If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant

It was good enough for us!

Forget the kids, they don't vote so they can be safely trod upon. Who cares what their experiences are.

But seriously, what about the not-kids? Australian adults, are you having to show your ID when you get a DHCP lease? Do a lot of websites who didn't have mandatory logins, now have 'em?

How does it work, and what has changed for you?

Europe is now eyeing similar bans, as well as proposals for a late-night "curfew", curbs on addictive features, and an EU-wide age verification app.

LATE-NIGHT CURFEW?!

If Europe isn't careful, they're going to teach a generation of kids that it's ok to do their FTPing during business hours.

Wouldn't use of a WiFi jammer incur a $10,000 fine from the FCC for use of an unlicensed transmitter?

If you want to cooperate with law enforcement you can always CHOOSE to do it yourself.

The problem is RING and a lot of others do not really give you the choice - they make you cooperate with them, taking control of it - even against you. You get into a fight with your neighbor on your doorstep, they will get the footage and use it against you. Your daughter comes home drunk and the cops use the footage in her DWI case.

It's not about doing things illegal, it's about YOUR rights. The cops love to ignore them. You should not be forced to pay for the cops to illegally spy on you.

If you buy the camera and set up everything, you get all the benefits with no downsides and you pay less money.

To watch your dogs a wifi device is OK but if real security is a concern understand that home invasion gangs use ~10W wifi jammers as standard practice now.

Amcrest supports RTSP pull and SFTP push which is handy.

The difference between the stock market and almost every other 'asset' is something called "Positive Sum Game". Gambling is a "Negative Sum Game." Much of the rest are "Zero Sum Game"

Negative Sum Games are games where someone takes money out of the system. Like a casino offering a poker game.

Zero Sum Game is when no one takes money out or puts money in. If you have a office bet and ten people put $50 bucks in and the winner takes 10*50= $500, that is a zero sum game.

None of the following are Positive Sum games: Pokemon, Art, Bitcoin, Commodities, etc.

The stock market however is a Positive Sum Game. Profitable businesses increase the value of the stock. Some use these profits to pay Dividends, others to buy assets or even buy out other companies. So the Net Sum of money in the system keeps going up.

This is a huge difference - the exact opposite of going to a casino where the casino always wins. If there was a casino that instead of taking a profit every day kept putting more money into the poker game, you would definitely play with them rather than real casinos.

That is why the Stock market is an Investment rather than gambling. The businesses put more money in than they take out.

Positive Sum Games are better than the other kind.

That is, while the law allows the US military to agree to vendor required repair contractors, the generals can still say no.

In fact, they have guns, and could theoretically take them out and threaten to shoot the salesmen as traitors to the country when they mention requiring repairs to be done by the vendor.

I would be surprised if they were even court martialled for shooting those salesmen.

But age based rules have three issues:

1) They are easier to get around than a ban of bad content.

2) They require anyone above the age to prove their age, thereby destroying their privacy which does far MORE damage than the supposed bad content. When it comes to censorship the government is always the bad guy, not the hero. Just look at the US currently.

3) They allow the bad content to continue to exist and affect the people they claim are old enough to deal with it. But people are not uniform. What some learn by 16, others do not until 18. Some never learn it. Worst of all, they never offer classes to teach people how to recognize the issues and deal with it. That would be far more effective than a temporary ban.

We need a Modern Home Economics class. It should talk about dealing with the police, dealing with taxes, dealing with the internet, how to recognize fraud/scams, how to recognize when a company is offering you a horrible deal (especially how your email/phone etc. is valuable and not a 'free' thing you give the company), sexual consent, how to ask someone out, basic medical care (do not remove the knife), and of course basic scientific method / logic.

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

Gyre is a more official name for the Pacific Garbage patch, as there are presumably few kids in it

Not really IMO, moderation is broken by design at best

I don't see a rash of bans, but I do see the same abusers of moderation given all the mod points they can use every day.

You can thank student loans for that. Earlier generations got their schooling subsidized, but now people have to get loans to pay for it themselves instead. Colleges therefore could raise tuition. Then a bipartisan effort in Congress was launched to make sure we couldn't discharge those loans through bankruptcy like you can gambling or other personal debts, which was led by Joseph R Biden. I think we know how that turned out, forgiveness for a few of the worst abused players, and blaming inability to keep his campaign promises related to partial forgiveness for all buyers blamed on Congress while he went around them to fund genocide in Gaza.

...how often does ChatGPT use Dictionary.com's word of the year, "6-7"?