A sold-out house for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in San Francisco proves she’s touched a national nerve
Whether or not you call her “radical,” her popularity shows how millennial politics are now everyone’s politics

Since Millennials have graduated college, these issues that Ocasio-Cortez champions — student loan debt, unlivable salaries, no access to healthcare—have been at the forefront for Millennials, meaning those those born between 1981 and 1996, according to Pew Research Center. In 2016, the average income for someone who was 29 was reportedly around $35,000 in the United States. According to the Federal Reserve, the amount of student debt owed by Americans has more than tripled from 2001 to 2016, accumulating to more than $1.3 trillion. And in 2015, 24 million American between the ages of 18 to 34 reported to have lived under their parents’ roof.

Millennial politicians are the future of America, and Ocasio-Cortez's popularity is an indication of what they very well may look like. According to Pew Research Center, there is a wide generational divide in partisanship among Millennials. Despite the adage that people get more conservative as they age, the Millennial generation has only tilted more to the left as they’ve come of age.

Many Millennials are not buying real estate, saving for retirement, getting married or having kids — and it is not because they are lazy or narcissistic or can’t grow up, but because the government and economy has failed them. Millennials came of age in an era of outrageous income inequality, staggering student debt, static wages, and a decaying social safety net unable to catch them. Millennial gripes have often been dismissed by older generations and entitled conservatives who mock our generation as punchlines — but in truth, a quarter of Americans are millennials, while these struggles extend far beyond the bounds of those born in that aforementioned 15-year span.

“I’m very excited about this very young woman who was able to win in the Bronx, she’s part of this wave of progressive young people,” Brigid Acuña, of Albany, Calif., told Salon at the event. “She’s young, she’s really cool... I have a 13-year-old and I’m from a bicultural family and it’s really inspiring, she’s very articulate and very passionate.”

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This is what the life of an incel looks like

Joey’s studio apartment has one huge window with the blinds drawn, a bed with a mattress pad but no sheets, and a laptop. He almost never leaves. He spends all day in chatting online, smoking Newports, sometimes going for two days straight. The blinds are drawn to cut down on the glare on the laptop. "Honestly I feel more real here, sitting in front of a computer. When I go outside I almost depersonalize a little bit and feel like I'm playing a video game,” Joey said. “I don't know why that is. It's just a state of mind. It's probably just a side effect of isolation.”

The internet world that keeps Joey in his apartment is “involuntary celibacy.” Joey is an incel, a 23-year-old virgin. Incels believe that they are doomed by society’s cruel rules to never have sex, because they are too ugly or socially awkward. On paper, Joey should not be one of them. He is attractive and smart and funny, and he has the social skills many incels believe they lack. But these are his people. “I'm addicted to it, because, like, I find the people I talk to online way more interesting than the celebrities that our society holds up,” Joey said. “I've just never met people this interesting, and you're willing to say things about yourself — that you would never tell anyone in real life — online.”




Most of the world was introduced to incels in 2014 when Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 14 more at University of California - Santa Barbara. Rodger wrote a long manifesto blaming women for not having sex with him, and it made him a hero among some incels. On message boards and forums, they joke that they’re going to “go E.R.” In April, Alek Minassian, 25, drove a van into a crowd in Toronto, killing 10 people. He’d praised Rodger on Facebook. The attack made incels the subject of international news, a mysterious internet phenomenon to be feared and ridiculed.

We wanted to talk to an incel on camera, someone who could explain this subculture and where it came from. A source from the radical political internet world put me in touch with Joey. (They’d met in a chatroom.) After a few weeks of chatting on Discord, a text and voice app designed for gamers, Joey agreed to an interview, and a tour of his online world.

Story continues https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/7xqw3g/this-is-what-the-life-of-an-incel-looks-like

More Americans are forced to "reside" in their vehicles

The number of people who live in their vehicles because they can't find affordable housing is on the rise, even though the practice is illegal in many U.S. cities.

The number of people residing in campers and other vehicles surged 46 percent over the past year, a recent homeless census in Seattle's King County, Washington found. The problem is "exploding" in cities with expensive housing markets, including Los Angeles, Portland and San Francisco, according to Governing magazine.

The problem of vehicle residency is national in scope, although its impact may be more "acutely felt in urban areas where space is more limited," said Sara Rankin, an assistant professor law at Seattle University and the director of Homeless Rights Advocacy Project, in an email to CBS MoneyWatch.

Challenges abound for people who live in their vehicles, ranging from racking up parking tickets to finding a safe place to park and shower, advocates say.

A recent survey by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP), which tracks policies in 187 cities, found the number of prohibitions against vehicle residency has more than doubled during the last decade.

Continues https://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-americans-are-living-in-their-vehicles-amid-high-housing-prices