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posted by martyb on Monday May 27 2019, @06:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-all-the-millennials'-fault dept.

The World Socialist Web Site, publication of record of the ICFI (SEP), on May 24th released a report about the grim situation many millennials face:

The stock market is booming, and President Donald Trump is boasting at every turn that the unemployment rate is lower than it has been in five decades.

However, the working class, the vast majority of the population, is confronting an unprecedented social, economic, health and psychological crisis. The same processes that have produced vast sums of wealth for the ruling elite have left millions of workers on the brink of existence.

Perhaps no segment of the population reflects the devastating consequences of these processes so starkly as the generation of young people deemed the "millennials," those born roughly between the years 1981 and 1996. More than half the 72 million American millennials are now in their 30s, with the oldest turning 38 this year.

A recent exposé by the Wall Street Journal noted that millennials are "in worse financial shape than prior living generations and may not recover." The article, "Millennials Near Middle Age in Crisis," [paywalled] concludes by stating that people born in the 1980s are at risk of becoming "America's Lost generation."

Selected bullet points from the WSWS article:

  • Millennials have taken on 300 percent more student debt than their parents' generation. [Source: The College Board, Trends in Student Aid 2013]
  • By 2014, 48 percent of workers with bachelor's degrees are employed in jobs for which they're overqualified. [Source: Labor Economist Stephen Rose, published by Urban Institute.]
  • The number of workers in the United States participating in the gig economy is expected to triple to 42 million workers by 2020, and 42 percent of those people are likely to be millennials. [Source: Freshbooks]
  • Between 1978 and 2017, according to the EPI, CEO compensation rose in the US by 1,070 percent, while the typical worker's compensation over these 39 years rose by a mere 11.2 percent.
  • In the 40 years leading up to the recession, rents increased at more than twice the rate of incomes. [Source: Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.]
  • One in 5 millennials say they cannot afford routine healthcare expenses. Many of these millennials are uninsured because of the cost. An additional 26 percent say they can afford routine health-care costs, but only with difficulty. [Source: Harris Poll]
  • Men and women in their thirties are marrying at rates below every other generation on record. [Source: The Atlantic, "The Death (and Life) of Marriage in America"]
  • It is predicted that most millennials will not be able to retire until age 75. [Source: NerdWallet analysis of federal data]

The report concludes, "Far from becoming the 'Lost Generation' predicted by the Wall Street Journal, this generation of workers carries within it an enormous source of revolutionary potential."

[Ed. Note. I debated whether or not to run this story given the partisan source for the article, but the list of references suggested it was more than a simple opinion piece. So, are things really as grim as portrayed here? I'm too old to be a millennial, but have both personally experienced as well as witnessed many others facing the same trends listed here. Where do things go from here?]


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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @07:02PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @07:02PM (#848230)

    Ed. Note. I debated whether or not to run this story given the partisan source for the article,

    Definitely partisan. wswswsboy and his source love to paint a capitalistic country in the worst possible terms. Still, we don't really need a thousand posts on #freewswswsboy do we? It's hard enough keeping #freearistarchus in his dungeon cell! Why don't we apply to FB for a grant to enlarge the dungeon? We can pretend that wswswsboy and Aristarchus are alt-righters, can't we?

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday May 27 2019, @07:12PM (1 child)

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Monday May 27 2019, @07:12PM (#848233) Homepage

      I may or may not be a Millennial, but after having many discussions with younger or similar-aged friends and family, we are in consensus that the Baby Boomers are perhaps the most hated generation in American history.

      A lot of you, here, are all-right and we like you just like we like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul. But everytime we see Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden fiddling while Rome burns we think, "Why won't these fuckers just retire* already?!"

      * And by "retire," we mean just fucking die.

      • (Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @08:06PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @08:06PM (#848247)

        Born in 1959, so still a baby boomer but I'll agree that people like Pelosi should be in an old farts retirement home. Even when videos of her aren't slowed down she sounds like she's already hit the vodka by 8am. She act's like a drunken stingy bitch that can't get laid.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:12PM (#848538)

      Yes, please argue the source and not the facts. It's not that you may have a point, but the editor was right to accept this article because it actually cites independent data that paints a collective picture that things are getting worse in my opinion.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @07:08PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @07:08PM (#848232)

    This is 100% monetary policy. Ron Paul was their last chance and the idiots called him a racist.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by istartedi on Monday May 27 2019, @08:12PM (3 children)

      by istartedi (123) on Monday May 27 2019, @08:12PM (#848248) Journal

      Inflation benefits debtors. If anything, the most indebted generations should be cheering it on.

      --
      Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
      • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @09:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @09:26PM (#848274)

        Keep repeating that to youself. Inflation benefits those who get access to the new money first. Wages are always the last thing to rise years after real estate, stocks, etc.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @10:24PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @10:24PM (#848294)

        Inflation benefit debtors, when wages rise alongside inflation.

        This because very few loans adjust for inflation over its lifetime (instead they may hike the interest).

        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @11:23PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @11:23PM (#848318)

          wat? Anyone giving out loans without planning for inflation would quickly go bankrupt.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @10:58PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @10:58PM (#848306)

      No its not.

      Society is more than money.

      I swear Libertarians have to be the stupidest smart people around...

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @11:10PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @11:10PM (#848314)

        Lol, everything is unfolding exactly as predicted.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by jelizondo on Monday May 27 2019, @07:15PM (53 children)

    by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 27 2019, @07:15PM (#848236) Journal

    My children are Millennials. They don’t have student debt because I paid for their education, alas, well paying jobs are hard to find, rent is high, and it pains me to see them struggling even when statistically they are better off than many of their peers.

    Back in the day (get off my lawn!) a University degree was a sure-fire ticket to a good life, nowadays it barely gets you a job. And the job barely lets you pay rent.

    A combination of automation, outsourcing and demographics is taking a heavy toll on Millennials. Sooner or later the economic system will be changed, by force or by social pressure because these kids know we oldsters had it much, much better.

    • (Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Monday May 27 2019, @07:27PM (20 children)

      by loonycyborg (6905) on Monday May 27 2019, @07:27PM (#848240)

      Any changes are likely to increase US debt even more. At which point US is supposed to default, anyway?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @08:06PM (19 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @08:06PM (#848246)

        Real question is: to whom owes the USA its debt? Mostly other nations grabbed of resources? No, those resources were grabbed for free... So, to whom, really?

        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @08:20PM (17 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @08:20PM (#848250)

          From: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States#/media/File%3AEstimated_ownership_of_treasury_securities_by_year.gif [wikipedia.org]

          To itself at 47%
          To foreigners at 28%
          To the States and municipal pensions plan at 6%
          To States and municipal governments at 5%

          The rest is private holding by insurances, pention plan, bank and individuals

          If you want the break down of the external bedt consult that chart https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States#/media/File:Composition_of_U.S._Long-Term_Treasury_Debt_2000-2014.svg [wikipedia.org]

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @09:12PM (14 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @09:12PM (#848266)

            Stop foreign aid (bribes) and take care of ourselves and the debt disappears quickly.

            • (Score: 5, Insightful) by NewNic on Monday May 27 2019, @09:36PM (10 children)

              by NewNic (6420) on Monday May 27 2019, @09:36PM (#848279) Journal

              Stop foreign aid (bribes) and take care of ourselves and the debt disappears quickly.

              More ignorance. This site is just a hotbed of it.

              The foreign aid budget:
              1. Is too small to have quick effect on the deficit.
              2. Is less that the annual deficit.
              3. Brings a lot of intangible benefit to the USA.
              4. Quite a lot of it ultimately gets spent in the USA, benefiting US companies.

              --
              lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
              • (Score: 5, Insightful) by julian on Monday May 27 2019, @11:36PM (9 children)

                by julian (6003) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 27 2019, @11:36PM (#848319)

                Thank you. Hating on foreign aid is just a crowd-pleaser line for low-IQ xenophobes and isolationists. It's the refuge of simple-minded rubes who say things like, "why are we helping people in Africa when I can't afford my insulin!?" Well, Karen, your insulin and mobility scooter would be free to you at point of use except you keep voting for Republicans who have tricked you into blaming people even less fortunate than yourself so that while you're distracted with misplaced rage they can raid whatever value and security you had left for in your future.

                • (Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 27 2019, @11:50PM (8 children)

                  You may commence betting on where julian's IQ sits in relation to mine. Betting closes as soon as julian replies with his score. I'd demand proper longshot odds if you want to bet on him coming out ahead.

                  Trolling aside, you're thinking entirely with your emotions and accusing others of not using their brains? Seriously? Helping a neighbor out is a grand thing. Taking food from your children's mouths to do it is insane though.

                  --
                  My rights don't end where your fear begins.
                  • (Score: 5, Touché) by julian on Monday May 27 2019, @11:56PM (6 children)

                    by julian (6003) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 27 2019, @11:56PM (#848334)

                    I guess I'm just not hurting the right people. [vox.com]

                    • (Score: 0, Redundant) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:17AM (2 children)

                      And that has what to do with the price of tea in China? Or if you prefer it in snooty-egghead-speak, you're using the fallacy of composition.

                      --
                      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
                      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:37PM (1 child)

                        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:37PM (#848549)

                        It's called providing evidence for his claim. Fairly convincing evidence, at that, although I am biased because I needed no further proof that Trump's primary strategy is to grant people permission to feel self-righteous anger instead of fear for their irrational phobias (homo, xeno, what have you...) Just another brick in Making Insecure Whites Great Again.

                        • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:49PM

                          by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:49PM (#848641) Journal

                          if you prefer it in snooty-egghead-speak, you're using the fallacy of composition.

                          Right-wing snowflack trigger alert! Clean up on Aisle 14! Bring out the inflatable safe-space bouncy castle!

                          Buzztard, in "snooty-egghead-speak" (sorry, some of us are educated enough to understand the subtle distinctions of big words), the fallacy of composition is not here committed. Could explain your reasons for thinking it is? Or is your lumpenproletariaty-pumkinheaded-jargon-spewing incapable of such self-awareness and justification?

                    • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:41AM (2 children)

                      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:41AM (#848347)

                      Heh, he went full IQ diptard. Don't mess with da Beezus, he's a convicted kiddy diddler. 12 year olds dude.

                      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 28 2019, @01:00AM (1 child)

                        Weak as hell. This ain't Twitter or a chan. Do better or be mocked.

                        --
                        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
                        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:32PM

                          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:32PM (#848633)

                          Lol says King Twat.

                          And I quote "And that has what to do with the price of tea in China? Or if you prefer it in snooty-egghead-speak, you're using the fallacy of composition."

                          Not to mention your initial reply, "You may commence betting on where julian's IQ sits in relation to mine. Betting closes as soon as julian replies with his score. I'd demand proper longshot odds if you want to bet on him coming out ahead.

                          Trolling aside, you're thinking entirely with your emotions and accusing others of not using their brains? Seriously? Helping a neighbor out is a grand thing. Taking food from your children's mouths to do it is insane though."

                          The most useful thing you added to the discussion was "Helping a neighbor out is a grand thing. Taking food from your children's mouths to do it is insane though" and that is a pretty lame bit of "reasoning".

                          Don't want to be insulted? Don't make stupid replies that are fodder for https://www.reddit.com/r/enlightenedcentrism [reddit.com]

                  • (Score: 2) by NewNic on Thursday May 30 2019, @07:48PM

                    by NewNic (6420) on Thursday May 30 2019, @07:48PM (#849407) Journal

                    Why are you attempting to rebut a comment that appears to be aimed at an Anonymous Coward?

                    Are you that Anonymous Coward?

                    --
                    lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
            • (Score: 5, Informative) by NotSanguine on Monday May 27 2019, @10:20PM (2 children)

              Stop foreign aid (bribes) and take care of ourselves and the debt disappears quickly.

              That's ridiculous. US foreign aid [wikipedia.org] is about 1% of government expenditures. What's more, if we were to use all of that money to "pay down" the national debt, it wouldn't cover even 15% of the annual *interest payments* on the debt [treasurydirect.gov].

              Helping other places make things better can enable those places to improve their lot and (hopefully) more of their people will stay there and grow the global economy rather than trying to come to developed countries.

              Next time, perhaps you should consider this [quoteinvestigator.com] before posting.

              --
              No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
              • (Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Monday May 27 2019, @11:55PM (1 child)

                by driverless (4770) on Monday May 27 2019, @11:55PM (#848333)

                You've also got to look at what that "foreign aid" is, the top three are trying to clean up the mess the US made in Iraq and Afghanistan and propping up Israel, none of which can be discontinued. After that it's mostly chump change, still a few billion but that's not even a blip on a $20 trillion debt.

                • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @01:00AM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @01:00AM (#848359)

                  Of course, we owe Israel so much. We should send more troops to protect them.

          • (Score: 2) by driverless on Monday May 27 2019, @11:51PM (1 child)

            by driverless (4770) on Monday May 27 2019, @11:51PM (#848327)

            The scary part though is what percentage is public debt, in other words debt held by the herd. 10-15 years ago it was around 50:50, so at least there was some stability in the form of intragovernmental debt holdings. Now the herd holds more like 75%, and climbing every year. Once any part of that herd panics...

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @10:41AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @10:41AM (#848453)

              'once the herd realizes that they can actually end the system if a relatively small percent of them just stop paying their debts...'

              FTFY

        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @11:44PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @11:44PM (#848325)

          So, to whom, really?

          To you if your pension fund holds US bonds, which is highly likely.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 27 2019, @09:06PM (14 children)

      Nah, it's just a side effect of two things:

      1. Women fully entering the workforce drastically drove down wages. Twice the supply (of labor) means half the demand.
      2. College degrees being held by so many people looking to avoid having to work for a living. If everyone's special, nobody's special.

      They would have probably been better off if you'd told them either earn their way through college or get a blue collar job. Either way they would have had a better work ethic and appreciated what they do have more. Free beer's delicious but the one you earn by cutting the grass in August tastes a hundred times better.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Monday May 27 2019, @09:42PM (11 children)

        by Snotnose (1623) on Monday May 27 2019, @09:42PM (#848282)

        Nah, it's just a side effect of two things:

                Women fully entering the workforce drastically drove down wages. Twice the supply (of labor) means half the demand.

        That happened 40-50 years ago. I'm old enough to remember when being told to take down certain calendars was annoying.

        College degrees being held by so many people looking to avoid having to work for a living. If everyone's special, nobody's special.

        That happened 30-40 years ago. I remember when my company had 10 engineers. 3 of the top programmers didn't have any degree at all, and 2 of the hardware guys didn't have EEs (the guy with the Geology degree actually won a Corvette in an EE Times hardware design contest).

        Sad to say, the only thing a college degree gets you is past HR. No degree, no phone screen. No phone screen, no interview. No interview, no job.

        IMHO, the real problem was the rise of the MBA in the 80s. Back then everybody in marketing, and all the iffy programmers in engineering, were going to night school to grab an MBA. So what happened? They learned how to squeeze everything that didn't have an immediate return to the bottom line out of life. Hence profitable companies firing people (oops, my bad. Laying off) not because companies weren't making money, but they weren't making enough money. Hence CXX types looking out for the next quarter, not the next decade. Hence stock buybacks, because how does that ever help a company? All it does is goose the stock price so bonuses for the Inner Sanctum go up, never mind nothing in the fundamental business has changed.

        --
        Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
        • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday May 27 2019, @11:07PM (5 children)

          by krishnoid (1156) on Monday May 27 2019, @11:07PM (#848313)

          Hence stock buybacks, because how does that ever help a company? All it does is goose the stock price so bonuses for the Inner Sanctum go up, never mind nothing in the fundamental business has changed.

          It doesn't help the company, but it does help shareholders who can think longer than one quarter. Does it really just goose the stock price only in the short term? It would seem that it would decrease the shares-outstanding denominator, at least altering financial fundamentals.

          It doesn't change anything in the business operation itself, but it indicates that they did enough in the past to earn actual cash that they're now spending on stock, to speculate on their own long-term future. It's still speculation, but it's at least putting their multi-year profits into longer than one-quarter-out planning.

          • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday May 27 2019, @11:51PM (3 children)

            by Snotnose (1623) on Monday May 27 2019, @11:51PM (#848329)

            Hence stock buybacks, because how does that ever help a company? All it does is goose the stock price so bonuses for the Inner Sanctum go up, never mind nothing in the fundamental business has changed.

            It doesn't help the company, but it does help shareholders who can think longer than one quarter.

            And that helps the company how? Seems to me if a company is sitting on a pot of money they can either reinvest it into the company, or give it back via dividends. Stock buybacks? How the fuck is that even legal? The company sold the stock, I'm not seeing any advantage to anyone outside of the CXX suite that benefits from it. Shareholders? After the buybacks the stock settles back to it's former level, so the only shareholders who profit are day traders. Who are gamblers, not investors.

            --
            Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
            • (Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:00AM

              It's essentially paying off a loan so that you'll be in a better position to ask for another if you need to down the line. Well, not really but that's as close as I can dumb it down.

              --
              My rights don't end where your fear begins.
            • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday May 28 2019, @02:13AM

              by krishnoid (1156) on Tuesday May 28 2019, @02:13AM (#848377)

              They are re-"investing" it -- the company is buying stock on the open market, hopefully at a local-minimum-style favorable price. That's a financial investment, it just happens to be in the company's stock itself.

            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 29 2019, @01:01PM

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 29 2019, @01:01PM (#848881) Journal

              Stock buybacks? How the fuck is that even legal?

              Because there's no reason to make it illegal. Glad to help.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @11:54PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @11:54PM (#848332)

            It doesn't help the company, but it does help shareholders who can think longer than one quarter.

            LOL.. wut?
            You confusing cause and effect: fall in stock price is the reason for layoffs.
            Example: EA was making money hand over fist in winter last year, but less than Fortnite. Fall in stock price followed,titles cancelation and layoffs soon after.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 27 2019, @11:58PM (3 children)

          That happened 40-50 years ago.

          No, it did not. It is just now getting close to a single digit participation percentage spread. Social changes don't happen overnight.

          That happened 30-40 years ago.

          No, it did not. Well over half of my highschool class did not even try to attend college around twenty-five years ago. That is not the case now. Tuition prices should take care of that soon enough though unless we keep shoveling tax money and loans at useless degrees.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
          • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:37AM (2 children)

            by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:37AM (#848413) Journal

            Most new degrees are useless to the point of having become a running joke [smbc-comics.com]. The universities everywhere have become administrative laden, top heavy, inefficient beasts. The funding models emphasize throughput rather than quality. In Europe, since the Bologne Process, the idea was to "harmonize" the levels of teaching. The result was a dumbing down across the nations to the lowest available standard. The basic degrees now cover about 40% of the material they used to prior to that agreement. Any faculty member skilled in teaching or research is pushed aside or flat out fired in favor of those who can and do concentrate on climbing the corporate bureaucracy ladder that the universities have become: some institutions now spend over 70% of their budgets on overhead not related to either research or teaching. The cycle has gone on long enough that the ignorant, uneducated students this broken system produced are coming back into the system as faculty members and driving everything down another notch. You can still learn these days, but you are mostly on your own. It is getting almost impossible to do that in the context of getting a degree.

            A concrete turning point was the Bologne Process. However that is a regional problem. Globally, the business community's LARP has spread throughout all of society. Such that there seems to be a universal derision for knowledge and skill which has spread even to institutions of higher learning.

            --
            Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
            • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @05:22AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @05:22AM (#848418)

              A large part of that top-heavy administrative structure happens to be social engineering SJW types. It takes literally hundreds of personnel at larger universities to ensure that the university is in compliance with all the nonsense rules.

              1. Do we have enough transgender?
              2. Do we have enough gays?
              3. Do we have enough women?
              4. Do we have enough transectionists?
              5. Do we have enough minorities?
              6. Are we persecuting traditionalist/conservative people?
              7. Are we undermining authority?
              8. How can we make normal white heterosexual males more miserable?

            • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @10:52AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @10:52AM (#848454)

              This is a great reason to intentionally default and never pay your student loans. (like me)

              Added benefit is the end of state capitalism, and the suicidal panic of people who never worked a day in their lives yet collect percentages off of people who do.

              Who needs a system where the ones at the bottom get starved for not working while the ones at the top are rewarded for not working?

              Without ideological consistency, there is literally no point to even having intelligence, as inconsistent ideologies are as deadly as ignorance.

              I refuse to be ruled by the Don Jr's Jr's of the world(which includes don jr's 'i started with a small loan of a million dollars and lost it all then asked for another') and you should too.

              I refuse to be ruled in general, but I especially refuse to be ruled by inherited wealth. (This is in The Republic, I'm not alone in this)

              This obvious logic, I suspect, is the actual reasoning behind what we know as 'The War on Terror.'

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @06:33PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @06:33PM (#848599)

          act like a slave? get treated like a slave. what kind of dumb whore applies for a company with a HR dept? what kind of suckass dipshit gets a loan to pay some propagandists to brainwash them in "college/university"? why don't you dumb little slaves learn a trade, start your own private enterprise(without registering it with the gov), and tell the leaches to fuck off? you know, like a real american.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @11:00PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @11:00PM (#848308)

        Don't forget college degrees that are complete shite.

        Just because you have a piece of paper, does not mean you are smart or no anything practically useful.

        The implication seems to be that getting the piece of paper somehow puts you in another category of citizen with implied special treatment during employment and life in general.

        Err...no. Those days are long gone...

        • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:22PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:22PM (#848628)

          Just because you have a piece of paper, does not mean you are smart or no anything practically useful.

          Ya mean, like, how to spell?

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 27 2019, @10:43PM (7 children)

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday May 27 2019, @10:43PM (#848298) Journal

      Back in the day (get off my lawn!) a University degree was a sure-fire ticket to a good life, nowadays it barely gets you a job. And the job barely lets you pay rent.

      I have several reactions to this, which are somewhat mixed. I tend not to reveal a lot of personal details about myself, but in previous posts I've already admitted that for quite a few years I taught at the university level. What I haven't said before is that last year I decided to voluntarily leave academia to teach high school (which I also taught for a few years after bachelor's and before grad school, when I wasn't sure where I wanted to end up).

      I did so partly because I cannot stand the state of American higher education today. Professors are welcomed to universities as new hires and told that "teaching doesn't matter" -- that only research will allow them to keep their jobs. That has been true at top research universities for generations, but it's now true of lesser colleges and even colleges that used to pretend to be "liberal arts" schools. I mean, you need to show up for class, but as long as you're not a complete disaster, teaching really doesn't matter.

      Which means that students are taking out huge loans to get an education, and the "educators" are told that teaching doesn't matter. I could not stomach the hypocrisy. Meanwhile, the number of tenure lines has been steadily decreasing, and administrators love exploiting desperate PhDs to get them to teach a course for a couple thousand dollars each (leading many adjuncts to string together huge teaching loads across multiple universities just to make a living). I was lucky enough to have found one of the few tenure lines that get offered in most fields every year, and my school was better than most in not exploiting adjuncts... but still, the fundamental inequality of that whole system has bothered me for years too.

      Why do I say all that now? Because while more and more people are going to college than ever, and students are taking on more debt than ever, the value of a degree has become less and less over time. Part of it is that the job market is flooded now with people with bachelor's degrees (and even useless master's degrees), so they have been devalued. I once queried a colleague in my university department about the statistics on what happened to our graduates. (We weren't a top-tier school, but I was at a Research I university according to the Carnegie list.) And my colleague's reply was basically, "I don't think we want to know the numbers about what happens to our graduates." How disheartening it is to think that the students I teach are paying for degrees that won't help them... and no one even wants to know the numbers! Disturbing, but a common attitude in higher ed.

      But I also believe that in bringing such a large percentage of the population through college, the actual value of the education has decreased... I'm not going on a rant about standards here. But when you have most teachers at universities either told "teaching doesn't matter" (if they are tenured or tenure-track), or told that their worth as a teacher is so small that they can't make a living (if they are an adjunct), it's pretty clear that the priority is not on quality of education.

      So, I quit. I found a job teaching back where people actually care about education. Alas, that's also not typically in public schools these days, which tend to be so politicized over continuous testing and "standards" coupled with teachers unions and overworked teachers... I'm not going back to that (which I did in the past). So, I'm teaching at a private school that values teaching, and I actually feel good about myself when I come home after a day at work.

      Now, I'll follow that up with a big, ON THE OTHER HAND....

      I haven't been in the real (corporate) world in some time, but I have several close friends who work for big companies. One in particular is a lab manager at a company that hires a lot of STEM grads. And every few weeks she has a story about some recent hire who turned out to be a total flake. Everyone they hire has at least a bachelor's degree. But even people with master's degrees can't be bothered to show up for work on time... or multiple cases of people with bachelor's degrees who just randomly wouldn't show up for work -- no call, no nothing. They can't be trusted with the most basic of tasks with supervision and/or loads of training. These are full-time jobs, with potential for advancement.

      So, what am I to make of such stories? I've heard them from multiple people in industry. Yes, they play into the "Millennials" stereotypes as lazy, etc. But I'm not actually ready to believe that Millennials are worse than previous generations in this regard. I just think most of those people wouldn't have gotten a bachelor's degree in a previous generation -- they would have flunked out or just not had the commitment to continue in college. Whether it's standards going down in higher ed or whatever, the bachelor's degree is no longer a guarantee of a committed, responsible worker. (Granted, in the past, some rich kids also scraped through college and probably never were responsible, but Daddy gave them a job in management -- that was a different track.)

      I'm by no means saying that Millennials deserve the crappy state they're in, for the most part. But I do think that priorities of some of the Millennial generation are different, and that plays into this reputation. (Which, I'll admit, is probably only describing a minority... but how many tales of irresponsible workers should one manager have to accumulate to tell to me on a monthly basis?) And the student loan system is screwed up, higher ed is screwed up, the job market is screwy with "gig economy" workers and contract workers the current way of employers exploiting workers (as they always have).

      All I can say now is that I'm not that much older than the arbitrary dividing line for "Millennials" by birth year, but I'm glad I got a start when I did. I'm very sympathetic to young people who can't find a full-time job for a living wage, even with credentials they shouldn't need. (I have several friends with master's degrees and doctorates who have had great difficulty in finding a steady job in recent years too due to "overqualification.")

      A couple weeks ago, I was talking to a senior at the school I teach at now. I asked him about his plans after graduation (since EVERYONE at our school goes to college, and that's of course highly touted in the brochures about the school). He said he was going to college, but he wasn't sure where. He had been accepted to two fairly elite but smaller schools -- not Ivies or top-tier schools, but definitely well-known colleges. And he said he looked at the cost of tuition and decided he would apply to a couple state schools instead in the past month or so (where they have rolling admissions). He said he'll end up going to one of those options instead.

      I told him I thought he was one of the most practical of all the students I've talked to in his class. Most kids and parents these days are chasing dreams of the perfect college (witness the recent cheating scandals), when honestly if they just went to their local state school and did WELL, they probably would do as well as most grads on the market from much more expensive schools. If you're not going to a top 20 or so school, is the name really going to help you that much, unless your hiring committee happens to have an alum from your college?

      Final thought: one of the other things that caused me to finally decide to abandon higher ed last year was seeing an actual TV commercial for the university I taught at. Not one thing in the commercial was about education. It seemed about community, about the location and facilities, about the sports culture, and "activities" (hinting at partying, but not explicitly so)... and it ended with an image of a woman walking in a white dress arm-in-arm with a man in ROTC uniform under a grove of trees on campus with a tagline about "memories for a lifetime." Message was: "Come to college, party for several years, go to some football games, and if you're a girl, you'll meet a manly man who will walk you down the aisle."

      Absurd, but I don't know what else I was expecting. What expectations does it set up for college students these days, whom I admittedly have seen as mostly clueless, irresponsible, and not very interested in learning? I try to focus on the good students, but many just want a slip of paper at the end to show off to employers (and maybe be lucky enough to find a spouse along the way!). They don't want to work hard; many certainly don't want to study. (I still recall the business student from the one semester I taught an intro class, who sent me examples of the review sheets his professor in business classes gave for exams and suggested that I create similar review sheets for him... after all, you're only in freakin' college, so you need a professor to teach you how to study for an exam...!?) And why should they want anything else, with teachers who are told that teaching doesn't matter?

      The whole system is a house of cards waiting to collapse.

      This post may be a little off-topic at times, but higher ed and student debt is a huge part of the crisis that many Millennials are experiencing. I don't have any answers, but this is at least my view of part of the problem.

      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:24AM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:24AM (#848342)

        I ducked out being a millennial by leaving school just before Columbine. My third year of junior college and first of only two not living with my parents was 9/11.

        From both personal experience and stories from friends, both Gen X and Millennials I can tell you it is twofold: The unnecessary expectations for jobs that don't need it, because on the job training is necessary either way, and the necessary skills are easy to check or test for. Combined with this is a general disregard for employees, a combination of under-budgeting for employees or employee advancement, a disrespect towards many of them, not in the form of 'everyone had to pay their dues' like in the old days, but rather 'these schmucks should be happy we give them a job at all and work whatever hours we tell them with no prescheduling of their workweek.' This latter effect caused many people Gen-Xs to do all sorts of questionable to outright illegal behavior at work, but after watching and listening to the questionable behaviors of managers, unless it was a health or safety issue for customers I left it to loss-prevention or the managers rather than narcing on fellow employees, because neither side was doing right by the other. Long story short, I gave up on the workforce (damn lazy millenial scum!) and have just done odd jobs while working on and off for family. My friends meanwhile have after a decade or more of work, managed ~25k/year as a midwestern female military veteran, 55k a year as a millenial techie (first in the bay and now on the east coast), 100k a year as a truck driver (with seasonal unemployment and better unemployment pay than either of the aforementioned people busting their ass, he gets to screw off and use it as vacation time, knowing its temporary.), and a few others still in the sub 20k/year pay range struggling with full time jobs and junior/state college workloads.

        For reference, my *MOM* in the 1970s managed to buy a house by 26, FULL PAID OFF, after getting a master's degree in social work and working for the state for a few years, at what was at the time not all that excellent of pay. But it was enough to cover an apartment with a roommate, gas, a used and then new car, and savings towards a deposit on a mortgage. While some of that is the housing boom that lead to skyrocketing prices, just as much of it is due to pay stagnation and inflation, leading to everything costing signifcantly more.

        For reference, her as a member of the boomer generation is being bled dry by medical bills, and the quality of medical service since I was a kid (where I got surgical treatment at my local hospital good enough to amaze radiologists at a children's research hospital a few years later when I had an unrelated injury.) Today however, just getting the right medications from the doctors, or finding a doctor who actually bothers to keep up on your chart is almost impossible. Both she and my father have had multiple medical issues due to doctors using either obsolete information or assumptions about the patient.

        Personally, I haven't had medical coverage since my early 20s. I'm sure I'll die from something easily treatable as a result, but given the number of people I know who have died from medical malpractice or worse, I'll save that money I don't have anyway, and at least die with some financial common sense.

        I feel more sorry for the generation after us, who didn't see pre-columbine schools and think our pro-authoritarian regime (on both sides of the aisle) is the norm, and doesn't remember the hypocrisy of the 'only a communist would do that' list of behaviors from 1980s school indoctrination, many of which the GenX/Millenial generation have forgotten about even as they march towards that 'bold new future' of dystopia everyone secretly longs for.

        • (Score: 5, Informative) by loonycyborg on Tuesday May 28 2019, @06:35AM (1 child)

          by loonycyborg (6905) on Tuesday May 28 2019, @06:35AM (#848428)

          Having a working accessible medical care system is one of the things 'only a communist would do'.

          • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @06:45PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @06:45PM (#848606)

            using a totalitarian nanny state to get it is what a communist would do. why can't you stick to the point and quit being dishonest?

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @03:09AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @03:09AM (#848392)

        Someone once said, may decades ago, that half of being successful in life is just showing up.

        I used to own a small manufacturing company in a college town. I hired actual college students who could not read a tape measure. I hired a guy with a masters in architecture for a $10/hour machine operator job. I hired military vets too. And I hired people with criminal records.

        Of all of them, the two stand-out best employees I ever had were an ex-con and the architect guy. None of the vets were worth it. They stole from me more than anyone else. Seriously, the ex-con was smarter than any of the college kids I hired. (We did CNC work with XYZ coordinates, including offsets and translations. Should be simple as high-school graphing. It was alien script to most people.)

        I was in business for 20 years. Biggest lesson learned-- running a business is great except for two things, employees and customers. Everybody wants everything to be easy, free and for someone else to be responsible.

        What I'm teaching my own kids-- Don't ever run a business unless someone else's money is behind it, and then make sure you get a fat percentage. You'll earn most of it just by showing up and the rest by giving a shit.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 28 2019, @09:54AM

          What I'm teaching my own kids-- Don't ever run a business unless someone else's money is behind it, and then make sure you get a fat percentage.

          You're doing them a disservice then. Sure owning a business is a huge pain but it's a pain of your own choosing instead of taking whatever's handed to you.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 28 2019, @05:47AM (1 child)

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 28 2019, @05:47AM (#848419) Journal

        More than 35 years ago, I started meeting truck drivers with degrees. I never thought it terribly odd to meet drivers with lesser degrees, but when a truck driver tells you that he has a master's or a PhD, you start wondering. I actually did a little work to verify that some of these people hold degrees, that they weren't just blowing smoke. Some were so full of shit, their eyes were shit-brown, of course. But, not all of them.

        I can't tell you why any of those highly educated people decided to drive truck for a living, but I can vouch for it happening way back when.

        You also begin to wonder how many educated people are driving truck, but will not tell you their level of education, for whatever reason.

        I don't mean to imply that you meet these people every day - there probably aren't tens of thousands of PhD's behind the wheel of a truck. But, they are out there.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @03:35PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @03:35PM (#848522)

          I can't tell you why any of those highly educated people decided to drive truck for a living, but I can vouch for it happening way back when.

          Believe me, if you had a PhD then you would know why. Trust me on this.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @10:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @10:55PM (#848305)

      Back in the day (get off my lawn!) a University degree was a sure-fire ticket to a good life

      Take a look at who is gettign the degrees now vs then, and at what they are majoring in. You can't stuff the fat part of the bellcurve into university and expect same results as from tail-end.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:03PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:03PM (#848468)

      these kids know we oldsters had it much, much better.

      True of the middle classes. Unfortunately, there is a ruling class, and even though the middle is suffering, the class that makes the rules is not.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 28 2019, @01:57PM (2 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 28 2019, @01:57PM (#848497) Journal

      Sooner or later the economic system will be changed, by force or by social pressure because these kids know we oldsters had it much, much better.

      Or because global wages will have risen to the point that the US is no longer experiencing today's intense labor competition. Please be aware of what's going on.

      What's different between today and oh, 1970 when the young baby boomers were doing well:

      • The only foreign labor competition back then was from Europe and Japan. Sure, there were billions of desperate potential workers out there, but they didn't have a way to get the products of their labor into developed world countries. Now, there's several billion of them putting products on developed world shelves. Meanwhile US labor no longer experiences serious labor competition from Europe and Japan.
      • There's been a massive global improvement in the human condition.
      • The suburbs filled up. Real estate inflation has been considerable over the past 50 years.
      • Similar cost inflation in health care and education. Government helping FTW!

      So, anyway things haven't turned out as well as you'd like? Why talk darkly of revolution when you can just fix the best economic system you'll see in your lifetime?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @06:17PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @06:17PM (#848591)

        Real estate inflation has been considerable over the past 50 years.

        Right, the US Millennials will be perfectly fine- if they and their employees were paying Bangalore rental rates...

        It's much harder for them to compete if their costs are so much higher.

        But the older generation retirement incomes/funds are probably reliant on those real estate costs staying up...

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 29 2019, @12:58PM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 29 2019, @12:58PM (#848880) Journal

          Real estate inflation has been considerable over the past 50 years.

          Right, the US Millennials will be perfectly fine- if they and their employees were paying Bangalore rental rates...

          And you are right as well.

          It's much harder for them to compete if their costs are so much higher.

          But the older generation retirement incomes/funds are probably reliant on those real estate costs staying up...

          Indeed. Cost of living is one of those great, unexplored areas of political economics. Lots of parties are willing to dump on us all sorts of policies that increase cost of living.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @06:05PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @06:05PM (#848587)

      Yeah in Vietnam they make half of all the Samsung phones ( http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=8785 [businesskorea.co.kr] ). So I suspect things are getting better for the millennials there (life probably still sucks for many of them, but if they have sucky USD200/month factory jobs it still is better than earning only USD1 or 2 a day).

      One contributing factor is the real estate in the USA (and many other countries) has got more expensive which tends to cause a vicious circle of cost increases till something blows up. If property prices increase, rents tend to follow then people start asking for higher wages, then they want to save for retirement so they invest in property or funds (which invest in property).

      Yes property in some places should be worth more than elsewhere. But how much more? A lot of it seems rather "artificial". When you keep selling the same house for higher prices it does not make the house any better nor are there any improved features.

      It's like pass the parcel for 10% more each time and hope you're not caught holding it when the music stops because you know what's inside really isn't worth as much as you bought it for and hope to sell it for.

      I do wonder though, perhaps the US actually has enough money to defend its people from poverty and illness. But it prefers to spend it on killing people thousands of miles away for "defense" (while making a few cronies rich). See also: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army/u-s-army-fudged-its-accounts-by-trillions-of-dollars-auditor-finds-idUSKCN10U1IG [reuters.com]

      Yeah I know it doesn't prove that money was siphoned off, but when your accounts don't balance by TRILLIONS how can you prove that it wasn't? Furthermore the US Military regularly spends over budget and has out of budget spending:
      https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/11/us-public-defrauded-hidden-cost-iraq-war [theguardian.com]
      http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/03/05/on_war_costs_bush_is_master_of_disguise/ [boston.com]

      Also when the US money is created ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing [wikipedia.org] ) who are the ones really getting richer from it?

      When Zimbabwe printed money the dictator and his friends were transferring wealth from everyone else in Zimbabwe. The rest of the world could laugh at Zimbabwe.

      Not so long ago when the US Gov printed money, they used it for highways, dams and stuff that helped the US residents. But now the US residents are no longer $$$ friends of the US Gov, only a few are friends. And the rest of the world who hold US dollars, or trade in US dollars or are owed US dollars can't laugh at the US of Zimbabwe. That might also be why China is building stuff around Asia etc with its US dollars, even if its a useless port/bridge/railtrack now it might still be worth something later...

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 29 2019, @01:06PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 29 2019, @01:06PM (#848882) Journal

        even if its a useless port/bridge/railtrack now it might still be worth something later...

        Yet another reason I think China isn't thinking far ahead. The build-it-and-they-will-come theory of infrastructure development has been shown to be a disaster yet everyone still does it.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @11:18PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @11:18PM (#848695)

      The problem is the housing crisis. The population keeps growing yet there is limited land to build on and limited resources to use. This creates more competition for the limited available resources.

      Hence millennials are less likely to get married and have children, why should we create more people that have to endure this torture.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 29 2019, @01:20PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 29 2019, @01:20PM (#848885) Journal

        The problem is the housing crisis.

        There's no such crisis. Thousands of communities across the US have decided they don't want affordable housing in their backyard - in large part to increase real estate prices. One can choose to live there and pay those elevated costs or not. It's a lot cheaper when one doesn't live in places with deliberately restricted real estate.

        Hence millennials are less likely to get married and have children, why should we create more people that have to endure this torture.

        Well, that, and women's empowerment and going to college first.

  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @07:25PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @07:25PM (#848239)

    Oh noes! Socialism! Did you ever wonder why in America, Memorial Day is in May, and Labor Day is in August? When every other country has International Workingmen's Day on May 1, where it should be?

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by stretch611 on Monday May 27 2019, @07:53PM

      by stretch611 (6199) on Monday May 27 2019, @07:53PM (#848245)

      Actually Labor Day is in September, not August.

      It is easy to remember that fact too... Labor Day is 9 months after New Years.

      --
      Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @08:37PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @08:37PM (#848253)

      Labour day is in September in the US. Canada too, and we're doing quite well here thanks.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Acabatag on Monday May 27 2019, @11:13PM

      by Acabatag (2885) on Monday May 27 2019, @11:13PM (#848315)

      The added irony is that International Workingman's Day on May 1st is to commemorate a historical event that happened in Chicago in the USA.

  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @07:40PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @07:40PM (#848241)

    Generation X was the lost generation, Millennials are the daycare generation. If millennials want to see the neoliberal variant of socialism, they can move to San Fran Shithole.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 27 2019, @09:10PM (4 children)

      San Fran Shithole

      The socialist Mecca where nobody not making six figures can afford a roof over their head. Gotta laugh at the irony.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 5, Informative) by julian on Monday May 27 2019, @11:52PM (3 children)

        by julian (6003) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 27 2019, @11:52PM (#848330)

        It's almost like it's not socialist at all but just socially progressive. Economically, SF and SV are rather right-wing. So yes, they're very tolerant of LGBT homeless people but god forbid you propose actually raising money through taxes to do something about homelessness as an economic issue. Actual socialism would look something like confiscating the vacant, under-used, and foreigner-owned single-family homes, running bright red bulldozers over them and building subsidized apartments funded by increased taxes on tech millionaires and billionaires. Force the parasites who complain to haul bricks.

        There's not a single elected politician, in SF or anywhere else in the USA, proposing anything like that. But MUH GUN RIGHTS! So I guess the Mayor of SF might as well be Stalin.

        • (Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:45AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:45AM (#848348)

          Woah woah, don't point out Buzztardo's ignorance like that. His IQ can't take much more of it.

          I would try and add something more useful to the discussion but these demons need exercising. No not a spelling error.

        • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @01:37AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @01:37AM (#848371)

          So give us an example where socialism ever worked anything like that? Historically, socialism grants wealth to the party and impoverishes everyone else; SF being the perfect analogy. You can fuck off with the "not real socialism" argument. Yes it was, each and every economically failing, murderous time.

          • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by julian on Tuesday May 28 2019, @06:44AM

            by julian (6003) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 28 2019, @06:44AM (#848429)

            We'll bulldoze your house first. And don't hold your breath on an apartment permit, comrade.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by stretch611 on Monday May 27 2019, @07:51PM (36 children)

    by stretch611 (6199) on Monday May 27 2019, @07:51PM (#848243)

    So, are things really as grim as portrayed here? I'm too old to be a millennial, but have both personally experienced as well as witnessed many others facing the same trends listed here.

    Same here... older than a millennial... but I have also experienced and witnessed the same.

    By 2014, 48 percent of workers with bachelor's degrees are employed in jobs for which they're overqualified.

    Would you like fries with that? Unemployment figures don't show good jobs vs bad jobs, only raw numbers. (and they ignore people who stopped looking for work because of the horrible prospects.) Even driving the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile [thepennyhoarder.com] requires a bachelor's degree.

    The number of workers in the United States participating in the gig economy is expected to triple...

    And people are paid next to nothing and treated like garbage in the gig economy. You are considered an employee because that would force them to pay minimum wage and have benefits. How many times do we here about uber drivers being paid less than minimum wage after their expenses... and they need to own their own car before they can even start. Instacart and others even steal tips [duckduckgo.com] of their workers.

    One in 5 millennials say they cannot afford routine healthcare expenses. Many of these millennials are uninsured because of the cost.

    So 20% of millennials can't afford healthcare... yet full time jobs at most places of business are now required to provide health care insurance. This means that too many are self-employed in the gig economy without benefits, or employed part-time so businesses do not have to pay for healthcare. And I bet that these people would prefer a real full time job instead of what they have. So much for the reality of the unemployment numbers.

    The question is how do we "Break the Wheel"?
    The fact is that we have been leading up to this for years... Trump did not start it, but as a benefactor, he will do nothing to change it. Until we remove the ability for the rich to buy our politicians it will continue. Sadly, the politicians getting the money continue to write the laws. There are a few politicians refusing to accept big money and that is a start but unless we hold them to their promises it will not mean a thing.

    The one power we have is to vote. Make sure you do it even if it hurts. Make sure to vote for people promising to stop the 1% from writing the laws and avoiding taxes. Be sure to vote them out if they do not keep that promise (or never promised it in the first place.) Sadly it will take a long time for real change... but do not relent. Not voting keeps them in power.

    --
    Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Monday May 27 2019, @08:37PM

      by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Monday May 27 2019, @08:37PM (#848254)

      Wow, I read that Oscar Mayer Wienermobile piece.

      Sounds awful.

      The healthcare thing is one of the real American problems. If you've managed to get a job that pays you enough to live, and you start getting ahead, saving a little each week, then get sick you then have to worry about paying that $6,000 "co-pay" or $40,000 because the doctor who treated you in the emergency room is "out of network" or what ever bullshit thing the insurance industry have come up with to screw you over to increase the shareholder's profits.

      I can't understand why you guys put up with it.

    • (Score: 1) by Chrontius on Monday May 27 2019, @08:38PM

      by Chrontius (5246) on Monday May 27 2019, @08:38PM (#848255)

      https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/u6-rate.asp [investopedia.com]

      Consider the unemployment rate. Or rather, the rates. There are several, and they count in different ways, and they tell you different things about the economy.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 27 2019, @09:14PM (17 children)

      You know what really makes me laugh? Anti-mega-corp types who keep demanding we pile more and more employment requirements on every employer until only the mega-corps can afford to employ anyone at all and they have to do so at pathetic wages.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by stretch611 on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:48AM (16 children)

        by stretch611 (6199) on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:48AM (#848351)

        You are right,,, It is much more important that mega-corps pay so much to their CEOs and board members that they have more money than they can actually spend in a dozen lifetimes while their rank and file workers can barely afford to feed themselves let alone pay rent and healthcare expenses.

        Even when their CEOs fail spectacularly, they leave companies with a golden parachute with a retirement package of millions per year. Even after a disgrace many of them are hired on to the board of a different company for much more than they are worth while still collecting the money from the golden parachute.

        And lets face it... The rank and file workers at the local office/store are the people that the customers actually interact with... They can have a larger effect on repeat business than the CEO/board members ever will.

        Maybe instead of companies complaining that they can't afford to give proper compensation and benefits to the rank and file, maybe they should eliminate the waste at the top.

        --
        Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
        • (Score: 1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 28 2019, @01:06AM (10 children)

          What they pay their C**s isn't really relevant. The job duties and rarity of skillsets aren't remotely comparable.

          Even when their CEOs fail spectacularly, they leave companies with a golden parachute with a retirement package of millions per year.

          Only a shareholder (or at least someone considering being a shareholder) is entitled to that beef even if I absolutely agree with it. Coming from an ordinary employee or a disinterested third party it's just boring-assed envy.

          They can have a larger effect on repeat business than the CEO/board members ever will.

          You are out of your cotton-pickin mind. A CEO or board member can sink a company or double its profits with one decision. The very rare ability to do the latter more often than the former is why they make and very much deserve so much more.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
          • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 28 2019, @06:01AM (6 children)

            by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 28 2019, @06:01AM (#848422) Journal

            What they pay their C**s isn't really relevant. The job duties and rarity of skillsets aren't remotely comparable.

            So, maybe you can explain what those job duties and skillsets are?

            Historically, top CEO's earned about 40x what his workers earned. That seems a lot, but it's about what almost everyone agreed that the top jobs were actually worth.

            What, exactly, do today's CEO's offer, that is worth 100x to 10,000x what their fathers and grandfathers earned?

            Sorry Buzzard, but few of those top tier executives are worth even a fraction of what they are paid. They are most certainly not worthy of those golden parachutes that guarantee that they will be rewarded with half a billion dollars, even after they drive their company into the ground.

            • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 28 2019, @10:06AM (5 children)

              So, maybe you can explain what those job duties and skillsets are?

              Okay, I will. They make the important decisions that decide the future of a business. They look around, say this is important, that's a fucking stupid idea, and people are going to pay through the nose for this if we make it. If that doesn't sound hard to you then let me ask you: why aren't you doing it and pulling in seven figures a year when you do a mediocre job? The answer to that one has nothing to do with who you know.

              When you don't even know why they can command the compensation they do, you really have no business having an opinion on the matter, man.

              --
              My rights don't end where your fear begins.
              • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 28 2019, @11:08AM

                by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 28 2019, @11:08AM (#848458) Journal

                The answer to that one has nothing to do with who you know.

                Really? So, what's this whole "networking" thing we hear continuously from college grads? Sorry, that is an outright falsehood. In fact, I'll go further - it has everything to do with who you know, as well as who you blow.

                I hate to disillusion you, TMB, but the world does not exactly work strictly as a meritocracy. That doesn't work out in the corporate world, or in politics, in the military, or even in academia.

                Let me rephrase the original question: If your grandfather could make the company profitable (in many cases, amazingly profitable) on a salary of hundreds of thousands, why do you need hundreds of millions today? And, at the same time, grandfather paid his employees a sizeable fraction of his own salary, why can we not do the same today?

                As for why I'm not sitting behind one of those desks, making millions, maybe it's because I have a soul (despite what some of our SJW's might say).

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:03PM (2 children)

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:03PM (#848533) Journal

                The answer to that one has nothing to do with who you know.

                We need to recall that some of this is due to status signaling and Other Peoples' Money (OPM) too. For example, if a large pension fund wants to show that they care about running the businesses they invest their clients' money in, they can point to the pay they gave to the CEO. It shows they care.

                And of course, being OPM, it's no skin off their teeth if the CEO turns out be useless.

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:46PM (1 child)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:46PM (#848639)

                  For example, if a large pension fund wants to show that they care about running the businesses they invest their clients' money in, they can point to the pay they gave to the CEO. It shows they care.

                  I could be wrong about this but I was under the impression that pension funds were fiduciarily separated from the businesses that they serve. Go ahead and educate me if I'm wrong.

                  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 29 2019, @01:24PM

                    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 29 2019, @01:24PM (#848889) Journal

                    I could be wrong about this but I was under the impression that pension funds were fiduciarily separated from the businesses that they serve.

                    Pension funds don't just sit on money. They invest it. When they do so with most stock shares, they get a vote (often a very large one) on the leadership and policies of that company. Those businesses are what I was referring to.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:40PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:40PM (#848637)

                They make the important decisions that decide the future of a business.

                Frankly, it looks to me like your average Fortune 500 CEO isn't any better at spotting future trends then a small gaggle of teenagers. So, again, why do you think CEOs are worth their over-sized compensation packages?

                If that doesn't sound hard to you then let me ask you: why aren't you doing it and pulling in seven figures a year when you do a mediocre job?

                Mostly because the vast majority of us don't have the resources of a Fortune 500 company at our disposal. You were saying?

          • (Score: 4, Touché) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday May 28 2019, @08:07AM (2 children)

            by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday May 28 2019, @08:07AM (#848435) Journal

            Shit, man, when even Runaway is telling you you're full of it, You Have A Problem (TM).

            --
            I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
            • (Score: 3, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 28 2019, @10:14AM (1 child)

              Ain't my problem. I don't mind most of the world not knowing what the fuck they're talking about. I mean, if they did know what the fuck they were talking about, they'd be running a business themselves and making those fat dollars they bitch so much about instead of punching a clock. Or possibly not. Most people are terrified of all the risk involved when the buck stops with them. They'd rather have the security of a regular check and leave the decisions and responsibility to $someone_else. And then bitch about how $someone_else is making more than them.

              --
              My rights don't end where your fear begins.
              • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @12:01PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @12:01PM (#848855)

                But it's not bitching about how someone earns more than them. It's bitching about how *much* more someone earns than them.

                I recognize that the people above me should earn more than me. They deal with things I don't want to, which I find more stressful. So let them earn twice my salary. Or heck, even five times my salary.

                But 100 times? Give me a break.

                This is the discussion.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 28 2019, @02:13PM (4 children)

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 28 2019, @02:13PM (#848501) Journal

          You are right,,, It is much more important that mega-corps pay so much to their CEOs and board members that they have more money than they can actually spend in a dozen lifetimes while their rank and file workers can barely afford to feed themselves let alone pay rent and healthcare expenses.

          Sounds like you don't like that. So why make the problem worse?

          Maybe instead of companies complaining that they can't afford to give proper compensation and benefits to the rank and file, maybe they should eliminate the waste at the top.

          No reason to, when you got rid of the competition for those workers!

          Once again, when you make something, like employment, more expensive, you get less of it. You're describing the symptoms above. Similarly, when you erect barriers to entry, you get oligopolies and cartels just like the megacorps TMB described.
          br. After all, we have decades of evidence showing that this is how labor markets work. When are we going to pay attention?

          • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @03:57PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @03:57PM (#848530)

            If this were true, corps would have less CxOs as the decades have worn on. It's not supply and demand, it's simply that the people with control over the money decided they wanted more of it.

            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:07PM

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:07PM (#848535) Journal

              If this were true, corps would have less CxOs as the decades have worn on.

              Looks like demand for CxOs went up instead. But then most labor law isn't a serious obstacle to hiring at that level.

          • (Score: 2) by stretch611 on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:14PM (1 child)

            by stretch611 (6199) on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:14PM (#848541)

            You are right,,, It is much more important that mega-corps pay so much to their CEOs and board members that they have more money than they can actually spend in a dozen lifetimes while their rank and file workers can barely afford to feed themselves let alone pay rent and healthcare expenses.

            Sounds like you don't like that. So why make the problem worse?

            Errm... sarcasm... One would hope in certain situations that adding a "/s" to the end isn't needed.

            --
            Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @11:05AM (14 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @11:05AM (#848457)

      If enough people didn't pay their debts, it would break the wheel without voting.

      Every time you pay a debt, you implicitly vote that you believe that debt is justified.

      So stop voting you think it's justified, it's not.

      First, the entire concept of interest is anti-ecology, it creates a situation where value must be mined from the finite ecological system at an ever greater rate, approaching infinity. What is the derivative failed-gamble debt we are chasing at now, 600 trillion?

      Second, capitalism has always been based on theft and slavery, that's where the fortunes came from originally before they were mutliplied by microsoft and stocks of other unethical surveillance tech.

      The only reason to pay debt is for fear of total societal collapse. Those at the top of the very spindly pyramid hold this over us, that if it collapses those at the bottom will feel it the worst. And they point their finger at other people saying they are terrorists.

      We are their meatshields and slaves until we choose otherwise. Those of us capable of pointing this out in the meantime, can expect our lives to be fucked with until the magna carta is so eroded that we can just disappear and have our existence eventually wiped from the archives.

      btw what happened to arjen camphuis?

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 28 2019, @02:26PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 28 2019, @02:26PM (#848504) Journal

        First, the entire concept of interest is anti-ecology, it creates a situation where value must be mined from the finite ecological system at an ever greater rate, approaching infinity. What is the derivative failed-gamble debt we are chasing at now, 600 trillion?

        Sorry, that's bullshit on several levels. Loans/debt are merely a promise to pay back with future earnings. Interest is what it takes to make the loan worthwhile for the party doing the lending. They don't create such "situations". Second, value can be mined from much more than finite ecological systems, such as increasing human knowledge or living longer.

        Finally, you're not borrowing money to buy derivatives. It's irrelevant to your argument (and exaggerated, nominal value is much higher than what anyone is borrowing to buy derivatives).

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 28 2019, @02:45PM (12 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 28 2019, @02:45PM (#848507) Journal

        Second, capitalism has always been based on theft and slavery, that's where the fortunes came from originally before they were mutliplied by microsoft and stocks of other unethical surveillance tech.

        Compared to what? Last I checked slavery has been out of the vast majority of the capitalist world for at least 150 years. Communism enslaved a billion people in comparison. As to theft, it's better than the non-capitalist alternatives.

        We are their meatshields and slaves until we choose otherwise. Those of us capable of pointing this out in the meantime, can expect our lives to be fucked with until the magna carta is so eroded that we can just disappear and have our existence eventually wiped from the archives.

        Or you could just not borrow money, if it's that much of a problem for you.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @03:48PM (11 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @03:48PM (#848528)

          Last I checked slavery has been out of the vast majority of the capitalist world for at least 150 years.

          My, my, my...such ignorance! Type "human trafficking statistics" into your favorite search engine and prepare to be both educated and amazed.

          • (Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:08PM (10 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 28 2019, @04:08PM (#848536) Journal
            human trafficking != slavery.
            • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:53PM (9 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:53PM (#848643)

              human trafficking != slavery.

              Oh, really? The people caught up in it might beg to differ. But, on the off chance you might have a point: care to educate all and sundry on the difference?

              • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday May 29 2019, @05:01AM (7 children)

                by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday May 29 2019, @05:01AM (#848783) Journal

                Because he says it's not and he needs it not to be for his worldview not to crumble into itty bitty little pieces. Guy's as self-centered as a gyroscope in a black hole.

                --
                I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Wednesday May 29 2019, @11:47AM (6 children)

                  by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 29 2019, @11:47AM (#848850) Journal

                  Because he says it's not and he needs it not to be for his worldview not to crumble into itty bitty little pieces.

                  I see you're projecting again.

                  My view is that illegal human smuggling is severely conflated with human trafficking and slavery, and thus, the latter two are grossly inflated. It's just another anti-immigration excuse. They're being "exploited" and thus, we're helping by keeping them out. I think it's telling that the Trump administration, for example, is pushing [dhs.gov] this narrative hard.

                  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday May 29 2019, @04:14PM (5 children)

                    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday May 29 2019, @04:14PM (#848958) Journal

                    A close friend of mine, with whom I am now living (don't ask...) was an underage sex trafficking victim. I don't know how she's still alive. That was slavery. She wasn't even allowed to drink water without permission and was usually beaten if she asked, had to service any man and as many men in any way they demanded at any time, and did I mention this started when she was 12, during the Reagan years? And this is still going on across the country and across the world. You have no conception, *none,* of the horrors that occur daily outside your notice.

                    --
                    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 30 2019, @12:46PM (4 children)

                      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 30 2019, @12:46PM (#849271) Journal

                      A close friend of mine, with whom I am now living (don't ask...) was an underage sex trafficking victim. I don't know how she's still alive. That was slavery.

                      A slave is human. Is a human thus a slave? See the fallacy?

                      Human trafficking can fall way short of slavery. Sorry. Sure, transporting people around and enslaving them falls inside the category of human trafficking, but so does a lot of stuff that doesn't meet the standard of slavery.

                      • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday May 30 2019, @01:26PM (3 children)

                        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday May 30 2019, @01:26PM (#849280) Journal

                        Ah, I get it, you want them to papercut your skin off with the pages of several dozen dictionaries and then burn you in the pile of papers when you get to hell. Sure, do your thing.

                        --
                        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 31 2019, @03:49AM (2 children)

                          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 31 2019, @03:49AM (#849617) Journal
                          Smuggling people into another country, robbing them, and then leaving them to fend for themselves qualifies as human trafficking, but not as slavery. Dictionaries trump your feelgood, as usual.
                          • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday May 31 2019, @07:17PM (1 child)

                            by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday May 31 2019, @07:17PM (#849927) Journal

                            Keep it up, Hallow. Anyone with a working brain can tell you what "undocumented labor" really amounts to. You're gonna burn on a huge pile of those dictionaries you seem to love so much.

                            --
                            I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
                            • (Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Monday June 03 2019, @04:23AM

                              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 03 2019, @04:23AM (#850725) Journal

                              Anyone with a working brain can tell you what "undocumented labor" really amounts to.

                              I did already. The exercise didn't go in your favor. This is yet another of your fantasies.

                              You're gonna burn on a huge pile of those dictionaries you seem to love so much.

                              Truth remains an absolute defense against your bullshit.

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 29 2019, @11:37AM

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 29 2019, @11:37AM (#848847) Journal

                The people caught up in it might beg to differ

                Bullshit. The problem here is that human trafficking for the purpose of enslaving people or transferring enslaved people around is conflated with illegal human smuggling - the former is far smaller than the latter. It's basically a rationalization for embracing anti-immigration memes without appearing to embrace anti-immigration memes.

                I grant that actual slavery still exists even in the developed world, but it's grossly dishonest to claim that capitalism is in the least dependent on this slavery as a result.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:07PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:07PM (#848471)

      Until we remove the ability for the rich to buy our politicians it will continue

      This is kind of like saying that the solution to government inefficiency is to stamp out corruption.

      I suspect that real progress will deal with real politik and find a way to make things happen without trying to change that which has been present since the beginnings of politics.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
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