After the Nazis opened the Ark, Jones was able to tell the Americans where to pick it up from. Otherwise when the Nazis sent a crew to look for the missing men they’d have just found and taken the Ark again.

The EFF are fighting a losing battle:

> we hope we’ll win in getting existing ones overturned and new ones prevented.

All the momentum is in the other direction and not slowing down. There are valid privacy concerns, but, buried in this very article, the EFF admit that it’s possible to do age-gating in a privacy-preserving way:

> it’s possible to only reveal your age information when you use a digital ID. If you’re given that choice, it can be a good privacy-preserving option

If they want to take a realistic approach to age-gating they should be campaigning to make this approach only option.

The fight is not just about privacy, it is about freedom. Age-gating websites violates the freedom of people who are under a certain age. Young people have the same rights to free expression and information access as anyone else.

Economics is usually optimising for a narrow utility function, usually something to do with price discovery, but that doesn’t normally align with more human societal goals. Take, say, surge pricing. Maybe without surge pricing you pay $60 for a taxi but have to wait 30 mins when it’s busy. With surge pricing at busy times it’s $120, so people who can afford $120 wait 0 minutes but people who can only afford $60 have to wait 2 hours for surge pricing to end. “Economists generally” would say surge pricing was better, but voters and politicians are considering the wider trade off of whether it’s fair some people get to jump the queue and some people have to wait longer. There’s also usually a bait-and-switch where the people having to wait 2hrs are told that the $120 will generate more in taxes so if they vote for surge pricing they’d actually be better off, then the $120 is spent lobbying to ensure the taxes never materialise.

Then they scrape together their pocket money and walk into a pawn shop and hand over the cash for a second hand smartphone. Plenty of free WiFi around.

You roll out the ‘bad parents’ trope then immediately admit bypassing parental controls is trivial.

Did I not mention 'seeing what your kids are up to'? I think that covers that.

> I think you can go back further

Reminds me of a line by John Maynard Keynes from 1919 about life before WW1 —

“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep”

They’re also strengthening the criminal consequences for future governments that misuse their position: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4019

Which can be undone by another single act of your “sovereign” Parliament. Acts like this must be understood in that context.

This works both ways though, ie there’s no point opposing the laws on the grounds that they might be abused in future because the future sovereign parliament could just pass the same abusable laws.

It's not always easy. If they don't have large majority, some with a bit of conscience might go against the party.

By this logic, governments shouldn't legislate anything or have any kind of policy. Child benefit? Scrap it in case King Herod takes over and has an ready made hit list.

> how you discover a new product

Buying magazines for trusted 3rd party reviews used to be way more common, far better experience than trying to sift through SEO slop these days.

qbasic mainly using previous generation books eg https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books

Personally find p5js/The Coding Train is the closest thing around to a modern equivalent.

The equivalent is that you could ask to be removed from the phone book.

I guess, but even that I don't think I'd support making that a legal requirement. If it's public data I have no problem with it being searchable on the internet. I know that's not always convenient but I think to do anything different starts to set bad legal precedents which will not be in favor of the public.