Additionally, modern Netflix is a streaming company, and even DVD Netflix was sending the materials directly to your house, which is a differentiator versus the library, whose materials need to be picked up. There's a convenience factor as an incentive to pay. Library streaming exists, but it's awful - very limited library and very limited watches - versus Netflix where once you sub you can watch as much as you want.

The economics aren't there.

I'm not sure re: the sunscreen being better. Maybe as a platonic ideal, but it's really easy to miss places when applying sunscreen, whereas a UV umbrella does cover everything with no fuss.

Since you're autistic, you might want to buy them in person: the tactile sensation of linens can be pretty different, so you might want to touch them before buying if sensory issues are a clothing concern.

One thing to look out for is that a lot of clothing that will come up when you search for linen are linen blends, which are better than a hoodie by far, but aren't going to have the same breeziness as 100% linen. Also, 100% linen wrinkles, so you've got to hang it right out of the dryer if you care about that.

Also, linen clothing. Far more comfortable in heat while keeping you covered. Hoodies and jeans sounds miserable.

And you want them to learn in a situation where the stakes are lower: at 18, someone can put themselves into a ton of debt or put nudes in the wrong place and just nuke their life in a way that they can't fix for a decade and everyone shrugs and is like 'you're a grown up!'

Think of all the kids who back in the day got scammed out of their Neopoints, or lost all of their in game currency in GTA, etc. That's a way, way better way to learn about account security and who to trust than their first experience with scammers involving real money.

Is the problem that we're exploiting kids, or is the problem that we're exploiting people? We're not going to be able to protect kids from exploitation in a society/culture that explicitly condones exploitation. If we think exploiting people is fine, actually, as long as they're over 18, then your kids will never be safe, because they will grow up.

Even setting aside the obvious examples I listed, binge drinking used to be a huge problem amongst college aged kids. Who's to say that the Internet/social media wouldn't be similar? How many kids are going to flunk out of school because they can't stop watching digital crack and now mom and dad aren't around to stop them? And unlike binge drinking, your body won't eventually revolt against you, and with the addiction consultants The Machine employs, there will always be new content. People grow out of binge drinking because eventually it grows stale and hangovers when you're 35 are far worse than ones when you're 21, but that's not true of social media use.

To tie this to other issues, we're already seeing issues with relationship and family formation amongst young people. I'm not sure flash banging them with addictive content when they're in their prime years is the call. If all it took for the Internet to be healthy was holding off until adulthood, we'd expect people who were adults when they started to have a healthy relationship with social media. They very much do not.

I've said before and I'll say again that this approach (strict age gating) also is going to produce a slew of really vulnerable 18 year olds. If I were a sports gambling site, I'd be salivating at getting a fresh crop of 18 year old boys each year who have had zero opportunity to learn how to navigate the Internet and who are legally on the hook for everything they do.

OnlyFans, likewise, is going to work out great! Now the 17 year old girls turning 18 won't have access to things like the social media of former OF performers or access to any communities where sex workers discuss the downsides of their job or how to stay safe.

Have to protect the children, don't you know. That way they can be perfectly pure and innocent when they turn 18 and are ready to be exploited. Like fattening up cattle.

One of the best ways to get through airport CBP quickly without being overly hassled is to be overtly, clearly sick in a gross way. If you're about to vomit or have horrible diarrhea, they do not want you in that line any longer than you have to be. If they're the type to want to take people down a peg, they won't bother with you because they're already miserable, and if they like picking on the weak, they're probably going to go for a solo young female traveler who isn't ill.

Nobody wants to risk getting vomit on their clothes or in their work area, having to close a line and shuffle people around while their coworkers glare daggers, or subject themselves or their coworkers to the very fun smells of human bodily fluids.

At the same time, it isn't purposeful so it's not read as malicious.

You don't want a conversation at all.

When I say 'right wing nonsense', I mean nonsense that is right wing, not that right wing inherently = nonsense. I thought that was worth clarifying. I'm left, sort of, in the sense that I'm more left than right, but a lot of my views are so far outside the Overton Window that categorizing them in either way is a futile endeavor. (And there are many instances where I 'cross the aisle' in my opinions: guns and administrative legal theory are two.)

It isn't the statistics that people object to when you present your case: it's the framing and the ideological assumptions behind them.

In writing your post(s) as you did, you embedded the following assumptions along with your statistics:

1.) That the government is 'acting in the place of a father', indicating that there is a specific natural place for a man in the world as it relates to his spouse and children, specifically that he should wield authority and care along the line of traditional roles (versus using the phrasing 'acting in the place of a parent' or 'acting in loco parentis', which would indicate a different critique centering around the amount of external authority in people's lives without prescribing how people should live otherwise).

2.) That we should organize society around/value what people willingly pay for. I disagree. Particularly in modern America, where we've all been raised from birth to be selfish babies and assholes with no ability to look beyond three months down the road (to be generous). Half of this country would throw a tantrum if you asked them to contribute to the roads they drive on. They're definitely not going to pay for cancer research, or to create any strategic resource reserves, if it means they have $5 less now.

3.) That 'bullshit jobs' are more likely to be taken by women and that as a class they're more likely to be impacted by AI than men. I don't agree with that. I think that white collar bullshit jobs are held pretty equally by both sexes: the devastation of the IT/tech job market + all the conversation around what AI means for tech suggests that white collar men are far from immune. In my opinion, pretending that women are going to be more impacted is a cope. They're going to be equally impacted, but women have more of an exit strategy. I also think they've got better non-white collar options, honestly. Pink-collar is going to be more resistant to robotics and AI than blue-collar. I'm betting that construction labor can be automated before hair dressers, and the fastest growing job sector is healthcare services. Or consider in home childcare and jobs like elementary teachers. We'll let robots drive our trucks, but letting them take care of our 4 year olds is going to be a much bigger hurdle.

Overall, I think your case would be stronger and better received if you dropped the gendered element. Discussions happen in a particular context (the Internet's attempts at collapsing that aside), and adding the gender aspect aligns you in the audience's mind with certain positions (just as I did deliberately when I described myself as a leftist woman - I did that specifically so I could present that I agree that women are likely to exit white collar work without aligning myself with other gender positions which in turn makes it easier to discuss the idea on its own merits, or when I started this message by walking back some of my flippancy wrt your message because I appreciate that you took the time to respond and are open to a conversation and therefore am also stepping forward to try to find common ground and reciprocate that I'd like a productive conversation).

The tl;dr is it's not the statistics that are putting people off and earning you downvotes, it's the rhetoric and presentation. Knowing your audience and the context in which an argument is being made is crucial. Like... if I posted this comment in any kind of sapphic group, I'd be run out with pitchforks.

My life is sustained by medicine produced by large international pharma companies, and I also feel really uncomfortable about that.

I've also seen already existing SaaS offerings integrating AI into their already existing product. How well that's going to work... I'm not sure. The economics of at least some of what I've seen is questionable (e.g. giving end users essentially unlimited token spend without passing any of the cost along), and at least one company in my field is clearly adding AI features because they're spooked that the existence of AI is damaging their moat/vendor lock in.

The shift might look like 'company Y contracts with AI companies A, B, and C, and as a result does more with less and therefore needs 30% fewer people'. In theory, companies A, B, and C are creating jobs so the job numbers shift, but your point about a certain level of understanding being needed to do those new jobs definitely stands.

The question is are there enough competent people to staff the middleman companies (I'd say yes specifically because entry level tech is a bloodbath atm) and how simple can these tools be made? Can they be dumbed down enough so that businesses can just buy a package from a vendor where they can give tool access to the people who can't program VCRs and trust that they won't shoot themselves in the foot? That, I don't know.

I lived in rural MI and neither of my parents had a 4 year degree. I wasn't the kid of someone at MIT or in the Valley. We weren't an impoverished family, but we were somewhere between middle and lower-middle class. We were by far some of the lowest people on the web totem pole, socio-economically speaking, but access wasn't out of the question for people who didn't come from a lot of financial/educational privilege.

Additionally, as working becomes worse and worse, anyone who has an exit path will take it. We'll see an uptick in the lumpenproletariat in the Marxist sense of the term (I'm not a Marxist, but the term is useful) as well. Straight and bisexual women have more of an ability to opt out of capitalism directly than straight and bisexual men do in broad generalities.

Additionally, a lot of the resistance to a more traditional family setup on the women's part is because it places us in a precarious situation where, if the person you depend on financially is abusive, you're screwed. If work gets to a point where most employment involves abusive conditions, it's a better deal to chain yourself to a potentially abusive husband than a potentially abusive employer. The legal system is greatly biased towards an employer and the odds of help or redress are low. If you have to pick an abusive situation, pick the one where it's concentrated in one person and you can poison him if you need out. Your husband can have a 'heart attack'. Much harder to pull that off against a megacorp.

In short: the opt out/traditional path is likely to become a better deal, and selfishness will always win.

Attempts at empathy in cases like this read to me as insulting, like how you'd speak to a toddler. I know you're lying, you know you're lying, and now I have to pretend like I don't know you're lying. It's one more indignity of status being used against me and demanding I play a part and accept the lie, primarily for their ego.

Whereas directness feels more equal to me.

For example, I have very weird/non standard genetics when it comes to processing medications, so I've had to learn which classes of drugs I need very small doses of or that I can't take at all. (Some drug classes aren't made in small enough doses for me to take safely). So I have to relay this to doctors and we make our medication decisions accordingly.

Or if you run hot or cold. My body temperature is usually a ~ 96.5, so I'm feeling awful by the time my temp hits 99.5, even though that doesn't register as a problem generally.

Or how I pushed to get a mammogram covered before it is ordinarily because my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother have all had 3+ rounds of triple-negative breast cancer even though they don't have the BRCA genes: the standard recommendation doesn't fit our family and I am high risk despite not having the standard markers for being so.

I have multiple sclerosis and at the time of my diagnosis the best treatment available to me in terms of slowing the progression of MS had a risk of triggering a rare brain infection that would kill you. So it was a choice between treatments that didn't work as well but had lower risk and treatments with greater odds of being able to walk/work/not be in horrifying constant pain in 10 years but also a small chance of death.

These decisions can end up being horribly complicated, and they are definitely revealing in terms of your values.

Usually, local laws are enacted by a city council with members elected to represent different areas of a municipality (and potentially some at-large seats). Legislation can come from a number of places: lobbying efforts (for example, there's a current effort for municipalities to ban data center development), citizen groups, specially formed committees (my city just had one to create and propose city charter revisions), or yes, occasionally the council members themselves. Typically, there are open council meetings where citizens can discuss their opinions.

In addition, some rules/regulations/taxes are directly put to a vote of the city/town population, and some regulations can be put in place by administrative departments in a locality. (Similar to things like EPA regulations on the federal level).

The specific implementations vary in accordance to municipal charters and how specific states handle the incorporation of local governments.