You missed the second half.

The Ants & the Grasshopper

One bright day in late autumn a family of Ants were bustling about in the warm sunshine, drying out the grain they had stored up during the summer, when a starving Grasshopper, his fiddle under his arm, came up and humbly begged for a bite to eat.

"What!" cried the Ants in surprise, "haven't you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?"

"I didn't have time to store up any food," whined the Grasshopper; "I was so busy making music that before I knew it the summer was gone."

The Ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust.

"Making music, were you?" they cried. "Very well; now dance!" And they turned their backs on the Grasshopper and went on with their work.

There's a time for work and a time for play.

Numbers 1 & 2 *can* be legitimate beefs.  I can think of numerous situations where their course of action is the best one.

Number 3 is a misunderstanding on your part.  Every corporate 401k I know of keeps your dollars in some kind of mutual fund.  Every match dollar you get is guaranteed to be in the form of company stock.  Now, I don't understand why Muslims can't simply donate their capital gains minus taxes & get on with life sin-free (probably because Jewish fund managers make money off it or some shit) but I can see how a 401k is set up in conflict with their beliefs against investment/usury.

Some of these newer guys sound just like the snowflakes on reddit. " life isn't fair, boomers suck, I deserve better pay, student loans aren't fair, my pussy hurts, whaaaaa"

If only there were facts to back that up.

Attached File

My favorite are the ones that spend every extra penny they make traveling. There is a single, childless 30 year old at work that has told me they can't afford to miss a paycheck or company travel reimbursement, makes 96k a year, just got back from Bora Bora recently. I don't fault them for doing what they love but they aren't saving a penny for the future, all those Instagram photos sure are nice though. To be fair, it isn't just millennials, I have dated several women from Generation X (40+) like that as well, not a penny of savings and credit cards maxed out but they travel constantly.

Maybe it's because I travel all over for work half the year already, a great vacation to me is sitting at the house with zero shit to do, drinking beer, riding the lawn mower, and burning stuff I definitely don't have the travel bug.

It was stolen from them because massive portions of the economy were sold to China.

We didn’t have to MAGA because the Boomers did such a good job with the economy

Simple reply misses the point entirely.  There's a ton of jobs out there --probably ones you older folks did in your youth when starting out, in fact-- that are simply inaccessible without a degree nowadays, for no reason at all.  "Go into the trades" is all well and good, but it's a joke to claim that education inflation in the professional sector isn't making life needlessly difficult for the current generation.  Boomers make the hiring decisions; that aspect of the economic stress lays squarely at their feet.  I've always assumed it was done to protect their own jobs from newcomers until their own retirement.

Things were really very bad during the Nixon years when I was building a business that eventually grew to employ 152 Americans at very attractive pay scales.

Most losers believe themselves to be way too smart "to fall for" the type of attitude and assume the sort of risk and put in the hard work necessary to ensure long term financial success in life.

Unlike foolish louts like myself who started out penniless, they're so smart that they understand all to well all of the obstacles that make success impossible.

Funny thing is, my kids have been extraordinarily successful and I haven't given them a fucking dime towards that success with the exception of paying for their college tuition at very inexpensive state colleges.

You boomers are going to break the system though. There are a lot of you and you are going from your prime earning years to collecting.  I suspect they will just print more money to deal with it.  You (and I later) will get the number of dollars promised, they just won't be worth that much.

That and 100 / month for dental is crazy.  Given the typical caps and what they pay out, I would go without and pay cash.

I worked like a dog until I established myself and then I played like a king.

In the beginning I went five straight years without a vacation, after I set myself up I lived the life of Riley and continue to do so.

You poor soul.

I’m not sure which is inflated more; Boomer ego or the price of an education one needs to get even an entry level job

No, in prior generations a good chunk of that accumulated wealth was reserved for the next generation...as opposed to accumulated at that future generations' expense in the first place

Folks my age have a hard time finding apartments --you know, that thing you need to "move to where the money is" because Boomers have created so much demand for Social-Security-subsidized geezer homes, and voted for so many Great Society section 8 housing projects.  Demand is so high, that in Texas renting is pegged very near the 30% income threshold of maximum affordability, despite huge job and economic growth, which makes it very difficult to accumulate cash for a down payment.  Even so, the real estate market is so overheated that renting is still a *much* better deal over a ten year period.  "Move somewhere cheaper" yeah, there's no jobs in those places since Boomers sold the corporations out to foreign interests to pump the stock numbers; it's just old folks retirement homes, and I didn't bust my ass in engineering college for four years to wipe the asses of people on the dole.

Ants are communists.

You're "feeling the Bern."

You need to learn to take personal responsibility; none of that unadulterated, grandiose bullshit you just posted is an excuse for failure.

None of it.

For my dad, a private room was ~310/day.  He did have nursing home insurance that covered ~240 of it after the first 20 days.  A shared room was IIRC about 240.  Medicare doesn't cover nursing homes for the most part.

It wasn't an order to sell gold stores, it was an order to sell gold stores to Uncle Sam at a heavy discount.  Gee, you think the passage of the NFA to ban machine guns & artillery a year later had anything to do with that Lex Luthor scheme?  Yes, in a just world FDR would have ended up like Lincoln or Mussolini for that one.  Luckily he had the foresight to have all the fighting-age impoverished men sequestered away from the cities doing CCC busy work for IOUs and training them up for his world war.

And I'm sure If you were to start it all over today, it would be just as easy.

Very clever.

Life is hard, but it's going to be even harder for you.

No, it would be far easier because due to my experience I already know how, and the Internet is an extraordinary business tool that wasn't available to me when I started out.

Word.

Oh yeah, Boomers ran the schools that profited from the tuition increases over the current period, too.  So that's another leach-move.

I mean, they *might* have a point if they could point out a single program that millenials have implemented that takes money out of Boomers' pockets.  There's lots of *ideas* among Bernouts on that front, but few/none have become reality.  Millenials on the other hand, are subject to an enormous degree of taxation without representation, to say nothing of the corporate equivalent.

The very arc of history argues against you and you have nothing but snide and hollow quips to try and rebut it.

Let me clarify, you would start out today in you early twenties with no savings, and without your current experience. You really think it's that much easier? Assets, like a home cost 4x what they did relative to the 70's.

Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is a lot harder when you have to take out a 30 year loan for boots.

I think it would be easier, I'd join the military again if you are talking about a 20 year old me today. The pay and housing are way better nowadays anyway. TA paid for college for me while active duty and the GI Bill paid eventually for my son's education, paid the bills, healthcare covered, pension, led to a decent federal civilian job with the same branch.

@barnbwt

1&2 aren't legit....effin move where the jobs are. Literally that's what people did for generations. Complaining because there are no jobs where you live is not being realistic.

3. I am correct, I do this for a living. Basically all 401ks should have a stable value fund or a money market fund. Those funds are backed by treasuries etc, the treasury issues bonds and then pays you a interest rate, since the US goverment uses tax dollars to to pay the interest or borrows money to pay that interest or prints more money to pay that interest, there fore you are simply getting back a small portion of the taxes you paid back from the government, The Quran prohibits Usury, it does not prohibit commerce, this is a clear teaching. Simply getting back some of what you paid is not usury.

I like to travel, but it's like to Destin

I'm 28 and just finished 1 year in my job that I will retire from. Worked 5 years to land this job (firefighter). Pension (37 years to max out) and decent 401k. Live with my fianc in a house she owns. Just got engaged (5 year relationship) and I want kids ASAP. No student loans. Hers are almost paid off. She's a nurse.

I think I'm doing alright. Wayyyy better than 95% of the people I went to high school with.

Lol

Could have done 20yrs in the military and had a retirement check and free medical for life.

The started a second retirement at 38-41 yrs old.

One of my nephews didn't have two nickels of his own to rub together so he enlisted in the army and spent some very tough time in Afghanistan.

He parlayed that experience into getting a terrific job afterwards, and has invested the money he saved up, in real estate and owns rental several houses and condos in Texas.

He's still a pretty young guy and drives great cars and travels extensively.

The whining lefties who are having their own pity party in this thread?

I don't give a rat's ass for their problems and the excuses they concocted to justify their failure to do right by themselves.

Don't forget wage stagnation.

I'm about as old a millennial as you can get (born in 84').  I cringe everytime i listen to all the boomers complain all day long.

They love to shit on younger generations with the "when i was 25..." bullshit.

Oh, you mean when you were making the same wage a year and a half out of school i am now after 6 years?  When your education was a 10th of what mine was?  When your first house was less than half of what a comparable model is today?

When you were partying your way through your twenties just like millennials are doing now; you call them lazy?

My knees would not have done 20 years in retrospect, and I was a mechanic.  I seriously considered ROTC after I left active duty and went to college.  I decided against it for various reasons, but as it turns out,  there is no way I would have made it to retirement.

So if pensions aren't an option, throw up your hands and give up? If housing prices are insane, throw up your hands and give up?

Put together a personal retirement plan. Live and work in an area where your income matches housing rates. Personal responsibility.

Not all of us can work the government gravy train.

Found old economy Steve.

Pathic, really.

But as Dirty Harry once said; "a man's got to know his limitations".

And to their credit; the crybabies here in this thread certainly do.

Their contrived and convoluted excuses notwithstanding.

Wow, so if we just believe in personal responsibility, me & my peers can start companies with hundreds of employees like you did?  Even though you never even had to deal with Obamacare (for starters)?  Wowey-zowey, you have to write a book, you've got the solution for all our problems!

By personal responsibility and risk-taking, do you mean leave a failing mega corporation 'safe' 8-4 gig before the layoffs to strike out across the state, hook up with a small ambitious business, and work 11-12 hour days with a 45min commute each way?  I'm the one posting facts, figures, and specifics --not bullshit cliches like "taking personal responsibility."  I earn decent wages, and so do most aerospace engineers; but decent wages don't get you a new-built suburban house with a wife and kids by your 30th anymore.  That's what's changed, and arguably to the benefit of the boomers.  My parents were wise enough to help me with college tuition so I was insulated from the unprecedented increases, and faced a burden closer to what they themselves experienced after scholarships & co-op work.  I can't imagine how much shittier most of my peer group has it with ~40k$ in loans; it must be downright unbearable.

I'm not Berning anything since I'm not out to steal your money unlike your past compatriots, Mr. Reformed NY Democrat.  I do however refuse to blind myself to the effects of the past few decades of public & private mismanagement, which have squandered previously existing opportunities enjoyed by those such as yourself.  For instance, a sudden love affair with destructive tariffs which aren't exactly helpful for a growing machine shop.  Though I'm sure you'll be happy to pay more for our products without complaining, seeing as you're such a big shot.   Come to think of it, the same could also be said for wages in general, since worker productivity has never been higher.  But no, of course you'll instead complain from your retirement villa subsidized by my tax contributions to your Social Security income, that "you commies aren't owed the money I earned!"  Somehow justifying that I should only be paid double what a Boomer burger-flipper makes.

Debt, crime, and suicides are spiking all over the place becuz snowflakes right?  Can't be because people are under legitimate financial stress.  Gotta be muh personal responsibility.

Wage stagnation/decline. The post-WW2 period of prosperity that gave rise to the Boomers is dead and gone.

The fact that far too many people my age are tide-pod-eating morons certainly doesn't help. Then I keep getting bullshitted about the need for workers, but can't get a job with an engineering degree from a theoretically-reputable school, internship in my field, good GPA, etc.... and I'm far from the only one. Even getting into the workforce to begin with at a job that pays more than $10/hr seems to be next to impossible. All those jobs we keep hearing about are minimum-wage service-industry jobs with no possibility of advancement. Young folks are now being pushed out of the job market by middle-aged workers in things like fast food and retail, and apparently it's our fault because we don't have enough experience. For "entry-level" positions.

Thank decades of anti-American trade policy shipping jobs offshore at the expense of domestic manufacturing. Want to know why the US is experiencing an explosion of opioid abuse? Because all the fucking jobs moved to fucking China and Mexico. (Thanks, Nixon. Thanks, NAFTA.) You've got an entire generation with no hope, and a virtual guarantee that their standard of living will be inferior to that enjoyed by their parents and grandparents. That realization destroys hope. About the only thing left is natural resources, because you can't ship oil or ore reserves overseas.

The costs of education and healthcare are exploding all out of proportion to the rate of inflation, either pricing the average Joe out entirely, or forcing him to go into thousands in debt that he'll never be able to repay because the job market is such a clusterfuck.

ETA: You want to know why my signature looks how it does? Because a 21-year-old girl from New Carlisle, Ohio, ran out of money and hope. Because this country's higher education system is broken beyond repair. She decided to eat a bullet a couple days before her birthday because of that.

The economy isn’t humming as well as you think.  Lipstick on a pig comes to mind.

“Limited access?”

Fuck no. You don’t get a retirement plan if you’re working part time as a barista.

@midcap

On a long enough time horizon, p(x) = 1.

Yeah, our latest mold designer was required to have a BS in engineering.  That eliminated 95% of the good candidates.  

Amen.  

We dated in college.  10 years later and a pile of debt, she came to me to unfuck it. We got together.  I gave her advice on how to unfuck it.  She absolutely can't stand being wrong and or being told she can't do things.

So went back with her ex that just tells her whatever she wants to hear.

I wish her the best.  Out of my life.  As since leaving me, all mutual friends tell me is she's in an extremely self destructive cycle.

I hindsight, I see why we broke up in college. And I'm glad we broke up again.  But I'm dreading the day she either shows up on my doorstep, or I see her obituary. I don't know which will happen first.

My parents' generation kept the same employer far, far longer than mine, and the same goes for residence.  We have to 'effin move to where the jobs are' more often now because there's less money to be made in more places, otherwise we wouldn't need to.  The effect can be seen in the hyper inflation hitting the big urban singularities where economy of scale is having a greater and greater distortion effect on profits, wages, economic activity in general.  As the only place to earn a decent wage, they attract more and more people to fight for the same discrete resources like housing.  For many reasons the housing market is far outpacing the wage increases available in these places.  Boomers weren't renting 40 year old closets to hot-bunk in the 60s if they had white collar jobs in LA or NYC.  Personally, I believe widespread rent control/subsidy in these areas is the cause of the problem.  Without rent controls, wages would have had to rise all these years, or there'd be no janitors within transit distance to clean the shitters in Trump Tower.  Of course, there'd also be a lot fewer Democrat voters in these cities, too.

Your description of the MM puts the investor right in the middle of the treasury issuing loans (usury) and making gains from it.  Again, it's not a financial (or logical) beef, but it's legitimate.  If the Muslim opposes supporting the system of usury/loans/bonds, a money market account is not an acceptable vehicle (in that case even giving away the gains isn't 'good enough' in a moral sense).  At the end of the day it's just another indictment of that ideology, that it denies such an obviously critical element of a healthy & productive society.  I'd have to settle for a goat & a cave, too, if I had to save the full 200k-300k suburban houses command around here before buying.

I'm feeling you except for this part in bold.  That's what things were like back in 2010 when I graduated (I just bet General Electric was only hiring 50 kids per year company-wide back in the good old days, too, right boomers?)  Right now the labor market's insanely hot, so if you aren't getting bites you're doing something wrong; probably trying to apply online if I had to guess.*  Possible, but unlikely that you're applying for H1B ringer-jobs unless you're not looking outside the Bay Area

I remain unconvinced NAFTA is even half as bad as people make it out to be.  The US has had profitable international business arrangements for centuries, it just wasn't until the earnings-chasing wiz-kids and profligate federal spending in the 60s that we started having these issues with trade imbalance.  Besides, to hear the old timers say it, we should just "go where the jobs are" and leave them to fester in their old age in a brain-drained America.

*totally separate issue is that HR and hiring practices are unprecedentedly retarded and counterproductive.  Sometimes intentionally for H1B reasons, but mostly because HR idiots turned their jobs over to half-assed software so they can collect a paycheck for doing VERY little work on the resume front.  Which is necessary since so much of their job is dominated by lawsuit-driven non-productive CYA crap.  The education-inflation is another side effect of this phenomenon.  Sadly, the days of cold-calls and shoe-leather job-seeking are long gone because these computer systems make it seem so much more efficient.  In reality you get jobs with 50,000 applications, and others with none, simply based on keywords and poor qualification/requirement decisions by HR.

My health care keeps me from saving 20 percent.

Which is what I would like to do. I'm also paying to work because of KREDA, Kentucky rural economic development act.

Everything sucks up money.

LOL.  Yeah, that field *specifically* benefits a lot more from tool & die experience rather than schooling (though ideally they go hand in hand).  I say that as a design engineer who has had just the slightest exposure to professional-grade tool & die work.  Very underappreciated niche that's critical to every industry, kind of like honey bees and agriculture.

I'm actually kind of surprised that job wasn't outsourced.  I thought mold manufacture in particular was an area that was almost entirely done by China at this point (and usually poorly, for reasons on both sides of the ocean)

I'm in manufacturing, my orders have always followed very closely with expansions and recessions.  My sales have grown 15% YOY for the past two years straight which is ludicrous speed in my business.  I've had record years 3 years in a row.  I've double the square footage of my facility and purchased machines at a previously unthinkable rate in order to keep up with demand and I am in a state of perpetual hiring.

I don't really know what to call that other than "humming" but surely you have access to better indicators than me from your internet machine.

If you want to debate the reasons or the sustainability of this economy then I'm not going to pick that fight.  In the context of my original post, it's a particularly accurate statement because the jobs and the hours ARE available for anyone who wants to play catch up these days.  That much is irrefutable.

Tru dat.

I'm genuinely curious about what you'd suggest in lieu of applying online. Every career fair I've attended has been a meet-and-greet with HR types who simply tell everyone they talk to to go apply online.