Places of religious worship and formal teaching (e.g. churches, and Sunday schools) should be treated like bars and porn. You need to be an adult to access bars and porn because children do not fully understand what is happening or the consequences of being there. Churches (etc) are the same and there should be a legal age limit.
It should also be socially unacceptable to talk about religious opinions in front of kids, just like most people don’t swear or talk dirty, etc.
I agree with schools teaching kids “about” religions, just like sex and drugs. Teaching facts is good, preaching (aka indoctrination) is not.
More and more people are against giving kids internet access. Allow me to go against the grain:
If your child is neurodivergent, or LGBTQ+, or any other form of misfit, then denying them internet access is tantamount to condemning them to social isolation. It wasn’t until I got unrestricted internet access, circa 17 years of age, that I realised that actually, no, I wasn’t a fucking alien, there were hundreds of thousands of people just like me, but I didn’t know because I was stuck in this shitty small town with shitty small town people. So I spent seventeen years thinking there was something fundamentally wrong with me when in reality there was something wrong with the environment around me.
I would have had a much happier early life if I’d gotten internet earlier. Wouldn’t have spent 90% of my teens being suicidal.
Most drugs should be over-the-counter. The especially dangerous or addictive ones maybe just require counselling with a pharmacist first. But I’m more concerned about people not able to access the medication they need than I am about idiots removing themselves from the gene pool by OD.
People in my dumbass country would rather 10 people with a genuine medical need suffer as long as 1 addict can’t get a fix, and it’s so many layers of bullshit.
If you think otc drugs are expensive now, waitl the scheduled narcotics find their way into the open market
there’s not really a way to know for sure but I imagine the price would actually come down somewhat due to removal of red tape and paperwork associated with drug control
possibly also from increased competition if that made it easier for a drug manufacturer to begin producing previously controlled drugs
for example amphetamine salt production is capped by the US DEA. if that cap were removed the supply would increase and the price might very well decrease
sadly this is largely useless speculation
Personally i hope it stays that way. There are enough legal ways to lose ones mind and life
Hot sauces should be required by law to list their Scoville range (SHU) on their packaging.
Fuckin facts, yo, I’m tired of searching up the sauce to try to get a gauge of wherever the fuck the sauce actually is, as opposed to its marketing wank wanting to convince me I’m chowing down on neutron star, despite it really being around room temp unflavored jello.
100% agree. I want to know whether I’m increasing, decreasing, or maintaining my heat threshold.
Ooh… capsaicin-powered hot take!
I don’t know if this is a hot take, but I think people need to stop basing their lives off of celebrities/influencers. We equate wealth with some hidden knowledge, when they’re just people. Sometimes really fucking stupid people who happen to have a profitable talent. Next time some tries to sell you something or teach you something, ask yourself if this person is even an authority/knowledgeable on what they’re talking about. I’ve gotten in the habit of mentally going “and you are?” when I get new information. Sometimes you find our that person is a leader in their field. Sometimes it’s just some terminally online teenager.
Hotter Take: I think black people put too much stock in celebrities and what they’ll do for the black community. You don’t get freakishly wealthy being a sweetheart. Jay Z is not going to save us. And our blind loyalty has us supporting subpar performances and people because we “have to support” and it keeps fucking us over. No, I’m not supporting this business just because it’s black owned if the service/quality sucks (especially since black owned goods tend to be more expensive).
Children should not be exposed to advertising at a young age (below 11/12 years old)
If you let your cat outside in the Americas (or anywhere cats haven’t lived for thousands of years) unsupervised I’m going to assume one of the following is true: you don’t care if your cat dies, and/or you don’t care about wildlife. Even if you live in a place with zero predators, why the hell are you trusting a CAT with road safety?
Saying this as someone who grew up with parents that let our cats live (and die, a lot) that way. And as someone who has seen two friends lose cats to coyotes in the past year. And also interrupted an attack on someone’s pet by a coyote. It’s been a bad fucking year here for coyotes.
In Australia I can’t tell you how frustrating this is. People are so fucking selfish.
I feel like this is slowly changing (based on no real evidence).
At least some councils are CATching up.
The new suburbs where I am are cat containment areas so that’s something. But I’m in an older suburb. Where all the wildlife is quite established. And I keep finding lizards and parrots ripped apart. My home cameras pick up the cats that visit all night.
My cats were born an outdoor cat and I’d rather they touched some grass and lived an actual life rather than be stuck inside all day even if they die earlier. I’m sure they would too.
Wildlife argument is valid though. They kill some good (rats, mice), but I can’t justify them killing birds and lizards.
Plus, my (indoor) cat can’t help but have a loud, boisterous conversation with any cat that wanders through my yard. Usually at 2am while I’m trying to sleep.
If your political opinion begins with “why don’t we just…” then its a bad political opinion.
If we could just, we would have already just. If you think you’re the only one with the capacity to see a simple answer - newsflash, you’re not a political genius. Its you who doesn’t understand the complexity of the problem.
I’ve always interpreted “why don’t we just X?” as a shorter way of expressing “I think I would like X. Is this a good idea? If not, why? If yes, what are the barriers to making it happen?”
My partner lacked political engagement until his 30s for reasons so he occasionally has these hot takes. But he expresses them to me and I do feel bad because he’s not coming at it from an arrogant perspective. It’s ignorance, some naivete and also exasperation at a whole lot of shit things.
I have to gently explain to him why XYZ isn’t that simple or black and white, or why his idea doesn’t work - and the answer to that, 9 times out of 10, is ‘because money/rich people/greed/lobbyists/nimbyism’.
I’m just slowly chipping away at his innocence and it feels bad.
Its great that you’re helping to inform him! I have found the people who know the most about politics and global issues tend to talk less and listen more.
My responses to him are always prefaced with a big sigh. Because whatever I’m about to tell him is negative. And he often concludes with ‘so how can you care about this/why do you give a shit if it’s pointless’ and I’m finding it harder and harder to answer that question.
Ignorance truly is bliss
Adam Savage had a bit where he pointed out there is practically zero times when to you should start a sentence with “why don’t you just”. My first instinct is to patiently listen & respond but I’m slowly turning into “why don’t you just stop, think & rephrase that”
My hot take: You shouldn’t downvote comments you disagree with in a thread asking for hot takes.
I think this should apply in general, not just in this thread. Down votes are reserved for comments that do not positively contribute to the conversation.
I have always upvoted comments I disagree with if they are using good arguments. I save downvotes for hate and bad faith.
I really like that you can view who upvoted/downvoted a post on Lemmy. Makes for some interesting analysis on some posts.
You are bad at parenting if you give your child a smart phone or social media.
until what age ?
Its difficult to point number because context, but 13 y/o at leat
I guess till they become and adult because they are in charge of their decisions at that point.
so they cant use a phone even at 15-17 ? a lot of kids have jobs at that point.
Flip phone or non internet phone. We have a phone for the kids, but its not one that can get them to the internet or sending pictures.
unfortunately they will almost certainly get picked on. i dont think abstinence is the best idea here, better to educate them on the dangers and monitor/restrict what they are using the phone for. lest they hate you. but certainly for someone under 12-14 they do not need a phone.
I hear what you are saying, but I dont want my kids to fit in with those kids, and thus we have them in private schools now. One main issue is even if you teach them not to just start watching porn, they turn into one of those kids that is on their phone all the time and then transitions into an adult like that too.
you realize most kids will still find a way, even if you tell them not to ? its better to actually educate them. which is the point of parenting; not just to restrict what they are allowed to do.
Using windows os should be marked as crimes against humanity.
Parents’ jobs aren’t to protect their kids. It’s to make sure that their kids are sufficiently prepared for the world when the kids grow up.
There seems to be this rising trend of parents being overprotective of their children, even to the point of having parental controls enabled for children even as old as the late teens. My impression has always been that these children are too sheltered for their age.
I grew up in the “age of internet anarchism,” where goatse was just considered a harmless prank to share with your friends and liveleaks was openly shared. Probably not the best way of growing up, to be fair, but I think we’ve swung so hard into the opposite direction that a lot of these children, I feel, are living in their own little bubbles.
To some degree, it honestly makes sense to me why the younger generation nowadays is so willing to post their lives on the internet. When that’s the only thing you can do on the internet, that’s what you’ll do
I have recently learned that the new helicopter parent type is the snowplow parent - these are the ones that not only shield their kids from the world, but also fully manage their lives for them. I work for the University of California and seeing how absolutely helpless these kids are is scary.
I’m in the UC system as well. It’s both concerning and amusing how much college students nowadays go to their parents for permission on minor things. I get it, to some degree. Respect for your parents and all that. But some degree of autonomy would be helpful at that age
If you’ve spent any amount of time among people who went to / are in college in their early 20s, and people who were working in their late teens and early twenties, it becomes clear that college arranges for the students to have a managed-for-them life to a degree that I actually think is severely harmful to them. It’s basically a big day care. Education is fuckin fantastic, I’m not saying it’s not, but the nature of the way your life is organized within it to me I think is very bad for people.
Like yes you know integrals, very good, but e.g. I spoke to a guy who had not paid his phone bill for months, who somehow still had phone service but was genuinely very confused about how the bills he was getting now could have gotten as high as they were. No matter how many times I tried to explain to him, I couldn’t get it across. I finally just gave up the endeavor.
Part of the issue with the value of college isn’t that it educated, but that it acted like an ordeal to overcome and filtered out people who didn’t have the makings of being a leader. Not all of that is due to educational ability.
I thought you’d be talking about letting kids climb up high into trees, going into the city on their own, let them hang out at the skatepark without supervision, stuff like that.
But no, it’s about computers and kids not being able to see goatse. Lol. That’s lemmy i guess.
Parents jobs arent to protect their kids
I get you don’t mean this so broadly but you lose all nuance with this statement.
Protect them from every minor mistake or risk that could ever possibly happen, and smothering them? Sure.
Someone about to stab your kid? Protect them from predators? Protect them from various risks and hazards in life which every parent should be teaching them?
- dont get into strangers cars
- dont let strangers into the house
- look both ways when crossing the road
Hard to prepare a kid for adulthood when they’re dead I suppose
On the other hand I owe my career in IT to learning how to bypass the parental controls my parents set up and cover my tracks. That got me started in computers really early.
Here’s one I get a lot of flack for that I don’t bring up much
I think people trying to cook up gun control laws are targeting the wrong guns, in going after semi auto or military rifles, when they should be going after cheap handguns that have been available forever. The majority of gun deaths are suicides, and that’s almost always done with a hand gun, but even if you control for that the majority of homicides with guns are done with hand guns.
Hand guns are usually relatively cheap. They are very easy to conceal. Its very common for people to walk into a bar with a holstered hand gun and make a series of bad decisions. Its too common for people to get in road rage incidents that escalate into something tragic because of a handgun in the glove box. People leave them around their house and treat them as toys that kids end up finding.
AND I would argue that handguns are not in the spirit of the 2nd amendment. They are not fighting weapons. They are for fun, personal protection, or making people feel tough without having to do any real work. They have little range and lesser power. There are are no troops in the world that deploy with handguns as a primary weapon. US military officers get them but that’s more about tradition.
Yes, I’m aware that shooting incidents done with rifles would be more deadly, but the fact there would be much fewer of them at all would be a net benefit in a society that banned or severely restricted hand guns.
This guy never saw John Wick.
No one authentically hates the word moist. There’s no evidence then anyone disliked the word before Friends made an episode about it. Everyone since that has either been parroting that episode or someone who, in turn, parroted the episode.
Either these people saw it and decided it was an interesting facet to add to their personality, or it was the first time they’ve ever consciously thought about how a word feels and sounds and that shattered their ignorance and spoiled a perfectly good word.
There was a Friends episode about it?
I don’t remember a friends episode about this either. I do remember it being on how I met your mother though so possibly the person you’re replying to was thinking of that.
Yeah, I think that’s the one I meant. I didn’t watch either of them.
Slurp is an infinitely worse word than moist.
Personally I dislike squelch, mulch, ask, just a ton of words, but I dislike them because they way they fell in my mouth. Either they’re hard to pronounce or they don’t feel nice in my mouth.
Suburban homeowners are the real “welfare queens.”
ice cold
