Ammianus wrote:noddy wrote:Ammianus wrote:In regards to the article:
Structural shift or not, its here to stay, permanently. Already we're getting smarmy sentiments about how its much more environmentally sound, sustainable, cool, hip, or less stressful and liberating it is to be less hung up on the previous "materialism". None of it can disguise the brutal truth of permanently lowered standards of living and opportunities for uplift and the lobotomized resignation accompanying it.
as you may have noticed humans are as a rule, very vain creatures, so what exactly is wrong about the generations that are going to get lowered standards of living whether they like it or not, short circuiting this drama by claiming they never wanted it in the first place.
the baby boomer dream of endless improvement via stable employment and wise governance and constant innovation aint exactly happening now is it ?
that was their vanity, why is it lobotomised resignation to have a different vanity ?
im quite keen to get rid of the compulsory middle class rules and baby boomer standards of living, they make me work far to hard for crap im barely interested in and steal time from things like friends and family and personal projects that make me feel human.
This expectation of rising standards of living and "endless improvement" are not only the fevered imaginations of the baby boomers, but also the very socioeconomic foundation the US currently rests upon, and arguably one of the foremost guiding principles that has sustained it since it was founded. If this bedrock were to not only change radically (which is guaranteed), but to also disappear (very likely), then it bodes ill for the American nation, to put it mildly, not that you as an outback bogan would understand.
i might be an outback bogan, or atleast enjoy a bit of that, but ive been watching the intermulectuals discuss this for many years now and even my reduced capicity gorilla brain understands this version of events is itself just one opinion and one version of the success.. i dont really feel i need to remind you that some think this "endless improvement" comes from letting people respond to change in their own way and some think it needs to be solved by interventions... so, ill need some more specificity if their is more than insults to be extracted from this speil.
the "baby boomer" dream to me is not indicitive of the history of the new world west, its an oddity that arrived post war and post colonialism and rejected most of the beliefs that came before it.
it has a fixation on housing always becoming more expensive and on taxes and rules and the powers of democracy that never existed in any previous generation, i know this because i have spent a fair bit of time with older people.
its built off their life experience alone and then they didnt bother having enough kids to grow it so that the demographic numbers that powered them and their experience looking after a much smaller elder generation could be replicated when they got old.
in their world jobs where stable and safe and all the worlds resources where theirs alone because the rest of the world had no interest in them.
these are all the issues that have been discussed ad nauseum on these forums for many years now.
Ammianus wrote:
I have no intrinsic problems with accepting a "lower" standard of living, provided that is competently managed and transitioned, is distributed as equally and justly as possible in its burdens, and leads quickly to something better. I do have problems, big problems, with certain ideological classes using it (or even defending it) for purposes of schadenfreude, moral puritanism, and various sundry agendas.
aaah, funny thing language, i can agree with that some portions of that but as always twitch at the competently managed bit, not enough political examples of that in my lifetime for me to want to sit round waiting for it.
i most certainly am aware of the fact that the mass movement of people to the cities based on the money gained from exports has resulted in a truckload of people with nothing to fall back upon, spotted that years ago when working in central melbourne with the government funded arts people, all good fun but my own sense of its fragility scared me too much to feel comfortable about it... for us its primary industry exports, for you it was manufacturing and a trusted economic system.. yours is unlikely to come back like it was, ours is dependant on china not stuffing up its incredible challenges and already that is scaling down.
i also come across nastier than i perhaps should because i dont really believe people can break bad habits until they are forced, its definately true of me and my experience with others, hence im more in favour of the hard stop on future debt than a "caring person" might be..
more simply put, i dont believe on any level we can refactor this into something that is better until the status quo maintained by debt is forced to re-evaluate, managed transitions sound fanciful to me, and id need a lot more detail that reveals more nuance in how to get all these disparate sundry agendas agreeing on something before i started taking it more seriously than any other middle class dinner conversation with its endless "but it would be easy if everyone agreed with me "
oh, and once again im reminded im talking to an american and your version of my right wing is so much more extreme than mine i realise most of my words are essentially useless and have different meanings to you,
our social structure has copped alot of privatisation via american influence but its still different and is no where near as extreme, the main "victims" of my version of this are the tax funded entitled ones on upper middle class wages who "manage" us with endless rules that make them more important, we have three layers of them from the local council, to the state and then the federals, all taking money and then all passing the buck for responsibility.
thats 30% of the tax pool in my country, if you also cut the corporate funding then its real money that could be better spent by me on my poor or the very east make its way out to the poor in general, not their comfy lifestyles at everyone elses expense.
id also prefer only one layer of government that then does take responsbility and because i want democracy and my voice to mean something, thats as local a government as possible.. the federal government is beyond my reach.