My grandmother had hers taken out in the 1940's. Now she has a small pocket/hole that food gets stuck in which can cause her to gag and/or sometimes throw up.
Perhaps I'm getting jaded (or wiser) in my old age, but anytime I see "mandate", I just picture congress people shoveling truck loads of money into a company's stock. So if this is mandated, what stock should I buy? (I'm serious).
Mandated safety features wouldn't increase stock price of any of the auto manufacturers. You might be able to expose yourself to the increase in price if you can isolate the manufacturer(s) of the technology involved itself. You're still highly unlikely to capture any alpha if the various car companies diversify which chips/camera's they are using.
Everyone is built different, I think I would have done good in a similar situation. I'm already an introvert, but having kids, a wife and bills to pay sometimes just gets overwhelming. I have a friend that has been in and out of jail for the last 10 years or so. We talk a few times a year (at my expense) and I hate to admit I sometimes get jealous. Every time he gets out, he goes right back to his old self: smoking, drugging, and missing parole meetings until finally a warrant is issued. I would think I would emerge from a jail cell full of newly gained wisdom. I'd reenter the world a master plumber, HVAC tech, CPA, and maybe even psychologist. Heck might even have some wonderful startup ideas. But in the current grind of things, I feel I have no room for self improvement or learning.
> I'm already an introvert, but having kids, a wife and bills to pay sometimes just gets overwhelming.
It took me years to become self-aware enough to understand who and what I am.
I love my daughters to death, now grown up, but I wish I could have been older and wiser when we had them so I could have done a much better job raising them.
Living in a small house with 3 other people, two of them noise-making children, on top of working from home (I was self-employed for 15 years) was very difficult for all of us and nearly killed me (literally). Had I understood why noise bothered me so much, why I needed time and space to myself, and why my anger issues were likely autistic meltdowns I think we could have made things work so much better and found a way to give our daughters a much happier and less stressful childhood.
This is one of the great things about the Internet. I was able to discover what introversion is, what high-functioning autism/aspergers is (no, I've never been diagnosed but even my mother tells me that it would explain my entire childhood), that other people go through this too and how to have these types of conversations with the people closest to you.
I'm very lucky to have a wife as patient and understanding as I do. We were high-school sweethearts and she went through the learning and discovery process with me.
I can't help you with how to make the time for self improvement and learning, but do know that it's not just you.
I find it funny how middle class people all talk about how it is too expensive to have kids. Meanwhile, a single mother in poverty with 4+ kids is a regular sight depending on what side of town you are on. Yet, "I'm too poor to have kids" is not a phrase you'd ever hear from such a person.
I don't think "poverty level" is the correct term here. I believe once below the poverty level, everything is basically free (if you have kids to claim at least). Free rent, school, food, healthcare, etc. But there are many other "levels".
I know for a fact that 5 years ago in small town Texas you got food stamps and extremely reduced healthcare costs if your yearly take home pay was less than $40k and you had two children. I know because my brother-in-law's wife would give us all the free junk she'd get from the SNAP program that she didn't want. Sugary juice, snacks, etc. We'd throw it straight in the trash. She tried breast feeding but gave up in an hour because she got free baby formula and she could then dump her kids on anyone to babysit without a need to worry about feeding the infant. Once her two boys were 3 and 4 years of age, she qualified to put them on a bus at 7am (they were still in diapers) to be taken to a preschool that was restricted to low income families only. She would then spend the next 8 hours sitting at home and trolling my wife on facebook. My wife only posts pictures, to which this woman would then critique in the most Karen way possible. "Your kids are too small for that car seat", "That car seat should be rear facing", "That doesn't look safe", etc. If we called her out on anything, she'd get mad and spend hours digging through our old photo albums to put the red angry face on whatever she deemed necessary. Felt extremely invasive. Absolute crazy lady. We put up with that for nearly two years before blocking her. Which then made family meetings awkward so we quit going to those as well. Which that just turned us into the "stuck up" "snooty" rebels of the family. But oh well, we are much happier now. No clue why I just typed all this, but what ever.
> Meanwhile, a single mother in poverty with 4+ kids is a regular sight depending on what side of town you are on. Yet, "I'm too poor to have kids" is not a phrase you'd ever hear from such a person
"I'm super happy and am living a great life" is probably also a phrase you'll never hear from this person.
Because what people are really saying when they say "I'm too poor to have kids" is "I would have to sacrifice a great deal of the comfort and stability of my life to have kids" and they are choosing not to do that.
From one perspective it's a selfish choice.
From another, having kids when you can't afford them is the selfish choice.
From yet another, having kids at all is a selfish choice.
That sounds really terrible. I honestly thought that Tesla FSD was better than that. It just reminds me of my opinions I had (and still have) like 15+ years ago when I'd get into discussions on random forums about self driving cars. I mean sure, perhaps 100 years down the road when everything driving is required to be in a fully autonomous mode with interlinked wireless communication, maybe perhaps that would work.
But that is not what we have right now. Right now every driver on the road is exposed to a potential instant tragedy that is unavoidable. I mean, what is a self driving car going to do if a large semi drops a huge log or freight right in front of you? You have one second to impact. You can either attempt to hold your line and drive over the object, potentially killing/injuring the passengers. Or you can swerve left into oncoming traffic. Or you can swerve right into a busy two way frontage road.
No matter which choice is taken, I guarantee there will be a lawsuit. Perhaps one way forward would be perhaps something similar to what medical companies did in the 1980's with the creation of the "vaccine courts". Maybe we need some kind of new "autonomous driving" court which would be staffed with experts who would then decide what kind of cases have merit. That would at least better shield the parent companies and allow them to continue innovating instead of worrying about potential litigation.
It’s fine in 90% of scenarios. Those 10% are scary. Mine tried to pull do a right turn at red light but didn’t properly detect the cross traffic last week. That type of scary. If would be nice if cars talked to each other so it didn’t just have to rely on vision.
Am I reading this right? They basically are trying to measure sleep quality and whether or not they have depression based on some random questions? Sleep quality and depression are no where near my concerns. My wife (who gives piano lessons) recently had a student (13yo girl) that for over a year was sending naked photos of herself to an account on instagram that was supposed to be the secret "true fans only" account of Justin Bieber (or some other popular singer). Can't remember how her parents found out, but they took her to the police department to let them handle it (they did nothing). My wife told her she should be more careful. Her only response was "Yea.. but what if it was really Justin?".
I'm with you on that, but if 10 years from now, her emotional health is fine and she doesn't lose sleep over it, then long-term the damage to her may have been minimal?
I think the idea is that poor mental health outcomes would be a proxy for a large fraction of the wide range of issues phones could cause.
> The harm a pre-teen suffers from sending nudes to internet strangers is likely substantial trauma for the rest of their life.
Was that ever researched? Or is it something that adults just find reasonable?
From my experience people are fairly good as adults, with dealing with memories of their own youth voluntary stupidity especially if it didn't result in damage to their bodies or didn't alter their life in significant manner.
This by no way excuses the behavior of a person that misled a kid into something like that, but I think one can abhor somebody doing something that has potential horrible consequences while at the same time observing that damage they managed to inflict in that case was actually minimal.
Of course not. But I have experience of being a kid and doing potentially life threatening and borderline criminal things because of my youthful stupidity that may have ended horribly.
I was never groomed but I managed to screw up my perception of romantic relationships all by myself with little help of same aged friends as I grew up.
Do you have the experience of being a kid who didn’t do those things and seeing how you turned out.
It’s good to survive and thrive. It’s another thing to say that traumatic events in childhood shouldn’t be avoided. And perpetrators of those crimes shouldn’t be punished.
Adults soliciting nudes from minors seems pretty bad to me. The fact that most victims don’t have dire outcomes doesn’t convince me that adults soliciting nudes from minors is ok.
I completely agree with you on all accounts. None of that is ok. And traumatic events should be avoided. I just ask about how founded is the automatic assumption that sending naked pictures to someone on the internet, possibly adult, is automatically traumatic for a kid who does that.
I do fundamentally agree with the logic -- we should be looking at harm. If I had send nude picks as a kid, and nothing came of it, it's probably not an issue. However:
- With growing compromises, anything sent on the internet today is likely to be found and linked back someday.
- We have no idea what risks will happen in 20 years.
- Even today, it can lead to stalky / groomy / etc. things
Those sorts of rare events won't be captured well in metrics. Usually, it's not that 100% of people are harmed, but that 1% suffers extreme harm.
So as much as I agree with the logic, I disagree with the conclusion.
(you're the other way around: your conclusion is right, but your logic is missing, and replaced by outrage)
while I understand your point, I have to believe that anyone hosting and showing naked underage pictures is very quickly going to decide not to so that particular threat really holds little water.
There’s ways to explore sexuality besides sending nudes to strangers and being tricked into transactional relationships that exploit their sexuality.
Everyone matures at different rates, but I think it’s pretty universal that no 13 year old is mature enough to consent to nude photos sent to strangers who are likely adults. Not to mention it’s criminal.
I mean I absolutely agree with the first point. The reaction of the adults in these circumstances almost certainly is worse than the damage caused in the first place.
What this means in the grand scheme of things though I'm not sure.
What is the alternative though? Trying to shelter kids from the internet with filters which are guaranteed to be either overbearing or easily bypassed? Deny them a phone which many of their peers will have (in all likelyhood the photos will just get taken on someone else's phone)? Try to treat them as intelligent young people and explain the realities.
Treating them as intelligent young people seems like the obvious answer, although those conversations are hard, especially at the young ages that kids can access adult content nowadays.
The "best" solution in my mind, is probably filtering internet access until they hit puberty, then have the talk. What goes in the talk, idk (probably what catfishing is, promoting neck-down nudes only, sex-positivity, and maybe one or two other things).
The sex-positivity feels like the most important part though, and what I was getting at originally. So many parents (including my own) only focus on what not to do, that kids don't know what to do. So many keep doing the same things in secret and just feel guilty about it.
Is there a future where it's the norm to promote safe sex amongst teens? Or are we too much of prudes to ever touch the topic?
I know this is meant to be a bit of a swipe at the police, but I mean... what can they do? You'd have to subpoena at least 3 entities to find the creep, and then potentially have to extradite them. A guy I play video games with used to be part of the FBI's cybercrime division and he always laments how difficult it is to go after people (he works in cybersecurity now). I hope to have kids one day, and I can't imagine how difficult it is to be a parent in the age of texting, Instagram, and Tiktok.
> You'd have to subpoena at least 3 entities to find the creep, and then potentially have to extradite them.
They could at least subpoena the social media company transmitting the nudes. If it’s across state lines then get the FBI involved. Daily photos means hundreds of counts of felony child porn, soliciting minors, etc etc.
Wait, this is the FBI. You mean they can't just knock on the door of the NSA, say "hey, use your XKEYSCORE to trace this creep", then parallel-construct an evidence chain with fictional provenance so they can nail him in court so hard all his lawyers can do is recommend taking a plea bargain?
What are we paying those guys for, anyway? What are secret police even for, if not prosecuting people you can't legally gather evidence against?
Well they would if it was the daughter of someone in power. But right now they are too busy trying to convince mentally ill people to commit terrorist acts so they can stop them.
I mean if you're young enough to have done something stupid like this when given unsupervised access to the internet you know that there's nothing you can do to prevent it except try to impart some good internet hygiene that they probably won't listen to anyway because they're 13 and humans are fantastically bad at learning from other people's mistakes -- "nice cautionary tale but this is different."
Sheltering doesn't work because it just postpones the naivete; it's called experience because you have to experience it. Plus it just makes your kids hate you, not trust your advice, and worse not come to you for help.
Your job as a parent isn't to devise some system to make it impossible for your kids to do stupid things, yes even serious ones like this, your job is to try as best you can to help them understand and choose to not do stupid things and, when they do and need an adult, help them deal with the consequences.
I mean if anything what I did at that age was worse, I knew the guys I was talking to were way older and still exchanged spicy photos. Yeah yeah something something daddy issues but it's true. At that age we crave male attention and validation, especially from older men, like a dried out sponge and when we don't get it or enough from dad we find it other places and I'm so sure that's what happened here. I didn't know there was anything wrong with the photos I was sending, I was just following the attention and praise and knew they liked them.
Experience works in a learning process if, and only if, there is awareness of consequences, and the developing brain is capable of linking actions with consequences. If there is a long feedback cycle, it is doubtful an adolescent is going to put much thought into it — or care.
Free range parenting, by the way, don’t necessarily advocate letting a child wander off with zero awareness on the part of the parent. There are often environmental rail guards invisible to the child — neighbors that know the child and the parents, for example, or in the case of Japan, a culture and social order where this is pervasive.
My view is that parents curate environments, and change the possibility space in which catastrophic mistakes can be avoided. This isn’t a question of “sheltering” or “exposure”, but whether or not posting up naked under aged pictures of yourself on the internet is a catastrophic mistake.
I don't think I really disagree with you but I don't know of any options here where you can do that. Monitoring internet usage destroys trust, same with trying to make it not private with something like "no phone / laptop in your room." This is the age for discovering porn after all. You can't make a web filter for "sketchy guys on IG", and it's the same sort of thing IRL with GPS monitoring or just not letting them go places. Apples new nudity filter thing might be a not too invasive option but that's iMessage only.
Thirteen is about the age where you lose control of what they're doing all the time and there's no way to afford them the necessary independence to actually grow up that they can't do catastrophically stupid things with. Best you can do is prepare them, have a relationship with them so they tell you things and you can smell when the vibes are off, and hope they took some of the bigger lessons to heart.
Sorry, too young for my own, I'm talking about my own experience. There is nothing my parents could have done to make it physically impossible for me to make the mistakes I did outside of stripping me of my privacy and independence -- the noose I hung myself with was "had a phone" and "had access to Instagram." Well I guess that's not true either, I got my phone and door taken away plus a curfew and that didn't really do much due to the whole "having friends" thing. Parent's somehow never caught on that I took the sim card out before turning it over and just used my friend's old phone.
I feel like you're not gonna believe me but it's the truth. I stopped being a menace when my parents loosened their grip. To this day I still have no idea why they completely changed their approach, probably just apathy, but without this looming oppressive authority to fight against there was just I don't know -- no point. All the twisted satisfaction I got from pissing them off or getting away with stuff just got sucked out of the air. I mean I still did things my parents didn't approve of like going to Forest without telling them, and getting my nose pierced but like I was more responsible about it when it wasn't an act of defiance.
I’ve raised a tween who became a teen step child. I also grew up as a teen in the 90s. I was accessing porn via gopher and usenet when I was around 10. Netscape wasn’t even around back then. The dotcom boom did not really ramp up until after I graduated high school.
There are a lot of factors at play in all of this. For one, in the 80s and 90s, I didn’t have the internet as you know it. I also enjoyed a lot more freedom, as many folks who grew up in that time will remember.
These days, as parents, we can get arrested for neglect because we want the child to be able to walk home from school with their friends school. The laws were put on the books due to fear of child trafficking — little do they know what kids are doing on the internet.
My wife and I now have a under-2 child and another on the way. I can tell you that for me, allowing the child independence forms a crucial part of the parenting, but independence for its own sake is not the whole thing. The key missing piece is somehow teaching the child to _voluntarily_ contribute something greater than themselves. There is freedom, yes, but also responsibility. One chosen by the person.
Without that “contribute something greater than yourself”, independence for its own sake is meaningless. So is forcing the person to take on a responsibility.
I’m not aiming for control of the internet for my child. I’m aiming for raising someone who can discover their own inner purpose and then can grow into someone capable of contributing that. The next generation will have to take care of the world long after my cold body is food for the worms.
I remember being 13-14. Probably always will, since I have a lot of good memories of that age. So, while I cannot relate to fear's for one's daughter or relate to how a young girl feels, I can safely say that sending nudes, dick pics, etc, was in full fledge at that age. I also cannot see how doing anything like that can ruin someone for the rest of their life. I don't understand the fears that people lament about the dangers of it. Where's the danger? Consequences? Sure, there is a fairly unlikely chance that the images will end up circulating into your adulthood. But dangers?
The situation you describe is rightfully terrible, but the conclusion you seem to be pointing at is, no one should have a phone until they're 18? or similar?
I don't think that's what you actually mean to say, so when we're talking about larger the group, this specific situation won't lead you to the same conclusion.
> Sleep quality and depression are no where near my concerns.
There aren't many ways to effectively study things at scale. This is 250 participants tracked over 5 years. That alone is hard enough, so I can appreciate wanting a much larger group.
In the end, I think that you're agreeing with the study - parents involvement and parenting matter.
> Sleep quality and depression are no where near my concerns.
Why are they not though? After all harm is not in what was done to you but how it impacted you. And bad quality of sleep and depression are signs that you've been wrecked.
Perhaps I am just dumb... but I'm not following anything you are saying. If Christ had to die to be a sacrifice, how is someone turning him in make it a "plot hole"?? Who else would it occur, just by chance?
From my recollection of Catholic school, Judas was tempted into being the betrayer, but his legacy as the betrayer is due to his abandoning his faith in Jesus and refusing to confess his sins. Both Judas and Peter are supposed to have betrayed Jesus on Good Friday, but Peter repented while Judas let his guilt drive him to suicide.
The message is supposed to be the devil tempts us all, and failure is inevitable, but God/Jesus forgives all.
And btw, kiwifarms had to get their own ip block because no one would host them any more that was like 5+ years ago or something. So cloudflare never really provided any service to the site as their IPs were public knowledge and could be ddos'd (hence why it is always going down)
A post deleted as soon as a mod saw it (~30 minutes) with an account ban, by an account with virtually no posting history before this drama started.... hmmm
I've thought this for the last 10+ years or so. I even tried to not buy anything that was "made in china" for many years. I'm so amazed that people were fine with the recent higher gas prices because it would be helping the war in Ukraine. But yet no one wants to end trade with china because it would rise the costs of goods. Just 40 years ago there was literally nothing coming from china. They flood our markets with cheap crap that is made by burning coal, nobody cares that the end product breaks in mere days or weeks because you can just "buy another one". They've ruined the entire aftermarket parts industry for cars as almost every replacement part you buy at autozone is a chinese knockoff that will leave you stranded on the side of the road (my family runs an auto shop, the parts reliability issues are insane while autozone stock goes to the moon).
And then the main issue is all this cheapness is possible because workers are paid pennies a day and take meth so they can work 15 hour days doing tedious hand assembly because the person labor is cheaper than using a machine to automate. And now our media is flooded with news bites about how oppressive and racist america is while china gets away with literal slavery and everyone there believes all non-chinese are inferior.
