Several comments say we should ban social media for people under 18. Such a blunt, indiscrimate, careless solution may indicate the typical ages of HN members!
What do some people under 18 think of the problem and solutions? I'm not sure how many are here, but maybe some HN members could ask their kids.
I'm mid 20's and it's obvious what to do. Universal child care, housing, healthcare, etc, and parents would have more time to parent their kids instead of slaving away to make someone else enough money to buy their fifth yacht or passing their childcare off to an ipad. We have worse than gilded age inequality, 9 people own more wealth than 3.6 BILLION combined. Maybe address that first??? I'd wager we'd find 99% of problems are downstream of poverty and inequality.
I'm in my late 40's and I agree with you 100%, more now than I would have at any point previously, and I certainly don't consider myself a bleeding leftie. Might be interesting to see how the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" HN/SV crowd react to your comment.
Slowly over the course of the last 48 years. There was no pivotal moment. Probably the key thing was the realisation that even with the very good wage i'm on, I was unlikely to be able to save enough deposit money to buy a house in my city without at least one of my parents passing away. And then the realisation that there are people that work far harder than me, earn far less, and understanding that they are in an even more fucked situation.
It sounds like you are in the Bay Area. Did you ever consider moving to a lower cost location? Assuming that we are talking about the US, the "flyover states" (midwest) have some insanely good value. Land and houses can be very cheap.
Watch the person operating the jackhammer go to a golf course, or watch someone operating a jackhammer and then visit a golf course myself? Your sentence is ambiguous.
Are you trying to say that you think that some manual labor roles are overpaid? Why can't a jackhammer operator play golf if they want to?
In my country an entry level jackhammer operator makes about $60K and an experienced one about $100K. Doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
I mean I get your point ... rich and lazy executives often play golf, but my buddy plays golf and he's a manager for a crew at a painting company. Hardly a millionaire. Perhaps you're thinking of private golf courses which are sometimes very expensive. Public ones generally aren't.
If you look at history, the biggest changes that allow people more free time to spend with their children or otherwise, are technological ones.
Look at the mechanical loom (industrialisation), pesticides (agricultural yield increase), penicillin (life expectancy increase), painkillers (life quality increase), clean water (wide-spread infrastructure), cheap microwaves (overseas slave labour), reliable vehicles for all (fossil fuel infrastructure).
We need to continue this trend to fix the problems. The billionaires aren’t blocking us. Yes, it’s unfair that they hold so much wealth and power. The world has been that way for a long time.
When electric lightbulbs came to the masses, it made some rich people even richer, but that’s not the important part. The important part is that the masses’ lives were better.
Next steps for us:
- Find manufacturing processes that don’t require overseas slave labour
- Agricultural processes that don’t need as much pesticide
- Better, cheaper medicine (recent developments in quantum computing suggest we may be able to crack protein folding within 10 years, which will lead to an explosion in medical research)
- Automated construction (see Hadrian X)
- A replacement for fossil fuels (if we crack fusion, we can use that for the grid and we can create our own combustion juice for vehicles using the enormous amount of energy available)
- Protocells that allow extremely precise manufacturing at scale (protocells are programmed cells or completely custom cells that we can equip & program for certain tasks, like “remove all the iron ore from the ground here” — they will change everything)
These are the things that will bring the rest of the world out of poverty. And, depending on how we adapt to the irrelevancy of capitalism as these technologies develop, it may solve the inequality/unfairness problem too.
> If you look at history, the biggest changes that allow people more free time to spend with their children or otherwise, are technological ones.
There's also the 40-hour, 5-day workweek; the end of child labor, parental leave - those developments, and more like them, led to more time with children than the mechanical loom.
In fact, as technology has improved, it's possible that the proportion of children with a parent devoted full-time to them has decreased (because now families need two incomes).
People had more free time before the Industrial Revolution[1].
Increases in productivity doesn't translate into more leisure time, it translates into just getting more work done in the same time frame and being paid as if you're doing the same amount of work.
>the biggest changes that allow people more free time to spend with their children or otherwise, are technological ones.
The important bit to note here is the allocation of that gain in efficiency. I agree tech is the driver of the positive sum games we call the economy, but it's important to note that on top of technology we need a political apparatus that allocates the efficiency gain. Ie a 30% increase in productivity should yield not a 30% increase in profits but maybe a 5% increase and a 25% reduction of time spent doing labor or 25% increase in wages. Obviously the numbers are variable, but I thought it important to note this too.
>The billionaires aren’t blocking us.
People hoarding more wealth than BILLIONS combined aren't blocking us?
You can seriously, earnestly think, in your heart of hearts, that hoarding that much wealth for yourself doesn't deprive some other more worthy endeavor of resources??
>When electric lightbulbs came to the masses, it made some rich people even richer, but that’s not the important part.
Not THE important part, I can agree with you. But AN important part, still. It might not be sensible to accost the inventor of the light bulb for the effect of his invention, but it should always be carefully noted the above mentioned calculation of where the efficiency gain is allocated. Did allowance of working at night, doubling the possible working hours allow any reduction of labor or increase in wages? Or did it simply increase profit?
I agree the profit itself is not the problem, the billionaires themselves aren't technically the problem, merely a symptom of an ill designed allocation of the fruits of technology. But to act like 9 people hoarding more than billions of people combined isn't detrimental to any goal other than the enrichment of those 9? I name you silly, sir.
>Taxing billionaires won’t accelerate any of this.
I mean, if we JUST tax them and then burn the tax money we get from them, sure... But if we spend the taxes on the above mentioned goals... You somehow think they wouldn't be achieved quicker???
While I agree with the general sentiment, poverty and inequality are wildly different problems (e.g. modern capitalism tends to increase inequality but also decrease poverty).
Wildly different, sure, but deeply, deeply connected which is why I include them together. There is no reason we can't decrease poverty AND inequality. In fact decreasing inequality would in turn reduce poverty if done correctly.
You probably should. Many of my school friends started experimenting with tobacco and marijuana in elementary school, which were the prevalent vices of my time.
Kids are autonomous humans with free will, and despite what many adults think, they have opinions worth listening to.
Really? It bankrupts its users? People can't hold a job because of it? People will rob stores to get more money to use more social media? It causes families to painfully detach themselves from addicts?
Those behaviors aren't limited to substance addiction--perhaps most well known is gambling addiction.
It's no secret that technology companies (especially social media companies) spend billions coming up with ways to keep users on their apps/services. Engagement is a palatable way to measure addiction.
The problem is that we are talking about kids who could be 9 or 10 and not just 17 or just under 18. Yes there may be some 12 year olds on HN but I would doubt that you will have a 10 year old here with their opinion. There is a huge difference b/w 10 year old and a 17 year old even though I personally want to Ban Social Media until 21.
I'm 20 and all for it, and have been all for it since I thought about it at 17. I think that social media and the internet are ways of not having to develop social or emotional skills and going through school without social media would be really healthy for future generations.
What do some people under 18 think of the problem and solutions? I'm not sure how many are here, but maybe some HN members could ask their kids.