So many areas in the US are much less walkable and bikeable than they used to be. I say that as someone who bicycle commuted for years. When I rode my bike to school as a kid I dealt with 25-35 mph traffic. The traffic was much lighter, the vehicles were much smaller, the drivers weren't perfect but they were way less distracted, and the shoulders were in better shape.
We can try to raise our kids with values that are consistent with the ones we grew up with. But trying to give them the same conditions because "it's what we did" doesn't always match up with reality.
Is it true that pickup truck drivers often threaten to run over bikes to assert dominance or is that just one of those myths about how crazy America is?
It depends on your definition of "threaten", but the short answer is yes. I live in a mountainous area that's a destination for road bikers and mountain bikers. There's lots of sources of tension between cyclists and drivers.
On a regular basis I see people racing past cyclists, rolling coal at cyclists (I can't believe that's even a term now), blaring horns, and a number of other behaviors that fall under "threatening".
US vehicles, especially pickups, have outgrown a lot of rural roads that had their origins as footpaths and horse paths. Even with well-intentioned cyclists and drivers, it's often times a setup for conflict.
I wear Lycra, ride a funny-looking carbon road bike, and average about 3,000 miles a year. In college, I rode a beater bike everywhere for transportation instead of owning a car. I’ve never experienced that kind of thing, though I’ve heard occasional stories.
Drivers don’t pay attention and seem like they’re trying to kill you, but that feels more like recklessness than malice.
Ah, beautiful times. I remember that me and my friend abused Orange's feature to send voicemail messages directly to the voicemail inbox, without calling the other person at all. Since it was billed by the second, if you spoke very fast, it became much cheaper than SMS.
Works great until your kid's the one that can't join their friends on, say, grabbing dinner after band practice, because they have no way of telling you "hey, change of plans".
If your kid can only participate in things that are planned well in advance, your kid is going to be missing out on ~80% of gatherings. Because everyone else is in the habit of making spontaneous plans, made possible by interconnectivity.
Are we talking about 8 year olds, or 15 year olds?
I think it's fine to give your 8th grader a flip phone. A third grader isn't "grabbing dinner after band practice".
For sports practice, I'd just take the sports bus home; the 30-60 minutes between the end of practice and the time the bus left was perfect for a little quiet reading or homework.
For band practice, I'd call my parents from the office phone, or plan to get a ride home from an older student who lived nearby, or just accept that I might miss out on something when mom picked me up at 6:30 and that's ok.
And: payphones were ubiquitous. Car parks, bus stops, restaurants, bars, other businesses, random street corners, airports, bus depots, train stations. Probably several at a given high school at different locations. So long as you had loose change they were a reliable option. These started to disappear in the late 1990s, though support continued generally through the late aughts, and in certain locales (e.g., NYC) through the late 2010s.
There's some interesting technological anthropology in The Paper Chase, a film set at Harvard Law School in the early 1970s (released 1973), there is a payphone on the dorm floor, and it is the only phone available. That and a number of other elements date the film in ways that other set-dressing (costumes, architecture, cars) don't convey as emphatically.
The issue isn't that it couldn't be done without technology. The problem is when everyone else has moved on to the technology based solution (mobile phones) if you don't you're just out of luck.
I have been dj’ing for ~20 years, and have a sizeable house music vinyl collection. I can’t wait for my kiddo to get into it. She’s showing interest already.
Same! ~25 years or so for me. I'm just now letting my oldest begin to manipulate the vinyl records beyond just playing them, but they've both loved slapping CDs into my CDJs and going wild with them.
>What a dumbphone doesn't solve is the social tax — opting a kid out of the addictive layer can also opt them out of the group chat. That's the actually-hard part.
It's hard to say how this'll go in the long run. I have two littler children right now, and a lot of the parents of much younger kids, at least in the area we live in, seem to be trying really hard to move in the "dumb phone/don't let them fall into these addictive layers" direction. Many of the parents we meet talk about eventually giving them dumb phones, or getting a landline at home so kids can call each other.
My hope is that with sustained effort from the community, this sort of concern falls by the wayside to a good degree. Who knows how it'll play out in the long-term given how much our culture has structured itself around this bullshit, but it's nice to see folk trying to push back in a more concerted way.
I imagine it’ll be quite socially stratified - upper-middle class parents will be giving their kids dumbphones and keeping them off social media, possibly sending them to ‘tech-free’ schools, while poorer parents won’t.
Unfortunately this seems quite plausible from today’s POV. As the old saying goes if you don’t want to be the product, you’ll have to pay for it. And I see only a silver of people being rich enough to afford and educated enough to care for paying privacy- or sanity-preserving tools and services.
We’ve dug this hole ourselves, without knowing better, over the last decade or so. Most social life / communications happens inside those platforms.
If we want our kids to thrive in the world without being hooked on this attention syphoning machines, we must get the socials out of those walled gardens.
This is a huge challenge, and no one but us will build it. It will require deliberate action in our community.
It's a massive struggle. I'm somewhat thankful that we didn't have kids until after it was apparent what the impact of this sort of ecosystem has on them, and it's refreshing to meet other parents who feel the same way. Who knows what kind of success we'll have, but it's reassuring to know that there's a push from at least some subset of parents with littles.
>Disagree and if you actively use it in your workflow well you will realize its a major competitive edge.
Depends on your line of work. I regularly try to incorporate it with mine and find myself telling it that it's wrong more often than not. I'm yet to be convinced that double-checking and correcting an LLM's work has saved me any more time than wading through garbage SEO-filled results to find what I need.
>Nobody is going to hold you back from falling behind tho and I'm not here to convince you otherwise.
The number of people in these comments who would be happy to be "paid well" to contribute to what's inarguably a huge net negative worldwide is exactly how the company got to this point.
It's astonishing how many people value a ton of money over doing something good. Everyone who talks about setting values aside for cash is the problem. Gross.
It is absolutely not what I think about "job" and "contributing to society": I would prefer to be paid less but work in an ethical company than the other people of this thread...
This is maybe why I am feeling so "disconnected" with Tech and devs today.
One of my good friend "Metamate" argument is that "if he doesn't do it, another engineer will do it. Might as well take the money".
But at least they all seem to acknowledge it is a terrible company and they know they are working on something terrible (which is beyond me why you would accept to do that).
When was the last time you applied for a job and got an interview?
I was on a salary of $550 a day with a bank. I left because how grim banks are. I have yet to find another job that pays that much outside of a banking circuit.
If meta is paying you high-end why would you give it up for something that pays you less?
>If meta is paying you high-end why would you give it up for something that pays you less?
Sure, because I don't value high-end living. A modest living is enough to keep me happy. If I can provide a happy, comfortable life for my family, we're good.
It would irk me deeply to set aside my values for the sake of a boatload of cash that I don't actually need.
I don't have the latest iPhone, my Android is years old and I'm genuinely considering a true-to-life dumb ol' flip phone for my next purchase. I hardly use the damn thing.
We don't have a tablet in the house, or the latest video game consoles. You should've seen how outdated our TV was before we upgraded a couple of years ago, but I didn't go posting about it online.
I don't subscribe to most streaming services, preferring to sail the high seas. Sure, we used them for a while, but then the experience began to become subpar. Even then, my collection is fairly small, limited largely to my favorite films and a small smattering of television shows I occasionally re-watch.
My musical hobbies all involve old gear that I've not upgraded in two decades.
I don't have social media and don't feel the need to show off to others.
My car is terribly old and has none of the modern luxuries of today's vehicles, but it still chugs along nicely.
Little Free Libraries are a delightful way for us to find new books and put books we love back into the community. Other than a few specific books related to our hobbies, that's where most of the books in our house come from. The children's books we have, most of them are hand-me-downs or gifts.
We value vacations in wilderness over hotels and fine dining - it's a lot cheaper, keeps us in touch with the natural world, and as a bonus, one doesn't have to have TSA fondle you prior to cramming yourself into a metal tube with a bunch of strangers for five to ten hours. And, no, we don't go camping with the latest-and-greatest gear.
I'm quite happy with all of that, and genuinely don't feel like I'm missing out on anything, or a connection with the people that matter in my life.
You talk about how everyone is addicted to unnecessary luxury, but that's an absolute that's simply not true. There are plenty of people out there who try to live a life as free of material attachments, luxury worship and whatnot as possible. The broader culture might be that way, but it's not everyone.
I've built my life around my core values (or "principled stances" as you put it), I wouldn't preach it if I wasn't trying my damnedest to practice it.
This is the same argument I hear about too-fast AI rollouts.
"If we don't adopt AI, then we will lose to the business that does."
It is so obvious how competition dynamics naturally ends up as a fight to the bottom, and yet so many people are happy enough clocking in to this grind, then trying to forget about it the moment they clock off.
I totally understand this from a survival standpoint - but choosing to work at Meta is likely not "the only job you could get"
> "if he doesn't do it, another engineer will do it. Might as well take the money".
You should introduce your friend to Kant. He’s taken a situational excuse and turned it into a general principle: ‘If someone else would do it anyway, it’s okay for me to do it.’
I have a dear friend who works at Meta. The conclusion that all meta workers are valuing money over "something good" is not reasonable. This fellow, who I know to be a good man of excellent character btw, for example has to support his family (which all together number 6), and be prepared to pay tuition for 4 kids starting in a decade and then one after another for the other 3! Is providing for your family and their future not "something good"?
> The number of people in these comments who would be happy to be "paid well" to contribute to what's inarguably a huge net negative worldwide is exactly how the company got to this point.
Sorry, have to call bullshit on this. As to the Meta products, who is forcing anyone to use it? They could have had armies of geeks working for them but if no one ever came, would Facebook cum Meta ever be this huge? I personally, from back when most people here would downvote you to oblivion when some of us pointed out the emergence of surveillance capitalism in "Web 2.0", recognized this company for what it is and have avoided every single product offering.
Who is forcing people to use Facebook?
And what was the role of websites like Hackernews in promoting the 'permissive' (irony alert) ethics of these 'ventures'?
There are many, many ways to provide for one's family, Meta is but one. And I say this as a father providing for mine.
Additionally, putting the blame for using Meta products on the users in spite of all of what we know about how the company has strived to make the productive terribly addictive is a very wild take.
After many years in research science I had an opportunity to work in applied sciences in the petroleum industry. This is an industry that knows that the writing is on the wall for them. Resources are finite and peak demand may well be behind us. (Almost everyone I worked with drove electric cars.) That does not stop the petroleum industry (drug dealers) from responding to economic demand (addicts). When I was younger I saw the petroleum industry as evil, but if there was no demand there would be no supply. Who is to blame? Working in this industry changed my perspective on addiction, drinking, gambling, infinite scrolling. I used to believe that the pushers were solely at fault, and some of them certainly are. But I find it hard to blame only Facebook for their practices.
When the entire world has been built around requiring you to use petroleum to go places and build certain things, and requires you to use certain software to interact with everyone, I have sympathy for users whose hands are often tied from the get-go. I can't blame them when "the system" (a reductive phrase, but it works for this response) is setup as such.
That there's demand isn't necessarily the fault of the user, in many cases it's the fault of industry. At this point, at least for petroleum, it's a feedback loop - we built infrastructure around it, people became dependent upon it because alternatives are limited, the dependence creates demand, and that demand is used to justify continued production.
The petroluem industry then just has to work hard to squash alternatives, as it very much has, thereby leaving the user with little to no choice.
> Working in this industry changed my perspective on addiction, drinking, gambling, infinite scrolling. I used to believe that the pushers were solely at fault, and some of them certainly are. But I find it hard to blame only Facebook for their practices.
So you changed your beliefs to ease some cognitive dissonance and help yourself sleep at night. Seems normal and expected to me, people do that all the time. These companies actively advertise and lobby to get their product into more peoples hands and quash alternatives.
Well, this fellow is a programmer, that's his trade and at his level he would be working for one of the fangs or whatever they are called these days and they're all creepy as far I am concerned. Which one of them is 'responsible'? Google and its pervasive tracking and selling of our data to all and sundry? Microsoft and "let's make our AI addictive"? Working for Amazon and contributing to the gutting of small businesses and bookstores? ... Really, you speak as if you have slept through the past 26 years in this field.
> Additionally, putting the blame for using Meta products on the users in spite of all of what we know about how the company has strived to make the productive terribly addictive is a very wild take.
Really? It's like me complaining that my pot and smoking habits were due to evil designs of their vendors. I take full responsibility for taking those initial puffs knowing full well that they were addictive and not good for me.
p.s. my general point is this: The entire industry was pushing developers to think nothing of 'ethical concerns' and 'just move fast and break things'.
And I find it disengenous to now pick on a single solitary entity, Meta, as if the rest of these newly arrived big techs were/are clean and ethical. Possibly some want to virtue signal while earning big $ at some other VC unicorn.
(Anyone working for "AI" companies here complaining about Meta? ...)
>And I find it disengenous to now pick on a single solitary entity, Meta, as if the rest of these newly arrived big techs were/are clean and ethical. Possibly some want to virtue signal while earning big $ at some other VC unicorn.
This particular discussion is about Meta, hence the focus in these comments. My views (and I'm sure the views of many others here) do, however, apply broadly to much of what you refer to.
That comment about me sleeping through the past 26 years? I'd say the same about all of the companies you cited, they've all had their own broad negative impacts.
Edit: Further, the marijuana comparison is a bit weak (as an aside, I'm a former pothead myself, who made the choice to start and stop). The world hasn't structured itself to the point where most people are required to smoke pot to do everything they need to do. The world has structured itself to require Meta products be used in many instances, lest you lose access to information from certain sources or the ability to communicate with others. "The system" pushes people to it, and it tries it's damndest to keep you there once you arrive.
Children are on Facebook because adults like you used their surveillance product and made them a "must have" aspect of social life.
Facebook and Google and the rest were harming society long before '20s. This was obvious to some us and when we spoke up forums like this were used to silence informed voices.
What about the less-tech-literate-than-us adult who tried their best to lock down the phone they gave their teen for "emergencies only", but the teen ended up hopping on social media anyway because of FOMO from their friends who were already there?
The kids feel the pressure from their own social circles, I can see it even with my littles and their requests for tablets and Minecraft at their young ages. And if they choose to give into that pressure in spite of their parent's best efforts, much of what they might use is designed to keep them there.
I made a comment about the petroleum industry's feedback loop making it hard for me to fully fault petroleum users for continuing to drive demand for oil in another comment in this chain. Like it or not, our society has become so structured around social media that we're already seeing something similar play out there. That feedback loop is driven by the companies at fault here.
> That feedback loop is driven by the companies at fault here.
I hear your. Regarding above however it is my understanding that VC$ determines the behavior and direction of companies in our sector. I just quickly ran a couple of queries that you can try:
"has paul graham of YC ever written about ethics that should govern startups and companies? interested in ethics in terms of social responsibility, impact of the product on the society as a whole, prioritizing social good over profits, etc"
It's just like privacy. Do you think we would not have socially responsible and optimal digital services by this point if investors and the entire propaganda system built around startups insisted on socially responsible products??
If you are trying to say that it's not just Meta but all tech giants, you have an oddly defensive way to make that point.
Just because the entire industry was doing bad things does not absolve the largest members of the industry from doing bad things. They were leading the charge!
> Is providing for your family and their future not "something good"?
No, intentionally giving kids depression and anger issues is not "something good" no matter how many bullshit platitudes someone throws out about their "family" and "excellent character".
Pixels? Everywhere? Pre-installed FB mobile apps that harvest contact info and build shadow profiles of non-FB users?
Doesn't seem like serious analysis. Raising a family is important, but so is how you fund it, right? Still ok to fund it if you're robbing banks, but it pays for college? That is your logic it seems.
Facebook is forcing people to use Facebook. If there were realistic alternative social network systems that allowed account migration with contacts and messages, Facebook would be dead in the water.
You can't seriously argue that everyone can just drop a mainstream communication tool without acknowledging the lack of replacements.
The solution is for a country to have decent baseline social services. The idea of hoarding money to ensure you don't die on the street or working a menial job at age 75 would diminish somewhat.
The comp-sci crowd has disgusted me since about when I graduated college. I do feel a certain sick sense of glee when these people who gloated they don't need worker protections and unions suddenly are left out in the cold. I hope the industry comes around, and stops acting 'better than' everyone who doesn't make 6 figures and get free catered lunch everyday.
How did people coordinate these before even email became widespread?
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