One convenient fiction that wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
I know lots of folks without a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out, and not one single one, is "lazy." In fact, a few have more than one (difficult) job.
I am old enough to see a few of them getting into the back nine, with no cushion.
Being poor is a lot of work, as is very well documented. When you have more money you can offload some (or in extreme cases pretty much all) of the labor.
It only makes sense that fetuses which choose to be born into blue collar families in the wrong zip code are more likely to continue to make poor decisions for the rest of their lives. You just can't trust people with such a poor history of judgement. Unless they're C-Suite.
The pervasive myth that hard work == wealth needs to die. Every people I have met in my life wanted to have a shot at a decent life and would have put the necessary work for a decent wage.
The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.
There's four quadrants, lazy, works hard on one axis, and poor and rich on the other axis. Of those four quadrants, people exist in all four of them and it's stupid to pretend otherwise. That means that not pretending lazy poor don't exist, nor that rich hardworking people also exist. I know lazy poor people that aren't lazy so much as have severe mental health problems related to being poor, but also know rich people who could have fucked off to the beach forever by now but they keep working for some reason.
Why do I bring this up? Am I nitpicking? (yes) Until such time that there are no poor people, claiming there are no lazy poor people just gets people that actually know lazy poor people to tune out anyone's dreams of UBI because I'm not paying taxes on income I earn through me working, so that everyone else can be lazy and not work. It's as simple as that. Yes we can point to systemic and racially moviated biases that lead to unequal outcomes, but that isn't convincing on why my tax dollars should go to lazy poor people who refuse to work or even go to the EBT office to. I'm all for my tax dollars going to hard working poor people, and especially to their health care because a cancer or diabetes diagnosis should not bankrupt anyone, but the rest is hard to swallow.
Wow, I didn't realize how much I missed blog posts like this. Is there any way we can get the version of the Internet where people posted like this on their personal blogs back? It's the reason sites like hacker news came to exist, you couldn't just scroll social media to find stuff, you had to sort of stumble upon (that used to be a website too, didn't it?) stuff like this and pass it around word of mouth. It was awesome.
Sorry, but it's not a fucking blog post. It's a long form post on a site I can't read because I have literally half an ounce of actual self respect.
It's not a blog. Nor is Medium. I can't believe this shit the site tolerates (laps up, really) being named "hacker news". Buncha hackers should be ashamed and embarrassed.
1. I don't believe you. Or at best, they're A/Bing you and letting you read a tiny modicum of content before forcing you to login. Actually, I'll donate $250 to a charity of your choice if you show me you on x.com mobile browser, logged out, and then load that link. *Any charity you want.*
2. I never said that. Weird that you would feel the need to put words in my mouth. Why might that be?
A friend was a property manager in Sacramento. His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copper, that currently pays ~$5/lb. If people are really working this hard for steel at $0.04/lb, then transformers and air conditioners will have to be installed in vaults.
> His biggest headache was replacing the electrical equipment thieves would demolish to get to the copper
It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables. They've been found to steal, too, heavy road grate if they were of any value: which created actual serious accidents (where a car's tire falls into the hole).
Regarding the electrical cables for trains, one solution is, slowly , replace them with cables with basically the same properties but 1/10th the copper.
Other funky solutions have been implemented: chemical sprays with a composition that is watermark and that cannot easily be removed. So when caught the thieves cannot deny because for x weeks the watermark stays, invisible and harmless, on their skin.
One question of course is: what does society think we should do with thieves who create road accidents and who render trains inoperable?
> It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables.
Even worse. Sometimes, the dumb fucks think something has copper in it, but actually it's fiber... once two copper thieves simultaneously took out the primary and secondary fiber for the GSM-R network, leading to a complete standstill in Northern Germany [1]. (Personally: given the timing, I think it was Russian throwaway agents, and I do not believe that "copper thieves" cover story for a single second)
The scrap price is what you get for bringing scrap copper to a recycler.
Not an expert, but I assume $5/lb is the peak value for dropping off nearly perfect condition copper. Not sure how much they’re actually getting for stripped copper wire.
I would also think that unscrupulous scrap buyers would offer a lower price for copper which has obviously been stolen or stripped from public works, since they are taking on more risk by buying it.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I understand the partisan juxtaposition of "X" and Moxie Marlinspike, and the partisan appeal of commenting on it, but to me it is a tangential annoyance.
I'm curious what cesspool you mean, because i can see cutting edge true hardcore science publication announcements on X better than elsewhere.
i ask because i evidently have tuned my account parameters somehow way the heck better than you experience.
I _do_ still see what look like rage-bait nonsense that people post for clicks, totally unrelated to medicine or biology, so i block or mute that nonsense. I'm guessing that's part of the cesspool but you may see different stuff.
Why do you think Moxie Marlinspike is not the type of person that would stay on this cesspool of a network that is X? From what I've seen I'd have been very surprised to see him anywhere else.
It is ironic that the founder of maybe the most popular privacy-conscious IM app is actively contributing to his and his followers' data being harvested on X though.
I know lots of folks without a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out, and not one single one, is "lazy." In fact, a few have more than one (difficult) job.
I am old enough to see a few of them getting into the back nine, with no cushion.
I'm extremely grateful for what I have.
just like all poor people aren't lazy, so too all wealthy people don't think this.
The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.
Why do I bring this up? Am I nitpicking? (yes) Until such time that there are no poor people, claiming there are no lazy poor people just gets people that actually know lazy poor people to tune out anyone's dreams of UBI because I'm not paying taxes on income I earn through me working, so that everyone else can be lazy and not work. It's as simple as that. Yes we can point to systemic and racially moviated biases that lead to unequal outcomes, but that isn't convincing on why my tax dollars should go to lazy poor people who refuse to work or even go to the EBT office to. I'm all for my tax dollars going to hard working poor people, and especially to their health care because a cancer or diabetes diagnosis should not bankrupt anyone, but the rest is hard to swallow.
It's not a blog. Nor is Medium. I can't believe this shit the site tolerates (laps up, really) being named "hacker news". Buncha hackers should be ashamed and embarrassed.
Glad I'm not the only one.
https://xcancel.com/moxie/status/2091218652133732491
what's the issue here ????
Are those of you on X really this out of touch?
That you personally can’t read it doesn’t imply that everyone else here is a horrible person.
2. I never said that. Weird that you would feel the need to put words in my mouth. Why might that be?
It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables. They've been found to steal, too, heavy road grate if they were of any value: which created actual serious accidents (where a car's tire falls into the hole).
Regarding the electrical cables for trains, one solution is, slowly , replace them with cables with basically the same properties but 1/10th the copper.
Other funky solutions have been implemented: chemical sprays with a composition that is watermark and that cannot easily be removed. So when caught the thieves cannot deny because for x weeks the watermark stays, invisible and harmless, on their skin.
One question of course is: what does society think we should do with thieves who create road accidents and who render trains inoperable?
They should be liable for consequential damages.
Make me late to the airport will ya?
Europe puts people in trains and freight in semi-trailers. China and Japan are more like this.
India dedicates its rail network 100% to passengers and also 100% to freight. Somehow it works.
Even worse. Sometimes, the dumb fucks think something has copper in it, but actually it's fiber... once two copper thieves simultaneously took out the primary and secondary fiber for the GSM-R network, leading to a complete standstill in Northern Germany [1]. (Personally: given the timing, I think it was Russian throwaway agents, and I do not believe that "copper thieves" cover story for a single second)
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM-R-Ausfall_bei_der_Deutsche...
Copper sells over $6 per pound these days: https://www.kitco.com/price/base-metals/copper
Not an expert, but I assume $5/lb is the peak value for dropping off nearly perfect condition copper. Not sure how much they’re actually getting for stripped copper wire.
Also nearly got a job in Pittsburgh this summer…
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Picking:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I understand the partisan juxtaposition of "X" and Moxie Marlinspike, and the partisan appeal of commenting on it, but to me it is a tangential annoyance.
i ask because i evidently have tuned my account parameters somehow way the heck better than you experience.
I _do_ still see what look like rage-bait nonsense that people post for clicks, totally unrelated to medicine or biology, so i block or mute that nonsense. I'm guessing that's part of the cesspool but you may see different stuff.
It is ironic that the founder of maybe the most popular privacy-conscious IM app is actively contributing to his and his followers' data being harvested on X though.