Raccoons have hands. Close enough!

Voice actors are among "those who actually make the games." Voice acting in particular also is strenuous work that can and does cause physical injury when workers are compelled to work long hours doing rough voices and so on. People end up having to have surgery on their vocal cords.

We don't need to devalue voice actors to value other game industry workers. The only difference is the voice actors organized first, probably because of the injury risk, and when you form a union you have to define a group that you can reach and coordinate. It shouldn't be an us vs them among works.

You make a good point in general, but this particular case is about preventing non-scientologists from treating the 'religious object' devices how they will, not about the scientologists being at all restricted in their own handling of the objects (as would be comparable to illegal drugs or animal sacrifice used in religious rituals).

This case in particular is comparable to requesting that the government outlaw the modification or destruction of the Bible or Qoran, even by people who own their own copy of a religious text. It would require non-adherants to a religion to treat that religion's objects as sacred and to do so in the specific manner prescribed by that religion. This is contrary to precedent and law established by cases against people who've burnt their own personal copies of the bible, or created derivative works making fun of the bible, and so on.

Dude. It's called a pet peeve. They're allowed, and even people who have very stressful lives have them. It's definitely better than shit-talking random people on the internet - just skip the thread if you don't care about it.

The absolute last thing I want to do these days is to try to remove kids' ability to call for help in emergencies.

Phones are also important so that kids can receive emergency alerts, like earthquake and tsunami and tornado alerts, depending on where you live. Such emergency alert systems provide only a little bit of warning, but that can make all the difference.

You think it should be disallowed even in cases like the one described, so a parent can tell their kid pickup will be late or to catch a ride with a particular trusted adult or to walk to xyz place to wait, etc?

And they can be used to help academics, too, such as for taking notes, recording lectures (when allowed), looking up an unfamiliar word (especially for kids whose first language isn't whatever they're being taught in), taking photos of the whiteboard. And more and more, boosted by LLM tech, they're becoming helpful for things like live translation and auto-transcription (great for deaf or hard of hearing students especially, but also just for anyone who finds subtitles make audio easier to follow along with, as many people apparently do).

A school can tell kids to mute phones, and not to look at them during class (and that part's hardly new - even before phones it was games on calculators and books and magazines and passing notes), but taking them or even forcing them to be turned off (except perhaps during tests) is too much imo. Especially when kids will absolutely bring them in anyway, and the whole thing will just create more of an us vs. them dynamic with the teachers and students. And especially now that phones have become such personal devices for so many people, like an external brain filled with your secrets.

Spacey had previously denied 12 charges – seven sexual assaults, three indecent assaults, one count of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent, and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.

A further charge of indecent assault was added mid-trial, taking to 13 the total number of alleged offences listed on the indictment.

Last Wednesday, the four indecent assault charges were struck off by the judge because of a “legal technicality”.

I don't know anything about this, and I wish the article went into a lot more detail about the accusations and why they were found not credible, especially since there were so many from separate people.

Like, did they find some evidence against the accusers, like happened with the Michael Jackson cases iirc, or did they just decide the accusers didn't present enough evidence or witnesses to be believed?

Spacey might well be innocent, of course. I just worry because society is often disinclined to take male sexual assault victims seriously, and I feel like if the alleged victims were female the press would (since "Me Too") at least give them a little more coverage than this? This article feels like it has a "the accused is found not guilty, and everyone knows that sexual assault cases are always decided correctly, so he is 100% innocent and we can all wash our hands of this" vibe, but meanwhile Bill Crosby walks free, so I can't personally trust it with so little information.

Especially not when it's about a rich, powerful man with a huge fanbase, aka exactly the type of person nobody wants to believe would be a predator (and maybe he isn't! But I need more info here, darn it!)

Ah well. I'll google more later I guess.

At least it doesn't seem to have turned into a media hellscape circus like what happened to Amber Heard.

I don't think meant that as snark at all tbh. They're saying they like that we're using synthetic processes to make biodegradable, useful, and known-safe materials in a more efficient way, as compared to making the usual synthetic cotton-alternative materials that have a lot of downsides by comparison (lack of biodegradability, poor breathability, microplastic pollution, etc). I think you two actually agree probably? Lots of synthetic things are bad or flawed, and it's nice to see this synthetic thing that is probably good.

It sounds like VPN's would also get flagged as bots? Or could easily be treated as such.

Calckey now Firefish seems really cool, but tbh I really can't say I'm a fan of this rebrand. Calckey was distinct. Firefish sounds either like a Mozilla product, or a Firefox browser fork, or else bland office software. Definitely a downgrade imo.

Oi, careful with the Outer Wilds spoilers. That game is the last game people should know anything about before playing fpr the first time.

Maybe ban targeted advertizing, or that degree of spyware, for all companies, instead of opening that pandora's box of giving the power to ban social media apps altogether to the government.

Especially since the anti-tiktok bills actually include a lot of other stuff, up to and including making VPN's illegal.

I'm glad this article exists; this has been bothering me. Specifically, I'm bothered that, while aljazeera featured the stories about the boat of refugees as and after it was happening, I haven't seen it crop up in U.S. news at all. One of the deadliest disasters in the Mediterranean, and... crickets.

Then a submersible with a handful of white rich lads gets lost and it's all over the papers and all anyone can talk about.

To be fair, part of this is the fact that the submersible story has a lot of wild and novel details to it, plus the novel "oh god imagine being trapped in a submarine" fear factor, that make it great for getting attention and clicks, but nevertheless.

The other part of it is that people see "poor, brown refugees drowned at sea in the Mediterranean, once again" and feel completely disconnected from that and glaze over. The refugees don't get the same automatic "what would that feel like if it were me" empathizing, and the situation doesn't get the same scrutiny of rescue details and chances and what exactly went wrong that resulted in hundreds and hundreds of innocent people drowning at sea.

And they were in a BOAT. They knew where the boat was. The boat was reachable. They just let them die.

It's true that we're talking about different countries and different organizations, but this is a recurring pattern. Refugees are being systematically and repeatedly allowed to drown when they are very near to people who could help them. Other people get prioritized and rescued like they're kings.