Quote:

---

1.The over-50 crowd will grow 21 percent in size in 10 years. The 18 to 49 age cohort will remain the same size. I’m not making this up. It’s Census data.

---

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

I'm buying stock in Tommy Bahama and Depends.

---

Quote:

---

http://www.esquire.com/features/young-people-in-the-recession-0412
The War Against Youth

The recession didn't gut the prospects of American young people. The Baby Boomers took care of that.

By Stephen Marche

Published in the April 2012 issue

Twenty-five years ago young Americans had a chance.

In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation.

This bleeding up of the national wealth is no accounting glitch, no anomalous negative bounce from the recent unemployment and mortgage crises, but rather the predictable outcome of thirty years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human potential has been consistently growing, generating greater material wealth, more education, wider opportunities — a vast and glorious liberation of human potential. In all that time, everyone, even followers of the most corrupt or most evil of ideologies, believed they were working for a better tomorrow. Not now. The angel of progress has suddenly vanished from the scene. Or rather, the angel of progress has been sent away.



Nobody ever talks about generational conflict. Who wants to bring up that the old are eating the young at the dinner table? How are you going to mention that to your boss? If you're a politician, how are you going to tell your donors? Even the Occupy Wall Street crowd, while rejecting the modes and rhetoric and institutional support of Boomer progressives, shied away from articulating the fundamental distinction that fills their spaces with crowds: young against old.

The gerontocracy begins at the top. The 111th Congress was the oldest since the end of the Second World War, and the average age of its members has been rising steadily since 1981. The graying of Congress has obvious political ramifications, although generalizations can be deceiving. The Republican representatives tend to be younger than the Democrats, but that doesn't mean they represent the interests of the young. The youngest senators are Tea Party members, Mike Lee from Utah and Marco Rubio from Florida (both forty). Here's Rubio: "Americans chose a free-enterprise system designed to provide a quality of opportunity, not compel a quality of results. And that is why this is the only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom of your home." He is speaking to people who own homes that have empty spare bedrooms. He will not or cannot understand that the spare bedrooms of America are filling up with returning adult children, like the estimated 85 percent of college graduates who returned to their childhood beds in 2010, toting along $25,250 of debt.

David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter, had the guts to acknowledge that the Tea Party's combination of expensive entitlement programs and tax cuts is something entirely different from a traditional political program: "This isn't conservatism: It's a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boom generation." The economic motive is growing ever more naked, and has nothing to do with any principle that could be articulated by Goldwater or Reagan, or indeed with any principle at all. The political imperative is to preserve the economic cloak of unreality that the Boomers have wrapped themselves in.

Democrats may not be actively hostile to the interests of young voters, but they are too scared and weak to speak up for them. So when the Boomers and swing voters scream for fiscal discipline and the hard decisions have to be made, youth is collateral damage. Medicare and Social Security were mostly untouched in Obama's 2012 budget. But to show he was really serious about belt tightening, relatively cheap programs that help young people like the Adolescent Family Life Program and the Career Pathways Innovation Fund were killed.

His intentions may be good — he may want to increase support for AmeriCorps — but the program shrunk last year. Three quarters of the applicants were turned away. He resisted Republican efforts to slash Pell grants by $845 per student, but then made other changes to the program that will save the government — or cost students, depending on your perspective — a projected $100 billion over ten years.

The youth vote still supports Obama, but in a chastened, conditional way. In hindsight, Obama's 2008 campaign looks like an indulgent fantasy in which the major conflicts in life simply don't exist. There may be no white America and no black America, no blue-state America and no red-state America, but one thing is clear: There is a young America and there is an old America, and they don't form a community of interest. One takes from the other. The federal government spends $480 billion on Medicare and $68 billion on education. Prescription drugs: $62 billion. Head Start: $8 billion. Across the board, the money flows not to helping the young grow up, but helping the old die comfortably. According to a 2009 Brookings Institution study, "The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children, measured on a per capita basis, with the ratio rising to 7 to 1 if looking just at the federal budget."

The biggest boondoggle of all is Social Security. The management of entitlement programs, already weighted heavily in favor of the older population, has a very specific terminal point that coincides neatly with the Boomers' deaths. The 2011 report by the Social Security trustees estimates that, under its current administration, the fund will run out in 2036, so there's just enough to get the oldest Boomers to age ninety.



Only 58 percent of Boomers have more than $25,000 put aside for retirement, so the rest will either starve or the government will have to pay for them. But the government's future ability to pay is decreasing rapidly precisely because the Boomers splurged so heavily during the Bush and Clinton years. Public debt per person in the United States currently stands at $33,777. George W. Bush inherited a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of 32.5 percent and brought it up to 54.1 percent during a period of economic growth. (The money borrowed from the future paid for massive tax cuts, with no serious reductions in domestic spending, two expensive wars, and a prescription-drug benefit added to Medicare.) Under Obama, the debt-to-GDP ratio has risen to 67.7 percent and is projected to rise to 74.2 percent this year.

This is no conspiracy; no nefarious backroom deal by political and corporate overlords. The impasse of the moment is, tragically, the result of the best aspects of the Boomers' spirit. The native optimism that emerged out of the explosively creative postwar world led them to believe that growth would go on forever; that peace and prosperity were the natural state of things. Their good intentions seem like willful naivete today, but the intentions were genuine. Clinton actually believed that globalization would export the First World rather than bring the Third World home; it did both. The prescription-drug benefit was the "compassion" in compassionate conservatism. All those tax cuts were intended to liberate opportunities, not destroy them.

Cynicism rises to fill the emptied space of exaggerated and failed hope. It's all simple math. If you follow the money rather than the blather, it's clear that the American system is a bipartisan fusion of economic models broken down along generational lines: unaffordable Greek-style socialism for the old, virulently purified capitalism for the young. Both political parties have agreed to this arrangement: The Boomers and older will be taken care of. Everybody younger will be on their own. The German philosopher Hermann Lotze wrote in the 1870s: "One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future." It is exactly that envy toward the future that is new in our own time.

And we will not talk about any of it. We will keep mum. We will hold our tongues lest we seem ageist, lest we seem bitter, lest we seem out of touch, lest we seem pessimistic, lest we seem divisive.

HOW TO DISENFRANCHISE A GENERATION:

Across the country, state branches of the Republican party are making a thinly veiled attempt to disenfranchise the young through "voting reform." The trick is simple: Require government-issue photo ID before allowing somebody to vote. Eighteen percent of young voters don't have current photo IDs. Scott Walker in Wisconsin has signed this "reform" into law. So has Rick Perry in Texas. Similar new rules are going forward in roughly thirty other states. Restricting out-of-state IDs is a natural next step, already under way: That way, thousands of college students won't be able to vote. The Advancement Project, a civil-rights advocacy group, calls the move "the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century."

Let's say you just graduated from high school.

College, right? You have to go to college. That's not just what your career counselor told you. That's in the numbers. If you go to college, you're significantly less likely to lose your job. The pay of college graduates has risen over the past twenty-five years and everybody else's pay has declined. Which curve do you want to be on?

And yet, at the exact moment when an education has never been more necessary, education is increasingly out of reach. From 1980 on, the price of attending a four-year college has risen by 128 percent. While the price has spiked, the quality has tanked. Students at college in 2003 did two-thirds the homework that students in 1961 did. In a survey published in 2011, 45 percent of students showed no improvement in "critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing" after two years of college. You did not read that incorrectly: That's no improvement. None. And how could the results be any different? Three decades ago, 43 percent of professors were adjuncts. Now, with colleges bloated by older, tenured professors who take up huge slices of academic budgets while teaching crumbs of courses, the vast majority of classes are taught by adjuncts. On college campuses, the supposed hotbeds of liberalism, the young are instructed primarily in the mechanics of crony capitalism.



Once you're out of college, you'll have to intern. Again, no choice. The practice of not paying young people for their labor has become so ingrained in the everyday practice of American business that we've forgotten how bizarre and recent the development is. In the early 1980s, 3 percent of college grads had had an internship. By 2006, 84 percent had done at least one. Multiple internships are common. According to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than 75 percent of employers prefer students who have interned or had a similar working experience.

Employers have feasted on despair — and these aren't internships for struggling small presses or rarefied design companies. Subsidiaries of General Electric, a company worth $200 billion, employ them regularly as an "important recruiting tool." Disney uses eight thousand of them in dismal working conditions. Jennifer Lopez Enterprises uses them. So does The Daily Show. So does the pope. And because internship programs are sheltered from the violation of labor laws by the complicity of universities that give students "credit" for them — as long as the students pay thousands of dollars for those credits — American companies can operate these programs for the most part hidden from scrutiny. The best study of intern life in America found that companies save annually around $2 billion from pseudo-employment.

But maybe you're an overachiever — instead of interning, you want to get a master's or a professional degree. With entry to the professions comes another opportunity to be taken advantage of, and it's not just the inherently ridiculous price of a creative-writing M.F.A. or journalism school, where on some level, everybody understands the students are being played for suckers. The cost of medical school has spiked over the past three decades. In 1981, average medical-school debt was less than $20,000. Today it is $158,000. Law-school tuition rose 317 percent between 1989 and 2009 while American laws schools wildly increased the number of lawyers they graduate. Naturally, a glut of lawyers decreases their value. So kids pay more for a worse education that leads to lesser prospects in order for the schools to prosper temporarily. Even for doctors and lawyers, an accrual of property or any rise in net worth happens much later in life than it did twenty years ago. The standard debt-repayment plan for physicians is ten years, but twenty-five is a commonly accepted option. For the new professional class today, life begins at forty. That's not just an expression.



And if you didn't take your high school advisor's advice to go to college? Well, you should have listened. What goes for the white-collar young person applies even more ferociously to the blue-collar world, or what's left of it. The nature of the generational setback for unionized labor can be summed up in a single devastating phrase: New workers will earn a "globally competitive wage." Manufacturing jobs, having been exported to the Third World, are now returning to America at Third World rates. Newer workers at unions across the country earn ten to fifteen dollars an hour less than established workers, and the unspoken but widely reported understanding with the AFL-CIO is that the wage of these workers will not increase. In other words, Boomer workers make almost double what their young counterparts do, and will continue to do so regardless of how long a young worker stays in the same job. As one older worker in one of these bifurcated factories told The New York Times, by the time the young reach their maximum earning, their elders "won't be here any longer to remind them of what they are missing."

Government, academia, the professions, corporations, unions, and both political parties — all continue to mine the vulnerability of youth in service of the needs of their aging power base. Separately, each of these cases would amount to a minor scandal, but taken together they point to a broader and more significant alteration to the way of the world. From every corner of the institutional spectrum, the whole of American society has been rearranged so that the limits of vision coincide exactly with the death of the Boomers.

Nobody wants this. The Boomers did not set out to screw over their kids. The wind just seemed to blow them that way. But no matter what their motivations, a painful truth grows truer with every passing year: Through its refusal to act, the generation in power is willing to do what other generations before them would not — sell their children's birthright for a mess of their own pottage.

WHAT'S HAPPENING IN AMERICA IS HAPPENING EVERYWHERE ELSE:

A generation now means an economic cohort — a moment in the cycle of rising and (mostly) falling economic data. The UK has 21.8 percent youth unemployment, France 22.8 percent, Hungary 26.1 percent, Italy 28.2 percent, Spain 47.8 percent. Around the world, young people are beginning to be defined by their unemployment: the mileuristas of Spain, "those who earn less than a thousand euros"; the NEETs of England, "not in employment, education, or training"; the hittistes of Tunisia, "those who lean against the wall." Revolutions or unmanageable riots have inevitably followed the rise of masses of bored, underemployed young people.

[image]http://www.esquire.com/cm/esquire/images/cA/esq-05-war-on-youth-0412-lg.jpg[image]

Many claim that the young deserve their fate: They're entitled, they have too many choices. They don't know what they want. They're getting themselves into debt. They don't know how good they have it.

These criticisms are convenient, but also demonstrably incorrect. Defining generations by cultural attributes or values, almost always done with unrepentant shallowness, is the stupidest thing that commentators do. However, a recent study from the National Center for Education Statistics comparing high school seniors in 2004 (who are in their mid-twenties today) with high school seniors in 1972 (now in their late fifties) is useful and practical.

The breakdown is rather stark: Two thirds of the Boomers thought "being able to give their children better opportunities" was important; 8 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 18 percent believed that making money mattered; 27 percent cared about social problems. The students in 2004: 83 percent claimed that the opportunities of their children were very important; 25 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 35 percent were serious about making money; and 20 percent cared about social problems.

Compared with their parents, high school kids who graduated from college into the teeth of the recession are a Republican fantasy. They want a good job in order to raise a family, and it's exactly that arrangement that is going to be denied them. The deal they were promised, that if you work hard and make smart choices you will have a good life, is not working out. A Great Disappointment will no doubt follow.

Everyone currently emerging into the workplace will be economically scarred for life by the misfortune of their timing. The initial wage loss for a worker emerging in a bad economy is 6 to 7 percent for every 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, which means a twenty-one-year-old starting a job today makes about 24 percent less than he or she would have five years ago. After fifteen years, even during the good times, the wage loss still hovers at around 2.5 percent.

A more profound shift is under way, though. Currently the average American parent spends 10 percent of his or her annual income on their adult children, regardless of income. Meanwhile, one in four young Americans recently moved back home with their parents after living apart. Calling them the Boomerang generation implies that it's the irresponsible, feckless children who don't have it together enough to leave the nest. But many children who live at home have jobs. So we have children living with their parents after they have income, just like they did in the early parts of the twentieth century and before. The idea of youth as a time of freedom and self-discovery will last exactly one generation, it seems.



People who want to join society will do so through an increasingly lengthy period of humiliation and struggle, and only through the help of their parents. Even before the recession, that was more or less true. It's the dirty little secret of every middle-class person in their mid-thirties: Everybody's parents helped them out. Who do you think is paying for all those summer internships? How many new parents do you think actually have enough money for a Bugaboo stroller, let alone a down payment on a first home? And if you don't have a mom or dad who can help with ballet lessons for the kids or family vacations, God help you. America is becoming what it was founded to reject, what it has resisted throughout its history, a patronage society.

The situation is obviously unsustainable: At the exact moment when the United States and all other Western countries are trying to deal with aging populations, they are failing to capture the energy and potential of the people who will have to work to support those aging populations. We have arrived at a moment, just before the 2012 election, in which the hedges, the corner-cuts, the isolated decisions about young people from a host of institutions have accrued to the point of a continuous catastrophe. The question rises from the wreckage: How long can you eat the young?



Get ready for the summer. It's going to be hot.

Youth should be the only issue of the 2012 election, because all the subsidiary issues — inequality, the rising class system in America, the specter of decline, mass unemployment, the growing debt — are all fundamentally about the war against young Americans. But the choice young Americans face is between a party that claims to represent their interests but fails to and a party that explicitly opposes their interests and actively works to disenfranchise them.

The protesters, the occupiers, the kids who screamed themselves hoarse in the parks of New York and Oakland last year have spent the winter nestled underground nurturing their strategies. Has there ever been a movement so full of people who don't want to be there, who would rather be working?

Around the world, the response to chronic youth unemployment has been consistently traditional. The Arab world takes to the streets the way it did in the 1950s. Italy returns to its antique paterfamilias. England goes into its standard mode of underclass rioting. And what's happening in the United States would be instantly recognizable to any progressive of the 1930s.

By bus and train and car pool, they will follow the gerontocracy to Tampa and Charlotte, the cities with the utter misfortune of hosting the presidential nominating conventions. Then we'll see if the people inside the convention centers can find the youth anything better to do.

We'll see then how the flowers of rage, planted and nurtured so carelessly for three decades, have sprung up and who will harvest them.

--
Sources: Pew Research Center; Urban Institute; Project on Student Debt; Eurostat; Bureau of the Public Debt; Brookings Institution; Department of Education; National Center for Education Statistics.

http://www.esquire.com/features/young-people-in-the-recession-0412

---

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

Here's a list of sponsor stickers on my boards:

The Clapper
Post Bran Flakes
Geritol
Viagra
The Little Rascal
Metamucil
Colon Flow
JP-Lax
Cialis

---

You forgot Fox News. Alzheimer's?

--------------------
"[Rush] doesn't influence me either - merely reinforces what I already know" - 23rdstMB

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

Here's a list of sponsor stickers on my boards:

The Clapper
Post Bran Flakes
Geritol
Viagra
The Little Rascal
Metamucil
Colon Flow
JP-Lax
Cialis

---

oh i thought these where your sponsers

--------------------
" It is not how good you are at something, it is how good that something makes you feel"

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

So, how do I make money off of you smart older gentlemen?

---

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

So, how do I make money off of you smart older gentlemen?

---

--------------------
"[Rush] doesn't influence me either - merely reinforces what I already know" - 23rdstMB

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

Yeah, it's fun to make fun ... all in good spirits..

But the fact remains, everyone of you SOB's will eventually get old, have growths, where you don't want them and forget that you have a growth because you can't remember that you DO, have a growth somewhere where you don't want nor need them.

Some of us will get lucky and have a heart attack and go quickly, Zip, Bam, Boom, and yer a goner. Lucky you! Some of you other know it all's, will be forced to hang around until your 90, can't stand, but you can shuffle, with your walker or wheel chair and your wishing you went at 80 now. Your Done, You want it over with. If you had your way, you would have taken yourself out years ago but your hands shake so much that you can't hold a gun and would probably shot your next door neighbor.

Phuck the statistics, I know I'm getting old. I don't need some bozo sitting in a cubicle telling me how much longer a 66 year old geezer will have to live. It doesn't make a dam bit of difference. I still surf, get in the ocean, chill with Deb & my dog Hanai.

A few of my friends have got prostate cancer, battled and won, but the toll on there body has made them older. My younger brother Nathan is yet again,
down with pneumonia, is having a hard time urinating and has a catheter and a bag. Surgery may be in the future for him.

You youngsters are having the laughs and pokes at us ole geezers, but fact remains, you'll soon be the jest of someone's "old joke" too, IF, you'll be around, for THAT long.

Getting old Sucks for sure...
Boogie till ya puke...
That's my generation, anyway ...
And soon enough
to be your's as well ...

---

You're right PPK, we're all going to have to deal with it sooner or later (or now).
I think that the making fun in this thread started because of JEwing's seemingly "better than all y'all young folks and liberals" attitude.

All generations who are still on this earth all work together to shape the present and the future. No one generation rules. When someone becomes a parent they start to work for (and be a bit ruled by) the next generation.
Any claim of supremacy or inferiority is futile.

--------------------
"This post is made of stupid "

-Norm-

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

...JEwing's seemingly "better than all y'all young folks and liberals" attitude...

---

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

1.The over-50 crowd will grow 21 percent in size in 10 years. The 18 to 49 age cohort will remain the same size. I’m not making this up. It’s Census data.

2.They buy things, lots of things. Overall, the over-50 crowd outspends the under-50 crowd by $400 billion. That’s more than Walmart sells annually.

3.They try new things. Boomers were raised in front of the TV; they are not “set in their ways.”

4.They read newspapers, they watch TV, and they listen to the radio.

5.With a median age of 54, boomers are far from being done. They think they are in the middle of middle age. They don’t think they will reach old age until age 75 or so.

6.They use the Internet. They search, they shop, and they buy. There may not be as many of them on social networking sites, but they are online‑just as many and just as often as younger generations.

7.Some 40 percent of all boomers are already grandparents. Over 55 percent of all grandparents alive today are boomers. They spend money on their grandkids, practically without thinking.

8.They control their parents’ consumption of health care and their kids’ education. They are a sandwich generation that likes being in the center of it all. Think “ham.” They like to influence everyone's purchases‑family, friends, Facebook buddies.

9.They like advertising. Sure, they’re skeptical, but they are also fans of good advertising.

10.They are the future. “Old” is where the action is for the next 20 years and boomers are the new “old.”

---

Dude...? Baby Boomers?

I'm 43. I'm Generation X, baby!



The exact date range that constitutes Generation X is the subject of diverging opinions. Part of the variance comes from slightly differing definitions of what exactly Generation X is. Geography can also influence date ranges. Another problem stems from the difficulty in exactly defining a generation by birth year, as Fran Kick explains, "please understand that there are no hard and fast lines that occur between December 31st of one year and January 1st of the next. More often than not, it's a shift that occurs over three to five years, maybe more depending on who you ask."[14] Most sources cite a start in the mid 1960s.[15] Some cite an end date before the end of the 1970s. Others cite an end in the early 1980s; the birth years of 1981 and 1982[16][17][18] are cited as common end dates, with either depending on geographics, researcher, or the determination of what year the first millennial generation officially left grade school.[6] Before the term became popularized, Generation X was intended to define the very narrow "lost" generation between the end of the Baby Boomers (1962) and the beginning of their children's generation (1969), which ultimately absorbed their identity.

Generation X fvcking rules!!

--------------------
"Your ego is not your amigo" ~Tony Alva

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

My mom is in her sixries - sent me this yesterday - meant to be funny but I found it pretty spot on:

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.


The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days."


The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."


She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.


Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.


Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, which we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household garbage bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribbling. Then we were able to personalize our books. But, too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.


We walked up stairs because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.



Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.


Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana . In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.


We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.


Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.


But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?


Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart ass young person...


We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to tick us off.

---

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

<snip>

---

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

Quote:

---

<snip>

---

TL/DR

---

funny, i was figuring that'd be my answer to the northcity's post with the thing his mom sent him
but it was good enough to get all the way through
very long but worth reading

but yeah, skully's thing - not a f*cking chance, man
cowabunga
rg

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

Quote:

---

Quote:

---

<snip>

---

TL/DR

---

funny, i was figuring that'd be my answer to the northcity's post with the thing his mom sent him
but it was good enough to get all the way through
very long but worth reading

but yeah, skully's thing - not a f*cking chance, man
cowabunga
rg

---

Seriously.

--------------------
Nothing is obscene provided it is done in bad taste.

Russ Meyer

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

My mom is in her sixries - sent me this yesterday - meant to be funny but I found it pretty spot on:

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.


The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days."


The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."


She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.


Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.


Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, which we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household garbage bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribbling. Then we were able to personalize our books. But, too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.


We walked up stairs because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.



Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.


Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana . In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.


We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.


Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.


But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?


Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart ass young person...

We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to tick us off.

---

fvck yeah!

...back then "we" yanked off all the low hanging fruits of nature for the sake of a quick $ - like riparian zone old growth trees, marshlands turned into parking lots and lush meadows into housing tracts.

...back then "we" dammed up every major river, ruining 90% of our nation's anadromous salmon and steelhead runs.

...back then "we" completely eradicated things like wolves and wild cats as vermin.

...back then "we" lived the mantra that material wealth was paramount to any consequence.



--------------------
Stock the erbb

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

Quote:

---

My mom is in her sixries - sent me this yesterday - meant to be funny but I found it pretty spot on:

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.


The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days."


The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."


She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.


Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.


Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, which we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household garbage bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribbling. Then we were able to personalize our books. But, too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.


We walked up stairs because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.



Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.


Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana . In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.


We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.


Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.


But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?


Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart ass young person...

We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to tick us off.

---

fvck yeah!

...back then "we" yanked off all the low hanging fruits of nature for the sake of a quick $ - like riparian zone old growth trees, marshlands turned into parking lots and lush meadows into housing tracts.

...back then "we" dammed up every major river, ruining 90% of our nation's anadromous salmon and steelhead runs.

...back then "we" completely eradicated things like wolves and wild cats as vermin.

...back then "we" lived the mantra that material wealth was paramount to any consequence.

---

wait a second...
i didn't see those episodes of leave it to beaver
cowabunga
rg

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

Quote:

---

My mom is in her sixries - sent me this yesterday - meant to be funny but I found it pretty spot on:

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.


The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days."


The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."


She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.


Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.


Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, which we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household garbage bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribbling. Then we were able to personalize our books. But, too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.


We walked up stairs because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.



Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.


Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana . In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.


We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.


Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.


But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?


Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart ass young person...

We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to tick us off.

---

fvck yeah!

...back then "we" yanked off all the low hanging fruits of nature for the sake of a quick $ - like riparian zone old growth trees, marshlands turned into parking lots and lush meadows into housing tracts.

...back then "we" dammed up every major river, ruining 90% of our nation's anadromous salmon and steelhead runs.

...back then "we" completely eradicated things like wolves and wild cats as vermin.

...back then "we" lived the mantra that material wealth was paramount to any consequence.

---

Dont forget all that nuclear testing that will still be measurable thousands of years from now.

--------------------
Bomb Hills not Countries.

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

Quote:

---

1.The over-50 crowd will grow 21 percent in size in 10 years. The 18 to 49 age cohort will remain the same size. I’m not making this up. It’s Census data.

2.They buy things, lots of things. Overall, the over-50 crowd outspends the under-50 crowd by $400 billion. That’s more than Walmart sells annually.

3.They try new things. Boomers were raised in front of the TV; they are not “set in their ways.”

4.They read newspapers, they watch TV, and they listen to the radio.

5.With a median age of 54, boomers are far from being done. They think they are in the middle of middle age. They don’t think they will reach old age until age 75 or so.

6.They use the Internet. They search, they shop, and they buy. There may not be as many of them on social networking sites, but they are online&#8209;just as many and just as often as younger generations.

7.Some 40 percent of all boomers are already grandparents. Over 55 percent of all grandparents alive today are boomers. They spend money on their grandkids, practically without thinking.

8.They control their parents’ consumption of health care and their kids’ education. They are a sandwich generation that likes being in the center of it all. Think “ham.” They like to influence everyone's purchases&#8209;family, friends, Facebook buddies.

9.They like advertising. Sure, they’re skeptical, but they are also fans of good advertising.

10.They are the future. “Old” is where the action is for the next 20 years and boomers are the new “old.”

---

Dude...? Baby Boomers?

I'm 43. I'm Generation X, baby!



The exact date range that constitutes Generation X is the subject of diverging opinions. Part of the variance comes from slightly differing definitions of what exactly Generation X is. Geography can also influence date ranges. Another problem stems from the difficulty in exactly defining a generation by birth year, as Fran Kick explains, "please understand that there are no hard and fast lines that occur between December 31st of one year and January 1st of the next. More often than not, it's a shift that occurs over three to five years, maybe more depending on who you ask."[14] Most sources cite a start in the mid 1960s.[15] Some cite an end date before the end of the 1970s. Others cite an end in the early 1980s; the birth years of 1981 and 1982[16][17][18] are cited as common end dates, with either depending on geographics, researcher, or the determination of what year the first millennial generation officially left grade school.[6] Before the term became popularized, Generation X was intended to define the very narrow "lost" generation between the end of the Baby Boomers (1962) and the beginning of their children's generation (1969), which ultimately absorbed their identity.

Generation X fvcking rules!!

---

Sweet, I'm Generation X too! GO Nirvana!

--------------------
The only two things in life that make it worth livin is guitars tuned good and firm feelin women

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

GO Nirvana!

---

--------------------
"That's their respect for me... I got leid," Rabbit Kekai

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

Quote:

---

Quote:

---

My mom is in her sixries - sent me this yesterday - meant to be funny but I found it pretty spot on:

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.


The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days."


The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."


She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.


Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.


Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, which we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household garbage bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribbling. Then we were able to personalize our books. But, too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.


We walked up stairs because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.



Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.


Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana . In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.


We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.


Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.


But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?


Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart ass young person...

We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to tick us off.

---

fvck yeah!

...back then "we" yanked off all the low hanging fruits of nature for the sake of a quick $ - like riparian zone old growth trees, marshlands turned into parking lots and lush meadows into housing tracts.

...back then "we" dammed up every major river, ruining 90% of our nation's anadromous salmon and steelhead runs.

...back then "we" completely eradicated things like wolves and wild cats as vermin.

...back then "we" lived the mantra that material wealth was paramount to any consequence.

---

Dont forget all that nuclear testing that will still be measurable thousands of years from now.

---

And that we let factories dump their waste directly into our watersheds.

And that the agricultural industry used to spray our food down with carcinogenic pesticides that would also find their way into our watersheds as well as our dinner table.

And kids didn't have to do silly things like wear seat belts

And women and blacks couldn't vote

Lets take it back to the good ole days!!!



--------------------
"[Rush] doesn't influence me either - merely reinforces what I already know" - 23rdstMB

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

"Better Living Through Chemistry"

---

--------------------
"[Rush] doesn't influence me either - merely reinforces what I already know" - 23rdstMB

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

Good stuff, nrthcty. Agreed.

But we do have Internet porn these days so that does cut down on paper costs and all that.

---

LOL!!!

--------------------
In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty...Rat Race!

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

phuck it... your all gonna die anyway...
doesn't really mean anything in the end now does it?

---

No one gets out alive.

Well, maybe Keith Richards. I think he's immortal.

--------------------
Nothing is obscene provided it is done in bad taste.

Russ Meyer

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

Why don't you all just f f fff fade away?

---

Post Extras:

Quote:

---

That longwinded cut-n-paste number-spinning article got thrown aside when it mentioned how tail-end boomers would be in their 90's by 2036, just when Soc. Sec. runs out.

---

Post Extras: