One thing I'd say is you need to be really careful about is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Yeah, a bunch of these boomers are totally wrong on the math of owning a home. I had it happen to me just yesterday where a coworker was going off on how everyone needs to buy a house no matter what because it can only go up and it can only be good for your financial situation. When you're looking at an average house price of $850,000 as we were in Canada for a little while (and it's still pretty high, and in the 2 most populous cities it's still in the million plus range) and mortgage rates are at 7%, the amount you pay for interest alone is as much as a decent full-time job before you even touch the principal. Handing $60,000 to the bank is not good financial sense and anyone with a brain ought to know this isn't good financial sense.
On the other hand, other parts of the advice are good. You should create a budget. You should watch your expenses. You should try to set aside some amount of money for long-term savings & investment. Deferring gratification has been a key strategy forever and that hasn't changed. What's changed is that the boomer million dollar house isn't the investment that it was when it was a ten thousand dollar house.
To give the devil his due, the boomers had some tailwinds, but they've also had some really bad headwinds. They came of age into an era of massive inflation and constant recessions, which means that while their houses might have gotten more expensive, many of them lost their jobs or even their careers. We're choking on 7% mortgages, they had up to 30% mortgages which means the principal on their homes may have been massively smaller but their payments were often similar in size even without accounting for inflation. The rust belt was hollowed out, factories shut down, and they had to figure out how to survive. During the entirety of the boomers lifetime, wages as a % share of GDP have been dropping.
Yeah, a bunch of these boomers are totally wrong on the math of owning a home. I had it happen to me just yesterday where a coworker was going off on how everyone needs to buy a house no matter what because it can only go up and it can only be good for your financial situation. When you're looking at an average house price of $850,000 as we were in Canada for a little while (and it's still pretty high, and in the 2 most populous cities it's still in the million plus range) and mortgage rates are at 7%, the amount you pay for interest alone is as much as a decent full-time job before you even touch the principal. Handing $60,000 to the bank is not good financial sense and anyone with a brain ought to know this isn't good financial sense.
On the other hand, other parts of the advice are good. You should create a budget. You should watch your expenses. You should try to set aside some amount of money for long-term savings & investment. Deferring gratification has been a key strategy forever and that hasn't changed. What's changed is that the boomer million dollar house isn't the investment that it was when it was a ten thousand dollar house.
To give the devil his due, the boomers had some tailwinds, but they've also had some really bad headwinds. They came of age into an era of massive inflation and constant recessions, which means that while their houses might have gotten more expensive, many of them lost their jobs or even their careers. We're choking on 7% mortgages, they had up to 30% mortgages which means the principal on their homes may have been massively smaller but their payments were often similar in size even without accounting for inflation. The rust belt was hollowed out, factories shut down, and they had to figure out how to survive. During the entirety of the boomers lifetime, wages as a % share of GDP have been dropping.
The Romans don't take over Europe again -- it's the barbarians who stayed close to the earth, kept their feet nailed to the ground who inherited the continent.
After the fall of the Roman empire, even the eastern Roman empire only for a short time retakes Rome before being batted back by the new civilization that forms. The Eastern roman empire is almost a new civilization in how differently it developed from the western roman empire. The art and architecture are different (and iconoclasm unfortunately destroyed many examples of that). The philosophy was fundamentally different, deeply diving into Christianity and using it as a lodestone to find its way out of the decadence of the Western Roman empire, while also facing new threats since it was so much closer to Asia and constantly faced existential threats keeping it vigilant much longer. I think that's why scholars give it a different name than Rome, because the Byzantine empire was a new thing in a different region that never was quite the same thing as its predecessor.
When looking back through the 20th century and 21st century, I consider there to be two distinct eras. After the enlightenment period came the modern period (you can consider the French Revolution to be the beginning of the modern period for the purposes I'm talking about), which culminated in the horrors of the world wars. The world wars took a world that was vibrant and confident and excited about the future (All the bloody napoleonic wars came about because men were excited to go out and die for their country because they believed in their country) and broke it, leading to the postmodern period we live in today whose defining factor is the destruction of everything that came before. The world wars proved that we are just as barbaric as we ever were and the so-called modern man was a myth. Thus a period of destruction followed because people were tearing everything due to the PTSD of the horrors we created. As a result, the postmodern period has been about the destruction of values and replacing them with either nothing or with a minimally thought out emotional replacement that has no practical use. I expect the postmodern period to end with the pending global population collapse that's already started but will get really bad in the next 30 years or so.
The population collapse I'm talking about isn't something caused by a lack of resources or anything dramatic, it's a further manifestation of the suicidal impulse of postmodern society. The greatest generation came home from the world wars and procreated like mad. Their kids went out and procreated quite a lot creating the millennials which have been called the "echo boom". The millennials largely chose not to have kids and so the largest generation in history, the boomers, are starting to die off and they aren't being replaced by anything like the same amount of people, which will has created a virtually inescapable demographic cliff in most countries on earth. We won't be talking about the risks of overpopulation in the future, we're going to be facing the single largest population contraction in the history of planet earth.
In my view, there's no reason to be too concerned with the fall of postmodern civilization, that's inevitable as the moment the world wars ended and postmodernism started to become the modern paradigm, the failure of this civilization in its current form was inevitable. What we should be concerned with is protecting ourselves as best as we can from the wrath of the empire as it falls, and making sure we stay true to ourselves and stay grounded and anchored to reality.
One very positive thing is that whereas we've seen the greatest drop in the power of the non-elite individual ever in the past 50 years, as would be predicted by secular cycle theory, what comes afterwards is a golden age because the shrinking population gives individuals more bargaining power and individuals are better able to negotiate for their time and effort. We could even see entire dynasties replaced in many parts of the world, and there's no saying for sure what that looks like or what we replace the current order with.
Unfortunately, it is indeed true that just because there is upheaval it won't necessarily be good. Some secular cycles saw massive improvements in the lot of the people such as in 9th century europe where we saw many of the foundations laid for constitutional monarchies, but we saw the french revolution just became a bloody massacre that had everyone walking on eggshells for a long time and was so bad that some Frenchmen (the ones that were left after the purges) were actually considering putting the aristocracy back in charge (and did until they remembered that the aristocrats were decadent and parasitic)
The way to stay grounded in reality is to remember something important: Failure is an option. You CAN die, you CAN fail to procreate, and the spark of life that you represent that goes all the way back to the first single celled organism will be snuffed out. There are stakes, the physical world exists and you are not God, reality has the final say over what happens. Also, you need to find meaning in life. It's so easy once you see it, the world is beautiful and terrible and there's so many things besides the current moment in culture we can soak in to become something different than just the water we were born in.
After the fall of the Roman empire, even the eastern Roman empire only for a short time retakes Rome before being batted back by the new civilization that forms. The Eastern roman empire is almost a new civilization in how differently it developed from the western roman empire. The art and architecture are different (and iconoclasm unfortunately destroyed many examples of that). The philosophy was fundamentally different, deeply diving into Christianity and using it as a lodestone to find its way out of the decadence of the Western Roman empire, while also facing new threats since it was so much closer to Asia and constantly faced existential threats keeping it vigilant much longer. I think that's why scholars give it a different name than Rome, because the Byzantine empire was a new thing in a different region that never was quite the same thing as its predecessor.
When looking back through the 20th century and 21st century, I consider there to be two distinct eras. After the enlightenment period came the modern period (you can consider the French Revolution to be the beginning of the modern period for the purposes I'm talking about), which culminated in the horrors of the world wars. The world wars took a world that was vibrant and confident and excited about the future (All the bloody napoleonic wars came about because men were excited to go out and die for their country because they believed in their country) and broke it, leading to the postmodern period we live in today whose defining factor is the destruction of everything that came before. The world wars proved that we are just as barbaric as we ever were and the so-called modern man was a myth. Thus a period of destruction followed because people were tearing everything due to the PTSD of the horrors we created. As a result, the postmodern period has been about the destruction of values and replacing them with either nothing or with a minimally thought out emotional replacement that has no practical use. I expect the postmodern period to end with the pending global population collapse that's already started but will get really bad in the next 30 years or so.
The population collapse I'm talking about isn't something caused by a lack of resources or anything dramatic, it's a further manifestation of the suicidal impulse of postmodern society. The greatest generation came home from the world wars and procreated like mad. Their kids went out and procreated quite a lot creating the millennials which have been called the "echo boom". The millennials largely chose not to have kids and so the largest generation in history, the boomers, are starting to die off and they aren't being replaced by anything like the same amount of people, which will has created a virtually inescapable demographic cliff in most countries on earth. We won't be talking about the risks of overpopulation in the future, we're going to be facing the single largest population contraction in the history of planet earth.
In my view, there's no reason to be too concerned with the fall of postmodern civilization, that's inevitable as the moment the world wars ended and postmodernism started to become the modern paradigm, the failure of this civilization in its current form was inevitable. What we should be concerned with is protecting ourselves as best as we can from the wrath of the empire as it falls, and making sure we stay true to ourselves and stay grounded and anchored to reality.
One very positive thing is that whereas we've seen the greatest drop in the power of the non-elite individual ever in the past 50 years, as would be predicted by secular cycle theory, what comes afterwards is a golden age because the shrinking population gives individuals more bargaining power and individuals are better able to negotiate for their time and effort. We could even see entire dynasties replaced in many parts of the world, and there's no saying for sure what that looks like or what we replace the current order with.
Unfortunately, it is indeed true that just because there is upheaval it won't necessarily be good. Some secular cycles saw massive improvements in the lot of the people such as in 9th century europe where we saw many of the foundations laid for constitutional monarchies, but we saw the french revolution just became a bloody massacre that had everyone walking on eggshells for a long time and was so bad that some Frenchmen (the ones that were left after the purges) were actually considering putting the aristocracy back in charge (and did until they remembered that the aristocrats were decadent and parasitic)
The way to stay grounded in reality is to remember something important: Failure is an option. You CAN die, you CAN fail to procreate, and the spark of life that you represent that goes all the way back to the first single celled organism will be snuffed out. There are stakes, the physical world exists and you are not God, reality has the final say over what happens. Also, you need to find meaning in life. It's so easy once you see it, the world is beautiful and terrible and there's so many things besides the current moment in culture we can soak in to become something different than just the water we were born in.
In this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTDTVbourzU
I discovered something I never knew about the mouse utopia experiment: There were roaming gangs of violent mice who actively tried to attack anyone who was perpetuating positive behaviors in mouse society and had kids (who would need to exist for the mouse society to continue)
The more I learn about this experiment, the more I see the insane genocidal behaviors I see in our civilization. If the world were to be like the final result of the mouse utopia, it will be a successful genocide.
I discovered something I never knew about the mouse utopia experiment: There were roaming gangs of violent mice who actively tried to attack anyone who was perpetuating positive behaviors in mouse society and had kids (who would need to exist for the mouse society to continue)
The more I learn about this experiment, the more I see the insane genocidal behaviors I see in our civilization. If the world were to be like the final result of the mouse utopia, it will be a successful genocide.
Canadians are kinda retarded, so I wouldn't be surprised if they misunderstood the question or don't understand that suicide kills people.
I'm afraid Canada isn't nearly that based. At least not yet.
No, that's a few insane bureaucrats rolling a nat 1
No, that's a few insane bureaucrats rolling a nat 1
I'm really glad to hear that there's no problems in Canada at all, and all those tent cities must be gone, everyone's able to afford enough food to eat, and personal debt is at all time lows!
Wait... If what she said is true then only one witness is required to prove the fact that the 2020 election was stolen...
Trump's off the hook, boys!
Trump's off the hook, boys!
That's clever. Took me a minute for the double meaning to hit (assuming it was intentional)
It’s interesting, there’s 2 times you can learn about who someone really is: Make things hard and take away their power, or make things easy and give them power.
You never know, people who are really good in one circumstance are really bad in the other or vice versa. You see it though, people who were decent when they were poor or even when things were normal; give them an ounce of power over others and suddenly they become tyrants. It’s an easy thing to fall into, especially when you have never been trained in the exercise of power and you think that once you have power you have a duty to use it early and often.
In such I think you can see where a guilt based ethic is so important -- having a good internal model of what a good and just person looks like and striving to be that person. Most people would look at a tyrant from outside a system and go "obviously that's the bad guy, he's abusing his power and harming others in the process", but if they end up in such a situation themselves they may be too concerned with chasing a theoretical ideal or some other piece of the puzzle rather than the holistic view of whether you're still a person you can look in the mirror and be proud of.
You never know, people who are really good in one circumstance are really bad in the other or vice versa. You see it though, people who were decent when they were poor or even when things were normal; give them an ounce of power over others and suddenly they become tyrants. It’s an easy thing to fall into, especially when you have never been trained in the exercise of power and you think that once you have power you have a duty to use it early and often.
In such I think you can see where a guilt based ethic is so important -- having a good internal model of what a good and just person looks like and striving to be that person. Most people would look at a tyrant from outside a system and go "obviously that's the bad guy, he's abusing his power and harming others in the process", but if they end up in such a situation themselves they may be too concerned with chasing a theoretical ideal or some other piece of the puzzle rather than the holistic view of whether you're still a person you can look in the mirror and be proud of.
Who can forget the vegan guy with superpowers? (not a shoop, why would you say that?)
If you ever see me drop some 5 paragraph 6000 character essay on you...
Don't worry about it. It's just kinda my thing.
Don't worry about it. It's just kinda my thing.
No, Canada's got some serious problems to face with respect to the implementation of MAID. Stories that are morally reprehensible to anyone with an ounce of good in their conscience.
It's good to allow terminally ill people to get help to stop their suffering. One longstanding family friend had terminal cancer and instead of having to suffer through a long and pointless treatment that would inevitably end in death, he was able to choose the day and go in and end things before the last tragic steps.
On the other hand, there's a lot of really morally repugnant stories that came out of the MAID program. For some monsterous bureaucrats it became the first choice instead of the absolute last resort; It became something being pushed for by the state instead of a freedom afforded to individuals.
In one case, A paralympic athlete asked for a chair lift for their house and was referred to MAID.
https://aleteia.org/2022/12/07/disabled-canadian-veteran-says-she-was-offered-suicide-in-lieu-of-chair-lift/
In another case, a veteran with PTSD was offered MAID instead of help.
https://nypost.com/2022/08/22/canadian-soldier-with-ptsd-outraged-when-va-suggested-euthanasia/
In yet another case, someone applied for MAID not because of their medical conditions but because they couldn't get help with living costs, and they went through with it -- the woman who applied for MAID on the grounds of potential poverty is dead now, successfully killed by the state.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/11/canada-cases-right-to-die-laws
Only under strong public backlash did the ruling coalition choose to delay plans to allow people to kill themselves solely for mental health reasons.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/maid-mental-illness-health-1.7101021
Once the state killing you legally is on the table, that's something that has to be treated with the most serious gravity, and moral weight, and the present ruling coalition lacks the moral foundation to be making such calls.
It's good to allow terminally ill people to get help to stop their suffering. One longstanding family friend had terminal cancer and instead of having to suffer through a long and pointless treatment that would inevitably end in death, he was able to choose the day and go in and end things before the last tragic steps.
On the other hand, there's a lot of really morally repugnant stories that came out of the MAID program. For some monsterous bureaucrats it became the first choice instead of the absolute last resort; It became something being pushed for by the state instead of a freedom afforded to individuals.
In one case, A paralympic athlete asked for a chair lift for their house and was referred to MAID.
https://aleteia.org/2022/12/07/disabled-canadian-veteran-says-she-was-offered-suicide-in-lieu-of-chair-lift/
In another case, a veteran with PTSD was offered MAID instead of help.
https://nypost.com/2022/08/22/canadian-soldier-with-ptsd-outraged-when-va-suggested-euthanasia/
In yet another case, someone applied for MAID not because of their medical conditions but because they couldn't get help with living costs, and they went through with it -- the woman who applied for MAID on the grounds of potential poverty is dead now, successfully killed by the state.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/11/canada-cases-right-to-die-laws
Only under strong public backlash did the ruling coalition choose to delay plans to allow people to kill themselves solely for mental health reasons.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/maid-mental-illness-health-1.7101021
Once the state killing you legally is on the table, that's something that has to be treated with the most serious gravity, and moral weight, and the present ruling coalition lacks the moral foundation to be making such calls.
How are we supposed to fill our universities with people who pay full price and our cities with people lying to banks to take out million dollar loans if we do that?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag
This is a good article.
One of the dumbest things we've seen not just from science media but from media in general is this phrase "no evidence"
I have a rock here, and I claim that this rock will cause you to become a millionaire if you hold it.
So you start a double-blind study to prove it or disprove it.
Guess what? If your sample size is large enough, *someone* is going to become a millionaire by pure dumb luck. Whether you like it or not, that's evidence. It's poor evidence, it's overwhemingly contradicted by more, but guess what? There is evidence that holding the rock will cause you to become a millionaire!
It seems pedantic, but when people say there's zero evidence for something, and exactly one evidence shows up, then that claim that there's zero evidence is automatically refuted! Even if it's something that everyone agrees is false.
This is a good article.
One of the dumbest things we've seen not just from science media but from media in general is this phrase "no evidence"
I have a rock here, and I claim that this rock will cause you to become a millionaire if you hold it.
So you start a double-blind study to prove it or disprove it.
Guess what? If your sample size is large enough, *someone* is going to become a millionaire by pure dumb luck. Whether you like it or not, that's evidence. It's poor evidence, it's overwhemingly contradicted by more, but guess what? There is evidence that holding the rock will cause you to become a millionaire!
It seems pedantic, but when people say there's zero evidence for something, and exactly one evidence shows up, then that claim that there's zero evidence is automatically refuted! Even if it's something that everyone agrees is false.
