Claire*, 42, was always told: “Follow your dreams and the money will follow.” So that’s what she did. At 24, she opened a retail store with a friend in downtown Ottawa, Canada. She’d managed to save enough from a part-time government job during university to start the business without taking out a loan.
For many years, the store did well – they even opened a second location. Claire started to feel financially secure. “A few years ago I was like, wow, I actually might be able to do this until I retire,” she told me. “I’ll never be rich, but I have a really wonderful work-life balance and I’ll have enough.”
But in midlife, she can’t afford to buy a house, and she’s increasingly worried about what retirement would look like, or if it would even be possible. “Was I foolish to think this could work?” she now wonders.
She’s one of many millennials who, in their 40s, are panicking about the realities of midlife: financial precarity, housing insecurity, job instability and difficulty saving for the future. It’s a different kind of midlife crisis – less impulsive sports car purchase and more “will I ever retire?” In fact, a new survey of 1,000 millennials showed that 81% feel they can’t afford to have a midlife crisis. Our generation is the first to be downwardly mobile, at least in the US, and do less well than our parents financially. What will the next 40 years will look like?
The next forty years will look like absolute hell and the lack of proper services for the explosive number of diseases in the millennial cohort will directly contribute.
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Milliennials by and large don’t have enough money to retire, and they are experiencing in striking numbers high rates of immunodeficiency and cancers. (I was personally diagnosed with cancer at 42. You know, the ultimate answer to life the universe and everything…) This will mean they will need more elder care and sooner… and they won’t really be able to afford it.
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No Child Left Behind has properly fucked US education for the foreseeable future, and US education was abysmal before that already. The elderly are going to be being taken care of by adults who may be functionally illiterate and when you’re functionally illiterate, you can become anti-vax even if you got hired as caretaker for the elderly. (Not all will grow up to be functionally illiterate, but if we’re to take teachers at their word, the gap between the struggling kids and the smart kids is wider than ever. As in C students functionally don’t exist, only A students and F students, and the F students are the larger group who are being passed on to higher grades just to hit numbers.)
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On top of education being gutted and there being a dangerous future of incapable people being put in these jobs because there’s no one else to do them: The collapse in birth rate because nobody can afford to have fucking kids will also make this problem worse as fewer and fewer workers will be available to take care of more and more elderly and infirm people.
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Most of the places that take care of the elderly are being bought up at rapid pace by investment groups, private equity, hedge funds, and the like, and all they do is cut services, make things worse, and cause more suffering and death so they can wring more money out of people suffering at the end of their lives. How many of these businesses will even still exist in 20 years? Many of them are shutting down constantly because the numbers just don’t add up, or because the private equity group that bought it has finished hollowing it out and there’s simply no money left.
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Because of all of this, we will see an absolute explosion of homelessness in the elderly.
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You can bet your ass fuck-nothing will be done to prevent any of this. Especially if Trump wins in November, then we’re dealing with this process outright accelerating at a breakneck pace.
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Oh and just for “fun” we can expect to see a lot more police violence against poverty-striken old people. “STOP RESISTING OLD MAN!”
EDIT: Oh yeah, and that’s not even counting climate change, finite amounts of topsoil left, potential pandemics, and the fact that most of the world doesn’t even have access to clean water. I try to keep an eye on neat, simple engineering projects from poor countries because we may need to rely on similar options soon enough ourselves.
EDIT II: Get involved in Mutual Aid Groups. We all have skills. No one is coming to save us. No government or political party or corporation. We have to save each other, and that will be very difficult to achieve. I forget the writer, but she said something like “No dictator is ever going to bring about the revolution. It will always have to come from the bottom organizing together.” The only thing we can do is help one another. It will not be easy or fair or entirely successful.
US education was abysmal before that already
Solid points all around, but I wanted to add one historical tidbit: at one point the USA had literally the best edumacashiun in the world. After WWII, the other nations (like the UK + those in the EU) were bombed all to hell & back whereas the USA was relatively fine. People like Bill Gates advocated strongly for US education funding, b/c it helped feed that behemoth giant of a corporation to have an already-educated workforce, funded by US tax dollars, that they could take advantage of.
We have fallen FAR down the world rankings since then. Tbf, some of that may reflect changes in measurements e.g. does “every” kid need one, or can some be excused to go be a farmhand without needing to finish? (this affects averaged measurements, but not peak ones, or the previously thus-filtered ones)
After WWII, the other nations (like the UK + those in the EU) were bombed all to hell & back whereas the USA was relatively fine.
There was certain union in Europe(not European Union) that was bombed 9% by area and 55% by population.
does “every” kid need one, or can some be excused to go be a farmhand without needing to finish?
Translation: To have more you should produce more, to produce more you should know more.
Farmers need education too.
EDIT: lemmy broke my comment with link to image
Farmers need education. Farmhands do not.
Anyway I was just attempting to use it as an example - we could substitute gas station attendant or fast food worker, etc. There are jobs where, for the job anyway while ignoring the quality of life for the actual person, formalized education is less necessary than for other jobs, e.g. doctor or lawyer.
But my example of using farmhand was not made up: farmers literally pulled their kids out of primary schooling in order to make use of them on the farm. Perhaps they supplemented it with homeschooling at other times when the crop cycles allowed… or perhaps not. But either way, the ways we use to measure intelligence - e.g. if we ask what country does the city of Athens belong to - the farmhands will appear extremely low in such rankings.
So long as someone else in the family does the planning work, someone who was not merely pulled out but who flunked out of primary schooling could exist in life by contributing purely manual but not much intellectual labor.
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try to keep an eye on neat, simple engineering projects from poor countries because we may need to rely on similar options soon enough ourselves.
I am just sitting here as a infrastructure guy trying not to have a mental break of crying and laughing. It’s so fucking bad and getting so much worse. You know what was today’s item? I am working on one small system for a replacement wastewater treatment plant for a town of about 3,000 people that the pieces of shit general contractor has dragged out for 8 fucking years. 8 years for a project that should have taken 6 months. They haven’t done any work. Longer it goes on the more they get to bill. Oh and my favorite part? The general contractor is one of the bigger ones, they have a Wikipedia page.
Cost disease is going to break us. Entire country is going to be spending a trillion a year with the water supply of Flint.
Now if you excuse me I am going to drink now. Cause fuck it I can’t save anyone.
Cause fuck it I can’t save anyone.
You’ve done your best. It’s definitely not personally your job to save anyone anyway. If we can’t figure out how to do it collectively, well, maybe we just suck as a species. Thanks for doing what you could and can and don’t bemoan yourself for your inability to fight a broken system on your own. I don’t expect engineers and scientists and doctors who have been telling us this shit needs to be done for years to have any fucking patience for it anymore. You’ve all done your bit.
Also, thanks because I’ve just been assuming as much has been going on behind the scenes for a long time. I’ve been saying for years the entire nation gave up on any idea of long-term maintenance of anything in the 90’s. We’ve had failing infrastructure grades for bridges all over the country since at least 2010, if not earlier, and fuck-all has been done. I’m not even close to being an engineer, but I’ve helped some friends with some basic construction and I’m just floored at how many corners are cut on so many things in our country. It’s prevalent everywhere, it’s part of why there’s so many data breaches in the tech sector. They don’t want to pay to update old systems to bring them up to compliance. We’ve literally built workarounds in the form of Virtual Machines just so people can run outdated software on modern hardware so insecure outdated software can simply keep being used despite its age. So yeah, feeling vindicated that it’s not all just in my head.
We’ve literally built workarounds in the form of Virtual Machines just so people can run outdated software on modern hardware so insecure outdated software can simply keep being used despite its age. So yeah, feeling vindicated that it’s not all just in my head.
Insecure outdated software AKA proprietary software. Fuck that shit.
Brought to you by Free Software Foundation.
Are lawyers involved? You should sue to get it for free, not to pay more, because contracts like that usually put a penalty on the supplier if they break their promises
I at first I expected you to work in IT infrastructure specifically, but sewage? When sewage can’t keep shit together - nothing in country can keep shit together. USSA is slowly turning from worse than Russia in some areas to worse than Russia in all areas.
We some how got wedged between Idiocracy and Cyberpunk 2077.
Our dreams of technology didn’t meet with the realities/limits of materials science/engineering except for computing and the internet.
The technology was there; the humanity wasn’t.
You know, we live in “technology was there; the humanity wasn’t” since DMCA was legislated. We literally have information duping machine, but there is law that forbids it. When there will be everything duping machine, ruling class will its use by anyone outside of ruling class.
What do you mean somehow? Cyberpunk as a genre has always been a vision of a future of unchecked corporate power, it only became prescient because Americans gave corporations unchecked power.
Original comment mentioned game Cyberpunk 2077, not entire genre cyberpunk. But yes, unchecked corporate power leads to neofeudalism.
I didn’t think to word it “Walking into the future lubed up, bent over, and ready to pay for the patriotic right to get split roasted by Google and Blackrock” because that’s a bit of a mouth full.
This is kind of where I’m at. I don’t imagine any amount of cash in a bank account is going to prepare us for what’s to come. Even if you could put money aside, the money you typically put towards retirement might just be better off towards becoming a doomsday prepper. Probably wouldn’t save you either way, but it may buy you a little time that you wouldn’t have otherwise.
Like others have said, I imagine my “retirement” as bearing witness to the collapse of modern society and ultimately dying in some lousy brawl with other desperate refugees, or by some untreated bacterial infection.
I just know that my death will be something dumb in the coming collapse, like stubbing my toe and dying to infection when there is no remaining, effective antibiotics on our superheated hellhole.
If the orange man wins, America is over and none of your concerns will matter as we slip into a fascist dystopia. That is an existential threat we have to deal with right now, and it can actually be prevented.
Because of all of this, we will see an absolute explosion of homelessness in the elderly.
And it can’t be fixed just through capitalism. Only either through policy or comand economy.
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Good post, but we really need to get out of the generational thinking.
I know rich and poor boomers. I know rich and poor millenials, and gen X/Z.
It’s a class struggle. Always has been.
Stop making it a generational battle. That only serves to divide the working class.
Yes, there is racism, ageism, sexism. We should debate those things and improve, but we can’t let those things divide us politically.
And since I’m ranting, let me end with a solution. We need to find themes that help all of us.
So perhaps we should say: for example, everyone with less than $1M in wealth gets a $20K tax deduction.
Who could oppose that? It doesn’t benefit home owners vs. renters. It doesn’t benefit students vs. retirees. It doesn’t benefit city dwellers vs. rural. Or white vs. black.
But it does benefit the class who owns nothing and gives them a better chance to own something.
there are a whole class of humans that actually think; ‘i had to suffer through student loans, everyone else should also’
The word “think” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there… plus how many conservative voters these days even have college degrees? The TV (or radio) man says to vote one way, so they do, end of the matter as far as they are concerned. (extraordinarily sadly, no /s on this one)
weirdly, its also older people who prolly paid <5k for their entire education whining about people getting ‘handouts’.
Exactly ^this. It makes sense to them that they “worked their way through college”, ignoring how that is no longer possible.
Tbh I’m not a fan of just handing out money to the predatory banks who screwed students over with those loans either, but damn we should do something. Like maybe educate ourselves on a topic prior to banning people from doing it, possibly, hopefully?
And then they go and say “that’s not how democracy works”, except when you win the majority so hard that you even overcome the electoral college effect then they simply overthrow democracy itself.:-(
There are indeed real facts, and real people, behind all those pithy sayings.
Stop making it a generational battle. That only serves to divide the working class.
That’s difficult when a lot of the news media is owned by *checks notes… the Capital class… and they have vested interest in keeping the conversation about a generational battle.
But yes, 100% agreed. The problem is we’re all commenting on news articles that will never stop presenting it that way.
Someone else could write news then? People started doing that on YouTube - e.g. CPG Grey, Ian Danskin/Innuendo Studios, Hank & John Green, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Kurzgesagt, etc. It did not work out well I think, especially since people seek more immediate gratification i.e. Twitch dances or whatever rather than fully college-level subject matter provided entirely for free, oh except having to watch ads for the corporate overlords.
If we do not value i.e. take care of things, we will lose them. In this case - and here I will use a generational term, b/c it refers to the only people in charge at the time it occurred - the Boomer (+ Great) generations chose this for the legacy of everyone who came after. Which is only the history of how we came to be here, but it is our choice to continue forward this way.
Someone else could write news then?
Well exactly, it’s an uphill battle, sadly. I’ve been upset at how weak our media has been since the Bush years, when I was working in local television for an NBC affiliate. I got to see all the behind the scenes of the beginnings of the War on Terror and how much our media purposefully pumped up both the war in Afghanistan and in Iraq and how they helped promote the outright lies of the Bush administration. It was eye opening as a twenty-something to say the least and made me incredibly distrustful of government overreach that was being exhorted by patriotism and nationalism. “Spy and snitch on your fellow Americans to prove how patriotic you are!” It was also part of the beginning of dropping the facade of “racism being over” because holy fuck did brown skinned immigrants all get put in the “dangerous radical Islamist” basket, no matter their real nationality or religion. It deeply colored my view of mainstream media as consistently right-wing, even back then, because of how often they would capitulate to Republican lies to support wars intended to enrich a small elite.
I’ve been wanting to see more independently successful media organizations most of my life, but most of what I have seen is media consolidation, and it’s certainly not like I have the capital to get into the business myself. It’s brutal.
Finally, just as you said, we’re competing with Twitch and TikTok and a lot of these issues really require text documents and references that can be checked more easily than needing to sift through a three-hour-Youtube-video of the issue. The problem is we’ve raised a generation that really doesn’t want to read much at all if it isn’t a subtitle for a video. That’s… distressing. (But not to act like it was much better in my generation, it’s not, it’s part of why we have so many shitty kids: their shitty millennial parents who shove a phone into their hand like Boomers shoved us in front of TVs.)
I wouldn’t even know where to start on how to fix it. I’m with Marshall McLuhan, we’re spitting out new communications mediums before we’ve even really understood the social impacts of the previous mediums. He argued we still didn’t understand writing and we had already jumped headlong into radio and television… Well, look at us now baybeee, shit’s spiraling with the internet, McLuhan. Maybe he’s spinning in his grave to match.
I guess I spoke too quickly as well. Probably people do write the news, but (a) how do you even find things these days, when searching is crap; and (b) it would perhaps do little to counteract the mis- (neutral), even active dis-information that is out there now. Also those sources I mentioned tend to be rather high-end, e.g. of the scale of intelligence required to make use of and especially to really enjoy watching them.
Speaking of the Bush administration, I recall hearing about the event where they pulled down Sadam Hussein’s statue (iirc?) but later when I watched it happen with my own eyes - with the audio ON mind you - it told a 100% different story. Crowds cheering, or booing, or something, but the important thing is that with the audio OFF they can say whatever they wish to, and we’d believe it b/c how else could we know the reality? Unless someone happened to have the original source… except even then, what if they swapped the audio out, how could we tell!?
The only real way to tell a counterfeit is to know the real thing so well that nobody can tell you otherwise. So what, I am supposed to know about the entire history of the Middle East, and all of the machinations of the US government within that!? I have a fucking job you know, and as a not-Boomer, may never see retirement or own a home even then - who has time to add all of that to their schedule, on top of every single other thing like climate change, ThE eCoNoMy ThO, Covid and/or vaccines, and all of the other myriad things out there (like gay frogs for some damn reason, I dunno)?!
Highly ironically then, the internet may have slowed down the pace of systemic and active disinformation - by providing an “alternate” source of real, true facts - even as in other ways it also sped it up (by providing a source of “alternative facts” that are not true).
And in response to all of that, the Democrats choose to nominate… HRC, smdh. Remember, Trump did not win, so much as she lost - worse than any candidate in modern history, and the second-worst btw was… him. Conservatives, liberals, voters, apathetic people - we brought this upon ourselves. I really hope that we get to live, but if we die, I cannot really blame anyone else? The wealthy elites, ahem excuse me, the Democrat politicians, don’t really exist within the same world as 99.999999% of the rest of Americans, which might be fine except neither do they seem to bother even so much as learning about them - except, you know, enough to carry hot sauce in her purse I suppose.
What you are describing sounds an awful lot to me like the mantra of “move fast and break things”, which as I understand it was popularized by Mark Zuckerberg of
FacismFaceBook, and refers basically to the fact that we can move so quickly nowadays - with the abilities of code monkies hopped up on crack (one presumes, this on top of the Red Bull and Dorritos combo:-P) that even if we screw up, we can still move quickly enough to fix it. Now, you might say that even one second’s thought would be enough to dispell that rumor, however my counter to that is… he’s rich. (and!? WTF does that even have to do with anything!? oh wait, he took all that money from society regardless of the harm that it did to us all, okay then)Anyway, there have always been the elites - the idea of the Illuminati, regardless of whether they are “really” real or not, like seriously, how could they not be, that’s simply how the world works!? - who have controlled society. The problem is, the elites feel like they no longer need the backing of irl human beings, b/c of (a) globalism (so humans here don’t need educating, if you can get sufficient number of coders somewhere, who are willing to work for bananas and cocaine), and (b) automation (so… do we really need human beings at all? and also climate change makes it unlikely that we’ll all survive? welp, better start killing them off in mass numbers, or better yet just let them do it to themselves, whilst *I* simply accumulate all of the wealth that I possibly can until then).
We are all so damn naive - and yes I include myself first and foremost among that set.:-P I am not sure that this problem even is fixable, but if it were, it would take an amount of collective effort that… I am not certain exists any longer. Or the backing of an elite. I guess we’ll see what happens. :-|
with the abilities of code monkies hopped up on crack (one presumes, this on top of the Red Bull and Dorritos combo:-P)
You underestimate coffee and power of Ballmer’s Peak.
automation (so… do we really need human beings at all? and also climate change makes it unlikely that we’ll all survive? welp, better start killing them off in mass numbers, or better yet just let them do it to themselves, whilst *I* simply accumulate all of the wealth that I possibly can until then).
I hate neofeudalism. They use what can be used for societal progress for social regress.
Their decision, whether they have spent even one second’s thought about it or not, is “strategic” as in one that will get them personally some benefits, but it is also short-sighted as in one that may doom us all. On the other hand, my naivite is perhaps far worse so I should be careful throwing stones in glass houses.
I rarely like popular TV shows but one that does make me think is The 100 that illustrates thougher choices needing to be made and all the gamesmanship going on surrounding those. e.g. will neoliberals survive whereas progressivism was too impractical to ever have a chance? I don’t know the answer but those seem like the kinds of questions that needed to be explored by people far smarter in such matters than I. Unfortunately, they instead have been explored by people who are fairly smart but whose defining characteristic may be a desire to become personally richer, which again far exceeds my own.
“Spy and snitch on your fellow Americans to prove how patriotic you are!”
Sounds very stalinism.
It did not work out well I think, especially since people seek more immediate gratification i.e. Twitch dances or whatever rather than fully college-level subject matter provided entirely for free, oh except having to watch ads for the corporate overlords.
I can’t completely agree with it. There are a lot of college-level-only channels. From English youtube I know only The Efficient Engieneer(engieneering), Thought Emporium(molecular biology, close to popsci), Marco Reps(engieneering), Breaking Taps(engieneering, close to popsci). From popsci Veritasium(miz), Practical Engieneering(engieneering), numberphile(math), computerphile(applied math).
From Russian youtube I can only think of popsci mixed with college-level: Ekaterina Shulman(politology, mix), Chemistry - Easy(chemistry, mostly college-level). From popsci: Physics with Pobedinsky(physics), SciOne(multiple hosts), QWERTY(multiple hosts, originally was about astronomy), Alexandr Panchin(biology), Vert Dider(mix, only translated from english), Artur Sharifov(mix).
Perhaps I am being unfair with my language, so here’s an example if it helps clarify: this is a video combating vaccine disinformation campaigns. It is cute, slow paced enough, but also keeps moving fast enough, it aims low but at the same time it contains high levels of content, and basically answers anyone’s questions about the situation. It is as perfect a video as I think can possibly exist - extremely bold words, but… accurate imho? Edit: oops, this is the one I meant, but notably the fact that there are multiple that fit this criteria also serves a different point as well!?:-)
However, instead of watching this, more people died in the USA from the pandemic than from all wars combined, and like so many other scenarios (e.g. gun violence) we will forever be ignorant of the true numbers because we are actively prevented from counting them.
This is literally, actually, full-on life vs. death, but people cannot be bothered to watch even so much as a 10-minute video to save their life, or the life of everyone around them including their entire family. And the nation that they claim to love and be patriotic for.
Knowledge can easily cure ignorance, but not much if anything can be done about obstinacy. Maybe if they suffer enough pain they may finally start to care enough to open up to listen a real answer, but brainwashing is so tough to attempt to break through.
That channel also deals with climate change, technology, etc. But to switch to a very different example, another one is the rise of fascism all around the world. Ian Danskin’s Innuendo Studios has a playlist for his series on The Alt Right Playbook that is as comprehensive and deep a collection on that topic as I have ever seen. One example of the series is I hate Mondays and another is There’s always a bigger fish. These in some ways are more important than knowledge about climate change or vaccines or gun control or whatever, bc it discusses what we as a society will do about those matters. But instead of watching such, and/or even reading the Constitution that they claim to love, people instead show up at the White House with the idea to literally behead people (January 6), and on the other side liberals always seem shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED!?! at the actions of conservatives, despite how remarkably consistent they are.
With so much free, virtually instant knowledge (okay so less than an hour?) available to us all, and with an ad blocker needs nothing at all in return but even without one having to watch a handful of ads is nothing in the grand scheme of things - with all that is available, I can only conclude that people do not want that knowledge. i.e. people in both sides - liberal and conservative - remain in their ignorance by choice, bc it’s easier to watch something akin to a TikTok dance.
CPG Grey
CGP Grey right?
Seriously the best content creator I’ve ever witnessed. His video on First Past the Post voting should be mandatory to watch.
So tired of people thinking inside the world’s smallest box, the two party system.
His video on First Past the Post voting should be mandatory to watch.
he doesn’t actually state in that video what should be the biggest takeaway: strategic voting is what leads to consolidation of parties, so your best interest longterm is to vote your values, even if doing so has a likelihood of losing short term.
Who could oppose that?
I think you know who… there is one class that seems to go FAR out of their way to control the conversation to the end of “there is no class struggle” (or even “there is no such thing as class”?).
Good post, but we really need to get out of the generational thinking.
I know rich and poor boomers. I know rich and poor millenials, and gen X/Z.
It’s a class struggle. Always has been.
As I said somewhere else, it is not that boomers are rich. It’s just all rich are boomers.
TIL Taylor Swift and Elon Musk are boomers.
So perhaps we should say: for example, everyone with less than $1M in wealth gets a $20K tax deduction.
As long as you a) have a robust enforcement mechanism (otherwise it will just be another PPP scenario), and b) offset that tax break with new taxes on the wealthy.
My wife has a job with an awesome pension and as a result there is basically no situation she will ever leave. I pointed out to her that the golden handcuffs are still golden.
One day some MBAs are going to learn that if you don’t want constant turn over you give workers a pension so great they would crawl over their mother’s corpse to get it.
What am I saying? MBAs learning? Hahaha I love being silly.
One day some MBAs are going to learn that if you don’t want constant turn over you give workers a pension so great they would crawl over their mother’s corpse to get it.
Plus, modern MBAs see turnover as a good things because it makes the short-term investors happy.
Wtf why?
Sociopathy, lack of long term planning skills, drugs (metaphorical and physical). Some combination of those I suspect.
For some, you get the Jack Walsh thinking that some employees are going to be statistically bad performers, so it is good to get rid of them.
You also have other cases where lowering the time to train means you can expand faster since you don’t need to find quality staff. The original McDonald’s trained its staff to be able to be high output restaurants. The business model changed to needing less worker training to help fuel expansion.
You also have the case where some managers believe some jobs only require a commodity level labor. At that point, there is no value in training.
So tired of hearing that shitstain’s name. I admit there is some wisdom to the up or out approach. You know for very very high level workers. Like C-suite or a rank below. Doing it across the company just promises misery and failure.
Christ…
Faust…
This is an appropriate reaction, in my opinion. Modern economic philosophy is entirely myopic with no apparent perceived value in anything beyond the next quarter. From that perspective, if your employees have already created value and you’ve budgeted more than severance would cost (or think you can get away with constructive dismissal), then, for the quarter, getting rid of employees looks like a financial positive.
Wasn’t there a study that said MBAs don’t have object permanence nor a real conscious understanding of the passage of time?
Money today. That’s all these businesses understand.
Just give them a box of crayons to eat so the adults can get some work done for once.
Unfortunately, living in the US, I would not take a job with a pension because the (private) pension system cannot be trusted. I remember the 00s when many company pension accounts went bankrupt, because companies were no longer offering it as a benefit and it was easy enough to screw over retired past employees. Companies would take poorly performing divisions and their pension plans, spin them off as a new company that would quickly file for bankruptcy.
I would not trust a pension without it being insured by an organization like the FDIC. Even then, I would be afraid that my pension would not cover living costs due to inflation.
Luckily there are alternatives. I have a 401k, which should give me a steady flow of inflation proof dividends… until a market downturn wipes it out. If that happens, I can fall back to Social Security. Don’t believe the baloney that the government will ever let Social Security go bankrupt. They will just cut down benefits.
I don’t deny things like that happened. You heard about them right? So did I. But that’s the thing, these are the stories you heard. It’s man bites dog, it is observation bias.
Also her pension is insured. And I am pretty sure the bankruptcy thing you mentioned was one particular case with a car part maker.
I searched what MBA actually means. Fuck that shit. Degree in “Business Administration” sounds like degree in praying. Wait, there is one! Fuck!
I’m a late gen-Xer (born in '80, so I’m more of a “Xennial”). I have a stable job, pension, matching 401k, no kids, no debt (paid off my car and student loans), make 6 figures, and I am STILL convinced that I will never be able to retire. I feel horrible for all those who are in a worse financial situation than me, but we are all really fucked in the next 20 years.
I have a stable job, pension, matching 401k, no kids, no debt (paid off my car and student loans), make 6 figures, and I am STILL convinced that I will never be able to retire.
If this is your reality, there’s more wrong with your expectations than your situation.
Social Security is set to run out in the 2030s, and I fully expect the stock market to crash, effectively wiping out my 401k. As others have mentioned, resources like water will start to become scarce, inciting instability.
SSI isn’t set to run out. It will have to be reduced if they don’t take the income cap off of it, however.
But all the other things you said will happen.
Correct. IIRC there’s an auto mechanism that will cut all benefits by 23% or something. So you’re mom/dad getting $2,000 a month would now only get about $1,500.
Invest in water you say…
and I fully expect the stock market to crash, effectively wiping out my 401k.
You only lose money if you sell. Those who were able to stay the course after '08 made it all back and then some.
The risk is a huge crash right before you retire, or you have to pull from your 401k to fund living expenses.
I think the fear is it stays crashed. Like a new paradigm takes over that is hard to plan for
If you think the stock market crashing wipes your 401k to 0 and that’s realistic you need to get your head checked.
In 2020 it only dropped 20% and bounced back within 3 years.
Where do you chicken littles come from? Lol
That’s very pessimistic.
Not for the entire southwestern United States. There’s 5 major cities off the top of my head getting ready to face a zero day. If you don’t think the stock market is going to react when that happens…
What’s a “zero day” in this context?
Zero day is the day a city runs out of water and must literally truck it in.
Gotcha, thank you!
I call it realistic. If you think everything is going to work out, you’re delusional, man. But I hope you prove me wrong some day, I really do.
Yeah, I’m not going to live my life like that.
Same exact boat. Zero confidence I can retire. My best case plan is to move to South America at so. E point and hope I can make it until I die.
Weird flex, but ok
He’s lying.
I’m almost exactly same as you and you’re full of shit.
If you’re honestly making 100k with no debt and one mortgage around 300k you can save 2k a month if your wife makes a decent wage.
Who said they have a wife?
What’s on the other side of middle age? Well, I’m not there yet, but it sure looks like the answer is “more work”.
Meanwhile your grandparents were golfing at 65 and are living comfortably on their reverse mortgages up to 95 years old.
What are we calling middle age? because 35 is about middle age on a global average
Well, going by the article: 40.
As someone born in '82, I plan to feel a strong dispassion for human society, and then die.
‘85 … I expect to die in the water wars.
Bless the maker and his water, Bless the coming and going of him, may his passing cleanse the world.
00s, I hope to not die for Putin’s palaces and yachts.
I just need to do the dying part.
Am millennial… xenniel or “elder millennial to be exact… I have completely given up on ever owning a home or being able to retire. Short of some major acts of public disruption at unprecedented, economy-toppling, billionaire-eating scale, my entire generation - and those after us - are fucked.
And yet we act like boiled frogs, each generation making fun of the prior one for expecting things to be better than they are. Gen z is so used to things being like shit that they think that all older generations are entitled fuckers And that we should get used to everything being worse because Right now it’s the best they’ve ever known.
You only need like 5% down for a home. Zero if you are a veteran for some reason. Mortgage is almost always cheaper than renting.
Unfortunately, this age-old folk wisdom just isn’t true any more.
Near Los Angeles (and many/most big cities these days) even “fixer-upper””starter” homes cost $1,000,000.
5% down ($50k) would result in a monthly mortgage payment of $7,939.88 which more than twice my rent payment, which is already high.
And saving is nearly impossible given the rate at which the basic costs of living (including rent) have skyrocketed in recent decades.
It worked for me last year. Put 5% on a home near a major city, purchase price $425k
Some areas like LA are just a special kind of fucked, but you don’t have to live there.
The lesson here is do the calculations for your area. There are a lot of “buy vs rent” calculators online.
Even at 425 PMI is killing you to the tune of an extra 300/ month
$61/mo actually.
LOL I’m never retiring. I’ve already accepted that I’ll be working until I’m dead. There are those who get dealt the right cards and will get to retire comfortably. I’m just not one of them.
Now try being a mid 30s millenial that couldn’t even make it running a business
For real. I’m over here having a mid-life crisis since I was 27.
That was your “quarter-life crisis”. Don’t worry your mid-life crisis is still on its way :D
Goddamn right, I thought the quarter was rough, I was wrong
Running a business is way harder than just being a worker. I don’t understand what you mean by this.
in the article someone with a successful business is worried about home affordability and retirement. elsewhere someone with an unsuccessful business is worried about both of those things plus the business bleeding money. I’m referring to myself. I ended my so called business, quitting while I was behind because there is no getting ahead of the explotative big players without drowning in stress and never having time to relax or enkoy life.
Aw shit I did the classic reddit thing and only read the headline. Sorry, that’s my bad.
I do that all the time too.
For the last 10 years when I’ve been asked about my career goals during job interviews I always respond, “I would like to retire.” I then clarify that I don’t mean tomorrow, next year, or even 5 years down the road. I just don’t want to die a wage slave.
What’s the typical reaction to that? Bring honest like that doesn’t sound like a winning strategy, unless you pass it off as a joke maybe.
I don’t say the wage slave part outright like that. I say the part about retiring with a smile like I’m joking but then use the opportunity to point out that I think about and plan for the future and that I’m financially responsible. Then I ask about the company’s benefits package.
Covid made thing weird for a while but my career has had a generally upward trend. My current job is a pretty serious step up for me in both salary and benefits and has a pretty clear path for future progression. I lost out on some of the creativity that I enjoyed in prior positions but I gained more free time to engage with my hobbies.
I’d say it’s been working for me but your mileage may vary based on your delivery and what kind of job you’re interviewing for.
Lol!
No.
Gonna leave a bit of advice for any young folks that might see this. Something I wish to god someone had told me when I was 20.
Start an annuity plan. They’re generally stable, all but guaranteed to accrue money. You can set a percentage of your paycheck to be deposited automatically into the account. If you have the option to do this through your employer, do it, find out if they match the deposit like mine. Put 10% of your paycheck in there. After 10 years, I have $40,000 sitting in a retirement account with a progressive series of bonds set to mature in between now and my retirement age. Those bonds will roll back into shorter term bonds as they mature, and add more value to the account. My projected retirement age is still 72, but at least I know that money is there.
Also, after 4 years, the account matures and you’re able to borrow against it, like collateral for a loan. So if I wanted to right now, I could take that money and use it as a down payment on a house. I’ll be expected to put it back, but the interest is generally lower than a home owner’s loan.
Generally speaking in the US annuities are horrible and significantly underperform a regular 401k/IRA invested in a broad total market index fund. The fees eat you alive. Don’t know how it is in other countries. But annuities here are damn near fraud.
Annuities have been bad because they invest in bonds and interest rates have been very low in recent years.
Over the next 10-20 years stocks could crash and rates increase.
I mean, if this is what you believe, you can still invest in bonds in a 401k or brokerage account. Even if I believed this about stocks crashing, I still wouldn’t put any $ in an annuity.
Also, predicting the stock market and making huge decisions based on that tends to not go well.
But what happens if you have an annuity and need cash noooooowwwwwww?
Call J.G. Wentworth!
877-CASH-NOW!
The downfall of every one of my savings plans. At a certain point rent takes priority
This sounds a lot like superannuation that we have in Australia and is mandatory. A certain amount of money from your paycheck is put with a super and they invest it for you, and the idea is that you should have a few hundred grand by the time you retire.
No.
But one day I will get so desperatly poor that taking out someone in siphoning wealth from the country and ending them might seem like a fitting end.
If we don’t change things anyways.
I always wonder why people shoot up schools and parks when their problems are caused by people in board rooms. Never see a mass shooting in a board room for some reason.
Well one of the original mass shootings resulted in the expression ‘going postal’, but I don’t recall what was ever theorized as a motive there. Workplace frustration maybe?
Maybe there’s a selection bias, and we only hear about the dumb ones who target innocent people and get caught.
she has about $75,000 saved up for a downpayment
Oh you poor child. That’s not even close to enough. 💀
It’ll get somewhere just north of half a million.
So a two bedroom condo. Probably not what most people had in mind for that much work.
Studio condo here…
You got four walls? Lucky.
Yeah that’s about it where I am but in other places that’s a 2b/2b house with a half acre yard, which isn’t horrible.
I guess that means you can add on to the house. Like one of those shanty towns.
It is tho. 75k gets u closed on a 300k house with 20% down basically
You won’t retire, no. No longer work a job because everything is slowly falling apart as our climate apocalypse trudges on? Sure, but you’ll still be working hard to survive.
