(long tweet warning) This. Not only this, those on the Right sneering at Gen Z in particular need to truly consider and internalize this. There are no guarantees in life is as true as it it trite. Of course there's not. I spent years working for a plaintiff side PI firm where the business model required awful things to happen to people unexpectedly. There are no guarantees is simply true. There are, however, supposed to be actions that a person can take to hedge against the vicissitudes of life. Those hedges appear to have been set on fire intentionally in order to be sure that Line Goes Up. The trite part is this - there are no guarantees in life is, far too frequently, being used to hand wave away people making legitimate objections to having done what there were told would lead to success and then that success does not come despite those people doing nothing wrong. People went to college and put in the extra time and were loyal to a company and did all the things they were told would lead to success and the reward for that was getting fired while the company is making record profits and the CEO is getting a huge bonus because, hey, labor is just another line on the spreadsheet to optimize. Actions are supposed to have consequenes. Working hard is supposed to be rewarded with something other than more work. When people mock Gen Z for asking about work life balance because when you start a career, you have to be prepared to put your time in to get ahead, those people are ignoring that putting the time in no longer has any rational connection to getting ahead. Why on earth would a human being donate time to a for profit company, which is what working extra hours without extra pay is, when said for profit company will turn around and fire that person at any time? There has to be some financial reward that will materialize in this mortal plane on a rational time scale for someone to work extra hours and telling Gen Z that look just slog through and, in three years, you'll get that promotion makes Gen Z, justifiably, laugh in the face of the person saying that because more likely than not in three years that company will be firing people wily nily. A job is a job and it is what a person does to make money and when the money will not be there, it is insane to tell people they should do the work anyway. Does a company owe a person a job no matter what? No. However, neither do human beings owe their labor to a company. It is supposed to be a mutual exchange. Human being gets compensated, company gets labor. The hoary old joke of a company wants to pay as little as possible for the most work while a person wants the most pay for as little work as possible was also true and trite. There was never going to be a perfect balance there because this all involves humans and thus perfection is impossible. Yet, people muddled through. I stayed with the Psychopaths for as long as I did because I was paid enough, both in direct pay and in benefits, to make it worth it. Psychopaths had to pay about 25% over market rate for employees due to having the earned reputation of being a horrific place to work. That was the balance, Psychopaths were horrible bosses and thus quite literally paid the price for that. Those of us who stayed there knew, to the penny, how much our dignity and pride were worth. The market corrected. The problem is that there now seems to be a fundamental break in that marketplace correction. Working longer hours does not result in promotions, it results in headcount dropping because, see, the remaining staff picked up the slack. Credential creep drives up the entry cost for even being considered for a job in the first place. Line Goes Up is looking at the line on a quarter by quater basis, not with any kind of longer term plan as to what will happen next year when headcount is down and now there aren't enough people to do the work. Crony corporatism is parasitical and anti-human. I despair.

Indeed, rare I disagree with @cremieuxrecueil (whose broader point is good) but I propose the right metric is “What share of men at 30 are married, employed, fathers?” A drop of ~50% → ~25% in one generation

Everyone argues about the best and worst presidents, but nobody talks enough about the weirdest, and it is not close. Calvin Coolidge was a deeply strange little man, and I mean that with love. Start with the raccoon. In 1926 some supporters in Mississippi mailed a live raccoon to the White House so the Coolidges could kill it and eat it for Thanksgiving. Instead Calvin took one look, decided this animal ruled, named her Rebecca, had her fitted with an embroidered collar that said White House Raccoon, and let her roam the building. The First Lady would take her out on the town like a socialite. They gave her her own little house on the grounds. Rebecca was not even the strangest pet. The Coolidge White House was basically a zoo. He had lion cubs, a wallaby, a black bear, a bobcat, and a pygmy hippopotamus named Billy that he eventually gave to the National Zoo, where Billy went on to father a huge chunk of the pygmy hippos in American zoos. This man had a hippo. Then there is the morning routine. Coolidge liked to eat breakfast in bed while a valet rubbed petroleum jelly into his scalp. Vaseline, on the head, over eggs, as a wellness ritual. Nobody fully knows why. He also loved to press the buzzers that summoned Secret Service and staff, then run and hide so he could watch them come sprinting in looking for a president who wasn't there. He thought this was hilarious. And the whole time, this is Silent Cal, the man so famously quiet that when a woman told him she bet a friend she could get more than two words out of him, he looked at her and said "you lose." The quietest president we ever had was privately running a petting zoo and pranking his own bodyguards. Weirdest one in the building, easily.

The solution, as I've long advocated, is eliminating blue slips for US attorneys. They are appointed by the president, carry out his policies, and leave when he does. They're not like judges, who have life tenure and therefore arguably merit the scrutiny a blue slip entails.

Americans should not be forced to breathe hazardous air year after year because Canada refuses to properly manage its forests. This is no longer a one-time emergency—it’s becoming an annual public health crisis. That is unacceptable. I am reaching out to Members of Parliament and the Canadian Ambassador to demand answers about the devastating impact Canada’s forest management failures are having on Western New York, the Southern Tier, and communities across the United States. Millions of Americans are paying the price for policies they had no role in creating. We can all accept that nature is unpredictable. But repeated failures to reduce wildfire risk and manage forests responsibly are a policy choice. The United States cannot continue accepting dangerous air quality every summer as the new normal. Canada must take meaningful action to prevent these catastrophic wildfires and protect both Canadians and Americans. If it refuses to do so, there should be consequences. Our citizens should not be forced to suffer because another nation’s government failed to do its job.