Tim Cook’s Message to 2019 Graduates: ‘My Generation Has Failed You’

A lot of this is by-product of Globalization. Not that it can be contained, but with Globalization, wages seek their level, with Worldwide capital flows housing becomes a hot investment. College is more expensive, but greater numbers of people are going to college than before because it's thought a blue-collar job is insufficient to survive. More people and wealthier people means greater consumption which degrades the enviro.

Now, if Boomers are seen as greedy, then wouldn't their successors be greedier if they wanted to out-earn them?

Society always supports retirees through the efforts of current workers. If you want to eat forty years from now when you're no longer working, your choices are either to start stocking up on canned food now, or subsist on a portion of what workers make forty years hence. The physical storage plan is obviously impractical when you think about it in full, especially for services like health care.

The Social Security / Medicare point is basically just saying that our future society will not be wealthy enough to take care of retirees and other non-working members of society in the number and standard we're currently projecting. There's no victims of under-saving because it's basically impossible to save. If our current benefit levels are "too high" right now, the people victimized are today's workers having too high of taxes, too much debt to repay, or too high of asset prices to pay.

Gab offered a censored version for Apple, twitter does not, and twitter allows porn. Gab being banned was political choice by Apple, there was no reason to ban the censored version when they allow uncensored twitter/instagram/etc.

I see tons of Mastodon clients on there. Toot! is a good one. The dev even added an option to change the icon to a trans flag.

Your post is a string of fallacies.

> not predicting the future > if everyone in the previous generation had a crystal ball

This is, of course, an absurd expectation, and a straw man. We're not blaming anyone for "not predicting the future." That would be obviously unfair, and of course that is why you accuse us of it. Straw men make the weakest opponents; it feels good to thrash them.

Our upset with previous generations is _not_ that they "didn't predict the future," but that they re-implemented the past: concentration of wealth being the chief crime.

> young folks like living in cities more than suburbs

This is not the cause of our woes.

> robots and computers [are] more reliable than humans at menial repetitive tasks

This is not the cause of our woes.

> young folks want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mediocre private universities.

This is not the cause of our woes. Three times you have tried to redirect the blame, and three times you have made things up.

Living in association with others has _always_ been a human predilection and a necessity, but the "invisible hand" of an unprecedented global marketplace is extremely good at jacking up the price in response to this endemic demand. Those who're profiting from this are members of the previous generation, whose wealth has allowed them to construct the real-estate machines that're now manipulating the markets. The previous generation owns the real estate that we're left squabbling over to rent at rising prices. The result is a bifurcation of society into those who've acquired patronage by obsequience and those who're struggling on the periphery.

It's not feasible to live "in the country," for most young people. We don't have the social structures, the commons, the resources that our ancestors had. We need urban institutions. Don't get me started on the bigotry of small towns. You can do that research yourself.

So when you say it's not Boomers' fault that "young folks like living in cities more than suburbs," you're attacking an oblique target. Of course Boomers did not invent the desire; they've merely perfected its exploitation. And for that, you had better hope we forgive them. Once they stop.

Your other two misdirections are equally oblique. Robots and student loans? Two mechanisms for which we cannot, rationally blame the previous generation, and yet two mechanisms which are so obviously played to favor the wealthy, and maintain the desperation of the working majority.

Boomers didn't invent the laws of physics which make machines ostensibly tireless, but they did maintain the enclosure by which commons are made inaccessible to the workers whom robots replace.

What happens to me when a robot takes my job? Do I prosper, as a shareholder of the firm whose profits I made, and with whose profits the robot was purchased? Likely, not. The majority of the value I produce is turned into a robot in which I do not own a stake. This is theft. It's not a theft invented by Boomers--it is an old, and tiresome theft--but it has been implemented by wealthy Boomers, and defended by poor, brainwashed ones.

Boomers didn't invent machines, they merely continued the practice of crystalizing surplus value into them: capital accrued on the backs of workers who'll be cast out when they can sacrifice no more at their bosses' altar. You can pretend "robots" are an "unpredictable innovation", but they're no more than a continuation of the practice. We're not angry that you "didn't see the future." We're angry that you thought we couldn't see the past.

As for the student loans we've acquired to attend these so-called "mediocre private universities," I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself for casting blame on the students who, groomed to be so naive by the age of 18 that we'd fall for such a trick, were swindled by the entirety of the adult world into signing these documents, and attending these institutions.

It was the previous generation that wrote that screenplays, the Public Relations marketing material, that funded the outreach campaigns, the college preparatory texts, that put out this entire ecosystem of propaganda to groom children into ostensibly prestigious institutions. We were told--and if not by "the previous generation", then by whom--that these loans were the gateway to adulthood; that life ended if we didn't acquire them.

Many of us died over this decision, by stressful suicide, but most of us went with it. After all, there were billions of dollars to be made by our compliance, and many, many people wanted to see us take these loans. People from the previous generation.

This is what we, at 17, were stacked up against: the billion-dollar endowments of centuries old institutions, their networks of generationally wealthy alumni, and the banks that facilitate the financials.

So when you say "that's not Baby Boomers' fault," you're either stupid, or you're dissembling, because while the boomers didn't invent the noose, they sure didn't hesitate to string it up.