[Serious] What's your hot take?

Hot sauces should be required by law to list their Scoville range (SHU) on their packaging.

Parents' jobs aren't to protect their kids. It's to make sure that their kids are sufficiently prepared for the world when the kids grow up.

There seems to be this rising trend of parents being overprotective of their children, even to the point of having parental controls enabled for children even as old as the late teens. My impression has always been that these children are too sheltered for their age.

I grew up in the "age of internet anarchism," where goatse was just considered a harmless prank to share with your friends and liveleaks was openly shared. Probably not the best way of growing up, to be fair, but I think we've swung so hard into the opposite direction that a lot of these children, I feel, are living in their own little bubbles.

To some degree, it honestly makes sense to me why the younger generation nowadays is so willing to post their lives on the internet. When that's the only thing you can do on the internet, that's what you'll do

If you let your cat outside in the Americas (or anywhere cats haven’t lived for thousands of years) unsupervised I’m going to assume one of the following is true: you don’t care if your cat dies, and/or you don’t care about wildlife. Even if you live in a place with zero predators, why the hell are you trusting a CAT with road safety?

Saying this as someone who grew up with parents that let our cats live (and die, a lot) that way. And as someone who has seen two friends lose cats to coyotes in the past year. And also interrupted an attack on someone’s pet by a coyote. It’s been a bad fucking year here for coyotes.

If your political opinion begins with "why don't we just..." then its a bad political opinion.

If we could just, we would have already just. If you think you're the only one with the capacity to see a simple answer - newsflash, you're not a political genius. Its you who doesn't understand the complexity of the problem.

My hot take: You shouldn't downvote comments you disagree with in a thread asking for hot takes.

Suburban homeowners are the real "welfare queens."

No one authentically hates the word moist. There's no evidence then anyone disliked the word before Friends made an episode about it. Everyone since that has either been parroting that episode or someone who, in turn, parroted the episode.

Either these people saw it and decided it was an interesting facet to add to their personality, or it was the first time they've ever consciously thought about how a word feels and sounds and that shattered their ignorance and spoiled a perfectly good word.

America is a lost cause

Places of religious worship and formal teaching (e.g. churches, and Sunday schools) should be treated like bars and porn. You need to be an adult to access bars and porn because children do not fully understand what is happening or the consequences of being there. Churches (etc) are the same and there should be a legal age limit.

It should also be socially unacceptable to talk about religious opinions in front of kids, just like most people don't swear or talk dirty, etc.

I agree with schools teaching kids "about" religions, just like sex and drugs. Teaching facts is good, preaching (aka indoctrination) is not.

The vast majority of people whining about the current political landscape have done absolutely nothing IRL to remedy this (tangibly supporting good candidates, running for office themselves, etc.)

Lemmy is left leaning but downvotes anything that suggests poll numbers are slipping for Biden, or if people are unsatisfied with his performance. It’s news! Are y’all just downvoting it because you don’t like it?

Children should not be exposed to advertising at a young age (below 11/12 years old)

There's no ethical way to kill someone that's done nothing to you and doesn't want to die, and that's not just for humans.

@TehBamski Most entertainment is produced in abusive environments, promotes positively evil people to become famous, and twists the legal system through in such a way that it enables surveillance and erodes ownership rights. But barely anyone is willing to boycott it.

If your free software communications can only be done thru US-based, proprietary options, then you are not free software. To think open source is ideal for your project, but not the tools surrounding it misses the point of trying uplift support & usage of these free sorts of projects (& this isn’t even starting with the privacy & lock-in concerns). Instead of coding around flaws in Microsoft GitHub or building Discord/Slack/Telegram bots, actually build & upstream integrations into the free options as you would like to see folks do unto your own project. Not saying you can’t have these services as an alternative, but as the only option (or the primary option to IIABH) should be shamed & definitely not considered the norm.

Also Matrix is pretty shit, where all the clients/servers run too heavy, & eventual-consistency means self-hosting storage often ballots into ‘too expensive’ which has led to de facto centralization the project cannot fix by design. Meaning Matrix is a better, but still bad chat option.

Here's one I get a lot of flack for that I don't bring up much

I think people trying to cook up gun control laws are targeting the wrong guns, in going after semi auto or military rifles, when they should be going after cheap handguns that have been available forever. The majority of gun deaths are suicides, and that's almost always done with a hand gun, but even if you control for that the majority of homicides with guns are done with hand guns.

Hand guns are usually relatively cheap. They are very easy to conceal. Its very common for people to walk into a bar with a holstered hand gun and make a series of bad decisions. Its too common for people to get in road rage incidents that escalate into something tragic because of a handgun in the glove box. People leave them around their house and treat them as toys that kids end up finding.

AND I would argue that handguns are not in the spirit of the 2nd amendment. They are not fighting weapons. They are for fun, personal protection, or making people feel tough without having to do any real work. They have little range and lesser power. There are are no troops in the world that deploy with handguns as a primary weapon. US military officers get them but that's more about tradition.

Yes, I'm aware that shooting incidents done with rifles would be more deadly, but the fact there would be much fewer of them at all would be a net benefit in a society that banned or severely restricted hand guns.

Drinking, driving, smoking, voting, consent, ability to enter contracts including marriage, joining the military:

Raise it all to 25 and be done with it. At 25 you're an adult, before that your body and brain are still developing.

Beeing honest about mistakes you make is way better than trying to deflect or lie about them. This is true in professional and in social settings.

Own up to your mistakes, try to correct them and be open about you fucking up. Most people will respect that more than you trying to be Mr or Ms Perfect.

Breakfast tacos at home are better than breakfast tacos out. This is true of many foods because you choose each ingredient (type, brand, ..) that you prefer and prepare it in your preferred way (more done, less oil, ...).

Climate change is making turbulence worse.

Straws are mostly unnecessary, so metal washable straws are dumb.

Plastic bag bans are dumb because they sell boxes of plastic bags.

Me tossing leftovers in the trash does not in any way interfere with hungry people getting food.

Most drugs should be over-the-counter. The especially dangerous or addictive ones maybe just require counselling with a pharmacist first. But I'm more concerned about people not able to access the medication they need than I am about idiots removing themselves from the gene pool by OD.

People in my dumbass country would rather 10 people with a genuine medical need suffer as long as 1 addict can't get a fix, and it's so many layers of bullshit.

You are bad at parenting if you give your child a smart phone or social media.

Every human is an egoist. You too.

Everything you've ever done was for your own purpose. Everything we do, we do it cause it makes or will make US happy. Even if a person is kind to others, they are because it makes THEM happy. Even ascetics do what they do, because in their mind it will grand THEM happiness in the future.

So realize that you and everyone around you do what they do, because it makes THEM happy and live you life so it will make YOU happy

Tears of the Kingdom is a terrible game, it's a mod of BOTW but with more ways to skip the exploration so you don't get to memorize the map like in Elden Ring or Fallout.

[Country] isn't real, it was made up by [its founders] to [dodge taxes / dominate neighboring city-states / measure dicks with [Other Country]]

I don't know if this is a hot take, but I think people need to stop basing their lives off of celebrities/influencers. We equate wealth with some hidden knowledge, when they're just people. Sometimes really fucking stupid people who happen to have a profitable talent. Next time some tries to sell you something or teach you something, ask yourself if this person is even an authority/knowledgeable on what they're talking about. I've gotten in the habit of mentally going "and you are?" when I get new information. Sometimes you find our that person is a leader in their field. Sometimes it's just some terminally online teenager.

Hotter Take: I think black people put too much stock in celebrities and what they'll do for the black community. You don't get freakishly wealthy being a sweetheart. Jay Z is not going to save us. And our blind loyalty has us supporting subpar performances and people because we "have to support" and it keeps fucking us over. No, I'm not supporting this business just because it's black owned if the service/quality sucks (especially since black owned goods tend to be more expensive).

Realists are just pessimists.

You should be an optimist even if you are faking it. To lift others up.

More and more people are against giving kids internet access. Allow me to go against the grain:

If your child is neurodivergent, or LGBTQ+, or any other form of misfit, then denying them internet access is tantamount to condemning them to social isolation. It wasn't until I got unrestricted internet access, circa 17 years of age, that I realised that actually, no, I wasn't a fucking alien, there were hundreds of thousands of people just like me, but I didn't know because I was stuck in this shitty small town with shitty small town people. So I spent seventeen years thinking there was something fundamentally wrong with me when in reality there was something wrong with the environment around me.

I would have had a much happier early life if I'd gotten internet earlier. Wouldn't have spent 90% of my teens being suicidal.

Humans are doomed, destroy themselves one way or another.

That Amerikans don't deserve any special consideration, and in fact, deserve a Century of Humiliation where the odious "please collaborate in our genocide so the cryptofascist oligarchy Democracy™ that anglo-saxon, protestant-descended magnates and a small fraction of uplifted misleaders we All™ enjoy will be saved!" brainworm is concerned.

Yes. My principles do matter to me more than you do at this point if you're going to look me in the face and tell me I have to support a genocider, all so you (or whatever minority you're about to only care about long enough to use as a cudgel) can remain comfortable.

If someone's too dangerous to own a gun they should be institutionalized until they're no longer a danger. Just taking guns away from them won't prevent them from being a problem.

Pepper Mills are overrated.

The bear would eat women alive while they simp for an actual killer.

Deep down we all love and facilitate the chaos in the world because we’re bored.

If we're talking about Lemmy rather than wider society then;

Inb4; I'm broadly in support of trans people and trans rights/equality but I think there are three small snagging issues

That people who identify as a women but who went through puberty as a male shouldn't be competing in women's sports. I think it's a basic issue of fairness and that it ultimately disincentives people born female from entering a career in sports competitions.

That there is a serious debate to be had about trans people in women's changing rooms. I know it is a very nuanced and sensitive topic and I don't pretend that I have the answer, but I don't think it is as simple as "I identify as X so I'll use X changing room". I'd like to make it clear that I don't think this is a "sneaky perv" issue but rather a debate about spaces that should possibly be reserved for people born as female.

That no permanent changes should be made to the bodies of children. If you're not old enough to get a tattoo, piercing, drink, smoke etc. Then you're not old enough to make an extremely important decision that will effect you for the rest of your life.

The doomsday argument is correct, and becomes more obviously correct with each passing day.

The destruction of the library of Alexandria was a win.

Fediverse is not for everyone and I'd rather not have fediverse go mainstream, and if it does I'd rather have normies use normie instances like lemmy.world and mastodon.social because that way you can filter them out if you don't like them.

The Batman > The Dark Knight

Using windows os should be marked as crimes against humanity.

Other people shouldn't be able to hurt you, non-physically.

Usa obsession with keeping the 2nd amendment is doing more harm than good. Your obsession with possession of fire arms in general generates problems that I don't see in other countries, starting for the school shootings...

But no "muh rights, I must gun down anyone invading my home, we do things the muricah way here yeewah, Bald eagle screech! 🦅

Gun laws are ineffective. There is zero correlation between gun deaths and strictness of gun laws. Despite limits and bans of short barreled rifles, "assault weapons", machine guns, etc, gun deaths have continually increased.

Gun bans are only effective where there already isn't violence, at which point it's redundant.

I believe the culprits behind widespread American violence are high rates of youth delinquency and gang related criminal activity.

AI must die for us to survive.

or the one I got a temp ban at the other place for “promoting violence”: if there’s a threat to your wellbeing and you have to protect your dog, you chose the wrong dog and any harm that comes to you is your own fault.

You can have your anxiety dog, but I feel safer with my security guard dog. You’re dead because you’re dumb.

Epstein killed himself and you're a tedious memebrained dickhead if you think otherwise.