Gee, it is almost as if the U.S. government needs to encourage homegrown solar panels. If only the U.S. could find such a government.

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.

You can get fired at the drop of a hat for no reason at all. Bosses blow their top over being 1 minute late. Fill out these forms you just filled out last week and again online before you can see the doctor. IRS knows exactly what you made and what you paid in witholding, and what you owe but YOU need to compute it, better not be wrong! Don't be late! Rent and mortgage take up an ever increasing portion of your monthly income (if any). 23 calls a day, mostly scams. You have health insurance even though it was damned expensive, but somehow you still owe a heap of money you don't have after a single visit to the ER.

Meanwhile, you're getting badgered about your "credit score". If you let it get bad everything gets more expensive and it gets harder to get a job (for some reason).

Yeah, you're less likely to actually die today than years ago, but your place in life is far more precarious than it was even 20 years ago. More things demand your attention.

The problem you get though is what I call the "California Cancer Warning Problem"
Basically, people can only pay attention to so many warnings. The more often people get false or trivial warnings, warnings where they have to continue to get things done as standard, the more likely they are to just plain ignore the warnings.

While hackers might be able to figure out a way to do something malicious without triggering the warning, the warnings back then were worse than useless, because they not only triggered for just about every document, users by default could not assess the document for safety without enabling the scripting. IE I couldn't by default open the document and look at the scripts to assess them (and some of them were only like a dozen lines) without enabling them.

Saying the warnings were necessary also ignores that there have been exploits that didn't even require opening a document to cause infection. Preview was enough.

Basically, if the hackers figured out something clever, just add that to the check. It would still be a better situation than what we had back then.

Even re-architecting might not fix their problem. It depends upon how much their software people are relying upon bot generated code. Given their famous attention to detail, what's the likelihood that they are pushing out code they do not understand because "it worked"? The hardest bugs do not show up in test harnesses. So if they have built up a giant sticky wad of code they do not understand, there's no going through it all quickly if that is even possible. If they re-architect with the same software dependence on bots, they haven't really solved the underlying issue which is the way they build stuff.

I’d argue that slavery wasn’t “legal because nobody banned it.” It was legal because there were explicit laws that created, defined, and enforced the institution.

There were statutes specifying who could be held as slaves, rules that the child of an enslaved woman was automatically a slave, procedures for manumission, regulations on how slaves could be bought, sold, punished, or inherited, and laws requiring that escaped slaves be returned. That’s not a legal vacuum, that’s a full legal framework.

It’s similar to how segregation laws later forced discrimination on people who might not have engaged in it otherwise. The state wasn’t passively allowing something; it was actively mandating and structuring it.

Slavery existed because the law built and maintained it, not because the law failed to forbid it.

I remember those days where it would warn if there was any scripting at all, rather than look for dangerous commands first.
Just as a thought, not bothering if the script cannot reach outside of the document itself. Functions that access other files or documents, email functionality, and such triggering the warning instead would have been more effective.

If speed limits were enforced, they would be abolished tomorrow. They only continue to exist because most people can break the speed limit for years without getting a ticket.

If drivers received a fine every time they broke the speed limit, politicians houses would be burning down the next day and the law would be abolished the day after.

You know why encryption is legal despite Bush and Clinton's best attempts to prevent it?

Because Gen-X kids risked a decade in jail for breaking Federal law to ensure the code got out there and everyone had it. It simply became impossible to regulate because anyone anywhere in the world could download the code and run it.

Today programmers won't even say 'no' when governments demand they ID all their users.

Because it's not about age. It's about eliminating anonymity online.

There were laws requiring that escaped slaves were returned to their owners. I presume you would have obeyed those laws, even though they were immoral.

> You live in a country with laws.

A country with laws, yes. A country with law, no.

It's ludicrous to tell people they should obey the law when none of Epstein's clients have been arrested and probably at least half of the business owners in the country would be in jail if the laws on employing illegal aliens were enforced.

If an escaped slave had turned up at your house in the 1800s asking for help, would you have followed the law and sent him back to his owner? From your post, I'm guessing you would have.

I know a few Christian Nationalists. None of them are pushing for "Age Versification" and most are against it because it's clearly just another step toward The Mark of the Beast where people won't be allowed on the Internet unless they bend the knee to Satan.

This push is coming from the communists and WEF-bozos who want to eliminate anonymity on the Internet. Literally everyone who's been following this for long knows that.

Which is why you see support for it from both "left-wing" and "right-wing" governments. They both have the same hands shoved up their behinds.

We would have to re-arrange society to ease many of the stressors in life. I predict we'll be needing those drugs for a while.

Based on the cost of products from China vs the price of products made in China but sold by non-Chinese companies, I'd say the price well more than covers the cost of everything for practically any product where they also choose to display ads.

They just want more, more, always more.