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Comment by lifestyleguru | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to the honorable club with with Italy and Germany. What's very specific is that the old pull up the ladder. They don't pass the knowledge, nor experience, not a single cent trickles down, no power is delegated. Even the opposite, with help of immediate family they vacuum up the money and power even further.

What's quite mindblowing for an outside observer is that the birth year of American president has been almost constant since 2001. I know that millennials are irresponsible and unreliable brats, but c'mon... they're over 40 now.

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I don't think that old people today are systematically willing or unwilling to pass down their knowledge and experience. But an underrated phenomenon of the modern world is that human society is now changing quickly enough that the knowledge and experience that old people have gained over their lifetimes is very likely to be out-of-date, irrelevant, or even actively-counterproductive with respect to the conditions of younger people.

This is a massive change from the situation of most of human history, where your life was extremely likely to be substantially similar to that of your grandparents, so anything useful they had learned and could pass on to you was likely to continue being useful. The rate of change in human life really started to accelerate with the industrial revolution, now some three centuries old; but humanity is now in a state where massive changes are happening much faster than the passage of human generations.

Not really. Medicine, engineering, law all are a sum of intergenerational knowledge.

Yet everytime I deal with healthcare I encounter some <30 years old kids who learn medicine from scratch and have only 5 minutes of their time for me. Reading about medicine fells like reading science fiction. We seem to know everything about a human, yet in practice you might die or become crippled even from a trivial problem.

i see lower voting rates for young people as a nihilistic reaction to gerontocracy. i.e. if they are blocked from upward mobility, they see power protects assets and have no clear path to this, isn't it a natural reaction? let's say they all organized and had higher voter turnout - they'd still lose on the wealth front, which is what counts. the aged would defend their power vociferously and probably win through PACs, lobbying, etc.

I expect them to vote more and vote farther right, that is the other thing disaffected people do. Germany's far right holds 25% of the parliament.

They don't vote as a protest or from apathy. Unfortunately the reality is nobody cares about this protest and it even works against their interest. When they finally go voting it's for far right parties which give them a feeling that their vote counts.

Bush Jr was born '46. Obama (literally the next president) was born in '61. Not much of a pattern there

Look up, Obama is the only exception.

Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump were all born within a 2 month period in 1946.

JFK, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush 41 all served in fairly junior roles in WW2, even if Reagan just made training films and so on. LBJ pretended to serve in the same war. (He went out on one bombing mission as some kind of observer and was awarded a Silver Star, after which he stopped bothering the military and went back to his real career.)

We really need some kind of interstellar war right now so that next presidents can serve in some junior roles.

What year was the president born in for the past decade

Would you look at that. Clinton born in 46, Bush Jr 46, Obama 61, Trump 46 and Biden 42.

And this why immortality is bad and death is not to be cured.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...

Then birth year of American president is almost constant since 1993, with the exception being Obama.

I was agreeing with you

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