71–80 of 164 posts
One of the most productive engineers I knew (who I’m guessing will read this) was in his 60s when I met him. He’s since “retired” and helped a company obtain a $1B valuation. Similarly, my 85 year old grandfather still doesn’t own a wheelbarrow and will move stone, dirt, etc every summer. His motto is “keep moving”, I don’t think there’s really anything else to it. Yes you will slow down, but stay engaged and motivat…
Also, who else noticed the poster is @fortran77? Oh, the irony. (I cut my teeth with Fortran 77 on a VAX 11/780).
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I came to say something similar but less succinct. I've been in a transitional state career-wise, partially by choice, but I think there's two major factors not really mentioned by the article, and in fact, factors I think the article reinforces. The first is ageism, like you say. But I think ageism is a lot more subtle than other things, because it's not only an assumption of age-related decline, but more generally…
What a trashy article. A lot of elderly Americans, including in the upper middle class, never retire due to Medicare being inadequate. You can quite literally save millions for retirement as an individual, and have coverage for drugs and treatment under Medicare, and still run out of money due to having to pay extortionate prices for covered drugs. This line in the article is quite revealing and strange, contextually…
This is a totally ridiculous statement. Medicare-assisted drug costs are absolutely NOT going to bankrupt someone who has very wisely saved "millions" for retirement.
I have watched both my parents now pass, and I actually helped them both work out which Medicare plan to select based on their specific medications by creating a spreadsheet and carefully going thru the documentation of each plan and doing the math.
2 million dollars can rather safely throw off 3% after-taxes, so thats 60k/year not counting the odd 1800 that the federal government pays everyone with Medicare "benefits", that that is 6800/month someone who has saved "millions" has for income, and that's not even touching the principle nest egg.
There is no possible way someone's monthly drug costs are going to be anywhere even CLOSE to that number..I think each of my parents spent around 1200/month for what seemed to me to be way more "medication" then they could possibly need.
Unless you somehow come up with numbers that are way, way different than mine, your assertation that drug costs could bankrupt someone with "millions" saved is rather laughable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I came to say something similar but less succinct. I've been in a transitional state career-wise, partially by choice, but I think there's two major factors not really mentioned by the article, and in fact, factors I think the article reinforces. The first is ageism, like you say. But I think ageism is a lot more subtle than other things, because it's not only an assumption of age-related decline, but more generally…
What a trashy article. A lot of elderly Americans, including in the upper middle class, never retire due to Medicare being inadequate. You can quite literally save millions for retirement as an individual, and have coverage for drugs and treatment under Medicare, and still run out of money due to having to pay extortionate prices for covered drugs. This line in the article is quite revealing and strange, contextually…
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To be fair, the definition of "productivity" has changed a lot since the start of the industrial revolution too, from "helping your community make ends meet" to "engaging in soul-crushing, inhuman labour to make a group of wealthy investors who actively campaign against your well-being even wealthier".
Actually, prior to the start of the industrial revolution, the definition of "productivity" was "Spend nearly every waking hour tending the fields (that someone else owns) if you're a man, or spinning flax and wool (to make clothes for you and your family) if you're a woman." Not much left to better the community when keeping yourself fed and clothed[1] is two full-time jobs. And that's for free-persons, who aren't s…
My point was, back then, your two full-time jobs benefited the community in and of themselves.
I'm not trying to argue that we should go back in time to the dark ages (I like modern medicine and technology), but am just suggesting that workers would have been far more likely to find intrinsic satisfaction in the work they did back then because they both had more autonomy/personal input and could also directly see their labour benefitting the people they cared about.
What do we see in [1] and [2]? A very prominent downward trend ( https://i.imgur.com/avKUvTd.png ) on all but a single cognitive test, which is verbal knowledge. All the important cognitive abilities related to thinking and understanding seem to decline severely with age, by as much as 1.2~2.0 s.d. from the peak. This is 18~30 lost IQ points on a typical 15-s.d. scale. For some people, the naturally gifted (starting point of +2.5 s.d. from the mean) this decline may be merely sad and inconveniencing, but for most of us this reality poses significant challenges to our daily life and autonomy as we approach our late years. I really don't see how this point may be overstated or talked away.
By the way, if we try to delve deeper in our research exercise we can find pretty specific biological mechanisms associated with the cognitive decline, such as cellular senescence, vascular degeneration and BBB breakdown, loss of mitochondrial function, loss of white matter integrity.
In my opinion, as adult human being approaching middle age, this cognitive ability decline due to age cannot be ignored, or cheered away with the usual gung-ho or wished away with wishful thinking. Instead we should acknowledge the obvious process happening to our older relatives and beginning to happen to us, and push our representatives to fund more targeted research grants and biotech investments, to find some remedies.
Some of the necessary research is already happening, if you know where to look [3], but it's really a tenth to hundredth of the effort we could muster, if we cared. If we believed.
1. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.167...
2. http://www.iapsych.com/wj3ewok/LinkedDocuments/McArdle2002.p...
3. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acel.13296
Related: The notion of "retirement" is a relatively recent invention. Traditionally, when you were too old to work the farm or prove the theorem (sorry, cognitive decline is a well-documented thing, and tends to coincide with physical decline[1]), you would "retire" to a productive life in less-demanding pursuits: caretaking of the grandkids, woodworking, food preservation, writing, etc. It's important to maintain ho…
If somebody is as illiterate as I am: metformin is type II diabetes medicine.
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While I share your antipathy for low-efficiency vehicles, why is traveling around the national parks of the west a sad way to spend your retirement years?
> low-efficiency vehicles Tangent: Are these actually low efficiency? Sure, 10 mpg (this is a more typical average, BTW, not 8 mpg) is terrible gas mileage ... for an average car. But a portable house that can drive down the interstate isn't just a car. Per pound, it doesn't seem that bad.
I get that corporate shipping industries would benefit but a lot of delivery vans are the same platform as an RV. I think a Ford F350 is the size of those 25 ft uhaul rentals - about same size as a decent sized RV.
RV's typically park somewhere for days, campgrounds could be good places for charging stations. If you have a stay booked for 5 days, it could even slow trickle charge over that time.
Related: The notion of "retirement" is a relatively recent invention. Traditionally, when you were too old to work the farm or prove the theorem (sorry, cognitive decline is a well-documented thing, and tends to coincide with physical decline[1]), you would "retire" to a productive life in less-demanding pursuits: caretaking of the grandkids, woodworking, food preservation, writing, etc. It's important to maintain ho…
> Related: The notion of "retirement" is a relatively recent invention. Not really. The idea of old people who could no longer work effectively but still had many years of their life ahead of them is not a recent invention. The notion of an old age pension -- whether paid by a company or a government -- that "everyone" got is relatively new. But that doesn't mean "retirement" is new. It was just paid for by individua…
But were they retired by choice or were they just too frail to work?
> And, of course, there is the entire other half of humanity -- women -- who also weren't in the workforce.
Kind of true, but not exactly retirement either, and most of them weren't not working, they were working inside the household.
