The problem with "let the parents decide" is that so many parents take the option of least resistance and currently that's a terrible option. From what I see of my childrens' peers, it's not parents are deciding to let their children run wild on social media, it's that they don't even think about it, they just hand over a phone or tablet, often with their own login, and don't think much about it.
One way of solving this is if the default was everything locked down, then effort needed to give the children anything, forcing parents to consider each permission.
However I also see that parents are addicted to their devices and social media, so don't see the problem.
I’m still not convinced what is fundamentally different today about social media compared to violent video games which were the supposed evil my parents obsessed about when I was a kid. This is just the “sex drugs and rock & roll” for the 21st century’s control freaks.
You can’t tell the difference between a finite experience like Goldeneye or Doom and an endlessly scrolling, network connected app like TikTok, optimized to feed you what it thinks will keep you scrolling?
> Kids as young as 3
years old can use mounted guns to shoot people to pieces and
watch blood splatter on the screen. Kids get points for killing people. Parents eat pizza while their kids blow somebody up. I have
friends who play them. Their eyes look crazy when they play them,
and they get excited when the blood splatters and parts of bodies
fly.
> The project is going to continue for a long time, because it is really hard to convince some people about the dangers. Some will not
even listen. Some parents do not think it is harmful for a child to
make blood splatter and body parts explode. I do not understand
why they think it is okay to do this killing.
> Mortal Kombat series, Mortal Kombat Ultimate—This has joysticks. You use
your fists and legs and feet. Bodies explode blood when you hit them. Mortal
Kombat Ultimate says on the screen—‘‘There is no Knowledge that is not
Power.’’ Does that mean that if you know how to kill someone, then you will
have power?
It's very hard for me to read commentary on social media and not be reminded of this kind of rhetoric. All of the individual facts are true, it's hard to explain exactly what's wrong, and it's clear that everyone in this hearing passionately believed that disaster was incoming if we didn't take action. Yet I'm very confident that video games do not have the negative effects they thought were obvious.
I lean libertarian and I resent the nanny state, but I’m sympathetic to the idea of restricting social media access to children for two reasons:
1. Even in the 1990s, there were problems with child predators using chat rooms and Web forums to talk to minors for inappropriate, illegal purposes.
2. Social media “algorithms” (recommender systems) that are designed around increasing user engagement are a big problem.
I’m very cautious about poorly written legislation with too-broad definitions of social media that restrict useful forms of Internet access for children. However, I believe that algorithmic social media is harmful, especially to minors, and I am sympathetic to restrictions for minors provided that the laws are well-written.
> I lean libertarian and I resent the nanny state, but ... I am sympathetic to restrictions for minors provided that the laws are well-written.
Then you know that "but think of the children" is the most common fear-mongering approach to justify increased authoritarianism. I've seen no way to craft legislation on this issue that uses government force to achieve your desired outcome, that don't also create massive undesired effects like invasion of privacy or outlawing anonimity. Can you point to some model laws on this that you like?
There are plenty of apps that parents who care can install on their kids' devices or ISP and carrier services to limit kids' social media access.
I don't think rock and roll taught fundamentally bad values nor did playing mario or doom.
Social media is by contrast fairly designed to spread 17 different kinds of poisonous stupidity. So you liked $conspiracy_theory... how about 10 more 3 of which suggest genocide!
Disney is worse in ways, subtle sexual imagery in their cartoons and interpersonal drama in their teen shows. Kids are learning these patterns before they even get to social media
While I am quite laissez-faire and not sure how much I care about this particular issue, I have seen this mentality on teaching. "Its the parents fault the kids can't read in college."
No... They spent 13 years in government school, that is not the parents fault if they can't read. If we assume its the parents job to educate their kids, there will be some 1-5% of kids that fall through the cracks, damning millions of kids to failure.
For policy that we care about, it is not good enough to have parents decide.
If that school doesn't take into account parents' preferences it would be a farm, not a school.
> If we assume its the parents job to educate their kids
We should assume it's the school's job to educate kids approximately in alignment with the wishes of their parents.
> For policy that we care about, it is not good enough to have parents decide.
"Good enough" for whom? Who is supposed to decide to the exclusion of parents? How such a decision is going to be made? Who is going to be responsible for the inevitable failures which are now called "successes"?
> "Its the parents fault the kids can't read in college."
If you understand what I'm trying to say here, you'll know that parents will always get the blame, no other party is willing to accept even the slightest hint of responsibility.
I moved from the UK to Scandinavia, where there is a federated ID (BankID) that you use to access pretty much everything and it removes all this complexity that the UK has. I can't imagine life without such an easy system. One of the downsides is that there's a bit of a catch-22 to getting an ID in the first place but once you've managed that it's done.
A key difference is the relationship between the people and the government and the motivation behind creating a federated ID. There's definitely an element of governmental monitoring to the Scandinavian model but the relationship with the government is less adversarial than in the UK.
The inefficiency of large companies is widespread. In many there are layers of managers whose jobs are little more than to attend meetings with each other and tickle down the bare minimum of requirements to delivery teams. So it's no surprise that they can be willingly blind to the inefficiency of the process that guarantees their job.
My story of being paid to do nothing involves spending a month waiting for my own PC and login details at a large corp, being billed at $1200+ a day. It was mind-numbing and demotivating and I soon left.
Hopefully these experiences made me a better manager when I started hiring contractors. I always had a computer & user account ready, scripted any local environments needed and work lined up, plus never asking them to start first thing in the morning due to my experience of waiting around in a new office whilst waiting for everybody I needed to arrive and have their first coffee. Just because somebody is a temporary contractor doesn't mean you can't show them some respect for their time & profession.
True. Remember that as well. I think I worked remotely for another client while I was waiting 3 weeks (paid) for my login, so had 3 weeks of double pay.
My record is about 9 weeks to get onboarded enough to do work, where "onboarded" was getting my Laptop to work and login and access to a few critical systems.
These kinds of costs are baked into every level of the company. This is a place where they calculate it costs about $30,000 to add a period to the end of a sentence in a static website.
A couple of decades ago most people I knew were spending considerable time thinking about the best folder structure to use to manage large collections of MP3s (and then making them available on Limewire). Then you'd move over selections to your or someone else's MP3 player.
One great product of this among my friends was the MP3 mix tape swap parties. You'd select a bunch of your favourite songs and put them on a thumb drive, then go hang out at a friend's house. All the MP3s would be put together, virus checked and then copied to everyone's thumb drives. It was a great way of discovering new music.
Perhaps they meant digital download sales such as Bandcamp & Beatport and less so for iTunes, Amazon, etc... as there are still real revenues to be made from selling digital music. It all depends upon how many middlemen between purchaser and the artist but vinyl adds in unavoidable production costs, risks of unsold stock, etc... versus Bandcamp where there is little upfront cost, low risk and low transaction costs.
> Why hasn't the UK been able to create any local tech giants?
In the UK there are several tech or tech adjacent companies valued in the tens or hundreds of billions such as ARM, BAE, Revolut, Sage and delivery companies like Deliveroo & Ocado are tech equivalents. Sure there could be more but given that the UK only recently came out of 14 years of being run by pro-capitalist, pro-privatization, small-government conservatives, I don't think it's 18 months of weak Labour rule that is the issue. Personally, from having spent half my life there working in tech, I think it's more a mix of culture and market size.
I often hear "why are the big tech companies only in the US" but there are big tech companies all over the world that people haven't heard of because "we" have a US focused media. The big 7 do definitely dominate globally but I'd argue that this isn't actually a healthy situation or model that other countries should emulated. I suspect smaller, localized versions of US companies would probably have better consequences.
The truth is more likely that both the junta and local militias have ties to different scam centres. The Myanmar government never does anything for its people, it's motivated by power and money and they were profiting heavily from scam centres until China's patience broke, due to large numbers of Chinese being trafficked and imprisoned at these scam compounds. The junta needs China's support in order to survive. As the junta lost control of the border regions the local militias stepped in to either profit from scams or close them to please China, depending upon what they thought would benefit them most.
i haven’t seen any good evidence tying the Tatmadaw to these large-scale scam operations, while I have seen a fair bit of evidence tying a few of the regional militias.
Many of those regional militias are or were integrated into the Tatmadaw as Border Guard Forces to hold territory against other militias. E.g. the scam centers in Laukkai were run by the local BGF until 2023 when the Tatmadaw lost control to the MNDAA, who then shut them down, presumably as part of a deal with China. The Tatmadaw doesn't control many towns on the eastern border anymore, but they do control Muse near the border with China, where scam centers were operating unimpeded until after that offensive, when the Tatmadaw began to target them with arrests and deportations https://shwepheemyay.org/english-edition/junta-raids-muse-sc... probably to get back on China's good side.
It seems less about access and more about agreeing to the principle that publishing anything unapproved, or even asking anyone for more information than is not approved, is a national security risk and press privileges will be revoked if they do that. It's an attempt by the government to control what the press publishes through coercion, aka chilling.
A few years ago I moved to a country that didn't have Amazon. At first it was frustrating as I didn't know where to shop but now I see it as a benefit with some downsides. Before trips back home I'll look on Amazon for some stuff I can't get here and I'm flooded with Aliexpress junk and sponsored placements for Aliexpress junk. Amazon is hideous in so many ways.
Most people (including me) perceive Amazon based on their 20-year history with it; same day delivery for free, exceptional delivery and service, good prices, etc.
But that is the past; the current reality is boring or expensive prices, crappy shipping and service tending toward shitty, and better deals to be found elsewhere; either target or Walmart on the “high” end or Temu or Aliexpress on the cheap Chinese shit end.
The most important thing for me to break the bonds was to cancel prime. Every time they try to coerce me back in strengthens my resolve to check everywhere else first.
Hah, I quit Prime and they just gave it back to me. No charge. I can't cancel it. I can't figure it out, but perhaps they realized that their margin on me before I canceled was well over the cost of Prime? I'm not sure, but I still only use it a fraction of what I used to...
I am for a medium risk profile and I've already started diversifying. A lot of major "global" or "index" tracking funds are now majority comprised of holdings in Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and also Tesla. I've seen many supposedly non-tech funds where about 50-75% of their portfolio are linked to this bubble. Sometimes the holdings aren't clear if the fund invests in other funds. As an individual investor I won't be able to react fast enough to a crash, so am being proactive with moving investments so that no more than half is exposed. Will obviously keep an eye on things to reduce that if it looks wise.
One way of solving this is if the default was everything locked down, then effort needed to give the children anything, forcing parents to consider each permission.
However I also see that parents are addicted to their devices and social media, so don't see the problem.
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