Knowing how kids are, they will just snicker and skirt their way around these bans anyway thinking they are some super bad ass. This is mostly symbolic.
The data we have on bans on underage drinking and smoking show that they work. Some kids will still smoke and drink, but the number is reduced, drunk driving accidents go down, and eventually fewer adults abuse alcohol and smoke cigarettes.
The myth about age limits making it forbidden and attracting more kids to do it is just that it’s a myth. Spend some time looking at the studies. They almost universally show that age limits on drinking and smoking are harm reducing.
There are a few differences. For one, it's much easier to regulate the sale of alcohol and tobacco, the level of friction is much higher and usually involves an in-person interaction with an adult. Visiting some dodgy website or downloading a VPN is much easier.
Second, the peer pressure to drink/smoke has never been as strong as the network effect of social media. Almost all 15-year-olds are on some form of social media, I don't think you can reasonably expect they will suddenly stop wanting to socialise outside school. Their entire identities are built around their online presence; that was never the case with smoking or drinking, at least not on this scale.
I'm sure it will have some effect, but kids are clever, and they have lots of time, they will find ways to bypass these fairly weak bans. Imo, the only way to do this is to provide an alternative along with the ban, like what the Russians are doing with Max as a replacement for Telegram/WhatsApp, though that's not entirely successful either.
In a way, it's nice because young people will find way to circumvent the limits and they'll learn "hacking", just like we used to do in the very different internet we grew up with.
You can’t conjure up a bottle of vodka or a pack of cigarettes out of thin air in your bedroom with a cheap Wi-Fi only Android phone, but you can use that cheap Android phone to access social media.
That’s why I said it depends on the enforcement mechanism. If they require an ID or a credit card then it’s roughly analogous to getting someone to by beer for you.
I always find it entertaining to see the contrast and tech sites between everyone bragging about circumventing internet blocks when they were a kid, then when a story about blocking parts of the internet from kids comes up it’s just assumed that it will work.
Then there’s the contrast between calls for regulating social media for kids followed by the outrage when people realize that 1) products they use are considered social media (Discord, Reddit, Hacker News) and 2) you can’t keep kids out without age checking everyone who uses the product.
Since something has to be done (seemingly) to appease parents, I think tech companies and people here should focus on something that looks good like parentally controlled smartphones or whatever with age locks on the phone end. The kids will get around it anyway, but that's true in any set up (worst case they borrow an adults ID) and at least it might get the parents to not worry as much?
Age verification is coming. It'll come to all the countries - for one reason because it will be baked into the hardware and the same hardware will be sold everywhere.
As the father of a girl, having struggled a lot to stop her from TikTok and similar when she was just 9, it would have been so much easier to enforce that if it had been forbidden by law. It's too late for us, but I'm happy that these measures are coming - it would have been good even without age checks.
Some will do that, but it will hinder the network effects which will be helpful overall. There is at least a good excuse not to be on social media for the ones that didn't really want to anyways, but felt pressured to do so.
Cigarettes don't get less addictive when they are banned. On the other hand, a kid is less inclined to use social media if most of their friends aren't on it. They're less likely to post a video on TikTok if there is a significant chance it will be removed if it goes viral. Even if the majority of kids continue to use social media, some of them will follow the rules and they can avoid social media without missing out on socialization altogether.
Teens are famously resilient to that sort of thing though. Making something illegal is just about the only thing to get a teenager to want to do something.
I'm okay with that, I remember the "cool kid" at my school who smoked cigarettes and I see today how he turned out later in life. Doesn't mean everyone will do it.
I don't have a horse in this race, but I'm curious. Could you please shed some light on why they are on their way out? I'm from Poland and they seem to keep hiring here. Afaik most of their engineering department is in Poland. At the same time, I don't understand the product as credit cards are not popular here and Affirm as a product isn't available in Poland anyway.
They loan money to people that have either bad understanding of money, or who no other lender will work with. A lot of their revenue also rely on discretionary spending on consumer goods (the kind of stuff that people stop buying first when things go badly).
They kept getting surprised by how many of their loans go unpaid on top of all that.
So they are lending to the riskiest consumers, and they kept underestimating the risk, though they might have fixed that. The past three quarters they have finally become profitable, but given their portfolio of risky consumer loans that are unsecured, any kind of economic downturn could really hurt them.
They aren’t really on their way out right now, but they are in a dangerous position if, say, some global economic event were to cause a massive economic shock…
Thank you. I think their biggest threat is rapidly rising interest rates but as you said, they are profitable currently, so I wouldn't say they will go under anytime soon.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. Affirm has some of the lowest delinquency rates of any BNPL and targets consumers that are more likely to repay their loans. In addition, the consumer spending dependency is remarkably resilient in both upturns and downturns, of course to a certain point - if we’re in a complete economic collapse affirm is not the only stock that will crater.
You seem to be speaking from what you’ve heard through social media and sheer ignorance.
What made the old web cool, is that it was the first time we can communicate with so many random people in far away places digitally and share information through cool web pages.
That novelty has mostly died now. Communicating with people in distant lands is mundane now. And there is little new things to share that we haven’t already seen or heard before.
So what’s the point of the web now? Maybe the internet will become purely a utility for exchanging data for infrastructural and business purposes, and the idea of using the internet as a source of entertainment or recreation will fade away.
It would be nice to retreat back to an analog world, where the internet still exists, but only as a layer of glue in the background that orchestrates multiple technologies that power our world, and nothing more.
And we were just getting a breath of fresh-air after being restricted to local phone calls (or paying ghastly long-distance phone bills). Finally we could communicate anywhere for one price!
Without that context, it all falls flat, I agree.
I've considered trying to make a speed-of-light-ping-limited BBS that can _only_ be connected to by actual-locals, but reality is harder. (And the moment it got popular, nefarious actors would just rent or compromise a box in-radius.)
It's a matter of focus, we cannot stop the internet adoption to the current business needs.
The reason you are posting here is an example of how people from all over the world are still can benefit from the internet to share their optinions and communicate regardless to the internet changes.
Tons of people still use the internet as a source of entertainment and recreation. Just because you're too jaded to care doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
It's really not clear. We might all become unemployable. But as coders become more powerful, they can do more, which makes them more valuable, if they or the businesses empluying them can invent work to do.
If all we can do is compete for the same fixed amount of work, though, it does look bleak.
I don’t want the US to win anything ever again. They are a net negative in this world, obsessed with short term profits. Countries like China with long term objectives are better.
China took a very rich business man and told him to stop showing his richness and start doing more for china.
China has a real plan for renewable energy and pushing through it.
China is smarter because it doesn't allow some people to vote for people like Trump and its smarter than russia because it is less motivated by one persons personal agenda.
you don't really need to explain that to someone with common sense. If someone says a communist countrie should be the top of the world, they are obviously part of the communist party or simply re*rded.
A Marxist Leninist vanguard party is objectively demonstrating better management over markets and improving citizen welfare than our decadent bourgeois financial elites. As an American and previously a China hater, it’s painful to admit but it’s clearly true
I'm a bit sad that the US now look less reliable (and, on average, more of a net negative) than China, but I can't blame anyone who has that impression right now. As long as the guy who sets the long term objectives is reasonably sane, I guess? Putin attacked Ukraine, Trump (and Bibi) attacked Iran, I'm hoping Xi is smarter and doesn't attack Taiwan, otherwise we can all say good bye to our jobs, and who "wins" AI will be the least important question on our minds...
It’s all about appearances isn’t it. America has dropped more bombs than China. When did China bomb a country last time? But appearances change and that is sad.
The only thing that changed was that America turned on its client states and started saying unhinged shit instead of appearances-speeches like spreading freedom and democracy.
Edit: replaced “has bombed more countries than China” with “dropped more bombs”
America’s goal is to rule the world through a hegemony built on fear and violence. With the current administration, it’s just that the mask has slipped.
Americans are all the same really, it doesn’t matter who voted for who: FIX your shit, fix your society. Stop oppressing the world with destructive capitalism. And yea maybe that means you have to slow down and live a little more inconveniently, but it will be for the betterment of the world.
I think China has too much to gain by looking like the word's stable alternative to America. What really gets me depressed is their current trajectory towards cultural homogeneity, even internally. There seems to be a real push to calcify the Han identity. I don't know why dictators are so drawn to homogenizing their own cultures when nature itself seems to point to diversity as strength. It leaves me still kind of hoping America is somehow able to pull its head out of its ass, but they'll have to overcome their own oligarchy and entrenched structures - Trump was a symptom.
I am puzzled by this sentence, which combines nationality, psychosis, and intelligence into one. What if the parent commenter is Vietnamese? Or Hungarian? Or Turkish? Will this fall into the "or" clause?
Beside posturing, modern China was only involved in skirmishes at the Indian border. What's delusional is blindly comparing China to Russia or the USA.
From company metrics I have found that developers who make a lot of mouse movements correlate with weaker performance reviews. Something to think about.
"What it means to be human is to work 16 hours a day for someone else taking home just enough salary to survive another day, because you too, someday could become a millionaire" --HN
A lot of what humanity does seems to be a persistent terrible take.
I hope you count "stimulating our minds for either learning or imaginative purposes" as one of those outcomes because if you only count "work produced and kpis met" as an outcome then that sounds pretty bleak.
I think at best we will find very distant evidence of advanced alien life: Inspiring, but so far away and unreachable that we’ll never meet or communicate with them in any way.
Don’t know what’s worse: wondering if there is alien life or knowing there is alien life in a distant system somewhere but having no further information that can be learned about them.
Or the implication that FTL and interstellar travel is either outright impossible or completely impractical. We are trapped alone in our otherwise unexceptional solar system forever, or until there is a catastrophe so large as to kill us off as a species.
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