I'm not sure what motivates this. If you invert the situation and someone made a list with stuff like "use coupons", would rich people come by and say "this is dumb because it only saves you $0.50 and I (as a rich person) don't care about $0.50"?
People have different starting conditions and different current situations, if what's described isn't relevant to yours--why does it bother you so? Let the people who find value in it find value in it.
Privilege and meta-privilege, mainly, and the underlying assumption this privilege engenders that the poor are morally or mentally deficient.
An example: there was an article posted on hn recently titled (and I'm paraphrasing here) "How to be rich". To utilise this advice one had to be already financially comfortable, with safety nets and backups and whatever to begin with, and, from this position of comfort, to rationally accept and take large risks. The article carried with it the implication that, now that you have the advice in your hands, only the willfully stupid or lazy will remain poor.
So, in the end, a) one feels judged, b) one has wasted one's time on an article/video/etc that c) promised and failed to relieve the crushing stress burden and mental load that poverty brings.
Being poor, particularly during your formative years, carries with it a debt that is never paid. If you are poor and have issues with health (physical and mental) you are very, very unlikely to ever be rich in any objective sense. Being poor affects your patterns of thought, your behaviours, your language, and your culture. But the worst of it is that poverty robs you of the opportunity to do things like "move fast and break things" that folk on hn seem to think is so simple and easy. If you are poor, you only get one roll of the die.
Not that their experiences are any more representative of "poor" than what people here write about, but there are clearly different experiences and different outcomes. Again, this is not to shame anyone--but the fact that I have to caveat an accurate description of my parents' life to assuage some unknown reader's sensibility is just crazy to me.
But for the sake of argument, I'll concede everything you've described about the "poor experience" and the emotional consequences faced by this group.
Given that, does that mean that any and every discussion among the people not in that group must be couched in ways in order to not offend the sensitive group? How / where should non-deprived people discuss the best way to play the cards they were lucky enough to be dealt?
In extremis, do we need to segregate ourselves away from the sensitive group in order to protect their delicate constitutions?
Complaining about the the "privilege" that the median HN reader/commenter is born with is like if I stumbled on to a message board for 6'8" super-athletic 18-year olds and spent all my time lecturing them about how they need to consider 5'8" kinda-athletic-once-but-now-middle-aged-me in all their discussions. Of course a programmer-centric newsboard is going to have a bunch of well-off people in it.
Now, people shouldn't be jerks--but nothing in the posted article can be construed in the least-bit mean-spirited. The goal posts seemed to have moved from "don't be a dick" to "pretend you're in a support group for X all the time". Is this where we're going?
I get what you are saying. I think good luck plays a huge role in escaping poverty and that it rarely gets the thanks it deserves. It has certainly helped me in my life, far more than perhaps I deserve. I grew up, not as poor as your mother, but quite poor by the standards of my country (ditch toilet, rigged running water, etc) at the time. I have no problem in ascribing my meagre success largely to luck, but I can't pretend it doesn't hurt a little when my private-school, politically-connected colleague (and heir to a $20,000,000+ fortune) asks me why I'm not a millionaire and I have to explain that I began by having to unlearn the habits of someone who grew up poor.
> In extremis, do we need to segregate ourselves away from the sensitive group in order to protect their delicate constitutions?
Replace 'poverty' with race, gender or any other form of privilege and then ask the same question. I could argue that poverty is probably the most pernicious of dis-privileges in that if you compared a rich person who was encumbered with every other common dis-privilege (gender, race, religion, gender, etc) they would be likely in a significantly better position that a white, Christian/atheist, cis-male poor man.
> Given that, does that mean that any and every discussion among the people not in that group must be couched in ways in order to not offend the sensitive group? How / where should non-deprived people discuss the best way to play the cards they were lucky enough to be dealt?
I can only give my personal view here - no, I don't think you need to avoid talking about "how to get rich" any more than we need to avoid the topics of race, religion, gender, etc. The BIG problem we have is that we talk about things in absolute terms, and only in terms of what we, ourselves, don't possess or claiming that something we do possess had no impact (and that it was all down to our hard work).
We talk about privilege as a currency, when it is only a tendency, a weighting on the probabilities of life. The lack of privilege is not a prison sentence, but life is much easier if you are privileged and, if you fail or fall, the path back to normalcy is much shorter and easier if you have the safety net that privilege provides.
> The goal posts seemed to have moved from "don't be a dick" to "pretend you're in a support group for X all the time". Is this where we're going?
I hope not. We can only fix these issues by reaching agreement and moving forward. If we start by berating people, that makes moving forward soooo much harder.
Yes, even for race and gender it is ridiculous to claim people thus "affected" have no chance in life whatsoever. You had a black president not that long ago. There are several black billionaires.
Is this really accepted canon that underprivileged are going to be underprivileged, no matter what - so much so that there can be no useful discussion about it?
I'll let my mom know that she wasn't poor when my parents spent an entire year eating nothing but cabbage, and they weren't poor when they had to leave me with my grandparent for 15 months (back when there were no video calls and long-distance was too expensive) because they couldn't support a child and build a new life. That they weren't too poor when my dad was working 2 jobs while studying for his license and had to live in a tiny apartment with roommates and borrow money to meet basic expenses.
I get it. There are people who have been and are currently worse-off. The idea that everything should always and everywhere be measured in relation to the extreme reach of the left-tail is batsh*t.
The whole point of the comment that I replied to was that the commentor felt that the article needed to be aware of and somehow speak to his experience--while he's a stranger on the internet who the original author could not possibly know anything about.
I have specifically detailed some of my mom's experience of poverty to you, and you claim the right to deny it--what, because they were not the worst-off people in recent human history? If I had said, "my parents were rich because we had X,Y,Z", would you have commented "No, your parents were not rich because they did not also possess a chateau and a private jet?"
Is this it? Any and every judgement of a comment and denial of experience can be "okay", as long as it's approached from the left-tail? Does this not strike you as mad?
Yes, and being an adult gives the opportunity to change your patterns, behavior, language, and culture.
I've had a lot of destructive attitudes and behaviors formed young that I've discarded because they don't work. It's not easy, but it can be done. I still have a number of bad habits to work on :-/
> If you are poor, you only get one roll of the die.
In America, there are more rolls. For example, migrants walk a thousand miles to get in, have nothing, then they start businesses. Oprah went from welfare to billionaire, for example.
And your ramblings about having no opportunities when poor are simply not true anymore. Even poor people can get a cheap computer and internet and have access to all the information in the world. Running a web site only costs 1$/month.
Many startup founders famously slept on the floor in cramped offices while starting up.
And if you really live in such a shitty place, you can still sell drugs and become rich that way.
I sympathize with the poor, but I am tired of these "poor people are such victims, there is nothing they can do to change their condition, ever. They are just victims" type of comments that pop up in every discussion about wealth.
And recommending drug selling as an alternative...
Your name is appropriate for your comment.
You can get a Raspberry Pi 400 and do stuff, for example. With a used computer you could get there even cheaper, presumably.
If you really, really claim you can not even afford that, ask for donations. There are many people who are willing to help, if you are making a credible case of really wanting to learn.
Maybe going into IT is not an option for everybody, but it shows that the broad claim that "poor only get one shot and have now chance whatsoever" is not generally true.
As for tooling, you can still create websites with vim on the command line.
I don't recommend selling drugs. But people growing up in very poor environments got rich selling drugs. Another case showing that poor are not condemned to remain poor simply by virtue of being poor.
Maybe if you are in such a poor environment, and you don't want to sell drugs, sell counselling for drug addicts.
You already seem to have a computer that runs the modern web, or how are you commenting here?
If you can't afford a computer, go to a public library. Or ask at a school. Or ask a local business if you can use their office computers after hour. Or whatever. Do something!
Another idea: since you already seem to have a computer, help out a homeless person by giving them your computer over night, while you sleep. Most modern computers are capable of multiple user accounts. Most computers are idle for 99% of the time (or something).
I'm sure you are aware of the story in India where somebody installed a computer terminal in a wall, and the kids taught themselves how to use it.
Why is it so important to you to believe that everything is hopeless and nobody has a chance in life, unless government rises the minimum wage and instates a UBI?
(And yet, in the same breath, say you don't recommend it? And yet still fail to connect those dots into "systemic disadvantage"?)
Also quit with the fantasy that people have unlimited life - sure you can always get lucky, there is hope, but that's what it is, luck. It's not even hard to see - the financial landscape depends on people mortgaging over half their lives.
People like you absolutely disgust me.
Again, in extremis: Buddhist monks. And if Buddhist monks exist (and don't care about money), then surely there can be a spectrum of what money means to different people?
Maybe there's even a more successful attitude for earning money than maintaining a singular focus on monotonically-increasing your inventory of it? Maybe past a certain point, the best thing to do with money is to risk it? (Which doesn't even imply forgetting or debating its importance?)
You would be fair to say "this advice doesn't apply to me" or "this advice only applies when conditions X, Y, and Z have been met" or even "this advice is wrong". However, the statement that this advice is "insulting" creates a toxic environment.
No one will ever be able to anticipate all the ways they might cross/deny/fail to recognize someone else's experience or what they "know to be true". Nor is that anyone's job. After all, we're all just stumbling through this thing-called-life trying to do our best. If people persist in taking offense to comments made by strangers on the internet who have never heard of them, the only logical outcome is to exclude those people from the discussion. Is this what you would choose for yourself?
At best, this makes it harder to for me to find like-minded people to have the discussions I want to have--and at worst, it deprives people from being exposed to things that they might find valuable in those discussions, because those discussions are no longer being had in the open where they could be stumbled upon.
Whatever you choose to do from this point forward is no skin off my back. My point is that, in the face of such reactions, my response is to take my very important (to me), real-world discussions about maximizing my life-given-my-circumstances away from the people who would comment in this way.
Anyway, this is not a debate I need to win. Maybe you want to hear this stuff, maybe you don't.
No. There is an extremely common tendency for the wealthy to pass on advice...for the wealthy, and pretend like its good news for everyone.
The wealthy are by definition the minority, the advice they give is mostly wrong in this regard (unless you are rich/lucky), the posturing about minorities and such is so much hot garbage.
In fact even the argument that it might work for the middle class is an oxymoron - anything serving to bring more people to wealth and out of middle class-dom necessarily reduces the number of middle class, and mathematically increases the likelihood of the being poor.
Such advice is never presented as 'wise ways to keep the middle class around' it is usually always framed as 'do this and you will reap rewards!!'.
Need money to make money, as they say.
Those advice are most of the time given as being universal, that's why.
> Advice like these are not laws. They are like hats. If one doesn’t fit, try another.
> In most every discussion I've come across that touches on money advice, I've see a variant of this comment "This world view doesn't incorporate (my) reality of the poorest of the Western world and is so in invalid and offensive".
I'd call yours a radical interpretation of the text.
Lists like these are full of survivor bias. In fact, it's baked into it.
Evolution is the process that preserves those who survived and left progeny, and chaffes away those who don't. The only measure of success in it is the survival.
It does not mean that attempts to make some rational models is worthless; quite the contrary.
Of course, there are many who tried things like these and failed; maybe many more than those who prospered. But there are those who tried something opposite, and fewer of them, if any, have prospered. So these inclinations of prosperous people have something to them, though not a guarantee.
If you take many such accounts of successful people and correlate them, you will find certain similarities; they, of course, are pretty well-known.
I have yet to meet someone who downplays the importance of money who doesn't also come from enough wealth that they've never had it be a real concern.
This is frustrating in multiple ways- one, it shows that they have a strong disconnect from the day to day reality for the majority of humanity. That doesn't make them a bad person. It does bring in to question the universal applicability of their advice. Secondly, being currently wealthy is no guarantee that someone will maintain that state in perpetuity. Having respect and gratefulness for what money provides, instead of downplaying it, goes a long way towards being able to preserve it.
There's a reason the pattern goes from rags to riches to rags again across three generations, and it's not just regression towards the mean.
However, if your goal is to do something legitimately creative, I agree with the spirit of the article. Indie game developers often work absolute wonders in spite of (or maybe because of?) Their limitations, whereas super heavily funded giants like Google and Amazon seem to be unable to think through any problem where the solution isn't dependent on "we have really deep pockets; buy the creative talent"
https://kotaku.com/bloomberg-report-reveals-major-dysfunctio...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02...
It's not even just that. It is spoken like someone who has not even been around poor people.
Class segregation is a much more serious issue than simply class distinction. I wonder if it is a growing problem in society. Because if so, it will not end well as it never has historically.
If you grew up upper middle class or wealthy and you have not had multiple friends on much lower financial tiers than you then you are absolutely out of touch. It is not possible to be aware of the (mostly minor but not insignificant) differences in people's lives by simply reading a book, watching a documentary, listening to a TED talk, or "being an activist".
In areas like startups, where family connections, early education, family environment, and fallbacks, matter, yes.
But the 20th century was full of people from poor backgrounds (includings immigrants arriving with 0 dollars) making it in e.g. arts. So much so, that the "starving artist" is a cliche.
(And of course, starting and succesfully running regular businesses - the 99% of businesses kind, from grocery stores and restaurants to design studios and software houses, not the 0.0001% that is VC-backed startups sold for b/millions).
First up, the "starving artist" cliché isn't one because of those artist who got really really rich. It's a cliché because of all the very poor artists that were starving.
Secondly, survivor bias. Don't focus on the few artists who escaped the clutches of starvation to frame the group as a whole. Especially in case the calling may be abandoned in order to not starve.
How many "starry night"s could we have had if no one ever needed to Weeley about food, shelter, or safety?
We've got one, from someone who worked about all of those at various points in his life.
Probably much fewer. Part of the allure of starry night is the backstory and toil involved - not the same as some fat complacent well off guy painting pretty pictures in a nice house.
And the 20th century was quite full of rich artists making it, too.
I also see advice in here that implies he tried and failed at many things, and perhaps was most successful when not focused so much on money:
• A multitude of bad ideas is necessary for one good idea.
• Most overnight successes — in fact any significant successes — take at least 5 years. Budget your life accordingly.
• Don’t create things to make money; make money so you can create things. The reward for good work is more work.
Even a cursory look at who has developed what over the years shows that people who actually had the resources to do whatever it was that interested them are the ones in the history books. Who knows how many others of equal or greater talent spent their whole lives scraping by instead.