361–370 of 388 posts
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I didn't make any such claim. If you'd like to respond to what was actually written, feel free. :)
> If you can't connect with your kids when they have iPhone in hand, you're not going to be able to connect with your kids even if you're a million miles from the nearest wireless cloud. It seems to me, you did make that claim.
I'm always struck by the arrogance of parents. It never changes through the ages. Why do you think you know what's best for your kids? Do you really have the insight and experience from a single lifetime's perspective to know what's best for kids? Especially striking are the programmers who grew up on technology. Literally spent all day on a computer as a kid, and now have high paying jobs, and happy lives. And then…
I'm not saying it's bad, necessarily. I'm just concerned by the lack of logic in a lot of these pro-technology responses.
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Some people like background noise, not a fan myself.
If pure background noise is the goal, a radio would waste a lot less electricity.
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> ... it can't be turned on in the morning. How are you doing this? I have been for a solution to this for the last few months but nothing really came up. TIA.
Even if our kids turned on the TV, there would be nothing to watch on it except the Chromecast homescreen. No cable, no antenna. Elder child's phone has no video apps on it except the built-in one they can play their own home videos on (maybe they could cast those to the TV?).
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When you eat with someone multiple times a day, every single day, for decades , sometimes eating is just a utilitarian task you are performing to fuel your body and to not be hungry. Why does it always have to be social? When I was a kid in the 80s, we often would just get plates of food and go back to whereever we had been doing whatever we had been doing. I am someone who grew up to hate notifications: my phone is…
Do you have kids? Dinner might be the only 30-60 minute block of the day when you have the entire family in the same place, enjoying each other's company. Almost certainly so on weekdays.
'One of my favorite things you can do is plan a “device-free dinner.”' _A_ device free dinner? Why aren't all of them? These weird little "small gestures" make me feel like people have lost control of their homes. We have a landline expressly to give out to emergency contacts. And dinner is tech free. Every night. I think the main problem is tech has made everything _else_ easier, but parenting harder, and parents ju…
"I think the main problem is tech has made everything _else_ easier, but parenting harder, and parents just aren't prepared to fight the battles / put in the work. A parent who is staring at Instagram when they're at the park shouldn't be surprised that their kids wants screens, too." As a technologist who is in their early career, I love this sentiment. Too often do I see people blaming younger generations for an ad…
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I don't know the numbers. But if my intuition isn't completely wrong, and I'm not a total outlier, most seem to spend a lot of time on Messenger (/other IM) talking. Usually talking about content that is social in nature. And quite frankly, most "real-life" interactions seem to be pretty much the same. Just sitting around with phones talking about things you saw on the [social] Internet.
> And quite frankly, most "real-life" interactions seem to be pretty much the same. Just sitting around with phones talking about things you saw on the [social] Internet This is a bit of a sad statement. What about conversation in a group, or debate in a meeting at work, or communicating with your children, or any other kind of relationship? Not everything can be showing each other videos, as YouTube can already reco…
Given how much social life basically migrated to the Internet, there aren't that many happenings without a digital trace.
I mean you can't even discuss politics without talking about Trump's twitter...[0]
Just yesterday grandma was showing me pics my aunt sent her. Pics she found on cousin's Facebook profile.
[0] We already have political scandals that involve just email dumps, think how cool things are going to get when we get dumps of facebook/slack/whatever convos!
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As a transhumanist, I see the recent advertisement campaign for device-free dinners as an implicit accusation that devices necessarily inhibit interpersonal engagement rather than enhance it. A device-free social event makes as much sense to me as having an equipment-free sporting event. Imagine playing baseball without bats, balls, or gloves. Imagine soccer without balls or goals. The family dinner with meaningful c…
>As a transhumanist, I see the recent advertisement campaign for device-free dinners as an implicit accusation that devices necessarily inhibit interpersonal engagement rather than enhance it. They do inhibit it. I think it's funny that we live in this amazing world of sights, smells, movement, filled with other animals and humans with all sorts of physical and social activities to choose from, but instead we choose…
Most of the time, in the US, a "normal" conversation consists of one or more people employing impolite tactics such as interruption, overtalking, and non sequitur to crowd me out of the conversation entirely. In short, most people have no interest in what I have to say, but somehow expect me to listen to them anyway.
While on a device, I can at least finish my paragraph without being interrupted. It doesn't matter so much if no one bothers to read it, so long as I am not prevented from saying it in the first place, which is the modal situation for a synchronous voice conversation. I eagerly anticipate a world where it is no longer possible to take one look at me and dismissively decide that I am not worthy to add to a conversation. Unattractive and unpopular people can have interesting ideas, too.
Sometimes I'm the schlemiel, but mostly I'm the schlimazel. I'm the type of person that gets insulted out in public, for no particular reason, and no one bothers to call out the bad behavior. Because I guess that person is just cooler than I am, and that's the way of the world. If you want to run with a casino metaphor, imagine a slot machine that not only never pays out, but also punches you in the face every time you push the play button. That's me whenever I step out of my bubble. That little black rectangle doesn't make the slot machine actually pay out, but it does stop me from getting punched in the face, which is nice, comparatively speaking.
Regular humans can be pretty awful. I try not to be bitter about it, but it's difficult whenever people declaim how great and fun their life is, because it just reinforces that the terrible people are often selectively rude--to me, specifically--and not uniformly horrible to everyone.
I got Internet access in 1990 when I was 12 years old. Completely unfettered, unmonitored, unlimited in any way. And I wouldn't trade it for anything. Certainly many, if not most, kids would end up obsessing over social status and gossip and similar things. That has nothing to do with technology and absolutely everything to do with how they deal with their life in general. They're encouraged to avoid taking an intell…
> That has nothing to do with technology and absolutely everything to do with how they deal with their life in general. With all due respect, accessing the internet today is nothing like what it was in 1990. It's like comparing apples to oranges. There's a huge difference between accessing a BBS with a modem and pulling an iPhone out your pocket and pulling up Facebook's newsfeed with a couple taps of your finger. Th…
I'm a retired geek but I do tractor work, I just pulled a 14 hour day and I'm having some wine so salt heavily. In my opinion, the best thing you can do with kids is create boredom. If they have access to a shop, or some lumber, they will start to build stuff. If kids are bored and they turn that into building, that's the first step towards getting into a good undergrad school. Building stuff is good. The hard part,…
> I'm ashamed to admit that I like private schools, but wow, have they been good for my kids. Nothing to be ashamed about. You want the best for your children and private schools get more money. The problem is not that private schools are better, but that public schools are so much worse. The people feeling shame should be the politicians who have worked and continue to work to dismantle the public education system (…
One obvious reason is that, relative to cost-of-living, the per-student funding is incredibly low in costal Revenue Limit[1] districts (this distinction applies to 95% of districts statewide, but only ~65% bay area).
This makes it hard to retain teachers. It is made even worse off by the fact that the wealthy school districts tend to be so small. Where I live, there is a school district with ~15 K-6 schools in it that is funded as a Revenue limit district. Less than a mile away from there are two separate districts each with only one elementary school each, and no secondary schools. Both of those schools, of course, are Basic Aid; one has per-student funding of double the larger district and the other has per-student funding of more than triple.
This doesn't explain all of it, of course. California has had to deal with more ESL students, for longer, than most other states and those students are very uneavenly distributed as well (Aforementioned school district with 15 schools has only one neighborhood school with less than 80% either hispanic or non-hispanic).
1: In california there are two ways that schools are funded. The state has a limit of around $6k per student that it will guarantee each district gets, if the property taxes cannot cover that amount. This does not include Federal funding, or state funding that is earmarked for specific purposes, so districts budgets are a bit higher than the $6k.
If school district has revenue in excess if the ~$6k limit they only get the special-purpose state funding, but can keep the excess. Thus small wealthy neighborhoods have a strong incentive to have as small a school district as possible, to increase the per-student funding there.