James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

Modern civilization has encroached on nearly every corner of the globe, but a few uncontacted tribes still do exist today, almost exclusively in dense rainforests or on isolated islands. These tribes manage to live completely self-sufficiently, surviving off the natural resources in their environment. But when outsiders intervene, things can become disastrous. 

In 1981, a small, uncontacted tribe in Brazil made contact with outsiders for the first time in history—and it was the worst mistake of their lives.

.

Slide 1

.

.

Click the link below for the slideshow:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Before I became a mother, I was certain I’d have two children — possibly three. In our many conversations about our future family, my husband wasn’t sure about a second. “Let’s see how we’re doing with one,” he would say, “then decide.”

“I already know I want two,” I said. “I’m already sure.”

My daughter was born in the spring of 2020. We spent nearly two years on all the day care waitlists in town, desperate for help, as my husband and I both worked from home. My daughter did not nap; she did not sleep; breastfeeding did not come easy. I was totally in love with my baby, totally isolated, and totally overwhelmed. While feverish with my third bout of mastitis, at the onset of the most dangerous depression of my life, I had the thought: I can’t do this again. It would be the death of me.

We had no money to spare; no more hours in the day to work; no sleep to lose. I was so humbled, so in awe that anyone had more than one child. I didn’t understand how they were making it through the day with everyone intact. As I looked closer, I saw they weren’t. They were falling apart.

My vision of having two or more children was not a fantasy, I realized, so much as a received image of what a family should look like. Having two children seemed more inevitable than desirable. I hadn’t considered having one child as a real option — and now I couldn’t imagine it any other way.

I was very fortunate that my husband agreed. We were obsessed with our daughter, we were so happy we’d made parents of ourselves, and we were at capacity. We were a kingdom of three.

My mother says that after I was born, she felt another child waiting for her.

Three years later, a baby began appearing in my dreams. I didn’t know this dream baby; she wasn’t my daughter, and she wasn’t the pregnancies I’d lost — those had a different feeling when I dreamed of them. Soon I was having constant, intrusive thoughts about this baby, both while asleep and awake. I didn’t know this baby, but I knew she was mine.

My mother says that after I was born, she felt another child waiting for her. When I was two years old, she became pregnant with my sister, heeding the call. What was it she felt? I’d imagined it was what I was feeling now — a haunting from the unborn ether. I was afraid to ask her. If these dreams were that call, I wasn’t sure I could heed it. I wasn’t sure what that said about me.

“I don’t know if I want another baby,” I told my husband, when I could no longer keep it from him. “All my reasons for not having another haven’t changed. I just keep seeing her. I don’t know what it means. I want the thoughts to go away, but they won’t go away.”

He confessed he’d been having thoughts of his own. He wasn’t sure he wanted another baby, either, but he’d also been having thoughts.

.

PeopleImages/Getty Images

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House could embolden Republicans who want to weaken or repeal the Affordable Care Act, but implementing such sweeping changes would still require overcoming procedural and political hurdles.

Trump, long an ACA opponent, expressed interest during the campaign in retooling the health law. In addition, some high-ranking Republican lawmakers — who will now have control over both the House and the Senate — have said revamping the landmark 2010 legislation known as Obamacare would be a priority. They say the law is too expensive and represents government overreach.

The governing trifecta sets the stage for potentially seismic changes that could curtail the law’s Medicaid expansion, raise the uninsured rate, weaken patient protections, and increase premium costs for millions of people.

“The Republican plans — they don’t say they are going to repeal the ACA, but their collection of policies could amount to the same thing or worse,” said Sarah Lueck, vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research and policy institute. “It could happen through legislation and regulation. We’re on alert for anything and everything. It could take many forms.”

Congressional Republicans have held dozens of votes over the years to try to repeal the law. They were unable to get it done in 2017 after Trump became president, even though they held both chambers and the White House, in large part because some GOP lawmakers wouldn’t support legislation they said would cause such a marked increase in the uninsured rate.

Similar opposition to revamping the law could emerge again, especially because polls show the ACA’s protections are popular.

While neither Trump nor his GOP allies have elaborated on what they would change, House Speaker Mike Johnson said last month that the ACA needs “massive reform” and would be on the party’s agenda should Trump win.

Congress could theoretically change the ACA without a single Democratic vote, using a process known as “reconciliation.” The narrow margins by which Republicans control the House and Senate mean just a handful of “no” votes could sink that effort, though.

Many of the more ambitious goals would require Congress. Some conservatives have called for changing the funding formula for Medicaid, a federal-state government health insurance program for low-income and disabled people. The idea would be to use budget reconciliation to gain lawmakers’ approval to reduce the share paid by the federal government for the expansion population. The group that would be most affected is made up largely of higher-income adults and adults who don’t have children rather than “traditional” Medicaid beneficiaries such as pregnant women, children, and people with disabilities.

A conservative idea that would let individuals use ACA subsidies for plans on the exchange that don’t comply with the health law would likely require Congress. That could cause healthier people to use the subsidies to buy cheaper and skimpier plans, raising premiums for older and sicker consumers who need more comprehensive coverage.

“It’s similar to an ACA repeal plan,” said Cynthia Cox, a vice president and the director of the Affordable Care Act program at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. “It’s repeal with a different name.”

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Slowly But Surely, the Right Is Taking One of My Heroes for Their Own. It’s Very Hard to Watch.Slowly But Surely, the Right Is Taking One of My Heroes for Their Own. It’s Very Hard to Watch.

Read More

Part of it is simple: Educated people live farther away from their extended families. Twenty-one-year-old college grads starting their careers are probably not thinking about who would watch their older child during the birth of their second. But if you want a village, and your parents don’t live close, you need to socialize with neighbors and friends. And when it comes to this, people repeatedly reveal their preferences: They are “too busy” to meet people. Things are “crazy over here” and they’re “going out of town.” Community is not a priority.

What takes priority over community, for people who claim to want it? A lot of the time, it’s spending time with the nuclear family (parents spend more active parenting time with their kids now than ever before) or the evergreen “going out of town,” which is what I hear every time I try to plan something. Yes, people work, but not more than they used to. At the end of the day, “going out of town” seems to be a far bigger priority than building a community. This is compounded by the fact that (again) the people I’m around are more likely than ever to live far from their parents or other relatives, and if you live far away, you need to travel to visit. Alternatively, maybe nobody likes me!

I’m not saying it’s bad or shameful to enjoy leisure time with your nuclear family. This applies to me, too. Creating community, especially when nobody else is participating, eats up a lot of time. I have some free time, but I spend it at home with my husband and kids, or on hobbies. Yes, I would enjoy having more of a community, but would I rather spend a Saturday playing with my own children, or helping my neighbor move? Building community isn’t my top priority either, despite my occasional attempts to manufacture it by hosting gatherings (the invitations to which are often ignored and never reciprocated).

There’s another element too: Our standards for caregivers are higher than ever. Social media is awash with mothers who decree it’s dangerous to let anyone watch their children, including relatives. People no longer feel comfortable with the 14-year-old neighbor babysitting (our teenage neighbor offered, and we declined). Grandparents can be presented with an email with a list of “boundaries” before the birth of a child, a custom that seems to have become increasingly popular since COVID, when everyone got increasingly worried about vaccines and baby-kissing. As a new mom asked a Parents advice column, “I’m worried about how to set baby boundaries within a family that doesn’t seem to have many. I don’t want my newborn passed around from relative to relative. What do I do?” On the other side of the aisle, a grandmother wrote in to Newsweek expressing dismay that her daughter-in-law won’t let her babysit, or even hold, her 5-month-old grandson.

Rules aren’t necessarily unreasonable—I had a few myself—but the trend is clear. We don’t really want a village, we want a free caretaker or cleaning crew who does things exactly the way we wish.

.

Monkeybusinessimages/Getty Images Plus. 

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Roblox is the latest platform amping up its parental controls in an attempt to keep its young users safe.

The gaming platform, which features thousands of free user-created games that people can access, announced several new protections for users under 13, on November 18, 2024. 

“These changes were developed and implemented after multiple rounds of internal research, including interviews, usability studies, and international surveys with parents and kids, and consultation with experts from child safety and media literacy organizations,” Matt Kaufman, Roblox’s chief safety officer, shares in a statement announcing the new parental controls.

Stephen Balkam, CEO of the Family Online Safety Institute, who supported Roblox’s work, tells Parents, “Parents need help navigating the online world with their kids. Roblox’s new labels and tools will go a long way to provide peace of mind and assurance to busy parents wanting to protect their children from unwanted content or contact.” 

Rblox Parental Controls​ Updates

Parents will now be able to access parental controls from their own devices instead of through their child’s. That means they’ll be able to manage their kid’s account even if they aren’t physically together. They will need to verify themselves through credit card or ID.

Here’s the breakdown of what caregivers will have access to:

• Friends list: Parents will be able to view who their child is friends with on Roblox. 

• Screen time control: They’ll be able to set limits on how long their child can play Roblox. Children will receive a pop-up once their time for the day is up. 

• Chat settings: In a game, the built-in setting is now no direct messaging for users under 13, which can be changed through parental controls. (Direct messaging outside of a game is restricted and can’t be changed by parental controls.) But users under 13 can access public broadcast messages within a game or experience.

.

GettyImages/Bloomberg

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Scientists and engineers are developing big machines to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but the technology sucks up a lot of energy and money as well—as much as $1,000 per metric ton of captured CO₂. Chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, have created a yellow powder they claim could boost this field by absorbing CO₂ much more efficiently.

Detailed climate projections indicate the world will need to remove far more CO₂ than it is doing now to achieve climate targets. The U.S. is investing billions of dollars in start-ups developing direct air capture (DAC) technology, which uses fans to blow air through alkaline materials that bond with the slightly acidic CO₂. Along with lye and crushed limestone, a popular alkaline material is an amine, a compound that is typically manufactured from ammonia.

Graduate student Zihui Zhou and professor Omar Yaghi, both at U.C. Berkeley, embedded amines in a crystalline compound known as a covalent organic framework, which has extensive surface area. The resulting powder, which they named COF-999, is a microscopic scaffolding of hydrocarbons held together by superstrong carbon-nitrogen and carbon-carbon bonds, such as those found in diamonds. The amines sit in the scaffolding’s open spaces, ready to snag CO₂ molecules passing by. When Zhou and Yaghi pumped air through a tube packed with the powder, it captured CO₂ at the greatest rate ever measured, they wrote in a recent Nature study in October. “We were scrubbing the CO₂ out of the air entirely,” Yaghi says.

Besides equipment, the biggest cost for DAC is often energy to heat the absorbent material so it releases the captured CO₂, which is collected in tanks and later injected underground or sold to industry. The powder released CO₂ when heated to 60 degrees Celsius—much less than the more than 100 degrees C needed at current DAC plants. The powder was deployed again to grab CO₂ from the air. After more than 100 catch-and-release cycles, it showed no significant decline in capacity, according to the study.

The COF-999 compound might also compete with liquid amines used in carbon capture and storage scrubbers on refinery and power plant smokestacks, Yaghi says. It’s light enough—200 grams can draw down as much CO₂ in a year as a large tree—that it could potentially strip carbon from the exhaust onboard ships, too.

Companies already manufacture a similar material, metal organic frameworks, to capture CO₂ from smokestacks, as well as for gas masks to protect against hazardous chemicals. In these crystalline structures, the superstrong bonds are formed between metal compounds rather than hydrocarbons. But Yaghi, who owns a company that produces both types of materials, says COF-999 can be more durable, water-resistant and efficient at removing CO₂ than leading metal organic frameworks. A Nature Communications study published in September reported that another covalent organic framework based on phosphate bonds also had potential for carbon capture.

The COF-999 powder hasn’t yet been tested for real-life applications, notes Jennifer Wilcox, a University of Pennsylvania chemical engineer who formerly worked on carbon removal at the U.S. Department of Energy. For example, if it restricts airflow too much when coated on a filter or formed into pellets, that could increase energy consumption by the fans. These kinds of engineering properties, Wilcox says, “will ultimately dictate costs.”

.

Boris Zhitkov/Getty Images

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Archaeologists have unearthed an first-of-its-kind ancient Egyptian tomb that dates back nearly 4,000 years. The burial chamber contained the remains of 11 men, women, and children, suggesting it was a family cemetery used for generations during the 12th and 13th Dynasty.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the slideshow:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Whether it’s dating, at work or within families, we’ve become pretty adept at identifying red flags from a mile off.

They don’t make time for you? Red flag. They constantly offload their issues onto you? Red flag. They rarely take responsibility for their own actions? Huge. Red. Flag.

All of these behaviours indicate a lack of self-awareness, boundaries and probably a bit of selfishness.

But, if we’re really honest with ourselves, don’t we sometimes act that way too? Haven’t we all gotten defensive when feeling under attack, or excused bad behaviour because we didn’t want to make a scene?

As neuroscientist Bobbi Banks explains in an Instagram post, we often talk about red flags in relationships and friendships, but rarely do we open a discussion around red flags in ourselves.⁣

It’s understandably difficult to navigate. Much like recognising the narcissist within ourselves, or when we’re trauma dumping on the people around us, it can be a painful experience to confront our own shortcomings.

The truth is, we all have them, and highlighting them isn’t about scolding ourselves for being complex human beings. It’s about identifying the things we want to work on and taking positive action.

Source: Instagram

Banks goes on to identify five behaviours that could be considered red flags within ourselves.

Firstly, she suggests that making excuses for other people’s behaviour is an early red flag, as it creates an open environment for toxic actions to take place unchallenged.

Next, she identifies not speaking up due to fear of rejection or conflict as another self red-flag. This can often interplay with our people-pleasing tendencies, as we feel overly responsible for others’ feelings, and will go to any length to not cause pain – even if that means not standing up for ourselves.

Criticising and putting ourselves or others down is another trait Banks suggests could be a self red flag. This is often rooted in insecurity and is more of a reflection of our confidence and self-esteem than it is our nature.

Allowing people to cross our boundaries is another example of potentially toxic behaviour to be mindful of. Healthy boundaries are necessary components for self-care because without them, we can feel depleted, taken advantage of, taken for granted or intruded upon.

Finally, Banks writes that basing our worth on people’s validation is another unhealthy habit we should watch out for. We come from a society that gains confidence in the approval of others, be that our family, partners or wider community, IRL and online. However, it can easily lead to jealousy, self-deprication and low self-esteem if left unchecked.

Source: Instagram

.

                 woman carring roadsign

 .

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________