The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

> It's the only policy are I feel Germany has nailed better than anyone else I'm aware of

I'm not super familiar, but my impression is Germany also handled early 90s-ish hackers better than the US did. Just comparing the CCC in Germany to stuff like Operation Sundevil.

> And they also should feel ashamed for what they get and consume, as it has a CO2 impact and their future is doomed if they use too much.

I loathe how this has turned into an easy way to dismiss any product you don't like, a thought-terminating cliche, because hey, you're not going to argue that your iphone is more important than the planet, right? What a jerk!

I have seriously had probably a dozen discussions where people insisted that wireless charging was bad because the extra 2.5w of power for 2 hours a day was contributing to global warming. And of course sending the delivery truck out a couple times a year with extra cables doesn't count - not that deliveries aren't efficient, but even a single extra delivery certainly uses more than the 1 kWH a year that wireless charging "wastes", plus the cables themselves, etc.

There isn't such a thing as a product that's not meant for you personally anymore, or a product that is built on the assumption of a different use-case/lifecycle from the one you wanted, or a product that's just bad. It's actually bad because you're a monster who's burning down the rainforests personally. And meanwhile all the things I like are pure unalloyed social-positives.

That's been the whole android/iphone lifecycle discussion for years now. Every single product anyone dislikes is now instantly labeled a "waste of sand" or whatever, because if you don't personally want to buy an RX 6400 it should actually be outlawed by the EU because it's bad for society and bad for the planet. It pretty much is godwin's law for tech discussions at this point.

As the old joke goes - "guy who never goes anywhere with nothing in his apartment except xbox and a mattress on the floor has the lowest carbon footprint but y'all ain't ready for that discussion". The efficiency difference between gaming for 8 hours a day on ampere and rdna2 for the rest of your life is utterly annihilated by taking a single vacation once in your life. And if you point that out people go into this dumb "well that's bad too!" mode, like everyone should just stare at a blank wall all day just because some other guy doesn't like apple products or whatever.

Being charitable I'm sure tons of people just have an extremely bad intuitive yardstick for what actually matters, but it's also kinda just turned into a way to shut down the discussion while virtue-signaling, and again, it always turns into this "all consumption is bad, actually" as if it's possible to exist in a capitalist society without consumption.

Are there non-alcoholics over the age of 30 that actually believe this?

I don't even drink, but alcohol after college has been nothing but trouble.

I think what changed, which is pretty easy to identify is an increased invasiveness in placement and format of advertising.

Advertisements in the past had always been fairly simple to ignore. Billboards, commercial breaks, and print or even radio ads were disconnected from the content.

Today ads are in many cases often indistinguishable, even if labeled from content.

Facebook ads look like regular posts, and many ads ARE regular posts. A fitness podcast talking about their sponsors product with the same tone and passion as the content or simply being paid to influence on a product.

Everyone pretty universally used to recognize and be annoyed by commercials and pay little attention to ads.

Now, especially young people, can barely even recognize ads. Especially those done by so called influencers which are just part of the regular content flow.

Google, Amazon, And Facebook are 3 of the 6 largest companies in the US and are effectively advertising companies.

That's a huge change.

If you look at the people who did it early, they're very different in personality than the people who are now doing it. I was the kid who would have preferred to sit in the library all day reading. Not that they let me. For me, I've been plugged into the absolutely largest library mankind has ever been built, since 1994 or so... and I still find myself amazed at what can be found online even now. Some of it are recently digitized works that because they were obscure, I could never have known they existed. Other things are discoveries (even amateur ones) that people post online today that would have been forgotten or unknown in the 1980s (unlikely for the people to have even put it in one of those crappy xeroxed newsletters).

I check out Facebook once or twice a month because my wife tells me to like something on it. I didn't even create the account, she did it for me years ago.

Even now, I read. And read. And read. Everything from rigorous scientific studies on down to the weirdest shitposting. From great works of literature down to fringe science theories. But all I see other people doing, if I notice at all, is watching Tiktok videos. Are any of the rest of you out there reluctant to bother with consuming video/audio content, even if a search seems to indicate that it might be the only place the information you seek might be found? Well, then you might be one of those personalities for which being online wasn't/isn't so shitty.