I sort of did this with Second Life when I was in my teens, logging on daily to have fun and hang out and also to script/build/sell things for real money, answer support requests in-world and so on. I don't go on nearly as much as I used to, but I still draw some passive income from my store there.
I was always curious about 2nd life but never tried it and I'm not sure why. What year was your store's peak revenue? Where do you think most 2nd lifers went? Is there a viable successor these days, maybe in its early stages?
My guess is most "2nd lifers" still among the living (people with disabilities and medical conditions seem to be overrepresented among users; death announcements are not uncommon) are still around, they just log on less frequently and spend more time in other online worlds.
The obvious successors in the works are Linden Lab's own Sansar,
It's been happening more and more for almost the past 8 and it's been getting worse both in the data and anecdotally.
I know a lot of qualified people who've graduated from school and still haven't found work. In CS I know some who have struggled to get a job. That said, those who taught themselves had jobs either while in school or lined up for right when they got out, but that's how it is everywhere if they're willing to move/commute.
That doesn't mean there's nothing to see here. The fact remains that the official metrics are getting worse, and the changes can be reasonably ascribed to people choosing to opt out and play video games (among other things). In another decade we'll be reading articles like this one, but the share of young males opting out will go from 14% to at least 20%, maybe even 25%, if the trends hold. How long until 50% of young males are opting out? And consider that as that number rises those are men who are not buying stuff (better for the environment, but worse for the economy), getting married, having kids, starting businesses, etc
UBI will prime the pump, entrepreneurs will make alternate reality enticing, value will be found there, new goods and services will sprout. Manufacturing and service working parents and grandparents will complain about the alternative working kids, just like manufacturing workers didn't see value in being a service worker. "They're not making anything real."
It's a real possibility, but consider thinking about it this way: Many jobs do not provide (marginal utility > income) to society, and many even produce negative marginal utility.
Everything from utility companies to the financial sector to government to even academia has a heck of a lot of perverse incentives and corruption.
Over half a century ago John Maynard Keynes--one of the most influential intellectuals to shape the world today--said "it's better for people to toil over their bank account than each other."
I would easily wager it's better people toil over their virtual realities than their bank accounts, provided we're able to keep the scarcity problem solved (which I'd bet we'd be able to pull off).
> provided we're able to keep the scarcity problem solved (which I'd bet we'd be able to pull off).
I'm curious as to how we can pull that off given that an ever increasing percentage of young smart capable people are opting out of solving real world problems in favor of "toiling over their virtual realities"...
I really dislike the romanticizing of employment as "solving problems." The effect of employment is that somebody's problems get solved, but as the employee, they aren't my problems, and subjectively it feels like mostly solving a lot of meta-problems like how to follow somebody else's process and get along with all kinds of coworkers. If employment felt like object-level problem solving, I'd be employed.
I'm with you, to some degree. By "solving problems" I was referring to the parent comment's phrase "provided we're able to keep the scarcity problem solved", which I read as "let (vague, unidentified) them solve the scarcity problem while I play video games".
Getting that paycheck saps the majority of the time and energy of a given person. Using a paycheck as a side effect to actually do something useful seems like a very strange system.
It's the capitalist system. If you want to set the objective, then get to work and create the means for yourself to do so. It's so easy to blame the boomers, but in my day job, all I see are younger people who expect a promotion after 6 months, while the boomers are happy to have a job, come in, do what's expected, and don't complain.
Because technology give us massive leverage. The economic opportunities aren't going away, and to the extent that we still need labor, compensation will adapt to what makes it worth an individual's time.
A lot of middlemen roles - real estate agents, recruiters etc fall into this. The role starts out with utility (instead of selling your house yourself get someone experienced to do it!), but as using a middleman becomes ubiquitous and is maintained with rent seeking (you can't list on this real estate site unless you're a registered RE agent), there's no reason for them to do anything more than the bare minimum.
In short, in modern, mainstream economic theory the ideas that explain this are what's called Market Failures. In 2001, the Nobel Prize in economics went to people who studied information asymmetries, which lead to market failures.
A concrete and classic example is the Tragedy of the Commons.
My earlier example of the financial sector, which in 2008 showed everyone how private gains created public losses in the form of subsidies, recession, inflation, bail-outs, moral hazard, public-sector risk, was created despite (and many argue in part, because) of government-oversight.
Another, more benign example, is one I was reminded of while on vacation in France. A toilet bloc was guarded by an unhappy attendant who took 1 euro per use. It would be better to install a 100euro toll gate and give her the remaining profit to buy a computer to play video games (or art supplies, whatever she wants to do), in the hours between cleanings. Everyone wins. This is what's called pareto-efficient. Someone is made better off and no one is made worse off (tourists don't need to encounter an unhappy attendant, either).
Not all jobs are necessarily done because they are profitable to an employer. Mainstream economic theory supports this idea as my previous post explains.
However, to address your general sentiment: First let's establish the premise that the most important thing to ones survival and welfare in the world today is money.
Without that--and therefore by separating the relationship between survival, social status, welfare and money--it could be argued that we would take a step in the direction of fixing incentive alignment.
They'll take up gaming. The gulf between being a truck driver and, say, a programmer is vast. Imagine losing your truck driving job and suddenly trying to figure what the hell else you're going to do to support your family. Yikes!
> The gulf between being a truck driver and, say, a programmer is vast
It really isn't. AI might not be able to take over 100% of our jobs anytime soon, but if even half of the things we spend time on, things like understanding requirements. If an AI system can coax users/managers to provide better requirements, maybe even create tests for those requirements, then every programmer could be twice as productive. That means half as many of us are needed.
Because in any large organisation they are indistinguishable from the productive ones. Sometimes even in your own team there might be someone that appears very productive but creates long term maintenance costs.
I don't mind paying for it even if it does keep young men immersed in a fantasy world.
But I have a daughter. And she will be surrounded by men whose idea of women will be shaped by game characters that fail the Turing test but have big tits.
I guess for her first birthday after puberty I'll have to get her a taser.
6 hours of running around a fantasy world, rescuing damsels in distress who fall out of their dresses and embrace you.
Or 10 minutes watching real people having sex, knowing those people use aliases so that after the camera shuts down and the paper towels come out, they can go and live their own real lives.
I think you underestimate peoples abilities to comprehend what a game is.
I think Princess Zelda's flirtatious tendencies are about as formative to real relationships with women as call of duties role in informing me on gun violence is realistic. They are clearly fantasies with no bearing on reality, that's the appeal of escapism focused games.
I think the issue comes about when people don't have any other experiences to form real expectations of the world around them.
I think you underestimate the time someone who would play a game for 6 hours would spend watching porn (hint: it's probably closer to 6 hours).
Would you rather have your daughter date a guy who has skewed opinions on how to impress a girl, based on video games, or a guy who has skewed opinions on how enjoyable anal fisting is on average, based on pornography?
What scares me about both settings is 1. the way comic fans freaked out about things like Marvel casting Nick Fury as a black man for the movies, and 2. Gamergate.
Both cases had thousands of people freaking out about the details of their fantasy world being changed. And I'm freaking out about having to share a planet with these people.
Racist, sexist and bigoted people exist in all communities.
You have a demographic represented by mostly people who are highly active in online communities, it's entirely unsurprising that a lot of unsavory opinions are seen.
The LGBTQI community has to deal with trans-phobic people who would call themselves queer, feminists try protect their cause from those who want anything but equality, political party's have to constantly fight their own members to maintain image.
No one community will ever be free of people who hold onto what you may consider to be abhorrent opinions.
> And I'm freaking out about having to share a planet with these people.
Then don't. Isolate yourself in a place where everybody shares your views and there's no disagreement. Sounds like a boring way to live, but if you're that scared of the opinions of others, reality has harsh surprises in store for you.
Gamergate (which is a vague term) also has connotations of a social backlash against progressivism and political correctness, which I wholeheartedly endorse.
Sometime you just want to blow things up, and not every game without a female or minority or gay role model is sending a bad message.
Are games really that relevant here? I'd suggest it might be more relevant that they haven't interacted with women enough. If that's the case, then that's the issue. To say something is a timesink is different from saying it warps wordviews strongly in and of itself.
That's fine, the young men will much prefer sex robots anyway. Relationship dynamics, freed of men needing human women to fulfil their sexual urges, are gonna get weird.
Yep. And then the birth rate will fall off a cliff. Your sex robot will always be enthusiastic, and fulfill about 85% of what you want out of sex. Maybe not the human connection, but at least on par with a one night stand. Will we even develop romantic relationships then? It's going to get soooo weird!
I'm not convinced. One male can seed an awful lot of women, even before artificial insemination is considered
> Will we even develop romantic
> relationships then?
I'm sure of it, it'll just be a very different dynamic to right now. Same-sex pairings will go up dramatically, I think; I know many people who prefer company of the same sex, but have no sexual interest in them.
I don't believe in the idea that the video game itself is the source of the negative influence rather than the community surrounding it.
Video games from the pre-internet era was just as marketed towards the males as the it is right now, but the toxicity level is higher than ever in today's "community" focused gaming.
Overwatch is a good example of this. I applaud the developers for making such a diverse and stereotype-defying world and rosters. It is a game that includes lesbian characters, an autistic character, a beautiful Iraqi city thats not war-torn, and a futuristic African city thats not a slum. But even all that doesn't stop the player base from being toxic and harass other players for whatever reason.
> Video games from the pre-internet era was just as marketed towards the males as the it is right now, but the toxicity level is higher than ever in today's "community" focused gaming. Overwatch is a good example of this.
That's generally a problem of competitive PvP games. DotA 2 has a similar problem - love the game, can't stand the people that play it. On the other hand, Destiny's community is pretty nice.
The toxicity level in cooperative or single player focused games seems fine to me.
I think you might be worrying about the wrong thing.
Young men have much healthier views on gender equality than when I was young.
The trend I see is young men not putting in the effort to form romantic relationships and young women, rather than adjust their standards or put more effort in, trying to compete for the few guys who do measure up.
I would be much more worried that my daughter was going to end up very lonely.
I think you're right. Already we have a world in which we may be married, and yet lonely because our spouses are absorbed in their phones. Young people are more and more incapable of even achieving that because they don't know how to communicate in real life. Via text, Snapchat, Instagram, or whatever they're comfortable, but in person?
I think you're right: the society of tomorrow will be lonely indeed.
Wouldn't it be ironic if it's not nuclear war, or environmental catastrophe, which leads to the extinction of the human race, but social media, Netflix, games, and VR?
> Young men have much healthier views on gender equality than when I was young.
Honestly, it broadly depends on what communities you're part of, IME. Some are wonderful, some are abysmal, and a lot are well-meaning but terrible at policing bad behaviour from a minority of members.
Why do only men have to lower their standards? From what I see amongst my peers, the guys have lower standards than women do. These aren't guys who don't "put more effort in" either.
See Tinder for example. Most guys have a hard enough time getting matches but one male-model looking guy can easily have hundreds. The modern dating reality for men is winner-take-all.
I'd be much less concerned about how women are portrayed in video games (pornography is a LOT worse in this respect), and more that the young men in question are often not very happy.
Really, this is a wider concern than someone's daughter in particular. Women are getting hit, too, it's just not as visible. It's a societal problem.
A large benefit of a UBI compared to the status quo is that it reduces marginal tax rates on low income people. Right now you can get a lot of assistance if you have little to no income, but if you make a dollar you lose 90 cents in benefits. Who wants to work for 10 cents on the dollar?
With a UBI you make a dollar and you keep most of it, so there is more incentive to work.
How does a UBI prevent this? The people described in the article don't seem to want more money. They want to play video games. Giving them enough money to live off of would allow them to do exactly that while producing nothing of benefit to society. Right now, at least, some of them seem marginally productive (contractors, the cashier, etc).
Utility, as a function of money, generally has a negative second derivative - think Utility(income)=log(income) rather than Utility(income) = income. Utility'(0) > Utility'(UBI), so the UBI is still a massive work disincentive regardless of marginal tax rates.
A better solution is work incentives - EITC, Basic Job (UBI but only if you do government work), that kind of thing.
Twitch seems to be an existence proof against the idea that playing video games produces nothing of benefit to society. Clearly, people playing video games has produced in excess of $1B benefit to society. "Make something people want", and all.
You could argue that watching people play video games isn't a real "benefit" to society in the way that food or houses are, but I don't see it as being fundamentally different than, say, televised sports. Are televised sports of no benefit to society? What about art, or music?
What happens when technology progresses to the point where they can't be productive at all? Where it simply costs money to give them a job. Are you okay with paying people to dig holes and fill them back up again?
So you want to turn all those unemployed dudes who eat cheeseburgers and play video games all day into your domestic servants, but pay them the same amount of money they're receiving as part of their benefits right now? Do you have any idea how angry they'd be if that happened? It would make la Terreur look like an episode of Teletubbies.
I'm glad we've gone from moral imperative to recognition that these folks are merely extortionists.
But on practical grounds I disagree with la terreur - call of duty is not really a substitute for military training. Senseless violence of the sort you almost seem to be advocating (am I misreading?) could be easily suppressed by a modern police force.
It's true that of late, the police do seem to look the other way when anti-intellectual thugs assault political dissidents (e.g. Murray, Milo). They do obey the orders of the ruling class.
But why would the cops side with a bunch of layabout gamers seeking only to pillage and plunder?
Well, the presumed scenario here is that all but the 1% are starving in the streets (including the friends and relatives of said cops).
Why wouldn't they side with them?
Just to be clear here, I think the outcome of such a revolution scenario would almost certainly lead to even more suffering. But it would happen nonetheless.
It behooves us to not allow things to get that bad.
Why is this the presumed scenario? That is not the scenario here in India, where the lower class does in fact work as domestic labor for the middle class.
Starvation only seems to happen nowadays in war zones and communist countries.
Starvation is not the motivator I would suggest. Just curious, have you taken a look at the comments section on YouTube? There's an ENORMOUS amount of hate being tossed around and I would conjecture that it is coming from the cheeseburger gamer cohort (and their employed gamer allies).
This hate is being directed at anyone who appears to be doing better than they are of late: women, minorities, Jews, middle and upper class liberals attending private liberal arts schools, anyone with a non-STEM degree... You get the picture.
Anyway, the point I want to make is that these people aren't afraid of having their cheeseburgers taken away, they're afraid of having their games and gaming time taken away. Revoke their social security cheque and give them a mop, they aren't going to starve but they are going to lose most of their gaming and YouTube time. And the people they'll end up serving? Those are the same people they passionately hate.
>This hate is being directed at anyone who appears to be doing better than they are of late: women, minorities, Jews, middle and upper class liberals attending private liberal arts schools, anyone with a non-STEM degree... You get the picture.
This perception depends highly on the media you read. Anyhow, identity politics for some but not all groups instead of "e pluribus unum" will lead only to more division and conflict.
If you were a Jew, would you rather have the Nazis sit at home collecting cheques and playing video games or cleaning your house and looking after your children for minimum wage?
All kidding aside, it may already be too late for a lot of these people. The argument to be made is what sort of program would do a better job of creating fewer violent nationalists. You think it's serfdom, I'm not so sure.
>And the people they'll end up serving? Those are the same people they passionately hate.
Do you think coddling their anti-social instincts will help them become better people? Or would a little bit of hunger motivate them to see past their animus and create more healthy and productive social relationships?
If you want some numbers to back up the intuitive argument I made in the other comment, take a look at this article by Branko Milanovic[0]. It shows in explicit detail where all this resentment is coming from. Juxtapose this chart against your suggestion (as presumably a member of the 95th percentile) that these global upper-middle-class people (between 78th and 90th percentiles) be reduced to the level of Indian domestic servants and you get a good sense that might hate the idea.
The norm for India is not the norm for the U.S. (or quite a few other countries, but especially the U.S.).
I personally would not work as a personal servant for another person unless driven to it by starvation, and I am far from the only person who feels that way.
The real reason people need jobs, as evident by the number of able-bodied people who don't work at all, is for acquiring status. UBI (nor any other welfare measure) will not solve this problem.
If all you want is to live in a low rent area and play video games then you can already do it with existing government assistance. The change is that you don't lose the assistance by getting a job.
Work incentives for low-utility jobs are highly inefficient when people choose the makework jobs over real jobs, and work incentives for arbitrary real jobs are just a UBI with unnecessary paperwork, since you can just "work" for your friends and vice versa to do things you were going to do anyway.
The IRS is reasonably good at cracking down on the fraud you suggest.
Existing welfare/disability fraud/etc does allow one to exploit the taxpayer as you suggest, but it requires active work to do so. That too is a disincentive, and to an extent a social stigma. UBI has no such mitigating factors.
> The IRS is reasonably good at cracking down on the fraud you suggest.
The problem is it isn't fraud.
These are all real jobs: Cook, landscaper, courier, housekeeper, driver, repair tech, janitor, etc.
They aren't any less a "job" when you're doing them for your roommate, but they're also the list of things that are already on the chore wheel. Nobody bothers to tell the government about them right now or do the accounting in dollars because there is currently no financial advantage in that. If you change that all it does is cause the same amount of real work to have more deadweight paperwork around it.
> Existing welfare/disability fraud/etc does allow one to exploit the taxpayer as you suggest, but it requires active work to do so.
It requires the same amount of active work regardless of whether or not you're "exploiting the taxpayer". Creating a bunch of paperwork for everyone is not an advantage.
> That too is a disincentive, and to an extent a social stigma.
The thing with a social stigma is playing video games all day, which hasn't changed.
Eliminating the social stigma of low income people using government programs for low income people is an advantage. There are poor kids suffering in America because their parents are too proud to apply for programs they qualify for, or don't understand that they qualify for them.
What's the point in having assistance programs if the only people you expect to use them are the most unabashed moochers because you shame honest people into not applying even though they qualify?
You are assuming that a person working is always better than a person not working, but if some of the nascent technologies become mainstream (AI, robotics), it might be that the aggregate offer of jobs dries out. In those conditions, what justifies incentives to jobs that no one needs? Wouldn't it be possible that such a scheme becomes more expensive than a UBI scheme? Another solution would be to heavily regulate AI, robotics etc. in a way that human jobs are still needed, but that would mean paying a very high price in terms of international competitiveness.
Most readers here have significant flexibility in our work schedules and choice of jobs. But right now, I take on an extra responsibilities and an extra 10 hours a week over the regular 40 hours in the hopes of getting a promotion and a ~15% raise. This flies flatly in the face of a sublinear utility to income relationship. And I choose this even though I could easily move to a less intense or part-time job.
What's your theory to explain these choices? They're not crazy, and if anything are more typical than atypical. Some personal hypotheses, all of which except the last would counteract a UBI work disincentive:
1) In terms of labor choices, you've got to view utility primarily as a function of status, not income. Status is a positional good and, within a given profession, is highly correlated with income. So although I'm chasing a relatively small bump in salary, it will give outsize gains in utility.
2) Putting extra work in now is best viewed as investing in your own human capital, as a promotion isn't a permanent gold star for delivering on a project but instead supposed to recognize an increase in your human capital. That kind of increase in human capital provides lifelong excess monetary returns that exceed the decreasing marginal utility of money.
3) The increasing concentration of wealth accruing to the most productive workers means that income is in some kind of power law relationship with work effort.
4) The extra utility of a promotion is coming primarily from non-monetary effects, such as more autonomy in work and ability to work on more interesting problems.
5) Some combination of 1-4 exist and are valid, but they only have a significant effect on work effort toward the higher end of the income spectrum. A cashier boy doesn't gain any real status with a fifty cent raise, and the most-skilled and hardest working barista is not bringing home millions of dollars. Their work-for-utility functions are dominated by the effect of beer money, and the tenth beer is never as good as the first.
If 5) is true, a UBI would, of course, result in a significant increase in voluntary unemployment. I'm not sure it's even really a bad thing, though it'd be good to have a sense of how large the effect is and where it kicks in, which would have to be an empirical question.
I wonder if there'd be a significant gender split in how a UBI acts as a [dis]incentive to work.
This flies flatly in the face of a sublinear utility to income relationship.
It does no such thing. Will you put in an extra 20 hours for a 30% raise? How about 30 hours for a 45% raise?
Sublinear utility merely means that there is some point at which you'll stop.
I wonder if there'd be a significant gender split in how a UBI acts as a [dis]incentive to work.
In the Mincome experiment, which resulted in a 10% decrease in work effort, the effect was higher among women than men. However given that the original data/study is unavailable (merely news reports about it), it's impossible to know if that effect was significant. (Back in the day they weren't as good at multiple comparisons corrections as they are now.)
> It does no such thing. Will you put in an extra 20 hours for a 30% raise? How about 30 hours for a 45% raise?
By that point you're just running into the superlinear cost of time. Easy demonstration: What about an extra 130 hours for 195%? 40 + 130 > 168, so that's literally impossible. 120 would be possible but you would die of sleep deprivation.
Even if the value of money is linear or superlinear, the value of time quickly catches up to it as it becomes more scarce.
> In the Mincome experiment, which resulted in a 10% decrease in work effort, the effect was higher among women than men.
You always cite the 10% but the link you gave last time showed that the majority of the decrease was from young mothers and students. That's clearly a different situation than people quitting their jobs to play video games.
majority of the decrease was from young mothers and students.
Let me repeat: "However given that the original data/study is unavailable (merely news reports about it), it's impossible to know if that effect was significant. (Back in the day they weren't as good at multiple comparisons corrections as they are now.)"
What you're describing (low taxes as an incentive to work) is a libertarian argument for small government. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it's the opposite of UBI which requires a per capita tax equal to the per capita basic income.
No, it's very different. Let's say I'm getting $100 worth of benefits a day (makes the math easier) And let's say I could do a days work and make $100, but I'd lose $90 worth of benefits. That extra $10 may not be worth a days work.
With UBI you'd get that same $100, but if you took that days work you'd get an extra $100 (minus tax, let's say 20%). Now you're reward for that days work is $80.
The UBI system taxes higher but also provides more incentive to the worker. Welfare cliffs are an awful demotivator.
Most welfare systems don't have a cliff where you lose more than you earn; they phase out. For example, in the US, the child tax credit is reduced by $50 for every $1,000 earned above a threshold, so the phaseout is a 5% "tax" on income in that range rather than being a welfare cliff.
A phase-out reduces effective hourly wage, which theoretically reduces the incentive to work. That's no different than any other kind of marginal tax rate, though, and UBI would require a high marginal tax rate.
Probably the best argument UBI is to replace current welfare systems with one cash payment because, in addition to theoretically reducing administrative costs, it would make phase-outs easier to understand. If there are welfare recipients who misunderstand when benefits apply, they might not want to obtain additional income even though it would benefit them.
We already have classes of goods/services that are post scarcity. Music for instance is post scarcity in that it costs effectively nothing to reproduce. Before anyone argues creation of _new_ music is not post scarcity.
Anyway as manufacturing techniques improve more item will become post scarcity or effectively so if we can provide all the demand for an item for little to no cost.
It's not. At least, not as long as the "passion between the sexes" remains unbalanced by birth control. Even if it does become balanced, there are finite resources.
Read Heinlein's For Us The Living. Robots make all essential goods, and everyone has a minimum basic income. People only work to get extra income for nice things. That is a societal wide post scarcity society- no one who desires a basic living will ever lack anything they need.
But post scarcity happens all the time. It used to be the domain of nobles, who had easy access to basically anything they could desire. Now it belongs to middle to upper class first world residents, a growing class of people who can lean on mommy if they ever get in trouble and who generally are never more than an Amazon Prime delivery away from any good or service they need.
People will say oh but a feudal lord didn't have an iPhone it's all relative. And sure that's one argument, but I'm sure you can see the point being made.
You can work a lousy job, and play video games, eat pizza, and be basically happy. Or you can take on tens of thousands in student debt to work a much more stressful job, and wish you had enough time to play games, and stop eating pizza because it doesn't fit your lifestyle. A growing number of people can't rationalize the latter option. There's no need to endure that hardship, goods aren't that scarce. Hence, people bring up post scarcity.
It's not possible; human desires are infinite for all practical purposes and physical matter is inherently scarce. Have a great house? A car? A plane? Great... now, how about a spaceship?
Well, its about marketing. Used to be we dreamed of flying cars and going to Mars (1950's science fiction). Jobs got us programmed to anticipate a little more RAM, a bigger screen and more colorful icons. Just dumb down the consumerism and there you are.
I would say, with rise of SpaceX, some of us dream of those things again. Comments like this on HN make me think there are more of use than we think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13706116
Its about basic human necessities, not some hunkydoodle future where everything is infinite for everybody.
So, food clothing shelter and maybe entertainment. Hey! We're already there - those things take a tiny fraction of the population to produce for everybody. Mostly automated from start to finish.
Like JoeAltmaier said, I was referring to just basic needs being met (eg. shelter, food, internet connection). Obviously we'll never reach a point where everyone can have whatever they want.
If there's a better term than "post-scarcity", would love to hear it.
My friends were getting addicted to "Evercrack" 15 years ago, playing for days on end, affecting school, work, and social life. Other games had similar effects (usually mmorpgs). Nothing new here
I'd argue those metrics are important to all of us because they are they suggest that all is not well in our society. It's hard to imagine how declining male participation rates are anything but a bad thing for society. These metrics indicate our society is in for some rough times ahead. When you get millions of people opting out of the economy (to paint it broadly) that is a very bad thing, and that is what these metrics indicate is already happening. Worse, this is just the beginning.
This article provides absolutely no evidence of that.
> What these individuals are not doing is clear enough, says Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, who has been studying the phenomenon. They are not leaving home; in 2015 more than 50% lived with a parent or close relative. Neither are they getting married.
Yes, that's very clear from many surveys & studies.
> What they are doing, Hurst reckons, is playing video games. As the hours young men spent in work dropped in the 2000s, hours spent in leisure activities rose nearly one-for-one. Of the rise in leisure time, 75% was accounted for by video games.
Ok, so people are playing more video games. That makes sense, not only as they become more ubiquitous and engaging, they take up new forms of media and are easier to acquire. There's even products marketed to people who never played a video game before. More people are gaming, and existing people are playing more. That's logical enough.
They also mention that at the same time, working hours dropped. Sure, in the 2000s we had a massive recession on the heels of a new generation about to join the workforce. Perhaps there were reasons other than gaming that people worked less hours. They don't speculate on that.
> It looks as though some small but meaningful share of the young-adult population is delaying employment or cutting back hours in order to spend more time with their video game of choice.
Uh.... What?
They go ahead and interview a handful of more people who have a story about how they like to game more than they like to work, or how it affected their life. This is anecdotal, cherry-picking, speculative fiction. And this is the only evidence they propose.
Why else would a young adult delay employment or cut back hours?
1. There aren't any jobs.
2. People are getting horrible loans they'll never pay back and can now afford a home with much less money (or none?), so their kids can stay at home longer and don't need to get a job yet.
3. There aren't any jobs.
4. There are less hours available to work, because the economy is crashing.
5. There aren't any jobs.
With those "opportunities" to stay at home, without a job, of course they're going to play video games. What else are they going to do, dig ditches? Go outside and play? These are millennials we're talking about.
The circumstances are new, and the scale of those circumstances is new, but there is no trending ramp in people not working in order to play video games. This isn't Japan.
As a teenager and early-20-something I was video-game obsessed, dropping out of sports and university, and wondering why anyone would want to devote their life to anything as pedestrian as a realistic career.
At 30 I've realized how harsh and cruel the world and its people (not everyone, but many) can be, which is the primary motivation for making some big changes in my life away from video games.
When I was 20, I had a great job and was happy with my lot in life, certain that everything was going to be okay. I was going to continue working in the public library, get the Assistant job, spin that into my MLS, and take up a Reference Librarian position.
I just turned 30 last week. The bottom dropped out of my world when the budget focus shifted to a strongly anti-education agenda when I was 23. For 7 years I have floated between jobs, trying to find something that gave me even a significant fraction of the satisfaction I had at 20. The world is harsh, cruel, and unbeatable. Some days the tabletop, online, and video gaming that I do nightly is the only thing keeping me from jumping in front of a train.
I genuinely appreciate your concern. I still have my lifeline in gaming - both tabletop (which is social) and computer (which is antisocial). For now, I'll leave the hotline to those who have less than me and are closer to the edge.
ETA: One of these days I need to find out what it takes to get a paying job with them; it seems like a service we're going to need for a very long time. And since I spend a lot of time sitting around with a computer and a phone next to me, I figure I should go see about getting paid to help people.
I played plenty of computer and video games when I was young. I don't have as much time now but every once in awhile I'll go on a Rocket League or Overwatch binge and I wonder if modern games really do enrapture us more than 8-bit games ever could. It's not that older games weren't as well-designed as far as games go, but there's only so many times you can beat Super Mario Bros. 3/Super Metroid in a week, or in a lifetime. Whereas competitive multiplayer games with no defined ending has the tendency to make you lose track of time.
I really like this read, something just smells off about blaming young people for "wasting years" on video games. We've got a horribly stacked real life "game" where the boomers and elites have horded everything and fucked future generations, blaming an individual for dropping out and not wanting to really participate in that trainwreck is being dishonest at best.
How else do you think grandma stores her priceless porcelain dolls and collectible thimbles? In that giant house that cost a year's salary when she got it, that's where.
I have more real estate than all of them combined actually, but that's not really what I meant. The stuff they have purchased and still own is baffling. It's all cheap, throw away, walmart crap. Compare this to the things I've saved from my grandparents and great grandparents which are mostly heirloom quality and the difference is striking.
I've said for a long time that millenials have more in common with their grandparents than their parents from a values point of view. (I consider a millenial anyone born early 80's to 18-20 now fwiw).
careful, there. that line of reasoning smells a bit like "why is old music always so much better than the crap that comes out these days?"
only the high quality old music is still played and remembered today, and only the high quality old things survive long enough to be saved by great grandchildren. i imagine cheap throw away old crap has disintegrated long ago.
Right now, the biggest pile of useless stuff I have is .. video games.
(~Twenty years ago I bought every Atari/Intellivision/Vetrex/etc game I could find at various flea market and thrift stores, and for the last ten I've been dreading getting rid these boxes of useless stuff.)
Useless is 3 different vacuums that have different brand names, colors, attachments, etc... but are all made by the same parent company and all break predictably after 2 years of use.
Collecting game systems that you play and use which are also not being made anymore isn't useless in the least. Comparatively, that is.
Rationing was still in place when my parents were children (they are early boomers), even after that material goods and many foods weren't readily available, you can see how they developed the attitude that accumulation is important.
Unfortunately they haven't been able to turn it off and their constant pursuit of comfort hasn't done them any good in the longer term.
Spot on. I've got a good job and it has gotten me almost nowhere. Land prices have outrun wage gains. No point working. If I didn't have kids I'd drop out.
Owning your own home has never been an optimal investing strategy anyway--consider index-based investing instead. Play with a compound interest calculator and see where you can get with 4-10% interest each year.
You don't get it at all. None of it. This goes to show how people who consider themselves financially literate have no idea how things work.
Banks create new money by lending. Most lending is issued against real estate. People who "invest" in holding the same piece of land to accrue the effort of others do not have 400K. They "borrow" it from the bank (the bank creates it).
Go to your bank and tell them you want to borrow 400k to invest in indexes.
And how many of those boomers have themselves slipped into the alternate realities of drugs and alcohol? If you are going to distract yourself, videogames are better than drinking. The remark in the OP about the father having to change a baby while playing a game is telling. That father could put his gaming on pause. A generation ago, how many fathers in similar situations were catatonic with a bottle in one hand? Rather than being down at the local watering hole, the traditional place for forgetting life problems, this father was at home. That's progress.
I don't mean to derail because I think you have a valid point, but I believe alcoholism is still a way worse problem today. If I'm remembering correctly, it's something like the same number of people die due to alcohol every year in the US as shoot themselves death (~30k)... and that's just fatalities; if we're talking family problems it's way higher.
Alcoholism is certainly still a thing, but there is a generation of young people these days who simply aren't drinking. Some do, and do so to an excess, but something like like half of collage-educated young people just don't. It isn't religion or ideology and so they aren't shouting it from rooftops. They just don't want to drink. For me it started at university. I was riding a motorcycle to class and a job with insane hours (film/TV). Drinking wasn't a practical option. (Riding in pouring rain, on a fiday night night, after 20+ hours of class and work... I would not have survived long.) Without making any decisions either way, one day I realized I hadn't had a drink in over a year.
"The proportion of 16-24-year-olds who do not drink increased by more than 40 per cent between 2005 and 2013. Today, one in five is teetotal."
"...wet sales at student union bars have dived in the last 10-15 years."
This is interesting. Does this also carry over into startup-culture? In the US, many startups have normalized the consumption of alcohol to an alarming degree (in-office happy-hours, kegerators, beer-Fridays, etc.).
What does it look like in the UK? Are there equivalents (aside from the traditional round-at-the-pub-after-work, that is)?
Historically, we (Americans at least, I hear Russians are quite a bit higher) aren't drinking much these days: ~2.25 gallons of pure alcohol a year. Compared to 6.6 gallons in 1770 [1] and 7.1 gallons in 1870 [2] (thus igniting the calls for Prohibition).
There is a big non-drinking movement amongst young people in Russia right now. Putin, love or hate him, has passed on an attitude to his young followers. I'm reminded of an interview with a British soccer hooligan about confrontations with Russian hooligans: "It's not fair when the other team is sober!"
I read that same passage and wondered who was paying attention to the kids? Great, Dad's got some buddies who will lay down some cover while he changes a diaper. What's the kid get out of that deal?
A clean nappie, but that's the bare minimum a child should expect from a parent. Guy should be interacting with his kid instead of playing some stupid bs video game.
What's the kid entitled to? He has a father. He gets a clean diaper when he needs it, and likely extra attention. Compared to some of the kids of single moms I knew where video game protagonists WERE their father figure, the kid has it good.
Are you serious? The bar for being a not-shitty parent is not an alcoholic. Every child is entitled to a caretaker that is paying attention to them. The fact that some children don't get that does not mean they aren't entitled to it.
I completely agree with the sentiment, but isn't your own comment being dishonest? There's plenty of land in the United States, and plenty of cities that have hardly been met with the "hoarding" you mention.
That being said, living in Boston, MA, I totally feel what you're saying (literally, most of the houses here are expensive, even in crappy areas).
Places like Melbourne and Sydney are crowded and expensive, but the cheaper properties are all out in rural areas, where your choice of employment is slim, especially if you made the "mistake" of training in any tech sector job.
Just live in the lame ass suburbs like everyone else. What the fuck is wrong with you people? Are you going to be on your deathbed wishing you had more squid ink pasta and museums in your life? No, you'll wish you spent more time your loved ones, which you can do anywhere.
My loved ones live in a town with the population of 1000 people and 400km from the city, where the only tech jobs are.
Not everyone grew up in the city suburbs. Not to mention, I am talking about the burbs not the CBD anyway. Rent is still %50 of my tech sector wage for an ancient two bedroom unit in the suburbs. Rent sharing is the only sane option, hooray living with strangers.
I don't mind, I enjoy and appreciate what I have, but you can't pretend like it's the same opportunity for everyone and the same opportunity as it was a few decades ago. Things are different, and it's different in ways wr can try and fix, hence the conversation on the topic.
If you're talking about real estate you need to check out San Francisco. I thought it was bad about 4 years ago when I moved to Japan and a 2 room was going for $3400.. it's even worse now.
>There's plenty of land in the United States, and plenty of cities that have hardly been met with the "hoarding" you mention.
It doesn't matter how cheap the land/housing is if you can't get a job while living on it.
I'd love to be in a world where geography doesn't matter and everyone can work remotely. For now, only a small and elite subset of software engineers can pull US cost of living (even rural cost of living) from remote work.
Sure, but it's a chicken and egg problem, unfortunately. Besides, there are other cheap cities that are way cheaper that have software jobs -- Salt Lake City, Dallas, Nashville, etc. It's not adtech, but hey...
"It doesn't matter how cheap the land/housing is if you can't get a job while living on it."
B.S.
Unemployment in the US is relatively low even on a long term basis.
The average home prices in the US is $188K. Most people can afford that.
There is more opportunity for mortgages and financial services than at any time in history.
There is more opportunity for mobility than at any time in history.
You have it easier than any generation in history - but all you can do is complain.
If you want to 'have it like the boomers did growing up' - well, you can skip going to college because few of them did - and you can do some crap job pushing paper for most of your life, in boring but steady employment, and buy a small, mediocre home in the burbs and mow your lawn. That was the 'steady, sable American dream'. You have opportunities that they never had - and that most kids in the world would kill for.
> Unemployment in the US is relatively low even on a long term basis.
Dear God save me from whatever unemployment you deem to be high. Over a third of the people in this country don't work and another third work part time.
Maybe you actually believe those numbers coming out of the gov on unemployment and don't pay attention to the people who have rolled off the unemployment benefits. I know people that have been looking for work for the better part of 5 years without luck.
Also, have to call bullshit on the "You have it easier than any generation in history" remark. This generation is the first generation since the inception of this country to not have it better than the previous one. Every person born today is born with upwards of 70k debt thanks to the drunken sailors in Congress. The bill will come due. It always does.
Would you rather get drafted and go to war? Because everything you say hints at politicians creating a war just to divert attention and offer the unemployed "a job": playing a first person shooter with real victims.
Those sorts of wars are largely in America's past. The real money is made in high-tech munitions: cruise missiles, anti-missile missiles, and drones with missiles.
If you're a defense contractor, you're not interested in selling "hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground," but rather guns (weapons systems) and ammo.
As a corollary, no one is lobbying politicians on behalf of a force increase at the scale you're suggesting. Private military contractors just don't operate at the "give the hoards of unemployed young men some plausible way to die" scale.
The situation you're referring to is more of an issue in countries with weaker economies and geographically close potential enemies.
What I was saying was give the hoards of men games to play: piloting drones, UUVs, playing Red Alert with robotic infantry, mostly against a weaker economy, the real victims. And let's not forget the amount of jobs created to build those drones.
I find your lack of imagination disturbing. There are more types of games out there, others can be based around finding the best designs, or alternate fulfillment for a standard interface if materials are short.
We have entire video-games, and mods for games, that revolve around setting up factories and designs.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of truth in that. Still, the bit about the guy who went to law school and decided not to practice, opting instead to play video games, and for whom finances were no biggie because parents... Jiminy Christmas, WTF is up with that.
Right, but the author spent three paragraphs on Chris from Ipswitch who's a contractor in the health-sector who rarely gets work and can't get an employer to help train him. It's not exactly like Chris is running away from some lucrative alternative to spend his time playing videogames.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that many of these games are skinner boxes that our brains have relatively few defenses against, but Chris is a stupid example.
I'd also guess that many people who trash video games would happily say watching baseball, perhaps playing baseball, opera, or chess are somehow superior. It's not like those have much intrinsic value in them besides the enjoyment they may generate for the participant.
as far as stupid examples go, I was surprised at how low the quoted hours played were (the couple of times they were mentioned). the largest was 600 hours of KSP. I have more than 1000 hours each in Dota 2 and Eve Online. I'm not sure if I'm significantly more addicted than the interviewees or I play fewer games longer than them. I know I don't game hop much, but still. Worrying.
At least I have a dev job I'm happy with that scratches my problem-solving itch and that I partially got because of experience I gained writing tools for Eve. Haven't been playing anything as much these days because when I get home from work, I'm usually ready to take off my thinking cap for a while and most of my games very much require me to keep it on.
I feel like the Boomers were pretty happy with the Greatest. You know, defeating genocide, sowing the seeds for a decades long wave of economic expansion, technological advancement, and peace (albeit by not managing to swap nukes with the Soviets).
> I feel like the Boomers were pretty happy with the Greatest.
Yeah, there wasn't like a big youth counterculture in the 1960s-1970s rebelling against the previous generation that was then dominant in society and government over major international policy (Hello, Southeast Asia), domestic policy, notions of public and private morality, and, basically, every other aspect of life.
You might have a better case with Gen X not particularly blaming the Boomers (and focussing more on the trailing end of the influence of the "Greatest" Generation), and even better with Millenials not even paying attention to Gen X enough to blame them for anything (Boomers, sure, but Gen X? Not so much.)
Point. Although I'd argue that the economic trends of the 1950s-1970s were in-spite-of rather than because-of the counterculture movement (Piketty, Capital, war being the greatest economic equalizer, etc). But the 60s definitely did hasten the unseating of previous thoughts and people in positions of power.
We're probably just starting to tip past Boomer-in-power to GenX-in-power in the upper echelon of power structures.
Which incidentally probably explains why older companies finally seem to be starting to "get" the internet, now that I think about it...
So why did the generations before the Baby Boomers do so well despite having a much worse game stacked against them? I think the crisis that Millenials are facing are a case of over-parenting/over-protection, increased secularization, the rise of feminism and demonization of masculinity, and a failed higher education system.
Not the OP, but the theory I've seen with those terms posits that the increased upward marketplace pressure toward tech jobs and office work have drastically increased competition for the same jobs which were typically "feminine" roles, or at least "woman-friendly" roles. Meanwhile the masculine role-workers like coal miners are being pushed out due to environmental regulation and manufacturing is currently largely automated - and as the manufacturing becomes more and more automated, the upward pressure on tech increases because we don't need factory workers, we need robotics specialists and skilled machine operators.
Socialists screwing things over and keynesian economics at work. Maybe not so much in the US as in Europe, but you were on the right track with your previous administration. Mindless state borrowing without any intent to pay back. Taxes. Then a single salary wasn't enough for a household so why not encourage women to get a job, be independent? Feminism. Then why not encourage immigrants work small jobs for us? Those are nasty/boring jobs anyway. Secularism. Now what? More taxes? Americans' incomes being tracked outside the country. Climate change taxes?
The Trump administration is merely a reaction (of the people fed up with this) against just that: political correctness, immigrants, feminism, socialism, taxes taxes taxes.
You say that almost like you believe politics in the US and western nations in general has been dominated by the left-wing, when the exact opposite has been true for decades.
The US Democrats are right-wing by any serious measure of the political spectrum, as are the UK's New Labour and Conservative Party.
The US has had one lefty on its radar in recent times and the DNC roundly conspired to never allow him a serious chance at the candidacy.
The "horribly stacked life" card is, in my experience, most often played by people trying to get by in the overly competitive environments of large cities.
I know a lot of people don't like to hear it, but I'll let you in on a little secret: if you don't feel like you're getting anywhere trying to work and live in a major city, do yourself a favor and move to a less-populated area.
Many cities have become extremely competitive, which naturally selects against all but the few who can manage to work for less (competition in the labor market drives down wages) and pay more to live (that same competitive environment drives the cost of living higher).
Get outside those inflated bubbles and life really does become easier for someone who just wants to earn a decent living.
Stop blaming other people for your choice to live in a place where the cost of living feels "out of reach".
Part of the issue is that for decades sprawl was preferred by many people and development followed this path while many more dense areas suffered from neglect. Now there's been a strong shift towards density, but the amount of people who want to live in dense areas is greater than the amount of desirable dense areas available.
At least around here, I've noticed that developers in the (often cheaper) suburbs are making a push towards building high-density walkable devevolopments.
It's worth noting that in many cities, there are still a lot of affordable options (some even cheaper than a few decades ago), but they're often not in the hip areas that people want to live. When people talk about how unfair it is that others got good values in the hip areas, they often don't realize that those areas were once the cheap undesirable areas.
If you go to rural Kentucky, you will see how wrong you are. Likewise, if you go to rural West Virginia, you will see that you are wrong.
Visit the farms in rural Arkansas, spend a few days, engage some farmhands in conversation. If you talk to at least 4 such people, then at least 1 of them will be addicted to meth. You can often detect this simply by looking at them. Often their teeth give them away.
Spend some time in rural Missouri. Go to small diners and try to engage the waitresses in conversation. If you stay a few weeks you will get to know them. You will hear stories about husbands and boyfriends who are unemployed, or who can only get sporadic work. Whole families surviving on what one woman can earn as a waitress at a small diner.
I've done a bit of traveling, and I've seen people struggling with hard times all over the USA.
And in the examples above, I'm talking about areas that are mostly white. If you really want to feel like Dante, and descend into Hell, go visit the mostly black counties in Mississippi.
For many decades now, the interior states of the USA have become increasingly poor. Wealth has been concentrating into the coasts. Farming has been mostly automated. Mining has been mostly automated. The number of coal jobs in the USA peaked in the 1940s and has declined (with some ups and downs) rather steadily over the last 7 decades.
As to automation in farming, remember that the novel "The Grapes of Wrath", by John Steinbeck, was published in 1939. The opening scene of that novel shows us a man trying to get home to his farm (after he spent some time in prison) and finding that his family has lost the farm due to the tractors, which both reduced demand for labor on the farms, and also allowed economies of scale that caused a great consolidation of the land into bigger and bigger corporate farms.
And remember too, in 1961, Ralph Abernathy (the right-hand man of Martin Luther King) gave a speech in which he warned people "The civil rights movement is in a race with the tractors." He meant that the tractors were rapidly replacing black labor on the farms, but the blacks had been kept out of most other professions, so it was urgent that the Civil Rights movement open up the rest of the economy to black people, before black people lost the last remaining farm jobs.
Most historians of agriculture in the USA will point to the 1920s as the era when farms hit their economic peak. The rural areas of the USA have been facing decline for 9 decades now.
In observance of the etiquette that is expected on Hacker News, I've tried to stick to the facts in responding to you. But I also want to be clear: your advice is terrible.
Perhaps he's referring to one of the higher quality-of-life, lower rat-race cities in America, which have nearly all of the amenities of your megalopolis of choice without nearly the soul-crushing pressure. It's true, you'll never get famous living in flyover country, but you're more than able to live well.
However, the observation that our cities are extremely competitive is on point.
Between the two of you, the picture this paints is one of Americans jostling for position around twenty relatively small fires scattered amidst a large, cold, dark forest.
Thank you for this reply. I especially appreciated the quote "The civil rights movement is in a race with the tractors." which seems extremely apposite given the pace of general automation.
I have found that the "Game of Life" as the author puts it is much more rewarding and meaningful. But then again, I guess I get to do what I like and I'm paid well for it.
I'm worried what our culture and life will be like with a large number of people who do nothing but play video games. Especially if a UBI is created and they can continue to play video games without any big effect on their basic income.
That said, maybe I'm just being cynical. Maybe all that time playing increasingly high-quality games, reading books (some in the article were), and talking about it all with people online will grow into that group of people having a different and better perspective on things. A group of gaming philosophers.
Hard to blame anyone for spending their time doing things where success is quantifiable and quickly displayed.
This is the Western countries' version of hikkikomori and there will only be more of it as education and good opportunities become out of reach for more people.
Men seem more likely to do this than women because of the societal pressures on them to get a job and run the rat race of dating and climbing a nonexistent corporate ladder.
For those people living in major job centers or major job creation industries it seems unfathomable, but there is an entire American generation out there experiencing this, being told that they're not shit if they don't go to college and work a 9 to 5 (which really is more of a 9 to 9). I don't blame them for opting out of such useless propaganda. Not everyone enjoys or is interested in computer programming, and starting your career in your 20s without an inherently marketable skill is terrifying for most people.
But you get some points for being mature because you're no longer the type to get drunk on weeknights and call in sick to work. This isn't always deserved though.
>Men seem more likely to do this than women because of the societal pressures on them to get a job and run the rat race of dating and climbing a nonexistent corporate ladder.
Like marry into money? If that's your point, it's not going to be valid much longer the way things are going, with women dominating more and more of the middle- and upper-middle-class jobs (glass ceiling problem notwithstanding).
I love how the first conclusion you jump to is "marrying into money". Really? You know that there are plenty of single-earner households outside of SF/SV, NYC, and the other tech hubs, right? (That aren't rich, if that needs to be stressed).
>If that's your point, it's not going to be valid much longer the way things are going, with women dominating more and more of the middle- and upper-middle-class jobs (glass ceiling problem notwithstanding).
White and Asian women*
Step out of your HN bubble for a moment, and try to think about the existence of groups that you don't normally acknowledge. It's "not going to be valid much longer" just because things are changing in the immediate regions that you typically spend time reading about. There's the rest of the country and even the world to take into consideration too.
> Men seem more likely to do this than women because of the societal pressures on them to get a job and run the rat race of dating and climbing a nonexistent corporate ladder.
And perhaps because "taking care of themselves" pressure on women is much, much higher.
I think the social penalty of a young man dropping out is lower than a young women because their perceived social value is much lower. It is a lower height to fall from.
The social penalty is called opportunity cost in Economic terms. These men generally don't have big social networks that could have gotten them jobs in the first place, so there isn't much lost when they isolate themselves.
For women, losing their social network is losing a large chunk of their safety net (if they aren't receiving welfare otherwise), so it's almost unfathomable for them to do so of their own accord.
* Disappointing that the false meme about some gaming communities being hostile to women because they're women was promoted in this article. Some gaming communities are very hostile to newcomers: but it's not because you're a woman, it's because you're a noob or just suck. Welcome to one of the last remaining meritocracies.
* The article makes a correct observation insofar as more men (not just an occasional sad social reject) are using games as an escape, often due to poor economic realities. But it's disappointing that the huge role that male/female relations and sex plays in this trend is ignored.
* Google terms like "the sexodus". There are many politically incorrect truths here about what is going on with male/female relations and why more men are seeking an escape and why everybody is unhappy that I think are more at the root of this issue.
You're horribly mistaken, likely because you haven't spent time in communities that aren't hostile to women. It's really hard to know whether your community is hostile to women unless you're a woman. A lot of guys just don't understand how much harassment a typical woman experiences, and when they hear it criticized basically fall back on "well I don't see it" and conclude it must not be happening rather than trying to collect more information.
a) Where did I say that women aren't experiencing harassment on some gaming communities? In fact, I explicitly acknowledged it. Your post is kind of pointless virtue signaling or something.
b) I just pointed out that it's just generally not about your gender. It doesn't matter if you're a man or woman: every newcomer gets harassed in really rough ways using the most biting insults available. A fat guy will get the obvious insults. An ugly guy will get obvious insults. A young kid who has a high pitched voice because he hasn't hit puberty yet will get obvious insults. A gay man will get obvious insults. So will a black guy or an arab. Or a christian. They'll use any facts they know about you. And guess what, women are treated equally here as well and will get insulted. Not saying it's right, but it's what actually happens to everybody. Gamers are treating women equally, I thought that's what women wanted?
c) The only difference is that when a woman gets harassed, most of civil society is sympathetic about it by default and she'll get a horde of white knights expressing sympathy. When a man gets his feelings hurt, he's portrayed as weak for showing emotion. Maybe this is part of the reason that some men are seeking an escape from society?
d) It's really hard to know whether your community is hostile to men unless you're a man. A lot of women just don't understand how much harassment a typical man experiences, and when they hear it criticized basically fall back on "well I don't see it" and conclude it must not be happening rather than trying to collect more information. (2 of us can play this game)
e) While this is a fascinating discussion that I'd love to have, this point about sex and male/female relationships is 100 times more important than debating about harassment to women gamers for the hundredth time. Things like family and relationships are important motivating factors to men, and when social reforms (some people call that progress, some don't) remove or lower that factor for ~80% of men, civilization will also decline.
a) Red pill? Gamergate? What's that stuff? Certainly nobody should ever google any information and do their own research and make up their own mind.
b) You'll notice that in my responses I didn't say that women weren't being harassed nor did I say that harassment was right. So why the hostility? I'm speaking IMO accurately about gaming culture.
c) Speaking of tired cliches, what would you call the "women are always eternal victims in every walk of life" school of thought?
PS: I love women and want them to have the same rights as men. I think telling the truth about gaming culture is honest and fair and the right thing to do.
What is the difference between "cliche" and "same, tired," and "tried-and-true"? (That is a rhetorical question, but the reader is encouraged to answer it for themselves as an exercise).
There is a nearly irresistible temptation for people reading comments like the grandparent to engage in tribal thinking. "I'm against being a dick to women," they think, "This guy, who shows signs of being a dick to women, therefore has nothing of merit to say."
I don't really have a point, except: Beware your epistemology! Your cognitive biases put Trump in office and you still don't understand why. If you can master the difficult art of reading things you disagree with, there may yet be hope for you.
a) Just for the record, I'm not a fan of being a "dick" (more on that below) towards women. My thought-crime was merely pointing out how gaming communities insult everybody equally and don't just insult women because they are women. I would have thought that a community like HN would understand that this was an explanation of what I believe happens, not an endorsement.
b) I'd like to make a mild observation. You used the phrase "dick" to mean a synonym for rude or disgusting behavior, and nobody batted an eye. Can anybody guess how the usual suspects would react if somebody whose ideas they disliked used "pussy" as a pejorative? It's an interesting thought experiment.
c) I'm not sure where your ideas or philosophy is at, but I appreciate your observations here and your willingness to at least advocate openness to ideas you may disagree with.
Your point is wrong, though. Targeting everyone based on their distinct still isn't being equally hostile to everyone - you're just more exclusionary. That just means gaming communities are racist and fat shaming and etc in addition to being sexist. Equal harassment would mean they target people based on shared characteristics - like skill level, for example.
Some gaming communities are hostile to noobs. Some are hostile to women. Some are both. I'm surprised anyone is willing to make the claim that there is no hostility towards women in videogame communities!
It doesn't seem like he's implying it's not hostile to women. Rather, it's hostile in general. Which is bad, but not merely because you're women. Though that happens as well in some community.
I haven't played video games in years but I think that's it not video games causing young men to drop out of the work force. Rather, there are other societal causes and young men without prospects for their future are going to fill their unused time with something.
Thanks, but I think video games can be, at minimum, an equally-valid pursuit in one's life (i.e. something to be proud of). My reasons for a change were external pressures.
>Game designers often deploy a technique called “dynamic difficulty adjustment”. In many games, the software assesses a player’s skill and rebalances various attributes of the game accordingly, to keep the game fun and manageable for those of less ability. Gamers early in their careers, or who are simply struggling to pick up the skills necessary to succeed, are given a helping hand; their world might be more generously strewn with useful power-ups, for instance. As players advance, these helping hands are withdrawn.
This sounds really silly, but I honestly consider being thrown into the deep-end when learning how to play Tribes 1 (I started playing in 1999) and DOTA (started 2004) as a child greatly benefited my overall mindset and attitude as I grew older.
I think I qualify as a videogame addict. I've probably spent more than 1/3 of my waking hours since I was nine years old gaming. I'm approaching 5000 hours on DOTA2 alone since 2011, though I've played significantly less games in general within the past three years due to finally being employed. Programming feels just as good, and I get paid on top of it.
I think my social development was stunted, but I feel like I'm mostly normal now as an adult. I really don't have any regrets, and I plan to give my kids completely unrestricted access to their own computer and the internet as soon as they want it, barring any laws or regulations that prevent me from doing so legally.
I have pretty much the exact same experience with Dota. I think there's one thing it teaches better than any other game that's exemplified in your post. If you want to get good at Dota, you have to accept responsibility for yourself and the decisions you've made to get you to where you're at. At first in the small setting of the game, but as this gets drilled in over and over through all the hours of play, the habit grows outside the game.
It's proven a surprisingly good barometer for me on how I'm doing in my life. When I'm taking care of myself and actually growing elsewhere, even losses are fun. But when I'm running from something, the wins feel empty. I also notice that when I meet a 5k+ mmr player in real life, we're immediate friends, simply because they've accepted responsibility for themselves and have interesting theories on the world as a result.
That is how you got alt-right. Bad job market and on the other hand portrayed as oppressor and reminded to check your own privilege. Video game is just the surface of the underlying illness. It is cheap(per hour), and accessible source of pleasure.
I think you got caught trying to humanize and understand people with reprehensible beliefs instead of condemning them, censoring them, and diagnosing them as sociopaths.
I think I see what you're saying here: This story is about young unemployed people who have many hours to spare and use them gaming. There are similar young people who use those hours on the alt-right parts of 4chan, Reddit or other online communities.
Not quite. Actually, it is not coincidence, 4chan is primarily a video game/anime forum while being the one of the online centers of alt-righters.
Unemployment stays as the center of all issues here. Or bad employment if we look from a higher perspective. With low income and bad job, video game, as a way of pleasure, it is cheap per hour, very little requirement for room, easy obtain of the feeling of achievement, make it the best option of entertainment for frustrated young males out there.
Bad job market creates video game addicts. It is quite logical this demographic will find alt-right philosophy appeal to them. What I disagree with the author, is that a lot of young men don't have the luxury to live a more 'normal' life, which is getting more and more expensive every year, as the society demands.
Look at it from another way - jobs don't intrinsically fill any need on Maslow's hierarchy. We do then to get the money we need to do the things that we want. Gaming - alone or in a group - does fulfill some high level human need. Obviously not for everyone, some people prefer getting drunk in company to sitting quietly at home, but that's what makes us human.
I think you and others on HN also need to consider a very critical issue on game design:
SKinner boxes posing as games.
While youth unemployment in itself generates flight/distraction direct behavior, game designers themselves are creating absolutely unethical skinner boxes which will generate addictive behavior.
This is like dumping a slot machine into the hands (literally) of vulnerable children/young adults (also literally).
I argue very strongly that this shit needs to be banned, and people on HN need to pick up that torch fast. Because if its not carried by the tech industry to clean its own house, its going to be used by those inimical to it.
This comment totally needs to be higher. Every other comment on this thread makes little to no mention of "Skinner Box Design", when design tactics like these are almost certainly the #1 factor for creating video game addicts.
The issues we're discussing in this thread start with the game designer. Cognitive flow is a real thing, and game designers have learned through decades of research and testing how to put players into a state of cognitive flow. They've only recently (within the last 5 or 10 years) begun learning how to monetize your cognitive ability, bringing players to the brink of a flow state only to hide reward behind a paywall. The player is psychologically conditioned into a purchase by simply playing the game.
Nearly everything else being discussed in this thread is a secondary issue stemming from the game designer's desire to increasingly monetize their game. This desire to monetize has given rise to the use of tactics that permeate the gambling industry. These tactics are designed to do little more than CREATE addicts - players who will return to your game and continually spend money.
This, I believe, is the root cause of this issue - game designers who do not respect their players or their time. Designers who have specifically chosen to abuse and extort the emotions of their players in order to increase profits.
These designs are evil, and as a game designer myself, I find the practice abhorrent. If you are a game designer reading this post, and you build games that fall into this category, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.
I think what you are describing might be called 'Weaponized Flow State'. Flow states that arise while [acting, playing music, playing sports, programming] are really hard to generate. You have to develop those skills without "dynamic difficulty setting" that the author refers to. But when your basic skills are enough for you to do well, you can get drawn into a flow state much quicker.
I disagree that these flow states are difficult to generate. While they are extremely more common within designed experiences (such as video games), they can and have been applied with great effect to more "common" tasks, such as acting, playing music, or sports.
What I'm saying is that 'common' tasks that generate flow states take much longer than video games to generate the same cognitive effect. For example, when I play guitar I _must_ deliberately practice. I play the same 30 second melody half as slow, then only a quarter slow, and then finally i try really hard to play it at the right rhythm, and after a little more practice I'm playing it mechanically. I now can enter a flow state much easier.
Looking at your link- I start out with low skill, but with something that has high difficulty. I wratchet my skill upwards until I enter flow state. Video games, on the other hand, use dynamic difficulty settings to change the difficulty to my skill. They generate the flow state programmatically.
I've never been able to replicate the flow states I used to have from Starcraft/Civilization elsewhere (I've played very few games in the last couple years.) I don't miss the time spent playing them, but my life is much emptier without them.
Sort of exception is when everything breaks down at once and I have a ton of stuff to fix/do in emergency style. That's comforting.
Also a game designer here (and programmer). I think you should be clear that a game designer is not always the one who makes the decisions on how to monetize a game. Often it's the people who are in charge of financing the game's development, i.e. publishers or executives.
In fact, often game designers would rather not do this pay to win crap, although it's hard to ignore that it does seem to be the primary way people are willing to give you money in certain markets nowadays (mobile especially), and they would like to keep making games for a living, instead of making one game while ignoring current market trends, the game failing spectacularly, and the company shuts down as a result (I've worked for three game studios which have done basically exactly that, although two of them did try making free to play games eventually and still failed).
I would love to make mobile games where I just charge $1-3 and still see success, but the stats just do not back it up. Yes, there are people who have successes that way, but they are either much larger, much more networked in the industry and know how to get a ton of media coverage (Just getting 'some' coverage is not enough. I've worked on games that have gotten 'some' media coverage. They've done poorly), or have worked on something so beautiful and compelling people feel they have to share it with others (Monument Valley comes to mind).
I've actually mostly given up on video games right now and I'm focusing more on board games, where it's much easier to actually charge money for what you produce, since there's a physical component to it. That industry has exploded in the last 5 years also and it's starting to get harder to find success there as well, but I'm more passionate about that right now. Plus there's the bonus that you can make a video game version of your board game and existing fans would be willing to pay money for your app, as well as some cross-promotion between the two.
Personally I don't think there's a problem trying to make your game as fun as possible (and fun and addiction are very closely linked) as a designer, you almost have to in order to get people to talk about and share your game.
It's when you actively try to snare people into giving you a constant feed of money for virtual benefits that I think is a bit dodgy, but again the public has already voted with their wallet and said they won't download a mobile game unless it's free, so game developers/publishers have to get money for the game somehow.
As an avid board game player to a board game designer:
Please make sure that the chance to win isn't determined purely by random chance (die rolls), or at the very least enough rolls to average out for the players, or, in the worst case, some way to optimize for the most probable die rolls (like Catan)
Losing a game from a critical success or critical failure from a die roll makes me never want to play the game again.
I'm an avid board gamer as well. I've averaged over a hundred new board games tried every year the past 3 years. I'm pretty aware of the state of the hobby board game industry, and that's mostly what I'm targeting (albeit the simpler card game end, not the eurogame end, at least not yet. Think something like Arboretum, Parade, or Sushi Go). Tonight I'm excited I'm going to finally get to try Imperial out, and I'm going to try to get an older game I had to order from Canada, Pack & Stack, to the table.
That being said, there are benefits to having randomness. It helps to broaden its appeal. If you've got the time, I recommend checking out one of Richard Garfield's many talks on Luck vs Skill. He talks about his experiences with Magic the Gathering, as well as how Valve designed Team Fortress 2 based on his articles and juggling luck vs skill. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSg408i-eKw
I know how worrying it can be when a video game designer switches to board game design though. You get some that will just slap something together without considering the industry, and then you get something more akin to Exploding Kittens or some sprawling miniatures game that looks beautiful but plays like garbage.
This is NOT going to work, You alone can do nothing.
There is NO way, an indie, or a Game firm, can afford to NOT make as much money as their competitor in the industry is making.
1) Margins and discovery is difficult in this industry.
2) If you are a public company, you will face management and market pressure to improve your numbers which means going ahead and making a skinner box.
This is straight up a case for legal frameworks and avenues for legal recourse to be made available.
So no - you wont manage it on your own. Its not possible.
You WILL manage it by connecting with other game devs, writers, reviewers, indies, game houses, parents, programmers - especially people who get why this is an issue (as opposed to the ones who are happy with the status quo)
I know that there is at least one other Game dev who recently spoke out against this (<5 months ago).
Also consider that NOT having addiction boxes as your competition means the hooks and attention grabbers in gamers are shallower. This both reduces the size of the population.
You are definitely not alone. This is precisely what needs collective effort at an international scale. Farmville/candy crush is as effective as it is in California, as it is in Cochin, or Trindiad.
Frankly, I wouldn't be damned surprised if eventually a law firm does catch on, and then targets the entire industry.
I'm not sure what you're claiming I'm planning to do is not going to work. I'm not trying to fight the market trends, I understand they're bigger than me. My main job isn't even in the game industry right now, but in the healthcare industry.
My plan right now is design board games, get them published somehow (I'm slowly working on that front, my games have been evaluated by some publishers and professional designers, but nothing is signed yet), then developing an app/PC version in Unity and releasing that while promoting it on the channels I know people would be interested (i.e. board game sites). But I'm getting older and don't have the free time I used to, so it's going pretty slowly. I'm also not expecting to get rich off these games, it's more about getting things out there again and making some side money, hopefully more than a couple of games I worked on for other companies which sold abysmally due to some unfortunate timing and inadequate PR coverage (I've already made games and released them on my own that have performed better than those did, it's not a high bar to clear).
But yeah, I'm not really disagreeing with you. It is what it is. And if a much more well known game designer than I am, Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), can rail against these types of games in multiple talks while having almost zero effect in changing the trends in the industry, then I, as an almost completely unknown designer, can not expect to make any significant changes.
It just makes me less excited to get back into mobile game dev industry when I'm almost guaranteed to work on a skinner box type game.
This issue gets little traction, and has been going on for way too long.
I argue that this problem be posed as one of collective action as opposed to individual responsibility.
As comments have already shown, people will point out that if they don't do it, the competition will. IF the larger group uses abhorrent systems, people will just say its normal, and do nothing.
Individual responsibility will only get us as far as comments on social media.
There is instead a larger coalition of people ranging from devs, non dev coders, game houses, parents who will be able to collectively push for changes and organizations to manage this.
This will require legal frameworks and legal recourse. Private incentives are not aligned to create a healthy environment.
It is also possible that the entire industry can soon get sued, which I suppose is one way of attempting to deal with it.
What is the labor market, if not an interminable, poorly designed MMORPG?
Most of us will be alive by the time there's enough economic incentive for all the things humanity needs, with only a token labor force. Many of the world's richest countries are already there, at least when it comes to their own citizens.
In the future (i.e. the present, in the software world), to the extent that employers need workers, they going to have to compete for them with high salaries and copious perks. We'll largely conquer poverty, and we'll have a very large lower-middle class working part-time, a smallish upper-middle class of knowledge workers, and tiny class of ultrawealthy capitalists.
I imagine it's going to be more like a handful of kleptocrat authoritarians, a small class of knowledge workers, and the rest are the shock troops of the above or the people who's heads their cracking for even thinking about rebelling.
Your assumptions rest on some very big claims, such as being able to work part time as a low end labour worker. I can't imagine how that would come about in a natural market unless cost of goods dropped even further, and that's not possible through automation alone. Food for example, still needs huge resources and even if it's 100% automated you can't avoid the use of the finite resources required for it.
I do appreciate your optimism though, and I really hope we can work out how to arrive at a solution to the myriad of new problems without everything falling apart first.
We need to show initiative, as it's going to be a race between preserving quality of life with proactive policy and the very quickly changing labour landscape removing the means to participate in the way communities are currently structured.
I see this part-time work happening via things like the informal economy and the sharing economy. We're certainly a long ways off from this dynamic playing out across the entire economy, but it seems to me to be the general direction we're headed.
So the majority of the population will make their income from gray market work? I can see this being feasible only if we have fusion power, some kind of benevolent dictator and a fully developed social safety net. I do _not_ see this as an inevitable equilibrium state extrapolated from the current economy and political thinking, so if it does happen it will have to be the result of decades of hard dedicated work, much like our 40 hour work week.
Sure, think fusion power and UBI. I'm talking beyond the immediate future.
And I don't think it's that crazy, current politics aside. People will eventually realize the factory jobs aren't returning and there will need to be a political solution.
Or, we're in store for a much bleaker future...I have predictions for that one too.
Every job I've worked in my adult life has involved being judged by standards the boomers doing the judging could never live up to, and then covering for their incompetence with technical skills(because I'm young, so I can just do that stuff). It would be such a sad joke if it weren't for the fact that they squat in every opportunity young people have for their futures (real estate, higher positions, etc) while the young themselves drown in debt and exploitation.
It's even better when they don't like the fact that you are doing the job in a way they can't understand. I swear some people think they are paying you to suffer, and if you do something in a way that doesn't require enough suffering they feel ripped off.
Lets be clear here. What-ever the persons opinion of you should have absolutely no bearing on your professional work, and your relationship between then. I have rude clients, I have smart ass clients. Something is very clear I make it to them when I do the job, I'm doing it for money. If they think $1000 per hour is too much then they're not a client I really want to be working with.
I have found you need to make it very clear to clients why you're there, and what the ROI will be for them. After you've done the work, you move onto the next client.
They may be a wealthy business man, they may be a boomer. They may be a startup. You're there to get a job done.
That works fine when they're "clients" and you have a business - they naturally accept B2B situations as equals. But when you're the employee, that doesn't work. If you make it clear that you're only in the job for the paycheck, you're going to get fired - you have to make it seem to management like you have some psychopathic desire to be there busting your ass for nine hours on their inane and unfulfilling tasks.
I have to disagree with you there. You're taking the passive approach. Go out make a name for yourself in the market place in the field you work in. Do some volunteer work as a example to build up a client base and contact list. Advertise your services to other businesses and go to business functions. Get some offers on the table, and then you know where you stand within the organisation. You cannot do it if you're a slave to your job and you're literally working 10 to 12 hours a day. Cut back, turn off the phone after work. Go for a jog and go and have a beer with competing businesses or colleges.
Here's the problem - I don't work in a "field". I work in whatever office will have me, being another faceless drone, more grist for the mill of half-secretarial and half-self-taught patchwork IT people. No matter what the exact role is, there's someone who's either got better qualifications or training than me if it gets technical. I'm "discount office guy" - they don't want me to be anything other than passive.
Your mindset is too stuck in the victim mentality. Yes, people are going to better than you, BUT there are also people who are LESS qualified than you! I will tell you a secret most people wont tell you. People with less qualifications than you get paid more than you.
So drop the `Technical qualification` bull####. If you need qualifications, like other people have recommended open up a text book and start reading. Start building web-sites. Start development with Postgresql. Go out and market yourself and your products. See WHAT people want to buy. See what people are willing to pay for products. Go and take night classes in business management/business skills.
You're a discount office guy because you let them treat you like a discount office guy. If you're worried about failure let me tell you now you're going to fail in amazing screwed up ways, but that is part of the fun. You're going to find your own style, you're going to fall in love and be walked over, you're going to get shit but you're not going to grow as a individual, person, and be a human if you are that `Discount Office Guy`
## I will end on this.
Honestly to dear &&&& god. You've got some of the most friendliest, supportive, happy go people on this community web site who I believe would love to give you pointers and critique your work. Leverage what you have, leverage your network.
I have seen this in Australian academia: Boomer academics who were permitted to publish a paper every 2-3 years during the first 10+ years of their academic life, and/or defer getting a PhD to ludicrously late in their careers, are now elevated to senior positions supervising students and junior faculty who will not have reasonable careers unless they publish a paper every 2-3 months or better.
I'm not salty about that. More just salty at the experience of dealing with people who were teleported to the top of a hierarchy, throwing their weight around as if they'd climbed it.
The 'boomers' invented most of the 'computer stuff' you use, most 'developers' today are hacks (granted, some are amazing).
Boomers had difficult upbringing, brought real social change, lived through - and ended the Cold War.
Female boomers were expected to be secretaries - and had to fight for the right just to do normal jobs in the workplace.
Even the boys - were expected to do the same jobs their fathers did, mostly boring labour - and only a fraction of them got to go to University.
There was no such thing as 'startups' back in the day - there were zero opportunities for middle class young people to generate wealth or do globally impactful things.
They lived during the draft, and 50 000 of them died in Vietnam.
Millenials are born into massive entitlement, wealth , privilege and opportunity.
You get bored easily, and don't want to do the same job for more than a year - but expect loyalty and long term employment? Yes - boomers had steadier work - but it was also incredibly boring, stagnant - and in real wages, pay was crap.
Boomers could own a small, shoddy home in the suburbs, and were able to have 'a fridge' and 'an oven' and 'a car' - even though they were all crap by today's standards - that was 'The American Dream' and they were generally happy.
If you are born past the fall of the Berlin wall in America - unless you are from a ghetto - you do not know hardship.
As for real estate: the average home price in the US is about $200K. You can afford a home. You just can't be 'Instagram baller'.
As for 'higher positions' - do you think the 'Greatest Generation' just handed over their choice positions to the 'Boomers'? Or do you think it took mostly a lifetime of work and loyalty? If you don't like your job make yourself CEO of your own company. What's stopping you?
American Millenials have more opportunity than any group of people in the entirety of history - enough with your complaining.
This response is so stereotypical and contrary to the facts of the conditions of young people today, I have to thank you for demonstrating both my and the parent's points. Thanks for that!
Life is far too simple to flippantly dismiss all those points.
In some ways, life was simpler. The pace of life was slower. A good illustration of this is comparing the suicide rates of today. The pressure is much higher today and so are the suicide rates.
I also see a lot more bullying and viciousness, especially in the media today. By comparison, newspapers of 50 years ago were much more relaxed and easy going (I studied a years worth of papers recently). There was also more social cohesion, albeit in smaller communities. That feeling of caring makes a huge difference to people's mental well being.
I'm inclined to believe that life was generally easier for many boomers (at least from about 1960 onward) than it is today for younger people.
When I run a search and find that almost all media outlets still insist that only males do domestic violence, or, boys are (in the last few decades) falling way behind in education because they're suddenly lazy and stupid, I recognise just how collectively nasty we've become. These appalling attitudes must wear the younger generation down.
As an older guy, I'm inclined to agree the younger generation have a lot of issues that older people didn't need to worry about. Access to technology not withstanding.
However, I totally accept my view is mostly anecdotal (except for suicide rates, domestic violence prejudice and snarky education comments directed at boys by many media outlets).
"It is so perfectly stereotypical and dicorced from reality "
It is exactly reality - and that you don't grasp it only validates how utterly self-deluded Millenials are.
By every measure Millenials are doing better.
Millenials have:
+ Better healthcare, more coverage
+ Better access to education, information, more college grads than ever
+ More job opportunities, more diverse fields to apply knowlege
+ More opportunity for wealth creation
+ A life full of gadgets, toys and trifles that couldn't even be imagined
+ You have 'fast fashion' - just 20 years ago there was no suh thing. Clothes were expensive.
+ Your cars are pretty good, stereos are great, they are fun to drive. Drive a car from the 1970's - they are shit-boxes
+ You have access to unlimited entertainment and music. In the 1970s' you had 10 records. You wanted to listen to more you went to your friends house.
+ You have more mobility and access to jobs not only around America, but around the world.
+ Millenial girls can actually have careers and jobs - and not have to fight vicious stereotyping.
It's basically disgusting that this generation should make existential complains.
What are your beefs?
That you don't bet to be CEO after 1 year?
That you can't live in a baller apartment in SF and have to actually commute from the burbs?
That you don't have job security? Well, you could, if you wanted a more boring job.
That you have school debt? Every generation did. You could have gone to a state school, private school is a luxury.
All of these gripes are really sad 'Oh the Boomers fed everything up' and 'life sucks'. Bullshit.
Provide some facts.
Other than University being a little more expensive - I don't see anything that is remotely more difficult. And FYU with interest rates so low compared to the 15% it was in the 1980s, I say in real dollars, maybe that's not so bad.
You cite no actual quantitative measures to support this claim, so rather than rebutting with such I'll just say this: by many economic measures, Millenials are worse off than boomers (by a few, they're also worse of than Gen X, though by more Gen X is in the worst position of the three, though it usually gets left out of comparisons.)
> All of these gripes are really sad 'Oh the Boomers fed everything up' and 'life sucks'. Bullshit.
It's true that the f-ing up (specifically, of the features in the politico-economic system that resulted in aggregate gains being widely distributed) mostly happened wat the end of the time when the "Greatest" Generation was running the show, the Boomers just were the last generation to have a substantial fraction of their working life before things were f-ed up.
What is stereotypical and divorced from reality are the things you are missing.
The economy is structured as a ponzi scheme. The ponzi scheme will collapse and many unsympathetic boomers will go broke.
To take your interest rate example. Prices are inversely correlated to interest rates. If you buy when interest rates are high (low prices) and sell when interest rates are low (high prices) then you benefit enormously. Since interest rates are pretty much as low as they can go then there is no upside left for millennials. Only downside. I, like many millennials, wish for much much higher interest rates. Low interest rates are another wealth transfer from those with earnings (millennials) to those with capital (boomers).
I do not suggest that all millennial complaints are valid. I'm simply saying that they shouldn't be dismissed with technological handwaving. The hidden message in the complaints is that we're in this together. The ponzi scheme economy hurts all of us.
Speaking as a non-American millennial, that is largely true though.
I think the current generation American kids will be even more worse.
When I saw kids in the US and when I see the kids in India. Its just feels like American kids live in some kind of Disneyland. The level of competitiveness and hard work as a culture in kids in India have is just a whole double digit factors higher.
The fact is that US ecosystem is largely saved because of the Economic inertia and the endless stream exceptionally talented pool of great people who immigrate there. That large replenishing pool of people pays for the party forward.
Millennials also have helicopter parents. This is a totally new hardship. Being raised in a way that is completely incompatible with reality. Then we get to the "real" world and are told we don't know anything. Well gee thanks dad. Judging by the American economy and the state of world affairs, doesn't seem like boomers are all they crack themselves up to be either.
Helicopter parenting is not new (except for the name), and is neither unique to nor universal among parents of Millenials.
> Judging by the American economy and the state of world affairs, doesn't seem like boomers are all they crack themselves up to be either.
To be fair to the Boomers, while they certainly failed to fix it, the damage was mostly done by the "Greatest Generation" (the strong economy the GG often gets credit for was created when the GG were in their youth and the Lost Generation was running the show.)
Sorry I am going to have to disagree. Parents used to be strict, far stricter, sure. But helicopter parents is just pure putting [kids in a bubble](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-rise-of-the-helicopter-pa...). I do agree that it isn't universal. Anecdotally, my friends who are doing best in life right now are the ones who have less helicoptery parents (obviously not scientific, this is just my observation and trying to make sense of what I'm seeing). One friend in particular, grew up in a rural area and had to work very hard. He's now a PhD and works at Bosch.
Not sure how this is being downvoted - the truth hurts. We just have it too damn good, and without any wide-scale struggles to know how good we have it.
I would like to a read a serious response from a detractor.
I'm your Huckleberry. My parents are late boomers and they and many of their friends were able to sleep-walk into middle class comfort and early retirement. Literally all they had to do was show up for work, 9-5, Monday-Friday and their prosperity was lifted on a rising tide of property prices. When they were in their 20s you applied for a job by sending a CV and covering letter. No three rounds of assessment days and homework assignments. When they left work at the end of the day, it didn't follow them home because technology didn't allow it. And the world of fax machines and mail rooms was limited in the amount of ruthless efficiency pressure it could put on workers.
They didn't even need degrees. And my mother is a perfect example of how boomer women being expected to be secretaries is anachronistic SJW nonsense. She never attended university, just started working as a junior claims person at an insurance firm in the 70s, showed up for work for 30 years and ended up in the boardroom with stock options. Never faced any discrimination. And she would be the first to admit she never put much into her career - no need for constant re-training, seminars, conferences, when she was home she was home.
While enjoying these comfortable lives, their generation with their hippy views presided over explosive increases in immigration to most western countries, and are the architects of wealth-hoarding tricks like buy-to-let and all kinds of snaky BS union-breaking contract work. The bottom line is, as a young person today you simply couldn't repeat their lives in terms of comfort and financial security. To match it, you'd need to put in several times the effort and hours they did, with a lot more anxiety biting at your heels.
The first Millennials came of age to the images of those planes hitting the WTC and, as corny as it is, that was some incredibly apt symbology. The few of us who manage to be "anti-fragile" may make out good from this new era, but that the security of the ordinary middle-class majority has been shattered is indisputable.
In the modern world, for most people, there's nothing productive to do and no fame to get from it.
In the USA, all the highways are already built (and even when they're failing, their fixing will be postponed).
High speed rail lines weren't, and they're not going to be. Not on any human time frame.
So most people are engaged with running pre-built technosphere that is slowly falling apart, with no new developments, for ever-shrinking pay, while more and more money are extorted from them to pay for previous generations entitlements, and also for medicine, real estate, tuition and law, which from services all turned into endless money sinks.
Friges and ovens are not the alpha and omega of life. Productivity, respect and growth are. Are we having any all across post-development countries?
"Productivity, respect and growth are. Are we having any all
across post-development countries?"
Have any of you ever taken a basic Econ course?
'No room for growth'?
THE ECONOMY HAS BEEN GROWING EVERY YEAR.
Do you realize that 'feature phones' to 'cell phones' is economic growth?
Do you realize that '2G to 4G' is economic growth?
Do you realize that more people going to college than ever before is good?
There are new medicine trials every day - gene therapy. Jesus H Christ you can now chose the gender and eye colour of your offspring. That's how advanced we are.
100 years ago - there was no 'medicine'. 95% of all operations were basically amputations with crossed fingers of no infection.
Do you realize that the amount of air travel in the world has doubled in the last little while?
That you have access to 100000x more information that people just 20 years ago, before the internet?
You do realize that the iPhone/Android/Facebook are only 10 years old?
That 20 years ago there was no YCombinator?
I'm just going to assume that most of you are too young to have any perspective, because I just can't understand the commentary here.
When you hit your 30's, you can look back and your own life can be a literal testament to the change.
Yes, some things stay the same, but at least in terms of material productivity, things are better.
If the college provides same service while extorting twice as much money, this means that economy grows, but people become poorer, more indebted and strained. The economy might be growing; but WE don't.
> Do you realize that more people going to college than ever before is good?
But when they graduate they have worse employment prospects than High School graduates 40 years ago.
> Do you realize that '2G to 4G' is economic growth?
But how many participate in it as makers and not just as consumers?
When Interstates happened, a lot of people made them with their hands. But now, very few people are directly involved in the 2G to 4G transition and are proud for it. The others just feel like a passengers in a fast moving bus without any control of the route, or, for that reason, trip safety.
> Jesus H Christ you can now chose the gender and eye colour of your offspring
But can you afford it today as a middle-income person? If you can't, it's not there yet. What's the engagement numbers?
> You do realize that the iPhone/Android/Facebook are only 10 years old?
...but I liked more what was before them. I would have preferred N900 and LiveJournal, too bad I don't have this choice realistically. Talk about bus passengers.
> Do you realize that the amount of air travel in the world has doubled in the last little while?
How many people are making it happen? And not on the crappy jobs such as flight attendants? Wait - now even the pilots have their jobs unsatisfactory thanks to long hours and bad pay.
Okay, here's one. The boomer's coasted on the tail end of a rising post-war economy and government largesse, then burned the ladder behind them and destroyed their legacy by electing Reagan. By any measure (college financing, wages, home prices) they were ridiculously advantaged relative to young people today, who now have to suffer under an obscenely priced regime of credentialism, largely administered (for their own profit) by Boomers.
Instead of extending these advantages to young people, they sold them down the river to an actor pretending to be a conservative, who got off on police shooting protestors and buddied up with apartheid South Africa. Why? So they could get pay less taxes and get false promises of "animal spirits" inflating their 401ks. And when the social progress they ostensibly fought so hard for came up against the wall, they chose to let schools be resegregated, throw all the POC drug users in jail, and have LGBTQ people die of AIDS (because, y'know, property values).
This disgusting rightward lurch sets the stage for a CIA scion to pretend he was a cowboy and kill half a million innocent people in the Middle East and destroy the economy. And now a parody of Reagan himself to do the same or worse, putting the nail in the coffin of Millennial's future.
And also: Ended the Cold War? Look at 2017 and think about that one. More like destroyed an already poor country with corrupt Capitalism, so the KGB could take over and come back at us even stronger.
"The boomer's coasted on the tail end of a rising post-war economy and government largesse, then burned the ladder behind them and destroyed their legacy by electing Reagan. "
Utter bullshit.
It's not even anectodal - it's just complete narrative fiction.
This is HN, try some facts.
Which material or social elements regarding standard of living between the generations, implies that 'Millenials have it harder'?
By every external measure, you have more wealth and opportunity than any generation in history.
"This disgusting rightward lurch sets the stage for a CIA scion to pretend he was a cowboy "
What the smack are you on about?
This is HN not the Huffington Post.
"Ended the Cold War? Look at 2017 and think about that one."
If you were alive during the cold war, then you know that 2017 is obviously not the cold war.
I was actually alive during the Cold War because I'm an older millennial, but since you're on some Boomer Archie Bunker rehash trip, I doubt that matters.
> If you were alive during the cold war, then you know that 2017 is obviously not the cold war.
As a Gen Xer, I was alive during a lot of the late Cold War, and I'm very much aware that after the brief hiatus with the fall of the Soviet Union, there's been wide talk of a growing new cold war between the US and Russia since the Balkans crises of the 1990s, and that that Cold War has included many of the hallmarks of the old one, including proxy wars, direct saber rattling, violent covert actions, attempts by each side to subvert the government of the other principal and/or allies, etc.
> Millenials are born into massive entitlement, wealth , privilege and opportunity
Something is strongly wrong with your reasoning if you think that boomers did so much things right and failed miserable in their most important job that is raise kids.
Okay, apologies. Wasn't intentionally trying to stir up trouble, just share my experiences along the lines of the parent. I can see from some of the responses I solicited why this is problematic and will try to be more measured in my comments
One that I graduated high school with in particular comes to mind. We all played video games back then. Half Life, Goldeneye, Starcraft, Everquest, etc. He was a smart guy, driven, usually made better grades than me (I was lazy in high school). Took a job at an medical supply company after graduating from high school intending to work for a few months before starting college.
Well, when it came time to start school, he tried to balance work, school and an ever increasing amount of time in front of the TV or computer playing games ... and failed. Dropped out of school after one semester. Got an apartment with a couple of his coworkers where they would mostly play games when they weren't working. I went over a few times. It was depressing to watch. You really want to say, "Dude, is this really what you want to do?"
Spent seven years working that same job stocking shelves and spent the rest of the time drinking and playing whatever the newest game was that month. He'd message me at like 12am asking if I was playing anything and I'd be like, nope, studying. He'd type "LOL" (back in the AIM days).
When World of Warcraft came out, he was instantly drawn into the WoW universe. He'd stay up all night playing. Broke up with his girlfriend because he was playing WoW literally every waking moment. Started being late to work, eventually lost his job and lost his apartment (I'm guessing his coworkers asked him to leave when he couldn't pay rent). Moved back in with his parents and still, just ... gaming. All the time. He'd just spend whole days sitting in front of WoW or some other video game. For three years that was all he did.
Eventually, his parents had to SHUT OFF THEIR INTERNET and have an intervention to reach him. Obviously I don't know the full story of what happened, but after that he did start to pull it together.
Got back into school at 29 and just recently graduated with a business degree. He's managed to "stay clean from games" (his exact words, BTW) for the last seven years. I can't imagine what an immense struggle that must be considering how ubiquitous they are now.
All told he lost more than 10 years of his life.
The whole time I'm looking on at this and thinking, if he was drinking, we would call this alcoholism. But what do we call it when it's video games?
Yes, lost, because "normally" you'd gain something in those ten years that you could put into the coming years: money/savings, job experience which gives you a firmer hold on a self-sustaining life, relationships.
And how does a period of 10 years of successfully plodding along in "any" profession, perhaps writing code for an ad platform that enables $people to sell some $shit to $other_people, that are in the habit of buying things they don't need, make a person great?
Doing work does not make a person great. It makes a person fed, clothed and housed, if the pay is decent. But that's about it.
Good paying jobs are scarce and video games are relatively cheap for the amount of time you can spend on them. It's escapism. They are confusing correlation with causation.
> Video games are relatively cheap for the amount of time you can spend on them.
This has far-reaching consequences. With most goods, the consumer has to keep consuming (and thus creating demand). There's major concerns whether or not we can keep enough people working (and buying things) to keep the economy going, and video games don't contribute as much to aggregate demand. With an economic system that depends on continuous growth, we are trying to simultaneously squeeze more labor out of people while reducing the value of what people get out of it. This contradiction doesn't come with new luxury goods, but is a contradiction within capitalism that has been well described for almost two centuries: the dual nature of labour as capital and labour as a commodity.
>They are confusing correlation with causation.
Actually, this is one of the biggest questions of the paper cited, so the authors are not oblivious.
This is such bullshit. Right now you can walk into a long haul trucking job with zero years experience and be making $70k minimum with a $10-20k signing bonus after a short month long training. And that's one of myriad trades that are available today. The lie that has been sold to America's youth that everyone has a "right" to go to college and is entitled to a job upon graduation will go down as one of the greatest crimes committed against an entire generation.
What are the hours and benefits like for long haul trucking? I'd imagine it's not a job widely available in West Virginia or areas where there is mass unemployment. Genuinely asking and I don't think what I said is bullshit. There are definitely people who can't find full-time jobs and spend their time playing video games because it's a cheap hobby/luxury/entertainment. Why else do you think the labor participation rate is so low? Why don't all those people who lost manufacturing or coal jobs just follow your advice? I don't think you should dismiss millions and millions of people making minimum wage, working part-time, or out of the labor force altogether and just assume (without a shred of evidence) that they are simply choosing not to take well paid jobs that you describe as so freely available.
> What are the hours and benefits like for long haul trucking? I'd imagine it's not a job widely available in West Virginia or areas where there is mass unemployment.
The benefits are like any other salaried position, and the hours are restricted by federal mandate for safety reasons. The one downside is being away from home for extended periods of time, but... y'know... it's a job; if it were easy it wouldn't pay well.
The labor shortage in the trades is well documented:
> Why else do you think the labor participation rate is so low? Why don't all those people who lost manufacturing or coal jobs just follow your advice?
They should follow my advice. My guess as to why the participation rate is so low is because Millennials are living at home with their Baby Boomer parents, playing video games and avoiding the harsh realities of adult life. They were sold on the false dream that they could get any degree they wanted and walk right out of college into a high paying, indoor job. Dreams like that are hard to wake up from.
> I don't think you should dismiss millions and millions of people making minimum wage, working part-time, or out of the labor force altogether and just assume (without a shred of evidence) that they are simply choosing not to take well paid jobs that you describe as so freely available.
When we no longer have a labor shortage in the trades and other blue collar jobs, I'll stop dismissing the millions of people making minimum wage.
>Millennials are living at home with their Baby Boomer parents, playing video games and avoiding the harsh realities of adult life
This is a terrible strawman and it really discredits the rest of the argument you're making. I'm a millennial and I don't know anyone like you're describing.
>labor shortage in the trades
Every time you hear "labor shortage" you need to add "at the offered salary/wage"--they need to offer more money.
Why do you think people would rather work a minimum wage job than take your advice? You offer literally no explanation and just make claims without any evidence. You are speaking from opinion, not fact.
> This is a terrible strawman and it really discredits the rest of the argument you're making.
Uh.. did you even read the article we're commenting on? I'm speaking directly to its main thesis. If you're making a claim about it being a straw man, take it up with the author.
> I'm a millennial and I don't know anyone like you're describing.
And I'm a millennial too and I know plenty of people like the one I'm describing.
> Every time you hear "labor shortage" you need to add "at the offered salary/wage"--they need to offer more money.
It's not that simple. Many of the industries experiencing labor shortages are labor intensive and there are limits to the amount they can increase wages and remain economically viable.
> Why do you think people would rather work a minimum wage job than take your advice? You offer literally no explanation and just make claims without any evidence. You are speaking from opinion, not fact.
Frankly, Millennials aren't as money-motivated as previous generations were. They choose to accept the stigma of staying at home with their parents or working low wage service jobs over the life of a blue-collar worker. I don't even really fault them for it; money ain't everything. But they have to lie in the bed they make for themselves. They can't both live a bohemian lifestyle free from responsibility and have all the trappings of life that hard work provides.
That requires that you're able to drive, and get a CDL on top of that. There are some people out there who are not disabled enough to actually earn Disability from the government, but whose physical or psychological issues prevent them from passing a driving test.
There's a massive shortage of long haul truckers right now. Industry turnover is at 100%. When was your family doing it? I know of quite a few places here in Minnesota that are offering $70k with a $10-20k signing bonus and still having a hell of a time retaining drivers.
If the job was so high paid and cushy then why would there be 100% turnover? And 100%? You believe there's literally nobody who is a trucker for more than a year? You are not making any sense.
"Pay for truckers varies by distance and employer. Glassdoor estimates median pay for truckers drivers -- mostly long haul drivers -- is $54,000. The American Trucking Association says that truckers who work for a private fleet can earn up to $73,000 a year."
Up to, not minimum. For someone who's very experienced not some inexperienced bozo off the street who doesnt even have a CDL. Not even the frigging industry claims you're going to make $90k your first year.
You are right, I was wrong about it being "minimum". $54k is still an absurdly high salary for any entry level employee, so my original point about there being plenty of jobs out there still stands.
"[Truck drivers] typically live paycheck-to-paycheck while employed, and then suffer a big step down in income when they retire with only social security."
Uh..... Doesn't sound like the ideal job you're making it out to be to me...
If turnover is so bad there's got to be a reason, thus the job must not be as cushy and perfect as you claim. If 100% of people are quitting their job there must be something very, very bad about that job.
Anyway, the point of that article was for some moron to say how awesome ESOPs are. I once worked for an employee owned company, ESOPs are no silver bullet to a toxic work environment. They aren't going to do anything at all on their own. If you go to a shitty company to work for and make them an ESOP that doesn't do anything. ESPOs help in that better companies to work for are the ones who tend to consider being employee-owned.
$54k is median salary, not starting, entry level, salary. Your starting salary is more around $35k-ish, from what I've seen.
Where are these magic 5 figure sign on bonuses for people without a CDL? Are you a truck driver? What was your sign on bonus? Did you have to get a CDL on your own time?
you mean, the cruel world tell them to be ashamed of their gender, their country, their life - then they have to pay for their students debts and think about how they wont ever afford a house and they prefer going to an alternate reality? no way!
I personally love escaping reality by playing games. There's other ways, but it's a pretty fine one. Better than depression.
This is what happened in Japan in the mid 1990s when it firmly entered the post-industrial age. There's an entire sector of society that's given up on getting ahead because the old model of employment is broken, and there's no point in fighting to get ahead since there's no winning.
It seems like there's a limit to growth and Japan were just the first ones to hit the limit. Everyone else has just cheated the limit with "artificial growth" via immigration.
534 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadhttps://xkcd.com/722/
My guess is most "2nd lifers" still among the living (people with disabilities and medical conditions seem to be overrepresented among users; death announcements are not uncommon) are still around, they just log on less frequently and spend more time in other online worlds.
The obvious successors in the works are Linden Lab's own Sansar,
https://www.sansar.com/
and SL cofounder Rosedale's High Fidelity:
https://highfidelity.com/
EDIT: I'm being downvoted for pointing out that these kinds of articles have been rehashed for years? thanks. continue on, then.
I know a lot of qualified people who've graduated from school and still haven't found work. In CS I know some who have struggled to get a job. That said, those who taught themselves had jobs either while in school or lined up for right when they got out, but that's how it is everywhere if they're willing to move/commute.
https://twitter.com/ryanavent/status/841411624904863746
Everything from utility companies to the financial sector to government to even academia has a heck of a lot of perverse incentives and corruption.
Over half a century ago John Maynard Keynes--one of the most influential intellectuals to shape the world today--said "it's better for people to toil over their bank account than each other."
I would easily wager it's better people toil over their virtual realities than their bank accounts, provided we're able to keep the scarcity problem solved (which I'd bet we'd be able to pull off).
I'm curious as to how we can pull that off given that an ever increasing percentage of young smart capable people are opting out of solving real world problems in favor of "toiling over their virtual realities"...
What are some examples of this? Why are people paying those workers?
In short, in modern, mainstream economic theory the ideas that explain this are what's called Market Failures. In 2001, the Nobel Prize in economics went to people who studied information asymmetries, which lead to market failures.
A concrete and classic example is the Tragedy of the Commons.
My earlier example of the financial sector, which in 2008 showed everyone how private gains created public losses in the form of subsidies, recession, inflation, bail-outs, moral hazard, public-sector risk, was created despite (and many argue in part, because) of government-oversight.
Another, more benign example, is one I was reminded of while on vacation in France. A toilet bloc was guarded by an unhappy attendant who took 1 euro per use. It would be better to install a 100euro toll gate and give her the remaining profit to buy a computer to play video games (or art supplies, whatever she wants to do), in the hours between cleanings. Everyone wins. This is what's called pareto-efficient. Someone is made better off and no one is made worse off (tourists don't need to encounter an unhappy attendant, either).
However, to address your general sentiment: First let's establish the premise that the most important thing to ones survival and welfare in the world today is money.
Without that--and therefore by separating the relationship between survival, social status, welfare and money--it could be argued that we would take a step in the direction of fixing incentive alignment.
People might know part of this work better by the paper title / catchphrase "market for lemons" [1]. This inspired "lemon laws" in several countries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
It really isn't. AI might not be able to take over 100% of our jobs anytime soon, but if even half of the things we spend time on, things like understanding requirements. If an AI system can coax users/managers to provide better requirements, maybe even create tests for those requirements, then every programmer could be twice as productive. That means half as many of us are needed.
Lots more jobs (medical billers) exist mostly in opposition of other people (insurance adjusters).
Because in any large organisation they are indistinguishable from the productive ones. Sometimes even in your own team there might be someone that appears very productive but creates long term maintenance costs.
I don't mind paying for it even if it does keep young men immersed in a fantasy world.
But I have a daughter. And she will be surrounded by men whose idea of women will be shaped by game characters that fail the Turing test but have big tits.
I guess for her first birthday after puberty I'll have to get her a taser.
Is this because you believe people playing these games are not able to separate the fantasy of the game from real life?
If so, what differentiates them from pornography?
Or 10 minutes watching real people having sex, knowing those people use aliases so that after the camera shuts down and the paper towels come out, they can go and live their own real lives.
That's the difference I see.
I think Princess Zelda's flirtatious tendencies are about as formative to real relationships with women as call of duties role in informing me on gun violence is realistic. They are clearly fantasies with no bearing on reality, that's the appeal of escapism focused games.
I think the issue comes about when people don't have any other experiences to form real expectations of the world around them.
Would you rather have your daughter date a guy who has skewed opinions on how to impress a girl, based on video games, or a guy who has skewed opinions on how enjoyable anal fisting is on average, based on pornography?
men however, even men you clearly see they spend most of their time in the gym could never even remotely fill out many male fantasy characters.
Both cases had thousands of people freaking out about the details of their fantasy world being changed. And I'm freaking out about having to share a planet with these people.
You have a demographic represented by mostly people who are highly active in online communities, it's entirely unsurprising that a lot of unsavory opinions are seen.
The LGBTQI community has to deal with trans-phobic people who would call themselves queer, feminists try protect their cause from those who want anything but equality, political party's have to constantly fight their own members to maintain image.
No one community will ever be free of people who hold onto what you may consider to be abhorrent opinions.
Then don't. Isolate yourself in a place where everybody shares your views and there's no disagreement. Sounds like a boring way to live, but if you're that scared of the opinions of others, reality has harsh surprises in store for you.
Gamergate (which is a vague term) also has connotations of a social backlash against progressivism and political correctness, which I wholeheartedly endorse.
Sometime you just want to blow things up, and not every game without a female or minority or gay role model is sending a bad message.
Video games from the pre-internet era was just as marketed towards the males as the it is right now, but the toxicity level is higher than ever in today's "community" focused gaming.
Overwatch is a good example of this. I applaud the developers for making such a diverse and stereotype-defying world and rosters. It is a game that includes lesbian characters, an autistic character, a beautiful Iraqi city thats not war-torn, and a futuristic African city thats not a slum. But even all that doesn't stop the player base from being toxic and harass other players for whatever reason.
That's generally a problem of competitive PvP games. DotA 2 has a similar problem - love the game, can't stand the people that play it. On the other hand, Destiny's community is pretty nice.
The toxicity level in cooperative or single player focused games seems fine to me.
Young men have much healthier views on gender equality than when I was young.
The trend I see is young men not putting in the effort to form romantic relationships and young women, rather than adjust their standards or put more effort in, trying to compete for the few guys who do measure up.
I would be much more worried that my daughter was going to end up very lonely.
I think you're right: the society of tomorrow will be lonely indeed.
Wouldn't it be ironic if it's not nuclear war, or environmental catastrophe, which leads to the extinction of the human race, but social media, Netflix, games, and VR?
Honestly, it broadly depends on what communities you're part of, IME. Some are wonderful, some are abysmal, and a lot are well-meaning but terrible at policing bad behaviour from a minority of members.
See Tinder for example. Most guys have a hard enough time getting matches but one male-model looking guy can easily have hundreds. The modern dating reality for men is winner-take-all.
Really, this is a wider concern than someone's daughter in particular. Women are getting hit, too, it's just not as visible. It's a societal problem.
A large benefit of a UBI compared to the status quo is that it reduces marginal tax rates on low income people. Right now you can get a lot of assistance if you have little to no income, but if you make a dollar you lose 90 cents in benefits. Who wants to work for 10 cents on the dollar?
With a UBI you make a dollar and you keep most of it, so there is more incentive to work.
Utility, as a function of money, generally has a negative second derivative - think Utility(income)=log(income) rather than Utility(income) = income. Utility'(0) > Utility'(UBI), so the UBI is still a massive work disincentive regardless of marginal tax rates.
A better solution is work incentives - EITC, Basic Job (UBI but only if you do government work), that kind of thing.
You could argue that watching people play video games isn't a real "benefit" to society in the way that food or houses are, but I don't see it as being fundamentally different than, say, televised sports. Are televised sports of no benefit to society? What about art, or music?
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...
Similarly, the average American fat person shouldn't eat 6 cheeseburgers on the theory that starvation is coming.
But on practical grounds I disagree with la terreur - call of duty is not really a substitute for military training. Senseless violence of the sort you almost seem to be advocating (am I misreading?) could be easily suppressed by a modern police force.
What makes you think the police are going to be on your side in such a situation?
But why would the cops side with a bunch of layabout gamers seeking only to pillage and plunder?
Why wouldn't they side with them?
Just to be clear here, I think the outcome of such a revolution scenario would almost certainly lead to even more suffering. But it would happen nonetheless.
It behooves us to not allow things to get that bad.
Starvation only seems to happen nowadays in war zones and communist countries.
This hate is being directed at anyone who appears to be doing better than they are of late: women, minorities, Jews, middle and upper class liberals attending private liberal arts schools, anyone with a non-STEM degree... You get the picture.
Anyway, the point I want to make is that these people aren't afraid of having their cheeseburgers taken away, they're afraid of having their games and gaming time taken away. Revoke their social security cheque and give them a mop, they aren't going to starve but they are going to lose most of their gaming and YouTube time. And the people they'll end up serving? Those are the same people they passionately hate.
This perception depends highly on the media you read. Anyhow, identity politics for some but not all groups instead of "e pluribus unum" will lead only to more division and conflict.
All kidding aside, it may already be too late for a lot of these people. The argument to be made is what sort of program would do a better job of creating fewer violent nationalists. You think it's serfdom, I'm not so sure.
Do you think coddling their anti-social instincts will help them become better people? Or would a little bit of hunger motivate them to see past their animus and create more healthy and productive social relationships?
If you want some numbers to back up the intuitive argument I made in the other comment, take a look at this article by Branko Milanovic[0]. It shows in explicit detail where all this resentment is coming from. Juxtapose this chart against your suggestion (as presumably a member of the 95th percentile) that these global upper-middle-class people (between 78th and 90th percentiles) be reduced to the level of Indian domestic servants and you get a good sense that might hate the idea.
[0] http://voxeu.org/article/greatest-reshuffle-individual-incom...
I personally would not work as a personal servant for another person unless driven to it by starvation, and I am far from the only person who feels that way.
They can have a whiff of grapeshot.
If nobody can ever improve on anything, either everything is free or we're all dead, and in neither case do you need a job in the first place.
Just having a lot of manufacturing robots does not mean there is nothing to do!
The real reason people need jobs, as evident by the number of able-bodied people who don't work at all, is for acquiring status. UBI (nor any other welfare measure) will not solve this problem.
http://craphound.com/down/download/
Work incentives for low-utility jobs are highly inefficient when people choose the makework jobs over real jobs, and work incentives for arbitrary real jobs are just a UBI with unnecessary paperwork, since you can just "work" for your friends and vice versa to do things you were going to do anyway.
Existing welfare/disability fraud/etc does allow one to exploit the taxpayer as you suggest, but it requires active work to do so. That too is a disincentive, and to an extent a social stigma. UBI has no such mitigating factors.
The problem is it isn't fraud.
These are all real jobs: Cook, landscaper, courier, housekeeper, driver, repair tech, janitor, etc.
They aren't any less a "job" when you're doing them for your roommate, but they're also the list of things that are already on the chore wheel. Nobody bothers to tell the government about them right now or do the accounting in dollars because there is currently no financial advantage in that. If you change that all it does is cause the same amount of real work to have more deadweight paperwork around it.
> Existing welfare/disability fraud/etc does allow one to exploit the taxpayer as you suggest, but it requires active work to do so.
It requires the same amount of active work regardless of whether or not you're "exploiting the taxpayer". Creating a bunch of paperwork for everyone is not an advantage.
> That too is a disincentive, and to an extent a social stigma.
The thing with a social stigma is playing video games all day, which hasn't changed.
Eliminating the social stigma of low income people using government programs for low income people is an advantage. There are poor kids suffering in America because their parents are too proud to apply for programs they qualify for, or don't understand that they qualify for them.
What's the point in having assistance programs if the only people you expect to use them are the most unabashed moochers because you shame honest people into not applying even though they qualify?
What's your theory to explain these choices? They're not crazy, and if anything are more typical than atypical. Some personal hypotheses, all of which except the last would counteract a UBI work disincentive:
1) In terms of labor choices, you've got to view utility primarily as a function of status, not income. Status is a positional good and, within a given profession, is highly correlated with income. So although I'm chasing a relatively small bump in salary, it will give outsize gains in utility.
2) Putting extra work in now is best viewed as investing in your own human capital, as a promotion isn't a permanent gold star for delivering on a project but instead supposed to recognize an increase in your human capital. That kind of increase in human capital provides lifelong excess monetary returns that exceed the decreasing marginal utility of money.
3) The increasing concentration of wealth accruing to the most productive workers means that income is in some kind of power law relationship with work effort.
4) The extra utility of a promotion is coming primarily from non-monetary effects, such as more autonomy in work and ability to work on more interesting problems.
5) Some combination of 1-4 exist and are valid, but they only have a significant effect on work effort toward the higher end of the income spectrum. A cashier boy doesn't gain any real status with a fifty cent raise, and the most-skilled and hardest working barista is not bringing home millions of dollars. Their work-for-utility functions are dominated by the effect of beer money, and the tenth beer is never as good as the first.
If 5) is true, a UBI would, of course, result in a significant increase in voluntary unemployment. I'm not sure it's even really a bad thing, though it'd be good to have a sense of how large the effect is and where it kicks in, which would have to be an empirical question.
I wonder if there'd be a significant gender split in how a UBI acts as a [dis]incentive to work.
It does no such thing. Will you put in an extra 20 hours for a 30% raise? How about 30 hours for a 45% raise?
Sublinear utility merely means that there is some point at which you'll stop.
I wonder if there'd be a significant gender split in how a UBI acts as a [dis]incentive to work.
In the Mincome experiment, which resulted in a 10% decrease in work effort, the effect was higher among women than men. However given that the original data/study is unavailable (merely news reports about it), it's impossible to know if that effect was significant. (Back in the day they weren't as good at multiple comparisons corrections as they are now.)
By that point you're just running into the superlinear cost of time. Easy demonstration: What about an extra 130 hours for 195%? 40 + 130 > 168, so that's literally impossible. 120 would be possible but you would die of sleep deprivation.
Even if the value of money is linear or superlinear, the value of time quickly catches up to it as it becomes more scarce.
> In the Mincome experiment, which resulted in a 10% decrease in work effort, the effect was higher among women than men.
You always cite the 10% but the link you gave last time showed that the majority of the decrease was from young mothers and students. That's clearly a different situation than people quitting their jobs to play video games.
Let me repeat: "However given that the original data/study is unavailable (merely news reports about it), it's impossible to know if that effect was significant. (Back in the day they weren't as good at multiple comparisons corrections as they are now.)"
With UBI you'd get that same $100, but if you took that days work you'd get an extra $100 (minus tax, let's say 20%). Now you're reward for that days work is $80.
The UBI system taxes higher but also provides more incentive to the worker. Welfare cliffs are an awful demotivator.
A phase-out reduces effective hourly wage, which theoretically reduces the incentive to work. That's no different than any other kind of marginal tax rate, though, and UBI would require a high marginal tax rate.
Probably the best argument UBI is to replace current welfare systems with one cash payment because, in addition to theoretically reducing administrative costs, it would make phase-outs easier to understand. If there are welfare recipients who misunderstand when benefits apply, they might not want to obtain additional income even though it would benefit them.
Anyway as manufacturing techniques improve more item will become post scarcity or effectively so if we can provide all the demand for an item for little to no cost.
But post scarcity happens all the time. It used to be the domain of nobles, who had easy access to basically anything they could desire. Now it belongs to middle to upper class first world residents, a growing class of people who can lean on mommy if they ever get in trouble and who generally are never more than an Amazon Prime delivery away from any good or service they need.
People will say oh but a feudal lord didn't have an iPhone it's all relative. And sure that's one argument, but I'm sure you can see the point being made.
You can work a lousy job, and play video games, eat pizza, and be basically happy. Or you can take on tens of thousands in student debt to work a much more stressful job, and wish you had enough time to play games, and stop eating pizza because it doesn't fit your lifestyle. A growing number of people can't rationalize the latter option. There's no need to endure that hardship, goods aren't that scarce. Hence, people bring up post scarcity.
So, food clothing shelter and maybe entertainment. Hey! We're already there - those things take a tiny fraction of the population to produce for everybody. Mostly automated from start to finish.
If there's a better term than "post-scarcity", would love to hear it.
> What these individuals are not doing is clear enough, says Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, who has been studying the phenomenon. They are not leaving home; in 2015 more than 50% lived with a parent or close relative. Neither are they getting married.
Yes, that's very clear from many surveys & studies.
> What they are doing, Hurst reckons, is playing video games. As the hours young men spent in work dropped in the 2000s, hours spent in leisure activities rose nearly one-for-one. Of the rise in leisure time, 75% was accounted for by video games.
Ok, so people are playing more video games. That makes sense, not only as they become more ubiquitous and engaging, they take up new forms of media and are easier to acquire. There's even products marketed to people who never played a video game before. More people are gaming, and existing people are playing more. That's logical enough.
They also mention that at the same time, working hours dropped. Sure, in the 2000s we had a massive recession on the heels of a new generation about to join the workforce. Perhaps there were reasons other than gaming that people worked less hours. They don't speculate on that.
> It looks as though some small but meaningful share of the young-adult population is delaying employment or cutting back hours in order to spend more time with their video game of choice.
Uh.... What?
They go ahead and interview a handful of more people who have a story about how they like to game more than they like to work, or how it affected their life. This is anecdotal, cherry-picking, speculative fiction. And this is the only evidence they propose.
Why else would a young adult delay employment or cut back hours?
1. There aren't any jobs.
2. People are getting horrible loans they'll never pay back and can now afford a home with much less money (or none?), so their kids can stay at home longer and don't need to get a job yet.
3. There aren't any jobs.
4. There are less hours available to work, because the economy is crashing.
5. There aren't any jobs.
With those "opportunities" to stay at home, without a job, of course they're going to play video games. What else are they going to do, dig ditches? Go outside and play? These are millennials we're talking about.
The circumstances are new, and the scale of those circumstances is new, but there is no trending ramp in people not working in order to play video games. This isn't Japan.
At 30 I've realized how harsh and cruel the world and its people (not everyone, but many) can be, which is the primary motivation for making some big changes in my life away from video games.
When I was 20, I had a great job and was happy with my lot in life, certain that everything was going to be okay. I was going to continue working in the public library, get the Assistant job, spin that into my MLS, and take up a Reference Librarian position.
I just turned 30 last week. The bottom dropped out of my world when the budget focus shifted to a strongly anti-education agenda when I was 23. For 7 years I have floated between jobs, trying to find something that gave me even a significant fraction of the satisfaction I had at 20. The world is harsh, cruel, and unbeatable. Some days the tabletop, online, and video gaming that I do nightly is the only thing keeping me from jumping in front of a train.
Hey man don't say that. Despite what you may think, you are valued and important. If you're feeling suicidal, Please call this hotline 1-800-273-8255.
ETA: One of these days I need to find out what it takes to get a paying job with them; it seems like a service we're going to need for a very long time. And since I spend a lot of time sitting around with a computer and a phone next to me, I figure I should go see about getting paid to help people.
The wastefulness is simply depressing.
only the high quality old music is still played and remembered today, and only the high quality old things survive long enough to be saved by great grandchildren. i imagine cheap throw away old crap has disintegrated long ago.
(~Twenty years ago I bought every Atari/Intellivision/Vetrex/etc game I could find at various flea market and thrift stores, and for the last ten I've been dreading getting rid these boxes of useless stuff.)
Collecting game systems that you play and use which are also not being made anymore isn't useless in the least. Comparatively, that is.
Unfortunately they haven't been able to turn it off and their constant pursuit of comfort hasn't done them any good in the longer term.
Landlords, banks and boomers are disgusting.
Banks create new money by lending. Most lending is issued against real estate. People who "invest" in holding the same piece of land to accrue the effort of others do not have 400K. They "borrow" it from the bank (the bank creates it).
Go to your bank and tell them you want to borrow 400k to invest in indexes.
"The proportion of 16-24-year-olds who do not drink increased by more than 40 per cent between 2005 and 2013. Today, one in five is teetotal."
"...wet sales at student union bars have dived in the last 10-15 years."
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/featu...
What does it look like in the UK? Are there equivalents (aside from the traditional round-at-the-pub-after-work, that is)?
[1] http://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/moonshine-whiskey-i...
[2] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31741615
Don't end up wasted except by accident. People usually drink in company, which acts as moderator.
This compared with Sovied men from 70-s and 80-s which would drink any alcohol-containing liquid immediately without even asking themself "why".
I don't think it's Putin related, not even economy related so much, it's just return to normalcy after a century of Soviet experiment.
Edit - And yes, that's a big step for a lot of kids with alcoholic parents.
That being said, living in Boston, MA, I totally feel what you're saying (literally, most of the houses here are expensive, even in crappy areas).
Places like Melbourne and Sydney are crowded and expensive, but the cheaper properties are all out in rural areas, where your choice of employment is slim, especially if you made the "mistake" of training in any tech sector job.
Source: was a uni student for 10 years and survived.
Not everyone grew up in the city suburbs. Not to mention, I am talking about the burbs not the CBD anyway. Rent is still %50 of my tech sector wage for an ancient two bedroom unit in the suburbs. Rent sharing is the only sane option, hooray living with strangers.
I don't mind, I enjoy and appreciate what I have, but you can't pretend like it's the same opportunity for everyone and the same opportunity as it was a few decades ago. Things are different, and it's different in ways wr can try and fix, hence the conversation on the topic.
Canberra is the most affordable city in the country.
Sydney and Melbourne just are not worth it any more unless you and a partner earn 200K+ or you have property there.
It doesn't matter how cheap the land/housing is if you can't get a job while living on it.
I'd love to be in a world where geography doesn't matter and everyone can work remotely. For now, only a small and elite subset of software engineers can pull US cost of living (even rural cost of living) from remote work.
B.S.
Unemployment in the US is relatively low even on a long term basis.
The average home prices in the US is $188K. Most people can afford that.
There is more opportunity for mortgages and financial services than at any time in history.
There is more opportunity for mobility than at any time in history.
You have it easier than any generation in history - but all you can do is complain.
If you want to 'have it like the boomers did growing up' - well, you can skip going to college because few of them did - and you can do some crap job pushing paper for most of your life, in boring but steady employment, and buy a small, mediocre home in the burbs and mow your lawn. That was the 'steady, sable American dream'. You have opportunities that they never had - and that most kids in the world would kill for.
Dear God save me from whatever unemployment you deem to be high. Over a third of the people in this country don't work and another third work part time.
Maybe you actually believe those numbers coming out of the gov on unemployment and don't pay attention to the people who have rolled off the unemployment benefits. I know people that have been looking for work for the better part of 5 years without luck.
Also, have to call bullshit on the "You have it easier than any generation in history" remark. This generation is the first generation since the inception of this country to not have it better than the previous one. Every person born today is born with upwards of 70k debt thanks to the drunken sailors in Congress. The bill will come due. It always does.
If you're a defense contractor, you're not interested in selling "hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground," but rather guns (weapons systems) and ammo.
As a corollary, no one is lobbying politicians on behalf of a force increase at the scale you're suggesting. Private military contractors just don't operate at the "give the hoards of unemployed young men some plausible way to die" scale.
The situation you're referring to is more of an issue in countries with weaker economies and geographically close potential enemies.
We have entire video-games, and mods for games, that revolve around setting up factories and designs.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that many of these games are skinner boxes that our brains have relatively few defenses against, but Chris is a stupid example.
I'd also guess that many people who trash video games would happily say watching baseball, perhaps playing baseball, opera, or chess are somehow superior. It's not like those have much intrinsic value in them besides the enjoyment they may generate for the participant.
At least I have a dev job I'm happy with that scratches my problem-solving itch and that I partially got because of experience I gained writing tools for Eve. Haven't been playing anything as much these days because when I get home from work, I'm usually ready to take off my thinking cap for a while and most of my games very much require me to keep it on.
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/A-glut-of-l...
Sorry, but this is just bullshit.
But if it makes you feel better, it's normal to think this, every generation blames the previous.
(And the older generation thinks the latest is lazy)
But true, people don't normally think that.
Yeah, there wasn't like a big youth counterculture in the 1960s-1970s rebelling against the previous generation that was then dominant in society and government over major international policy (Hello, Southeast Asia), domestic policy, notions of public and private morality, and, basically, every other aspect of life.
You might have a better case with Gen X not particularly blaming the Boomers (and focussing more on the trailing end of the influence of the "Greatest" Generation), and even better with Millenials not even paying attention to Gen X enough to blame them for anything (Boomers, sure, but Gen X? Not so much.)
We're probably just starting to tip past Boomer-in-power to GenX-in-power in the upper echelon of power structures.
Which incidentally probably explains why older companies finally seem to be starting to "get" the internet, now that I think about it...
The Trump administration is merely a reaction (of the people fed up with this) against just that: political correctness, immigrants, feminism, socialism, taxes taxes taxes.
The US Democrats are right-wing by any serious measure of the political spectrum, as are the UK's New Labour and Conservative Party.
The US has had one lefty on its radar in recent times and the DNC roundly conspired to never allow him a serious chance at the candidacy.
I know a lot of people don't like to hear it, but I'll let you in on a little secret: if you don't feel like you're getting anywhere trying to work and live in a major city, do yourself a favor and move to a less-populated area.
Many cities have become extremely competitive, which naturally selects against all but the few who can manage to work for less (competition in the labor market drives down wages) and pay more to live (that same competitive environment drives the cost of living higher).
Get outside those inflated bubbles and life really does become easier for someone who just wants to earn a decent living.
Stop blaming other people for your choice to live in a place where the cost of living feels "out of reach".
At least around here, I've noticed that developers in the (often cheaper) suburbs are making a push towards building high-density walkable devevolopments.
It's worth noting that in many cities, there are still a lot of affordable options (some even cheaper than a few decades ago), but they're often not in the hip areas that people want to live. When people talk about how unfair it is that others got good values in the hip areas, they often don't realize that those areas were once the cheap undesirable areas.
Visit the farms in rural Arkansas, spend a few days, engage some farmhands in conversation. If you talk to at least 4 such people, then at least 1 of them will be addicted to meth. You can often detect this simply by looking at them. Often their teeth give them away.
Spend some time in rural Missouri. Go to small diners and try to engage the waitresses in conversation. If you stay a few weeks you will get to know them. You will hear stories about husbands and boyfriends who are unemployed, or who can only get sporadic work. Whole families surviving on what one woman can earn as a waitress at a small diner.
I've done a bit of traveling, and I've seen people struggling with hard times all over the USA.
And in the examples above, I'm talking about areas that are mostly white. If you really want to feel like Dante, and descend into Hell, go visit the mostly black counties in Mississippi.
For many decades now, the interior states of the USA have become increasingly poor. Wealth has been concentrating into the coasts. Farming has been mostly automated. Mining has been mostly automated. The number of coal jobs in the USA peaked in the 1940s and has declined (with some ups and downs) rather steadily over the last 7 decades.
As to automation in farming, remember that the novel "The Grapes of Wrath", by John Steinbeck, was published in 1939. The opening scene of that novel shows us a man trying to get home to his farm (after he spent some time in prison) and finding that his family has lost the farm due to the tractors, which both reduced demand for labor on the farms, and also allowed economies of scale that caused a great consolidation of the land into bigger and bigger corporate farms.
And remember too, in 1961, Ralph Abernathy (the right-hand man of Martin Luther King) gave a speech in which he warned people "The civil rights movement is in a race with the tractors." He meant that the tractors were rapidly replacing black labor on the farms, but the blacks had been kept out of most other professions, so it was urgent that the Civil Rights movement open up the rest of the economy to black people, before black people lost the last remaining farm jobs.
Most historians of agriculture in the USA will point to the 1920s as the era when farms hit their economic peak. The rural areas of the USA have been facing decline for 9 decades now.
In observance of the etiquette that is expected on Hacker News, I've tried to stick to the facts in responding to you. But I also want to be clear: your advice is terrible.
Between the two of you, the picture this paints is one of Americans jostling for position around twenty relatively small fires scattered amidst a large, cold, dark forest.
I'm worried what our culture and life will be like with a large number of people who do nothing but play video games. Especially if a UBI is created and they can continue to play video games without any big effect on their basic income.
That said, maybe I'm just being cynical. Maybe all that time playing increasingly high-quality games, reading books (some in the article were), and talking about it all with people online will grow into that group of people having a different and better perspective on things. A group of gaming philosophers.
This is the Western countries' version of hikkikomori and there will only be more of it as education and good opportunities become out of reach for more people.
Men seem more likely to do this than women because of the societal pressures on them to get a job and run the rat race of dating and climbing a nonexistent corporate ladder.
For those people living in major job centers or major job creation industries it seems unfathomable, but there is an entire American generation out there experiencing this, being told that they're not shit if they don't go to college and work a 9 to 5 (which really is more of a 9 to 9). I don't blame them for opting out of such useless propaganda. Not everyone enjoys or is interested in computer programming, and starting your career in your 20s without an inherently marketable skill is terrifying for most people.
Not as terrifying as starting your career in your 40s without an inherently marketable skill because 20s and 30s were spent playing video games...
Women also have more options.
>If that's your point, it's not going to be valid much longer the way things are going, with women dominating more and more of the middle- and upper-middle-class jobs (glass ceiling problem notwithstanding).
White and Asian women*
Step out of your HN bubble for a moment, and try to think about the existence of groups that you don't normally acknowledge. It's "not going to be valid much longer" just because things are changing in the immediate regions that you typically spend time reading about. There's the rest of the country and even the world to take into consideration too.
And perhaps because "taking care of themselves" pressure on women is much, much higher.
For women, losing their social network is losing a large chunk of their safety net (if they aren't receiving welfare otherwise), so it's almost unfathomable for them to do so of their own accord.
* The article makes a correct observation insofar as more men (not just an occasional sad social reject) are using games as an escape, often due to poor economic realities. But it's disappointing that the huge role that male/female relations and sex plays in this trend is ignored.
* Google terms like "the sexodus". There are many politically incorrect truths here about what is going on with male/female relations and why more men are seeking an escape and why everybody is unhappy that I think are more at the root of this issue.
b) I just pointed out that it's just generally not about your gender. It doesn't matter if you're a man or woman: every newcomer gets harassed in really rough ways using the most biting insults available. A fat guy will get the obvious insults. An ugly guy will get obvious insults. A young kid who has a high pitched voice because he hasn't hit puberty yet will get obvious insults. A gay man will get obvious insults. So will a black guy or an arab. Or a christian. They'll use any facts they know about you. And guess what, women are treated equally here as well and will get insulted. Not saying it's right, but it's what actually happens to everybody. Gamers are treating women equally, I thought that's what women wanted?
c) The only difference is that when a woman gets harassed, most of civil society is sympathetic about it by default and she'll get a horde of white knights expressing sympathy. When a man gets his feelings hurt, he's portrayed as weak for showing emotion. Maybe this is part of the reason that some men are seeking an escape from society?
d) It's really hard to know whether your community is hostile to men unless you're a man. A lot of women just don't understand how much harassment a typical man experiences, and when they hear it criticized basically fall back on "well I don't see it" and conclude it must not be happening rather than trying to collect more information. (2 of us can play this game)
e) While this is a fascinating discussion that I'd love to have, this point about sex and male/female relationships is 100 times more important than debating about harassment to women gamers for the hundredth time. Things like family and relationships are important motivating factors to men, and when social reforms (some people call that progress, some don't) remove or lower that factor for ~80% of men, civilization will also decline.
b) You'll notice that in my responses I didn't say that women weren't being harassed nor did I say that harassment was right. So why the hostility? I'm speaking IMO accurately about gaming culture.
c) Speaking of tired cliches, what would you call the "women are always eternal victims in every walk of life" school of thought?
PS: I love women and want them to have the same rights as men. I think telling the truth about gaming culture is honest and fair and the right thing to do.
There is a nearly irresistible temptation for people reading comments like the grandparent to engage in tribal thinking. "I'm against being a dick to women," they think, "This guy, who shows signs of being a dick to women, therefore has nothing of merit to say."
I don't really have a point, except: Beware your epistemology! Your cognitive biases put Trump in office and you still don't understand why. If you can master the difficult art of reading things you disagree with, there may yet be hope for you.
b) I'd like to make a mild observation. You used the phrase "dick" to mean a synonym for rude or disgusting behavior, and nobody batted an eye. Can anybody guess how the usual suspects would react if somebody whose ideas they disliked used "pussy" as a pejorative? It's an interesting thought experiment.
c) I'm not sure where your ideas or philosophy is at, but I appreciate your observations here and your willingness to at least advocate openness to ideas you may disagree with.
"Equality." "Political incorrectness." Sure.
This sounds really silly, but I honestly consider being thrown into the deep-end when learning how to play Tribes 1 (I started playing in 1999) and DOTA (started 2004) as a child greatly benefited my overall mindset and attitude as I grew older.
I think I qualify as a videogame addict. I've probably spent more than 1/3 of my waking hours since I was nine years old gaming. I'm approaching 5000 hours on DOTA2 alone since 2011, though I've played significantly less games in general within the past three years due to finally being employed. Programming feels just as good, and I get paid on top of it.
I think my social development was stunted, but I feel like I'm mostly normal now as an adult. I really don't have any regrets, and I plan to give my kids completely unrestricted access to their own computer and the internet as soon as they want it, barring any laws or regulations that prevent me from doing so legally.
It's proven a surprisingly good barometer for me on how I'm doing in my life. When I'm taking care of myself and actually growing elsewhere, even losses are fun. But when I'm running from something, the wins feel empty. I also notice that when I meet a 5k+ mmr player in real life, we're immediate friends, simply because they've accepted responsibility for themselves and have interesting theories on the world as a result.
The hate on all sides is understandable, but in the end, we all lose.
Unemployment stays as the center of all issues here. Or bad employment if we look from a higher perspective. With low income and bad job, video game, as a way of pleasure, it is cheap per hour, very little requirement for room, easy obtain of the feeling of achievement, make it the best option of entertainment for frustrated young males out there.
Bad job market creates video game addicts. It is quite logical this demographic will find alt-right philosophy appeal to them. What I disagree with the author, is that a lot of young men don't have the luxury to live a more 'normal' life, which is getting more and more expensive every year, as the society demands.
SKinner boxes posing as games.
While youth unemployment in itself generates flight/distraction direct behavior, game designers themselves are creating absolutely unethical skinner boxes which will generate addictive behavior.
This is like dumping a slot machine into the hands (literally) of vulnerable children/young adults (also literally).
I argue very strongly that this shit needs to be banned, and people on HN need to pick up that torch fast. Because if its not carried by the tech industry to clean its own house, its going to be used by those inimical to it.
The issues we're discussing in this thread start with the game designer. Cognitive flow is a real thing, and game designers have learned through decades of research and testing how to put players into a state of cognitive flow. They've only recently (within the last 5 or 10 years) begun learning how to monetize your cognitive ability, bringing players to the brink of a flow state only to hide reward behind a paywall. The player is psychologically conditioned into a purchase by simply playing the game.
Nearly everything else being discussed in this thread is a secondary issue stemming from the game designer's desire to increasingly monetize their game. This desire to monetize has given rise to the use of tactics that permeate the gambling industry. These tactics are designed to do little more than CREATE addicts - players who will return to your game and continually spend money.
This, I believe, is the root cause of this issue - game designers who do not respect their players or their time. Designers who have specifically chosen to abuse and extort the emotions of their players in order to increase profits.
These designs are evil, and as a game designer myself, I find the practice abhorrent. If you are a game designer reading this post, and you build games that fall into this category, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.
The very best article I've found on the subject is here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/166972/cognitive_flow_...
Highly recommended reading.
Looking at your link- I start out with low skill, but with something that has high difficulty. I wratchet my skill upwards until I enter flow state. Video games, on the other hand, use dynamic difficulty settings to change the difficulty to my skill. They generate the flow state programmatically.
Nice article though.
Sort of exception is when everything breaks down at once and I have a ton of stuff to fix/do in emergency style. That's comforting.
In fact, often game designers would rather not do this pay to win crap, although it's hard to ignore that it does seem to be the primary way people are willing to give you money in certain markets nowadays (mobile especially), and they would like to keep making games for a living, instead of making one game while ignoring current market trends, the game failing spectacularly, and the company shuts down as a result (I've worked for three game studios which have done basically exactly that, although two of them did try making free to play games eventually and still failed).
I would love to make mobile games where I just charge $1-3 and still see success, but the stats just do not back it up. Yes, there are people who have successes that way, but they are either much larger, much more networked in the industry and know how to get a ton of media coverage (Just getting 'some' coverage is not enough. I've worked on games that have gotten 'some' media coverage. They've done poorly), or have worked on something so beautiful and compelling people feel they have to share it with others (Monument Valley comes to mind).
I've actually mostly given up on video games right now and I'm focusing more on board games, where it's much easier to actually charge money for what you produce, since there's a physical component to it. That industry has exploded in the last 5 years also and it's starting to get harder to find success there as well, but I'm more passionate about that right now. Plus there's the bonus that you can make a video game version of your board game and existing fans would be willing to pay money for your app, as well as some cross-promotion between the two.
Personally I don't think there's a problem trying to make your game as fun as possible (and fun and addiction are very closely linked) as a designer, you almost have to in order to get people to talk about and share your game.
It's when you actively try to snare people into giving you a constant feed of money for virtual benefits that I think is a bit dodgy, but again the public has already voted with their wallet and said they won't download a mobile game unless it's free, so game developers/publishers have to get money for the game somehow.
Please make sure that the chance to win isn't determined purely by random chance (die rolls), or at the very least enough rolls to average out for the players, or, in the worst case, some way to optimize for the most probable die rolls (like Catan)
Losing a game from a critical success or critical failure from a die roll makes me never want to play the game again.
That being said, there are benefits to having randomness. It helps to broaden its appeal. If you've got the time, I recommend checking out one of Richard Garfield's many talks on Luck vs Skill. He talks about his experiences with Magic the Gathering, as well as how Valve designed Team Fortress 2 based on his articles and juggling luck vs skill. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSg408i-eKw
I know how worrying it can be when a video game designer switches to board game design though. You get some that will just slap something together without considering the industry, and then you get something more akin to Exploding Kittens or some sprawling miniatures game that looks beautiful but plays like garbage.
There is NO way, an indie, or a Game firm, can afford to NOT make as much money as their competitor in the industry is making.
1) Margins and discovery is difficult in this industry.
2) If you are a public company, you will face management and market pressure to improve your numbers which means going ahead and making a skinner box.
This is straight up a case for legal frameworks and avenues for legal recourse to be made available.
So no - you wont manage it on your own. Its not possible.
You WILL manage it by connecting with other game devs, writers, reviewers, indies, game houses, parents, programmers - especially people who get why this is an issue (as opposed to the ones who are happy with the status quo)
I know that there is at least one other Game dev who recently spoke out against this (<5 months ago).
Also consider that NOT having addiction boxes as your competition means the hooks and attention grabbers in gamers are shallower. This both reduces the size of the population.
You are definitely not alone. This is precisely what needs collective effort at an international scale. Farmville/candy crush is as effective as it is in California, as it is in Cochin, or Trindiad.
Frankly, I wouldn't be damned surprised if eventually a law firm does catch on, and then targets the entire industry.
My plan right now is design board games, get them published somehow (I'm slowly working on that front, my games have been evaluated by some publishers and professional designers, but nothing is signed yet), then developing an app/PC version in Unity and releasing that while promoting it on the channels I know people would be interested (i.e. board game sites). But I'm getting older and don't have the free time I used to, so it's going pretty slowly. I'm also not expecting to get rich off these games, it's more about getting things out there again and making some side money, hopefully more than a couple of games I worked on for other companies which sold abysmally due to some unfortunate timing and inadequate PR coverage (I've already made games and released them on my own that have performed better than those did, it's not a high bar to clear).
But yeah, I'm not really disagreeing with you. It is what it is. And if a much more well known game designer than I am, Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), can rail against these types of games in multiple talks while having almost zero effect in changing the trends in the industry, then I, as an almost completely unknown designer, can not expect to make any significant changes.
It just makes me less excited to get back into mobile game dev industry when I'm almost guaranteed to work on a skinner box type game.
My deep concern is that this is also an issue with media and political legs. It's got "think of the children" and "evil video games." Built into it.
I argue that this problem be posed as one of collective action as opposed to individual responsibility.
As comments have already shown, people will point out that if they don't do it, the competition will. IF the larger group uses abhorrent systems, people will just say its normal, and do nothing.
Individual responsibility will only get us as far as comments on social media.
There is instead a larger coalition of people ranging from devs, non dev coders, game houses, parents who will be able to collectively push for changes and organizations to manage this.
This will require legal frameworks and legal recourse. Private incentives are not aligned to create a healthy environment.
It is also possible that the entire industry can soon get sued, which I suppose is one way of attempting to deal with it.
Most of us will be alive by the time there's enough economic incentive for all the things humanity needs, with only a token labor force. Many of the world's richest countries are already there, at least when it comes to their own citizens.
In the future (i.e. the present, in the software world), to the extent that employers need workers, they going to have to compete for them with high salaries and copious perks. We'll largely conquer poverty, and we'll have a very large lower-middle class working part-time, a smallish upper-middle class of knowledge workers, and tiny class of ultrawealthy capitalists.
I do appreciate your optimism though, and I really hope we can work out how to arrive at a solution to the myriad of new problems without everything falling apart first.
We need to show initiative, as it's going to be a race between preserving quality of life with proactive policy and the very quickly changing labour landscape removing the means to participate in the way communities are currently structured.
And I don't think it's that crazy, current politics aside. People will eventually realize the factory jobs aren't returning and there will need to be a political solution.
Or, we're in store for a much bleaker future...I have predictions for that one too.
I have found you need to make it very clear to clients why you're there, and what the ROI will be for them. After you've done the work, you move onto the next client.
They may be a wealthy business man, they may be a boomer. They may be a startup. You're there to get a job done.
i was once where you are now. i am no longer there. it took time and a lot of work. it was worth it. you can do it too.
So drop the `Technical qualification` bull####. If you need qualifications, like other people have recommended open up a text book and start reading. Start building web-sites. Start development with Postgresql. Go out and market yourself and your products. See WHAT people want to buy. See what people are willing to pay for products. Go and take night classes in business management/business skills.
You're a discount office guy because you let them treat you like a discount office guy. If you're worried about failure let me tell you now you're going to fail in amazing screwed up ways, but that is part of the fun. You're going to find your own style, you're going to fall in love and be walked over, you're going to get shit but you're not going to grow as a individual, person, and be a human if you are that `Discount Office Guy`
## I will end on this.
Honestly to dear &&&& god. You've got some of the most friendliest, supportive, happy go people on this community web site who I believe would love to give you pointers and critique your work. Leverage what you have, leverage your network.
I have seen this in Australian academia: Boomer academics who were permitted to publish a paper every 2-3 years during the first 10+ years of their academic life, and/or defer getting a PhD to ludicrously late in their careers, are now elevated to senior positions supervising students and junior faculty who will not have reasonable careers unless they publish a paper every 2-3 months or better.
The 'boomers' invented most of the 'computer stuff' you use, most 'developers' today are hacks (granted, some are amazing).
Boomers had difficult upbringing, brought real social change, lived through - and ended the Cold War.
Female boomers were expected to be secretaries - and had to fight for the right just to do normal jobs in the workplace.
Even the boys - were expected to do the same jobs their fathers did, mostly boring labour - and only a fraction of them got to go to University.
There was no such thing as 'startups' back in the day - there were zero opportunities for middle class young people to generate wealth or do globally impactful things.
They lived during the draft, and 50 000 of them died in Vietnam.
Millenials are born into massive entitlement, wealth , privilege and opportunity.
You get bored easily, and don't want to do the same job for more than a year - but expect loyalty and long term employment? Yes - boomers had steadier work - but it was also incredibly boring, stagnant - and in real wages, pay was crap.
Boomers could own a small, shoddy home in the suburbs, and were able to have 'a fridge' and 'an oven' and 'a car' - even though they were all crap by today's standards - that was 'The American Dream' and they were generally happy.
If you are born past the fall of the Berlin wall in America - unless you are from a ghetto - you do not know hardship.
As for real estate: the average home price in the US is about $200K. You can afford a home. You just can't be 'Instagram baller'.
As for 'higher positions' - do you think the 'Greatest Generation' just handed over their choice positions to the 'Boomers'? Or do you think it took mostly a lifetime of work and loyalty? If you don't like your job make yourself CEO of your own company. What's stopping you?
American Millenials have more opportunity than any group of people in the entirety of history - enough with your complaining.
No cell phones.
No GPS.
No soft contact lenses.
No electronic fuel injection (carburetors! yay!)
No Google
I can keep on going with this for a long time
LIFE WAS A LIVING HELL FOR BOOMERS! BE SO HAPPY YOU WERE NOT ONE!
Just a minor nitpick.
In some ways, life was simpler. The pace of life was slower. A good illustration of this is comparing the suicide rates of today. The pressure is much higher today and so are the suicide rates.
I also see a lot more bullying and viciousness, especially in the media today. By comparison, newspapers of 50 years ago were much more relaxed and easy going (I studied a years worth of papers recently). There was also more social cohesion, albeit in smaller communities. That feeling of caring makes a huge difference to people's mental well being.
I'm inclined to believe that life was generally easier for many boomers (at least from about 1960 onward) than it is today for younger people.
When I run a search and find that almost all media outlets still insist that only males do domestic violence, or, boys are (in the last few decades) falling way behind in education because they're suddenly lazy and stupid, I recognise just how collectively nasty we've become. These appalling attitudes must wear the younger generation down.
As an older guy, I'm inclined to agree the younger generation have a lot of issues that older people didn't need to worry about. Access to technology not withstanding.
However, I totally accept my view is mostly anecdotal (except for suicide rates, domestic violence prejudice and snarky education comments directed at boys by many media outlets).
It is exactly reality - and that you don't grasp it only validates how utterly self-deluded Millenials are.
By every measure Millenials are doing better.
Millenials have:
+ Better healthcare, more coverage + Better access to education, information, more college grads than ever + More job opportunities, more diverse fields to apply knowlege + More opportunity for wealth creation + A life full of gadgets, toys and trifles that couldn't even be imagined + You have 'fast fashion' - just 20 years ago there was no suh thing. Clothes were expensive. + Your cars are pretty good, stereos are great, they are fun to drive. Drive a car from the 1970's - they are shit-boxes + You have access to unlimited entertainment and music. In the 1970s' you had 10 records. You wanted to listen to more you went to your friends house. + You have more mobility and access to jobs not only around America, but around the world. + Millenial girls can actually have careers and jobs - and not have to fight vicious stereotyping.
It's basically disgusting that this generation should make existential complains.
What are your beefs?
That you don't bet to be CEO after 1 year?
That you can't live in a baller apartment in SF and have to actually commute from the burbs?
That you don't have job security? Well, you could, if you wanted a more boring job.
That you have school debt? Every generation did. You could have gone to a state school, private school is a luxury.
All of these gripes are really sad 'Oh the Boomers fed everything up' and 'life sucks'. Bullshit.
Provide some facts.
Other than University being a little more expensive - I don't see anything that is remotely more difficult. And FYU with interest rates so low compared to the 15% it was in the 1980s, I say in real dollars, maybe that's not so bad.
You cite no actual quantitative measures to support this claim, so rather than rebutting with such I'll just say this: by many economic measures, Millenials are worse off than boomers (by a few, they're also worse of than Gen X, though by more Gen X is in the worst position of the three, though it usually gets left out of comparisons.)
> All of these gripes are really sad 'Oh the Boomers fed everything up' and 'life sucks'. Bullshit.
It's true that the f-ing up (specifically, of the features in the politico-economic system that resulted in aggregate gains being widely distributed) mostly happened wat the end of the time when the "Greatest" Generation was running the show, the Boomers just were the last generation to have a substantial fraction of their working life before things were f-ed up.
The economy is structured as a ponzi scheme. The ponzi scheme will collapse and many unsympathetic boomers will go broke.
To take your interest rate example. Prices are inversely correlated to interest rates. If you buy when interest rates are high (low prices) and sell when interest rates are low (high prices) then you benefit enormously. Since interest rates are pretty much as low as they can go then there is no upside left for millennials. Only downside. I, like many millennials, wish for much much higher interest rates. Low interest rates are another wealth transfer from those with earnings (millennials) to those with capital (boomers).
I do not suggest that all millennial complaints are valid. I'm simply saying that they shouldn't be dismissed with technological handwaving. The hidden message in the complaints is that we're in this together. The ponzi scheme economy hurts all of us.
I think the current generation American kids will be even more worse.
When I saw kids in the US and when I see the kids in India. Its just feels like American kids live in some kind of Disneyland. The level of competitiveness and hard work as a culture in kids in India have is just a whole double digit factors higher.
The fact is that US ecosystem is largely saved because of the Economic inertia and the endless stream exceptionally talented pool of great people who immigrate there. That large replenishing pool of people pays for the party forward.
Helicopter parenting is not new (except for the name), and is neither unique to nor universal among parents of Millenials.
> Judging by the American economy and the state of world affairs, doesn't seem like boomers are all they crack themselves up to be either.
To be fair to the Boomers, while they certainly failed to fix it, the damage was mostly done by the "Greatest Generation" (the strong economy the GG often gets credit for was created when the GG were in their youth and the Lost Generation was running the show.)
I would like to a read a serious response from a detractor.
They didn't even need degrees. And my mother is a perfect example of how boomer women being expected to be secretaries is anachronistic SJW nonsense. She never attended university, just started working as a junior claims person at an insurance firm in the 70s, showed up for work for 30 years and ended up in the boardroom with stock options. Never faced any discrimination. And she would be the first to admit she never put much into her career - no need for constant re-training, seminars, conferences, when she was home she was home.
While enjoying these comfortable lives, their generation with their hippy views presided over explosive increases in immigration to most western countries, and are the architects of wealth-hoarding tricks like buy-to-let and all kinds of snaky BS union-breaking contract work. The bottom line is, as a young person today you simply couldn't repeat their lives in terms of comfort and financial security. To match it, you'd need to put in several times the effort and hours they did, with a lot more anxiety biting at your heels.
The first Millennials came of age to the images of those planes hitting the WTC and, as corny as it is, that was some incredibly apt symbology. The few of us who manage to be "anti-fragile" may make out good from this new era, but that the security of the ordinary middle-class majority has been shattered is indisputable.
In the modern world, for most people, there's nothing productive to do and no fame to get from it.
In the USA, all the highways are already built (and even when they're failing, their fixing will be postponed). High speed rail lines weren't, and they're not going to be. Not on any human time frame.
So most people are engaged with running pre-built technosphere that is slowly falling apart, with no new developments, for ever-shrinking pay, while more and more money are extorted from them to pay for previous generations entitlements, and also for medicine, real estate, tuition and law, which from services all turned into endless money sinks.
Friges and ovens are not the alpha and omega of life. Productivity, respect and growth are. Are we having any all across post-development countries?
"Productivity, respect and growth are. Are we having any all across post-development countries?"
Have any of you ever taken a basic Econ course?
'No room for growth'?
THE ECONOMY HAS BEEN GROWING EVERY YEAR.
Do you realize that 'feature phones' to 'cell phones' is economic growth?
Do you realize that '2G to 4G' is economic growth?
Do you realize that more people going to college than ever before is good?
There are new medicine trials every day - gene therapy. Jesus H Christ you can now chose the gender and eye colour of your offspring. That's how advanced we are.
100 years ago - there was no 'medicine'. 95% of all operations were basically amputations with crossed fingers of no infection.
Do you realize that the amount of air travel in the world has doubled in the last little while?
That you have access to 100000x more information that people just 20 years ago, before the internet?
You do realize that the iPhone/Android/Facebook are only 10 years old?
That 20 years ago there was no YCombinator?
I'm just going to assume that most of you are too young to have any perspective, because I just can't understand the commentary here.
When you hit your 30's, you can look back and your own life can be a literal testament to the change.
Yes, some things stay the same, but at least in terms of material productivity, things are better.
If the college provides same service while extorting twice as much money, this means that economy grows, but people become poorer, more indebted and strained. The economy might be growing; but WE don't.
> Do you realize that more people going to college than ever before is good?
But when they graduate they have worse employment prospects than High School graduates 40 years ago.
> Do you realize that '2G to 4G' is economic growth?
But how many participate in it as makers and not just as consumers?
When Interstates happened, a lot of people made them with their hands. But now, very few people are directly involved in the 2G to 4G transition and are proud for it. The others just feel like a passengers in a fast moving bus without any control of the route, or, for that reason, trip safety.
> Jesus H Christ you can now chose the gender and eye colour of your offspring
But can you afford it today as a middle-income person? If you can't, it's not there yet. What's the engagement numbers?
> You do realize that the iPhone/Android/Facebook are only 10 years old?
...but I liked more what was before them. I would have preferred N900 and LiveJournal, too bad I don't have this choice realistically. Talk about bus passengers.
> Do you realize that the amount of air travel in the world has doubled in the last little while?
How many people are making it happen? And not on the crappy jobs such as flight attendants? Wait - now even the pilots have their jobs unsatisfactory thanks to long hours and bad pay.
> When you hit your 30's
I'm 32.
Instead of extending these advantages to young people, they sold them down the river to an actor pretending to be a conservative, who got off on police shooting protestors and buddied up with apartheid South Africa. Why? So they could get pay less taxes and get false promises of "animal spirits" inflating their 401ks. And when the social progress they ostensibly fought so hard for came up against the wall, they chose to let schools be resegregated, throw all the POC drug users in jail, and have LGBTQ people die of AIDS (because, y'know, property values).
This disgusting rightward lurch sets the stage for a CIA scion to pretend he was a cowboy and kill half a million innocent people in the Middle East and destroy the economy. And now a parody of Reagan himself to do the same or worse, putting the nail in the coffin of Millennial's future.
And also: Ended the Cold War? Look at 2017 and think about that one. More like destroyed an already poor country with corrupt Capitalism, so the KGB could take over and come back at us even stronger.
Utter bullshit.
It's not even anectodal - it's just complete narrative fiction.
This is HN, try some facts.
Which material or social elements regarding standard of living between the generations, implies that 'Millenials have it harder'?
By every external measure, you have more wealth and opportunity than any generation in history.
"This disgusting rightward lurch sets the stage for a CIA scion to pretend he was a cowboy "
What the smack are you on about?
This is HN not the Huffington Post.
"Ended the Cold War? Look at 2017 and think about that one."
If you were alive during the cold war, then you know that 2017 is obviously not the cold war.
Stop complaining.
Anyway, here's a good breakdown on how we're worse off financially: http://younginvincibles.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/FHYA-...
As a Gen Xer, I was alive during a lot of the late Cold War, and I'm very much aware that after the brief hiatus with the fall of the Soviet Union, there's been wide talk of a growing new cold war between the US and Russia since the Balkans crises of the 1990s, and that that Cold War has included many of the hallmarks of the old one, including proxy wars, direct saber rattling, violent covert actions, attempts by each side to subvert the government of the other principal and/or allies, etc.
Something is strongly wrong with your reasoning if you think that boomers did so much things right and failed miserable in their most important job that is raise kids.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13891018 and marked it off-topic.
One that I graduated high school with in particular comes to mind. We all played video games back then. Half Life, Goldeneye, Starcraft, Everquest, etc. He was a smart guy, driven, usually made better grades than me (I was lazy in high school). Took a job at an medical supply company after graduating from high school intending to work for a few months before starting college.
Well, when it came time to start school, he tried to balance work, school and an ever increasing amount of time in front of the TV or computer playing games ... and failed. Dropped out of school after one semester. Got an apartment with a couple of his coworkers where they would mostly play games when they weren't working. I went over a few times. It was depressing to watch. You really want to say, "Dude, is this really what you want to do?"
Spent seven years working that same job stocking shelves and spent the rest of the time drinking and playing whatever the newest game was that month. He'd message me at like 12am asking if I was playing anything and I'd be like, nope, studying. He'd type "LOL" (back in the AIM days).
When World of Warcraft came out, he was instantly drawn into the WoW universe. He'd stay up all night playing. Broke up with his girlfriend because he was playing WoW literally every waking moment. Started being late to work, eventually lost his job and lost his apartment (I'm guessing his coworkers asked him to leave when he couldn't pay rent). Moved back in with his parents and still, just ... gaming. All the time. He'd just spend whole days sitting in front of WoW or some other video game. For three years that was all he did.
Eventually, his parents had to SHUT OFF THEIR INTERNET and have an intervention to reach him. Obviously I don't know the full story of what happened, but after that he did start to pull it together.
Got back into school at 29 and just recently graduated with a business degree. He's managed to "stay clean from games" (his exact words, BTW) for the last seven years. I can't imagine what an immense struggle that must be considering how ubiquitous they are now.
All told he lost more than 10 years of his life.
The whole time I'm looking on at this and thinking, if he was drinking, we would call this alcoholism. But what do we call it when it's video games?
[1](http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3488130.htm) [2](http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/features/video-...)
The same forces that destroy a person, also make a person great.
Replace video games with 'work'. And with 10 years of doing it day and night, you would quite literally be a successful guy in any profession.
Doing work does not make a person great. It makes a person fed, clothed and housed, if the pay is decent. But that's about it.
This has far-reaching consequences. With most goods, the consumer has to keep consuming (and thus creating demand). There's major concerns whether or not we can keep enough people working (and buying things) to keep the economy going, and video games don't contribute as much to aggregate demand. With an economic system that depends on continuous growth, we are trying to simultaneously squeeze more labor out of people while reducing the value of what people get out of it. This contradiction doesn't come with new luxury goods, but is a contradiction within capitalism that has been well described for almost two centuries: the dual nature of labour as capital and labour as a commodity.
>They are confusing correlation with causation.
Actually, this is one of the biggest questions of the paper cited, so the authors are not oblivious.
Perhaps, but consistent demand isn't everything. I mean, hard drugs keep people buying, but...
The benefits are like any other salaried position, and the hours are restricted by federal mandate for safety reasons. The one downside is being away from home for extended periods of time, but... y'know... it's a job; if it were easy it wouldn't pay well.
The labor shortage in the trades is well documented:
http://www.career.org/news/shortage-of-skills-construction-s... http://www.centerforamerica.org/pledge/gr/AAMGA_Magazine_Rat...
> Why else do you think the labor participation rate is so low? Why don't all those people who lost manufacturing or coal jobs just follow your advice?
They should follow my advice. My guess as to why the participation rate is so low is because Millennials are living at home with their Baby Boomer parents, playing video games and avoiding the harsh realities of adult life. They were sold on the false dream that they could get any degree they wanted and walk right out of college into a high paying, indoor job. Dreams like that are hard to wake up from.
> I don't think you should dismiss millions and millions of people making minimum wage, working part-time, or out of the labor force altogether and just assume (without a shred of evidence) that they are simply choosing not to take well paid jobs that you describe as so freely available.
When we no longer have a labor shortage in the trades and other blue collar jobs, I'll stop dismissing the millions of people making minimum wage.
This is a terrible strawman and it really discredits the rest of the argument you're making. I'm a millennial and I don't know anyone like you're describing.
>labor shortage in the trades
Every time you hear "labor shortage" you need to add "at the offered salary/wage"--they need to offer more money.
Why do you think people would rather work a minimum wage job than take your advice? You offer literally no explanation and just make claims without any evidence. You are speaking from opinion, not fact.
Uh.. did you even read the article we're commenting on? I'm speaking directly to its main thesis. If you're making a claim about it being a straw man, take it up with the author.
> I'm a millennial and I don't know anyone like you're describing.
And I'm a millennial too and I know plenty of people like the one I'm describing.
> Every time you hear "labor shortage" you need to add "at the offered salary/wage"--they need to offer more money.
It's not that simple. Many of the industries experiencing labor shortages are labor intensive and there are limits to the amount they can increase wages and remain economically viable.
> Why do you think people would rather work a minimum wage job than take your advice? You offer literally no explanation and just make claims without any evidence. You are speaking from opinion, not fact.
Frankly, Millennials aren't as money-motivated as previous generations were. They choose to accept the stigma of staying at home with their parents or working low wage service jobs over the life of a blue-collar worker. I don't even really fault them for it; money ain't everything. But they have to lie in the bed they make for themselves. They can't both live a bohemian lifestyle free from responsibility and have all the trappings of life that hard work provides.
a) long haul truckers usually seem to work long hours
b) at a desk you can at least get up and walk around occasionally
c) usually truckers end up eating at fast food places/diners along the way, mostly unhealthy food
I have family that was/are long haul truckers and none of them made anywhere near $70k a year and certainly didn't get a signing bonus(?!)
From what I could find online median salary is around $50k, which is about right from my experience.
If the job was so high paid and cushy then why would there be 100% turnover? And 100%? You believe there's literally nobody who is a trucker for more than a year? You are not making any sense.
"Pay for truckers varies by distance and employer. Glassdoor estimates median pay for truckers drivers -- mostly long haul drivers -- is $54,000. The American Trucking Association says that truckers who work for a private fleet can earn up to $73,000 a year."
Up to, not minimum. For someone who's very experienced not some inexperienced bozo off the street who doesnt even have a CDL. Not even the frigging industry claims you're going to make $90k your first year.
And I know that turnover rate sounds absurd, but it's really that bad: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryjosephs/2016/01/06/100-driv...
Uh..... Doesn't sound like the ideal job you're making it out to be to me...
If turnover is so bad there's got to be a reason, thus the job must not be as cushy and perfect as you claim. If 100% of people are quitting their job there must be something very, very bad about that job.
Anyway, the point of that article was for some moron to say how awesome ESOPs are. I once worked for an employee owned company, ESOPs are no silver bullet to a toxic work environment. They aren't going to do anything at all on their own. If you go to a shitty company to work for and make them an ESOP that doesn't do anything. ESPOs help in that better companies to work for are the ones who tend to consider being employee-owned.
$54k is median salary, not starting, entry level, salary. Your starting salary is more around $35k-ish, from what I've seen.
Where are these magic 5 figure sign on bonuses for people without a CDL? Are you a truck driver? What was your sign on bonus? Did you have to get a CDL on your own time?
I personally love escaping reality by playing games. There's other ways, but it's a pretty fine one. Better than depression.
- It's a rapidly growing market
- those people will eventually need financial support systems beyond family - new forms of annuities?
- more demand for "gig economy" type jobs
- demand for jobs that can be done inside virtual realities that are better suited for humans instead of robots - this one is a stretch
- more demand for on-demand "life support" services - food, cleaning, medical, sex
This is veering into dark-ish dystopian territory, so imma stop now.
Console games and ramen noodles until you die.