Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 624 posts

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#611

Post by shadowerm »

qwertox wrote: post #431
tirant wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fear the (negative) impact of our current technological drugs goes beyond the impact of traditional drugs. I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller. Main impact on kids is lack of socialization, lack of emotional regulation and a complete impact on their capabilities to keep their attention. Those used to b…

> I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller. Now imagine that they would not be engaging with silly YouTube videos, but with an AI trying to get them to interact with them in order to learn to speak, to learn about the world. Things which parents can't dedicate enough time to. Then also give the kids ideas for…

The problem is I thought kids would have been doing this 15 years ago already by using the internet to learn more and more.

This is not our culture. We don't have a culture that is really able to take advantage of the internet for this. Our culture plus the internet actually creates a type of learning disability for a huge % of the population.

A small % of people will use AI to be smarter than they would have otherwise. A much larger % of people will use AI to learn less than what they would have.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#612

Post by ANewFormation »

temp0826 wrote: post #598
Spivak wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Happiness, to me, also seems like such a false goal. Happiness is, and should be, a fleeting sensation.

I think the term we generally really mean when we say happiness is contentedness. Because that is more a state of being than some temporary sensation.

And far from just a semantic difference, I think this opens up an entirely different life perspective because it's much more about controlling your response to things, particularly those outside your control than it is about pursuing some carrot of happiness that will always slip away as quickly as it comes.

The Stoics referred to this state of mind as apatheia [1]. It's not apathy, which has the connotation of indifference, but rather the freedom from one's emotions so you can guide your life without being pulled in a million different, and oft irrational, ways by emotion.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatheia

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#613

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

abduhl wrote: post #605
FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hou…

You can back door around $70k per year into a Roth currently I believe. I don’t know where you’re from, but few people would say that isn’t much. And I’m not sure why you’re talking about LEAPS. Options are naturally leveraged: you have synthetic positions on [complicated Greeks math]*100 shares with every option. Theta is only one of the Greeks. Same with futures contracts re: natural leverage. With respect to “bets…

> You can back door around $70k per year into a Roth currently I believe.

You can only backdoor $7k/year into a Roth IRA. That isn't much.

If you have access to a qualifying 401k plan, you can mega-backdoor $46,000 into a Roth 401k. Many 401k plans do not support this, however. In practice, a plan is unlikely to support it if the company doesn't give a 401k match (it's basically impossible for a plan to meet the "non-discrimination" requirement without matching).

> And I’m not sure why you’re talking about LEAPS. [...] Theta is only one of the Greeks.

Because the effect of theta is least for LEAPS. They're the "most share-like" options.

> Options are naturally leveraged: you have synthetic positions on [complicated Greeks math]*100 shares with every option.

I agree that the "natural leverage" is the reason for the appeal, but the 100x multiplier is priced in.

In practice, IIRC (it's been a while) I've found that, with long-dated calls near the money (ideally a little bit in the money, for lower risk), you end up with about 2x leverage. The "100% loss" downside sort of gets "balanced" (debatable) by "2x upside". In the past I've felt really smart doing this until it's blown up in my face. Given the multiplicative nature of gains/losses, I'm not sure it's a good deal at all.

> Same with futures contracts re: natural leverage.

Curious about this. I suspect that it's a sucker's game, but wouldn't mind learning more.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#614

Post by BeFlatXIII »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #516
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My observation of teens online, as someone who was once an online teenager, is that they are noticeably less mature than my cohort. Perhaps because it's no longer just the nerds who are online all day—if everyone in my high school was chronically online, there's a high possibility that Bush-era teens would've been just as openly immature and stupid as today's youth. Whatever happened to pretending to be an apathetic…

Lol, when I was 12-14 that is exactly what I tried to pull off... A early 20 something so people wouldn't kick me from the server/team lol

It used to be that the stricter the adults only verification for an IRC channel, the more certain the head admin was 16.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#615

Post by abduhl »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #613
abduhl wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can back door around $70k per year into a Roth currently I believe. I don’t know where you’re from, but few people would say that isn’t much. And I’m not sure why you’re talking about LEAPS. Options are naturally leveraged: you have synthetic positions on [complicated Greeks math]*100 shares with every option. Theta is only one of the Greeks. Same with futures contracts re: natural leverage. With respect to “bets…

> You can back door around $70k per year into a Roth currently I believe. You can only backdoor $7k/year into a Roth IRA. That isn't much. If you have access to a qualifying 401k plan, you can mega-backdoor $46,000 into a Roth 401k. Many 401k plans do not support this, however. In practice, a plan is unlikely to support it if the company doesn't give a 401k match (it's basically impossible for a plan to meet the "non…

>> [Roth IRA stuff]

Debating the availability of a Roth backdoor is something that's orthogonal to the discussion. I agree that your $46k number is the correct number, so adjust the numbers in my prior post as appropriate (e.g., it'll take 5 years to get to $200k in a retirement account). I still assert my primary conclusion: buying property is generally not the best option on a purely financial basis.

>> [Options stuff]

I disagree with your view that LEAPS are the "most share-like" options. Short dated deep in the money calls are essentially a synthetic stock position, and they are the most share-like in that they will move nearly 1:1 with stock price whereas LEAPS do not move 1:1 with stock price fluctuations because of time attenuation. If leverage is what you want then there are probably better options than LEAPS (rolling 3 month to 6 month positions maybe) because you pay out the nose in terms of time value on LEAPS.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#616

Post by nozzlegear »

throwaway_ahfmn wrote: post #604
nozzlegear wrote: post #110

It's remarkable to me that many of the top-level comments on this story are all positing that something (i.e. the damn phones ) must have replaced drug use and we're just not accounting for it. And if it isn't the damn phones , then it must be that the kids are just too scared of modern-day drugs and the dangers lurking within. I'm not saying it's not phone addiction, or fentanyl in the weed, but is it really that ha…

Drugs of one kind or another have never been unpopular. So yes, it is hard to believe.

I guess I'm primed to believe it, because I'm a teetotaler who's never done drugs and never drank a bit of alcohol in my entire life. I'd like to believe that the younger generations are more like me. Of course, I'm just one data point, and a millennial so not even the article's subject demographic.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#617

Post by nozzlegear »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #309
sandy_coyote wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the reference here? I thought Pink Floyd at first.

Quoth the AI: > According to Freud, dreaming about trains often symbolizes the journey of life, with the train representing the progression of time and the destination representing death, and the act of riding a train can be linked to unconscious sexual desires due to the sensation of movement and confinement, particularly when experiencing anxiety about missing a train or being trapped on one.

Yes, Freud was who I was referencing; the references to the mother, pacifier, and constantly looking for approval from women made me think of Freud's fringe theories about the Oedipus complex. He was also big into the symbolism of dreams, and thought that one explanation for trains in your dreams were the phallic representations of your repressed sexual desires.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#618

Post by cbdhsjshs »

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…

> Pre-antidepressants my life was fantastic on paper: stable job, close friends, good family, strong relationship, perfect health

I had the same. Post-SSRIs I have none of those things, and am surprised that I'm still alive.

When I asked my shrink 'why zoloft?' the only reason was 'got to start somewhere'. I wish we had evidence-based psychiatry, but instead we have 'throw shit at the wall' psychiatry.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#619

Post by cbdhsjshs »

jsheard wrote: post #8
Izkata wrote: post #3

> But, according to data released Tuesday, the number of eighth, 10th, and 12th graders who collectively abstained from the use of alcohol, marijuana, or nicotine hit a new high this year. Use of illicit drugs also fell on the whole and use of non-heroin narcotics (Vicodin, OxyContin, Percocet) hit an all-time low. From an unexpected conversation with some younger people not long ago (though not this young), they may…

Notably absent from those stats is nitrous oxide, which has had a resurgence in popularity lately. https://archive.is/wRa3Q

wowowowow

Ketamine too. Mine comes in the mail from doctor that's conducting a 'safery trial'. They've never asked for feedback from me, and have never pushed back on me requesting a higher dosage.

Re: Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

#620

Post by kortilla »

bitwalker wrote: post #600
kortilla wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Inflation adjusted gas prices have been on a slight downward trend for a long long time: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/gasoline-prices-adjust...

With the increase in fuel economy, the cost of gas as an actual pain point is close to the lowest level it has ever been for the vast majority of the US. The only real exception to this is places like California where additional costs are added for tax revenue or additional emissions controls.

> I do think many people are anxious, and have reason to be

Previous generations had just as many reasons to be anxious, they just didn’t sit around crying about it non-stop in victimhood perpetuity.

Post reply on HN