Snowflake's Forum

The AP reports that a new law restricting game time goes into effect tomorrow in China: China is banning children from playing online games for more than three hours a week, the harshest restriction so far on the game industry as Chinese regulators continue cracking down on the technology sector. Minors in China can only play games between 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Fridays, weekends and on public holidays starting Sept. 1, according to a notice from the National Press and Publication Administration. That limits gaming to three hours a week for most weeks of the year, down from a previous restriction set in 2019 that allowed minors play games for an hour and a half per day and three hours on public holidays. The gaming restrictions are part of an ongoing crackdown on technology companies, amid concerns that technology firms — many of which provide ubiquitous messaging, payments and gaming services — may have an outsized influence on society. The company [Tencent] issued the curbs hours after...

Hundreds of naked — or partially clothed — people paraded through the streets of Philadelphia for the  Philly Naked Bike Ride  Saturday evening. But this year due to COVID-19, many people donned masks as they rode their bikes, skateboards, or rollerblades around the City of Brotherly Love. https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/news/2021/08/philly-naked-bike-ride-2021-clothes-off-masks-on-photos.html

  I don't usually venture into politics here, because 1) they're kinda boring and 2) they drive us away from one another.  But Snowy suggested this topic to me, so I'm giving it a shot. Are you a VICTIM?! I'm reliably informed that many here in the Yew-knighted States feel positively victimized by mask mandates, vaccine requirements and such.  This really isn't new.  Americans, as a people, are very prone to feeling put-upon.  We've always had some anti-vaxxers (yes, even before that fraud  Andrew Wakefield  first claimed vaccines caused autism).  Back in the 1960s, we had flakes who insisted that fluoridating water was a Communist plot.  Heck, there are still some locales where it's illegal to add fluoride to water;  you can find these places by searching under  "poor tooth hygiene." But the recent notion that mask mandates and vaccine requirements are akin to the imposition of the "Jude" star in Nazi Germany and its occupied terri...

In her 1999 book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life , moral philosopher Sissela Bok strenuously argued that when people hold false beliefs and they act on them, they are deprived of the freedom to decide and act on the basis of actual knowledge. Citing lies by politicians to the public, she argued that deceit and false beliefs can destroy a democracy. Deceit and false beliefs take from society its freedom to choose based on true reality.  False beliefs can come from intentional deceit or propaganda or from honest mistakes. Regardless of the source, some false beliefs are occasionally lethal. One important issue now is whether to get vaccinated or not. Some people who decide to not get vaccinated do so on the basis of false information about the vaccine. Sometimes one of them gets infected and passes the virus to another(s). Occasionally they die from the infection. Some or most of unvaccinated people claim they reject the vaccine as a matter of personal freedom. The is...

These are sad days. The Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository will close forever on Aug. 31. The depository is a court-ordered collection of documents used in years of litigation against tobacco companies. There's a lot of history in those tens of millions of pages. One researcher is visiting for the last time and recalls what came out of those pages. He writes :  The warehouse, open to the public for 23 years, will close on Tuesday, ending an unprecedented court-ordered, industry-funded central collection of the legacy of a product that, according to the surgeon general, has killed more than 20 million Americans and continues to kill more than 400,000 a year. Most of the documents have been put online by the University of California at San Francisco, which used software to lift them from company websites, and the physical copies will be destroyed. In these boxes, Minnesota lawyers found evidence that tobacco companies had known for decades that smoking caused cancer, that nicotin...

...God (Allah, Yahweh, what have you, and there’s plenty to pick from) was born.*   And we “saw that it was good.”   Yes, I’m saying humanity created the concept of God; the concept was not instilled into humanity by a God.  In other words, hierarchically, we came first, God came after us.  I further submit that the attributes of “good and evil,” that which we tend to associate with God-judgment, are moral judgments that are strictly human concepts.  Good and evil does not exist outside of human judgment.   No humanity, no good and evil.    Rather, existence as we know it is one massive energy in/energy out phenomenon/machine, pure and simple. Organically, all life feeds on death as all death in turn feeds life, cycle after cycle after cycle.   Even the energies of inorganic things give way to other inorganic things.  So, was this OP too cold, too morbid for you?  Am I just a heartless b!tch who has no idea of what she sp...

Over at Neurologica blog, Steve Novella writes on recent survey data : Acceptance of the basic tenets of evolutionary theory, therefore, is a good litmus test for any modern society. Of what, exactly, is another question, but certainly something is going wrong if the population does not accept this overwhelming scientific consensus. The US ranks second from the bottom (only Turkey is worse) in terms of accepting evolutionary theory. Researchers have been tracking the statistics for decades, and now some of the lead researchers in this field have published data from 1985 to 2020 . There are some interesting details to pull from the numbers. The big news is that between 1985 and 2007 US public acceptance and rejection of evolutionary theory were in a statistical dead heat, each hovering between 40-45%, with “don’t know” varying between 10-20%. Then since 2007 the lines have started diverging, by 2019 with more people accepting evolution. (54%) than rejecting (36%). It’s too early to say...

 Perceptions: I would argue are 9/10th of how we view people. See someone in a leather jacket vs a business suit, we make assumptions. See a mother in dowdy clothes vs one dressed to the 9s, we make assumptions. Bigots of course, see a headdress, and make assumptions, while others see a trailer part and make assumptions. We see a 50 year old male with a stud in one ear, in tight jeans, driving a sports car, and we make an assumption. SO... Perceptions? Why do we have them? Were we raised on them? Were we conditioned on them by Media or what we saw on TV? Long hair means hippie, right? Dreadlocks means gangsta, right? Can we admit that we have those Perceptions? Or do we hide behind the "not me, I see each individual as an individual." Is that even realistic? When I see a lady decked out in jewelry and heavy makeup wearing designer clothes, I think "hoity toity". Is that shallow? Or am I ONLY to blame for saying it out loud, because most of you would think the same t...

Where the Wild Things Are The Aurora borealis making a grand display over Kirkjufell Mountain in Grundarfjordur, Iceland. MMW

 Whoops, there goes the phone again!   What's that you say?  You're calling from the Social Security Administration and threatening to close down my "account?"  Say it isn't so!   No, it's a robot calling to offer me a better deal on my Discover card!  If only I had one! You're my grandchild, and you've been arrested in Mexico?  O, no!  Um, wait, I don't have one of those either.  Better call someone else for that bail money. Yes, they're at it again.  Endless illegal calls, robocalls, "surveys," and every single one wants your money.   My response depends on my mood. Sometimes I just hang up.  Sometimes I play along for a little while.  More often than not, I tell the tele-scoundrel what the goat is doing with his sister or mother. But maybe I'm just more impolite than most people. I mean, even a criminal creep who lives by ripping off innocents has gotta eat, right?  I know exactly what I'd like them ...

 People tend to romanticize the era they grew up in, for me that was the 60s and 70s, and it was the 70s I remember most fondly, as I transitioned from adolescence to manhood. BUT is the romanticizing overblown? We had Vietnam, Watergate, we were fighting racism (still are but it was worse then), and there was little tolerance for the gay community. We didn't have computers, cell phones, video games, and all the distractions that have made us fat and lazy.  Most of all - we had FUN! Sex before HIV. A lot of pot smoking. A lot of really great music (at least until disco came along and spoiled it all) And talking about romanticizing: Growing Up in the ’70s: Very Different Than Today https://medium.com/@twoguyswhoblog/growing-up-in-the-70s-very-different-than-today-two-guys-who-blog-46507b98d738 25 Reasons We're Glad We Grew Up in the '70s A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY... https://bestlifeonline.com/we-love-70s/ A CHILDHOOD OF THE 70’S VERSUS TODAY. ARE WE JUST LUCK...

Delta Air Lines announces a $200 monthly health insurance surcharge for unvaccinated employees August 25, 2021, 10:31 AM Delta Air Lines  David McNew/Getty Images  Delta Air Lines isn't requiring its employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19. But if they don't, they'll be  facing a surcharge of $200 a month . Delta CEO Ed Bastian  announced Wednesday  that the airline's employees who choose not to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and are enrolled in the company's healthcare plan "will be subject to a $200 monthly surcharge" beginning on Nov. 1. "The average hospital stay for COVID-19 has cost Delta $50,000 per person," Bastian said. "This surcharge will be necessary to address the financial risk the decision to not vaccinate is creating for our company." Bastian added that as the Delta variant of COVID-19 spreads, all of the company's employees who have been hospitalized with the coronavirus in recent weeks weren't fully vacci...

30 years later, the baby on Nirvana’s Nevermind cover is suing for damages Spencer Elden is seeking upwards of $150,000 in damages for the album cover. Andrew Cunningham  -   8/25/2021, 12:36 PM Enlarge   /  Nirvana's  Nevermind  album cover. DGC Records Nirvana's 1991 album  Nevermind  is widely credited with bringing alternative and grunge rock into the mainstream, but now it's in the news for another reason. Spencer Elden, the adult who was the baby depicted swimming naked on the album's cover, has filed a lawsuit on the grounds that the photo violated various federal child pornography laws. The suit, posted  here  in its entirety, names (among others) DGC Records and its parent companies; Courtney Love and the estate of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain; then-band members Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl; and Chad Channing, a drummer who had left Nirvana the year before  Nevermind  was released but whose work on the album has...

 A Belgian zoo has banned a woman who said she had an "affair' with one of their chimpanzees  https://news-yahoo-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/news.yahoo.com/amphtml/belgian-zoo-banned-woman-said-023651564.html?amp_js_v=a6&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQKKAFQArABIIACAw%3D%3D#aoh=16298999335909&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.yahoo.com%2Fbelgian-zoo-banned-woman-said-023651564.html The Antwerp Zoo has banned a visitor from seeing Chita, a 38-year-old chimpanzee. The zoo says visitor Adie Timmermans' interactions with Chita have caused other primates to ostracize him. Timmermans told the local news that she loves Chita and that they have a "real relationship" akin to an "affair." Adie Timmermans, a regular at the zoo's primate enclosure, was told this week by the Antwerp Zoo that she would be prohibited from seeing the apple of her eye - Chita, a 38-year-old chimpanzee. "I love that...

  Snowflake likes to mostly keep his blog “lite.”   And that’s fine, even commendable.   It can provide a useful release-valve for the heavy lift of life-in-general. But I’m gonna infiltrate it today with something a bit on the heavy side.   So, perk up, grab another cup of coffee, and ponder this: Was math "developed" or "discovered”? Make your case. (by PrimordialSoup)