Tag: Millennials

Posted on

The Revenge Of The Lost Boys

lost_boy_snowden_theridgewoodblog

Western societies are producing more and more Lost Boys, the fail-to-launch young men who carry dangerous social grudges.

What’s going on with young American men? Another mass shooting has led to another round of social and political recriminations. A young man—a “loner” and “adrift,” as usual—seizes a vile cause and attacks innocent people. Amidst the wreckage, we look for reasons that already fit our preconceptions about violence, and we blame racism, guns, unemployment, drugs, a bad family, or whatever else helps us to make sense of the tragedy.

But the truth of the matter is that Dylann Roof (at least from what we know) isn’t that different from so many other young, mostly white men over the past 30 years or so who have lashed out against their society in different ways. Although mass killers understandably seize our imaginations and dominate the media, and not all dysfunctional young males are violent and not all of them gain the publicity they crave. Some are terrorists, others are murderers, and some are merely vandals. A few are traitors and deserters.

What they all have in common is their gender (male), their race (most are white), and their youth (almost all under 30 at their peak destructiveness). Beyond this, they seem to share little beyond a stubborn immaturity wedded to a towering narcissism. In almost every case, they dress their anger in the clothes of ideology: white supremacy, jihad,hatred of abortion, or anti-government paranoia. Stuck in perpetual adolescence, they see only their own imagined virtue amidst irredeemable corruption. In a typical sentiment, Roof wrote before his rampage that “someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

The Lost Boys Arise

This is the battle cry of the narcissist, and we’ve heard it before. Western societies are producing more and more of these Lost Boys, the fail-to-launch young men who carry weighty social grudges. Some of them kill, but others lash out in other, more creative ways: whether it’s Edward Snowden deciding only he could save America from the scourge of surveillance, or Bowe Bergdahl walking away from his post to personally solve the war in Afghanistan, the combination of immaturity and grandiosity among these young males is jaw-dropping in its scale even when it is not expressed through the barrel of a gun.

https://thefederalist.com/2015/07/09/the-revenge-of-the-lost-boys/#.VZ666QrvEu0.facebook

Posted on

Fewer ‘extremely proud’ to be American

flagpole3_theridgewoodblog-

By Ian Swanson

Fewer people are “extremely proud” to be American, according to new polling from Gallup.

The pollster finds that 54 percent are “extremely proud” to be American, which is down from around 70 percent between 2002 and 2004. The percentage may have jumped in those years after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Gallup released the new numbers just before the July 4 holiday.

Twenty-seven percent said they are “very proud” to be American, 14 percent say they are “moderately proud,” 4 percent are “only a little proud” and 1 percent say they are “not at all proud.”

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/246833-fewer-extremely-proud-to-be-american

Posted on

On ISIS’ Terms: Courting a Young American

skate_borading_theridgewoodblog

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHIJUNE 27, 2015

Alex, a 23-year-old Sunday school teacher and babysitter, was trembling with excitement the day she told her Twitter followers that she had converted to Islam.

For months, she had been growing closer to a new group of friends online – the most attentive she had ever had – who were teaching her what it meant to be a Muslim. Increasingly, they were telling her about the Islamic State and how the group was building a homeland in Syria and Iraq where the holy could live according to God’s law.

One in particular, Faisal, had become her nearly constant companion, spending hours each day with her on Twitter, Skype and email, painstakingly guiding her through the fundamentals of the faith.

But when she excitedly told him that she had found a mosque just five miles from the home she shared with her grandparents in rural Washington State, he suddenly became cold.

The only Muslims she knew were those she had met online, and he encouraged her to keep it that way, arguing that Muslims are persecuted in the United States. She could be labeled a terrorist, he warned, and for now it was best for her to keep her conversion secret, even from her family.

So on his guidance, Alex began leading a double life. She kept teaching at her church, but her truck’s radio was no longer tuned to the Christian hits on K-LOVE. Instead, she hummed along with theISIS anthems blasting out of her turquoise iPhone, and began daydreaming about what life with the militants might be like.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/world/americas/on-isis-terms-courting-a-young-american.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0

Posted on

To Destroy ISIS, Conscript Millennials, Says Baby Boomer Journalist

Millennials theridgewoodblg.net

I am a millennial, get me out of here!

Robby Soave|Jun. 17, 2015 10:40 am

National Journal’s Ron Fournier has come up with a frightening, ageist approach to defeating ISIS: enslave the millennials! He explains:

I know a better way to fight ISIS. It starts with an idea that should appeal the better angels of both hawks and doves: National service for all 18- to 28-years-olds.

Require virtually every young American—the civic-minded millennial generation—to complete a year of service through programs such as Teach for America, AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, or the U.S. military, and two things will happen:

1. Virtually every American family will become intimately invested in the nation’s biggest challenges, including poverty, education, income inequality, and America’s place in a world afire.

2. Military recruiting will rise to meet threats posed by ISIS and other terrorist networks, giving more people skin in a very dangerous game.

The tone of Fournier’s column suggests that he considers mandatory national service a compromise in light of political realism—he would clearly prefer to restore the draft outright. This “compromise” idea is less horrifying than the draft, but not by a whole lot.

Disclaimer: I’m a millennial. I’m 26-years-old. I’m married and have a surprisingly steady job writing about why the government sucks. I’m supposed to just set all that aside for a year to work for causes I either don’t support, or actively oppose?

There are so many things wrong with this idea. For starters, it violates the principles upon which this nation was founded—that all men and women have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. While the Supreme Court has never held that mandatory national service violates the Constitution, the language of the Thirteen Amendment seems pretty clear to me: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”

At the root of Fournier’s plan is a more insidiously evil notion: that millennials aren’t doing anything worthwhile with their lives right now, and their time would be better spent in Teach for America, or the Army. There’s some anti-market thinking at work here, since typically, the activities that free people choose for themselves are more productive and profitable than the ones totalitarian governments assign to them. This is why the comparatively less meddlesome U.S. government is generally in better shape than, say, Venezuela. Fournier is essentially saying that in order to defeat our enemies, we have to mimic their levels of disrespect for individual freedom.

https://reason.com/blog/2015/06/17/to-destroy-isis-conscript-millennials-sa

Posted on

Poll: Millennials Are in Search of a Different Kind of Career

skateboarding_theridgewoodblog

By Gillian B. White
The Atlantic
June 15, 2015

There have been many labels thrust upon the Millennial generation, especially when it comes to their work ethic. The group has been called lazy, entitled, and spoiled—but at the same time the generation has also been heralded for its collective innovation and desire to work for something other than money.

While America may still not know quite how to pin down the drive and desires of this generation, it does seem that their views on jobs and careers differ from their Boomer parents and the Gen Xers who came just before them. The most recent Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll separated respondents into a younger group of those “just starting out” and an older group of participants who were more established in order to determine whether or not these groups saw things differently on a variety of issues. In many instances there are, in fact, generational differences in perspective, but on some questions, Americans aren’t quite as far apart as they might seem.

When asked what their primary concern was during their first job, about 64 percent of older Americans talked about  making as much money as possible or learning new skills. When asked the same question, younger Americans were much more likely to say that their top priority was doing something that they found enjoyable or making a difference in society, with 57 percent choosing one of these options.

https://www.govexec.com/excellence/promising-practices/2015/06/poll-millennials-are-search-different-kind-career/115255/?oref=govexec_today_nl

Posted on

Generation X’s Parenting Problem

graydon_kids_theridgewoodblog

file photo By Boyd Loving

Posted: 05/13/2015 10:36 am EDT Updated: 05/13/2015 10:59 am EDT

By Anjali Enjeti

You remember childhood, don’t you?

We wore our house keys around our necks like dog tags, walked home from school alone and let ourselves inside while our parents were still at work. We crossed busy intersections during rush hour to purchase bubble gum cigarettes with change from empty soda cans.

Our playgrounds were construction sites, heaps of dirt, creeks filled with snakes and turtles we collected as pets. We climbed trees, muddied our Garanimals, scaled fences between neighbors’ backyards. We spent Memorial Day to Labor Day barefoot, the soles of our feet blackened like coal, dirt clumping underneath our toenails. Skateboards, roller skates and bikes defined our boundaries — our Baby Boomer parents would scoff if we asked for a ride somewhere. They were too busy reading the newspaper, watching soaps or drinking beer on the stoop with the neighbors.

We were told to come in at dark, not a second earlier.

We had our kids late. Probably too late. Now we’re cranky, sleep-deprived 40-somethings changing chlorine-free, biodegradable diapers while Dora the Explorer morphs into a hormonal teen right before our very eyes. We claim we don’t regret waiting because we “needed to get established in our careers first” and “wanted to save enough money,” even though we know damn well we have neither viable careers nor anything resembling a nest egg.

We cart our children to chess, robotics, baseball practice, ballet, cello, swimming lessons and birthday parties. Though they run our lives like lunatic ringmasters, we insist such activities make them well-rounded / social / intellectual / competitive / creative.

They are rarely out of our sights. They’re our extensions, buds hanging off our stems, the quality, durability, and character of their bloom wholly dependent on our careful, measured, intentional nurturing. We stuff them into slings as babies, backpacks and strollers as toddlers, tie them with leashes as preschoolers and use GPS and apps to monitor their whereabouts as teens.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-mid/generation-x-parenting-problem_b_7258314.html?1431527825&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000037

Posted on

Millennials Need Better Career Skills

18623_836800089728556_6050318712627822734_n-300x300
May 11,2015

Alfred Poor

The fact is that our recent college graduates are already costing our country billions of dollars every year. Not long ago, the average tenure for an entry-level worker was five years. Now, that average is below two years.

U.S. companies report that the average cost of replacing a single entry-level worker is $20,000 (lost productivity, recruitment, training, and other costs). Amortized over five years, that’s an annual overhead of $4,000. Amortized over just two years, however, it soars to $10,000 per year.

Our young workers have a hair-trigger when it comes to changing jobs, or even just quitting a job without a replacement in hand. This is costing our country $6,000 more per year per new entry-level worker. That’s money that could be much better spent on creating new jobs or paying higher salaries.

Our high schools and colleges need to start paying more attention to the “soft” career skills that our young workers need to land and keep good jobs after graduation.

Posted on

This Boy Wonder Is Building the Conservative MoveOn.org in an Illinois Garage

Charlie-Kirk

May 7, 2015 11:00 AM EDT

Republican donors are counting on the 21-year-old to energize voters.

Charlie Kirk was just about to leave the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa when he spotted the multimillionaire investor Foster Friess in a stairwell. Kirk, who was 18 and fresh out of high school, had spent weeks memorizing the names and faces of the top 25 Republican political donors in case he found himself in just such a situation. He grabbed Friess into a handshake, took a nervous breath, and began his elevator pitch. Instead of going to college, he wanted to start a grass-roots organization to rival liberal groups such as MoveOn.org, which offer Democratic candidates a standing army of volunteer activists. All he needed, Kirk told Friess, was cash. Friess, who’d just blown $2.1 million on a failed quest to help Rick Santorum win the GOP presidential nomination, handed over his business card. Three weeks later, Kirk had a five-figure check. “He impressed me with his capacity to lead, intelligence, and love for America,” Friess says. “I instantly knew I wanted to support him.”

In the three years since, Kirk—who still sleeps in his childhood bedroom in Wheeling, Ill.—has built his organization, Turning Point USA, into the go-to group for reaching young conservatives. It has a presence on 800 college campuses, where fieldworkers hand out posters and collect e-mail addresses. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February, the group hosted an event featuring Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, who have each since announced they’re running for president. On May 8, Paul was scheduled to speak at a Turning Point rally at Arizona State University, and Carly Fiorina is on deck to speak in June at a Turning Point conference for women in Chicago. Kirk says he’s met candidate Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who is considering a presidential run.

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-07/conservative-boy-wonder

Posted on

Poll: Just 2% of Young Americans Trust Media to ‘Do the Right Thing’

imgres-1

By Jeffrey Meyer | April 30, 2015 | 9:44 AM EDT

A new poll from Harvard University’s Institute of Politics has some alarming findings about the trustworthiness of the American media. Among adults aged 18-29, the poll found that just 12 percent believe the media “do the right thing.”

An even more startling 88 percent said they “sometimes” or “never” trust the media and just 2 percent of 18-29 year olds said they trust the media to do the right thing “all of the time.” 39 percent said the media “never” do the right thing.

The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard called this poll “the latest nail in the media’s coffin, a downward spiral that has resulted in fewer younger Americans reading traditional media and especially traditional platforms such as newspapers and magazines.”

The poll also found that the public’s view of the media’s ability to “do the right thing” ranked the lowest when compared to other organizations. Media ranked 12th with scientists coming in as number 1 followed by the United States military, local police, the Supreme Court, the United Nations, President Obama, local government, state government, federal government, Congress, and Wall Street.

Not only is the media consistently ranked as untrustworthy by the American public, a recent Quinnipiac poll found that among the different media outlets, MSNBC is the least trusted source of news in the United States, while Fox News was the most trusted.

According the poll, just 7 percent of Americans trust MSNBC, with NBC News and CBS news each considered trustworthy by 10 percent. ABC News garnering just 8 percent of the American public’s trust. Fox News ranked first, earning the trust of 29% of Americans.

– See more at: https://newsbusters.org/blogs/jeffrey-meyer/2015/04/30/poll-just-2-young-americans-trust-media-do-right-thing?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=marketing&utm_term=facebook&utm_content=facebook&utm_campaign=young-media-trust#sthash.kWarUee8.dpuf

Posted on

How Millennials Could Damage the U.S. Economy

18623_836800089728556_6050318712627822734_n

BY DAVID KOEPPEL,
The Fiscal Times
April 30, 2015

Millennial workers have had it rough in recent years, coming of age during the Great Recession and experiencing higher levels of unemployment and underemployment than older generations.

A new study finds that Millennials, who will dominate the U.S. labor market for the next 50 years, may face another problem: They’re less prepared for today’s job market than many of their international peers, putting them (and the country) at a distinct disadvantage in an increasingly global economy.

A recent report by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) examined data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIACC), which showed that American millennials are badly lagging behind in numeracy, literacy and problem-solving skills. Experts can only speculate on the reason for the skills gap, but the report warns that the consequences of such relatively low scores could be serious for American competiveness and could have an impact on the U.S. both socially and politically.

The study shows that even our top-performing millennials are not measuring up to their counterparts overseas. Further, the gap between America’s highest- and lowest-performing workers is among the largest.  The study suggests that such a disparity can lead to dire consequences, including “mistrust in government, decreased civic engagement, increased rates of incarceration, poor health, obesity, addiction and more”

“We did not do well across the board in all three of the skills that we looked into, particularly in numeracy,” said Madeline Goodman, director of research at the ETS and one of the study’s co-authors, adding that the report presents troubling implications for the future of American competiveness.

Nearly two-thirds of millennials scored below the minimum standard in math. “If these individuals are going to be trained for jobs that have remuneration … then they need to have basic skill level” she said.

Among the 22 participating countries, U.S millennials 18 to 34 years old ranked 21st in numeracy — only Spanish millennials had lower scores. In literacy, half scored below the minimum proficiency level, ahead of only Spain and Italy.  For problem solving in technology-rich environments, 56 percent of American millennials met the minimum standards, behind every other nation.

That’s a problem for U.S. employers, more than two-thirds of whom look for communication, problem-solving and quantitative skills in their new hires, according to a report last year by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Even so, employers expect to hire more new college grads this year than they did last year, according to a NACE report released earlier this month.

One of the central paradoxes of the ETS study is that the millennial generation is our most educated, and the study’s authors make the case that many post-secondary institutions are not adequately providing students with the skills necessary to be successful in the job market.  The financial loan burden to pay for this education can also be crippling.

“These results are suggesting that a significant chunk of Americans will have trouble moving up in the labor market and getting out of lower-wage jobs,” says Harry Holzer, professor of public policy at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy.

The skills gap may be having an impact on productivity and growth, and federal educational programs such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have not produced the needed results, Holzer says.

Holzer adds that Americans may need to revaluate the way they obtain these skills, and suggests that post-secondary education should not mean only a bachelor’s or  associate’s degree. Upgrading America’s technical education schooling, including certificate programs in such high-demand fields as IT and health tech, may give young people entrée to high demand middle class jobs. He compares American millennials to Germans, where many high school graduates can already solve complex technical problems.

Mark Schneider, vice-president and Institute Fellow at The American Institutes for Research, is also critical of American universities, many of which he believes don’t equip students with the skills they need to function in the workplace or the wider community.  He calls most college educations “too long, too expensive” and says the liberal arts skills that they provide are not marketable.

https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/04/30/How-Millennials-Could-Damage-US-Economy

Posted on

Americans bomb Pew test of basic political knowledge

1000509261001_1094056090001_Bio-Need-to-Know-Martin-Luther-King-Jr-SF

By NICK GASS

4/28/15 12:41 PM EDT

Updated 4/28/15 1:15 PM EDT

Only one-in-three Americans knows how many women serve on the Supreme Court, but 91 percent can identify Martin Luther King Jr., 47 years after his assassination.

That’s according to the latest Pew Research Center News IQ survey released Tuesday, which tests how well the American public knows the world in words, maps and pictures.

Almost all millennials surveyed — 96 percent — could pick out King from a list of names that included Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson and Thurgood Marshall. Older generations could mostly identify the slain civil-rights leader, as 89 percent of Gen Xers, Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation did.

But millennials apparently aren’t so great at identifying the current party makeup of the Senate. Only 47 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 were able to do so, compared to 52 percent overall. Those who described themselves as more politically engaged were more likely to know the upper chamber’s composition. (For the record, Republicans hold 54 seats; Democrats 44 seats; and Independents two seats.)

Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/pew-news-iq-test-results-117421.html#ixzz3YgbzVtQT

Posted on

Construction Spending Surges in New Jersey

unnamed-12

By Kelly Waldron April 14, 2015 5:18 AM

If you have traveled around the state lately, chances are you have come across construction of some kind.

According to the State Department of Labor and Workforce Development, there has been a spike of 10,000 construction jobs in 2014 and an increase of 7,900 during January and February of this year.

One housing and economics expert said there are five main factors driving the construction increase.

“The first is higher education which is the result of the bond issue and universities and colleges are leveraging those funds in public/private partnerships,” said James Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.

The second is demographically driven.

“The real growth in the population is millennials and aging baby boomers who are resizing in the housing market. So, we have almost record high numbers of multifamily construction. The multifamily rental housing sector is now about 60 percent where historically, it’s been about 30 percent,” Hughes said.

New Jersey is also the third largest warehouse distribution center in the country, a sector that has been growing very rapidly as a result of e-commerce.

“Instead of building conventional warehouses, what are now being erected are very large fulfillment centers, like the one for Amazon in Robbinsville. With people shopping on the Internet, a lot of space is needed to store items before they are shipped,” Hughes said.

Data centers are a significant factor to the increase in construction as well, namely because of New Jersey’s geography.

“In many cases, the big New York brokerage houses need vast data centers to store their information and they want them on a different power grid than the main headquarters, but they can’t be too far away from the major trading centers because those milliseconds are very important in high-speed trading. New Jersey is in a good location for that,” Hughes said.

Read More: Construction up in New Jersey | https://nj1015.com/construction-up-in-new-jersey/?trackback=tsmclip&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Wake%20Up%20Call%20NJ&utm_campaign=Wake%20Up%20Call

Posted on

Mark Cuban: Forgiving student loans is ‘bailout’ for universities

dal_u_mcuban_576

dal_u_mcuban_576

Mark Cuban: Forgiving student loans is ‘bailout’ for universities
March 13, 2015
Victor Skinner

DALLAS – Dallas Mavericks owner and billionaire investor Mark Cuban is waving red flags at higher education, and he’s arguing against the idea to forgive student debt amid the current “student-loan bubble.”

“Forgiving the debt is the worst thing you can do, because all it does is bail out the universities,” Cuban recently told Business Insider.

Cuban’s comments come a week after Sweet Briar College announced it will close following the spring 2015 semester “as a result of insurmountable financial challenges,” according to the news site.

The closure is the latest in what Cuban calls a “student loan bubble” brought on by a cycle of ever-increasing tuition and student loans. Cuban, who bought collegedebt.com to keep tabs on student loan debt, believes it’s simply a matter of time before the benefits of higher education are outweighed by the costs.

“What you thought you were going to get in quality of life by going to that college,” he told Business Insider, “you’ve just undermined with the amount of debt you’re taking on.”

Collegedebt.com shows student loan debt in the United States currently totals about $1.3 trillion.

Cuban told Business Insider that an initiative laid out by President Obama this week to help students with federal student loans may have some merit, but cautioned against a college debt bailout.

“Anything that causes lenders and service companies to act fairly is a good thing,” he said. “The challenge is that you can’t subsidize or forgive existing debt without very strict rules. Otherwise it allows schools to tell future students not to worry. They too will get some portion forgiven. Which in turn gives the school more leeway to raise tuition.”

Cuban said he thinks a bailout would only exasperate the current situation.

After news of the Sweet Briar College closure last week, Cuban tweeted “this is just the beginning of the college implosion.”

“At some point,” he said, the student loan bubble is “going to pop.”

Cuban told Inc.’s GrowCo conference last year that if he was “running the economy, I’d go and say, ‘Sallie Mae, the maximum amount that you’re allowed to guarantee for any student in a year is $10,000, period, end of story,’” according to Business Insider.

“There’s all kinds of things that have been proposed to reduce existing student debt,” he said. “At some point, there’s got to be legislation where we put a limit on how much you can take out on a loan.”

https://eagnews.org/mark-cuban-forgiving-student-loans-is-bailout-for-universities/

Posted on

The average college freshman reads at 7th grade level

10-Things-College-students-should-not-do1

The average college freshman reads at 7th grade level

Maggie LitReporter@MaggieLitCROon Jan 06, 2015 at 10:47 AM EDT

Renaissance Learning found that the average book assigned for summer reading at college has a seventh-grade reading level.

Most college textbooks and reading material written before 1970 require mature reading skills according to Arkansas Prof. Emerita Sandra Stotsky.

The average U.S. college freshman reads at a seventh grade level, according to an educational assessment report.

“We are spending billions of dollars trying to send students to college and maintain them there when, on average, they read at about the grade 6 or 7 level, according toRenaissance Learning’s latest report on what American students in grades 9-12 read, whether assigned or chosen,” said education expert Dr. Sandra Stotsky.

Stotsky, a Professor Emerita at the University of Arkansas, served on the Common Core Validation Committee in 2009-10, during which she called the standards “inferior.” She claimed the Common Core left out the very standards needed to prepare students for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers.

“The average reading level for five of the top seven books assigned as summer reading by 341 colleges using Renaissance Learning’s readability formula was rated 7.56 [meaning halfway through seventh grade],” Stotsky told Breitbart Texas.

The study also found that most high school graduates don’t do much with mathematics past eighth-grade compared to students in other high-achieving countries.

In addition, the lack of “difficulty and complexity” found in high school reading material is indicative of what colleges can assign to students once they enter higher education and professors aren’t requiring incoming students read at a college level.

https://campusreform.org/?ID=6174

Posted on

Young people are ‘lost generation’ who can no longer fix gadgets, warns professor

bttf-1

Young people are ‘lost generation’ who can no longer fix gadgets, warns professor

Danielle George, Professor of Radio Frequency Engineering, at the University of Manchester, is giving this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

Young people in Britain have become a lost generation who can no longer mend gadgets and appliances because they have grown up in a disposable world, the professor giving this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures has warned.

Danielle George, Professor of Radio Frequency Engineering, at the University of Manchester, claims that the under 40s expect everything to ‘just work’ and have no idea what to do when things go wrong.

Unlike previous generations who would ‘make do and mend’ now young people will just chuck out their faulty appliances and buy new ones.

But Prof George claims that many broken or outdated gadgets could be fixed or repurposed with only a brief knowledge of engineering and electronics.

This year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures are entitled ‘Sparks will fly: How to hack your home’ she is hoping it will inspire people to think what else they can do with common household objects.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11298927/Young-people-are-lost-generation-who-can-no-longer-fix-gadgets-warns-professor.html