It is expected, just disappointing. "I got mine, fuck you" is not exactly the kind of thinking we wish our fellow citizens engaged in.

And for the record, I would appear to be in the group bankrolling it rather than receiving from it, and I'm completely cool with it.

> It is expected, just disappointing. "I got mine, fuck you" is not exactly the kind of thinking we wish our fellow citizens engaged in.

What it too to get mine, required very hard work and literally signing my life away for 4 years. Then, when I started gaining, I got fined for not having health insurance. Now that I can comfortably afford my health insurance and am starting to look at buying a house, here’s the left again saying I should help others, when I received no such help, and taking away the money I worked hard to earn. Imagine not having a degree in the software engineering field. The struggle is real, and if I can do it then what are others excuses?

No, I’m sorry, I will fight to force others to follow my path (albeit in a different field should they choose). I will not willingly pay for others to have an easy life unless they are related to me.

I never understood how twisted someone's mind has to be in order to say "I suffered, so I'll fight to make others suffer too".

I’ve never understood why people are so willing to give up what they’ve earned for people who are not trying that just have their hand out. Why do we do it this way, those that want to help can pay the UBI tax and receive the payments. The rest of us that don’t want it can never receive it but also don’t have to pay. Why don’t we do that instead?

Also I’m a Navy veteran. I can’t tell you how many times I can back from deployment to see actual hatred from these people I had never met, who I was defending their freedom for. The idea of helping others is gone after 1) I already did by defending their freedom and 2) most people here are assholes only thinking of themselves, so i joined them.

I don't think that's the mindset. The mindset is, "I worked for what I have, you can do the same"

People with that mindset usually greatly overestimate the influence their work has on what they have and underestimate external factors, so pushing them to reevaluate may be a good thing.

So, people that worked and earned what they have and are compensated accordingly don’t deserve it?

Do such people even exist?

Being a programmer, what I earned is a result of several factors - most importantly investments made into me by my parents and by the society (with schools, infrastructure etc. mostly funded with taxes); and also plenty of pure luck and sheer coincidence. Only afterwards comes a lot of hard work I've put into learning what I know. Without the former, I would probably earn only a small fraction of that (and/or under much worse conditions) even assuming that I'd be putting the same amount of hard work. Alternatively, with more dumb luck I could be earning much more while putting less work into achieving that. Of course, this is just barely scratching the surface, as there are also other ways to get rich than working hard or being lucky; mere ability to invest your time and effort into "working hard" is often filled with external factors as well; and "being (un)lucky" itself contains so many factors to consider that I wouldn't even know where to start.

> Do such people even exist?

You’re talking to one. I have no degree, am self taught and a software engineer. The most help I got was reading open source code, which was pretty difficult to do when I started. My parents had no money for school for me, and I joined the military to try to get some education. That still wasn’t enough to actually get a degree so I had to work low paying jobs knowing I could do better while working side projects to improve my skill. I just recently caught up to what I should be making.

It’s common for those that took the standard path to think nobody works for what they got.

I'm not. You were able to read open source code and learn from it, taking advantage of a lot of effort its authors put into it (who knows, maybe you even stumbled on some of my work out there?). You had access to computers and to the Internet, and had time to use it, most likely thanks to your parents, which isn't a given. You admitted yourself that you turned into publicly funded military for it to invest into your education. You also had ability to do side projects while working a low paying job, instead of, say, taking care of an ill relative your whole spare time - not everyone is so lucky. And perhaps most importantly of it all, you turned your attention into software engineering during time when software engineering is extremely lucrative - it doesn't have to stay this way at all.

I don't even have a degree, by the way; I'm mostly self-taught too.

> You were able to read open source code and learn from it, taking advantage of a lot of effort its authors put into it (who knows, maybe you even stumbled on some of my work out there?).

I knew you were going to fixate on that, as you’re grasping at straws, which is why I put it in there. The amount of source code I read was one project, a php web framework. Yea I learned about 2 things from it back then, which I’ve long forgotten now.

Since I didn’t earn what I have, call your school, revoke your degree, quit your job and start over again with only unskilled jobs on your resume. Until you do that you won’t understand.

> Until you do that you won’t understand.

I already said that I don't even have a degree. All you did in this thread was proving the point of my original comment.

No, I haven’t. You are assuming people give out info for free. What you’re saying is essentially that your degree was free. Someone had to pay for it. For me it was buying books. Did those authors help me with free books? No they charged me just the same. How is this getting help from others? Unless you believe that if you gain knowledge at all even with compensation from someone else is help. But that’s just commerce.

> You are assuming people give out info for free.

They do. I learned a lot thanks to them.

> What you’re saying is essentially that your degree was free.

My degree that does not exist?

> They do. I learned a lot thanks to them.

Since you’re still not following, why do people post blog articles? Why do people write research papers? Just to get the info out there? No, they do it because it gives them some advantage over others. FAANGs won’t hire you without proof of knowledge. The other side of it is SEO. You want to exist on google you have to look like an expert, so you write a lot of articles to increase your score. Both of these situations are driven by money, not by some desire to help others.

> My degree that does not exist?

Fine, then you’re essentially saying that all the learning you did was free for you. It required no effort at all, all you had to do was read. If your self taught, or went to school, you know this is just dumb.

So back to the point, did you or did you not work for the knowledge you have? Or did it just get matrixed into you?

> Both of these situations are driven by money, not by some desire to help others.

I've learned a lot from pseudonymous or even anonymous people with no money or fame involved. And helped others this way too.

> Fine, then you’re essentially saying that all the learning you did was free for you. It required no effort at all, all you had to do was read.

That's not what I'm saying at all and you would have known that if you would read what I wrote with comprehension. It took a lot of effort, but I recognize that this effort alone is just a single factor that influenced what I earn, and not even the most important one. Other factors outside of my control could have easily ruined (or boosted) it all, and it's true for everyone.

Nobody earns what they have in a vacuum. There is a society that exists around you and enables what you do.

And we pay taxes to cover that.

Right, and that's what would be supporting UBI: taxes. So either you're arguing that taxes are unjust because they take what is rightfully yours, or you're just saying that UBI will cost too much. It very much seems like your argument is the former.

> It is expected, just disappointing. "I got mine, fuck you" is not exactly the kind of thinking we wish our fellow citizens engaged in.

I haven't "got mine" yet and tend to disagree when people propose to lock me out of upper-middle class lifestyle by taxing the hell out of my income. It is more like people like you who "got theirs" want to pull the ladder up.

It's not "I got mine, fuck you". It's "I got mine. You got yours. Now you want to take mine, fuck you".