One convenient fiction that many 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.
I'm extremely grateful for what I have.
[EDIT] Added "many" because it's more appropriate, and short-circuits the implied "all."
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.
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.
I'm trying hard to make your post make any sense at all..
I guess you believe everyone gets the same starting point and same opportunities? How did you come to believe such a thing? Have you looked around to see what society is like?
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.
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.
Your tax dollars go to all kinds of things far worse than helping people survive. The Protestant work ethic cannot die soon enough. Never once have I cared if someone is "lazy". A rich person may work very hard exploiting others, that's far worse than not working at all.
I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.
Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages.
> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
If they aren't physically lazy, they're unambitious or refuse to attempt nominally mentally difficult things (like math) and that is mental laziness. Poverty isn't random.
I live in Pittsburgh and I can tell you it's still like that - which is convenient when you want to get rid of things. I had some scrap aluminum that I put out with the trash the night before pick up and it was gone before I had walked back to the house. A guy pulled up in a Subaru Forrester and grabbed it. He asked me if he could have the wooden crate that I had also thrown out. I said sure. He asked me if I had any more scrap metal. I said not today, but I've got a 500 pound cast-iron tub that I need to get rid of soon.
Last year I bought a fixer-upper house last year on a bike trail and river in a small town outside of Pittsburgh ($40k - still possible here). I got in touch with the town secretary to discuss getting a dumpster for a while and she volunteered "I know a good scrapper". I called him and he and his son came and cleared out several hundred pounds of metal stuff that wasn't going to be part of my house renovations.
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.
My GF works with energy infrastructure in Colombia and they have lots of issues with people stealing copper, I didn't verify her claim but she said despite not having natural sources of copper Colombia had significant export volume of copper, pretty much all stolen. Her company has launched multiple investigations and unveiled gangs and networks repeatedly.
> 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.
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.
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?
The first image is what I see when I visit the page; the second when I dismiss the dialog. The third image is what happens when you take a screenshot of a web page on iOS and save "Full Page", which is why you don't see Chrome's UI or the iOS status bar.
I dislike X and normally use xcancel instead of giving them traffic.
But what you said is not my experience with x.com on mobile the few times I’ve accidentally visited a link from it.
It will show the first post in the thread and some nag popups, but it will let me read it if it’s all in the first post in the thread and not split up across a bunch of posts.
Here is a screen recording from my phone where I visit the Twitter.com link from this thread. The video link expires is 2 days.
> 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.
One convenient fiction that many 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.
I'm extremely grateful for what I have.
[EDIT] Added "many" because it's more appropriate, and short-circuits the implied "all."
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.
> convenient fiction that wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"
just like all poor people aren't lazy, so too all wealthy people don't think this.
Never said they did. Interesting read of what I wrote…
You wrote wealthy people tell themselves that poor people are lazy.
he wrote "many" wealthy people, not all.
To be fair, I added that, after being called on it. It was a fair point, but I also didn't mean "all," so I just clarified the meaning.
Yes, I did. There’s a word that was inserted into what I actually wrote.
By that logic, it is then accurate to say poor people are lazy.
Sure. Knock yourself out. I won’t lose any sleep over it.
[dead]
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.
Not lazy, smart -> Likely to become a millionaire
Not lazy, not smart -> Will probably make ends meet, but not a millionaire
Lazy, samrt -> Toss-up. Can either make it far or end up broke
Lazy, not smart -> Likely to be broke
Not factual
Some people just have a several hundred year head start on others.
It's not "lazy"; it's "made the wrong choices"... which I suppose you could call "intellectually lazy".
I'm trying hard to make your post make any sense at all..
I guess you believe everyone gets the same starting point and same opportunities? How did you come to believe such a thing? Have you looked around to see what society is like?
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.
Or… were never given a choice/opportunity…
The more money I’ve been paid the less hard I’ve had to work. Across my friends this seems to be a pretty strong trend.
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.
Your tax dollars go to all kinds of things far worse than helping people survive. The Protestant work ethic cannot die soon enough. Never once have I cared if someone is "lazy". A rich person may work very hard exploiting others, that's far worse than not working at all.
I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.
Something like 90% of my tax dollars go to social security net programs.
Not 90%[0].
Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages.
[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
If they aren't physically lazy, they're unambitious or refuse to attempt nominally mentally difficult things (like math) and that is mental laziness. Poverty isn't random.
> Poverty isn't random.
Now you're just trolling. Be nice.
I live in Pittsburgh and I can tell you it's still like that - which is convenient when you want to get rid of things. I had some scrap aluminum that I put out with the trash the night before pick up and it was gone before I had walked back to the house. A guy pulled up in a Subaru Forrester and grabbed it. He asked me if he could have the wooden crate that I had also thrown out. I said sure. He asked me if I had any more scrap metal. I said not today, but I've got a 500 pound cast-iron tub that I need to get rid of soon.
Last year I bought a fixer-upper house last year on a bike trail and river in a small town outside of Pittsburgh ($40k - still possible here). I got in touch with the town secretary to discuss getting a dumpster for a while and she volunteered "I know a good scrapper". I called him and he and his son came and cleared out several hundred pounds of metal stuff that wasn't going to be part of my house renovations.
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.
My GF works with energy infrastructure in Colombia and they have lots of issues with people stealing copper, I didn't verify her claim but she said despite not having natural sources of copper Colombia had significant export volume of copper, pretty much all stolen. Her company has launched multiple investigations and unveiled gangs and networks repeatedly.
> 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?
> 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.
Death.
Make me late to the airport will ya?
We should raise their standard of living so they don't turn to theft
European countries generally have a fairly generous social safety net.
trains arent really useful in the US on purpose
Trains in the US are super useful…for freight. Pretty much worthless for passengers in most cases. Canada and Australia are similar.
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.
> 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)
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM-R-Ausfall_bei_der_Deutsche...
> ~$5/lb
Copper sells over $6 per pound these days: https://www.kitco.com/price/base-metals/copper
I’d say $6 is == ~$5
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.
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.
[flagged]
Change x to xcancel and read it that way.
Clickable link:
https://xcancel.com/moxie/status/2091218652133732491
[dead]
> It's a long form post on a site I can't read because I have literally half an ounce of actual self respect.
Glad I'm not the only one.
It’s a 2006 journal entry.
xcancel.com
I mean twitter used to be a micro blogging website that people could use without maintaining real blog website
what's the issue here ????
ITS COMPLETELY UNUSABLE (aka, unreadable) LOGGED OUT.
Are those of you on X really this out of touch?
I can read it fine. I’m not logged in to X.
That you personally can’t read it doesn’t imply that everyone else here is a horrible person.
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?
> 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.
Sure.
https://waltergr.com/misc/hn-scrap-on-x/1.png
https://waltergr.com/misc/hn-scrap-on-x/2.png
https://waltergr.com/misc/hn-scrap-on-x/3.png
The first image is what I see when I visit the page; the second when I dismiss the dialog. The third image is what happens when you take a screenshot of a web page on iOS and save "Full Page", which is why you don't see Chrome's UI or the iOS status bar.
> *Any charity you want.*
I choose Habitat for Humanity.
I dislike X and normally use xcancel instead of giving them traffic.
But what you said is not my experience with x.com on mobile the few times I’ve accidentally visited a link from it.
It will show the first post in the thread and some nag popups, but it will let me read it if it’s all in the first post in the thread and not split up across a bunch of posts.
Here is a screen recording from my phone where I visit the Twitter.com link from this thread. The video link expires is 2 days.
https://streamable.com/5bvhdz
The whole text Marlin wrote is in the first post in the thread and therefore fully readable without logging in.
Donate to one of the following:
- https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/donate/
- https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/
- https://immigrantjustice.org/ways-to-help/
I opened a fresh instance of Tor browser and went to https://x.com/moxie/status/2091218652133732491
I got https://i.imgur.com/JCeLEgG.png which is readable.
Then I enabled mobile browser using devtools and got https://i.imgur.com/ryJk07p.png which is unreadable.
I think mobile vs desktop was the central confusion. Mobile is broken logged out. Desktop works ok.
https://imgur.com/a/p6p5WlR
https://www.alzinfo.org/donate/donation_form/, in memory of Terry Pratchett.
Works for me
https://imgur.com/a/w8HYdgz
I can also read without being logged in, on mobile
https://imgur.com/a/nDcCuPd
I (still) like the EFF.
I also hate Twitter and cancelled my account.
I'm able to read it while logged out - and if I wasn't, there's xcancel.com, and others.
You're not doing yourself any favours.
We have them in Chicago, too. Call streets and san when you got something too big to fit in the can? Nah.
Also nearly got a job in Pittsburgh this summer…
https://xcancel.com/moxie/status/2091218652133732491
Not sure why of all people, Moxie Marlinspike would stay on this cesspool of a network that is X
I'm open to correction on which rule to cite, or whether to cite a rule:
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'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.
Not sure what image you have of him. But a cesspool is where he belongs, imo.
I fear FIFTEEN CENTS A POUND is going to become a new vocal stim I will spam 50 times a day.