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Study finds young men are playing video games instead of getting jobs

chicagotribune.com

31–40 of 59 posts

Re: Study finds young men are playing video games instead of getting jobs

#31

What jobs? All the ones I know of are for people with "experience" with XYZ. Pardon if out of the bazillion candidates in this world, biz's can't find that oxymoron of a candidate: the perfect, outgoing socialite whose as good at brown-nosing as he is on the PC. You could roll the dice to go to school and end up stuck in debt over your head (btw, loan defaults are ever on the rise). There's more to this story than ju…

> What jobs?

My first thought was "What games?"

Re: Study finds young men are playing video games instead of getting jobs

#32

How do they support themselves? Parents basement?

yes that was the point of the article(that you obviously didn't read), young men aren't going out and doing the low level jobs that would lead to career advancement. they're doing them but at later ages, leading them to miss the cutoff for advancement and being stuck in lower level roles

Re: Study finds young men are playing video games instead of getting jobs

#33
post #15

This is the demographic that's traditionally fueling crime/war. You can give a positive twist to the story by rephrasing the title "study finds young men are playing video games instead of shooting people."

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I think men are obsolete. Men are responsible for forcing all the natives out, setting up the government, constructing nearly every piece of infrastructure and creating nearly all technology. Not to minimize the potential of women (patriarchy really, really held them down), just highlighting that these male flavored contributions to society are really not needed anymore.

Re: Study finds young men are playing video games instead of getting jobs

#34
post #33
post #15

This is the demographic that's traditionally fueling crime/war. You can give a positive twist to the story by rephrasing the title "study finds young men are playing video games instead of shooting people."

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I think men are obsolete. Men are responsible for forcing all the natives out, setting up the government, constructing nearly every piece of infrastructure and creating nearly all technology. Not to minimize the potential of women (patriarchy really, really held them down), just highlighting that these male flavored contributions to society are really not needed anymore.

The most needlessly sexist thing I'll read today.

Re: Study finds young men are playing video games instead of getting jobs

#35
I had two thoughts as I read this:

- Lots of talk about how the happiness of this group of people was higher, but no numbers on the happiness of their parents. I have three kids. I love them immensely. I don't want them living with me in their 20's. Especially spending all day playing video games while I work to pay the bills.

- I wonder what proponents of Universal Basic Income would say about this. Turns out that when there's less incentive to do things, less gets done. Which seems to run contrary to the narrative of "if only I didn't have to worry about bills, I could do something meaningful." At least for me, I find providing for my wife and children quite meaningful. What job I choose to do that is almost secondary.

Re: Study finds young men are playing video games instead of getting jobs

#36
post #9

This article is a pile of just-so bullshit designed to appeal to baby boomers so they can convince themselves that voting against unemployment benefits isn't going to directly screw over a whole bunch parents and children from all over the social strata.

Facts are not BS.

Data is also not the plural of anecdote.

Stitching together a bunch of statistics with anecdotes is not research, which is what the article does whereas the actual source is as yet still unpublished.

Of course the article is somewhat worse then that: the anecdotes pretty clearly paint a picture of a poor job market with few low-skill opportunities for advancement. But speculates wildly that it must just be video games.

Re: Study finds young men are playing video games instead of getting jobs

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people want to know why there's no longer an easier way. It seems people 50 years ago didn't have to dedicate their waking hours from 6 to 18 years old constructing an impressive enough resume to give them the luxury of then dumping a hundred thousand dollars on an employable education. Software has an obscenely low bar for getting experience, you're right. Software comprises enough job vacancies to employ th…

"It seems people 50 years ago didn't have to dedicate their waking hours from 6 to 18 years old constructing an impressive enough resume" People 50 years ago didn't go to University - and they took a menial job at the factory, or did 'what their parents' did, took over the family shop/farm etc.. They earned very little, travelled little, had little in the way of material or aspirational opportunities. They also had s…

> They earned very little, travelled little, had little in the way of material or aspirational opportunities.

That is some extraordinary revisionism you've come up with there.

It is the 1960s, not the 1600s.

> We chose' what we have now, and at least in material terms, it's a whole lot better. There's a lot of opportunity out there.

Real wage growth stalls half way through the 70s, just five years later.

Re: Study finds young men are playing video games instead of getting jobs

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people want to know why there's no longer an easier way. It seems people 50 years ago didn't have to dedicate their waking hours from 6 to 18 years old constructing an impressive enough resume to give them the luxury of then dumping a hundred thousand dollars on an employable education. Software has an obscenely low bar for getting experience, you're right. Software comprises enough job vacancies to employ th…

I only know employment in IT. I have no doubt that people in other sectors, particularly blue collar, have it much harder.

It is normal for blue collar workers to make 2x - 4x more than white collar workers today. This is in my area so things may be different elsewhere.

Kids don't want to go into blue collar work because it is looked down upon as a 'lack of advancement' or similar middle class trope.

Re: Study finds young men are playing video games instead of getting jobs

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only know employment in IT. I have no doubt that people in other sectors, particularly blue collar, have it much harder.

It is normal for blue collar workers to make 2x - 4x more than white collar workers today. This is in my area so things may be different elsewhere. Kids don't want to go into blue collar work because it is looked down upon as a 'lack of advancement' or similar middle class trope.

Uh it might be normal for some. And by some I mean highly skilled unionized workers.

Let's not forget the millions of blue collar workers who had their jobs disappear overnight in the past 15 years. Many of these people showed loyalty to their employers for spans of several decades. Of course, loyalty plays no role in the calculus of capitalism.

You think a kid should aspire to a blue collar job right after an entire generation of blue collar workers were laid off at the stroke of a pen? Right when every other post on the front page of HN carries foreboding of an automation job-pocalypse just a decade after an outsourcing job-pocalypse?

You're a maniac. Anyone capable of evaluating these options with an ounce of foresight is going to take the gamble on college and make a desperate debt-ridden attempt to scramble to the top of the knowledge economy. The only economy that isn't demonstrably under threat.

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