It is naive to think that the government can just be 23% more efficient at getting you electricity. This excludes account for tax exceptions, cheaper financing or even government financing. The government is a monopoly and not allowing competitors in with legislation and using tax dollars to be more "efficient".
"Efficient"? Nobody believes that the sourcing is more efficient. It's the profit-margin which the government doesn't need which makes the difference, they can be significantly less efficient and still beat "investors" who have shareholders to pay.
I meant "Efficient" as in delivering the power for less cost. Investors don't necessarily care about a profit margin either. Space X is a trillion dollar company and has 0 profit.
Its naive to think that removing the rent-seeking middle-man class won't lead to savings. Same with private healthcare costs vs more socialized or single-payer systems.
rent seeking middleman? I would say the government has the most special privileges of the competitors in the market no?
We have the most expensive healthcare in the world and some of the worse it is a over regulated industry full of complexity and corruption. Look at industries without government involvement, the less involvement the cheaper and better things get.
healthcare, education, and child care all suck.
tvs, software, and clothes, all cheap and very good.
Also this is not the sole purpose of companies.. SpaceX is a trillion dollar company with 0 profit.
The free market has created everything you use the more we turn the keys over to government's the worse things get.
Companies can't get infinite profits because they will be undercut by other companies COMPETING. The government can get infinite power and control though.. they have no competition.
To establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.
> Also this is not the sole purpose of companies.
Friedman disagrees.
> The free market has created everything you use the more we turn the keys over to government's the worse things get.
Which is why we have never needed government regulation of things like food, air, water, shelter, work safety, accessibility, or anything else. The free market provides.
> The government can get infinite power and control though
Which is why in a free society the government is answerable to the people.
The pro free market Liberian crowd are yet to give an example of their system working.
The best government is deeply imperfect but the regulation free Libertarian paradise is probably best demonstrated by some warlord somewhere. Great for him, not for any other individual.
Maximizing value to shareholders is a literal legal obligation of public companies. A company being unprofitable today does not mean they are not seeking to be highly profitable tomorrow.
Yup, tax exceptions, cheaper financing or even government financing. It's like letting the referees play the game and then pointing out that they make more free throws.
Removing the rent-seeking middle-man class generally brings in savings. Same with healthcare.
Also the "refs" should be in charge. That is to say the working class are the refs and they should be able to build infrastructure without the capital owning class inserting itself as a rent-seeker between them and these services.
The entire point is to gain control over internet traffic. Your suggestion doesn't work because it requires people to implement it themselves and since you can't control all people, you can't control how they're going to implement it.
The title "for the children" is tongue-in-cheek. It's not serious.
It amazes me how compartmented the mind of the West is: the "protector of Democracy" is barely conscient of its own lies... There is no democracy, barely an illusion of one.
> The entire point is to gain control over internet traffic.
I see many arguments claiming it's about mass surveillance and an invasion of privacy and so on.
We already have mass surveillance, so I don't really buy into those arguments.
I think it's worth considering that it is actually about control. Or more precisely, that it's about dissuading citizens from using social media in the first place.
The damage done to our western democracies from misinformation spread via social media has not gone unnoticed...
Censoring the internet is about as anti-democratic a policy that can be implemented.
I remember reading someone argue that anytime you see a claim that we need to do something to protect democracy just replace the word democracy with bureaucracy and then the statement makes sense.
That's already a thing. One can install Squid on their router, generate a CA cert, sign their server certs with it and install the CA into all the devices in the home. It's called Squid SSL Bump. [1] A small handful of sites still use public key pinning and will have to be added to exclusions in the configuration.
The router must then be configured to only allow Squid HTTPS, Unbound DNS and Chrony NTP out to the internet.
Doing this will of course break things like video games. The parents should have a way to bypass Squid and permit all traffic out during family video game time.
Websites have public key pinning. [1] HPKP Most sites don't do this any more but enough do that anyone running a Squid SSL Bump MitM proxy needs to know.
Are there? Because we have had the last 15 years to see it isn’t working. Theres also the issue of peer pressure, it’s incredibly hard for one parent to say no to social media when every other kid has it and all the parties are arranged on Facebook. Right now telling your child they can’t have social media is crippling their ability to have a normal social life.
Banning it outright means parents have a strong foundation of “no you can’t have it, it’s illegal” and all of their peers will instead organise on private messaging apps instead.
That's why I suggest starting with really small children, kids that will be 13 by 2032. Starting with teens is a non starter regardless of how it is attempted in my opinion. It was a very long time ago but I recall being a teen. I could not be locked out of anything. Starting with small children is much easier and when they prove that they are mature and responsible enough then the floodgates open.
You are advocating parenting kids. So many others seem to want "policy" to raise peoples kids for them. That is a fools errand. And personally, I could not care less what some bureaucrat thinks is alright for my children or any others. Simply not their decision to make.
The psychological impacts come from secondary network effects. The studies suggest that taking social media away from just your kid doesn't do anything, because the culture wherever they go will still be driven by it.
So the only way I can protect my kids from it is to pass laws to force other parents' hands.
It is not necessary to dump our kids into institutions to be raised by their peers. It is necessary that you don't make decisions for other peoples kids.
Whether you legalize social media or not (or smoking, or drinking, or riding in a car without a seatbelt), that's making a decision for other people's kids. Choosing parental liberty is still choosing.
I sympathize with the libertarian impulse but for me, protecting my kids from other parents' poor decisions comes first.
Its not a war because children arent combatants. It's instead a one sided slaughter where Meta and Google are destroying the minds of a whole generation of children who cannot and cannot be expected to defend themselves against the claws of trillion dollar corporations, all in the name of profit.
One individual cannot meaningfully fight back. The only way forward is through collective action and legislation, just like what was done to the Tobacco industry a few decades ago.
It's the State's responsibility once something affects enough people. That's why a law like this makes sense but should exempt OSes under some number of users. It's not great that we have such a harsh divide between "do whatever you want so long as not too many people are bothered" and "alright now the people have spoken and it's a State/national law," but it's the system we have and better than the people only getting a say with their wallets.
This conversation makes me wonder if age verification at the system level could be considered an externality for its cost to society as a whole, and the solution be to collect tax from any commercial sale of a desktop OS that doesn't implement a defined open standard. If there is any money raised it could be used for eg. education pieces on harm and harm reduction
Maybe it doesn't work in this case, but I think you both make great points. Just feel like there must be a way of bridging this gap
The state requires things sold to meet a bare minimum of safety. Cars sold require seat belts, movies/games sold require ratings. Devices sold have a meaningful parental controls flow.
Seat belts aren't forced on you - if you want to not use them and face the risk of fines, you can do so. Media ratings systems are informational, you can choose to let your kids watch R rated movies or above. Are they going to let parents have a choice when it comes to parental controls? What about non-parents?
That's my gripe with the age verification systems I've seen, there is no room for parental choice and no consideration for people that are adults and don't have kids using their computer.
If something is illegal for kids to access it is illegal and therefore parental choice is being overriden by the state just like every single other thing that is illegal for kids to do such as smoke cigarettes, do drugs, drive etc.
I don't think it is overreach since its fairly simple to implement and non obtrusive. We have had multiple decades of failure from tech companies already to prove that they won't act on their own.
If you are putting individual parents up against Meta, Google, etc, the big tech companies easily win. As we have seen already.
> I don't think it is overreach since its fairly simple to implement and non obtrusive
Those two things have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Something being easy to implement is completely unrelated to whether forcing its implementation is overreach.
Which is why s/he mentioned both of them. *This* law is simple to implement *and* it's unobtrusive. It's actually a really good way to solve the problem without creating privacy concerns.
How do you verify someone’s age reliably without identifying them? Unless there’s some standard around zero-knowledge proofs they’re implementing that I’m not aware of, they’re probably going to end up identifying everyone as part of this system, since kids will try and bypass it and parents will demand it be made more robust. Kids will still bypass it no matter what we do.
You don't. The law we're discussing doesn't verify someone's age. Please stop calling it an age verification law, because that's completely disingenuous FUD.
