I know a lot of people don't like to hear it, but I'll let you in on a little secret: if you don't feel like you're getting anywhere trying to work and live in a major city, do yourself a favor and move to a less-populated area.
Many cities have become extremely competitive, which naturally selects against all but the few who can manage to work for less (competition in the labor market drives down wages) and pay more to live (that same competitive environment drives the cost of living higher).
Get outside those inflated bubbles and life really does become easier for someone who just wants to earn a decent living.
Stop blaming other people for your choice to live in a place where the cost of living feels "out of reach".
At least around here, I've noticed that developers in the (often cheaper) suburbs are making a push towards building high-density walkable devevolopments.
It's worth noting that in many cities, there are still a lot of affordable options (some even cheaper than a few decades ago), but they're often not in the hip areas that people want to live. When people talk about how unfair it is that others got good values in the hip areas, they often don't realize that those areas were once the cheap undesirable areas.
Visit the farms in rural Arkansas, spend a few days, engage some farmhands in conversation. If you talk to at least 4 such people, then at least 1 of them will be addicted to meth. You can often detect this simply by looking at them. Often their teeth give them away.
Spend some time in rural Missouri. Go to small diners and try to engage the waitresses in conversation. If you stay a few weeks you will get to know them. You will hear stories about husbands and boyfriends who are unemployed, or who can only get sporadic work. Whole families surviving on what one woman can earn as a waitress at a small diner.
I've done a bit of traveling, and I've seen people struggling with hard times all over the USA.
And in the examples above, I'm talking about areas that are mostly white. If you really want to feel like Dante, and descend into Hell, go visit the mostly black counties in Mississippi.
For many decades now, the interior states of the USA have become increasingly poor. Wealth has been concentrating into the coasts. Farming has been mostly automated. Mining has been mostly automated. The number of coal jobs in the USA peaked in the 1940s and has declined (with some ups and downs) rather steadily over the last 7 decades.
As to automation in farming, remember that the novel "The Grapes of Wrath", by John Steinbeck, was published in 1939. The opening scene of that novel shows us a man trying to get home to his farm (after he spent some time in prison) and finding that his family has lost the farm due to the tractors, which both reduced demand for labor on the farms, and also allowed economies of scale that caused a great consolidation of the land into bigger and bigger corporate farms.
And remember too, in 1961, Ralph Abernathy (the right-hand man of Martin Luther King) gave a speech in which he warned people "The civil rights movement is in a race with the tractors." He meant that the tractors were rapidly replacing black labor on the farms, but the blacks had been kept out of most other professions, so it was urgent that the Civil Rights movement open up the rest of the economy to black people, before black people lost the last remaining farm jobs.
Most historians of agriculture in the USA will point to the 1920s as the era when farms hit their economic peak. The rural areas of the USA have been facing decline for 9 decades now.
In observance of the etiquette that is expected on Hacker News, I've tried to stick to the facts in responding to you. But I also want to be clear: your advice is terrible.
Between the two of you, the picture this paints is one of Americans jostling for position around twenty relatively small fires scattered amidst a large, cold, dark forest.
The wastefulness is simply depressing.
only the high quality old music is still played and remembered today, and only the high quality old things survive long enough to be saved by great grandchildren. i imagine cheap throw away old crap has disintegrated long ago.
(~Twenty years ago I bought every Atari/Intellivision/Vetrex/etc game I could find at various flea market and thrift stores, and for the last ten I've been dreading getting rid these boxes of useless stuff.)
Collecting game systems that you play and use which are also not being made anymore isn't useless in the least. Comparatively, that is.
Unfortunately they haven't been able to turn it off and their constant pursuit of comfort hasn't done them any good in the longer term.
That being said, living in Boston, MA, I totally feel what you're saying (literally, most of the houses here are expensive, even in crappy areas).
Places like Melbourne and Sydney are crowded and expensive, but the cheaper properties are all out in rural areas, where your choice of employment is slim, especially if you made the "mistake" of training in any tech sector job.
Source: was a uni student for 10 years and survived.
Not everyone grew up in the city suburbs. Not to mention, I am talking about the burbs not the CBD anyway. Rent is still %50 of my tech sector wage for an ancient two bedroom unit in the suburbs. Rent sharing is the only sane option, hooray living with strangers.
I don't mind, I enjoy and appreciate what I have, but you can't pretend like it's the same opportunity for everyone and the same opportunity as it was a few decades ago. Things are different, and it's different in ways wr can try and fix, hence the conversation on the topic.
Canberra is the most affordable city in the country.
Sydney and Melbourne just are not worth it any more unless you and a partner earn 200K+ or you have property there.
It doesn't matter how cheap the land/housing is if you can't get a job while living on it.
I'd love to be in a world where geography doesn't matter and everyone can work remotely. For now, only a small and elite subset of software engineers can pull US cost of living (even rural cost of living) from remote work.
B.S.
Unemployment in the US is relatively low even on a long term basis.
The average home prices in the US is $188K. Most people can afford that.
There is more opportunity for mortgages and financial services than at any time in history.
There is more opportunity for mobility than at any time in history.
You have it easier than any generation in history - but all you can do is complain.
If you want to 'have it like the boomers did growing up' - well, you can skip going to college because few of them did - and you can do some crap job pushing paper for most of your life, in boring but steady employment, and buy a small, mediocre home in the burbs and mow your lawn. That was the 'steady, sable American dream'. You have opportunities that they never had - and that most kids in the world would kill for.
Dear God save me from whatever unemployment you deem to be high. Over a third of the people in this country don't work and another third work part time.
Maybe you actually believe those numbers coming out of the gov on unemployment and don't pay attention to the people who have rolled off the unemployment benefits. I know people that have been looking for work for the better part of 5 years without luck.
Also, have to call bullshit on the "You have it easier than any generation in history" remark. This generation is the first generation since the inception of this country to not have it better than the previous one. Every person born today is born with upwards of 70k debt thanks to the drunken sailors in Congress. The bill will come due. It always does.
If you're a defense contractor, you're not interested in selling "hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground," but rather guns (weapons systems) and ammo.
As a corollary, no one is lobbying politicians on behalf of a force increase at the scale you're suggesting. Private military contractors just don't operate at the "give the hoards of unemployed young men some plausible way to die" scale.
The situation you're referring to is more of an issue in countries with weaker economies and geographically close potential enemies.
We have entire video-games, and mods for games, that revolve around setting up factories and designs.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that many of these games are skinner boxes that our brains have relatively few defenses against, but Chris is a stupid example.
I'd also guess that many people who trash video games would happily say watching baseball, perhaps playing baseball, opera, or chess are somehow superior. It's not like those have much intrinsic value in them besides the enjoyment they may generate for the participant.
At least I have a dev job I'm happy with that scratches my problem-solving itch and that I partially got because of experience I gained writing tools for Eve. Haven't been playing anything as much these days because when I get home from work, I'm usually ready to take off my thinking cap for a while and most of my games very much require me to keep it on.
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/A-glut-of-l...
"The proportion of 16-24-year-olds who do not drink increased by more than 40 per cent between 2005 and 2013. Today, one in five is teetotal."
"...wet sales at student union bars have dived in the last 10-15 years."
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/featu...
What does it look like in the UK? Are there equivalents (aside from the traditional round-at-the-pub-after-work, that is)?
[1] http://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/moonshine-whiskey-i...
Don't end up wasted except by accident. People usually drink in company, which acts as moderator.
This compared with Sovied men from 70-s and 80-s which would drink any alcohol-containing liquid immediately without even asking themself "why".
I don't think it's Putin related, not even economy related so much, it's just return to normalcy after a century of Soviet experiment.
Edit - And yes, that's a big step for a lot of kids with alcoholic parents.
Landlords, banks and boomers are disgusting.
Banks create new money by lending. Most lending is issued against real estate. People who "invest" in holding the same piece of land to accrue the effort of others do not have 400K. They "borrow" it from the bank (the bank creates it).
Go to your bank and tell them you want to borrow 400k to invest in indexes.
Sorry, but this is just bullshit.
But if it makes you feel better, it's normal to think this, every generation blames the previous.
(And the older generation thinks the latest is lazy)
But true, people don't normally think that.
Yeah, there wasn't like a big youth counterculture in the 1960s-1970s rebelling against the previous generation that was then dominant in society and government over major international policy (Hello, Southeast Asia), domestic policy, notions of public and private morality, and, basically, every other aspect of life.
You might have a better case with Gen X not particularly blaming the Boomers (and focussing more on the trailing end of the influence of the "Greatest" Generation), and even better with Millenials not even paying attention to Gen X enough to blame them for anything (Boomers, sure, but Gen X? Not so much.)
We're probably just starting to tip past Boomer-in-power to GenX-in-power in the upper echelon of power structures.
Which incidentally probably explains why older companies finally seem to be starting to "get" the internet, now that I think about it...