Ok, good to understand your viewpoint. It’s clear you seek an entirely different way of managing vices for children. I can appreciate the world you’re describing, where responsible adults help and guide their children to maturity.

I live in the U.K., not sure where you live, but it is my utmost conviction that many parents here do not guide and shape their children and that should your approach to vice management be instituted, you’d see an heap of children slip into dependency before 10.

But you may live in a different part of the world, one where your approach could work. What do I know?

We ban gambling, cigarettes, alcohol, media for children, because of harms we understand that they inflict on children. Should these be parental discretions too?

Sort of the same here. Our 17 and 14 year olds were the last in their classes to get one and I still felt it was too early.

And for those without kids, here’s my actual story about what smart phones do to children: I was recently visiting an enormous aquarium abroad; just tank after tank of impressive displays.

As we arrived we realised, ok wow, shark feeding is literally now, let’s go watch it. It had obviously drawn an enormous crowd of families but eventually we got ourselves into a position where we could see. And then my wife tapped my shoulder and pointed and I noticed what she had noticed: At prime viewing position, on these pedestal sort of things, we’re sitting a row of teenagers, all of them, to the very last boy and girl, hunched over and staring at their smartphones.

LITERAL SHARKS WERE BEING HAND FED RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM and they couldn’t give a shit because PHONES!!!

Got two teenagers. I’d outlaw smart phones for anyone under 18 if it was up to me. Bring the flame!

May I gently ask if you have children in the phone age range?

I have never seen anything with such a hold over teenagers.

You can milk anything with nipples!

It’s the same the world over. I’ve worked for years for a western company which has got a large part of their business in Asia and China.

You try taking our “western ways” of leadership to China and see how well it fares; what I would consider “leaving space for a leader to operate and feel accountable” is seen as “my leader has no fucking clue what he is doing; he never tells me what he wants me to do”.

Culture eats everything for breakfast. As a western leader in China you have to act like a controlling maniac (in my cultural frame) to be seen as an effective leader in China.

And it goes both ways. My brother reports to a Chinese manager transplanted to the west and she “desperately wants to micromanage everything” according to the western team.

We are all trying our best.

All media has an agenda.

TFA cites papers, published in Nature no less; clearly it isn’t hogwash. Doesn’t mean that it’s as amazing as the article claimed, but to dismiss it as “having an agenda” is quite something.

Apple has to keep it generic or the software providers will have a fit. It cannot start making judgments that 9 hours of Facebook is bad, or Meta would throw a fit.

What’s even worse is that screen time for children is actually, directly, flagrantly broken. It resets itselfs regularly. This is a known thing for parents who get into habits of re-enabling it twice daily to ensure it’s likely to be on when their kid exceed a quota. Apple, of course, ignores it. I doubt a single person on the team that owns the feature actually uses it OR they are under instructions to leave it broken to ensure digital habits get built in children. Get them started in the crack early.

You’re forgetting the role of societal regulation, laws, culture etc.

Electric cars ARE catching on, at their current technology level.

Yes agreed.

But: Battery capacity, charging and discharging speed, price has dramatically moved in the last 20 years.

So while it’s easy to disregard revolutions, evolution has most definitely occurred. And many of them are fuelled by what gets hailed as a revolution and then, quietly, sneaks into the current production processes and makes it to market.

Well you’ll soon be able to subscribe to the big accounts on Threads, even from Mastodon, provided your server allows it.

I personally wonder if the time for this kind of microblogging hasn’t come and gone now. A lot of media on Instagram but my teenage kids don’t use Twitter, don’t want to use Twitter and don’t care about what happens to Twitter. Pry TikTok out of their hands, though…

Alternatives to Google Maps aren’t great. The only place where I find Organic Maps better is China, since the authorities have stunted GM there.

For driving in Europe I find TomTom better (whereas both Apple Maps and Google Maps are better in the US), but in terms of POI Google reigns supreme.

Mac?! Christ no, that’s doing the opposite of liberating yourself and it has less gaming than Linux I’d say.

Come again?

Wholeheartedly agree with TFA. People who claim Firefox should go all in and block everything and return no data to advertisers need to explain how Firefox should continue to fund development.

Touch controls are becoming increasingly common in airplanes and then backed up by mouse cursors. Flight critical controls still need to be backed by physical hardware but stuff like route planning etc is now almost entirely touch based. For light sports aircraft’s even flight critical stuff can be approved as touch controls. Look at the G3X or Dynon SkyView. They both have some form of dial-based backup controls, but it’s clearly designed for touch first.

No. That doesn’t make it right though.

I’m not asking you to prove anything. I’m saying I haven’t seen evidence either way so for me, it’s too early to draw conclusions.