Years ago when Meg & I were first dating in and around 2010 we started noticing that when patronizing a restaurant other people, families of mom & dad & children, were all sitting at the same table, but no one was talking with each other & everyone in the group was staring into a smartphone doom scrolling social media or similar, not exactly reading wikipedia. My optimistic youthful naive view of giving everyone handheld computer to make everyone more intelligence turned out to be dreadfully wrong, since that is now what people are generally doing with their smartphones, though you can learn a language with DuoLingo app for example, on your smartphone.
Housing prices nearby are 20X higher than wage increases over the same time period or expensive but not nearly as bad as Toronto Canada which is 10X worse housing prices out of sight with average incomes lower than that of the poorest state in the USA, Mississippi. When you adjust Canadian Dollars to US dollars the average wage in Canada only $30,000 while a decent home near Toronto costs $15 million. I wing & complain about local homes that sold brand new back then for under $100K that now sell for $1. something million, when its literally 10X more expensive for the same near Toronto, in Canada.
Can the loneliness epidemic be explained away by increasing smartphone use alone? No, there are many social factors that come along with the use of social media. Teens today are hopeless, more depressed than ever before. People in their twenties are dating less, 20% less than ever before. People in their 30's are getting married less, more are calling marriage old fashioned and out of date institution, and people in their 40's have fewer children.
Now looking at the US dollar & the crooked evil Federal Reserve manipulating the fiat currency dollar, noting that prior to 1973 the US dollar was backed by Gold metal Au, that shinny lustrous soft jewelry metal, it works miracles on electrical contacts to prevent corrosion, so does platinum, palladium and rhodium. Perhaps the real tax rate when you consider all taxes in America closer to 50%, in part driving a loss in the middle class of America, of course made worse with global trade especially with China run by the CCP the most unethical government in the world. Inflation of the dollar just another kind of tax.
The societal costs of screens dominating peoples free time are extraordinary. People today have more social anxiety, more social phobia, are afraid of taking time and effort to meet up with someone, afraid the conversation will be boring or it will not be worth their time. People today are afraid they will never be able to achieve the American Dream of Home Ownership, many young people do not even think they will be able to buy a car in locations in America where the car is the only practical way of getting around, incredibly. The moral, mindset and outlook of the youth of America so bad that teen suicide rates are on the rise in America.
Ask yourself how many school shootings have happened in America? The symptoms of societal decay are everywhere & have never been greater than when shoved the internet into peoples hands over 4G LTE and 5G more recently in the form of smartphones which are more than just a handheld super computer, they are also our phones, text platform, social media, camera for image or video capture, calculator, calendar, email, browsing, shopping online, there apps for smartphones that turn a smartphone into 65 different devices that you would have had to buy separately in the 80's, now its all in one in rounded rectangles of glass with computer chips inside called SOC or system on chip, mostly made by TSMC using ASMLS best equipment, of what Apple calls M1 through M5 so far or Apple Silicon.
We not only have an anti-social trend emerging, there are dehydration, kidney failure, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, cancer epidemics overlapping as uncontrolled climate change causes the weather to become more imbalanced or crazy, as if the entire world going crazy as more people withdraw into lonely isolation. What is the silver bullet. I spent a lot of time not using my smartphone theses day, leaving it in my pocket and only using it when required.
Now I shoot YouTube video with it, so in this sense I use it more, and lately I have been studying Japanese on DuoLingo on my phone so my screen time is up, but in general its less than 15 minutes per day. When Meg & I are out & about together, we rarely tough our phones, though her DEXCOM G7 uses the iPhone 16 Plus as its information display interface for the related App to stream blood glucose trends, log food and insulin intake, so forth, her phone is part of a medically essential type 1 diabetes life saving technological setup or kit, so she uses her phone a bit more in this way.
When I am online, it's publishing blog posting or uploading YouTube or often posting to X. It requires a laptop and keyboard. I can't easily do the same on my phone, the touch screen too small & finger fumbling, it is just so much faster on the laptop, a MacBook Pro M2, that the iPhone 14 acts like video camera most of the time and my series 8 Apple Watch just a glorified overpriced fitness tracker :) The inductive charging runs circles around Fitbits I previously owned with their weird charging cables. Speaking of weight when apple switched to USB-C, my iPhone 14 still lighting but Megs iPhone 16 Plus USB-C. It seems like everything is going to USB-C. For more than 20 years USB-A was a miracle. Like the headphone jack on iPhones that let wired earbuds work, I really miss that, though I got some awesome wireless bluetooth earbuds on Amazon for under $45 that sound fantastic.
Streaming, imaging trying to explain that to a pirate in antiquity! Today so many people watch YouTube videos or similar content online. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, its many platforms like Disney+
Where is the original, what ceases to be the original, the studio captures the movies after editing and so forth, they have the master copy, usually digital these days, its big data at first, but then H.264 like JPEG for videos compression allows HTML5 streaming on YouTube for example, much more data efficient, which is cheaper for Alphabet Inc to stream, from cloud computing or server clusters in racks in data centers that use millions of watts of electricity. The internet uses more power than some medium sized countries and data online doubles every 12 hours. What is your brain doing with all of this?
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