You own 3 houses, including an airbnb and your conclusion is how unfair society is ?
Your doing better than most people. The weird moral grandstanding against Peanut Butter had to be the strangest part.
Anything less than organic whole foods produce is simply barbaric.
This isn't to say the system is good, our criminal justice system is a nightmare of indefinite detentions and human rights abuses.
But I'm not seeing much struggle in this post. OP kept that making weird choices. At a point you need to sort yourself out.
Everyone got experiences.
A lot of us are excited about AI, but economic displacement can cause generations of trauma, and our safety net in the US is wholly inadequate toward that end.
It is a likely outcome that the wealthy class offers the most meager basic income to avoid revolution but not much more than that.
I think we all need to talk about our leverage as a class of people who work for a living, and I'm not seeing nearly enough discussion about it. When Amodei talks about displacement of labor, he doesn't acknowledge how much trauma that economic displacement can cause and how many years that bell can ring.
https://www.statista.com/chart/30411/share-of-people-at-risk...
/rant
Edit: Why downvote? debate me. Its so childish to suppress comments you do not agree with.
Humans are omnivores, veganism is a choice. You don't get to complain about how rough it is when you yourself have chosen to play with hard mode turned on. Obviously if there are health issues that require an altered diet that's a different story, but if that was mentioned I missed it somehow.
Everything else about the story has merit though, the rich are too rich and the US's "safety nets" are awful. Nobody should go bankrupt due to health problems they can't control.
Avoiding hyper-processed food may be smart if it would lead to health problems later. One jar or peanut butter probably isn’t an issue. But at the macro level, countries spend much more on ER treatment than they could on preventative care, like free or subsidized healthy food.
America has been a cruel place to be poor since day one. I encourage everyone to read Howard Zinn’s ‘A People's History of the United States’ as it shows a more grounded history of this country. The US needs a workforce of starving, ill, desperate people in order to work. That’s how the system was built: on the backs of African slaves and the European poor.
The unspoken rule of this society is that everyone should rely on their family for help and not the government. This is why life is especially cruel for those with little to no family.
Those who embrace and celebrate AI when there’s a chance it could lead to mass unemployment and suffering should take a long hard look in the mirror.
Can't you see what a slippery slope that is? And in fact, how dangerous that level of economic despair is for a functioning democracy?
It's also not fair, because people who are more fortunate to be born into a well-off family can eat vegan their whole lives.
This person did everything he was supposed to do, stood up for things he believed in, and still was left in the lurch along the way. This is not the American dream, it is a clear indication how arrested social mobility is in the US. The rags-to-riches "Horatio Alger" story has been a myth in the US for quite a well, buoyed by anecdotes that are predicated on luck.
Some part of the story are clear failures of the system. Some parts have nothing to do with the system (moms and dads decision). Some parts are system actually helping, maybe not enough but helping.
And then there were genuinely confusing parts as in someone with a seemingly normal job and three houses feeling like they dont have secure housing.
Two dimensions to interpret this:
- article author judgement on what’s healthy based solely on its personal nutritional knowledge at the moment.
- the judgement of his decision, solely on the details of this post.
IMHO the only fault here is to omit more information he was basing his decision. But reading between the lines: he repeat being "hungry" but never saying "staving". That’s a huge difference: being hungry isn’t a health hasard.
This guy sounds like another "everything sucks but I got mine and everyone else should figure out how to get theirs". I get the struggle but I didn't really see him demonstrate empathy for others in his situation.
I'm not saying "be happy for what you have; it could be worse". I'm specifically saying "when you're advocating for what you have to end; go see what it looks like in the world that doesn't have it".
Having moved to the US, I see a lot of people here have this strange Every Man Is An Island mentality combined with a view that Society Has Failed Me. For these people it is actually harder to cram 3 people to a room and just grind it out than to go buy a van and deck it out so you live by yourself and so on. Something I realize is a superpower a lot of successful people have is that they can do the things that are tough for them but nonetheless blockers to their success. They don't indulge their instincts like this (as he finds out after doing it that it doesn't save him much).
People don't like to hear this kind of thing because it seems like punching down. But don't imitate the guys who tried and failed if you want to succeed. Imitate the guys who tried and succeeded. You can look at the ones who failed to see what not to do. There's a lot there of trying to get one over everyone. "I'm going to do X and then I'm set for life" kind of reasoning. If you play that specific game you have to face the fact that loss is possible. It's a gamble. If I just buy the right crypto coin, I'll make it. I'm done. Then you post the loss porn on /r/wallstreetbets or whatever and everyone gives you props and upvote karma or whatever and then what. No money. They forget you. Next guy.
If you read the book Evicted you'll see this. The characters do all sorts of crap. One gets a windfall of a few hundred dollars. Chance to delay rent and eviction for a while. What does she do? "I deserve a treat after all this". When I moved here to the Bay, 3 men to a room, beds against the wall, rice and eggs every day, milk in the morning. Cheap. A few hours at min wage if necessary. I only realized many years later why people say "It's a marathon not a sprint". Neither metaphor made sense to me until I saw the guys who failed. Always with a scheme. "once I pull this one off, I'm done. I've made it". So that's what a sprint looks like. Success for them is 3 houses, one Airbnb'd, one for the mum, one for myself, leveraged 5x 3 times over. Live there by myself. Made it. Grinder. Hustler. Success.
Actually, the majority of people who are successful are the opposite. Did the hard thing. 3 men to a room, rice and eggs, milk in the morning. Not resoundingly successful. No 3 houses. No Airbnb. But kids one rung higher on the ladder. Those kids, 2 to a room, rice and eggs sometimes pork, milk in the morning. Not resoundingly successful. No 3 houses. No Airbnb. But kids one rung higher on the ladder. Those kids, 1 to a room, good food. Other guy sees that "born with a silver spoon in your mouth; born on third base think you hit a homer" etc. etc. Truth? If you're not this one, you have the chance to be the first guy. Your kids be the guy envied by the other guy. But if Every Man Is An Island then you can't do something for the ones who come after. You never step on the ladder. Just scheme at the bottom to invent trampoline to the top. Then complain when you bounce and land on ground instead of top of ladder.
My wife is also from Oregon. Her grandma was “marry a random truck driver at 14 for a ticket out of town” poor. The guy abandoned the family and drank himself to an early death. And her dad was similarly situated to this guy—my wife lived part of her childhood in a converted barn. Her takeaway from her family history was the opposite: people are often incredibly self destructive and you can’t help those people.
The problem isn’t that lawmakers were never poor. Many were. The problem is that all the ones who were were high-functioning enough to escape poverty. So our systems for helping poor people assume a level of competence and administrative capacity that’s simply beyond the capability of a lot of poor people. For example, a third of uninsured people are actually eligible for Medicaid. Someone in my wife’s family racked up 50,000 in medical bills because they didn’t sign up for Medicaid despite being eligible the whole time.
You can, and you should. We all need a helping hand of a community, and a community to heal. We are social beings. And we carry the responsibility for not helping, too.
- free or greatly reduced cost of higher education
- replacing means-tested programs like Medicaid with universal versions. Medicare for all, for example, where you don’t have to jump through hoops or even opt in, is better than the dehumanizing system we have in place today. Also removes the barrier to slightly improving one’s life, since you won’t lose your aid after getting a 10% raise or w/e.
- cheaper housing, or public housing (god forbid!)
These are not pipe dreams, these are all things other civilized countries have. I don’t want to live in a world where you have to be either lucky or extraordinary to live a secure, modest life.
So did my mom, in Oregon.
Maybe no so ironically, my wife lived on a 2 trailer desert compound on a plot 2 miles from visible city infrastructure and 5 miles from any sort of built structure for most of her childhood.
We don't live in a vacuum and there a reasons why people turn to drug use that the system exacerbates. But that is completely irrelevant, because this blog post is a systemic critique, even if it is told through the life story of an individual. To cherry pick one stanza of the entire blog post to dismiss it on the grounds that the father who left is a drug addict is one more example of the delusions or strategies of the moralizing capitalist.
That such a trivial thing destines someone to endless debt and health issues is just cruelty. That it doesn't account for terrible parents when they are a constant like gravity itself is nothing more than the result of willfully ignorant politicians parroting tropes of long dead, less educated, and more ignorant politicians
Many politicians are intentionally in on the scam, erecting barriers so they can funnel wealth to rich corporations instead; look at this surplus from cutting education! Of course they don't say where the surplus came from so plainly. Mathematically air tight non-violent eugenics. Nevermind the meat suits engaged in such are useless themselves. Politicians are primarily just that, not also scientists and doctors. Just fuzzy VHS copies of historical story.
The system as a whole can be blamed for ignoring reality and coddling non-contributors. Boomers and GenX did not invent anything we rely on. Art, music, technology...etc etc... are centuries old.
But the contemporary elders act like reality itself is due to their existence. It's such a farcical concept. None of them are owed as none of them gave. They merely took the baton and redipped both ends in their own shit.