Here’s the thing: as a parent you had a high amount of control over what your children consume. Yes, there is peer pressure, but you can just decide to make your kid uncool or weird or quirky. My child basically doesn’t see ads. She travels with her own tablet and hotspot with ad-free services and ad-free mobile games. Tiktok and YouTube shorts is almost totally banned in my house, but she may watch a few videos specifically on my devices under my supervision if she wants to see something her friends send her. I don’t really have a problem with tiktok per se, more how it zombifies kids with constant dopemine hits. Youtube is a whitelist since don’t trust that algorithm at all.

You get the picture. I won’t say that my kid is watching things wholly appropriate for her at all times, but my mission as it stands is to keep her attention span solid and teach her moderation, so some games get banned before she ever get to play them (roblox), some get banned after me seeing the impact on her cousin (fortnite) and some get banned for impact on her (mobile games are evil). The fall out can be severe, but in this respect I’m an authoritatian parent. My word is law. Your feelings don’t matter. You’ll thank me later. Or not. You have a long adulthood play videogames.

Do we though? Alcohol the most commonly used addictive drugs is allowed for adults and even children in many states as long as the adults approve and do it in in private residences.

Parents need to be better about paying attention to games. I remember telling my aunt about a game my 10 year old cousin wanted. She was horrified and said absolutely not. She bought it for him when he asked when they were in the store because she doesn’t take any time to pay attention to game They’re for kids. Even though games are clearly marked with any objectionable material. She “blindsided” by what was in the game when her son booted it up dispite the game be rated as mature, marking objectionable things and me giving her a play by play.

There are a lot of additive things that we expect parents to use their judgment on. Sugar for example. Until someone is talking to me about how we need a bad on soda and BS like that because parents can’t be expected to parent their kids about it, I don’t really care about the most optional of activities that is games. Children have extremely limited access if their parents don’t allow it. Theu buy the phones/tables/game consoles and robust parental controls have existed for a while.

Kids can be addicted to all sorts of things and it’s still on the parents. Because it’s technology we for some reason stop believing parents can do a thing. Oh however would the person who controls the internet ans the devices control their child’s access to social media (another one I see whining about) and video games. As a parent myself, I’m just under the impression that at least watching in my circle, the parents who don’t aren’t paying attention or don’t actually care that much, they just don’t like the outcome judgment.

That’s because someone can easily track your address via a phone number. This is why I have a burner VoIP number to give out until I trust people.

What is a “pointless pursuit”? History and any marginalized population by the list. So apparently when the government makes a plan for how to invigorate an area, they don’t need to know anything about it’s culture and history? We don’t need people who understand things like that. Every citizen is the same obviously any thing the government demands is correct and will work out for all populations.

Also why does the state even fund PhDs? PhDs don’t enter industry and spin that economy baby, so that worthless. Doctors and lawyers can just take out more loans. It’s fine. Looking at that why fund programs for most master’s degrees? What companies require one anyway?

I’m being flippang here because even as a STEM major, I’ve gotten so much mileage out of the “useless” part of my degree. Being exposed to those “pointless pursuits” allowed me to build things that people actually needed and avoid the pitfalls before we exposed people to them.

When I was in school, I wondered why the state was forcing me to take these stupid humanities classes at an engineering university at that, but I see it now. Mine was a school where humanities students had to learn to code a bit, and engineers had to learn do media analysis and probably take more history than they wanted, but getting out into the world, I’ve found that the engineers who got that exposure are just better because they know there is a whole class of problem involving people and they know when it’s time to ask for help or when it’s time to do research.

Public school? You mean that place that children are mandated to be? Also you forgot government. It was a whole thing. So if you’re a Muslim and you want to be a part of the French government, then I hope you don’t have any attachment to those head scarves. There are other religions ornamentation, but the head scarves one was the last one I saw. And whether school or a DMV clerk, it’s dumb.

Also noticed I used two different labels for France rather than China. I think China is fascist with what they’re doing. France is xenophobic with what they’re doing.

Honestly, I feel the same about both: it’s absurd. With France I get the “freedom from religion” spiel from some Frenchman, but it’s veiled xenophobia to me. When you ban a kind of clothing but only for one group of people, that’s basically the definition. Here, it’s just fascism. At least the Chinese people are speaking out.

Damn, if only there was some sort of established and regulated type of business where you could rent lodging by the night in New York City. I bet they could make a whole lot of money building big buildings full of rooms you can rent like that.

As someone who has a big ass family, hotels fucking suck for families. When I compare my childhood vacations in hotel to what we do now in airBNB, we do airBNB every single time.

Do you make a habit of charging your friends and family that come visit you?

I have in the past when I was hard up for money because food costs for extra people can be great.

I was with them until they banned more than 1 guests at a time. Are you a couple needed somewhere quick to stay before going to an airport or something? Go die in a fire. New York only wants solo couch surfers. People who want a friend along. A single person with a child. A family in a money crunch, anyone really can just pound sand.

That is a super bizarre and IMO indefensible position. If someone wants to host more than one person in their home for a short span why is does they city even care?

I’m also worried about how this could be abused. What if you legitimately take someone (or even two someones) in for a week, kick them out and then they report you for being “an unregistered short term rental”. This is going to be a shitshow.

Edit: alright I misread this morning. It’s 2. Still bullshit. Why have a limit at all with the other stuff. My same complaints apply now with one more person. It’s not like 3 people groups (aka 2 parents an a single child or one parent and 2 children, etc) are uncommon.

IMO hotels just don’t fill the niche of needing a cheap single night or needing to have a bunch of people for a long time. Traveling with my family got so much better when airBNB became a thing.

I just felt like replying.

1. Children probably need to be in school basically year round, but for less time. They need reinforcement, but can’t focus for long. The whole day could probably work if the 2nd half of the day was unstructured. This is basically how I’ve seen (successful) college students work. They tend to have a 3-4 hour block of classes and then between that they work on stuff at their own pace including studying, getting help, etc. This is how my kid’s grade school works and honestly, I was shocked all the kids score the same as the public school, so apparently no loss. It is a year round school and the kids are in school more days of the year, so I don’t know if it’s technically more or less effective.
2. Accurate. Anyone who says differently is lying to themselves. Schools are also a monitoring service for abuse and a safe place for kids to escape hope abuse and maybe even report it.
3. Before we had more grandparents involvement. I have a lot of memories of my grandparents doing things my parents now refuse to do and I have to do. Families with grandparent involvement are just less stressed.

As for the 4 day thing, I’m interested to see how it works out. In Texas it has resulted in poorer outcomes for children on the whole mostly due to the safe place service schools provide.

The maybe rheu shouldn’t advance and be failed? Like to me if you’re bad at a subject, you should be required to take it until you pass it, not push along to the next harder version of it. Kids don’t get left back or failed now. That is the problem. If you’re not ready fine, but you can’t take algebra until you pass pre-algebra.

I’m speaking as someone who didn’t learn to read until 3 grade and still graduated on time and went to a good college. Failing classes is fine as long as you can also catch up if you rapidly learn the material as well.

I’m 100% in agreement. I think that our school system fails deeply in expressing the point. What I liked about college was what even if it was tedious, etc my professors took the time to explain why I needed to do it this way first and what the dangerous of not having some of these skills were. Did I always believe them? No, but now that I’m out in the world working I definitely know they were always right and I’m glad I did it anyway even if I didn’t always believe them.

Grade school is a different beast and I spent so much time frustrated and bored and not knowing what the point was. If it wasn’t for the fact that I just really wanted to be a roboticist and there was only one school in my state I could so that at, I probably would have done the least effort thing all the time.

I did appreciate my calculus teacher who gave us word problems. It really helped me understand the point of calculus. Those words problems showed me there were scenarios where algebra was not gonna cut it. I wish more of my grade school classes explained the point of it all after it became less obvious from middle school onwards.

Oral would suck for the transition students. It’s a completely different style and skill set of answering questions and no kid would have training or the mental framework on how to do it. It’s great if you’re the kind of person who can write a mostly perfect draft essay from start to finish no skipping around or back tracking, but if that’s not you, it’s gonna be a rough learning curve. This is before we ask questions like how does a deaf person take this exam? A mute person? Someone with verbal paraphasia?

This is fine and all and you have a point, but in the current system many times the subject isn’t about the subject it’s about the auxiliary skills you pick up along the way. My history classes in high schopl weren’t really about history. I mean if I retained those facts, fantastic, they were more about analyzing given evidence and multiple references to make a point. I’m an engineer and I use that skill all the time. Facts about the Civil War not so much.

Even in college I had classes like that. It’s why just programming the answer wasn’t always allowed although literally everyone in the university took a programming class freshmen year. That wasn’t always the point.

To always allow AI is like never taking the time to teach kids how to do arithmetic by hand. I mean, sure, we could do that, but learning arithmetic is not really about memorizing times tables and more about understanding the concept of a number and internalizing counting and so much stuff people don’t realize they use all the time the existence of a calculator or not.

I think there is some value in not allowing AI usage sometimes. Before you use a calculator you should learn how to do it by hand so you can have a sense of when you’ve keyed something in wrong. AI has entered my workplace and it’s so annoying. People who never knew how to write the things they ask AI to do can’t vet the AI output and the result is somehow worse to me than if they’d bumbled something by hand. That’s kind of what I’m afraid of in the future. I don’t think that AI is ever going to be perfect and kids have to know what output they’re looking for before they’re taking this shortcut.

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Let’s just be simple about this: pensions and oth3r old age support. Who pays for those? Young people. If young people have to support a lot of old people, you’re gonna have a bad time. Everyone. The young people have have larger amounts taken out of their pay and old people who get less support because there are just literally not enough resources. And because old people outnumber young people young are pressured more and more under democracy to give more to older people.

That is only one terrible thing from demographic collapse.

You are correct. That’s why I didn’t assume maintenence guy, but instead rapist.

Nope. He had a key, I guess he used it? IDK I just heard my fucking door open. He was there to fix something or other that was causing issues with the apartment below Mr. It was like 2PM which I guess is why he didn’t announce himself, but yeah he almost died.

Because I’ve lived in shitty areas with actual drug dealers and BS like that. Less people have guns than you might imagine. Maybe it’s different in nowhere USA, but in urban shithole, USA and Middle class suburbia that’s about what I’ve found. People have like 3+ guns or none at all. I guess it’s possible all my friends are just hiding this from me for some reason and in my hometown I just happen to know all the people who shoot guns, but honestly it’s been rare that I’ve seen people with just one gun. It’s not that I’ve never seen it. My cousin’s husband owns exactly one gun.

I don’t think there’s any way to get stats, but I think that the US has more guns than people lends some credibility to this idea.

Honestly, if everyone woman only had 2 children that would still reduce the population without causing demographic collapse which is what Japan is undergoing. A rapid decline in population creates misery for everyone. You really what a birth rate that hovers around 2 for gentle population decline.