pfm
62
The indicator is whether the current generation has it better than their parents in a relative sense. In the West you have stagnant wages and major housing affordability issues. Japan also suffered from it’s post-bubble stagnation. When your whole life is a stagnant or downward trend with respect to your parents, it’s not hard to see why there is general pessimism. It’s may also not be a coincidence that birth rate issues are also common across these places
3 Likes
zubat
63
Just a few things to note:
-
There is still opportunity and dreams in America. No question. But things are tougher than they should be. First time home buyer’s like myself are in a steep climb, as pfm said. Even renting is difficult. There already was a US housing shortage, made worse when the fed kept rates too low for too long.
-
Social media aside, technology crossed a line when it became basically mandatory to own a phone made by Google or Apple to pay for parking, get into a professional sports game or enjoy other parts of public life. I owned a Windows Phone 2 years ago and I regularly could not do things because I didn’t have “the app”. Part of the brilliance of the internet was you no longer needed applications installed to perform certain functions, you could just go to a web page. Now we’ve reversed.
-
If Halo CE came out in 1999 its 90’s no question.
7 Likes
As someone who is using a $30 Nokia as a daily life phone, I can confirm. If they set up busses as rail replacement then I can’t physically pay the fare. Several restaurants and other places you won’t get into because they use some sort of cellphone registry system. Many takeaways/delivery only take payment through apps, not even cash anymore. No internet, not being able to receive QR-codes or any form of scannable code. It’s only a matter of time before the good old printer method becomes unacceptable. I own a smartphone as a precautionary measure, ideally I would just have a spotify/scanner device around my wrist or something and never have to own a smartphone again.
2 Likes
@zubat @c0ll3ct0r respect! I’ve always been behind the tech curve, purposely. I currently have a refurbished iPhone 8 I bought on eBay, and people look at me like I’m crazy for not having the latest phone with 6.9 cameras. We have definitely gone backwards on some payment things, and I use cash whenever possible. A phone should not be a requirement to live in America in 2023.
2 Likes
7-8 years ago, my friends credit card stopped working right as we were going on this long trip together. He had to borrow cash from his dad to make the trip because in the week between this and receiving the new card, he had no access to money.
Why? Because his bank, the second biggest one in Norway, have no places to withdraw physical currency in all of Norway.
3 Likes
Scary. Banks, leverage, and currency are rabbit hole for anyone who’s been down it. It just took me 10 days and 13 phone calls to wire money from Merrill Lynch to Bank of MERICA. Given it’s the same bank, I can’t say electronic “money” is any better.
1 Like