Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Fleecing of Millennials

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 132 posts

Re: The Fleecing of Millennials

#121

Post by hoaw »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #114
hoaw wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generation X and Millennial isn't really a sharp transition. No generation is, but it is even more diffuse this time since there wasn't necessarily one or multiple "big events" at a fixed date. I don't know if parent's argument is correct, but what is being said is essentially early Millennial, ~1985 and late Millennial, ~1995. Huge difference in many e.g. housing markets. Once people born around the actual millennia…

Most people born in 1985 had their income affected too much by the Great Recession to really take advantage of the lower housing prices then.

Could be the case for many people. I think the commonality between generations might even be declining in favor of other divides. It is in some ways assumed that many people are starting at the bottom and mostly share paths based on development. But I am not sure that is the case anymore, if it ever really were.

Re: The Fleecing of Millennials

#122

Post by loraa »

tinktank wrote: post #12
kleborp wrote: post #9

This is an honest question I have that's tangentially related to this article (everyone on this forum is a lot smarter than I am so apologies if this is a stupid question): What is the catalyst for any action/change in regards to reversing these trends? I feel like I've been reading versions of the same article for the last 10 years with negligible change.

The people in power have to start representing the interests of the millennials. This will only happen when people of that generation are in power, or people in power are being influenced by them.

At some point it is not realistic to expect everything should be free, you should be given the job you want and the salary you want or else you want the government to pay you the salary you want for the job you don't have.

That you deserve the latest cell phone, deserve the most expensive Macbook.

People mention AOC, but if you notice her followers don't seem to get reality.

Re: The Fleecing of Millennials

#124

Post by NeedMoreTea »

hoaw wrote: post #110
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what I saw then too. In the 90s recession youth unemployment was over 20% nationally. Can't find any decent regional or city figures now, and the tories changed the way unemployment was measured during that recession, so anything earlier is incomparable. In Scotland, the NW and NE, and probably the Midlands it was well over that. Apprenticeships had recently disappeared (my generation was probably the…

Ah, I get what you are saying. Certainly not a good situation either. I guess the UK is a bit ahead of its time on this front. I still think there is a bit of difference though. In earlier recessions there at least seemed to be some recourse. Certainly harder to e.g. study in the UK I would imagine. But when the market turned you could get a chance. In Sweden we had had high youth unemployment for 15 years (it's "low…

It was partly because it was policy. De-industrialising kept on throughout the 80s, not while in the recession as would have been the case in the past. Even as recession ends industrials were still being kicked. Kids in sharp 80s shiny suits would turn up on TV news telling us we shouldn't do yesterday's car making, tool making or $niche any more and all go into services or banking. Germany was far more pragmatic about it.

The biggest difference I see is housing. They keep getting more and more absurdly expensive with no signs of stopping. Even in countries far less attached to the idea of ownership than the UK. Which is more neoliberal policy again - public housing is right out of fashion everywhere it seems, even places that once did public housing really well.

Re: The Fleecing of Millennials

#125

Post by jmull »

echelon wrote: post #103
jmull wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. However, the narrative of "blame the boomers" is a con. Blow this off if you want, but just realize that unless you're a russian bot or an ally of the American oligarchs you're working against your own self interests. The con is blame the problems of one group on another group to separate them and get them fighting each other. This distracts everyone from the real causes of the problems. It's the…

> I don't know the full solution to that, but one thing is we have to make voting easier. I wholeheartedly agree. We need absolutely zero friction to onboard younger generations. What does this look like to you? Do we provide an app where people can input their social security, driver's license, or other ID number? How do we keep it from being abused if this information was stolen by a third party? Ideally we could h…

> What does this look like to you?

I don't know, really.

An app & web site are great for convenience, but large-scale hacking needs to be very difficult to do and easy to detect and verify... vs. highly motivated & well-funded state-level actors. That's not easy. On a related note, people generally also have to have a level of trust and comfort with the system.

While those "details" are worked out, maybe some enhancements to the existing mechanisms will help...

* pre-paid postage on mail-in ballots? I've heard that the post office will deliver mail-in ballots even without postage, but when the envelope clearly says "postage required" not a lot of people are going to attempt that route.

* Same day voter registration? There's some increased potential for fraud. But it's also the day where all the political officials & volunteers of all parties from big to small are mobilized and watching. It should be possible to have a system for this that is very difficult to perpetrate fraud against it at any scale.

* Make voting day a Saturday or Sunday? (A national holiday is tricky. A lot of people don't get paid when they don't work, it doesn't matter if it's a national holiday or not. And I expect a new national holiday will be largely used for purposes other than the intended one.)

* 6am to 9pm polling hours? This is tough. There are real people working the polls all day, from before they open until after they close, sometimes a long time after. IDK, maybe 6am to 8pm?

* Give people a sandwich or a pizza when they vote? I guess more generally, get food trucks to come out and work the polling places which accept vouchers from the polling place?

IDK. There are surely people who've worked on this for years so my off-the-top-of-my-head ideas are surely hopelessly naive, aside from the ones I've gotten from those people.

Re: The Fleecing of Millennials

#126

Post by rnernento »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #21
rnernento wrote: post #4

It's cute that they call it a fleecing, as if millenials could really have done anything about this. Sadly (I guess...) I suspect the generation responsible for all of this is going to end up paying some unexpected prices when the time comes as they age out of power and have to look to millenials for care.

> I suspect the generation responsible for all of this is going to end up paying some unexpected prices when the time comes as they age out of power and have to look to millenials for care. Are they going to age out? It seems as though politicians are staying politicians as long as possible - I feel like they last dying gasps of that generation will be clinging to power with shaky palms all the way into the grave. Th…

I don't just mean political power, physical power counts too.

Re: The Fleecing of Millennials

#127

Post by rnernento »

treespace8 wrote: post #108
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> millenials will be paying for the older generation's retirement and healthcare via Social Security and Medicare My guess is younger generations, once better politically ensconced, will flip the script on boomers by funding broad social benefits out of social security and Medicare. (For example, by reducing Medicare benefits while making them available to all age groups.)

This won’t happen until the boomers numbers are much smaller then the milliennials. The boomers will be a unified block all voting for social security and health care for the elderly. Everyone else will be split around various special interests. So maybe in 20 years?

I think you're underestimating the fact that the boomers will be a bunch of sick old people literally relying on millenials to take care of them in nursing homes.

Re: The Fleecing of Millennials

#128

Post by rnernento »

jmull wrote: post #86
rnernento wrote: post #4

It's cute that they call it a fleecing, as if millenials could really have done anything about this. Sadly (I guess...) I suspect the generation responsible for all of this is going to end up paying some unexpected prices when the time comes as they age out of power and have to look to millenials for care.

That's a good point. However, the narrative of "blame the boomers" is a con. Blow this off if you want, but just realize that unless you're a russian bot or an ally of the American oligarchs you're working against your own self interests. The con is blame the problems of one group on another group to separate them and get them fighting each other. This distracts everyone from the real causes of the problems. It's the…

You're acting as if all of this is deliberate and planned. I'll give you a hint, it isn't. Everything is not going to be ok. The responsibility of these problems is societal ignorance. I'll give you another hint, that isn't going to get any better.

This isn't going to end well...

Re: The Fleecing of Millennials

#129

Post by howard941 »

fulafel wrote: post #116
bryanlarsen wrote: post #20

Boomer's may have accumulated a large amount of wealth, but that wealth is going to be hit hard by Baumol's cost disease. Right now the US has ~4 workers per retiree. That's going to be dropping to about 2 in the next few decades. And despite frantic efforts from the Japanese, the services that the elderly need are hard to automate. These services generally suffer from Baumol's cost disease: nursing et al are very 1:…

Are the services really very hard to automate? It seems a lot of the staff time is spent administering medication, helping patients move around and monitoring. All of these sound amenable to automation within today's state of the art.

> Are the services really very hard to automate?

Absolutely yes. Patients may be frail and suffering cognitive decline that demands compassionate expertise if one is to provide humane care.

Re: The Fleecing of Millennials

#130

Post by howard941 »

gaius wrote: post #41
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #2

Does anyone know / remember if there were similar pieces written in the late 90s about people in their 20s and 30s then? Ie is this a trend that has always happened or something new?

Read Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, the original book that coined the term. It’s all about 20-somethings in the ‘90’s dropping out because the rewards seem so impossibly far out of reach that it’s not even worth trying. Also held the Boomers to blame.

That was a good read. Before Gen X we were called the 13th gen but that didn't get traction. Someone else wrote a book on it, reviewed here: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CLASS/OBJECTS/III/reviews/13thge...
Post reply on HN