Unexpected increase in Deaths

[RLLD 3,455]

 

[kutulu 1,542]

I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.  

[RLLD 3,455]

18 minutes ago, kutulu said:

I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.  

 

[Hardcore troubadour 12,594]

54 minutes ago, Ray Lewis's Limo Driver said:

 

Nafta and immigration have really done a number on the working class of this country. Jobs left and cheap labor came in. Not a recipe for success. But Wall Street and the Banks cleaned up. Hell, they designed it that way. 

[sderk 1,040]

1 hour ago, kutulu said:

I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.  

Is MDC still breathing? 

[kutulu 1,542]

9 minutes ago, sderk said:

Is MDC still breathing? 

Killed by Death 

[BiPolarBear 476]

18 hours ago, kutulu said:

I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.  

Word. 

 

 

[BiPolarBear 476]

Companies used to have pensions. If you spent your life working for them, you got taken care of, on top of Social Security. They replaced the pensions with 401Ks. Anybody lose a few dimes in 2008? 

Lots of young people get a shiot job and just stay there until they are old people. They will never own a home or have a decent car. They know it, and they give up, instead of figuring a way out of their situation. I have a friend whose son has been slapping subs together at subway for years. He is married now. To be honest, I see a lot of people in those low jobs that are not worth the little they make. The effort is just not there.

the plastic roses at checkout in the convenience stores told me a lot when I realized they contained a glass tube to use as a crack pipe. 

People give up. 

[Strike 3,950]

10 minutes ago, BiPolarBear said:

Companies used to have pensions. If you spent your life working for them, you got taken care of, on top of Social Security. They replaced the pensions with 401Ks. Anybody lose a few dimes in 2008? 

Lots of young people get a shiot job and just stay there until they are old people. They will never own a home or have a decent car. They know it, and they give up, instead of figuring a way out of their situation. I have a friend whose son has been slapping subs together at subway for years. He is married now. To be honest, I see a lot of people in those low jobs that are not worth the little they make. The effort is just not there.

the plastic roses at checkout in the convenience stores told me a lot when I realized they contained a glass tube to use as a crack pipe. 

People give up. 

Why would anyone have lost a few dimes in 2008?  The only people who lost money are those who panicked and sold, which shouldn't apply to people with 401k's.  Unless you were on the verge of retiring you should have been fine, and even those about to retire should have had a much more conservative portfolio than those with a bunch of years left.  Investing is a marathon, not a sprint. 

[MDC 5,877]

Really good video. Class stratification and stagnant real wages are the big culprits IMO along with this sense of political tribalism. I also suspect years from now we are going to be diagnosing a lot of social problems related to the Internet and lack of face to face or even verbal communication.

[Strike 3,950]

Video is pretty lame.  They spend the first half detailing stats that show higher income doesn't have anything to do with increased suicides.  Then they spend the last half indicating that the increased suicides only happen to people without college degrees.  They use that to go on the attack against capitalism.  Yet, they never (and this never happens in these type of videos) discuss one of the  main reasons wages are stagnant with the uneducated - Illegal Immigration.  Illegal Immigration has done more to kill wage growth than any other factor.  But who would expect a couple of Princeton Economists to ever acknowledge that truth?

[Frozenbeernuts 1,652]

33 minutes ago, BiPolarBear said:

Companies used to have pensions. If you spent your life working for them, you got taken care of, on top of Social Security. They replaced the pensions with 401Ks. Anybody lose a few dimes in 2008? 

Lots of young people get a shiot job and just stay there until they are old people. They will never own a home or have a decent car. They know it, and they give up, instead of figuring a way out of their situation. I have a friend whose son has been slapping subs together at subway for years. He is married now. To be honest, I see a lot of people in those low jobs that are not worth the little they make. The effort is just not there.

the plastic roses at checkout in the convenience stores told me a lot when I realized they contained a glass tube to use as a crack pipe. 

People give up. 

Most people should have more than recovered from their 2008 401k losses. I agree that pensions were a nice guaranteed way to earn a retirement, but have 401ks done a decent job of replacing them? I have no idea how it works in the white collar sector. In my line I get both.

[Frozenbeernuts 1,652]

5 minutes ago, Strike said:

Video is pretty lame.  They spend the first half detailing stats that show higher income doesn't have anything to do with increased suicides.  Then they spend the last half indicating that the increased suicides only happen to people without college degrees.  They use that to go on the attack against capitalism.  Yet, they never (and this never happens in these type of videos) discuss one of the  main reasons wages are stagnant with the uneducated - Illegal Immigration.  Illegal Immigration has done more to kill wage growth than any other factor.  But who would expect a couple of Princeton Economists to ever acknowledge that truth?

I was talking to some hands from Alabama who spent a year in Corpus Christi Texas. They were the vast minority down there being union. They talked about how many Mexicans worked in the plants and refineries and how little they were willing to work for. It's pretty sad to hear how many construction jobs we need, and then some desperate Mexican will undercut the wage system. 

[Strike 3,950]

8 minutes ago, Frozenbeernuts said:

I was talking to some hands from Alabama who spent a year in Corpus Christi Texas. They were the vast minority down there being union. They talked about how many Mexicans worked in the plants and refineries and how little they were willing to work for. It's pretty sad to hear how many construction jobs we need, and then some desperate Mexican will undercut the wage system. 

Yup.  I know people who are personally affected as well.  And, to be fair, one of my friend's owns his own construction company.  The only way he can stay competitive is to hire illegals.  Is is what it is.  The same academics lamenting the stagnant wages for the working class refuse to discuss this aspect of the issue, and it is why I pretty much ignore them. 

[naomi 343]

5 hours ago, Strike said:

Video is pretty lame.  They spend the first half detailing stats that show higher income doesn't have anything to do with increased suicides.  Then they spend the last half indicating that the increased suicides only happen to people without college degrees.  They use that to go on the attack against capitalism.  Yet, they never (and this never happens in these type of videos) discuss one of the  main reasons wages are stagnant with the uneducated - Illegal Immigration.  Illegal Immigration has done more to kill wage growth than any other factor.  But who would expect a couple of Princeton Economists to ever acknowledge that truth?

Although some really interesting thoughts were brought up in the video, I agree...although I wasn't thinking about the illegal immigration factor in response. ..Probably super relevant but the elephant in the room.

It did make me wonder if white guys without college educations in the suicide belt just loathe service industry type jobs, and it plays a small part in the overall situation, which is more of a psycho-social problem.

[naomi 343]

One of the most interesting comment threads I've seen (from the YT comments):

 

As a UK resident, one other observation I would like to throw in is the strange American pressure of having to be outlandishly happy all the time. You see it in the hyper response of audiences (audacious cheering and clapping) in political rallies and late night talk shows. I can only imagine that if your life was in real crisis, this hyped "happiness" in everyone one around you would make your life even more isolated and desperate.

-I tell my fellow Americans this all the time. The idea of positivity and always being happy is well intended but has terrible consequences. If you put on a face all the time and try not to feel "negative" things, you eventually become numb and tired, and you lose some empathy for people who are feeling those things.

-You should come to any latin country, people here are always happy and in a good mood and we view Americans rather todo serious for us, or selfish , self absorbed....

-Image is more important than reality in the US.

-Very astute observation. I didn't realize how emotionally stunted and one dimensional we are until I lived in England for a few years.

-Definitely. This effect is made all throre powerful by social media.

-This was one of Greta Garbo's complaints when she came from Sweden to the U.S. in the late 1920's.  She was genuinely unnerved and even terrified by all the incessant smiling and garrulousness of the Hollywood types.  Add to that the fact that she had no clue what they were saying, unless it had been interpreted.  "The Dumb Swede", as she was called, almost abandoned Hollywood, but then she hit it big.  Maybe more and more of us are becoming like Hollywood types.  Not me, of course.  I don't know.  Maybe it's the tyranny of bourgeois niceness, as Camille Paglia has said.  Whatever its origin, it needs to stop.  Now.

-Because it is a veneer. As a descendant of Latin Americans, I feel we are also happy but we also show sad and all the in between rainbow of emotions. The one thing is we aren’t lonely very often. Even if you try to get your own space everyone is in yours and know when something isn’t right. loneliness is a killer.

-That is the entertainment brain-washing that Americans have been under for years! This works to keep people in a state of stupor.

[naomi 343]

The supposed lack of community with Evangelicals, something that mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, and I'll add Orthodox Christianity doesn't have, is of interest to me.

I'm not Catholic, Orthodox or mainline Protestant which in the end means not part of a 'church system' that has a global hierarchy. When you're not part of any of those, you would think a main difference would be that you don't have a big structure of extra-biblical thought that you esteem.

But, I take it that most Evangelicalism is just as man-based, only in a marketing and self-help or "prosperity gospel" sense. It's a lifestyle machine based on faith pretense. It may not be glued together with layers of extra-biblical doctrine of men, but it's not more pure for that either.  There is an air of community in the approach but I can see how deep down people know there's no actual community.

[Frozenbeernuts 1,652]

How Americans always have to put on an image is disgusting. Social media is a cancer. It's baffling that people post mundane things, thinking that someone actually gives a flying fock about what they have to say, when they themselves don't give a fock about what anyone else has to say. People are just flat focking stupid in general