I hope you got the therapy you clearly need. People drop off the internet for all sorts of reasons. I remember bleeding friends because a platform died. It’s just how it is. This can be their lesson learned that you actually need multiple ways to contact your digital friends.

If it were me, I would have been oh well too with my kid. Taking gambles like lying about your age sometimes doesn’t pay off. Sometimes your parents just up and move. Somehow I survived losing digital and IRL friends because of things I had no control over. Learning to cope with that is an adult skill that you everyone eventually needs.

Facts are how you build up everything else. It pretty hard to reason about complex math if you don’t understand how to count to 100. It’s pretty hard to reason about how societies move in waves and cycles if you don’t memorize something about history.

I think people don’t understand that you don’t just start doing abstract work. You build it a bunch of facts that you memorize and then you can start building higher level things like patterns and abstractions.

I know this from trying to teach my child basic concepts like what money is. What exactly is a day. How magnet work. The entire concept of estimation. These are trivial to adults, but these are hard won concepts that were build from concrete ideas for my child.

We know this is necessary because of cultures that are missing whole concepts like particular colors. The idea of right and left. So on.

Tell me how many people rely on you? Because being unavailable for hours can actually be deadly to a child you are responsible for.

I have 3 examples I have experienced, one with my own child where if I or the other person was just unavailable while they were outside of the house, irreparable damage would have happened to the child. Or in my in kid’s case, she would have just died.

Spoken like someone who isn’t responsible for others. My kid is ADHD and autistic. She’s high functioning, but that doesn’t mean I get to just be unreachable. I’m several people’s emergency contacts. I have to travel unknown places all the time and be there exactly to get the help my kid needs.

I’m a single mother. I trade off whatever they are stealing from me for the ability to get cheaper versions of what my kid needs. My job is flexible, so it allows me to take my kid to what she needs with the understanding that I can answer questions when I’m away.

Oh, I also have a deadly neurodegenerate disease that is only kept in check by this specific medication that I need to be places for a while to get. I like my phone reminding me to go get that and also being able to fill out the paperwork on my phone because of my shitty hands.

A lot of people I see who are like, “Just live without a phone!” Are not the people who are actually responsible for people and/or things. I was like that when I was young, but then you know, I became a pillar of my family and friend network. People who are unreachable when needed are dropped from my network. I know several people who when I actually needed them and it was very dire, were unreachable. I left them messages and everything. Nope. Don’t think they ever knew the issue. Dropped. Sorry even in the 90s and 00s, you were expected to listen to your voice mails promptly. I shouldn’t have to mount a search party to find you, which is actually necessary for some people I know.

Please, these are just the volunteers who either have years until reelection or are retiring. We know they are just a front because Warner voted yes and then mysteriously changed his vote to no. Couldn’t be because his reelection is coming up next year. No way.

Segregation is not mass murder. That’s how they could live with themselves. They just didn’t want Those People living next to them. They could be over here. Away from them. They would unironically think they were better than nazis.

As a black person, I’ll say that of the choices, I do think that segregation worked out better for black people. There is simply more POC wealth in historically segregated areas than areas there that’s not true. Turns it, it was actually better to keep racists away from you than letting them torment you while you were trying to establish your community from an even from horrific situation (everything abojt Jim crow and slavery.). I think the battle for integration was a good one, but it was done once there was such a thing as middle class blacks.

I mean… the Japanese who as a nation are mostly non-Christian and don’t know much about it beyond pop culture, celebrate Christmas. I mean it’s a couple’s holiday there, but they do all the superficial things around it. Plenty of non-Christians celebrate Christmas the way that many people celebrate Halloween. It’s just a fun little tradition cooped because a dominant culture enjoys it and doesn’t care too much if you don’t adhere to the heart, but just the ritual of it.

There are plenty of people who don’t know the first thing about what Christmas actually is that celebrate it.

Ads are super effective. If you have something to buy, but you don’t know much about it, you will tend towards buying the thing that was advertised to you more often than not just because you are more familiar with it over other things. You might not stick with it, but being the first thing someone tries is huge.

Every company has learned that any friction to using your site is a bleed of customers. There are a lot of people who will just not use your site if it requires a lengthy validation process. If there was some kind of identity system that sites would integrate with like login.gov, then people would ignore this, but I don’t think the UK has such a thing that every site can use, so a lot of people will not use the site and over time fall to piracy or illegitimate sites.

I’d be interested to see if that ruling would apply with video evidence and no illegal fire arm or reasonable suspicion on the part of the officer. That case seems to uphold the idea of a search on the grounds of reasonable suspicion. That’s not the case here.