Any regime which does not provide relief for people currently on earth, instead promising something better for future generations / afterlife reincarnations, is a dangerous con. People claiming to be capitalist, communist, fascist, anarchist and everywhere in between have been guilty of it.
This doesn't mean instant gratification, but it must mean that the society you are living in must exist to make your life better providing you do not act at the expense of others in that society.
It's expected that things might be even better in 200 years' time. But that's a side effect.
So more time alive - specifically, more time alive and not having to labour to survive - is not the defining characteristic of a "society that progresses"?
The USSR had a downturn? I am not sure what they teach in American state schools, but can you begin to imagine what life would have been like as a peasant under the Tsar? 20 years later, its industrial might challenged Hitler. A decade later it was ahead of the US in the space race. When the US was still keeping niggers on the fields and women in the kitchen, the Soviets were providing excellent technical education and opportunity according to merit.
As for Cuba, I know Americans aren't allowed there (perhaps you'll be able to get in if you go via another country in the free world, like everyone else?), but it's a decent American country with good healthcare and fair education, doing thoroughly better than any other country which has been bombarded by US hate propaganda and embargo for the past half century.
NK, well... I know little about NK. As do you. Because it's really hard to get accurate information about NK. There's lots of propaganda, but very little verifiable information available to the general public. I'm sure you'll quote propaganda. Looks like a cultish dictatorship from the outside, but again, it's hard to say.
China? Well, they're certainly the most successful nation on earth right now, if success is measured in actually producing rather than trading in invisibles. And, like in the US, a lovely place to live if you're part of the middle class (except its is growing while the US is losing its own). It's its own special gem: while US government serves business interests, Chinese business serves government interests. The government still invests heavily in public works projects, so it's not exactly feudalism.. and it doesn't have the nationalism and superiority complex typical of fascism. Hard to say what it is. Certainly neither capitalist nor communist.
Capitalism makes people work hard, because they have a purpose and goal to achieve something they build or develop.
Under every regime from anarchism to fascism people can have "a purpose and goal to achieve something". If you're talking about the workers having control of the means of production, i.e. the productive having access to the resources they need to achieve their goals, that's precisely socialism. In capitalism, the person building/developing is usually not the owner of the results of the work.
On the other hand socialism says everyone gets their equal and fair share if they work or not.
No form of socialism has never said such a thing. 20th century socialism is worker control of the means of production. Marxist socialism is the stage before communism where everyone does his part and is rewarded according to his labour rather than according to his capital input.
You may be thinking of social democracy of the sort in Western European nations, but even that has no notion of "equal and fair share" - the welfare safety net just provides a minimum to enable people to pick themselves up, or to maintain people who are too disabled/sick to work. It also provides a level of assistance to lift people with certain conditions up to the level of someone without that condition.
Or perhaps you're thinking of Marxist communism, which also doesn't give people an "equal and fair share" - it gives to people according to their need. Just because Bob without no legs gets a wheelchair, it doesn't mean you get one.
What are you thinking of?
So tell me, why would anyone with a goal and purpose give give that to someone who is lazy, looter, or parasite. Not me.
Observing the outcome of elections in the UK and the US over the past decade, I'd say that rewarding rich, lazy, looting parasites appears to be the main goal of the citizens of those two countries.
So you're saying that the purpose of capitalism is to make things better 200 years from now? Was that its purpose 200 years ago? You sound exactly like the preacher: suffer today and you will find glory in the afterlife. Except you're not even offering glory for me, but for... the children I don't have?
Is that your clever way of saying, "Oh but we've never had capitalism because THE GOVERNMENT"?
Either state that the problem with America is that businessmen have never been free enough to own and to exploit, or concede that America is showing what capitalism is really like. If you believe this is a false dichotomy, justify your belief.
A majority of the working class in the US (and today's middle class since it didn't exist) used to work 10-12 hours a day, six days a week to put food on the table and little else.
That's funny, I know lots of people like that in the US today. Oh, yes, there's a dwindling "middle class" which it's great to be in if you're still in it. I don't know how that helps otherwise.
They burned 3000-4000 calories per day and were lean and fit.
Yes, that's another problem with modern living: we either outsource jobs to countries with fewer worker protections or we simply develop technology to do the work instead. Because we treat "the economy" like religion and the US has a legacy Protestant work ethic (or, simply, because it's the best way of exploiting you), the new working man is a member of an elite cadre of chair warmers.
Today many people work 8-9 hours a day, five days a week, and 10 hours on the longer side
Really? How many people actually have all the remainder of the week completely free from work duties? What is more, twentieth century labour movements to limit working hours have been neutered.
life expectancy has doubled in the last 200 years
Because infant mortality has reduced, because we have social works and health projects: clean water, vaccinations, etc. The increase in adult life expectancy is not so impressive.
And before you whine that iPad factories give better labour opportunities than the rice paddies, the same argument was used 200 years ago in England. Land use changes by country landlords, the increasing cost of living space and the goldrush mentality brought on by the success of initial migrants persuaded people into city slums: by the time they'd realised their fate a few years later, there was no way of moving back.
If capitalism were a success, we'd all be working fewer hours and adults would be living significantly longer. We are not and they are not.
There's a tendency by humans to identify some positive trait as horribly negative. After all, the world must be fair and someone gifted must suffer for it, right?
I cannot outright reject "equalising" hypotheses, but I am slow to accept them because they may betray the motivations of the humans behind them.
Your argument now rests on the assumption that Microsoft was misleading developers that its extensions were part of standard Java.
Microsoft was never doing such a thing.
Moreover, it's fairly obnoxious to suggest that people developing using Microsoft solutions are all so dumb that they wouldn't be able to figure out that (e.g.) a call to the native Windows API is not cross-platform, even if MS had somehow tried to convince people of that. Which, again, they weren't doing.
What Microsoft was doing was enticing developers to use the non-standard extensions so they'd be able to choose Java as a language but end up with software that wasn't actually portable. Clearly Java was the fashionable new language, but Windows was the traditional desktop OS. So this method would rope in people whose skills and existing codebase was Java, as well as persuade those whose real knowledgebase was in the Windows API to never really leave Windows.
Some of this mirrors what Google are doing: leverage existing Java codebase and developers but require (not even just entice) them to use non-standard extensions so further work remains tied to their platform.
This is the danger of "embrace and extend", and this is what Google are doing. They're just much better than Microsoft at maintaining the odour of roses.
Now show me the Java VM that Google produced like Microsoft did.
This is a red herring. Developers don't write in bytecode so it doesn't matter whether the resulting binaries are slightly different or very different from standard.
If I build something Java-y but with MS extensions, it will work on the MSJVM but not on a standard Java VM.
If I build something Java-y but with Google extensions, it will work on Google's virtual machine but not on a standard Java VM.
Not really, no. Google is not creating a Java VM that only works on Google devices.
A VM is obviously written for a particular native platform, so I don't know what you mean here.
They are not claiming to implement Java
If you're implying that "the Java programming language" is not part of Java, then you're being intellectually dishonest. If you're implying that you don't "implement Java" unless you implement every single spec related to Java, then nothing "implements Java". What are you actually trying to say?
and breaking compatibility with other Java environments.
MS tools compiled standard Java source code and ran execute Java bytecode. The programmer could choose to use incompatible extensions. In a sense, this is better than what Google is offering, where AFAICT standard Java mobile libraries aren't properly implemented and you have to use non-standard extensions to get things working on Android.
Again, the choice of compiled executable format is irrelevant. Every developer can run a compilation script to produce an executable for various different platforms. What takes time and matters is whether the source must be changed
And even if you take offense to coding in Java for a Dalvik environment, anyone can take the Apache License Dalvik VM and port it to other platforms (which more than one entity is doing).
Yeah, because what we need is another non-standard where alternative implementations are always playing catchup. Thanks for illustrating the problem.
Anyone can implement anyone else's API/protocol, possibly by reusing code they supply under a permissive licence. The problem is that you have to actually do that with every platform you want to run your software on - and in every case it'll be a lot more work than just recompiling (to begin, which cross-platform lower level API are they using? oh...).
And because, in practice, that costs a lot of effort, proprietary extensions create lock-in.
And that's why we have hardware/software standards. Not because compatibility layers are impossible without them, but because things are more difficult, and you're always playing catchup.
Everything you say makes sense. I guess I was highlighting a couple of issues:
The people you describe are only "needy" in the sense that they need education on money management - there are lots of people who are genuinely trying hard and being careful with money but who remain on the bread line because of poor health/intelligence/circumstances. Unfortunately, it's the former rather than the latter sort of person who too many people think of when they refer to the "poor" as lazy/irresponsible;
The economy may outlast you, but you only have one life in which to delay gratification. A 20-something can learn patience and a well-paid 30-something with multiple expensive cars and mounting debt may need to pull in the reins. But if you really don't have the health or intelligence to save up after a couple of decades, it might be better just to say fuck it and get into debt, so you're not dead before you have some fun. It's easy for one well-off individual to say "don't live outside your means!", but you only have one life and why should you remain miserable until you die? No man exists merely to serve a system.
tl;dr It's OK to tell someone to be patient when they're 20. But lecturing that to a 50 year old who has been responsible but who hasn't got anywhere for it... not reasonable.
From what I've seen, a sizable percentage of the poor show remarkably bad money management skills, and even when they get jobs that pay remarkably well,
There are very few people who jump from poverty to getting jobs "that pay remarkably well" - you're talking about the outliers who are smart enough to be demonstrably in high demand but who for some reason can or will not apply that to money management.
Reality is that most people simply aren't ever going to be in much demand: there are so many people who can do what they can and who can be educated to the highest level they can reach. It is this pool which makes up the majority of the poor in a developed country - not the quirky genius who fails at life skills.
Of course, it's not entirely their fault. The existence of poverty inherently points to the U.S. education system being a complete failure.
Yes, this is a contributing problem, and not just in the US. But you can only go so far teaching people to be careful with money they don't have, and no-one is going to be satisfied for very long with barely enough to put food on the table.
Also note that the poor receive a much better ROI based on taxes in vs payments out.
Except that society and the government which supports it isn't "taxes in vs payments out" - it's a whole infrastructure to protect and serve the people. If a poor man is still poor while a rich man is still rich, the rich man has received a better RoI.
A rich man who thinks taxation gives him a poor RoI is welcome to try to stop paying tax at every stage it's taken from him. He will soon find he can do barely any business and, what is more, society which has previously protected his big house and his nice car will take them both from him.
Whereas a poor man with no assets for society to protect enjoys exactly the same indirect taxes.
I don't have any friends whose financial situation I'm not at least vaguely aware of. Close friends we share in detail with. Friends help you achieve good things for yourself or others, and to help someone you have to know what they have to work with... so it just seems to come up naturally in conversation.
The people I know and get along with who have higher incomes tend to give away their money a lot to help others, whether to fund something - like a small business start-up grant or the welfare of a family in some far-off third-world country they happen to have done business in - or simply to help people out of shit. For example, two people I know might each make, say, $100/hour, one of them is ploughing it into helping extended and adopted family and continuously doing favours for people; the other spends it on gadgets and holidays. The former is very relaxing to be around, full of good humour and advice; the latter is insufferable.
So many folks treat credit cards like magical plastic objects that just make the things they want appear.
No, they don't. It's just convenient for your argument to paint a picture in which they do. Some people get into debt they were unlikely to ever be able to afford. Most people either never reach unmanageable levels of debt or simply had a significant downturn in their employment luck - just as applies to many small business owners, who couldn't even have set up without being in debt for a while and who would be fucked the moment a couple of large customers decide not to pay an invoice on time.
There's also a need to put in the work to earn the standard of living you want.
Those with the best standard of living haven't needed to put much work in at all, having either inherited it or being very smart. Hard work is a very small component of financial success.
That includes sacrifices such as getting a job and working one's way up or going to college rather than being a self-indulgent brat until one hits 30 and realizes he or she is still living in mom's basement, has no career, and really not much of a future.
Most college programmes are overrated and you'd be better off paying $100,000 on an advertisement campaign for someone to hire you. And I say this as a mathematics graduate who performed well.
You really ought to check the requirements for each of those programmes. Not only is it fairly difficult to get on them, but you'll end up with a miserable life if you continue with so little income that you continue to qualify.
If you are more responsible maybe you won't need the government support.
Bad health, lack of intelligence and workers >> available jobs.
But if you like you can ignore all this and assume it's about not being responsible.
You might have some more dignity, but your neighbors will be better off.
"Dignity" is one of those quasi-religious terms, like "faith", instilled by the prejudice of your parents. There's nothing "undignified" about asking for and receiving help. Life would be a lot worse if everyone considered it "undignified" not to lie in the streets and die.
Slashdot Mirror
How many countries have you lived in?
Ive not heard anyone complaining about capitalism or espousing socialism, pretty much ever.
What part of the southern United States do you live in?
Any regime which does not provide relief for people currently on earth, instead promising something better for future generations / afterlife reincarnations, is a dangerous con. People claiming to be capitalist, communist, fascist, anarchist and everywhere in between have been guilty of it.
This doesn't mean instant gratification, but it must mean that the society you are living in must exist to make your life better providing you do not act at the expense of others in that society.
It's expected that things might be even better in 200 years' time. But that's a side effect.
So more time alive - specifically, more time alive and not having to labour to survive - is not the defining characteristic of a "society that progresses"?
The USSR had a downturn? I am not sure what they teach in American state schools, but can you begin to imagine what life would have been like as a peasant under the Tsar? 20 years later, its industrial might challenged Hitler. A decade later it was ahead of the US in the space race. When the US was still keeping niggers on the fields and women in the kitchen, the Soviets were providing excellent technical education and opportunity according to merit.
As for Cuba, I know Americans aren't allowed there (perhaps you'll be able to get in if you go via another country in the free world, like everyone else?), but it's a decent American country with good healthcare and fair education, doing thoroughly better than any other country which has been bombarded by US hate propaganda and embargo for the past half century.
NK, well... I know little about NK. As do you. Because it's really hard to get accurate information about NK. There's lots of propaganda, but very little verifiable information available to the general public. I'm sure you'll quote propaganda. Looks like a cultish dictatorship from the outside, but again, it's hard to say.
China? Well, they're certainly the most successful nation on earth right now, if success is measured in actually producing rather than trading in invisibles. And, like in the US, a lovely place to live if you're part of the middle class (except its is growing while the US is losing its own). It's its own special gem: while US government serves business interests, Chinese business serves government interests. The government still invests heavily in public works projects, so it's not exactly feudalism.. and it doesn't have the nationalism and superiority complex typical of fascism. Hard to say what it is. Certainly neither capitalist nor communist.
If I had worthwhile options, I'd take a pick.
If I said I had three heads, would that give me three heads?
If you claimed a country was communist, would that make it communist?
If the problem with America is that it is not capitalist enough, say so. That's a fair start to any counterargument to "capitalism has failed".
Capitalism makes people work hard, because they have a purpose and goal to achieve something they build or develop.
Under every regime from anarchism to fascism people can have "a purpose and goal to achieve something". If you're talking about the workers having control of the means of production, i.e. the productive having access to the resources they need to achieve their goals, that's precisely socialism. In capitalism, the person building/developing is usually not the owner of the results of the work.
On the other hand socialism says everyone gets their equal and fair share if they work or not.
No form of socialism has never said such a thing. 20th century socialism is worker control of the means of production. Marxist socialism is the stage before communism where everyone does his part and is rewarded according to his labour rather than according to his capital input.
You may be thinking of social democracy of the sort in Western European nations, but even that has no notion of "equal and fair share" - the welfare safety net just provides a minimum to enable people to pick themselves up, or to maintain people who are too disabled/sick to work. It also provides a level of assistance to lift people with certain conditions up to the level of someone without that condition.
Or perhaps you're thinking of Marxist communism, which also doesn't give people an "equal and fair share" - it gives to people according to their need. Just because Bob without no legs gets a wheelchair, it doesn't mean you get one.
What are you thinking of?
So tell me, why would anyone with a goal and purpose give give that to someone who is lazy, looter, or parasite. Not me.
Observing the outcome of elections in the UK and the US over the past decade, I'd say that rewarding rich, lazy, looting parasites appears to be the main goal of the citizens of those two countries.
So you're saying that the purpose of capitalism is to make things better 200 years from now? Was that its purpose 200 years ago? You sound exactly like the preacher: suffer today and you will find glory in the afterlife. Except you're not even offering glory for me, but for... the children I don't have?
Also, your table gives at birth life expectancy.
Is that your clever way of saying, "Oh but we've never had capitalism because THE GOVERNMENT"?
Either state that the problem with America is that businessmen have never been free enough to own and to exploit, or concede that America is showing what capitalism is really like. If you believe this is a false dichotomy, justify your belief.
A majority of the working class in the US (and today's middle class since it didn't exist) used to work 10-12 hours a day, six days a week to put food on the table and little else.
That's funny, I know lots of people like that in the US today. Oh, yes, there's a dwindling "middle class" which it's great to be in if you're still in it. I don't know how that helps otherwise.
They burned 3000-4000 calories per day and were lean and fit.
Yes, that's another problem with modern living: we either outsource jobs to countries with fewer worker protections or we simply develop technology to do the work instead. Because we treat "the economy" like religion and the US has a legacy Protestant work ethic (or, simply, because it's the best way of exploiting you), the new working man is a member of an elite cadre of chair warmers.
Today many people work 8-9 hours a day, five days a week, and 10 hours on the longer side
Really? How many people actually have all the remainder of the week completely free from work duties? What is more, twentieth century labour movements to limit working hours have been neutered.
life expectancy has doubled in the last 200 years
Because infant mortality has reduced, because we have social works and health projects: clean water, vaccinations, etc. The increase in adult life expectancy is not so impressive.
And before you whine that iPad factories give better labour opportunities than the rice paddies, the same argument was used 200 years ago in England. Land use changes by country landlords, the increasing cost of living space and the goldrush mentality brought on by the success of initial migrants persuaded people into city slums: by the time they'd realised their fate a few years later, there was no way of moving back.
If capitalism were a success, we'd all be working fewer hours and adults would be living significantly longer. We are not and they are not.
As someone who knows people with brain diseases
Who doesn't?
The brain's ability to detect the salience of certain information
This was concentrating on forgetting / ignoring, IOW what eidetics don't do. That's not the same thing as determining relevance.
There's a tendency by humans to identify some positive trait as horribly negative. After all, the world must be fair and someone gifted must suffer for it, right?
I cannot outright reject "equalising" hypotheses, but I am slow to accept them because they may betray the motivations of the humans behind them.
Your argument now rests on the assumption that Microsoft was misleading developers that its extensions were part of standard Java.
Microsoft was never doing such a thing.
Moreover, it's fairly obnoxious to suggest that people developing using Microsoft solutions are all so dumb that they wouldn't be able to figure out that (e.g.) a call to the native Windows API is not cross-platform, even if MS had somehow tried to convince people of that. Which, again, they weren't doing.
What Microsoft was doing was enticing developers to use the non-standard extensions so they'd be able to choose Java as a language but end up with software that wasn't actually portable. Clearly Java was the fashionable new language, but Windows was the traditional desktop OS. So this method would rope in people whose skills and existing codebase was Java, as well as persuade those whose real knowledgebase was in the Windows API to never really leave Windows.
Some of this mirrors what Google are doing: leverage existing Java codebase and developers but require (not even just entice) them to use non-standard extensions so further work remains tied to their platform.
This is the danger of "embrace and extend", and this is what Google are doing. They're just much better than Microsoft at maintaining the odour of roses.
Now show me the Java VM that Google produced like Microsoft did.
This is a red herring. Developers don't write in bytecode so it doesn't matter whether the resulting binaries are slightly different or very different from standard.
If I build something Java-y but with MS extensions, it will work on the MSJVM but not on a standard Java VM.
If I build something Java-y but with Google extensions, it will work on Google's virtual machine but not on a standard Java VM.
Not really, no. Google is not creating a Java VM that only works on Google devices.
A VM is obviously written for a particular native platform, so I don't know what you mean here.
They are not claiming to implement Java
If you're implying that "the Java programming language" is not part of Java, then you're being intellectually dishonest. If you're implying that you don't "implement Java" unless you implement every single spec related to Java, then nothing "implements Java". What are you actually trying to say?
and breaking compatibility with other Java environments.
MS tools compiled standard Java source code and ran execute Java bytecode. The programmer could choose to use incompatible extensions. In a sense, this is better than what Google is offering, where AFAICT standard Java mobile libraries aren't properly implemented and you have to use non-standard extensions to get things working on Android.
Again, the choice of compiled executable format is irrelevant. Every developer can run a compilation script to produce an executable for various different platforms. What takes time and matters is whether the source must be changed
And even if you take offense to coding in Java for a Dalvik environment, anyone can take the Apache License Dalvik VM and port it to other platforms (which more than one entity is doing).
Yeah, because what we need is another non-standard where alternative implementations are always playing catchup. Thanks for illustrating the problem.
From the SDK: All applications are written using the Java programming language.
A search +java +site:android.com will make it abundantly clear what Google is "presenting".
Second request addressed above.
You and several posters are being deliberately obtuse.
That's the worst analysis I've read in a while.
Anyone can implement anyone else's API/protocol, possibly by reusing code they supply under a permissive licence. The problem is that you have to actually do that with every platform you want to run your software on - and in every case it'll be a lot more work than just recompiling (to begin, which cross-platform lower level API are they using? oh...).
And because, in practice, that costs a lot of effort, proprietary extensions create lock-in.
And that's why we have hardware/software standards. Not because compatibility layers are impossible without them, but because things are more difficult, and you're always playing catchup.
MS were bad to embrace and extend Java to create platform lock-in.
Google are good to do so, right?
Everything you say makes sense. I guess I was highlighting a couple of issues:
tl;dr It's OK to tell someone to be patient when they're 20. But lecturing that to a 50 year old who has been responsible but who hasn't got anywhere for it... not reasonable.
From what I've seen, a sizable percentage of the poor show remarkably bad money management skills, and even when they get jobs that pay remarkably well,
There are very few people who jump from poverty to getting jobs "that pay remarkably well" - you're talking about the outliers who are smart enough to be demonstrably in high demand but who for some reason can or will not apply that to money management.
Reality is that most people simply aren't ever going to be in much demand: there are so many people who can do what they can and who can be educated to the highest level they can reach. It is this pool which makes up the majority of the poor in a developed country - not the quirky genius who fails at life skills.
Of course, it's not entirely their fault. The existence of poverty inherently points to the U.S. education system being a complete failure.
Yes, this is a contributing problem, and not just in the US. But you can only go so far teaching people to be careful with money they don't have, and no-one is going to be satisfied for very long with barely enough to put food on the table.
Also note that the poor receive a much better ROI based on taxes in vs payments out.
Except that society and the government which supports it isn't "taxes in vs payments out" - it's a whole infrastructure to protect and serve the people. If a poor man is still poor while a rich man is still rich, the rich man has received a better RoI.
A rich man who thinks taxation gives him a poor RoI is welcome to try to stop paying tax at every stage it's taken from him. He will soon find he can do barely any business and, what is more, society which has previously protected his big house and his nice car will take them both from him.
Whereas a poor man with no assets for society to protect enjoys exactly the same indirect taxes.
I don't have any friends whose financial situation I'm not at least vaguely aware of. Close friends we share in detail with. Friends help you achieve good things for yourself or others, and to help someone you have to know what they have to work with... so it just seems to come up naturally in conversation.
The people I know and get along with who have higher incomes tend to give away their money a lot to help others, whether to fund something - like a small business start-up grant or the welfare of a family in some far-off third-world country they happen to have done business in - or simply to help people out of shit. For example, two people I know might each make, say, $100/hour, one of them is ploughing it into helping extended and adopted family and continuously doing favours for people; the other spends it on gadgets and holidays. The former is very relaxing to be around, full of good humour and advice; the latter is insufferable.
So many folks treat credit cards like magical plastic objects that just make the things they want appear.
No, they don't. It's just convenient for your argument to paint a picture in which they do. Some people get into debt they were unlikely to ever be able to afford. Most people either never reach unmanageable levels of debt or simply had a significant downturn in their employment luck - just as applies to many small business owners, who couldn't even have set up without being in debt for a while and who would be fucked the moment a couple of large customers decide not to pay an invoice on time.
There's also a need to put in the work to earn the standard of living you want.
Those with the best standard of living haven't needed to put much work in at all, having either inherited it or being very smart. Hard work is a very small component of financial success.
That includes sacrifices such as getting a job and working one's way up or going to college rather than being a self-indulgent brat until one hits 30 and realizes he or she is still living in mom's basement, has no career, and really not much of a future.
Most college programmes are overrated and you'd be better off paying $100,000 on an advertisement campaign for someone to hire you. And I say this as a mathematics graduate who performed well.
You really ought to check the requirements for each of those programmes. Not only is it fairly difficult to get on them, but you'll end up with a miserable life if you continue with so little income that you continue to qualify.
If you are more responsible maybe you won't need the government support.
Bad health, lack of intelligence and workers >> available jobs.
But if you like you can ignore all this and assume it's about not being responsible.
You might have some more dignity, but your neighbors will be better off.
"Dignity" is one of those quasi-religious terms, like "faith", instilled by the prejudice of your parents. There's nothing "undignified" about asking for and receiving help. Life would be a lot worse if everyone considered it "undignified" not to lie in the streets and die.
I have no heroes, and even if I admired a wealthy celebrity it wouldn't mean I thought he was nice and would make a good friend.