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At least one person in Kentucky is infected after taking part at a "coronavirus party" with a group of young adults [...]
The partygoers intentionally got together "thinking they were invincible" and purposely defying state guidance to practice social distancing, [...]
[...] the virus seems to be affecting young people in the United States more than it has in China. A report released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that up to 20% of people hospitalized with coronavirus in the United States are between the ages of 20 and 44.
[...] "So far the demography definitely seems to be very different in the United States versus in other countries that saw this hit earlier,"
[...] In New York state, more than half of coronavirus cases -- 53% -- have been among young people between the ages of 18 and 49
From MSN:
Kentucky coronavirus party with group of young adults has left at least one person infected:
At least one person in Kentucky is infected after taking part at a "coronavirus party" with a group of young adults [...] The partygoers intentionally got together "thinking they were invincible" and purposely defying state guidance to practice social distancing [...] "This is one that makes me mad," the governor said. "We have to be much better than that."
And...From Slate:
A group of Kentucky partygoers recently attended a "coronavirus party." The event, which appears to be a pandemic-themed soiree, as you might imagine, was not a civic-minded effort to promote social distancing practices and best hand-washing practices, but a slap in the face to everyone else's collective efforts to not kill our parents and grandparents. The party mocked the virus, and the coronavirus gods were angry. One of the twentysomething attendees of the ill-advised gathering in the midst of a national emergency tested positive for the virus Tuesday.
Maybe I'm too old to get it, but it seems to me somewhat unwise to do this.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday March 26 2020, @09:46AM (90 children)
I'm sorry to say this, boomers, but a lot of younger folk hate your guts. I don't, I love bullshitting with you guys at bars and hearing your war-stories. But many of those younger than you are see you as rude pricks who outsourced their livelihoods and deprived them of having a standard of living even half what you had and seeing all those out-of-touch boomer pricks in congress and running for presidency, or perhaps being the president himself, probably isn't helping.
Hell, even kids in high school and middle school aren't taking this seriously and actually using the term "Boomer Remover."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Thursday March 26 2020, @10:14AM (30 children)
> I'm sorry to say this, boomers, but a lot of younger folk hate your guts.
I don't either, nor do I know any who do myself. After all, I have parents and grand parents, and I don't wish them any harm. Likewise most old people are someones parent or grandparent. It is empathy if nothing else.
> I don't, I love bullshitting with you guys at bars and hearing your war-stories. But many of those younger than you are see you as rude pricks who outsourced their livelihoods and deprived them of having a standard of living even half what you had and seeing all those out-of-touch boomer pricks in congress and running for presidency, or perhaps being the president himself, probably isn't helping.
> Hell, even kids in high school and middle school aren't taking this seriously and actually using the term "Boomer Remover."
To be honest, sounds like "entitled asshole" mentality more than just being young. It might be correlated by youth, but youth is not the primary cause IMO. Much easier to whine about how others have not provided you a job and the standard of living you feel are entitled to, than it is to work to improve your lot in life.
Also, I suspect that there is a positive correlation between being an entitled asshole and splurging inane drivel on social media. Those of us who don't go around saying things like "boomer remover" are unlikely to be on social media, so what you see online is a distorted view of Millennials and the generations after them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @10:46AM (15 children)
interesting topic...
I do not remember people cursing antibiotics cuz their aged grandmother did not die as she should and instead was living "with the family" cramped as hell...
But i do remember the silent frustration and the salvation that the communists brought witht the many (poorly built) flats.
They saved people from sanitary and psychological disaster...
Of course, nowdays they are mostly known as the enemy of the little people. Sometimes nothing you do is the right thing =).
Also, I agree with the drunkard abowe...
I have worked at shelter of elderly, and seen what they are like in the head, when the neurological marvel starts to fade...
I say, they are not there anymore, and they should live as long as they can wipe their own asses...
I look forward to the culling that is to come =)
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Thursday March 26 2020, @01:31PM (10 children)
Slavery with poorly built flats is still slavery.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @02:39PM (9 children)
haha look at history of and current situation of Usa...
u are talking, free man?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 26 2020, @03:16PM (8 children)
And? It's a vastly better situation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @04:01PM (7 children)
u took more of what "belongs to others", then russians ever did.
ofc that is the way of coming out on top in evolution, but getting kind of tilted by PR shitposters like u...
(Score: 0, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday March 26 2020, @04:09PM (6 children)
I think a huge part of the problem is the "belongs to others" concept. For Communism, the fruits of your labor allegedly belong to you no matter how distant they travel. But a billion peoples' lives didn't belong to themselves in practice. The various flavors of capitalism have a much saner grasp of property and ownership. When that is coupled with universal democracy, it works pretty well.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @04:22PM (5 children)
since most of people here are tech educated, u should know that u post bullshit.
the method of leadership is in accordance with history, current problems and available resources.
stop trashtalking history...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 26 2020, @05:34PM (4 children)
Please tell me you're posting from a cell phone.
That's a remarkably low content post. I don't think anyone has claimed that leadership is somehow independent of context. But I think there's a vast chasm between what Communist leadership was allowed to do and what was necessary for them to do. It's far better in a democratic society.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @07:49PM (3 children)
yeah, i was at work and used cell...
and also, yeah, look at the madness after 9/11... and that was not even a "war" on murican soil, just some random sabotage/jewish conspiracy.
if u count the change and look at all the problems communists inherited/got, and how emo and shit the people in those countries are, i am not surprised at the outcome.
bro, things are not as you think they are.
but in the end, what i say is irrelevant...
god bless trump and murica!!1!11!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 26 2020, @10:20PM (2 children)
As compared to?
I'm not either. But my lack of surprise is because Communists were in charge. Emo and shit goes with the belief system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @08:09AM (1 child)
cmon man, u cant be this stupid.
when you project backwards, u cant assume that thigs start with fully developed identity...
the communists became what they became for reasos, they were mostly born out of 2 cells like evevry other motherfucker...
u were a serious threat to them, dropping 2 nukes... having enemys like you creates nightmares, yes?
by the way, we are all mortal humans in the end, not having 10 reincarnations in the package to act upon...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 27 2020, @01:18PM
Had to be. There were something like 20-30 countries taken over by the Soviets prior to 1945 with several afterward. It was a growing empire. Then that bullshit stopped till Afghanistan.
So no time for Communism then.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday March 26 2020, @03:28PM (3 children)
I don't think it's building housing that gave them a bad name. It's building a centralized control structure that valued power over all else. That wasn't part of their ideology, but it was inherent in their approach.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @03:56PM
damnit why the little people no come with a manual?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @06:34PM (1 child)
Hence philosophers like Mikhail Bakunin, who argued with Marx that Marx's plans would fail because bureaucracy of any kind has an inherent and inescapable tendency to become corrupt.
And really, the people criticizing government bureaucracy today are not wrong. But they're blind if they miss that corporate bureaucracy is every bit as bad. The problem isn't government bureaucracy or corporate bureaucracy, the problem is bureaucracy. But as much as I think the anarchists get their criticisms of bureaucracy right, they're as naive in their solutions as anyone else. If you convince a group of people to live in a tiny direct democracy with no higher authority, you and your group will just get conquered by the closest state with a larger power structure and set of resources.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday March 26 2020, @10:25PM
It's not. Because you can destroy business bureaucracy, sue it, or route around it legally. Even in the best of countries, government bureaucracy has protections that business bureaucracy can never have. The whole government/business divide is a mitigation of bureaucracy, not merely another flavor of it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 26 2020, @02:02PM (13 children)
I've been observing all manner of adolescent behavior in the South-East US since roughly 1975. Entitled assholes of course cross all demographics and generations, but... those born around 1980 and later take the behavior to all kinds of new levels - as if associating their identity with an organization is all they have to do to merit salary and benefits. Sure, this works for multi-millionaires on corporate boards, but when 19 year old clueless morons start acting like it should work for them too... society can only support so many of those before it does indeed collapse.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @06:10PM (2 children)
This timeframe seems to highly correlate to the rise of the helicopter parent and to the "everyone, even the loosers, gets a trophy" mentality in child rearing where little Johnny/Jane was protected from anything bad ever happening to them, and they were constantly told how important and special they were.
Result: adult snowflakes who can't handle the real world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @11:43PM
For added effect, make college more expensive, outsource jobs and have a recession or two. Wah wah like little babies.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday March 27 2020, @05:21AM
Which raises the question of why helicopter parenting became a thing.
(Score: 5, Informative) by acid andy on Thursday March 26 2020, @06:59PM (6 children)
You're right, but their perspective isn't too hard to understand when they know they have stagnating wages, no job security, little to no hope of promotion, sky high tuition fees and healthcare costs. If they know just how badly they're being screwed over, then why on Earth should they give their heart and soul to the employer / system that's doing the screwing?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 26 2020, @08:13PM (5 children)
Welp, from 1991 through 2003, I worked for a small company that hired more than half of their staff through the intern program. Typically we'd take on interns in their last semester or two of school, part time or whatever made sense, and on graduation they'd get permanent job offers at competitive salaries. It was a more stable company to work for than most, until it wasn't in 2003 - but... for comparison, my graduating classmates who went on to work for the state power company, IBM, some parts of Motorola, and the local phone company were all churned out on the street within 3-5 years of starting for those "secure bastions of reliable employment." So, anyway, back to our special flowers:
In 2001, I hired an intern at $20 per hour, on the assumption that he might be as valuable as the last 3 interns we had hired over the last 5 years and made permanent offers to... Not only was he clueless as to how to perform, he also failed to ask for help - basically took up space for 3 months - and was let go in the "downsizing" that took place (just for him) at the end of the quarter. Job security, and hope of promotion within that small company were genuinely tied to value delivered, and many of our earlier interns had indeed delivered value, and advanced in responsibility and salary - right up until the economic turmoil surrounding the Gulf War tanked the company in 2003. The thing that really struck me about the worthless intern was his outward attitude of his own value, even after having been told repeatedly: if you don't know, ask for help, there's no value in you sitting here all day being stuck, and we can't tell you're stuck if you don't tell us.
I never thought of showing up 40 hours a week and doing what I could to advance the projects in progress as "giving my heart and soul..." maybe I was a fool, but just doing that between 1991 and 1997 advanced me from Junior Software Engineer to VP of R&D (of a very small place), along with raises that more than tripled my starting salary. This from some random job at a small company I found in the classifieds section of the newspaper. Maybe those opportunities aren't as plentiful as they used to be, but in January of 2013 I started looking for a job in a new town and found one with a very similar small company, this time through the "career opportunities" section of the company website. Half the staff at that company also started as interns before they earned their degrees, and over half of them were H1B candidates or holders... That boss did indeed try to keep salaries lower, my opportunity was open because of a fight he had with a previous employee over compensation, interestingly he ended up paying me more than the employee who left had asked for - I found a better fit for myself about 6 months later and the two of them patched things up, I suspect simply by the boss realizing that it is bad business to lose good employees because you're not willing to pay them market rates...
Anyway, this ramble always ends up with me back at a few well worn points:
1) demand what you're worth, be willing to walk away, if you're really worth it (and your boss isn't an idiot) you'll get it. If your boss is that kind of idiot, you'll do better with a different boss anyway. Of course there are some "common sense" caveats about how to go about making those demands... I've been the boss when an employee tried a very poor execution of this, and it didn't go well for them, but... they weren't worth even what they were being paid, much less what they were demanding, so... c'est la vie.
2) having a secure financial safety net is key to delivering a convincing message in 1)
3) if we'd just elect Bernie & a humane Congress this fall, we could get some kind of UBI which should provide 2) to the bottom tiers of society, enabling them to do 1) more often and start flattening the wealth pyramid, which at present seems to be dangerously pointy on top.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by ChrisMaple on Friday March 27 2020, @06:05AM (2 children)
You make several paragraphs of sense and then promote Bernie as a solution to our problems! Bernie is a communist. He'd impoverish the country while enriching himself and those who suck up to him. He is one of the most evil and dangerous men alive.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday March 27 2020, @12:08PM
Social democrat != communist. Evil? Impoverish? Already happened when you look at the suffering and death among the poorest and look at how far the wealth that could easily save them has been concentrated with the richest.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 27 2020, @12:18PM
I'm sorry, Bernie must be truly evil and dangerous because I've become convinced that it's the present administration, and the W Bush one, that had (and successfully executed, to varying degrees) the agenda of enriching themselves and their friends/sycophants/business partners.
What I just saw Bernie do was boost unemployment benefits to unprecedented levels for millions of people impacted by the recent unpleasantness. Quite the head-fake, I guess he'll suck us all dry later?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday March 27 2020, @12:27PM (1 child)
I more or less agree with 1), 2) and 3) but I think 1) is probably a lot harder than it used to be, precisely because there's not been enough of 2) and 3). That and the increasing levels of downsizing, outsourcing, asset stripping, short-termist focus on only the next quarter.
I think the environment probably got even more hostile since '97 although I'm somewhat out of the loop these days. There are always going to be some opportunities for a few talented risk takers. It's just harder to take risks when failing might mean you lose your home or go without food. You were also lucky if it was your skills and hard work that got you those raises. It often rather seems to depend as much as anything on social skills, connections and manipulation.
Yeah that's a bad attitude but I'm sure we could find clueless overconfident youths in every generation. I'm not saying there aren't more of them now--I honestly don't know. All the evidence I've seen has been anecdotal at best. The best thing is to keep treating everyone as individuals and try to ensure every generation has the best opportunities possible. People like the guy you described probably need a few years to learn from their mistakes and grow up a bit more. They may or may not, but failure shouldn't mean starvation and homelessness.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 27 2020, @02:26PM
In my work from '91 through '03 I came to appreciate the value of taking risks. The only risk I've ever really taken was accepting employment from smaller companies, which, since Ronnie's trickledown started and as stated above - apparently hasn't been any more risky than employment with the bigger organizations. I suppose in today's environment more risks need to be taken, but I still see plenty of engineering students who get on the intern track before graduation and move up from contractor to full time status after a couple of years. In my present company, our intern to perm conversion rate is over 80%.
Social skills have always been important - I somewhat lucked out in '91 to be hired at a firm where the CEO was about 63 years old, even more seriously lacking in social skills than myself, and appreciative of the value I brought. In retrospect, it didn't hurt that his wife was a closet hippie rebel and appreciated my long hair... Of course I didn't know any of this going in - didn't even meet the CEO until I had been working there a month, but looking back I'm sure those factors had more than a little weight in my success.
I think the US/Europe/AusNZ is silently suffering from a mild version of China's "One Child" special flower children issues. We don't have the sex imbalance, but families after WWII got radically smaller, with many more only children, and even two child families give the children much more individual attention than the larger situation where the parents are outnumbered and overworked just keeping up with the basics of daily life. It seems like we should be able to turn this into a big positive thing, but it has created quite a schism where the ideas of "traditional childrearing" with roots going back before WWII (and corporal punishment is a big part of that) are, rightly IMO, being abandoned, but the new ways are literally breaking new ground in a tremendously different society as compared to the 1500-1900 era. My point: it's not surprising we're "less than optimal" in achieving our desired outcomes.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday March 26 2020, @09:42PM (1 child)
Remember the "Me" generation? Yuppies? When Boomers were thought more spoiled than usual? There was this notion floating around that the Boomers could hardly help being extra spoiled and entitled because they didn't have to sacrifice like their parents did, didn't have to live through anything like the Great Depression and WWII, and so didn't come to appreciate how good they had it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 26 2020, @10:24PM
In my family at least, the only children seem to have this DINK Yuppie tendency. Dad divorced at age 35 (I was 15) and became a nearly-DINK from there on.
Reducing family sizes probably drive a fair amount of this reduced empathy, ME generation stuff.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @02:55AM
To be fair, they see it works to make other people very wealthy. Please don't be too hard on them for trying to do their part to boost the economy.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday March 26 2020, @12:01PM (16 children)
Younger folks are understandably upset about the points you raise, but the fact is that every generation has its share of selfish, money grubbing assholes. There’s nothing inherently bad about Boomers. Had we switched places with Millenials we’d undoubtedly find ourselves in exactly the same circumstances.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 26 2020, @02:10PM (9 children)
Not as such. The thing that makes the Boomer response stink isn't so much that they did worse than previous generations, it's that they had the opportunity to do so much better, but instead of building up the next generation like their parents did for them, they expanded into McMansions and the jet-set lifestyle and let their children fall down, relatively speaking.
Boomer kids probably have it a bit better than boomers did as kids overall, but their opportunities for advancement have changed from a broad landscape of relatively easy climb to a rocky terrain requiring inordinate amounts of support and luck to reach higher levels.
If advancement is a forced swim test [nih.gov], I don't really blame the present generation for giving up. Boomers had a modest sized pool with a big shallow end they could stand in. Modern advancement is more like a rolling ocean with a couple of tiny islands, often too far away to reach before the sharks get you.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday March 26 2020, @04:25PM (6 children)
I guess the way I look at this is not so much to ask what Baby Boomers could have done, but what any other generation would have done if they had taken the Baby Boomer’s place. Assuming the same historical and cultural conditioning, I don’t see any reason to expect a different outcome.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 26 2020, @05:12PM (5 children)
What disappoints me about my boomer parents is: their parents really sacrificed for them, and even for me- their grandkids. My grandfather set aside an account with my name on it when I was born, funded it with a piece of every paycheck he earned, not much, but by the time he retired it was $10K. He took the effort to manage it in safe return CDs, never told anybody about it - especially me, and by the time he died it was worth $44K. Luckily, my dad was decent enough to just hand the passbook to me when he found it, unlike some that might try to get the money for themselves. He inherited a bit more, I think. Granddad could have easily spent that money on travel, or new cars, or a bigger house (he lived with his wife in the same 1600sf 3/2 from 1968 until he died in 2001), or a lawn care service, but he never did - he lived his modest lifestyle and helped his kids and grandkids.
By contrast, at 72 years of age, Dad has a 4000+ square foot house with maid and lawncare service, and a 2000 square foot beach house 600 miles away, which are only ever used by him, his wife, and their two cats (our children are too unruly to be allowed in the fancy mansions, or to ever be invited to the beach house, apparently.) A rotating parade of Porsches and BMWs to drive between their residences, and an avowed goal to "spend it all before he dies."
I'm not bitter, or envious - I'm doing O.K., possibly about as good as he was at my age, - but he's certainly not supporting his progeny to the level that his parents supported theirs. It's not just my family, I see a lot of this across the "born in the late-40s/early-50s generation" to the "born in the late-60s/70s generation."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @05:26PM (4 children)
Unfotunately, that's rather common. I'm really lucky, in that my parents aren't like that, I'm going to be just fine. I'm fortunate enough that I'm renting from my Boomer parents and they were lucky enough to be able to buy a house when the housing prices here were dropping and long enough ago that the prices hadn't yet really shot up. So, they were able to afford to buy a second place as an investment to rent to children while waiting for it to appreciate in value. That hasn't happened yet, but it will as there's a train station going in.
My personally biggest concern financially is going to be affording to provide for my children when I have them and pass something on to them that's more than what I had. And, that was a bigger concern in previous generations than it is now. Unfortunately, so many Boomers got theirs and to hell with them. If each generation of a family does their best to make sure that the next generation is better equipped whether that's with literal money or better knowledge about how to deal with money, it does get better over time.
But, beyond that, there's a huge number of things that are a more general responsibility. It's the resonsibility of companies to not hire people for jobs that they aren't going to pay at least enough money for the employees to have food shelter and the possibility of saving for the future. Paying less than that is definitely exploitation and jobs like that wouldn't exist if the economy wasn't so badly distorted that employers could do that. Those jobs would cease to exist as people wouldn't take them in a functioning economy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 26 2020, @08:30PM (3 children)
Around here, kids in High School used to staff the fast food joints for minimum wage - just to earn some pocket money, often driving their parents' car to the job - or a car their parents bought for them. I worked at one of those jobs where they had a meat slicer that the company required the employee to be 18 years old or older due to the risk of cutting off body parts - it was a pretty scary contrast between the happy suburban high school kids doing the job basically for fun and the 18-24 year olds who were working the slicer, living in a trailer park with roommates and usually catching rides to work from friends in cars that barely worked.
The sad trend is that those minimum wage jobs are increasingly being staffed by men and women in their 30s and older, some trying to support families, on multiple part time minimum wage jobs with no benefits. They take public transit to work, work 2 and 3 jobs, are continually burnt out, and can barely make rent.
With automation, I'm not sure that's true anymore. There's a surplus of people and not as much valuable work to be done. Even before Yang started running, I'd bought into the concept of UBI as a way to address this. Give people a safety net, take away the (semi-hollow) threats of starvation and homelessness, such that if employers want employees, they're going to have to offer something that will be better for the employees than the shitty apartment and cheap food that you might get with UBI alone. As it is now, the government "assistance" programs are basically shoving people back into the market and doing all they can to force them to take whatever shitty jobs there are. We've got a whole lot of people living on disability benefits who are better off than the working classes, and there's a whole other part of the workforce that knows this and is angling to get on disability however they can. It's beyond broken, it's bizarre, and needs to be brought out in the open, called out for what it is, and fixed to something you might be able to explain to a 2nd grader as "fair."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @01:17AM (2 children)
A lot of the jobs that kids used to work are now being filled by adults. I had friends that delivered newspapers when I was in high school and now those are pretty much all done by adults driving cars, often in pairs. They just cover so much more ground than what a single highschooler on a bike can cover.
As far as the automation goes, we've created a ton of jobs just to give people things to do. Most service sector jobs exist for no particular reason other than we don't want a UBI that's enough to live on and we don't want to allow smaller businesses to exist. We would have far more people employed doing useful things if we didn't allow so much consolidation. I'm sure we will get to the point where there's legitimately no work for large numbers of people even though we have all our essentials handled, but at that point, you start paying people to engage in their hobbies and creating new moonshot efforts at new creations.
The status quo where we don't pay people enough to support themselves is the worst of all worlds. It's not fulfilling, but it's also not permitting time to do things that are fulfilling as these people are working multiple jobs in many cases. And, it doesn't even lead to the hope of self-sufficiency in the future either, as in many cases these are people working full time and needing government assistance to get by.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday March 27 2020, @12:36PM
Exactly. When it gets to the point that all you're doing is living to work, and suffering a great deal in that process, you have to start to question the point of the whole system with regard to the masses. Some people will say you keep doing it to raise children but in a world where their lives will be more of the same--or very likely considerably worse, you have to question that as well. Especially when breeding more humans is currently accelerating the damage to the planet and the fierce competition for land and resources.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @07:05PM
yep, all the retail jobs where i live are staffed with old women who ended up broke instead of young juicier women.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @04:25PM
That's just rose colored glasses bullshit. Every new generation bitches about how the previous generation blew it for them justifying it with cherry picked excuses of how "your parents had it better because your grandparents made it better".
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @06:58PM
Holy shit, preach! This is my exact view of the situation. It sounds like I'm a bit younger than you, but my impression is the same. In 1972 my dad was stacking car batteries in a factory for $8 an hour. That was 5 times minimum wage at the time, and minimum wage then is equivalent to at least $10 an hour now. He lived in an apartment and paid his rent, groceries, and college tuition with cash and bought a brand new family sedan with what he saved in a single year.
Then I hear Boomers whining that "kids these days don't know how to work". In the same area today, a 20 year old would be lucky to get 50% above minimum wage. That might cover an apartment and groceries and it might leave enough left to buy a skateboard and take one community college class. It sure as hell wouldn't also pay for full time college tuition and the sticker price of a brand new family sedan in one year.
I'm in tech, and I have been ridiculously lucky, and financially I'm better off in my 40s than my dad was. But my brothers, my cousins, my college friends - most of them are in their late 30s and early 40s, 15-25 years into their careers, and lucky to get $60k. Again, my pop and most of the people who he knew were doing better than that at age 20, almost 50 years earlier, without college degrees.
...and my father has been laid off three times in the past five years, and since he can't pay his bills on Social Security alone he's a retiree working for minimum wage. Now, for the first time in my life, instead of hearing him screaming that it's too high he's yelling that it's far too low.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @04:25PM (5 children)
Most previous generations had at least some modicum of restraint when fucking the next generation. The Boomers benefited a great deal from the generosity of previous generations and used what they got to pull the ladder up behind them so that future generations would have a harder time.
The cost of college went up, the quality of K-12 went down in many ways. Corporate taxes and taxes on the wealthy went way down, as good paying jobs were shipped overseas so that people could buy things for less money. But, cheaper goods doesn't really help, if you're not making enough money to buy them and the cost of things like rent and transportation have continued to go up.
As far as switching places, just tell yourself that you entitled prick. Other generations could have done this as well, but they didn't. It was the Boomers that chose to burn down the economy for the poor whereas previous generations tended to allow the next generation some hope of a better life. You guys curb stomped it gleefully while blaming the youth for not being able to overcome the millstone that you tied to their necks.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @06:15PM (3 children)
The cost of college skyrocketed because of freely available student loans.
When it is "other peoples money" (cash from the bank, as most didn't understand the 'pay it back later' aspect) one has less incentive to price shop.
With less incentive for purchasers to price shop, colleges had less incentive to keep tuition costs down.
Rinse, repeat, for a few cycles, and you have tuition costs so high that a loan is required, rather than optional.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday March 26 2020, @07:14PM
They did understand that they'd have to pay it back, but they were assured 2 things that just weren't true:
1. They were assured that if they got a college degree, they'd be getting paid like somebody who had graduated college in, say, 1970, rather than like somebody who graduated college in 2010. And that didn't happen, because too many people had taken that advice.
2. They were assured that if they worked 10 years in the public or non-profit sectors, their student loans would be forgiven entirely (i.e. they wouldn't have to pay the rest). It turned out that lots of them worked those 10 years at jobs they thought would give them loan forgiveness, sent in the paperwork, and learned that they didn't actually qualify [forbes.com].
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @08:02PM (1 child)
Except, that's not true. The cost of college has been shifted onto students from the state. Loans are a factor, but they're hardly the factor. 40 years ago, the state would pick up 80%, now is 20%.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 26 2020, @10:31PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @07:07PM
Ok Doomer.....
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @12:25PM (1 child)
I think Trump has a higher support among the older generation than the younger, yes? So in the abstract, I'll be pleased when the Boomers are gone. But I have parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and their friends that are Boomers that I do care about. I have a hard time believing there are that many Millennials that really don't give a damn about any single person anywhere over the age of 50.
Really, I blame this on a failure of education. One of the things American schools fail to do is teach kids strategic thinking - or financial planning, or basic internet security, or dozens of other practical skills. "There's an old white asshole couple down the block and every fifth word out of their mouths is blaming 'niggers' for something. I can't wait until they are both dead." Yeah, I get it, but the same disease that might kill them is probably going to hit everyone in your family over the age of 50 pretty hard.
But I think teaching kids strategic thinking will be unpopular in American schools forever, because if you start to think critically about the big picture you'll realize a lot sooner how hopelessly corrupt Washington politics are, how most of the big churches are just money grabs, etc... Politicians, bureaucrats, and religious leaders would fight any education program that undermines their power.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday March 27 2020, @03:20PM
Thomas Jefferson wrote about the priest being one of the prime opponents of education and progress. And it's absolutely because critical thinking is a threat to their racket. Of course they don't put it that way, they use dog whistles and coded language, because they know it's not socially acceptable to be too blatantly anti-science. Indeed, Creationism/Intelligent Design is an attempt to co-opt the trappings of science to dress their nonsense in a veneer of rationality. Yes, big churches are money grabs.
One of the things I find a bit puzzling about the corruption in any capital, really, is the sort of weird selfishness on behalf of others. If you personally are comfortable, why risk your neck on yet another dirty deal so someone else can benefit? Is it the potential for blackmail that spurs such efforts? That is, if you don't keep wheeling and dealing, your supplicants will turn on you? Tiger by the tail.... But I think other explanations are more likely. Like, that some politicians get a kick, a thrill, out of breaking the rules and getting away with it. Many politicians are also just plain stupid.
Anyway, I have hope. Research in psychology is laying bare ever more of these oddities and irrational aspects of human nature. And, same as video recording finally exposed police as prone to lying and abusing their power, when for years all that many of us had were rumors and anecdotes, I think video recording will also finally out these fake priests so greatly that their power will be forever vastly reduced. Perhaps they should have tried concealment, to prolong their power. Instead, many leapt for the cameras, becoming televangelists. Any time you want to see notorious Moral Majority televangelists blame 9/11 on God being angry with America for tolerating various "sinful" behaviors such as premarital sex and homosexuality, you can run that video down quick, with a search or two of the Internet.
Education is very important. A lot of things are badly taught, but there too I hope research in education is discovering better methods. Also, there's convincing the hardheads of stuff we figured out 50 or 100 years. Consider the progress. Corporal punishment is pretty much gone. In elementary writing class a century ago, teachers used to use a heavy wooden ruler to whack students' writing hands whenever they made a mistake. When I was in elementary school, they brought back corporal punishment on a sort of trial basis. The teachers were all given paddles that were basically a bare wood, double-sized ping-pong paddle. Some kept the paddles out of sight behind their desks. Others hung them prominently on the wall. The experiment was a huge failure and a farce. Many of the female teachers couldn't swing the paddles hard enough to hurt, and the students would mock them with obviously fake cries of pain. Or they'd pervert the sorry affair with sexual innuendo, suggesting the teacher was into S&M, and who knows, maybe some were. To counter that, a new rule was introduced. Boys could only be beaten by male teachers, and girls only by female teachers. We also had a principal whose favorite tactic when sent naughty children was to use a big knife to noisily and violently open a letter or two, try to let the kids sweat while he read (or pretended to read) the letters and look Very Important, then point with the knife at each child in turn, to demand explanations. Anyway, despite frequent backsliding of that sort, education has progressed.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Thursday March 26 2020, @12:57PM (16 children)
That's a point instance of "I'm sorry to say this, $older_generation, but a lot of $younger_generation needs something to get angry about, and in this case it's you". It's always possible to come up with some reason to be angry, don't understand our music, don't like the way we dress (those two go back forever), are holding us back, I think the Boomer one is "ruined the world for us" or something isn't it? It happens with every generation.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @02:12PM (15 children)
No other generation whines as much and does so little to change their situation as the millennials.
Millennals blame everyone except themselves for their:
-poor life decisions ("going $120k in debt to pursue a humanity degree seems like a good idea")
-entitlement of galactic proportions ("I just graduated-where's my $160K/yr starting wage job?")
-poor mental and physical health ("I am a sexy and beautiful 240lbs vegan(part-time) at 18, but I can't figure out why I already have diabetes, high blood pressure, and early-stage arthritis in the hips and knees?")
-continuing to pick terrible mentors and terrible role-models ("this tumblr-celebrity doesn't vaccinate her kids so neither will I. No one gets polio any more, right")
-herd mentality ("I saw a video of fire-challenge/eyeball tattoos/pile-driving my friend off a roof/drinking bleach.That looks like fun so I must do that too!)
-poor financials ("How can I possibly afford a mortgage when I am spending $2500 a month on dining out?","Make a budget to control my spending? I will no lower myself to that level!")
Disclaimer-I am not a boomer.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday March 26 2020, @03:36PM
To be fair, when I went to college, I didn't really consider what it was costing. It's true, the cost wasn't as high, and nobody went into debt about it, but it was high, and I still didn't really think about it. To expect long term decisions of someone in the late teens or early twenties is foolish. What's annoying is that older folks tend to become increasingly selfish without even any long term advantage. And an abysmal number of them don't seem capable of long term, or even medium term decisions. And I'm not talking about the ones who are driven into short term decisions by immediate survival needs (in which I include not only the next meal, but the next month's rent).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday March 26 2020, @04:17PM (6 children)
> No other generation whines as much and does so little to change their situation as the millennials.
Note that on average, millenials are expected to earn less and have lower disposable income than their parents. So there is a systematic issue.
https://www.ft.com/content/81343d9e-187b-11e8-9e9c-25c814761640 [ft.com]
I agree, that it is up to the millennials to fix it, rather than complaining that no one is fixing it for them. I am sure many millennials are doing just that.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @04:27PM
How are they supposed to solve this when they haven't got the monetary resources necessary to out bribe the entrenched interests?
Right now, the federal government is going to just give out roughly $5tn in money to various corporate interests. That sum of money could easily cover the cost of student debt and medical care for everybody. Instead, they're giving it to special interests with few strings attached.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @04:35PM (4 children)
Their parents earned less and had lower disposable income starting out. It takes time to build up a career and financial stability. Millenials have been raised to believe this happens over night as soon as they graduate from high school.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @05:31PM (2 children)
Where do you get this bullshit from? The Boomers were doing far better as a group at this point in their careers than the millenials are. Or, how about Gen X? In the years since I graduated high school, we've had 3 major crashes in the economy and after each one, the rich got richer while passing on less and less to the workers. The economy has gotten more and more hollowed out and there you go. It's not a matter of expectations of the underclasses, it's the expectations of the rich to be allowed to accumulate more and more wealth and to hell with anybody that's not making enough money to invest.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 26 2020, @07:00PM
Early Boomers were. Not so for the latter half. As I see it, this is primary a combination of first mover advantage from being in front of social and economic trends (such as being the first to buy houses in the hot real estate markets of the past half century) combined with globalism - labor competition from the developing world.
(Score: 2) by EEMac on Friday March 27 2020, @09:32PM
IIRC, the Federal Reserve was given control of the money supply to stop economic crashes from happening.
They still happen a lot, yet the Fed is still in control. Hmm . . .
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday March 26 2020, @07:42PM
This is so inaccurate it's not even funny.
According to census figures: The average wage of a 25-year-old Millennial was approximately $30,000. The average wage of a 25-year-old in 1970 was approximately $8000, or around $50,000 in today's dollars. So younger adults today are getting paid a little more than half of what their parents were getting paid.
And to add to that, rent and many other fixed expenses are much higher now than they were in 1970.
And then they wonder why younger adults have much lower disposable income than their parents did when they were young.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday March 26 2020, @05:49PM (3 children)
Those life decisions were the result of 18-year-olds following the advice of their parents, guidance counselors, teachers, academic advisors, financial aid officers, loan officers, political leaders, and numerous celebrities. Or in short, absolutely every adult that they could listen to when making their decisions. I think it's safe to say that if it was a bad life decision, they had absolutely zero way of knowing it. Oh, and the "humanity" degree isn't really the issue either: Lots of STEM graduates are just as screwed right now as the English majors.
They weren't, on average, asking for a $160K/yr starting wage job. They were asking for a starting wage job that allowed them to pay rent, utilities, food, their student loans, a way to get to work, and maybe a little bit extra for an occasional date or something. So about $30-40K/yr in my area at least. And do you know who told them those jobs would be available once they graduated college? Their parents, guidance counselors, teachers, academic advisors, financial aid officers, loan officers, political leaders, and numerous celebrities. Or again, absolutely every adult they could listen to when making their decisions.
Those jobs weren't available after they graduated for the most part because what had been the entry-level jobs were being occupied by the boomers who had been making $80K a year but had been "downsized" in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis and were trying to hang onto their homes, car, etc.
Or their medical problems are more likely to be diagnosed and treated. For example, just because nowadays we understand about autism doesn't mean it didn't exist a century ago, it means that we used to just call this person "stupid" or "weird".
Y'know, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bernie Sanders, and Elon Musk, nothing admirable about any of those guys. And as for anti-vax beliefs, those are apparently mostly 45-54 years old [qz.com], a.k.a. Gen Xers.
Meanwhile, boomers and their parents seem to be the age group most congregating around Donald Trump, who seems to be trying to get millions of people killed for no good reason and has probably raped quite a few people. Real role model.
Every human of every age group has that to some degree. The only difference now is that their idiocy is more visible, e.g. I doubt the number of people who actually ate a Tide pod isn't much higher than the number of people who licked a lamppost in winter decades ago.
I find it interesting that young people are simultaneously supposedly spending recklessly on luxuries and at the same time destroying industries that provide those luxuries by not actually buying them [businessinsider.com]. One I find particularly interesting is that young people both smoke and drink less than they used to, both pretty good indicators of irresponsible behavior.
You might not be a boomer, but you clearly believe a lot of nonsense about young people.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @07:06PM
Sorry I don't have any mod points. I agree 100%. I was lucky enough to get a full scholarship - and I do mean lucky. My siblings didn't know, and all of them are buried in student loan debt. The only exception is one that worked a blue collar job and spent every spare cent paying down his student loans. He paid them off at age 30, but really spent 8 years of his life doing nothing but working overtime just to get them off his back. We have all agreed on the same thing: if our kids want to go to college, we will help them go to community college and then the cheapest accredited institutions we can find.
But just like you said - my parents, my teachers, my school guidance counselors, politicians at every level - everyone said a college degree would lead to a good career path. None of us expected $160k after graduation, but we did expect $40k - and most of us didn't get it. A lot of us didn't even get $30k. My sister has been climbing the ladder in her technical field for 20 years and just got to $90k. That might sound reasonable, but as I posted elsewhere my Boomer father was making the inflation-adjusted equivalent to that amount at age 20. So at his generation it took a work ethic and a high school diploma, in ours it took a master's degree and 20 years of work. I work as a software engineer and I didn't reach 90k until I was in the field 11 years.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday March 26 2020, @07:43PM (1 child)
I don't buy it. Someone would have at least warned of the perils of too much debt. I had several people warn me when I was going to college for the first time.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday March 26 2020, @08:54PM
They were mostly told "Don't worry, it will be fine, because you'll be making $50K a year right out of college." And then they weren't. Whoops. Now, granted, some of the people telling them this (e.g. loan officers and the financial aid officers getting kickbacks from the loan officers) had a profit motive to lie to them, but they're 18-year-olds, and most 18-year-olds aren't wise to that part of life.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @05:50PM (1 child)
Millennals blame everyone except themselves for their:
-poor life decisions ("going $120k in debt to pursue a humanity degree seems like a good idea")
oh yeah, it's college kids fault you fucking whores made getting a degree a fucking scam.
-entitlement of galactic proportions ("I just graduated-where's my $160K/yr starting wage job?")
how dare they expect their stupid piece of paper be worth what it was supposed to be worth.
-poor mental and physical health ("I am a sexy and beautiful 240lbs vegan(part-time) at 18, but I can't figure out why I already have diabetes, high blood pressure, and early-stage arthritis in the hips and knees?")
as if their stupid fucking whore ass parents didn't teach them to eat pig slop from the time they were born and spoil the shit out of them.
-continuing to pick terrible mentors and terrible role-models ("this tumblr-celebrity doesn't vaccinate her kids so neither will I. No one gets polio any more, right")
shove your boot licking bs up your ass, you baby brain damaging bitch. no one gets polio anymore b/c people stopped eating infected shit/indoor plumbing, you brainwashed slave.
-herd mentality ("I saw a video of fire-challenge/eyeball tattoos/pile-driving my friend off a roof/drinking bleach.That looks like fun so I must do that too!)
this is just the stupidity of youth. always has been always will be.
-poor financials ("How can I possibly afford a mortgage when I am spending $2500 a month on dining out?","Make a budget to control my spending? I will no lower myself to that level!")
they went to your schools, they went to your churches they went to your institutional learning facilities and they're the ones who are crazy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE4Fvjhz2sE [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 26 2020, @07:47PM
Interesting how when everyone is at fault, you're not. Those were your schools, churches, etc.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday March 27 2020, @02:28AM
Yeah, you've got a point there. Comparing my parents, Boomers, and my nieces, Millennials, they both had the same plan:
My parents followed through on this. We never had much as kids, but we were secure. My niece changed it to:
He's an electrician and she's at home looking after the baby, with more to come. They will never own their own home, or have anything much. Any extra money that comes in gets spent as soon as they get it. This has nothing to do with "well the parents had it so much easier", they grew up in a country destroyed by war where people were living in bombed-out cellars, and everything to do with total irresponsibility and poor life choices.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @01:33PM (2 children)
"I love bullshitting with you guys at bars and hearing your war-stories"
If you mean WWII 'war-stories', then you are not speaking to boomers but rather the fathers of boomers because Boomers were born after WWII.
Boomers were even too young to serve in Korea in the 1950's.(Hawkeye, BJ, Winchester, Klinger, et al were not boomers)
The boomers' war was Vietnam, and even by the early 1970's a third of the boomers were too young to serve in that war.
By definition "baby boomers" are people born from 1946-1964, but the term has mutated into something that subjectively means 'any person who is much older than me'.
GenX is the only subsequent generation who knows who the real boomers are. They know boomers are old, really old, older than the hills and are aware that even the youngest Boomer today is beginning to look like Deforest Kelly's in his cameo on the premiere of ST:TNG.
Millenials think boomers are anyone over 45.
Z's think boomers are anyone over 30.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @09:54PM (1 child)
... have you been to a bar in the past, say, decade? Because you won't find a lot of WW2 vets there (or anywhere else but Boot Hill) these days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @01:21AM
Yes and very soon you're going to start seeing fewer and fewer veterans that served during real wars as the Vietnam vets die off. And I do mean that, compared with what my dad and his cohort went through, the military personnel of this era have it easy. Short deployments and real ability to keep in touch with people back home. And the ability to put bodies back together in a way that wasn't even possible in the past. Sure, you do have people getting killed and dismembered, but not at anywhere near the rate that they used to be. Going to war during Vietnam was an extremely risky proposition and often compulsory.
It's been decades since any of our wars could be considered a benefit to society as the DoD and related industries are by far the biggest threat to our safety of any out there. The CIA creates the enemy and the DoD expands that as much as possible to justify funding defense at ludicrous levels.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by crafoo on Thursday March 26 2020, @02:22PM (7 children)
Well, who can really blame the young kids. Collectively, the boomers have instituted some of the worst, most destructive policies possible. I get that they were just voting their own self-interest and rationalizing it away. Everyone does that. They were just very efficient and effective about it due to the size of their voting block and their solidarity in fucking over the younger generations.
On an individual level, boomers are the most narcissistic, fart-sniffing, greedy fucks you will ever meet.
A few less is quite frankly a blessing to the world.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Thursday March 26 2020, @03:43PM (3 children)
When did that happen? I can't think of a single election where I had a candidate that I really approved of who also hadn't deceived me. Occasionally in the primaries, but they never won.
These days when people supporting a cause I favor ask for my support, I'm quite cynical about the honesty of those they are backing. The best argument for Biden is that he's not Trump. And conversely. And that's a really shitty argument. And people who say "You should vote for candidate X because she's a woman" should have their head examined. I don't have anything against women as candidate, but I also don't have anything in favor of it. If you say "because she support birth control" I've got grounds to support or oppose her. If you say "because she's a woman" I just think you're a different kind of bigot.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @06:38PM (2 children)
This 1000%
Most of the last presidential elections have come down to choosing the lesser of two evils.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @12:21AM (1 child)
Reagan was the lesser evil? Bush W? Etc.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 27 2020, @02:58AM
It's reasonable that different people would disagree over which was the lesser evil. And since only one ever wins there's no objective measure, even if the different people agreed one what actions were good.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday March 26 2020, @04:14PM (1 child)
Like the greatest improvement in the human condition ever? I think a big part of the problem is that people aren't seeing the trees, much less the forest. There is this delusion that the world is a terrible place based on confirmation bias.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @12:26AM
No no, see - Catholic priests weren't abusing boys for 2 thousand years, only the last 20. Things suddenly got much worse.
Income inequality was also invented recently. The King (who was appointed divinely) saw to it that everyone was given a fair shot. Much worse now.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @05:52PM
and they've been shamelessly kidnapping and caging the younger generations with their seditious drug war. they are lucky they are not drug out of their nursing homes and shot in the street and left to rot there as a warning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @04:23PM (9 children)
>boomer remover
Gen-X here: the punishment for wishing the removal of boomers is... a society with less boomers. In for a big surprise, kids.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @04:30PM (8 children)
Also Gen X here and I'd love to have the lot of them wiped out. Yes, I'd be sad to lose some relatives, but let's be honest about how much damage the Boomers have done to our generation, generations after us and the world at large. We've had a rapidly shrinking window during which we could do something about climate change and the boomers could have been a powerful force for doing something about it, anything about it, but by and large they've shown no interest at all in doing something about it. Same goes for shipping jobs over seas, they're generation was the one that did that at the largest rate.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @07:09PM
Ok Doomer..
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday March 26 2020, @08:02PM (6 children)
If we're going to be honest about the Boomer damage, we need to keep in mind that they also played a big role in the greatest improvement in the human condition ever. It's remarkable how the usual minor mistakes of a generation are used as a pretext to damn the whole lot. Sorry, there's no evidence that we have a "rapidly shrinking window" to deal with climate change - after all, adaptation is a viable and cheap option. As for shipping jobs overseas, welcome to labor competition with the developing world. Those people, not the Boomers, got to decide whether they wanted to improve their own lives or not. I think they choose well as a whole.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @08:07PM (2 children)
Not really, that was their parents that set that up. The boomers were just doing the work they were assigned through that. It's been steps backwards since the boomers took over. Life expectancies going lower, more poverty.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 26 2020, @10:10PM
Which as I already noted is incorrect. You're not even characterizing the world right, so how can you determine what the Boomers' contribution is.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 28 2020, @03:43PM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Mykl on Thursday March 26 2020, @09:33PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Friday March 27 2020, @01:44AM
Hmmm. I wonder if people are using the "Troll" modifier in the absence of a "Butthurt" modifier?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 27 2020, @01:31PM
Several of your listed items come from either a poorly designed social safety net (say "sucked up free/cheap education", "draining the health care system") or artificial scarcity ("sucked up cheap housing within reasonable distance to urban centres", "enact policies that specifically enriched Boomers"). Others I think will go away on their own ("offshored") as the world becomes wealthier and labor competition becomes more a matter of who has better systems than who has cheaper labor.
Here's some suggestions. In the short term:
And it helps hide government misdeeds.
In the long term:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @05:47PM
Don't worry. It's almost certain that when boomers are all dead and these "millenials" have reached the boomer age, they'll be the ones having to deal with their own bunch of entitled, ungratefull little shitfuck.
That's karma for you.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday March 27 2020, @03:18PM
And in their day Boomers hated the Greatest Generation and Silent Generation. "Trust no one over 30," was a common Boomer saying during 'Nam.
So for y'all (collectively, not saying you personally) your time will come too. You will get old, start worrying about how much longer you have and how you spent your years.
May you be lucky enough to get to that point where the next generations tell you how badly you fucked up the world, too.
This sig for rent.