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Comment by askin4it | Hacker News Reader

| you'd do exactly the same thing these people have done, if you had their set of experiences.

Nonsense! It's possible you learned everything you know about people by reading it from a book.

This is a report from the real world: everyone (at least in the US) these days get a "shot" and while some are lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon, most people who are below middle class get lots of extra attention and resources paid for by everyone else (who work for a living). Opportunity is there and is often just left on the table in favor of anti-social (more entertaining) behaviors. Sorry, but it's true. If you want to "owe" other people something, go ahead, I'm tired of paying the bills for other people's sentimentalism.

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What I find interesting is that, even here on HN, someone still confuses an anecdote with a representative study.

It may surprise you to learn how many people in my life have not gotten a "shot", how many have, and how many have gotten vastly more than their fair of a "shot" in life. Those are the circumstances, and when you find yourself in similar circumstances, with a similar set of life experiences as someone else, you tend to make similar choices as they would. Humans, generally, act similarly, all else being equal.

To quote MLK, "It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps." [0]

The people who are stealing from these trains are, by and large, men without boots.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xsbt3a7K-8

What's curious to me is the absence of women. If it were people in penury and dire straights, you'd see more women doing it. But we don't. It's guys doing it.

> most people who are below middle class get lots of extra attention and resources paid for by everyone else (who work for a living).

Most of those people are working and paying taxes, as many benefits programs are stipulated on first having a job. Those benefits are also laughably terrible to non-existent, as well, and vary heavily from state to state.

Also, many people who are "below middle class" are not eligible for the programs, anyway. The federal poverty level is something like $12k a year for an individual, and benefits are cut off if you earn more than that.

~12k is the federal level for eligibility, but the actual threshold depends on state definition as most states increase the baseline.

> most people who are below middle class get lots of extra attention and resources paid for by everyone else (who work for a living).

No, the people that work for a living are the people below middle class, hence why the class below the (petit bourgeois) niddle class in capitalism is known as the “working class”.

sorry my bad. I just meant that there are lots of social programs which are generously paid for by tax payers. Didn't mean misquote Marx...

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