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Years of idiotic generation-bashing have led to this particularly stupid statement: “People don’t want to work.” Great minds will no doubt come up with a dumber assessment but let’s stick to this one. Let’s start with the obvious. WRONG. They don’t want to work for nothing, and they want to have lives. The constant bleating self-righteous headlines tell a long irritating story of ignorance and ineptitude. Wages are now useless. The workplace environment is often hellish and absurdly stressful. People turn over fast due to multiple good reasons. The paranoid penny-pinching surveillance-obsessed management culture is utterly insufferable for many. Unrealistic and absurdly costly demands like “back to the office” don’t help people struggling to pay rent, health, and power. You can pay for your long time-consuming commute or eat, apparently. This imbecility effectively turns 8 hour days into far more expensive 12 hour days and bites deeply into wages and savings. That can never be sustainable in this massively overpriced economy. Thanks to the cost of living , the ordinary job, particularly a low-wage job is now a form of extended torture, and it looks like it’s about to get a lot worse. It’s not a complete mystery how this happened. The banal, simplistic certainties of jobs and careers were completely blindsided. A job now means nothing and a career is, at best, likely to be patchy. People have been infamously working more than one job just to meet rent and living costs for well over a decade. Food banks are supporting incredible numbers of people . According to one person I spoke to from a food bank, they say more people should be using them. Contrast this cluster of stupidities with the “one job was enough to raise a family and own a house” of 60 years ago. That was pretty much true. You couldn’t call it flashy, but it worked. People had lives, too. The society was healthier, crime was much lower, and there were actual opportunities. You could at least convince yourself that you had a credible future. Not anymore. The Millennials and Gen Z don’t and can’t believe it. They can’t own homes, and it’s a miserable, unhygienic, and hyper-neurotic living environment in so many ways. How are they supposed to achieve anything? They’re trying to live in an economic environment that no longer functions. Ground-level data is all bad. If you look at the global medication stats , you’ll see that things aren’t great. Some of these meds are even dietary supplements, used to manage deficiencies in basic nutrition. Gen Alpha will be totally feral, with so many good reasons. They have nothing but economic hardship to look forward to, particularly with AI hoovering up so many jobs. They have no reason to do anything but go into survival mode. “The system” is effectively dead. I doubt you could convince the Mills, Z or Alphas that the system ever worked because the system has basically killed their chances. We’ll leave out the politics. Suffice to say that the word “politics” is now a synonym for “insanity” For progressives like me, that’s incredibly infuriating. Who told you sanctimonious morons to just babble on while civilization collapsed? You’re as bad as they are. What’s needed is the exact opposite, The world needs a lot of competence on the job. That’s what jobs are supposed to do, and who’s supposed to be doing them, in case the topic ever comes up. Not ridiculous greedy little nobodies who screw up everything they touch and get overpaid for it. A gang member said years ago that there was no point in working a low-wage day job when he could make thousands a day illegally. Sound familiar? I remember hearing that 50 years ago. So let’s get back to this “Nobody wants to work” idiocy. In the absence of leadership which has taken mediocrity to new heights of ineptitude, what are you supposed to do? The only thing you can do. Create a life for yourself. Go indie . Be a contractor or whatever so you can work on your own terms doing work you’re good at. Just make sure you get paid. Get useful skills like a trade or something that can’t be automated overnight. Be your own boss, if for no other reason than it’s much less annoying. It can be quite frustrating and worrying working with “whatever” in the market. if you know how to hustle, you can work on your terms. Good luck. Editor-at-Large based in Sydney, Australia.Donald Trump will ring the New York Stock Exchange bell as he's named Time's Person of the Yearhydrangea magical ocean 。

After Trump's win, Black women are rethinking their role as America's reliable political organizers

ATLANTA -- Deliberations are underway in Atlanta after a year of testimony in the gang and racketeering trial that originally included the rapper Young Thug. Jurors are considering whether to convict Shannon Stillwell and Deamonte Kendrick, who raps as Yak Gotti, on gang, murder, drug and gun charges. The original indictment charged 28 people with conspiring to violate Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Opening statements in the trial for six of those defendants happened a year ago . Four of them, including Young Thug, pleaded guilty last month. The rapper was freed on probation. Stillwell and Kendrick rejected plea deals after more than a week of negotiations, and their lawyers chose not to present evidence or witnesses. Both seemed to be in good spirits Tuesday morning after closings wrapped the previous night. Kendrick was chatting and laughing with Stillwell and his lawyers before the jury arrived for instructions. Kendrick and Stillwell were charged in the 2015 killing of Donovan Thomas Jr., also known as “Big Nut,” in an Atlanta barbershop. Prosecutors painted Stillwell and Kendrick as members of a violent street called Young Slime Life, or YSL, co-founded in 2012 by Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams. During closings on Monday, they pointed to tattoos, song lyrics and social media posts they said proved members, including Stillwell, admitted to killing people in rival gangs. Prosecutors say Thomas was in a rival gang. Stillwell was also charged in the 2022 killing of Shymel Drinks, which prosecutors said was in retaliation for the killing of two YSL associates days earlier. Defense attorneys Doug Weinstein and Max Schardt said the state presented unreliable witnesses, weak evidence and cherry-picked lyrics and social media posts to push a false narrative about Stillwell, Kendrick and the members of YSL. Schardt, Stillwell's attorney, reminded the jury that alleged YSL affiliates said during the trial that they had lied to police. Law enforcement played a “sick game” by promising they would escape long prison sentences if they said what police wanted them to say, Schardt said. He theorized that one of those witnesses could have killed Thomas. The truth is that their clients were just trying to escape poverty through music, Schardt said. “As a whole, we know the struggles that these communities have had,” Schardt said. “A sad, tacit acceptance that it’s either rap, prison or death.” Young Thug’s record label is also known as YSL, an acronym of Young Stoner Life. Kendrick was featured on two popular songs from the label’s compilation album Slime Language 2, “Take It to Trial" and “Slatty," which prosecutors presented as evidence in the trial. Weinstein, Kendrick’s defense attorney, said during closings it was wrong for prosecutors to target the defendants for their music and lyrics. Prosecutor Simone Hylton disagreed, and said surveillance footage and phone evidence supported her case. “They have the audacity to think they can just brag about killing somebody and nobody’s gonna hold them accountable,” Hylton said. The trial had more than its fair share of delays. Jury selection took nearly 10 months , and Stillwell was stabbed last year at the Fulton County jail, which paused trial proceedings. Judge Paige Reese Whitaker took over after Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Ural Glanville was removed from the case in July because he had a meeting with prosecutors and a state witness without defense attorneys present. Whitaker often lost patience with prosecutors over moves such as not sharing evidence with defense attorneys, once accusing them of “poor lawyering.” But the trial sped up under her watch. In October, four defendants, including Young Thug , pleaded guilty, with the rapper entering a non-negotiated or “blind” plea, meaning he didn't have a deal worked out with prosecutors. Nine people charged in the indictment, including rapper Gunna , accepted plea deals before the trial began. Charges against 12 others are pending. Prosecutors dropped charges against one defendant after he was convicted of murder in an unrelated case. ___ Kramon is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Kramon on X: @charlottekramon