Because if you read the thread it all started about smart phones. Some people saying they needed an expensive smart phone just do their job (maybe even requiring them to purchase an upgrade when they otherwise wouldn't have). I was asking what jobs required the use of their personal phone.

I'm still using an IPhone 6 which already can't update to the latest IOS and is starting to lose app support. So if I had a job that actually required running latest versions of stuff or newer apps I probably would have been forced to upgrade long ago, at my own expense. But I can still use it to call my boss just fine if needed.

Not asking if you need a basic way to contact people in life.

No one is saying they need a $1000 phone for their job. It's 2021 and a smartphone is the default for phones. My Motorola G7 cost $200 and it's kinda nice to have. A smart phone isn't why people can't buy a house

Not sure why anyone here is arguing about smartphones. You can literally sell any AR that you own, and buy any smartphone on the market today.

Having an old phone in your pocket does not show that you are any more, or any less, financially responsible. It is the most boomer argument that you could possibly make, if you own any AR15, right now.

Either you're not listening to what I'm saying or your being intentionally dense. It spun off into asking about using your personal device as a requirement for your job.

It's all about options and choices just because cheaper phones are available and you bought one that's probably a good value doesn't mean that's what other people are doing. In fact it's about people that probably should be buying that $200 but making bad choices and going for that $1000 option because it's still a low enough monthly payment.
Making poor choices on something like phone prices probably means someone is making lots of poor choices for lot of other little things too that really add up.
Hence how people can easily end up hemorrhaging money and not really have a clue as to where it's going.

Again choices. For lots of people that means one or the other, not both. (Like you're saying)

A phone is just one small example of a purchase that might mean sacrificing from something else.

Nope

$80 phone and a $45 plan

It's a solid theory.  A highly paid person pays their own way, and then some.  America needs all of the Elon Musk type immigrants we can get.

On the other hand, a group of low-IQ workers doesn't pay their way, and actually becomes a parasite on the system.  We've got more than enough of that.

Now we need to get those highly paid immigrants (such as Asians) to stop reflexively voting democrat.

If any millennials (or others) want to learn to get rich, this is a decent start:

("Lose the overpriced cell phones" is one of the tips )
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich-from-zero-to-hero-in-one-blog-post/


Another site with tons of good information:
https://www.lynalden.com/save-money/

How does Marriage benefit anyone in this day and age?

I have a $200 smart phone, only one I've ever bought, and $15/month plan.

Scans thread, sees only a few whom may understand what the central bankers have done...

well, if you're a stereotypical bluepilled boomer and ignore the divorce statistics...

FYATHYRIO

I guess you'd know about being on your knees, junior.

No, and this is the most moronic take possible, because the smart immigrants are generally just as leftist and just as un-American, but they have real influence. It's one thing to have foreigners working construction, it's another to have them in charge of your media. Remember, it was an Indian immigrant that made the decision to ban Trump from Twitter

You can go ahead and stop worryingly about the “Long term trend”

It’s Done.

Those millennials just sold themselves and all future decendents  into slavery.   Lots of older people helped of course, but they’ll be long gone by the time it gets bad.

Looks like the one thing all generations have in common (at least for the mediocre members) is a penchant for using everyone else as an excuse for their shortcomings.  

"Muh smartphones"


I'm sure it has nothing to do with this:


or this:


or this:


or this:



This thread combined with the Q shit is proof why conservatives are too stupid to survive.

Having families and owning businesses are two things that are proven to make conservative voters. Yet, conservatives give zero shits about making these things easier for the younger generations. Barriers continue to get put up in front of young kids who would otherwise be favorable towards these activities, but boomercons reactions are "pick yourself up by your bootstraps kiddo" (i.e. go fuck yourselves) "I did it (when it was much easier), you can too". Then they are surprised when they flock to socialism...

My two boys (31 and 27) each have the latest personal phone and work phone, two work iPads, two work laptops, two home laptops, and Seal Team Six-level gaming systems.

They're both in the software industry and earn ridiculously large paychecks.

And they are 10X wealthier than I was at their age.

It is gonna get MUCH worse now that we have the dumbest asshole as president in U.S. history (with his minions a close second).

I'm required to have insurance

I'm required to have a phone

I'm required to have WiFi

I'm required to pay taxes out the ass.

Based. I love the schadenfreude. It's like watching boomers stare down the barrel of a loaded gun. You wanna feel sorry but it can't be helped their overwhelming stupidity and greed.

That’s a very interesting example.
The median household income in 1968 was $7700.  About 57K in today’s dollars.  In 70% of households, only Dad had a paycheck.  
The median household income now is about 66K dollars.  It’s better than in 1968!  Well, except for the fact that 60% of households are now dual income with both Mom and Dad working.

The average cost of a new car in 1968 was $2800.  About 20K in today’s dollars.  The average new light vehicle sold in America is now $38,000.
For $2200 you could have gotten a base Nova.
That would have gotten you, say, a regular V8, power steering, mid level Chevelle Malibu.
For $3200 you could have gotten a positraction, disc brakes, bucket seats, 396 Chevelle SS.

Jumping to the Corvette alone brought you to $4500.
A rare, major performance upgrade to the L88, unless you got a deal, listed for $6300.

We've gone from one income earner supporting his wife and 3.2 kids with extra for savings, to 2 income earners going deep into debt to support their 1.8 kids.

$15 minimum wage will cripple most boomers.

Their fixed incomes simply will not provide enough to survive. It's just another step in forcing everyone to the government tit.

They all feel they are where they are by hard work, ability, intelligence, superiority, etc.

And some are.


I used to have the same exact feeling.
I still don’t like the percentage of snowflake, entitled, not wanting to pay dues, etc. attitudes of many in the younger generation.

Half a dozen years out from retiring from the military, and I am paying 140K in federal income tax.  I am doing very well.

Physically, I was capable of playing soccer or baseball at the college level, and passing a SOF pipeline.  Most people are not.
Mentally, I was tested by my school around 12 and had an IQ breaking over 3sd above the mean/99.9th+ percentile.  SATs, GTs, and adult test for a scholarship, and GREs were more modest, ranging from 2+sd above mean/98th+ percentile to 99.6th percentile.  With none of the “absent minded professor” or “them smart guys got no common sense” or interpersonal/social issues.  With an ENTP personality type.  And not below average height, or above average ugly.

I was brought up with a strong work ethic and zero sense of entitlement.  I had drive.  I could pretty much have done anything with my life I wanted.  Except for aging and time.  I would like to have been an Infantryman Paratrooper, Ranger Bn, Green Beret, SEAL, Force Recon, STEM undergrad degree, classic liberal alerts B.A. degree, Tier One unit, STEM Ph.D., Emergency MD, Trauma Surgeon, Huey Pilot, Jet Fighter Pilot, Astronaut, affluent, classic muscle car collector, off road over landing, million plus dollar country estate owning, falconing, horse breeding, MWD trainer/handler, adventuring archaeologist, paleontologist, historian, multilingual, secret agent, powerlifting, shooting champion, race car driving, sat diving marine biologist, be a UFC champion, on target under fire combat veteran, with dozens of sons sired via multiple hot, brilliant, athletic women, with a massively successful business where I didn’t  have to work anymore, capable of restoring or working on any gun, car, watch, electronic device, etc.  But the majority of those things didn’t happen.  And at my age, there is no possibility for many of them.  And for some of them, my max skill despite training and effort was not enough to compete at the serious level in shooting, driving, fighting, or lifting.

And when I look around at a lot of  people that kicked ass in life, despite starting from nothing, a very disproportionate portion had mental, physical, and drive ability.  

And, while the game of life is always stacked in favor of the house, it was far less stacked when entering adulthood for the silent generation, boomers, gen X, and older millennials than it is for youngest millennials and GenZ entering adulthood now.

And while many of them have a soma like upbringing free of any real adversity or challenge, full of safe spaces and participation trophies, with manufactured outrage to participate in, it is literally full of big brother surveillance, Newspeak, psychological manipulation, granting them comfort in exchange for accepting their predetermined role in society.

And things have been made way harder for them to say fuck that, I’m going to kick ass and do my own thing.

You're still not considering interest rates and how much the home actually ends  costing after the end of the term.

Low rated are driving demand and increasing prices.

How would you like boomers to help you with that?

You don't have to go into a $400,000 right away.

Going deep into debt for what though? Just to keep a roof over their head? Or for that sweet side by side?

How old are you?

Do you really think the boomers will be effected?

Are you glad about the direction things are going?

Damn.  .   If this isn’t a copypasta, it should be.

I have striven for copypasta caliber posts many times, but never quite seem to have gotten there.

The basic point is that just because everyone on GD is a genius, multimillionaire, former operator, business tycoon, super model wife, hung like a porn star, 6’4” tall fitness model looking guy,99.9%  of Americans are not, and in previous generations a large portion of them were able to climb a few rungs of the American dream or even skip a few steps.  Things are not as they were, and all the bread and circuses and soma - while palatable and just fine or even enjoyable for many - are a poor substitute.

Welfare class thread.

The right owns a lot of the blame for that. Take pro skilled immigrant stance, and do outreach. Lots of immigrants are very socially and economically conservative, but they get a message that conservatives hate them. Hard to expect them to embrace the republican party when they see that. If conservatives ever want to have power, we need outreach. You can end immigration today but its not going to change anything, other than make America less competitive. We need more than just white males voting R.

When was that time period that tons of people were jumping multiple rungs of the American dream? Was it when virtually everyone lived and died on the same farm? The people who went west, what percentage of them got rich? Was it the people working their 9-5s punching a timeclock in a factory?

I'm the last person to say that everything is great right now, but for what you describe, its actually never been easier to jump into the upper middle class- its growing extremely quickly, and larger than its ever been before.

You know what millennials never start these threads?

The ones that make something of themselves instead of making excuses....

Bingo

I’m essentially using the last 80 years or so, but, even though life was arduous and harder 100, 200 years ago-  you could be a property owners, etc. Vs what they left behind.

Are you correcting four double CS single income and size of households when you talk about the growing middle class?

In the 1960s 3/4 of homes were single income and averaged 2.5 kids.  61% of households were middle class.  About 10% were upper middle, and 4% high.  On the other end 9% were lower middle class, and 16% were “low”.

Now 50% of homes are middle class.  2/3 of homes are dual income, supporting an average of 1.8 kids.  The lower middle class have been constant at about 9%.  The lowest class has creeped up to about 20%.  I don’t really know what to do about that.  


Upper middle class has grown to about 12%.  High to 9%.  This is fantastic.  Roughly 7% have grown above middle class.

And 4% slid down.

While some of that upward mobility if s rom completely, self made, single income, with lots of kids, that’s not where the majority is coming from.

This upward mobility and those improved class lifestyles are with two income earners supporting less kids.  And built upon pre-existing family success, or started and got going under different circumstances than exist now.  And, more importantly, a lot of this upward mobility is based on and very disproportionately distributed. being above 90th percentile brain wise means being three times over represented among the wealthy and highly successful.  Over 98th percentile, eight times so.

Everyone tries to Pooh Pooh it,
But I borrowed a simple graphic.

Everyone will try to downplay it, and control it with dozens of variate factors to get the correlation down, but when all is said and done, all those factors are directly related to intelligence.  



But, if people that already have money, and smart people, etc. can crush it, but the ability to crush it for others is less than it was, we are going to have a problem.

Younger silent generation and older boomers coming of age, graduating HS, graduating college, getting married, etc. in the 1960s had far more availability of merit based scholarships, livable benefit providing jobs, proportionally lower rent,  living expenses, college, etc.  None of them came to adulthood unable to join the military because they were a class C felon from when they were 16 and had sex with their 14 year old girlfriend, or because they got in a fight at recess and had to do a ton of counseling and get stuck on psyc meds for it.  None of them got kicked out of college because they wore blackface to a Halloween part, called someone a fag, or lost a job because they got drunk and slapped a waitress on the butt.  None of them got bumped from their med school  or business school or law school slot  for a transgender lesbian or color in a wheelchair with much lower scores, or got waitlisted And not hired in their PD or FD for  4’9” tall 87 pound females instead. They STARTED a job out of college ABOVE the median household income.  They started businesses without many of the crippling factors we have now.

Younger Boomers and Older Xers, like me, that came of during our period also had, compared to now, better availability of proportionally less expensive cars, rents, starter homes, college, etc. and a more forgiving social environment.  The trends were already there, but not like now.

Things are much better for the bottom of the heap and the poles that are never going to kick ass at life, and the people at the far end of the kick ass at life heap are going to be fine.  The lot of those in the middle is kind of F’d right now.  

You need a job with at least a 60K salary and some benefits in order to have the kind of lifestyle, benefits, insurance, etc. that a welfare, EBT, section 8, Medicaid collecting baby mamma or an SSDI/Medicare scammer has.  That’s a 30$ an hour job.  The average HS graduate in America starts around $11, like 25K a year, and the mean overall is and hour and overall is about 45K a year.  The average college grad starts around $22 an hour, about 45K a year, then 65K a year.

Something seems kind of wrong when regular people working their ass of start off worse than someone that does not work.
And even a new computer science, engineering, or nursing B.S. degree starts at a level on par with welfare momma or fat ass SSDI scooter boy.

I can argue how much bigger homes are, how much better cars are, how many luxuries we have, and how high our standard of living is and how I went from poverty to being a top 1%er, and how people just need to suck it up, dig in, etc.

But the way things were for me, and what worked, and how things are now is very different.

Not everyone is going to crush a petroleum engineering degree, pre med and MD, MS in comp  sci, etc.
Get one of those awesome retirement and benefits big city FD or PD jobs,  
A great union plant job,
Be able to hack being a lineman,
Live where a plumber can make serious bank, etc.

The seething rage and black hole sense of entitlement of the underclass was not tolerated, catered to, sheltered from shame, supported, or enabled at the expense of the producers.
Even the least capable producers were better off.
The net positive producers were not punished, estranged, marginalized, cajoled, etc.
The high end net producers were held as an example, lauded, and allowed free reign to success.
Now, only the very most elite, party line, right think, newspeak parroting will be.

If you cannot understand this, or want to change it, or at least express you get it, the pendulum will never shift back, and more will continue to be lost.

Im a millennial that’s 4+ times more wealthy than my boomer parents.

It’s because Im not a huge piece of shit.

Pretty simple really.

I'd argue against that point.

Taking the (implied) stance that the only reason someone wouldn't have 4 times the wealth of their boomer parents is because they are a piece of shit is kind of a piece of shit thing to do.

edit

That's because Boomers were busting their ass at a real job when they turned 18.  Married by 21, buying a house by 23 ish and having kids.  Being responsible good Americans.

Kids today are still playing video games in their mom's basement at 30 waiting for Daddy Government to bring them a successful middle class lifestyle.

Fucking kids.

Attached File

my boomer parents are pieces of shit.