AND THATS HOW YOU DO IT 👏🏼 call your local legislators and remind them that they CAN do something to stop this. Contracts can be ended people. We do not have to live like this.
There are zero Flock cameras in Manhattan’s wealthiest neighborhood
Flock cameras for thee but not for me? I guess the rich don't want to be monitored like common criminals by their government.
Are you mad yet?!
They’re destroying the books.
They’re destroying the museums.
They’re prosecuting the scientists.
They’re cutting down the forests.
They’re destroying the planet.
I did a whole research project on this in grad school. Companies reap over $300 BILLION a year in free labor from customers using self-checkouts. If they’re not going to pay customers, they can shave some price.
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%.
Do you recognize this painting? Blue Monday is one of the most iconic works in Black American art, portraying a Black woman who is exhausted yet rises each Monday to return to work. Painted by Annie Lee, an artist who didn't start to pursue art until her 40s, the piece was inspired by her own all too familiar morning struggle.