The magic of the system is that there's enough trickle down to motivate the petite-bourgeois (I hate Marx, but I'll be darned if he didn't enumerate some good economic tiers) to make them keep the system running.
Your media talking heads peddling division, your 200k+/yr software engineers implementing extractive algorithms to make the gig economy tick, etc, etc, etc.
No matter who or what is to blame, the individual is who is paying the price and who should have the strongest interest to get out of that situation. Which means, if you're staying in that situation for years on end you have to admit to yourself you are doing something which isn't working.
Thats why people have more sympathy for somebody who is poor because they are temporarily down on their luck or born into poverty, and less sympathy for somebody who has been poor as an adult for decades.
All research (e.g. UBI trials, mirco loan experiments...) have shown that giving someone poor access to money allows them to dramatically improve their situation.
And I don't think anybody is arguing that people shouldn't get help to get back on their feet. Rather that some people refuse to get back on their feet.
So I'll reply here, since I can't reply to a [dead]:
> And then what? You're 54 years old. No degree. No work history. Criminal conviction for drug possession. You're mentally ill and unmedicated. You realize for the first time you want to change your life. What's your first move? You have until your lucidity is interrupted by the next bout of mania and paranoid delusions to turn your life around.
You get medication and join the merchant navy as a mess hand. Not only do you get food, a safe bed, medical attention, safety, a salary, and companionship. You also get away from a destructive environment, drugs, threats, and all that shit that made life hell.
I't been my experience* that HN folks don't like reality, practicum, and personal experience. They mostly like abstractions and theory.
*See what I did, there?
A long discussion is going on, with people flinging poo, back and forth, and one comment appears, from someone actually in the industry/organization being discussed, or by someone with very relevant direct experience, and that comment gets immediately dogpiled; often by both sides. It’s happened to me, a couple of times. I’ve learned to just stay out of these shitfests, even if they are embarrassingly offbase.
With this kind of emotionally-charged, nontechnical topic, it’s even worse than things like OS or methodology dogma battles.
Sure, but it's the system's fault, and we can point at the people who are keeping the system the way it is. The system is what it does, and what it does is syphon money from everyone else and pumps it upward to a few individuals. That's not an accident, people are responsible for that, they like the way it works, and they're intent on keeping it that way.
Remember, in this system you get paid money for having money and you get charged a fee if you don't have enough. You get taxed more for working with capital than for owning capital. You pay more the less you buy. People always say "The hardest million was the first million". This is by design!
> You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
Maybe, but we refuse to fund those because they're too expensive to operate.