Another one you missed is the Boomer’s refusal to retire and go home. Generations before them retired at 55 or 60 if they hit a certain amount of success, letting the following generation take over the reigns. Today’s Boomers are hanging on into their late 60s and even 70s. I had one family remember tell me “I can’t retire, the next group doesn’t have anyone who can step up and take my role and do what I do.” Aside from the incredible arrogance there, part of the reason no one can step in (says you) is that you haven’t done it and let them try. It becomes self fulfilling.
No kidding. I had an 80something history professor who taught Russian history: I kid you not, this guy was a card-carrying communist who thought the Soviets had it right. You couldn’t understand him, he mostly bumbled through lectures and never really graded anything (not because of commie egalitarianism or anything, he was just fucking senile and couldn’t use computers). Because he’d been Department Chair during the HW Bush administration, he earned some ridiculous salary (195k I think) for teaching one class a semester and having not really published anything relevant since 1997. When the budget cuts came I think he volunteered to retire to save like 3 jobs that collectively didn’t add up to his salary. At least he finally went and nobody actually useful had to leave.
Spot on wrt humanities (I gather; not my field), but not so much in nat sci. Sure, we've got old fogeys collecting six figures for lectures they haven't updated since Babylon fell, but the new crop have gotten a fundamentally worse education. Hence the current campaign against imposter syndrome, which is just a funny way of admitting that students are getting dumber. I'd like some more olds sticking around.
From the conservative podcasts I listen, much of the ideology is coming from fresh doctorates who want to teach DEI stuff. One of the guests said half her teachers were only 5 to 10 years older teaching nothing but feminism and any flavor of victimhood that could be found. Older professors are getting ran out because the students want to learn revisionist history instead.
It isn't though. Are there older professors hanging around? Sure. The majority of professors in these liberal arts colleges are people who got there doctorates in the last 5 years and can't find work so they go teach. Because of the demand for college education, there aren't enough boomers to teach anyways. I graduated 20 years ago and I only had a handful of boomer professors. Most were all Older Gen Xers ( mid 30's to mid 40's in 2004).
As I said later down below, I think too many folks who are blaming boomers really are blaming older Gen Xers and just don't realize it.
One of my good friends is 24, 6’6 handsome, graduated with a 3.9 GPA in business from a respectable school, wants a job in pharma sales. These jobs used to be a dime a dozen when my mom was 28 and got her first one: it’s been an incredibly lucrative career for her, too, regularly netting 250/300k per year (to her credit, she’s also highly competent and works harder than most others, and her income isn’t really close to the norm). I asked my mom why the jobs were so slim and why he couldn’t get any, aside from companies operating with smaller sales forces: she told me that, at her last sales conference, she was at a table of 10 people. She was the youngest one at the table at 60, the oldest roughly 77. Multiple boomer colleagues have retired from Merck or something, only to hop over to Pfizer for another job and fat paycheck until the next round of layoffs. One of these fellows is about 73, owns an excavation firm, golf course, real estate brokerage, and collision repair shop: absolutely no need to keep pulling up the ladder from young people, but can’t let himself retire because “if I quit working I’ll die.” My mother has no real desire to work beyond 61, but the same cannot be said of her colleagues.
Which would make sense if the entire industry was going to just succumb to the magic fairy ev, ai, and automation future provided by silicon valley code monkeys who only edit other people's work from stack overflow, but that's not what I'm seeing in practicality.
I predict what you say to be true in the short term, and then some ousters at a high level and a reversal and panic hiring, but by then the talent pool may truly have shrunk a lot.
"code monkeys who only edit other people's work from stack overflow,"
Is this a problem? I love stack overflow. Why reinvent the wheel? You still have to understand the problem you're trying to solve to know what to look for.
My FIL and my Mother both got Covid packages, and both are still working despite not needing to. My FIL's excuse is he enjoys his work and he can only play so much golf. My mothers is that health insurance, which she could afford to pay for, is too expensive so she will work until she can get on Medicare. Meanwhile I tally up my money daily to figure out just how much more I need to be able to scale back my career.
I sometimes wonder if they (boomers) were indoctrinated by their depression era parents that they must work while they have the opportunity regardless of if they need to or not because it isn't always guaranteed.
My dad will probably never fully retire. In my case, I don't mind for the most part because I get to see dad every day but he has trouble giving up the control. In his defense, I probably should've started working a little harder before I had kids.
This is why you're seeing so many family-owned businesses go under. If you resent your parents for neglecting you to keep their shop/restaurant/bar/store running, why would you in turn do this to your own children?
My late brother-in-law's father made a good living doing accounting for a bunch of diners in the NYC area owned by Greek immigrants. The kind of place parodied by Belushi on SNL as "cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, coke, no pepsi." After his dad died, Sandy left his actuary job with a big insurance company and he took over his father's accounts. Then, as the first generation owners started to retire, their kids had no interest in working 100 hrs a week.
Hard to blame boomers when a company they never worked for hires them. I'm sure the people doing the hiring are younger than them and they see a benefit in hiring them as opposed to someone younger.'
Anyone with "Feelz" with it not being fair, are not serious people. A company doesn't give a fuck about your feelings. If they think an old timer can bring in money better than someone younger, oh well.
I just retired. Our clients are financial institutions. Our customer service is for them. So, you need to know banking and you need to know the computer system. We had a guy retire at 65. Got bored. Came back. Got cancer. Took chemo. Never missed a day. Retired at 80. The company begged him to stay. The FIs loved him. Smart guy. Died at 98 with 2 older siblings over 100 still kicking. I believe there were a couple that had previously passed that were over 100.
His family history showed everyone to be extremely long lived. His 65 was like everyone else's 50.
That certainly couldn't have been the shame of employing a pedophile who abused kids under their care at football camps and looked the other way the whole time so they can all pretend like it's a big shock that no one knew about when it FINALLY came to light after years and years of coverups. Right?
There’s another side to this. I’m 66 and plan to work two more years. I enjoy my job and they pay me well to do it. I work in the field that built the platform you are using for this discussion, Internet Protocol routers. I have been working with them since 1992. We can’t get younger people for these roles because they don’t want to do them. They all want to work for Google, Amazon, Apple, or Facebook. We have a new college grad hiring program we started last year where got some good candidates but it takes time to get them up to speed. IP networking is not sexy enough for most computer science and engineering grads.
"We can’t get younger people for these roles because they don’t want to do them."
How much of that is due to HR relentlessly shredding the resume of every young white man they see? For reasons I can't disclose at the moment, I recently got a reasonably intimate look at the hiring process for a tech firm. White women and foreign-born men were advanced through the system, while young white men were discarded immediately.
Hey, let's honest - neither did YOU at that age, Old Man. You only did it because it was the only way up. Don't go attaching virtue to donkey work. People have options now, and if they can avoid thankless slogs and empty promises of "If you do a REALLY good job, there MIGHT be something good in it for you!" they will.
I didn’t mean no one wants to work. They don’t want this job. We have to compete with the aforementioned companies in the same talent pool. They choose those over my 160 year old company. As far as HR, I have no input are visibility into that process. If it’s is bad as you say, that’s a crime.
People want to work for these companies because they pay well and look great on a resume for when you eventually get tired of the grind and wish to work elsewhere.
What exactly does your firm do to put themselves on a similar level? Is the compensation similar?
Where I worked, maybe 10-15 over the decades left to become bank presidents or VPs at banks. Mostly with our clients. The Financial Institutions already knew them, so the hires were pretty easy.
Having worked for a number of large old companies (Motorola, Honeywell, Siemens, >< close to a job at GE) those companies have massive massive bureaucracies and you’ll spend your whole career fighting tooth and nail for every promotion, stuck in a rigid payscale structure, stocks and bonuses are only at the senior level which will take you forever to get to, etc. Young people don’t want to deal with that shit. “Just put in your time at $60k a year and some day you too can get laid off before you reach director, 20 years from now…”
Work 70 hours a week but get paid for 40, weekends and evenings too, and be responsible for the work of people you can't actually control, just so in 20 years you might get partway into six figures?
Yep. Grind for 20 years at one of these companies to maybe make Director (but probably not), or make the same salary one year out of college at one of the FAANG companies? It's a no brainer if you have the skills.
I would like to respectfully disagree. They may have to jump through different hoops but not necessarily more. It took me 30 years, 2 million airline miles, 2 thousand hotel nights, and a willingness to jump on a plane and fly anywhere in the world with little notice to solve a problem before I got a consulting engineering role. I am now at 44 years in this industry and enjoying the fruits of that effort. I don’t think you can earn it that way anymore. It was a new industry at the time. I was the second service provider SE CIsco hired in Ohio. It was new ground. The path was different. The problem is all of the big three router vendors I worked for, Cisco, Juniper, and Nokia, always ran so lean they wouldn’t hire the next generation to get them in the pipeline after the 2001 melt-down. All of them are trying to fix that now. We hired 12 college grads this year for North America. Only two are for IP products. The rest are for optical and PON applications. The average age in my group is fast approaching 60. I am one of the older as I got into it later in life than most. It is a huge problem in the industry that we are trying to address. And yes, it is a problem of our own making.
Immigration is Big Biz' way of depressing wages. Results in a higher supply of labor, and increasing the supply of any resource devalues that resource. In 1980, meat packers were black, earning decent middle class wages. By that decade's end, they were mostly immigrants, toiling under atrocious conditions where amputations were common, for barely above minimum wage. (See: Back of the Hiring Line: A 200-Year History of Immigration Surges, Employer Bias, and Depression of Black Wealth, by Roy Beck (probably still $14 on Amazon).
We're currently in an immigration surge that began with enabling legislation in 1965, and the Census Bureau projects we'll be adding nearly 20 million per decade for this and the next three decades--that's one NY state population equivalent per decade. Meanwhile, we're running out of groundwater, endangering the future of American agriculture
It's actually that Americans in the Southwest, California, the South, and other areas that become less inhabitable or uninhabitable will flee to the the northern US. Read the article. It'll make you happy you live in Ohio instead of California.
I agree, but I also appreciate the irony of the people pushing fear about climate change and workforce discrimination being the same people unapologetically exacerbating the problems by pushing unfettered immigration.
It's not BS. It's simple chemistry and physics. I learned about it in a college class in 1975. Everything the prof said would happen if we didn't stop it HAS happened, including the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has roughly doubled, with the amount of planetary heating, glacier melting, etc that was predicted.
And believe me, I wish to hell it weren't happening. I LOVE driving cars powered by internal combustion, and I find driving electrics boring. They totally lack personality and the ridiculous amount of torque doesn't make up for that.
Even Road and Track had an article about climate change, where they showed photos of the glaciers in Glacier National Park, and how they shrank over most of the previous century.
"Even Road and Track had an article about climate change, where they showed photos of the glaciers in Glacier National Park, and how they shrank over most of the previous century"
Dumbest fuckin' thing Sam Smith ever wrote, but I don't blame him for it because his heart was surely in the right place.
1975 was three years after "Limits To Growth". If you had a professor espousing modern climate theory, he was certainly outside the realm of accepted thought at the time.
What passes for "science" in the climate game is unimaginably sloppy. Most of their historical records were inaccurate past the range of usability. It makes paleontology and their variously risible depictions of dinosaurs look like hard physics.
“Climate Change” is such a convenient catch-all for that very reason. Literally anything can be climate change. Nevermind that the climate has been changing since long before we were around.
And nobody ever goes around suggesting we lower our impact by doing the simple, obvious conservation stuff like planting more trees. Or maybe something like demanding better quality consumer goods that last longer before they go in a landfill. No, we jump straight to everyone has to give up their gas appliances, eating beef, and move to urban multi family rental housing.
"And nobody ever goes around suggesting we lower our impact by doing the simple, obvious conservation stuff like planting more trees."
Rather interestingly, the current CONSENSUS is that planting trees is worthless because the carbon is only "sequestered" for the life of the tree. Which is only 40-100 years, so it doesn't matter.
Of course, when it comes time for you to give up your stove they believe that only direct and immediate action will suffice.
I've planted 155 trees on my property in the past year and will keep doing so. Eventually we will sequester ten tons or more or more per year from the new growth. My existing forest is about 20 hectares, so I'm pulling far more CO2 than I'm emitting. Maybe everyone should live like me!
they've been warning about flooding, along with higher temps, for decades. I learned about global warming in a college class in 1975. Everything predicted has been coming true. In fact, even in the late 1800s, people who understood physics and chemistry, and that combustion emitted CO2 were predicting global warming.
Flooding has become worse because of global warming. A warmer atmosphere holds more water, and floods have been increasing because of warming. Hurricanes have been more powerful because of warming.
They're all based around models and if there's one lesson you should have taken away from the past 48 months it's that the majority of models are made up bullshit that say what people want them to say.
when we went thru a k.c. packing plant on dec. 7, 1951, i saw 2 black employees. it was a ymca highschool trip from bartlesville ok. by bus. had a great innocent time...
I went on a field trip to a plant that produced carbon black. Every single employee was black. I was told it took 4 or 5 consecutive showers to turn them white again.
Same issue in Pharma, Clinical Research Organizations, and legal within those areas.
Had a friend apply for a legal job that gets reposted with a pharma company every other to every third quarter. The chosen ones can’t get it done. Helped him get another legal position and obtain his certification as a privacy professional. He just had a head hunter call to see if he would be interested in going over to the company that would not look at him.
He is going to interview for $hits and giggles. But will not take the job.
How'd they know they were white? I've heard by certain communities that accuse hiring managers of tossing resumes that have more "cultural" names and that's why color blindness doesn't work. Of course now, with DIE, HR isn't allowed to be color blind.
Just think, an Indian born man having a name of Sam Jones gets their resume tossed.
When I wrote resumes, I could always tell I was writing one for a black guy because his name sounded like either a Roman emperor, an Old Testament prophet, a Dust Bowl farmer or had a number after it.
I mean, who would you picture if you saw a name like Tiberius Stubbs III or Otis Jenkins?
I’ll be the typical millennial and ask, “won’t work for you or won’t work for you for what you want to pay them?” Is working for FAANG sexy, or because it is a payday? If you aren’t as desirable a workplace, you’ll have to pay a premium. That’s simple market economics, not laziness in millennials.
My wife could spend every dime if I let her. My wife has absolutely no idea what I make or what we have. I tried to go over it with her once and her eyes just glossed over.
I'm a low six figures millennial plus my wife's decent salary, and wholeheartedly agree with this. Vacation days and working the bare minimum I need to (giving full effort into the hours I do work though) is way more important. Yet, I volunteered last month to take a boomers management position for probably not enough money extra. :sigh: I guess that's the silent generation's work ethic I latched onto growing up.
Not the case for me and my wife at all. The faster we make money now, the sooner we have enough to retire. 41 now, should have enough to be done at 50.
We have trouble hiring people because we are small. Our work life balance compared to big 4 or even mid size is 10x better. I've never worked 100 hours in a week and I hear big 4 auditors do it all the time (from reddit so put that into consideration) but all the quality resumes go to bigger firms. Start big 4 to bounce to industry is the dream. I worked industry, it wasn't a dream.
You have to break the prestige stranglehold, which is powerful given the brands of the Big 4 (or investment banks for that matter).
A typical middle market, sell-side investment banker will sell some guy’s widget business for $100MM and collect a ~1.5% fee for his firm. That ~$1.5MM fee to the firm turns into roughly $500K pre-tax to the banker. That’s nice, but you need a handful of those a year to keep your head above water.
Meanwhile, the seller of the business - let’s assume he owns the whole thing; and let’s assume, just for the sake of example, that his business was a leading manufacturer of above ground swimming pools located in rural Tennessee, hypothetically - takes the rest of it. That’s right - $98.5MM!
The investment banker can comfort himself with the knowledge that he will spend his $500K (pre-tax) tastefully - a Calatrava, renovating the kitchen, NYE in St. Barth’s, private school fees, Charvet shirting, etc. - whereas the hick swimming pool fellow is sure to spend his windfall on Monster Trucks, Morgan Wallen tickets, taxidermy, and so on.
But eventually, that peddler of financial advice will start to wonder if it’s a better path to build a business than compete in a knife fight against hordes of driven, ambitious people just like him…
I frequently ribbed the guy who sold that business, referring to him as the “premier advisor to vertically integrated above ground swimming pool manufacturers located in the Cumberland Plateau”
Sure - and they can genuinely benefit from smart advice.
Some of ‘em find a way to spend it all - fishing boats, jet charters (to Vegas), buying a house and a new pickup truck for everyone in their entourage, funding their kids’ “businesses,” and so on.
I know a guy from my hometown who sold a bottled water business that he inherited. He got $30MM before tax. Every business he touched turned into dust. He developed a luxury equestrian community (in 2007…); he opened a steakhouse (gone); each and every one of his five sons got a new F-250 with chrome rims and lights and shit every six months or so.
That can be part of the problem. The FAANGs will give high pay and stock to the rock stars. We can’t do that but we do pay well for the role. We do have a much more balanced work-life ration than them but big money talks.
Those are, hands down, the WORST places to work in the USA. I've known people who have worked for them, and yeah, 20 years ago they were kinda okay, but now? Now they suck.
Even working in a business adjacent to them, it's amazing how quickly you get used to people not really speaking anything you'd identify as English while just sitting at their desks for 100 hours a week, accomplishing nothing.
I typed a reply above. From someone who is a "tech" job, there are two reasons: money and status. Working at a FAANG company means a lot of work, but the compensation usually makes up for it. If/when you desire a better WLB, it looks great on a resume.
Personally, I have no desire to work at one of these companies but I have friends that do and understand their motivations for doing so.
Work life balance means something when you’re 35 and have 2 kids and a spouse. When you’re 25, work life balance means working your ass off desperately hoping for a lotto hit promotion/stock grant/IPO that means you can work 0 hours at 35.
I can understand why guys who are 35 with families can’t work the insane hours any more. One simple thing alone - I can’t operate (as in, I will just sleep through a litany of alarms) on less than 5 hours of sleep a night for multiple nights in a row.
This also depends on the family. A father could work more hours if a father didn't have to worry about all the home stuff because women want to also work 50 hours or more a week instead of taking care of the kids and being homemakers.
A lot of guys I know who do work those hours - and there’s a good bit of travel involved at that age (and older), probably 100 nights a year on the road - have wives who either don’t work or who have vanity businesses (yoga instructor, needlepoint shop). The ones with two demanding careers often have grandparents nearby as supplemental caregivers.
It’s often hard to explain to your wife why you can’t spend the weekend at T-Ball or taking family pictures with a photographer or apple picking or going on a short notice beach trip because you’ve got a deal blowing up or getting announced the next week.
Money is a motivator but as the FAANGs keep hiring is the talent available worth the premium. When they were smaller, it wasn't all diversity hires and dead weight but as they keep doubling their staffs you can't tell me they are getting primo talent.
I see a similar trend with young engineers these days. For example, young EEs do not want to work in power. Their parents or grandparents worked for the utility or at the nuclear plant; that's old hat. They all want to do robotics, automation, battery research, etc. Never mind that we actually still need power (and lighting, and grounding, and telecomm), and that automation or AI isn't the answer to every process enhancement.
Newly minted Chemical Engineers are the same. They don't want to work at the nonwovens plant, or the paper mill, or the carbon fiber facility. They want to work with renewables and sustainable fuels, and the idea of designing an expansion of, say, an Anheuser-Busch plant makes their rainbow-colored hair stand on end.
Like others have said, there are more options now than ever--and some cool options at that. That being said, stuff has to work. Lights have to stay on, systems need to be maintained so that accepted quality of life is uninterrupted. My dad is a EE that still works in power. Doesn't know coding, but has never needed to. Part of me wishes I had the EE brain or similar as I do very much appreciate and see the need for the systems that undergird our modern society to keep working as flawlessly in the background as possible. Then again, I've never been the trendy/flashy type, so tending the proverbial flock of small and large plants, reservoirs and grid systems (the "herd") not only makes more sense, but would give me increased satisfaction. Stewardship of what we've been given and all of that.
I understand where these kids are coming from. Many years ago, I was an EE student. Quickly I realized that I didn’t want to spend the next 30 years of my life designing door lock mechanisms or some other mundane auto engineering job.
Even 20 years ago most EE degrees spent little time on power. Most classes dealt in high speed communications or digital design. Some of that was partly due to the de emphasis on getting a PE license and a PE license is typically required when doing serious work in power
I've heard as much from my colleagues. It astounds me that college Profs give such bad advice. I hear from many young grads that they were never told about the FE/EIT, whereas other schools make it a requirement to at least attempt it before you can graduate.
Where I went, PE wasn't required. States are all different in their requirements with PE for Civil Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, and Electrical Engineers. I know some states were even pushing Software/Computer and Computer Science majors to get PEs but I think that fell flat.
The city where I work is heavily invested into custom digital and analog electronics and Radar. The only power needed, outside of utilities, is design of 120/240 down to 24/12/9/5V DC.
I look back and think how foolish it was to have not taken the FE exam while it was fresh in mind. My university was heavily automotive focused so it was also one of those institutions that did not market PE licenses. I have not needed it to get a job so far in my career but doing what I do now a PE license would definitely give me a larger pool to choose work from.
Maybe a little bit chicken or the egg. My college class had about 35 of us in ChemEng. Maybe 5 people out of that went to work for someplace traditional (Exxon or Honeywell). The rest, if they weren't going to grad/professional school, were hired by Goldman, Pricewaterhouse, or Accenture. Is that cause they wanted it or that's who was recruiting? For my part, I tried to get jobs at a roofing materials company, Chrysler, Anheuser-Busch, GE, Dow Corning, a tool maker, and others. They wouldn't take me.
We start new college grads at about $100k which is split 70/30 base and bonus. These are consulting engineering jobs. I’m a Principle Consulting Engineer which is equivalent to a Director level which tops out over $300k with the same 70/30 split. I would put our average in the $200k - $300k range although the latter is not common.
I've heard 1 new worker for every 7 workers retiring in the trades. I've seen some young guys on a job, but not on the next job cause they couldn't make it. I didn't do vo-tec in highschool but made fun of the guys that did. Now I like working with my hands, maybe attitudes like mine were part of the problem. Also I don't think it was productive to have the first lady do tv commercials pushing college to get ahead
You know maybe telling all the millennials that they’re Special People who can Change The World and they Shouldn’t Settle and should Shoot For The Stars which coincidently involved all of them moving to a handful of expensive cities was a colossal mistake.
Boomers didn't retire and go home because they don't have a retirement.
The Greatest Generation came along, bought up all the companies with retirement plans, gutted those plans and put the money in their own pockets, then dumped the companies.
So what do you do when that 30 - 40 year retirement plan you worked for is suddenly gone? Or gone before you could even get it?
You don't retire.
I don't think there's a company out there, other than the government, who offers retirement anymore.
I’m not talking about people whose choice is work or eat dog food. I’m talking about the olds occupying the executive and director level spots at companies across the country, hoovering up their $200-300k/yr + 25% bonus.
Unless they paid cash, never spent a dime to repair it, sold it for 2 million plus AND are content living out their days in some dirt cheap retirement haven, I don’t think it’s a windfall to brag about.
This is the lie that seems to be sold to Millenials that Boomers just have buckets of cash somewhere and need to get out.
My mother got shafted when the hospital got rid of her retirement plan. What they did was give everyone some sort of measly payout and dump into a 401K. This happened in her 40's in the mid 90's. Even after investing 10 percent by the time she was in her 60's there wasn't enough.
My father was lucky enough to have a retirement but it was reduced by 1/3 because the school board lost so much money during the financial crisis that they blew the money and never recovered.
This idea that all the boomers are sitting in these 200-300K jobs is greatly exaggerated and a narrative generated by the media and the left.
Just looking at this, Gen Xers are making MORE than boomers.
This is not the average. There are so few people in Aerospace that these companies had to retain some of these people.
I've seen both in the private and public sector where engineers hang around because they are the only one's that know how to fix something that's been around for 40 years. In some sectors, they can't find anyone who knows COBOL , BASIC, or Fortran.
That's -now- I'm talking about the 80's when I started working in it and I saw so many companies destroyed. They destroyed something like 90 percent of all the aerospace companies that used to be out there.
All gone.
The F-14, one of the best aircraft ever built and way better than any F-18 (even today) Gone and it will never come back. Hell, the A-6 was better than anything the Navy's got now. Again, gone. Destroyed for Money, destroyed for Politics, and the people doing the destruction was 'the greatest generation'.
Yeah, we've got Boeing and Lockheed left and I'm not so sure how much longer Boeing is gonna hold on. Though I think that can be blamed on Boomers.
As for being the only guy who knows how something works? Yup, been there done THAT. Wasn't worth the bullshit though, so I walked away. And trust me, there is a LOT of bullshit when you're in that position. Some people would rather lose a half-billion dollars than have their ego's bruised.
Something tells me we junked the F-14 for the same reason we went from 7.62 NATO and .45 ACP to 5.56 and 9mm. The F-14 was the hemicuda to the F/A-18's Toyota Sienna - it took a strong man to fly it but was too much plane for a Strong Woman. Just like how Mike and Tyrone and Juan can handle an M14 & a 1911, but Danielle and Jessica and Megan can't.
It was a CRIME what they did to the retired F-14s, just because we didn't want Iran to theoretically get their hands on spare parts.
Know what would be appropriate compensation? Scrapping EVERY SINGLE BEV now sitting unsold on every dealer lot in America, as a Fuck You to those people who want to replace What Works with What's New.
Since the very late 80's. Or was it the early 90's? I quit a company because they did away with the retirement plans which was the only reason I went to work for them and was willing to put up with their bullshit in the first place. I was a year from vesting too and had seniority (of a sorts) for all the successful programs I'd helped along.
Not accurate, but there is a 401k like plan called the TSP and the current system (FERS) isn't as good as it was for people who were hired in the 70s and 80s.
My dad just turned 80. He is still sharp, but doesn't have either the stamina or the force of personality he used to. Nevertheless he keeps on working, both because he did not manage his money well enough to have anything to retire on and because he doesn't have anything else. He neglected both his kids for work, and then married a harridan of a fourth wife who managed to estrange my sister from him permanently. His work took him abroad, and he stayed there, even though all of his family is in the US. He refuses to delegate any of his projects even though the very same firm he founded is full of talented younger professionals.
I dread the day when his wife calls me and tells me that he is in the hospital, because I'm going to have to drop my life and travel to another continent for long enough to settle his affairs in a way that doesn't just give up all of my and my sister's interests to her. But I know it's coming and it's his damn fault that it's going to be so painful.
I often wonder if the "Boomer's refusal to retire and go home" is simply because they are the first generation to enjoy a life expectancy long enough to stay in power well past their 60s.
I would imagine there is a lot of truth to that. My grandfather, who is still kicking around at 92, retired when his pension at 62 thinking he would at best live to 70 or 75 because his parents did not even make it that far. My father is knocking on 64 and is fairly healthy and wants to work until 70 (he does make bank and enjoys his job though). He doesn't have any hobbies to keep himself busy if he quit working either which is part of it. I see myself on a body of water boating, fishing, golfing, etc. the day my financial planner says I can do it.
Absolutely! At 67 I need to keep working and paying tax to help keep the system running. In the UK we have millions claiming to be too ill to work post Covid (which has to be bollocks in most cases) and have imported 705,000 migrants (roughly the 10% of the size of London) in the last year to fill the gap. Utter madness and, in my view, morally wrong.
Don't assume that the person is responsible for keeping the secret knowledge to themselves. I retired in Oct at 66 years and 11 months. I was the man for IRS reporting for near 150 financial institutions. I begged for help for decades. I'd get it and they'd move on. The company culture has always been "Hey, new guy, work on this". And "THIS" was yours forever. I was given IRS reporting in 1979. IRS reporting and time tracking for it, was probably 3 months of the year devoted to it.
Also, If your job is something where you need to "React" like right now it can be tough to get someone else up to speed. Because you need something fixed right now. I've stepped in and tried to help concerning things I had no knowledge of.
I wrote software for 45 years. It makes no sense to show someone else the code and go into detail. A particular program may not need any modifications for months or years. A decent explanation of the what the point is, is fine. Detailed doesn't make much sense. So, if there's an immediate issue, who they going to call? You or "The future" who can't hit the ground running?
The company does ego massages with something called High Fives. I was getting them up to a week before retirement. Most of them for reacting to something hitting the fan. I knew and the company knew that in the long run it was going to suck for awhile with me retiring. Their culture. I had a boss retire at 74. Every year they'd beg him with a "Just one more year". His wife threatened him with divorce. It sucked for about 6 months after he left. He's called me for the last 5 years in February since asking how IRS processing went. They'd probably hire him back if he asked.
Had another coworker retire in May. 67+ They've called him 3-4 times since then.
The boss I mentioned was a AVP in a 700 person company. His "People" was me and the other guy. "What do those guys do?" We don't know, don't bother them. Our jobs were to take shit that no one wanted to touch and turn them into something. We did the "Icky" stuff.
Like taking over 2,000,000 individual customer PDF statements and putting a different bank logo on each one. A client bought a bank. They wanted their logo on the bank statements. Seems stupid, but that's what they wanted. Took me a couple of weeks to figure out how to do that. Then the program ran on my PC for about 100 hours. I couldn't remove the old logo and the best I could do was "Paste" a new logo into each PDF file with the logo and X,Y coordinates.
Ideally there's someone now that I'm gone that will step up for that kind of stuff. Frankly, I'm not sure there is. I've no doubt the brains are there to do it. But, not sure about the culture that will allow them.
What finished me off was the final enhancements I had stuck around for. I wrote my stuff more or less for me. If they created e-mails, the body of the e-mail made sense to me. Which wasn't going to work out that well after retirement for them. The QA process by others got bogged down. I got bored. I gave up.
I wouldn't be surprised if the family member you mention started out when things were not nearly as controlled as they are now. I used the term "Cowboy'd" for the way things were.
I wrote hundreds of ASP pages using a Yellow "For Dummies" book to hit financial institution databases using Oracle. I got sick of being called constantly with "Hey, what value is this? That?" 20 years ago. I installed them on my work PC because the PC had Personal Web Server on it. Maybe it was Windows XP. It was fine, until we were told to turn the PCs off at the end of the day. So, I did. And every dept that relied on the pages after 5 PM screamed bloody murder. So, they put in a dedicated server just for my pages. I just did the pages. Never asked for permission. Just did them. Because I felt like it. When federal and state bank auditors came in, the orders were to never mention my web pages. Never. "Who authorized these?" Uhhhhhhh.
Again, a company's culture may have been the reason for the family member's concern. Not arrogance. I'm not stupid. But, I worked with people much, much smarter than me. But will a companies culture allow them to use their brains?
If not, you may feel a personal responsibility to keep things running smoothly.
I’m sure you do. But as you point out, so much of what you did wasn’t taught, it was figured out. So you, at XX years of experience, had a storied career of figuring shit out. But how is anyone else going to come in and get started “figuring shit out” until they’re in that spot? And yeah it may not be perfect on Day 1, but it will never be until someone is put in that role and given a little bit of a chance to go figure shit out.
I remember a point about 10 years ago, I had just made management and my previous boss had left the company. It was about 6PM on a Friday evening and I had a 9AM meeting Monday morning to present the new budget. To do so I had to load it into the system, refresh some slides, etc etc. Nothing terribly complicated, but shit that needed to be done and Figured Out. I couldn’t get it to load at first and I was getting frustrated and I remember taking a breathe and saying “no one is coming to help, this either gets done and you present to the CEO on Monday, or you don’t and look like an assclown. Which is it going to be?” And I stayed and made it work and all was fine. But until I was in that position and given the chance to fail, I wasn’t going to be able to prove I could succeed. That’s the point. If no one else ever has the chance, they’ll never succeed, and all the olds can sit around saying “well they just can’t do it.” And all the young people will quit and go elsewhere, and then what?
I've been good and staying off of reddit but so many redditers would complain about "Why won't they train me" in the accounting forums. Like, the job is "Just figuring shit out" It's 90% of the job. There is always going to be a curveball, if you can't figure shit out at the entry level position, you aren't going be figuring shit out when something complicated comes along.
As a computer engineer, what I see is that much of the students out of college with "Software Engineering Degrees" or even "Computer Science" degrees aren't being taught the basics of "how to figure shit out". It's like these students were given the tools but weren't taught the engineering process of how to use the tools for a given situation.
1000 times this. When I hire software developers I actually look for candidates without computer science degrees first because they often can't "figure shit out" at all.
Sincerely,
VP of a software company with an Anthropology degree
Preach, brother. The number of "I'm retired/retiring but not actually retiring" stories I've heard from family and those around me is maddening. Just GO! You think you need to keep growing that "nest egg" (man, I hate that f******g term) into seven figures to properly retire otherwise you can't afford things like mortgage and bills for years? Get outta here. Absolutely frosts me. SS payouts nearly (or more) of what I earned monthly ($70-80k a year salary, which makes me average or a complete chump "at my point in my 'career'"), and it's "not enough" or "I really need to slash the budget to make this work." Why are you buying an expensive new car or truck, then??? Why not make an effort to sell what you have that you do not use? Blast me to Andromeda on a Space X rocket, I don't want to live on this planet any more.
Life happens, and I have realized that I have not been on whatever middle class expectationally-prescribed path for over a decade in spite of working diligently, but watching my brothers have to claw and considerably compromise accepted norms to get into houses (especially this year), among other things, is sickening.
Jack, you wrote beautifully on societal or income echelon-based expectations and how they are quite different for middle class vs. not. One has to always perform and is counted as less if not, versus the other can drift as freely as finances allow and be fairly content. I'm underperforming as an industrial designer if I take a "lesser" job I've happily held long before (ok, and even in spots this year) that's available for half the pay, but not a non-available design job. Yeah ok.
I, an early Gen-Y/Millennial--have long felt sad for the s**t Gen-X'ers have had to endure from their elders, and noticed that s**t aimed at my generation as far back as the turn of the millennium. Newspaper, TV, and online pieces about how lame young people were at the time. Always resented it. Every generation gets trash handed to them, Boomers included. I don't expect Z or anybody after me to care about or revere me. I've already experienced the normal "older people are irrelevant" that happens with every generation coming into their teen years, but X, Y, and Z+ are going to need each other as we try and sort through the coming years, and I will be here for that comradery and that attempt to unify in purpose.
I worked with several software engineers that won't retire because they can't afford insurance. You have to be 65 for Medicare and that age will likely go up. And many hang on past 65 because Medicare is worse than the employer sponsored plan.
This is writ large in the political class. The fucking Boomers won’t retire, basically stay in office until carried out feet first, and that happens waaaay too late. A Senator my age at 55 would be refreshing, and it’s all too rare.
In the civil engineering world, much of the most critical stuff - water mains, sewer mains, and electrical ductbanks - are buried underground. Because much of this infrastructure was constructed in the 1920-1980-ish era of massive growth, but prior to digitization of construction plan drawings and "as built" drawings, plans showing how what was constructed *was constructed* and where simply don't exist.
The only as builts that exist, exist in the memories, in the brains of some 100,000 boomers.
I'm all for boomers clearing the way for younger American-Americans to take over their jobs and businesses.
But when SOME of the boomertariat retires... we are in real trouble.
The as builts are in their head, and fixing stuff without them will have a difficulty tantamount to impossibility.
I'm not much on board with a lot of the reasons listed in the article, but I am with this. I work with some multi millionaire boomers past retirement age and they really need to just go away.
They have massive chips on their shoulders against someone much younger holding similar rank. Some of these people try and make my life a living hell because their egos are threatened by me. They truly believe they're the smartest people in the room while causing fuckups that cause 10s of millions of dollars. Just take your money and go home. If I could retire I wouldn't spend one extra minute in an office.
Thank you for neatly outlining the hate levelled at boomers, usually from my generation. I should also say that every boomer here is not at all the object of my displeasure because you guys are not the type to do the things your cohort gets ragged on. You guys are cool and I would 100% shoot the breeze with any of you.
i will however continue to use boomers as a punchline because its funny and for all the times millennials were the punchline of comics in the newspapers kthx
I'm going to be a pain in the ass and state that the particular is not the whole: when people criticize millenials I do my best not to take it personally and boomers should do the same.
Anyways, in MotoGP's finale Jorge Martin cut the point lead by a third in an excellent sprint race at BALENTHIA and anything looked possible.
The race, however, saw a less than stellar start for Martin who fell far back in the pack and began working his way up aggressively. Too aggressively, as he ended up crashing out by striking Marc Marquez' rear tire and taking them both out the race and ending any chance of a championship. Bagnaia's Sunday consistency came through and carried him to the end of the season as repeat victor. He saw the pit lane board indicating Martin was out and, during his check to look back, almost lost a few places. However. He held firm against the KTMs (both crashed) and DiGiantonnio's late charge.
Digi picked up VR46's open seat as revealed on test day. The Ducatis appear the same for 2024 with internals and electronics changes. Marc Marquez looked immediately comfortable on the 2023 spec Ducati and put down solid times given that he hasn't been on one before now. It will be interesting to see how much manufacturer concessions for mid season changes come into play next year as Yamaha and Honda both sport new riders and new bikes with a chance to close the development gap despite fielding fewer on race weekends.
All in all an excellent season of competition and I'm looking forward to the 2024 kick off.
Try being a Genx'er. No one even cares about us. Lol. Good attitude, generalizations of any group of people are bound to hold some truth and many, many wrongs.
I would argue that Gen X, of which I'm a member, is actually The Greatest Generation. We learned how to use computers, rather than having them control us from birth. We understood the joy of waiting for and then owning physical media, rather than having immediate access to anything ever created. We learned how to be bored, which creates patience. We benefited from the economic sprawl of the '80s. College was cheap. Nobody uploaded video of you climbing the clock tower, or getting punched in the face downtown after midnight. People argued without anyone getting offended. You could have an awkward hookup without being Me-Too'd. Everyone was just more... chill about everything. The President played sax, fingerbanged his employees, and pretended he didn't know how to smoke pot. The military was still focused on killing people and blowing things up.
Against that, however, you had AIDS PANIC, where every college in america told you that you could DIE OF THE AIDS because you ate the pussy of a 19 year old virgin girl.
AIDS PANIC was so widespread, and so deleterious to hookups, that I knew a pair of lesbian virgins who actually bought dental dams for oral sex until their AIDS tests could come back. "How did you think," I inquired, "that either of you had it before?"
Yeah, uh, we didn't have that problem. As much as no one will say who gets it, every 20-40 year old man and woman seems to know it's not them. Herpes though, lotta them have that. HIV prep is the only commercial that actually advertises to their target market.
Yet another example of the government lying to us about what would certainly kill us. Dental dams are probably the only thing less sexy than condoms. I'd probably just rather rock a cold sore for a week or two.
Although I am younger I can recall moving a game in fifty installments via floppy between computers was not cool. Same for pictures of certain content your buddy's older brother had.
We're also the generation that is simultaneously caring for children and parents without bitching and moaning about it while also propping up Boomers' social security and wondering about our own.
Some pundits are already arguing about who's going to be second next year. I rate Mark Marquez pretty highly, maybe not that high. Looking forward to next year.
So Yuki is the real deal but you had doubts about Oscar?!?
Put the two of them in the same team next year … who comes out ahead? Yuki would already be gone if Honda didn’t get control over one of the four Red Bull seats.
One wonders. The Bull hasn't exactly set the world on fire choosing their drivers over the years. They tend to be Australian whiners with an allergy to consistent performance or weirdo autistic kids who handle pressure about as well as marshmallow. Vettel made heavy weather of winning, that's for sure.
That’s why he got the seat, and that’s why he kept it after a patchy 21 and 22 season. He has a high ceiling in terms of speed, but the immaturity and outbursts - while funny - aren’t really F1-level in 2023.
He just needs to stay on the grid in 2025 (when the mother of all silly seasons will take place), and then he can transition to either of the seats at the then Honda-powered team currently known as Aston Martin in 2026. IF Stroll still controls the team, Honda will have a say over one of the seats. IF Stroll does NOT control the team, Lance certainly won’t be there.
why didn't we fans act/think like this in, say, '55? was it because the rampant selling of motorsport had,'t oozed thru our shoesoles and up our spinal columns? or is it just social media?
This is gonna be a spicy thread. My biggest boomer gripe is we (millennials) did exactly what we were told to do by our parents and the relentless shit we get for the student loans in mind boggling. "well, why did you take out loans?" "YOU FUCKING TOLD US TO!"
Also, they assume every single one of us who notices our co-generation problems are all failures. My boomer parents mostly avoided the biggest pitfalls of their generation. No Drugs, no divorce, no mid life crisis side pieces, paid 100% for my college they insisted I attend. I appreciate my parents. Some of my friends were not as lucky. If you are a boomer who help your kids on the down payment of a house, plan on leaving an inheritance, helping your children raise their own children, babysit your grand kids, we aren't talking about you.
I'm not so sure I disagree with the guy in the link... it's their money, they earned it (assuming it wasn't stolen) and can do with it as they wish...
I've encountered a fair amount of Millennials over the years who were in line to receive significant inheritances... their attitudes ranged from simple entitlement, to utterly useless human beings who were biding their time until their parents died...
...FWIW, I'm not going to get any inheritance, so maybe that's where my perspective comes from...
These two demons want to be able to tell their friends that they advanced some social justice cause at the expense of their children, and receive FEELS in exchange.
I was told - not in as many words, of course - to Go To College And Your Life Will Be Set.
So I did. So did EVERYBODY my age. We held up our end of the bargain. We only took out crippling loans because the Boomers told us it was worth it, that the jobs would be there. But the Boomers saw to it that they weren't.
So you know what? If the jobs aren't there, a little compensation is in order. Like student loan forgiveness.
I don't disagree with your chain of logic, but you have to make sure the compensation is sequestered to the people that SHOULD owe it, and not other innocent people that never took out loans.
Decide if the latter and its fallout politically and socially is worth it.
It's never getting paid back so it really doesn't matter. It's not like our taxes in equal our taxes out. We just spent 500B on immigrant invaders and we can't let Millennials discharge their loans in bankruptcy?
That’s how you break up the university cartel, make them have real skin in the game. Tax their endowments, and also make them take Required Minimum Distributions each year from their endowments, no different than a retired individual must do. And no government money should flow to any student at a university where the endowment is over $100 million. Any remaining government money which flows to a university should be matched 1-for-1 to community colleges and trade schools.
I took out student loans and I paid them off. That said, the US has no problem funding every proxy war it can over the last half century, spending countless trillions. Millions of young people in this country aren't buying homes, they aren't starting families, they aren't saving. Instead they are drowning in debt.
I'm at a delusional level of being anti-government. A "privatize the sidewalks" kind of guy.... but dammit if we're just spending all of this money and time killing people in the other countries, could we just throw a little at the Participation Trophy Kids so they don't have to import more people to save the declining birth rate?
33% forgiven for each child birthed in marriage. All of it back to square one if divorced before kid turns 18. Probably takes some fine tuning but more pro natal policy’s that aren’t dysgenic would be a start
I'm a Government Regulations Are Written in Blood and Generally A Good Thing type of fella, so let's say our viewpoints are not exactly in line with one another.
With that said, I agree with pretty much every word you wrote. And who said bipartisanship couldn't work, huh?
Every single person in my community was told this. EVERY SINGLE ONE. If you don't go to college you are a failure. God, we still tell zoomers this retarded shit.
I have told people that I've considered buying my son a machine shop instead of sending him to college. You'd think that I'd proposed to tie his hands behind his back and throw him naked into the bonobo cage.
The job I do is almost totally irrelevant to anything I’ve learned at uni: maybe American politics, basic finance courses, and GIS have been useful. Otherwise it’s just a checkmark and mostly a waste of money
I have to tell my old college roommate with both a bachelors and master's in history this one. Made me actually LOL (FWIW he is now pursuing his CPA in his mid 30s).
Having worked for one--admittedly not as a machinist:
I love the sentiment, but go carefully.
In the olden days (2010-2014) it was possible to get machined, finished, anodized PARTS from specialized machinists in china, for less than the cost of raw MATERIALS in the US. Think of a part like a motorcycle front fork triple-tree. Imagine getting quotes for $75 us for the aluminum billet, but also getting quotes for $65 to china for a completed part.
It would be absolutely critical to manage this business with a wary eye toward cost management and sending out quotes that can be delivered for a profit, to customers who pay.
Looking at the next five to ten years (heck, just the next year), my view continues to angle towards being able to make real [stuff]: machine, weld, fabricate, form, construct, lay up, etc. Yes, job security, but more the benefit behind it: usefulness and the ability to be needed in many places, thus resulting in consistent provision for one's self (and family). I'd say there are still college degrees worth the effort (STEM-related mainly), but outside of say, purely engineering-related courses, the "balanced education" classes are cancerous.
I've mentioned this before, but two of the most successful people that I know run machine shops. Both took over from their fathers and grew the business significantly.
Eh, my cousin, a middle school science teacher, said exactly the same thing at Thanksgiving. Shocked me right up. Shes a good old fashioned liberal, but the stories of her white school kids in a middle class area are hair raising.
Of course, any of the black school districts in America that DON'T push their largely illiterate students ( in quotes, you know what I mean) into jobs that demand hands are malpracticing.
To Hell with what those people think or say. I bought the "just get a degree, doesn't matter what" bullshit my mother fed me. No one in her family ever got a degree, only one on my father's side before me. Thank God I lived cheaply enough to pay for it all working at a motorcycle shop and not going into debt. A masters degree in anthropology later, everything I've needed to know for my career I learned from reading the Commodore 64 programmers reference guide at the age of 10. My firstborn graduates from trade school tonight debt-free, and I couldn't be more proud of him.
Statistically though they aren’t wrong. Lifetime earnings for a college grad are statistically significantly higher. The problem is when we don’t caveat that with “with a marketable degree” and “at a price you can afford to go into debt for”.
Yes, but every single college student should be given an amortization schedule and future earnings compared to degrees. LIke when I buy a car, I got a little sheet that said "If you stick to this schedule, you will pay this much a month and 9k in interest over the life of the loan" So I'm paying it off faster. It also locks women into working who might rather stay with the children they thought they'd never want at 18 to pay off their loans. I did an ROI for an accounting degree compared to starting as a plumber and it take 18-20 years to break even. I don't remember my exact assumptions. Taking out 100k in loans to become a teacher? Absolutely retarded. Can't even afford the interest on that.
I sincerely wish I had this before settling on a degree(s) path simply because it required the fewest amount of math courses.
I was, and remain, something of an idiot, but trusting an 18 year old to make wholesale decisions about how to spend the rest of their life is not the smartest move we as a society have made.
I now, naturally in my third career, work about as far away from my degree field as possible making a decent (if unspectacular) income for someone in my age bracket.
Right, the Pareto principle in action. 20% are making it rain. Doctors, lawyers, engineers (maybe), bureaucrats and trust funders all count on the college graduate side. Everyone else will never recoup the money and time spent vs lost wages.
I went into accounting because I figured I could make twice as much as an engineer and drink twice as much at school because it was an easier degree. I was right! This isn't true anymore. Accounting wages have not kept up with inflation
Engineering is pretty terrible but lots of us were at least keeping our heads above water and earning in the top 10-20%. Combined with financial discipline due to personality type, they are usually building a networth.
Yeah that's been my experience as well. And even though my standard definition of "hustling" is "making pornography or selling stolen tires," in this case I was going with the conventional "working your ass off."
I'd make a joke about how much virtue you could signal, but at this point they just jumped all over that Mr Beast for doing exactly that so you'd probably be vilified for having a white savior complex or something.
I actually enjoy YouTube channels Brick Builder and All New Bricks.
But then I remember I live in a world where grown-ass men make a living recording themselves playing with extremely expensive children's toys, and I start shouting for that asteroid to knock it off with the malingering.
I went to a good college and was too dumb/naive to realize that meritocracy isn’t real and the only point of a high ranked university is to network with people higher up and trade favors for jobs.
There are, off the top of my head, three practical problems with student loan discharge, aside from the obvious moral ones.
1 (sorry I don’t start at 0), you create a precedent that we will continue to bail out people in the future and it causes poor incentives (a moral hazard)
2 it does nothing to solve the actual problem of inflated college pricing and will only encourage it (see #1)
3 it’s a literal vote buying scheme pushed by the “something for nothing” party that is trying to drive us into the ground even faster than the other group.
That's why I promote the bankruptcy approach. 7 years of shit credit isn't fun but at least it isn't a lifetime burden. It would have to be tweaked to not immedietly declare out of school but it's not even on the table for discussion. It's all "just enough to keep voting for free shit but not enough to fix anything"
We’ve had this discussion before, but how do you solve the interest rate problem? Make loans dischargable and they’re unsecured debt, with interest rates 2-3x what secured debt rates are.
Can you imagine the screams from the borrowers and the universities?
Also I’d argue it shouldn’t be a high risk investment, because it should come with a meaningful payback assuming a reasonable career path, and a low ish price tag.
The government’s blanket policies distorted the student debt market, so that someone with a resume of Ivy League College>Goldman Sachs>Middle Market Private Equity>Harvard MBA>Big Boy Private Equity would pay the same rate as someone attending the University of Phoenix.
SoFi made a lot of money refinancing the former and rejecting the latter.
College/student loans has evolved into a system to scam students; boomers' advice would have been better if that had not happened. Also, some degrees have positive ROI and others not, is that really a surprise?
No, you didn't do your bit youngster. You couldn't fucking count, so it never occurred to you that your degree in useless studies from bumfuck U wouldn't pay off the $150,000 loan you took on.
(That's at least one way to look at it from my perspective)
I’ve written this before, but I once had to explain fractions to a summer diversity higher on a trading floor stock desk by drawing a pie on a piece of paper and dividing it into pieces. Wish I was imaginative enough to make that story up. Then I had to explain the decimal equivalents to her.
Some of them do not have the iq to do it. We encourage dumb people to get 100k degrees they can’t use. When they could have a middle class life with no loans.
There’s also the people who are let into universities but then fail, when they could have been successful at a lower tier school that matched their intelligence. And they still owe on the loans!
But this is just like the government giving middle class things to people who do not have middle class values, and failure results.
18 years old. As an accounting major I didn’t take finance 101 till my junior year in college. That shit isn’t taught in highschool. Most high schoolers can’t do math let alone a npv. So no, it never occurred to them. They listened to their parents. “Fuck you for trusting us”
I would rather leave money to a distant blood relative I haven’t seen for decades than to my “community”. Seriously, WTF, your “community”?!?
There’s a way to leave money to benefit family even if some family members are faulty individuals. I also realize some family members should not be left anything.
Having lived in a couple of wealthy little suburbs, it’s at first nice with all of the order and cleanliness and seemingly polite people, but after a while, I realized that these towns are no different than The Village from The Prisoner.
It's not the people of the generation, it's their timing... Sir John Glubb's "Fate of Empires" breaks down the life cycle of the world's powerful civilizations, and it's the same pattern again and again... Baby Boomers are in the phase Glubb calls, "High Noon":
"All these periods reveal the same characteristics. The immense wealth accumulated in the nation dazzles the onlookers. Enough of the ancient virtues of courage, energy and patriotism survive to enable the state successfully to defend its frontiers. But, beneath the surface, greed for money is gradually replacing duty and public service. Indeed the change might be summarised as being from service to selfishness"
The Boomers enjoyed the fruits of the postwar economic boom and then got to enjoy the rise of asset prices after the gold standard was abandoned. A series of tremendous benefits accrued to them (as an aggregate generation), and they have worked steadfastly to keep it for themselves.
I think it is worth pointing out that economic growth comes from the conversion of energy. This wasn't really possible on a meaningful scale until the coming of the industrial revolution. It seems to me that the west generally (and the US in particular) had a simply massive advantage after WW2 as the rest of the world operated with (at least) one hand tied behind its back (self-inflicted though it may have been). So we had access to most of the world's oil and gas with very little competition, ie at a lower price than it would otherwise have been. Think of it; China (huge population) enjoying Mao's Great Leap Backwards into starvation, India (huge population) closing its economy to socialist autarky, Africa (large population) in post-imperial tribal kleptocracy, Russia and its reluctant east European satellites (large population) in the frozen dead-end of Communism, South America (large population) flip-flopping itself from right to left into bankruptcy (with possibly some gringo-ist help along the way, one might consider). So who is left? The US, Western Europe and the civilised bits left over from the British empire. Happy days! But, having had it easy, now we have to compete with a much larger chunk of the rest of the world for resources and with their lower labour costs (in part because they lack those nice but expensive Government benefits, in part just historic). So the modern era was never going to be an easy ride for the West. Then add, as Sherman points out above, the funny money era starting when Nixon (not a boomer) cut the dollar/gold link in 1971 (when the French sent a submarine to the US to collect gold to pay for their lovely wine/cheese exports - dunno what else they sold as it certainly wasn't Renaults). But nobody foresaw how much of an asset boom would be created or how it would lead to utter nonsense like QE and ZIRP. So a smart boomer is one who didn't question his luck and just got lifted by the tide. The dumb boomer is the one who asked questions and got himself on the wrong side of that trade. Which is why I shall be carrying on working....
The Boomers' sin with their houses wasn't "selling them to Chinese real-estate interests" - relatively few of them are owned by the Chinese. It was imposing draconian zoning rules in rich places, so that no new houses could be built anywhere close to the majority of available jobs. Depending on who you ask we have a shortage of somewhere between 2 and 6 million houses in this country, and it is most acute in all the places where the job market is best. There are multiple causes for this but boomer-imposed zoning is one of the biggest.
And exorbitant housing costs are by far the biggest driver of economic malaise, and also a big contributor to other social problems that have gotten worse over the last 30 years.
Houston is "unzoned," but the rich parts of it achieve the same effect as restrictive zoning through covenants that run with the land. Nevertheless the infill development in some parts of Houston is better than we get in the coastal cities.
Dallas has just expanded despite its zoning through sheer force of sprawl, replicating the LA model of paying for everyone to have huge lots and houses by forcing them all to spend 2 or 3 hours a day in their cars. That has worked well to date because there are few geographic obstacles to sprawl in Dallas. But it (like LA and Atlanta) is getting so big that it's no longer possible to commute from the outskirts to the job centers. Housing prices in the built-up areas are going to start rising, just like they did in LA, unless infill starts to be allowed.
Not an unfamiliar conceit. Basically with you, as far as the problem itself (housing costs too high) is concerned.
But in places where this "problem" (zoning density limits) gets "solved", its often ugly.
Arlington County, VA recently abolished single family zoning. It sounds nice, but
-the process did not take into account engineering constraints to water, sewer, electric, gas, etc
-there was no ballot issue or democratic aspect to the proposal, thus a county board exclusively composed of hyperlibs with zero technical or civil engineering background voted for a hyper partisan liberal proposal that will overtax every supporting engineering system while overcrowding schools, turning heritage trees into stumps, and turning quiet, single-family, ownership-society neighborhoods into transient renter neighborhoods, with carve-outs for low/no-income residents to ruin the schools, parks, and low-noise/no-crime aspects of the neighborhood.
So yeah - it's a problem--but no one on the YIMBY spectrum has made a proposal I've seen that didn't come with drastic drawbacks that are worse than the problem itself.
I would add that there's an odd aspect to almost everyone who is working toward densification and YIMBY goals.
Solving the problem is probably simple: densify what is already dense without any need to abolish or irrevocably change any one particular zone district. yes it turns charming mid-rise towns into ghastly glass-and-steel bughives, but theoretically it (could) solve(s) the problem.
Yet everytime the issue is discussed on any of the internet's public squares - twitter, NYT comments section, reddit - there's always a really strange and schizoid sub-current of revanchist hatred directed toward single-family zone districts and homeowners, as if such people should not exist (or if they must exist, they should be unable to choose to live in a single family home). It's really weird, and it makes an honest person wonder if the YIMBY crowd do not secretly desire something much more sinister than merely reasonably-priced housing.
It also seems that nearly everyone speaking on the issues of YIMBYism and densification is an urban crime denialist, a per capita denialist, and a committed Chesa Boudin voter basically. Such people are clearly unfit to make decisions for others, much less city-scale decisions on matters that have direct effects on the safety of their fellow citizens.
They hate single-family housing because they do not own a home themselves and/or they own a home in an area that is not where they are pushing for housing reform.
Basically, they hate you and wish to destroy the fabric of your neighborhood out of spite.
Multi family housing sucks. I loathe townhomes with a passion. We just had a developer buy land that wasn't supposed to be developed and he is putting in big row homes at 1.2mm a pop into a neighborhood of single family housing. 1.2 mm isn't affordable housing. I'm not a fan.
-Not in intermixed with single family zone districts - they should be proximate to urban cores / downtowns where they are density-appropriate
-Filled with civically minded, extremely conscientious people --- no loud dogs or loud late night music and partying (The only late night noise that is acceptable is a young baby crying)
-Brick or concrete block double firewall between houses for noise minimization
Under these circumstances, it makes sense.
Basically 0 recently constructed townhouses that I know of are built this way, much less inhabited by people who can universally meet these basic behavioral standards.
I don't really even consider those townhomes. I'm talking about 30 identical townhomes all put next to each other and made out of cardboard. I really don't like them.
there are some lovely groups of connected housing in nashville's belle meade--highfalutin--district. i was told they were called 'cluster homes.' my late friend bill called them 'clutter homes.' the whole small areas are fenced and kinda look like attractive postcards.
They’re retarded left wing autists who grew up playing Sim City and think that anything less than maximum efficiency per square foot of urban space is obscene, human nature be damned. I.e., the people of that group too dumb to get tech jobs.
Here's a thought: Make it so people can live in shipping containers, storage facilities, decommissioned gas stations and other non-standard enclosures, as long as they sign documents stating they understand the lack of amenities. Not everyone needs or wants 1,200 square feet of wall-to-wall carpet and WiFi.
The reason you can't do that, of course, is that few people would pay $2,000 a month for a place to live if they could get one for $200.
Where there are jobs, it's a binary choice: densify, or price all the young people out. If you preserve the lovely old single-family home neighborhoods, you are going to have Los Angeles housing prices to go with them. It's inevitable, a straightforward matter of arithmetic.
Having lived outside of the United States, I know it's possible to have equally beautiful and desirable neighborhoods at 10x the level of density. We need to change our approach to development and permitting to get there, but I guarantee you that you would enjoy living in the dense neighborhoods in Vienna or Munich that are full of parks, trees, playing kids, quaint retail streets, and old wise people sitting on benches eating sandwiches. Those cities, meanwhile, are affordable enough that real live middle-class people live in them, which is just a memory in Seattle or San Diego.
THis is what people of a particular political persuasion believe and claim in public, but the math never actually adds up in reality.
Example, this has happened in MY formerly SFH neighborhood. Single family zone districts are abolished, and the minimum by-right density is a triplex here. Developers building them are not pricing new triplexes lower than old, 1950s 3B1B SFHs.
Example prices:
50s boomer 2000sf 3b/2b ~950k-1.2M
New Duplex: 1.7-1.9M
New SFH: 2.3-2.5M
It literally doesn't address the problem (buying an existing house or condo & fixing up remains the cheaper alternative) but it is a nice handout to developers who fund political campaigns and it enables EHO mandates that require some affordability (ie blockbusting) plus rental schemes in ownership neighborhoods.
This issue is yet another example of the innumeracy of the naive utopian. Next you'll tell us paroling prisoners will lower crime
You're not building dense enough. Here are real-world examples from my medium-density city neighborhood, where apartment buildings are now fully legal (although we won't do it citywide):
Teardown SF, mostly built in the 1900s-10s: $1M - $1.2M
Old SF in good condition: $1.5M - $1.8M
New build larger SF (the only thing you'd get if you kept SF zoning): $3M+
Townhouse, usually built 6-8 to a SF lot: $800k - $1M
Apartment in a large apartment building: $500k-$1M depending on size
Sure, if you replace one house with only three in a high-demand place, it's not going to have much impact.
But architecturally speaking it's not realistic to replace one house with 6-8 on a single 6500sf lot configured for SFHs. Most would never see sun. The blocks are not configured properly, because the neighborhood was designed for SFHs
This still carefully elides that the water/sewer pipes and electric services and substations were not made for upzoned demand, and *will not be replaced to suit uprated demand.* In my hood, what you describe is not possible without infrastructure failure or a massive, impossible-to-fund infrastructure replacement program.
The more we talk the more i get the sense upzoning really isn't in american-americans' benefit. Had we solved the border crisis this would not be a problem. Obviously we can solve this problem much more easily on the demand side by closing the border and repatriating illegal aliens. It may be unpleasant but we have to put the needs of actual american citizens first.
"But architecturally speaking it's not realistic to replace one house with 6-8 on a single 6500sf lot configured for SFHs. "
There is a project on my block right now that is doing exactly this. It appears to be 9 townhouses on a 5000 sf lot. All of the townhouses have at least one side facing either a street or a wide alley, so none of them are in the dark. 6 is typically the minimum, usually in two layers of three each.
"This still carefully elides that the water/sewer pipes and electric services and substations were not made for upzoned demand, and *will not be replaced to suit uprated demand.*"
That's a political choice just like the zoning. We are paying large fees on new construction and renovation to fund major expansions of our sewer systems (water is already fine). Our electric utility has installed several new substations in the last decade. The residents of new units can fund new infrastructure if officials and voters allow it.
"Obviously we can solve this problem much more easily on the demand side by closing the border and repatriating illegal aliens."
Where I live, very little of the booming demand (we have been the fastest-growing large city in the country for a couple years running) is from illegal aliens. It is mostly from people, some but not all of whom are legal immigrants, chasing tech industry jobs. Setting aside the humanitarian nightmare that a mass deportation would cause, it would have very little effect on demand in most of the nation's hottest housing markets. It would mostly immiserate places that are already struggling economically.
I used to live in a dense, urban rowhome district and was forced to move when my city simply stopped enforcing laws against violent crime in 2020. I PREFER that way of living to suburban life. With a big caveat: in America you need law enforcement to make it work!
Ask yourself, what does Vienna or Munich (at least historically speaking!) not suffer under that American cities have?
The answer is a statistically numerous criminal recidivist underclass that terrorizes the taxpaying citizenry.
I'd STILL be living in what is (for american development styles) tantamount to vienna, hardly needing a car at all, were it not for the impossibility of raising a family around violent repeat-offender criminals empowered to act with utter impunity by democrat city council and democrat mayor. Here are some nice statistics that can't be lied about: https://nitter.net/fentasyl/status/1728082500293992722#m
(Note these numbers if anything probably understate the issue, as people won't even call the cops for most crimes less violent than carjacking)
However much of a naive-utopian wrapper you want to cognitively blanket this issue in, the party you claim to work for did this to my former city. No one else is responsible. And no, I shouldn't have to run for office to fix the issue. Citizens should agree that committing violent crime is unacceptable. As a country, USians can't even agree on basics like that, which is why this country's people and its political elite/journo class are at each others THROATS and will be for some time
I still live in a near-car-free neighborhood, with my family of 4, and am not suffering this impact. I agree people need to be safe. Many American cities in fact remain pretty safe, and even in many cases safer than their surrounding inner suburbs. (For example, New York is safer than the average urbanized place in America.) Unfortunately DC is not among them, which is too bad because it's a beautiful place otherwise. I lived there for six years and miss it.
Boomers are the quintessential FYGM hypocrites. We need to be tough on crime, we need to lower spending and we need to building more housing becomes: my don is innocent, don't touch my social security and not in my backyard. Boomers are running the country and it is fucking deplorable. Lol.
I don't really hold anything against the Boomers and only use the word to piss off the people it offends while also most likely fitting the above description. Plenty of opportunity in this country. No one wants to put in the time or effort previous generations did. Sucking shit at the plant 50 hours a week for 45 years to get a pension, die and never see a cent of it does not hold the romance it once did.
I’m a boomer. Peak boomer in fact. I don’t believe in age cohort labels that use statistical correlations to paint a whole generation. It seems that a black man born in Louisiana in 1946 is like an Asian woman born on the upper east side of New York in 1964 because they are both boomers. Using terms like boomer and millennial is intellectually lazy unless you are using it to define when a person was born. Every generation has assholes that fuck things up. In some cases they happened to be boomers. Some assholes are boomers. I’m a boomer. Am I an asshole? Probably, but not because I’m a boomer. I don’t know one thing for sure. Everyone who confuses correlation with causation eventually dies.
I had a very uncomfortable conversation with some co-workers about the "old man they hate" in the department. He is 48. They assumed I would also hate him, since I am not 48. They're right about that, anyway.
No one has ever accused me of being an intellectual. Thanks, I think...
As far as being a Porsche guy I like how some of them drive so I choose to drive them. I have had just as much fun in my Miata and my Minis. I refer to myself as a serial car buyer. I have owned over 60 in 50 years of driving. Twelve of which have been Porsche sports cars plus three Macans. I have never kept a car more than two years. I am the depreciation king unfortunately.
Born in very late 1961 to young, very young, parents so I seem to be in between generations at times. Apparently being young and pregnant didn't get my parents in on the financial lotteries of the times as they stayed that way. Lost the only house we ever had while I was still in diapers and lived in a series of sketchy (and eventually a little less sketchy) apartments until I graduated high school. No money for college, cars, much of anything for me so I lit out on my own and learned to make do. Bounced around working on college while loading trucks, delivering newspapers, catching sleep and a roof over my head whenever possible.
I went into law enforcement on the advice of a friend and worked 30 years dragging myself upwards in fits and starts. Reasonably successful due to hard work so I'm thankful if nothing else. But...more recently I was over hiring for a time in my agency and I was shocked when we did screening as EVERY young candidate came in a brand new car. Came with brand new clothes, a brand new phone and parents who (shockingly) called us to see how the interviews went to try and help their "kids" get a decent job. I had a $500 Honda Civic when I was hired, no suit but decent clothes that I hustled to buy. So I'm burdened with believing that hard work and dedication will get one ahead in America. I'm probably and little bit right and a good bit wrong as usual. Probably too old to change my viewpoints anyway ;)
I write not to condemn the boomers, but to ... sort of defend them. Backhandedly.
(Note this doesn't apply to all boomers, and especially not to many of the beloved boomers here)
TL;DR You're never going to agree about the world when you don't agree on the facts describing the world.
I have debates similar to the above with one of my in-laws from time to time.
One way in which white collar boomers, often totally unintentionally, ladderpulled everyone younger than them, is with the immigration thing.
Of course they were not responsible for the Hart Celler immigration act. They had no idea what would be entailed, and it appears to have been sold under false pretenses.
But you can talk to a boomer about it, and many of them are *not even aware* that immigration is happening at the level it is. They don't know the statistics; most boomers woudn't believe you if you tell them the US went from 90-95% white to ~53% in 58 years, the greatest population migration in known history. Such statistics are carefully omitted or lied about in the Post, Times and Journal. Most boomers haven't been to South Texas, or even the areas where the post-1965 migrants live *in their own states.* They don't go to Home Depot, where they might be the single only European-American--- their contractors go to Home Depot for them. And when they do see entire neighborhoods and counties from the global south, most professional boomers say, "Good! It's good they're getting a chance to live the American Dream, like we did." Many professional boomers seem to be ignorant of the fact that European-derived, first-world people were a necessary part of building and maintaining European-derived, first world America.
Boomers love diversity migration because it makes: their lawn service cheaper, their blue collar labor class more docile (or else!), and their first-year associates *totally non-threatening*. A guy of equal intelligence on equal footing with equal dominance is a threat or will be eventually. A guy (or gal!) with *more* intelligence but lesser footing and dramatically lesser dominance needs isn't a threat at all, and might never become one.
Diversity has been good to boomers. I don't think I've ever convinced even a single boomer that their children and grandchildren having to live as aliens in their own homeland is a negative. "What's the matter, Donkey," a beloved boomer once said to me with a smile, "You don't like cheap lawn care?"
It's certainly in the running. I'd like to see an updated edition with data through 2020 to gauge whether the 1960-2010 trends are accelerating as some suspect.
I remember reading that book and The Devil’s Pleasure Palace (about the Frankfurt School of identitarian Marxism) around 2014-2015 and thought those seemed like a bit much but whooooo boy did those two books turn to be more terribly correct than you’d like.
"Not seeing past their own desires, eating their children's future and mortgaging their grandchildren for further material benefit". Whether by voting a certain way or not.
I have no skin in this as a first gen unwanted (possible) immigrant, save for being an early/mid gen Y kid, and seeing this from an outside perspective.
On your note about needing the boomers, most of them are so oblivious to anything but their own selfish wants that the 'keeds' don't have the time to deal with it, being busy trying not to literally starve.
The last two paragraphs of Donkey Konger's comment is 100% the sentiment I've seen as well.
Item 1: since this is an open thread, I have an open request. My family is planning a vacation (my parents, my wife and our three kids, my sister and her husband and their two kids, possibly my brother and his wife) and we are looking for a nice, secluded place, preferably on a lake with some water-based activities to enjoy for a week in August. Does anyone here know of a nice place that won't break our bank we could go? Possibly in the Appalachians somewhere. Seclusion, as in very few or no people is our top priority.
Item 2: Speaking of my family, I only understand the boomer thing in the abstract. My parents taught me to underachieve with the best of them. My dad went to college in the late 70s and was presented with two majors, computers or marketing. He took one look at computers, thought there was no future in it, and chose marketing. He became a salesman and had a job with a company selling paper forms that allowed him to give us a comfortable life until the late 90s when computers took over everything and his company downsized him in perhaps my lifetime's biggest "Ha ha, I told you so." My mom earned a Master's in English and worked at a store in the mall with her buddy where they made fun of the people who came in to shop. So they accumulated no assets aside from some debt and, especially in the case of my dad, had to watch in horror as their peers sent good jobs overseas at the turn of the millennium. Don't worry, although they struggled for a while, my dad now drives a truck and loves it (his boss is always so far away!) and my mom sold furniture for a while and is now retired. So, a happy ending, sort of? Still no assets, though. I aim to die the way they will: leaving behind pretty much nothing but loving kids and happy memories!
My parents have a place in Canaan Valley, WV. A beautiful condo near lakes, mountains, hiking spots. You could rent theirs (I’m sure I can get you an ACF discount) and the condo next door (which is a lovely unit maintained by a wealthy older lady psychologist who daily drives a C7 Z06) for a total of 6 bedrooms and 4 full bathrooms. The condo complex has a nice pool, fishing pond, and is pretty secluded. Nearby there’s Pendleton Lake for kayaking, Blackwater Falls, cool restaurants, and Dolly Sods which is breathtaking.
Here you go. If you’re interested, I could secure the time myself and give a significant discount. The people watching from the back deck in the summers can be fun: once got to watch Joe Manchin and Biden’s Senior Advisor negotiating the Inflation Reduction Act in a hot tub while listening to Disney show tunes
No problem! The place was a passion project for my father and myself while we were holed up during covid; it’s pretty nice and plenty to do nearby. It’s not explicitly pet friendly, but my dad and I have made some exceptions for friends.
And you’re from MI right? Weirdly enough I’ve driven from there to Ann Arbor for some less than family friendly reasons, and it’s a decently easy drive
Yep. I live in Marquette County in Upper Michigan, and my parents live right across the border from Toledo. Cutting across Ohio after driving all of Michigan is really no big deal.
I do the Toledo-Detroit thing just about any time I travel south or east and it's often after a long drive home, so the 60 miles to Detroit or even less to Ann Arbor from Toledo seems like a short drive. I figure anything less than 300 miles is a short drive.
Hi Bryce. My sister decreed it wasn't close enough to water for her so we will keep looking for a different location. I would again like to express my gratitude for the offer. If there's ever a way I can help you in the future I'd be glad to help.
No problem :) I think a few other ACF members are interested, so my offer might pay off :) and, if you ever totally lose your mind and decide to decamp to Ocracoke Island, NC I can help there too!
The whole thing was just fucking weird, but there’s an even better lining:
There were three cars at Manchin’s place. His Maserati Levante, Steve Richetti’s (Biden’s advisor) Audi A8L, and some aide’s Kia EV6. Disney music aside (which had to be a Biden person’s thing, Joe is much more for yacht rock and Led Zep in my experience), the vibe was just weird.
The best part? After negotiations of the bullshit climate deal concluded, THIS happened to the EV6 en route from Canaan to DC
I have a relative on a lake in Maine just outside Portland. She rents the place out, it's on a dirt road but 15 minutes from the city. Get in touch with Jack who can connect us up. I'm sure I can get it cheap(er) if you're interested.
Fair questions about Walt Kowalski's children in Gran Torino. But Kowalski was an assembly worker, and doesn't fit the profile of the boomers that Gen X and Millennials rail against. He didn't amass great assets or become addicted to power like women become addicted to Botox.
Following WWII women stayed/entered the workforce. This event alone put massive downword pressure on wages followed by virtually unrestrained illegal immigration. No wonder a young man can't expect to find a job earning enough to buy a house and raise a family.
The Boomers, as you note, enjoyed access to decently affordable education. I sometimes wonder how much the education boom contributed to their slide toward decadence and self dealing?
RIP Racer Phil. I knew him primarily as a Tire Rack installer of all things. I'd order up a set of tires and send them to Phil's house, then look forward to talking about racing, Mazdas, and wrenching on cars while he mounted and balanced tires in his screened-in porch. A nice and knowledgable guy that said he was just installing tires for a few extra bucks to go racing.
That's how I knew Phil, too. He didn't discriminate...he put Star Specs on my Miata, then put TripleTreds on my Buick. He had a cat named Toyo and a 1st-gen RX-7 and a Neon ACR in his garage (Jack, didn't you buy that Neon from Phil) and a Sienna he used to tow his race cars. RIP, Phil. You will be missed.
Bought the Neon and used it for an R&T article before selling it to Jake Rupert who is slowly catching up on all the deferred maintenance, including body brake lines that just rusted to dust.
If he hasn’t tackled this yet, Inline Tube sells pre-bent stainless lines for the Neon. I remember having to massage a few bends but the fit was very close to perfect.
Some sympathy for the boomers: VOATING is useless. No matter what they say and who you vote for they will fink on you. Both parties. No exceptions. Any boat rockers will be dealt with summarily and/or sandbagged. Perfect examples of finks on the right, Ronnie Raygun and GWB and on the left Clinton. Potential boat rockers dealt with: Perot, Sanders, Trump, RFK Jr. Most of the current gerontocracy are older than boomers.
Most of the worst and most long lasting damage was done by the Greatest Gen, after the misty eyed optimism that winning the war against the Japs and Nazis (and destroying Europe and leaving half of it in the hands of the Communists) gave them the impression that they could and *should* do anything.
The twin ponzis of Medicare and SS and the unassailable military industrial complex (and therefore the forever wars) are the big ones and currently make up 90% of all fedgov expenditures. If you want to get spicy, pushing the Civil Rights Act at bayonet point also counts. Burn, Loot, and Murder and associated inner city mayhem all lead indirectly from it.
Another one you missed is the Boomer’s refusal to retire and go home. Generations before them retired at 55 or 60 if they hit a certain amount of success, letting the following generation take over the reigns. Today’s Boomers are hanging on into their late 60s and even 70s. I had one family remember tell me “I can’t retire, the next group doesn’t have anyone who can step up and take my role and do what I do.” Aside from the incredible arrogance there, part of the reason no one can step in (says you) is that you haven’t done it and let them try. It becomes self fulfilling.
This is especially true in academia, which allows the moldy nonsense ideologies of the 1960s to endure and propagate.
No kidding. I had an 80something history professor who taught Russian history: I kid you not, this guy was a card-carrying communist who thought the Soviets had it right. You couldn’t understand him, he mostly bumbled through lectures and never really graded anything (not because of commie egalitarianism or anything, he was just fucking senile and couldn’t use computers). Because he’d been Department Chair during the HW Bush administration, he earned some ridiculous salary (195k I think) for teaching one class a semester and having not really published anything relevant since 1997. When the budget cuts came I think he volunteered to retire to save like 3 jobs that collectively didn’t add up to his salary. At least he finally went and nobody actually useful had to leave.
Spot on wrt humanities (I gather; not my field), but not so much in nat sci. Sure, we've got old fogeys collecting six figures for lectures they haven't updated since Babylon fell, but the new crop have gotten a fundamentally worse education. Hence the current campaign against imposter syndrome, which is just a funny way of admitting that students are getting dumber. I'd like some more olds sticking around.
From the conservative podcasts I listen, much of the ideology is coming from fresh doctorates who want to teach DEI stuff. One of the guests said half her teachers were only 5 to 10 years older teaching nothing but feminism and any flavor of victimhood that could be found. Older professors are getting ran out because the students want to learn revisionist history instead.
"Older professors are getting ran out" sounds like pure boomer bullshit.
It isn't though. Are there older professors hanging around? Sure. The majority of professors in these liberal arts colleges are people who got there doctorates in the last 5 years and can't find work so they go teach. Because of the demand for college education, there aren't enough boomers to teach anyways. I graduated 20 years ago and I only had a handful of boomer professors. Most were all Older Gen Xers ( mid 30's to mid 40's in 2004).
As I said later down below, I think too many folks who are blaming boomers really are blaming older Gen Xers and just don't realize it.
Mid 40's in 2004 is boomer.
Not arguing the larger point but as a Boomer (71) I had to look it up. In 2004, a Boomer could've been between 38 and 56.
One of my good friends is 24, 6’6 handsome, graduated with a 3.9 GPA in business from a respectable school, wants a job in pharma sales. These jobs used to be a dime a dozen when my mom was 28 and got her first one: it’s been an incredibly lucrative career for her, too, regularly netting 250/300k per year (to her credit, she’s also highly competent and works harder than most others, and her income isn’t really close to the norm). I asked my mom why the jobs were so slim and why he couldn’t get any, aside from companies operating with smaller sales forces: she told me that, at her last sales conference, she was at a table of 10 people. She was the youngest one at the table at 60, the oldest roughly 77. Multiple boomer colleagues have retired from Merck or something, only to hop over to Pfizer for another job and fat paycheck until the next round of layoffs. One of these fellows is about 73, owns an excavation firm, golf course, real estate brokerage, and collision repair shop: absolutely no need to keep pulling up the ladder from young people, but can’t let himself retire because “if I quit working I’ll die.” My mother has no real desire to work beyond 61, but the same cannot be said of her colleagues.
Another side effect of feeling disconnected from their families; they won't quit work because it's all that gives them THE FEELS.
This also continues to be true in the auto industry. I'm HONESTLY just waiting for people to become infirm and go away.
Even with all of the recent buyouts, it isn't happening.
Plus, with the recent uaw contract, it's likely that those senior jobs won't be backfilled when they're vacated.
Which would make sense if the entire industry was going to just succumb to the magic fairy ev, ai, and automation future provided by silicon valley code monkeys who only edit other people's work from stack overflow, but that's not what I'm seeing in practicality.
I predict what you say to be true in the short term, and then some ousters at a high level and a reversal and panic hiring, but by then the talent pool may truly have shrunk a lot.
"code monkeys who only edit other people's work from stack overflow,"
Is this a problem? I love stack overflow. Why reinvent the wheel? You still have to understand the problem you're trying to solve to know what to look for.
My FIL and my Mother both got Covid packages, and both are still working despite not needing to. My FIL's excuse is he enjoys his work and he can only play so much golf. My mothers is that health insurance, which she could afford to pay for, is too expensive so she will work until she can get on Medicare. Meanwhile I tally up my money daily to figure out just how much more I need to be able to scale back my career.
I sometimes wonder if they (boomers) were indoctrinated by their depression era parents that they must work while they have the opportunity regardless of if they need to or not because it isn't always guaranteed.
Winston: "So you add up all the hours in a day you could be working. What is that, 20?"
Red: "20?! Something's outta whack there. Either your math or your priorities, something's wrong!"
And yet they were also the hippie generation who "dropped out".
My dad will probably never fully retire. In my case, I don't mind for the most part because I get to see dad every day but he has trouble giving up the control. In his defense, I probably should've started working a little harder before I had kids.
Have you ever seen a tombstone with these words?
"If only I had spent more time at work."
I work 60-70 hours three months a year and it sucks. In November there is nothing to do. I should be doing CPE instead of commenting here.
I know what the PE stands for but what's the C
"I only have one regret: I should have worked more."
- Jack Donaghy from '30 Rock'
Oddly enough, a cinematographer would still be alive if that actor would have worked less.
This is why you're seeing so many family-owned businesses go under. If you resent your parents for neglecting you to keep their shop/restaurant/bar/store running, why would you in turn do this to your own children?
My late brother-in-law's father made a good living doing accounting for a bunch of diners in the NYC area owned by Greek immigrants. The kind of place parodied by Belushi on SNL as "cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, coke, no pepsi." After his dad died, Sandy left his actuary job with a big insurance company and he took over his father's accounts. Then, as the first generation owners started to retire, their kids had no interest in working 100 hrs a week.
Hard to blame boomers when a company they never worked for hires them. I'm sure the people doing the hiring are younger than them and they see a benefit in hiring them as opposed to someone younger.'
Anyone with "Feelz" with it not being fair, are not serious people. A company doesn't give a fuck about your feelings. If they think an old timer can bring in money better than someone younger, oh well.
I just retired. Our clients are financial institutions. Our customer service is for them. So, you need to know banking and you need to know the computer system. We had a guy retire at 65. Got bored. Came back. Got cancer. Took chemo. Never missed a day. Retired at 80. The company begged him to stay. The FIs loved him. Smart guy. Died at 98 with 2 older siblings over 100 still kicking. I believe there were a couple that had previously passed that were over 100.
His family history showed everyone to be extremely long lived. His 65 was like everyone else's 50.
You know who quit working and immediately died?
(It’s Joe Paterno)
That certainly couldn't have been the shame of employing a pedophile who abused kids under their care at football camps and looked the other way the whole time so they can all pretend like it's a big shock that no one knew about when it FINALLY came to light after years and years of coverups. Right?
You might look into John Ziegler’s work in Paterno and Sandusky
Charles Schulz, cartoonist, died the day before his last strip ran.
Yes, this. They occupy seats at the top and won't give them up, either blocking the ladder or pulling it up.
There’s another side to this. I’m 66 and plan to work two more years. I enjoy my job and they pay me well to do it. I work in the field that built the platform you are using for this discussion, Internet Protocol routers. I have been working with them since 1992. We can’t get younger people for these roles because they don’t want to do them. They all want to work for Google, Amazon, Apple, or Facebook. We have a new college grad hiring program we started last year where got some good candidates but it takes time to get them up to speed. IP networking is not sexy enough for most computer science and engineering grads.
"We can’t get younger people for these roles because they don’t want to do them."
How much of that is due to HR relentlessly shredding the resume of every young white man they see? For reasons I can't disclose at the moment, I recently got a reasonably intimate look at the hiring process for a tech firm. White women and foreign-born men were advanced through the system, while young white men were discarded immediately.
And yeah, also this.
I am incensed.
"Nobody wants to work anymore!"
Hey, let's honest - neither did YOU at that age, Old Man. You only did it because it was the only way up. Don't go attaching virtue to donkey work. People have options now, and if they can avoid thankless slogs and empty promises of "If you do a REALLY good job, there MIGHT be something good in it for you!" they will.
Just like you would have.
Makes you want to go to work with a sign hanging around your neck that reads, "bauxite" or "Sitka spruce."
I didn’t mean no one wants to work. They don’t want this job. We have to compete with the aforementioned companies in the same talent pool. They choose those over my 160 year old company. As far as HR, I have no input are visibility into that process. If it’s is bad as you say, that’s a crime.
People want to work for these companies because they pay well and look great on a resume for when you eventually get tired of the grind and wish to work elsewhere.
What exactly does your firm do to put themselves on a similar level? Is the compensation similar?
"Is the compensation similar?"
You already know the answer to this.
Where I worked, maybe 10-15 over the decades left to become bank presidents or VPs at banks. Mostly with our clients. The Financial Institutions already knew them, so the hires were pretty easy.
Having worked for a number of large old companies (Motorola, Honeywell, Siemens, >< close to a job at GE) those companies have massive massive bureaucracies and you’ll spend your whole career fighting tooth and nail for every promotion, stuck in a rigid payscale structure, stocks and bonuses are only at the senior level which will take you forever to get to, etc. Young people don’t want to deal with that shit. “Just put in your time at $60k a year and some day you too can get laid off before you reach director, 20 years from now…”
That's the Salary Trap.
Work 70 hours a week but get paid for 40, weekends and evenings too, and be responsible for the work of people you can't actually control, just so in 20 years you might get partway into six figures?
Wow, you don't think much of me, do you?
Yep. Grind for 20 years at one of these companies to maybe make Director (but probably not), or make the same salary one year out of college at one of the FAANG companies? It's a no brainer if you have the skills.
Lots of people want your job. The issue is they are required to jump though many more hoops get it than you did
I would like to respectfully disagree. They may have to jump through different hoops but not necessarily more. It took me 30 years, 2 million airline miles, 2 thousand hotel nights, and a willingness to jump on a plane and fly anywhere in the world with little notice to solve a problem before I got a consulting engineering role. I am now at 44 years in this industry and enjoying the fruits of that effort. I don’t think you can earn it that way anymore. It was a new industry at the time. I was the second service provider SE CIsco hired in Ohio. It was new ground. The path was different. The problem is all of the big three router vendors I worked for, Cisco, Juniper, and Nokia, always ran so lean they wouldn’t hire the next generation to get them in the pipeline after the 2001 melt-down. All of them are trying to fix that now. We hired 12 college grads this year for North America. Only two are for IP products. The rest are for optical and PON applications. The average age in my group is fast approaching 60. I am one of the older as I got into it later in life than most. It is a huge problem in the industry that we are trying to address. And yes, it is a problem of our own making.
Heck, I don't want to work now!
It's called WORK because all the other four-letter words are taken.
Immigration is Big Biz' way of depressing wages. Results in a higher supply of labor, and increasing the supply of any resource devalues that resource. In 1980, meat packers were black, earning decent middle class wages. By that decade's end, they were mostly immigrants, toiling under atrocious conditions where amputations were common, for barely above minimum wage. (See: Back of the Hiring Line: A 200-Year History of Immigration Surges, Employer Bias, and Depression of Black Wealth, by Roy Beck (probably still $14 on Amazon).
We're currently in an immigration surge that began with enabling legislation in 1965, and the Census Bureau projects we'll be adding nearly 20 million per decade for this and the next three decades--that's one NY state population equivalent per decade. Meanwhile, we're running out of groundwater, endangering the future of American agriculture
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/28/climate/groundwater-drying-climate-change.html
And Propublica projects millions of Americans will become climate refugees over the next several decades.
https://www.propublica.org/article/climate-change-will-force-a-new-american-migration
The Climate Change stuff is BS. It's just another scare tactic to make people comply. Most of that article is just BS.
"Climate refugees" is a fancy way of saying,
"They'll give the country away to Guatemalans, and the people who used to have it can live under a tree."
It's actually that Americans in the Southwest, California, the South, and other areas that become less inhabitable or uninhabitable will flee to the the northern US. Read the article. It'll make you happy you live in Ohio instead of California.
I agree, but I also appreciate the irony of the people pushing fear about climate change and workforce discrimination being the same people unapologetically exacerbating the problems by pushing unfettered immigration.
They are not terribly clever.
That's because they're either fools or evil. Possibly both.
It's not BS. It's simple chemistry and physics. I learned about it in a college class in 1975. Everything the prof said would happen if we didn't stop it HAS happened, including the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has roughly doubled, with the amount of planetary heating, glacier melting, etc that was predicted.
And believe me, I wish to hell it weren't happening. I LOVE driving cars powered by internal combustion, and I find driving electrics boring. They totally lack personality and the ridiculous amount of torque doesn't make up for that.
Even Road and Track had an article about climate change, where they showed photos of the glaciers in Glacier National Park, and how they shrank over most of the previous century.
"Even Road and Track had an article about climate change, where they showed photos of the glaciers in Glacier National Park, and how they shrank over most of the previous century"
Dumbest fuckin' thing Sam Smith ever wrote, but I don't blame him for it because his heart was surely in the right place.
1975 was three years after "Limits To Growth". If you had a professor espousing modern climate theory, he was certainly outside the realm of accepted thought at the time.
What passes for "science" in the climate game is unimaginably sloppy. Most of their historical records were inaccurate past the range of usability. It makes paleontology and their variously risible depictions of dinosaurs look like hard physics.
With due respect to your prof, the mid-‘70s was also when the alarmists were saying that we were entering an ice age.
It's a drought and it's cyclical, not global warming. Give it a couple of years and they'll be blaming flooding on global warming.
Also groundwater is not the full picture; Aquifers, rivers, lakes, moisture profile in the soil......
“Climate Change” is such a convenient catch-all for that very reason. Literally anything can be climate change. Nevermind that the climate has been changing since long before we were around.
And nobody ever goes around suggesting we lower our impact by doing the simple, obvious conservation stuff like planting more trees. Or maybe something like demanding better quality consumer goods that last longer before they go in a landfill. No, we jump straight to everyone has to give up their gas appliances, eating beef, and move to urban multi family rental housing.
"And nobody ever goes around suggesting we lower our impact by doing the simple, obvious conservation stuff like planting more trees."
Rather interestingly, the current CONSENSUS is that planting trees is worthless because the carbon is only "sequestered" for the life of the tree. Which is only 40-100 years, so it doesn't matter.
Of course, when it comes time for you to give up your stove they believe that only direct and immediate action will suffice.
I've planted 155 trees on my property in the past year and will keep doing so. Eventually we will sequester ten tons or more or more per year from the new growth. My existing forest is about 20 hectares, so I'm pulling far more CO2 than I'm emitting. Maybe everyone should live like me!
It's like "safety." Means anything and everything, and yet nothing, all at the same time.
they've been warning about flooding, along with higher temps, for decades. I learned about global warming in a college class in 1975. Everything predicted has been coming true. In fact, even in the late 1800s, people who understood physics and chemistry, and that combustion emitted CO2 were predicting global warming.
Flooding has become worse because of global warming. A warmer atmosphere holds more water, and floods have been increasing because of warming. Hurricanes have been more powerful because of warming.
They're all based around models and if there's one lesson you should have taken away from the past 48 months it's that the majority of models are made up bullshit that say what people want them to say.
saw a chart of hurricans over the past century. no increase in power; a bit of diminshed frequency. not to worry
Not sure if you are a troll or what. Hurricanes are not getting worse. https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml
didja see the bit on newsmax about the global cooling all over the news 50+ years ago? magazine covers, etc...ice age coming!
when we went thru a k.c. packing plant on dec. 7, 1951, i saw 2 black employees. it was a ymca highschool trip from bartlesville ok. by bus. had a great innocent time...
I went on a field trip to a plant that produced carbon black. Every single employee was black. I was told it took 4 or 5 consecutive showers to turn them white again.
so youre saying theres a cure
Same issue in Pharma, Clinical Research Organizations, and legal within those areas.
Had a friend apply for a legal job that gets reposted with a pharma company every other to every third quarter. The chosen ones can’t get it done. Helped him get another legal position and obtain his certification as a privacy professional. He just had a head hunter call to see if he would be interested in going over to the company that would not look at him.
He is going to interview for $hits and giggles. But will not take the job.
How'd they know they were white? I've heard by certain communities that accuse hiring managers of tossing resumes that have more "cultural" names and that's why color blindness doesn't work. Of course now, with DIE, HR isn't allowed to be color blind.
Just think, an Indian born man having a name of Sam Jones gets their resume tossed.
When I wrote resumes, I could always tell I was writing one for a black guy because his name sounded like either a Roman emperor, an Old Testament prophet, a Dust Bowl farmer or had a number after it.
I mean, who would you picture if you saw a name like Tiberius Stubbs III or Otis Jenkins?
James Tiberius Kirk was white! Just sayin't....lol.
I get your point.
I’ll be the typical millennial and ask, “won’t work for you or won’t work for you for what you want to pay them?” Is working for FAANG sexy, or because it is a payday? If you aren’t as desirable a workplace, you’ll have to pay a premium. That’s simple market economics, not laziness in millennials.
Was just about to say that. The amount of motivation money can give a guy is insane.
Don't tell me money isn't a motivator. I'm not levitating over anyone else, only considering jobs that let me "make a difference."
I'm good with "lets me live comfortably without overtime."
Entitled of me, I know.
how dare you want a decent life
I'm a spoiled child at heart. Where's my participation trophy?
Once I went over low six figures to less low six figures, the money motivation completely left the room.
Your wife isn’t spending fast enough. Have her talk to mine.
$2k country club bill last month….
My wife can spend three times that every month on club racing.
Happily she covers most of her own tab.
My wife could spend every dime if I let her. My wife has absolutely no idea what I make or what we have. I tried to go over it with her once and her eyes just glossed over.
I'm a low six figures millennial plus my wife's decent salary, and wholeheartedly agree with this. Vacation days and working the bare minimum I need to (giving full effort into the hours I do work though) is way more important. Yet, I volunteered last month to take a boomers management position for probably not enough money extra. :sigh: I guess that's the silent generation's work ethic I latched onto growing up.
A manager of mine floated me transitioning to management and I replied to the effect of, "managing humans?"
Not the case for me and my wife at all. The faster we make money now, the sooner we have enough to retire. 41 now, should have enough to be done at 50.
No kids I presume? I gave up my dreams of early retirement when I had children.
We have trouble hiring people because we are small. Our work life balance compared to big 4 or even mid size is 10x better. I've never worked 100 hours in a week and I hear big 4 auditors do it all the time (from reddit so put that into consideration) but all the quality resumes go to bigger firms. Start big 4 to bounce to industry is the dream. I worked industry, it wasn't a dream.
You have to break the prestige stranglehold, which is powerful given the brands of the Big 4 (or investment banks for that matter).
A typical middle market, sell-side investment banker will sell some guy’s widget business for $100MM and collect a ~1.5% fee for his firm. That ~$1.5MM fee to the firm turns into roughly $500K pre-tax to the banker. That’s nice, but you need a handful of those a year to keep your head above water.
Meanwhile, the seller of the business - let’s assume he owns the whole thing; and let’s assume, just for the sake of example, that his business was a leading manufacturer of above ground swimming pools located in rural Tennessee, hypothetically - takes the rest of it. That’s right - $98.5MM!
The investment banker can comfort himself with the knowledge that he will spend his $500K (pre-tax) tastefully - a Calatrava, renovating the kitchen, NYE in St. Barth’s, private school fees, Charvet shirting, etc. - whereas the hick swimming pool fellow is sure to spend his windfall on Monster Trucks, Morgan Wallen tickets, taxidermy, and so on.
But eventually, that peddler of financial advice will start to wonder if it’s a better path to build a business than compete in a knife fight against hordes of driven, ambitious people just like him…
Hypothetically, of course.
I frequently ribbed the guy who sold that business, referring to him as the “premier advisor to vertically integrated above ground swimming pool manufacturers located in the Cumberland Plateau”
"whereas the hick swimming pool fellow is sure to spend his windfall on Monster Trucks, Morgan Wallen tickets, taxidermy, and so on."
So many clients... They also typically tend to be my favorite clients.
Sure - and they can genuinely benefit from smart advice.
Some of ‘em find a way to spend it all - fishing boats, jet charters (to Vegas), buying a house and a new pickup truck for everyone in their entourage, funding their kids’ “businesses,” and so on.
I know a guy from my hometown who sold a bottled water business that he inherited. He got $30MM before tax. Every business he touched turned into dust. He developed a luxury equestrian community (in 2007…); he opened a steakhouse (gone); each and every one of his five sons got a new F-250 with chrome rims and lights and shit every six months or so.
He manages a BBQ joint in a strip mall now.
What about bent-up cowboy hats that look like they've been run over by a truck?
Funny shit!
That can be part of the problem. The FAANGs will give high pay and stock to the rock stars. We can’t do that but we do pay well for the role. We do have a much more balanced work-life ration than them but big money talks.
There is also a perception that if you don't get FAANG time you'll be the first to be laid off and the last to be hired afterwards.
Those are, hands down, the WORST places to work in the USA. I've known people who have worked for them, and yeah, 20 years ago they were kinda okay, but now? Now they suck.
Even working in a business adjacent to them, it's amazing how quickly you get used to people not really speaking anything you'd identify as English while just sitting at their desks for 100 hours a week, accomplishing nothing.
I typed a reply above. From someone who is a "tech" job, there are two reasons: money and status. Working at a FAANG company means a lot of work, but the compensation usually makes up for it. If/when you desire a better WLB, it looks great on a resume.
Personally, I have no desire to work at one of these companies but I have friends that do and understand their motivations for doing so.
Work life balance means something when you’re 35 and have 2 kids and a spouse. When you’re 25, work life balance means working your ass off desperately hoping for a lotto hit promotion/stock grant/IPO that means you can work 0 hours at 35.
That’s right.
I can understand why guys who are 35 with families can’t work the insane hours any more. One simple thing alone - I can’t operate (as in, I will just sleep through a litany of alarms) on less than 5 hours of sleep a night for multiple nights in a row.
This also depends on the family. A father could work more hours if a father didn't have to worry about all the home stuff because women want to also work 50 hours or more a week instead of taking care of the kids and being homemakers.
A lot of guys I know who do work those hours - and there’s a good bit of travel involved at that age (and older), probably 100 nights a year on the road - have wives who either don’t work or who have vanity businesses (yoga instructor, needlepoint shop). The ones with two demanding careers often have grandparents nearby as supplemental caregivers.
It’s often hard to explain to your wife why you can’t spend the weekend at T-Ball or taking family pictures with a photographer or apple picking or going on a short notice beach trip because you’ve got a deal blowing up or getting announced the next week.
My wife is basically the house manager. I handle the money, she handles mostly everything else. At least inside the house.
Get Rich And Get Out is the definition of grift.
On the other hand, the craftsman dies at his workbench.
Boomers have this idea that Millennials should gleefully work for considerably less pay than they did.
Money is a motivator but as the FAANGs keep hiring is the talent available worth the premium. When they were smaller, it wasn't all diversity hires and dead weight but as they keep doubling their staffs you can't tell me they are getting primo talent.
I see a similar trend with young engineers these days. For example, young EEs do not want to work in power. Their parents or grandparents worked for the utility or at the nuclear plant; that's old hat. They all want to do robotics, automation, battery research, etc. Never mind that we actually still need power (and lighting, and grounding, and telecomm), and that automation or AI isn't the answer to every process enhancement.
Newly minted Chemical Engineers are the same. They don't want to work at the nonwovens plant, or the paper mill, or the carbon fiber facility. They want to work with renewables and sustainable fuels, and the idea of designing an expansion of, say, an Anheuser-Busch plant makes their rainbow-colored hair stand on end.
Like others have said, there are more options now than ever--and some cool options at that. That being said, stuff has to work. Lights have to stay on, systems need to be maintained so that accepted quality of life is uninterrupted. My dad is a EE that still works in power. Doesn't know coding, but has never needed to. Part of me wishes I had the EE brain or similar as I do very much appreciate and see the need for the systems that undergird our modern society to keep working as flawlessly in the background as possible. Then again, I've never been the trendy/flashy type, so tending the proverbial flock of small and large plants, reservoirs and grid systems (the "herd") not only makes more sense, but would give me increased satisfaction. Stewardship of what we've been given and all of that.
I understand where these kids are coming from. Many years ago, I was an EE student. Quickly I realized that I didn’t want to spend the next 30 years of my life designing door lock mechanisms or some other mundane auto engineering job.
That said, I would’ve killed to work at a NPP.
Even 20 years ago most EE degrees spent little time on power. Most classes dealt in high speed communications or digital design. Some of that was partly due to the de emphasis on getting a PE license and a PE license is typically required when doing serious work in power
I've heard as much from my colleagues. It astounds me that college Profs give such bad advice. I hear from many young grads that they were never told about the FE/EIT, whereas other schools make it a requirement to at least attempt it before you can graduate.
Where I went, PE wasn't required. States are all different in their requirements with PE for Civil Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, and Electrical Engineers. I know some states were even pushing Software/Computer and Computer Science majors to get PEs but I think that fell flat.
The city where I work is heavily invested into custom digital and analog electronics and Radar. The only power needed, outside of utilities, is design of 120/240 down to 24/12/9/5V DC.
I never heard about EIT except for one friend who took the exam right away. He was very much an outlier.
We're probably an outlier, because we have 6 ChemEs who have their PE licenses. Never stamp any drawings, but more of a credential to show clients.
I look back and think how foolish it was to have not taken the FE exam while it was fresh in mind. My university was heavily automotive focused so it was also one of those institutions that did not market PE licenses. I have not needed it to get a job so far in my career but doing what I do now a PE license would definitely give me a larger pool to choose work from.
Maybe a little bit chicken or the egg. My college class had about 35 of us in ChemEng. Maybe 5 people out of that went to work for someplace traditional (Exxon or Honeywell). The rest, if they weren't going to grad/professional school, were hired by Goldman, Pricewaterhouse, or Accenture. Is that cause they wanted it or that's who was recruiting? For my part, I tried to get jobs at a roofing materials company, Chrysler, Anheuser-Busch, GE, Dow Corning, a tool maker, and others. They wouldn't take me.
Just curious - do you have a rough idea of what the job(s) pay?
We start new college grads at about $100k which is split 70/30 base and bonus. These are consulting engineering jobs. I’m a Principle Consulting Engineer which is equivalent to a Director level which tops out over $300k with the same 70/30 split. I would put our average in the $200k - $300k range although the latter is not common.
I've heard 1 new worker for every 7 workers retiring in the trades. I've seen some young guys on a job, but not on the next job cause they couldn't make it. I didn't do vo-tec in highschool but made fun of the guys that did. Now I like working with my hands, maybe attitudes like mine were part of the problem. Also I don't think it was productive to have the first lady do tv commercials pushing college to get ahead
You know maybe telling all the millennials that they’re Special People who can Change The World and they Shouldn’t Settle and should Shoot For The Stars which coincidently involved all of them moving to a handful of expensive cities was a colossal mistake.
Well put.
And perhaps a healthy dose of Nobody Cares If You're Offended So Shut Up And Get Me That Report Right Now.
Best fucking comment in this whole thread.
Boomers didn't retire and go home because they don't have a retirement.
The Greatest Generation came along, bought up all the companies with retirement plans, gutted those plans and put the money in their own pockets, then dumped the companies.
So what do you do when that 30 - 40 year retirement plan you worked for is suddenly gone? Or gone before you could even get it?
You don't retire.
I don't think there's a company out there, other than the government, who offers retirement anymore.
I’m not talking about people whose choice is work or eat dog food. I’m talking about the olds occupying the executive and director level spots at companies across the country, hoovering up their $200-300k/yr + 25% bonus.
You'd be shocked how many of those people spend every dime and can't retire.
Most can sell the mansion they bought for $300k back in 1992 and live forever on the proceeds.
Define “most” and “mansion.”
Unless they paid cash, never spent a dime to repair it, sold it for 2 million plus AND are content living out their days in some dirt cheap retirement haven, I don’t think it’s a windfall to brag about.
This is the lie that seems to be sold to Millenials that Boomers just have buckets of cash somewhere and need to get out.
My mother got shafted when the hospital got rid of her retirement plan. What they did was give everyone some sort of measly payout and dump into a 401K. This happened in her 40's in the mid 90's. Even after investing 10 percent by the time she was in her 60's there wasn't enough.
My father was lucky enough to have a retirement but it was reduced by 1/3 because the school board lost so much money during the financial crisis that they blew the money and never recovered.
This idea that all the boomers are sitting in these 200-300K jobs is greatly exaggerated and a narrative generated by the media and the left.
Just looking at this, Gen Xers are making MORE than boomers.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/average-salary-by-age/
Paycheck to paycheck on a quater a million a year. We are not even middle class. Cues up the fake empathy.
In New York, that'd be right.
When I was working in Aerospace in the 80's those people were there. 70 and 80 year olds, who were doing the same thing. It's nothing new.
This is not the average. There are so few people in Aerospace that these companies had to retain some of these people.
I've seen both in the private and public sector where engineers hang around because they are the only one's that know how to fix something that's been around for 40 years. In some sectors, they can't find anyone who knows COBOL , BASIC, or Fortran.
That's -now- I'm talking about the 80's when I started working in it and I saw so many companies destroyed. They destroyed something like 90 percent of all the aerospace companies that used to be out there.
All gone.
The F-14, one of the best aircraft ever built and way better than any F-18 (even today) Gone and it will never come back. Hell, the A-6 was better than anything the Navy's got now. Again, gone. Destroyed for Money, destroyed for Politics, and the people doing the destruction was 'the greatest generation'.
Yeah, we've got Boeing and Lockheed left and I'm not so sure how much longer Boeing is gonna hold on. Though I think that can be blamed on Boomers.
As for being the only guy who knows how something works? Yup, been there done THAT. Wasn't worth the bullshit though, so I walked away. And trust me, there is a LOT of bullshit when you're in that position. Some people would rather lose a half-billion dollars than have their ego's bruised.
Something tells me we junked the F-14 for the same reason we went from 7.62 NATO and .45 ACP to 5.56 and 9mm. The F-14 was the hemicuda to the F/A-18's Toyota Sienna - it took a strong man to fly it but was too much plane for a Strong Woman. Just like how Mike and Tyrone and Juan can handle an M14 & a 1911, but Danielle and Jessica and Megan can't.
It was a CRIME what they did to the retired F-14s, just because we didn't want Iran to theoretically get their hands on spare parts.
Know what would be appropriate compensation? Scrapping EVERY SINGLE BEV now sitting unsold on every dealer lot in America, as a Fuck You to those people who want to replace What Works with What's New.
That’s an important point. Boomers didn’t start that and a lot of them got hosed in the process.
My dad was nearly 50 before he got any traction on his retirement savings, thanks in part to a couple of gutted pension plans.
401ks have only been a thing since the 1980s…all but the youngest Boomers entered the workforce with a very different set of rules. L
Since the very late 80's. Or was it the early 90's? I quit a company because they did away with the retirement plans which was the only reason I went to work for them and was willing to put up with their bullshit in the first place. I was a year from vesting too and had seniority (of a sorts) for all the successful programs I'd helped along.
Never worked for a major company again.
Even the federal government is all 401k for most employees now, AFAIK
Not accurate, but there is a 401k like plan called the TSP and the current system (FERS) isn't as good as it was for people who were hired in the 70s and 80s.
Thank you for the correction!
My dad just turned 80. He is still sharp, but doesn't have either the stamina or the force of personality he used to. Nevertheless he keeps on working, both because he did not manage his money well enough to have anything to retire on and because he doesn't have anything else. He neglected both his kids for work, and then married a harridan of a fourth wife who managed to estrange my sister from him permanently. His work took him abroad, and he stayed there, even though all of his family is in the US. He refuses to delegate any of his projects even though the very same firm he founded is full of talented younger professionals.
I dread the day when his wife calls me and tells me that he is in the hospital, because I'm going to have to drop my life and travel to another continent for long enough to settle his affairs in a way that doesn't just give up all of my and my sister's interests to her. But I know it's coming and it's his damn fault that it's going to be so painful.
Bleak.
Sorry to hear, but appreciate you sharing.
I often wonder if the "Boomer's refusal to retire and go home" is simply because they are the first generation to enjoy a life expectancy long enough to stay in power well past their 60s.
I would imagine there is a lot of truth to that. My grandfather, who is still kicking around at 92, retired when his pension at 62 thinking he would at best live to 70 or 75 because his parents did not even make it that far. My father is knocking on 64 and is fairly healthy and wants to work until 70 (he does make bank and enjoys his job though). He doesn't have any hobbies to keep himself busy if he quit working either which is part of it. I see myself on a body of water boating, fishing, golfing, etc. the day my financial planner says I can do it.
Retirement age of 65 was set back when people lived to 68. It was never intended that people should spend three decades drawing a pension.
Absolutely! At 67 I need to keep working and paying tax to help keep the system running. In the UK we have millions claiming to be too ill to work post Covid (which has to be bollocks in most cases) and have imported 705,000 migrants (roughly the 10% of the size of London) in the last year to fill the gap. Utter madness and, in my view, morally wrong.
Like the bumper sticker says:
"Keep working! Millions on welfare depend on you!"
The T-shirt version shows a donkey in a hammock wearing sunglasses, holding an umbrella drink, laughing.
I'm going to look out for one of those!
Don't assume that the person is responsible for keeping the secret knowledge to themselves. I retired in Oct at 66 years and 11 months. I was the man for IRS reporting for near 150 financial institutions. I begged for help for decades. I'd get it and they'd move on. The company culture has always been "Hey, new guy, work on this". And "THIS" was yours forever. I was given IRS reporting in 1979. IRS reporting and time tracking for it, was probably 3 months of the year devoted to it.
Also, If your job is something where you need to "React" like right now it can be tough to get someone else up to speed. Because you need something fixed right now. I've stepped in and tried to help concerning things I had no knowledge of.
I wrote software for 45 years. It makes no sense to show someone else the code and go into detail. A particular program may not need any modifications for months or years. A decent explanation of the what the point is, is fine. Detailed doesn't make much sense. So, if there's an immediate issue, who they going to call? You or "The future" who can't hit the ground running?
The company does ego massages with something called High Fives. I was getting them up to a week before retirement. Most of them for reacting to something hitting the fan. I knew and the company knew that in the long run it was going to suck for awhile with me retiring. Their culture. I had a boss retire at 74. Every year they'd beg him with a "Just one more year". His wife threatened him with divorce. It sucked for about 6 months after he left. He's called me for the last 5 years in February since asking how IRS processing went. They'd probably hire him back if he asked.
Had another coworker retire in May. 67+ They've called him 3-4 times since then.
The boss I mentioned was a AVP in a 700 person company. His "People" was me and the other guy. "What do those guys do?" We don't know, don't bother them. Our jobs were to take shit that no one wanted to touch and turn them into something. We did the "Icky" stuff.
Like taking over 2,000,000 individual customer PDF statements and putting a different bank logo on each one. A client bought a bank. They wanted their logo on the bank statements. Seems stupid, but that's what they wanted. Took me a couple of weeks to figure out how to do that. Then the program ran on my PC for about 100 hours. I couldn't remove the old logo and the best I could do was "Paste" a new logo into each PDF file with the logo and X,Y coordinates.
Ideally there's someone now that I'm gone that will step up for that kind of stuff. Frankly, I'm not sure there is. I've no doubt the brains are there to do it. But, not sure about the culture that will allow them.
What finished me off was the final enhancements I had stuck around for. I wrote my stuff more or less for me. If they created e-mails, the body of the e-mail made sense to me. Which wasn't going to work out that well after retirement for them. The QA process by others got bogged down. I got bored. I gave up.
I wouldn't be surprised if the family member you mention started out when things were not nearly as controlled as they are now. I used the term "Cowboy'd" for the way things were.
I wrote hundreds of ASP pages using a Yellow "For Dummies" book to hit financial institution databases using Oracle. I got sick of being called constantly with "Hey, what value is this? That?" 20 years ago. I installed them on my work PC because the PC had Personal Web Server on it. Maybe it was Windows XP. It was fine, until we were told to turn the PCs off at the end of the day. So, I did. And every dept that relied on the pages after 5 PM screamed bloody murder. So, they put in a dedicated server just for my pages. I just did the pages. Never asked for permission. Just did them. Because I felt like it. When federal and state bank auditors came in, the orders were to never mention my web pages. Never. "Who authorized these?" Uhhhhhhh.
Again, a company's culture may have been the reason for the family member's concern. Not arrogance. I'm not stupid. But, I worked with people much, much smarter than me. But will a companies culture allow them to use their brains?
If not, you may feel a personal responsibility to keep things running smoothly.
I’m sure you do. But as you point out, so much of what you did wasn’t taught, it was figured out. So you, at XX years of experience, had a storied career of figuring shit out. But how is anyone else going to come in and get started “figuring shit out” until they’re in that spot? And yeah it may not be perfect on Day 1, but it will never be until someone is put in that role and given a little bit of a chance to go figure shit out.
I remember a point about 10 years ago, I had just made management and my previous boss had left the company. It was about 6PM on a Friday evening and I had a 9AM meeting Monday morning to present the new budget. To do so I had to load it into the system, refresh some slides, etc etc. Nothing terribly complicated, but shit that needed to be done and Figured Out. I couldn’t get it to load at first and I was getting frustrated and I remember taking a breathe and saying “no one is coming to help, this either gets done and you present to the CEO on Monday, or you don’t and look like an assclown. Which is it going to be?” And I stayed and made it work and all was fine. But until I was in that position and given the chance to fail, I wasn’t going to be able to prove I could succeed. That’s the point. If no one else ever has the chance, they’ll never succeed, and all the olds can sit around saying “well they just can’t do it.” And all the young people will quit and go elsewhere, and then what?
I've been good and staying off of reddit but so many redditers would complain about "Why won't they train me" in the accounting forums. Like, the job is "Just figuring shit out" It's 90% of the job. There is always going to be a curveball, if you can't figure shit out at the entry level position, you aren't going be figuring shit out when something complicated comes along.
As a computer engineer, what I see is that much of the students out of college with "Software Engineering Degrees" or even "Computer Science" degrees aren't being taught the basics of "how to figure shit out". It's like these students were given the tools but weren't taught the engineering process of how to use the tools for a given situation.
1000 times this. When I hire software developers I actually look for candidates without computer science degrees first because they often can't "figure shit out" at all.
Sincerely,
VP of a software company with an Anthropology degree
Sounds like some of my "overseas" classmates. Good with numbers and example problems, useless on the floor.
Preach, brother. The number of "I'm retired/retiring but not actually retiring" stories I've heard from family and those around me is maddening. Just GO! You think you need to keep growing that "nest egg" (man, I hate that f******g term) into seven figures to properly retire otherwise you can't afford things like mortgage and bills for years? Get outta here. Absolutely frosts me. SS payouts nearly (or more) of what I earned monthly ($70-80k a year salary, which makes me average or a complete chump "at my point in my 'career'"), and it's "not enough" or "I really need to slash the budget to make this work." Why are you buying an expensive new car or truck, then??? Why not make an effort to sell what you have that you do not use? Blast me to Andromeda on a Space X rocket, I don't want to live on this planet any more.
Life happens, and I have realized that I have not been on whatever middle class expectationally-prescribed path for over a decade in spite of working diligently, but watching my brothers have to claw and considerably compromise accepted norms to get into houses (especially this year), among other things, is sickening.
Jack, you wrote beautifully on societal or income echelon-based expectations and how they are quite different for middle class vs. not. One has to always perform and is counted as less if not, versus the other can drift as freely as finances allow and be fairly content. I'm underperforming as an industrial designer if I take a "lesser" job I've happily held long before (ok, and even in spots this year) that's available for half the pay, but not a non-available design job. Yeah ok.
I, an early Gen-Y/Millennial--have long felt sad for the s**t Gen-X'ers have had to endure from their elders, and noticed that s**t aimed at my generation as far back as the turn of the millennium. Newspaper, TV, and online pieces about how lame young people were at the time. Always resented it. Every generation gets trash handed to them, Boomers included. I don't expect Z or anybody after me to care about or revere me. I've already experienced the normal "older people are irrelevant" that happens with every generation coming into their teen years, but X, Y, and Z+ are going to need each other as we try and sort through the coming years, and I will be here for that comradery and that attempt to unify in purpose.
I worked with several software engineers that won't retire because they can't afford insurance. You have to be 65 for Medicare and that age will likely go up. And many hang on past 65 because Medicare is worse than the employer sponsored plan.
This is writ large in the political class. The fucking Boomers won’t retire, basically stay in office until carried out feet first, and that happens waaaay too late. A Senator my age at 55 would be refreshing, and it’s all too rare.
Dianne Feinstein case in point. McConnell is going to make a play for that.
Agree. Caveat: two edged sword.
In the civil engineering world, much of the most critical stuff - water mains, sewer mains, and electrical ductbanks - are buried underground. Because much of this infrastructure was constructed in the 1920-1980-ish era of massive growth, but prior to digitization of construction plan drawings and "as built" drawings, plans showing how what was constructed *was constructed* and where simply don't exist.
The only as builts that exist, exist in the memories, in the brains of some 100,000 boomers.
I'm all for boomers clearing the way for younger American-Americans to take over their jobs and businesses.
But when SOME of the boomertariat retires... we are in real trouble.
The as builts are in their head, and fixing stuff without them will have a difficulty tantamount to impossibility.
I'm not much on board with a lot of the reasons listed in the article, but I am with this. I work with some multi millionaire boomers past retirement age and they really need to just go away.
They have massive chips on their shoulders against someone much younger holding similar rank. Some of these people try and make my life a living hell because their egos are threatened by me. They truly believe they're the smartest people in the room while causing fuckups that cause 10s of millions of dollars. Just take your money and go home. If I could retire I wouldn't spend one extra minute in an office.
Thank you for neatly outlining the hate levelled at boomers, usually from my generation. I should also say that every boomer here is not at all the object of my displeasure because you guys are not the type to do the things your cohort gets ragged on. You guys are cool and I would 100% shoot the breeze with any of you.
i will however continue to use boomers as a punchline because its funny and for all the times millennials were the punchline of comics in the newspapers kthx
LOL.
The only other thing you can't go wrong with is your mom.
and "that's what she said" for the less mature among us
"Get away from me or I'll shoot you, you creep!"
"Dude! She wants you!"
There are only two people in this life who love you unconditionally: Your mom and your dog.
I'm going to be a pain in the ass and state that the particular is not the whole: when people criticize millenials I do my best not to take it personally and boomers should do the same.
Anyways, in MotoGP's finale Jorge Martin cut the point lead by a third in an excellent sprint race at BALENTHIA and anything looked possible.
The race, however, saw a less than stellar start for Martin who fell far back in the pack and began working his way up aggressively. Too aggressively, as he ended up crashing out by striking Marc Marquez' rear tire and taking them both out the race and ending any chance of a championship. Bagnaia's Sunday consistency came through and carried him to the end of the season as repeat victor. He saw the pit lane board indicating Martin was out and, during his check to look back, almost lost a few places. However. He held firm against the KTMs (both crashed) and DiGiantonnio's late charge.
Digi picked up VR46's open seat as revealed on test day. The Ducatis appear the same for 2024 with internals and electronics changes. Marc Marquez looked immediately comfortable on the 2023 spec Ducati and put down solid times given that he hasn't been on one before now. It will be interesting to see how much manufacturer concessions for mid season changes come into play next year as Yamaha and Honda both sport new riders and new bikes with a chance to close the development gap despite fielding fewer on race weekends.
All in all an excellent season of competition and I'm looking forward to the 2024 kick off.
Try being a Genx'er. No one even cares about us. Lol. Good attitude, generalizations of any group of people are bound to hold some truth and many, many wrongs.
We certainly bore the brunt of the "forever young" philosophy, particularly in the realm of music and culture.
For what it's worth - not too many millennials and zoomers are out there aping boomer music. Enjoying it, maybe, but not playing or expanding upon it.
However, what Xers started is still being refined to this day.
Yeah, as much as I despise Future and Kacey Musgraves at least it's not old stuff.
As bad as the Millennials got it, gen x really got screwed.
I would argue that Gen X, of which I'm a member, is actually The Greatest Generation. We learned how to use computers, rather than having them control us from birth. We understood the joy of waiting for and then owning physical media, rather than having immediate access to anything ever created. We learned how to be bored, which creates patience. We benefited from the economic sprawl of the '80s. College was cheap. Nobody uploaded video of you climbing the clock tower, or getting punched in the face downtown after midnight. People argued without anyone getting offended. You could have an awkward hookup without being Me-Too'd. Everyone was just more... chill about everything. The President played sax, fingerbanged his employees, and pretended he didn't know how to smoke pot. The military was still focused on killing people and blowing things up.
Someone should write a book about how lovely the '90s were. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557048/the-nineties-by-chuck-klosterman/
As an elder millennial, that was pretty much my experience too. Except the cheap college. College was not cheap. The 90s were awesome.
Against that, however, you had AIDS PANIC, where every college in america told you that you could DIE OF THE AIDS because you ate the pussy of a 19 year old virgin girl.
AIDS PANIC was so widespread, and so deleterious to hookups, that I knew a pair of lesbian virgins who actually bought dental dams for oral sex until their AIDS tests could come back. "How did you think," I inquired, "that either of you had it before?"
Yeah, uh, we didn't have that problem. As much as no one will say who gets it, every 20-40 year old man and woman seems to know it's not them. Herpes though, lotta them have that. HIV prep is the only commercial that actually advertises to their target market.
Yet another example of the government lying to us about what would certainly kill us. Dental dams are probably the only thing less sexy than condoms. I'd probably just rather rock a cold sore for a week or two.
Although I am younger I can recall moving a game in fifty installments via floppy between computers was not cool. Same for pictures of certain content your buddy's older brother had.
I am old enough to remember when Zip drives were the next big thing! 100mb floppy. Insane!
Speaking of Iomega when I saw an ad for the Jaz(z?) drive I thought that was insane.
Space Quest!
We're also the generation that is simultaneously caring for children and parents without bitching and moaning about it while also propping up Boomers' social security and wondering about our own.
'our own'
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
inhales
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Hey now! I dunno about you, but I fully intend to claim my $29.99 each month. I've worked damn hard for it.
As a Gen Xer, you get to be disgusted by the generation above you and below you.
Not that anyone will care what you think :)
Some pundits are already arguing about who's going to be second next year. I rate Mark Marquez pretty highly, maybe not that high. Looking forward to next year.
Boomers loudly complaining about being unfairly maligned is hilariously on-brand.
Do we really have to put a “THEY’RE NOT ALL LIKE THAT” disclaimer on everything?
Nah, we ought to put a "Yes, literally all of them are like that without exception" disclaimer on everything
So Yuki is the real deal but you had doubts about Oscar?!?
Put the two of them in the same team next year … who comes out ahead? Yuki would already be gone if Honda didn’t get control over one of the four Red Bull seats.
Yuki would wipe the floor with everyone living or dead based on how much Jack has ingested his favorite intoxicant. He is AVERAGE at best.
Thanks for buttressing my argument. He did drive a GREAT RACE though.
Average at worst, I'd say!
Red Bull knows more than you in every way that matters. He get a seat atleast the same way Ocon or Albon do downfield if what you say is true.
One wonders. The Bull hasn't exactly set the world on fire choosing their drivers over the years. They tend to be Australian whiners with an allergy to consistent performance or weirdo autistic kids who handle pressure about as well as marshmallow. Vettel made heavy weather of winning, that's for sure.
Yuki is literally in the seat because of Honda.
That’s why he got the seat, and that’s why he kept it after a patchy 21 and 22 season. He has a high ceiling in terms of speed, but the immaturity and outbursts - while funny - aren’t really F1-level in 2023.
He just needs to stay on the grid in 2025 (when the mother of all silly seasons will take place), and then he can transition to either of the seats at the then Honda-powered team currently known as Aston Martin in 2026. IF Stroll still controls the team, Honda will have a say over one of the seats. IF Stroll does NOT control the team, Lance certainly won’t be there.
Yuki has no future at Red Bull.
You're literally saying everything I did in earlier posts to Jack, but I assume he's engaging in some harmless fantasies here.
Well, it's easy to argue that Yuki out-drove Oscar at Abu Dhabi!
Yuki tends to go well there - finished fourth in 2021.
Yuki for president.
I want to have Yuki's baby
why didn't we fans act/think like this in, say, '55? was it because the rampant selling of motorsport had,'t oozed thru our shoesoles and up our spinal columns? or is it just social media?
This is gonna be a spicy thread. My biggest boomer gripe is we (millennials) did exactly what we were told to do by our parents and the relentless shit we get for the student loans in mind boggling. "well, why did you take out loans?" "YOU FUCKING TOLD US TO!"
Also, they assume every single one of us who notices our co-generation problems are all failures. My boomer parents mostly avoided the biggest pitfalls of their generation. No Drugs, no divorce, no mid life crisis side pieces, paid 100% for my college they insisted I attend. I appreciate my parents. Some of my friends were not as lucky. If you are a boomer who help your kids on the down payment of a house, plan on leaving an inheritance, helping your children raise their own children, babysit your grand kids, we aren't talking about you.
If you are this guy: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/12/15/estate-planning-wrong-to-not-leave-children-inheritance/4385107002/
Fuck you
OF COURSE he is from Columbus, Ohio.
Peter the Planner?! Puh-leeaze! How preposterous!
Well that's just evil.
I'm not so sure I disagree with the guy in the link... it's their money, they earned it (assuming it wasn't stolen) and can do with it as they wish...
I've encountered a fair amount of Millennials over the years who were in line to receive significant inheritances... their attitudes ranged from simple entitlement, to utterly useless human beings who were biding their time until their parents died...
...FWIW, I'm not going to get any inheritance, so maybe that's where my perspective comes from...
If your kids are entitled brats, take a look in a mirror.
From the article "They’re not bad people, and they’ve done nothing wrong"
It's literally all about the feels.
These two demons want to be able to tell their friends that they advanced some social justice cause at the expense of their children, and receive FEELS in exchange.
They're going to feel pretty warm.
Nah, they're going to freeze in some shitty nursing home that's being paid for by the Medicaid benefits that they are ENTITLED to.
The eternity in a pit of fire is after that.
Which would then ask (beg?) the question, "why wouldn't you want them to have your money?
my folks' attitude was you live well and leave your children enough to live well; they then add to that when they begin their careers. works for me!
I was told - not in as many words, of course - to Go To College And Your Life Will Be Set.
So I did. So did EVERYBODY my age. We held up our end of the bargain. We only took out crippling loans because the Boomers told us it was worth it, that the jobs would be there. But the Boomers saw to it that they weren't.
So you know what? If the jobs aren't there, a little compensation is in order. Like student loan forgiveness.
We did our bit, Old People. You owe us.
I don't disagree with your chain of logic, but you have to make sure the compensation is sequestered to the people that SHOULD owe it, and not other innocent people that never took out loans.
Decide if the latter and its fallout politically and socially is worth it.
It's never getting paid back so it really doesn't matter. It's not like our taxes in equal our taxes out. We just spent 500B on immigrant invaders and we can't let Millennials discharge their loans in bankruptcy?
I paid for my Millennials to go to college so I'll not join that particular debate except to politely dissent.
Oh, I agree. The innocent should not be made to suffer.
I suggest we raid the Ivy League's endowments.
That’s how you break up the university cartel, make them have real skin in the game. Tax their endowments, and also make them take Required Minimum Distributions each year from their endowments, no different than a retired individual must do. And no government money should flow to any student at a university where the endowment is over $100 million. Any remaining government money which flows to a university should be matched 1-for-1 to community colleges and trade schools.
A-FUCKING-MEN.
Couldn't agree more.
Unless there was a way for the faculty to be tortured as well.
At which point I would agree more.
There definitely needs to be a Room 101 for faculty and administrators.
I took out student loans and I paid them off. That said, the US has no problem funding every proxy war it can over the last half century, spending countless trillions. Millions of young people in this country aren't buying homes, they aren't starting families, they aren't saving. Instead they are drowning in debt.
I'm at a delusional level of being anti-government. A "privatize the sidewalks" kind of guy.... but dammit if we're just spending all of this money and time killing people in the other countries, could we just throw a little at the Participation Trophy Kids so they don't have to import more people to save the declining birth rate?
That's the right-wing case for forgiving loans, eloquently stated: it will allow people to get off the debt treadmill and actually raise families.
Which is enough reason for me to support it. Even though I know that half of the "Forgiven" will just fire up Amazon and replace the debt.
33% forgiven for each child birthed in marriage. All of it back to square one if divorced before kid turns 18. Probably takes some fine tuning but more pro natal policy’s that aren’t dysgenic would be a start
At least the debt then gets recycled into an economy of buying goods-and-services instead of disappearing into the ether of some collection office?
Exactly, and I think that's a good thing.
I'm a Government Regulations Are Written in Blood and Generally A Good Thing type of fella, so let's say our viewpoints are not exactly in line with one another.
With that said, I agree with pretty much every word you wrote. And who said bipartisanship couldn't work, huh?
You, my friend, should call into some public comment periods on new rules for the California Air Resources Board.
It will perhaps disabuse you of this notion.
Every single person in my community was told this. EVERY SINGLE ONE. If you don't go to college you are a failure. God, we still tell zoomers this retarded shit.
I have told people that I've considered buying my son a machine shop instead of sending him to college. You'd think that I'd proposed to tie his hands behind his back and throw him naked into the bonobo cage.
I’d take a machine shop over a history degree
I'd take a Best Buy gift card over a history degree.
The job I do is almost totally irrelevant to anything I’ve learned at uni: maybe American politics, basic finance courses, and GIS have been useful. Otherwise it’s just a checkmark and mostly a waste of money
I have to tell my old college roommate with both a bachelors and master's in history this one. Made me actually LOL (FWIW he is now pursuing his CPA in his mid 30s).
We have some blue collar clients who started a machine shop 30+ years ago. They make bank.
I'd be happy with just the Bridgeport.
If he gets an accounting degree, I'll give him a job in 7 years and I'll make him deal with the IT guy. He will also have to do taxes.
Having worked for one--admittedly not as a machinist:
I love the sentiment, but go carefully.
In the olden days (2010-2014) it was possible to get machined, finished, anodized PARTS from specialized machinists in china, for less than the cost of raw MATERIALS in the US. Think of a part like a motorcycle front fork triple-tree. Imagine getting quotes for $75 us for the aluminum billet, but also getting quotes for $65 to china for a completed part.
It would be absolutely critical to manage this business with a wary eye toward cost management and sending out quotes that can be delivered for a profit, to customers who pay.
Looking at the next five to ten years (heck, just the next year), my view continues to angle towards being able to make real [stuff]: machine, weld, fabricate, form, construct, lay up, etc. Yes, job security, but more the benefit behind it: usefulness and the ability to be needed in many places, thus resulting in consistent provision for one's self (and family). I'd say there are still college degrees worth the effort (STEM-related mainly), but outside of say, purely engineering-related courses, the "balanced education" classes are cancerous.
I came very close to ditching engineering and becoming a plumber. I was working for one between DOD jobs and he was making more money than I was.
if I had it to do over again, I'd seriously consider skipping college and becoming an electrician. we're gonna need a whole lot of electricians
Based on my research these aren’t as widely available as you might be thinking.
If you have 5 million dollars, I know some people who are selling.
I've mentioned this before, but two of the most successful people that I know run machine shops. Both took over from their fathers and grew the business significantly.
Eh, my cousin, a middle school science teacher, said exactly the same thing at Thanksgiving. Shocked me right up. Shes a good old fashioned liberal, but the stories of her white school kids in a middle class area are hair raising.
Of course, any of the black school districts in America that DON'T push their largely illiterate students ( in quotes, you know what I mean) into jobs that demand hands are malpracticing.
Do said bonobos have chlamydia? Asking for a friend.
To Hell with what those people think or say. I bought the "just get a degree, doesn't matter what" bullshit my mother fed me. No one in her family ever got a degree, only one on my father's side before me. Thank God I lived cheaply enough to pay for it all working at a motorcycle shop and not going into debt. A masters degree in anthropology later, everything I've needed to know for my career I learned from reading the Commodore 64 programmers reference guide at the age of 10. My firstborn graduates from trade school tonight debt-free, and I couldn't be more proud of him.
Hell yeah!
Statistically though they aren’t wrong. Lifetime earnings for a college grad are statistically significantly higher. The problem is when we don’t caveat that with “with a marketable degree” and “at a price you can afford to go into debt for”.
Yes, but every single college student should be given an amortization schedule and future earnings compared to degrees. LIke when I buy a car, I got a little sheet that said "If you stick to this schedule, you will pay this much a month and 9k in interest over the life of the loan" So I'm paying it off faster. It also locks women into working who might rather stay with the children they thought they'd never want at 18 to pay off their loans. I did an ROI for an accounting degree compared to starting as a plumber and it take 18-20 years to break even. I don't remember my exact assumptions. Taking out 100k in loans to become a teacher? Absolutely retarded. Can't even afford the interest on that.
Ooh, that's good!
I sincerely wish I had this before settling on a degree(s) path simply because it required the fewest amount of math courses.
I was, and remain, something of an idiot, but trusting an 18 year old to make wholesale decisions about how to spend the rest of their life is not the smartest move we as a society have made.
I now, naturally in my third career, work about as far away from my degree field as possible making a decent (if unspectacular) income for someone in my age bracket.
Some school districts break into low 6 figures. Superintendents mid 6.
Edit: and very generous benefits. Cadillac level healthcare, guaranteed return annuities.
Right, the Pareto principle in action. 20% are making it rain. Doctors, lawyers, engineers (maybe), bureaucrats and trust funders all count on the college graduate side. Everyone else will never recoup the money and time spent vs lost wages.
I went into accounting because I figured I could make twice as much as an engineer and drink twice as much at school because it was an easier degree. I was right! This isn't true anymore. Accounting wages have not kept up with inflation
Engineering is pretty terrible but lots of us were at least keeping our heads above water and earning in the top 10-20%. Combined with financial discipline due to personality type, they are usually building a networth.
Wages have not kept up with inflation*
Some of my Javascript programmers with 5 years experience are making $175,000 a year, Scott. :)
(base. +10% bonus)
Being a college graduate has literally never put a single dollar in my pocket. I should have spent the four years digging wells in West Africa.
Mine DID start paying off - FOURTEEN YEARS after I completed it. Which it would've done almost immediately in a functional economy.
"Oh, you just didn't hustle!"
Why should I have to HUSTLE to live a NORMAL life? Hustling's for making something EXTRAORDINARY of yourself.
Many of the hustlers I have met in my life have been liars who will say ANYTHING to ANYONE to make a quick buck.
Yeah that's been my experience as well. And even though my standard definition of "hustling" is "making pornography or selling stolen tires," in this case I was going with the conventional "working your ass off."
Yes, it is rare to see that sort of working-your-ass-off hustler these days, though.
I'd make a joke about how much virtue you could signal, but at this point they just jumped all over that Mr Beast for doing exactly that so you'd probably be vilified for having a white savior complex or something.
Apparently, there are LEGO sets of Mr. Beast.
LEGO! That man has even gotten his wretched shirkaday hustler claws into LEGO!!!
LEGO has some pretty daft stuff out now.
I actually enjoy YouTube channels Brick Builder and All New Bricks.
But then I remember I live in a world where grown-ass men make a living recording themselves playing with extremely expensive children's toys, and I start shouting for that asteroid to knock it off with the malingering.
I went to a good college and was too dumb/naive to realize that meritocracy isn’t real and the only point of a high ranked university is to network with people higher up and trade favors for jobs.
Aren't you an English major? Doh, Homer.
There are, off the top of my head, three practical problems with student loan discharge, aside from the obvious moral ones.
1 (sorry I don’t start at 0), you create a precedent that we will continue to bail out people in the future and it causes poor incentives (a moral hazard)
2 it does nothing to solve the actual problem of inflated college pricing and will only encourage it (see #1)
3 it’s a literal vote buying scheme pushed by the “something for nothing” party that is trying to drive us into the ground even faster than the other group.
"2: It DOES, because who do you think increased tuition at multiples of inflation because they could?
You think injecting MORE government money into the system is going to make the cost go DOWN? Where did you get your gender studies degree?
Look, sooner or later there's gonna have to be an ugly, shocking SOMETHING to fix the higher-education mess.
Let's start with Harvard's and Princeton's untaxed billions.
And it's Underwater Basket Weaving, not gender studies!
Sure. Something will have to give.
But what I’m telling you is that every single forgiveness program that doesn’t address the root cause isn’t a solution, it’s a vote buying program.
That's why I promote the bankruptcy approach. 7 years of shit credit isn't fun but at least it isn't a lifetime burden. It would have to be tweaked to not immedietly declare out of school but it's not even on the table for discussion. It's all "just enough to keep voting for free shit but not enough to fix anything"
We’ve had this discussion before, but how do you solve the interest rate problem? Make loans dischargable and they’re unsecured debt, with interest rates 2-3x what secured debt rates are.
That's solving the problem.
Because you should approach student debt the way you'd approach any other high-to-middle-risk investment.
Can you imagine the screams from the borrowers and the universities?
Also I’d argue it shouldn’t be a high risk investment, because it should come with a meaningful payback assuming a reasonable career path, and a low ish price tag.
SoFi began with a brilliant idea.
The government’s blanket policies distorted the student debt market, so that someone with a resume of Ivy League College>Goldman Sachs>Middle Market Private Equity>Harvard MBA>Big Boy Private Equity would pay the same rate as someone attending the University of Phoenix.
SoFi made a lot of money refinancing the former and rejecting the latter.
federal student loan interests rates have been 2-3x regular rates for the past 10 years
Thank you for not starting with 0.
I’d be all for refinancing loans at 0% somehow, over out right loan discharge/forgiveness.
College/student loans has evolved into a system to scam students; boomers' advice would have been better if that had not happened. Also, some degrees have positive ROI and others not, is that really a surprise?
If you are knowingly selling a negative ROI degree with the promise of future riches, shouldn't that be fraud?
It IS fraud.
Odd how hard the media has been on "Trump University" and similar when in fact getting a degree in history from Columbia is a bigger ripoff.
College should be for rich people and traditional professionals like lawyers and doctors.
Everybody else can make a good life on trade school and experience.
There are very few entry-level jobs that a history degree would preclude you from being interviewed for.
Had drinks last week with a buddy at a hedge fund who earned a BA in American History from UNC.
If I recall correctly, for-profit trade schools are the biggest offenders when it comes to tuition fraud.
I think you should sue the college for selling you a bad product and committing fraud for telling you it would make you money.
They went out of business years ago, apparently.
No, you didn't do your bit youngster. You couldn't fucking count, so it never occurred to you that your degree in useless studies from bumfuck U wouldn't pay off the $150,000 loan you took on.
(That's at least one way to look at it from my perspective)
I’ve written this before, but I once had to explain fractions to a summer diversity higher on a trading floor stock desk by drawing a pie on a piece of paper and dividing it into pieces. Wish I was imaginative enough to make that story up. Then I had to explain the decimal equivalents to her.
Lmao... Shit I learned in 1st grade for $100, Alex. This is also the reason youngsters can't go into trades.
Boss, I cut it 3 times and it is still too small.
Some of them do not have the iq to do it. We encourage dumb people to get 100k degrees they can’t use. When they could have a middle class life with no loans.
There’s also the people who are let into universities but then fail, when they could have been successful at a lower tier school that matched their intelligence. And they still owe on the loans!
But this is just like the government giving middle class things to people who do not have middle class values, and failure results.
18 years old. As an accounting major I didn’t take finance 101 till my junior year in college. That shit isn’t taught in highschool. Most high schoolers can’t do math let alone a npv. So no, it never occurred to them. They listened to their parents. “Fuck you for trusting us”
And unless your parents are self-made millionaires, they have nothing to teach you about money.
I would rather leave money to a distant blood relative I haven’t seen for decades than to my “community”. Seriously, WTF, your “community”?!?
There’s a way to leave money to benefit family even if some family members are faulty individuals. I also realize some family members should not be left anything.
The use of "community" to mean "disconnected narcissists living in gentrified areas" is one of our century's great ironies.
Having lived in a couple of wealthy little suburbs, it’s at first nice with all of the order and cleanliness and seemingly polite people, but after a while, I realized that these towns are no different than The Village from The Prisoner.
Be seeing you.
Hah! I need to start using that, along with the salute.
I don't have any kids. It's all going to my niece and nephews. And THEIR kids.
I guess I'm strange that I don't see the point to spending it all before I die.
It's not the people of the generation, it's their timing... Sir John Glubb's "Fate of Empires" breaks down the life cycle of the world's powerful civilizations, and it's the same pattern again and again... Baby Boomers are in the phase Glubb calls, "High Noon":
"All these periods reveal the same characteristics. The immense wealth accumulated in the nation dazzles the onlookers. Enough of the ancient virtues of courage, energy and patriotism survive to enable the state successfully to defend its frontiers. But, beneath the surface, greed for money is gradually replacing duty and public service. Indeed the change might be summarised as being from service to selfishness"
-Sir John Glubb, "Fate of Empires"
The clue is in the name.
The Boomers enjoyed the fruits of the postwar economic boom and then got to enjoy the rise of asset prices after the gold standard was abandoned. A series of tremendous benefits accrued to them (as an aggregate generation), and they have worked steadfastly to keep it for themselves.
I think it is worth pointing out that economic growth comes from the conversion of energy. This wasn't really possible on a meaningful scale until the coming of the industrial revolution. It seems to me that the west generally (and the US in particular) had a simply massive advantage after WW2 as the rest of the world operated with (at least) one hand tied behind its back (self-inflicted though it may have been). So we had access to most of the world's oil and gas with very little competition, ie at a lower price than it would otherwise have been. Think of it; China (huge population) enjoying Mao's Great Leap Backwards into starvation, India (huge population) closing its economy to socialist autarky, Africa (large population) in post-imperial tribal kleptocracy, Russia and its reluctant east European satellites (large population) in the frozen dead-end of Communism, South America (large population) flip-flopping itself from right to left into bankruptcy (with possibly some gringo-ist help along the way, one might consider). So who is left? The US, Western Europe and the civilised bits left over from the British empire. Happy days! But, having had it easy, now we have to compete with a much larger chunk of the rest of the world for resources and with their lower labour costs (in part because they lack those nice but expensive Government benefits, in part just historic). So the modern era was never going to be an easy ride for the West. Then add, as Sherman points out above, the funny money era starting when Nixon (not a boomer) cut the dollar/gold link in 1971 (when the French sent a submarine to the US to collect gold to pay for their lovely wine/cheese exports - dunno what else they sold as it certainly wasn't Renaults). But nobody foresaw how much of an asset boom would be created or how it would lead to utter nonsense like QE and ZIRP. So a smart boomer is one who didn't question his luck and just got lifted by the tide. The dumb boomer is the one who asked questions and got himself on the wrong side of that trade. Which is why I shall be carrying on working....
H. Beam Piper's SF addresses this well. And entertainingly.
The Boomers' sin with their houses wasn't "selling them to Chinese real-estate interests" - relatively few of them are owned by the Chinese. It was imposing draconian zoning rules in rich places, so that no new houses could be built anywhere close to the majority of available jobs. Depending on who you ask we have a shortage of somewhere between 2 and 6 million houses in this country, and it is most acute in all the places where the job market is best. There are multiple causes for this but boomer-imposed zoning is one of the biggest.
And exorbitant housing costs are by far the biggest driver of economic malaise, and also a big contributor to other social problems that have gotten worse over the last 30 years.
years ago i read that houston was unzones; dallas was; you couldn't really tell the 2 economies apart. is this still the case?
Both are kind of special cases.
Houston is "unzoned," but the rich parts of it achieve the same effect as restrictive zoning through covenants that run with the land. Nevertheless the infill development in some parts of Houston is better than we get in the coastal cities.
Dallas has just expanded despite its zoning through sheer force of sprawl, replicating the LA model of paying for everyone to have huge lots and houses by forcing them all to spend 2 or 3 hours a day in their cars. That has worked well to date because there are few geographic obstacles to sprawl in Dallas. But it (like LA and Atlanta) is getting so big that it's no longer possible to commute from the outskirts to the job centers. Housing prices in the built-up areas are going to start rising, just like they did in LA, unless infill starts to be allowed.
Not an unfamiliar conceit. Basically with you, as far as the problem itself (housing costs too high) is concerned.
But in places where this "problem" (zoning density limits) gets "solved", its often ugly.
Arlington County, VA recently abolished single family zoning. It sounds nice, but
-the process did not take into account engineering constraints to water, sewer, electric, gas, etc
-there was no ballot issue or democratic aspect to the proposal, thus a county board exclusively composed of hyperlibs with zero technical or civil engineering background voted for a hyper partisan liberal proposal that will overtax every supporting engineering system while overcrowding schools, turning heritage trees into stumps, and turning quiet, single-family, ownership-society neighborhoods into transient renter neighborhoods, with carve-outs for low/no-income residents to ruin the schools, parks, and low-noise/no-crime aspects of the neighborhood.
So yeah - it's a problem--but no one on the YIMBY spectrum has made a proposal I've seen that didn't come with drastic drawbacks that are worse than the problem itself.
I would add that there's an odd aspect to almost everyone who is working toward densification and YIMBY goals.
Solving the problem is probably simple: densify what is already dense without any need to abolish or irrevocably change any one particular zone district. yes it turns charming mid-rise towns into ghastly glass-and-steel bughives, but theoretically it (could) solve(s) the problem.
Yet everytime the issue is discussed on any of the internet's public squares - twitter, NYT comments section, reddit - there's always a really strange and schizoid sub-current of revanchist hatred directed toward single-family zone districts and homeowners, as if such people should not exist (or if they must exist, they should be unable to choose to live in a single family home). It's really weird, and it makes an honest person wonder if the YIMBY crowd do not secretly desire something much more sinister than merely reasonably-priced housing.
It also seems that nearly everyone speaking on the issues of YIMBYism and densification is an urban crime denialist, a per capita denialist, and a committed Chesa Boudin voter basically. Such people are clearly unfit to make decisions for others, much less city-scale decisions on matters that have direct effects on the safety of their fellow citizens.
They hate single-family housing because they do not own a home themselves and/or they own a home in an area that is not where they are pushing for housing reform.
Basically, they hate you and wish to destroy the fabric of your neighborhood out of spite.
Multi family housing sucks. I loathe townhomes with a passion. We just had a developer buy land that wasn't supposed to be developed and he is putting in big row homes at 1.2mm a pop into a neighborhood of single family housing. 1.2 mm isn't affordable housing. I'm not a fan.
Townhomes would be fine, if:
-Not in intermixed with single family zone districts - they should be proximate to urban cores / downtowns where they are density-appropriate
-Filled with civically minded, extremely conscientious people --- no loud dogs or loud late night music and partying (The only late night noise that is acceptable is a young baby crying)
-Brick or concrete block double firewall between houses for noise minimization
Under these circumstances, it makes sense.
Basically 0 recently constructed townhouses that I know of are built this way, much less inhabited by people who can universally meet these basic behavioral standards.
I don't really even consider those townhomes. I'm talking about 30 identical townhomes all put next to each other and made out of cardboard. I really don't like them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3_ug-IGBJY
there are some lovely groups of connected housing in nashville's belle meade--highfalutin--district. i was told they were called 'cluster homes.' my late friend bill called them 'clutter homes.' the whole small areas are fenced and kinda look like attractive postcards.
And the people that fund them hate 'owners' and want 'renters'.
Own nothing, be happy.
They’re retarded left wing autists who grew up playing Sim City and think that anything less than maximum efficiency per square foot of urban space is obscene, human nature be damned. I.e., the people of that group too dumb to get tech jobs.
I still love playing city building games, but I don't think I would ever want to live any of the places I've built!
Here's a thought: Make it so people can live in shipping containers, storage facilities, decommissioned gas stations and other non-standard enclosures, as long as they sign documents stating they understand the lack of amenities. Not everyone needs or wants 1,200 square feet of wall-to-wall carpet and WiFi.
The reason you can't do that, of course, is that few people would pay $2,000 a month for a place to live if they could get one for $200.
Take all the tiny homes and turn a cargo ship into a floating HOA
Just a big houseboat...
A cityblockboat
Where there are jobs, it's a binary choice: densify, or price all the young people out. If you preserve the lovely old single-family home neighborhoods, you are going to have Los Angeles housing prices to go with them. It's inevitable, a straightforward matter of arithmetic.
Having lived outside of the United States, I know it's possible to have equally beautiful and desirable neighborhoods at 10x the level of density. We need to change our approach to development and permitting to get there, but I guarantee you that you would enjoy living in the dense neighborhoods in Vienna or Munich that are full of parks, trees, playing kids, quaint retail streets, and old wise people sitting on benches eating sandwiches. Those cities, meanwhile, are affordable enough that real live middle-class people live in them, which is just a memory in Seattle or San Diego.
THis is what people of a particular political persuasion believe and claim in public, but the math never actually adds up in reality.
Example, this has happened in MY formerly SFH neighborhood. Single family zone districts are abolished, and the minimum by-right density is a triplex here. Developers building them are not pricing new triplexes lower than old, 1950s 3B1B SFHs.
Example prices:
50s boomer 2000sf 3b/2b ~950k-1.2M
New Duplex: 1.7-1.9M
New SFH: 2.3-2.5M
It literally doesn't address the problem (buying an existing house or condo & fixing up remains the cheaper alternative) but it is a nice handout to developers who fund political campaigns and it enables EHO mandates that require some affordability (ie blockbusting) plus rental schemes in ownership neighborhoods.
This issue is yet another example of the innumeracy of the naive utopian. Next you'll tell us paroling prisoners will lower crime
You're not building dense enough. Here are real-world examples from my medium-density city neighborhood, where apartment buildings are now fully legal (although we won't do it citywide):
Teardown SF, mostly built in the 1900s-10s: $1M - $1.2M
Old SF in good condition: $1.5M - $1.8M
New build larger SF (the only thing you'd get if you kept SF zoning): $3M+
Townhouse, usually built 6-8 to a SF lot: $800k - $1M
Apartment in a large apartment building: $500k-$1M depending on size
Sure, if you replace one house with only three in a high-demand place, it's not going to have much impact.
But architecturally speaking it's not realistic to replace one house with 6-8 on a single 6500sf lot configured for SFHs. Most would never see sun. The blocks are not configured properly, because the neighborhood was designed for SFHs
This still carefully elides that the water/sewer pipes and electric services and substations were not made for upzoned demand, and *will not be replaced to suit uprated demand.* In my hood, what you describe is not possible without infrastructure failure or a massive, impossible-to-fund infrastructure replacement program.
The more we talk the more i get the sense upzoning really isn't in american-americans' benefit. Had we solved the border crisis this would not be a problem. Obviously we can solve this problem much more easily on the demand side by closing the border and repatriating illegal aliens. It may be unpleasant but we have to put the needs of actual american citizens first.
"But architecturally speaking it's not realistic to replace one house with 6-8 on a single 6500sf lot configured for SFHs. "
There is a project on my block right now that is doing exactly this. It appears to be 9 townhouses on a 5000 sf lot. All of the townhouses have at least one side facing either a street or a wide alley, so none of them are in the dark. 6 is typically the minimum, usually in two layers of three each.
"This still carefully elides that the water/sewer pipes and electric services and substations were not made for upzoned demand, and *will not be replaced to suit uprated demand.*"
That's a political choice just like the zoning. We are paying large fees on new construction and renovation to fund major expansions of our sewer systems (water is already fine). Our electric utility has installed several new substations in the last decade. The residents of new units can fund new infrastructure if officials and voters allow it.
"Obviously we can solve this problem much more easily on the demand side by closing the border and repatriating illegal aliens."
Where I live, very little of the booming demand (we have been the fastest-growing large city in the country for a couple years running) is from illegal aliens. It is mostly from people, some but not all of whom are legal immigrants, chasing tech industry jobs. Setting aside the humanitarian nightmare that a mass deportation would cause, it would have very little effect on demand in most of the nation's hottest housing markets. It would mostly immiserate places that are already struggling economically.
Also, re: your second paragraph:
I used to live in a dense, urban rowhome district and was forced to move when my city simply stopped enforcing laws against violent crime in 2020. I PREFER that way of living to suburban life. With a big caveat: in America you need law enforcement to make it work!
Ask yourself, what does Vienna or Munich (at least historically speaking!) not suffer under that American cities have?
The answer is a statistically numerous criminal recidivist underclass that terrorizes the taxpaying citizenry.
I'd STILL be living in what is (for american development styles) tantamount to vienna, hardly needing a car at all, were it not for the impossibility of raising a family around violent repeat-offender criminals empowered to act with utter impunity by democrat city council and democrat mayor. Here are some nice statistics that can't be lied about: https://nitter.net/fentasyl/status/1728082500293992722#m
(Note these numbers if anything probably understate the issue, as people won't even call the cops for most crimes less violent than carjacking)
However much of a naive-utopian wrapper you want to cognitively blanket this issue in, the party you claim to work for did this to my former city. No one else is responsible. And no, I shouldn't have to run for office to fix the issue. Citizens should agree that committing violent crime is unacceptable. As a country, USians can't even agree on basics like that, which is why this country's people and its political elite/journo class are at each others THROATS and will be for some time
I still live in a near-car-free neighborhood, with my family of 4, and am not suffering this impact. I agree people need to be safe. Many American cities in fact remain pretty safe, and even in many cases safer than their surrounding inner suburbs. (For example, New York is safer than the average urbanized place in America.) Unfortunately DC is not among them, which is too bad because it's a beautiful place otherwise. I lived there for six years and miss it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Seattle
New York is safer than Seattle and has a very different demographic picture.
Thank you.
The bigger problem is why are all the jobs centralized in the same locations in the first place?
Because that is how most humans work. They generate value when clustered together. Always have, always will.
"I've got mine! Now help me pull this ladder up."
Boomers are the quintessential FYGM hypocrites. We need to be tough on crime, we need to lower spending and we need to building more housing becomes: my don is innocent, don't touch my social security and not in my backyard. Boomers are running the country and it is fucking deplorable. Lol.
I don't really hold anything against the Boomers and only use the word to piss off the people it offends while also most likely fitting the above description. Plenty of opportunity in this country. No one wants to put in the time or effort previous generations did. Sucking shit at the plant 50 hours a week for 45 years to get a pension, die and never see a cent of it does not hold the romance it once did.
I’m a boomer. Peak boomer in fact. I don’t believe in age cohort labels that use statistical correlations to paint a whole generation. It seems that a black man born in Louisiana in 1946 is like an Asian woman born on the upper east side of New York in 1964 because they are both boomers. Using terms like boomer and millennial is intellectually lazy unless you are using it to define when a person was born. Every generation has assholes that fuck things up. In some cases they happened to be boomers. Some assholes are boomers. I’m a boomer. Am I an asshole? Probably, but not because I’m a boomer. I don’t know one thing for sure. Everyone who confuses correlation with causation eventually dies.
Should say I don know one thing for sure. No edit in the app.
The app was made by avocado toast millennials!
In all seriousness, I have personally applied twice to Substack, hoping they'd let me fix some of it, but I'm not the right demographic.
Zero reason you can't apply as Jackpreet Baruthinder after a spray tan.
I think Mohammed Baruthi might get him more $$$ and social credits.
Actually Yuhanna Baruthi is closer to correct. ai to the rescue.
There are three kinds of people who have the name:
0. Germans from Baruth or surrounding areas
1. Jews who derive it from Baruch, meaning "blessed"
2. Somalis, and I don't know why
Haha, wait until there is a backdoor teams or zoom filter to change your race and voice. "All remote"
I'm getting dinged for virtual blackface within seconds
Lie! John Baruth, 25 years old. When you get the interview really lean into it by dressing like an asshole. Actually, dress how you normally do!
I had a very uncomfortable conversation with some co-workers about the "old man they hate" in the department. He is 48. They assumed I would also hate him, since I am not 48. They're right about that, anyway.
https://media1.tenor.com/images/87916653e4e086e2a53d0bdcb5cc2db1/tenor.gif?itemid=5510636
The Boomer label is a misnomer because as a late Boomer I have nothing in common with the other Boomers I see. I just don’t think like them.
The best marker I have seen is that if you were eligible to go to Vietnam, you’re a Boomer. If you weren’t, you’re not a Boomer.
And if you managed to GET OUT of going to Vietnam, you're REALLY a Boomer.
My father volunteered, which doesn't make him an intellectual but does turn down the knob.
See? Terry is both an intellectual AND a Porsche guy. Disproves Jacks theory for sure.
No one has ever accused me of being an intellectual. Thanks, I think...
As far as being a Porsche guy I like how some of them drive so I choose to drive them. I have had just as much fun in my Miata and my Minis. I refer to myself as a serial car buyer. I have owned over 60 in 50 years of driving. Twelve of which have been Porsche sports cars plus three Macans. I have never kept a car more than two years. I am the depreciation king unfortunately.
Born in very late 1961 to young, very young, parents so I seem to be in between generations at times. Apparently being young and pregnant didn't get my parents in on the financial lotteries of the times as they stayed that way. Lost the only house we ever had while I was still in diapers and lived in a series of sketchy (and eventually a little less sketchy) apartments until I graduated high school. No money for college, cars, much of anything for me so I lit out on my own and learned to make do. Bounced around working on college while loading trucks, delivering newspapers, catching sleep and a roof over my head whenever possible.
I went into law enforcement on the advice of a friend and worked 30 years dragging myself upwards in fits and starts. Reasonably successful due to hard work so I'm thankful if nothing else. But...more recently I was over hiring for a time in my agency and I was shocked when we did screening as EVERY young candidate came in a brand new car. Came with brand new clothes, a brand new phone and parents who (shockingly) called us to see how the interviews went to try and help their "kids" get a decent job. I had a $500 Honda Civic when I was hired, no suit but decent clothes that I hustled to buy. So I'm burdened with believing that hard work and dedication will get one ahead in America. I'm probably and little bit right and a good bit wrong as usual. Probably too old to change my viewpoints anyway ;)
Great story, thank you.
I write not to condemn the boomers, but to ... sort of defend them. Backhandedly.
(Note this doesn't apply to all boomers, and especially not to many of the beloved boomers here)
TL;DR You're never going to agree about the world when you don't agree on the facts describing the world.
I have debates similar to the above with one of my in-laws from time to time.
One way in which white collar boomers, often totally unintentionally, ladderpulled everyone younger than them, is with the immigration thing.
Of course they were not responsible for the Hart Celler immigration act. They had no idea what would be entailed, and it appears to have been sold under false pretenses.
But you can talk to a boomer about it, and many of them are *not even aware* that immigration is happening at the level it is. They don't know the statistics; most boomers woudn't believe you if you tell them the US went from 90-95% white to ~53% in 58 years, the greatest population migration in known history. Such statistics are carefully omitted or lied about in the Post, Times and Journal. Most boomers haven't been to South Texas, or even the areas where the post-1965 migrants live *in their own states.* They don't go to Home Depot, where they might be the single only European-American--- their contractors go to Home Depot for them. And when they do see entire neighborhoods and counties from the global south, most professional boomers say, "Good! It's good they're getting a chance to live the American Dream, like we did." Many professional boomers seem to be ignorant of the fact that European-derived, first-world people were a necessary part of building and maintaining European-derived, first world America.
Boomers love diversity migration because it makes: their lawn service cheaper, their blue collar labor class more docile (or else!), and their first-year associates *totally non-threatening*. A guy of equal intelligence on equal footing with equal dominance is a threat or will be eventually. A guy (or gal!) with *more* intelligence but lesser footing and dramatically lesser dominance needs isn't a threat at all, and might never become one.
Diversity has been good to boomers. I don't think I've ever convinced even a single boomer that their children and grandchildren having to live as aliens in their own homeland is a negative. "What's the matter, Donkey," a beloved boomer once said to me with a smile, "You don't like cheap lawn care?"
Might be common knowledge here, but "Coming Apart" by Charles Murray indirectly delves into this phenomenon of Boomer ignorance.
Great info. I need to promote this one higher on the reading list...
That may be the most prophetic book of the 21st century thus far.
It's certainly in the running. I'd like to see an updated edition with data through 2020 to gauge whether the 1960-2010 trends are accelerating as some suspect.
I remember reading that book and The Devil’s Pleasure Palace (about the Frankfurt School of identitarian Marxism) around 2014-2015 and thought those seemed like a bit much but whooooo boy did those two books turn to be more terribly correct than you’d like.
EVERYTHING you listed can be summed up with:
"Not seeing past their own desires, eating their children's future and mortgaging their grandchildren for further material benefit". Whether by voting a certain way or not.
I have no skin in this as a first gen unwanted (possible) immigrant, save for being an early/mid gen Y kid, and seeing this from an outside perspective.
On your note about needing the boomers, most of them are so oblivious to anything but their own selfish wants that the 'keeds' don't have the time to deal with it, being busy trying not to literally starve.
The last two paragraphs of Donkey Konger's comment is 100% the sentiment I've seen as well.
"...early/mid gen Y kid..."
[queues Michael Scott meme]
"THANK YOU!" (from an early gen Y guy myself)
Item 1: since this is an open thread, I have an open request. My family is planning a vacation (my parents, my wife and our three kids, my sister and her husband and their two kids, possibly my brother and his wife) and we are looking for a nice, secluded place, preferably on a lake with some water-based activities to enjoy for a week in August. Does anyone here know of a nice place that won't break our bank we could go? Possibly in the Appalachians somewhere. Seclusion, as in very few or no people is our top priority.
Item 2: Speaking of my family, I only understand the boomer thing in the abstract. My parents taught me to underachieve with the best of them. My dad went to college in the late 70s and was presented with two majors, computers or marketing. He took one look at computers, thought there was no future in it, and chose marketing. He became a salesman and had a job with a company selling paper forms that allowed him to give us a comfortable life until the late 90s when computers took over everything and his company downsized him in perhaps my lifetime's biggest "Ha ha, I told you so." My mom earned a Master's in English and worked at a store in the mall with her buddy where they made fun of the people who came in to shop. So they accumulated no assets aside from some debt and, especially in the case of my dad, had to watch in horror as their peers sent good jobs overseas at the turn of the millennium. Don't worry, although they struggled for a while, my dad now drives a truck and loves it (his boss is always so far away!) and my mom sold furniture for a while and is now retired. So, a happy ending, sort of? Still no assets, though. I aim to die the way they will: leaving behind pretty much nothing but loving kids and happy memories!
My parents have a place in Canaan Valley, WV. A beautiful condo near lakes, mountains, hiking spots. You could rent theirs (I’m sure I can get you an ACF discount) and the condo next door (which is a lovely unit maintained by a wealthy older lady psychologist who daily drives a C7 Z06) for a total of 6 bedrooms and 4 full bathrooms. The condo complex has a nice pool, fishing pond, and is pretty secluded. Nearby there’s Pendleton Lake for kayaking, Blackwater Falls, cool restaurants, and Dolly Sods which is breathtaking.
https://www.vrbo.com/2105918
Here you go. If you’re interested, I could secure the time myself and give a significant discount. The people watching from the back deck in the summers can be fun: once got to watch Joe Manchin and Biden’s Senior Advisor negotiating the Inflation Reduction Act in a hot tub while listening to Disney show tunes
Note, *they* were in the hot tub listening to Disney music, not me. Nobody should envision that
I will forward the link and information to my family and let you know what they think by the end of the week. Thank you!
No problem! The place was a passion project for my father and myself while we were holed up during covid; it’s pretty nice and plenty to do nearby. It’s not explicitly pet friendly, but my dad and I have made some exceptions for friends.
And you’re from MI right? Weirdly enough I’ve driven from there to Ann Arbor for some less than family friendly reasons, and it’s a decently easy drive
Yep. I live in Marquette County in Upper Michigan, and my parents live right across the border from Toledo. Cutting across Ohio after driving all of Michigan is really no big deal.
I do the Toledo-Detroit thing just about any time I travel south or east and it's often after a long drive home, so the 60 miles to Detroit or even less to Ann Arbor from Toledo seems like a short drive. I figure anything less than 300 miles is a short drive.
Less than three hundred miles is pretty much the entirety of the state below the bridge. Lots of nice areas to day trip to!
Hi Bryce. My sister decreed it wasn't close enough to water for her so we will keep looking for a different location. I would again like to express my gratitude for the offer. If there's ever a way I can help you in the future I'd be glad to help.
No problem :) I think a few other ACF members are interested, so my offer might pay off :) and, if you ever totally lose your mind and decide to decamp to Ocracoke Island, NC I can help there too!
I'll step in here and say this is a gorgeous area. Your family won't be disappointed.
Holding onto this link myself Bryce.
Great. Instead we get to envision two corrupt geezers sitting in a hot tub doing further damage to our economy while LISTENING TO DISNEY TUNES!
The whole thing was just fucking weird, but there’s an even better lining:
There were three cars at Manchin’s place. His Maserati Levante, Steve Richetti’s (Biden’s advisor) Audi A8L, and some aide’s Kia EV6. Disney music aside (which had to be a Biden person’s thing, Joe is much more for yacht rock and Led Zep in my experience), the vibe was just weird.
The best part? After negotiations of the bullshit climate deal concluded, THIS happened to the EV6 en route from Canaan to DC
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/west-virginia-coal-miners-help-tourists-push-dead-electric-car.amp
Oh, it was a Nero, my bad.
It’s a small world, after all...
I might be bugging you next summer
I have a relative on a lake in Maine just outside Portland. She rents the place out, it's on a dirt road but 15 minutes from the city. Get in touch with Jack who can connect us up. I'm sure I can get it cheap(er) if you're interested.
Thank you! I will keep that in mind.
Fair questions about Walt Kowalski's children in Gran Torino. But Kowalski was an assembly worker, and doesn't fit the profile of the boomers that Gen X and Millennials rail against. He didn't amass great assets or become addicted to power like women become addicted to Botox.
Following WWII women stayed/entered the workforce. This event alone put massive downword pressure on wages followed by virtually unrestrained illegal immigration. No wonder a young man can't expect to find a job earning enough to buy a house and raise a family.
The Boomers, as you note, enjoyed access to decently affordable education. I sometimes wonder how much the education boom contributed to their slide toward decadence and self dealing?
RIP Racer Phil. I knew him primarily as a Tire Rack installer of all things. I'd order up a set of tires and send them to Phil's house, then look forward to talking about racing, Mazdas, and wrenching on cars while he mounted and balanced tires in his screened-in porch. A nice and knowledgable guy that said he was just installing tires for a few extra bucks to go racing.
He sounds like a cool dude.
The coolest.
That's how I knew Phil, too. He didn't discriminate...he put Star Specs on my Miata, then put TripleTreds on my Buick. He had a cat named Toyo and a 1st-gen RX-7 and a Neon ACR in his garage (Jack, didn't you buy that Neon from Phil) and a Sienna he used to tow his race cars. RIP, Phil. You will be missed.
Bought the Neon and used it for an R&T article before selling it to Jake Rupert who is slowly catching up on all the deferred maintenance, including body brake lines that just rusted to dust.
If he hasn’t tackled this yet, Inline Tube sells pre-bent stainless lines for the Neon. I remember having to massage a few bends but the fit was very close to perfect.
Oustanding! I'll pass that along!
That's what he was! His Tire Rack business fell off because he couldn't do anything above 16" wheels.
Some sympathy for the boomers: VOATING is useless. No matter what they say and who you vote for they will fink on you. Both parties. No exceptions. Any boat rockers will be dealt with summarily and/or sandbagged. Perfect examples of finks on the right, Ronnie Raygun and GWB and on the left Clinton. Potential boat rockers dealt with: Perot, Sanders, Trump, RFK Jr. Most of the current gerontocracy are older than boomers.
Most of the worst and most long lasting damage was done by the Greatest Gen, after the misty eyed optimism that winning the war against the Japs and Nazis (and destroying Europe and leaving half of it in the hands of the Communists) gave them the impression that they could and *should* do anything.
The twin ponzis of Medicare and SS and the unassailable military industrial complex (and therefore the forever wars) are the big ones and currently make up 90% of all fedgov expenditures. If you want to get spicy, pushing the Civil Rights Act at bayonet point also counts. Burn, Loot, and Murder and associated inner city mayhem all lead indirectly from it.
As for Boomer musicians, I'll just leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlyPiacNoAU
https://www.ticketmaster.com/rod-stewart-tickets/artist/736200
That South Park episode is around 23 years old.
Problem goes deeper than Greatest Generation even
Gen prior to them were the people that enacted the New Deal
Gen prior to that got us into WW1 and then the debauchery of the Roaring 20s and the 1929 stock market crash
Gen prior to that engaged in America’s brief colonial experiment with the Spanish American war