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Generation Wrecked
Ryosen writes "Fortune magazine has an interesting article discussing how members of Generation X (those born between 1966 and 1975) have been damaged by the fall of the economy and the life-long ramifications of the dot.com boom-bust, stating 'No generation since the Depression has been set up for failure like this.' Particularly disturbing is the statement 'Worse yet, for some Gen Xers, their peak earning years are behind them. Buried in college and credit card debt, a lot of them won't be able to catch up as they approach their prime spending years.'
Are the best years of our lives truly behind us?"
This has been pretty obvious for some time now to those of us in the middle of it all.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I missed all this crap!
WHoo hoo! I'm living the high life like it was 1989!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
It's not my fault I'm a bum, it's all because I was born in a twenty year period of time.
Does all this 'Generation whatever' crap annoy the hell out of anyone else? People do not care about their 'generation' in general.
But, those of us who didn't blow every paycheck on toys and assorted junk are doing ok. I drive a modest car, live in a modest apartment and don't live beyond my means. I have 0 credit card debt and 8 months of salary saved away.
Michael Loves Me!
I was born in 62, so I guess things must be sucking for some other reason...
Gen-X'ers, (including me) may have to admit that the lifestyle we got used to from 1996-2001 was a mirage, and we really can't afford a county club house and two BMW's in the garage. Here in Northern VA we are starting to see people selling their $500K McMansions and downsizing to a house more in keeping with their current income levels. For those of us that have been working in the dot com environment the last few years, I think its necessary to assume you will make less money the next couple of years, and adjust your lifestyle accordingly.
I'm not sure I agree totally with this article.. I mean it was because of this boom that I got thwarted into the IT market before I could even graduate from college. I was making nearly $40K at 23yrs of age. (im 26 now.) I was able to buy a house at 24 and become a *responsible* person. i.e. not living with momma. So it shot me up to a higher point in my life faster than the average bear and now i consider myself *ahead* of the game even though all those huge salary increases are gone. oh well..my two cents.
What's becomming clear is that the inital tech boom was a 1-off. You're never going to get that kind of frenzy in the IT industry again. A lot of people were getting way over paid, or in this case of companies, way over funded.
A few people were big winners, they were funded by the much larger number of people who were losers.
It'll recover, of course it will, but never to quite the same excitement "next big thing" frenzy.
The result will be a stronger long term industry but it is entirely possible people will struggle to earn as much in the future as they could during the boom.
Especially as there are a lot of good graduates now that started degrees during the boom in the hope of getting a massive payig job. This over supply is going to restrict saleries for a few years.
Sure, it's not a spectacular amount, but in my area you can get pretty nice house for $80,000, apartment rent is $400 a month, taxes aren't high....
I'm 21 and I've gotten $1,000 raise each year. Sure, I'd like to make $50,000, but I'm in a pretty stable position in IT (basically, I'm the only person who touches it in a 50 year old, 150 person company) so I'll just tread water for a while.
I think my first computer job was working as a PC Tech at Best Buy, making $9-$10 an hour, then I was a wiring goon/PC mover for $11 an hour at a 'consulting firm', then I got to where I am now.
The days of reading an HTML/Java book and going to a $65,000/year job with a startup are behind us.
I am not trivializing the loss of jobs, nor am I saying the economy is about to boom again. However, there are many people that used to punch a clock working harder than ever to start up new businesses or boost the technology base in old businesses. Both of these are good things!
Click here or here.
My sister -- Sister Reba -- might be considered Generation X.
She doesn't have a dime saved. Everything she spends comes from Riley the boyfriend (a Gen-X'r who dropped out several liberal arts colleges, got a short story published when he was hosteling around Europe, and now has such a severe case of Writer's Block (a fear that he can't reproduce his single success) that he and Sister Reba spend all their money just 'trying to have fun.'
I think they live in a perpetual state of 'recapturing their youth.'
It's sad. I've saved nearly everything, and not long ago loaned Sister Reba a thousand bucks to pay off the last of her college debts. But her credit rating is ruined.
Yet the two of them -- Sister Reba and Riley -- continually talk about the 1970's like they were the best thing in the world. Riley tells me about the movies that changed his life -- Saturday Night Fever, Apocalypse Now, the Deer Hunter -- and swears that at even at age 33 he's still got a good novel inside of him -- somewhere.
Not long ago Riley was reading Jonathon Franzen's _Corrections_ and was so enraged that Franzen had written *his* novel, that he pitched it at one of the plate glass windows in their townhouse. The window shattered, the super won't foot the bill, and now their even deeper in debt.
Me, I know what's what. Or at least I think I do.
If those wacko islamicists are targetting the economy like they say they are, then I know what I have to do. I have to save, save, save. I have to prepare for the day when the power goes out for good and there's no more water coming out of the tap.
It scares me, and I'm only 16.
But Sister Reba and Riley? Fuck it. They could care less. They work at their dumb jobs all days just to pay off their credit cards.
Andrea Tinker, professor of Social Gerontology at King's College, London recently published the results of research into the way that the changing age distribution of the population is affecting different generations. Her conclusion is that today's under 30s are the first generation who can expect lower living standards than their parents. In this writeup, I will present some British demographic statistics, and my own hypothesis as to the underlying reason for Professor Tinker's conclusion.
Fewer children are being born: 91 live births per 1000 women in 1961, dropping to only 55 in 2000. In the 25-29 age group, the drop is even more dramatic, from 178/1000 in 1961 to 95/1000 in 2000.
It is clear that the trend is towards fewer taxpayers supporting more pensioners. I believe that this is no coincidence, rather that the generation(s) born since 1970 were systematically and deliberately set up by the policy makers of the so-called "baby boomer" generation.
They set up a system for healthcare and pensions under which taxation is immediately paid out to recipients, rather than being invested for growth and the purchase of an annuity in a real pension system. They did this at a time when they knew that their own contributions would be minimal, given the population's age distribution at the time. Quite cynically, they decided that it would be easier to levy punitive taxation on their own children and grandchildren than invest for their own futures.
The money they saved by doing so, they poured into the housing market, driving up prices and placing mortgages out of the reach of many first time buyers. This created massive inflation in property prices - almost 20%/year at present - which they benefitted immensely from, already being owners of at least one property.
The state education system has been systematically wrecked. Grammar schools and the Assisted Places Scheme which sponsored children to attend fee-paying schools have been abolished, as the baby boomers further try to pull the ladder up after themselves. These same baby boomers, who once swore never to trust anyone over 30, are now in positions of responsibility and have carefully structured corporations to ensure that today's under 30s cannot enjoy privileges such as a job-for-life that the baby boomers enjoyed. They are scrapping defined-benefits pension schemes, after making sure that they got them for themselves, at the expense of those currently paying into employer's pension funds - us.
We are also paying the price for their disasterous social experiments. Soaring crime rates and falling literacy rates originate in the pseudo-liberal ideals of the baby boomers, who knew that they would escape scot free while their children and grandchildren would pick up the pieces for them. Rather than being the unfortunate result of a well-intentioned experiment than didn't work out, it is indicative of the baby boomer's defining attitudes: firstly, that nothing matters to them more than instant gratification, and secondly that they will never have to face any consequences for their actions.
What can we do? It may be too late; huge damage has already been done to the economic and social fabric of our country. The only hope is that when those of us born since 1970 are in power, that we use that power wisely: to ensure that not a penny of our our generation's money is wasted on or by those that came before us. Let them live on the pensions that they knowingly intended for us, with the standards of healthcare and accomodation that they intended for us, and let us invest our own money in our own future and our own children.
"Age 32 and piercing-free, Karen Doss . . . has just $5,000 in a 401(k) and $20,000 in home equity. Ideally, someone her age should have at least $100,000 stashed away." Fuck me, $100,000 by age 32? I'm about $100,000 behind, then.
"Gen Xers managed to survive in that environment by denouncing long-held workplace tenets like corporate loyalty. " Did we eschew loyalty, or did they treat us like "human resources" and fire us and lay us off? I loved my first computer job , and would still be there if they weren't evil bastards.
"The Campbells' luck dried up in April, when Alex was laid off, rehired as a contractor without benefits, then rehired yet again as a full-time employee but at a lower level. " Well, sounds like all he needed was company loyalty, huh? I've said for a year this shit was intentional, that the whole "tech downturn" was an intentional ploy to lower our salaries and benefits.
"So is Karen prepared? On this subject, she does her best slacker impression. " They call people our age "slackers" several times throughout the article. Sorry, I thought we were working? The article says how we keep working jobs, the economy sucks, etc., but it also keeps calling us slackers. How are we different than our parents and grandparents? We work, pay the bills, try to do better, etc. The author of this piece is torn between wanting to tell how fucked up things have been for a lot of us, and wanting to insult us.
Everyone jumped ship to go 'design web pages' for 60k and now they don't have college degrees.
The people who stuck it out, have graduated and now can make 60k, 'legitimately'
My god, why didn't you tell me this sooner? Had I known that money wouldn't flow like water forever, I might have tried to make some financially responsible decisions, like not buying more crap than I could afford to buy! *forehead smack*
You might be amazed--nay, astonished--to learn that there are a whole bunch of people our age who are weathering this storm just fine. Not everybody lived like the movies told us to live, you know.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I'm not exactly a Gen Xer, born in 1979 (generally considered to be the end of the era), and while my prime earnings oppertunities may be behind me, I'm not dumb enough to shackle myself with college, car or credit card debt (all payed off).
.com overhype in the first place: bad spending habits.
The problem comes from the same stupidity that caused the
I've never seen such whining about a "generation".
Before the dotcom bubble, we saw these same exact articles on how jobs were tough to find, people with college degrees were bussing tables.
Let me give you a hint: except for very narrow slices of american history, the economy has always been "tough".
If GenX (and its a dumb label) has a failing its this:
They're convinced debt is no big deal and is inevitable.
I see kids in college with brand new cars!
Then they whine that they graduated with debt and no job!
Here's some myths that I wish the media would start pushing:
1) Don't overpay for college. A 4-year degree from any accredited university is pretty much the same as any other. The idea of paying more is stupid except in about 2 or 3 "big name" schools. But boys, Penn State = Michigan = Duke = Virginia Tech = USC = Oregon = Cornell.
So if you have a choice, go for the cheapest school! Use your fricking head!!!
2) Debt matters - if you graduate from college with significant debt (and yes, $10K is significant debt) you're handicapped financially for the rest of your life.
3) Students should not have credit cards - (see debt matters). This does 2 bad things, first it puts you in debt when you can't afford it second you never learn to put off your "wants" until you can afford it.
4) Learn the difference between want and need - you may "need" a laptop computer (although I doubt it). But you "want" the latest $2500 wonder laptop. You can get by with a used $300 laptop.
I could go on and on. The people whining are people who don't think ahead, put themselves in a bad financial position and then whine society isn't taking care of them.
They're a bunch of spoiled rotten babies.
One of the things that I've noticed is that many employers are charging alot more for their products and services but are paying their employees alot less then they are worth. It's been an employer's dream always to have this happen but it's no longer a dream.
/me commits suicide!
For instance, I just got done working at this computer service based business in where I was making 36k/year. I'm worth 55k/year and when hired was told that "it would be no problem" if I were motivated, etc. I quit when I found out that the max anyone makes there at the company was 36k, heh. I was there for 2 years.
Well, the charges that we were giving customers was insane. If it was after hours and on a weekend, they were being charged like $400 an hour for computer service. Granted it was pry to fix one or two of their servers or something but still, that's some serious income for the company and yet I get to see none.
No tech jobs I find want to start anyone much above what I was making and most are lying to me about what I could potentially make at the company. There's a whole slew of $8/hour jobs around me, especially if I want to go into the food service field.
I'm 35 right now and pull in $125,000 a year. I'll be retired by age 50 despite the current market gloom (or *because* of it, actually). I arrived here by working hard and not being lured by will-o-the-wisp nonsense. So, please do not include me in your "generation". Thank you.
I joined the internet rise in 1995 straigh out of college, and my entire skill set was based on the following years of experience. I worked through a lot of successful start-up companies, building up enough seed money to start one of my own. Enter the dot com failure due to the choking number of net companies. Not only did I lose my company, I lost all my money, and gained some hefty debt trying to keep things afloat.
At that point not only was my skill set the same as the other 50,000 people out there applying to every small position that cropped up for half the pay it used to be, I had a failed company on my resume. An emergency change of my skillset from web to video games is all that kept me from going back to salaries I was making in 1997-8.
I mean come on this is like saying being overweight is bad, or shooting heroin can cause problems down the road.
However, that being said my income has risen every year except one when I moved from Dallas TX to Norman OK and now I make more than I did in Dallas. I guess it all depends on the opportunities you create for yourself. I knew several people in college that dropped out because with their MCSE they could get a 50 to 75K job in Dallas overnight. I decided to stay the course and get a broad education in both business (both MIS and Finance degrees) and technical learning (I began working with linux in '95 as well as Windows based systems).
Having a wide area of knowledge only helps. I've saved my company 10s of thousands of dollars by implementing Linux based solutions instead of MS solutions at my full time job and we are a MS shop only (not anymore).
I guess it's all in how hard you worked toward tangible goals when things were going good as opposed to taking the easy way out.
Frozen salary, every day reading e-mails with subjects like "Thank you and good-bye", helplessly watching how entire product lines are being discontinued, development units are closing, waiting for my turn to say goodbye...
Another telecom engineer developing network products for an equipment provider... oh yes, and born in 1974! There lies my mistake! Unrecoverable error!
The recession of 1990-1991 was more painful, with a much higher unemployment rate.
It's not that difficult. If you're making $60,000, you don't need to drive a $50,000 car. People my age (sigh - ok, Generation X) who are spiralling into credit card debt due to gratuitous overspending in the "boom years" only have themselves to blame. Save judiciously, live conservatively, and crappy economies like this one won't hurt quite as much.
Being labelled a "slacker" by the "me generation" is such a crock of shit. Their only concern seems to be that they're not screwing me enough by getting me to work 80 hours a week to fund their fat salaries and Lexus payments. The current generation always seeks to undo the excesses of the previous generation. Maybe we actually want to spend some time with friends and family and "live life like we mean it."
Gen X has the highest contribution to their 401(k) of any generation -- why? Because instead of fixing social security, money is getting doled out in a tax cut to benefit the "me generation" so that we can fund 14 retired people when we're at 50. And we have the highest rate of vounteerism. Slacker, my ass.
"It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
There is a change in the paradigm of life since the sixties. Up until the sixties, one working parent families were the norm. Now two working parents represent by far the largest majority of families. Why? because you need the incompe produced by two to even approach the style of living that took one (income) then. I think that everyone under fifty is doing worse then their parents did. Why? well first off, for the reason above. Second, most people don't have retirement funds set aside. As they reach retirement age, they won't be able to do so. Up until the early seventies, Social Security was sufficent for at least a reasonably comfortable retirement. Now it falls far short of even poverty levels..and the baby boomers haven't really begun to draw it yet! Once they do, we'll be lucky if it can even stay solvent. If history proves me wrong on this, it'll make me happy.
throw BOO_HOO("Your own damn fault");
I take exception to this statement - if you are up to your ass in credit card debt, you have no-one but yourself to blame.
I was reading how the AVERAGE college student has over $5000 in credit card debt (and here am I obsessing over having a debt of about that when I have a high-paying job!) When I went to school, I didn't even HAVE a credit card! Why?
BECAUSE I DIDN'T HAVE A FREAKING JOB!
No income -> no way to pay -> no card!
It's one thing to have a high student loan burden - but that's why you have TEN YEARS to pay it off!
If people would stop going into debt for crap that will have no value when the debt is paid off, and ONLY go into debt for things of long-term value (i.e. don't go into debt buying a stereo, go into debt buying a HOUSE! Don't buy expensive cars that will be junk before you clear the debt, buy a car you can pay off in a couple of years or less) then they would be a lot less worried about the future.
But because credit cards are easy to get, and kids in school are told "Go ahead, buy that stereo, buy that DVD player, go to Padre for Spring Break, you have a credit card", they end up with a lot of crap and a lot of debt!
I was born in 1965, so I miss being a Gen-X'er by a year. I was fortunate to be born to parents that were children of the Depression, and who hadn't bought into the BS put out by Dr.'s Spock et. al. I was raised to take responsibility for my life.
So BOO HOO HOO, cry me a river for the kids who screwed up by charging a bunch of crap on their credit cards. Maybe they will learn from their mistakes.
But I doubt it.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Just don't believe any corporate BS. They are out to get you.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
After going to culinary school, my starting income was $18,600. This was for a sous chef position at a large, expensive hotel. This was 9 years ago. Over the next 5 years, my income in the culinary industry, rose to a whopping $26,000 per year. I'm at a loss on how I should have saved $100,000 during that time, purchased a house, and had more than $20,000 in equity in it. I wasn't exactly driving a BMW during that time. 4 years ago, I changed careers, ( I wanted to have a regular family life), and my income has changed becuase of it, so it's easier to save now, but I think the expectations in the article are a bit higher than what the average person is capable of.
Gee, if life was all about money (spending it, making it) and I read this article, I would be rather depressed.
Personal enrichment and the best years of your life have little to do with things you can buy. I don't expect the writers and editors over at Fortune to understand this.
Speak truth to power.
Not to get too political on either side of the fence, but perhaps now that the bubble has burst and the easy money has dried up, the Gen X'ers will get some civic responsibility and start voting...
You know that Europe's shrinking (despite Italy, France, Poland and other Catholic countries) while the US birth rate is rising, right?
They're at under replacement rate while we've just gone over 2.1 births/woman/lifetime.
Go secular humanism!
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Like I have been saying what my age group needs is a good depression. Maybe their entire warped moral structure will change and they'll actually grow up. I can only hope.
Perhaps instead of complaining they only have a 41 inch big screen TV instead of a 61 inch they'll actually be thankful they HAVE A TV.
Perhaps instead of running out to a club hyped up on X and pot they might actually be forced to confront reality and THINK about important things instead of hiding from reality in superficial relationships.
Perhaps the children will toughen up and not whine and cry when people don't like them as they desperately try to litigate a perfect world that will never exist. You FAT, YOUR UGLY, AND PEOPLE AREN'T ALWAYS GOING TO LIKE YOU FOR -WHO YOU ARE-, GET OVER IT. YOUR SHORT NOT VERTICALLY CHALLENGED. DEAL WITH IT.
Perhaps trial lawyers won't be millionaires on average and people that love JUSTICE will be the only ones left practicing law.
Perhaps pocket book doctors will vanish left only with doctors that are in it to help people.
Perhaps when all those trial lawyers are gone insurance rates would drop and medical professionals can focus on saving lives and not red tape.
Perhaps they'll develop some self-esteem and grow a unique and self-identifying personality instead of rebelling by looking exactly like ANOTHER group of people rebelling.
Perhaps people will value each other on important things instead of the superficial things they can't afford anymore.
Perhaps trite and watered down sitcoms will become readily seen as crap and perhaps they'll learn to read and write re-developing an interest in real literature. Maybe, just maybe when a teacher asks a class "Who is your favorite Author" Steven King won't come out of their mouths 19 out of 20 times (And I was a teacher btw and have asked this question). Maybe names like Milton or Ambrose Pierce might pop up. They might even start reading from he PG archives more!
Perhaps people will once again gather in a park on a warm summer day and philosophize about life and all that is around them.
Perhaps we can avoid "A Brave New World" and dodge the "Orwellian" society.
Perhaps... perhaps not...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
..what life was like for them. My grandparents grew up on a farm doing manual labor, and worked their entire lives to improve their lives and those of their offspring. When they were my age, the didn't have air conditioning. Oh yeah, and there was this whole thing about my grandfather watching his friends get hosed off the inside of an airplane because there was a REAL threat of evil in the world. Oh...us poor gen X'ers. We wouldn't know prosperity if it sat on our faces...because it IS and we DON'T KNOW IT. We have more than anyone has ever had. I almost wish we'd have a real depression so we'd know what it's like.
I'm pretty much slap bang in the middle of the described bracket (1971).
I graduated from school in 1988 and spent the next 11 years studying (without much enthousiasm), partying (with enthousiasm), generally having a good time.
My peers had overtaken me by 1995, high-paying jobs, stock options, stomach ulcers, the lot.
In 1999 I was kind of jealous coz i was approaching 30, not much to show for it, a classical "loser".
I then joined the telco industry in 2000 and witnessed the crash from within, my stock options were never worth jack (thank god we didn't IPO)
My Point? Due to my modest studenty lifestyle which I continue to this day, I never punched my expenses or debt up to an unmanageable level, the telco crash didn't affect me as much as my friends (almost all of which lost most of their paper millions through hanging on to their shares), and I am generally quite happy with my life.
I have enjoyed watching the rest of my office tearing their hair out while staring at the Nasdaq plunge, comfortable in the knowledge that I have never owned a single share. If my present owner goes belly up, I know I can still get by flipping burgers or failing that digging potatoes in my garden.
The 90s were a wasted decade for me economically, but boy did I have a good time. On the whole, I believe I came out on top or at least broke even. No ulcers, no debts, most of my hair and most important my self esteem are where they should be.
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
that the writer was actually able to define generation X. I wonder where he got that from, since that terms is the most overused term in modern media in the last decade. It's good to know that I'm not in generation X... missed it by 2 years, I guess.
in the next 2 to 5 years all the Baby boomers will start retiring from their "life long" government jobs. If you have good education (and I mean Grad school degree or professional designation like I do) the future is bright.
As a matter of fact I am looking forward to the Baby Boomers retiring because I will be able to secure a government (Municipal, Provincial or Federal) job position that will last me till the retirement and will pay above average wage for the next 25-30 years. Plus the pension benefits are insane. I don't need to contribute to my pension plan for the rest of my life once I get me one of those jobs.
Yes it's true: my career is getting chainsawed by the dot-com bust. I went from AI programming to mainframe programming (and took a $10,000 pay cut) and was told a little while ago that, barring a miaracle, my position is going to be eliminated in February. The good news is I have four months to find a new job before I start collecting unemployment; the bad news is that computer jobs are scarce and I may end up just packing groceries or something.
Are the best years of my life behind me? No.
For the first time in my life, I have more friends than I can count on both hands, a girlfriend who loves pizza and beer and horror movies, a positive reputation in the circles that matter to me, and all the comforts I've ever wanted. My biggest concern if I end up packing groceries is health insurance.
As for computers: I can still do computers for fun. Well-documented, professionally-designed free software builds resumes. I can still take courses toward a Masters' degree in CS. If the field ever recovers, I can get a job. If it doesn't, I have a fun hobby.
What about the future? I admit I didn't plan on being a security guard for the rest of my life. Ultimately, however, a career is two things: an opportunity to do what you love, and a tool for getting the things you want and need. I can do the one and I have the other. Let the career get chainsawed.
The best years of my life are here, and are still to come.
Finding God in a Dog
Am I the only person whose got his 401k maxed?
M@
Krispy Cream is people
Unless you were lucky enough to be involved in a web-type startup in 1996, this has no effect on you. So we're talking, what, like 0.0002% of this supposed Generation X?
And you know what, we're still here witnessing the rise of the web. You can get cheap web space. You can put up whatever you want. You can use Google. And that's all pretty amazing, and it offers some big possibilities for future business opportunity. Just because you were in some company without a product or business plan that managed to get $100 million in venture capital, then blow it all in four years, doesn't mean that the rest of your life will be a train wreck.
Please don't credit us with being the MTV generation. We were there in the beginning, when it was a music video channel. But MTV strayed from us long ago.
It really fucking does...
"Information wants to be paid"
Generation X (those born between 1966 and 1975) have been damaged by the fall of the economy
The economy right now is far stronger than it was 10 years ago. That was 1992. The economy right now is far stronger than it was 20 years ago. That was 1982. From the perspective of someone born in 1966-1975, how has the economy fallen?
in this forum for pity for the boomers.
I appreciate the hardships that Gen X has undergone. Financial issues are certainly part of that, but I also feel sorry for many of my younger friends that endured anonymous childhoods filled with divorces, peer pressures and an MTV manufactured reality that never got fulfilling.
From my perspective, the downturn in the economy means that my 401k has lost almost half its value since early 2000 and I'll end up having to work a lot longer than before.
I think the thing that bothers me the most is the pay-as-you-go Social Security system in the U.S., where current beneficiaries get a lot more out of the system than they ever put in (hey, they vote!) and during my golden years the reality of this Ponzi scheme will start to set in.
I'm quite willing to pay my SS taxes and even to take reduced benefits in the future and at a later age than our current crop of retirees.
It's hard for me to believe my older friends don't feel at least a little bit guilty if they're drawing handsome SS benefits while their other sources of retirement income amount to many times as much.
But, sigh, that's the sad part of the American way- What can my government do for me?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
And if you think you are doomed by your age to a lifetime of finanical failure, just look at Colonel Sanders: he was basically broke until he started KFC when he was 65 years old!
I don't want to be a polyanna or say I've never had or seen setbacks -- my gf was un/under-employed for a year -- but to just write off a whole generation in Fortune just seems like a sack of Baby Boomer sour grapes bullshit.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
The article, like most stories in the media (gotta have an angle and stick to it to make a story interesting) is one sided. There are a number of good things going demographically/marketwise on for Gen Xers. For example, the market crash, has allowed younger folks to start buying stocks at lower valuations. For a buy and hold investor with a 30 year time horizon, the crash is the best thing that could have happened. They can continue to buy stock as the market slowly builds value over the long term. On the other hand the market crash was horrible for a baby boomer who was planning to use that money in five years to retire. Second, by following the boomers demographically, we will get the benefit of the large supply of housing that was built to house all of those boomers and their families. As that housing comes on the market as empty-nesters sell out to retire, there will be a lot of housing supply and less relative demand (as there are less Xers than boomers). As one poster noted, all the boomers leaving their VP jobs will also open up areas for promotions for Xers. Finally all those boomers in retirement are going to be spending big bucks to buy products and services from Xers.
These are just a few examples of how things aren't as bad as they seem for Xers (I was born in 72).
--Spooky Action At A Distance
The media seems to have vision problems beyond myopia...it also seems hindsight-impaired. In all of the press, I don't see the dot-com bust blaming the Y2K budget bubble at all. Maybe I'm wrong or maybe I've a perspective unique to Tech Support.
The IT and Software Development industries were overbudgeted by 300-500% in many companies from 1998 to 2000. A company I worked for in 1999 had perhaps 1000 employees, but had around 100 developers and IT staff working full-time on Y2K and Y2K+1 calendar-related issues. Once the Y2K problems were gone, many COBOL, Foxpro, and other programmers were out of work. The bloated IT budgets in companies saw *lots* of contractors and regular employees alike seeking other jobs in the summer of 2000.
Many companies were created just to handle Y2K issues. Others were started to try to soak up some of the money being thrown around that was left over after Y2K didn't soak up all of the budget.
And let's face it, the United States was getting excited about technology. The first wave of real computer consumerism happened when Windows 95 was released and coincided with Intel working the bugs out of its Pentium chips.. This wave lasted about 1.5 years. The second wave was around 1998-1999 and it came down in the year 2000 when people were sick and tired of hearing about Y2K and how all of the computers were going to blow up. After the computers didn't end up blowing up and consumers realized they had computers fast enough for solitaire and email, the consumer frenzy stopped. Now you can except computer consumerism to coincide with Christmas and back-to-school shopping like many other industries.
Eventhough computer consumerism is not rampant and technology is no longer the big news in the U.S., the economy still seems doing alright in some industries:
In order to reasonably support the people expected to make social security claims over the next thirty years, taxes would have to be doubled at a minimum.
In other words, it is only a matter of time before social security breaks. The only things that can save are an incredible development in the economy that drastically increases real wealth in a short period of time, or massive immigration to increase the number of paying (but not deducting) parties by a huge amount. Its just turned into a pyramid scheme at this point, and that really is what drive most immigration policy.
A while back I saw something saying that gen Y was 1980-1989, and gen Z was 1990-1999. If you do it that way, what do you call people born in 2k+?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Of course I don't expect to eat sushi twice a week and buy everything in sight anymore. When it was 1999, we all knew it would end. I socked away money then.... and guess what? All the jobs went away and I slowly spent all the money on rent and food. Now I have a part-time job without benefits because I can't find a real job anywhere, and not because I'm holding out for the $85000/yr perl-and-html gig. And I have $100 in the bank and am living check-to-check.
We're not all bitching and moaning because the Guvmint took away our precious foosball jobs. It is actually hard to scrape by today.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It only takes 4 to 6 years for a person that is well-rounded in the computer sciences to study another field, gain some experience in that field, and prosper. A common analogy is the professional middle-aged man or woman (we have all seen them in college hallways) that goes to back to school (usually a state college for 2 years), and slowly integrates themselves into a new field/trade. I wouldn't stick a fork in the techie crowd of generation X just yet.
In a recent paper Wolff notes that young households lay claim to a smaller percentage of total U.S. wealth than they did in 1989.
I thought that we had an aging population with fewer and fewer young people. Of course they represent less wealth of the total economy! Statements like this seriously diminish the credibility of the article.
My mother is a college professor, and when "generation x" was the majority of her students, she was ready to quit academe and run screaming into the hills. Even when their mommies and daddies were paying for them, this sadass generation still had the obnoxious "whatever" attitude, a lack of moviation, and few redeeming qualities. One might infer, then, that their current economic standing is wholely self-imposed.
As an afterword, my mother is still teaching. The present generation, who's work ethic appears to be far stronger, is a "delight" to teach, in her words. These kids are already making their own success. You figure out who's gonna be kvetching about unfair economic trends 10 years from now.
Total hooey, probably written by a Gen-X'er who failed history.
My Dad went through the Great Depression and WWII. These are cataclismic events uttery overshadowing minor economic ripples like the dotcom bomb. Yet when all was said and done, he found himself living well with a good retirement.
Gen-X set up for economic failure? Give me a break. How about the boomers who are late in their working life and are having their 401K's blasted by the current stock market? The boomers don't have 30 years of working life to recover from this like the Gen-X'ers do.
Especially compared to the rest of the world.
My cousin went into a hospital in Kinshassa last week.
He died from blood poisoning from badly-cleaned equipment.
Life for most people, most places, sucks
In some respects that is what makes life worth living.
The GenXers were a generation on holiday.
Time to get back to work, fellows.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
W for Wingers .
The simple fact is that Generation X have had it better than any past generation in history, except for the baby boomer generation - the generation of negative unemployment, antibiotics without antibiotic resistence, reasonable housing prices, free Unis (well in Oz anyway), welfare without scrutiny, lifelong employement with long service leave & gold watches, etc, etc.
So what if the baby boomers had it so good, Xers should get some perpective & realise they are still better off than all the other previous generations.
& what's this with complaining about the fact that Xers were able to rort billions out of the community with the Y2K scare campaign & the dot.bomb pyramid schemes? So what that the party's over, they still made billions at the time, doing sweet FA of consequence.
Reason to whine? Comparing now to the depression?
How about this: The current unemployment rate is 5.6%. At the height of the depression, the unemployment rate was 25%+
By historical standards, this "recession" is absolute peanuts. This generation has the most opportunity of any generation in HISTORY.
Every generation thinks they have it the worst.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I'm confused about the math. Riley is 33, meaning he was born in 1968-69. So how the hell did he see Saturday Night Fever(1977), Apocalypse Now(1979), and The Deer Hunter(1978)? All were Restricted, and he was 10.
He probably saw them on video in the '80s or on re-release in the same period. Which means he's nostalgic for a childhood he didn't have.
Careers should combine three things: what you can do, what you want to do, and what you can get paid for.
But since GenX'ers are too apathetic to vote, the boomers are going to continue to screw us over
Well a lot of us who are (technically) Gen-X do vote, however, even if all of us did, we still couldn't outvote the boomers. They aren't called that for a reason. There are a lot of them. There aren't so many of us, you know, birth control and smaller families during our generation puts us at a demographic disadvantage (not that I'm saying birth control and smaller families aren't a good thing, of course). It is also why Social Security is going to go bust when all the boomers retire because there won't be enough Gen-Xers to pay, and because the gov't raided the "surplus" to make it look like they were paying off the national debt. They won't be able to raise social security taxes enough to make it solvent without GenXers and younger marching in mass on the capitol with torches and pitchforks.
I was born in 1968. I almost flunked out of two colleges and worked in food service to scrape through school. I ran up a bunch of debt on my credit cards while in college and in the first few years afterward.
I finally decided to grow up. I began spending less money than I was making. Reducing your standard of living is no fun, but it _is_ possible.
I now have no debt. I own a modest house - with a ton of equity thanks to the current real-estate market and my accelerated payment schedule, I have two cars - both paid for, and I have a decent amount of short and long term savings.
Don't give me that crap about it's because I'm white and I'm college educated.
After all, the family from El Salvador living next door can do it. The husband has two jobs, the wife works, they have three kids, their parents live with them and they rent out the basement of their 1400 square foot house so make ends meet.
This idea that the good life is over for GenXers is just FUD.
Get real. Get responsible. Quit carping about how hard your life is. Ask your grandparents about living through WWII - rationing of food, metal, gasoline - no place to live, no furniture was being made, there were so many men involved in the war effort that the only way that that ware materiel could be manufactured was for the women to find child care and go to work building planes and bombs.
We sit in our air-conditioned cars with CD changers, on our way to our air-condintioned homes with cable, DVDs, PCs and dishwashers and think that life is tough.
We're rich. Life is EASY in the US.
Don't believe me? Try living in India, China, Sudan or any other of dozens of poor nations.
Quit complaining and just do the work necessary to be successful in this economy.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Written in 1997, "The Fourth Turning" stated that the U.S. was (then) in an "Unraveling" and would be entering a "Crisis" period around 2005.
It is a fascinating book, and I highly recommend it.
I almost made the mistake of missing a broad education until my employer told me in 1992, after working for him for 2 years on hiatus from Univerity of North Texas, "If you had a degree I'd have to pay you twice what I pay you now." I enrolled that month in University of Texas at Arlington and graduated in 1994 with a BS-InfoSys. Now I'm married, two kids and am the CTO of a small pharmaceutical. I run on Linux where possible and Windows when it makes business sense. My salary has also gone up, steadily, every year since college--but I avoided the easy money and harsh lifestyle of dot-com startups. A series of choices.
You wanna know about a real, bonifide wrecked generation that was born between 1966 and 1976? Try Cambodia. My wife was born in 1967 in Cambodia and her entire culture, livelyhood, and many of her family were lost to the Khmer Rouge communists and genicidal elitists. Awwww. . .our portfolios are wrecked. . .damn. What about the Killing Fields? Yet, instead of whinning like spoilt brats, my wife's family (a mother and 4 children; her father was killed) immigrated to the US out of a refugee camp in Thailand. Now all the children are successful professionals (the youngest is finishing college) and productive members of society.
What a stupid generation I belong to. Thinking that the baby boomers wrecked it for us and we're worse off than all that have gone before us. Yet, I think not everyone in my generation whines and complains. It's just that we're too busy making good, or at least, careful choices to be noticed.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
If you rent, get used to being perpetually behind the curve. You are better off buying even if it means downgrading.
The article says how we keep working jobs, the economy sucks, etc., but it also keeps calling us slackers. How are we different than our parents and grandparents? We work, pay the bills, try to do better, etc. The author of this piece is torn between wanting to tell how fucked up things have been for a lot of us, and wanting to insult us.
Amen.
The baby boomers were the most well educated, richest, most spoiled generation in the history (of the United States, at least). What did they do with all this wealth, all this privelege?
They did some great things. They rebelled against the establishment and ended institutionalized racism (and the social acceptance of common racism in most circles, despite the nagging existence of a few ethnocentric throwbacks in populations of every ethnicity). They rebelled against the establishment and won the right for a woman to choose the fate of her own body. They rebelled against the establishment and won a large degree of gender equality and sexual freedom.
And they engaged in excesses that proved to be a little less positive, such as excessive drug experimentation in the 60's, arguably excessive sexual experimentation in the 70's, excessive conservatism and reactionsim in the 80's, and excessive dishonesty in the 90's.
They took all the freedoms they inherited and enjoyed, abused some of them, and then took those same freedoms away from us in the name of their 'knowing better', they systematically and deliberately inundated us with incessent marketing from the day we were born, tempted us with easy credit, pounded into our heads the compulsion to use that credit to buy their products and enrich them, then blamed us for our irresponsiblity when many of us succumbed to their repeated conditioning and actually did what they were telling us to do, an average of 10 minutes each hour (of television viewed or radio heard), and countless other times as we innocently walked or drove down the street to work.
Do we bear some of the responsibility for our alleged lack of self control? Sure. Do the generation of our parents and grandparents, who have orchestrated the incessant advertising that conditions us into submissive little shoppers and consumers, often as unable to resist a shiny new object as we are unable to join a protest for a cause we are forbidden, by that very same conditioning, from feeling strongly about? You bet they do.
There is enough blame for everyone to share, but no generation ever engaged in as much excess, or stripped their descendents of as much freedom and constitutional protection, not to mention financially mortgaging their children's future with unprecendented government deficits and ponzai retirement and real estate schemes than did the generation of our parents.
So while they may condemn us of our weaknesses (and they are real, valid weaknesses we must address if we are to survive), they would be well advised to check out beam in their own eyes.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Hey are you hiring? I could send you a resume . . .
Interesting though the article was, their sampling could have been a little better. "Jessica, an art therapist and professional harpist, has $50,000 in student loans." Art therapist? Well duh! Everybody knows the big money is in pet psychiatry.
I fail to see how the economic well being of this generation is faltering for any reason save poor money habits. The article speaks of this "great depression" and yet all the replies are littered with sob stories that equate to nothing more than "I have to buy everything I see and I can't save shit." The whining about the DOT com industry fallout is even more pathetic/funny. Oh boo-friggin-hoo, you can't find a job where you get a BMW, 100k a year, and free privaliges to shoot your co-workers with nerf-guns. Of course, no buisiness plan, but who needs a buisiness plan when you have vision, right? Listen babies, save your money, set up a debt payment system, and quit going to Best Buy 4 times a week.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
You are absolutely correct! The slacker nomenclature was applied time and time again without just cause.
There are plenty of very hard working people in the workforce right now. Just look at the productivity numbers. Our productivity is so high, that we are only hurting ourselves.
Higher worker productivity increases economic strength at a high price--no new jobs. We are working ourselves right into what analysts call a "Jobless Recovery". That basically means that the economy gets better for everyone but the working stiffs.
Of course, we all know what the baby-boomer execs do. They take credit for the increased productivity as a result of their management skills, and caller us slackers for not increasing productivity more.
> I mean come on this is like saying being overweight is bad, or shooting heroin can cause problems down the road.
What?
you mean they don't just cancel each other out?
I'm in my 20's, and steadily employed with a job that is pretty much "guaranteed". I make a nice living, and don't PLAN on retiring. (The concept of it bores me.) But will be able to at a decent age, and expect to be able to live nicely after that.
Don't include me in the 'generation', either. The 'generation' that is refered to, for the most part, is all the guys who thought they could learn HTML and have a porsche-mansion-gorgeoussupermodelwife by the time they were 25, and retire at 30 to travel the world.
Yeah, some hard workers and brilliant minds got/are getting burned, but such is life... And for the most part, they realize "such is life". The ones doing the loudest complaining are those who wanted to retire after only working 5-10 years, and spent those 5-10 years buried in booze, women, and various electronic play-toys. I've got a few friends like that, and they spend all their time complaining and don't even look for a job now that they're unemployed. The world was "supposed" to do them a favor, and it didn't.
I hate people who got into tech stuff just because they wanted to become rich. It's like the doctors who don't give a damn about anything but their wallet. I'm happy the market crashed, it weeded out a bunch of the people who were just trying to get rich quick off of vapor-skills.
-Sara
Halfway to pension age, she has just $5,000 in a 401(k) and $20,000 in home equity. Ideally, someone her age should have at least $100,000 stashed away.
What rubbish. I would like to see the numbers of people who have over $100K saved by the ripe old age of 32.5. Probably about the same number of people who are still rich using the Forbes philosophy of "buy and hold". Ideally, we would all love to be millionaires by the time we are 40, no, 30! While I would, indeed, recommend saving at least 10% of your pay and not spend it on anything less than a true emergency (after a house is bought), most of the people I know (most of whom make near $100K/year) spend just about every other penny on their families, especially on getting their kids quality education and giving them a quality environment to grow up in. Most of them took over 20-25 years to get to that sort of salary. Few of them got to their age without one or two episodes of work or family related emergencies that required tapping that next egg once or twice. (Unemployment would qualify. It did for me.) All of them worked their collective fannie off. Few of them or their parents read Forbes or any other magazine by and for people with silver spoons in every orifice. Few of them will retire rich, but they might have enough to have some fun for 5-10 years of retirement.
I predict that, since he/she is an uninformed idiot, the author of that article will soon join the unemployed, too. But not the magazine owner. Nosirree, bob. He's some kind of insulated from the economy. That Forbes boy is about a good at giving financial advice (much less political) as the Catholic Church is at giving advice on how to avoid pedaphiles.
Great, this happens just in time for us to be broke when it comes time to start supporting our do-nothing, war-protesting, draft-dodging, Clinton-voting, social security and "drug benifit" grabbing, questionable accounting practicing, baby boomer parents.
We're screwed.
-Peter
they had it easy. They never knew the pain of dealing with the falling value of stock options, not having the smartest car on the block, or falling behind in the gadget race. Maybe we should get a medal or sumthin
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
Personally, I think it's good that the "standard of living" is declining, at least in the sense of material possessions. I think Gen Xers got too caught up in material possessions and have lost focus on what's really important. Just my personal opinion.
That said, I have a good job and make a good living. But I've been relatively poor in the not so distant past (living in a run-down studio apartment and barely able to make enough to put food in my mouth).
That was a good experience. I learned to be frugal. Despite an income that could afford me a $30,000 car, instead I drive a 1991 Honda Accord that I bought in cash for $3000 a few years back. I live in a modest apartment. My bills are paid and I'm saving money.
Go back 10 years, and I was $30,000 in debt, had collectors after me, and car within hours of being repossessed. I've been on the other side, and I'll tell you what, a little frugality goes a long way.
I think it's a lesson a good portion of the country could stand to learn. Besides all of this other stuff, I've gained an incredible amount of personal and spiritual (not meaning religious) growth. Anyay, just my humble opinion.
I hate it when everyone seems to try to classify a generation as being wreck or something. Baby Boomers are gunna be hurting cuz dey is no soc security, GenXer's dey be hurting because of the dot bombs. Well, you know what? Not all of us gut SUCKERED by a dot com and them flaunting money. Some of us actually had the smarts to realize it wasn't going to last. Why do people get suckered by pipe dreams? To me, working at a dot com would have made me feel like I was depending on the Lottery for retirement. That's not to say that anyone was wrong for what they did though.
....stuff like that is why they failed. Not all Xer's did this.
I blame it on the genxer dropped out of college that decided he'd start a company (without his degree) and make more money then he'd make as a graduate (like that can really happen) and then decided oh let's have a fully stocked gourmet kitchen for our employee's to use for free. Let's have breaks for as long as you want whenever you want. Let's have utopia. Well, in the situation they were in the set themselves up for failure. Spending money on frivilous stuff for the employee (free gourmet kitchen), not making sure that deadlines were hit, unrealistic business model:
1. Idea
2. ???
3. Profit
While this was going on I was slaving away working in a Community College. I may not have made what the commers were making, but I have now been here long enough that I am vested and every dollar I put into the pension fund is matched by the college. I plan on retiring from here. I don't have a 401k (maybe look into 403b if we every get them), I don' own stock. I would only buy stock if I could afford to loose the money I would invest (I can't, so I don't). I did not let a mortgage company or home builder pressure me into a house I could not afford. What's happened to me? I still have a job, I still have my house (although there are a lot of empties in my neighborhood). Do I want a bigger house? Sure, but I can't afford it. My mission is to try to climb out of debt and try not to go any further in debt. So far I have done ok, but there have been things happening lately....ever have everything in you house or household decide to die or break all at the same time? We were careful though and we intend to not use credit cards for holiday shopping. I hope to have at least 3-4 presents bought next week. As soon as I am out of debt I plan on staying out as much as possible, with exception of maybe a car payment and a house payment. I do not want a 300,000 dollar house (150,000 to 200,000 would be fine). I don't feel my peak earning years have happened just yet (in fact, I will soon be making enough money that I can take care of most of the bills and my wife will work long enough to get our credit cards and some other things paid off. After that, she's being a mom. SO, quit saying I am or most of the people born the year I was (1971) are wrecked. We have plenty of time before we're history.
Gorkman
Please ignore the rant on Forbes. Sorry. (Does he own stock in Forturne?) ps
Yes the bubble will burst in the housing market.
However in the mean time, my monthly payment GOES somewhere (part to interest (which is TAX free!) and part to equity) AND my rent doesn't raise every year.
And if you aren't going to be in a house for 5 years, DO NOT BUY! I REPEAT, DO NOT BUY!
I have a fixed cost per month. Also, I have a town house well situated close to schools in a pretty good neighborhood. When I go to sell in a few years I will have no problems.
So lets see, instead of paying 1200 for a 1 bdroom apt, I pay 1000 for a 3 level town house.
Hmmmm, do the math. Never mind equity and investment... I get more space for less money. Plus my income keeps rising while my mortgage stays fixed. Sounds like a great deal to me!
Oh, and the reason why I am not paying extra money to bring down the principal: This is the starter home. In 4-5 years when the market drops I will be in a prime position to buy a fat lot of land. All the money that I could have put towards principal will instead be in a REAL investment vehicle (short term, we're talking about 5 years here) which I will then use towards downpayment of the house- getting me a teensy-weensy mortgage.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Article says for many Gen Xers peak earning years are over. Ok, for the 50 people who earned 200k as a DotCom CTO now tending bar in the Valley, maybe. However, the oldest Gen Xer (going from '66) would now be 36. My understanding of peak earning years was that they always began at age 40-ish, continuing on to retirement.
It might be different in the go-go-go IT industry (where you hear about a lot of coders burning out by then), but nowhere else does this apply.
I certainly do know a number of folks my age (just turned 30, ick) who are in hock with credit card debt, etc.--but our problems are nothing compared to the 50-somethings down the street who've refinanced their houses twice to cover debts and nice cars, etc. I'm guessing Fortune has an older readership, and they're trying to make those folks feel better about themselves.
One neat thing about the article is it does at least admit there won't be Social Security. Would this be a good place to rant about how I'd like the opportunity to invest my quarterly Self-Employment tax payments in government-run, low-fee index funds instead of, you know, somebody in Florida on the premise that that the same will be done for me?
(Disclaimer: own house in one of the last reasonably priced areas of DC metro--bubble's hitting this market as we speak--no debt besides mortgage, drive 1997 Nissan Sentra, run own business after three years of developing it part-time have 401k, ROTH IRA, and SEP IRA currently, just made another contribution to SEP, tend to hang out with Asian immigrants so my savings are comparatively paltry).
You cannot even *BEGIN* to compare this to the Great Depression.
See http://www.korpios.org/resurgent/Timeline.htm
Unemployment in 1933 was 24.9. 24.9 percent!!! GNP dropped 8.5 percent in 1931 and 13.4 in 1932.
Unemployment is 6-7% and our GDP rose by 1.2% last quarter. We are not in any sort of hardship by any means. Hardship is not being able to eat. Not being able to afford a new PS2 is not hardship.
For example, look at the quote "Salesclerks became programmers; coffee slingers morphed into experts in Java (computerese, that is)" So basically the dot-com bubble burst and things are getting back into reality.
And I love this one: "Jessica, an art therapist and professional harpist, has $50,000 in student loans". Hmm, maybe racking up $50,000 in student loans for an unmarketable degree was not a good idea. Who would have thought?
Ever hear the story of the grasshoppper and the ant?
The majority of the reason that these people are in trouble is because they stretched themselves beyond their means.
People who had used some forsight could make a killing during the tech boom we recently had, or during the real estate boom following the crash in the late 80s.
There are too many people in their late 20s and early 30s who want to run into buying houses, while at the same time leasing two mid-priced cars and paying for their cell phones and cable modems.
I know way too many people who were quick to move out of their folks' homes as soon as they got a job... then after a couple of years they realize that they've barely breaking even on living costs and have no savings. Anything not in the budget goes on the credit card and takes them years to pay off.
Sorry guys, maybe it's worth a year or two living at home and not being able to have your girlfriend stay over or throw parties on the weekend... but at least you won't be fucked if you lose your job.
I think you and I both are in Y. Whatever that means. Maybe that's 'Y', we look at the Xers and just wonder...
--
I post links to stuff here
Puhlease... as a newly about to be 39 year old, I want to be counted as Gen X. I'm not a VP or Exec. I certainly don't feel like a baby boomer. I missed doing the free sex and drugs in the 60s, I missed the bad hair and roller discos in the 70s, and justly as a nerd, came out of high school in 1981/2, just in time for the end of Punk. I'm Gen-X. Its an attitutde :-)
Winton.
Adds Bruce Tulgan, a Gen Xer and founder of RainmakerThinking, a consultancy that studies labor trends: "I had a college president say to me, 'I don't know how much longer I can pull this off because people will start to ask, Is it worth this much money to be that much smarter?' "
I would definitely dispute the implication that college makes people smarter, College provides Knowledge and teaches Skills if anything people are dumber after leaving college but they should have learned a few tricks to help them hide the Fact...
As to the actual point of the Article, Economics is based on supply, demand and perception. Since the Eighties the perceived growth has been based on Wishful thinking. The IT bubble was based around companies that had and never could make a profit; IT is here to stay just take ANY office environment once the network goes down, ALL WORK STOPS. Once confidence and reason are restored it will be easier to predict the future but the future is ALWAYS uncertain and is not something someone should gamble with ever, People need to relearn how to plan for an uncertain future rather then depending on Pure Luck.
Fists up to that!
I grow so tired of seeing others of my 'generation' so willing to accept the pessimism handed to us by the fear mongering media. Comparing our actions/experiences to those of previous generations is largely like comparing apples and oranges - so much changes, especially our illusions.
I'm doing just fine in my own time.
http://iratepublik.com
As with every generalization, they tend to be grossy overexagerated, but have some grains of truth tucked in there. Most GenXers I know have some things in common with this gestalt picture that the article provides. On the grand scale, I do believe the article is pretty insightful. No one knows what exactly is going to be happening, but they give good reasons and examples and it seems to hold together. What they don't have any opinion on is where this will lead the national economy, and I personally can only think it will be a pretty grim thing...close to the Great Depression if not as bad, though I would love to be proven wrong. =) Though I don't believe all is lost. The article stops short at offering any kind of ideas as to where we go from here, and that's not very constructive in the least. Alot depends on how the GenXer in question sees their situation.
Me? I'm a dot bomb casualty. I went from ISP tech support, to roving infosec software installer/trainer, to high-end VPN design in the space of three years, then was summarily kicked to the curb with about enough money to keep myself around comfortably through 6 months of unemployment. I've got zero credit card debt (mostly because I've never liked borrowing money in the first place) and no student loan debt (thankfully, my mother works for a school). I look at it as if I got taken on a 3 year ride with people who paid for my crap, and the ride came to an end, time to find something else to do. =)
I don't save alot, because I don't make alot. I do consulting work with my father, because he's too busy to do it all himself. I live in the nice apartment that's attatched to my father's office (he used to live here until he got remarried, and the rent is VERY inexpensive), and the rent and utilities get paid with a few hundred bucks every couple-few weeks depending on the vagaries of the small-scale consulting biz. I don't live large because I've never really lived large. My one real vice, video games, gets some money, with plenty left over for food and the like. My gf is a grad student finishing up her doctorate, so she's got more than a few loans, and that's made us consider any wedding plans alot more carefully, but it isn't going to be overwhelming. No, it certainly won't be a walk in the park, but I've got plenty of reason to believe that things are going to be better. =)
I looked but am unable to find the original article, but the title sticks out in my head, and it's a classic. I remember reading this in their print edition, waaay back in 1999:
"Stock Market 'best since 1928', say analysts"
Synergy is your friend
First, NOTHING is guaranteed -- but you probably know that if you haven't been under a rock for the past 3 years.
I agree with the rest of what you're saying. Reading this Fortune article, I feel sorry for these people that have tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt on top of $50k+ in college loan debt. But, I don't know what the hell is wrong with these people because I paid off my college loan debt years ago (I'm 32), and have never had more than $3-4k of credit card debt -- I'm ashamed when I have even that much, but I'm told by bankers that that is incredibly low. I also grabbed a home here in the Silicon Valley at a great price (current selling price is still more than double what I bought it at), and I've put another $20k into it out-of-pocket to improve my equity even more (about $300,000 today). AND, I have over $25k in retirement funds (IRA & 401k) TODAY -- including the losses of the past few years.
I hope the article is too pessimistic because I can't believe how irresponsible you'd have to be to have so much debt and so few assets.
And speaking of "vapor-skills", yes there were too many losers out there winning projects over me just because they could sell themselves better than I could. Where are they now? Broke and unemployed -- thank God sanity has returned...
It might be a "recession" for *most* folks, but for techies it is an outright "depression". Techies are living in the same situation that our grandparents used to tell us long annoying stories about.
Basic "service" jobs (drivers, cash register operaters) are all there is out there right now if one is job hunting. These activities keep a company afloat. Programmers don't, except for a few to fix occasional high-priority bugs. In the short run, you don't need techies. Most techies do things that are "change oriented". For example, upgrading the network, upgrading desktop OS's, making the ultimate Management Info System to track widgets, etc. When things slow, companies PULL THE PLUG on these expansion or "investment" endevours and keep things as-is. AS-IS == Slim_techy_jobs
Intellectual-intensive jobs tend to be like this. It is the bone-head jobs of physically moving thing A to box B that stay afloat during slow times because those are the basal metabolism of a company. The brain shuts down most higher functions.
Ironic how the bone-head jobs have the most job security these days.
Table-ized A.I.
Your parents can blow their savings if they want. It's not your damn money you greedy a$$.
Take some responsibility yourself, and choose wisely.
Couldn't have said it better....
Grandpa had a highschool education (I think ... maybe not.) and was in debt, running a small business. When the depression ended, his peak earning years were definitely behind him. I don't think it ever occurred to him that he'd been set up for failure, or that he had failed.
This is pretty silly stuff, I think. Everyone has some rough patches, and for some of us they last pretty long. The big oil price bust in the early 80's was hard on the folks in Alaska and Texas. The generation which fought WWI was called ``the lost generation'' (This was the backgroung for Hemmingway's ``Big, something-hearted River''). If you ever find a generation which was NOT set up for failure in some way, let us know.
See what I've been reading.
1) I live in the NYC metro area (NJ actually) ... uhm ... rather large company ( > 40,000 employees)
...
:)
.... Some of us had to pay for our own college (and I'm glad I'm not swimming in loan debt.... My "state university" education is just as good as any big-name school, really. NJ has one of the best state higher-ed programs in the country.... )
2) I'm a Unix sysadmin for a
3) My salary is ~$65k
4) I'm 23
Now, I moved out of mom & dad's house this year into an apartment. Buying all the furniture, etc. that I needed leaves me about $4k behind the 8-ball. But it's sitting on a 0% APR bank card, so who cares? I'm paying $1000/mo on it, so it'll be a bad memory soon enough
I also owe another $10k on my car. (Nothing fancy, it's a 2000 Grand Am). That's at a 1.9% APR. I'd be better off putting the car payments into a CD or somesuch -- I'd _make_ money that way.
Debt isn't wholly a bad thing. If managed correctly, it can allow you to purchase things and spread the payments out, and come out ahead. The car is a perfect example. If I blew the $20k for the car right up front, boom, it's paid for, and that's that. But I'm out $20k. This way, if I pay them $500/mo and put some more away in a high-interest savings account or CD or somesuch, I'll _make_ money on the interest alone. Basically, it's like _they_ loaned _me_ the money.
Sure, the interest isn't that much, but hey, it's something
Having said all that, and knowing that I'm doing OK, I'm scared sh_tless. My job is secure, I don't worry about that. My company's having some record quarters recently. (No, we're not in the sin business -- we're an honest, legit company)
Anyway, what worries me are the 3 things that are looming:
1) An engagement ring;
2) A wedding;
3) A house after said wedding.
Heh. Wish I had more put away
Let's home my schoolteacher girlfriend can put some of her money away... but we all know what schoolteachers make!
--NBVB
In my case, my parents basically made sure I had a job since I was 11, starting with a paper route. I had to learn in that time, how to budget my money and not to overspend or I had to wait until it was time to go collecting and then I had to figure out what I owed back to the newspaper and what I got to keep. While they helped a lot with the accounting, it did teach me early on how things work and how if you want something (Back then it was a Super Nintendo), you have to save for it and only buy it when you have enough money saved up so that you can buy it and still have a bit left over in case of a crisis.
In high school I got a job at a grocery store and also got a bank account. Now I had a little more spending power but by this time, I knew how to be conservative with my money and to keep a close eye on my accounts, using software to track my spending and keep track of checks I had written.
By the time I got a credit card, I knew well how to live within my means. I made sure to ALWAYS pay off the card in full each month unless it was an absolute emergency expenditure that I couldn't cover with one months pay. I also make sure not to have more than 2 credit cards and to try to never use more than one each month. I also make sure I can pay them in full each time unless its an extreme situation.
On top of that, I also set a "Paranoia level" on my Savings account. What that means is I choose an amount, in my case $5000 (started at $500 when I first got my bank account all those years ago) and I go VERY conservative on spending if I go below that until I've built it back up to above that level. So far that has saved me from every major disaster (car breaking down expensively, sudden big bill or need to buy something expensive like furniture) I've had in the 10 years I've had a bank account. It also reduces the need to use the credit card to cover sudden needs, as I do not like spending money I don't have at all.
Because of that, and driving a modest car ('95 Grand AM) and eeking out the most time I can from my computer (using a 5 year old Mac G3) rather than blowing it all on the latest and greatest every 6-12 months, I have managed to get a $120K home just this June and maintain over 5k in savings since then. I am going to try to raise that up to 10K soon as well as start cautiously getting into investing (maybe should have sooner but after the latest rounds of disasters in the financial world, glad I waited).
The main thing is to learn how to budget, keep a paranoia level of cash in the bank and don't spend money you don't have when you can avoid it (i.e. no credit card debt or loans unless necessary).
If you do that, you should be able to weather all but armageddon or the next great plague.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
I was right up with you until you said your were 16...
Hot pants! When I was 16 I was listening to the Smiths (and they were before my time in the way that the 70's were before Riley's time) and being stupid (being a male, that's kind of a given)
In college I pulled the fabulous equation "reap the benefits NOW of my future success... I'll charge it!"
(since then I've made good on my promise and now live a responsible financial life)
Wow... when did you have your first existential crisis... at the ripe old age of 3?
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Got my MSEE, went into Internet company, several friends became millionaires, started my own company, company (and industry) tanked, $30K cc debt, paid it off on tail end of dot-bomb employment, now work for company that has been around as long as I have making median for my education.
Well, during that time I made videos seen by millions, got my picture in hundreds of newspapers and magazines, got to work with the ultra-cool Slashdot guys and a Net superstar who was on David Letteman, videos were in NY MOMA exhibit, flew around the country on crazy business deals that mainly never happened, friend of mine purchased warship, acquired stomach acid problem from crazy business deals, multicasted video over satellites (twice now), and got married in castle.
Now I just need to chill out at my 9-5 job... whew! At least I have something to tell my (future) children about.
A house for my parents was about 2 years salary, a car was about 6 months and food was a MINOR part of their monthly bill. My house cost me almost 5 years salary, I live in Cal, bay area, my car runs almost 3/4ths a years salary, and food is a HUGE CHUNK of my budget not to mention the monthly bills eat up a FAR greater percentage than our parents payed, We are screwed and It WAS NOT BY the .com bubble bursting trust me, we have been systematically screwed by the federal government over the last 20 years. The only way to get ahead is to become a corporation and avoid paying your fair share of taxes, and USE the system to your benefit and everyone elses detriment.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I am now learning like crazy.
First thing I learned: Do not confuse your job with how you create your wealth.
Check out my diary to see what I am changing in my life.
<RANT>
The article says something about the average college loan of a baby boomer at about $2000, now it's $17000. About the price of a small new car in the 70's and now. Big deal.
The baby boomers didn't start off with the inflated salaries of the dot-com era. So salaries will finally get in line with what you can actually do. Big deal.
The relatively high unemployement rate of 6% is nowhere near the rate of the 70's (closer to 8%).
Finally for those of you who don't have a job. You already have one: it's called finding a new job. Treat it with the seriousness of a real job and you will find one. Maybe not in the geographic area of your choice or in the field of your choice, but to summarize Who Moved the Cheese, there are good jobs out there, you have to find them. Don't ask where, that's your job, remember?
</RANT>
The article mentioned that we should have all been set for life by the dot.com era. What kind of blinded logic is that? I guess all of the GenX social workers, construction laborers, accountants, bank tellers, etc. dropped everything and became programmers? I suppose the boomers temporarily filled in those positions until they came back? Newsflash. The majority of jobs are not tech jobs. The dot.com boom and bust had no direct affect to most of us.
However, many of us did go to college because it was a basic requirement to get a decent job. The Boomers got the same jobs without going to college. Here's the difference - we have to pay $50,000 up front to enter the job market where the Boomers got in for free. As a result, we can't save early enough for interest to compound and work in our favor. It used to be that parents paid for their child's college education but the Boomers have figured out that divorce works for them at the cost of their children's future irrevocably damaged. I am not knocking divorce. Some people genuinely need it. It is, however, a symptom of some sort of selfishness (i.e. adultery, substance abuse, gambling, spousal abuse, etc.) by making yourself feel good - however temporary - at the expense of others.
I'm a 33 year old GenXer with two kids. I have no credit card debt. My wife drives a '93 Lumina and I an '89 Civic. We have massive payments on student loans. We have a mortgage on a $60,000 condo. There was no freakin' way we could have saved $100,000 by now. She's a teacher and I'm a CAD technician. I am sick of people on this site telling us it's our fault we won't have enough for retirement. It's not. The rules have changed and we're trying to adapt to them the best we can.
Meanwhile the Boomers are threatening to break into the Social Security "lockbox". Our money, not theirs. Theirs is already guaranteed. Boomers aren't called the "Me" Generation for nothing.
Ach, I'm rambling and venting and none of it matters.
The starting pay absolutely blows. If I were to have 100k "stashed-away" by the time I am 32, I would have to save 1/4 of my earnings for 10 years. Now, explain to me how you are supposed to: buy a house, pay for your car, keep out of debt, and still fucking have 100k saved by the time you are 30s?
... the norm for most entry-level jobs. Do not be loyal to an employer who pays you so little -- my initial mistake at the time -- but rather, get the experience you need, then find a proper paying job with someone willing to pay you appropriately).
If only someone had sat down and explained to me how things work when I was in my twenties.
You need to sit down and understand how compound interst works. Seriously. You need to run the numbers, until you understand exactly how modest savings over time, invested wisely, will compound into wealth by the time you hit retirement. Calculate the numbers for yourself over 10 years, over 20 years, over 30 years.
One of the surprises you will find is that, if you start saving $100/month at 20, you will live better than someone who starts saving $1,000/month at 30. Time is the most important ingredient in saving, and if you are only 24, you still have a good amount of time on your side.
Yes, your beginning salary sucks, and yes, you should probably be putting as much extra cash away now as you can reasonably afford. My first job paid only $20,000, so little that the minimum payment on my college debts exceeded my takehome pay. I obvously only worked that job for as long as I needed to find a much better one
And this brings me to my second point: you will not be making such miserable wages for the next 6 years. Put away as much as you can afford now, because time will grow that money remarkably over the next decade, and time is the most potent ingredient in the mixture (assuming, of course, you are earning interest that exceeds inflation. Modest interest will do, you do not need to be making 10% annual returns, and as I pointed out, $100 put away today will do more for your retirement than $1,000 put away ten years from now).
Compound interest is something everyone who participates in a capitalist economy should have an intimate understanding of. The only good debt 'interest' is real-estate interest, because of the tax savings it creates (which reduces the real interst to a very small amount) and the equity in your (likely) improving property value, plus the fact that if you weren't paying it you'd be paying rent and flushing your entire monthly payment down the drain with no benefit and no asset to show for it, and you have to live somewhere.
Other than your morgage, you want to be on the positive side of the compound interest equation, and that means saving and investing, even modestly, while avoiding debt otherwise. If you are on the positive side of that equation and do nothing, you will eventually become wealthy. If you are on the negative side of that equation, there is a good chance you will become impoverished despite working your ass off.
When I was in my twenties I thought I understood compound interest because I'd had a couple of business and economic classes, and because I knew what the words meant. It wasn't until I ran the numbers, and pondered what the results meant (like the surprising result I mention above) that I realized how little I understood the concept's implications in our everyday lives, much less its impact on our retirement. I wish to hell I'd known 10 years ago what I know now, and can only reiterate my advice: run the numbers, study and ponder the result. Understand what the implications are, and start saving and investing, even modestly, now.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
What am I talking about? This: get married, whether you want to or not. You may not make enough money to get a home loan, but you probably make half enough.
And if not, consider a Heinleinesque "line marriage" or something like that. Get enough people, and the group can afford it. Then you can all start building equity instead of being bled with rent.
Marriage: A ridiculous nihilistic individual-destroying cultish idea? Or a historically proven strategy for pooling resources?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Why are Americans in debt more than they were thirty years ago and not saving money? Household debt has gone from 65% of post-tax income to over 100% in the past thirty years and saving rates have dropped. Well, one reason is that the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage is below what it was thirty years ago. You can see the raw data at the government's BLS web site, or check out LBO's nice graphs of the same data. This is a very important piece of economic information, but one rarely, if ever, mentioned in the news. The fact that Americans are making less money per hour (inflation-adjusted) than they were thirty years ago sheds a lot of light on why savings are down and debt is up - they are making less money and thus have less to save and thus by food and clothes and so forth on credit cards.
Some people, for whatever reasons, would rather stick to their own conclusions about how people are indulging themselves too much and this will cause them repercussions. This seems to be a tenet of Christian thought, and since Christianity dominates American society so heavily perhaps that's why people prefer their "faith" view over the scientific and logical conclusions one would draw from economic data. Or perhaps, as I said before, they and their circle are all white collar Java professionals and they apply what happened to them as what's happening to the Gen X janitor who sweeps up late at night in their offices, however falsely. Even in this case I'd disagree, as Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc. bankrolled the ITAA to modify laws such as the H1-B cap, FLSA overtime provisions, section 1706 IRS tax codes etc., in an attempt to lower IT wages. An attempt which was largely successful. Of course, that just played a part in lower IT wages and higher unemployment, the bigger tidal wave of the economy helped lower wages as well. But again, to hear some people talk about it, it sounds like "the economy did it" is like we're all farmers and our crops were flooded and people say "it was just the weather". The economic system is not some foreign, alien force we have no control of, like the weather. The millions the ITAA spent on lobbying efforts, plus larger scale forces manipulating the economy are what caused this. All I hear here are a bunch of people whose solutions to everything is to tighten their belts (and increase their skill level so they'll be more valuable specialists). It sounds a lot more meek and submissive than what the dock workers in San Francisco have been doing - men who have more secure jobs and are paid more than a lot of IT techies, and who probably used to beat these meek little techies asses and could this day still probably beat the meek, submissive techies asses. Quite often reading comments here, I get disgusted by the attitude of many of the posters. The important thing is, those of us who think as we (or I) do have to band together and push things forward, as these toadies never will. Efforts are already being made - Washtech/CWA, the Programmers Guild and so forth, they just need more people on board to start reaching critical mass. We can't wait around for the pansies, we have to get out there and get things moving ourselves.
Hey I got laid off a few years ago too, but doesn anyone else notice a *slight* disconnect between "No generation since the Depression has been set up for failure like this," and one of their 28-year-old hard luck cases, who is "looking at jobs that pay around $50,000, 40% below the salary he was collecting at Claimshop."
Oh, the humanity! $50,000 a year! However will he afford Gucci and Prada on such a pittance? $50,000 a year ain't filthy rich, but it sure as HELL ain't Depression-level poverty; I personally would be thrilled to get a raise that boosted me to $50,000 a year.
Once they find college-educated 30-year-olds forced to nourish themselves Grapes-of-Wrath-style with breast milk from healthier women, then I'll pay attention to the whining. Why do these stupid stories keep popping up?
-brennan
Every article has a slightly different definition for Gen X. The way I look at it, if the baby boomers get 20 years (1945-1965), Xer's should at least get about the same, but I think a prerequisite though is to have some cultural consciousness of the 80's. 1966-1980 is a good range. Generation Y comes next from 1981-1995. Generation D (the Digital generation) comes after the Internet really took off.
YMMV
Buried in college and credit card debt, a lot of them won't be able to catch up as they approach their prime spending years.
This sounds more like an excuse. Running up credit card debit is careless and stupid in any economy. If the NASDAQ and Dow are way up, you're still capable of screwing yourself.
I find it silly that ppl can say that their home is an investment and that they're not going to buy one since the value will only increase X amount in 10 years instead of Y. Sure not all houses will be worth $20000 more in five years, but they wont go down in price either, unless you live on some toxic waste dump.
A house is your home. It's YOURS, not the landlords, it's where you wake up, go to bed, sleep, eat, relax-essentially you LIVE in a home. You can paint the walls purple, the ceiling green, and put in orange carpet if you want. You have a backyard to sit outside on a summer day.
I grew up on a farm where all the land within 2 miles of our HOME (not investment) was ours. Maybe because I grew up there and we owned (not invested) in all that land I view a house==home and != investment instead of ppl that grew up in a 1400 sq feet home, err..sorry, investment.
I have to agree with you 100%. Every time I hear someone bitching and moaning about the job market; that they can't make $100k/year doing HTML and Javascript I can't help but snicker. Yes, some good people have fallen on hard times, but mostly I see alot of lazy/unmotivated people that expected everything to fall in their lap.
Oh yeah, before I forget, stop killing the old people right before I get old. Thanks.
if you bought a house in the last 2 years, you're going to look worse than this guy after the bubble bursts in the housing market.
... hold off, and let the bubble burst.
houses arent that great of investments, and unless you are sure you are going to be in it for 5-10 years, you will get screwed.
That reasoning is only valid for investment property, not the home you live in. Everyone has to live somewhere, so either you own a house and get a tax break, and have some equity in it, or you are flushing a rent check down the toilet every month. Period.
Even if the property value went to zero (to use an extreme, absurd example), as long as it is fit for you to live on, you are still ahead owning as opposed to buying for two reasons:
1) you still get the tax break, which is vastly more than you get flushing that rent check down the drain every month
2) your property value can rebound from zero to some positive amount, while the asset value of the rent you paid will always and forever remain zero, regardless.
Of course, even the shittiest properties in the shittiest areas, assuming they haven't been contaminated chemically or otherwise and thus made uninhabitable, have a value far greater than zero. Having attended numerous tax foreclosure auctions I can tell you the value of said properties is usually surprisingly greater than zero.
Even in the worst case scenerio, where you own a house in a neighborhood that is going down hill, even if you sell at a loss, you will almost always be ahead of where you would have been had you merely rented for the same period of time.
However, if you are looking to buy a second house as an investment, then I agree absolutely with everything you've said
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
It does piss anybody off to shell out 7.5% of my first 80K or something (plus another 7.5% hidden) to pay for somebody who rigged the political system the right way, and to realise that he wouldnt see any of this money when the time comes.. So he has to shell out another 10% for my own personal Social Security..
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
A-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
Okay, now that I'm done with that . . . listen, y'all; if you really thought you could spend the rest of your life getting paid $100K+/yr for doing a tenth of the work I do, you're fools. Really. Stop crying in your beer and face the fact that you were acting foolishly. I don't get paid that much, but I actually have a little money in savings, and the only thing I owe on is a new car (and a used Altima, at that, so it's not much!) and quite frankly, I smirked behind the backs of people ditching school for Dotcoms back in the boom days. I knew it couldn't last, and I knew I'd have to tough it out (tough for me because I'm a lousy student
Quitcherbitchin and start pulling your weight.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
First we were "Slackers" who were good for nothing and completely disolutioned.
Then we were the "Uberkind" that could do no wrong, defied the establishment, and were successfull in spite of "how the previous generations had set us up".
and now...
We are doomed to a fate of financial ruin...so bottomless the pit into which we have fallen because of the ".com bust".
Bah! I am pretty sure that we...(if you can call it a "we"...I have never been all that sure about clasifications) will continue to do what we have always done about the "world" arround us....Give it the Finger and get on with getting on.
dimes
...for "weird."
... technologies that may make our political system obsolete, just as mass-produced guns made feudalism obsolete.
...when the full set of artificial organs are available? ...when anyone can afford the boost into orbit? ...when computers stop sucking and start working?
For all the advances in science and technology, we're still basically living the same lifestyle of the 50's. Stuff works a little better, people live a little longer, we have nicer toys, some irrelevant fashions continued to evolve, that's it. We still drive cars at about the same speed, not many people live to 100 years old, hardly anybody goes to space, and most things are still mass-produced in big, expensive factories.
When today's toddlers grow up, some seriously weird technologies are going to start kicking in
What happens when factories are no longer necessary to provide complex goods?
I have to admit that things look pretty bad right now but I am still optimistic. Life is hard, no doubt about it. You have to work your ass off and every strategy that you try is not going to be successful but I'm not willing to give up just yet.
The recession in '92 taught me some valuable lessons and this latest bust has reinforced those lessons and validated my strategies. I'm glad that these events happened while I am still relatively young.
1. Work for a company that is making money (as an employee or a businessman). If the company is not making money, find one that is. Don't wait, it will only get worse.
2. If the company isn't making money and your department isn't making the company money, your days are numbered. Get out.
3. Live lean. Keep your fixed expenses as low as possible.
4. Avoid debt at all cost for non-appreciating assets. If it is going to be worth less after you buy it, then pay cash. If you can't pay cash then do without it.
5. Use credit cards for convenience only and always pay them off every month.
6. Keep a war chest. You must have 1 year's expenses in cash if you are going to have any options in a pinch. There is nothing worse than having all of your options limited because you need a paycheck in 2 weeks to cover your rent.
7. When times are good, save your money. It won't stay that way. It NEVER does. The business cycle isn't going anywhere.
The biggest mistake that I saw people make during the last boom was planning as if everything would stay optimum forever. They took shortcuts, they loaded up on debt and expenses so when things took a downturn, the house of cards came falling down. If you can't be smart then you have to be tough.
Things seemed simpler in the past. Most of our parents probably worked for the same company for 30 years and retired with a pension that can sustain them for the remainder of their lives. The price that they paid was fewer choices in life. They couldn't start their own company and work out of their house. They didn't have portable pension plans that allowed them to change jobs or even careers. Many of them didn't have the opportunity to get a college education because there were not as many grant and student load programs. Given the choice, I would rather have things the way that they are now. More choices and thus more opportunity.
I still think that we will end up being better off than our parents in the long run.
I can relate because I'm financially in about the same boat. Little retirement funds, house but little equity (yet), and little confidence that those greedy boomers will leave anything for the rest of us. Don't get me started about our recent tax cuts (not to be US centric, or anything). I'm not whining (or a 'winger' to quote our friend from down under), but I am hopping mad about all the greed.
Fortunately, I have about 20 years experience in the right technologies, and my earning potential is excellent even if it isn't as good recently. I'm well aware that the squeeze is a lot tighter for some, but it is also clear that the outlook is bleakest if you follow the conventional wisdom. Find a way to express your creativity and take care of yourself. Reduce your needs while you take the road less travelled. I'm constantly seeing people who did this, and have been richly rewarded. Not always in money, but they have what they need.
If things keep going the way they have, I'll still be working at 70 to pay the bills and I won't be able to afford to retire, but that's fine with me as long as I can still do it, and I am doing something that interests me. I'm not that worried.
A guy I worked with who is a bit older was trying to convince me that we are in for a long term downturn when the boomers start to retire in large numbers during the next 10-20 years. The argument is that there is a big loss of experience, and there just aren't enough coming up behind to take up the slack. I say hogwash, let them go. Sure, you are going to lose some very talented people, but I think the generations that are coming on are a lot more clueful about the important shifts that technology and the new social networks made possible. If Gates retired now, we would all be a lot better off, and that goes for most of the leadership of large corperations.
He may have a point about the other end of the size scale, and I think there will be tremendous opportinity in small to mid-sized businesses. IMHO, the way out is to start now to empower people working in these organization to use their vision to keep up with all the shifts. The best business people will do this no matter what generation they come from, and the ones that don't will mostly fail and be replaced by new businesses with vision long before they get a chance to retire.
My claim is that the dotcom bust isn't what it first appears, a conventional bubble (although, it was that too). You have to look more closely at the survivors, and you have to be careful about what conclusions you draw. Sure, Gates and company are still making a fortune, but it is on a dead business model. IBM was making a fortune still when I was in school on the same dead business model and it didn't save them. If I'd learned Cobol (actually, I did, but I knew not to go that way) I'd have had a good year or two leading up to Y2K and I'd be desperately trying to catch up now.
It is an open future, and those that understand the importance of creativity and its relationship to freedom are going to shape it.
I've always liked this phrase, and I think it applies here: "When the going gets strange, the wierd turn pro". I think I've just found something to put in my sig.
I work for in international company. roughtly 1/2 the people staffed here are from the company's 'mother land' in Europe.
Working for this company, I have learned several things about the world, and reflexively, the US. See we (Americans) have a system where it pays to work hard and get ahead. In other countries, you work hard, get ahead, and make very little back. The 85% tax rate ensures you don't see much ROI. Now, what they do get is a workign social security system where your retirement is completely paid by the government.
I have a friend here who is from that mother land, and he soo wants to be american so he can start his own company and experience the reward for his hard work. (AKA the American Dream) So I'm going to have to say: If you want to go to work, do the minimum as to not get fired, and have a good retirement, leave the US. If you want to work hard and get ahead, then stay. After listening to my friend, I have decided to start my own company. Ironically, this foreigner is helping me start it, pro-bono, because I don't know how.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Or does your sig refer to something other than the long shoreman situation happening on the US west coast?
XML causes global warming.
-begin rant-
I've never been so angry after reading Slashdot comments. I can't believe the number of people (both Generation Xers and people of other ages) who are sitting here and calling Generation Xers a bunch of whiners. Where the hell do you get off condemning an entire age group based on some stupid article written for people in the top 1% of income in the US.
From various threads above:
All I ever se when I read an article about them is a bunch of whiny bitches that think everything should be handed to them on a silver platter complaining about "corporate america" (whoever that is) conspiring to steal from them, take away their rights, and in general make their life miserable. Score 4: Interesting.
What the fuck? You moderators find it interesting to stereotype an entire age group?
I think they live in a perpetual state of 'recapturing their youth.' Score 5: Interesting.
Yeah, we sure do, every one of us who was born between 1965 and 1975.
Gen X is the first instant gratification generation, much to their own dismay. Credit card and other short term debt is killing this generation, as well as an affliction for absurd consumption. Score 5: Interesting.
I don't know about the rest of the people from my generation, but the only times in my life when I had short term credit card debt was when I was unemployed. So fuckin sue me for needing to pay the rent.
Unemployment in 1933 was 24.9. 24.9 percent!!! GNP dropped 8.5 percent in 1931 and 13.4 in 1932.
Unemployment is 6-7% and our GDP rose by 1.2% last quarter. We are not in any sort of hardship by any means. Hardship is not being able to eat. Not being able to afford a new PS2 is not hardship. Score 5: Interesting.
Right. So because fewer people are unemployed now than were in the Great Depression, that means that the people who nonetheless are unemployed right now are not really suffering. I guess the logic is that they have more ability to mooch off of their friends or something, because the friends are less likely to be unemployed.
I could go on, but I have work to do. Please moderate this as flamebait, and go piss off.
-end rant-
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
A New York Life Investment Management survey of high-net-worth Gen Xers found that the respondents thought they needed $2 million to retire. Not even close, says Beverly Moore, who conducted the study. A Gen Xer who makes $100,000 and wants to retire at 59 needs $7.3 million net of taxes to sustain that lifestyle. (That means saving $2,600 a month and assumes an 8% return.)
Someone help me understand why those numbers don't seem to work. If someone has $2mil saved with an 8% return, they're pulling $160,000 per year pre-taxes or about $105,000 net. $7.3 mil should give you over $380,000 after tax income. Even if we correct for 5% inflation, it only takes $5 mil in savings to keep an income of $100k.
It just seems that these figures, like every other number in the article, were set artificially high.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
You want to study engineering, go for it. Want to study something professional, great! Want to study things that are practical, great.
The white collar world is still nice, and growth will resume, the economy is rebounding. After the election, everyone will stop "talking down the economy" and we'll probably avoid a double-dip recession. Sure things aren't as good now as they were 3 years ago, but they are better than they were 5, 8, or 10 years ago.
The biggest problem in Gen. X was learning our parent's bullshit mistakes. The Babyboomers got everything.
People saw that educated people have money, and confused cause and effect. Rich people sent kids to play in Ivy League schools before running the family business. Bullshit education is bullshit.
Born rich? Go to Harvard to drink $8 cups of coffees and study the "classics." Sorry, but that's a luxury for the idle rich. Everyone else? Work hard, get an education to advance your career, and work harder. Invest money, and live within your means.
Want to spend $100k studying garbage? If you parents have millions? Great. Otherwise, save enough money to do so on your own. Have at least 3 kids (the population aging, let's all do our part here to fix the situation, don't be selfish and hoard money with no offspring), and work hard. In "retirement" go to the local university and amuse yourself.
Just make sure you save enough to provide your kids with the means to a better life.
Sorry, those born with a silver spoon get the perks, such is life. Instead of whining that you don't get it, provide it to your kids. That SHOULD be the goal.
Sorry, when I watched my father's friends (all doctors) keeping their $2 million homes and pulling their kids out of private school and making them go to state schools, I was ill. Your FIRST priority should be giving your kids EVERY opportunity possible. Your personal luxury is secondary.
Sure, public schooling and state schools are PERFECTLY acceptable. However, if your choice is giving your children a "better" option or buying a new Lexus? Go get a Ford Taurus and deal.
Work hard, better your life, give your kids whatever advantages you can.
I have $10k in credit card debt from starting my business, it will be paid off by my wedding next summer. The fiancee racked up some in school. We're both working, paying off the debts, and trying to save money for a house AND start Roth IRAs (after the credit cards are paid off). We balance transfer our creditcards every 6 months to get 0%-3% interest.
We'll get a nice home in 5 years, and hopefully have 4 kids. They'll all get great schooling, and we'll live nicely. If my business takes off, we'll have a life of luxury. If we don't? We'll have a reasonable home. Either way we'll be happy with our family and extended family.
Alex
Ha! I am immune to the doubling of taxes. ~50% of my income already goes to taxes in one form or another.
The median US family in the US pays about 40% of their income to taxes. nifty graphs. (note: I didn't check out the credibility of the people hosting this report, but it matches what I have read in known reputable sources, so I will link it)
Maybe "taxes would have to be doubled refers to the social security taxes? That would be roughly a 33% increase in total taxes taking the median tax burden to something just over 50%.
BZZT! WRONG.
I was laid off from my first job after eight months. I was unemployed for some time thereafter. Don't give me this "it was harder for us" crap - it won't wash.
I simply didn't spend money I didn't have. My first car was an old beater. My stereo was the same boombox I was given as a present when I entered college. I didn't buy things I couldn't write a check for. It was YEARS before I got my first credit card.
I simply lived within my means - something YOU obviously cannot understand.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Generation X has already come to terms with a less than friendly socio-political environment. I think we all understood what we are up against before these "doomsday" articles came out in the early nineties. Many of us came out of college in the middle of a recession and faced economic challenges from the start. We know what we are up against, and I think we know that our success isn't going to be given to us on a silver plater.
Of course, this article also gives us none of the credit and all of the blame for our participation in the recent Internet/technology boom and bust. The author of this article gives the impression that we were just swept up on the ride. I would argue that, for the most part, our generation made the ride.
On a related note, I read somewhere back that if when the SS was initiated, if the gov't had saved the tax revenue for TWO YEARS and invested the money, the SS system would be in surplus right now...
My story in brief: At this point in my life (b. 1969), I'm doing very well and in a stable situation. I'm earning a very comfortable salary for this area, have a wife and child, live well within my means. My house is appropriately priced for the salary I earn, I have no credit debt to speak of other than my mortgage. My parents didn't give me a financial boost, as they were always middle class and lived in a poor city (Flint, MI).
However, my job could evaporate and I'd be fine because of a diverse skillset which I'm always improving and savings. I'm well insured so if something happens to me my family will be fine. It's all a matter of having good survival skills. I have friends in the same age group that are doing just as well. As I look around those that are doing badly, they've almost always made poor choices. The themes are similar:
- They overextended themselves. It doesn't matter if it's credit card debt or college loans. When you take on debt you have to realistically think about how you're going to pay it back.
- Trusted their employer. The age of Corporate Loyalty has been over with for 30 years. Get over it. And the personal word of a company officer is wasted breath.
- Trusted the government to rescue them. The best you can hope for is that the government will get out of your way and let you do your business.
- Planned their careers poorly. The IT industry is cyclical, always has been. Over the long curve it's grown since the 50's, but it has downtimes. The only defense against cycles is diversification, and if you're a 1-trick pony (open source or proprietary) you're vulnerable.
- Stayed in school too long. There is a point at which it's better to bail from school, get into an entry-level job, and start clawing your way up than to stay in school and hope for a better job later. Thinking that "the market is really good, but if I just take another 18 months to finish this 4-year degree I'll be all set with a better salary" is just stupid, especially if you're piling up debt to do it (see previous point).
To the rest of my generation: take care of your own business and stop yer whining. Please. I'm sick of hearing about it.To be honest, the only thing I resent the Boomers for is eating up Social Security at an alarming rate. Every time I look at my paycheck stub I resent the elderly and their voting block -- and despise GenX's fake politics (all talk and slack, no votes). For now I pay the tax, expect no returns, and vote for anyone willing to change the system to my pesonal benefit.
Get off my lawn.
Amen!
.boom years at a JC (I had to pay for it all myself, and I don't like the idea of debt). I took some tech classes so I would have some real skills with which to earn the money to finish up my degree (was EE, but I discovered programming along the way, which I love even more than hardware, and have changed to CS). I met my wife and we had a beautiful daughter.
I know a few of those, and it's just pathetic. A few years ago they thought they were so much better than me because they were making all this money and living in the Bay Area and having all this fun. Now their all moping around, living in their parents basements and begging them to pay for their return to school since they didn't bother to save any money.
I spent the
In the end I came out ahead, at least from my perpective. I have a wonderful family, 2 new cars, a job that I love, all my bills are paid, and I still can to go to school part time (taking only 1 or 2 classes a semester may be the slow road, but it does wonders for your GPA). I entered the job market just before the crash (or perhaps right at the beginning of it), but thanks to the real world skills I took the time to learn, I've never been out of work for more than a week, which is totally doable because my car payments and rent combined are half what my Bay Area friends were paying for just rent.
On the whole, it seems like the crash has actually been to my advantage, all because, as I said, I took the time to learn some real skills.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
The generation is not defined as guys that thought they could learn HTML and have it all by the time they were 25. Where did you get that from?
Anonymous posts are filtered.
That you pay $1,200 USD for a single bedroom appt? Where I am, $700 US rents you a house (4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms) next to the university.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
like any other product. it was like this ritual that you must go to in order to be considered to be part of the non-trailer trash society. People go to college not to learn, but to live like a child for a little bit longer. When magazines like PlayBoy and Maxim are regularly publishing articles about which schools are the biggest drinking school you've got to stop and wonder if maybe people don't really take school that seriously.
The only thing about this is that it hurts lower education. A High school education should not be about preparing you for college, it should be about giving you an education that you can use in Real Life. To get a job that is crappy, but it should give you the skills to be able to get any crappy job you want. You can then work your way up from there, or go and get a higher education from college or from a trade school.
You've right, college is not for everyone, but I feel that my generation was the first in which everyone was expected to goto college. No real reason other then to go. Oh, and pay huge amounts of money in order to do it.
Can you imagine driving your (due to be paid off in 1995) BMW home from your job as a DEC VAX System Analyst to the Condo you'll be working for the rest of your life to pay off, grabbing a California Cooler from the fridge to go with the sushi you got from the nearest Japanese place, and watching MTV (some things havent changed in 20 yrs) for a while before spending the rest of the evening playing PACMAN while listening to Depeche Mode CDs, until you get a message on your answering machine that says "wanna do some coke" or some such nonsense?
And it WAS hell
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
Flame suit on here, because this certainly isn't true of everyone, but people on /. tend to flame first and think later...
/., is an extremely vocal majority of the pool of tech workers who only had jobs because of the bubble. In the peak of the internet craze, the quality of your average tech worker was in the toilet. These coffee-slingers-come-Java-developers were still only really qualified for coffee slinging. Every joe-blow who sent out a resume because they read HTML For Dummies wasn't a qualified web developer. As we all saw, every tech visionary wasn't a qualified CTO. There were an order of magnitude more unqualified people in high paying positions than there were qualified people.
There was a certain size population of well-off, well-paid tech workers in existance well before the dot-com explosion. Tech work at that point took a reasonable amount of experience and skill. Not necessarily formal education, but skill sets were generally acceptable, and people were well paid.
I don't think the number of people in those positions is any lower now than it was pre-bubble. In fact, I think the number is quite a bit bigger. There are hundreds of thousands of tech workers right now who are not feeling the pinch of a "depression" or "recession".
What you see, particularly on places like
When the bubble burst, there were a lot of people who thought that a position they once had was still owed to them because of their "experience" and "history". But, the fact is that when push comes to shove, they didn't have real marketable skills. Anyone who has hired anyone in the last year or two has seen that -- 100 B.S. resumes come over your desk for every qualified one, and for the most part those qualified people are not having any problem finding jobs.
Now, again, before people start to flame like crazy, thats not true of everyone. People who were truely talented web developers, for example, are still having a hard time. Companies can't easily pick the gems out of the rest of the dirt, and some of the people who really are qualified aren't going a good job networking with people who know that, or selling themselves. But most of my friends who have lost their jobs in the last two years and haven't been able to find anything, honestly aren't as qualified as they think they are. One or two are, but they are in the vast minority.
Thats the real shock that most people are having -- that they really aren't as good as they and others spent four years telling them. They don't understand that you 99% of people can't be a senior anything with just two years of experience... They still are shooting way too high in their job search, and aren't realizing that there are people out there who are looking (and finding with little trouble) who *are* qualified.
Bone head jobs have the most job security because they aren't filled with people who think they are more important than they are.
that's interesting. i never knew *why* it was called generation x... what came before the "Baby Boomer" Generation? or was that the first generation to bother naming themselves? I've never heard anyone mention any names for anything earlier than the baby boomers. Also, it seems weird to say that a generation lasts for 20 years. I mean, I was born in 1979 so depending on who I go with here i'm in the same generation as someone born in 1999 and what could I possible have in common with them that someone 5 years older than me wouldn't? Seems to me it should be 10 years or something. By the time you're old enough to start gaining an identity of your own there should be a new generation marker for it.
The subject is just my meta-comment about the idea that slashdotters are of one mind on most things. In this case, personal responsibility is the "groupthink" that is going on. Actually, I'm pretty impressed by it.
If you're in your 20s, you should expect to live into your 90s. Easily. Do you really plan on doing your guaranteed job for the next 70 years? That's almost 4 times as long as you've been alive!
I guess they mean since this one .
If you sit in your parent's basement moaning about how you can't afford Starbucks anymore, you deserve to fail. Or you could be the next "Greatest Generation," who make anything that the current genX has to "overcome" look like a tough mosh pit.
---
"I hate people who got into tech stuff just because they wanted to become rich"
Me too, that's why I'm jobless at 22 and don't know where to knock my head. All those "consultants" who put "I can double-click" on their resumes, I'd just pummel them into cat-chow because they pretty much ruined my career opportunities. I was writing code before I even knew how to tie my own shoe laces. How many 5 year olds do you know who'd ask for "an Assembler Editor cartridge" for christmas ? But today I'm just a rusted nerd looking for a new hobby.
Just last week as I contemplated the last days of my work contract, I had the "pleasure" of meeting my replacement, a dreaded consultant who expected my mouse-wheel to be assigned to double-click, and was wondering why her apps weren't loading up. That's it, their puzzle is complete, the last brain has left the building.
Some people do it for money, others do it by passion. The latter are always getting fscked by the former, in just about every field. It's hard to find someone that can appreciate the masochist genius of self-modifying multipass assembler code anymore. "Why bother with that ? Just get a faster computer/bigger hard drive!". Might as well be running 5 mpg engines in our case, why bother, just buy more gas.
So it is very easy to get pissed at people who earn absurd salaries, because very few of them have any actual talent in the field they're working. They do have an outstanding talent for lying their way out of real work and into even higher paying jobs that were probably created from one manager's competition-class bullshit.
The market crashed and threw out the dotcoms and other groundless businesses, but vapor-skills are still rampant in all industries and are the main reason why our taxes are so high and the things we buy are so crappy. It's not about designed obsolescence or "what we want the market to want", it's about incompetents running the show, unable to tell the difference between a brilliant interviewee with poor social skills, and a "Look at my suit" lying sack of shit. The sack of shit wins every time.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
So, how did this all happen? I meet a woman (now my wife) that taught me not to spend all my paycheck and to save some money. I still have all the toys I need (ham radio and computers) but now I have my own place (and garage!) to play with them in.
Moral: Get a good woman that will ride you ass about saving money and investing in the future and you just might have a future in which you can enjoy life and help out others.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I managed to miss most of this because I bought into ESR's propaganda about the open source business model and the imminent ascendance of Linux. So instead of getting my MCSE and an Oracle certification, I dived into Linux system administration and Perl- and PHP-based web development. Consequently, while my friends were making $100k+, I was averaging half that through the 90's, taking the work I wanted to do instead of slinging C++ and VB writing Windows apps.
Of course, my $100k+ friends are now making what I was, and I'm only down a few thousand a year from my peak pay in the late 90's. Not that I don't occasionally wish I had gone for the big bucks during the boom, but I know myself well enough to know I would have squandered most of what I would have earned, just like my friends did.
So in the end, thanks to Linux, it worked out about even for me. Except that my total debt load is now about $14k, and more than a few of my friends are into six digits.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
b. 1970 and in the same situation. Graduated from an excellent private university with a degree in Mechanical Engineering (Washington University), wife has two undergraduate degrees, a masters and is finishing her doctorate from Stanford. We founded a Linux based company in Puerto Rico, hired people, fired people. We lost money, acquired debt, but kept up the effort. We are just hanging on at the moment, working hard, but it seems like the economy/climate is a bit immature right now. We are in flux, technologies aren't settling down. I like what IBM is doing with Linux. Sun is starting to get it.
Perhaps in 5 more years I won't have to sound so much like a Jehovah's Witness (have you seen this literature, Linux can save you) going door to door evangelizing about Linux and the benefits of Open Source. It's tough, but things are turning around.
So here we are two highly educated hard working people who BELIEVE in what they do. And you know what THAT could be the difference between us and our parents' generation. From what I see in my peers, the so called Generation X is really fired by passion and belief... perhaps a more spiritually connected generation. We do things for vocation not money.
And yet, we feel left out in much the same way as the a non-popular kid in high school sometimes wishes he/she was part of the in-clique. We lament our lack of savings, smaller earning power, and extra debt... but you know what? We are happier than our parents' generation, less beholden, less trapped in bad marriages, less held down by corporate structure, more racially integrated, more tolerant, more liberated, more accepting. We don't have as much retirement savings as they do, simply because we really LIKE what we do regardless of salary. We aren't working to earn a retirement. We are pursuing work that we find worth our while.
Maybe baby boomers were a product of THEIR parents' generation, that is Depression era. To this day, my grandmother washes and stores her used aluminum foil among other things (war years and depression). That's got to have an effect on people. So, perhaps, shaped by that, GenX's parents overcompensated by saving more, earning more, pursing money as a way to plenty and in the process sacrificed their souls a bit.
So I say to my fellow GenX'ers: Just keep it up. Don't fall apart, stay the course. We'll reap the benefits someday... and if they aren't in the form of money, that's okay.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
Just because the N-N-N-NASDAQ's down.
Ah, the sympathy for other people I'm seeing here is so heart warming.
It is fun and easy to make judgements about people you have never met.
Yes, everyon that has lost ther jobs in the IT sector in the past several years is one of those people that learned html, etc whatever. All 400,000 of them make me sick!
Plus, we've got ours, right? I make 150K a year so leave me out of any thoughts of bad things. Fuck everyone below me.
Wait this sounds more like baby boomers than Gen-X's. Show me your birth certificate! I think you shall be removed from our generation.
- I like pudding.
We have to cut the crap about who is doing what to whom and start really being responsible. I won't be able to face my kids if we don't because there won't be much left for them. And they won't be whining about the stuff in the article, they will be facing environmental devistation.
'No generation since the Depression has been set up for failure like this.'
The depression generation succeeded like none before it! This is the generation that enjoyed the boom of the '50s!
The baby boom generation (of which I am an early member), OTOH, has been foisted with paying for the Social Security and Medicare of our elders. Contrary to one poster in this thread, SS and Medicare were set up before us boomers were out of college!
The depression generation also had to fight in WW-II, and many boomers (myself included) went to Vietnam. The Gen-X'ers, with very few exceptions, didn't have a war to worry about!
The biggest problem for the Gen-Xers will be paying for the retirement of us boomers. And this will indeed be a problem, since *we* have lots of votes. This is true in all of the first world countries that I am aware of - the government created retirement systems have always been a generational transfer tax (although not sold as such) and a bit of a scam. The ease of abortion, the later age of marriage and the greater percentage of working women have all lead to a dramatic reduction in birth rate, hence they extra load on the Xers.
The worst thing the boomers have done to the Xers is a result of our generation's rejection of traditional morality, causing too many Xers to grow up in dysfunctional divorced families and without moral guidance.
Boomers grew up when there was little crime, almost everyone had their natural fathers (main exception was those who lost their fathers in war), suicide was rare and drug abuse (with the exception of alcohol and tobacco) was unknown.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Funny, most of MY friends in the area are selling their townhouses and smaller houses and moving INTO much BIGGER homes - making a fortune at it too. What they don't seem to realize is that while their home has gone up in value so has everyone else's so moving up right now and staying in this area probably isn't that bright an idea but.....
:-)
:-( Those who say they will work till they drop can have at it, I want free time to explore all of my interests and hobbies - if you're working too hard to have outside interests you're an idiot. I have hobbies and I enjoy life, so should everyone else.
;-)
My home is over 10years old and MINE. If I want a nicer one I'll improve this one - the mortgage is low
Having said that - my 401K is decimated. I was up over $100K and am now looking at maybe $30K in that account. I have a second account with a more diverse portfolio that's doing pretty good compared to the other thanks to my employrer but nowhere near good enough to make up for the YEARS worth of losses in the other account. I have to laugh when people say it's not really gone until you sell but when companies go under it's REALLY gone! My girlfriend's 401K is even worse since she started out with more and she's much closer to "retirement age" than I
What's saddest here is that I don't see things changing soon. We can no longer trust the numbers Wall Street puts out and companies that were supposedly doing well LIED. Who exactly feels like they shoudl be BUYING stocks right abotu now? Personally I favor the death penalty for those who have screwed over so many as they certainly don't have the money to pay us back nor do I feel like supporting their fat asses in some country club prison.
Maybe someone will come up with a great way to use all of the zillions of computing cycles going to waste an people will buy more computers. As things sit now I have no need for a faster computer and I've not bought or upgraded one for over a year. Someone write something new and amazing that sucks cycles like crazy so we can all start moving forward again
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
of what NOT to do. I spent my teenage years watching GenXers bury themselves in college loans, car loans on BMWs, ludicrous mortgates, etc..
Unsure what to do with my own future, I made a big point of not following in their footsteps. Rather than sink into debt for an unsure future, I left college and went to work. I eschewed credit cards and bought a cheap Honda. Now I am happy in a great job, making a great salary, and paying my way through school without loans, working toward a goal that I understand.
None of this really would have happened had Generation X not fallen on their faces. Their unguided life choices and foolish financial habits left a legacy of how to NOT handle life as a twentysomething in a wildly successful capitalist society, and by doing the opposite I and many others have been able to enjoy our lives by understanding the dangers that exist in modern America.
But for every Gates, Jobs and McNealy, there are millions who never found a good niche.
Look at the following quote from the Fortune article for a blatent lie in this regard:
Oh really? Let's look at these graphs.Notice that age of first marriage of baby boomer females as given in http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/trends/change.pdf matches closely the peak cohort for 1980 as well as the peak in crude oil prices in constant (1996) dollars near 1980. Onset and drop-offs of these variables also match.
Also notice that mortgage rates, crucial for nesting and reproduction at first marriage, accurately match these same trends. Finally note the radically different way government policy affected WW II GI's seeking their first mortgages compared to the treatment of their children at the same phase of life. Those who were 30 in 1984 were subject to delayed marriages from a variety of factors, not the least of which was the 1970s "stagflation" under which early boomers and GI generation bosses applied mandated "wage and price controls" preferentially to wages but not to prices -- which hit those just entering the job market the hardest. That's when people started jumping jobs to get better pay, but even that wasn't enough given the explosion of prices in real estate, energy and interest rates toward the late 1970s.
You know "boomer" programmers born after 1950? I know quite a few and there aren't many who are looking any better than Gen-X'ers. Look around and see if they're really as good off compared to Gen-X programmers as you would think given the article in Fortune and the comments on "boomers" here at ./ -- then report here.
PS: I was born in 1954 and the only ways I feel even remotely more advantaged by my birth year over Gen-Xers are due to the fact that microprocessors may have been more "real" as a frontier opportunity than the Internet -- and herpes was merely incurable while AIDS kills you. However even that last advantage (Herpes vs AIDS) evaporates when you consider that the disco studs were far lower in number than disco whores. "She can wait if she wants... blame it a all on yourself cuz she's always a woman to me..." -- Billy Joel
Seastead this.
http://www.inthe80s.com/dynamic/child8e.shtml
Don't even get me started on the idea of credit cards
What's wrong with them? They're a wonderful way to get a free 30-60 day float on money. Hell, some companies can't even get that much float from creditors!
Oh... you mean not paying them off in full every month? Well barring sudden emergencies that is stupid. Of course, for emergencies there should be an emergency fund, but sometimes shit flows thick. Fortunately it hasn't happened to me yet.
If a ten year loan costs too much per month, buy a cheaper house.
That's a fallacy. Yes, a 30 year mortgage will mean you deeply overpay for the house. Making additional payments can radically reduce the final payments of course - I expect to have my 30 year loan paid off in 15. So why don't I get a 15 year loan? Flexibility. If my wife and I both lose our jobs then I'd rather make the minimum payment on the house than wind up in foreclosure. And no, we're nowhere even close to overbought. I wasn't close to overbought on my single salary.
A 10 year loan schedule simply isn't viable for most people. I don't live in an area with absurdly overpriced housing, but a 10 year mortgage would've still put me in a neighborhood that would have shitty schools and potentially endangered my life. No thanks.
Besides, the argument can be made that you're better off owing on a house than owning it outright at the moment. 30 year mortgage rates are around 6% nationally. I bet you can make more than 6% on a 30 year investment if done wisely. It's not my cup of tea - I want to own my house, not pay the bank, but it's a viable strategy.
I agree with the gist of your argument - don't spend more than you make. Don't think creature comforts are necessities. Life within your means and your life will be far richer than having all the latest toys.
I have seen a lot of comments critical of the article, but have not seen one critical of the basic presupposition: that each generation has a unique identity (maybe my lameness filter is set too high.)I think this is a major flaw in making these broad characterizations.
I am technically a baby boomer but share most of the traits of a Gen Xer. What makes me a baby boomer? I was born after WWII. OK, riiight.
My mother and I are both baby boomers how can two generations be part of the same generation(figure that one out.) Besides my mother and I have little in common when it comes to political ideas, financial status or educational background (which in my mind create ones identity more than the year they were born.)
Finally, look at the 60's counter culture- Babyboomers. And the Counter-counter culture- also babyboomers. So what identifies the baby boomers, conservatism or change? The answer depends on whom you ask.
We need to just drop the Gen *blank* titles and realise that they are all just gross over-generalizations.
"watching MTV (some things havent changed in 20 yrs)"
Except that 20 years ago, MTV played videos, now it's just a bunch of really low-mentality "Stuffed morons at the beach" type shows. WTF happened?
Wow, I've run down the same road you have. And yet when I try to show up at interviews they wonder why I'm wasting their time.
You got LUCKY.
Easy way out my ass. Degreed and certified with computers/business/electronics.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
i know that real-estate price dramatically dropped between 1989-1991.
real estate is not without risk. prices do go down.
... hi bingo
I find it pathetic that middle age is being viewed as, "prime spending years", as if being able to buy a lot of shit is the sumation of my being. (I'm not middle age, but the ramafications on society are disgusting.)
What about those of us that are younger - 20, for instance? Some of us have gotten into the work world early, having trained ourselves. In many cases, we're much more skilled and tallented at what we do that people 5, 10 years older than we are. Things look equally as bleak, with no resurfacing of the economy forseen, for those still in college, even. Especially with all the war and conflict going on.
The people of my generation are an unseen, lost generation. Generation X is several years our senior, and Generation Y is approaching high school still. Sure, we have a lot of nice whiz-bang gizmos, lots of entertainment, and various other benefits. But to what end? There's a large degree of unemployment in most of the desireable job markets, and the markets that are open, are undesireable - a lot of low-end, dead-end jobs that nobody would enjoy doing in the first place.
In the eyes of many people of my generation, there are very few exciting, challenging, new things in this world left to do. National Geographic has the whole 'exploration' thing down pat. Computers and technology are passe, nearing the point of being transparent - simply another entertainment device.
Even in simple living, things don't look good - pay is distributed in a horrible arc curve, distributing most of the wealth to a small percentage of society. What little most people can earn is leeched from them from the upper crust through taxes, credit, lawyer and doctor fees - people that scratch each other's backs, further increasing the differential of wealth. Combine these factors with all of the social decay and unpleasantries going about (STDs, divorce, decay of the atomic family, etc), things are downright depressing.
Even the decay of America's core is occuring. The DMCA and all the various laws like it, destroying our freedom, get overlooked by the populace, while commercials rage on TV telling us to "value our freedom as Americans". The strongarming of foreign countries isn't improving America's international status much, either. The economic benefits that were protecting the US from attack in the past are slowly being whittled away.
It's times like this that even a patriotic American starts to wonder about the future of his country, and whether he should take drastic measures, such as make a new life as a Canadian.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Simple equation. It doesn't matter how much money you have but how much you have relative to everyone else. Money determines what fraction of the total resources of the earth you can utilize. As the total resources of the earth decline, the amount each individual can utilize is going to decline, even if you have a larger fraction than everyone else. In the same way, the total resources of the earth determine what fraction of the money you own. Declining natural resources cause reduction in the value of money.
For hundreds of years, we got around the declining natural resources by increasing efficient utilization of the remaining resources, but now for several years we've seen no major improvements in efficiency and the decline has caught up.
However, my job could evaporate and I'd be fine because of a diverse skillset which I'm always improving
Don't be smug about it. Having a diverse skillset is a necessary condition for continued employment but not a sufficient condition. It's considerably easier to get a job when you're 33 than it is when you're 43 or 53. Regardless of age, I would not want to be pounding the pavement right now, skillset notwithstanding.
I fully agree with you about staying out of debt.
Planned their careers poorly. The IT industry is cyclical
Yeah, but you best extend that strategy outside IT. You may find it necessary to change your line of work. I've already had to twice. You can be prepared for other opportunities but there's no guarantee they'll arise and there's only so much you can do to position yourself to take advantage of them.
I resent the Boomers for is eating up Social Security at an alarming rate
Whoa up there partner! Boomers were born between 1945 and 1960. The post war crowd will be starting to draw SS soon but the Sputnik babies have a ways to go. That having been said, I sympathize with your resentment of those who ARE drawing SS, particularly those of means who don't need it. Roosevelt foisted this colossal pyramid scheme on us 70 years ago.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Throughout the article, Social Security is described in pessimistic terms, and yet many people continue to resist its privatization. Think how much better off you'd be if the 15% of your wages going there were instead deposited into your 401(k). Not only would you have a better retirement that SS will ever pay you, but you'd have a nest egg to pass to your descendants.
And here is the counter to the obvious objection:
The recent stock market plunge shows how risky relying on business to provide retirement income is. Where do you think government is going to get the money to pay you? From those very same businesses through taxation. If business tanks, so does government revenue. And while government can use deficit spending for a while to prop things up, there is no free lunch: ultimately benefits would have to be cut or inflation allowed to erode the real value of the payout. Besides which, we're talking about a very long term accumulation of capital here, so short-term fluctuations in the market are not a threat to the long-term health of a privatized retirement plan. The California Public Employee Retirement System (CALPERS) relies on investment to pay out a generous (several times that of SS) pension to its employees who are exempt from participation in the Social Security system, by the way. Many other states have comparable plans based on investment. If it's good enough for a bunch of state bureaucrats, why isn't it good enough for you?
I've programmed computers since I got my first zx81 when I was 15 years old, that was all my family could afford, and since then I've worked hard and had a lot of fun working hard to learn to program better. There have only been opportunities. I've set up my own business before the
With your talent you should be very capable of getting on with your life.
Maybe it's very easy to get pissed off at people who seem to get everything for nothing, but it serves no purpose whatsoever.
Take control of your talent.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Was this girl thinking...
"Jessica, an art therapist and professional harpist, has $50,000 in student loans."
Who the hell racks up $50k in student loans to do that? Doing what you love is important, but being realistic is crucial.
Too many kids are heading off to college thinking that a degree is going to make them rich no matter what.
I gave myself to Jesus, but now he never calls
Every argument (in the article) seems to try to blame the dot-coms, the economy, and everything else under the sun, each argument always goes back the underlying problem....debt.
Servicing debt is the least effecient way to use money, and the quickest way to make you broke. Most of the debt "Gen Xers" have is college, or related to college (i.e. the computer and books you bought on credit during school).
The real culprit seems to be outrageously inflated college tuitions. Look at the past 10 years; college tuition increases have outstripped GDP growth, inflation, and wage rates. With 60% of american students going to college, is it any suprise that this generation is servicing record debts? My dad got a 4 yr. college degree for $8000.00. One year of college cost me more than that.
America needs to get college tuitions in check, and we also need a national health care system. These are two of the biggest burdens on American consumers....if we accomplish both of these goals, we will be poised for long term growth.
-ted
Ironically, this is one of the few articles I've read that don't lump GenX into "everyone under 40". In that sense, it's accurate - but that's where it stops. "Most productive earning years behind them"? What? I was born in 1967, I'm 35. I'm certainly HOPING that my best earning years are ahead of me. /. comments for this pretty funny because they reinforce what I'm saying. In my experience GenX'ers tend to be more characterized by a "leave me alone to live my life" philosophy (mischaracterized by older and younger generations as apathy).
Generally, I find the tenor of most of the
Living in the the demographic slump after the baby-boom has, for most of us, meant that we are not catered to in any way - by the media, by advertisers, by the markets, etc. Never have been, don't really want to be. Douglas Coupland nailed the ethos of the generation. (That and The Breakfast Club.)
We were too young to be hippes or protesters in the late 60's and early 70's - we've merely been saddled with the rubble therefrom (drug abuse, AIDS, etc.).
We grew up post-Watergate, so government has NEVER been something trustworthy. We matured under the shadow of Reagan and Brezhnev/Andropov/Chernyenko/Gorbachev. When I walked into senior high the day of the Challenger disaster, I was RELIEVED to find out it was "only" that the shuttle blew up. The pale faces and utter silence of the commons made me fear the balloon had gone up (remember that quaint phrase?).
In the 80's, we watched all of our older borthers, sisters, and cousins who had railed against "The Man" and "Corporate America" put on their suits to go rape the economy in corporate takeovers. So all these 'paragons' of idealism are as totally corruptible as anyone else.
Now in the 90's, we saw all these tainted idealists who made a giant pile of money in the 90's, settle down in their cozy 5000 sqft homes, have their one child name Zoe, drive gigantic vehicles in some pursuit of safety-through-egotism and become the "family" that they also said was hopeless back in the 60's.
Finally, now that they are staring old age in the face, now they're all joining churches like mad. HA HA HA. Still looking for God that you couldn't find in drugs/sex/money/domesticity?
As Generation X'ers, THAT'S what we've witnessed, that's what's formed our views of the world. Every decade since we were tots the generation ahead of us has said "we know the true way to happiness!" and been wrong EVERY TIME. We're not "Generation Wrecked". But we're forced to step over their wreckage to live our lives.
-Styopa
The people succeeding now are the ones with solid technical/analytical skills, a personality, and who didn't spend the last 5 years competing in the "I can accumulate the most debt" contest
Tell that to a friend of mine who has been out of work since December last year. The best project manager, analytical thinker, business planner I know. He's charming and personable and treats people right. He also looks for the bottom line in what he's doing, and has a passion for it. He turned a $2MM budget into $30MM of revenue for two years. And what did he get?
Laid off.
And right now, he can't get his foot in the door because in Seattle, everyone's networks are down (everyone who knew someone has suddenly found that the person they knew is out of work too), and resumes are clogging the channels so great people don't get seen over the sea of thousands who apply for EVERY job they see, whether they're qualified or not.
He can't move out of the area, because he has an ex-wife and joint custody of the children. So he's screwed.
"If someone isn't getting a job, it's probably because their skills are a bunch of fantasy or they are anti-social whiners" is just complete and utter BULLSHIT -- at least in Seattle.
The reason people aren't getting jobs is quite simple: there's not enough jobs to go around, and everyone's stampeding after every job that comes up.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Everyone should have the freedom to succeed - and also be given a fair chance on achieving that. When the parent generation has generated an economical structure that makes things harder for the coming generation than it was for the parent generation - I think the coming generation is entitled to rant a little.
However, lying on your back and complaining will not improve matters.
Stop the brainwash
Maybe we are whiners,
Well, at least you admit it.
but that doesn't mean that our parents our justified in to blowing their savings on globe-trotting and hippie weekend camps
Of COURSE they are. its their money! Go get yourself a good job and save so that you can spend it when you're their age. Hell, they freaking RAISED YOU and still managed to save the money they are spending now. They certainly have earned it!
Don't even get me started on the implications of Enron, WorldCom et. al. They've screwed us royally.
Really? Did you have stock in Enron? Were you a worldcom shareholder? I want to get you started. I want to know the exact dollar figure. How much did you loose to enron and worldcom, precisely? How much?
You weren't an employee or shareholder of them, yet you're still complaining? Piss off. The real victims of fraud have a right to complain but you bed wetting liberals do not.
Yes, you are a whiner. And you should be ashamed.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
NO one will probably read this since there are already a million posts on this story but anyway...
several people have summarized this story as being about gen-x'ers whining. but it isn't. it is about a baby boomer who wrote a story and tried their best to make gen-x seem worse than their genreation. really, how many gen-xers read fortune in comparison to their other readers? their target demo is not gen-x but baby boomers. this is an article to make the baby boomers feel better, "Look how great we are compared to these damn kids." does anyone REALLY think that our best earning years are over? no. not a chance.
it's not gne-xers whining, its baby boomers looking for a story.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
If you had a child that could benefit from Art Therapy, you'd change your tune awful fast. Until then, try not bash something as worthless just because it has the word 'Art' in the name.
I'm sure the harpist for the New York Philharmonic makes enough to live comfortably. Are you saying that becoming a musician is worthless as well?
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
If you read my comment again, you might notive that my real skills were picked up in tech classes at a Junior College. One of the things I noticed working as a tech is that electronic engineers come out of school knowing dick about electronics. They know tons of theory, sure, and they can calculate charge capacitance in their sleep, and they have a much better understanding of circuit design as a whole than I do, but when their circuit doesn't work they come to me to find out why. That's what I mean by "real" skills.
However, I wasn't talking about people who went to school and actually got an education. I was talking about web-monkeys who dropped out their freshman year to capitalize on their investment in "Learn Web Design in 24 Hours" and spent their $75k on partying.
But hey, getting buried in debt is just plain dumb anyway, college education or not. Whenever you gamble, eventually you lose. Merely having an education doesn't somehow magically make you not a "lamer" or "loser", especially when so many schools will let you make up degrees that are essentially meaningless (like the guy who started Sub Pop records who has a degree in "Punk Rock"). If you've buried yourself in debt, you are a loser, I don't care if you're the next Einstein (who, btw, wasn't buried in debt only because he married women who were as practical as he was not).
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Life is full of surprises, some good, some bad. If you're in your 20's and you think your life is set, cross your fingers. If your're in your 30's and you think you've life is in ruins, it might not be.
I know this sounds like pablum, but much of our lives is really out of our control.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Until his parents use their massive voting power to award themselves your money for their retirement.
No, it's easy to make that assumption since most of the people posting reasonable comments on this thread have had enough financial experience to have an opinion, while the younger "gen-X'rs" have not.
Firstly the dates of a generation are not clear-cut as generations are defined by generalized beliefs withing groups of people, it is absolutely asinine to say people born before 1976 (or whatever) have this attitude and people born after 1976 have a different attitude, doesn't work like that. the 'Baby Boomers' are the only generation actually defined by when they were born (as opposed to their attitudes) and thus grouped inappropriately. i've read reports of the Generation-X'rs (is this a really stupid fucking name or what?) extend all the way to 1980, which places yours truely as an "X'r" (1979).
So then, as a fellow "X'r" i will disagree with you on this point: i am 23, 6 months away from completing college (PharmD is a 6-year degree) which i started immediately out of high school. i worked my way through college (at one point i had 3 jobs while enrolled in 22 Sr. level credit courses (i believe it was 7 classes)) have $0.00 in debt, and had over $20k put away before the market crash, today i think i have around half of that (yes they are diversified investments: global, national, large cap, mid-cap, small-cap, techies, utilities, etc, etc). i do not come from an "advantaged" family other than that my family works for their money, i am one of three children and my parents have never made more than $40k or $50k per year combined (yes, tehy both worked full-time). The difference between myself and a billion other people my age that are broke and in debt, is that i was not, nor am i, a dumb-ass with my money. There are people with poor financial skills of every generation and age strata within those generations, it's no suprise to me that the majority of slashdotters (my perception anyway) are also fiscally responsible... This isn't bragging from a "high horse" or anything (it sounds kind of conceited now that i look at it), but a representation of how the world works, why some people don't "get it" is absolutely beyond me... If i can "do it" then a lot more people than currently are can too...
What'll really erk your cranks (everyone that's proud of this responsibility) is when the government steps in 40 years down the road and gives all those louts who never saved a penny a bigger pension than they give you. "Why should we give it to you?-you have money." they'll say.
Of course the US population could increase to 500m by that time (economist.com(might be subscription-only, sorry if it is)) so this could offset the babyboomers moving into retirement moreso than EU or Japan, but that's a different debate altogether.
-tid242
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. --Carl Sagan
I'm 30. I worked through the dot com explosion at a conservative finance company. I hear all the old fart executives laugh at the failure of the computer age. Daily I hear this. Usually because I am the one hooking up their laptop to the presentation system. I am the one showing them how to load that power point presentation that their secretary designed. I am the one who helps them sync their PDA with their laptop. I am the one who is suggesting what computer they should buy their daughter now that she's going away to school. I'm the one showing them how to use Nextel direct connect. Yeah, the computer age is over. My job is in jeopardy and my pay is getting smaller all the time... hardly. The Chicken Little's can complain all they want. I have my geriatric providers right where I need them: Hooked on my technology and convinced that it does not rule them.
Grimwell - old, cranky, mean, obsessive
Wasted? I think not.
You learned about real life. In real life, the well-rounded survive.
You say you learned to program when you were 5 (you win, I was 11). Turn that around. You have a skill that even a 5 (or 11) year old can learn. Why on earth would it be valuable by itself by age 40?
Learn about communication, negotiation, and salesmanship. You don't have to learn golf, but you should learn how to engineer a deal. Those are skills that tend to be marketable even the roughest of times.
Learn, and be passionate about ANOTHER skill. Do you ride a bike? knit? travel? take pictures? like to teach? Turn one of those into a job. The world IS bigger than the latest release of Debian, no matter what Slashdot says!
JoAnn
On posts like this, it's a damn shame the point limit can't be modded above five.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Of course, we all know what the baby-boomer execs do. They take credit for the increased productivity as a result of their management skills [in cutting staff], and caller us slackers for not increasing productivity more.
I keep telling ya, bullshitting is a key job skill. Calculas? Pfffffpt! They should have at least 4 courses in bullshitting (not just producing it, but getting away with it) before handing you a degree. "The Art of War" should be required reading. (It is not really about military stuff, but skillful BS.)
The world is powered by bullshit.
I don't like it any more than you do, but I would rather not be able to sleep at night because of a guilty concience rather than because the street cleaner keeps running over my bed. (I still can't do it because I am simply bad at BS. I have no BS skills. My face gives me away.)
My wife has a good job and she lied to get it.
Table-ized A.I.
I don't do programming or networking for a day job, but I do work on the side. There seems to be enough work here (small/midsize city) to keep me busy. Not a lot of companies looking for 9-5 people, that's for sure, but there IS a lot of contract work. The problems are going to be worse in areas where there is a high concentration of techies (and out of work techies) though.
The article did nothing to indicate that those of us with sensible career plans are having any problems. Infact, the examples that the article cites implies quite the opposite. Those that planned for a potentially harmful future seem to have gotten along rather well. While the article did seem to collect as many sensational facts as possible, it didn't support the notion that people with solid professional career plans are worse off.
If you waste 50k on an underwater basketweaving degree & take out an 8% loan to do so, of course you're going to end up in a quandry.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Been there, done that. Nothing feels quite so "good" as paying tax on your charitable contributions because you gave away too much of your income. :-(
I'm allowed a bit of personal smugness. My diversification includes careers (and jobs) not related directly to the IT industry. There's quite a few things I can fall back on if one industry goes sour.
Get off my lawn.
This is the funniest post I've read in a long time, thanks so much for it. The irony expressed about you getting out of paying as much of your taxes as possible and profiting as much as possible from living here and then taking this bounty and indigantly leaving the country had me in stitches.
When my parents graduated from college with BAs in the 70s they were actually sent invitations for jobs through the post. Neither one of them really interviewed. They just chose the job they wanted and went to work. In time they went on to other careers where their experience served as all the credential they needed. They got started with an invitation and they never looked back. I looked forward to the day when I would enter the work force like my parents.
When I got my BA in '91 the career counselor told me and my buddy that there were two alternatives, go to grad school or leave the country. There were no jobs including her own. She was being dismissed as part of budget cuts at the time. My buddy went to Japan and I went to grad school.
A few years later with a Master's degree there were still no jobs so I left the country as well. I'm still outside the country almost ten years later and I only go back for Christmas vacation.
Of the friends that stayed in the States, a surprising number are already dead. My brother born in '74 finally landed a teaching job a few years ago, but it's not clear how stable it is and he's got two kids.
Out of all my cousins only a few made big bucks and the only way they made it was hustling in the worst way. I'm talking backstabbing salespeople types. There is a total lack of people who just had normal career lives among family members in my generation. It has been either balls out money or jack shit. Education seems to be meaningless. The price of your school means everything, but the degree is nothing except perhaps a shot at a part time teaching gig at best.
I do think people in my generation were trapped by circumstances. Those who made it didn't make it simply by being good citizens and playing by the rules and most of the people I know don't have shit and have little chance of ever making it work out.
I think the part that surprises me the most is that there isn't more outright hostility than there already is. Probably now that we're riding down the back side of the distraction of the IP bubble we'll start to see some more active participation --cough-- in social affairs by members of this generation.
You seem to be in the habit of categorizing people.
"The 'generation' that is refered to, for the most part, is all the guys who thought they could learn HTML and have a porsche-mansion-gorgeoussupermodelwife by the time they were 25, and retire at 30 to travel the world."
And...
"The ones doing the loudest complaining are those who wanted to retire after only working 5-10 years, and spent those 5-10 years buried in booze, women, and various electronic play-toys."
And...
"I'm happy the market crashed, it weeded out a bunch of the people who were just trying to get rich quick off of vapor-skills."
Yet you seem to be oblivious to your own position:
"I'm in my 20's, and steadily employed with a job that is pretty much "guaranteed". I make a nice living, and don't PLAN on retiring. (The concept of it bores me.) But will be able to at a decent age, and expect to be able to live nicely after that."
The truly sad fact is that all of your generalities are mostly crap and if the economy takes another dump at the appropriate time you will be in the same boat as many of these poor hard working victims whom you so coldly ridicule.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
University exists to create experts in targeted fields. It's for people who wish to specialize in a specific area (Doctors, Scientists, or really anything else). So that when you are done University you are valuable in your target field. So when a company needs to do something in a specialized target field they use these experts.
Back before the Baby boomers went to University, a Degree just about guaranteed you a good job. Experts where few and Business needed them.
But then more and more people started to go to university, and the number of experts increased and increased, but businesses didn't need more experts.
At first governments, and other public institutions took the extra in. (Including the Universities themselves) but the number of Graduates continued to increases.
This is all fueled by the myth that higher education is the only or best way to get ahead in life. And that is simply not the case.
The educational path to success is very appealing to some, it is a relatively straightforward and clear path. Grade school, High School, University, Great career. As opposed to the alternative. Grade school, High School, Bust your ass working hard, continue to try new things, fail, learn from failure, (repeat), great career (eventually).
It doesn't help that all though grade school and high school, your told that the only way to succeed is to graduate with great grades for am good University. (And also being told that the people that make it without all the education are just lucky, and or that it just doesn't work that way any more.)
The fact is that with so many going to University there are not enough expert positions, and that only the Top students in the Top schools are getting the good jobs. The rest end up and an equal playing field with the people who didn't go (But worked hard and smart).
This whole thing will turn around once people start to realize that there is no guaranteed path to success and that you need to make your own way in life.
Go ahead. But if I were living on 1,700$ USD a month just for rent, I'd seriously consider moving so somewhere cheaper and using the money I saved from not living in a money pit towards things I cared about, like retirement :)
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Excellent. You start saving while I continue to have fun.
Then, when civilization collapses, I come and shoot you, take your money and resources, and then have a very good laugh.
Get moving!
Saskatoon is cheap to live in compared to Toronto or Vancouver, but only a little under what you'd see in Calgary.
.57 to convert to US dollar amounts.
:)
With proper budgeting, I can have a nice apartment for 450$ plus 150$ a month for food, with utilities all included in my rent. Unlimited internet access is another 40$ on top of that (home user, cable modem), or 99$ (SOHO -- static IPs and allowed to run services). Very handy when you have to live on minimum wage for a bit between jobs (min wage is 6.35$ per hour).
Note: all dollar values in Canadian. Multiple by
If you wanted to move your university education to Canada, you'd pay about $500 per class registration fee + 50$ to 200$ (or more) for books per class, 5 classes a term, 3 terms a year. Based on your $36,000 Canadian a year to have a house, you could easily attend university while living a decent life in a nice part of town with nice things for that much money.
One thing you notice when you cross the border a lot is that while "big" things cost different (TVs, computer parts, etc), "little" things tend to cost the same (bag of chips, candy bar). You also notice the artificial price controls on things (books are often cheaper in Canada even after the conversion, DVDs cost the exact same dollar amount despite the value difference, most CDs are within the same dollar amount).
The absolute best of both worlds is to live in Canada while drawing income from the US, becuse the US has a hugely inflated costs of living. Canadians are really, really cheap to employ compared to local people, and (on the Canadian side) you'll make more than you're likely to make locally
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
> ... Stayed in school too long. There is a point at which it's better to bail from school, get into an entry-level job, and start clawing your way up than to stay in school and hope for a better job later. Thinking that "the market is really good, but if I just take another 18 months to finish this 4-year degree I'll be all set with a better salary" is just stupid, especially if you're piling up debt to do it (see previous point).
I have to disagree with that one.
Lets suppose I need $50,000 to finance my education. I could either delay graduation and work for it now, or I could benefit from low student loan rates (which are much cheaper than mortgage rates I might add)
I'm a recent graduate, and even in this market I find it easier to pay back my loans than to consider the enormous amount of time I'd be flipping burgers (or time spent on some other non-degree paying job)
Of the "poor" students at expensive schools like MIT or Harvard, wouldn't it make more financial sense in the long run for them to just borrow what they needed?
Geez!, You'd be 65 on graduation day if you had to pay for that on student wages!
My translation of most of the people quoted in the story:
"Um, yeah, like I've been working for like ten years ya know and went clubbing every nite, bought every cool high-tech piece of shit I could find on credit, instead of ya know paying down my school loans and like buying a house. Now like I've got like ya know tons of credit card bills and I have ya know big school loans. I like can't understand how it happened dude."
And this classic:
"Dude, I'm so clever because I'm deferring my huge undergrad loan while I rack up more debt for my hot-shit MBA..."
ACHTUNG! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
You're right on about the difficulty of finding a job if you're over 40, particularly in IT, if you haven't moved into management. Personally, I've started paying more attention to a negotiated severence package than annual salary increases. Back when I was a 30-something coder, I could (and did) change jobs on a dime. Now that I'm over 40 I think if I had to go back out into the job market I would find it to be much more difficult due to me age (which is not supposed to matter, but it does).
Karma: Professionally Doomed (mostly affected by inability to keep opinions to self)
Ye gods! Why? How? Where?
I'm 34 and I don't think I know _anybody_ my age with '$100,000 stashed away'. Hell, I'm not at all sure it's a good thing to have that kind of money 'stashed away'. I make stuff- I have made a bunch of CDs (at ampcast.com, above), I make guitar DI boxes, I even make costume tails. That in spite of the fact that I live on a little more than $5000 a year- it's about budgeting, handling money responsibly, doing without and working hard on things (depression-era values?)
Money doesn't come from the money fairy, people- though I can understand 'Fortune' magazine not understanding this. It's exchange value for goods and services- it's to do things with, not to 'stash away'. From my perspective, as someone who tries to do and build things rather than 'stash away', these mythical people with '$100,000 stashed away' (a HUNDRED thou? not even ten thou, a freaking hundred?) are the PROBLEM.
Where does that money go? Typically not gold, or bank notes in a mattress. No, that money was expected to go straight to Enron- woops, I mean WorldCom- woops, I mean Microsoft. Do we see the problem?
These people are crazy. I can't even feel inferior to their expectations because they seem to have no clue that what they expect is what will RUIN this country. For how many years have people 'stashed away' in this way, and see where it's got us? The answer is not to make it safe to stash away investment in Wall Street and multinational corporations again.
Get out there and do stuff. Build, create, do- within your means, but I'm talking ALL your means, no 'stashing away'. If you get hit by a truck next week you'll have been happier to have been engaged with a real life- you'll be building abilities that are better than any corporate-wall-street-speculation-policy as insurance for your future- and the money you spend in pursuing your plans and interests is money that CIRCULATES, rather than getting 'stashed away'.
Honestly, what IS this shit? I think some people still believe in the money fairy, and it isn't Slashdotters or Gen Xers, it's Fortune Magazine. You'd think one Enron, one dotcom implosion, would've taught them.
What do you expect of the expectations of those who thought they could work at high paying dot.com that don't really produce anything but speculation about what hype words will be salable next?
I never could figure out what dot coms were trying to sale but the "how to make a million, do what we do... make dot coms"
Imagine a generationm blaming such illusions as being there down fall. Perhaps they need to file a class... uh, errr generation x lawsuite against the dot coms.....huh?
I have to say that I don't know where I fit in. Born in 1978, I remember hearing about "Generation X" when I was in high school, so I assume I'm between generations - whatever that means.
My wife and I have more than $60,000 in school debt (no CC debt), and didn't enter the job market until after the crash. We don't spend irresponsibly. I don't look fondly back on any point of my life, so I guess I'm on the way up.
She, then an EE major, now has a permanent position at a bank headquarters for $11.50 per hour (nice health plan, though). I'm an ex-CS major working as Web consultant for $18/hour, working under my mother-in-law, though that's due to be up in about two months.
New job prospects look grim, and I have absolutely no personal networks. I forget, what happens when you can't pay off your non-bankruptable student loans? Not that I'm planning to, but I'm just curious.
There, I defy anyone to pidgeonhole me. Actually, I've always wanted to be pidgeon-holed for some reason. Any takers?
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
And there is no tooth fairy.
While we can't go back in time and actually experience what it was truly like for our grandparents, we can read personal accounts from those who did experience the Great Depression. Studs Terkel's book is essential if you're going to draw any comparisons about "hard times." It's a terrific read. The point I'm making is, don't make grandiose statements about our plight as techies. Not yet at least. Food is in abundance. Deflation is in check. You can at the very least get that bone-head job if you need income. In the 1930's, folks were being shooed away from highly dangerous jobs like bridge building. You have a good point; just manage your perspective.
Not planning on retiring != planning on not retiring. I'm not thinking about my breathing, but that's doesn't mean I'm thinking about not breathing!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Furniture. Appliances. Home electronics. How many of these things do you have enough cash for to walk into the store, lay down legal tender, and walk out with them under your arm? And automobiles. Don't even begin with automobiles.
Until prices return to earth where you and I can make a purchase without a financial institution getting in the way, the economy is gonna sit like a brick. I'm not calling for runaway deflation, but we Americans have to bring our spending in check.
The only thing credit history is good for is...more credit.
Believe me, there's plenty of time to build up a credit history once you're working.
The trouble with a credit card is that you get used to satisfying needs immediately. Everything becomes an impulse buy.
How much better on all our purchases if we said, "not now, I'll wait until the end of the week".
if we did that, we probably wouldn't buy 1/2 the "junk" we do today, ie. CD's, DVD's, video games, electronics.
I doubt many 18 year olds have the necessary willpower.
So what do you get? A $5,000 debt when you graduate college at 20% interest. And you'll be earning $20K per year. Tell me how long it will be to pay that back. A L-O-O-O-N-G time. A "credit history" doesn't seem like much of a payback, particularly if you default.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
...What will it take to bring things back into balance?
Will it take a Malthusian vision where war, pestilence and famine wipes out a huge fraction of the human population to start all over again? Given the large number of nuclear weapons, rapidly spread human diseases and potential blights that could destroy much of the human food supply, it's not impossible the human race could contract severely like what happened during the explosive spread of the bubonic plague in Europe from 1348 to 1352--nearly 50% of the European population died.
I think at least humans in 2002 will likely survive after such a horrible event--we at least won't lose our scientific knowledge completely like what happened during the Dark Ages of Europe, thanks to the massively huge number of books of general knowledge printed.
aesop? - i prefer joyce
('scuse the line-numbering)
~ ~ ~
The Gracehoper was always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant 22
of his joyicity, (he had a partner pair of findlestilts to supplant 23
him), or, if not, he was always making ungraceful overtures to 24
Floh and Luse and Bienie and Vespatilla to play pupa-pupa and 25
pulicy-pulicy and langtennas and pushpygyddyum and to com- 26
mence insects with him, there mouthparts to his orefice and his 27
gambills to there airy processes, even if only in chaste, ameng 28
the everlistings, behold a waspering pot. He would of curse 29
melissciously, by his fore feelhers, flexors, contractors, depres- 30
sors and extensors, lamely, harry me, marry me, bury me, bind 31
me, till she was puce for shame and allso fourmish her in Spin- 32
ner's housery at the earthsbest schoppinhour so summery as his 33
cottage, which was cald fourmillierly Tingsomingenting, groped 34
up. Or, if he was always striking up funny funereels with Bester- 35
farther Zeuts, the Aged One, With all his wigeared corollas, albe- 36
dinous and oldbuoyant, inscythe his elytrical wormcasket and 1
Dehlia and Peonia, his druping nymphs, bewheedling him, com- 2
pound eyes on hornitosehead, and Auld Letty Plussiboots to 3
scratch his cacumen and cackle his tramsitus, diva deborah (seven 4
bolls of sapo, a lick of lime, two spurts of fussfor, threefurts of 5
sulph, a shake o'shouker, doze grains of migniss and a mesfull of 6
midcap pitchies. The whool of the whaal in the wheel of the 7
whorl of the Boubou from Bourneum has thus come to taon!), 8
and with tambarins and cantoridettes soturning around his eggs- 9
hill rockcoach their dance McCaper in retrophoebia, beck from 10
bulk, like fantastic disossed and jenny aprils, to the ra, the ra, the 11
ra, the ra, langsome heels and langsome toesis, attended to by a 12
mutter and doffer duffmatt baxingmotch and a myrmidins of 13
pszozlers pszinging Satyr's Caudledayed Nice and Hombly, 14
Dombly Sod We Awhile but Ho, Time Timeagen, Wake! For if 15
sciencium (what's what) can mute uns nought, 'a thought, 16
abought the Great Sommboddy within the Omniboss, perhops an 17
artsaccord (hoot's hoot) might sing ums tumtim abutt the Little 18
Newbuddies that ring his panch. A high old tide for the bar- 19
heated publics and the whole day as gratiis! Fudder and lighting 20
for ally looty, any filly in a fog, for O'Cronione lags acrumbling 21
in his sands but his sunsunsuns still tumble on. Erething above 22
ground, as his Book of Breathings bed him, so as everwhy, sham 23
or shunner, zeemliangly to kick time. 24
Grouscious me and scarab my sahull What a bagateller it is! 25
Libelulous! Inzanzarity! Pou! Pschla! Ptuh! What a zeit for the 26
goths! vented the Ondt, who, not being a sommerfool, was 27
thothfolly making chilly spaces at hisphex affront of the icinglass 28
of his windhame, which was cold antitopically Nixnixundnix. 29
We shall not come to party at that lopp's, he decided possibly, 30
for he is not on our social list. Nor to Ba's berial nether, thon 31
sloghard, this oldeborre's yaar ablong as there's a khul on a khat. 32
Nefersenless, when he had safely looked up his ovipository, he 33
loftet hails and prayed: May he me no voida water! Seekit Ha- 34
tup! May no he me tile pig shed on! Suckit Hotup! As broad as 35
Beppy's realm shall flourish my reign shall flourish! As high as 36
Heppy's hevn shall flurrish my haine shall hurrish! Shall grow, 1
shall flourish! Shall hurrish! Hummum. 2
The Ondt was a weltall fellow, raumybult and abelboobied, 3
bynear saw altitudinous wee a schelling in kopfers. He was sair 4
sair sullemn and chairmanlooking when he was not making spaces 5
in his psyche, but, laus! when he wore making spaces on his ikey, 6
he ware mouche mothst secred and muravyingly wisechairman- 7
looking. Now whim the sillybilly of a Gracehoper had jingled 8
through a jungle of love and debts and jangled through a jumble 9
of life in doubts afterworse, wetting with the bimblebeaks, drik- 10
king with nautonects, bilking with durrydunglecks and horing 11
after ladybirdies (ichnehmon diagelegenaitoikon) he fell joust as 12
sieck as a sexton and tantoo pooveroo quant a churchprince, and 13
wheer the midges to wend hemsylph or vosch to sirch for grub 14
for his corapusse or to find a hospes, alick, he wist gnit! Bruko 15
dry! fuko spint! Sultamont osa bare! And volomundo osi vide- 16
vide! Nichtsnichtsundnichts! Not one pickopeck of muscow- 17
money to bag a tittlebits of beebread! Iomio! Iomio! Crick's 18
corbicule, which a plight! O moy Bog, he contrited with melan- 19
ctholy. Meblizzered, him sluggered! I am heartily hungry! 20
He had eaten all the whilepaper, swallowed the lustres, de- 21
voured forty flights of styearcases, chewed up all the mensas and 22
seccles, ronged the records, made mundballs of the ephemerids 23
and vorasioused most glutinously with the very timeplace in the 24
ternitary not too dusty a cicada of neutriment for a chittinous 25
chip so mitey. But when Chrysalmas was on the bare branches, 26
off he went from Tingsomingenting. He took a round stroll and 27
he took a stroll round and he took a round strollagain till the 28
grillies in his head and the leivnits in his hair made him thought 29
he had the Tossmania. Had he twicycled the sees of the deed 30
and trestraversed their revermer? Was he come to hevre with his 31
engiles or gone to hull with the poop? The June snows was 32
flocking in thuckflues on the hegelstomes, millipeeds of it and 33
myriopoods, and a lugly whizzling tournedos, the Boraborayel- 34
lers, blohablasting tegolhuts up to tetties and ruching sleets off 35
the coppeehouses, playing ragnowrock rignewreck, with an irri- 36
tant, penetrant, siphonopterous spuk. Grausssssss! Opr! 1
Grausssssss! Opr! 2
The Gracehoper who, though blind as batflea, yet knew, not 3
a leetle beetle, his good smetterling of entymology asped niss- 4
unitimost lous nor liceens but promptly tossed himself in the 5
vico, phthin and phthir, on top of his buzzer, tezzily wondering 6
wheer would his aluck alight or boss of both appease and the 7
next time he makes the aquinatance of the Ondt after this they 8
have met themselves, these mouschical umsummables, it shall be 9
motylucky if he will beheld not a world of differents. Behailed 10
His Gross the Ondt, prostrandvorous upon his dhrone, in his 11
Papylonian babooshkees, smolking a spatial brunt of Hosana 12
cigals, with unshrinkables farfalling from his unthinkables, 13
swarming of himself in his sunnyroom, sated before his com- 14
fortumble phullupsuppy of a plate o'monkynous and a confucion 15
of minthe (for he was a conformed aceticist and aristotaller), as 16
appi as a oneysucker or a baskerboy on the Libido, with Floh 17
biting his leg thigh and Luse lugging his luff leg and Bieni bussing 18
him under his bonnet and Vespatilla blowing cosy fond tutties 19
up the allabroad length of the large of his smalls. As entomate 20
as intimate could pinchably be. Emmet and demmet and be jiltses 21
crazed and be jadeses whipt! schneezed the Gracehoper, aguepe 22
with ptchjelasys and at his wittol's indts, what have eyeforsight! 23
The Ondt, that true and perfect host, a spiter aspinne, was 24
making the greatest spass a body could with his queens lace- 25
swinging for he was spizzing all over him like thingsumanything 26
in formicolation, boundlessly blissfilled in an allallahbath of 27
houris. He was ameising himself hugely at crabround and mary- 28
pose, chasing Floh out of charity and tickling Luse, I hope too, 29
and tackling Bienie, faith, as well, and jucking Vespatilla jukely 30
by the chimiche. Never did Dorsan from Dunshanagan dance it 31
with more devilry! The veripatetic imago of the impossible 32
Gracehoper on his odderkop in the myre, after his thrice ephe- 33
meral journeeys, sans mantis ne shooshooe, featherweighed 34
animule, actually and presumptuably sinctifying chronic's de- 35
spair, was sufficiently and probably coocoo much for his chorous 36
of gravitates. Let him be Artalone the Weeps with his parisites 1
peeling off him I'll be Highfee the Crackasider. Flunkey Footle 2
furloughed foul, writing off his phoney, but Conte Carme makes 3
the melody that mints the money. Ad majorem l.s.d.! Divi gloriam. 4
A darkener of the threshold. Haru? Orimis, capsizer of his ant- 5
boat, sekketh rede from Evil-it-is, lord of loaves in Amongded. 6
Be it! So be it! Thou-who-thou-art, the fleet-as-spindhrift, 7
impfang thee of mine wideheight. Haru! 8
The thing pleased him andt, and andt, 9
He larved ond he larved on he merd such a nauses 10
The Gracehoper feared he would mixplace his fauces. 11
I forgive you, grondt Ondt, said the Gracehoper, weeping, 12
For their sukes of the sakes you are safe in whose keeping. 13
Teach Floh and Luse polkas, show Bienie where's sweet 14
And be sure Vespatilla fines fat ones to heat. 15
As I once played the piper I must now pay the count 16
So saida to Moyhammlet and marhaba to your Mount! 17
Let who likes lump above so what flies be a full 'un; 18
I could not feel moregruggy if this was prompollen. 19
I pick up your reproof, the horsegift of a friend, 20
For the prize of your save is the price of my spend. 21
Can castwhores pulladeftkiss if oldpollocks forsake 'em 22
Or Culex feel etchy if Pulex don't wake him? 23
A locus to loue, a term it t'embarass, 24
These twain are the twins that tick Homo Vulgaris. 25
Has Aquileone nort winged to go syf 26
Since the Gwyfyn we were in his farrest drewbryf 27
And that Accident Man not beseeked where his story ends 28
Since longsephyring sighs sought heartseast for their orience? 29
We are Wastenot with Want, precondamned, two and true, 30
Till Nolans go volants and Bruneyes come blue. 31
Ere those gidflirts now gadding you quit your mocks for my gropes 32
An extense must impull, an elapse must elopes, 33
Of my tectucs takestock, tinktact, and ail's weal; 34
As I view by your farlook hale yourself to my heal. 35
Partiprise my thinwhins whiles my blink points unbroken on 1
Your whole's whercabroads with Tout's trightyright token on. 2
My in risible universe youdly haud find 3
Sulch oxtrabeeforeness meat soveal behind. 4
Your feats end enormous, your volumes immense, 5
(May the Graces I hoped for sing your Ondtship song sense!), 6
Your genus its worldwide, your spacest sublime! 7
But, Holy Saltmartin, why can't you beat time? 8
In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holo- 9
caust. Allmen. 10
Times are truly what you make of them...
Reading this Fortune article, I feel sorry for these people that have tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt on top of $50k+ in college loan debt.
Why? I don't feel sorry for anyone that gets into that situation unless it was due to something like an illness or family emergency. People that get that far into debt with credit cards, especially when they already have other debts, are just stupid! My response to people that whine about CC debt is, "Stop spending money you don't have, moron, and you won't get in trouble!"
Personally, I only use my credit card for things I already have the money for, but either don't want to write a check, or just want to hang onto the cash for a while longer in case something unexpected comes up. Don't carry a balance, and there aren't interest fees.
BTW, when I went to school, we were taught about basic finances by having a mock checking account and checkbook, and had to balance fake bills and such against our income. Did they stop doing that? People growing up today seem to have no concept at all about money.. hence CC companies are pushing the "learn about credit and money management" stuff.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
What I see around me is a lot of people with no real skills sitting in coffee shops whining that they aren't getting paid big money anymore, and that's all I was talking about. As for the debt thing, I think it's just plain dumb. I make 1/2 to 1/3 of what some of my friends were making, and yet I have very little debt, while they are buried under it. My credit card debt I could pay off in a few months at my current wages, and even if I were making 1/2 as much (which would be possible just about anywhere, since that wouldn't be much over minimum wage) I would still be able to cover all my bills, including the 2 cars.
Yeah, everything is a gamble, but if you aren't prepared to lose, if you over-extend yourself to the point where you can't afford to be making less than you are, then it IS your fault, and your situation is the direct result of your own poor planning.
And again, while I've been laid off several times in the last few years, and I haven't collected a single unemployment check. I always apply, just in case, but I've never been unemployed long enough to recieve one. Mostly that's due to the skill set I've developed, which anyone could get within a year at a JC. Most retraining programs will support you for at least that long. My attitude makes a big difference to, in that I view every job that comes my way as a learning opportunity, and if it sucks, well, I've still learned something from it that will likely come in handy down the road, and there's nothing stopping me from looking for another job just because I already have one.
So no, fate has nothing to do with it. I've worked to get where I am, and I take what opportunities come my way even if they aren't exactly what I want, rather than sitting around whining about how the economy is so bad and I can't get the exact job I went to school for.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You can do what you want, I plan on living less expensively and saving.
Even if the dock workers win this particular round chances are good that they are going to lose in the long run. There are plenty of people that are willing to do their work at lower prices (especially in California with their large immigrant population). A quick look at the ILWU's website shows that shipping companies are already shifty work away from the longshoremen. It's only a matter of time.
Programming is something that is even easier to shift overseas. Programming unions would simply guarantee that software development shifted overseas.
Oh please. "Oil may run out...someday."
THAT'S their prediction? Hell, *I* can do that. How much does the job pay?
Here's a free sample to future employers:
"Sources of clean water will become more rare and valuable."
Not bad eh?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
You know, there's a Dilbert strip in which the PHB estimates the size of a development project by assuming that everything he doesn't know how to do is easy.
The various Slashdotters scoffing at the idea of an "art therapist" remind me of that, for some reason...
Will all people who actually believe that generationalist crap please go stick their head in a bucket and go away!
/. by people who should know better). Let's try to answer it, shall we?
Everything which is said about the so-called 'Gen-X' is said by the media -- first advertising slime, then editorial slime, followed by stereotyping lazy journalist slime -- not by the members of this nebulous and meaningless 'group'.
What is this article saying? That it looks like younger people are going to have a really crappy time for the forseeable future, probably the rest of their lives. And that despite the crapulous stereotype fostered upon a generation by fiat, "This time they have reason to whine." (think about that byline. It means that according to them 1: all Gen-Xers whine and complain, and 2: at all times except for this one, any complaints are trivial and meaningless and can be ignored safely. Who decides?)
Why is this bullshit continuing? Why are 'Gen-Xers' going to do so badly? (A question which is not even asked on the Fortune article, and is answered by "because they are all whining shits" here on
For a start, lets use the term 'Gen-X' merely as a reference to the people who happened to be born in that time period, and not say anything about their personal habits, merely the opportunities they (...'we', I should say) have).
Gen-Xers have been around to take up and ride the greatest explosion in technology since the Industrial Revolution. A few have even managed to become senior programmers and sysadmins. Where to from there? The people who run the companies are still from generation older -- lets label them 'Baby Boomers'. As generations, we -- Gen-X -- have watched them -- Baby Boomers -- profit from wealth and progressive social policies from the sixties to the late seventies -- and then systematically dismantle those things behind them. Here in Australia we used to have free (government-funded) Universities. Student fees were introduced in the early eighties. They have been increasing steadily since, and it now costs between tens- and hundreds-of-thousands of dollars for a degree. And the people who are most shrilly declaiming that fees are still too low and students don't know how good they have it are precisely those who recieved most benefit from free education.
And then there is the Reagan/Thatcher economic model, which says that selling off your country and renting it back from whoever could afford to buy it somehow makes good economic sense. Gee, that does work! Just ask anyone with a privatised Electricity Company! or Water. or Prison System.
Governments now have the same or higher debt than they used to have, but there is nothing left to sell off. Except maybe the citizenry as slave labour.
The Baby Boomers, as a group, are statistically the greediest and most selfish for a hundred years prior, and certainly since. They (that is, those members of that group who have had unfettered access to the pension funds) have squandered the pension money, but do you think there will be any willingness to forego the best care in their dotage? And what will be left after the largest retired population -- by proportion, and absolutely -- in the history of mankind has gone? SFA is my bet. It will be up to us to fund our own retirements, if we get any.
But wait! There's more... those of Gen-X who have managed to find $100,000 pa jobs are statistical freaks. Most have been dumped on the streets after the bubble burst. There used to be a path of promotion to a point where you could set company policy. How many of you are in that position? How many are under 35? How many of your peers are over 40-45? What about superiors?
Or the media -- where are the Gen-X journalists? Don't include MTV, or anyone whose only task seems to be reporting on skateboards and rap music. Where are the Gen-Xers interviewing Rumsfeld or Rice? Where are the Gen-Xers reporting in Afghanistan? Or hosting a talking-head show? (Conan O'Brien Doesn't Count).
When you think about it, this comes down to the powerful members of one generation saying to their children "We will tell you what you are. You are dissapointments to Us. You will never live up to what We were and what We did. We therefore will not give up the world until We cannot hold on with Our palsied hands one moment longer, and We will then expect you to take the best possible care of Us no matter what the cost to your own future."
And you wonder why those children are pissed!
P.S. I am not saying that all Boomers are consciously subduing all Gen-Xers, but I am saying that the social structures dismantled by one generation has amounted to pulling up the ladders set up by their parents before the next generation can make its own way up. Any who have climbed the wall on their own, or slipped into the fortress through a fortuotous (sp?) crack, more power to you. But don't forget the increasing crowd still locked outside the gates.
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
Nice to hear of your success in life. I think the statement you make about having "so much debt and so few assets" is outright insulting.
Sure, there are some college students I know who do stupid things like using credit cards for "emergencies" including a week long Spring Break orgy in Dayton Beach. However, there are also quite a few people I know who did nothing wrong except for taking a chance, working their asses off to get a good degree while taking on a big chunk of debt, and rolling snakeyes as they graduated into an unwelcoming job market.
What were an 18-year-old's options circa 1998? Go without a degree, and wind up at a McDonald's level or low-end blue collar job? Nothing morally wrong with that. However, those jobs, even in the best-paying regions of the country, usually pay no more than $10/hr, with few or no fringe benefits like a health plan. This will probably allow a frugal person to make an acceptable living for him/herself, but forget about raising a family with two jobs of this nature. And as far as the future goes, people who are in these sorts of jobs tend to be compensated at about the same level related to minimum wage (e.g. a position that paid $6/hr. in the 1980's when minimum wage was $3.35 would probably pay no more than $9/hr. today). And we know how the minimum wage has always kept pace with inflation, especially since the 1970's. Right.
How about joining the armed forces? A noble proposition, but with two significant drawbacks: low pay (especially for enlisted personnel) making it difficult to make a decent living for oneself off-base, and more importantly, having to deal with the fear that you'll be among the first called to put your ass on the line to defend American Freedom(tm). I know a couple of people who have more balls than I'll ever have that enlisted in the past year. I pray for their safety and success.
The only other major alternative was to get a degree of some sort, which is a necessary condition for most jobs paying a decent or better amount. Degrees aren't cheap, and if one's parents aren't able or willing to pony up some of the money required, there's going to be a hell of a burden on the student, either in hours worked during school or in debt serviced afterward. Even at a state school, you're talking $5K a year easily unless you happen to qualify for special scholarships. I don't know many people in high school (outside of a couple of drug dealer types) who could accumulate more than a few grand from their teen jobs, leaving one with a nasty choice: take a full-time job during school to pay your expenses and risk not having enough time and energy to complete your degree, or focusing on studies and accumulating a five-figure debt.
I chose the latter route, and am dealing with a $600 payment on my loan. At this rate, I'll be done in about 6 years. If I lose my job and have to take a significant pay cut, I'm toast. Most of my college classmates are in a similar situation. If I make it through the next 6 years with my job, I'm basically in the clear either living a pretty damn good lifestyle or saving a lot of money (in reality, it will probably be somewhere in the middle). If I don't make it, then I'm basically fucked for life. I took a gamble based upon the premise that if I worked hard that, I COULD make myself a good living. In the Boomer generation, the "could" in that last sentence was pretty much a "would". That's the major difference between the 1950's and today. Working one's ass off 40 years ago would give one close to a 100% chance of "living the good life." Today for most people in or recently out of college, that probability can only be raised to maybe 75% or 80%.
I get tired of when people say "well, I did XYZ and live in the lap of luxury." I don't know about your particular situation, but more often than not in my previous experience, these sorts of people essentially fell into money rather than spending a entire career earning it through continuous hard work wise investment decisions. So get the hell of your high horse when criticizing those whose luck turned out differently. If for some reason the Silicon Valley real estate market tanks for reasons outside your control and you become upside down on your house, wouldn't you be offended if someone labeled you "irresponsible"?
Social service agencies here in the Phoenix area report that they are overwhelmed by the demand for their services. They report that they are seeing entire families show up who were formerly middle class, but now are destitute. Even the soup kitchens are now having to turn away people, in a scene right out of the Great Depression. There are a lot of people hurting out there, but due to the way unemployment figures are cooked by our government (it's not a new thing, BTW, I mentioned this several years ago on my web site), we're spared knowing just how bad the situation is.
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We've had a front row seat to the excesses and extremes of the Baby Boomers and feel jaded as a group. But we're not slackers or cry-babies. Sure there were excesses during the dot-com era, but from what I could see it was the salespeople and their ilk doing most of the excessing; the coders, sysadmins, designers, and project managers worked 80 hour weeks. Hardly a bunch of spoiled children living in a fantasy land.
/.'ers here without jobs. You're just lucky. Luck is the only reason you're not suffering right now, and I hope you get the chance to learn that before the economy picks up again and preserves you in your delusions.
Yet expectations were generally unrealistic and this patch we're going through now, though rough, will in the long run turn out to be a very positive time of soul-searching and learning what is truly important in life. Family, good friends, and helping your fellow human beings are the truest source of happiness. It makes me happy to know that a much greater share of my peers will realize that than otherwise would have, and it makes me quite optimistic that our descendants will recognize us as the most compassionate generation. Our finest years are just ahead of us, and no other generation will be as able to clean up the god-awful mess the boomers mean to bequeath to us.
That said, from many of the posts here I actually hope that the tech slump deepens so all of you calling the unemployed among us losers can share in the experience of having your professional world crumble around you despite being a brilliant programmer/sysadmin/designer/whatever and busting your butt 90 hours a week to make someone else money. You did not make the right choices, you did not out-code anybody, you did not brilliantly and with prescient foresight save while your silly peers played the day away, and you sure as shootin' don't enjoy a greater share of common sense than anyone else. You are not superior in any way to any of the
So to you all, I say can it until you reach retirement age without ever once having been laid off because you're so brilliant. Chances are astronomically good you'll never make it.
To the rest of my downtrodden brothers and sisters, lay low, husband your resources, and wait for the day this turns around because we're gonna take the world by storm.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Why is it that Generation X is being called a bunch of slackers? I know GenX-ers (older than me) who work longer hours than my parents ever did. Meanwhile, the company they work for allows executives (members of the Boomers) to do things like spend $500 on "dinner with a client" or take a day off of work to play a round at an exclusive country club AND EXPENSE IT.
.com thing was a scam, yes... but the Generation X CEOs who were part of the scam were being strung along by venture capitilists... who were mostly (surprise)... Baby Boomers.
It is members of the Boomers who get to fly around in the company jet, get to stay in fancy hotels in business trips (which the company pays for), and so forth.
Then the GenX-ers at the company are asked to work more than 8 hours a day, plus weekends... and are called slackers for wanting to do things like "spend time with their families."
To top it off, it is members of the Boomers who are "cooking the books" to give themselves fat paychecks. Who suffers when the company goes bankrupt? The GenX-ers who were working at the company.
And it isn't looking very great for people who are graduating from college now. Not only do we have to compete with LAID OFF Generation X members with Masters Degrees and PHDs who are being forced down into what would normally be entry level positions, but some of us face even greater debt from school.
(I'm luck that I don't have any debt from school, but plenty of my friends have tons...)
The government is _encouraging_ the GenX-ers to go into debt by "going shopping" to fight terrorism at the same time. Great idea!!
I talked with someone from the DEPRESSION generation a few months ago at a picnic.
The economy entered the discussion.
They said that they don't understand how younger people can even survive today with the damage that the _Baby Boomers_ are doing.
The
I'm not trying to bash all Boomers here. I know plenty of Baby Boomers who are having just as much trouble as the Generation X people are. But it is just really kinda messed up when Generation X is being called a generation of "slackers," when most of the damage is being done by people from the Boomer Generation who are purposefully doing things that are hurting the economy and hurting the Generation X people so that they can get more money that they don't even need.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Cashflow-wise, my neighbors are poor. They earned their living in pre-inflation dollars, and their Social Security benefits are measured in pre-inflation dollars. They can barely afford the property taxes on their homes and dog food for their dog. While "wealthy" on paper, the reality is that they live in poverty because you can't eat equity until you sell -- and if they sell, they're on the streets.
Frankly, I haven't had a health insurance policy in the past 10 years that did not pay for prescription drugs, albeit sometimes with a hefty deductible (e.g. basic Blue Cross/Blue Shield had a $1500 deductible before they would start paying 80% of the cost of prescription drugs). Medicare is "just" a health insurance policy. Why should old people have less benefits than I do?
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Figures, I had something interesting to say but I was carded.
I haven't heard much of or about him in years. I guess he's retired. You would think he'd be still making some noise if he isn't dead. I would be very interested in his take on 9/11, but maybe he's just too 'over the edge' for current times.
In my city, mortgage payments on a 1500 square foot house are cheaper than rent payments on an 850 square foot apartment. You're saying that I should have continued to send my money down a rathole for rent?
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I stayed 9 months in that job, hated it, and quit.
I now live on a reasonably small percentage of that same wage and have a higher quality of life.
It's not always about the money.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Granted, I haven't had to use this so-called "unemployment insurance" yet. Last time I was unemployed, I had a job within four days of starting my job search. But that was before the local job market totally crated.
I suggest that before you make blithe statements about "unemployment insurance", that you check to make sure that it exists in places other than where you're posting from. Unemployment insurance that actually replaces a large percentage of one's salary is limited to a few states. In most states, unemployment insurance is capped at an artificially low maximum that is only barely adequate for buying food for a family, and definitely NOT adequate to keep one from tapping savings while unemployed.
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I think a lot of the people responding to this article are missing the main point in that there are less jobs available today than even twenty years ago.
The majority of the jobs available now are $6/hour working at McDonald's. You might say.. you gotta take whatever job you can get.. but $6/hour at McDonald's is not even enough to live on what we'd now call a 'bare minimum' of living quality.
Okay, you could move back in with your parents, ditch the girlfriend, and the $6/hour paycheck would be fine.. but don't the skilled members of the generation have the right to be able to get a job (even if it was just $25k per year) so they could live in their own apartment, own a modest car, and be able to live the life of an average 30 year old?
That's the main question, and I'm not arguing it either way.
My opinion is that a lot of this is blown out of proportion, and that most of the whiners are those who want to live in a $1500/month apartment in San Francisco while having two gay lovers on the side.
Forget that shit. You can rent an apartment in somewhere nice, but cheap, for like $300/month sometimes. If you can find a job in Wisconsin, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Missouri, or the Deep South, that pays at least $20k, you can live like a king.
mogorific carpentry experiments
The result is that our houses are built crappily and tend to fall apart, but what the hey, they're cheap.
Now, that applies primarily to carpenters, lathers, and stucco appliers. In other trades there is a great demand, for example plumbing, electrical, and HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning). On the other hand, the training to get into those fields is getting more expensive than it once was. You're talking about a six month course of study at a vocational school, or if you're one of the lucky slobs whose Dad was in the union, you can slide into a union apprenticeship. (Hmm, I'll have to ask my mother where my father's old union card went to). Those are definitely NOT fields where you can simply walk in off the street and be hired. If you don't believe me, the full National Electrical Code is over 1,000 8 1/2 by 11" pages long. If you don't have that tome pretty much memorized (at least to the point where you can thumb directly to the table that you need to, say, detirmine the proper depth for a buried type UF feeder to a subpanel in a detached garage that is 120v with a GFI protector), you're not qualified to be an electrician.
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I had to see if I could find something more recent from him after getting this info. I'll have to read some more, but this seemed pretty recent. An interview video. I didn't want to download RealPlayer just to view this, but there were some interesting tidbits here. For instance he has a new book coming out in December.
Regarding $50,000 in student loans, average tuition costs at state colleges are approaching $10,000 a year (they were $8,655 a year in 2001), with the better state colleges costing more, and average stay at state colleges is approaching 5 years (it's virtually impossible to earn a degree in 4 years unless you kill yourself doing it). $50,000 in student loan debts does not sound out-of-line to me.
Is a college degree worth $50,000? Probably not in today's job marketplace. But I'm sure it seemed a good idea at the time, compared to spending the rest of her life reciting "Do you want fries with that order?".
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Number of cars: 1
Well guess what, I can easily afford that on one income. Heck, I can even afford what was a *BIG* house in 1959 on one income (I own a 1500 square foot house built in 1959). Heck, my house, unlike most 1950's houses, even had provisions for a *dryer*! Granted, I don't live on the coasts, which are horrendously expensive, but it is quite possible to live as well as in the 1950's on a single income.
BTW, most people in the 1950's did NOT live in rural areas. The 1950's were the first decade in which more Americans lived in cities than in farms, thanks to the aftermath of the Great Depression, WWII, and the mechanization of farms after WWII (which drove many of the ex-farmworkers to the cities).
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Honestly, that's why I'm not a chef. It's definately a labor of love. For every wealthy Wolfgang Puck or Mario Batali, there are *thousands* of highly trained, mega-skilled, extramely talented, creative, ambitious, smart people working in the world's great restaurants and hotels, for less than $10/hr- even at age 40! Try living on that in NY or Napa- better have a trust fund to fall back on!
It is only money. Why are we all so worried about how much everyone else is making? Money does not equal happiness. Living a full, rich and rewarding life does. And that does not require money.
You know, I've always found that when ever you have one guy yelling "Everyone else is an ASSHOLE!!! THEY'RE SO FUCKING DUMB!!!", inevitably it turns out he's the only asshole in the room.
Sad, but true.
"...you can steal my woman, but you ain't done nuthin' smart."
Now, will I be better off than my parents? Yep. Wanna know how I know that? Because I know-not guess, not think-but know that I will. I werk my ass off and I am rewarded for it.
Dear Jerk Off--
I was working my ass off and had been for 4 hours when some assholes flew a couple of planes into some buidings down the block from where I was working my ass off. The company I happened to be working my ass off for was a Travel Company... guess what... people stopped travelling and all my fucking hard work meant shit when the economy went to Hell.
Then my company that I had been working my ass off for went belly up. Been tough to get a job lately.
Don't tell me about how hard work means anything. Anything can happen and does. Count yourself lucky.
This
The reason people with decent jobs don't have money is that they spend it all. That's not saying Generation X is any more stupid or less responsible than their parents or grandparents. It's that they have grown up in a world where things are instantly available, advertising is designed by psychologists, and credit is doled out like candy.
People often simplistically credit WWII for the economic boom of the 1950's, as if war itself creates prosperity. The war did create employment, but more significantly it created huge shortages because so much production was diverted to the military. Everything from cars to coffee was hard to get. For several years people were making decent money and couldn't spend it. They saved like crazy. When the war ended and the tooled up factories switched to consumer goods, people poured all that money back into the economy. High demand, high production, high employment, it was party time. Citizens devolved into consumers. It wasn't the euphoria of victory that drove the economy, it was that people simply had tons of real money to spend. That generation is retired now and is generally able to live comfortably on its own leftovers.
We won't have a situation like that in the near future. If anybody thinks going to war with Iraq or terrorists will boost the economy, they're not reading the liner notes. We don't want to get into a big war, and little wars that don't deprive the public in a way that creates postwar prosperity. At least not when the message from leadership is Business as Usual instead of Batten Down the Hatches.
I don't look forward to the next few decades in America at all.
Nail on the head about broad skill sets. I am a programmer who works in C, Perl, Visual Basic (ASP and Desktop) and C#. However, I can also install servers and workstations, troubleshoot third party software problems (MRP and ERP programs most frequently) and build LAN and WAN networks. Because I never stuck myself into a narrow niche, I have never lacked for work. In fact, during the last few years I have had to repeatedly increase my rates to keep the workload manageable.
Sig under construction since 1998.
You always have a choice. A person is responsible for his/her life. what happened to us was due to us. putting it on someone else wont solve anything
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Fifty years ago it only took one person working full-time to pay for the expenses of a whole family. Now we have both parents putting in 40+ hour work weeks to achieve the same purchasing power.
Mimimum wage was actually closer to a living wage back then too, but powerful and well-connected lobbies (McLobby) keep it artificially low.
Getting deeply into debt in your 20s for the sake of an education or because of a sudden medical emergency is par for the course. Its no wonder that credit card companies and payday loan companies are doing so well. People need fast credit ASAP to stay afloat.
Hopefully, my generation will address these problems instead of shoving them under the rug when they begin to consolidate more power in the next couple decades as the boomers drift off to retirement.
Thus, it makes more financial sense to get a tech degree from some state university rather than Harvard (unless you go into research perhaps).
Hmmm, would need more data to evaluate this. Certainly CS graduates from MIT, CMU, Waterloo, et al are paid a premium and here in Britain, technologists from Imperial are well respected.
Sorry, none for you
Hey, lifes tough. Sucks that your parents aren't more supportive, but assuming you're over 18, they don't owe you jack.
Go get a job and leave college for awhile, its probably a better move anyway, given the state of colleges these days. Having trouble paying rent? Get a roommate. If you're still having trouble, get a smaller place. That's what responsibility IS.
I didn't own any stock, but now I am going to pay more taxes so the government can bail these cheating baby boomers out.
Where did you get that idea? Enron isn't being bailed out. Sheesh.
could go on and on, but it's easier to point your sorry ass to the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Or are you too busy making pathetic, flamebait posts like these on slashdot?
Oh, I'm well aware of the fraud at enron. I 'm just trying to figure what in the world gives you the right to have an opinion on it. It isn't affecting you at all.
Fucking whining liberals are always blaming others for their problems. Can't pay rent this month? Is it because you sat on your ass? No, its because of Enron!
Give me a break.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
The point here is that talented people are getting caught up in this downturn. And the idea that if you are good you WILL get a job is COMPLETE BULLSHIT.
No, it isn't. I don't know a single talented software developer who's out of work, unless it's by choice. Many of them have had to relocate, many have had to take a pay cut, but all of them are gainfully employed. And so are you.
Todays take-home assignment:
I get cold calls from recruiters every couple of months, offering to set up an interview with some company they're working with. The opportunities always have salary ranges attached that are too low, and sometimes have other unpleasant conditions (long commute, or heavy travel or some such), so I'm fully aware that I'd have to tighten my belt if I lost my current job, but there's no doubt I'd get another one, and quickly.
Is my skill set so amazing then? I don't think so: Twelve years of software experience, most of it with C++, but some with a variety of other languages, including Java, on a wide variety of embedded platforms, Unixes and PCs, BSs in Math and CompSci from an unknown state university. I have a decent résumé, but nothing that would make me so much better than the friends you mention.
It's bad, but it's not that bad.
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In my own home state, the board of Regents that governs the state Universities raise tution at all state schools by the maximum allowed by law EVERY YEAR. Quite often, they even whine about how they need to let out of this limitation for the best of the state schools (especially my own alma mater).
The end result of this is that college tuition for the schools in my own home state is growing much faster than inflation and is starting to catch up with some of the cheaper private schools. Now, this is only considering the tuition costs for residents. Tuition at those schools is TRIPLE for out of state students.
You can't even count on public universities to be cheap anymore.
Where have you been?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Except, they aren't just blowing their own money. They are even stealing the life savings of other BOOMERs that just aren't as rich. Ponzi schemes are usually illegal and considered a form of theft.
Don't forget that only a select few BOOMERS are benefiting. It is not as if the generation as a whole is making out like a bandit from all of this chicanery.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I never said it was perfect.
There were a lot fewer inner city problems than today, in spite of what you have heard.
Beating your wife was most definitely not accepted.
Women could work - my mother worked as an engineer in the 1940's, and then quit to raise her children. When we were old enough, she went back to work as a teacher.
Racial discrimination was more widespread and was not illegal in some states, but it was certainly not accepted by many of us!
My comments on moral guidance stand.
And the '50s were a better time in terms of kust about any social measure you can come up with other than racial discrimination.
The only good weather is bad weather.
It's not that at all. He's complaining that the Boomers benefited from the old ettiquite and then changed ingnored it so that they wouldn't have to do the same for their own children.
You can still call someone out for being a selfish self-centered bastard, even if it is their money you're talking about.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Been food shopping lately ? I buy for a houshold of 4 and shop every 2 weeks easily spending 200-250 per trip. I think if you sat down and did some figuring you'd see. The cost of living has risen almost 20 times higher than the salary level. Just ask your dad what a loaf of bread used to cost and what he made per year and figure from there. I am sure part of the problem is the area I live in, Calif. Bay Area, which has a very high cost of living, rent here for a 1 bedroom apartment in a SLUM neighborhood is about $900, anything safe to live in is $1100.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You can blithely say "tough, every adult is responsible for what they do no matter what" and feel good about condemning others who stumble and fall,
I didn't condemn anyone, I just pointed out that it does you no good to complain. After all, none of the problems you're whining about will be fixed by posting on /.
It is far better we begin to address the crux of the problem, which is the impunity with which corporations, governments, and other groups can use indoctrination and conditioning techniques via our media and brainwash the public, with little restraint and no accountability for the direct and measurable consiquences of that behavior
Blah, blah, blah.
It is not the government's job, or anyone else's, to sanitize what you read and see. If you can't learn to filter what people tell you, you're always going to be confused.
Read that last sentence again, and again, until it sinks in. And then some more until you understand that it applies to everyone, and it's not the job of some "elite" to care for all of the "poor, ignorant, masses", who are neither poor, nor ignorant and really prefer not to be looked down upon by arrogant liberal pseudo-intellectuals.
If you really want to do some good about this problem, you're attacking it the wrong way. Don't try to get some oversight committees set up to eliminate the brainwashing (Quis custodiet custodes ipsos?), teach people to recognize it for what it is. It's nearly impossible for someone to manipulate you if you consciously recognize what they're doing and how.
I've taught my children how to read ads with skepticism, how to recognize the use of color, fonts and symbols to provoke an emotional reaction, how to read the text/hear the words that invariably exaggerate and paint the issues in the best light. I've given them the opportunity to experience firsthand, with their own money, the disappointment that comes from believing advertising. I'm also teaching them how to read newspapers, watch TV, listen to the radio, always with an eye towards what biases might be behind the words that are said.
IMO the real problem is that we see/hear/read is *too* sanitized; we're trained to believe that the newsmen are "objective" (as if that were possible) and that advertising cannot lie. I think the advent of "objectivity" as a goal in journalism is one of the worst things that has ever happened to us as a society. It, quite literally, has made us stupid, trusting, robots. I have mixed feelings about the statutes on false advertising.
However, there's really no *need* to change anything, people are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves that they're not interested in being anybody's patsy, if that's what they want.
Including you. If you want. It sounds like you want big brother to take care of you and keep you from having to think, weigh, analayze and discern.
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You are clearly confused. My parents are not pissing away money, they are managing it wisely. They helped me with college, but they didn't give me a free ride. That was the right thing to do. and I will be there when they need me in retirement, though somehow they probably won't need me for a long time.
That you have 401ks and mutual funds is not justification for claiming enron has damaged you, unless you owned enron stocks. Enron didn't bring down the market, and over the long term the market is doing great, and will continue to do so.
I think enron is an excuse to exercise the bigotry against corporations that many of todays neo-marxists exercise. Ignorant of economics they point to one criminal and exclaim this justifies and oppressive, fascist political ideology, ignoring the hundred million people killed by this ideology and the wholesale fraud that Social Security is. You and I both are being forced to contribute to social security and that fraud DOES affect us directly yet I hear democrats whining about enron while they ignore the fact that their party has raided the social security trust.
If you don't like your income, go work somewhere else. Its a free country. Take care of your kids, great. Don't whine that your parents didn't take care of you as you would like-- you have the choice to rectify that situation with your kids.
But to claim that everyone has some claim on their parents money is absurd.
Where did this sense of entitlement come from? You think life is supposed to be easy? You thin the world owes you something?
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
You could acquire some marketable skills and earn the money to pay for it yourself. You could work while going to school. You could get scholarships and grants. You could take all your general ed requirements and intro classes at a JC. You could go to a public school, which is much less expensive. You could live off-campus, which is generally much cheaper than living in Dorms. You could go to a school near your hometown so you can avoid housing costs completely by living with your parents.
And before you say you can't get a good education at a cheaper school, in my experience instructors at the JC level are much more involved in their classes, so the education is actually better. You may not get a prestigious education, but you will probably learn more.
Doing any one of these things will dramatically reduce your college debt, and aren't particularly difficult. So, yes, excessive college debt is dumb.
I offer my sister as an example: She got a BS in Combined Sciences with a Medical Focus from Santa Clara University, which is both highly respected and very expensive (around $26k/year, IIRC), and then she went to UCLA for Paramedic school. Her college debt is under $30k, and the $11k loan for paramedic school doesn't have to be paid back as long as she maintains employment in a medical field for a certain number of years. While she was at SCU she took some classes at the local JC to get her EMT license and worked part time as an EMT, and she persued all manner of scholarships (she even competed in a beauty contest for one). She's currently working as a paramedic and taking classes to become an RN. Once she has fulfilled the time requirement for the above loan, she'll go to medical school for her MD, which she will likely have saved enough to pay for herself. The cost to our parents was only a couple thousand a year.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
in the start of 90-x we have no real way - old economy stops, new picked up.
Nope, you're wrong. The reason the dot-bomb thing happened was that people believed there was a 'new economy'. Later they found out it was actually the same old economy with a fresh coat of paint.
Yeah, that's exactly what I said.
I don't design circuits, because I'm bad at it. Most of the engineers I've worked with are good at it, but they still make mistakes. I'm very good at finding those mistakes. And in the mean time, I'm also continuing my education (you know, at school, where I already said I learned my tech skills).
I'm glad your school gave you real experience, it's too bad they didn't teach you how to read.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Well, being a white male who is paying his own way through college while also supporting a family, I have to say "cry me a fucking river".
I know you are trying to present valid arguements, but I hear a whiny teenager saying things like "But I don't want to work, I'll never have time to party", and "You mean I have to live with my parents for another four years? I can't take it!"
Seriously, how much of that is just wanting to get away from your parents and do stupid, crazy stuff? How much of that has anything to do with actual education?
As for the supposed change to excessive debt, there was no change. Read my earlier comments where I was talking about people are buried in debt. Most people have some debt, and that isn't necessarily bad. Christ, I've got 2 new cars, I've certainly got debt, but I my level of debt is such that I could still make my payments if I were making half as much as I am now, so I don't consider my debt to be excessive.
I never said having debt was dumb, I said being buried in debt was dumb. You're the one who decided that was an all-or-nothing deal.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
There's more than just racial discrimination that was wrong with the old times. There was also discrimination and accepted violence on gays, and yes women.
There was discrimination, but not accepted violence.
Just because your family didn't approve of wife beating doesn't mean your values were the norm.
Wife beating was NOT the norm. Where are *you* getting this stuff?
Birth control was largely unavailable meaning women had to have kids even if they did not want them to.
I suppose you have never heard of the condom, or imagine that it wasn't invented until AIDS came along.
If you mean abortion wasn't freely available to any women and any state of pregnancy, you are right. And I consider that a good thing.
Religious oppression was also rampant as every devout God fearing individual took it upon themselves to "preach" their own particular morals to everyone else.
Oh really? Where do you get that idea? Did you experience it?
That is utter nonsense.
Simply put, if the old days were so great and wonderful they would have never had led to the social revoultions that followed in the 60's and 70's
The primary social revolutions were:
1) Civil rights. Converting racial discrimination into a national desire for fairness, and then perverting that movement into more racial discrimination (quotas). Racial discrimination was a a bad thing - no doubt about it. Blacks in the US got the shaft. "Reverse discrimination" is equally stupid and unjust, if not as damaging in the short run.
2)Womens rights. Ending discrimination against women. Replacing it with easy divorce, which results in, ultimately, great harm to divoced women and especially their children.
Adding a supposed right to abortion at any age, ending the respect for life that our country had cherished.
The combination of "the pill"
3)The "me" generation - the replacement of social responsibility with the idea with selfishness.
4)Mindless opposition to authority - this was a result of a combination of a huge generation that thought it knew better than the billions of people who had come before it, and an unwillingness of the males to serve in the Vietnam War. In addition, the old seductive marxist ideas were in vogue. The combination led to the anti-war movement, much of which morphed into a general attitude of moral superiority and selfishness on the part of those who took part in it.
The old ways weren't perfect. But the old morality, with the exception of discrimination, produced better social results than what we have today!
The only good weather is bad weather.
I'm forced to conclude that you're just whining because you have to actually work for a living.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Well, you certainly had your say!
It was *my* duty to serve in Vietnam, and I did so. And as an *informed* citizen who had seen communism first hand, I knew better than the silly elites who believed the pap they were being
fed. That the Soviet Union was a deadly menace to mankind, and was fighting through Vietnam as a proxy, was hardly in doubt. Today, at least, most people have finally come to realize how dangerous and evil the USSR was.
And as far as the impact of the draft... keep in mind two things:
1) Until large numbers of Americans were being drafted and sent to Vietnam, there were very few people in the anti-war movement.
2) Once young people no longer had to fear going to Vietnam, the anti-war movement again dropped to almost nothing.
3) The anti-war movement served only to help the communists. It did NOT protest the communist takeover (and subsequent massacre) in Cambodia by Pol Pot. It did not protest the subsequent invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam. It did not protest the subsequent invasion of Vietnam by China. In fact, it never protested anything except American policy, and it never helped anyone except the Soviets. Furthermore, it was aided and abetted by the KGB, as has been aptly proven by information available since the fall of the USSR. It was what Lenin called "useful fools" - people who believed what the communists fed them.
There is no question in my mind, having lived through the period and known people on all sides of the issue, that a large percentage of the anti-war crowd were protesting because *they didn't want to go, or didn't want their boyfriends to go.*
Vietnam was IMHO a just war. It may not have been a smart one, and it wasn't carried out well, but it was a just war. Furthermore, we won that war with the Christmas Bombing of 1972, and if it had not been for the perfidious actions of the democrat majority in the congress of the US (in embargoing all aid to South Vietnam including previously promised ammunition), South Vietnam would have remained free of totalitarianism, and probably would have gradually become democratic (like South Korea). Instead, it was overwhelmed by a massive armored invasion (the fantasy that indigenous guerillas won that war is just that. The VC were not a factor after the Tet Offensive of 1968).
While I am not surprised that you consider Vietnam to be unjust, after all the dissention about the issue, I am indeed surprised that you found our action in Korea to be unjust. What are you? A Soviet apologist? The Korean war was started by a naked act of aggression, where Kim Il Sung, a KGB asset and dictator of North Korea, sent his armies to invade South Korea. It was a simple attack on a sovereign nation. Pure aggression. The United Nations voted to stop that attack, and the US provided most (but certainly not all) of the troops, and indeed kept the south from being conquered.
Today, South Korea is a prosperous free society. North Korea is a catastrophic failure, with a least a million of its citizens dead just in the last couple of years as a result of a famine caused by its government's corruption and mismanagement. It is a fascist dictatorship and personality cult. And you think we were wrong to resist the spread of that?
You must have some very odd values.
As far as your views on abortion... well... they are your opinion. You want to repeal biology. You want to repeal the most important humanistic value - the respect for life. All in the name of sexual freedom. If a woman doesn't want the burden of a child, she should not conceive the child. Isn't that simple?
Your assertion that single mom, single dad, two gay parents etc are as good as a nuclear family is totally discredited by plenty of statistics. For example, the odds of a male being a criminal rises dramatically if he does not grow up with his natural father. The odds of a step-parent molesting a child are much larger than that of a natural parent doing so. There are many other statistics showing the value of nuclear families. These are facts. You can go look them up. Regardless of how you would *like* the world to work, you are committing the same mistake that progressives have made for the last 200 years: assuming that human nature is what you wish it is rather than what it stubbornly insists on being.
Regarding "desperately clinging to the status quo" - I would turn that around and say that you are desperately seeking to avoid that which thousands of years of human experience has already learned. I can understand - when I was younger, I thought (the hubris of the boomer generation) that we knew more than all those folks in the past; somehow they were just dummies. The brave new world was coming - and we were going to lead the way.
Hogwash! Human nature has not changed in recorded history, and will not (barring genetic engineering, which is a whole different can of worms). What has happened throughout history is that people have put forth utopian ideas that ignore human nature. The modern progressive movement, starting with Rousseau, is the longest lived and most damaging of all of these, with 100,000,000 deaths on its bloody hands just from communist states alone.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Are they kidding? Someone born in 66 is only 36 now. Most geek types in the software world earn more money in their mid-30s to mid-40s by far than in their earlier career. This article has the stupid ageist myth that really young coders are the most productive. It has the even more egregious myth that young coders get bigger salaries commensurate with the huge hours they might be more willing to work. Really good hackers usually improve with age. A virtuoso hacker takes many years to fully flower.
While it is true I burned more hours and wrote much more code when I was 11 years younger, it is also true that arguably my best work was developed after 10 years in this business and continues today as I am pushing 22 years.
More generally, most people don't mature where financial matters are concerned until their mid-30s.
Nobody has paid for the their SS money 'up front'.
Then how do you explain that the SSA sends you a statement with your contributions? And that the amount you get upon retirement is dependent on what you put in?
Although the underlying financial mechanism is as you describe, the government tries pretty hard to pretend that it's a lot like retirement savings. The guy isn't a troll just because he believes the bullshit that the SSA sends him in the mail.
You can retire early. All you have to do is be financially prudent.
There are many books that will show you how-- from the Motley Fools "You have more than you think" to "Buffettology" to the popular "Wealthy Barber" series.
Its actually quite easy to save up enough money to retire on in 10 or 15 years if you decide you want to do it.
What possible reason could you have to think that you can't do this? Or that generation X cant do it? The stock market is there- and in fact, there is far MORE opportunity to do this than your parents had or the generations before them-- financial instruments are more readily available and cheaper than ever before.
What you can't have is a house that is wastefully big, a new car every 4 years, lots of credit card debt buying crap AND early retirement.
But even living high on the hog (a nice lifestyle without scrimping) I've been able to make alot of progress to early retirement.
And here's the ironic thing-- the stock market crash has gotten me closer FASTER than if it hadn't crashed. (IT didn't crash, but you know what I mean.)
The only think keeping you from this, far as I can tell, is ignorance and attitude. The ignorance is easy to fix, read any of the books I just recommended. The attitude is up to you.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Sheesh. You lamented that you didn't think you'd be able to retire before 85.
I pointed out that this is a silly worry-- that it is really quite easy to retire early.
And it is. A bunch of whiners complaining about how things are tough now are just idiots, and of course I'm ignoring them.
Its really quite simple: Either you are wasting money and won't be able to retire before you're 85 as you claim, or you are being prudent and you can retire 10-15 years from now.
You set up the strawman by claiming you couldn't retire.
Its garbage- if you have an income, you can retire early, its simply mathematics.
And if you're in Generation X, , even if you got started late, you should still already have 5 years toward retirement.
I can understand not getting started on your retirement when you're 22, but by the time you're in your late 20s, you should be saving.
I do know enough about you-- you claim to be in Generation X, and you post to slashdot. Therefore you have at least some technical skills and are old enough to know better.
Stop whining and start investing.
Read the books I suggested.
Its really within your power-- the thing that determines whether you will be traveling the world, carefree or destitute at 85 is YOU.
Don't let a forbes article that managed to find some stupid slackers convince you that its not your responsibility and fault whether you retire early or never.
In fact the article supports my position- these people who got training in worthless careers, didn't bother to save any money while the economy was hot, are now whining because things are tough when the economy is cooled off? What pathetic losers! The economy cooling off has hurt me, but I've been able to coast thru because I was prepared for it. I didn't know it was coming, but I had already spent a couple years getting my cost of living down so that in any situation I can live cheaply- and save more when I'm employed, or have the freedom to develop my own business when I'm not.
I understand-- it too me about 8 years of denial before I took financial responbility of my own life, and it was quite amazing how quickly things turned once I did that.
Like I said before, the only things that will keep your from retiring early are laziness, attitude and ignorance. All of which are in your control.
Whatever the state of the economy or generation you were born into.
Be a man (or woman) and take responsibility for your own life, for gods sake.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
It is not BS. Yes, you can pick a local high and then pick a local low (in the beginning of WWII no less!) but hwen you look at 10 year peariods (Rather than picking specific dates) the trend does hold.
Most of the time, you end up much better off.
Most of the original dow stocks are not worthless. That's a stupid thing to say-- after all, when a company is past its prime it gets bought.
They live in on current dow members.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
I did read the article. You have provided no facts for me to ignore.
YOU lamented that you'd still have to be working when you were 85. And with the foolish and risky investment strategy that you now claim to have made (why the switch? I suspect you're making it up now.) you're going to do poorer and have higher risk than following this "guru" who has never written a book.
Sheesh you're such a fucking idiot- you think buffett is a guru leading people astray when he's never written a book, never lead anyone-- he's just invested and answered peoples questions about what he invested in begrudgingly.
You have provided no facts for me to ignroe-- just an article claiming that a music major can't find work and somehow I'm supposed to be concerned?
I actually thought you were someone who was redeemable that you were just ignorant of the ways of the world. Stupid me for trying to help you.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23