Stalin would be proud. Send them all to the salt mines.
Hahaha. Pretty awesome to read this on HN, the juxtaposition is quite funny.
I mean the kind of people that were offended when I offered them each a cheap flashlight during a power outage. (We were all standing outside.) One of them said he would take what he wanted. He demanded the very best flashlights that money could buy. I declined, and I guess he thought I was tougher than him, so he eventually left after some more posturing. I never got his name.
I mean the kind of people who fake injury claims and collect disability for the rest of their lives, under 8 different identities. Their names were Tony and Theon.
do you consider what the parent pointed out, intentionally hiring below poverty wages, and the externalizing basic business costs onto local, often small town, police to be “welfare leeching?”
what about the companies who go out of their way to hire armies of accountants and lawyers to play games in order not to pay taxes?
what about the companies who engage in wage theft? there has been a number of reputable studies which show that wage theft may absolutely dwarf other forms of theft such as shoplifting.
if you consider these things leeching, then i think your point probably stands. but if one of those groups is not a leech, yet the other is, i don’t think your point stands at all.
if you do consider the instances i brought up to be leeches, which do you think “leeches” more? companies across the board who go out of their way to avoid taxes, wage theft, and externalizing costs? or poor people on welfare?
This is such a bizarre encounter that it's hard to take it as representative of anything other than one weirdo.
This group ranges from Congress to homeless drug addicts.
Personally, when I see someone who needs help, be it neighbor with a flat tire or a homeless person asking for a couple bucks as I walk by, I try to provide it. I often talk to people with some Venn Diagram intersection with your world view (as I know it thus far) and usually they’d literally give the wheel off their car to help the first subject in that hypothetical, and sometimes even go out of their way to give a sandwich to the second… but when it comes to policy they are so much more cruel. That’s my word for it, others call it pragmatic, or the free market.
I’m not saying that because I think I am one of the group who contributes, or one of the better, or what have you. Honestly, the sum total of my life has been going to war as a combatant, working for a defense contractor making missiles, working for a couple startups and large companies that you could sun up as selling advertising in novel ways, selling makeup, and getting people to pay slightly less for college if it’s online. Recently I’ve made a couple of new people that I hope to raise to be better contributors than I. But that’s it, I have no illusions that I’m some saint.
So, long preamble, but my point is that many of us don’t contribute to society, and don’t contribute in far more pernicious ways than a homeless drug addict. In comparison with a homeless drug addict my contribution to society has probably been markedly more detrimental, considering I used automation to deploy it on a mass scale.
In closing, look in the mirror, and unless you’ve been curing cancer, maybe cut the drug addict a break.