How about this one?

You don't consider it serious that you're essentially indentured servants of corporations and that they can easily circumvent due process and force you into settling on their terms?

O... kay...

Yeah, there's a lot of lamenting, but face it, it's tantamount to complaining that the Beef Wellington isn't exactly medium on point where everyone around you is starving to death.

Compared to the problems you face, we're actually, I hate to say it, pretty well off.

You are aware that the replacement rate of young people is not up to what it used to be, yes? For every 5 people you fire, you can only hire 4 new ones.

Replacement electronics aren't really that hard to find. Even modern recent cars have aftermarket parts that can be used.

You don't see any 10 year old cars rebuilt because they are barely out of warranty and are still running fine. The technology is vastly superior in that respect to what it was in the decades you mention.

Between my wife and I we've owned 4 cars from new to at least 20 years old, and a fifth that we sold around 15 years old cause newborn babies and 2 seat convertibles don't really mix, but beyond the water pump it was all original.

You're argument that your new car can't be serviced is bunk, you haven't needed to and if you did, the dealer probably paid for it.

Replaced the ECU in a 1996 Jeep just a few years ago. No there aren't any third party replacement infotainment computers for tesla yet ... because tesla is still fully making them.

Yeah, I don't know where the *good* Sci-Fi authors went either? ... cry me a river. There are way more good SF books than you can shake a stick at let alone read.

Vernor Vinge just died. Read any of his stuff? Very well written classic SF.

The Expanse series.

The Dune books, not just the first one. Given, Dune is a tad overrated in some regards but the good bits are really good and well worth the read. That goes for the entire Dune series.

What about Cyberpunk, somewhat of a sub-genre of SF? Neal Stephenson, read him? If not you've got some catching up to do. ... William Gibson seems to put out a Cyberpunk novel every odd year and the latest stuff is still as premium as ever.

Cory Doctorov, Orsen Scott Card, Richard Morgan, Michael Weisser ...

If you get bored you can look into lore books. The RPG universe of Shadowrun is your type A Nerd fest but of the 80 novels or so they have the top 5-10 are really good and worth a look, even if you don't care about the franchise. I'm pretty sure other expensive IPs have similar traits. It's quite unlikely that the top 5 novels of the Battletech or Warhammer universe are a complete waste of time. The writers of those books tend to spend years working on the worlds before writing a book on them which does lead to consistency and a baseline of quality.

Bottom line: You likely have vast unexplored areas of SF still to discover. Old and new.

In a red state, the money would just be embezzled and then some semblance of the project is realized, preferably in a way that nobody can or would ever use, so nobody notices it's unusable.

You have to drive them horizontally. Not vertically.

Of course you're breaking ground if you slam a high speed train right into it. Jeesh.

We are talking about an IT person getting fired for being "too old". The athlete is something that was compared to.

What makes you think that someone who is considered "too old" at 35 for an IT job would get some other job?

Do I really have to explain how analogies work?

It's less that, it's more that I can't just tell me to fuck off and leave. That works in an abusive relationship, but what can you do if you notice you share a body with an asshole?

It's harder to exploit older people, that's true.

They have already heard all the bullshit and empty promises and just don't fall for them anymore.

And even if you fire most 35 year olds, there is always a need for someone to train the next generation of layoffs.

But like with coaches and trainers, you need far fewer than you need players.

You think?

Tell me one good reason why I would not put such a clause in a burger flipper job contract to ensure my burger flipper will think twice before bailing from the horrible boss I am, knowing he will never flip a burger again if he does, and he already has a non-compete from his time at Target.

There are only so many no-skill jobs in a town, and once you're barred from all of them by ridiculous non-compete clauses, you have to stay with that last one that gang-pressed you into indentured service, because you have no way out anymore.

What exactly is sensible about that? You're punishing someone for creating a successful business by disallowing him to compete with the company that was stupid enough to buy it from him.

The idea of the EU, and one of the few ideas hatched by politicians that actually worked out 100% perfectly, was to intertwine and mix the economies of European countries so deeply that it would be economic suicide for anyone to go to war with a neighbor.

Germany and France have been at war, on and off, since the partition of the Frankish Empire into an eastern and western part, somewhere in the 9th century. Those (almost) 80 years of peace between these two countries that we had for the past (almost) 80 years are unprecedented in recorded history.