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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

#191

Post by metaphorm »

magic_beans wrote: post #134
_pmf_ wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The anger that got trump elected is just the beginning if things don't change Try to get a single Democrat to acknowledge this. They are still belitteling and stigmatizing those who share these concerns (and riduculing them for their audacity of hoping that Trump will be able to change anything).

I'm a Democrat (or a bleeding-heart liberal if you will). I completely understand why people voted for Trump. I'm simply puzzled as to why many of the poor folks who voted for him would do so, as his election is clearly not going to help anyone who isn't in his tax bracket.

economic self-interest is not even close to the top priority of people when making their voting decisions.

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

#192

Post by cookiecaper »

magic_beans wrote: post #129
cookiecaper wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grandfather was dyslexic and in his 92 years, he never could learn to read. He started his own garbage disposal business and became wealthy from it, eventually getting contracts with several significant municipalities in the Northwest before he sold it off. He surrounded himself with intelligent, well-educated people who would read the contracts to him and advise him (primarily his sons and wives, but also trusted…

Ah, that is the very definition of white privilege. This despairing young white America just doesn't realize they actually have it, unlike their truly hopeless minority counterparts.

First, you've presumed that my grandfather was white. Second, I'm not connecting the dots anyway. How does this involve race or privilege? One would assume that illiteracy is a substantial disadvantage regardless of one's family background or ethnicity.

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

#193

Post by Animats »

peterhadlaw wrote: post #183
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…

I saw that Redwood City robot. In it's current state, it's just for show. There was a guy trailing it with a joystick control.

I've seen it running around without anybody visibly controlling it. They have these things running in a few other cities.

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

#194

Post by rz2k »

posguy wrote: post #16
cryptarch wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe learning a craft could work for him? Woodworking, metalworking, glass-blowing, programming? An apprenticeship might just be right up his alley, but I'm not sure how available that is in the US.

For plumbers, electricians and a few other trades you can become a journeyman apprentice in the US, and after a few years you can earn high 5 digits to low 6 digits with healthcare usually. That being said, its a mature industry and not highly regarded in the US as it is a "blue collar" job. Stigmatizing & devaluing an honest days work is ridiculous to me, but that is what our society has done to these jobs.

For a parent who believes college is not an option for his son, a skilled trade could be a pretty awesome job.

What contexts are we talking about for the regard afforded different occupations? Other parents at a school, former classmates at a reunion, talking to a stranger at a bar? what kind of bar? Making money, and being handy and able to work with your hands impresses people. Imagine telling someone in a bar that you are a contractor, plumber, fisherman, fireman, or lumberjack or telling someone that you do tech support at a call center.

Different people are simply going to think one job is cooler than the other, so his son should just choose the occupation that gives him the best life and ignore those who don't regard it highly.

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

#195

Post by ocschwar »

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…

"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."

How is this "looking down"?

He made a well-backed empirical observation: life in this country sucks donkey balls for those who didn't graduate from college.

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

#196

Post by simonbarker87 »

exhilaration wrote: post #166
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.

People seem to think that robots are everywhere, but they just aren't. To repeat a comment I've made before, some industries are starting to roll back some of their robot numbers (automotive for instance) as they are realised that robots are only generally good for one thing and when something changes take a lot of capex to modify. There is a move instead toward pairing humans with helper robots, essentailly to robot does the (literal) heavy lifting and then the human does the finesse bit.

Source: wife is an engineer in high volume new model automotive

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

#197

Post by temp-dude-87844 »

Retric wrote: post #169
temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure whether you're saying that sabotage of infrastructure performed by the populace is a good way to perpetuate unrest in a way that a militarized state can't squash, or whether you're saying that the state can quickly destroy key pieces of infrastructure to cause pain to people who refuse to fall in line. Because both are true, but the latter is far more likely and effective: after all, who wants to destroy the last remaining enablers of their comfort, shelter, and livelihood just to prove a point... and then what?

One only need to look at the city of Flint, whose water pipes continue to deliver lead-laced water to households black and white, but society has largely routed around the damage: we carry on with our lives and ignore it's a problem. It's only a problem for those in Flint.

Meanwhile, the military and police can turn off utilities, blockade towns, enact curfews, and isolate even the flow of information, all without firing a single bullet. This way, pockets of unrest can be abated before they become a movement so pervasive that the military themselves defect.

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

#198

Post by rexicus »

Jtsummers wrote: post #17
pjmorris wrote: post #9

I think you could strike 'Young' and 'White' from the title, and it'd still be accurate.

Setting aside white, young is relevant as the numbers are showing a marked increase in some behaviors versus ~15-20 years ago among the same age group in particular. It's one thing (still bad) to see alcoholism and drug abuse amongst the middle aged following the termination of a career or something, it's quite another to see it increase amongst the youth before they even have a chance to start (or because they find…

I wonder if they're mistaking economic factors causing more drug deaths for the new and lethal Fentanyl-laced heroin on the streets.

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

#199

Post by zeteo »

anigbrowl wrote: post #180
zeteo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and winning the lottery is highly marketable too, isn't it? I didn't say working in sports, arts or cooking was a stupid job. The stupid job is what you get if you can't make any money using the skills you've developed.

Apparently you think that anything other than being at the peak of one's profession is a 'stupid job.' There are large numbers of jobs that depend on people being diligent rather than innovative, and those jobs are certainly easier to automate, but that does not make them stupid jobs. Stop devaluing hard work just because some people choose predictability over risk.

> Apparently you think that anything other than being at the peak of one's profession is a 'stupid job.' [...] Stop devaluing hard work just because some people choose predictability over risk.

The "stupid job" was what the kid himself called his employment making wooden pallets. It wasn't a job in sports or cooking and I nowhere implied that I agreed with his assessment. If he had been hard at work and passionate about a line cook job that didn't pay well, then we'd be having a totally different discussion.

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

#200

Post by creaghpatr »

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…

Globalization naturally results in regression to the mean for countries like the US and UK, both in economy and culture. Still a long way to go.

Without borders or a culture, what's the point of a country other than being a sort of municipal corporation? And what if the stakeholders are outside shareholders looking to extract value?

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