Big ups to Floridian Kelly Slater on winning the A.S.P. World Tour for the 9th time in his career. 9 freakin' times! This is absurd. No one in the history of surfing is even in the same ocean as this dude.
RIP Mr. Francis, one of the last remaining folks from the original "Lost Generation". Can't say the last few babyboomers will be as missed as this man should be.
With his usual penchant for hyperbole, Martin Amis claimed on the Today programme last week that “a kind of civil war” is looming between the generations. Baby-boomers, he said, have enjoyed the best of the economic upswing of the 1980s, growing rich on property and investments and basking in their final-salary pensions, and now their children will have to pay for it.
Raised lazy and irresponsible on the fat of their parents’ achievements, these Generation Xers are crashing back to earth facing likely redundancy, the possibility of never owning their own home and the task of caring for their ageing parents – a population set to outnumber the working young. Which means that the notoriously selfish Generation X will have to dig even deeper to fund the National Health Service, social care and state pensions for the vast army of postwar babies who have frolicked through the past 50 years. Result: burning resentment and even violence.
Babyboomers are shown to be a pack of potato chip eating layabouts watching their blowhard idols Oprah and Bill O'Reilly:Put another way, the older you get, the more you watch, according to a new report from Deloitte, millennials, the generation of 14- to 25-year-olds, watch just 10.5 hours of TV a week.That compares to 15.1 hours for those belonging to Generation X (ages 26-42), 19.2 hours for baby boomers (43-61) and 21.5 hours for matures (62-75).
2nd semester of my sophomore year I was broke. I mean really broooooooo-ke. For 2 full days all I ate was hot dog buns (just the bread, I didn't have the coin for the cheap cylinder-shaped meat). “It’s so great to be a member of Generation X,” I said to my husband last week on my 47th birthday. He’s 51, a member in good standing of the baby boom generation.
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“It’s so great to be a member of Generation X,” I repeated more loudly, thinking that perhaps he hadn’t heard me the first time. I smiled sweetly, as one does around the elderly.
“If you’re Gen X, then I’m Gen X,” he said.
“You can’t be Gen X, you’re 51,” I snapped.
Whatever you call them (I'll just call them early Xers), the numbers are clear: Compared with every other birth cohort, they have performed the worst on standardized exams, have acquired the fewest educational degrees and have been the least attracted to professional careers. In a word, they're the dumbest.
Don't expect much from this blogger this weekend. We finally have some surfable waves on Florida's West Coast!
It’s a bit of a generation game when it comes to appreciating the implications of the global recession, with Generation X workers who were born in the Sixties and Seventies fearing the worst, while Generation Y workers who were born since the Eighties are feeling no fear.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Tom Brokaw’s book “The Greatest Generation,” that classic about our parents and their incredible sacrifices during World War II. What I’ve been thinking about actually is this: What book will our kids write about us? “The Greediest Generation?” “The Complacent Generation?” Or maybe: “The Subprime Generation: How My Parents Bailed Themselves Out for Their Excesses by Charging It All on My Visa Card.”
Silver hair, pension funds and personal memories of a Kennedy assassination are not the only things our struggling economic engine will lose when Boomers settle into the quiet life. Boomers hold the majority of major leadership roles in the workplace, and their retirement creates a leadership gap that must be filled by the next generations. The question is whether or not their successors are up to the challenge?
I don't mean to continue on with financial shtuff, but this is going to haunt us if ignored.I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.
Tanta from Calculated Risk died of cancer yesterday.Tanta worked as a mortgage banker for 20 years, and we started chatting in early 2005 about the housing bubble and the changes in lending practices. In 2006, Tanta was diagnosed with late stage cancer, and she took an extended medical leave while undergoing treatment. At that time I approached her about writing for this blog, and she declined for a simple reason – her prognosis was grim and she didn’t expect to live very long. To her surprise, after aggressive treatment, her health started to improve and she accepted my invitation. When she chose an email address, it reflected her surprise: tanta_vive ... Tanta Lives!
