When you sum up all the verbiage, regardless of its original or embellished content & meaning, it could just as well be titled The Enclosure Of Outsized Financial Ambition.
Maybe his LLM is trying to tell him something, like peoples' idea when it comes to rewarding greed is really just mediocrity in wolf's clothing.
First and foremost: I think HN needs a reliable way to leverage downvotes for LLM generated articles. This crap is not worth discussing 99% of the time.
This is clearly a draft scribbled by someone and then post-processed by chatGPT.
That said:
>> When boomers hold ~50% of national wealth while comprising 20% of the population, and millennials hold ~10% despite being the same share, the game reveals itself to be fundamentally broken.
These numbers mean nothing. Also, the byproduct of billionaire-driven inequality is the collapse of the American Middle Class. That’s what’s under attack and the reason why the road is closed has nothing to do with those lucky enough to still make it into it. Look up, ffs.
Articles like this are unfair to boomers. Yes they have 50% of the wealth or whatever despite being 20% of the population, but they also have had time to earn that wealth fair and square and are not quite elderly enough to have spent it all on average. I'm sick and tired of articles blaming normal people who worked for what they have for issues that amount to geopolitical struggles.
"fair and square" = building wealth by owning homes while fighting tooth and nail to prevent enough new housing to be built. A house was never supposed to be an investment vehicle, it's a place to live and as we grew in population we needed more of it to keep up.
I agree with you, except the "fair and square" part.
Can we please stop pretending there's any fairness to any of it? That the reward is proportional to merit, effort, strength of character, utility, or any respectable and desirable quality? That everyone was on equal footing when trying to succeed?
You really do put it in perspective when you look at it closer like that.
It never was fair.
Tens of millions of boomers, if they could even get paying work during rampant inflation & recession, still had to work minimum-wage jobs for many years at rates like $2 per hour. With constant overtime or they wouldn't be able to make ends meet or have any kind of home equity now. Many for more than a decade before anything resembling recovery was on the horizon.
Most are still not homeowners and those that are, very few have it paid off completely even if they have been there more than 30 years.
The cool thing is that millions of others were in better positions, avoided the massive layoffs, and actually weren't dragged down as far by the predatory financial policies of the time. And there are whole neighborhoods of them today where it's still a free enough country where you often get to witness their eventual stately homes and selection bias where this kind of good fortune finally arrived after all this time.
In case not everyone remembers, the "great recession" of the 21st century was a nothingburger by comparison.
>but they also have had time to earn that wealth fair and square
By pawning the future of their country and its economy: printing money, making the economy a casino and getting trillion dollar bailouts, outsourcing industry, basing the web on ad revenue, making a God out of the stock market and enshittifying everything in the process...
All this 21st century activity you're pointing out was mainly carried out by those about 20 years younger than the youngest baby boomers.
All we had were multi-million-dollar bailouts to go with that.
You know, the value of the dollar and all.
There was major presidential malfeasance and this thing called "inflation" back then too. It was devastating with no actual recovery since. Or young people wouldn't be complaining now.
Not going to pick on Boomers specifically, but I entered the workforce in 2011. I watched my late Gen-X and Elder Millenial seniors swoop up cheap houses post recession for cheap rates then flip and sell them and go remote in cheap locations. I’m talking buy at 300k and sell at 800k-1M type of deals in 10 years.
While you’re right, there is work involved on the part of the boomers, the amount of leaving scorched earth for future generations is infuriating to watch.
The article barely mentions boomers, and in the one place it does, it cites a stat, and then immediately abdicates them of any responsibility for that stat.
The rest of the article is about a different generation of folks and the current conditions/perceptions of those conditions.
Why make this about boomers? The article is not about them, nor is a brief factual mention of them unfair. Nor is the follow up sentence absolving them of responsibility for the one thing time are mentioned.
IIRC a current statistic is that the top 10% overall own 60% of the wealth.
Also I believe that actual surviving boomers are underrepresented in that 10% compared to the general population now. And that trend can be expected to continue predictably.
No doubt OP had something great to say, but it reads like an LLM was used to explode their ideas out to a long, “professional” essay.
Extra words rarely have more content, only potential surprises - forcing your reader to go through it all in case of something unexpected..
LLM use doesn’t help you stand out. To make your writing professional in 2025, use as few words as possible.
I know what you mean.
When you sum up all the verbiage, regardless of its original or embellished content & meaning, it could just as well be titled The Enclosure Of Outsized Financial Ambition.
Maybe his LLM is trying to tell him something, like peoples' idea when it comes to rewarding greed is really just mediocrity in wolf's clothing.
> Companies offered pensions. … Staying at one company for 20 years is now a career liability, not an asset.
This was already old news during the dot com era. The question is whether 401k plans and job-hopping still works out in the end.
To do that, though, you need to be able to switch jobs enough times, which isn’t easy when jobs are hard to find.
The irony of another article about AI that appears to be written by an LLM...
First and foremost: I think HN needs a reliable way to leverage downvotes for LLM generated articles. This crap is not worth discussing 99% of the time. This is clearly a draft scribbled by someone and then post-processed by chatGPT.
That said:
>> When boomers hold ~50% of national wealth while comprising 20% of the population, and millennials hold ~10% despite being the same share, the game reveals itself to be fundamentally broken.
These numbers mean nothing. Also, the byproduct of billionaire-driven inequality is the collapse of the American Middle Class. That’s what’s under attack and the reason why the road is closed has nothing to do with those lucky enough to still make it into it. Look up, ffs.
Articles like this are unfair to boomers. Yes they have 50% of the wealth or whatever despite being 20% of the population, but they also have had time to earn that wealth fair and square and are not quite elderly enough to have spent it all on average. I'm sick and tired of articles blaming normal people who worked for what they have for issues that amount to geopolitical struggles.
"fair and square" = building wealth by owning homes while fighting tooth and nail to prevent enough new housing to be built. A house was never supposed to be an investment vehicle, it's a place to live and as we grew in population we needed more of it to keep up.
I agree with you, except the "fair and square" part.
Can we please stop pretending there's any fairness to any of it? That the reward is proportional to merit, effort, strength of character, utility, or any respectable and desirable quality? That everyone was on equal footing when trying to succeed?
That would be great, thanks.
You really do put it in perspective when you look at it closer like that.
It never was fair.
Tens of millions of boomers, if they could even get paying work during rampant inflation & recession, still had to work minimum-wage jobs for many years at rates like $2 per hour. With constant overtime or they wouldn't be able to make ends meet or have any kind of home equity now. Many for more than a decade before anything resembling recovery was on the horizon.
Most are still not homeowners and those that are, very few have it paid off completely even if they have been there more than 30 years.
The cool thing is that millions of others were in better positions, avoided the massive layoffs, and actually weren't dragged down as far by the predatory financial policies of the time. And there are whole neighborhoods of them today where it's still a free enough country where you often get to witness their eventual stately homes and selection bias where this kind of good fortune finally arrived after all this time.
In case not everyone remembers, the "great recession" of the 21st century was a nothingburger by comparison.
>but they also have had time to earn that wealth fair and square
By pawning the future of their country and its economy: printing money, making the economy a casino and getting trillion dollar bailouts, outsourcing industry, basing the web on ad revenue, making a God out of the stock market and enshittifying everything in the process...
All this 21st century activity you're pointing out was mainly carried out by those about 20 years younger than the youngest baby boomers.
All we had were multi-million-dollar bailouts to go with that.
You know, the value of the dollar and all.
There was major presidential malfeasance and this thing called "inflation" back then too. It was devastating with no actual recovery since. Or young people wouldn't be complaining now.
Not going to pick on Boomers specifically, but I entered the workforce in 2011. I watched my late Gen-X and Elder Millenial seniors swoop up cheap houses post recession for cheap rates then flip and sell them and go remote in cheap locations. I’m talking buy at 300k and sell at 800k-1M type of deals in 10 years.
While you’re right, there is work involved on the part of the boomers, the amount of leaving scorched earth for future generations is infuriating to watch.
The article barely mentions boomers, and in the one place it does, it cites a stat, and then immediately abdicates them of any responsibility for that stat.
The rest of the article is about a different generation of folks and the current conditions/perceptions of those conditions.
Why make this about boomers? The article is not about them, nor is a brief factual mention of them unfair. Nor is the follow up sentence absolving them of responsibility for the one thing time are mentioned.
I'm also always curious to know what happens if you remove wealthy boomers from this pool.
I forget the exact numbers, but let's say ten billionaires own 50% of all the wealth in the US; how many of those folks are boomers?
That'd remarkably change this ratio if it were the case that much of this wealth is held by only a few very wealthy boomers.
IIRC a current statistic is that the top 10% overall own 60% of the wealth.
Also I believe that actual surviving boomers are underrepresented in that 10% compared to the general population now. And that trend can be expected to continue predictably.