This is absolutely coming
https://x.com/dougjballoon/status/1742386661449674888?s=46&t=XGja5BtSraUljl_WWUrIUg
Those two guys are definitely experts in what can go wrong when someone gets a big job for reasons than merit lol.
At some point the world has to realize it’s intentional.
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What it comes down to is bad faith conservatives are willing to talk with their money and the babies on the other side aren’t. Easy equation for Harvard every time.
lol wut
The article itself actually isn’t bad. It says Trump is lying about the election, points out he’s been charged over 1/6, points out how many people have been convicted over it, and that they were trying to block the certification.
Speaking as someone who was a renter until he was 36 these reporters and their subjects can go fuck themselves. As someone who paid rent for 18 years your parents being pleasant and generous enough to live with until you can put a down payment down is exactly the same as being given an equivalent amount of $$$, probably greater.
Incredible journalism there that housing is affordable if your parents give you the money to buy it. Truly top notch lol.
In case anyone was wondering how it’s possible to make top 1% money for your age for 5+ years and still not be rich yet… it’s the 10-20k in dentistry you get from growing up poor, the student loans, and rent that explain it. The first 150-200k in earnings you generate above your cost of living is basically automatically gone when you factor in helping out family, medical costs, various kinds of debt your poor past self racked up in the form of medical costs and consumer debt, and all of this has to happen before you can even start saving for a home.
Meanwhile these rich kids have none of those costs, buy a house at 22, and then tell a reporter how not impossible that is. OK sure. The only reason I got out of poverty was by being outlier good at sales and operations at the same fucking time. Totally viable and easy everyone can do it right?
You wanna know what’s really infuriating though? How easy life is now. The hardest level in the game capitalism is the poverty level. I’m sorry but if your parents bought you out of even having to play that level where do you get off giving anyone advice besides be luckier next time you get born?
Elon Musk does something stupider than I have ever done at least once a month in public these days. The notion that this system can be meritocratic when you gatekeep 75%+ of the population behind an almost unwinnable level is absolutely ridiculous. It took me the first 10 years of my career to get to the point where I could clear 50k a year consistently. I won’t be getting my youth and the energy I had back then back. They took the hardest working years of my life and all I got in return was the skills I picked up during that time period and a small mountain of debt.
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It’s basically just propaganda trying to keep the masses of people who are likely to be forever renters brainwashed into thinking that if they just work hard, side hustle hard, spend frugally, and maybe live with family/friends, they too can own a home and live the American Dream!
And then of those who don’t fall for it, a large percentage will be so outraged/depressed about it they just go for their favorite form of escapism. Either response works just fine for the wealthy, as long as people aren’t rioting.
More and more of this kind of propaganda is being cranked out it seems. Makes sense.
The propaganda really isn’t working anymore from what I’ve seen… and in the arts I’ve seen a LOT of capitalism as the villain going on over the last few years. Organized labor is picking up hard etc etc.
What’s interesting about this propaganda is the target of that propaganda. It seems to me the people it’s intended to work on are the top 5-10% families (5% for the younger, 10% for the older) who desperately want to believe that everything about the wonderful system they exist in is fine and stable.
I gotta say it is nice up here if you can just totally ignore how all this nice shit is getting to you. It would probably be easier for me if I didn’t earn my money sorting out a series of usually medium significant problems with getting that nice shit to us rich assholes.
If you want a house, skip 1-3 meals a day. Otherwise, quit yer bitchin’.
Article doesn’t seem that terrible to me? The opening line is person saying they bought a house because they were “lucky” and then follows up with the line about being “lucky enough” to have family to stay with.
I feel like there actually some value to these articles. Historically lot of young folks got indoctrinated with idea you should save money/pay debts/etc and then eventually buy a house. But seems housing economics over time really favor a buy a house the second you have means to do so approach?
The younger generations (young millennials and below) aren’t buying the bullshit at all.
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I mean they lowered what you get for buying into it quite a bit over the last generation. Buy the bullshit and be a loyal corporate drone who tries medium hard used to at least get you a small house, a 401k / pension, and sent your kid to state school. For our grandparents the deal was one worker and they got the above. For our parents generation it was both the parents work and they get the above… and now it’s both parents work, they probably shouldn’t have a kid, and you get a 1BR (for a kind of nice lifestyle) or a 2BR with a kid (for a kind of crappy lifestyle), extremely weak retirement savings, and no money for the kids college.
They’re lowering the standard of living for workers over time and lately the pace hasn’t even been slow lately. Lately it feels like the internal dialogue at the chamber of commerce is ‘we’ve been spotted dash for the finish line!’
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Would just building a shit ton of houses fix this? Like when I fly once every couple years it’s always crazy to me how quickly outside cities it’s mostly just fields/trees for as far as you can see. There is no land shortage, just a housing shortage right? Lot of that land is not very expensive per acre.
It’s a lot of it. But also wages haven’t kept up with inflation much less productivity. It’s just rich people constantly ‘optimizing’ every transaction they do trying to get the cost paid as low as it can go and the price charged as high as it can go. A large % of the time the ‘savings’ they’ve found are just forcing someone they have leverage over to do the same thing for less money… which leads to them doing the same thing to their employees and vendors… and on and on it goes.
Of course in 2024 we hit diminishing returns like 15-20 years ago (at least) on that sort of thing so we’re just pushing the pain forward a quarter so we can dress up this quarters numbers over and over again. The reason Berkshire Hathaway as a tangible thing has been crushing it for so long is that anything they’re doing they’re doing because they think it’s the right move for the long term. That means if their vendor has decent but not unreasonable margins and does a great job for them they aren’t going to demand that the vendor cut costs by X% next year to keep the contract… because that would force them to cut corners that could impact the quality of the work they’re getting and make their own product crappier.
If it seems like everything is getting shittier all the time it’s because it mostly is. That’s because there’s an endless drive from MBA’s mostly to make everything just good enough that you will pay the highest possible price point for the product that maximizes X for this quarter.
I wanna be clear I’m an efficiency minded dude. I care quite a bit about not wasting anything that I can prevent wasting at work. Space on a truck, hours in a truckers day, fuel, customers warehouse space, name a tangible thing and I can tell you what I’m doing to prevent wasting that thing. There’s a line where trying to cut costs can turn back on you and start triggering really ugly one off events. Everything has diminishing returns including efficiency particularly when there are other things being consumed trying to conserve any given thing. We are MILES into diminishing returns on this stuff because the thing our whole society is actually trying to do is hit this quarters numbers and it doesn’t matter what the trade offs even are to get that done anymore.
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That’s all true. In addition, everything young people have to buy (that boomers don’t) has 10x’d in a generation. Day care, health insurance other than Medicare, education, the list is endless.
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