Sounds like you’ve never had to endure Amateur Services.

You might be missing the context, which is that an Australian childcare worker, who is a man, and who was in the industry for about a decade and had access to over a thousand children in that time, was recently arrested on child sexual abuse charges relating to a number of those children.

This has prompted a lot of editorial inches on the myriad problems in the for-profit childcare industry and how they compounded to allow this situation to occur for so long. I haven’t seen any coverage that blamed men, but there have been a few talking about the prejudice against men who want to work with children and the suspicion directed at them, especially right now.

Nobody sensible is actually suggesting that the solution is to vilify men who work with children, that’s just a side effect of the revelation that a man who worked with children was a child molester. This piece is simply trying to redirect some of that reflexive distrust toward reforms that could actually make childcare and similar industries safer for children.

I’m mostly talking out of my ass, but I wonder if the access to copious amounts of hard drugs and alcohol that comes with money plays some part in it. Seeing if there’s anything to substantiate that idea, here’s a review of prior studies on the subject: Substance misuse and substance use disorders in sex offenders: A review.

The following is an excerpt from Table 1. History of substance abuse among sex offenders: retrospective file research:

(No, I don’t know what “child molesters without pedophilia” means.)

It basically continues like this. You can read the study yourself, but there does appear to be at least some correlation with drug and alcohol abuse when it comes to child molestation. Speaking anecdotally, I have also heard that cocaine use can lead to engaging in riskier sex acts that might not be appealing while sober.

I have no experience using cocaine, but being drunk has never made me want to sexually abuse children, so I suspect there must be some other personal defect which leads to these kinds of behaviors, with drugs/alcohol reducing inhibitions. Obviously, drug and alcohol use does not explain disgustingly rich people being disgustingly horrible creeps on its own, but it might be in the mix.

The for-profit childcare system in Australia is profoundly broken. They’re chronically understaffed and the pay is awful to boot, so there’s tons of burnout and staff turnaround as people move around trying to get hours at different locations, etc. I don’t know that 27 different gigs over a decade is actually that unusual in the sector.

If you’re interested, ABC News Australia did an article on it:

• In Australia’s childcare centres profit comes before safety - ABC News

Fair warning, there are some pretty unpleasant descriptions in the article of things that have been done to kids in the system.

Same here basically, cross-eyed viewing is super easy for me but I have to work for minutes to perform wall-eyed viewing. I was really excited to see a post with cross-eyed stereograms.

Occasionally they take the “investigation bungled by police” angle, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

I AM THE PARK!

I feel a thousand years old. People are mixing up George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the TV series Avatar.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Earth has been split into three large superstates: Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia. These three states are in perpetual war with one another, with Oceania’s alliances frequently shifting so that the current enemy and ally could change at any given moment and history is rewritten to affirm that the enemy and ally had always been in their present alignment.

Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs—all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.

“There is no war in Ba Sing Se” is the Avatar line, while “Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia” is generally the line that gets quoted from Ninteen Eighty-Four in similar contexts.

Neat, thanks for explaining!

The “stone” with the words in it has a suspiciously uniform appearance. I wonder whether it might be concrete and the letters pressed into it while wet, in which case basically none of it is true.

Yeah, he was reportedly conceived in a casual encounter. His parents weren’t in an ongoing relationship and the father didn’t remain very involved in either of their lives.

That is not how a bastard works. To be clear, all of this is archaic, I’m not actually calling anybody a bastard, but the definition of bastard is “a child born to parents who are not married to each other.” He matches that definition because his parents were never married.

Affairs don’t come into it, it’s just some old bullshit cultural and religious ideals about which types of relationships (just the one: heterosexual marriages) children are “supposed” to be born into.

I don’t think he’s anywhere in the line of succession regardless. He’s the son of the Crown Princess (by marriage) but not of the Crown Prince. i.e. His mother had him as a result of a prior relationship, then married the Crown Prince, making him the stepson of the man who will one day be king, but not really anything on his own account. Besides a rapist.

“It really tied the room together.”

There’s already several comments saying “depends on the beliefs and how important they are,” and obviously there’s that.

I’ll add that there are beliefs people don’t immediately think of when talking about religion. There’s religious humanism, which is a secular religion based around behaving ethically which also has a bunch of traditions similar to spiritually-based religions, minus the spirituality. Adherents (can) attend church and hear sermons on ways to be a better person, etc.

I’m not a religious humanist but they sound like they’re probably decent enough people. They’re quite different to my generic fediverse atheist/irreligious views, in the sense that I don’t have any desire to attend congregations of people who identify as religiously ethical, but I don’t harbor any strong objections to their beliefs.

Personally, I understand it more as something that might be nice for people who have left spiritual religion but still want the trappings of a place to go and be with a community of like-minded people, but that’s not my experience. Ultimately, that’s probably about as far as I’d be comfortable, where we have roughly equivalent spiritual views but highly divergent religious views.

Not trying to discourage anybody from switching to Linux, but Nook is also available for Windows and Mac if that’s not an option for you.

But if they were just re-using old recordings of her as Peach saying “Yeah!”, there’s every chance she wouldn’t get a call for that at all. Not getting a call back for the new Mario Kart doesn’t immediately mean “I’m not Peach any more,” until the game comes out and it becomes clear they haven’t used archive recordings and somebody else is Peach in it.

On the day before launch, she was basically Schrodinger’s Peach: “I haven’t recorded any new lines for this one, so I’m either in this game via archive recordings or I’ve been replaced.” She doesn’t need a phone call for either of those to be true.

I feel like Mario Kart is a bit ambiguous, there’s always the potential they could just re-use voice work from a previous entry rather than bringing all the actors in to go “Whoa! Ha-ha-ha. Luigi number one!” I don’t know if they still do this, but in the N64 era a lot of the same samples were used for Mario Kart, Mario Party, maybe other stuff, so the actors wouldn’t have been involved after the original recording sessions.

You might be thinking of Mbin, the other one of the “big three” (more like big one and the other two). Mbin’s biggest differentiating feature is microblog support. It’s hard to boil PieFed down to one main feature compared to Lemmy/Mbin, but anonymous voting and de-duplication of reposts might be the main ones. However, its focus is still on the (Lemmy-style) threaded side of the fediverse.

The web site has a list of differences between Lemmy and PieFed:

• Comments with -10 score are collapsed by default.
• Communities are organized into topics. See https://piefed.social/topics.
• Image-heavy communities can have a tiled/masonry view, like https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]
• People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.
• Hide all posts based on keyword filters.
• Keyboard shortcuts.
• Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
• Better UI design (somewhat subjective!)
• Improved hotness ranking algorithm (subjective)
• Voting is private.
• See also features for healthy communities.
• Each community has it’s own wiki. Demo

This list isn’t exhaustive; one major feature that’s not listed there is de-duplication, where reposts all get combined into a single post with a split comment section (one for each individual post).