I hate these articles.

Look, for every generation since the dawn of man-kind there have been lazy-ass young people and then there have been those who work hard to earn the respect and praise of others. This isn't something new, so quit blaming all young people for being like this. There's a very good chance the older generation said the same thing about your generation.

/Please get off my lawn now.

DRFTA, but "You're lucky to have a job/not be fired" should not be misconstrued as a good management style.

Dancin_In_Anson: declaring the house 'Clothing Optional'. That should keep them away.

Yeesh, I'm never visiting you.

Young people are lazy, disrespectful, and have an unjustified sense of entitlement. This is an entirely new complaint, and not at all something that has been said of pretty much every generation for the last three thousand years.

PacersJAM3s: I hate these articles.

Look, for every generation since the dawn of man-kind there have been lazy-ass young people and then there have been those who work hard to earn the respect and praise of others. This isn't something new, so quit blaming all young people for being like this. There's a very good chance the older generation said the same thing about your generation.

/Please get off my lawn now.

Lets go back a little way and see:

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. "
- Socrates

Yeah, screw all of your hopes and dreams! Don't ask for a raise or aspire to move up in the company! Get back to work, peasant, and be thankful you have a job at all!

Mary Jane Snowflake Rottencrotch.

xria
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. "
- Socrates

Pffft.

You kids just have no respect for the boundaries your elders had to push through to ensure your life is as coddled as it is.

Older people no longer expect younger people to rise to their feet when the walk into the room thanks to all our hard work at tearing down that social artifice.

And don't get me started on chatterin before company...

You can see the turmoil in our society just by looking at this disjointed, 7 comment thread.

Fat chance now that the rubber playground
generation has its own President.

Dancin_In_Anson: platkat: He moves back home

The younger Son moves out in June.


I'm changing the locks and declaring the house 'Clothing Optional'. That should keep them away.

In most Asian cultures, the parents usually look after their children well past their teens (sometimes past the kids mid-20s or more), so that they'll look after them in turn when they're old and decrepit. Bonus: The kids don't move out, evar! Else, the parents move in when their kid purchases a new home.

/And in some households, multi-generational families, siblings, cousins and all ... 24/7!
//Just a different cultural paradigm ...

beelzebubba76: Dancin_In_Anson: platkat: He moves back home

The younger Son moves out in June.


I'm changing the locks and declaring the house 'Clothing Optional'. That should keep them away.

In most Asian cultures, the parents usually look after their children well past their teens (sometimes past the kids mid-20s or more), so that they'll look after them in turn when they're old and decrepit. Bonus: The kids don't move out, evar! Else, the parents move in when their kid purchases a new home.

/And in some households, multi-generational families, siblings, cousins and all ... 24/7!
//Just a different cultural paradigm ...

And I should add that this happens after marriage as well, the guys parents usually move in so that the spouse has to take care of the parents as well ... fun times.

/It's a difficult concept for the west to grasp.

I always enjoy reading stories written by Baby Boomers, a.k.a the Me Generation, a.k.a. the entitlement generation, a.k.a. the guys who destroyed our economy trying to get rich with the least amount of work possible, talking down to the generations that followed them.

Come talk after we clean up your mess, and maybe we'll be able to work something out. Till then, kindly STFU and let the grownups fiz things.

Our I.T. manager has a sign in his office that says, "Do not confuse efforts with results". I think that may sum it up nicely.

I dunno, it should probably more like, "Don't confuse results with job security."

It's easy to become jaded when even results aren't enough to save someone from getting cut. I know it's a fact of life with the current economic conditions, but things are a far cry from the way they were just a few generations ago. It is commonplace to hear stories of people who would start work at 20-25 and work for the same company for 30 years or more, saving a pension and retiring at 65 with a fair amount of financial security.

The conditions are drastically different now, and it's not simply the younger generation who is to blame for that.

Pocket Ninja: Nothing instills in me a more seething, white-hot hate than the small-town, folksy, "I'm just chatting with you over a cup of coffee, friend, and here's a real-life anecdote upon which I'm going to hinge my whole point, which isn't really a point at all but simply my own regurgitation of something that's been said a million times before by far more interesting, talented, and worthwhile writers than I" approach to article writing that low-talent hacks use to generate sappy pools of drivel and snot.

Remind me again which magazine regularly publishes your articles?

beelzebubba76: In most Asian cultures, the parents usually look after their children well past their teens (sometimes past the kids mid-20s or more), so that they'll look after them in turn when they're old and decrepit. Bonus: The kids don't move out, evar! Else, the parents move in when their kid purchases a new home.

Yeah, but at some point (when the kid hits adulthood and qualifies for the job-hunt pool) the kid becomes a full adult in the household too, so they're fully carrying their share, which eventually transfers all the way to them when the parents retire.

It's different from the modern US version of "kid moves home after college and remains a kid (partly because the PARENTS both don't expect anything from him AND refuse to stop treating him like a kid) living in mom's basement."

True US version of multi-generational families (maybe not so common now) were similar to the Asian type.

Meanwhile in Asia too there are some lazy kids coming home and not taking on responsibilities though too. With the girls they spend all their income on clothes and travelling.

Lusiphur: Come talk after we clean up your mess, and maybe we'll be able to work something out.

Yeah really. I actually wish the idea of privatizing social security had happened. I'd love to see all the Boomers realizing how farked they'd be when their retirement portfolios were worth about as much as toilet paper.

There is a mentality in students that 'if I work hard, I deserve a high grade."
[...]
Eventually, even I found out I had to work hard to get what I wanted.


5 line separate these statements.
A mediocre article lamenting mediocrity? Oh, mercy.

James F. Campbell: Pocket Ninja: Nothing instills in me a more seething, white-hot hate than the small-town, folksy, "I'm just chatting with you over a cup of coffee, friend, and here's a real-life anecdote upon which I'm going to hinge my whole point, which isn't really a point at all but simply my own regurgitation of something that's been said a million times before by far more interesting, talented, and worthwhile writers than I" approach to article writing that low-talent hacks use to generate sappy pools of drivel and snot.

Remind me again which magazine regularly publishes your articles?

Piss Drinkers Quarterly

NYZooMan: Fat chance now that the rubber playground
generation has its own President.

And here you go, passing the blame.
Here's a clue for you, ya old fart.

The kids didn't build the playgrounds. They just played in what they were given. If they had gotten their share of scars and scrapes and told 'that's life', that's what they would have learned. Instead they learned that the ground will always be soft, and never try to swing from the top.
So whose fault is it that the ground was covered in rubber instead of gravel? Who told them to stay low instead of climb? Who made sure nobody would ever burn their butt on a steel slide?

Yes. You. Your fault. The fault of the older generation that decided to change all the rules then still expect the same results at the end.

Just like your generation demanded all these social services for themselves-I'm talking about social security, medicare, medicaid, and all these other government assistance programs for the old and frail.

Not that your generation was ever too bright. You're the ones that used to run in the cooling spray behind the DDT trucks, and toss mercury between your hands because of how damn cool it was, aintcha?

Screw them... they're young, and can still get work in the prostitution and and porn industries.

Us grizzled old adolescents, not so much.

RaceDTruck: Our I.T. manager has a sign in his office that says, "Do not confuse efforts with results". I think that may sum it up nicely.

This is for you....

Ishidan: NYZooMan: Fat chance now that the rubber playground
generation has its own President.

And here you go, passing the blame.
Here's a clue for you, ya old fart.

The kids didn't build the playgrounds. They just played in what they were given. If they had gotten their share of scars and scrapes and told 'that's life', that's what they would have learned. Instead they learned that the ground will always be soft, and never try to swing from the top.
So whose fault is it that the ground was covered in rubber instead of gravel? Who told them to stay low instead of climb? Who made sure nobody would ever burn their butt on a steel slide?

Yes. You. Your fault. The fault of the older generation that decided to change all the rules then still expect the same results at the end.

Just like your generation demanded all these social services for themselves-I'm talking about social security, medicare, medicaid, and all these other government assistance programs for the old and frail.

Not that your generation was ever too bright. You're the ones that used to run in the cooling spray behind the DDT trucks, and toss mercury between your hands because of how damn cool it was, aintcha?

THIS. I want a time machine and a BB gun so I can fix my childhood. (Also, records of lotto numbers, not childhood-related.)

AmazingRuss: Screw them... they're young, and can still get work in the prostitution and and porn industries.

Us grizzled old adolescents, not so much.

Obviously, you and I are into different fetishes.

FTA: In fact, even my mother used to say that I never let my studies interfere with my education.

The author's mom is misquoting Mark Twain.

Ishidan: NYZooMan: *pointless troll whargarble*

And here you go, passing the blame.
Here's a clue for you, ya old fart.

The kids didn't build the playgrounds. They just played in what they were given. If they had gotten their share of scars and scrapes and told 'that's life', that's what they would have learned. Instead they learned that the ground will always be soft, and never try to swing from the top.
So whose fault is it that the ground was covered in rubber instead of gravel? Who told them to stay low instead of climb? Who made sure nobody would ever burn their butt on a steel slide?

Yes. You. Your fault. The fault of the older generation that decided to change all the rules then still expect the same results at the end.

Just like your generation demanded all these social services for themselves-I'm talking about social security, medicare, medicaid, and all these other government assistance programs for the old and frail.

Not that your generation was ever too bright. You're the ones that used to run in the cooling spray behind the DDT trucks, and toss mercury between your hands because of how damn cool it was, aintcha?

Do you have a newsletter? Because I wish to partake in it's circulation, if you have one.

NYZooMan: Fat chance now that the rubber playground
generation has its own President.

Diss not the rubber playground. It's cheaper than metal and less prone to needing repairs...

OK, yeah, I really don't care enough to turn this into a synthetic materials/progress of science thread. Have fun.

However, I will note:
Ishidan:
Not that your generation was ever too bright. You're the ones that used to run in the cooling spray behind the DDT trucks, and toss mercury between your hands because of how damn cool it was, aintcha?

DDT doesn't do much to humans that any other industrial chemical won't, and it damn near solved the malaria problem for us as well as increasing crop yields dramatically, and Mercury really isn't all that dangerous, unless you're dumb enough to eat it or treat your moustache with it every morning or something. Handling it with your hands or poking it with a stick in a ventilated room (as in, any room that's not airtight)? Not gonna do anything to you, any more than painting your house is gonna kill ya.

That's OK, fellow Gen-Yers. Twenty, forty years from now, we can rewrite history and claim we were to busy standing up to the establishment, single-handedly ending an unfair war, and conjuring civil rights out of the ether. We're right-nay, heroic-for not going to work for The Man.

jack21221: Yeah, screw all of your hopes and dreams! Don't ask for a raise or aspire to move up in the company! Get back to work, peasant, and be thankful you have a job at all!

As an IT manager, I have to point out these things are not mutually exclusive. I run my shop treating all my hires like adult professionals. They get a ton of good perks like laptops, vpn, flex-time. I treat them to movies during the workday and lunches when they hit deadlines with good quality etc.

However, every person I hire knows coming in the door about the good things we offer in our environment (I daresay my culture goals are better than 90% of organizations out there), but with that I demand high quality work, I demand them to be respectful of their peers, I demand them to set reasonable deadlines and stick to them.

Every employee that comes in the door generally falls into 1 of 2 categories, they either stay for years, or we fire them after 3-6 months. It very quickly becomes apparent when someone thinks they can half arse their way through work. Those who succeed, get rewarded, those that don't are shown the door.

/I'm 30, and I don't know what generation I fall in.

Jim_Callahan: DDT doesn't do much to humans that any other industrial chemical won't...Mercury really isn't all that dangerous, unless you're dumb enough to eat it or treat your moustache with it every morning or something. Handling it with your hands or poking it with a stick in a ventilated room (as in, any room that's not airtight)? Not gonna do anything to you, any more than painting your house is gonna kill ya.

Wow man, you're just cruising for me to question your intelligence, aren't you?
That first one is exactly what the DDT manufacturers said, too, except they did it without the qualifier.
Question. What is DDT for?
Answer: it's for killing things. True, it doesn't kill everything it touches on the spot (we're not dancing in a cloud of chlordane, here), but geez it must take some brains to wilfully dance in a cloud of poison.
Second question: why don't we use it anymore?
Answer: Because it was too damn good at killing things. They didn't think that it affected birds at first, either. This was the beginning of responsible behavior.
(of course, for this I really need to blame more generations back: after all, today's 80 year olds were the ones dancing behind the truck, not the ones driving the truck.)

On to mercury. Incorrect. Liquid elemental mercury can be absorbed through the skin and mucous membrane.

Then to housepainting. Ah. You've gotten spoiled by today's modern latex paints. Back in their day, we'd be talking about lead-based paints thinned with xylene, acetone, and other neurotoxic petroleum solvents.

Rules at my company:

Do a good job, help your company stay in business, and your reward is your paycheck.

Do an awesome job, and get promoted, and make a few more bucks a month.

Do a ridiculously awesome job, and you'll get bonuses on top of everything else.

Do anything else, and don't expect to have a job.