And it’s also only banned on work devices. There’s no ban on government employees having TikTok on their personal phones, although I personally don’t.

As a child protection caseworker, I’m right here with you. The amount of children and young people I’m working with who are self-harming and experiencing suicidal ideation over this stuff is quite prevalent. Sadly, it’s almost all girls who are targeted by this and it’s just another way to push misogyny into the next generation. Desensitisation isn’t the way; it will absolutely cause too much harm before it equalises.

I would love for more of this work to be done in my country too - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have so much lore, history and knowledge that we’ve been losing with each passing generation due to the ongoing effects of colonialism. I agree that video is the most appropriate way to preserve oral traditions and knowledge, and that we should be creating massive publicly-accessible databases to store and view them.

That’s interesting, because “the apple doesn’t/didn’t fall far from the tree” is a known Anglophonic saying that basically means that a child turned out a lot like a parent (gender not necessarily specified). I wonder if one is a calque of the other.

…does the chicken’s power level need to be over 9000 in order to be safe to eat?

His work is important to study from an historical perspective in order to see how psychology grew into what it is today, in the same way that it’s important that we learn about outdated concepts like tabula rasa and phrenology in order to better understand what is correct. The fact that he applied so much of his own subjective thoughts to his brand of psychology shows us how we, as potential future psychologists, also have the same capacity to search for confirmatory evidence and eschew disproving evidence in search of a theory. He’s a great example of what not to do when it comes to psychology.

The way I like to think about it is that social media has acted as a magnifying lens for many aspects of social interaction, for both positive and negative. The positives include greater sharing of knowledge, better lines of communication with relatives, easier capacity to organise and protest… but the negatives include what you’ve described: bigotry and social division, commercialisation, and exploitation of the dopamine-reward system for profit gain among many others. It’s brought together some amazing people but has rewarded some abhorrent behaviour. Social media has both intensified and distorted our social interactions.

It’s often advantageous to prevent catastrophe before it occurs rather than clean up the mess once it happens.

The US needs a a legitimate grassroots movement that is well-funded (fucked if I know how to be honest, hopefully it’s just a lot of small donations from regular people) that consistently lobbies for voting reform. The following changes should be up for debate:

• Replacing FPTP voting with ranked choice voting
• Instituting proportional representative voting where appropriate, particularly for state senates
• Referendum on changing the number of federal senators per state to better represent population
• Referendum on abolishing the Electoral College and instituting a simple, ranked choice popular vote for president
• Systematic review of every single electorate by an independent organisation to unwind gerrymandered districts; this organisation then sets the districts on an ongoing basis in an apolitical way
• Expanding ease of access to voting by every sensible measure possible (much of what AG Garland is doing now) and then considering mandatory voting
• Real-time full disclosure of all political donations to all political bodies (especially PACs)
• Sensible caps on political donations
• Truth in political advertising laws

I’m sure there are plenty of others but if all of those things were managed to be achieved, the body politic’s state and Overton Window of the US would shift dramatically.

I like your idea of using 3 as an approximation to get ballpark figures - if you wanted to add a smidge of extra accuracy to that you can just remember that in doing so, you’re taking away roughly 5% of pi.

0.14159265 / 3 ≈ 0.04719755

Add in around 5% at the end and your approximation’s accuracy tends to gain an order of magnitude. For your pizza example:

108 in^2 x 1.05 = 113.4 in^2 which is accurate to three significant figures and fairly easy to calculate in your head if you can divide by twenty.

You could even fudge it a little and go “108 is pretty close to 100. 5% of 100 is obviously 5, so the answer is probably around 108+5=113”

Yeah it’s totally worth it though. They’re extremely diligent by industry standards when it comes to ethical sourcing of cocoa.

The blocks are a bit weird, the segments are an odd geometric tessellation where no two pieces are identical. Great chocolate though.

At this point Trump is trying to delay everything he can until the presidential election, because he’s hoping that he’ll win again which will give him some kind of immunity against civil and criminal prosecution for another four years. I assume he thinks he’ll get into power and arbitrarily change laws to try to exonerate himself, despite the fact that that won’t really work because he’s being sued/tried under state laws, but I don’t think he’s smart enough to figure that out.

I would hope that sharing polls showing a trump lead would help insofar as it may motivate apathetic anti-Trump people to get out and vote where they otherwise wouldn’t.

Side note: the only reason he’s ever won anything is because the US doesn’t have mandatory voting. The fact that you have to encourage people to engage in the most fundamental expression of democracy is a little bit baffling.

The kind of people that eat up his “debating” style are people who treat the idea of an open debate of concepts the same way - that is to say that they’d be flipping tables and shitting everywhere themselves. They’re uneducated and hold unqualified and unjustifiable positions, and the only way to maintain those positions is to simply ignore or reject all rhetoric to the contrary.

They eat it up because that’s exactly how they’d act when faced with reason, logic, facts or statistics.

That’s a fair call. I just think all reasonable measures should be taken to limit the attractiveness of vapes to children, and that’s just one piece of the puzzle. It’s not a necessary piece, but I think it would have helped as part of a suite of measures to regulation. I think you’re right in that online glorification definitely had a role to play here as well.

If the government, 5-10 years ago when it would have been apropos to do so, looked into vaping and drew up specific regulations to have legal vaping, we wouldn’t have the issue we have today. Instead, because of almost a decade of inaction, we now have a new generation of nicotine addicts that they’re hurriedly trying to stop.

We needed regulated, plain-packaged and limited-flavour vapes available to legally buy at a reasonable price to quash out both smoking and prevent kids from getting addicted, but that horse has already bolted.

The cynic in me says they intentionally didn’t regulate vapes because the science wasn’t ready yet, and they didn’t want to accept any blame for legalising something that could end up to be pretty harmful in the long term. So, because they didn’t want to accept that risk then we now have a whole generation of vapers whose health issues we’ll be dealing with for 80+ years to come.

Spoken as an ex-smoker, current vaper as a smoking cessation method.

Holy fucking shit mate, I’m a social worker who works with people experiencing violence and fuck you highlighted the issue far better than I ever could. Thank you for giving me the tools to better explain myself when I need to.

Racism is not an immutable concept. People are not either “racists” or “not racists”. Racism is a behaviour that people engage in.

Calling people ‘a racist’ implies that that’s all they’ve ever been and that’s all they’ll ever be. It leaves no room for improvement. Don’t call people ‘a racist’, call their behaviour racist.

People can grow and change. I’ve met a good handful of people who were raised in households that engender conservatism, racism and sexism who have been able to deprogram that bullshit and become well-rounded human beings who care about social justice. When they were young, you’d have incorrectly called them ‘a racist’ and may have driven them further down the conservative rabbit hole.

The way we speak to and about one another needs to get better. We need to identify that people are flexible and have capacity for change if we ever want to see that change. People cannot be bullied away from these positions, they need to be guided.

Your idea is right, but your numbers about population are wrong. Republicans definitely don’t make up 50% of the country given that your voter turnout for presidential elections tends around 50-60% and many who vote Republican in a given year are independent or swing voters who aren’t rusted-on voters. It’s hard to get a 100% clear number on it, but I’d estimate that Republicans only make up around 20-25% of the country at most.

It only seems like they’re 50% of people because they win a lot of elections, but a lot of that has to do with the Electoral College, First Past the Post voting, and a lack of mandatory voting coupled with low voter turnout.

I never understood why Americans call a ‘#’ a ‘pound sign’ but then if you put words in front of it, it suddenly becomes a ‘hashtag’. Shouldn’t it be a ‘poundtag’? I mean the rest of the Anglosphere refers to a ‘#’ as a ‘hash’ so it makes sense to us, but why do Americans call it a hashtag? Seems weird to me.