smart enough to find the market. Most people want to be handed it...which just isn't going to happen.

"Also, regarding success: hard work and intelligence matter a lot, but so does opportunity. Have a look at Gladwell's Outliers for an interesting analysis of this."

I don't need to. I see opportunities every day that people in my exact same position at the exact time (at work for instance) miss. Why? Because I have the skills and experience and I know what I'm looking for. Without the skills, knowledge, and experience, the opportunity is worthless.

The more knowledge and skills you have, the more opportunities you will see and the better chance you have at becoming successful.

It's really sad to see so many people equating success with pure luck.

In some sense, I sympathize with you. I too have worked hard and been successful. I chose (out of passion, but I don't begrudge those who chose based on economics) to go into engineering while friends of mine went into less lucrative fields.

I myself was fortunate. Lucky, to be honest. My parents took advantage of things like student loans so that they could work hard and be successful. The result was that I didn't have to worry about student loans and graduated without debt. I worked hard to graduate, but I don't have illusions that my financial situation was anything other than luck on my part.

You may not call it luck, and I don't know your specific situation, but I'm going to hypothesize that you had some help along the way. How did you educate yourself? How did you pay for it? Did you go to a public school system? Was it better than the ones that exist now? Did you go to a private school? Did you pay for it yourself? My point is, we often take this sort of assistance for granted, and it is gratifying to credit ourselves with 100% of our success. Maybe you are 100% responsible for your own success. If that's the case, you're the first such person that I've ever met.

"You may not call it luck, and I don't know your specific situation, but I'm going to hypothesize that you had some help along the way. How did you educate yourself? "

We could go very far with attributing luck to success. Einstein must have been very lucky to come up with the theory of relativity.

In fact, everything we do must be due to luck because it's lucky our planet is in a position from the sun that's habitable.

"How did you educate yourself"

By going to the library in the beginning (which is free) and then later through the Internet (which is also now free at almost any library in the US). Most people in Highschool and in college are out partying every weekend with their friends..and then they wonder why they aren't successful when it comes to getting a job. I chose to sacrifice my time to learn things that I knew would help advance my career.

"How did you pay for it?" With a crappy retail job that didn't really have much to do with my career.

"Did you go to a public school system". Yes.

"My point is, we often take this sort of assistance for granted, and it is gratifying to credit ourselves with 100% of our success. Maybe you are 100% responsible for your own success. If that's the case, you're the first such person that I've ever met."

I'm still not sure what your point is. It seems to only be brought up when anyone successful achieves anything great or when someone wants an excuse as to why they can't succeed.

I also said luck has less than 1% to do with it. I know people that were in my exact same position at the exact same time. They chose to do things differently and now are working paycheck-to-paycheck. I saved my money (instead of buying the new $500 android phone when it came out) and now I don't have to worry about emergencies because I have enough money to pay for it.

I'm really just tired of people not taking personal responsibility for their actions.

You were lucky to have a quality library available to you. They aren't really free, and not everyone has the good fortune to grow up in a place that can afford one. You were lucky that your public school education was able to get you into a college. Not everyone has that opportunity, no matter how hard they work in school. You were lucky that you were able to find a crappy retail job to put yourself through college. Some people can't find jobs to do that, and not for lack of looking.

Libraries and public schools are excellent examples. While I can't speak for these protesters as I'm not there with them, a lot of the sentiment that people are expressing is a sense of fewer opportunities. Schools and libraries are getting their budgets slashed across the entire country. This due in large part to fiscal policy. Bad policy leads to lower tax revenues leads to cutting teachers and library resources. I don't have the solution, but I can see how it's related to the finance industry as a whole.

I agree with you that people should be responsible for making use of the opportunities that they have. Being offered a public education doesn't guarantee you anything, you have to actually take the time to learn from it. But that only works so long as we continue to offer quality public educations.

I'm really just tired of people saying "I made it, why can't everyone else?" without considering that their situation may be different.

Lucky to have such good libraries available?

Are you KIDDING ME!?!?

I grew up in relatively poor small towns most of my life, where the town library was lucky if it had more than a thousand books. Certainly had no internet.

But you know what? I did the same thing rick888 did and I was at that library all the time learning, trying to make myself better.

I took advantage of every opportunity that came my way and I made the most of them.

I didn't have wealthy parents with connections like so many of the rich spoiled brats I see around me bitching about how "lucky" I am to have a good job, or moaning about how there's so many fewer opportunities around them.

Bullshit. Open your eyes. Stop making excuses.

If you want something bad enough, like I (and clearly rick888) did, you will be successful.

Do some people have more opportunities because of who their parents are and/or how much money they make? Sure, but so what? That's life.

I overcame. Rick888 overcame. So can everyone else.

Stop expecting things to just fall in your lap and complaining about how the world "isn't fair" and cast aside your damned entitlement complex.

The world doesn't owe you jack. You have to fight for everything you want. That's the reality, and nothing these protesters do will ever change that.

Jesus Christ, are you my mirror image!?

Seriously.

I'm so sick of people whining about how I'm "so lucky" to have my job. To hear these people talk about how lucky I am is a huge fucking insult because they act is if it just fell in my lap.

It didn't.

I worked my ass off for it, seemingly just like you did. I worked shitty part-time jobs to pay for my own college education. I worked one summer AS A VOLUNTEER (i.e. unpaid) in order to get noticed and it worked, too, because at the end of that summer the company offered me my first decent-paying job in the tech industry (well, it was only $10-something/hr, but it sure beat $5.25 that I was making before).

All this time I was working on contributing to Free Software projects - not just in the hopes of getting noticed, but in order to improve my skills.

After several years of this, I got noticed and got an internship at a start-up and I grabbed that opportunity and I've become very successful because of it.

Saying this was all "luck" is bullshit. I made my own luck. I worked my ass off for everything I got.

I had friends in college that came from much wealthier families than I came from (my family isn't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination) who had plenty of opportunities in their lives but didn't act on them. Where are they now? Probably at those protests whining that they didn't get a job handed to them just for being them.

I'm serious.

Someone I knew in college (studying anthropology iirc) was offered, through a friend, a job interview at the Smithsonian. He didn't take it. Why? Because it wasn't a "sure thing". He was upset that he'd actually have to (heaven forbid) interview.

Where's he now? Living with his parents because he hasn't been able to get a job in the past 8 years.

He had better opportunities than I did, but I made more out of mine than he did.

He's one of the people who tell me how "lucky" I am that I have such a good job.

Makes me sick.

I can't believe you got downvoted. No, wait, yes I can... this is HN, domain of the liberal "it's society's fault" left.

I in part agree with the sentiment of good fortune. But only in part. I went into Engineering not out of passion, but out of economics. I knew it was safer than continuing with my first path in studying History.

And I know people who are at the protests. And I know many more who would be there if they could. And I try and ignore their pleas for economic help when they also demand that Walmart be shut down.

> and it makes them sickeningly self congratulatory.

Now imagine how people in finance are.

again and again, i encounter people in my circles of well-employed colleagues who do not realize how lucky they are to have interests coinciding with aptitudes coinciding with particular economic demands in their productive years.

and it makes them sickeningly self congratulatory.

It's one of the things that delayed my entry into the technical profession. I grew up a passionate and involved hobbyist, but seeing this kind of self-aggrandising Randian narrative played out over and over in forums and bodies of knowledge that I considered proxies for the values of the profession (i.e. Slashdot) nauseated me. For a long time, I was determined not to go into tech out of loathing for the idea of working with such people.

Ultimately, I went anyway, and realised--as teenagers are wont to do once they grow up--that any world is more diverse than meets the eye. But I can definitely say that the mythos of the well-earning "self-made" IT man was a major blemish on the idea, not an asset.

"But I can definitely say that the mythos of the well-earning "self-made" IT man was a major blemish on the idea, not an asset."

That's right, there's no self-made anything. It's all luck.

Now, did I say that?

"But I can definitely say that the mythos of the well-earning "self-made" IT man was a major blemish on the idea, not an asset."

Yes.

Obviously, the implication is that it is a combination of nature and nurture. Don't be thick.

I am fully aware that I'm "lucky" that I have an interest in computer programming -- a highly marketable skill. But when people harp on that fortune, it really comes across as trying to devalue the effort I put into developing those skills. Just as an idea has no value without execution, luck is worthless unless you put in the hard work to exercise it. People are emphasizing the former at the expense of the latter to make others feel guilty about their successes and obligated towards the "less fortunate," and that's why people push back.

This.

All the damn protestors' fault, eh?

Here's a question: Why was unemployment so much lower five years ago than now? Did people just get really lazy?

Every right wing asshole with a grievance against attacks on privilege is out there mocking these protests. Somehow they simultaneously deny that environmental pollution, restricted access to healthcare, and involuntary unemployment exist. But systemic issues do exist.

I don't know anyone who is denying that the economy sucks. The reason we make fun of these people is that they're protesting against the fact that the economy sucks. This is much like protesting against the weather. Nobody has a magic "make the economy work again" switch that they just need to be persuaded to flip.

They're silly because their world view is flawed in many ways. It's not just their ideology which is wacko, but their ontology. One of the chief problems which afflicts the left is their tendency to believe that "good intentions lead to good outcomes", which has the flipside "bad outcomes are caused by bad intentions". They therefore assume that since we're currently having bad outcomes they must have been cauesd by somebody's bad intentions, so they choose a scapegoat [I wrote spacegoat the first time, which is a much better mental image] and blame it until they're blue in the face. I feel sorry for all the workers on Wall Street who have been chosen as the scapegoat this time.

For my part, I feel that while financial institutions were complicit, one only has to look at the savings rate of the average US household pre-2008 to realize that there were systematic problems. Its not just Wall Street tycoons that failed -- people at every level did.

You misread what the protest is about.

It's not that the economy sucks. It's that institutions of power exist that are doing their damnedest to maintain their position of power. This has led to bad outcomes in this particular historical moment.

> This is much like protesting against the weather.

Perhaps this is where many people disagree. I don't think the 2008-present economic crisis was a random freak event, like a hurricane, or caused by immutable laws analogous to atmospheric convection. Instead, I would guess, there are definite structural causes, which should be understood, and to the extent some of them are mutable, either fixed or mitigated (the U.S.'s particular arrangement of financial infrastructure isn't a law of nature).

I do agree that there's too much focus on bad intentions. I think the problems are structural more than they are moral; it's not a matter of convincing a bunch of "greedy bankers" to be more egalitarian, but of addressing the causes of economic instability.

A good start would be understanding that it is the unholy alliance of government and big business that tends to be at the heart of many problems.

Government has taught big business that if they donate money to re-election campaigns, wine-and-dine legislators, and even ghostwrite legislation or regulations then the business is rewarded. Incentives like this only encourage more of the same.

Pointing at businesses and saying that they are greedy for grabbing at the billions that Congress and state legislatures dangle in front of them is missing the point.

> Why was unemployment so much lower five years ago than now? Did people just get really lazy?

Could the raise of the minimum wage have something to do with increased unemployment?

Perhaps, but is minimum wage actually a living wage? Would the greater economy adjust to make that wage livable if it was removed? I really don't have the answer to these questions, but I think its important to remember that just because someone is employed doesn't mean that they are in a good position.

> Perhaps, but is minimum wage actually a living wage?

What is a 'living wage'?

> just because someone is employed doesn't mean that they are in a good position.

They certainly are in a better position than somebody who is unemployed.

As Thomas Sowell pointed out: The real minimum wage is always zero: unemployment.

All the minimum wage does is distort the labour market to favour automation and highly skilled workers over the inexperienced and low skilled.

Basically, it hurts precisely the people it was supposed to help.

Good points all around.

How I define a living wage: Enough income for a 1 BR apartment, 3 square meals a day (from a grocery store, not a resturaunt), and health care. Basically, the bare minimum.

I'm not skilled enough in economics to be sure whether removing minimum wage would benefit workers. My suspicion is that it would, and you have made a good argument to that affect. I just feel the need to play the devil's advocate.

Thanks for your input.

By the way, are you the same Uriel as the one on Reddit?

Glad that you are quite open minded and ready to listen to new points on this topic, most people seem to prefer to ignore logic and evidence and instead follow what feels good.

> How I define a living wage: Enough income for a 1 BR apartment, 3 square meals a day (from a grocery store, not a resturaunt), and health care. Basically, the bare minimum.

The "bare minimum" is quite different if for example you are a student living with your parents that is working to help pay for university, or if you have children, or a working spouse, or savings.

Not to mention the HUGE differences in cost for the things you mention in different locations within the same country or even state.

For more info and links to many studies on the topic see: http://harmful.cat-v.org/economics/minimum-wage/

And yes, I'm the same uriel as in reddit :)

I always wonder about this argument. Wouldn't it be more about the VALUE of the minimum wage, and not the number associated with it? I mean, the minimum wage was far higher in value in 1968.

And don't some nations reevaluate the value of their minimum wage annually, adjusting for de/inflation? That seems reasonable to me. And stops the arguments over when/if to increase it. (Though of course many obviously believe we shouldn't have it, but that's a different conversation.)

I could not upvote you enough. It's sickening what is happening in this country. I was born in Soviet Union, and the resemblence grows more and more every day. All the protesters are lacking is a charismatic leader who will promise to punish the evil bourgeouis and distribute their wealth to the poor.

What happened to entrepreneurship. What happened to taking control of your life. What happened to working hard and making things happen. These protests make me very sad, and go against every principle this country was founded on.

> These protests make me very sad, and go against every principle this country was founded on.

Given how enthusiastic the American founding fathers were for the French Revolution, which had a definite socialist and anti-elite flavor (not merely anti-monarchism), I'm not sure how true that is. Opinions varied, but many were of the view that a free society needs reasonable equality and can't coexist with large concentrations of economic resources.

Thomas Jefferson hoped (futilely) to achieve it by avoiding industrialization, remaining a nation of yeoman farmers and thereby avoiding what he saw as the ills of British industrial capitalism, with its predominance of wage labor, large factories, etc. (he didn't like either the industrialists or their trade-unionist counterparts). That, combined with robust public education.

Thomas Paine was a proto-socialist, traveling after the American Revolution to France to help with the revolution there, where his Rights Of Man: Part The Second was one of the first comprehensive proposals for what can now be seen as social democracy, with a progressive income tax and inheritance tax used to fund a social safety net.

The existence and independence of corporations was also a pretty active area of controversy until the 1850s or so. Before then, many of the founding generation were of the view that corporations were limited-time constructs under supervision of the state (which held visitation and dissolution rights), not fully independent entities, and were skeptical of corporations with a "life of their own", seen as a European pathology (the Dutch East India Company, etc.).

To use a Marxist term, what we're seeing here is a Social Democratic consciousness, not a push for centralized Communism. If you asked the protestors whether they wanted Russia in 1917 or Sweden in 2011, what do you really think they'd pick?

In other words, I think you're overreacting.

The American Dream is that everyone should be able to get a full-time job and that if you're willing to work a full-time job, you'll be able to pay your bills.

None of the bargain is that it will be interesting. None of the bargain is that it'll be glorified in media. But the bargain is that if you're looking for a job, there'll be one. And the job will be physically safe (unless extra-ordinarily compensated to make up for it), that you can get healthcare, and that you can go to sleep at night without wondering whether you'll be able to make rent the next month.

It's the dissolution of that bargain and that Dream that's driving OWS.

"The American Dream is that everyone should be able to get a full-time job and that if you're willing to work a full-time job, you'll be able to pay your bills."

If this is what people think, they have been misled. The american dream has always been that you have the ability to pursuit your dreams, not guaranteed a job. This means, you can start a business as someone who is poor and one day make enough to support your family and more. Right now, we still have this freedom.

With huge taxes and more government regulations and control, the dream will be dead. Then, the only entities left (because they can afford the taxes and regultions) will be big corporations.

"In the end, that's all most Americans are asking for. It's not a lot. You don't expect government to solve all your problems. You want to be self-reliant and independent. You want to be responsible for your own lives and take care of your own families. But what you do expect is a government that isn't run by the special interests. What you do expect is that if you're willing to work hard, you should be able to find a job that pays a decent wage, that you shouldn't go bankrupt when you get sick, that you should be able to send your children to college even if you're not rich, and that you should be able to retire with dignity and security." -Barack Obama

"Anyone who is honestly seeking a job and can't find it, deserves the attention of the United States government, and the people." -John F. Kennedy

"In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; . . ." -FDR

"But what you do expect is a government that isn't run by the special interests." -- Barack Obama

LOL. Says the man who gets money from special interest groups.

The liberal left are all about special interest groups.

While we're at it:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." -TJ

"If a man doesn't have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists." -MLK Jr.

I'm not sure if it was the same way in the 60's and 70's, but every protest I saw in Chicago since 2003 always attracted a fair share of professional protestors. Your "Free Tibet"ers, environmentalists, and various others always seemed to show up for Iraq War protests and immigration protests. It's easy to ignore protesters when they are obviously doing it as lifestyle choice rather than out of honest indignation.

There's not much you can do about such people showing up, though, unless you have a very organized, centrally run protest with a gatekeeper for who's allowed to show up. People who have their pet issues will show up and attempt to use the platform if participation is open. I guess you'd just need enough new people to swamp the 'regulars'.

(These kinds of things are, incidentally, why Lenin-style communists argue for agitation to be tightly organized by a vanguard party, which keeps things on message and makes sure protests and other actions maximize tactical and strategic effectiveness, rather than becoming an incoherent free-for-all. But Leninist organization isn't too in favor on the contemporary left.)

My feelings exactly.

Left-wingers got us into this mess in the first place by demanding that banks give out subprime loans to people who would never pay them back and Clinton promised these banks that the US Government would bail them out in return.

Now that same liberal left got bitten by their own ideology and who do they blame? The banks and Republicans, of course! Republicans bailed out the banks (because they were obligated to by Clinton) and the "greedy" banks loaned money to people who couldn't afford to pay them back!

If the liberal left used their brains for once they'd see that they caused these problems themselves. They have no one else to blame but themselves.

Instead, they blame everyone else for their problems.

It should be blatantly clear that the liberal left do not believe in taking personal responsibility nor do they believe in free will.

For if they believed in those things, then it's not the banks they'd be blaming at all. The banks didn't put guns to people's heads to take out loans that they couldn't afford to pay back. The banks didn't just wake up one day and decide to start giving out subprime loans. No, they were pressured into doing it by the liberal left's own greed.

They made their bed, now they can lay in it.

They better not come begging me for handouts. All they ever did for me was force my taxes to go up and try to drag me down with them. No thanks.

What we should do is gather up every single person in the protest and every single person who wishes they were but can't and send them over to Scandanavia/France/etc. Then they can participate in the kind of system they actually want and all that will be left in the US is people like you.

My mouth literally waters imagining what would happen when all the "hippies" and "losers" were gone and no one was left but self proclaimed "hard workers" and the mega rich. Listening to people like you try to rationalize the fact that, despite all your "hard work", your wealth was staying flat or decreasing (in relative terms if not literal) while the top 1% continued to capture more and more of all the created wealth would be pure bliss.

And I'm sure all the "99%", who would be enjoying systems with much healthier distributions of wealth would be enjoying the show as much as I was.