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

Post by positr0n » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:52 PM UTC

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…

Post by SirMaster » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:53 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #70

Pet_Ant wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Richest? How? 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. Unfortunately, our standards have gone up and there are things that are now necessities that weren't before.

>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…

Post by pimlottc » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:54 PM UTC

keybored wrote: post #29

neilv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: Nobody in a village should take up 2 houses for themself. But some can, and can even take up 100 houses... so long as the other villagers are fighting amongst themselves, over whether their house should be larger than that of their neighbor. Turns out most of their problems are arguably traceable back to those people with 100+ houses each. Which would be glaringly suspicious to an outside observer. But the vill…

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.

Post by gruez » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:55 PM UTC

floatrock wrote: post #50

jasperry wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Value growth isn't tied to physical resources anymore, it's increasingly ascribed to intangible things, such as intellectual property. I'm not saying that growth is guaranteed to continue, just that economies have already been growing based on more abstract values; it's not all about food and fuel anymore.

> it's not all about food and fuel anymore Is it, though? The biggest IP bubble now is AI, and the main bottleneck of AI is energy to power those datacenters. Doesn't google use as much energy as a few small countries now? 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 sprinkl…

Post by keiferski » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 1:56 PM UTC

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.