Hacker News Reader

Comment by xkbarkar | Hacker News Reader

Amazing how this irritates many. We never had classes before 8.30 ( not US ) when I was a kid. School starting at 7 would have caused an outrage. Parents were generally starting work between 8-9 so dropping of the kid on the way to work makes sense. At 7 most parents would have been an hour early for work which is not awesome for everyone.

How bizarre to read that an entire culture apparently has promoted extraordinary lazy kids for 5 or so decades, because their standard school starting time differs from the US one.

View on HN

There is a catasrophic level of disrespect for the younger generation. It is clear by looking at the tone in the media, the derision with which issues that affect them are treated and the level of devastation we are leaving for them to handle, both in financial debt and climate change.

I don't know if it's envy, if they oldies are uncomfortable with change, or they just feel incomplete if there isn't someone lower down on the foodchain.

Arguing with them is of little use, they already decided their position, and what they are giving you are their justifications and confabulations for why it's okay to do so.

That's why there are articles about how Millenials have destroyed the economy and the housing market because they eat too many avocados and are all turning gay and genderfluid. Millenials even broke politics, but all the politicans are like 80

It's okay for a senile 90 year old to vote even if he never finished school and voted for the same party his entire life, but a 17 year old just isn't mature enough. However it's okay to draft them into the army just 1 year later and send them off to die in a foreign land, without them ever having had a chance to vote on the issue. It's also okay to send them to prison.

There seem to be 3 attitudes to kids:

1 - Adults that get some kind of power trip out of tyrany and justify it by 'toughening them up'. They demand respect and dicipline they never had themselves. They will have endless stories about how their childhood was tough, and they had to talk to school and home 10 miles, alone, thorugh the snow, and it was uphill both ways

2 - Adults that 'care', by helicoptering over kids and try to shape them into a career they wish they pursued themselves. In practice they rob kids of all agency and don;t let them gow. These guys are like a 'left-wing' version of the above, for lack fo a better metaphor.

3 - Adults that actually respect children as people with independant thoughts and emotional needs - seem to be a minority.

Maybe they look at kids and think that kids could do things better/smarter.

Because everything gets easier with experience. I think everyone has thought at some time what they would do differently if they were kids again or back to school again. Some things we'd do better and have a handle on because as an adult you have some school and life experience.

If they then without empathy look at schoolkids they don't understand how they think and what they struggle with.

FWIW, Boomers were a very entitled generation. They have the post-war benefits of their previous generation and ran up a huge deficit for the following generations to pay back.

I actually agree with you and millennials are, rightfully, somewhat bitter about it. It’s not just post-war benefits. It was the era of 9-5 jobs, pensions, union jobs that paid nearly 6 figures in rural America…in the 90s…with no education, fully paid medical benefits for the family, and cheap homes.

What do we have now? Self managed 401k which you have pour a life savings and second mortgage into in order to beat inflation, overpopulated suburbs, record levels of pollution, rising temperatures, impossibly expensive homes, their kids getting shot in schools, their rights being stripped away, skyrocketing college tuition costs…

I actually believe a lot of millennials don’t know how bad they have it comparatively and somewhat ironically, boomers also don’t know how good they had it.

> Boomers were a very entitled generation. They have the post-war benefits of their previous generation and ran up a huge deficit for the following generations to pay back

That's a better description of the Silent Generation than the Boomers.

I've literally never heard the silent generation described in that way.

That's because the dominance of analysis of named generations for anything besides marketing labels pretty much always ignores everything before the Boomers, and 90% of the time also skips GenX, too, limping everything before Millenials into “Boomers”, and ignores things like Clinton being not only the first Boomer President, but also pretty close to the early boundary of Boomer political dominance.

The generation who grew up during the Great Depression and WWII were very entitled???

I was more referring to the concrete description in the second sentence than the personality-based explanation in the first.

(But, now that you mention it, a lot of the Silent Generation would have no memory of the Depression and little to none of the war, and the main formation of their adult expectations would be the immediate post-War period whereas Boomers either missed that entirely or were infants/toddlers, so...)

I gree up in a suburban (but bordering city limits) district outside of Pittsburgh. In high school, our first bell was at 8:40. In middle school, 8:20.

I went to high school 20 years ago and it started at 7:15 am and got out at 2:15 pm. I walked to school so it was never a problem for my parents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com