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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • If it’s f2p I’m assuming there’s going to be microtransactions to generate the income. Cosmetic microtransactions are conspicuous consumption and the ‘value’ comes from others seeing the items. Like skins on Fortnite, kids love showing them off to each other and that’s what generates the frenzy that means they buy them. Add in a few other dark patterns (limited time sales, dodgy conversion into fake money, loot boxes, etc) and you’ve got a game that uses kids to extract massive amounts of money from their parents for nothing.

    Unfortunately, this feels like the dominant model for a lot of big studio games now. I’m sure the next bit disappointment will be GTA. Although, interestingly FIFA / EA FC sounds like they’re starting to realise that this might not be enough and are putting more effort into offline gameplay.



  • As always, it’s important to actually read the source rather than just commenting.

    They have a whole list of covariate variables that they examined that have been found in other studies to possible and probable risk factors for cancer. For each of the types of cancer they looked at (they looked at 365 different types) they have specific other variables that they examined that influenced that type of cancer (i.e smoking and exercise for lung).

    They are examining seven day adventists only - even the non-vegetarians they were comparing against eat less meat, smoke less, drink less and are more health conscious than most Americans (from the article). This is also the biggest study of plant based diet and cancer.

    They also discuss that the strongest effects are those where eating meat is a risk factor for that type of cancer (i.e cancers of the stomach).

    This is a big study that suggest a strong link between diet and cancer where both the meat eaters and vegetarians are much more health conscious and eat less meat than average Americans. This method cannot establish causality, but to do that would require randomised participants agreeing to strictly stick to a diet for decades. There are extremely small or no negative impacts to not eating meat (source: article), but the health benefits from this study appear significant. As always, more data is needed - but this is just one of a number of scientific studies that show benefits to not eating meat.


  • I agree that it should primarily be a parents responsibility to keep kids off social media. But the big problem with social media is that a large proportion of young children don’t want to be on social media and recognise the detrimental impact it has on them, but the fear of missing out or being excluded is what keeps them on it. it then becomes a collective action problem, to get them off it you need to get a lot of their peers off it as well. There are movements where groups of parents try to do this, but reaching the critical mass necessary to do it is difficult.

    Hopefully the ban keeps a large number off to reduce the pressure on kids to be on it and at the same time the parents can do their bit as well.