If zoomers and millennials are any indication, the segment of our population comprised of pre-adolescents up to and including age 14 - generation alpha - has been rapidly losing their predisposition for creativity and imagination
A perfect example of this are Legos. A thread:
LEGO, a company teetering precariously on the premise that kids want to be creative, has been struggling with exactly that conundrum for decades. As recently as 1990, the standard box of LEGO bricks contained anywhere from 500 to 1000 pieces
Through sales research, focus groups and peer review, LEGO now believes such a set is way, way too complex. Let's dial it back a bit: not only do children not have the patience to gather together all the required parts for a castle, or boat, or car - there isn't enough space in
their tiny, ridiculous brains to previsualize long-term plans, imagine new forms, or create the requisite custom shapes
As a response to this trend, LEGO decreased the number of pieces in each box
Instead of grappling with a full one-hundred pieces to build that Kentucky Fried Chicken or Starbucks Coffee, now you only need ten
And look: these pre-fab green umbrella straws snap directly into the miniature espresso machine - you don't even gotta build 'em. LEGO bricks have gotten bigger, as well: the size of each block in a set has increased steadily over time in direct proportion to your child's
inability to manipulate his backwards, clumsy-ass ham hands. Who needs hours of unnecessarily complicated finger work when you're trying to develop your motor skills?
Finally, the majority of "bricks" in today's LEGO kits have evolved exactly as Darwin intended: they're now shaped exactly like the cars, trees, humans, animals, ships, and rockets originally subject to interpretation by a kid's imagination
And which set of LEGO is right for you? Choose from styles like Harry Potter, Star Wars, Exoforce, Knight's Kingdom, Bionicle, Minecraft, Ghostbusters and numerous other brandy-brands too depressing even to think about
It's only a matter of time before LEGO starts packaging their product directly inside the Happy Meal carton
From little plastic bricks and imagination to electronic, battery-operated toys and program squiggly meta-scripts so his optically sensitive robots to kaput in 24 years. Not sure where along the way imagination was lost but it happened
There should be a children's aptitude test where they're in a room with 10,000 single-cell plastic bricks and given however long they want to successfully construct something from their mind
Everything in this thread is 100% verifiably true, and anyone that argues otherwise is either willfully ignorant, woefully misinformed, or has a malicious agenda
Unfortunately most medically trained individuals - be they nurses, physicians, or researchers - fall into the first two categories
If the beginning of the universe happened just because it could - or because it had to - it would have happened before it did, a second earlier for instance
As it had an infinity of before where all potential of random chance or function had been maxed out
Neall "Nellis" Ellis: defeated an African rebel army out of spite: a brief thread
>Born 1949 in South Africa
>Fights in Rhodesian Bush War
>Joins SA Army
>Learns to fly attack helicopters
>Masters the MI-24 HIND
>Apartheid ends
>Can't serve in SAAF anymore because white devil
>Acquires a HIND of his own
>Becomes mercenary
>"Have gunship, will travel"
>Gatling-guns his way throughout the dark continent >Almost all African communists and anti-western groups put a price on his head
>Fights in the Congo War
>Year 2000
>Hired by Sierra Leone
>RUF rebel army surrounds SL's capital, Freetown
>It's nightfall so helicopters can't fly
>Sierra Leone army virtually overran
>Civil government prepares to capitulate
>Fall of Saigon tier chaos begins to erupt
>Ellis fires up his HIND, which was not equipped for night combat
The economy is a curious subject. It affects all of us, but hardly anyone wants to state the obvious
Culture war on both sides share this blind spot. It is avoided at all costs because it is a feature, not a bug
The coming American collapse: a thread
A quick note:
Comparison to Rome is warranted and justified but depending on the context or example
America is actually more similar to the USSR than Rome. We are just as socialist as they were and its bankrupting us. A (giant) nail in the USSR's coffin was its subsidized rent
The US economy has about 15 years left
The next major shock to the dollar and the economy will be the social security default in the early 2030s, it will make Chinese lung herpes and what it did to everything look like a joke