Overworked parents turning to phones as babysitters combined with a nihlist mindset that hard work no longer pays off, and “why bother since the planet is on fire?”. So you have underprepared kids who don’t see the point flooding schools staffed by underpaid and frazzled teachers. Just a few kids that are way below grade level and not caring drags down the entire class. Various factors have also kept kids from being failed, so they get punted to the next grade to continue dragging everyone else down with them.

If everyone was after you, you’d be paranoid too.

So faked ads selling counterfeit products. Can’t wait

We've gone to the movies a few times in the last year, and I mostly hated it. Ads go on for 15-20 minutes after the listed start time, then you get a bunch of trailers for another 10 minutes that are so spoiler heavy that they ruin any desire to see those movies. So by time the movie even comes on I am out of both snacks AND patience.

Given the shrunken audience I am guessing this is all a desperate money grab to make up for the tiny audiences, but it is resulting in a death spiral where their few remaining patrons are being turned off.

I need AI generated 3D NFT’s to watch on my 3D TV and in my VR goggles that are certainly getting a killer app any day now.

NFT Lemonade

I believe kids are also showing up to school already behind, and not by just a little. Our kid went to a Title 1 elementary school where you have a lot of parents working multiple jobs and the kids were raised with the iPhone as the babysitter. Some of the tales from incoming Kindergarten classes were horrid and trending downhill as he finished there. We are talking kids showing up that were barely verbal and just screamed a good part of the day, one step away from being feral. Many studies have shown that those early few years are absolutely some of the most formative and trying to teach a kid to read, write, or do math when the simple concept of a "book" and how it works is foreign to them is just a losing battle even if we actually funded our schools well.

I don't know what answer is, but we have a terrible situation where a lot of working class families simply cannot work enough hours to pay the bills AND actually care for their kids at the level needed for them to be successful at school. Free daycare and an actual living wage would help a great deal, but blaming laptops is just the tip of the iceberg of the problems families living on below median incomes are facing in raising their kids.

100% agree. How about we address the Visa Mastercard Duopoly that keeps swipe fees so high? We all effectively pay a 3% monopoly tax on every transaction that does not get any attention.

Indeed, many aspects of work have just gotten slowly and steadily worse. The amount of technology noise is wearying, dozens of different portals to log into a few times a year. No offense to the WFH crowd, but mixed in-person with remote meetings just exhaust me. Being in an office when half the people around you are on a conference call from their cubes is maddening if like me you don’t really want to live inside your noise canceling headphones. All the administrivia what used to be handled by an admin is a chore shoved back onto the worker bees, usually in the form of so e portal you flail around with a few times a year after work travel or for minor reimbursement.

Monitoring has so far not hit me, but constant paranoia has got to be exhausting. Hard to be creative and do deep work with HAL constantly staring over your shoulder.

NY Post is propaganda and rage bait, not proper journalism. I would not trust them as a source, full stop.

He just believes he is more equal than the rest of us.

Nobody will go to jail or face real consequences for this. Moving on.

Happy and satisfied employees is usually a red flag to a VC, CFO, or other powers that be that there is inefficiency to be mined. Happy making work means you can either demand more output or pay less, usually both.

Happy jobs these days seem to just be transitory as a result. If you don’t whip your employees, then a competitor will, putting you out of business. Failing that you become a target for acquisition by someone who sees “hidden value” and will squeeze it out by laying off as many as they can while not quite destroying everything before they sell off the demoralized and debt ridden remnants to the financial scrap yard.

Always project near crisis. Always report your team is hanging on by a thread and how you have only been successful by luck and back breaking hard work. Optimize the crisis perception to not quite get the project canceled, but to also keep anyone from stealing your resources. Basically, keep two sets of books, one for how you run your team in a calm methodical fashion, and another you use to report up the food chain about how the wheels are very close to coming off.

Administrivia

Lack of functional healthcare is killing this one, but in a less figurative way.