Here’s the thing: as a parent you had a high amount of control over what your children consume. Yes, there is peer pressure, but you can just decide to make your kid uncool or weird or quirky. My child basically doesn’t see ads. She travels with her own tablet and hotspot with ad-free services and ad-free mobile games. Tiktok and YouTube shorts is almost totally banned in my house, but she may watch a few videos specifically on my devices under my supervision if she wants to see something her friends send her. I don’t really have a problem with tiktok per se, more how it zombifies kids with constant dopemine hits. Youtube is a whitelist since don’t trust that algorithm at all.

You get the picture. I won’t say that my kid is watching things wholly appropriate for her at all times, but my mission as it stands is to keep her attention span solid and teach her moderation, so some games get banned before she ever get to play them (roblox), some get banned after me seeing the impact on her cousin (fortnite) and some get banned for impact on her (mobile games are evil). The fall out can be severe, but in this respect I’m an authoritatian parent. My word is law. Your feelings don’t matter. You’ll thank me later. Or not. You have a long adulthood play videogames.

Do we though? Alcohol the most commonly used addictive drugs is allowed for adults and even children in many states as long as the adults approve and do it in in private residences.

Parents need to be better about paying attention to games. I remember telling my aunt about a game my 10 year old cousin wanted. She was horrified and said absolutely not. She bought it for him when he asked when they were in the store because she doesn’t take any time to pay attention to game They’re for kids. Even though games are clearly marked with any objectionable material. She “blindsided” by what was in the game when her son booted it up dispite the game be rated as mature, marking objectionable things and me giving her a play by play.

There are a lot of additive things that we expect parents to use their judgment on. Sugar for example. Until someone is talking to me about how we need a bad on soda and BS like that because parents can’t be expected to parent their kids about it, I don’t really care about the most optional of activities that is games. Children have extremely limited access if their parents don’t allow it. Theu buy the phones/tables/game consoles and robust parental controls have existed for a while.

Kids can be addicted to all sorts of things and it’s still on the parents. Because it’s technology we for some reason stop believing parents can do a thing. Oh however would the person who controls the internet ans the devices control their child’s access to social media (another one I see whining about) and video games. As a parent myself, I’m just under the impression that at least watching in my circle, the parents who don’t aren’t paying attention or don’t actually care that much, they just don’t like the outcome judgment.

That’s because someone can easily track your address via a phone number. This is why I have a burner VoIP number to give out until I trust people.

I’m 100% in agreement. I think that our school system fails deeply in expressing the point. What I liked about college was what even if it was tedious, etc my professors took the time to explain why I needed to do it this way first and what the dangerous of not having some of these skills were. Did I always believe them? No, but now that I’m out in the world working I definitely know they were always right and I’m glad I did it anyway even if I didn’t always believe them.

Grade school is a different beast and I spent so much time frustrated and bored and not knowing what the point was. If it wasn’t for the fact that I just really wanted to be a roboticist and there was only one school in my state I could so that at, I probably would have done the least effort thing all the time.

I did appreciate my calculus teacher who gave us word problems. It really helped me understand the point of calculus. Those words problems showed me there were scenarios where algebra was not gonna cut it. I wish more of my grade school classes explained the point of it all after it became less obvious from middle school onwards.

I say history is for analysis because honestly anything that would let you truly understand today isn’t taught. Yes you will learn about segregation, but my history classes barely touched my grandparent’s time, so it’s hard to connect that middle missing period to today. Sure. I’m the mind of person to go fill in that middle period, but many people aren’t.

What was useful to me was the analysis part. Seeing how bias was in sources. Seeing how different people had the same sources, but different conclusions. Yes, seeing how a past event caused a future event.

But, I don’t think many people in the US connect US history with why we have many things going on today. Grade school history isn’t going to give that. My college history lessons did though. I had a whole ass history class on nothing by lobbying and I really gained an appreciation for why lobby should exist, how Americans are ridiculous, and how writing laws to keep the good of something, but not the bad is really hard. But no, I cannot tell you anything about the history of lobbying to day I spent 3 months studying and debating about it.

Back to math for a bit. I think that the logic part of math needs to be brought more into focus again. I think that programming is only going to become more and more important and it’s a shame we’re not teaching any of the fundamentals to allow people to even do things by make fancy excel formulas.

Oral would suck for the transition students. It’s a completely different style and skill set of answering questions and no kid would have training or the mental framework on how to do it. It’s great if you’re the kind of person who can write a mostly perfect draft essay from start to finish no skipping around or back tracking, but if that’s not you, it’s gonna be a rough learning curve. This is before we ask questions like how does a deaf person take this exam? A mute person? Someone with verbal paraphasia?

This is fine and all and you have a point, but in the current system many times the subject isn’t about the subject it’s about the auxiliary skills you pick up along the way. My history classes in high schopl weren’t really about history. I mean if I retained those facts, fantastic, they were more about analyzing given evidence and multiple references to make a point. I’m an engineer and I use that skill all the time. Facts about the Civil War not so much.

Even in college I had classes like that. It’s why just programming the answer wasn’t always allowed although literally everyone in the university took a programming class freshmen year. That wasn’t always the point.

To always allow AI is like never taking the time to teach kids how to do arithmetic by hand. I mean, sure, we could do that, but learning arithmetic is not really about memorizing times tables and more about understanding the concept of a number and internalizing counting and so much stuff people don’t realize they use all the time the existence of a calculator or not.

I think there is some value in not allowing AI usage sometimes. Before you use a calculator you should learn how to do it by hand so you can have a sense of when you’ve keyed something in wrong. AI has entered my workplace and it’s so annoying. People who never knew how to write the things they ask AI to do can’t vet the AI output and the result is somehow worse to me than if they’d bumbled something by hand. That’s kind of what I’m afraid of in the future. I don’t think that AI is ever going to be perfect and kids have to know what output they’re looking for before they’re taking this shortcut.

It’s hard. I took out a loan against my 401K to do it when rates were rock bottom. I’m glad I did because at the time I considered just waiting until the pandemic was over, but that would have priced me put of this town if I did that.

I don’t believe this will last. AirBnBs are crashing in non-tourist towns because people don’t have money. I firmly believe the remote revolution will push people out from cities and build up small towns so that work that has to be done in a physical location can thrive too. Small towns have the opposite problem of city centers where they have too much housing.

I picked up a house in one of these areas. It was I’m the 3rd ring of a metro and thus too rural for most. I bought right when the first Starbucks got finished and now they have expensive “luxury” apartments like crazy. I’m pleading with my sister to take a house one more ring out because she has a chance to get a house before they’re too expensive. I got my house for 200K, but it’s worth over double that and it’s only been 2 years crazy.

To say I’m within an hour’s drive of a big city I rarely go’s because this city was a small town first not a suburb, so it has all you need really and they build responsibility knowing that most of the population has no taste for going more than the next small town over.

I feel like movement back to these small towns is the future. The internet will let us keep jobs there.

There’s a bug in v18 that’s going to be fixed in v18.1. The way I’ve been working around it is clicking the comm title and for some reason that makes the button real. Refreshing the page doesn’t do that. I don’t understand why this works, but this is how I’ve been getting around the subscribe button bug.

Education probably. Back in the day people didn’t have any problem understanding that different forums had different capabilities. When MMOs were in full swing, people didn’t have problems understanding what being on thr popular server during peak hours meant.

Everyone has just gotten too used to centralization with a lot of money behind it. Eventually people will adjust their expectations. Even if Meta’s fediverse attempt takes off, there are always going to be niche communities that exist outside of those spheres, so if people want that, they’ll have to move.

The point of the fediverse is having a choice. Some people are going to chose megacorp of the week’s offering and that’s okay as long a little pockets exist for when people get mad at the megacorp. Also federation leaves space for multiple dominant platforms in a way the current system doesn’t.

In short, eventually some instances are going to be bankrolled either through a robust crowdcourcing effort or through being a company. That’s okay. The purpose of the fediverse is to allow for smaller niche ideas to be able to breathe without having to adhere to one group’s ideals. “If you don’t like it, make your own” is a fair statement now

At least they gave us Rocko to let us know what adulting would be like before we got there.