How to Deal with Stupid Parents

[quote]legendaryblaze wrote:
LoRez:

Sure, but jumping at a kid (“entitled shit”) because he complained about his parents is a bit exaggerated. I know this is the internet but I expected more from a site like T-Nation.[/quote]
Your points aside… this is the OP in another thread:

[quote]SonOfWolf wrote:

[quote]xXSeraphimXx wrote:
Is that 1kg cooked rice?[/quote]
theres no difference betwenn cooked and uncooked,only changes in volume
[/quote]
He’s not exactly the brightest crayon…

Right now. And it’ll be lower again eventually too.

The cost of sleeping on someone’s couch is right around the same as it always been.

And most of the guys I’ve known from India working in the US for ridiculously low wages in H1B visas usually end up with 6-8 people in a 2 bedroom apartment, if not more. Is it in violation of their lease? Most of the time, yeah. Do they do it anyway? Of course.

There’s pretty much always options. Most of those limits are self-imposed.

Hell, my sister had a [psycho] ex-boyfriend who lived in a tent in the woods outside her apartment building for a few months while he was “transitioning” between places.

[quote]-Cost of tuition is MUCH higher
-Worth of tuition (over-educated/certified/qualified) is lower since markets are over saturated with degrees. [/quote]
This is true. My tuition doubled between my sophomore and junior years. The guy in the financial aid office didn’t believe me until I showed him the numbers. He was also trying to convince me that it’s my parent’s “duty” to pay for my college. I don’t know where they find these people.

But secondly, I’m not understanding why people are still dead-set on this traditional route of “go to college, get a job”. It doesn’t work like that, it hasn’t for a long time, and even despite overwhelming evidence from their friends and classmates who’ve graduated and still can’t find jobs… they still do it.

It’s especially odd when combined with the “things aren’t like they used to” excuse. Why make the same choices then? Figure out how to work with how things currently are. (If I really wanted to belabor the point, I’d add “just like everyone else has”.)

Job security comes from being valuable enough that keeping you is worth more than getting rid of you. There’s really not much more to it.

If you talk to just about any employer, they’ll pretty much complain about the same thing… lots of people want a job, but they can’t find any good people.

Put those two things together, and the answer should be pretty clear.

(There are also hundreds if not thousands of different job markets, based on your speciality, location, tolerance for bullshit, pay requirements, etc. etc.)

I really really think you need to widen your perspective to include more than just the West, and more than just the 60s to now.

There are a whole lot of other places, and a whole lot of other times, where things are/have been far worse and people figured it out.

But at the same time, the people who are going to make it figure out how to make it, and a bunch of other people complain how it’s unfair. That’s been going on for a few millenia. Just as the older crowd has always been there saying some variant of “grow/man the fuck up”.

Nothing new.

I do, however, still agree with your basic premise earlier of… make use of the advantages you have.

Well, moving out at 18 because your parents won’t buy you pasta seems a touch extreme to me. Getting a job so you can have a little spending money and contribute to household finances seems perfectly reasonable to me. So does doing your own cooking and/or offering to prepare meals for the family from time to time. I also recommend washing, folding and putting away your own laundry and helping with other household chores.

Calling your parents “stupid” in a public forum and bashing Americans after coming to an American website for free advice is not particularly reasonable for any person of any age. You criticize Atheism, which leads me to believe that you subscribe to some sort of religious tradition. I don’t know which one, but it seems to me that a number of the ones that I’m familiar with contain something about honouring thy father and thy mother (I’m a bit rusty, but I’m pretty sure it’s in there somewhere.)

Also, I recommend not eating 500 (dry) grams of pasta a day. You might get puffy.

When you’re 18 your good for manual labor and not much more
Manual labor jobs were much more prevelant before the steel belt turned into the rust belt and most US labor/manufacturing jobs went outside of the US.
Labor jobs used to provide a more (reasonable) liveable wage for an 18 yr old

To generalize things

If you want me to believe how hard your life was at one point, tell me about the sacrifices you made, don’t give me your wage at the time

Gas is $3.50/gal right now and beef prices are at an all time high…and yes tuition prices.

All previous generations have had the same conversation since the beginning of time:
“We had to WORK, just to put rags on our feet, you don’t know what work is BOY”!

Your faulty perecpeptions are taking place of any accurate memories, and you know what? No one can call bullshit cause we weren’t there with you at that time, but you can sit here and pick apart the younger generations cause YOU ARE HERE right now.

Give me a fucking break

[quote]pushharder wrote:

Horseshit.

I lived in the 60s, 70s and 80s. You didn’t. Why should someone here believe you?

That’s your problem, squirt, you’re too willing to sit on your ass and read things online instead of going out and living it.

You don’t know what you’re talking about. Cease and desist.
[/quote]

You need to work on your reading comprehension, old man; what is this supposed to mean: “you’re too willing to sit on your ass and read things online instead of going out and living it”?
Nice red herring, too.

When I dropped out of college because I couldn’t afford to pay tuition and wasn’t willing to take on more debt or transfer to a cheaper school, I lived at home for about 3 weeks before moving out to an apartment.

For the next 9 months or so I worked as a cashier at a home improvement store, working right around 24 hours a week at $7.50 an hour, while spending my days trying to convince someone to hire me to write software for them. Plenty of interviews, but no bites. Here and there a temp agency called me for a day job doing stuff like stuffing envelopes or ripping out tile.

I found an apartment upstairs from a hair salon and bail bonds office, in a building run by a commercial landowner who didn’t care about having apartments. He just happened to have this building with 4 apartments. Rent was $225 a month. The kitchen counters were peeling off, the drawers were broken, the bedroom door had been kicked in, and a whole bunch of other issues. The plumbing and electrical worked, the exterior walls were all cinderblock, the floor was concrete, so it was good enough.

My next door neighbor was in his 50s, mentally disabled, addicted to horse tranquilizers and was housing homeless people. His place was infested with roaches, which I had to deal with periodically. I reinforced my front door about 5 minutes after moving in by literally drilling and running steel rods through it and attaching a vertical deadbolt to the wall framing. I parked so my car was always in view of a couple different security cameras on neighboring buildings. It was not the safest neighborhood.

My diet consisted of rice and eggs, and eggs and rice. A few spices mixed in for good measure.

Eventually I found a job making $11 an hour writing software for a small company. For awhile I was still working as a cashier in the evenings and weekends. I eventually quit once I hit 70-something 12-15 hour days without a day off.

After 3 years, my pay ultimately rose to $13.50 an hour. (Most construction and manufacturing paid around $18.) Both at work and in my free time, I focused on getting better and better at what I did, working on a few significant open-source projects on the side, building good industry connections and skills. Most of that time, my budget for food was $3-4 a day.

Over those 3 years, I also did a fair amount of renovation to my apartment, making it into a pretty nice place to live. All out of my pocket, all without the landlord’s consent or knowledge (not that he cared, I had to do all my own maintenance work anyway).

And then I made a good connection through a project I worked on with a possible job opportunity, saved up, rented a car to go to the interview, and was hired that afternoon. I threw everything in, found a place sight unseen and moved within 2 weeks.

That job I had for 11 months (~$60k, more than double what I made before), before random political BS screwed me over and I was unemployed for a period of time. Again after a long time looking (and some temp work to fill in the gaps), I found a 6 month consulting gig that ended up lasting for quite a bit longer. That paid ~$75k, but ended when the project was done.

And so on and so forth. Things right now look pretty good, but that’s no guarantee of anything.

[quote]LoRez wrote:
He’s not exactly the brightest crayon…[/quote]
No, but just because he’s like his parents (Do you see what I did thur?) doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be given good advice.

[quote]LoRez wrote:
Right now. And it’ll be lower again eventually too. [/quote]

Right now? It started in 2008. It’s been 6 years. You generally plan and make sacrifices when it comes to purchasing a house. 6 years is more than a lull, it’s life changing. That house you can’t really afford puts you back for other stuff you need to pay too. Less to pay off student loan, financial burden of children, etc.

So is sleeping on the street, but I think your point here is a straw-man. What happened to the American Dream of white picket fence, etc? “Gotta settle for couch surfing or you’re a whiny bitch”. Not buying it.

[quote]LoRez wrote: And most of the guys I’ve known from India working in the US for ridiculously low wages in H1B visas usually end up with 6-8 people in a 2 bedroom apartment, if not more. Is it in violation of their lease? Most of the time, yeah. Do they do it anyway? Of course.

There’s pretty much always options. Most of those limits are self-imposed.[/quote]
As I wrote above.

[quote]LoRez wrote:
This is true. My tuition doubled between my sophomore and junior years. The guy in the financial aid office didn’t believe me until I showed him the numbers. He was also trying to convince me that it’s my parent’s “duty” to pay for my college. I don’t know where they find these people.

But secondly, I’m not understanding why people are still dead-set on this traditional route of “go to college, get a job”. It doesn’t work like that, it hasn’t for a long time, and even despite overwhelming evidence from their friends and classmates who’ve graduated and still can’t find jobs… they still do it.[/quote]

The explanation is simple: All the generations that came before the last 2 lived in a world where you were paid an honest wage for honest work, you didn’t need a degree to have a good job (let alone A job); university degrees were something that were fairly rare and so commanded a certain prestige and guaranteed a career, universities were not cash grabs that raped students; etc. What this did is create parents that instructed a generation or two to get university degrees because “it will open doors and you’ll make tons of money, guaranteed job, etc”. The only way that happens when you hit 17/18/19, in today’s world, is if you take out a government or student loan, or have parents willing to pay (rarely the case ime), work a few jobs, and extend your time spent in university by a few years. Then when you finally do graduate, you’re much older (min 22) and in debt.
I was promised heaven and earth if I went in to engineering. Boy, that was a brutal wake up call. When guys that spent years in construction and landscaping, with 4.1 GPAs (out of 4.2) in civil engineering and are very likeable can’t find jobs, you know something is wrong. My generation is getting burned by universities, and parents and grandparents, and it will cause us (when it’s our turn to become parents) to tell our kids not to bother with university, and the pendulum is going to swing back and forth till some sort of equilibrium is established in a few generations, imo.

In life you tend to learn from parents and mentors (teachers and the like). When they all tell you the same thing, it’s generally difficult to go against “the grain”, so to speak. You realize these things after the fact, when it’s too late and you’re committed.

[quote] LoRez wrote:
If you talk to just about any employer, they’ll pretty much complain about the same thing… lots of people want a job, but they can’t find any good people.

Put those two things together, and the answer should be pretty clear.

(There are also hundreds if not thousands of different job markets, based on your speciality, location, tolerance for bullshit, pay requirements, etc. etc.)[/quote]

Yeah, that’s bullshit. Between the time I started applying for jobs and the time I graduated, I put in LITERALLY over 200 applications. This was over the period of just over a year. I got a few interviews but only one job offer. I have lived abroad most of my life, was involved in all kinds of community stuff (president of engineering club that built dune buggies, volunteered for habitat for humanity, etc), had good work experience (relevant engineering+ military as officer, etc), likeable, etc. I would even look up what software the company used and teach it to myself, just so I could confidently put it on my resume when I applied for a certain position. Even if it took weeks or months to learn, I did it. Barely helped.

Story time: companies generally come to universities to give presentations and pitch their company so they get more candidates. Makes sense, right? A large Engineering Procurement and Construction Management (EPCM) company came to my university: during the HR person’s presentation, in an auditorium, we were over 60 students, easily. Some of the people I knew, and I’d say they were very good candidates. The HR lady told us that across Canada there would only be about 6 positions made available this year. She said it was the most in a long time, generally 3 positions became available every year for new hires. This is a multi-billion dollar company, not a mom and pop shop. They’re involved in oil, etc. These available positions were for new hires that were not necessarily specialized in one kind of engineering (mechanical versus whatever). Remember this was my university, just one off the list of the many this HR lady was visiting. This doesn’t include any people applying that had graduated it’s been a year or two. I’ve come to find that a lot of people can do a good job, it’s just HR being retarded. There are candidates out there, they’re just ignored or HR is incompetent. Company I was hired by, in my region, hasn’t had a new hire in years.

Some ass clown might say get a job at McDonalds, which can be valid if there’s no other job I can get, but no one spends 5 years of their life and untold amounts of money to work at McDonalds. It’s like the retarded quip theists use when they don’t actually have an answer: “just have to have faith”.

[quote]LoRez wrote:
I really really think you need to widen your perspective to include more than just the West, and more than just the 60s to now.[/quote]

Apples to apples. We’re talking about how this (western/NA) generation has it harder in terms of making it. When you enter adulthood laden with debt, it’s generally difficult to make it, regardless of what all the exceptions and made up feel good stories you’re told. I’m sure that people in Palestine have it rough, but it’s a pointless comparison to make and serves no purpose other than to be a strawman.

[quote]LoRez wrote:
But at the same time, the people who are going to make it figure out how to make it, and a bunch of other people complain how it’s unfair. That’s been going on for a few millenia. Just as the older crowd has always been there saying some variant of “grow/man the fuck up”.[/quote]

We both know it’s not that simple.

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]carbiduis wrote:
When you’re 18 your good for manual labor and not much more
Manual labor jobs were much more prevelant before the steel belt turned into the rust belt and most US labor/manufacturing jobs went outside of the US.
[/quote]

The construction industry has been booming for the last 30 years in spite of a lull after the 2008 recession.

There are PLENTY of manual labor jobs available.

And yes, I’m in the construction business. I daresay I know what I’m talking about.[/quote]

That’s a point I forgot to bring up. Old cunts not willing to retire or pass the torch, screwing over the new guy looking to pay off his debt.

[quote]legendaryblaze wrote:
The explanation is simple: All the generations that came before the last 2 lived in a world where you were paid an honest wage for honest work, you didn’t need a degree to have a good job (let alone A job)[/quote]

Out of all the things you said…

My great-grandpa had his land taken from him for internment camps, my grandpa and his brothers grew up eating bread with lard on it as their only source of food, and went off to the war because it was the only place they were guaranteed 3 square meals a day.

There wasn’t much for jobs when they came back, so my grandpa spent a few years working as a volunteer firefighter (in exchange for room and board), and as a cabby. Summers were spent harvesting wheat up and down the middle of the US. Eventually he went into business as a plumber with his brother, which, of course, has nothing to do with getting an honest wage for an honest days work.

But, I mean, it was all easier than today.

[quote]legendaryblaze wrote:
When you enter adulthood laden with debt, it’s generally difficult to make it, regardless of what all the exceptions and made up feel good stories you’re told.[/quote]
I agree with this completely.

You could have avoided the problem. You didn’t. Most don’t.

And, again, there are lessons going back millenia about this. More than any other generation, we actually have the ability to be far more informed about this stuff. If you chose not to take advantage of that information BEFORE signing on the dotted line…

You really can’t blame anyone but yourself for buying into a storyline that isn’t (and really never was) based in reality. You could have known better, but you didn’t do the work to find out (“lazy”), and you expected things to turn out better than reality would dictate (“entitled”).

Maybe next time you’ll pay more attention to the people who develop and promote those stories… and maybe you’ll notice that it’s often the same people you end up indebted to.

[quote]LoRez wrote:

[quote]legendaryblaze wrote:
When you enter adulthood laden with debt, it’s generally difficult to make it, regardless of what all the exceptions and made up feel good stories you’re told.[/quote]
I agree with this completely.

You could have avoided the problem. You didn’t. Most don’t.

And, again, there are lessons going back millenia about this. More than any other generation, we actually have the ability to be far more informed about this stuff. If you chose not to take advantage of that information BEFORE signing on the dotted line…

You really can’t blame anyone but yourself for buying into a storyline that isn’t (and really never was) based in reality. You could have known better, but you didn’t do the work to find out (“lazy”), and you expected things to turn out better than reality would dictate (“entitled”).

Maybe next time you’ll pay more attention to the people who develop and promote those stories… and maybe you’ll notice that it’s often the same people you end up indebted to.[/quote]

The people that develop and promote these stories are parents.

[quote]legendaryblaze wrote:
The people that develop and promote these stories are parents.[/quote]

Who generally, admittedly, don’t do research. As you wrote earlier, they just go by what they knew in their younger years… Which probably don’t apply to now.

That being said…

[quote]LoRez wrote:
You really can’t blame anyone but yourself for buying into a storyline that isn’t (and really never was) based in reality. You could have known better, but you didn’t do the work to find out (“lazy”), and you expected things to turn out better than reality would dictate (“entitled”).[/quote]

Wow. Just. Wow.