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

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

robkhenderson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 600 posts

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

#141

Post by bryanlarsen »

quacked wrote: post #128
bryanlarsen wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who do you think is building the houses that are being built? Without immigration we'd still have massive housing shortages because internal migration is much larger than external migration -- people moving from the hinterland to cities with jobs. But housing would be a lot more expensive because we would no longer have cheap labour to build & renovate our houses.

This is the constant refrain of pro-illegal/poor/migrant immigration. My answer is: "in the first world, businesses should operate by offering competitive wages, and the lifestyle costs of first worlders should be balanced against those wages". I am uninterested in living in a materially wealthy society that can only operate on the back of a recently-arrived serf class, and it's bizarre to me that so many people defe…

"serf class"? Immigrants to America come here because they choose to. They're not serfs, they're not locked to the land. They move freely, and at much higher rates than other Americans do.

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

#142

Post by FredPret »

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.

Assuming you’re asking in good faith:

1) Ephemeralization [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization] is when we arrange a given set of atoms in increasingly useful ways, letting us get the same thing done with less.

A trivial example is information distribution. Another one is how we turned sand into thinking machines. Myriad more examples exist.

2) We have vastly more resources than people think. Our deepest mines are ~5km. There’s a hell of a lot of planet below that, with increasing % valuable metals. There’s enough room on the planet - you can give everyone on earth a big house with a yard and we’ll all fit into a single Canadian province, or into Texas. We can generate 100% of our power needs with solar, nuclear, and batteries. And as we get richer, there are more and more people with the time and ability to make greener choices.

Our systems are proving to be flexible - look at the price of solar + battery over time; look at the deluge of funding for nuclear research. People are working on bio jet fuel. Other people are working on carbon capture tech and geo-engineering ideas for the worst case scenario.

3). We’re not stuck down here. There’s a whole universe out there. A tiny but growing % of our economy happens off-planet. A private company recently landed on the moon. SpaceX is dramatically lowering launch costs. In a few decades, we’ll be mining materials up there and manufacturing goods in space.

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

#143

Post by piuantiderp »

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?

It very well could

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

#144

Post by grugagag »

lenerdenator wrote: post #78
taylodl wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, healthcare and childcare.

Food is starting to cost a bit too, especially if one wants to avoid eating badly.

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

#145

Post by quacked »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #141
quacked wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the constant refrain of pro-illegal/poor/migrant immigration. My answer is: "in the first world, businesses should operate by offering competitive wages, and the lifestyle costs of first worlders should be balanced against those wages". I am uninterested in living in a materially wealthy society that can only operate on the back of a recently-arrived serf class, and it's bizarre to me that so many people defe…

"serf class"? Immigrants to America come here because they choose to. They're not serfs, they're not locked to the land. They move freely, and at much higher rates than other Americans do.

Okay, "serf" was the wrong word, since they are indeed not bound to parcels of land under a feudal government.

What do you think about the content of my point?

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

#146

Post by yard2010 »

SirMaster wrote: post #84
gruez wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe by total wealth. >I think wealth should be measured by how many hours at the median wage do you need to achieve a socially acceptable standard of living. That's a weird definition of "wealth". Wealth is generally understood to mean how much assets you have accumulated, not your free cash flow. What you're describing is properly referred to as discretionary income. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_incom…

I don't think it's that weird. I think most people would naturally define wealth by the kind of life and lifestyle the wealth can afford. Who cares how much actual money it is if it can't actually afford a decent life.

It's a real problem that you absolutely have to have money for living (food, housing, healthcare), but it's the same money you use to buy computer games or supercars.

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

#147

Post by piuantiderp »

quacked wrote: post #99

Many have not yet squared up to the fact that society itself is an unprofitable boondoggle that requires massive moral radicalization and willingness to participate in odd, polarizing institutions and practices. We live inside the semi-decayed skeleton of a society built by deeply religious people who believed that society should be built and maintained because that is the moral thing to do . They weren't only motiva…

In other words, everyone became a Marxist, at least when it comes to the materialism.

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

#148

Post by welshwelsh »

What I took away from this article is that many low-income men have no real interest in being fathers or raising children. Yet, they tend to produce children anyway.

We should focus on making birth control more accessible, instead of trying to make people take responsibility for raising children they obviously don't want.

That guy who spends all his money on weed and booze while his kids go hungry? He should have gotten a vasectomy. We need to be asking why he didn't- was it a lack of education, or was the procedure too expensive?

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

#149

Post by lelanthran »

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?

> 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?

What on earth does any of that have to do with the GP post?

I'm also quite curious - you think all of those things listed above are generally seen as positive (or negative) by the same group of people?

That's a bundle of different issues that most people either won't support all of, or won't oppose all of.

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

#150

Post by toomuchtodo »

quacked wrote: post #140
toomuchtodo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All excellent points, a fair assessment of the situation. But, I would also say corporate profits of these firms rely on this low skill desperate labor that cannot organize and will not speak up (versus being shipped back to whatever terrible place they fled from). ADM, Bunge, Tyson, Koch Industries, etc are what come to mind in the ag sector, but is certainly not all inclusive.

I don't have a solution, but I hope smarter people than me with leverage figure it out, because it isn't sustainable.

Post reply on HN