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Comment by Insanity | Hacker News Reader

I think there’s 2 factors at play. 1) they grew up with technology rather than having it introduced later in life and 2) they grew up with a version that is arguably quite negative.

For e.g millennials, we didn’t have internet until our teens, and the early years of the internet looked very different from the ad-infested hellscape that it is today.

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Those younger generation are in a really dark place right now. In many cities they will never be able to afford a house; and on top of that AI labs are now saying they will never have a job.

Effectively, they will never have a true life. They will just meander around here and there, making money whatever ways they can, surviving, and ultimately pass away from something they can’t afford to fix.

That, or become violent. I'm not saying that in a supportive way, moreso thinking of uprisings historically arising from people with no other option. Although, that was before facial recognition technology...

They didn't need facial recognition technology because they were physically in one place and the cops could just arrest everyone in that place - if there were enough cops which there never were.

Historically people needed to starve a little for this. But perhaps energy shortages might do it today.

This was predicted by Jack Womack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_Acts_of_Senseless_Viole...

I bet they wouldn’t radicalize and elect people with bad intentions in mind.

And the guys outside the AI labs are saying they won't even reach adulthood.

And the teachers are saying they can't even read and that they're dumber than the previous generation.

Teachers have said that about every generation since time immemorial.

Thankfully anyone who dealt with a teacher knows how much value their opinion holds.

Maybe reading is going the same way as a typewriter or knowing how to mill grain between two big stones?

We don't need the ability to read. We need the ability to convey and understand -- audiobooks can do this, for example.

> In many cities

In like five cities in the USA. I live in a top 10 city by population in the USA (so it's not "flyover"), and the median home price is 288–319, while median HHI is 89. That's easily in the recommended home loan range of 3*HHI.

Look, I'm sorry you can only be happy living in SV, but there's plenty of jobs in the boring parts of America, and the homes are affordable.

All that being said, homeownership is largely a scam, financially. Use your downpayment as a market investment and rent. You'll end up with more money when you retire, and as a bonus, you aren't tied to one geographic location if you lose your job.

The only reason apartments can even exist is because of economies of scale. If you have one rental property, it's virtually impossible to make money (certainly not in a way that outpaces index funds) because you don't have the economies of scale at your disposal.

I hired a few contractors out of the bay area to another state where their salary was 1/3 a nice permanent home and they ended up scattering to other parts of the country. One even went back to the Bay Area. Yes there are nice places to live besides the bay area.

Your entire premise is one that's missing important context. Based on the numbers you provide, you're probably in Chicago or Dallas, maybe Austin, but that's pushing more like 400K.

Homes in the median are generally not viable unless you don't have a family or don't care about quality schools. In my city (90K), two houses that are identical but divided by the school district boundary between rank #1 and rank #265 out of 359 is a difference of $300K. One would be within the median and the other well above.

And let me be clear: ALL HOUSING IS A SCAM FINANCIALLY. Rent screws you one way and housing screws you another.

Median income probably also matches closer to Millennials, not Z and certainly not Alpha.

"Quality schools" are almost entirely about the student body, so it doesn't really make sense to say median schools aren't viable for the median family. Obviously you're not going to get a ton of doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc. kids at a median school because the median person is not one of those things, and those people tend to care about "quality schools" i.e. living near each other and away from the median.

Mortgage pretty much always costs less than rental per square foot.

Right, but the opportunity cost of the down payment is what gets you. You're forgetting that if you rent, you have a large chunk of cash that you could invest in higher yielding assets.

This isn't controversial. This is what anyone with finance expertise will tell you.

Yeah but real estate is something even people with seriously subpar IQ understand well, like gold. Its a conservative investment in most places, but risk of losing it is next to 0 realistically, which is something folks like a lot. Those that invested 20 years ago in many cases saw massive returns, in very safe manner. Not even going into airbnb and similar.

Also, if your down payments on mortgage are equal to rental fees, you won't save much renting, you just have better flexibility with moving, something great for single folks but families want opposite. In our case, for example we pay less mortgage than we would be paying in rental for same place (can check easily since symmetrical apartment next door is rented).

I don't want risky investments with potentially better returns for me, real estate is good enough.

Finance people are welcome to go live in shoeboxes and invest in higher yielding assets, clears them out of the housing market for the rest of us who value a house to live in over higher yields.

Do we really want people to have no association with their city, and encourage them to be interchangeable cogs for whatever business deigns them worthy of a job in some remote part of America, so they can be ready to take whatever’s offered like that’s a good thing?

Most people like putting down roots, knowing the town and people, having a local community, would like to have family and friends nearby.

It's too late. The industrial revolution destroyed this.

And on top of that they'll have to deal with crumbling infrastructure, aging population and global warming. They've already had COVID. I hope they don't have a catastrophic AI bubble pop.

Poor kids.

One of main reason i postpone having kid. I definitely don't want to bring my child to this current world. Unless i see some better future, i don't think i will change my plan anytime soon.

Given a choice, a vast majority of children (and people in general) would choose to have a life, even with arguably uncertain future prospects, over not getting to live at all.

The real reason you're postponing parenthood is probably that you choose to prioritize your comfort and financial independence at this moment. And there is nothing wrong with it, but I do miss honesty.

This is an insane framing.

What's insane is that there's seemingly an account made just to post this useless comment, in a thread buried several levels deep, under an, for HN standards, old post.

I used to think like this. People were having kids while bombs were falling around them, I think we can manage.

You need to zoom out a bit, too much narrow focus HN style can be pretty toxic in age of ai. Tons of folks here have obsessive traits and this is perfect tool to hone that crack in personality further and go deeper and deeper.

Or, in other words, world is fine, will be fine and whatever comes societies will adapt. Don't have kids if you don't want to but llms shouldn't be the deciding factor. Think how late 1930s must have felt apocalyptically in Europe and rest of the world, yet we came through that stronger (and then got weaker but thats another story) and mankind goes on.

I sympathize with the scariness of never being able to own a house. But I also think between Automation and remote work, what we really need is to encourage the development of like 50-100 new tier 1 cities in the US. Part of the major cost is the fact that you have to deal with the old before you can get to the new in these cities.

Whereas a field 5 miles off a major highway? I bet you could build a city, a better one, for half the cost.

Remember how we were all going to “surf the information superhighway” and we’d all become smarter because we had access to all the worlds experts and books?

I remember!

And we did. People were not more well informed before.

Debatable. Maybe they were less informed in the sense of not having access to as much so called news or content. But what about the quality? Being strictly less informed by emotionalized info shots could very well mean being less misinformed.

Before the like button, it was more individualistic. Before web 2.0, before global market penetration had hit 10%, it was mainly early adopters.

Who clicks on the clickbait? Who upvotes the garbage? Who actually sees ads and goes to buy what they didn't need? I think we all know.

The window we saw may have been one of an illusive sub-population who is forever on the treadmill trying to get away from the unwashed masses.

More likely the adoption increasing to near 100% made it a prime revenue source opportunity for bad actors.

Not everything is Silicon Valley stereotypes trying to feel special.

Nor you though and not me. Best among us are dead or isolated from cancers of the world. Ambition, how disgusting a trait the only thing the ambitious deserve is suffering.

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