We can't lay all of the blame on trump.

The problem is conservatism in general. Every Republican president of the past 50 years has caused economic turmoil. When Republicans get power in the legislature, the only notable thing they work towards is tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and gutting things that help people in order to pay for it.

Trump isn't singularly the problem here, but he is so fucking stupid that he's speedrunning the economic crisis. A Republican with a halfway functional brain would know to move slowly enough that the economy falls apart as they're heading out the door, not within the first 20% of their term.

Start selling trump "I did that!" stickers of him pointing up at the eclipse. You'll start seeing them everywhere soon. Gas pumps, grocery store shelves, car dealerships, etc.

Trump is a symptom of the US, not the cause.

Capitalism has been rotting out the interior of the industrialized world for decades. The dogged belief that Gore or Kerry or Hillary or Harris would have insulated the US (much less the rest of the world) from the same foibles and failures committed by Clinton and Obama and Biden is painfully naive. Nevermind the disastrous administrations of Trudeau and Starmer and Felipe Caldaron.

The idea that you just need a competent liberal technocrat in charge to make a country work never seems to bare out in practice. We get an earful about liberal reforms that will fix everything, but then those reforms either never arrive or get so watered down in the offering that they're meaningless.

Trump's revanchism is actively breaking a rotted out institutional economy. But we've been living in a progressively-more-gutted-out house since the end of the Reagan Admin. "The Free Market" is the root of this decay, not any one of its particularly boorish champions.

Okay you just need to stop pursuing higher education lmao.

I graduated with my associates in 2008, which is how I ended up joining the military later that year.

A young salmon swims downriver searching for an ocean he has never seen. Eventually the riverbanks give way to a vast blue expanse. He approaches the first fish he sees and asks them where he might find the ocean. The other fish replies

"You're in it!"

The salmon shakes his head.

"This? This is water. I'm looking for the ocean!"

The character building and customization never ends, but it's also not something that has to be a burden. The way school and such introduces things like reading and learning or physical activity is sometimes very damaging because it gives you this impression that these things have to be work, that it's all about deadlines and what you can get out of them instead of enjoying them for the sake of the thing.

Suffice it to say if you're waiting to one day start your life and become who you want to be you're missing the point. The journey is supposed to be the focus, don't wait to start living for some lofty time you're allowed to begin building the life you want. Start the journey for it now and find passions to savor along the way. Life doesn't begin at 20, 30, or even 40, you just get different content so you might as well make the most of the fleeting window to enjoy the things that make life at your age special.

A long ramble, but I hope it conveys my point. Good luck!

Sorry there's no game, just a character screen with microtransactions.

We didn't start the fire comes to mind. Things have always been crazy, welcome to life since the dawn of society as we know it.

It was always burning, since the world's been turning.

I decided to finally do my masters in biotech after a decade in data engineering got me to have some savings, mostly because I did want to do one eventually.

Man, these kids don't know what's waiting for them. None of the companies in biotech are hiring, as in their career pages are empty. LinkedIn, Indeed and the usual suspects only throw up listings which are obviously just staffing orgs fishing for data to sell. I feel there is a similar break in the industry with the pandemic, nobody is hiring people just graduating, the barest minimum is 5-6 years of experience.

I'm seeing some of the best minds in Europe here, doing something that is both hard and useful science, I mean we just had a worldwide pandemic and this masters should be extremely relevant for that, and apparently the system will not let them work in their field.

Only way out is academics, on barely-decent, you-will-never-have-a-house-much-less-a-family wages. If they can get in to the limited number of exceptionally "well" paying PhD slots, for 40-45k gross. They may earn as much as me doing random bullshit internal tooling two years ago for a bank that went bankrupt since if they can get tenure as a full prof at a good uni in like 30 years of hard work.

This is bullshit.

Everything has been a downward slide our entire lives which means it also rolls downhill for all the future generations too until someone can yank back on the economic flightstick and get us out of this dive.