Can't get flood insurance. Nor can I get a mortgage. But there's been no flood since the big one in 1936. They built 2 dams.

I'm not who you asked, but I moved to Pittsburgh for a job, figuring I would earn money for a few years then move to real city. That was over thirty years ago. Turns out, I love the place.

Pittsburgh has most of the benefits of a larger city without most of the problems. Its infrastructure is in many ways over-provisioned, being built for past industry and a larger population (but the maintenance burden is catching up). Its unusually hilly and berivered geography has allowed its neighborhoods to escape homogenization and retain their individual ethnic characters. And the setting, with rivers, bridges, trails, forests, is beautiful. Plus the airport recently got overhauled to meet the region’s actual needs, making it way more convenient.

Oh, if you're in to sports, Pittsburgh has some great teams and a great fan base.

Yeah, I like the ’Burgh.

Like many non-natives, I moved back because spouses parents were here. It is a very friendly city and I have like a dozen close friends and we go and explore regularly. Bike and brews is a favorite. Or run then coffee.

Is much less affordable now compared to 10 years ago. But there are still lots of fixer-uppers still.

> One question of course is: what does society think we should do with thieves who create road accidents and who render trains inoperable?

They should be liable for consequential damages.

> It's one of the reason trains get stuck in Europe: thieves stealing copper cables.

Even worse. Sometimes, the dumb fucks think something has copper in it, but actually it's fiber... once two copper thieves simultaneously took out the primary and secondary fiber for the GSM-R network, leading to a complete standstill in Northern Germany [1]. (Personally: given the timing, I think it was Russian throwaway agents, and I do not believe that "copper thieves" cover story for a single second)

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM-R-Ausfall_bei_der_Deutsche...

trains arent really useful in the US on purpose

We should raise their standard of living so they don't turn to theft

I’d say $6 is == ~$5

The scrap price is what you get for bringing scrap copper to a recycler.

Not an expert, but I assume $5/lb is the peak value for dropping off nearly perfect condition copper. Not sure how much they’re actually getting for stripped copper wire.

no

I really don't want to support a man who has killed so many people and advocates so aggressively for white supremacy and the elimination of trans people.

I really wanted to be a journalist when I was young, but then the PC era began and I became sort of addicted to computers and developed my first commercial website at a very young age.

I remember making more money than most people in my family (not a high bar, really) when I was working as a 20-year-old developer.

That led people in my family to think I was some sort of brilliant young man, but that bar was easily cleared (and still is) by pretty much anyone who had an interest in computers and applied themselves to pursue a career in the field.

My life would have been very different if I'd had a few more years to pursue journalism, which was already a very difficult field back then.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi.

I also think that we should have mercy for people who’ve made mistakes. People who’ve willingly done dumb things, especially when they were young.

I feel this way because I did dumb things when I was young, and I’m sure you did too dear reader, and at least for me, I was lucky that those dumb things didn’t end in catastrophe.

It’s like it’s human nature to forget the dumb things you did if you were lucky enough to escape the consequences, and look down on those who weren’t so lucky.

This whole thing is one of those fruitless arguments about a badly defined notion of "most people".

For instance the scope of the "especially chance" assertion has strange effects. Does "get born in the wrong year" include 300,000 years of human history? In that case chance has very little effect. You're overwhelming likely to grow up using stone tools, with a 1 in 3 chance of also having access to pottery.

But that would be silly and obviously wasn't the intended question. The intended question is one that's closer to home, a question that we care about. But how much closer to which home, and what exactly is the scope of the question? It can be made less about luck by filtering out the unlucky from the scope.

> education

eh, i kinda disagree on this. in the era of information being so abundant there's so much you can learn on your own.

sure you won't become a surgeon but there are so many other things you can learn and get a job.

and this is true even without having AI in the picture.

Most of life is luck, with regards to success and economic prosperity. We’ve built a system that ignores that for the benefit of a privileged few, using fairy tales around exceptionalism and faux meritocracy. We should build socioeconomic systems where luck is less a component for survival and living a good life, imho. I think we’re on our way there (support of democratic socialism and their candidates is at record highs, mostly around the young, and the old age out at a rate of 2M per year 55+ [higher support of capitalism because they were lucky under it]), but it’s going to take another decade or two to see the improvements (political cycles, electorate turnover, policy implementation lag, etc.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 (citations)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027462 (citations)

> Persistent poverty is usually a byproduct of poor impulse control.

Go visit a brick factory in Pakistan. The laborers are extremely poor and no amount of "work harder" effort on their individual part (they already work hard as fuck, six days a week) is going to lift them out of that life. Telling them they're poor because they have poor impulse control is one of the most ridiculous things I've read today.

Valid hypothesis, but I suspect that cause and effect may be reversed.

When you don't have much, and opportunity is fleeting, you tend to grab and implement, quickly.

If you get a windfall, but don't have a bank account, you spend it quickly. Hanging onto it, could actually be very dangerous, or at least, increase the likelihood of having it taken away.

I'm open to this correlation. But I wonder about causality. Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential. Breaking the cycle of poverty is difficult, but I'm not an expert on where the best investments to solve this problem would be.

You can have really stupid parents who ingrain suboptimal behavior patterns and interests to you. Things like poor eating, attitudes and beliefs about work and what’s possible, abuse, poor ways of coping with stress and conflict. Throw into that a hopeless environment with no immediate opportunities, bad peer group, and early pregnancies and you have a recipe for disaster

Usually? Dude, you're implying that most impoverished people deserve it without providing a shred of evidence. You saw it, huh? Sorry, idk what you saw, but your anecdotes are no basis for making such a sweeping and important claim about one of the most complex problems humanity faces.

How about growing up in a neighborhood and environment where there isn't negative influence and impulses around you to begin with?

For your example, people in poor environments have more liquor stores, convenience stores, etc. If you are rich you have more positive influence around you and less to impulse control against.

Want to test your argument? Try to live in a strip club and tell me if you can control your impulses as a male (or if you are a female, whatever is your temptation equivalent). Since you believe your control in that situation is 100% innnate and cannot be changed, then you have squandered all your resources. However you and I can see thats silly, why would anyone choose to live so close to temptation and negative influence? But isn't your argument saying you shouldn't bother to control that since you'd just fall to poverty anyway.

The myth is so pervasive because it's propagated by people with more wealth against people with less of it, and the conflict of interest prevents anyone from giving it up.

Everyone wants to feel better about themselves and the easiest way is to look down on someone who has less. Less "whatever" really, people always find something that they think makes them better, money is just the obvious choice because society slowly associated money with success. It doesn't matter if the wealth came from their parents, or luck, they can still pretend it makes them better.

It's one of those situations where everyone's in on it. The poor really haven't much else to go on and they'll take this little boost in their standing, the rich are tempted to think they so much better than most other people. Everyone in between sits somewhere on that scale.

I think it’s self evidently true that hard work is not equal to wealth and I don’t know how that meme became a thing.

You can exert extreme effort in unproductive directions and provide marginal, even extremely negative, value.

You can work extremely hard, all day every day, and accomplish nothing.

Gulags aren’t known for their wealth or value generation. They’re known for their labor input.

Hard work is often necessary but not sufficient. You can work very hard moving a pile of sand with a pair of tweezers but you’re not going to get wealthy doing that.

The people who simply think that because they worked hard wealth should just come to them are going to remain confused until they figure out that what you work on is also important.

There are a lot of factors to getting wealthy. Most of them are out of your control. Hard work happens to be one that is in your control. Its not like you can choose to be born to different parents or a different place.

But its still not magic. It doesn't guarantee anything. Worst of all its useless if the work is directed to the wrong ends.

How about hard work + courage ? Without ability to take risk and potential failure it is very difficult to change your economic level. It is very naive to think that doing the same thing everyday will somehow change your economic level.

Never said they did. Interesting read of what I wrote…

Most likely you're seeing the causality in the wrong direction - poverty creates a strong incentive to go for immediate benefits rather than absorb the risk of one that is delayed.

Talk to the immigrants - a lot of them came to the US with only a few thousand $$$ in the bank or even less. They are not multimillionaires, but a lot of them got from zero to high-paying programmer jobs.

Granted, there is a healthy dose of luck and talent involved, but saying that the only way to get rich is to have rich parents is a lazy and wrong take.

Ah, so you're jealous of the inheritance generation currently enshittifying everything? What word would you use to describe them? "Lazy"?

I've worked in both tech and construction. Never seen a tech worker go home and come back with the soles of their shoes resoled overnight because they didn't have a better option for work tomorrow.

Is that the best option? Generally no, it's probably not worth your time to do things that you don't specialize in. But at some point, you run out of hours to profit from the things you specialize in, and you still need something, so you figure it out. You do your oil changes, and fix your shoes and repair things even when they would generally considered 'totaled'. You miss work or at least hours on days when your late model car doesn't start. You take care of your own house repairs and yardwork, if your lucky enough to own something your landlord's yard and maintenance work more likely. And this is all off hours stuff because that's the option you have.

I've worked so much less in tech, yeah the hours can be long and oncall sucks. But I end up being able to redirect all my effort into the thing I'm specialized in and that I get paid the most to do. Which means I can pay to have my boots resoled, or just buy new ones, I take my (newer cars that always start) to the dealer every 6 months. I can pay a premium for delivery of food and staples, I can hire help around the house for anything from lawn care to tree trimming to roof repairs.

When I left the trades, 50 hours was generally required and 60 was becoming the norm. I'm not working any more in tech at work, but I work a lot lest to have a better life outside of work. It's just night and day.

That is kind of the expected outcome of capitalism - the more value you provide the harder it is to replace you and the easier it is for you to leverage that for better working conditions.

If you'll excuse the dehumanizing metaphor, you probably treat your valuable possessions a lot better than your cheap possessions too. Capitalism makes possessions out of all of us.

Your tax dollars go to all kinds of things far worse than helping people survive. The Protestant work ethic cannot die soon enough. Never once have I cared if someone is "lazy". A rich person may work very hard exploiting others, that's far worse than not working at all.

I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.

Not factual

You are going to have a rude awakening if you get a bit unlucky.

I'm trying hard to make your post make any sense at all..

I guess you believe everyone gets the same starting point and same opportunities? How did you come to believe such a thing? Have you looked around to see what society is like?

It only makes sense that fetuses which choose to be born into blue collar families in the wrong zip code are more likely to continue to make poor decisions for the rest of their lives. You just can't trust people with such a poor history of judgement. Unless they're C-Suite.

Or… were never given a choice/opportunity…

> Poverty isn't random.

Now you're just trolling. Be nice.