When you’re young, the overwhelming and irrepressible desire to overcome society's proscriptions to satisfy your intellectual and sexual curiosity is natural and understandable. The open Internet made that easier than ever, and I enjoyed that freedom when I was younger—though I can’t say it was totally harmless.
When you’re older and have children—especially preteens and teenagers—you want those barriers up, because you’ve seen just how fucked up some children can get after overexposure to unhealthy materials and people who want to exploit or harm them.
It’s a matter of perspective and experience. As adults age, their natural curiosity evolves into a desire to protect their children from harm.
The only thing this is going to achieve is to bar unverified users form the vaguely reputable and mainstream places into the small, completely unregulated spaces, sites and networks.
I presume you prefer hard requirement of IDs.
I'm saying this will make kids go to i2p, tor, to the obscure fora in countries not giving a f* about western laws.
As a parent to the teens and teens, THIS makes me concerned. The best vpns are very hard to detect (I know, I try it myself).
> I'm saying this will make kids go to i2p, tor, to the obscure fora in countries not giving a f* about western laws.
Some will, but most won't. Similarly, most kids who are dissuaded from buying alcohol because they don't have ID are not going to break the law to get it, or switch to hard drugs as an alternative.
You can't let perfect be the enemy of better.
So you basically want to prevent your children from doing what you did at their age?
And you don't mind that freedoms of all of us would be restricted as a result?
And then, we keep blaming boomers for those restrictions.
> And you don't mind that freedoms of all of us would be restricted as a result?
Usually the people who say things like that really just want to restrict everyone's freedoms. Everything else is just bluster.
Freedom to do what, exactly? You realize that the extreme opposite of laws and restrictions meant to maintain a working social order is anarchy, right?
> Freedom to do what, exactly?
You may be failing to comprehend the concept of "freedom".
Please, O wise one, explain "freedom" to the political scientist and lawyer you're talking to. Let me get my popcorn first.
I am so sorry. I didn't realize you had a *political science* degree.
I'll get my simpleminded ass out of here leave this discussion to the scientists.
Alternatively, you could provide a substantive and respectful argument instead of a snipe, as you should have done in the first place.
I'm sorry but I don't think I have the proper training to debate someone so far outside of my intellectual weight class.
> Please, O wise one, explain "freedom" to the political scientist and lawyer you're talking to. Let me get my popcorn first.
If you think only "political scientists and lawyers" have to decide what a freedom is, you have quite a totalitarian mindset.
If you have some arguments, pray tell. "I'm the smartest guy here" is not an argument. It's just something an NPC would say when they run out of arguments.
PS: This is not ad hominem. It's a dismissal of your claim of authority.
I'm afraid you missed the point of my reply. You have to assume here that the people you're arguing with may, in fact, be as smart as, or even more knowledgeable than you regarding certain subjects; and that dismissive replies like "You may be failing to comprehend the concept of 'freedom'" put you way out of line and at risk of having your ass handed to you. Come armed with substance, not snipes.
Where I said that?
You didn’t say that; the person I was responding to did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123782
There's 190,000 pages of CFR that are essentially bound as law, almost entirely written and maintained by unelected bureaucrats.
They've been deciding what "freedom" is for a long time (even deciding what constitutional rights are, on occasion, see ATF bureaucrats constantly publishing and changing rules re-deciding what constitutional restraints they think there are on the 2A).
Of course, these "scientist and lawyers" know they have this power, and are so seeped in it, they occasionally forget when they step out of the ivory tower that the plebs (and indeed, the foundational ideals USA was built on written by those such as Locke) usually either disagree with it or aren't aware that much of the USA functions under "credentialism/technocrat makes right" and the scientist and the lawyer as the arbiter of freedom.
This feels like one of those moments when the technocrats forget that they've shed the thin façade they hide behind.
No political thread would be complete without a Second Amendment absolutist joining the conversation in order to derail it. They're joining sooner than ever!
The opposite of something like Bastiat's ideal of the law is something more like the law of tyranny or law of the plunderer. Anarchy I place somewhere closer to the middle -- better than the law of a tyrant because at least under anarchy the law of the tyrant isn't legitimized even if it still might be enforced by might.
Yes, in exactly the same way that my dad would want me to only use SawStop table saws so that I don't lose a finger like he did.
As for "freedoms," you're not free to vote or drink alcohol below a certain age. And before the internet, minors couldn't purchase pornography, either. Some people perceive this change as a return to normal, not an egregious destruction of freedom.
> As for "freedoms," you're not free to vote or drink alcohol below a certain age. And before the internet, minors couldn't purchase pornography, either. Some people perceive this change as a return to normal, not an egregious destruction of freedom.
I am not talking about pornography or alcohol at all.
I hope you are aware that requiring an ID to surf the internet leads to total censoring and self-censoring of the complete internet. There goes your privacy, anonymity, and right to free speech.
If your country's regime really wanted to address pornography or alcohol, I'm pretty sure they would be able to shut it down without requiring everyone's identity. The issue is, they are just using these topics to manipulate people, and you are failing to that trap.
> requiring an ID to surf the internet
Who's proposing this? I don't want to argue over a straw man.
Age verification === require an ID
Right. I meant the "to surf the internet" part. Who's proposing this, exactly? No government is mentioned in the article that is doing or considering this.
They are talking about it in the context of "high risk" services and social media, but not the Internet as such.
SawStop table saws still suffer from kickback like other table saws, which is arguably much more dangerous than losing a finger and can even cause lethal injury. The SawStop mechanism might provide an illusion of safety that results in users being less careful with their work.
I think the solution we really need is age verification for table saws. Of course, it goes without saying that the saw should also monitor the user's cuts to make sure they're connected with the right national suppliers who can supply material to meet their needs, and to ensure that you aren't using the saw to cut any inappropriate materials from unregistered sources.
Ah, yes, the old "safety mechanism doesn't protect against all dangers, therefore it has no value" argument. Right.
The door is over there. Take the baby out with the bathwater as you leave. -->
> When you’re older and have children—especially preteens and teenagers—you want those barriers up, because you’ve seen just how fucked up some children can get after overexposure to unhealthy materials.
You mean that you shirk your responsibility to teach your child how to protect themself on the Internet, and instead trust the faceless corp to limit their access at the cost of everyone's privacy? How does this make sense...
They may be looking at the societal level and saying: "I can attempt to teach my kids best practices, but I've learned I sure can't rely on my peers to do the same with their kids...", then feeling like the outcome of that, if left as-is, is societal decline... and then believing that something needs to be done beyond the individual level.
If a business demands you reveal your identity as a condition of use, and you would rather maintain your anonymity, you can choose not to use that business. It's not like these companies are providing essential services necessary for life.
Heck, you can't even obtain housing -- which is an essential service -- without having to provide identity in most cases.
Some people would argue though that if the friend group is on Facebook/Discord or whatever, and they aren't going to move off to cater to the person rejecting those services, then those services are at least essential to maintaining those social ties. They decided that giving up their data was a tradeoff worth it.
What remains to be seen is if the outcome of teenagers becoming social pariahs is really worse than the alternatives.
If not joining social media with friends has been seriously detrimental to teens by making them social pariahs, I'm sure we'd have heard plenty of horror stories by now, as these services have been around for over 20 years. Compare against the horror stories we have heard about those who have gone down the dark roads social media has opened to them that ended in tragedy.