If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant

It was good enough for us!

Forget the kids, they don't vote so they can be safely trod upon. Who cares what their experiences are.

But seriously, what about the not-kids? Australian adults, are you having to show your ID when you get a DHCP lease? Do a lot of websites who didn't have mandatory logins, now have 'em?

How does it work, and what has changed for you?

Europe is now eyeing similar bans, as well as proposals for a late-night "curfew", curbs on addictive features, and an EU-wide age verification app.

LATE-NIGHT CURFEW?!

If Europe isn't careful, they're going to teach a generation of kids that it's ok to do their FTPing during business hours.

So this isn't at all what you asked for, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway: Ubiquiti. You'll pay more and they're all PoE rather than wireless, but if you spend the money and run the wires (hey, you have to run a wire for power anyway, might as well use it for data, too) you won't regret the results.

We are not slow, we are just "bubble-aware".

> USENET was never this bad

Um, not sure I concur. I encountered nasty trolls and doxing there.

If we start losing a war we will resemble them.

...paid off. Our Bribeocracy in action.

Actually he tried and partly failed because it was only partly legal.

That might not stop him from trying, and unless Congress or the courts rein him in, it won't stop him from doing it. As I pointed out above, in this case it's unclear that anyone would have standing to sue (not taxpayers; it wouldn't be tax money -- maybe nVidia or China, but they like the deal), so stopping him would probably require Congress to act. And what are the odds that the Republican Congress would grow a spine?

"Not be possible" is too strong.

It's clearly possible unless Congress or the courts prevent it, even though it is clearly illegal. But Trump is doing lots of things that are clearly illegal, which is why the courts keep issuing injunctions to stop him (and then SCOTUS keeps staying the injunctions to let him go ahead and do it anyway, at least for a while). In a sane world, the fact that an action is illegal would be a stronger constraint because the president would have to be concerned that Congress would impeach and convict him, and he would have to be concerned about potential criminal liability. In the world that exists, the GOP leadership in Congress refuses to do their job to rein in the executive, and SCOTUS has declared the president above the law so there are few practical limitations on his power.

So far, the only thing that seems to really make Trump back off is when the stock market crashes.

Nevertheless, a slush fund of several billion dollars per year that the president is truly able to spend with complete discretion would be a significant additional increase in power because it's not clear that anyone would have standing to sue, so courts could not intervene regardless of constitutionality. Congress would be able to intervene, of course, but, again, the GOP-led Congress has almost completely abdicated. I had to add "almost" only because they actually did stand up to him on the Epstein files (sort of; the bill left Pam Bondi with near-total freedom to withhold anything she wants, not legally, but practically).

No, Trump is more secretive than most other presidents. You're confusing "unfiltered and disorganized" with "transparent". I do have to grant that he's incredibly transparent about his corruption. Well, maybe. He has been transparently corrupt in lots of ways, but it still seems likely that there's more corruption which he's keeping hidden.

Bitcoin does have some small intrinsic value. But it would be around the value of a ticket to the 1933 world's fair. Or an old newspaper with the headline "Dewey Wins".

Communism is not a workable system for more than Dunbar's number of people, and no country on earth uses it.
I really don't think it would work as an economic system, either, for the same reasons.

For groups smaller than Dunbar's number, that also have a charismatic leader, it can work quite well. But when that leader fails or retires, they tend to adopt a different system...or just fall apart.

That's not quite true. Occasionally some people in government do want to reduce the power of the government. For some reason they never end up making the decisions. This is because "power" is an instrumental goal that even an anarchist would desire if they wished to further their belief.

Every one dimensional metric oversimplifies things. But "fascism" is not well defined enough to use as a metric. And "statism" is the wrong term, if you're going to contrast against "individual freedom" the opposite pole should be "authoritarianism". E.g. many small communities traditionally didn't have any central government (i.e. no state), but they insisted on strict conformance to their rules via social pressure. (In that case the "authority" wouldn't be a person, but a set of social rules.)

Ay Ay...