Randalor posted:

Have they started saying that persecuting Trump for what he did in the past is pointless because it was so long ago, but also persecute Hillary for her e-mails, yet? I've always "enjoyed" the cognitive dissonance of those two thoughts when they start spouting them back to back.

Randalor posted:

Oh, no, I meant at the protest today.

TheDisreputableDog posted:

You are objectively, demonstrably wrong. White, blue-collar workers voted for Bill Clinton, and their lives continued to get worse. Thirteen percent of Trump voters also voted for Obama, without which the contest wouldn’t have even been close. Those people aren’t racist or motivated by race.

There’s no dearth of valid criticism to level against the right, but painting the voters as one dimensional cartoon characters isn’t one of them.

DarkCrawler posted:

California is not wealthy because of government policies,

Epic High Five posted:

If you think all the interventions and stuff started AFTER the USSR fell that's just an incorrect understanding of history, as they were a well-established duty of intelligence agencies even before Operation Paperclip made them all official national policy.

Main Paineframe posted:

Whether it's claiming that the system is somehow rigged in favor of fascism, or insisting that voters are too "pro-suffering" to support leftism, or claiming that voters are simply voting against their own interests...it all seems to boil down simply declaring leftism to be functionally impossible to attain (whether in America or worldwide), and absolving the left of its responsibility to convince other people to support leftist policies.

TheDisreputableDog posted:

Mellow Seas posted:

lol, how could I possibly believe that? You know me well enough to know I’m not that ignorant. I didn’t say “collapse”, I said “collapse into totalitarianism,” which it had fully done by WW2. (If you don’t think that’s accurate then I dunno what to tell you there.)

Fister Roboto posted:

What does "collapse into totalitarianism" mean though? The USSR definitely became more totalitarian, but I wouldn't call what it did in WW2 "collapse".

quote:

Got Milk? Not This Generation. Alarmed by dwindling sales to Gen Z, the dairy industry is going all out to get younger Americans on the milk train.

To the marketers trying to reboot milk as a sports drink for Generation Z, Yvonne Zapata seemed like the perfect ambassador. An exuberant 24-year-old marathoner from Brooklyn, she describes herself as a proud Latina runner. Her nickname is Miss Outside.

The Milk Processor Education Program signed her to its 26.2 project, an ambitious effort to provide training, gear, advice and other support to every woman who runs a marathon in the United States this year. In March, Ms. Zapata’s face lit up a giant Times Square billboard. She starred in her own video. Her portrait is one of several anchoring the Gonna Need Milk website.

There is only one problem: Ms. Zapata would rather drink oat milk.

“Dairy milk is good,” she explained in an interview, “but I feel like realistically it’s unhealthy.”

She grew up hearing that dairy products weren’t good for her sports-induced asthma. Then her sister became a vegan and made a strong case against them. But Ms. Zapata is dedicated to getting women with different shapes and from different cultures to embrace running, so she joined #TeamMilk.

“I feel like that’s more important than whether milk is good for you,” she said.

Ms. Zapata is part of the Not Milk generation, teenagers and young adults who grew up ordering milk alternatives at coffee shops and toting water bottles everywhere. Turned off by the no-fat and low-fat milks served at school, worried about climate change and steeped in the increasing skepticism toward the dairy industry on social media, many of them have never embraced milk. Last year, members of Generation Z bought 20 percent less milk than the national average, according to the consumer market research company Circana.

“Nobody drinks regular milk on purpose nowadays,” said Masani Bailey, 30, who created a nostalgic deep dive into the celebrity-driven “Got Milk?” campaign from the 1990s and early 2000s for her TikTok account, @cultureunfiltered.

The dairy industry isn’t banking on nostalgia to save the day. It has embarked on a full-frontal marketing assault intended to do what the “Got Milk?” mustaches on celebrities like Taylor Swift and Dennis Rodman did for previous generations.

“We have to reclaim milk’s mojo,” said Yin Woon Rani, the chief executive of the Milk Processor Education Program, a marketing and education arm of the dairy industry based in Washington, D.C.

The campaign takes several forms. Although the science about the health benefits and drawbacks of milk isn’t settled, some studies have shown that chocolate milk contains basic electrolytes and a precise ratio of carbohydrates to protein that can help muscles recover after workouts. One strategy involves showing athletes like Ms. Zapata that milk is a good sports drink (though the Gonna Need Milk people thought she was more of a milk fan when they signed her up).

Milk processors are betting that supporting women and girls who run, and promoting gender equity in sports — with plenty of post-race chocolate milk — will change some minds. For every woman who joins #Team Milk, the milk processors will make a donation to Girls on the Run, a national nonprofit sports organization.

Milk marketers have also tapped Olympic medalists, women who play football and other sports influencers who swim, climb or play street soccer.

“We sometimes refer to milk as the O.G. sports drink, powering athletes for 10,000 years,” Ms. Rani said.

At the other end of the activity spectrum, the industry is making a play for gamers. Milk processors declared milk the official “performance beverage” at last year’s TwitchCon gaming convention in San Diego. Dairy Management Inc., a trade organization, hired the gaming superstars Preston Arsement and Jimmy Donaldson (known to his 139 million YouTube subscribers as Mr. Beast) to introduce seven new cows to Minecraft. The two streaming celebrities heaped love on the nation’s dairy farmers and explained sustainable dairy-farming practices.

Some milk marketers have created Shark Tank-like contests that encourage small food entrepreneurs to invent dairy-based products aimed directly at Gen Z. One winner was Spylt, a caffeinated chocolate milk whose tagline is “Chill it. Then chug it!”

All this is not to say that young people don’t eat plenty of cheese, yogurt and ice cream.

“They’re not abandoning dairy,” said John Crawford, a dairy analyst for Circana. “But they certainly are walking away from traditional dairy milk.”

The decline has been happening for decades. Americans’ annual milk consumption peaked at 45 gallons per person in 1945, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It fell to about 23 gallons in 2001, and by 2021 it was down to 16 gallons.

Although Generation Z is the target, millennials laid the groundwork for milk’s identity crisis, with their focus on health and wellness and demand for transparency in the food system.

“I feel like this is another punch line about us: Did millennials kill milk?” said Rebecca Kelley, 39, a content strategy consultant in Seattle.

She and her friends drink almond milk. “I do have some old millennial guilt because I know from a sustainability perspective almond milk is not great,” she said. But she also sneaks in a glass or two of whole milk with spaghetti or a tuna sandwich, despite judgy comments from friends. “For me, it’s a nostalgia play.”

Milk has a tougher battle with Generation Z. Born between 1997 and 2012, it’s the country’s most diverse ever. A bare majority are white, and 29 percent are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Many come from backgrounds in which lactose intolerance is common.

Some have turned to nut milks and other plant-based alternatives, whose sales are expected to grow by more than 9 percent a year through 2027, far faster than milk.

The dairy industry has long waged a battle to keep plant-based alternatives from using the word milk. The Food and Drug Administration in February made it clear that the war is probably over, issuing a draft ruling that drinks made from oats, almonds or other plants can be called milk. The agency did hand dairy producers a small win, recommending that packaging for plant-based drinks make clear the key nutritional differences between their products and cow’s milk.

But dairy milk is still a much bigger player. In the year that ended in November, milk sales were almost $15.7 billion, compared with $2.4 billion for alternative milks.

“People are saying, ‘Oh, plant-based. That’s what’s destroying you,’ ” said Ms. Rani, of the Milk Processor Education Program. “That’s not it. Dairy milk sells as much at retail in a week as oat milk sells in a full year.”

Dairy milk’s real competition is other beverages, like water, both bottled and tap, and specialty coffee drinks.

“People come to work with a Gatorade or a Coke in one hand and a Starbucks cold brew drink in the other,” said Curt Covington, senior director of partner relations at AgAmerica, an agricultural lender. “It has clearly taken away from the milk sector.”

Some young people don’t like milk because they didn’t grow up with it as a dinner-table staple. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 removed whole or 2 percent milk from schools, and required that any flavored milk be nonfat. This led to a genre of social media posts complaining that school milk was disgusting. The Department of Agriculture in 2018 allowed 1 percent chocolate or strawberry milk back into schools.

“We lost almost an entire generation of milk drinkers,” U.S. Representative Glenn Thompson, a Republican from Pennsylvania, told a farming publication.

Dairy farmers say government policies and nutritional standards have demonized whole milk, and that stigma is hurting their livelihoods. In upstate New York, roadsides are dotted with hay bales painted with messages urging the passage of a federal law that would return whole milk to schools.

In February, Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican from northern New York, reintroduced the Protecting School Milk Choices Act, a direct response to New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, a vegan who has floated the idea of banning chocolate milk in schools and providing more plant-based foods.

But all the legislation and marketing in the world may not help eliminate what many Gen Z-ers refer to as “milk shame.”

Hampton Searcy, 21, has felt it. He lives with three fellow students who don’t like milk in an apartment near Auburn University, in Alabama, so they don’t keep any in the refrigerator. Mr. Searcy grabs a cold pint of whole milk at a convenience store three or four times a week.

“People say, ‘How could you not at least get chocolate milk? Why not get a soda or a sports drink?’” he said. “I just like the taste of white milk. It’s either you like milk or you think it’s weird. And a lot of people I know think it’s weird.”

Haden Gooch, 31, and Katie Gualtieri, 39, want to change that. They tend to about 50 cows on their farm in Leeds, Maine, and sell the milk to Stonyfield Organic.

“If people better understood the nuances of milk as a seasonal product that gets richer in the winter and sweeter in the summer based on what the cows are eating, and saw the effort small dairy farmers put into producing that milk to help feed and keep rural communities alive, they might like milk better,” Ms. Gualtieri said.

In the end, milk’s ace in the hole might not be marathons, YouTube videos or organic farming. The cultural churn that makes something a star one day and destroys it the next could be the saving grace.

Sherry Ning, a writer in Toronto, was only half-joking when she recently tweeted, “The next counterrevolution is the return of whole milk.”

Her theory is akin to what Emily Sundberg suggested two years ago in a New York magazine article arguing that whole milk was making a comeback.

The dairy milk dip coincided with the rise of wellness culture and what Ms. Ning called the influence of tech-bro culture, with its overengineered, health-optimized lifestyle that demonized dairy.

Whole milk, Ms. Ning said, might be the antidote, riding a wave of neo-traditionalism among some members of Gen Z who are embracing a more down-to-earth ethos, centered on nature and regenerative farming. Call it milkcore?

“The return of cow’s milk is kind of the cultural zeitgeist saying, ‘Screw tech. This is too fast and science is going too far,’” she said. “Just go back to normal and stop engineering the way we live.”

quote:

Saving for retirement in America makes 'dramatic' shift, new report reveals

American workers are receiving some "very encouraging" news about their retirement futures, with one generation, in particular, that’s most set up for success thanks to a "dramatic" shift in behavior, according to a new Vanguard report.

"The good news is all generations are seeing a lift, are seeing an increase across these topics that matter most," Vanguard Strategic Retirement Consulting principal Dave Stinnett told Fox News Digital on Monday. "But we're seeing the biggest lift with younger workers."

The U.S. saw significantly more millennial and Gen Z workers contributing to their savings or retirement plans in 2021 than compared to 2006 primarily due to automatic 401(k) enrollments and target-date funds. Vanguard client participation increased across all age groups as well, rising from 62% in 2006 to 82% in 2021.

U.S. workers are also putting away 40% more capital than they were in 2006, even with inflation costs accounted for.

"What this paper shows is, across all generations, youngest up to the oldest, you've seen a dramatic change for the better in diversified investing in an age-appropriate way," the expert said.

Stinnett pointed out one Bush-era bill that fueled the savings surge and led to more diversified portfolios.

"The Pension Protection Act, at that time, gave plan sponsors the fiduciary protection to implement some of these plan design techniques: automatic enrollment and also defaulting participants into a particular investment, but most often a target-date fund," Stinnett explained.

"Those things had been certainly known and available before then, but the Pension Protection Act gave explicit fiduciary protection to plan sponsors if they wanted to implement this," he continued. "Since then, you've seen a lot of plan sponsors rush to adopt these best practices."

Vanguard’s report further solidifies how automatic enrollments – as opposed to voluntary savings options – incited "a dramatic change for the better" with diversified funding in an age-appropriate way, Stinnett pointed out.

"That's been mainly the result of the popularity of target-date funds, which are almost always the lowest cost investment in the lineup of funds available and are always the most diversified. So that's been a huge part of this paper, too," he said. "We've really kind of solved this problem of portfolio construction errors."

While baby boomers, Gen X, millennials and Gen Z all saw retirement benefits increase, according to the Vanguard report, Stinnett claimed it's Gen Z that’s "best prepared for retirement" than other age groups.

"There was a hypothesis that younger workers, Gen Z and millennials who had lived through these really difficult times, particularly the great financial crisis... that maybe that would alter how they view investing in stocks. And what this data shows is that's not the case, is actually they invest, they have higher equity allocations and their age cohort from earlier years had," the expert noted.

"You're seeing the younger cohort benefiting the most, and all generations are benefiting from these modern plan designs and from defaults. And so the 2021 version, across all of these age cohorts, is better off than the 2006 version, but certainly, younger workers are being impacted the most," Stinnet added.

For those younger workers who have just started contributing to a savings plan, the Vanguard principal recommends taking advantage of a company deferment match and sticking with it.

"Stick with that plan year after year, that's the best thing. It sounds simple, but it's a very, very important thing to do," Stinnett said.

Employers should also pat themselves on the back for producing better-allocated portfolios since 2006, as Stinnett notes they also play a role in setting workers up for retirement success.

"Retirement savings is a long game. If you're able to get it right and get things set up in an optimal way from the start, really, really helpful and encouraging things happen over the course of time," the principal said. "And so I think from a macroeconomic perspective, this should be very, very encouraging about how American workers are set up for retirement for the future."

CuddleCryptid posted:

If Millenials/Gen Z have the ability to put money into retirement, I'm not sure why it would be surprising that they are. The other option is "work til you die" because the concept of social security is going to be dead unless a *massive* reinvestment plan is put into place within 20 years.

Younger people don't have more faith in the markets, they just don't have any other choice if they ever want to retire.

Artonos posted:

The Wisconsin polls close at 8 central and we should get an initial surge of vote counts dropped then. Wisconsin doesn't allow counting absentee or early votes til election day.

Milwaukee and Madison are usually the later in the night places to report. Although we'll be able to infer some stuff from initial counts on smaller counties.

An interesting wrinkle is Dan Kelly beat out the judge from the Waukesha parade massacre case. She was very popular and won the vote by a decent margin in the Waukesha (WOW) area and then she lost by a ton everywhere else in the state. Will the favored candidate getting knocked out in the primary suppress the vote a bit? Who knows.

I'm wary of putting too much confidence in the primary vote also. The republican spending has been very concentrated in the last few weeks. I don't think any of the Uihlen dollars started coming in until March.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Just for clarification:

Social Security going "bankrupt" does not mean that the program is dead. Social Security is funded by current payroll taxes, so the benefits can never go to 0.

What will happen is that Social Security will only pay out what it takes in, which is estimated to be between 71% and 77% of current benefits for several decades until the population curve balances out.

A 23-29% cut in benefits for decades is a pretty big deal, but it is not the same as Social Security going away forever.

Randalor posted:

Have they started saying that persecuting Trump for what he did in the past is pointless because it was so long ago, but also persecute Hillary for her e-mails, yet? I've always "enjoyed" the cognitive dissonance of those two thoughts when they start spouting them back to back.

Mellow Seas posted:

Yea, Social Security isn’t in any danger and the idea that it is was doomed was deliberate propaganda to get young people to not prioritize preserving it. Like Leon said the worse case is a big haircut to benefits, but when that day starts approaching they’re going to find the money. It’s a pretty big shortfall in the forecast but not an unmanageably huge shortfall.

Also regarding the milk thing, “good luck” to the dairy industry, I think they’re screwed. They should try focusing on cheese probably, people still like that. In any case I really appreciate a runner named “Zapata”. As Kramer said, “it’s like an ice cream man named Cone!”

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Here's two interesting studies that came out today. They determined that there are two defining qualities for Gen Z:

- They hate milk.
- They love saving for retirement.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/dining/milk-dairy-industry-gen-z.html

Gen Z are saving far more for retirement and investing in the stock market than any other generation and are currently on track to be "the best prepared generation" for retirement in the U.S.

67% of Gen Zers that have a retirement plan offered are contributing to it and they are contributing an average of 20% of their income to retirement. The average person age 18-25 with a 401(k) has $33,000 invested already.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/saving-retirement-america-dramatic-shift-new-report
https://www.kiplinger.com/personal-finance/study-finds-gen-z-doing-an-extraordinary-job-saving-for-retirement

Kalli posted:

https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1643299195938299909

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Just for clarification:

Social Security going "bankrupt" does not mean that the program is dead. Social Security is funded by current payroll taxes, so the benefits can never go to 0.

What will happen is that Social Security will only pay out what it takes in, which is estimated to be between 71% and 77% of current benefits for several decades until the population curve balances out.

A 23-29% cut in benefits for decades is a pretty big deal, but it is not the same as Social Security going away forever.

JosefStalinator posted:

As our various wars and macroeconomic policy have taught us, money isn't real and anyone saying literally anything is unaffordable is just straight up lying.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

The problem becomes if the U.S. ever gets to a point where it can't service its debt or becomes less attractive to be used as the global reserve currency. We're currently up to 12% of the budget every year being spent on just interest from debt.

We're still paying interest on the wars from 20 years ago. The U.S. government could take over the federal reserve and force it to print enough money to cover all of our debts right away, but that would have the problems of causing massive inflation (and you've seen how even going 5-6% above the normal inflation target drives people crazy and hurts people) and making it very risky to hold U.S. dollars as a reserve currency.

There isn't currently another viable currency to take our place, but that might not always be the case. China really likes to manipulate and float their currency, so it is somewhat unattractive for people to hold it for safety reasons, but if the U.S. just dropped the value of the dollar by 25% overnight, then those 7-10% changes on the Yuan backed by an $18 trillion GDP look a lot safer.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

The average person age 18-25 with a 401(k) has $33,000 invested already.

World Famous W posted:

i quick read the article, may have missed it, does it state the percentage of younger folks who have a savings/retirement plan that they can invest more in?

also, im sure social security will be there for me, just it won't be enough to keep me from working till the day I die in a restaurants freezer

Ringo Star Get posted:

I just want to say drinking dairy milk is gross and I hope it dies out and I’m glad they’re freaking out over people not drinking it enough. It’s just wet white fluid and does a lot of harm to the environment. Oat milk all the way.

World Famous W posted:

i quick read the article, may have missed it, does it state the percentage of younger folks who have a savings/retirement plan that they can invest more in?


also, im sure social security will be there for me, just it won't be enough to keep me from working till the day I die in a restaurants freezer

quote:

Seventy-three percent of workers have access to a 401(k) or similar employee-funded retirement plan in the workplace. Generation X (77 percent) and Millennials (74 percent) are more likely to be offered an employee-funded plan than Generation Z (67 percent) and Baby Boomers (68 percent).

brugroffil posted:

This is "total household retirement savings" for Gen Z. How many Gen Z constitute their own household? Page 108 here: https://transamericainstitute.org/d...ment-report.pdf

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

I think household is only including the individuals and potential spouse, but that is a good point. They also say "workers between 18 and 25 already had $33,000," which doesn't seem like they would be counting parents.

brugroffil posted:

Right, so how hard does "18-25 yo and already constitutes an independent household" skew things? How many Gen Z are even in that category?