My spouse saying to the four year old about his brother, "He is telling you about it because he's excited, not because he thinks you don't know." And that, my friends, is also a lesson I need to hear.
And THAT ladies and gentleman is why PHYSICAL MEDIA IS IMPORTANT. Cause you may never know when the things you love will be taken off streaming one day.
Class dismissed.
One convo away from crashing out bad because of all these customer service bots.
Why do I have to scream “I WANT TO SPEAK TO A HUMAN” because it is insisting on “helping” me
We cannot consider #AI to be morally neutral. In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores, and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. Ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes. It must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it. #MagnificaHumanitas
Beyoncé dropping a Cécred video on Father’s Day about Hov’s loc comb-out + revealing he started locking his hair because of how Blue felt about hers is not only great marketing and intentional storytelling, but such a sweet tribute to fatherhood.
The thing is Pope Leo is right. Hammering nothing but sexual sin while letting pride, wrath, greed, gluttony, envy, avarice, selfishness, hatred etc. get a free pass is not a good thing.
They're the reason block parties are banned/overly regulated, businesses close, music isn't allowed, everything has to be a luxury apartment, roommates were so profitable and "trendy" as the "moving to New York" dream that rent became 2.5k for a studio. The list goes on really.
Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it.
The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state.
What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it.
Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure.
In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.