Hacker News Books

"Money won is twice as sweet as money earned."

Paul Newman - The Color of Money

The Hustler - 1961 & The Color of Money - 1986

Both with Paul Newman.

Optically about pool hustling. Really about the processes through which the naive progress as they encounter the underbelly of reality.

The Color of Money (1986):

Eddie Felson: "If you got an area of excellence... you're the best at something, anything... then rich can be arranged. Rich can come fairly easy."

If you're one of the best at something, at that point you just need a lever, a platform of consequence to hitch up to and ride. Whether that's being the best toy reviewer on YouTube, or the best podcaster on a giant streaming service, or the best writer on Substack, or the best disc golfer.

A book that goes deeper into this conversation is The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

Well worth the read, the story had a lot of nuances

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34758210

Massive investments in black communities. Comparing the treatment of the Irish to 400 years of institutionalized chattel slavery is absurd on its face. Also, again, ignoring everything else I mentioned. Some books you should check out to learn more about this. The New Jim Crow and The Color of Money. Black communities have been chronically underfunded, underserved, over-policed, and segregated for the entire history of our country.

> because the media has chosen to report on that problem near constantly since Colin Kaepernick took a knee, it has dominated the public consciousness and therefore influences thousands of people to loot, burn, protest, riot and thousands more to develop opinions and attitudes that create more and more division in our country.

No, systemic racism caused by capitalism is the root cause of that.

The capitalist media is but one contributing factor of this.

The root cause for this rioting is hundreds of years of systemic oppression: redlining (now digital redlining in the digital age), racist banking policies (for a detailed analysis see ‘The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap‘ and ‘How The Other Side Banks‘, both by law Professor Mehrsa Baradaran), the school to prison pipeline, the CIA and Reagan’s ‘war on drugs‘ that flooded inner cities with crack in the 1980’s causing the crack cocaine epidemic (journalist Gary Webb exposed this), the CIA also systemically murdered the leaders of socialist black liberation movements (Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, etc.), and more (these are only a few examples that I can think of right now).

Wage slavery of course exploits and oppresses all of the working class (the 99% of us who don’t own capitalist property: technology in the form of trade secrets, patent claims, etc. (the means of production)). Yet black and brown people (both in the global north and the global south) have especially had a harder time simply because of the color of their skin.