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The death of partying in the USA

derekthompson.org

301–310 of 756 posts

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well… mostly fixed price. Property taxes go up every single year, and are now the largest single payment I make every year.

This is a detail conveniently left out by home owners justifying their purchase, especially if they overpaid and have a higher interest rate on their mortgage on top of it. With a mortgage, the amount you pay is the expected floor you'll encounter, whereas with rent, the amount you pay is the maximum you'll deal with, at least for the duration of the lease agreement. Renting honestly can be a better deal, especially…

> This is a detail conveniently left out by home owners justifying their purchase

I mean you can phrase it this way. Or you can phrase it as homeowners are willing to play a premium for stability / forced savings. (And to be less generous, homeowners may be getting cheaper access to capital than otherwise available to a renter; espsecially as the homeowner locks in ~2% interest rate while a margin loan has increase to 10+% [1]).

However, for markets with low construction and strong demand I'm pretty sure home ownership comes out ahead. Like look at housing prices in the bay area historically vs current rents. That said, you need a handicap'd rental market for renting to be worse so the general situation is it's better _iff_ you invest the difference.

[1]: https://www.schwab.com/margin/margin-rates-and-requirements

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#302
post #28

This article isn’t wrong, but it neglects to mention real estate, transportation, and lodging. A party needs a venue, and it needs guests. And the guests need a way to get to and from the venue. If they stay a long time, they need a place to sleep. People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party witho…

Jeez, youngish people feeling left out on investing into real estate see it as root of most of problems this world is facing now.

Sorry but can't agree, as do most folks here backing up with some hard data. That 'glass is half-empty' approach to daily life ain't healthy long term, ever thought about that?

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#303
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened is that everything turned into playdates? When we were kids, the general direction was GTFO, and don't be late for dinner. Who did you go play with? Whoever was at the park. When you got older, you hopefully had access to the skating rink. Or maybe a bowling alley. Before that, kickball at the park. Pretty much every day. Maybe see if you can over shoot the swing again.

Im convinced that car seat rules have played a big role in shaping child socialization. When was a kid, you were done with your car seat by elementary school so one parent could offer to carpool a minivan full of kids to/from an event. But now that some kids need their car seat into middle school carpools are gone and every kid needs their parent to pick them up. It requires way more planning and parental involvement

Whoa what?? I had no idea about this.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You correctly blame corporate buy up of real estate as a problem but nobody ever cites upper income new immigrants as a problem. Where I live the only people purchasing $600k - $1 million residential properties are newly arrived Chinese, Eastern European, South Asian and Arab immigrants. Makes for a very angry native population who are being pushed out of the places they were born for new arrivals. We'll never be abl…

Most of these immigrants are not rich before they get here with maybe the exception of the Chinese who explicitly buy real estate as investments outside of China.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#305

This was a post on the GenX subreddit (from a Gen Zer) from just a couple days ago asking about if parties as portrayed in late 90s/early 00s "teen movies" were actually a real thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1lu102v/were_parties_... The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!? I feel so ancient…

I think this article was way overdone, based on what I see with my teenage kids. They don't go to any "parties", but during the summer they are at the beach around 4x per week with bonfires at night. Almost 1/3 of their class (at a somewhat small school) is there.

And with Snapchat they know where everyone is. It's typical on a Friday school night they are scanning their map to see, "this group is at the mall. this group is at the football. this group went to her house." And then pick where to go.

Honestly, the current method of social gathering seems so much better than what I did in the 80s.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties. This is baffling to me. Most of the parties I went to in high school, college, and my 20s were in people's tiny apartm…

People are tired

always so much

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#307

This was a post on the GenX subreddit (from a Gen Zer) from just a couple days ago asking about if parties as portrayed in late 90s/early 00s "teen movies" were actually a real thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1lu102v/were_parties_... The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!? I feel so ancient…

Yeah and in 30 years a thought post on brainnit will appear in everyone's head and they'll ask Gen-Zer's did you really have a brain that was isolated from everyone elses?

And someone will respond:

It's really sad to me how we fucked you guys up and you didn't even have phones...

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#308
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened is that everything turned into playdates? When we were kids, the general direction was GTFO, and don't be late for dinner. Who did you go play with? Whoever was at the park. When you got older, you hopefully had access to the skating rink. Or maybe a bowling alley. Before that, kickball at the park. Pretty much every day. Maybe see if you can over shoot the swing again.

Im convinced that car seat rules have played a big role in shaping child socialization. When was a kid, you were done with your car seat by elementary school so one parent could offer to carpool a minivan full of kids to/from an event. But now that some kids need their car seat into middle school carpools are gone and every kid needs their parent to pick them up. It requires way more planning and parental involvement

I definitely feel a bit lucky that my kids were big enough to be out of car seats by elementary school, already. That said, I thought most were out of needing car seats by the second or third grade? I'm surprised to hear it is at all common for kids to still be in seats all the way to middle school.

I also can't offer much of a defense of car seats. Obviously, go for safety; but it does feel that people are chasing a tail end of safety that is not really measurable. Modern cars and using seat belts have come a long long way to make vehicles safer.

There is also the interesting contrast with busses on this. Kids don't buckle up or use seat belts in school busses.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#309

This was a post on the GenX subreddit (from a Gen Zer) from just a couple days ago asking about if parties as portrayed in late 90s/early 00s "teen movies" were actually a real thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1lu102v/were_parties_... The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!? I feel so ancient…

> It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on Reddit and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media. If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Of those…

> If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them actually post anything or even have accounts.

Certainly true. But it's also undeniable that a huge number of them are on TikTok, Instagram and the like. I think OP's point still stands that today's youth have been affected by that.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#310
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents Yeah if i was a kid i'd be mortified at having to do this.

My kids would totally be up for this. I don't have business cards though

It’s surprisingly fast and cheap to print a 100 of them and have them mailed straight to your house.
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