2) Your discussion of ordering a steak refutes your position.
3) Your error is not new. Magritte refuted you decades ago:
Posted on 02/16/2026 7:48:48 AM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
As a mom of three kids, Christina Mott had been counting the days until her oldest son, Colton, got his driver's license.
It falls on her to drive each of them — age 10, 12, and 16 — to three different charter schools every day, and then to extracurriculars and social outings. "Having him able to drive himself would free up a lot of time," she says. If only.
While out one day on his learner's permit, Colton rolled through a red light and a stop sign. He panicked and decided to put his license on hold indefinitely. "Getting in crashes, that's something that scares me a lot," Colton explains.
That means his mom is still chauffeuring three kids around their Northern California suburb. Christina, who's 46, says a lot of her fellow parents are going through the same thing: Teenagers are slamming the brakes on the time-honored rite of passage of getting a license at 16, either out of fear or because they're put off by the process or the costs. And that means a lot of Gen X parents are stuck behind the wheel longer than they bargained for.
Even so, she admits Colton doesn't feel quite as ready for a license as she was at 16. "He's not very observant and tends to live in his own world," she says. "I don't think, without GPS, that he would even know how to get to the grocery store from our house that we've lived in for eight years. So, the idea of him dealing with traffic lights and other drivers makes me nervous, too."
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Old folks wreck going 20, Teenagers 120.
Maryland is 17.
What’s insanely stupid is that they can get their permit, drive 50 hours with parents who have poor skills then they take driver Ed.
There are some parent directed driver Ed courses, but of course oir nanny state doesn’t allow them.
Be of mine had his CDL at eighteen and was living alone driving semi’s by 19.
“In Korea in the seventies, many of the soldiers in my unit kept failing the international drivers license required there. They didn’t want drive off post.”
I went to Korea in 1997. Company driver took me to Pohang to get my DL.
Dude at the windows didn’t know what to do, wouldn’t allow my driver to interpret the testing.
So he sent us upstairs where we met with a guy sitting at a big desk all alone in a very big room.
After a few words he made a call and sent us back downstairs.
They smiled, took my photo and handed me my driver’s license.
And how to cuss at the windshield. :)
My niece’s daughter turned 16 last summer and got her drivers license. She’s a cheerleader and is on the school yearbook staff among other things My niece pretty much told her she had to get her license so she could drive herself to and from extracurricular activities, competitions, etc. She had no problem with it, but most of her classmates do not have their licenses.
We could hardly wait to get our licenses when we were in high school. My mom loved it too. I was the oldest of five and not only relieved her of chauffeuring duties for my stuff, but could help her with the occasional errand or picking up a sibling from an extracurricular activity.
I got a job at a gas station, made $2.00 an hour, cash. I was in heaven, there was a lift! Hello new dual exhausts and Walker Continental mufflers! We’d experiment all day, straight pipes under the axles (too raw), bend them up and over the rear axles, much better sound and you got “rackback” when you backed off.
“ While out one day on his learner’s permit, Colton rolled through a red light and a stop sign. He panicked and decided to put his license on hold indefinitely. “Getting in crashes, that’s something that scares me a lot,” Colton explains.”
Pussy…. And no mention of dad I notice.
I’d say something else but I’m in polite company.
You must not come here very often.
2) Your discussion of ordering a steak refutes your position.
3) Your error is not new. Magritte refuted you decades ago:
At some point, all I can do is pity them.
“...our ‘62 Mercedes-Benz 190D - no risk of speeding tickets in that thing!”
Putting turbos on almost all Diesels was a Good Idea.
My father picked out my first car. It was that or nothing.
The mentality that you seem to be promoting is basically a recipe for creating 20 and 30-something man-children who still live at home with mom and dad, with no steady employment (much less a career) as they spend their days playing computer games and scrolling through silly "memes" on their phones.
The reason you see more male than female basement-dwellers also has to do with a society that pathologizes normal male behavior as "toxic masculinity". The very drives and healthy instincts that motivated men to advance in their lives and careers is now treated as pathological by society, so young men prefer to retreat into little worlds of AI-generated make-believe. There's no similar impetus to pathologize female behavior as "toxic feminitity".
I am posting to you twice in an hour. I have a teaching credential and worked in public schools for twelve years — when engineering for the defense department was between programs. (I liked where I was living and actually love teaching, except for the teachers union and most administrators.)
I do not know how to fix it but we have changed so much as a society. (I went out all day and came home when it got too dark to play outside.) My parents were busy and did not mind the risks we were taking — and there were lots of risky things in my childhood. But teachers, many anyway, are easily satisfied to repeat last year over and over. Kids look around for teachers who make learning exciting and are often disappointed.
I got my license at 16 and I was not really ready for the responsibility, but got a lot of experience (and one minor accident changing lanes — but we did not havde cell phones, I was sick and should have stayed home — just did not know how my reflexes were slowed by the cold.)
I couldn't afford a car and insurance either, so when I got my learners permit in 1965 at age 15 1/2, which allowed my to legally ride a motorcycle on the street, I bought a Yamaha 80.
The bottom line is that anyone, particularly someone who spends long hours on an internet forum, who pretends the internet doesn’t allow someone a much higher exposure to the world is a rather pathetic self deluded excuse for a human being.
I’m simply pointing out reality. That people who have spent their entire life (remember the iPhone turns 20 next year) in a world with the entire internet in their pocket doesn’t see the car as a world expander like it was when we were that age. Drive to the mall? Why, what does the mall have they can’t already get from the web? Hang out with your friends? They’re all on the internet too, virtual hang outs are everywhere. My generation loved to gather at the video arcade, of course arcades are dead, in a large part because internet enabled kids can play all the games together without leaving the house.
The mentality I’m promoting is KNOWLEDGE and UNDERSTANDING. They grew in a very different version of the world than we did. We grew up in a mobility based world. Where you could go defined the scope of your life. So every step of growing up, every new mobility you gained, made your life bigger. It’s not like that anymore. They grew up in a world where everything they were interested in was half a dozen clicks away. They just don’t see the car as a path to freedom of experience, they already have it. And of course if they really really HAVE to be there physically, Uber.
Wow, what a beauty. Dad was an immigrant from Italy, bought himself a used ‘59 Vette for $1,800 in 62, had no idea how dangerous it was. He gave it to me in 66, by a miracle I survived. Hopped it up and didn’t get outrun until the big blocks came out. Put in 4.56 differential and I could hang with them too, except for the 427 Vettes. Only mistake was selling it after blowing the motor. Oh, to have it today...
Interesting take, thanks. The resulting physical isolation was being pointed out in science fiction books decades before it happened.
If you’re too pig-headed to see the connection between the epidemic of unemployed, basement-dwelling man-children and the infantilization of society facilitated by a retreat into a fantasy world of “virtual reality”, you really aren’t worth having any further discussion with.
I had mine at 15 before the law changed. I wasn’t old enough to need a fishing license, but I could drive.
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