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Notes -
I think this is probably much easier said than done. You know how it's pretty easy for the average kid of 7 or so to learn a new language, but it's much harder for most adults?
If you grow up in the hood, by the time you develop any sort of adult-style self-awareness, you might already be fucked because you just spent your most formative years getting conditioned in really unproductive ways.
Add on top of that there is the violence that is common in the hood. It's probably pretty hard to focus on productivity if you regularly hear gunshots when you're lying in bed at night. I think that high levels of exposure to violence also tend to put people into a near-permanent fight-or-flight mode in which it is difficult to focus on any future further ahead than maybe tomorrow.
I think that some social justice activists are really doing the wrong thing by making it seem like it's all the fault of the white man, when in reality many of the problems of black communities are mainly caused by other black people.
However, I'm not going to blame some kid who grew up with a single mother in a violent inner city neighborhood for not having the sort of psychology and life skills that the typical kid who grew up in a healthy family in a safe neighborhood will tend to have.
I think you're making his position a little too strong. First, he never said it was easy. Secondly, there's no guarantee of success for anything you do in life, but you try and seize the opportunities that are available to you, and if they aren't there, you do your best to create them. That's the formula for every community out there.
Like you, I wouldn't fault a kid who grew up in the hood for being the kind of person he is, beset with all the influences he grew up around. I fault him for not trying to do something about it. It's the same reason I roll my eyes when I see people complaining about "the economy" and how "poor" they are, but it's a really odd thing to have observed. I've never seen a self-described "poor" person who 'didn't' have a smartphone. These are the kinds of people who live to the maximum of their income, and have worse "lifestyle" inflation than the economy has "monetary" inflation. When you're eating your meals from a crockpot, working 2 jobs, and are paying your bills before you pay for anything else, you then have a 'right' to complain about how bad things are. I feel bad for impoverished communities who are casualties of the system despite their best efforts. But I have zero sympathy to give whatsoever for the ones that don't even try.
A smartphone with internet access is table stakes for societal/economic participation these days, and doesn’t even cost that much, especially if you buy it used. Have you been to a third world country lately? Even poor tuk tuk drivers got smartphones.
Which is not to say the people you describe don’t exist. Just that having a smartphone isn’t a great identifier for them.
Regardless of how hard you’re trying, it’s legitimate to complain that the economy is worse now by giving you less in return for the same amount of effort as you’ve put in before.
Your life isn't going to end without blowing your payday the latest and greatest.
Not if complaining about it comes at the expense of your willingness to participate in fixing it, which let's be serious here for a moment, most people don't. Most people are spectators in their own lives as the days pass them up. They are not people who become vested in taking command of their own existence and do something to improve what's lacking in their lives.
That may well be the case, but is there a strong correlation between people who complain and people who work to improve their circumstances? Certainly some amount of people scrimp and save more, or work a second job, in order to adjust to changing economic circumstances, all the while complaining that this is now necessary for them to survive.
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I'm poor (particularly right now), and I don't own a smartphone — just a $8/mo. "Obamaphone" subsidized flip-phone that's something like a decade old.
I see someone watches Jesse Lee Peterson.
Poor people of course exist. Most of the people living the high life in the urban cities who burn their paychecks within a day of getting them are going to have a hard sell of it, in tying to convince me.
Never heard of him. I'm just disabled and living on various government handouts (and currently fighting with Social Security over my SSI due to issues from the COVID days, along with them counting among my assets a bank account that literally doesn't exist).
I'm going through a massive haggling of my own with the government at the moment. It's quite sad how the law protects criminal behavior from being exposed by those who would seek to do the right thing.
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Who said anything about it being easy?
I'm making an observation about the micro, not the macro. And macro observations should not be prescriptions. Statistically most people can't actually lose their weight, however that is terrible advice for an individual.
In the US it is feasible for one individual to make it out of the hood, is it realistic? No.
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Usually this is because adults don't need it. If I throw you in china or korea without google translate - you will learn fast. I know this because my father learned two languages at the age of 55 in the 90s when his job wanted for him to live in a different country.
A lot of adult immigrants who would really benefit from speaking good English struggle with it, though. Latinos can get by fine in most of the Southern US, but if you’re a 50 year old Cambodian or Turk or Russian you’d benefit a great deal from fluency in terms of both jobs and daily life, and yet those people often never learn good English. Before she died my 103 year old great grandmother still spoke in pretty broken English with a strong German accent after like 80 years in the US. And she wasn’t a SAHM, worked various retail and clerical jobs in the 60s and 70s but had limited progression because of language, would definitely have benefited from fluency.
I agree that extremely motivated people dropped into a totally foreign culture are forced somewhat to survive (although many do so barely to the level where they can buy food and work - if necessary - the most basic job) .
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