Throwaway585250's comments

Sorry, dang. Posting this wasted a small but irretrievable part of our lives and was a bad decision all round.

Please remove this chain of comments, or the whole account, if you want.

It's a ridiculous comparison, given in response to the ridiculous assertion that homelessness is a privilege.

At the end of the day, at some point someone says "these working conditions are too shitty and I'd rather go look for something else". That person sets a lower bound on working conditions for people who aren't able to leave so easily. Saying "how dare you not work for a pittance with all the other poor buggers trapped on a wage where saving is impossible" is blind; calling it privilege is wilful stupidity.

Yours is showing too, along with an unhealthy dose of smugness. GP literally chose to be homeless instead of licking the boots of the wealthy for table scraps, which is a degree of courage above and beyond what could have been expected of him, but it was still courage. Saying that his ability to do this is privileged, is like claiming a man who saves a baby from a burning house is showing his able privilege: true, technically, but grosly unfair and an underhanded way of attacking him.

Why do you eat at restaurants that don't pay staff enough? If "some people" treat service workers badly, and you know this because you've seen it, why don't you tell "some people" that they're acting like pigs?

After the Spanish civil war was underway, tipping was made illegal within the Republic, and George Orwell reports that one of his first experiences "was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy". They had it absolutely right. A business model where staff get paid whatever their customers feel like moves all the financial risk from the rich business owner to the poor worker, emphasises the class differences between the two, and is generally a practice which anyone left-wing enough to be using the word "privilege" should find abhorrent.

They very clearly do not take orders from an ostensibly racist 70 year old. That's beside the point, because she wasn't giving orders; she was complaining about her neighbours on the internet, not to the cops. Lastly, it would be extremely surprising if she'd done the same thing twice, let alone ten times.

It's clear that she was in the wrong for being bitchy on social media, but how could she have predicted the outcome? In what sane world do the police seek out unfounded accusations on social media then act on them?

It cost more than half a million lives to end slavery at that particular time.

What is the appropriate life per slavery-year exchange rate? Because if for one less year of slavery you would spend 10,000 human lives, and 20 years of peaceful compromise would have ended slavery, then your war was a mistake.

Having rights doesn't stop you being morally and factually wrong, which is the point of this piece: while you are allowed to cross the road when you see a black man, doing so is a dick move, because it upsets the man in question.

I never demanded you stop crossing the road because you're scared of specific groups, and for that matter neither did the author of the article, although our situations are obviously very different. It has merely been pointed out that doing certain legal things can have a negative impact on other people. In my case, I am pointing out that crossing the street to avoid someone has a negative impact on whoever is being avoided, regardless of race. This is clearly not the same as calling for legislation to prevent unlawful street crossing.

As you have noted, the government won't stop anyone from calling you a dick. If you don't like being called a dick, well, that's too bad.

I may not have been clear. I don't feel particularly discriminated and don't really care in any case. It's incredibly minor.

However, I strongly object to the idea that it's okay to discriminate based on unalterable characteristics as long as you're not discriminating against a member of a legally protected group.

As someone who is extremely tall, it's not very nice to see people crossing the street to avoid you at night. How is making statistical inferences using my height any more justified than making statistical inferences using my race?

The notion of justifiable discrimination will take you to a very scary place if you apply it consistently.

Spoiler: Asian males, who have higher IQs and commit less crime than white males, earn more than white males.

As no white male on HN has ever worked with an Asian male, this will of course be a total shock to all readers.

How about torsion dystonia? Increased IQ can be observed before the onset of the disease, even when matched to comparable members of the same population.

What evidence would falsify your position?

Heritability of traits can be measured by twin studies. Some people have spent quite a lot of time doing this for IQ. Others have even identified some of the genes that are correlated with high IQ, TOR1A being one of the more interesting ones. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this area of research.

Regarding population genetics, I don't think it matters as much as people seem to think. Han Chinese are short, but Yao Ming is tall, and there's no contradiction in that.

Regarding Urbit, I certainly hope that it isn't heritable, or for that matter infectious, because it seems totally opaque.

It would be a real shame if the next Larry Page or Bill Gates decided to live in a barrel instead of founding a company because of this sentiment. A happy home and middle-class parents aren't a bad thing. In fact, they're so good that everyone should have them. You should apply your advantages strategically in order to affect change[0] in the world, and while doing so may not be courageous, squandering the effort spent on raising you is a waste of time and resources that helps nobody.

I live with a gardener who makes just above minimum wage[1] who is planning to start his own business. For him not to do so would be a gigantic waste of his skills, as he's far and away the most competent employee of his current boss. He's courageous because he's going to take a carefully managed risk in order to fully use his skills, even though his life is reasonably comfortable as is, and by doing so will fractionally lower the cost of living for all the residents of the apartment blocks he plans to service[2].

When people say "pursue your passion", what they really mean is "you are too good for your current job, and staying there is a waste of your good fortune". It's a goad to prod the elite into working and climbing long after they've passed the point where they can live for the rest of their lives on savings and investments, and to push the comfy middle class to go through the extremely uncomfortable process of starting a business.

Having the audacity and wealth to single-handedly eradicate polio is also a privilege, but Gates is currently trying to do it, because society taught him that he'd be a good person if he did good things. Turning around and denouncing entrepreneurs as privileged will make for fewer entrepreneurs, even if it's true, in the same way as calling Gates a privileged do-gooder sufficiently loudly might stop his charitable work in Africa.

[0] hopefully positive change, and hopefully change that uplifts others

[1] minimum wage here is quite a bit higher than in the US

[2] by raising supply; I'm not an economist, correct me if I'm wrong here

The two more or less inescapable identities are "human" and "yourself". I read this essay as saying that you should embrace both of these, and nothing more.

A socialist, a trade unionist, and a Jew are still all people. You should be a human being, and treat others as such. If your identity is, as per your example, "right-wing", "German", "Christian", "pagan", "working class", or "member of the NSDAP", then you may not feel that your shared humanity is more important than your other identities.

I don't know which reading is correct, but I prefer mine.