Yeah, people defend Linus and other faces like MKBHD for one huge reason: Parasocial relationships.

Just look at all the conversation happening in this thread with people defending the figure of Linus (and others). Influencers, even tech influencers, make money because they can monetize those people.

And Linus appeals primarily to the folks who like thinking of themselves as the tech person in the family or at the office, but really they are no more technical than slotting a stick of RAM into a case on average.

So the argument boils down to it being due to bad parents rather than evil technology, yes?

That’s not the main arguments being used to ban these devices and advocate for more radical plans. Removing access to these doesn’t make someone a good parent. Kids turn to other methods.

And to an earlier point in another comment: guess which cohort has explosive growth in smoking at the moment? Not people our age. Teens and young adults of legal age. Gen Z, in particular, is a huge market for that industry now. Cigars and pipes in particular. Vapes are counted separately but are wildly popular.

Banning the sale of highly regulated goods where the state is the official and only legal seller of said good in many states is one thing. We are talking about the internet here, though. And cell phones. And computers. And tablets. May as well put TVs and connected devices on the list, and definitely console platforms.

That’s the real problem, kids being able to spend unlimited time unsupervised because they have horrible absent parents. Parents shouldnt let their kids have unrestricted time like that. That is one reason why kids suffer in school not because of phones; because their parents aren’t involved to guide them in making good choices and forcing good habits.

So we take away the phones as the luddites demand. What fills the gap? Definitely not independent learning. Most definitely not suddenly mindful and present parents.

There is a lot of fear mongering and blaming, but no actual effort to fix it. Banning or removing doesn’t fix it. There is a reason that, when absent parents for latchkey kids were huge problems, they didn’t simply decree gangs illegal and pat themselves on the back. Communities offered alternatives. But no alternative is being offered here. All the woes are shifted onto the unholy smartphone and internet.

Ya know why predators can find success online? Because shit parents don’t parent. A better use of resources would be forcing the parents to sacrifice their phones contingent on spending time with their kids, right?

No, you don’t get. Or didn’t live it. Or are being purposely obtuse.

None of those qualifiers were attached to those things at the time the applicable fear mongering luddites were vilifying them. What we have right now are 21st century Tipper Gores. People engaging in moral public freakouts over tangentially related things which affirm a much larger fear of the whole (technology in this case). You see it also with how people violently and emotionally react to “AI.”

Remember when D&D would turn you into a Satanist who’d go on to sexually abused children, maybe even engage in ritualist murder? Remember when similar was said for merely listening to even the radio edits of Marilyn Manson?

People pearl clutch over hypotheticals. Parents who engage with their kids and set healthy boundaries which are enforced don’t often run into these problems. Hell, the arguments people make about tech right now could also apply as reasons not to let them play outside. Never know where a predator is lurking. I mean, we actually do: in your church and in your house. The two most statistically likely places for children to be preyed upon.

But let’s blame the internet. Apple makes it trivial to lock things down and monitor it all. No kid is able to outsmsrt those restrictions because adults can’t either.

No, what’s happening is yet another hype cycle. The entire reason all these schools are banning devices this year is due to a marketing effort from Haidt’s publisher. They put copies of his book into the hands of higher ranking faculty with purchasing authority for their districts. And they talk with each other. What a brilliant way to weaponize ignorance and make a buck doing so.

And it magically doesn’t make bad parents into even mediocre ones. Who or what will they blame next? Definitely not the person looking back at them in the mirror every morning.

There’s also credible reports that Reddit is testing an even sneakier method. They will hide the “deleted” comments when you are logged in and looking for them in your history. But other people can still see them; Reddit just understands you are a hostile actor in their eyes so they pull manipulation games like with shadow banning.

Fark still exists with that small monthly payment to support the site model. Drew, the owner, regularly meets up with folks, too. And if you’re a subscriber he must buy you a beer if you ask him per the “terms” of service.

A nice, relatively small, community. That’s what Reddit used to be. Your post really resonated with me.

my experience is such that people don’t get these sweeping bans for having opinions. They get them for acting like sociopathic aggressive individuals.

And based on what I’m seeing when I check folks’ profiles reiterating the same story… Yep it checks out more often than not. There’s no discourse on the internet when it consists of calling people slurs in a weird barrage of insults. Those are the people who get banned here or there.

How do you mean “the other side?” EFF has a high factuality/credibility but is marked as left of center in bias.

EFF, like ACLU, are mostly orgs that stick to their expertise. Look at entities rated as “Very High.” The climate science orgs don’t and shouldn’t give time entertaining the deranged conspiracy theories of science deniers, nor should EFF focus on advancing rhe worldviews of entities looking to limit speech on the internet. It would be like demanding AA set aside time at meetings to discuss the merits of getting black out drunk once in a while.

Sure, many sides exist. But mere existence doesn’t make them equal.

I have family that are similar. I wouldn’t classify them as racist, but they straddle that line with opinions. I’ve never seen or heard them classify an entire group of people or act discriminatory in person. It is more along the lines of “everyone is equal and nobody should get special treatment” regarding things like affirmative action or the more extreme DEI practices of some companies.

My experience is such that these people can be reached if we keep the lines of communication open rather than do the easy thing of cutting them off. I’ve been able to use their own logic and verbiage (especially verbiage) against them but one can’t go in guns blazing. To change minds, it must feel like their idea. Turn the heat up slowly and introduce doubt and ideas.

My big take away, with people like I described above, is that they are reacting to the more extreme people who would feel right at home in the racist far right if things were just a tad different. Cultural warriors and grievance politics leaders are cancerous regardless of which side of the spectrum they occupy because their goal remains the same: divide the normal people and turn us against each other.

And judging by what happens in my extended family and how it is breaking down on political lines… it is sadly working.

This is most definitely a feature here. What ARS won’t say (but their source articles do) is that Newsbreak is an app right out of China. That’s why they don’t care that this creates entirely fictional stories. This is the leftwing equivalent of all those rightwing agitprop sites that pretend to be local news in order to trick people

Tell me, how culpable were thr old SPD members that fled Germany immediately prior to the Enabling Act? The politicians who skipped town rather than vote to stop Hitler. I mean, they didn’t explicitly vote for Hitler to become dictator. But they had the ability to prevent lr delay it and didn’t.

At some point the rational and adult thing is to recognize that inaction is a defacto vote for the worst scenario you can imagine because you didn’t attempt to stop it. If you see a car hit a little girl, and then flee, are you in the free and clear ethically and morally for just driving right by only to hear she later died because no one else tried to help?

Biden is a genocidal dictator?

And people insist that the far left isn’t blue Maga and then I witness crazy similarities like this be normal here.

Like it or not, a vote against Biden (or no vote at all) is tacitly supporting the Republican takeover and implenetation of project 2025, regression and perseuction of LGBTQ and immigrants in our societies, and wild escalation in the middle east as Trump and Republicans have promised to do vis a vis Gaza.

Folks, yall gotta deradicalize a bit. Put another way, what does it say about you that you’d rather allow a person like Trump, who wants to implement a final solution type deal, than a person like Biden who isn’t so crazy and even walking back? You don’t have to love these people. But if you could do so right now, and HAD to do so, would you vote to a hurt 1,000 gazans or millions of them? That’s the choice you MUST make in November. Even sitting it out is a choice.

You could say similar about our leftist history. How many countries did we instigate revolutions in to overthrow even somewhat democratic governments?

Radicals will rationalize anything including putting Trump back into office.

It’s easy for people to cherrypick with groups.

There are tons of antisemitic leftists. I’ve had to heavily curate my social media because of them, and I’m lucky because that’s all I’ve had to do (eg, I’m not being chased across college campuses or doxxed for belonging to a synagogue or have people waiting outside of my door to hound me immediately).

But there are tons of leftists who aren’t as well.

Leftism has become co-opted as way for people to virtue signal and rationalize things they want to believe. The right is definitely seizing on this strife. But historically, there’s nobody the left likes to fight more than other leftists.

And the meme at the top about immigrants… that isn’t new. The USSR was famous for establishing ethnostates and it carries over to modern day. Sure, you could immigrate. But it isn’t like workers held hands and ignored the differences. The pressure was there, but perhaps not the wage pressure. Out groups were still blamed for things like shortages and service degradation, just like today. Nor a defense of anti immigration, but people seem to think the problem exists in uneducated or unenlightened people close to be leftwing. Nope, it’s our cohort. We are watching it in real time right now.

And the hardware is often total junk. There’s a reason people still recommend the Shield, a device which is 5 years old and runs Android 9.

People here don’t want to hear it, but using an Apple TV will ruin the experience for everything else from a hardware perspective. Software aside, of course. There’s no reason for Android devices to exist on such sub par hardware. And yet…

Go onto TikTok or Reddit (verboten, I know). Gen Z is currently going wild on how cooked and ruined Alpha already are.

They also have very strong opinions on what good child rearing looks like despite making up a huge portion of the child free ideology.

I generally dislike broad generational… uh generalizations. However, trends are undeniable. And as Z ages they appear to be going through Boomerification. I think that’s why so many public freakouts on service workers happen with them. Millennials have the opposite reputation, of bending over backwards to be overly polite.

Edit: to say that I’ve never seen a generation publicly express nostalgia as hard and young as Z. My older Alpha kids are sort of up there with their friends, too, but Gen Z just seems like they are retreating into a false past which never really existed as they remember it because the world is so shit.

Probably depends on your subs. Most of mine have went far, far left and have become a tiresome dog pile of virtue signaling from behind keyboards and screens.

And I’m a leftist. There seems to be a huge difference these days in being a leftist and being a “this is now my only personality trait” leftist through which all views must be fundamentally filtered. Even non-political/non-social. It has made some subs unreadable for me, specifically my state and city subs.

Edit: I guess where I am going with it is that the extremes are becoming more extreme and seeking out new frontiers now that moderation is light.

Huge CEX have huge liquidity. Probably why Binance got hit with failure to follow antimony laundering practices.

Now, parking stuff there? Maybe ease. People are lazy and most are ill informed. Plus, CEX tend to offer other services such as staking or other ways to earn yield.

Yeah you could go to a DEX. but there’s a lot of risk there. A lot in CEX too but I get why some might trust them more than fly by night DEX that are one bridge attack away from insolvency.

I highly recommend Death Must Die. It is early access, as a fair warning. But it successfully mixes up Hades with Vampire Survivors and a few others. Runs great on Deck as well. The dialog can be cringe and the story is clearly under development. But if you want a fun gameplay loop–this is the game.

Has to be Krampus, and Anna and the Apocalypse.

Krampus really scratches that nostalgic itch every year and I don’t know why. The broken family dynamics, the environment, the sound and set designs are amazing. And it has a lesson like every good Christmas movie should.

And Anna and the Apocalypse is similar. It is funny, musical, and ultimately an allegory about growing up and leaving everyone behind to forge your own path. A good reminder that you never know when it will be your last Christmas with someone. Or maybe I’m looking into it too much and I just like zombie musicals.