You can’t do this in most schools any more. Some people think it’s a good thing; most don’t.
I have known several people who felt that CPS should totally butt out when it comes to discipline, and that if a parent or other person in authority wants to deliberately injure a child in the name of discipline, they should be allowed to do so. :eek: No, they don’t think men should be able to do that to their wives. Go figure.
Back in the day (1970s), we would build tree forts in the woods. We would scavenge construction sites for wood and nails.
Is that even done today? Nope. Boys are too busy playing video games.
People who think kids these days never play outside sure doesn’t live in my neighborhood! 
There’s lots of call for trades like welding and machining, but nobody wants to do them.
I keep seeing signs from trucking companies saying “Come drive our trucks, pay starts at $5000/month.” The signs stay up; they can’t find drivers, because it’s just not a job anyone seems to want to do. You can get a commercial driver’s license in 3, 4 weeks. Guaranteed decent income the rest of your life but yet in today’s paper there was a story about how someone who was a “communications major” was puzzled that they couldn’t find a job.
It i9s all about me…
Flying from 1950 to 1988 or so was great.
The lack of nanny state laws & silly stuff was much less so the stupid were much more self removing from the gene pool.
The only natural resource the planet has too much of is people.
Less government in most areas of my life.
Best thing was being born in the USA at that time. All the rest of the world got the shaft. Still that way for the most part.
If you just look at the distribution of people and their conditions at any time from 1950 on, being lucky enough to be born in the USA put you in the top 10% of the luckiest people on earth.
I like some of the tech but that is not near enough to compensate for the increase in the size of the government & it’s decline in being of the people for the people.
I feel sorry for my grandchildren.
Since I can’t change anything, I’ll go for the old days on some stuff, others, today is OK
I am going to disagree a little. Those are great jobs when you are young. But they are awful from 55-67 (or likely 70, for today’s 20-somethings). I mean, do you want to be unloading trucks into your 60s? And you can’t do them at all if you end up physically disabled–you shatter an ankle or develop terrible arthritis or develop MS. Then you are stuck: you haven’t the time or space or background to retrain. But if you have a desk job, all those things can be worked around.
Now, nothing promises that your mind will stay sound, either, but if that goes, you are screwed no matter what you do. But banking on your body holding together and holding together well up until the day you retire seems like a bad gamble to me, and it isn’t something I’d want my kid to do.
I think people are aware of this calculation and that’s why those jobs pay so well: they need to pay well enough to offset the fact that you likely can’t do them as long.
My brother drives a truck. He can do so because he’s divorced and his wife has full custody of the kids. But if he were trying to do the family dad thing, he wouldn’t be able to drive a truck. Not long-distance, anyway. I don’t blame people for wanting to be a full-time parent over being a full-time truck driver. (Not to mention, it’s a hard job. There’s no such thing as a fender-bender when you drive a semi.)
Seems to me that everything that was better “back in the day” came with a cost. McDonald’s french fries tasted better back in the day, but they were not as healthy as they are now. The middle class in the US was in great shape back in the day, but only because of their counterparts all over the world were suffering from war. Medicine was cheaper back in the day, but there was less they could do for you. There was less income inequality back in the day, but absolute poverty was worse. At least poor children today don’t have to go to school barefoot. People might not have been so individualistic and self-centered back in the day (at least that’s what they tell you), but busybodism and judgmental attitudes were more tolerated and encouraged.
I have nostalgia for the 80s because that’s when I was a kid. Sometimes I long for those days when you’d find kids hanging out at the park, roller skating and breakdancing. When I hear about kids too afraid to play outside, addicted to computer games, and medicated for type II diabetes, depression, and everything else, I do think of the “good ole days”. Maybe those kids, if they had been born “back in the day”, would have developed the same neuroses and worse, would have gone undiagnosed. But I am not naive to believe that the advances of today haven’t come with their own costs. Fifty years ago they will be more obvious to us.
Things were better back then for the white, straight Christian male. Other people, no.
Yeah, as long as you’re a white and affluent non-homo like panache45!
I feel like your generation reminisce about some sort of conservative Leave it to Beaver America that never was, except for perhaps a small portion of the population. You seem to conveniently forget or gloss over McCarthyism, Nixon, Vietnam, the Civil Rights unrest, the Cold War and some of the other issues of the day.
Also, in spite of what you might think, the entire rest of the world does not live in shantytowns and thatch roof huts.
Although being born in 1972, I have to say growing up in the 70s and 80s was ok. Not being constantly bombarded with information through the internet and 1000 HD digital channels, text messages and emails was kind of nice. It was probably like an edgier version of the 50s where we knew how awesome America was, but we all sort of thought by the time we grew up, we’d be fighting Russians.
I found the 90s to be kind of a glum time. There wasn’t any “Evil Empire” to fight anymore. There was also a bit of a recession in the early 90s and the dot come bubble hadn’t happened yet. That’s really the first time I think people had a sense that my generation wasn’t going to be as successful as the previous one. Those feelings were captured in films like Singles or Reality Bites where educated 20-somethings were entering the world directionless and under-employed. Or films like falling down where older Americans were no longer employable.
And that was before 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis. Now, in spite of all the high tech stuff, I think there’s a general feeling that unless you invent the next Twitface, Yahoogle or eMazon, or work as a Goldman Sachs banker because your parents sent you to Harvard Business School, the economy has mostly gone to shit for you. And the people who are supposed to do something about it would rather spend their time bickering on Fox News and CNN 24/7 because most voters are too stupid from watching the Kardashians.
I don’t know if things were actually “better” back in the day. Probably simpler though.
I don’t think they were. Things have improved even more for everyone else, of course, but this way of saying so implies that that improvement was at the expense of white, straight Christian males–as if women and minorities exercising rights cheapened the rights of those who already enjoyed those freedoms.
like Billy Joel said “'Cause the good ole days weren’t always good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.”
That being said I think most things are better now then in my good ole days of the 70’s.
Born 1961 - I started working at 15, and up until probably the mid 90s if I could manage to get an interview, I probable got hired 80% of the time. Now it is almost freaking impossible to actually get an interview, damned near impossible to get a second interview and freaking fucking impossible to get a job. I think one of the most horrible things is the tendency now to go ‘temp to perm’ where they are using temporary employment agencies to screen employees combined with ‘professional HR personnel’ where the person doing the interviewing has absolutely NO idea what the job in question actually needs. When the manager for the job was doing the interviewing, he/she generally knew what the job actually was, not just buzzwords.
I can also remember NOT being treated like disposable workdrones. I can remember training for a job that lasted more than a couple hours or days - counter human for Budget Trucks was a month of training and supervision. Warehouse for Service Merchandise way back in college for just Christmas seasonal was a full week.
54 here, and imho, most things are better. (“music” these days? not so much:D ). But almost everything else is so much better. Number one on that list, for me, is technology.
I was born in '53. Were things better when I was kid? Sure. I didn’t have a job, my parents loved me, took care of me and bought me presents. I didn’t know about diseases, civil unrest, war, etc. So things were great! At least for me. Not so much for the rest of the world.
Really? We don’t have to worry about any of those diseases? Stop all research immediately!
Since we no longer have to worry about those diseases then you must think that there’s no point in getting vaccinated, right?
Does it hurt much to use that kind of “logic”? :dubious:
And what do you think makes it possible to not worry anymore about them? Magic crystals?
No, we have not forgotten them. But McCarthy was eventually shamed, Nixon resigned, Vietnam ended, and the Civil Rights “unrest” did lead to significant improvements in Civil Rights (this did happen over a couple or so decades, of course.) That’s what we miss (along with riding in the backs of station wagons and pick-up trucks - I never said it was safer.)
We did and do not find Gulf Wars I & II, Afghanistan, loss of reproductive control, rise of the New Racism, and the general threat of theocracy an improvement.
Simpler? Well, we did have fewer television channels. And fewer investment opportunities. And communication options. But I think on-line banking trumps having to coordinated four email accounts.
This is sarcasm, right? Because you understand the reason we don’t (well, for a while didn’t) worry about most of those is because we got vaccinated against them?
We need to be concerned about them, but how many people do you know who have recently died from any of them, other than hypertension, cancer, and diabetes, which aren’t infectious diseases?
I know someone who recently had THREE interviews for a job that she didn’t even get. What kind of job was she interviewing for? A cashier at Best Buy. :smack: