Here’s a discussion on Quora about Telsa’s ability to remotely shut off its cars:
https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Tesla-stop-stolen-cars-by-deactivating-them-They-have-the-ability-to-disable-a-car-remotely-If-one-is-stolen-they-can-have-it-shut-off-as-soon-as-it-is-not-moving#:~:text=First%20of%20all%2C%20the%20company,not%20to%20be%20used%20lightly.
I call BS. Our car’s connection to the mothership was fried. We could still drive it. Took it to the dealership to fix the issue. Thank goodness that was before the chip shortage.
Who will buy any car that can be remotely disabled in the middle of a 90 mph drive? Think about bad publicity.
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Let’s move the conversation off EV’s please. You’re welcome to start a different thread for that topic.
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So may EV posts here already that it might be helpful if the mods split this off into a separate thread.
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My kids and I have been discussing at dinner this week that the biggest geopolitical event that could emerge out of our current circumstances is the alignment/partnership of China and Russia and that if that occurs it has the potential to detrimentally affect life in this country in far-reaching ways, both immediately and long term.
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Had an interesting conversation with kiddo about this last night - and my parents at he same time. So three generations.
Grandparents’ view boiled down to: they have lived their lives, so it’s easy for them to align with a path that jeopardizes the future of younger generations. They feel bad about that, but there is nothing they can do to change the path we seem to be on.
My perspective was his generation has to handle a lot more than mine did, and that isn’t fair.
Kiddo’s perspective was - don’t worry about him, he’ll be fine. Worry about the people living in Ukraine. Besides, in the broader world and historical context, this is just one of many horrible atrocities, keep it in perspective- humans and despots regularly do horrible things. Always have, always will. And that we would all be surprised what his generation would be willing to sacrifice for the greater good.
So I take that conversation to reflect pretty well what geopolitics do to people
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Doesn’t every generation think that? This advice from 25 years ago still seems apposite:
“Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.”
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Nah, I don’t think so. My parents were older and grew up in the Depression and my dad was in the Navy in WWII. I don’t think that for a second they thought we kids had more to handle than their generation. As I mentioned up thread my brother missed the draft for Vietnam (it ended in '72, he was class of '73). I think they probably thought we were pretty spoiled, but they didn’t mind spoiling us a bit. They both grew up working. My mom on a farm and she literally rode a pony to school. My dad’s family lost the farm in the Depression, but they held onto the drug store where he worked as a soda jerk. Oh, and my mom’s oldest brother died of a degenerative disease when he was 9. And my dad’s father died when my dad was 15. My dad’s mom had a stroke with her first pregnancy (probably preeclampsia) with my aunt, but then went on to have my dad and his younger sister.
They never ever dwelled on any of that stuff. Everybody they grew up with had struggles. And really they knew that they were the fortunate ones. They had really fond memories of their childhoods and had great stories. They got through all that — the Depression, WWII, etc. There were plenty of people who didn’t. They recognized how good they had it and they were definitely living the post WWII American Dream. My parents just took it all in stride and wanted better for us than what they had.
I think that’s what all parents want and it’s hard to see the world now and feel like it’s going to be a better place.
I think that would be an interesting topic — Do you think your kids will be better off than you?
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I don’t know, maybe on some level. But I am acutely aware these days that growing up in the 80’s I am fortunate to have missed much of the hurt that came before and has come after. Personally, the financial collapse didn’t impact me much - I was broke but job secure, no savings to speak of. I don’t come from a military family, so Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t touch my life meaningfully. 9/11 was definitely traumatic- as much because it shook me out of an otherwise blissfully contented life, as it did personally touch me.
So my comment came from a uniquely Gen X mindset of: My generation dodged a lot of bullets, and my kid’s generation has not. It is like there was a lot of pent up awfulness that has unleashed itself.
On the flip side, my mom was a child in England during WW2, and endured the bombing. She has had her share of strife, too. Gen X in America was timed uniquely well.
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I think there is a lot of perspective involved in this discussion. What is true for some won’t be true for all. I grew up in an industrial town. During the 70s/80s there was a lot of upheaval. Many of my friends didn’t do as well as their parents. You could pull cancerous fish out of the river. A nearby one caught fire. Much improved on all counts since. Though still issues remain.
Will kids be better off? In what sense? Income? Quality of life?
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My oldest is graduating this May. He’s going into a job that offers a healthy pension, excellent low cost health insurance and early retirement. He also has a better understanding of investing than I did at his age. Those factors alone, all else being equal, means he’ll be in a better place when he reaches my current age.
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I grew up in the 1980s too, but I don’t think life was that bad for my parents: they were born towards the end of WW2 but college and early adulthood in the 1960s was pretty good and as homeowners they benefitted hugely from the surge in house prices that resulted from inflation in the 1970s. And of course they had excellent final salary pensions.
Nevertheless I’ve done (much) better than them in terms of quality of life. For my kids I expect at least one of the three will be more successful than me. Not totally sure which of them it will be yet 
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I agree with this for my parents too. In the bigger picture, everyone, regardless of generation, living in the abundance of the 50’s-90’s without much regard for future implications is a big contributor to the geopolitical/financial/environmental circumstances that exist now.
I am talking macro trends - individual paths vary a lot, as people note.
My kid will be fine, and I am not so worried about him. Financially he will be stable. But his generation as a whole, not so much. My brothers are better off than our parents, but I’m not (not complaining, it is a function of life choices and some luck). Kiddo will be better off than me financially, but the world he lives in is a lot less stable. The things beyond his control are what worries me.
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I agree that paths differ widely and most likely will lead to disparate outcomes.
My parents made less money, but retired in their late 50’s with pensions and provided health care for life.
I make more money than they did, but my retirement income will be less certain, and I’ll work much longer than they did.
My younger brother amassed generational wealth by 45 because of the path he followed.
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H grew up in a family that struggled financially. My folks struggled a bit as well but things got better for both our families as we got older. We and all our sibs have college degrees and more degree as desired.
Our kids both have college degrees. S has a good job with excellent benefits plus his part time job. He and his GF live in a nice place in a vibrant city and seem pretty happy though are much more aware of geopolitics than I was at their ages. S is much more aware of long term investing and retirement accounts than I was at his age.
D has chronic health issues and has never been able to hold any fulltime job.
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So much better.My spouses’s parents only wanted their kids to do better than they had. They worked to that end. We invested early, never wasted money, had a number of windfalls and could retire well before the normal age.
In all respects our kids have no money worries and will likely have solid jobs with graduate degrees and no debt. They will also inherit money and homes due to our investments. We will be able to support ourselves in old age. Any businesses they inherit from us would likely be sold or spun down as their interests are not our interests.
I think this is pretty uncommon. Most of our family ( cousins) will either have large college debts or no debt and might have to support their parents in later years. Most of our friends who have college age or recently graduated kids, have enough to retire and have figured out college. Most of our friends kids have no debt. That is likely due to where we live and where we sent our kids to school ( higher income area so parents had more to spend on college).
When I look around I’d say 90% of the people I know who are middle class are doing far worse than previous generations. At the upper echelon, people are doing well, some quite well. Investments have done great in the last decade. It’s really a matter of having enough resources to send your kids to college with no debt and retire well. Lots of moving parts and exceptions. But I think college debt, housing prices, inflation and spending habits have resulted in lesser outcomes.
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Since I posed the question of do you think your kids will be better off than you I guess I should answer it.
I’m not sure really. We have been really fortunate with several strokes of luck. My parents and grandparents were able to leave us a nice nest egg with investments. I ignored the wee little investment nest egg from my grandparents — bank stock in their county bank, but it split and split again and split again as the tiny little county bank got taken over by bigger and bigger banks. When we wanted to buy a house 25 yrs ago I had that stock we could sell some of for a down payment, which proved to be great timing because then it tanked afterwards. So I was lucky I didn’t do anything with the stock before then, lucky that my grandparents could leave it to me at all (it was only like 100 shares in a little county bank), lucky that it split so many times, and lucky that I sold It when I did.
We were also lucky to be able to buy our house before housing prices got crazy in our area (bought for $139K and houses in our neighborhood now go for mostly in the $350k-450k range). We were just kids and thought that was the next thing we should do a few years after we got married. We could have upgraded from our “starter home” but we were conservative about that and didn’t.
My husband luckily has a job where he will get an actual pension in 2-3 years if he wants to take retirement at 20 years and do something else.
My parents — my dad was in sales and my mom worked for the schools — had also investments that they were able to leave to us three kids. I was lucky there too. They were solidly middle class with a three bedroom brick ranch. But they saved well.
We are somewhat frugal (don’t buy a lot of extras except nice food) and don’t have any debt except the last $20k left on the mortgage. Cars all paid for, don’t carry credit card debt.
We will be able to send D22 to college without loans if we want to.
Our kids (oldest is 21) are not ambitious for money. Oldest is working in food service and taking a break from Community College right now, but plans to go back in the summer. Not sure if a 4 year degree is in that one’s future or not, but maybe. Our 18 year old definitely wants to go to college, but wants to major in Creative Writing, so not a clear path to a lucrative career.
As far as the geopolitical stuff, we graduated college in the mid/late 80s and married in the early 90s. I do feel like things are worse in the greater world now than they were then. I think politics all over the world is more polarized. The Ukraine situation seems much worse than Iraq or Iran since they didn’t actually have nuclear weapons. COVID is more contagious than HIV. Global Warming is more intense now. We had Glastnost and Perestroika and the Berlin Wall coming down and Solidarity.
So I think if the world keeps turning (some days I have my doubts) my kids will be okay. They’ll be fine. We will be able to help them and they do know how to work (my 18 yr old has a part time job too), but I don’t know that they will ever be in careers where they will be raking in the big bucks and I do fear for what this world will be like in the future.
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Our S could buy a place and pre-Covid was seriously looking for a place. Since then, he stopped looking. Both S and D have no debt and S has a significant sum saved in his retirement accounts as well as significant amount in his very liquid business inventory.
I feel S will be fine financially—with what he has and what we will likely gift him. D will be fine as well, even if we have to support her for the rest of her life.