Hacker News

Ethics is taught. Directly or indirectly (i.e. environmental/cultural). Also for some, a loss of an employment has significantly higher consequence than others.

If you take these into consideration then it makes sense why one would make such choice. Whether they are aware of building an evil device is irrelevant at this point -- they're making best choice for themselves and their family. Employers love employees who follows orders so they'll craft environment where only those kinds of employees would survive.

IMO this isn't really the problem between employers and employees. They are doing what the system incentivizes them. It's the regulator's role to govern to protect individuals.

The irony is U.S. allows lobbying and SuperPAC which essentially makes the system in favor of those with money.

A few years ago this would have made the perfect April Fools joke.

(Continue down below for an amusing rant - trigger warning maybe?)

Now it’s just part of insatiable corporate greed and the current sad reality.

I wonder if Zuck lets his girls use Instagram all day long or if Andy would gift his own toddler (if he had another one) this beautiful tablet. Probably not, he’d have a full time nanny to keep the kid busy.

Alas, these folks are the symptoms and the real problem is systemic folks. Companies are chasing targets to please…drumroll…the shareholders. Yes, each one of us holding index funds are also culpable. It’s a SNAFU. We’ve been sucked whole into the system and escape is hard (especially with the newly proposed Dell bank account for kids that can only be used to invest in stocks).

I think the people who choose to hurt others for profit are basically psychopathic. No conscience. Lack of empathy or compassion. Inflated Ego. They're no different than muggers and rapists who are also willing to hurt others to get what they want, they just happened to end up finding a way to hurt people that they can (so far) get away with.

People like Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy who already have more money than they could ever need but still feel compelled to cause others to suffer in order for them to make even more money likely have some other kind of mental sickness. Either some form of pathological greed that causes them to never be satisfied with what they have and obsess over hoarding, or something that causes them to derive some sort of sick pleasure from causing suffering.

Unless/until they can treated our world would be better off if we locked these kinds of people up to keep the rest of us safe from them, but right now those with enough money can get away with just about anything which only further emboldens them. They can bribe law makers to prevent regulations that would stop them from releasing harmful products and services. They can hide behind corporate shields. Hopefully we find a way to hold them accountable for the harms they cause soon because they're never going to stop hurting us, or our children.

That's exactly correct, The idea in itself isn't bad.

Amazon doing it will make it really horrible.

Unless this is 100 open source and ad/telemetry free? Right..

Child abuse is practiced by the parents who end up deciding to use such a thing. Please don't shift responsibilities away from those who have them. If a parent makes such a decision, they are prone to also do other bad things to their children.

Neoliberalism is at a state where moral shaming has very little effect. If you shame someone for trying to build a career or better themselves, you are the problem to a bigger extent than the person doing the previously morally bad thing. People's shame in a neoliberalist society comes from personal failures, such as not working hard enough, eating too much, not looking good enough, etc.

Have you considered that they are making the the world better and your process of measuring is flawed.

150 years ago, people used to pacify toddlers with "cordial" containing laudanum, better known as opium.

Today we're still doing the same thing, only the drugs hit is being delivered by other means.

Marx explained how the division of labor alienates people from what they produce, from the act of production itself, from their human nature, and from one another. People are forced to perform mind-numbing, degrading, or *harmful tasks* simply to earn the wages needed to stay alive, reducing human life to a commodity

> I genuinely wonder how people working at some of these companies that actively make the world a worse place live with themselves. This is basically, and obviously, child abuse in the implied usage.

My guess: there are a lot more narcissists and sociopaths out there than you'd guess, and they bully the rest into submission.

If not Amazon, someone else would ship this. At least if you ship it you can make it less shitty

It's not obviously child abuse. If you go back 100 years old children were abused far more than we possibly could simply by malnutrition, disease, lack of shelter. Giving them something that may or may not harm them is not obviously child abuse.

Cool idea. Where would I get one?

Don't give kids a computer, give them a camera. A real one.

I was thinking about what a great commentary Toy Story 5 was on this topic. I'm surprised Amazon didn't call their tablet a Lily Pad.

I recently watched Toy Story 5 on a long flight. I almost felt it should come with a trigger warning - I thought it was a spot on, brilliant yet inherently depressing commentary on our current relationship with tech.

(Minor spoiler alert) One of my favorite scenes was when a slew of toys were running through a house with a family inside. Normally in the Toy Story world when a human see the toys they need to "play dead", but since all the humans were glued to their screens they could run by unimpeded.

Closer to the coke, unfortunately

… until your get to the political messages further down.

My kids liked to watch Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street (before the age of YouTube). They had to catch it when it was on and when it was over, that was it. They had to go find something else to do. The scarcity made my job as parent a lot easier.

It's also a slippery slope. And a function of our society. We went in with the best of intentions and I'm now letting my toddlers watch 30 or 40 minutes of TV a day. It started with one quick work meeting that I couldn't reschedule or skip. Then they started asking for it, demanding it really. It has taken incredibly strong will to limit their watching to 30 or 40 minutes in the early morning.

> bad choices

As one of them, no, not really.

I looked hard into the question but all the litterature I got was a mix of "I'll give you candy if you do X" experiments that beg the obvious "what if the kid doesn't want the candy for whatever reason ?", including their mood while doing the experiment. And this goes on for every detail of the experiments.

And the rest was philosophical and hypothetical "it's not like the olden days" style of conservatism, mixed with "this time it's different" to try to barrage criticism.

Testing on kids is just hard, so coming up with good experiments is in itself a PITA. I wish people would recognize that and take the research with shovels of salt (and I don't see misleading research as better than nothing).

Buying a kindle for my kid has been a decision that still pays dividends, I would have kicked myself if I refused it on social pressure.

I’ve built Tellybox to specifically control what and how long my kids can watch anything.

It has a visual indicator (sun going down) that tells them how long they have remaining and that works quite well to remove any discussions (well… screaming and shouting)

https://github.com/sandermvanvliet/tellybox

As others have said in adjacent threads, kids are hard, every situation is different.

It's not as if the kids who get the digital pacifiers are well behaved.

Usually my kids are sitting quietly at the table and playing with their little cars or whatever while some kid is melting down that he ran out of roblox or his game isn't working.

I've literally seen kids that are 9 or 10 act this way in public! Like little babies!

I have a rule for gifts for my kids: no screens. Toys are so much more interesting than screens. They'll prob end up staring at screens their whole lives for work.

If you’re not a parent, you're probably only seeing children in places which are not designed with children in mind - places where there’s no place to run and play, and kids have to be quiet. In those places you have to pacify child somehow, a lot of parents use digital entertainment. If you go to child friendly places, you would see it much less.

Our child has maybe 1 hour of tv a week, but if someone sees them only on a plane, they would guess it’s an iPad kid.

this is what the future will look like if the epstein-class wins: https://www.instagram.com/p/Dez_ma0xagT/?hl=en

> The discourse on tablets for kids tends to degenerate into a very judgy, black-and-white debate of so-called “tablet kids” vs… not, which I find really reductive.

Some of the kids in my neighborhood derisively called another kid a "tablet kid" because he'd rather stay inside on his tablet than go outside in the summer and play.

Personally, tablet time is reserved for airplanes and trains. We also have a color eink android tablet that is hooked up to Libby and isn't used for anything else but reading.

TV screen time is limited to watching shows together with one of us, or when my son is sick.

Video/computer games are always played together.

Same goes for movies, movies are always co-watched, we sit through the movie, pause and discuss what is going on, I'll ask about why people are doing certain things, what emotions different characters are having in a scene, and so forth.

From the article,

> While observing 422 children ages 3 to 5, a 2022 study led by Radesky found that mobile device use for calming — in other words, a digital pacifier — was associated with “decreased executive functioning and increased emotional reactivity.” (Executive function refers to memory and problem-solving skills needed for everyday life. Emotional reactivity refers to poor impulse control in response to stress, pain, and other negative feelings.)

ADHD is a type of executive function disorder.

you think this isn't gonna ship with some illegal data harvesting ai? oh sweet summer chile

This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy). But this is besides the point.

I feel it's great, but then I use Google Kids on the Fire, because Amazon's app is junk in comparison.

And also, my kid is (disabled) autistic and non verbal and this keeps them calm and happy.

So yes it's a great idea.

A loaded question and I feel like people here including yourself are criticizing from the sidelines. Essentially the old "OMG you let your kid play on the phone!!! what a terrible parent!!!!". Although this isn't a phone, it's a device designed for kids with hopefully some apps that have a little more educational value than the typical phone apps.

The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points. If anyone here looks back on their own childhood perhaps they actually had similar freedoms? Hell i used to play the Apple 2 obsessively from a very young age. I credit it as formative in a positive way.

You can argue that if you're both working and no one has 100% time to dedicate to raising the child they shouldn't have children but that argument leads to plummeting birth rates.

I say all of this as someone who doesn't have kids but I have at least some sense of how freaking hard it is and in the grand scheme of things a tablet designed for kids isn't the worst thing.

Tell me why an alternative that's at least better than a phone is so bad? If you want to argue a phone or any such device that keeps kids occupied for some time is unacceptable i think you're waaaaay out of touch.

doing devil’s advocate here, because it does look like a nightmare.

IF my kids were to have access to a tablet, I would prefer it be a tablet specifically desgined for kids, rather than a commodity all powerful generic computing device and OS

Demand for products comes from the consumer, not the producer. This trend happened a long time ago, with parents giving their kids a tablet to avoid actually parenting.

Maybe it's making the best of bad parents

They're going to use a device anyways because mom or dad are going to want to avoid parenting. Might as well give them something designed for them.

I’m with you 100% on obsessively blocking ads. I cringe whenever I accidentally see one in someone else’s house. They’re just so transparently playing on our insecurities…keep that particular mind virus away from me. I buy as little as possible and I’m quite content with it, thank you very much.

They might be because they don't get to build the muscle around how to control themselves in front of addictive software. It's an important skill to develop.

Don't worry, Amazon still sells books

I agree for age of 3-6 years, but until age 14 is ridiculous.

Not all devices are equally bad.

I've been happily learning to code my own video games on Intel 486 PC in QuickBasic since late elementary school (age 10), and yes, I played outdoors with other kids too.

Before I had PC of my own, I was making them on paper (game design and mechanics, not literal code).

Another thing to blame on the billionaires then. Soon they will become like gods, feared and blamed for intentionally causing plagues and famines when people dont appease them enough.

So, they screamed for 30 minutes. They're kids. I'm not gonna give my 4 or 6 year-old something that's gonna take a hatchet to their attention span just because they're doing a thing that's completely normal for that age.

That drive fucking sucks ass, don't get me wrong, but oh well, that's part of life - the kid has to learn that sometimes shit's not gonna go their way and they have to figure out how to get over it. I'll be damned if I'm gonna teach them that the way they can calm themselves down and regulate their emotions is by the sweet, sweet blue hue of a tablet.

We're a two working parent household and we keep screen time limited to a short amount of TV time. We'll expose them to screens more and more so that we can properly educate them over time, sure. But man, I don't get the whole, "even a two working parent household barely has time for anything and is stressful," bit because - yeah, that's exactly what parenting is.

Parenting is hard. It's exhausting. If you don't have a village, the onus is on you to do it right. That's what we've signed up for, is giving our all to our kids until they're out on their own. That's what we're supposed to do. It's not supposed to be easy, it's a constant stress the likes of which you will never know until you're in it. But we're here, so let's do the hard work and do it right. We owe it to them.

Edit: You're right, we need time and space and the ability to make good choices, but neither of those should come at the expense of my kids.

I wish people should just avoid talking about using tablets on flights altogether.

It's a non-issue. Toddlers/kids maybe fly once a month max. Using tablets during that time is negligible.

How much of screaming kids, is bad parenting? None of the kids in dual working parent, or single parent households that I grew up with, screamed.

My kids are far from perfect angels, but they do just fine on a 5 hour flight with some colouring books, a small container of legos (with pieces pre-chosen to be ones we're okay with losing), and then the excitement of getting to order ANY drink they want (from their point of view).

I wonder what parents did for thousands of years before screens came along.

Did you try "the car won't go until you're quiet"?

Not sure why you’re getting so strongly downvoted. The travel situations are the ones I find the most reasonable for tablet use. It’s definitely possible to keep a kid occupied for a 5 hour plane ride without a tablet but it takes work. Very few adults can raw-dog a 5 hour plane ride themselves, ffs. I may judge other parents for allowing tablet use in other situations, but not on an airplane.

Flag me because it’s only acceptable to judge “those kind” of parents. Your decisions are valid and above reproach.

This is nice that you're walking them through it but I wonder why you'd need a tablet in the first place, then? It's better to sit with them in front of a monitor with the proper posture and viewing position.

I think that once parents become the OS devs specifically for their own children (or at least app devs) the tablet becomes less like a pacifier and more like a ball game between the toddler and parent, as each throws new stuff (metaphorically) at the other.

Nice, you're managing a curriculum now.