There's no strawman here. Your proposal requires the individual adult app and website vendors on the global internet to comply with state laws requiring they do $THING. We can argue all day long about how you want to define $THING, but ultimately the flaw rests in the belief that you'll be able to get a myriad of different companies to implement any form of age gating in a privacy-respecting manner.

Again, at the OS level, all three major commercial OS vendors are US-based companies operating under then jurisdiction of US laws. Requiring they comply with age check regulation is actually achievable (in fact, Apple is already complying with a UK age verification law), unlike the broken mess that is immediately obvious if you've been following how, for example, Discord implemented their age checking.

We have age gating at the website level here in Florida. Some adult sites complied by blocking Florida IP addresses from accessing the site, some sites actually are doing the age checks (which is a potential privacy issue), and since the internet is worldwide with site operators being unaware of individual state laws (or just not caring since they're outside of Florida's legal reach) - there's also adult sites that are just ignoring the law.

Yours is the first I've seen of someone actually praising this mess as the lesser evil. Having the age gate at the OS level can at least be implemented in a more privacy-respecting manner than trusting individual app developers and websites not to leak/sell your information. Yeah, there's still the "what if a kid installs Linux" loophole, but you have to remember these laws are primarily intended to stop kids from accessing adult content through their phones, and most phones have a locked bootloader anyway. Plus, with the mobile OS realm being essentially a duopoly, if Google and Apple comply - mission accomplished.

Well, I've got good news and bad news:

The good news is that it's only a buck twenty-five.
The bad news is that, unfortunately, it does not include an Apple sticker to place on the back of your car.

I had something delivered to the local CVS by UPS once. It wasn't in a locker, it was just left on an unattended shelf near the front of the store. If I order something high value, I prefer to either have it delivered directly to my door when I know I'll be home. If I have to go out and pick up the damn thing myself, that kind of defeats the whole purpose of shipping.

So what you're saying is that if I figure out where you live, I can score a free laptop?

Only if you meet the order minimum or have a paid Prime membership (and even then, there's still some limitations). Packages don't just ship themselves, you know.

Okay, here's in the same words instead, since derivation seems to be the order of the day:

Actually, defending the Trump administration's decision to attack Iran also implies a condonation of the resulting jacked up gas prices. Perhaps it's the conservatives who don't have "I bought this before we knew Musk was crazy" bumper stickers on their Teslas. There's gotta be at least a few of 'em.

Music can be formulaic, repetitive and highly derivative and still be entertaining. Stories, on the other hand, aren't always things that lend themselves well to fan-interpreted extrapolation. Hell, often even when the original authors try to extrapolate upon their own stories, the result is kind of *meh* (The Matrix sequels, I'm looking at you).
 

People have been saying this since Napster's heyday. The thing is, the labels act as gatekeepers to a massive promotional network, and as long as they're the ones who decide if anyone will actually discover your music in the first place - they'll continue to exist.

Yeah, every once in a great while some musician gets their start going viral on YouTube or TikTok, but then they usually end up signing with a label anyway because that's where the money is.

The resources were wasted the moment investors decided that funding this scheme was the best use of their money. To think otherwise is like the farcical belief that finding ways to extend the lifespan of consumer electronics reduces e-waste (you're only delaying the inevitable - the product will still eventually get thrown out).

That ship has sailed. I mean they did everything together in the original films except knock boots in a tent Brokeback Mountain style, so...

In other words, a screenplay indistinguishable from the output of a LLM trained on the entirety of Tolkien's works, basically. No wonder Hollywood types are worried about their jobs.

Dress it up however you like - it's still fan fiction. When you're dealing with a dead author, the correct approach is to write something original that pays homage to older works of the genre.

Imagine if we'd just kept endlessly reusing Shakespeare's characters and worlds over and over, rather than writing anything new.

Have you been on social media lately? It doesn't take long before it also runs out of engaging content and starts showing you absolute slop. Generally, your "friends" have to sleep too, so actual social interaction has its limits as well.

There's really little inherently unique to social media that makes it more addicting than anything else kids have a tendency to overindulge in, other than the fact that having it on a smartphone in your pocket makes it extremely accessible.