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.

They have the right number of fingers.

That’s been a solved problem for some time.

Certainly possible this was produced with clip-art or photoshop instead of AI. I just suspect AI because it’s the laziest possible way to produce this image.

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.

The AI that produced this image should be arrested.

The modern anti-immigration police state is a guerrilla war of the unemployed against the underpaid.

We are quite literally paying one half of the poor population to arrest, brutalize, and kill the other.

“Give me a cheese pizza in the style of a famous italian restaurant pizza kitchen. Use lots of cheese, tomato sauce, and bread. Cook it in an oven at a very high temperature. The cheese should be hot to the touch. The crust should be thin when the cooking is complete and have a few tiny black spots on it to show that it is crispy. Put the pizza on a metal tray and deliver it to my table within the next thirty minutes. Make no mistakes.”

Throw out the cheating angle

At this point, it’s less “cheating” and more “being trafficked by your boyfriend”

Literally Big Pimpin’

The campaign is run by FairSquare. We’re a UK-based non-profit organisation working to improve accountability in sport.

I mean, that’s cool I guess? I just don’t know anything about these guys other than what’s in the click-through.

The most Elon Musk ass “we’re looking into it” article. They aren’t even launching an investigation. They’re discussing the possibility of beginning the process of forming a committee.

They expected him to overthrow the governments in Latin America so they could go back to being petite bourgeois landlords on the south side of the border.

And he has helped overthrow a bunch of Latin American governments. So a bunch of them still like him.

Oh, I forgot. You fascists only think the government exists to hurt rich people

Not letting them off the hook that easily.

It’s not your hook. They’re dealing with their fascists. You’re dealing with yours.

When Canada stops putting members of the Ford family in elected offices and clapping for real literal 1930s Nazis, they can tell the Americans about how to do democracy correctly.

They could still vote against an obviously horrible candidate.

That’s not how elections work. The seat doesn’t sit vacant because enough people vote “I don’t like you” to the winning candidate.

For starters…

You’re willfully ignorant if you think the average California voter does more harm than the harmful Kentucky voter

I’ve seen enough evidence to believe Gavin Newsom and Dianne Feinstein have committed atrocities. Nevermind Kamala Harris.

And fuck those who say that a lot of Americans didn’t vote, as though that exonerates them.

The US disenfranchises voters with a variety of techniques. One of those techniques is to foster guarantee popular candidates aren’t afforded a place on the general election ballot.

If you’ve got nobody to vote for, I can’t blame you for not voting. Demanding people participate in a ritualized farce of democracy when the race is uncontested is pure foolishness.

Can’t believe Alex exploded in his car like that. And now he’s got a clone?

Crazy days.