^ you underestimate the circumstances of the current generation of protesters. They have been trashed on the economic scrap pile since entering the workforce, not had jobs having a pick of vocations like the boomers.
Maybe I'm out of touch, but I really don't get this whine. Economic progress is so simple it is stupid. Create something of value that someone else is willing to pay you for. End of story.
I hear you, there is a spectrum of oppression, and I am not at all sure that any US citizen is truly oppressed and without opportunity.
That said, there does come a time when pulling oneself up by ones bootstraps involves burning the lords house and seizing his lands.
There are likely opportunities in the USA; however, let's say if some one grows up poor and with a lot of poor values being passed down by parents, then that kid is going to have to figure things out on his own and get his shit in order and that kid is not going to have as many opportunities to screw up as some rich kid that fucks around until he is thirty or forty and daddy can just put him into a position of power and influence.. etc.
So, surely starting points are relevant in regards to how much hard work might need to be carried out and still very difficult odds, yet i would still say if you are dealt a rough hand, then surely you have to figure out how you want to proceed by attempting to figure out some way to get ahead and be self-sufficient, or sure it can also be tempting to party every day like it is 1999.. and there are some folks who choose to do that and seem to have few if any goals (beyond just saying that they wished that there circumstances were better.. and likely to even be in a worse situation if they continue to party for the next 10-15 years after graduating from high school (presuming graduation might be a threshold to adulthood that may or may not be accomplished) rather than buckling down).
Where as the poor don't have that bailout opportunity, sure it sucks but the idea of it being owed to you (which seems to be an idea spreading right now) seems a bit wild. The reason I invest and work is to be able to have a surprise fund for my children. I want to give them an inheritance that lets them quit their jobs if they have ended up doing something they hate and live their dreams. That's just me, I completely understand the desire to spend wealth on lambo's and babes.
Sure there are some people who want freebies, but you should not be believing spin bullshit.
People would like to be able to have some fairness, including fairness in opportunities, and that does not necessarily mean taking away from the rich. I was not arguing that rich fucks should not be able to bail out their loser kids, even if I had been making an attempt to describe that poor people are going to have more challenges.. sure I had been stating the obvious in some ways.
Largely, we do not seem to disagree, kingcolex, even if we might be expressing some of the details slightly differently.
By the way, I do not believe in universal basic income.. that seems like a bullshit way to disincentivize people, but I do believe in some universal basic rights such as access to some basic health care, basic education opportunities and having a social security system that allows for retirement by a certain reasonable age and things like that.
Sure we might argue the fuck about some of the details and fairness of some systems and the need for incentive based systems in society, but the fact that some people might start out from better positions than others and the fact that some people might even have talents for screwing up their starting advantages are definitely going to play out in a lot of ways, and sure frequently the two homeless losers in their 50s have gotten there from quite different paths, but it may be a lot easier to attempt to at least provide some basics that everyone have access to instead of figuring out the extent to which we might be able to redeem someone in their 50s... to get them to start over again when they have actually gotten into a pretty bad place but we cannot necessarily assume if or how much they screwed up until maybe we try to get to know their history and figure out if there is some way to get someone like that to potentially be functional in some kind of way or do we just leave them in the street by the time they get to that point? (answers are going to vary).
I am surely not saying that I know the answers because that is not my area of specialty, but sometimes there might need to be some input from various stakeholders in the community, when trying to figure out various ways that unequal starting points are sustainable or if there are some ways to improve... and how much of a role does government have in that, and are our elected representative performing their duties in terms of building and carrying out the services of some of those social systems.
