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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: 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.