Exactly this, it's not even the fucked up economy state that scares me the most, it's the state of ecology that may make the place uninhabited in the pretty near future 😢
I actually know a Lot of boomers who feel just that way. My dad is one he thinks its their right to destroy the environment because they can't live forever.
Then you have the christian nuts who want to destroy it so that jesus will return.
But most boomers want take the money with them and leave nothing to future generations. Hell they do want to burn it all down and they destroy the American dream out of greed.
The me generation that only want them to have it all.
Let's have a purge city. Every year, let's say like a Burning Man City. Every one can come together and we'll nuke the city at the end of a week long party.
Unsustainable system finally collapses under the weight of greedy spoiled generation when their children cannot compete with their parents enough to continue supporting said unsustainable system.
There fixed that shit.
Those fools need to get the fuck out of here with that nonsense!
Most boomers and whatever came right after boomers don't even have decent retirements.. That's what's sorta funny about all this. I know quite a few 60s and 70s yr olds that legit don't have enough to sustain their lifestyles and still have to work. The system failed LONG before Millennials showed up.
Many of them went their whole lives "not trusting the stock market" just to literally have no retirement. Much of it was lack of education and access to the stock market when they could have been investing, but then at the same time it is a pretty stupid fucking system of retirement when without notice you can lose 40% of value because some bankers fucked around.
The system sucked for them that's why they still have to work, but instead of trying to fix it, they just complain that it's their kids fault.
And even the ones that have a lot of assets to be considered well off have a problem. They're living in the only thing they own that's worth a significant amount of cash.
Property prices have completely fucked everyone. Just because somebody can barely afford to pay 50% of their wages every month for the next 40 years in order own their own house, it doesn't mean they should. It means they've got no choice because there isn't enough.
oh yeah that reminds me of an 80 yr old lady I know. She's land rich and insanely poor. Like if she sold all her real estate assets she'd probably have easily over a million dollars. But she doesn't want to sell anything just cause. But she's super poor. Like she literally needs a new roof on her trailer and can't afford it. But is sitting on 7 figures of assets lol.
Hell my FIL is that way not that I'm thinking about it. He can't take care of his house he's in a booming hood in Houston and has like 8 acres to boot. He keeps borrowing against it to afford shit and still owes like 100k on it which would still net him a pretty penny for the whole set up. I keep telling him just sell the shit and buy a small home out right and get out of the debt and whatever, but he's super stubborn about it.
This is literally my landlord too. She's a nice lady, but she depends on my income to pay her bills...
She's sitting in a beautiful town on a property that could easily get over 1mil, probably 2-2.5, but instead I have to live in her garage that has a leaking roof she can't afford to fix... I imagine she's just holding on to it for her kids or something, but she'd be so much better off if she sold. Of course I'd get kicked out in an instant and be in deep shit myself, but that doesn't change what's best for her.
Never underestimate the power of psychology and sentiment. If he sold it at his age he'd be left with what? A pile of money and regret? And at, say, 80 starting over is brutal. Living in a place he doesn't recognize, away from anyone he knows, etc. It is probably why some people don't leave struggling small towns, they grew up there and to leave is to start over and abandon everything.
As always it's your fault that you weren't born into a rich family. If you want to get rich you have to be rich, it's not hard. Some of the dumbest members of our society manage it all the time.
i'm not saying "don't put money into savings", i'm saying every now and then, people should make a decision that benefits the world as a whole rather than just their personal financial situation.
boomers didn't sacrifice their own spending to build their net worth, they sacrificed *public* spending to do it. and not just public spending, but things that are literally free. like, deciding nobody should ever be allowed to build more housing anywhere ever, because that makes their real estate investment go up.
I find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that spending more debt than every government before them every single time for decades is austerity. They spent more than all the money constantly. Some austerity would have actually helped but they didn't do that.
You're rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic. You get into some pretty absurd taxation levels, you just won't get the sort of revenue that you need to balance a budget that is so much spending.
And the worst part is, the government's already taxing you for stuff that you should just get. The United States spends more public money on health care than most countries, as much money on health care as some single payer nations. Everyone seems to think that there needs to be more money, but there doesn't. The money is there. It's just not being used properly. In any other country on the planet that amount of money should result in universal healthcare. Instead, the government program is run so incompetently that every family needs to spend absurd amounts of money on Private health care.
This just seems to be the way that the US government works. They take the money to do a thing, then they just don't do the thing. That is an austerity, it's incompetence.
That's exactly the neoliberal agenda: austerity is spending less for workers and public services, and more to help companies so that growth can come back and make earth a paradise free of socialism.
Austerity has nothing to do with spending less. It's all about taking the money from the poor to give it to the rich.
There is an explore button down the bottom of the app, you can search in there. To be fair I mostly just browse top.posts at the moment and haven't really started to compile a list of sub subscriptions
I get your point, and I'm not saying that boost is the panacea of client possibilities, but here are my experiences with other clients (I'm also happy to be corrected if these gripes are resolved):
The web interface.
No ability to customise default views, when i go to all, it keeps loading shit as in trying to read it as new posts are added. Frustrating and I did not engage in the platform
Jerboa, buggy as hell. Constantly crashing. Unusable.
Connect. Good browser, but every time you comment you get punished by losing your place. No read tracking.
Sync. Does almost everything I want. Some ads, wish it would hide read posts when I come back later.
I'm a much more valuable member of the Lemmy community because I use sync.
If there is another client that's more betterer let me know and I will check it out.
My Y daughter is doing well, maybe it will be shitty for her to buy a house or condo but she can. My Z one, yeah, I'm helping her, paying stuff here and there like groceries, microwave, etc, she's in her own flat and all and is not too bad but still, rent is 40% of her earning. It's ok to help your kids.
I absolutely agree! It’s not a competition, we are all living in the same world with the same problems.
Families are at the centre of any society. Families function best when they help each other out. Parents are meant to sacrifice to help their children, just as their adult children should sacrifice later in life to help them.
In the literal sense, yes, but not in the context of marketing cohorts, which are usually based on birth date ranges and are used to group members of society who experience similar pressures and exhibit similar behaviors. Gen Y/Millennial and Gen Z are marketing terms, so it’s possible for a parent to have a child in each.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I was trying to be funny but it totally missed the mark and fell flat. Oh well 🤷♂️ I do think it would be nice if we didn’t find ourselves referring to our social constructs in terms of marketing cohorts.
There's also us zillenials born between 1990 - 1996. The defining feature is that we're old enough that we were alive during 9/11 but were too young to understand the way it changed society at the time. Our formative years also occurred during both pre and post internet being everywhere.
According to Forbes? Of course is the fault of the impoverished they didn't take personal responsibility. Forbes is a magazine for persons with stock portfolios.
That's pretty much the main thesis used to justify capitalism. You have the money you deserve. If prosperity isn't merit-based, then capitalism would be a horrifying abuse of the underclasses.
Good, perhaps the boomers will recognize how impossible the current structure is to live under and actually pay attention to what they are voting for...
A lot of people are in denial about the effects of policies they support.
Just look at the cost of housing. There's a ton of NIMBY homeowners who are deep in denial that zoning huge swaths of cities to be exclusively mcmansions could possibly cause house prices to be artificially high.
As a NIMBY guy...I'm going to protect my investment. There's plenty of affordable housing out there, it's just not 10 minutes walking distance from an urban center.
I can go pay 20k cash and live in a trailer across town if I need to.
Edit: If you want to do it that way, you can rent said trailer for a pittance. I'd suggest you do, you won't want to be there long.
Everyone wants low cost housing, no one actually wants to live in a low cost area.
First off, housing isn't a fucking investment. It's a human's basic need. Anyone thinking a roof over your head is an "investment" can fuck right off because your line of thinking IS the problem.
It shouldn't be an investment but the time to put that idea to bed has long since sailed.
Governments, like the one in Canada claim to want to build more purpose built rental housing and increase supply but without reducing home prices, a most contradictory statement. This kind of talk isn't unique to Canada either.
The reality is that generations of people now have their wealth from their homes. Unless we're willing to endure pain as a society from values lowering, and thus people's wealth reducing( all signs point to the fact we aren't), then the issues will only get worse.
Until we are, get ready for more variations of the same chorus "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"
Which brings me back to the 20k trailer...it's dirt fucking cheap. If you don't think housing is an investment, you can easily afford rent or payments on 20k over 10 years with a minimum wage job.
However...I don't see a lot of people scrambling for the "affordable" housing.
If you really want to socialize living space, there acres and acres of really empty, really cheap land in the fly over states. Grab an acre of land somewhere and you can house 100s of people on it.
Something tells me none of those options are appealing to you.
What will these differently-housed individuals do for income? Where will they work?
If they are in the middle nowhere as you claim, how will they physically get to their job? If they have to drive significant distances to get to these civic centers, then you have grossly underestimated the percentage of their income that would be slated for transportation.
Let's do some math!
Your fantasy $20k trailer with your parameters, with an estimated $1000 initial cost for service connections would wind up being a bit more than $27k after APR adjustments.
Calculator
That winds up being $222 per month. What a steal!
Federal minimum wage is $7.25. Taxes are a thing, so $7.25 turns into $6.52.
An individual would have to work a bit more than 34 hours to afford just the dwelling.
We are assuming that this person is healthy, with nothing to prevent the individual from working.
Will this person have electricity? $122 or 18.7 hours
Will this person have clean water? $18 or 2.76 hours
Will this person require clothing?
Will this person have healthcare?
Will this person take any prescription medication?
Will this person have a dental plan?
Will this person pay for transportation (the vehicle, insurance, wear and tear, gas, and incidentals)?
Will this person support additional family members who are unable to work (children, elderly, injured, disabled)?
Will there be air conditioning and heating in this $20k trailer?
What will this person eat?
Going beyond the absolute basics:
What will this person do for entertainment? One cannot honestly expect a human to live without some form of stress relief.
Will this person have access to the internet? That is required for resume submission for almost every job.
What will this person save for retirement?
An individual would have to work a bit more than 34 hours to afford just the dwelling.
That's reasonable...that's around 1/4 of their income which is typically the guideline for housing if you want a savings account as well.
For reference, that's roughly what I put in to afford my mortgage.
The rest of it is fluff "what ifs" and kind of out of context. We could've had universal income and health but people keep going with the safe choices on votes instead of the things we really need.
A quarter of their income for housing.....for a fictitious $20k used manufactured home. Mind you, we never included the taxes or the rental or owned land.
And the other items are not fluff. One has to be fed and clothed.
And since you opened the door, what do you pay for your mortgage?
I would love for the market to plummet where I'm at. Housing as an investment that outpaces wage is a primary problem here, if it crashed maybe half my income wouldn't go to rent, and more and more people wouldn't be pushed to the streets while people's "investments" sit around empty, as they search for the perfect petless, 6 figure making tenant.
But because of that you are against the idea that it just shouldn't take 20 years of saving and 10 years of payments for someone to have a decent home?
Honestly, that would be great news, and I hope you know many Americans would support deregulation of zoning laws for exactly this effect. A drop in housing prices is exactly what we need. People treating home ownership as an investment are the problem, home ownership should be more like owning a car: it's a commodity, not an investment. We should not be subsidizing poor financial decisions, I feel bad for everyone wrapped up in it, but ultimately the system we're in has been broken for a long, long time
And then the people across town need to travel somehow, so they need a car, and then they're spending more on a car (lots more), and then they fill up the roads, and then we need to pay for more road infrastructure, and then we have more cars to replace with BEVs because we can't possibly continue having gas cars around.
Or we can try to get more housing near to where people work and get the things they need, and we avoid every single problem above.
NIMBY isn't even a good financial position. Think about it. Say your area is rezoned for mixed use and you start getting apartments and condos on top of store fronts. Land value will skyrocket and all likelihood, you will come out ahead. Ever wonder why Manhattan and DC real estate is so expensive?
So then the apartments and condos become more expensive due to skyrocketing land values, not solving the problem of affordable housing? You can expand current low density zones with limited medium density without impacting values too much, but NIMBY concerns aren't completely crazy. Either new zones are created for multifamily high density and medium density housing instead of opening single family low density zones for these projects, or we accept that as a society we are fine crushing a percentage of the middle class to solve housing for the lower classes. The top 10% may take a hit on real estate dips from rental properties, but not crippling. We can spread the damage slowly, but houses losing 10-30% value will cause a miniature 2008 wherever that happens.
This was caused by housing becoming a cornerstone step into and for remaining in the middle class instead of being a commodity like it was pre 1970/80. That probably wasn't a good idea, but changing that removes the largest remaining leg of the middle class. All options moving forward will suck I think, and it will take a lot of work to resolve.
Let me tell you a story, when I was looking for my house we found a gorgeous 6 bed 4 ba all brick house with like 3500 sq feet for around 250k...it's an insane price for that house.
I looked at it and found out there's a section 8 unit next door. After asking around it ends up the place gets robbed every 2 months and the sellers are trying to give it away.
It ended up going for 175k.
That's should have been close to a million dollar piece of property...now it's a mom and pop tax firm.
I do want to point out that no one is actually complaining about price of just building per say. Trailer is fine and all, but does that 20k cover land and basic utilities like water and heating/cooling (Is it well insulated?) in reasonable price and effort? Is Trailer Park actually located close enough to jobs (I don't remember gas and time being free) and it is secure from natural disaster?
That aside, NIMBY mindset is generally dumb stance when everyone is taking it. So there's that.
Normally, the meaning of an investment is that they take a measure of effort, and sometimes, they don't pan out.
But houses will always pan out, because everyone wants them, because they're usually expected to go up in value, because everyone wants them, because they're expected to go up in value, because...
Someday, mark my words, it'll be a gold-buying bubble that bursts.
I mean, despite the rampant bootlicking seen in that generation, boomers didn't create that system. They're victims of it as well, just victims that generally refuse to see it. My mom absolutely has been fucked over by capitalism, and has fucked herself over helping her kids. But she acknowledges why, and agitates for something better. My dad is a victim of this shitty system, too, but was so brainwashed by cold war propaganda that he can't see it most of the time. :/ tldr fuck the boomer politicians and brainwashers, try to help regular boomers realize they're just as much a victim of this shit as we are.
Lead poisoning really did a number on that generation. While I'm also angry that they were complacent in what's happened, as I refuse to be, it's like blaming a severely handicapped kid.
Did you know we found out to stop including lead in gas in 1976 because school kids were getting dumber and less empathetic?
We knew from the time Thomas Midgley put lead in gas it was toxic, but it was cheaper. He also introduced CFCs to the environment. Sherman Williams reported in 1904 that lead paint was bad, but it took until the 1970s for bans to start, but plenty of places still have no ban.
The only solace in his detriment to humanity is that he died a terrible death. He got polio made a contraption to help him move around and got tangled and died of strangulation
Motorsports are by far the most polluting form of sport per capita. Hardly anyone can partake in them and those that do inflect massive amounts of environmental damage. It's ok to like something, but we should still be mindful of the negatives a hobby can cause so we can at least minimize the damage. Like golf is fine, but we don't need to use so many pesticides and build golf courses in deserts.
lol you got a source on that claim, or is it a “I pulled it out my ass stat” because I find it pretty hard to believe.
The MASSIVE water consumption, in addition to pesticides, and the plastics used in golf balls (going with your example here) that are left in the wild, in addition to the significantly higher rate of people who play golf, are likely far worse for the environment than a handful of cars having some fun. I’m not saying racing isn’t bad for the environment. What I am saying is there are things that are FAR more common, and worse.
I love how you all singled out a small subset of a pretty niche sport to be uptight about. No mention of avgas, which is used far more widely, and covers far more people. According to FAA nearly 250k planes still use it. They fly all over. They flyover your house, mine, everyone.
Or lead in ammunition, which is studied and proven to kill animals, and their young. The CA condor is a good example of it. They are still dying from lead poisoning, and lead ammo has been outlawed in CA. It only took until 2019 to outlaw it here, but I believe we are the only state. The recent fires here, that killed multiple condors proved that. At least one (probably more but I heard about this one) had lead in its system and when they went to try to find their young, they also had lead poisoning.
Oh and it’ll probably shock you to know, even in CA, you can go buy fuels (C16 and Q16 are the most common we see) and use them in street cars. Go to any classic American car show, and you can smell it. But yes, please single out a small subset of race cars as being the issue.
They are all an issue. Just because someone mentions one thing it does not mean the other things aren’t an issue also. If I tell you leaded race car fuel is an issue and should be banned, I am not telling you all other uses of exhausted lead are fine, or even “lees bad”. The post did but appear to be in any way constructed as an comparative analysis of lead use in order to author regulation from.
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic but yeah, they have been dying of lead possessing since like forever. In the 90s, when the condor was something like 20 animals alive on the planet, organizations like the San Diego Zoo, started to push for the outlaw of lead ammo. It took until 2019 (apparently) to finally outlaw it here completely, yet the animals are still dying from it.
Lead poisoning from ingestion of lead ammunition is the most significant threat to condor survival, but other factors - including ingestion of microtrash and electrocution - also present challenges to condors as a species.per the national park service
Of the 213 condor deaths in the wild between 1992 and 2020, half (107) were due to lead poisoning, according to USFWS. according to us fish and wildlife
To answer your question why, people just don’t give a shit. Apparently lead is preferred because it’s softer than steel, and deforms in an appealing way for “hunters” and “gun enthusiasts”.
The thing to remember is that they had to rely on trusted authorities in the news or government back then. They didn’t have easy access to primary sources or alternate viewpoints that we have now. That’s why all they can do is pick an authority figure and put all their trust in them. They literally do not know any other way. To them “research” is finding a talking head they like or who looks “trustworthy” and then believing everything they say. It was an age of authority and now we’re moving into an age of transparency and they’re not happy about it. They expected that they would get their turn to be the trusted head of the family and now all their kids and grandkids barely want to talk to them.
No no. The system they built was great. The thing is, the system was changed by them, just in time to rob all the younger generations blind, then stood back and watched it happen, did nothing, and then they have the balls to blame us when we can't independently thrive in the system they stood by and allowed to be built.
It's cute, in a frustrating kind of way, that you think the system was either created that recently, or was ever meant to be anything but exploitative and oppressive and isn't working exactly as designed.
Oh, I know the roots of the system date pretty far back.
Fact is that boomers made good headway, they started unions, health and safety, human resources.... Stuff that was basically unheard of before that....
While health and safety still exists, most jobs no longer require significant health and safety protection. HR still very much exists, and also does very little for workers day to day.
Unions have all but been disbanded; if you work an office job, it's very unlikely that you have a union at all, and it's unlikely that any whispers of a union are happening.
As a result, most workers are getting shafted in salary and benefits, and on top of that companies are raising prices to inflate their profits even more than simply screwing their workers out of their salary, and you end up with trillions running companies, making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars a year....
This has been going on so long that the problem is completely out of hand.
Fact is that boomers made good headway, they started unions, health and safety, human resources… Stuff that was basically unheard of before that…
That was all started by the generation before the boomers. The boomers have only gotten only the benefits of those systems. And then started and supported the dismantling of those systems.
So... If the boomers didn't give money to their children, what'd they do with it? Sit on it for 10 years, die, and then pass it to their children?
Articles like this are either missing the grand picture or they serve someone else's interest: Making boomers spend their money on leasing luxury apartments and other crap, so there'll be no inheritance.
Leeches are the enemy of all generations.
Have the elites who tell us we "never want to work" thought about lowering the rent below $3k at times? Even below 2k? Because we can't work or do shit with no actual place to live.
We have a lot to be mad at property owners for right now. Their lobbying and bullshittery is part of why so many people have to go back into the office and have so few protections against it. If we're not pointlessly wasting time commuting to the office their properties won't be worth as much! Won't somebody think of the poor landlords?? 😔😔
Thing is, it's not the same "they". Those who profited off the working class and shut the door behind them are not the ones seeing their finances ravaged because their kids live in the basement.
This really is the most stupid inane culture war attitude. People vote less when they are young. And yes that applies to your parents. There are more young people below 50 than over 50, so get off your backside and vote. The problems of the world today are not down to a specific age or voting pattern; it is down to corporation buying out your politicians. Stop voting Democrats or Republican, they are just one big massive con.
That's a whole lot of bullshit unrelated to what I said.
The American voter base is responsible for the state of the country, sorry that's such a controversial statement for you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Of course, we can't blame boomers for poor decisions or tell them to skip that avocado toast. Clearly they must continue to suck the remaining resources from life so that they have something to bring to the afterlife when they finally croak.
The whole avocado thing really betrays a failure in the thinking of the people behind it. Some places some times avocados are absurdly expensive. Other places and times they are as cheap as any other random vegetable. To not realise that requires having no awareness at all of the importance of seasonal and ideally local produce. If you want to budget competently you need to pay attention to what is good value near you and when. Not understanding that time and location affects the price of fresh perishable foods makes you entirely unqualified to condescendingly tell people they are budgeting their food shopping poorly. All they know is that they spend $10 an avocado so therefore anyone else buying them must be irresponsibly spending just as much.
I have no savings for retirement. Every spare penny I invest in the success of my family, mostly my own kids. I don't need to go to Florida and hang out playing golf.
I've gotten tired of this whole "everyone from this generation thinks the same, acts the same, is poor/wealthy", etc bullshit. The coincidence of your birthday doesn't automatically identify you.
No. But we are all a combination of our biology plus our experiences. Bring born at the same time as someone means a significant portio of your experiences will be more similar than with someone born decades after you. The fact is that Zoomers went through a disruptive global pandemic either while still in education or leaving to start their careers. That experience will inform who each of those young people become. The way that this effects each individual Zoomer will vary but it will affect them and so it makes them a demographic of "people who's education or early work experiences were disrupted by a pandemic." Those people will on average be a little more similar to one another then people who didn't experience that. Generational identities are formed by all the millions of experiences, big and small, those people have in common with one another but not with other generations by merit of being born at a particular time. Just as Zoomers went through a pandemic at a crucial early point of their lives the Greatest Generation endured the great depression and world war 2 in the first half of their lives. There's absolutely no reasonable way to claim that living through world war 2 wouldn't inform your personality and behaviour on some level. And so, people from the Greatest Generation (who lived through World War 2) will, due to that experience and many others, will have things in common with one another that they do not share in common with Zoomers (who didn't live through World War 2.) Another huge example is that somewhere roughly alligned with the millennial generation we made the transition from people who grew up with constant easy access to the vast expanse of information and communication on the Internet and people who grew up before they'd ever heard of it. Those are hugely different experiences. They change the part of you that is due to your experiences. The other people who share those experiences will tend to have commonalities with you that people who didn't share those experiences don't have.
Wrong way to see it, yeah the boomers are rich but a lot of Gen X are broke as shit too. Kids cost money, and with the direction the economy is going, it is just the sad reality we face.
I am extremely thankful for the help my parents have given me, my dad was broke as hell for most of my childhood despite working his ass off, and this was pre-2009 recession, the recession made it worse and it is only recent he is starting to get a real foothold on finances.
Not to be that guy... But Americans have always been partially socialist. That's the reason child labor is not supposed to be a thing, your work week isn't 60 - 80 hours long without overtime, you have things like vacation days, sick leave, agencies in charge of stamping out food and drug adulteration, OSHA codes for safe workplaces, a public school system, public libraries, banking regulations... And a very long list beyond that.
Do you think any of these things are naturally occuring under a capitalist system? These were the fights you can map to specific socialist movements of the past.
But who am I kidding anybody who unironically starts complaining about Communists is so far up McCarthy's ass all they can smell is grave rot.
A strong labour movement isn't necessarily socialist. In fact I do believe it kind of gets in the way of socialism as they make capitalism bearable for the well organised labour class. Socialism is when the labour class also own the means of production, and for now, mostly, that isn't the case in most developed countries.
Your definition of socialism has been warped by decades of propaganda to weaken labour friend. Labour movements including labour unions are a feature of socialism, not capitalism or even liberalism. Only at the very deep end is socialism about labour co-ops and abolishment of private property. There is also not a unified singular definition philosophy or movement within socialism though it can be very roughly broken into a raft of different breeds of "market socialism" and "non-market socialism" . Market socialism looks at itself as a balancing force to coexist and oppose capitalism because capitalism left unchecked is a hellscape. Capitalist marketing has been very good at taking credit for a lot of market socialism's previous fights and rebranding it as a sort of "responsible capitalism" but basically all the civil rights and labor movements that we celebrate today had variable breeds of socialist cores. The few unifying factors of Socialism is democracy and collective action and that there are at least some things that should be held and maintained as "public goods" that require protection from private interest. Things like national parks, environmental services, roads and infrastructure, sanitation, public education, fire fighting services, the public domain are examples. In some places these extend to things like healthcare.
When the majority of people on the left talk socialism they talk market socialism or social democracy. When people on the right start frowning and stamping their feet about socialists (and what you are doing now) they are usually tarring all socialists with the brush of non-market socialism... which even the majority of people who identify as socialists veiw as complete loony-toons idealism.
I get your point, but I would still argue there is use for a distinction between two sets of ideas. One which aims to improve upon capitalism to make it sustainable for the working class, and one which aims in some for to transition to a system where workers own the means of production outright. Ownership (of labour) is really key in Marxist theory.
The term social democracy is kind of unhelpful too because while it is used for the Nordics, Western Europe, etc., a society where capital is exclusively owned by the workers can be, at least in theory, at least as democratic. But I still prefer it as a term over socialism.
I'm not stamping my feet about socialists either by the way. I just don't want people to get the wrong idea about countries like mine. I live in the Netherlands, and the left is not doing that great. We've had right leaning coalitions for decades that have been slowly eroding social services, sometimes aided by misguided political ambitions of labour leadership. The working classes are voting for populists and even our largest party VVD, which presents itself as the fiscally conservative entrepreneurs' party. It's the familiar story.
I'm not sure if socialism is Utopian or not, but using that term to describe countries like mine and the social policies we're known for internationally surely doesn't do socialism any justice.
I don't think folks have such high expectations of it being utopian. The issue is that unchecked capitalism is kind of a worldwide gig. If you as a society are competing with people from a market who basically allow their people to save their money by being dangerous and unprincipled and put their money permanently out of the tax system they are still mining your society for resources and cash that are taking it out of the system.
But even a system that is imperfect but equal is better than one that basically tells you that if you don't earn enough you basically deserve to die. I fear for a lot of my friends in the states because everytime they change jobs if anything happens to their health before their insurance re- kicks in they mighy never financially recover.
I know a lot of people with what have been considered jobs you could afford to pay a morgage with 30 years ago who are living paycheck to paycheck out of their cars. I see people with disabilities whose families can't afford to help them who depend on institutions like libraries because other government services got privatized and decided that they were "able enough" because of bottom lines. I know people who have suffered burnout, displacement and have been traumatized by working conditions because their employers decided that their shareholders were more important than the people actually making their products.
Being Canadian is to have more than a bit of surviors guilt watching American friends you visit from time to time do everything you do but without the same safety net... We are a more socialism forward country with less people and less resources but the difference is stark. My American friends have it noticeably worse.
Right now my Province is losing another city because climate change, lobbied for by rich assholes worried they won't be able to make as much money on plastic and oil is causing my province to burn. We are too small alone to fix these problems. It requires the sign on of a much bigger collective action. The failure isn't your country - it's that its not enough countries.
Do you think any of these things are naturally occuring under a capitalist system?
Some of them did evolve, looking a bit differently. I mean soup kitchens, places for the poor to sleep (it didn't look nice, I'm thinking late XIX and early XX centuries), sick leaves and vacations were sort of traditionally fine, work weeks, while being unregulated, weren't necessarily longer than what we have, cause unregulated just means individual arrangement, and so on. Life of a factory worker surely sucked, yes.
It's just questionable whether this social progress and labor protection laws are the same.
I mean, there's that problem with socialists - they like to call anything good in human history socialist or proto-socialist (the extreme case is Soviet history books for children with their descriptions of what was Spartacus' rebellion or German peasant rebellions and so on).
One of the issues with capitalist narratives is that they are very good at rebranding successful socialist initiatives as "responsible capitalism". Also it likes to point at non-market socialism and claim that's what socialism looks like completely ignoring market socialism and social democracy.
Also you really need to check your history. The 12 hour day was looked at as the standard before 1926 in America though 100 hour work weeks were not unheard of. Overtime pay was not a thing it was all flat rate. Ford gets the credit for adopting what was then a long standing issue campaigned for by labor to show "actually it's beneficial for capitalist interests!" but the idea as it applies to modern labor was originally campaigned for by Robert Owen in 1818 and was being implemented across Europe by socialist labor parties starting in the 1850's. Ford just basically swooped in last second and like capitalists do stamped his bloody name on it.
What a vacation looked like for a lot of people pre - vacation pay was you packed up to the countryside to work an non-mechanizable agricultural job like hop picking. Labor day and the American origin of the paid vacation itself comes from the Haymarket mass rally of socialist interest in 1887.
So yeah, it's not really as questionable as you make it seem.
I mean, there's no particular narrative in my comment - but there is one in yours.
So yeah, it’s not really as questionable as you make it seem.
I'd say you are arguing against something you've imagined. The subject your whole narrative is built around is touched in my comment by the following words: "life of a factory worker surely sucked". And that's it.
So you've basically illustrated this observation, I'll quote myself:
I mean, there’s that problem with socialists - they like to call anything good in human history socialist or proto-socialist (the extreme case is Soviet history books for children with their descriptions of what was Spartacus’ rebellion or German peasant rebellions and so on).
That's some short term memory loss there biddy. You seem to have left all the stuff I was responding to on the table... And quoting yourself OOF. I am embarrassed on your behalf
It's like you don't remember saying any of this :
Some of them did evolve, looking a bit differently. I mean soup kitchens, places for the poor to sleep (it didn't look nice, I'm thinking late XIX and early XX centuries), sick leaves and vacations were sort of traditionally fine, work weeks, while being unregulated, weren't necessarily longer than what we have, cause unregulated just means individual arrangement, and so on. Life of a factory worker surely sucked, yes.
I would suggest reading a bit more into the labor practices of the 18th and 19th centuries and the labour movements of the 19th and 20th otherwise you really are gunna just keep playing pretend and talking out of your ass about this pastoral fantasy and this conversation is really gunna leave you behind.
Yep. Nick Hanauer's done activism including TED talks pointing how ethical capitalism has become impossible what with regulatory capture and stable longer-term business models failing to compete with exploitative short-term models... and that we proletariat aren't going to stand for our state of perpetual precarity for much longer.
It doesn't even matter if the proletariat decides they've had enough. If things don't change then we get dramatic vast-scale climate migration that breaks the existing system that drove it to happen in the first place. Ideally, we'd change those systems now so things don't get as bad as they could. But if we don't, those systems are about to blow themselves up either way.
In my opinion, the whole population growth excuse is always an excuse and leads to dangerous results. The growth in population in Western countries has completely decimated since WW2. At this moment, only Africa is thought to have a positive growth number in the coming years. The population has grown, but the needs of almost the entire world have drastically increased. Leading to enormous growth in wealth and also productivity. That productivity has not been translated into less work, and the population increase has not translated into less work. Both of those things have translated into more wealth and more wealth inequality. Blaming the housing crisis/ financial crisis on too many people will only lead to racism, while the system keeps sucking everyone dry and making very few rich. There is plenty to go around, and the population growth is a story of the last century. We will reach our cap this century with all its effects to it.
By the end of the century only Africa will have a fertility rate higher than 2. All the other continents have a lower rate than 2, meaning a decline in population.
Infant mortality rate is off the charts in Africa compared to the majority of the world.
Average life expectancy is also much lower in most African nations compared to the places with low total fertility rate.
There's a lot more nuance than even just these two other pieces. Generalizing at a continent level is really poor. A typical metropolitan couple/family is going to have less kids than a rural family in the US where cost of living is lower and pressures from religion and family are higher.
When your neighbors, friends and family are holding off from kids to pursue higher socioeconomic standards there's pressure to live up to them or surpass them. When your neighbors, family and friends are having kids left and right you feel pressured to join them too. Just food for thought.
I hope no one takes this the wrong way, because I fully support equality for all races and sexes, but there's also double the workforce now. Women entering the workforce and eventually gaining near, or sometimes even superior footing, means that there are twice as many people competing for the same jobs. A larger candidate pool means companies can pay less and it's harder to get a job for the individual.
All true, but neither of these parent posts address the fact these efficiencies we’re not passed onto the worker but hoarded at the top
If pay would of stayed near the slope of productivity gains in the US none of this would be a problem.
Every average worker from french fry cook to teacher to nurse to engineer should be paid double what they are if everything stayed in line. Or you at least increase the top tax rate to redistribute the money back to normal folks.
But the US has done none of these which leads us on the path to the most common reason nations fall. Excessive amounts of inequality….
This has absolutely nothing to do with women or demography! We didn't need pills to invent riches inequalities or slavery, which is basically what liberalism reinvented with money rather than blood.
There is absolutely nothing interesting in your ideas here but the worst conservative propaganda!
Anytime someone claims to know why the economy behaves the way it does I am immediately skeptical. Unless the reason is to create inequality we should be able to use that information to establish a better syatem.
I'm having trouble understanding what you're trying to say. You think we have a lower standard of living today than in the past?
50 years ago what was so great that we have lost? 25 years?
From where i've sitting my QOL is only higher than when I was a kid growing up without hot water or air conditioning. Poorest family in a middle class town. That's just anecdotal but most seem to take for granted the things everyone has today. Magical handheld computers didn't exist when I was a kid and now almost everyone has one in the US.
The only thing out of reach is home ownership. Landlords are the new slaveowners. Not that you can really compare slavery to modern day working class jobs.
It's not the same people that were poor before that are poor now. A lot of immigrant makes for the poors of today, and their situation is certainly not better than 50 years ago.
Many things are to consider: it's far harder to find a job now, and it's far, far more expensive to have a home.
But indeed we got stuff that didn't existed before. Phone, Internet, etc. But these things are comparatively very cheap. And you actually need them to have a normal life today. They are more like new expenses than luxury. You also need a car today, something you didn't 50 years ago.
Basically, inflation rised faster than income, new expenses were created. I'm pretty sure we have less public services now than 50 years ago too.
The new expenses would be a benefit to societies if the rich didn't take all the benefit for themselves. All progress has been stolen by the rich.
My wife grew up in a 3rd world country so I know a bit about how things have changed in the past 30-40 years or so even abroad. QOL has risen around the world. Immigrants from poorer countries will ALWAYS be last place when coming here and competing to climb the ladder if they come with few skills - but they'll also be better off than the overwhelming majority of people in their former country.
Many things are to consider: it’s far harder to find a job now, and it’s far, far more expensive to have a home.
I disagree that it's harder to find a job. It's harder to find a job that pays well that isn't blue collar without a college degree and fluency in English. In Massachusetts it's trivial to find a job for $15/hr (minimum wage). You can't afford an apartment on your own though... you're going to be renting a room at best and hopefully if you're lucky living with family who already have a home.
If you start off as a blue collar apprentice doing carpentry, hvac, plumbing - you name it, you're going to start off above minimum wage, you're going to get regular raises and each certification you pass will greatly increase your income, and it'll all be paid for by the employer. Blue collar jobs in construction will always be in demand and are always hiring. Amazon may lay off tens of thousands of highly compensated employees but aint nobody laying off a plumber. If you've ever looked at getting work done on a family home you'd know there's a lengthy waiting period.
Basic cell phones are fairly cheap. Internet is fairly cheap for low income households.
Basically, inflation rised faster than income, new expenses were created. I’m pretty sure we have less public services now than 50 years ago too.
If you think we had things better 50 years ago i'd try watching a documentary about life in the 60s or 70s. We take a LOT for granted today. Life is practically nothing like it was back then. MRIs didn't even exist until 1977. CT Scans weren't invented until literally 50 years ago. This is just two examples of medical technology but the list goes on and on. The cost of everything is much higher but the quality and safety standards today are higher than ever in most industries. Labor cost here is also higher than ever.
Higher housing costs are almost entirely a function of higher incomes and higher demand. US population has grown from ~212 million to ~331 million.
When I was a kid you were still paying per minute for phone calls. Air conditioners were still a luxury (I never had one growing up.)
In my extended family i've seen two people who are immigrants pass a programming boot camp and get jobs in this economy (past 12 months.) Zero connections, references etc... they applied and got jobs. What's stopping someone from learning how to program? or if ADHD- learning how to do blue collar work as an apprentice?
Population means more labor and more consumption as well. For all of human history before thr industrial age, labor shortages were dire.
The problems that come with overpopulation are pollution and shortages of specific resources. No this is about unchecked capitalism focusing all the resources to a tiny elite class. Even more concentrated than the wealth in France, 1789.
Tbf, the boomers came of age in the 70s, so the economic system was well in decline by then.
Part of the problem is a secular cycle. The baby boom of the postwar period helped fuel a big economic expansion that helped people for a while, but eventually the power of individuals fall because there's so many people.
Most boomers didn't want their jobs to move to China. China is starting to experience the same secular cycle ironically.
Many millennials were the same age during the gfc. Are you to blame for that? Are you to blame for the debt expansion and money printing that have promised to destroy the next generation? Zoomers came of age during covid, are you to blame for covid policies that destroyed the economy?
In fairness, even this just seems like those two authors are the only ones using this term in this way, almost like they intentionally chose a word to specifically use in a way that didn't agree with the way everyone understands it.
Further, I don't think it's tricky reasonable to be snotty about it when you're choosing to use the term in this one very specific, abnormal way without explaining why.
Like...they might just as well have called their book Chocolatey Cycles. Most people wouldn't make the connection unless they were familiar with the work, and would think that it's a typo or other error.
Simply put, your referencing this work doesn't make me think "Oh! They were actually right about the word!", rather, it makes me think, "Oh...they, and the authors of that book, were all wrong about the word."
The etymology of the word secular from latin is "of a generation". So while it is a non-standard use of the word, it can be used to refer to something that happens once in a generation or once in a large amount of time like a century.
c. 1300, seculer, in reference to clergy, "living in the world, not belonging to a religious order," also generally, "belonging to the state" (as opposed to the Church), from Old French seculer, seculare (Modern French séculier) and directly from Late Latin saecularis "worldly, secular, pertaining to a generation or age," in classical Latin "of or belonging to an age, occurring once in an age," from saeculum "age, span of time, lifetime, generation, breed." ...
The ancient Roman ludi saeculares was a three-day, day-and-night celebration coming once in an "age" (120 years). Ecclesiastical writers in Latin used it as those in Greek did aiōn "of this world" (see cosmos). It is the source of French siècle "century." The meaning "of or belonging to an age or a long period," especially occurring once in a century, was in English from 1590s.
Generation is commonly used in the sense of a fairly short span of time, ~20 years. Secular cycle, googling quickly, seems to be using secular more in the 'lifetime/age' sense since the cycles are over the course of a couple centuries.
a
: occurring once in an age or a century
b
: existing or continuing through ages or centuries
c
: of or relating to a long term of indefinite duration
The word "secular" has been used in this manner referring to things over a much longer term in multiple Fields including investment, astronomy, medicine, sociology, climate. It's in the dictionary. Its Used in major newspapers. When I used the term originally referring to secular cycles specifically, I immediately followed the use of the term with a general explanation of what I meant, it was the next sentence in the same paragraph.
I mean, is it really surprising that a generation full of Karens who have blamed other people their whole life for their problems are now blaming their posterity?
Late Gen X with a Gen Z kid here, not contributing nearly as much to my retirement as I should be because I'm supporting her through college (without loans). We inherited this shit and we're sacrificing ourselves for the sake of our kids. I don't know who's to blame, but we've been dealing with this shit our whole lives. Don't blame us; we're trying to help
At least you can help your kids. My older daughter is going through college on loans which I don't advocate but it is her choice. I can't even keep my cars running.
You may be underestimating how expensive college is. I earned a full ride and worked three part time jobs in college. I am still paying off loans. A full ride doesn't cover rent, food, transportation, lab fees, textbooks, school supplies, toiletries... Whatever expenses you have right now, those are the expenses kids in college have, they're just spending so much time on homework and in class, they can't earn enough to cover them at the time, and that gets you into trouble. If you aren't lucky enough to have a full ride, and your only options are predatory loans because you don't qualify for grants- that's what gets almost all into deep trouble.
I think it's funny that you think less college debt boils down to finding a "cheap" place to live with the current astronomical prices, going out to eat too much, and that people don't have roommates. I'll give you that those 18 to, say, 24 probably don't have the best budgeting skills. But this comment comes across like those people telling to stop buying Starbucks and avocado toast.
Doing the same thing with my older son now. We are paying cash for his college so he doesn't start out under a mound of debt like we did. It took over 10 years for us to dig out from under that load and start building assets.
My wife is 45 and we didn't get her loans paid off until two years ago. And we only we were only able to do that because we sold our house at the absolute height of the COVID real estate market. She didn't even have post-grad; just a bachelor's
It is, at least partially, an inevitable consequence of an educational system that, whether by design or by accident, makes social mobility really difficult. Accessing advanced education often requires financial or personal sacrifices that are harder to make for lower income parents and kids. This is also compounded with the fact that in many places there's a perception that if you want a really good job you will need to go through this advanced education.
I was in that situation myself, I was always told that I couldn't expect to get a really great job in IT unless I went to college, which was unfeasible for me both financially and in terms of my aptitudes as a student. But fortunately for me, I discovered that my country had a vocational education system that prioritized the quick transition from education to employment, and a mere year and a half later I had a decent job, six years later I am an engineer. Turns out it wasn't necessary to go through four years of extremely expensive, pointless hoops, I only needed a chance to prove myself in a professional environment. It only cost my family 800 euros in two payments, now we are doing well financially.
So yeah, maybe just maybe if there were more systems in place like that, we wouldn't be reading how more and more parents are having to sacrifice everything just to give their kids a chance at some sort of future, you know?
You've identified a part, and symptom, of the system. What is behind it is capitalism.
Our education systems are designed to make us complacent worker drones incapable of critical thinking. Our higher education systems are sold as a necessity for anyone who wants a slightly less crappy life, and ensure anyone who doesn't already come from money who wants to go down that path starts their life in deep debt, making them desperate and easier to exploit.
These are all features of the system there to ensure its own existence.
It's a systemic problem they helped setup. The amount of public support they had while going through education and young adult life was wild. Unions were popular, housing was relatively cheap and affordable, same with education. Things didn't start blowing up til the 80s, 90s, 00s, when they were firmly of voting age and able to exert their numbers politically.
When did corporate and private tax policy change drasrically? The 80s. When did college costs start to increase? 1980 referencing a graph here.. When did housing start to increase (the first time)? In the 2000s, cause banks and the fed (led by boomers; all 5 of the largest financial institution crashes were headed by boomers; Lehman, Merrill, Citi, AIG, and Goldman Sachs), the fed was led By Greenspan prior to '06, but Bernanke afterwards (and he was the one who bailed those fuckers out, same with the GM and Chrysler with Bush, Boomer). Additionally, boomers are the generation most opposed to any climate change policy (along with Gen X, but that's a different conversation), referencing this article.
I do think it's a systemic issue. I just think boomers have played a large role in it's construction. Their parents before them had strong public works projects for infrastructure strong social safety nets, strong employee protections through growing unionization, lengthy fights for workers rights and de-segregation in many places. Boomers have wanted less of that and have actively worked to get rid of them.
The system wasn't built by no one, and changed pretty dramatically during a specific time frame.
While I definitely agree with you here, the systemic problem is in place due to an extreme overabundance of boomers sitting in Washington creating systematic problems and perpetuating existing ones. So, yes, not all boomers are culpable and blaming the whole generation is excessive, but perhaps this helps shed some light where the sentiment comes from.
Also, for most anyone after the boomer generation, retirement will be a complete financial impossibility so boomers inconveniencing their retirement for the sake of those who will never get to doesn't feel too out of line
Boomers are more to vote for conservative and liberals, more to vote, and a bigger part of the population. That's the truth of stats a'd demography. It's not all boomers, but as a generation, they failed their grand-children. And it comes to bite them now, which is the biggest surprise to me. I really thought they wouldn't see the collapse of the system or the global warming effects.
Stop immigration as a mean of increasing population and keeping wages down.
Sure, it is immigration that is keeping the wages down... I have no idea which country you originate from, but immigration is probably necessary to keep your population balance in check. So they are not the reason that wages are down; that would be the few determining the wages and exploiting you and those immigrants together.
I don't believe immigration is necessary for a countries survival.
Maybe fore increasing GDP but not for sustaining high standard of living. There is plenty of fat in the system and a lot of it is taken up by lack of affordable housing. Which immigration does not help with.
It's basic supply and demand if there are less workers wages have to go up.
Affordable housing is not a problem caused by migrants but by landlords who inflate the prices and governments and companies who delay the constructions so prices rise even more.
Look at many of America's top companies and you'll see they are run by immigrants. There is a huge demand for skilled labor in America and there aren't nearly enough skilled Americans. If you stop immigration these skilled workers will immigrate to other wealthy countries and build world class industries there instead and outcompete the United States. Immigrants are by far one of America's most important assets.
Not your fault but "They built a terrible system" is wrong too. If your parents were congressmen or business owners, you might have a point, but the actual affect the average person has on the system is negligible. The rich and powerful were going to destroy it.
That's why it doesn't really matter who sits in the presidential chair, bad laws still get made, and only the absolute worst get repealed, because they all overall agree with the direction of the country, it consolidates their power when they get it. People think "Things will get better under Biden" should really have been saying "Things won't get as bad as fast." because that's more accurate.
Its like where I live... senior individuals voting for a right-leaning political party that's actively harming the public services they rely on to survive - such as healthcare, public transport etc... then they complain that services are getting worse.
The irony is that people think that giving the government more power and more money will solve their problems... weird that 100 years ago when taxes were miniscule and government funding was too small, people were rich compared to today, and a single income was enough to fund a whole family.
The period of time 100 years ago is referred to as "The Roaring 20s" and it led to the Great Depression. In the 1950s we had a top marginal tax rate of 90% and that period saw the largest and wealthiest middle class we've ever had.
Couple oversimplifications there. "Roaring Twenties" were fed by the nascent Federal Reserve ballooning the economy through the 20s and an inevitable contraction occurring at the end with a huge regulatory clampdown, expansion of the state and prolonged low interest rates/inflation into the 40s. The "top marginal tax rates" were essentially base rates and the effective rates paid were close to half that. A more meaningful metric is federal spending as % of GDP by year:
which, taking into consideration that the economy has been growing in the last 80 years, indicates that federal spending has been gradually increasing ever since. The spike in the 40s is of course the enormous WWII spending. It's also critical to take into advantage that the general state of technology/industrial infrastructure is light years ahead now than where it was at the beginning of the 20th century.
It's pretty universally known that the entire working class has basically been left behind by economic growth since the 60s/70s, while government spending has continually increased since then, and simultaneously, corporate profits have also kept pace with economic growth. Which really begs the more important question, what specific mechanisms in our economy are actually producing these outcomes. I feel like people spend a ton of time arguing about things they think will curb the effect instead of asking why it's happening in the first place.
Or in plain English: the system isn't producing equality of ownership, or equality of proceeds from production/labor - why not? How can we fix that without just piping half the economy through the government? That's the real question.
Marx points out the unregulated economy will always pull capital to the top. So how do we prevent the government from its fate of getting captured by the bourgeoisie?
The more I went over this, the more I realized there is no "unregulated market". There's basically a status quo of rules of property distribution accepted by a society. Even what people refer to as a "free market" gets extremely complicated the second you get into the questions of property and contract law, with questions that in total can completely change the outcomes of the system depending on how you answer them. If you had no state but a society unanimously committed to equalizing the distribution of wealth, it would still happen.
I don't think it is the way forward to lay blame on our elders, or to be disrespectful towards any generation other than our own. Some people are stupid, some are not. Stupity is not dependent on age.
We all blunder through life and fuck up sometimes. Beeing smarter after the fact isn't that much of an achievement.
I wonder how many people took out 6 figure loans to fund an Art History degree they didn't finish and now seethe all day at their barista jobs, hoping someone cancels their student debt. I bet it's a lot. I also bet their parents advised them to do something else.
Say you're a single parent. Say you have to take medication for your mental health, say you have ADHD and can't work without it. And your job doesn't provide health insurance. Say your job pays less than minimum wage. There are entire industries that avoid minimum wage legislation in the United States. Say your parents are minorities and have spent the majority of their lives in a country legally discriminating against them in governance, finances, employment, housing, transportation, education, and in social programs meant to help the poor.
You have no fallback. You are only ever offered debt that you can never return, and eventually they offer you nothing. You can't afford even a single bedroom apartment. You pick between feeding your children and taking your meds. And if you can't take your meds you can't work. You spend every single day perched precariously on a knife edge, one single Healthcare bill or car repair bill away from homelessness starvation and death.
These people are real. There is no possible financial adaption that will alleviate this situation. And if we count up all the people unfairly treated in this society, if we track everyone and see the way all disenfranchised oppressed people suffer injustice - it becomes immediately apparent that the vast majority of the working class is in a perpetual state of near homelessness barely scraping by even as they slave themselves away for the interests of corporations who have proven time and time again they see human life itself as worthwhile only in its ability to generate capital.
You sound like somebody who had an incredibly fortunate childhood and you don't understand anything about people who actually had to work to get where they are.
You claim that your parents didn't support you but they paid your college. It sounds like you got supported a lot.
The people who really had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps are people like me. I quit a full ride scholarship to go back home and get a job to support my father and family after he broke his back at work and it took two years before his disability paid out.
From there I was destitute and I've had to work my way back up to a point where I can afford to pay college out of pocket by myself while also affording all of my other expenses (like purchasing a house, and supporting my own family as an adult.) I've had to make serious sacrifices in my life.
You really should be less judgmental about other people because you sound ignorant when you make those comments.
You started you adult life with education and without being indebted for 20 years? You are a privileged one. That's just how it is. I am too. That's just life, but you should have the honesty to recognise that most people don't have this privilege. They can't be conservative and plan their life because they don't have the education or the resources (social or monetary) to do it.
You are oblivious to reality. There's nothing to do with you, you are blind. Hopefully one day you'll discover social sciences and you will learn some facts about your society.
Millennials are between 25 and 40 years old now and you guys are still blaming "the system"?!
You guys ARE the system, at this point in time.
For fucks sakes, you should be well past the age of being in college and should have many years (nearing a couple of decades at this point in time for the older millennials) into the work force. You are also the single largest voting bloc, but you don't exercise that power so even though Boomers are now a smaller group, they out-vote you by a wide margin making them more important. You still haven't connected the dots that those who vote the most get the most attention from politicians?? There's a reason why the rec center has a broken AC, but the senior bus has those expensive, cushy seats.
If you are still blaming anyone for your failures in life, you should be blaming yourselves. If the world isn't the way you want, then get off your asses and be the change that you want to see. You are the largest generation, but you still act like a tiny minority group. Obama was in his mid 30s when he was elected to the Senate, and in his mid-to-late 40s when he was elected President. Yet as of 2 years ago, Millennials only represented about 6% of Congress. Are you expecting those seats to just be handed to you? Because that's not how it works. That's not how any of this works.
You guys are still acting like you're some powerless 16 years old and still need to beg your mom to borrow the car on Friday night. Hell, even older Zoomers are in their mid 20s at this point in time and have little excuse for their woes.
You sound more nieve than a preschooler. Another boomer aka elder todler trying to pretend their greed didn't destroy this country and the planet. Why don't you learn to read before you die instead of hoarding everything? Your dumbass generation made this country far too corrupt for voting to do shit at this point. The worse part is how fucking dumb most of you are.
The median age of voting House lawmakers is 57.9 years, down from 58.9 in the 117th Congress (2021-22), 58.0 in the 116th (2019-20) and 58.4 in the 115th (2017-18). The new Senate's median age, on the other hand, is 65.3 years, up from 64.8 in the 117th Congress, 63.6 in the 116th and 62.4 in the 115th.
Come on son, we worked hard and ruined the economy and the climate and the nature, now be a good boy and pay for our retirement.
Exactly this, it's not even the fucked up economy state that scares me the most, it's the state of ecology that may make the place uninhabited in the pretty near future 😢
I actually know a Lot of boomers who feel just that way. My dad is one he thinks its their right to destroy the environment because they can't live forever.
Then you have the christian nuts who want to destroy it so that jesus will return.
But most boomers want take the money with them and leave nothing to future generations. Hell they do want to burn it all down and they destroy the American dream out of greed.
The me generation that only want them to have it all.
Let's have a purge city. Every year, let's say like a Burning Man City. Every one can come together and we'll nuke the city at the end of a week long party.
Generation of vipers
The author of this article is not nearly old enough to be a boomer though. This is outrage bait.
Unsustainable system finally collapses under the weight of greedy spoiled generation when their children cannot compete with their parents enough to continue supporting said unsustainable system.
There fixed that shit.
Those fools need to get the fuck out of here with that nonsense!
Most boomers and whatever came right after boomers don't even have decent retirements.. That's what's sorta funny about all this. I know quite a few 60s and 70s yr olds that legit don't have enough to sustain their lifestyles and still have to work. The system failed LONG before Millennials showed up.
Many of them went their whole lives "not trusting the stock market" just to literally have no retirement. Much of it was lack of education and access to the stock market when they could have been investing, but then at the same time it is a pretty stupid fucking system of retirement when without notice you can lose 40% of value because some bankers fucked around.
The system sucked for them that's why they still have to work, but instead of trying to fix it, they just complain that it's their kids fault.
And even the ones that have a lot of assets to be considered well off have a problem. They're living in the only thing they own that's worth a significant amount of cash.
Property prices have completely fucked everyone. Just because somebody can barely afford to pay 50% of their wages every month for the next 40 years in order own their own house, it doesn't mean they should. It means they've got no choice because there isn't enough.
oh yeah that reminds me of an 80 yr old lady I know. She's land rich and insanely poor. Like if she sold all her real estate assets she'd probably have easily over a million dollars. But she doesn't want to sell anything just cause. But she's super poor. Like she literally needs a new roof on her trailer and can't afford it. But is sitting on 7 figures of assets lol.
Hell my FIL is that way not that I'm thinking about it. He can't take care of his house he's in a booming hood in Houston and has like 8 acres to boot. He keeps borrowing against it to afford shit and still owes like 100k on it which would still net him a pretty penny for the whole set up. I keep telling him just sell the shit and buy a small home out right and get out of the debt and whatever, but he's super stubborn about it.
This is literally my landlord too. She's a nice lady, but she depends on my income to pay her bills...
She's sitting in a beautiful town on a property that could easily get over 1mil, probably 2-2.5, but instead I have to live in her garage that has a leaking roof she can't afford to fix... I imagine she's just holding on to it for her kids or something, but she'd be so much better off if she sold. Of course I'd get kicked out in an instant and be in deep shit myself, but that doesn't change what's best for her.
I can sympathise. A home isn't just a house. Depending on how long they've lived there, there's a lot of memories wrapped up in that.
It's not a simple financial equation.
Exactly. I think most of the people here don't understand this basic fact.
Never underestimate the power of psychology and sentiment. If he sold it at his age he'd be left with what? A pile of money and regret? And at, say, 80 starting over is brutal. Living in a place he doesn't recognize, away from anyone he knows, etc. It is probably why some people don't leave struggling small towns, they grew up there and to leave is to start over and abandon everything.
alternate phrasing: boomers stuffed all their money in their bank accounts instead of building a world their kids could afford to live in.
As always it's your fault that you weren't born into a rich family. If you want to get rich you have to be rich, it's not hard. Some of the dumbest members of our society manage it all the time.
While I can agree about their failures, "don't save it's bad for the consumer economy" can go to hell.
i'm not saying "don't put money into savings", i'm saying every now and then, people should make a decision that benefits the world as a whole rather than just their personal financial situation.
boomers didn't sacrifice their own spending to build their net worth, they sacrificed *public* spending to do it. and not just public spending, but things that are literally free. like, deciding nobody should ever be allowed to build more housing anywhere ever, because that makes their real estate investment go up.
You should be able to do a little of both.
Are you actually saying that saving instead of being in debt is a bad thing?
If they stuffed into bank accounts instead of real estate, stocks, and businesses, the played capitalism wrong.
Corrected headline: boomers voted in austerity assholes and now their kids have to pay for it with their money
Oops
I find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that spending more debt than every government before them every single time for decades is austerity. They spent more than all the money constantly. Some austerity would have actually helped but they didn't do that.
They have been needing to raise taxes on the wealthy for decades, but they've been reducing them instead.
You're rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic. You get into some pretty absurd taxation levels, you just won't get the sort of revenue that you need to balance a budget that is so much spending.
And the worst part is, the government's already taxing you for stuff that you should just get. The United States spends more public money on health care than most countries, as much money on health care as some single payer nations. Everyone seems to think that there needs to be more money, but there doesn't. The money is there. It's just not being used properly. In any other country on the planet that amount of money should result in universal healthcare. Instead, the government program is run so incompetently that every family needs to spend absurd amounts of money on Private health care.
This just seems to be the way that the US government works. They take the money to do a thing, then they just don't do the thing. That is an austerity, it's incompetence.
That's exactly the neoliberal agenda: austerity is spending less for workers and public services, and more to help companies so that growth can come back and make earth a paradise free of socialism.
Austerity has nothing to do with spending less. It's all about taking the money from the poor to give it to the rich.
No one is mentioning upper management and CEO's pay. The money is trickling up, and that's more of a problem than all of the other factors combined.
UGH! I can't figure out how to reply OR how to find communites/subs on this app!!!!!!
I totes agree wif yew, doe!!!!!
Go download sync
not the person you replied to but I'm on sync how go I find new subs?
There is an explore button down the bottom of the app, you can search in there. To be fair I mostly just browse top.posts at the moment and haven't really started to compile a list of sub subscriptions
thank you for your help.
Or any other Lemmy app that works better, no ads needed
I get your point, and I'm not saying that boost is the panacea of client possibilities, but here are my experiences with other clients (I'm also happy to be corrected if these gripes are resolved):
The web interface. No ability to customise default views, when i go to all, it keeps loading shit as in trying to read it as new posts are added. Frustrating and I did not engage in the platform
Jerboa, buggy as hell. Constantly crashing. Unusable.
Connect. Good browser, but every time you comment you get punished by losing your place. No read tracking.
Sync. Does almost everything I want. Some ads, wish it would hide read posts when I come back later.
I'm a much more valuable member of the Lemmy community because I use sync.
If there is another client that's more betterer let me know and I will check it out.
I'd suggest trying Summit or Infinity.
hey what if you're on desktop? I'm new here but just trying to adapt, not complain lol
My Y daughter is doing well, maybe it will be shitty for her to buy a house or condo but she can. My Z one, yeah, I'm helping her, paying stuff here and there like groceries, microwave, etc, she's in her own flat and all and is not too bad but still, rent is 40% of her earning. It's ok to help your kids.
I absolutely agree! It’s not a competition, we are all living in the same world with the same problems.
Families are at the centre of any society. Families function best when they help each other out. Parents are meant to sacrifice to help their children, just as their adult children should sacrifice later in life to help them.
Nope this is Lemmy we hate kids here just like Reddit.
I have seen absolutely nowhere near the same hostility people on Reddit have towards children and their parents.
Seems like you’re pulling shit out your arse to cause a rile.
Wrong. This place is going to turn into an antikid circlejerk in no time. There are already childfree and kidsarefuckingstupid communities.
christ, I was really hoping to get away from that garbage.
In the literal sense, yes, but not in the context of marketing cohorts, which are usually based on birth date ranges and are used to group members of society who experience similar pressures and exhibit similar behaviors. Gen Y/Millennial and Gen Z are marketing terms, so it’s possible for a parent to have a child in each.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I was trying to be funny but it totally missed the mark and fell flat. Oh well 🤷♂️ I do think it would be nice if we didn’t find ourselves referring to our social constructs in terms of marketing cohorts.
Should have ended with an /s
After Trump, it has become impossible to tell if someone is joking or serious.
Indeed I will surely remember next time! Thanks for the reminder 😅
There's also us zillenials born between 1990 - 1996. The defining feature is that we're old enough that we were alive during 9/11 but were too young to understand the way it changed society at the time. Our formative years also occurred during both pre and post internet being everywhere.
What?
If you have 1 child born in 1995 and another born in 1999, then your children are of two separate generations.
Oh, I'm sorry, of course...it's OUR fault that we're broke!
According to Forbes? Of course is the fault of the impoverished they didn't take personal responsibility. Forbes is a magazine for persons with stock portfolios.
That's pretty much the main thesis used to justify capitalism. You have the money you deserve. If prosperity isn't merit-based, then capitalism would be a horrifying abuse of the underclasses.
Ummm yes. Do better.
Good, perhaps the boomers will recognize how impossible the current structure is to live under and actually pay attention to what they are voting for...
Who am I kidding, that's not going to happen 😭
A lot of people are in denial about the effects of policies they support.
Just look at the cost of housing. There's a ton of NIMBY homeowners who are deep in denial that zoning huge swaths of cities to be exclusively mcmansions could possibly cause house prices to be artificially high.
As a NIMBY guy...I'm going to protect my investment. There's plenty of affordable housing out there, it's just not 10 minutes walking distance from an urban center.
I can go pay 20k cash and live in a trailer across town if I need to.
Edit: If you want to do it that way, you can rent said trailer for a pittance. I'd suggest you do, you won't want to be there long.
Everyone wants low cost housing, no one actually wants to live in a low cost area.
Holy shit, you solved homelessness, good job! All we need is to have 20k in cash and then... wait.
First off, housing isn't a fucking investment. It's a human's basic need. Anyone thinking a roof over your head is an "investment" can fuck right off because your line of thinking IS the problem.
It shouldn't be an investment but the time to put that idea to bed has long since sailed.
Governments, like the one in Canada claim to want to build more purpose built rental housing and increase supply but without reducing home prices, a most contradictory statement. This kind of talk isn't unique to Canada either.
The reality is that generations of people now have their wealth from their homes. Unless we're willing to endure pain as a society from values lowering, and thus people's wealth reducing( all signs point to the fact we aren't), then the issues will only get worse.
Until we are, get ready for more variations of the same chorus "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"
I mean, they described themselves as a fucking NIMBY. I'm baffled anyone even bothered responding to that type of BS.
Which brings me back to the 20k trailer...it's dirt fucking cheap. If you don't think housing is an investment, you can easily afford rent or payments on 20k over 10 years with a minimum wage job.
However...I don't see a lot of people scrambling for the "affordable" housing.
If you really want to socialize living space, there acres and acres of really empty, really cheap land in the fly over states. Grab an acre of land somewhere and you can house 100s of people on it.
Something tells me none of those options are appealing to you.
Yes, because all the jobs are in the middle of the woods somewhere.
How did you get this fucking ignorant?
You have forgotten to factor in many things.
What will these differently-housed individuals do for income? Where will they work?
If they are in the middle nowhere as you claim, how will they physically get to their job? If they have to drive significant distances to get to these civic centers, then you have grossly underestimated the percentage of their income that would be slated for transportation.
Let's do some math! Your fantasy $20k trailer with your parameters, with an estimated $1000 initial cost for service connections would wind up being a bit more than $27k after APR adjustments. Calculator That winds up being $222 per month. What a steal!
Federal minimum wage is $7.25. Taxes are a thing, so $7.25 turns into $6.52. An individual would have to work a bit more than 34 hours to afford just the dwelling.
We are assuming that this person is healthy, with nothing to prevent the individual from working.
Will this person have electricity? $122 or 18.7 hours Will this person have clean water? $18 or 2.76 hours Will this person require clothing? Will this person have healthcare?
Will this person take any prescription medication? Will this person have a dental plan? Will this person pay for transportation (the vehicle, insurance, wear and tear, gas, and incidentals)? Will this person support additional family members who are unable to work (children, elderly, injured, disabled)? Will there be air conditioning and heating in this $20k trailer?
What will this person eat?
Going beyond the absolute basics: What will this person do for entertainment? One cannot honestly expect a human to live without some form of stress relief. Will this person have access to the internet? That is required for resume submission for almost every job. What will this person save for retirement?
That's reasonable...that's around 1/4 of their income which is typically the guideline for housing if you want a savings account as well.
For reference, that's roughly what I put in to afford my mortgage.
The rest of it is fluff "what ifs" and kind of out of context. We could've had universal income and health but people keep going with the safe choices on votes instead of the things we really need.
A quarter of their income for housing.....for a fictitious $20k used manufactured home. Mind you, we never included the taxes or the rental or owned land.
And the other items are not fluff. One has to be fed and clothed.
And since you opened the door, what do you pay for your mortgage?
Where do you live that trailers are only 20k? I live in a small Indiana city and the cheapest trailers here are over 30k.
Close to there actually. I see them go for that cheap all the time...It's tempting as hell to liquidate everything and go buy one and retire.
Weird how I'm not seeing any for 20k no matter where I look.
You are trash.
"Low Income." "20k Cash." Pick one.
Sure, but let's say you build a section 8 settlement next to my house. I'm moving...immediately, and so are all the neighbors.
The entire market there plummets and you end up with Detroit.
So great, you solved the problem for a decade. Now what?
Wow, you're selfish.
It's a safety issue rather than a selfish one.
Why don't you just come right out and say you hate poor people?
I would love for the market to plummet where I'm at. Housing as an investment that outpaces wage is a primary problem here, if it crashed maybe half my income wouldn't go to rent, and more and more people wouldn't be pushed to the streets while people's "investments" sit around empty, as they search for the perfect petless, 6 figure making tenant.
I should clarify...this is my only home. I'm anti-corpo buying property. It's not like my 2nd home or I'm renting something out.
I have one house...I saved for 20 years to buy it, and I'll be paying another 10 on it...it would destroy me if it lost 1/2 it's value.
But because of that you are against the idea that it just shouldn't take 20 years of saving and 10 years of payments for someone to have a decent home?
Honestly, that would be great news, and I hope you know many Americans would support deregulation of zoning laws for exactly this effect. A drop in housing prices is exactly what we need. People treating home ownership as an investment are the problem, home ownership should be more like owning a car: it's a commodity, not an investment. We should not be subsidizing poor financial decisions, I feel bad for everyone wrapped up in it, but ultimately the system we're in has been broken for a long, long time
loooool so you don't know what's going on in Portland, OR huh.
And then the people across town need to travel somehow, so they need a car, and then they're spending more on a car (lots more), and then they fill up the roads, and then we need to pay for more road infrastructure, and then we have more cars to replace with BEVs because we can't possibly continue having gas cars around.
Or we can try to get more housing near to where people work and get the things they need, and we avoid every single problem above.
NIMBY isn't even a good financial position. Think about it. Say your area is rezoned for mixed use and you start getting apartments and condos on top of store fronts. Land value will skyrocket and all likelihood, you will come out ahead. Ever wonder why Manhattan and DC real estate is so expensive?
So then the apartments and condos become more expensive due to skyrocketing land values, not solving the problem of affordable housing? You can expand current low density zones with limited medium density without impacting values too much, but NIMBY concerns aren't completely crazy. Either new zones are created for multifamily high density and medium density housing instead of opening single family low density zones for these projects, or we accept that as a society we are fine crushing a percentage of the middle class to solve housing for the lower classes. The top 10% may take a hit on real estate dips from rental properties, but not crippling. We can spread the damage slowly, but houses losing 10-30% value will cause a miniature 2008 wherever that happens.
This was caused by housing becoming a cornerstone step into and for remaining in the middle class instead of being a commodity like it was pre 1970/80. That probably wasn't a good idea, but changing that removes the largest remaining leg of the middle class. All options moving forward will suck I think, and it will take a lot of work to resolve.
Now look at home prices next to low cost areas...
Let me tell you a story, when I was looking for my house we found a gorgeous 6 bed 4 ba all brick house with like 3500 sq feet for around 250k...it's an insane price for that house.
I looked at it and found out there's a section 8 unit next door. After asking around it ends up the place gets robbed every 2 months and the sellers are trying to give it away.
It ended up going for 175k.
That's should have been close to a million dollar piece of property...now it's a mom and pop tax firm.
Your momma is a hoe.
A concise rebuttal.
I do want to point out that no one is actually complaining about price of just building per say. Trailer is fine and all, but does that 20k cover land and basic utilities like water and heating/cooling (Is it well insulated?) in reasonable price and effort? Is Trailer Park actually located close enough to jobs (I don't remember gas and time being free) and it is secure from natural disaster?
That aside, NIMBY mindset is generally dumb stance when everyone is taking it. So there's that.
Utilities are really up to your usage, but all in would be maybe 500$ a month. That includes all the above plus lot fees.
The walk from there to downtown is 20 minutes...the walk to the two major employers in my area would be 30-ish minutes.
You have to work 76.7 hours to afford utilities.
Assuming that these individuals are able- bodied to walk.
Which again...those are out of scope. Even if the house were free, they'd still have to pay those things.
It sucks, I agree, but the price of housing doesn't really matter in the face of our energy crisis.
Normally, the meaning of an investment is that they take a measure of effort, and sometimes, they don't pan out.
But houses will always pan out, because everyone wants them, because they're usually expected to go up in value, because everyone wants them, because they're expected to go up in value, because...
Someday, mark my words, it'll be a gold-buying bubble that bursts.
No they'll just sit there continuing to pretend climate change isn't happening
A lot of them will recognize the problems, they just blame them on the wrong things.
This is organized gaslighting. Dont get caught up in it.
Times are though, gotta bring home the bread somehow. It's your duty to click on the article and rage share it so that the economy doesn't collapse..
I mean, despite the rampant bootlicking seen in that generation, boomers didn't create that system. They're victims of it as well, just victims that generally refuse to see it. My mom absolutely has been fucked over by capitalism, and has fucked herself over helping her kids. But she acknowledges why, and agitates for something better. My dad is a victim of this shitty system, too, but was so brainwashed by cold war propaganda that he can't see it most of the time. :/ tldr fuck the boomer politicians and brainwashers, try to help regular boomers realize they're just as much a victim of this shit as we are.
Lead poisoning really did a number on that generation. While I'm also angry that they were complacent in what's happened, as I refuse to be, it's like blaming a severely handicapped kid.
Did you know we found out to stop including lead in gas in 1976 because school kids were getting dumber and less empathetic?
We knew from the time Thomas Midgley put lead in gas it was toxic, but it was cheaper. He also introduced CFCs to the environment. Sherman Williams reported in 1904 that lead paint was bad, but it took until the 1970s for bans to start, but plenty of places still have no ban.
The only solace in his detriment to humanity is that he died a terrible death. He got polio made a contraption to help him move around and got tangled and died of strangulation
Because it serves are purpose. People don’t just fill their race cars up with leaded fuel for the pleasure of paying a LOT more.
We're aware that it does make a difference. In something completely unnecessary. You can enjoy life without polluting lead.
Probably should talk to the multiple other “sports” that allow it in FAR larger and more harmful ways.
Whataboutism
Motorsports are by far the most polluting form of sport per capita. Hardly anyone can partake in them and those that do inflect massive amounts of environmental damage. It's ok to like something, but we should still be mindful of the negatives a hobby can cause so we can at least minimize the damage. Like golf is fine, but we don't need to use so many pesticides and build golf courses in deserts.
lol you got a source on that claim, or is it a “I pulled it out my ass stat” because I find it pretty hard to believe.
The MASSIVE water consumption, in addition to pesticides, and the plastics used in golf balls (going with your example here) that are left in the wild, in addition to the significantly higher rate of people who play golf, are likely far worse for the environment than a handful of cars having some fun. I’m not saying racing isn’t bad for the environment. What I am saying is there are things that are FAR more common, and worse.
Clair Patterson lives!
What happens if you get 20% lead in your body? How are you supposed to remove any of it from your body?
I love how you all singled out a small subset of a pretty niche sport to be uptight about. No mention of avgas, which is used far more widely, and covers far more people. According to FAA nearly 250k planes still use it. They fly all over. They flyover your house, mine, everyone.
Or lead in ammunition, which is studied and proven to kill animals, and their young. The CA condor is a good example of it. They are still dying from lead poisoning, and lead ammo has been outlawed in CA. It only took until 2019 to outlaw it here, but I believe we are the only state. The recent fires here, that killed multiple condors proved that. At least one (probably more but I heard about this one) had lead in its system and when they went to try to find their young, they also had lead poisoning.
Oh and it’ll probably shock you to know, even in CA, you can go buy fuels (C16 and Q16 are the most common we see) and use them in street cars. Go to any classic American car show, and you can smell it. But yes, please single out a small subset of race cars as being the issue.
They are all an issue. Just because someone mentions one thing it does not mean the other things aren’t an issue also. If I tell you leaded race car fuel is an issue and should be banned, I am not telling you all other uses of exhausted lead are fine, or even “lees bad”. The post did but appear to be in any way constructed as an comparative analysis of lead use in order to author regulation from.
My point is that it’s likely the absolute smallest subset of use. There’s also a functional reason it’s used in race cars. Same is true of avgas.
There isn’t one for it being used in ammunition, for instance, which is simply a preference
Wait, the California condor is having a population crisis due to lead poisoning? Why won't they stop lead use immediately?
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic but yeah, they have been dying of lead possessing since like forever. In the 90s, when the condor was something like 20 animals alive on the planet, organizations like the San Diego Zoo, started to push for the outlaw of lead ammo. It took until 2019 (apparently) to finally outlaw it here completely, yet the animals are still dying from it.
Lead poisoning from ingestion of lead ammunition is the most significant threat to condor survival, but other factors - including ingestion of microtrash and electrocution - also present challenges to condors as a species.per the national park service
Of the 213 condor deaths in the wild between 1992 and 2020, half (107) were due to lead poisoning, according to USFWS. according to us fish and wildlife
To answer your question why, people just don’t give a shit. Apparently lead is preferred because it’s softer than steel, and deforms in an appealing way for “hunters” and “gun enthusiasts”.
The thing to remember is that they had to rely on trusted authorities in the news or government back then. They didn’t have easy access to primary sources or alternate viewpoints that we have now. That’s why all they can do is pick an authority figure and put all their trust in them. They literally do not know any other way. To them “research” is finding a talking head they like or who looks “trustworthy” and then believing everything they say. It was an age of authority and now we’re moving into an age of transparency and they’re not happy about it. They expected that they would get their turn to be the trusted head of the family and now all their kids and grandkids barely want to talk to them.
Wow, that's really eye opening in relation to my in-laws. You just put it all in perspective.
Another article that refers to millennials in third person because they have a target audience that will be dead in 10 years.
Then they go out of business.
Hmmmmm 10 years ? Probably not
No no. The system they built was great. The thing is, the system was changed by them, just in time to rob all the younger generations blind, then stood back and watched it happen, did nothing, and then they have the balls to blame us when we can't independently thrive in the system they stood by and allowed to be built.
It's cute, in a frustrating kind of way, that you think the system was either created that recently, or was ever meant to be anything but exploitative and oppressive and isn't working exactly as designed.
Oh, I know the roots of the system date pretty far back.
Fact is that boomers made good headway, they started unions, health and safety, human resources.... Stuff that was basically unheard of before that....
While health and safety still exists, most jobs no longer require significant health and safety protection. HR still very much exists, and also does very little for workers day to day.
Unions have all but been disbanded; if you work an office job, it's very unlikely that you have a union at all, and it's unlikely that any whispers of a union are happening.
As a result, most workers are getting shafted in salary and benefits, and on top of that companies are raising prices to inflate their profits even more than simply screwing their workers out of their salary, and you end up with trillions running companies, making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars a year....
This has been going on so long that the problem is completely out of hand.
That was all started by the generation before the boomers. The boomers have only gotten only the benefits of those systems. And then started and supported the dismantling of those systems.
So... If the boomers didn't give money to their children, what'd they do with it? Sit on it for 10 years, die, and then pass it to their children?
Articles like this are either missing the grand picture or they serve someone else's interest: Making boomers spend their money on leasing luxury apartments and other crap, so there'll be no inheritance. Leeches are the enemy of all generations.
Let's eat the rich. That'll pass the wealth around.
Child free gang wins again.
Time and money. What a savings.
Same here! Well time at least... Finally I see a benefit to being completely undesirable! Lol
Have the elites who tell us we "never want to work" thought about lowering the rent below $3k at times? Even below 2k? Because we can't work or do shit with no actual place to live.
We have a lot to be mad at property owners for right now. Their lobbying and bullshittery is part of why so many people have to go back into the office and have so few protections against it. If we're not pointlessly wasting time commuting to the office their properties won't be worth as much! Won't somebody think of the poor landlords?? 😔😔
But then they might have to work... Oh the humanity.
My parents spent most of their time getting drunk and trying to be 18 again. I wouldn't really call that a good setup for their kids.
Unfortunately, they fucked around for us to find out. I don't feel bad if they find out a little bit too.
Thing is, it's not the same "they". Those who profited off the working class and shut the door behind them are not the ones seeing their finances ravaged because their kids live in the basement.
Unless you consider their voting history complicity, which I do.
This really is the most stupid inane culture war attitude. People vote less when they are young. And yes that applies to your parents. There are more young people below 50 than over 50, so get off your backside and vote. The problems of the world today are not down to a specific age or voting pattern; it is down to corporation buying out your politicians. Stop voting Democrats or Republican, they are just one big massive con.
That's a whole lot of bullshit unrelated to what I said. The American voter base is responsible for the state of the country, sorry that's such a controversial statement for you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Of course, we can't blame boomers for poor decisions or tell them to skip that avocado toast. Clearly they must continue to suck the remaining resources from life so that they have something to bring to the afterlife when they finally croak.
The whole avocado thing really betrays a failure in the thinking of the people behind it. Some places some times avocados are absurdly expensive. Other places and times they are as cheap as any other random vegetable. To not realise that requires having no awareness at all of the importance of seasonal and ideally local produce. If you want to budget competently you need to pay attention to what is good value near you and when. Not understanding that time and location affects the price of fresh perishable foods makes you entirely unqualified to condescendingly tell people they are budgeting their food shopping poorly. All they know is that they spend $10 an avocado so therefore anyone else buying them must be irresponsibly spending just as much.
I have no savings for retirement. Every spare penny I invest in the success of my family, mostly my own kids. I don't need to go to Florida and hang out playing golf.
reaping what one sows comes to mind
or the classic 'well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions!'
They actively took away the supports.
I've gotten tired of this whole "everyone from this generation thinks the same, acts the same, is poor/wealthy", etc bullshit. The coincidence of your birthday doesn't automatically identify you.
No. But we are all a combination of our biology plus our experiences. Bring born at the same time as someone means a significant portio of your experiences will be more similar than with someone born decades after you. The fact is that Zoomers went through a disruptive global pandemic either while still in education or leaving to start their careers. That experience will inform who each of those young people become. The way that this effects each individual Zoomer will vary but it will affect them and so it makes them a demographic of "people who's education or early work experiences were disrupted by a pandemic." Those people will on average be a little more similar to one another then people who didn't experience that. Generational identities are formed by all the millions of experiences, big and small, those people have in common with one another but not with other generations by merit of being born at a particular time. Just as Zoomers went through a pandemic at a crucial early point of their lives the Greatest Generation endured the great depression and world war 2 in the first half of their lives. There's absolutely no reasonable way to claim that living through world war 2 wouldn't inform your personality and behaviour on some level. And so, people from the Greatest Generation (who lived through World War 2) will, due to that experience and many others, will have things in common with one another that they do not share in common with Zoomers (who didn't live through World War 2.) Another huge example is that somewhere roughly alligned with the millennial generation we made the transition from people who grew up with constant easy access to the vast expanse of information and communication on the Internet and people who grew up before they'd ever heard of it. Those are hugely different experiences. They change the part of you that is due to your experiences. The other people who share those experiences will tend to have commonalities with you that people who didn't share those experiences don't have.
Wrong way to see it, yeah the boomers are rich but a lot of Gen X are broke as shit too. Kids cost money, and with the direction the economy is going, it is just the sad reality we face.
I am extremely thankful for the help my parents have given me, my dad was broke as hell for most of my childhood despite working his ass off, and this was pre-2009 recession, the recession made it worse and it is only recent he is starting to get a real foothold on finances.
What retirements? What savings?
I'm 50 so not a boomer but I have no retirement savings. Zero. I do have adult children still living at home though.
Does the $200 left in my savings account after paying hospital bills count?
Feeling so vindicated, Americans are massively becoming not just socialist, but outright communist
Not to be that guy... But Americans have always been partially socialist. That's the reason child labor is not supposed to be a thing, your work week isn't 60 - 80 hours long without overtime, you have things like vacation days, sick leave, agencies in charge of stamping out food and drug adulteration, OSHA codes for safe workplaces, a public school system, public libraries, banking regulations... And a very long list beyond that.
Do you think any of these things are naturally occuring under a capitalist system? These were the fights you can map to specific socialist movements of the past.
But who am I kidding anybody who unironically starts complaining about Communists is so far up McCarthy's ass all they can smell is grave rot.
Is that really socialist though?
A strong labour movement isn't necessarily socialist. In fact I do believe it kind of gets in the way of socialism as they make capitalism bearable for the well organised labour class. Socialism is when the labour class also own the means of production, and for now, mostly, that isn't the case in most developed countries.
Your definition of socialism has been warped by decades of propaganda to weaken labour friend. Labour movements including labour unions are a feature of socialism, not capitalism or even liberalism. Only at the very deep end is socialism about labour co-ops and abolishment of private property. There is also not a unified singular definition philosophy or movement within socialism though it can be very roughly broken into a raft of different breeds of "market socialism" and "non-market socialism" . Market socialism looks at itself as a balancing force to coexist and oppose capitalism because capitalism left unchecked is a hellscape. Capitalist marketing has been very good at taking credit for a lot of market socialism's previous fights and rebranding it as a sort of "responsible capitalism" but basically all the civil rights and labor movements that we celebrate today had variable breeds of socialist cores. The few unifying factors of Socialism is democracy and collective action and that there are at least some things that should be held and maintained as "public goods" that require protection from private interest. Things like national parks, environmental services, roads and infrastructure, sanitation, public education, fire fighting services, the public domain are examples. In some places these extend to things like healthcare.
When the majority of people on the left talk socialism they talk market socialism or social democracy. When people on the right start frowning and stamping their feet about socialists (and what you are doing now) they are usually tarring all socialists with the brush of non-market socialism... which even the majority of people who identify as socialists veiw as complete loony-toons idealism.
I get your point, but I would still argue there is use for a distinction between two sets of ideas. One which aims to improve upon capitalism to make it sustainable for the working class, and one which aims in some for to transition to a system where workers own the means of production outright. Ownership (of labour) is really key in Marxist theory.
The term social democracy is kind of unhelpful too because while it is used for the Nordics, Western Europe, etc., a society where capital is exclusively owned by the workers can be, at least in theory, at least as democratic. But I still prefer it as a term over socialism.
I'm not stamping my feet about socialists either by the way. I just don't want people to get the wrong idea about countries like mine. I live in the Netherlands, and the left is not doing that great. We've had right leaning coalitions for decades that have been slowly eroding social services, sometimes aided by misguided political ambitions of labour leadership. The working classes are voting for populists and even our largest party VVD, which presents itself as the fiscally conservative entrepreneurs' party. It's the familiar story.
I'm not sure if socialism is Utopian or not, but using that term to describe countries like mine and the social policies we're known for internationally surely doesn't do socialism any justice.
I don't think folks have such high expectations of it being utopian. The issue is that unchecked capitalism is kind of a worldwide gig. If you as a society are competing with people from a market who basically allow their people to save their money by being dangerous and unprincipled and put their money permanently out of the tax system they are still mining your society for resources and cash that are taking it out of the system.
But even a system that is imperfect but equal is better than one that basically tells you that if you don't earn enough you basically deserve to die. I fear for a lot of my friends in the states because everytime they change jobs if anything happens to their health before their insurance re- kicks in they mighy never financially recover.
I know a lot of people with what have been considered jobs you could afford to pay a morgage with 30 years ago who are living paycheck to paycheck out of their cars. I see people with disabilities whose families can't afford to help them who depend on institutions like libraries because other government services got privatized and decided that they were "able enough" because of bottom lines. I know people who have suffered burnout, displacement and have been traumatized by working conditions because their employers decided that their shareholders were more important than the people actually making their products.
Being Canadian is to have more than a bit of surviors guilt watching American friends you visit from time to time do everything you do but without the same safety net... We are a more socialism forward country with less people and less resources but the difference is stark. My American friends have it noticeably worse.
Right now my Province is losing another city because climate change, lobbied for by rich assholes worried they won't be able to make as much money on plastic and oil is causing my province to burn. We are too small alone to fix these problems. It requires the sign on of a much bigger collective action. The failure isn't your country - it's that its not enough countries.
Some of them did evolve, looking a bit differently. I mean soup kitchens, places for the poor to sleep (it didn't look nice, I'm thinking late XIX and early XX centuries), sick leaves and vacations were sort of traditionally fine, work weeks, while being unregulated, weren't necessarily longer than what we have, cause unregulated just means individual arrangement, and so on. Life of a factory worker surely sucked, yes.
It's just questionable whether this social progress and labor protection laws are the same.
I mean, there's that problem with socialists - they like to call anything good in human history socialist or proto-socialist (the extreme case is Soviet history books for children with their descriptions of what was Spartacus' rebellion or German peasant rebellions and so on).
One of the issues with capitalist narratives is that they are very good at rebranding successful socialist initiatives as "responsible capitalism". Also it likes to point at non-market socialism and claim that's what socialism looks like completely ignoring market socialism and social democracy.
Also you really need to check your history. The 12 hour day was looked at as the standard before 1926 in America though 100 hour work weeks were not unheard of. Overtime pay was not a thing it was all flat rate. Ford gets the credit for adopting what was then a long standing issue campaigned for by labor to show "actually it's beneficial for capitalist interests!" but the idea as it applies to modern labor was originally campaigned for by Robert Owen in 1818 and was being implemented across Europe by socialist labor parties starting in the 1850's. Ford just basically swooped in last second and like capitalists do stamped his bloody name on it.
What a vacation looked like for a lot of people pre - vacation pay was you packed up to the countryside to work an non-mechanizable agricultural job like hop picking. Labor day and the American origin of the paid vacation itself comes from the Haymarket mass rally of socialist interest in 1887.
So yeah, it's not really as questionable as you make it seem.
I mean, there's no particular narrative in my comment - but there is one in yours.
I'd say you are arguing against something you've imagined. The subject your whole narrative is built around is touched in my comment by the following words: "life of a factory worker surely sucked". And that's it.
So you've basically illustrated this observation, I'll quote myself:
That's some short term memory loss there biddy. You seem to have left all the stuff I was responding to on the table... And quoting yourself OOF. I am embarrassed on your behalf
It's like you don't remember saying any of this :
Some of them did evolve, looking a bit differently. I mean soup kitchens, places for the poor to sleep (it didn't look nice, I'm thinking late XIX and early XX centuries), sick leaves and vacations were sort of traditionally fine, work weeks, while being unregulated, weren't necessarily longer than what we have, cause unregulated just means individual arrangement, and so on. Life of a factory worker surely sucked, yes.
I would suggest reading a bit more into the labor practices of the 18th and 19th centuries and the labour movements of the 19th and 20th otherwise you really are gunna just keep playing pretend and talking out of your ass about this pastoral fantasy and this conversation is really gunna leave you behind.
No, I haven't, I've addressed all in your comment worth addressing. Think again.
Yep. Nick Hanauer's done activism including TED talks pointing how ethical capitalism has become impossible what with regulatory capture and stable longer-term business models failing to compete with exploitative short-term models... and that we proletariat aren't going to stand for our state of perpetual precarity for much longer.
It doesn't even matter if the proletariat decides they've had enough. If things don't change then we get dramatic vast-scale climate migration that breaks the existing system that drove it to happen in the first place. Ideally, we'd change those systems now so things don't get as bad as they could. But if we don't, those systems are about to blow themselves up either way.
This is how the system eats itself and you get parasites like Carl Icahn.
^^^ How to say you don't know what communism is, or the history of it, without saying so
Honestly? Fuck "Fortune." I hope it will eventually be called "Bankrupt."
Can they drag a few others down with them?
BI?
Children cost, who would have thought.
"Fuck planting a tree, I'll never get to sit in its shade!"
what's the point of having kids if you're not gonna do anything for them the second they turn 18
Most boomer parents would kick their kids out at age 8 if they could. Children are like Christmas puppies to them.
1% of the U.S. population holds >31% of the country's wealth. Is it any wonder so many of the rest of us are broke?
The era of a strong economy was brought on by factors from WW2 and the weakening was brought on by 2-3x growth in world population.
More people fitting into the same cities means less space and more demand.
More people means more workers for jobs that pay even less because the competition is fiercer than ever.
More people means more percentage of resources going to surviving and less on luxuries.
We can give a small % of global population luxury. US QOL isn't sustainable on a global scale with the resources available in the world.
In my opinion, the whole population growth excuse is always an excuse and leads to dangerous results. The growth in population in Western countries has completely decimated since WW2. At this moment, only Africa is thought to have a positive growth number in the coming years. The population has grown, but the needs of almost the entire world have drastically increased. Leading to enormous growth in wealth and also productivity. That productivity has not been translated into less work, and the population increase has not translated into less work. Both of those things have translated into more wealth and more wealth inequality. Blaming the housing crisis/ financial crisis on too many people will only lead to racism, while the system keeps sucking everyone dry and making very few rich. There is plenty to go around, and the population growth is a story of the last century. We will reach our cap this century with all its effects to it.
This is wildly incorrect. Where the heck did you get this data from??
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Total_Fertility_Rate_for_6_Regions_and_the_World,_1950-2100,_UN2022.svg#mw-jump-to-license
By the end of the century only Africa will have a fertility rate higher than 2. All the other continents have a lower rate than 2, meaning a decline in population.
Fertility rate is just one piece of the equation.
Infant mortality rate is off the charts in Africa compared to the majority of the world.
Average life expectancy is also much lower in most African nations compared to the places with low total fertility rate.
There's a lot more nuance than even just these two other pieces. Generalizing at a continent level is really poor. A typical metropolitan couple/family is going to have less kids than a rural family in the US where cost of living is lower and pressures from religion and family are higher.
When your neighbors, friends and family are holding off from kids to pursue higher socioeconomic standards there's pressure to live up to them or surpass them. When your neighbors, family and friends are having kids left and right you feel pressured to join them too. Just food for thought.
I hope no one takes this the wrong way, because I fully support equality for all races and sexes, but there's also double the workforce now. Women entering the workforce and eventually gaining near, or sometimes even superior footing, means that there are twice as many people competing for the same jobs. A larger candidate pool means companies can pay less and it's harder to get a job for the individual.
All true, but neither of these parent posts address the fact these efficiencies we’re not passed onto the worker but hoarded at the top
If pay would of stayed near the slope of productivity gains in the US none of this would be a problem.
Every average worker from french fry cook to teacher to nurse to engineer should be paid double what they are if everything stayed in line. Or you at least increase the top tax rate to redistribute the money back to normal folks.
But the US has done none of these which leads us on the path to the most common reason nations fall. Excessive amounts of inequality….
I hope it was made clear that I wasn't advocating for either of those options.
This has absolutely nothing to do with women or demography! We didn't need pills to invent riches inequalities or slavery, which is basically what liberalism reinvented with money rather than blood.
There is absolutely nothing interesting in your ideas here but the worst conservative propaganda!
Anytime someone claims to know why the economy behaves the way it does I am immediately skeptical. Unless the reason is to create inequality we should be able to use that information to establish a better syatem.
I'm having trouble understanding what you're trying to say. You think we have a lower standard of living today than in the past?
50 years ago what was so great that we have lost? 25 years?
From where i've sitting my QOL is only higher than when I was a kid growing up without hot water or air conditioning. Poorest family in a middle class town. That's just anecdotal but most seem to take for granted the things everyone has today. Magical handheld computers didn't exist when I was a kid and now almost everyone has one in the US.
The only thing out of reach is home ownership. Landlords are the new slaveowners. Not that you can really compare slavery to modern day working class jobs.
It's not the same people that were poor before that are poor now. A lot of immigrant makes for the poors of today, and their situation is certainly not better than 50 years ago.
Many things are to consider: it's far harder to find a job now, and it's far, far more expensive to have a home.
But indeed we got stuff that didn't existed before. Phone, Internet, etc. But these things are comparatively very cheap. And you actually need them to have a normal life today. They are more like new expenses than luxury. You also need a car today, something you didn't 50 years ago.
Basically, inflation rised faster than income, new expenses were created. I'm pretty sure we have less public services now than 50 years ago too.
The new expenses would be a benefit to societies if the rich didn't take all the benefit for themselves. All progress has been stolen by the rich.
My wife grew up in a 3rd world country so I know a bit about how things have changed in the past 30-40 years or so even abroad. QOL has risen around the world. Immigrants from poorer countries will ALWAYS be last place when coming here and competing to climb the ladder if they come with few skills - but they'll also be better off than the overwhelming majority of people in their former country.
I disagree that it's harder to find a job. It's harder to find a job that pays well that isn't blue collar without a college degree and fluency in English. In Massachusetts it's trivial to find a job for $15/hr (minimum wage). You can't afford an apartment on your own though... you're going to be renting a room at best and hopefully if you're lucky living with family who already have a home.
If you start off as a blue collar apprentice doing carpentry, hvac, plumbing - you name it, you're going to start off above minimum wage, you're going to get regular raises and each certification you pass will greatly increase your income, and it'll all be paid for by the employer. Blue collar jobs in construction will always be in demand and are always hiring. Amazon may lay off tens of thousands of highly compensated employees but aint nobody laying off a plumber. If you've ever looked at getting work done on a family home you'd know there's a lengthy waiting period.
Basic cell phones are fairly cheap. Internet is fairly cheap for low income households.
If you think we had things better 50 years ago i'd try watching a documentary about life in the 60s or 70s. We take a LOT for granted today. Life is practically nothing like it was back then. MRIs didn't even exist until 1977. CT Scans weren't invented until literally 50 years ago. This is just two examples of medical technology but the list goes on and on. The cost of everything is much higher but the quality and safety standards today are higher than ever in most industries. Labor cost here is also higher than ever.
Higher housing costs are almost entirely a function of higher incomes and higher demand. US population has grown from ~212 million to ~331 million.
When I was a kid you were still paying per minute for phone calls. Air conditioners were still a luxury (I never had one growing up.)
In my extended family i've seen two people who are immigrants pass a programming boot camp and get jobs in this economy (past 12 months.) Zero connections, references etc... they applied and got jobs. What's stopping someone from learning how to program? or if ADHD- learning how to do blue collar work as an apprentice?
Population means more labor and more consumption as well. For all of human history before thr industrial age, labor shortages were dire.
The problems that come with overpopulation are pollution and shortages of specific resources. No this is about unchecked capitalism focusing all the resources to a tiny elite class. Even more concentrated than the wealth in France, 1789.
So what you're saying is fifty percent of all life
Tbf, the boomers came of age in the 70s, so the economic system was well in decline by then.
Part of the problem is a secular cycle. The baby boom of the postwar period helped fuel a big economic expansion that helped people for a while, but eventually the power of individuals fall because there's so many people.
Most boomers didn't want their jobs to move to China. China is starting to experience the same secular cycle ironically.
Many millennials were the same age during the gfc. Are you to blame for that? Are you to blame for the debt expansion and money printing that have promised to destroy the next generation? Zoomers came of age during covid, are you to blame for covid policies that destroyed the economy?
You should maybe check the definition of the word secular.
You end up looking really silly when you say something like that.
https://peterturchin.com/books/secular-cycles/
In fairness, even this just seems like those two authors are the only ones using this term in this way, almost like they intentionally chose a word to specifically use in a way that didn't agree with the way everyone understands it.
Further, I don't think it's tricky reasonable to be snotty about it when you're choosing to use the term in this one very specific, abnormal way without explaining why.
Like...they might just as well have called their book Chocolatey Cycles. Most people wouldn't make the connection unless they were familiar with the work, and would think that it's a typo or other error.
Simply put, your referencing this work doesn't make me think "Oh! They were actually right about the word!", rather, it makes me think, "Oh...they, and the authors of that book, were all wrong about the word."
The etymology of the word secular from latin is "of a generation". So while it is a non-standard use of the word, it can be used to refer to something that happens once in a generation or once in a large amount of time like a century.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/secular
https://www.etymonline.com/word/secular
Generation is commonly used in the sense of a fairly short span of time, ~20 years. Secular cycle, googling quickly, seems to be using secular more in the 'lifetime/age' sense since the cycles are over the course of a couple centuries.
You wanna go hard? Let's go hard.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/secular.asp
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2002/08/aa1923/aa1923.html
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/mwre/49/4/1520-0493_1921_49_230_tsvoc_2_0_co_2.xml
https://study.com/learn/lesson/secular-trend-puberty-overview-causes.html
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-230-27468-6_9
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/secular
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/24/business/market-watch-oil-spurt-a-rally-that-few-believe.html "Sure, there can be market hiccups, but the secular trend is against rising prices of real things and for rising prices of stocks and bonds."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/us-risks-falling-off-a-global-cliff/2012/10/25/38cdc85c-1ebe-11e2-9cd5-b55c38388962_story.html "If so, a long-term secular trend of higher interest rates, a lower dollar and stunted GDP growth would contaminate an already polluted fiscal chemistry lab with a fiscal gap of growing and unacceptably large proportions."
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-recession-is-over-but_b_375770 "The secular force is the D-process and the deleveraging, so I expect deflation to be the resulting secular trend more than inflation."
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/18/health/13-reasons-why-study-suicides-trnd/index.html "I take issue with their analysis which did not take into account the secular trend in suicide and the large increase that occurred in 2017 in young men."
The word "secular" has been used in this manner referring to things over a much longer term in multiple Fields including investment, astronomy, medicine, sociology, climate. It's in the dictionary. Its Used in major newspapers. When I used the term originally referring to secular cycles specifically, I immediately followed the use of the term with a general explanation of what I meant, it was the next sentence in the same paragraph.
What's retirement? -the adult children
Doesn't matter. We'll die before that age due to the earth becoming uninhabitable. -other adult children
I mean, is it really surprising that a generation full of Karens who have blamed other people their whole life for their problems are now blaming their posterity?
And here we are, blaming other people for their problem as well, and mostly just the other regular Joe whose only fault is to be born earlier
Late Gen X with a Gen Z kid here, not contributing nearly as much to my retirement as I should be because I'm supporting her through college (without loans). We inherited this shit and we're sacrificing ourselves for the sake of our kids. I don't know who's to blame, but we've been dealing with this shit our whole lives. Don't blame us; we're trying to help
At least you can help your kids. My older daughter is going through college on loans which I don't advocate but it is her choice. I can't even keep my cars running.
You may be underestimating how expensive college is. I earned a full ride and worked three part time jobs in college. I am still paying off loans. A full ride doesn't cover rent, food, transportation, lab fees, textbooks, school supplies, toiletries... Whatever expenses you have right now, those are the expenses kids in college have, they're just spending so much time on homework and in class, they can't earn enough to cover them at the time, and that gets you into trouble. If you aren't lucky enough to have a full ride, and your only options are predatory loans because you don't qualify for grants- that's what gets almost all into deep trouble.
I think it's funny that you think less college debt boils down to finding a "cheap" place to live with the current astronomical prices, going out to eat too much, and that people don't have roommates. I'll give you that those 18 to, say, 24 probably don't have the best budgeting skills. But this comment comes across like those people telling to stop buying Starbucks and avocado toast.
Doing the same thing with my older son now. We are paying cash for his college so he doesn't start out under a mound of debt like we did. It took over 10 years for us to dig out from under that load and start building assets.
My wife is 45 and we didn't get her loans paid off until two years ago. And we only we were only able to do that because we sold our house at the absolute height of the COVID real estate market. She didn't even have post-grad; just a bachelor's
Have they not figured out yet that this whole capitalism thing is imploding on itself
It is, at least partially, an inevitable consequence of an educational system that, whether by design or by accident, makes social mobility really difficult. Accessing advanced education often requires financial or personal sacrifices that are harder to make for lower income parents and kids. This is also compounded with the fact that in many places there's a perception that if you want a really good job you will need to go through this advanced education.
I was in that situation myself, I was always told that I couldn't expect to get a really great job in IT unless I went to college, which was unfeasible for me both financially and in terms of my aptitudes as a student. But fortunately for me, I discovered that my country had a vocational education system that prioritized the quick transition from education to employment, and a mere year and a half later I had a decent job, six years later I am an engineer. Turns out it wasn't necessary to go through four years of extremely expensive, pointless hoops, I only needed a chance to prove myself in a professional environment. It only cost my family 800 euros in two payments, now we are doing well financially.
So yeah, maybe just maybe if there were more systems in place like that, we wouldn't be reading how more and more parents are having to sacrifice everything just to give their kids a chance at some sort of future, you know?
Idk maybe I'm rambling.
You've identified a part, and symptom, of the system. What is behind it is capitalism.
Our education systems are designed to make us complacent worker drones incapable of critical thinking. Our higher education systems are sold as a necessity for anyone who wants a slightly less crappy life, and ensure anyone who doesn't already come from money who wants to go down that path starts their life in deep debt, making them desperate and easier to exploit.
These are all features of the system there to ensure its own existence.
It's a systemic problem they helped setup. The amount of public support they had while going through education and young adult life was wild. Unions were popular, housing was relatively cheap and affordable, same with education. Things didn't start blowing up til the 80s, 90s, 00s, when they were firmly of voting age and able to exert their numbers politically.
When did corporate and private tax policy change drasrically? The 80s. When did college costs start to increase? 1980 referencing a graph here.. When did housing start to increase (the first time)? In the 2000s, cause banks and the fed (led by boomers; all 5 of the largest financial institution crashes were headed by boomers; Lehman, Merrill, Citi, AIG, and Goldman Sachs), the fed was led By Greenspan prior to '06, but Bernanke afterwards (and he was the one who bailed those fuckers out, same with the GM and Chrysler with Bush, Boomer). Additionally, boomers are the generation most opposed to any climate change policy (along with Gen X, but that's a different conversation), referencing this article.
I do think it's a systemic issue. I just think boomers have played a large role in it's construction. Their parents before them had strong public works projects for infrastructure strong social safety nets, strong employee protections through growing unionization, lengthy fights for workers rights and de-segregation in many places. Boomers have wanted less of that and have actively worked to get rid of them.
The system wasn't built by no one, and changed pretty dramatically during a specific time frame.
While I definitely agree with you here, the systemic problem is in place due to an extreme overabundance of boomers sitting in Washington creating systematic problems and perpetuating existing ones. So, yes, not all boomers are culpable and blaming the whole generation is excessive, but perhaps this helps shed some light where the sentiment comes from.
Also, for most anyone after the boomer generation, retirement will be a complete financial impossibility so boomers inconveniencing their retirement for the sake of those who will never get to doesn't feel too out of line
Boomers are more to vote for conservative and liberals, more to vote, and a bigger part of the population. That's the truth of stats a'd demography. It's not all boomers, but as a generation, they failed their grand-children. And it comes to bite them now, which is the biggest surprise to me. I really thought they wouldn't see the collapse of the system or the global warming effects.
Pointing_spidermen.jpg
The system needs changing.
The goal should be overtime everything gets relatively cheaper and relatively better. Housing is the big exception.
Stop immigration as a mean of increasing population and keeping wages down.
In crease density in cities even if it means new taxes (LVT) or forced government buy outs.
Built new cities or high density suburbs with direct train links to the city centre.
So they build residential skyscrapers... to not house anybody in them? Just a waste of money then!
Sure, it is immigration that is keeping the wages down... I have no idea which country you originate from, but immigration is probably necessary to keep your population balance in check. So they are not the reason that wages are down; that would be the few determining the wages and exploiting you and those immigrants together.
I don't believe immigration is necessary for a countries survival.
Maybe fore increasing GDP but not for sustaining high standard of living. There is plenty of fat in the system and a lot of it is taken up by lack of affordable housing. Which immigration does not help with.
It's basic supply and demand if there are less workers wages have to go up.
Affordable housing is not a problem caused by migrants but by landlords who inflate the prices and governments and companies who delay the constructions so prices rise even more.
Look at many of America's top companies and you'll see they are run by immigrants. There is a huge demand for skilled labor in America and there aren't nearly enough skilled Americans. If you stop immigration these skilled workers will immigrate to other wealthy countries and build world class industries there instead and outcompete the United States. Immigrants are by far one of America's most important assets.
Haha. Good. Suck it.
Not your fault but "They built a terrible system" is wrong too. If your parents were congressmen or business owners, you might have a point, but the actual affect the average person has on the system is negligible. The rich and powerful were going to destroy it.
That's why it doesn't really matter who sits in the presidential chair, bad laws still get made, and only the absolute worst get repealed, because they all overall agree with the direction of the country, it consolidates their power when they get it. People think "Things will get better under Biden" should really have been saying "Things won't get as bad as fast." because that's more accurate.
Young men keep voting against their interest for liberals makes this part of their fault. Ask Canadians about it.
Its like where I live... senior individuals voting for a right-leaning political party that's actively harming the public services they rely on to survive - such as healthcare, public transport etc... then they complain that services are getting worse.
Make it make sense ugh 😭
It's a result of weak parenting.
It's a result of zoning laws and car dependent cities driving up housing costs and lack of socialized programs for basic needs like healthcare
The irony is that people think that giving the government more power and more money will solve their problems... weird that 100 years ago when taxes were miniscule and government funding was too small, people were rich compared to today, and a single income was enough to fund a whole family.
The period of time 100 years ago is referred to as "The Roaring 20s" and it led to the Great Depression. In the 1950s we had a top marginal tax rate of 90% and that period saw the largest and wealthiest middle class we've ever had.
Couple oversimplifications there. "Roaring Twenties" were fed by the nascent Federal Reserve ballooning the economy through the 20s and an inevitable contraction occurring at the end with a huge regulatory clampdown, expansion of the state and prolonged low interest rates/inflation into the 40s. The "top marginal tax rates" were essentially base rates and the effective rates paid were close to half that. A more meaningful metric is federal spending as % of GDP by year:
which, taking into consideration that the economy has been growing in the last 80 years, indicates that federal spending has been gradually increasing ever since. The spike in the 40s is of course the enormous WWII spending. It's also critical to take into advantage that the general state of technology/industrial infrastructure is light years ahead now than where it was at the beginning of the 20th century.
It's pretty universally known that the entire working class has basically been left behind by economic growth since the 60s/70s, while government spending has continually increased since then, and simultaneously, corporate profits have also kept pace with economic growth. Which really begs the more important question, what specific mechanisms in our economy are actually producing these outcomes. I feel like people spend a ton of time arguing about things they think will curb the effect instead of asking why it's happening in the first place.
Or in plain English: the system isn't producing equality of ownership, or equality of proceeds from production/labor - why not? How can we fix that without just piping half the economy through the government? That's the real question.
Marx points out the unregulated economy will always pull capital to the top. So how do we prevent the government from its fate of getting captured by the bourgeoisie?
The more I went over this, the more I realized there is no "unregulated market". There's basically a status quo of rules of property distribution accepted by a society. Even what people refer to as a "free market" gets extremely complicated the second you get into the questions of property and contract law, with questions that in total can completely change the outcomes of the system depending on how you answer them. If you had no state but a society unanimously committed to equalizing the distribution of wealth, it would still happen.
I don't think it is the way forward to lay blame on our elders, or to be disrespectful towards any generation other than our own. Some people are stupid, some are not. Stupity is not dependent on age. We all blunder through life and fuck up sometimes. Beeing smarter after the fact isn't that much of an achievement.
Counter-argument: Most of them keep doubling down.
Nah, they voted for this shit. We wouldn't have this problem if they didn't vote for Reagan.
I wonder how many people took out 6 figure loans to fund an Art History degree they didn't finish and now seethe all day at their barista jobs, hoping someone cancels their student debt. I bet it's a lot. I also bet their parents advised them to do something else.
I wonder how many business majors did the same because they're so abundant and low value.
Econ, Business, Art History, Regular History, Poli Sci, Communications, Law, English -- take your pick
Quick question, what percentage of jobs in America do you think pay below a living wage?
Say you're a single parent. Say you have to take medication for your mental health, say you have ADHD and can't work without it. And your job doesn't provide health insurance. Say your job pays less than minimum wage. There are entire industries that avoid minimum wage legislation in the United States. Say your parents are minorities and have spent the majority of their lives in a country legally discriminating against them in governance, finances, employment, housing, transportation, education, and in social programs meant to help the poor.
You have no fallback. You are only ever offered debt that you can never return, and eventually they offer you nothing. You can't afford even a single bedroom apartment. You pick between feeding your children and taking your meds. And if you can't take your meds you can't work. You spend every single day perched precariously on a knife edge, one single Healthcare bill or car repair bill away from homelessness starvation and death.
These people are real. There is no possible financial adaption that will alleviate this situation. And if we count up all the people unfairly treated in this society, if we track everyone and see the way all disenfranchised oppressed people suffer injustice - it becomes immediately apparent that the vast majority of the working class is in a perpetual state of near homelessness barely scraping by even as they slave themselves away for the interests of corporations who have proven time and time again they see human life itself as worthwhile only in its ability to generate capital.
The bare minimum before falling into poverty.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/living_wage.asp#:~:text=The%20term%20living%20wage%20refers,them%20from%20falling%20into%20poverty.
You sound like somebody who had an incredibly fortunate childhood and you don't understand anything about people who actually had to work to get where they are.
You claim that your parents didn't support you but they paid your college. It sounds like you got supported a lot.
The people who really had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps are people like me. I quit a full ride scholarship to go back home and get a job to support my father and family after he broke his back at work and it took two years before his disability paid out.
From there I was destitute and I've had to work my way back up to a point where I can afford to pay college out of pocket by myself while also affording all of my other expenses (like purchasing a house, and supporting my own family as an adult.) I've had to make serious sacrifices in my life.
You really should be less judgmental about other people because you sound ignorant when you make those comments.
You started you adult life with education and without being indebted for 20 years? You are a privileged one. That's just how it is. I am too. That's just life, but you should have the honesty to recognise that most people don't have this privilege. They can't be conservative and plan their life because they don't have the education or the resources (social or monetary) to do it.
You are oblivious to reality. There's nothing to do with you, you are blind. Hopefully one day you'll discover social sciences and you will learn some facts about your society.
Actually, I was thinking about what I said and that was way more harsh than I should speak to anyone.
I apologize for acting like a jerk. I appreciate what you said and hope you have a good day.
I was being far too sensitive, and that's on me.
Uphill in the snow barefoot both ways, and so on...
Bless your heart
No, but its your fault you're still a teenager.
Stuck in the carbonite again.
Grow the fuck up.
Millennials are between 25 and 40 years old now and you guys are still blaming "the system"?!
You guys ARE the system, at this point in time.
For fucks sakes, you should be well past the age of being in college and should have many years (nearing a couple of decades at this point in time for the older millennials) into the work force. You are also the single largest voting bloc, but you don't exercise that power so even though Boomers are now a smaller group, they out-vote you by a wide margin making them more important. You still haven't connected the dots that those who vote the most get the most attention from politicians?? There's a reason why the rec center has a broken AC, but the senior bus has those expensive, cushy seats.
If you are still blaming anyone for your failures in life, you should be blaming yourselves. If the world isn't the way you want, then get off your asses and be the change that you want to see. You are the largest generation, but you still act like a tiny minority group. Obama was in his mid 30s when he was elected to the Senate, and in his mid-to-late 40s when he was elected President. Yet as of 2 years ago, Millennials only represented about 6% of Congress. Are you expecting those seats to just be handed to you? Because that's not how it works. That's not how any of this works.
You guys are still acting like you're some powerless 16 years old and still need to beg your mom to borrow the car on Friday night. Hell, even older Zoomers are in their mid 20s at this point in time and have little excuse for their woes.
You sound more nieve than a preschooler. Another boomer aka elder todler trying to pretend their greed didn't destroy this country and the planet. Why don't you learn to read before you die instead of hoarding everything? Your dumbass generation made this country far too corrupt for voting to do shit at this point. The worse part is how fucking dumb most of you are.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States
The median age of voting House lawmakers is 57.9 years, down from 58.9 in the 117th Congress (2021-22), 58.0 in the 116th (2019-20) and 58.4 in the 115th (2017-18). The new Senate's median age, on the other hand, is 65.3 years, up from 64.8 in the 117th Congress, 63.6 in the 116th and 62.4 in the 115th.