

Young people are a lost generation that can no longer fix things - Balgair
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11298927/Young-people-are-lost-generation-who-can-no-longer-fix-gadgets-warns-professor.html

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grownseed
"Get off my lawn!"

I find it rather ironic that this would be posted on HN; this is essentially a
straw man argument generalizing a narrow perception of society, which is a
little worrying coming from a University Professor. It's pretty amazing that
after a couple of centuries of fighting against the culture of "Generation
(n+1) can only aspire to be as good as Generation (n), but can never be
better", we still see articles like this, over and over again.

This is not to say a lot of people are not incapable of fixing things, but I'd
argue this has always been true, in one way or another. Culture and technology
move on, the breadth of our knowledge has expanded so far and so deep that it
has become near-impossible (and it is only getting harder) for any given
person to be generalistic enough - whether this is good or bad is a different
question.

My parents can do things I'd be unable to do, but the opposite is true as
well. This doesn't we belittle each other, it simply means we respect and
value what each other can achieve, as individuals and members of society.

This cross-generation bashing (in both directions) is toxic, as toxic as other
kinds of discriminations (gender, race, sexual preference, ...).

I suspect the Professor in question was originally upset about our culture of
waste, which, again, is a different question.

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guelo
The technology stack keeps getting bigger. A lot of the new generation is
tinkering way higher up the tech stack than this professor, for some reason,
wants them to. But some are still tinkering at the lower levels. There's just
a lot of levels. As much as I'd like to be able to, you can't tinker with them
all.

