How granular would the permission be? If web browsers start blocking all animation and post-load layout shifting by default, including CSS transitions and animations, this would encourage website operators to structure the page to coerce permission to animate in each document. For example, a website operator could make each page load blank other than a notice to the effect "Tap or click to view 'Title of Article' on Name of Site."

In my experience on laptops and tablets, I've found the exact opposite (eager loading) helpful in some situations with limited or no data. I would download an entire page on unmetered Wi-Fi, go offline, and read while riding as a passenger in a car or bus.

I sincerely doubt that 14,500 USD per year (full-time minimum wage) is near enough to pay for income tax, rent, food, health insurance, and a round-trip taxi ride every weekday in most of the United States. I'd be interested to read examples of budgets that you have in mind.

Recent graduates tend to be stuck with hourly food service and retail jobs. These tend to treat availability outside 9 to 5 as a condition for hiring, not to be doable from home, and not to pay enough for a taxi. Even a cyclist needs a backup during bad weather.

AI has been running at a big loss to get the users hooked. It was inevitable that prices would start climbing. That process is nowhere near done, running AI is expensive as hell.

Once the market starts reflecting the actual costs, you can bet the cost/benefit will not be nearly as rosy as it looks now. But some customers will already have gotten themselves between a rock and a hard place and will be sucked dry, then discarded. Those "expensive" people that are getting dumped will start looking like a bargain, but they will have already been snapped up by smarter companies by the time management that can't see past their own toes figures that out.

All of this makes me remember a short story reading assignment in the 5th grade. It was about kids growing up in a society where machines did all of the intellectual work. To them, writing was 'squiggles'. They managed to disable a filter on their "bard" (a story teller for children) and had it tell them a tale of machines ruling over Man.

Nobody expects prophesy from a 5th grade reading assignment.

If someone happens not to have this privilege, then how would they go about traveling to or from work at night or on Sundays, when all the bus drivers are at home with their families? (Source: Citilink in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA)

I imagine that most gamers are unwilling to pay for business-class service if business-class service is the only "real" service offered at their home address.

How are you going to host a game server on a home computer if you share your IPv4 address with other subscribers to the same ISP in the same neighborhood,[1] and the combined modem and router that your home ISP requires all subscribers to use lacks an option for port forwarding? Both of these are true, for example, of T-Mobile US Home Internet.

[1] Many home ISPs apply carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to conserve IPv4 addresses since the worldwide exhaustion.

The problem is that the people who could afford this and would do it are exactly the people the rest of society is better off without.

As a counterpoint, The Linux kernel and much of the userspace in various distros is done remote. It can work, even on highly collaborative projects. Like anything, some will enjoy that more than others.

Required physical equipment can be a limiting factor, of course. Though I have done firmware development from home because the dev board wasn't expensive nor is a debugger for that hardware.

There is a nicotine source that isn't at all age locked. I guess the teens will move on to these "cigarettes" you hear about from time to time.

They even come in cool Menthol.

The laws are a joke by people who apparently flunked "Hello World".

They demand a mechanism, but don't even offer guidance on what mechanism it should be. You can technically comply while having no 2 Linux installs following the same API, making it effectively useless.

A better approach would be a purely optional userspace package (perhaps call it "Californication") that returns 1 dword with the age information encoded in it. Each person installing it gets to decide what that encoding will be.

Yes, it returned 0x0BADF00D, that's the code for 18+.

Someone else might decide 0x0B00B1E5 means 18+.

Some early adopters of "Here's a complaint one, pretty please use it" included small operations like PGP. Others were small companies then, later to become large.

Not too long after, there was the whole flap around DeCSS for DVDs. The medium itself is nearly dead now, but it was individual efforts that rendered region coding largely a joke. The Chinese vendors whose DVD players didn't give a damn about region codes came second.

I can buy alcohol because I don't live in Saudi Arabia. I can have an OS that doesn't know or care how old I am because I don't live in California. That law literally doesn't apply to me. If I make a distro where I am, why should I bother with age verification at all? It's none of my business if a friend of a friend or a complete stranger decides to download it and install it on a machine in California. Not my circus, not my monkeys.