#2: I happen to believe that people should be entitled to education, healthcare, safety and respect.

#3: There are certainly bad jobs. Jobs where the employer does not pay, abuses their workforce etc.

#5: Debt you cannot afford? Sure. But sometimes debt is useful. A mortgage or a business loan for example.

#6: Safety is everyone's responsibility. It's all well and good that you behave well but if Bill decides he doesn't need to follow safety precautions it can just as easily injure, maim or kill others as well as himself.

#7: Don't I regularly see "Work smarter, not harder" plastered over HN? If the only way you can stand out is by working more, you're either at the top of your game or you can do whatever you are doing better.

#8: "The machines here are not maintained correctly, but I guess complaining is bad so I'll either put up with it or leave."

#10 (ish): Car accident breaks both your legs, you can no longer perform manual labour. Tornado destroys your business, insurance shrugs and pays you a pittance. Someone else's bad decisions cause an equipment failure that costs you an arm.

#11: These two sentences are not equivalent. I'm okay saying I agree with the latter, but not the former. I'm not okay with the fact the world is not fair and feel it's a noble cause to try and correct this.

#12: This just reeks of the blame the poor mindset I see in a lot of US conservatives (and in our own UK conservatives to be fair).

I read Mike's list and it filled me with ferver and the desire to stand up and make my life better. I read you list and it made me want to sit on my butt and mope.

In my experience, leaving emotion out of the decision making process usually yields more optimal decisions.

I couldn't care less about the warm words in that pledge. I'm fearful of the mindset of the person that wrote it.

We all fancy the "meritocracy" mindset, but we can't just ignore that there are very, very important factors at play (your gender, the color of your skin, your upbringing, the wealth of your family, the social standing of your family..) that determine a persons success regardless of their conduct, determination or other internal factors.

If an employer is dumb enough to not hire a great worker because of their gender or skin color, then that business is doomed in the long run anyways. Because somewhere out there is a competitor who will snatch up that talented person and crush them.

Capitalism is a brutal business, but it does have a way of sorting these things out.

> Because somewhere out there is a competitor who will snatch up that talented person and crush them.

Empirically, this is not always the case.