How are so many people still on Xitter?
The same way people are still on heroin.
Xitter is addictive?
Yes. Dopamine is a helluva drug.
Does being called a faggot and communist online really stimulate the dopamine release? I’d be a little worried if that’s the case.
Looking at it strictly from your perspective, it doesn’t make sense does it? But, keep in mind that there are a lot of people who share the same view (regardless of how correct or wrong they may be to you). And when those people gather together and start validating each other, yes your brain releases more dopamine. And when someone is addicted to a substance (even dopamine), we will try to seek out those same triggers so we can continue to get that hit.
The problem with addiction is that our biology builds a tolerance to it, so we need more of said substance to get the same high as before. So we need to escalate the things we do. And when we don’t get those hits, our physiology causes us to experience pain. And what do you do when you’re in pain? Hopefully you stop doing whatever it is that causes you pain. It’s a vicious cycle; a feedback loop if you will.
Now I have a question for you: did you actually type out
Censoredor did you say a “bad” word?
Did you actually type out Censored
Oh wow. That looks like your instance or your app that did that. I’m on Lemmy.zip using Voyager
That’s disappointing. While I don’t personally condone the use of that word, we’re all adults here and should be able to just downvote or rebut or whatever without censorship. 🤷♂️
It’s the .world censoring. I can see the slur from my instance.
I can see the word. And it’s an appropriate reference to inappropriate speech by others, imho. But to avoid having the censorship interfere with making your point, you might want to type something like fxxxxt that gives a clue to the slur you’re referring to.
I dislike that because then we get to the point of typing sht and sx or m**st to self-censor.
Yes. Social media addiction is comparable to those of illicit drugs, both in terms of actual symptoms, as well how alter dopamine networks in the brain.
This is just a recent review article that focuses on teens, but similar results hold more broadly as well if you search.
Social Media Algorithms and Teen Addiction: Neurophysiological Impact and Ethical Considerations - PMC - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11804976/
People are fine with nazis as long as it benefits them or they don’t have to change.
Dude its terrible. I tell my friends they need to get off and theyre like " but why doh? Me like it. " Ugh.
“In many ways, this age group is in a better place financially, on average, than their parents were at this age. The problem is that they don’t seem to know it.”
Yeah? What ways are those?
Is this one?
“Our expectations are so much higher today,” says Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland whose research focuses on children and family. “Generations before us didn’t expect to have large houses where every kid had a bedroom and there were multiple vacations.”
We just shouldn’t expect to have mansions for our many many kids? Fuck you. I don’t have kids, am experienced in a well paying career and I can’t afford a house at all unless I go somewhere that I can’t find the kind of work I do in. That’s not even considering the lack of kids many of us have, because we can’t afford them.
Fuck this out of touch shit. I’m so sick of these people who already got theirs telling the people who can’t do the same that it’s their own fault. This fucking article goes further than that suggesting it’s worse than our own fault because we’re better situated somehow.
Avocado toast ass argument. This country needs more guillotines.
Your parents had one dollar, you have three. Much rich. Nevermind the fact that your parents one dollar was the down payment on a car and you cant afford a bowl of lettuce.
I remember reading this in an Uncle Scrooge comic when I was a kid. For context, Uncle Scrooge was explaining how money works to his nephews. The gist was “it’s not how much money, but how much it will buy that counts”.
I learned that lesson from a Scottish cartoon duck.
How many hours did I have to work for this?
I unironically use that as one of the measures I use for assessing whether something I could do is worth the effort or not. Want to try a video game? How much of my life did I have to sell to afford what it will cost? Things like that. It’s not the only consideration, of course, but it definitely is one.
They had $1.00, but the bread was 50 cents. The 30-somethings have $3.00, but bread is now $5.00, just saying how many slips of green paper a has compared to b is useless when those slips buy less and less.
Guys, guys, you’re forgetting how much cheaper TVs have gotten! /s
The misdirection is entirely deliberate.
Yeah, they cherry-pick that average income is up vs previous generations, adjusted for inflation.
Okay, but… cost of living has gone up.
Not just for the things that existed 40 years ago, but also from the new things that are necessary for maintaining a career, like broadband internet and a smartphone.
Needing a fucking subscription for your toaster or hair dryer or stairs or whatever. Having to tip your landlord.
They had a guy in the article that owes 200k in student loans! This is not apples-to-apples.
And also, so what if it’s up in average? Inequality is the worst it’s ever been. They barely sneak an asterisk in to address that, too.
Average real income (adjusted for inflation) has been pretty steady in the last 50 years for the bottom 50% bracket. The higher up you go in the income bracket the higher the growth becomes. The real income of the top 0.01% has grown by 670% in that same time. So you can see where all that extra wealth generated from 2x productivity boost has gone. Trickle up economics.
*This is for the USA, but if you look at data for other countries the tendency is the same.
“trickle up economics”
Aka … Capitalism
They had a guy in the article that owes 200k in student loans!
Everything else can be argued when it comes to growth/wages, but by far the single most crippling issue we have in the US is massive debt to survive, and once you’re in debt, you often never get out.
We had a term for this in the middle-ages.
History repeats over and over.
Average income isn’t even useful because the only salaries that have gone up are CEOs.
It’s not out of touch, its deliberate gaslighting.
It would be gaslighting if the intended audience was the young people it was talking about. But they aren’t the ones reading the Wall Street Journal.
It’s right-wing propaganda designed to confirm the existing biases of boomer haves (their real audience) toward gen-z have-nots (the smeared out-group)
Meh. There is always a pipeline of aspirants. The temporarily embarrased millionaires.
I can’t afford a house at all unless I go somewhere that I can’t find the kind of work I do
I think this is a key point.
The average house prices in major cities has gone up ridiculous amounts. But, if you look at the average national house prices it isn’t as dramatic. The problem is, that there are a lot of jobs that only exist in those expensive, major cities. It doesn’t much matter if a house in the suburbs of Detroit is dirt cheap if your job doesn’t exist anywhere near Detroit.
So, you have places where the housing prices are reasonable, but nobody earns a really high wage because it isn’t one of the major metro areas in the country. Then you have places where the jobs exist but housing is completely out of reach.
Also, it seems to me like the big issue is that while some goods have become cheaper and cheaper over the years, the ones that have become prohibitively expensive are the important ones. Like, look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Food price inflation and overall price inflation have been about the same since the 80s, but since 2020 that’s not true. Since then food has become much more expensive relative to the inflating dollar. Then there’s housing (a.k.a. “shelter”) that has been outpacing inflation by a massive amount since Reagan’s time, but even worse since 2020. The only thing that has become cheaper in at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid is clothing. But, the kind of clothing that’s cheap is “fast fashion”. It’s not basic “shelter” type clothing. Maybe that has become cheaper, but enough clothing to survive was never a major expense.
The next tier up in Maslow’s hierarchy is safety needs: personal security, health and wellbeing, financial security, safety nets. This is probably the area that has been hit the hardest. Because of America’s messed up healthcare system healthcare costs are getting more and more expensive. Financial security is also a joke for most non-boomers. The US has no safety net to speak of. And personal security, in the era of Trump, I think a lot of people feel much less secure.
There are things that are part of the consumer price calculation that have been getting cheaper. But, if you can’t meet your basic needs, that really doesn’t matter. Sure, my grandpa would have been absolutely amazed with the entertainment I can get on a screen. Compared to a black and white TV a modern TV is incredibly cheap, amazingly high quality, the selection of things to watch is astounding, etc. But gramps had a steady job, a guaranteed pension, reasonable medical costs, a house that could be bought for a couple of years of salary, etc.
remove all speculation incentives from housing, fuck remove all speculation incentives full-stop, and maybe all these rich cunts will actually do something with their $ (like pay for housing to be built, since there is such a massive market for it) instead of jerk themselves off while watching lines go up.
the reason the US is falling is because we’ve built a nation of gamblers that would rather watch lines go up, and and then argue/gamble on why those lines are/arent going up, than do any actual work
the real fucked irony here is that, as a nobody working up from nothing, if you actually want to change this fucked up system and need capital to do it… by far the most time-effecient method to get it is to just syphon it out of the casino, cause all these degenerate gamblers jerking themselves off to their lines going up haven’t figured out that everybody knows the rules now…and they’re getting/going to be absolutely fleeced out of every $ they put into this bubble.
It’s more than just speculation incentives from housing. I agree that needs to be done, but it’s nowhere near enough.
A bigger issue is that with the complete mess things are in, for a lot of people near retirement age, the only asset they own is their home. That means they’re going to desperately fight to keep house prices high, and ideally to keep them going up and up. But, this completely fucks over anybody who doesn’t yet own a home.
As part of their fight to protect the value of their homes, they’ll block any new construction in the neighbourhood because it will lower the value of their homes. As a result, this blocks new, denser housing construction for anybody who needs a house. The only place where NIMBYs aren’t blocking new housing are suburbs in the middle of nowhere. And, construction companies aren’t going to be building condos or small houses out in the middle of nowhere. Those homes are going to be big, suburban homes. So, the only real hope for someone who needs a house is that someone moves out to one of these big new homes in the suburbs. But, retired people aren’t going to do that. They’re looking to downsize, if anything. So, they’re more likely to just stay in their current homes.
Basically, what’s needed is to do whatever it takes to keep houses from appreciating in value, and to go around NIMBYs who try to block densification. But, to do that, you also have to address the problem that these boomers don’t have a real safety net, and their house is the one thing they own of value. Oh, and the boomers vote and lobby effectively… so…
The housing market is just a big fucking pyramid scheme.
Stocks go up and up and up too, but they aren’t an essential good (e.g. shelter) or even tied directly to any day-to-day utility. They can also be cut into smaller increments by splitting or via fractional shares, so they remain accessible even to people with modest amounts of money to invest.
Real estate as a speculative investment has been hugely detrimental to society and has a lot of ancillary effects (e.g. sprawl and car dependency).
IMO in a well run country real estate should not go up in value. If your great-great-great-great-grandfather could have bought a house for 3 years of his wages, you should be able to buy an equivalent house for 3 years of your wages, assuming you’re buying a similar house and have similar wages.
The value of a house should go up only because of overall inflation going up. But, it should slightly lag behind inflation, because older houses need repairs to bring them back up to the standard they were in when they were new.
Basically anything other than a house should be a better investment than a house: a treasury, a savings account, a gold nugget.
I mean, imagine if there was anything else in the world that went up in value in a way similar to stocks, but was also something that you used. Imagine if, instead of depreciating immediately, your car went up in value each year. Or, imagine if your clothes were consistently worth more than when you bought them. It’s ridiculous that houses are both something you use and put wear and tear on, but also something that goes up in value every single year.
Just more propaganda from the haves to the have-nots. Everything that sucks about your life is directly related to your personal lack of willpower, your unwillingness to hustle, your inability to see the ways the market moves and pivot in just the right way and at just the right moment. No, don’t look at your neighbors, stop noticing all the other crabs in the bucket, this is your shortcoming. This is because you suck. Work more hours, sacrifice more of your connection to nature and friends and family, stop asking questions. What is life if not servitude? What is existence if not submission? Stop thinking and start doing what you’re told. Don’t look up. Don’t you EVER look up.
Are those smaller houses in the room with us?
Lmao, like in 95% of the US people can’t build anything but single family houses.
I don’t know about the entirety of the country, but I do know that around me, the only affordable homes being built or sold are for people 55 years and older. It’s like a slap in the face when you’re looking for somewhere to live and oh, whoops, you’re 20 years too young!
Is the baby boomer generation even buying those places? My experience is only anecdotal, but I don’t know a single baby boomer who’s moved to a seniors-only community. It’s something my grandma did, but my parents? They’re moving to a state with a lower cost of living and getting a bigger house than the one I grew up in. 😑
Meanwhile, my best chance of having an affordable apartment requires winning a low income housing lottery. Yes, a literal lottery. That’s what decides if I’ll be living in my car or not next year (or, dread of dreads, doing what my mom keeps telling me to do and uprooting my entire life to move to a southern state like she’s doing. I told her that if I have to move, I’d rather move out of the country. I also told her that I don’t want to live anywhere where I may be left to die if I end up with an ectopic pregnancy. She’s too detached from reality to understand.)
I know two women who have gone through an ectopic. First very nearly died, second got lucky and caught it while it was merely urgent. They’d both be dead if we lived in a state with worse medical rights.
I’ll probably live in 55+ housing when I’m of age. I specifically want a smaller home since I’m a bit of a minimalist, and of course the lower prices on these is a big draw.
It’s shitty that these are not generally accessible to younger people. But then the age restriction is probably what keeps the prices lower by limiting the marketability and competition.
Pretty funny that the article and the reply both implicitly assume adulthood is owning things or doing certain activities. Adulthood is being able to navigate life through adversity. Every young person I know treading water with unstable income and no support is way more ‘grown up’ than boomers complaining about having to cut back on retirement cruises.
In Capitalist America, milestones bypass you!
lol. buying a house? having kids? I can barely afford to EAT, let alone bring another person into the world.
Many couples are putting off marriage because they both have student loans, and they don’t want to make their credit even worse.
Worse, one might have loans, but not the other. Would you want to marry someone knowing you have to take on $100K in debt?
And yet both legacy and new media unironically tells you to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps
like the rich dude who said he could make $1M in one year, starting from homelessness. He cheated, and he still only made $60K
The answer is so easy:: make doing things affordable, and people will do things… anything, it doesn’t matter. Do you want people to have kids? Make having kids affordable. This is unregulated capitalists’ fault. Plain and simple.
Bingo. I think capitalism’s just dandy, but no economic system is going to work for the people if the governmental system refuses guardrails. At this point America isn’t merely declining to put rails in, we’re removing the few we had.
For the capitalism haters, capitalism is not what your are experiencing. You are experiencing oligarchy.
It is capitalism we’re experiencing, but it’s treating capitalism as the only tool in the toolbox and structuring an entire culture around it.
Markets work great for some things. Not everything. Currency works great for some things. Not everything.
Anonymous transferrable shares of ownership, and all of the abstract financial instruments that spin out of that one simple mechanism… are honestly not very good for many things at all, but they’ve become the primary assets that our economy optimizes for.
Most of us just realized long ago the game is fucking rigged so what’s the fuckin point.
Been saying all this shit since 6th or 7th (stupid meme not intended) grade when I saw the writing on the wall. It’s fucking annoying that only since the COVID lockdowns does it appear anyone else started seeing it, too.
I mean, I’m not going to turn away allies just because they woke up later. I might be a little suspicious, but allies are allies.
Most people don’t care until it impacts them personally. I don’t love it, but it’s just how people work. I hate that the accelerationists may have been right.
God that sends chills down my spine. I never thought of it that way. I always thought accelrationists were just opportunists, but you may be right in that they aim to have as many people personally harmed by the system so that they might all wake up and form a resistance.
I think I figured out I was never going to make it back in 2015 - 2017. When I was in my mid twenties. I rented shitty shared flats with tenants I didn’t like (one even stole property from me) and I also lived in a crack den, a place they sent people to, after they served their prison sentence. Meth and whores from time to time. Lots of passive-aggressive crap in the TV room that tenants obviously learned from prison. I heard that in prison people fight over what to watch on TV, so people were anal about rules in that crack den. They lived like they were still locked up.
Imagine renting or getting a mortgage in this shitty society with no job security.
I’ve been laid off four times in my adult life.
I had a mortgage, I couldn’t keep it. See above.
Fucking hell that’s rough
Imagine?
I didn’t skip my loan payment, I bypassed it. You’ve made me bypass numerous meals over the years.
Or better yet … more and more people will start to realize that it’s cheaper in the long run to just skip your loan payments. Even if you lose everything, how much more can you lose?
And when enough people lose, the banks and corporations start losing as well. So it’s in the best interest of the banks to keep everyone afloat as long as possible to keep up the illusion that the system is still working.
It’s a precarious balance between making people believe that they need to stay in the game and stopping them from thinking that the game is rigged.
They’re going to make debtor prison a thing, put people to work to pay it off at prison wages.
WSJ motto: always be punching down.
And anyone with the potential for a future, destroyed it all as soon as they became an adult by taking on a mountain of student loan debt, only to be told that the career they paid a fortune for is being largely replaced by AI.
The WSJ is a right wing rag, unfit for toilet paper. No one should be surprised they publish half wit musings.
It’s because we’re all accepting this unfair system even though the social contract has been broken. The first step is to stop accepting this system.
Most of us are preoccupied with survival.
Whoa, I feel like I jumped back in time 10 years when these corporate meat-riders were blaming us for their beer businesses failing while simultaneously telling us the reason we’re struggling is that we’re being irresponsible with our money. The “arrested development” is the USA’s disillusionment with capitalism.
I think lack of accountability is a common trait among americans in general though. Everything is someone else’s fault. The individual is sacrosanct. They can do no wrong.
This image popped into my mind upon reading the headline; I hope my meaning comes across:
