It's not always black and white. Pretty much every parent I know, is against their kid using phones at school. And yet, as most kids have phones already, they end up buying one for their kids too. I will inevitably do too. Of course you can take a hard stance and not doing it - but the social isolation your kid would risk, could end up worse.
I'm getting increasingly disillusioned by the whole idea of 'freedom' on the internet. That worked well until big companies and states figured out how to take advantage of it - for profit & influence. And then invested billions with very specific objectives - how to make you addicted to it, and how to influence your thoughts.
On this specific issue: not giving kids phones. Case for tablets, watches, desktops/laptops, cameras, etc. depending on individual maturity, but their use is to be appropriately monitored, e.g. no social media in most cases.
This parental responsibility is not be to outsourced to quasi-government surveillance entities with unclear private interests and security practices.
I'm not sure you appreciate that your solution is just as absolutist as the proposed ban. You're just banning a different thing.
I've raised two girls to adulthood (now in their mid-20s). When they were at high school, it was a mandatory requirement for them to have laptops (from year 8/9 onwards). (I'm not wanting to kick off a discussion about schooling and the efficacy or not of various tech).
Highly complex problems with lots of nuanced issues are not amenable to trivially simple and seductively satisfying solutions.
This makes sense. Social media is much less harmful over wifi vs cellular data or when viewed through a tablet form factor mobile app vs phone form factor mobile app
Tablets don't fit in your pocket and go along everywhere. Watches are still pretty limited in functionality. Constant connectivity is the problem, but again up for families to figure out, not something that demands the end of anonymous social media usage. Will HN need to comply with age checks or face a ban in Australia?
Exactly. It is difficult to the point of impossibility for a youth to move a tablet to a second location. Further, watches can neither display or send tweets. These are the reasons why a phone is uniquely bad and other devices are uniquely manageable
It's the way they're used and how they alter behavior and affect those in the vicinity. Phones are antisocial. Tablets and watches and laptops are not.
Exactly, that is why the phrase “iPad kid” isn’t a thing that describes a phenomenon.
Calling handing a child a 6” screen “inadequate parenting” and calling handing a child a 9” screen “adequate parenting” is rational because 9 is 6 upside down, which everyone knows means that it’s the opposite
You can be anonymous to the public, doesn't mean you have to be anonymous to the platform holder. Bad actors need to be held to account for harmful content.
> myGovID is the Australian Government’s Digital ID app which allows you to prove who you are when accessing government online services. You can choose to connect your myGovID to your myGov account.
Because parents are not equipped to defend their children at scale from the threat actors mentioned. Again, high support of these measures from the public. You’re blaming parents for the digital equivalent of tobacco and alcohol. Victim blaming has no place here.
The public support is for an age limit of social media (which already exists), not necessarily the measures to achieve it which are yet to be determined. There's not 68% support of using measures like digital ID.
Perfectly reasonable to have a position opposing digital ID, however to this outsider, the US seems to be quite happily using other stepping-stones to head in the same direction.
Ancient Europeans had the sulphur, just no rubber trees.
Ancient Mesoamericans vulcanized rubber (e.g. to make the ōlli for Ollama) by extracting latex from the Panama rubber tree and mixing it with moonflower juice:
Those balls (which were solid rubber, very heavy, and deadly) are the only Aztec use of rubber we ever hear about. The other uses mentioned are more interesting:
> they identified a number of ancient hollow rubber figurines, a band made from rubber that secured a stone axe head to its wooden handle and numerous small rubber balls. The 16th-century documents also mentioned that Mesoamerican people made rubber-soled sandals and rubber-tipped hammers and drumsticks.
I mean, phrases like "ancient hollow rubber figurines" and "a stone axe head secured by a rubber band" are delightfully incongruous.
> Someone forgot to check a physics textbook before sewing a flag, which isn’t exactly a shocker.
Why does the author find it necessary to mock "scientific accuracy at Gay Pride parades"? Especially when the point of the article is that 7 is no more "scientifically accurate" than the gay 6?
I think it's in very poor taste to suggest that to be gay is to be scientifically inaccurate.
Yeah, I shouldn't've linked to the National Post, someone forgot to check a history textbook before publishing that article, which isn't exactly a shocker.
The original rainbow flag from Gilbert Baker had 8 symbolic colors.
It’s a proposed possibility that doesn’t defy logic. I am not saying it is reality.
Also, it carries about as much weight as their arguments that safety features aren’t helping reduce fatalities/are driving up car costs. Neither of us is presenting any evidence.
Increased deaths of people walking getting hit by cars says everything about the effectiveness of recent safety regulations. They clearly are not working and we need to take a new approach beyond more surveillance and beeping.
This isn't rocket science. We could just, you know, do what the Netherlands does.
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