I'm going to split your arguments into parts, because they don't make much sense clumped together. I have a hard time understanding it.
> not whataboutism because it is valid to compare taxation regimes.
But this isn't a taxation regime. It's a penalty for choosing a way of life. It's as if the non-parent is responsible for the far future income of the state, especially in a state (USA) with no state-provided pensions; a state that doen't contribute anything back to the future non-parent compared to a future parent.
> the onus is on you to justify your claims
I already demonstrated that the only states that implemented it were totalitarian states. Are you in disagreement with this? Proportional taxation (fixed % of income) and even progressive taxation (higher % of income for higher income) is used everywhere, totalitarian state or otherwise. I'm not going to argue why that type of taxation is a good thing. Ask a LLM.
> (doing your job at keeping the birthrate above replacement)
Not my job. Not _a_ job. Not unless you consider that women should stay at home, cook and take care of children. BTW, do you?
> applying the exact same regime to another characteristic [...] Is totalitarian while applying it based on income is not
Sorry? Should that be the other way around to be comparable? More children, more tax? The state spends money on children, even in USA.
> This will incent the rich to have more kids because a 10 % penalty when you are making a million dollars a year is 100k but it's a rounding error if you are in poverty because the first almost 32k of household income is tax free if you joint file.
The rich have more disposable income. They won't feel 10%. A poor person is already at their limit. 10% will break them, so they'll have more kids and they'll be poor too. They will not contribute to future taxes. "useless turds" as you said - be careful what you wish for.
> the first almost 32k of household income is tax free
Oh, so they're exempt from childless tax too? That's moving goalposts.
Not a recent version, not from the last 10 years at least. They dropped even 8/32MB devices. On my Turris Omnia, the bare system with nothing else running takes about 70MB RAM, mostly because of kernel size. Linux itself isn't as light as it used to be.
The best you can do is put DD-WRT on it. AFAIK, they still use kernel v2.6 on devices this old.
US wants Greenland, Russia wants Ukraine, China wants Africa, etc. This reminds me of the intro to Fallout games, the one with "war, war never changes". The fight for the last of Earth's resources enters endgame phase.
Sound like a totalitarian regime to me. Look at which countries already tried it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_on_childlessness These were all communist countries with at least an intention/policy of providing social services for those children: free health, free education, guaranteed job after that, afordable or even free housing, etc.
USA has none of those. The rich will have a choice; the poor won't. And we already know that children of the poor tend to stay poor and the more children the are, the poorer they'll be. It will be a generation of poor with no hope of escape.
Then there's the slippery slope: What stops the government from increasing the tax to severe punishment levels or levels completely unafordable by anyone?
Complexity in the name of cost cutting. A hardware power limiter based on temperature would cost... $1? A thermal pipe from speakers to case acting as a radiator would be... $5?
> AI tools are probably not even on the radar for the kind of politicians that keep pushing this.
Forget about the politicians for a bit. There still are many regions on the globe where no age verification is mandatory, yet websites chose to implement it anyway. Why, if not for tracking and bots?
Considering the kind of people that get voted into Parliament, I consider that a very good thing.
I only consider true democracies those countries where citizens can force new legislation by national referendum, bypassing parliament. There are very very few countries that allow it, and even fewer where the requirements are low enough to actually allow it to happen.
Anyway, back to the subject. If Stop Killing Games will ever be law, it will be in EU. We already have very nice things like GDPR, USB charging, and replaceable batteries (soon).
My own experience is the opposite. Since ~2006 when I fist started using Linux, all systems had ACPI errors in Linux, sometimes making some hw components completely unusable in Linux. Device tree boards either just worked (Raspberry) or I patched them until they did (Asus, Radxa).
And you don't have to belive me. See what Linus said[1] about ACPI:
> [...] ACPI was designed by a group of monkeys high on LSD, and is
some of the worst designs in the industry [...]
So, it won't work on the same retro PC as the game.