Unfortunately, refundable tickets are more expensive.

Social media addiction is a subset of screen addiction, and screen addiction is destroying Gen Alpha at an alarming pace. I have so far found zero specialists who can help with this. It's not just a matter of taking screens away, we have literally turned an entire generation into junkies who will lie and cheat to get their fix. The adolescent mind never stood a chance; male or female.

If Meta wants a nicer spot in hell they can at least help with the mess they have profited off of. Help train the next generation of rehab specialists and help people find help. We made big tobacco do it, we can make these monsters do it as well.

That is not a trivial feat in the least. You don't have to give your kids smart phones, you don't have to have a PC at home. You can try to send your kid to a school that deemphasizes technology. And yet your kid will still end up with a screen addiction because it is that consuming. Kids don't have a chance. What today's kids face today is so far beyond what any of us grew up with that there really is no comparison.

My youngest siblings grew up on a heavy diet of Barney and Friends and it drove me up the wall. At least there was only a certain time of the day that was available on broadcast TV. And my 8 bit NES was not portable in any reasonable meaning of the word. Those barriers are gone now and the programming targeting kids makes Barney look like Mr Science.

In Soviet Russia, Amazon sell book to you!

Uber and Lyft drivers almost certainly wouldn't count on this, as they - with very few exceptions - use GPS to navigate. A taxi is a completely different animal in that regard.

Yet you took the time to reply. You could have chosen to ignore it instead. Glad we can count on folks like you to continue to drive down the signal to noise ratio here.

Yes, I know my ID is also 7 digits long. I don't consider myself longtime, even having read and posted for over 20 years here.

Brain and brain, what is brain?! By 17 years old you're expected to have seen The Empire Strikes Back and have committed "R2-D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer" to your memory.

...requires age verification on traffic coming from known VPN addresses

A state enacting such a law should be required to publish their official list of The Known VPN Addresses.

People running websites should not be required to make up that data, or have to pay to subscribe to someone else who makes it up. If the gummint wants to force something that ridiculous on us, the gummint should make the taxpayers, not the webmasters or their users, pay for it.

Advertising has been on this site for over 20 years now. The only difference is which ads are here, but that's all automated as well. We see slightly fewer mail order bride ads now, which is a likely a good thing, but otherwise its nothing different. There's no reason for a human to screen them.

I say this often, but honestly when was the last time any new code was written here? Stuff breaks over time but it has been years since anything was added or updated. We all know that of course Unicode is over 20 years past its promised rollout (beating even Duke Nukem Forever in terms of development hell cycle), but really it seems unlikely that there are any software developers left working for this site. I'm not sure there are any full time employees at Slashdot at all anymore.

In other words you can put the complaint in front of more eyes but it won't find any more eyes that can do anything about it.

It's been a while, but I've written some Fortran 77. I changed the value of 4 long ago. Sorry, everyone.

It's irreversible in that it's a pain in the ass, so they would prefer to not help.

It's reversible in that other forces (e.g. negative publicity) can be greater than the pain in the ass.

her expecting me to read her mind and magically know how to please her in every way, (a very long list), was always a factor.

oh, so by dating you mean watched 80's comedians all day . got it.

No, it means there are communication problems, which is far more common and cliche than even 1980s comedians.

Not getting any sunlight until past 10.00 AM is so annoying,

Well not getting any sun past 4:30 in the afternoon is also so annoying.

Gosh, it's almost as though people in different geographic areas have different needs and desires. If I didn't know HOW IMPORTANT it is that we all be forced to do everything the same, I would suggest that timezones be regional, agreed upon by local governments. But of course that's heresy since not every local government would make the exact same choices.