[Bender]

FWIW economists have known since the 60's that Boomers would be retiring in large numbers around now. This makes me curious why businesses have not been proactively planning for this somehow. Is there a gap in business processes that excludes economics? Is this something taught in business school?

Boomers ruin everything.

Next in line will be Gen-X albeit a much smaller group. I can't fault any of the groups, retirement is expected behavior and something we hopefully all get to do. I believe the onus is on the business to plan accordingly. Perhaps even better would be to prioritize documentation and training to be on par with the primary function of the business. This could even be part of business continuity planning. Maybe insurance companies could add this as a line item in their audits.

[PaulHoule]

It would be nice to see some boomers retire from politics. The U.S. sometimes looks like a Soviet-style gerontocracy and China seems to be going the same way now that Xi gave himself a third term.

[LinuxBender]

I support term limits for non-elected government staff positions. 20 years and forced retirement with a nice severance/retirement package with the agreement they will not enter into a civilian career that benefits from their former position? i.e. attempt to prevent the creation of collusion, kickbacks and some bribery prior to retirement.

[PaulHoule]

I dunno.

I know a person who is an advocate for nuclear energy, who sincerely believes that it is "the power to save the world". He was an officer in the nuclear navy and spent some time working in procurement of naval reactors.

When he retired from the navy he got a job working on small reactors (a subject that he's been passionate about) at a vendor that supplies naval reactors.

The "revolving door" can have the appearance of impropriety but sometimes it's the only way you're going to get people with certain knowledge and talent. For instance anything having to do with naval nuclear power requires a special security clearance on top of an ordinary security clearance. The person who is most likely to have that security clearance (as well as knowledge about naval nuclear reactors) is a person who serves as a "nuke" in the navy. So that kind of person is naturally going to wind up working at that kind of vendor not necessarily because of corruption but because of the scarcity of talent.

[LinuxBender]

I agree. What I mean is there needs to be something to prevent collusion and kickbacks. Maybe a group that follows up on former government officials to see if they influenced legislation that would then benefit them or their buddies. There must be something like this already, some type of anti-corruption group, assuming it has not been corrupted.

So to use your example, if your Navy friend passed laws or voted on laws or were part of a government org that removed obstacles for a private nuclear company and then joined that company receiving a nice hiring bonus that should be investigated as corruption.

[confidantlake]

Seems premature to start investigating former non voting government officials working in the private sector when we have sitting congresspeople trading stocks based on the legislation they are voting on.

[LinuxBender]

Well, I agree with that too. There was talk of doing something about that but I don't know if it has gone anywhere beyond talk in a meaningful manor.

[kelseyfrog]

> This makes me curious why businesses have not been proactively planning for this somehow.

Since when do businesses proactively plan when there is much more money to be made by whittling down the value-creation change to the bare minimum? In my view, the business meta for the last 50 years has been to strip away useless redundancy in favor of speed[profit] at the behest of shareholders. The result is crystalized value-creation pipelines which are much less robust to shock than their predecessors. Due to their inter-causal dependence and the stochastic nature of shocks(plus the central limit theorem), we get a reoccurring business cycle. It's baked into the system.

Intergenerational antagonism is a frustration redirection mechanism co-oped by the media to replace class-politics for obvious reasons. So much angst and ennui is wasted by diverting away from the ownership class who are made incredibly wealthy from the above and into gen-pilled boomer-haters. It is incredibly effective.