5 Things This Generation Is Trying To Render Extinct

The Washington Post reports on "style mavens" seemingly screaming from their front porches at those dang kids with their skateboards and paper towels. I don't know what it takes to be baffled by paper towel usage, but if I did, I wouldn't be writing this article; I'd be spitting on Oliver Twist as he begged me for a sixpence. The mavens scoff as if using something cheaper and more widely applicable was a scandal on par with sleeping with the kitchen staff. One writer had to explain that dinner parties are a lot less common than they used to be, and this was quite a concern for me, until I realized that I wasn't a side character in Downton Abbey.

This one isn't just throwing away traditionally useless items. Killing napkins is environmental self-defense. Shredding forests to create slightly smaller versions of other tissues to sell in more expensive boxes is worse than anything Captain Planet ever fought. Napkins were only invented because the previous generation couldn't be bothered to do laundry. Or rather, putting another item into the laundry they were doing anyway. Using napkins is basically telling nature, "Look. You seem like a great person. It's just that we want different things. You want to stay around, and I want little scraps of paper that the people sitting at my dinner table will forget about almost instantly."

"How Millennials (Almost) Killed the Wine Cork" isn't news; that's discussing the survival of a friend attacked by a vicious brute. Because anyone celebrating the survival of wine corks absolutely says shit like "vicious brute." And prefers old vintages to young people. Blaming kids for attacking wine corks is when Cruella de Vil starts pulling up her puppy-skin collar to pretend she hasn't seen you in the street.

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Prepare your fainting couch before reading another sentence from The Atlantic: "Millennial wine drinkers, a generation that has less of an allegiance to traditional cork closures ..."

When a generation is judged by allegiance to a 17th-Century wine closer, it's because the writer's upset they can't be converted into Soylent Green. A 2015 report by the Wine Market Council, which I'm imagining as the world's most inebriated Illuminati, reported that companies are using screw caps to appeal to millennials. Presumably because millennials don't give a shit what's used to close a wine bottle, as long as there's wine in it. The Wine Council doesn't come to that conclusion, but I used a bottle of wine while writing this, so who's the real expert now? Anyone who attends a Wine Market Council meeting sober should be fired.

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Wine corks suck. You need a special tool to remove them. You need another special tool to re-close a bottle. A non-zero percentage simply fail, ruining the wine, or crumble into it at the last second. They demonstrate almost every problem we invented metal and plastic tools to solve. If I'm going to have something go wrong with wine and end up destroying things, it's going to be after I drink it, not before. And "cork taint" sounds like an infection you'd get from having a little too much wine and way too much imagination.

Complaining about corks is nonsensical. It's been shown that expert wine tasting is imaginary. We don't mind people spending tens of thousands of dollars pretending it's possible to truly taste the difference. They're paying extra to enjoy the sensation, so it doesn't matter if it's psychosomatic. It's probably the least damaging ludicrously rich asshole indulgence. But anyone who knows wines by year doesn't get to mock kids for catching Pokemon. And the fact remains that anyone who can really tell the difference between corked and capped wine has a spectroscope in their nasal cavity, because they're a T-800 sent back to humiliate Lord Jonathan Connerington-Smythe before he can make a cutting remark about Monsier Jacquard's new Skienette Loom.

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The only reason to defend wine corks is that you want to make more money by the bottle. Right on cue:

The Atlantic

Listen, if popping the cork was really part of the "wine experience," we'd all get wasted on sheets of bubble wrap.

Regular golfing requires so many luxurious securities that it should rank between Earl and Baronet. Business Insider complains that millennials aren't golfing while the boomers are dying off. Past headlines probably complained about these mammallennials flourishing after the asteroid strike, while the dinosaurs were wearing striped jumpers and little caps and clutching clubs in their tiny forepaws. Wait, those dinosaurs sound awesome. Plus, I've got a great idea for a movie in which a T-Rex has to win a golf tournament to save Jurassic Park from closing.

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Golf isn't so much being killed off as it's being sloughed off. It's evolution getting rid of anaerobic respiration because it's monstrously inefficient and benefits ridiculously few living things. This is millennials as the mammals "killing" the dinosaurs. All wars are fought for territory, and this is the class battle for the countryside. Golf is the sporting embodiment of capitalism: a huge area set aside for a few rich people to use to celebrate the fact that they're amazing at something simple. Golf benefits fewer people per money spent than the space program, and requires more ridiculously specialized equipment. And an astronaut has never had anyone arrested for wandering into a space station.

Right now, far too many millennials don't have medical insurance. If you want them to start buying golf memberships, you could put a free clinic in the 18th hole. Millennials would tear each other apart trying to get to it, at which point everything would be going according to your plan.

In the modern office, millennials are more replaceable than printer ink. That shit has to be paid for, and can refuse to work if it's not properly set up with the right equipment. So they're scared to do the smallest thing which might result in them getting shitcanned. Millennials aren't killing the vacation; they've been forced to cannibalize what was killed by external disasters in order to survive. They're not workaholics; they just enjoy not starving to death.

Inc's utterly opened asshole of a column admits all of that, then goes ahead and blames millennials anyway, insisting it's on them to oppose the world's conversion into a vast work camp. It regurgitates a report from the sanctimonious staff of "Project: Time Off," who feel the need to explain to workers that taking time off feels nice. No shit, you need a focus group for that? You'd think that it would only take three words to say "Weekends are fun!" but Project: Time Off manages to do it with one long, extended fart noise. Brace yourself for the most rage-inducing tech shit ever dumped through your eyeballs:

Join us in disrupting the vacation stigma.

But instead of advocating and organizing the requisite national strikes, Project: Time Off's entire strategy seems to be talking about their last holiday and motivational posters.

Project: Time Off

That is the least problem-solving group in the world. Don't tell over-stressed workers buried under debt and unpaid overtime that taking a break would be good for them, because they're not allowed to break your face. You want to help people? Get minimum income going. That fixes so much more than your smug reminder that maybe a day at the beach would be great. It's pretty easy to discuss the importance of vacations at your job when that's your entire job.

The depression of the diamond trade is a wonderful example of millennial success. Before the internet, your only information about diamonds came from the people advertising them and other people agreeing that you should be impressed. But now, we know so much more about almost everything. True, many people still don't give a shit about most of it, but there is still more shit-giving than there used to be, and it will only increase as a new generation embraces their magic boxes which tell us about anything, anywhere, any time. Making silicon chips far more beautiful than carbon crystals.

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Diamonds do have a few genuine uses (like creating twice the pressure of our planet's core and forcing matter into new phases with an awesome Diamond Anvil). Which is why we're making artificial diamonds which are superior in almost every way and getting better all the time. This may be the most flawless combination of improving technologies and exterminating an exploitative industry. The diamond industry blaming millennials is a real-world Scooby-Doo plot, an old industry getting annoyed at the inquisitive kids for seeing through some false advertising and trick lighting.

None of which excuses The Economist, which paints the picture of a bored hypillionaire chewing fried genetically-reconstructed dodo wings as they discuss how a huge new diamond ripped from Botswana might possibly "enhance the image of an industry that is struggling to sell to the "millennial" generation. Young consumers increasingly shun the taint of conflict and exploitation." I've never read a paragraph which so clearly contained the word "insolent" without actually using it, holding even the concept of a new generation in quotation marks as if it was something platinum tongs pulled from the sole of their diamond shoes.

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Diamond merchants are never, ever the struggling party in any situation they encounter. Anyone referring to the next generation as "young consumers" is their enemy by default. Then theres the discussion of them shunning the "taint" of conflict and exploitation as if they were fussy infants who've suddenly decided they don't like the color of their baby food.

Why aren't millennials buying diamonds? Because millennials can see through the bullshit.

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