Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in MA there is a 'bell to bell' phone ban bill in the works. I'm very happy we're letting kids be kids again. There is no need for a phone during the school day.
>> There is no need for a phone during the school day I see you don't have kids yourself. You need to sync up with them when after-school plans change.
NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
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Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful. Next let's ban kids from social media. Or better yet, let's tax social media as a negative externality. Anything with an algorithmic feed, engagement algorithm, commenting/voting/banning, all hooked up to advertising needs to pay to fix the harm it's causing. They're about as bad as nicotine and lung cancer. They've taken p…
> Chatbots [are] going to remain niche for quite some time. > iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire. > I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population. The facts say you're wrong about this. The adoption rate for the iPhone was slow. There were only 1.4 million iPhones sold in its first year,[1] whereas there were 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users in its first year.[2] ChatGPT is n…
ChatGPT and Claude have incredible utility, whereas Character.ai-type chatbots are much less certain. I can't fathom trying to spend more than a few minutes talking to them since they have so many shortcomings.
I don't consider ChatGPT a chatbot because my inquiries tend to match my usage of Google Search. It's a search tool.
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#303Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#304Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#305Does not sound good.
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#306I don't see how a loud lunch break is good in any way
That's my take.
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#307> In the cafeteria, Ryan Tripathi, 16, was paging through “Lord of the Flies,” which he said is slow-going. “I'm just not used to reading,” he said. “I’m usually on my phone.” Damn, that hits pretty hard.
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it will eventually settle into a net positive - we're just in the Wild West of smartphones still. I try to use my phone less and less but as someone who loves photography the ability to take a raw photo and edit on my phone is amazing.
I think it won't automatically settle in a good state. We need to actively work towards it. Phones obviously have many useful and beneficial functions, photography, phone calls, etc. It's the engagement hacking from social media primarily which has broken society.
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
America has an entire political party who runs a party line that unregulated businesses will naturally do what's "best" because of "free market mumble mumble". They even sometimes outright insist that "best" in that context means "best for humans and society", and that any attempt to constrain that will be Communism and cause all of society to collapse. >What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligen…
> the higher fraud claim is just false and probably a lie, ask me how I know! How do you know? :)
Credit Card companies do not care about chargebacks, as long as you don't substantially hurt consumer goodwill. They get their money back from the merchant, and every successful chargeback is a reminder to consumers of how credit cards will protect you. A false chargeback would also be unlikely to harm consumer confidence in that protection, since the consumer knows they weren't defrauded.
We know Ashley Madison had millions of paying subscribers. The idea that porn websites have "Higher fraud rates" entirely comes from the unstated assumption that porn consumers will chargeback their payment, and this claim is not justified. Consumers do not make a habit of making false chargeback claims, it just isn't substantiated in the data. We also have substantial evidence that lots of people want to genuinely pay for porn, and will pay significant amounts.
If 1 out of every 5 people who paid for pornhub tried to do a chargeback, that would not be a payment stream the credit card processor would be bothered by.
Meanwhile, the facts on the ground are that there is a fundamentalist religious organization formerly known as Media Matters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl... who have been working since at least the Nixon administration to ban things like sex toys from sale, to ban sex education, to stop same sex marriage legalization, to prevent the decriminalization of sex work. They were part of LBJ's commission on obscenity and pornography. They asked Reagan to ban pornography in 1983. They are significantly responsible for the large media blitz in 2020 that demonstrated that pornhub had a genuine problem with things like revenge porn and underage porn that lead to pornhub deleting 90% of their content, which frankly is a good thing, but they are demonstrably and openly not out to help sex workers or keep porn safe, but rather to kill it. Their official stance is that porn is a public health crisis. They were one of the principle supporters behind FOSTA, a bill that most sex workers insisted would make their jobs less safe.
Why is there a popular, trite, completely unsubstantiated narrative that is super popular on places like reddit for how porn companies lost the ability to take payments despite open and direct and admitted actions by an organization that has openly worked for decades to ban porn who helped sue porn companies? Gee, I wonder why.
Meanwhile, two months ago, the stepson of the chairman of that very organization was charged for child porn, so you know, the standard religious right style of "We have to protect the children" while literally abusing children.
Notably, the recent spat with getting some really, uh, """Niche""" adult oriented games off steam was not (at least, publicly, but this is not an accusation) done by them, but an unaffiliated Australian organization that has a better track record of doing what they claim. Steam also is still selling lots of porn games.
Re: NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
I couldn't disagree more. And it was the one thing that surprised me every time we cracked open a new book. "All Quiet on the Western Front" sounded terrible to a 14 year old me, but after starting it, I couldn't put it down. Same with Lord of the Flies. Fahrenheit 451. The Giver. I loved Animal Farm. And the Great Gatsby (though I get people not liking this one). The Outsiders was good. The Old man and the Sea was p…
You liked all of those at 14? We lived completely different youths :) No lasers or dragons -> I skipped the book at that age. Today-me would agree with you about all those books, teenage me would not.
And Besides a bit of Orson Scott Card and LoTR I didn't get into fantasy until later in life.