[We] find that, if the program pushes individuals above a threshold level of initial assets, then they escape poverty, but, if it does not, they slide back into poverty…Our findings imply that large one-off transfers that enable people to take on more productive occupations can help alleviate persistent poverty.

Their paper clearly illustrates that many poor people stay poor not because of their talent/motivation, but because they are in low-paying jobs that they must work to survive."

More on this here: https://ofdollarsanddata.com/why-do-poor-people-stay-poor/

And to add insult to injury, people will rather think you deserve it than face the fact that we're all in the same stinking boat.

I am in New Zealand, which is fairly civilised, and I think your statement is mostly wrong.

Firstly, I have seen people get some government help, but it is rarely enough. Even with government help and sharing the load with siblings you may still need to help your parents full time.

Secondly, many people choose to look after their parents because they want to, or sometimes they don’t trust that others will give them the same quality of care. Even with high quality private care, I have seen plenty of children dedicate a lot of time to their parents (similarly friends looking after sick friends).

For some children it is acceptable for them to hand parents over to aged care, provided by the state. Many other children choose instead to do as much as they can to help their parents, often because they have experience of the systems and see the reality of overburdened elderly care.

When infirm people have nobody else to help them except government services, their care is sometimes of low quality, although still expensive for the economy to provide. A mature economy with many elderly perhaps doesn’t have enough people to provide the number of dedicated hours needed to support all of their infirm? I did a quick search and it looks like New Zealand spends about 1% of GDP on long term aged health care. That seems surprisingly low to me - although I didn’t look at how much other countries spend. https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=crown+expenditure+%22aged%...

He also could probably have declared bankruptcy early and been able to focus more on learning useful skills instead of killing himself trying to pay bills he never could. That is what bankruptcy is for.

But hard to say what was really going on.

Something tells me you've never even come close to walking in those shoes.

The second you stop generating profit, the state starts treating you like a broken toy.

There are methods to avoid being destroyed by situations like this, but some never try or don’t bother to even figure it out. Doesn’t mean it still isn’t hard work, and stressful as hell, but it is there to stop the destruction. Folks have to look and try though.

the battle cry of every 20-something laissez faire evangelist

Shit sucks sometimes. It's often hard or nearly impossible to cope. Sometimes the terribleness comes from those you loved the most, or least expected it from. Sometimes it comes from a literal random stranger. Life isn't fair, and there is no guarantee - and fundamentally cannot be - that things work out for anyone, no matter how right or wrong their actions.

Sometimes this kills someone directly. Sometimes it just wears them down, sometimes someone can take a direct hit to the face that would kill most others and just smile.

Often the bigger part of the damage or ongoing problems stem from our own inability to face reality, what is going on, and make use of the tools we do have and what we have around us to actually make things better - but that is a problem no one can fix but us. Ultimately, we end up with the consequences of this, deserved or not. There is no magic bullet to solve this either, just hard and uncomfortable work.

There are tools however, and our current society provides a LOT of them. I fully recognize how hard it is to use them during hard times. Probably more than 99% of the posters here. But pretending they don't exist or aren't available is BS as well. Pretending that they don't exist and that is why society is unfair and fucked up because of this is also just wrong and corrosive to society - and people even actually using these tools.

How many people read these posts and actually think there IS no other option and they're permanently fucked, and so never actually take the actions they can to make it better - or even take drastically worse actions that just compound the problem?

A lot more than anyone wants to think about, I can assure you.

Bankruptcy exists. I've seen many people use it (including one close friend) and everyone came out fine at the end. Was it embarrassing for them? Yes. Was it fun? No.

I've always worked my ass off and saved money to avoid the risk, and still barely survived, as I saw how unfun it was as a child and felt many of the effects first hand. But it worked for them to do it, and I knew I had the option if it went even further south.

The whole point of bankruptcy is to get the creditors off your back so you can actually get your life back on track again - like learn a useful skill, or get a new job despite the market being screwed, or not go homeless, or build back a functional life after crippling medical issues and/or debt.

Is it guaranteed that said person will do so? No - there is no way to even attempt to give such a guarantee.

Is it a useful tool someone can use to do so? Yes, you bet.

And if you think I'm 20, lol.

From a sheer utilitarian perspective, healthcare and safety nets are positive ROI. Imagine the job-producing startups that don't exist because "how do you pay for insurance?"

I think healthcare in the US is riddled with ways to "accidentally"* spend the entire accumulation of your wealth, leaving absolutely nothing to the next generation.

Long term care is needed by a lot of folks over the age of 65 (~70% of adults age 65 will require at least partial long term care).

Even "reasonably cheap" care (in my experience, roughly the same quality as living in a college dorm, with a roommate and a meal plan) can easily run 10k/month - or 120k a year.

Of those needing long term care (roughly half of all folks): Men will need that care for an average of ~2 years, women nearly 4 years. 20% will need that care for 5 years or longer.

I watched my parents spend all of their inheritance covering long term care costs for their parents (Alzheimers is a bitch). Once the inheritance was gone, they worked longer than they would have preferred to continue covering those costs (my mother only retired this year when my grandmother died of covid - as horrendous as it sounds, it was almost a blessing).

My personal take is that "single family homes" and "private healthcare" are a literal fucking disaster for long term wealth inequality. That policy combination takes a lot of middle class families and leaves them poor.

* - I personally don't think it's an accident at all, I think it's very, very intentional.

...

> * - I personally don't think it's an accident at all, I think it's very, very intentional.

Its extremely intentional wealth stealing, and it's even worse than just lost generational wealth transfer. Filial responsibility laws mean that your illness and long-term care are your children's financial burden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws .

In the worst cases, people estranged from their parents for decades end up bankrupted. Depending on what state your grandmother lived in - your mother may have been on the hook even if she hadn't chosen to keep working to care for her mom.[1]

The idea that paying for elderly parents' expensive (intentionally or accidentally) care is a choice only applies to people in less than half of the states. These laws make the only choice "pay the provider directly now" or "pay the provider costs and late fees, etc via the courts". So anyone who wants to claim that the people who care for their parents are chosing to do so is claiming wrong - if your parent spends their last days in one of 26 states, the parent is chosing what your wealth is used for.

[1] I hope that didn't come across as suggesting your mom was only making a financial choice, or that she didn't make her choice out of love. I'm sorry you lost your grandmother and I hope your mom enjoys her retirement.

Families should take care of their own. If nobody is willing to do that for you, you probably aren't deserving.

Might be more fair to say ‘every tomahawk missle fired randomly at a target at the Middle East is an entire middle class families lifetime income down the tubes’.

I can only imagine the hardships your family endured for this sentence to come out. I'm glad things are working out for you guys and I'm sorry for your loss.

That's not true, the money isn't just lost. The money is passed to the children of the person who extracts the money from the sick people. It's by design.

I can't imagine there are too many people in this world with half a million dollars ready to go.

The only reason I see expenses really causing massive debt is if you choose to accept/request medical procedures you can't pay for.

While it's morbid to consider the idea of just letting yourself die because you don't want to go into debt, it still is a choice... isn't it?

Medical technology is quite advanced these days. Advanced != free. And there's a thing where the longer you try to prolong someone's life the more progressively expensive it becomes, not just from a "price of care" perspective but an "[externalized] cost of care" perspective. Is it worth X carbon dioxide emissions to keep a person on a "level-III dialysis machine"? Is it worth X acres of rainforest to extract an anticancer drug to keep someone's cancer at bay?

Anyways the political divide, in the US, between the left's clueless utopianism and the right's underhanded support of market-distorting profitmongers, has become so farcical that it's impossible to question if humans should have "a general right to have their life extended" even if there are actual, difficult questions to go around.

[0] capital We, as in "the state"

[1] if you ever have the experience of being by the bedside of someone who is dying (n=2 for me), you will see people who come to visit, and have so much pathos, I suspect largely due to their own hangups about death. To be at your best in your role, you will want to shoo them away as quickly as possible.

Have you ever been to a US hospital? They don’t have a menu where you browse treatments and prices. You get your treatment and then later on you get a massive bill

That’s all putting aside the fact that a society allowing people to suffer from treatable illnesses is completely unnecessary and cruel considering that providing free care to everyone is something many countries do successfully

At the extreme end of diminishing returns, I'd guess that most deaths of elderly people in hospital are preventable because machines to perform the function of failed heart, lungs, kidneys, GI tract, etc. exist. But it's expensive, and countries with socialized healthcare don't pay for it for everyone because they don't have infinite money. My dad died this way when his lungs filled with fluid while in hospital.

What part of my comment are you referring to? I can’t really tell from what you wrote

I'm saying no country provides free healthcare for all treatable illnesses. And not providing it is necessary because the cost would be too great.

I agree it's cruel though.

No. I'm glad I could clear up this very difficult topic for you.

I understand if you are unconscious, you can't decide, or in a coma. But what if you are lucid and asked by a doctor if you want a procedure or not?

Sure, if anyone wants to use their time to learn something new that would be a plus for them.

That said, the formula is a political choice just as the UBI benefits are a political choice. We could give everyone the same SSA benefits regardless of prior income and index the amounts to age instead. UBI and SSA could be the same administration with lower amounts for younger people and higher amounts for retirees.

https://www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/questions-an...

Anyway, my point is, it's very important to make sure students understand that their confusion surrounding how things are structured in JavaScript is natural, and that they can (and should, on their own preferably) look forward to learning more stable/sensical languages in the near future. It's a shame I have to do this for my students instead of the course just doing it for me, however.

A junior developer who is just learning how to code will not deal with all of JS historical baggage; they will deal with historical JS when joining a large historical codebase. A junior developer will also not be dealing with the different quirks arising from different browser runtimes. These are concerns for businesses who already have products.

But a Student does not encounter these things while learning and writing greenfield apps. Otherwise we are advocating for a student to learn an additional "learning" language. That sounds ideal for a 4 year university program.

The key problem with js is the relationship between objects and functions is extremely confusing. You end up having to explain associative arrays, and spend 30+ minutes doing some hand-waving to even begin to describe what an object actually is in JavaScript. Then they get it. Contrast that with something like Java or even Rust where, despite the other complexities, it's pretty clear what the data is and how it is stored.

When you're teaching, you should be enabling the student to do one more thing that they couldn't do before. If you're spending 30+ minutes trying to explain what an object is, you're trying to do way too much. You don't need to have a 100% complete and correct understanding of Javascript's object model to use objects.

> Contrast that with something like Java or even Rust where, despite the other complexities, it's pretty clear what the data is and how it is stored.

That's nonsense. Particularly with Rust, now you're deep in the weeds of pointers, stack vs heap vs other segments, and borrow checking rules.

[1] helped design a JS class at Stanford for first-time programmers. Also designed an intro Rust class.

Programming is a very particular and abstract way to look at performing a task and most people need to be eased into it, trained to think like a computer.

This ideea that you can take a shoe salesman, make them "proficient" at JavaScript, and let them loose in the job market is a bit strange. It might work for a very limited number of people with an knack for it, but most people I've seen will approach the task as some sort of incantation of magic formulas that make the computer work. When the complexity of the task exceeds what can be achieved with magic formulas, they give up in frustration.

Also, most languages have quirks. What are you going to teach them? Python, which also has almost 30 years of baggage? Java, which requires you to spend significantly more time to produce basic functionality? Haskell, so they can gloat about the power of purity and monads on Hacker News?

I understand that javascript might not be the ideal intro language in theory. But I think it probably is the best one in the bootcamp specific use case.

Ruby's also got a much better web dev story, which is good for junior devs (without ML and/or infrastructure backgrounds) who are looking to enter the market. After learning Ruby, either JS or Java could be a great 2nd language.

> It's much more beginner friendly and is a thoroughly consistent OO language—i.e., everything is an object, including numbers and strings.

This sort of thing occurs to you and me and makes sense because we have a broader understanding of software engineering. In practice, I just don't think "everything is an object" means much to someone who's a month into a bootcamp.

IMO learning very beginner-friendly language like Ruby to a low-intermediate level first actually speeds up the process of getting to an employable level with a more difficult language like JS.

Elm would probably work too.

With Java you will spend a huge amount of time on pointless ceremony that can seem important to a beginner but is really pedantic enforcement of programming preferences from the Java designers (everything is a class for example).

With Python you have a pretty easy language but the dependency management situation is a disaster. Python in a Google Colab notebook where everything is pre-installed could be good.

Dependency management with either Java or Python is PITA IMO, but my idea would be to avoid dependencies during this initial phase of learning the basics.

On one hand, it seems like an antiquated curriculum. On the other hand, a surprising number of mid-sized companies still run on Rails or Django.

(I don't comment on the usefulness of Rails and Django to small companies and individuals, because they're not the ones hiring bootcamp grads.)

The other thing about Python is that, because it's already so popular for teaching, it has an ecosystem of tools around that. E.g. it has turtle graphics in the standard library (!), which is a very good way to explain loops, recursion etc for visual learners. There's also IDEs like https://thonny.org/ that visualize program execution step-by-step.

Also, the language has clear defects, but they irritate much more the experienced folks than the rookies (that are not so surprised when encountering inconsistencies).

Oh, and I have also trained many people using Java, and I initiated my dev career with Java 0.99 (or 0.98?). Most of my courses started with the sentence "let me tell you a joke: public static void main(String[] args)" :)

Eg just disallow for...in to be used at all (but allow for...of)

No iterating over objects except via eg Object.entries

No inheriting objects from other objects (ie no prototypal inheritance)

No var

No anonymous functions (ie only named function declarations or lambda/fat-arrow expressions, to avoid `this` binding gotchas)

Etc

I think the only real big blocker to a thing like this is that it'd need tooling (eg a transpiler that injects error throws at appropriate places), and tooling is another big hairy thing that makes JS less approachable for beginners.

It's almost like we could use a better frontend language. Too bad there isn't some magical universal assembly language supported by all major browsers we could use as a launchpad for such a thing ;)

Compare to graduation rate of traditional colleges: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40

"The overall 6-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time undergraduate students who began seeking a bachelor’s degree at 4-year degree-granting institutions in fall 2012 was 62 percent. That is, by 2018 some 62 percent of students had completed a bachelor’s degree at the same institution where they started in 2012. The 6-year graduation rate was 61 percent at public institutions, 67 percent at private nonprofit institutions, and 25 percent at private for-profit institutions. The overall 6-year graduation rate was 65 percent for females and 59 percent for males; it was higher for females than for males at both public (64 vs. 58 percent) and private nonprofit (70 vs. 64 percent) institutions. However, at private for-profit institutions, males had a higher 6-year graduation rate than females (26 vs. 25 percent)."

  That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of them had any background in programming and went right from bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for some people.

I just want to echo this, I have also worked with some really really sharp engineers coming out of these bootcamps. They were also people changing careers. I would really hate for the questionable aspects of these bootcamps to reflect on all of their grads, because some of the grads are fantastic.

I guess traditional colleges are the same way, right? A degree is like an informal union card that says "Hey this person can sit for 4 years and take tests."

This is what I really wonder about - how many of the negative comments are from students not succeeding possibly because of unrealistic expectations around teaching (and what's actually required for learning). Lots of kids fail in college too (particularly in CS) where the attention given to students (and projects) is often worse.

I remember kids constantly complaining at University about how the teachers weren't good or giving them enough attention etc. etc. There's some truth to this, but it's also a common way people take away their own agency for failure.

There's some baseline IQ requirement (for lack of a better term) - LamdaSchool puts the incentives in the right place, but they can't magically get rid of that prerequisite and if their screening isn't good enough some admitted students will fail. At least that failure won't include tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

I think the outcome comparison needs to be with universities - at least with ISAs the incentive alignment protects students even when they fail.

That's certainly the case for me - I landed a job after Lambda as a backend engineer, and I am/was extremely upset by Lambda's continuous deceptive language and degradation of their program

Could not agree more. When I was 14 years old my friends would go out to the mall to hang out. I would sit at home working on the modem routines for my BBS program.

If I didn't get paid to work in IT, I would be doing it for free.

Even now I'll show off my projects during interviews. The rare times this backfires I know that company would have sucked anyway.

You need this to be successful at anything. My cynical take is most people aren't, and see programing as some get rich quick scheme. If they did have these qualities they for the most part would already be successful

How does this compare to traditional colleges? We hear a lot about students saddled with massive debt and useless degrees, but I don't have a good sense of what percentage that is.

And my understanding of Lambda is that you don't end up with debt if the school fails you?

"That said, two of our best junior devs (at Arist YC S20) are Lambda School and Ironclad grads respectively, and neither of them had any background in programming and went right from bootcamp into their current positions. So it definitely works for some people."

Some folks thrive in this environment either by natural ability or their learning style and others do not. For whatever the reason the coding bootcamp gets the flack for underperforming folks and it seems to me unfair: Why are they held to this super high standard to teach a difficult subject (computer programming at a high level) to all kinds of learners at all levels?

College is gated by GPA and standardized test scores. You can quibble over the effectiveness and wisdom of this specific gate, but the upside is that mediocre students aren't going to spend a year and $30,000 convincing themselves they're going to major in CS at MIT. At Lambda, students quit their jobs, and take months out of their lives, only to find out 4 months later that programming isn't for them.

Heck, there are "intro" (OK, some of them aren't really) MOOC classes that, while more theoretical in some cases, should give you a pretty good idea if this is something you're really willing to devote a lot of time and money to.

I recently learned this is increasingly no longer true. Many top institutions have made standardized test scores optional in recent years, and we're a few years away from it becoming normal to not even take the SATs and get into multiple ivy league schools as a top student.

because this is the standard they advertise to and represent as the capability of their learning platform and their teachers?