owisd

> For many years this system served well

Surely don't need to ditch the whole system then and just needs a better kill-switch.

The rules are inconsistent. You can be Mayor of Sheffield and an MP at the same time but you can’t be Mayor of Greater Manchester and an MP.

After the Nazis opened the Ark, Jones was able to tell the Americans where to pick it up from. Otherwise when the Nazis sent a crew to look for the missing men they’d have just found and taken the Ark again.

The EFF are fighting a losing battle:

> we hope we’ll win in getting existing ones overturned and new ones prevented.

All the momentum is in the other direction and not slowing down. There are valid privacy concerns, but, buried in this very article, the EFF admit that it’s possible to do age-gating in a privacy-preserving way:

> it’s possible to only reveal your age information when you use a digital ID. If you’re given that choice, it can be a good privacy-preserving option

If they want to take a realistic approach to age-gating they should be campaigning to make this approach only option.

Economics is usually optimising for a narrow utility function, usually something to do with price discovery, but that doesn’t normally align with more human societal goals. Take, say, surge pricing. Maybe without surge pricing you pay $60 for a taxi but have to wait 30 mins when it’s busy. With surge pricing at busy times it’s $120, so people who can afford $120 wait 0 minutes but people who can only afford $60 have to wait 2 hours for surge pricing to end. “Economists generally” would say surge pricing was better, but voters and politicians are considering the wider trade off of whether it’s fair some people get to jump the queue and some people have to wait longer. There’s also usually a bait-and-switch where the people having to wait 2hrs are told that the $120 will generate more in taxes so if they vote for surge pricing they’d actually be better off, then the $120 is spent lobbying to ensure the taxes never materialise.

Then they scrape together their pocket money and walk into a pawn shop and hand over the cash for a second hand smartphone. Plenty of free WiFi around.

You roll out the ‘bad parents’ trope then immediately admit bypassing parental controls is trivial.

> I think you can go back further

Reminds me of a line by John Maynard Keynes from 1919 about life before WW1 —

“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep”

This works both ways though, ie there’s no point opposing the laws on the grounds that they might be abused in future because the future sovereign parliament could just pass the same abusable laws.

They’re also strengthening the criminal consequences for future governments that misuse their position: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4019

> how you discover a new product

Buying magazines for trusted 3rd party reviews used to be way more common, far better experience than trying to sift through SEO slop these days.

qbasic mainly using previous generation books eg https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books

Personally find p5js/The Coding Train is the closest thing around to a modern equivalent.

The equivalent is that you could ask to be removed from the phone book.

The leading theory for the etymology of the “foot” in “football” is because it’s played on foot unlike, say, jousting or polo.

The steelman for federation is that email survived the rise of the big platforms despite no-one owning email, so making other applications follow the email model means they too could be free from central ownership.

That’s an argument that sounds convincing in principle, but in reality I can walk into any independent bookstore and find it’s not filled with porn and AI slop, so clearly there is a successful vetting process going on. Namely, the publishers vet the books then the bookstore owner only has to vet the publishers. A proof of concept internet equivalent is if I scrape a bunch of trusted YouTube channels onto a NAS and give my kids access to that NAS but block YouTube access otherwise.

The problem interpreting the intent of that tweet is that Lucy Connolly herself admitted to authorities she was inciting violence so becomes hard to build a defence at that point. Incitement isn’t first amendment protected in the US either https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-18-crimes-and-criminal-pr...

Seems very coordinated, like whenever there’s an article on the Trump administration crushing free speech by cutting funding/sanctioning/suing anyone critical of it, it quickly gets flagged into oblivion, but anything the UK and others do gets spun out of proportion and hangs around on the front page for ages.

If you want ideas for what you can do about it, "Let Grow" (founded by the Anxious Generation author and others) provides resources for raising more independent kids and campaigning against anti-kid neighborhoods and overly burdensome neglect laws - https://letgrow.org

Free speech was always just the pretext. They still rage about Europe or Australia regulating social media or punishing people for using social media to commit crimes, even when the arguments those actions infringe on protected speech are far weaker than this situation.

Seems to be a device for American free speech advocates to feel like they’re contributing something while being distracted from Trump chilling free speech by shaking down CBS & ABC, defunding Harvard, bogus investigations into James Comey, Tish James & others, Texas school book bannings, AAUP vs Rubio, etc, etc.

It’s already a solved problem- load a digital ID into a wallet app, the operating system can then perform a zero knowledge proof for each website that the user is over 16. The government issuing the ID doesn’t know which websites it’s being used for and the website only gets a binary yes/no for the age and no other personal info:

https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...

Michael Burry famously did quite well betting against that advice.

For a more rigorous definition than “things I don’t like”, there’s Umberto Eco’s core characteristics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism

You’d be forced to pay way more than the cost of the licence fee in punishing austerity if it was up to the Mail and the Times. The per capita cost of Brexit that they campaigned for far exceeds the licence fee.

There are privacy-respecting ways, e.g. https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id... uses Zero Knowledge Proofs to just verify age without revealing any other personal data. If Online Safety was just a data collection Trojan horse than this kind of approach wouldn’t be allowed.

This is just another “bendy bananas”-tier myth. The UK was never forced to privatise because of EU competition rules, see, for example, France, an EU member state that retained publicly owned railways during the same period.

There are EU competition rules that require separating operations from infrastructure, but it is and always has been fine to do this as separate divisions under the same publicly owned umbrella.

It’s a bit like the Elizabeth Warren toaster analogy. If you bought a toaster with shoddy wiring and it caught fire and burned down your house, everyone would blame the manufacturer and not sneer at you online for not learning electrical engineering and not checking the wiring yourself before using it.

It’s tragic how many are baffled by the idea someone might genuinely accept a minor inconvenience to benefit their community.

If you compile it from source yourself using Xcode you can deploy to your own device without an Apple developer subscription.