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It's extra hard because the poor have less information available to them. When Clojure was released, I saw it as my opportunity to become a real-life Lisp ninj

It's extra hard because the poor have less information available to them. When Clojure was released, I saw it as my opportunity to become a real-life Lisp ninja, on a platform in wide deployment. How did Meem see it? Oh, that's right, she didn't. Because she was sewing shirts instead of reading "Beating the Averages."

buro9 13y ago
It's not just information that inhibits the poor. The poor struggle. Daily. In that struggle a truth emerges: Struggle is all you've known, it's what you knew yesterday and it is what you will know tomorrow. For the poor struggle, hardship and despair dull the senses and the reality of the present stretches out before them. There is no future, there is just more of the present forever and ever. What I feel those with privilege cannot comprehend is that words like aspiration, phrases like social mobility, are so alien that they are meaningless. If you're aware enough to have been angry, you're probably also aware enough to realise the stupidity of throwing yourself against the tide of the world. And so you accept and endure. You can provide information but without hope and belief that change is possible to their lives, and that the struggle can be overcome, information is worthless. Food and shelter for a day are the only things you can offer of value.
- tucaz 13y ago
  I Think this the best comment I read here at HN. Thank you
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  which may be why terrorism is a predominately educated middle class affair. But accepting your argument, I cannot give in to nihilism. Take the children out of the factories, put them in school, build libraries, train teachers, and wait twenty years to see a vast difference. If you are a military dictatorship that uses your twenty years to educate the country and drag it by the bootstraps into the global upwards pastures, you may retire with your ill gotten gains on a beach somewhere with our thanks. Get rich and change nothing I want you hunted down with dogs.
  - buro9 13y ago
    It isn't nihilistic. It's just really important to understand how poverty feels, and how it is akin to a trauma that never ends, otherwise how can we in the West ever actually use what influence we have to change.
    - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
      I think we are agreeing - but it's frustrating to have to wait for technical solutions to problems we could solve with pure political will. (For example I see the biofabrication of meat as a technical solution to the awful statistic that cows in Europe recieve a daily subsidy of two dollars while around 1 billion humans globally live on 1 dollar a day)
- weirdkid 13y ago
  I want to print this on cards to hand out every time I hear some jackass equate poor with lazy.
- hepek 13y ago
  This sounds like a quote from Down and Out in Paris and London

buro9 13y ago

It's not just information that inhibits the poor. The poor struggle. Daily. In that struggle a truth emerges: Struggle is all you've known, it's what you knew yesterday and it is what you will know tomorrow. For the poor struggle, hardship and despair dull the senses and the reality of the present stretches out before them. There is no future, there is just more of the present forever and ever. What I feel those with privilege cannot comprehend is that words like aspiration, phrases like social mobility, are so alien that they are meaningless. If you're aware enough to have been angry, you're probably also aware enough to realise the stupidity of throwing yourself against the tide of the world. And so you accept and endure. You can provide information but without hope and belief that change is possible to their lives, and that the struggle can be overcome, information is worthless. Food and shelter for a day are the only things you can offer of value.

tucaz 13y ago
I Think this the best comment I read here at HN. Thank you
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
which may be why terrorism is a predominately educated middle class affair. But accepting your argument, I cannot give in to nihilism. Take the children out of the factories, put them in school, build libraries, train teachers, and wait twenty years to see a vast difference. If you are a military dictatorship that uses your twenty years to educate the country and drag it by the bootstraps into the global upwards pastures, you may retire with your ill gotten gains on a beach somewhere with our thanks. Get rich and change nothing I want you hunted down with dogs.
- buro9 13y ago
  It isn't nihilistic. It's just really important to understand how poverty feels, and how it is akin to a trauma that never ends, otherwise how can we in the West ever actually use what influence we have to change.
  - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
    I think we are agreeing - but it's frustrating to have to wait for technical solutions to problems we could solve with pure political will. (For example I see the biofabrication of meat as a technical solution to the awful statistic that cows in Europe recieve a daily subsidy of two dollars while around 1 billion humans globally live on 1 dollar a day)
weirdkid 13y ago
I want to print this on cards to hand out every time I hear some jackass equate poor with lazy.
hepek 13y ago
This sounds like a quote from Down and Out in Paris and London