I'm 66, walked today about a mile and a half..... stopped at two stores, one, a supermarket.
Weather is nice enough, thanks to that global warming stuff.
Carried two bags of groceries home, and the whole trip was enjoyable.
And NO..... I did not carry a cellphone with me, why? - I don't need it for such things.
I much better enjoyed the "real world" scenery, the breeze, and the people around me.
Two types of chemistry sets popular in the US at that time -- Gilbert, and Porter. I remember the latter was in Cherry Hill NJ. Both companies kits had a little bottle of phenolphthalein which was a pH indicator and laxative.
Interestingly, about 10 years ago my wife was so engrossed in trying to look into our neighbours house as she walked past, she tripped, fell and dislocated her small finger at the 2nd joint from the end. It was actually at 90 degrees to the rest of the finger. Ugleeee.
Anyway, to cut a long story short (we were at the A&E at our local hospital until 2 am . . . Saturday nite, as usual lots of trouble . . . ) the doc told us there are two peaks in broken limbs in males in England. The first is between 7 and 10 and typically arises because boys do exactly what they are doing in that picture - climbing trees, poles, walls etc. The breaks are mainly legs and arms. The 2nd peak is in their late teens to early 20's and arises mainly from sports injuries and include ribs and collar bones.
Probably the same the world over. Kids will always be seen to be dumber than their parents but I don't think its true. We were all dumb up until the age of 30.
Some dumbazz added that to my bottle of Irn-Bru, Scotland's other national drink, and I can certainly vouch for its laxative qualities!
I was condemmed to sh*t through the eye of a needle for an entire afternoon. No one ever admitted to performing the vile act as I may well have murdered them! 😡
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I know you're being sarcastic, but I think there is actually may be a very real element of truth to what you're saying. 🙂
A couple of generations before me, children used to walk miles (kilometres!) to school across largely unmarked country; across meadows, through woods, beside streams. No roads, no street-signs, no traffic-lights to tell you not to cross the meadow that held the bull.
I took public transportation to school starting fairly young, so I had to know where the bus-stop was, which bus to board, how much money to pay for my ticket, where to get off, et cetera. But I had an (unpaved) road that led me to the bus-stop, and there were landmarks like street-signs and buildings that told me where to get off the bus. It was easier for me to find my way than it had been for my great-grandparents.
What if we go back a couple of centuries? Canada, for instance, was almost entirely wilderness, and anyone old enough to walk away from "home" needed to also have the wits to find their way back, through unmarked virgin forests. Ten year old children knew how to do that; even younger children did. Anthropologists say that a seven year old child was considered to be a reasonably self-sufficient member of the tribe in those times, smaller and physically weaker, certainly, but expected to be fairly independent, and to contribute food and other forms of help to the community.
Like most people of my generation, I've never learned the skills to deal with finding my way through dense unmarked forest. If you took me twenty kilometres into a real forest and dumped me there, there's a good chance I would never make it out alive. Am I stupider than a ten-year-old child from a couple of centuries ago? Certainly I'm more limited. Maybe I am stupider, too.
Bigger picture: the human race evolved intelligence because we were a small, helpless, slow, tasty treat in a world full of strong, powerful, fast carnivores that enjoyed snacking on us. There were many challenges to survival, so the smarter you were, the more likely you would live long enough to pass on your genes. Those who tried to pet the cute leopard or who couldn't remember the way home, died in short order.
How about today? There are few challenges that we have to face to survive. We live in a kinder, gentler time, when wild predators have been wiped out, and most societies won't stand by and let the weak, the slow, or the stupid starve to death. It's absolutely the humane thing to do, and no sane person would wish otherwise; but it has removed the evolutionary pressure to be smart. Now we can be dumb as a post, and still survive to the age where we can pass on our low-IQ genes. (If you haven't seen Idiocracy, it's worth a watch: Idiocracy - Wikipedia )
This won't be a fast process, but it may very well be that over the centuries our species becomes, on average, dumber than before.
There are at least two independent sub-threads within this thread. One is "Ha ha, I'm so smart, everyone else is so dumb!" 😀
That particular sub-thread is idiotic. The impulse behind it is the same brute-stupid one that leads to racism, sexism, et cetera; blind ego, trying to feel superior to "the other", without any shred of evidence to actually support that sense of superiority.
The other sub-thread is more thoughtful: participants are trying to put together observations and data points, and identify changes in abilities and behaviour across generations.
There is very little doubt that ongoing changes in our world lead to ongoing changes in our abilities and behaviours. My generation climbed trees for fun, and in the process, we learned about gravity, friction, and inelastic collisions. But we didn't learn to find our way home through ten miles of dense forest, as our ancestors did.
Now many kids don't climb trees, make sand-castles, or learn to use a pair of scissors, a screw-driver, or a hammer. As young adults, they don't have a sense of what a pailful of sand weighs (i.e. the concept of density), and can't do things that seem very simple to members of my generation, such as cut a reasonably straight line through a sheet of paper with a pair of scissors, or hammer a nail into a piece of wood without smashing their fingers and missing the nail.
No doubt. We are a very self-blind species, and as I alluded to earlier, we love to feel superior to "the other". As Robert Burns wrote,
In contemporary English, Burn's poem means "If only we could see ourselves with the same clarity with which other people see us, we would make far fewer foolish mistakes". 🙂Robert Burns said:
Clearly, you don't know the right older people. 😀
Some of the older people I knew could code video games directly in 32-bit assembly language, figure out how to invert large matrices in milliseconds using slow 1960s computer hardware (think cruise missle terrain recognition system), put together supercomputers using Linux and a cluster of dozens of cheap PCs, and write and run software that uses sets of complicated differential equations to tell us what our overheated planet's disastrous future is going to look like.
(This is far more challenging, and requires far more knowledge, than what the young coders at Microsoft do, i.e. coding buttons and check boxes on yet another user interface for yet another privacy-stealing piece of software.)
Young people today often expect computer illiteracy among the elderly; they forget that lots of computers were in use by the 1960s, and many smart people born in the 1940s and 1950s spent their careers working with computers. Those people are in their 70s and 80s today, and many of them know / knew far more about the workings of a computer than the average twenty year old swiping at his/her iPhone does.
What about young adults who have never actually struck a match, or lit a fire? Ask around - if you live in an urban area, you might be as surprised as I was at the result of the informal poll. 😱
I don't know if people are getting stupider in the short term (I doubt it), but I'm quite sure that the average person's real-world cabilities are diminishing, and rapidly at that.
One more data point: the "automotive technology" (auto repair) instructors I knew were becoming increasingly concerned, and afraid, during the years from roughly 2000 to 2016. Around the year 2000, one auto student was routinely expected to be able to do a "brake job" on one axle (both fronts, or both rears) during one 2-hour lab, and if he/she was good, and no unexpected problems surfaced, it wasn't unusual to be able to replace the brake pads on all four wheels during one lab.
By 2016, it took one student per wheel, and two hours was no longer sufficient time to replace one set of brake pads on one wheel. Auto lab instructors were having to give students an extra hour to finish the job, and often the instructors had to lend a hand to get it done in time.
But that wasn't why they were scared; they were scared because of a sharp rise in dangerous mistakes, such as trying to hoist a car into the air without centering it over the lifting pads first. 😱
Which, I suspect, was a result of that growing disconnect from the behaviour of real physical objects in the real physical world. If you've never tried to balance a pile of plastic blocks on top of each other in kindergarten, or a pile of bricks at the construction site down the block on the way to elementary school, how will you ever internalize the frightening destructive power of a two-tonne SUV hoisted a couple of metres into the air?
-Gnobuddy
Apropos nothing at all: is that a mandarin fish in your avatar?
I first saw a mandarin fish at the Birch Aquarium, part of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, San Diego, California. It was one of the most incredible creatures I'd ever seen, a living jewel of coruscating colour. I've never seen that amount and variety of colour on any other living creature, before or since.
-Gnobuddy
Wise old tech,
I don't need a cellphone on my daily walks either but it sure came in handy on 3 occasions in particular.
When there was smoke coming out a window in the development next to ours.
While out with my neighbour and she sprained her ankle too far to hop home.
When three thugs were roughing up a guy who didn't look like he could take even one of them.
No, I don't take it out unless it's needed but there's 3 times I am glad I always take it with me.
I don't need a cellphone on my daily walks either but it sure came in handy on 3 occasions in particular.
When there was smoke coming out a window in the development next to ours.
While out with my neighbour and she sprained her ankle too far to hop home.
When three thugs were roughing up a guy who didn't look like he could take even one of them.
No, I don't take it out unless it's needed but there's 3 times I am glad I always take it with me.
Such an astonishingly beautiful creature. 🙂
As if it's not enough that Australia has so many incredible birds and animals, there are so many astonishing creatures in the ocean around Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand too. Sea dragons and handfish are among my favourites too...the first time I saw a picture of a weedy sea dragon, I thought it was a crude Photoshop job. 🙂 Later I saw both leafies and weedies at the Birch aquarium, and many years later, also at the Aquarium Of The Pacific in Long Beach, California.
I've never seen a live handfish, though. And now they're being driven to extinction by climate change, and the abnormally warmer ocean waters around Tasmania. I may never get to see one except in blurry video clips. 🙁
-Gnobuddy
This is what makes the decision difficult. Smartphones are amazing, wonderful things that save lives and keep people from getting lost. Smartphones are also horrible things that turn millions of people into distracted, dysfunctional zombies, suck a thousand dollars a year or more out of their pockets, and hand over all their personal information to vast hordes of corporate thugs.
If smartphones were entirely beneficial, or entirely detrimental, it would be very easy to figure out what to do about them. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to get the good without also getting the bad.
A flip-phone is one possible compromise. They're not addictive in the way smartphones are, yet they're just as capable of saving lives. And while they do transmit your location every moment of every day, they don't hoover down tens of thousands of tracker cookies from the Internet that spy on your every key-press. (One security researcher found that Google Chrome allowed over eleven thousand two hundred more tracker cookies onto his computer during two weeks of testing than Firefox did.)
-Gnobuddy
It isn't the device, it is the apps. Specifically, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. They are addicted to the attention, not the device.
I'm young enough to have let myself slip into this trap ever so slightly about 10-12 years ago. I quickly realized that I didn't like the feeling of wanting to check Facebook after posting something. The fact that I enjoyed seeing that people "liked" something I posted. They've proven now that our brains get a dopamine rush from it.
I have an addictive personality, but I am good at recognizing the signs and I am good at quitting things that I like too much (I've had plenty of practice). So one day I just cancelled it all. Got rid of the apps, deleted any of the accounts that I could, and never went back.
I still have a smart phone. I use it to phone people, check email, text family and friends. I do my best to not use it in social situations.
If someone who is nearly 50 needs to be this conscious and disciplined about it, the younger generations seem doomed. Luckily, I banned my daughters from social media while they were growing up. Now that they are very close to adulthood, they have a pretty good handle on reality and have not fallen into the trap that their friends have. Oddly, they prefer the company of middle-aged (or older) adults because most people their age are so different from them.
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I'm not saying that cellphones aren't handy devices, but it's obvious that society in general has become addicted to them, and abuse them.
In other words, yes, there is a useful, valid reason to use them, but please, don't allow the device to overtake your whole life.
That - is the problem today.
To comment further, these devices have also caused deaths through their overusage.
People just don't know when to put them away anymore.
While we are off-topic, I'll take the opportunity to bitch about distracted driving.
My "commute" to work is about 6km one way. Every time I drive it, I count dozens of oncoming drivers that are looking at their phones.
This addiction now kills more people in British Columbia than drunk driving, and it is only going to get worse.
Strange world indeed. I enjoy driving very much - it is a great excuse to ignore my phone calls and texts.
EDIT: I see this at least relates to the post immediately above, which I did not see before.
My "commute" to work is about 6km one way. Every time I drive it, I count dozens of oncoming drivers that are looking at their phones.
This addiction now kills more people in British Columbia than drunk driving, and it is only going to get worse.
Strange world indeed. I enjoy driving very much - it is a great excuse to ignore my phone calls and texts.
EDIT: I see this at least relates to the post immediately above, which I did not see before.
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If anyone has not seen the "Black Mirror" episode named "Nosedive" you should check it out on Netflix. Is this where it is all headed? They already have a social credit system like this in China.
This thread is hilarious, and yes, it does make me feel very lucky to be here still.
How about magnesium chips/scraps, on fire, then adding water, in the vicinity of high voltage power lines. That’s something that someone from my generation managed to do.
I could probably write a book on the stupid things I’ve done.
So the next generations will be less apt to do things outdoors it appears, how that will change things has yet to be seen.
How about magnesium chips/scraps, on fire, then adding water, in the vicinity of high voltage power lines. That’s something that someone from my generation managed to do.
I could probably write a book on the stupid things I’ve done.
So the next generations will be less apt to do things outdoors it appears, how that will change things has yet to be seen.
Well...when I was around six or seven years old I discovered that my blunt nosed scissors (the kind you give to little kids) fit perfectly into the horizontal part of the "T" shaped holes in the outlet receptacle...yep, there were sparks until the fuse blew. The grown-ups were not amused, and I'm lucky I didn't seriously hurt my ignorant self.
The state of NSW now has mobile phone detection cameras. Some fixed, transportable, or attached to police cars. The fines are huge, and the points loss heavy.
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Being a "senior", I much enjoy the life I have, and the knowledge I've amassed.
My cellphone is a 2002 model, devoid of having GPS....
I don't "do" facebook, twitter, instagram, etc etc...
I don't subscribe to cable tv, or any internet-based services like netflix, etc...
Broadcast TV is fine enough, I get 60+ channels in crystal clear digital....
Plus my Panasonic LED TV, all my TV's are a "dumb TV" - nothing but a TV.
The radios in my home are all "vintage" AM-FM types...
So no "spying" goes on with these things, and my Fios-connected computers are cleaned regularly of cookies to minimise crap, plus ad blockers keep crap out of my face.
It's pretty nice not having to have big corp up your azz, if I had my choice, I'd live completely off "the grid".
I feel "free" of all the junk going on in the world, and I like it.
My cellphone is a 2002 model, devoid of having GPS....
I don't "do" facebook, twitter, instagram, etc etc...
I don't subscribe to cable tv, or any internet-based services like netflix, etc...
Broadcast TV is fine enough, I get 60+ channels in crystal clear digital....
Plus my Panasonic LED TV, all my TV's are a "dumb TV" - nothing but a TV.
The radios in my home are all "vintage" AM-FM types...
So no "spying" goes on with these things, and my Fios-connected computers are cleaned regularly of cookies to minimise crap, plus ad blockers keep crap out of my face.
It's pretty nice not having to have big corp up your azz, if I had my choice, I'd live completely off "the grid".
I feel "free" of all the junk going on in the world, and I like it.
I stopped reading the thread. But to the OP, maybe you should be glad they’re learning something in the physical world... tough lessons aren’t so common these days.