It’s not generational, its proportional to how brain-rotted you are.

The more time you spent scrolling mindlessly, or doing some other brain rotting activity, the more your brain defaults to that reward path and makes you crave it and the more you do it.

But there are tiers to the activities you choose to do and how they rot or don’t rot your brain:

Tier 1:

• Playing a social sport or game - it’s fully engaging and interactive, it requires planning and foresight, and forces you to communicate and engage socially.
  • It often also forces active choice in picking something to do
  • It often requires broader commitment and week-week planning just to create the events
  • Bonus points if it’s a physical sport or game since it helps you stay fit
  • Bonus points if it’s an intellectual challenge that pushes you to think outside your comfort or default zones (for some people that might be DND, for some it might be playing a team sport)
• Pursuing a challenging cooperative project - joining volunteer organizations, starting / running a business or charity to try and do something for world, organizing large social events, or participating in parent Council and community groups, and local politics, etc. - these all require working with other, broadening your skills, and will be rewarding as you change your environment
• Caring for others who need it - when you have the ability and others don’t, it benefits everyone to help even out the world

Tier 2:

• Reading a challenging book that will make you grow as a person (maybe the news or a genuine deep research binge depending where you’re at) / listening to an educational podcast / watching a challenging movie or mini-series / pursuing a challenging independent project / pursuing independent physical fitness - those are all great pursuits that will help grow you in some specific way that will benefit the world in the long run, and all require active choice and follow through which is great, but when you do things solo, you have orders of magnitude lower effectiveness in terms of your impact on the world, you don’t grow socially (and tend to atrophy). For some people who are hyper social, these might be more Tier 1 since they need to adjust in that direction, but for most people, I would put these at Tier 2.
• Socially consuming good, but non-challenging media / activities. Picking something to do, but picking something good and well made that you can examine and critique with people. Watching breaking bad and picking apart the foreshadowing or symbolism, watching sports and dissecting the strategy, watching a bad movie and actively extrapolating what their bad writing implies about the universe they’ve created and the horrors that would create. Playing the same casual sport you play every week, and not really trying to push yourself or do better.
• Healthy social events - seeing friends / family / neighbours, going out to parties and festivals and events and socializing with people and making friends and adding positivity to the world.
• Necessary cleaning & maintenance - you still gotta take care of yourself, the world you live in, and learn how to do it all sustainably.

Tier 3

• Independent physical fitness activity where you don’t push yourself - going to the gym / run / etc without actually trying very hard. Still good that you’re doing it to prevent atrophy, but not really improving and not necessarily the greatest use of time. Usually hiding a deeper underlying issue like exhaustion, depression, etc.
• min/maxing cleaning and home improvement - still good in that it will make you happy and satisfied, but at a certain point it’s just an obsessive waste of time without benefit

Tier 4:

• Passively consuming content – this is the dividing line between healthy and unhealthy in my mind – but this is putting on cable and watching whatever’s on, opening an app and scrolling, defaulting to reading the latest gossip magazine because that’s just what you do at this time of night, - this behaviour is, imho, fundamentally toxic, in that the act of doing it not just wastes your time, but actively makes you less happy / stable / etc, though it’s often not the root cause. You tend to default towards these when you’re stressed and low energy, on the flip side, they tend to make you stressed and low energy.

Everything is a spectrum, and I’ve known Pre-Boomers, Boomers, GenX, Millenials, and Gen Z who all have problems with Tier 4 (and lower) activities. Usually it’s a sign of other stress / unsatisfaction / depression (note that Tier 1 activities are the ones you tend to drop when you get depressed), but it’s really upsetting to see anyone when they seem unaware of how stuck in a toxic Tier 4 loop they are.

I do understand why the state wants to prosecute him

Because he exposed the state for being a massively illegal and corrupt pile of shit directly perpetrating crimes against not just the American public, but the world at large?

Like yeah, I understand why cartels kill informants, that doesn’t make them justified in doing so.

If you’re a user who grows up using one, and then starts following instructions on how to build one, when are you going to come across the word program?

It will be app, maybe application, saas software, functions a service, compute as a service etc etc. Hell what most people think of as an “app” is really a collection of applications all working together.

People at the University of Washington don’t refer to soda pop the same way as people at Berkley, or at MIT, or at Oxford. Why would they all have had the exact same term for writing software?

Edit: I’m being argumentative, I honestly have no idea what term was common then. At that point most people I knew referred to it as “computer stuff”

It’s probably predominantly because of the switch to mobile computing / smartphones / web being dominant, and everyone referring to programs there as “apps” / applications.

i.e. If you write a mobile app with a function-as-a-service backend, you will never compile what someone would refer to as a “program”, so calling yourself a “programmer” (as-in, someone who makes programs) feels inaccurate and a not helpful description for people. “Coder” (as-in, someone who writes code) is a vaguer in terms of the type of code you write and more accurate in terms of what you spend your time producing.

Also anyone writing scripts, or even just using stuff like AWS Lambda / functions as a service, etc. etc.

In your specific circles.

… try it now.

It’s honestly worth keeping the principle behind crumple zones in mind with everything:

If energy can go somewhere else, then less of it will be transferred to what matters.

For cars, the energy going into bending and breaking the materials of the crumple zone then doesn’t get transferred to the interior compartment.

For Xbox controllers, they’re designed so that when they drop, the batteries shoot out and go flying, which means less energy goes into the controller shell and internals.

And with a lot of laptops these days, you’re seeing the actual toughest, most survivable ones not be built out of heavy rigid metal and glass like Apple does, but out of light flexible aluminum composites. A) they weigh less so there’s less potential energy involved in a fall, and B) some of the energy gets transferred into bending the shell which will then snap back to form.

This isn’t an explanation, it’s a thought terminating phrase. Youre just othering people as psychopaths/monsters/inhuman.

I mean, to be fair, electrical engineering is one of the most notoriously difficult to grasp disciplines.

People don’t generally have a great intuitive sense for how pulsed electromagnet waves propagate through 3d space and time.

I’ve used the advanced systems analysis math I learned in university as an actual calculation in my job precisely zero times.

I roughly think about how those models apply to situations and how that will effect the various likely outcomes and behaviours etc on a literal daily basis.

University isnt just about training you to do a job.

Where did I say this?

👀

The US pumped massive percentages of its GDP into

…

Which changes absolutely nothing from the perspective of NATO

Lmao yes it does. It only doesn’t if you declare “I’m ignoring this information”, and stick your head in the sand.

That’s not reasoning, that’s weaponized incompetence.

Let’s remember that the US has been, by far, the richest country in the world since the world wars, largely because it stayed out of them til the ends, and issued massive loans to European countries that they continued to profit off of for decades and decades.

You talk about GDP percentage, as if every country had a similar GDP per capita, and could thus afford to spend similarly. The reality is that the US had more then enough money to both fund its military and fund its social programs, but it chose to instead fund the military and the already wealthy.

Maybe you should have spent some of those years studying law.

This is a post from an LLM.

Lol this is an interesting shower thought, the fact that you’re taking it seriously makes me wonder if you spent too much time in Sovereign Citizen circles, or just watched Mircacle on 34th Street too many times.

If you’re talking about the chicken and egg problem in the abstract, i.e. how do you determine “what caused what” in a system that feeds back into itself… the answer is that in feedback systems, determining blame or ascribing one or the other as the cause is simply meaningless, and you need to examine how the system behaves as a whole, and how the different parts contribute to the output of the system in various configurations.

Overly simplistic. Lots of things are the abuse of anxiety.

Objectively false my friend.

How would animals have morals if that was the case? Why would they have a sense of fairness baked into them if it came from a religion they couldn’t possibly comprehend?

The reality is that morality as we perceive it, is mostly just the natural rules that let us work together. This little known scientific concept called ‘apes strong together’, meant that the people who possessed a basic sense of morality could work with others and accomplish more, then those without it, and those without it, died off.

That’s all morality is. It has nothing do with any magical creature.