Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

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If you're on minimum wage with dependents, you made some bad decisions. There are people that have been working minimum wage for 10 years. Those people are stupid. It doesn't take much, other than showing up, to get a raise at McDonalds. All of this Marxist drivel fails to recognize the critical truth: people are responsible for their own failures. We like to blame 'the Man' but ultimately it IS your fault if you're poor. With the entirety of human knowledge at one's fingertips, it's amazing how people who are poor spend so much time on Facebook and so little time learning anything. As a poor person if they've ever took a free online Stanford course. Ask them if they have ever seen dancing with the Stars. Ask them who Bruce Jenner is. As them who the Speaker of the House is. Being poor is not a circumstance: not having money is a circumstance, being poor is a mindset. I've been broke, living in a car for months, but I was never poor. Some people choose to be poor their entire life. I have no use or sympathy for those people for whom ignorance is a choice.

Please stop posting ideological rants to HN. You've done this often, and we've asked you to stop before. Thoughtful discussion is welcome, flamebait is not—it makes the threads tedious. Erring on the side of the former is straightforward enough if you're using this site in good faith.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10485724 and marked it off-topic.

Do you really think people seek out minimum wage jobs? For a lot of Americans it's minimum wage, or nothing. Most employers will pay just what they have to in order to fill that position. It's like landlords. Have you ever had a landlord lower the rent? No--they get the maximum amount they can weasel out of a tenant, at least in my godless part of the world--The Bay Area.

As to taking a few online courses, I wish it was that easy. I have worked with some highly intelligent minimum wage workers. I have worked with idiots who have Bachelor's, and even Master's degrees. I have met Mensa Society members who became homeless, and one who's in jail.

I have a feeling by your writing you are young. Come back to your post in ten/twenty years; and I bet you will have change your mind?

(I used to think a bit like you before I had a nervous breakdown. The world is not black, white--it's grey. Yea, you strive to improve yourself, but that's only a small part of success equation. It's a supportive family. It's an in demand degree, at a reputable college. It's networking--which I always found nauseating. It's being a risk taker, that very few poor buys can even think about. See the rich boys can fail, and while they don't tell people; a family member seems to always be there giving them a second chance. Poor kids seem to get one, or two chances at pulling themselfs out of minimum wage. When I was younger my ticket was getting into a good Union. I was poor, but did well on a test, and it didn't hurt that my father was in the same Union. Yea, it's called nepotism, or in my case white privilege.. It still exists.

I don't want to argue, and I wish it was a cut and dry as you think.

You've been down voted to oblivion, and you can see the other responses point out some of the errors of your points.

But I'm actually shocked that given you do have access to things like free stanford courses (which of course are only free in the $ sense) you still hold opinions like the one above... It is victim blaming, and you should know better.

Marxist drivel... really? Whether you agree with Marx or not, it isn't drivel, it's pretty well thought out. While I don't agree with Marx' ultimate conclusion, he has turned out to be right about a lot of things relating to capital.

Please, please educate yourself more. Maybe volunteer somewhere that puts you in front of "the poor" so you can see how normal, and how hopeless their situation is.

Because a larger truth in this, is that you're opinion and by extension you, yourself, are the reason poor people exist. Which is such sad situation.

>If you're on minimum wage with dependents, you made some bad decisions.

Maybe 15 years ago. These days bad luck is all you need.

> I have no use or sympathy for those people for whom ignorance is a choice.

He said, without irony, to end a rather ignorant rant.

There's a Dickens quote that escapes me now, but it was something along the lines of "He was one of those people who thought poor and ignorant people liked being poor and ignorant, and so wanted nothing to do with them."

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