You get this a joke?

Children were never eating tide pods either.

Bro - I was literally a fucking teacher during the peak of that moral panic. I spend more time every day with teenagers than half of you on this thread do. Every kid knew it was a fucking joke. A handful of children actually did it on purpose, and like every moral outrage/hysteria it became “teens are doing this wild crazy thing!”

Yes, teenagers do dumb fucking shit all of the time. It’s not the shit the media picks up on for the viral clicks.

The real shit teens are actually doing is vaping shady carts and creating massive group chats to bully each other with naked pictures. But that doesn’t sell the same kinds of ad impressions as “there’s a stupid TikTok video that when viral so we are going to assume this is a massive regular thing that hundreds of children are doing.” Talking about those issues involves parents having to, you know, parent but instead it’s gotta be about stupid shit.

The real “hiding under a rock” is being distracted by the newest stupid TikTok video instead of dealing with the things teenagers actually do.

With administrative, I meant that IT is a about information flow - defining rules how data is consumed, transformed and ultimately output. These by definition of a classic business I'd see as administrative.

I agree the wording isn't good, and I didn't mean it as in "anyone working in IT is just performing administrative tasks", but rather that the field of IT is traditionally more of an enabler of other businesses.

The mechanic is usually the actual worker - you run a repair shop - but his spare parts management is an administrative task, and nowadays usually implemented by an IT solution.

The mechanic is usually the actual worker - you run a repair shop

But what is being repaired? A machine of some kind? And the machine is operated in pursuit of another actual productive activity, right?

Machines are just about the application of mechanical force in some way, and that in itself isn't an end goal. Instead, we want that machine to move stuff from one place to another, to separate things that are apart or smush/mix separate things together, to apply heat or cooling to stuff, to transmit radiation or light in particular patterns.

Everything in the economy is just enabling other parts of the economy (including the informal parts of the economy). Physical movement of objects isn't special, compared to anything else: kicking a ball on TV, singing into a microphone, authorizing a wire transfer, entering a purchase order, answering a phone, etc.

I'm not seeing a real distinction between an IT consulting business and a heavy equipment maintenance/repair business. The business itself is there to provide services to other businesses.

Okay, so I posted initially to correct your false statement that:

Children were never eating tide pods either.

What you said was demonstrably false.

You then tried to walk that back by saying those ingestions were unintentional and posted a link to a consumer reports article about adults with dementia eating tide pods.

Now you are following it up by implying it applies to cognitively delayed teenagers.

Are you saying that your initial statement about children never eating tide pods is true based on this?

Because there are actual videos of (probably) non-cognitively delayed teenagers doing this.

I don't understand why you've chosen this hill to die on. Is this one of those things where you're so sure you're right you can't admit you were wrong?

You get this a joke?

Children were never eating tide pods either.

? I've never used TikTok...

But yes, kids die all the time for various reasons. When talking about individual causes, it's important to look at the impact on trends. Are more kids dying due to TikTok, or is TikTok merely replacing another cause?

Obviously no death is acceptable, but death will happen. The role of public policy isn't to prevent all death, but to address the bulk of it with the least invasive policy possible.

Like all horrible male "beauty trends" it comes from looksmaxxing forums where it was a joke but the people were highly autistic and actually did it. The same thing happens when it gets to tiktok. A bunch of people post about it knowing its a joke and people who struggle to understand its a joke get sucked in.

To "normal" people its like yeah obviously this is stupid, but to someone whos extremely socially inept they view it as a real path to looking like that. I've not met someone who has done this one exactly but ive met people who have done insanely destructive things because of what they saw on the internet.

Get a better job.

Well you can't stop everyone from being foolish. Before this they copied stuff on tv.

Do you think lemmy sets public policy? The only thing that happens here is people comment on shit. So you're bothered by comments to the effect of "influencers tell kids to do stupid shit and sometimes kids die because of it, and this is bad."

Why do you think that freedom of speech means no one is allowed to criticize speech? Criticism is also speech.

You get this a joke?

Children were never eating tide pods either.

How does one unintentionally eat a tide pod? So you tell the guy when you're checking in at the ER "Homie and I were just playing catch with a tide pod and I was yelling at cousin Mabel to get off the dang roof and it just dropped into my mouth and I swallowed. It was a one in a million shot doc. One in a million."

More likely they did it intentionally and didn't want to admit to it to avoid embarrassment. That or one of their dumb buddies thought it'd be funny based on some Tiktok they saw so they dropped one into someone's bowl of Doritos.

Either way all I was doing was correcting a false statement you made about children never eating tide pods. Because they surely did.