This angry insomniac rant won't be very polite. You have been warned.
To all the "Greatest Generation" and Baby Boomers who want to blame younger folks for apathy and laziness: Shut the fuck up. Yeah, I'm going there. Depending on how you want to calculate dates, I might be catalogued as an exceptionally young member of Gen X, but more likely I'm an old Millennial, so I'm gonna go ahead and throw Gen X under the bus, too.
You ran up impossible debt and left us holding the bag. Your social experiments have gone down in flames every damn time. Your Ponzi schemes make us foot the bill for your medical care and retirement. Your jingoistic warmongering gave us the Cold War, chaos in the Middle East, and various smaller interventions across the globe, saddling us with massive expenses as you borrowed on our earnings as your collateral. You tell us to agitate for raising the minimum wage instead of asking why you devalued the dollar and crippled economic progress. Your policies keep housing prices high because you think it makes you wealthy even though that means we struggle to even pay rent, and then you say we're lazy for having so many of our generation moving back home. Every grand scheme from the Great Society to Obamacare has failed, but you spin them as successes anyway. Now you offer to benevolently assume even more power even though those policies retarded (or even reversed) all the real progress that had been made before then. Do you really expect us to believe a "Green New Deal" will fix any root problems? What does "Make America Great Again" actually mean? You taught us to argue over these partisan false choices as if they really matter.
You have the audacity to claim we're lazy and ungrateful. Damn right we're ungrateful. You've done everything you could to kill the legacy economy, and then tried to bulldoze any progress outside of that with taxation, regulation, and prohibition. Anything new must be bad, so government needs control. Bitcoin? Uber? Gotta get in the way! Hell, you've even overseen new restrictions on travel and punishing kids who run lemonade stands. You're the ones who pushed college debt as a path to prosperity, and now people with useless college degrees are competing for entry-level jobs because you sold them a bill of goods. Unfortunately, most of my generation are also seeing the endless insanity of politics as both an empty answer and the only option. We don't want incalculable debt, senseless wars, economic collapse, crumbling infrastructure, or control freaks running our lives. That's some pretty goddamned bleak shit. What the fuck do you expect besides apathy in response?
We need a glimmer of hope, not your petty demands and condescending criticism as you pile more burdens on our backs and offer us the poison pill of politics as if it were a cure for the ills you inflicted on us. Youwere the ones with power. You abused it. Maybe you should pay the price? Swallow your pride, apologize, and admit your own responsibility for the mess we're in. Don't sell us more of the same mistakes with a fresh coat of paint. If you old fuckers participated in the system, you have no claim to authority or legitimacy. You built this monument to failure, and no, the fix isn't more damned legislation and bureaucracy. We tried it your way, and it doesn't work. Your social models are as relevant as flat earth theory.
Thanks to you, Gen Z has only known perpetual "war on terror," propaganda masquerading as news, economic turmoil, and the all-pervading surveillance state. You old fuckers built that while promising peace, freedom and prosperity. Shut up, get out of the way, and let us experiment with real liberty. We can't possibly fuck up as badly as you did after you expressed the same sentiments.
I am not sure any of the "greatest generation" are still alive.
As Catherine Austin Fitts says, the baby boomers had great aspirations and govern-cement came along and said be quiet, here's your check.
So the baby boomers sold us all out. Thought it was more important to work/party and left a generation to basically grow up on their own.
The baby boomers stood quiet as the factories were sold out from under them. They oversaw the movement to Mexico and then to China... but they got their bucks. And then they say, these unemployed kids are just lazy.
I really do not know what is going to happen when all these baby boomers need geriatric care. The proper thing is just give them the key to an old folks apartment and leave them to fend for themselves. (like the way the raised their children) But that would be cruel and heartless. So, i do not know what we are going to do.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
A bunch of them are. It’s only recently that the last of the WW1 veterans died, so a fair number of WW2 vets and their generation are still around, albeit quite elderly.
Robots, at least in Japan. Or young immigrants in the US.
But I’m a boomer who watched my parents spend their last years in a nursing home. Not at all how I want to go. Drive me out to the boonies, leave me with a .38 Special and one bullet.
Meh, it’s too easy to blame the earlier generations for society’s ills. That’s been going on for a long time. I fully expect that millennials will some day receive the wrath of their grandchildren.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Yes, it is too easy to blame them, however, there is a lot to be laid at their feet.
House prices are too unaffordable for the latest generation.
And this has come about by mostly the baby-boomers wanting to keep property values high.
However, the real solution is build houses like the Amish build barns. The community gets together and builds a house. This was actually common not terribly long ago for newly married couples.
My thoughts are that in high school, the shop class is to build your own house. (probably a one room apartment above a garage) Thus, each man becomes a part of the community, and each man knows at least one skill essential for life.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Within a few years, 3D printing might cause the price of housing to drop precipitously.
Keep in mind though that many boomers who may seem to have lucked out and bought houses are really only a paycheck or two away from not being able to make mortgage payments. In millions of cases, it’s really banksters who own the housing stock, not the boomers who are living in them.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
That would be easier if the past generations hadn't built a regulatory morass that makes that kind of thing effectively illegal. When I worked as a draftsman ca. 2005-2009, we had two major problems: McMansion Syndrome from clients and city/county code compliance. Our designs weren't unsafe, they were just unapproved. And getting approval is a time-consuming and expensive pain in the ass to keep people employed in pointless jobs.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
It was already that way when i worked as an engineer and architect back in the 90s.
Minimum house sizes are actually the worst idea.
If anyone looked forward in time they would see, that there would be no starter homes. But, the desire to keep property values was high, especially among the rich... the ones who were on the county boards.
Mike Oehler designed a great system for building underground houses.
And although it puts standard construction to shame in almost every measurable way, it is "illegal" in most counties.
And, the pain of going through plan check.
These people who are supposed to make sure that everything is up to code
... asks, "Where are the truss calculations?"
"Those are the papers there, stapled to the front of the plans"
Yeah... they were "checking" the plan.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
We are going through a minor remodel of our library workspace, and it involved building two non-structural partition walls. There are no doors. The traffic path meets ADA requirements. I worked with our maintenance manager to design and draw the plans. We still needed city (ha, small-town self-importance much?) approvals and inspections. I totally see 3rd-party verification for electricity, plumbing, and structural calculations, but why does it need to be a government bureaucracy? We got by with my hand-drawn plans on a copy of the original blueprints and avoided the expense of hiring an architect, so there's that at least.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
If we don't reject the failed ideas of the past, we will. We can't just pass the buck again and rely on nanny state counterfeit society like the last generations did. But that means understanding where they went wrong, and politicians always offer easy answers in exchange for power, and even though those answers are wrong, many find them too tempting.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Some kind of reset is almost inevitable. There’s just no way that the world’s mountain of debt will be repaid. The only options I see are massive defaults or hyperinflation.
Artificial intelligence, automation, and 3D printing suggest that there may be a huge wave of job destruction coming down the pike. I expect that talk of UBI and “helicopter money” will be all the rage, even if governments can’t hope to provide it without risking even faster defaults/hyperinflation. Money creation may need to come from blockchains rather than governments.
That said, there’s plenty of blame to go around. When was the last time someone said “Um, no thanks” to government money? Even Ayn Rand applied for Social Security and deposited the checks.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
AI, automation, etc. won't create unemployment. they will change what employment is available on the market, but the economy has been experiencing that since at least the industrial revolution, and the result has been higher wealth production. 3D printing is more hype than practical micro-manufacturing, but it has the potential to decentralize the economy, and that is a good thing.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Oh, I may of course be proven wrong by events, but I think this time is different may finally be the case.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. HP is rolling out 3D printers that can print steel.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Sintered metal is a decent option for many applications, but it has been widespread in industry for ages. Cutting the cost for the home user is great, but I still don't see it as the end of the manufacturing industry.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Solid sentiments and rightful indignation
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Boomers in general, not only allowed the current state of existence, they begged and shouted for it. The hippies in the streets shouting "baby killers" at returning Vietnam vets went on to be roe v wade apologists (actual baby killers) and the yuppies who gave us latch key kids. Lived their lives for themselves while sucking up the slop of the greatest economic boom in known history. Most of them will die in nursing homes alone, abandoned and will rightfully deserve it.
I didn't fully realise how hard the boomers lose until I had raised my own family without spontaneously pissing all over my children's future for my personal wants and desires.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit