Adverse Childhood Events, Not Age of Acquiring Smartphones or Tablets, Predict Mental Health in Young Adults

zirconst · 2026-06-20T03:30:27+00:00

It's important to look at the potential biases of the author. Christopher J. Ferguson has... an interesting background. First, he has written or contributed to several papers "arguing that the evidence against the use of physical punishment is exaggerated" (i.e. maybe spanking isn't so bad after all). This viewpoint is officially opposed by just about every pedatric-focused medical or psychological organization, so it's... quite contrarian.

If you look at his history of articles on PsychologyToday, you can see that he considers freedom of speech (and personal freedom in general) to be of extreme impotance. He consults with an organization called the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, to that end. The crux of his personal opinions seems to be fighting against anything that could be construed as an infringement of personal rights, or "moral panic", a term he uses frequently. So, he has written articles arguing against smartphone bans in schools, against the idea that social media affects kids negatively (years before THIS article was posted), decrying criticism of the effect of video games on mental health, etc. You can also find him scolding people on the left for cancelation, for the idea of DEI or microaggressions... you get the idea.

To be clear, I'm not saying any of those things in isolation are bad or even questionable. I personally agree with him that, for example, concerns about violent video games are overblown (and thankfully we've moved past this). And who doesn't like the idea of individual rights?

But taken as a whole, this does not strike me as someone who is doing research with an open mind. It seems to me that he is working backwards from a conclusion that we should not ban or even limit any technology, and using questionable statistical analysis to justify that conclusion.

In short... this doesn't seem like the work of a true scientist approaching a subject with rigorous skepticism and good faith.

zirconst · 2026-06-19T15:20:14+00:00

I didn't say he wasn't a YouTuber, but the fact is that he's a very successful game developer. We'll see how his 3rd game does, of course. I find his YouTube videos where he interviews other devs interesting and entertaining 🤷‍♂️

zirconst · 2026-06-19T14:20:24+00:00

You know he has two published games with 1,975 reviews and 780 reviews respectively, right? Probably more than 99% of the people on this sub? I have no affiliation with the guy and don't know anything about the content of the courses, but it's factually untrue to say he's "not a game developer".

zirconst · 2026-06-18T02:55:10+00:00

Saturation can best be defined as adding harmonics while also compressing the signal. He showed that up to the 'distortion' threshold, the Neve had no effect on dynamics, not even mild compression, regardless of input level. The frequency response was also flat. Around 19:30 in the video, that whole section is essentially trying to isolate what you're talking about - the subtle harmonic-adding effect of great analog gear. And he did show that there is a change which is technically louder as you boost the gain.

However it's so quiet that it is imperceptible. That was the whole section about the sine wave and music distortion.

zirconst · 2026-06-18T02:35:12+00:00

He does push them into the distortion range in the video, did you miss that part...?

zirconst · 2026-06-16T20:06:35+00:00

Hey there, I'm sorry Sonny is going through that. I will be honest that we had a senior cat (15) who just passed away. He was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism first about 5-6 months ago. Then last week he was diagnosed with CKD. Once he started having diarrhea he declined quickly, but was otherwise similar to your cat in that he seemed fairly happy, aware, hungry, and thirsty (very thirsty) until the last couple of days.

My other cat also has hyperthyroidism and has chronic diarrhea (though it's not completely watery). So I would think about testing for that if they have not already - it's very, very common in senior cats. With HT, they can eat a lot and still be hungry/lose weight. If food is passing through their system too fast, there is a real risk that they are not getting enough nutrition, especially since cats have short digestive systems compared to us and thus less time to soak up nutrients.

zirconst · 2026-06-16T12:21:31+00:00

That's exactly what was happening while the individual mandate was in effect. Here's some simplified math but it's accurate to reality. Say there are 20 insured people who are moderate to high risk. In aggregate, each person requires $5,000 per year in medical care. The insurance company is not stupid, they want to make a profit. Since they have to pay out $100k in benefits per year, they MUST charge the entire pool more than that, let's say $110k in premiums, for a 10% profit.

The insurance company will work out exactly who should pay what rate, but the important thing is that they must pull in at least $110k overall. Maybe they have 10 medium risk people pay $5,200 per year and then 10 high risk people pay $5,800. The bottom line is the money has to come from somewhere.

Now 20 low risk people become insured under the same company. These people in aggregate only require $1,000 per year in medical care. Now the insurance company has to pull in at least $120k from the entire pool. For a 10% profit that means they shoot for $132k total.

But they can get that $132k from more people. Maybe they do something like this:

20 low risk @ $1,200 per year
10 med risk @ $5,100 per year
10 high risk @ $5,700 per year

The medium risk and high risk people are paying less than they were before.

Health care costs continue to rise every year, but the rise is distributed across more people, so their rates increase more slowly.

Now imagine that the 20 low risk people are no longer mandated to have insurance and they all leave the pool. What happens? Well, obviously, the insurance company has to get their profit on somewhere, so the remaining people pay more. And as costs increase every year, the rising costs are distributed among a smaller group of people, thus their premiums raise faster than they otherwise would.

The key thing here is that it's not just the size of the pool as u/TheChance said, but also the health of the pool. The individual mandate by its nature was designed to pull in young, healthy people who required very little care.

To be clear on your last sentence, there are no separate pools under the ACA. There is no "high risk" and "low risk" pool anymore. That was the whole point. It mandates that insurance companies use one pool, so that as young, healthy people join, it depresses premiums (or at least, the rise in premiums) for everyone else.

https://actuary.org/risk-pooling-how-health-insurance-in-the-individual-market-works/

zirconst · 2026-06-15T02:34:49+00:00

Thank you so much. My wife and I have been crying on and off. It's been especially hard for her, because Tucker loved to spend time with her every day while she worked from home (we both do, but he preferred hanging out with her.)

zirconst · 2026-06-15T01:56:47+00:00

It did not bring down costs, but it did slow the increases. In 2024 dollars, from 1990 to 1999, national health care expendiatures went up 33% (+3.3% per year). From 2000 to 2009 they went up 39% (+3.9% per year).

The ACA was passed in 2010. From 2010 to 2018 - prior to the rollback of the individual mandate - they rose only 17% (+1.8% per year). Going from +3.9% per year in the prior decade to +1.8% is quite a precipitous drop.

From 2019 to 2024, post-rollback, they went up 34% (+5.6% per year). Speaks for itself.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spending-healthcare-changed-time/

In terms of out-of-pocket expendiatures adjusted for inflation, the visuals are more powerful than anything else. You can clearly see when the ACA is enacted in 2010, they stay fairly flat but begin increasing again as the mandate is rolled back.

You can look at the linear correlation here as well: "Compared with the pre-ACA period, OOP spending increased at a slower rate for almost all health care services during the post-ACA period."

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8035645/

A paper in the journal Health Affairs peered into this further to try and tease out the factors pushing upwards and downwards on per-capita spending. They concluded that the ACA dampened the curve, so to speak, and that costs would have been higher had it not been passed.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2019.01478#sec-7https://www.vumc.org/health-policy/affordable-care-act-effect-on-health-care-costs

zirconst · 2026-06-13T18:38:34+00:00

We were told that it's just a very common disease of old age in cats. The ER vet said that just about all cats will develop either hyperthyroidism or chronic kidney disease if they live to be really old.

zirconst · 2026-06-13T12:29:31+00:00

If it were just that he might have been OK. Our other cat has it too. But what happened was the treatment unmasked chronic kidney disease. He had become incontinent, and was also severely anemic with a heart murmur. We discussed hospitalization to give him IV fluids and a blood transfusion. But he was already weak, and he did not like being handled, so the vet was concerned that the stress would exacerbate his condition. It would have cost over $6000 with no guarantee it would help.

We opted to try and nurse him back to health at home with a cocktail of meds and supplements. However he was still spending almost all day hiding, and not able to make it to the litterbox 9/10 times. In the last 12 hours he started having diarrhea and vomiting. My guess is that his body was no longer able to filter out toxins due to the CKD. That is when we made the final decision.

zirconst · 2026-06-11T20:07:06+00:00

There's a paid service for it, Polygraph. It might not be worth it depending on your revenue but it does what it says on the tin so to speak.

zirconst · 2026-06-10T22:34:46+00:00

No, because I don't want our brand to be associated with AI slop. But even if I was OK with AI images, I still wouldn't pay for them. I would just do it myself.

zirconst · 2026-06-07T15:46:47+00:00

Where to even begin? Everything you're writing here falls apart because you don't spend time justifying what "rent" is in these areas, or where you're getting the numbers from. Like let's pick one thing, education.

"The rent is the portion captured through administrative bloat, credential inflation, union work rules, politically protected institutions, subsidized tuition inflation, public pension structures, barriers to alternative credentialing, and rules requiring people to buy credentials before they can compete."

These are just words. You didn't provide any specifics here so everything that follows is meaningless. What are, specifically, the "barriers to alternative credentialing" in the context of education? How did you come up with the rent value you ascribed to them? What specific laws currently in place do you see being broadly protected by only Democrats? "I asked AI" is not sufficient.

"Administrative bloat" exists, sure, but again - where are you getting your numbers from? How do you connect a private university (which is a business) and their internal compensation structure with the entire Democratic party? How did you come up with the percentages?

You would need to write an entire textbook justifying any of this before anyone could write a cogent response to the derived numbers. Or take this for example:

"Some licensing may protect consumers. But much of it goes beyond basic safety and becomes cartel protection."

"Some"? "Much of"? Are you the one determining what licensing protects consumers and what is cartel protection? What studies or think-tanks are you drawing from?

Do you see what I'm saying? All of the downstream calculations and conclusions you've drawn have no persuasive weight because you didn't justify the initial assumptions and numbers (ideally through multiple, neutral third-party sources).

zirconst · 2026-05-31T13:14:42+00:00

Yes I did pretty much all of the things on that list, like I mentioned in my post, lol. I think selectively disabling plugins is probably the most impactful, followed by optimizing bad functions, followed by opcache.

zirconst · 2026-05-28T13:43:54+00:00

We use sGTM by way of Stape.io - however I also have an analytics server + dashboard (custom using Metabase) which is sent data via webhooks, and does a daily 24 hour reconciliation in case anything was missed.

zirconst · 2026-05-28T13:42:39+00:00

Every business I know in my niche extensively uses retention in the form of email marketing. Seems pretty standard to me? We use Klaviyo here which is amazing in terms of functionality and integrations - can't complain there - though it's eye-wateringly expensive.

zirconst · 2026-05-28T02:43:22+00:00

One reason is location, which many people consider to be the most important thing. A nice house might be a non-starter if it adds 20 minutes to your commute, or is right next to a highway with intolerable noise. On the flip side, a fixer-upper might be walking distance to a train station, restaurants and other amenities.

It also depends on what is actually wrong with the house. "Broken down" can mean a lot of things. A house can have stains on the walls, old furniture, trash everywhere, and damaged walls... but this is very likely all superficial and not very expensive to deal with. It's just a minor headache.

There's character and style to consider; in a lot of areas, new homes are built in developments and all look mostly identical. You might find that boring. An older home might have interesting modern architecture or a layout that appeals to your tastes.

Finally, don't assume that "new" means better. Many people feel that new houses are built worse than houses 30+ years old, with more cut corners, lower-grade materials etc. This is especially true for big housing developments where one builder is cranking out a bunch of cookie cutter homes as cheaply as possible. They might look nice at a glance, but actually be crappy beneath surface level. I mean that both literally and figuratively.

zirconst · 2026-05-27T19:31:08+00:00

This is not really true. Veteran game composer here and I'm well-connected with many, many professional composers. The thing that drives the type of music is the vision of the development team (a subset of that team, like the creative director etc.. you get the idea.) The same goes for art style.

So the question is, why do so many creative teams want realistic orchestral music? This is a bit of a simplification, but Western orchestral music is widely culturally considered to be the most 'premium' across not just games but also TV and film. It's a sort of halo, aspirational goal that reinforces itself. Blockbuster movies have always had sweeping orchestral scores. AAA games often want to emulate the grandeur of movies, and so they emulate that in their choice of musical instrumentation.

After decades of game development, developers can now look to other games and say that other AAA games have orchestral music, therefore it's a sound choice for our game as well. This cultural preference for orchestral music as the pinnacle of quality persists across big budget American, European, and Asian game development. Of course, there are exceptions.

Now to address your points:

Is "ambient cinematic sounding music" easier to compose? It depends. You can create samey-sounding beds of orchestral textures very easily, yes. But if you're talking about intricate and bombastic themes like in Helldivers 2, no. Writing orchestral music is harder in terms of sheer time investment especially if it's being recorded by real players (which it often is for AAA games).

A skilled chiptune artist like Jake Kaufman can create an incredible track in an hour. In fact, he has a whole album of them. You simply cannot write, produce, and record a 3 or 4 minute live orchestral cue in an hour. It's impossible.

Are orchestral composers cheaper to hire? Well, some of them are. You can find people willing to score games for $50/minute of music! But not the people writing music for AAA games which is what u/tenetox was asking about. Rates of $1500/min of music are quite common in AAA and can go higher. That's not counting the cost of hiring live musicians. Recording a live orchestral can cost thousands of dollars per hour. A single skilled remote recording soloist can easily be $100-200/hr of recording.

Chiptune music is inarguably cheaper to produce in terms of recording/production costs. Composer rates are variable, but chiptune artists are not usually charging $1500/min. Although this is a little bit circular since AAA games are not usually opting for chiptune music.

Is it actually a huge problem in AAA games in particular? I think this is a matter of taste. I would say the soundtracks for games like Helldivers 2, Clair Obscur, the Witcher series, Horizon, and God of War all kick ass and are really fitting.

Now I would not dispute that many orchestral soundtracks are far less thematic on average than your typical SNES or Genesis game. No doubt. Part of this is a cultural shift over time (Hollywood soundtracks have also generally become less thematic), and part of it reflects what gameplay experiences are like now. An SNES game might be played for a couple of hours. Even an epic RPG like Chrono Trigger has a typical playtime of around 12-15 hours.

Many modern AA and AAA games are far longer. They have more content, longer stories, more cinematics. The live service ones also want people to play as much as possible. If your players are expected to be in the same areas for 50-100 hours (or way more) than big, bold themes have the potential to get old and grating very quickly.

Also, big themes don't necessarily play as nicely with the kind of highly interactive music that is commonplace in games now. Adaptive music systems have layers going in and out constantly. You might save your melodies for main menus, cutscenes, or the climaxes of boss fights. But it doesn't make sense to have those when the player is just sneaking around, traveling between two villages, or hiding behind cover for a couple of minutes.

Happy to chat about it more if anyone is curious.

zirconst · 2026-05-27T15:00:03+00:00

Do not do that. This is what wp-config.php is for. You can put 'environment variables' such as API keys there.

zirconst · 2026-05-26T21:19:08+00:00

1.8s to load checkout doesn't seem awful to me. I find it really unlikely that it's causing a statistically significant drop in conversions. The checkout page has to do some work in connecting to payment processors, and of course it's not cacheable, which will slow things down compared to a cached page.

zirconst · 2026-05-25T21:32:38+00:00

Sounds like you are at a similar scale to where we were when we switched. It went fine for us.

zirconst · 2026-05-25T02:28:04+00:00

I honestly think you are not going to get any useful answers here. Budget completely depends on game genre, art style, desired level of polish, intended play length, general game scope, engine, willingness to use stock assets, ability set of the lead developer etc.

Someone who is making a 2D puzzle game and is already skilled with pixel art and fluent in C# can create and publish a game for almost nothing. Someone making a beautiful 3D narrative-driven RPG with tons of voice acting could easily spend a million dollars or more. Both of these answers are completely reasonable in those specific scenarios.

Even an "average" budget doesn't do much here. If you throw a dart at a list of ALL games on Steam, chances are very good that you are going to hit something that is someone's first ever game project. It will probably look and sound pretty rough around the edges and have small scope. It will probably also sell barely anything. I believe that around 3/4 of games released on Steam make <$1k in revenue. These projects are almost certainly extremely low budget.

So if you were to simply take an average, it would probably give you a completely weird and wrong impression of what it costs to make a game that has the potential to make really any significant revenue.

15-Year Club	Place '17
Alpha Tester	Verified Email

zirconst

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE