This made me chuckle: "haves" versus the "have nots". How about we change that to: "made smart decisions, studied hard, work hard" versus the "made bad decisions, jealous of others"
To be clear, I think this opinion demonstrates such a completely bullshit, narrow, entitled, and ethnocentric view of the world it blows my mind. It's a helpful reminder of why I don't live up there.
Well you can safely unblow your mind. He used a stereotype broadly applied to a group, but lazy people do indeed make up some portion of the "have nots". Sibling comments show measured, thought-massaged responses that correct the GP.
Let's not combat bad generalizations with hyperbole.
There's a good book on this: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Well worth a read.
There are no easy answers here, though being mindful of history is important in arguing this topic - predisposition and environment have historically been used by social darwinists to assert superiority over other cultures and races (see: "tropical climates breed laziness" and "blacks are predisposed to lesser intelligence but greater physical ability"). They're not verboten, but it pays to tread carefully if you want to argue in that direction.
Spoiler: GG&S ends up arguing that the answer to why some countries are more productive than others is historical geographical circumstance, particularly because of access to large grains and domesticate-able animals which propelled some early cultures into agriculture and the rest is history.
The question of why Africa was largely technologically undeveloped was of some importance to Europeans during the slave trade. The predispositional argument was made to justify the practice of slavery, and post-slavery to justify continued discrimination.
Similarly, if you go to East Asia today (see: Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong) you will still see today continued mistreatment of Southeast Asian migrant workers under the guise of predispositional and environment inferiority ("tropical climates breed simple minds" and such nonsense), justified by macro-scale outcomes ("look at all the tropical countries, all of them are a mess, clearly non-tropical climates breed harder workers").
These attitudes are depressingly common. The macro-scale differences in countries is often used as justification for odd micro-scale beliefs.
I don't think the GP deserves a measured response. I think the comment deserves outrage, but I get your point. I certainly get hyperbolic.
Unrelated to this, I wonder if people are outraged at the people who move to ND to pursue the oil boom over there. There relatively medium skilled and unskilled workers can earn more per year than SV 'tech' workers. Are people also showing the same contempt and or jealousy (or whatever it is) for those workers who decided they would partake in the energy industry boom in North Dakota? Or are tech workers a special kind of evil manifestation of things gone wrong? If so, what exempts the ND blue collar workers from this outrage at people's earning power?
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In both cases I pretty much see supply and demand at work. If suddenly everyone sought a CS degree (and then saw a devaluation in the degree, kind of like EE degrees in the 80s/90s), then salaries would slump. Same for the energy boom workers.
That said, I still think the comment fails. "haves and have nots" is only arguably hyperbolic because it's cliche, but ignoring cliche connotations it's just plain dryly accurate because the discussion is effectively about a resource: Money.
paul_f's proposed hyperbole makes a jump from "has money" to "has a work ethic", which is what I find wildly invalid and offensive. Even ignoring opportunity and circumstance for a moment (which I put aside so that I can avoid getting into a Randian snowball fight), it still ignores the existence of two people with equal opportunity and circumstance, but unequal tendency/desire to optimize for income.
If that is so, then it doesn't come across that way.
I'm not sure what the perception is towards the ND oil boom workers, but to get a sense of how the protesters perceive the tech community, take a look at the Fake Google employee that was at the protests: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/12/fake-google-emp...
It's a caricature for sure, but it sounds a lot like the comment at the top of Hacker News right now.
"Making smart choices" doesn't always pan out. I don't think one can easily accuse someone who studied hard, disciplined themselves, and made their way through law school of being shortsighted, but here they are facing unemployment or dramatic underemployment.
Ditto traditional fields of engineering. Lots of people who studied hard, planned ahead, worked hard, and then fell into the massive collapse of manufacturing in this country.
It's nice to know that the crazy "improv political theater" from that one guy has some bearing in reality, though.
Lazy they are not.
(seriously thinking of pushing them into joining one of those RoR or similar bootcamps and getting into Programming, they have the drive and intellect to do well, I think)
Edit: Just to be clear, their PhDs are both in the 'Hard Sciences' - biology to be specific - Virology and Genetics respectively.
In the Bay Area this isn't possible, since NIMBYs have fought against every and any transit project, and caused the neglect of existing mass transit. Housing is expensive from SF all the way south - where exactly would these people commute in from? You can't even get from downtown into the Outer Sunset in an hour during commute hours, where do you think your baristas are going to come from?
The SF Bay is one of the most thorough and complete failures of government and infrastructure I've witnessed first-hand.
I know a few nurses and none make $100k.
Someone should invent an economic mechanism that raises salaries when it's hard to find workers. This mechanism should work in some automatic fashion that allocates money to fields that are understaffed.
The choice to pursue a career as a mechanic or plumber or electrician or whatever else isn't a "bad" decision - those jobs are necessary and thus we need people to do them.
SF is a city and has the same needs as any other city, which means it needs people to meet all those needs. You can't have a city with just wealthy tech people because then no one's going to come over to fix the plumbing.
Wealthy tech companies are growing, hiring more talent, and paying them lots of money; this means that housing demands go up (from the people they're importing from other cities/states/countries) which leads to increased prices (specifically because you now have more demand from a group of customers that can afford to pay higher prices than everyone else).
Now, all of a sudden, people who aren't as nicely compensated at their jobs can no longer afford to live in the city they work. The issue is that the city still needs those people - regardless of what wealthy people think.
> SF is a city and has the same needs as any other
> city, which means it needs people to meet all
> those needs. You can't have a city with just
> wealthy tech people because then no one's going
> to come over to fix the plumbing.
Coffee shops aren't closing in the mission, quite the opposite, more are opening all the time, selling expensive coffee to tech people and providing barista jobs to baristas. Now for it to make sense for the barista to work at these coffee shops he or she needs to be able to live within commutable distance of the coffee shop. If there is no one within commutable distance willing to work for what the coffee shop is willing to pay, the coffee shop has to pay more and raise prices. If coffee prices go up so much that people hate living in SF because of it, then rental prices will go down because people will move away.