9 ms·

It's important that there be jobs for people without much education. Average education levels for women when Abe Lincoln was president was 2nd-4th grade level.

by Mz 9y ago

It's important that there be jobs for people without much education. Average education levels for women when Abe Lincoln was president was 2nd-4th grade level. People routinely quit school after 8t grade. Often, only people who wanted a serious professional career went on to high school. It is within my lifetime that we moved from more than half of all people living outside of cities to more than half living within cities. Not terribly long ago, most jobs were farm related in some fashion. I don't know what the solution is, but I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job as they are, without first getting more education. As society evolves, there tends to be upward pressure on how much education is needed to get even an entry level job. This is not merely assholery by the people running the bureaucracy or whatever. Things seem to genuinely get more complicated and take more skill. I think one big piece of the puzzle is that we need to bring back genuinely affordable housing. It has largely gone the way of the dinosaur. I think this puts enormous pressure on people, regardless of what kind of job they have. It cuts off a lot of avenues. But I seem to be howling into a void. Everyone seems to be discussing UBI and largely ignoring the fact that even if you cut everyone a check for some kind of basic income, if we don't solve some of our housing issues, you will still see growing numbers of people either homeless or crammed together like sardines in a space not intended to hold that many people.

linkregister 9y ago
I agree with you. I am also an advocate for (quality) boarding-house style accommodation in cities. I disagree that affordable housing is gone in rural areas; there is nothing wrong with renting a double-wide trailer, of which there is usually a good supply.
chillwaves 9y ago
The lack of affordable housing seems to be a feature, not a bug.
- malandrew 9y ago
  Elaborate? Do you mean in general or in cities?
jlarocco 9y ago
> I think one big piece of the puzzle is that we need to bring back genuinely affordable housing. It's impossible to solve affordable housing by constructing more buildings and regulating prices. The only solution is to decrease demand, and large scale UBI helps do that because it frees people up to move to cheaper cities without having to worry so much about finding a job there. There's a ton of affordable housing in the United States, the problem is the lack of jobs in those locations.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  The solution then is to work on advanced public transport and secondarily road network. This allows the metropolitan area to expand enhancing the availability of land to build affordable housing. (Don't get into a suburb trap though. Mixed use is best to reduce unnecessary traffic.)
  - posguy 9y ago
    Sprawling cities are really bad, you end up paving over and building atop your best farmland. Dense development is cheaper in both the short term & long term, if we remove zoning barriers to it we can have affordable, unsubsidized and non-rent controlled apartments in Seattle. Instead we mandate worthless parking be built, despite that it is extremely costly and goes unused quite often, while capping and limiting how large & tall buildings are, kneecapping sustainable, affordable housing.
- posguy 9y ago
  There is a huge difference between affordable housing, and building "Affordable" housing. Rent regulation causes prices for unregulated units to increase dramatically (cross-subsidizing regulated units). Is it better to have 100 units at $1000 a month each, or 33 units at $600 and 67 at $1200? Why do we still have archaic zoning that forces worthless parking to be built (sub-$0.50sqft parking vs $3-4sqft housing)? Fixing this alone would cut $150 to $300 a month off rent in many complexes, as it is another massive cross-subsidy that goes markedly unused in newer buildings. Lets not even touch on how zoning in nearly every city blocks high density development in smart areas (eg. adjacent to mass transit) and causes medium to low density, super expensive slum to be built. Who really wants a $600k 2 bed/1 bath home when a similar condo would be less than half the price on the same land? TL;DR: Zoning is killing our cities and causing horrid price increases. Kill zoning, keep fire code, watch housing prices stabilize.
kermittd 9y ago
On the education front why IYO are we actually stuck in a loop of credentialing instead of actual learning? Everyone is forced to take x amount of math, art, english etc. This really should be done at grade school not everyone needs Calculus I or a Contemporary modeling of Shakespearean characters.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  The problem is, that unlike vocational school, students cannot really be trusted they know what they want or need. Additionally some level of general knowledge is needed as a fallback. The solution is to fast forward through the easy parts, do not block it. The trouble then becomes managing mixed age classes.
  - kwhitefoot 9y ago
    > The problem is, that unlike vocational school, students cannot really be trusted they know what they want or need. Neither can anyone else be trusted to know what the students want or need. At least it looks like that these days.
    - kermittd 9y ago
      This may be a cop out but I would say I agree with both of you. Students may not know for sure, but nor does the education bureaucracy. For my part I'd far rather student choice!
      - sokoloff 9y ago
        I wouldn't, any more than I'd let my 6 & 8 year olds choose their food entirely. I'm fiercely independent and libertarian, but I believe that a basic level of education is sufficiently important to a free society that it's worth curtailing that freedom to mandate certain things (or mandate by default with an opt-out process, which is pretty close to the condition today).
        9y ago
Consultant32452 9y ago
>I don't know what the solution is, but I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job as they are I'm less concerned with what people's feelings are than I am about results. The problem here is the minimum wage. We send people to sub-par schools in shitty areas, denying them the ability to get the skills to be productive. Then we require employers to discriminate against them if their productivity is insufficient to justify the minimum wage. Without the minimum wage that abysmally educated person would be more likely to get some amount of productive work and learn skills which would make them qualified for other jobs with higher pay.
- aplummer 9y ago
  > Without the minimum wage that abysmally educated person would be more likely to get some amount of productive work and learn skills which would make them qualified for other jobs with higher pay. Wow that is a very controversial opinion. With a higher minimum wage, that person would have disposable time they could use for whatever they want, including study.
  - kgc 9y ago
    I think you're making the assumption that the person you're talking about would get the job without being out-competed by someone else? Higher paying jobs have more competition.
    - eastWestMath 9y ago
      Relatively higher paying jobs have relatively more competition. The lowest paying jobs (minimum wage) will always have the least competition.
      - erikbye 9y ago
        This does not seem to be a universal truth. Time and again I see news stories of grocery store type jobs (or McDonalds) getting hundreds of applicants.
pavement 9y ago
bring back genuinely affordable housing Housing is not entirely the problem, it's the commute to work. People will still have places to be, even with basic income. That, and the depersonalization of cookie-cutter homes. Getting into or out of a city is this recurring nightmare, of feeling trapped in a car or cramming into a train compartment with 250 other people. We know how to fund, develop and create residential neighborhoods, but the interconnect with commercial and industrial zones, as lives change across decades becomes the challenge. People resist being packed together in stifling ways, and rightfully so. Some people hate the claustrophobia of cities, and some people chafe at simply having neighbors. Very few people would advocate for randomly assigned neighbors, if random includes ex-convicts for violent crimes, which becomes a reality in large cities. If it were as simple as just building many reasonable houses, and bringing any people into them, to meet the needs of anyone who wants a place to live, this would have been solved a hundred years ago.
- ehnto 9y ago
  I think you may have misread. The parent comment mentioned housing as an issue because people with even normal incomes are struggling to afford housing. That has nothing to do with the commute, although I totally agree that commuting for work is its own very serious proble.
- posguy 9y ago
  Build denser neighborhoods, eliminate the need for long commutes in general. Commuting is not adding value to our economy, it is just a large money pit that we throw gas, maintenance, and tax dollars into. The concept of low-rise residential & commercial is very recent, and was a reaction to the cold war (eg: lets spread out, nukes can't kill us all then!). You end up with sprawling burbs covering your best farmland, and a crapton of infrastructure to maintain at great expense. If it weren't for federal infrastructure subsidies covering the up front capital for infrastructure, most suburbs would not exist. You can build dense, multi-story complexes with good insulation and seperation, were it not for running into your neighbors at the mailbox, you'd hardly see them at all. Most buildings built from 2002 on in Seattle are of this caliber, and having put up walls before, stapling some insulation between isn't that hard or expensive, and is worth every dollar if you plan to live there.
Mikushi 9y ago
> Everyone seems to be discussing UBI and largely ignoring the fact that even if you cut everyone a check for some kind of basic income, if we don't solve some of our housing issues, you will still see growing numbers of people either homeless or crammed together like sardines in a space not intended to hold that many people. And you seem to miss the fact that with UBI you have no incentive to live and stay in an expensive area. For the deposit amount on an average house where I live I would cover 80% of the cash price of a bigger house country side. But you know, I'd have no work. The problem is not housing, the problem is cramming all the work in cities. My last 3 jobs could've been done remotely, I asked and was always denied even while offering to take a pay cut. I and many like me despise living in cities, we do not live there by choice. I've slightly moved out of a big one (London) but still live/work in the outer rim where housing is a dream far away, even on a way above average salary. Give me UBI and I quit my job to settle country side tomorrow, so would my wife. So would a few of my colleagues.
- dagw 9y ago
  Give me UBI and I quit my job to settle country side tomorrow, so would my wife. So would a few of my colleagues. If you're a halfway skilled programmer you can scrape together the equivalent of what you'd get on any sort of realistic UBI doing small freelance jobs while living in the country side.
  - geon 9y ago
    And going freelance is scary without some kind of economical safety net. Like ubi.
    - bicubic 9y ago
      Bingo. All of these 'but you can work remotely' suggestions are non starters to anyone who isn't already relatively wealthy, because they carry immense risk. If there was a serious safety net that guaranteed a decent quality of life, a significant portion of people would be taking on those options and leave the city centers.
dvdhnt 9y ago
> I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job as they are, without first getting more education. Speak for yourself, cowboy. It's ironic, considering how affectionate HN claims to be towards "disruption" and the many of us who have learned by doing, that this comment exists here. We should not make arbitrary judgements as to what someone else deserves, especially in regards to feeding his or her family, by applying our own sensibilities so broadly.
- malandrew 9y ago
  No one, including everyone on HN, self taught or otherwise, "deserves" a job. Jobs are earned. You need to demonstrate that you can provide value to someone else directly (freelance) or to someone else's value producing firm (employment). The exchange of value (goods and services for goods, services or a tool that can be exchanged for either, money) is the foundation for why jobs exist in the first place. Without the exchange of value, the only job that exists is providing for yourself.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Opportunities for less skilled workers have been dwindling, though. Not because the job isn't being done, but because the work has been shipped overseas so the rich could increase their profits. It's not all due to automation. If a society does not provide an individual the potential to live a comfortable life, the individual has no incentive to help that society.
  - true_tuna 9y ago
    Your choice of vocabulary creates a false choice and a logic trap. Please consider some re-framing. Everyone deserves to be part of society. Everyone ought to have the chance to contribute to the extent they can. No one deserves to be thrown away and forgotten. Example: My wife's uncle can't hold a job and requires assistance for basic life tasks like figuring out how to live on his own. He wakes up everyday at five, takes the bus to the hospital and works as a (volunteer) greeter. He is not capable of a lot of tasks you'd associate with the idea of a job, but the work he does benefits society (makes the world better) it also benefits him to be able to give back. Have you ever walked into a place and had no idea what to do next? Have you ever benefited from someone calm and welcoming who provided a quick hello and simple directions? Have you ever felt lost and just needed a human to help the littlest bit? There's room for a lot more humanity in the world I see around me. I don't know if there's strictly a financial need, but it would sure make the world a better place. But back to my uncle by marriage: His work and his maintenance of basic needs are decoupled. I would argue that he deserves both. I don't know what you deserve or what you've earned or the relationship between the two. Let's just remember not to throw people away as we plan the future we'll all live inside.
egh5oon 9y ago
Life and the universe don't owe us anything. This concepts of "deserve" comes from some monotheistic religions and it's been called Just World Fallacy. > I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job Thankfully, a large number of people in the world support the idea of feeding the hungry in a way or another.
- Mz 9y ago
  I am currently homeless. I have, in fact, eaten at soup kitchens. I do everything in my fucking power to stay away from the free meal sites. They are so uniformly shitty and expose me to crazy people who are dirty and germy and a threat to my health and welfare to stand next to. Any dive eatery is vastly better for my health and welfare than the soup kitchens. I desperately want to figure out how to establish an adequate earned income. I am not pro Basic Income. You can keep your charity. It is almost never anywhere near even the very average, middle of the road quality of the cheapest fast food places. When free food is as good as what you relatively rich people are eating, then you can talk to me about how wonderful this impetus is. Until then, I would like a fucking adequate earned income, thanks. And I would like to see that standard applied more generally. People who imagine they are generous, good people are very, very often just justifying incredibly bad treatment of other people that they don't really believe deserve a real life, like they have. If they believed that, instead of giving charity, they would create jobs and build affordable housing. But, no, we can't do that. And fuck you all to hell to the poor schmucks ending up homeless because of the incredibly shortage of affordable housing. Y'all all must just be losers. It couldn't possibly be that society as a whole is all kinds of fucked up and you just happened to draw one of the excessive number of short straws.
  - ionised 9y ago
    > People who imagine they are generous, good people are very, very often just justifying incredibly bad treatment of other people To be honest, I find that people who genuinely believe that about themselves are oblivious to how utterly hypocritical and inconsistent they are as human beings. Some of the worst people in history have acted out of perceived righteousness.

by Mz 9y ago

linkregister 9y ago

I agree with you. I am also an advocate for (quality) boarding-house style accommodation in cities. I disagree that affordable housing is gone in rural areas; there is nothing wrong with renting a double-wide trailer, of which there is usually a good supply.

chillwaves 9y ago

The lack of affordable housing seems to be a feature, not a bug.

malandrew 9y ago
Elaborate? Do you mean in general or in cities?

jlarocco 9y ago

> I think one big piece of the puzzle is that we need to bring back genuinely affordable housing. It's impossible to solve affordable housing by constructing more buildings and regulating prices. The only solution is to decrease demand, and large scale UBI helps do that because it frees people up to move to cheaper cities without having to worry so much about finding a job there. There's a ton of affordable housing in the United States, the problem is the lack of jobs in those locations.

AstralStorm 9y ago
The solution then is to work on advanced public transport and secondarily road network. This allows the metropolitan area to expand enhancing the availability of land to build affordable housing. (Don't get into a suburb trap though. Mixed use is best to reduce unnecessary traffic.)
- posguy 9y ago
  Sprawling cities are really bad, you end up paving over and building atop your best farmland. Dense development is cheaper in both the short term & long term, if we remove zoning barriers to it we can have affordable, unsubsidized and non-rent controlled apartments in Seattle. Instead we mandate worthless parking be built, despite that it is extremely costly and goes unused quite often, while capping and limiting how large & tall buildings are, kneecapping sustainable, affordable housing.
posguy 9y ago
There is a huge difference between affordable housing, and building "Affordable" housing. Rent regulation causes prices for unregulated units to increase dramatically (cross-subsidizing regulated units). Is it better to have 100 units at $1000 a month each, or 33 units at $600 and 67 at $1200? Why do we still have archaic zoning that forces worthless parking to be built (sub-$0.50sqft parking vs $3-4sqft housing)? Fixing this alone would cut $150 to $300 a month off rent in many complexes, as it is another massive cross-subsidy that goes markedly unused in newer buildings. Lets not even touch on how zoning in nearly every city blocks high density development in smart areas (eg. adjacent to mass transit) and causes medium to low density, super expensive slum to be built. Who really wants a $600k 2 bed/1 bath home when a similar condo would be less than half the price on the same land? TL;DR: Zoning is killing our cities and causing horrid price increases. Kill zoning, keep fire code, watch housing prices stabilize.

kermittd 9y ago

On the education front why IYO are we actually stuck in a loop of credentialing instead of actual learning? Everyone is forced to take x amount of math, art, english etc. This really should be done at grade school not everyone needs Calculus I or a Contemporary modeling of Shakespearean characters.

AstralStorm 9y ago
The problem is, that unlike vocational school, students cannot really be trusted they know what they want or need. Additionally some level of general knowledge is needed as a fallback. The solution is to fast forward through the easy parts, do not block it. The trouble then becomes managing mixed age classes.
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  > The problem is, that unlike vocational school, students cannot really be trusted they know what they want or need. Neither can anyone else be trusted to know what the students want or need. At least it looks like that these days.
  - kermittd 9y ago
    This may be a cop out but I would say I agree with both of you. Students may not know for sure, but nor does the education bureaucracy. For my part I'd far rather student choice!
    - sokoloff 9y ago
      I wouldn't, any more than I'd let my 6 & 8 year olds choose their food entirely. I'm fiercely independent and libertarian, but I believe that a basic level of education is sufficiently important to a free society that it's worth curtailing that freedom to mandate certain things (or mandate by default with an opt-out process, which is pretty close to the condition today).
      - 9y ago

Consultant32452 9y ago

>I don't know what the solution is, but I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job as they are I'm less concerned with what people's feelings are than I am about results. The problem here is the minimum wage. We send people to sub-par schools in shitty areas, denying them the ability to get the skills to be productive. Then we require employers to discriminate against them if their productivity is insufficient to justify the minimum wage. Without the minimum wage that abysmally educated person would be more likely to get some amount of productive work and learn skills which would make them qualified for other jobs with higher pay.

aplummer 9y ago
> Without the minimum wage that abysmally educated person would be more likely to get some amount of productive work and learn skills which would make them qualified for other jobs with higher pay. Wow that is a very controversial opinion. With a higher minimum wage, that person would have disposable time they could use for whatever they want, including study.
- kgc 9y ago
  I think you're making the assumption that the person you're talking about would get the job without being out-competed by someone else? Higher paying jobs have more competition.
  - eastWestMath 9y ago
    Relatively higher paying jobs have relatively more competition. The lowest paying jobs (minimum wage) will always have the least competition.
    - erikbye 9y ago
      This does not seem to be a universal truth. Time and again I see news stories of grocery store type jobs (or McDonalds) getting hundreds of applicants.

pavement 9y ago

bring back genuinely affordable housing Housing is not entirely the problem, it's the commute to work. People will still have places to be, even with basic income. That, and the depersonalization of cookie-cutter homes. Getting into or out of a city is this recurring nightmare, of feeling trapped in a car or cramming into a train compartment with 250 other people. We know how to fund, develop and create residential neighborhoods, but the interconnect with commercial and industrial zones, as lives change across decades becomes the challenge. People resist being packed together in stifling ways, and rightfully so. Some people hate the claustrophobia of cities, and some people chafe at simply having neighbors. Very few people would advocate for randomly assigned neighbors, if random includes ex-convicts for violent crimes, which becomes a reality in large cities. If it were as simple as just building many reasonable houses, and bringing any people into them, to meet the needs of anyone who wants a place to live, this would have been solved a hundred years ago.

ehnto 9y ago
I think you may have misread. The parent comment mentioned housing as an issue because people with even normal incomes are struggling to afford housing. That has nothing to do with the commute, although I totally agree that commuting for work is its own very serious proble.
posguy 9y ago
Build denser neighborhoods, eliminate the need for long commutes in general. Commuting is not adding value to our economy, it is just a large money pit that we throw gas, maintenance, and tax dollars into. The concept of low-rise residential & commercial is very recent, and was a reaction to the cold war (eg: lets spread out, nukes can't kill us all then!). You end up with sprawling burbs covering your best farmland, and a crapton of infrastructure to maintain at great expense. If it weren't for federal infrastructure subsidies covering the up front capital for infrastructure, most suburbs would not exist. You can build dense, multi-story complexes with good insulation and seperation, were it not for running into your neighbors at the mailbox, you'd hardly see them at all. Most buildings built from 2002 on in Seattle are of this caliber, and having put up walls before, stapling some insulation between isn't that hard or expensive, and is worth every dollar if you plan to live there.

Mikushi 9y ago

> Everyone seems to be discussing UBI and largely ignoring the fact that even if you cut everyone a check for some kind of basic income, if we don't solve some of our housing issues, you will still see growing numbers of people either homeless or crammed together like sardines in a space not intended to hold that many people. And you seem to miss the fact that with UBI you have no incentive to live and stay in an expensive area. For the deposit amount on an average house where I live I would cover 80% of the cash price of a bigger house country side. But you know, I'd have no work. The problem is not housing, the problem is cramming all the work in cities. My last 3 jobs could've been done remotely, I asked and was always denied even while offering to take a pay cut. I and many like me despise living in cities, we do not live there by choice. I've slightly moved out of a big one (London) but still live/work in the outer rim where housing is a dream far away, even on a way above average salary. Give me UBI and I quit my job to settle country side tomorrow, so would my wife. So would a few of my colleagues.

dagw 9y ago
Give me UBI and I quit my job to settle country side tomorrow, so would my wife. So would a few of my colleagues. If you're a halfway skilled programmer you can scrape together the equivalent of what you'd get on any sort of realistic UBI doing small freelance jobs while living in the country side.
- geon 9y ago
  And going freelance is scary without some kind of economical safety net. Like ubi.
  - bicubic 9y ago
    Bingo. All of these 'but you can work remotely' suggestions are non starters to anyone who isn't already relatively wealthy, because they carry immense risk. If there was a serious safety net that guaranteed a decent quality of life, a significant portion of people would be taking on those options and leave the city centers.

dvdhnt 9y ago

> I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job as they are, without first getting more education. Speak for yourself, cowboy. It's ironic, considering how affectionate HN claims to be towards "disruption" and the many of us who have learned by doing, that this comment exists here. We should not make arbitrary judgements as to what someone else deserves, especially in regards to feeding his or her family, by applying our own sensibilities so broadly.

malandrew 9y ago
No one, including everyone on HN, self taught or otherwise, "deserves" a job. Jobs are earned. You need to demonstrate that you can provide value to someone else directly (freelance) or to someone else's value producing firm (employment). The exchange of value (goods and services for goods, services or a tool that can be exchanged for either, money) is the foundation for why jobs exist in the first place. Without the exchange of value, the only job that exists is providing for yourself.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  Opportunities for less skilled workers have been dwindling, though. Not because the job isn't being done, but because the work has been shipped overseas so the rich could increase their profits. It's not all due to automation. If a society does not provide an individual the potential to live a comfortable life, the individual has no incentive to help that society.
- true_tuna 9y ago
  Your choice of vocabulary creates a false choice and a logic trap. Please consider some re-framing. Everyone deserves to be part of society. Everyone ought to have the chance to contribute to the extent they can. No one deserves to be thrown away and forgotten. Example: My wife's uncle can't hold a job and requires assistance for basic life tasks like figuring out how to live on his own. He wakes up everyday at five, takes the bus to the hospital and works as a (volunteer) greeter. He is not capable of a lot of tasks you'd associate with the idea of a job, but the work he does benefits society (makes the world better) it also benefits him to be able to give back. Have you ever walked into a place and had no idea what to do next? Have you ever benefited from someone calm and welcoming who provided a quick hello and simple directions? Have you ever felt lost and just needed a human to help the littlest bit? There's room for a lot more humanity in the world I see around me. I don't know if there's strictly a financial need, but it would sure make the world a better place. But back to my uncle by marriage: His work and his maintenance of basic needs are decoupled. I would argue that he deserves both. I don't know what you deserve or what you've earned or the relationship between the two. Let's just remember not to throw people away as we plan the future we'll all live inside.

egh5oon 9y ago

Life and the universe don't owe us anything. This concepts of "deserve" comes from some monotheistic religions and it's been called Just World Fallacy. > I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job Thankfully, a large number of people in the world support the idea of feeding the hungry in a way or another.

Mz 9y ago
I am currently homeless. I have, in fact, eaten at soup kitchens. I do everything in my fucking power to stay away from the free meal sites. They are so uniformly shitty and expose me to crazy people who are dirty and germy and a threat to my health and welfare to stand next to. Any dive eatery is vastly better for my health and welfare than the soup kitchens. I desperately want to figure out how to establish an adequate earned income. I am not pro Basic Income. You can keep your charity. It is almost never anywhere near even the very average, middle of the road quality of the cheapest fast food places. When free food is as good as what you relatively rich people are eating, then you can talk to me about how wonderful this impetus is. Until then, I would like a fucking adequate earned income, thanks. And I would like to see that standard applied more generally. People who imagine they are generous, good people are very, very often just justifying incredibly bad treatment of other people that they don't really believe deserve a real life, like they have. If they believed that, instead of giving charity, they would create jobs and build affordable housing. But, no, we can't do that. And fuck you all to hell to the poor schmucks ending up homeless because of the incredibly shortage of affordable housing. Y'all all must just be losers. It couldn't possibly be that society as a whole is all kinds of fucked up and you just happened to draw one of the excessive number of short straws.
- ionised 9y ago
  > People who imagine they are generous, good people are very, very often just justifying incredibly bad treatment of other people To be honest, I find that people who genuinely believe that about themselves are oblivious to how utterly hypocritical and inconsistent they are as human beings. Some of the worst people in history have acted out of perceived righteousness.