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Comment by ajay_sibri04 | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently in high school and yes we are very angry about what is being handed to us. Bad job prospects, vilifying success, socialism, over priced college, loss of privacy, increased racial divide in society etc.

I am determined though to persevere and change the world for the better.

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Compared to what? The dark ages, WW-I, WW-II, cold war with a real prospect of annihilation, slavery, the big depression, recession, colonialization, wars, communism..... Shall I go on?

Every generation faces this, it just seems that this generation feels a little bit more entitled than previous generations.

Edit: to quote from The Komensky Method It hurts to be human. It hurts like hell. And all the exploring in the world doesn’t make that hurt go away. Because being human and being hurt are the same damn thing.

I think you make a great point. Every generation has their own unique struggles.

There are more than purely-internal personality factors that cause suicides. Hell, even personality is influenced by what you grow up in and experience daily. If we're making a society that makes more people kill themselves than in the past, we're fucking up.

Is it "entitlement" to not want to live in a world where the culture and stimuli aren't so negative? How do you think kids would entitle themeselves, anway? The world they grow up in is the world we create. So if the kids are fucked, we done fucked them up.

It's not a fact of nature, either. My generation had it pretty easy, and I'm assuming yours did too, since the US had been a pretty idyllic environment for several decades there post-WWII for most demographics. But hey, kids today have iPads, who cares if they're far more lonely and fed a constraint stream of depressing stimuli!

That is a fair point. But how do you reconcile it with the rise of the gig economy and more and more people not interested in holding permanent jobs, unlike previous generations.

Where do you get the idea people aren’t interested in holding permanent jobs?

From what I’ve seen, employers are not able to offer them, either due to needing cheaper labor in other countries. And employers themselves are subject to more volatility, so they can’t offer “permanent” jobs even if they wanted to. Of course, permanent jobs here means jobs that have decent pay.

I'm not sure how the two are connected, exactly. If you're a software engineer you should be very familiar with the reason why people switch jobs instead of holding down one for longer, and it has nothing to do with the people.

It has to do with companies not compensating people, offering career tracks, training etc. Employees are no longer treated as part of the company and valuable to train but instead disposable. The rise of the gig economy is just that logic taken to the extreme.

For example, one comparison is the millennial generation owns about half the wealth at age 35 then the boomer generation did at the same age.

What makes you think that events you mention did not made people angry, suicidal, violent and so on?

I don't know. However, I doubt it was at the scale we're hearing now.

I wonder if news and social media are partly to blame.

Bad job prospects compared to what? We had youth unemployment of about 25% in the early eighties in Western Europe ( NL ).

How bad are your prospects exactly?

>increased racial divide in society

Please explain this one

Yeah, for a example currently on TV watch the most recent episode of Watchmen. The racial divide has closed wildly since the 1960s, and simply because tech gives alt-right a platform doesn't make them any bigger than they were on their Oregon compounds decades ago.

I see increasingly that people are pitted against each other based on race. We should all be treated the same.

> socialism

That... is not it.

What do you mean by socialism? How is that a threat?

Going too far to the right or left is definitely a threat. The great thing about the US imo is that we are a nation of moderates.

The entire 20th century was a case study on the dangers of far right and far left wing political systems.

To give you some perspective. What counts as moderate in the US is, at best, center-right in Europe. Heck, a lot of Democrats would be considered center right over here. People like Bernie and Warren would count as moderate with, maybe, a tendency to the left. So your standard left wing politics in Europe would probably count as extremist in the US. Just as an example from the German capital: nationalization of residential buildings to prevent further rent increases. Or one, agreeably rather extreme, proposition from the youth wing of Germanies center left SPD was the nationalization of certain public companies to better share out profits to workers.

what do you mean by too far to the left? how is america going to the left? america is "the" right wing goverment.. there is a whole healthcare debate going on?

Don't forget climate change. Probably a bigger worry than socialism or "vilifying success".

Honestly climate change doesn't seem like that much of an issue. We have many of the smartest people in the world working on this problem and are making great strides in technology.

I think we will figure out the solutions and avert any serious consequences. Humanity always seems to find a way to prevail.

Upvoted you for you being rather young, so benefit of doubt all that.

Just one thing, expensive college is a purely US thing, except some MBA programs most universities in Europe are practically free. So, that thing about socialism. Free, public healthcare as well as education are what some in the US might consider "socialism". So there you might have an issue with your reasoning.

Part of the reason for the recent protests in Paris was because the government wanted to add fees (though comparatively small) to university tuition. This was viewed as another slap in the face of lawmakers (many of whom went to university for free) wanting to pull the ladder up behind them.

True, Germany got rid of tuition fees after a short period. Still a far cry from the US, so.

I don't think college should be free. It is a business after all. But the price of college in the US is definitely inflated. People used to be able to pay for the tuition by taking a summer job or going one semester on, and one semester working. I just think college should be priced affordably for middle class people and that there should be more merit based aid for lower class people.

I have some friends I play video games with online who have went to college and they have all said that it really wasn't that useful as far as education is concerned, but does get you into the 'club' to apply for better jobs.

For me college is not a business, same as basic health care. Education is not a business. But then I guess I am used to that way.

But let's stick to college as business. You say tuition is to expensive. A college needs professors, equipment, buildings, employees. All that costs a ton of money. If they are not government owned, they have to cover that plus profits. And they cannot decrease tuition fees. So as long as college are businesses they have to be expensive. Your average studies in Germany run somewhere around 100k Euro if memory serves well, stuff med school and engineering tend to be higher.

In my opinion, a society can only benefit from making education as accessable as possible for everyone. The one thing nobody can take away from you is your knowledge, so the more you have the better yptu are off. That also means there is no such thing as "useless" knowledge. That you only need part of what you learn in school in your future professional life is true. Still nobody knows where you will end up when you are an adult. So the younger you are the broader your education has to be. As you progress, education becomes more specialized up to a point. From there on it is experience and dedicated training on the job.

Can you explain what you mean by vilifying success? If anything I'd say the problem is the we praise the wrong success, i.e. the Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashians of the world.

For example, I have been closely following the elections, since this will be the first time I can vote, people that make a lot of money are considered enemies of the common person I think this is wrong.

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