Yeah, which was its own level of toxic, but maybe doesn’t have the super gross power imbalance?

You can train your kids at McDonalds.

Respectfully, no. That’s an entirely different scenario with entirely different norms, patterns, expectations, etc. A sit-down, table-service restaurant in a “boring” location with slow food is an entirely different experience than counter service at a fast food restaurant. You start with that, of course, but that’s definitely not where it can end.

Not to mention, there are no casual fast food places that serve vegetables. If you care about offering your kids any kind of healthy food, you have to go somewhere at least slightly more upmarket.

if alcohol is served, children shouldn’t be.

That excludes pretty much every restaurant that isn’t fast food. In some countries, that excludes even McDonald’s. It definitely excludes Applebee’s. It excludes Chuck E. Cheese, for crying out loud.

Maybe in the 90s that would’ve been a reasonable limitation, but that is far from the case today.

Sure that may limit what you can do as a parent.

Nah, I’m not worried about that even a little bit. I chose to be a parent, which means that I chose to accept certain limitations on my life while they’re still young. I don’t have any issue with that as a principle. Yes, parents are still human and should be able to exist independently of their children, and yes, some people didn’t choose to be parents (but had that choice made for them), but I don’t think that either situation is a large enough situation to be worth discussing here.

What I’m saying is that teaching and training has to happen in real situations. It doesn’t start there, no; you work on not throwing your food on the floor at home, you work on not shouting and screaming at the table at Grandma’s, you work on not running around the restaurant at McDonald’s. But once you have the basics down, you have to go out and actually work on them in the real world. That means a real restaurant, with waiters and other diners, where the food isn’t exactly what they want, and it takes “forever” to arrive. It has to be in the real world, or else it doesn’t work.

That means that your kids’ bad days are going to go out into the real world sometimes, too; and you won’t have any warning that they’re coming. They’ll just show up along with your basket of breadsticks at the pizza place, or they’ll be serving them alongside the General Tso’s chicken at the Chinese buffet.

At that point, you have three options: leave (probably not super feasible, you still have to pay for the meal and you still have to feed your kids and yourself), ignore them (this is clearly the type of parent you’re frustrated by, and I agree, but they’re far more exception than rule), or parent your way through it (which is honestly the whole point of this excursion). But the last one is the hardest, and runs the most risk of looking like ignoring if you have more than one kid and have to focus on them in turn.

I’m sure the joys and triumphs of parenthood will outweigh the loss of having a beer […]

Yeah, honestly, it does. Not all the time, but every time.

Gotcha. Yeah, parents can definitely suck just as much as any other human (or, to be fair, they can just be exhausted or distracted). Though I will also note that in the cases where my kids have acted unexpectedly badly, it is notable to me that my usual nuclear threat (“we’ll just leave”) carries with it a financial penalty as well (now we have to pay for food we ordered but can’t eat), which adds an additional wrinkle to this problem; particularly for lower-income folks.

I do think that I usually have a lower tolerance for my kids’ behavior than most of the people around me do, so hopefully that’s part of what is on my side here.

I wouldn’t say “holy.” David’s actions with Bathsheba were explicitly not holy.

“Hallelujah” has an overt reference to the story of David & Bathsheba in the Bible, which is a story about a king watching a woman bathe and then sending her husband into an unwinnable battle so he could steal her from him.

But Kids should be free to learn so for me it feels like they are allowed/have the right to be annoying

That is a fantastic perspective.

Yeah, the two are usually (though not always) correlated. Annoying adults have annoying kids that grow up to be annoying adults, and the cycle continues.

I didn’t see the meme, but–

YOU choose to have children and where you take them. If you take them to a place where you know they have the potential to inconvenience the people around them and they do, then you are inflicting them on others and that makes you a bad parent.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I kinda feel like that ignores the reality of how kids learn. They can’t be taught how to act at restaurants if they’re left at home for their entire childhood. We’ve got fairly well-behaved children, but it’s because they were a little bit crazy when they were younger and we disciplined them through the process. Particularly for neuro-spicy kids, they’re never going to be able to learn how to calm down unless you take them to those places, teach them how to act, and discipline them when they transgress those boundaries.

Yeah, it’s an inconvenience to others, but them being a minor inconvenience now so that they won’t be a major inconvenience when they’re adults is kind of the tradeoff you make in order to live in a reasonably well-adjusted society.

Now, if you’re talking about, like, a Michelin-starred restaurant with pristine tablecloths and no dollar signs on the menu, that’s one thing. People save up for months to have a single pleasant, quiet night at places like that, and parents need to find better ways/locations to train their kids. But if you mean Applebees or whatever, I kind of think the minor inconvenience now is worth the better-behaved adult the kids will turn into.

Yeah, I think “forumverse” isn’t bad. Though I have always felt like a Reddit-like interface and a forum interface are fundamentally different, in some way I can’t really put my finger on. I’ve been involved in bulletin board forums (fora?) in one aspect or another since the late 90s, so maybe it’s just nostalgia vs. recency bias; though it could also be the feeling that a “forum” seems like it should be hyper-specific, with different subforums on an already-niche bulletin board scoping down to even more niche and specific areas.

(Side note: Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the forum -> topic -> thread connection is why people like the name “threadiverse.” The word “thread” definitely seems like it arose from there.)

Anyway, I am fully ready to admit that I’m yelling at clouds here. Get off my lawn, dang kids and all that.

Definitely agreed.

I don’t think likes serve the same function as votes. The downvote, the ranking as a function of score and recency, and the surfacing and consensus-building that comes as a result are the main point of this sort of platform.

By contrast, the microblog “like” (at least on a platform without an algorithm, like Mastodon) doesn’t do anything other than express appreciation.

Threads are common in pretty much every form of social media now, from friend-aggregation sites like Facebook and Friendica to messaging services like Discord and Revolt. They’re hardly exclusive to a Reddit/Lemmy-type service. Mastodon even organizes posts into threads (though I think that it does so in a much more clumsy way).

(Edit: by “don’t they have votes?” do you mean polls? Because that’s a completely different function altogether than the Lemmy/Reddit vote.)

I’ve been calling them “Redditlikes” or “Reddit replacements” in ordinary conversation. We won’t need terms like that forever, though.

What about “Fedivotes” or “Votiverse?” Upvotes and downvotes are pretty key distinctives to this form of social network.

Well, you’ve just unlocked a new goal of mine: move to Atlanta…

I did also leave the walnuts out because my son is allergic, so there’s that. But left to my own devices, I’d rather have the walnuts on the side.

The recipe I used actually suggested raisins in the cake and walnuts in the frosting. While I don’t mind either on their own or in other things, carrot cake is supposed to be creamy and smooth. If I wanted crunch or chew, I’d choose…I dunno, german chocolate or something.

My old work number used to have a 404 area code. I work in tech. It was a fun inside joke.

Just last week, someone left a note for me saying I’m a “goddess among mortals” for making a carrot cake without raisins.

I’m an overweight 40-year-old man with a beard. She hadn’t seen who made the cake, so she was just making a guess that the baker was a woman, but still. Funny experience.

The people in charge want to have complete control over everything, for their own benefit. They don’t want to have to see anything they don’t like. They don’t want to have to interact with people they don’t like. They want all of their citizens to have to do their bidding, either directly or indirectly, in order to survive. They don’t want any outside “interference” or inside opposition. They want to wield this power for their entire lives, and handpick the person who replaces them at their death. Basically, look at North Korea.

The actual endgame of a totalitarian country is inevitably collapse, though; every totalitarian regime has either fallen or is in the process of falling. Corruption and massive wealth inequalities always result in revolution. Repressive legal codes always produce martyrs to rally behind. Social oppression and persecution often end up with outside countries invading to depose the fascists; and if they don’t, the purity tests get more and more specific until everyone is “out,” leading to large enough blocs to challenge the leadership. The only way that any totalitarian leadership has ever avoided the deadly consequences of their fascism is by voluntarily (or, uh…“voluntarily”) giving up some power in exchange for their lives.

Historically, the only truly stable countries are ones that allow their people a significant amount of financial, social, and legal freedom and security.

I mean, for one thing, the Rebel Base on Yavin 4 was filmed in Tikal, so they’re definitely connected.