You Pay The Price

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

You make your bet and you pay down the price….

Even if you don’t gamble, you do this every day.

People seem to be unaware of it, because when you make the wrong bet no one comes to pull the money out of your wallet. And heck, often you have no money. But you still pay for it.

Everything you do in life is a bet: your education, your job, what you choose to spend time on, what you choose to work at and make an effort at: all of those are bets. And whether they win or lose, you put down your bet first. As in, you put in your effort, the years of passion, the years of stress, the work, the time, and sometimes the (literal) money. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. Life is too uncertain to pretend it’s not a roll of the dice. Most of the time you take some bad with the good, even if everything goes according to plan.

Take my writing. Okay, it was a crazy bet, particularly when you consider English is not my native language and I was writing for a culture I took some time to understand. And given the chances of even getting published back then — which of course I didn’t know when I started trying, of course, because those things were completely opaque — were slim as heck. And yet… well, here we are. So I did get published and I did make a living from it. I even beat the odds on staying published, since the average career when I came in was 3 books. And all it cost me was years of lost sleep, getting up at five thirty to get a couple of hours of writing in before being mommy. And then years — years — of writing like a fiend while they were at school, and doing all my work before and after. And making as much for all that effort as an underpaid secretary.

On the other hand, even then there were things that came with it I didn’t expect and which were a price. Like being known. This is even harder with the blog, which is not something I even set up to do, it just sort of happened. I’d much rather not have my real name attached to it, you know? There is a danger and not just of harassment.

Oh, yeah, and my family paid all the price too, though honestly I don’t know if I’d have been the world’s best mother if I hadn’t been a writer.

Anyway, this is not an extended whine. It’s saying: I wanted something and I paid the price. And I was lucky enough to get it warts and all.

Mostly what I saw, in writers’ groups and with acquaintances as I came up from nothing to fledgeling to fan writer to semi-pro, to professional, I saw that mostly people got what they were willing to “pay” for. If they wrote a few stories and expected instant success and didn’t get it, well, they stopped. And those who were published, but something happened and the publisher didn’t want them anymore, they gave up and whistled as they went because they were free. And then some of us stuck to it, half in love and half in hate, but mostly because we wouldn’t be failures, I think. Oh, and because baby needed shoes.

I was thinking about this the other day as a friend was talking about the left’s obsession with millionaires and billionaires. Because he said none of them would pay in time and effort, in work and in worry and in everything that comes with it.

And it doesn’t even take billionaire and millionaires, because I remember when Dan had a traveling job and made more money than ever before or since, we weren’t willing to pay in the time he was away from home, in his not seeing the kids as much as he wanted to. And so it was a price that was too much for us, and we stepped down to a lower income and lower lifestyle, just so we could have the other stuff with that, like time with the boys.

But there are people out there whose tolerance for stress, for uncertainty, for possibility of loss… all of it is massively larger than average, and they can do things like change the world. Like start companies that aim to take humanity to the stars.

My hat is off to them. I’d stop sleeping, I’d never have a minute of peace.

But fortunately my ambitions don’t run that way either. They run to writing my stories and making enough to live on. And if by a miracle I make enough to pay off the kids’ student loans I’ll be so happy, it will be like my crowning achievement. That’s it.

The flip side on that is that I don’t claim anyone’s reward for their own efforts. I mean, I’d hate for someone to come up and say “I’m supposed to get published, because I worked just as hard as she did and I–“

Oh, and I’ll absolutely admit that there’s luck involved. But luck is just how far you go. If you want the minimum you can have it, even if the price is being a total b*tch to yourself. I’m here to attest to that. I was willing to work enough for my modest needs.

But that, in the end is why the left’s envy is so destructive.

They don’t pay the price. And they want the big reward. The one that requires insane work and risk tolerance and all sorts of sleepless nights and sacrifices of a healthy family life and everything else. But they want the millions or billions, and they are offended it wasn’t just handed to them.

And, given a chance they will destroy those people who are willing to take the risk and make the effort. And they’ll destroy all opportunities for people to do so. They will take away every opportunity for the world to be the kind of world where people take risks and improve everyone’s life (even if they do it for their own comfort and profit, they usually improve the world for everyone) while demanding all the rewards of all that work and effort.

I think it would be easier if they understood that everything has a price. That everything has to have a price. And that without people willing to pay that price all of us would be poorer.

But I don’t think there’s any way of getting through to them.

And so we’ll have to endure it. You takes your bets, and you pay the price. And our price is to live with spoiled children who will scream and pout all the way, and think they’re entitled to spend the money of those who make the effort to create and make and do.

And not let them stop us. Ever.

115 thoughts on “You Pay The Price”

  1. We had (well, my beloved had) to make a similar sacrifice. He was hired by a Fortune 5 company which lied through its corporate teeth about things like vacations and reasonable work hours. He quit after having to tell our son he had to miss a Saturday T-ball game, again, and then hearing, “Cats In the Cradle,” on the way to work. He felt guilty about, “letting the team down, until he realized he was the last member of the set-up team left.

    Mind you, our boy is a lot like him, but we’re still talking and seeing each other.

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  2. Well said Sarah! As I heard it, “You lay your money down, and you take your chances.” As I say about my book A Geek’s Progress:

    “Many books purport to tell you how to innovate, but most of us will never be Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates. I never had any interest in being among those folks. I just have always wanted, like most of us introverts who develop software, to be able to do a good job, making things better and getting a little recognition along the way. So if you’re a future high risk/high rewards entrepreneur, this book is not for you. It’s for the rest of us little people who just want to have a good life.”

    Or as I say in the book:

    “Feel free to become an entrepreneur though. We need successful entrepreneurs. Just don’t kid yourself. Most entrepreneurs don’t succeed despite the long hours and endless headaches. Also, even if you’re successful, don’t expect to get married until later in life—see Steve Jobs and Bill Gates—or expect to deal with divorce—see Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos.”

    The tragedies of human life are all centered on the seven deadly sins. Gambling and con games are built to exploit our greed. Communism/socialism is built on envy.

    The powers that be in our country have been hard at work to do destroy the Christian ethics our country was built upon, so they refuse to heed the words of the Bible. “Those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.”

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      1. As to Gates, we all have our niches in life. Steve Jobs was derided by many because he was no nerd like us. He did have a vision for how to make products that people liked using and driving the expertise of others to make it happen. Gates had a shrewdness for seeing value and, unfortunately ruthlessly, exploiting it. Just being able to create DOS didn’t mean you could turn it into a profitable business. Despite all that, he actually had more technical expertise than Jobs.

        Likewise Trump is the proverbial born on third base and think you hit a triple baby, but he managed to steal home and bring the two guys who drew walks after him with him.

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        1. Gates was one of the best judges of talent ever. That said, his mother was personal friends with Louis Gerstner at IBM when the decision to put MS-DOS into the IBM PC was made. No IBM PC, no Bill Gates Billionaire with a mansion und a yacht,

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        2. Gates did not create MS-DOS. It originated as a copy of CP/M-86 hacked up by a company called Seattle Microcomputer. Billzebub sold an empty promise to IBM, used the money to take control of Seattle Microcomputer and forced them to turn their hacked-up CP/M-86 into a product — without bothering to license it from Digital Research, or pay Gary Kildall a plugged nickel for his work.

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          2. Gates did not create MS-DOS.

            Sorry, I now see how what I wrote led you to think I was saying that. I meant that the actual creator of DOS didn’t have the business expertise to create a successful business using it.

            Gates was shrewd enough to tell IBM that he had an OS for them, then go out and acquire one to sell them. AND he was shrewd enough to only license it to them because IBM thought all the money was in the hardware. All very sharp dealings, but he didn’t steal it from Kildall. He legally acquired it. Gates is not somebody I would trust to sell me a cup of coffee, but he is smart and had a certain amount of technical savvy. His technical savvy wasn’t what made him a fortune. It was his slippery, but not provably illegal, business dealings.

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            1. Gary Kildall, founder of Digital Research and creator of CP/M and CP/M-86, would disagree. Gates did not acquire that hacked-up version of CP/M-86 legally, never paid anything to Digital Research for the stolen work, and got away with it because the Gates family knew a lot of sneaky lawyers.

              IBM initially tried to make a deal with Gary Kildall for CP/M-86, but they made demands he wouldn’t accept. Then Billzebub stepped in, promised them an OS that didn’t exist, used the down payment to take control of a small company that had modified a copy of CP/M-86 for their own internal use (a legal use), had them modify it some more, and sold it as a product (definitely not a legal use).

              In the 90’s, Microshaft outright stole Stacker. If you were to do a hex dump of the ‘drivespace’ files in MS-DOG 3.22, you would find the Stacker copyright strings still embedded in the binaries. Stacker sued, of course, but Microshaft’s lawyers kept the case tied up in court with endless delays for 8 years, until Stacker went bankrupt, then settled the case for chump change.

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              1. Yeah, I didn’t know all the details about Gates’ getting DOS. I just knew that he covered himself enough that Kildall wasn’t able to successfully sue him over it.

                STAC was one where he was caught dead to rights stealing the software by breaking the NDA he had with them that had allowed M$oft to “examine” it before acquiring STAC. The deal fell through, and he just outright stole the software, then tied them up in court for years. They eventually got their judgement after years, but, but by then progress had moved on, making the software obsolete. STAC went bankrupt and was eventually acquired by M$oft at rock bottom prices, thus ending any further litigation.

                Making any kind of deal with Gates is like signing a deal with Mephistopheles. Buyer/seller beware. Be very ware!

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      2. As Frank said, Gates had real technical skills. I used to be of exactly your opinion, that Gates didn’t build MS so much as buy it from other companies, until I read about one programmer’s experience working at Microsoft in the early days, when Gates was still personally running things. He had written a piece of code relating to date management in Excel, I forget the details, and was coming up on his first “Bill review”. He got to the office where Bill Gates was waiting for him, a printout of his code in hand. Gates asked penetrating question after penetrating question, and the programmer answered them. Eventually Gates said, “Good job,” and left the meeting room. The other managers in the room told him that he was the first person they’d ever seen be able to answer all of Gates’s questions; usually Gates had found something the programmer hadn’t thought of, and told him, “Fix that” at the end of the code review.

        Now, the technique of picking apart code until you find something wrong isn’t necessarily a good management technique. It smacks of “I’m smarter than you and I want everyone to know it.” However, Gates couldn’t have used that technique if he didn’t have a thorough understanding of the code. He wasn’t just a ruthless businessman; he also had a deep knowledge of programming. Any experienced software engineer will tell you that code review is actually harder than writing the code yourself, and Gates was good at doing code reviews.

        So now my opinion of Gates is more nuanced. Both a ruthless businessman and a skilled programmer.

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        1. No one ever mandated that “evil” has to be “incompetent”.

          Some of the evil are smart enough to exploit the appearance of incompetence while actively being adroit.

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          1. Gates was known for his sharp dealing, and I would agree that much of it was unethical, but he was careful enough to make it difficult to prove him at fault in court. So, yes, evil but competent, like a Lex Luthor come to life, legally cornering the market on kryptonite and licensing it to villains, but pleading innocence about what they did with it.

            It’s no surprise that he’s aligned himself with the Davos crew to destroy the modern world in order to “make the planet safe.” Thank God that, unlike him, Bezos and Musk read The Man Who Sold the Moon and were inspired by that instead of by Captain Nemo.

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        2. I read that as well. It was a blog from the early aughts by Joel Spolsky that I followed. He had founded his own software company and produced some worthwhile software management tools. As I recall he was relating how years before he had hired on to Micro$oft and was put in charge of Excel development. Gates final question was about how he planned to handle the 1900 problem with the calendar. Unlike 2000, 1900 was not a leap year for you non-Gregorian aficionados. Oh what dangers lurk in the hearts of engineers in our attempt to make the planet safe for computers. Just ask the F-22 software designers.

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        3. He’s skilled at self-promotion. I’ve always questioned the provenance of that story. He’s no dummy – the BASIC he and Paul Allen wrote for the Altair was pivotal for the industry – but he didn’t hire smart people just to give himself more free time.

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          1. Which story, the one I quoted? Frank is right, it was told by Joel Spolsky about his own experience working at Microsoft in the early days. (When he mentioned Spolsky’s name, I remembered where I had read it). Bill Gates didn’t tell that particular story, so it (at least) wasn’t a case of self-promotion.

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            1. Thanks, Robin. I first met Bill Gates at a MITS presentation in Ann Arbor. Admittedly, the field was very young – I recall one attendee asking if “core memory” (he meant RAM) would be made available for the Altair; one of the presenters – I think it was Ed Roberts – suggested humorously that they might come up with something using thin wire, sewing needles, and a bag of magnetic cores before graciously rephrasing the question.

              Bill Gates was a skilled hobbyist at the time, and may well have sharpened his chops since, but my memory of him was that he oversold his abilities. I suppose that’s just the entrepreneurial mindset, and I don’t fault it, I just take it with what may be too large a grain of salt.

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  3. My husband took a 60% cut in pay to go from a contracting job that required constant travel, to teaching (which had its own issues, but he’s a born teacher). Later we took another deep cut when I lost my high-pay, high-stress job and found one I liked better, at half the pay. Here’s the curious thing: In both cases, our lives were better with less money.

    How is that possible? First, our marriage was better when we were actually together, not coming and going and fighting jet lag. Second, we discovered that when we weren’t working/travelling long hours, we didn’t feel the need to compensate by eating out a lot, taking expensive vacations, etc. I could detail a lot more things that the change saved us (e.g., teachers don’t need $400 suits), but the bottom line is that most of the money we thought we “needed” had been spent on stuff we bought to try compensate for the fact that we hated our jobs.

    We worked just as hard doing what we loved, but we spent less. And it saved our marriage. Here endeth the lesson.

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    1. I took a huge cut in pay about 20 years ago for the same reason. I was commuting from NY to Chicago and would fly out on Monday and home on Friday. the wife said there was more to life than money. BEst decision I ever made,

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      1. From before our son was expected, hubby requested non-overtime (salary not exempt) job assignments. It took a few months before he was moved to one. Then declined the overtime jobs until he was transferred to a different area (wasn’t going to be in town anyway, except weekends). Non-overtime meant he was there for pickup from school and coach duties. Allowed us to limit daycare, we split work and childcare duties, and prioritized family time. Even in my career, salary, I limited work hours to 40 despite the annual review comments (“great work, but not putting in the same hours as rest of the team”. If you are a programmer, you know …)

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        1. “great work, but not putting in the same hours as rest of the team”

          Arrggghh! Yeah, I know the type. Stupid bean counters. Fortunately I managed to avoid that most of my career, and I certainly didn’t inflict it on those who worked for me the times when I led a team.

          At one company they ranked us 1-5 with 5 being the highest on our assessments. My boss gave me a 4 and said, “You’re really close to a 5, but you’d need to put in extra effort.”

          I replied, “Boss, the only one I know who you gave a 5 to ended up divorced, working at a gas station, and living in his car. I’ll take my 4.”

          “I can’t argue with that,” he replied, smiling.

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          1. Every single time, used to justify why your raise percentage wasn’t as high as anyone else in the department. Couldn’t even justify the decision based on the team I was on. If you can count a team of “one” a team.

            Never mind that push came to shove, when required percentage number of people of department (bankruptcy cuts) be let go, I was one of three chosen (okay, there were three of us to choose from, for the third: 1 – Mother of toddler triplets whose husband was unemployed. 2 – Someone on family leave taking care of elderly recovering from surgery. I lost that toss.) The problem? I wasn’t gone a week when they called me for (free) help. Willing to “help”, just not for free. So just because others in the two engineering companies can write and read C, C++, and Visual Basic, (better than I can, because the C programmers were embedded OS programmers) but they can’t figure out the (*documented) application code? Pull another leg, it has bells on it.

            (*) Documented because I didn’t want to dig through the logic managing proprietary text data files and index management, again. Two different methods for two different reasons.

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    3. 100%

      The only time we’ve been apart long term (in 47 years), week after week, due to job requirements, was the 17 months hubby had been transferred out of town. Too far to commute daily. We discussed him quitting. One little problem there, I didn’t have a job, due to company bankruptcy (not coming back). Hadn’t for 6 weeks. He was only 30 months from being able to retire (had the years on the job, wasn’t old enough). He had two options, we checked out both. Neither had job options anywhere near for me (pre-work from home). Kicker? Son had just started HS, and his eagle project. He took the transfer, immediately put in a volunteer transfer request back home. It was a long 17 months. He put 48,000 miles on a little Elantra we got for him to drive to work (Monday at 3 AM), and home (Friday), every weekend; in 16 months (either that or put 48k on our existing rigs. The difference in fuel costs, paid for the new car. We made money.)

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    4. I was a little different. Got a job where I wanted to live (a small 40k city) and eventually bought a modest house six blocks from work. I ended work and all thoughts thereof at five, because my productivity plummeted after a certain time and the extra hours spent are useless busywork. I would come in early (0630) and on weekends voluntarily just because I wanted to see how the calculations I was doing would end (hopefully as I expected). My boss wanted me to be a group manager once. I told him I would do it if he told me to, but I wouldn’t like doing it and probably wouldn’t be very good at it. Fairly shortly after, I became a “Technical Manager” – a new category created to bypass the previous evaluation criteria and pay raise scales of management versus technical people. Good place – I spent 34 years there doing many different things, but all of them fun.

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      1. Nicely done!

        Where did you find the Warhammer 40k city? That might be kinda cool to visit. …. “Why is that uniformed person pointing at me and yelling “HERESY!” ???

        (grin)

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  4. One of the more interesting social science theories is the Cultural Theory of Risk developed by the British sociologist Mary Douglas.  It’s a description of approaches to change rather than the economic and financial model based stuff you usually find under Risk. 

    THe theory divides people into four groups,  (my words) Authoritarians, Collectivists, Self Reliant, and schlubs.  I add psychopaths to it myself, but they’re not in the original theory.  Each group is distinguished by their attitude to towards authority and change with collectivists (.g.,) being egalitarian and resistant to change.  DOuglas went so far as to (correctly) identify that most of the lefty things, whether the bomb, or “climate”, are driven by fear of change.

    Really useful stuff. 

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    1. I find that interesting, because one of the key components of the “Big 5” personality trait theory that leftists love to cite is their “openness to experience.” I guess it’s more that they like novelty, but not actual changes. That is, they prefer to seek novelty in a safe environment where they don’t have to deal with the broader effects if that novelty became widespread.

      Which is basically what we’re supposed to do as parents for our children, provide that safe environment for exploration. Adults are not supposed to require that, however.

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      1. They absolutely destroyed Mary Douglas when she pointed out that they were motivated by fear of change. There have been critiques of the theory, I’ve made some myself, but it was dismissed for entirely political reasons. They didn’t like being told the truth about themselves. This and similar is why social science, and sociology in particular, is dead. Too bad, there are important questions there.

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        1. There’s no thrill of transgression if everything is accepted and allowed. So if what you’re after is that frisson of the forbidden, then people tolerating you feels hateful, because they’re not giving you what you want. But you can’t articulate that, because it puts you in a bad light, to WANT to be derided and disdained. Ironically, usually the people pursuing BDSM as a way to “shock the mundanes.”

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        2. I keep thinking so much of “progressivism,” is people who actually want a society in stasis, perfectly stratified, so everyone has an exact status and knows exactly how to respond to every social cue in terms of relative status. Where every day is like every other day, nothing ever changes and they are safe. Safe forever and ever.

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          2. I keep thinking so much of “progressivism,” is people who actually want a society in stasis, perfectly stratified, so everyone has an exact status and knows exactly how to respond to every social cue in terms of relative status.

            … if that’s the case, maybe they shouldn’t have gone to so much effort to destroy the teaching, learning, and concept of good manners.

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          3. And Marxism in particular seems literally to be stuck about right smack in the middle of the Early Industrial Age… from say about 1860 (Marx’s time) to maybe 1920 or so. In its thinking and in its view of how society-and-the-economy “is supposed to” operate. (As opposed to, say, small-shops using either 18th-century or 21st-century cutting-edge techniques to function as well as any larger scale practically could; or, far worse for them, radical transformative change of any other sort but the kind prescribed in their long-codified “blueprint for the inevitable future” a la Karl, which would be heresy of a highly virulent sort.) Not much ‘progress’ (snort!) beyond a century past.

            The very closest thing I’ve seen (that I can point to right off the top of my head) is what we likely ought to call “robocommunism” — where “smart” (cough!) machines of “AI” and robotic varieties will do all the real work, and most of the thinking too; and we can all “retire” to a gratifying life of the sort of leisure the early-model Eloi (remember, Wells was a socialist reformer in non-SF life) most logically would have had. That’s about as creative as any of “them” seem to be able to get.

            (Please note, before you laugh too hard, Elon Musk’s model for the near future has more than a slight similarity to all that last.)

            Thought experiment, to which I have no neat prefab answers: what would “Marxism” have looked like if Karl Marx had been born a century earlier, before the Industrial Revolution really got rolling? Maybe like (what I currently remember of) Fourier’s socialism, some sort of quasi-feudal Rustic People’s Paradise? But again, “evolve catastrophically to the ideal, then stop forever” would seem to be a feature not a bug in any such system…

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            1. It’s like the old ecology idea of a final steady-state ideal ecosystem, where everything stayed as it was and no further changes or succession were likely unless a disaster of some sort hit (“climax state vegetation” and all that).

              Guess what? There ain’t no such thing in the real world. If you stop burning the Great Plains of North America, they revert to brush and woodland (depending on where you are). If you stop grazing to protect the plants, they choke themselves out and DIE, and brush takes over, along with desertification. And so on. Oops.

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            3. If Karl had been born a century earlier he would have starved.

              The state of society in his era was finally able to support layabout lazy “philosophers” of his ilk. Before by much and he’d have needed a noble patron, and none in The Germanies would have liked his spiel much.

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          4. The society that they’re agitating for will try to be like this. However, that society will also ensure that the ones who were agitating the hardest for it will be the first up against the wall.

            They’ve served their purpose, and will no longer be needed. And such a society wants cogs, not “activists”.

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      1. Me neither. And I wonder if I’m projecting sometimes.

        But there does seem to be a, “make it be the way I like it!” theme running with a lot of “progressives.”

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        1. Make it the way I like it and keep it that way forever! No, I don’t care what you have to do to keep it that way. It’s the way I like it and that’s how it should stay!

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      2. I’m indifferent to change qua change. I hate new clothes and new architecture (modern anyway since it’s all so very ugly) for example, but enjoy new tech. I think it tends to be people Douglas counts as collectivists who are most against change, the authoritarians are fine with it as long as they’re the experts in charge. I would classify within the theory most here as individualists in that what’s important to us is agency

        This theory’s classification is one of the key ways I deal with the world. ITs very rich and very useful.

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        1. So a massive anxiety spike in recent years is MS hypothetically breaking my stuff, and a recent concern is that I realized that I could break my best working machine by being too careless in adding yet more package managers.

          I broke a tool chain that I had specifically set up a computer to use, but it does not bother me because all of the choices were self inflicted and ‘because I was bored’, and I was not using that tool chain yet. This week I broke it, and found out about it, over like three days.

          It was a machine I’m using to get comfortable with that distribution, and the problem is only that the package manager server I switched to does not carry the software.

          I’m weeks away, in the best case, from having any need to use the software. Which is literally the impossibly optimistic case.

          Agency, speed, and pressure/stress are the only obvious explanations for these seemingly wildly disparate outcomes. And, I’ve had some stress or uncertainty coming off from me this week.

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          1. Warning.

            Let Kindle upgrade yesterday. Bad choice. Very bad choice. Don’t just don’t. 2.8.70 looks like it installs, but then won’t run. Even after uninstalling, rebooting and downloading the last release, that one would not install (even though it was the one I installed after Christmas 2025 on a new laptop).

            Finally got an older version to install and run.

            Yesterday was NOT the best day for this to happen. Since at 8:30 (ish) AM my eye was worked on. Might have been equivalent of still under the influence (medication to relax is similar to glass and half of wine. That is about a glass more than I would imbibe.) Even after a nap late morning.

            I was not happy.

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    3. For about six years, my employer had a “communications expert” come in once a year and explain communication styles for us Geek/Techies. Almost always a 2×2 matrix with different names but same results “Commander, Communicator, Collaborator, Collector” Boss, Broadcast….” One year it was the “four letter personality tests.

      I test differently each time, usually based on biggest work priority. I have been told that normal humans do not change this stuff much. For those “four letter personalities” tests, I am all over the place. “Thats really not normal to see that much drift in a year.” I counter with “Is everyone Normal in your system?”

      You can have fun with the 2×2 folks by coming up with a third axis, like Imaginary/realist or deceptive/honest. Done with proper timing, its a “long record scratch” show-stop moment.

      (grin)

      For some reason, co-workers bet on me breaking scenarios in teambuilding meetings.

      (big grin)

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  5. The flavor of communist or of socialist that really works to dehumanize the rich, is cannibal or serial killer logic. “These humans are totemically related to what they are associated with, and redistributing the totemic power redistributes the result.”

    Similar runs right through the heart of the problems with the first part/executive summary/woke boilerplate of the Draghi report. The Draghi report was an EU exercise in supposing that they could fix the EU’s problems with tech development.

    Right off the bat, the first part of the Draghi report assures its audience that they will still try to fix economic inequality, or disparate financial and economic outcomes.

    One of the other points where this is explicitly contrary to the proposal is the elaborate make believe about ‘fixing’ the universities of Europe. The A part of this point is that they want more world class universities, like China dn the USA. (The problem here is whether the metrics associated with assigning universities to those categories are meaningful.) The B part is that they want more academic work translating into start ups.

    The problem for that thought is that I have a slight idea about work in academia, and work in start ups, and if you don’t want to let your start up people become absurdly wealthy, your academics do not have incentives to make start ups successful.

    See also, a BBC article about 996 culture, which is maybe functional for short times in start ups.

    996 is a specific cult of seventy hour work weeks.

    I personally think of 50 and 60 hour work weeks as being salary work, engineers and managers who are supporting a factory floor, for example.

    Anyway, I don’t want Musk or Bezos left unmolested because of hero worship, or whatever. I care because government leaving them alone is related to the government that does not screw me on the margins of my own efforts to accumulate wealth.

    I don’t want to cut welfare services because of a lack of love for a distant ‘the poor’. I do so because I know myself that bottom 20% or 25% of the population is an absurdly broad class to define as poverty, and the interventions I maybe doubt whether they do me good. Before I heard the fraud hypothesis substantiated, I just had serious doubts about being too comfortable in my own messes.

    Hearing about the fraud makes me less angry at hypothetical poor people crazier and more self destructive than I am. But, I have that same lack of desire to be screwed on behalf of fraudsters, and their unthinking emotionally charged enablers.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Even without the fraud, 95% of our tax money is consumed by the Poverty Industrial Complex and never reaches those it’s supposed to ‘help’. The giant bloated bureaucracies and parasitic ‘NGOs’ that have grown up like fungus around Teh Poor!

      If we actually eliminated poverty, or even reduced it, too many people might see how useless and counterproductive the Poverty Industrial Complex has always been. Can’t have that!

      LBJ. Another grave that needs a big urinal installed.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. “Poverty” is usually defined as the bottom quintile, that 20% counting up from zero.

        If everyone had a at least a million a year income, the bottom 20% woudl still be “below the poverty line”

        And now you see it.

        The bottom 20% here live better than about 80% of the rest of planet earth. I started off there. That is not “poverty”.

        And when we do not require the cessation of poverty-making behavior for the helped, that is also a clue that the end result is not to be the ending of poverty, but the enriching of “helpers”.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. The whole purpose of ‘welfare’ programs is to raise and sustain the Poverty Industrial Complex. Teh Poor! are just disposable props.

          I say, bring back the Poor-House. Someplace they can go for ‘3 hots and a cot’ and nothing more. Well, showers of course. A place that is universally recognized as the last refuge of losers. Because if their most basic needs are met, what can motivate them to actually do the work required to be productive members of society rather than invertebrate parasites?

          Liked by 2 people

          2. Most places have plenty of homeless shelters, which from the sound of things are functionally similar to the Poor House that you’re describing. The problem is that most (if not all) homeless shelters require their “customers” to be drug free…

            If you rebuilt the Poor Houses, that’s what would be the spanner in the works.

            Like

        2. There were a raft of articles originating from Substack a couple of months back that re-examined “poverty” in the US defined in terms of being able to effectively participate in life and the economy at all. What was found was…sobering. And an indication that, in a number of cases, what we’re able to earn is less the problem than what we’re being asked to pay…

          Liked by 2 people

  9. The left is consumed by envy: the desire for what your neighbor has but, knowing you’ll never have it, you want it taken from your neighbor, preferably with a large dose of violent humiliation. This governs all their attitudes and actions, even amongst themselves, e.g., the victimhood hierarchy.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. The ‘Mansion on the Hill’ parable. Two men look up from their labor at a mansion on a hill.

      Leftroid: “Some day I’m gonna burn that sucker down!”
      Conservative: “Some day I’m gonna buy my own mansion!”

      Liked by 3 people

  10. Just another gypsy, with her plastic guitar
    Just another dancer, with her eyes on the stars
    Just another dreamer, who was going to far
    Just another drunk, got the wheel of a stolen car.

    The odds get even, you name the game
    The odds get even, the stakes are the same
    You bet your life.

    Liked by 3 people

  11. I can’t remember if it was Dick Rutan or Stephen Coonts who said, apropos of flying, “If your luck gets thin, read the manuals, study procedures, drill ‘What if’ emergency scenarios, and practice more.” In other words, do the hard work that make luck more likely.

    Liked by 5 people

    1. Seriously, though. So much of “luck” is being able to spot the opportunity and in having the skills to take advantage of it when it appears.

      Tangent to that, you find what you look for. People always looking for the depressing things will certainly find them and get depressed as a result. If you look for the positive things, you’ll find those, too.

      Liked by 2 people

  12. Off topic I think, but maybe not by a lot….the Day by Day cartoon which I have read since it appeared jumped Off the Jews run the US (if not the world) bridge.

    Also today, member of Trumps cabinet(?) in hearings in congress was wearing a propalestinian pin and couldnt or didnt explain how her position on things was not antijewish….so she was terminated….which apparently means that MAGA was surpressing her free speech.

    Along with it, as she is Catholic, she said something about being taught that the jews killed christ (lots of inside baseball deleted). I will note that the catholic kids I grew up with in the 60s and 70s were taught this…and that referring to them as CKs was perfectly fine.

    A final opinion on it all….anti-semitism or anti-zionism are mind short circuiting phrases for kill the jews.

    Like

    1. The whole anti-semitism thing is nuts. And it’s being pushed from the left to taint the right. As for being taught that, I was never taught that, and I grew up Catholic in the sixties. So–

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Yep – Same era, and part of my Confirmation stuff included visiting a local synagogue for services there. And family oral history includes details of instances of the anti-Catholic activities directed at my family in the midwest from the local klan in the first half of the last century, including a direct ancestor using a shotgun to run off a couple of local sheet-heads who strolled over to object to his courting a Catholic girl. I had more than one now-passed relative who participated in the ETO land campaign in WWII, and while they were not in the units that liberated camps, at least one for certain and I think several saw them right afterward.

        I do not recall one tiniest bit of anything in the antisemitic direction at all during my upbringing.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. I think it was location. The instances I knew were private (paid by parents) catholic schools vs ones opened to all catholic kids paid for by diocese. As I didnt go and only talked with the kids and I was a kid myself, it may have been old nuns….as one did say explicitly that is who taught her. I didnt think it was universal….my mother attended a catholic univ in the 40s and there was nonw of that there.

          Still, as I said, I have heard …..I went to look for the article about it….and cannot find anything and I cannot find the womans name now. Catturd had a link to it on his X account and I cannot find it. Maybe I slipped universes. She was a Christian who fought for trump during the biden admin. Her name was familiar but of course I cannot find it now. Anyway, your experience will vary. I know protestants and atheists who froth about the jews….and nuts , I wasnt singling out catholics, but this woman cited her education in catholic school. Aasrrrgh. Sorry

          Like

      2. Grew up Episcopalian during the ’60s, which try to out Catholic the Catholics in a lot of areas. I wasn’t taught the Jews killed Jesus. I was taught Romans, the conquerors of Israel, did. The Romans were killing another Jew, not Christ.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. No one alive today killed Christ and I firmly reject the notion of inherited guilt.

      I still appreciate the joke about the punishment for the Romans killing Christ was to become Italians though.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. “firmly reject the notion of inherited guilt.“

        –

        Same.

        Every child conceived is “a blank slate of New Hope”. Every child conceived and lost to miscarriage is a loss of hope (anyone who has been through a miscarriage can verify).

        Yes, this means every child deliberately aborted is a destruction of hope.

        Liked by 1 person

    3. She converted five months ago, according to reports. Honestly, she had no business being there, simply because of inexperience.

      I grew up Southern Baptist in the South in the 60’s and I never heard any of this crap.

      Liked by 1 person

  13. All the Yiddish I know, I learned from my Catholic grandfather.

    Antisemitism is a sort of disease of the mind, which makes no sense. If you’re Christian at all, you worship God Who was incarnate in Galilee and Judaea, and you read a Bible written by the children of Israel.

    At least the Christians who have decided that the Emperor Constantine is the root of all evil aren’t going against God’s personal blood relatives.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. If someone says that they read the Bible and are thoroughly antisemitic, it’s reasonable to question their reading comprehension. The Old Testament is very clear that the Jews are the chosen people, and there is nothing that contradicts that in the new.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. The claim, as I have heard it and as I understand that claim, is that the covenant of the New Testament isn’t a new covenant, but an alteration/better explained version of Abraham’s covenant.

        The follow on is that the Church is Israel, and God’s chosen people. And since the Jews aren’t members of the Church, they’re nothing, since they still follow an outdated (and invalid) understanding of God’s covenant.

        Worse, the Jews make conflicting claims about the Old Testament’s meaning (beyond that of just plain disbelief) which makes them heretics rather than merely unbelievers.

        Not quite sure where that goes to straight-up anti-semitism, although it’s clear that it sometimes does. Even if it isn’t clear whether it’s really theology running to anti-semitism or motivated theology excusing anti-semitism.

        Like

        1. There’s also the one where the people in the crowd shouting for Jesus to be crucified, when Pilate told them “Would you crucify an innocent man?” yelled back, “His blood be on us and on our children!”

          Thing is, anyone using that argument to justify calling modern Jews “Christ-killers” is failing Biblical literacy. Because elsewhere, in the book of Jeremiah (chapter 31) and the book of Ezekiel (chapter 18), God makes it very plain that He does not attribute the sins of the parents to the children. (In the words used in the Constitution, there is no “corruption of blood” for sin). Ezekiel 18 could not be plainer (emphasis mine):

          The word of the Lord came to me: “What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel:

          “‘The parents eat sour grapes,
              and the children’s teeth are set on edge’?

          “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. For everyone belongs to me, the parent as well as the child—both alike belong to me. The one who sins is the one who will die.

          The chapter then goes on to explain, in very great detail, with examples, that God counts each person’s sin as his own, and does not count the father’s sins against the children.

          Meaning that when those Jews in the crowd said, “His (Jesus’s) blood be on us and on our children!”, they were explicitly going against God’s wishes in attributing their own sin to their children. And anyone who takes them at their word, and attributes their sin to their descendants, is also going against God’s explicitly-stated wishes. The Bible could not be plainer on the subject.

          Like

          1. Nod.

            I’ve heard idiots try to use that passage (in the NT) to say that Christians’ hating Jews is Biblical.

            Of course, they ignore the OT passages that you mentioned as well as the fact that G*d didn’t say “so be it” concerning that NT passage.

            And ignoring the fact that nothing else in the NT says that the Jews are “damned” as Christ-Killers.

            Note, one idiot hated Christianity and tried to use that NT passage as “evidence” against Christianity.

            Liked by 1 person

    3. Antisemitism is basically a conspiracy theory – “they’re doing well despite everything, so they must have secret powers”.

      Look at where is most prevalent:

      -Middle East (conspiracy theory heaven)

      -Russia (same)

      -Leftist politics, which from the US view, contains most of the European Right (mostly because they look at *everything* by group and already have that mindset about anyone successful)

      -Right Wing coded conspiritards (Candace Owens and her ilk)

      Like

  14. I seem to pay, pay, pay…and always seem to come back to about where I was before.

    Little bit above entry-level white-collar job.

    Physical health issues have replaced mental health issues (so that’s a change).

    Back home with family and knowing I will probably not have Dad’s decently middle-class lifestyle in California. And not being able to explain to him that I can’t get it anymore.

    Single, with the only company that wants me being the fruit of toxic femininity.

    And having seen just what a little bit better could be. Having had it for a while.

    Then losing it for desperation, contracting, and then a little bit above entry-level white-collar job (that has benefits, at least).

    My envy is mostly along the lines of watching people complain who have done a lot better than I have with a whole lot less (seeming) effort. And claim that I’m not doing enough, I don’t have enough hustle, etc, etc, etc…

    Liked by 4 people

      1. Between the commute, the low salary that you get at my level working for the State of California, and the learning curve at the new job, it hasn’t quite wrecked my ability to write, but I have so little energy TO write that a lot of projects are just…accusing me of not spending time with them, like a jealous and expensive mistress.

        Liked by 3 people

        1. I hear that. Just keeping one project at a time going in fits and starts is the best I can manage ATM.

          But! White Cat’s Bluff is still going. I’m sketching out the Final Battle Scene, and I’ll do it even if I have to do it in pieces and multiple passes. Once I get that rough done…

          Well, I want to do the next Colors book, More Perilous Than Tigers. Just need to work out where the plot of that one ends!

          (I also have a pile of other potential projects and I haven’t had time or energy to touch fanfic in over a year and augh. Sigh.)

          Liked by 3 people

      2. We’re finally to the point where we kinda sort of can keep up with inflation. But 100% wouldn’t if we hadn’t reviewed spending VS income, plus COL on the governmental funding (which never, ever, matches inflation). The private pensions, all three sources, do not have COL (note, one pension is $121.63/month, used to be able to pay for a steak dinner out, twice a month). Plus we can access, required on one, our personal saved retirement funds (IRA’s), for shortfalls.

        It hasn’t always been this way. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, is an art form. Been there, done that. Have saved and counted change to be able to buy gas, or food. Never did recover our backup (usable-taxed non-investment) savings from the ’02 dot com bust drain. Was able to stop the financial bleeding, but not build it back up, by my taking an entry level salaried position 20-years into my career. The ’08 market hit was particularly bad because, while we could let retirement funds ride, it hit the (child) college fund as it was being used.

        It is hard. It is doable to eventually get there. You have to pay yourself first, and do not touch it. Even if there is no employer match. We didn’t start with an employer matches. If a 401(k)/SimpleIRA through employer has a match? Put away at least that much to get maximum match!

        All I can say is after 47 years, compound interest/investments, add up.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Because of how everything worked out, I know that my Dad’s family trust and my Roth will be my retirement for the most part (I’ll be vested in CalPERS, but that money will probably be what pays for my medical).

          If I could tell the younger me what to do-less crappy game lines that would die quickly, put money into a money market account.

          Such is life.

          Like

          1. Son’s retirement is going to be his Roth/IRA and savings accounts, and (fingers crossed) eventually our family trust. (Only child. As Second Hand Lion quote, “the kid gets it all”.) Not that he is not looking for work. OTOH he won’t date either.

            He has looked at houses for sale to buy. Hasn’t found anything he sees as good value. Problem is locally, short of a *2008 type housing bust, when housing prices are down, houses do not go on the market. Unless forced, people do not sell. This is similar to what we ran into late ’80s. It wasn’t the house that had an appraisal problem, our income, or credit rating. It was the expanded neighborhood had an average value problem. Because the average valuation was over 10 years old. True in most middle class neighborhoods.

            (*) In 2008 there were a few, very few, zombie houses, where people packed up and walked away. Which provided a good value for those in the market once the houses could be sold. Do not want to see that type of market again. Our area was luckier than most.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. I got a sister, but all the assets (including the house) are in the family trust. Can probably afford to live here until my health reaches the point I need to move somewhere else.

              The issue is that it’s…well, it’s California, which is becoming steadily either for the Very Rich or the Very Poor, with an almost fedual level of “middle class” around here.

              Now if Trump can mass-deport enough illegals from here (and have the rest self-deport), the crashing sound as the economy falls apart will be music to my ears. Hopefully by then, I’ll have enough seniority in the State of California to be safe from most layoffs.

              Liked by 1 person

    2. I love it when they tell you that you don’t have enough hustle. Heard it many times. So helpful.

      Canada is a wreck right now, job wise. The big news this week is that the unemployment rate is dropping while the economy sheds jobs. Yes, you read that right. Because people are dropping out and not looking for work faster than the jobs are leaving.

      Liked by 4 people

      1. I spent five years having a COVID weekend.
        I applied for no less than three jobs a day.
        Pretty much drove myself into an anxiety attack in ’22 trying to find a job after I got laid off the Monday after Thanksgiving at the job I was at for nine months.
        Only reason I have this job is my sister knew the person doing the hiring.
        And if I’m in this kind of shape, dear God how is it for people that don’t have the help and options that I did…

        Liked by 4 people

        1. We were starting to pinch, and we’re almost at the point we could retire and are not responsible for our kids who are grown up. We might like to help them, but we don’t HAVE to. But we were pinching. I imagine what it was like for people raising kids. Or people starting out.

          Liked by 3 people

          1. I’m getting afraid that having kids is becoming a thing only for the very poor and the very rich, as the sheer cost to have a kid at a reasonable age is nearly impossible for the “middle class”.

            And that is never good for a nation.

            Like

        2. People are living in tents in the park, when it’s -5F out. Admittedly they are the drug addicts, burnouts and mental cases, but still. They’re in the park, in the killing cold.

          And this is CANADA, the supposed social safety net paradise where no sparrow shall fall unmarked.

          And to tell the truth, up until about 2018 no sparrow did fall outside the safety net. Even the most freakish losers had some kind of arrangement looking after them. The tents in the park started ~2019 and continue with no end in sight.

          That’s how you know all this is deliberate.

          Makes a job hunt so much more fun.

          Liked by 3 people

          1. And a lot of these jobs are going to people that have “connections” of some kind. Gone are the days when you could apply for a job and get it in 2-3 rounds of interviews. It’s all theater to hire the people they want, usually DEI, but have to “claim” that they’re looking…

            Liked by 2 people

            2. The last time I was doing job search was over a decade ago, but I remember. A hundred applications for a dozen interviews. A dozen interviews for ONE job offer. And that offer was minimum-wage position doing literal sh!twork. (In-home care, where, yes, a large part of the job revolves around diapering and toileting.)

              Liked by 2 people

  15. “But I don’t think there’s any way of getting through to them.”

    There is one way, but it’s far too much work.

    Once upon a time, probably because I’m Odd, I thought that if only people would be made aware of the facts, they would see things my way. Because I like to be sure of the facts about things.

    My pet issue is gun control. I know every f-ing thing.

    So for a long, long, LONG time I educated the public on my blog, in person, etc. I was your one-stop info shop for self defense with a firearm.

    But after 20 years of this, I found that facts, logic, even video of events or things, none of it made any difference what so ever. If a person was anti-gun, absolutely nothing would change their mind.

    Unless they got mugged. Then they wanted to know EVERYTHING. They wanted to know right f-ing now. Talk faster old man, you’re slowing down.

    But I still believed that most people would see the light, given enough time.

    Until Covid. During Covid I watched people drink the bong water like they were dying of thirst. People that to my very certain knowledge knew better. They did! They knew. But there they were, guzzling that disinformation and regurgitating it verbatim, on command.

    But many of those same people would come to me privately, under cover of darkness, and want to know every f-ing thing about guns. Because even an idiot could see everything was looking very shaky.

    And that is when I finally understood how Odd I really am. I look at the world, learn everything I can, and make decisions accordingly. If I find new info or learn that the old info is wrong, I adjust and continue moving forward. If the crowd is doing one thing, chances are good I’m not.

    Nobody else does that. They say that’s what they’re doing, but really they’re going along with the crowd. And you can’t talk them out of it.

    The other thing is that all the crowd movement these days is astroturf. They’re herding the Normies like sheep. Normies are largely cooperating and letting themselves be herded.

    Anybody else notice that the rainbow thing is over now? All the mainstream media is still doing it in Europe and Canada (The RCMP guy said “gunperson” on f-ing television yesterday about the school shooter in BC. Seriously, ‘gunperson’. He looked like he was eating glass when he said it too. Sucks to be you, RCMP guy.) But in America, the joke seems to be over, thanks to #TheDonald. Just like Covid is over, even though the damage remains.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. COVID is over? Who told you that? I still see masks at the grocery store. I still hear about how cheap paper masks and ‘social distancing’ and shutdowns saved us from the COVID-pocalypse that would have wiped out the whole human race. Few indeed are the Normies that believe it was cooked up in a communist Chinese bio-warfare lab and paid for by Fauxi. Even though the evidence was revealed years ago.

      And, yes, I saw the ‘gun person’ farce. What, we’ve got guns walking around shooting people at random now? Last I heard, it was Yet Another ‘Trans’ deviant that actually pulled the trigger.

      The Leftroids have doubled down on the stupid so many times it’s gotta be up to 8,192 by now.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. If I had a way to get the vax-related *miscarriage* numbers out there and absorbed/believed at large, we would never have to worry about those f-ers again.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. “If I had a way to get the vax-related *miscarriage* numbers out there…”

          About that, the Canadian government has put all the Covid vaxx numbers under judicial seal for the foreseeable future. The vaxx accident evidence apparently does exist, but you’re not allowed to know what it is.

          Which tells us all we need to know, honestly. Professionals aren’t even allowed to query the vaccine injury database, that means it’s bad.

          Makes me grind my teeth.

          Liked by 1 person

      2. Few indeed are the Normies that believe it was cooked up in a communist Chinese bio-warfare lab and paid for by Fauxi. Even though the evidence was revealed years ago.

        You need to move somewhere with a higher quality population.

        I’ve heard totally normal– not even geeky!– folks make jokes about “look out, they’ll brew up a new kill us all disease.”

        Liked by 1 person

    2. Old quote: “Most men would rather die than think. Many do.”

      Odds like us want to poke all the facts we can find, then have the courage to take a deep breath and make a decision. Most people I’ve run into don’t want to do either.

      Liked by 1 person

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