@evan_thayer How did Apple sell your apartment and upstate cabin? Did you have to give them power of attorney or something?
I’m curious about the logistics of that.
When my dad was in boot camp two teenage boys tried to kill themselves by drinking bleach and were caught. That’s how bad the treatment was and guess what happened? They were paraded around and made fun of for being weak before being discharged with zero counseling for the trauma they experienced.
When my mom was in boot camp a girl literally had a mental breakdown over the verbal abuse and tried to hop the fucking fence on the base to escape in the middle of the night with nothing other than the clothes on her back. They were never told what happened to her other than she was caught.
Being verbally abused 24/7 doesn’t make you strong. It makes you numb and traumatized. There’s a reason why so many vets end up alcoholics and drug addicts. They go through so much trauma and a lot of it happens before they’re ever even deployed. Not sure what’s it’s like now but back then mental health access was not a big thing in the military nor was it encouraged. If you were struggling with mental health then you were seen as weak and unworthy of serving.
It’s an incredibly fucked up system and in my opinion it is barbaric recruiting teenagers to go through that. Your brain is still developing at that age and it definitely isn’t capable of properly processing the intensity of the military.
Can’t recommend Full Metal Jacket enough if you want to understand what it’s truly like for teens entering the military. There are consequences to grooming children into becoming killers with emotional suppression. They either go on to hurt others or they end up hurting themselves. Either way, the ones responsible for making them that way never face any consequences.
I’m actually a child online safety expert and was one of the pioneers in this space with Club Penguin and so I feel uniquely positioned to critique this.
The groomer problem is real but it’s also vastly overstated. The far larger issue we saw at Penguin was suicidality or reports of sexual abuse in the home.
There is no solution for lazy/bad parenting. You can implement all the ID laws you want but if parents are going to just hand kids their phones unlocked, those kids will have access to all the same things the parents have unfettered.
What I found is that these draconian safety laws actually make it harder to be an honest operator of kids apps because on one hand it’s so much legal risk and so much user friction that it simply becomes uninvestible as a business.
Parents will just lie to let their kids use the unfettered internet. For example, I have a friend who works in mobile gaming who has two kids, one above and one below the age limit but separated by just 2 yrs, and the two wanted to play and chat together on Roblox - which is reasonable. To do this, he just verified that his younger kid is old enough for the chat feature when he’s not.
This happens all the time and will happen with these laws to. How far do we want to go with this? Scan the face of the user in real-time to make sure it’s not a kid using the device? We could do that but it feels like a massive unwanted intrusion of privacy.
That’s how you know this law isn’t about kids. COPPA and GDPR-K and so forth already make it illegal to allow chat and other grooming vectors to kids.
What’s really being done here is trying to eliminate online anonymity. And this is a far bigger issue that goes to core speech rights because if you cannot criticize the govt anonymously and if wrong speech is a crime then it becomes easy to identify all the detractors of the govt in power, and ban, fine or jail them for speech crimes.
Starmer has already been doing this and he wants to do it at a much bigger scale. Starmer won’t even acknowledge the problem of actual grooming gangs in Britain’s neighborhoods but he’s worried about online grooming?
No he’s not, and this hypocrisy gives away the game. What he wants is to kill online anonymity so he can enforce censorship of his unpopular policies. No politician should have this power.
... making it awkward to use, on top of the control knob being at the back of the seat. Needless to say I'll be ordering another Neo 120 to replace the Brondell bidet seat.
To illustrate the difference: The Neo 120 is like a pressure washer, the Brondell is like a leaky faucet.
Anyway, so I've had a LUXE Bidet Neo 120 for YEARS, and love the ease of installation, ease of use, the water pressure, and the self-cleaning nozzle. I recently tried a Brondell model from Costco and not only is the pressure weak, the rear spray is off center... 1/2