Who Did The 80s Like Who Built Them Up What Generation

Will the 80's and 90's generation become like most of today’s old people regarding technology?

Nah. Bad ideas just keep recycling. Once you get old enough you just recognize something coming full circle.Meanwhile, I do just fine with my Smartphone. But I’ll bet a lot of you young whipersnappers wouldn’t recognize a dial telephone, or know what to do with one if forced.If anything, I expect that younger generations are less able to cope with technology. Back in the day, we learned by taking things apart, repairing things, and building stuff. That’s a lot harder when everything is miniaturized and factory sealed. Older engineers played with TTL logic circuits and built computers from them - so we kind of understand how computers work under the hood. These days, it’s all on a chip - you can’t look inside, you can’t take it apart, you can’t really do anything. Same thing for cars - it used to be easy to do minor repairs (say, tuning a carburetor). These days, it’s all sealed fuel injectors and ECUs.ADDITION: And then there’s the way that recent technology (or at least the way it’s packaged) is leading our entire civilization to become ADHD. How the heck can anybody understand anything when communication is reduced to 140 character sound bytes, and everybody has the attention span of a gnat. Not really conducive to systems thinking.My prediction is that things will just keep dumbing down, and only the very few will understand anything. As Arthur Clarke said, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And has anyone noticed that wizards tend to be old, with long grey beards?

Are Gen Xers the most stunned generation in history that they are now old?

I'm almost 50 and never had kids but occasionally I'm struck by how young teenagers and 20 yr olds seem, not that I'm old but that they are that young.  Still I remember vividly the music of Cyndi Lauper, Weird Al, David Bowie,  Culture Club, Duran Duran, and Wham.  Do some degree various things from my teen and young adult yrs seem like a distance dream and then other times it seems like yesterday.  When I was finishing up HS and starting college, I had a talk with my Dad (who was a few yrs younger than I am now) and he mentioned how he still felt inside like he did when he was 20.  Sure his body was older and he had accomplished a lot but those same dreams and interests he had as a kid were still there.  He remembered the 1950's like I remembered the late 80's and early 90's.  I think from that talk with my Dad, I've always excepted to pretty much be myself as I got older, I mean hopefully we do grow and change some, but at the core we are still who we are all of our lives, was my Dad's point.  Sadly my Dad passed less than 20 yrs after that conversation and has been gone since '03.  Recently I was reminiscing  with a junior high school friend and I was shocked how much I still remembered, once I got going and also how much has changed since then.  The Internet, cell phones, and DVDs didn't even come into use until after I was technically out of college, my family didn't even get a VCR until I had graduated HS.  So teenagers lives today are pretty different in some ways that it was when I was a kid, but in other ways they are still so similar.

80% of America's millionaires are 1st generation rich i.e. didn't inherit money from rich relatives (The Millionaire Next Door). Any thoughts on this?

I think context is important, and I’ll point to two sources for perspective (Millionaire Myth Busters, and A record number of Americans are now millionaires, new study shows).The ratio of millionaires between Canada and the U.S. is about average - there are roughly a million millionaires in Canada, and the U.S. is about 10X that number - 10.8 million.According to the cited article, In 2016, there were 9.4 million individuals with net worth between $1 million and $5 million, 1.3 million individuals with net worth between $5 million and $25 million, and 156,000 households with more than $25 million in net worth, the report says.That means 90% of them are “barely millionaires”.And if you think being a millionaire means you can retire in the Caribbeans under the tropical sun and drive an Aston Martin, think again, because for many, their total net worth is tied up in the house they’ve paid off over 25–30 years while living frugally.The second article summarizes it nicely - millionaire is the new middle class; do the math with today’s cost of living and life expectancy and you’ll soon realize being barely a millionaire just might put you at risk of not making it to end-of-life.So who are all these lower tier millionaires?It can be the hard working small business owner, the roofer, plumber, or gardener you’ve hired, or just the average working Joe who made wise choices throughout his unpretentious life.These folks might not have much to pass on to their offspring, but the opportunity for their kids to make it is still there if their aspirations are in the right places.

Music: Why do most people from the previous generation hate and criticize the music of the current generation?

Lots of answers that touch on reasons, most of which revolve around older people always disliking the stuff younger people do, but that's not the whole story.I'm a musician, who grew up in the 80’s, but I do like and listen to modern music. I always have. Part of that is because my music taste has always been varied, and occasionally… eclectic. But I feel the same way about new music as I do about the music of my youth, and every generations music for that matter, and that's that it follows Sturgeon's law - Wikipedia : 90% of everything is crap.I recognized, when I was young, that most of the music on the radio wasn't very good. That sent me looking for other music, from other genres, and from other generations. It also kept me listening to new music as it came out. But I found the same problem every time I took a deep dive into a new genre or generation: mostly it wasn't very good, with a handful of artists who were very good, followed by a million copycats who just didn't understand what they were copying.Take away the nostalgia of what was playing in the background during memorable moments in my life, and what I'm left with is a very few good artists who did something worth listening to. Of course it varies a bit by each musical generation; some have more good artists and other have fewer, but overall it hangs around 90% crap and 10% good.So there are gems in modern music, but mostly it's unoriginal, parroting of something good someone else did, with all the things that made the original good made bland and lifeless. Even within a single artist's catalogue, as they try to recapture what they, themselves achieved on a previous song. It's inevitable.So a lot of people dislike what they hear in younger generations' music because the examples they have to work from are largely crap, and the examples of their own generation's music that they have in their heads are either the top 10% that was worth remembering, or they have a nostalgic attachment to it. We forget all the bad songs that we knew were bad at the time, and only remember the “best of,” or the ones attached to personal moments.I, for one, won't stop looking for the good music in new generations and movements. But I will tell you that Post Malone, Drake, and Cardi B are the crap you won't remember later, when you're 40, unless you have a personal nostalgic attachment to one of their songs. They are the fodder for “why did I listen to this crap when I was a kid?”