Who should Gen Z be voting for?
In my country I've been voting since 16, because my vote actually counts. But if I were a citizen of the USA/UK or other similar countries, maybe I wouldn't bother too. What's the point?..
At later stages the Occupy movement was infiltrated by 'other' causes camps. The 'identity' focus causes became vocal within - the early days of social justice causes. That is something you need to avoid like plague to run successful movement - lack of direction, due to multiple divergent goals. It caused people to loose interest as movement was going everywhere and nowhere. Lets bring up Solidarity, they had leaders and quickly drafted what they want and did not stray from that path. If solidarity wanted democratic poland and strengthening ties with catholic church and establishment of diplomatic ties with africa and banning of military production... it would be hard to get all people behind all of the goals and it would be hard to achieve all those goals. I digress... back to occupy.
Since then media created new fault lines for populous to fight over. Straight man vs the world, men vs women, whites oppressing non-whites, police vs blacks, can trans people use toilets and so on and on. We are bombarded by those narratives constantly. The moment one fades next one takes place.
Those are very easy to instigate as all of them are based primary on emotions - whatever the factual background of the issue is.
Occupy Wall Street and future movements like that need to be based on facts and logic to expose all of the systems that siphon wealth up into unproductive upper class. It takes effort to expose those complex systems and educate people about it to the point where they want to change it.
In contrast to: police kills people, here is a video example, now come protest against injustice. Nothing really changes as nobody is doing anything about the underlying systems that create those outcomes... and look new injustice... we need to protest that now.
I don't have any evidence but I find it very coincidental what happened with Occupy and thereafter, to not be suspicious if people targeted by Occupy did not do anything about it.
What boggles my mind is how so many still think "protesting" makes any kind of difference at all. Talk about doing nothing about the underlying systems. Standing out on the street impotently yelling about something is pretty much one notch above "impotently posting to the internet about something". You think anyone in charge looks at a 100K person protest and says "Ohmygosh, they're really angry about this! Maybe I should change the status quo!" Hahaha never. You might as well pray--in both cases, nobody is listening.
Occupy had exactly zero chance of changing anything, because in order to actually change things, you need to be in the rich club or one of their bought-and-paid-for politicians. And all of those people are already on the gravy train--they have no incentive to change anything.
We haven't seen change on the economic front, because as the OP who you responded to is all the "distractions" people got them outraged upon. Black Lives Matter for instance was doomed to fail because of it's dubious origins, and lack of clear objectives. But media promoted it because it doesn't hurt the rich and corporate folks at all and serves as a distraction away from the root of the issues. People nowadays are just WAY too susceptible of getting their attention distracted away from the most IMPORTANT subjects.
What I find the most irritating is the people who talk about "nothing can be done now" or "we are powerless", are many of the same people who I have had to argue against a while back who never once cared about political lobbying or corporate monoliths and in some cases argued against me. Now those same people who once said that are no longer to be found.
Protests and majority opinion do matter. In fact most of these corporations attained this level of power in government because majority of people LET IT HAPPEN. For example until covid, the majority sentiment of people were "Business = good no matter what" camp, and political lobbying was barely talked about. In fact, I've had the wonderful experience of being the minority being vocal on wonderful online forums getting pushback saying I'm an idiot about businesses becoming that large is not a bad thing (thanks libertarians). Opinions do matter, and if majority of people were against the consolidation of corporate power, it wouldn't have gotten this bad. Corporate power is susceptible to shareholder sentiment, and shareholder sentiment is whether you like to believe it or not, dictated by regular people. But corporate power is consolidating more and more and used it's power through regulation so it's less dictated by regular people.
Now the same people who called me the idiot are the same people saying "its hopeless", or "we are powerless" or "we have to find a completely new system" instead of thinking that they were a huge part of the problem. We can still turn things around through protests and constant and persistent pushback however, it will just be harder and require more drastic measures. emphasis on "constant", which will be very difficult considering how people nowadays want "instant gratification" and want things to change "instantly". The biggest hurdle is the belief we can't change things. All you have to do is hurt their bottom line (FOR LONG ENOUGH, very important) and all the rich greedy numbnuts will fall in line easily considering if other greedy numbnuts will do the same thing, but the powerless people don't believe anything affects rich people.
I would love to see candidates addressing the needs/wants of Gen-Z... But uhh, I don't know anyone who is actually appealing to them. The only 2 parties I see (in the us) are:
Republicans: Actively trying to harm them. Democrats: Actively trying to maintain the status quo.
Neither of these groups are interested in Gen-Z issues. The Democrats pay lip-service, but don't actually want to shake up the social hierarchy. So instead they mostly try and move to the center for the more regular turnout they know how to ask for.
Gen-Z is not stupid. And I believe they demonstrate good turnout for the candidates they like... Maybe Politicians should be doing more to appeal to them instead of older generations that they claim are who they need to appeal to.
Still sucks for young people. Even the healthcare systems are going to crap now!
What do you mean? Last time I was in Europe, their healthcare wasn't the pinnacle of healthcare systems. Cheap? Sure. Effective? Not really.
You can absolutely be refused care until you die in the USA. Sure at the very end if you stumble to a hospital they'll put on a good show as they find out you're uninsured and you didn't take an ambulance because it was on average thousands of dollars, and you didn't go to a doctor because you knew you couldn't afford it...
People die here all the time from lack of care. Our systems suck and are way broken.
It's so good they practically have a surplus they use in trade. Like, they'll send doctors or medicines to other third world countries the US hates or ignores in exchange for oil or whatever. People tout how amazing it was USA could make covid vaccines so quickly, but Cuba did that too (while under trade embargos from the USA). It's impressive.
A very large segment of the poor and even middle class in the US who work jobs that don't provide insurance.
> In the US you can't be refused life-saving healthcare.
You're probably thinking of emergency room care for immediately life-threatening accidents. For those yes, the emergency room is required to stabilize you in the short term. You'll be billed for it of course, causing bankrupcy if you had any money.
But if you have advanced diabetes or cancer or any other life-ending conditions that aren't going to kill you right now, you will not get any treatment in the US if you can't pay for it so you can be left to die.
Some states are better than others with options for the poor, but many are atrocious.
Because I did. Belgium's healthcare was no bueno for a foreign exchange student just looking to kick a cold.
Au contraire, I go to the doctor and get medication so easily prescribed that I'm afraid the doctor is to nonchalant ... (and always without an appointment, maybe sometimes 20 min wait)
Edit: regarding Sinus infections, quick google search shows that the "apotheek" carries and sells medicine for this.. so maybe you just had bad luck/was misunderstood?
I hail from a country with the lowest number of practicing physicians per 1000 inhabitants in the EU and I still can get an appointment with a general practitioner on the same day.
Specialists are of course a different matter but again - lowest number of doctors in the EU. They're all in Norway now.
I thought that was pretty good, because scheduling our last an annual check up was much further out.
I've definitely had to wait 2 weeks to schedule an appointment with a specialist in the US.
The "best" healthcare in the world, according to some talking heads.
The “European” model varies from country to country, sure. But the overall mindset behind it does not.
The wealthiest don't have an absurdly high income, they own enough assets to live off dividends and wealth appreciation, which typically gets taxed 20-30%. If they even have an income to be taxed, it's basically symbolic.
This is where the real inequality exists, and it's unfortunately not part of the discussion at all. Instead wagies with slightly higher than average income get portrayed as 18th century mustache twisting top-hat capitalist factory owners.
Meanwhile wealth gets taxed much lower (when it gets taxed at all)
I earned $1 in 2018. That dollar had the buying power of $1.21 today.
Now imagine, I worked hard to save $30K. That $30K is now worth just under $24K now because I didn’t spend it immediately.
Tell me - why would I save my $30K? There’s a 4% wealth tax per year on unspent money. I paid over $6,000 in unofficial taxes for the crime of saving money - I could literally have been reinstated from a DUI almost 8 times for the crime of trying to save for a mortgage down payment. I don’t think you want to know what happened to housing affordability since 2018, making a $30K down payment feel more like $10K-$15K in usefulness.
Saving money is quite literally for people who like seeing money lit on fire.
You could also have it in the market. Neither will dramatically beat inflation, but they will beat it.
The debatable part here is the merits of pretty much having to understand finance to not lose money all the time is a separate topic. I am in IT and always thought my finance/stats degrees were a complete joke, but it helps to have an intuitive understanding of this stuff not to get **ed by the basics.
Now it will. During the pandemic and earlier? Getting a 1% CD was tough. There was almost no insured way to protect yourself before it happened. My 4.15% high yield bank account was paying about 0.4% until last year.
> You could also have it in the market. Neither will dramatically beat inflation, but they will beat it.
Yay, invest myself to the stock market which, to me, reeks of overinvestment and too much money in it. Do you actually believe Apple is worth $3 trillion?
Take a look at historical long-term returns. On average the market is a good investment.
For 90% of people that is code for: Put it in the stock market you idiot.
Maybe I’m a rebel, but I don’t think a sane society should all but require investing for people who want to do something as basic as getting a mortgage down payment without exposing themselves to risk.
The stock market has been the solution to most people’s inflation problems, and in my mind, it’s a central point of failure. Central points of failure have Black Swans. A sane society would have inflation low enough that people wouldn’t feel like idiots for saving money and wouldn’t feel the need to rush into a centralized failure method.
You can't live life without risk. Your parents try to make your life relatively risk free until you are 18, but then hopefully you've learned enough life lessons to be able to see which risks are worth taking and which ones aren't.
But there's never going to be a risk-free or tradeoff-free way to live through 60+ years of your adult life, including something like getting a mortgage. It's amazing how many Gen Zs and Millenials are struggling with this concept.
> A sane society would have inflation low enough that people wouldn’t feel like idiots for saving money
We already do.
Not really. You paid the effective 6K for the "crime" of keeping that money under the mattress. Put your savings in an investment instead.
"Gen Zers are tracking ahead of their parents’ homeownership rate: 30% of 25-year olds owned their home in 2022, higher than the 27% rate for Gen Xers when they were the same age. But the Gen Zers who didn’t take advantage of the pandemic-era’s low mortgage rates could be left behind."[0]
[0]https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-r...
Best you can do is tax income a lot and capital gains at 30%. Which is exactly what we do in Europe.
These are Swedes. Basically border-line commies from a US viewpoint, they can't even tax the owners of their most famous company.
Literally unconstitutional in the US.
Unused property and land is already taxed through property taxes. Regardless, unused property is an easy scapegoat but not a significant problem (similar to the foreign investor bogeyman) when the real problems are loose monetary policy, speculation, NIMBY zoning, and real supply/demand imbalances.
Where has this been tried and caused brain drain?