[decode]

"Right, so I bust my ass in school, non-paid internships, contracting as much as possible, and 50 hour work weeks on my startup... and the reason I'm making money is b/c I'm more "fortunate" than the slob who is still playing video games in college after 6 years and the idiot who chooses to have kids he can't afford?"

I don't know you, but I consider myself fortunate to be making more money than most because I was given, through no merit of my own, the ability and environment in which I could become educated and work towards goals that ended in lucrative work. As the child of educated, middle-class, white-collar people in a modern industrialized country, I have had thousands of opportunities denied most others in the world. If any of those things changed, for example if I happened to be born 300 years ago or if my community never taught me the importance of education and hard work or if I was born in a place where subsistence-level living is the norm, I would be in a completely different boat. If you have the ability to make wise choices that effect change in your life, then yes, you are fortunate.

On a side note, this sort of disdain for the poor is disturbing to me. Do people really think poor people choose to be so? Nobody wants to be poor.

[miked]

Do people really think poor people choose to be so? Nobody wants to be poor.

That no one wants to be poor is obvious enough, but it's hardly the same as whether or not they choose to be. The poorest person I know has an IQ of 186 and a PhD in chemistry. He chooses to live on government disability and not work, even though he's quite capable of doing so. But he he shares a quality I've noticed in all of the poor people I know personally: a belief the world owes him a living. Everything in his screwed-up life is someone else's fault, never his, no matter how much damage he inflicts on others.

That isn't all poor people, but it's a lot of them.