Resident Contrarian

Big fan of Tom Gamon's Programming is a Losers Game (Sept 2020)[1]. Tom's short post was a very welcome introduction to the matter for me, very open ended, & Ben Hosking here elaborates much more clearly specific concerns & outlooks.

[1] https://tomgamon.com/posts/a-losers-game/

Both Ben in this "Software" and Tom Gamon in "Programming" anchor their arguments to Charles Ellis, & his example of tennis as a game where the talented score points, and amateurs inflict self harm.

Both of these articles espouse a similar, conservative minded viewpoint that maintaining & supporting is a more key or perhaps just more-absent activity than progressing. They warn that devotion to progressing/going out and winning often brings about doom & trouble. They speak to us of the hazards about, that the paths available to the software's future becomes confined or the ground unsteady if we don't take our software environment seriously.

I'm both very sympathetic to this software-conservatism , because (a) legacy systems/the past rule so much of the software world, and (b) we certainly do make confounded mistakes a lot, but also deeply worried about what it's done to our moral character. Software isn't eating the world anymore: it's past that now, that's past tense. Software has eaten the world. At almost everyone company you go to your world will almost entirely be already consumed by mounds of existing software, upon which the company is most often busy accreting new layers of software that…

>Lonely? Make strong friendships! Spend your time with other men who like you and enjoy your company and validate you.

The author has a great followup comment that should really be part of the original article that addresses this line of thinking exactly. Pasted below:

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I want to have a dialogue about this, because I think it's important in a couple ways. To start, I agree in sort of generic terms that a lot of the Incels must be whining without doing anything to fix it; that's just necessary.

But your scenario here for them, parsed, seems to be making a lot of assumptions I'm not sure are true. One thing I get told a lot when I talk about dieting/obesity is that everyone WANTS to be thin; if it were possible/doable/easy then we'd expect to see a bunch of obese people losing weight, and we don't, so it would be wrong to treat all obese people as lazy fat slobs. Basically that they deserve sympathy and the assumption should be that even if they aren't trying real hard at the moment, that what they would have to try is real hard, and it's more complex than just writing them off as voluntarily broken.

In this case I'm not sure what you are doing is the same, but it feels similar. It's something like "Yes, there's a problem - why don't they just change their personality, looks, and conversational abilities?". If that's easy, great; if that's even something someone can do, fine. But I'm not sure it's that simple; I don't know that many people who have drastically…

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Who I am:

I'm the Resident Contrarian, a known blogger with an audience of thousands-to-tens-of-thousands per post and a half-dozen HN frontpages. I'm recommended by Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten and Ben Kuhn's blogroll, and I've been linked by Marginal Revolution and Andrew Sullivan's The Weekly Dish.

My last two years were spent at a YC healthtech company creating high-quality outward-facing content (blog posts, profiles, website copy, etc) and I'm looking for new opportunities doing the same.

You might have read:

On Being Poor-ish

https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-the-experience-of-being-poor-ish

Employee Value Prop and Hiring

https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/a-limited-interest-article-on-employer

A Defense of Q-tips:

https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-the-exciting-subject-of-earwax

> But if you put aside those examples, I need to know what they did, and where they are, and what they are capable of doing.

Interestingly enough, the article I linked in my previous comment[0], and another one by the same person[1], have answers to your questions. Also, that particular person managed to get out of poverty eventually, and wrote a follow-up post on that[2].

So that's the guy who was /really/ poor, and struggled for a while. He has some insight on what it is like and why it is so hard to get out. I guess he'd be infuriated by this patronizing "hey, that's easy, why don't you just...", even though he does not write it out loud.

Let's have more compassion to those who are less lucky than us, fellow stranger, shall we?

[0] https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-the-experience-of-being-poor-ish

[1] https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/what-does-shitty-job-mean-in-the

[2] https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-being-rich-ish-lessons-i-learned

There was a popular submission to HN a few years ago that really opened my eyes to how having a low income can cause problems to compound, making things exponentially worse.

An example the author gives of this is car problems: people with low incomes often have older cars that are more likely to have issues. If their car breaks down, there's a chance they can't afford repairs, which means they're unable to commute to work. Perhaps because of this, they choose to stop making water bill payments or buying as much food while saving for repairs. Everything is very precarious—you're essentially one or two unlucky incidents away from ruin. That, to me, is what it means to "be poor" in the US.

https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-the-experience-of-being-poor-ish

This was a pretty good read, if somewhat depressing.

One optimistic thing I've noticed with respect to cheap (close-distance) travel is that personal electric scooters and bikes are becoming more noticeable on streets and sidewalks. I own a scooter and have considered consolidating vehicles with my wife, since I ride my scooter to work (winters are the main drawback).

Transportation is called out specifically as a reason for dread in this terrific article https://www.residentcontrarian.com/i/32348260/transportation Hopefully small electric transport can help.