Smartphones Are Killing Americans, but Nobody’s Counting | Hacker News Reader

Smartphones Are Killing Americans, but Nobody’s Counting

medium.com

11 pointstashapenguin11 comments

Brits too - on a tangential point - Childline (a children's charity) reported today a large increase in the numbers of suicidal children from the age of 10.

This is the age children start secondary school, so stress would of course increase there, but it's also the age they start to use mobile phones. Causation != correlation of course, but a pervasive form of bullying that doesn't stop at the school gates, and that can be carried out pseudo-nonymously, might be a significant factor in the uptick seen. That, coupled with constant streams of 'perfect' lives and no place to really discuss teen issues when everything is recorded and potential blackmail material, can't be helping the situation.

If Apple/Google really wanted to make a big difference to people's life quality, they would take steps to mitigate this. They do have a responsibility to their clients, even if they are minors.

And, back on point, they could take a stab at working on stopping phone use if the user is driving (and being able to differentiate between passenger/driver). This, I hear, is also a large problem in NZ, for one, where road fatalities are way higher than they should be.

> they could take a stab at working on stopping phone use if the user is driving

Apple has implemented that in iOS 11.

> [children and phones]

And from something I posted elsewhere yesterday:

adults: record numbers of teens are depressed, we must find out why

teens: school is more stressful than ever, our parents screwed over the economy, the earth is on a path to total environmental destruction, and now we have to deal with actual fuckin' nazis

adults: it's the iphones isn't it

Fair point on the 'blame phones'. But social media is powerful and might have an amplifying effect on mental imbalances.

“Story for Medium members only“. I’m normally the last one to complain about paywalls and the like, but if there’s a workaround for this one, I can’t find it.

Here’s the original Bloomberg link that works for me: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-17/smartphon...

Please, let's make this the official link for this post.

tl;dr, headline is false. Smartphones aren't killing people. Stupid behavior is killing people.

They know better, and they do it anyway.

Smartphones make it easy for everyone to record all of their phone calls, protecting them from phone predators. They provide location capabilities which make it easier for rescuers to find victims of accidents. So on and so forth.

Smartphones are great. Stupid people are going to find ways to kill themselves no matter what tools you place in their hands. It's natural selection.

> It's natural selection.

<pet peeve> No, it isn't. Not even slightly natural selection. </pet peeve>

Depends where you draw your subjective threshold of "natural" ;)

I will say I believe it's a limited definition if you consider human-constructed things as artificial but e.g. termite hills as natural.

Oh great, now Medium are hiding behind a forced login "paywall".

Up until now, Medium have been "encouraging" me to create an account and login, now it is requiring it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-17/smartphon...

Weird that Bloomberg is in medium.

Interesting -- but I believe it's to do with Bloomberg more specifically. I checked another post on Medium incognito and could view it just fine.

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