What do you mean it costs too much to start businesses here? I’ve founded 3 start ups and have not had any issues with things costing too much. Not a single one of those startups needed much to get going and there was no red tape or mysterious taxes that got in the way.
Parents (myself included) have an impossible task of regulating access to technology for their children.
Societal norms are not aligned with what these educators are saying. I and many other parents know this but they are exposed to technology outside of our direct oversight at schools, friends and relatives houses.
Imagine whining about smoking in the first half of the 20th century or even the 60s and 70s.
Sure there’s an obvious element to it, but smoking rates used to be higher than 50%. Societal norms were that everyone was exposed to smoke, government was lobbied by tobacco and tobacco got rich.
There has been a generational shift in attitudes to, and prevalence of smoking, but only when the medical consensus was harder to lobby away and politicians were faced with pressure of a critical mass of bereaved relatives. It’s at the this stage that “average” adult has strong enough convictions supported by regulation that society breaks through.
Meanwhile, as an adult I am borderline forced to use a smartphone for banking, shopping and communication and need superhuman levels of willpower to avoid social media entrapment.
Big tech is 100% thrilled that people still push around the argument that parents are 100% to blame.
Exposure outside the home is a miniscule amount and could not result in this sort of deep rot. It's not an impossible task at all. Don't give the kids a screen, and when it's necessary, use site whitelists. Yes, they will be mildly alienated, but I don't think we should care. They would also be alienated if their peers all smoked, and I would still not consider giving my kid a pack of cigs. They will recover from an unpopular school life, but they may never recover from the effects of addictive technology.
No, you don't need "superhuman levels of willpower to avoid social media entrapment". Just block the damn sites. Delete your account before you do. No you don't need to keep up with Timmy from the 8th grade and his third marriage and worsening benzo addiction.
People smoked for the same reason people doomscroll - anxiety.
You can expose your kid to technology and also explain the role of moderation the same way you do with candy and sweets. You will need to model the behavior you want in your kid - that means putting your phone down. Buy a timed lockbox if that is what you need.
These kids will grow up and sadly/likely be a burden on the 60% who can read. Or the even smaller subset who can read, write, count, and be productively employed.
On my carrier it's called a MultiSIM. It's having two SIM cards with the same number. On most carriers you can set up if you want this extra SIM to have voice or data (or both). It's usually cheap.
It's true that having two devices might seem complicated, but this is the only setup that ended working out for me: when I know I won't need any smart features on my life, I am happy to go out with my dumphone without worrying about missing urgent calls.
You couldn't instantly record the radio on CD and until computers with CD recorder were common it was harder to share/copy/mix stuff between friends. Tapes were useful before MP3/broadband/p2p file sharing were a thing even long after CD had become common. As a teenager I couldn't afford every CD and vinyl release I liked and even if I had the means the records weren't necessarily available in store locally. Many of us had to rely on that tape being ready in the deck and ninja reflexes to hit the record button fast enough.
Minidiscs would have been better but harder to finance/justify as a kid.
This is bulk of the problem. Don't expect kids to do better when their role models screw up so badly. Sure some will come on top of their own parents but thats not the norm rather just an exception.
There is always the peer pressure excuse but thats not good enough. At the end who buys and setups and keeps paying for that phone?
The other side of it - why can't parents set up screen time and app limits, especially during school hours? No kid needs access to clash royale or snapchat during the school day. The phone should be locked down to "essentials" like the calculator, etc.
If you believe the rule of law and ~general financial stability of the US will persist just keep on investing regularly and ride it out. Markets have a long history of bouncing back and they will keep doing it until they don’t. When/if that happens your retirement dreams might seem quaint compared to the global socioeconomic reality. The people who could sustain the most near term pain are those who have already retired and are living in a fixed income.
Index funds, generally. Ideally something more diversified than just an S&P500 one, but honestly historically it usually hasn't made _that_ much difference in the long run.
Assuming you're talking decades away, it usually all comes out in the wash.
Now, where you should really potentially worry is if you were retiring imminently and needed to pull out a bunch of money to make that happen. But if you're retiring in 20 years or whatever, and, say, the S&P halves next year, is it really, in the scheme of things, _that_ big a deal?
If you could time it perfectly, you could come out better by selling now and reinvesting after the crash, but bear in mind that you probably cannot time it perfectly. People were predicting the 2008 crash imminently from about 2004 on, say, whereas the dot-com crash went from dark mutterings to chaos in a year or so. These things are very hard to time.
As long as you have a decent capabilities and range, and don't keep all your savings in your employer's stock (either real, or, more stupidly, imaginary "options"), stupidity of your employer will only affect you in the short term. In the longer term, you're likely find another one. It's not fun, but it's how it goes.
Like everyone else, wait until the very last second, just as the market peaks, to unload your assets. Before the institutional investors and insiders beat you to the punch.
Spend well below your earnings, max out tax advantaged savings plans, save aggressively, invest lazily (standard blended portfolio or close to it probably will suffice) and 20 years should be enough to make a decent nest egg.
