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More Millennials Would Give Up Voting Than Texting (nypost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the New York Post:
As the staggering national student loan debt tally sits at an all-time high of $1.33 trillion, according to the Department of Education, many millennials say they would go to extreme lengths to wipe their slate clean. According to a new survey from Credible, a personal finance website, 50 percent of all respondents (ages 18-34) said they would give up their right to vote during the next two presidential elections in order to never have to make another loan payment again.
Yet only 44% said they'd be willing to give up Uber and Lyft -- and only 13% said they'd be willing to give up texting.
Yet only 44% said they'd be willing to give up Uber and Lyft -- and only 13% said they'd be willing to give up texting.
They're unable to come to a logical conclusion.
No rights = no rights to have smartphones.
n/t
I'd sure as well do it too, regardless of what I lose in the process.
it's hard to think that way about voting. Our last election was Giant Douche vs a Turd Sandwich both of which were rammed down our throats.
Thing is, you need to get people to show up to primaries, but it's hard enough to get them to mid terms. Voter suppression doesn't help matter either. I don't know about the rest of you folks but I waited 3 hours in line to vote for Bernie in my primary. That wasn't an accident. Nor was it because of overwhelming turnout.
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This finding makes a lot of sense. Texting and loan payments are both things which strongly affect young people (18-35) on a daily basis. For the most part, people in the same age range will not be strongly affected depending on which party wins the election. There will be some big-picture changes from one administration to the next, but not nearly on the same level student loans and communication with their friends.
The survey could be reworded to say "Would you rather give up the ability to make small, almost invisible political changes for the next eight years, or lose contact with your friends & family - in exchange for $80,000?"
Collectively deciding to vote is precisely what can help our youth build the sort of future they want. Giving up their right to vote will just ensure that theyâ(TM)re saddled with burdens shifted from other populations who do vote!
than switch. Not unexected. They'd rather die than stop.
Did you know women smokers outnumber men 2 to 1? Now you do.
I'm surprised that it's only 50%. Given that voter turnout in the average presidential election is only about 50-60% without extra incentives not to vote, it's hard to imagine that you couldn't come up with another 10% who would skip voting in exchange for a big pile of cash.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
what about 2-3 years in jail/prison to wipe them away. (don't tell them that room + board + doctors are free in there)
I think this says more about the kabuki-show of voting in the US than it does about young people. Too many people 18-34 have figured out that voting has little or nothing to do with who ends up in power. You can vote for "outsiders" and "change agents" and you still end up with some guy from Goldman Sachs making decisions about your life while he flies his trophy wife to Fort Knox to perform some satanic sexual ritual over the gold during a total eclipse.
Seriously, a show of hands: in an age of gerrymandered, electoral colleged, voter suppressed, primary rigged, black box voting machine, foreign government influenced elections, where the guy who loses the vote gets to rule, who wouldn't give up their right to this meaningless exercise in exchange for the forgiveness of $100,000.00 in debt?
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is not unexpected from a generation that has never known tyranny, opression, war and bloodshed. But it's not exclusive to millenials, the same applies to most people alive today in developped countries.
When one has never known the horrors of tyranny, one tends to assume that the current status of civilized societies is the normal human condition. It is not.
Ask anyone who's lived through the horrors of tyranny and war if they'd be willing to give up the little power they have over their leaders. You'd get a totally different answer.
What's the point of voting when the electoral college makes your vote irrelevant?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So they go through a public education system designed to leech the maximum amount of money from their parents, then they go through college which does the exact same thing. The entire point of a FASFA is to expose the amount the parents make to the college.
Then the New York Post taunts them. "Do you want your right to vote or do you want to pay off your school debt?". Anyone with even the most basic critical thinking skills would say "I'd shoot the questioner in the face".
Do you not really understand what's being asked here and why? This is not a friendly conversation.
50 percent of all respondents (ages 18-34) said they would give up their right to vote during the next two presidential elections in order to never have to make another loan payment again.
When put like that it sounds bad.
But when you turn it around it's a damn good deal. The average student debt in the US is about $37,000. If you asked the population in general whether they would give up 2 presidential votes in exchange for $37k I expect that way over 50% of the voting public would snatch it out of your hand.
And when you consider that the youngest adults will be the ones with the highest debt, they would be the most "expensive" ones to buy-off.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Everyone knows that if you give up voting for texting you will lose both and deserve neither.
...and these are the muppets we are entrusting the future to.
They'll be far too distracted with trivial shit like facetwit, far too worried about their online popularity, and far too leftie/peecee passive to ever do what it takes to defend important stuff like rights/freedoms. Goodbye constitution, hello slavery.
Jail is just another place to live. I am sick and have been largely confined to medical facilities for the past few months.
A generation of morons. They can't compute simple interest, hell, they can't add numbers! They don't socialize with real people ; everything is done through their phone. But they don't know how to configure their phone.
Sad truth is that this generation is too stupid to defend themselves from anyone willing to take advantage of them. Luckily, they're also unable to reproduce or, if that should accidentally happen, to keep their young alive.
My vote has never meant anything in presidential elections anyway, and never will. It only has half the theoretical electoral college weight of a voter in other states to begin with, and it's a single party state with a winner take all electoral vote system so there's never any doubt about the outcome. So I'll gladly give up that farce for $10, as long as I can continue voting on everything else.
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because it was still only a small number of (mostly old and conservative) people showing up for the primary. If the primaries had the same turnout as the General we'd be saying President Bernie right now because Clinton's shenanigans wouldn't have flown. You need tight margins for cheating to work in elections.
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I hacked the voting machine to send my texts!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
We voted for obama to end wars. He expanded them. Some of us voted trump figuring he'd end some wars that he railed against. Nope. So fuck it why vote?
I've never taken a loan, what does that poll question even mean? Is the premise that I'm going to be able to borrow a billion dollars, invest it, and retire living off the interest because I'll only have to pay off the principal?
That only 50% of people would give up voting for that kind of power is astounding.
I think there is a serious discussion hidden in there, voting is a social responsibility, not an act for which you derive personal benefit. How much personal cost people are willing to endure in order to exercise that responsibility is an important question. A question that comes up every election when some populations suddenly find they need forms of ID they don't normally acquire, or their district suddenly doesn't have sufficient polling stations. The question of how much cost they're willing to endure can decide elections.
I just find these survey questions to be nonsensical.
I stole this Sig
I understand why it is that politics turns you off, but there's something you need to consider, especially since you're going to be a mother soon: There are plenty of people out there who do care to make their wishes known so far as what direction our country will go and how it's run -- and they do not care if you're happy about the results or even what happens to you and your family, so long as they get what they want. There are people out there right now who would see you disenfranchised entirely, merely because you're a woman, make it illegal for you to have your own money, own property, run a business, and considered the 'property' of your husband, who would have the legal right to do with you as he wished -- including beating and killing you, if he felt justified. Do you really want to live in a country like that? Do you want your children to inherit a world like that? That's why you need to care about 'politics': so that your voice, and the voices of everyone who thinks and feels the way you do about things, can be heard, so those who represent you in Congress can work to enact the Will of the People, all the people, not just the rich and the power-hungry. You do it for yourself, you do it for your kids, and their kids, and so on. The alternative is to live like a slave, having no say whatsoever in the course your life takes, because The Few speak while The Many are silent -- or silenced. It doesn't matter if it's something as small as some inconsequential little local ordinance that your city is voting on, or as big as who is President, you either exercise your right to make your wishes known, or someone else will see their wishes enforced on you.
Bull shit. Spoken like someone who hasn't been in jail or prison much, if at all.
As another poster pointed out, this is a perfectly rational decision.
Just think about it:
Instead of voting at 16 (or whatever the age is in the US) you vote at 18, and in return you get a free education.
Sounds like a no brainer to me.
The main problem is the education system, that leaves graduates with these high debts. Debts are to be paid, so while still being allowed to vote they have little freedom of choice than to work all day under any circumstances. They are already slaves.
While it may not be how our founding fathers envisioned things, the people in power are quite content with how things are turning out.
Disenfranchise so many voters that they simply don't even care about it anymore. Make voting as painful and unpleasant as possible with absolutely no reward. Make it seem utterly pointless. Also ensure that every campaign promise remains unfilled and forgotten, so people feel totally conned and don't bother in the next election.
All is as it is supposed to be, according to the few and powerful.
If every eligible voter in this country actually voted, the entire system would likely implode. Our system could not even come close to handling a proper turnout. It's not designed to.
And if in young minds, the right to SMS is more valuable than the right to vote, well, we are lost. Doomed to follow in the path of the ancient Romans. Was a good run though.
See the orange White house resident, that I can't call 'President', sorry.
R-E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N
How the fuck did JFK get shot while this prick ruins your country. Right to bear arms - my ass.
Dear US Americans,
I tried to express my concern regarding your countries condition in a polite way, but that would have included a lengthly discussion of indicators which no one would have read. Therefore, in short: You are so fucked!
While other countries support their students with a basic income and allow them to study free of charge, you have to pay for it. In addition you seem not to have learned critical thinking at school, college and university otherwise you would not depend on Uber but disregard voting.
You people.need to start to think logically and go into politics. Yes that will get messy. Yes it is ugly. And yes you might end up being a zombi like those in congress, but that is up to you. Otherwise you will wake up in an Imperium Americanum with a Cesar as President and a paralized congress (senate to stay in the picture). Oh wait .... never mind.
Still upset the DNC rigged the primary against Bernie? And what are you going to do about it besides complaining on a web site they don't care about?
Nothing...
Don't worry, you are so stupid you will still vote DNC blindly in the future. Thus letting them know that no matter how corrupt, how much they screw their base, and how bad they lie to you, that their base is so stupid they can still count on their support.
Good luck with that.
...is functioning exactly as intended. Docking almost complete.
Uhh yeah. Im unsubscribing from slashdot. Any sources that use 'millenials' in it, isnt worth my time. Millenials dont fucking exist. Its a marketing term. And people are using it as yet another way to categorize other people and treat them differently. There arent any baby boomers or gen Xers or millenials. theyre people. Now stop being retarded and go do actual studies based on actual science, not this bullshit fit for yet another self help best seller book
There's a reason cons call it "3 hots and a cot"
I'm more surprised that less people are surprised at this. If you're a recent college graduate, you've never really lived in a time where your president seems to have affected your life positively very much. And you can try and vote to change that, but the big game of politics such as constant recounts, potential vote rigging, and the electoral college makes your vote more or less completely useless. Or you can just not vote entirely, something a lot of people do ANYWAY when they feel there's no point. Was the country really going to be saved at all depending on the turnout of the last election? Hell no. Was it saved the last several times? Nope. So trade that otherwise useless next couple of votes in exchange for being freed of one of the many curses of being in poverty. You were told that if you take out this money, if you can graduate college you'll make so much money you'll never have to worry about paying it back! And yet people are working for nothing but minimum wage and that huge amount they have to pay to some stranger that popped out of nowhere instead of the reputable bank they took the loan from, is just one more burden they have to worry about in terms of their survival. It's a good trade! Everyone I know has more or less given up the idea that voting even matters. Texting on the other hand, still a pretty useful tool and not very expensive.
Given the millennials I work with, I think it's safer for all of us that they do.
...is functioning exactly as intended. Docking almost complete.
Fixed that for you!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Just let the millennials vote by texting, problem solved.
Of course some may argue that this will make voting insecure, but with electronic voting machines, it already is.
> likely got their education at a time when it was actually possible to do so without crippling debt
You mean like right now, for example? My tuition at a state school is $6,000 / year. The tax credit is $1,500 / year, so net cost $4,500 / year. Some of my classes had as the final exam the Cisco and Microsoft certification exams. Getting those certs helped increase my income even before I finished school, so I'll finish school with more money in the bank than I started with - essentially a negative amount of student debt.
I majored in Information Technology - Security, so I'll have a six figure income right about the time I graduate.
A person CAN choose to get a worthless degree from an expensive school, or they get can a valuable degree from an affordable school.
Sorry, but Hillary didn't win.
"...and only 13% said they'd be willing to give up texting."
Sounds like an addiction worse than crack to me. I wonder how many Millennials would suck a dick to get debt wiped clean...
That will take care of millennials voting rights. Cant vote when you're dead in Qatar.
Things people do in text messages have a direct, verifiable impact on their personal lives. Leaving aside the whole Electoral College system point, the President is only a single branch of the government, and the least important one IMHO. Changes in the head of state may create ripples that down the line impact me personally, but for the most part I see very little difference in my prosperity when the President changes from a D to an R. Changes in Congress have a bigger role because they actually make laws, and I see changes in state and local government influencing things things more.
Free communications (beer and speech) is more important than the vote.
Dialectician. Archology.
I am all in favor of mellennials not voting. They are pretty stupid and un-informed for the most part anyway..
Let the adults handle this..
so i guess, it's just fair if the millennials are confused about how this democracy stuff works.
What!
More Millennials would rather text than vote!!!???
No doubt that college loan was money well spent. Please forgive their debt...! They learned nothing, sue the schools that ripped them off into thinking they got an education.
Sounds like a lot of other Slashdot readers already get this, but the votes that matter most are for the people geographically closest to where you live.
The people we voted in as our city council members and mayor have already made more decisions that impact my life than anything Trump has done.
The President in America is only slightly less of a figurehead than than Queen of England, and that's been by design since the nation was founded. If you visit the Old Courthouse in Annapolis, MD - you can see the original letter General George Washington wrote when he declined the offer to become the first King of the USA, right after the Revolutionary War. He felt that control of the nation shouldn't be in the hands of just one individual like that, and just wanted to go back to farming his land. He wound up our first President, instead, by a unanimous vote.
When you really look back at the claimed "big accomplishments" of past Presidents, much of it had more to do with advisors and other staff members putting the ideas forward and convincing the President to get behind them. Ronald Reagan's "trickle down economics" was a great example. He didn't come up with that idea himself. He wasn't even a Finance guy ... just a former Hollywood actor. In other cases, we don't really know if a President really had a plan themselves or not -- but we do know that many changes they make just get watered down or reversed within a decade's time. (President Clinton was famous for his "welfare to work" policy, where he mandated time limits on how long welfare could be collected. In the years that followed, the states slowly dismantled that with exceptions to rules and changes - so today, none of that has any effect on how the system works.) Obama's presidency made a lot of claims about improving our economic and employment conditions - yet historically, we know the economy is cyclical. If you have a boom, you have a bust that follows it, and vise-versa. Become a president when the economy is poor and just hang in there, and you'll eventually be able to take credit for the inevitable turn-around.
I don't want to discount Presidential voting as irrelevant ... but choosing wisely in the Primaries is where you really get more control over who wins. By the time you're at the general election, you've literally got over a dozen contenders who didn't make it -- quite often for the wrong reasons. (Candidates with well known names often get automatic advantages over people nobody has heard of. And candidates pouring more money into trying to win the election can make some of the others look bad for just long enough to bump them out of the running. Reality might be that those "also rans" were actually more qualified candidates all along.)
According to information known at the time and later leaked by WikiLeaks, it was likely because Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign was a victim of collusion between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC corporation. And if you read the (remarkable but predictably underreported) DNC lawsuit (CAROL WILDING et al. v DNC SERVICES CORPORATION, d/b/a DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE and DEBORAH âoeDEBBIEâ WASSERMAN SCHULTZ), you'll understand why voting in party primaries is a waste of time. Consider what the DNC corporation's lawyer, Bruce Spiva, said about how that party could have picked a standard bearer (http://jampac.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/042517cw2.pdf pages 36-37):
There's no obligation for them to pay attention to your primary "votes" and you, Court, keep your nose out of our corporate business. I doubt any court would have told a corporation how to pick its representatives here anyhow, but the lawsuit was worth mounting even though it was likely to lose.
I don't want anyone to have to run YouTube's nonfree Javascript, so either look elsewhere for clips of "Redacted Tonight" (one of the few TV shows to mention this lawsuit which, uncoincidentally, is very revealing of the Democratic Party) or use youtube-dl to download https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoSYC45cl6k and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_fdBqISODQ for information on the class action lawsuit and how it ended.
Digital Citizen
...young people who think that they have something unique to add to the conversation are stupid, by definition.
I actually already unregistered to vote lol.
And yes, i would rather have secure texting via signal than voting in a rigged election system
The free lunch crowd will be with us forever. At least they can be distracted by a tweet.
As chair of one of the biggest democracy groups in the UK, it pains me to say it.
The average margin of victory is ~100,000. That means you have a 1 in 100,000 of affecting 1 seat. As long as enough people vote to give your candidate a chance, your vote is that worthless.
I haven't voted in 10 years and was recently taken off the register. I could probably live without texting, but the choice is clear.
Passing the Cisco certs and posting them on your LinkedIn absolutely does get recruiters calling you about much higher paying jobs than the $30K you're talking about. My income today is four times as much as it was five years ago.
Almost passing Cisco hasn't done much for you, but studying a bit more and passing, so you have the cert, and putting it on your LinkedIn DOES work.
> Working full time and taking the minimum fulltime hours for classes meant I was not fully prepared.
Most of my Cisco study was listening to YouTube videos in the car. I was already spending that time driving, so it didn't take any extra time to study that way. I also did some hands-on labs, but most of my study time was listening while driving. I achieved multiple Cisco certifications that way.
> You do know the number of companies willing to pay for a six figure paycheck is relatively low right now, right?
Based on the things I did, the items I put on my resume, when I last switched jobs there was a bidding war for me. Multiple offers over $90K - for what's on my resume.
> Do not think that because you managed to beat the odds, that your success is the norm.
It's not luck and it's not because I'm special, the companies looked at my resume. The result of the items on my resume is multiple offers over $90K. Most other people on Slashdot would get similar results if they put together a similar resume, by doing the same things I did. That includes listening to YouTube videos in order to get Cisco, Microsoft, and CompTIA certifications, and then based on those certifications, getting college credit. It's a recipe that works.
Let's apply a 1 cent tax on every text message, and we'll see if that motivates you to get involved in democracy.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
And that headline alone explains the hot mess dumpster fire that is our politics. Replace "millennial" with any other generations nickname and "texting" with any other time consuming past-time from that generation and it becomes less true as you go back in time. I'm not indicting millenials here - just the trend.
Because you could pretty easily replace texting with email, but they probably don't even know that. They just view it as old fashioned, even though if texting (either with apps or SMS) vanished tomorrow, you could contact all the same people just as effectively with email.
As for voting, well you can debate about how much your vote counts of course, but you can't just replace it instantly with something else like dictatorship and expect similar results.
Vote by text. Don't vote can't text.
So why should they care?
...DUH! They're not the brightest bulbs in the box after all......
Wait just a second here. Are miniskirts back in fashion again and I missed it?
Some fashions, like the abrupt dawn of eternal September and bell bottom jeans you figure are a once-in-a-lifetime freak event.
But no, eternal September is baaaaack.
Dialogue with the governed: cronyism.
Failure to dialogue with the governed: deep state.
Heads I win, tails you lose.
Not quite eternal September, but close, yet for some reason we seem to have skipped a month.
Now, I need to run outside immediately and check me out some bell-bottomed miniskirts.
You sound like a marketing guy for a college.
CompTIA, really? Are you actually suggesting spending money on an A+ cert? That draws between $16,000 to $20,000 around here, and like the Cisco cert, had to be renewed regularly.
That is another problem with the Cisco certs. They gave them expirations after I failed mine. So it makes it that much harder to stack them.
At $30,000 annually, budgetting for whatever it takes to get my foot in the door is a challenge. I'm looking at needing $30,000 in savings to afford to be able to leave the job I have, first months rent or a down payment, car's about to fall apart and won't last for a job outside of town, etc. Its going to take more than three years, so I'll shoot for those cisco certs at the end of three years.
Considering how children have been (un)educated the past 30+ years, since the "age of political correctness" it doesn't surprise me ONE BIT! Kids today, into their 20's & 30's have become nothing more than 4 second attention span morons, glued to their smartphones, never put them down, would have a heart attack if the stupid battery were to die in the middle of taking a selfie. They have NOT been educated as to the greatness than is the American experience. Before the United States was founded, NO nation on this earth, had it's people be free. Every nation was ruled by a King, Queen, dictator. EVERYTHING was "owned" by whomever was in charge. You could not do as you wished, without the consent of the "ruler". Then, escaping the tyranny of the British empire, people came here, set up a rule of government where the people would rule themselves with laws based on the principal that people should live in accordance to their choice, to be able to do with the fruits of their labors, as they saw fit. Hell, the pilgrims even toyed with collectivism (socialism) and damn near starved to death, had it not been for the indians, and the first thanksgiving. We set up the government, to be ruled by the people (now, we can argue all day long how far off track it is now, but that is besides the point). This 240+ year experiment of FREEDOM was never known until the 1700's. If it is such a bad idea, why do so many flee their nations to come here? Why have so many died, by oppressive governments, who went so far as to build walls to keep their people from leaving? Kids today willingly (adults too) give up their freedoms every time they turn on their bloody phones! They don't understand the rights, and responsibilities that come with being a citizen. To them, the important things are tweets, likes and instagram.
No. Trump did. Please try to keep up.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I gave up voting a long time ago, you just end up on the jury duty rolls.
> At $30,000 annually, budgetting for whatever it takes to get my foot in the door is a challenge.
I been absolutely understand that! I've been there.
Let me say again - I've been there. And I found the path from there to here. A few years later I'm making more than three times that much. My take home income is four times what it was five years ago.
If someone making $350,000 in this field told me the recipe they followed, I would listen carefully. I wouldn't dismiss what they say, acting like they don't know what they are talking about - they are making three times as much as me, so I'd want to know exactly how they did it.
> so I'll shoot for those cisco certs at the end of three years.
Sounds reasonable, and in the meantime when the mood strikes you, you can prepare by watching YouTube videos or read a book you got on eBay for 99 cents.
>. the Cisco certs. They gave them expirations after I failed mine. So it makes it that much harder to stack them.
The Cisco certs do expire after a few years UNLESS you stack them, or meet other criteria to keep your knowledge up to date. That's okay - today you can say you achieved CCNP in 2012. Whether the cert has expired or not, you did achieve it. I would renew it (by getting another Cisco cert) if you plan to work in networking, or if your employer pays for the exam. If you're not directly working in networking, and your company or school won't pay for it, maybe there is no need to renew it. It's main value is to get you that first and second "good" job anyway. Once you're the CIO of one company, the next company isn't going to care whether your CCNA is fresh or not.
> CompTIA, really? Are you actually suggesting spending money on an A+ cert?
I actually didn't say A+, but let's use that example of one that is common and therefore less valuable. (I have Network+, Linux+ and Security+, because my school chose those as final exams). But you wanted to talk about A+, so let's do that.
A great investment in a stock or fund is one that has a 20% annual return. The very best, luckiest investments might average 100% annual return over five years. What is the return on investment for A+. One author criticized A+ saying that it only increased earnings by $3,000 / year. I'll play along with the critic. The exam costs $300. If a $300 investment returns $3,000 / year, that's a 1000% return! Hell yes I recommend ANY investment with 1000% annual return!
Voting != Democracy
Casteism
This is a study from the US. They don't have anything to choose in elections anyway.
and we won't have this problem.
Dirk Lannister out.
I completely disagree with that statement, given the current economic system we have in place.
UBI is a fantasy unless we first reach a post-capitalist economy where the labor required for all of our basic needs is fully automated. Then you can start talking about taking the revenue generated by the robots and automation and issuing it back out to citizens.
As it stands right now? You can't implement a UBI without it amounting to yet another "rob from the rich to give to the poor" scheme. Because where is the money going to come from that's paid back out? Governments don't generate income. They tax people to get money to redistribute.
As it stands right now? You can't implement a UBI without it amounting to yet another "rob from the rich to give to the poor" scheme.
The poor do the work, and the rich profit from it while the poor suffer. This is a "take the profits made possible by the poor and give them to the poor" scheme.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"