I can think of a better analogy than littering for pirating an item at more than 1 place. When you litter, you add to the trash. If everyone littered, it would be awful. But if everyone pirated the same content on a different site/platform/protocol, it would still be 1 pirated item.
The better, IMO, analogy, is if you have an ad glued somewhere, say at a bus stop. Another person comes with their ad and wants to glue it. They glue it over the previous ad. The amount of ads visible remains the same. There's a negligible disadvantage for the city - they have to haul away twice as many paper. But most importantly, the amount of visual clutter hasn't been increased if the second ad is glued over the first one.
That analogy works if you're against piracy and ads on public places, of course.
Except for schools or where kids are likely to be like hotels it's a nanny state solution that forces unnecessary spending, unnecessary licenses and inspections and, most of all, people being told how to lead their lives.
Unrelated to that specific regulation, the US National Electric Code is made by a non-profit who, until 2016, didn't even make copies of the code freely available. That's crazy to me. What's also crazy is how the 2023 version I checked just now has 918 pages of dense regulations. Am I really supposed to believe all that is necessary?
SoulSeek was also pretty good for finding obscure music. I like collecting everything that was released (not live performances, though) and SoulSeek filled some, but not all gaps I had.
But the people in each house would suffer from from asbestos in their own house. [0] If I bought a house in such a neighborhood, I'd have it checked from cracks or deterioration. If the results show a risk, I'd inform the neighboring houses, too.
Similar to how if you're using a insecure program written in C, whoever finds the bug should tell you immediately - don't use that program.
[0] You might say that asbestos from 1 house would affect the whole neighborhood but that would be similar to how a smoker smoking in the streets would affect the neighborhood. Second-hand smoking and second-hand asbestos are bad but they're negligible compared to living with a smoker who smokes indoors with the windows closed or smoking yourself.
The bunny suit for a child is the parents, teachers and social workers.
Like I said in another comment - if a parent is working 3 jobs and doesn't have time for their children, change the subsidies given to the parent for having children. Make child care free or really accessible.
A child needs a parent or at least a role model. If you ban social media, the children will still see random crap on the internet, whether it's YouTube videos or content from random sites too small or shady to be regulated. Do you want 100% of the internet regulated or do you want the government to empower the children and their parents? We have the resources, we just haven't allocated them correctly. Otherwise a parent would have time to spend with their children.
I am worried about this and completely oppose these subpoenas. In an ideal world all communications would be over a censorship/subpoena-resistant protocol and the government wouldn't try to infiltrate or stop any kind of online communication. I wish we can collectively ditch Meta, Google, Twitter, reddit and all the other centralized crap for something better. I don't have accounts there and if I had a company I wouldn't even make a company account there even it would mean I'd lose visibility and potential customers.
I hate those companies with a passion. I know most of us here do even if some of us work there (I don't and will not; I'm not even in IT right now). Yet I see how easily regulations against these centralized platforms will expand to regulations on communication in general, whether it's commercial centralized ones or an FOSS decentralized E2EE ones.
I get what you're saying but installing asbestos correctly is much easier than writing an app that could have security implications in C, is more easily detectable where things go wrong and it affects less people if things go wrong.
And the people using asbestos in their homes, or buying homes with asbestos, are endangering themselves. How likely is that an improperly installed or maintained asbestos is going to affect a whole neighborhood?
But this solution has several negatives that likely make it net negative.
It normalizes age verification online which will likely lead to a less free internet. We could wait for decades until a really privacy-preserving way of age verification will come but what will happen is we'll have to give up our privacy and anonymity to a few large governments and companies.
It opens to door for regulating any kind of communication channels amongst the people. It will start with big social media but it will likely expand to any kind of forums, chats and even open protocols like AT. It will normalize the government interfering in all kinds of online activities.
These may seem distant and abstract to most people but the people in power want or will want to get power over every kind of communication. We should oppose this now, not when it's normalized and has happened for "platforms bigger than X users".
The people should be able to form any kind of group where they communicate freely. If you want to regulate commercial addictive algorithmic content suggestions... OK, maybe, sure. Do it. Don't regulate where people communicate, how they do it, what they talk about and what they share. People who can use the internet, even children, need a way to share their ideas and concerns. They need to be able to belong to whatever community they please.
Wouldn't the correct solution be to empower those parents with subsidies or free child care? If you have to work 3 jobs, parent or not, there is something wrong with how we've structured our society. Banning social media in your example seems like a bandaid put on a person with external and internal bleeding. You'll stop some of the bleeding but the person will still suffer and die.
From what I know, asbestos is bad when it gets airborne. If it's installed correctly, if workers wear PPE when handling it and if there are periodic checks for cracks, leaks and so on, it's safe. From what I've read, at least - I'm not an expert by any means. I've removed asbestos from a few old buildings but wore PPE. It was very uncomfortable to have the masks and suit on. I even threw away the cloth bags I had to my tools in, just to be safe. We disposed of the asbestos as per regulation. I feel safe and would do it again.
So maybe banning asbestos altogether is overkill.
I'd love to be proven wrong. I don't have any financial interest in asbestos besides the few jobs I've done over the years removing it.
My point was different. I was just trying to compare China to other countries. If you just say "4000 dead per year", it seems awful. And it is - I agree. But in a country with 14 million people (instead of 1.4 billion in China; 100x less) we'll see a headline like "40 dead per year" (100x less). We might not bat an eye to that number. We should think in terms of probability or in terms of ratios like [dead people]/[all people].
We should try to bring that number (4000 or 40) down but if it's happens to be a very unlikely cause of death, maybe we should focus on more pressing things. Not ignore the 4000 (out of 1.4 billion), of course, just put it in perspective. I'm sure much more people in China die from other easily-preventable deaths. Road-related deaths are much more graphic and frightening than deaths from things like the quality of our food and water, contaminants in paints and construction materials, air pollution, infections, diabetes, cancer and so on. Most such deaths are not graphic, you won't see them on kaotic, but are usually far longer, painful and disturbing for the person and family.
To offer a personal rebuttal to you saying I don't care about those people as there are many that look like them, I love the saying "if you help a stray animal, you won't make a dent in the whole situation of helpless stray animals but you'll have changed that animal's life completely". So yes, 1 person or animal matters a lot. I've moved snails from the sidewalk back into the grass so they don't get stepped on. Likely billions of snails are getting crushed every year and what I do is not sustainable, but I still do it.
Here we are, but let's think of ways to change it. I hope that even if some people start thinking differently, in terms of changing the status quo, we could reach a better future.
Centralized controls are better if we assume the user is either technologically dumb (or uneducated, or naive, if you prefer other terms) or strapped for time.
Current users might be just that. I agree. But those same users decided to download dozens of hundreds of apps. They use each app much more than it would take for them to go to the settings (if such good settings exist) and take care of what is allowed and what isn't. It's their responsibility.
We've let users be treated as infants far too long. That leads to centralized decisions on behalf of these users, for their own good. Which leads to users being more and more negligent in their duty to govern their own digital selves. It's a vicious cycle.
Can we break it just by changing the way users manage their notifications? Likely no, sadly. We need a complete overhaul of personal digital responsibility. We need to remove (almost?) all safeguards and nanny-state (nanny-corp?) treatments the users get. Let them get hacked, let them lose money, let their digital lives, money, identities completely go to shit. They will recover but they'll have learned a valuable lesson - the computer in their pockets is their own computer, the apps they install could be malicious, the consequences are not artificially removed. I think the users will learn after a a while.
We don't install guards to prevent someone from poking into the outlets with a fork. We do it for small children. We don't put guardrails everywhere. If you're not careful where you go, you might fall or get hit by a car. Why is the digital realm so different? We've had computers for a while now, it's time to take responsibility for ourselves.
Otherwise we'll always treat users as infants or sheep or retards or whatever you wanna call it. That means making our safety and security someone else's problem, but that also means letting go of any agency we have. Letting others control our lives. And our digital lives are becoming a bigger part of our lives as times goes on.
I upvoted your comment, btw. You are right that now centralized solutions are better, but later that might change and we'll have no recourse. "We" as a people, not individuals.
> From my perspective, the more roadblocks the platforms put between unnecessary notifications and my phone, the better.
I know lots of apps behave badly when it comes to notifications but I'd still prefer if the apps controlled the level of notifications they sent. I could, of course, reduce that client-side, but I don't see why I'd want Google or Apple or any other intermediary see or control the notifications.
If an app behaves inappropriately, I could uninstall it. If a gatekeeper like Google or Apple prevent an app from sending me notifications, I'd have to change my OS, usually my hardware, too.
I think that stems from the format. It has to be video so they must show something. Better than a stock footage of a fire or, as South Park did, an "imagine if that school was full of rabbits".
We see the same useless media in thumbnails of text-based news and in the articles themselves with irrelevant stock photos.
Not only is it useless but it makes me consider the site/network less reputable if they're engaging in such attention-grabbing practices that tend to pander to idiots.
About suffering, it's everywhere, sadly. I think most of life is suffering. Our own life is likely a mix of suffering and pleasure but if we view all life (not only humans but other animals), most of it is suffering. I think the way out of this is by intervening in nature, as nature has a lot more suffering than humans themselves do or have even caused. Look up David Pearce or even Peter Singer. Pearce's "The Hedonistic Imperative" was written in a very hard-to-read way, at least for me. Like, I had to constantly re-read sentences and look up words. Nevertheless, I loved his ideas. Singer's ideas are also worth considering. What I remember from reading Pearce and Singer years ago is that there's a lot of suffering in the world, that humans' suffering is just at tiny bit of it and that we should strive to reduce the overall suffering. It might sound like a pipe dream to intervene in nature - someone will say "we'll only make it worse". And probably right now we will, but I believe we'll reach a point where we can actually intervene adequately.
Zapffe makes interesting points but are too close to what I consider attempts to describe human psychology through vague philosophy. Yes, isolation, anchoring, etc. may be useful things to talk about, but his philosophy, at least from the minuscule amount I've read, doesn't discuss suffering generally (using terms and ideas like qualia, etc.), doesn't extend suffering to non-human animals and doesn't offer much of a solution beyond some psychological changes we can implement (which could only benefit humans).
But I love that you're focused on suffering. It sucks and it's the thing that sucks the most and that could suck the most - by definition, even. I rarely find people acknowledging suffering as something to eradicate. It's usually something more specific, like a problem with economics or unions or tech or mental health. But all these lead to suffering and suffering is what matters in the end.
I have yet to reread the rest of your post and reply (as I don't like to just reply immediately).
The card shouldn't cost money or could cost 50 yen which would be more than enough to cover printing it.
You're not vulnerable to SMS interception or phone malware. You're also not forced into Google's or Apple's walled gardens.