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Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

arstechnica.com

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Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#591

Post by lostemptations5 »

Izkata wrote: post #115
achairapart wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suddenly I remember this movie from the 90s where people drugged themself with some kind of minidisc. “Strange Days”, maybe? Anyhow, I always found the plot weird, but maybe they actually were onto something…

Offhand the only drug-like thing I remember from that series is the nutrition bars that had 0 calories that most of the school got addicted to. Or maybe the cheerleader that got bee pheromones and started controlling the rest of the students. Aside - I just learned a month ago that there's an official followup miniseries that brought back several of the original actors, titled "Echoes", with hopefully more coming sin…

Best OT I've seen in a while : )

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#592

Post by atombender »

Fluorescence wrote: post #413
bregma wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the central point was the porn played on a loop. Maybe I was distracted and missed the real plot. Also maybe mixed up by the fact that one of the principle actors died in real life while the movie was being made.

The central point was like Lawnmower Man, the military / government were going to misuse the tech for evil purposes. The porn and the vicarious near-death-experience were just plot points.

The military stuff is a McGuffin-type subplot. The real plot is the main character's obsession with seeing Lillian's vision of the afterlife.

The author of the screenplay, Bruce Joel Rubin, is a self-described spiritual teacher, and "transitional journeys" is kind of his thing. His three most well-known films (Brainstorm, Ghost, and Jacob's Ladder) are all about characters experiencing the afterlife in some way.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#593

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

abduhl wrote: post #387
FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 20% down mortgage is a 5x levered bet. Plus you can roll capital gains into new real estate. The S&P 500 cannot offer these advantages.

With the proper mix of retirement accounts, options, and futures contracts it can. It can offer even more leverage if you want.

A retirement account is a ship in a bottle. You can't put much into it. The only way to make it huge is to take huge risks inside and have them work out. Which isn't a plan.

And -- options? The most leverage I can think of reasonably getting would be LEAPS (calls) and rolling them. But, even with LEAPS, you have limited timing flexibility, and are forced to realize more gains/losses.

There's nothing on par with a house. They're almost $1M everywhere now. You can't get that much into a retirement account when you're young.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#594

Post by aucisson_masque »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #583
aucisson_masque wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great but the way you write I can't stop comparing them to what used to be brainwashed communist kids. People aren't robots, or we would be living in a sad world What did you do to make them behave like that ? That's uncommon, at least in occidental society. Closer to what the CCP does.

As the article says, most kids aren't drinking or doing drugs these days. When I talk to my friends, that's true for their kids too. They're very different from how their parents were and still are to some degree. I don't know why my bad habits didn't rub off on them, and like I said, they criticize me for my bad habits, so I can assure you that if someone brainwashed them, it wasn't me.

Sure but there is a wide gap between teens doing less drugs but still being teen and kids behaving like tibetans monks.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#595

Post by pixl97 »

cluckindan wrote: post #420
ghaff wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from BBSs from about the mid-80s, followed by some Usenet and related later, there was very little online presence until getting well into the mid-90s or so. Certainly my social friends who weren't part of the local BBS scene had no online presence until maybe the dot-coms really took off.

Mid-90s were 30 something years ago. Perhaps the US was a little slow to develop in this front compared to Europe.

It wasn't the internet that was the problem exactly. 90s internet was still a haven for nerds because you had to choose to be there over somewhere else. You weren't carrying the net around.

2008ish was really probably the most massive change in this. About every cellphone turned into a web device at that point and social media started it's mega boom as a phone app.

Even when you were out in public everyone was on the net.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#596

Post by ghaff »

pixl97 wrote: post #595
cluckindan wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mid-90s were 30 something years ago. Perhaps the US was a little slow to develop in this front compared to Europe.

It wasn't the internet that was the problem exactly. 90s internet was still a haven for nerds because you had to choose to be there over somewhere else. You weren't carrying the net around. 2008ish was really probably the most massive change in this. About every cellphone turned into a web device at that point and social media started it's mega boom as a phone app. Even when you were out in public everyone was on the…

Maybe a couple years later. The iPhone came out in 2007 but it was probably around 2010 before it really exploded. I was doing email with an earlier smartphone before that but 2010 or so is when mobile web really exploded and everything associated with that.

And, yeah, the 90s weren't really a mobile era for most people overall. I got a laptop at work in the latter part of the decade because I sort of begged and pleaded but it was mostly unconnected. Even when I became an analyst in 1999, I had to buy my own laptop for travel as I was just given a PC. (And WiFi at conferences was still an adventure.)

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#597

Post by ghaff »

iteria wrote: post #588
ghaff wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't in instant messaging until I was an analyst in the 2000s. Never had an AOL account outside of being IM I used for some subset of mostly journalists. So, yeah, didn't really communicate with social contacts with email/IM until the 2000s for the most part.

I guess it might be an age thing. My teens were the start of proto-social media. Forums and IMs were big. Neopets and livejournal was a core memory of my youth. These were social spaces even if they were be nothing like when Facebook rose up in the late 00s and changed everything

There were various sea changes over fairly short time horizons. When I went to grad school in the mid-80s, few people had their own PCs and mine wasn't a portable much less a laptop. At my job afterwards, we still used terminals and were ahead of the curve in that we made heavy use of internal-only email.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#598

Post by temp0826 »

Spivak wrote: post #525
ANewFormation wrote: post #495

Simultaneously, pharmaceutical use rates have skyrocketed and continue growing. I'm curious if there is a causal relationship there. And I don't think this is a positive trend. Teens experimenting with weed, alcohol, and so on should not be encouraged but is, or was, just a part of life. Teens being on antidepressants, prescribed stimulants, and so on is rather quite sad.

I think you have a warped view of antidepressants, it's not a sad thing, kinda the opposite actually. Medicating with drugs and alcohol is the much sadder timeline. Pre-antidepressants my life was fantastic on paper: stable job, close friends, good family, strong relationship, perfect health. But none of it mattered, there was no happiness, no sadness, no fulfillment, no contentment, it's hard to convey the total abs…

Did you consider you might have a warped view on what is supposed to make you happy? IME society will lie to you about that because it has wholly different goals.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#599

Post by mmooss »

globular-toast wrote: post #589
mmooss wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should do what you feel, of course, and there is no right or wrong. I still think that, generally, we have evolved to have a strong sex drive and to very much desire and enjoy it.

My point is it's not just sex drive. Do people who enjoy fine cuisine get more hungry than everyone else? I very much doubt it. There are just other things to do now and sex (and food) can be a very small part of a rich and fulfilling life. But I'm not disputing that this is (or will be) probably a problem. Not because of sex specifically, but because of people having no meaning in their lives. In less than a decade…

> Do people who enjoy fine cuisine

IMHO that would be the analogy for 'great sex' rather than for 'sex'; that is, it would be for people who are motivated to have especially 'good' sexual experiences.

I think the analogy for sex generally is basic hunger - food rather than starvation. Our sex drive, generally speaking, is that fundamental.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#600

Post by bitwalker »

kortilla wrote: post #443
bitwalker wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not need to go to college, but you're going into significant debt if you do, so now one has to decide which disadvantage they want to start their career with: no degree, or crippling debt. A fast food job might be $17/hr, but the cost of gas is >2x what it was when that same job paid $8/hr, not to mention other basic costs like groceries, rent, and buckle up if you have to go to the doctor. Pay has simply n…

> A fast food job might be $17/hr, but the cost of gas is >2x what it was when that same job paid $8/hr This is probably the worst example. In 2008 gas cost as much as it does now and fast food did only pay $8/hr. https://www.creditdonkey.com/gas-price-history.html > Millennials are, if anything, brutally realistic No, your entire post is an example of the dramatic doomerism waxing on the anxieties of normal life. Co…

> In 2008 gas cost as much as it does now and fast food did only pay $8/h

Did you deliberately pick the time where the cost of gas skyrocketed before eventually coming back down to more normal levels? Gas where I lived at the time went from like $2/gal to $4/gal for months, then came back down to ~$2.75 but never fully returned to where it was. You're cherry picking your facts.

> your entire post is an example of the dramatic doomerism waxing on the anxieties of normal life. Complaining about anxiety is one of the hallmarks of a millennial.

Where was I complaining about anxiety? I do think many people are anxious, and have reason to be - but if I'm complaining about anything, it's greed. Dismissing the extensive evidence of its pervasiveness in our society today, and the negative outcomes it is producing, is the mindset of someone that doesn't care about anyone or anything that doesn't affect them personally.

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