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Many of the refutations offered didn't actually contradict what I had in mind at all. For instance, I could come up with a (wrong) theory vaguely similar to general relativity, and showing how that's wrong =/= showing general relativity is wrong, similarly, the link about La Sage's theory is not some iron-clad refutation of this one.
However, I wasn't exactly confident that it was right; it actually bothered me that I couldn't come up with why I was wrong. I was mostly expecting to find out why my idea was wrong by running it by others who might already know more than me on the subject. I did wind up getting that (gravitational lensing clearly tears it apart). You guys certainly saved me the effort, either way, which freed me up to focus on actual useful efforts. This sort of effect is actually why I posted here before putting in all that work on something I strongly suspected would be a waste of time.
The main reason I'm commenting here again, is because of the total lack of civility of some of the replies. The negative karma score is probably what the post deserves, and I probably shouldn't expect anything else posting so far from my own specializations. However, there is a certain sting that comes with being wrong, and it's not that difficult to avoid adding to it when pointing out someone's errors. Sadly, the best example of being as rude as possible about it is actually the post that included what I was looking for.
Compare the difference between:
Have you considered gravitational lensing, or gravitational time dilation? Your theory seems to be incompatible with these observable and well-documented phenomena.
and:
Good start. I know how tempting it is to talk about crackpot physical theories, believe you me I do, but you've gotta contain yourself. Seriously, you're embarrassing me, and I'm not even you.
Since you failed #37, among others, I'll help you out. Your theory predicts that what we call gravity depends not on mass but on something like solid angle, which is a measure of how big one object appears from another. If we're talkin bout heaven here objects are spherical, so solid angle (and thus your theoretical force) depends only on the size of the object (radius) and distance. Guess what? It turns out that gravity actually depends on something called mass and energy. Newtonian gravity is linear in mass, but your theory is not (you can work out the relationship between proton count and surface area of a nucleus or something along those lines, tee hee). This linearity has been experimentally verified.
Anyway, does your theory have anything to say about this or this? Nope! It turns out gravity isn't as simple as pushing and pulling. Time and energy and fahoosalah are involved too. You might know about these things if you take physics courses.
LessWrong is partly about learning how to be wrong. You're wrong. LessWrong teaches to acknowledge when you don't understand something, to listen to the knowledge of those who do, and to not post silly crackpot theories that don't even. 0/10 will not think about again.
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At least in the United States, less than 4% of households report under 5,000 USD in taxable income, while between 14% and 20% of households are defined as under the poverty line (depending on source). The official BLS numbers put it at 10.4 million people who are 'working poor', aka working or looking-for-work for half the year and also under the poverty line (pdf warning), and a little over three quarters of households under the poverty line have at least one person who fits into the "working poor" category. This is further complicated by income disparities and cost of living varying heavily from state-to-state: one can live much more comfortably on 20k in the midwest than on 40k in California.
A little over half of off-campus college students live under the poverty line, making up a significant part of total poverty . There's a perception that a degree (and usually a four-year-degree) is necessary for any desirable "real" (non-retail non-fast food) job. Worse, there's a perception that any degree is both necessary and sufficient for long-term "real" jobs. So you do get a lot of people trying to take classes and make ends meet at the same time, even if the system eventually shoves them out the door with a lot of student loans and a liberal arts degree that barely improves their options (or not even that: low-income folk who drop out get screwed even worse).
It's probably not the average case, but it does make up a non-trivial portion of the total.
((On the other hand, many of the issues raised in the linked blog post show problems related to information access. "Sliding scale" payments usually mean nearly free for a low-income mother, in the odd case where she doesn't qualify for Medicaid. The documentation necessary to set up even a post-9/11 bank account is less than that necessary to get most forms of public assistance including WIC or TANF, while there are other complex reasons people in poverty avoid bank accounts. It's quite possible to cook basic staples with nothing more than a microwave, a plate, and a couple pieces of silverware, but that's not really something that's taught in Home Ec or cookbooks. And the depression self-diagnosis is... not robust.))
another emerging issue is that degrees can have a negative utility these days. if your degree can't land you a "real" job, and employers who would otherwise take you now see you as 'overqualified', your options are more limited than if you never went to college in the first place.