Yeah it always feels awkward getting people to celebrate me. Like “hey guys lets have a party where you give me gifts and celebrate my existence”. Seems weirdly presumptuous
If you don’t want to celebrate your birthday, you can take the day to celebrate your mom. She’s the one who did all the work, after all. And I think pushing an entire human being out of your birth canal is worthy of some recognition.
I agree that if you can get enough parents onboard with the no cell phone rule then it's not a problem. But there's a bit of a coordination problem there so that might not be achievable in all circumstances
I’m relatively young so I can attest to the fact that, even when I was in high-school, not having a phone would put you at a social disadvantage. Thats how kids kept in touch out of school hours and coordinated social events. It’s not ideal but thats how things work now.
Assuming he hasn’t destroyed the evidence, this could potentially lead to more arrests once police search his laptop and read his texts messages and emails.
I should have been more clear. I mean banning advertising in general would not be realistic, so a ban on targeted advertising is a more realistic alternative
Fair point. I'm sure if there was a social media ban the fediverse would be a low priority. That said I still don't see how it would be financially unviable because like I mentioned earlier most instances already have an application process
The ban target advertising would definitely be a more realistic solution than banning advertisements in general (which some people are advocating for here). I really am not a fan of ads and would love if they were banned, but I understand that it's not politically realistic due to what a large role they play in our economy.
You don't need to ban literally any website that could be classified as social media to have the desired effect. You just need to ban the big ones: TikTok, Instagram etc. Because these are the sites that are creating the most harm (through addiction, body image issues, etc.). There are diminishing returns blocking anything beyond that. Kids aren't getting addicted to gardening forums or developing anorexia because they spent too much time on tech support IRC channels.
This is a unique idea. I think if we were to have a publically funded curation effort it would need to maintain some structural independence from whatever government was in power, to prevent any potential for abuse. It would be like government funded news agencies, like the BBC or the CBC. These organizations are funded by their respective governments funds but the government can't tell them what to publish unless It's violating some law or something (e.g. by doxxing someone). Similarly: the government could fund these block lists but have no say in what websites eventually land on it.
Ideally the process would be as transparent as possible too, but that might have some drawbacks. By explaining in depth why they blocked a website they might be inadvertently drawing attention to that website, which is not always a good thing.
Damn so thats why I keep buying potato chips