Oh, but ain't that America for you and me?

Ain't that America, somethin' to see, baby?

Ain't that America, home of the free, yeah?

Little pink houses for you and me

Doesn't he still need to try to work in order to qualify for medicare?

Were you actually under the impression that SS and medicare are sufficient on their own to retire?

This country has been specifically designed to make sure that the average person can’t retire.

Not only that, but it's designed to take everything they have before they die as well.

Assuming he saved nothing for retirement, and assuming he never worked for an employer that had a pension (which would be a bit odd for a 72 year old)

• when the car needs new brakes, you don't have retirement money. When the hot water tank breaks, that's most of your contribution. When your upstairs neighbor floods the bathroom and you're moving the things out that can be saved while dealing with the futility of insurance and renting from old and new place for a month, retirement contributions tend to be null for a bit. When life isn't like on TV, retirement becomes a secondary dream to just getting by.
• we don't get dream jobs every time. Sometimes you go for a living wage and that's not enough to live large at 70.
• sometimes we have car accidents or horrible illnesses. And, in america, that means you lose everything you ever saved - either on costs, or on fighting your medical insurer.

Americans live in this cognitive dissonance where they know all these things but yet just hope they'll win the lottery and not have any of it happen to them. I hope you also never have to deal with any of that, and you don't die for many years until that freak parachute/jetski/shark accident takes you.

Putting aside that some people have lost their retirements in financial collapses or to medical expenses there are also predatory things like Reverse Mortgages that regularly invert people’s financial situations.

This country has been specifically designed to make sure that the average person can’t retire.

You may be surprised to learn that the elderly still have bills. Social Security doesn't necessarily cover all of those bills. Medicare does not cover all medical expenses in their entirety, and many times require a part B private insurance plan and a monthly premium payment and co-pays to go along with it. And medication expenses. For someone that just had a major medical issue, they could be looking at thousands, or tens of thousands, or more, to pay for the medical treatment they just received. They can be indebted to medical debt for life.

Source: My parents worked their entire lives and put money into retirement savings. It did not last them their expected lifetime so they ran out of retirement savings. Their social security checks do not cover all of their expenses. They pay over $200 a month OOP in medications, pay ~$800/month for a Medicare part B premium, ~$100/month for medication insurance, and still have to go to doctors/specialists multiple times a month with co-pays/OOP expenses.

This isn't an elderly-specific issue. My brother had cancer and was in and out of hospitals for 3 years. He died owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in OOP medical debt (total bills were well over $1 million). His widow, my sister-in-law, will be paying those expenses for the rest of her life, even though she is remarried and my brother died 25 years ago. He had insurance. He was a teacher.

TLDR: Our medical system is barbaric and should be torn to shreds and rebuilt as a universally-paid, non-profit social service.

That is some dystopian shit.

hundreds of applications and a handful of interviews? they're doing better than younger people, then.

Have they tried showing up in person, asking to see the manager and giving them a strong handshake?

Or is it that the job market has been fucked for a while.

Only job security is to make VP.

Ageism has been an issue for a long time, but becomes more noticeable in the lean years. My friend was just canned on day 89, and she's 55, whip-smart and finished an MBA this year focused on machine learning and its application in finance (not a slouch or a fogey).

It's a challenge since the people who were mentored are now easier to ignore. Hope to fuck I never need a heart machine because I've seen who's gonna be writing their firmware.

Nepotistic job market bypass. Happens daily.

Capitalism throws away the sick and the old.

If we liquidated that list of people and whoever is left in the epstein files the world could begin healing.

This is the job market today, to a large degree. I suppose there may be some amount of age bias, as with anything, but this is how things are lately.

Here is a step-wise approach to solving the employment crisis (and many others):

Elon Musk, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Bernard Arnault, Jensen Huang, Steve Ballmer, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Amancio Ortega, Michael Dell, Carlos Slim Helú, Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, Julia Koch, Zhong Shanshan

If you're making 1/10th of what your boss makes?

Absolutely! By-and-large, the income disparity is way worse than that in the USA.

Does this make you a member of the non-working class?

This is coming, whether humans like it or not. These factories are already heavily automated, adding one more type of robot to the mix only feels different because of their shape.

We (humans) need to be spending our effort on reconfiguring our economy to work for everyone when labour loses most of it's value, not try to stop the automation. It's possible to do this, it's just a massive shift in how we think and operate.

At the end of the day I don't want a job, I want the things that come from the money I get from having a job. As long as I can continue to get those things, I'm fine.

But it'll be funny to see all the bots crashing on things on YouTube.

retatrutide

Dude, you can't say that anymore.

We are genuinely running out of drug names.

This article tracks. I lose at least half a day of productivity on the 2 days / week I’m required to be in office. That commute time is spent in early meetings with colleagues in different time zones. I won’t attend meetings from my car or the train. New boss said don’t come in unless you want to or there’s a team event. We are going to get along methinks.

It’s so fucking obvious that it’s about power for these insecure idiots.