The current issue is that there is an unprecedented percentage of elderly individuals in positions of power, and they are often reluctant to relinquish their authority. This presents a significant dilemma because many of these older decision-makers struggle to comprehend the reality faced by younger generations, including their own children and grandchildren. They frequently cling to outdated notions, such as the belief that a starter apartment costs only $400 or that well-paying jobs are readily available to anyone who simply shows up. This generational disconnect makes it challenging to address the evolving needs of society as a whole.
In Germany, there is a proposal that suggests individuals nearing retirement should work in a social service job for a year, similar to the requirement for young people who wish to avoid military conscription. This idea could potentially bridge the generational gap by reacquainting older individuals with the current societal challenges. However, it appears that the older generations, who previously favored reinstating the draft, are now hesitant to support this notion.
It's important to note that this proposal is currently hypothetical and would only be considered if mandatory military service were to be reintroduced
> there is a proposal that suggests individuals nearing retirement should work in a social service job for a year
And what about letting people live their lives without constantly micro managing their fate. What happened to freedom?
As long as I pay my taxes, don't infringe on the basic universal sane laws (you know, don't kill, steal etc) leave me the fuck alone.
I don't know for Germany but France, my country, starts to ask too much in exchange for what they're offering. Can't do this, can't do that, pot holes everywhere, prices and taxes skyrocketing, impossible to find a doctor that will receive you the same day and now they want to send us to die in Ukraine?
I think the problem is that society is not offering enough, not demanding too little.
I did my conscript service in Sweden at a time when only 8000 did. 10 years earlier, 50,000 did. I don’t think it’s a coincidence Sweden has now joined NATO. People are simply clueless about the needs of the Defense.
I have since moved to Switzerland where the military is still fully staffed by each generation. I believe this is a link that should never be broken.
Additionally, I believe countries like France and Germany are too big and should reduce in size, but that’s another discussion.
> military is still fully staffed by each generation
There was an interesting comment recently that discussed the development of a 'warrior caste' in the US military, which to no-one's surprise largely overlaps with poor people. https://hackertimes.com/item?id=40787714
When you are 65 then you already have done a lot for the economy of the country. The probelm at hand is that 30% of the workforce will retire in 2030 because of the baby boom in 60s. In the 2030s there will be many open jobs for young people to show their talent and AI will help them to be even more productive. There is no need to bother old frail people into social service. Very often people in their 60s are burnt out and will not be very helpful for the society anymore.
> Very often people in their 60s are burnt out and will not be very helpful for the society anymore.
Cynical takes being de rigeur on HN, I’m not surprised to read this comment here; but it’s sad nonetheless. I suppose in a very narrow economic context of “utility”, you may be right. But it would be a truly impoverished society that marginalized the non-economic contributions of its citizens 60 and over.
I’m just shy of one of those “people in their 60s” and volunteer many hours a week at a music school. I’d like to think that I’ll continue being useful to society in that way and in other ways less formalized.
Could you provide a link to these datasets? People always talk about data but never show it. I wanted to make an opinion but couldn't find the data at all - not counting obviously opportunistic inconclusive studies designed to support a predetermined political opinion.
The topic is so complex that I don't think I can satisfy your curiosity.
AI is just the next step of technology development, so it will just increase the rate of change we see for last couple of decades in the same direction.
And while technology is indeed helping people to be more productive, it also allows megacorps to capture the added value. You can see it in different economic benchmarks - that while there was an enormous economic growth in the past decades, there is increasing gap between classes, people outside of tech feel the decrease of their purchasing power and quality of life in general throughout the developed world.
There is a powerful systems forces in play, so it is not political, but rather more like a natural force of progress and especially automation.
If you're young and work in tech, you may notice that you are being disproportionately rewarded for your effort from the rest of the world for building tech.
> When you are 65 then you already have done a lot for the economy of the country
My hunch is that in some cases boomers have been and will continue decreasing their net contribution to whichever economy they live in, which shouldn't be the most important thing in evaluating the value of someone's existence, except that in this case everyone servicing them is also being squeezed by the tax system, and the same people they're servicing. Could be living in a boomer's basement making less than them but paying 1/2 your check, or in a managed rental that's owned by a reit that's invested in by their pension fund.
This kind of shallow dismissal is very hard to take seriously for those of us who personally know soldiers from NATO countries who are currently "on vacation" (officially) in Ukraine. This approach, by the way, has been borrowed wholesale from Putin's playbook in Crimea back in 2014. But officially you are right, they are not there.
Well, I happen to know people in the US military who have been on this vacation since the beginning of the year. I am not particularly social or well-connected, so the fact that I know someone like that means it's widespread. Downvotes or no, that's reality.
it doesn't logically follow from the fact that you know about a group that there are similar groups.
for example let's say you know a few people who work for the military and they happen to work at Area 51. sure lots of people know military personnel, but your sample is still pretty special. without a good representative sample we simply have no idea.
First let’s get one thing clear: NATO sending personnel is not France sending personnel. The two are distinct and anyone who would make a valid point in a conversation about this understands that.
Second, Putin’s playbook is to sow discord by introducing a bunch of FUD into the political discourse across the world, something which you are doing here. So the remaining question here is: are you doing so willingly, or are you just prey to the same?
Because this is HN, I always believe it’s the latter. Still, your comment is unsourced, your account is four months old, and all your historical comments are systematically pro Russia and/or peddling common Russian talking points that “get people thinking”. Not a good look, huh?
Leaving you and anyone else alone - be they young, old, male, female, blue, furry or even ... American - implicitly requires the continuation of politics that will make sure that you are in fact left the fuck alone.
You are probably not going to be surprised, but things are not going great.
I think you're misinformed or showing anti-Ukraine bias. No one would send their military there, but could get sent in aid to another EU/EEA/NATO member.
Anyway, I agree that mandatory drafting should not be reintroduced.
Doesn’t matter. If a real war starts you want a lot of men and the only reliable way is conscription. No one could have fought WW2 with a volunteer military. Ukraine aren’t relying on volunteers. Israel don’t rely on volunteers. You do the best you can with what you’ve got available.
Peace-time armies will not ask for that, that’s for sure, but when a real war is on the table (like it looks to soon be the case here in Europe) then things change.
This is definitely one of those citation needed comments.
Firstly, professional armies are recruited from the general population and are on average no better or worse than conscripts.
Secondly, the above comment completely sidesteps the moral aspects. Why should the burden of military service fall predominantly on the poor and the desperate? Why should decision makers be able to only send other people’s children to war?
To your first point, it really ought not require a citation to understand that people who have been training full-time for years make better soldiers than people you pull out of civilian life and ship off to the front after a few months, and who want nothing more than to exit the service.
There is no modern, professionalized army that wants conscripts. None. Conscripts are a liability, and a measure of last resort.
To your second, it’s far from just the downtrodden that fill the ranks of professional armies. In many countries, e.g. France (where I served), the upper classes of society (grande bourgeoisie and nobility) are over-represented in the ranks.
> Firstly, professional armies are recruited from the general population and are on average no better or worse than conscripts.
This isn’t true. The US and UK conscript armies of WW1 and WW2 were significantly healthier and better educated than the general population. Lots of people grew up in wretched poverty and had deficiency diseases or were malnourished or had parasites. Those people were rejected.
It is illegal for the US military to accept recruits with an ASBAB score of ten or below, roughly equivalent to IQ 83. The military is in some sense representative but it is not a random sample.
Why do you imply that non mandatory conscription means that the poor or desperate will be the ones to enroll?
In Romania around 2008 mandatory drafting was removed from the constitution and yet we still have an army. The reason why we have such a small army is in a significant part due to pervasive corruption in all of the state's structures, low salaries and abusive higher ups. We have an interesting documentary about the subject (has english subtitles) about the ridiculous state of the army due to reasons mentioned. https://youtu.be/0_YnxJJcC7M?feature=shared
That's a very un-European view that would mark you as crazy here. Nobody goes to the army to get a job, not even those who can't find a job, and the unemployment office won't try to suggest it - it's not considered a job here, it's a service duty.
In my country we don't have mandatory military service. The "employer of the last resort" is the unemployment office and welfare, not army. I have never heard of anybody going to the army for any other than duty/ideological reasons, desperation for a job might even disqualify you - they want people who are motivated to join the army, not poor desperate people looking for money.
I am in the United States. It isn’t a categorical truth here, but many people here have and do join the US military because that is the “ticket out” that they have access to. I saw it a lot in my high school. I had some friends who were good people but they were not terribly academically gifted, their families were poor, and college wasn’t a realistic option for them. Several of them joined the military in part due to the recruiters that would visit the school. During my senior year of high school one of those guys ended up being the recruiter that visited my high school. It was interesting to see a bit of a cycle there.
It’s almost a trope here. I expect that’s why the original commenter said that the military is the employer of last resort. In the US that is often the case for many young people.
Yeah I know it is in the US, but military recruiters visiting a school class would be a major nationwide scandal here, comparable only maybe to visits of some political or religious figures. The only approvable way is a moderated discussion where both positives and negatives are (must be) voiced in age-appropriate way.
The entire culture around the separation of state, its components and citizens is very different here. We really don't want another 40 years of dictatorship - best to stop it right at the beginning.
Different culture and society. Here you get paid better as a supermarket clerk with overtimes than a soldier, or clearly better if you get promoted from a clerk to/pick another role (shift manager, or warehouse work). And our desperate also use the travel flexibility to work in Greece, Spain, Italy, Germany, Denmark, than here. We used to be the source of manual labour during summer in many of those countries.
This topic was talking about conscription though, a measure of last resort.
If we really reach a point where conscription is required, it also means that carrying an uterus is probably irrelevant: it's either kill or be killed.
Hopefully that's never going to be a thing again in as many countries as possible
Yikes. You can't post like this to HN, and we ban accounts that do.
I'm not going to ban you right now because you have a sizeable history here and don't seem to have been in the habit of breaking the site guidelines, but please don't do this again.
Thanks for your kind words. Could you please show me the sentence or paragraph in the guidelines where 'post like this' is mentioned? Or must I assume that because this is an anglosaxon site, automatically the political correctness illness takes effect?
I’m fine with personal freedoms "American style" but you’re a fucking dangerous redneck if you ignore red lights. I see morons like that all the time and, thanks to them (not you I hope), I’m almost killed once a year.
I live now for a decade in a country where traffic lights are just a non-binding recommendation, and I never got almost killed or even hurt for that. You just have to drive slowly and watch and communicate with the other traffic participants. In some cases, morons are made, not born.
I think you are completely ignoring the single most important factor here, ge reason why more older people are in power.
The demographics in the West are heavily skewed towards older generations who had a lot more kids than their kids, who are now having less kids than their parents. The power discrepancy directly follows from that and in my opinion so does the disconnect between the generations.
The "retiree draft" is just an absurd proposal which will do exactly one thing: increase resentment and further disconnect.
It's not just demographics.
People tend to make social abd economic connections over time, and to be actual mover and shaker you do need key supporters.
That's where democracy also fails. The shorter you're around, the lower chance people heard about what you've done and who you are, no matter how good or bad you are at something.
(Same applies to functionaries often enough.)
But young people, who are more ambitious and less established are also more willing to take a chance on young and ambitious people. I don't see how this is unconnected to demographics.
Demographics play a part still having 70% of our government officials over the retirement age (*Germany) of normal people is a clinging to power problem.
It's only a terrible job if you want it to be we have more than enough government officials in the back ranks that miss 80% of sessions and get payed really well to just vote with their party. They should just have to retire when everyone else HAS to retire based on laws they introduced...
> unprecedented percentage of elderly individuals in positions of power, and they are often reluctant to relinquish their authority
Why are they reluctant? Because you eventually realize as you age that slow societal change is better than fast change. The young demand fast change aka “revolution”. Revolutionary change creates volatile societies and volatile societies don’t create progress that sticks.
When I was in my twenties, I was impatient and demanded immediate change. Now approaching my sixties, I want progress, but know that a slow trickle is better and would rather be patient to get there.
Older people have much lower "give a darn" so we do still need younger clueless people to show us the way we were when we were young, and that whatever that thingy was-- it was important.
These "outdated notions" are based on decades of experience and working knowledge. One should not discount that. One should never base quality on age alone. New is not always better.
EDIT: Of course, now I read the article which pretty much says the same thing.
The disconnect was always there in 20th century too, if you actually cared to look hard enough at your / peers previous generation. The more you steered from some basic life path the more friction there was, and not even going into various social minorities who can now actually live a decent life.
The idea that now young have it much tougher is simply not a reality in my surroundings, I had 1% of the options my children had and ie path to just freedom was where you risked your actual life. Some young just have little patience and want it all immediately, or otherwise they are failing in life and some form of communism needs to be installed promptly. Cant comprehend that social networks arent showing a reality, just few marketaeble slices of it. But this is largely failure of parents failing to explain to kids how world runs, what to expect and how to get what you want out of it.
Previous generations lived through world wars, famines, and other devastation. Those born in the wrong place also face unimaginable hardship today, but most of us have not been that unlucky. Still, youth unemployment in the south of Europe has been 20%-40% for the past two decades. You can’t blame people for feeling their prospects are grim when they see all their friends struggling in young adulthood, even when objectively speaking previous generations had to deal with far worse problems. The paradox is that when everybody has a lot of opportunity then competition becomes proportionally more fierce. That gives rise to the impression that things are getting worse when people should conclude the opposite: more people getting more opportunities means more competition. You can’t have upward mobility without commensurate downward mobility.
Problem is world isn't fair, some people do get it all for free, absurd/perverse scenarios happen all the time.
I think what's different in this generation is that it's becoming much more visible to everyone, so even if these are the outliers everything is judged accordingly. Also it's kind of making extremes more acceptable slowly because they are always in the attention sphere. Just look at the political spectrum - Trump really changed the game even here in Europe, politicians lost so much shame - stuff that would previously cause you to resign - now they just do some stupid spin, double down and get even more support from the tribe.
I'm mid 30s and I feel things have changed considerably in last 10 years, loss of shame in particular - once you get stuff chewed up by social media as the latest shock fad - everyone gets used to it so fast and it becomes almost normalized (not shocking at least).
They don't have it much tougher in life comforts, for sure, but it's not because of that they should be grateful and accepting of all the issues and injustices that plague societies.
People have always wanted a better world, and the young have a very different lens than you to judge that, it's absolutely common to become more conservative when you grow older because you lived through how the world was before, that world is gone and the before of the youth's future is right now, they will strive to make it better just like you might have had in your past.
An old man sitting down and pointing fingers at how the youth is corrupted compared to their golden days is a tale as old as time, you're just playing your part of this endless cycle...
Aristotle ~400 BC:
> “[Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances.
> They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.”
Horace ~20-50 BC:
> Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'.
We, their sons, are more worthless than they;
so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.
> The beardless youth… does not foresee what is useful, squandering his money.
You'll find many, many many many more examples of the same rhetoric across all human writing.
Old man yells at cloud, let the youth carry the fire of bettering societies, you already got comfortable and scared.
This is the first time in modern history where the younger generations are materially worse off than their parents were at the same time on a massive scale—as in, not just in localized areas due to specific circumstances, but in most of the western world.
Yes the proposal is quite interesting. But do you really think a 60 year old software developer will want to work in a social service job? He was working his ass off for 40 years in daily scrums or so and then he should be doing social work in a retirement home or hospital? Retirement is done of a special reason, because people want to stop working and not because they want to change into a social service.
My suggestion: Let people start part time retirement with 55 and train and consult the next generation that comes after them. Then the loss of knowledge is avoided and when they are 65 just leave them alone in their retirement. They have deserved it well. If someone wants still to work, good for him, but a mandatory social service sounds to me like slave labour and the votes at the next elections will come in. There is a reason why the ultra right are so strong in the east of germany.
The main issue is the health care system is pretty good at fixing physical hardware and quiet inept at upgrading mental software. There is another German propsal to stop funding hardware fixes if software upgrades can't be done. I personally think this is the right path.
The other issue is accumulated toxic damage we cannot fix at all.
When did we phase out leaded petrol?
(We haven't fully, but you get the idea...)
When did people mostly stop smoking carcinogens and heavy metals?
When did we start, or stop, using toxic azo dyes for clothing?
Or particular fireproofing or plasticizing chemicals that are endocrine poisons?
Or the latest plague, which hit a lot of people in the brain?
While any of those things is not predictive enough at individual level due to genetic variance, statistics of big numbers show delayed correlations that heavily imply causation, while high dose studies show obvious toxicity of this kind. And when such chronic damage happened 20-30 years ago there's not that much our medicine can do yet.
We cannot even reactivate a thymus (major gland of the immune system) well yet en masse. Or fix or reliably help livers.
I interpreted the post as an indication that hospitals have got good enough at keeping mentally absent old people alive until they die. It rings true. Certainly, not all of them are 'not there', it does not seem like a small chunk of the population either.
In Germany, there is a proposal that suggests individuals nearing retirement should work in a social service job for a year, similar to the requirement for young people who wish to avoid military conscription. This idea could potentially bridge the generational gap by reacquainting older individuals with the current societal challenges. However, it appears that the older generations, who previously favored reinstating the draft, are now hesitant to support this notion.
It's important to note that this proposal is currently hypothetical and would only be considered if mandatory military service were to be reintroduced