YouTube Kids is massively popular and also the actual worst content the world has to offer. The most successful content, racking up hundreds of millions of views, is extremely vapid and just consists of sounds and colours punctuated by disguised adverts for expensive toys. No narrative, no speech, nothing educational. Kids are so malleable and early development is so important, yet a sizeable chunk are watching people in knock-off Spider-Man costumes unwrap toys and chase around knock-off Elsas all day. I won’t even get into the unsettling uncanny valley side of things and the creepy procedurally generated animation on there.

I’m genuinely concerned about kids being brought up on what is essentially mental junk food through their most formative years. I’m not saying they all need to be listening to violin concertos all day, but I feel that when I was a kid straight up garbage like this didn’t even exist and every kids show had at least something you could learn from it, like Sesame Street, or was decently produced entertainment, like Pokemon. This has a quarter of a billion views and it’s just... nothing.

    • KasDapital [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Meh, the math behind orbiting is pretty well understood. The issue is that we've found asteroids that could level a city or more after they've crossed our orbit. There's simply not a many eyes out looking for them. Also the event of an impact is exceedingly rare. It's far more likely that a serious climatic event will occur.

      In the geologic record only the K-Pg extinction can be reliably attributed to an impactor. The rest seemed to have happened because volcanoes erupted and changed the climate very quickly. In fact the PT extinction, the worst known, experienced rapid warming and ocean acidification associated with the Siberian traps, a series of volcanoes in northern Russia. A lot of the symptoms of that extinction seem somewhat similar to today's warming.