The word commonly used for this sort of thing is "ineffable" - that which cannot be put into words.
If you want to see a less "these are magical" and more "here's some science" perspective, you might like "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan. Always very down to earth, gets into some mechanics of effects, well written and engaging.
More and more research is showing that poverty has a severe impact on the brain, and left unchecked it can become nearly unbreakable.
Many of the decisions made by impoverished people are either somewhat sensible for their situation in the short-term (e.g., asking a 16 or 17 year old child to drop out and start working) or are sensible when viewed through certain forms of skewed perspectives (e.g., spending a small windfall immediately because 'that money will just be gone soon anyway'). Children of impoverished parents overwhelmingly learn these lessons, and the stress of poverty is an ever-present part of their lives, so they are often debilitated by it from the very start.
Or perhaps some decisions are just depressingly sensible given the odds of actually escaping poverty. Having your near dropout 16 year old enter the workforce is perhaps a better bet for their future than letting them drop out and associate with malevolent role models who prey on kids like this.
The final time I ordered from DoorDash, the driver ignored directions (which no one else had ever had issues with), didn't tell me there was something wrong with the directions I had sent him 10 minutes in until over half an hour after leaving the restaurant (my apartment is a 7 minute drive in normal traffic), and I had to call him to get him to tell me that much. He refused to listen to the directions, and when the address that I live at didn't work for him, demanded a different address. DoorDash support then demanded the same, but I told them I was not allowing an obviously irate man to come to my apartment. It took me 20 minutes to get them to assign a new driver so I could give my address.
As a member of the LGBT community, there are entire states I will not move to until they fix their legislation/legislators. I also will never move back to PA because of their filial responsibility laws.
It's less a retelling and more an expression of a culmination of factors in post-war Japan. Japanese media in that era really had a lot of fear about the post-war state, especially the loss of culture, baked in.
There's a few. My company has been using serverless aurora pretty much since preview and will keep doing so for some parts of infra, but are moving some services back to provisioned.
- Data is replicated cross region, but your compute all lives in the same AZ, so if (when) an AZ goes down you have to wait for a new instance to be created elsewhere. AWS says the time for this is undefined, IIRC we've seen it be around 15-20 minutes before the DB is back online.
- If you have lots of long running transactions or queries, serverless can have trouble finding a scaling point and won't scale up/down. You can set it to force scaling after 5 attempts, but this results in dropped connections and 1-2 minutes of downtime every time.
- Scaling up actually takes 45s-1:30 for new capacity to be available. If your load is spiky enough that that's too slow, you're stuck with overprovisioning anyways.
- Tools like VividCortex don't work for serverless if you rely on those. Teams here that use serverless have shifted to DataDog APM for this purpose.
- Loading data from S3 doesn't work. This wasn't really a usecase we had but it's something to be aware of.
That said, for gradual load or DB downtime tolerant services it's great! Also very nice for dev environments as the scaling down to 0 can result in some very real cost savings.
First, there is no IQ barrier. I have several friends who, based on psychologist-administered IQ tests, are very, very close to average, who do well in the industry, usually better than me. They worked hard to get where they wanted to go. Sure, you probably can't do this work if you have an IQ under 85, but the same can be said for most any knowledge or even office job. It's not like we're unique in that regard.
Second, a "genetic bottleneck"? That absolutely reeks of genetic elitism. It implies, rather heavily, that they are genetically superior to those who cannot (or just don't) do this work.
The idea that we are special because no one understands us - finance, biotech, pharmaceuticals... No one really gets those, either.
This is pretty much it. My generation has been called entitled, lazy, selfish, etc, for wanting the same things our parents were given, like a living wage, affordable college, or career stability. In what world is that friendly?
And the boomer generation were called entitled, lazy, selfish by their parent's generation too. Think about the attitudes of the war generation to the hippies, recreational drugs etc.
This shitting on the next generation thing has been going on for a long time.
There's solid evidence going back 150 years of older generations complaining about school kids being undisciplined, not respecting their teachers ("not like back when I was at school"), and some slightly more anecdotal evidence going back some 2000 years of the same.
We always find it hard to reconcile the negative aspects of our old behaviour with our current mindset, and it's way easier to just reduce in our minds the severity or scope of our actions. We learn from our mistakes, and try to make them seem as small as possible in our minds.
Our parents. Are you talking of Gen X? The boomer generation? In general, your statement seems to apply to Gen X. But not really the boomer generation - e.g. they didn't have affordable college like Gen X did. Gen X seems to have been at the crossroads of things shifting and kind of got the best of all worlds.
And for Millennials, some have it rough but some don't. College was cheap and affordable for some of them - certainly more affordable for them than the boomer generation. Keep in mind the generation spans to 1981. Some Millennials are almost 40 now.
Gen Z is in a whole other category of course. Lots of things going/have gone rapidly downhill. But boomers mostly aren't the parents of these people. It's Gen X/Millennials.
Yeah, I feel like a lot of the things Boomers and Millennials are blaming on each other, actually apply to Gen X (and I say this as a Gen-Xer myself). We got the best education deal before (admittedly Boomer-) politicians started to undermine education. We were the slacker generation. We're the generation that refused to grow up. We got jobs in the booming 1990s.
But sure, let Boomers and Millennials fight. We're happy to stay out of this (just know that I'm on your side, Millennials!)
That's funny, I'm GenX and I have very different memories. I remember high inflation ("stagflation"), high unemployment ("misery index"), multiple recessions during the first half of my career. Sure, college seemed pretty affordable compared to nowadays, but not compared to those before.
Also, a lot of the anger at Boomers is not just because of how they had it (that's mostly the doing of their Silent/Greatest predecessors) but because of how they made it. Boomers have dominated politics since those student-activist hippies got into it, largely because of sheer numbers. Thirty or forty years, depending on exactly which ones you count. GenX is finally making a dent, but mostly at the state level. At the federal level it's still heavily Boomer-dominated, regurgitating the same policies that got us into this mess. Ditto Wall Street etc.
If Boomers had enjoyed good times and then made some effort to prolong or repeat them, #okboomer wouldn't be a thing. It is a thing because so many Boomers are using their political power to keep selling everyone else's future for the sake of their own comfy retirement.
I guess I was still in university back then. I'm late Gen X. I imagine early Gen X has a very different story. (I bet the same is true for every generation.)
I'm not sure that's true about the boomers having access to affordable college. I had an ex whose boomer grandfather lectured us endlessly about how he worked hard all summer long to save up for college -- which, for him, meant a 40 hour work week during the summer, to afford a year of university, with room and board -- and why couldn't anyone else do the same these days?
No matter how often we pointed out that college is, in general, vastly more expensive, and summer jobs comparably less well-paying, he'd just repeat himself. "I just don't get it, you go work for the parks department, you work all summer long, why isn't that enough? It's your iphones, your cell phone plans, etc." when, you know, yeah we're paying $20 a month for cheap cell phone plans and five-year-old iphones, but the reality is that working three months at, say, $15 an hour, nets you what, $5-6k? That might cover a year's tuition at a community college if you live at home, not a year living at a state-run four-year university.
No, GenX didn't get the "best of all worlds". If you were too young to remember the period, the famous documentary "Slacker" (1990), describes the period well. We had the same frustrations that Millennials and now GenZ have in terms of lack of opportunity.
In defense of "the Boomers," and believe me I have plenty of gripes about trends within that generation, we Millenials aren't exactly above reproach.
I can agree that it's not nearly as easy for us as it was for the past few generations, but it's not nearly as grim as most make it out to be. To put it bluntly, I see a lot of the same "me me me" mentality that the Boomers have been criticized for.
There's the idea that life is just handed to us, so long as we "do the right things." It's perfectly possible to own a home, raise a family, what have you. You just might not get to work the job you want, study the degree program you want, or live in the neighborhood you want.
I don’t think the boomer generation “earned” cheaper college. That was given to them either by circumstance or by the previous generations. Similarly, post-war prosperity wasn’t something they had earned or worked for.
The contention is that the world left by boomers has less opportunity than what the one provided to them. It’s not entirely true (if you’re black in America, the civil rights movement sure changes a lot for the better), but that’s the argument.
>I don’t think the boomer generation “earned” cheaper college.
Exactly. Later generations simply inherited expensive college after the devastation of Nixon.
If Nixon wasn't stopped, they would have continued until all Americans had been returned to lower opportunity levels equivalent to many minorities before Civil Rights, other than those whose significant capitalist privileges had already been well established before the early 1970's.
EDIT: more rapidly returned to lower opportunity levels
Edit: It's still too easy to underestimate Nixon Youth.
Can't tell what point you're making, but when my brother left his job at Google our grandmother asked what that was going to do to his pension. As if companies paying pensions was still a thing.
These people grew up when a factory job could support a family of four, and companies hired people with no experience and then paid actual benefits.
Boomers benefited from very generous circumstances. To suggest they earned the postwar economic boom is laughably misguided.
My parents, I guess who were boomers, suffered from crushing debt, divorce, poverty, unstable work. Factory work killed two of my Grandfathers, COPD and asbestosis. But go on, tell us how Google ruined your Brother's future.
>But go on, tell us how Google ruined your Brother's future.
I didn't write or imply this in any way.
My point is that many boomers conveniently gloss over the fact that they benefited immensely from the economic climate of yesteryear, and the common refrain of millennials needing to just tug harder on their bootstraps isn't received well because of it.
Indeed. The labor movement in the early 20th century claimed a significant number of advantages for workers, and employers have been steadily chipping away at them ever since. The effect of this has been cumulative, with each generation both never seeing the benefits that were taken from their parents and having new ones taken from them personally. Pensions are long gone, unions are on life support, insurance is a debacle (though somewhat unrelated), wages have stagnated resulting in inflation-driven pay cuts, and the latest trend is to eschew employees altogether and treat everybody as an independent contractor (thus eliminating virtually all benefits).
If you want to see a less "these are magical" and more "here's some science" perspective, you might like "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan. Always very down to earth, gets into some mechanics of effects, well written and engaging.