Did you not go to school when you were younger? You benefited from those schools at some point in your life.
The doctors giving you end of life care also went to school. Unless you are ok with us changing that?
I love the “but I don’t use that so I shouldn’t pay for it” argument. Like come on, my dude, that’s what a society is about. If you don’t want to live in society, move to Siberia.
I’m tired of people acting like they shouldn’t contribute to the betterment of society as a whole because their contribution doesn’t benefit them personally, or benefits others they dislike.
I always take it to a literal extreme when these sorts of arguments come up.
“I’m happy paying towards unemployment benefits because everybody needs to eat. Even if its going to drug addicts spending it on crack, because they need thst crack and theyre going to get it. I’d rather them be in the dole office with their hands out than sneaking around my house in the night taking my xbox.”
Same is true for people who really really don’t want to work. I’d rather they live in social housing, get some small social assistance check and spend their time in front of the tv drinking beers, than roam the streets and bothering people by begging or worse committing crimes because they can’t hold a job down and refuse all help.
Some people just can’t be convinced to better their lives and these people need to be managed and jail is not the answer. And often these people do turn around and start accepting help.
I vote for school tax levys. I don’t (and probably will never) have kids.
And it absolutely does benefit them personally, just in ways they’re too dumb to see.
People are not a consistent part of any community and have no relationship with the past or future of any community. The past is a completely different world, as will be the future, and we move through communities constantly in modern life, never becoming a meaningful and enduring part to any of them. A community would have to be part of our sense of self to have any of our interests be in its future. The pace of change has completely disconnected us from any concept of planning beyond the boundaries of our own lives, especially into a future we will never see and for communities we don’t, and never felt a part of.
We have also become almost completely powerless with regard to how the world is shaped and for what purpose. Corporations, the wealthy and powerful, and authoritarian inclined governments have taken that power from individuals and communities to use for their personal desires. They are also the cause of the pace of change, creating the very context of community disempowerment which enables them to take that power.
Everyone in the lower 99% is struggling to simply keep existing and find a justification to do so, maybe have a couple of kids if they’re lucky. It is not reasonable, living in a rapidly changing system of constant political and economic selfishness, to expect the struggling people to make their own lives harder to try and make plans that benefit other people’s futures. It’s impossible to even know what plans are wise when the powerful and wealthy change things so fast to benefit themselves, that most plans will never have any confidence to even be fulfilled.
We are all being fucked, present past and future, by the runaway selfishness of people whose power is seemingly unchallenged. Pointing fingers at each other for making desperate decisions that hurt others to protect ourselves is fucking stupid. These are not the choices we want to be making but are forced to. There are no good choices to make, be selfish or be dead is becoming normal. That’s the world we inherited.
I am 70 and tired of paying for wars, corporate welfare, and bailing out bankers and oil companies.
EDIT: And genocide.
Sorry, but Bari Weiss is running a story on 60 minutes about a rich black woman using food stamps to buy a fancy car. So now we’re cutting the Give Surplus Food to Starving People program in half and giving twice it’s value to a company run out of Hondorus by Peter Thiel’s Ket dealer called QueefCoin.
The best corporate propaganda money can buy.
“Why should I, a man who religiously drives and has no children or grandchildren, pay for these things?”
Because it benefits you and society at large in other ways. It is in society’s best interests that people are educated so they can do much more in society than they would’ve otherwise. It is in society’s best interests to have robust, comprehensive public transport, because that way the roads won’t be clogged up, stopping you from driving. It benefits you that the nurses at your care home can read what meds they’re giving you and can do maths. It benefits you if people can get to their destinations without driving otherwise you would not be able to park at your destination. Your meals on wheels not getting stuck in traffic? The ambulance being able to get to you and get you to the hospital on time? The people around you being able to have the skills to operate in not just the work place and the world? All of that benefits you.
Thinking like this is how we ended up in the shit we’re in worldwide.
Yep.
Just cause you don’t actively use it every day, doesnt mean you don’t actively benefit from it every day.
People are so myopically fucking ignorant…
I have met people who think like that on the regular and I just want them to go move to an American Car Suburb and see how they like it.
Funny username
I’d be willing to wager these people also exhibit telltale signs of anti-social personality disorders. Who woulda thunk, that anti-social people would be antithetical to society?
How that person move around at 90 without public transit? Hope is not driving.
Cycling? My granddad did at 90. 4 years later he still does, but on 3 wheels
Not sure, but the two arguments aren’t even equal.
“I don’t want to pay for something I’ll never receive” vs. “I don’t want to pay for something I already received”
Neither one is a good attitude, but one seems more selfish than the other. Now, if the other person said “well I was well off and went to private school so we never used it” at least it would be more similar, still greedy
What public transit. If you don’t live in a larger city there is none.
Edit: I would surly love to hear from the down votes how I’m wrong? But I doubt I will.
If only there was some way to change that
Give up! All is lost!
If it has a blue check on a Nazi platform, it might be a Nazi.
They also give out blue checks for verified accounts and frequently if you don’t even ask for it. Plus, lots of them are just idiots, not Nazis.
At 40, I’m tired
opinion: individualism is a plague and the generational war is a distraction
Yep, the real war is the class war and the billionaires are winning.
Amen, brother. No war but the class war.
Jesus Christ you said the exact words I was going to. Am I robot?
Na brother, we’re all just equally burnt out from this capitalist hellscape the billionaires created, and with a collapsing global ecology, we want justice for the future that has been stripped away from us and our children.
Preach sister!
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
It’s a common mantra.
Exactly. Class is the biggest thing that divides us, the rest is a distraction.
Most billionaires are also boomers. The class war and the war against gerontocracy are one and the same.
There are shitty people in every generation.
Neither of those are billionaires.
Gerontocracy is fundamentally an issue of the few holding more than their fair share of wealth and power at the expense of others and pulling the ladder up behind them. It is a class issue same as everything else.
We’ve got Sam Altman and Taylor Swift in the millennial category off the top of my head. Elon Musk is Gen x, not a boomer. So boomers have Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia at the moment, but soon they’ll go to gen X and the problems will perpetuate. Oh, Googles Ceo is Gen X as well
Yes, and once boomers start dropping dead, gen Xers will be fighting tooth and nail to hold on to their slice of the state pension ponzi at the cost of everyone below them on the ladder the same as boomers did. That does not change my point at all.
There is no fair and equitable world in which state pensions can continue working the way they work now. The system was built on the expectation of infinite growth with every generation being larger than the last.
With the projected population decline, the inflationary effects of creating money in order to pay pensions could actually be beneficial
Yeah, if we saw something like an unavoidable 25% tax on all wealth over $300 million, we would see around $2.5 trillion in taxes that could be distributed as a universal base income that would place $17,857 per average household (2.5) in the U.S.
If we actually combated housing prices, that could potentially cover housing everyone in the U.S. from that alone, then retirements would only need to cover food costs. There are a lot of changes that would need to be made, they just won’t come until the last second when people are dying in large enough numbers to make people do something.
Musk is Gen X, Suckerberg is a Millenial, Luckey is a Zoomer, etc. etc.
Money generally takes some time to acquire, so many ultra rich will skew towards older demographics by volume. As Boomers die, it will be mostly Millennial billionaires as we’re the biggest age demographic alive now.
This is so close. You’re nearly there. Just let go.
opinion: individualism is a plague and the generational war is a distraction
people should be able to have their own sense of choice and identity.
people should also realise that together we can make it so that everyone can reach their full potential, making society better.
pay your fucking taxes
I love taxes, I would gladly pay even more taxes if that meant everyone would be provided for.
Except at the moment our taxes here in Belgium are already quite high, and our tax system is a complete cluster fuck with plenty of loopholes for the strongest shoulders to not have to carry their weight. Some part of that is even fraudulent, and they’re trying to get a law through right now to find those cases of fraud more efficiently… But it is being opposed by parts of the govt with privacy as the excuse (which I’d normally agree with, except what they’re trying to change is not that egregious afaik and the ratio of found vs investigated fraud is insane)
I wasn’t calling out your tax Stance, more of a general statement to go with the “pro individualism” statement I have.
I wasn’t calling you out at all just going on a bit of a tangent :)
We can’t, because there is always a percent of people, a large percent, for whom suffering is the point.
We can’t, but something else can, and something more civilized will displace us.
Our evil dies with us.
There can be more than one issue, of which both of these are a problem.
The boomers and the rediculously wealthy have the same mindset: fuck you, I’ve got mine
Something something not all boomers. There’s selfish rich people in every age group. In the case of Boomers they happened to be born at the same time as a ton of other people, so they became the most influencial voting block (and later the wealthiest voting block because of the political influence) but of course many boomers are absolutely struggling financially, getting screwed over by the same ladder pulling that younger folks are getting screwed over them
For sure I don’t disagree.
But as you say, they are the wealthiest generation ever. And based on who is voted in and policy made (at least in my country), they very much don’t want to share that wealth.
My parents are a part of that struggling generation, so I know first hand it’s not all
It’s a myth that all the boomers got theirs. Don’t get me wrong, our deal is absolutely worse, but the rich have been fucking people for profit as long as there’s been rich people.
Fun fact, the guy who posted that (Caleb Hammer) is a YouTuber that allegedly hired actors to pretend to be broke people making bad financial decisions to get money off selling you a budgeting course when real people weren’t shocking enough for the audience, and also allegedly pressured a guy into doing OnlyFans after touching him inappropriately. Fun! /s
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beware-austin-based-creator-caleb-hammer-victor-vulcano-bjzaf
Jesus that’s on Linked in
Linked in is basically facebook for weirdo “80 hour workweeks should be a minimum, thats how I show my dedication!” types.
The allegations don’t entirely surprise me, either. I find it hard to believe people the kind of people desperate enough to come on his show, would act like that without an incentive of being encouraged, or just being wholesale fake actors.
Wouldnt surprise me if the accusations of being a right wing troll prove accurate, with how they keep seemingly trying to get people who look like what right wingers think liberals are, just to scream at them and denegrate them while they act, according to script, flippantly.
Jesus Christ, it’s not Jason bourne
I’ve seen a bunch of the videos. Ones from a year ago or longer were much better, lately he’s been a dick.
Common Caleb L.
I love paying for schools, because I hate being surrounded by dumb people.
Jokes on you, I pay for schools and am still surrounded by dumb people!
How unbearable would it be if they received no education, I can’t imagine.
The underfunding or undercutting of education is a big part of why we’re in the current situation
Yup, stupid people vote Republican. Their war on education will only end when their party is dead, burned, buried, and pissed on.
stupid people vote Republican
That’s not true, though. Partisanship is far more tied up with local industry than individual intelligence or educational attainment.
People who earn money in Republican friendly industries vote Republican. What the GOP has done to capture the nation is to seed big swing states with a petrochemical industry and tell people “if you vote Democrat, they’re going to Green the economy and you’ll lose your cushy jobs”
I’ve heard this argument before. It seems to neglect how much modern libertarian ideology is packed into the modern school curriculum.
Conservatives scream about education being Marxist and Woke. Thousands of teachers are purged. Curriculum gets ratcheted further to the right. And by the time your own kids are going to school, they’re asking why history textbooks are venerating Newt Gingrich, bio textbooks include disclaimers decrying evolution and germ theory, and math class is just 8 hours a week of long division exercises the whole semester.
But you can’t just pretend we’re living in a Shepard Tone of a society, because we’re here now in spite of “superior” education we received a generation or two ago.
We can’t just blame this on “schools make you smart/dumb” because so much of your modem understanding of the world is formed after you’ve graduated.
If you’re 90 and that selfish, you shouldn’t have made it to 90.
Overgrown toddler. (The actor going on the dumb rant, not you)
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit”
So many people don’t understand why we live in a society, and apparently have no capacity for empathy.
They’re free to go live in the wilderness, with no roads, no fire department, no water or electricity, no services whatever, and find out how much they’re actually benefiting from our collective.
They won’t, because though they like to complain, they’re pussies who can’t be bothered to think for 5 minutes that the fact they can read and write their snarky bullshit is because they benefitted from free education, else they’d be illiterate.
But gods forbid they pay back the overwhelming amount they benefit from society in a small way. It’s fucking infuriating.
As someone who works on private wells and water systems, its always baffling to me when someone with a “hunt camp” more luxurious than any house I’ll ever afford is complaining about the cost of our services. Like dude your “camp” is 2000 sqft and 200 kms from the nearest city. Yea its gonna cost a bit to make your well water clean, clear, and safe to drink while running on a solar system.
They’ll even start to question my wage and why the bill costs so much (as if i have any say) completely tone death to the struggles of people outside their class. They imply if i was paid less their bill would be much cheaper despite me barely making enough to own my own tiny home and my wages really aren’t a major cost on the bill.
if you guys don’t have much competition, you should start treating those customers fairly
and by fairly I mean treat them how they treat you
Sounds like you need to raise your rate. And also not break out your wage from the other costs in the invoice.
You know the Mongols did this thing where they poisoned wells.
They’re free to go live in the wilderness, with no roads, no fire department, no water or electricity, no services whatever, and find out how much they’re actually benefiting from our collective.
That’s the neat part. They do try, repeatedly, and it always fails. A classic one is Grafton. It’s also known as A Libertarian Walks into a Bear because their little paradise got overrun by aggressive bears. Lack of public services will do that.
we live in a society, while rich people live in an economy
You are not free to do any of those things as the land is owned and you would be squatting. These people are removed by force. There is no choice except engage with society as there are no other options.
You’d have to buy your own land, of course.
But you could buy a tiny plot in the middle of nowhere, not hook up any utilities or have roads, and just live off your land if you wanted.
There are small parcels in the middle of noplace that nobody wants because there are no roads, utilities, or other services.
Small parcels? Australia and many other places are pretty much empty. And yes, nobody wants to be there for a reason.
Yeah, but ‘nobody wants to be there for a reason’ is my whole point.
It will absolutely suck for you. That’s why civilisation is better, and also why we have to make some concessions to be in a society.
There’s no utopia where everything is perfect. There never was.
If you want societal amenities, you have to pay for them in some small way, and if you don’t, your life will be very hard. Those have always been the choices.
I know. I just wanted to point out that the are huge swaths of land that are empty, not buy tiny patches.
But you could buy a tiny plot in the middle of nowhere, not hook up any utilities or have roads, and just live off your land if you wanted.
Not legally mate.
You literally can do that.
Why do people seem to think this is impossible?
What’s changed? Some parts of that life are sometimes illegal, but most people haven’t been against it like this.
What’s different?
For one there’s zoning laws, most property do not allow any construction, so you’re fucked for shelter. Likewise if you’re on agriculutrally zoned land as most of those large rural parcel are you are legally required to use it for commercial farming. You can’t just go and fell trees or hunt animals, so you’ll be fucked for food. Most councils do not allow new constructions that don’t meet rigid standards such as requirements for plumbing, so no more out-houses. You’re often not allowed to stay on many properties for extended periods of time (i.e. more than a few weeks or month). And if the council ever finds or hears of you living in such a place, they’ll send the police for you
Linking to a few mansions in the bush isn’t the same thing as being able to just go fuck off to woop-woop for the rest of your days.
Well, yeah. Regulations are a major part of society, and a major reason we tend to come together. Yet another reason libertarianism is misguided.
Regulations can be good, they can also be bad.
Such as regulations demanding housing meets a certain area size or standard plumping system means we are not allowed to live in affordable tiny homes with composting toilets.
They’re free to go live in the wilderness, with no roads, no fire department, no water or electricity, no services whatever, and find out how much they’re actually benefiting from our collective.
Where?
This is what I want to do, but I can’t afford to buy land on which to do it (and not just any land is useful for this either, it needs to be capable of supporting people before you can count it). Land enough to support a small homestead isn’t cheap, and zoning/local laws often restricts what you can do on it. So for example you may buy land, but not be allowed to drill a well, even if you have the means and knowledge to do so. Or if you buy land you can afford, you may not be allowed to build a permanent structure on it at all.
You’ll get kicked out (and possibly fined) of both state and national parks in the US if they find you “permanently camping”, which they are likely to do since there are frequently people out there. The only other option is squatting on private property. If you get caught before whatever time passes for squatters laws to take effect, you lose everything you’ve built up.
I mean don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind paying for things I’ll never use because it makes society as a whole better. All I’m saying is opting out of living in a society is nearly impossible for most people even if they are ok with not having all the stuff society funds like roads and fire control.
Search off-grid properties. They exist.
For the downvoters, here are some in the US:
https://www.landsearch.com/off-grid/united-states
Plenty of gorgeous listings.
And in Australia:
https://www.realestate.com.au/news/for-sale-australias-best-offgrid-properties/
Some very beautiful places, and also some very cheap.
Or Iceland:
https://www.bluehomes.com/buy-secluded-Iceland/ISL/10AL/AL/en/theme3.html
Or Siberia?
Off grid in Australia is a joke.
You’re still located within a council who have bullshit laws and won’t even allow you live in a tiny home on your land because it’s not up to code that only allows for McMansions.
Yes I know, I’ve looked at them. That’s how I know they are quite expensive.
But you never have to pay for utilities, rent, taxes for schools or roads or services … obviously it wouldn’t be completely free to purchase the land.
Ok, but if your plan is to live solo forever and not interact with society, you’d basically need to pay for it upfront. That means you need a lot of money all at once, otherwise you’ll still need income, which limits the ability you have to be separate from society.
Yes, that would need to be the plan. One upfront payment then never paying for utilities or other things forever. That’s the only way this works. You don’t need income, because you live on rabbits and fish and your garden. If your house burns, you put it out with buckets from your stream. You build your house yourself by cutting down trees.
If you get sick, you either die or you don’t.
I think this is madness, but that’s how you do this.
Right, and you get why this is impossible for most people? That was my original point. Most people, even if they want to do this, can’t. It’s unaffordable.
The point is that your suggestion that someone is free to do this is just very much not the case.
It’s almost as if we all rely on each other to exist. If only there was a word for that.
People aren’t down voting because they don’t think the properties exist, they’re down voting because your argument doesn’t really make sense. People that are saying, “I’d rather just live in the wilderness” are not the ones that can afford to just purchase land. You almost will certainly have to pay taxes on the land as well.
Saying you can not participate in society by participating in society very hard so you can afford to participate a little less and a little further from society isn’t what these people are looking for, they want to hop in a truck with some tools, drive into the woods, never to be seen again. Without a million dollar piece of paper saying they’re allowed to.
I like how your dream of self-sufficiency starts with there being g a road you can drive on. Or do you think most woods are reasonable places for driving trucks? You’d be better off buying a donkey or mule. Worst case scenario, you’d have a bit more meat to eat before you starved.
I was speaking figuratively, but if you want to be literal, I never said anything about a road, and there’s many kinds of trucks that can drive over many types of terrain.
The kind of truck that can handle any kinds of undeveloped forest are more expensive than the land you say is too expensive for the people who would want to do what you’re saying. So, unrealistic expectations all around.
many kinds of trucks that can drive over many types of terrain
truck that can handle any kinds of undeveloped forest
Again, not what I said. A second hand F150 or Tacoma will get you damn near anywhere you want to go that is not heavily forested and is certainly cheaper than a plot of land. You’re trying to pick minute details of my comments and blow them up into the most literal sense of the words yet somehow failing to actually read what I’m saying.
At this point the conversation is a day old and the chance of actually interesting dialogue coming from it is practically zero, so any further misreadings will have to be done on your own.
Well yeah, I get that. But there are plots for really cheap, but they don’t have any kind of access to water, sewage, or whatever. Plots for like 10,000 or less. That sounds like a lot, I suppose, but it isn’t. I think it’s more that people don’t understand how money works,
God I hate boomers
The rich and powerful are making us hate each other to distract us of the real problems of the world
Yes, but boomers are a chunk of the reason that the rich and powerful continue to be able to grasp and maintain power.
If boomers ceased to exist tomorrow and elections were held, I think there’d be a good swing left. Not a total swing, but substantial.
The machine would stop having elections at that point, or just come up with more convolutions to try and undermine the sentiments within the movement of any emerging “public consciousness”.
The revolution Must Not be Televised (or on the internet, lol)
Good thing it won’t be too long until it’s over.
Disagree, the machine is 99% boomers to begin with. It would cease to exist.
the machine is 99% boomers to begin with.
These people don’t look like boomers to me.
I wouldn’t put money on it (especially since that technology is precisely what has gotten us into such catastrophes as for example all the oil cartels buying government influence around the world, wanting to continuously gain access to more of natures most profitable industrial raw material, despite all of us now recognizing what it would mean to actually burn all of it, and how, generally, the creation and use of better ways of capturing energy and byproducts from oil refineries, is not worth the tradeoff of letting robber barons around the now-more-global-than-ever world’s economy own nearly the whole of the worlds reserves of various resources through private claims made to vast scales of area of the globe is not, and will not likely ever end up being, a valuable or productive enough use case for those landscapes, and that the systems of measure we have been using to determine compensation, resource pricing, and measuring+recording debts have all contained various major design flaws which had not been established with enough guard rails in place [or maybe one could argue that no such single use currency could have enough guard rails, so perhaps upwards of 3 or 4 might be required] to be able to protect innocent lives throughout nature which have all each found their niche by carefully and patiently adapting a resilience to survive and thrive another day, despite constantly changing adversity throughout their environments.)
Boomers are only 28% of the US voting population. Try again.
And boomers are NOT all the same
Google search tells me 48% Democrat, 46% Republican and the remaining undecided
They’re way fucking more than 28% of the fucking politicians dipshit.
No need for the unnecessary hostility. It’s obvious that plenty of young people are voting for your rich politicians too. US politicians can’t win with only 28% of the vote. And US elderly make up a substantial portion of those below the poverty line, and they don’t all vote alike anyway.
boomers are a chunk of the reason that the rich and powerful continue to be able to grasp and maintain power.
Boomers are only 28% of the US voters. Explain why their chunk is more responsible and the younger 72%.
while that is true, it is also true that a majority of boomers I know are worth this feeling of contempt and loathing
Of the boomers I know
- one neighbor was a spiteful asshole, the other not
- my ex’s father is a fairly liberal vet
- my exs mother is not just liberal but is still at her age motivated by how much she can help people working at social services
- my mom is the most liberal in our family and frequently argues with my conservative brother
I hate them too but boomers can fuck off as well. Logan’s run was onto something.
Not that I disagree, but 90 would be silent generation.
Then you should disagree. Saying all boomers are entitled traitors is like saying all millennials squander their income on avocado toast.
