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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

That's what big tech wanted, looks like they succeeded. Hard to shove targeted ads into the eyeballs of people socializing with one another.

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US politicians have been at war against teenage drinking since the 1980s when the minimum drinking age was raised. Gen Z social trends helped it along, but this is the desired outcome of bipartisan policy going back decades.

More than half of Gen Z is over the legal drinking age now, I’m not sure teen drinking is it

But lower teen drinking can lead to lower lifelong drinking. Habits formed during those years have inertia.

With US legal drinking age being 21, this eats into drinking at university/drinking after work, which is very much where bulk of socializing for young adults happens. Can't imagine it's not hugely affecting adulthood habits.

Eh, 21 limit was in place for all millennials and most of Gen X. And millennials drink like fish.

It might be policy but it’s not that new. Millennial here, we had no trouble getting alcohol under 21.

All thanks to crashing the economy and making the act of spending $15 on a low quality beer untenable for young adults giving 60+% of their income to rent.

Alcohol tax would have been a simpler and much less destructive means of achieving such a goal, but I guess breweries can't lobby when everything else is collapsing too.

When they introduced the higher alcohol tax here in Australia back in 2006(ish), all it did was push us to find ways to make it ourselves. Went from cheap to unbelievably cheap but completely unregulated. Who knows what the alcohol content of some of that stuff was. There are some vague fuzzy nights from that period.

You see the same trend in countries without a crashing economy. The economy is not the main reason.

since when did everyone, ditch personal responsibility to the drain ? I understand that social media platforms are hardcore unethical with the way they prioritize screentime and addiction

Over our wellbeing even at the cost of knowingly decreasing our attention spans with all the Shorts / Tiktok Algorithms.

But we must also take personal responsibility, it costed me $2 (/year) to buy a screen time addiction removal app that works for my iPhone, iPad and even my linux machine with firefox browser, and to lock down every damn social media app in both intervention and absolute blocking ways, and it worked great !

I moved from a screen time addiction of 9h / day to just using my phone in total for 2h out of which most of that is Phone Calls, Apple Music, and Booking Ubers. I was able to set free, and my life was better for it, because of my personal responsibility towards my own life.

It doesnt cost much / almost nothing, to reclaim your life back, there will always be people / organizations trying to screw you over, they have always existed since time millenium , be it corrupt empires, cults and anti-social religions, horrible food, bad peer pressure in school leading to poor influence, bad habits picked up from parents/elders in a kid's life.

The only consistent way that humans have been able to survive, thrive and personally excel in their own lives, against all odds of their society, family, and their sorroundings.

Is PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. I sometimes feel many of us have given up on any outlook of fixing ourselves, i see it with my friends and my loved ones too, we have to make personal responsibility, popular again, if we want a better future.

Classic "personal responsibility" argument used to subjegate the masses.

Individuals have personal responsibility, but the behaviour of a group of humans regresses towards the mean as it gets larger.

You can't assume someone will get fat just because you offer highly addictive processwd food, but you can assume the population as a whlle will.

I prefer the notion of shared responsibility.

Personal responsibility is what you focus on when you are talking to an individual. If you are trying to make your life better, or someone you know's life better, it is great to talk about personal responsibility and making choices for your life.

But that doesn't apply when we are talking about society wide shifts in behavior. It isn't like people suddenly got genetically better or worse at taking personal responsibility. If suddenly a lot fewer people are making healthy decisions, that isn't because we just happened to birth a bunch of people who don't take personal responsibility. Something has changed. Individuals have a lot of control over their own lives, but at a society level all of those individual decisions average out, and you are left with a representation of the effect of society.

Systemic problems require systemic solutions.

Man, this was a really good response to that type of argument. I'm going to save it for later.

Yes people can get swept up in things and be unaware of downstream consequences of their actions, but you can also become informed and decide to change your behavior, find ways to mitigate damage, or communicate with others the damage/solution. How easy to wave your hand at the government or a corporate entity and abdicate responsibility, the parent is correct; personal accountability is faster and more effective than government regulations that also have knock on effects. My regulation example would be how cars in north america became less popular when fuel economy regulations were applied to them, but not SUVs creating the monster car epidemic we all live in.

We crossed over the "personal responsibility" rubicon somewhere around 2016 at the latest. Law is finally catching up in 2026 where Meta is settling/losing multiple lawsuits over the effects of addictive algorithms that caused mental anguish (or something like that. I don't remember the exact language).

Since we're at the legal stage, I hope we can finally get to a stage where such algorithms are treated as seriously as cigarettes. But society moves slowly, because the powers that profit from this pay to push back on regulation.

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