100% this.

Louder for the folks in the back, please.

MBAs are like surgeons; their every solution is to cut.

Now ask it whether Taiwan is a country.

*Cue Josh Lyman parading through West Wing gloating about globalization

I think that’s splitting hairs. Both things are valid.

100%

My mom worked at Sizzlers in the early 90s when she and her husband, a no-degree “engineer” were able to buy a 4 bedroom house with a huge yard and 2 car garage in the DC suburbs (MD side), with two cars. A few years later, they upgraded to an even bigger house in an even nicer part of the county.

Objectively poor people had houses that they owned, in places people wanted to live. None of that has been possible for at least a decade or more. Millennials are now in our 40s and have more education and experience than Boomers ever did, yet the ROI and QOL differentials are staggering.

Don’t let Boomers gaslight you; they collectively played this game on the easiest mode.

Of course. American prosperity fell off a cliff around 1980, so the last 40 years or so have just been inertia and grinding the middle class into dust.

Which is roughly where we are now.

Not to mention their wholesale willingness, as a cohort, to pull up the ladders that they used to raise themselves, assuring that subsequent generations would have it much harder, and would likely fail to achieve the same cornerstone successes of prosperity.

At the same time, Boomers have a penchant for constantly gaslighting any opinion or statement that might pierce the insulating lies in whatever trumped up mockery they call an identity.

It’s why Boomers are always regaling the world with anecdotes of how hard they worked and how much they deserve their stations in life, when anyone with the ability to parse history can see that Baby Boomers objectively had the easiest, most rewarding slice of American prosperity in the history of the country. In the richest nation on Earth.

I used to work in a consulting firm for import/export driven businesses. Almost every single client was a Boomer who inherited the business from their parents, knew fuckall about business, and spent their time mainlining Fox News and lamenting the laziness of their workers and their general dissatisfaction with trends in America.

The uniform dearth of awareness and irony of their entire existence was astounding. Most, if not all, would be otherwise unemployable personalities, in any other scenario.

Sociopathic greed is the root; Covid 19 pulled the mask off when people collectively had a few months to exit the rat race and discover life apart from being constantly ground to dust for some shareholders’ profits.

“There are piles of poo just waiting to match with YOU! Only $14.99/week!”

100%

Which is a long way to say that Google exists as a prime failure of the government’s onus to regulate businesses. Google should never have been allowed to creep its tentacles into so many facets of life.

Just as with most technology, the Feds have been turning a blind eye, and pocketing cash while tech robber barons privatized existence.

My test search for the UPS store up the street sent me 4km away. So…not great.

Governments and corporations still use the same playbooks because they’re still oversaturated with Boomers who haven’t learned a lick since 1987.

Start sometime around 2008 when the US went into overdrive to punish the most vulnerable for Wall St’s unending, unrestrained greed. Then you’ll additionally benefit from 14 years of open-purse monetary policy, as the Fed handed out cash like Halloween candy. Then get yo self some sweet sweet Covid relief.

You reached the right conclusion, but muddied your own waters.

Texas would invade to steal and subjugate. Texan “leaders” wants slaves and resources and New Mexico, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana are right on the doorstep.

Texas immediately invades smallest Southern states