bragh

Yes, but this is ridiculous for society. It is to the level of "do not wear a nice watch if you do not want it to get stolen": there should be no need to avoid wearing a nice watch or to pull a telematics fuse from the car in the first place!

It is not about preference, but because of regulation. Nowadays the government demand is that each child needs to have a separate studying and sleeping area. If a sliding wall in a room counts as a separate area is up to the officials' discretion.

On one hand, all of this is understandable, but on the other hand these policies do indeed raise the cost of having children.

It's not mean, it's practical. Household chores need doing, men would go and spend money on alcohol, might get into fights and so on.

> Another thing that caught my attention is that my female friends all have active social lives, whereas that is very rare among the men I know (again, past a certain age).

Yes, that is a pretty typical thing. Starting around late 20s, pretty much most guys are either part of a steady relationship, usually with kids or permanently without a relationship. The men with families have their own family events and get included in the wife's social and family circle. The guys who do not get paired up are not welcome at those events and wives forbid the partnered up guys to hang out with their single male friends on the other days. To be fair, there is nowadays anyway so much online entertainment, that it probably will be fine in the end.

As much as I personally dislike TikTok, I don't think it is fair to it: cultural willingness for more sensor sheep on Internet started years before TikTok's popularity in the west.

Sure. And there were never any restrictions during COVID either, right?

Social media is upstream from beliefs and actions that happen in real life. Not even by mid-2000's, early days of 4chan, could people claim that Internet and real life are separate. The same people who write those kind of things on Twitter and Tumblr and now Bluesky, are the same ones who work at schools and universities, run NGOs, advise local municipality and government policy, and so on. So "you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you", but with social media roots of politics.

Also, what's up with misquoting me? I never used the phrase "mainstream cultural mainstream".

Not sure if honest mistake, but this is what was going on in Twitter and Tumblr for a long while. Obviously in recent years people are trying to walk back on it because of the backlash.

Complaining about blowback when for the past 15+ years the mainstream cultural narrative has been #killallmen, "COVID-19 vaccines came too early, not enough men died", "religious people should be sent to labour camps" and so on is for sure something.

Unattractive nerdy kids being able to escape generational poverty thanks to programming skills is what broke law, business and politics caste members minds. It is unfathomable that somebody could be paid well for a job when they didn't even do Erasmus program or have an internship in EU or NATO office.

Exactly this. That would probably not have been a good ending without the donated PC and shared ADSL connection between neighbors.

God bless Debian.

And now, "it's still in the package!"

It's an interesting topic, though. If Latin is backwards because of assocation with European cultures, what are biologists nowadays proposing to replace it with? Some kind of universal coding system like ISBN or DOI?