FriendOfDeSoto

With kids there is no one size fits all approach. And you won't do everything right as a parent either. Ever. You're on a tightrope walk of keeping the ills of the world away from them and them fantasizing about the ills of the world from the bits and pieces they pick up along the way.

They have to feel safe. With you/at home/etc. As long as you get that mostly right, the other pieces fall into place. One of those pieces will be the MO you're looking for here.

If you're overly worried about the idea of having kids: even the dumbest, most ignorant humans have brought up the overwhelming majority of their children successfully. It's not as hard as one thinks before. Because you worry about something like this way ahead of time, I am fairly sure you'll do better than them.

It takes much longer to fall out of love than the other way around.

The good news is that the magas cherry pick what lies they want to believe. And they'll wholeheartedly believe when he says it wasn't his dumb economic policy but [insert scapegoat here] that increased the price of eggs twentyfold.

A gifted politician will find a way to give these people an out that doesn't require them to admit they ran behind the wrong fasces, but somehow reinstalls stability in DC. If you can't cut a path like that all they can do is double down because sure as hellfire they won't admit he was, or indeed they were, the problem.

I think the tipping point where most credits were at the end occurred in the early 00s.

I think it's funny, nay, Alanis would call it ironic, that decades earlier trailers moved from the back to the front.

Don't shoot me, for I'm only a messenger As a rule in life, if you can blame everything on everyone around you it's time to look inwards for change. I'm just saying, maybe it's not all of us, maybe it's you? My first reaction to reading your post was to suggest a therapist. And I'm saying that as somebody who isn't great at social interactions either.

We lionize medical professionals as these infallible gods in lab coats. They're only human too, although they would not admit that. It's good to keep that in mind; alter your perception to work with them on you rather than you being fully serviced by them.

I don't think that's the case in France. Technically, there was consent from the parents. The age of consent is 15. What they did was morally questionable but not illegal.

Then you haven't been to China. It's a shorthand gesture there. The character for ten is 十 so I'm not sure if the gesture informed the character or the other way around. What is noteworthy is just that both cultures ended up with a cross to denote ten.

Most of us don't have the luxury of choosing our families. We can just try to do the best with the hand we're dealt. I'm sorry for your loss.

Maybe delete the picture, put the phone down, and try to think of 20 great things about your grandmother.

Nobody here can really give you specific advice based on the few facts. You're part of this family, you know them better than all of us. If you feel off about it, there's a reason for it. You've come here to ask the question. So I think you're well within your rights to reduce contact with that side of the family. I would only suggest you quietly ghost rather than making a big stink.

I think for answering that question we would need a baseline to compare with.

Lacking that, with kindness and empathy in conversations. And with resoluteness in the face of injustice.

I think ads on Gmail are also a thing of the past, aren't they? The answer to your question is: no income. But you're having a constant time share lunch with Google to actually buy a share in a beachfront condo. By which I mean subscribe to their cloud and AI plan. Or YouTube. Or their business suite. Etc. And then they have converted you to a paying customer. The free service is an investment to get you hooked and then paying.

And in the meantime they can collect some data from you so when you're faced with ads they might be more effective.

In a time of handwriting, you could make clearer that This Was a Title without having to say it was a title or putting it in quotation marks.

Are social media the root of all problems? No. Do they have a significant influence? Yes.

You mentioned spineless billionaires who eff around. There are instances of real harm. There is bullying (everywhere), there are schemes to make groups depressed (teenage girls on Insta), there is a lack of moderators that lead to genocide (Myanmar). These things deserve to be looked at by legislators when the sycophants don't do it by themselves.

Social media addiction is a thing as well. Addictions in young people are bad. Parents should be on the front line of this. But that does not absolve social media companies from taking measures to curb certain excesses. Tobacco companies are not allowed to advertize to toddlers either.

So saying they're just a tool, like, say, a hammer is insincere. You can use a hammer to cause real harm. You can deploy social media to cause real harm.

One of the greatest issues of social media is scale. People on the fringes of society who would be largely outcast in their communities can group and organize with much more ease. In the past, this was limited to the pub in three sheets to the wind discussions. Now you get sh!t like Q Anon, flatearthers, vax nuts, etc. - stuff that common sense in smaller communities would have moderated or stamped out now gets mass appeal. They seem much bigger as an online presence than they often are. But they get dedicated believers to start shooting.

The introduction of the internet has been compared to the introduction of the printing press in Europe. Both events caused a quantum leap in the dissemination of information with profound influences on society. After the printing press we got a century and a half of conflicts and wars. We'll be well off if all we get here is a century of people typing in caps lock at each other.

We limit things in society. The availability of nicotine products, alcohol, the ability to drive, the availability of weaponry, antitrust laws, environmental protections, etc. I think we will not get past regulating social media somehow. By which I mean I don't know how either.

One thing that is certain will benefit society is investing in education, teaching media savvy-ness to young children and all adults if possible, giving them the tools to sort the relevant from the distorted. We are largely unprepared for this and I include myself here having grown up with papers and landlines. But education is the saddest item in any budget, as the costs are high and the results take a generation to bear fruit.

Trump wants to dismantle the DOE...