> Would you prefer for your technologically illiterate relatives (think grandparents/etc getting their first computing device):
Ah, the good old "think of the grandma".
HN's version of "think of the children". And just like the conservative pearl clutchers, I don't think there's much sincerity in those thoughts. You are more afraid of the possibility that there would be less users to squeeze through adtech and crapware sold on appstores. Most HNers make a living from making the world an even worse place.
There's a lot of devs here very happy to have a captive audience of people too ignorant to know better, either exposing their eyeballs to constant onslaught of ads on "free" apps, or paying for really basic functionality.
I will never forget that show HN post that talked about selling a clone of Handbrake, a program that exists just to set a few flags on FFMPEG, and making a living out of it, because the Apple audience has been brainwashed to take out their wallet for the dumbest of things.
The average value add of people constantly bemoaning the idea that there could be regulations to stop them from enslaving new generations to tech is lower than that of scammers.
>>In 2023, there were approximately 55.94 million people living in rural areas in the United States, while about 278.98 million people were living in urban areas
If Trump won, it couldn't have been solely because of people in the boonies, who represent a much smaller proportion of total demographics. The same goes for Brexit, and all the happenings that have been shifting Western societies as a whole towards the far right.
This sort of obliviousness is not helpful in fixing the situation. Same energy as the media acting like Trump could never possibly become POTUS. These incompetents are getting in positions of power because the left and moderate right are, it seems, still not perceiving what is going on outside of their very specific bubbles.
> Should insurance or the state not cover the medical costs of pregnancy?
Do you think pro-natalist policies (anything that can be seen as incentivizing the act of having more children) need to come from a desire to see more equality, or human dignity?
In fact some of the most evil people of the 1900s thought it was good to support the medical costs of pregnancy, and even thought you should /pay families if they had more children to incentivize having more/ (see pro natalist politics in Western Europe in 30s, 40s, 50s. The ones in my country, France, actually had their strongest push in 1939, and are a large part of the reason why France's baby boom was one of the strongest in Europe later on).
You will find out that people who usually hate social programs will have different opinions about anything related to demographics, and it's not complicated to understand why (whether their motives come from racism, or selfishness ie a desire to preserve the GDP and make sure the country won't be an empty hell hole of old people dying in the hospice when they retire).
Recently at the restaurant I saw a family with three kids, all with their own individual smartphones. One was a toddler barely a few months old, too young to even be able to understand how to use it, his smartphone was on a stand on the table, playing some of those coma inducing toddler videos that exist on the nightmare-ish corners of youtube.
There is a legitimate problem at hand here with our relationship with tech and how children.. are left to their own device with that stuff. On purpose, for the most part: the parents seem all too happy with the ability of those devices to make their kids shut up and stay constantly distracted. Doomscrolling habits makes for more "well behaved" children in public settings.
chatGPT is but one of the many symptoms, the root problem is that children should really have no business having unsupervised internet access.
> While China claimed a breakthrough in 2017, manufacturing a ballpoint pen all by itself and “ending a long-term reliance on imported [ballpoint pen tips],” as of 2021 the country was still reportedly 80% dependent on imported ballpoints.
> In fact, Chinese imports of ballpoints pens (comprising the ballpoint and ink reservoir) have more than doubled since 2017, from 12 million USD to nearly 28 million USD last year.
> Machine tools are machines that make other machines. China is a leading producer of machine tools, accounting for about 31% the world’s output in 2021 (p.10, fig. 12)—ahead of Germany (13%), Japan (12%), the US (9%), and Italy (8%). But China is heavily reliant on foreign technology for high-end machine tools: in 2021, it was 91% dependent on foreign firms for the most advanced machine tools.
China just doesn't have the ability to do high precision, high quality engineering and manufacturing.
I am not saying that everything that comes out of China is bad, but that there are limits to what can be produced at a high level of quality there. You can buy simple tools, like knives, at a good level of quality from China, but anything that requires complex tooling is likely not actually made in China.
For that matter, smartphones aren't "made in china". They are /assembled/ there. China doesn't make the CPU in an iPhone, TSMC did. China doesn't make the /machines/ that engrave silicon in TSMC's factories, ASML does. And so on, and on, and on.
If something is truly mainly made in China, with Chinese tools, and it's complex to manufacture, you should avoid like the plague.
China hasn't really become the manufacturing capital of the world. It's just the place where a lot of people are paid to use screwdrivers, glue, and package things.
Ah, the good old "think of the grandma". HN's version of "think of the children". And just like the conservative pearl clutchers, I don't think there's much sincerity in those thoughts. You are more afraid of the possibility that there would be less users to squeeze through adtech and crapware sold on appstores. Most HNers make a living from making the world an even worse place.
There's a lot of devs here very happy to have a captive audience of people too ignorant to know better, either exposing their eyeballs to constant onslaught of ads on "free" apps, or paying for really basic functionality.
I will never forget that show HN post that talked about selling a clone of Handbrake, a program that exists just to set a few flags on FFMPEG, and making a living out of it, because the Apple audience has been brainwashed to take out their wallet for the dumbest of things.
Ah, there it is:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39987579
The average HNer.
The average value add of people constantly bemoaning the idea that there could be regulations to stop them from enslaving new generations to tech is lower than that of scammers.