You’re proving my point. You’re worried about something that’s just not going to happen to you. I can safely make a $500 bet with 4,000 people in the US that if they don’t wear their seat belt that they will be alive a year from now and be $1,999,500 richer. It’s not psychologically healthy to constantly worry about this, strapped into a bucket seat by a 3 point safety harness, like you’re an astronaut riding an SLS rocket to the Moon when you’re only driving down the road to buy a gallon of milk.

And what I mean by saying that people shouldn’t wear seat belts unless they need to, does not mean go fumbling for your seat belt in the middle of an emergency situation. It means when you know you are about to be in a dangerous situation that requires one, like riding with someone who you know is a horrible driver. Or that famous scene in Bullitt where Bullitt and the villains buckle up before their big car chase, jumping the hills of San Francisco. Today we buckle up like we’re about to get into a wild car chase when we’re just going around the corner to McDonald’s. That’s making everyone neurotic.

People shouldn’t wear seat belts unless they need to. Constantly being hypervigilant, prepared for the worst case scenario, thinking you have zero control over whether you get in a deadly accident is bad for the psychological health of our society.

Before seat belt laws there wasn’t even a word for road rage. It didn’t exist because when someone accidentally swerved into your lane or cut you off it didn’t feel like attempted murder.

In 1971, it was hold me close tiny dancer and count the lights on the highway. Today it’s stay over there tiny dancer and stay strapped into your bucket seat just on the off chance we get into a horrible accident. We’re driving ourselves batty with this kind of paranoia.

They were probably expecting Walmart cashiers to use it to find out why their family members in Medieval 2 Total War aren't having children instead of doctors using it to find out how to perform an open heart surgery.

https://www.gutenberg.org/

It's been around for half a century and nobody knows about it. It's like a world wonder, a modern Library of Alexandria.

Every generation is like this at that age. The hallmark of my generation, GenX, was apathy. Not that I care. Whatever. Never mind.

It worked best when YT had banner ads instead of video ads. Today you get Wix rolled for a minute or two before you get to the Rick.

If it is, I think it's illegal in the US at least. By law I think employers are required to give at least one 30 minute break a day.

Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog is news.

Are we safe here on Lemmy?

Every other post here I've seen is low key promoting violent revolution. So I'd imagine there's at least one FBI agent hanging around and writing reports.

I blame commercials and PSAs. I stopped watching TV in the mid-2000s and have ad blocker online. Watching TV today is like stepping back into Plato's Cave. You don't realize how psychologically damaging commercials are.

As an example, a few years ago I watched a live stream of the local news during a weather event with ads that couldn't be blocked. Four hours later, I had seen the same commercial for an HIV drug at least 8 times. I had the thing memorized and I was very, very aware of HIV all day as it replayed in my brain. I don't ever think about HIV. But I was forced to. I'm usually happy go lucky but after that ad, and other ads for a myriad of other drugs for diseases, plus PSAs reminding me how my life is a vicious jungle with death just a step away, I felt pretty bummed. Some of those PSAs are down right mean spirited.

Without ads, I can control my exposure to the horrors of the world. With ads, you're at the mercy of the station or website drowning you in human misery. There probably needs to be a law to limit those kind of commercials. Like one PSA a week and one pharmaceutical commercial a day.

Governments know about parental controls. They know it's the most effective, most efficient, and least destructive way to deal with this. They don't care. And they don't care about the children. If they cared, they'd develop their own parental control software, offer it for free, and encourage it's use.

If they really wanted to get draconian about it, as they are doing now with age verification, they would pass laws to prosecute parents who don't use parental controls for negligence.

But it's not about the children. At all. It's about preventing you and me, and all of us from talking to each other and entertaining ourselves. It's about turning the Internet into TV, a one way faucet of entertainment and information controlled by the wealthy .001% where us peons can't talk back.

These age verification laws are just the first step. They kill small forums and games like Urban Dead, and leave only sites controlled by megacorporations that can afford the age verification infrastructure and the massive corporate fines if a single kid sneaks in. Once you get used to this, it's easier for you to accept not being able to communicate online at all, or start your own forum, or YouTube channel.

I never understood why we're stuck with just capitalism or communism, two economic systems developed before railroads were a thing and written down at night by candle light or a lantern burning whale fat. I think we should come up with something better. To quote President Not Sure, "The water doesn't have to come from the toilet, but that's the general idea."

AI isn't magic. It's been my experience trying to seriously work with it that I realize that it would be easier just to do it myself in Photoshop.

Edit:

Actually, now it's Krita. I'm moving away from PS.

Porn is always the canary in the coal mine when it comes to things like this and censorship.

This is different from pirating. The government will be going after the developers like they did Kim Dotcom.

I remember in the early 2000s when I got Internet at home, one of my relatives kept telling me about forums and how great they were. And my thought was "Why would would I want to know what the average dumb fuck thinks about things?" I might have forgotten this wisdom.

It's interesting reading Cabeza de Vaca's account of living in Texas for a decade. All the natives living on the Texas coast weren't even hunter-gatherers. They were just gatherers and lived in lean-tos. Meanwhile, 1000 miles south of them was Tenochtitlan, and a bunch of other cities that Bernal Castillo described as grander than those in Europe.

The problem is there are a lot of subreddits that are an excellent resource. As far as I know, there aren't any Blender help instances with a 100,000 people. I really wish there were.

That lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old, K.G.M, who hopes the jury will agree that Meta and YouTube caused psychological harm by designing features like infinite scroll and autoplay to push her down a path that she alleged triggered depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality.

What the hell is everyone watching? YT recommends me Red Letter Media, Veratasium, old movies, Blender tutorials and a bunch of other stuff that's never going to drive me to self-harm. I don't understand. May be this woman doesn't have ad blocker installed and is forced to sit through a bunch of soul crushing PSAs? Why is my experience so drastically different from this?

Did you see her get dumped? If not, did you take her to the vet to see if she has a chip? She could be lost.