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Baby Boomers are fucking worthless
Posts
Supported Obama?
For the younger Generation, Bush the Lesser was "The Man".
Also they are the conservative punching bag for liberal values.
Gay geting married? Damn Hippies.
People want peace in the Middle East? Damn Hippies
An end to dangerous chemicals in our food? Damn Treehughing Granola eating Hippies.
As such their effect is muted.
The Hippy/Loyal Soldier divide that Vietnam crated still has a stranglehold on the Political Debate in the US to this day.
Just another thing you can blame the Boomers for.
I agree with particular argument this to a ridiculous degree. That was the primary difference between the presidential elections in 2004 and 2008 for me. John Kerry represented the aging boomer left (and thus the arguments for and against him were stepped in 1960s, hippie, war protester contexts aimed at boomers.... while young voters didn't give a shit), and Obama represented the modern face of the democratic party that actually wants to (gasp) address current issues.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Only partially true, as McCain made his Vietnam service a centerpiece of his campaign.
The hippies were always more influential as a conservative boogeyman than they were in reality. This was true both in 1968 and 2004.
Most of the "countercultural" Boomers weren't all that countercultural. They wanted to smoke weed and get laid and party but reform society? Not on their agenda. I'm sure a lot of them probably acted like they wanted to change society back then, but of course it was all talk, and people like that aren't unique to any generation. Like the people you meet today who think they're enlightened because they own Bob Marley's Legend.
In the US, this recession has been the worst since the great depression in regard to unemployment.
Not quite the worst yet, but it pretty clearly will be rather soon. The worst was in the early 80s where it hit around 10%, but we are pretty steadily approaching that and have only just recently hit an inflection point on new jobless claims (which means things are still getting worse, but at decreasing speed).
For boomer hating, I think you have to focus a lot on how things have gone when they've actually been running stuff, which has been the past decade or two. In terms of Presidents, you have Clinton and Bush II. They are the ones at the wheel as we've going off the road, which is a rather inauspicious matter.
https://medium.com/@alascii
Yah you sound really fucked over right here.
But no, it's the baby boomers that are plagued with a sense of entitlement.
Not every American.
Yes, how dare we expect to benefit from the fruits of our labour or manage to get employed in our field after becoming qualified for a position in it?
It's like this entitled fuck of a friend of mine at work. He puts in his hours and at the end of the week he feels like he deserves to get a paycheck. What an entitled jackass, mirite?
I know lots of people with post-grad qualifications who can't get work. From some of the best universities in the UK too. Makes me very relieved not to be in their situation. Too qualified to get unskilled work, not enough experience to be competitive with older people who have recently been made redundant.
Yeah, it's bullshit. The little fuckers won't stay off my lawn.
No, seriously. 7th graders wearing make-up and talking about sex over coffee in the cafe right across from my high school. I got up and told them to gtfo. They started making a scene, the waitress asked me why I told them, I told her, she told them to gtfo.
Cynical teen angst is the most inpotent kind of angst.
The Number of teen pregnancies is also going down. No matter what the Media wants you to belive(Cough*Bristol Palin*Cough).
I don't give a shit what the media and statistics say. This 7th grader was talking about blowing her boyfriend so he likes her more, her friends were agreeing, and they all looked like fucking clowns with make-up on.
E: I also ran into a 3rd or 4th grader smoking in the bathroom of my elementary school, when I was visiting my teacher. I was terrified of smoking within 50' of any adult when I was 13, and this kid was 10-11.
Congratulations, your anecdotes totally disprove all wider trends in a population of millions. Your lived experience should be the touchstone by which we measure all social practices.
Do you even bother reading posts in this thread, or just come in here and spam the POST REPLY button?
but they're listening to every word I say
I think the problem with this is that our generation has been groomed with the aid of the Internet, currently the most influential tool for globalization (another factor previous generations have not had the benefit of having) and the single greatest bastion of information out there today - all at our fingertips.
Well, if someone who's put in the hours to learn engineering isn't qualified for an entry level position in engineering then I guess I don't know who is.
That doesn't hold true for all professions, and being able to graduate means you were able to pass the classes. Generally that correlates to learning the materials. They don't just hand those pieces of paper out because you paid tuition for 4 years. The consistently rising rate of unemployment for those with degrees would seem to seem to suggest that people are just getting screwed.
Or we're all just so plagued with a sense of entitlement that we collectively aren't accepting job offers at a growing rate.
We're not talking about people with bullshit degrees possibly being unqualified for jobs, we're talking hours and hours of science and math courses. You don't fake your way through those classes, unless you look like Ashley Judd and hypnotize all of your professors with blow jobs.
PS: You can finish certain colleges (economic/marketing, philosophy) with a 90% + average and only show up for 2 or 3 exams over here. So.. yeah. I'm actually wary of applying to a uni because they're kind of one of those. At least their liberal arts colleges, but I'm interested in physics, so hopefully the teachers actually.. teach.
Oh hey here's some data.
What Employers Look For
Oh hey look GPA is only at 4% of those surveyed. Hm.
Edit: Clarification -- yes, I know the survey is only of what an employer most looks for. It's still pretty telling that GPA is close to the bottom.
The situation is reversed in Romania
And rote learning is encouraged in school.
Couple those two, and you have 0 good-looking job prospects for me here, since I fucking hate rote learning and refused to do it, or write 8 page essays that could be summarized in 4 short paragraphs.
Still, a med student that finished with a 60% average would make a pretty lousy doctor, imo. The specific example I had in mind had a grade of 9/10 in parasitology, but a 6/10 in anatomy.. God forbid she become a GP.
The rest of this thread should just be this increasing in size. Because seriously. Fuck you, Richard Nixon
You keep bringing this up and you keep being wrong. Worst of all, you keep blaming Greenspan for something he didn't even do. Your point is nothing but accounting hand-waiving. Let me lay it out for you (again).
The Greenspan Commission recommend to raise payroll taxes in excess of funding needs for SS expenditures. The surplus is accounted for in the so called Social Security Trust Fund (it's actually two funds, but that's irrelevant). This Trust Fund is an accounting construct recording the accumulated surpluses the government "owes" Social Security (i.e. it's government debt). It does not exist as an actual pile of assets that were ever or could ever be "stole[n]."
Now, the lockbox controversy revolves around what ledger we stick this pile of debt ($2.4 trillion) in. If you think that the lockbox is real (which I presume you do), Social Security will be solvent until the 2050s (CBO estimate). This is what Greenspan meant when he said that the recommendations of his commission will keep Social Security solvent for 75 years. That was the extent of his task and he solved it straightforward.
However, there is a consequence of treating the lockbox as real. It means the debt the federal government owes the Trust Fund is also real, meaning our current debt level is $8.8 trillion. Instead, the federal government likes to argue that the debt level is $6.4 trillion, because it owes the Trust Fund to itself (intragovernmental) as opposed to the public. This is called the unified budget approach.
You can argue about which perspective is correct until you are blue in the face, but it doesn't change one cent about the actual economic resources "we" will have to forgo to finance the retirement of "them." The bottom line is that the boomers massively undersaved for their retirement. Where in the ledger you stick that debt (Social Security or General Fund) doesn't matter. The problem is aggravated by there being relatively many of "them" for each one of us.
In yet other words, the Social Security is structurally unsound in the promises it makes to future retirees about the amount of resources they will receive from future workers. There's not enough economic output at current taxation levels to honor current promises. Whether the Trust Fund exists is 100% irrelevant to this problem. We can lower the output pledged to future retirees (higher retirement age, means-testing, taxation of benefits, lower cash payouts, lower inflation adjustment, etc.) or we can raise taxes on future workers, or a combination of both.