Whenever the older generations pile on and stereotype the younger generations, it's just as easy to hand a stereotype right back and point out the older generation leaps to an assumption without actually knowing anything about the younger generation - which a lot of folks might say is the driving force behind the lower quality of folks in the younger generations. Blame your kids and grandkids for being low-quality, but remember, they're YOUR kids and grandkids.

The easiest retort in this kind of thread - prove to me that using new technology excludes knowledge of the old. Prove to me using a GPS or smartphone to navigate excludes younger generation folks from knowing how to read maps and compasses. Many here seem to want to jump on a bandwagon and hold the old ways above new technology, but prove to me your comments are anything more than a stereotype - prove to me the fact we're all using computers to type here excludes us from the ability to use a typewriter. Prove to me navigating by electronic compass bearing and topos in a handheld GPS will negate the same skillset for paper maps and magnetic compasses? Why does being young mean a guy can't read wind? Was it windier 30yrs ago so no younger shooter has ever had to deal with wind?

If we want to talk stereotypes: You wanna know how SOME of the older generation of hunters taught me to dope my rifle? Cut the lid off of a box of factory ammo of the same bullet weight and tape it to your stock. That's no joke - there were two guys in their 60's in my uncle's hunting camp when I was a kid who had flaps from remington or winchester ammo boxes taped to their rifle, even though they were shooting reloads! I could name a few older hunters, from 50+ to 80+ years old who I find very difficult to respect because of how they choose their quarry - every damned year I help them go hunt, then they take 5 shots to kill a fawn barely out of spots, simply because it was the first deer they saw, and they "hunt for meat, not horns," regardless of whether the deer was mature or not. Luckily, my family taught me better than those old fools.

Older generations often criticize the younger generations for this - "kids just don't read anymore..." However, studies has proven the opposite is actually true - kids spend more hours per week reading today than at any point in the history of man - they just read from a screen instead of a piece of paper.

There have been schitheads in every generation - my great grandpa, born in 1913, used to tell a story about his first cousin who came to live with them during the Great Depression because his parents wouldn't let him move back home as a grown man because he couldn't take care of himself - he'd never studied in school, and never paid attention to learn how to be of use on our ranch, nor did he have any work ethic. One of my uncles ran off to California in the 1970's and was a hippy living in his van - he was largely worthless until his 30's when he knocked up a girlfriend, took a huge amount of debt to go back to school, and finally found a work ethic. In the next generation, I've employed interns who have been more productive, hard working, and skilled than half of my colleagues 20-30yrs their senior. I've also rejected interns who wouldn't get out of bed if a super model offered to make them breakfast in the nude. Studies have proven the "millenials" to actually have a stronger desire to work and a greater sense of social duty than the last two generations before them - i.e. the two generations which criticize them the most.

But after 2 pages - I still fail to see how any pedantic ageism has anything to do with using a cell phone to take photos through a spotting scope - folks have been using spotting scopes and telescopes as zoom lenses for cameras for as long as a camera has existed. Certainly nothing the younger generation came up with, so I'm not really sure how all of this came to be in the first place.