This is one of my favorite genres of journalism. See also: why is everyone so mad about the economy? Meanwhile, the economy: 3 chicken wings, a carrot, and a 1/2 lb of lentils is $37.
Seriously, we are also seeing record high inflation, used to 20 bucks could get me a bunch of drinks, a few microwavable meals to take to work, and some butter flavored Crisco to make my popcorn.
Now it might cover the butter flavored Crisco to make my popcorn and maybe one thing of drinks if it’s on special offer. And that wasn’t me comparing growing up to now, that’s me comparing two years ago to now
Well they finally connected dots 1 and 2, huh.
What I really don’t understand is all the people who in the next post tomorrow will mock China’s oversupply of homes. “Haha, stupid dictators who oversupplied the market. Their investors are all screwed because the homes didn’t go up in value.”
What over supply? You mean all the unfinished Ponzi homes?
The Chinese government overbuilt housing. Housing investors didn’t realize gains because there were more homes than people looking for homes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in_China
A ponzi scheme is where you collect investments and pay out the first investors high interest with the early money collected to make it appear you are legitimate and thereby trick more into giving you money.
Buying real estate which goes down in value because the government makes more homes isn’t a ponzi scheme. It’s no different than losing money investing in wheat futures by betting against the US subsidizing farmers. (which creates a surplus.)
Sounds like you haven’t heard of Evergrande
I referenced overbuilding above. Overbuilding into bankruptcy isn’t a ponzi scheme.
I was going to but then I saw an avocado toast and now I can’t afford a house. Silly me.
Wait, why didn’t you get a 34k gift from your grandfather to buy your first property, like avocado toast dickhead did?
Youre just doing it wrong, bro
Mmmm… Avocado toast sounds yummy… Here I go again wasting money on silly things like food. I can’t help myself 😭
Pfft that’s stupid. Everyone knows millennials prefer to rent because settling down just doesn’t fit our lifestyle, bro.
Plus we aren’t “handy” enough to deal with all the work of owning a home.
Just kidding, it’s because we’d rather be driving for Uber or something, I don’t know.
Point is, we’re just lazy, entitled, inept children.
Sadly, Millennials aren’t handy. Baby boomers are famous for the idea of being able to fix it themselves. If the dishwasher broke, they fixed it. If the carpet needed cleaning, they cleaned it. They enjoyed doing these tasks on their weekend. That is not the case with Millennials. They don’t care to understand how to fix something.
These are the same people that can’t use an iPad unsupervised without somehow getting tricked into sending $2k worth of bitcoin and their SSN to a scammer.
Boomers created the current system where you can’t “just fix” your dishwasher. The old dish washer at my parents can be fixed with a screw driver and a ¢25 washer from home depot. The newer ones are all glue, one way plastic clips, and stickers that say it can only be repaired by a certified repair shop. I get kinda what they are saying but the change didn’t happen in a vacuum. I used to repaired computers for a living and I noticed year after year computers became more difficult to repair. For most laptops you can’t just open them up and swap out bad parts. It’s all glued together and has micro components that need to be resoldered to the motherboard. Great for size but impossible to repair outside of the manufacturer. I mean for fuck sakes their are billion dollar military equipment that can’t be serviced without the manufacturers help. It’s all a scam to keep us dependent on corporations.
The pixel watch is so bad that if you crack the screen, Google tells you to throw it away and buy a new one. Apparently even Google themselves can’t repair that.
Proper watches >>>> wristphones
I can’t remember who made it, but some years ago before the big smartwatch boom, someone put out a watch that had a standard mechanism, but also a tiny one-line screen that would show information like texts to you. That seemed like a good middle ground. But I don’t see a lot of watches that fit that middle ground anymore.
Withings and then Nokia had this one. Looks decent
They still do: https://www.withings.com/mx/en/scanwatch-2
And they’re awesome. Battery lasts weeks on a single charge, works like a watch should, tracks all sorts of things and gives you silent notifications like a smart wearable should.
That might be the one I was thinking of.
isn’t that just a pager?
Only really high-end pagers showed texts and you didn’t have the convenience of wearing one on your wrist.
That said, it makes Google a hell of a lot more money if you keep buying new watches than if they have to keep repairing the old ones.
That’s the logic behind every one of those decisions that made things harder to repair. The only fix really is government intervention, because capitalist logic by itself dictates that this is how you make more profit.
Knock on wood, but I’m still rocking a fuckin’ Pebble. The build quality on these is fantastic.
Boomers invented using several different screws in a device to make it unfixable, and then making sure it broke in a year or two
Yeah, the shit they fixed was generally just a motor and some bearings, maybe with some simple electrical switches. Everything was simple and made as durable as possible because that used to be a selling point.
Modern appliances are specialized computers with moving parts that are designed with cheap, flimsy pieces that are only meant to last until their warrenty period runs out. One minute after that and its all “replacement parts? You mean call our service dept or buy a new one, right?”
Lots of boomers fixing modern machines out there? Somehow I bet they are still talking about that one time in 1983 when they changed out the belt in a dryer that had 6 parts total and had been working for 23 years. Yeah, congrats. You did a simple thing to a simple machine.
Being the guy who owns a truck (work truck, I’d love an electric work van or teleporter since we’re now in fantasy land lmao) I went with my parents to pick up a new washer and dryer for their house.
While wandering around one of those “we fixed this broken used stuff, and are now selling it to you at 70% original price” , the old guy behind the counter kept talking mad shit about how people my age don’t know how to just fix something, and the whole time I’m looking around at verious appliances, I notice something pretty obvious.
All this shit is old, extremely simple, or the only issue was clearly cosmetic and was likely purchased as part of a defect lot. No smart devices, no sensors, not even microwaves. Just things exactly like you described, a belt had broken, or some very simple swappable part needed swapped.
I asked him when the last time he fixed a computer was, or the last time he worked on a car from after 2010. Because I do those all the time, and never see people his age working on their own stuff, they always come to people my age. So maybe let’s just get along with our business and try to show off on our personal times, huh?
He thought that was hilarious, and I wasn’t intending for it to be rude so I just chuckled with him and went about loading everything up.
Honestly I love working on older things, and I like working on my truck because of how simple it is. My truck is from the 90s, and while it’s about half the size of modern trucks, I’ve always wanted a smaller one like an old Ford ranger or even some of the smaller pickups from the 60s/70s. If I could do an electric swap within my budget limitations on one of those, I’d be soooooo thrilled. Modern EVs are too complicated for me now. I can do electronics work, but damn.
Not to mention… you can’t fix modern appliances. They’re built to be replaced.
PLUS if you’re working multiple gigs to make ends meet over 40 hours a week, the last thing you want to do on your free hours off is try to take apart your dishwasher
This. My uncle used to have a garage and already in the nineties was complaining that fixing cars was about to become impossible due to the addition of electronic parts that were black boxes to him. 30 years later and we live in a world where obfuscation is done on purpose.
Edit: we must start a movement of open source appliances. Cut out the middleman, buy directly the parts and assemble the thing yourself, so youu know exactly how to fix it later on. If it works for 3d printers why can’t it work for kettles and dishwashers?
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In my experience, boomers pay someone else to fix it, then say they did it themselves. Gen x are the do it yourselfers.
Gen X here. I’m just shocked someone remembered us
I thought we couldn’t afford a home because we bought too much avocado toast?
And Starbucks. Remember had we invested in Starbucks instead of buying it, we’d be bagillionaires like heroes Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos who totally got rich the same way.
Yeah, just do the math! $5.00 cup of coffee every day for a year is a whopping $1,825! That’s like 2 weeks rent in LA! After 10 years you could buy a used Ford Fiesta :O
That last article comes sooo close to figuring it out.
Finally, renting allows millennials to live in more desirable or “happening” parts of cities that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive for home ownership.
That sure sounds like a fancy way of saying we can’t afford to buy houses.
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I bought a house because I hate being beholden to unreliable landlords. Shoddy maintenance, selling the place, neverending rent going up every year. Been there, done that.
Enjoy the neverending costs… Stay angry
And rent going up every year somehow isn’t neverending?
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Dude…you think your landlord is loosing money? You’re subsidizing all his expenses with the house and paying a nice extra on top of that. That’s what rent is!
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- You’re paying someone else’s mortgage
- Could be kicked out for no reason
- Can’t modify your home
- In the end, all that rent money goes towards nothing for you.
Enjoy not actually owning anything.
Enjoy thirty years of debt
You people are incredibly butthurt. I am pretty sure I deleted all my comments because you capitalists were annoying so why/how are you still writing me?
What exactly do you think rent is?
That and most landlords are in it to make money. You’re secondary to their budget.
Expenses to maintain a house should not be so overwhelming that renting is more cost effective. If that were the case how would a landlord make any profit?
It’s more likely that you were just particularly bad at homeownership. That’s on you, not owning a home in itself.
I never said I would be saving money by renting. I think I figured it out. You people are so weirdly defensive because you have to justify to yourself being in debt for 3 decades.
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ah, you see, the trick to getting into real-estate is to have been born earlier … and not live in Canada, some Canadian boomers are learning about that requirement now as more of them are choosing to go homeless rather than pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
Yeah the trick was buying a bunch of cheap homes in 2009 and sitting on them.
I’m a millennial and own a home and can fix things. I do get experts in sometimes when I am less familiar with the job. What I found was that the previous boomer owner did a lot of things wrong. I can find the code violations, but may need an expert to come up with better solutions. I shadowed my electrician and don’t need him anymore. Still have my plumber in a bit for now.
The previous owner of my place “fixed” the front door handle by gluing the mechanism into it. Now if I want to change my locks I have to replace the entire door. Cheers mate.
In my house (just bought it, renovating) the light switches by the front door seemed kind of loose behind the cover plate. Finally got around to looking at it and found that the switches and their plate are attached to the wall only with caulk; the metal box they’re supposed to be screwed to was somehow pushed a few inches into the wall. For bonus points, one of these switches produces a few seconds of loud humming when flipped followed by the main circuit breaker tripping.
Their is a fault in the circuit. What is the switch supposed to control? Had the same thing with the circuit for the lamppost. The wire for it wasn’t buried deep enough by the previous owner and became compromised over time. For the plates, they make longer screws and also spacers for times when the box is seated too recessed. If you don’t have those on-hand, you can remove the box and seat a new one properly, but that can be a lot of trouble depending upon the circumstances.
Acetone removes glue typically. Sometimes, when you think something is glued in hard, there is an extra screw that you missed.
My garbage disposal just broke. Turns out that the previous owner rigged the dishwasher drain in-line after the disposal, so that there is a chance that disposal water can kick-back into the clean dishes. Fixing that currently.
The kitchen hood vents into the attic, so have to fix that. The owner created a nest of electrical wires in the attic as well, so ended up creating a channel for them and organizing them so they are fastened nicely to the joists.
They created an unstable loft in the garage, so had to demo it since it was ugly as well. The list goes on and on.
I started laughing when I went into my attic and saw the vent duct just hanging out not connected to anything.
Change the door and take it with you when you move😈
JFC boomers are retarded.
Knock that shit off. Millennials wrote the story, for starters. That journalism degree had to go somewhere.
They probably wrote a perfectly reasonable story about people not buying homes for obvious reasons, and then, like always, some editor with a Master’s Degree in Being A Cunt put a clickbait title on it so we’d end up talking about the stupid thing and oh look is that the CNBC brand all over the place? It is. OP even typed it into the title, how helpful.
The last time I chased down one of these shitty meme stories, you know, the ones about too many avocado is why you can’t pay rent, I came to the sort of realization you don’t have because you just jump in here and have an emotional squirt about the meme.
Namely, the reason so many of these stories seem so fucking absurd is because the “young people” in the news story are specifically the adult children of the wealthy, the actual 1%. So yes, those assholes, all spending daddy’s money, are real bad at holding onto a buck and legitimately need scolding.
The target audience for ALL these articles is “daddy”, the holder of 1% wealth. Everyone else is too poor and the ad rates are abysmal for that demo.
If the article is in Forbes, WSJ, or Bloomberg then this is absolutely the case. They are talking to genuinely wealthy people about their own wasteful children and THAT is why they always seem to have absurd ideas about how much money the “millennials” have to spend. Their children really do have a lot of money to waste, that’s why they can’t stop paying $8 for a coffee. I guess CNBC wants a piece of the action, too.
And that’s the thing. None of this is about you. None of this is about most of the people reading the article or making stupid Tweets about it.
The typical millennial online has a fairly middle-class upbringing with a college degree for better or worse. Many of them have boss jobs, either holding positions of authority, or just working in the office, and not in the factory, which is a boss job enough.
So they get delusional. The floor monkeys at the factory know that they’re “the help”, but the college-educated types? They struggle. They delude themselves into thinking this is about them, that they are part of the conversation.
Nope. You’re “the help”. You may as well be one of the Filipinos in the sweatshop making underwear, you basically do not exist in this conversation, at all. It’s a tough pill to swallow as a Westerner with a degree.
So that’s why the articles are so “clueless”. The people writing them, for the intended audience of wealthy old people, mostly men still, are ignoring you as completely as you ignore the janitor at the mall. You might as well be a water cooler or some furniture to them.
They know why you’re poor. They employ you and control your access to money. They have all the records and it was them who made you poor. That’s not news. They know why you can’t buy a house because they made sure you wouldn’t have the funds. Instead, they bought 12 properties to rent this year and decided to lay off 500 people to tighten up the ship. They know why you’re fucked, because they’re fucking you.
But why their own kids, the wealthy babies of the 1%, are acting all stupid? That is a mystery to them, so they’re liable to read news articles about it. They don’t think of you as a child of concern, any more than you think of the eggs a housefly lays. You? You just come with the building. You’re the help.
Once you grasp that these news articles are aimed way, way, way over even your college-educated, “knowledge worker” head, then a lot of stupidity suddenly makes more sense.
Publish the book already.
Every time I see your comment it’s a goddamn novella
I love Mr. Robot. Reminds me a little about it. Not a cup of tea for everyone, but there was a lot to love about that show, from acting, dear gods the editing and some of the shots are just amazing, to being able to resonate with each and every character in one way or another.
Anyway, I send you virtual hugs because we are all fucked and sometimes we just need a damn hug in-between the horror show we dance to. And if you don’t want to be touched, then that is ok too.
Jfc. That was too much. Get to the point. Eat the rich.
k
And here I thought they wanted to live with their parents until they were 40.
News flash, the vast majority of people want to purchase a home, not continually rent forever. Yet, many can’t even afford to do so. More at 11.
It’s true. I am boycotting all the things I can’t afford, as well as all the things I can afford but no one has given me a good reason to buy.
swear as a culture we’re not just headed toward being only renters, but we’re being primed for the cultural dialogue around home ownership to be about what a pain in the ass it is and how renting is just so much better. This weird, Deleuzeian dystopia where the thought of owning land is just completely foreign to most people.
Just listened to an interview on NPR today saying that very thing.
