I’ve mentioned it before in a similar thread, but if you shave your head, get a Pitbull Skullshaver that can be used in the shower or while walking around the house, etc. About $100 and adding it to a shower routine is great.
A wand for the vegetable garden hose. About $70 and much better than a normal gun/nozzle for watering plants at the base if not all of your gardens are raised.
$500ish: 12v car fridge. I use mine camping or on work trips but also at home on mains power as a drinks fridge near the outdoor seating when people are around.
Ok, but none of the domestic interests are (theoretically) controlled by the government and yet all are (evidently) at least as malicious.
I suppose this would be easier to rationalize if domestic interests were democratically controllable.... but they're not. And they certainly aren't by canadians, which makes this action doubly confusing.
Nonetheless, this underlines the hypocrisy of punishing TikTok but not western corporations. By any standard (except for foreign control, which is of dubious merit when domestic control is equally harmful) Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc are equally of deserving of restriction as TikTok is.
No comment on the implementation, but I wonder if there's some value in just allowing parents to be able to point to this and say "No, little Fred, you're not allowed to have an Instagram account until you're 16. It's the actual rule."
Yep, the "everyone else has BLAH" argument is a strong one. If we collectively take action through government to set a standard it is MUCH easier to shut down those self-fulfilling claims.
Seems to me that the better solution is to give parents the ability to observe their kids' activities, and for <16 accounts to be able to operate only when tied with an adult account, which can observe activity...
Of course many will say this can be abused, but all technology can be abused and the reason we're in this mess in the first place is because OS designers haven't figured out that the relationship between parent and child is an important one which should be strengthened, not made weaker ..
What? Why would parents need permission from their government to forbid their kid from having an Instagram account? They're parents, so they can engage in parenting.
Not allowing as in "giving them permission", but "allowing" as in enabling them to do so.
Right now if a parent says "You can't have instagram. Because I say so." the kids answer will be "But I will be a looser noob if I can't. All my friend are on it. Jenny has 5k followers!"
Vs after the ban: "You can't have instagram. This is the law." "But mom! Some of my friends are on it. Jenny has 1k followers!" "Is that so? I will ask Jenny's mom if she knows about that."
It is not going to stop absolutely everything. (Same as prohibiting underage alcohol drinking is not stopping teens from drinking any). But it will put a serious damper on it and fracture the social networks into smaller more underground ones.
I have three kids. They have access to devices they use primarily for reading and language/music lessons. They don't use social media and would likely pay a decent level of attention if (in addition to us having explained concerns about social media for children) we indicated that there was government advice/ruling around this.
This always amazes me when visiting the US. I'm from a dry part of Australia where bushfires are a regular summer threat, but the smoke seems to dissipate quite quickly. In the US, I've driven more than once for a week across areas where the sky is thick from smoke coming from a fire 1-2 states away. And it's a fire that started weeks prior.
It struck me last trip that an adversary so inclined could really sap lives, morale and resources from huge areas of the country by having rogue individuals secretly starting fires on top of regular lightning and firebug sources.
The news is wise enough not to make a huge deal of it, but a non-trivial number of the last bunch of fires were determined to be arson. It's hardly even a stretch to imagine that the arsonists might not have been just random folk who thought it'd be really cool to start a fire.
Then again, when a casual arsonist can set significant fractions of a state or even country on fire, and there's millions of people living in the area, and when "pyromania" is sufficiently common enough that it's got it's own entry in the DSM [1] (with estimated incidence at 1.13% (!)), it probably counts as an unnecessary complication to the explanation. There's no way 1.13% of "millions of people" can be stopped. The only solution is to not let the powder keg be created in the first place.
I hiked in the Wind River Range (Wyoming) in July and there were massive swarms of mosquitoes. They'd hang around and generally be annoying but I don't think a single one bit me; we were quite bemused. At home in Australia, one mosquito will absolutely bite and create a far greater annoyance.
I'd like to see a voice instruction layer that can work independently of the mouse/keyboard later without stealing focus. Things like moving files or preparing windows/positioning prior to switching.
I know a family with a pre-teen son investing a huge amount of time in another individual sport. 4-5 hours every weeknight, putting pressure on schooling and on the family by limiting schedules and recreation. They all give a certain look when they talk about it, knowing that there is a cost to creating (potentially) an elite athlete. At least the kid himself doesn't look glass-eyed and lonely, but I do wonder how that life would compare in hindsight to regular family, time for socialising, regular holidays, etc. This is not really sport with NBA money at the end.
A wand for the vegetable garden hose. About $70 and much better than a normal gun/nozzle for watering plants at the base if not all of your gardens are raised.
$500ish: 12v car fridge. I use mine camping or on work trips but also at home on mains power as a drinks fridge near the outdoor seating when people are around.