I think it should be 16 or so. If you can wreck my car, you should be able to vote.

We lived in a house where the previous owners had it exorcised and I’ve never slept better. I’d take living in a cursed/haunted house over a shitty roommate any day.

As there’s no responses, I’ll offer that my friends’ kids in dense parts of NYC, LA, SF, DC, etc. do all those activities. (Maybe the ones in LA don’t go sit by the LA “river.”) There’s usually loads of neighborhood parks and less formal places in cities where kids play (like playing soccer in an alley). And I know my friends in urban centers have their kids in just as many organized sports leagues as my friends who live in the suburbs. (It might actually be easier on the parents in the cities because my suburban friends are like youth sports taxi services every weekend whereas the ones in NYC have enough population density where the league is in the neighborhood.)

So, my impression (from the parents’ childless friend’s side) is that kids, like Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, find a way. They’ll play hide and seek in a desert and try to hide behind tumbleweeds.

Again, sorry if I’m talking out of turn but this is Lemmy and there were no responses yet so I thought I’d toss in what I’ve seen as an adult. Gotta feed the content maw until the Fediverse grows up to be an uncontrollable beast.

Anything Elon Musk can track is probably a security risk until he stops being the most divorced person to ever exist.

Laziness is the number one skill anyone innovative should have. Whoever invented the wheel definitely didn’t do it because they liked work. It was because they hated it knew there had to be a better way.

So, what we really need is lazier inventors. Only then will we get lazier robots.

Dude, I love China and its people and have been there several times. I obviously don’t approve of everything but some of the funniest, most kindhearted people on Earth are in China. I’m not sure there’s a place on Earth I’d rather have a meal with some regular citizens.

But just follow The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Taipei can be wrong too. But those laws took like centuries of stupid wars and, ultimately, diplomacy, to establish. Even if you want to change them, it’ll require diplomacy and cooperation, not hosing down some Filipino fishermen.

This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.

Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.

Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.

A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.

Whom amongst us hasn’t accepted concert tickets from a conservative German aristocrat?

Also, a technicality but once a country abolishes nobility, the noun becomes “pretender” not “aristocrat.” I know keeping track of titles is complicated but it’s only polite to use the correct terms.

Another way to help the service industry would be to make medicinal cocaine (and similar) a tax deductible business expense. It’s a more valid business expense than a programmer buying a third monitor.

Or how about banning the practice of making the bartenders/waitresses tip out the bar back or bus boys when they should all just be getting paid a living wage by their employer. That would also be good for tipped employees.

I’ll never forget during COVID when I learned Denmark had more mink than people and had to do a cull and it went very poorly. I assumed Denmark was a pretty normal place and then one day, they were like, “OK, so we have 17 million mink.” Like, what the fuck?

It was like finding out your seemingly most normal friend runs a Pokémon card funded crime syndicate that smuggles mini ponies or something where you’re like, “I’m not mad yet. I’m confused. But I reserve the right to be mad. What were you doing with 17 million mink?”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Danish_mink_cull

If you ask a historian “How would you assess Winston Churchill?” and they criticize the concept of fighting fascism and not, like, the Bengal famine, strategic decisions, imperialism, drinking up all the gin, etc. then maybe you aren’t talking to an actual historian.

Claiming to be able to make massive cuts without cutting national defense, Social Security/Medicare, or loads of basic government stuff (like the U.S. Mint, patent office, passport services, etc.) is how you know this will never happen.

Every conservative comes to Washington ready to cut whole departments and then learns the Department of Energy manages the nuclear weapons stockpile and the entire National Park system is a rounding error on a B-2 bomber order.

I went to high school during peace time — that used to be a thing way back when — and I think my school required it for ROTC but maybe it was more of a strong suggestion rather than a requirement.

We also had possibly the worst possible system for military recruiters. You had to choose between the regular P.E. class, weight lifting (if you played a sport), and ROTC. The end result was that ROTC was always like 2% committed future service members (who would have joined the military with or without high school ROTC) and 98% awkward people avoiding sports at all cost. (Or the worst fate of all, 1st hour PE so you were the person who smelled like stanky teen gym clothes in every one of your classes.)

Well, at least he has the memories. Maybe. Grandpa has good days and bad days now.

Yep. Thanks for catching that. I meant NIH, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and accidentally combined it with HHS (the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services that NIH is an agency within) and that was apparently too many acronyms.

I’ve read my limit of articles this month. Is it because Trump’s policies are the same as Herbert Hover’s, he hires the stupidest people on Earth, and his brain is already 80% smooth goo and the remaining 20% is about golf courses and Ivanka being in Maxim?

Russia wasted $10 million dollars on people who have to beg Joe Rogan for attention when someone cancels at the last minute. I almost feel sorry for them.

If it was the best healthcare in the world, we’d have the best outcomes and we don’t even have that for rich people. We have a (non-metric) shit ton of world class research universities and highly respected agencies like the FDA and NIH but Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, can’t even get the mental health services he obviously needs.

I’d obviously rather go to an American hospital than a hospital in most of the world but spending a lot to cover up a shitty system isn’t as good as a functioning system.

Edit: I originally had NHS instead of NIH but the NHS, is, obviously, where British people get their brain medicines.

I’m a developer posting on Lemmy so maybe take this with a huge grain of salt but I think we need to focus less on STEM/finance and more on humanities education. Definitely in the United States but probably most of the world considering India and China focus on tech too.

When I was learning to code (in the 90’s and 2000’s unless you count a 9 year old making BASIC do loops), my mentors basically all had majored in something besides computer science because there wasn’t necessarily even a computer science major available if your college didn’t have “Tech” in the name. It was a lot of hippies who spent their weekends making pottery and got into IT or software development almost by accident; it was a job to fund their non-lucrative hobby or passion.

Basically, we lost something when being a programmer became a goal and not a way to reach some other goal. I’m not sure we can return to a time when it was tinkerers and hobbyists coming to the field with different backgrounds but more creatives should learn to code and more coders should be forced to make art.

I hope I’m not being too cynical but I suspect Israel’s largest police union is going to have to arrest Netanyahu for there to be a ceasefire/hostage deal. He definitely seems like he’s clinging to power to avoid jail and if the negotiators come to an agreement, he’ll tack on additional demands until it’s unacceptable and then blame Hamas for the deal collapsing.