twice as long

https://www.star-telegram.com/news/business/article287009720.html



Must've been nice to buy a single family home for $88k and flip it for $800k with no renovations

Don't have any bread and this is out of date, so I guess I will never understand the guacamole toast

Avocado toast, not guacamole.

Ever listen to Russ Martin? His sidekick Alfie would get triggered by the term Avocado Toast.

There's definitely a crowd who hate the facts.

I'm sure they will attack you and claim that the facts you state are just whining, even though the issues don't even apply to you. I seent it and been that guy, in this thread and others.

They were criminals too, but I don’t recall them pushing and signing NAFTA into law.

I will say on my experience it’s only the online Xers and Boomers who pull that type of stuff. My parents and friends parents are Xers and plenty of them have told me that they would hate to be starting out nowadays. Same with the few boomers I know. People online just like the anonymity that a screen and keyboard afford them, so they’d rather opt for the asshole route and call everyone else lazy for struggling.

100%

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Neither of my boomer parents have an education. My mom didn’t work, my dad had a great job with Sysco Foods with a high school education.

Do I seem like the kind of Gen x shitposter who would listen to a dude name Russ ?

I think for some of the successful ones their ego absolutely refuses to consider that their accomplishments and success would have been harder, delayed, or even derailed under current conditions.

For those that have led lives of relatively meager, basic, and unimpressive natures- their self image and ego must- at ALL costs- refuse to acknowledge or accept  what abject and utter failures they might be under current conditions and cannot for even a moment-
Do something as simple as consider what things would have been like - when they were busting ass and struggling-
If their pay was only 87% what it was then,
And their medical insurance was twice as much,
Their apartment 3 times as much,
Their used car twice as much,
The ten minute / 10 dollar headlight they replaced was a four hour, 200 dollar issue,
And the oil change they did in the parking lot that nobody cared about was now a court date, missed work, and $500 fine.
Or their promotion went to some social justice shitbag,
or their enlistment was refused because the rod in their tibia was not missed at MEPS with the new med screens, etc.

US guaranteed student loan debt was NEVER dischargeable in bankruptcy

now get to work zoomers/millennials.  If life isn't hard, you're not living, snowflake

I'll trade you 3 Bing Crosby CDs for that

Jesus , what a shit show .  Im still trying to figure out how people and not the .Gov/Fed are responsible for this . How many Trillions went overseas that should have stayed here ?How many trillion’s into worthless non taxpayers mouths and pockets and not into something more productive? How many millions of illegals and H1B visas are fucking over American citizens in some way shape or form? If you cant afford a house buy a nice camper,  buy a piece of land and do it phases or buy a mobile home and keep it as rental when you move up to something better , I know people that have done both . Figure out a way around . I know a guy that built a metal building on his land and backed his camper in that bitch along with his toys and vehicles and he and his wife are content as shit building out one side as a house as money permits. Or just bitch and blame.

I see it in real life.
Some is valid-
The percent of young adults that suck seems to get higher than it used to be with each generation.
Most is nonsense, especially when directed at the high potential younger ones.

Anonymity is a wonderful thing. In an age of right-think and doxxing, you would be well served to keep as much of it as you can.

Nothing about this is really new. Late in life, my Silent gen. father would piss and moan about how his generation and the Greatest generation had screwed over the Boomers - my generation. Like me, he never went to college. But he and I both worked, saved and invested. When he died a decade ago there was a substantial wealth transfer to my mother, my brother and I. Not to mention the special needs trust for my mother. When I die, which will likely be in the next few years, there will be a substantial transfer to my millennial daughter.

Everyone struggles except for the fortunate few who are born on third base and crowing about hitting a triple. There's a couple of those on this board. The rest of us, regardless of generation get to go to work and try to build our own families and lives. Many of us fail. I know plenty of my contemporaries who suicided, OD'd or slipped into mental illness and prison.

Now I'm off of my soapbox until it's time to post my favorite images when you dare to threaten my SS...

I don’t disagree with this. Most of my generation is fucking retarded. Luckily I get to be around some of the high potential ones cause a mechanical engineering degree tends to weed out the losers over time.

I guess I'm a boomer.

I got out of high school and got a job.  Dead end job, I recognized withing a couple months.  Signed up to go in the US Army in the fall of 1975 and quit that job (wiring, rewiring houses/buildings).

Got out of the Army after my four year enlistment was done and used my GI Bill benefits to go to college.  I was married and a couple years into college we had our first son.  I'd been working part time but had to go to full time work about the time my junior year started.  In order to keep my GI Bill check at max. I had to take at least 16 credit hours a semester while working full time or some weeks more than 40 hours a week.  I was busy, didn't get a lot of sleep some days.  

Got my B.S degree in Mining at 4 years and my B.S. degree in Industrial Management at 5 years (had to take summer classes my last two years to get all those classes out of the way).  Got a hell of good job when I got out and worked 30 years before retiring.

I didn't have any debts when I graduated because I paid my bills as I went.

You do what you have to do and most people never learn how much they really can do when they have to.  They give up, back off, quit, and some blame others for their unwillingness to work harder/longer to get what they want.

Sympathy?  I don't have much.

My guess would be Stove coal, one size above Chestnut coal.  That's probably what the well-to-do folks burned in their basement coal furnaces.
I learned about the coal stove when I gutted the living room and found the "stub" chimney, complete with old bricks and cinders, in the interior wall between the living room and the downstairs bedroom.  I think that's when I bought my big shop vac.

They used their bootstraps. Boomers had the hardest time of all generations.

Boomers offer help, they should use bootstraps and shake hands of managers to get high paying jobs

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It wasn’t just that. That was part of it, but that wasn’t something that lasted into the 90’s.

It's pretty amazing that their are 50 topics a day on this board documenting and bemoaning the decline of the US. Most of those have near unanimous agreement that we are in decline and heading in the wrong direction by most meaningful measures, including economic. Now if you post a thread that claims you had a better opportunity by being born before or early in the decline, people will try to claim it's just belly aching.

Why pay for streaming services when GD is free and better than most tv shows and movies?

Ok, replace insurance with parents basement. Because I see a scary amount of 20-40 year olds there now.

Too many people attend college.  And the enabler has been the lottery for “higher education” funding all the billions and billions of buildings and investments the universities have done over the last 20 years.  College campuses today don’t even compare to what they were in the 70s and 80s.

The general concept is all youth know better than the preceding generations and need to fix everything.  The older silent Gen/first decade of the boomers were of such a size- that unlike in the past- they were able to dominate culture, social norms, politics, etc. for decades.  The far left/progressives never had such a dominant sized cohort to work with.
Then, as boomers rose to leadership in academics, business, education, finance, etc. it is felt their efforts for economic, social, etc. reasons destroyed our economics and culture.
With the final straw being MC/SS expenses for that huge cohort will crush us even further.
And the young adults getting blamed for being a product of the boomer’s culture, the boomer’s refusal to acknowledge any role in current politics, fiancés, etc., mocking young adults for having to fund their medical care beyond what many of them will have made in their entire life, just stirs up even more shit.

Is this 100% the reality?
Regardless, perception is reality.

When you start getting close to a 3rd world economy, you get people doing third world stuff.

Why bother working when welfare pays nearly as much as an average job?

Multi generational homes make a lot of sense. It's one of the first thing people in 3rd world and socialist countries do. Makes even more sense for the Boomers and millenial dynamic here. A lot of Boomers bought 300% more house than they need and don't even know what to do with the finished basement. They may as well let Jr live down there, because he dropped out of college with $87,000 in debt and works at Starbucks now.

Jr's last hope to live a life better than minimum wage is his inheritance. But he hasn't considered that mom and or dad are likely to give it all to the medical industry on end of life care.

I get it and understand what you are saying and agree . But they gonna have to learn to navigate this brave new world just as most generations have . The salad days are gone . We are all going to pay for epic amounts of money mismanagement by those who seem to think it grows on trees. Or a printing press.

No, we are just gonna have to suck it up and struggle. It's no harder today than it was 50 years ago. People right here in this thread will tell you that with a straight face.

Let’s say some guy and his wife are in the exact same shoes you were in.  Exactly the same.  The only difference is they have proportionally higher insurance and medical costs, the rent is twice as much, the equivalent of 2500 bucks in today’s dollars you spent on a vehicle does not buy much in the way of a daily driver you need for work now, you would have to spend closer to 8K.  And that alternator you changed in ten minutes for 30 bucks is now a three hour job needing about 50 bucks of some extension, and the part is 200 bucks.  Similar when you need a new starter.  Or that 90 hour week you had when the car acted up and you needed to get to work, come straight home, study, then get to school- and the carb acted up and you spent 20 dollars and one hour rebuilding it.  What if that had been hundreds of dollars of infections and several hours of time?

On your first job that house you bought is now 2.5 times as much.  The same money proportionally gets you 8.7 more hours a week communizing with shittier schools for your kids in an area with more crime.
Your first promotion went to a diversity/social justice hire.
They did so bad they actually got hired.  But the other two guys in your section already left, now you finally get that promotion, do that job, plus your old job, plus the work of the two guys you can’t replace because of the hiring freeze.  That next promotion you got in your career-
Goes to an MBA or H1B.


I won’t go into the higher education costs because luckily the new GI BILL is enough better than the old one at least that did not impact you.

This right here. Holy shit.  In my current gig, I've seen mil dudes who deserved a promotion because of their work, but were denied because the promotion was given to a protected minority who produced less and shittier work products. Said minorities have any qualifying factors? Did they get some cert recently? No. MBA? No. Just years and years of mundane, unremarkable "exposure" in my industry, where they relied on their subordinates to propel them by being ass-clowns.

ALL of the 'good' workers I've seen passed up couldn't find anything better, and had to move to a state further from their families for better (more lucrative) job opportunities. Meanwhile, the DEI ladder climbers continue to say "ditto" or fail to contribute ANYTHING TANGIBLE to the overall contract when asked to do so. Why the fuck are you even alive?

I really ponder daily and wonder how we fcked this one up so bad for short-term corporate profits.

Corporations are happy with the endless migration + H1B slaves to replace the American male... seems like one of the most plausible reasons. Females make for more compliant long… pic.twitter.com/MLkgbkhj9g

Don Johnson  (@DonMiami3) March 24, 2024

They talk about the purchasing power of a degree in the 80s being more than now.  I don't doubt that, I bet the number of people in college today for non-STEM, management or finance degrees is astronomically higher than the 80s.  Sorry that your degree in afroeurasian bisexual art appreciation isn't paying off the loans you took to get it.

We are a nation in decline. There are generations that experienced triumph and tragedy plenty and not so much and war and peace from the beginning. A select few generations reaped the rewards of America at her peak . It just wasn’t yours . Good luck .

You misunderstand.  I'm sure I could make my way successfully if I were in my twenties today because I am determined and driven just like I was 30+ years ago.  Of course it would be different, but that's why it is important to adapt to reality, because reality sure isn't going to change to suit you.

 Everyone has their challenges to overcome.  Were mine harder than my parents'?  In some ways yes, in others no.  Than my grandparents?  Absolutely not.  And neither do the millenials and Gen Z people have it harder than those who grew up in the great depression.


Work overtime, get a second job, or make do with less.  Just like when I took mandatory 10-15% pay cuts in lieu of layoffs several times in my career.

When I lost my job and was out of work for four months that's what happened.  I ended up going independent and contracted for two years and when my COBRA ran out I went without insurance.  Had to pay the Obamacare penalty.  

I moved from Chico where I made $33k/yr and paid $500/mo rent to Sunnyvale where I made $42k and paid $1100/mo.  Get a roommate or three.  I rented a bedroom in a co-worker's house the first few months in CA.

Yep.  Bidenomics sucks.  Democrat lockdowns suck.  Your generation voted for it.  Save money by doing your own maintenance.  Run errands on your way home from work.  Do what it takes.

Not following.  I had my car vandalized and parts stolen a couple of times, too.  Sucks.  If you got fined for working on your car on someone else's property...why didn't you do it at a family or friend's place?  Who thinks trespassing is ok?


Sucks.  Same with ageism in high tech (on top of all the SJW crap).  Do you think GenX hasn't had to deal with that stuff?  Push back.  Yes, that's risky, but nothing is going to change if everyone just bows their head and goes along.

Sounds like you knew the rules and tried to slip by.  How is not being accepted by .mil a new thing?

I guess I'm just a hard ass.  I expect adults to be able to find ways to improvise, adapt, and overcome obstacles in life.  The world is not fair.  Never has been.  Deal with it.  Whining and blaming others for problems does nothing to fix them.  Don't vote for idiots.  Encourage your friends to do the same.  

That's all most of us have been saying, in this thread and others. But we get shouted down by angry posters who call us lazy, entitled and stupid for being born after 1975 if we dare make comment on the decline unless it follows the approved GD narrative.

I wonder if a big part is "boomers" only went to college if they were academically inclined or had financially successful parents, with few exceptions. Tho young men who weren't good students and didn't have a rich daddy got a job after high school. Maybe they went into manufacturing or retail. Maybe they learned a trade on the job. Maybe they went into the family business. The young women often married young, including those who went to college for the "MRS degree" if they were more interested in a family than a career. Maybe they worked as secretaries or in other jobs that didn't require a 4 year degree.

By contrast, "millennials" were raised to believe they needed a 4 year degree. They were discouraged from following blue collar career paths. We can argue about why that was, but when someone who wasn't in the top quartile academically in high school goes to college without a burning desire to pursue a profession that requires higher education, they're unlikely to magically become better students. As mediocre students, they're probably not getting academic scholarships, especially if they're White or Asian males. If they don't have rich parents or an athletic scholarship or GI benefits to foot the bill, that means borrowing the money.  

I'm not disputing that higher education costs have risen far more quickly than wages. However, I think there's an element of supply and demand behind that.  

I don't personally know any boomers who have college degrees. Only a few that I know in my GenX/Xennial peer group have them. Lots of degrees in the 35 and under group, based on resumes that come across my desk.

Completely anecdotal FWIW.

I was born after 1975 . Be tough or smart, preferably both .

There it is in a nutshell.  Never give up.

Oh, well then welcome fellow stupid lazy avocado toast millennial. JLPIII and Eagerminuteman will be along shortly to give you a tour of the facilities. Please wipe your feet before entering the tents.

thnx.

Ain't no neighbors in AJ.

just co-conspirators or alibis

Fucking Boo Hoo, historical conditions, inflation, market forces, sheer hard work, predisposed *some* people older than me to be successful.

Lazy young fuckers.

*I'm 47.

tent?

look at big pimpin' over here.

i'm still using a stahtah tent AKA harbour freight blue tarp.

Tents? I just went out in the desert and found some Indian ruins. Only need a Bluetooth speaker every time the hikers come through to keep em from staying too long. Who knew mud huts made for decent housing?

be me: JL Pettimore III

Big tears boomers ruined American jobs,
buys H1B tent.