The dominance of baby boomers is becoming total
themonthly.com.au
themonthly.com.au
It's undeniable that old people have always held power in society, from hunting-gathering societies (various elders/shamans/wisepeople) through early civilization (Senator comes from the Latin "senex" for "old". Senatus = "chamber of old men"), though to today.
At the same time, their numbers (and effectiveness) were probably limited, either by a more pyramidal population distribution and/or by lower life expectancy (including duller minds in older age).
I think what we're seeing for the first time in history is a huge swath of healthy, long-lived older people, throwing the relative balance way off and leading to various situations we see across many different societies.
I like to sum it up as Boomers eating the young and I don't think things will change until the numbers/demographics do, ie, Millenials will experience a lost generation and things won't start to look good until we're well into middle-age.
Exactly, and they cast a disproportionately long shadow over society and politics.
EDIT: just look at the recent Irish referendum on same-sex marriage. A vast majority of the "no" votes came from the >60 cohort. I'll wager the age breakdown of last weeks election would reveal a similar dynamic: the young want change and meaningful progress while the old continue to vote for the past, keeping our culture and politics firmly rooted in the early/mid 20th century.
There's been a weird number of things like this that I've seen bubbling up, like extreme anti-union rhetoric in regards the police. It's usually in reaction to a specific issue, but it's still weird to see.
Obviously, 51% of the population voting to enslave the "other" 49% would be completely unfair and IMO un-democratic (even if it was enacted by democratic means). We could argue about how much each subsection of the society should contribute (or get) for the world to be "fair", but honestly, I'm not even that concerned about that; what I'm concerned is the trend (of older people increasing in numbers (power to enact benefits for themselves by taxing others) but decreasing in productivity (contributions)). If that trend continues making the benefits/contributions disproportionate, at some point it's bound to become unsustainable and the system will collapse.
I am not sure which contribution you are measure so I used a simple money based one. I would "love" to have vote proportional to taxes I pay (kidding ..)
How about in 10 years, when they stop working and retire?
So of course they're paying a lot more in taxes as most younger people have negative wealth. But the older are paying 15%-25% on capital gains and dividends, while the young are paying 30% on income.
The old are living off of huge pensions and medical insurance being paid for RIGHT NOW by income from the young. They did not save it. That is why most localities are pretty much kicking the debt can down the road: increasing things like property taxes, fines (e.g. speeding tickets), toll roads, etc. all the while providing less services.
The vast majority of the federal budget is not Planned Parenthood, the EPA, or road costs. It is the military, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the vast majority of which benefit the old. Even the military is more about keeping the US system propped up instead of ensuring our 'safety'. Two large oceans have always been more than enough.
Our economy is becoming more automated and efficient with every invention. Its that economy that supports us all. Not on the backs of the (unemployable) young.
We used to dream about a future where robots did all the work. The closer we get to that, the more folks lash out in confusion.
Surely things are not equitable. That needs to be addressed. But old solutions of tax and make-work are all misdirected. This is a different world.
30% of young people income is still way less than 15-25% on capital gains and for sure you don't think that majority of people 40+ are living of dividends. Majority still works and is paying more taxes than that young person. The way you explaining just does not add up
I don't think it's at all strange that younger people tend to be more progressive, regardless of party.
Wrong too, I'm afraid. In lots of Western countries the average age of the population has rose as high as 40 year old (in contrast with older values of even less than 30). So it's not always that 'young people don't vote', it's also there are less of them too.
Just because there happen to be more old people, and they tend to vote more conservatively, does not mean that it's "disproportionate" when they actually vote and influence policy. If all the baby boomers died tomorrow nobody would bemoan the disproportionate influence of 40-year olds in the next election.
I'm afraid you have misread disproportionate to mean some kind of unfair representation.
It just means "they are more, and thus get more votes", i.e. that their influence (because of their numbers) is higher. Nobody implied they get more than 1 vote per person...
disproportionate: "too large or too small in comparison with something else"
"Too" means excessively. Boomer representation is only "too large" if you happen to disagree with their policy choices (which I usually do) - but it's not an unfair level of representation or influence, which is what disproportionate does mean in this context.
Consider a country with 10,100 people, where 100 baby boomers voted and only 1 younger person bothered to vote but the general demographics are the inverse ratio (10,000 young people, 100 baby boomers).
The exact word to use for the baby boomers voting influence there would be "disproportionate".
That's literally what the word means -- it's not tied to the voting system, or stealing votes.
It's disproportionate not because they got more votes than it's fair to according to the voting system, or because they don't deserve those votes, but because they got more votes than what would be the ideal proportional representation of the two demographic groups.
(E.g. where young/old is as close to votes_of_young/votes_of_old as a ratio).
The two groups have the same capacity/opportunity to get proportional representation (in the voting system), but they don't have actual proportional representation (in the voting results).
Who said that that, in itself, is reason to blame anybody?
It's just an empirical, quantifiable, observation.
That said, there are many OTHER, valid, reasons to blame "old" people, or the baby boomer generation, and lots of them have been laid out in the comment section.
>Only if you go by extension that I intentionally raised my kids to not to vote as a part of my evil plan for dominance over young. sheesh
Well, I don't think anybody brought this conspiracy shit up, or even implied it. Just that:
a) older people are over-representent at elections,
b) thus they exert the most political influence
c) most politicians elected are crap
d) that these get elected is predominantly the fault of older people
One might argue that younger people are also to blame for not participating as much in elections, but that's probably not as bad as actively voting for and supporting crap.
Disproportionate means they get _more_ than you would already expect from proportional representation.
It's not about cheating or "proportional representation". It could mean that too, if we were discussing voting systems, but we are not.
We're discussing the fair share of the vote each group gets -- and how the total of young votes vs old votes are out of proportion, that is imbalanced.
disproportionate: "too large or too small in comparison with something else" (dictionary)
Captains of business, finance, and education make a lot of important decisions and use money to influence the political process through lobbying and litigation. As corporations grow in power, gaining more rights and representation, so does this channel of political influence, which is controlled almost exclusively by an older cohort.
The article calls this out in detail: casino interests played a huge role in destroying Sydney's nightlife in order to funnel drinkers to the casino bars that were exempt from shutdown laws.
Notable exceptions would be Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Evan Spiegel. But they are just that: exceptions. And I wouldn't exactly consider any of them role models or champions for a younger generation.
So the people who'd argue for change can't afford to live on the wages provided, leaving only the people with a decent amount of money in the bank (and who usually trend towards having more conservative or authoritarian views). It might also be why journalism isn't particularly diverse in terms of who works in the field (despite what some of them like arguing about), because non minority candidates tend to have the support networks to fall back on to continue working in the field.
If there's a predominance of older people at the higher levels in the media world on the other hand, I suspect it's because getting rich in this industry was a lot easier before the internet was a big thing. Most of these people started when anyone wanting visibility had to go through the old media gatekeepers...
I'm not really very interested in Sanders except that he is clearly a response by a frustrated youth.
Compare this to 60+, who are probably often retired or semi-retired, or working a job at a higher level where they've earned some form of paid time off, or are financially stable enough to just take the day off without pay, etc. They have no kids at home to take care of. They can much more easily just head over to the polls that day, without having to make extensive arrangements in advance.
*And no, this isn't universal, just general trends. Yes, some young folk have professional positions with paid time off, some don't work. Likewise, some older folk are stuck working crappy low end jobs to make ends meet. But when we're talking percentages, I'm rather confident that the older generation is more likely to be able to go out and vote on one particular day in November.
Honestly, voting gets more credit than it deserves. I don't think it's 100% corrupt at the booths, but the candidates that are allowed to compete are vetted by the elites.
Interestingly enough, both Sanders and Trump have snubbed the major political systems, but neither of them are really that much of a threat to the establishment.
Those that are truly feared (e.g. MLK Jr, Malcolm X, perhaps JFK) are not 'allowed' to take part in the game.
As I've gotten older, one thing that I've consistently found is that the young want change. Always. Regardless of whether it's beneficial, been tried before and negative consequences were seen, would only benefit certain people or negative outcomes long term are clearly visible: they want change for sake of change.
Older people have a lot more experience in observing human nature. There is a very big reason that the slogans around "Wisdom comes with age" and "Young know it alls" have existed for so long. They've been observably accurate.
It's a lot easier to get people fired up about things that they don't understand, because any contentious subject has two sides and the fire generally shows that you only understand one of them.
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” - Mark Twain
It may also vary by location and culture, so I can only speak to my own experience with the place where I came from, where the elder population have acted as custodians for utterly retrograde policies and actively resist any attempt to move forward.
I'd question the wisdom of any generation who (broadly) thought the Magdalene Asylums were a good thing.
While for particular older people it might not hold (e.g. some guy might be stuck in his house/bubble for all his life and have less life experience than a guy half his age) in general this is obviously true.
Older people have a lot more experience observing politics and government, and as such have seen the consequences of historical campaign promises and highly-touted government agendas. If these consequences are negative and they have been given reason to believe that the government and its politicians are either liars or just not competent to deliver, that may explain their conservatism.
Science progresses one funeral at a time, that sort of thing.
Enough so I might actually pay for access to a journal in order to get it.
But we shouldn't dismiss this. On the topics of racism, same sex marriage, sexism... really any injustice of the past out there, the old tend to want to hold on what was in the past regardless if it was good or bad.
To think that the old have a better grasp on things ignores all the times they do not.
>There is a very big reason that the slogans around "Wisdom comes with age" and "Young know it alls" have existed for so long. They've been observably accurate.
It works 100% of the time when it works. The old have wisdom only if you consider the cases they were wise. If you look at issues like racism or homophobia, the young are the wise ones. Society advanced one funeral at a time because the we lose their 'wisdom'.
If the young want change just for the sake of change, then the old want stability just for the sake of stability.
When a problem is caused by legislation, it could also serve as a warning to the problems that come from trying to solve problems that way.
If a homosexual person is fired for being homosexual (legal in many states), is it really acceptable to approach that with "well if its truly worthwhile to fight for, sexuality will eventually become a protected class"?
Experience will definitely show that as you approach a certain age, you'll have a harder time finding a job and a big part of that is the risk a business takes on if they have to fire you for underperforming.
Understanding that there are always consequences to legislation, no matter how noble the intentions, will lead to looking at solutions from different angles.
The legislative solution is "Make THEM do this!" while the non-legislative solution is "Campaign to help people be more understanding, tolerant and welcoming to homosexuals." The latter improves society as a whole while they former may help in the short term but create risk-management tendencies among businesses along with resentment from non-protected classes.
The problem is that we are both biologically making that enabling age older and older, and at the same time we are making the world more and more dynamic. And I'll risk a guess that this is a problem that will get solved, whether we come out with a good solution to it, or we only have bad ones.
Maybe I'm getting older myself (30's), but the way that racism, homophobia, etc. is being handled by the young is troubling at best, facist at worst.
A large majority of millenials support restrictions on freedom of speech when it's considered hateful. What ever happened to 'sticks and stones...'?
Honestly, on this issue, I see millenials about as bat-shit crazy as the other extremes - everyone's favorite uncle or old neighbor from the deep South, stuck in the 1960's.
What I see is the way that free speech is being handled when it involves something offensive. But this is not something unique among young individuals; all that is changed is the topics. Which generation was around when obscenity was allowed as an exception to the First Amendment?
For example, consider John Stewart - he's somehow made a shtick of mocking the establishment while somehow calling for them to have more power and deligitimizing anyone who is outside the mainstream.
Insofar as young people want "change", it seems merely to be going back to mythical glorious past era when a single person could support a family, have "health care" and engage in real estate speculation via the proceeds of unskilled manual labor. They believe this "change" will happen mainly by funneling more money into existing programs and bringing back a few policies from the recent past.
(Admittedly, the tech world is an exception to this. And my vantage point might be skewed due to spending my US life in NY.)
What change do you believe the young want today?
Affordable education and access to high quality teachers.
Bringing our healthcare cost/efficacy profile into line with other advanced economies.
Repairing and rebuilding crumbling public infrastructure.
Environmental reform, especially wrt carbon emissions & how we treat the oceans.
Revisiting social security to ensure its long-term viability.
Reducing the government's ability to invade privacy.
Ending the "war on drugs" and regulating/taxing it like the alcohol or tobacco industry.
[1] https://sites.google.com/site/kocherlakota009/home/policy/th...
I'm hoping Donald Trump helps to solve this (or rather, helps the GOP implode.). The Republican party has been an ideological mess for the better part of a decade, and that anti-intellectualism is coming back around to bite them in the ass. When men of substance spend all their time tearing each other down, why is it a surprise that a clown is the only one able to rise above the fray?
We've needed to hit the reset button on the Republican party since the mid-90s. We're finally getting a chance now that the GOP's corporate backers have so obviously lost control, so hopefully we'll be able to get back to normal within a decade or so.
Consider the most establishment presidential candidate in the race right now. Would Hillary Clinton even use different words to describe her policy proposals?
I could imagine policy details that might count as change, but you don't seem to be advocating those. E.g., if you wanted to provide affordable education by replacing teachers with Khan Academy, or cut infrastructure costs down to everywhere-else-in-the-world levels [1] by breaking the back of public employee unions or other such reforms. Are you advocating big change like this?
[1] Delhi Metro Phase 2, 77 miles of track and 85 stations cost Delhi $2.9B and 3 years. Hudson Yards, 1 mile of track and 1 station, cost NYC $2.5B and 9 years.
Sanders explicitly says that his "single payer" plan is "Medicare for all". Medicare is an existing program. It hasn't been a single-payer system for quite a long time, though; it has been -- longer than the ACA has been around -- a lot like a federalized, rather than state-based, version of the ACA with subsidized private plans but with a public default option.
A proper single payer system would not have Medicare broken down into part A,B etc. It would be end to end covering diagnosis, treatment, drugs etc.
If these fundamental injustices don't get addressed, I fear the alternative is revolution in the long term.
It's very different in Africa where life expectancy is near 45:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
A lot of problems in western countries comes from the society itself (how the society is organized and how it works) and most of them can't be solved with laws.
A recipe for getting living standards as bad as Africa.
In the big picture, maybe it doesn't matter exactly how comfortable 5% of the world is. Maybe the real issue is how bad things are in Africa. If people really all matter?
The boomers are behaving disgustingly by ramping land prices in hock with the banks. It has sent living standards into free-fall for the young.
I always find it a curious approach, taken by so many activists, to start by disaffecting the group that they claim is in power. How can it help to piss of and blame the actual people than are in a position to help?
Calling the US housing market "free" is a sad joke.
Maybe we're talking apples and oranges. City centers and highly urbanized areas will work very differently. But is it a civil right to have cheap housing downtown?
The banks provide credit as required. It costs nothing to make. As productivity increases (or as we work longer) more credit is created to absorb the surplus via interest.
It's not them. You would do the same if you had properties and kids.
Realestate is a market. It's inside the money.
Some regimes tried to change that by force but it doesn't work. Even if you kill all the richs, they are replaced by another group (lawyers or bureaucrats):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
I think it's not a fatality. It's just a lack of knowledge. We don't know enough of human group behaviour.
If you think that, you might become a victim of "bad" people. Most people are not bad and do what they can. Even the wealthy do their best. Most of them have a family or friends to take care.
Vote is useless. Big changes happens even during economic crisis or after wars.
I'm sorry to say that Africa doesn't really factor into all that. Peace, love and understanding for the entire planet sounds great but I have work to do and bills to pay.
These sort of "reduce everything into rubble by equalizing" arguments provide nothing to the discussion but wishful thinking and meaningless utopianism.
They can't change that. They had no writing. History of Africa begins with XIVth century.
Our culture comes from the Greeks, Roman Empire and India. Even in the Middle Ages, the western technology was superior.
This is certainly one opinion, however on the other hand, we have actual reality.
or to reframe your argument:
Maybe it doesnt matter how mysoginistic the US is, maybe the real issue is how bad things are in the middle east.
Does that sound like something you agree with? we should cease all effort to improve conditions for women in the US because all of that effort should instead be expended on improving conditions for women in the middle east?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Red_herring_...
I'll even reword it into the right semantic order:
"The US may have some minor societal issues, but its not as bad as africa, therefore those issues can be dismissed"
What exactly is logical about claiming every problem in the US is able to be dismissed on the basis that its worse elsewhere - especially given that we are in a discussion about internal US demographics? How exactly is africa related to the growing proportion of elderly voters in the united states and the effects that has on youth populations?
Your argument is a pretty good illustration of the problem I have with these catalogues of fallacies. You've discovered the fallacy of relative privation, as others have discovered, say, ad hominem, and concluded that relative privation is a fallacy. No, that's not the point! As with ad hominem, it can be used fallaciously, but it is not inherently so.
>A logical fallacy is an error in the logic of an argument that prevents it from being logically valid but does not prevent it from swaying people's minds
Can you show me the logic of the argument in a manner that makes sense?
heres what i see:
1. elderly population is becoming ever larger part of electorate
2. this is causing an imbalance, as in the past new generations began influencing the political sphere earlier, as the older generations were much thinner
3. this imbalance is evidenced by political support for a youth focused populist candidate
(heres where maybe im missing something)
4. this imbalance doesnt exist because its not as bad as africa.
To me, its a straight up non sequitur let alone a FRP - on its face fallacious in more ways than one.
On one hand we have a discussion about internal demographics in the US, and then here we have a counter argument proposing that the problems are not real based on the fact that someone has it worse.
This isnt an argument i disagree with - I am not somehow implying that the US has it worse than africa. I am purely saying that bringing africa into a discussion about internal demographics and specifically age demographics of voters, is fallacious (i mean the commentor literally responded to political unrest of a population segment with 'at least there is no one starving'). Hopefully you can present the argument in a way that clarifys what i may be missing.
You are free to believe that's the case, but you cannot invoke the fallacy of relative privation to transform it into an open-and-shut argument.
I'm not doing anything to improve this thread at this point, so I'm bowing out now.
Ok, then is this an argument for or against that idea?
>I'm sorry to say that but there is no real injustices in western countries. Everybody has food, education, a minimal healthcare and even luxury products like smartphone or TV.
It sounds to me like they are:
>dismissing a complaint due to the existence of more important problems in the world, regardless of whether those problems bear relevance to the original argument.
But sure, maybe its a real argument. Maybe campaign finance reform in the US doesnt exist as an issue, because when i go home i know theres still food in the cupboard.
Maybe because i can go to an emergency room if i get shot and they'll care for me before knowing if i have insurance, that means that black people getting murdered by police officers isn't an injustice.
Maybe given that i have a smartphone, ever rising costs of engaging in a legal battle dont favor the wealthy, and that doesnt represent a legal system based on economics rather than justice
Maybe since my country has a public education system and i was able to learn to read and write, that means that my country doesnt criminalize the mentally ill.
And since someone in africa doesnt have those advantages, any injustice they face is real.
I honestly cant see a way to read these comments that dont fit the exact definition of relative privation. Are you saying that the other commentor was saying that campaign finance reform is not an issue because campaign finance reform is needed even more greatly in africa? Or as you saying they meant an armed revolution is not possible in the US given that countries worse off are not engaged in armed revolution currently? Those are the most generous reads of the comment i've been able to come up with. I appreciate the discussion, have a good one
The innocent tangent was "maybe this all seems a little overblown to people that have it worse". Which is undeniably true, as at least some of them actually said that.
>4. this imbalance doesnt exist because its not as bad as africa.
> I'm sorry to say that but there is no real injustices in western countries
How you got from "there are no injustices in the western world" to "maybe this is a little overblown" im not sure i understand.
People have the right to complain but they don't understand where the problems come from. They are often manipulate by parties to win the elections and nothing changes.
Most of the defects we can see in westerns countries come from the way we are organized (with hierarchy, money and laws).
African societies are more horizontal and people share more (the food for example). There is no homeless in most african cities (some in big ones).
USDA says that 14% of all households in the united states suffer from food insecurity.[1]
>no real injustices in western countries
institutional racism, police killings, homelessness, drug addiction, political oligarchy, rapidly rising secondary education costs, etc.
These problems dont vanish because someone else has it worse, that's a well known fallacy called the fallacy of relative privation[2]
[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/foo... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Red_herring_...
There is no effective solution to any of these problems. Nothing works.
They are consequences of the money. We use money because we do not understand each other. Money is far more than a commodity. It has its own live and rules.
What is possible is to do small tunings with taxes and laws. That's all.
If you take big revolutionnary measures, you will destabilize the money system and everything will be broken like in 1929.
Another approach is real anarchist communism but it doesn't scale. It works only locally. That's why some libertarians are for feodalism.
Yeah but that doesn't make it right. Look at the lashback from the right against Immigration and the rise of Donald Trump. It has been hard for everyone, and human nature is to find individuals or groups to blame.
I am an advocate of sanity on both ends. The left loves to talk about 'revolution' (as if right wing doesn't love to do that, except it calls it 'secession' and 'nullification') but the harsh truth is, we are about a million miles away from a revolution/secession/nullification.
A revolution against the 'injustice' won't move 2 blocks from Times Square before it goes so violent that it would be an effective stalemate.
There are far too many private guns in America for there to be a successful revolution. Civil War is more likely (lets not forget this is what really happened in China and Russia).
Similarly a secession/nullification isn't happening irrespective of how many illegal immigrants arrive in this country (again thanks 2nd amendment for that).
The principles true for the rest of the world just aren't that easily possible for America. There is no extreme right wing or left wing party winning election (Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are hardly the American Golden Dawn, UKIP or Hollande of America). American citizenry is heavily armed and hate speech is legal. Neo-nazis can freely march in America (that surprisingly neuters the power these groups have).
"The problem is Muslims and Mexicans. We should deport them and build walls. We should obliterate their countries and take their oil. Torture is fine. We should kill the families of terrorists. Shooting Muslims with bullets dipped in pigs blood is a good way to teach them a lesson. The president should be able to directly punish CEOs who aren't protectionist enough. The freedom of the press should be curtailed. It's ok to use violence to punish non-supporters at your rallies."
If that's not extreme right wing, I'm not sure what is.
It's a golden age on the coasts, but many areas of the country have been spiraling downward for decades. If you're a working stiff with negative wage growth essentially working as servants for boomers with fat pensions and reverse mortgages, you're going to get more and more resentful. That's why a demogague like Trump is successful.
At least Millenials have better numbers than Gen X. Nobody even mentions us anymore..
Reading between the lines you're a millenial (if so, sorry) and "they" are trying to manipulate you by claiming if you wait a decade or two, things will be better, just warning you they pulled that trick on us X-ers. I would not be pacified by the same old line. At least make them tell you a new lie.
This tends to push back the timeline of wealth acquisition: the boomers being such a big demographic along with the economic crisis in 2008, and what I see in my highly progressive US city is a massive failure for late Gen X and older millenials to form households: children, mortgages, and the typical consumption patterns this usually breeds.
There are advertisements for IVF treatments on our metro. I'd say 30-40% of educated women are unable or unwilling to have children due to the inability to find a stable partner (who's also educated). I make well over 6 figures and my girlfriend also does pretty well. Together, we'd still need to pay half our joint salary to afford a mortgage on a typical home in a area close to our jobs. There is no way a couple with the median income could do the same without leveraging a huge amount of debt relative to income.
Whether I'm able to do so or not, I'm defintely not willing. Jobs are not certain - I'm always waiting for the next crisis or recession and lay off. No way in hell would I want to be in so much debt in this system. Same for children (along with family court, but I digress).
I'm guessing our politicians see this and understand that the whole pyramid will come crashing down, hence the elite's push for more and more immigration.
Maybe the solution would be, instead of subsidizing foreigners, to create massive tax breaks for locals to procreate - housing, child care, etc. But that wouldn't do anything to push down wages, so it's obviously a no-go in today's political debate.
Parents of baby-boomers lived through war. Food was rationed. Luxury food was seriously rationed. Many grew up without processed fats like butter, or even sugar.
The end rationing was a celebration and these parents wanted their children to have everything they couldn't. Sugar. Fats. The new-fangled convenience foods that came over with Americans post-WWII (operating bases, etc). As time went on this junk food just became even more affordable.
The result is a demographic that has just awesome levels of T2 diabetes, obesity and coronary issues, as well as all the problems that have been associated with these conditions (a fair amount of dementia).
In many cases, the parents who lived through the war are now caring for and outliving their children.
At the end, we do our own choices where to spend money - is it cheap and somewhat tasty junk food, or something better (which might not be more expensive, or even cheaper if prepared ourselves). Blaming others for issues that people cause themselves when they have other options is cheap...
In any case, I don't see high levels of obesity and diabetes in baby-boomers. And I think it's more my generation and possibly later generations that eat too much junk food.
Food waste is something slightly different but I agree, there's a very consumerist approach to food these days. Most are disconnected from production so don't care where it comes from, how much effort goes into it, how many welfare sacrifices are make to get its cost down.
Fixing both of these issues is done by getting people making and eating real food.
Re my original comments, OT is a geriatrician in England. She's seeing people in their 60s and 70s who have had to move back in with their parents to be cared for. You shouldn't be having geriatric issues until you hit your 80s. She obviously doesn't have the direct experience of other generations but her colleagues tell me this is a relatively recent thing, with this generation.
It'd be interesting to munge through a ton of medical data on this.
Also, the tax system is complicated and favours people who own houses (In Australia, you get tax deductions if you lose money on a rental property which you own). There are actually a lot of (older) people in Australia who own like 10+ houses (with 10 mortgages) and rent them out to young people and get huge tax deductions (and capital growth).
Older people own everything. To make it worse, the older generation in Australia doesn't really want to invest in technology - They prefer just investing their money into real estate (which has been growing an an impressive rate year-over-year for the past 20 years or so).
The idea of 'investing in yourself' is mostly a foreign concept in Australia - The only thing worthwhile investing in is a block of land with bricks and concrete on top.
There are many people who dropped out of school, became construction workers and bought a house on a mortgage and are now wealthier than most university-educated students thanks to the insane real-estate growth and labour shortage (due in part to tough immigration laws).
Some recent changes in laws suggest that conditions might be improving but it's too late for me.
I'm looking forward to living in San Francisco - Yes the rent will also be high; but at least it seems that everything else is cheaper, taxes are lower and it's generally a good place to build a career in technology.
Im planning long term to move into the US with mountain states and midwest as the most favored locations.
Good things about Germany:
- Great job opportunities, even if you only speak English (less jobs than if you speak German, but with EU orgs, international companies, etc its possible)
- Rent is not cheap in the more attractive cities with good jobs (Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich), but it's not that expensive either compared to say Paris or London
- No out-of-control housing market, as Germans don't have the same lust for owning property and property speculation that you see in much of the English speaking world
- Cost of living (food, drink) compared to wages is really good, compared to much of Europe
- Amazing cheap beer, great festival culture. The food here is seriously underrated, Schweinbraten, etc is amazing. Yes it's not pretentious like e.g. some French food, but it's no-nonsense and delicious, especially in Bavaria. Even the weather compared to the British Isles is decent.
- Low cost university
- A culture of paying for things upfront (e.g. Energiewiende and pensions for old population), hence high taxes but not kicking the can down the road is obviously the best thing in the long run (although it's not much comfort to young workers)
- Soaks up talent from the rest of Europe, you can move with no visa from other EU countries
Regarding taxes, t's possible to get a contracting job, where you are paid as a freelancer and certain social contributions are waived for a period of time. I also know that's it's possible to earn as a contractor, trading as a company from another EU country (earn German wages, pay Greek/Maltese/Irish corp taxes). You need a good tax advisor, but I've seen first hand that it's possible.
Source: expat working in Germany.
I wouldn't say that's evidence of a police state - plenty of other countries have bus lanes, and you'll be fined for driving in them - would you expect otherwise?
I think they need to be small enough that people can feasibly pay them, but large enough that they can't just shrug it off
There was a lot of reporting on this sort of thing in the St. Louis area following recent events in Ferguson. Poor people get ticketed for some minor violation. They can't afford the fine when it comes due. The fine snowballs with late fees and court costs, and soon they're facing jail time because they committed some minor infraction, like failing to signal a turn, that half the people on the road commit every day.
I think the proper answer is to adjust fines according to the person's income. It's ridiculous to me that a person making $200,000/year will pay the same fine for speeding as someone working minimum wage. Or, really, that the person working minimum wage will likely pay more, because the fees compound if you can't pay right away.
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/dday-for-nsw-cyclists-as-stiffer-p...
In the US you get fines for that too. (I learned this after I moved from places without curbs, where everyone parks on the verge rather than the street, to a town with curbs and therefore on-street parking.)
> staying in a parking spot for 10 minutes too long
Also in the US.
> I'm looking forward to living in San Francisco
Do you think the parking will be easier and driving will incur fewer fines?
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...
And some would get your points substracted. (In France you have 12 Driver's license points. At 0 your license is revoked.)
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4437917,-79.9556978,3a,79.6y...
On the parkway, I've seen people use the exit specifically designated for buses that leads to a busway. I've seen two pull in as I went by once! If they charged $300 each time (and posted it), that would stop pretty fast. They are usually pretty nice cars, so I imagine that those are douche bag executives that don't give a damn.
parking your car facing the 'wrong' way
They've spent decades building something - they're probably the people least capable of objectively valuing the business. There's too much emotion tied into it, especially if they're at a point where they could sell but are just as happy to keep working, meaning the price needed to get them to leave goes up.
It's not unique to business owners, either. One of the real estate websites have a "Make Me Move" option, which is basically the homeowner saying what number they'd need to pack up their shit and leave. It is consistently 180-200% the actual market value. To the point where you want to ask the homeowners what exactly they're smoking that they think their house is worth even close to that much money.
Same is true of a person who owns their own business but isn't ready to stop running it. You're not reflecting the market value of your business, you're reflecting the market plus emotional/‘satisfactional’ value of it.
I actually know someone who was in this situation. A company wanted a sliver of the guy's land for an access road. Eminent domain wasn't an option for the company. The company offered $100k for the 10x30 piece of land. Sensing blood in the water and figuring that redoing all of the project would cost at least $2M + lots of time, he demanded $750k for his property and got $700k. It was worth about $250k total.
Market value is what it would take to have a buy/sell transaction on the house. If there are no houses for sale in the neighborhood, everyones make me move number IS the market value for the house/neighborhood.
It's not perfect, but I'm hoping that these position changes and bouts of walking are working for the better. It shouldn't be harmful at the very least.
Boomers are running the business. Young pp are worthless garbage. I heard about some middle school teachers saying "young germans should be expelled from all social security...".
Like weow...wait until these pp are old. Then its time for retaliations on the great nazis-kid bastard generation.
Robots.
Here is Atlas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY
I don't think we need 30y for a real robot application for old people. This could be in less than 10 years.
(I am dodging the other half of the question regarding who pays for it.)
So far, no robot seems even close to taking on the everyday tasks performed by low-wage nursing home employees in the US. But take a look at "Babyloid" and "Pepper". They are robots designed to socially engage with people, so they don't get lonely and depressed.
Japan's elderly may soon be conversing with chatbots more often than living people. Baby Boomers in the US had better take note.
I'm not sure that makes sense - don't TV and Skype solve that problem just fine? I mean, why would old people talk to robots instead of other old people - unless they want to, that is, but then I'd guess this trend wouldn't (isn't) be limited to just old people...
Wait until they start "getting the savings out of the stock market" (eg to pay for robots or medicine). This wont be a "pleasent" day at all. Guess what, the stock market will collaps! There is no one buying all those stocks!(its the same with insurance. where is the insurance "invested"?)...their savings will evaporate, they dont have children or the children will be gone (to foreign nations).
Its looking grim for those ruthless, egoistic baby boomers. They just dont understand this yet.
Ireland is a different world some times.
1) Why just close booze stores? Why not close restaurants or grocery stores or any of the non-essential businesses on sunday?
2) What about a grocery store that is already open and staffed and has piles of beer. What does not selling it do for the already working employees?
If this is habitual maybe you should, I don't know, have a couple of bottles of wine on-hand for such occasions?
There is evidence that later hours of alcohol sale are related to increased violence, injury and incidence of drunk-driving. Correlation is not causation and all that, but I'm sure people living in the vicinity of bars, or in college towns, aren't swayed by your minor inconvenience.
Just stock several bottles. Problem solved. It's not like it will go stale.
young parents care more about this than old farts.
Could culture have something to do with this if they can avoid this cost of living crisis in continental Europe and most of the US? Or may be they're suffering there too. Only way to solve a lot of these issues is to be able to work remotely and not have to live or buy in commuter areas.
Though, I noticed many of my facebook friends started voting once they hit their early 30s. I think that's when people start to settle down in life and either have the time to study/figure out politics, or get more interested in it. It might be the time where their youthful naive idealism vanishes and they realize that true change is a slow process. They become more pragmatic and more realistic. Much of their concerns tend to be more local/regional where their votes actually hold some power. It's less about voting in a president who can wave a magic wand and create their ideal utopia overnight and more about voting in a local city councilman or state senator who will best represent their interests. People they have actually met in real life and shook their hands.
Then, because of thinking like that in your post, people gave up on voting for them, despite being the best possible representation.
I'm entitled to be a little resentful when the term "Massachusetts liberal" exists as an insult, a perennial way of kicking my state in the shins and telling us our voice will always be overridden.
- http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/23050/1/plastic-pe... - https://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/were-closing-the-vibe-bar - http://www.cable-london.com/broadcast/single/we-have-closed-...
1. Most more developed countries have an aging population, so the percentage of baby boomers is much higher than it probably should be. This is due to better conditions, better healthcare, etc, which leads to people living longer and the population demographics skewing older. Either way, politicians tend to support them, because they make up more of the population.
2. Older people vote more (perhaps due to younger generations seemingly losing all interest in politics or trying to change their situation in any reasonable way), so politicians target them more. Combine with the aging population mentioned above...
It's a pretty bad problem to have, and a perfect illustration of why a population shouldn't be skewed too much towards any one demographic. And even more problems are going to arise when more of this demographic start retiring and the numbers of people working isn't enough to support it...
I have no idea how to solve this issue. Maybe mandatory voting would be a good start, to try and encourage people to vote rather than mere discuss politics/sign internet petitions? But it's still problematic, since you need both political parties that fight for younger people's political views and enough people to support said parties that the issues can't simply be ignored.
The lockout laws have stopped the violence. They have also caused collateral damage in the form of these closures.
So there you have it. Would you rather be safe out or cry over the closure of a few late night businesses? Having experienced all sides of King's Cross, I know which I'd choose.
Here is one police comparison (there might be more recent data but it's hard to search on a tablet):
http://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Pages/bocsar_news/Mapping-the-i...
> Bravely, his government had first tried to tamp down the issue with cold facts: statistics showed drunken violence was actually decreasing, by almost 40% according to some estimates, and the culture of small bars was starting to sap violent drinking away from the city.
1. Small bars are exempt from the laws: http://www.nsw.gov.au/newlaws
2. In the 10+ years I've known Sydney I did not notice much change in the late night character of King's Cross; certainly not enough to make believe the culture of drugs, drunks, prostitution and violence is going away all by itself. The fact that the laws were introduced in the first place is testament to that.
It praised the state’s “lockout” laws, which Baird’s
predecessor, Barry O’Farrell, had introduced in early
2014 in the wake of high-profile “one-punch” deaths.
Googling around, a "one-punch" assault seems to be some Britishism for an assault on an unsuspecting person, where they're knocked out after a single hit, and occasionally die. Most the results are for the new mandatory minimum sentencing laws, but I can't seem to actually find the text of the law anywhere.
EDIT:
The result feels like a final victory in the battle
between Australia’s version of the cavaliers and the
roundheads, the larrikins and the wowsers.
I've never lived anywhere that allowed purchasing alcohol all night long. I read the article and thought to myself "Who the heck drinks after 3am anyways?" Even through my teens and twenties, an all-night party was the exception.
* edit: of course I'm talking about my experience living on a medium-sized city (Maceió). I guess bigger cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro you can find a good number of late open venues.
The article also mentioned other things, like all liquor must be served with a mixer after midnight. That means drinking a whisky neat is now illegal, which is quite ridiculous, and will definitely drive people away from going to bars.
Parts of Alaska are apparently 5am and Louisiana has no official last call from what I've read.
I'm sure there are some other cities or states with late last call requirements but I'm only familiar with these ones. Occasionally in my city, there are special exceptions like New Year's Eve where bars can stay open and serve all night if they feel like it.
They sell all sort of non-perishable food and, well, convenience stuff, but most of their profit comes from selling alcohol at night. And man, be it for alcohol or convenience, they are soooo useful !
There are a few exceptions that allow 24 hour drinking, but I think it's mainly casino towns like Vegas & Atlantic City.
What this had done is turn the strip clubs into normalish clubs after 2 am since everywhere else is closed.
It's variable though, so some pubs still close around 11pm, and some don't.
The jury is out about whether this decision was a good thing. On the one hand, there are some articles and studies saying the amount of alcohol drunk has gone down because of it, and on the other hand, others saying that people are drinking more because of it.
I started out in financial services and per our change management if the building wasn't on fire I wasn't allowed to touch anything until 5pm on trading days, so I wouldn't even show up at the office until at least 4pm and if things went bad overnight I could certainly use a drink around 3am... I suspect this kind of work-life balance is not unusual here on HN.
There is also some tax break that if you had no income in Portugal in the last 10 years, you are eligible for a very reduced personal tax rate if you move to Portugal for X years so that also brings up rental and property prices.
Related thought... I wonder how much AirBnB plays into this? I'm vacationing in Florence later this year and was surprised at the large number of available flats in the historic center. Not just rooms, or random apartments, but in some cases significant portions of buildings.
Our tax laws create a huge incentive for large scale negatively geared local investment in housing, which means there's a lot of people "losing money" in rental income in order to reduce their income tax. It's an awful unintended consequence that no one has had the cojones to fix.
All the comments here read like those aren't humans, allowed to participate in society just like anyone else.
And if they have more voting discipline and get what they care about, well, whose fault is that?
Everyone will be old one day, then those bad, bad things will suddenly be awesome again.
Guess you need to move into middle age to understand both side better.
"Millenials can't have fun w/o alcohol".
Initially the article seemed promising, but then it just devolved into the usual lockout law garbage.