When my kid started out using the internet, it was over-the-shoulder supervision to start out, then slowly dropping to in-the-room supervision (the PC in the living room), and progressively less over time, with the clearly stated proviso that I would occasionally be glancing over history just to make sure he wasn’t getting caught up in anything horrible, but that I wouldn’t be going into any kind of detail. At 13, he got his own PC in his room, and I left him to it.

I’m a very firm believer that you don’t attempt technical solutions to administrative problems. Privacy is important and monitoring is shit. You equip your kid with the tools and the supervised-experience to make good decisions, and once they can balance by themselves you let go of the bike.

Teach them to do dangerous things safely, that’s parenting in a nutshell.

(actually to clear up a misconception: to teach a kid to ride a bike, you hold the shoulders, not the bicycle. With the extra feedback they can actually compensate and learn to balance; if you hold the bike itself it just weirdly fights them and their cerebellum never gets it)

Entirely context dependent.

Who’s cooking tonight? Me, and if it’s sandwiches, salad, etc - still counts.

No cooking in the room. Combining sliced bread with sliced cheese out of the bag - doesn’t count.

Nonsense. Where do you think lawyers come from?

Why do you only frame the issue in terms of the voters’ responsibilities, and never in terms of the candidate’s responsibilities?

Why aren’t the politicians the ones who need to make hard choices? Why can’t they get wedged on the issues for once?

That’s not the question.

The question should be what choice does Harris have, except to stop Israel?

If (as I strongly agree) trump is the worst human on the planet who will cause irreparable damage to :gestures wildly: fucking everything, then why doesn’t his opponent have the responsibility to do whatever the hell it takes, within the law to keep him out of power?

Especially as in this instance his opponent is currently sworn to be responsible for the ongoing welfare of the nation.

Imagine being so fucking intent on enabling genocide half a planet away that you’d rather let your own country fall into the hands of Camacho Harkonnen rather than attract progressive voters.

Why is it always ‘voters need to lower their standards’, and never ‘candidates need to be decent human beings’?

Two things I need to ask:

• What inspired this question, exactly, and
• Can I have some, please?

Congratulations you just invented magenta

Have they tried fucking off?

bash

If you actually fill the drive with zeroes, the chances of anyone getting anything back are somewhere between fuck and all.

Old MFM drives (tech likely as old as your parents) had a theoretical exploit for recovering erased data.

With modern tech, that loophole was firmly closed; even state-level actors would be shit outta luck.

A file comes in two parts: the actual blocks of data that hold the file itself, and a directory entry with the name of the file, and the location of the first block.

When you delete a file, it only scrubs out the directory entry, and re-lists the data blocks as available for use.

What do you get when you cross Kim Jong Un and Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg?

Because this isn’t a Spot The Dog book, and we don’t need little picture of all the nouns.

On their own they’re ambiguous and vague; with the matching word they’re completely redundant.

What good does it do to say “I had pizza [little picture of pizza] for lunch”?

I’ll use the occasional :) or such as befits the tone, but pointless hieroglyphics are pointless and annoying.

My brother in christ, you need some Hatchie.

Hatchie - Rooftops

Hatchie - Giving the World Away

It’s true. Badminton players will never ever get laid.

As for helping - I think that once they get far enough down the path, there’s probably not much you can do for them. But compassion is always a good thing no matter who you spend it on.

As is sparing a thought for the poorly-socialised, and for the lack of opportunities people have to just hang out in any kind of casual social setting, if you’re not already part of a friend group.

Someone works a shit job in a dingy office with three people they hate and no general public flowing through, they’re exhausted at the end of the day and even if they had a place to go they just want to go home. Weekends are for laundry and chores and recovering from the week - and besides, what are they going to do, head to some bar and spend all their money drinking alone, just getting aloner?

Most of the opportunities out there rely on having either a pre-existing set of people to hang out with, or enough acquired charisma that they wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place.

Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.

Nah, I’m just old - and I was the weird homeschooled kid; there but for sheer blind undeserved luck go I.

Hell yeah, though I prefer untoasted multigrain - also some cracked black pepper, maybe a little parsley or chives.

When you hollow out the middle class (in the US sense of the term), people go looking for a narrative to explain it, to give them a reason they don’t get (or can’t give their children) the lifestyle they were promised in the media.

One narrative that fits is corporate greed, late-stage capitalism, enshittification and staggering corruption.

Another narrative, however, is all this rampant social change going on, people changing the demographics, changing the rules, changing definitions, changing the comfortable rules of thumb they were used to - and now everything’s shit, the two must be connected, we need to slam the brakes and catch our breath, perhaps even go backwards, and maybe conditions will follow suit. Even if they don’t, change is a loss of control, and that’s scary. We need to pull our heads in, hunker down and take back what’s rightfully ours from those we’ve been forced to share it with.

Once people start looking through that lens, everything starts self-selecting to fit - and they start thinking yeah, maybe those guys had a point.

Yes, there’s horrible shitty filter bubbles on social media and 4chan and everything else, but this stuff doesn’t take root without the underlying socioeconomic issues driving it.

As for incels - I don’t think people realise just how much social privilege is involved in having a peer group during childhood and adolescence to develop the give and take of social skills necessary for actually courting a partner. Consider the weird kids, the fat kids, the (disproportionally) poor kids, the ones with a fucked up home life, who didn’t get to form stable relationships, who didn’t get the practice at human-wrangling, who maybe ended up in a socially-isolating job, who had no ‘third place’ to hang out with people, to socialise and to meet people they might be interested in.

And once people start out without social skills, it can be really hard to pick them up; the embarrassment and exclusion that can follow small fuckups get exponentially worse as time goes on. And you don’t have to be painfully awkward, you just have to… not have game. Just enough to kick you to the bottom of the rankings, so failure (or the likelihood thereof) stacks up and becomes progressively discouraging, so you don’t try and don’t get practice.

And then it’s the same situation: the world doesn’t work for them the way they were told it would; they do all the things that they’ve heard were supposed to work (but without any of the nuance needed to do it successfully), and it just doesn’t.

For some of them, they feel like they’re getting singled out to get ripped off, or that the whole damn system is rigged; it’s a big club and they aren’t in it, as it were. So they look for a narrative, they look for someone to blame, they look for the bad guy, they look for a coherent explanation of why they’re the victim here. And of course that spirals out of control and ends up in a very bad place.