[truxus]

Your success touched a nerve. Lots of people making excuses for how lucky you are, and how lucky others aren't.

It's been known for millennia that "luck" is actually being ready for opportunity and then acting decisively when presented with opportunities. Preparation and action is what seperates winners from losers. You cant help losers win, you can only buy them time.

My parents were small farmers in the 80s when it was "get big or get out". I remember a lot of kids in my 20-person grade level had shoes that were falling apart, myself included. Grandpa died in 94 and my dad tried to keep the farm going by himself but could only last 2 years before the farm went broke. He left home and trained to be a truck driver. He drove over the road for 2 weeks at a time, when he was home he'd sleep, then go back out. My parents declared personal bankruptcy and the bank took their property and we were evicted in April 1999. We moved not far away, my parents needed a co-signer. My grandmother lived in the same house as us because they couldn't afford to move her double wide trailer. My parents slept on a pull-out couch for a year. Nobody gave them hand-outs. Life began slowly to turn around soon after.

You do what you have to do. And in the meantime you get ready for the next move. America is the land of opportunity, don't forget that.

[michaelmrose]

Some land of opportunity. You can help people win. Your distinction between winners and losers is arbitrary. At a different degree of adversity the line falls at a different point in the population. If you turn up the heat you would eventually fall on the losers side of the line. If you extend a hand and help your fellow man a lot more of them will end up on the right side of the line. Open your mind instead of your mouth.

[Applejinx]

What you call 'losers' I call 'my customers'. Why would I want to sell only to people who 'win'? Doing that means scorning perfectly good customers, and very likely perfectly good people.

Just because people aren't as brutally committed as you or I doesn't make them bad people. I would argue that we are the bad people, and they are more likely to be the good. We are driven, ruthless obsessives (well, me, anyway) and that's why we look so saintly to our socioeconomic system, but everyone clawing their way to the top of this heavily-clawed system of business savagery is by definition a lot meaner than the regular person.

And when we triumph, it's on top of a huge pile of nice regular people who couldn't or wouldn't fight as hard or as dirty. And I see that reflected all across society, with a disturbing lack of exceptions.

Love the losers. They're your customers, your userbase, plus it's good business sense. Try HARDER to help the losers, because if you mean to be a winner, you will have to be standing on top of them all, and you had best not be too heavy or unpleasant a burden ;)