(06-09-2016, 04:40 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: For some generations, adulthood is the Holy Grail. For such cohorts, it is a time of self sufficiency, rich rewards for hard work, and seemingly limitless opportunities. For others, it is an unending nightmare of shattered dreams, limits to growth, and a nasty ride down the razor blade of life culminating in death and decay. Identify your cohort and tell me your view.

X_4AD_84 Wrote:For some generations, adulthood is the Holy Grail. For such cohorts, it is a time of self sufficiency, rich rewards for hard work, and seemingly limitless opportunities.

Quote: For others, it is an unending nightmare of shattered dreams, limits to growth, and a nasty ride down the razor blade of life culminating in death and decay. Identify your cohort and tell me your view.

Saxon Wrote:'Ive paid my dues, I've been around
I've had my share of ups and downs
I'll never stop, it's in my blood
I've got to rock, it feels so good
Can't stop me now, it's in my soul
I've got to play more rock 'n' roll
I can't live, I can't breathe
You got to give me what I need
Can't go on, can't survive
I got to rock to stay alive, stay alive
Play it loud, turn me on
Give it to me all night long
Loud and proud that's what I like
You've got to get the feeling right
Don't stop now, it's in my soul
I've got to rock, I can't say no
I can't live, I can't breathe
You got to give me what I need
Can't go on, can't survive
I got to rock to stay alive, stay alive
I can't live, I can't breathe
You got to give me what I need
Can't go on, can't survive
I got to rock to stay alive
Let me tell you what you need
You've got to set your spirit free
Just hear the power and feel the beat
Shout out loud and stamp your feet
Cut me loose but don't let go
I got to have more rock 'n' roll
I can't live, I can't breathe
You got to give me what I need
Can't go on, can't survive
I got to rock to stay alive, stay alive
I can't live, I can't breathe
You got to give me what I need
Can't go on, can't survive
I got to rock to stay alive, stay alive
I can't live, I can't breathe
I've got to rock to stay alive

(06-11-2016, 05:00 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Hmm…

I had a lousy young childhood.  I was a nerd before nerds started projecting their own version of cool.  I got my act more or less together my junior year in high school, and pretty much enjoyed social life from there on out, finding various like minded groups to have fun with without too much difficulty.

Quote:I did a co-op plan through college, going to school for 3 months then alternating with 3 months of work.  The co-op jobs paid well in those days.  My senior year in college I looked at my tuition bills, looked at my bank account, then went out and bought a brand new car and an organ.  These days, instead of a well paying high tech job, a kid would be trying to get an internship, doing unpaid work for the sort of experience I got paid for?  Not right.  The millenials in the family came out of school with quite a debt burden, while the boomer generation came out fairly clean.

Quote:I came out of college into stagflation and the national malaise era.  The ride wasn’t always smooth, but I managed to stay with one high tech military industrial complex job for my entire career.  For a while wage- price controls made it fashionable for professionals to jump from company to company.  Companies weren’t allowed to give competitive wages to keep professionals, so those who wanted top dollar would change jobs every several years.  In the Route 128 high tech environment at least, the professionals had the advantage in job seeking.  I eventually retired reasonably comfortably, though at the time it felt more like being the victim of downsizing rather than retirement.

Quote:  While my GI father could count on a job for life from Ma Bell after getting a job shortly after World War II, by the end of my career well paid older professionals were often and systematically let go if they could find youngsters who could do the job almost as well for much less money.  I guess you could say I wasn’t totally immune to Reagan’s unravelling era reinvention of the economy to favor the corporations over the workers.

Quote:Music wise, the Beatles were popping out new albums on a regular basis in my youth, while Carol King’s Tapestry was the sound track of my senior year in high school.  I know we boomers should not be so very smug about our generation’s music, but no buyer’s remorse there.

Quote:In my youth, NASA was running projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.  In young adulthood, Mohammad Ali and Secretariat were doing their thing.  For a while on any given night on the half hour network TV news coverage, there was 25 minutes of Watergate coverage.  They finally did get the (expletive deleted.)  I got a favorable number when they did my birth year’s draft lottery.    Over my life time, the local pro sports teams have featured Bill Russell, Bobby Orr, Larry Bird and Tom Brady, all with fine supporting casts.  The Red Sox even managed to break their 86 year drought.  Not bad.

All in all, I’d say I landed in a pretty good time and place.

Bob Butler 54 Wrote:Hmm…

I had a lousy young childhood.  I was a nerd before nerds started projecting their own version of cool.  I got my act more or less together my junior year in high school, and pretty much enjoyed social life from there on out, finding various like minded groups to have fun with without too much difficulty.

Quote:I did a co-op plan through college, going to school for 3 months then alternating with 3 months of work.  The co-op jobs paid well in those days.

Quote: My senior year in college I looked at my tuition bills, looked at my bank account, then went out and bought a brand new car and an organ.

Quote:  These days, instead of a well paying high tech job, a kid would be trying to get an internship, doing unpaid work for the sort of experience I got paid for?  Not right.

Quote:I came out of college into stagflation and the national malaise era.  The ride wasn’t always smooth, but I managed to stay with one high tech military industrial complex job for my entire career.  For a while wage- price controls made it fashionable for professionals to jump from company to company.  Companies weren’t allowed to give competitive wages to keep professionals, so those who wanted top dollar would change jobs every several years.  In the Route 128 high tech environment at least, the professionals had the advantage in job seeking.

Quote:  I eventually retired reasonably comfortably, though at the time it felt more like being the victim of downsizing rather than retirement.

Quote: While my GI father could count on a job for life from Ma Bell after getting a job shortly after World War II, by the end of my career well paid older professionals were often and systematically let go if they could find youngsters who could do the job almost as well for much less money.  I guess you could say I wasn’t totally immune to Reagan’s unravelling era reinvention of the economy to favor the corporations over the workers.

Quote:Music wise, the Beatles were popping out new albums on a regular basis in my youth, while Carol King’s Tapestry was the sound track of my senior year in high school.  I know we boomers should not be so very smug about our generation’s music, but no buyer’s remorse there.

Quote:In my youth, NASA was running projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.  In young adulthood, Mohammad Ali and Secretariat were doing their thing.  For a while on any given night on the half hour network TV news coverage, there was 25 minutes of Watergate coverage.  They finally did get the (expletive deleted.)  I got a favorable number when they did my birth year’s draft lottery.    Over my life time, the local pro sports teams have featured Bill Russell, Bobby Orr, Larry Bird and Tom Brady, all with fine supporting casts.  The Red Sox even managed to break their 86 year drought.  Not bad.

Quote:All in all, I’d say I landed in a pretty good time and place.

(06-12-2016, 01:16 AM)taramarie Wrote:

(06-11-2016, 11:59 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: At one time, any liberal arts degree was useful because it established that one could think coherently and communicate effectively. One had been exposed to the Great Questions of Existence. As such one could be a leader. One could adapt to many things.

Today one needs think only in narrow categories on behalf of organizations that prefer having interchangeable parts (people as if machines -- how dehumanizing!), that people think only of reward and punishment, that people live in fear of the Master Class, and that they do not challenge the status quo. Blind obedience, recognize of economic elites as people beyond judgment or criticism, and ideally support of reactionary politics well serve a grossly-inequitable social order. So one had to do something nasty to people? Dissolve your conscience with booze.

...Even if colleges all became technical  and vocational schools, there would be far too many graduates for the engineering and software-design people, lab technicians, and nurses.  

We need to rediscover the subtle delights of being truly human even at the cost of economic efficiency and rationality. Efficiency and rationality are not enough; a plantation of the Old South, a Gulag, or a fascist labor camp could be extremely efficient and rational while denying the qualities that make people human.

...The late science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein castigated the old Soviet Union as the land of the drunk. For the common man there was toil and there was drink, and nothing else. I wonder if America is headed that way.    

... Speaking of something Soviet, I have a joke. George W. Bush got struck by a lightning bold on a hot, clear Texas day, and found himself in the Hereafter. But instead of meeting such illustrious predecessors as Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, or even such mediocrities as Fillmore, Harding, or Coolidge he found himself with Leonid Brezhnev.  Unsettling as that encounter they got through a discussion of their shared mess of Afghanistan, and finally discussed the relative merits of their respective economies.

Brezhnev said, "You know the old saying... the workers pretend to work and we pretend to pay them".

Dubya responded, "We give workers fear and pay them with debt!"

Agree but NOT to the point where it sacrifices economic efficiency and rationality. That is illogical. You want another crash go right ahead.

(06-12-2016, 12:43 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(06-12-2016, 12:02 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(06-12-2016, 01:16 AM)taramarie Wrote: [quote pid='2702' dateline='1465707586']
Agree but NOT to the point where it sacrifices economic efficiency and rationality. That is illogical. You want another crash go right ahead.

Short-term efficiency at the cost of human happiness, let alone the survival and health (mental as well as physical) of those who actually do the work, is suspect.

Our productive capacities are great enough that we do not need poverty -- and we do not need to drive people to physical exhaustion just to get productivity.  We are at the stage at which we cannot get more prosperity from more production of stuff. We do not need more junk for the landfill or even more clutter.

Sustainable happiness is the measure of a wholesome life.

(06-13-2016, 01:56 AM)taramarie Wrote:

(06-12-2016, 11:58 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I am in great fear of losing everything. You do not understand the economics of the nursing home business in America.  

If we get good economic measures in return for gross inequity and a climate of fear, then something is wrong -- most likely with the economic elite. The MBA culture that formed around 1980 was a rejection of humanistic values that make life tolerable for non-elites. People who believe that no human suffering is in excess so long as the Right People get what they want (basically everything not necessary for animal-like survival for everyone else, as in fascist and feudal orders).

We make enough stuff. We do badly at creating happiness because the ideology of American elites well suited to the sweat-shop level of economic development.

You guys make enough "stuff" but people do not have the money to buy necessities and many are in debt. I believe that is what many are focusing on as the most important thing of all. Survival in hardship.

(06-13-2016, 05:24 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(06-13-2016, 01:56 AM)taramarie Wrote:

(06-12-2016, 11:58 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I am in great fear of losing everything. You do not understand the economics of the nursing home business in America.  

If we get good economic measures in return for gross inequity and a climate of fear, then something is wrong -- most likely with the economic elite. The MBA culture that formed around 1980 was a rejection of humanistic values that make life tolerable for non-elites. People who believe that no human suffering is in excess so long as the Right People get what they want (basically everything not necessary for animal-like survival for everyone else, as in fascist and feudal orders).

We make enough stuff. We do badly at creating happiness because the ideology of American elites well suited to the sweat-shop level of economic development.

You guys make enough "stuff" but people do not have the money to buy necessities and many are in debt. I believe that is what many are focusing on as the most important thing of all. Survival in hardship.

The economic elites have found how to control people so that they believe that nothing matters except that the elites get whatever they want -- which is everything. Around 1980 we largely Americans sold out to the concept that we are are nothing more than our basest drives. We allowed ourselves to be atomized in return for some vague promises of economic gain. Everything is about lucre.

We enter a Crisis Era because of the bad practices that have developed since the last Crisis, vices that have become nearly sacred. Yet those vices degrade us. Most arise from the 3T -- bad business practices and bad mass culture. One big contributor to our misfortune is the debasement of education, mostly from the Awakening-era "Multiversity". The idea that the college student wants to go as quickly into specialized training or to experience a watered-down grad school instead of developing some wisdom from millennia of experience best taught as the liberal arts has ensured that people, however technically proficient they may be, lack the wisdom even to recognize the virtue of reciprocal kindness. Life becomes little more than personal manipulation.

"Ship it", "sell it", "cut the deal". Of course it is all pragmatic. But what if "it" all depends upon the degradation of human existence?

(06-13-2016, 11:46 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(06-13-2016, 05:24 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(06-13-2016, 01:56 AM)taramarie Wrote:

(06-12-2016, 11:58 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I am in great fear of losing everything. You do not understand the economics of the nursing home business in America.  

If we get good economic measures in return for gross inequity and a climate of fear, then something is wrong -- most likely with the economic elite. The MBA culture that formed around 1980 was a rejection of humanistic values that make life tolerable for non-elites. People who believe that no human suffering is in excess so long as the Right People get what they want (basically everything not necessary for animal-like survival for everyone else, as in fascist and feudal orders).

We make enough stuff. We do badly at creating happiness because the ideology of American elites well suited to the sweat-shop level of economic development.

You guys make enough "stuff" but people do not have the money to buy necessities and many are in debt. I believe that is what many are focusing on as the most important thing of all. Survival in hardship.

The economic elites have found how to control people so that they believe that nothing matters except that the elites get whatever they want -- which is everything. Around 1980 we largely Americans sold out to the concept that we are are nothing more than our basest drives. We allowed ourselves to be atomized in return for some vague promises of economic gain. Everything is about lucre.

We enter a Crisis Era because of the bad practices that have developed since the last Crisis, vices that have become nearly sacred. Yet those vices degrade us. Most arise from the 3T -- bad business practices and bad mass culture. One big contributor to our misfortune is the debasement of education, mostly from the Awakening-era "Multiversity". The idea that the college student wants to go as quickly into specialized training or to experience a watered-down grad school instead of developing some wisdom from millennia of experience best taught as the liberal arts has ensured that people, however technically proficient they may be, lack the wisdom even to recognize the virtue of reciprocal kindness. Life becomes little more than personal manipulation.

"Ship it", "sell it", "cut the deal". Of course it is all pragmatic. But what if "it" all depends upon the degradation of human existence?

That is all correct. We focus on economic gain, justified by and geared toward gain for the elite. We end up with neither real life, wisdom and culture OR economic gain. We forget our millennia of experience, which includes the teaching of the one we once revered as our spiritual leader: seek first the Kingdom of God, and its righteousness, and all else will be added.

Quote:Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. John 14:6,ESV

(06-13-2016, 01:00 PM)radind Wrote:

(06-13-2016, 11:46 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(06-13-2016, 05:24 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(06-13-2016, 01:56 AM)taramarie Wrote:

(06-12-2016, 11:58 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I am in great fear of losing everything. You do not understand the economics of the nursing home business in America.  

If we get good economic measures in return for gross inequity and a climate of fear, then something is wrong -- most likely with the economic elite. The MBA culture that formed around 1980 was a rejection of humanistic values that make life tolerable for non-elites. People who believe that no human suffering is in excess so long as the Right People get what they want (basically everything not necessary for animal-like survival for everyone else, as in fascist and feudal orders).

We make enough stuff. We do badly at creating happiness because the ideology of American elites well suited to the sweat-shop level of economic development.

You guys make enough "stuff" but people do not have the money to buy necessities and many are in debt. I believe that is what many are focusing on as the most important thing of all. Survival in hardship.

The economic elites have found how to control people so that they believe that nothing matters except that the elites get whatever they want -- which is everything. Around 1980 we largely Americans sold out to the concept that we are are nothing more than our basest drives. We allowed ourselves to be atomized in return for some vague promises of economic gain. Everything is about lucre.

We enter a Crisis Era because of the bad practices that have developed since the last Crisis, vices that have become nearly sacred. Yet those vices degrade us. Most arise from the 3T -- bad business practices and bad mass culture. One big contributor to our misfortune is the debasement of education, mostly from the Awakening-era "Multiversity". The idea that the college student wants to go as quickly into specialized training or to experience a watered-down grad school instead of developing some wisdom from millennia of experience best taught as the liberal arts has ensured that people, however technically proficient they may be, lack the wisdom even to recognize the virtue of reciprocal kindness. Life becomes little more than personal manipulation.

"Ship it", "sell it", "cut the deal". Of course it is all pragmatic. But what if "it" all depends upon the degradation of human existence?

That is all correct. We focus on economic gain, justified by and geared toward gain for the elite. We end up with neither real life, wisdom and culture OR economic gain. We forget our millennia of experience, which includes the teaching of the one we once revered as our spiritual leader: seek first the Kingdom of God, and its righteousness, and all else will be added.

A verse that I like.

Quote:Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. John 14:6,ESV

(06-09-2016, 05:53 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(06-09-2016, 04:40 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: For some generations, adulthood is the Holy Grail. For such cohorts, it is a time of self sufficiency, rich rewards for hard work, and seemingly limitless opportunities. For others, it is an unending nightmare of shattered dreams, limits to growth, and a nasty ride down the razor blade of life culminating in death and decay. Identify your cohort and tell me your view.

I'm a late-wave Boomer, and I graduated from college (which was then relatively cheap), only to find that the Vietnam-era draft-dodgers had beaten me to all the desirable opportunities. What was left? The crap jobs of the 1970s -- fast food, retail sales, and work in sweat-shop factories. I could never get on track. Once one takes those crappy jobs one's career potential is gone. Some times I wish I had never been born. The only good thing to say about the last forty years is that we have had some really-cheap entertainment. Mass low culture has become the opiate of the masses in the sense that Karl Marx saw religion as the opiate of the masses.

At the least the oppressed prole toiling in a sweatshop had no obligation to express how happy he was to hold the job that he had. Today the prole often is obliged to suffer with a smile in jobs that show how degraded his life is. In that respect workers in the service jobs have it far worse, at least existentially, than the millhands of early capitalism. But that said, people addled on stupefying bilge might see nothing wrong.  

I could almost think of the plot of a dystopian novel in which a repressive and exploitative regime offers entertainment but little else as a reward for pliancy. If one is a double-high-ninety in verbal and mathematical aptitude, then that is the worst possible world. Most nasty systems co-opt people like me. Unfortunately that plot looks so much like reality that it would be a bore.

The rules changed for young workers around 1978. Before then college graduates could usually expect good pay in interesting work unless they went to some diploma mill. After that they were qualified to do the sorts of work that high-school graduates got. What has changed? A college education has become not only a way to qualify for jobs that used to require a high-school education, but also a means of beginning adulthood deeply in debt.