drnonsense42

I think your take is the crazy one. I’m not sure if you remember how this whole thing works with Zuckerberg, but it sounds like they’re in the “let’s gather a lot of 6 year old users” stage. The “let’s make billions of dollars off them now that they’re all on here” stage comes later. Most of the people on here (not you) aren’t falling for the same crap.

I’m aware this is not the only issue, but we’ve really jumped the shark by letting private equity and tech companies prey on private home prices. We’re turning into a set of case studies for future societies as our candle snuffs out. Entrepreneurs are no longer rewarded - the great spoils belong to speculators and the vampire class.

I think you should go read the list you yourself decided to link more carefully. You will find many more than 4 billionaires who grew up with at most a lower middle class background.

It looks like you're struggling with reading comprehension, so let me make it more clear. The article takes the position that viewing individuals in the billionaire class differently based on their individual story is wrong and provides a means manipulate people into viewing them all homogeneously. I do not "tolerate lavish wealth" or think these people should have so much command over society, that is the subjective word choice of the authors to describe their interpretation of a phenomenon, but I personally do think many of these people who come from very little deserve more respect and success than wealthy scions who, at best, have every advantage, or at worst, do nothing at all with their lives and yet command extreme wealth.

Many ultra wealthy individuals did not come from a highly privileged background. Larry Ellison, one of their motivating examples, had essentially no advantage compared to say Bill Gates. Sergey Brin and Warren Buffet certainly had some advantages but they should not be treated the same as the Waltons by any means. Of course, if you take the expected value of privilege of the 1%, you’ll find a high level. So, it seems to me the notion that people treat wealthy individuals separately from the broader group means that people are acting fairly and rationally to some degree. The authors ignore this nuance altogether, assuming that any individual nuance is a fallacy, and the article seems to indicate that their only purpose is to make people ignore individual success stories and to jade people into treating every wealthy person as equally privileged.

Thankfully, they actually are not. Then again, I know there's a broad group of delusional liberal that thinks any republican is a neo-nazi. Maybe you have those glasses on when you see posts outside of your bubble?

Except the Alex Jones tribe isn’t on HN. I’m leaning towards the tye-dye-hair-babies-cause-global-warming tribe.

I'm probably going to get downvoted, but this article is nonobjective, which, in my opinion, is standard fare for the New Yorker. In fact, I think it presents a delusional worldview. As an aside, I think it's unfair to compare this article to the slave labor camps mentioned in this thread. They are fundamentally different. Anything with Christian theming, obviously, the New Yorker and most of HN passionately hate.

But, the New Yorker, for all the useless people and vapid criticism it employs, could not come up with an alternative to an organization like this. This is a place where children who have severe drug or other problems, possibly violence, can be sent that essentially functions the same as a juvenile detention center but is patently not as bad. I even empathize with the parents in the article. What would I do if I had four children and one of them is doing drugs, sleeping with numerous guys to the point of getting pregnant, and literally working at a brothel (buried in the hit piece, obviously), and the other children are perhaps younger, currently normal, but exposed to this continually? That is a challenging situation. Many New Yorker columnists surely live in a "post-children world", so perhaps that is not something they'd empathize with. The only evidence I saw that made me question if the parents were horrible was when they refused to let the move to a halfway house with the child.

Although I am not a Christian and empathize with not wanting to be in compulsory Christian brainwashing, I'm sorry, the article provided no evidence these kids are being physically or mentally abused. Citing that 13 of them attempted to commit suicide is more evidence about the type of kids, without judging whether their current mental state is due to genetics or a poor break in life, being placed here. Further, I didn't find other criticisms valid, such as declining to raise children resulting from pregnancies. It is not the organization's responsibility to raise children, and to their credit, again, it looks like they would have allowed the girl to transfer to a halfway house and keep the child, if not for the maligned parents. But, other than that, their "case study" seemed like she belonged in a mental hospital and I am skeptical it is entirely the fault of the "system". After leaving the program, she went on a desperate search to find her drug addict mother, before abandoning a husband and new son to live with friends, while literally repeatedly applying to work at "Teen Challenge" (what?!!?).

It is quite frightening to live in an era where we want to dismantle anything that is remotely Christian because someone had a bad emotional experience. This is the psychotic liberal zeitgeist - where the homeless capitals of the world want to dictate solutions to scenarios like this.