Hacker News Reader

Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

And many of those degrade with age too, IQ peaks in your 20's, and I question life experience formed in the cold war, back when homosexuality was a crime and racism was common sence, houses were 2x annual income and top tax bracket was 70%

If we have minimum age for participating in politics, there should be a maximum age. Set it at like 70% of life expectancy.

Alternatovely, remove minimum age - I would rather have a 16 year old in parliament than a 90 year old, maybe some problems with schools will actually get addressed.

View on HN

> and I question life experience formed in the cold war,

It's not like russia is a nuclear armed threat actively leading a war that everyone is afraid to intervene in right now...

The rest of your comment here is just nonsensical name calling and assuming anyone older is automatically homophobic and racist. This kind of childish behaviour is why there are minimum ages for offices.

I don’t read it as “calling and assuming anyone older is automatically homophobic and racist”, merely saying those things were considered “common sense” during the Cold War.

I don’t actually know the extent to which each of those things were or weren’t considered common sense in any given year in any given location, so it may be correct or false or even every combination of both, but in any case it is a very different claim.

Yes, @bbarn I also don't think GGP meant any of those things

(Did you wake up on the wrong side today :-))

The dude has a point, if offices have an age minimum, I'd argue they should have a maximum as well. IMHO nobody over the age of 70 should be in high ranking public office. Heck the average age in the senate is 63. Is there any wonder that our government is out of touch?

> maybe some problems with schools will actually get addressed

You're basically saying you mostly care about problems you have experienced, while complaining that other generations don't understand you (without any basis, I might add). That's pretty self-centered.

Uhhh the generation that we call the Baby Boomers have been in control of their respective societies for over forty years. You can see the age (and the apathy, of course) in all of them. The worst (and oldest, of course) are Japan and Italy, but it's a bad problem everywhere.

I would support a maximum voting age, give the reins over to the next generation and let it go already.

The amount of nonsense is staggering

> the generation that we call the Baby Boomers have been in control of their respective societies for over forty years

So they grabbed control when they were in their 20s and didn't let go? That's a bit unlikely, isn't it? And most of the people in that generation had no power whatsoever.

> You can see the age

If you define a group by its age, of course you bloody can see the age. Do you add sentences in the hope that a random true one strengthens other ramblings?

> and the apathy

Strange. In the last years, apathy under adolescents and young adults seems to be getting out of control. Or are you calling them boomers too?

Lol why would I attempt a "conversation" with someone like this

Isn’t the point of democracy to align governments with the things people care about? To rely on self-centred voting averaging out over the whole population?

Not when young people concentrate disproportionately in urban areas and we weight presidential election votes by arbitrary land boundaries.

It's might be a kind of "expectation" outcome of one-man-one-vote, but it's not the point of democracy, IMO. I doubt it even has a universally agreed upon point beyond letting everyone participate. But averaging out interests, which is a sensible starting point, indeed requires that everyone gets to vote, old people included. The problem with "averaging out" interests is that the interests of minorities can get ignored for a long time. If that was the parent comment's point, it might have been formulated a bit better.

Any sex worker can tell you that 90% of debate and politics around sex work is disenfranchisement and lies.

If you deny that people with actual experience of the subject matter are better placed to resolve the issue, I am not sure our comprehention of the world is compatiable.

> complaining that other generations don't understand you

Have you seen Marz Zukerberg's senate hearing? Do tou think Senate has succesfully held him to account for the shenanigans Facebook was pulling? Do you dispute that if everyone in that chamber was a 40-year old proffeshonal who could remmber studying IT, and some of them w Veing recent IT proffeshionals, they would be able to do a better job?

Do you feel that in that hearing anybody at all of the older senators, say over 75, has demonstrated how their wealth of life experience has enabled them to do a better job?

IQ doesn't peak at any age, since its defined so that you can't really compare between people (or if you believe in such things “races“) with different (average) ages. I'm not sure why such a measurement would become the standard one for intelligence as it seems a bit useless by design.

> And many of those degrade with age too, IQ peaks in your 20's

Maybe true, not sure, but outcomes surely do not correlate with age.

"Scientists can publish their best work at any age"

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.20926

I think thats the wrong measurement - in politics a crisis happens, and you must respond withing a set amount of time.

So if older people take longer to come up with sensible solution, it could be too late

In politics it's almost always the old people who have to come up with a sensible solution to the rash and impetuous decisions made by their younger colleagues in a time of crisis.

What is the basis for this assertion? I believe the opposite is true - older politicians overhwlmingly cause a mess because they are stuck in their old ways

Kennedy was 46 years old during Cuban missile crisis, he has shown restraint when many generals, significanlty older than him, advocated use of force and likely would cause a global nuclear war.

Today young people overwhelmingly show the will to deal with climate change, and older generation overwhelmingly wants to continue to ignore it.

I love quoting Hayek's suggestion that the franchise be restricted to people between ages 45-60, because young people don't have enough life experience to decide, and old people don't have a stake in the future!

> IQ peaks in your 20's

Does that tell us more about intelligence or the testing?

> If we have minimum age for participating in politics, there should be a maximum age

Or a test: do you know where Canada is located? The largest country (area wise) on each continent? Can multiply two double digit numbers? And some other basic things -- one would need to pass such a test to get to vote.

Would reduce the likelihood that the voters change their country to a dictatorship

> If we have minimum age for participating in politics, there should be a maximum age. Set it at like 70% of life expectancy.

As if the people who actually vote are going to disenfranchise themselves. Also, your 0.7 of life expectancy is about 55-57 in the US and UK. Is that really where you think people are probably incapable of making decisions for themselves?

Seems silly.

"Is that really where you think people are probably incapable of making decisions for themselves?"

You don't hold public office to make decisions for yourself, you are making decisions for everyone else.

Well we can argue where exactly the boundary lies, but why do you think most scams and fraudulent schemes target older peopl? They are also considered vulnerable cusotmers by UK competitions and market authority.

> why do you think most scams and fraudulent schemes target older peopl?

(1) just following the retirement money

(2) student loans… crypto… mlm… home loans… plenty of scams target people at other stages in their lives. (I won’t even mention religions.)

> student loans…

I am talking about criminal fraud, the kind that send you to jail. Either you are being disengineous and are equating crime with questionable investment strategies.

Or you believe that the US government is complicit in defrauding an entire generation? I mean the latter could be a good argument for cancelling student debt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com