I don't disagree with much of what the author wrote here, except for the part about "I'm starving, but I'm vegan so I won't eat SPAM and I won't eat the peanut butter because it is 'processed' and has 'chemicals.'"
Humans are omnivores, veganism is a choice. You don't get to complain about how rough it is when you yourself have chosen to play with hard mode turned on. Obviously if there are health issues that require an altered diet that's a different story, but if that was mentioned I missed it somehow.
Everything else about the story has merit though, the rich are too rich and the US's "safety nets" are awful. Nobody should go bankrupt due to health problems they can't control.
Just...that attitude right there, that is part of the problem. That humans who struggle but stand on principle somehow are less deserving than those who willfully throw away their morals or values for comfort.
In that moment, he chose to stand by what was important to him knowing the risks involved. That's one of the things I believe makes us human: the ability to sacrifice our personal benefit for greater causes than ourselves. To suggest he should throw that aside so as not to prolong hunger, instead of critique the system that demands he sell his principles for unhealthy foodstuffs "they" deem appropriate?
That was my reaction too. Muslims and Jews, neither of them especially pick-and-choose religions, are allowed to eat haram/non-kosher food if there's no other alternative and yet this guy rejected food he was given due to a lifestyle choice. So instead they stole food that was meant for other hungry people, and felt euphoric about it.
I mean, if it’s eat meat or die you eat meat or die…but being vegan is a basic privilege. Especially because AFAIK vegan foods require less resources per calorie to produce, so would be cheaper except for logistics.
Avoiding hyper-processed food may be smart if it would lead to health problems later. One jar or peanut butter probably isn’t an issue. But at the macro level, countries spend much more on ER treatment than they could on preventative care, like free or subsidized healthy food.
Not sure if you’re straw manning intentionally so I’ll imagine the best: a misreporting of his words. Here they are:
> One winter when my roommate and I both were navigating our latest setbacks, we couldn’t make ends meet and we literally went hungry. There just was no money for food. We would go to the catholic food box donation center and they gave me a box, but I was vegan and the box was full of garbage Spam and Frank and Beans type stuff that I ended up just settting out on the curb. I would rather go hungry than develop health problems from filling up on ultraprocessed hydrogenated oil government peanut butter.
Being hungry isn’t starving, the way being out of breath is different from suffocating.
> Humans are omnivores, veganism is a choice
To understand his choice to not eat the box we might paraphrase him: "humans are natural whole food eater, not UPF eater".
It depends on what "human" definition is used: homo sapiens (biologie)? A poor American (context)?
A heartbreaking story about a man's attempt to break out of generational poverty that feels relevant as we consider how AI changes labor and who it empowers.
A lot of us are excited about AI, but economic displacement can cause generations of trauma, and our safety net in the US is wholly inadequate toward that end.
thank you for sharing this. Too many people around me i see this story in. EU here. I am a lucky one as i get to look at my friends suffer from my temporary comfort. The title could not be more on point.
Are you actually EU? You know we are not one homogeneous state right? There are currently 27 nations, in which policy and circumstance varies between even at a regional level. There is immense poverty in some nations, notably Spain or Italy, but even Germany. I've seen it first hand, its heartbreaking.
I appreciate what you're saying holistically speaking, but whenever we talk about the societal consequences of AI in the US, I find it insidious that we focus on the inadequacy of our social safety nets. As if to say: Yes, C-suite, all you have to do is support UBI and you are free to obliterate what remains of the middle class in the United States of America.
I totally agree actually, and I think that having ownership over one's labor is extremely important. Without that self-determinism, people do not have the agency to define their lives, and their political actions become limited by their economic realities.
It is a likely outcome that the wealthy class offers the most meager basic income to avoid revolution but not much more than that.
I think we all need to talk about our leverage as a class of people who work for a living, and I'm not seeing nearly enough discussion about it. When Amodei talks about displacement of labor, he doesn't acknowledge how much trauma that economic displacement can cause and how many years that bell can ring.
I grew up in a poor single parent household. I'm doing better than most now. I don't have any more or less moral high ground because of my past as far as what I do now goes. I kinda hate how that stuff like people's past is used like a tool, source of credibility, or weapon/sheild ...
> The weird moral grandstanding against Peanut Butter had to be the strangest part.
I suppose you’re not aware that peanut butter manufacturers (and many other food manufacturers) in the states were allowed to cut their product with partially hydrogenated oil because it’s cheaper and doesn’t go rancid as fast. GRAS strikes again.
Unfortunately partially hydrogenated oil is pretty bad for most humans: raises LDL, lowers HDL, correlates with colon cancer, etc etc.
FDA didn’t ban it until c. 2020.
One of the few things actual nutrition scientists agree with RFK Jr. on.
If you exclude all processed foods with preservatives and say if not for Certified Organic foods you'll just not eat, you don't really come off a struggling.
It's just an absolutely weird thing for the author of focus on.
What do you want the government to do when your parents decide to abandon civilization and then live out without plumbing in the Oregon wilderness and then your dad abandons the family to do drugs and alcohol? How can you blame “the system” for that?
My wife is also from Oregon. Her grandma was “marry a random truck driver at 14 for a ticket out of town” poor. The guy abandoned the family and drank himself to an early death. And her dad was similarly situated to this guy—my wife lived part of her childhood in a converted barn. Her takeaway from her family history was the opposite: people are often incredibly self destructive and you can’t help those people.
The problem isn’t that lawmakers were never poor. Many were. The problem is that all the ones who were were high-functioning enough to escape poverty. So our systems for helping poor people assume a level of competence and administrative capacity that’s simply beyond the capability of a lot of poor people. For example, a third of uninsured people are actually eligible for Medicaid. Someone in my wife’s family racked up 50,000 in medical bills because they didn’t sign up for Medicaid despite being eligible the whole time.
Here are a handful of things that “the system” could change that would have helped the author:
- free or greatly reduced cost of higher education
- replacing means-tested programs like Medicaid with universal versions. Medicare for all, for example, where you don’t have to jump through hoops or even opt in, is better than the dehumanizing system we have in place today. Also removes the barrier to slightly improving one’s life, since you won’t lose your aid after getting a 10% raise or w/e.
- cheaper housing, or public housing (god forbid!)
These are not pipe dreams, these are all things other civilized countries have. I don’t want to live in a world where you have to be either lucky or extraordinary to live a secure, modest life.
You can, and you should. We all need a helping hand of a community, and a community to heal. We are social beings. And we carry the responsibility for not helping, too.
“A child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.“
I’m not sure you are familiar with the way some traditional communities treat, say, single mothers.
The system is, that if you make unfortunate choices (such as moving away from your support network and carrying your life savings where you can forget them) and do not have anything (such as skills or low morals) to compensate, life is going to be hard. That has always been the case, that will always be the case. What the consequential decisions are, differs. But the basic premise of “f around and find out” holds.
Human are imperfect. One of the most critical functions of "the system" is to flatten out the consequences of imperfection across all humans in the system. To deny this is to invite the end.
> my wife lived part of her childhood in a converted barn.
So did my mom, in Oregon.
Maybe no so ironically, my wife lived on a 2 trailer desert compound on a plot 2 miles from visible city infrastructure and 5 miles from any sort of built structure for most of her childhood.
This is deeply ironic, since often it is the people touting "personal responsibility" most loudly who misunderstand the concept most dramatically. They use it as a convenience to make it easy and comfortable to dismiss human suffering, rather than attempting to understand it.
The system should not grind to a halt for a person because they did not fill out some paperwork
That such a trivial thing destines someone to endless debt and health issues is just cruelty. That it doesn't account for terrible parents when they are a constant like gravity itself is nothing more than the result of willfully ignorant politicians parroting tropes of long dead, less educated, and more ignorant politicians
Many politicians are intentionally in on the scam, erecting barriers so they can funnel wealth to rich corporations instead; look at this surplus from cutting education! Of course they don't say where the surplus came from so plainly. Mathematically air tight non-violent eugenics. Nevermind the meat suits engaged in such are useless themselves. Politicians are primarily just that, not also scientists and doctors. Just fuzzy VHS copies of historical story.
The system as a whole can be blamed for ignoring reality and coddling non-contributors. Boomers and GenX did not invent anything we rely on. Art, music, technology...etc etc... are centuries old.
But the contemporary elders act like reality itself is due to their existence. It's such a farcical concept. None of them are owed as none of them gave. They merely took the baton and redipped both ends in their own shit.
>...abandons the family to do drugs and alcohol? How can you blame “the system” for that?
We don't live in a vacuum and there a reasons why people turn to drug use that the system exacerbates. But that is completely irrelevant, because this blog post is a systemic critique, even if it is told through the life story of an individual. To cherry pick one stanza of the entire blog post to dismiss it on the grounds that the father who left is a drug addict is one more example of the delusions or strategies of the moralizing capitalist.
An excellent essay. Very grim but honest and likely resonates with most people on some level.
America has been a cruel place to be poor since day one. I encourage everyone to read Howard Zinn’s ‘A People's History of the United States’ as it shows a more grounded history of this country. The US needs a workforce of starving, ill, desperate people in order to work. That’s how the system was built: on the backs of African slaves and the European poor.
The unspoken rule of this society is that everyone should rely on their family for help and not the government. This is why life is especially cruel for those with little to no family.
Those who embrace and celebrate AI when there’s a chance it could lead to mass unemployment and suffering should take a long hard look in the mirror.
Any longer or harder than someone using a car, knowing full well the depravity for war caused by a lust for oil, and the chance to get into a car crash every time they get behind the wheel? Or every smartphone user for the use of slavery to procure cobalt the device is dependent on to function?
There's also a chance it could lead to something better. If everyone should rely on their family for help, then if you have the skills to take advantage of the AI boom, then you have a duty to make as much money as possible in order to better be able to provide for said family as times change.
I find it strange how individuals lament the lack of support from “the system” while actively harming the same system by leaving food bank items on the curb or stealing
To me this reads as a person with no understanding of mutual support networks because they have never felt the need to provide to others in the way they would like to be provided for.
And mom leaving the entirety of their liquid net wealth at a store? There's something deeply flawed with the whole story that reeks of dissociation from reality.
A dude makes a series of terrible decisions. Decides to not learn from any them. Then blames society. Okay.
But my early story is eerily similar to his. Expect instead of just my dad dropping out to do drug, so did my mom. I grew up constantly moving between women’s shelters, random peoples couches and storage units.
And while he was in rural Oregon, I was in rural Idaho.
I ditched my parents as soon as I could. I worked basic non-silicon valley tech jobs. Moved from help desk ticket closer to actual IT career. No college, no money or time for it. Did alright.
Yeah life would have been a fuckton easier if I had supportive parents. But I’m in a good place and what I did wasn’t magic or luck. It was simply get basic job. Get shit apartment. Get slightly better job. Repeat.
This dude is deep in incel territory, which you can tell from the incel words he drops throughout his rant.
This dude says he never expected or needed any hand outs but several paragraphs earlier was complaining that the food bank didn’t provide vegan food. Ooohhh Kay. I have a lot of thoughts about both those statements. But dang dude. Maybe if you’re starving you should take any food you can get and deal with the rich people virtue signaling once you can afford to eat.
(To clarify on the above, being vegan is fucking great. It’s good to not kill animals… but you gotta take care of yourself before you take care of a cow.)
Yeah parts of the system are screw up. Yeah some people get a really unfair hand. But this guy was in generally good health, should have had health insurance through these crap jobs he was complaining about for his skateboard thing. (Which is another wtf that shows total lack of risk analysis. Who choses skateboarding as a hobby when you can’t afford a doctor. Jeez. Take up running.)
You, especially as someone who has "been there", nailed it.
And congrats on taking personal responsibility rather than blaming others and society for your bad decisions (and I'm betting that you, like most of us, have made some bad decisions from time to time - but try to learn from them rather than wallow in them).
My first job was Call Center tech support for eMachines (through a random 3rd-party contractor called "Alorica") at a whopping $7.25/hr in 2003.
It had health insurance. Not great insurance, mind you, but insurance. It would cover ER-type emergencies and had something like a $100 co-pay for standard visits. It was basically "don't go to the doctor unless you're actually dying insurance," and if you're in generally good health, like I was, or the author of this article. It's "good enough".
My next job after that was sales-drone at CompUSA for a whole 7.65/hr. But they had slightly better insurance. Then they went out of business. And my job after that was as a phone agent at Delta Airlines, starting at $8.50/hr and rising to $11.77/hr when I left.
It wasn't until 2007 that I got my first real tech-job. And it was still customer service. But it paid $15/hr and had "normal" insurance.
I fully realize the insurance situation is f'ed. And those in less good health get quite screwed. But, this guy... This guy caused himself a lot of his own problems.
I’m probably gonna be downvoted to hell but I was rebutted by the part where the guy just throws away food because it was not vegan (and stopped reading after that). He did mention health issue concerns, so maybe it was on good faith, but AFAIK if you’re hungry, and I mean really hungry, you don’t care. You just eat what you have as long as it is edible.
Amazing the amount of people who hate on him for this part of the story. He didn’t throw away food, he stuck to his morals and didn’t eat it. Hating on a poor person for having dignity? Keep up the good work.
It is because that part does not track at all. It is not healthier to go hungry then to eat that food. It is not "simple life" to ge vegan, it is cranking the complexity and expenses up.
Some part of the story are clear failures of the system. Some parts have nothing to do with the system (moms and dads decision). Some parts are system actually helping, maybe not enough but helping.
And then there were genuinely confusing parts as in someone with a seemingly normal job and three houses feeling like they dont have secure housing.
Actual words from article: "but I was vegan and the box was full of garbage Spam and Frank and Beans type stuff that I ended up just settting out on the curb."
You are creating a fantasy to support your arguments.
So because of his economic realities he should be pragmatic enough to drop his values?
Can't you see what a slippery slope that is? And in fact, how dangerous that level of economic despair is for a functioning democracy?
It's also not fair, because people who are more fortunate to be born into a well-off family can eat vegan their whole lives.
This person did everything he was supposed to do, stood up for things he believed in, and still was left in the lurch along the way. This is not the American dream, it is a clear indication how arrested social mobility is in the US. The rags-to-riches "Horatio Alger" story has been a myth in the US for quite a well, buoyed by anecdotes that are predicated on luck.
Readit News
Humans are omnivores, veganism is a choice. You don't get to complain about how rough it is when you yourself have chosen to play with hard mode turned on. Obviously if there are health issues that require an altered diet that's a different story, but if that was mentioned I missed it somehow.
Everything else about the story has merit though, the rich are too rich and the US's "safety nets" are awful. Nobody should go bankrupt due to health problems they can't control.
Just...that attitude right there, that is part of the problem. That humans who struggle but stand on principle somehow are less deserving than those who willfully throw away their morals or values for comfort.
In that moment, he chose to stand by what was important to him knowing the risks involved. That's one of the things I believe makes us human: the ability to sacrifice our personal benefit for greater causes than ourselves. To suggest he should throw that aside so as not to prolong hunger, instead of critique the system that demands he sell his principles for unhealthy foodstuffs "they" deem appropriate?
Just...fuck, man.
Fuck.
I kinda stopped reading about then.
Avoiding hyper-processed food may be smart if it would lead to health problems later. One jar or peanut butter probably isn’t an issue. But at the macro level, countries spend much more on ER treatment than they could on preventative care, like free or subsidized healthy food.
> One winter when my roommate and I both were navigating our latest setbacks, we couldn’t make ends meet and we literally went hungry. There just was no money for food. We would go to the catholic food box donation center and they gave me a box, but I was vegan and the box was full of garbage Spam and Frank and Beans type stuff that I ended up just settting out on the curb. I would rather go hungry than develop health problems from filling up on ultraprocessed hydrogenated oil government peanut butter.
Being hungry isn’t starving, the way being out of breath is different from suffocating.
> Humans are omnivores, veganism is a choice
To understand his choice to not eat the box we might paraphrase him: "humans are natural whole food eater, not UPF eater".
It depends on what "human" definition is used: homo sapiens (biologie)? A poor American (context)?
A lot of us are excited about AI, but economic displacement can cause generations of trauma, and our safety net in the US is wholly inadequate toward that end.
https://www.statista.com/chart/30411/share-of-people-at-risk...
/rant
Edit: Why downvote? debate me. Its so childish to suppress comments you do not agree with.
It is a likely outcome that the wealthy class offers the most meager basic income to avoid revolution but not much more than that.
I think we all need to talk about our leverage as a class of people who work for a living, and I'm not seeing nearly enough discussion about it. When Amodei talks about displacement of labor, he doesn't acknowledge how much trauma that economic displacement can cause and how many years that bell can ring.
Deleted Comment
You own 3 houses, including an airbnb and your conclusion is how unfair society is ?
Your doing better than most people. The weird moral grandstanding against Peanut Butter had to be the strangest part.
Anything less than organic whole foods produce is simply barbaric.
This isn't to say the system is good, our criminal justice system is a nightmare of indefinite detentions and human rights abuses.
But I'm not seeing much struggle in this post. OP kept that making weird choices. At a point you need to sort yourself out.
Everyone got experiences.
I suppose you’re not aware that peanut butter manufacturers (and many other food manufacturers) in the states were allowed to cut their product with partially hydrogenated oil because it’s cheaper and doesn’t go rancid as fast. GRAS strikes again.
Unfortunately partially hydrogenated oil is pretty bad for most humans: raises LDL, lowers HDL, correlates with colon cancer, etc etc.
FDA didn’t ban it until c. 2020.
One of the few things actual nutrition scientists agree with RFK Jr. on.
If you exclude all processed foods with preservatives and say if not for Certified Organic foods you'll just not eat, you don't really come off a struggling.
It's just an absolutely weird thing for the author of focus on.
My wife is also from Oregon. Her grandma was “marry a random truck driver at 14 for a ticket out of town” poor. The guy abandoned the family and drank himself to an early death. And her dad was similarly situated to this guy—my wife lived part of her childhood in a converted barn. Her takeaway from her family history was the opposite: people are often incredibly self destructive and you can’t help those people.
The problem isn’t that lawmakers were never poor. Many were. The problem is that all the ones who were were high-functioning enough to escape poverty. So our systems for helping poor people assume a level of competence and administrative capacity that’s simply beyond the capability of a lot of poor people. For example, a third of uninsured people are actually eligible for Medicaid. Someone in my wife’s family racked up 50,000 in medical bills because they didn’t sign up for Medicaid despite being eligible the whole time.
- free or greatly reduced cost of higher education
- replacing means-tested programs like Medicaid with universal versions. Medicare for all, for example, where you don’t have to jump through hoops or even opt in, is better than the dehumanizing system we have in place today. Also removes the barrier to slightly improving one’s life, since you won’t lose your aid after getting a 10% raise or w/e.
- cheaper housing, or public housing (god forbid!)
These are not pipe dreams, these are all things other civilized countries have. I don’t want to live in a world where you have to be either lucky or extraordinary to live a secure, modest life.
Deleted Comment
You can, and you should. We all need a helping hand of a community, and a community to heal. We are social beings. And we carry the responsibility for not helping, too.
The system is, that if you make unfortunate choices (such as moving away from your support network and carrying your life savings where you can forget them) and do not have anything (such as skills or low morals) to compensate, life is going to be hard. That has always been the case, that will always be the case. What the consequential decisions are, differs. But the basic premise of “f around and find out” holds.
Dead Comment
So did my mom, in Oregon.
Maybe no so ironically, my wife lived on a 2 trailer desert compound on a plot 2 miles from visible city infrastructure and 5 miles from any sort of built structure for most of her childhood.
Deleted Comment
That such a trivial thing destines someone to endless debt and health issues is just cruelty. That it doesn't account for terrible parents when they are a constant like gravity itself is nothing more than the result of willfully ignorant politicians parroting tropes of long dead, less educated, and more ignorant politicians
Many politicians are intentionally in on the scam, erecting barriers so they can funnel wealth to rich corporations instead; look at this surplus from cutting education! Of course they don't say where the surplus came from so plainly. Mathematically air tight non-violent eugenics. Nevermind the meat suits engaged in such are useless themselves. Politicians are primarily just that, not also scientists and doctors. Just fuzzy VHS copies of historical story.
The system as a whole can be blamed for ignoring reality and coddling non-contributors. Boomers and GenX did not invent anything we rely on. Art, music, technology...etc etc... are centuries old.
But the contemporary elders act like reality itself is due to their existence. It's such a farcical concept. None of them are owed as none of them gave. They merely took the baton and redipped both ends in their own shit.
We don't live in a vacuum and there a reasons why people turn to drug use that the system exacerbates. But that is completely irrelevant, because this blog post is a systemic critique, even if it is told through the life story of an individual. To cherry pick one stanza of the entire blog post to dismiss it on the grounds that the father who left is a drug addict is one more example of the delusions or strategies of the moralizing capitalist.
America has been a cruel place to be poor since day one. I encourage everyone to read Howard Zinn’s ‘A People's History of the United States’ as it shows a more grounded history of this country. The US needs a workforce of starving, ill, desperate people in order to work. That’s how the system was built: on the backs of African slaves and the European poor.
The unspoken rule of this society is that everyone should rely on their family for help and not the government. This is why life is especially cruel for those with little to no family.
Those who embrace and celebrate AI when there’s a chance it could lead to mass unemployment and suffering should take a long hard look in the mirror.
There's also a chance it could lead to something better. If everyone should rely on their family for help, then if you have the skills to take advantage of the AI boom, then you have a duty to make as much money as possible in order to better be able to provide for said family as times change.
To me this reads as a person with no understanding of mutual support networks because they have never felt the need to provide to others in the way they would like to be provided for.
Inherently asocial, and weird.
A dude makes a series of terrible decisions. Decides to not learn from any them. Then blames society. Okay.
But my early story is eerily similar to his. Expect instead of just my dad dropping out to do drug, so did my mom. I grew up constantly moving between women’s shelters, random peoples couches and storage units.
And while he was in rural Oregon, I was in rural Idaho.
I ditched my parents as soon as I could. I worked basic non-silicon valley tech jobs. Moved from help desk ticket closer to actual IT career. No college, no money or time for it. Did alright.
Yeah life would have been a fuckton easier if I had supportive parents. But I’m in a good place and what I did wasn’t magic or luck. It was simply get basic job. Get shit apartment. Get slightly better job. Repeat.
This dude is deep in incel territory, which you can tell from the incel words he drops throughout his rant.
This dude says he never expected or needed any hand outs but several paragraphs earlier was complaining that the food bank didn’t provide vegan food. Ooohhh Kay. I have a lot of thoughts about both those statements. But dang dude. Maybe if you’re starving you should take any food you can get and deal with the rich people virtue signaling once you can afford to eat.
(To clarify on the above, being vegan is fucking great. It’s good to not kill animals… but you gotta take care of yourself before you take care of a cow.)
Yeah parts of the system are screw up. Yeah some people get a really unfair hand. But this guy was in generally good health, should have had health insurance through these crap jobs he was complaining about for his skateboard thing. (Which is another wtf that shows total lack of risk analysis. Who choses skateboarding as a hobby when you can’t afford a doctor. Jeez. Take up running.)
And congrats on taking personal responsibility rather than blaming others and society for your bad decisions (and I'm betting that you, like most of us, have made some bad decisions from time to time - but try to learn from them rather than wallow in them).
It had health insurance. Not great insurance, mind you, but insurance. It would cover ER-type emergencies and had something like a $100 co-pay for standard visits. It was basically "don't go to the doctor unless you're actually dying insurance," and if you're in generally good health, like I was, or the author of this article. It's "good enough".
My next job after that was sales-drone at CompUSA for a whole 7.65/hr. But they had slightly better insurance. Then they went out of business. And my job after that was as a phone agent at Delta Airlines, starting at $8.50/hr and rising to $11.77/hr when I left.
It wasn't until 2007 that I got my first real tech-job. And it was still customer service. But it paid $15/hr and had "normal" insurance.
I fully realize the insurance situation is f'ed. And those in less good health get quite screwed. But, this guy... This guy caused himself a lot of his own problems.
Deleted Comment
Some part of the story are clear failures of the system. Some parts have nothing to do with the system (moms and dads decision). Some parts are system actually helping, maybe not enough but helping.
And then there were genuinely confusing parts as in someone with a seemingly normal job and three houses feeling like they dont have secure housing.
The literal source text beg to differ. He could have at least given it to someone else in need.
Actual words from article: "but I was vegan and the box was full of garbage Spam and Frank and Beans type stuff that I ended up just settting out on the curb."
You are creating a fantasy to support your arguments.
Deleted Comment
Can't you see what a slippery slope that is? And in fact, how dangerous that level of economic despair is for a functioning democracy?
It's also not fair, because people who are more fortunate to be born into a well-off family can eat vegan their whole lives.
This person did everything he was supposed to do, stood up for things he believed in, and still was left in the lurch along the way. This is not the American dream, it is a clear indication how arrested social mobility is in the US. The rags-to-riches "Horatio Alger" story has been a myth in the US for quite a well, buoyed by anecdotes that are predicated on luck.
"Slippery slope" is literally the name of a common logical fallacy.