Can we really not think of other reasons today's younger generation(s) is strugglng than the presence of smartphones and social media?

They've grown up with school shootings and safety drills, fear that they will never own homes or find jobs, accelerating climate-related disasters, diminishing physical freedom, and interrupted family life (as parents have to take on more jobs to make ends meet).

For many of them, the smartphone/Internet/social media is their access to support, friends, etc.

Does anyone really think that if you took away their phones parent would erturn to letting them hang out in the local park or mall (if either still exists)?

wg

I wrote two articles at the time - one for the Daily Telegraph in the UK and one for Scientific American - about the people who were sure that Y2K would bring the collapse of civilization (then known on Usenet as TEOTWAWKI, for The End of the World As We Know It). In the SciAm piece, I said I thought society would survive because most people wanted it to and would cooperate to make sure it did. This got the more survivalist members of comp.software.year-2000 emailing the editor to demand that he fire "this dizzy broad" (a description I never expected to encounter in my lifetime). Editor ignored them, fortunately. Ten years later, wandering back into the newsgroup to find out if they had dared come out of their bunkers yet, several members apologized, which I thought was handsome of them.

My model was the Irish banking strike of the 1970s, which went on for months. Since no one could get paid, people wrote IOUs to each other and traded them back and forth. Eventually, when the strike ended, everyone settled up. Ireland is a small country, which makes something like that easier, but it shows that cooperation can still win.

wg

Yes, and it's a shame because what I've read of Pando was good and useful reporting.

wg

I last saw him 10-11 years ago at one of those California future/transhumanist type events. I only ever met him a couple of times, but the Scientology connection means you really can't judge whether there's truth behind the claims. Look up Leah Remini's show to understand why.

wg

Hubert Horan explains it all for you:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/p...

Most recent update: https://www.nakedcapitalism.co...

wg

Yeah, it was a great site, but even at half off there's nothing there I'd want any more, and it used to be a mainstay for Christmas gifts.

wg

Thank you. I was wondering how I was going to get any work done today. Shows how limited Firefox is on its own without the extensions.

wg

In the last few years of Roger Ebert's life, CereProc, a Scottish company, assembled a synthetic version of Ebert's voice from his DVD commentaries. Although Ebert did all those TV shows, they couldn't use the voice tracks from those because there was always too much (unmatchable) background noise. CereProc said at the time they were hoping to be able to provide an inexpensive web service that could create a good-enough synthesizer for others who had lost their voices.

From Scientific American, in 2011: https://www.scientificamerican...

wg

LSE prof Sonia Livingstone, who runs the Parenting.Digital blog as part of her research in this area, sprayed some sense on this story: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenti...

wg

What I can't understanding is how anything you kept inside your seat would be accessible in-flight. There isn't enough room *now* to stand up, extract a bag, pull something out of it...which you'd have to hold while trying to stuff the bag back into the bin.

wg

Yep. Speed of loading and no clutter. I switched the instant I saw Google's home page, because while I was doing fine with Altavista's search results I hated all the crap that took forever to load.

Since 2010, of course: DuckDuckGo. For similar reasons, really.

wg

You have to think about searches a little differently than on Google, but I've been using it for about five years, and it's gotten noticeably better over that time (or I have adapted).

Like Startpage, it doesn't track you.

wg

I guess no one's read Jon Ronson's latest book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed. There's a chapter on the Zimbardo prison experiment in which Ronson interviews a couple of the key figures and casts a lot of doubt that the experiment unfolded the way it's been told for these many years. IF you believe the people he interviewed, which includes the main "prison guard" bully, there was a lot of play-acting going on. Ronson cites academic psychologist and textbook author Philip Gray's argument that the experiment was flawed because Zimbardo awarded himself the role of superintendent, especially since he gave the guards a pep talk about their total power in the situation (as recounted in Zimbardo's own book, The Lucifer Effect).

That does make me wonder about the quality of Zimbardo's research on this occasion.

wg

What's expensive is not healthy older people; it's *un*healthy older people. The focus on smoking and death ignores the more important point that smokers are much more likely to need many years of expensive care in their later years before they die and are likely to have much lower quality of life.

wg