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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

If you try hard enough you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable. And yet on Saturday at the neighborhood Independence Day party I met a guy who immigrated from Ukraine about 25 years ago with no money, no college education, no family support, and no English language skills. Instead of complaining he just went to work and while not exactly wealthy he's now doing fairly well as an electrical contractor.

Life is usually a struggle. No one should expect any different.

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> you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable

I think this starts to make an inferred narrative about how failure is inevitable and that its excessive complaining, when there is large amounts of data showing how it is genuinely more difficult.

Just your Ukrainian example, it was cheaper to live 25 years ago, the cost of college has gone up ~180%. Since 2001 incomes have gone up 64% while housing has gone up 136%, healthcare up 180%, food up 100% and transportation up 120%. Thats a different playing field.

The point being made isn't that failure has any inevitability. Most people will be able to make it work enough to live, and those who can't due to choices, trauma, disability, drug use, or excessive bad luck are the homeless people you see begging on freeway offramps and intersections. At the economy level its a numbers game. It will never be impossible to make it big, in the same way that some people with every single advantage will end up on the street without a penny.

Rule of thumb for survival vs sober reality. nradov provides the mindset needed to survive, you provide the wisdom of risks and challenges to be aware of.

Today a dreaming Ukrainian is quite likely to instead get ripped away by conscription kidnapping teams and used as cannon fodder on the front, and not even make it to America. The reality changes but the rule of thumb is still good, you do the best with what you have and make yourself ready for opportunity you might not ever get.

My mindset in the workplace is not about these facts, its more about what I present to people to help their worldview and advocate for a world where we don't just hold qualitative data (those who are doing well are likely to meet others who are doing well, people who vacation on a Yacht do not interact with people who don't take vacations), but also the trend and to advocate for policies that address the growing grotesque inequality and opportunity gap. Its hard to make people empathetic for others who they don't see, which is why I try to draw a line to the homeless population.

Everyone, everywhere, tries to optimize their local situation as best as they can with the skills and knowledge they have available. The further one gets into understanding how mental health works, the more one realizes that mindset is a result of experiences usually more than it is of willpower. People in poverty are exerting willpower to the maximum every single day. People are anxious for a reason, and depressed for a reason - these do not pop up like some contagious airborne virus, they're a result of the setting and society and their place in it.

Or you can think differently, 4 families can buy a 1 acre land plot, 5 or 6 children and a couple dads then start building a modest house (maybe 1200sqft) and then resell the entire thing in about a year for 4 times the land-only price. Suddenly 4 families that were making 25k each per year have $1.3m from some tiny plot they bought in the Santa Cruz mountains. Then they do it again and again and again. This is LITERALLY not even that hard to do today.

The step of building the house for your family at an incredible discount vs buying can work a lot of places. It's not very repeatable to do it commercially though. I DIY'd my entire house for extremely cheap but even in one of the most generous spots in the USA they only allow me to build a house once every 5 years and I have to file a sworn affidavit I do not intend to sell or profit off of it. If you want to do this as a business proposition as a random unlicensed person you'll be fronting all your own capital and then looking at about 5-6 year turnaround per time, and the buyer likely won't be able to use a mortgage, plus (in my case at least) I'd be subject to prosecution if it came to light I was doing that for a living. The smaller scale version of this is motorcycle/car curb-flippers that don't spend a gazillion dollars securing a dealership license, probably a bit more accessible but again as soon as the state or real dealerships get a sniff you're fucked.

I can recommend doing this to make a house for your own family but I think you have to be a bit insane to front your own money to build houses in almost anywhere in California as a business proposition unless you have a contracting license, which is to say, you already were able to make a decent living. I only got away with doing it for my family because all the people who could have brought the insane rules down upon me were kind enough to realize it was just a family trying to survive, they'd have fucked me with all sorts of inspections, shenanigans with the utility company, having trouble getting water, trades licensing, engineering stamps and plans, etc if they'd have gotten a sniff I had done this "again and again."

This kind of stuff did work fairly well up until in the 60s/70s before developers got in bed with the regulators/planning and zoning boards. Back then a guy and his truck could become a developer easily.

Sure, may be more difficult in Santa Cruz, but fairly typical in 90% of the country. And families that would dare do this, probably know 5 GCs that stamp their name.

If you know 5 GCs well enough to sign off for liability on your work, it's not necessarily a bad plan, but at that point, you're already bootstrapped enough to squarely make it into the middle class, as you could have just been offering to the public under that license or as an unlicensed sub to those 5 GCs.

I don't hate the idea but it's not a bootstrapping plan. It's a plan for someone already bootstrapped.

“Just think differently” but the answer starts with have a pile of money

You could probably get away with it without much money once per county or maybe state, max out every loan imaginable, buy shit land (probably 50% financed at best on vacant land), declare you're owner-building your own house for non-commercial reasons. It's possible in my state. By the second or third time though your creditors and the planning board will be on to you and you'll be chased out of the county and you'll have to relearn all the bureaucracy again, which is the hardest part.

There are also 9 states, including texas, that regulate the build entirely by process, not licenses.

God bless Texas

> you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable.

Exactly! This is the mind set. So tell me, how do you progress when you are there?

Or even better, now that we've accumulated many people conditioned by streaks of failure, how do we maximize their productivity and tax revenue? Should be an easy question for you :)

This is why immigrants are often the most exemplar people of the American Dream today. Most of the people today pushing socialist or communist agendas are not these immigrants, but instead children of very wealthy company owners that only saw a downward trend from their parent's trajectory. It's from that privileged that they found fighting for other people their cause. However it's misguided and they don't even understand this. They're in a small class of very privileged people, and they're pushing an ideology that has taken so many people from the world. And they don't understand that most people just want a meaningful job, not handouts and not free stuff. Meanwhile these people just keep pushing it to college students and the cycle continues. No matter how many times you tell them that it hasn't worked before they always respond with well it hasn't been done "right", and even current attempts in the United States are causing nearly unlimited fraud, they won't listen. The current philosophy of these people is to break the United States so badly that the only trajectory could be up. It's almost like they're seeing their own failures as people and want to replicate it for the country. Stop treating everyone as a victim, stop being a victim and you'll see the world shine.

Steps off soap box.

> And they don't understand that most people just want a meaningful job, not handouts and not free stuff.

Wanting my tax dollars to go to children who can’t access food is not begging for a handout - you’re repeating middle school Republican propaganda at this point.

I’m a success story, but unlike you I’ve developed some empathy for the very real cycle of poverty I myself got out of, instead of the jingoistic “just create value”.

> They're in a small class of very privileged people, and they're pushing an ideology that has taken so many people from the world.

This is exactly how I feel about your ideology - that if only people would stop being a victim and think outside the box instead of complaining then they would see a better world. You’ve never dealt with disability or not being able bodied, you don’t see the value in anything other than what makes money.

There’s a spec of truth in it - some people turn their minds off and think of themselves as victims. I think of myself as a survivor, and a lucky one at that. I’ve overcome a lot and I can see where if many things outside of my control went the other way I could be dead right now. Wanting the path to be more clear for the next person is exactly the “see the world shine” that you advocate for.

We have the highest concentration of wealth ever in this country, because that’s what this system produces right now. Has it improved the world for the average person or made it worse?

> Has it improved the world for the average person or made it worse?

Capitalism has VASTLY improved the world for the average person. A lot of the things you're doing are becoming the nanny for other people. That cripples their future. Instead of letting people become the best they can be, they will languish in average or low because the safety net allows them to just sit. This cripples countries and it destroys working ethic. I am not advocating for cutting protections for disabled people, but right now able bodied people are just sitting back and being victims.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7n6injw8GI

I'm not arguing against the improvements to the average person in the last 100 years, but I am saying the system that exists TODAY produces poverty, desperation and homelessness on the bottom end, and massive wealth to the top, and a hollowing out of the center, and that we should do something about it. Its easy to argue that it was the worker protections and safety that enabled the economy and the middle class. Since 1979 worker productivity and wages have diverged, and all the resources have funneled to the top.

> Instead of letting people become the best they can be, they will languish in average or low because the safety net allows them to just sit

We're not concerned with people being the best we can be. Else education wouldn't be on a shoestring budget, housing costs wouldn't force two parents to work with no pre-k childcare, our colleges wouldn't cost 10x that of other countries many of which are free, we'd provide healthcare not tied to employers so that people could take risks, we'd mandate maternity and paternity leave for parents so that they can bond with their children instead of leaving them with attachment disorders.

People are undeveloped for those reasons - it costs a lot of money and society is filled with middlemen maximizing the profit of every single human need. Our birth rate is horrible because its expensive, there is little hope for a better future, and there is no support within the country to have kids. We have a massive child poverty problem, and we can't even fund school lunches.

If you cared about people being the best, you'd care about that, not making sure that everyone gets punished. The system benefits business owners and investors, and everyone else serves them.

> I am not advocating for cutting protections for disabled people

Yet protections and programs continue to be cut!

Most socialists and communists have an ideological blind spot in that they don't understand how to create any wealth in the first place. Based on their policy proposals they implicitly seem to believe that the means of production just appear from somewhere, like a gift from a benevolent parent. And that wealth can be redistributed based on ideological whims without destroying it — or without preventing it from being created in the first place. This is an example of magical thinking.

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