(water is wet and fire is hot).
Don’t worry everyone, you 100% have the freedom to exploit the working class yourself. See? The system is fair. Oh, you’re not exploiting the working class for passive income? Maybe you’re just not smart like you think you are dummy!
/$
Nobody can convince me that passive income is real.
I mean if you’re wealthy enough you can just make money on interest and dividends. You can get a 5% interest rate on $2m right now and that’s insured, no real risk. That’s like 75k/yr without doing any work.
But that’s probably not what most people mean when they say passive income. And basic income for the wealthy is kind of backwards.
I get around $400/mo from the VA for being exposed to toxic chemicals that will lead to me having cancer in the next ten years.
Pretty good trade off, let me tell ya!
that reminds me I need to get the burn pit stuff going
Yes, you do. If you need help, message me. No dox, but I can help you out.
Google “intent to file VA”, and fill it out right meow. Whatever claim gets processed will be backdated to the date that form was submitted.
Lol well ok there’s one. I do surveys for money so I suppose that’s kind of passive?
I think you need a refresher on the definition of passive
It’s real in the same sense that income from illegal activities is real. You have to report it to the IRS and it requires harming others in order to acquire.
It’s real when you own property.
Or any investment, such as stock
Well, some stocks. Probably not going to get much in the way of passive income by buying DJT or RDDT
Rereading my comment I realize I was more vague then I meant to be lol
I meant any type of investment in a broad sense and not like “any crappy stock will do it!”
Obviously a bad investment is a bad investment and is not gonna bring in them dolla dolla billz
I know, I was just poking fun :P
It is real, you just have to have sufficient funds already to be able to pay someone else to do the active part of the income and make sure they are earning less than their worth so that you can pick up the excess. Most effective if there are many layers in between, so that the income becomes increasingly passive as you move up the chain, so that those under you have something to strive for, because you don’t want to be in charge of hiring all of those people, so you hire people to hire those people, each taking a cut of the value along the way.
But don’t worry, the American Dream™ is that, as long as you keep working about 10 layers deep in value cuts, eventually you might be able to get into layer 3 or 4 and get your kid into the job early so that they can get to layer 5 or 6, and maybe they’ll have enough money to get their kid to 6 or 7.
Not with that attitude!
What about royalty income? Like, residuals, or…?
A few years ago I designed a bunch of clever tee shirts…and they keep selling. Not a ton, but enough for me to call it “passive income” at this point.
This just puts a huge spotlight on the thing I hate the most about my line of work. I’m sure it’s not just my line of work with this problem, but there’s plenty of examples of workplaces that do not have this problem.
My career is in IT support. Whether doing systems administration or networking or something else related, it’s my lifeblood.
Almost every job I’ve ever had in this field works on the basis of tickets. A concept which, isn’t in and of itself a problem, nor is it unusual. Similar systems exist in many careers; they’re similar to a chit in the restaurant industry, which contains an order, which is passed to the kitchen for the cooks/chefs to complete. Same thing. And there’s examples of this same idea across many careers, called all kinds of things from a requisition, to a work order, they’re all variations on the same idea.
The trouble begins with how tickets are worked and completed. In other industries, you pick up a task, whether a chit or work order, you finish the task, and you mark it as complete, but in IT, it’s very different in one key way. We have to not only justify and report everything we do, but also mark down exactly how long it took. It’s this last point that’s the problem. I am under continual scrutiny, every minute of every day to justify what I’ve done, and when I did it. In every job I’ve had, my ability to fill every second of my day with records of what I’ve done and how long it took to do is praised, or the lack of that ability can create some significant issues with maintaining my employment status.
There are good reasons to keep these records, to have a record of changes, and coordinate with coworkers, in the event they need to continue work I’ve started, or vice versa, and to note when something changed so that if issues arise, those actions can be examined as a potential cause. But this requirement has become weaponized by every employer to keep a stranglehold on productivity. If you take too long on a task that they think should have taken less time, you’re suddenly found in a meeting where you have to explain why you were so inefficient. If you excel and you’re able to complete your tasks quickly, that faster pace becomes the new standard, and anyone who isn’t capable of keeping up gets reprimanded for dragging their heels and wasting time.
The goal posts continually move. I can’t so much as take an extended shit without someone taking notice.
Meanwhile, so many jobs are simply focused on being present and looking busy. Before I went into IT, I worked at a grocery store, and short of clearly and obviously standing around doing literally nothing, no manager even took notice of you. If you were doing something, literally anything that looks even remotely productive, you were left alone. Which isn’t to mention all the down time, when there isn’t anything to do, and you just go and adjust the products on the shelf needlessly because it made you look busy. That same concept can be applied to a lot of different jobs, but with IT, it’s not sufficient to simply look busy. Your time must be put into a ticket.
It’s oppressive and the way of things in IT.
I feel you fellow IT brother/sister!
The IT world is chock-full of this garbage, and all it really forces people to do is A. Provide lesser service so that it “takes longer”, inflating their time metrics, and B. Causes people to make shit up, or submit their own BS tickets to make it look like they’re doing stuff to justify their existence.
Ultimately holding people to a metric-based system like this leads to worse service, and make people hate their jobs.
The job I had before my current one, I was site lead for Field Services. Luckily we were sort of a start up/experimental program, so the technician metrics weren’t tracked at all. MAN it was nice. Nobody felt stressed out needing to justify every second of their day, they wound up doing the work in an appropriate amount of time because it didn’t matter how long an individual took (be that long, or short). We only had an SLA to meet for the customer, which was easily hit.
I even took it a step further and didn’t really pay much heed to the corporate timekeeping rules… If someone needed to run an errand or “telework” for a day; fine by me. The company didn’t give anyone sick time, or enough time in general, OR a big enough salary, so they can eat my whole ass. Lo and behold, our section had the lowest MTTR, and highest amount of tickets closed, all with 100% SLA met. Crazy what you can achieve when you treat people like adults and actual human beings instead of soulless automatons.
Agreed. The time wasted just marking down what you did and how long it took you is incredible. If I get too busy, I look like a fucking slacker because the first thing I just cannot do when I’m too busy is to mark down exactly how busy I am. It just doesn’t happen. I’m moving from one task to the next so fast that I barely have time to take a drink, nevermind write a short story about how I did a thing and figure out exactly when I started working on something.
Compounding this, when it’s that busy, I’m often flip flopping between tasks, while I wait for a program to install or a file to copy or something, I’m off trying to chip away at something else. When it’s slow, I can take a minute while thing copy/load/whatever, and update my notes. My tasks occur sequentially, so it’s easy to see, I started on this at 9:30 and working on this and only this until 10:45. Meanwhile when it’s busy, I did X from 9:30 to 9:48, then Y from 9:48 to 9:56, then X again from 9:56 to 10:10, then Y from 10:10 until 10:18, then I finish X from 10:10 to 10:45, and finished Y from 10:45 to 11:05… Yeah, I’m not entering all that time… At best I’m going to guess, at worst I’m just going to not enter anything. Closed/resolved. Worked for unknown time, text entry: “fixed problem” done.
The task of entering time takes more time to do. If I’m too busy trying to put out fires, I don’t care what the time sheet says, I care that the fires were put out as quickly as possible. So I look like I did nothing, but I damn near lost my mind trying to get it all done.
This was a major problem at my last job. Not only would I be so busy, jumping from one foot to the other trying to put it fires, but people would continually walk over to my desk and bug me about unrelated crap. 90% of the time they were managers or senior staff whom I couldn’t just ignore, or tell them to go away. So now I’m not putting out a fire instead I’m taking to Sally, who is the daughter of the owner, about her stupid Excel issue that she can, has, and could continue to work around, but she wants it to work in a different way that she never learned how to do from the cut rate community college during the business course she took.
I dunno Sally, why don’t you fucking Google it? I’m not your personal chat GPT of problem solving shit that’s not broken. I’m currently trying to solve a problem that affects hundreds of people, and this issue barely affects one. Can you go away and stop distracting me? But nooooo. If I tell Sally to go away, daddy bossman will hear about it and I’ll get pulled into yet another pointless meeting about my “attitude” towards staff, that will only put me further behind on fixing contoso corp’s file server, which is preventing them from doing millions of dollars in business today alone. Apparently Sally’s feelings are more important until contoso corp changes IT providers because we couldn’t meet our SLA with them, which will also be my fault because I’m lead technician on that account.
Fuck.
That sounds like hell.
Then there’s the IT support team I have to design systems for in my org that are COMPLETELY useless. They can’t be bothered to do their job, and escalate tickets randomly to Tier 3 without any triage, documentation, or careI wish their management would put even a semblance of accountability on them.
I think a middle ground would be fantastic for everyone.
They can’t be bothered to do their job, and escalate tickets randomly to Tier 3 without any triage
Level 1 support teams are universally useless. I think I’ve ever worked with one that’s actually effective.
Can you imagine that in a hospital? “Oh this guy came in with a broken finger, I’d better call the lead surgeon.” Now of course the lead surgeon can fix it, of course they can, everyone can fix it, but you can’t send the patient back down to accident and emergency because then you get complaints about why you’re passing this poor guy around.
The IT cycle of violence.
Ain’t that the truth
Mechanics at your local car dealer likely get paid on flat rate. That means they get paid a set amount of hours based on the time estimate for the job, regardless of how long it takes. Also, manufacturers set lower times for warranty repairs than you would get paid if the customer had to pay. Also, if there is no book time, you have to guess ahead of time. If the vehicle comes back, you have to work on it for free. You also get service writers and managers breathing down your neck while you’re trying to troubleshoot and not understanding how long things take and also pressuring you to upsell unnecessary services and repairs. Anyway, I don’t work on cars anymore.
I write software for car dealerships so have been aware of all of what you said by proxy for some time simply by virtue of having to write time tracking code which handles all that.
It’s insane.
I understand why. I have had a bit of insight into how all of that works and short of being a prodigy, you can’t really get ahead.
This is why I do a lot of my routine maintenance on my own car. If all I need is a wrench, some materials and a few hours, I’ll do it myself. I’ve become quite skilled with mechanics over the years; I’m sure it’s nothing compared to what an actual mechanic knows, but brakes, tire changes/rotations, battery replacements, even coolant changes and thermostat replacements, totally do-able. I could go on with minor repair crap I’ve learned but you get the picture.
I did a brake job on my SIL’s car and discovered that the last person in there didn’t lube anything up, I had to beat it with a hammer to get the damn brake pads out. I put the right lubrication in the right places and put everything back together better than I found it. I even did the slide bolts, which I had to break out the torch to get loose. New pads, rotors, slide bolts, slide bolt boots, the whole nine yards. Pretty much everything short of doing the calipers and brake fluid.
I suspect the last few techs that touched her vehicle were trying to move so fast that they didn’t bother doing anything to the side bolts even though they would have been obviously in need of maintenance/replacement.
The thing that bothered me is that she sold the car a few months after I spent 10+ hours fixing the stupid brakes. So next time I have to go look at her vehicle, it’ll be a surprise for what things were not done, or were not done right.
grumbles
In order to avoid that kind of situation many shops will simply quote a “loaded caliper” for each side. It includes the caliper, hardware, brake pads, and bracket. You simply disconnect the brake hose and take out two bolts that hold the caliper bracket on. Give the rotor a couple of slams from the hammer, clean up the hub, reassemble everything and bleed the brakes. It might cost $600, but it saved a ton of time for the shop and prevents a comeback when the old caliper decides to get stuck anyway.
Yeah, she needed it on all four. I think I needed to torch out at least three of the slide bolts around the car. We saved a bunch of money by having me do it, but I broke my cheap torque wrench in the process, snapped the socket connector right off the end of it trying to loosen the lug nuts. I only used the torque wrench for loosening things because I didn’t have another tool long enough to pull them off (aka a breaker bar, I think it’s called). So, RIP. I told her that if she wants me to do another wheel/brake service, she’ll have to buy me an impact wrench, and I’ll send her the link to one I found that will fill the purpose (which is both compatible with the stuff I already use and was tested and recommended by the torque test YouTube channel). Because I’m not dealing with getting, and breaking, any tools to get her tires off because some crackpot at the shop decided to torque her lug nuts with an impact.
I only want to reduce my workload and not sit there standing on a breaker bar, unable to get the damn lug nuts off… I’m not light, over 200lbs, so if I need to stand on a bar to get the lug nuts to loosen, someone probably did something wrong.
Never again.
I have one of those “compatible with” Milwaukee impacts and it works great for most things. I also have a couple of really cheap 1/2" breaker bars that I bought years ago that just won’t break. I have a 3’ cheater bar that fits over them and I’ve had to put some weight into that a time or two.
This is the way.
The impact wrench I’m looking at is one of the newer lineup from DeWalt. I have DeWalt everything already (impact driver, hammer drill, circular saw, reciprocating saw… Even my hedge trimmer, string trimmer, lawnmower and snowblower), all using the 20v MAX or compatible batteries, except the snowblower, which uses the power flex 60v (which can be used in 20v tools, but 20v MAX batteries cannot be used in it). The impact wrench uses the same 20v batteries. So I just need the tool. It’s still something like $200 for it, but I don’t think I’ll need anything more for power tools for a long assed time after that.
We picked most of this stuff up over the past year starting with a kit (impact driver, hammer drill, circular/reciprocating saws, even a small light, with some batteries and a few extras) about a year and a half ago, and we’ve been steadily adding to it. I chose DeWalt because I have an old, 12v drill I used for like 10 years and it still works. The original battery has left us but the second battery I bought when it was new (it came with one and I bought an extra so I could have one in the drill while one was charging) is still kicking. I got a replacement for the original battery that shipped with it, so I still have two for that unit. It still works, and it’s fine, but there were a few times I really needed a hammer drill and the puny 12v was all that I had… But that was literally my only real gripe about it. Given that history, I wanted to keep with DeWalt because they clearly make tools that can last.
I wanted to go with one brand so I didn’t require several different battery chargers for different tools. DeWalt was only missing a snowblower, but they released one late last year and we obtained it shortly after it hit the market, which completed our large tools. There’s only a small number of handheld tools in the DeWalt lineup that I still want to get. The impact wrench is one. Another is a brad nailer (IIRC), because I have to install some baseboards/trim, but it’s hard to justify buying a $500+ tool for the job.
My entire automotive kit probably needs to be replaced. I have a complete socket set with ratcheting wrenches, and not a whole lot besides that at the moment. I will need to get a new torque wrench, breaker bar… Probably a lot more that I’m not thinking about right now. I have access to my brother’s Jack and Jack stands, so I’m ok there. For the impact wrench, I’ll need to add a small set of impact ready sockets for it, otherwise I’m going to rip my sockets to shreds.
I have a ton of electrical testing stuff for my other hobbies, so I’m good on that front, but I notably don’t have a CCA tester, which I would like to get. Among my more electronic things I have a fairly crappy, and old, OBD2 reader, which has come in handy plenty of times.
As you can imagine, I’m the “handy” guy in the family. I just find it all fascinating, but I wouldn’t want to make it my job. After working on a vehicle for a few days, I don’t even want to look at a wrench for several weeks.
By day, I work in IT, so I’m generally sat at a computer pushing buttons until the screen dots show up in the right order.
I have several socket sets and wrenches from harbor freight that are perfectly fine. The 1/4" set, the open ended ratchet set, the short impact set, and the long metric wrenches, these cover 99% of everything. If you don’t abuse your tools, then they won’t break. I even have a second 1/4" set from Aldi of all places and never had an issue with it. I’m not using them all day every day, so I’m not that worried about buying expensive stuff.
The problem is your boss. I work with tickets and just have a maximum for the average amount of time to be under for the quarter. It’s very relaxing.
You need to explain to your boss that different tasks take different amounts of time. Explain that you may be able to do things faster at the risk of larger issues taking up more time later. Then when they tell you to work faster, reiterate that it will cause bigger issues.
Literally give them what they want: fast solutions at the expense of quality. Then don’t worry about it when things eventually break.
Literally every boss I’ve had has been like this. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of IT jobs that aren’t at this point. I’ve worked several and if they’re not call centers (a few have been - where call time is factored in), this has been the primary time system, required by all employees.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I think the issues that you mentioned are becoming increasingly prevalent in other lines of work as well. I do not work in IT, but really resonated with what you mentioned about documentation/reporting requirements being weaponized by upper management to increase “productivity” regardless of the cost (namely, quality of the work performed). I wholeheartedly agree that this environment is toxic, oppressive, and unsustainable.
you’re suddenly found in a meeting where you have to explain why you were so inefficient.
probably an account of the being in meetings questioning me about my efficiency, which proceed to then lower my efficiency, which then proceeds to spawn more meetings, and then proceeds to lower my efficiency even more.
Seems rather obvious to me.
IT support
And the mentality you’ve described is extra bullshit in an IT or support role, as I’m sure you’re aware.
This is paraphrased in the “Doom talk” I had to have with my boss back when I was working in systems maintenance. As in, he’d come into my office and complain, “Every time I come in here you’re just playing Doom. You need to justify your salary or otherwise maybe we don’t need to pay you.”
What MBA’s and PHB’s don’t realize is that IT and systems maintenance is not a production-oriented operation. You’re not making widgets. The metric is not how many tickets do we generate and how fast are they solved. The metric is, how can we have as few tickets as possible? Because by and large what you’re doing in support and IT is fixing stuff that’s broken. The ideal state for the business to be in is not to have anything that’s broken at all, on a minute-to-minute basis.
Boss, you want to see me in my office playing Doom. Because that means none of your millions and millions of dollars of mission critical infrastructure which your engineers rely upon to generate billable hours is on fire. If any of it catches fire today, I am on site to put it out. If anyone has a problem or a question, I am on call to solve it. If there is maintenance to be performed or new equipment to be rolled out, I’ll be doing that. But otherwise I’m not going to invent busywork just to placate middle management which, as a whole, can’t reliably remember which of the two mouse buttons to click.
Yep. I’m in the midst of that. We’re in a “busy” season for my clients (mostly finance/accounting people), and I’ve reduced my output hours per day to a lower amount because I want to be more available for more time so that I can jump on critical issues as they arise. For the most part, you want to jump on critical things regardless of the situation, but right now it’s more critical because of the busy season, so minor gripes get sidelined, all of my maintenance and other duties, like projects, scripting, etc, are all on hold, favoring time to resolution over almost everything else. So if I can be free more than normal so that I have the bandwidth to take care of things when they arise, so much the better. I don’t want to be distracted writing a script when a critical ticket drops and I miss it by a few hours while the customers are unable to work because I was debugging a PowerShell function.
So my logged hours are down because I refuse to pick up dormant unimportant tasks while I’m idle. I use the time to review all tickets and just patrol the service tickets for critical issues. I have absolutely no reservations about doing it.
I agree, the goal should always be to play doom. Not because you ignore your work, but because there’s nothing to do since everything works. IT support isn’t here to justify their existence by staying busy. We’re here so that when you need help, we can help. If there’s nothing to do, then we’re standing ready, and if we play doom, or Halo, or literally any other game/distraction/whatever, while we wait, as long as it doesn’t impact our ability to respond when needed, then that’s fine. That’s what everyone should want. If the hardware is so unreliable that you’re constantly having to work on it to keep it running, then, as IT, you fucked up.
I’ll also mention that there’s a paradox in IT: we’re expected to do so much and if you just do all the work by hand, you’ll be busy all the time. If you leverage scripts and scheduled tasks, you can significantly cut down on your workload. The paradox is that when you don’t have those scripts and scheduled tasks, and you’re doing everything by hand, you don’t have enough time to create the scripts to reduce your workload.
I’ll give an example. At a previous workplace, the bossman was very much in favor of doing things by hand, the original business model was T&M. He later moved to a more MSP model, where people are paying regardless of how much time was spent, so my focus shifted to automate everything and drop the ticket load as much as possible. In one such case, we kept getting issues related to a service failing. I don’t recall what the issue was, nor what problem it created, but I remember that simply restarting the service fixed the problem. So instead of fielding dozens of tickets a year to restart the stupid service, I added a scheduled task to run a script that would restart the service automatically every week at (some godawful hour) AM, on a Sunday or something. Once that script was scheduled for weekly runs, we stopped getting those tickets.
I have dozens of other examples along the same lines. One of my most proud moments was a script to fix a service where, if another service was running before it, the service wouldn’t load properly. The program service just wouldn’t start if a system service was running. It was a non-critical system service, but both had to be running after boot time. I had already tried every combination of delayed start, and every time, the program service would fall because the system service ended up running too quickly. So I made a script to shut down the system service, start the program service, and then restart the system service, and scheduled it to run 15 minutes after boot, anytime the system restarted (usually overnight for patching). Once that was in place, complaints of (program) not working after patch day, went away.
I hate repeating process because nobody thought to actually fix the problem, they just patched it back together manually. When faced with a reoccurring problem, I look at how I can stop it from happening; of course I fix it in the short term but as soon as I’m done I’m working on a script that can do it for me, then figuring out the best way to trigger the script so that I don’t have to be involved.
No matter how busy you are, finding a way to get rid of problems like that, by any means necessary, is essential; otherwise, you’ll be drowning in tasks to fix stuff that shouldn’t be broken.
There are times I’ve worried about not having kids, but comments like this help me feel good about my decision. Why would I want to put someone I love through this? (Or anyone, for that matter)
This is exactly why I’m opposed to bringing kids into the world… I mean, have you looked at the world? It sucks. Why would I want to condemn another individual, whom I’m sure I will love wholeheartedly, to suffer through all of this for their entire life?
I didn’t have any say in being born and if I had even an impression of what I was in for, I probably would have said no thanks.
The only thing I’m thankful for from my parents is that they took care of me for so long. I’m not thankful that I’m alive and I’m not thankful for being born. That said, I’m also doing my damnedest to be a force for good in the world. I’m not making a significant impact, because I’m just one guy working a menial job, but I’m going my best. If I must continue to be alive, I might as well try to make everything suck a little less.
I am still in my first job as a B2B tech and thought this was something only my workplace did, was scrutinise ticket time.
I continue to find it hard there because I legitimately don’t slack but gaps end up between my time records (its hard to continuously work 4 hours at a time with zero downtime) and the boss comes down saying his KPI of ticket time / worked time teamwide keeps going down, and like you say the goalposts keep shifting.
I even went to the trouble of making my own time tracker that gave me even more information about my time entries and what was left for the day and how much I was out, way more info than what PSA gives you, but then got scared of continuing to work on it as the goalposts shifted again to billable time entries / worked time, and doing a time tracker isn’t billable to a client.
My advice: fib.
Not really, but yes. Fib. Lie. Put down what you think is appropriate. Don’t exaggerate, don’t over bill, just adjust for what fits.
For me, I refuse to track my time down to the minute. I realized that if I put in 5 minutes for sending an email, I would get credit for 0.08 of an hour, but, 5 minutes is actually 0.083333… of an hour. So I started putting in 6 minutes instead (0.10 of an hour). Rather than be irrationally docked the 20 seconds or so, I’m getting a whole ass extra 0.02h (or rather 0.1666… of an hour).
I’ll do 6 minutes, or anything in 15 minute increments. If it took 7 minutes, that’s 15m. If it took 20, that’s 30m on the record. If I’m looking for a ticket, or closing a ticket (after my time is entered), or even if I go to take a shit while working on a ticket, that goes in the time entry. I might be in the bathroom, but my brain is working on the problem. I’m not exactly taking a break from working the issue, I’m just trying to brain storm while I’m away from my keyboard.
Every second from the time I start looking for a ticket to work, to the time I’ve closed it, should be on the books. I didn’t work from 9:35 to 9:56 on anything, I spent 9:30 to 9:35 finding, and opening the ticket prior to my time entry being started. I spent 9:56 to 10:00 closing the ticket and mentally preparing myself for the next task. Minute by minute tracking is unreasonable, and bluntly, you shouldn’t do it. You’ll lose more time from what I call “grey time” (doing all the things you need to do in order to account for your time), than you account for actually doing your job. Reading email, looking at documents and keeping up to date on technology issues… All of that is grey time.
I’ve put in time for internal meetings, "ticket review"s, even “reading email”. None of which has every been questioned. You need that time to simply keep yourself organized. Don’t hesitate to mark it down and bill it to your own employer. I know they don’t want you to do that, it “artificially inflates” your worked time, but bluntly, if they’re going to require that you account for so much of your day that you can’t have grey time anywhere in there, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not adding some kind of entry to account for it.
The only thing I strictly do not do, is mark down my time for lunch and breaks. That’s not acceptable to me. Everything else, sure. But I’m going to pad it to account for my grey time. When I spend too much time doing stuff that I consider grey time, I’ll put in an internal entry for it, and bill my employer. I try to keep these to a minimum, but it’s an easy entry when you get called into a meeting or something.
Once you start seeing all the losses from grey time adding up, you’ll be able to account for 6-7 hours of your day easily. Plus 30 minutes for lunch, and 2x15 minute breaks, and you’re missing an hour of your day at most.
Grey time. Log it.
Gen X and I’m not making much more now than I did in 2008.
The US never really recovered from 2008.
Millennial and I’m making over twice at much as I was in 2012. 🤷♀️
So am I. My rent however is three times as much (for a worse apartment), food is 2-6x as expensive, gas is… shockingly about the same but it was killer in 2012 too. Utilities are up, insurance is at 250%, medical aid remains unaffordable even with insurance, and I’m older will more medical problems, less energy, and it’s harder to learn new things. Oh and I’m in much more debt due to all the previously mentioned things, so I don’t even have space on credit cards for emergency purchases.
And 9/10 people I talk to are in the same situation.
Sounds rough. But I wasn’t trying to invalidate the other guy (nor you now), just making a point that individual circumstances don’t dictate the state of things overall.
Guess the juxtaposition by itself was too subtle to convey that, lol. Oh well.
Millennial and I’m making over twice at much as I was in 2012. 🤷♀️
And able to afford a third as much…
What does not much more mean? How much more do you expect to make
Keeping up with the cost of living would be nice.
What is that then? I’m looking for a percentage or something. What does it mean that you haven’t had much of an increase in 16 years. At that length of time I would blame you
If you want, say, a boat; its probably less work to build it from scratch than to ‘earn’ it for the overwhelming majority.
Which is wild: Even with modern tools, economies of scale, and specialized master craftspeople (or more likely; enslaved teenagers halfway across the world chained to a shop bench, similar effect here) its easier to DIY than go through ‘society’, unless the thing has been made deliberately difficult to DIY-which more and more things, especially repairs and retrofits, are.
It takes more work, more coordination, and orders of magnitude more time to get the government to raise your taxes to half assedly feed the hungry with food that was gonna get thrown away than it does to just find a patch of land nobody’s watching and do it yourself from Fucking scratch. Every Fucking time.
All the big decisions, decisions about Commons, and decisions about the future, including habitability of the planet, are being made in what we can all agree is the dumbest fucking way possible, and regardless of our disagreements, 999/1000 random people off the street would find it difficult to make worse ones.
So, communist or individualist, insurrectionist or moderate, what kind of brain dead fucking moron would participate in this on purpose? Would follow the rules of this on purpose?
So, what the fuck is to be done?
P.S. If you say “vote” I swear I’ll fucking scream.
Stand for election. Voting doesn’t work unless people who aren’t benefiting from the system stand for election. Join a party. Fake loyalty to that party. Fake moderate beliefs. Fake everything until you get selected to stand. Keep faking until you’re elected. Once elected, wield whatever power you have for the good of all mankind. Prioritise the future, not the present.
Oh my god do you think nobody’s Fucking tried this? It doesn’t work. The elections are fake, my dude. Remember 2000? Remember 2016 dem primary? Remember 194…4(?)? 2020 dem primary?
And I live in California. My vote literally does not count.
Fuck your bullshit elections, I can’t respect that shit
Gotta respect your choice of home Lemmy tho. I feel ashamed for not thinking to do the same.
The issue isn’t lack of effort, it’s lack of scope. If everyone whinging online signed up to a party today, started attending every single local meeting from tomorrow onwards, put themselves forward for roles within that party, actually put in time and effort to get selected, get elected, move up, keep moving up, keep aiming higher, we’d have a completely overhauled political system in 5 years.
Granted it might be harder in the States (UK here), but for us, we have 650 members of parliament. That means we only need 326 individuals, members of any party, out of nearly 70 million people, who will vote in favour of any policy that will benefit future generations, be it climate related, electoral reform, workers rights reform, anything beneficial, and the country and world would start to get better. Instead hopelessness is pervasive, very few people try and as you point out, if they do try, they find themselves alone. Well now, how about we all just agree to do it? There are thousands, possibly millions of people who are under 30 and sick of all of this crap and follow pages on reddit, Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, any of the random new social media that I stopped keeping up with once I turned 25, pages dedicated to ‘antiwork’, political reform, climate issues, the general decline of western society under late stage capitalism.
If even 10% got off their asses and actually did something about it, everything would be fine. If YOU get off your ass and do something, it will help. I’m literally an elected politician at the local level in the UK. I tell anyone who asks that I’m only involved because I hated the idea that the climate crisis was raging and nobody was doing anything, so I may as well do something myself. I have seen that things can change at the local level because I’m there, changing them. I’m one person. In this mid-sized town, there are probably hundreds or thousands of others who are also scared that nobody is doing anything, but they’re lazy, or apathetic, or just not aware of the possibilities, so I’m alone for the moment.
You asked what anyone can do, but you’re complaining that you don’t like the answer. Live in California? Move. It’s expensive as hell anyway, so move to Arkansas or Missouri. Pretend you’re a republican. Infiltrate. Change that party from the inside. Or move to a smaller town. Join the town council. Then run for mayor. Then for governor. Just do something. That is the only answer. There is no quick fix, no easy path. The solution is simple - make sure every decision you make for at least the next 5 years will get you closer to your goal of attaining political power so you can change things. That is the only way anything will ever change. Left to the hands of the ‘default’ political classes, they won’t do anything. They won’t change anything. They have it easier than you. They have connections at prestigious universities, they have more money, they have better access to internships and people of influence. Tough luck, but that isn’t an excuse for you not to try. You will be alone at the start. Be the example. Bring people with you. Constantly encourage anyone you know who feels the same as you to get involved. Things can be changed for the better, but the first step is on you. Stop waiting for other people to make things better.
So I’m in the united states. The second (or third) major step towards fascism… Well here’s how I remember it:
It was the year 2000, first election I was remotely politically conscious for. I, uh, didn’t vote. Had opinions tho.
So there was this fascist piece of shit-his dad was a former CIA director, his grandpa was point man for a failed fascist coup (thank you smedley butler. Not that I knew about this at the time, being a literal child), and the guy running against him was kind of a bland milquetoast wonk-but his credentials and rep were, in retrospect, pretty perfect. Conscious and cautious about global warming, knew about the internet, kind of all the right shit for the moment.
So when the fascist piece of shit took office, everyone gave my mom shit, because she voted for a third party and allowed it to happen. Nevermind that we live(d) in CA, where votes in federal elections are between like 1/5th and 1/500th of a full citizen, and the electoral votes for CA still went to the bullshit wonk. She caught shit for years. And it kind of confused me.
Because here’s the thing; the bland milquetoast wonk won the election. I don’t mean “he won the popular vote; the electoral college is bullshit” (although he did and it is) but he won in college votes too. He won by every metric.
Nobody cared. Because elections don’t count. They’re not real, and you will never win begging. It was entirely a wasted effort. The aristocracy just appointed the guy they wanted. Don’t get me started on 2008, the first one I did vote in, and how that bastard betrayed every single fucking thing he promised.
You tell me to get off my ass and do something, have you ever actually done anything in your life? I don’t mean sucking some aristocrat’s dick, so you can beg them for scraps later, that aren’t worth 1/10 of the effort you spent doing the lobbying, much less getting them their throne, but actually fixing building solving something with your own fucking hands abd organizational capacity?
Ever? Or are you so obsessesed with being in a fucked up machine you can’t even see what it’s for, what its doing, and what purpose you serve within it?
When you see someone dying on the street between five buildings, all of them with ‘(residential) for rent’ signs on them so old they’re barely legible, what’s your first thought? Do you think every politician doesn’t fucking know? Is your first thought to beg all the people who are profiting off this poor fuckers death? This isnt a hypothetical BTW, I saw this enough times this week that I straight up stopped fucking counting. So what should I have done, according to you?
If everyone whinging online signed up to a party today, started attending every single local meeting from tomorrow onwards, put themselves forward for roles within that party, actually put in time and effort to get selected, get elected, move up, keep moving up, keep aiming higher, we’d have a completely overhauled political system in 5 years.
yes, if the system was built for people this would work. Currently it’s built for people with money and incumbency. The new guy in the race is going to need one hell of a financial backing to get his name out there. Do you think they just mail shit to people for free?
stop waiting for other people yo make things better
But also
beg the fuckers who ruined everything and the system designed to turn your horrified screams into complicit babble to make it better
I’m gonna try the first, which is what I said, rather than the second, which you seem to favor.
this is genuinely my plan. Work in trades to pick up a skill (and hopefully make a decent bit of coin) buy some land, and build it out. Spend as little as possible, and enjoy it as much as possible.
I feel like it’s viable. Maybe i’m hopeful, idk. We’ll see.
I don’t want to criticize that, it soubds pretty nice, but that’s nowhere near as radical as I was thinking.
Plus, remember; there is no outside, walled gardens do not endure, thermodynamics apply, and you cannot lifeboat the coming catastrophes.
it’s certainly not radical, i agree with that. Personally i just don’t really care about others. So it’s not like it would really bother me one way or the other.
I do have foundational beliefs on a lot of this shit, but if i don’t have to think about it, then i won’t, and i see no other reason others couldn’t follow in suit.
reason others couldn’t follow suit
It can look like there’s an outside, but that’s a lie our masters tell, so people who’re fed up walk away instead of fighting back, violently or otherwise.
i don’t consider it outside, i consider it to be the corner of a large room with a lot of people in it. But that corner just so happens to have very few people in it.
Til it doesn’t. Good luck, I guess. Could stand your help to really fix shit though.
i’ll be around, it’s not that i won’t, it just depends on how important it is to me really. If we’re talking fundamental individual freedoms, i’ll be there.
Vote and be engaged. Nothing else you do alone will be effective, including being upset about it.
Copy pasting:
So I’m in the united states. The second (or third) major step towards fascism… Well here’s how I remember it:
It was the year 2000, first election I was remotely politically conscious for. I, uh, didn’t vote. Had opinions tho.
So there was this fascist piece of shit-his dad was a former CIA director, his grandpa was point man for a failed fascist coup (thank you smedley butler. Not that I knew about this at the time, being a literal child), and the guy running against him was kind of a bland milquetoast wonk-but his credentials and rep were, in retrospect, pretty perfect. Conscious and cautious about global warming, knew about the internet, kind of all the right shit for the moment.
So when the fascist piece of shit took office, everyone gave my mom shit, because she voted for a third party and allowed it to happen. Nevermind that we live(d) in CA, where votes in federal elections are between like 1/5th and 1/500th of a full citizen, and the electoral votes for CA still went to the bullshit wonk. She caught shit for years. And it kind of confused me.
Because here’s the thing; the bland milquetoast wonk won the election. I don’t mean “he won the popular vote; the electoral college is bullshit” (although he did and it is) but he won in college votes too. He won by every metric.
Nobody cared. Because elections don’t count. They’re not real, and you will never win begging. It was entirely a wasted effort. The aristocracy just appointed the guy they wanted. Don’t get me started on 2008, the first one I did vote in, and how that bastard betrayed every single fucking thing he promised.
You tell me to get off my ass and do something, have you ever actually done anything in your life? I don’t mean sucking some aristocrat’s dick, so you can beg them for scraps later, that aren’t worth 1/10 of the effort you spent doing the lobbying, much less getting them their throne, but actually fixing building solving something with your own fucking hands abd organizational capacity?
Ever? Or are you so obsessesed with being in a fucked up machine you can’t even see what it’s for, what its doing, and what purpose you serve within it?
When you see someone dying on the street between five buildings, all of them with ‘(residential) for rent’ signs on them so old they’re barely legible, what’s your first thought? Do you think every politician doesn’t fucking know? Is your first thought to beg all the people who are profiting off this poor fuckers death? This isnt a hypothetical BTW, I saw this enough times this week that I straight up stopped fucking counting. So what should I have done, according to you?
Yes, don’t try to fix it all alone. Organize. Change. But the systems that allowed these Fucking oligarch shit stains to ruin it so bad? The ‘good’ people when they do take the reins in a system where their only levers are ‘taxes’ and (ratcheted)‘cops’? What century are we on of prison reform? 2? 10? I know it’s been nonstop since before the steam engine. Still seems pretty bad.
Direct action doesn’t mean ‘go it alone’. Bring your friends. Collab with strangers. Make new friends. Actual democracy can actually be pretty fucking fun, but it gets a lot sweatier.
I am building a wooden boat right now, and this isn’t true. I’m about $1500 in on a Bolger Cartopper, which is 10’6" with 4’ beam.
Okay maybe boats were a bad example. I probably should have used something I know about, but that’s all shit everyone thinks they can’t do.
Still, compare the effort you put in, keep in mind you’re being gouged on materials (because you’re being gouged on everything), and figure out how many hours at minimum wage to buy the sameish quality.
Not sure how this is millennial-specific. Everyone has been doing this for a long time. One of the few good things to come out of Covid was work from home being integrated into scheduling. Of course big business is trying to rob people of that again.
Sorry but for those of us not in industries where WFH is even an option, it ruined things for us.
I have to quit my job eventually and move to a completely different state because once WFH took off and everyone that could move out of the areas their jobs were in did so the housing market exploded.
I had just reached a point where I was financially healthy enough to consider buying a house and then pretty much immediately had the rug pulled out from under me… Now between greedflation and everything else, the raises I had been fighting for are equal in purchasing power as my income was like 4 years ago…
😮💨 I understand too well. “Average” single family homes in my area were like $400,000, now it’s $820,000. Rents for single bedroom apartments went from about $800-900 month to $1,600+ per month. I live in a town of about 65,000 in the Rockies, middle of nowhere, like minimum 5 hour drive to a city with more than a million people, yet somehow, people are still flocking here from all across the country.
We need to tax big corporations and use it to fund public housing at a rate of one unit per 1000 residents in every Big City to small town in this country, and that’s the minimum amount some areas will need much more
I hate the housing market too but it’s been going bonkers way before covid and WFH.
Sure WFH added fuel to the fire, but that fire has been growing and would have grown without WFH.
Shift your blame to the housing market for jacking prices up for well over 40 years. Yes they used wfh as another excuse but seriously housing market has been fucked looooong before wfh
Pretty sure that’s what op meant about water being wet…
Yeah like. I’m sympathetic to this arguement, but anyone thinking the average American today works “harder” and more strenuously to the average American in like 1920 is off their gourd.
All this stuff is really hard to measure, and ultimately we just need a system where people can live decent lives and not be miserable. There’s a difference between working hard and having a happy & fruitful life out of it and working little while remaining miserable
Edit:
Only in Lemmy could you get downvoted for suggesting that maybe doing enjoyable productive work is an okay thing. Day by day I’m more convinced the average user here just wants to live in the space ship from Wall-E getting force fed milkshakes all day
Productivity has gone up, pay has remained flat or declined when adjusting for price increases. How is that not “working more for less?”
And your read on the average lemmy user is inane. Most of the people I’ve interacted with want to do meaningful work and be able to live without the constant threat of homelessness, starvation, or death from easily preventable causes.
If you do “enjoyable work” and get paid enough to have a personal life that is also fulfilling, bully for you, but the vast majority of people are fucking struggling.
Productivity has gone up because of technological and logistical innovations. Not because you personally work so much damn harder than your great grandpa ever did.
Did you seriously not understand that? This is like middle school economics.
And yes, I am literally saying most people should be able to do a good amount of enjoyable work for good pay. It is only freaks like yourself who have a knee jerk negative reaction to that because you read the word “work”
This guy thinks productivity has gone up because he personally works harder than the massive amount of people working 16 hours a day since the day they turn 14 a hundred years ago and not because of technological innovations hahahahahahahah
Or maybe it has gone up because we have vastly more efficient machines and technology at our disposal.
Yeah man. That’s what “technological innovations” are.
the average American today works “harder” and more strenuously to the average American in like 1920 is off their gourd.
The point is that the average person’s work produces more value, but that increase in value is all going to corporations. The value of wealth went up, the value of labour stagnated. That means the rich have more of the pie, and since money begets money, the poor get less and less.
Yeah that’s fine, and completely true. I think people on Lemmy sometimes just get confused by the stat and don’t realize like… how hard most every generation before them also had to work (at least before 1970 or so). Like, on average, much harder than today.
People see the whole productivity rise and people who are maybe not exactly lateral thinkers think that means the average employee literally works so much harder compared to the “comparatively easy” lives of before.
It just ends up creating really… strange dynamics
most every generation before them also had to work (at least before 1970 or so). Like, on average, much harder than today.
How do we know, though? Everyone will think they worked the hardest, suffered the greatest, deserve the most.
Most of the news subs on Lemmy are just cynical pity parties for first world problems. Idk what to make of people here. Wealthy educated countries with historically low unemployment and yet no one can seem to find a decent job.
Because unemployment is a bad metric. If you are working part-time at a pay rate that isn’t enough to pay the rent, you’re not unemployed but you’re also not living well.
If you’re not working any job because your skill set isn’t in demand but you can’t afford to learn new skills because you’re not working, you’re not considered unemployed. And you can’t just get an “unskilled” job because your experience makes you overqualified and applying without a resume won’t get you hired and even if you did get hired see the first point for why even bother.
Good thing the US underemployment rate, which includes part time workers, is also at near historic lows (7.3%). I’m not saying everything is honky dory, but this obsession with how hard our generation (millennials) has it, in denial of living in the wealthiest parts of the world at the most prosperous and peaceful times in human history, is pathetic.
I will give you my two pennies on this.
I had to go back to college after the army. My BA degrees in business and criminal justice were worthless then, and still are worthless now. I got them to go through OCS. I was going to go into computer science, but got a C in C++, so went into mechanical engineering instead. Was jealous of all my coding friends, except now they are all laid off. Every single one of them.
These were the good jobs, the guys making 100-350k/yr for their programming knowledge. Now they have nothing, and no job prospects in their field. Companies are laying off workers in expensive areas and hiring unqualified people in much cheaper areas like Vietnam, China, and India to use ChatGPT to spit out code. MBA folks think they cracked the code and are out producing other firms who don’t use AI, but in reality the AI code is mostly shit. It looks good on KPIs, which are helping to fuel a massive bubble. It allows those who do nothing to act like they are more useful than those who do work.
Why don’t people work a good job like the one I have? Because not everyone can get a masters in engineering. The “good jobs” are disappearing.
I hope things get better for your friends. Tech is taking a hit right now.
I had trouble finding work after college, had to work some shit jobs and move around a lot, but I was never out of options, never at risk of going hungry or not sleeping in a bed. It takes a hell of a lot to go hungry or homeless in the US. There’s an insane amount of industry, wealth, and opportunity here.
Meanwhile, in my home country, there is 70% inflation in the past year. There is war everywhere on the borders (and conscription). There is no opportunity for young people. Inflation has destroyed most people’s ability to emigrate or get an American/European education. They’re just stuck there with a crumbling economy, a refugee crisis (about 10% of the population), an increasingly religious and oppressive government, and the constant threat of war.
It’s hard to see so many posts like these complaining about how hard everything is for people living in US, UK, Canada, France etc. from people with the most disposable income in the world, the highest carbon footprints, the biggest cars, the most meat consumption, good labor laws.
Yes, we should still strive to improve things. There are tons of problems in this system that result in conflict and inequality. But this kind of article is the epitome of first world problems from privileged people.
This whole site is filled with these cynical, self-pitying posts so we can all read them and think “yeah, everything is so unfair for me, everyone else had it so much easier” like everything is happening to us, and we have no control or agency in our own happiness and satisfaction. We bear no responsibility for our own situation. We live in the best part of the world in the best time of human history, yet we’re all miserable because everything is so terrible and hard.
In power grids (where I currently work) we have a very hard time finding field techs.
It pays around 90k your first year, 150k+/yr after depending on how many jobs you take. It’s tough work, but it’s not hard since everything is so heavy. Not a lot of manual lifting, but you are out in the elements.
All hotel and meals are paid out on sight. Hardly anyone wants the jobs. You don’t even need a trade school anymore, all training is on the job.
There are jobs out there.
It’s the same in biotech and pharma. We are basically always hiring skilled labor, even during layoffs. You can get a 6 week certificate that will land you a manufacturing job for $80k per year plus OT. No college needed. Many companies will even pay for it if you agree to a 6 month contract with them.
Are they willing to hire people who don’t already have 10 years experience? Are they willing to train people who are fresh out of high school? If not then those companies can only blame themselves for not having workers. After the Great Recession companies got entitled because they could hire whoever they wanted with whatever experience and degrees they wanted for rock bottom prices and that entitlement never left.
You need zero experience.
Have to 21 due to state laws in high danger areas and nuclear power.
You say it takes a hell of a lot to go homeless but there’s literally homeless people everywhere in this country. I literally can’t ride my bike to the thrift store (can’t afford a car) without passing a half dozen tents on the sidewalk, and then you get to the thrift store and it’s so deeply picked over there’s nothing worth buying. None of that is a sign that things are good. America is a great place if you’re rich not if you’re poor
Just because unemployment is low doesn’t mean the jobs are good comment to the contrary the jobs are shit and you often need more than one just to survive
Yeah it’s just kind of like… I don’t know what to call it other than pathetic. Everyone here postures themselves as being these great advocates for workers rights but seemingly that’s all contingent on a revolution that does nothing but give them more money for less work under the assumption that yunno, people like laborers and nurses and all the people with jobs that actually require continuous will just get fucked
I cannot buy healthy, tasty, food. I can work less hours, buy ingredients in the marker and make that food.
I will never be able to buy a house, never. Even saving over half my income by living in shit neighborhoods. The cost of houses goes up too fast. Even after investing, and getting good returns, on the little I managed to save, it is not enough.
So working a little less, and having healthy food it is.
After understanding the ongoing ecological collapse, I don’t care much about a house anymore, rich or poor, we are all dead in less than 10 years anyway.
If you can, work less, play more. And I actually love what I do at work, but fuck that scam.
Ha less than 10 years? You wish
More like 100 years of slow burn
Every system is going down faster than expected. Food sources are already taking hits.
This will accelerate exponentially.
Unless we get unlikely, easily sacked, breakthrough energy source quickly or fucking aliens come down and save us, we are doomed.
Climate change was stoppable around 1980, the worst of it was preventable around 2000, now? We may survive if we put our resources toward adaption. Which we don’t, and cannot unless some magic happens.
So unless you believe in fairies, don’t bring children cus they won’t grow old. If you do believe in fairies, you are too delusional to raise children.
It’s exponential but you and I will still live our full lives, it’s just going to get incredibly fucked up
It’s not like one day everyone will die, first will be third world countries most affected by climate
We don’t, scientifically, know which one of us is right. We can only go based on gut feeling and anecdotes.
My job is in bioinformatics, from the computational side. The measurements we took were assumed to be wrong due to how far they were out of the expected. Sadly, the equipment did not malfunction, the temperature of the environments we measured shifted drastically causing a reduction in community complexity.
My fun-time is partially in small scale farming, while some of my family members work full time in the agriculture. I’ve seen both small scale collapse, meaning a tree or a bush die from extreme weather. Members of my family now drink more, as they witnessed fields ruined in a few hours. Hail out of session, a once in a hundred years wind that blew day after day for a week, extreme cold (for the region), extended dry spells in winters with floods between. Each one of those events reduced the agricultural output of a given area to zero for that season.
I live in a western country, we have no technology to stop that and it will become more frequent and global. We have no technology to save our own food supply.
We know how to grow food in building. If we have energy to replace the sun. We don’t. So we are going the route of food collapse, leading to population collapse, extinction will follow a few years later.
I really hope you’re right.
No need to be ashamed. You’re doing a great job creating shareholder value. Just keep your head down and make doo with the scraps you’re given. You’ve realized that it’s not possible for this earth to provide 8 billion people with affluence and fulfilment. Your sacrifice is making a small percentage of people very happy. Keep up the good work.
Move
Move where? I can move to a cheaper country, buy a house and push a local down the economical ladder. Or stay and stay in contact with people I love.
Everything is measured now. That has to add to the pressure.
Grade schoolers are going to get called into the principal’s office for not hitting their KPI targets.
Sorry, but everything is already on the list of things I have worry about to survive.
YAY WORKING 6 DAY WEEKS AT 2ND SHIFT I LOVE NEVER BEING ABLE TO GO OUT AND DO SHIT LIKE KEEP MY FRIENDS AND BEING ABLE TO VISIT MY MOM AND DAD BUT THE COMPANY REEEEEEEEAAAAALLLLLLLY NEEDS ME TO BE THERE SO TGE CEO OF ONE OF THE KARGEST COMPANIES IN THE WORLD CAN BUY THEIR 23RD BEACH MANSION THEYLL NEVER USE I FUCKING HATE THIS WORLD
I’m gen X and working 3 jobs. We’re not immune.
The older GenX are voting to destroy the economy right along with the Boomers. Everyone under 55 is fucked at this point unless you are a trust fund baby or managed to get a government job with a pension.
Named generations don’t exist and function as a working class divider. They’re used so we squabble with each other and not those in power who force us all work more for less money. We all have to deal with their nonsense in unison.
OK Trotsky, time for bed
Thanks fucko
Sounds like Boomer/ Xer.
Divide and conquer. If one of us suffers, we all suffer; young and old.
I’m torn on my response.
Enjoying all the benefits and then trying to call for unity with those who havent urks me.
That said, I do enjoy a small handful of privileges over my peers, which I have not actively relinquished, and take a similar tone on other topics, because I only have my words of dissent at the the tilted scales, but I also won’t turn down a free lunch.
Fuck it. Cheers mate.
You could just say “Millennials are exhausted” and be correct.
I’m gen X and I too am exhausted. Solidarity with my young homies.
Twice as exhausting for us boomers. You think you’re tired. 60 and 2 jobs is bullshit.
This points out why the idea that boomers (as a whole) caused many of our modern problems upsets me
I sincerely doubt you voted for the situation you’re in now
This in-fighting and blaming does nothing but detract from the real issue of who’s doing this to us (spoiler alert: it’s the politicians and it always has been)
It’s not the politicians, they’re bought out for cheap, a low rung facilitator. A few tens of thousands is all the lobbying you need to own them.
It’s the corporations and capitalists who are to blame.
Generational politics are bullshit.
Yeah some dude has a failed acting career, and now I have to hope my for profit insurance will cover a doctor or I’ll be eating ramen for the rest of my life
At least he didn’t fail art school in Austria
Though he likely killed nearly as many.
It’s not really boomers, it’s people with too much power and greed.
60? Doesn’t that put you closer to GenX? Was there a “cusp” generation like Xennials?
It’s okay. Soon AI will take over our jobs and we won’t have to work anymore. But we won’t have wages either. So no food. No shelter. No clothes. No future.
Win-win.
It ends so soon?! This is good news! The tornment is almost over!
Recommend watching this gem; onion future news broadcast https://youtu.be/iKC21wDarBo
Lolol
Yes, of course.
But it’s okay, because line go up!
Just shuffle some KPI’s around and now everything is fine!
deleted by creator
the problem is you can’t easily go get another job because all the other jobs require a stupid amount of qualifications that don’t really relate to what they are offering in anyway shape or form.
Job postings are a wishlist for an ideal candidate. Only some of the stuff is actually required, For the rest, it varies based on how scarce people able and willing to work in that field are.
To see through the fog, you have to try reaching out. Either apply at places or try to build yourself a network. Sadly I’m not great at it myself. Alternatively, if you have the time and inclination to learn new skills, that’s a thing you can do.
the very fucking concept of building a network makes me think violent thoughts.
“hey wouldn’t it be funny if we put this job thing behind like 12 layers of people knowing people who know people because i think that would be funny”
Yeah I get that, and it’s just finding the time to get another qualification whilst still maintaining a decent income, I mean some job postings are quite straight to the point in that they literally want you to have about 100 different things all to get in
How is this oniony?
I think cause it’s just so blatantly obvious.
At least I learned something from this article. Highfalutin is a word in the English language.
