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Comment by noelchurchill | Hacker News Reader

I assume by greatest generation you mean baby boomers. The article doesn't OP doesn't refer to them as the greatest generation. And by given way, I think you mean enabled, because the OP is making the point that Scotts parents have paid his whole way and still pay for him while he declines job offers.

I have issue with calling the baby boomers the greatest generation. They've saddled this country with an unimaginable debt burdon, creating a situation where their kids may be the first American generation who's quality of life may not exceed that of their parents, yet the baby boomers call their kids lazy for not wanting to pick up the tab and pay for their extravagances.

However, Scott from the OP is still a lazy sack of ...

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"The Greatest Generation" refers to the parents of the baby boomers.

The open question is if gen-Y will be even worse than the baby boomers. I don't think they can be, if only due to numbers.

The work of Gen X is cleaning up after the Boomers and babysitting the Millenials. Gen Y could go either way.

Interesting, I guess I wasn't aware that was question anyone cared about. Keeping in character with the 2nd greatest generation (X), I certainly don't.

They don't get off Scot free either. Here in England they voted in the Nanny State in '45 and we've been paying for it ever since.

Did you know in '48 they claimed the cost of nationalized healthcare would go down in time as the population got healthier...?

Certainly vastly cheaper relative to the alternatives. Britain's health care system does a pretty good job of controlling costs while maintaining decent results.

Do you mean go down in the sense that a bottle of coke is cheaper now than then after accounting for inflation or down as in an operation that costs £100 will be £50 in a decade?

Also, you could have the American system that only seems to go up in costs exponentially.

Down as in, a healthier population will require less healthcare. They never foresaw the NHS paying for hymenoplasty...

The "Greatest Generation" who guaranteed themselves the "Greatest Retirement" package. In the fairy tale, all the goods and services they consume will come from the magic money tree that the government fertilized somewhere with all the money they paid into social security.

Back in reality land, a smaller population of heavily taxed and badly paid members of the Gen X and Gen Y cohort will have to change grandma's bed pan and they better be damned productive given how long everyone's living.

Considering they were born between 1901 and 1924, the Greatest Generation is mostly dead.

But not all dead! Mostly dead means slightly alive. All dead... well, there's only one thing you can do: go through their pockets and look for loose change.

Um, that would be the baby boomers, not their parents.

I have a pet theory that says that they are the first and last generation every to retire wholesale. I'm pretty sure my generation (I'm 31) isn't going to get to retire in the same way that my grandfather did (two sets of government defined benefit package money + teacher's retirement). Don't misunderstand me, I think he worked hard for it and played the system well, but I don't even have the opportunity to play the system the same way he did.

Sorry, are you saying the generation that created the baby boomers didn't adequately provide a large enough work base for the social programs they wanted to access?

They call the offspring generation the boomers after all. The "greatest" did a perfect job in understanding what they were doing in that respect.

Their children, however, are the ones who use their own strength to ensure lucrative benefit programs for themselves on the backs of their offspring in the Gen X/Y bracket.

So named because if it wasn't for them we'd all be speaking German or Japanese right now. Or, depending upon your ethnic status, exterminated, or used for bayonet practice.

My dad (who personally is as conservative as they come, though with fond memories of FDR) is of the tail end of this generation--he enlisted just in time to go to Okinawa. He always tells me people living today don't fully understand what WWII was really like. It wasn't like Vietnam or Iraq where everyone at home carries on as normal while the troops are on the front lines--everyone was in the war effort, whether it's boys too young to enlist working in shipyards churning out a ship every day or two, or old men in Bend, Oregon meeting at the bar and planning how to defend the town in case the Japanese landed, to the rationing. And that's America--not Britain where they had bombs and rockets raining on their heads, and where the success or failure of the RAF could dictate whether your family survived the night. Total war means the entire population is involved, and WWII was the last total war the English speaking world ever fought. Keeping all of that in mind, I'm willing to forgive a lot from the WWII generation.

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