Dear almost all other parents with kids between the ages of 2 and 5 years old,

I appreciate all you're doing. You are taking an active role in raising your children, and I applaud you for that... it's hard to do nowadays.

But this is a rant that I won't say to your face because I largely believe in parental autonomy. You need to hear it though. It's important, because many of your good intentions are crippling your child's development., and my own kid's. If at the end of this rant, you agree with it and aren't horrified or offended, PM me cause we could be best friends.

So let's start with the basics: If you take your young child to a children's play area, stop with the hovering. If your child can walk for more than 5 steps without falling on their face, give them some space (like more than 15 feet). Even if they get hurt, that is a teachable moment. If nobody is going to the hospital, don't worry about intervening. Sure they might get some scrapes and bruises, a couple of hard falls....but they will learn and they will grow. Shielding them from everything teaches them nothing. Hovering over your children also scares other children that are not yours, and discourages social interaction. I know this, because I am a very tall man who easily and accidentally terrifies anybody more than a foot shorter than me. It took me a few months to learn this lesson.

Next, let's talk about sharing. I know everyone wants to instill in their child that it is important to share. It's generally a good principal. But sharing is a two-way street, and every time you intervene whenever there is the slightest possibility of conflict, you're teaching your kid that 'sharing means to give whatever someone else wants to them no matter what' and you're teaching my kid 'you can totally take what other people want with 0 consequences.' My child can utterly dominate children twice as old because of this. I do my best to prevent that from getting instilled, but it's a long uphill battle when myself and my spouse are the only two teaching that lesson.

Children need to be able to have conflict with their peers. They need space from adults, and learn to interact with others their age. Yes there will be conflict, pain, and suffering. But there will also be joy, reconciliation, and fun. It's part of learning to be a human with empathy. My child learns far more about socializing in 5 minutes of interaction with your kid than 5 hours of interaction with me.

Next up: Potty training. My kid potty trained at 2 years old. They showed signs of being ready at 18 months, but couldn't quite verbalize well enough at that point. By 2 years, they were completely potty trained during the day. Took a while before being able to get through the night without accidents (tiny bladders have trouble going 8+ hours without peeing), but during the waking day 0 accidents for months on end. I see many of your 4+ year olds still wearing diapers and shitting themselves in the aisles in the grocery store, and it's one of the most depressing things ever. If your kid isn't potty trained by 3, it's your failing, not theirs.

I know my spouse and I are not the best parents (our stance on screen time is very controversial), but I also can blatantly see when development issues are forming as a result of hovering parents, both in my child and yours. Do these things, and everything will be better for everyone.

Signed,

A parent who is judging you harshly.

I'll start with @TheFanficGuy's reply to a comment of mine where he said you can bring down an authoritarian regime without a coup'd etat/successful civil war, although I admittedly can't really imagine any dictator just giving up power like that unless it hurts their economic allies. (And the Arab spring shows this above all else.)

I also wouldn't be surprised if many of these regimes only make a minimal amount of effort to keep their population shut.

I'm Brazilian, and personally (in the most radical, electability-indifferent and honestly meme-y campaign) would go for Bernie with the campaign finance and tax reform but with a platform for civical reform like putting STV as the nomination method for our chamber of deputies and supporting automating or funding new technologies to replace menial labor, like funding lab grown meat to replace all farming companies and labor now or robotics to automate large parts of the industrial and service sectors and use that money saved from not paying wages to people doing bad jobs to fund free universities and better schools/wages/welfare/infrastructure to the people once doing that work, along with adding civics and economics as subjects in school and always including notes as to where do you use the content you're learning, along with requiring subsidiaries to go independent or drop their branding. Clearly this isn't very realistic so feel free to expouse absurd policy.

I really want to talk about the SCP Foundation with other people, so let's get a thread going!

For those of you who don't know, The SCP Foundation is an online creative writing project where people write fake files and stories about The Foundation, a secret organization committed to containing various anomalous creatures. It's a really cool website, one that I recommend to anyone who likes thrillers, horror, sci-fi, or are just looking for something interesting.

Be warned though, there are over 4,000 entries on the wiki (they just had a 5,000th entry writing contest), so if you are feeling overwhelmed by the number of articles, feel free to start out with SCP-2030, one of my personal favorites. And if you're someone who prefers audiobooks to regular reading, a YouTuber going by the name Brendaniel has a great video narrating SCP-2030.

The nice thing about electability being uncertain is that you can choose the candidate you think is best.

Unfortunately I have lost faith in my ability to decide that. Studying candidates' policies seems useless since, after all, Congress makes the laws. We are likely to see either stalemate or centrist legislation regardless.

Maybe I should decide based on foreign policy instead? Most people don't do that but I don't see why not. Any recommendations for interesting articles to read?

So I don't know about all of you, but I'm pretty sick of terrible healthcare in the USA.

So I'm starting this thread for all of us to rant about our personal issues with healthcare. I'll be writing my rant into it's own reply later (it's a bit of a long one), but I wanted to start the thread now to give others a chance to start venting.

Rules of Rant Thread:

1. Don't argue a rant
2. Thread is likely going to be incredibly USA-centric. USA healthcare is assumed unless stated otherwise.
3. Rants should involve people no more than 2 degrees of separation from yourself. This thread is to vent about your personal experiences, not hearsay from total strangers.

In order to foster further discussion, and include those without a rant: Here are some things I personally would appreciate and expect for replies, but others might not.

• Explanation of how things would work out for you if you were in a similar situation
• Advice for dealing with any ongoing or future problems

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

New debate, new thread. (Unfortunately somewhat late as the debate was streamed right at the time I wrote this post.)

The debate was being live streamed in CBS's channel in YouTube.

Twitter is one of the debate partners so expect a few questions from there.

The south Carolina primaries are due February 29th and there willl be no more debates until after super tuesday so this debate is pretty important.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

At work there's a project that was originally pitched as an automated system we would build for a new client, and now the conversation has shifted towards automating away some data entry tasks for an existing client. If the project is successful I would guess that some or all of the people doing the data entry tasks would be out of a job. And if it's a resounding success I would guess that the powers that be would be eager to apply it in other areas and potentially put more people out of jobs.

This project is in the very early stages of gathering requirements and whatnot so it's not really clear what exactly we're building or what my role in building it would be. But it involves a technology that's new to us (natural language processing) and often times I end up playing some role in a project that involves learning something new, even if it's just in some small way.

So yeah, I know automation replacing low-skill work is nothing new and if these jobs can be automated away, they will be sooner or later, but this is the first time I've been confronted with the idea of using my skills to put people I don't know out of a job and it sticks in my craw. Normally I love automation and interacting with new (to me) tech even if it's nothing groundbreaking and I'm just doing the plumbing to connect system A to interface B, but in the past it's always been in the name of freeing up people from tedious tasks so that they can do more interesting and more important work, rather than "freeing" them of their paycheck. So I'm finding myself adding this to the small but compelling pile of frustrations I have with this job and weighing it against the also-small but also-compelling pile of things I love about it.

Anyway, if you've ever been in a position where you were asked to automate away someone else's job, how did that go? What did you do?

If you haven't, what do you think you would do?

What question have you asked yourself multiple times but have not come to a solid conclusion? Why have you not been able to come up with a answer that satisfies you?

edit: only now do I realize I misspelled quandry

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

I don’t like my name, and I never really have. It has nothing to do with ‘tomf’.

My main questions are:

1. How did you go about choosing the new name?
2. How did you manage/roll out the new name?
3. What unforeseen challenges came up?

My main concern is that I’ll settle on a ‘cool’ sounding name and that people will think it’s weird. While I want something normal, I do have some parameters:

1. The name should be free for the .com and major social media
2. I don’t want a main ‘S’ sound, since I don’t like how I say it.
3. I am hoping to have something simple to use over the phone. I use ‘Tom’ for Starbucks and reservations because it’s clear, short, and not me.

Anyway, has anybody done this? Any feedback is great, but I am more focused on changing my first name.

Pardon the crappy tags.

• How do you decide which kind of car you want?

  • How do you prioritize what you're looking for?
  • How do you know if you'll like it or not?
  • Bonus points for tips on selecting a car your spouse will like as well.

• Why do you pick new/used?

• How do you negotiate the price of the car?

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

I find this to be a pretty important question when news organizations like Fox News are literally aiming to help the Republican Party to stay on power, CNN and MSNBC promote centrist candidates and media aggregators ranging from r/the_donald to r/chapotraphouse banning anyone who opposes them. Thing is, these are the most well known examples. How could we tell faulty media sources and aggregators apart from good ones in mass? Do you think that's possible?

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

I don't watch T.V very often, but do - when I'm up (which is infrequent given I'm outside the U.S) - watch the NBA. Recently I've had a little time so have watched a few games live. Doing so, I was quite taken aback at how commonplace humour and meta advertising are nowadays. Is this just a U.S thing?

Is there any research out there on when and why advertisers started doing this? Seems like every other ad shoots for either humour or "we know you know this is an ad, you're clearly smart enough to realise that, so smart in fact you might want to buy into our brand". Whatever the case, as ever, grateful for resources/discussion from those more in the know than I.

EDIT: A good example that is equal parts humour/meta is LeBron James' Super Bowl Sprite Ad.

It's been a while since we had one of these. probably for good reason since clogging the site with 'do we exist' threads like this is counterproductive

'Developmental disorders' comprises autism, ADHD, Tourette's and more. (Here's a wiki article for them.)

I'll start with my asperger syndrome which was very strong autism when I was a child.

This is a question I've been thinking about a great deal in the context of changing global power dynamics. Rising authoritarianism, militarism, fundamentalism, and other ailments of our times are getting in the way of dealing with universal threats to humanity, like climate change, pandemics, and even asteroid impacts.

But nationalism has such a grip on people's psyches... Parts are nostalgic, and parts are about tribal sense of belonging and purpose. Tonight, I watched a Chef's Table episode about a young Russian chef on a mission to make Russian cuisine great again (not his words). The interesting thing is that Mukhin essentially acknowledges that he's helping Russian cuisine become great not by denigrating other nation's products, or clinging to an idealized version of his home food, but through intentionally discovering what is worthwhile elsewhere and at home. It got me thinking about what's been lost in a globalized world, what could be found in isolated places, and what it would take to let people bridge local interests and universal values.

I'd also watched Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins over the weekend. Ivins' writing on Texas state politics as a microcosm and foreshadowing of current U.S. concerns is essential. Then I read Citylab's old story on the paralysis of New York subway system development.

It occurred to me that the U.S. has become fractally parochial, with increasingly local or corporate interests thwarting any exercise favoring broader national or regional goods. The original framing of the nation in the U.S. Constitution has significant flaws because of the original tension between sovereign state interests, and the federal system. We're not learning from the rest of the world very well, either.

I'm curious about whether Tilders think there's such a thing as positive nationalism, capable of both unifying localities and maintaining or growing what's good about a culture in the face of potentially hostile competing nations.

• Do you think there are positive aspects to nationalism, and if so, what?

• Do you think nationalism has been, on balance, a positive or negative force in your country in the past?

• Do you think nationalism is, on balance, a positive or negative force in your country right now?

• Do you think your country could have a positive version of nationalism in the future?

• Is it necessary to exclude or mitigate influences from elsewhere in order to maintain the original nature of your national culture?

If I may ask, please include your nationality when responding.

I was having a conversation with a friend today about the economics of art and the potential cost of purchasing an idea. It got me thinking, what are some other things relatively cheap to create but expensive to purchase?

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Anything is fair game: from a movie seemingly everyone panned to a company seemingly everyone hates. Give us a justification for why you think, say, nails on a chalkboard is actually a delightful sound or why Ringo is the best Beatle.

With that said, I'm interested in genuine answers, not just people playing devil's advocate, so please only submit something you actually believe! Also, while my examples are light-hearted, serious answers are welcome too.

Guiding questions:

• What are the common criticisms for your chosen thing?
• Why do you feel that it's worth defending, even in light of those criticisms?

Rules

1. Please identify your city, and post a link to Wikipedia if the name is ambiguous or not well know. If you do not wish to provide this information for privacy reasons, you can provide some general informations about your city or nominate a similar one.

2. Your funds are unlimited, but you're limited to a maximum of 3 projects. The projects can be as big or small as you want. And try to give a reasonable amount of detail. This is not intended for comedy or fictionalized speculation. Please submit ideas that you think are actually viable!

3. You must increase any metrics included on or related to the Human Development Index^[1] of your city.

4. The projects don't need to focus on your birthplace or where you currently live. Any city you have significant knowledge of will do. But it must be a single one.

5. Both consequentalist and deontological ethics must be observed. The projects must not contradict the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In other words, be excellent to each other!

6. Unlike my previous ~talk thread, in this one I won't play a jackass genie or anything like that. The purpose of this thread is to have a healthy discussion on urban development by sharing our aspirations for the cities we love.

Example of areas to improve

• culture
• education
• internet access
• employment
• transportation
• water
• environment

^[1] This is only a starting point. There is space for subjectivity

This question really came to mind to me about last week when I was hanging out with some friends. I always noticed it as a part of my personality but I never really thought about it as in depth as I have recently. That night I immediately got concerned to the point of it ruining my evening about the following things:

• We're running out of helium in the world
• Where is my birth certificate
• The old VHS tapes of my childhood and important moments in my family are slowly degrading but I can't digitise them until I go home to my parents and that's not for at least half a year, will they hold up that long?
• There's too much space junk
• I used so much plastic just cooking dinner this one evening for my friends, imagine how much gets bought and consumed worldwide
• Some languages are going to die out and there's nothing I can do about it
• Are the rhinos doing ok?
• What's my blood type and am I allergic to anything?

Does anyone else suffer from this idiosyncracy? If so, what are some things that concern you or what are some other things that I can be concerned about?

EDIT: This turned dark, I thought I was just sharing some lighthearted fun and now I have schizophrenia, OCD and should talk to a therapist... jeez louise

(Presuming it's done purely for statistical purposes of course.)

I, like most of us am personally fine with age, sex, city level location and relationship status. I really dislike using real names though since I feel like it ties you to who you are in person, which I really dislike and I support people deciding not to fill them in because in some places even what I've outlined can get you in trouble.

This is presumably unanswerable for anyone whose handle here is known by anyone in their real life, but I figured I'd ask it anyway, as there are likely a good number of us for whom our Tildes names are fully separate from our real life identitires.

• What are you willing to share with internet strangers but not people you know in real life?
• Why is it important to you that it is not shared with people you know in real life?

As noted in the question, I'm looking for stuff you're comfortable sharing. I'm not trying to fish for deep dirt here.

I'll preface this by saying this post is birthed out of a small argument I'm having on Reddit, but the topic seems like a worthwhile one. (And I'm not getting much other than downvotes for a counterargument over there!)

The initial question is whether or not the death of someone who is very old (95 years or more) should be considered tragic. Some things to consider:

1. The overall health and condition of the person.

• Are they in constant state of suffering?

2. The wishes of the person.

• Do they actively wish to be dead? This might not even be out of suffering. Some people, as they get to be quite old, are just bored of their lives or want this stage to be over. Anecdotally, my great-grandmother was this way from the ages of 90 and onward. (She quite famously would greet cashiers with "I want to die.")

3. Are they still active?

• Do they still find meaning in what they are doing? For example, David Attenborough is 93 years old and is still a big presence on the world stage. Despite his great age, if he were to die, his work would still be ‘cut short.’

4. The circumstances by which they die.

• Was it sudden, or did it take a long time? Was it painful? Was it violent?

This list is not exhaustive. I welcome suggestions for what should be added to it.

There is also how we define tragedy. In general terms, it typically just alludes to an event that causes great suffering and distress. I think this is the definition that we are more concerned with. Alternatively, there is the theatrical definition of tragedy, which is more tied to the leading character suffering some major downfall at the end of the narrative. While we could construe the death of someone in real life this way, it seems to be a bit of a stretch as most of us do not live out our lives in three-act structures with a clear climax and finale. (I’m going to rule out this definition now, if not just for the sake of argument.)

Balancing all of these thoughts, I think the crux of where disagreement lies is in how we feel about death for the deceased versus our own selfish desires. Bringing this back to my anecdote, about twenty years ago, my great-grandmother passed at the age of 94. She spent at least the last 5 years of her life pleading to God to finally take her. Her health was fine. She lived in her house, alone, fully capable of maintaining it (and herself). In fact, in the year prior to her death, she was so physically active that she painted all 200 feet of her white picket fence! By all means, she was not physically suffering. She just simply wanted to go.

Then she did. I think the group consensus was something akin to, “Well, I guess she finally got what she wanted. I’m going to miss her.” It was a feeling of simultaneously being happy for her and grief for ourselves.

To which, does this make for a tragedy?

Some might call it splitting hairs, but what I am arguing is that the death itself was not tragic. What is tragic is our loss of the ability to interact with that person and the feelings of grief that follow. I cannot help but feel these are ultimately separate things that we have such a difficult time reconciling. Part of life is death, and as long as we revere life, we must also revere the last part of it. If we did this better, we might have an easier time accepting things like medical-assistance-in-dying. It is for this reason that I say, death, by default, does not necessitate tragedy.

However while death is not necessarily tragic, I do think there are a multitude of conditions that would make death sufficiently tragic. Looking back at my list above, the death of a young healthy person would be considered tragic. Suppose someone was violently beheaded; this could be considered tragic. Even suppose that the 93-year-old David Attenborough passed away, I would think his death to be tragic as he wanted to offer more to the world.

Anyway, I think I’ve rambled enough. What are your thoughts?

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week.

If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work related, I'd love to hear about them. This is a place for casual discussion about your week, past, present, and future.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this week?

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their weekend.

If you have any plans, things you want to get done, things you have done, things you haven't done, or even if you just want to talk about how you're doing this weekend, this is a place for casual discussion about those things.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this weekend?

The mission

You have been tasked with the mission to kill Hitler. The mission is mandatory and you cannot decline it. You have access to a state of the art time machine: a simple Casio wristwatch in which you enter the time, date and location where you wanna travel to. It can travel to any point in past Earth's history, and it is programmed to automatically and safely return you to the present time as soon as the mission is completed.

You have access to all weapons available to humankind in the present day, but you can only take what you can carry.

You also have access to technology that will make you look ethnically German complete with Nazi uniforms, and a perfectly functioning universal translator.

How this thread will work

I will try to come up with a negative outcome for every answer in jackass genie style. Others are welcome to do the same!

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week.

If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work related, I'd love to hear about them. This is a place for casual discussion about your week, past, present, and future.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this week?

I didn't know tildes has trending topics.

I'd either pick the rise of the bolsheviks in Russia (You can replace them with the mensheviks, who wanted to abide by democracy.), The division of the HRE (A united germany in 900CE would be very consequential.) And the rise of the hapsburgs in what would be Austria-Hungary, since it meshed a dozen linguistic groups together.

As far as "vice" is concerned, do any of you draw the line somewhere? For example, has anyone here been to a strip club? Paid for sex? Engaged in recreational use of illegal drugs? Gambled?

I was inspired by this post and was wondering where ya'll stand.

I'll start (for reference, I am a 14 year old Brazilian in a presumably poor house , also in retrospect this reminds me of what they tell you to do at the beginning of most English courses, which makes me feel like a cringy kid):

• Wake up (6:15, praised be alarm clocks)

• Put on the school uniform (takes 5-10 minutes)

• Have breakfast (takes 10 minutes)

• Brush my teeth (takes less than 5 minutes)

• Walk to school (6:45)

• Reach school (less than 100 meters from my home thankfully) and enter a classroom (7:00 plus a few minutes for teachers to set stuff up)

• stay in school until 12:17 (every time the subject changes, we pack our stuff and go to the classroom the teacher of the subject is in. There is also a break between 9:30 and 10:20.)

• Leave school and go home

• Get home by 12:45

• Have lunch, usually rice and beans with either meat or chicken meat in some flattened form I can't describe, usually at 1-1:30 PM.

Do... whatever on the phone (as of recently be here or in discord, along with reddit and YouTube for longer unless it runs out of battery) Edit: see here for details.

• Have dinner (usually at 8:30-9:00, same food as lunch)

• Pack the books for the subjects they teach tomorrow

• Go to sleep at 10.

During vacation/weekends I can wake up from 5-10 AM depending on how well I slept the previous night. The rest is the same, except for Saturdays my parents go and buy some esfihas to break the monotony of lunch and dinner.

Hey there people!

Seeing how last post I could find on the topic was posted almost one year ago and how my question is a bit more specific, I thought a new one could be worthwhile.

Admittedly, I am not an assiduous podcast listener - what I'm mostly looking for is a show to 'scratch the itch' every once in a while which features good chemistry between its hosts, exploring whatever topic with humorous tones; bonus points if said topic is interesting.

To exemplify, some of the best podcasts I can think of on the spot are How did This Get Made (I can particularly recommend the episode dedicated to Mr. Nanny), or How to Fuck Up an Airport.

The first one is a serie that analyze extremely poor or obscure movies, while the second one unveils the debacle surrounding the 20 year old (and still aging) Berlin Brandenburg Airport project; I know this last one might sounds boring, but it's a baffling and hilarious journey - surely and by far my favorite Podcast.

TL;DR
So yeah, what are your most entertaining, hilarious, and generally fun podcasts?

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their weekend.

If you have any plans, things you want to get done, things you have done, things you haven't done, or even if you just want to talk about how you're doing this weekend, this is a place for casual discussion about those things.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this weekend?

Specially those of you who attend courses on the field of humanities, in which I feel the amount of note-taking is even greater than most fields, given all the reading and talking that occurs during classes and out of them. How do you do it? Do you write on paper perhaps, or do you find that digital notes suit you better?
I'm asking this because I am about to start my studies (finally) and am curious about how other people handle this task which, honestly, has been a nuisance through all my life. I'm not the best at organizing my notes and I believe it harms my studying overall.

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week.

If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work related, I'd love to hear about them. This is a place for casual discussion about your week, past, present, and future.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this week?

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their weekend.

If you have any plans, things you want to get done, things you have done, things you haven't done, or even if you just want to talk about how you're doing this weekend, this is a place for casual discussion about those things.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this weekend?