I still remember the cable company knocking on my door and demanding I let them search my house as they were convinced I was stealing cable as it was unheard of being cable cutter. I told them to come back with a warrant, only to have them trespass onto my property while I was not home and wreck cable hookup, expecting I'd call them back to fix it.

This is not how I remember living through it. It was Blockbuster + Cable + Piracy, then Netflix appeared to challenge Blockbuster and pivoted from that to challenge Cable and being more convenient managed to also displace Piracy. Personally, I went from sailing the high seas to Netflix subscription, there weren't any in-between stops on that journey.

This will get me to cancel after years of uninterrupted subscribing.

The difficult part was to get Hollywood studios on board with streaming. So yes, I think that if not for Netflix, we would still be renting DVDs.

No, it is not, as this app does more than one thing. Yes, it does age verification. It also implements a regime that allows government to refuse you full access to Internet for any reason. This WILL BE used to suppress free speech by denying ADULTS age verification.

I think it is well-deserved. Remember, if not for him it would still be cable and rental DVDs.

I spend A LOT of effort to make certain I see no ads. It is shocking to see how other people interact with tech. Why would anyone put up unfiltered internet is beyond me.

Yes, price and solid build helps make it attractive, but the key reason people are buying these is to flee from Windows.

What, are you some kind of freedomphile?

Exactly. The end goal is Chinese-style social score.

Age verification = invasive tracking to identify dissenters.
Digital currency = debanking dissenters.

Well, what are you waiting for? Step on it!

(The idiots may also have been algorithms.)

Can you please explain what fan base that would that be in context of Starfleet Academy?

Starfleet Academy to Start Trek is what The Rings of Power is to Lord of the Rings. To me, both were unwatchable.

It is shocking how internalized misantropy is in some people. Humanity is uniquely cooperative and does so at scale. Natural state of things, and this is how every non-human organism behaves, is that you murder or drive out all other organisms when they possess or access resources you want. Many species even compete with their offsprings. That is how Nature behaves for millions of years. For humanity, even in the most lawless places like in Somalia, humanity cooperates a great deal more than that.

Thank you for taking the time to read all that! You are right, of course. It is something of an unsolved problem with the design. The question of "exactly what work are these draftees contributing?" is something I'm still working on; it may not literally be core parenting or teaching work, but actually more like e.g. hanging out with your cool uncle on the weekend who helps you learn life lessons. Maybe said uncle isn't exactly teaching or parenting material, but he still has something to contribute to building a child's character, and is assisting the parents just by being around to lighten the load. The Big Brothers Big Sisters charity seems to indicate that this is a sound principle with incredible ROI.

There would also be mandatory training to teach people the skills needed to do this work (critical to figure out what goes in there.) Also I'd like to hope that the system would "even out" over a few generations; if we assume the root cause of dangerous personalities like BPD or NPD is being trapped (or in an echo chamber) with a toxic parent figure, the practice of this "socialized parenting" is essentially guaranteeing kids have alternative support networks that can soak some of those traumas. Efficiency would never reach 100%, of course (does it ever?) and there would always be some difficult people for whom alternative credit would need to be devised, but in any substantial system there's always other work to do—maybe a truly broken person contributes by grading homework or something.