I just want to be clear that nowhere did I say that *I* think the average new diver of today is less competent than the average new diver of yore.
Well that's good because there isn't really any way you could objectively assess that.
What I said was that "some might argue" that today's new divers are less competent.
Some also argue that humans never went to the moon or that the earth is flat... that climate change isn't happening or that if you are gay then you are sick. People *believe* a lot of things that have no bearing in fact and are backed up by emotional convictions without facts and cannot be defended by logic. You've had at me, IIRC, in several threads about technical diving.... one in particular I recall about how computers work. I'm pretty sure that you have ZERO technical dives to your credit to my 489 (a few more than I quoted at that time)... but you brought it as if YOU were the expert on technical diving and I had no idea what I was talking about.
I eventually gave up debating it with you but much for the same reason that I don't debate politics with knuckle dragging red-necks. Not because I am wrong, but because giving you a podium to talk **** was a disservice to this community.
I've been on this board since 2002 IIRC and before that on various other online platforms, as primitive as they might have been, since about 1995. In that time I have also gone through the phases of thinking (early on) that I knew nothing to (later) thinking I knew everything and more recently thinking I know nothing again.
My experience over, let's call it 20 years (I've been diving for 33), of online participation is that people with little experience but big opinions are not really the ones you want to listen to. You want to listen to people with big experience who seldom express themselves in black-and-white terms.
I'm as guilty of being the guy you don't want to listen to as anyone.... however, you've been diving for 3 years. You LITERALLY have no idea how things were done in the past but you speculate, draw conclusions based on those speculations and then condemn modern practices based on some fantasy about how things must have been back in the good-old-days. You do the same thing in discussions about technical diving even though you are not a technical diver...
WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO STOP and start listening instead of talking?
R..