I actively detest and have contempt for people past a certain age who don't have or aren't working on at least a four-year degree. Really. Because if you don't have one, it shows that you're at the least incredibly immature and don't value education very much, and at worst a complete dumbass who frankly doesn't have the skills or the knowledge to compete with the rest of the world.
Advertisers disguise themselves are real humans...
proving you eat the best and fanciest food (I didn't agree with that earlier comment about travel and art but did with the mention of money...people here have a lot of disposable income it feels, whether that's true or not...Yeah. I think that because the gender stuff has gotten a lot better and because I'm otherwise kind of a typical mefite type, the stuff I notice the most here has to do with money. I feel like I frequently encounter the assumption that everyone here has lots of it, or at least a fair amount of it. I hear a lot of "nobody could possibly live on $30,000 a year!" type comments, which is weird to me, because I do, and I don't even feel particularly deprived. My income is pretty average for the community in which I live, but I feel like the average mefite would be shocked to know that they were conversing with someone whom they would consider poor and therefore in all likelihood an idiot.
How do you measure manufacturing output?This isn't adding up to a picture of a community of people unwilling and unable to discuss economics with you.
What about jobs? Isn't this the real issue when we discuss manufacturing?
Are large segments of the American workforce — millions of people — at a structural disadvantage in the face of global competition, technological advance and ever more sophisticated forms of automation? Is this situation permanent?
Will the share of profits from improving corporate productivity flowing to capital and to high-earning C.E.O.s continue to grow, while the income of wage earners stagnates and their share of profits declines?
Has the surging wealth and income of the top one percent and of the top 0.1 percent reached a tipping point at which the political leverage of the very affluent decisively outweighs the influence of the electorate at large?
Is it possible that in the United States and Europe, democratic free market capitalism is no longer capable of providing broadly shared benefits to a solid majority of workers?
I rarely see anyone here call them that. In fact, I think jessamyn, cortex, and the rest of them have it pretty darn good.She's talking about actual police officers, I believe.
My husband doesn't frequent mefi much anymore because of his perception that it's anti-military (he's a veteran).FWIW, I've never felt attacked for relating my experiences or opinions related to being a vet. Although it's also true that there's a degree to which people will make comments about how soldiers are trained to evil etc. I guess for whatever reason those don't really bother me, although maybe that's because I have some ambivalence about how ethical my decision to enlist could have been.
I'm a Buddhist and it was feeling like I had to defend the Dalai Lama from accusations of being a rampant homophobe (?!) that made me quit the site under my previous name.I googled some stuff and I could see why that would happen. One of the things that came up in my googling was this blog post. Maybe it can explain some of the bitterness/anger that people might have felt?
Oh, and also KathrynT has contributed a lot more than I have. Hopefully I haven't forgotten anyone else who pointed to themselves. Also wanting to shout out for muddgrrl (if I am spelling her name incorrectly, I apologize) who has been a heroine of the revolution.Also Nattie's sidebarred post in the schroedinger's rapist thread was awesome and I have linked several people to it over the years and almost without fail gotten a "woah, I had no idea" response.
Sandwiched between 80 million baby boomers and 78 million millennials, Generation X — roughly defined as anyone born between 1965 and 1980 — has just 46 million members, making it a dark-horse demographic "condemned by numbers alone to nicheville," as Gordinier puts it in the book.I do think that it's hard to be heard in mass media when demographics stack up like that. And it's something I've been conscious of from a very young age - that mass media skewed boomer in its perspective almost completely until milennials started making the news. I can recall being 17, and a dedicated Nightly News watcher and fan of Tom Brokaw's, when Clinton entered the White House and there was much reporting about the relative youth of his staff, which was novel then. Tom Brokaw said something like "many of us grew up thinking one day we could be in the White House. Today, our children are there." And I can clearly recall thinking "What you mean 'our' children, dude? Why aren't you talking to me?"
...Gordinier's book began as the essay "Has Generation X Already Peaked?" in Details magazine. He composed the rant in four days after the birth of his first son. "It grew out of a time when I think Gen-Xers were feeling colossally invisible. All the mass-media oxygen seemed to be sucked up by baby boomers and millennials. The baby boomers were turning 60, and that's all you heard about. How the boomers were turning 60 and they were still sexy and they're hot and they're launching their second acts," he said in an interview with TIME. "And at the same time, there's this media monotony, this bombardment of Lindsay/Paris/Britney...Where, he wondered...were the cover stories about Generation X turning 40? How about less Bob Dylan and more Kurt Cobain? "If Nevermind changed the world, the world changed back pretty fast," Gordinier writes.
I kid. Other than self-disclosure, do we (by which I mean the mods) really know what the demographics of the users are?
posted by jquinby at 7:12 AM on March 6, 2012