pjwestin
@pjwestin@lemmy.world
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 2 weeks ago:
Sees someone articulating the problem of streaming platforms elevating low quality or toxic media in children’s feeds.
You, a genius: “This is bad parenting.”
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I was a teen in the early 2000s too. Most people still consumed most of their media through live TV. Anyway, you’re right, I should build a home server and start burning my own torrented DVDs. That’s the only reasonable solution to, “apps suggest crappy shows to my kid,” and it’s definitely the thing a parent of a toddler has the time to do.
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, thanks, I’m not looking for notes.
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 2 weeks ago:
Accept they didn’t. They mostly watched live TV.
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 2 weeks ago:
Paw Patrol is empty calories. It doesn’t teach emotional regulation like Daniel Tiger, or shapes and colors like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, or numbers, letters, and problem solving like Sesame Street. It’s not harmful like Cocomelon, and I’ve accepted that my son loves it, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.
Curating what your child consumes, both dietary and cultural, is the basic requirement raising a child.
Yeah, I curate what my child consumes, thanks, I just don’t have the time or energy to create a bespoke tablet of torrented kids shows to present him, or track down a circa-2002 portable DVD player and start a new physical media collection. If you’ve got that kind of free time, great, but I’ve just got to use the apps I’ve got, accept that he’s going want to watch some shows that I find worthless, and make sure he doesn’t consume anything active harmful.
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 2 weeks ago:
I don’t give him a tablet, he only watches at home on TV (or a phone on very long car trips). I don’t know a toddler parent that has the time to download a curated media library for their kids, and even if you do have the time, things like that fall apart eventually. My wife and I managed to avoid most crap TV until we wound up in a hotel room with two dead phones and a fussy toddler, and that’s when we finally caved and put on Nick Jr. For a while, we managed to convince him that Paw Patrol was only available in hotels, but eventually he saw the thumbnail for it when we were trying to show him Dora the Explorer, and that beautiful lie finally died.
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 2 weeks ago:
Holy shit, I did not know you could do that. That is going to be life changing.
- Comment on And they even get a seizure when you take their ipads away 2 weeks ago:
App suggestions make it so hard to keep kids away from slop. I started out only letting my toddler watch PBS Kids programs and a few other educational programs, but then your kids start seeing suggestions for all sorts of shlock, and they want to see the show with the superhero kitties is (it’s called Super Kitties and it is garbage). God help you if you try to watch something on YouTube; every suggested video is either low-quality home movies of people playing with toys (which is like crack to toddlers or weird shit like this that absolutely shouldn’t be on YouTube Kids but often is anyway.
- Comment on Intelligent Design 2 weeks ago:
Rabbits’ digestive systems are so inefficient they have to eat their own shit to get enough nutrients.
- Comment on Superfan Ben Stiller Has A Star Trek Pitch, Says It’s Important For Franchise To Return To Big Screen 3 weeks ago:
I love many Star Trek movies, but the big screen is not important to the franchise, and it’s best work has always been on the small screen.
- Comment on Anyone else guilty of this? 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, if she plays an N64, she won’t be exposed to any popular series from today, and will instead play things like Mario Kart, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Smash Bros., and Pokémon.
- Comment on Tried naming the states from memory as a European 5 weeks ago:
I world have labeled you guys, “Frasier.”
- Comment on Tried naming the states from memory as a European 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, seriously. At least call us, “Revolutionary War Reenactors,” or, “Cold NYC.” I’d even take, “Southern Quebec.” But lumping us in with Montana and the Dakotas? That’s some bullshit.
- Comment on YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States 5 weeks ago:
Do you mean one and two? Two and three are clearly different, as three has no pattern other than disenfranchisement. I agree that one and two are both valid ways to divide the squares visually, but the text is stating that one is, “perfect,” and two is, “compact but unfair,” implying that the goal should be getting each political group some representation. That is still allowing politicians to pick their constituents, and even if it’s more fair than three, it still built to serve the candidates, not the voters. Compact (i.e. a system that divides districts entirely by geography and population, without consideration towards demographics or political alignment) should be the actual desired outcome.
- Comment on Meet the AI vegans: They are choosing to abstain from using artificial intelligence for environmental, ethical and personal reasons. Maybe they have a point 5 weeks ago:
I don’t use A.I. because I’ve had nothing but negative interactions with A.I. Customer service bots that fail to give adequate responses, unhelpful and incorrect search result summaries, and, “art,” that looks like shit hasn’t made me want to sign up for ChatGPT or Gemini. For most people, this isn’t a moral stance, it’s just that the product isn’t worth paying for. Stop framing people that don’t use A.I. as luddites with an ax to grind just because tech bros spent billions on a product that isn’t good yet.
- Comment on YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States 5 weeks ago:
Everyone’s been doing either one or three for decades, the fascists are just more effective at it. What’s changed is that they’re doing it in a non-census year with the explicit goal of changing the outcome of the 2026 midterms. The only states with have unbiased districts are the places where people have passed ballot measures against partisan districting, but Democrats have been just as happy as Republicans to pull this shit.
- Comment on YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States 5 weeks ago:
Number 2 is the actual ideal, not number 1. Number 1 represents, “good,” gerrymandering that politicians argue for, but it really only serves them. They get to keep highly partisan electorate that will reelect them no matter what, which means they can be less responsive to the will of their voters. They only have to worry about primary challengers, which aren’t very common, and can mostly ignore their electorate without issue.
It’s also important to note that this diagram is an oversimplification that can’t express the nuances of an actual electorate. While a red and blue binary might be helpful for this example, a plurality of voters identify as independents, and while most of them have preferences towards the right or left, they are movable. The point is that actual voters are more nuanced and less static than this representation.
Number 2 is how distracting would work in an ideal world; it doesn’t take into account political alignment at all, but instead just groups people together by proximity. A red victory is unlikely, but still possible if the blue candidate doesn’t deliver for his constituents and winds up with low voter turnout. It also steers politicians away from partisan extremism, as they may need to appeal to a non-partisan plurality. That being said, when literal fascists are attempting number 3, we’ll have to respond in kind if we want any chance of maintaining our democracy, but in the long term, the solution is no gerrymandering, not, “perfect representation,” gerrymandering.
- Comment on How Coldplay actually sounds 1 month ago:
That’s certainly how I feel about Parachutes. Solid little album, even if it’s not reinventing the wheel. I feel more mixed about A Rush of Blood to the Head. Some of their best tracks are on that album (The Scientist may be their best song), but a lot of it is forgettable, and Clocks just sucks, don’t know how that became a big single. I thought X&Y was pretty meh, and then I stopped listening.
- Comment on How Coldplay actually sounds 1 month ago:
I don’t know, maybe? When I was in high school the girls were all listening to emo. Once pop-punk went out of style (pretty much the minute Sk8ter Boi was released), most of the girls I knew pivoted towards Death Cab for Cutie or Dashboard Confessional. I was having a sad-boy period and other sad-boys I knew got me into Radiohead, Interpol, Coldplay (again, those first two albums), the Shins, and the Strokes.
- Comment on How Coldplay actually sounds 1 month ago:
I got the impression they were more of what bro-dudes listened to when they were sad rather than what sad-boys were listening to, but only exposure to them was Chasing Cars. I got the impression they were closer to The All-American Rejects than, say, The Shins or Interpol or any of the other shit I was listening to when I was my most insufferable teenage self.
- Comment on How Coldplay actually sounds 1 month ago:
20 years ago they were what teenage sad-boys were listening to when they got bored of Radiohead and The Postal Service (and I mean that in the nicest way possible). Then after X&Y they kinda became electronic/synthpop for the clinically depressed.
- Comment on How Coldplay actually sounds 1 month ago:
Cut Coldplay some slack, this was the funniest thing that’s happened in a while. Plus, Parachutes is…fine…A Rush of Blood to the Head has a couple of good tracks. Everything after that is pretty trash, but those first two albums were good to mid.
- Comment on Why democrats under Biden administration didn't release Epstein files? 1 month ago:
First, Bill Clinton is almost certainly all over them, and older Democrats still think of the Clintons as the epitome of Democratic success. Some of the old guard is still trying to push focus away from the Epstien files. Just two days ago, Nancy Pelosi was calling the Epstien files a distraction, which is a bat-shit crazy thing to say about evidence that could prove that your opponent was involved in a pedophile ring.
Second, Epstien probably has some sort of ties to the intelligence community. I don’t know that I believe all these stories about him being a secret Mossad asset, but I think its very possible that the someone in the CIA was using him. Alex Acosta, who prosecuted Epstien in 2008, claimed that he was told to back off because he, “belonged to intelligence,” and they’re clearly withholding a lot of information, there’s definitely something they don’t want people to know. Anyway, since 9/11, the Democrats and Republicans have had basically the same position on the intelligence community (essentially, abject deference), so if the CIA says that it would be a national security risk to release the files, the Democrats aren’t going to release the files.
- Comment on Instant and overnight are synonyms and antonyms depending on context. 2 months ago:
Shit, that’s a good one.
- Comment on We really don't want to talk about our problems 2 months ago:
Then again, have you seen reality?
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Well, I wasn’t even thinking about that, but now I’ve got a whole new thing to be self-conscious about.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
People are right in saying it’s context and consent, and it’s not completely gendered. Men’s swimsuits are basically just boxer shorts. Normally I’m not self-conscious about that, but a few months ago I signed up for a toddler swimming class with my son where I wound up being the only Dad, and suddenly I felt a bit exposed. I think the normalcy of walking around in nothing but a small pair of shorts kinda evaporated once I was the only man in the room.
- Comment on Yes, this is what people did back then 2 months ago:
I mean, I feel like that one has some cascading effects that really fucked things up for pretty much everyone on the planet, so if you ever find yourself hurled back in time, you might consider it.
- Comment on Yes, this is what people did back then 2 months ago:
None of you said, “prevent 9/11.” For shame.
- Comment on If you have used this you are immune to all disease. 2 months ago:
OK, so it sounds like they died out in the 70s?