Look what happened when Bear Sterns stopped doing business

Can’t do that. It would be bad for business.

it would not be interfering with their education

Education doesn’t end the moment you step out of school. Anyone who has held a job knows this

Except for at the retail venues that failed, of course.

They never drafted anyone out of highschool.

Plenty of 18-year-olds were drafted during both Korea and Vietnam. Since deferment expired once you were no longer enrolled, this meant anyone who couldn’t get into college was fair game.

I was talking about the study I linked, not yours.

And I rebutted it with my own.

I would have preferred he lingered in a state of horrible suffering, tbh.

that short of a period does not account for the giant spike we had

Trying to explain to a corpse that, on average, it’s still got a heartbeat.

you aren’t interfering with a child’s ability to learn which is what we were discussing

Drafting a kid out of high school and putting them on a 12-month tour of duty absolutely interfered with their education. Even if they never see a day of combat, they’re still doing some menial work that allows their accrued educational experience to atrophy. Same as what happened during COVID.

they are specifying passive activities

They are specifying interpersonal communications through text.

In this study children 10-12 were asked to compose text messages. The number of textisms was recorded, and a positive correlation was found between use of SMS abbreviations and success at literacy tests. This is then related to David Crystal’s concept of “ludic” language: the playful use of language as a contribution to language development. That notion is developed here: By playing with textual language, one develops writing skills

How is this “passive”? None of it involves “swiping”.

Again, what does this have to do with your argument…

That public reporting on learning difficulties only became interesting when students were educated to the level at which the difficulty was relevant? It goes directly against the notion that the current generation is in a unique situation.

That is not relevant to the current argument.

It is extremely relevant.

Amazon’s data center revenue — primarily from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) business — has grown faster than its retail sales in recent years, reflecting a strategic shift toward high-margin cloud infrastructure.

Some of this is governmental. But a big chunk is functionally a circular network of business spending. Microsoft pays Amazon a dollar. Amazon pays NVIDIA a dollar. NVIDIA pays Microsoft a dollar. Ad Infinium.

These are a handful of exceptions to a sweeping 15 year trend.

The following retailers in the United States and Canada have all either closed or announced plans to close large numbers of retail locations, since 2010, deemed a “retail apocalypse” by media, accelerated by both the increase in online shopping and by the COVID-19 pandemic.

I mean, Vietnam didn’t happen to children…

US soldiers killed in Vietnam were as young as 16. The average age was 23, so assume roughly half under that. The human brain isn’t fully developed until 25. FFS, we didn’t let people vote until 21 when the war started. And we only passed the 26th amendment in '71, directly in response to the contradiction between enlistment and elections.

Something like COVID or the introduction of screens marks a new impediment that is being laid on top of residual ones

I’ll spot you COVID, at least for the specific cohort that hit their prime learning years during the shutdown.

But the introduction of screens? We’ve had screens since the 1950s. And, I gotta throw back to XKCD on this one…

The introduction of keyboards has been an enormous boon for education.

Yes, but children had always had those impairment

And in a largely agricultural or early industrial economy, it hasn’t been a serious issue. These only truly become classified as “impairments” when they interfere with a very specific kind of intellectual labor.

Reported application rates for any kind of credit over the past twelve months increased in February to the highest level since October 2022

So we had a four year long dip and we’re finally caught back up?

Which still counts as disposable income spending.

There is no elasticity in these budget items.

Yes it has.

Virtually flat for five straight years.

This generation of children are also dealing with some unprecedented events that we know are pretty bad for cognitive development.

I don’t want to play the “who had it harder?” game, because that’s always just a war of the sob stories. But COVID is competing with Vietnam enlistment and lead/asbestos poisoning, when it comes to generational intellectual speedbumps. Nevermind the sheer dearth of educational establishments prior to the Boomer-Era buildout of high school and college campuses. I lived through the era when everyone and their kid brother was being diagnosed with a learning disability. And when weed was supposed to obliterated cognition in young people. And when video games were rotting brains. And when Cliff’s Notes was destroying academia. There’s always something.

I see so many “My 16-year-old is a drooling idiot” hysterical denouncements of modern education. And it’s all couched in this insufferable nostolgia for a past that never existed. Long-form Op-Ed articles about how not wearing a bike helmet built character or why Montessori School turned our kids queer. Screaming tirades about the poor quality of STEM and the insidious nature of liberal arts education, combined with jerk-off sessions over Classical Education and the endless need for Teaching The Controversy and in-class debates.

Fucking awful people pushing bullshit lines that get gobbled up by whatever audience is being told “You’re the smart ones, every other generation else is worthless trash”.

more people have more access to acquire debt than ever before

That’s. Not. Actually. True.

Fewer people have access to consumer credit today. A select subset have access to higher debt limits in an inflationary economy. And most of that debt is housing debt, not retail consumer debt, anyway.

The $18.2 trillion isn’t distributed equitably. It’s also overstated, given that a bunch of it is bad medical and housing debt that debt-holders refuse to write down.

Do you often interact with young people?

I mean, I have a toddler, just for starters. Also, a bunch of nieces and nephews and friends with kids of various ages. Then I do some of the professional onboarding for interns and college new hires at my company.

So, Idk, for some definition of “young people”, yes.

For there to be no disposable income these corporations are somehow making money hand over fist at every level of commerce.

The big winners of the post-COVID economy have been B2B companies - enterprise level software firms, data center firms, government contractors, and corporate supply chain companies. Your grocery store chains and big box retailers have been comparatively flat. Car companies have underperformed. Even real estate has been anemic, at least by comparison.

To call this a consumer economy, you really have to point to the consumer end of the equation and show some kind of growth. Inflation might be rising, but retail consumption certainly hasn’t.

Standardised testing results plummeting for the first time ever

The Pineapple And The Hare: Can You Answer Two Bizarre State Exam Questions?

Consider what would happen if every single student in the testing pool gained superintelligence overnight and they all aced the tests uniformly. What would testing companies do next? They can’t just hand out perfect scores to everyone all the time. There’s no value in that as a metric.

In the same vein, imagine if everyone was hit in the head with a hammer before test day and they all failed. Testing companies would be lambasted for flunking an entire graduating class, as the default assumption would be that the tests were the problem, not the students.

Standardized testing must be a rigged game which seeks to produce a particular set of outcomes to satisfy the state education boards, not to accurately measure the cognitive capacity of test-takers. Exam difficulty can change radically year to year simply because students are doing too well (or too poorly) for the purposes of sorting the “smart” students from the “dumb” ones.

That’s before you get into the economic incentives of privatized exam-prep courses and supplemental material sales. Or the incentives offered by schools looking to goose scores by a certain degree per year in exchange for some kind of bonus.

Millennials lost the ability to communicate in complete sentences because of mobile phone texting.

Writing Skills

I have been reading the “children are getting dumber” article since grade school.

It is the Shepherd’s Tone of news coverage, right up there with “rising crime rates in urban centers” and “migrant caravans are crossing the border”, that reports the same tired set of manufactured concerns paired with a call to ramp up funding for profitable interventions.

Capitalism finally got its perfect consumer.

The consumer with no disposable income? FFS, these toss off lines don’t even make any fucking sense. You could earn more as a blue-collar day laborer 40 years ago than as an entry-level college grade today.

Why do you think so much of corporate industry has pivoted from retail sales to B2B SaaS as a profit center? Consumerism is dying. Six mega-corps passing each other the same dollar in an investor circle jerk is the future of the economy.

Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.

I don’t think this guy was being reasonable

Cracked had a good rundown of the messy details.

In the early '90s, Heemeyer got involved in a campaign to bring legalized gambling to the city, even launching his own newspaper to promote it. Patrick Brower’s paper had come out against the measure, which was eventually voted down. That’s the first time the local press and government wound up on Heemeyer’s bad side.

Around that time, Heemeyer bought a patch of land for $42,000 and opened another muffler shop there. Several years later, a group looking to open a concrete batch plant offered to buy the land for $250,000. Heemeyer reportedly agreed, then later bumped the price up to $375,000, and maybe went as high as $1 million. Instead, the buyers went to the city to rezone the land around the shop and build there instead.

Heemeyer attempted to start a grassroots campaign to fight the plant. The problem was that the new plant would cut off customer access to his shop completely – he apparently bought the bulldozer to create a new road, but permission for that was denied too. He lost his battle and was forced to sell the shop, at which point he immediately started building a Killdozer. The rampage would come a year and a half later; it was hardly done on impulse.

Did the zoning dispute go badly for him? No doubt. Did he have multiple chances to avoid that outcome? It seems like it. Did the city leave him no choice but to do what he did? Well, most schools of morality posit that even in the most bitter business disputes, there are always non-Killdozer options.

…

In addition to the newspaper, Heemeyer tore through the concrete plant, the town hall, a hardware store owned by another man he had a dispute with – he’d made a list. That’s where the noble vigilante story comes into play. He wasn’t out to hurt anybody, they say, just to do to others what they’d done to him.

But as Piechocki points out, the lack of a body count was down to pure luck. “When he attacked the town hall, the library is in there, and my son was in that library at that time. Gambles, the store he got stuck in, what happened if somebody was stuck in there?” In fact, most of the buildings were occupied right up until the inhabitants ran away screaming that a Killdozer was coming their way.

Trump going on a tirade about all the tomahawks he’s going to fire loses some steam after the tenth time he does it.

At this point, I would genuinely like to see some kind of critical analysis regarding the effectiveness of these attacks, relatively. Because all I’m hearing - from Kiev to Riyadh to Seoul - is that interceptor missiles are in short supply and (relatively) cheap drones and ballistics have become shockingly effective at this stage of the game.