Our kids are in another trough.
Daycare is really expensive if you don't have low standards.
Locally, the Gen X contingent is especially small since the economy crashed when we were kids. Parents moved and took the middle-aged of today with them.
I'm not sure if demographics played into it at all, but I certainly got lucky in my career choices/opportunities. Got hired for my first full-time job at a largely subscription-based publication just as print advertising was about to fall off a cliff. Started covering a famously boom/bust sector early enough in the boom to make lots of good contacts and to build experience before the bust, so that I was spared the worst effects of the bust.
I suppose I was theoretically demographically unlucky when it comes to higher ed - as a member of one of the first classes of the undergrad tuition fee era. But a) my family was well off so it wasn't really an issue, and b) fees back then were nothing compared to what they are now.
I've boggled at how much more competitive college admissions were for my children as opposed to me, and come to think, I was dead center of the Gen X trough.
I misunderstood the OP. In raw numbers there were more Gen X and Millennial voters than Silents and Boomers. In terms of voter turnout (people that voted as a percent of eligible voters) the oldies still beat out the young'un's
Being in a trough is weird. I remember growing up, a lot of schools in the area were closing and/or in really shitty used-up condition. Five years behind me, schools started getting reopened and rebuilt.
5: yes, sorry, I was trying to say absolute numbers.
I'm also pretty close to the middle of Gen X and probably benefited from that when it came to college admissions.
As far as generational luck, it's a mixed bag. On the one hand, having one's teenaged years overlap with the scariest period of the AIDS epidemic kind of sucked. On the other hand, the 90s now look like a pretty nice decade to have spent your 20s in.
It's pretty useful to sublimate your youthful fears that sex = death by making jokes about Tinder being useful for kidney trafficking.
I have to say, being able to hop on board the very last part of the '90s tech boom probably made a huge difference in my career, even if I did spend a large chunk of the early 2000s looking for work.
At least I was able to get the experience under my belt. Also, I was ridiculously overpaid for about 18 months, which was nice.
I was in grad school/postdocing during the "get ridiculously overpaid for basic html skills" window of opportunity. Since I was setting up our lab's website for free, I sometimes regret not trying to make some mad $$$ on the side.
I think I've finally caught up with the salary that Microsoft offered me in 1999, with a BS in math and zero computer skills. Or I'm within just a few $K of it.
I sold out only last year. It's probably why my blood pressure is high.
I've boggled at how much more competitive college admissions were for my children as opposed to me, and come to think, I was dead center of the Gen X trough.
Don't kids apply to like 10 times as many colleges as they used to, since you don't have to do an elaborate application for each one?
Eventually every kid will apply to every college and the colleges can finally just get together and assign kids to colleges instead of trying to read each other's minds.
Do high school kids still get 1,500 pieces of junk mail asking them to go to small colleges Minnesota?
Striking example: my high school graduating class had 360 kids. My sister, nine years behind me: 682.
My high school graduating class had 17 people.
15: I was just about to ask whether the deluge of college junk mail declined once we were out of the Gen X trough. I can still remember the masses of mail I and my friends got. Some of it was probably even from Minnesota.
15: Yes! My son is doing this right now and getting all the mail. He doesn't want to leave the state, though.
As I remember it was a ton of in-state junk mail from Pennsylvania colleges, a couple from Stony Brook, and about 15 pieces each from St. Lawrence College and Oklahoma State.
Due to dropping out of university, going back, then working for a few years, and then doing postgraduate study in two chunks, I kind of hit all of the potential shit points. I'm a Gen X person, who hit certain milestones at the same time as the "millennial" cohort. The most important being going on the proper job market right after the financial crash, and entering peak earnings when I _should_ be buying a house and saving at a time when that was almost impossible to do.
That said, I think people 20 years or more younger than me, have it worse.
I'm a (late) baby boomer. We and consumed all the good stuff and left those who followed with high tuitions, shitty medical care and Donald Trump. Sorry about that.
21: I suppose the main generational shit point I participated in was the great real estate crash, which left me with an underwater mortgage that took years to finally get rid of without owing money.
To this day when I hear someone talking about buying instead of renting because home ownership is such a good investment, I have to resist the urge to punch them in the face.
24: Oh sure, in Pittsburgh. Cleveland was a different story. I blame Drew Carey.
The outlier far-away junk mail that sticks in my head is Tulane. Which wouldn't have been out of the question except that my father didn't want me to go far away due to 9/11 (yeah, I dunno), and he had a very strong bias against schools south of the Mason-Dixon line.
22: Are we about the same age?
I'm sure I still don't make nearly as much money as heebie was offered by Microsoft in 1999, but I've never had any serious difficulty finding employment and mostly making a living wage. It's easy to imagine that I could be doing a lot worse, but then I suppose there's still time for that.
Eventually every kid will apply to every college and the colleges can finally just get together and assign kids to colleges instead of trying to read each other's minds.
That's roughly how it's done here*. Generally you do one UCAS application form before your A-Level results are in and send it to a bunch of universities, some of which may do interviews on top. Your school will tell them your expected A-Level results. You may or may not get an offer from one or more of them, contingent on achieving your expected results. If you don't, or don't get an offer, you go into "clearing", where universities advertise empty spaces with their requirements.
* Was when I was an undergrad anyway. It's probably changed.
Early Gen X and like ttaM having a bit of a varied work/school history I also hit all of the shit points. My significant worry about landing this good gig overseas i that I'm not paying into SS, that and the mandatory 60 year old retirement age here. I should probably start seriously looking for something stateside in a few years but I don't really want to go back.
I'm heartened by the "OK boomer" catchphrase. (I think of it as applying to all conservative and/or resistant to reform, of any generation.)
AIMHMHB, I'm a late boomer who procrastinated myself into the Gen X economy. (I use '60-61 as the cutoff, and will fight anyone arguing for 64). Various privileges kept me more or less afloat in the downturns in 82/83 (college grad) 91-92 (law school grad) 00-01 (partnership) 09 (starting a business).
29: Unchanged so far, though it's all done online now. Tatsu submitted his application yesterday, after we wrote and rewrote the hell out of his personal statement the night before. The length of that, and the fact that he doesn't get to rank his five university choices but just lists them in alphabetical order, are the main differences from when I was applying in the early 80s. (Fuck. I really am getting old.)
I've been working steadily since 1996, leaving aside one year of part-time work while failing graduate school a second time. I'm sort of tired, but also work is less stressful than everything else I have to do.
I use '60-61 as the cutoff, and will fight anyone arguing for 64
I'll take you up on that. I was 15 when Thatcher was first elected in 1979, and see myself as among the very last of the boomers because I have a political memory of life before her. When I was in my 20s, people born even a year or two later who came of age under the Thatcher government felt like a different cohort, more likely to accept the status quo and to focus on their careers than to try and change things. Now it's boomers who are the selfish, materialistic generation, but in 80s London it was my age group that was idealistic and Gen Xers who were cynical and disenchanted.
I would like to draw a distinction between 'cynical and disenchanted', which I'll own for Gen Xers, and 'materialistic', which I don't know that we're more than anyone else.
I'm a Gen X-er however you slice it but as I've argued here and elsewhere many times before I think the cutoff should be whether one (as an American) has a memory of the JFK assassination. So I agree with Charley.
That seems way too early -- wouldn't that mean the boom ended in about 57?
Seconding 36. Maybe it's a difference between the US and the UK? In the US, the late boomers were the yuppies who defined the "greed is good" 80s.
I have a very small house, despite selling out, because I'm cynical and not materialistic.
37: I don't even have any memory of the RFK or MLK assassinations. My earliest memory of an historical event is the moon landing.
Seconding 36. Maybe it's a difference between the US and the UK? In the US, the late boomers were the yuppies who defined the "greed is good" 80s.
That might be it. I think 1990s British youth culture was associated with hedonism much more than US youth culture with all our grunge and slackers and whatnot.
35 It's primarily cultural, so you'd expect different cultures to give rise to different dividing lines. I should have been clearer: I think the American white middle-class divider is 60.
It's a suite of things, from Kennedy to Vietnam live on TV to the moon landing. And it's not individual -- lille kids were at Woodstock, not many people from North Dakota made it there. It's a composite. Does not being precise like, say, astrology, make generational theory useless? I would say yes, for nearly every purpose
When they reinstated draft registration, they decided not to go back to when registration stopped, but went to a line that excluded boomers.
I'm usually oblivious to all these things, but I do remember the "He who dies with most toys wins" t-shirts in the 80s, and the college students sitting on the sidewalk like homeless people in front of Insomnia coffee house in the '90s.
47: Sorry, should say, "He who dies with the most toys, wins".
The idea that a theory the posits a feedback loop between age cohorts and shared cultural experiences would peg Americans, English, and Germans as having had the same experience in WWII and its aftermath makes that iteration of generational theory less reliable than astrology.
We share the Beatles, obviously, and David Hassellhof.
(Just yesterday, I found myself explaining to an old Millenial why The Big Chill was something of a milestone, in white American boomer culture.)
I remember The Big Chill from high school.
Having nostalgia for the formative youth experiences of the boomers shoved down our throats was one of the formative youth experiences of Gen Xers. We were very meta.
I was twenty five before I could name The Beatles. My parents were too old for that.
Mine knew who they were, but thought of them as hippie music. And they meant 'hippie' to sting.
53: Now that is a generation gap. When I was 2-years old, my parents would play "I Want To Hold Your Hand" at parties, to show off my dancing.
My dad always mentioned that he successfully defended the first guy in our county who was arrested for possession of marijuana. He did it for the usual reason, the kid's grandparents had money.
I'm heartened by the "OK boomer" catchphrase.
I can't tell if I should standpipe or not.
53: My parents were too old for the Beatles too(and were only interested in classical music anyway), but the music scene in my home was dominated by my older siblings.
Anyway, nobody was very big on hippies when I was growing up.
52 I'm sure I'm on record saying it's totally bogus that when I go to a restaurant or skiing or the grocery store, they're playing music that was a hit at least decade before any of the staff, including staff picking out the music, were born. Your Mother Should Know was supposed to be harmless fun, not a prediction.
I'm glad I didn't; Minivet was referring to something totally different than my association.
I think '63 is the cutoff for the baby boom, just because that's when my younger brother was born, and he's not one of you Gen Xers.
I know people my age (born 1960) who profess to remember the Kennedy assassination. I'm like peep in 43 -- the moon landing was the first big event that made an impression on my mind. I was aware of the existence of Dr. King in real-time, but not his death.
The article I linked in 22 does something that is both common and annoying: It illustrates the boomers' selfishness and destructiveness with a picture of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators. Today's asshole boomers weren't generally the ones dancing at Woodstock or whatever back in the day.
Yes. The better ones were more likely to die younger. Or at least the poorer.
The quintessential boomer that went from yippie peace activist in the 1960s to "greed is good" businessman in the 1980s was Jerry Rubin. He was born in 1938.
The first current event that I remember is the Challenger exploding when I was eight.
The Silent Generation liked ice cream.
I hope that doesn't make me a millenial.
66: and yet they slurped terribly.
66: Jerry Greenfield (and Ben Cohen) are actual Boomers.
"Baby boom" refers to the specific phenomenon of the generation born to people sufficiently prosperous to marry young, and insufficiently technologically advanced to limit their families. In the United States, the baby boom began in Spring 1946, nine months after the American soldiers began to return from the war in Europe. It ended on March 23, 1961, nine months after the Pill was first commercially marketed.
71: never mind, i guess you would have been 3. I misremembered how close together those were.
71 is probably the first thing I can remember. We went outside and played like assassins, but with rubber band guns.
OT: David Nunes leaked the whistleblower to other Republicans.
I think the Iran hostage crisis might be the first political event that I actually followed. I certainly heard about others before then, but they didn't make much of an impression on me.
Actually, I remember Reagan's election also.
Anyway, I'm guessing you can't blame anyone but Gen X for Nunes.
75 sounds right to me. Maybe not the initial hostage taking, but the news having the days counted off that they'd been held. And then the election.
Actually, come to think, I just barely remember a babysitter saying something about the 76 election. She was voting for Ford, because it was disloyal to vote against the President.
74. Of course he did. They're all horrible.
I had a friend who told me that if Reagan was elected, his mom would be fired. That turned out to be wrong, but on the larger point about Reagan, he was correct.
And I will always remember my mother's reaction to being told Reagan had been shot:
"In the head, I hope."
We're a bloodthirsty people.
My earliest memory from the news is, I think, the death of Sid Vicious. I have some vague memories of the Callaghan government, but they are very unspecific.
I swear I can clearly remember Bill Murray announcing that Afghanistan had just been invaded at the end of an episode of Saturday Night Live. But it seems like it should be easy to find some reference to something like that on the intertubes, and since I can't, I'm no longer sure it actually happened.
Gen X has shit politicians. I blame Alex P. Keaton.
82: I'm not sure I properly remember Sid Vicious, or just after-the-fact talk about it. I remember John Lennon though.
I find a lot of childhood memories of newsworthy events are wrapped in uncertainty in a way that closer to home things aren't. There are a few I have clear memories of, say sitting in a particular room with the news on. Others seem a bit too out of place and time to be certain they are true memories, especially of things that later get repeated (e.g. newcasts) in popular media for years.
I remember John Lennon. I also remember a bunch of yellow ribbons tied around trees when the hostages were released from Iran. I guess those things both happened within the span of about six weeks.
I remember John Lennon though
My sixth grade teacher absolutely lost it. We came in to find her weeping in the front of the room with Imagine on the record player playing over and over again. None of us knew what the deal was, so we sat quietly for a really long time and then someone asked if we could get her some water or something.
86: You have no idea how deep the conspiracy goes.
I was watching Monday Night Football when Howard Cosell reported Lennon's death.
One of my high school best friends lived across the street from the Dakota and really really hated the throng of mourners singing tunelessly all night every December. He would try to drown them out by aggressively playing harpsichord, but of course the harpsichord isn't an ideal instrument for drowning anything out.
The boomers who went to woodstock or tuned in and dropped out bought condos in the village or painted ladies in SF and now have the 'all are welcome'/'no building anything anywhere' signs. Most boomers felt left out by that, and are still upset that someone else had fun when they were too afraid to.
90: should have looked into pipe organ.
My parents didn't watch TV news so I got the news from school. I don't think I remember anything before the Gulf War.
The death of Kurt Cobain was an incredible deal in my middle school. A group of 8th grade girls got special permission to make a bunch of collages in his memory that sat in the lunch room until the end of the school year, which was only about 6 weeks later.
I'm a little younger than Ned but my earliest current events memory is also the Gulf War.
The boundary between Millennials and Gen Z is still hazy and will be for a while, but when it eventually becomes more defined I think a significant dividing line is likely to be having a personal memory of 9/11.
I remember Elvis, but I never thought he was much good. I think this may probably be a useful dividing line between boomers like me and whatever came before.
When you look into the pipe organ, the pipe organ looks into you.
I remember when Lennon died not having any idea who he was.
I remember the Daily Mirror (from which I learned to read) calling on Attlee to resign. My Iraq was Suez; we kids thought there'd be a war and America would sit it out or be on the other side. Buddy Holly was my John Lennon. I benefited from University expansion, grants and the second ever undergraduate course that included computing.
And I will always remember my mother's reaction to being told Reagan had been shot:
"In the head, I hope."
We're a bloodthirsty people.
I just learned about when Reagan "joked" about wanting botulism to break out when the Hearsts were distributing free food to the poor under the extortion of the SLA. Seems pretty mutual.
I guess that explains Paul Ryan's "Bulging Can Food Drive."
I'm on the X/Millennial cusp. The first big political memory I have (other than attending anti-nuke rallies) is of the Iran-Iraq war. A reporter on the news mentioned underwater mines, and I was scared that they were talking about the the ocean near my house.
I always thought it was strange that I don't remember the Challenger explosion, because it's certain my kindergarten class would have gone out to the playground to watch for the shuttle--we did for every other shuttle launch that I can remember. A very Florida memory. I also remember being pissed that I couldn't go with my parents to Cape Canaveral to protest against SDI/Star Wars because I had come down with the chicken pox that week.
I've boggled at how much more competitive college admissions were for my children as opposed to me, and come to think, I was dead center of the Gen X trough.
As I understand it: at the level of competitive-to-highly-competitive schools (and I'm not sure where exactly those lines are drawn), the competition is now insanely fierce. But once you move beyond those lines, to those places where the bulk of American college students actually live and breathe, it's actually the schools now competing for a shrinking pool of candidates/potential undergrads. And yeah, the admissions officers are now getting a bit nervous...
29: girl x is taking cambridge's natural sciences exam this actual moment, having had her interview already. she also turned in her early action for chicago this morning. I am wishing her all the luck with all intensity possible, hoping the generational trough will help her out here, and longing for all this shit to be over. she has the SAT subject exams saturday and then things will calm down briefly. until december's normal SAT. and finals. fml. I can't even go home for christmas because she can't go and she needs too much help tutoring (from pros) and quizzing, from me and she doesn't like my husbands help. plus girl y is making important decisions for her stupid IB diploma program. I'm cool though. I got this.
You got 99 percent, but girl x ain't one.
106: I wish I had had kids in the generational trough too.
I think of my Dad as a boomer, because his younger siblings were and my Mom is, but he's '44 so technically silent generation. My great uncle was a bomber pow in WWII. My grandfather worked in the defense industry and was married, so he did not go off to war and had kids during the war, so my Dad was born to the boomer parents generation.
SAT subject exams for high schoolers?!
If you take them in college, they don't count.
In addition to the SAT, you now need to submit scores from a BuzzFeed quiz sorting you into a Hogwarts house.
Hey:
A dear loved one has started a poetry chain letter, and I would not participate if it were anyone less beloved. But they are, and so I am. I'm having trouble forwarding it on, though, because it's a chain letter. Is there anyone here who would enjoy being part of this kind of thing? At least at the moment, it is an Unfogged-level of participants, although I suppose each person gets the chain-descendants that they deserve.
If you would find it a warm comfort to be part of this kind of thing, could you send me an email at heebie dot geebie at gmail?
I remember the Daily Mirror (from which I learned to read) calling on Attlee to resign.
Do you mean Eden, in the context of Suez? I can't imagine the Mirror in 1951 calling on a Labour government to resign. I don't personally remember Suez, but I vaguely remember my parents being angry about something on the news. Not sure if that was Suez or Hungary; they were angry about both, retrospectively.
I remember hearing clips from the radio debates between Nixon and Kennedy in 1960 (I was 9) and thinking that Nixon came across much better. Later, people told me that he did on radio, but that Kennedy looked much better on TV.
113:. You should make your poem be about sending ten dollars to the person at the top of the list and forwarding the letter or else being cursed.
Pretty sure my first actual current events memory is also Challenger, though I do have a memory of the Iranian embassy siege which definitely is not contemporary, but must be from popular culture in the mid-80s somehow.
Bruce Laingen ("the most senior American official held hostage during the Iran hostage crisis") drove by my high school after he was released. We all assembled in front of the school and cheered and he waved at us. I yelled out "Bruuuuuuuuce!" because I was that funny even in high school.
I think generations are mostly bullshit without some overwhelming common experience to tie them together. For my parents' generation, that was the war, although mother and father had very different experiences of it. Equally, the experience of German contemporaries of theirs would have been importantly different. But they, too, would have been moulded into a coherent cultural unit at least around certain attitudes.
I think of myself as part of the last generation of English people who were brought up and indeed educated in the (unspoken, but no less powerful) expectation that we would have to fight another war. This was not just a matter of the Combined Cadet Force at school, where we trained in our spare time to be infantry officers, or the fact that ten year olds were routinely taught to shoot even when their parents were so poor or misguided as not to have land to shoot over. It was more than that the kind of character that schools were meant to mould and the kinds of virtues -- chiefly courage and tolerance of physical hardship -- that they were meant to encourage. That is I think incomprehensible to people even ten years younger than I am.
Also, the expectation that anyone properly educated would have spent at least five years studying Latin, but that was a class thing. I suspect the expectation of war was general in British society until about - idunno - 1965, when I was ten? Conscription ended in I think 1957.
The only comparably huge change in what people expect from life, and what they think they are educated for, has been the slow change this century from expecting the future to be better than the past to expecting it to be worse.
My children seemed mostly to grow up in the same patterns of thought that we had gone through at their age. It is astonishing how quickly the charisma of the Sixties was routinised into an orthodoxy. Some years ago, C*r* D*ctor*w published a pretty crappy book which was intended as science fiction, but whose tropes and thoughtworld would have been entirely recognisable in about 1968, before he was born. Nothing that had happened to disturb those orthodoxies had made any impression on him at all. Generations, phooey
last generation of English people
Distinct from British?
The Welsh are still training hard.
I did CCF and at least five years of Latin.
re Attlee no it was some time after the 51 election and he was hanging on as Labour leader. Obviously I'd read lots more before that but it stuck in my memory as the first time I'd encountered that sort of contempt (very mild compared with today of course) toward a towering figure.
115 I was working for the Forest Service in the fall of 1980, out of TV range (and didn't own one anyway) and so I listened to the Reagan/Carter debates on the radio. I already knew the guy was a big phoney, but man was that clear.
What would history look like if Nixon had won in 1960?
expectation that we would have to fight another war
Xi Jinping explained in January that 2049 is a logical deadline for a resolution of the Taiwan problem.
The deadline for PLA modernization is 2035.
Ah, Comrade Yellow: we will both be offered commissions in Seumas's Republican Guards regiment when the civil war breaks out.
125: At first this didn't seem like a particularly compelling alternative history, as my sense is that it wasn't clear that Nixon would have pursued different policies than Kennedy -- but then I realized that this meant that it was possible that the Nixon that became President in 1961 might have returned the Republican Party to its roots and become the champion of the Civil Rights Movement. How would the Democratic Party of the 1960s reacted to that?
120: I think Ajay would be the first to claim that the Scots were always up for a war. Let us not speak of the Irish. I have no opinion about the Welsh. But, yes, British rather than English. My mistake.
the last generation of English people who were brought up and indeed educated in the (unspoken, but no less powerful) expectation that we would have to fight another war.
I grew up in the last generation of American people brought up under the expectation that one day us, our homes, and everyone we loved would get vaporized by an atomic bomb.
You're gonna get on great with your grandkids.
I grew up in the last generation of American people brought up under the expectation that one day us, our homes, and everyone we loved would get vaporized by an atomic bomb
Last, or only?
133: I think Spike is of a later generation than me, and I definitely was brought up under the spectre of nuclear holocaust.
I recently noticed something that I thought was a true generational divide. My 5-year-old wanted to watch a YouTube video of kids playing with PJ Masks figurines over watching the PJ Masks show itself and I thought to myself that that was a true difference between our generations that I would never understand.
135: Haven't there been any tv shows/books/movies/historical events that you preferred to discuss on Unfogged over watching/reading the thing itself?
"the degree to which consuming endless content has come to feel like tedious labor we'd just as soon be done with." (There is immediate pushback on this take.)
Huh. That's an interesting analogy. I hadn't thought of it that way before.
Watching videos of people playing Minecraft is something I'm really glad my son quit doing.
My son makes videos of himself playing Minecraft and he's very upset that people don't watch as much any more. So tell your son to get back on track!
129. The interesting question is how Nixon would have dealt withe the Cuban missile crisis. Because if he got that wrong everything else would be might have been.
136. Bad ones mostly. Sometimes flawed ones with a redeeming feature. But say the group reads with chapter summaries, I liked the books themselves a lot, myself.
141 last: But would it have really? For the USSR, yes, tickets. But the USSR didn't have many ICBMs in 1963, or AFAIK even that many IRBMs in Cuba. So it would've been the worst war ever, easily, but I don't see it ending civilization. Even an exchange in the 1980s wouldn't actually have ended civilization, just most of white-people civilization.
Not demographically related, but I'm struck by the generational differences that led to radically different educational outcomes for me and my son. We were both smart kids who tested really well, but struggled with writing assignments in high school. I got the benefit of SATs that were purely multiple-choice, and teachers who mostly regarded homework as optional as long as you did well on the tests and/or term papers (the latter of which I mostly did as all-nighters the night before they were due). He had to deal with an essay requirement on the SAT that pulled down his average, and mandatory homework assignments from kindergarten on that pulled down his grades when he didn't finish them or turned them in late (a perpetual struggle with us).
So I got the Ivy League education and glided into a well-paying tech job right after graduation, while he went to the local state college and is still looking for full-time paid work three years after graduation. Part of that is that he insisted on doing writing-heavy majors in college (first English, then Communications) instead of the STEM-oriented degree I recommended. I really respect him for challenging and strengthening his weakness (his writing got a lot better in college) instead of avoiding it as I did, but it's been a challenge on the employment front.
I took a two-year break between undergrad and law school and I'm so incredibly lucky it wasn't a three-year break. I graduated in 2007 and it was the last year that people from my law school had good job prospects.
I remember driving home from the law firm listening to the increasingly-terrifying news about Bear Stearns collapsing. The 2008 graduating class couldn't find jobs unless they were in the top 10%. Even with my graduating class, it seems like half of them gave up on being lawyers.
And in 2008, a variety of employed lawyers guy laid off.
146: 2008 was heartbreaking to watch from inside a secure government job. For years afterward, my office had 'volunteer' attorneys who were working for us full time for free. And it was a good deal for them, because on a resume they looked employed (and in terms of the work they were doing, they really were employed!), and for a kid who'd just graduated to not have a lawyering job at all for years would have meant pretty much never being able to get one. But wow were they exploited.
Fortunately, there was a hole in the government so that there was enough light to read by.
Anyway, maybe that was 2009? Fortunately, houses are cheap enough that they can be paid for with one income.
I'm just over millennial, but I remember the Challenger since I was a big Space nerd.
I was not able to get a 'volunteer lawyer's job post-crash, but all in all, I think I'm glad because actually lawyering seems like it kind of sucks. As long as I don't think too much about equity prices during the crash.
Wow, an English major who graduated when I did should not have/have had such a smooth career. A clerical job just a couple months out of college, a reporter for almost two years after that, a technical writer in two different years for the 11 years after that. I'm not bragging, just boggling. If anything I guess it helps that I was never too in love with the idea of suffering for my art followed by maybe someday making it big or whatever.
I always like to make other people suffer for art. Mostly by crop dusting in museums.
In 1970 there were 90000 software workers in the UK. In 1971 60000. Post-decimalisation. Given that I survived I can only imagine how useless the other 30000 were.
I had no idea that shillings were worth 30,000 jobs by way of fucking up math.
I have no opinion about the Welsh.
Almost nobody does! Well, almost nobody outside of Wales, I guess. When it comes to the English, the Irish, or the Scots, people have opinions, and prejudices, and sentimental attachments, and deep-seated animosities. But when it comes to the Welsh ... er, coal miners who don't like vowels? Don't know much about them, have nothing against them, therefore.
Speaking here as a clueless North American, of course. But "the Welsh" just doesn't resonate in North America the way "the Irish" or "the Scots" still do ...
The year I lived in England (equivalent to fourth grade, I think called "third-year junior," while my first-grade sister was a "top infant," which still cracks me up, but I digress), my best friend was Welsh, and I remember we wrote and performed a skit for the school assembly on the comparative standing of the USA and Wales, where I'd say things like "In America, we've sent men to the moon," and he'd say, "In Wales, we've sent men to fix the chimney," and so on from there. Also a lot of jokes about leeks, which I'm still missing background on.
155 is a magnificent statistic.
I thought, at the time of decimalisation, that we should have settled the new currency as being the Crown (5/- or 25 new pee) rather than the pound. It would have been romantic, reactionary (because there was only half a crown left of the ancient currency) and anti-inflationary because pennies would still have represented significant, if small, sums.
Which proves that even at the age of fifteen I was ready for the internet, as a space where I could explain how al the people running the world had got it wrong again.
157 - is that the spell of summoning drausqed?
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At least 150 people have died over the course of six months while detained at an internment camp for mainly ethnic Uyghurs in northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), according to an official source, marking the first confirmation of mass deaths since the camps were introduced in 2017.|>
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Bleg: how much do y'all think I could wing it as an SAT tutor? Not being American and never having taken an SAT.
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157: my Canadian father-in-law - whose father came over from London as a boy after WWI when his mother, a war widow, married a Canadian soldier - identifies quite strongly with his Welsh heritage.
163: I was never tutored on that so I don't know what they do.
163: Where you are, there's probably a real market. There are a lot of workbooks available, so it wouldn't be hard for you to figure out content. There's no longer a penalty for wrong answers, which was the only strategy beyond normal standardized testing. You should definitely take an SAT though. Apparently there are ten free online SAT tests available, so you could at least do that. I've taught test prep free to poor kids, which you shouldn't do since it's not lucrative.
Robert Benchley identified as a Welsh American, I believe. People who are entertained by the early days of the New Yorker and/or the friends of Dorothy Parker will have heard of him. Otherwise not, except that his grandson wrote Jaws. But he's probably the most famous Welsh American who was actually proactive about it.
These would presumably be rich kids. With asshole parents.
I used to be in the same building as the Kaplan prep stuff, but I didn't ask any questions about how the did their work.
And now you're in the same building as the DARPA stuff, and you can't ask any questions even if you want to.
The disturbing part is the cancer researcher who never washes his hands after using the bathroom.
Can we just boycott the car makers that sided with Trump on fuel efficiency standards? Maybe nobody who cares buys enough cars for it matter since half of Pittsburgh now drives giant pickups.
Theoretically, I could buy a car. There's no way for Toyota to know I'm not buying a car. Our oldest car is 14 years old, so if I say I'm not buying a car only as a protest, they should believe me.
Which proves that even at the age of fifteen I was ready for the internet, as a space where I could explain how al the people running the world had got it wrong again.
Also overly concerned about inflation. Though, I suppose, maybe not "overly" back then.
For the Welsh connection to the US look no further than Elvis Presley. Both obviously Welsh names.
163: I think you'd want to take a bunch of SATs, at least, to get a feel for what they're like -- they're not a straightforward test of material, there's a lot of particularized stuff about them. Doing well is as much about getting in sync with the SATs particularly as it is about knowing the academic stuff.
Mostly I have learned about Wales from Hinterland.. Also, a former roommate raised in England now lives in Cardiff.
I was raised listening to mildly racist cracks about the Welsh, because Dad's family is Welsh way back (stereotypically Welsh name, but they came to the US in the early 19th century and there's no ongoing connection.)
There's a line from some Evelyn Waugh novel that somehow came up often: "The Welsh are the only nation that has produced no graphic nor plastic art; no literature; no drama. All they do is sing. Sing, and blow down wind instruments of plated silver."
What about Dylan Thomas, not that I actually read him.
WE HAVE THIS GREAT PERFORMANCE PIECE. "PERFECT PARABOLA". SMASH HIT IN THE CONTINENT.
Oh, I think from the same novel: "In Ireland and other colonized nations, the question of intermarriage with the locals was a political matter. In Wales it was moral."
That's pretty racist, or whatever the relevant category is.
It's possible Waugh was an asshole.
Have I mentioned my parents had a complex marriage, but certainly one with a lot of not particularly well-buried hostility in it? Also, Evelyn Waugh? Huge asshole.
WE THINK YOU'RE LOOKING FOR "CULTURAL APROPRIATION".
Welsh-Americans were a distinct community mostly in coal-mining regions in the 19th century, but had been completely assimilated by the time the next immigrant communities came to those regions, or at latest by the 1920s.
The last American politician to succeed by pandering to the Welsh community was probably Pennsylvania senator "Puddler Jim" Davis (signed his name Davies, but those crooks at Ellis Island made it Davis).
Puddling was never automated because the puddler had to sense when the balls had "come to nature."
Both Lloyd Alexander and Susan Cooper made Wales seem bewitched and hazardous at least to American kids. Land of the dead, mountain with King Arthur inside, all that good stuff.
For years afterward, my office had 'volunteer' attorneys who were working for us full time for free.
This practice has been basically formalized, and now it's quite common for new law grads to do their first year of public service work at a sponsoring agency or non-profit while being paid by a "fellowship" from their own law school. This relationship theoretically benefits the new lawyer (who gets to buy groceries and get training/experience and not look unemployed on a resume) and the law school (which gets to pad its employment numbers by calling these students "employed") and the sponsoring agency/non-profit (which typically need all the help they can get).
As LB indicates, it feels exploitative and awkward, as the fellowship lawyer is hoping for a full-time position, and the agency may really want to hire that person but lacks the funding or whatever. I think law schools could be doing more of this sort of thing via externships during the (notoriously easy*) Third Year of law school.
*3L is literally called 3LOL
188: Same for Pennsylvania senator.
190: At least with the fellowship, someone's paying them. That doesn't bother me all that much. We had genuinely unpaid volunteers, living in their parents' basements eating ramen. (Also one independently wealthy kid -- an orphan who had inherited a townhouse on the upper east side. Looked like Harry Potter. I used to look around nervously wondering if I was a background character in a young adult novel.)
I think in the US most Welsh surnames that aren't too super-Gaelic-looking (up to and including Lloyd) will get you categorized as "Anglo-Saxon" by most people caring.
Typical colonials. No standards.
I didn't even know "Lloyd" was a Welsh name.
You've been thinking the double L was Spanish all these years?
Meriwether Lewis disproved the best theory of a Wales connection.
I'd never heard of the Welsh community in Butte -- https://mtstandard.com/news/local/butte-s-welsh-community-remembered/article_e0ff3db6-e156-5bc3-b8bc-41697a100fbd.html -- I guess the Cornish get all the attention.
I can't say I gave the matter any thought.
Man, I'm so glad I got in first of those three simultaneous comments.
176 is the great weakness of SATs, and part of their effectiveness as a method of exclusion.
(to be clear, not that they are particular or broad, but that they are this way in a predictable manner that can be prepped for, to the degree that there are schools that basically specialize in this).
I think in the US most Welsh surnames that aren't too super-Gaelic-looking (up to and including Lloyd) will get you categorized as "Anglo-Saxon" by most people caring.
Even in Britain 95% of Welsh surnames aren't Gaelic-looking anyway. They all have surnames like "Owens" or "Edwards" or "Jones" but then go for first names like Dafydd and Myfanwy and Alun and Hywel and Rhodri and Siân and Nerys.
The American Academy of Multiple Choice.
Which doesn't sound like fun. But maybe lucrative. But probably it'll be nothing, so.
Cornish hard-rock miners were a notable group ricocheting all over the New Worlds well into the 20th C. Were Welsh less valuable, being coal people? Is it just the methane attrition ground them down.
Ongoing research and archaeology on Offa's Dyke has been undertaken for many years by the Extra-Mural Department of the University of ManchesterI see what they did there.
Speaking of age cohorts, Happy 80th Birthday to Grace Slick!
I think in the US most Welsh surnames that aren't too super-Gaelic-looking (up to and including Lloyd) will get you categorized as "Anglo-Saxon" by most people caring.
Starting with a bilabial plosive is a good clue.
Price = ap Rhys
Pendry = ap Henry
Pritchard = ap Richard
Probert = ap Robert
Bevan = ap Evan
Bowen = ap Owain
etc.
ISTM (from my fragmentary perspective) that there's a whole bunch of roughly contemporaneous YA-ish literature (Garner, Alexander, Cooper, Malcolm Saville, plus Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill and Ransome's Lake District books, and presumably a bunch more) which suck fragementary Welsh mythology/folklore/topography into postwar consumerizing British (/world?) culture. I bet someone has written something interesting about that.
The Lake District isn't in Wales and neither are the Norfolk Broads, and I think Puck is set in Sussex. Possibly Kent.
"plus"
So useful a syllable.
Pucks's framing setting is IIRC somewhere in the SW as you say, but the internal stories bounce all over, as far as West Africa (though admittedly not AFAICR Wales.)
Also your weaponeering insights are called for in the other thread.
Puck is indeed from Sussex, "Seely Sussex for everlasting," as the Tudor character remarks. Due south of London on the coast. Kipling had a farm there; it went bust.
The Lake District isn't in Wales, but there's a certain amount of cultural hangover from the Old North, when it was Cumbric speaking. Yan, tan, tethera, pethera and that sort of thing.
The Lake District should be in Wales because of all the sheep.
And Ransome also had a Celtward drift: the Picts and Martyrs, theme of a a whole book, Great Northern? in the Hebrides, complete with turfhouse.
Had anyone ever seriously tried to reforest large areas of Britain or Ireland? I think they could both do with more trees.
There's the New Forest, which I think was an attempt?
220: yes, but... https://www.thejournal.ie/extinction-rebellion-forestry-protest-dublin-4715443-Jul2019/
The only holiday ever invented in my home state was Arbor Day. Planting trees is our thing.
Well, right, because you don't naturally have any. CoughGreatAmericanDesertCough.
Kipling had a farm there; it went bust.
Should have stuck to cakes.
Right. It just looks nicer with the trees.
Also, prevents large-scale dust bowling.
The dune-dammed paleovalleys are actually much more promising. You just need a good agency to polish it up for you.
People come to see Sandhills cranes, but I assume most birders are probably looking at fowl for pornographic purposes and that this should not be encouraged.
The Lake District should be in Wales because of all the sheep.
The Ocean District should be in Wales because of all the whales.
The Corduroy District should be in Wales because of all the wales, and the wool.
Surely the Crying, Sobbing, Gnashing of Teeth District is there too.
Do people ever gnash anything besides teeth? Can you gnash your hands?
Is sex basically just gnashing bodies?
234: No, OED says just teeth (you used to be able to just "gnash" intransitively, but that meant teeth).
Not all forests have trees. "Forest" originally meant a hunting preserve, and still does in the highlands, where you'll find a lot of forests on the map that are virtually treeless. The New Forest is a forest in this sense (though it also contains quite a few trees). It's new in the sense that it only dates from 1080 or so.
The Forest of Dean is just a bunch of academic officials sitting around with no trees. But, I'm pretty sure that much of Britain was forested before human habitation. Why not put the trees back? Pennsylvania did, kind of, after a much shorter period of too much agriculture.
Speaking of demographics, my son just asked "What's MTV?"
Mostly I have learned about Wales from Hinterland.
Yeah, me too. Was seriously impressed when I learned they shot each scene twice: once in English, once in Welsh.
Prior to watching Hinterland, I read How Green Was My Valley as a teenager, which gave me an elegiac, world-we-have-lost sense of Wales, a country/place about which I knew absolutely nothing. Oh, and also some poetry by Dylan Thomas, of course (again with the elegiac...).
164: One of my cousins is married to a guy (a Canadian with a Welsh-born father) who identifies strongly with his Welsh heritage. So I was being a bit flip when I suggested 'almost nobody outside of Wales,' of course. But I still maintain that "Welsh" does not have the same ethnic-identity resonance as "Irish" or "Scottish" in a North American context.
240: But if they bring back the forests, how will they obtain juche-like self-sufficiency?
The only true juche is being an autobrewer.
240: there is actually more woodland in Britain now than there was in the 11th century. Though a lot of that is forestry plantation.
Also I suspect that before human habitation what most of Britain was covered with is not woodland but ice.
Tired: the Internet is a liberalising force.
Wired: someone's writing apps so that Gulf Arabs can buy and sell slaves on their smartphones.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50228549
In interests of non-racism, I'm sure there are some non-Arab Gulf residents also trading slaves. Afghan politicians, or Russian businessman, for instance.
246 True, but during the earliest stages of (the latest episode of) human habitation, the ice gave way to forest; the Magdalenians and Western Hunter Gatherers didn't impact the density of woodland much.
I think covering Britain with ice would not appeal to the residents. Maybe it would if they got to move to Doggerland.
I had an on-topic theory that I forgot to mention. There is very clearly a lot of parental status anxiety wound up in where the kids go to college. Some of it can be explained by declining wages, so they're worried about their kids being able to get good enough jobs that they can leave the house. But people buying their kids into school by spending hundreds of thousands on bribing coaches and paying for SAT scores aren't worried about that because they have enough money that the kids don't need to work. They're worried because they hold that intelligence is hereditary and that the United States is a meritocracy where people with wealth earned it by their own intelligence. If you believe both of those things, or more to the point if you believe everybody in your social circle believes those things, you can't send your kid to Ohio State.
I don't think you ned the hereditary bit, you just need the putative meritocracy. Compare Top Chinese officials plagiarised doctoral dissertations.