5 ms·

Did you actually read the article? The three things you cite were literally never mentioned. We've been heavily car dependent since the 50s. Most of the places

• mintplant 3y ago
  foxyv's comment is much closer to how my friends feel about the world than the convenient list of conservative talking points presented in the article.
  • dingnuts 3y ago
    Jon Haidt is a conservative now?? good lord, if that is what you think you must be so far left that anybody to the right of Stalin is a Republican. Jon Haidt is about as even-tempered and desiring of reconciliation as anybody out there. We could all stand to be a little more like him. Please, talk to the people in your lives about politics, or the polarization will only continue to intensify. Common ground is found through dialog, not through cutting everyone in your life out because they fall to one side or another of an arbitrary ideological goalpost that you've decided is the critical opinion everyone needs to agree with in order to be blessed with your presence. I say this because Jon Haidt started this website, among other things: https://civilpolitics.org https://civilpolitics.org If Haidt and those like him are getting lumped in with the MAGA election-denying types, we're all screwed.
    • vore 3y ago
      Are these not literally a laundry list of conservative talking points? And, by the way, you can be conservative without being MAGA. Love — “Monogamy is so outdated.” Community — “I have enough friends online.” Country — “I’m embarrassed to be an American.” Work — “I’m quiet-quitting.” Family — “I’m not bringing kids into this melting world.” Faith — “My parents are such naive Bible thumpers. By the way, what’s your star sign?”
      • mcpackieh 3y ago
        Quiet-quitting is a conservative value? I thought the conservative value was that hard work and having dedication to your employer is the way to get ahead in life. That's what conservatives have always told me. And you certainly don't have to be a conservative to become dissatisfied with internet dating. It genuinely sucks for a lot of people who just want to find somebody who understands them. Getting your dick sucked is great but wanting something more than that doesn't intrinsically make you a conservative. I think you're just seeing what you want to see. These are the kind of things anybody with liberal or progressive political opinions can find themselves feeling.
        • vore 3y ago
          Did you read this backwards? These are examples given in the article of society’s alleged ills. Having the entire grab bag of them listed like this is undeniably conservative.
          • mcpackieh 3y ago
            It's a list of things young people are dissatisfied with. They're dissatisfied with work and don't believe they can get ahead by working harder. They're dissatisfy with app dating and don't believe they can find lasting happiness with it. These are not conservative concerns; they're anybody concerns. > Having [an] entire grab bag of [concerns] listed like this is undeniably conservative. Ridiculous. Anybody who has multiple concerns in their life will have a list of concerns. Articulating this isn't a conservative trait, it's just basic self reflection. If you don't have a list of concerns with your own life then you're obviously doing very well. But just because you can't relate to people who's lives aren't as great as yours doesn't mean those people are conservative. (You see I swapped out "the" with "an". Because that list is not The entire grab bag of characteristically conservative concerns. There's no mention of immigration, guns, abortion, voter IDs, crime rates, fear of carbon taxes and corporate regulations, drag-queen story hours, critical theory and progressive school teaches or really anything like any of that. It's clearly not "The" list of conservative concerns. You're characterizing it that way because that's what you want to see for some reason. Maybe you tripped over the mention of religion, but if you put stereotypes aside and look at public opinion polling, you will find that religion in America is largely bipartisan. Even the denominations that lean strongly one way still have millions of adherents who lean the other, e.g. 28% of evangelical protestants who lean Democrat. 55% of American Democrats report that their belief in God is absolutely certain and an additional 21% say their belief is fairly certain.)
    • mintplant 3y ago
      You've made a lot of assumptions about my personal life from a single sentence.
    • 303uru 3y ago
      You're the one lumping traditional conservative with MAGA types. And yes, many of these talking points are traditional conservative as is your appeal to "even tempered reconciliation" which is classic stop fighting and just accept my conservatism talk.
    • mikestew 3y ago
      Jon Haidt is a conservative now?? <snip> If Haidt and those like him are getting lumped in with the MAGA election-denying types, we're all screwed. There's only one person that I see in this branch of comments trying to lump Haidt in with the MAGA-hat-wearers. One can be a conservative without a red hat. To put it another way, what, you're going to argue that Haidt is progressive? It doesn't take much of a glance at the URL you listed to determine that just isn't the case.
  • brightball 3y ago
    Every item on that list is popularized online and is definitely not uniform across the country. I live in a low cost of living area, that's car dependent. Yes, houses are expensive because _everybody_ is moving to these areas and there's construction everywhere. House prices went up here because so many people started fleeing dense areas when remote opportunities became common. But even 2 miles from my current house you can get a big 3 bedroom apartment for about $900 / month in a good location. Get 2 roommates and your rent is $300 / month. But the flip side of this should be cause and effect. If people are leaving other areas in higher numbers then there should be deals in those areas.
    • xboxnolifes 3y ago
      > If people are leaving other areas in higher numbers then there should be deals in those areas. Only if people are leaving for reasons other than housing availability.
      • brightball 3y ago
        The people dropping $700,000-$1,000,000 on a house in this area aren't doing it for housing availability.
  • maxdoop 3y ago
    Can we not ruin HN with political stuff and claims like this?
• brightball 3y ago
  I've long wondered why we haven't had a federal level (or even some state level) bans on social media for minors at this point? It seems like the effects are well established, more widespread than any drug has ever been and probably more severe. My kids aren't allowed to use social media and we are "the mean parents" now because of it since "everybody else's parents let them." Some of these kids were on Instagram in 4th grade. It took years of explaining what we were protecting them from before they started to really get it, seeing their friends at school who's entire life is on a 4 inch screen. They understand now, but the pressure is very real.
  • nradov 3y ago
    The Supreme Court has generally allowed certain limited restrictions on media content targeted towards children. But an outright ban would probably run afoul of the First Amendment. I expect the vagueness doctrine would also present an obstacle. How could legislators even define social media in a sufficiently precise way? Is email or group chat social media?
    • mcpackieh 3y ago
      We already have an outright ban for children under 13 and that hasn't been shot down on First Amendment grounds. I don't see why that number couldn't be bumped to 18. (Technically it's not a complete ban because it has an exception for parental permission, but it's a de facto ban because companies don't want to deal with it.)
      • Der_Einzige 3y ago
        It’s a de jure ban because everyone lies about their age. Defacto means that they do real actual age verification
• bedobi 3y ago
  the devices are no small part of it, but neither is car centrism and the resulting lack of agency - it was lost gradually but is now complete, at least in the US vs kids in Japan, Europe etc who are meaningfully independent from a far, far earlier age and have far, far more opportunities for socialization than kids in the US do this is not to say they do not also have their own issues (in many cases device related), but yeah, let's not pretend like car-centrism has nothing to do with it, because it absolutely does
• colechristensen 3y ago
  They're sitting around doomscrolling because they can't afford to do anything else. I had a medium-range breakfast the other day... waffles coffee and a mimosa with bacon on the side: $66. Jesus that's more than 4 hours with the local minimum wage before taxes. Realistically the take home from an entire shift -- for a standard breakfast. If I go out to a bar, every drink is $10. If I want to go visit a friend, there's no parking anywhere on a Friday night unless you live miles and miles away from the city center. And people keep getting shot/stabbed on public transit. You can laud it all you want but it feels unsafe for a tall dude in his 30s... a lot of young people aren't going to feel comfortable with the local public transit. The rent is too high, there's nothing to do that's affordable. What the fuck else are young people supposed to do?
  • mnky9800n 3y ago
    How to move to Denmark as a software developer https://matduggan.com/developers-guide-to-moving-to-denmark/ https://matduggan.com/developers-guide-to-moving-to-denmark/
    • colechristensen 3y ago
      I'm not talking about my costs or the costs of an entry level developer. I can afford stupidly priced breakfast even if I don't want to spend that much. I'm talking about waitresses, cashiers, shelf restockers, CNAs and whomever else on the bottom scale of pay not being able to afford anything but rent.
  • nradov 3y ago
    Come on. If you're drinking mimosas that's not a "medium range" breakfast. I don't know what kind of hipster cafe you're brunching at but you can eat a lot cheaper at Denny's or the local greasy spoon.
    • colechristensen 3y ago
      No, I wasn't eating the cheapest breakfast. I also don't think orange juice with a little bit of cheap sparkling wine should be an unattainable luxury for anyone with a job. I don't think my breakfast was worth a day's labor for a big chunk of the society I live in.
• macNchz 3y ago
  So while cars became popular in the 50s, it look a long time for us to basically build everything around them. As late as 1969, 48% of kids walked or biked to school, which declined to 13% in 2009^. This has been the result of a combination of real and perceived dangers, and subject to somewhat of a feedback loop as we've made roads wider and faster. I was lucky to be able to walk to school as a kid in the 90s, and found that time to be a delicious moment of early freedom each day as kids from my neighborhood and I chose our route and cut through backyards and patches of woods to pick up other kids. I lived in a small town without wide or fast roads, so this was largely safe, but I understand why it's not possible in most suburbs today. I loved my ability to ride my bike to friends' houses and down to the town beach in the summer, without having to ask my parents for a ride. I think I would have been a very unhappy kid growing up in the typical American suburb of today, shepherded between structured activities and constantly monitored by adults. Retreating to a private online world may be an unhealthy coping mechanism, but it makes sense. ^ http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_walking_and_bicycling.cfm http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...
  • 0max 3y ago
    I grew up around SF and was a free range teenager taking buses everywhere knowing the trunk lines across town would show up every 5 minutes, glad there were large shared spaces and affordable places to hang out and eat with friends. Pieces from the New York Post would prolly make parents not want their kids to take MUNI regularly.
• sanderjd 3y ago
  The comment you replied to was an attempt (IMO a fairly successful one) to go one "why?" deeper on the question. It takes as a given the article's point that the proximate cause of the issue is phone / social media centrism (IMO this is also right), but then it asks why? Why is youth culture so centered on devices and social media? It wasn't phones or the contemporary version of social media for me (missed that by just under five years), but I already felt this when I was an adolescent. For me it was the late-90s wave of internet-connected video games, and the forums about the ones I played - absolutely a form of social media. And I very much relate to, "well what else would I be doing?". Everything else I could do required a parent to do it with me, and while they spent a huge amount of their time on involvement in fruitful things for me to do, in the form of things like sports and organized group activities (boy scouts, etc.), they also very reasonably had their own lives and couldn't just chaperone their kids all night every night and all day every weekend day. And then, what in the world else was I going to do? Where could I go to just hang out with friends, when I was 13, and what could we do on our own? Nowhere and nothing. My impression is that this has only gotten worse. The respite from this was college, and I'm convinced this is why pretty much everyone fortunate enough to go to a residential college looks back on it very fondly. Colleges have everything their students need, within short walks, and like an infinite number of places for young people to just independently hang out with each other, without having to pay for anything. It's such a revelation! But you do that for just a few years, and then you discover that it only worked because it was absurdly subsidized, either by someone else - parents, taxpayers, wealthy scholarship / grant funders - or by your own future earnings. And out in the real world, all the gathering spaces - bars, coffee shops, restaurants - suddenly become impractically expensive, and all the distances between people become impractically large.
  • mixdup 3y ago
    >It takes as a given the article's point that the proximate cause of the issue is phone / social media centrism (IMO this is also right), but then it asks why? Why is youth culture so centered on devices and social media? Do places in the US and other countries with good public transit or are walkable like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc somehow not have any of the problems the article is referring to? I kind of doubt it There's plenty wrong with how car dependent we are in most of the US but it's both not new to the latest generation and not uniform across the entire country yet there IS something that is uniform across the entire country AND new for this generation. Spoiler alert: it's not suburban sprawl.
• helf 3y ago
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• foxyv 3y ago
  Of course I read the article! But it ignores the problems that have plagued three generations before Gen Z and focus on stuff that is unique to them. Sure, cell phones kinda suck for mental health, but why are kids even using them if they suck so much? What prevents kids from doing anything else? > Parents ask me: Why are my kids so anxious and depressed? Where do they go all day on their devices? How can I get them back? The answer is to give them somewhere else to go!