Yeah, possibly I have read too much into a shower thought that became a Twitter tweet… or whatever the fuck they’re called now.
I was really thinking of not just this guy, but the Boeing whistleblower and Virginia Giuffre, who also seemed to think a small text post or mentions to friends that they’re not suicidal would save them.
Wild to me that these people think this will save them. They need to learn that a text social media post, or a letter, or a signed affidavit (or whatever) is near useless to protect via dissuasion.
Make a goddamn video post. Professionally shot, get your/a psych to be in it with you, get close family and friends in it. Make the videos creative commons so that news agencies have full rights to use them, post to multiple services, and make many versions of the video.
Any group considering your murder knows about blowback and they surely weigh the risks. If you have a crappy 48 word post on Twitter as your only protection they know the death will be easily framed as a suicide by legions of happy-to-oblige media services that’ll repeat the official findings read on video by the coronor/investogator/official, or audio played on podcast, and easily sell the false narrative. But if there are a bunch of high-quality widely available (and free to news networks) counter videos - its going to weigh a much higher risk for them.
I’m in agreement that the privacy grab-bag of age verification services is a big concern, but in my mind the remedy to that is strong privacy laws and protections like GDPR - with harsh punitive penalties for any companies that break them.
Companies already process and control huge amounts of private data so the best approach to increased potential for them gaining more access is strong privacy protections.
I’ll add that the laws that have been implemented in various US states to mandate porn sites validate ID are the ones that have generated this new industry of digital checks and privacy concerns, not the under-16 laws. There are 25 states with these laws now, going back to 2022.
Ironic. The article does not frame the outcome as the fault of Gen Z. It in fact goes to great lengths to point out that the fault almost certainly lies with how they were educated, and the parenting environment they were raised in.
I’ll highlight the framed factors for you and where the blame gets pointed.
Horvath took the same message to Capitol Hill during a 2026 Senate hearing on screen time and children. His framing skipped the generational dunking and focused on exposure. “More than half of the time a teenager is awake, half of it is spent staring at a screen,” he told lawmakers. Human learning, he argued, depends on sustained attention and interaction with other people. Endless feeds and condensed content don’t offer either.
Schools leaned hard into technology during the same window. Educational software replaced textbooks, long readings, and extended problem-solving. After class, students returned to phones, tablets, and laptops, bouncing between social feeds and bite-sized explanations of material they never sat with for very long.
“I’m not anti-tech. I’m pro-rigor,” Horvath told the Post. Rigor, in his view, comes from friction. Reading full texts. Working through confusion. Spending time with material that doesn’t immediately reward you. Take that friction away, and cognitive skills dull. Brains adapt to the environment they’re given, and this one prizes speed over staying power.
The same decline appears outside the United States. Horvath told senators that across roughly 80 countries, academic performance drops after digital technology becomes widely embedded in classrooms. The timing alone raises serious questions about how learning environments affect cognitive development.
This conversation feels uncomfortable because it doesn’t offer villains or easy fixes. Horvath summed it up bluntly during his testimony. “A sad fact our generation has to face is this: Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.” His recommendation focused on restraint, dialing back screens in schools, and restoring depth before the next generation is doomed.
Most frustrating for me is not just that many people read this article and take away an emotive framing that is completely counter to the text of the article, but that many people on Lemmy that read this article will just memory-hole it and continue to complain about phone bans in school, and the under-16 social media bans going on around the world that are very likely to have significant positive benefits for children’s learning and go some ways to resolving the problem.
They’re measuring lower across all the classical tests designed to measure intelligence. The skills they test for are all very much still needed in modern life.
That song is based on a real lady, and she didn’t just sell sea shells - they were fossils that were hundreds of millions of years old.
She and her family made a living off it, and she’s now known worldwide for the incredibly rare fossils she carefully extracted and sold to museums.
Not the worst idea, all told.
But first before you buy a new SSD don’t forget to go back to September of last year.
Get ready for mid-life joint pain and RSI if you spend that much time doing just one thing in one posture.
Wish it wasn’t how things go but it do be.
I read the same, and I feel like that is a negative feedback loop.
Like the more the content is written so that people don’t have to pay attention and plot and scenery is verbally stated by actors, the less people will feel like they need to pay attention… and then they’ll turn to their phone.
Its gonna come back to bite them when they dumb the content down and people realize they don’t actually need to pay for Netflix to run in the background, and can instead just have YouTube videos of people reciting the plot to them while they doodle on their phones.
Yeah that’s a good point. It’s a psychological hurdle.
Except that if you look at the stats, most Netflix viewers binge watch (88% here), and most engage in long binges (70% here reported 5 episodes or more at a time), binge watching is by all accounts ‘the norm’ for streaming service users.
So while you may be able to ‘decide if you want to continue or stop’ the statistics show that the vast majority of people end up watching much, much longer than a movie runtime - which was my point.
Not to completely invalidate your point but have you ever noticed the [pause] button when you’re watching a movie?
The exception is for cinema films, and any cinema film over two hours long (which is very rare) will generally have an intermission. Not that we were limiting the discussion to cinema entertainment anyway.
Love that people complain about the length of movies while simultaneously happily siting through eight, hour+ long episodes of Stranger Things over two evenings.
Especially when many hours could have easily been left on the cutting room floor of most streaming shows, but they need to streeetch the runtime so that the writers can meet their contractual, or whatever other internal requirements.
Did you have an iPad/phone shoved in front of you during mealtime, or when waiting for a sibling during their sports practice or game, or while waiting at the doctors office, or if your parents had guests or were visiting a friend, or in literally every single potential moment of boredom that could be filled with learning patience, reflection and just enjoying silence?
Because that’s the new normal for a whole generation of kids.
I have young kids in gen alpha, bought them up with quite minimal screen time, and the behavioural differences between them and their peers that have been bought up with heavy screen use iPad as the primary tool of choice is stark and very concerning for those kids’ future.
And lemme tell you, none of the parents I gently tried to encourage the importance of boredom with over the years changed their behaviour much. As soon as it became a regular tool to deal with an child needing attention it became a very hard thing to part with.
The same Melius Finance that gave Tesla stock its highest rating of “must own” due to Elon lying again that Full Self Drive is being deployed imminently to Teslas via their in-house “AI chips” eta Dec 2025?
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/tesla-stock-must-own-melius-220721932.html
Tesla stock is currently at $416 after a high of $474 in November, around when this call was made.
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I think they’re only not ‘discontinuing’ the Cybertruck because they have a massive backlog of them to sell, and they don’t want to spook the few potential buyers that remain.
They have scaled them back though, discontinuing the cheapest RWD model, and a bunch of trim options. The writing is definitely on the wall.
And all while the ongoing Tesla sales boycott is occurring… Impressive.
Volkswagen has now overtaken Tesla witj the lead-selling EV model in the EU. Love to see it.
I don’t wanna shit on the positive result of a good environmental policy, but it sure is hard to sit it in my brain alongside the knowledge of the semi-militarized Chinese mega-trawler fleets that are devastating the oceans while this is happening…