Spengler talked about the total decay of morals and ethics and the death of the West more than 100 years ago, and he was later called reactionary by many. When even parents have totally abdicated from the sacred duty of raising a child, we know he has been right all along.
Spengler kinda was a reactionary, though. And his writings on this subject aren’t particularly unique. Off the top of my head, Hannah Arendt and Christopher Lasch are 20th century philosophers who have made similar critiques.
I thought the millenial journey of discovering their parents sucked through therapy was almost a trope at this point. Certainly the previous generations had more kids, and probably spent less time actively parenting them.
There have always been bad parents. There have always been parents who dgaf; there have been parents unable to cope; there have been earnest but misguided parents.
Meanwhile, the majority of parents care deeply and are doing their best at a difficult charge. They instill a grounding in contemporary consensual morals, which is all they have ever been able to do. The idea that they have, en masse, "abdicated a sacred duty" is cheap. I'll stipulate that tablets are bad. I don't agree that morals peaked in some edenic past.
I mean, peak father-son time was sending the boys down the mines with their dads. I'm not convinced that screen time is worse.
I regret the industrial revolution as much as the next crunchy hipster, but finding a nice stick to beat it with is not going to raise the floor. Whatever dogma you fancy, the groups you most want to ram it into will never even hear it. Parents who use tablets as pacifiers so they can smoke meth or watch telly are not going to change because you shout at them about the arts and crafts movement. Neither are parents working two jobs without support networks. If you're right, you're pointlessly right.
Philosophically, it doesn't. No art project needs to exist. Neither did the first HN client app, or any of the dozen HN readers on the app store.
But "Why does it need to exist?" kills every art project, side project, or anything built for the love of building. None of those need to exist either.
There's also the argument that if something isn't forbidden, it should be allowed. The way you lose rights over time is by your existing rights getting clipped off at the edges.
A lot of the criticisms leveled at me here would also apply vs Google back when Larry and Sergey were grad students. If they'd had to worry that indexing content equals copyright infringement, they'd have a steep hill to climb.
i love that you patiently answer these hopelessly antagonistic comments with reason and substance. you'll never convince them, but still i respect that you don't lose your cool. ofc, you're no stranger to this.
I don't know why people decided to jump on this one specific project but there have been numerous replacement frontends for HN published over the years, and put on Show HN. And clones of HN. And datasets of HN comments.
I can't speak for other people, but I commented here because the person I replied to shared their project and then in response to concerns about it copying other people's content, tried to position that first as being OK because they'd offer opt-out, and then said that was viable because if it were opt-in the site wouldn't be possible.
No, they are not "replacement frontends". Those are known as "3rd party clients". These are not clients but clones. They are cloning all the content. That means they've replicated the backend, the frontend, and the database full of content, by scraping/pirating it from the original source.
old.reddit.com is an "alternative frontend". Clones of scraped content are not.
While you can generally restrict new ones, you can't eliminate existing ones without basically paying out the lost revenue+etc to whoever is running it.
There's been a moratorium on new billboards in SF for a long time already. No new ones are getting built. Given the reliable revenue they provide, will be a long time before they naturally go extinct.
You can actually just eliminate existing ones. The government can just do things and absolutely already does whenever politicians really want something to happen (data centers, etc.). There's no law of nature that billboards must be allowed to remain where they are.
It's not a government problem - it's a constitutional one - Banning existing billboards is considered both a first amendment problem, and a takings problem.
Doing it without compensation is a constitutional violation, and even if california modified it's constitution, it would be a federal one. Less of one for sure, but still an issue.
The current law (Business & Professions Code § 5412) is a codification of what the court requires.
Banning existing billboards isn't a first amendment problem if it's not contingent on the contents of the billboard. Much like some radio frequencies are reserved, other media are forced to obey regulations.
>Doing it without compensation is a constitutional violation, and even if california modified it's constitution, it would be a federal one.
Only matters if the constitution is enforced. Courts can easily overturn previous decisions. If there's a will, there's a way.
It would help but probably you'd still owe something.
Business & Professions Code § 5412 is the current controlling statute, and that is a codification of what the courts have required.
That requirement is not just a california constitutional problem, but a federal one.
So even if you modified the california constitution, you'd still have the federal problem.
The federal problem is much less than the state one (SCOTUS has found the floor here to be quite low), but it's still bad enough that feds require compensation as well. Just less compensation.
For example, 23 U.S.C. § 131(g) conditions federal highway funds on paying just compensation for removals along Interstate and federal-aid primary highways — 10% of apportionment forfeited otherwise.
I looked into this quite heavily, and had long discussions with legislators, because there was a huge ugly billboard 150 feet from my house in San Jose :)
It would still get tied up in litigation. The “takings” doctrine that requires compensation is based on the fifth amendment: “ nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
I believe regulatory changes similar to what you propose have been ruled takings in the past. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the state would lose, but this supreme court doesn’t seem particularly amenable.
Why do people keep making these models? Don't they care about the effects this has? It's either that, or they do it on purpose. Just let people push clips about foreigners eating dogs, Jews dry-bleeding babies or the police choking another black man on TikTok, and sit back. "In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity."
If you buy one of the Motorola Grapheneos phones, you're gonna be marked. You will stand out in the crowd. It has happened before and will happen more frequently as the world becomes more authoritarian.
Oh but “the government already knows everything” as all the other privacy doomers like to say. “They” can probably already predict what phone you’re going to buy and what you’re going to eat for lunch, right? So why worry about this?
On the other hand, privacy becomes a luxury. People love signaling their status and standing out from the crowd. Entire car and clothing brands exist solely because of that.
And if enough people stand out, it doesn't matter anymore.
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