• Clbull@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Millennials and Gen-Z are truly the lost generation.

    Imagine still living with parents in your late twenties or even early thirties because you simply cannot afford to even rent your own place. Now imagine that work pays like shit and you are busting your ass working long hours to chase an eternal pipe dream of economic prosperity. You can’t even seek psychiatric help for your ailing mental health because it’s expensive, inaccessible and oversubscribed.

    For a man, being in that situation makes you downright undateable so it’s not like you can rely on the joint incomes that couples do either.

    And we wonder why toxic masculinity is on the rise…

    The rich have done a smash & grab on the economy and made everybody poorer as a result of their own greed. It’s a dangerous game.

  • AnnaPlusPlus@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    The part I don’t understand is why it’s important to hit the “replacement level”. Wouldn’t it be better for the planet if there were fewer people living on it and competing for resources?

    • seeCseas@lemmy.worldOPM
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      1 year ago

      but then the megacorporations can’t hit their iNfInItE gRoWtH and we can’t keep making the billionaires richer.

    • AttackBunny@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The Ponzi scheme, that is American “social security” (I mean actual social security, but all the rest of the social services too), would collapse if there arent more poor people pumping money into, than are taking out of it. Instead of doing shit like taxing the fuck out of the rich, or AI/robots.

      But, yes, it would solve A LOT of the worlds problems if there were less people.

        • AttackBunny@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          How do you figure. If the workforce becomes by and large robotic, taxing the businesses, based on that, like you would humans, would work well enough. If not, then there needs to be some concession from businesses to pay the same or more as when humans were doing the jobs.

    • drkt@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It would be, but the economy was built on perpetual growth schemes.
      Don’t forget, the economy is here to be served by us, not the other way around!

      • Sahqon@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        The economy will crumble if we don’t get to replacement levels at least, but it will also crumble, along with everything else if we do. Only way out of this is to change the whole model before it crumbles. But that would mean the rich need to get (willingly) less rich, so I’m not holding out hope…

  • morgan423@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If you wanted the younger generation to continue producing workers for the capitalist machine, you should have made sure that potential parents had enough resources to actually maintain a family if they started one.

    But yeah, that would have slightly reduced quarterly profits, and we can’t have that kind of long-sightedness messing with the short-term returns of our shareholders.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You can always move to North Korea if you don’t like capitalism that much.

        • Mereo@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Why do we have to go to the extreme. The scandanavian countries are socialist/capitalist countries and they have one of the best living conditions.

  • hurricane@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I am a member of Gen X and I think Millenials are doing the best they can with the shitshow they inherited. Earth needs fewer humans, not more.

  • MiddleWeigh@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m 33 and me and my so are not having children. Cope you capitalist pigs. I’m living my one life the way I want and you can fk off with your credit cards and apple pies.

  • HollandJim@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s not just millennials. I was born 5 years after the end of the Baby Boomers and by the time I was 20 everything was becoming out of reach. Add a energy crisis or two, 40 years of Republican austerity for anyone but themselves, and a few financial crashes We the People ended-up bailing out, and I never got anywhere enough traction to do more than just get by without a mountain of debt. We never outran the entitlement of the Boomer generation.

    Good luck Millennials - and I mean it - but the only way out is to get out of the US while you can.

  • literallyacat@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Hoooooo boyyyy, just wait until the next few generations are up to bat for breeding more worker bees. Population’s gonna plummet :)

    • Corvidae@lemmynsfw.com
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      1 year ago

      Given the ability to automate production, its not really a bad thing for the population to decrease. Of course the process of decreasing and the sociatal adjustments are going to be… difficult.

  • refugeered@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Hasn’t the fertility rate in the US been going down from the 1960s? With immigrations covering the shortfall?

    Actually looking at the data. It went down significantly in the 60 and 70s. Then picked up in the 80s, 90s and early 2000. Then started dropping again from 2010.

    But one thing to note to seem to be that it never went past replacement rate after 1972. 2.1 is considered to the global number for replacement. So for the last 60 years or so immigration has kept the population growing in absolute terms.

    Not making a political statement, I find it weird when people club a huge group of people into one bucket and brand them.

    I do not like the terms but sticking to the terms here. It looks like the young boomers had a similar number of children to today and the older boomers were already dropping the number of children they were having.

    But Gen-X had a higher rate for some reason.

  • Domille@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    That, and the planet cannot sustain our population with our current systems. Why have a kid when you know their future is doomed?

    • Navi1101@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I forget where I heard this stat, but the Earth could support 12 billion people if resources were distributed equitably. But, alas, :gestures broadly:

  • TAG@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If only there were people in this world who would want to come to our country . Heck, we could set up a system where employers can post jobs that they have trouble filling and we could match up people outside country who can fill that need. Then, if those people turn out to be decent and moral, we can let them stay in the country permanently.

    It is too bad that everyone outside of the country is a foreigner who wants to steal jobs.

      • SuiXi3D@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        ‘Not a rapist, tax cheat, or murderer’ seems like a pretty low bar that most could manage to get over.

        • teuast@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Which is itself fine, until you take into account the long and ongoing history of the way that immigrants, marginalized demographics, and particularly immigrants from marginalized groups are treated by our justice system, whether or not they’ve actually committed a serious crime or any crime at all.

      • Katana314@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’ve started rolling my eyes at “Who decides?” prompts. Whether it’s judging people, interpreting laws, etc.

        PEOPLE. People process your grocery purchase at checkout, and verify you found everything okay. People determine whether the charge of murder is substantially proven and justified. People evaluate a person’s immigration application.

        This is not a brand new science. Fallible, sure. Imperfect, sure. Useless, absolutely not.

        • blueskiesoc@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Thank you for responding. My “who decides” comment was an unuseful shortand for what I wanted to express, which is that I don’t have much trust in our institutions to carry out the will of the people.

    • CIWS-30@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Immigrants help out in the short term, but then they and their children realize the same thing that people who already live here do: that wages are too low, and that rent and cost of living is too high to support children.

      Plus, corporations can use those immigrants to bust unions and keep wages down and rent prices up. Supply and demand, because we live in an oligrarchic dystopia that doesn’t have enough social safety nets to make sure that new workers coming in don’t sabotage the ones currently working.

      I’m the children of immigrants and hang around with the children of other immigrants, and we’re not having children ourselves, or ware waiting until increasingly later ages (minimum 30) because of how expensive it is to live, even without children. It only takes 1 generation to realize that new immigrants will just get stuck in the same rut that non-immigrants are already in.

      Adding more people just increases the power of corporations (the real government) to treat workers as disposable objects. It’s probably why corporate run governments don’t try to stabilize unstable regions, but rather prefer to exploit them until there’s a mass migration. More people to use for dangerous labor = more expendables that no one can afford to care about.

      • hydra@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The very same reason NATO destroyed Libya’s infrastructure including water pipelines and plunged all their inhabitants back to the dark ages back in 2011, and now NATO countries are complaining they are getting full of immigrants. Maybe if they hadn’t commited war crimes there they would have stayed there. That waterway increased the country’s carrying capacity and destroying it could arguably be classified as genocide.

    • PenguinJuice@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Then you’re just committing them to taking low paying jobs. Don’t you see what is going on? This is what happened after the black plague that ended feudalism. We need to stick to our guns and make them increase wages. Your argument to have immigration solve the baby crisis is EXACTLY what business owners want. They WANT to keep wages low with an infinite influx of people from poor countries because these immigrants won’t know they are getting fucked in the ass with low pay.

  • Evono@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Me and my gf make ends meet ( sometimes not) just by being alive and eat, we go super rarely out and didn’t had vacation the last 10 years.

    Doesn’t help that I got I’ll and need to hold now a special food diet till I die which makes mostly everything I can eat like 2x as expensive and it was rough for us before my illness.