Once-in-a-generation

And the wealthy manage to come out on top every single time.
- When you're the ones manufacturing the crisis, it's easier to prepare and profit from it
- When they should really come out 6 feet under.
- Buy blue chip stocks during recessions and sell after recovery
  
  Kinda hard to buy when you dont have any fuckin money
  
  Instructions unclear, invested life savings in a company that produces blue corn tortilla chips.
  
  Brother I'm still recovering from the last time I took the internet's advice on stocks.
  Unrelated, but fuck Ryan Cohen.

It starts to make sense when you realize that each of those events is basically a fire sale for billionaire investors.
Just look at income inequality before/after each of those events.
- This is the truth.
  The economic crisis's have all been real, they all really have been huge events that have restructured life for everyone, it's just that they're not accidental, they're not unforseen consequences of policy decisions nobody could have imagined... they're engineered, or foreseen with great clarity.
  And every time, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the so-called middle-class shrinks even more. Prices go up, we all have to work a few more hours in the week, we get less in return, our future dreams dwindle, and we plug into social media and AI slop and drugs and alcohol to placate us while we say "I just gotta save up enough so I can..."
  And those savings NEVER increase. There is always some event, some family crisis, some medical problem or a car breaks down or your parent dies or the company you work at gets bought out and your 6 years of experience only makes you a liability for the new management team who wants to make a culture of "young, energetic pioneers." (who they can pay less.)
  The wealthy are at their happiest and strongest when they exist as they have for centuries, land-owners up high, living off the hard work and struggles of thousands of people beneath them, shaving a bit off everyone's pay, offloading their problems to people who are already struggling. They want to run around in the manor and keep getting wasted and banging winches while we serfs toil in the fields we don't own.
  
  I wish upon a star that we could be a generation that takes power back for the average worker and uses our strength in numbers as leverage to have a better quality of life by making the wealthy pay their fair share.
  But it's looking like our historic legacy is going to be that of a fool generation that votes against their own interests and refuses to stand up for themselves.
  A very embarrassing time to be an American.
  
  Seeing shit like this play out just makes it harder to keep going. At this point it's a matter of when I do it, not if. What point is there if it's only getting worse? I've seen my best years by now

This message is brought to you by the Storm of the Century and the hotest year in history. Available to you every year.
- I was going to say I live in a "50 year flood plain" and I’ve seen 3 floods in the last 16 years.
- I know there have been people predicting they live in the "end times" for all of humanity. But I can't help but feel like our generation isn't crying wolf like the others.
- Don't forget the wildfires.
  
  Good thing we dumped the california agriculture water reserves to solve their winter fires.

Don't worry tho, because although everyone's broke as shit, the houses you bought in the 90s when you were a young child are worth like 10 times as much now!
- I bought houses as a child?
  
  What, you didn't use your 1994 influencer money to buy houses?
  
  You didn't know to sell one of your beanie babies to pay for a house? That's like wu tangs #1 rule: diversify. Going all in on beanie babies is all fun and games until your divorce has you fighting over the most precious things in your life.

Don't forget - you were also BORN into a once in a generation economic crisis: The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was the failure of approximately a third of the savings and loan associations in the United States between 1986 and 1995. These thrifts were banks that historically specialized in fixed-rate mortgage lending.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis

I understand now.
- How can a partially muscled skeleton scream
  
  He partially has lungs and a vocal chord ?
  Though it reminds me of a conversation you can over hear in one of the Divine Divinity ~~Baldurs Gate~~ games between two skeletons, who talk themselves into how they shouldn't function, and then promptly fall to the floor in a pile.
  Edit: corrected the game
  
  Like this
  AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!! I'M A BONEY BOI WITH SOME BUT NOT ALL OF MY MUSCLES!!!!!!!
  
  If you've done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with a partially skeletal scream?

You start noticing this pattern after some decades.
Always accompanied by "we need to temporarily tighten the belt now to keep our properity for the following generations".
The period before is sold as a great economic time, despite that they called it a crisis back then and also 'needed' austerity measures to get back to the prosperity of the previous period.
The western standard of living has been destroyed bit by bit since the post WW2 period with this tactic, not for the multinationals, banks, stock folks OC, that's where the stolen money goes to.
The ones in power telling us in their paid press how great 'the econonomy' is doing bcs stock line go up and BS GDP up.
In reality that means more billions in the pockets of a few oligarchs while income equality is growing.
- "we need to temporarily tighten the belt now to keep our properity for the following generations".
  But followed by "you guys need to be expending" and also "we are going to fund a lot more things with public money"
  Fuck Keynes.
  
  We should be spending public money though. The public debt has literally never been an actual issue for the US.

It’s the same crisis, in various stages of escalation. The rich are squeezing more and more of the lower and middle class all over the world, and there is almost nothing left to squeeze.
The next few years will bring a massive collapse in government services (the USA is starting) for ordinary people, because that is one of the last things that the rich can still squeeze out.
After that, there will be only the ultra rich and the destitute poor left; and the ultra rich will only be able to take from each other.
This will mean war, and they will send you all into it.
Unless we stop it now. Tax the rich.
- After that, there will be only the ultra rich and the destitute poor left; and the ultra rich will only be able to take from each other.
  It's already starting to happen. Half of consumer spending in the US is done by just the top 10% of earners. For an economy built on consumer spending this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
  
  For an economy built on consumer spending this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
  You've gone and mixed up correlation and causation here.
  The top 10% arent spending 50% of the money because they are the glorious saviors of the economy, protecting and nurturing it while us poor people thoughtlessly hoard and save all our wealth. It's actually quite the opposite.
  
  this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
  This is probably true for industries like fashion, but I disagree with this point applying in general. There is only so much food, gasoline, and paper products an individual is willing to buy, no matter how rich.
  The restaurant industry, for example, would collapse as we know it if most non-wealthy people suddenly don't have any extra income to spend on prepared food. They need velocity in orders just to remain open at all. I doubt most places could remain open off of a few rich people buying a lot.
  This isn't to say that they won't stop extracting more from the lower earners. Many of them would be fine killing off industry if it makes themselves richer. I personally think all of it's a short-sighted cash grab that's gonna keep poisoning the economy until something changes.
  
  Except they could still do that level of spending while not perched atop a massive hoard, and the rest could do cumulatively more spending via their sheer numbers if said hoard were distributed more evenly.
  
  Trump45 term benefitted signifciantly from QE based suppressed low rates that inflated financial assets, and so made rich people richer without creating inflation as wages and jobs were flat (until way down from covid mismanagement). He/sycophantic media could boast about economy without improving people's lives.

I don’t think boomers are very good at running things.
- They grew up in a for the most part prosperous time, middle class had 2 cars in the driveway, jobs were easier to obtain, it's no wonder alot of them think the way they do.
  
  Think about it this way: They were literally the most spoiled highest quality-of-life group of humans to ever exist on Earth in any timeline.
  Ubiquitous access to healthcare and vaccinations for longer life.
  Access to pensions and retirement options no longer available where the employer did all the legwork to ensure they had a future post-work so they didn't have to learn a thing about investing or retirement savings.
  Infrastructure that was borne from the Great Depression, so they had roads, bridges, dams all built up to last their lifetime with no care about maintenance, as they figure, "oh it was always there, it will always be there," so no money was committed to maintenance we are now having to do, freeing that money up to live like kings and queens in the short-term.
  Easy to access jobs, homes, boats, cars with little to no education or financial acumen. Just that "walk in and hand them a resume" trope they love to perpetuate.
  The most modern travel technology and geopolitical climate to go on vacation pretty much anywhere on the planet, and access to time to have vacation.
  Relatively calm planetary climate so they didn't have to worry about things like today's weather weirding with tornadoes where they shouldn't be, hurricanes going inland, hail everywhere, and on and on, all the while driving their 5 MPG giant SUVs all over the country while tossing their food wrappers on the side of the road.
  Cheap (during the majority of their lives) to relocate anywhere in the US or abroad if they wanted to work or live somewhere else, or be "snowbirds" when they're too wimpy to tolerate the winter in their home states.
  The same geopolitical climate prevented them having to grow up in war-torn anywhere.
  Access to any kind of entertainment imaginable any time anywhere.
  Artificially post-world-war inflated US economy that took some decades to spin down (that "Great Again" they fap to) - which only happened because the US joined so late and had few losses ourselves. The war never happened at home, so we got out for minimal effort/casualties/infrastructure loss.
  And they got to adult in an age of computer technology that enables them as olds to not have to drive their car, pick up food, or do any errands they don't want to do themselves, all without having to learn any technical skills because the tech was designed for idiots.
  No human generation before or after them got to, or likely will ever, experience such a prosperous story-arc. They should consider themselves damn lucky and act like it, while supporting future generations to have a sliver of what their spoiled asses were able to enjoy.
  
  Boomers grew up in a world with a 91% top-tier income tax rate that drove businesses to spend their excess income on products and services, which became their parents' paychecks.
  
  Exactly what my depression era grandma says of them.
  
  All of them with only 1 parent working and the other managing the home
- Take heart, in 10 years the worst of the boomers in power today will be dead. In 20 years there will be almost no boomers left. Hopefully there will be enough of a country left to fix once they're all dead.
  
  You're forgetting that there are many brainwashed younger people who totally bought the bullshit. It won't be easy.
  
  I’m in the prime time of of my life, waiting 10-20yrs just sounds very depressing
  
  in 10 years the worst of the boomers in power today will be dead.
  I remember thinking this about the WW2 generation back in the 90s. The result:
  
  In about 25 years most countries will be warzones and anyone that cant afford whatever the elite are charging for the few freshwater sources left on the planet will be dead or enslaved. anyone within twenty degrees of the equator will have fled or be dead, and anyone living above ground anywhere else will live in nonpermanent shelters due to the yearly storms that destroy standing structure.
  boomers will be taking the worlds habitable range with them, and leaving us with a nightmare.

and every time the rich get richer, funny that.

This hits too hard. I was born in 83, so even the ages line up.
- 82 here and obligatory fuck this timeline
  
  82, born April 1st. Life has been a joke, that's for sure.
- Same year here... fuck us, amirite?

I don't mean to be that guy, but look which US political party was in charge for each of those dates...
- 2002 - Bush II, Republican
  2008 - Bush II, Republican
  2020 - Trump, Republican
  2025 - Trump, Republican
  Cheat sheet.
  
  Trump approves, "The economy does better under Democrats than the Republicans"
  Donald Trump, 2004, on the CNN Show 'The Apprentice'

2002: We lost the house 2008: got evicted from apartment 2020: dad died from covid 2025: let's see how it goes this time
- That's fucking rough dude, I hope the world throws you a bone this time and just leaves you alone for once.

Crisis seems like the natural operating mode of c*pitalism
- Slavoj Žižek: Democracy and Capitalism Are Destined to Split Up | Big Think
  Bonus Slavoj clip Slavoj Žižek - Tell me a dirty joke about yourself and we will be friends

What happened in 2002? Was that from the war on terror?
- End of the dot com bubble.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_market_downturn_of_2002
  But it happened mostly in 2000:
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
  And coincidentally 9/11
  The September 11 attacks also contributed heavily to the stock market downturn, as investors became unsure about the prospect of terrorism affecting the United States economy.
  
  Was the 2002 a year of recession? Or is the stock market downturn considered a recession because rich people lost money?
- 9/11
  
  That didn't cause a significant economic downturn, though.
- War of terror.
  
  Didn't that pay off so well. How many American soldiers were killed, injured, or traumatized? How many innocent Afghani and Iraqi civilians were murdered? And for what? ISIS and the Taliban now have complete control over that entire region.
  And to the people saying how much better Bush was than Trump as well as the dumb as fuck democrats embracing that fucking war criminal Cheney, I say you all need to get your god damned head examined. Trump's election denialism was born out of the Brooks Bros riot in Florida during the 2000 election and Trump is absolutely hoping for some terrorists to kill Americans so he can declare martial law and suspend elections in order to remain president indefinitely. Bush and Cheney lead to this. This was every republican's goal.

If it worked to funnel money to the wealthy the first time why not the second? Or third... and so on.
- well new time iwth gen z, people dont want to work for the richest people for minium salary and opputinity, meanwhile boomer generation just work to work and earn some money, and get some children to fight for even more spare jobs......... AI days coming sooner or later yep yep. still respect them for building our country. but honestly idk why your life should be the job your working on, when the job treats you like bad fish that when you do something to get any attention, your fired.
- Pretty much, all that stocks getting sold must be bought by someone.

Capitalism cannot continue to exist without it begging for socialist bailouts.
Just proves that socialism is superior. It can even float a shit system like capitalism as it continues to fail.
- The only way to really make capitalism work in the long term is if you pair it with sufficient social spending to provide a substantial redistributive effect. A free market, if you can maintain it, is a wonderful thing. Competition breeds innovation and efficiency. The problem is that there's nothing capitalists hate more than a free market. As soon as any company gets big enough, or any capitalist gets wealthy enough, they start directing their wealth to buying public policy that will give them an unfair advantage in the market. And as soon as any company gets enough market share, they start engaging in uncompetitive business practices if not heavily regulated.
  Marx was fundamentally right. Capitalism is an unstable system. Even if you could magically start a society with a perfectly free market, it would inevitably collapse into oligarchy. And when the oligarchs push things far enough that enough people are desperate enough, oligarchy collapses into fascism.
  The free market has a lot of merit to it. But ironically, the only way you can maintain even a vaguely free market is by heavy handed government intervention. You need a large redistributive mechanism to prevent wealth accumulation at the top, and you need strict regulation on the size of businesses to prevent them from dominating markets. Free markets require heavy government intervention in order to persist long term.

what did you expect? You were born in 1984 ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
edit: added link to book
- Born then too, I always hoped it wasn't prophetic.
  
  Nah what we have is way worse

I'm tired, boss.

Wait, I miss this, did a new recession just drop?
- If it hasn't yet it's about to. 1-5% daily drops across the stock market for the past month pretty much and now with a 10%+ minimum tariff on all imports means everything is going to get way more expensive. I'll chew a brick if we're not in a recession by the end of the year
  
  At that point, is it a recession or should we just call the 2020s: depression part 2 AI boogaloo?
  
  At this point I'm just ignoring my 401k and hoping time in the market makes up for this fuckery....
  
  That brick might be your only source of essential minerals and nutrients by the end of this year. You'll need to learn how to go without, and make that single brick last until 2028. Also, you'll need to work 80hrs a week to afford it.
- Not officially, no.
  But yes, it's already here.
- We never really recovered from COVID.
- We were in the beginning stages of a recession Sept 2019, before COVID hit, and the Trumpster is doing the same shit now, so...

"Funny"
- Everybody laugh. Roll on the snare drum. Curtains.

I don't know who came up with this "once a generation" bullshit, but you can see that economic crises were more often than once a decade in 20th century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_economic_crises#20th_century
- They were every fifteen years pretty regularly

Me when capitalism
- Capitalism works if we factory reset it every 10 years or so.
  
  That 10 years coincides with US debt and bankruptcy law. "Like a free Uno reverse card", a quote that needs be in grade school textbooks.
  
  Capitalism works when it's allowed to work, and part of that is strong social safety nets... For the people, not the companies.
  If we'd let banks and businesses fail in 2008 it, it would have been devastating at the time, but we wouldn't be in this hot mess today. Because the government is so friendly to failed businesses, models that play fast and loose can make huge profits, squirrel away that cash, fail, and then get bailed out by the taxpayer. Meanwhile, slower and more stable institutions get outcompeted in the short term, and don't get bailed out when they withstand the failing economy events.
  Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.
  Oh, and we need actual monopoly laws. No way in hell Amazon isn't a monopoly.
  
  Oh yes, that's true

See, I exchanged my 100% S&P500 401k to SPAXX in December, waiting for the crash. I've made 10%~ doing nothing! It took me a while to realize, but I'm finally going to buy the dip.
- What a visionary. This guy fucks, am I rite?
- How can you make 10% in a few months when spaxx annual return is less than 5%?
  
  You netted 10% vs broad market. You "made" 2%
  
  The delta between the losses in the S&P 500 and gains in SPAXX.

Ill give a small example here how I know we are fucked. I leased a vehicle for 1900 a month back in 2022, the lease is up in October. I just bought a new 100,000 dollar truck today, I'm over 200,000 in debt already with barely enough to cover my monthly payments. They should not have given me this truck. But I'm a business, they give me anything. Sure I'll make 2 mill this year but they never once asked anything once I said a company was buying it. I'm personally saving money on this transaction but the fact that the financial system allowed this to happen worrying to say the least.
- Respectfully, why the fuck would you buy yourself a $100,000 truck?
  
  He works with software so it’s probably because it occasionally snows where he lives and his micropenis.
  
  Could need a pickup with the tool boxes and shit built in, or maybe a hydraulic lift. My family owned a construction company for decades, and we always had one of those in the driveway, and while I don't know how much they were, they were definitely more expensive.
  
  I work in environmental reclamation, I haul things a lot. And travel down rough roads a lot. I'm actually downsizing to this truck because the other ones are too damn expensive.
- Don't worry. People like my parents will blame poor people for accepting loans that they can't pay.

It’s almost like granting a supreme veto to a single, wholly imaginary ideology, and positioning it as a monoculture for how society values activities and production, is problematic.
We apparently did away with it once before through the separation of church and state, maybe it’s time to force the separation of bank and state.

There’s only one thing to do. Kill John Lennon

Well, if US attacks Canada, Greenland, Panama, Greenland and Iran, then we will see once in 10 generation stuff !
- What is so fucked is that many people who experienced ww1 also lived to see ww2 and the build up to it. If there was one thing that the 90s promised was that the future was gonna be a cool and better place. I mean the internet has given me the gift of being able to acquire all the knowledge I want, but the downsides have been massive.
- Greenland, the cowards that ran to Iran after being attacked!

Sounds like it's time to stop believing the way headlines and pundits phrase things.

To make matters worse, well, for my generation here in Denmark, 1983 is the smallest generation alive. That means we have the least voting power. Between us and larger voter pools, it's pretty clear who politicians will cater to.
- In the US 1984 was the nadir in births. So a similar experience.

It never really felt to me like the tech bubble crash was that big a deal to many people outside of a group of greedy rich assholes. There's always collateral damage of course, but the only change I really witnessed was a stop to people getting paid 20x the median salary after spending a few weeks with a Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours book.

Kind of seems like the lesson is to buy the dip.
- If you are an insider into the chaos, can truly make a fortune from knowing crashes are about to happen, and then when the chaos is reversed.
- And not sell the fall
  
  This part I'm not on board with, because the majority volume is going to be doing that either way. Anyone who would see this advice would just be ruining themselves to make some vague statement if they followed it.
- If you have the money to do that then you are the problem.
  
  Right, anyone who has 'the money' to make any kind of investment at all is 'the problem'.
  
  Not really. In today's world, a couple having assets of up to a few million is the equivalent of someone 50 years ago having a paid off house and a pension. That's the kind of assets you need if you want to finance a basic middle class retirement.
  
  Don't hate the player hate the game
  
  This would be a great argument if fractional shares didn't exist

You literally stated the story of my fucking life.

It was only once-in-a-generation when it was being done accidentally.

....fucked

Good news! This is the last one. US dead forever.

Getting sick of it honestly just once I want a W financially

Less once-in-a-generation and more continuously-for-a-generation

Forgot 2015

- Seems to math to me? 2002 to 2008 is 6 years, 2008 to 2020 is 12 years, 2020 to 2025 is 5 years

Oh hey. Can I join this bullshit party? Fuck boomers.
edit: lol at the downvote. how did grandpa figure out alt socials?

This tracks as generation’s are getting increasingly closer together now. I’m supposedly the same “generation” as people who graduated from school before I was born. Last few years there’s a new generation every few months - zoomers, generation alpha, beta cucks, etc.

It's what you get when pedophiles run the most powerful country: a new generation every 8-10 years.
Edit: /s

You only been in 1.
9/11. That was our JFK moment. The rest? SSDD.

For your own mental well-being, stop reading the news. Unsubscribe and block all news communities.
- Many of us are ambivalent. We are overwhelmed by the terrible things happening around us. We can stick our heads in the sand, but we can't help fix things if we don't know what is happening. I take breaks from Trump/Musk news, but I can't stay away forever if I want to fight for my family, and maybe my country.
- That is what a third of non voting Americans have done and its working out great for all of us. /s
  
  I didn't say don't vote. You can look stuff up around election times. But general day to day there is really no point in looking at the news.
- Not gonna happen. Ignorance is what got us here.
- By all means everyone should take breaks from the media and not doomscroll constantly. But if you disengage completely you will have given the people making the world like this everything they want. They want you to be apathetic and disengaged. They want you to stay home on every election day. They want you to ignore everything they are doing, because criminals can work better when there's no one watching what they are doing.
  So, for your mental well being please do take regular time off from the 24hr news cycle but also, look into how you can help to turn back the tide. See where you can volunteer if you have the time, join your PTA and keep an eye on your local library (these have been major targets of right wing nut jobs looking to undermine progress), or if you are too busy then just simply repost the positive messaging from those few in our government who are doing all they can to hold the line against this regime. Challenge the thoughts of those you know who are either giving in to apathy or voted for Trump but are even slightly doubting his actions. Every crack can be a door. And, most importantly, VOTE IN EVERY ELECTION.

AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!! I'M A BONEY BOI WITH SOME BUT NOT ALL OF MY MUSCLES!!!!!!!