https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...on/534198/

Quote:One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people...




https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...on/534198/

So that others might learn .... and ... for pure pleasure of venting.

What were your wrong turns in life?

What was wrong about them and what were the lessons learned?

What would your X year old self tell your Y year old self and / or, what would you tell up and coming Millennials and eventually, Homelanders. A few Homelanders are now approaching tweenerhood, which is typically where wrong turns start to happen. Some of my earliest wrong turns happened when I was 9.

So our 20-year old moved back home (temporarily, so we're told) after being away for school, and I've noticed something that I'm now seeing resonating across the rest of society ... and am wondering if this is a symptom of the 4T: valuing style/perception over content/knowledge.

He (and his girlfriend) are massively concerned with how they're perceived.  All teens/early twenty-somethings are.  But this seems like something different.  They're both overly concerned with how to build their followers on social media to the point where they don't have anything of real value to contribute, they're just completely focused on the numbers.  Then there's personal style - fashion; it's pretty crazy how they not only care in the extreme about how others see them, but how they judge others based only on appearance.  I really don't think we raised him this way (obviously I'm not exactly objective here) - but it seems there's a much larger societal pressure this way than when I was young.

On top of this I'm noticing tons of examples in popular culture - movies & tv - where all kinds of people including professionals (doctors, lawyers, whatever) succeed not because they know stuff, but rather because they simply care whereas nobody else does, & they just try really really hard to solve whatever the problem is.  In many cases it's positioned that smart people are themselves the problem, & that the people who care need to work around them.  Apparently knowing stuff doesn't matter anymore, you just have to really really really care.

I don't remember reading about this in the book, but it's been a while since I read it ... is this an expected feature of 4T's?  it seems that I'm going to have a real hard time with this!!!

So as a guy who loves our work here, I got very moved by this trailer.






Would this be the next Prophet generation in action?

It looks as if we have a prolific poster of new threads, and this fellow has surpassed even me in posting new threads. Before the next-newest one to have had anything new posted in this category for threads that have no obvious other place (Cubs win! alluding to how much has changed since the Chicago Cubs had been in a World Series, let alone won one) we have what looks like a plethora of spam threads.

I may have made some new threads in mistake, but ordinarily I have done so in good faith. The other guy? Just spam.

Obviously I welcome anyone who makes a contribution to these threads (yes, that includes in disagreement with me), but not spammers and trolls. I hope that the Threadmaster will give the spam threads the Forum equivalent of "ten years without the right of correspondence". That was a Stalinist euphemism for a death sentence against one of his real or imagined enemies.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi traveled to Mosul on Sunday to declare victory during the final phase of the long campaign to drive the self-described Islamic State militants out of the city of Mosul.

Armed forces were still battling over the last part of the Old City under militant control on Sunday as Abadi congratulated Iraqi fighters and Baghdad residents celebrated by dancing in the streets. 

On Monday, the U.S.-led coalition that supported Iraq throughout the battle announced that fighters had managed to clear the rest of the city. “While there are still areas of the Old City of Mosul that must be backed-cleared of explosive devices and possible ISIS fighters in hiding, the Iraqi Security Forces have Mosul now firmly under their control,” the coalition said in a statement.

As the end of the battle neared, the destruction brought on by nine months of fierce fighting came into plain sight. 
Thousands of Mosul residents have lost their lives in the violence. Nearly a million people have been displaced. Entire districts have been leveled.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mosu...mg00000009

My second published paper. This one is about the inequality turnaround of a century ago that was completed during the last 4T.
It does not yet bring the S&H theory into the mix, (this is for the third paper that I am still working on).

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/42p5m46m

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/29/15892...irst-click

The iPhone killed my inner nerd
76 comments
iPhone 1, geek 0

'I used to run a full Active Directory with individual organizational units and push out group policies to manage my family’s local PCs. I had a proxy server set up to control web access, and revoked administrator rights to ensure my family never installed malicious software. All of our email went through my Exchange server, and I had a custom app that pulled mail from ISP and Hotmail POP3 accounts and filtered it through an assortment of anti-spam tools before it was allowed to hit an Exchange inbox. All of my family’s important documents were stored on a file server, backed up in a RAID array. I even used Zip drives for the really important stuff. I was a true IT administrator, and I was only 15.

'All of these PCs were built by hand, with custom cases, cooling configurations, and my own selection of processors or RAM. I laughed at the thought of having to buy a Toshiba or Packard Bell PC, and opted for AMD’s Athlon 64 processors. I’d build powerful gaming rigs and spend hours writing scripts to get a better field of view in games, or a slight advantage by squeezing out every single drop of performance by altering textures per map. I would enter contests and win better processors or RAM, upgrade my PC and push the older components down to my servers.

'These servers were so powerful at the time that I was able to get push email on my phone, something you couldn’t really do back in 2002 unless you were a business using BlackBerry devices. I’d sit smugly reading my emails on a train with my iPAQ or one of the original HTC Pocket PC devices with a stylus. I couldn’t download apps from an app store for these phones because those stores didn’t even exist yet. Instead, I’d find apps on the internet and load them on, modifying the registry along the way to tweak things. I used to spend hours browsing on XDA-Developers for the latest ROMs, downloading and installing them to tweak and test the latest software and firmware. It was an exciting time, and I miss it.'


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'Even devices that we’d consider “traditional” computing have been impacted by the iPhone. Chromebooks are locked down with an app store, the iPad Pro continues to push what can be done with a tablet, and now Windows 10 S tries to answer both with an OS that only runs Windows Store apps. Windows 8, Chromebooks, and Android all probably wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the iPhone.

'When I look at modern PCs, tablets, and phones now I’m surprised at the simplicity of them. Not all of them are perfect, but technology is rapidly turning into something in the background that’s accessible to everyone and doesn’t require hours of configuration. I miss the thrill of hacking away and tinkering, but as I shout to Alexa to turn off my lights at night I can’t help but appreciate just how easy everything is now.'

=============================================

There is something indescribably sad about the last two paragraphs. Back in the heyday of the 80s and 90s, I recall thoughts regarding the digital divide. My thoughts were along the lines of "what can we do to bring the masses up to our level? How can we engage them, train them, and bring them to the table?"

Instead, what we've done is lowered to bar. We've made technology dumb, and, at first blush, "cheap," so that the "amigos" I see cleaning the office buildings now have supposed access. But what access do they have? What control do they have over their personal technology? Their apps? Their information? Does dumbing down technology for the masses really give them the information they need for power, or, does it actually result in a feedback loop leading us further into a state of low information? Furthermore, look at ownership. Who actually owns their technology as opposed to leasing it? Who actually owns their data and info?

I submit that "Smart" phones and the ecosystem which has evolved around technology over the past 10 - 15 years has moved the masses toward being dumb, dependent, low information proles. Things could have been so different. Maybe it is still possible, who knows.

Ok, probably an old GIF.  However, why do folks grow rice in California?  Really?!  Rice needs lots of water.  So, California, shoot for higher use plants like avocados and pistachios.  Unless, there's some odd water rights thingie or some long dusty, tax break for growing rice. It's like the federal tax break that farmers get here for not planting wheat. Yes, there's stupid tax breaks or a regulation that tells farmers to not plant stuff and the farmer gets reimbursed with a tax break, Line 105.  Enter value from EPA-1040 and copy that number here.

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