> I am certain they never intended to inspire a 12 year-old kid to find a better life.
i can't speak for everyone, but as one of the people writing tutorials and faqs and helping people learn to do things with free software during the period miller is talking about, that is absolutely what i intended to do. and, from the number of people i knew who were excited to work on olpc, conectar igualdad, and huayra linux, i think it was actually a pretty common motivation
as a kid on bbses, fidonet, and the internet, i benefited to an unimaginable degree from other people's generosity in sharing their learning and their inventions (which is what software is). how could i not want to do the same?
underwritten by the nsf, the internet was a gift economy, like burning man: people giving away things of value to all comers because if you don't do that maybe it's because you can't. the good parts of it still are
The author seems about a decade younger than me and "raised" isn't the word I would use for myself, but I doubt I would have made it if not for the friends I made and the things I learned that way.
The thing about pulling yourself up out of a bad situation is that you learn to be usually very deliberate in how you talk about it and what you talk about. People who've never really known anything but stability in their lives tend to make a lot of assumptions they're not equipped to recognize, so it's usually just better not to create the opportunity.
If you feel you've noticed an odd ellipticality in accounts like these, the vague sense of something going unsaid, it's this. If that's all you've noticed, better not to pry.
Well said, something I had not yet put to words.
It came up on HN recently, about how work is a place where it can be best to leave some things unsaid, because it invites assumptions about your character and capabilities that might not be true, or positive.
That isn't even unreasonable as a cultural norm, although it is that those who most firmly enforce it also cherish silly habits like saying "bring your whole self to work."
The expectation of not oversharing needs to be met by a commitment of not over-asking, but I suppose that's really too much to expect in an age so degraded that all the obligations across lines of social class are understood to run in only one direction.
I once heard, in a different century, that the "modal restaurant script" differed between the US and the UK in that in the former, the waitstaff asks the diners a bunch of (to a cultural outsider) overly prying questions, while in the latter, the diners ask them of the waitstaff. Still true? Never was?
Australian who has spent time living in the US: yes, the difference is still true today between how waiters at an Australian restaurant and servers at a US restaurant interact with customers.
Waiters wait. If you need anything you make eye contact and they come over.
Servers are overly friendly and will interrupt conversations to ask if the food is up to standard, etc.
I've always thought it was due to tipping. Servers need to be active and show they're being attentive in order to get tips.
> The expectation of not oversharing needs to be met by a commitment of not over-asking,
Nosy people are a fact of life, and their existence shouldn't invalidate norms against over-sharing in inappropriate contexts.
I haven't sought to argue either should override the other, but indeed exactly that both should exist in more balance than has lately been evident.
you can just… lie
Keep your identity small. https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
(Not saying I agree or disagree with the essay but it seemed topical)
Says the guy who gets into culture war arguments online all the time
I think the central takeaway of this essay is dead wrong, you should aim for the exact opposite. The fewer labels or identities you have yourself, the more strongly you hold on to them and the more fragile your personality. If the only thing you identify yourself by is your job and that gets taken away from you in a downturn, never to return, what's left? A lot of people who are in that situation and don't have other selves to identify with struggle strongly. On the other hand, people who identify with more facets of what makes them them have a lot of options to fall back on. You're not only your job, but you're also a parent, a child, an athlete, a hobbyist, etc. Even if you stop being one of those things, you keep being all the rest, and that gives fortitude and resilience.
If your self-image includes the structure of the world around you, or the behavior of people other than yourself, you'll run into problems.
I enjoy working with computers. I happen to work at a particular company doing computer things. Only one of those is an innate "what makes me, me" thing. Even if computers didn't exist, I'd still probably tend to gravitate towards things that are fun for the same sorts of reasons.
In this connection it seems fit to note that "I am someone who found ways to overcome the problems that I faced" is also a statement of identity.
Any quasi-public forum it's probably best to leave controversial and nuanced opinions on things unsaid especially under your real name. (But even under a supposedly anonymous handle, it's probably worth asking if you really need to post this.)
People with different life experiences should just be quietly written off due to the faulty assumptions they might make out of ignorance.
> If you feel you've noticed an odd ellipticality in accounts like these, the vague sense of something going unsaid, it's this. If that's all you've noticed, better not to pry.
In what context? Work acquaintances chatting over coffee at the office? Parasocial public discussions on the internet? Intentionally public discussions? Friends talking all night over drinks?
You give the impression here of having taken something I said quite personally. I hope I may be forgiven for not yet really understanding what or why. Likewise, my responses may be somewhat less on point for the distraction.
The account under discussion is attributed public speech on the Internet. In other contexts, other conventions apply. There are about as many such contexts as there are kinds of relationships between humans. That's about as general as I can really make it.
If you're asking for a recommendation, it would be twofold. First, if a question seems like it might be taken as nosy, try to find a way to reframe it, or don't ask it at all. Second, when someone seems to persistently misunderstand something you're saying or asking in a more personal than professional context, consider that they may be intentionally deflecting a question or subject which they consider inappropriate to address in that setting.
The bit I quoted seemed to be saying that curiosity and wanting to understand things are bad.
Maybe that can be off topic and so out of place at work, but in online arguments prompted by something intentionally made public?
I'm talking about behavior. What motivates that behavior isn't relevant.
A nosy question is nosy because it demands an answer to which the querent is not entitled. Whether that undue desire is motivated by curiosity, prurience, arrogance, pity, or simple fascination - and I have seen all of these, sometimes in combination - has no bearing on the effect of the question on the one so asked. The vice inheres in the asking, because that forces the choice between refusing to answer and arousing the ire of jilted entitlement, and giving you an answer you have already done much to suggest you are not prepared to understand.
Within acceptable error, everyone who ever tries to have this conversation from your side proceeds from here to umbrage at the idea their behavior within it is in any way either predictable or discreditable, owing to the purity of their intentions.
I faced nothing like the hardships the author did, but I'm nonetheless deeply indebted to people who took a young Linux nerd with an upbringing that was "no fun" under their wing and ignited a lifelong passion that became a very interesting career and a very interesting life.
So I'd like to add my gratitude to that of the OP to the wonderful mentors I've had over the years. I don't see eye-to-eye with all of them in 2024, but that in no way diminishes the tremendous debt of gratitude.
This is the kind of debt that's paid forward: when and where I can I try to pass some of this treasure along to younger hackers.
Thank you for a moving personal story @jimmyhmiller.
We are going to see a lot of children (and adults) raised by chatbots. Asking them for advice, confiding in them where real people don't seem safe, etc. Through the looking glass! Still, definitely better than asking Reddit for relationship advice
Red flags galore. You should divorce immediately. Not the asshole.
I do fear, in the long term, what happens to those chat logs?
Surely they will be used for training later on, and being anonymous doesn't always work out.
Will the viewer be more AI bots? Human employees? Law enforcement? A dump on 4chan?
not just training; they'll be used for background checks and targeted assassinations
What if I told you those chatbots are trained on Reddit?
Rough seas ahead, thats for sure
I wasn't raised (as a technologist) by the internet, but by cassettes, floppies, magazines and books. But we share at least one experience: the horrors of ndiswrapper.
20 years later, I recently tried to install Ubuntu on an old Intel MacBook Pro that I got somehow, and I realized that in 2024 you still can't install Linux on a laptop (at least, on laptop of a certain popular make) without jumping through hoops, due to, IIRC, lack of support for the particular Wifi chipset this computer uses.
I’m glad this author had an endearing experience.
I can’t say that I did. I’d blame “being raised on the internet” as a consistent contributor to a lot of negatives in my life. Certainly, I picked up a lot of the rage from people in the IRC circles I ran with, and like a parrot exhibited it in my personal life. Beyond that, the general degradation of IRL social skills.
I can say my life took a significant upturn once I extricated myself from that community.
I’d say the thing is that the internet is filled with a lot of negative places, filled with people who literally can’t operate IRL. If as a kid you’re sucked into them, it can be detrimental.
There are online communities for all kinds of addictive activities. They offer perfect validation, and it's easy to lose track of how little you're actually doing in the real world or how few people you're interacting with face-to-face. Some people stop trying to meet others locally once they find their intellectual and emotional peers online. This can go on for years, and it's not something I'd recommend.
I interpreted this piece as focusing on how information is being made more accessible. People are taking complex textbooks and university-level knowledge and turning them into understandable tutorials and examples. Anyone who can break down and share complicated information has a valuable skill that really helps others.
cute article, whenever I hear about someone “raised by the internet” I usually think of a negative result but glad to hear this is a positive one
Agreed. I was expecting to read an article on something "ipad kids", but instead found a very inspiring and heart-warming article
Yea it was a similar situation for me. I definitely wasn't in poverty, but my family was a mess. I mostly hung out in my room on the internet and got away from it.
Expected something a lot more dark. But this sounds like the best thing that would be written under that heading. Probably because not too current-day
The part about why it happened seemed plenty dark.
Of course nothing on the internet is new, it just assumes a default culture and philosophy which is less prominent in real life. It would be interesting to pin early internet to a particular demographic. Is it 90s stem graduate students primarily in the US? Middle class engineers?
The earlier you go, the easier it is to pinpoint a single demographic (although not sure what's the point in doing that). But from '95 on, I'd say it's pretty misleading to point that to US or middle class engineers. Even in 95, it was already available to non-ranked university students in peripheric countries, and not just for those studying at engineering faculties. Although most web content at that time was related to porn (90%) and jokes (9%) and some other content (1% - probably stem and engineering?), but I don't know exactly in what philosophy that content is considered prominent and default. From 2000, it was accessible and even not too expensive for most middle class households by landline. From that time on, it was more about which demographic is not yet present... I think you had to wait e.g., another 10-12 years for mobile-first minors and for the idle retired people.
> It would be interesting to pin early internet to a particular demographic.
Well, what counts as "early"?
This says that fully half of US adults were online by y2k: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...
This is titled "Profile of computer owners in the 1990s" with data points for 1990 and 1997: https://www.bls.gov/mlr/1999/04/atissue.pdf
I would instead say, as many have, that the entire wonder of the young Internet was that it couldn't be tied to just one demographic.
I just don’t think that’s true. The sampling of early internet users and writers is not the general population.
Nor did I say that it was. You've assumed an equation between "not just one demographic" and "the general population" where none exists.
There are histories in my bookshelf downstairs that I can recommend here. If I don't happen by before the edit window closes on this comment, I'll mention some titles in a reply.
And with this black and white thinking you won’t find any trends or patterns anywhere in real life.
To rephrase the question, who was influential on the internet? What biases and ideals were on the internet due to those selection effects.
For example, the internet was very secular and perhaps nihilistic. Where does that come from.
It is a remarkable reading of my comment, in which I identify where black-and-white thinking has led your analysis into error, that can mistake that criticism for the error it describes.
It really isn't a simple question you're asking, is the problem. If I thought it needed less than a book to answer, why would I be about to recommend books?
I think the response was an uncharitable reading of my comment. Obviously you get 10 people together and you have all kinds of demographics even in the same neighborhood. The question is about which of many are dominant, or which are simply missing. I didn’t think that needed to be said.
> It really isn't a simple question you're asking,
I agree. I apologize for miscommunication and if you have any books to share please do.
It needed to be said because that question makes no sense in the situation of which you ask it. That any demographic or mix of same would necessarily be "dominant" is an assumption. As long as you keep that, no history I can recommend is going to help you, because read with that assumption they will also make no sense. (I'll still recommend them, of course; just that I don't see them doing you any good this way.)
The scare quotes are because I honestly do not understand what you mean by that term here; I think you and I might be speaking across an ocean, too.
We have to differentiate between the "young Internet" that existed before Eternal September and the internet that existed afterwards, which is just "young" relative to most current users.
The former was definitely an elite monoculture composed of primarily young, white, nerdy American college students and faculty. It would be correct to say internet culture, for better or worse, comprised the common interests and affectations of that culture.
Yes, that's true. After "Eternal September" the Internet for the first time had real cultural relevance, and this is important to take into account.
I grew up in a rural part of the United States. First got online in 1996 when I was 8 years old. The best thing that the Internet gave me was a way to talk to strangers from around the world and make friends with people who I would have never had a chance to interact with in person. In my 20s, it lead to real life friendships with people I had met online, which is really cool. I have used Couch Surfing to make friends in places I was traveling through. Lived in Australia for a while with a group of friends I met online.
20 years later, some of my closest friends are those I met in 97 in a MUD. I have other friends, of course, but it's notable that friendships have endured entirely online for twenty years.
Some of those friends I've talked to every day, or every few days, for decades, but I've only seen once or twice IRL.
Online friendships can be more durable than in-person ones. They aren't affected by physical changes and moves.
Yeah, they kind of start in the worst failure mode a friendship can have.
I played non-Steam CS in early 2000s and made friends there in a foreign country. Years later added to Steam, and continued staying in close contact. A decade later we both ended up at the West Coast and still chat daily to this day.
We even worked on projects and started some companies along the way.
I also grew up in a rural town, in Norway. I think internet made me more of a "world citizen", empathic to all kinds of people, than I would have been without. A small town can be quite unwelcome to those not like us.
But I wonder if some of that is lost now to those being "raised on the internet"? That things are too big. There were small forums, behave, as you know the avatars of everyone and they become your friends in a way. But on reddit, everyone is just faceless, I will never chat with the same person there again. So no sense of community, don't learn to feel empathy for others in the same way.
I also wonder how my choice of games affected this. Playing WoW, you had to behave, get friends, join a guild, and spent time with those. I got friends I've visited in other countries, and learned much about life elsewhere through this. But my irl friends playing FPS shooting games on xbox live? Mostly swearing and trash talk, never to see the players again after getting a new random pairing.
Good point. I also made friends on an RPG, Phantasy Star Online, and was active on a fan board. The message boards I posted on were in the thousands of users, so everyone knew everyone and I didn't want a poor reputation.
ndiswrapper was a big learning moment for me as well
Huh this could have been written by me. I am a kid of the internet. A place built on altruism.
a beautiful post. it's really nice when we get posts like this here, just personally i find it very meaningful.
> But sometimes the employees there would give me the employee discount, I guess they realized I needed it.
that is such a heart-warming thing.
i would maybe argue the following point in the article:
> People whose work was not aimed at me in the slightest.
idk. i think that part of the point of being open is being open to possibilities. obviously no one can see the far-reaching consequences of their work when they set out to do it. but sometimes, people have hopes, i think, that their openness will create possibilities just like this article is describing.
> resources like w3schools,
i remember a long time back - maybe 15 years ago - i would occasionally read w3schools, and i had a coworker who would kind of turn up their nose at that site, they were kind of a snob about it. i knew enough then to realize it wasn't the best site for everything but out of insecurity after that person said that, i stopped reading it too. but it helped me, too. and i'm glad it helped you. i am starting to re-revise my opinion of that site.
Kinda like me modulo the internet, I relied on Debian Sarge docs at 17-18, self taught. The DVD and the accompanying book/magazine was more than enough to deeping your knowledge.
Also, no project it's pointless. A Gopher/Gemini client in JimTCL with a basic cli interface a la cgo/gplaces? Go for it. A simple IRC client with a simple thread in the backgroup looking up for PING messages from the server ? The same. It wont be a killer application, but it wll be fun and you will learn a lot.
For better or worse, I too was raised by the internet and found kindness in random strangers. I try and return the favor today, in Discord servers and what not
It's fascinating how someone can feel like they've been "raised by the internet," almost as if it’s a parent in this digital age. I'm curious to learn more about how that experience shapes a person!
The internet is important in my formative year, taught me a lot, including how to program. You could say that my intellect is formed by the internet firehose.
I would like to say that my experience is largely positive, but it's hard to say that without the internet, I would actually be more capable. There are many things that the internet does well, but building young adults able to deftly navigate the real world is not one of them.
That said, the internet once again is now a source of information on how to be a responsible adults. However, there's no doubt that the internet is also a source of toxic information without good judgement and ruthless filtering.
I had way more conversations with random people on internet forums, IRC, etc. than my parents while growing up, and learned orders of magnitude more from those interactions... but they didn't feed, clothe, or house me so I would never claim I was raised by the 'net.
It's said in the same way as how the environment you grow up in shapes who you become, the internet being (one of) your primary environment(s) due to escapism or just amount of time spent in it.
And now it is even worse. Kids left for hours in front of a TV or tablet watching 30 different versions of baby shark.
To be fair this viewpoint should be included as well talking about being raised by the internet. People can have so very different experiences with the computers.
I sometimes wonder how much of a difference being raised on PC-s vs phones or tablets is there.
I am young enough that when I grew up phones started to become mainstream, and anecdotally people that started using PC-s before phones developed greater interest in technology later on.
In a way computers allow you to break stuff and learn how to fix it. Phones put you in a sandbox with a hose of internet content.
Back in the 80s kids were left for hours in front of a TV watching cartoons. I suspect this was the case even earlier that that too.
Some kids were, some kids weren't. I don't know how I ended up hacking with Linux and programming, while many others spent their time watching series and playing Nintendo. Not to say it is somehow a bad thing.
80s cartoons were better than regular YouTube on autoplay. Which is a Russian roulette of inappropiate content.
YouTube Kids is better in this respect, but more recent.
My kids get a fair share of unsupervised tablet time.
And they seem to know 10x of what I did at their same age.
My son is 9, watching endless Geometry Dash tutorials, and making his own levels. He loves it, and he loves to show me his work.
Tablet time will become an extension of your home life.
If you have good discussions - encouraging curiosity, fostering creativity, challenging their approach "Why did you design it this way?" - the kid and the algorithms will follow that lead.
Hey, it seems that we helped! B^>
This is not being raised by the internet. Being raised by the internet is getting all your mores and morals from the internet. Learning how to do everything you know through YouTube videos. Learning appropriate responses to situations through forums etc. A lot of us are raised by the internet.
Wild guess, Alabama?
The writer of the article was poor when young but at some point got internet working on an old computer and suddenly they would have access to learn a lot about information technology, thanks to mostly freely shared info. What I wonder... would they have reached out back then not just for computer info but also for psychological support and a way out of poverty, would that have worked? And why didn't they?
It sounds like computers were an outlet away from the hardship - something the author could sink into. I didn't get the sense he was in practical problem solving mode, but more coping and survival mode. Lucky him that this particular form of coping led to greener pastures.
He seemed indeed in survival mode. It's indeed unfortunate that in such situations, people, especially minors, cannot find to reach out for a practical solution for, for example, cheap food (leftovers in shops?) or good advice in such situation.
Here in the Netherlands we have the Kindertelefoon (Children’s Telephone), a free hotline for children to call and talk about anything. [1] I never called when I was young, but I think it’s great that such an initiative exists.
Even for adults, there are such initiatives, such as the Luisterlijn [2] and MIND Korrelatie [3].
[1] https://www.kindertelefoon.nl/
I really can't imagine these kind of initiatives not to exist on the other side of the ocean. From all i read here, i must assume so though.
There is nothing remotely similar.
Have you noticed it's only in our cities you seem to really hear about the homeless poor? It isn't the corollary of overall population distribution that it might intuitively look like.
I just read following are available throughout the entire USA so I guess there is some hope?
Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline. This hotline provides 24/7 support for children and adults concerned about child abuse.
National Runaway Safeline (1-800-RUNAWAY)
Boys Town National Hotline (1-800-448-3000).
Oh, I didn't say we have nothing that we could call a system, just that there's nothing remotely similar. There are some people that some of those don't fail, and one on that list with so pervasive a documented history of child sexual abuse among its caretakers that I'm honestly shocked if they still answer the phone - although if I recall correctly, Boys Town also has a history for giving kickbacks to judges in exchange for remanding children whose unpaid labor the organization then can exploit, so I suppose it's worth some money to them to take the calls. I might misremember, though; there are so many such stories, it's hard to keep them straight without checking. Churches also answer much of what need anyone does, most places this being small, poorly resourced local evangelical congregations. These also, in the form of the revelations around the conduct of the Southern Baptist Convention, have this year seen the breaking of a major child sex abuse scandal which has not yet ceased to ramify. There is no general oversight or coordination anywhere, and for entry into "the system" to result even in safe, much less beneficial, placement, is much more than anything else a matter of chance. And you only hear about homeless poor as a city problem because those who can't make it to a city end up imprisoned, dead, or maybe worse if they're young and attractive.
I was being a little hard on you earlier, maybe. If I'd lived a life in the environment of a northern/western-European style system of social welfare, it would also I think be easy for me to see something in America that looks vaguely similar and assume it must be much the same.
I took that as a rather arrogant sort of assumption, and might in that have earned the accusation of incharity that I earlier criticized. Specifically, I think I might have failed to account for how, to someone raised in a country that looks after its people, the situation in America might seem far too grim to easily credit. If I did make that error, I apologize.
> Have you noticed it's only in our cities you seem to really hear about the homeless poor? It isn't the correlate of overall population distribution that it might intuitively look like.
I don't see that claim anywhere in this comment chain though?
You keep reading me as if I mean to nitpick word by word and line by line. Please don't. I'm addressing the same questions the article does, and participating in the conversation to that end. Inventing minutiae over which to quibble does no one any good.
while it might have been theoretically possible.. it's not obvious to me that a kid growing up poor would know of that possibility, or know how to find that information.
Sometimes it's a matter of luck, like how he had met someone that knew about linux.
> What I wonder... would they have reached out back then not just for computer info but also for psychological support and a way out of poverty, would that have worked?
Joining someone in their hobbies is a much much smaller ask than having that same someone listen to (and maybe advise about) your problems, or having them provide career coaching / direct financial support.
One is "lets have fun together", the other is "please stranger, do me this huge favor".
> And why didn't they?
Knowing who to ask might be a bit much to ask of a kid. Even aside from asking for unreciprocated favors being generally not a thing most people do easily (or look on favorably).
I hope you are aware of your immense luck in life if you think a kid in a situation like this has agency of any kind, let alone access to resources to help them “escape poverty” as a minor.
You know why no-questions asked, free lunch programs for everyone are so hugely important for kids suffering from food scarcity? Often it’s because their shitty parents won’t even sign forms to get them free lunch.
Please educate yourself in what actual suffering looks like in this world.
Biweekly I work freely at an initiative in our city to help deliver food to the needy. I believe i know what poverty looks like. I'm not sure what this has to do with my question, probably it was ill formed, for which i apologize.
From how you all use the language, I suspect you and your critical interlocutors are speaking across the Atlantic to one another. Poverty in Europe looks a lot different from poverty in the US. It is not wise to assume much at all about one from the other.
You also failed in reading the article to notice that the author plainly did derive considerable psychological support from improving his skill. This was not explicitly stated but was trivially implicit, which I think not only for me may add to the sense you more pattern-matched on the article than read it.
For myself, I'm much more unfavorably impressed with your failure to notice the kid plainly was solving his own problems with computers and in life, and deriving from that success a stronger sense of personal agency which helped him approach the larger tasks that faced him.
It seems to me only a view of poverty which is paternalistic unto contempt could fail to attend this process which was explicitly described in the article, but then I am an American, and would not wish to risk commenting on a culture I don't understand well enough to form opinions about.
Like i wrote, the question was probably ill formed, but it is a question, not an opinion nonetheless.
I am a bit touched that it seemed like i did not read or understand the article, in fact i read the article in its entirety, as one of the first to comment, even to my surprise for such a compelling story. I understood he was getting support and feeling strengthened by his learning on the internet. I feel my questions seem to be taken as rhetorical. I feel it is still unanswered, even no hints towards how or why, only that 'i should not ask such questions'. I guess American culture is very different from European (can it even be seen as having a culture as a whole, there is so much diversity)... and hence my question not being appreciated?
Your reading comprehension is being interrogated because, in speaking of the article as though it did not say several of the things it says, you make such questions seem necessary.
You are being told that the question you asked is "not even wrong": it is without meaning and so not meaningfully answerable, because it could only be asked at all from such a fundamental ignorance of the American situation around poverty that to attempt to even explain the misapprehension would require more the scope of an undergraduate course than an HN comment.
I would not usually be so blunt, but in this case meeting an apparent need for directness seems worth the risk of a rude impression. If you need it put still more plainly, though, I'm afraid I cannot help you.
> in speaking of the article as though it did not say several of the things it says, you make such questions seem necessary.
What specifically does it say that is being ignored? That the author happened to find things he hadn't gone looking for directly?
> fundamental ignorance of the American situation around poverty
Are you claiming that terrible parents are uniquely American, in a way that is incapable of being explained to outsiders?
The idea that this man's past situation reduces to "terrible parents" is a better example than I could ever invent of why this conversation will end fruitlessly for you.
It isn't that I don't see the obvious and honest effort you're putting into trying to have it. I respect that. The problem still is, though, that you don't see the entire world of social support structures that have been so ever-present for you throughout your life that you're unable in any real way to imagine what a life in their total absence even looks like.
For you maybe this is the first time trying to talk across that divide. For someone like me, it's usually anything but. It's hard to fairly blame us for getting to learn some idea of how that usually goes.
Thanks
> You also failed in reading the article to notice that the author plainly did derive considerable psychological support from improving his skill. This was not explicitly stated but was trivially implicit
There's a difference between happening to find psychological support in something, vs asking for it directly. I assumed the comment you're trashing was asking about why they didn't do the second and only the first.
> For myself, I'm much more unfavorably impressed with your failure to notice the kid plainly was solving his own problems with computers and in life, and deriving from that success a stronger sense of personal agency which helped him approach the larger tasks that faced him.
So what you're saying is that it's a great personal failing to wonder why he relied on this happenstance rather than looking for those things directly.
> It seems to me only a view of poverty which is paternalistic unto contempt could fail to attend this process which was explicitly described in the article, but then I am an American, and would not wish to risk commenting on a culture I don't understand well enough to form opinions about.
You are showing utter contempt for someone who understood a described situation differently due to what you assert must me incurable ignorance borne of living in a society not your own. This seems rather different from refusing to comment on other cultures that you claim to not understand.
In fact this is the gist of what i wanted to reply, but i feel we were cross-talking anyways...
You demonstrate very well the same incharity with which you intend to argue I've read and spoken.
I live in a wealthy area in the US, we have many food banks and social support services, and still there are huge numbers of kids suffering from food scarcity. It always comes back to the parents. Even delivering food requires said parents to give a shit, which they don’t —- whether out of pride or sociopathic disdain.
My state is one a handful that provides free lunches and morning snacks to all kids, regardless of parent incomes. It’s essential for these children.
You are still conflating your experience volunteering with full knowledge of the problem.
I don't have full knowledge of the problem. Hence the questions. It's a pitty i only get answers in the sense of "you don't know what you are talking/questioning about".
Your entire comment is strange and snarky but this stuck out:
> You know why no-questions asked, free lunch programs for everyone are so hugely important for kids suffering from food scarcity? Often it’s because their shitty parents won’t even sign forms to get them free lunch.
So its no questions asked but "shitty parents" still have to sign forms? Most states with reduced/free lunch programs have income thresholds. Regardless, if you let your kid eat that crap, you're a "shitty parent", because its literally choked full of sodium and fake ingredients. If I lived in one of those states, I'd be asking for my lunch voucher in cash to go towards real food.
Indeed. People tend to reflexively assume that income thresholds are a good idea because it prevents people who don't need the program from benefitting, but you've got to think about the cost to the kids whose parents won't do that particular piece of paperwork. Just give kids food if they say they need it. You'll also save money on bureaucracy.
This is a separate question from the quality of the food. I will note that if you give out cash instead of vouchers you are giving the kid something that others can and will take away from them.
I think what they meant was that if there are eligibility requirements and such, paperwork is required and some parents won't do it. So no questions asked solves that problem. That's how I parsed it, at least.