South Korea To Give $490 Allowance To Reclusive Youths To Help Them Leave the House (theguardian.com) 133
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: South Korea is to offer reclusive youths a monthly living allowance of 650,000 won ($490) in order to encourage them out of their homes, as part of a new measure passed by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. The measure also offers education, job and health support. The condition is known as "hikikomori," a Japanese term that roughly translated means, "to pull back." The government wants to try to make it easier for those experiencing it to leave the house to go to school, university or work.
Included in the program announced this week, which expands on measures announced in November, is a monthly allowance for living expenses for people aged between nine and 24 who are experiencing extreme social withdrawal. It also includes an allowance for cultural experiences for teenagers. About 350,000 people between the ages of 19 and 39 in South Korea are considered lonely or isolated -- about 3% of that age group -- according to the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs. Secluded youth are often from disadvantaged backgrounds and 40% began living reclusively while adolescents, according to a government document outlining the measures.
The new measures aim to strengthen government support "to enable reclusive youth to recover their daily lives and reintegrate into society," the government said in a statement. Among the other types of support are paying for the correction of affected people's physical appearance, including scars "that adolescents may feel ashamed of," as well as helping with school and gym supplies. South Korea also has a relatively high rate of youth unemployment, at 7.2%, and is trying to tackle a rapidly declining birthrate that further threatens productivity.
Included in the program announced this week, which expands on measures announced in November, is a monthly allowance for living expenses for people aged between nine and 24 who are experiencing extreme social withdrawal. It also includes an allowance for cultural experiences for teenagers. About 350,000 people between the ages of 19 and 39 in South Korea are considered lonely or isolated -- about 3% of that age group -- according to the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs. Secluded youth are often from disadvantaged backgrounds and 40% began living reclusively while adolescents, according to a government document outlining the measures.
The new measures aim to strengthen government support "to enable reclusive youth to recover their daily lives and reintegrate into society," the government said in a statement. Among the other types of support are paying for the correction of affected people's physical appearance, including scars "that adolescents may feel ashamed of," as well as helping with school and gym supplies. South Korea also has a relatively high rate of youth unemployment, at 7.2%, and is trying to tackle a rapidly declining birthrate that further threatens productivity.
Social anxiety (Score:2)
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the recent uptake in social anxiety ...
Why do you think it is "recent?"
Was there once a golden age when young people had no anxiety?
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Yes. Pretty much entirety of human existence, when what modern people called "anxiety" was beaten out of a handful of aristocrats who could afford to try that lifestyle and actually survive.
Everyone else starved if they tried to live that kind of life. So no one did. Turns out hunger is a really good motivator to get out and get some food.
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certainly young people 40+ years ago weren't that anxious about going outside...
Rubbish.
The difference is that 40 years ago there was nothing inside. Now there's an infinite stream of dopamine hits to swipe through.
(OK, there were books back then but only a small percentage of adults are readers)
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People had televisions, radios, even video games 40 years ago. And almost every adult was a daily reader back then, there were things called "newspapers" and "magazines" as well as "books" which people checked out from "libraries."
But yes, the dopamine hits were of inferior quality. You'd have had to live on only pizza, and perhaps most importantly your social isolation would've been total except for family -- whereas now people can be "socially isolated" while simultaneously following and being followed by
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People had televisions, radios, even video games 40 years ago.
Some good ones as well! https://www.imdb.com/search/ti... [imdb.com]
And almost every adult was a daily reader back then, there were things called "newspapers" and "magazines" as well as "books" which people checked out from "libraries."
Sure. And yes, things have changed.
But yes, the dopamine hits were of inferior quality. You'd have had to live on only pizza, and perhaps most importantly your social isolation would've been total except for family -- whereas now people can be "socially isolated" while simultaneously following and being followed by hundreds of people they interact with far more often than people interacted with friends 40 years ago.
I'm not certain that those dopamine hits were actually of low quality. The Commodore 64 came out in 1983, and a lot of people in here were learning programming on those bad boys. Even before then there were computers. And radios you could build and operate and talk around the world with. Sports was always good for quality fun, and then there were the young ladies of our appropriate age group.
Lots of things to occ
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And their was a lot more to do outside the house.
Now everywhere outside require a lot more money to do anything.
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I have never been too much of an outdoors person. The key difference is that today, I can stay inside for 99% of what I need to do, this was much less possible in my youth.
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I thought that the recent uptake in social anxiety was only limited to western countries.
So you never heard of Otaku?
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I thought that the recent uptake in social anxiety was only limited to western countries. It's interesting to see that it's more universal than I expected. I'm wondering what the cause is - certainly young people 40+ years ago weren't that anxious about going outside...
Young Men didn't have to contend with Instagram, Tinder, and OnlyFans 40 years ago.
There's a general slowdown in sexual activity for Zoomers, but it's weighted far more on the male side.
Almost any young woman could get a date, on demand. That's not the case for young men. Women have always been the more selective sex, but the Internet has accelerated this beyond belief. Combine this with a modern culture that teaches young women NOT to get married and have children, but to pursue a career instead (per the a
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I thought that the recent uptake in social anxiety was only limited to western countries. It's interesting to see that it's more universal than I expected. I'm wondering what the cause is - certainly young people 40+ years ago weren't that anxious about going outside...
Misguided parents trying to protect their larvae from any and all adversity. Not a minute of unsupervised activity, often using strong drugs that affect the larvae's developing brain. And adopting the "stranger danger" concept that any person you don't know is going to abduct and rape you, and males you do know probably will molest you.
Coupled with the assumption that you are abusing your female partner. There are horror stories of postpartum fathers getting bumrushed out of the birthing room while the n
Won't help (Score:2)
It won't help anything. People don't become hikikomori because of poverty. (Howard Hughes comes to mind as a counterexample.) I've spent some years off and on in hikiko-mode myself, the last being around 2020-21. Very easy it was to collect the stimulus checks, unemployment, and not leave the house.
Anyway, I feel this is a timely article as I've had this hyperpop track "Hikikomori" on repeat for the last couple weeks. If you think that's something you can vibe with, here you go... https://www.youtube.com/wa [youtube.com]
Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
More money to purchase League of Legends items!
Hikikomori is completely relatable (Score:5, Interesting)
The formalized human encounters of a tribal or human-centric industrial civilization have nearly vanished over the decades. If anyone knows this, it's us computer nerds. We have seen this coming für decades and by and large humanity as a whole is trailing our lifestyle design by 2-3 decades. The amount of "regular" youngsters I meet that are nerdier than I was at 16 is breathtaking. And I coded opcode on a portable sharp Pocketcomputer and deemed the C64 "too mainstream" ... Which, to it's credit, it actually was.
I see the problem this way: Cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk has become reality, more or less. And the one thing that isn't romantic about cyberpunk at all is the utter lack of sustained real and true human connection. We identify with some programming language or some profession in which we are Gods of the virtual world and then some service or soon some software bot takes our lofty high-tech priest position and we're out of a high paying cushy job and on the streets with little and (very) rusty social skills and contacts to buffer the experience.
Point in case: More or less by accident I bumped into social dancing (Argentine Tango)15 years ago. One of the last refuges where there still exists an actual formalized encounter between men and women. I didn't like the classic music and fancy attire wasn't exactly my thing either, but intensely hugging cute ladies for hours on end had me hooked like synthetic crack. I basically built my life around Tango for the following decade, starting at age 38, catching up on stuff I missed out in my youth because I was too busy nerding about, including finally getting my brains f*cked out by top-shelf ladies like some giga-chad. I did this in an age where nerdy male late bloomers can completely leverage a significant nerd advantage in sexual attraction vis-a-vis the ladies.
I'm not out and about 3-5 nights a week anymore, but it has become a core part of my repertoire in dealing with losses or bouts of stress in my life when they occur. It is scientifically proven that dancing Tango improved mental health (no surprise here) and reduces stress hormones.
When I finally ramped up Tango in summer of 2009, at age 39, my testosterone went up notably. My body hair got darker, my posture improved significantly, I got more and more secure around the ladies and other people outside of nerd-town, my metric for women I deem in my league completely shifted to the point where decades old crushes seem laughably unsophisticated and completely dropped of my list.
The social dancing scene is it's own little world, a bit like surfing, and there are quite a few people - men and womem alike - who have become addicted to this lifestyle and have become Tango-Nomads. And for the simple reason that they need a regular dose of hugs and close-embrace social dancing is a perfect way to get that.
Society only works when there are trusted and formalized modes of encounter between real humans. If those go away, hikikomori looks like a regularly normal reaction to me.
Especially when your core sense of value can be upended by some small shift in the stock market or some new piece of software that gets released and voids an entire market over night.
Re:Hikikomori is completely relatable (Score:4, Funny)
Some of us just do not want any close human interaction, formalized or otherwise. Humans are, for the most part, rather unshapely, ugly pieces of meat that you can't even eat.
Or at least, you shouldn't.
Re: Hikikomori is completely relatable (Score:2)
If you like food, you'll find that it's better to go to restaurants with someone.
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Just no. Everything about a restaurant--except for the food--is worse than eating at home.
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Most adults remember, in fact it's the only emotion many remember from their teenage years, this need to play with naked people. But I see tweenies buried in their computer games, having semi-anonymous online friends. I think that removes the skill for meeting people in public and tweenies actually avoid public spaces. I still see older teenagers out and about, so maybe, it takes longer for that 'naked people' drive to overpower the "unshapely, ugly pieces of meat" issue.
I agree with Ol Olsoc [slashdot.org], while a
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People are already disgusting enough while being covered with fabric, I always thought that was the whole reason we invented that, so we don't have to look at that meatbag.
It was one of the few social conventions that I could actually relate to.
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That's not really why people become hikikomori. It's more fundamentally about avoiding responsibility and stress. Lesser forms of it include things like refusing promotions at work, to maintain an easy job with lots of free time.
For some people that stress can come from social interaction, which makes them more likely to become hikikomori. It often seems to coincide with autism, possibly because people on the spectrum can find it very difficult to get by in Korean and Japanese culture.
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But I think that you missed a few human constructs that provide largely the same thing. Put it another way: there’s more than one way to skin a cat or meet a gal.
1. Speed dating. It’s a pretty big thing. Totally focused on modern formalized
Some general optimism on their future would help (Score:3, Interesting)
I can remember comments about people living through wars and how that would impact their decisions on life. If young men thought they'd likely be conscripted into fighting a war, and likely dying as a result, then they'd be less likely to pursue getting an education, getting married, and having children. Instead they'd do the minimum to survive, such as getting a menial job while living alone or with their parents. I believe the term for this is "learned helplessness". After a war, like what happened after World War Two, we'd see people take on greater optimism. Young men that might be petty criminals during the Great Depression would instead make long term plans and investments, something that would hold true whether they fought in a war or not since the future looked brighter once that threat was removed. They'd make the effort to learn a skilled trade, seek out more productive employment, start families, and so on. That brought an economic boom, and a baby boom.
South Korea has been living under a threat of war with North Korea or some other neighboring nation for a long time. On top of this are concerns that are seen more widely like global warming and COVID-19. I suspect the issue is they've been told for so long that there's little hope for a productive future that they don't bother to try. Maybe giving money for seeking an education or work would help. What would help more, in my humble opinion, is to create an environment where they see value in seeking an education or work beyond getting a government stipend. Stop scaring children to death over global warming. That doesn't mean we should lie to them, quite the opposite since the truth is we have many reasons to be optimistic. We solved global warming. There's as much of a self fulfilling prophesy about solving global warming as there is in global warming dooming humanity. If we tell them they can look to global warming getting so bad their bodies will burst into flames, only for those flames to be extinguished by rising sea levels, then expect them to not see much point in leaving the house.
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Sorry man. Fake it 'til you make it might work for religions, but it fails if applied to reality.
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Sorry man. Fake it 'til you make it might work for religions, but it fails if applied to reality.
I'm not sure how to interpret that reply in context. Do you mean that there is no solution to global warming? If so then choosing to live out one's days without children and rarely leaving the house is a logical response. No children means not subjecting another generation to global warming, a phenomenon that is claimed would lead to human extinction.
I'll see solar and wind power advocates point out that the cost of energy from wind and sun cost less, produces far less CO2 (to a point they consider both
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"So, which is it? Did we solve global warming or not? "
You are such an idiot that no response would even be productive, even if there was one. The answer is no, we have not. Of course not, and there is not "an answer" because it is a. complex problem.
"I repeat back to them the conclusion the made, that we solved global warming, and they get upset. "
Renewable energy advances are important, but the mere "costs less, produces far less CO2" claim does nothing unless it is sufficiently deployed and "less" is n
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Sorry man. Fake it 'til you make it might work for religions, but it fails if applied to reality.
Spotted the hikikomori! Good for you - please stay at home, off the protest lines, and allow the rest of us to solve the problems you love to wax apocalyptic about.
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Ya know, when I was young, I tried to solve problems. I really did. I wanted to solve social problems, I wanted to solve environmental problems, I wanted to "be good" in general.
Then I noticed: I have no family, I'll be dead in about 30 years, I'm rich, why the fuck should I care if people who are actually affected by it don't give a fuck?
Re:Some general optimism on their future would hel (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop scaring children to death over global warming. That doesn't mean we should lie to them, quite the opposite since the truth is we have many reasons to be optimistic. We solved global warming. There's as much of a self fulfilling prophesy about solving global warming as there is in global warming dooming humanity. If we tell them they can look to global warming getting so bad their bodies will burst into flames, only for those flames to be extinguished by rising sea levels, then expect them to not see much point in leaving the house.
I agree with you and will go further. "Stop scaring children over everything". Most children are not dumb. They see/hear what is being said around them and in the news. But they have limited processing capability to filter out what is fear mongering and what is a real danger. And because the 24 hour news web sites want clicks, they distill news items down to 1) The most fearful title or 2) the most acrimonious "us vs them" "Republican vs. Democrat" title. Add to this the social media websites of pushing dopamine pleasing "Likes" and the youth of today is just freaking TIRED. It's no wonder some of them don't want to interact with society, they just want to stop having their emotions pulled back and forth by a society that they view just wants to use them.
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Sounds like a parental problem. Who is "scaring children over everything"? Since when does society direct apocalyptic climate change messaging to children? News is for adults, adults supervise children. News does NOT censor what it provides to protect children.
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"I can remember comments..."
You understand that comments aren't facts?
"South Korea has been living under a threat of war with North Korea or some other neighboring nation for a long time."
That's why South Korea hasn't achieved anything, right?
"Stop scaring children to death over global warming."
There it is, a tell-tale sign of Republican derangement.
"That doesn't mean we should lie to them, quite the opposite since the truth is we have many reasons to be optimistic. We solved global warming."
LOL, so we shou
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I always thought potential for death/conscription was a major motivator to marry and knock someone up before going off to war....
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Climate denial and inaction is lying to them. Greta Thunberg addressed the real issue: Old people (AKA political conservatives) are not going to help us (14 year-olds) repair the planet. Us teenagers have to save the planet, starting now.
Time to Man Up! (Score:2, Funny)
Come on, men, us women have been doing the birthing for thousands of years. Now that "The Science" says that you can give birth, it's time to do your part for the birth rate. Shit I've already told my husband that he's carrying the next kid, and he's all like "but I caaaaaaan't" and I'm all like "shut up, liar, the science is settled and it says you can give birth, so throw those legs open and get to it", and he's all like, "I already told you, I'm not trans, I'm gay!", and I was all "what the fuck is the
They're not "reclusive" (Score:2)
Also not sure about South Korea but Japan has their. Shut ins too... And very low homelessness. Basically they've got extended family networks that take care of their mentally ill. In America the kids get kicked out to "set em straight with tough love" and wind up homeless. I suspect SK has a similar effect going on
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Clearly the hikkikomori aren't having problems paying their rent. Otherwise they'd be outside, albeit not by choice.
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Housing is unaffordable. $490 won't matter unless you do something about rent seekers.
Government-owned housing? Ban ownership of private property?
Something comes to mind... (Score:2)
This reminds me of the Mouse Utopia experiment [youtube.com]. If mice need private space to expand within, and can only function if they have it, then it's not too much a stretch to think that humans are similar.
Hell, our case is worse since we need not only physical space, but also an economic one to financially expand. If your "active" age is between 20 and 65 years old, but you know that you will spend about 95% studying then paying off loans, disconnecting seems only natural.
We have an overpopulation problem, yes. Bu
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Too much about the current state of this world is screwed up and it is blatantly obvious. Overpopulation is just one aspect. Anybody that looks at actual climate change predictions (you now, by actual scientists with on-target expertise) knows that putting kids into this world now is doing them a huge disservice. Careers are uncertain with a lot of established ones going away and new ones being not only few, but having high and very high requirements. On top of that, things are getting more and more complex
How (Score:2)
Other people (Score:2)
Making the taxpayer pay for other people's poor parenting.
Trends are just accelerating (Score:2)
As a nerd myself, I found dating really difficult when I was young. Meeting new people was difficult and women even more so. It didn't stop me from getting a job or pushing for other things but it definitely left me jaded. I totally get the whole incel movment.
I think what helped me out was I didn't give up on being independent and working my way up in my job. I made enough at 20 to live on my own and was eventually able to get a girlfriend. Eventually she left and I ended up dating older women because they
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This is what happens when you have way more people than you have any use for.
Korea has the opposite problem. The population is collapsing.
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You can have a collapsing population and still way more people than you need.
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This is what happens when you have way more people than you have any use for.
Korea has the opposite problem. The population is collapsing.
Oomph - I read up a little on this. While I doubt the population drop will continue on the present rate (like ending up at 12 million in 2120), it is kind of disturbing.
While some folks in here believe that there is no bad way to reduce the population - especially in Western and westernized societies, I think that South Korea might be showing some symptoms of what is happening here. https://www.dw.com/en/whats-be... [dw.com]
Which is to say - young males are dropping out. They tap dance around the issue, but the
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Fun fact: Maslow's hierarchy of needs was never presented as a pyramid, by Maslow. The pyramid came later, invented by a marketing exec who wanted to appeal to the egos of other high-level executives who like seeing themselves as being "above" teeming masses of people who are less actualized than they are and hence desperate to come work for them.
So, the takeaway is people do not need to fulfill their sexual desires (traditionally put on the bottom of the pyramid) in order to achieve the highest levels of
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We either make marriage financially and legally safe, AND make child-rearing affordable, or we will continue to get very little of both. It's as simple as that.
Exactly this. There is a running joke in the male community:
Women are better educated than men, receive priority in hiring and promotions over men, and increasingly filling top level jobs, and have no need for men at all any more..
Women most affected.
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AND make child-rearing affordable
If affordability was the problem, rich people would have the most kids and poor people the fewest.
This is the exact opposite of reality.
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Rich people choose between work and looking after kids.
Poor people do not have work and can look after the kids.
You're spot on with that assessment too. (Score:2)
One of the big problems with Western societies is that from day one, males are marginalized.
Bingo. Yepp, pretty much this. If you can't connect to your masculinity, slacking and going hikikomori is actually one of the main ways out.
This is where I think the manosphere is a god-send for society. I don't completely agree with every notion that floats around there, but the fundamentals about men rediscovering their mental point of origin ("inner flame"/"true male self") and not being ashamed of it and recogn
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One of the big problems with Western societies is that from day one, males are marginalized.
Bingo. Yepp, pretty much this. If you can't connect to your masculinity, slacking and going hikikomori is actually one of the main ways out.
This is where I think the manosphere is a god-send for society. I don't completely agree with every notion that floats around there, but the fundamentals about men rediscovering their mental point of origin ("inner flame"/"true male self") and not being ashamed of it and recognising ever-present fem-centric societal gaslighting and denigration of everything with the trait "male" or "masculine" is desperately needed.
It is with this spirit that western men must fully and completely recognize that the relationship between the genders is being renegotiated, and negotiate hetero-men absolutely _must_ these days, lest they go insane.
Not consciously recognizing that does cause hetero-men to become traumatized reclusives and shut-ins if they take the anti-male propaganda that permeates the mainstream these days seriously.
You have some excellent points.
One of the big issues with the increasingly strident misandryic narrative is that it has lost contact with reality. My sister who is a staunch feminist, recently posted new thing. Women being nice is to be ended. Women must become unpleasant in order to protect themselves.
Now - it is easy for her, having gone to college, yet only ever worked minimum wage jobs, and married a well to do man who conveniently died, leaving her a millionaire for no effort.
But that narrativ
Re:Epitome of this moment (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd hire women preferentially if all I heard from men was whining about marginalization of men and the masculinized of women. I hire people because they do the job, not because of what is between their legs or how much entitlement they happen to feel. The whole MR movement is a brain poison to young men who need character building and hard work more than they need Jordan Peterson YT vids.
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This is what happens when society says you have to have a perfect appearance. In a couple more generations we will have met the robots in the middle of the uncanny valley because we want to look more perfect(ly the same).
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Right now, developed world has the exact opposite problem. There are too few people. We desperately need more. And there's none coming, because birth rates were in the toilet for 40 years in many countries.
So now we're all starting to run out of workers. Very large part of inflation we're experiencing is likely permanent, because it comes directly from shrinking worker base pushing salaries up.
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So now we're all starting to run out of workers. Very large part of inflation we're experiencing is likely permanent, because it comes directly from shrinking worker base pushing salaries up.
Bullshit. Bull. Fucking. Shit. (I'm in a pissy mood this morning). The greatest part of inflation is coroporations raising prices because they can [hbs.edu]. Companies are reaping profits [cbsnews.com] not seen since the 50s as a result. This is a direct result of consolidation and lack of competition.
For example, there are four meat compan [reuters.com]
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And this is the standard "man screaming at the moon, and then calling himself a wolf" moment.
It's not "salaries". It's the cost of producing things. Cost to to produce things is far more than just the salary paid out to the people doing the work. It's finding those people, training them up for decades to be truly excellent at what they do, and then having them keep grinding at the things that need to be done. Germany is a great example here, because they have an extremely talented, experienced and in econom
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"It's not "salaries". It's the cost of producing things."
Funny, considering this is what you previously said:
"...inflation we're experiencing is likely permanent, because it comes directly from shrinking worker base pushing salaries up."
"...training them up for decades to be truly excellent at what they do..."
For decades? You think anyone is going to listen to stupid shit like that?
"So there's no people to do the work that was done before."
You mean "tens of percent smaller" not "no people", not that it's t
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They are getting really focused on trying to get people to procreate more. Except that no one knows how.
It's not complicated, but it is super difficult.
First, there's not the *need* for large numbers of children as there were in the past. Large families were common because it was common for several children not to make it past ten years old. Medical science, sanitation services, the absence of a need for farm labor, and a number of other societal improvements over the past century have meant that the necessity factor has been removed. I'm certainly not suggesting we revert to this, but families with four chil
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Housing is dirt cheap as long as you're willing to live in less than perfect luxury of a modern metro area. The main reason people congregate in cities is ease of life there. Unsurprisingly, this rapidly accumulates the costs of living. But only in those areas. Problem here is that modern people are trained to be lazy and helpless. Few if any people can fix their own things, much less actually do. Heck, even cooking is increasingly becoming something people don't want to do in the age of delivered restauran
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Not really, Moscow is one of the most expensive cities to buy a house in the world. St. Petersburg isn't cheap either. But if you move to some random small village in Siberia, it's dirt cheap.
So same thing of New York vs a small town in flyover states, or Paris vs a village in rural France. Logic holds regardless of nation you look at. This even works in developing world, be it comparing Beijing to a random Chinese village or Delhi to random Indian village.
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Nice story, but it doesn't really explain why were having so much inflation now while wages were actually outpacing inflation back in 2019.
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"Very large part of inflation we're experiencing is likely permanent, because it comes directly from shrinking worker base pushing salaries up."
And yet salaries aren't going up and earning differential has gone through the roof, precisely opposite of what would happen if what you claim is true.
Republicans love your propaganda, though. A reasonable solution to your non-problem would be increased immigration, wonder why you wouldn't propose that?
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Right now, developed world has the exact opposite problem. There are too few people. We desperately need more. And there's none coming, because birth rates were in the toilet for 40 years in many countries.
And they are only going to get worse. The combined factors of women waiting until their mid 40's to have children and men deciding that it is better to avoid emotional entanglements - a minefield for men today - geriatric pregnancy, and women having sex with a decreasing number of men, those men at the very top of their desirability https://www.yourtango.com/2016... [yourtango.com] we aren't going to get anywhere near replacement level.
The problem of course, is what are we going to do with all those surplus males? Euth
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Meanwhile, since it has become nigh impossible for a young couple to buy a house so they have a decent place to start a family, they won't start a family. They sure don't want to do it in an apartment with the rent eating half of their combined income. They can barely afford health insurance for themselves (or they're doing without already), much less provide for a child's needs.
Next up is education. At a time when higher education is becoming unaffordable, companies seem to think you need a 4 year degree t
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Meanwhile, since it has become nigh impossible for a young couple to buy a house so they have a decent place to start a family, they won't start a family. They sure don't want to do it in an apartment with the rent eating half of their combined income.
That's part of an excuse narrative. Somwhere along the line, the idea sprang forth that unless you have a big house to live in, and are financially upper middle class, you. cannot. have. children!
It has never been like that. The age of fertility happens to be at the same time as people are young, which happens to be at a time when they are not making much money.
My path is typical of the time - We lived in a mobile home for a little over the first ten years of our marriage, we saved money. We had our son
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Did the rent on the mobile home consume 50% of your combined income with student loan repayments eating a considerable portion of the rest?
Notably, you were actually able to save money for a down payment on a house, even with the expenses of a child. Since the cost of a house has gone up WAY faster than average income, even saving for the down payment takes longer.
In other words, if you waited to reach the very same milestones today as you waited for back then, you would still be childless.
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Did the rent on the mobile home consume 50% of your combined income with student loan repayments eating a considerable portion of the rest?
Notably, you were actually able to save money for a down payment on a house, even with the expenses of a child. Since the cost of a house has gone up WAY faster than average income, even saving for the down payment takes longer.
In other words, if you waited to reach the very same milestones today as you waited for back then, you would still be childless.
If you insist. I guess you are doomed, and there is no possibility of success. How did this happen - poor planning? I've always lived below my means while I was planning my arc.
There were people saying the exact same failure narrative when I was young. Inflation and real estate prices were going to make owning a house impossible, and it was impossible to save for retirement, and social; security was going to fail in the early 90's. Doom! Us late Boomers were well and truly screwed, Now we are hated becau
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I have a house and some modest savings for eventual retirement. I am GenX. My assessment is based on my 3rd party observation of Millenials and GenZ's situation.
Have a look at actual costs vs. income since the time you were getting started. It is objectively worse now. Note, I didn't say impossible, but by being objectively worse, it should surprise nobody who knows how statistics work that less people will take the path you did. You say they should pull themselves up ny their bootstraps, I observe that str
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I have a house and some modest savings for eventual retirement. I am GenX. My assessment is based on my 3rd party observation of Millenials and GenZ's situation.
Have a look at actual costs vs. income since the time you were getting started. It is objectively worse now. Note, I didn't say impossible, but by being objectively worse, it should surprise nobody who knows how statistics work that less people will take the path you did. You say they should pull themselves up ny their bootstraps, I observe that straps are now expensive optional feature of boots.
Exactly when did I say that people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps - that won't work homie?
Anyhow, I give up - it is not possible for millennials and GenZ to do this. I better tell my millennial son to stop buying his house.
Thanks, you saved him from embarrassment.
If you really want to know, I'm sure you don't but I'm typing here - after an early financial disaster he had, I sat down with him and explained money to him and how it works. He took a lot of notes, and followed my advice. A
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If you know that your chances of success are very low then it is not an irrational response to not strive if the striving is certain to include years of denial. Why deny yourself for years of the only life you've got only to have the goalposts get moved further away?
You know why? Because there was never a thing of instant gratification. So I lived frugally for a few years, So I drove my cars for ten years instead of five, so I kept my furniture longer. Today I buy my cars cash, my house is mine outright, and I vacation often. Didn't happen overnight though.
But the narrative that has a lot of young people think that they graduate from college, make halfway to 7 figures in the job they start the day after, buy a McMansion, and buy a new Beemer at their meaningful jo
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The presumption has always been that humans want to raise children. The emotional rewards of raising children are assumed to be the primary motivation for marriage and family. There is also a narrative about the desire for love motivating marriage and the children then happening as sort of a side-effect, though this is generally regarded as a sad story with an unhappy family full of parents saddled with unwanted children, so I don't think it was ever expected to be the driver of population growth. The dr
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Rather than try new social experiments we should return to what we know works.
1) Eliminate no-fault divorce. You do not get to exit the marriage contract simply because you wish to , and if you violate it well you will not be getting any sort of support or running off with half the assets.
2) Women need to be incentivized to have children as well as yes STAY HOME and raise them. We should alter the tax structure such that its financially non-viable to have two income households. Society should recognize ther
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> You want me to live my live? PAY ME!!!
"Hikikomori is currently viewed as a sociocultural mental health phenomenon, rather than a distinct mental illness. Given at least 1.2% of the population (around a million people) are affected, hikikomori is a significant social and health problem. Hikikomori is also increasingly being identified in other countries. The term is now used across the world to describe anyone who fits the criteria." - https://theconversation.com/hi... [theconversation.com]
"Although it is not currently class
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I am living my life. But if you want me to live my life the way you want, PAY ME!
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I am living my life. But if you want me to live my life the way you want, PAY ME!
They are staring at an abyss. The demographics are very disturbing, and if continued, make South Korea's population eventually hit around 12 million people.
They are trying to find a solution. But paying young males to move out of the house is not addressing the actual problem. You note it isn't a good answer.
What is needed is a honest investigation of why so many modern males are steeped in apathy. Because South Korea isn't the only place. But there are some third rails there. I'll not go into them agai
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I don't know why other people don't want to leave the house unless they have to, for me it is simply that I hate the company of people. The world would certainly be a nice place, I have no doubts about that, it's the humans that bother me.
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I don't know why other people don't want to leave the house unless they have to, for me it is simply that I hate the company of people. The world would certainly be a nice place, I have no doubts about that, it's the humans that bother me.
Different strokes for different folks, fo shizzle.
I don't know what you would call my outlook. I love being outside, but more than that, I don't mind being around people.
But, as introverts say, I need to get away to recharge my 'batteries". At least once a week, I have to get out beyond cell phone reach. My batteries recharge, I even fix problems. Maybe others do this - I dunno. I just think about what needs fixed, and the noggin processes it at a subconscious level.
Here's something - When around pe
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It's more that I don't act human and that this irritates humans. I seem to reside in the uncanny valley if I behave "normally", so I have to waste resources on faking human mannerisms. I consider this wasteful and that stresses me.
Human interaction via written medium, like here, is preferable for me. No need to pretend and most of all, if the humans I interact with start to bother me I can turn them off. I was advised by my lawyer to refrain from doing that in direct contact.
Re:Not bad (Score:4, Interesting)
I lived in a camper trailer parked on public land for two years.
No property tax but also no running water.
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Depending on the country you're in, this may or may not be legal.
It would not where I live.
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Depending on the country you're in, this may or may not be legal.
It was in America. Northern Virginia.
I have no idea if it was legal or not, but nobody bothered me. Perhaps the cops had better things to do.
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That's of course also a possibility.
Here, the tourism lobby is pretty strong, so anyone trying to escape the insane hotel prices by parking their van somewhere and sleeping there will instantly get a visit.
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Unluckily, that has become so popular that there is now quite a bit of push back from the local governments. There's a lot of working people who can't afford housing and with no running water, there's the shit problem.
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That depends on the state you live in. Many states DO have a tax relief program for property taxes for seniors, low income individuals, or disabled veterans.
Random examples:
https://comptroller.tn.gov/off... [tn.gov]
https://www.texastribune.org/2... [texastribune.org]
https://dor.wa.gov/about/stati... [wa.gov]
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Ya know, landlines gave people more of a need to stay indoors, I don't know if that approach has any beneficial effect...
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As if either of those were realizable or relevant...
Note that answering machines and voicemail (remember those?) obviated the need to stay tethered to that tether.
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Well, not really. What answering machines did was allowing to time shift messaging. Essentially it had the same quality as email has today.
If you were waiting for an important message, especially one where your immediate reply was important, back in the day your only choice was to stay at home and sit next to that phone.
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I lived through those times too, and there were plenty of times when we had to sit by the phone waiting for an important call. Today the phone sits beside us, wherever we choose to be. I consider that single factor to be a huge advantage in convenience.
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Then you were obviously a kid during those times. As an adult with a rotary phone, you would spend quite a few hours sitting near it with little else to do because you were waiting for some important call.
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Then kids would return to handheld consoles. Because those basically got replaced by cellphones. Which, by the way, are way more socially interactive than the consoles ever were.
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Well, they sure are socializing way more than I did growing up. Then again, if I had the ability to interact with humans during my teenage years, I probably wouldn't know as much about computers as I do.
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They probably don't have any choice. The supposedly well-adjusted adults working and living in society aren't producing enough offspring or economic output on their own to carry the country.
The hikkikomori are a last-ditch effort to turn that ship around.
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Not everybody is a psychopath like you. Some people (in fact about 99%) have some level of empathy for the suffering of others. And then they want to help. That said "coddling mental illness" is not psycho. It is _uninformed_.
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I see somebody desperately trying (and failing) to justify his inhumane and uninformed stance. Quite a combination of defects you have there! Well done! Let me add one more: From your low-ID I conclude that you not only wasted your own life, you made it count negatively.
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"On a related note: In population ecological studies of mammals, you only count the females. Males do not matter."
The idiots are out in full force today! How is this issue related to "population ecological studies of mammals"? Are Koreans merely a mammal population to you?
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Maybe this has something to do with it: https://www.bbc.com/news/stori... [bbc.com]
I mean, if women are not going to play along, then what can a guy do about it?
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$490 will go a long way when they move to North Korea.