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Comment by fjfaase | Hacker News Reader

I think these processes are also driven by the fact that more and more people are living at or below the poverty level (due to an evert getting bigger gap between the rich and the poor) and reduction in social-economical mobility. The 'American dream' is no longer a reality in the USA. When large parts of socity live at the bare minimum and have no hope for improving their situation except through crime, it is to be expected that crime rates will increase.

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> I think these processes are also driven by the fact that more and more people are living at or below the poverty level

Not true in the US: https://www.statista.com/statistics/200463/us-poverty-rate-s...

At 11.5% only two years since 1990 have been lower, 2019 and 2000.

There was an education thread the other day. No one much said it explicitly, we all danced around it... but it was mentioned that some states aren't bothering to teach math anymore, because some "groups" always failed. It was supposed to be some social justice thing.

I'm no racist. None of the children who were failing were incapable of understanding algebra. But there is a toxic culture that interferes with them wanting to learn it and behaving in ways that allow them to learn it.

It is asinine to say that they have no hope of improving their situation, when the same people are sabotaging themselves from childhood on up.

Sabotage piles up. When those retail stores inevitably flee those regions, there will be even fewer legitimate jobs to go around. There will be so-called "food deserts". And then that too will be blamed on late-stage capitalism and so forth.

Any group or culture will possess a number of progressive and regressive tendencies (with specific reference to education). For every enlightenment there is a Spanish inquisition.

If a particular group holds too many regressive tendencies they're going to slide backwards, and unfortunately we are not culturally permitted to point out that their cultural beliefs might be at fault. A non-US example to calm your pitchforks: The 'Travelling Community' in Ireland/UK (a culturally distinct group, though not genetically distinct) believe that formal education is not a worthwhile use of a teenagers time.

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmwo...

Watching everyone blame a complex system failure on their pet theory reminds me of the parable of the blind men and the elephant.

I'll say that after the previous decade or so of watching oligarchs treat the law/decency as a non-entity and seeing zero repercussions, I've lost most of my belief in the law myself. While some might take that as a free license to do whatever they can get away with, personally it's made me evaluate my own morals and try to live as closely to them as I can, and I feel good about myself for living my values.

But I often see the attitude here that I should be a mercenary and work for the highest bidder no matter the social cost of the company that pays the best. I can't help but wonder - what if the best employment available to me was as a member of a retail theft gang?

Is greed good? I don't think so, but it seems to be a core value these days.

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