I think the mentality is shifting a little as millenials and gen z are slowly letting go of the meritocratic myth, but blaming internal motivations more than context is a problem in the American conception of the world we still suffer from as a nation. The inability of us to accept that our actions are not the only determining things in our lives seriously limit our ability to fully comprehend the world and how it really works which leads us to thinking ideas like work requirements are actually sane rather than completely counterproductive.
I've been around to see people over decades, and how their decisions affect their lives. Meritocracy is not a myth. Where people wind up is very much a consequence of their choices.
This isn't the Soviet Union where one is assigned a career, a job and an apartment.
I've seen immigrants arrive here with nothing and become millionaires. That's why everyone wants to come to America. The opportunity is here.
True.
But we also have lots of studies showing that the best of the lowest socioeconomic class almost never do better than the laziest of the uppermost socioeconomic class.
That looks an awful lot like a meritocracy.
If things keep going like this, those millionares will soon have to build their own fortress cities to keep all the undesirable and disgruntled poor people away.
The fact that poor people come to the US doesn't prove anything either, 99,(9)% of them will never be millionares, just like most people won't.
* does not apply if you or your children get shot by the police for being the wrong shade of brown, maimed by unsafe working conditions associated with low-skilled labour, get sacked because you ask for a raise, etc.
Where I am, the good and the bad, is nearly entirely the sum of my choices. For example, if you floss or not eventually has a large effect on your health. Ditto for the amount you choose to drink, smoke, and exercise. Where you choose to live, who you choose to marry, who you pick for friends, what you do with your free time, do you work to excel in school or do just enough to squeak by, what major do you select in college, it just goes on and on.
Could you point me to one? I've seen a number of studies on averages, and anecdotally, this contradicts my experience, so I'd be interested in whatever data you're referring to.
When millions can barely do it, the political and business classes fucked up and they need to fix it. That's the point of goverment, they can tackle systemic issues.
Choices is not the same as skills. Meritocracy is about merit, not choices.
Who told you poor people are capable of as good choices as richer people?
When you live life in easy mode is easy to make the right choices.
It's also easy to see some people who managed to play in hard mode and win, and extrapolate to everybody (especially if you don't account for lucky breaks and mitigating factors in their course).
But because a handful managed to win in hard mode, it doesn't make it as easy as those who play in easy mode, nor it makes it any more statistically possible for the masses to win the hard mode gameplay they were dealt.
>Where I am, the good and the bad, is nearly entirely the sum of my choices.
LOL. http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate
(One is even tempted to wish upon people saying hat a couple some serious accident or decease that kills their savings or takes their job, or puts them into depression, or have them tend to another family member, and such, to see whether their tune will remain the same...)
From https://www.wola.org/analysis/fact-sheet-united-states-immig...
"While the total number of migrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border is near its lowest level since the early 1970s, the number of apprehended unaccompanied children and families is again on the rise after a dramatic drop in the months following Trump’s inauguration.
This is a vulnerable population who, for the most part, are deliberately seeking out U.S. border security authorities and asking for protection. Affirmative requests for asylum of individuals from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have increased by 25 percent in fiscal year 2017 compared to 2016.
These people are fleeing for a reason. As White House Chief of Staff John Kelley once put it, the mass migration of children from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border primarily consists of “[parents that] are trying to save their children.” The countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are facing unparalleled levels of violent crime, with El Salvador and Honduras ranking among the top five most violent countries in the world."
As an aside, when the word "meritocracy" was coined, it wasn't considered a good thing. It was a bad thing.
This is a traditional, stereotypical belief that in order to escape poverty you have to work harder. This is old understanding of meritocracy and it's no longer valid. The new meritocracy is that you have to learn harder. And now, given all the learning resources available for free on the internet (which is also very accessible nowadays) it's probably the best time ever to self-educate.
Once in a while I walk past a person selling pens/begging for money in my neighborhood. I always wonder how much he could've learnt and improved his life if he spent his time on learning instead of sitting on a bench and begging for money. I have sympathy for people that are poor due to unbearable circumstances such as mental illness or disability. But I honestly don't understand why an otherwise capable person won't make an effort to self-educate in order to break out of poverty.
The first step in making better choices is to realize that one is making choices.
Which policies hurt the poor and middle class the most?
Our housing policies, our immigration policies, our trade policies, and our anti-family policies.
That doesn't make much sense if the US is a hell-hole of capitalism grinding people into poverty (as immigrants usually have little).
In 2016, 1.49 million immigrants came to the US. The median age is 44, so they're hardly all children.
Meanwhile, an awful lot more want to come but can't get in legally.
> This is the most ridiculous proof that America is the land of opportunity I can imagine.
People run to opportunity, not away from it. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested...
A lot of the planet is just terrible. Of the places that aren't terrible many wont let you just sneak in and make a living if you live a cash and carry lifestyle.
At best you can prove that the US is viewed as better than their current abode by people that don't live here.
This is the definition of damning with faint praise.
You still need to cover your basic expenses, homeless or not.
For example, you can get an MIT education for free on youtube, you can open a business on github for free, you can get funding for free from kickstarter, you can advertise for free on reddit, you can reach a worldwide market for free via the internet, you can write and sell a book on Amazon for free, and on and on. Nobody needs to know your age, gender, ethnicity, religion, location, disability, marital status, etc.
There's never been such opportunity, right here anywhere in America.
You don’t have to go back many generations to see that compared to today almost everyone played on hard mode.
Police kill ~1000 people per year in the US and roughly half are white. While there is an inarguabale disparity there, that means your chances of getting shot by police are extremely, vanishingly rare. And the numbers killed each year is in steep decline. Let's abandon the fear mongering rhetoric of getting shot by police is any real threat. It makes good headlines but it's just not likely to happen to 99.9999% of people no matter their "shade of brown" as you say.
There are more worker protections, more systemic empowerment of people in all classes, all genders, all faiths, all backgrounds than ever in history. There's a lot of work to be done and the system is by no means equal. Wealth disparity is real. But the fact is there's more learning resources available for free with which to bootstrap yourself than ever. As someone descended from hard working immigrants who valued education, and who is part of an incredibly racially diverse family, I don't think it's a crap deal at all.
That's a cute clip, but if you look at statistics you'll see Americans with less than a high school degree work on average 7.8 hours a day, and only 30% work on weekends and holidays.
30% is how many people?
What’s their schedule look like if they have kids too?
That’s a cute trick, using cold hard facts to normalize away bullshit
Hard mode is comparable across the same game. Those in 1800 played 1800s game, those in Nigeria play the Nigerian game, etc.
You wouldn't consider it much of a success if a person with huge work, skills, and effort got themselves to 1800-era middle class possessions TODAY, would you?
When you're working a double shift to put food on the table, it's really hard to learn an extra skill set (e.g. programming) and make time to build up a resume on github (or whatever).
The cost isn't really located in the act of "buying" education.
In other words, you "make" decisions only partially, and your choices are shaped by your status in life, before your conscious self can "chose".
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6107/682
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-br...
https://qz.com/964920/data-show-poor-people-make-better-fina...
http://news.berkeley.edu/2015/03/02/anxious-people-decisions...
I personally work 2 full time jobs, I'm aware how scarce free time can get. I'm certainly not saying that everyone can do it on their own either. Just that cost is a very weak barrier to knowledge and that I agree you need to learn your way out of poverty.
I'm also a big proponent of basic income exactly for the reasons above, but I think the core idea is well founded. Hard work at a job (or two jobs) doesn't usually get you out of a shitty job, where as learning enough to get a better job does.
1) had a job
2) had access to the internet
now trying learning anything for free online when you don't have money for food because you're jobless and don't have access to the internet because you don't have money for that either.
>It's the whole point of all the education available to Americans, most of it free. Choose it, or not. Heck, you can even get an MIT education for free over the internet. It's up to you.
It's only free if your time is worthless.
Else you have opportunity costs. Which are not just monetary (e.g. needing to work long hours to put food on the table) but human too (e.g. tending to a sick relative or raising your kid).
One could still study after his shift flipping burgers for their "MIT education for free over the internet". But they'd still be left without an actual MIT degree, and even following that free education will be much harder than the average HN commenter whose parents splurged for their education.
Also don't overlook that America is also supposed to be a country of redemption and second chances, and that we as a society derive strength from that. We foster risk-taking, and we don't throw away people who seriously screw up - but rather capitalize on the fact that those who have overcome serious mistakes often become formidable humans. This is one of the bright spots of American culture, lets not throw it away for the cheap thrill of standing in self-righteous judgment.
That said, making good decisions isn't sufficient, especially when you're trying to claw your way out of deep poverty.
You need more than just hard word. You need the opportunity to do the right kind of hard work, which many people lack.
For (2) as I said: libraries are free, coffee shops are free. hotel lobbies are free, heck some whole areas have free Wi-Fi. Internet is very easy to find.
I'll be the first to admit I had a good education, caring and supportive family, and my story would be different and harder without them, but I can't imagine a world that I didn't try to learn something new each day.
Again though, people always try and compare the worst. The solution for someone without a living wage job is a society that doesn't allow that to happen and is a different argument IMO. Getting out of abject poverty is very different than getting out of poverty / being poor.
That said, for someone homeless and jobless, time IS their greatest resource, so learning can be a useful resort. Further no one said they had to do it on their own. The main premise here is that learning is better than hard work for increasing your station. I think that's true regardless of feasibility.
The only kind of children society should encourage is those in stable financially-secure families.
>We foster risk-taking, and we don't throw away people who seriously screw up
These are things some Americans would like to be true, but are actually far from true, and far from universally supported. America IS a cruel society in many ways. Many Americans blame the poor for being poor, and do not support any form of public assistance. The nation does "throw away" people who screw up - the nation has a high incarceration rate.
Or is this the same old trope with an extra step added?
Our ancestors struggled in a much harsher world and got us to a point where we can enjoy easy mode.
Why can’t the poorest Americans do the same?
I don’t think you’re giving this enough weight. I went to a small unknown state college and got a degree in CS. The CS curriculum was horrible. My saving grace, was that I had been a hobbyist programmer since the mid 80s when my parents bought me my first computer. When I graduated in the mid 90s, I knew I wanted to get out of the small town I grew up in. My choices were to move to a slightly larger city and developing using technology that was already out of date, but would have provided me a salary to support myself, or moving to the major metro area where I still live not making nearly enough to support myself as a computer operator based on an internship that I had the previous year.
There was no way that I could have chosen that job if I my parents hadn’t already bought me a car, paid for insurance, paid my moving expenses, and help me pay my other bills for the first six months.
I “worked hard” but I didn’t have to work two jobs to support myself.
There was another guy who graduated with me, who was just as smart, but didn’t have parents that could help him. He had to get a job in the same place that I avoided like the plague. He’s still working there 20 some years later.
Learning basic personal finance, or a skill, or learning to exercise, or reading about government services, learning cooking etc can go a great deal in fixing one's problems.
Education often involves learning something, its not always reading text books and writing exams.
They struggled in an era of economic upward momentum, much mobility, job creation, with a population boom, and when the US emerged as global leader. And from 30s to 70s, in a much more labor and working class friendly climate, when lots of protections and rights were established (the 8-hour work day, pensions, minimum wages, equal rights for women and foreign workers, work safety, etc).
Not on an era of stagnant wages, job outsourcing, automation, over-concentration of money to too few hands, precariousness, eroded labour rights, when other countries emerge as global leaders, and so on.
When playing life's levels, it's not just the conditions you meet that matter, it's the momentum of the whole game environment too. If the game environment constantly upgrades, gives you more guns, ammo, etc, it's easier than playing easier initial conditions but seeing very slow or negative game environment progress.
A person still has to work an uphill run everyday until they reach some financial break through .
Don't get me wrong I enjoy the benefits of a "good" job and I finished college to get where I am.
If a person is poor, and they still think sparing an hour watching a Ivy League university lecture(that can vastly increase their opportunity range) isn't worth your time, they have far bigger problems related to entitlement.
>>Else you have opportunity costs.
And there they have a choice. Which opportunity is more important to one's life?
>>and even following that free education will be much harder than the average HN commenter whose parents splurged for their education.
There is often a huge space between Homelessness and being a billionaire.
You can always start doing work that is better than flipping burgers. And I don't any one will contest the fact that it will take a person years before they reach 6 figure salaries.
Again, even an entry level QA job could pay you better than flipping burger and you can work from there.
Don’t be sexist. She has agency. She has responsibility. She made her bed and now she lies in it. People with your paternalistic condescending thought process are ultimately what holds people like Vanessa back in society in the first place. Don’t take away her agency. She’s responsible for any decisions she’s made, good or bad. And 99% of her 16yr old female peers know that having a kid at 16 is a “ bad decision.” It’s literally sexist as fuck to suggest she was somehow stupid enough or irresponsible enough not to know what she was getting into. Vanessa KNEW she was making a “bad decision” and she CHOSE to make it anyway. Stop pretending like she didn’t choose it. Stop pretending like she has no agency. Stop being sexist. Thank you
I would argue here that you've confused correlation with causation.
Perhaps a minimum wage 60 hours/week worker just doesn't have the time or energy to make their bed, not an unwillingness. Maybe the poor conditions in a neighborhood are what make it affordable, not preferable. Etc.
You can escape poverty by buying lottery tickets too. Obviously it is all about the probabilities. But if you earn $10/hour (what kind of insane unlivable wage is that?) even if you work 16h/day you'll still be poor.
To many people having a family is the #1 thing you know, the 'economics' are in support of that.
Wealth and poverty for both society and the individual a generational. This generation lifts themselves to a height that makes life better for the next generation. One life time isn't enough to measure whether working hard will make you successful.
Being born into a well off standard is being born into generations of sacrifices and hard work. If the current generation doesn't work hard to maintain they will certainly make life harder for a few generations down the line.
We say that a blanket or jacket "is warm", even though all it's doing is trapping heat that we produce. We say a task "is difficult", even though we are the ones who are having the difficulty in completing it. We say an apple "is red" even if we know that the color we perceive is a property of how light interacts with the apple's matter.
And we often say that people "are poor" rather than "in poverty."
Language exists somewhere between representing the way we think, and affecting the way we think. Attributing poverty to an inherent property of a particular person, rather than their context, seems in line with how we speak (and perhaps think) about a lot of the world around us.
I think this is one reason it is so hard to fix social problems: because the first step must be a critical mass of people who can and will overcome a default way of thinking about the world.
If you're just into shaming people for bad decisions, I'm not.
This is the part you should be focusing on.
You've developed a model to explain why people live in poverty and how they can get out. Yet, as you can plainly see yourself, it doesn't actually jibe with reality.
I think what a lot of us a eluding to, is that some people can work as much as they can, up to burnout, without ever reaching above the poverty line.
I think that would be basically fate for a minority group single mother with low education living in a poor neighbourhood. People could blame her for her life, but except if her kid is exceptional in some way, he/she would also be doomed to be poor, for instance.
That also matches rich kids going through college. It's hardly an indicator of anything in my opinion.
My house is cluttered, mostly because I'm frugal and we live in a house that is a bit too small for our hobbies (art for me, music for the spouse, though we both dabble in the other). I have more money this way.
I'm lazy.
And honeslty, the only time I've really gotten crap for this type of thing is when I'm poor and honestly too freaking tired to do any of this stuff. THere is nothing quite like working for 8 hours, using feet for transportation, and not being able to actually feed yourself well enough to have energy nor keep your house warm enough in the winter to do much. (I kept multiple blankets on). It is really easy to just give up. I wouldn't have gotten anywhere without some help and getting really freaking lucky.
Many schools do not have a great library. That have a library adequate to the school needs. Being able to use said library at school is sometimes difficult. By the time I was in high school, the library was a rare treat in class. They weren't open after school. You could not go there during lunch. My senior year, the school I went to changed and sometimes you could go there during home room period. Before that, not really: It was only 15 minutes most times anyway.
Not everyone has a public library to use either, and even when you do, good luck. You might need transportation.
I will also assume you are talking about older children. Most 13-year olds just don't have a lot of maturity for what you describe. Perhaps a 16 or 17 year old, and hopefully they aren't so poor that they have to work to help support their family or take care of their younger siblings while their parents work.
All in all, it really kind of seems out of touch and looking from the outside in instead of the other way around.
Being poor changes how you think and who you are.
I am as well. And have parents enabling this behavior, with an career outcome as bad as you could expect. I can totally understand that part of the political spectrum doesn't want to encourage this at all (favorable interpretation of them), even though they IMO often overshoot that goal and advance less optimal outcomes.
> I will also assume you are talking about older children. Most 13-year olds just don't have a lot of maturity for what you describe.
Your phrasing makes this seem like a natural fact. Finding ways to deeply engrave important values (work hard, strive for greatness, delayed gratification, stuff like that) into future generations seems like a real challenge right now. And what makes stories like [0] so interesting. Evolution doesn't take care of that job for us anymore in a "work or starve" way. Religious "work or go to hell" probably did an ok job for a while, but comes with a lot of other baggage. A very capitalistic "work if you want a decent live" society over many generations leads to increasingly unequal starting conditions for offspring and thus seems especially incompatible with democracy, since it will lead to "the system is rigged, lets burn it down" votes, as recently observed all over the western world.
So what's next? As mentioned in my prior anecdote, mostly letting your children do what they want, thinking this will naturally make them strive for greatness, will probably not work. What are the necessary environmental factors parents and society should provide to shape future humans into productive members of society? I'm sure with all our knowledge, mankind can do better than the earlier simple carrot & stick systems.
Just because the West is no longer hungry doesn’t mean that nobody is.
Compared to working to put food on the table?
Not to mention that after back-to-back shifts, your ability to take in a Ivy League university lecture diminishes compared to somebody whose parents pay for their college...
And that's assuming you even have the necessary background in your underfunded school district and impoverished childhood to seek it and understand it in the first place....
My comment was really more about brain development, maturity, puberty (and the hormones that go with it), and things like that. It doesn't mean they are lazy or anything like that at all. These things are learned, and these young people aren't even in high school.
"mostly letting them do what they want" isn't true now and I don't think that has ever been true. As far as what to do next, we can start by trying to make sure folks have stable households which include not only things like shelter, food, and medical care but also things like internet access. These things lessen the stresses that are an issue - being poor won't necessarily make you suffer.
Make sure kids have freedom to explore. Treat kids like they are intelligent (they are, just not mature) and teach what sort of work goes into getting things. Be realistic about what to expect out of life (for example, a chem degree might really wind up working in a lab somewhere). We could do things like showing kids how work and patience pays off by allowing "fun" subjects (arts, music, inclusive sports, "hobby" classes). Increases in freedoms as kids get older so they can experiment with some of their choices (Such as being able to have free contact with friends, choosing one's own classes, ability to not follow in the parent's religion). A 13 year old might not be mature enough to realise what to do to make their future better 15 years into the future, but these sorts of lessons can be taught so when the maturity catches up it'll come together.
(I should note that naturally, some kids are geared more towards some of the long-term planning than others and I cannot speak for all young folks, just what I notice).
"But we also have lots of studies showing that the best of the lowest socioeconomic class almost never do better than the laziest of the uppermost socioeconomic class."
The entire point is that there is inequality of opportunity and unequal return on equal potential not that there isn't opportunity.
If you recall the post I replied to you said
"So why do penniless immigrants keep coming here? Do they know something poor people in America don't, or are they simply misinformed?"
This is terrible logic. This is a wealthy nation with lots to offer but people here have actual problems here too. You are glibly dismissing these actual problems with bad logic which personally makes me very angry. Who the heck are you.
Imagine if someone was talking about how racism was still a problem in America and you piped in with how your black doctor friend's practice was doing great and people shouldn't let negatives become a self fulfilling prophesy.
Well no shit but what we were actually talking about was inequality in America which we can actually do something about.
From the individual's prospective whatever society does the individual ought to do the best they can and for many decent lives await in spite of challenges. From the perspective of society we ought to try to maximize everyone's chances as best we can.
By sarcastically pretending that this 16-year-old made an affirmative choice to become a parent, the parent is actually trying to shame her for having sex as a teenager.
This goes directly to the heart of the article's point. Rather than confront a system that places some people at a disadvantage (lack of access to birth control or childcare), it's easier to insinuate that a person's hard life is solely the result of their own bad decisions.
My ancestors came here because life in the "Old Country" was so bad that braving the crossing of the Atlantic in cattle class on a ship, coming through Ellis Island, finding out that working in New York wasn't much better, and finally landing in the steel mills and coal mines of Western Pennsylvania was a step UP--but not by much.
Those same ancestors also stood in front of bullets from Pinkertons because that was preferable to allowing their working conditions to continue.
The fact that immigrants move is generally a sign of how shitty the place they are leaving is, not necessarily a sign of how good their destination is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...
Edit: in fact, the Wikipedia article directly contradicts your claim, saying "Looking at larger moves, only 4% of those raised in the bottom quintile moved up to the top quintile as adults. Around twice as many (8%) of children born into the top quintile fell to the bottom" - suggesting that the best of the underprivileged are far more successful than the laziest of the over-privileged.
People who make bad decisions will often go without resources. Society thus diverts resources to people who make good decisions. Things work better this way, with much less waste. We get more messed up families if government pays people to have messed up families.
I don't think that "she mothered too young". There is nothing wrong with age 16. The problem is instead that she didn't first find a suitable husband to support her family.
Percentages hides values:
"However, because US income inequalities have increased substantially, the consequences of the "birth lottery" - the parents to whom a child is born - are larger today than in the past. US wealth is increasingly concentrated in the top 10% of American families, so children of the remaining 90% are more likely to be born at lower starting incomes today than the same children in the past. Even if they are equally mobile and climb the same distance up the US socioeconomic ladder as children born 25 years earlier, the bottom 90% of the ladder is worth less now, so they gain less income value from their climb ... especially when compared to the top 10%."
And, those who fall from the top quintile are likely starting at the 80% point and not the 95% point.
This is true. But the fact that you're not fixed in your position and could live better is an incentive to keep moving. Thus if you don't stop at the person right above you then there's hope you can make the jump to a better living condition.
> I think what a lot of us a eluding to, is that some people can work as much as they can, up to burnout, without ever reaching above the poverty line.
Again, this is true. But whose fault? I think we could get rid of the concept of poverty line and let people decide for themselves. 2 person making $500/mo in California could be living different lives. It's possible for one of them to not consider themselves poor. But they're out of luck since their poverty status isn't defined by them. It's imposed by the state.
> I think that would be basically fate for a minority group single mother with low education living in a poor neighbourhood. People could blame her for her life, but except if her kid is exceptional in some way, he/she would also be doomed to be poor, for instance.
Story of my life. Illiterate parents, but committed to giving their children a better life. My believe that wealth is generational, that state should define a poverty line stems from this story of my life. It's less a matter of fate than decisions and commitment to exiting a terrible situation.
I disagree. Most mentally healthy people are capable of self-education. Self-education is what makes human a human. Being an adult person requires working self-education skill -- using public transit, bank services, mobile phones, internet, microwave ovens, TV sets, driving, etc -- all requires self-education to some extent. Getting professional skills is more difficult, but it just requires more effort, not a completely new skill.
Not everyone is going to be able to find a well-paying tech job. How many times have you come onto this forum seeing active HNers who are tech-literate and have a history of programming employment complain that they cannot find a job?
Look at your neighbors.. everyday people like your grocer or mechanic or mailperson.. Take a look outside your bubble. Not everyone is going to be able to be fluent in tech even with great effort. It's not so much that it's impossible, but that's it's incredibly unrealistic.
The only reason I've been able to work as a programmer is because I lucked into it. I got hooked when I was 12 or so because I found it fun. I had plenty of time and enjoyed it. If I had to do it all over today out of desperation I'm not sure I could will myself to do something completely foreign and uninteresting.
I think you take for granted the knowledge foundation that you were given.
No offense, but this screams of ignorance. If you take into account the poverty tax [1], poor people pay more for many goods, have worse access to many services, and encounter much higher transaction costs to accomplishing normal life.
For example, if you are a single mother in Southside Chicago living in a food desert and far from the main L/Subway/Metro lines, then you take longer to commute to work, to go grocery shopping, to pick your kids up, etc. There are many additional costs to being poor that easily explain why they don't focus on "making their beds" or "organizing their place".
The Atlantic has a good article on decision fatigue and poverty "Your Brain on Poverty: Why Poor People Seem to Make Bad Decisions And why their "bad" decisions might be more rational than you'd think" that is worth a read [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto_tax
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-br...