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

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

#181

Post by ryandrake » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 2:54 PM UTC

eadmund wrote: post #167

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.

> We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders And ever-decreasing prices for consumers. Don’t forget that! Free trade results in more goods for everyone, by enabling different places to focus on what they do best. > while doing nothing on the whole to retrain the workforce. I completely agree that some more attention needs to be paid to retraining. The answer to disappearing jobs is to prepare folks for new on…

> And ever-decreasing prices for consumers. Don’t forget that!

Except that's not happening for major purchases. Housing is more expensive than ever. Education is more expensive than ever. Healthcare is more expensive than ever. Cars and Trucks are more expensive than ever.

Besides taxes, the above are the biggest slice of the consumer's wallet, and those prices have almost never decreased. Shareholder returns keep going up, up, and up though.

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

#182

Post by mensetmanusman » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 2:56 PM UTC

addicted wrote: post #177

> Those who sit at or near the apex of the social ladder (who decide what behaviors are prestigious) have decided that family stability is unimportant. The author unironically writes this after pointing out that research shows that affluent families the share of families with biological parents has only dropped to 85% from 95% while the share for poor families has dropped to 30% from 95%. The idea that the social ape…

I’m in a thriving affluent family community, and I haven’t seen anything like what my lived experience is portrayed in media after the 1980s.

I think this is a case of the unwashed masses having no idea how good it can get, and the government failing to counteract cultural messages that being a single mom is empowering.

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

#183

Post by corpMaverick » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 2:56 PM UTC

HumblyTossed wrote: post #127

Men* have to have a purpose for being. They will either find a constructive one or a destructive one. If they fail at either, they'll find a way to self-destruct. It's really that simple. * Can't speak for women.

Scott Galloway has been saying something similar.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/19/opinions/masculinity-toxic-me...

We may agree or disagree with Galloway, but we need to pay attention to this issue.

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

#184

Post by Zababa » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 2:57 PM UTC

floatrock wrote: post #101

gruez wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Biggest pharma IP now is Ozempic, which let's be honest here, is because westerners are addicted to processed corn and fried stuff. And hectares of monoculture corn sprayed with Roundup and sprinkled with just the right amount of laboratory-calibrated satiating salt is far easier to produce than a balanced diet. And what is needed to grow all that corn, soy, and alfafa feed? The tapped-out Colorado or the dwindling…

To me it's more like slapping an expensive patch on an imperfect solution. Instead of encouraging healthier diets which have lots of follow-on nutritional and long-term medical benefits, we're paying pharma a huge monthly subscription price to keep doing something that's causing the problem in the first place. It's better than nothing, sure, but holistically it looks more like a rent-extraction trap to me.

> Instead of encouraging healthier diets which have lots of follow-on nutritional and long-term medical benefits

This has been done for a while and mostly doesn't work.

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

#185

Post by ryandrake » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 2:57 PM UTC

stonethrowaway wrote: post #43

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.

> Too bad that can't buy a functional society for people born after 1980. They don’t care about a functional society or other people. Their kids are off in Bali this week, Nice the next.

Yea, the world of the actual-rich is like Elysium, but (for now) without outer space as the physical separation. They live in an entirely different world, fully detached from our reality. They don't need to care about "a functional society" because they make their own society and very rarely have to land on planet Earth and interact with our dysfunctional one.

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

#186

Post by mensetmanusman » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 2:57 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #171

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most doctors refuse to perform sterilization procedures on young people, at least until after they have had children. After all, what if they change their minds? My girlfriend couldn’t get hers done until she was over 30.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart, because unwanted children leads to enormous suffering (which I have seen up close as a volunteer Guardian ad Litem, a legal advocate for children in the system). A recent thread on the topic of unwanted children at scale [1]. So I bought and operate a domain which points to the r/childfree subreddit wiki list of doctors [2] who will provide permanent birth control to people…

Bandaid solutions to societal ills probably just prolong the suffering.

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

#187

Post by toomuchtodo » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 2:59 PM UTC

mensetmanusman wrote: post #186

toomuchtodo wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart, because unwanted children leads to enormous suffering (which I have seen up close as a volunteer Guardian ad Litem, a legal advocate for children in the system). A recent thread on the topic of unwanted children at scale [1]. So I bought and operate a domain which points to the r/childfree subreddit wiki list of doctors [2] who will provide permanent birth control to people…

Bandaid solutions to societal ills probably just prolong the suffering.

On the contrary, this is a pipeline problem. If you get to the root of the problem by avoiding unwanted children, the effort to paper over the suffering in the future is never needed. Society ain't changing on any meaningful timeline (based on all available evidence), "the purpose of the system is what it does," so attack the root cause in earnest.

It is a choice to not actively solve for the suffering, so find an inexpensive point of leverage to attempt to solve for it. Folks seeking this healthcare are being marginalized by the system at great cost realized as externalities, and therefore require empowerment (with strong positive second order effects). Like vaccinations, prevention is far cheaper than the alternatives.

Tangentially, it's kind of wild to think that the global population boom, billions of people, over the last ~100 years was because of women not being empowered [1], broadly speaking. Because as soon as women are empowered [2], educated, and have robust access to contraceptives, boom, fertility rate plummets off a cliff. Turns out, society (economic pyramid schemes leading to pearl clutching about rapidly declining populations) and men [3] [4] want more children than women do. Ergo, we must empower the human, because all available evidence demonstrates the system is built and operated to subjugate rather than empower (from a first principles systems analysis).

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982392 (citations)

[3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/women-children-study-1.711984...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/paid-paternity...

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

#188

Post by semiquaver » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 2:59 PM UTC

PessimalDecimal wrote: post #110

semiquaver wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And prices for much of what we buy would instantly double. The US is addicted to cheap immigrant labor for a huge number of jobs that Americans largely aren’t willing so do.

> The US is addicted to cheap immigrant labor for a huge number of jobs that Americans largely aren’t willing so do. Maybe more like "business owners are 'addicted' to paying cheaper wages that only immigrants from poor countries are willing to do at the offered rate."

For better or worse, US consumers are addicted to the low prices those low wages enable. Just look at how upset people are at the relatively modest inflation of the past four years. Thats nothing compared to the shock that ending immigration would create.

Since we live in a democracy, such a plan would be swiftly reversed because of the pain it would cause.

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

#189

Post by SketchySeaBeast » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 2:59 PM UTC

Dalewyn wrote: post #166

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Record pace for only the last two generations: > Roughly 30% of 25-year-olds in 2022—the oldest of the Gen Z (born between 1997 to 2013)—owned their home in 2022, a slightly higher percentage than the 28% of Millennials (born between 1981 to 1996) who owned homes at that age and the 27% of Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980)—but lower than the rate for Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), 32% of whom owned ho…

32%->27%->28%->30% appear to be just rounding errors, especially considering the number of individuals concerned. If anything, such numbers indicate to me that homeownership rates haven't meaningfully changed and the only thing that did change is the advent of noisey narratives.

> appear to be just rounding errors, especially considering the number of individuals concerned

Isn't it in fact the opposite? The bigger population, the easier to find a significant signal? Those are variances of millions of people. We wouldn't treat a 5% swing in unemployment as a rounding error, would we?

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

#190

Post by sneed_chucker » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 3:00 PM UTC

bloopernova wrote: post #83

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…

> and there is almost no increasingly-terrible situation in which a mother will not love her son. Could someone please rephrase this? I'm having trouble understanding it.

You see mass murderers and serial rapists whose mothers still love them.