Category: Nannies

Handing Over The Reins

Control Freaks, Corporate Fuckery, Science!

Read this story and see if you don’t get a slow burn, or even an RCOB:

An Australian small business owner says she lost about $50,000 after Instagram suspended her accounts over what she describes as an innocent photo of three dogs.

Rochelle Marinato, managing director at Pilates World Australia, recently received an email from Instagram’s parent company Meta stating her accounts had been suspended because the image breached community guidelines relating to ‘child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity’.

The photo had been mistakenly flagged by an AI moderator which confused the image of the dogs with those of children.

She appealed the decision and sent 22 emails to Meta, but received no assistance from the global tech giant, which owns Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Messenger and WhatsApp.

Ms Marinato claimed her story was just one of many and that the problem was widespread.

She also said it was impossible to talk to a human at Meta to explain her situation.

‘I couldn’t get a human to look at it. Clearly any human that looks at this photo is going to know it’s completely innocent,’ she said. 

‘You can’t contact a human at Meta. There’s no phone number, there’s no email, there’s nothing and you’re literally left in the dark.’ 

To paraphrase Insty:  And Skynet smirks.

Appropriate Age

Control Freaks, Nannies

As Colorado continues to turn blue — from Californian expats, and not from the cold — we have situations like this one:

On Friday, Colorado House Democrats approved a measure, HB25-1133, which would raise the minimum age for purchasing rifle and shotgun ammunition to 21 years and require that ammunition be stored behind the counter at retailers that sell it.

The battle against young adults’ Second Amendment rights is extensive, with many states and even the federal government debating and enacting laws that restrict the right of 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds to keep and bear arms. For every other constitutionally protected right, Americans are nearly universally regarded as adults at 18 and afforded protection under the Constitution.

It’s really quite simple.  If 18-year-olds are old enough to be drafted, sign a contract, get married (or get abortions) without parental consent, and vote:  then they are entitled to full Second Amendment rights as the adults they are.

Oh by the way:  as adults, they should be allowed to consume booze as well.  Adult privilege, in terms of the law, is kinda like virginity.  You either have it or you don’t.

And it’s long past time that we acknowledge that fact, under the law.

That said, if people think that 18-year-olds can do this, but not that, depending on the opinions and prejudices of politicians and moralists, then we should just go ahead and overturn the 26th Amendment and restore the age of majority (and the voting age) to 21 and have done with it.  (Oh, and make the 18-20 age group ineligible for the draft and ban them from driving, while we’re there.  Let’s at least be consistent.)

No?

Then the current age of majority should preclude any and all restrictions under the Equal Protection clause, no matter how popular or how we choose to address the topic of “immaturity”.

Fucking busybodies can all go to hell.

New Ban?

Government Thugs, Mocking Furriners, Nannies

This is an interesting development:

Australia will ban children from using social media with a minimum age limit as high as 16, prime minister Anthony Albanese said Tuesday, vowing to get kids off their devices and ‘onto the footy fields’.

Federal legislation to keep children off social media will be introduced this year, he  said, describing the impact of the sites on young people as a ‘scourge’.

The minimum age for children to log into sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has not been decided but is expected to be between 14 and 16 years, Albanese said.

The prime minister said his own preference would be a block on users aged below 16.

Age verification trials are being held over the coming months, the centre-left leader said, though analysts said they doubted it was technically possible to enforce an online age limit.

Loath as I am to give any kind of credit to the OzGov, foul totalitarian nanny bastards that they are, I can’t help but wonder whether a) this can work and b) if it does work, will it benefit teens in any way?  Given that teens nowadays appear to have absolutely no problem in accessing porn — even porn sites protected by “age walls” — I’m somewhat skeptical about it all.

It’s probably just the usual “We have to do something!” posturing so common among all politicians.

(Just an aside:  Albanese’s “center-left” philosophy is somewhere around that of Bernie Sanders, politically speaking.)

More “Health” Bullshit

Health, Nannies

Turns out that this “YOU HAVE TO WALK 10,000 STEPS A DAY OR YOU’RE GONNA DIEEEEEE!!!” mantra is absolute bollocks.  Actually, I always knew this instinctively, but here’s the !Science!:

By analyzing data on tens of thousands of people across four continents compiled between 15 existing studies, a team of researchers has landed on a more comfortable figure: the optimal number is probably closer to 6,000 steps per day, depending on your age.

Anything more is unlikely to further reduce your chances of stumbling into an early grave.

“So, what we saw was this incremental reduction in risk as steps increase, until it levels off,” said University of Massachusetts Amherst epidemiologist Amanda Paluch when the study was released in March 2022.

“And the leveling occurred at different step values for older versus younger adults.”

So… 10,000?

Half a century ago, the Yamasa Clock and Instrument Company in Japan sought to cash in on the buzz left by the 1964 Tokyo Olympics by producing a pedometer they called ‘Manpo-kei’ – a word that translates into 10,000 steps.

Why 10,000? Good old fashioned marketing. It’s a nice, round number that sounds taxing enough to be a goal, but achievable enough to be worth striving for. What it doesn’t have going for it is any scientific backing.

Yeah, but for the Health Nazis, that’s all they needed to boss us around.  It’s like that “drink 100 gallons of water a day” (or whatever bullshit “round” number they came up with for that bit of nannying);  everyone knows (or should know) that too much water is about as bad for you as too little.

Funny thing, that:  humans actually have a trigger mechanism to tell you when to drink.  It’s called “feeling thirsty”, and we’ve somehow managed to survive as a species for thousands of years by relying on it.  Also, we know when to stop, because we start feeling “full”, but clearly we have to ignore our bodies and keep on chugging back the water… until our overworked kidneys say “Fuck this nonsense” and quit.

As will our hearts when, as senior citizens (or “useless mouth-breathers” as the yoof calls us), we end up dying because those useless and as it turns out, dangerous extra few thousand steps will tax that organ into failure.

Every doctor or “health professional” or “fitness expert” who has ever insisted on the “10,000 steps and/or x liters of water per day” regime needs to get strapped to a scaffold and flogged, say, 10,000 lashes with a bullwhip.

Is that too much?  I dunno, but it’s a nice round number.

Return Of The Asshole

Marxists, Nannies, Two-Minute Hate

Just when I thought that ex-BritPM Tony “Oily Little Shit” Blair had disappeared from public view, he steps forward with yet another Nanny-State idea:

Tony Blair has urged ministers to tax junk food so it is too expensive for the poor in a bit to tackle obesity. The former Labour prime minister urged an interventionist policy on public health, with an expansion of the sugar tax, new levies on foods high in fat and salt, and advertising bans.

He said ministers needed to help ‘create the circumstances’ in which poorer families choose healthy food, and likened the situation to the fight against smoking when he was in No10 — which included a ban on publicly lighting up indoors.

…which did fuck-all except drive people outdoors to get their nicotine fix.  It certainly didn’t stop poorer people from buying cigarettes.  There’s no reason to suspect that his jihad against “junk” food will perform any differently.

I also love the “create the circumstances” line — a classic piece of unctuous Blairite pablum which covers the intrusive governmental bossiness of what he’s suggesting.  “We know better than you what you should do.”  (cf. Hillary Clinton.)  And speaking of this bitch…

This, by the way, is the real problem with electing leaders when they’re young:  they carry on with their bullshit after leaving office (e.g. the Clintons, the Obamas and even Jimmy fucking Carter).  As much as I detest the late Harry S(hitbrain) Truman, when he left the Oval Office he retired to Bumfuck MO and we never heard from him again.

Would that his political descendants would follow his example.

Crap Statistics

Food & Drink, Lies and Untruths, Marketing / Advertising, Nannies

Via Reader Mike L. comes this nanny article telling us how youngins are drinking themselves to death:

An estimated 1 in 5 deaths of people ages 20 to 49 were attributable to excessive alcohol use in the United States, according to the study published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open. For people ages 20 to 64, drinking-related deaths accounted for 1 in 8, the study said. The percentage of deaths attributed to alcohol use varied state by state, but nationally it’s a leading cause of preventable death, said lead study author Dr. Marissa Esser, lwho leads the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s alcohol program.

Researchers took national and state mortality data from 2015 to 2019 and looked at deaths either fully or partially attributable to excessive drinking. Those causes of death included vehicle accidents, alcohol poisoning and other health impacts, such as liver disease, Esser said.  The data showed that the deaths fully attributable to alcohol have risen in the past decade, Esser added.

Umm yeah.  Notice how when you add the 50-64 age group’s numbers, the incidence drops from 1 on 5 to 1 in 8 — which should your clue right there that the BULLSHIT STATISTICS bell is clanging loudly.

Ever wondered why beer company commercials tend to show young people drinking at picnics, beach parties, watching the game on TV and so on, and not old farts like me huddling over a pint in a dark pub?

 

It’s because the 20-49 age group accounts for most booze sales (from memory, it’s about 70% although that’s an old number).  Also, youngins (especially young men) are most likely to do stupid stuff, especially when drunk (“Hold my beer!”) and so it’s small wonder that the death rate is high.  Remembering my own misspent youth and narrow escapes, I’m amazed it isn’t higher.

Also from the article is another little snippet which makes me reach for the gin bottle:

“I’m not surprised at the numbers,” said David Jernigan, a professor of health law, policy and management at Boston University. “This is a conservative estimate.”

Health law and -policy?  Allow me to bring in a guest speaker for comment:

It’s all neo-prohibitionism, masquerading (as always) under the mantle of caring.

Fuck off, the lot of you.