Watch any number of animal documentaries. Animals (particularly mammals) of all kinds engage in play, whether children or adults. I find it odd that anybody questions the idea.
That's more evidence that playing is part of the logical business of survival than evidence that animals aren't spending their time in the logical business of survival.
If we dial into any number of our "higher level behaviors", you can often go all the way back to "survival". Play is an important part of skill acquisition, and the easiest way to incentivize it is to make it "fun". Naturally, having fun as an evolved trait will lead to behaviors that don't necessarily have an obvious survival benefit.
I'd be more surprised to see a mammal that doesn't at all engage in behaviors purely out of enjoyment.
Corvids are totally playing. There's a video of a young crow which has discovered that it can stand on a small object and "snowboard" down a snow-covered roof. Fun! Gets to the bottom, picks the object up, flies to the top, goes again. That's almost exactly what a human child would do. And it's exactly as much "part of the logical business of survival" ie none.
My guess would be that it's a side-effect of evolution, in that play is helpful for the young and is driven by it being fun. Doesn't seem like adults playing is necessarily beneficial to survival, I'm curious what the evidence to the contrary would be.
One non-inconclusive piece is the massive number of productive, but opaquely so, behaviors that animals have. In this case, my guess would be that their "play" is closely intertwined with their intelligence, and that "play" is actually an evolutionary mechanic to explore potentially unoccupied niches in the environment. I.e. if "crow snowboarding" was somehow an exploitable niche, this crow might have just found it, and over generations, crows that are specialized to do just that would evolve.
This is a bad example, because I don't see a niche to exploit. As a more appropriate example, New Caledonian Crows use shaped pieces of twigs to dig bugs out of trees because their beaks are too short to reach. I could absolutely see that having evolved out of a young crow messing around with a twig. Older crows see what's happening and decide to try it themselves, and you end up with crows specialized to use twigs like that.
Imo, it's hard to find truly purposeless activities in the living kingdom. Millenia of natural selection have favored creatures that do purposeful things. The squirrels that liked to do nothing or romp around in the trees for no reason didn't spend their time stashing away nuts for winter, and they died. Humans largely being the exception, since our use of technology has created such a large ecological niche that we're not really at threat of being outcompeted or starving during the winter.
What graphics card and which drivers? It's especially problematic with older GPUs, but with modern ones it's largely fine and none of these issues show up as much as they apparently did for you.
I'm disappointed that the study focused on over-60's. I've felt extremely lonely since the pandemic started that I've only recently been able to counteract with in-person meeting with friends. Online contact doesn't make up for a lack of real-world social contacts in my experience. I was in a severe depression for much of the pandemic and I'm 30.
Agreed, it's just not the same. I bet the effect is present for the younger folks, or even exaggerated because so much of a younger person's life depends on serendipitous interactions. We don't get those with scheduled digital calls.
Hope you're better soon. Glad you can still meet with friends.
Since the pandemic started, I've switched from hitting the gym to buying dumbbells so I can train at home. I've made huge strides in muscle mass and strength. Even just 30kg in plates can last you months if you haven't lifted before and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
I'm not sure what you mean with the last part though. Weightlifting isn't just something you do for a few months and then you're done. It's by its nature a long-term process. After a few weeks without training, you start losing muscle mass and strength.
As climate change affects more and more of Africa and the Middle East, we're going to see the EU drift towards more of a cohesive nation state by necessity. Just a few million refugees from Syria sparked a tide of far-right movements across Europe. Just wait 'til tens or hundreds of millions stand at the gates, representing an existential threat. It's almost an inevitability.
I'm not talking about tomorrow or next year. More on a timeline of 20-40 years when we start seeing more profound global upheavals. The nature of the EU will change too.
I don't think that German Greens and Orbán/Vox/Fratelli d'Italia are going to agree on the same approach to migration ever, even if millions stood at the gates. They are literally on the opposing sides of the spectrum.
German NGO ships explicitly supported by German churches and German politicians move people from the shores of Africa, while half of Italian political scene wants to lock them up.
It is now 6 years since the great migration crisis of 2015. There is no EU-wide consensus on anything substantial in the asylum and migration policy. All the proposals have proven themselves unworkable.
> “ Every couple of days I curl up on the couch at 10pm, scroll through Amazon Prime video, and pick something to see. It’s almost always a disappointment.”
... how can he use this the basis for his argument? Every day, I curl up in front of my PC, look through some Reddit threads about movies and find a handful of incredible movies that I'm thankful for that people pointed out. What should the title of my article be?
> Every day, I curl up in front of my PC, look through some Reddit threads about movies and find a handful of incredible movies that I'm thankful for that people pointed out. What should the title of my article be?
Probably "hundreds of good movies are made every year, but if you don't move your ass and try to find them they won't magically land on your lap".
The author has identified these problems himself (point 5) but looks like he just doesn't want to put in the effort.
Well, different people, different tastes. I myself almost never enjoy movies, even though I haven’t watched many of them. I have tried using reddit, IMDB, Metacritic, etc, to select movies, but it doesn’t make a difference.
Are you forgetting the recent post about how kids these days don't even have any concept of files? You're over-estimating most people in their technical competence and the required level of understanding and patience needed to do anything with SFTP. You say "drag and drop" and I think of the hours of troubleshooting and explaining (and re-explaining) I'd have to do if I were to try to implement this with family.
I think the environmental impact is overstated. There's a healthy second hand market that thrives because of companies buying laptops and eventually selling them. I've gotten plenty of great laptops at great discounted prices over the years that probably wouldn't be possible otherwise.
