My only problem with millennials is they keep abandoning this forum because it’s “dominated boomers who are mean”.
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Yea - well in my day we respected our elders and valued their pearls of wisdom. We learned about hard work walking to school in the snow uphill both ways. Our jobs were harder and we never got anything wrong. We also have the answer to every problem you can come up with. Now get off of my lawn. - hope that was helpful.
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Like you, I am a Boomer, too. I also have two millennial kids. They both put themselves through college, both have careers and both own their own houses (with the bank, of course). One is a veteran, and one has a wife and kid. I get tired of hearing that the American dream isn’t possible any longer. . . oh, and the unmarried one regularly travels internationally (except this year, of course) and the other had been deployed to some interesting places. I have a feeling that my constant traveling has had an influence.
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I’m not THAT mean. . . .
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It’s interesting that they mention the aids epidemic in that graphic. It’s not something you read much about but it’s something us X guys talk about often.
Today it’s only mentioned in the context of the gay community but our boomer teachers and parents really put the fear of god into us. It’s a big reason why we are cynical. They would talk about free love all the time and how great their youth and how wonderful sex is (seriously our sex ed classes were run by hippies) was then tell all the young women that if they had sex they would die. Even oral sex would kill us unless we used condoms and “dental dams”. You couldn’t even buy dental dams anywhere but you HAD to use them. Hardly anyone was having sex in my high school and even in college you had to convince them that you’d be tested.
There was ZERO education or clubs or anything for gay students. Everyone who was gay was in the closet even a lot of teachers and fathers. And the only time the issue was brought up was in frequent warnings to the women that they maybe sleeping with a bi man who has aids. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for people who were gay… they were labeled as public enemy #1.
And the resentment towards bi people still is prevalent today because of this.
That’s a big reason why my generation has pushed so hard for gay rights. Many boomers revolted because of McCarthyism and many In my generation revolted because the lgbt community was treated even worse than commies.
And let’s not forget that our Republican boomer parents and teachers were convinced that we were going to all die in a nuclear war with Russia. And our liberal parents and teachers all said the rainforest and whales would be extinct by 2000 and nuclear power plants were certain to kill us.
And now there are so many whales it’s hard to cross the ocean without hitting one.
Our generation rolls it’s eyes at everyone because nobody in my class died of aids, Russia never invaded, the rain forests and whales didn’t die.
And the millennials all want a house? We don’t care about houses. All we ever wanted was to have sex and survive to middle age and to stop being told what we “should” and “shouldn’t”.
We are just happy to be alive and happy that gays are free to marry and yes, and somewhat resentful of the boomers sexual revolution and millennials on tinder… and very much tired of the fact both generations keep telling us what we must do.
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Wake up? We are vividly awake. And angry.
We have the solutions too but neither generation wants to put us in charge because we are so cynical.
We are cynical because we were lied to. Lied to about the imminent extinction of the whales and rain forests, lied to about all the straight women who where going to die of aids, lied to about the coming war with Russia, lied to about acid rain, lied to about gay being a sin, lied to about nuclear winter.
The Boomers grew up being told to duck and cover, watched the local streams die from PCBS and DDT, watched gay city communities die of aids and rightly wanted to fix them. Problem is they went overboard and extrapolated those problems to a
F’n epic, cataclysmic proportions and put the fear of god into us.
But none of those apocryphal stories they told about nuclear winter and mass extinctions came true.
So we laugh at the woke millennials and roll our eyes at the boomers… but that doesn’t mean we don’t care.
What problem do you want us to fix?
Housing and the American dream? Well get a map the. pick your favorite big city hipster coffee spot and trace the railroad tracks an hour inland. Houses are cheap up here and you can hike in the beautiful woods and fish in the streams that are (despite boomer predictions) teaming with life.
Global warming? That’s even easier to fix. It’s called nuclear energy… you know that stuff that the boomers told us would kill everyone by now.
The us merchant marine? Well there is room for boomers AND millennials if we build more ships… we can do that too once the boomers stop telling everyone that the merchant marine is going extinct (like the whales and rain forests) or while the millennials keep posting memes about John Konrad being full of shit.
Free safe sex? Well we already fixed that by building the internet.
To fix anything in this world you first need to wade through mounds of bullshit to find the truth. Then you need to accept the truth for what it is, not what you want it to be.
Well nobody’s waded through more bullshit than my generation and we have already found the truth. Problem is it’s not the dark apocalyptic truth that boomers had predicted nor is it the bright shiny truth the millennials were hoping for. It’s just plain ordinary vanilla truth.
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Here’s one:
The only difference between HIV and AIDS is about $20K a year to the pharmaceutical industry.
Only in those places where people care enough to stop the pillaging.
I don’t know about anyone else but I sure as Hell don’t trust anyone with a financial interest in a nuke plant to manage it with my safety as the highest priority. I don’t give a shit which generation the financier comes from.
I’m not sure anyone can be trusted with the things to tell the truth. Look at Chernobyl and Fukushima, one run by political idiologues and one designed by morons who place the emergency generators below sea level next to the beach in a land famous for tsunamis.
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X’er here. My kids are Z’s but I’ve happily worked with many awesome Millennials, mostly veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. My one issue with Millennials is they have no patience and expect to be managers right out of school/off the dock. They’ll move up way faster than X’ers did who had to wait for Boomers and WWII hands to move on. I’ve seen the average age of Captains and Chiefs actually drop by 15 years! Eventually you’ll occupy leadership positions way way longer than X’ers had a chance to, at the expense of those behind you.
That’s how it is, always was and probably will be. Boomers had to wait for the WWII guys to get out of the way. And whatever they call who comes after millennials will have the same. If a millennial can be Master at 30, and works until they are 60, they will be an obstacle to a younger type for 30 years.
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If I had to pick one gripe about millennials, it would be their catastrophic lack of resilience.
The same situation existed for pilots trying to get on with the major airlines in the 1970s. To make it worse, as the WW2 guys retired, they were replaced by pilots trained by the military buildup to Vietnam. Unless you had thousands of hours of jet time, the airlines wouldn’t look at you. Following deregulation, the regional airlines blew the employment doors wide open although at pay rates that were a fraction of the majors. Sometimes it’s better to move on to greener pastures rather than to keep banging your head against the wall.
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Snowflakes do melt under heat.
At one time all us “boomers” [in other countries we are respectfully referred to as elders] were generation some letter. We didn’t have letters of the alphabet to label us. I can’t keep up with what letter matches anyone’s age. I also don’t give a rat’s ass what year anyone was born. Just do your job when you are working, take care of your family when you’re off, respect everyone and you’ll fit right in whether you are 21 or 91.
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Bingo.
For a wealthy state that boasts being the 7th largest economy in the world or whatever it is, they always seem strapped for cash and too happy to take most of yours. No thanks. Horrible place to live, and they are trying to tax people for up to ten years even after they leave the state.
If cost of living bugs you, California is not the place to hang your hat.
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Hah! As if this is news. I was raised in California back in the 1960s. Hated it then. Moved out in the early 1980s. Too expensive back then. Too many people. But here’s the thing…
“According to estimates by the California Department of Finance, California’s population grew by 7.3% (or 2.7 million) from 2010 to the end of 2019; this rate is only slightly higher than the national rate of 6.3%. International migration to California has remained strong, with a net inflow of 1.5 million.”
We may hate on it, but millions love it. I’ve hired people from California. Working here, they can live any place in the USA they want. They wander around the country for a few years–then they go right back to California.
It’s the place people love to hate, and long to live.
If you made enough money in California to be considered under the “proposed” tax you are indeed a fortunate individual. You are a billionaire!
I am always amazed at the opportunities people have in the USA to make millions or billions yet when it comes time to pay back to the country that gave them the opportunity they suddenly move or get a mailbox in Ireland like Apple or a mailbox in Grand Cayman like many others in order to avoid paying to support the country that gave them the opportunity to succeed. That would all be fine and dandy IF us folks that work for wages could avoid paying to support our country too. But of course us working folks can’t afford to pay the politicians to write the tax laws in our favor.
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Hasn’t that ALWAYS been the case with academy kids though? I’m sure old timers in the 1980’s were saying the exact same thing about new academy graduates.
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Ok but then how are the big companies going to make any money now if they can’t sort us into a bunch of neatly organized boxes?
I can’t even log into youtube or Netflix now without telling the program if it’s me or my wife. That’s not so it “can suggest programs that I will like”… it’s so they know what boxes of ads it’s going to show me.
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They make their money selling information. Information sells as you well know. There is no escape as long there are a very few corporations controlling the internet. I use a VPN and I try to avoid the major search engines but even Million Short sells me out on occasion. Netflix did a good program called “The Great Hack” about this. I recommend it.
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Boomers who are mean? I live for that vitriol.
The housing issue is my biggest issue. It isn’t it that housing is expensive, it is that housing is expensive because of excessive government incursion at all levels. It is that developers cannot come into a city and build more housing because of “environmental concerns” or “traffic congestion” or “destroys the neighborhood charm” or just pick a pet excuse. It is that homeowners are, by and large, so concerned about their property values that they will do anything to keep them high, even to the point where their kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids will be priced out of being their neighbors unless someone dies and inherits a house. It is that the so-called “free market, small government” conservatives all of a sudden seek the protection of government largess when it affects their pocketbooks. My grandfather and his neighbors should never have been able to stop an apartment complex being built on the land behind him outside of market forces, like pooling money to buy it from the developer. So people, like my grandparents, are contributing to a system that artificially inflates their home values by artificially keeping housing supply low and the governments that live on property tax revenue have little to no incentive to change it as why would they? The system is designed to drive property values higher which drives property tax revenue higher which disincentivizes “certain people” from buying. I currently live in one of the most liberal cities in the SF Bay, but not in the City itself. It is amazing to me how much my ultra-conservative grandfather has in common with the “liberal elite” he so often derides.
You would imagine in cities like San Francisco and New York that developers would be knocking door to door offering to buy single family homes for well above what the families paid for it to build. You would have people selling, probably happier with the money and going one hour down the railroad tracks with the one or two Carl Fredricksens of the area more willing to stay put. It doesn’t happen that way, people are more concerned with what their neighbors will do that they will cry to their city council and other local officials to keep their neighbor in line. That is disgusting. It shouldn’t happen that way. If you need the government to prop up your property values then your property is inherently worthless and you have bigger issues to sort through.
I believe my record on this forum is pretty consistent in that I always try to defer to market forces. I am adamantly anti US shipbuilding requirement of the Jones Act. Just satisfy the safety and environmental concerns and then do whatever the hell you want. I do, however, firmly believe that US government ships should be built in America, but for commercial ships? C’mon. I want everybody who drives a foreign built car to raise their hand. Imagine how much more capital Crowley/APT, Polar, SaltChuk, you name it will have to hire more workers and transport more goods if they can buy and use in US trade quality Japanese/Korean/German/Polish ships at a fraction the cost than what it costs in Philly.
1000% agree. You should watch this and this. It is a shame that PG&E plans on shutting down two more nuclear power plants.
Everything else John says in that post I agree with and I would be writing a novel if I address everything.
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