Parents should have the tools to protect their children, the providers should have those tools in place. But those that are dealing the goods as also heavily invested in trying to maximize engagement and so they do not really work to hard on providing those tools.

>(but unintentionally criminalizing open source)

Why do you assume this was unintentional? Because she said so?

Even if perfect age verification is implemented, kids will be harmed. Because they are vulnerable while above the arbitrary age limit. So -arguing for age verification is harming children. Won't somebody think of the children?

And the answer comes back to the same point. Parents should mediate this. Online content should advertise its maturity level, and parents should be able to configure devices at setup time for the maturity level they are appropriate for. Then apps should respect that and everyone can be better off without robbing everybody of anonymity or freedom.

Is there, though? The push is coming from lobbyists who seem to be largely funded by wealthy elites, corporations, and other opaque organizations. One of them seems to be Meta. It doesn’t look like a grassroots effort.

Can also just lie about your age, "I am as old as the fjords, as young as a newborn lamb" - Thor - GTA Vice City radio ;)

The companies pushing age verification make their money monetizing access to children. They are exactly the sorts of groups I’d like to keep my kids away from. Forcing the kids to label themselves as minors just makes them more vulnerable to online exploitation.

This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.

You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.

No school zone speed limits, or protected crossings on streets near schools.

No requirements for railings on public balconies, fencing around public pools, protective covers over drains or other holes in the ground.

Parents/guardians can just supervise.

Sounds great!

Privacy doomerism is a form of complicity.

The one thing he always said is, they have always been watching and know who is who, what these things do is allow it to be entered into the court of law. Now they can act on these things.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/prot...

Worse, these laws will actually create new harms to children who will be forced to give their identity to websites and identity services that will exploit them and fail to protect that data.

Governments want control, Companies want money. Control typically comes from a reduction in rights, freedoms, money. When you fail to give those up "naturally" violence, worsened living conditions and abuse are the tools used.

"We need the plebs to want to mock people who work from home, to reduce the reticence in coming back to work in the office"

"We need our commercial property values to go back up"

Edited to add:

"Our managers need to _feel_ as if they're actually managing people"

They can keep floating this stuff and we have to put in a thousand times as much energy to shoot it down. We get worn down quicker than they can. It only has to work once for them, we have to keep pushing back.

My very pessimistic take is one out of Taoism. If you wish for them to fail, let them grow. Eventually the weight of the whole system collapses itself, the question is just on what time frame.

The way out is to go through. I don't like this framing but it seems to be the most accurate.

"The government says all children need to be vaccinated in order to be safe"

I'm not saying these arguments are equivalent, but they seem equivalent because they induce the same feeling of loss of agency. And one cannot simply ignore and dismiss something like this.

You’ll also notice that Anduril is quickly being accepted now that we’re expending munitions faster than our replacement rate.

For parents who are genuinely concerned about child safety, you are being used to push an agenda. If we want to solve the digital parenting problem, we have to understand how the problem came to be in the first place and why there isn't a good solution at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578

That one can get deep really quick.

These are NGOs not parents. And "child safety" is often a euphemism. The point is it's hard to argue against child safety. For example, if opaque NGOs demand deanonymization to stop CSAM, I am assuming most people would not want to seem like they are in favor of CSAM. So you need an organized effort to argue in favor of privacy and even then anyone who does it can easily be smeared as a CSAM user. So child safety can backdoor something else.

edit: sp

In letting things flow to easily the opposition is to have heavy lock down on information. A lot of the time, the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea.

And here's like ~120 of us who showed up to oppose AB 2023 (the 3D printer spyware bill). It was incredible. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/hearings/279741#t=19...

I think the easiest way to get involved is to become an EFF member. They'll keep you up to date on all the censorship and surveillance bills. Then you can contact your legislator, sent letters to the CA legislature committees, or show up to the hearings in Sacramento.

How would the Nazi Germany and Hitler gone if they had this system in place, telling them who and where every single Jewish, gay, gypsy, disabled, or just ideologically opposed to them person was, 24/7?

What about other insane rulers? What do you think they would - or rather, will - do with these systems?

The immediate reply is the accusational: "why are you trying to trying to prevent safety for kids".

It's a simple next step to accuse you of hiding your own child abuse ring.

This sounds like hype, but it's the normal path here in Australian.

So it will most likely happen especially because you are certainly right, in part, that no government has ever said no to actions that'd give them more power, let alone ones that are widely supported. But the point of this is that rather than having this as some sort of red-line no, I think it'd be much more pragmatic to try to argue for identity verification regulations that would be most palatable.

[1] - https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54969-eight-in-ten-parents...

Believe it or not, sometimes the best answer is to do nothing until the crowd moves on to the next panic, as with the “Satanic Panic” in the 1980s. Turns out D&D was not actually a gateway to Satan worship.

That said, I’m a father of 3. I’m a millennial and tech worker. I have the digital literacy to teach my kids about the internet and its horrors in a safe way. Not every parent does, so passing this off as a “parent better” issue doesn’t solve anything either.

I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”, but I’m open to similar ideas so parents can get some support without compromising on privacy.

There is a really good way to do this that solves most concerns: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

The only real downside to this is that a 0kp cannot be reliably tied to an identity of the person using the device and thus tickets could be proxied/shared around with semi technical tools (and/or an ai agent tasked with creating a proxy). This really isn't solvable without device-level attestation[0], as if a website needs to reliably say "this person is actually this person" then it needs all pieces of data itself.

This could be solved by adding in a still privacy-preserving step like "The device is doing periodic face id scans and matching them to an identity, and constantly renews/re-presents to the age assurance consumer", but that has its own drawbacks[0].

0: Namely, lock in to devices that can do this, and that includes basically guaranteeing a double digit percentage of adult humans would not have access due to their device being old, unsupported, missing the hardware, etc. And with so many humans excluded, you would not have mass adoption. Probably also excludes rooted devices if we bring in attestation of unmodified software.

I have never wanted to move out of Europe more than now tbf. Complete f* morons - I get spammed by the wanna be child protectors who are giving a smartphone to their kids.

I don't know how to deal with this anymore - what we are not realizing is that *we* are under engagement - this *is* state surveillance.

Because of the goal of advertising revenue as the ultimate driver as to build an addictive permanent scroll of slop on tiktok or instagram, and the desire of social media companies to build walled gardens where someone's entire online experience stays in their "app.". As you say, this affects young and old alike.

Larry Ellison on surveillance: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

This is not new and it’s not about kids. This is the culmination of years of planning that began after the Arab Spring, when elites began to get concerned about how the Internet could be leveraged for domestic regime change.

Cheaper computer technology has been great for the average persons uses but it cuts both ways. It also means much cheaper surveillance. I suspect that governmental/corporate surveillance now costs less than 1% of their spending, something that simple couldn't have been done even a few decades back.

I do wonder what the world would have been like is say computer technology peaked at 486 level performance/memory. Much of what we have today simply could not have happened in terms of surveillance and social media damages. Alas, this is the world we didn't get.

The problem is that those laws are NOT designed to protect children, and the people who convince politicians and the public to support them are NOT doing so out of genuine concern to protect children.

The real, underlying reason why they are being pushed for so hard is to destroy privacy and control people which is going to make everyone but the elite less safe, children included.

Especially if and when we get another Nazi Germany type regime and realize that - oh shit, they have 24/7 overview of where every single person in the world is, what they do, what they think, what their worldviews and identities are.

It's impossible for any of this to end well.

  > parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids

When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!

That is where this become more than just gate keeping and becomes full on tracking.

That's exactly what this is.

They want to build an internet where it is structurally impossible for children to be harmed in any way.

This requires the destruction of the very concept of agency. You can't just do things. You need government approval.

This is something I have noted with Trump, he seems to be one of the last names that made it really big in pre-social media era and had a somewhat unified presence in peoples minds.

Making it to that level nowadays is actually really difficult, heck I would argue that even people like Mr Beast hasn't hit that level of awareness due to the fragmented nature of media and fame.

You can build movement in an echo chamber, it just depends if that is enough.

Corporations all over the world routinely and knowingly poison, injure, or outright murder their employees and their customers. They spend massive amounts of money preventing the public from knowing about the harms they are causing. Even in the most egregious cases where there is well documented proof of what they've done the heads of these companies still get away with it. They profit from it. They're just happily living their lives in their mansions and on their yachts while graves are dug and families are torn apart.

Put in a less polite way, they're preparing for the metaphorical pitchforks and torches held by mobs of the common people which might manifest themselves in a more kinetic format.

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...

The threat from COVID (and more importantly, long COVID) never went away, but they sure convinced the average person that it did.

Today you can see an N95 in the wild once in awhile, so some people are paying attention, but they are less than 1%. Many others are suffering brain damage, unexplained heart issues, taxed immune systems, etc and have no idea why (nor does their doctor).

It’s also a good idea to maintain your own private means of communication, as there will be some hard times ahead.

Conversations where the root submission talks about failures at social media firms and the evidence of harms, or evidence from trials.

Conversations on the attacks against freedom and privacy.

I see very little hope that an actual rebuttal or alternative to the desire to muzzle tech will be forged, because the two conversation streams seem to rarely intersect.

We are not in the 90s anymore. Tech as most people experience it is not the new new thing, and most parents are tired of tech. A more recent pew survey showed that nearly half of teens think that social media is bad for teens. We know that Meta went ahead with features even after their own internal research told them it was bad for teen mental health.

How in hell, is there any effective response created, if the social pressure parents and children are driving, is being dismissed as a conspiracy?

This should be the time that the business models and incentives that allow loot boxes and addicting design mechanisms should be discussed.

There needs to be an actual solution that addresses the issues users are facing, or else they are simply going to choose to sacrifice freedoms for the hope of gaining some control.

That said it was funny, yesterday Microsoft said I had to age verify my account. I went in basically with the intention of backing out of it at the first sign of over reach.

First step was, 'provide you email for this account'. So I did that and then... approved! You are certified over 18+. That is the flip side of this, some of these companies will put up some of the weakest barriers on this stuff.

You don't argue with these people. You summarily dismiss them. You recognize the game they are playing and you refuse to play it.

Call attention to their methods instead: they are exploiting and weaponizing children to push their big tech friendly surveillance agenda.

The FTC let the free-market run riot with children’s TV. Shows used commercials to push expensive plastic toys. The shows themselves became commercials for their associated product lines. Parents felt unable to resist the social pressure channeled through their children and congress eventually passed an act that let the FCC reign in the FTC’s damage.

In the 2020s family economics has raced to the bottom: wages have stagnated, the cost of goods and services is set based on a household where everyone is in full time employment, and latch-key kids now have He-Man in the palm of their hands courtesy of Apple, Google, Samsung, and Xiomai.

This situation is ripe for exploitation by anyone who can offer parents a solution to their kids’ insatiable phone addiction.

George Orwell was pretty on the mark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-F...

Why would you think that? Most of my friends are parents now and all of them are quite concerned about the effect of social media, phones, and technology more broadly.

Basically all of them are planning to delay exposing their kids to phones and screens for as long as possible.

Parents do not have the time or energy to configure modern parental controls which work more like tuning firewall rules.

The other part of the problem is you need collective action, if you ban your child from Facebook, they won’t get invited to parties anymore. If all children get banned, the parties will be arranged over sms or some other non social media. As it is today, banning your kids from social media is overly punishing since all the other kids are using it.

Old hardware will have to be grandfathered. Old cars don't track us and that has created a market for old cars.

Hardware age attestation will be a long timeframe project. The current work should be towards standards that can get us there.

Finally, anonymity didn't exist for my grandparents. It won't exist for my grandchildren.

The polling I have seen from Germany and Australia of a social media ban for children was quite in favor of it. Sentiment here on HN and on Reddit was the polar opposite. We are in a bubble.

If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag. Lock it behind the most basic parental controls that can be protected and remotely monitored. There are some loopholes with kids downloading apps that allow custom web requests without the flag being sent, so there probably needs to be an app allowlist or special App Store category to match.

Carve out some legal exemptions for Linux distributions that no kids are using and leave it to the iOS, Android, Windows, and Macs of the world. Any parent who doesn’t like the idea doesn’t have to enable it on their kids’ devices.

The unspoken part of this requirement is that websites would have to block users who aren’t connecting via one of these attested, verified, locked down devices.

There is the obvious loophole that using a VPN to a country without these requirements would circumvent it. That’s how kids are already circumventing age restrictions in places like Australia and it’s why the UK has taken an interest in attacking VPNs.

There is direct evidence from trials, in which Meta researchers told executives that features like infinite scroll and others “ are inherently at odds with well-being”

There is no effective fight for freedom if there is no effective understanding of the politics and social forces driving change.

The freedom of the internet in the 90s was in itself a social revolution, not just a technological one.

Fighting for a status quo that didn’t work for children and even for many adults is a losing fight.

Fighting for privacy and against ad tech, and against addictive design features for all users is a far stronger fight.

A LOT of damage is done that way.

We live in a society, you wouldn't be on HN otherwise.

Not possible. You can strengthen defenses but you cannot guarantee it can withstand any possible, dynamic and adaptive attack strategies.

So what you say is impossible to do.

> The right people to protect children are those responsible for them - their parents and guardians.

My position is that there is a social responsibility to protect children which extends to the community at large, not just their immediate guardians.

I do believe we should allow for a lot more nuance in our political opinions and avoid most statements that can be made in the constraints of a short comment on social media.

What rights and freedoms should I worry about when a politician wants to make sure my child is fed by supporting food stamp programs or free hot lunches at school?

The idea that any attempt to help a child is inherently suspect honestly says something distrubing about your own worldview. You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?

Yes it might actually work out ok if a mythical benevolent dictator could manage things with infinite precision and unlimited compassion. I would imagine that has never happened at any reasonable scale.

The Conservative folks seem to phrase this as a desire to “keep government small” - which always seemed a little clunky given the stakes and track record of these governments.

A cursory google suggests that the return-to-office movement is primarily driven by management's desire for voluntary turnover, avoiding the bad press of mass layoffs. But certainly doesn't show that it's 'been debunked 100 times'.

In my own experience, it's been 50/50 a desire for voluntary turnover, and also a control tactic. Employees are easier to strong-arm when they're immersed in the idea that company culture actually matters.

I haven't come across much of the debunking of the commercial property issue. I would say it's undeniably factor, but we can argue about the scale.

A total of $800 billion—in real terms—of value is at stake by 2030, and, on average, the total value of office space is expected to decline by 26 percent from 2019 to 2030.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/real-estate/our-insights...

I challenge anyone to post the proof here.

The “Welfare State” is nothing but modern share cropping from the party of Jim Crow.

OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?

When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?

The sentiment of "keep my kids safe on the internet" definitely comes from parents. Yes. We agree.

How we actually get there in a privacy-respecting way is the issue.

If we actually cared about supporting children and parents as a country, parental controls and access, and making sure that systems were actually safe and protected privacy, would NOT be an afterthought.

Your grandparents could walk to the next town over and give themselves a different name and nobody would ever know who they were. They could get a job, be paid in cash, and deposit that money in a bank account with no KYC. They could drop a letter in a public mailbox without a return address, or put up posters at night, or make phone calls from public telephones. Nobody would know who did it, and there would be no surveillance footage to review after the fact, no digital footprint to trace. They could write a letter to their local newspaper to be printed with a fake name, or publish a book or story or magazine under an assumed identity. There were no ALPRs, no automated facial recognition, no built-in vehicle telematics, no drones, no smartphones to track anyone’s movement, no doorbell cameras on every block, no video tapes, no serial numbers hidden in the printouts from copy machines, no DNA analysis, no databases instantly searchable with the click of a button.

Feel free to make a value judgement about whether what we have now is better or worse than the past, if you want, but don’t invent history to rationalise it. The internet did not invent anonymity. It used to be the default.

Unfortunately it's so much easier for lawmakers to slap down a law that says "you must verify IDs right now if you want to continue to exist" with no requirement, and often not even support for, privacy preserving ways to make this happen. The laws are happening now. The chance of reform to align with a privacy-preserving option once the laws are implemented is slim to none.

Will you allow an argument against this?

I mean, I want to show an example where it is only a problem when someone else is not as convinced as yourself, one way or the other.

>so the way to refute is to ask for proof..

No use. The same proof will not be convincing for everyone. Let us take vaccine. The proof for a Vaccine for X saving Y lives is often the following.

"Before the vaccine there was Y deaths per year from X. But after vaccines there is zero deaths from X".

The implication is that vaccines saved X lives. This could convince most of the people. But someone can ask. Are those kids who are not dying of X (thanks to the vaccine), are dying of something else?

Now the picture is not so clear.

See, same data, different results depending on how deep you want to probe,

The answer every time is “well then Google/Apple/Facebook/Shopify/mcMaster Carr shouldn’t exist as a business” and if I’m being honest that is not an achievable target so you’re going to arrive at the attested internet.

I'm not trying to call everyone else voting for these things dumb, but does the average person who doesn't think about this stuff for a living actually know what they're voting for?

Parental controls already exist. Lawmakers want to step in and parent peoples' kids for them by removing these freedoms from everyone.

What a fucking stupid, impossible, idea.

Like, explain to me how you think this could be done meaningfully other than some setting that can just be arbitrarily flipped without adding massive complexity.

Government violence is different though. When the government acts against the public they are generally required to follow long and complex procedures with multiple points of checks and accountability. A cop has to get enough evidence to convince a judge to issue an arrest warrant. A person is taken into custody and given access to a lawyer. A trial is held in court with a jury. At every step there are volumes of records detailing exactly what was done, by whom, and why. All of that information is public record and we can request those records to keep watch on what the government does. If the government abuses the power we give them we can vote them out of office and replace them.

Obviously there are a lot of problems with our legal system and places where all of that breaks down, but the goal was for there to be transparency and accountability and nothing stops us from improving the situation. With corporations on the other hand, they act in secret, they don't have to ask anyone for permission, they aren't required to keep records of everything they do, you have no legal right to examine the records they have, and even if you find out a CEO is responsible for murdering a bunch of people for profit you have no power to vote that CEO out of office.

It's pretty clear which of whose two entities is the larger threat. Which one of them has already repeatedly poisoned you and your entire family. Which one do you think was responsible for more violence done to your loved ones?

Military's, intelligence agencies and actuaries have been warning about this for decades now and their language is getting very direct on this and the time lines nowadays.

If you have ever been caught in a rip while swimming, there is a moment when you suddenly getting a sucking sensation as you transition from stable waters into an outward flow. I am starting to think we are in that transitional phase on global stability, that the 2030's are not going to be a comfortable time for many.

They are ensuring that potential disruptors can be reigned in if needed. To try and stop things from being even more unpredictable, for better or worse. Buckle up.

You don't build long term surveillance systems and billionaires don't build bunkers for what they think of as a temporary tough situation.

While I do think we should make efforts to reduce crime and create better spaces for kids, laws like this aren’t the answer.

I think most people can see that there are levels to everything and UK police are better than a lot of places whilst still needing to improve.

Embellished: marriage rates are 33.8% for Black women and 37.8% for Black men, neither of which I would round to 25%.

Uncorrelated: marriage rates dropped sharply among people of all single races on the Census except for Asians. It has dropped more sharply for Black respondents, but anything disproportionately affecting the lower and middle economic classes would disproportionately affect Black families.

Show me some data, and not outdated welfare policies from the 1980s, that supports the "social engineers" causal narrative better than plain deindustrialization. Or deindustrialization combined with good old American racism and mass incarceration. I am willing to change my position on this.

1: https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-...

It's funny because this is exactly the opposite of what actually happened. Mafias are the reaction to the "unification" of Italy, and they almost all come from the previous governments that existed before unification. Northern Italy conquered the south and defeated all the little states there ... and then levied taxes and did not much else. Specifically they did not provide policing, and very few public services.

And then the remnants of the old governments stepped in, provided public services, security on the streets and "pressured" people into paying a second tax. Now you can say that they were almost-feudal governments and therefore defended and enforced the law of large landowners but that wasn't seen as a problem ... because that's how it had always been.

The reason for their success, their initial success at least, is that, first, when Italy was young, it left citizens to their fate, suppressing dissent, stationing small forces in most of Italy that abused locals, were extremely corrupt and did little else. What is generally blamed for their later reputation is that the mafias started using their power more and more for their own purposes, irrespective of cost, while the mafias also pressured the centralized state to do the opposite.

Especially early on it's very hard to pick "the right" side in the war on mafias. In the beginning people saw the mafias as the good guys, and with good reason. Over time mafias became worse and the central state became better, but honestly, the central state wasn't particularly good for people either (in fact it still can be improved quite a bit)

The alternative is what we're getting right now: laws that require verifying ID documents, often in ways that restrict even the notion of maintaining the user's privacy. Attestation might be an "OK" to "good" solution while this is between bad and really bad.

Only if "following this logic" means "extrapolate to an unreasonable extreme." Compare:

1. "Just eat healthy food and you'll be healthy!"

2. "Yes, but [things are complex]"

3. "Following that logic, we should just eat trash."

Or perhaps you’re not actually following the logic but rather an oversimplified characterization of it?

Conservatives seem to be fine with mafia rule, so long as the don has the correct party affiliation.

> When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?

Mob rule doesn't with very well as a defacto government, or oligarchy. Nor food and drug safety or national defense. Some things just have to be tackled by society as a larger group. Ideally as locally as possible, but not so locally that minorities are crushed or rule becomes petty and micromanaged.

And arbitrarily changed? Can a regular user arbitrarily change the super user password?

The end results is they are two sides of the same coin but with very different mechanics. Neither should be accepted.

There is no form of digital ID that isn't evil, but anything requiring attestation is super evil.

I didn’t take a position on the argument. I pointed out a distinction.

IMHO you have more freedom in China than in Europe. Can you walk on the street and say "Fuck Xi Jinping" like you would in France with Macron? Probably not. But it's a completely useless freedom to have.

At least in China you get relative safety when you walk on the street at night. And when the government decides to restrict some liberties you don't have to pay tens of thousands of politicians and lobbyist to do it.

If you have to choose your poison pill, you might as well pick the cheap one that does bring a semblance of harmony and not complete polarization and chaos.

For example, all devices could require your ZKP ID attestation to be usable unfiltered. Then the relevant apps/sites would be equally inaccessible to children. And then you remove the ZKP ID attestation because the device owner (parent, school, etc) already knows when the user is a child.

If you shout insults at Macron, you will be prosecuted. If you display insults about Macron, you will be prosecuted.

https://www.rue89strasbourg.com/insulte-macron-selestat-mani...

https://www.ouest-france.fr/societe/justice/un-homme-de-77-a...

I really wish I had kept all the others from the US, Europe, Aus/NZ etc. It is a very common theme but they are largely kept quiet and only typically (partially) released through freedom of information requests.

This one from Actuaries UK was one that set off alarm bells. As they advise the insurance industry, they are structured to be politically neutral. The key takeaway is the impacts of 3c temperature rise by 2050 on page 9. The reason this is an issue, we are currently on target to hit that with us likely to pass 2c mid next decade with the rate of warming increasing.

https://actuaries.org.uk/media/r3cporjb/planetary-solvency-c...

This one from the UK government is all about addressing national security regarding this issue. Typically they are advising that they secure their food supplies and hardened up boarders in the next 5 years. Funnily enough Brexit may have given them the power to enforce this much more than they would have otherwise had. But that just means they have built a unique flavor of oppression.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nature-security-a...

I have said it for years now about a lot of countries. They will welcome immigrants with open arms, those arms being machine guns, rockets and drones.

Or are you suggesting these would turn as problematic as zero-privacy surveillance systems in case the government becomes totalitarian?

ZKP ID would work but that’s essentially deanonymization because you have to provide your ID to someone though no one has total information. Also just checking for its absence doesn’t work because that’s opt in and less than 5% of parents would do it. Every individual, irrespective of age would have to have a valid one.

You see, China and the US aren't that different you know. In the US, I can go up to Donald Trump and say "I don't like Donald Trump. The policies of the republican government are rubbish!"

In China, I can go up to Xi Jinping and say "I don't like Donald Trump! The policies of the republican government are rubbish!"

They also pass my personal test of not advocating for dumb feel-good ideas. Recently they published a well-sourced article on why the US rail system isn’t a good candidate for electrification.

I've written about this in other comments over the last couple of years, but the root of all of this is quite simply, foreign interference. We all remember Cambridge Analytica, its interference in democratic elections in the West, and even how it caused a few regimes to topple in the 3rd world. It's machinations and manipulation of curated news stories was quite simplistic and minor compared to where we sit now.

You simply cannot have a high-trust, well functioning democracy, if 99% of the stuff recommended to you is entirely fabricated nonsense. Worse, if it purposely fabricated to create as much social unrest as possible, and doubly worse if it becomes curated to each person and created and generated on demand.

CA managed this by having a sloth of "different archetypes" for its 100 or so altered news stories per topic. If you were a left wing shopkeep, or a right wing car salesperson, or anything else, you'd be slotted into one of these 100 version of the precise same news story, and fed the best lies to make you do as the payee requested.

Modern AI means this can be far more fine tuned. And algorithms can be gamed, just as CA gamed them with support of Facebook's APIs.

So my point here is twofold. First that government moves slow. What we're seeing now, is the result of CA a decade ago. Really, two election cycles, with senatorial and congressional committees and debates during that time.

And second is that things will not continue as they are now. Nothing you, or I, or anyone does will result in an unchanged Internet. From the perspective of lawmakers, and really a lot of the public, the "world wide" Internet is really only used by "The Rest of the World" to attack us. Attack water plants, hospitals, meat packing plants, nuclear reactors, and beyond that, to manipulate our children into thinking Western Democracy is vile and malign in various ways.

Now of course, there's no reason for most of those things to be on the Internet at all. But the manipulation of adults and children in our society just isn't going to wash. In days gone by, you'd see each community with police informants, not the sort in cop movies where the guy was crooked, but instead actual cities who would keep an eye out, and inform if someone planned something against the state. Pretty much every pub had one in the UK, for example.

Heck, when I was a teenager in Canada, one of my friends had a plan to become an officer. Part of this path was reporting on everything he heard at local parties, of an untoward nature. It's how misinformation campaigns used to be curtailed, stopped, dealt with.

Yet suddenly we presume that the average person, and average kid is going to just deal with misinformation. And bizarrely so, compared to misinformation in a pub, we let people get siloed so every single thing they read and see says the same lie.

How can an average person ever stand again absurdities, if from their perspective everything they can see around them says it is true?

So back to the start? The above, correctly assessed or not, is what the politicians and police and agencies view as happening in the West. And while there are multiple ways to deal with this, their stance is "Why are you afraid of putting your name on your words?".

If we want something other than all the bills being proposed, and all the change coming, we as a tech community need to provide a path to end all anonymity on the internet, in the least privacy reducing way possible. And there are some ways to do so. They've been discussed. But if we don't provide such a method, and drive this conversation, you know who will?

Politicians, with no technical capability at all. The average Joe, scared for his country and family.

Try to fight those two types of people, and you will lose every single time.

So my recommend is, everyone needs to stop bellyaching, suck up to the harsh realities here, and take this massive, unstoppable river, and redirect it by a few degrees so that the best-case is achieved.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/

Was all about just doing the math on energy transitions. He wasn't anti renewable technology but did want to point out how scale is a problem that few understand.

My favorite number of his is, that at 3% growth year over year, we would need all the energy of the Milky way galaxy by the year 13,000. As the galaxy is 100,000 light years across, this would defy physics itself.

Of course, that doesn't mean we can't do better and shouldn't.

But we do need to compare "How things have been for all of human history" to "How we do things now", and see that our modern democracies show immense restraint and a lack of malfeasance, compared to how they've been used in the past.

I feel that people view how the world is today, through such a restricted world view. Where the history of how things were, and the immense and great and incredible progress we've made, is thrown aside because "Oh bad thing happened!", and therefore "The entire West is completely corrupt and everything sucks and we should rip it all down because it's bad".

One only need take a tour around the rest of the world. To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively. And yes, I know that's saying a lot.

Are you serious?

During the Vietnam War era, the US dropped over 7.5 million tons of ordnance across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which is more than double the tonnage dropped in all of WW2. In rural parts of Laos and Cambodia, unexploded ordinance is still a daily threat to people. 50 years on.

As for raping and pillaging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_Vietnam_War

> To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively.

When I see comments like this, I want to believe that it's not real but sadly, I suspect you really believe this.

Online posts for _what_ though?

> buying a baseball bat or butter knife

Those are weapons, so long as you have a legitimate use for them, jobs a goodun. But more importanly anything in common law is a weapon. Same for the USA. but the difference is, most of the time you're shot, rather than beaten with a stick.

> refuse medical aid to a victim that is bleeding out because the foreign attacker with the open carry bloody ritual knife called them racist

Ah so you didn't actually look at the case then. The victim was foreign, not the attacker (Harry was polish, not english). Also when two people come to you saying that "that man over there attacked me" and have a whole crowd of people saying the same thing, you arrest the person. Now, if you look at the timeline as soon as the police realise he's been stabbed, they give first aid. Of all the cases to bring up, thats kinda the weakest. tragic, but not a signal of systemic failure. especially considering the number of deaths caused by cops in the USA. and that cops have qualified immunity, unlike in the UK.

NOW! the grooming gangs are interesting, and point to Manchester police being corrupt little shits that they are. The problem is we only hear about the brown gangs. Not the other ones. at the time there used to be a whole string of nonces that would drive thier nackered ford escorts up to the school gates to pick up some 14 year olds. The working class girls would go missing, or suddenly get into drugs. It would be their fault. If you want the actual data, the Jay, Berelowitz and ann coffey reports all lay out the failings there.

Now I'm less worried about the grooming gangs as I am about the general lack of empathy for the working class victims. The warped lens of "oh it was the $racial_group" that "did" it misses the main point is that girls were industrially exploited, and have been repeatedly ignored as they are "shouty little brats". Regardless of the abuser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Cong_and_People%27s_Army_...

The opposing party in the Vietnam war was far worse than the US on a moral level, before, during and after the war. And it wasn't a small difference. We're talking about democracy and democratically selecting laws here? Well: the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets.

After all, you're trying to find and hold up the worst the US has done, right? So to compare, you need to find the worst in modern militaries. In militaries of all time. That was what I discussed, after all.

I was quite clear. Compare to all of history. Compare to all militaries today.

Instead you grab at part of an action, and hold it up, without making that comparison. Still.

As a Canadian who has had your current ridiculous president state that we should be the 51st state, and belittled us by calling our Prime Ministers "Governors"? Who has talked about unilaterally redrawing borders? As a Canadian who has considered how I may have to one day slaughter Americans crossing our border? How I may have to look my brothers in the eye, and kill them? I still say that the US military has been a shining light for freedom around the world. If I can remain impartial, then surely you can.

I also say that about police officers in the West, including the US.

Are there bad actions taken by police departments? By individual officers? By groups of officers, over the last decades? YES! Yes, most assuredly.

Now compare the overall score with police in totalitarian regimes.

Comparison is vital, important, key, and any finger pointing has to be in context.

And also note, I said "yes we must do better".

But if you think the US military is evil, then you have never seen evil. Ever.

Now imagine grooming gangs, in addition to police shooting and killing civilians, on top of political corruption going unchecked, police stalking, in addition to every other terrible thing you could imagine.

The UK isn’t perfect, but the never ending sentiment that it’s the worst in the world because there’s an issue with grooming (which is an issue nearly everywhere sadly) is foolish. Brits have such high standards that you don’t even realise how much of a privilege it is to be annoyed about only a small handful of systemic global issues.

You’re not afraid to walk to your local for a pint and be shot in the head by a cop or kidnapped I suppose, right?

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/photos/2006/08/nachtwey_phot...

It takes a lot to get me to want to say something very nasty to a person but you, sir, would deserve it.

The 1954 Geneva Accords, which ended the French war, called for nationwide reunification elections by July 1956. Those elections never happened. Ngo Dinh Diem, the US-backed first president of South Vietnam who was a brutal authoritarian, refused to hold them. The US backed his refusal and kept backing him afterward.

In Eisenhower's 1963 memoir, he wrote that everyone knowledgeable he'd spoken to believed Ho Chi Minh would have taken around 80% percent of the vote if elections had happened.

The Vietnamese didn't really care about the Soviets. They are a fiercely independent and proud people with a long history of defending themselves against foreign interlopers and aggressors.

So let me restate your asinine and totally inaccurate conclusion:

The large majority of the population in Vietnam, in both the North and the South, didn't want a foreign power controlling their country and determining their fate. They wanted to run their own country, and have peace.

And yet, the poster you're replying to said no such thing. Not even close. They merely said they wanted help repelling an enemy. You're also using hindsight to frame this conflict, something entirely unfair to the people involved at the time.

The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.

Millions upon millions of people around the world protested the Vietnam War, including millions of people in the US.

On one day alone, an estimated 2+ million Americans participated in anti-war protests. Over 500,000 men were officially categorized as draft dodgers, more than 200,000 charged with violating the Selective Service Act and millions more found a way not to go to Vietnam through deferments and exemptions.

It's both amusing and sad that there are some people (like you) who 50 years later can't see what was apparent to so many people at the time.

> The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.

That's right. Those pesky Vietnamese villagers just wouldn't let American GIs stop torching their villages, gang-raping their women and children, and executing them. The American military was trying to leave but spreading democracy demanded sacrifice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre

If you look at actual statistics you know why it keeps happening. The chance to be shot if you don't act or live like them is miniscule.

>You’re not afraid to walk to your local for a pint and be shot in the head by a cop I suppose, right?

No "just" scared to open my mouth or defend myself or family with the little to none legal weaponary left that still exists from foreign attackers imported against our will which are excluded from such laws.

Bitch please. Firstly the _victim_ was foreign not the attacker.

second, you are well within your rights to use reasonable force. Sometimes that involves chasing an attacker down the street with a cricket bat and beating the shit out of someone.

> foreign attackers imported against our will which are excluded from such laws.

mate, thats not way to talk about the scottish (they too are allowed to carry knives as part of thier national costume) but if you lived here, you'd probably know that.

I could literally be arrested for what I said, can you claim the same in the US?

>chasing an attacker down the street with a cricket bat and beating the shit out of someone.

Someone literally got arrested for buying a baseball bat couple days ago...

>thats not way to talk about the scottish

Somehow they aren't included in the law exclusion or are part of disproportionate amounts of stabbings, curious.

As much as I like visiting China for leisure, I could personally never live there. I agree the healthcare and safety are great in China though. It’s the same reasons I could never live in places like Dubai or Singapore.

Safety is not a #1 priority for me in the places I choose to live.