Can I install /etc/hosts on Android and block social media, AI, trackers, and ads? Because that seems more convenient than spending $500 on a phone.

Ever take a tablet away from a 6 year old boy, with the promise that it will be returned shortly? Screaming and crying is just perfectly normal human behavior.
 

Cultural and legal reasons more than scientific ones. 12 year olds can work in my country (California, US). With limited hours and required to attend full time schooling, unless the 12 or 13 year old is a high school graduate, then can work the same hours as an adult. In another state (my home state), you can legally drive under very specific circumstances at age 14.

The cultural angle is that in Western countries going back to at least the Middle Ages considered seven to be the "age of reason". And it was an age where a male child would interact with his father more, and in some cultures start choosing his own clothing to wear. Commonly known as Breeching in English speaking countries , as the age where a child approximately starts wearing breeches or trousers. (the buttons and fit were a bit complicated compared to modern clothing, I think a kindergartner today would struggle with them).

By tradition, Jewish children become religiously responsible for their actions at age 12 or 13, and they aren't the only culture that sets a milestone around this age.

I'm mostly in agreement with your entire point. I can't think of too many instances where I'd trust a 12 year old to make decisions unsupervised. But I think letting them exercise autonomy and then receive a limited form of consequences is fine. The consequences that adults artificially impose on children are meant to be a substitute for real world and permanent consequences if we just Lord of the Flies our childhood.

Adults seem to have convinced themselves that letting their children play on a screen controlled by Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc. for several hours a week is safe. When I'm more in the camp that it is harmful at any level of exposure, perhaps with the exception of direct adult supervision. (i.e. you look, I click, and I explain what a bunch of B.S. it is)

in the 80's and 90's, my parents did get home until after 6pm. So I have a lot of unsupervised time to play games and watch TV.
And can confirm that I have the attention span of a goldfish. But doc says I don't have ADD, so I don't even get to use that as an excuse.

Letting 0-10 year olds read social media: It's right beneath binge drinking while pregnant and leaded fuel in terms of intellectual harm to children. Maybe 16 is not the right cut off, 12 is probably easier to agree to. But an argument for cutting it off at 25 probably exists as well.

I'm not sure even adults should be on social much if at all. But generally society lets adults decide for themselves how much of they should drink and gamble and otherwise harm themselves to a degree. To a degree in that most countries don't tolerate cocaine and heroine usage. These are roughly agreed to limits in societies throughout the world, although not quite universal.

So I guess the question is: will social media laws in the UK and other commonwealth nations be at the extreme like the laws for drinking alcohol for most adults in the UAE? Or are the limits going to be accepted as normal and rational like laws for minors in the vast majority of nations?

The US will sell Israel more jets, especially if they continue a war with Lebanon and Iran.

The messaging in my management chain has been to use AI tools to work on 10 hard things at once.

Fox is real, a very real threat truth and rational thought.

Half of women being able to read is pretty significant. It's mainly mothers that teach their children to read, not their fathers. Especially in that era. It's a self-sustaining level of literacy where the skill can be passed onto the next generation. But that's only the basics of reading, that's learning the alphabet and some phonetic rules. I'm not trying to imply that Victorian mothers were teaching children to read at a university level.

I learned to read when I was 3 from my parents. I was reading on my own without prompt before I started school. Just pick up whatever was around, read it, and then ask my parents and grandparents about it.

American education system in the 19th and 20th century was (likely) influenced by goals of philanthropists and industrialists to create a population of compliant workers. This idea is repeated and expanded on in the the book "Dumbing Us Down" by John Taylor Gatto, not that I agree entirely with its conclusions but at least some of the premise is independently verified.

What has changed is that the drive to have factory workers is not there. Coming out of high school with a baseline education to get a job is not really a priority for the education system or for industrialists, as they have long been hiring immigrant labor and have withdrawn from monkeying around with the American education system as their primary labor pool. Look at who works in a fast food restaurant today versus 30 years ago. And the honest advice from even management that you shouldn't make a career out of it (exceptions are Home Depot and Target management, which loved to tell me stories about how people made it their life long career)

So what's next? It's simple, don't educate anyone. Then hire the handful of people that managed to get through childhood by their own abilities or their parent's intervention. It creates a class system trap that people cannot escape, and millions of people who are not employable but also not the problem of the industrialists. An entire cohort of people becomes another tragedy of the commons.

They'll make more money, but they're never going to win the AI race and make that back.

radical: Become ungovernable!
Congress: We're haven't governed for a very long time.

My country should be so dynamic that it is constantly changing and never stuck in the past.

Every day you wake, it is a fresh start and a new world.

Replacing worthless people with worthless software that boils the oceans. It's not exactly progress, more of a lateral move on the stupidity track of humanity.

He's a billionaire, he'd have a place on Elysium or The Aerium, if such places existed.