The point is fraud. They give you just enough to think they will cover you when you really need it. And by then, they've already extracted the optimum amount they were gonna get from you.
I think the objection to the term is fine, you don't have to see yourself as a parent or your pet as your kids. It's an imperfect analogy for familial closeness and caregiving role--im sure other terms have their advantages. I was more suggesting an explanation for why it makes sense for some people, especially those who adopt puppies. After all, parents to human children stay parents regardless of the children's age... Which gets to the semantic hiccup behind this disagreement, there are two usages of child, one usage denotes familial relationship and social role, and one denotes age. I'm not a child, but I am the child of my parents.
Words are socially constructed, develop new meanings, and vary between cultures. Pet parent might be a new definition distinct from biological parent. Some people feel comfortable calling every family friend of their parents' generation auntie/uncle and others find it weird because it defies their blood-relation conception of the term. That's okay. Live and Let live.
Though, I think comparing the analogy of pets as children to treating pets as plushies says more about how you view children than anything :P
It is weird for the traditional view of pets as property, beasts of labour, ornaments, or other living in-person. However recent decades has seen a popular shift towards treating select sentient animals (experience emotions) with some degree of sapience (reasoning/higher cognition), like cats and dogs, as people. Humans treat them as individual persons with their own subjective experience, desires, and lives worth living.
So when a human adopts a non-human animal under this view, they are also taking on the responsibility to care for the animal's needs and we'll-being, not just for what the animal provides the human (as would be the case of a beast of burden) but primarily for the sake of the animal's own worthwhile life--the human takes on a guardianship/parental role. This is why people are more and more being referred to as mom/dad/parent of their pet. More and more people are adopting animals as non-human children. Vets like to enforce it because it reduces animal cruelty and makes people more likely to do basic care.
This isn't to say many farmers don't try to give their animals a good life or recognize them as feeling beings with their own personality. They do, but not to the same degree as treating a pet as a non-human child.
Well it's a lab in China, and neutrinos are small, like viruses. So clearly they're developing a quantum virus to destabilize the west. Come December, we will see the first cases of the ominous QUOVID-25.
I think the debate around reducing complex tasks into simple and ignorant ones (pressing a button) is worthwhile, but not the most urgent one. Most car owners used to know basics of how engines worked in order to do basic repairs. Now they're more complex and most people don't know what a piston or timing belt is, you just take it into the shop. And really, does the parent with a reliable econobox for getting from A to B really need to know? Same thing with PCs. But there's still a healthy proportion of people who are into these things and preserve and innovate the knowledge.
The standards of necessary life skills also change over time. Baking bread, food preservation, fire starting & wood handling, penmanship, paper map navigation, phone etiquette, etc... these used to be basic life skills. For a good 1-2 generations, installing software from physical media and manual updates, configuring email clients, and keyword searching has been the norm. Now those skills are becoming less relevant.
This isn't an argument for AI, it's more reflecting on the fear around losing skills and what really matters.
The argument around critical thinking and creativity are more pressing to me. But it's also not a new argument. Similar arguments have been made around new media in the past, around novels, radio, TV, videogames, and most recently Gen-Z's post-covid social media-fueled not-so-social ways of being. Of course the context and speed of AI re: big data is novel, but the themes are the same. It's a scary inflection point with massively disruptive implications for how humans do and do not interact with each other and express themselves.
If I may make an argument for faith in humanity, it is true that humans are deeply lazy and refuse to change until it's too late. Humans are also deeply curious, creative, and are constantly inventing new ways to interact 😸💩😝.
While I think we have to be vigilant about fostering critical thinking and creativity. We are also in a period of great upheaval, oppression, and hardship. Tragically, it is also during such times that humans create the greatest art and think the most critically.
Fuck AI and all that for the ethical implications, but the comment is dumb because they are placing their contempt on people who may lack certain skills rather than on IP theft, environmental waste, or exploitation.
People literally hire other people to tasks all the time because they can't, don't have time, or it's not their role. We literally have robots to wash and dry our asses for us. Replace AI with service or employee in the comment and it reads as ignorant. Replace AI with assistive technology and it gets really mean.
TL;DR The problem isn't that people need help with tasks, it's with the ethics of how the help is created. The comment misses this distinction.
If you're out of the loop, I found this article fairly helpful for a primer on the issues. It's CNN, but I can't be arsed to find a more kosher source.
Perhaps, neither of us seem to have statistics here so it's a little moot. But I was talking more about my impression of Lemmy, the scope of OP's question, rather than the internet at large. I'd be curious to hear your alternative explanation tho!
Yes, that is the implication I was making to answer the original question. The majority of content here is in English-->the majority of English-first users are from the US-->this is why Lemmy seems so US-centric.
I was being a little obtuse because it's like a French-filtered user asking why social media seems so France-centric even though there's lots of social media in Africa--there are other languages that people use that you're not necessarily seeing on your feed.
Hey friend, I'm people, I've got a face, and I'm no corporation. Can I control your privacy? I promise I'll be good ^^