The ship has sailed on hoping for individual solutions. Probably sailed long before we as a species could be considered homo sapiens. I'm not sure why there's this weird reluctance to make systemic changes and improvements, and instead solely pushing the responsibility on every single person that interacts with kids.
Nuclear families became popular long after our species was considered homo sapiens, and even today they aren't the norm for most of our species, so I don't understand what you mean when you say the ship has sailed.
I'm all for systemic changes, but lets make them more real than a national firewall, which is only treating a symptom, and instead focus on how we can make raising kids economically and socially feasible again.
I never said we should "push" responsibility on "every single person that interacts with kids," however, it wouldn't hurt if families would actually "take" a little responsibility in it. If we had UBI it would be a lot simpler for them to do so, but I'm guessing that's not on many peoples' list of systemic changes.
The ship has sailed on us being able to deal with influences like modern social media on an individual level. Modern social media like TikTok, Twitter and even YouTube Shorts are fundamentally designed to take advantage of what our brains evolved into over millions and millions of years.
The nuclear family can't do shit about it. That's just a dream, an ideological fantasy. We don't need a dream. We need real solutions. "People should take a little more responsibility" isn't a solution. It's just empty wishful thinking and part of the reason why things are so screwed up today.
I think we're disagreeing about what real solutions are. To me, banning TikTok won't change anything because Instagram, Youtube, etc. will take over what they did and/or VPNs will become the new awesome. To you, altering how families are formed or making child care free, or establishing UBI are (probably accurately) impossible dreams.
So what would systemic changes and improvements would you make, keeping in mind the First Amendment?
The first amendment doesn't apply to companies. Shutting down TikTok doesn't prevent you from exercising free speech. That's not how it works. Like, I'm not going to bother with this conversation if this is the direction you're going to take it.
And the fact that "Instagram, Youtube, etc." will just do it shows that regulations and laws are required. Systems that prevent companies from doing whatever they want in controlling the opinions of citizens in other countries. How is that compatible with the first amendment? Do you even understand the issue? Do you even understand the first amendment?
Who do you think voted for Trump? You point out that it's perfectly possible to live a "simple" rural life.
I see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_in_Spain and the reason why they vote the way they do. Modern society has left them behind, abandoned them, and not given them any way to keep up with the rest of the US. Now they're getting taken advantage of by the wealthy like Trump, Murdoch, Musk, etc. who use their unhappiness to rage against the machine.
> My money is that rural towns USA will look almost identical in 30 years from now.
You mean poor, uneducated and without any real prospects of anything like a career? Pretty much. Except there will be far more people who are impoverished and with no hope for the future. I don't see any of this as a good thing.
> You point out that it's perfectly possible to live a "simple" rural life.
Indeed, more the point though is that many people still live these lives. The propagation of technology is not uniform, slow, ongoing, and not necessarily even a good thing. My point is that technological progress and the feeling of living in a very advanced age is actually a veneer. The second point is how are we going to get massive adoption of technology that is decades away, when we still haven't fully adopted the technologies of the last two centuries?
> You mean poor, uneducated and without any real prospects of anything like a career?
A lot of those rural towns had large farms, which had people far richer than software engineers. I think there is a lot of complexity when characterizing 'rural' america (which is a lot closer to a lot people than I think they otherwise know).
I don't quite share those value judgements. I think it's varied and complicated. My point instead is really more about the propagation of technology. Another example is all of the US compared to say Japanese smart phones. I was told the USA is about 15 years behind in generalized smart phone tech. A podcast I was listening to recently talked about the deep integration of technology in Chinese Uber equivalents, something that is only recent in US offices where you can go into a room and 'cast' something onto a screen. Apparently in China, for a while, being able to play a movie on a screen in the back of an Uber has been a seemless and integrated experience for a long time. Another good example is credit card technology. The oldest is to do a carbon copy of the embossed phone numbers, to the magnetic strip, to the chip, to tap. Europe had chips used in all of their credit cards while some places in the US were still doing carbon copy, and even the "advanced places" were doing magnetic strip only. Canada has been ahead of the US for a while for point-of-payment systems, virtually every restaurant brings a card reader to you instead of (as is in the US) this dance where you give someone a credit card so they can go to the register where there is a wired machine where they swipe the card.
So, I suppose my biggest point is that technology spreads a lot slower than we tend to think. It's not a process of years, but decades and centuries. I'm really pushing back on this technophile sentiment that we're already living in a super advanced age with a strong society that is robust, that instead these are veneers with very uneven and slow moving advancement. This is not going to change overnight (or in the next century) just because someone creates an humanoid AI robot thing that can lift bails of hay and stack them in the right place. Given the lack of adoption of various technologies that we already see, I take that as evidence that nothing will change too quickly, 30 years or even more, just because we get a bit better with robotics.
I think it's weird to dismiss an article without engaging with it at all and not making any arguments as to why it should be dismissed beyond "it's CNN".
If you're allowing a single data point to have that much power over what or how you think, you've already lost. Especially if you decide to ignore context like "I just lost water by running and I haven't had anything to drink yet", or even important variables like time of day. The number by itself is meaningless. Data (as in a ton of data points) with context can be incredibly useful. Don't blame the tool if you don't learn how to use it properly.
It's not unsubstantive or flamebait. It's fact. Chinese companies have been throwing a lot of money at Western companies for years, which gives the CCP a crazy amount of influence over wide swaths of the economy. But yeah, let's squabble over what's flamebait while the CCP slowly takes over the world.
If you continue to use HN for nationalistic flamewar we will ban you. That is because of the degrading impact it has on discussion here, and it goes regardless of what country you have a problem with.
HN users can, and do, make thoughtful points on such topics from many different viewpoints. "China has their fingers in everything" is not that.
On one hand, it’s refreshing to see this HN guideline and mods asking to follow it. On the other hand, you’d never, ever see anything like this in mainland China. Quite a conundrum.
Like these personal data collection “ad tech” companies that are staffed by foreign nationals who send the data back to their homelands. Most Americans (not in tech) don’t get that there’s a dossier on everyone.
Repeating it doesn't make it sound more plausible. If you have evidence, please take it to a journalist - this would be an explosive and worthwhile story! In a comments section, though, it's indistinguishable from mere slander against immigrants.
Thanks for the feedback. I feel bad that I offended people. I'm sorry; it wasn't my intention to imply all immigrants are problematic. It's only the state-sponsored immigrants, and they're only a tiny, tiny fraction.
I don't think most people care, honestly. Plus, as the parent poster said, this has been going on for 10 years. Not much can be done about it now.
But, if a journalist does happen to reads this and is interested, post your contact info. I'll reach out.
I mean, until somebody does something about it, there's value in repeating it over and over. Maybe at some point it'll sink in how criminal these companies are.
Indeed! Let's just repeat it until nobody can forget it ever again and also drop tax avoidance by these huge companies in the mix.
Maybe there is still hope for something we can call justice and probably the money they stole from exploiting the commons can be used for something more valuable than personal gains of some managers and stakeholders.
Can you explain the Microsoft bit? There's an ocean of difference between Microsoft and Apple. You can pretty much pick any MS API from the past 20 years and it'll still work on Windows 10.
Microsoft is moving away from that model. The cost of rapid release cycles for Windows is dropping the testing and compatibility work that was done in the past.
You see the impact on a few things like Office and SCCM today. As the legacy windows platforms fade, it will become a thing in other areas. My guess is you’ll see more “fixed in Azure only” scenarios to drive demand for those products, and act as a sales funnel for complementary services.
I mean, the problem isn't the university or the students or the people on the board. It's how the CCP uses its relationships to push its agenda and (incompatible-with-ours) values in an oppressive way on non-Chinese entities. This is just another example of how deep the rot is. (Yes, yes, the US does the "same thing", and I'll care when the US turns into a dictatorship that arbitrarily takes your job, livelihood and family for speaking out against it with zero recourse, transparency or accountability)
I find Schmachtenburger hard to listen to. He rejects all media outright because it's all not true or propaganda. Might as well go live in a cave. If you listen to news, whether it's a podcast, a news channel, an article, or whatever, there's always a bias. But the solution isn't to reject all bias, it's to accept that bias is fundamental to human existence and to learn how to deal with bias while consuming that media. It's why I can listen to certain kinds of conservative media and not have my head explode - even if I disagree with many of their premises, I'm able to recognize what is fact, what is supposed fact, what is informed analysis and what is pure opinion, such that I can still extract value from it. More importantly, I can generally can recognize whether somebody is making a good faith argument or simply pushing a point to achieve certain goals or push an agenda.
Yeah, I would discern personal bias from institutional distortion.
I can deal with biases because like you said I can sense truthfulness (good faith), and triangulate multiple sources to form an image by trusting my own bias. Bias and different perspectives are everywhere and carry valuable signals.
What I can’t sense is that I can check all sources to find what is actually true. His solution is to proxy our sense-making to some collective intelligence (community) grown in a positive-sum game. But our current game is zero-sum, and information becomes competitive rather than collaborative, which incents (guarantees) institutional distortion (e.g. obscuring, disinforming, context-shrinking).
Aside for describing the problem, I think he covers some practical ways to make sense of things in the broken information ecology, but I haven’t gone over that part in any detail yet.
I'm exactly the same. I actually consider it a matter of intellectual honesty to listen to 'the other sides' of what I believe/think. I didn't know this was called Hegellian dialectic but that's exactly it (just generalized beyond dichotomy, a multi-dimensional 'tension' to account for nuance and complexity).
I find that it gives me a much better "BS" (bad faith or belief-driven argument) whichever side it comes from; and the good arguments are then free to flow irrespective of our perception of 'sides': it does not matter who said it, or whether it contradicts other elements; if there's truth to it, then it deserves to be explored, integrated. That's reality for us.
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