#1 I'm not a boomer, I'm a Xennial. I realize shit's gonna get bad before I'm taking a dirt nap, but I nor anyone else can fight the tide.

#2 The Amish are really the only subculture that has managed to artificially hold back technological progress to maintain their way of life, and it's debatable whether they'd have been able to pull that off without resources they acquire from outside their communities. Their lifestyle really only makes sense when you look at it through the lens of arbitrary religious doctrine, rather than logically analyzing things such as why they're allowed to be reliant upon fully modern supply chains for the kerosene they burn. The point I'm attempting to make here is that even if you try to ignore technological progress, the rest of the world will move on without you and you're still not entirely insulated from the effects.

Perhaps I should've given an example of an industry that was ultimately more thoroughly doomed by the march of progress. How about Blockbuster seeing postage-stamp sized RealPlayer clips and going "Man, no one is ever going to want to watch that crap instead of a full-feature length film they can rent from one of our stores!"?

Singing avocado or no, the genie isn't going back in the bottle. I'm not even going to pretend I have the solution for what we're supposed to do when AI does become good enough to put most people out of work, and anyone who just comes up with some quick hand-wavy proposal (such as "let's just implement UBI, problem solved!) clearly hasn't considered the full complexity of the issue. Maybe we get that Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode with the sanctuary zones, maybe we get Hunger Games, maybe we get Futurama's suicide booths, or maybe we get something so much more horrible than even sci-fi writers could've imagined. For context, we didn't even collectively consider environmental pollution to be a significant problem until a river caught on fire at least a dozen times. Our society's track record for proactively addressing problems before they literally burst into flames, kind of sucks.

I'm sure the buggy whip makers were telling themselves the same thing back when hand cranking a car could leave you with a broken wrist (or worse). Yeah, today you can laugh at the slop that AI churns out, but technology doesn't sit still.

Except we're just as likely to go back to that as we are for Blockbuster to rise from the dead and replace Netflix.

Hell, even the return of vinyl records hasn't meant that kids are abandoning Spotify, they're just also collecting these silly large plastic discs and hanging the album covers on their walls.

Since when does private party A doing something "unlawful" compel private party B to take some action?

Ever since the first time someone pointed a loaded gun as B's face and said "do what I say or else I'll kill you" and B did as ordered, instead of accepting their death.

I think it was sometime around 1234567 BC.

The most expensive game I've ever bought at release is still Super Mario Bros. 3. I vaguely recall it being about fifty bucks, and the interwebs says that's about right. Adjusted for inflation, that'd be around $120ish today.

These days though, I'm fine with waiting for games to hit the virtual discount bin.
   

Either way, the ends justified the means because England was never going to nerf its monarchy if we were still saying "long live the king!" from across the pond. It might be nice to imagine the USA being ruled by the Labour Party right now, but if we were in that specific timeline where America never had its revolution and England still somehow became a democracy, who's to say those alternate-reality Americans would've voted any differently than ours? I'm picturing Trump as Prime Minister, scheming how he can bring back power to the monarchy and declare himself king.

All jobs are going to be affected by AI when there's a race to the bottom in the labor market for the jobs that AI can't do.

Hell, look at low HVAC job wages in Florida. That's not even being caused by AI (yet) - there's just too many people competing for trade jobs with too few open positions. It's all well and good to imagine that everybody put out of work is just going to find new employment at jobs that aren't feeling the crunch from AI, but the problem with that is: Everybody else who lost their job due to AI has exactly the same idea.

It has already happened. The recently passed "Big Beautiful Bill" carved a huge chunk out of NOAA's budget. Elections have consequences and all that jazz.

Never mind that we have the most unaffordable, miserable excuse of a healthcare system out of any of the supposedly first-world nations. Yep, what we truly needed is *checks notes* big tech getting in on the for-profit medical data privacy rape-a-thon.

It's like some Republican ass kisser somewhere said "Hey, remember when Chevrolet was selling their OnStar telemetry data to a broker, which then in turn resold it to insurers? What if we did the same thing, but with health data?"

Do not look into peacock with remaining eye.

"Think of the children" really was just the excuse. The people who passed these age check laws just have a problem with porn. The actual fallout from it though, wasn't really worth lighting the torches and sharpening the pitch forks over.

"Free" porn sites have mostly gone to shit ever since they realized it's just too much a liability hosting user-provided content. The credit card companies threatened to cut them off permanently, since advertising/sponsorships/etc. alone wasn't enough to remain profitable, that was the end of that. There hasn't been anything good on PornHub since the purge anyway.

Semi-paid sites require the ID check if you want to freeload. This would mostly be the chat-n-wank type cam sites, where interactivity is very limited if you're not a paid member (usually involving the purchase of on-site currency tokens), and even most of the entertainers will boot out free members who haven't bought a ticket to watch anything more titillating than the cam entertainer just sitting there looking bored.

Nothing much changed with paid sites. The content locked behind a paywall is still locked behind a paywall.

Sites that technically aren't porn sites by virtue of the amount of non-porn content they host (such as Reddit and X), still have porn without the age checks. It's all mostly people hawking their OnlyFans and Fansly pages, though.

Yeah, you can get upset about it over the principle of the thing, but the heyday of free porn on the internet is over. ChatGPT compared it to the run that the original Napster had, and honestly, I'd concur. As to today's teens missing out, they're probably all sexting each other naughty pictures anyway. I don't think they're going to be deprived of being their usual hormone-driven selves just because PornHub now says "papers, please."

Freemium gaming is just weird in that they're trying to find "whales" - people who spend ungodly amounts of money on the game. Their whole business model depends on getting as many copies of their game in front of as many eyeballs as possible, in the hopes that someone has the right mix of addictive personality and pocketbook size that it pays off for them.

Porn is mostly not like that. Yeah, there's purchasable tokens on adult webcam sites, where the entertainers work for "tips" and the site takes a cut of the action, but it's still a bit up in the air if you'd truly lose those customers without the free preview access. Heck, the entire concept of free porn is mostly an internet thing. In ye olden days, you'd go into your local House O' Fappage and if that copy of "Busty MsBoobFace III" on VHS you bought wasn't doing it for you, well, caveat emptor.

Even outside of porn, the business model that's used by all the major streaming wars participants seems to work just fine without a free access tier. In fact, the bottom paid tier in many cases still has ads. Yuck.

It actually used to be free to watch "old" South Park episodes before Paramount bought the rights. Of course, these days "old" IP is now back catalog to make your streaming service look like it has more content, even if most people are just signing up to watch the latest new hotness anyway (like Disney's Star Wars: Yet Another Character We Pulled From Our Arse, Paramount's Star Trek: Beating a Dead Horse, but in Space, and of course Netflix's Stranger Things: Damn, These Kids Got Old).

The second you sign up for a paid account you've ceased to be anonymous. These sort of age verification laws don't affect people who have paid access to porn sites.

I specifically did say that free content is mostly used in the context of attracting new paid customers. However, a lot of businesses get by just fine without giving away free samples, so it may not be the end of the world for paid adult sites if the freebies go away.

If hosting unverified user-provided content wasn't a huge legal problem, there'd be more porn sites still willing to deal in it. Even in the non-explicit content realm, it's damned hard to turn a profit hosting user-provided content unless you're absolutely raking in the advertising revenue (it also helps to be owned by an advertising company, in the case of YouTube). Plus, with porn, you're very limited in the types of sponsors who are cool with their product being hawked right next to someone being reamed out with a dildo. That's not exactly something Geico or Coca-Cola is going to want associated with their brand, if you catch my drift.

The YouTube-style business model might just be dying for porn sites, but it was on its way out even before age verification laws entered the chat.

That's really the important distinction here though - it's about access to free porn.

I'd assume that signing up for a paid account meets the age check requirements, so it would seem the sites are just losing the freeloaders. Sure, that'll eventually bite them in the ass when they can't use free explicit content as a means of attracting new potential customers, but the immediate negative effect on their revenue is probably not that significant.

At any rate, I'd have to wonder how profitable it really is to run a free porn site anyway. Seems like you'd need to get most of your content for free, and that presents its own massive set of problems (such as people uploading content that is underage and/or non-consensual), which is why PornHub purged all its unverified amateur content.