Hey young people, tell us what you can do!

This is so much BS it makes my six hurt. In my day you could get out of high school, no college, no nothing, and get a job in a factor that paid you well enough to be solidly middle class. You could feed kids, drive cars, have tV and even a boat or a vacation place in the styx somewhere. There were even some pensions, so you could retire some day. Lots of folks did that.

Those jobs are long gone. It's a different world, and the Millennials have to navigate it. I don't envy them.
Thank you. It's easy to skew the numbers in a way to make it look like millennials suck, fact of the matter is, the world is indeed much different, costs are orders of magnitude higher (especially education and housing) and jobs are more limited in their upward growth potential and benefits

Always easier to blame a person, or a group of people, than a systemic issue or failure that needs correcting
 
Our three adult sons all purchased houses (their first and still current homes) that were MUCH larger and nicer than any of the first three houses we owned and raised them in. Two have under- and graduate degrees, one chose not to go the college route. All are doing well, and all got through college on their merit, hard work, loans, and some help from us here and there (the two that DID go and complete their degree paths). NONE are engineers, lawyers, doctors, or in any other particularly high-paying careers. None of them have ever bought a new car or even remotely expensive used car, but all spend more money on smartphones and cable TV than I ever have... or ever will. All are productive and self-sufficient. The comments in this thread about this generation having high expectations for their living conditions are spot on. Some millenials just kind of "expect" it and finance their way into it.. and a lot of trouble. Others work towards that expectation and make it happen in a financially responsible manner. The ratio seems to be skewed towards the former rather than the latter, but I could be wrong. My experiences teaching at a local very well-known university didn't give me a lot of reasons to think highly of the work ethic and reality-grasp of the current crop of young people in general. Again, I hope I'm wrong. I'd LOVE to be wrong.
 
I don't think they really went to Mexico/China because of organized labor. They went to Mexico/China, because the politicians (both sides guilty) signed the "Free Trade" agreements. The only thing free about it was the freefall of manufacturing jobs in the country. Organized Labor wouldn't have kept them here. The UAW is still around and look at how much of the Big Three stuff is not here. The only thing that would have kept them here is putting some protectionism provisions in to keep the jobs there. But that wasn't going to happen because the hard core capitalists would have screamed "you can't do that, it goes against the free market!" and the ones at the opposite end were worried about "the poor people in Mexico and China need a chance, think of their children." Every single one who voted for or signed those bills should have been tried for treason.

However, even if we kept all the factory jobs, I doubt the millennials would be like "oooh, tool and die, sign me up." It's not prestigious enough.
 
Thank you. It's easy to skew the numbers in a way to make it look like millennials suck, fact of the matter is, the world is indeed much different, costs are orders of magnitude higher (especially education and housing) and jobs are more limited in their upward growth potential and benefits

Always easier to blame a person, or a group of people, than a systemic issue or failure that needs correcting

Not sure if you are just trolling at this point, but it sure feels like it.
 
...

BUT.. the fact of the matter is Millennials have far less spending power. You can no longer buy a house and feed a family of four on one income. More likely, you rent an overpriced apartment and not have kids while two people struggle to pay rent, don't own a car, and use public transport. And I'm sorry, most people are not clamoring to live in the middle of nowhere where rents are still cheap, and that's kind of besides the point anyway..

Meh. As others have observed, expectations have increased, both as to where you love and how you live; what were considered "entry level" homes (and were thoroughly livable by any reasonable standard) are simply not what the market wants. I had clients who, having observed how expensive the least-costly homes in the market were, thought they'd create some good opportunities for home ownership by building modestly smaller homes on modestly smaller lots, in good neighborhoods; what they learned (to their extreme disappointment) was that the market simply didn't want those houses. NB: they were a lot nicer than the normal entry-level home in the 50s.

Two cars is the norm, eating out is routine. Not apples to apples.

Also, there is some truth in the "rich get richer" thing. CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978

So true! The Boards of publicly-traded corporations are circle-jerking each other (so to speak). The market is allowing it.

So.. you know. Life honestly does objectively SUCK for millennials, and to top it off we have older generation folks telling us, basically, that it's our fault and to "pull ourselves up by the bootstrap" and move on while they collect a pension and social security that most people under 40 will never dream of having

Yep. But (by and large), it *is* "their fault," to the extent they fail to evaluate the economic realities and conduct their lives in accordance therewith.

This is so much BS it makes my six hurt. In my day you could get out of high school, no college, no nothing, and get a job in a factory that paid you well enough to be solidly middle class. You could feed kids, drive cars, have tV and even a boat or a vacation place in the styx somewhere. There were even some pensions, so you could retire some day. Lots of folks did that.

Those jobs are long gone. It's a different world, and the Millennials have to navigate it. I don't envy them.

Funny thing: in most markets now, everyone who wants to work, is working. There are thousands upon thousands of well-paying, entry-level construction jobs begging for workers. The utterly-untrained entry-level, fog-a-mirror construction work (basic labor) is starting at $15.00+/hour, with benefits added and legitimate training and advancement opportunities.

Electrical contractors will hire a young person right out of high school, give them full-time employment at a decent starting wage with benefits, and fund their attendance in an apprenticeship program, at th end of which (4 years) the apprentice graduates, passes for Journeyman, and is instantaneously able to make an easy $60,000 - $80,000, plus benefits, plus OT, and they have zero student debt and a skill that will always feed them.

There are similar programs for every other trade.

Good luck recruiting today's youths into the trades, though. If it involves actual work, maybe some sweat, 80% plus of the potential workforce is Not Interested.

Never to mention that a huge proportion of new-hires cannot pass a basic drug screen.

No, they went away because we deep sixed organized labor.

Nobody has "deep sixed organized labor." To be blunt, to a large extent, organized labor has deep-sixed themselves. There are still solid and successful trade unions, but they are fighting the trend in their so-called "leadership," to decouple themselves from the essence of the union-owner compact of providing a ready source of productive, well-trained workers in exchange for solid pay and stability.

There are, of course, som eunions that have resisted the trend, and they thrive yet.

As for those who suggest that "there's no need for unions any more," I'd counter that there is no need for corrupt unions; but also, that management of large-scale business get the union they deserve, based upon their treatment of their people.
 
This is so much BS it makes my six hurt. In my day you could get out of high school, no college, no nothing, and get a job in a factory that paid you well enough to be solidly middle class. You could feed kids, drive cars, have tV and even a boat or a vacation place in the styx somewhere. There were even some pensions, so you could retire some day. Lots of folks did that.

Those jobs are long gone. It's a different world, and the Millennials have to navigate it. I don't envy them.
this is fair, but in fairness, this isn't new. Gen X experienced the same thing as millennials. none of us could go get a factory job like our parents could, no one got pensions, etc.
 
No, they went away because we deep sixed organized labor.

Organized labor deep sixed itself. Quality fell dramatically on the products being produced at higher prices. See: GM. Even you drove a Toyota (that wasn’t made here - now many are) for decades. There was an economic reason. Detroit was in a death spiral of not being able to afford unions AND a high quality product for a long long time. Might still be.

There hasn’t been a single significant technological upgrade between my ‘04 Yukon (started in ‘02) and the one they’re making today. They only came out with a new powerplant and drive train last year.

And look who’s on strike again trying to kill the company... again. I suspect we won’t bail them out this time. It didn’t work last time.

I’m also amazed my transmission hasn’t grenaded at 179,000 miles. It’s going to. The problems have been well known with this transmission since about the time this one rolled off the line, new. GM hasn’t done anything about it. They can’t afford to make a 300,000 mile transmission nor make it in the U.S. anymore.

And as far as pensions and factory jobs go, be honest. How many of your “you’re all winners in life” students would happily walk into a factory and mount the same transmission to the same frame for thirty years to earn that pension? No way. They expect more than that sort of job.

Or I could mention how many trips I made to businesses who had Teamsters working their loading docks where I waited around for half a week to get a crate OPENED by a union guy or risk causing the company all sorts of heartache. This wasn’t helping their employer or even showing the slightest pride in the job. Delayed a million dollar project by a week, every time it happened.

Or the union UPS guys who stuffed a forklift tine right through the center of half a million bucks worth of Cisco gear and they still delivered it with the delivery guy literally running away after getting the front desk girl to sign for it without looking at the giant splintered wood and electronic parts mess he dropped in the hallway near the elevators at our startup company?

Yeah. Sorry. Unions killed themselves with crap like the above. I was told if I touched those crates in multiple states at multiple companies that my rental car tires would be slashed. I damn near got tackled by a 300 lb VP of Technology at a Bank in Cincinnati when I was poking at one of the crates wondering if I could just pop it open and get to WORK. Never seen a 300 lb guy move so fast outside of the NFL. LOL.

I spent four days in a hotel room in Cincinnati waiting on some jackass I never did meet or see, to pop open a crate with a crowbar and walk off.

And NYNEX. Don’t even get me started on working with Bell System Union people. I literally called the desk phone at the site where I KNEW one of them had plugged into the wrong jack field and knocked down thousands of my customers in telecom, and the guy literally told me (after he yelled across the room at someone telling them they screwed up) that they’d check it after their half hour union coffee break. Direct words. Then he sat the phone on the desk and proceeded to leave for exactly a half an hour. This is an outage he or the other guy on site CAUSED to circuits that cost us five figures a month to keep operational.

And then there were the AT&T guys who went against the engineering approval we got for tie-wraps in our cabinets and cut every single one of them out and laced every cable with wax string which added four days to twelve site projects which all were worth $3M each for the build and made massive daily revenue. Even the VP who fought for four months for the approval when he toured the first site in NJ and saw what they were doing and the look on my face, just sighed and pulled me aside and said “They’re going to do whatever they want to do, you know it and I know it, so just work around them as best you can.”

Yeah. I’d love to have had ONE major telecom, networking, or building build-out that wasn’t delayed, screwed up completely, or just plain sabotaged by the union people. I did that work for over a decade in telecom and another six years in data center buildouts in networking and NOT ONCE did a union worker bust ass to help their company keep a schedule for their customers.

I even had one guy at that NJ site (granted it was NJ) refuse to get up from his desk and open a door when I had to go outside for tools. He decided the only person who could let me in was the national Subject Matter Expert who was juggling five projects on his cell that week and I was the top of his list so he came in person. That’s how important the project was to the company. And jackass on site literally heard me knock on the secured door, looked at me over the top of his newspaper from five feet away, and made a show of putting the newspaper back up.

Now not to put too fine a point on it, but this was in the era of MCI/Worldcom handing AT&T their butts on a plate, which is basically still where they’re at today. They’re Verizon now, and the name change happened during my time in telecom, but these folks didn’t care at all about the companies they worked for. Not in the slightest. As long distance became a commodity that rides essentially for free on top of fiber data networks, they got left behind. And now they’re still behind.

AT&T did get crushed and had to let the worst and most backward RBOC on the planet buy them and take their name or they’d be a distant memory. Only the marketing people wanted the name.

I loved working with the management and the senior staff out of Middletown. They still had pride in the company and damn near killed themselves constantly to keep that company going. The front line, simply didn’t care at all. The Union would back every bit of their bad behavior that hurt the company.

Sure, they were making a staffing point, but not opening a door for a contractor and leaving him in the hall for half an hour, or refusing to open a crate for four days, is going too far. Businesses can’t afford that. They didn’t care.

And yes NOW there’s no pensions. But EVERY one of those techs that did that crap when I was in that biz had one AND lifetime medical coming in retirement. THEY killed the golden goose for the new kids that came up behind them.

I could see it happening. But again, I had people tell me to just back off or the crate would NEVER be opened. Or that six guys getting paid overtime to wax string Ethernet cables was just how it had to be.

At least in telecom, the union employees cut off their noses in spite of their faces. And then wondered why they were replaced with cheap contractors. You can’t take a week delay on every project or more and expect the company to survive it. Not when the competitor has people who will actually work a full eight.

There was a time I was jealous of those guys. Work maybe four real hours a day and screw off doing paperwork and pretending to work on tickets and get a pension and medical for life. But realistically, they harmed everyone they came into contact with. We figured it out early enough that we put a daily rate on field engineers being on site and unable to work for just that reason. So we got paid whether I was sitting in a hotel room waiting on the Teamster with a crowbar, or actually working.

And yeah, I worked in the hotel room those days either writing lessons for the classes I taught when in Denver or doing phone support for the other field engineers when they hit problems in my specialties. Over a damn modem or 2-3G cellular data card.

Unions sound great on the surface until the reality kicks in at the work level. If you’ve never had to work a project where they were in the way, you just don’t know this.

And I would LOVE to say it was the much touted higher quality work when they did get to work, but it was about the same as contractors. Same number of people can’t read a wiring diagram and wire things up correctly the first time. Or test it. I truly wish it weren’t the case, but humans are humans. We always scheduled an extra two days and if needed a weekend day up against however many days we thought a project turn up should take. All it took was attention to detail and a multimeter to find the inevitable mistakes before powering anything up. The union techs wouldn’t fix their mistakes on a weekend was about the only difference.
 
Yeah. Sorry. Unions killed themselves with crap like the above. I was told if I touched those crates in multiple states at multiple companies that my rental car tires would be slashed. I damn near got tackled by a 300 lb VP of Technology at a Bank in Cincinnati when I was poking at one of the crates wondering if I could just pop it open and get to WORK. Never seen a 300 lb guy move so fast outside of the NFL. LOL.

Luckily I've only dealt with that a few times. I was doing a trade show for the first time, went in to set up our booth. I pulled our power strip out of our box and attempted to plug it into the outlet at the back center floor of the booth. Some big burly guy started foaming at the mouth about how I couldn't plug in the power strip. I asked him what gives, I can most certainly plug a power strip into an outlet. He yelled even louder and said a union electrician had to make the "electrical connection." I asked how to go about this and he told me to go to the convention center contractor office and put in a work order. So that I did, paying $50 to have some guy come out and plug my power strip into the outlet.

After that I knew, and when going on later shows/trips pre-arranged such highly technical special services like having a guy plug in a power strip or crowbar the top off of a crate...
 
Luckily I've only dealt with that a few times. I was doing a trade show for the first time, went in to set up our booth. I pulled our power strip out of our box and attempted to plug it into the outlet at the back center floor of the booth. Some big burly guy started foaming at the mouth about how I couldn't plug in the power strip. I asked him what gives, I can most certainly plug a power strip into an outlet. He yelled even louder and said a union electrician had to make the "electrical connection." I asked how to go about this and he told me to go to the convention center contractor office and put in a work order. So that I did, paying $50 to have some guy come out and plug my power strip into the outlet.

After that I knew, and when going on later shows/trips pre-arranged such highly technical special services like having a guy plug in a power strip or crowbar the top off of a crate...

Just tell him you are union, and say you're IBEW (and make up a number 7-6-25 should work). Or hide the outlet, and plug it when it's obscured by your table.
 
Luckily I've only dealt with that a few times. I was doing a trade show for the first time, went in to set up our booth. I pulled our power strip out of our box and attempted to plug it into the outlet at the back center floor of the booth. Some big burly guy started foaming at the mouth about how I couldn't plug in the power strip. I asked him what gives, I can most certainly plug a power strip into an outlet. He yelled even louder and said a union electrician had to make the "electrical connection." I asked how to go about this and he told me to go to the convention center contractor office and put in a work order. So that I did, paying $50 to have some guy come out and plug my power strip into the outlet.

After that I knew, and when going on later shows/trips pre-arranged such highly technical special services like having a guy plug in a power strip or crowbar the top off of a crate...

My first trade show in Javits Center (1991 0r 1992) our plugged in power strip was dead. So I unplugged it and plugged it into the other plug in the duplex receptacle. It worked. And I _almost_ got thrown out of the convention center. I had no idea...
 
A nearly identical house to mine near where I grew up in California just sold for $2.6M and the monthly mortgage payment is estimated at nearly $7,000...

Choosing to live there is insanity and shows poor judgement and life choices...
 
My first trade show in Javits Center (1991 0r 1992) our plugged in power strip was dead. So I unplugged it and plugged it into the other plug in the duplex receptacle. It worked. And I _almost_ got thrown out of the convention center. I had no idea...

Heh.

1989, Moscone Center, San Francisco.

I almost got grieved because I placed a square of peel & stick Velcro on a portable trade show booth. We had to pay a Sign & Craft guy 30 minute minimum to place adhesive squares of Velcro on posters. It was, genuinely, 30 seconds of work. Credit where due, he placed the squares VERY carefully, did all he could to make it look like real work for as long as he could, but even at that, it took, maybe, 3 minutes.

There was a circuit breaker inside the cabinet of the units labeled "TS" on the system schematics, and it was not until I went to a trade show that someone explained to me why there was a wholly-unnecessary breaker inside the system cabinet - the "TS" stood for "Trade Show," and it was an added "feature" after one show when they paid a union electrician to sit there and plug in, and unplug, the unit while setup and test were completed. This was an example of a gift from the city of SFO to the unions, because it wasn't their money, so they agreed to the work rules. Sort of a silly waste of money, and (more importantly) of the skills of a well-trained (and have no doubt, an IBEW-trained journeyman is a skilled pro by any measure) electrician.

Good union training is REALLY good. Bad union management is REALLY bad. So much opportunity, wasted for no good reason.
 
Good union training is REALLY good. Bad union management is REALLY bad. So much opportunity, wasted for no good reason.

I have to give credit where it’s due after my rant about bad telecom unions. Electrical unions turn out some top notch work that sometimes beats what you’ll get out of a non-union contractor.

But we never saw it, other than the wax lacing crap, in telecom... OTHER than the guys who laid in the enormous power cables for -48 VDC in the central offices.

I think they all had it scared into them by the first time they created a massive arc welder without an ability to stop it until it melted a lot of copper and steel tray... :) That crap would kill you and hurt the whole time you were dying.
 
A nearly identical house to mine near where I grew up in California just sold for $2.6M and the monthly mortgage payment is estimated at nearly $7,000...

Choosing to live there is insanity and shows poor judgement and life choices...

If one can afford it, why does living there indicate poor life choices?
 
If one can afford it, why does living there indicate poor life choices?

It's when they can't, complain about it being unaffordable, and don't move to a place more affordable that indicates poor life choices. If you make $10MM a year and live in a house like that, go for it. If you make $95k and are trying to live in a house like that, well....I've got 999 reasons, or maybe even one more than that, in which you are a tool.
 
It's when they can't, complain about it being unaffordable, and don't move to a place more affordable that indicates poor life choices.

I get that, but I'm not sure overextending is what IK04 is talking about.
 
Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but if it requires an annual income of $400-500K to be able to "afford" a $7,000+ monthly payment, you are wasting money...

EDIT: I forgot to mention these $2M+ houses are less than 2,000 sq. ft. and were built in the '50s for under $13,000!
 
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What can millenials do?

Well, for one, they can ignore the constant stream of old folks telling them they're ruining everything. :rolleyes:

millennials_2x.png


-- Gen Xer who's heard all this same crap before and thinks Millenials have been getting it for way too long.
 
What can millenials do?

Well, for one, they can ignore the constant stream of old folks telling them they're ruining everything. :rolleyes:

millennials_2x.png


-- Gen Xer who's heard all this same crap before and thinks Millenials have been getting it for way too long.

I think it's just human nature for the more (ahem) mature generations to haze the newbies. Think high school seniors picking on the freshmen.

Nobody should take any of this too seriously.
 
They just need to hurry up and make up a catchy name for the post-Millenials so the Millenials can start picking on them. LOL.

No kidding. I was thinking that "millenials" has become a synonym for "young people I need to complain about" because the next generation doesn't have a name yet. Dang no-namers. ;)

Okay, I had to look it up. They have name, but it's not nearly as catchy as "Millenials". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Z
 
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