You're a 26 year old in 1926. You're part of what history would later call the Greatest Generation. You will suffer through both the Great Depression and World War II. Perhaps due to those experiences, you will be the only generation that votes more left as you age.
dctoedt 25 minutes ago [-]
If you were born in 1900 you probably are at the tail end of the Lost Generation — the Greatest Generation is considered to be those born between 1901 and 1927.
I read Sinclair Lewis' Babbit last year and it was kind of depressing how little had changed since 1922. The political climate seemed eerily similar to now. Maybe we continually go through oscillations.
davoneus 24 minutes ago [-]
Great article. Just reminds me of how much societies resemble a pendulum; swinging from one extreme to the other. And of course you have the problem that some people want to freeze it mid-swing, or worse tear the damn thing down completely.
fierycatnet 31 minutes ago [-]
Still reading the article but it reminds me that I need to watch Metropolis now, I think it came out in 1928 or so.
pfdietz 45 minutes ago [-]
So, we're about to have Great Depression 2 and WW3? Fun.
Avicebron 41 minutes ago [-]
Sometimes I wish Strauss–Howe theory hadn't been hijacked. It seems noteworthy how similar (cyclical?) things are even if it's a coincidence..
edoceo 39 minutes ago [-]
A key feature of the human condition is thinking "this time will be different"
copper-float 11 minutes ago [-]
What do you mean hijacked? I'm not familiar with that theory.
UncleOxidant 29 minutes ago [-]
We're kind of already having the WW3 part.
pfdietz 24 seconds ago [-]
Not even close, unfortunately. WW3 would be massively worse than what we have now.
stackghost 26 minutes ago [-]
It has felt inevitable to me for a few years now. The market != the economy but a major crash can still trigger a credit crunch that will materially affect regular people. Look at the insane valuations on some of these companies. They can't continue forever.
As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.
miroljub 14 minutes ago [-]
> As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.
How naive one must be to consider this NPC as the biggest threat to human kind since the dawn of man.
It's not that single person who threatens the world, it's the complete American elite and the whole American society who push for wars and more wars, and the current NPC of the day in the office is just their tool.
jmyeet 21 minutes ago [-]
I an a completely unabashed leftist who has been "radicalized" (if you call free school lunches "radical", which apparently it is in modern America) by seeing the rapidly accelerating wealth and income inequality since 2008. I mean it really kciked off in the 1970s but the effects post-2008 became impossible to ignore.
In the spirit of all models are wroong but some models are useful and that generational politics is overly reductive (which it is), I still see the Millenials as the new Lost Generation. The original Lost Generation were born 1883 to 1900. They came of age in the devastation of WW1 and the Spanish flu. What happened after 2008 was that all the entry-level jobs disappeared. Millenials had taken and continued to take on massive student debt and otherwise "do the right thing" yet found there were limited opportunities at the end of that pipeline. Baby boomers still had a stranglehold on academic and they both refused to quit or die (something which is still true). This is where the trope of the college educated millenial barista came from.
Obama's presidency was a massive lost opportunity to correct some of this. It directly led to Trump being elected (over Hilary "more of the same" Clinton). Trump, for all his many, many faults, talked to the rising anger in young people at the lack of opportunity, the possibility that they'd never own a house or have a good-paying job or they'd have a family. The disillusionment and anger has only grown.
So, as a leftist, the irony is that I get shit on constantly for essentially trying to preserve the current system by those people who like the current system but are contributing towards us bouldering towards war and revolution. Because those are the ultimate form of wealth redistribution [1] and become increasingly inevitable as material conditions worsen.
Even more ironic, many of those same people fetishize the 1950s where the top marginal tax rate was 91%, the CEO-to-median-wage ratio was a fraction of what it is now and the corporate tax rate was 40-50%. But then came along the likes of McKinsey who justified greed witht he patina of executives being "underpaid" [2] and then the social destruction of Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.
It took FDR in the 1930s to repair the damage of 1920s pro-business slavishness of Coolidge and Mellon. And let's not forget there was an attempted coup in 1933 [3]. But you see the same messages (as the author notes) in the 1920s of lower taxes, destroying unions and being pro-big business. Sound familiar?
> talked to the rising anger in young people at the lack of opportunity, the possibility that they'd never own a house or have a good-paying job or they'd have a family. The disillusionment and anger has only grown.
This should be the absolutely only thing that Democrats talk about. Every single day, with a big graph and call in number, so people can call in to say if this was fixed for them or not. And if it's not fixed, they should outline steps on how it gets fixed that day. It's insane they aren't using this opportunity.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 8 minutes ago [-]
> It's insane they aren't using this opportunity.
Instead they're taking the opportunity to be insane. But the faithful are not allowed to admit that.
ck2 26 minutes ago [-]
yeah but America 1926 didn't have a billion dollars a day being extracted from the economy by a totally useless war (that is going to start again in 60 days)
or a President extracting billions from his own government for a plane, golf, inexplicable illegal destruction and renovations to national sites
the government was also not purposely imploding academia, science and medicine
there are also now over a THOUSAND billionaires "silo-ing" their wealth, barely paying any taxes and trying to eliminate the cost of employing anybody
we cannot recover this decade, maybe not even next century, and that assumes this horror show doesn't have a "part 2"
Schiendelman 23 minutes ago [-]
You might be surprised to hear that wealth concentration was worse a hundred years ago than it is now. It's very easy to assume otherwise when the numbers are so much larger now across the board.
yes almost all americans now have running water and indoor toilets
except we have more homeless than ever so they don't even have that
with taxes slashed for billionaires and safety-nets for food and healthcare being destroyed, we are actually headed back to 1926 on purpose
WillAdams 4 minutes ago [-]
The definition of homeless was quite different at that time --- note that there was an entire class of people defined as hobos/migrant workers who began the year helping out with cutting lumber and harvesting maple sugar in the winter, then working south to help with the planting of truck crops (lettuce, spinach, broccoli, peas...) in the spring, pruning fruit trees and harvesting early crops in the summer, then in the fall helping with the harvests and picking cotton and so forth, then helping to plant cover crops and so forth and moving north to repeat the process.
Louis L'Amour writes on this a bit in his wonderful book:
No offense but outside of money does the US have anything going for it?
artisinal 20 minutes ago [-]
Natural parks.
Tasty drinkable water from the tap in nearly the entire country. Being able to flush toilet paper. Free toilets almost everywhere.
Being a country for 250 years is also quite an achievement.
I’m European and have witnessed many wars on my continent in my lifetime. A childhood friend was shot down with a Russian surface to air missile.
2muchtime 15 minutes ago [-]
The water is drinkable but in many places not what I would call tasty.
jandrewrogers 14 minutes ago [-]
The best geography of any country by a large margin and a non-ethnic culture that believes anything is possible and celebrates the ambition to try.
The money is largely a side effect of these two things.
fluidcruft 9 minutes ago [-]
The Mississippi river. Few understand what an advantage that river is.
AnimalMuppet 4 minutes ago [-]
Freedom to say (almost) anything, publicly, including criticism of the elite and powerful.
Freedom to do, to create a business with far fewer roadblocks than in, say, Europe.
Freedom to go, to travel anywhere in a really large country, with no borders or restrictions.
Yeah, you can quote me all the caveats. They're there; I don't deny them. But: Freedom to say, freedom to do, and freedom to go. Those are really big deals.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 11 minutes ago [-]
Ask those returning home from world cup visits. They'll be in the best position to compare to their home country.
Rendered at 17:09:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_Generation
As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.
How naive one must be to consider this NPC as the biggest threat to human kind since the dawn of man.
It's not that single person who threatens the world, it's the complete American elite and the whole American society who push for wars and more wars, and the current NPC of the day in the office is just their tool.
In the spirit of all models are wroong but some models are useful and that generational politics is overly reductive (which it is), I still see the Millenials as the new Lost Generation. The original Lost Generation were born 1883 to 1900. They came of age in the devastation of WW1 and the Spanish flu. What happened after 2008 was that all the entry-level jobs disappeared. Millenials had taken and continued to take on massive student debt and otherwise "do the right thing" yet found there were limited opportunities at the end of that pipeline. Baby boomers still had a stranglehold on academic and they both refused to quit or die (something which is still true). This is where the trope of the college educated millenial barista came from.
Obama's presidency was a massive lost opportunity to correct some of this. It directly led to Trump being elected (over Hilary "more of the same" Clinton). Trump, for all his many, many faults, talked to the rising anger in young people at the lack of opportunity, the possibility that they'd never own a house or have a good-paying job or they'd have a family. The disillusionment and anger has only grown.
So, as a leftist, the irony is that I get shit on constantly for essentially trying to preserve the current system by those people who like the current system but are contributing towards us bouldering towards war and revolution. Because those are the ultimate form of wealth redistribution [1] and become increasingly inevitable as material conditions worsen.
Even more ironic, many of those same people fetishize the 1950s where the top marginal tax rate was 91%, the CEO-to-median-wage ratio was a fraction of what it is now and the corporate tax rate was 40-50%. But then came along the likes of McKinsey who justified greed witht he patina of executives being "underpaid" [2] and then the social destruction of Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.
It took FDR in the 1930s to repair the damage of 1920s pro-business slavishness of Coolidge and Mellon. And let's not forget there was an attempted coup in 1933 [3]. But you see the same messages (as the author notes) in the 1920s of lower taxes, destroying unions and being pro-big business. Sound familiar?
[1]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2017/01/stanford-historian...
[2]: https://observer.com/2013/08/the-godfather-of-ceo-megapay-mc...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
This should be the absolutely only thing that Democrats talk about. Every single day, with a big graph and call in number, so people can call in to say if this was fixed for them or not. And if it's not fixed, they should outline steps on how it gets fixed that day. It's insane they aren't using this opportunity.
Instead they're taking the opportunity to be insane. But the faithful are not allowed to admit that.
or a President extracting billions from his own government for a plane, golf, inexplicable illegal destruction and renovations to national sites
the government was also not purposely imploding academia, science and medicine
there are also now over a THOUSAND billionaires "silo-ing" their wealth, barely paying any taxes and trying to eliminate the cost of employing anybody
we cannot recover this decade, maybe not even next century, and that assumes this horror show doesn't have a "part 2"
https://americanbusinesshistory.org/superwealth-a-historical...
except we have more homeless than ever so they don't even have that
with taxes slashed for billionaires and safety-nets for food and healthcare being destroyed, we are actually headed back to 1926 on purpose
Louis L'Amour writes on this a bit in his wonderful book:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/828165.Education_of_a...
Tasty drinkable water from the tap in nearly the entire country. Being able to flush toilet paper. Free toilets almost everywhere.
Being a country for 250 years is also quite an achievement.
I’m European and have witnessed many wars on my continent in my lifetime. A childhood friend was shot down with a Russian surface to air missile.
The money is largely a side effect of these two things.
Freedom to do, to create a business with far fewer roadblocks than in, say, Europe.
Freedom to go, to travel anywhere in a really large country, with no borders or restrictions.
Yeah, you can quote me all the caveats. They're there; I don't deny them. But: Freedom to say, freedom to do, and freedom to go. Those are really big deals.