Lemmy Shitpost
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
view the rest of the comments
Taxes don't go to boomers retirement.
Either they get social security that they paid into. Or they have retirement pensions or 401ks. IRAs. That they paid into.
Some of our taxes do go to Medicare/Medicaid, but I don't have a problem with that.
Boomers got pensions, then killed them off and barely paid anything into social security while sucking it dry. They get to double/triple dip into retirement with pensions, SS and 401k as a cherry on top. Younger gens basically fund that while the SS collection age keeps getting higher. So we are saddled with 401ks because that means our future is tied to the market creating a financial incentive not to push back to hard on the system.
How did boomers stop pensions? Wasn't it company owners who decided not to provide them anymore ?
Yeah corpos that were run by boomers who killed pensions to increase profits.
So that's like 1 percent of the boomers.
Does social security really only come from their own payments? The US must be one of the few countries that does it like that then. Usually, current workers finance current retirees, rather than current workers financing future retirees (themselves). There's an element of "has paid into it", yes, but it's quite obviously not the same money sitting in a bank account somewhere. It comes from a future national budget.
Doesn't matter either way. Much like I don't expect to retire because there won't be enough taxpayers 40 years from now in my country, I doubt the US dollar will be worth enough for current young workers to retire on social security without major interest being earned on it. There won't be enough actual productivity in the economy to support its value.
401k and other similar funds that invest in the stock market are also how old people profit off young people's work. You know all those comments you see blaming BlackRock or Vanguard for everything wrong with the US economy? Well BlackRock and Vanguard manage all these funds, but they don't actually own it all, mostly retail investors and different retirement accounts do. You could behead all the billionaires and it'll improve things, but that's mostly just idle wealth on paper since there's like a thousand of them, versus millions of retirees constantly consuming things using money that earned interest by being invested in the economy (i.e profiting off younger people, as that's just how capitalism works)
Capitalism or communism doesn't matter in the medium term either, the only way a person can retire is to start living off the backs of others. It's not an issue when a society is growing, but once it plateaus and eventually starts shrinking, it's a problem. This could be changed once human labor is no longer necessary to provide everyone's needs, assuming capitalists don't get to keep ownership of everything.
Look at the US population pyramid in 1970
vs 1990
vs 2025
Ain't no gen z going to be retiring at this rate. Or they'll be the last generation to be able to do so without a major rework of society.
So yes, people are rightfully jealous that they have to pay upkeep on retirees when they themselves will likely never get to retire.
Yes social security in the U.S is a specific tax that only goes to social security. Or at least that's how it's supposed to work but lately there has been talk of using it for the war. Which shouldn't be allowed.
I think it's pretty obvious to anyone that billionaires hoarding wealth and capitalism greed has gotten us where we are.
It's silly to blame older generations that had it better for the decline.
They have as much control over all of this as I do right now. Which is very little.
Profit and production per person has been increasing for as long as it's been recorded. Yet wages have not came close to matching inflation.
Why is that? Did boomers as a group some how orchestrate a decline in wages?
No.
That's thanks to corporations paying off politicians and making sure no laws would pass to force them to pay people a living wage. No laws would pass to restrict increases in college education. No laws would pass to keep rent affordable.
Didn't matter who you voted for. There have been plenty of Dems and Republicans in control at various times in the last 50 years. And yet. No laws were passed to help the people. Only create tax loop holes for the rich.
(Or in your country, I'm sure there are many times the progressives and the conservatives have each had majority power to make laws)
Because the rich pay off the politicians.
These problems are not from boomers existing at a time before it got bad.
It's true many billionaires are boomers but there are many that aren't that are the richest. Bezos isn't. Musk isn't.
I hope that maybe collecting signatures could make politicians in position that they can not simply refuse changing the law, like with affordable rent initiative right-to-housing.eu I mean if they would collect the 1 mln of signatures, it would be hard to just ignore it
They ignore such things all the time.
There have been many instances here of people voting to pass a bill and then the governor just vetoes it.
I think we need to change things so that votes outrank what any politicians want.
Well, it seems that the US has one of the best systems for retirement in the world then.
The total net worth of all billionaires in the US is actually a bit less than the total value of all 401ks alone, ignoring other forms of retirement and savings funds. When things are done "for the shareholders", what makes you think that it's only the billionaires? Retirement by definition benefits from the next generations being held down by low wages to benefit the corporations you're invested in. Boomers, or at least the selfish ones, have a tendency to vote republican because their interests align with billionaires' interests.
But both the net worth of billionaires and total value of 401ks pale in comparison to the total net worth of baby boomers in total.
In comparison, all billionaires put together are under 10 trillion, though they might be slightly over that number now since the last year or two have been WILD for economic growth. But then the boomer number is also ~85 trillion as of April this year and probably over 90 now since the S&P 500 has gone up plenty.
In a few decades it'll be Gen X and then millennials. As a millennial I hope my generation doesn't take the same hard right turn once we're in charge of the economy, but that's like 30-40 years from now and who knows how jaded millennials will have become by then. Luckily we won't get as many decades in charge as the boomers have had.
Don't get me wrong, we should still delete all billionaires, but I'm just saying that this doesn't fix the whole issue of retirement being old people living off young people's work. It'll actually do fairly little because the scale is actually so much bigger.
They will be gen X and millennials if bommers will transfer the wealth to them. But there is possibility that they will just sell everything and big corporation will buy it. Like with agricultural land in US. Some land is not longer in hands of private people but in corporation owners hands. (Like in feudalism, by the way there is even term: tech feudalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism) Bill Gates is doing it already (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-finally-explains-why-194910939.html)
This is not evidence that boomers stole your money.
It's just evidence that companies have been exploiting people to greater levels over time.
Boomers had as much power to shape the economy as you and I have right now.
Do you really think that the people paying off politicians to pass laws or hinder laws to increase their profits is blameless ?
Blaming boomers is akin to blaming immigrants. Or women. Or disabled people for the reason that companies won't pay their employees what they should.
It's scapegoating propaganda.
Billionaires don't want you looking their direction so they constantly are trying to find a new group to point the finger at.
They own all the mainstream media which is also pushing this narrative.
It's not the exploitive hoarding billionaire controlling your politicians making your life harder. No. Couldn't be.
It's the older generation who have a little bit more than you have. Yeah. Fuck old people. How dare they not die already ?
Fyi. Billionaires money is largely tied up in stocks. So yes of course a large portion of the wealth is in stocks.
They have right to live like everyone else, it is not about that. I just don't understand why they don't see any issues with billionaires as we do. Why they dont care about that? Maybe they are not informed as good as they should be. Maybe there should be an initiative "Inform a boomer" or a board game for them "younger generations" were you will always loose because of the billionaires, to create space for discussion. Idk just kidding about that but I don't understand why they don't care
Yeah there is definitely an issue there. Many don't seem to realize times have changed.
"I worked part time during the summer and put myself through college. These newer generations just want everything handed to them".
No realizing tuition is 30k-50k a year.
"I was able to buy a house at 25, working as a clerk at a feed store".
Not realizing that working full time for minimum wage isn't even enough to afford an apartment on your own anymore.
I think many don't realize how much income-to-expenses has changed.
And seem to not realize that without a college degree, it's unlikely you can find much work that pays more than minimum wage. And even that is generally only for men doing physically demanding jobs which have long term health consequences.
So it's either take on a huge amount of student loan debt for a chance at a slightly better job pay and security, or stay in poverty forever.
Depends a lot on where you are. My grandmother gets 2€ for every euro they put into their pension payment. I get 0.85 for every euro, and I get that in 40 years. I am talking here about the national pension system, if I could avoid paying into it I would, as the only worse investment I can think of is buying a car. Or perhaps NFTs
I am fortunate, as I have had a decent career. Still I must assume that the only way I can retire is have some savings and live outside the city. And even that's assuming the whole system doesn't collapse before I retire.