Why is everyone concerned about giving sexual and religious minorities when both Europe and US are experiencing an increase of aging population? Why not give older people equal rights by eliminating discrimination in employment and media representation? Old people have years of experience and expertise in the workplace and life, in general, so why are they being pushed aside in our society?
You’re asking if there is a problem and demanding we solve the problem at the same time.
I just see that nobody really cares about the older population in the West. It’s all about gay rights and transsexual rights right now. Old people are like invisible people in our society.
You are jut now realizing it is a slave society? It is a slave society. Slave owners, want to hire young slaves. Slave owners toss old slaves aside like Emperor Palpatine did with Vader…are you just now realizing this.
My dad is old and can’t even get pills for his hip
Young people can’t get jobs either, neither can transsexuals, they only hire people who conform to all the rules regs and are maximum cucks and slaves
Because the baby boomers are responsible for the economic mess that the world is in and they don’t deserve any special treatment. Why don’t they mortgage their mcmansions and cash in their 401k’s and go and fuck themselves.
Let the younger generations make some money and get a pension… they’ve had their turn.
Ageism is one of those made up -isms. When someone discriminates on the basis of race or sex, it is frequently irrational. Unless you’re hiring for a sunscreen commercial, race just doesn’t tell you much about how good someone is for the job.
Age, on the other hand, tells you a lot. A person who is 65 now was 55 when Facebook was started. They were 45 when cell phones hit the market. In a lot of roles, that matters. Moreover, someone who is 65 is eligible for retirement, they’re more likely to die, they’re unlikely to take direction as well from a boss who is likely to be younger than them. These are all true by definition or very highly correlated with age. Age has predictive power about work-related attributes.
I many industries, the additional experience is as much a liability as an asset. If an industry is trying to innovate, to overhaul processes to use new technologies to gain efficiency, someone with years of experience in an analogue workplace may find that change more challenging than someone who is used to doing everything online.
That isn’t always true: since enterprise applications tend not to be as glitzy as Facebook/Google/Twitter, older workers actually tolerate them better than digital natives whose expectations are never met. It can’t be said that age is all costs, and surely there are some roles where age is at least as much or more an asset than it is a liability.
Still, in a lot of cases, the benefits don’t outweigh the rationally predicted costs. In a lot of cases (not all cases, of course, but most, and in any case in a larger percentage of cases than is the case with sexism or racism), ageism isn’t irrational, it is actually pricing in real factors about a potential job candidate.
Are you getting old, Pandora?
People can rationalize any kind of bias. 
By using your own arguments, one can say that sexism against women is perfectly reasonable. Women are more likely than men to leave a job to get married and have children. They are more likely to take time off to take care of the children that they already have. They are more likely to leave a job to follow their husbands when the husband changes jobs and moves. They will take time off to deal with female illness like PMS.
But one can’t say it because it’s not PC. 
The fundamental unfairness of these isms (racism, sexism, ageism) is that a group is assigned some average characteristics and then an individual is evaluated based on that average and not or his/her unique characteristics.
Even if the average is statistically correct, it does not correctly represent the individual (unless he/she is exactly average). 
It’s like if a class of 20 students takes a math test and the average score is 72/100. Looking at any particular individual, the average does not tell you if he got 30/100 or 95/100 on the test.
What actually is the fair thing to do in this situation? I wouldn’t want to put women into a bind wherein they are forced to choose either to have children or a career (or just to earn a livelihood), but is it really the right thing to do to extort the cost of this choice from the employer? It’s almost like saying: look, she wants to have children but she needs a source of income to make that possible. You!!! Give her money! Why does any one person, or corporation, bear the moral burden of having to pay for that?
Like I said, I don’t wish for women to be put into a situation where they have to choose between career or family–everyone should be able to have both–but neither do I wish for other people to be arbitrarily selected to pay the price for that. ← It’s a dilemma. What would be a reasonable, fair, right-wing solution to this problem?
I am aging like a fine wine myself.
My main goal in this thread is to point out the absurdity of calling ageism a “made up ism” while calling sexism a problematic “real” ism.
If you are going to be fair to people, then you evaluate them purely based on their unique abilities. And if you insist on accommodating a particular group then you ought to make the same accommodation for another group. If you choose to ignore the fact that women will leave a job to have children, then you ought to ignore the fact that older people are more likely to die or retire soon. (Soon may be 10 or 15 years.)
And to say that it’s okay to discriminate based on when Facebook or iPhone was created, is completely ridiculous.
Why did you ask for a “right-wing solution” instead of a solution? 
Phyllo, you make some valid points, but to push back: at some margin, you are stereotyping every person you interview for a job. You have, at most, a few hours of interaction and a few pages of information about the person before you hire them. You stereotype them based on the past work, and you say “the average person who had job X would also be good for this job, so that weighs in this applicant’s favor”. That’s all stereotyping, it’s completely legitimate, and that isn’t at all at odds with the suggestion that race is illegitimate when used the same way.
It’s also not at all at odds with the statement that sex is a generally illegitimate factor to weigh, to say that sometimes sex is a legitimate factor. Moreover, it’s pretty easy to come up with cases where even something like employment history can be weighed in an illegitimate way: say someone applied to a job at a bank and on their resume indicated that they paid their way through college working as a garbage collector, and they were scored down because working as a garbage collector is seen as déclassé and the person is seen as tainted by it. That’s illegitimate, even though past employment is obviously fair game in general.
So, is age more like sex or more like past employment? I’d say it’s close enough to the latter. You dismiss the role of age-at-first-use of a technology, but that matters; people learn differently as they age, their thought processes solidify and consolidate and streamline, and they become very good at the things they’ve always done, and very bad at learning new things. While there’s some variation, it’s much more like claims about “the average person who had job X” than it is like claims about “the average person of race X”. And it applies to all technology, Facebook was just one I knew the timeline for. Google, Excel, Word, and Outlook are all essential in a modern workplace, and if you started using them in your late 40s you’re unlikely to get beyond rudimentary proficiency. Sure, it’s a probability, but then there are some people who have been cashiers for 20 years who would make great middle managers, but there’s no bias in betting on safe odds.
Look, there aren’t clean lines here. Age can absolutely be misused as a factor, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But where with race and sex the odds that it will be used illegitimately make it safest to have a strong presumption that a particular use is illegitimate, that isn’t the case with age. Age tells you something meaningful about a person, and as often as not it’s rational and fair to factor it in.
The reason sex doesn’t appear to be a factor is because when you get woman lumberjacks, you get tomboys, girls who are obsessed with lumberjacking and do their best whereas men don’t really give a fuck. The girl is a try-hard, and so appears to be on par with the males.
More discrimination coming your way then.
Because the left think that the way things are setup now–where maternity pay is mandatory and that employers can’t legally discriminate when hiring on the basis of potential maternity leave–is the solution. In other words, they don’t even see it as problem.
The issue here is that when there is a problem affecting some group–women, other races, different age groups, etc.–the left take it as a forgone conclusion that the source of the problem is another group–an oppressive dominant class who, on purpose, are making life difficult for the victim group on the basis of some prejudice–and so to extort a toll on the oppressive group, or to legally force them to cater to the victim group, is an acceptable solution because, well, they deserve it.
No you don’t. You made that up.
You aren’t wrong, but rationality is not the standard by which we judge discrimination in this society. If it’s discrimination of a demographic on a particular list, it’s bad. It doesn’t matter how rational it is.