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Comment by mathgeek | Hacker News Reader

You can’t block all of it all of the time, and children (some of the most vulnerable) especially can’t.

Or you end up with the opposite end of the problem. I grew up in destitute poverty and was told all my childhood that credit was an evil trap - I should absolutely never use it.

Well, spring forward to me starting a pretty good career as a software developer and wanting to get my first reliable car. I had no credit history and ended up with a 19% APR. That really, really sucked.

It's been 10 years since then and I still get dinged for not having "enough" credit history despite having a couple car loans and several credit cards that I rotate bills on. The whole system feels like it's designed to punish anyone who doesn't fit into the role of a perfect consumer.

You didn't get fucked with 19% apr because you had no credit history. You got fucked with 19% APR because either the parameters of the loan were really bad or there were some other circumstances. Income less existing obligations vs payment size account for the lion's share of interest rate on an auto loan or just about any other consumer loan.

Credit history is massively over-sold as being impactful by the kind of idiots who live payment to payment.

I agree. My first use of credit was a car loan when I graduated. I had the offer letter to show income (I had not started yet) and some up front sign on / relocation money for the down payment.

It was fine, I paid it off quickly.

No, I got 19% APR because I had no credit history. I know this because there is a big detailed letter full of reasons for your offered rate that you receive when you take out a loan.

The fact that you don’t know this suggests you probably don’t know a lot about how loans work.

I got a car loan at a 8% rate right out of undergrad… you got hosed, maybe you were in a hyperinflationary environment though.

I bet they sent you a letter telling you it was your lack of credit history. You didn’t find one of the many credit providers and have them fight to give you the best rate?

Credit is an extremely elementary thing to grok in a day or so

Why'd that suck so much? As a software dev couldn't you just pay it off a month or two later?

That would depend on what car they bought.

I’m not sure what software devs make $15 grand a month in disposable income 2 years into their career, but I certainly was not one of them.

Some of the ones in the Bay Area do. Sometimes they don’t realize it’s not the norm.

Yeah, it's pretty common in the Bay. I did project that on wherever they're from.

I also didn't expect $15k-$30k in the jump from "not reliable" to "reliable" cars from somebody worried about a 20% interest rate over a long period of time. I have no idea what their background is, but even at today's prices you can do much better than that.

I dunno about you but my first car was when I was 16 working at Tim Hortons for minimum wage, long before I had a software developer salary...

> I still get dinged for not having "enough" credit history

Maybe the data is wrong? I took out a few loans over the years with strange comments from the lenders like "You don't have much credit history", but since it didn't impact anything I didn't think much of it. Somewhere down the line a lender was like "I don't think this is you". Turns out that it wasn't.

What do you mean? Your credit report was someone else’s credit history?

As I understood it, it was a bit stranger than that. There was some minimal activity on the report that was actually me (a phone account, if I remember right), but my credit cards and whatnot didn't show up. But also some activity did that wasn't mine. I was somehow partially combined with another credit history, or something like that. I am not well versed in the technical details to truly understand what the problem was. I had to fill out some form to get it corrected and haven't thought about it since.

I’ve had entries show up on my credit report that were not mine, but my father’s in another city 750km away. I did not want his bill payment history mixed in with mine. At all.

It was actually more difficult to have them removed than you’d expect. I’m sure it is by design. You could start the process only after signing up for an online account, but the actual request needed to be made via fax.

True, and this is why you shouldn’t just hand your kid an iPad and peace out. I’m all for technology and video games for my kids, but I’m vigilant to keep my kids’ eyes away from ads. As a result, my kids aren’t foaming at the mouth for the latest and greatest toys and games which was my experience as a child.

Thing is, keeping children out of Instagram, Facebook, or whatever new social media is hyping currently will probably make them kind of weirdos in their bubble, e.g. in school. At least this would be my fear (don't have children). And good luck trying to use any of these ad-infested privacy-invading platforms while trying to avoid ads.

It doesn't have to make them weird, especially if you're in a school district where there are no-phone policies. Otherwise it can be difficult, for sure.

Learning how to stand on your own in school is good practice for doing the same thing in life. By which I’m absolutely not saying “don’t have friends” but rather, you don’t have to be like everyone else.

My kids won’t be on social media until they’re not kids anymore. If none of us take a stand, nothing ever changes.

Your kids will create hidden social media accounts that you don't know about. That's what I would have done in their situation.

Their exposure will still be much less than someone who gives them free reign and lets them sit in the livingroom staring at a phone. They won't be staring at the phone distracted while they're hanging out with the family.

Hiding things from parents is a far bigger problem than staring at a phone in a living room.

No it’s not. Everyone hid things from their parents. I hid soooo much from my parents. It’s fine. It’s normal. It’s far more important to have limited exposure to modern smart phones.

The people who say things like this inevitably are the ones who spend ten minutes with a therapist and the therapist’s eyes go wide

What, exactly, is so problematic about not telling your parents that you smoke weed with your friends before playing video games? What, exactly, is so problematic about not telling your parents who are dangerously religious, that you had sex with your high school girlfriend? These are all normal, innocuous activities of teenagers. A therapist would not think twice about hearing them.

Indeed, I might have done the same. At least that will be a challenge, lacking smart phones.

Being an outlier when the in-group is actively having their brains turned to mush seems like the better of the two outcomes.

This argument is popular but doesn't hold water. If we suppose for the sake of argument that social media is bad for kids, then it is a parent's duty to keep them off it even if that makes the kid unpopular. As an analogy, consider a kid whose social circle is all shooting heroin. Would it then become acceptable to let your kid do heroin? Of course not. Similarly, even if all the other kids are on social media, it doesn't become acceptable to let your kid use social media (going with the assumed premise that it's bad for them).

It takes a lot of work to be a parent and also monitor all that media consumption/stop all ads. The “average person” isn’t as tech savvy as most of us here and that stuff just doesn’t come as easily to them.

For instance I am very comfortable letting my kids play video games. I play a lot myself, I can make good judgments about what is appropriate for them, what is an appropriate amount of time to play, what is good/bad behavior when playing, what systems are a good choice or if online access (if any) is appropriate. I barely need to think about these things, but for some people this is an incredibly time-consuming, intimidating task.

Is it not ok that parents that spend more time and effort with their kids have better outcomes than parents that spend less time? I’d rather that than have the nanny state regulate everything bad for kids out of existence; we already know what kind of civil rights violations politicians try to justify with children.

It is very hard work raising kids if you are interested in parenting and want to do your best.

The thing is that not everyone's life goal is to be the best parent around. And there is pressure from the society/culture/government to reproduce for healthy economy.

If we as a country want people to have more children, then we need to make their job easier. That may include censorship, age verifications, etc.

You’re making this a very stark, binary choice. Reality is far more nuanced.

Half of the country is teaching their kids to take religion literally and never question it, and that any news story that you don’t like isn’t real, simply because you disagree with it.

Handing over an iPad is the least of the issues facing a large portion of our youth and frankly they might be better off if their parents did sit them in front of it and walk away.

One of the important purposes of a society is to improve the raising of kids who might not be raised well by their parents alone, because it is a valuable outcome to everyone.

You don't choose who you get born to, so if society chooses to say "If you get born to a shitty person, you will suffer immensely and we will do nothing about it", that is a bad society.

Nobody deserves to suffer due to an accident of birth.

Also, "It takes a village to raise a child" is not exactly metaphorical.

I’m not sure my kids have ever seen an ad except for little computer games, and they have laptops and iPads (but no network TV or cable). They are far less exposed to consumerism than when we were kids. My teenage daughter dresses like a hobo.

If they've seen Paw Patrol they've been exposed to ads. I don't mean "commercials" I mean that the entertainment itself is the ad - generating excitement for branded merchandise, but also normalizing the idea of kids accomplishing things and learning life lessons in 20-minute increments with the aid of a tremendous amount of stuff that they just have.

Maybe they haven't but the idea extends to most kids' entertainment.

And that's why government regulation was invented.

You mean corporations regulating the government? Oh wait...

> children … especially can’t

Worry about your own kids, teach them the right values, and use others’ imperfect knowledge to the advantage of your family.

Yeah who cares about society?

How do you propose to at least get society off TikTok or Instagram? You will only face backlash if you try to utter in that direction.

I’ve never had anyone say anything other than “yes, that seems like a good idea, I wish I could do that” when i tell them I do not have a TikTok, instagram, twitter, facebook, etc account.

I guess they all need those accounts for their student visas.

Like virtue signalling techies are actually able to do anything about it.

Fix your own house - as the previous poster said - and then worry about outside your family unit.

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