I remember pre covid you could apply to pretty much any local retail, fast food, supermarket, etc and get a full time position. And by full time I don't mean they're paying you benefits, but you'd at least get a 39 hour work schedule. Now though, it seems like every minimum wage place just hires part timers.
Is this just my imagination or am I onto something?
My current help desk job starts at 8 AM which is really difficult for me as a night owl. I'm hoping to get a job that starts at 9 or 10 when I level up. Is that likely or do most jobs start early?
The old model of company loyalty is dead, and following it in 2026 will likely hurt you in most cases. Many younger people are jumping from company to company every 1-3 years in order to increase salary and level up in positions as opposed to waiting 5 years for a promotion, only to get minimal increase in compensation.
Are companies going to adjust to this new model of hyper-competition and short-form employment? The trend I mentioned might be kicking off but many employers still don't like it when they're interviewing someone and see that they don't stay at jobs more than a year or two.
How do you think the culture around job hopping will change in coming years?
Growing up as a kid there were a number of games I was really good at. I could beat anyone in Mario Kart Wii and I really knew how to use the bikes to win a race. A few years ago I tried to play bikes on Mario Kart Wii and was astonished at how bad I was at it! The inward drifting of bikes was a skill I had completely lost! I also played Galaxy 2 and Kirby Super Ultra's True Arena and was shocked at how much I was struggling to win at games I was a pro at 15 years ago.
Time really does have weird effects I tell you...
What I'm talking about is for example a 30 year old and a 70 year old being best friends, younger person calling older person by first name, viewing each other as equals and not treating each other differently because of age in any way. How often do you see this in your culture?
Where I'm from (USA), this is not uncommon. Sure it's probably not something you're going to see every day, but most people won't really think there's anything odd about two people with a 30-40 year age gap being best friends. There aren't any cultural rules that say you can only be friends with people your own age.
Asking more from an economic point of view, I want to know what ancaps and austrian economists think about the AI revolution and how it's going to affect employment, economic behaviors related to saving and investing, and also if it contributes to maintaining liberty or not.
Any recommendations? Thanks!
I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that literary (գրական) Eastern Armenian is almost a different language from the Eastern Armenian that people speak in their homes and with their friends. I would say the gap between formal and colloquial speech is much wider than in many other languages, and also wider than in Western Armenian.
Eastern Armenian has different formality registers of MANY basic words that might not have such variations in other languages. Take a very simple word like "why," and EA has four different ways of saying it depending on how formal you want to sound. «ինչու» is standard and the most formal, but it sometimes sounds a little cold if someone uses it a lot in casual speech, so many people just say «ինչի». If you want to go to qyartu street boy level, you can say «ընչի». And lastly there's the shortest one: «խի». In comparison, Western Armenian only uses «ինչու», which sounds normal regardless of what the social context is. I only explained one example, but there's also այդ/էդ/դա, այս/էս/սա, վերցրեցի/վերցրի/վեկալեցի/վեկալա and so many other words that really show how big the gap between formal and informal EA can be. And what's interesting is that the specific levels of formality you choose to incorporate can be the difference between sounding educated and eloquent, and sounding completely cold and robotic, which sadly happens sometimes with EA that's overly grakan.
I'm a native speaker of both dialects, and though my ties are closer with Eastern, one thing that's really nice about WA is that it has a very healthy medium between formal and informal speech. It doesn't have the three, four, five variations of the most basic everyday words that EA has. The gap isn't as wide, which means you can be professional while still sounding like a human. And indeed most languages don't have such a wide gap between formal and informal speech the way Eastern Armenian does. The only major exception I can think of is Arabic where, like Armenian, many natives can struggle to use the formal literary language comfortably. And even if they can do it, it can come off a bit cold.
I'm an ancap, so naturally I'm against the use of physical force. But I'm also against non-violent and threat-free ways of imposing one's will onto another. I think the following things are wrong:
Telling people what to do, in many cases
Obnoxiously pushing your ideas and opinions onto someone or trying to directly influence people
Giving unsolicited advice, in many cases
Intentionally instilling your values, opinions, and beliefs into your children
Being nosy and asking personal or intrusive questions
Pressuring people or making them feel like they have to do certain things or live up to certain expectations
Basically any form of not minding your own business or respecting people's physical and metaphorical bubbles
The reason I think these things are wrong is because they make people feel uncomfortable, annoyed, or hurt. The initiator of these actions gains something—feelings—at the expense of the recipient's happiness or right to be left alone and live in whatever way they see fit, similar to how a criminal or politician gains private property at the expense of their victim.
Does what I described fall under the category of libertarianism? The word "libertarianism," as far as I'm aware, is almost always used to define a political philosophy that deals with the prohibition or minimization of the use of physical force. But does it also extend to such non-violent and threat-free ways of imposing one's will onto another? And if the answer is no, then what term would or could be used to broadly describe the prohibition on all forms of imposing one's will onto other humans?
Thank you!
In Armenian culture, individuality, independence, and being the ultimate authority on your life is an idea that's often condemned and suppressed. It doesn't exist, and the effects are bad, to say the least.
First you're a child and then a teenager. Your parents and society control your life as you would naturally expect. But then you finish school and have to go to university or start working. There's a good chance your parents are heavily involved in that process and either force you to go down a certain path, or at least heavily pressure you into a certain path and give you a headache for not doing what they want. Then you start dating and the interrogation begins... "Who is it? Where did you meet them? How much money do they have? The concept of privacy just doesn't exist. If you're a girl the questions might be worse. And if you have typical Armenian parents then they're going to rush you into organizing the wedding as soon as possible. Or if you're really unlucky, you never even got a chance to date and your parents decide to wed you to some tsanot of their choosing because god forbid you reach the age of 24 and you're still single. And then when you and your spouse choose to finally get your own place, there's a good chance your parents will be involved in the finances or purchasing of your new home. In some cases, the house might be in their name! The end result is that you blink your eyes and see that you're 30 one day and still haven't made any choices on your own yet and don't have control over your own life.
Armenian culture is genuinely problematic in this regard. Parents and society are heavily involved in young people's lives and don't learn to let them grow on their own, either because they're controlling them or because they're coddling them. In the most extreme cases this leads to 30+ women who aren't allowed to stay out late, or 40+ men who don't work and are living off mommy and daddy's money. I think the psychological effects of this can be really damaging for a person, not to mention embarrassing.
The good news though is that things are changing. Younger generations are much more western-minded. And with 21st century technology and economics, there's no way that old-fashioned mentality will be able to continue. Cheers to a modern western Armenia🇦🇲
It's the Armenian word for Georgian person. Just curious to know if it's common knowledge. Most Armenians aren't aware of the word Somekhi.
I think most of us grew up hearing the simple, neat story of Mesrop Mashtots sitting down and creating the alphabet in 405 AD with the help of King Vramshapuh and Catholicos Sahak. But these days, there's an increasing number of people who believe that Mashtots didn't necessarily invent the alphabet from scratch, but rather went out and found the old letters Armenians once used and somehow lost.
Is anyone aware of what is being taught in schools in 2026? Does this alternative theory ever get brought up in classrooms? I'm not saying it's 100% verified fact but some historical sources suggest something like this, and I think it'd be cool if they mention it in schools.