My friend recently got his sons a smartphone and he says their relationship has been irrevocably damaged because of it. Not because they are rude, etc. But when they used to talk, now it's complete silence and them looking at their phones, chatting with their friends or girlfriends. He hates the phones now because there is no socialization whatsoever with his kids. The power of the phone is that strong, and he had such a close relationship with his sons.
Like others who have replied, I'm skeptical that it's really about the phones. The age when kids get phones just happens to be about the same age when they start to separate from their parents and have always done so. Some people maintain a strong connection during that time and some don't. 'Twere ever thus.
Personally, I'm fortunate that I've maintained a pretty strong connection with my 15yo daughter. A large part of that is that I'm comfortable communicating with her the same way her other friends do, not only the physical medium of the phone but also the cultural medium of memes and slang and pop culture. I can still play Authority Figure when I need to, but there's a lot less friction involved when I'm also part of her daily social context and not The Alien who requires a unique mode of communication.
It's time to move past the idea of "self-control" as an option against the onslaught of addictive apps. I've been leaving my phone at home on the weekends when I go out for a few hours, and it's been liberating. It's easier to leave my phone at home completely than to stop checking it when I'm away. And yes, this does require some self-control. I mention this to friends and they say they can't at all leave because of paranoia - what if I'm really needed, what if I miss something? I'm okay with missing important calls if they come. That's the price of it all.
If I understand correctly, what you're saying is you use self-control to create situations where you don't need to rely on self-control? That seems like a good compromise between having a smartphone 24/7 and no smartphone ever. I've done similar things in the past; when I needed to study for an upcoming exam, I setup a web filter that would block distracting websites if I browsed them for too long.
My own approach is to treat the phone as a tool, not as a social media consumption gadget. GPS, quick point-and-shoot camera, weather apps, music player - those are my main uses. Spending all day with my face buried in my phone? No thank you.
one possible interpretation of this story is: when given the option, the son prefers to talk to his friends instead of his parent. the phone is not the culprit here; it merely revealed a pre-existing preference.
I think you're spot on, and this is part of the reason I will have "no phones* after dinner/school/whatever" when my kids become smartphone age. I expect I will have similar rules about headphones in cars, or tablets at restaurant tables.
If my relationship with my kid's is falling apart, I want to have some sort of signal that alerts me to it happening. I want it to feel awkward, so that I know to fix it. If the damage is masked behind a screen, I might miss it and never know to repair it.
* or whatever the new distracting device is in ~10 years.
I think my point suggests the opposite conclusion: arbitrary electronics bans are counterproductive. if your kid chooses the device over interacting with you, that is a strong sign that something is wrong; this is the signal you are looking for! if you remove the choice by prohibiting the device during "family time", you are just removing a source of information.
my parents never told us we couldn't use our phones at dinner, but they did explain that when we did it, we were signaling that what we were doing with the phone was more interesting/important than family dinner. I decided that wasn't the message I wanted to give my parents, so I would only pull out the phone for time-sensitive communications. a little bit of respect can go a long way.
Some patterns work in some families and don't in others. I don't believe a permissive parenting style is going to work equally well everywhere. A kid choosing to do something bad for them is often just a signal of youth and inexperience.
I just think there's an important difference between "this activity is harmful in excess, so you may only do it for n minutes per day" and "I've decided I want to interact with you at this time every day, so you are not allowed to use your phone then".
I think it's okay to set reasonable limits on screentime. I don't think you should force your child to interact with you; that seems kind of unhealthy.
idk man, the pace of text communication is a little slow for my tastes. if I have the option of texting person A or speaking to person B, I'll usually choose B if both conversations are just as interesting. ymmv, of course.
What if I told you there is no scenario, at all, in which the best thing for any child is a smart phone, or a social media app, or the internet on any device?
> But when they used to talk, now it's complete silence and them looking at their phones, chatting with their friends or girlfriends. He hates the phones now because there is no socialization whatsoever
I hate it but it happens with adults too all the time. Not only it's incredibly rude but I feel I'm missing a lot of meaningful communication
I think as a parent you can still compromise and set limits/rules on the usage of the smartphone(s) at home. There is time to talk to friends (before smartphones, it was MSN messenger or else), and there is time to spend as a family where phones are not allowed. The same thing is also kinda true for school.
I agree about etiquette. Using a phone while with someone doesn't bother me in and of itself. Shutting others out does, whether it's in person or online. The "with people but texting" scenario is difficult because there's no established norm for how to balance the competing social needs.
Your friends are probably lying to you or themselves
(or both) about the making money part. It's typical for gamblers to overstate their winnings and understate their losses in the long-haul to somehow convince themselves they're ahead when they're actually behind.
They are lying because you've never made money daytrading? As per my other comment, this is absurd. Being a profitable daytrader is very hard, and it's not probable, but definitely possible.
It's not a question of possibility, but a question of probability. Lots of things are possible with very tiny probabilities. That's why we do research, to estimate the probability of a phenomenon being true, in this case making money daytrading.
The research in the paper suggests that the probability that your friends are making more than a teller is 0.4%, therefore the probability that they are making less than a teller is 99.6%. So, if you have a hundred friends in daytrading, only one of them made more than minimum wage, two of them made money but at or below minimum wage, and ninety-seven of them lost money. Therefore, if they all told you they were making money, most (97%) of them were lying.
Look at the 10-k filings of companies. Lot's of people beat the market and hedge funds in particular. The thing is it's a hard skill to attain. Day trading is probably not the best, but the study should have focused on Full-Time trading. If you trade reversal/swing it's definitely possible to beat the market.
Just this year, I am at 35% returns, however, September is not in my calculation and this month was probably the most profitable so I should be around 50% at the end of the month if not higher (and this is a bad year.) Also the market has been choppy lately, the last few months so harder to lock in gains.
All things considered, "5 figures" seems like a pretty low income for something that is "very very hard", and risky. Seems like if you have the skills and tenacity to day trade like that you could find some other job to pay you high 5 figures with a more stability.
$20,000 per year is livable in many areas of the US, especially if you have a lot of savings to back that up. The point is that saying it's "impossible" is a lie.
Where is $20,000 ‘livable’? Savings or not, I don’t know of many places where you could live on a net income of ~$1,300/mo. what do you do for medical benefits alone in that income bracket?
If you have $20,000 you get MI Health plan, essentially free healthcare in the poor income bracket (for now anyway unless it gets taken away, sign up where you get food stamps).
Rent on a 2 bedroom apartment, as long as you are not in the "big" city of Marquette should be $400-$500.
Heck when I was younger we 'rented' an entire 5 bedroom house, two story with basement for $950 (split 4 ways with roommates).
Food and cost of living is cheap, especially if you go to farmers markets and buy stuff in season.
Winter can be tough as heating costs go up, however they do offer those 'locked' in plans where you pay more in summer month but less in winter as it averages out your price. Overall you always pay more this way, however if you have trouble managing money having a steady rate can be more beneficial.
If they took medical benefits away from low income bracket which I could see happening, well just hope you don't get sick, otherwise the rest is doable. As my dad once told me when I moved out at 18, as long as you got a roof over your head, and food in your stomach, the rest is details.
I feel that is subjective. I know many people in this area who live wonderful happy lives being self sufficient, living off the land and having a large community and frequent family gatherings. The area is beautiful if you like outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, fishing, bike trails and in the winter there is a lot of cross country skiing and snowmobiling. Worst thing here right now is the Opioid crises which sadly is happening in many rural areas across the nation.
I guess personally I would prefer the country life vs fast living in a big city, but again that's my opinion. Especially with the ability to work remote, and the ability to get things shipped up here via the internet it makes life easy.
Gone are the days of having to drive 3 hours for computer parts :)
I make $10,000 per year while sitting on my backside and at almost zero risk. It’s called “collecting rent”, which is especially easy if you have a lot of savings.
Sigh. Here's the truth, everybody knows a guy at work who claims they make money "day trading."
If you know more than 1 person who beats the market consistently by trading, you should open a fund-of-funds and start investing institutional money, ASAP. The Harvard endowment would love to speak with you.
This is absurd. You don't know my friends, and you say they are lying?
Daytrading for a single account and managing a multi-billion dollar fund are completely different strategies and need completely different skillsets. You should educate yourself before talking authoritatively on subjects you don't know very much about.
> It's hard work but they make 5 to 6 figures consistently per year.
For how many years, and how much seed money did they start with? The problem with making a high percentage consistently is it requires taking on huge risks. Those huge risks mean at some point a trade will go bad and your friends will be done.
California voted against gay marriage AND legalization of marijuana. So it's not nearly as progressive as you think. It took a court case to bring gay marriage to California and a second attempt for pot.
California was once the stronghold of conservativism, recall GOP God-head
Reagan had his political epicenter of Orange County. Now, California is majority minority and much more liberal. Could the same happen to Texas, Georgia, Arizona?
There MUST be some sort of ISO certification for support people.
Giving first line, poorly trained support people access to people's PII and the ability to change passwords is something that needs to be stopped. Social engineers are completely exploiting poorly trained, minimum wage workers for huge gains.
We need to have some sort of ISO certification so that front line support people must hand over any security information to highly trained second-tier staff. If EVERY company used the same subset of information to verify, under the guidance of well-trained staff with a consistent methodology across all companies, and didn't expose various bits and pieces of info (some use last for of SSN, some use credit card info, address, date of birth, etc) then it would extremely hard for social engineers to do hacks like this.
Yes. If there was some uniform standard on how support workers were trained, what data they have access to, then social engineering attacks would drop dramatically. The leaking of data would not be as prevalent and it would be standardized.
Last I heard from some friends in YC when considering a position there, Wepay was handling less than 10^6 payments per day. Is that still the case and is something with such low requirements a good replacement for Kafka in the wild?
Your comment made me realize that I had confused WePay with WeChat Pay, which has a slightly different scale. The "We$VERB" field is getting a bit crowded.
A preliminary injunction is considered very strong. So it's not that "nothing is final here", it's actually almost pretty much final unless something comes out of left field.
The injunction was to stop LinkedIn from blocking access while the case is ongoing, not to stop them from arguing that hiQ violated the CFAA. The trial court could hear the arguments and say "hiQ is wrong, they did violate the CFAA". Maybe that's not likely, but it also is not yet decided.
So what exactly did I misunderstand and why do you think this is final?
The 9th circuit uses a sliding-scale version of the preliminary injunction test. Because hiQ has more at stake, all hiQ needs is a serious question in this case, not a likelyhood of success on the merits.
It still might be case that hiQ has less than a 50% chance of winning in the eyes of the appeals court.
He was convicted of a crime, and he served his time. In hindsight, the sentence was too light, but as regular people are we really supposed to understand all the details? If I met someone who went to jail, should she be exiled forever after serving her sentence? I just don't understand. And people get lenient sentences all the time, am I as a non-lawyer supposed to understand this and then give my own sentence on top of that? Or should some people who commit crimes should never, ever be allowed to interact with other humans again?
As far as I can tell, from the perspective of those around him in 2014, Epstein was convicted of a crime, and served his time. By 2014, he had committed no further crimes from what people knew at the time, so why exactly is this an outrage. Obviously in 2019, we know that he committed further crimes and he rightly went to jail, and it's sad that he won't face justice. But in 2014, did anyone know this and should they be treated so harshly if they didn't?
The only real problem was covering up the donation, which Ito definitely should have been fired for, but I don't understand why Epstein at that time should have been considered a persona non grata.
The biggest question is: should criminals never ever be forgiven for their crimes? And should anyone who decides to forgive them and associate with them also be considered despicable as well? Or is it just some criminals depending on their crime? Who judges which crimes should never be forgiven and which should?
I will reserve the right to not do business with pedophiles and sex traffickers — even if they have served time in prison for their crimes. And I reserve the right to judge people who do harshly, especially since I know that horrible people sometimes use these sorts of donations to launder their reputation and I don’t want to be anywhere near that.
Want to remain a part of polite civic society? Don’t rape kids.
But what about people who feel otherwise and think that by serving out his sentence he has paid for their sins? If those people associate with criminals who have served their sentence, are those people worse in your eyes? It seems like not only is redemption for criminals no longer allowed, but you're not allowed to believe in redemption for others as well.
I don’t know what we’re arguing. If you want to professionally associate with people who have raped and exploited kids from a position of extreme wealth and privilege, then I guess you’re probably legally allowed to, as long as you’re not putting people in danger. You have to decide where you’re at on that. I know where I’m at. I think most people do. Which is why they’re disgusted.
The question isn't about legality. It's about morality. Is it morally wrong to judge people who decide to associate with criminals after they have served their sentence? That to me is the crux of the issue here.
What it sounds like is that criminals are not absolved by serving their sentence. Or maybe some are but it depends on the crime? And sometimes it's okay to ostracize those that believe that criminals are absolved by serving their sentence, depending on the crime?
> What it sounds like is that criminals are not absolved by serving their sentence. Or maybe some are but it depends on the crime? And sometimes it's okay to ostracize those that believe that criminals are absolved by serving their sentence, depending on the crime?
Sounds about right.
I'll add that it is difficult to forgive people who show no remorse for their crimes.
There are also certain crimes and evil actions that are hard to forgive, period. Sexual abuse, rape, and murder are all very hard to let go of (with very good reason), and even more so when the victims are children.
Epstein checks all those boxes, which is why even the people around him are so tainted by association.
> Is it morally wrong to judge people who decide to associate with criminals after they have served their sentence?
No. Judge away.
> What it sounds like is that criminals are not absolved by serving their sentence. Or maybe some are but it depends on the crime? And sometimes it's okay to ostracize those that believe that criminals are absolved by serving their sentence, depending on the crime?
He never served his time and he continued to commit crimes and yes, people are allowed to not want to associate with someone who raped children and helped others to rape children.
The poster is not defending Epstein (is anyone?) but is instead defending (in the abstract) people who may have met him, heard that he had been convicted and served time for sociliting underage women, and, given no other information about him, decided that given he had served his time with no further convictions that he had been rehabilitated and should not be alienated.
For every Epstein, there are others who have been convicted of similar (or worse) crimes who, ten years later, have served their time, are reformed, and are no longer a threat to society. This doesn't mean you don't have the right to choose to avoid interacting with them (I personally wouldn't when it comes to underage solicitation as was Epstein's conviction), but I'm inclined to agree with the poster that I wouldn't morally judge those who do because they on good faith, and with no contrary evidence, assume the person has faced justice and has been rehabilitated. I think it's important that as a society we don't have a general rule that it's OK to discriminate against convicted felons -- it seems wise and just to, in general, try to forgive and be fair to those who have been convicted of a crime in the past and who have no other evidence to disprove the claim they have changed and are rehabilitated.
To me this has no bearing on the details of this specific case here, because based upon peoples' behavior it seems likely that everyone involved actually knew this guy was still an abuser after his conviction. It sounds like Epstein made a point of telling people about his behavior as a means of controlling them, so in general anyone who took money from this guy I think is guilty of at the very least a moral failure.
I'm perfectly okay with executing rapists, sex traffickers, etc, if that were the sentence imposed.
But if you don't impose a life sentence, but then believe a person should continue to pay for their crimes after the amount determined by a court of law, isn't that hypocrisy? Having someone serve their sentence in jail but then making them never able to interact in society again because of outrage over their crime is fundamentally unfair. If you're going to do that, then just execute them or throw them in jail forever, because that's effectively what they're doing. And as I said, I'm perfectly okay with making execution for crimes the punishment for a large swathe of crimes, including everything that Epstein did.
And even worse, if someone believes that a person deserves the right to be forgiven for their sins, and they are thrown into the same bucket for even associating with them, is that even fair?
Apparently Bill Gates met with Epstein several times after his conviction. Should he be punished as well?
The article says that each entry has an ID associated with a Facebook account. What leads you to think that there are entries in this dataset for non-users?
It's well known that Facebook collects information on non users as well, frequently called "shadow profiles.", Zuck admitted as much to Congress although he claimed not to know what shadow profile meant. [0]
Whether or not that information was part of this database isn't clear, but it also isn't something the parent comment claimed.
> You are likely in this database if even a single one of your contacts uploaded their contacts to Facebook.
Shadow profiles are old news. The suspect claim is that the parent comment is more informed on this database than the source that published it.
> Whether or not that information was part of this database isn't clear
Yes it is. According to the source this particular public data dump consists only of entries with IDs linked a Facebook account.
> Each record contained a user’s unique Facebook ID and the phone number listed on the account. A user’s Facebook ID is typically a long, unique and public number associated with their account
I don't see why shadow profiles couldn't use the same ID system. why not?
For the parent comment saying they were in the data set: My initial interpretation was they meant if one Facebook user had done so, and you were also a Facebook user, whether or not you had provided your #, it was now associate with you. Your interpretation might be correct though.
