The effects are there for everyone to see. GenZ is depressed and can't hold a thought for more than a few seconds. No, it's not because of the housing or job market, it's the phones. Check e.g. Jonathan Haidt: https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/
And free speech: you don't need a mobile phone or tiktok to exercise that right.
It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state. Check out what teachers have to say about the attention span of the current generation pupils. But no, your access to whatever it is you're addicted to is more important.
Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.
Great example of what "hapless enabler" looks like.
We all agree there's a problem. But simply letting the .gov do whatever it finds convenient will likely not solve the problem any better than any other option, and will likely make a whole bunch of other things way worse.
But that's fine because it's for the children, right?
> It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.
Agree. A simple solution would be to regulate social media by forcing a maximum time per user per day or banning it altogether. But that's clearly not the agenda. (same with all the other dog-whistles).
> Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.
But currently they can't match anonymous social media profiles to IDs or bank accounts. This is why they want a mandatory "Digital ID" for social media.
The fact that this discussion seems to revolving around a single axis of limiting social media time and mandatory identification is such a farce.
When I was growing up, I had very limited access to real life social spaces that I actually enjoyed participating in. Online communities were my respite, the light in the darkness that honestly kept me alive until I managed to make it to college. If there was an overbearing nanny state preventing me from knowing that there was a better life waiting for me after grade school, I'm not sure I would've bothered to stick around until then.
That said, most of modern social media isn't the same as the online communities I and many others grew up on. It's a free for all with very thin walls between social spaces, almost no human oversight, and run by the most despicable and immoral people on God's green earth. So I am inclined to agree with the people who say that kind of social media is a bad influence and should be curtailed.
But even today, that isn't everything that's on the internet these days. Discord especially has quietly become the socialization hub of most of the younger folks I know of, and a large part of that is because it allows the creation of private, invite-only groups moderated by actual people. As far as I'm concerned, the Internet needs more Discords and fewer Twitters and Instagrams. There shouldn't be an arbitrary limit on socialization, but socializing should be...social, not some weird performance art done in front of the entire internet.
>It's a free for all with very thin walls between social spaces, almost no human oversight, and run by the most despicable and immoral people on God's green earth. So I am inclined to agree with the people who say that kind of social media is a bad influence and should be curtailed.
It was the same in the past. The difference is that the house odds were different. You didn't have algorithms cramming the worst of the worst down your feed, forums, IRC, message boards and the like weren't built with the goal of maximizing engagement. Heck, even vote based communities which inevitably turn into low common denominator groupthink producing cesspits are mild compared to modern stuff.
Frankly, the law should be "you can sue social media if you can link their service to a problem with you'r child's mental health"
then let the courts decide. they'll clean up their act pretty quick when lawsuits come pouring in, and it removes the central govt's role in USER ID's and other 1984 schemes.
> Frankly, the law should be "you can sue social media if you can link their service to a problem with you'r child's mental health"
So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents? That's totally something that I could picture happening under such a regime. And that's ultimately indicative of a larger conundrum we face as a society.
The fact that as a society we seem to favor giving parents the ability to make their children in their own image, over giving their children the leeway to figure out who they truly are outside of their parent's guidance. And that's a truly difficult line to tack. Sometimes the parents are 100% right and the children would self-destruct under their own supervision. Other times, the children are being abused and tortured for not following the whims of their selfish parents.
I was lucky, all things considered. My parents were well meaning, just extremely overbearing and micro-managing. Some of the outright abuse that some of my acquaintances describe undergoing would make y'all sick if repeated here. I don't know if there's any solution, but I'm not sure giving helicopter parents more leverage against social spaces is the right play.
> So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents?
Why not. In a court of law, and facts, such lawsuits would only serve to highlight that religion is not a real thing. That would be a good thing for the world.
I don’t think this is obvious - I have kids and this is a constant battle. If you take the devices away they are along and isolated and it’s so much worse.
Some schools have these rules, but unless they are practically enforced, kids get around it.
I worry these laws will result in the worse of both worlds.
We need really well moderated forums for kids, along with practical bans for everything else.
I'm 52 and I'm alone and isolated, so age has very little to do with any of it. There is no reason to pass laws to solve what technology caused and technology will undo or we will go extinct and it won't even matter anyways.
If it were bloody obvious the government wouldn't need to be involved, parents would find a way to get their children off social media. And there are much gentler solutions than a ban that should be explored first (like letting households volunteer themselves to be IP-banned by social networks, for example).
> parents would find a way to get their children off social media.
They wouldn't have a clue. Hell, I personally had this addiction for a long time and it just takes too long to see what a horrible experience it is in the long term. You can argue you should be able to do whatever you want at any age, I'm not the person to say anything about that.
But I totally agree that, as other comments point out, they use it as a justification for all sort of surveillance, I don't really think it is necessary to go that hard because whoever want to get access, they will. It's the internet after all.
I've read that after elementary school parents have an incredibly small impact on their children's development, peers and their environment (which includes virtual one), has virtually all of the impact on your children's development.
My parents gave me really shitty smartphones that were barely powerful enough to do important things but was an awful experience for Instagram/games/etc until I bought a better one with my own money (similar specs to Pinephone Pro)
How so? Parents and schools can collectively decide to take away the smartphones of preschoolers if keeping them safe and focused was the main priority. Like how else is a preschooler gonna get a smartphone without adult money and support? Last time I checked preschoolers can't open a checking account and a credit card.
This bs of government forcing everyone in the country to have to doxx themselves just so preschoolers can't access social media(which they will anyway since rebellious children are very resourceful on cheating the system made by tech illiterate adults), is like if prehistoric humanity were to stop using fire just because the village idiot burned his house down.
Let's suppose the cause really is as simple as "parents can't be bothered to parent". By default, this will continue to be the case. And realistically we're not going to fix it by telling bad parents to please start being good parents. So what do you actually want to do? I'm not saying it's this or nothing, but if you don't have an alternative policy that might actually help, I don't take much comfort in the idea that the kids who are damaged will have _parents_ who totally deserved it.
There are some alternative policies, for example, banning smartphones in schools. This doesn't completely solve the problem, of course, but at least it limits social media use while the children are under direct supervision of the government.
A more extreme policy would be to treat smartphones themselves the same way we treat alcohol and cigarettes, enforcing an age minimum at the point of purchase. Of course the giant tech corporations would fly into rage over this suggestion and lobby heavily against it.
It's why we see so many infants getting caught for DUIs. Seriously? You seem to be implying that there's no justification/efficacy for any law/ban prohibiting children from engaging in adult activities. That's... something.
>It's bloody obvious how damaging social media, especially on mobile devices, is to everyone's mental state.
It's not though. That's just the popular meme among easily influenced and excitable social groups (like parents). It's not reflective of reality. The idea that mobile devices are somehow damaging to mental state is not supported by scientific studies. Nor is the idea that online discussion forums and markets are.
What is dangerous is mis-using medical terms like "addiction" in apparently an intended medical context. When you start throwing around words like addiction governments get really excited about their ability to use force and start hurting and imprisoning people. Even murdering them. Multi-media screens are not addictive. There is no evidence supporting such assertions in reputable scientific journals.
> the term of problematic use characterizes individuals who experience addiction-like symptoms as a result of their social media use. Problematic social media use reflects a non–substance related disorder by which detrimental effects occur as a result of preoccupation and compulsion to excessively engage in social media platforms despite negative consequences.
This study is taking "problematic social media use" as it's implicit given and then from this arbitrary base it is then saying this small subset of problematic people experience depression because of the fiat declaration of "problematic".
But then it goes on,
>While there exists no official diagnostic term or measurement, Andreassen et al [17] developed the Facebook Addiction Scale, which measures features of substance use disorder such as salience, tolerance, preoccupation, impaired role performance, loss of control, and withdrawal, to systematically score problematic Facebook use.
This is not real science. This is anti-facebook political manipulation via science sounding words. I'm plenty anti-facebook myself but I am very pro-science so it's sad to see this successfully masquerading as real science.
By link you mean correlate, which doesn't mean anything.
Social studies are useless anyway. Academic social studies are so biased that anything they say on the matter should be discarded. They will always produce "evidence" on demand for whatever the left want to do.
Social media should be left alone. Parents who want to can block it on their children's devices. There's nothing more that needs to be done.
yes thank you Facebook shareholder for your clearly unbiased opinion, totally not a transparent attempt to insist there's no problem at all the big bad left boogyman is making it all up
It's much easier to say to a child "you can't have a social media account, it's the law because experts have determined it's not healthy at your age" than "your mother and I think that social media is bad for you".
Let's not forget: it's pretty unlikely that two orgs come up with the same administration/data-analyis for which they use those spreadsheets, so most of those proposed SaaS applications would have just one customer.
I found it hard too. Perhaps the difference with the other people responding is the size the font is rendered. On my screen, the distance between the top of a "d" and the bottom of a "y" in the body text is 7mm. That corresponds to font size 18 in Word, or 22px in the browser, so basically a chapter heading.
In C, tail recursion is a fairly simple rewrite. I can't think of any complications.
But ... that rewrite can increase the cyclomatic complexity of the code on which they have some hard limits, so perhaps that's why it isn't allowed? And the stack overflow, of course.
I don't know that it's just cyclomatic complexity. I think it at least part of it is proving that you meet hard real-time constraints. Recursion is harder to analyze that way than "for (i = 0; i < 16; i++) ... " is.
From quickly glancing over a couple of pages, that looks sensible. Which makes me curious to see some exceptions to the "shall" rules. With a project of this size, that should give some idea about the usefulness of such standards.
I'd really be curious to see any substantial proof for that claim.
The first time pupils encounter pi isn't when measuring angles. At least over here, that's still done in degrees, which is much easier to explain, and also latches onto common cultural practice (e.g. a turn of 180 degrees). So I suppose that already makes them good engineers.
But the first time pupils encounter pi is when computing the circumference and surface of a circle. While the former would look easier with the radius (tau * r), it looks just as weird when using diameter or when using it for the surface.
I don't know of any studies yet comparing the two approaches, but https://www.tauday.com/a-tau-testimonial is the story of one student who finally "got it" when using tau instead of pi. I strongly suspect she's not unique.
If there's more data available, I don't yet know where to find it.
P.S. Yes, angles are first presented in degrees in most contexts, and understanding sines and cosines is easier when given the degree units you're familiar with. But radians do need to get introduced at some point during trig, and it's exactly the study of radians which should be done using tau (the equivalent of 360°) rather than pi (180°). Because a right angle, 90°, is a quarter of the way around the circle, and that's tau/4. A 45° angle is tau/8, one-eighth of the way around the circle. There's no need to memorize formulas when you do it this way, it's just straight-up intuitive (whereas 45° = pi/4 is not intuitive the same way).
And free speech: you don't need a mobile phone or tiktok to exercise that right.
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