I'm double replying to you since the replies are disparate subthreads. This is the necessary step so the robots who can turn wrenches know how to turn them. Those are near useless without perfect automated models.
Anything like this willl have trouble getting adopted since you'd need these to work with imperfect humans, which becomes way harder. You could bankroll a whole team of subcontractors (e.g. all trades) using that, but you would have one big liability.
The upper end of the complexity is similar to EDA in difficulty, imo. Complete with "use other layers for routing" problems.
I feel safer here than in programming. The senior guys won't be automated out any time soon, but I worry for Indian drafting firms without trade knowledge; the handholding I give them might go to an LLM soon.
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
I actually think a lot of it comes down to self control.
Can you resist the allure of consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses? Are you buying liabilities that actually make your life harder? Are you living outside of your means?
IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.
> Being poor is you already did all those things. You cancelled all your streaming services years ago. You make all your food from scratch all the time. You never go to fucking Starbucks. You fix everything yourself. You already stretch everything to the limit. That is how you have to live every day of your life, for eternity, with no relief in sight.
Yes, the article says that, but I have direct experience which says the article is not telling the whole story. Some people are making all the right decisions and are still poor due to bad luck trapping them in a cycle of financial ruin. But also, some people really are poor due to their own crappy decisions. I've known them! They exist and must be accounted for in any productive discussion about poverty.
Many, many people try to act like only one of these two groups of poor people exists. For some people, that means they claim that if you're poor it's only because of your own bad decisions. For some people (including, to be frank, most of the commenters in this thread), it means they claim that if you're poor it's only because of systemic issues. Both claims are wrong, however, and both hamper us from finding effective solutions.
Whether one is poor due to external causes or their own bad decisions, they deserve to be treated with compassion and for us to try to help them. But the solutions for those two failure modes look very different and helping one group isn't going to do anything to help the other. Thus, trying to effectively solve problems of poverty in our society must include a balanced view, recognizing that both causes of poverty (systemic issues and bad personal decision making) are quite real.
> You make all your food from scratch all the time. [...] You fix everything yourself.
What stands out here is that if someone finds out that you can cook or fix things in my circles, they'll be knocking at your door trying to throw money at you. These are hotly desired skills. Of course, it is conceivable that if your circle is other poor people that can't offer you a good job, you'll never find those opportunities. Does this suggest that the company you keep is most signifiant? That is certainly not a new idea.
Being able to hobnob with the world's richest billionaires is probably a function of luck more than anything. But what about the moms and pops that are found everywhere? Is getting into their good graces also limited by sheer luck, or does self-control start to dominate?
> Being poor is you already did all those things. ... You make all your food from scratch all the time.
If poor americans did this they wouldn't be so fat, so that is wrong. Food stamps lets the poor eat unhealthily even though they are poor, while most of the world poor means you have to make your own and not get all the industrial crap.
The other interpretation is that people who don't make their own food aren't really poor, which would mean there are barely any poor Americans. But I doubt that is what they mean.
I suppose that depends on what you mean by "from scratch". If first you must invent the universe, starvation is certain. If you have to produce the food from the ground by yourself, you will struggle to scrape enough calories out of it to survive. There is no hope of excessive weight gain here.
If "from scratch" means going to the grocery store to buy a bunch of prepared ingredients that you go home with to mix up in a bowl, sure. Then it starts to become much easier. Where does the line get drawn?
Uh. We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too.
Also, butter, processed animal fats (such as lard), fatty meats... none of these are recent inventions, and they're all good at helping you to grow fat. I feel very confident in claiming that they (or things functionally just like them) have been around for a thousand years, and I expect that they've been around for several thousand.
> We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too.
Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself. If you include the input of many other people building things like a tractor you could also grow enough of your own food from the ground to exceed your normal caloric requirements without much trouble, but you're a long way from doing it from scratch at that point.
Unless, like before, you consider throwing some prepared ingredients into a bowl to be "from scratch", at which point anything goes. Perhaps opening a bag of chips is also "from scratch"? You did have to exert the effort to open it, after all.
> Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself.
One guy can totally make butter, lard, and harvest fatty meat by themselves. While it's far easier with help, it's not as if you're asking the fellow to -say- change the orbit of the sun. Fat people and high-calorie foods substantially predate modern industry.
> One guy can totally make butter, lard, and harvest fatty meat by themselves.
Theoretically it is possible that one person could, on their own, produce enough calories with cattle to feed around two people. So in a vacuum it is true that you could gain excessive weight.
But it still isn't actually possible in reality. The time commitment to produce that much is expansive. There isn't enough time in the day for you and you alone to both produce it and also eat it to excess. If you cut down on your time commitment to the animals so that you can focus on eating, then your caloric production plummets.
That is, of course, much easier to pull off with the modern tools we have, but then you're back to requiring the help of many people. Those tools don't magically appear out of nowhere.
> Theoretically it is possible that one person could, on their own, produce enough calories with cattle to feed around two people.
Right. This is the same species as the "birthing in olden times was fatal 50% of the time" assertion.
Anyway, I see what you're driving at.
Yes. I agree that a lone, naked, unarmed human surrounded by a couple dozen wolves looking to eat him right now is almost certainly going to be eaten by those wolves.
Though, what that has to do with a lone farmer getting fat off his own produce, I have no idea.
> Though, what that has to do with a lone farmer getting fat off his own produce, I have no idea.
Me neither as it has never happened. Said farmer was typically burning around 4-6,000 calories per day. If eating butter and fatty meats as suggested, we're talking a pretty significant time commitment just for maintenance, never mind pushing yourself over the time. You can't exactly guzzle down a slab of meat like it is a Coca-Cola. If you wanted to start packing on the pounds, ignoring the challenge of even just getting that much food down your gullet in the first place, when would you actually find time raise the animals in order to provide that much food?
It has always been possible if you have a lot of help, sure. Even the aforementioned bag of chips was made from scratch by a group of people — unless we're counting the need to invent the universe, I suppose. That's probably not what earlier comments were talking about, though.
Yes, there were always fat people around in history, but not at the same rates and severity as modern Americans.
Cooking your own food reduces how fat you are on average, American poors wouldn't be one of the fattest groups in the world if they made their own food.
What consumerism? Someone falling into the "poor" category the OP describes has already forgone all of that out of necessity. There is no money for consumerism.
Has nothing to do with self control and "maybe don't go buy a coffee." They weren't doing that in the first place.
There are places in this country where the minimum wage is still a paltry $10/hour or less and rent for a family is $2800+. The math doesn't work. There's a systemic affordability problem
Is the discussion about only one particular kind of poor person?
The system is a trap to keep people poor. A lot of people make the wrong decisions that keep them there. Can we not talk about that? It doesn't belittle the subset of folks that it doesn't apply to.
I grew up this way and saw it first-hand. A dead-beat step dad who didn't work for literally _years_. A mother with the only income of less than $40k/year for 3.
Cigarettes and beer every night. Fancy, financed cars with ridiculous interest rates because their credit scores were shit. Rent-a-center furniture payments. The newest phones and other bullshit that they couldn't truly afford.
So many people in our circles lived this way or worse. And I'm not trying to come forward and say "I got out of it so everyone can!" - just that people have a small amount of control and they regularly make the wrong decisions.
> Is the discussion about only one particular kind of poor person?
Yes, according to the OP. The article already describes the people you are talking about as "broke," not "poor." We already know that those in the broke category can, in most cases, make better decisions and reduce their spending and possibly get ahead.
The ones not in that category can't, which is who the article is about. The discussion is how do we address and help eliminate poverty, not how do we help educate people who are broke because they make bad choices.
I don’t think you understand how little some people have. Especially in rural (or really, anything that isn’t urban) areas, where you have to have a car for transportation, because public transit doesn’t exist.
Keeping an old car running and insured isn’t cheap.
> Especially in rural (or really, anything that isn’t urban) areas
What isn't urban but also not rural?
I've seen disagreement over exactly where urban begins. A density of ~400 people per km², with a minimum of 1-2,000 people is a common definition, although the OECD targets a density of 1,500 people per km², with a minimum of 7,000 people, to capture all the variation throughout the nations it tracks. Regardless, in all those cases "rural" always encompasses that which falls short of what constitutes urban.
I've never heard of this alternate state you speak of.
The sub-urban regions. All the suburbs I've been in (and I'd wager nearly all of the US suburbs in existence) require you to have a vehicle to go about your day... unless you work from home and have everything delivered to you, I guess.
Correct, but irrelevant. Suburban is a subset of urban, not the other way around — originally referring to the portion of an urban area found outside of the wall.
The physical walls aren't often found anymore, but the term still refers to an urban area that surrounds where a wall might have been placed historically.
Like you said, this is irrelevant. Cities aren't planned or built like that, and really haven't been... since the founding of the USA, at the very latest. (If they were, the Brits would have had a much more difficult time capturing D.C. than they did.)
Nice history lesson that you've written for absolutely no reason, but we still don't know what there is other than rural and urban. Pointlessly pointing out obvious things like that there can be suburbs within urban areas, like there can be hamlets in rural areas, does not answer the question or serve any purpose whatsoever.
> Nice history lesson that you've written for absolutely no reason…
This you?
> …originally referring to the portion of an urban area found outside of the wall.
The physical walls aren't often found anymore, but the term still refers to an urban area that surrounds where a wall might have been placed historically.
> I strongly suspect that if you polled random people, they would say something along the lines of b or c.
Yes they would. Absolutely. Which means that they clearly see it as being outskirts of a city or town, not the outskirts of an urban area. You even say so yourself. It is literally written as such.
> There are also exurbs, whose definition further drives home the point that it isn’t binary:
You did the same thing again: Outside a city, not outside of an urban area. Of course there are different community types within urban areas, just as there different community types within rural areas: e.g. hamlets, villages, small towns, it is even technically possible, albeit unusual, for a city to be rural! For example, Greenwood, British Columbia is both a city and rural.
Dude, take it from someone who is mildly autistic, and spent a very long time being staunchly prescriptivist: you’re being ridiculously pedantic, and no one cares.
If you don't care, why take time out of your day to formulate a message?
But, regardless, it is quite delusional to think that I would write for anyone but myself. Nobody is paying me to be here. It can only ever be for myself. As I care, that is more than satisfactory. It makes absolutely no difference what other people have to say about it. It was never for them.
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
I am answering this question.
Perhaps you could reply with something useful instead of attacking my comment.
> IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.
which implied you were also commenting on the condition of being "poor", rather than distinguishing those who are "broke" from those who are not with the same pay.
I take it you really mean:
"IMO, after a baseline, it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it."
You should feel embarrassed for “thinking” so callously and uncritically. Do you need everything handed to you? Family issues, natural disasters, medical events, house fires, abuse, wage theft, fate. I’ve worked with the destitute, there is no safety net.
Poor people don’t have control of their situation. You are literally victim blaming and surprised that rubs people the wrong way. Victim blaming is rude, offering your flippant two cents is rude. There, your ideas are challenged, rather than tone police go think about it.
suggestion: give people the benefit of the doubt instead of assuming they are out to get you, trying to blame you, or trying to attack you. Especially on hacker news.
Was it a “dumb” question? Yes. Maybe they are dumb. Maybe they are just totally out of touch because they don’t know any poor people. I don’t know because i’m not a mind reader.
Ask 5 people about the purpose of mandatory PR reviews and you’ll get 6 answers.
However catching bugs is always going to be at or near the top of list, so clearly it’s at least partially about catching bugs.
I’d argue that catching bugs along with ticking a compliance checkbox (which is only there because something thinks they catch bugs and malicious code) are the 2 primarily reasons that the business part of the company cares about or requires code reviews in the first place.
Man, if you don't want to deal with the challenges of children, why have kids? I don't lie to myself, I know I couldn't do it and I didn't.
Maybe you just don't get to go out for dinner or ride on planes until they don't need to be hypnotized with a screen? You know it's bad for them but you're putting your comforts and freedoms above theirs and everybody else's.
I can't help but feel like the next generation has been completely fucked.
I feel like this mindset is part of why so many people are nervous about having kids, and I couldn't disagree with it more.
Your kid is not an optimization problem, they're a part of your family. If you want to do something unique that's going to bore your kids, it's fine to give them something to do; a half hour of screen time while you enjoy that fancy restaurant while traveling is fine. Your kid will be fine.
Sometimes you should put your comforts and freedoms above your kid's. You are not their servant, you are your own person who has your own wants and needs, and those get to win out sometimes. If your kid throws a tantrum when you're in an art museum, yeah, try to discipline them and calm them down and teach them. If you have a rare opportunity to visit a museum you've always wanted to, though, then it's fine to lose a battle or two here or there if the alternative is missing out on unique experiences that you value.
There are sacrifices to being a parent for sure, but the mindset that it's taboo to allow anything to happen that's not immediately in the best long-term developmental interest of your child is mind-boggling to me. Don't raise your kids in front of screens, but being a parent isn't some phase change that means you have to abandon all your interests and dreams and desires; it just means there's one more person whose interests and dreams and desires you have to care about now.
If you can't deal with the challenges of being on a plane where someone else's kids are screaming, maybe you just don't get to go on commercial flights. Just charter a jet.
Non-parents always have all the answers about how kids should be raised.
Don’t judge until you’ve been there. Screens are more of a last resort for my family but we do use them. We avoid most activities where kids will bore quickly but it’s impossible to avoid all situations like that.
This is so off-base I don't even know where to begin. "Maybe you just don't get to ... ride on planes" -- so the kids never get to meet their grandparents or great-grandparents who are too unwell to make the trip because you won't give them a screen for an hour or two? Like everything else in life, dealing with screens is a balance. Every day for multiple hours is too much; a couple hours on twice-yearly trips is not going to have any effect on them.
I don't understand the confidence behind this. Is a good economy only based on having a job?
Average people are struggling to make ends meet and racking up debt. The gap between pay and the cost of goods has only grown in recent years. How is that good for anyone?
> The vast majority of Americans deserve more money.
This is pedantic but I strongly dislike when people say anyone deserves anything.
I support an equitable system that allows citizens to move up in economic class (which we don't currently have) but I don't subscribe to the idea that everyone inherently deserves anything.
That puts you at odds with the tradition of natural rights. The Declaration of Independence says everyone deserves life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The Declaration of Independence doesn't actually say that. It says that everyone is endowed with certain unalienable rights including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness whether they deserve it or not. Just like people have the right to free speech or a jury trial in front of their peers, whether they deserve it or not.
The distinction is important because whether someone deserves something is a normative statement while having the right is a descriptive statement.
What you deserve because of your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is up for debate.
its "have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", not "deserves" which is entirely different. Go to your boss and tell them you deserve a pay raise.
No, I don't think so. You specifically rejected the idea that everyone inherently deserves anything. Objectivists would agree, but I don't think Ayn Rand would have been popular with Jefferson.
Perhaps you could clarify - what do you mean by "everyone", and what do you mean by "anything?" Does everyone deserve UBI? Do workers deserve disposable income? Do the homeless deserve housing? Healthcare? Food? An attorney, if arrested? Do children deserve college? High school? Primary school? Orphanages?
You can't say that nobody inherently deserves anything, then say I'm intellectually dishonest when I take you at your word.
I don't think it's fair to qualify this as blue collar work
reply