You are making assumptions about what I am saying again. I am not advocating for more TikTok usage. At no point did I say anything positive about TikTok. What I am advocating for is people reaching a certain threshold of evidence before going around stating things as fact.

No, you did not get that right. I’m saying there is a small body of evidence that may or may not indicate some detrimental effects and that we should conduct further research before jumping to conclusions. The claim that TikTok is rotting people’s brains is, as far as I can tell, unfounded. A claim being unfounded doesn’t strictly mean it is untrue, but it does mean there isn’t any real reason to be making the claim in the first place.

The first one is one that I didn’t find in my own time. It correlates heavy usage of TikTok with a decreased ability to block one’s own distracting thoughts. Certainly interesting, and worth further study, but the authors appear to have equated that correlation with a causal effect. They did not satisfactorily delineate between someone who has a poor attention span and is attracted to TikTok because of it and someone with a poor attention span caused by TikTok.

The second and third studies I have already addressed in my other comments. The second study being the Chinese one that demonstrated a correlation between heavy TikTok usage and memory loss, anxiety, stress, depression, etc. Again, important findings, but crucially not causal. The third is the meta analysis that refused to make a statements regarding detrimental effects of TikTok usage.

The fourth isn’t a study, it’s an article. This article does link to several studies, however the only one the directly mentions TikTok is, again, that same study of roughly 3,000 Chinese students. The rest of the studies mentioned are targeting social media use in general.

Which neuroscientists are saying that? All the articles I’ve found referring to “TikTok Brain” quote one Dr. Patrick Porter. And I have become quite wary of trusting one man’s word, even that of a professional, since the whole vaccines cause autism thing.

You have linked a term paper, one study, and two articles. The study is a meta analysis that refuses to comment on the detrimental effects of TikTok usage due to a lack of research in the field in general. One article is about social media use in general and does not directly link to any scholarly works. The other does directly target TikTok and links to a study on Chinese students. There, TikTok Use Disorder was positively correlated with memory loss, anxiety, stress, and depression. Unfortunately my understanding of statistical analysis is not strong enough to judge the quality of the study, but to my limited knowledge it seems robust for its purposes. That being said, positive correlation does not necessarily prove causation. Notably, this study was a one time questionnaire. Meaning there isn’t any mechanism to determine the effects of high TikTok usage over time.

All this is to say that the field is deeply understudied, and that there aren’t any reliable conclusions that can be drawn yet. It may be that there are adverse effects, but that has yet to be proven.

Do you know how many times I’ve heard the “designed to exploit the dopamine pathways” line? You know how much proof I’ve seen for that? Zilch, nada, nothing. Not a single source is ever provided to back that claim. Does that automatically mean it’s a false claim? No, but it’s definitely suspicious. From my limited time looking into it for myself all I can see is that TikTok does, in fact, produce a dopamine response. That’s it. None of the (very few, this is an under-researched subject) studies I have found even differentiate it from other sources of dopamine. Hell, one of the articles I saw used the amount of time a fucking hashtag stays on the trending list as an indicator of the degradation of attention spans. I trust I don’t have to explain how those two are only superficially linked.

But only if you have a microwave with sensor cook. If it asks you to put in the weight just follow the directions on the bag.

I know it’s a long article guys, but it worth your time. This summary is a mess and completely removes crucial details, including all the quotes the summary alludes to. If you’ve got 30 minutes and are genuinely interested give it a read or a listen.

I find that the JoyCons work fine for most games, granted I have small hands. As for power adapters and carrying cases, I don’t carry an adapter and the case I use is very slim. Just enough to protect from drops really.

Using the larger, potentially more durable, joysticks would mean a larger potentially less portable Switch. Given that portability is the core feature of the Switch I can understand Nintendo’s reluctance to implement them. Especially when other companies are experiencing similar issues with their sticks. In my opinion a novel approach is the way to go here. Hall effect is nice, but it is costly and could potentially present some legal challenges at the moment.

Power generation and power use need to be synchronous. Renewables generate power at rates outside of our control. In order to smooth out that generation and bring a level of control back to power distribution we would need a place to store all the energy. Our current methods are not dense enough and are extremely disruptive/damaging to the environment. Nuclear gives us a steady and predictable base level of generation that we can control. Which would make it so we don’t need to pump vast quantities of water into massive manmade reservoirs or build obnoxiously large batteries.

For sure, I’m not saying we have to entirely ban cars. And small cars are much better than large cars. But neither should be everyone’s first thought for “how do I get around town?”

That is barely even the start of what we need. It would do us better to embrace public transit and densification. If we all just switched to small cars instead it wouldn’t solve the underlying issues with car dependent infrastructure. We’d still have wide swaths of useful land buried under miles of concrete and asphalt. We’d still have urban spaces that are hostile to anyone not in a automobile (admittedly somewhat less so). My commute time is nearly doubled simply because all of the parking lots I have to walk through. There’s no need (outside of accommodating drivers) for everything to be separated by so much empty space.

There’s technically two different rates employers are federally required to pay. First there’s the standard $7.25/h. The second is for workers that receive cash tips. Employers are allowed to pay said workers as little as $2.13/h so long as their tips and their regular wages work out to $7.25h. If the employee’s gross pay works out to less than $7.25/h, then the employer is obligated to make up the difference. The idea, I presume, is to allow some wiggle room to “encourage a more competitive market for smaller businesses,” while still ensuring workers make at least the minimum.

I just want to take a moment real quick to highlight that you wrote out the phrase “Ronald Reagan ball skins.”

Just wait a year or two. I’m certain Miyamoto will tell us development on Pikmin 5 is going well and the game is near completion by then. That should be some good meme material until at least 2030.

I wonder what this mysterious $2B deal was. It seems crazy to me that they would factor that income into their public projections without any further details on who they were partnering with on what.