Donald Trump for President Thread

[RaleighBlue]

There is much wisdom here, grasshopper. Look at the opportunities out there for skilled tradesmen in this economy. I have advanced degrees in the arts. That, in retrospect, was just stupid from an economic standpoint. On the other hand, I wouldn't be the person I am without that education. Is a puzzlement.

If people get married, get employed, don't develop bad habits, and stay married, things are pretty likely to still work out though. For me, that's been the key. There is no substitute for a good marriage to make you happy and productive.

Oh, I dodged the bullet. I dropped out after the first year, seeing the bill and went and found a job I could work my way up in. Computers saved me, but I was able to do so largely due a family background in technology. I was raised around computers...so it was an easy transition.

But I have friends that have literally $100,000 in student loan debt. Largely because they were sold a bill of goods when they were young and impressionable. And we removed the idea of the Trades from high school, and judged the people that went to trade school.

They're laughing now.

Education is something I value incredibly highly, but we go about it in a terrible way. We're too tied to the past and things that mattered in the last century. We need to be teaching kids to think critically, and how to learn. Facts and calculators are always at our fingertips. A new way to look at the world is not. But we save that education for the higher reaches of college - and then price out the unwashed masses of that education. And then we expect everyone to have been able to afford it.

I just get a little irritated when a generation rags on Millenials for our (very real) faults...we came by them honestly and have a borderline smoking crater to dig the world out of...and then people have the gall to wonder why we just want to go sleep it off in the basement and be kids again?

 

[mezzrow]

Millenials are just a new generation. I didn't care about voting at 19 either ('04). I'm sure we're not the first generation like that. But Millenials are very much a product of the Boomers, helicopter parenting, participation awards, and being wrapped in foam. They (we), need a few extra years to become full adults because we lost a number of years of individual development that prior generations had.

AND THEN the boomers went and blew up the economy right when we were graduating with a house worth of debt because of the 'everybody HAS to go to college' routine.

I'm just saying that there is a far more apt generational target than Millenials out there.

How old were you when you did your first work for money? I was 16. By the time I was eighteen, I was doing a man's job every summer for real money because the opportunity was there for those who were willing to work. By the time I was twenty-one, I found that I could toot a horn well enough to make just as much doing that, and it was much easier than driving a truck and slinging tall stacks of milk crates in and out of coolers.

I don't think this is available to these millennials because of how the world has changed. I play gigs with some of them, and the opportunities aren't there like they once were. Gigs don't pay anything like they did forty-plus years ago, either...

 

[ilikecheese]

I am still not following why the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation is some sort of evil entity because they are funded by wealthy people in a capitalist society.

They are trying to solve the problems of the poorest of the poor around the world.

 

[SerenityNigh]

Millenials are just a new generation. I didn't care about voting at 19 either ('04). I'm sure we're not the first generation like that. But Millenials are very much a product of the Boomers, helicopter parenting, participation awards, and being wrapped in foam. They (we), need a few extra years to become full adults because we lost a number of years of individual development that prior generations had.

AND THEN the boomers went and blew up the economy right when we were graduating with a house worth of debt because of the 'everybody HAS to go to college' routine.

I'm just saying that there is a far more apt generational target than Millenials out there.

Agreed, my comment was that I don't seen millennial changing the vote in this election. Unless their parents take them to the voting booth, which is always an option.

 

[RaleighBlue]

How old were you when you did your first work for money? I was 16. By the time I was eighteen, I was doing a man's job every summer for real money because the opportunity was there for those who were willing to work. By the time I was twenty-one, I found that I could toot a horn well enough to make just as much doing that, and it was much easier than driving a truck and slinging tall stacks of milk crates in and out of coolers.

I don't think this is available to these millennials because of how the world has changed. I play gigs with some of them, and the opportunities aren't there like they once were. Gigs don't pay anything like they did forty-plus years ago, either...

I was 14. I had my first part-time gig at 16, and was working full time by 18.

By 21 I had transitioned into the entry level of what became my career. I was fulltime there at 22 and haven't looked back.

Wage stagnation has killed people alongside getting started out with a bunch of debt. But if I look back at my fulltime job at 18, I was making ~$8/hour (good money back then for me). A little over 1000/month at 40 hours a week and no taxes. College tuition, in state was 3k/semester. Before we talk about room an board. So assume I'd have to cut hours and I'd make under 1000/month, and have to pay out literally everything I make on tuition and the dorms (cheaper than offsite).

So I have nothing left for food. And since then, college has gotten more expensive, but those jobs don't pay anymore than they used to. And a lot of the time those jobs are filled by someone that couldn't cut it a few years back, and is in the same dead end position at 25 as you want to be at 18...

Costs have risen completely out of line with wages over the past 30 years. Millenials are paying for that pretty hard on the front end (Generation X will get it on the retirement side).

 

[mezzrow]

Oh, I dodged the bullet. I dropped out after the first year, seeing the bill and went and found a job I could work my way up in. Computers saved me, but I was able to do so largely due a family background in technology. I was raised around computers...so it was an easy transition.

But I have friends that have literally $100,000 in student loan debt. Largely because they were sold a bill of goods when they were young and impressionable. And we removed the idea of the Trades from high school, and judged the people that went to trade school.

They're laughing now.

Education is something I value incredibly highly, but we go about it in a terrible way. We're too tied to the past and things that mattered in the last century. We need to be teaching kids to think critically, and how to learn. Facts and calculators are always at our fingertips. A new way to look at the world is not. But we save that education for the higher reaches of college - and then price out the unwashed masses of that education. And then we expect everyone to have been able to afford it.

I just get a little irritated when a generation rags on Millenials for our (very real) faults...we came by them honestly and have a borderline smoking crater to dig the world out of...and then people have the gall to wonder why we just want to go sleep it off in the basement and be kids again?

Yep. Same here. My first programming language was Palestrina-style counterpoint. From there, C++ and COBOL were child's play.

Thank God for the computers and the need for people to tell them what to do and when to do it.

The difference is that I could go to the highest-rated college music school in the USA and pay only 69 bucks an hour for tuition in 1974. Like healthcare, the amount of government financial assistance for higher education (Sallie Mae, anyone?) and the need for oversight and administration of all the various guidance associated with this assistance is at the heart of the enormous explosion in the cost of higher education over the interim. The bureaucracy always builds its own house first and gets you to pay for it, and will gladly help you borrow the money to do so. You're financing the expansion of their area of expertise, while you increase the size and depth of their rice bowl.

 

[SerenityNigh]

Agreed, my comment was that I don't seen millennial changing the vote in this election. Unless their parents take them to the voting booth, which is always an option.

*Which most boomer parents would be more than happy to do

 

[mezzrow]

I am still not following why the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation is some sort of evil entity because they are funded by wealthy people in a capitalist society.

They are trying to solve the problems of the poorest of the poor around the world.

I don't know where you see that. Nobody has accused Bill and Melinda Gates of anything. They seem like admirable folks, but I don't know them personally.

Some hate the wealthy just for being wealthy, and that is frustrating and destructive. I am in favor of the Gates' efforts, so long as they do not obstruct "the poor" from finding their own solutions. For some, I might be in the category of "the poor". For others, I might be in the category of "the evil rich". There are many eloquent Africans who are saying that a large part of their problem is grounded in the way all this foreign aid distorts local incentives in perverse ways.

When some individuals classify groups of other individuals, they embark on an exercise fraught with peril, whether those groups are "poor" or "rich", or "fill in this blank".

I recommend reading Thomas Sowell's Visions of the Anointed. Yes, I know I am being difficult, and my point is hard to see. If it was easier to explain, more would think as I do. At least that's my own personal fantasy.

 

[wm02]

There is much wisdom here, grasshopper. Look at the opportunities out there for skilled tradesmen in this economy. I have advanced degrees in the arts. That, in retrospect, was just stupid from an economic standpoint. On the other hand, I wouldn't be the person I am without that education. Is a puzzlement.

If people get married, get employed, don't develop bad habits, and stay married, things are pretty likely to still work out though. For me, that's been the key. There is no substitute for a good marriage to make you happy and productive.

Choosing a suitable spouse is probably the most important decision most people make imo

 

[SerenityNigh]

I don't know where you see that. Nobody has accused Bill and Melinda Gates of anything. They seem like admirable folks, but I don't know them personally.

Some hate the wealthy just for being wealthy, and that is frustrating and destructive. I am in favor of the Gates' efforts, so long as they do not obstruct "the poor" from finding their own solutions. For some, I might be in the category of "the poor". For others, I might be in the category of "the evil rich". There are many eloquent Africans who are saying that a large part of their problem is grounded in the way all this foreign aid distorts local incentives in perverse ways.

When some individuals classify groups of other individuals, they embark on an exercise fraught with peril, whether those groups are "poor" or "rich", or "fill in this blank".

I recommend reading Thomas Sowell's Visions of the Anointed. Yes, I know I am being difficult, and my point is hard to see. If it was easier to explain, more would think as I do. At least that's my own personal fantasy.

Do you have any thoughts on Collier's "The Bottom Billion?" Seems incredibly naive to me, but he still makes some great points that I think are generally overlooked. (And before you ask specifics, almost 10 years since I've read it, so...)

 

[mezzrow]

Do you have any thoughts on Collier's "The Bottom Billion?" Seems incredibly naive to me, but he still makes some great points that I think are generally overlooked. (And before you ask specifics, almost 10 years since I've read it, so...)

I haven't read it, but remember it was referenced a lot some years ago. I'll look for it at my local bookmine, looks like a good read...

 

[ilikecheese]

I don't know where you see that. Nobody has accused Bill and Melinda Gates of anything. They seem like admirable folks, but I don't know them personally.

Some hate the wealthy just for being wealthy, and that is frustrating and destructive. I am in favor of the Gates' efforts, so long as they do not obstruct "the poor" from finding their own solutions. For some, I might be in the category of "the poor". For others, I might be in the category of "the evil rich". There are many eloquent Africans who are saying that a large part of their problem is grounded in the way all this foreign aid distorts local incentives in perverse ways.

When some individuals classify groups of other individuals, they embark on an exercise fraught with peril, whether those groups are "poor" or "rich", or "fill in this blank".

I recommend reading Thomas Sowell's Visions of the Anointed. Yes, I know I am being difficult, and my point is hard to see. If it was easier to explain, more would think as I do. At least that's my own personal fantasy.

Right but I guess what I don't get, is that we are talking about people that do not have the means to find their own solutions in places like Malawi where getting a clean drink of water is a challenge. Their efforts are not to just throw money at the problem, they are efforting to come up with sustainable solutions for the poorest of the poor in the world. Some incredibly smart people are working their tails off, because these problems are very hard to solve. Who knows if any of them can be, but you have to applaud them for trying.

I find it hard to be critical of a self made billionaire who is now using his money and influence to actually try to tackle problems in the world at home and abroad for no personal gain. Especially when you have people like Donald Trump out there who'd struggle to give a penny to a worthwhile cause unless he benefited from it in some way.

 

[LinekersLegs]

Agreed, my comment was that I don't seen millennial changing the vote in this election. Unless their parents take them to the voting booth, which is always an option.

Fwiw from the early returns I've seen millenials appear to be voting in pretty decent numbers, at least higher than 2012 although obviously not at the rate the boomers are. Hopefully that improvement continues at the election date draws closer.

 

[SerenityNigh]

I haven't read it, but remember it was referenced a lot some years ago. I'll look for it at my local bookmine, looks like a good read...

Here are two critical reviews (wikipedia), and both seem on target.

Martin Wolf in the Financial Times called it "a splendid book" and "particularly enjoyed the attack on the misguided economics of many non-governmental organisations." He says that Collier sheds much light on how the world should tackle its biggest moral challenge. It shows, too, how far western governments and other external actors are from currently giving the sort of help these countries desperately need.[12] The Guardian called it an important book and suggested that citizens of G8 countries should fight for change along the lines he suggests.[13] The Economist said it was "set to become a classic" and "should be compulsory reading for anyone embroiled in the hitherto thankless business of trying to pull people out of the pit of poverty where the "bottom billion" of the world's population of 6.6 billion seem irredeemably stuck".[14] Nicolas Kristof in the New York Times described it as "'The best book on international affairs so far this year".[15]

William Easterly, an influential American economist specialising in economic growth and foreign aid, critically assessed The Bottom Billion in The Lancet. He lambasts it for being an "ivory tower analysis of real world poverty." Easterly notes that much of Collier's advice is constructive, but he is concerned that it is advice based on shaky argument, argument which relies on statistical correlation to establish causation. For example, Collier makes much of the "conflict trap" and clearly poverty and civil war do occur together, but this may be, according to Easterly, "[perhaps] only because they are both symptoms of deeper problems, like Africa's weak states, ethnic antagonisms, and the legacy of the slave trade and colonial exploitation."[16] Collier counters, "At present the clarion call for the right is economist William Easterley's book The White Man's Burden. Easterly is right to mock the delusions of the aid lobby. But just as [Jeffrey] Sachs exaggerates the payoff to aid, Easterly exaggerates the downside and again neglects the scope for other policies. We are not as impotent and ignorant as Easterly seems to think."[17]

 

[ilikecheese]

Fwiw from the early returns I've seen millenials appear to be voting in pretty decent numbers, at least higher than 2012 although obviously not at the rate the boomers are. Hopefully that improvement continues at the election date draws closer.

Even more of them would vote if they could just push the like button.