The Owls are not what they seem

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

We should be treating teens as more adult than we do. I don't mean some lowering the age of consent creep shit, I mean presuming competence. Get a job, learn life skills, learn to cook, be fully responsible for a pet, walk places alone (in daylight) or with a friend, have intergenerational friendships, teach skills to littler kids, be someone people can trust with more than wiping their own ass. Be someone they themselves can trust to do stuff and go places. We're stealing children's confidence by treating them like they can't do anything. Treat them like they can and should do many adult things and more will find the confidence to practice at them.

When I was still nursing in NY and occasionally helped out our colleagues in ER, several times I saw small children who'd been taught what to do save their whole families from burning buildings by having been coached in how to use the phone to call for help and say what the trouble was, even when their parents and other older kids were unresponsive.

Yeah, watching this pendulum swing has been wild as shit. College age kids who haven't been taught to do anything but sit there with their mouths open like baby birds, begging someone to put food in.

Some "emergencies" I remember:

Barbie fell off her bicycle and is not moving

A fire in the kitchen trash can

Tyrannosaurus in the bath tub with its head under water

Tyrannosaurus hurt its foot and can't walk

Barbie got stung by a bee and can't breathe

Barbie is sleeping but we can't wake her up

Tyrannosaurus got hit by a car

We'd see the situation, identify that we couldn't solve it ourselves, rush to the toy phone and call 911 (actually 000 because we're not in the US), say our full names and address that we had memorised, where we were pretending the emergency happened (school, grandparents' house, the park) and why we needed help.

As a result, when my dad fell off a ladder and cut open his leg to the bone, my 8-year-old sister could call for an ambulance and probably saved his life.

*

Similarly, my nibbling is 5 and we're playing shopping for groceries. When I pick them up from kindergarten, I'll ask them what they want for dinner. Then we'll go to the grocery store and they'll get a kiddie cart and go around picking out what we need (and one treat for dessert, this is THE MOST serious decision), and at home we cook together.

Yeah we are definitely at the "insane infantalization" equivalent to 3yo chimney sweeps and 6yo factory workers losing their fingers in machines

So they decided to get rid of that and people's minds went straight to toddlers crawling in machinery.

Of note: People have no fucking clue how to use roundabouts. A lot of them use the indicator to signal they're entering and not when leaving. Like, where could you go instead of right? STRAIGHT!?