Maybe people got tired of the old Socialism/Capitalism debate?
[QUOTE=Zeriel]
I’d say it’s almost the opposite–as has been said upthread, you can vilify socialism when you can pretend it’s all a Soviet plot, but once it becomes “socialist” to advocate for single-payer healthcare and a top marginal tax rate of 39%, “socialism” doesn’t mean anything particularly bad.
[/quote]
That’s not really “socialism”.
Socialism is where all the lazy people you have been complaining about get to enjoy the same benefits as you do.
What people REALLY want is a health care system that is efficient and fair and isn’t designed to put massive profits for insurance companies ahead of patient wellfair. Assigning inflamatory terms to it is a tactic to make dumb people act against their own best interest.
You think the world changes that much just because we have iPads and social networking? **Zeriel **still has people working with FORTRAN. That language was obsolete 20 years ago.
Let me ask you this. If the world changes so much, what do you plan to do for a career in 5-10 years? Do you plan to start a brand new career alongside the next batch of 22 year old “driven to excellence” college grads?
That was my point in its entirety, hence the scare quotes.
Hijacking the hijack, actually, the last revision of the Fortran standard just came out in 2008 (proposed)-2010 (officially implemented as the standard). It remains a very good language for certain engineering simulation tasks.
Granted, the guy I complain about writes his code to the FORTRAN 77 standard, specifically because it only allows six-character variable names (the better to obfuscate with!).
There is certainly a lot more job mobility these days. But even as one of your links suggest, those statistics can be misleading. What constitutes a “career change”? If an attorney leaves their firm to sell litigation software, is that a career change? It’s a different but related job in the same industry.
And from what I’ve seen, people who hop from job from job, often end up making a series of lateral moves doing the same exact thing. You generally have to be at a place for some length of time in order to move up.
And those stats are probably highly skewed by the high tech field and low-level service jobs. Other industries don’t change jobs every 18 months. You won’t make partner changing law firms every year. Nurses, accountants, cops and pilots don’t change employers every year (AFAIK).
So my choices are a FORTRAN programming failure or a successful iOS programmer?
The world of technology will change a lot in even 10 years, if you are successful or not, knowledge and experience can be leverage but it’s WHAT you learn not how long you’ve taken to learn it. No matter how you slice it, a ‘failure’ isn’t worth consulting no matter the age.
Though I’ll grant that’s a selling point when hiring good world weary bartenders or blues musicians pouring out their woes on the tear stained pages of their lyrics.
Based on what? What they’ve just learned in school or on Wikipedia? Because new technology lets them digitally pontificate to anyone who already agrees with them? What experience do young people have with the world that they are qualified to “understand it” better than people who have been actually living in it longer?
“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
-Winston Churchill
"Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. "
-Thomas A. Edison
“The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try. I would never promote to a top-level job a man who was not making mistakes…otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.”
Peter Druker
“My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”
-Abraham Lincoln
“Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.”
-Benjamin Franklin
“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”
-Michael Jordan
“Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”
-Henry Ford
The chairman of the United States House Committee on Science, Space and Technology is Ralph Hall, 88 years old. Nevermind the man developed in the coming age of radar, need I cite a statistical analysis of the cognitive abilities of your average 88 year old?
Appeal to Authority which is a laughable excuse for rhetoric around here.
It isn’t nearly as relevant now, but I think foreign policy had a big role in creating a new progressive movement too. Now that the war in Iraq is over, Bin Laden is dead and torture is illegal again it isn’t that important but during the Bush admin if thoughtless, arrogant neoconservativism is what passed for republican foreign policy then a lot of people were drawn to the exact opposite. Young people started drifting away from the GOP before the economy collapsed in 2008. In 2004 they (18-29 year olds) went for Kerry by about 10 points. In 2006 it was a 22 point margin. By 2008 it was about a 34 point margin. However that margin has narrowed again, but it is still bigger than it was in 2004.
With attitudes like this, is ANYBODY surprised that young folk want nothing to do at all with the paradigms and politics of the previous generation?
Out of curiosity, did you think like this when you were younger? I want to know how old you were when you got sour on youth and its advantages, so that I may be watchful in my own life.
In the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, these lefty under-29s would be the Millennial Generation, a Hero or Civic generation (the last such was the GI Generation that fought in WWII). FWIW.
Most likely some obscure person you’ve never heard of and never will, who is lucky if he or she got so much as a “good job” in return for inventing the company’s product, while the person or people with fancy titles and large salaries take the credit and the profit for his or her work while doing very little of use themselves.
It depends on whether the new stuff the kids bring to a company even existed back when we old experienced people were coming up. And don’t neglect the unfortunate fact that most people working don’t have the time to learn as many new things as someone in college does.
Your 40 year old PhD CEO may have invented the old products, but if the is busy inventing new products he is a crappy CEO and probably a crappy inventor. He might give input, he might give inspiration, he may have the final say, but if no younger people are involved in innovation your company is going to be in serious trouble.
As far as the quotes, while it is true that someone who never fails isn’t daring enough, it is also true that someone who never succeeds is daring too much.