Me to. I suspect its a combination of demographics and sub culture thing (I'm old, and out of the loop on a lot of pop culture and sub-variants). I have noticed a very high degree of nihilism and a sort of "morals are just a role you play in a game" kinda mentality with the younger crowd that looks and acts _very_ different to past generations though..
Plato allegedly said it better than you thoudands of years ago... and if you are "old", maybe he was talking about you? ;)
> What is happening to our young
people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?
All of this to say that generations judging each other are rarely objective and very prone to both confirmation bias and broad generalization.
But if are going to generalize, how about this, transgression is part of a healthy growth for most young people (we all test limits by crossing lines one time or an other, some more than others), and most old people (conveniently) forget that they were doing exactly the same with the tools they had at the time.
Let's take a step back and appreciate that societies around the world tend to become less violent and less criminal... when these trends might reverse we can start talking again about the decadence of young people and it's consequences.
So, in the context of the US, yes, those trends are reversing, so it is apropos to examine it (see article content). I am fully aware of the tendency of grumpy old people decrying the amoral youth, my point is that the degree of nihilsim seems qualitatively different than 70's burn-out, 80's goth, or 90's grunge, or what have you. It appears more like a kind of defeatism than rebellion (the more normal youth passtime). Who knows, maybe during the great depression the younger generation was in a similar place, don't know, not THAT old ;-) But it seems less a case of "those old peoples values aren't MY values" and more of a "there are no values" differnce than previous generatonal divides.
Surprised that generation who named themselves slackers gave birth to kids that also don’t have any vision and take pride in not caring about anything?
Also the group is so varied you can’t generalize of what the age group is about. If I think of young person I think of mrbeast or the kids who sit on the road to block the traffic cause they care immensly. I always thought the youth of today just hustle and influence and try to build it themselves and totally lack the ability to chill out. Happy to know there lurks some nihilists somewhere.
Even if it wasn't made up it, it would not be all that relevant IMO because it would not have to mean that "adults have always complained about youth but they always turn out fine", it could also mean "the quality of a society goes up and down over the centuries, in cycles, and both we and Plato/Socrates are/were on a downturn when things started going worse".
That’s an interesting step back, but stepping back further we can recognize that there is no single metrics to let us evaluate if some society is going up or down.
And also that "ceteris paribus sic stantibus" might be indispensable for growing scientific approaches, but irreconcilable gaps in world perception between generations is better taken as an anthropological constant across time than a minor insignificant detail.
I feel that stepping as far back as you do here will kill any meaningful discussion.
"There is no single metric" translates pretty much into "there is no objective meaning of life that can be proven".
In most discussions certain things are implied about shared values. E.g., fascism is bad and democracy good (plenty of people seem to disagree with this these days, but much written discussion, e.g. on HN, assume shared values anyway).
I heard a story yesterday from someone who's job involves dynamite. He had a vocational student tag along for a couple of weeks that would constantly stare at his phone and not pay any attention, causing some dangerous or at least inconvenient situations.
If you step enough back, who can say it is "bad" to get yourself blown up to pieces because you are too TikTok addicted to look around you? In everyday language we assume enough shared values to say this is "bad" though.
>"There is no single metric" translates pretty much into "there is no objective meaning of life that can be proven".
That seems a rather robust baseline, if "objective" means something like "absolute certainty on which we can practically leverage on to reach absolute understanding of everything we might have to deal with". That is, it’s one thing to admit there are some universal truths, it’s an other very different faith step to believe any human can ever be able to construct anything close to the latter.
>fascism is bad and democracy good (plenty of people seem to disagree with this these days, but much written discussion, e.g. on HN, assume shared values anyway).
I’m afraid that I observe the very same tendency in values evolution (I live in France for some context). Though contrary to what this threads focus on, I’m far more concerned with the extreme views that the oldest people in my acquaintances are moving to. No Tiktok on that side, but TV rolling news channel are not that much better. Probably my own HN addiction could be pointed at me just as well.
>In everyday language we assume enough shared values to say this is "bad" though.
Sure we agree here, but just because we assume something, it doesn’t make us correct and accurate.
It's obviously not going to be competing with prices from 60 years ago, it'll be competing with prices from today. Probably with first class tickets and private charter flights. I'm sure there's probably a suitable niche in there somewhere.
It's what a private jet charter costs now. I bet rich execs prefer that despite the longer flying time. Getting direct to your destination, not having to rub shoulders with random people, stuff like that. It's also what killed the Concorde. Not enough comfort for the price.
Thats not exactly true. The FCC911 and other government laws require the telcos to have access to location data and record calls/texts for warrants. The problem is both regulatory as well as commercial. It is unrealistic to expect the general public nor the government to go with real privacy for mobile phones. People want LE/firefighters to respond when they call 911. Most people want organized crime and other egregious crimes to be caught/prosecuted, etc. etc.
Nonsense. I kindly informed my teenage niece of the fact all her communications on her phone should be considered public, and the nature of Lawful Interception, and the tradeoffs she was opted into for the sakenof Law Enforcement's convenience.
She was not amused or empathetic to their plight in the slightest. Population of at least 2 I guess.
Make that population of 3. I'm not a fan either. But I'm also realistic. I treat the phone as what it is: malicious spyware. But I realize that most people want the convenience and the safety (of sorts) of dialing 911 and getting the right dispatch..
If law enforcement actually did their jobs, this would be more understandable. I don’t know about you or others’ experiences, but when I’ve called the police to report a crime (e.g. someone casually smashing car windows at 3p in the afternoon and stealing anything that isn’t bolted down), they never show up and usually just tell me to file a police report which of course never gets actioned. Seems pretty obvious to me that weakening encryption/opsec to “let the good guys in” is total nonsense and that there are blatant ulterior motives at play. To be clear I’m a strong proponent of good security practices and end to end encryption
Jennifer is a smart, dedicated gal who has been working on this problem since the Obama administration. I _very_ briefly worked with USDS on the DoD-VA hand-off of medical records (the very early stages of trying to fix that train wreck), which had very clear bipartisan support at the time. It was not for lack of political will, nor severity of problem, nor through incompetence that the effort struggled. Most people, from the whitehouse to the hill, very much wanted veterans to stop dying or killing themselves on the waitlist. And yet, there was no smooth path. I saw a very brief glimpse of the problem and understand that there is a whole iceberg under the water line. She has been dedicated to the problem for years. I would listen to her and give her a whole lot of benefit of the doubt about the politics of it all, regardless of your political tribal affiliation. Some times you have to set othodoxy aside.
The disconnect here is that, if I hadn't read the article, I would assume Jennifer was saying "Elon Musk may be the hero we need, the outsider who can finally reform the bureacracy." But a careful reading shows she isn't really saying that. There is some polite language in her tone and an unwillingness to antagonize unnecessarily. If you put 2 and 2 together, then, she's saying that the most likely outcome is that Elon Musk won't be able to reform the government either (but good luck to him, hope something good comes out of it, etc).
I'm not sure if this is controversial but here's my take: if your thesis can be so completely misunderstood on a cursory reading of a topic like this, it's either poor writing, or you're not writing in good faith, and are engaging in a kind of plausible deniability with regard to an unpopular opinion.
For me, the underlying problem with the piece (which I did read) is that it seems to accept and run with the basic idea that DOGE etc is about government reform rather than lack of accountability and self-serving grift. The tone in general is something like "well this is what you get for ignoring the need for government reform, a sort of monstrous crude reformer" rather than calling out the fundamental problems with conflict of interest and mismanagement afforded by further problems with lack of public accountability. It seems to me to have the same basic problems in ethical reasoning as blaming the victim arguments, although the contours are different.
I'm generally someone who is for deregulation in a lot of government, but that's not what we're seeing with DOGE. The problems are not about the orderliness of the disruption, it's about the nature of it and the ultimate actual goals of those involved, which are not in the public interest. Government reform in this particular case, in my opinion is just a fraudulent cover story for blatant grift and self-serving financial and social aggrandizement. No con artist is open about what they're doing; there's always a cover story, which is the nature of the thing. This piece at least indirectly supports that fraud by accepting its motivations and methods — if not its tact and pleasantness — at face value.
It's either poorly written to me, or disingenuous.
Insurance only pays for one chair every 8 years (IIRC, my aunt who was in a wheelchair died a few years back and so now I no longer have family conversations about these details). The ability to get custom chairs for different purposes would be nice. My aunt had an off road wheelchair for using around the yard, back when she could walk around the house (with a cane), but the doctor warned her she would be full time in a wheelchair around the house before the next time insurance would buy her one. So if you can get the expensive wheel chair for around the yard and afford to buy without insurance a second better suited for around the house that would be useful.
In the middle of the article they say that an insurance-approved wheelchair will tend to cost the patient $1000 after insurance. They're aiming for private purchase at the same price.
This pretty much embodies why I love hacker engineering. Solving hard problems by itself is fun, making peoples lives better in the process makes it really worthwhile.
However, at the sneakernet level, and at least today, I think the only region where it'd be useful would be North Korea, if this is ever used there. Interestingly enough, I'll be talking about this in the next episode of the Inside Awala podcast, in case you're interested: https://awala.alitu.com
The challenge with out-of-band RF networks in certain situations is that they can be triangualted by a hostile power. In places like Ukraine, that can trigger indiscrimante artillery or rocket fire onto civilians, for example. In China that can get people disapeared. Sometimes sneakernet is safer and more secure.
Right. I'm thinking North Carolina floods in populated areas. Even if nearby cell towers are out, there are probably enough phones around to pass short text messages out to an area with network connectivity.
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