For career path, you probably have little to no control over it. Life is full of people who pretend otherwise. Working your way up a ladder is largely a fantasy, especially in I.T. Too many people, not enough roles. Just go with the flow and try to find something that pays well and doesn’t suck 100% of the time.
Personal goals are mostly bullshit too. You’re not in control of life. Maybe it’ll look that way for a while but it can be taken away in a second.
Probably the only life goal you really need is to be happy after you figure out what that means.
In before someone says ‘blame the parents’ and not the multi-billion dollar companies who’ve spent decades targeting children for lifelong addiction, ignoring the negative effects on their mental health.
The guy who made the drugs is guilty. The guy who sold the drugs to kids is guilty. But parents who failed to warn kids about drugs and to oversee them properly are also guilty...
Generally in an article about arresting or sentencing a drug dealer, people don't bring up that the drug users are actually to blame.
Now if we're in a discussion around the cartels, plenty of people do bring up (and there's also those that get annoyed by it) that the drug users are actually the ones funding the cartels via their drug use.
Along these lines, I think another fun comparison might be opioid use and Purdue.
I think that that is actually an oversight. One needs to consider the entire chain. For example, with proper parenting, there would be a lot less youth demand for drugs. It doesn’t make what a drug dealer does any less bad, nor does it make the efforts of the police to arrest the drug dealer any less important. But it’s suboptimal to consider a small piece of a system, without thinking of the whole.
That is a fair point, I did not attempt to make a complete list, of course, but you are right, there are more layers that could be named. All valid. The point I was making is that parents are also responsible.
eg: I grew up in a very nasty place. My neighborhood had a few pregnant 13 year old girls and a lot of drunks and smokers, including kids in their early teens. My parents kept me away from it all, while also both having full-time jobs. They put a lot of work into filtering whom I could be friends with and where I was allowed to be. THAT is the job of a parent.
But at systemic level, we must consider the effect of social dynamics globally, not only how the most virtuous citizen deal with the direct situation. Pauperisation of the masses will mechanically lead to more social problem on the overall, even if they will always be brilliant heroes to point to as possible through exceptional behavior. And society that are structurally helping everyone to fall in distress or weak situation also help the exceptional people go further as they are freed from many cognitive loads they would have to deal with otherwise.
The thing is, it should be both. Parents often give too little fucks for long term welfare of their children, often also guilty of same vices. Issue is, these addictions are way more destructive to young forming mind than to adults. Nobody having small kids now had fb or instagram access when they were 5, did they.
Maybe you don't do this. Certainly I don't. But when looking around, its much less rosy and... lets say in blue collar families its too common to drug kids with screens so parents have off time. Heck, some are even proud how modern parents they are. Any good advice is successfully ignored, and ideas of passing some proper time with kids instead are skillfully avoided. People got lazy and generally expect miracles from life without putting in any miracle-worth efforts.
Companies just maximize their profits till laws allows them (and then some more), and expecting nice moral behavior by default is dangerously naive and never true.
Consider that the insane growth in the cost of living - especially childcare - combined with wage stagnation means that now the vast majority of families have 2 parents with full-time jobs, keeping them away for their families for much longer than before. Consider that childcare is much, much harder to even get into now than in decades past. Consider also that "EdTech" means that nearly every child needs to be on an internet equipped-device at all times.
But sure, "Parents often give too little fucks for long term welfare of their children", that's definitely it. Parents just hate their kids! What a useful perspective you've brought to the discussion.
Until the fines are large enough to impact business and cause heads to roll, and maybe we even see some prison time for executives, companies will continue to not give a fuck. This is chump change for Meta.
Rings of Power, an amazing show that manages to truly capture the feeling and atmosphere of the books, gets so much hate online. Yet all these garbage prequels and spinoffs get a pass. The Hobbit as 3 films? Really?
It's not just online. Rings of Power ratings fell off the cliff. By all reports of viewership numbers, it was awful.
People only watched it because it was in the Lord of the Rings univverse. As soon as they realize how bad it is, they stopped watching. I'm in this camp. I can't count how many times I fell asleep watching it.
The primary reason I moved away from Google Maps was because of all their ads and clutter, and I’m running out of reasons to have an iPhone anymore. Once my current one needs replacing, I’m going in a different direction. The Light Phone has my interest. Simple calling and text, maps, music and what appears to be a decent camera. I need to use my DSlR more often anyway. Fiio has some interesting audio devices too.
Apple's positioning of 'privacy' and 'data blindedness' was always opportunistic.
Apple never ever believed that. Even their positioning of 'standing up to the government/FBI' is super hypocritical as well. When going became tough, Tim Cook personally went to the White House to gift a gold plaque (puke).
So much for looking out for the little guy.
I'm 100% convinced that Apple has a backdoor in China. Why else would Chinese government allow Apple to operate there?
Google, love them or hate them, picked up their business and exited. I admire them for that. The day Apple truly does follow through, I'll respect them.
This doesn't match up with what I've heard from people I know within Apple, but perhaps things have changed recently. Certainly the encrapification seems to have gotten worse - my suspicion is that the services businesses have too much power within the company and are damaging product design to boost their own numbers.
There's an excellent Ben Thompson piece where he points out one of the big missteps of Apple executives. He was talking about Tim Cook and the like in the context of App Store legal case. He says Apple started drinking their own kool-aid around privacy, and user benefit - which makes them want to seek rent a lot more. I suspect your friends at Apple might be falling onto that as well.
This will be like saying - there are good people working at Nestle. The packaged water business is the villian, but people are nice.
It’s almost incalculable how much damage Trump has done to America's reputation across the world. Not just him though, his followers. All the Hollywood gloss in the world won’t shine this turd up.
Blockbuster was a corporate, soulless chain sent into the world to destroy the wonderful experience of mom-and-pop and small chain video rental stores. They were the Walmart of entertainment. They knew small stores couldn't afford many copies of blockbuster hits so when you visited Blockbuster they would have an entire wall dedicated to one single hit movie. Their selection was garbage.
The weekly visit to the local video store was one of the highlights of my youth. I could browse for hours. I remember the first Blockbuster that opened near me. It had zero atmosphere or charisma. I guess if you just want to watch a movie, that's the way to go. and that's why Netflix killed them.
About 10 years ago I was driving through remote Texas and stopped at a gas station that had, to my utter surprise, a video rental section. VHS tapes, not DVDs. And there was a young family browsing! It made me so happy to see.
The shift to digital for movies and music stripped away something real from the experience. Better picture and sound? Sure. At the cost of atmosphere and fun. I recently watched a 4K remastered Aliens (1986). There were maybe 3 short scenes where I said 'wow, the detail is amazing'. The entire rest of the film was me thinking how they had stripped the atmosphere from the film experience. The blue hue was gone. The murky, exoplanet looked fake.
Close Encounters (1977) on 4K is a different experience. It looks great, but there are scenes that play totally different in 4K. What once was a dark shadow moving against the starry sky is now very clearly a spaceship. The shadow was better. At the end, the aliens were clearly kids in crappy costumes. But on VHS they were child-sized aliens standing in front of a bright light, leaving much to the imagination. Outside of those who saw it in the theater during it's original run, everyone since has had the same experience, pretty much. The 4K version changes that. And don't get me started on the massive changes to color grading in Eyes Wide Shut and Trainspotting. Or how they jacked up the color and brightness on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) so it better matched the cartoonish, and inferior, sequels.
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