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Your sense of injustice, while not unwarranted, is misplaced. Both the person in the article and your father are the victims of unfair systems. Poverty exists in the first and third world. I think that, hypothetically, if you wanted to engineer a world in which everyone was taken care of, empathy and a sense of solidarity would be the foundation of it. It's not productive to point to someone worse off.

I think the author should have tried to improve their situation a bit more given that they lived in a prosperous time and place. But regardless they worked every single day and contributed to society. Is that not enough to at least be ensured a comfortable death?

Especially considering no one actually owns the earth, not Jeff Bezos, not anyone, yet almost every single bit of wealth (significant wealth) was generated from it's exploitation. through mining and pollution, and will continue to do so. Where do we think the bots and EVs will come from? Our ass?

Therefore, realistically, everyone is entitled to a piece of wealth, whether you like this truth or not, given a significantly more intelligent way of seeing things, this would be the only conclusion that can be made.

But we've drawn borders and set up law enforcement to protect the ridiculous wealth inequality that seems like it will never end.

> 30+ years seems like enough time to pick up some skills to earn above minimum wage ... at some point you have to learn enough life lessons to understand that retirement is going to _suck_ if you don't save anything. Most people manage to learn this before ~40 y.o

You can learn all of that and spend decades struggling to afford food. All it takes is not being lucky enough to avoid extremely common catastrophes.

> 30+ years seems like enough time to pick up some skills to earn above minimum wage

This is the fallacy of assuming the person can predict the future. Do you know what happened to typesetters when desktop publishing came along? They were decimated. Some did as much as they could to adapt their skills to the new environment - e.g. learning to use computerized typesetting systems as far back as the 70s, teaching others how to make documents that didn't look like shit instead of typesetting those documents themselves - and still got hammered. The kicker is that those who had invested the most in learning this fairly technical skill were the most vulnerable. Throw in some other kind of savings-liquidating reversal, such as natural disaster or unreimbursed medical expenses (possibly caused by the chemicals used in the related printing industry) and it's easy for someone who tried really hard to make all the right decisions to end up poor (or dependent on their children) in their old age anyway.

We're seeing the pattern repeat with LLMs. A lot of people right here and now have been talking about how "AI" is going to make many jobs obsolete, throwing their practitioners' life plans into disarray. They're probably right, though I'm still skeptical that programming is one of those jobs. The point is that it's unreasonable and monumentally callous to say all of those people screwed up and should accept the consequences. A society where a decent late-life outcome is possible only if you make all the right decisions even in the face of uncertainty is still not as just as one where even mere humans who make a few mere-human mistakes can still expect something better than complete abandonment. I suggest you try reading John Rawls for a fuller exposition.

> I have no plans to make minimum wage at 55

Neither did the vast majority of people who actually end up doing so. You might or might not be smarter - or more "meritorious" in any other way - than most of them, but I guarantee you're less so than some. It could happen to you. It could even happen to me, though it's probably less likely since I'm already retired and comfortably so. Everyone thinks they're going to be the lucky ones (see also: neo-feudalists of both authoritarian and libertarian flavors thinking they'll be among those who thrive by creating a less equitable society) but that's just another delusion.