I guess I'm considered a millennial, but messages like this sound like misconceived pandering. Firstly, I don't think any generation necessarily "owes" anything to future generations. But, even if we accept the premise, I am the beneficiary of absolutely mind-boggling amounts of technological advancement, culture, progress, infrastructure, science, and on and on and on even just over the course of my own lifetime (approaching 30 years). "Boo hoo, things aren't absolutely perfect in every way." That doesn't mean that any generation has "failed" another. Sure, there might be some setbacks and difficult problems to solve or adjust to in the future, but come on. As Steven Pinker has I think convincingly pointed out, things have been reliably getting better for a long time, and even when we think "the world is going to hell", it simply doesn't.
Not to mention, there is something extraordinarily presumptuous about the CEO of one tech company thinking he has the standing to either criticize or speak on behalf of literally billions of people.
I think there are numerous ways in which Tim Cook's generation has failed the next generation (at least in the US).
* Wages are flat,
* Housing costs are up (in large part due to NIMBYism),
* College is more expensive (in large part due to Cook's generation cutting subsidies that they got),
* Environment is shot- that whole global warming thing isn't going away anytime soon.
Generally speaking the baby boomers, as a whole, have focused more on enriching themselves than any other previous generation. This is the first time in generations that, in the US, the newer generation is seen as worse off than the one before it.
What are you asking for? The world has changed drastically, culture and preferences have changed drastically, and new technological tools make the job and economic landscape entirely different than earlier. That's not Baby Boomers' fault. Are you really going to blame them for not predicting the future well enough? Baby boomers aren't forcing young folks to like living in cities more than suburbs. They're not maliciously causing robots and computers to be more reliable than humans at menial repetitive tasks. They're not forcing young folks to want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mediocre private universities when reasonably priced state universities exist (and a world of knowledge for self-teaching is available through the internet). And even the global warming thing, our current prosperity--and don't kid yourself, America is pretty freaking prosperous--strongly depended on us exploiting cheap and reliable energy for decades. And it's that prosperity which gives us the bandwidth and resources to think "hey, let's do something about this, either find a way to avoid or prepare or cope".
Yes, it would have been nice if everyone in the previous generation had a crystal ball and selfless motives. But that is not something we are due as a right, nor is it something anyone should reasonably hold against them. They didn't blow up the world, and made it better in better in a bunch of ways, and maybe a bit worse in some ways. On net, that's still like a B+ or higher in my book.
On the whole, I too agree with Pinker. But I don't think it's necessarily mutually exclusive with one generation "failing" another (I hate that wording because it feels reductionist).
If the claim is true that the millennial generation is the first to have a lower quality of life than their parents, that sounds a lot like a failure to manage resources given the prosperity you cited. How can we be at the most prosperous time yet have a generation worse off than the previous? It seems like it's either a failure of values, mismanagement of resources, or bad metrics.
Put another way, if this was a company that was posting record sales and margins yet somehow posting worse profits than the previous CEO, wouldn't that at least raise some eyebrows?
If the millennial generation wants a higher quality of life than their parents, they will need to gather and harvest more resources.
The methods the boomers & prior generations used for that were a combination of investing in fossil fuel extraction infrastructure and sometimes waging war/extracting resources from other countries.
Look at China - massive generational improvement in living standards, massive increase in pollution (to the point where it goes well beyond the theoretical concerns of global warming).
As a body the wannabe thought-leaders of the millennials are inconsistent on this point. Do they care more about wages and living standards, or more about the environment? There is no longer the enthusiastic consensus on living standards that existed in the previous generations.
I think this is a false dichotomy. The only way it's true is if we assume the quality of life desired by millennials is the same as conspicuous consumption previously portrayed by Madison Avenue. To that point, I see younger generations largely rejecting this definition of 'quality of life' in favor of alternate definitions.
In regards to China, I don't know if this is a point that this is the only way to do things or if it's just following a previously defined template, similar to the way most economies transition from agrarian, to industrial, to service economies.
I also think it's erroneous to frame it as an either/or state when there's opportunity for both improving standards of living without an additional impact on the environment through increases in efficiency on how we put those resources to work. There's lots of sectors (healthcare, energy, etc.) that affect quality of life that can improve without the assumption that we throw more resources at them, just that we be smarter about how we use those resources.
I suppose this shows how old and out of touch I am, but who are the 'thought-leaders' you refer towards? I'm not being snarky, I legitimately don't know who would be considered a millennial thought-leader and would like to find out.
That was the interpretation I was going for. It is conspicuous - the only way we know how to rapidly increase living standards involves using fossil fuels. Solar and wind are only cost competitive at the moment after easily 30 years of pressure and research. They weren't an option to set the millenials up for success.
The alternatives are very tentatively proven at this stage, and not at the same scale as China from backwater to superpower in 60 years. They didn't do that with wind energy - they burned a lot of coal. We still don't have compelling evidence that a society can flourish without the internal combustion engine. Maybe it is about to hit, we can all hope.
> I suppose this shows how old and out of touch I am, but who are the 'thought-leaders' you refer towards? I'm not being snarky, I legitimately don't know who would be considered a millennial thought-leader and would like to find out.
I don't actually know who would be considered a thought leader for the millenials. Wouldn't even know where to start figuring that out, or even what the term means.
But there are a lot of very vocal individuals on the subject of environmentalism who clearly want people to think like them (the sort of people who lead protests and make up the activist core of the environmental movement). They were the ones I'm referring to.
I fully grant your point that the rate at which Chinese were brought into the middle class is dependent on fossil fuels.
But similar to your point on the infancy of renewables, this is largely because ICE and other fossil fuel technology has been improved on for the last 150 years. It's unfair to compare renewables to this standard as they are still very much the new kid on the block.
What I think will be very disappointing is if we, as a society, decide to blindly continue focused on fossil fuels because we're optimizing in the short term, rather than the long term. In my opinion, we should be leveraging the last 150 years of fossil fuel technology as a stepping stone to something more sustainable.
I think there's a tendency to treat it as an overly simplified optimization problem, as in we need to maximize output at all costs. It's probably better to set it up as an optimization problem with the proper constraints. These constraints may be externalities that the government is involved in regulating. Yes, we may sacrifice some short term benefit for long-term success. But we (hopefully) won't have squandered an amazing resource like fossil fuels for an ill-advised myopic gain.
Surely this has nothing to do with the increasing wealth inequality in america.
The only way we can have things is killing the environment.
You know that aside from the self aggrandizing purple haired political shitstains of the future that you see organizing rallies and shit. There are other sources of information about the environment
Since you've already posted several abusive comments, I've banned this account until we get some indication that you want to use HN as intended. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
It strikes me as a false dichotomy to think we have to choose between higher wages / quality of life and the environment.
As mentioned earlier, a lot of investment went into fossil fuels in the past. Now, we could put a lot of investment into technologies that won’t hurt the environment as much. There will be an initial cost to doing that (we’ll still use fossil fuels to get much of the electricity to make solar/wind/etc), but eventually things will even out and we can start having environmentally-friendly sources be much more affordable.
I would've asked Boomers to not have wasted trillions of dollars on unnecessary military spending (which could've gone to infrastructure, education, and universal healthcare) and countless lives on unnecessary military actions. I would've asked them to not have supported trade pacts that were great for those the jobs went to in developing countries and for domestic consumers of goods where production was off-shored/outsourced, but hollowed out the middle class. I would've asked them to not have allowed private companies to run rampant in healthcare, economically devastating anyone who has chronic health issues or doesn't have a cush employer provided healthcare plan, and then having the audacity of shouting "Socialism!" when healthcare systems working in every other first world country are proposed. I would've asked them to consider the world they were leaving their kids and grandkids, and make efforts to transition off of fossil fuels sooner. I would've asked them to make efforts to support Labor and Unions, not allow them to crumble under the guise of "Right To Work", stagnating wages for forty years and solidifying Capital's stranglehold over the economy, including workplace and employment conditions. I would've asked they not use drug legislation and prisons as weapons against certain classes of people. I would've asked for less greed and more compassion. I would've asked for a bit more (reasonable) sacrifice for future generations.
But here we are, so I suppose we'll just clean up the mess the Worst Generation left us all with. It's just a shame they squandered so much for so little; the time for asking anything of them has passed [1].
> I would've asked them to not have allowed private companies to run rampant in healthcare, economically devastating anyone who has chronic health issues or doesn't have a cush employer provided healthcare plan, and then having the audacity of shouting "Socialism!" when healthcare systems working in every other first world country are proposed.
"Boomers" didn't really do this--a small cadre of the ultra-wealthy did this with the help of a lot of stupid people.
"Boomers", in fact, were probably the last generation to engage in successful large-scale labor actions.
The fight isn't between generations--the fight is against the concentration of wealth.
One thing that has happened in the last few decades is that increases in prosperity mainly went to a few at the top and for the rest it stagnated. I think you can put the blame on the people in power during that time.
My net wealth is massively negative and will remain so for decades... and yet any fair assessment of my quality of life is that it's great. I can't afford a car, but I can still be chauffeured around like a celebrity at the push of a button on my phone. I can summon almost anything I want from across the planet and have it show up in my doorstep in 2 days as if I was a king. I have access to probably 99+% of the knowledge, information, art, entertainment, and telecommunication tools of the richest guy in the world. I could hardly care less that some people are preposterously wealthy while I'm "poor", because I really think my life is probably at least 80% as good as theirs is. I also hope for greater equality in the hope that it would further spur creation and make people feel more comfortable with risk taking and self-fulfillment or self-expression. But, thinking that millennials/post-millenials/future generations have been somehow "screwed over" or have been given a world on fire is an ungrateful and borderline laughable delusion.
The "previous generations failed us" mentality implies that we are somehow due all of the good things previous generations have given us (even though the only thing most of us have done to "deserve" them is exist) without having to deal with any of the bad. I think if some people had their way, we'd be shivering out in the cold and bartering mounds of dirt for big circular rocks because they'd have villified the people that first cut down a tree for shelter or crucified the people who thought that steam engines were an innovation.
I want cooperation. Younger people, myself included, want policy changes that will attempt to mitigate some of the damage done by the previous generation. However, boomers are still in power and actively resist changes that attempt to curb issues like climate change and income inequality. I think this is where a lot of resentment comes from. Additionally boomers will be dead before the consequences of their actions have a chance to seriously effect their lives, furthering the resentment.
To me this story of boomers callously enriching themselves at the expense of future generations sounds like just a bigoted unfounded accusation. Talk about not taking responsibility.. foisting all your problems onto the parent generation as if you yourself have no agency to tackle these challenges. Maybe the millenials will be blamed by the next generation for just burying themselves in video games and drugs at the time when climate change became common knowledge, when there was still time to do so something but instead they chose to be pandered to.
I never said anything about boomers enriching themselves at the expense of future generations.
I think blaming younger generations for not taking responsibility for what was handed to them is unfair. We are trying to fix things, however it is difficult when the people in power (who happen to be boomers) will not allow progress. That resistance to change and the resulting resentment is what I was attempting to discuss in my previous comment.
When people say "boomers" do they mean "boomers" world-wide, or do they mean "boomers" as in American "boomers"? I ask because everyone is part of this thing, but some people may think only American boomers have partaken in the above ascribed behavior.
There's nothing wrong with future generations holding millennials responsible for their actions as well. It doesn't negate the argument and is a fairly weak position to take
The undertone of your posts appears to be that climate change is not that big of a deal. Do you think we're facing an incredibly serious problem with climate change or just some minor corrections to be made?
> Are you really going to blame them for not predicting the future well enough?
They predicted it just fine. Then they failed to work together to prevent it.
> Baby boomers aren't forcing young folks to like living in cities more than suburbs.
Young people can only afford overpriced apartments because jobs have steadily migrated to cities, they don't have the credit or capital to afford a house and car in the suburbs, they're overburdened with debt and rising costs of living, not paid accordingly, and well-paying jobs for the lower and middle class are more scarce. Oh, and media conglomerates and advertising have been repeating since before they were born that what they really want is only found in glamorous cities.
> They're not forcing young folks to want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mediocre private universities when reasonably priced state universities exist
That's all they've ever heard. "You have to go to college. You have to go to the best college. You can go to the best college, you'll just be in debt for 30 years once you do. Don't worry, here's a thing we invented in the 70s called a credit card."
> our current prosperity [..] strongly depended on us exploiting cheap and reliable energy for decades
We have been the most powerful and wealthy nation since WWII, a generation or two before the boomers. The boomers were even hit by a major oil crisis and recession more than once, and rather than look to alternatives (which Congress literally declared they had to do), they doubled down.
What you’re wrong about is the notion that markets dictate itself. Actually pretty much the entirety of America and possibly most of the rest of the developed world is wrong on this notion because the country and the rest of the world is so rooted in capitalism. It’s like crying about the fact that we are polluting the world with single use plastics and saying that we are powerless to do anything about it because individuals will always optimize for personal gain. The reality is we as people are people and every single one of us has the ability and capacity to choose to not use single use plastics. We aren’t dumb robots that absolutely have to follow this code of maximizing for personal gain. People as individuals, or organizations, or really groups of people of any size are capable of doing anything because at the base level, every single person has the capacity to make one decision over another, because we are people not robots. If we chose to keep the earth clean, we could keep the earth clean. It’s not impossible, and people need to stop believing that the only force is this blobby uncontrollable multicellular creature of human mass that creates cities, destroys natural landscapes, and kills rhinos. It’s at this level of learned helplessness where you (and I’m not crticizing only you, but pretty much the rest of the world) is wrong. If baby boomers collectively chose to help the next generation they absolutely could have done more to help the next generation. They just never believed anything could be done so they never really tried.
Who changed the culture, preferences, and technological tools? Who made the economic and political decisions that brought us where we are today?
There's inevitably a window where some generational demographic is generally the driving leadership and consumer/citizen force behind societal trends and decisions. The boomers have been that force for some time and they're far from gone.
It's fair to acknowledge that some of the tech / choices made are useful. And, hey, "nobody owes anybody anything" or "no generation owes successive ones" is a values statement, even though it may be sociopathic. "That's not the Baby Boomer's fault" doesn't make any sense (except as an expression of that non-ethic).
> Baby boomers aren't forcing young folks to like living in cities more than suburbs.
> They're not maliciously causing robots and computers to be more reliable than humans at menial repetitive tasks.
> They're not forcing young folks to want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mediocre private universities when reasonably priced state universities exist (and a world of knowledge for self-teaching is available through the internet)
> And even the global warming thing, our current prosperity--and don't kid yourself, America is pretty freaking prosperous--strongly depended on us exploiting cheap and reliable energy for decades.
But they did preside over changes which:
* moved opportunities (not to mention narratives of opportunity) to cities over suburbs
* remove protections for labor and diminish safety nets for those who've been caught in automation-based change
* enshrined credentialism as a mark of professional opportunity, whether or not a world of knowledge for self-teaching is available on the internet, and then administered both public-supported universities and private universities in such a way that students frequently have to pay more in tuition than they did 30 years ago.
* prioritized individually maximized returns (with some degree of shared prosperity) over sustainability.
> " that prosperity which gives us the bandwidth and resources to think "hey, let's do something about this, either find a way to avoid or prepare or cope"."
Any post WW2 prosperity should have been enough to do some important things about climate change once we understood the relevant dynamics.
> it would have been nice if everyone in the previous generation had a crystal ball and selfless motives.
"Crystal ball", that's neat, it implies we'd need impossible magic to have foreseen economic or environmental consequences 30 years ago.
> not predicting the future
> if everyone in the previous generation had a crystal ball
This is, of course, an absurd expectation, and a straw man. We're not blaming anyone for "not predicting the future." That would be obviously unfair, and of course that is why you accuse us of it. Straw men make the weakest opponents; it feels good to thrash them.
Our upset with previous generations is _not_ that they "didn't predict the future," but that they re-implemented the past: concentration of wealth being the chief crime.
> young folks like living in cities more than suburbs
This is not the cause of our woes.
> robots and computers [are] more reliable than humans at menial repetitive tasks
This is not the cause of our woes.
> young folks want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mediocre private universities.
This is not the cause of our woes. Three times you have tried to redirect the blame, and three times you have made things up.
Living in association with others has _always_ been a human predilection and a necessity, but the "invisible hand" of an unprecedented global marketplace is extremely good at jacking up the price in response to this endemic demand. Those who're profiting from this are members of the previous generation, whose wealth has allowed them to construct the real-estate machines that're now manipulating the markets. The previous generation owns the real estate that we're left squabbling over to rent at rising prices. The result is a bifurcation of society into those who've acquired patronage by obsequience and those who're struggling on the periphery.
It's not feasible to live "in the country," for most young people. We don't have the social structures, the commons, the resources that our ancestors had. We need urban institutions. Don't get me started on the bigotry of small towns. You can do that research yourself.
So when you say it's not Boomers' fault that "young folks like living in cities more than suburbs," you're attacking an oblique target. Of course Boomers did not invent the desire; they've merely perfected its exploitation. And for that, you had better hope we forgive them. Once they stop.
Your other two misdirections are equally oblique. Robots and student loans? Two mechanisms for which we cannot, rationally blame the previous generation, and yet two mechanisms which are so obviously played to favor the wealthy, and maintain the desperation of the working majority.
Boomers didn't invent the laws of physics which make machines ostensibly tireless, but they did maintain the enclosure by which commons are made inaccessible to the workers whom robots replace.
What happens to me when a robot takes my job? Do I prosper, as a shareholder of the firm whose profits I made, and with whose profits the robot was purchased? Likely, not. The majority of the value I produce is turned into a robot in which I do not own a stake. This is theft. It's not a theft invented by Boomers--it is an old, and tiresome theft--but it has been implemented by wealthy Boomers, and defended by poor, brainwashed ones.
Boomers didn't invent machines, they merely continued the practice of crystalizing surplus value into them: capital accrued on the backs of workers who'll be cast out when they can sacrifice no more at their bosses' altar. You can pretend "robots" are an "unpredictable innovation", but they're no more than a continuation of the practice. We're not angry that you "didn't see the future." We're angry that you thought we couldn't see the past.
As for the student loans we've acquired to attend these so-called "mediocre private universities," I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself for casting blame on the students who, groomed to be so naive by the age of 18 that we'd fall for such a trick, were swindled by the entirety of the adult world into signing these documents, and attending these institutions.
It was the previous generation that wrote that screenplays, the Public Relations marketing material, that funded the outreach campaigns, the college preparatory texts, that put out this entire ecosystem of propaganda to groom children into ostensibly prestigious institutions. We were told--and if not by "the previous generation", then by whom--that these loans were the gateway to adulthood; that life ended if we didn't acquire them.
Many of us died over this decision, by stressful suicide, but most of us went with it. After all, there were billions of dollars to be made by our compliance, and many, many people wanted to see us take these loans. People from the previous generation.
This is what we, at 17, were stacked up against: the billion-dollar endowments of centuries old institutions, their networks of generationally wealthy alumni, and the banks that facilitate the financials.
So when you say "that's not Baby Boomers' fault," you're either stupid, or you're dissembling, because while the boomers didn't invent the noose, they sure didn't hesitate to string it up.
It may be that a lot of the issues do not represent any especially egregious failing of any generation, but rather structural changes. The post-war exponential growth that fed unprecedented wealth generation simply could not continue, it has run its course. So while it is tempting to look back a generation or two and see how they had it much easier in a lot of ways, if you look back just a little bit further, it's easy to feel pretty damn lucky to be living today.
A lot of this is by-product of Globalization. Not that it can be contained, but with Globalization, wages seek their level, with Worldwide capital flows housing becomes a hot investment. College is more expensive, but greater numbers of people are going to college than before because it's thought a blue-collar job is insufficient to survive. More people and wealthier people means greater consumption which degrades the enviro.
Now, if Boomers are seen as greedy, then wouldn't their successors be greedier if they wanted to out-earn them?
>* College is more expensive (in large part due to Cook's generation cutting subsidies that they got),
College is more expensive because the government ensures that 18 year olds have uncapped credit cards for educational expenses and everyone tells them "dont worry about it right now". When you increase demand and defer all cost pressure by years, the cost will always skyrocket.
Blaming this on a lack of subsidies is actually backwards; providing guaranteed funding for education would further boost costs. As long as schools are setting the price, demand is high, and the money is flowing like water, that cost is going to continue to increase.
> * Environment is shot- that whole global warming thing isn't going away anytime soon.
But renewables use is also way up.
This is the parent's point: these claims utterly ignore the historical reality. We're greener than ever, we've stopped using CFCs and arsenic preservatives and lead paints and high particulate energy generation. We have more access to education than ever. And in the west, our wages are on average 5x that of the rest of the world.
So many of these complaints look ignorant and petty when you zoom out a tiny bit from one's personal circumstances. You have college debt? Cry more, you have access to more opportunity than the preceeding 99% of your ancestors and than 95% of your current peers.
Boo hoo you guys haven't given us amazing wage growth in an era where we're all competing with cheap overseas labor so we can buy new homes at 25 plus Apple gadgets and endless media. And we had to pay :'( for our fancy degrees with housing included at elite schools in distant states because community college and nearby colleges aren't good enough for us...and you didn't solve all of the problems that didn't exist before your time (like global warming) and I feel sad sometimes too and I'm overwhelmed by social media....wha wha!!!!
This is the kind of millenial we hate. The arrogant narcissists who can't understand why every measure of happiness hasn't gone up for them.
Well, can you please forgive us? I, and the billions of other people in the past who suffered through wars, famines, plagues, witch hunts, slow progress, feudalism, and every other hardship, are sorry that world perfection didn't converge at the time of your birth and that you might have some hardships and might have to solve some hard problems. Maybe you can achieve perfection for your kids.
Imagine previous generations that were being drafted to the army to go off to WW2, Korea, Vietnam. Ah yes but Millennials have flat wages and expensive college. We've failed them all.
Personally, I'd rather be drafted than have to watch my kids and grand-kids go fight in pointless resource wars that will be the result of decades of unchecked climate change. Frankly, the attitude previous generations have had towards climate science has can best be described as criminally negligent.
Every generation owes the next generation a world that is in as good of condition as when they received it. Anything else is taking out a loan in the next generation’s name.
I'll take it a step farther: we are of the world. The world barfed you and me up, and we are made out of the stuff that makes the world up. The world is not "ours" or "theirs". We are it, and it is us. We are under the mistaken impression that we are separate from the world and that we "own" it. Until we realize this fact, we will continue to poison ours and each other's children.
> Firstly, I don't think any generation necessarily "owes" anything to future generations
Surely - at a bare minimum - it's everyone's responsibility to leave a habitable planet for future generations. Greed now is going to result in a very, very crappy place to live in the future.
> there is something extraordinarily presumptuous about the CEO of one tech company thinking he has the standing to either criticize or speak on behalf of literally billions of people.
I think he's only presuming to speak on behalf of US residents, which caps at 400 million, and even then only for his generation, which limits the number even more.
In any case, I think one can make observations about a group of people of which one is a member without representing every single member of that group. His generation either did or did not fail current graduates, whether everybody agrees with that or not.
The free market does that. People who can't generate more revenue than they cost are dead weight in a capitalistic system. It's not common to say that, but the US certainly works that way.
It's not about the definition of "dead weight", people are downvoting you because it's a fairly mean phrase to use to refer to your fellow human beings.
Animats may be saying thats what a capitalist system treats the downtrodden, but the actual actions are by that very capitalist system.
In order to face a problem, you have to be able to talk about it. And capitalism stratifies the "work" and "cannot work" brutally. And as a killing blow, then proceeds to separate food/shelter/communications and the means to try to make oneself better. In this way, capitalism forces the poverty-stricken to rely on charity of others, for 'market forces' nearly removes the ability to climb the ladder of success.
If you find using the term "dead weight" abhorrent (as I do), what are you doing about the root cause; capitalism?
The whole article linked to explains that the reason for high youth unemployment is not "capitalism" of "free markets", but the opposite, an unhealthily large public sector, and and unhealthily small private sector - what they need is more economic freedom, and *more" free markets, not less
That may explain the middle east and north Africa but doesn't seem to address the OP regarding the U.S. The census data I found looks like the public/private ratio has been pretty consistent since the 1980s
Yes, the oil states have bloated public sectors and dysfunctional governments. But the same basic problem - large numbers of young people with no jobs and no future.
I have mixed feelings on discussing problems with "generations"; its so broad and imprecise that it feels meaningless. However, I can accept that it has some value when discussing broad social effects.
I agree with Jobs; Gen X and further back generations, as groups, raped the planet for short-term economic growth. They aren't the first or last group to do so, but they did do it. My generation, I.e. gen Z, is looking at an abnormally bleak future. Yes, the past generations had the Cold War and possible Nuclear Armageddon. And while the Cold War is dead, possible Nuclear Armageddon is still very much alive. We also face, for the first time in US history, the likelihood that we will die poorer than our parents. We also face the fact that our middle age will come with practically certain catastrophic climate change. Any one of these problems is significant on a global scale, but their collective force is even more crippling.
All these problems exist because of the collective decisions of past generations; thats what every present is. WW1 was a product of dumb alliances and treaties made decades before. And it wasn't the generation that decided on the treaties that were butchered on the Somme, it was their children. And as a group, I believe that they are soaked in the blood of their children. However, I will agree that blaming generations is at best unproductive and at worst needlessly divisive. Yes, the actions of past generations create the wars and disasters of today, but that is a simple fact of societies. Blaming a generation hides the specific culprits behind specific problems. We should blame the Tobacco lobby for the death of millions, we should blame oil companies for crippling greener alternatives for decades, we should blame the Military-Industrial complex for chaining America to eternal wars just to make an easy buck.
This was more rambly than I intended, so I hope it still has some value.
Yes, you got technological advancement, but resources are pretty much down to zero. You are saddled with debt up to your eyeballs. Most of you will never be able to afford a house, if you somehow manage to buy one, you will be paying it off till your last breath. You will have no social blanket, boomers would have plowed through that.
Your culture was completely robbed from you before you were born. What stories do you love? What music fills your head? What great deeds of the past inspire you? Are you allowed to share ANY of that freely?
I'm doing better than my father but I had to get buttfucked twice as hard to do it. Fuck the boomers.
I can't believe you'd keep licking that boot even as they're still robbing you of retirement benefits.
>> Not to mention, there is something extraordinarily presumptuous about the CEO of one tech company thinking he has the standing to either criticize or speak on behalf of literally billions of people.
Yep, more than anything else it is simply patronising. Reading Hans Gosling and Steven Pinker clarifies a lot in terms of this planet's development over the last 30 years - and it's pretty much all for the better for your average human being.
Context is important. The qualifier at the beginning of the sentence is important:
> In some important ways, my generation has failed you in this regard [being too cautious]. We spent too much time debating. We've been too focused on the fight and not focused enough on progress. And you don't need to look far to find an example of that failure. Here today, in this very place, in an arena where thousands once found desperate shelter from a 100-year disaster, the kind that seem to be happening more and more frequently, I don't think we can talk about who we are as people and what we owe to one another without talking about climate change.
I get the feeling that Cook, like so many other public figures who bring up climate change post-2016, is really talking about removing the president from office.
Consider the last sentence here:
> When we talk about climate change or any issue with human costs, and there are many, I challenge you to look for those who have the most to lose and find the real, true empathy that comes from something shared. That is really what we owe one another. When you do that, the political noise dies down, and you can feel your feet firmly planted on solid ground. After all, we don't build monuments to trolls, and we're not going to start now.
Anyone who believes that climate change is caused mostly by human activity should be concerned about this trend. The deeply political nature of the conversation has turned what should be a deliberate discussion about science and policy into a shouting match.
On the other hand an entire class of political participants refuses to acknowledge the science. It's a bit hard to have a discussion with them when they deny there's anything to discuss.
Ironic, seeing as how Google is one of the biggest advertising platforms in the world, using their state of the art AI/ML algorithms to manipulate the minds of the masses into endless conspicuous consumption --which is one of the biggest drivers of ecological self destruction.
> Anyone who believes that climate change is caused mostly by human activity should be concerned about this trend. The deeply political nature of the conversation has turned what should be a deliberate discussion about science and policy into a shouting match.
The problem isn’t the science as much as the proposed solutions. The more extreme solutions are more about income redistribution rather than actual science. Whether or not climate change is unequivocally human caused, there are those that would use “climate” as a means to enact economic proposals they favor regardless of the climate impact. https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/goldstein-failed-c...
For example, what about nuclear? If we are “serious” about climate change, nuclear is the best choice for large scale electrical production, but nuclear faces opposition from those that scream loudest about the danger of fossil fuels. What about the Paris climate meeting? The local airport was filled to the brim with private jets. To normal people like me, why should I set my thermostat to a higher temperature in summer when my energy use is just a blip compared to some “Climate official’s” own carbon footprint. Why should poor people have to pay a higher percentage of their income for energy taxes while the limousine liberals keendoing their thing? They aren’t personally consuming less or suffering the impact of their proposals. Buying “carbon credits” is a cop out — unless they are actually reducing their own energy consumption, they are still spitting CO2 into the air, no matter how much they pay for the privilege. To me, if the situation were so dire, there’d be a lot less hypocrisy. If the “experts” aren’t flying commercial or video conferencing, then clearly the problem isn’t a grave as they suggest. There is absolutely no rationale for climate officials taking a Gulfstream to a climate conference. The concern over the climate rings hollow compared to the bigger goals of redistributing the means of production.
Al Gore becoming a billionaire because of the climate industry also creates some skepticism since he and other like him have a vested financial interest in propagating his opinions. His Inconvinient Truth movie was full of blatant inaccuracies and the forecast FUD never materialized. We constantly hear things like “in 12 years the world will end” yet, here we are, not too much different than we were in 2000. In fact, it might be argued that the climate changes with or without human intervention. The “settled” science isn’t very settled to me, otherwise the predictions wouldn’t be so consistently wrong. I am loathe to support the attempted destruction of capitalism based on unreliable computer models. Those of us skeptical of climate politics — we live here too. It isn’t like we are genuinely interested in destroying the planet; but some of us don’t have a lot of trust in power that they are actually altruistic. Remember, Eugenics was “settled science” too and we saw how horribly that turned out.
No matter which side of the climate politics your beliefs are on, you probably support the proposed solutions that apply to your choice. This is because the human mind works backwards from the solution to the problem, finding logic to justify what is desired. Unless you are one of the rare people whose belief in the validity of "there is human-caused warming we can fix or partially avert" is in disagreement with your belief in the validity of "income redistribution is proper", the failings of the human mind likely apply.
To be extra clear: no matter which side you are on, this DOES NOT just apply to the other team.
>I am loathe to support the attempted destruction of capitalism based on unreliable computer models.
That's a whopper. Have you worked with modelled climate data for any length of time? Or at all? In a past life, I became intimately familiar with the A1B1 data from half a dozen institutions. Collectively they did NOT present a pretty picture. IIRC by about 2050 climate change will really start to bite and make life miserable for us humans. But even if those models are hopelessly wrong (which I doubt), isn't it worth taking a conservative tack anyway with regard to the environment? Or should we just gamble with the future and hope that our energy intensive ways do not result, for example, in systemic crop failure that, in turn, leads to capitalism's self-immolation.
> The problem isn’t the science as much as the proposed solutions. The more extreme solutions are more about income redistribution rather than actual science. Whether or not climate change is unequivocally human caused, there are those that would use “climate” as a means to enact economic proposals they favor regardless of the climate impact. https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/goldstein-failed-c....
a link to an opinion piece in the toronto sun isn’t enough evidence imo (sorry just calling it like i see it, please feel free to provide more evidence)
> For example, what about nuclear? If we are “serious” about climate change, nuclear is the best choice for large scale electrical production, but nuclear faces opposition from those that scream loudest about the danger of fossil fuels.
what about it? there are serious problems with nuclear, for example what to do with the waste (we already saw the disaster waiting to happen at fukushima), what about proliferation of potentially refinable nuclear materials (weapons)? i agree compared to coal it’s a potential short term option, but why do nuclear when we have high powered solar (molten salt) stations [1] that cost a fraction of nuclear stations [2] to say nothing of traditional wind and hydro electric generation
again, i’m not 100% against nuclear but there are much faster, agile and cleaner alternatives already in production
> What about the Paris climate meeting? The local airport was filled to the brim with private jets.
1.) i think this argument is a bit of a nit pick, and 2.) how do you know every private jet was for each person meeting there? and even if so, their hypocrisy is no excuse to do nothing...
> To normal people like me, why should I set my thermostat to a higher temperature in summer when my energy use is just a blip compared to some “Climate official’s” own carbon footprint. Why should poor people have to pay a higher percentage of their income for energy taxes while the limousine liberals keendoing their thing? They aren’t personally consuming less or suffering the impact of their proposals.
that’s a very important point and gets to the real root of the issue: most greenhouse gas is emitted from power generation, farming, deforestation, cars/trucks (lack of public transport being a huge contributor) and industrial processes [3]
these are all systemic and industrial problems that have to be solved at those levels (system and industry), “you and me” barely contribute to that but simple things like not leaving the air on or tv or lights on (esp on large american-style houses) is reasonable imo (to say nothing of it being common sense to reduce your power bill).
> Buying “carbon credits” is a cop out — unless they are actually reducing their own energy consumption, they are still spitting CO2 into the air, no matter how much they pay for the privilege.
this may be true, but it’s a deep sign that our “market based” thinking is not working, and we need to just start passing laws and be done with it... todays politicians are paralyzed by industry and capital, that’s why they will do almost anything to shift the burden to you and me...
> To me, if the situation were so dire, there’d be a lot less hypocrisy. If the “experts” aren’t flying commercial or video conferencing, then clearly the problem isn’t a grave as they suggest. There is absolutely no rationale for climate officials taking a Gulfstream to a climate conference. The concern over the climate rings hollow compared to the bigger goals of redistributing the means of production.
is that “climate officials” or just al gore? and again, why should we let their hypocrisy stop us from doing the right thing? it’s entirely besides the point (and i would agree with you about the gulf stream point, just to be fair)
> Al Gore becoming a billionaire because of the climate industry also creates some skepticism since he and other like him have a vested financial interest in propagating his opinions. His Inconvinient Truth movie was full of blatant inaccuracies and the forecast FUD never materialized.
firstly, who cares about al gore, and secondly, how about some evidence? and what are the FUD that never materialized?
> We constantly hear things like “in 12 years the world will end” yet, here we are, not too much different than we were in 2000. In fact, it might be argued that the climate changes with or without human intervention. The “settled” science isn’t very settled to me, otherwise the predictions wouldn’t be so consistently wrong.
are you sure about that? [4]
> I am loathe to support the attempted destruction of capitalism based on unreliable computer models. Those of us skeptical of climate politics — we live here too. It isn’t like we are genuinely interested in destroying the planet; but some of us don’t have a lot of trust in power that they are actually altruistic.
who said anything about destroying capitalism, and why are you so concerned about that?
and sure, those in power don’t deserve much trust i’ll give you that, but that’s because they get their source of funding not from us, but from industry... we should be pushing for politicians that take no corporate and pac money as a start and hold them more and more accountable... and the second point is, those in power also include the financial sectors and heavy industry... do you have the same mistrust of them as well?
> Remember, Eugenics was “settled science” too and we saw how horribly that turned out.
completely different time periods, “sciences”, and cultures... this does not follow imo
The opinion article you linked is from a right-rated source [0]. The main suggestion in it,
> That would start with the federal government imposing a national, revenue neutral carbon tax of about $200 per tonne of emissions, immediately (not $50 in 2022 under Trudeau’s plan) and then returning all the money raised back to Canadians in dividend cheques.
has pretty wide support on the left. I'm not sure how that differs from being wealth redistribution, which is what the opinion piece is against. It also doesn't describe what the current scheme is nor how it is wealth redistribution.
As far as party support for nuclear, [1]. Democrats care more about wind/solar. Neither party has majority support for emphasizing nuclear. I don't think people that care about CO2 would rule nuclear out if it were the only option.
Jets vs. thermostat type problems are tragedy of the commons. I don't appreciate private jets ferrying around political leaders, but I doubt they'll be flying commercial. That doesn't seem practical from a security nor time perspective. But, millions of people adjust their thermostats. If everybody tolerated just a liiiiittle bit less than their ideal temperature, how much would that save? Consumption is a tragedy of the commons problem.
I'd like evidence that limousine liberals are the problems w.r.t. taxes. I agree that there is hypocrisy. I disagree about how it rings hollow compared to redistributing the means, especially since "redistributing the means" doesn't even really make sense in that block of text.
Lastly, studies aren't full of blatant inaccuracies nor FUD. The world isn't ending outright, but it's getting a lot worse in a lot of ways in a lot of areas. The Syrian civil war was partially exacerbated by the worst drought ever recorded [2]. The science is settled. Exxon Mobile predicted [3] exactly what would be happening today [4] back in 1982. The conclusion of their summary is that serious adverse problems are not likely to occur until the late century, and that the time should allow for coming up with solutions. That time is now, and globally, we are doing very little, because doing what needs to be done would be economically detrimental to established interests.
The full quote is "In some important ways, my generation has failed you", which I think drastically changes the meaning from the one in the headline, which is clickbaity.
Tim Cook can blabber all he wants about his supposed concerned about filter bubbles — his company, on his watch, is banning alternative social media platforms from putting apps on his App Store (Gab, for example).
While he spouts off about taking action instead of debating, he actively bans alternatives to the status-quo. Shut it, Tim. I don’t buy your propaganda.
Gab offered a censored version for Apple, twitter does not, and twitter allows porn. Gab being banned was political choice by Apple, there was no reason to ban the censored version when they allow uncensored twitter/instagram/etc.
Great point from a brilliant mind. You should decide for everybody what ideas they can and can't see on the internet, and what applications they can and can't download onto their hardware. Thanks for watching out for all of us.
If you own the site, feel free to ban me. You have every right to.
Apple doesn't want Gab on their platform? Well it's Apple's platform, so you have to play by their rules. If you don't like it, you can go create your own technology.
I was responding to @newfriend who wanted me banned for my comment.
This is how free speech works. You can't come into my home and say whatever you want. I'll kick you out onto the streets, the same way Apple kicked Gab off their platform. You can say whatever you want in your own home, though.
Again I understand that they can, and in principle they have the right to ban people from their platform. My point is that they shouldn't, so you repeating that "they can" is irrelevant. A friend of mine laid this out more eloquently here: https://wissler-jensen.com/declaration
Watching talks like this is what helps me keep my sanity in the face of climate change and have hope we will do something about it. My take-away phrase of the speech is gonna be "do something". I know my doing something will not even register in the global scheme of things but I'm gonna do it anyway.
...the problem is, I'm not really convinced that we really know of a specific "something" that we can do that wouldn't backfire and make emissions even worse by creating perverse incentives elsewhere in the economy.
The only idea I've heard that would likely help in a meaningful way would be to simply make all domestic oil and natural gas extraction 100% illegal and try to convince some other nations to do the same. That one thing would raise world energy prices enough to curb consumption and would also slow down the economy enough to decrease emissions. (But the economic consequences of doing this would be brutal)
Technology is the only way. Even slightly curbing economic activity to decrease emissions will not be politically popular enough to be implemented (see: yellow vest protests). Additionally global coordination is required meaning a system where individual countries can cheat to get economic gains will fail.
I agree that technological solutions are probably the only thing that is viable. my point is mainly to say that these silly half measures such as carbon taxes are a waste of time and are possibly just making the problem even worse.
The only way to make sure that oil doesn't get turned into CO2 is to simply leave the oil in the ground.
(disclaimer: I'm part of a climate&energy research group)
While climate change seems like a daunting and unsolvable problem at an individual level, to be honest it is fairly easy to solve with political solutions provided you could unblock the political machinery. I used to be fairly pessimistic about this, as a researcher, but now I think it's mostly a matter of getting political interest to align at the same time.
In our society, the simplest and most effective way to get something done is to just make it profitable. You can try to do things by fiat, but if you make something profitable it tends to encourage massive innovation and is usually faster.
For climate change, the easiest thing would be to just add a carbon tax that ramps up over time (or cap+trade, they have the same economic outcome, though cap+trade is a lot more complex to manage). You can even make it revenue neutral, though you do need tariffs on any goods not meeting the standard (which eventually encourages other countries to follow suit when the tax increases past a certain point).
Anyway, this gives you price discovery, as it eventually becomes cheaper to pay someone to take the carbon instead of emitting it. From a climate perspective, I do not really care if natural gas+sequestration wins over PV+batteries, but with a ramping price we can be confident that at least one of those will win over dumping Co2 into the atmosphere.
I claim no expertise on this issue, but it seems pretty obvious to me (perhaps wrongly, I'll admit) that the only reason carbon taxes are popular as a solution is PRECISELY because they don't work- i.e. they allow oil companies to continue extracting oil and sell it to people who then burn it into CO2.
The idea that carbon taxes are a meaningful economic incentive seems mostly like wishful thinking- It seems obvious to me that it just introduces an additional layer of perverse incentives for lobbyists to exploit. The only meaningful "free market" solution that I can see that could work is limiting supply (but nobody want to do that because it would be painful and most people care more about doing things that feel good instead of doing things that actually work)
I think you maybe (or not, couldn't tell) misunderstand the point of the tax. The point is to build a profitable market they can buy from to avoid paying the tax.
With my climate hat on (not to be confused with the environmentalist hat), I have no problem with oil companies continuing to pump out oil as long as they put the Co2 back into the ground. If they prefer to pay a $100/ton tax to pump it out over paying someone else $80/ton offset/sequester the emissions, then they'll quickly go out of business to their competitors.
But, they need an incentive to pay that $80/ton. And the companies that want to put the Co2 back underground need the $80/ton to make it profitable. Right now they have none, but if the alternative is a $100/ton tax, then you can be fairly confident that the net emissions will converge towards zero.
You have more authority on this subject than I do, given your background, but I remain convinced that any "solution" in which the oil companies take combustible carbon molecules from "below ground" to "above ground" is doomed, even if reasonable carbon sequestration tech is developed.
You are right that getting every last mole of Co2 in a controlled manner is doomed, but fortunately that is not required. What you really want is for net emissions to go to zero or even negative. If you are just pulling Co2 out of flue gas, that's very difficult (without BECCS, which is a separate thing).
However, Direct Air Capture is also economical at some price point (optimistically around $130/ton). At that point, you don't have to nab every last mole of Co2 that the oil companies pump up because you can always pull it back out of the air. You just need a profitable market to make it economical to spend that money.
If this was true, then the oil companies could just build a machine that directly converts hydrocarbons into CO2 underground and extracts the energy in the form of electricity and the hydrocarbons could stay below ground through the entire process.
That's a great start, but from my understanding that legislation stops at $50/ton, which is a problem.
You really need it to keep ramping up to get the price discovery. It's possible that at $51/ton the problem would solve itself (e.g. someone sells a way to pull Co2 out of a flue-gas stack, which then becomes profitable and marches down the learning curve), but wouldn't occur at $50.
By itself, $50/ton would make a huge difference in the PV learning curve in the US, but since Canada has such a terrible generation profile it doesn't even help that much.
You might get lucky, but most analysis I've seen puts the initial price point optimistically at $70-80/ton (flue-gas), and $130/ton for the walk-away and be happy knowing you saved the earth solution (DAC). Before that point, it mostly just shifts around accounting.
That doesn't even sound feasible, to be honest- humanity currently needs plastic for a billion medical things, for one- and if you outlaw extraction, then another company will go "gee, thanks!", open the valves, charge more, and make a ton of money.
Getting things off of oil is going to take a long time.
You would still allow imports of oil from countries that don't participate in the ban, with high tariffs added. This would still make oil available for medical use cases etc.
The bottom line is the only way to prevent oil from being turned into CO2 is to simply leave the oil in the ground.
So, I know people that create lists like this think they're helping things, but the people that created this site are basically "think tank" people, and I don't really think they have the expertise to make such precise quantitative claims- Almost no one on their staff has strong economics training as far as I can tell. Yes, they have science expertise, but none of the science is really in dispute anymore among reasonable people- The problem is how to turn the science into appropriate policy actions, and I am not very convinced these sort of "policy experts" who spend their time reading and writing white papers really have any greater insight into the problem than the rest of us- Having people with supposed authority make such laughable statements like "Refrigerant management will reduce carbon emissions exactly 89.74 CO2-Eq" is dangerous, in my opinion, because it greatly oversimplifies the problem.
I have outlined my concrete suggestions elsewhere in this comments section (though they don't carry much weight since I am stumped just as much as everyone else)
...but a specific suggestion for these folks would be to simply not publish claims on these sorts of matters with 4 significant digits of precision.
Perhaps all of the students can fuse into a cyborg-hivemind? That would allow them to all be the CEO of a company, then it would just be a challenge of making it the most profitable in the world.
Okay, so what Mr. Cook is going to do about it? He's one of the few people who is in a perfect position to actually make some change.
May be he's going to move Apple factories back from China to create more middle class jobs in the US?
May be he's willing to relocate the headquarters from Cupertino to a less crowded location? Come on, Mr. Cook, that would kill two birds with one stone: prices for SV houses will go a bit down and you'll be able to revive some dilapidated neighborhood. May I suggest Detroit, MI?
Or may be he wants to start small: just open a school in a poor SF community. Find decent teachers. Pay for the first class principal and give several hundred kids a good start in life.
I feel that we can say a particular person has failed you, an organization has failed you, but saying that his generation has failed us implies that his generation has some control on the overall trajectory of humanity. I think that's a pretty bad assumption. When the sample is big enough, it almost becomes a random walk/ markov chain instead of deterministic algorithm.
Tim Cook's generation can't take all the blame -- the Internet could've been a tool to help fix the problems, rather than spy, neuter, and manipulate.
My generation -- teens and college-aged who were already skilled in software and Internet at the start of the dotcom boom, and who seemed to already have a better median sense of Web opportunities and risks than people do today -- we went for the money and power, and often did the exact opposite of what we already knew about what's good for society.
That admitted, don't fall for standard diversionary and divison tactics that blame problems on some group -- whether it's ethnicity, gender, religion, nation, generation, voting group, sports team, or anything else. If you want to identify where to focus problem-solving, some old investigative advice applies: follow the money.
Not has. They are failing us today. Boomers have all the money and political power yet are doing nothing. Dont say sorry for things you did yesturday. Stop doing what you are doing today. Stop talking and help us fix the problems.
In my opinion, the much bigger issue is the burden of public debt (and Social Security/Medicare liabilities) being saddled onto future generations. Currently it's $181k per taxpayer, excluding Social Security/Medicare. [1]
We've kicked the can down the road for decades, and one day those debts will come due. Whichever generation inherits it, will pay a huge price, whether that is massive monetary inflation, or default on the debts.
Society always supports retirees through the efforts of current workers. If you want to eat forty years from now when you're no longer working, your choices are either to start stocking up on canned food now, or subsist on a portion of what workers make forty years hence. The physical storage plan is obviously impractical when you think about it in full, especially for services like health care.
The Social Security / Medicare point is basically just saying that our future society will not be wealthy enough to take care of retirees and other non-working members of society in the number and standard we're currently projecting. There's no victims of under-saving because it's basically impossible to save. If our current benefit levels are "too high" right now, the people victimized are today's workers having too high of taxes, too much debt to repay, or too high of asset prices to pay.
Made me think about Bruce Sterling's comments in this year's WELL State Of The World about the current depressive mood making headway among the world's richest people. Here's him riffing on Gates -
>"Here in 2019, there are more Americans alive over 60 than Americans who are under 18. So for a brisk, road-ahead, forward-looking viewpoint, it might be time for us to check in with that widely-noted retired guy, Bill Gates.
>Despite his advancing years, Mr Gates hardcore grinds it out more in a week than I ever do in a year. And, although he's not a facile TED-talk optimist, he's always got his eye on the deliverable. That's why it's a little weird to see him tacitly admitting so much defeat in his recent screed.
>To begin, Bill quotes his best pal Warren Buffett, claiming that the bottom line of human good behavior is "Do the people you care about love you back?" This seems an odd scheme to promote, considering the Sage of Omaha's polygamous lifestyle. Buffett's motto should have been, "If your wife leaves for California and sends her best friend over instead, go for that." Let's hope they were all happier.
>Then there's this prediction: "software will be able to notice when you’re feeling down, connect you with your friends, give you personalized tips for sleeping and eating better." Something downright ominous here, because obviously Gates is tacitly conceding that it's not your nearest and dearest but rather the software that ought to be caring about you and loving you back.
>First, I don't think that's ever gonna work. Second, I'm getting concerned about Bill's mood. Is he so personally unhappy now that he would want to digitally monitor his own mental state?"...
>..."finally, "Melinda and I are working on our next Annual Letter. The theme is a surprise, though it is safe to say we’ll be sharing some positive trends that make us optimistic about the future."
>Why does Bill even have to say that bullshit? It's because he's got nothing that he's genuinely enthusiastic about, that's why he says it. Whenever people are truly positive, they never whine about how, just any minute now, they're gonna lift their sorry heads and say something positive. "I'm not gonna be depressed about it, I'm gonna say something really upbeat here," that never works! It's like a poker tell, something Bill ought to get since he plays so much poker.
>You can't scold yourself about not talking properly, you have to take action in some aspect of life that actually makes you enthusiastic. Then you don't have to tell people that you and the wife will be cheerful any minute now. If you're really making any headway, people will show up on their own. You'll have to chase 'em off with a stick.
>In any case, this new-dark malaise I was talking about earlier? He's got it. Yeah, even him."
By that standard, Apple has never released a new product. After all, the iPhone was "just" an iteration on features that already existed in various previous devices.
The whole consumer electronics industry is stuck. Everyone has a phone. PC sales are flat and mostly to business. (Desktop PCs are now like commercial trucks. Every business uses them, but nobody gets excited about them. They're expected to last a long time and have low operating cost.) Tablets were a niche. 3D TV was a total flop. VR headsets are a niche. IoT turned out to be mostly voice terminals for services.
And everything that will be invented has been invented.
I'm going to guess that something in the future will be revolutionary. It might just be a while. Humans went millennia without electricity, and then everything kinda shot up- I wouldn't be surprised if humanity takes another step up the QoL stairs in a couple hundred years.
But not soon enough to keep the factories in Shenzhen and the sales at the Apple store going. If it's going to be the Next Big Thing in the next three years, it has to be in prototype now.
I guess I'm considered a millennial, but messages like this sound like misconceived pandering. Firstly, I don't think any generation necessarily "owes" anything to future generations. But, even if we accept the premise, I am the beneficiary of absolutely mind-boggling amounts of technological advancement, culture, progress, infrastructure, science, and on and on and on even just over the course of my own lifetime (approaching 30 years). "Boo hoo, things aren't absolutely perfect in every way." That doesn't mean that any generation has "failed" another. Sure, there might be some setbacks and difficult problems to solve or adjust to in the future, but come on. As Steven Pinker has I think convincingly pointed out, things have been reliably getting better for a long time, and even when we think "the world is going to hell", it simply doesn't.
Not to mention, there is something extraordinarily presumptuous about the CEO of one tech company thinking he has the standing to either criticize or speak on behalf of literally billions of people.
I think there are numerous ways in which Tim Cook's generation has failed the next generation (at least in the US).
* Wages are flat, * Housing costs are up (in large part due to NIMBYism), * College is more expensive (in large part due to Cook's generation cutting subsidies that they got), * Environment is shot- that whole global warming thing isn't going away anytime soon.
Generally speaking the baby boomers, as a whole, have focused more on enriching themselves than any other previous generation. This is the first time in generations that, in the US, the newer generation is seen as worse off than the one before it.
What are you asking for? The world has changed drastically, culture and preferences have changed drastically, and new technological tools make the job and economic landscape entirely different than earlier. That's not Baby Boomers' fault. Are you really going to blame them for not predicting the future well enough? Baby boomers aren't forcing young folks to like living in cities more than suburbs. They're not maliciously causing robots and computers to be more reliable than humans at menial repetitive tasks. They're not forcing young folks to want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mediocre private universities when reasonably priced state universities exist (and a world of knowledge for self-teaching is available through the internet). And even the global warming thing, our current prosperity--and don't kid yourself, America is pretty freaking prosperous--strongly depended on us exploiting cheap and reliable energy for decades. And it's that prosperity which gives us the bandwidth and resources to think "hey, let's do something about this, either find a way to avoid or prepare or cope".
Yes, it would have been nice if everyone in the previous generation had a crystal ball and selfless motives. But that is not something we are due as a right, nor is it something anyone should reasonably hold against them. They didn't blow up the world, and made it better in better in a bunch of ways, and maybe a bit worse in some ways. On net, that's still like a B+ or higher in my book.
On the whole, I too agree with Pinker. But I don't think it's necessarily mutually exclusive with one generation "failing" another (I hate that wording because it feels reductionist).
If the claim is true that the millennial generation is the first to have a lower quality of life than their parents, that sounds a lot like a failure to manage resources given the prosperity you cited. How can we be at the most prosperous time yet have a generation worse off than the previous? It seems like it's either a failure of values, mismanagement of resources, or bad metrics.
Put another way, if this was a company that was posting record sales and margins yet somehow posting worse profits than the previous CEO, wouldn't that at least raise some eyebrows?
If the millennial generation wants a higher quality of life than their parents, they will need to gather and harvest more resources.
The methods the boomers & prior generations used for that were a combination of investing in fossil fuel extraction infrastructure and sometimes waging war/extracting resources from other countries.
Look at China - massive generational improvement in living standards, massive increase in pollution (to the point where it goes well beyond the theoretical concerns of global warming).
As a body the wannabe thought-leaders of the millennials are inconsistent on this point. Do they care more about wages and living standards, or more about the environment? There is no longer the enthusiastic consensus on living standards that existed in the previous generations.
I think this is a false dichotomy. The only way it's true is if we assume the quality of life desired by millennials is the same as conspicuous consumption previously portrayed by Madison Avenue. To that point, I see younger generations largely rejecting this definition of 'quality of life' in favor of alternate definitions.
In regards to China, I don't know if this is a point that this is the only way to do things or if it's just following a previously defined template, similar to the way most economies transition from agrarian, to industrial, to service economies.
I also think it's erroneous to frame it as an either/or state when there's opportunity for both improving standards of living without an additional impact on the environment through increases in efficiency on how we put those resources to work. There's lots of sectors (healthcare, energy, etc.) that affect quality of life that can improve without the assumption that we throw more resources at them, just that we be smarter about how we use those resources.
I suppose this shows how old and out of touch I am, but who are the 'thought-leaders' you refer towards? I'm not being snarky, I legitimately don't know who would be considered a millennial thought-leader and would like to find out.
> following a previously defined template
That was the interpretation I was going for. It is conspicuous - the only way we know how to rapidly increase living standards involves using fossil fuels. Solar and wind are only cost competitive at the moment after easily 30 years of pressure and research. They weren't an option to set the millenials up for success.
The alternatives are very tentatively proven at this stage, and not at the same scale as China from backwater to superpower in 60 years. They didn't do that with wind energy - they burned a lot of coal. We still don't have compelling evidence that a society can flourish without the internal combustion engine. Maybe it is about to hit, we can all hope.
> I suppose this shows how old and out of touch I am, but who are the 'thought-leaders' you refer towards? I'm not being snarky, I legitimately don't know who would be considered a millennial thought-leader and would like to find out.
I don't actually know who would be considered a thought leader for the millenials. Wouldn't even know where to start figuring that out, or even what the term means.
But there are a lot of very vocal individuals on the subject of environmentalism who clearly want people to think like them (the sort of people who lead protests and make up the activist core of the environmental movement). They were the ones I'm referring to.
I fully grant your point that the rate at which Chinese were brought into the middle class is dependent on fossil fuels.
But similar to your point on the infancy of renewables, this is largely because ICE and other fossil fuel technology has been improved on for the last 150 years. It's unfair to compare renewables to this standard as they are still very much the new kid on the block.
What I think will be very disappointing is if we, as a society, decide to blindly continue focused on fossil fuels because we're optimizing in the short term, rather than the long term. In my opinion, we should be leveraging the last 150 years of fossil fuel technology as a stepping stone to something more sustainable.
I think there's a tendency to treat it as an overly simplified optimization problem, as in we need to maximize output at all costs. It's probably better to set it up as an optimization problem with the proper constraints. These constraints may be externalities that the government is involved in regulating. Yes, we may sacrifice some short term benefit for long-term success. But we (hopefully) won't have squandered an amazing resource like fossil fuels for an ill-advised myopic gain.
Surely this has nothing to do with the increasing wealth inequality in america. The only way we can have things is killing the environment. You know that aside from the self aggrandizing purple haired political shitstains of the future that you see organizing rallies and shit. There are other sources of information about the environment
Since you've already posted several abusive comments, I've banned this account until we get some indication that you want to use HN as intended. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
whynotboth.gif
It strikes me as a false dichotomy to think we have to choose between higher wages / quality of life and the environment.
As mentioned earlier, a lot of investment went into fossil fuels in the past. Now, we could put a lot of investment into technologies that won’t hurt the environment as much. There will be an initial cost to doing that (we’ll still use fossil fuels to get much of the electricity to make solar/wind/etc), but eventually things will even out and we can start having environmentally-friendly sources be much more affordable.
I would've asked Boomers to not have wasted trillions of dollars on unnecessary military spending (which could've gone to infrastructure, education, and universal healthcare) and countless lives on unnecessary military actions. I would've asked them to not have supported trade pacts that were great for those the jobs went to in developing countries and for domestic consumers of goods where production was off-shored/outsourced, but hollowed out the middle class. I would've asked them to not have allowed private companies to run rampant in healthcare, economically devastating anyone who has chronic health issues or doesn't have a cush employer provided healthcare plan, and then having the audacity of shouting "Socialism!" when healthcare systems working in every other first world country are proposed. I would've asked them to consider the world they were leaving their kids and grandkids, and make efforts to transition off of fossil fuels sooner. I would've asked them to make efforts to support Labor and Unions, not allow them to crumble under the guise of "Right To Work", stagnating wages for forty years and solidifying Capital's stranglehold over the economy, including workplace and employment conditions. I would've asked they not use drug legislation and prisons as weapons against certain classes of people. I would've asked for less greed and more compassion. I would've asked for a bit more (reasonable) sacrifice for future generations.
But here we are, so I suppose we'll just clean up the mess the Worst Generation left us all with. It's just a shame they squandered so much for so little; the time for asking anything of them has passed [1].
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/03/millennials... (Millennials approach Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation in the electorate [Note: As of 2019, Millenials will have surpassed Boomers as the largest electorate])
> I would've asked them to not have allowed private companies to run rampant in healthcare, economically devastating anyone who has chronic health issues or doesn't have a cush employer provided healthcare plan, and then having the audacity of shouting "Socialism!" when healthcare systems working in every other first world country are proposed.
"Boomers" didn't really do this--a small cadre of the ultra-wealthy did this with the help of a lot of stupid people.
"Boomers", in fact, were probably the last generation to engage in successful large-scale labor actions.
The fight isn't between generations--the fight is against the concentration of wealth.
One thing that has happened in the last few decades is that increases in prosperity mainly went to a few at the top and for the rest it stagnated. I think you can put the blame on the people in power during that time.
My net wealth is massively negative and will remain so for decades... and yet any fair assessment of my quality of life is that it's great. I can't afford a car, but I can still be chauffeured around like a celebrity at the push of a button on my phone. I can summon almost anything I want from across the planet and have it show up in my doorstep in 2 days as if I was a king. I have access to probably 99+% of the knowledge, information, art, entertainment, and telecommunication tools of the richest guy in the world. I could hardly care less that some people are preposterously wealthy while I'm "poor", because I really think my life is probably at least 80% as good as theirs is. I also hope for greater equality in the hope that it would further spur creation and make people feel more comfortable with risk taking and self-fulfillment or self-expression. But, thinking that millennials/post-millenials/future generations have been somehow "screwed over" or have been given a world on fire is an ungrateful and borderline laughable delusion.
The "previous generations failed us" mentality implies that we are somehow due all of the good things previous generations have given us (even though the only thing most of us have done to "deserve" them is exist) without having to deal with any of the bad. I think if some people had their way, we'd be shivering out in the cold and bartering mounds of dirt for big circular rocks because they'd have villified the people that first cut down a tree for shelter or crucified the people who thought that steam engines were an innovation.
> what are you asking for?
I want cooperation. Younger people, myself included, want policy changes that will attempt to mitigate some of the damage done by the previous generation. However, boomers are still in power and actively resist changes that attempt to curb issues like climate change and income inequality. I think this is where a lot of resentment comes from. Additionally boomers will be dead before the consequences of their actions have a chance to seriously effect their lives, furthering the resentment.
To me this story of boomers callously enriching themselves at the expense of future generations sounds like just a bigoted unfounded accusation. Talk about not taking responsibility.. foisting all your problems onto the parent generation as if you yourself have no agency to tackle these challenges. Maybe the millenials will be blamed by the next generation for just burying themselves in video games and drugs at the time when climate change became common knowledge, when there was still time to do so something but instead they chose to be pandered to.
I never said anything about boomers enriching themselves at the expense of future generations.
I think blaming younger generations for not taking responsibility for what was handed to them is unfair. We are trying to fix things, however it is difficult when the people in power (who happen to be boomers) will not allow progress. That resistance to change and the resulting resentment is what I was attempting to discuss in my previous comment.
When people say "boomers" do they mean "boomers" world-wide, or do they mean "boomers" as in American "boomers"? I ask because everyone is part of this thing, but some people may think only American boomers have partaken in the above ascribed behavior.
I am American and I generally am referring to Americans when I talk about boomers
There's nothing wrong with future generations holding millennials responsible for their actions as well. It doesn't negate the argument and is a fairly weak position to take
The undertone of your posts appears to be that climate change is not that big of a deal. Do you think we're facing an incredibly serious problem with climate change or just some minor corrections to be made?
> Are you really going to blame them for not predicting the future well enough?
They predicted it just fine. Then they failed to work together to prevent it.
> Baby boomers aren't forcing young folks to like living in cities more than suburbs.
Young people can only afford overpriced apartments because jobs have steadily migrated to cities, they don't have the credit or capital to afford a house and car in the suburbs, they're overburdened with debt and rising costs of living, not paid accordingly, and well-paying jobs for the lower and middle class are more scarce. Oh, and media conglomerates and advertising have been repeating since before they were born that what they really want is only found in glamorous cities.
> They're not forcing young folks to want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mediocre private universities when reasonably priced state universities exist
That's all they've ever heard. "You have to go to college. You have to go to the best college. You can go to the best college, you'll just be in debt for 30 years once you do. Don't worry, here's a thing we invented in the 70s called a credit card."
> our current prosperity [..] strongly depended on us exploiting cheap and reliable energy for decades
We have been the most powerful and wealthy nation since WWII, a generation or two before the boomers. The boomers were even hit by a major oil crisis and recession more than once, and rather than look to alternatives (which Congress literally declared they had to do), they doubled down.
> They didn't blow up the world
Yes they did. Climate change is going to be, and already is, disastrous.
People are complaining about the Syrian refugees crisis, that's literally the tip of the iceberg.
>> They didn't blow up the world
That's a depressingly low bar for "not failing".
And even so they've failed there too.
What you’re wrong about is the notion that markets dictate itself. Actually pretty much the entirety of America and possibly most of the rest of the developed world is wrong on this notion because the country and the rest of the world is so rooted in capitalism. It’s like crying about the fact that we are polluting the world with single use plastics and saying that we are powerless to do anything about it because individuals will always optimize for personal gain. The reality is we as people are people and every single one of us has the ability and capacity to choose to not use single use plastics. We aren’t dumb robots that absolutely have to follow this code of maximizing for personal gain. People as individuals, or organizations, or really groups of people of any size are capable of doing anything because at the base level, every single person has the capacity to make one decision over another, because we are people not robots. If we chose to keep the earth clean, we could keep the earth clean. It’s not impossible, and people need to stop believing that the only force is this blobby uncontrollable multicellular creature of human mass that creates cities, destroys natural landscapes, and kills rhinos. It’s at this level of learned helplessness where you (and I’m not crticizing only you, but pretty much the rest of the world) is wrong. If baby boomers collectively chose to help the next generation they absolutely could have done more to help the next generation. They just never believed anything could be done so they never really tried.
> That's not Baby Boomers' fault.
Who changed the culture, preferences, and technological tools? Who made the economic and political decisions that brought us where we are today?
There's inevitably a window where some generational demographic is generally the driving leadership and consumer/citizen force behind societal trends and decisions. The boomers have been that force for some time and they're far from gone.
It's fair to acknowledge that some of the tech / choices made are useful. And, hey, "nobody owes anybody anything" or "no generation owes successive ones" is a values statement, even though it may be sociopathic. "That's not the Baby Boomer's fault" doesn't make any sense (except as an expression of that non-ethic).
> Baby boomers aren't forcing young folks to like living in cities more than suburbs.
> They're not maliciously causing robots and computers to be more reliable than humans at menial repetitive tasks.
> They're not forcing young folks to want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mediocre private universities when reasonably priced state universities exist (and a world of knowledge for self-teaching is available through the internet)
> And even the global warming thing, our current prosperity--and don't kid yourself, America is pretty freaking prosperous--strongly depended on us exploiting cheap and reliable energy for decades.
But they did preside over changes which:
* moved opportunities (not to mention narratives of opportunity) to cities over suburbs
* remove protections for labor and diminish safety nets for those who've been caught in automation-based change
* enshrined credentialism as a mark of professional opportunity, whether or not a world of knowledge for self-teaching is available on the internet, and then administered both public-supported universities and private universities in such a way that students frequently have to pay more in tuition than they did 30 years ago.
* prioritized individually maximized returns (with some degree of shared prosperity) over sustainability.
> " that prosperity which gives us the bandwidth and resources to think "hey, let's do something about this, either find a way to avoid or prepare or cope"."
Any post WW2 prosperity should have been enough to do some important things about climate change once we understood the relevant dynamics.
> it would have been nice if everyone in the previous generation had a crystal ball and selfless motives.
"Crystal ball", that's neat, it implies we'd need impossible magic to have foreseen economic or environmental consequences 30 years ago.
Your post is a string of fallacies.
> not predicting the future > if everyone in the previous generation had a crystal ball
This is, of course, an absurd expectation, and a straw man. We're not blaming anyone for "not predicting the future." That would be obviously unfair, and of course that is why you accuse us of it. Straw men make the weakest opponents; it feels good to thrash them.
Our upset with previous generations is _not_ that they "didn't predict the future," but that they re-implemented the past: concentration of wealth being the chief crime.
> young folks like living in cities more than suburbs
This is not the cause of our woes.
> robots and computers [are] more reliable than humans at menial repetitive tasks
This is not the cause of our woes.
> young folks want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mediocre private universities.
This is not the cause of our woes. Three times you have tried to redirect the blame, and three times you have made things up.
Living in association with others has _always_ been a human predilection and a necessity, but the "invisible hand" of an unprecedented global marketplace is extremely good at jacking up the price in response to this endemic demand. Those who're profiting from this are members of the previous generation, whose wealth has allowed them to construct the real-estate machines that're now manipulating the markets. The previous generation owns the real estate that we're left squabbling over to rent at rising prices. The result is a bifurcation of society into those who've acquired patronage by obsequience and those who're struggling on the periphery.
It's not feasible to live "in the country," for most young people. We don't have the social structures, the commons, the resources that our ancestors had. We need urban institutions. Don't get me started on the bigotry of small towns. You can do that research yourself.
So when you say it's not Boomers' fault that "young folks like living in cities more than suburbs," you're attacking an oblique target. Of course Boomers did not invent the desire; they've merely perfected its exploitation. And for that, you had better hope we forgive them. Once they stop.
Your other two misdirections are equally oblique. Robots and student loans? Two mechanisms for which we cannot, rationally blame the previous generation, and yet two mechanisms which are so obviously played to favor the wealthy, and maintain the desperation of the working majority.
Boomers didn't invent the laws of physics which make machines ostensibly tireless, but they did maintain the enclosure by which commons are made inaccessible to the workers whom robots replace.
What happens to me when a robot takes my job? Do I prosper, as a shareholder of the firm whose profits I made, and with whose profits the robot was purchased? Likely, not. The majority of the value I produce is turned into a robot in which I do not own a stake. This is theft. It's not a theft invented by Boomers--it is an old, and tiresome theft--but it has been implemented by wealthy Boomers, and defended by poor, brainwashed ones.
Boomers didn't invent machines, they merely continued the practice of crystalizing surplus value into them: capital accrued on the backs of workers who'll be cast out when they can sacrifice no more at their bosses' altar. You can pretend "robots" are an "unpredictable innovation", but they're no more than a continuation of the practice. We're not angry that you "didn't see the future." We're angry that you thought we couldn't see the past.
As for the student loans we've acquired to attend these so-called "mediocre private universities," I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself for casting blame on the students who, groomed to be so naive by the age of 18 that we'd fall for such a trick, were swindled by the entirety of the adult world into signing these documents, and attending these institutions.
It was the previous generation that wrote that screenplays, the Public Relations marketing material, that funded the outreach campaigns, the college preparatory texts, that put out this entire ecosystem of propaganda to groom children into ostensibly prestigious institutions. We were told--and if not by "the previous generation", then by whom--that these loans were the gateway to adulthood; that life ended if we didn't acquire them.
Many of us died over this decision, by stressful suicide, but most of us went with it. After all, there were billions of dollars to be made by our compliance, and many, many people wanted to see us take these loans. People from the previous generation.
This is what we, at 17, were stacked up against: the billion-dollar endowments of centuries old institutions, their networks of generationally wealthy alumni, and the banks that facilitate the financials.
So when you say "that's not Baby Boomers' fault," you're either stupid, or you're dissembling, because while the boomers didn't invent the noose, they sure didn't hesitate to string it up.
It may be that a lot of the issues do not represent any especially egregious failing of any generation, but rather structural changes. The post-war exponential growth that fed unprecedented wealth generation simply could not continue, it has run its course. So while it is tempting to look back a generation or two and see how they had it much easier in a lot of ways, if you look back just a little bit further, it's easy to feel pretty damn lucky to be living today.
A lot of this is by-product of Globalization. Not that it can be contained, but with Globalization, wages seek their level, with Worldwide capital flows housing becomes a hot investment. College is more expensive, but greater numbers of people are going to college than before because it's thought a blue-collar job is insufficient to survive. More people and wealthier people means greater consumption which degrades the enviro.
Now, if Boomers are seen as greedy, then wouldn't their successors be greedier if they wanted to out-earn them?
>* College is more expensive (in large part due to Cook's generation cutting subsidies that they got),
College is more expensive because the government ensures that 18 year olds have uncapped credit cards for educational expenses and everyone tells them "dont worry about it right now". When you increase demand and defer all cost pressure by years, the cost will always skyrocket.
Blaming this on a lack of subsidies is actually backwards; providing guaranteed funding for education would further boost costs. As long as schools are setting the price, demand is high, and the money is flowing like water, that cost is going to continue to increase.
> * Environment is shot- that whole global warming thing isn't going away anytime soon.
But renewables use is also way up.
This is the parent's point: these claims utterly ignore the historical reality. We're greener than ever, we've stopped using CFCs and arsenic preservatives and lead paints and high particulate energy generation. We have more access to education than ever. And in the west, our wages are on average 5x that of the rest of the world.
So many of these complaints look ignorant and petty when you zoom out a tiny bit from one's personal circumstances. You have college debt? Cry more, you have access to more opportunity than the preceeding 99% of your ancestors and than 95% of your current peers.
Ah we found the true millenial!
Boo hoo you guys haven't given us amazing wage growth in an era where we're all competing with cheap overseas labor so we can buy new homes at 25 plus Apple gadgets and endless media. And we had to pay :'( for our fancy degrees with housing included at elite schools in distant states because community college and nearby colleges aren't good enough for us...and you didn't solve all of the problems that didn't exist before your time (like global warming) and I feel sad sometimes too and I'm overwhelmed by social media....wha wha!!!!
This is the kind of millenial we hate. The arrogant narcissists who can't understand why every measure of happiness hasn't gone up for them.
Well, can you please forgive us? I, and the billions of other people in the past who suffered through wars, famines, plagues, witch hunts, slow progress, feudalism, and every other hardship, are sorry that world perfection didn't converge at the time of your birth and that you might have some hardships and might have to solve some hard problems. Maybe you can achieve perfection for your kids.
Please don't post flamewar comments like this. We ban accounts that do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Could you put that in terms that are less condescending and ad-hominem? My impression of HN is that it's not the place for that kind of tone.
What if he’s just an aggressive person? He would perceive your comment as a micro aggression
Imagine previous generations that were being drafted to the army to go off to WW2, Korea, Vietnam. Ah yes but Millennials have flat wages and expensive college. We've failed them all.
Personally, I'd rather be drafted than have to watch my kids and grand-kids go fight in pointless resource wars that will be the result of decades of unchecked climate change. Frankly, the attitude previous generations have had towards climate science has can best be described as criminally negligent.
So the bar you're setting is based on the some of the bloodiest conflicts in human history?
Every generation owes the next generation a world that is in as good of condition as when they received it. Anything else is taking out a loan in the next generation’s name.
Super underrated comment right here.
I'll take it a step farther: we are of the world. The world barfed you and me up, and we are made out of the stuff that makes the world up. The world is not "ours" or "theirs". We are it, and it is us. We are under the mistaken impression that we are separate from the world and that we "own" it. Until we realize this fact, we will continue to poison ours and each other's children.
> Firstly, I don't think any generation necessarily "owes" anything to future generations
Surely - at a bare minimum - it's everyone's responsibility to leave a habitable planet for future generations. Greed now is going to result in a very, very crappy place to live in the future.
Could you make an argument that speeding up human extinction is actually best for the planet in the long run?
> there is something extraordinarily presumptuous about the CEO of one tech company thinking he has the standing to either criticize or speak on behalf of literally billions of people.
I think he's only presuming to speak on behalf of US residents, which caps at 400 million, and even then only for his generation, which limits the number even more.
In any case, I think one can make observations about a group of people of which one is a member without representing every single member of that group. His generation either did or did not fail current graduates, whether everybody agrees with that or not.
Things are getting better. But many of the new things don't need people so much.
What we're getting is a big underclass that isn't in the game at all. They're just dead weight. This is hitting the Arab world hard.[1]
[1] https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/youth-unemployment-mi...
Cool that you're out here deciding who is and isn't "dead weight."
The free market does that. People who can't generate more revenue than they cost are dead weight in a capitalistic system. It's not common to say that, but the US certainly works that way.
It's not about the definition of "dead weight", people are downvoting you because it's a fairly mean phrase to use to refer to your fellow human beings.
It's a statement describing his take on the situation, not an insult.
Animats may be saying thats what a capitalist system treats the downtrodden, but the actual actions are by that very capitalist system.
In order to face a problem, you have to be able to talk about it. And capitalism stratifies the "work" and "cannot work" brutally. And as a killing blow, then proceeds to separate food/shelter/communications and the means to try to make oneself better. In this way, capitalism forces the poverty-stricken to rely on charity of others, for 'market forces' nearly removes the ability to climb the ladder of success.
If you find using the term "dead weight" abhorrent (as I do), what are you doing about the root cause; capitalism?
Bailing out the banks and instituting QE is not capitalism.
No true Scotsman fallacy.
Please tell us what is capitalism.
The whole article linked to explains that the reason for high youth unemployment is not "capitalism" of "free markets", but the opposite, an unhealthily large public sector, and and unhealthily small private sector - what they need is more economic freedom, and *more" free markets, not less
That may explain the middle east and north Africa but doesn't seem to address the OP regarding the U.S. The census data I found looks like the public/private ratio has been pretty consistent since the 1980s
Yes, the oil states have bloated public sectors and dysfunctional governments. But the same basic problem - large numbers of young people with no jobs and no future.
They don't owe it as much as they stole more than their share, and continue to build deficits and prevent housing for younger generations.
I have mixed feelings on discussing problems with "generations"; its so broad and imprecise that it feels meaningless. However, I can accept that it has some value when discussing broad social effects.
I agree with Jobs; Gen X and further back generations, as groups, raped the planet for short-term economic growth. They aren't the first or last group to do so, but they did do it. My generation, I.e. gen Z, is looking at an abnormally bleak future. Yes, the past generations had the Cold War and possible Nuclear Armageddon. And while the Cold War is dead, possible Nuclear Armageddon is still very much alive. We also face, for the first time in US history, the likelihood that we will die poorer than our parents. We also face the fact that our middle age will come with practically certain catastrophic climate change. Any one of these problems is significant on a global scale, but their collective force is even more crippling.
All these problems exist because of the collective decisions of past generations; thats what every present is. WW1 was a product of dumb alliances and treaties made decades before. And it wasn't the generation that decided on the treaties that were butchered on the Somme, it was their children. And as a group, I believe that they are soaked in the blood of their children. However, I will agree that blaming generations is at best unproductive and at worst needlessly divisive. Yes, the actions of past generations create the wars and disasters of today, but that is a simple fact of societies. Blaming a generation hides the specific culprits behind specific problems. We should blame the Tobacco lobby for the death of millions, we should blame oil companies for crippling greener alternatives for decades, we should blame the Military-Industrial complex for chaining America to eternal wars just to make an easy buck.
This was more rambly than I intended, so I hope it still has some value.
Yes, you got technological advancement, but resources are pretty much down to zero. You are saddled with debt up to your eyeballs. Most of you will never be able to afford a house, if you somehow manage to buy one, you will be paying it off till your last breath. You will have no social blanket, boomers would have plowed through that.
Even when we think "the world is going to hell", it simply doesn't
Actually things are pretty much going to hell, as far as climate change (and its spillover effects) are foreseen to go.
Or what is your prognosis of that situation?
One thing that the previous generation is not to make the world worse. At some point, the increased debt will hurt future generations.
Your culture was completely robbed from you before you were born. What stories do you love? What music fills your head? What great deeds of the past inspire you? Are you allowed to share ANY of that freely?
I'm doing better than my father but I had to get buttfucked twice as hard to do it. Fuck the boomers. I can't believe you'd keep licking that boot even as they're still robbing you of retirement benefits.
>> Not to mention, there is something extraordinarily presumptuous about the CEO of one tech company thinking he has the standing to either criticize or speak on behalf of literally billions of people.
Yep, more than anything else it is simply patronising. Reading Hans Gosling and Steven Pinker clarifies a lot in terms of this planet's development over the last 30 years - and it's pretty much all for the better for your average human being.
Context is important. The qualifier at the beginning of the sentence is important:
> In some important ways, my generation has failed you in this regard [being too cautious]. We spent too much time debating. We've been too focused on the fight and not focused enough on progress. And you don't need to look far to find an example of that failure. Here today, in this very place, in an arena where thousands once found desperate shelter from a 100-year disaster, the kind that seem to be happening more and more frequently, I don't think we can talk about who we are as people and what we owe to one another without talking about climate change.
https://www.iphonejd.com/iphone_jd/2019/05/transcript-tim-co...
I get the feeling that Cook, like so many other public figures who bring up climate change post-2016, is really talking about removing the president from office.
Consider the last sentence here:
> When we talk about climate change or any issue with human costs, and there are many, I challenge you to look for those who have the most to lose and find the real, true empathy that comes from something shared. That is really what we owe one another. When you do that, the political noise dies down, and you can feel your feet firmly planted on solid ground. After all, we don't build monuments to trolls, and we're not going to start now.
Anyone who believes that climate change is caused mostly by human activity should be concerned about this trend. The deeply political nature of the conversation has turned what should be a deliberate discussion about science and policy into a shouting match.
> is really talking about removing the president from office.
Maybe I am not sophisticated enough but I have a feeling that he is really talking about climate change.
On the other hand an entire class of political participants refuses to acknowledge the science. It's a bit hard to have a discussion with them when they deny there's anything to discuss.
Ironic, seeing as how Google is one of the biggest advertising platforms in the world, using their state of the art AI/ML algorithms to manipulate the minds of the masses into endless conspicuous consumption --which is one of the biggest drivers of ecological self destruction.
Tim Cook’s Apple has definitely failed me.
> Anyone who believes that climate change is caused mostly by human activity should be concerned about this trend. The deeply political nature of the conversation has turned what should be a deliberate discussion about science and policy into a shouting match.
The problem isn’t the science as much as the proposed solutions. The more extreme solutions are more about income redistribution rather than actual science. Whether or not climate change is unequivocally human caused, there are those that would use “climate” as a means to enact economic proposals they favor regardless of the climate impact. https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/goldstein-failed-c...
For example, what about nuclear? If we are “serious” about climate change, nuclear is the best choice for large scale electrical production, but nuclear faces opposition from those that scream loudest about the danger of fossil fuels. What about the Paris climate meeting? The local airport was filled to the brim with private jets. To normal people like me, why should I set my thermostat to a higher temperature in summer when my energy use is just a blip compared to some “Climate official’s” own carbon footprint. Why should poor people have to pay a higher percentage of their income for energy taxes while the limousine liberals keendoing their thing? They aren’t personally consuming less or suffering the impact of their proposals. Buying “carbon credits” is a cop out — unless they are actually reducing their own energy consumption, they are still spitting CO2 into the air, no matter how much they pay for the privilege. To me, if the situation were so dire, there’d be a lot less hypocrisy. If the “experts” aren’t flying commercial or video conferencing, then clearly the problem isn’t a grave as they suggest. There is absolutely no rationale for climate officials taking a Gulfstream to a climate conference. The concern over the climate rings hollow compared to the bigger goals of redistributing the means of production.
Al Gore becoming a billionaire because of the climate industry also creates some skepticism since he and other like him have a vested financial interest in propagating his opinions. His Inconvinient Truth movie was full of blatant inaccuracies and the forecast FUD never materialized. We constantly hear things like “in 12 years the world will end” yet, here we are, not too much different than we were in 2000. In fact, it might be argued that the climate changes with or without human intervention. The “settled” science isn’t very settled to me, otherwise the predictions wouldn’t be so consistently wrong. I am loathe to support the attempted destruction of capitalism based on unreliable computer models. Those of us skeptical of climate politics — we live here too. It isn’t like we are genuinely interested in destroying the planet; but some of us don’t have a lot of trust in power that they are actually altruistic. Remember, Eugenics was “settled science” too and we saw how horribly that turned out.
No matter which side of the climate politics your beliefs are on, you probably support the proposed solutions that apply to your choice. This is because the human mind works backwards from the solution to the problem, finding logic to justify what is desired. Unless you are one of the rare people whose belief in the validity of "there is human-caused warming we can fix or partially avert" is in disagreement with your belief in the validity of "income redistribution is proper", the failings of the human mind likely apply.
To be extra clear: no matter which side you are on, this DOES NOT just apply to the other team.
>I am loathe to support the attempted destruction of capitalism based on unreliable computer models.
That's a whopper. Have you worked with modelled climate data for any length of time? Or at all? In a past life, I became intimately familiar with the A1B1 data from half a dozen institutions. Collectively they did NOT present a pretty picture. IIRC by about 2050 climate change will really start to bite and make life miserable for us humans. But even if those models are hopelessly wrong (which I doubt), isn't it worth taking a conservative tack anyway with regard to the environment? Or should we just gamble with the future and hope that our energy intensive ways do not result, for example, in systemic crop failure that, in turn, leads to capitalism's self-immolation.
> The problem isn’t the science as much as the proposed solutions. The more extreme solutions are more about income redistribution rather than actual science. Whether or not climate change is unequivocally human caused, there are those that would use “climate” as a means to enact economic proposals they favor regardless of the climate impact. https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/goldstein-failed-c....
a link to an opinion piece in the toronto sun isn’t enough evidence imo (sorry just calling it like i see it, please feel free to provide more evidence)
> For example, what about nuclear? If we are “serious” about climate change, nuclear is the best choice for large scale electrical production, but nuclear faces opposition from those that scream loudest about the danger of fossil fuels.
what about it? there are serious problems with nuclear, for example what to do with the waste (we already saw the disaster waiting to happen at fukushima), what about proliferation of potentially refinable nuclear materials (weapons)? i agree compared to coal it’s a potential short term option, but why do nuclear when we have high powered solar (molten salt) stations [1] that cost a fraction of nuclear stations [2] to say nothing of traditional wind and hydro electric generation
again, i’m not 100% against nuclear but there are much faster, agile and cleaner alternatives already in production
> What about the Paris climate meeting? The local airport was filled to the brim with private jets.
1.) i think this argument is a bit of a nit pick, and 2.) how do you know every private jet was for each person meeting there? and even if so, their hypocrisy is no excuse to do nothing...
> To normal people like me, why should I set my thermostat to a higher temperature in summer when my energy use is just a blip compared to some “Climate official’s” own carbon footprint. Why should poor people have to pay a higher percentage of their income for energy taxes while the limousine liberals keendoing their thing? They aren’t personally consuming less or suffering the impact of their proposals.
that’s a very important point and gets to the real root of the issue: most greenhouse gas is emitted from power generation, farming, deforestation, cars/trucks (lack of public transport being a huge contributor) and industrial processes [3]
these are all systemic and industrial problems that have to be solved at those levels (system and industry), “you and me” barely contribute to that but simple things like not leaving the air on or tv or lights on (esp on large american-style houses) is reasonable imo (to say nothing of it being common sense to reduce your power bill).
> Buying “carbon credits” is a cop out — unless they are actually reducing their own energy consumption, they are still spitting CO2 into the air, no matter how much they pay for the privilege.
this may be true, but it’s a deep sign that our “market based” thinking is not working, and we need to just start passing laws and be done with it... todays politicians are paralyzed by industry and capital, that’s why they will do almost anything to shift the burden to you and me...
> To me, if the situation were so dire, there’d be a lot less hypocrisy. If the “experts” aren’t flying commercial or video conferencing, then clearly the problem isn’t a grave as they suggest. There is absolutely no rationale for climate officials taking a Gulfstream to a climate conference. The concern over the climate rings hollow compared to the bigger goals of redistributing the means of production.
is that “climate officials” or just al gore? and again, why should we let their hypocrisy stop us from doing the right thing? it’s entirely besides the point (and i would agree with you about the gulf stream point, just to be fair)
> Al Gore becoming a billionaire because of the climate industry also creates some skepticism since he and other like him have a vested financial interest in propagating his opinions. His Inconvinient Truth movie was full of blatant inaccuracies and the forecast FUD never materialized.
firstly, who cares about al gore, and secondly, how about some evidence? and what are the FUD that never materialized?
> We constantly hear things like “in 12 years the world will end” yet, here we are, not too much different than we were in 2000. In fact, it might be argued that the climate changes with or without human intervention. The “settled” science isn’t very settled to me, otherwise the predictions wouldn’t be so consistently wrong.
are you sure about that? [4]
> I am loathe to support the attempted destruction of capitalism based on unreliable computer models. Those of us skeptical of climate politics — we live here too. It isn’t like we are genuinely interested in destroying the planet; but some of us don’t have a lot of trust in power that they are actually altruistic.
who said anything about destroying capitalism, and why are you so concerned about that?
and sure, those in power don’t deserve much trust i’ll give you that, but that’s because they get their source of funding not from us, but from industry... we should be pushing for politicians that take no corporate and pac money as a start and hold them more and more accountable... and the second point is, those in power also include the financial sectors and heavy industry... do you have the same mistrust of them as well?
> Remember, Eugenics was “settled science” too and we saw how horribly that turned out.
completely different time periods, “sciences”, and cultures... this does not follow imo
——
[1] https://inhabitat.com/revolutionary-new-solar-plant-generate...
[2] https://www.synapse-energy.com/sites/default/files/SynapsePa...
[3] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
[4] https://skepticalscience.com/ipcc-overestimate-global-warmin...
The opinion article you linked is from a right-rated source [0]. The main suggestion in it,
> That would start with the federal government imposing a national, revenue neutral carbon tax of about $200 per tonne of emissions, immediately (not $50 in 2022 under Trudeau’s plan) and then returning all the money raised back to Canadians in dividend cheques.
has pretty wide support on the left. I'm not sure how that differs from being wealth redistribution, which is what the opinion piece is against. It also doesn't describe what the current scheme is nor how it is wealth redistribution.
As far as party support for nuclear, [1]. Democrats care more about wind/solar. Neither party has majority support for emphasizing nuclear. I don't think people that care about CO2 would rule nuclear out if it were the only option.
Jets vs. thermostat type problems are tragedy of the commons. I don't appreciate private jets ferrying around political leaders, but I doubt they'll be flying commercial. That doesn't seem practical from a security nor time perspective. But, millions of people adjust their thermostats. If everybody tolerated just a liiiiittle bit less than their ideal temperature, how much would that save? Consumption is a tragedy of the commons problem.
I'd like evidence that limousine liberals are the problems w.r.t. taxes. I agree that there is hypocrisy. I disagree about how it rings hollow compared to redistributing the means, especially since "redistributing the means" doesn't even really make sense in that block of text.
Lastly, studies aren't full of blatant inaccuracies nor FUD. The world isn't ending outright, but it's getting a lot worse in a lot of ways in a lot of areas. The Syrian civil war was partially exacerbated by the worst drought ever recorded [2]. The science is settled. Exxon Mobile predicted [3] exactly what would be happening today [4] back in 1982. The conclusion of their summary is that serious adverse problems are not likely to occur until the late century, and that the time should allow for coming up with solutions. That time is now, and globally, we are doing very little, because doing what needs to be done would be economically detrimental to established interests.
[0]: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/toronto-sun/ [1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/182180/support-nuclear-energy.a... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Civil_War [3]: https://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/documents/... [4]: https://twitter.com/UNFCCC/status/1125085040768167937
The full quote is "In some important ways, my generation has failed you", which I think drastically changes the meaning from the one in the headline, which is clickbaity.
Quote in context: ”In some important ways, my generation has failed you”.
That’s not in all ways, not even in all important ways, so quite a different statement.
Tim Cook can blabber all he wants about his supposed concerned about filter bubbles — his company, on his watch, is banning alternative social media platforms from putting apps on his App Store (Gab, for example).
While he spouts off about taking action instead of debating, he actively bans alternatives to the status-quo. Shut it, Tim. I don’t buy your propaganda.
Gab is extremely toxic trash...I can completely see why they'd ban it.
Gab offered a censored version for Apple, twitter does not, and twitter allows porn. Gab being banned was political choice by Apple, there was no reason to ban the censored version when they allow uncensored twitter/instagram/etc.
Great point from a brilliant mind. You should decide for everybody what ideas they can and can't see on the internet, and what applications they can and can't download onto their hardware. Thanks for watching out for all of us.
I've decided your comment is toxic, you should be banned.
If you own the site, feel free to ban me. You have every right to.
Apple doesn't want Gab on their platform? Well it's Apple's platform, so you have to play by their rules. If you don't like it, you can go create your own technology.
That's how this works.
I never questioned if they can, I questioned if they should. "It's mine and I can do whatever I want" is the moral reasoning of a (low IQ) teenager.
I was responding to @newfriend who wanted me banned for my comment.
This is how free speech works. You can't come into my home and say whatever you want. I'll kick you out onto the streets, the same way Apple kicked Gab off their platform. You can say whatever you want in your own home, though.
Again I understand that they can, and in principle they have the right to ban people from their platform. My point is that they shouldn't, so you repeating that "they can" is irrelevant. A friend of mine laid this out more eloquently here: https://wissler-jensen.com/declaration
I see tons of Mastodon clients on there. Toot! is a good one. The dev even added an option to change the icon to a trans flag.
Watching talks like this is what helps me keep my sanity in the face of climate change and have hope we will do something about it. My take-away phrase of the speech is gonna be "do something". I know my doing something will not even register in the global scheme of things but I'm gonna do it anyway.
...the problem is, I'm not really convinced that we really know of a specific "something" that we can do that wouldn't backfire and make emissions even worse by creating perverse incentives elsewhere in the economy.
The only idea I've heard that would likely help in a meaningful way would be to simply make all domestic oil and natural gas extraction 100% illegal and try to convince some other nations to do the same. That one thing would raise world energy prices enough to curb consumption and would also slow down the economy enough to decrease emissions. (But the economic consequences of doing this would be brutal)
Technology is the only way. Even slightly curbing economic activity to decrease emissions will not be politically popular enough to be implemented (see: yellow vest protests). Additionally global coordination is required meaning a system where individual countries can cheat to get economic gains will fail.
I agree that technological solutions are probably the only thing that is viable. my point is mainly to say that these silly half measures such as carbon taxes are a waste of time and are possibly just making the problem even worse.
The only way to make sure that oil doesn't get turned into CO2 is to simply leave the oil in the ground.
(disclaimer: I'm part of a climate&energy research group)
While climate change seems like a daunting and unsolvable problem at an individual level, to be honest it is fairly easy to solve with political solutions provided you could unblock the political machinery. I used to be fairly pessimistic about this, as a researcher, but now I think it's mostly a matter of getting political interest to align at the same time.
In our society, the simplest and most effective way to get something done is to just make it profitable. You can try to do things by fiat, but if you make something profitable it tends to encourage massive innovation and is usually faster.
For climate change, the easiest thing would be to just add a carbon tax that ramps up over time (or cap+trade, they have the same economic outcome, though cap+trade is a lot more complex to manage). You can even make it revenue neutral, though you do need tariffs on any goods not meeting the standard (which eventually encourages other countries to follow suit when the tax increases past a certain point).
Anyway, this gives you price discovery, as it eventually becomes cheaper to pay someone to take the carbon instead of emitting it. From a climate perspective, I do not really care if natural gas+sequestration wins over PV+batteries, but with a ramping price we can be confident that at least one of those will win over dumping Co2 into the atmosphere.
There was actually a bill this year (DOA, presumably due to republican distaste) that would have done exactly this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Innovation_and_Carbon_D...
... that basically would have solved the problem.
I claim no expertise on this issue, but it seems pretty obvious to me (perhaps wrongly, I'll admit) that the only reason carbon taxes are popular as a solution is PRECISELY because they don't work- i.e. they allow oil companies to continue extracting oil and sell it to people who then burn it into CO2.
The idea that carbon taxes are a meaningful economic incentive seems mostly like wishful thinking- It seems obvious to me that it just introduces an additional layer of perverse incentives for lobbyists to exploit. The only meaningful "free market" solution that I can see that could work is limiting supply (but nobody want to do that because it would be painful and most people care more about doing things that feel good instead of doing things that actually work)
I think you maybe (or not, couldn't tell) misunderstand the point of the tax. The point is to build a profitable market they can buy from to avoid paying the tax.
With my climate hat on (not to be confused with the environmentalist hat), I have no problem with oil companies continuing to pump out oil as long as they put the Co2 back into the ground. If they prefer to pay a $100/ton tax to pump it out over paying someone else $80/ton offset/sequester the emissions, then they'll quickly go out of business to their competitors.
But, they need an incentive to pay that $80/ton. And the companies that want to put the Co2 back underground need the $80/ton to make it profitable. Right now they have none, but if the alternative is a $100/ton tax, then you can be fairly confident that the net emissions will converge towards zero.
You have more authority on this subject than I do, given your background, but I remain convinced that any "solution" in which the oil companies take combustible carbon molecules from "below ground" to "above ground" is doomed, even if reasonable carbon sequestration tech is developed.
You are right that getting every last mole of Co2 in a controlled manner is doomed, but fortunately that is not required. What you really want is for net emissions to go to zero or even negative. If you are just pulling Co2 out of flue gas, that's very difficult (without BECCS, which is a separate thing).
However, Direct Air Capture is also economical at some price point (optimistically around $130/ton). At that point, you don't have to nab every last mole of Co2 that the oil companies pump up because you can always pull it back out of the air. You just need a profitable market to make it economical to spend that money.
If this was true, then the oil companies could just build a machine that directly converts hydrocarbons into CO2 underground and extracts the energy in the form of electricity and the hydrocarbons could stay below ground through the entire process.
No carbon taxes necessary.
Canada tried that with a rebate to boot at the federal level. Look at what’s happening in Alberta and Ontario.
That's a great start, but from my understanding that legislation stops at $50/ton, which is a problem.
You really need it to keep ramping up to get the price discovery. It's possible that at $51/ton the problem would solve itself (e.g. someone sells a way to pull Co2 out of a flue-gas stack, which then becomes profitable and marches down the learning curve), but wouldn't occur at $50.
By itself, $50/ton would make a huge difference in the PV learning curve in the US, but since Canada has such a terrible generation profile it doesn't even help that much.
You might get lucky, but most analysis I've seen puts the initial price point optimistically at $70-80/ton (flue-gas), and $130/ton for the walk-away and be happy knowing you saved the earth solution (DAC). Before that point, it mostly just shifts around accounting.
Well no, I meant those provinces have opposing governments which might use the notwithstanding clause or some legal gambit to overturn it
Yeah, that sort of thing can make a climate scientist sad :/
That doesn't even sound feasible, to be honest- humanity currently needs plastic for a billion medical things, for one- and if you outlaw extraction, then another company will go "gee, thanks!", open the valves, charge more, and make a ton of money.
Getting things off of oil is going to take a long time.
You would still allow imports of oil from countries that don't participate in the ban, with high tariffs added. This would still make oil available for medical use cases etc.
The bottom line is the only way to prevent oil from being turned into CO2 is to simply leave the oil in the ground.
http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank
So, I know people that create lists like this think they're helping things, but the people that created this site are basically "think tank" people, and I don't really think they have the expertise to make such precise quantitative claims- Almost no one on their staff has strong economics training as far as I can tell. Yes, they have science expertise, but none of the science is really in dispute anymore among reasonable people- The problem is how to turn the science into appropriate policy actions, and I am not very convinced these sort of "policy experts" who spend their time reading and writing white papers really have any greater insight into the problem than the rest of us- Having people with supposed authority make such laughable statements like "Refrigerant management will reduce carbon emissions exactly 89.74 CO2-Eq" is dangerous, in my opinion, because it greatly oversimplifies the problem.
Have a better suggestion? You have to start somewhere.
I have outlined my concrete suggestions elsewhere in this comments section (though they don't carry much weight since I am stumped just as much as everyone else)
...but a specific suggestion for these folks would be to simply not publish claims on these sorts of matters with 4 significant digits of precision.
"the university’s president ... touted that the Apple CEO ... 'represents the kind of success we hope all of our graduates can attain.'"
... to become the CEO of one of the most profitable companies in the history of the world? I mean, aim high I guess.
Perhaps all of the students can fuse into a cyborg-hivemind? That would allow them to all be the CEO of a company, then it would just be a challenge of making it the most profitable in the world.
Yep. Sorry millennials, it's all downhill from here. We're checking out, the mess is all yours.
Okay, so what Mr. Cook is going to do about it? He's one of the few people who is in a perfect position to actually make some change.
May be he's going to move Apple factories back from China to create more middle class jobs in the US?
May be he's willing to relocate the headquarters from Cupertino to a less crowded location? Come on, Mr. Cook, that would kill two birds with one stone: prices for SV houses will go a bit down and you'll be able to revive some dilapidated neighborhood. May I suggest Detroit, MI?
Or may be he wants to start small: just open a school in a poor SF community. Find decent teachers. Pay for the first class principal and give several hundred kids a good start in life.
No...?
I feel that we can say a particular person has failed you, an organization has failed you, but saying that his generation has failed us implies that his generation has some control on the overall trajectory of humanity. I think that's a pretty bad assumption. When the sample is big enough, it almost becomes a random walk/ markov chain instead of deterministic algorithm.
Tim Cook's generation can't take all the blame -- the Internet could've been a tool to help fix the problems, rather than spy, neuter, and manipulate.
My generation -- teens and college-aged who were already skilled in software and Internet at the start of the dotcom boom, and who seemed to already have a better median sense of Web opportunities and risks than people do today -- we went for the money and power, and often did the exact opposite of what we already knew about what's good for society.
That admitted, don't fall for standard diversionary and divison tactics that blame problems on some group -- whether it's ethnicity, gender, religion, nation, generation, voting group, sports team, or anything else. If you want to identify where to focus problem-solving, some old investigative advice applies: follow the money.
"There are some who would like to believe that the only way you can be strong is by bulldozing those who disagree with you…"
This sentence reminded me today's headline news about Huawei !!!
US government bulldozing the other countries tech companies to make CEO of apple a role model.
I also enjoyed the speech, congrats to all 2019 graduates around the world.
Rich person: "Don't blame the rich, blame the old."
Tim Cook is 58, so I think it's possible to argue that he's both.
Old persons are in general richer than young ones.
Not has. They are failing us today. Boomers have all the money and political power yet are doing nothing. Dont say sorry for things you did yesturday. Stop doing what you are doing today. Stop talking and help us fix the problems.
In my opinion, the much bigger issue is the burden of public debt (and Social Security/Medicare liabilities) being saddled onto future generations. Currently it's $181k per taxpayer, excluding Social Security/Medicare. [1]
We've kicked the can down the road for decades, and one day those debts will come due. Whichever generation inherits it, will pay a huge price, whether that is massive monetary inflation, or default on the debts.
[1] https://usdebtclock.org/
Society always supports retirees through the efforts of current workers. If you want to eat forty years from now when you're no longer working, your choices are either to start stocking up on canned food now, or subsist on a portion of what workers make forty years hence. The physical storage plan is obviously impractical when you think about it in full, especially for services like health care.
The Social Security / Medicare point is basically just saying that our future society will not be wealthy enough to take care of retirees and other non-working members of society in the number and standard we're currently projecting. There's no victims of under-saving because it's basically impossible to save. If our current benefit levels are "too high" right now, the people victimized are today's workers having too high of taxes, too much debt to repay, or too high of asset prices to pay.
The Graduates to Tim Cook:
No kidding.
Link to actual speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taLzKBs-Yu4
Jump to mentioned segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taLzKBs-Yu4&t=11m55s
Made me think about Bruce Sterling's comments in this year's WELL State Of The World about the current depressive mood making headway among the world's richest people. Here's him riffing on Gates -
>"Here in 2019, there are more Americans alive over 60 than Americans who are under 18. So for a brisk, road-ahead, forward-looking viewpoint, it might be time for us to check in with that widely-noted retired guy, Bill Gates.
>Despite his advancing years, Mr Gates hardcore grinds it out more in a week than I ever do in a year. And, although he's not a facile TED-talk optimist, he's always got his eye on the deliverable. That's why it's a little weird to see him tacitly admitting so much defeat in his recent screed.
>To begin, Bill quotes his best pal Warren Buffett, claiming that the bottom line of human good behavior is "Do the people you care about love you back?" This seems an odd scheme to promote, considering the Sage of Omaha's polygamous lifestyle. Buffett's motto should have been, "If your wife leaves for California and sends her best friend over instead, go for that." Let's hope they were all happier.
>Then there's this prediction: "software will be able to notice when you’re feeling down, connect you with your friends, give you personalized tips for sleeping and eating better." Something downright ominous here, because obviously Gates is tacitly conceding that it's not your nearest and dearest but rather the software that ought to be caring about you and loving you back.
>First, I don't think that's ever gonna work. Second, I'm getting concerned about Bill's mood. Is he so personally unhappy now that he would want to digitally monitor his own mental state?"...
>..."finally, "Melinda and I are working on our next Annual Letter. The theme is a surprise, though it is safe to say we’ll be sharing some positive trends that make us optimistic about the future."
>Why does Bill even have to say that bullshit? It's because he's got nothing that he's genuinely enthusiastic about, that's why he says it. Whenever people are truly positive, they never whine about how, just any minute now, they're gonna lift their sorry heads and say something positive. "I'm not gonna be depressed about it, I'm gonna say something really upbeat here," that never works! It's like a poker tell, something Bill ought to get since he plays so much poker.
>You can't scold yourself about not talking properly, you have to take action in some aspect of life that actually makes you enthusiastic. Then you don't have to tell people that you and the wife will be cheerful any minute now. If you're really making any headway, people will show up on their own. You'll have to chase 'em off with a stick.
>In any case, this new-dark malaise I was talking about earlier? He's got it. Yeah, even him."
https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/506/State-of...
It is hard to say.
You can have progress but many consequences not taken on board.
If you roll through the world,
India ...
Russia ...
China ...
Europe ...
USA ...
Canada to Argentina ...
Let us not just talk so American centric as many like climate change, totalitarian control of humanity, human gene, AI, religion ...
Some goods some bad. Some very bad.
Hope he mean keyboards
Let's look at it this way.
For whatever reason, people who have a lot of resources are saying burning gasoline and digging for oil is bad.
Maybe they are hinting at something they just can't come out and say? Like, this is killing you, but you would die if we did anything about it?
Or
Hurry up and start engineering in the atmosphere, please, please, please we need it but can't say?
Props to the intern that wrote some bullshit speech making it to HN front page, I guess...
When was the last time Apple release a new product? By new I mean not an iteration of previous ones?
Watch, Airpods, Homepod, Pencil, credit card next month, many services including Apple Pay.
AirPods are pretty great, and conveniently they work on Android phones. :3
My generation may be consigned to socioeconomical bleakness, but the AirPods were a win, Tim. <3
How are those new products. Like I said those are just iterations of old ones.
By that standard, Apple has never released a new product. After all, the iPhone was "just" an iteration on features that already existed in various previous devices.
None of those things existed five years ago.
They did
Those were launched in 2014, 2016, 2017, 2015, 2019, and 2014, respectively.
Equivalent products existed before
The whole consumer electronics industry is stuck. Everyone has a phone. PC sales are flat and mostly to business. (Desktop PCs are now like commercial trucks. Every business uses them, but nobody gets excited about them. They're expected to last a long time and have low operating cost.) Tablets were a niche. 3D TV was a total flop. VR headsets are a niche. IoT turned out to be mostly voice terminals for services.
No new must-have product is in sight.
And everything that will be invented has been invented.
I'm going to guess that something in the future will be revolutionary. It might just be a while. Humans went millennia without electricity, and then everything kinda shot up- I wouldn't be surprised if humanity takes another step up the QoL stairs in a couple hundred years.
But not soon enough to keep the factories in Shenzhen and the sales at the Apple store going. If it's going to be the Next Big Thing in the next three years, it has to be in prototype now.
Getting the interface out of your hands along with some portable system of trust would shake things up a bit.