All reasonable points, however it's worth it to donate to creatives and free software projects. Part of the enshittification of the web is due to creatives being dependant on ad revenue.
Yeah. Why isn't that kid working? We need all the help we can get for the war cause. If we don't get enough Element 710 those bugs will kill more babies on this remote planet. You don't want that do you?
Wasn't there a movie where LL Cool J was the bad army guy who was using kids video games as remote controls for real war weapons? I want to say I saw it in the late 90's but it's possible my flakey memory is making this all up.
I was pretty small when my friend's parents rented the VHS while we were on holiday. The main thing I remember was that Robin Williams asked a kid how many points they got for killing a person and the kid said, "A thousand," and my friend reacted like that was a huge deal. I remember thinking that was weird because we didn't know what the point scale was so it might not have been that big, but I knew how to mask my autism enough not to say that. I can also speak neurotypical enough to understand they were going for the emotional effect of a big-sounding number, so in that sense my friend had the right reaction.
As an adult I can look back and go "oooooohhh this is about the military industrial complex exploiting poor young people by dangling meagre benefits in front of them", and I think that message did seep in to my young brain in some way.
The stakes between these two generations weren't the same at all. WWII was a real crisis where world freedom was actually at stake.
Nowadays, the wars are all a bunch of made up conflicts to help countries and their businesses keep control over world resources and exploit people around the world for money.
The internets way open now, plenty of places to find out what's going on vs back then where you literally just had the local radio and 1 of 3 TV channels feeding you the info.
Yeah, I try to figure out as much as I can on my own, unfortunately not everybody has that kind of time. So, information must be shared once somebody found it out. That's what we're doing when we're talking to other people.
Well, IQ scores rise over time. Smarter people realize how dumb it is to directly kill, or pay tons for the killing of, dirt poor civilians on the other side of the world. Especially for profits most of them will never, ever see.
Edit: I shouldn't make it sound as if the soldiers of WW2 were dumb though. As another comment correctly pointed out, there's a lot of difference between WW2 and at least some modern wars.
I'm pretty sure even the inventors of IQ test say it shouldn't be used to measure the general intelligence. The only thing IQ test measures well is how good you are at solving IQ tests.
Also
IQ scores have been shown to be associated with such factors as nutrition, parental socioeconomic status, morbidity and mortality, parental social status, and perinatal environment.
I've wanted to put the quote against the point that rise in IQ scores means rise of general intelligence, because the listed factors mostly relate to your standard of life, which has risen pretty significantly since 1909.
Same source, same section
While IQ tests are generally considered to measure some forms of intelligence, they may fail to serve as an accurate measure of broader definitions of human intelligence inclusive of, for example, creativity and social intelligence. For this reason, psychologist Wayne Weiten argues that their construct validity must be carefully qualified, and not be overstated. According to Weiten, "IQ tests are valid measures of the kind of intelligence necessary to do well in academic work. But if the purpose is to assess intelligence in a broader sense, the validity of IQ tests is questionable."
IMO making smarter decisions in a society doesn't boil down to academic work.
