saberlynx

Sure. It’s pure common sense. And parents can totally send their kids to school without a phone. I agree with everything in this legislation save for the fact that it’s a legislation. My future kid wouldn’t even get a smartphone until age 15, if I keep my mindset for this long.

But do we live in an age where parental and community authority are so diminished that parents need the power of the state to bolster their discipline of their kids? Maybe we cater to the kids too much in that case. My mother was never afraid of enforcing rules with me. Every kid in my life had a gameboy growing up. Except me. I complained and said everyone had one. I’m really grateful she didn’t just fold to me because I’m not addicted to video games and knowing my generally addictive personality, I would be if I had been playing games for hours since the age of 4.

I threw a tantrum. For sure. Many tantrums. I said abusive things that I’m ashamed of, because she wouldn’t buy me a gameboy. But dealing with childish outbursts is a part of parenting. We don’t fold to children just because they make our lives unpleasant. She was also under social pressure from my uncle (whose son had a gameboy). She ignored it.

My high school has a VPN that banned Facebook during school hours. We were sent to the principal’s for disrupting the class or playing with our phones. Must we involve the state in everything?

It’s also pure common sense not to cheat on your spouse, or let a young child have an iPad, or watch more than 3 hours of TV in a day. Or drink too much soda. Or not going to them gym. By this logic, we should outlaw these too? Why is our reaction to minor suboptimal behavior to involve the state? There are many intermediary steps to enforce such a thing before needing to do this.

Growing up under an authoritian government I learned the subtle difference between rule of law, where everyone has to obey the laws we enact in our society, and rule by law, whereby the powers that be enact laws that allow them to do whatever they want. It seems that in the US the distinction is quickly eroding, if it ever existed in the first place. And of course the establishment will call it rule of law. The law is convenient in this case. If it were not they'd just ignore it. The numerous leaks that came out within the past decade demonstrate this.

I use ProtonMail. I'm aware that puts me on a list in all likelihood. Still doing it however. I'm of the opinion that more encrypted private communication between citizens can only be a good thing for freedom even if it enables a few criminals. And I have to do my part.

Which is funny. Because they named A LOT of non mainstream media. So are these people really implying that non mainstream media swung the elections in favor of trump where THEY failed? What kind of admission is that?

As a math PhD student I concur. I got through most of my undergrad memorizing nothing. It was easy back then. The definitions were simple and intuitive. what's a group? I hold an intuitive picture in my head which can be translated into words if I want. What's the Taylor series of cosine? If you want to do serious work in applied math you'd better have that on the back of your hand. You can derive it every time of course. You'll just take WAY longer. What is are the homology groups of a group with integer coefficients? Ha. Good luck doing anything with it if you haven't memorized it. Not memorizing might work in undergrad. I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that it doesn't work anymore. In fact not memorizing anything is biting me in the ass. It seriously hampers my workflow to have to look up the definition of Calc iii stuff. If you don't have some things mmeorized you won't even understand lectures. They don't take the time to let you get used to a definition in grad school. They give it to you and just RUN with it. They expect that out of you. They don't remind you. They expect that they can just give you the definition and start using it to prove theorems right away. Most of the time they don't give you the intuition for it either. No examples. You need to get used to the language of math and do it fast.

Depends on who you are. I can't listen to other people talk about math without getting confused myself. Other people think about math differently and often throws my own thinking into a loop. I need to study alone and ask questions if truly stuck.

I'm still trying and most of the time failing to apply all of these things as a grad student.