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Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

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Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#441

Post by Danihan »

researcher11 wrote: post #224
Johnny555 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise if you plan it out it's completely possible to retire with dignity and people are doing it all the time Unless, of course your planning counts on government sponsored health insurance or even Social Security since in today's political climate, there's no guarantee that either will be around for your retirement.

Pensions are the first to go. They already are in many places. Taxpayers will be unable to bail them out. If you think being 20 with a shitty job is bad then consider being 65 with no savings or income whatsoever.

If you're 65 and have no savings or income you really lived your life wrong.

I mean, even if you bought a house at 35 and just made minimum payments, at least that would be paid off. And I'm sure taxes could be paid by renting out one room..

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#442

Post by edblarney »

thriftwy wrote: post #305
zxcvvcxz wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how this is being downvoted - the truth hurts. We just have it too damn good, and without any wide-scale struggles to know how good we have it. I would like to a read a serious response from a detractor.

There's no room to grow. In the modern world, for most people, there's nothing productive to do and no fame to get from it. In the USA, all the highways are already built (and even when they're failing, their fixing will be postponed). High speed rail lines weren't, and they're not going to be. Not on any human time frame. So most people are engaged with running pre-built technosphere that is slowly falling apart, wi…

"There's no room to grow."

"Productivity, respect and growth are. Are we having any all across post-development countries?"

Have any of you ever taken a basic Econ course?

'No room for growth'?

THE ECONOMY HAS BEEN GROWING EVERY YEAR.

Do you realize that 'feature phones' to 'cell phones' is economic growth?

Do you realize that '2G to 4G' is economic growth?

Do you realize that more people going to college than ever before is good?

There are new medicine trials every day - gene therapy. Jesus H Christ you can now chose the gender and eye colour of your offspring. That's how advanced we are.

100 years ago - there was no 'medicine'. 95% of all operations were basically amputations with crossed fingers of no infection.

Do you realize that the amount of air travel in the world has doubled in the last little while?

That you have access to 100000x more information that people just 20 years ago, before the internet?

You do realize that the iPhone/Android/Facebook are only 10 years old?

That 20 years ago there was no YCombinator?

I'm just going to assume that most of you are too young to have any perspective, because I just can't understand the commentary here.

When you hit your 30's, you can look back and your own life can be a literal testament to the change.

Yes, some things stay the same, but at least in terms of material productivity, things are better.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#443

Post by Danihan »

intended wrote: post #362
api wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already not ending well. A seemingly sizable and growing fraction of these disaffected largely male unemployed or under-employed people are embracing full-blown fascism and other equally unhinged ideologies. Look into the intersection between online alt-right / neo-Nazi trolldom and the gamer/4chan/etc. orbit. Humans don't like to live in zoos and alternate realities are ultimately unfulfilling. I agree about yo…

World war 3 is the dream for the disenfranchised. The reality is more like dystopia and control/distraction of the average user, packaged as good deals/market solutions to help you get ahead.

>The reality is more like dystopia and control/distraction of the average user, packaged as good deals/market solutions to help you get ahead.

That's the status quo, sure. But nothing says that will remain stable.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#444

Post by dragonwriter »

edblarney wrote: post #437
researcher11 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is so perfectly stereotypical and dicorced from reality part of me thought it was a joke.

"It is so perfectly stereotypical and dicorced from reality " It is exactly reality - and that you don't grasp it only validates how utterly self-deluded Millenials are. By every measure Millenials are doing better. Millenials have: + Better healthcare, more coverage + Better access to education, information, more college grads than ever + More job opportunities, more diverse fields to apply knowlege + More opportuni…

> By every measure Millenials are doing better.

You cite no actual quantitative measures to support this claim, so rather than rebutting with such I'll just say this: by many economic measures, Millenials are worse off than boomers (by a few, they're​ also worse of than Gen X, though by more Gen X is in the worst position of the three, though it usually gets left out of comparisons.)

> All of these gripes are really sad 'Oh the Boomers fed everything up' and 'life sucks'. Bullshit.

It's true that the f-ing up (specifically, of the features in the politico-economic system that resulted in aggregate gains being widely distributed) mostly happened wat the end of the time when the "Greatest" Generation was running the show, the Boomers just were the last generation to have a substantial fraction of their working life before things were f-ed up.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#445

Post by no_wave »

SticksAndBreaks wrote: post #344
fmihaila wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it depends. Some other addictions, while they may consume parts of you, can on balance be more contained (if they don't kill you first). Video games, on the other hand, are sure to eat away inordinate amounts of that which you can never get back: time.

Is a addict really that much worser off? At the end, all that remains of life, is sugar encoded eletricity in a jelly-fish on a walking sausage. They dont make copies of themselves though. My grandfather had a collague, who build a fast-breeder reactor in germany. Then the political climate changed and the reactor- brand new was deconstructed, and the whole thing reverted to a grass-farmland. Noting but memorys to sh…

The reason it's seen as depressing is that game addicts are usually celibate

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#446

Post by erikpukinskis »

vedranm wrote: post #387
mattmanser wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Occupy protests around the world? Arab spring? 2011 UK riots? Black lives matter? There's a definite undercurrent that politicians are barely keeping a lid on, the latest manifestations being Brexit and Trump.

Occupy and Black Lives Matter[1] have deep ideological differences to Tea Party[2] and Donald Trump. Do not trust those who classify all of those as the same kind of civil uprising. [1] https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/08/02/black-lives-matter-p... [2] https://www.teaparty.org/about-us/

Apples, oranges, and grapes have deep biological differences. Do not trust those who classify all of those as the same kind of fruit.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#447

Post by erikpukinskis »

hyperpallium wrote: post #299
laughfactory wrote: post #150

It's not just video games either. Add Netflix and social media, and soon, VR, to the equation, and it's pretty clear that the game of life offers insufficient rewards relative to one's efforts. I don't believe we ended up here due to some grand conspiracy, but I do think that the top 1% have gotten so skilled at trapping wealth and therefore opportunity that it's really screwing over everyone else. Even as a relative…

I've been thinking about gradients in evolution, what directions are fruitful for an organism to evolve in. The acceleration in intelligence in our line would seem to require an ongoing survival-advantage gradient for intelligence (that somehow, wasn't available to other apes...). It also relates to the brain-body ratio for species, because investing in intelligence works for them - it says something about that speci…

I doubt we're more intelligent than apes. We just have some specialized language machinery that allowed a new parasitic species (memes) to evolve on top of us. We're just apes with a "copy" button in our brains. We look intelligent, but that's just because we're being farmed by memes.

The memes aren't smart either, but the 2-layer system is smarter than any 1-layer system.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#448

Post by captain_crabs »

xor1 wrote: post #40

>Game designers often deploy a technique called “dynamic difficulty adjustment”. In many games, the software assesses a player’s skill and rebalances various attributes of the game accordingly, to keep the game fun and manageable for those of less ability. Gamers early in their careers, or who are simply struggling to pick up the skills necessary to succeed, are given a helping hand; their world might be more generou…

I have pretty much the exact same experience with Dota. I think there's one thing it teaches better than any other game that's exemplified in your post. If you want to get good at Dota, you have to accept responsibility for yourself and the decisions you've made to get you to where you're at. At first in the small setting of the game, but as this gets drilled in over and over through all the hours of play, the habit grows outside the game.

It's proven a surprisingly good barometer for me on how I'm doing in my life. When I'm taking care of myself and actually growing elsewhere, even losses are fun. But when I'm running from something, the wins feel empty. I also notice that when I meet a 5k+ mmr player in real life, we're immediate friends, simply because they've accepted responsibility for themselves and have interesting theories on the world as a result.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#449

Post by kamaal »

SticksAndBreaks wrote: post #344
fmihaila wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it depends. Some other addictions, while they may consume parts of you, can on balance be more contained (if they don't kill you first). Video games, on the other hand, are sure to eat away inordinate amounts of that which you can never get back: time.

Is a addict really that much worser off? At the end, all that remains of life, is sugar encoded eletricity in a jelly-fish on a walking sausage. They dont make copies of themselves though. My grandfather had a collague, who build a fast-breeder reactor in germany. Then the political climate changed and the reactor- brand new was deconstructed, and the whole thing reverted to a grass-farmland. Noting but memorys to sh…

Sorry. But that is precisely the point of opportunity costs.

Building that reactor isn't just a job. That kind of a job generally has a future/career. You would learn so many things on the way you will likely land a better job sooner or later.

One of things that I keep saying to my younger cousins that pretty much everything I built at the start of my career in programming doesn't exist now.

All that remains is me, and along the way I've gathered skills.

Video games don't give you this.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#450

Post by erikpukinskis »

zxcvvcxz wrote: post #225
laughfactory wrote: post #150

It's not just video games either. Add Netflix and social media, and soon, VR, to the equation, and it's pretty clear that the game of life offers insufficient rewards relative to one's efforts. I don't believe we ended up here due to some grand conspiracy, but I do think that the top 1% have gotten so skilled at trapping wealth and therefore opportunity that it's really screwing over everyone else. Even as a relative…

> I don't believe we ended up here due to some grand conspiracy, > but I do think that the top 1% have gotten so skilled at trapping wealth and therefore opportunity that it's really screwing over everyone else. I've got news people: the top 1% is not forcing you to watch Netflix, consume social media, or strap a VR headset on. We live in a generation absolutely devoid of personal responsibility. And it's why ideas t…

> Where's the hard work in today's generation? Where's the personal responsibility? Where's the discipline? Where's the can-do attitude?

Look out your window it's everywhere.

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