this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
139 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
84434 readers
3926 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
He wrote in his diary that he wanted $1B for himself.
Not like in a fanciful, thought experiment way, in a that was his actual personal goal way.
So he wanted to hoard 10,000 six figure (100k) salaries for himself.
Why is he allowed to walk free in society? Why is someone with a goal like that not immediately thrown in prison?
You wanna know why we can't have nice things? It's not because of boomers, it's because we allow rich assholes like these two to openly rob us of the fruits of our labour.
Why does a tech bro wanting to be a billionaire let the boomers off the hook?
Because literally everyone older than us didn't do this to us. The rich upper class of them did, just like the rich upper class of young tech bros are screwing us over now.
It's never been a generational issue, it's always been a class issue.
Plus, the wave of anti-boomer hate is literally a massive marketing campaign paid for by the former head of Blackstone, all to get the young generation of Americans to hate social security so it could be run by private capital.
Who elected Ronald Reagan twice, and George Bush, and George W. Bush? Who elected Trump?
I agree with you that the hyperbolic assertion that “every person older than us caused these problems” is wrong. But I also disagree with you that this somehow forgives boomers.
Their largest cohorts left us a dumpster fire and they’re doing everything they can on their way out to keep it burning.
By your logic, you did.
If that is what you think you haven’t understood my logic.
My generation is millennial. Our majority supported Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Harris in 2024.
Boomers as a voting cohort have always turned out disproportionately to give majority support to bad candidates.
Yes ,millenials elected Trump twice, because your generation was alive when he was elected.
That's the logic your using to ascribe every previous bad decision to every boomer. By your logic, you are to blame for Trump being elected.
Again, it's not boomers who did this to you, it's the rich.
That isn’t the logic I’m using though. You’re refuting an argument I’m not making.
The majority of the boomer voting bloc elected these politicians and supported the policies of the rich. Their entire adult lives the majority of their voting bloc time and again supported terrible regressive policies.
That isn’t true of millennials.
To the extent we can look at a generation’s consistent and prevailing political activity, we can fault the boomers.
Sam Altman wanting to be a billionaire doesn’t excuse them.
Yes it is the logic you're using.
That logic is called "collective punishment" or collective blame, and it's you blaming all boomers for what a subset of them actually did.
Don't feel like you deserve to be blamed for that? Great. Neither do boomers.
And that's on top of the fact that you're ignoring multiple factors:
boomers started out farther left and then drifted farther right as they aged, same effect is true for millenials, we haven't seen how far right this generation will go yet. And on a percentage basis, they don't even skew that differently, they just have always had the tyranny of the plurality available to them since they're the biggest generation, so when their generation shift right, everything did, an effect not true for millenials or gen z.
millenials and boomers were raised in different environments, with different pressures and values, hell boomers are largely the result of parents that just went through two world wars. That alone will have generational effects on families.
Even just in terms of information, would you be going to the library, reading books, and paying for newspaper subscriptions to replace the internet, or would you be out playing and hanging out with friends?
Without the Internet and your parents raising you, would you have fallen to Fox news or Sky news or The Telegraph, just like them?
If you were born in boomer times you would not be the person you are right now, and it's wild to blame all of them when half of them were literally deliberately manipulated by corporations, in a time with little awareness that that could be happening.
Blaming the Boomers overall accomplishes nothing. It is at best too broad a category to actually learn anything from or make any meaningful change.
The rich upper class however, has continuously fucked over Boomers, GenX, Millenials, and now Gen Z. They are the actual subset of people to blame, because a) they have the power to change the systems we live in, and b) they are by and large (though still not universally) the ones who have chosen to keep perpetuating the system.
I suppose to some extent I’m blaming the collective, and to some extent I’m saying “boomers” instead of “the majority of boomers that voted to support conservative politicians since 1980” to save some time.
This is sort of how discussion works. You’re also doing this. You’re saying rich people instead of “politically active rich people supplying money to XYZ, while ignoring those born into money and disconnected or lottery winners, or whatever other issue with syntax I can dig up. I’m just interpreting your language in good faith and more generously.
To your point, I do blame non-voters for electing Trump.
At some point “they’re a product of their time” stops being exculpatory. That logic can forgive just about anything when taken too far. For me boomers don’t get let off the hook. They’re happy to live in the GOPs alternate reality rather than face the reality of what they’ve done. The generation needs to be regarded with what their political activity produced and continues to produce, which is the entrenchment of the policies of the rich.
I get the sentiment/frustration, but I suppose they're trying to say "there are boomers who understand how greedy this is and there are people younger than the boomer generation who perpetuate and vote for these greedy, unsustainable practices".
I agree with those assertions. I think they’re going a few steps further than that too though. And that is where I’m trying to understand the thinking.