Picking a new "Coming of Age" Birthday

[TheOzoneHole]

My cousin and I have been talking about this a fair bit lately and I decided I wanted more opinions.

 

In the Midwest, which is where we are from*, there are pretty much three four "important" birthdays: 

*Note that this applies to pretty much the entire country, not just the Midwest.

 

At 16 you can get your license to drive, and get a job.  In 30 states you are considered "adult" enough to have consensual sex and/or get married with parental permission.

At 17 your are old enough to have consensual sex in 9 states. (Both my cousin and I come from states where this is the age of consent.)

At 18 you can register to vote, men/males must register for the draft, you can get your motorcycle drivers license, own a shotgun or rifle, get married w/o parental permission, show your naked body on the Internet or print legally, you are "adult" enough to have consensual sex in the remaining 11 states, and you can legally buy tobacco products.

(I'm guessing pot is 18 as well but we don't have legal pot where I live so I don't know.) 

At 21 your are old enough to buy and sell alcohol (even if you work retail you have to get someone else to scan booze if you're under 21), gamble, and own a hand gun. 

 

Both of us think that this is, to be blunt, dumb.  Pick one age and have done with it.  The reason I've left 16 and 17 off of the poll list is that picking those (if this was actually going to become law) is that would force some of the states to change the existing consent laws. Recent events near us have convinced us that 1. the existing system is not working and 2. even at 17 some people just aren't ready to get laid.  (And NO, it isn't either one of us, I'm in my 20's and my cousin is over 30.)   We both agree that if you might get sent out to get shot for America then you should be able to buy booze and own a gun.  My cousin goes on quite a bit about how much more dangerous cars/motor vehicles are than guns. (Please don't yell at me about my cousin's opinions!)

 

I really want to see what people say and know their reasons behind their choice.

 

Don't worry if you don't live in the United States, I want your opinions as well!  Maybe someone else has found a better system that I don't know about.

 

 

 

 

[davisev5225]

Don't forget age 25 to rent a car without a co-signer and age 35 to run for President.

[Sarge Misfit]

I'm Canadian, living in British Columbia.

 

16 to drive car, truck, motorcycle, as long as you pass the driving tests, you're good to go.

16 for sex with anyone up to age 18.

18 to vote, drink, gamble, have sex with anyone old enough.

18 to vote, own a firearm, (no registration of rifles; permits needed for pistols, semi-automatics; automatics are illegal)

 

Come to think of it, 18 is pretty much it for everything in BC.

 

[TheOzoneHole]

Don't forget age 25 to rent a car without a co-signer and age 35 to run for President.

 

Thanks for the reminder about the car rental Davisev, I don't actually remember if I've needed to rent a car so I didn't know about that.  

18 seems to be the running favorite at the moment; I'm not really surprised by that.

[pinky6225]

18 is most things in the UK except sex which is 16

 

Never really understood how you are old enough to have sex but not old enough to buy the alochol/smokes for after but then again i've never understood how americans trust people to drive at 16 (and potentially cause mayhem on the roads) but not to buy booze

[GimmeBACON]

Everything 21... I had to wait til 21 to "legally" drink, so fuck them future shitheads. 

[Darkpig]

Bah! 18 is more than old enough to trust people to start taking risks because people over the age of 25 do stupid shit anyways. On a side note: Politics is fun kids!

[the_mess]

Its 18 for everything in my country and its ok. Besides kids are buying cigs and alc and having sex since 13-14 so its not like the law is stopping them lol

[BuzbyT]

I was 17yo when I joined the UK Armed Forces....

Old enough to die for ones country.....

Old enough for anything one feels.

 

Also got my HGV licence at 17yo from them

[Feliks]

Got to agree with BuzbyT above me, I am of the opinion that if you're old enough to die for your country you should be old enough to drink/buy guns/drive a car/sex it up/whatever else.

[FusRoDah]

The ages are already arbitrary, making it one single age won't make it any less. At least with seperate ages you can have more nuance. Drinking age is retarded high in the US though 

[Benmc20]

In my own country (France) :

- working : 16+yo (you can be apprentice before that : 14 1/2 yo)

- marriage, vote, driving, gambling, tobacco and alchool : 18+yo

- sex : 15+yo (consensual) with an adult, without any limit iw only teens before 18yo

For the weapons : you must be registered and pass some tests and NO automatic weapons are allowed. Plus, the legal age is 18+yo.

[Kamen Rider Kuuga]

Do you have the strength and/or wits required to murder a person? If so, then congratulations, you've come of age.

[TheOzoneHole]

The ages are already arbitrary, making it one single age won't make it any less. At least with seperate ages you can have more nuance. Drinking age is retarded high in the US though 

 

I wouldn't go quite so far as to call them arbitrary, as there has been at least some legal thought put into all....most.....some of it.  Drinking age was raised back in the 1970's; and voting age was dropped to 18 from 21 as the draft was 18.  The age of 18 for showing of your naked self comes from the fact that you can (at the moment) legally have sex at 18; that said I think it is an utter waste of time and taxpayer money to go after people who have sex who are over 15, yeah if some dirty old fart in his 50's starts going around banging 15 yo girls, fine lock his ass up but leave the girl(s) out of it. Don't ruin their lives for being dumb, getting knocked up will ruin their lives as is, no need to add jail time on top of it.  The drinking age is federally mandated; gun ownership is, I think, state by state.

Driving being 16, well one of the big differences between rural America (where I live) and America's big cities or many parts of Europe is the distance many people have to go to get to places. The nearest store to my house is 3 miles of soy beans and corn fields. We don't have buses, or taxis, or ride sharing services.  Even in town it is difficult to walk to the grocery store or Wal-Mart (which only when in 10 years ago) as they are on the opposite side of town from many of the residential neighborhoods.  Yeah, I understand why it is set at 16, but I don't necessarily agree with it.

 

I did forget that we have a curfew on everyone under 18.  You can't be out past 10 p.m. if you are under 17 and past midnight if you are 17.  If you get stopped by the police you have to prove that you are coming home from work.  I honestly don't remember details on this, so I might be wrong.  

I should also be clear that I really don't have a problem with people 16+ getting a job or even necessarily having sex. But again it does kinda come back to the debate of should be make things stricter because a few people cannot deal with responsibility, especially a lot of it all at once, or do we just accept the lack of maturity in some people as a fact?

[Omega0]

i've witnessed a few children say/do things that would give einstein pause...and then later see some 30+year old "adults" do things that have me facepalming hard enough to leave a mark

[Nexussuckstwice]

"The reason I've left 16 and 17 off of the poll list is that picking those (if this was actually going to become law) is that would force some of the states to change the existing consent laws."

 

Yeah, and forcing 30 states to go from 16 to 18 isn't forcing them?

 

Are you adult enough to study Formal Logic in the uni?

[TheOzoneHole]

Thirty states were not forced to set the age from 16 to 18.  My entire point with this is that if we were going to consolidate all those things into one single birthday which one should it be.  And as I said, even in the states my cousin and I live in, where the age of consent is 17, there are some people who simply can't deal with it as they are not mature enough.  

 

I'll explain our logic chain on this as it might help people to understand our thought process.

 

If you're old enough to drive (16 in most places), then you should be old enough to have sex.  <-- (The age is 16 if you go through drivers ed in public or private school, otherwise you have to be 18.)

If you're old enough to have sex that means you're old enough to have children. 

If you're old enough to have children then you are also old enough to get married.

If you're old enough to have a family, then you're old enough to have a say in how you'll be governed and taxed.

If you're old enough to have a say in government, then you're old enough to join the military.

If you're old enough to join the military then you're a goddamn adult and are old enough to exercise your rights under the Constitution and own a gun. (And yes, a gun is a gun is a gun. We're country boys.)

If you're old enough for all of that, you're clearly old enough to drink. 

 

To me, this comes down to personal responsibility.  Know what your limits are and don't act like an asshole.  The government can get out of our lives and that will actually streamline the government and cause it to work better.  

And I took IT classes, not humanities.

[Nexussuckstwice]

You are seemingly not mature enough to decide for the others, whether they are mature enough or not.

You have no fucking idea about personal responsibility - in fact you do not understand basics of human biology.

Go fuck yourself and don't fight nature - puberty hits at the age of 12 (or so). Pushing your incel agenda wont work here.

[Jazzman]

On 6/25/2018 at 1:42 AM, TheOzoneHole said:

To me, this comes down to personal responsibility.  Know what your limits are and don't act like an asshole.

Laying aside the fact that folks of all age can't see past the choices they don't understand (yet), indeed everything boils down to personal responsibility.

However, personal responsibility requires personal capabilities backed up by personal skills and/or personal resources to manage the unintended consequences of choices made.

 

The irritations underage folks of today might encounter are, thus, largely caused by the growing gap between biological and social evolution. We don't live in a hunter-gatherer society anymore, a simple structured society of predetermined roles and fixed rules, appropriate for the human species living in small groups of up to thirty individuals from the biological point of view that has shaped our understanding of juvenile possibilities and limits for a million years. That model of society got replaced just recently, yesterday, some 7,000 years ago, first by pastoralists, then agriculturalists and finally by technologists.

 

And here we are, uprooted from the clan and often even the own family and yet still unconsciously stuck in the cave or camp and the romantic understanding that after the first ejaculation (that is not made of hot air), the first menstruation, one would be an adult thus has earned to be treated as such among the men or women w/o having proven to be worth it... that's something a youngster might find fatal. Most of the male skeletons excavated in dwelling places from the hunter-gatherer period are young males, rookies under the age of twenty. They usually died of severe wounds, received either in the hunt or in intertribal conflicts, in raids that is. And who needs a Virgin Mary that hasn't yet understood the difference b/t edible and poisonous mushrooms, hmm?

 

 

[FauxFurry]

The Age of Majority seems to be largely determined by the availability of job opportunities and resources and  in one's society.

The fewer jobs that there are (or if the jobs on offer are fairly complicated as opposed to simple entry-level jobs), the longer the transition from childhood to adulthood lasts.

Abundant resources allow that option where in the past, a lack of jobs and resources would necessitate expansion and conquest of other lands with more resources.

 

To gain access to those resources, a society would need as many post-pubescent males to fight in their armies as they could get and ideally a larger number of post-adolescent females waiting to replenish those numbers through childbirth.

 

This is why the Big Kid was invented following the Baby Boom and the Young Adult was redefined as a 20-something rather than a person in their teen-years who has completed their society's Rites of Passage for their specific gender and modern public schools along with them.

Too many people, too few people dying off to leave jobs vacant for the new people to fill. the schools are just there to warehouse what were formerly young adults to keep them from getting into too much trouble in all of their non-productive idle time.

[Jazzman]

1 hour ago, FauxFurry said:

...

To gain access to those resources, a society would need as many post-pubescent males to fight in their armies as they could get and ideally a larger number of post-adolescent females waiting to replenish those numbers through childbirth.

...

Now that's an outdated interpretation of the ongoing raid to get access to resources for free. Numbers don't matter anymore for an army in conquest mood, air superiority does. That's why everyone that can afford it tries to get state-of-the-art surface-to-air missile systems to protect what is theirs, and rightly so. It was simply too easy to force the owners of the required resources into submission just by bombing the shit out of the civilian population.

 

And only a hopelessly indoctrinated woman gives birth to a child for the sake of the military...

[FauxFurry]

15 minutes ago, Jazzman said:

Now that's an outdated interpretation of the ongoing raid to get access to resources for free. Numbers don't matter anymore for an army in conquest mood, air superiority does. That's why everyone that can afford it tries to get state-of-the-art surface-to-air missile systems to protect what is theirs, and rightly so. It was simply too easy to force the owners of the required resources into submission just by bombing the shit out of the civilian population.

 

And only a hopelessly indoctrinated woman gives birth to a child for the sake of the country's military...

The fact that large numbers of people are no longer required for military service due to a combination of troop force multipliers and generally peaceful business dealings between nations meant that, post WW2, that there overall fewer career opportunities at any given time, hence the need to keep young adults toiling away with busy work in public schools. What you added didn't contradict anything that I observed.

 

As for the issue of giving birth for the sake of a nation's military, in past ages of expansion, they either helped shore up the numbers or their people would eventually be conquered or die out. Indoctrination had little to do with it. Modern technologies enable a greater range of life choices now that would have been disastrous for a society just a few generations ago. 

Don't just thank soldiers and social activists of the past for your modern freedoms. Thank the tech-heads and nerds working in S.T.E.M. fields while you're at it.

[Jazzman]

1 hour ago, FauxFurry said:

...

As for the issue of giving birth for the sake of a nation's military, in past ages of expansion, they either helped shore up the numbers or their people would eventually be conquered or die out. Indoctrination had little to do with it. Modern technologies enable a greater range of life choices now that would have been disastrous for a society just a few generations ago. 

Don't just thank soldiers and social activists of the past for your modern freedoms. Thank the tech-heads and nerds working in S.T.E.M. fields while you're at it.

Please don't confuse the harsh conditions under which a clan of not even three dozen head tried to survive in prehistoric times with the modern conditions of many millions in an artificial construct called state. The survival of such a state does not depend on how many children I give birth to ( I have a son, that's enough for me), but on the mechanisms at hand to guarantee the grown traditions and territorial integrity of the state for the next generation. Only for suppressed ethnicities within a state that are facing a silent genocide over generations and are not rounded up like cattle in reservation camps the birth rate matters for survival. Isolated from each other (and often hiding the true ethnicity to avoid pressure in public as e.g. in Latin America) they go extinct at the end of the day as a people. Those that are rounded up instinctively increase the number of children. That's Mother Nature in action. There is no other explanation possible. Best example of today are the Palestinians in the ME, their birth rate is exploding. 

 

I'd not talk about freedoms in 2018, not to make the parents and perhaps even grandparents giggling. We're facing freedom cuts on all fronts, just saying...

[FauxFurry]

26 minutes ago, Jazzman said:

Please don't confuse the harsh conditions under which a clan of not even three dozen head tried to survive in prehistoric times with the modern conditions of many millions in an artificial construct called state. The survival of such a state does not depend on how many children I give birth to ( I have a son, that's enough for me), but on the mechanisms at hand to guarantee the grown traditions and territorial integrity of the state for the next generation. Only for suppressed ethnicities within a state that are facing a silent genocide over generations and are not rounded up like cattle in reservation camps the birth rate matters for survival. Isolated from each other (and often hiding the true ethnicity to avoid pressure in public as e.g. in Latin America) they go extinct at the end of the day as a people. Those that are rounded up instinctively increase the number of children. That's Mother Nature in action. There is no other explanation possible. Best example of today are the Palestinians in the ME, their birth rate is exploding. 

 

I'd not talk about freedoms in 2018, not to make the parents and perhaps even grandparents giggling. We're facing freedom cuts on all fronts, just saying...

No mistake was made on my part regarding when these things were necessary for survival. The Industrialization of the West wasn't too long ago in the grand scheme of things and only a few decades ago for much of the world.

 

I was pointing out that Industrialization in both the civilian and military sectors have created a stable environment where people have gained an unprecedented level of personal freedoms than can be acted upon without those freedoms jeopardizing the survival of the nation as well as stability as has never before existed upon this planet.  

This extended period of stability has no need of a plentiful surplus population in the workforce to replace a workforce which is rapidly dying off any longer so something had to be done with the young adult who would have previously be taking up an apprenticeship in their future careers, something even more important to do following the Baby Boom.

The answer was extending the time which it is socially acceptable for them to remain under their parents' roofs.

This is just an observation of how things were in the United States of America around mid-20th Century as they shifted over into a true world super power.

 

 As for the issue of 'freedom cuts', there will always be someone looking to erode someone else's freedoms but it is no guarantee that they will be successful in their aims. That is why we are all advised that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. 

[Jazzman]

On 6/26/2018 at 4:58 PM, FauxFurry said:

No mistake was made on my part regarding when these things were necessary for survival. The Industrialization of the West wasn't too long ago in the grand scheme of things and only a few decades ago for much of the world.

 

I was pointing out that Industrialization in both the civilian and military sectors have created a stable environment where people have gained an unprecedented level of personal freedoms than can be acted upon without those freedoms jeopardizing the survival of the nation as well as stability as has never before existed upon this planet.  

This extended period of stability has no need of a plentiful surplus population in the workforce to replace a workforce which is rapidly dying off any longer so something had to be done with the young adult who would have previously be taking up an apprenticeship in their future careers, something even more important to do following the Baby Boom.

The answer was extending the time which it is socially acceptable for them to remain under their parents' roofs.

This is just an observation of how things were in the United States of America around mid-20th Century as they shifted over into a true world super power.

 

 As for the issue of 'freedom cuts', there will always be someone looking to erode someone else's freedoms but it is no guarantee that they will be successful in their aims. That is why we are all advised that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. 

The industrialization hasn't perhaps led to personal freedoms as a welcome byproduct, these freedoms are exclusively the result of a partly violent reaction of the public to impoverishment in urban environments and the passing of traditional craft in rural areas caused by industrialization. Personal Freedoms are in fact a hard-fought social achievement in an industrializing environment. I don't have to go into the social philosophy behind and the colorful political bloopers it gave birth to, do I? Man is everything but perfect.

 

Stability, however, is like a stable atmosphere (cf. weather) just an illusion created by those in power to distract from the actual instability. They say that the unemployment rate is just 3.5% but that's only b/c in the US they kick the unemployed out of their faked statistics after four weeks as if they'd not exist anymore. The real unemployment rate is more likely 20% higher than the declared. They say that the economy is flourishing by pointing you to the indexes on the stock markets where in fact nothing gets produced and only speculation rules, fed by fresh money printed by the FED backed by nothing but hot air to keep the interest rates down and the dollar up. Inflation simply does not exist in state funded Ponzi schemes.

 

The local workforce is indeed dying out. Young graduated folk doesn't get a job in the learned profession anymore and consequently must stay with the parents (increasingly beyond the 30s) not to spend the nights under a bridge. Brave new family. Unhappy anyone? Manufacturing got outsourced by local companies to 'Asia' and its cheap labor force to maximize the profit margin for the shareholders, only to get re-imported by said companies under the label 'made in Asia', the root cause of the giant trade deficit. Now the shit has hit the fan and we put the blame on the 'Asians' instead of the CEOs and the managements of the companies that backed by hopelessly corrupt lawmakers single-handedly have caused the deficit (and thus a big chunk of the unemployment as well) and start a quixotic trade war after the other that inevitably leads to a price war at home and the beloved toaster becomes unaffordable for us (but not for them) at the end of the day. Hooray! How sick is that?

 

So, if we'd take personal financial independence as the ultimate touchstone of "coming to age", well, then it's ranging between fourteen and forty...  oops!

 

Moreover, I'm pretty sure that already before my today five year old son has finished college there won't be any personal freedoms left next to the right to declare yourself a member of the umpteenth alien gender (just invent a name to your liking) and no constitutional rights whatsoever aside from the right to pay taxes (then most likely to be subtracted from your charity food stamps) and/or free board and lodge (and a job for 1$ per hour) behind state bars run by private contractors, of course.

 

Gimme a break.