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Can we please cut it with the boomers/millenial shit-flinging? There are plenty of boomers out there who don't have tons of money, even after multiple decades o

by vacri 10y ago

Can we please cut it with the boomers/millenial shit-flinging? There are plenty of boomers out there who don't have tons of money, even after multiple decades of working.

cookiecaper 10y ago
Yes. Young/childless people don't understand this, but there is nothing that older people want less than to harm their children. They've just spent the last 50 years of their lives taking care of their posterity so that they could have a nice life in a nice world. Parents and grandparents are not just going to muck that up casually; it would counteract everything they've worked for. You can argue that the policies of the older generation have unintended consequences that will negatively impact younger generations, but it is not credible that the older generation as a class is intentionally selling out any part of their posterity that is currently living for short-term personal gain.
branchless 10y ago
But in aggregate, which is what we should be interested in, the gap is stark.
- vacri 10y ago
  In aggregate, young people today have a lot of advantages that the boomers didn't have. Just talking about money is disingenuous. Poor people have always spent their entire income on living expenses - yes, rent now is more expensive, but food, clothing, and transport is much cheaper, for example. And no, the gap is not stark when you look at the boomers in their youth. It's only stark now, when the boomers have a lifetime of earnings behind them - hardly an apples-to-apples comparison. And when we look at things other than money, the young today are better off than ever before. Remember when it was shameful to be seen to be pregnant in public? Remember when intellectually disabled kids were shameful and you were expected to keep them out of public view? Remember when every house had only one phone, and it was in a central area? None of these always-on-call compact contact and entertainment machines that travel with you. Remember when if you forgot to do your food shopping on Saturday, you'd go hungry on Sunday, because nothing was open? And this is before we even start to touch on equal rights for minorities and similar. I don't have a problem if you complain about how we got here and are looking for a way to fix it, but just whining that you've been shortchanged while simultaneously ignoring all the better things about life... just sounds so adolescent. There isn't a boomer 'team' and there isn't a millenial 'team'. People don't fall into such overbroad demographics, at least not to any useful diagnostic degree. Boomers didn't get together and simply decide to fuck over their kids, so talking about them like that's what they did is just plain rude.

by vacri 10y ago

Can we please cut it with the boomers/millenial shit-flinging? There are plenty of boomers out there who don't have tons of money, even after multiple decades of working.

cookiecaper 10y ago

Yes. Young/childless people don't understand this, but there is nothing that older people want less than to harm their children. They've just spent the last 50 years of their lives taking care of their posterity so that they could have a nice life in a nice world. Parents and grandparents are not just going to muck that up casually; it would counteract everything they've worked for. You can argue that the policies of the older generation have unintended consequences that will negatively impact younger generations, but it is not credible that the older generation as a class is intentionally selling out any part of their posterity that is currently living for short-term personal gain.

branchless 10y ago

But in aggregate, which is what we should be interested in, the gap is stark.

vacri 10y ago
In aggregate, young people today have a lot of advantages that the boomers didn't have. Just talking about money is disingenuous. Poor people have always spent their entire income on living expenses - yes, rent now is more expensive, but food, clothing, and transport is much cheaper, for example. And no, the gap is not stark when you look at the boomers in their youth. It's only stark now, when the boomers have a lifetime of earnings behind them - hardly an apples-to-apples comparison. And when we look at things other than money, the young today are better off than ever before. Remember when it was shameful to be seen to be pregnant in public? Remember when intellectually disabled kids were shameful and you were expected to keep them out of public view? Remember when every house had only one phone, and it was in a central area? None of these always-on-call compact contact and entertainment machines that travel with you. Remember when if you forgot to do your food shopping on Saturday, you'd go hungry on Sunday, because nothing was open? And this is before we even start to touch on equal rights for minorities and similar. I don't have a problem if you complain about how we got here and are looking for a way to fix it, but just whining that you've been shortchanged while simultaneously ignoring all the better things about life... just sounds so adolescent. There isn't a boomer 'team' and there isn't a millenial 'team'. People don't fall into such overbroad demographics, at least not to any useful diagnostic degree. Boomers didn't get together and simply decide to fuck over their kids, so talking about them like that's what they did is just plain rude.