Great article that I think will not be read by anyone that needs to hear its message. Primarily because it's not going to make any 10 second content or images on the 'rage farms' that they inhabit. I don't know how we remedy that, but it's a big problem.
Awesome, thanks for the offer. Do you know if it works OK on all the 4g/5g networks?
I generally try to get Telstra via a cheaper provider like Boost, but they've become to expensive so I'm on Amaysim now (Optus 5G).
How much did it end up costing with postage etc from EU?
Finally, any dramas with it so far eg hardware or software problems?
Well, this certainly changes things. Seems like another story of ego and greed blowing up (potentially) good research.
The most useful quote in the article for me was from the sole administrator of the company that will be owning the license to the new drugs (if and when they materialize) and their comments were far more reserved about the 'cure'.
"The probability of this working out well isn’t high, to say the least, but if things go well, we estimate that in two or three years we could begin trials in human volunteers."
I'm in agreement that the privacy grab-bag of age verification services is a big concern, but in my mind the remedy to that is strong privacy laws and protections like GDPR - with harsh punitive penalties for any companies that break them.
Companies already process and control huge amounts of private data so the best approach to increased potential for them gaining more access is strong privacy protections.
I'll add that the laws that have been implemented in various US states to mandate porn sites validate ID are the ones that have generated this new industry of digital checks and privacy concerns, not the under-16 laws. There are 25 states with these laws now, going back to 2022.
Ironic. The article does not frame the outcome as the fault of Gen Z. It in fact goes to great lengths to point out that the fault almost certainly lies with how they were educated, and the parenting environment they were raised in.
I'll highlight the framed factors for you and where the blame gets pointed.
Horvath took the same message to Capitol Hill during a 2026 Senate hearing on screen time and children. His framing skipped the generational dunking and focused on exposure. “More than half of the time a teenager is awake, half of it is spent staring at a screen,” he told lawmakers. Human learning, he argued, depends on sustained attention and interaction with other people. Endless feeds and condensed content don’t offer either.
Schools leaned hard into technology during the same window. Educational software replaced textbooks, long readings, and extended problem-solving. After class, students returned to phones, tablets, and laptops, bouncing between social feeds and bite-sized explanations of material they never sat with for very long.
“I’m not anti-tech. I’m pro-rigor,” Horvath told the Post. Rigor, in his view, comes from friction. Reading full texts. Working through confusion. Spending time with material that doesn’t immediately reward you. Take that friction away, and cognitive skills dull. Brains adapt to the environment they’re given, and this one prizes speed over staying power.
The same decline appears outside the United States. Horvath told senators that across roughly 80 countries, academic performance drops after digital technology becomes widely embedded in classrooms. The timing alone raises serious questions about how learning environments affect cognitive development.
This conversation feels uncomfortable because it doesn’t offer villains or easy fixes. Horvath summed it up bluntly during his testimony. “A sad fact our generation has to face is this: Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.” His recommendation focused on restraint, dialing back screens in schools, and restoring depth before the next generation is doomed.
Most frustrating for me is not just that many people read this article and take away an emotive framing that is completely counter to the text of the article, but that many people on Lemmy that read this article will just memory-hole it and continue to complain about phone bans in school, and the under-16 social media bans going on around the world that are very likely to have significant positive benefits for children's learning and go some ways to resolving the problem.
They're measuring lower across all the classical tests designed to measure intelligence. The skills they test for are all very much still needed in modern life.
Heard you out.. Now hear me out. Your suggestion, while it may seem logical on its face (ban all the doom-scrolling networks), is near politically impossible.
Meta, Alphabet, Tiktok etc.. Banning their platforms is a utopian pipe dream presently.
Politicians act on reality - things they have the political capital (backing, party votes, public support) to achieve - and nobody has sufficient political capital to ban those giant companies. Can you imagine the years of court fights, the tarrifs threatened or imposed by the US to any country that wants to ban the big social media giants?
What they do have is a majority of experts in psychology, psychiatry, public policy and technology telling them "well a close second would be to minimise the damage to kids by banning under 16s", so they do that instead.
By the principle of least harm, banning under 16s is a much more useful action than banning the platforms - as it's actually practicable in short term timeframe.
Right.. 5 page law. With literally no way to check if it's being followed for any closed-source software (ie: all of the problem social networks & apps).
Wait, remind me who funded over $250 million for Trump to win in the Nov 2024 elections, and subsequently went scorched earth on USAID with his new DOGE department - literally disbanding the entire agency in 2025?
It seems almost like there is a lot of money to be made in the Ukraine-Russia war, and being one of the main guys who pulls the strings gives you a huge amount of leverage.
Lady looks like she just blew in on the west wind with her flying monkeys in tow, and she's claiming the left are the ones trying to destroy civil order.
Put out racist/inflammatory/severe mental error/obvious lie comments, then his team would go into damage control and claim it was a technical error / intern / junior staff, then someone would ask him about the mistake/lie and and his ego would cause him to pipe up that he did it on purpose and it was a good statement, throwing his own team under the bus as liars again, and again.
His cult member voters don't care, its the post-truth era.
This would be absolutely cringe if a high school kid was doing it as a petty insult to their rivals... But it's the president of the USA.
I know its a melting pot of factors that has caused it, but it still blows my mind that "normal" for the USA has fallen so fucking far, so fast since Trump came on the scene. 10 years ago a fucking tan suit was 'weird' for a president..
Great article that I think will not be read by anyone that needs to hear its message. Primarily because it's not going to make any 10 second content or images on the 'rage farms' that they inhabit. I don't know how we remedy that, but it's a big problem.