What? No? That has not much to do with encryption at all that's all politics and social issues.

Wikileaks is one of many examples that encryption simply impossible to ban, that cat has been out of the bag for awhile now.

You're not helping your case by quoting a quack like him. He's a pop sci author that specializes in junk science. Exactly the kind of guy that I would expect to do a lazy study pointing to cell phones bad.

Like I mentioned on other comments I'm still not at all convinced and correlation is not causation.

I keep coming back to the fact that these same studies have been done with every new form of media and they always find a correlation.

The problem isn't the New Media the problem is we don't support parents and kids enough so the parents plop their kids down with Penny dreadfuls or radio or TV or Internet and now cell phones and screens.

In another hundred years these same dumb studies will be done for cyberdecks.

Neither, he ran a website and and in his zeal to disrupt America willingly became a political prop for the ruling US regime. Idealistic rebel turned useful idiot, common story.

So I'm aware that the abstract says that they controlled for socioeconomic factors I'm just dubious of that.

It's far more likely that kids spending a bunch of time on screens is a symptom of other problems.

That said on the off chance that the phones are a problem they are a miniscule problem compared to everything else kids are up against in 2025.

Taking your kid's phone away isn't going to magically make them get better grades or take up sports.

Even so I think it's far more likely that you're seeing the same basic problem across different economic groups. And because of that you could replace the phone with basically any form of media. Which is why you get the same little panic every time a new form of media comes out and the same group of social scientists running the same experiments blaming the New Media for causing the problems.

I'm not a huge fan of folk music but having listened to a little bit of it just because I'm a lefty and Lefty's tend to blare the stuff I can tell you that the same problems that we had a hundred years ago or more we're getting sung about in folk music back then and are getting sung about it and folk music today. We haven't solved any of the problems. And it's the same damn problems. The only thing new is obesity and that's just because we have reasonably reliable access to food for most people... Most people. There are still several million kids having sleep for dinner every night...

What generation has overwhelmingly been at the forefront of both of those for like, 4 decades now?

I'm not understanding why you thought that was a reasonable reply to my comment.

Until they are infallible, yes.

Life is chock-full of "should haves", alas. Instead of each new project being better than the ones before, many people and organizations seem to think they know everything when they should have learned from others. I'm quite sure someone else had figured this out already.

It's entirely possible even likely that what we are seeing here is just that latchkey kids are more likely to have smartphones at an early age.

The problem isn't the phone itself it's overworked parents with low pay and no social support.

The abstract at least says that the account for socioeconomic factors but I'm not able to read the actual study past the abstract.

Also I guarantee that these exact same studies can be found for television, the internet and if you go back far enough you can find the 18th century equivalent of these studies for Penny dreadfuls.

Every time a new form of mass media or a new device for mass media shows up you can bet somebody is going to find a correlation between everything bad and if. Meanwhile we never actually do anything about things like child hunger or forcing kids to get up early to go to school when we have plenty of studies indicating the teenagers need more sleep and it needs to be later in the morning...

You know whether people should or not they do. I've more than once come across somebody using Excel like a database application. It's exactly as bad of an idea as it sounds but people do it and for the most part despite time spent debugging problems it does work.

I guess what I am saying is the answer to, there isn't a tool that can do what the customer wants to do, should not be, tell the customer to knock it the fuck off.

Antitrust is mostly how Microsoft stays in power but they do one thing. It's called the 80/20 rule and the idea is that 80% of your features are used by 20% of your customers but it's a different feature for every single customer. So you can't just take features out because you will rapidly start losing customers even though on paper very few customers are using those features. Basically when you have a sufficiently complex application it has a ton of features only used by a small group of people but you keep adding those groups up and suddenly you've got market dominance.

Before the industry consolidated that was part of what put Microsoft on top. Of course nowadays they just don't let anyone compete

Headline is they refuse to give up Instagram reality is that they refused to gag order.

I just got a article in my feed that the lead actress for the Asoka series at Disney refused to do another season because she wasn't paid enough.

The actual facts are that season 2 filming is already done and one of the other less important characters didn't come back because they didn't offer her enough money to afford to live in London where the shooting was.

I'm so sick of clickbait. Lately it's being written by shitty AI so it's gotten even worse.

I agree with a lot what you said but this is a false choice. Those jobs, those companies and that capital doesn't dispensary when Elon Musk is'nt a billionaire and only is still a very wealthy man. Even using him as an example. The $44B for Twitter, did he take the majority or even a plurality of his own wealth to do it? No, he went out and found investors and took out loans against his wealth (which are tax loopholes) who then funded that. Same with all his ventures and really any billionaire, it's one of those -isms of wealth, you always use someone else's money.

If instead you had 1000 millionaires instead of a single billionaire, they all invest their money, the capital is available. What you are describing is just "Great man theory" and some variant of Randian objectivism, not any type of economic reality. Billionaires themselves are not the problem itself but they are a symptom of an economic rot that requires correction.

Part of what boomers were born into was the post war "golden age of capitalism" in the US when marginal tax rates had very high rates at the top end, pensions were the standard for large employers, home ownership and construction was expanded and this was all during a time of intense government spending still on the sciences, research, etc.

This is what the boomers undid starting in the 1980's, instead of taking the continuing exploding productivity and capital technology created and investing in infrastructure, social services, education, human capital and research they enacted tax breaks, de-regulation and as you mentioned, protectionary measures for their own wealth.

So they're being told they can stay if they don't complain about what the church allegedly did.

It's the same thing for Indigenous peoples wherever the Church went.

Looks like Turo is available in the UK as well, I dunno if it's as popular as in the US but they kinda stole their whole bit!

Yes, because $10B state-of-the-art semiconductor fabs grow on trees. Just go pick a new batch of fabs and make millions of RAM modules, right?

Still wrong.

There is a base value to any college degree that employers are going to look for: that you demonstrated the ability to show up where you were supposed to show up, and do the work you were supposed to do, and the work was accomplished to enough of a satisfactory level that you earned passing grades. And you didn't quit before getting it done, even with all of the other distractions that surround college life.

It shows that you are a mature enough adult to show up to work on time and solve problems with quality. Even with an English Lit degree.