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Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

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Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#161

Post by sgift »

posguy wrote: post #150
sgift wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the region and your experience you may consider asking for a raise or changing your job. You are probably (seriously) underpaid.

Pay in Germany is generally low. Where someone in Seattle would earn $120k to $140k easily, the same person in Germany may net only $40k to $50k. Housing and especially food & drink are much cheaper than the US though, $12 beers aren't anywhere near as common.

I'm from Germany, so yeah, you are right, but if he makes less than half of the numbers above (80k-100k) he is still underpaid.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#162

Post by Mendenhall »

irrational wrote: post #6

I worry about this for my oldest son. He has dyspraxia and apraxia. In practice that means he has difficulty with memory (at 15 he still doesn't know his multiplication tables) and putting things in order (such as speaking - you have to put phonemes, words, sentences together in order to speak). But, he doesn't look like he has a disability and he doesn't speak much so people don't readily realize he doesn't talk lik…

I wonder what he likes to do? It may be hard for him to fit into a "normal" job, but it makes me ponder the edge case "jobs". Things like making stuff and selling on etsy, Twitch channel or youtube videos, buying and selling comic books etc, cutting grass to start own landscaping business. It seems like he has supportive family so that to me is huge. Best wishes and I understand that concern completely, it just got me thinking about possible ways of harnessing what he is into etc.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#163

Post by anigbrowl »

anorphirith wrote: post #52

it's really getting annoying how US news outlets always separate the ethnicities in USA, let's stop focusing on who's white and who's not. I'm sure a lot of these same problems mentioned in the article affect other ethnicities.

If socioeconomic outcomes are heavily biased by group membership (which certainly appears to be the case) then it would irresponsible not to report on that fact. Racism is a major factor in US society whether you want to acknowledge that or not.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#164

Post by Wohlf »

gambiting wrote: post #25

"America is not a great place for people [....]" It seems to be true in general, unless you have a boatload of money, but then I would argue you would be ok pretty much anywhere. HN has been bombarded with such grim news of the US that I honestly feel bad for Americans(maybe I shouldn't, I don't know), but at least on paper, the world's greatest country doesn't look that great to live in anymore(UK is looking worse a…

You think this because you've bought in to media hyperbole. America and the UK are fine places to live, they may have some problems but they are fine. Our homeless are often better off than the lower classes of many countries and millions of people risk life, limb, and fortune to come here.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#165

Post by [deleted] »

ModernMech wrote: post #80
ryandrake wrote: post #4

> The fates of the less-educated and those who graduate from universities diverge in dire ways. Middle-aged white Americans without four-year degrees are at increasing risk of dying, a well-documented trend driven not only by drug use but also by alcoholism, suicide, and slowing progress against heart disease and cancer. While that's pretty damn horrible, the fate of people with newly-minted bachelor's degrees isn't…

> unless you happened to major in the few areas of study where gainful employment is possible. Crushing student debt, high cost of living cities, an unreachably inflated housing market, low (but non-zero for now) job prospects Very much this. I came out of a good school with only $30k in debt and a degree in a tech field. My wife came out of an okay state school with $60k in debt (much of that private loans with high…

[deleted]

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#166

Post by exhilaration »

Animats wrote: post #141

From the article: “America is not a great place for people with only a high school degree, and I don’t think that’s going to get better anytime soon." That's it. It just doesn't take that many people to make all the stuff. Erie, PA isn't going to come back. The mantra used to be that people would be employed in "services". But services are more automated, too. Services done at some fixed location are rapidly being au…

> * Stock picking in an Amazon warehouse - robots taking over.

I just wanted to offer a data point here, my buddy worked at the Amazon warehouse in Breinigsville PA a few months back and said he never saw a robot. Reading Hacker News I would have thought that Amazon had their robots widely deployed but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#167

Post by _rpd »

zeteo wrote: post #104

> Johnson started using opioids in high school after breaking his collarbone, first in football and again while wrestling [... T]hings slipped out of control after he graduated and found that his skills — art and cooking, but not academics — meant little in the workforce. > At one point [... he] got a full-time job making wood pallets. [...] “It’s a stupid job. It doesn’t matter if you’re high to work it” It's hard n…

Agreed. And the same is true of college courses. $120k in debt with a degree in Art History is digging your own financial grave.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#168

Post by anigbrowl »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #114
gdulli wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame that the party that's in favor of subsidizing education didn't do better in the election. Education decreases fear and prejudice, so there's a catch-22 where we can't get people more educated and fix that without convincing them first that the problem isn't immigrants seizing a large amount of resources in a zero-sum game.

"In favor of subsidizing education" isn't the same as "actually getting people educated", though. And that party's policies, even when enacted, haven't created an educational system that does much better at actually educating people.

That's true, but the other party is openly antagonistic to educating people which is a bit of a problem.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#169

Post by Retric »

temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #128
cmahler7 wrote: post #35

We're at the point where the United State can either become utopia or dystopia. Automation can either allow everyone to do whatever they want with almost unlimited leisure, or continue as it has destroying the middle class and consolidating wealth for the elite. I used to be hardcore capitalism but if something isn't done to spread the wealth we are going to have our own French revolution with the plebes rising up ag…

It's difficult to imagine a violent uprising in a state with such militarized police and widespread, distributed armed forces presence as the US. When even outside of times of unrest, encounters with the police result in getting fatally shot or seriously injured much more frequently than in comparably high-HDI states [1][2], it would take the cooperation of police and the military to allow unrest to take its course i…

It's one thing to turn a foreign country into a police state, when you need to actually be a productive society that simply stops functioning with large scale unrest.

The problem is not direct force of arms, the problem is society needs a vast number of soft targets to continue to operate. If large numbers of people chose to simply take down power lines there is almost nothing the police or military could do. City's water supply pipes are similarly easy to destroy and difficult to replace. Roads are harder to destroy, but easy to prevent most civilian traffic.

Re: Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair

#170

Post by okreallywtf »

rfc wrote: post #46
ams6110 wrote: post #18

“America is not a great place for people with only a high school degree, and I don’t think that’s going to get better anytime soon,” said Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize-winning Princeton University economist. Coming from a Princeton egghead that's not a surprising point of view. It seems very typical for those with education to look down upon the less-educated. The truth is, US high schools miserably fail the non-colleg…

This. 1,000x. Some of the most successful folks I know went into trade, became "masters of their domains", and then bridge their skills with business to create their own businesses. As an example: A friend from back home got into boring right out of high school. 20 years later, he runs one of the most successful directional boring companies in the region and is a multi-multi millionaire. He was told in high school th…

Do you think that this result is available to everyone willing to work hard? If you come out of high-school and don't achieve this level of success did you fail or are people this outliers? We should try to make a path for success at all levels of education provided you are willing to work for it and not put all our hopes on high-performers and or lucky people.
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