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No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

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Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#131

Post by apwell23 »

ragingrobot wrote: post #21
apwell23 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

workforce in usa seems pretty good. Have you seen the homeprices they are able to afford ?

Have you seen the sacrifices made to afford those homes? Just because someone owns a home doesn't show the whole picture. There are plenty of Americans that own homes and are struggling to make ends meet elsewhere. Home ownership is set up to consume a person. Miss a payment and there are serious repercussions to one's financial well being, so it becomes a priority. Up to a point, miss a credit card payment and it's…

> There are plenty of Americans that own homes and are struggling to make ends meet elsewhere.

They need to downgrade then. Not everyone needs to live in 5 bed mcmansion. I know ppl who bought 100k cars are 'struggling to make ends meet'.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#133

Post by HumblyTossed »

taylodl wrote: post #116
lenerdenator wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, healthcare and childcare.

Great point - the cost of childcare is insane right now! But at least the states using the force of law to make women carry their embryos to term will be paying for it, right? Right?

[flagged]

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#134

Post by PessimalDecimal »

positr0n wrote: post #82
motohagiography wrote: post #67

simply, when a boy is dependent on his mother's approval for a sense of self it's all the justification he needs, and there is almost no increasingly-terrible situation in which a mother will not love her son. the worse his life, the more he depends on her, the less abandoned she is. it's the definition of a co-dependent cycle. Maybe he replaces her or shares that role with other women, but he ends up in the same cyc…

> The entire culture war is between people who resent their dads for being absent or weak, and those who don't. Are you saying that having an absent father or not determines your views on trans people, abortion, saying Merry Christmas vs happy holidays, DEI, etc?

I've never read about this topic but the comment above interested me in trying to find any references related to the claim it's making. So far, [1] is the most interesting one. While it doesn't precisely line up with what is claimed above, it does say that a more "paternalistic" parenting style is causal for the child's later political beliefs.

[1] https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2022/june/when-par...

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#135

Post by boringg »

taylodl wrote: post #76
energy123 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gen Z are the richest generation in all of American history on a median per-capita real income basis, compared to older generations when they were the same age. And it's not even close. Millenials are the second richest in American history. The only problem is housing. Any discussion not focused 100% on housing is not grounded in reality.

Income isn't the only measure of wealth. Also, there are two major expenses affecting Gen Z: 1. Education 2. Housing Both have been increasing at a rate faster than inflation for some time now. While Gen Z may have a greater income, their major expenses are even greater. When all is said and done, they're poorer as a result. Turns out that simply having money is insufficient to solving all financial problems.

Knowledge and intelligence is a greater measure of wealth

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#136

Post by toomuchtodo »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #130
xivzgrev wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Institutional ownership is immaterial? Erm, from the same source, 10% of some metros is a lot, and that’s just moving the meter to 100+ homes. If you did 10+ or 3+ it would be even more. “This share rises to 3.8 percent of single-family homes for institutional investors owning over 100 homes, and up to 10 percent in certain metro areas such as Atlanta.” Then if you also consider foreign ownership of home, it would ri…

34% of Americans rent their homes, and having a good stock of rental units is good for America because it makes it a lot easier to move. Institutional owners provide the vast majority of rental units. Getting rid of institutional ownership would increase rental prices substantially, and that's bad for the poor and for the mobile.

> Getting rid of institutional ownership would increase rental prices substantially, and that's bad for the poor and for the mobile.

Extremes are unhelpful, we must find balance. Institutional ownership restrictions reduces monopoly pricing power, and rent controls de-risk against rents rising faster than wages. Outright outlawing of institutional ownership is not a solution, but allowing it to operate in a highly regulated fashion (where there are still some, but more reasonable, returns and mobility is enabled for mobile consumers of this service). If the argument is continue increasing supply vs rent price controls, well, it is clear that isn't happening in the short term.

TLDR Housing needs to be pushed more towards being a regulated utility, vs a free for all. If we regulate electricity like a utility, why not housing?

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#137

Post by HumblyTossed »

asynchronous wrote: post #6
lenerdenator wrote: post #2

We didn't want young men to do anything. We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders, and that meant moving factories (where these young men's grandfathers were working 60 years ago) overseas while doing nothing on the whole to retrain the workforce. We got the shareholder returns. Too bad that can't buy a functional society for people born after 1980.

I want a financial person to explain to me why we continue to expect exponential growth of companies’ revenue year after year, and why that makes any logical sense in a world with finite resources.

It's all just one big ponzi scheme. Albeit a legal one.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#138

Post by keybored »

mistermann wrote: post #59
keybored wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s ironic[1] about these comments is they set up these ignorant-sheep narrative about how the villagers are bickering among themselves. Which begets more finger-pointing among the villagers instead of looking at the real source of their problems. [1] Not ironic if you don’t think you’re one of the villagers.

It is a narrative, yes, but are you asserting that the narrative is not substantially true? I struggle to think of anyone I know of , let alone know personally, that is mostly on the systems analysis side of the spectrum vs the story telling and bickering side. Culture is constantly running in the background, teaching us not only what to think, but also how to think . And changing culture is hard .

I assert that there is no good evidence that it is true and that in lieu of good evidence it’s a limiting perspective to propagate.

I know how the real world works and am not fooled by the bread and circus—of course I am! :) And how often do I reveal that in real life? Very rarely because I don’t have any sympaticos in my life right now. But how many people do I know who are like me? And to how many people do I look like an unconscious NPC on this issue?

It’s a limiting perspective because you stay stuck in the mode of bickering among yourselves about who has seen the light and who hasn’t. Instead of the more useful perspective: that a non-insignificant people already know or that if they don’t then it won’t take much to convince them (X years of brainwashing does not take X years to undo).

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#139

Post by piuantiderp »

asynchronous wrote: post #6
lenerdenator wrote: post #2

We didn't want young men to do anything. We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders, and that meant moving factories (where these young men's grandfathers were working 60 years ago) overseas while doing nothing on the whole to retrain the workforce. We got the shareholder returns. Too bad that can't buy a functional society for people born after 1980.

I want a financial person to explain to me why we continue to expect exponential growth of companies’ revenue year after year, and why that makes any logical sense in a world with finite resources.

That's close but not quite. In older times, this economic profit is an accumulation of wealth, instead of having the apples just pay for the daily laborer's calories, it means, maybe they can take a few apples home to make apple sauce and that the farm owner can sell the extras in a market. You paid for the maintenance (ie. workers not starving, replacing machinery, ) and you had some left. Land is a whole other problem. The Wealth of Nations has a pretty good description of the interactions between labor, landowners, capital.

The recent problems is the disconnect between money and actual food/materials/energy production.

If your grandfather lived in a 100kw village with a 100 dollars circulating, and made 1 dollar, it is reasonable to think he could buy 1kW for his family.

If we live in a 100kw village (because no, we should reduce energy production) with 100,000 dollars circulating and you make 500, you can buy 500w.

Now do it for turkeys, or steel, or etc... Degrowth is impoverishment in most cases. Things haven't gotten much more productive, and we are more people

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#140

Post by quacked »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #92
butshouldyou wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So would the economy.

There is some truth to their point. The economy in aggregate is receiving the benefit of immigration labor (through reduced labor costs and inflation) while socializing the harm on everyone who is competing for this housing (because, obviously, there are only so many affordable housing units available). There is probably a discussion to be had about governing immigration quotas according to available (not planned, av…

A close relation of mine worked in a very, very high-up position in the Department of Agriculture. He has been farming-adjacent for his entire career, and years before he joined DoA he explained to me how meatpacking and butchery has slowly been taken over by a central set of massive corporate conglomerates who destroyed competition in the beef industry by pricing then out.

All of these major central corporations are completely dependent on illegal labor, and if they hadn't been able to pay lower wages, their takeovers couldn't have occurred at the speed or scale they did. My relation talked about this issue in the DoA and many senior officials pushed back and said that since addressing this issue of illegal labor in the beef industry would cause a rise in beef prices, threatening the availability of the migrant labor base is a no-go. (Biden admin, not that it matters--I'm sure the answer would have been the same under any admin through at least GWB).

That's where we are now, in US agriculture, residential construction, etc.. Prices must be kept low, and therefore the stream of low-skill desperate labor must not be turned off. Massive companies enjoy enduring near-monopolies because no one is willing to threaten the comfort of the American consumer.

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