Population and Housing

[ijmorlan]

https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-24

Yeah, I don’t think boomers as a group are really the problem here. If we’re going to blame anybody, it’s all the random people who don’t know anything about how it works, don’t care to learn, and who are pandered to by ill-considered features from people who should know better. For example, the way browsers are moving in the direction of hiding the actual URL of the page. Browser makers, as technical people, should know better.

Ugh...Scott Adams.

Yes, I’m well aware that he has turned out to be a huge disappointment in his public attitudes. But we should all be able to separate the person from the first few years of Dilbert, which were hilarious. He’s one of many public figures who would do well to just close their Twitter accounts, or at least get an editor.

Anyway, I actually disagree with this point. We should develop technology to be more user friendly and more accessible. I don't have to know an internal combustion engine works to drive a car. I shouldn't have to know how the underlying technologies work to use the web.

Obviously it is a grey area discussion of whether a URL should be underlying technology or part of the user experience, but given how my parents have been using computers and the web for decades, still fail to understand what a URL is, I'd say there's a reasonable argument for it being an underlying component.

These things also change over time. At one point using the command line was the "user friendly" way of using a computer for people who didn't understand programming.

One purpose of URLs, explicitly called out in the early RFCs which defined the Web, is to be able to share a web page with somebody by writing down the URL on a piece of paper (literally, “napkin”) and giving it to them. Getting rid of URLs is like getting rid of page numbers from books, because “math is hard”; it removes important functionality and makes the technology harder to use. Nobody is saying that people should have to be able to set up a DNS server in order to use the Web.

Anyway this is just an example. Essentially I’m blaming the technical elite for creating a culture which encourages the non-elite to stay ignorant. A better culture would be one in which people can learn just as much as they want; the baseline should involve more basic awareness of the technology without needing in-depth knowledge to use, meaning it would be less magic and more just sophisticated, meaning that people would be more able to jump in and acquire more knowledge when and where it is useful to them. Making things easy and allowing people to get things done without knowing how to re-build the engine, so to speak, is definitely a good thing overall.

I think a similar situation exists in political discussion, where media often don’t do much to encourage understanding. For example, nobody should ever say anything on TV about government finances if they don’t understand the distinction between debt and deficit. Somebody operating at that level of confusion cannot possibly have anything meaningful to contribute to the discussion.

I certainly don't think you folks look down on renters, but tomh asked if people look down on people for renting, and yeah, they definitely do. I have experienced it. There is an expectation that you will own your home when you have the means, and if you don't then it's because you have failed to gain the means.

Although I myself can’t recall noticing this, I definitely believe you.