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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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I mean it's hard to phrase it palatably, especially when the majority of democracies have huge, strong voting blocs of the elderly... but modern conceptions of state-funded retirement just don't really mesh with any economic or societal sensibility.

Retiring at 60 from a life of hard labor when you had a life expectancy of 70ish and end-of-life care was more palliative and less 'here is 98% of your lifetime healthcare spending in order to eke out another 6 months of nil life quality' combine it with the majority of jobs becoming increasingly vague laptop sinecures with little-to-no coherent output and the whole 'I earned my retirement on the public purse' thing is also getting odd.

Yes, one of the issues skirted around in the documentary is the nature of the boomers who live there. This was the hippy generation (of course, not all of them) who essentially built the world that they now inhabit (atomisation, make work etc etc). I suppose they don't have to live with the consequences.

The oldest boomers are 76. If the people living there are around 80 years old, they're mostly Silents.

Thanks for pointing this out- at the moment I'd imagine average age is closer to 70-75, but obviously 10 years ago that would mean mostly silents. The demographics data on the wiki page will probably get you an exact answer.

In Australia, the first pensions were introduced in 1900 for 65 year olds. It seems weird that the cutoff's only drifted by 2 years in the time since.

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