I have never had a problem switching doctors.
The Internet is good for new mothers, too. I got a lot of support I wouldn’t otherwise have gotten during COVID.
And it makes genocide easier.
Given the current state of my country, I’d say it’s a net loss. It’s true that it helps marginalized communities connect, but it also exposes them to far more instances of hate than they would otherwise get. It also helps organize their enemies to launch coordinated attacks on their civil rights. It galvanizes monsters and pedophiles and gives them more power than they had before. It gave Trump a 24/7 mouthpiece for God’s sake. Imagine what could have happened with someone who knew what they were doing.
Before the Internet, I didn’t know how misogynistic it was possible to be. I encounter some degree of sexism daily on the Internet, but in my actual life people are nice to me or in the very least indifferent. Seeing all that hate and being powerless to change it can be disempowering. It can give you a very warped view of the way most people are, and it can make you feel more threatened than you actually are, which we have seen happen politically.
Okay, it can do some cool things too, for example memes. I really like memes. But on the balance I’m not convinced it does more good than harm.
Whenever the “things are so awful now” people spring up I always want to be pointed to that specific time, even a single day, when the world was completely free from hatred and prejudice. Just one day. There is no such day, never was, yet the lure of the “good old days” is strong. Despite the innumerable atrocities that can be looked up on Wikipedia.
Is there a starting point for sexual abuse in the Catholic Church? Remember slavery and Jim Crow? Women not being able to vote? Lynchings? How many people you think got beat up over any sort of difference? A wide swath of racial slurs? Even seemingly two thirds of people being alcoholics in the years before Prohibition?
Research is available, you guessed it, through the Internet. The libraries are closed where I live, and encyclopedias are expensive. Gosh, there’s just a wealth of information at the tip of your fingers. Feel free to read some.
Nobody is claiming that.
NOBODY.
You’re being facetious, I think, but it’s actually true that a whole lot of people, and more of them every day, can’t tell time anymore because digital clocks shielded them from having to learn how.
Is this actually true? It’s not like they stopped teaching first grade skills or that non-digital clocks and watches have largely disappeared, or n any country. They are still everywhere.
If it’s not already true , it will be. My 4 year old granddaughter has as much chance of learning to read an non-digital clock as I have of reading a sundial. Because she will see that few non-digital clocks. When I was a kid, nearly all clocks and watches were non digital. There was maybe a digital alarm clock with the flip-over digits. Everything else - cars, watches, ovens, wall clocks , clocks in airports and bus stations and post offices was analog. Now everything is digital - and there are more of them. Cable boxes, cell phones, microwaves, thermostats, computers, - some of these things didn’t exist when I was young and others didn’t have clocks. The only reason I ever see an analog clock is because I have one in my living room - and that’s for decorative purposes more than anything else, because that same room has a cable box that displays the time, a HVAC remote that displays the time and most of the time somewhere between 1-4 cellphones/tablets with the time.
I’m being humorous to make a serious point.
It’s also true that since the analog clock was invented and gained popularity that people’s ability to tell time using sun dials decreased. Or their ability to maintain and read a water clock.
Technology marches on. People don’t tend to bother learning how to use obsolete tech.
I see you made the exact same point as me.
Does your life lack meaning because of the gaping hole in your soul where sundial knowledge should have been? Of course not. And our kids will feel the same way about analog clocks.
I’m in my mid-30s and I think it’s been ten or fifteen years since I’ve used an analog clock on a regular basis (I quit wearing a watch as soon as I started carrying a phone everywhere). And while I still can tell time, I’m pretty sure I was never quite as natural at it as people who grew up when digital clocks were nonexistent, and I’ve definitely lost some of it in the intervening period, because I now have to actively think about it when I look at an analog clock. It’s like knowing the vocabulary of a foreign language, but still having to translate it in my brain to actually use it.
I wouldn’t be at all shocked (or dismayed) if Kids These Days ended up being even less proficient at it.
Although it has been some years since I have been in a school classroom, I bet most or all of them still have old-fashioned clocks. So does the gym, many stores and businesses, any fancy clock on a building. So far today, I have seen four old-timey clocks.
When learning any language, understanding time is a basic skill. It’s not like it is difficult to tell time, or hard to pick up this elementary thing in the unlikely event it is no longer taught. Are these people really going to lose points on a future mini-mental exam for being unable to draw clock hands?
Have you ever looked at the ads in the back of cheap magazines and comics from the 20th Century? That quackery didn’t get new life; it just moved to a new platform with the rest of the world.
All this “It existed before!” bullshit ignores the fact that the web allows it to exist to a much greater degree.
It has allowed everything to exist to a much greater degree. Would you advocate getting rid of bookstores just so there wouldn’t be an outlet for quack diet books?
No, I am not in favor of taking my argument to a ridiculous extreme.
And in three or five or seven years they’ll be too stupid to actually tell time because they won’t think they have to learn to do so, what with being spoon-fed by digital clocks.
Analog clocks should have become obsolete half a century ago. I suspect they are here to stay, just like Roman numerals and cursive writing. Just enough will be around to require everyone to know how to read them.
Schools here in Oregon still use analog clocks.
I hope you’re right, because the mass enstupidulation of the general public is going quite fast enough as it is, and it’s a drag whenever another humble, useful little skill is eliminated for the sake of “convenience” and idiocy.
Are you too stupid to use a water clock or a sundial? Are you too stupid to make and use Acheulean hand axes?
Or do you just not bother to learn archaic tools that aren’t useful anymore?