News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on ave... by rayiner on Friday July 12, 2019 @01:20PM (#20422408)
I love cities, structurally. But I find the people soul-killing. I just have very little in common with young, childless people anymore. Even when we're experiencing the same things, we're not really experiencing the same things. If I go to MOMA, it's because I want to show my daughter Starry Night. I'm scoping out tickets to take her to Hamilton, because I feel guilty for going without her. My kids are super well-behaved, but I hate going into a restaurant with them in tow and watching young childless people glare at me. I know brave souls who are toughing it out in cities with young children, and more power to them. Meanwhile, there are 8 small kids and two teenagers on my block of 15-20 houses. I walk into the Whole Foods, and see other parents from my kid's school. The default is people like me.
Re:Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on ave... by hestipod on Friday July 12, 2019 @02:35PM (#20423167)
>The default is people like me.

I think not finding things in common with young people isn't abnormal. My childhood was miserable partly BECAUSE of the sameness of it all. I find the suburban vanilla Stepford ways soul-killing. I had no exposure to culture. The internet didn't exist yet. I was ignorant and brainwashed in many ways. I felt out of place and like I was a freak because I didn't believe what I was told was "correct". The city was "bad" and "city folk" were "bad". The family and people in those places still have the same narrow beliefs and I am still "wrong". The people I know that grew up in multicultural cities had so much richer experiences and opportunities to grow and explore their beliefs and ideas without their parents ideologies infecting them as much.

Re:Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on ave... by rayiner on Friday July 12, 2019 @03:22PM (#20423600)
Having rich experiences and exploring different ideas is admirable, in some respects, but I'm not convinced that's a good basis for sustainable, tight-knit communities. Your choice of phraseology is interesting--parents "infecting" kids with their ideologies. Most people would consider it a key function of parenting (and society) to socialize children in the community's values, rules, and orthodoxies.

One of the things I find ironic about "experience seeking" is how often people go to places like India or China to have "rich experiences." But people from those places generally would relate much more easily to people like your parents. Circling back to the topic at hand--people in my home country of Bangladesh, where there is a rigid social order and strict indoctrination of children, may suffer from many things, but loneliness is not one of them.

Re:Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on ave... by hestipod on Friday July 12, 2019 @04:23PM (#20424147)
If the sustainable tight knit community is awash with horrible "values" like racism, homophobia, xenophobia, tribal bigotry and arrogance etc then I don't want to be a part of it. It's perpetuating the wrong things in my view and is like any bureaucracy just existing to serve itself. Kids should be taught the basics of human decency like honesty/empathy/kindness/sharing/helping etc, and then allowed to arrive at any specific spiritual or political views themselves through varied experience, not indoctrinated from a malleable age into mini-mes who never know anything else, as is usually the case in areas like I mentioned above.
Re:Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on ave... by rayiner on Friday July 12, 2019 @04:53PM (#20424396)
Few tight-knit communities would consider those to be "values" (i.e. beliefs that are core to identity). Your view is also a bit of "throwing the baby out with the bath water." Humanity has lots of vices, and those vices are often amplified in tight-knit communities. But those shortcomings can be improved without undermining the social order or adopting pernicious individualism.

Again, I can't help but notice the irony of your assertion. What is the virtue in not being xenophobic against Bangladeshis, if you're going to condemn the way they structure their communities and raise their children?

Re:Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on ave... by devdas on Friday July 12, 2019 @10:02PM (#20426063)
They absolutely are values. Just not good ones.
Re:Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on ave... by vonseel on Friday July 12, 2019 @09:48PM (#20426020)
> The people I know that grew up in multicultural cities had so much richer experiences and opportunities to grow and explore their beliefs and ideas without their parents ideologies infecting them as much.

I’m from rural East Texas and would agree with that statement 100%.

Re:Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on ave... by tptacek on Friday July 12, 2019 @07:02PM (#20425294)
You're in the wrong city. I was at Longman and Eagle last week and the back bar was lousy with kids.

This probably sounds like a throwaway comment, but it's not; there are big cities that are more friendly and less friendly to kids. An advantage of places like Chicago is that the trendy areas are shared between people with families and single people, where in New York the family-friendly neighborhoods are specialized, like Park Slope.

Re:Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on ave... by rayiner on Friday July 12, 2019 @08:21PM (#20425708)
I mean there is an element of that. Several of my friends have converged on the same neighborhood in Lakeview. My experience is colored by living in DC the last couple of years, which is mostly devoid of kids. (Of course, not in primarily minority area, where there are still kids, but those families are being pushed out by gentrification.)
Re:Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on ave... by MiroF on Thursday July 18, 2019 @12:38AM (#20466751)
Upper NW DC has plenty of kids