"Poors today just need to learn about hard work"

the analogy works on another level, given that carnival games are notoriously rigged in favor of the owners of the carnival

Also, when you have no more darts, you're thrown out on the street.

And when you hit the bullseye, a rich kid can just take your prize away. But you have the right to complain to the owner of the park. Who is his dad.

This hits home. I have 2 failed companies to my name. First one flopped, second one I learned from my obvious failures and it got started, then folded when a client refused to pay and I didnt have the resources to fight it in court(single person business, no resources to fall back on as it was just starting out). So back to working the carnival. The second attempt took everything I had, savings, working 12hr days minimum, and every bit of my technical skills. While the first I was hoping for side cash and didn't invest as much time and effort and got practically nothing. I am not going to sacrifice like I did for the second one ever again, too much work to have it fail because of someone else, the place that didn't pay me ended up folding within a year so likely I just took on a bad customer, but if that's all it takes for a fledging business to become untenable for a single hardworking person to accomplish, then it's not even worth trying because there are so many failures out there that you have to weed out if they will be likely to pay or not.

You can bootstrap yourself into a better life, but the grind is unrelenting and slow. You'll almost never hit the bullseye because of time constraints working FT.

I left a high-paying job for a part-time low-paying job, now I've got to make more. Got lots of ideas, trying different things in my spare time.