Raccoons have hands. Close enough!

From the study paper, if I'm understanding correctly, it appears they gave each participant an initial "baseline" self-reported survey covering everything from health history to subjective personality characteristics, and then they weighted their statistical analysis different for dog owners and cat owners to "balance" against dog and cat owner baseline characteristics. "Weight was calculated based on the physical, social, and psychological characteristics of community-dwelling elderly Japanese dog and cat owners." It says, followed by two quite different lists of which characteristics were used to calculate the weight for dog owners vs cat owners. Color me unconvinced.

Also worth noting that dog and cat owners were defined by whether they marked current or past ownership on the self-reported survey. So if you had a dog when you were 30 or 20 or 13, you're in the dog owner group even if you've never had a dog since, and seemingly regardless of how long you had the dog. It's unclear what they did for people who owned both over the course of their life, but I think they just left them out, unless they were looking for "most recent type of pet owned" rather than "only type of pet owned". I don't know.

The study appears to have been funded by Japanese health institutions/centers rather than, like, a dog food company or something, so that's good.

Apparently they also did a previous study that concluded dogs had a positive effect against "frailty and death". Seems to likewise confuse correlation for causation.

Overall, I think someone really likes dogs, and I don't personally trust any of the rest of this.

Way to confuse correlation and causation, jeez. We can't conclude causation from this. And it looks like even the stufy abstract itself makes this mistake.

For all we know, maybe elderly folks who are doing worse already get cats because they require less exercise (for the human) and consistent personal attention.

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.

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.

I'm not prepared to call anyone still associating themselves with the GOP "reasonable" at this point. That's like joining a neo-nazi militia and claiming that you're just a member but not a neo-nazi.

Ditto for the people who voted for the Nazi party for "economic reasons" while turning a blind eye to... Fucking everything. They were not innocent. Very far from it. However 'normal' and 'socially acceptable' their day to day behavior may otherwise have seemed to those around them. Evil can be as banal and understated as anything.

Past a certain point, you just can't declare affiliation with an organization, make-nice with its 'more extreme' members and overlook their behavior and actions, etc, and still claim that you're uninvolved and not participating in and enabling what the organization has become as a whole.

Especially not when the GOP - in congress and in state houses - votes in near lockstep when it comes to their vilest culture war talking points. These supposedly "fringe" points that have such a mysterious tendency to become less and less and less fringe within the party as time passes and the line of what is or isn't "acceptable" (or even encouraged) is shoved farther and farther out.

Any actually reasonable members of the GOP bailed and became right-wing dems or independants or libertarians ages ago at this point.

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