People's expectation have shifted a lot too. Having a cookout with another family be it in your own back yard or at the park on one of those nice grills the park service dutifully spends our tax dollars maintaining but (sadly) I hardly see family use much these days.

It works for all ages depending on the people involved you might need to add $6 bottle of wine, or $3 beach ball or package of water guns; but all told you can still have pretty nice little party for 6-8 people for $60 between you.

A lot of it is people just don't want too, and yeah maybe because they think they'd rather stream another movie. I don't know.

Maybe...

However the previous generation certainly could have a novel in their back pocket, a magazine, a comic book, flipped the radio on, etc. It is not like Apple invented personal entertainment in 2007.

Something IS different about they way interact with smart phone and related technologies. Centuries, of anthropological study says humans are social animals. It is hard just go whoops they must have all been wrong, turns out we just did not have good enough portable video games and mobiles, and people just spent time together because they hadn't anything better to do!

Obviously the only answer is we will have to do the science somehow ultimately. Still I find a hypothesis that we just did not have something more stimulating than talking to uncle Marty about old dodge pickup grandad "forced" him to drive in high-school is the reason we did not previously tend to all retire to our own corner as readily.

It sure seems like we are getting 'something' out of these connected devices that meeting or making us feel our needs are being meet.

A CEO making that kind of money is in charge of a company with thousands or more likely tens of thousands of employees. A CEO earning $5 million only needs to replace 100 workers earning $50,000 to save the same amount of money. It only takes a company of 2,000 for those 100 employees to be the kind of 5% reduction in force headline that's been common for the past several decades.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if in some cases AI is just an excuse to dump the usual amount of corporate deadweight that accumulates over time. Management will never admit that they overhired during COVID and AI provides a convenient excuse that doesn't point the finger at anyone in any kind of legally actionable way.

Are you suggesting the aboriginal tribes would have died off by now were it not for the British dumping prisoners there?

At the end of the day you're not wrong, but you must admit the laws help. Remove the age limit for alcohol and tobacco use and you'd have more teenagers drinking and smoking. A parent can't be there at every single moment of a child's life and having guardrails in place that allow teenagers to start learning how to be adults while making it more difficult for them to do something colossally foolish is reasonable.

Look at this from the opposite direction. How much excess socializing was done in the past because people didn't have anything else or didn't own a personal time-occupying device that didn't require sharing?

All this shows is that when given the choice, people choose their own interests over shared socialization. If previous generations had phones and tablets they wouldn't have talked to their uncle about mundane shit on Thanksgiving either. I don't think people have changed all that much, we just have more options now and this is identifying our actual preferences.

I haven't made poor choices though. I have happy healthy child, and a great life thank you very much. I think I'd pretty much do it all over again save for a stock trade or 10.

That said people like you are making that harder for everyone else to achieve. Why, I don't know; you're addicted porn, you own Alphabet stock, who knows.

Nobody is forcing you to do shit, we are talking about regulating what are in fact dangerous products; like we do everything else. The simple truth is this, if you think it is reasonably to say you have to be say 18 to buy a box the .380 rounds or a bottle of Rye, then it is equally reasonable to say we should be will to make device manufactures keep the likes of youtube under the black covers.

Have you tried it?

Parenting in a world where kids face unlimited temptation to consume things that you believe are harmful to them paired with near instance access all over the damn place is pretty hard.

In ever previous era, with every previous vice society has agreed to put at least some barriers in front of children and to do so in a mostly if not perfect way. Most 8 year olds cannot simply go get a case a beer anytime they want, and if they do there is ample opportunity for parents to find out about. You know if your two young child is running with inappropriate people and you either do something or don't.

Same thing with other things like smoking, hazardous materials, etc. The book shop won't let your kid into the adults only section...
but here is the important but, you CAN still let your child take their bicycle and pocket money and go to the c-store, bookstore, etc and get some candy and comics/pokemon cards etc. They can go an interface with the world in a safe way.

Now try this online... At best you get parental controls on the platform, which may or may not reflect what YOU the parent feels is or is not fit for your child, but rather what someone at Meta decided was fine. Things like youtube-kids, ok but nothing stops them from just watching as a guest. Sure you can lock down their phone, but you have control over the library PC, their friend bobby's tablet, etc. Thanks to 'privacy and security' which we all know is really just about DRM you can't implement your own parental controls without entirely breaking the web and apps, and smart devices.

You are left with accepting mega corps get to put whatever they want in front of your kids eyes, infantalizing them entirely and/or never letting them touch anything electronic without your shoulder surfing.

The status quo is an should be treated as unacceptable. The privacy and expression concerns should be the problems to solve rather than reasons to toss our hands up. Anyone just saying 'parent harder' should should get busted in the teeth!

There is surely a better way to protect children.

I am not sure I agree. Strong typing prevents a lot of errors in large complex projects. It adds a lot of complexity to small and simple projections.

I still think Visual Basic was and IS just fine. The problem is that people tried to use it not for the simple intake forms, business calculators / quoting tools, "scripting" on top of ISV built COM enabled apps, it was designed to be and tried to do stuff like make Enterprise scale server applications with it, and usually it was people with previous experience consisting of writing those little calculator and intake form apps and little else.

Negative testing is standard software engineering practice. If you're not doing it, you're not doing software engineering, you're just a code monkey.

What's mission in this analysis is any consideration of whether Google was favoring anticompetitively favoring their own product over Klarna.

While there is an argument to be made that the EU has done cash grabs in the past, there is also an argument to be made that Google has acted anticompetitively in the past.

If they act anticompetitively it distorts the free market.

I understand the sentiment, but as a logical thought it's incomplete without an analysis of reasons. If the reasons are good, Google deserves to pay (maybe the lawyers don't deserve the penalty money, but that's a separate issue).

This idea is purely another example of 'this time it will be different' its bogus and would not play out anything like the way you think it would. Actually it would probably bring down that Empire (which is what I think you really hope for).

Go look at the history of Soviet healthcare. Sure there was a time it was envy of the world but it did not stay that way, because Socialism and Workers Unions turn everything they touch into shit.. Let me give you the really short version. You might end up with a paid for MD to stand over you but you're still going to die because he won't have access to diagnostic tools needed to treat you let a lone a sterile syringe to use.

The SSR managed to do things like mass vaccination (mind you they had to important everything from capitalist economies to do it) but the standards of care and the technical capability absolutely stagnated at 1950s levels. At best you could hope a government run system to trap us where we are at. You will never see cure for cancer, never see type-1 diabetes solved, and so on... If that is what you want for your fellow citizens - well DAMN YOU

It may not be logical, but they might get the return they were hoping for. After IPO it's someone else's problem.