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Comment by offtop5 | Hacker News Reader

I know on a personal level the best thing you can ever do is avoid people like this.

LA, my hometown is full of people who simply don't want to do anything. They have a nasty tendency to introduce chaos, and not appreciate anything done for them.

One of my elder male relatives lived with his mother up until he was 50 and she died. He then immediately purchased a new truck , took out high interest quick cash loans against the home and lost everything within a few years.

You don't want idiots like this in your life. Once I moved to Chicago I had no trouble finding fantastic friends and an amazing partner with a great career( real life only, I've never meet anyone online with a job) . You become the people you surround yourself with.

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What you're describing is a real type of person, and one that should be avoided, but that's probably not what's fueling this statistic. Large portions of the population did not suddenly become lazy and lose all ambition. They're not engaged with the economy because they're losing the ability to engage. This is a global phenomenon, and it's getting worse and worse as tech makes most of the population increasingly irrelevant in the job market. We are rapidly approaching a situation with only two end states: Some kind of intense wellfare state, or riots and brutal chaos. Forget South Africa, the US is full of 30-and-unders who are perfectly capable and willing to engage, but can't because there's no place for them. No good jobs, rent and home prices are through the roof, college prices are through the roof and don't buy a good career anymore anyway. And on and on.

The problem isn't that young people are lazy. It's that they're being left behind. And if something isn't done about it soon, society is going to start to crumble. In some ways, it already has.

> Large portions of the population did not suddenly become lazy and lose all ambition. They're not engaged with the economy because they're losing the ability to engage. This is a global phenomenon, and it's getting worse and worse as tech makes most of the population increasingly irrelevant in the job market.

Spot on.

When media hypes up the automation as the doom for employment, they are ignoring the doom of employment already happening around them.

The only country that seriously paying attention to this problem probably is China. CCP is at no time not paying attention to make everyone busy up doing something meaningful (probably more to the state's ends, less so to individual in the western sense).

Of course some young people are lazy. And some are not lazy. I have no idea about South Africa, but in the US I can hardly find a business in my town (especially restaurants) without a "help wanted" sign. This may be a short term issue related to the pandemic.

What do help wanted signs have to do with lazy or not lazy?

I assume it means that jobs are available and people aren't taking them

That would be a pretty useless definition of lazy.

I can hang a sign out asking someone to work for minimum wage during evening hours in an area that requires them to live with 3 other roommates in a 2 bedroom apartment with a 60min commute on an erratic bus.

But I would not classify people not taking me up on this offer as being lazy.

They keep bumping up the starting wage. $12/hr for fast food. You can get a nice one bedroom here for $800/month. No long commutes here.

I never said I had a definition of lazy. I just said that some people are lazy and some aren't. You can't make a blanket statement saying all young people are not lazy. Just pointing out that I've never seen so many help wanted signs as I do now.

They should take that wage and job if they don’t have one. Beggars can’t be choosers.

At the same time they need to get out of that situation as soon as possible.

It’s one thing to look for a job and not find anything - it’s quite another to not have a job for years because the pay/job isn’t what you like and you are burdening the taxpayer in the meantime.

> They should take that wage and job if they don’t have one. Beggars can’t be choosers.

They do, our whole quality of life is based on the bottom 3 quintiles not having better options. It’s a unique situation that COVID caused the government to broadly hand out assistance, giving people the ability to not have to subject themselves to those low wage-low quality of life at work positions.

> it’s quite another to not have a job for years because the pay/job isn’t what you like and you are burdening the taxpayer in the meantime.

It is possible to me, if I were a low wage worker, to look at the data for the past 5 decades and conclude the probability to “get out of that situation” is sufficiently low to warrant opting out of the game entirely.

Curious, what metric would you use to determine if a group of people are lazy?

I do not think I would be able to distill it into an easy to describe metric(s).

I agree

Are you really suggesting that the reason 43% of South African youths are unemployed is because they're lazy?

>Are you really suggesting that the reason 43% of South African youths are unemployed is because they're lazy?

Not at all, it's structural problem. I've seen this in LA as well and it's the number one reason I left. Since I lack the personal capacity to fix LA, I no longer live there.

If anything if you live in a city or a nation where unemployment is rampant , you just need to leave. Not worry about what the government is going to do to fix it.

> you just need to leave. Not worry about what the government is going to do to fix it.

I'm voiding the HN policy and assuming bad faith since you either lack the empathy to see that not everyone is able to "just leave" or you have an agenda to make this a talking point. I'm hoping it is the later.

Do you leave in LA, or had a long and deep history living LA?

Wondering where your bad faith come from.

Back in the old days where I live in China, there were plenty of situations where people had no other way to engage the economy, and had to be lazy. They gamble, they prostitute, they murder as well. The government was absolutely powerless to do anything, simply because they had no whatever resources to fix those. Then people just left. Look at what's happening in China's north east provinces. Same situation.

According to this [1] the unemployment rate in LA is 9.9% vs Chicago 7.5% Is that really the difference between a thriving city and an unlivable hellhole?

What I am getting at is trying to figure out which city minimizes the types of "idiots" you are referring to and i'm finding that no city is really like that. Every city has these kinds of problems to some extent as well as positive aspects.

Maybe you just like a smaller city? ~2-3 vs ~12 million is a big difference.

[1]:https://www.bls.gov/web/metro/laummtrk.htm

Your experiences are completely different from mine. LA is the second largest city in the US, so I’m sure it contains all extremes. But in my experience it is full of young people who are striving and hustling. There seem to be more young people there with passionate professional dreams than most places.

Chicago is also huge- maybe you just got lucky in making your move?

Leave where?... How...? Many of these South Africans are rock bottom poor.

Someone who spent time in South Africa, I think it’s funnier that he suggest I try and avoid 43% of young people.

While I found your comment interesting, I think this is more specific whereas the article is more or less talking about a society that has a disfunction, not the individuals in it (well I mean it could, but 43 percent is extremely unlikely to be similar to your elder relative).

Sounds like you got outside your bubble (comfort zone) by moving somewhere new. People in Chicago are no better than people in LA or NYC or Mobile.

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