Comment by ipython | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ipython | Hacker News Reader

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Also to you- how many kids do you have?

Some assumption that I did not impose a punishment. Prey tell what would you suggest the punishment be? Don’t forget, assignments for school are posted online in Google classroom and need to be turned in online. Many require watching YouTube videos. Please enlighten me.

You edited your comment to add nuance past the snide “parenting is hard” useless quip. So I’ll add some to mine as well.

Greed is the problem. There is a problem of misalignment around this entire ecosystem we have built. We are in an age where we can measure so much more accurately than ever before, so we have invented metrics for everything.

Unfortunately these metrics ultimately boil down to “how can I make more money”. We are what we measure. So now we are stuck with platforms whose key performance indicator is time on site, leading to micro optimizations to identify how to get people hooked. No wonder parental controls are so shitty! Those don’t exactly move the “engagement” graph up and to the right, do they? And there’s no meaningful regulation to counteract that force. In other words there is no incentive for them, and I fact every incentive to make my job as a parent harder.

So now back to your first comment, boiling down to “you’re a shitty parent. If you were a better parent who scolded their children, you wouldn’t have this problem”. It’s telling that you started your comment that way, and instead of responding to my comment by perhaps enlightening me with your sage parenting tips, decided to edit your comment to add bs about how oh it’s greed not parenting after all. Tell me again how I as an individual is supposed to take on an entire industry built upon a profit motive to do exactly what my kid is doing?

Punish him how? Take away his video games? Did that. But then he got up at 6am on Saturday and turned on the Apple TV. Guess what, there’s no meaningful parental controls on that. So I took the remotes and locked them away. Encourage him to go outside and play with friends? Won’t do that because the screens are way more stimulating than interacting with actual people.

Then, one day, I forget to turn the Internet back off on his school laptop after he turns in a project online, and the cycle starts again.

I have none, nor will on grounds that I'm not bringing children into this world on ot's current trajectory, but I will damn well stand up to try to help and prepare every child brought into the world otherwise, including by working through prepping or aiding parents if need be. They'll need all the help they can get in a system currently orchestrated to turn their natural drives into a production line for ongoing State directed labor.

I don't want to see children being exploited by master manipulators with huge R&D budgets directed purely to the task of incenting more wealth/value extraction. I don't want to see adults targeted by the same. I don't want an economy centered around that. I don't want "Captains of Industy" vying for and directing "engines of wealth creation", utilizing human capital and resources to their own ends. Because that's what leads to my earlier glib answer, where we have to perpetuate the current cycle of suffering in order to prepare them for that world, and punish them as well as ourselves in the process. Which is exactly where we're bloody headed without change, and in a hell of a different direction than installing emperors who want to completely change the shape of things to suit their ends alone.

You can feel free to dismiss me as "you'll never know because you aren't currently what people recognize as a parent". That's fair enough. But please understand that short of massive change to how and who drives the levers of our existing (and crumbling) regulatory edifi, we're on track for Great Depression 2.0 and speed running the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons and relearning the lessons of the 20th century again because we clearly failed to do it the first time around.

Without setting limits to what we, the adults in the room can do in terms of optimizing for wealth centralization through exploitive commerce models, the only people left to pass on the skills necessary for your children to thrive in an increasingly exploitive world where the trend in cost for being able to crank out systems to amplify parasitic value extraction is you. The parent, and any other caregiver with their eyes open.

If you think you're shitting bricks right now, I've been taking the last year or so to evaluate how life has changed for the young folks in my life, and I'm horrified by what I've found, and I know if it's happening in my circles, it's happening in everyone else's. And while I played a part in the genie getting out of the bottle, I know enough about the nature of the thing in question to be able to recognize that right now, y'all, and anyone who cares are the only ones who can get this train turned around.

And in the meantime, yeah, that's going to mean a lot of the onus on policing those little scions of chaos we call offspring to the active caretakers. The essence of the Internet ain't to bring the Angels to your home, but to offer the Angel and Demon alike a highway through which to enter your home. They (kids) don't know the difference, or appreciate that for you, telling the difference is work to be done which you have to balance with other demands; I understand, and don't discount that.

I can't change it alone either though, because it's a collective action problem. And we seem to really suck at that when it's goal is "enforce an upper limit on greed".

I appreciate your response. Collective action is tough. I don’t have any answers but I’m struggling nonetheless. My only hope is I can raise my little kiddos to understand the problem and help create the solution. The world has generally progressed in the right direction so I hope it can continue that way.

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