There's a balance to be found between work and school. I worked 30 hours per week my junior and senior years to pay my tuition. It definitely hurt my grades. On the flip side, I increasingly hear, "Kids don't want to work," from parents of teens. So those kids are deciding ZERO is the right number of hours per week. Even beyond that, my company increasingly struggles to hire kids in their early 20s, which used to be the backbone of our warehouse labor. Our pay has stayed about the same, so either all those kids are in college now, or simply don't want to work in a warehouse.

Unfortunatley my mom and my aunt didn't heed that advice. Both of them have been sitting on the couch for several years and their health has suffered for it.

My uncle told me that he watched a lot of his older coworkers retire for a long time and the ones that sat on the couch were dead in a few years. He vowed to stay active. I'm terrified i will just put on a VR headset and disappear.

"I was told by people whose opinions I trusted that it really had been a good place to work, back when Sam Walton was alive. He was ruthless anti-union, but part of his fighting unions was treating employees such that they didn’t feel the need to unionize. That also was the era of frequent stock splits. There were stories of secretaries from the early days who were millionaires."

This is kind of how things go at my company. About 2/3 of our company is unionized but my division is not. To give you an example, I have talked to management on the union side and they said it's common to hear cussing, yelling, etc from employees directed at management. If they fire someone, the employee is usually back within a couple of weeks. On my side, if an employee raises their voice on the floor, there's a good chance we will be in the HR office sorting it out. You have to tolerate a lot less bad behavior and take steps to keep morale higher in a non-union environment, or at least that is my experience. On the union side you quickly realize you can't win, so you just sort of quit worrying about it.

Or they do it because they are bored. My father-in-law is very comfortable financially but at 75 he started stocking shelves at a big liquor store a few days a week just for something to do.

Correct. Have you ever heard the story of the Hula Burger?

https://mcdonalds.fandom.com/wiki/Hula_Burger

"When I was a kid, all of the people in the back (excepting the manager) were teenagers. Now they’re all grown-ups."

This. And the adults there often look like they are familiar with the inside of a jail cell. And they are pretty terrible. Meanwhile, Chic-Fil-Et has mostly actual kids working there and they kill it. Seriously, that company has their training and processes dialed.

I have the same problem. My wife has been forced to march through a lot of cemeteries in new England.

"Just a note for you and Saul, and maybe others: Boomers are not the largest population group in the US. This ended about 5 years ago. They may still be the largest voting bloc, because people vote more reliably as they get older, as a general rule.

The world is yours."

Most of my complaints surround BBs seemingly being unable to exit the job market and make room for the rest of us.

My wife and I finally agreed on historic Cave Hill cemetery, here in Louisville. We'll be in there with my great, great-great and great-great-great grandparents. We'll also be neighbors with George Rogers Clark, founder of our fair city, Muhammed Ali and Colonel Sanders. Old cemeteries are awesome.

https://www.cavehillcemetery.com/

Obama lived in Indonesia for 4 years.

It dep2nds on who you read but starting dates for GenX are generally given as 1961 to 1965. Obama being born in 1961 puts him on the very front of that. I consider him an honorary Gen Xer though, based on cool points.

Iowa is a pretty politically-savvy electorate and Warren has done a good job there. I think her and Sanders will split NH due to their current home states. That leaves SC. Question is, does Biden get the Obama love or do they abandon him? We could possibly not have a clear front-runner even after the First Three primaries.

I know I have said this many time, but as a proud GenXer, I'm so done with the Baby Boomers. I would begrudgingly vote for Warren but Biden and Sanders can suck an egg.

It's always going to be a conversation, especially as more and more people move to cities and have less contact with guns. But just how responsible gun owners have never really been successful at reassuring the non-gun owning public that most guns are in safe hands, the not-friendly-to-guns crowd is never going to be able to reassure us completely. But with that said, we have SCOTUS for a generation so I think we're mostly safe on that front.

(I would also suggest that if we actually insisted on 2 & 3, similar to what hunters did in the past with hunting regulations, we would actually facilitate #1)

I don't disagree with Chip on this. If someone can't follow existing laws regarding guns they need to not only lose their guns but probably also lose some other belongings to re-enforce the point.

Three separate conversations:

1) What guns should be banned? (Mike says zero)

2) What should be the requirements of gun ownership and usage? (Mike says lots of them)

3) What should be the penalties for people that violate #2? (Mike says take lots of their stuff)

The primary law enforcement folks I have dealt with is fish & wildlife and they are all-powerful. They seize millions of dollars in assets yearly and you hear no real complaints.

I would absolutely give their houses to someone else. Or at least their car.

I am always a bit amused about gun owners that think the government doesn't know about their guns. It's 2019. Paper trails are very long these days.

"I will never understand why people who are anti-gun control are so prejudiced against gun owners, asserting they are literally incapable of following the law."

*ahem*

https://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2015/06/24/nearly-one-million-new-yorkers-didnt-register-their-assault-weapons/#1f0bb804702f

"Oh I understand it’s not all about the entry costs, but entry cost is part of it. I would speculate the biggest decline is due to video games or social media."

You're absolutely entitled to speculate, however your conclusions don't align with any survey data I have read. Declining numbers are due to A) aging out of Baby Boomers and not enough recruitment of new hunters. The latter part is not due to costs and couch potatoes but lack of access to land and no one to mentor them. The hunting organizations I belong to put a ton of time, money and effort into mentorship programs for that very reason. Why do I know it's not due to people being to lazy? Because plenty of other outdoor sports are exploding (ex, disc golf).

"I don’t think hunting has much of a future IMO."

I don't disagree. I don't really mourn the eventual loss of a pastime that has been an important part of my life. We as a nation will find other ways to support conservation (GOP be damned) but I do mourn the ultimate loss of more sensible voices within the gun community.

Hunting regs are pretty easy to comply with and no one has seen it as an infringement of their right to hunt. When they passed the hunter's ed requirement in KY I was four months shy of being grandfathered in, so I had to take the class. I still apply lessons learned around gun safety. I also dutifully purchase my hunting license and permits every March. It's all done online and it's an easy process, but it creates a lot of structure around hunting and (again) gives teeth to enforcement.

it would be wrong to look at declining hunter numbers as a function of entry costs. Hunting is contracting significantly because Baby Boomers are aging out.

But again, this isn't about hunting specifically. It's about applying decades of best practices to the large gun culture in the United States. This would not only reduce gun death IMO, but also put the rest of the country a bit more at ease with the idea of guns in the first place.

I am with you on all of the arbitrary bans of certain gun types and accessories, however this:

'I actually do have a problem with hunters paying for all that stuff, because I want more hunters in the future with fewer barriers to entry. Of all the gun owners, we need more of this particular type.

If something is not a necessity, I see permits, licensing, fees, etc. as limiting something that is not wanted. IMO hunting should be a completely free action, and probably a tax right off."

That is a fundamental misunderstanding of hunting in America. Hunters are extremely proud of the dollars they put towards conservation through Pittman-Robertson and hunting licenses. In my 32 years afield I have never heard a hunter complaining about any of those things and to the contrary, we're all pretty outraged when people are caught hunting without paying their dues, both monetarily and metaphorically.

Again, for me it's about personal responsibility, training shooters and creating barriers to entry. It's an awesome privilege and one I don't take lightly. If I am being blunt, I know far too many recreational shooters and casual gun owners that i would not want to be around when they had a loaded gun in their hand. I can't really say that about any of the people I know that hunt. It's just a different IMO.

I think it's important to note that barriers to entry are not about trying to limit who gets to do something. As Randy Pausch said, barrier are about proving how bad you want something. I want gun ownership to not be less common, but to be harder to obtain and I want it to require a reaffirmation at least once every few years.

David Baldacci likes to write all of his novels with a male protagonist and a female helper. I always saw it as a buddy-action thing with a little bit of potential romantic tension thrown in (he almost never actually delivers on that). I never think of it as pandering, but more of an attempt at adding a different perspective. And in the case of at least one of those series, the female is the better fight/shooter of the two so she ends up doing a lot of the saving.

On a personal note, I always like to hear married couples talk about the division of labor in the household, when they aren't bitter about it. Marriage is a partnership and finding that balance is special.

I think the cooling off period can help with crimes of passion - but it's also just about gun safety too. Being forced to wait some time and have a safety class before a purchase is going to prevent accidents. I view gun deaths as needing a holistic approach.