National Crisis of Smartphone-Inflicted Loneliness Hurting our Teenagers

Jonathan Haidt and Jean M. Twenge warn that we need to separate teenagers from their smartphones:

Teenage loneliness was relatively stable between 2000 and 2012, with fewer than 18 percent reporting high levels of loneliness. But in the six years after 2012, rates increased dramatically. They roughly doubled in Europe, Latin America and the English-speaking countries, and rose by about 50 percent in the East Asian countries . . . All young mammals play, especially those that live in groups like dogs, chimpanzees and humans. All such mammals need tens of thousands of social interactions to become socially competent adults. In 2012 it was possible to believe that teens would get those interactions via their smartphones — far more of them, perhaps. But as data accumulates that teenage mental health has changed for the worse since 2012, it now appears that electronically mediated social interactions are like empty calories. Just imagine what teenagers’ health would be like today if we had taken 50 percent of the most nutritious food out of their diets in 2012 and replaced those calories with sugar. So what can we do? We can’t turn back time to the pre-smartphone era, nor would we want to, given the many benefits of the technology. But we can take some reasonable steps to help teens get more of what they need.

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Loud Noise at City Parks – Pro and Con

Can we agree on anything anymore? I often like to walk through Tower Grove Park, close to my house in St. Louis. On many evenings I like sit on a park bench and read and write. I've found it increasingly annoying that so many loud vehicles/motorcycles cruise through the park (some loud enough that you can hear their engines growling 1/2 mile away). Every night or two, somebody parks their vehicle, near a beautiful pond and garden area, opens their windows and blasts their music loud enough that you can hear it thumping 1/4 mile away. I see these two things as problems, so I called the park office and asked what we can do about this. I was told we can't do anything about the loud car engines, but I was given the park ranger's phone number in case someone "is playing their music very loud" or "blaring" their music.

I shared my concern on the Nextdoor.com website for my neighborhood and ten neighbors promptly "liked" the post. But I also received a long comment (liked by six people) who reminded me that it is a "public park," calling me "passive aggressive," suggesting that I am over-wrought and needing meditation and suggesting that I avoid the park during popular times. Ergo, we have two factions re loud park noise: Pro and Con.

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NYT: Consider Every Energy Source Not Called Nuclear When Discussing Climate Change

There is no good faith explanation for the failure of the NYT to discuss nuclear power. Nor is there any good faith explanation for failing to discuss the discouraging real-life science-based numbers re the % of U.S. energy usage that could realistically be replaced by wind and solar.

Michael Schellenberger discusses the missed opportunity:

The underlying reason for the failure of Biden’s ambitious climate plans is that progressives remain dogmatically pro-renewables and anti-nuclear. After I and a handful of others spent much of 2019 criticizing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her anti-nuclear Green New Deal, she said in May of that year that she would “keep the door open” on nuclear power. But in October she advocated the closure of New York’s Indian Point nuclear plant. When the plant closed earlier this year, natural gas use and carbon emissions increased, as my colleagues and I had long predicted. Had Biden advocated the increase of nuclear power from today’s 19 percent to 50 percent of America’s electricity by 2050, he would have won Republican support, and America would be on a path to significantly reduced emissions.

Schellenberger also discusses the reasons the US is missing the opportunity to actually do something about fossils fuels, especially the fear that nuclear power plants will be over budget (something many other countries are willing to figure out):

The public interest case for nuclear power is obvious. Building nuclear power plants that can last 80 or 100 years is much more similar to building roads and bridges than it is to importing from China solar panels that last just 10 or 20. And taking responsibility for the peaceful use of our most dangerous technology, the only one that truly poses an apocalyptic threat to human civilization, rather than let China and Russia control it, is obviously in America’s national security interests.

From an environmental point of view, safely managing and eventually re-using used nuclear fuel rods at the site of production is much closer to the “circular economy” vision of permanent recycling than to the reality of solar waste disposal, which turns out to involve either dumping flimsy used solar panels on poor Africansor paying four times more for solar electricity than progressives had claimed.

Progressive support for nuclear has grown quickly. Two progressive and socialist science writers, Will Boisvertand Leigh Phillips, spoke out forcefully and insightfully in support of nuclear, in 2013 and 2016. This year, two socialists, Emmet Penney and Bhaskar Sunkara, made the economic and climate case for nuclear power.

Unfortunately, most mainstream news reporters remain hostile to nuclear energy and they reach many more people. They repeat the same false claims that there is something so terribly complicated about nuclear plants that we can’t build them, even as they are built all over the world.

But all infrastructure projects are over-budget, and everybody in construction knows this. Even people who have renovated a kitchen know this. The UK-France tunnel under the English Channel was $3.6 billion over budget. The International Space Station program is tens of billions of dollars over budget. And the Sochi Winter Olympics were $39 billion over budget.

I was once a big fan of solar panels.  It seemed like we would be getting electricity for almost free.  That was before reality set in.  Here's Michael Schellenberger discussing the big problems with solar:

But a major new study of the economics of solar, published in Harvard Business Review (HBR), finds that the waste produced by solar panels will make electricity from solar panels four times more expensive than the world’s leading energy analysts thought. “The economics of solar,” write Atalay Atasu and Luk N. Van Wassenhove of Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires, one of Europe’s leading business schools, and Serasu Duran of the University of Calgary, will “darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash." . . . .

The problem is the sheer quantity of the hazardous waste, which far exceeds the waste produced by iPhones, laptops, and other electronics. The volume of waste expected from the solar industry, found a team of Indian researchers in 2020, was far higher than from other electronics.

“The totality of these unforeseen costs could crush industry competitiveness,” conclude the HBR authors. “If we plot future installations according to a logistic growth curve capped at 700 GW by 2050 (NREL’s estimated ceiling for the U.S. residential market) alongside the early replacement curve, we see the volume of waste surpassing that of new installations by the year 2031.”

It’s not just solar. “The same problem is looming for other renewable-energy technologies. For example, barring a major increase in processing capability, experts expect that more than 720,000 tons worth of gargantuan wind turbine blades will end up in U.S. landfills over the next 20 years. According to prevailing estimates, only five percent of electric-vehicle batteries are currently recycled – a lag that automakers are racing to rectify as sales figures for electric cars continue to rise as much as 40% year-on-year.”

But the toxic nature of solar panels makes their environmental impacts worse than just the quantity of waste. Solar panels are delicate and break easily. When they do, they instantly become hazardous, and classified as such, due to their heavy metal contents. Hence, used solar panels are classified as hazardous waste. The authors note that “this classification carries with it a string of expensive restrictions — hazardous waste can only be transported at designated times and via select routes, etc.”

This is a frustrating topic for me because the high level of hypocrisy by those who claim to be concerned about the environment.  I have many left-leaning friends who claim that the environmental issues we face, including energy issues, are "dire." They've been saying this for a decade, yet most of them do nothing in their personal lives to change that situation. This hypocrisy is rampant among Democrats, and it looks like Joe ens new infrastructure package will do next to nothing to reduce carbon emissions.  Nuclear will still be on life support, even though it is our most promising technology.

The people who claim the be the most concerned about carbon will continue to put their furnaces and AC on high, as they always have (I know almost know one who will sacrifice comfort (or even wear a sweater in the winter) for the sake of the environment.  People will blithely continue to take jobs requiring long commutes in their large cars, many of which have pathetic gas mileage. They will continue taking long trips in cars and jets (I'm guilty of this one).  When is the last time (if ever) that you've ever heard another American refuse to burn fossil fuel for the sake of "the environment"?  I would challenge anyone to tell any difference between Democrats and Republicans on environmental issues based on their conduct.  At least many conservatives are honest, when they say they have no intention of changing their conduct to reduce consumption of fossil fuels. We, the left-leaning American people, left-wing media and "progressive" politicians, talk a loud game about the environment. But if action really speaks louder than words, the only thing we can confidently conclude is that most of us on the left don't give a shit about "the most pressing existential issue of our day."

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Lenore Skenazy Discusses Fearful Childhoods

For a child, is the world mostly a big playroom or mostly something to fear? Writer (and parent) Lenore Skenazy tells us how dramatically things have changed:

Kids are being treated like babies for even longer stretches. When Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, gives lectures, he often asks audience members born before 1982 to shout out what age they were first allowed to leave the house on their own. Many in the crowd answer eight, seven, or even six. (Personally, I shout "Five!")

Then, skipping the mishmash of Generation X, he asks everyone born after 1995 to answer the same question, and most of the millennials respond in the 10-13 age range. "The effect is always huge," says Haidt, a co-founder with me of Let Grow, the nonprofit dedicated to making childhood independence easy, normal, and legal.

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“Fact-Checking” Lurches Along

As Matt Taibbi indicates in his article, he is not taking a position on whether the "lab origin" theory is true. That said, in his article on "fact-checking," he describes what goes for serious reporting on a most urgent topic in modern day America:

Fauci’s new quote about not being “convinced” that Covid-19 has natural origins, however, is part of what’s becoming a rather ostentatious change of heart within officialdom about the viability of the so-called “lab origin” hypothesis. Through 2020, officials and mainstream press shut down most every discussion on that score. Reporters were heavily influenced by a group letter signed by 27 eminent virologists in the Lancet last February in which the authors said they “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” and also by a Nature Medicine letter last March saying, “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct.”

The consensus was so strong that some well-known voices saw social media accounts suspended or closed for speculating about Covid-19 having a “lab origin.” One of those was University of Hong Kong virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who went on Tucker Carlson’s show last September 15th to say “[Covid-19] is a man-made virus created in the lab.” After that appearance, PolitiFact — Poynter’s PolitiFact — gave the statement its dreaded “Pants on Fire” rating.

. . .

Fact-checking was a huge boon when it was an out-of-sight process quietly polishing the turd of industrial reportage. When companies dragged it out in public and made it a beast of burden for use in impressing audiences, they defamed the tradition.

We know only a few things absolutely for sure, like the spelling of “femur” or Blaine Gabbert’s career interception total. The public knows pretty much everything else is up for argument, so we only look like jerks pretending we can fact-check the universe. We’d do better admitting what we don’t know.

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