> Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.
You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.
There are many scenarios in which politicians can be legitimately worried about the kids. For example if they want to install crosswalks and enforce speed limits around a school, or if they want to increase funding for social services.
I do believe we should allow for a lot more nuance in our political opinions and avoid most statements that can be made in the constraints of a short comment on social media.
>When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!
What rights and freedoms should I worry about when a politician wants to make sure my child is fed by supporting food stamp programs or free hot lunches at school?
The idea that any attempt to help a child is inherently suspect honestly says something distrubing about your own worldview. You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?
>I just said the opposite. I can imagine many people genuinely caring for a child that isn’t their own.
Sure, but limited to "family and friends". Following that up with "who does not know my children" indicates you clearly view empathy as extending to merely one's personal relationships and you seemingly can't imagine caring for a stranger's child. I'll grant you cyncism is not the correct description of that worldview, but I stick by the general label of disturbing.
This level of cynicism is only possible if someone has never interacted with people on a local political level. Once again, it's more a reflection of your own worldview than an accurate reflection of all of humanity. There are some people who genuinely have empathy for others and want to do good. The way some of you refuse to believe that is truly disturbing.
There are some people who have genuine empathy for others and want to do good, and they aren't politicians. The only thing disturbing about this is you don't see it.
Once again, you can only say this if the idea of "politician" is some abtract concept that you can dehumanize. If you get involved in local politics, I guarantee you will meet someone who cares.
I find it difficult to give some people on this site the benefit of the doubt when they say nonsense like this. How can you possibly believe that free hot lunches in schools leads to slavery? Like what is the literal chain of events that you imagine happening to lead from one to the other?
In the case of food stamps, that was the leverage by which social engineers destroyed the black family via incentives for single mothers — collapsing from 75% married (circa 1950s) to 25% married (modern).
The “Welfare State” is nothing but modern share cropping from the party of Jim Crow.
Just so I'm clear here, you think half of Black moms have pushed their child's father away for the lucrative reward of food stamps? And that scenario was preplanned by some unnamed "social engineers"?
The sharecropping nature was intentional, ie, their vision of subservient people generating wealth for the state which it then distributed for their basic needs rather than those people owning property by which they could do for themselves.
That it destroyed black families (among others) is merely happenstance rather than intentional racism — stemming from the overall failure of technocratic managerialism.
Your narrative is embellished and does not correlate strongly with the data [1].
Embellished: marriage rates are 33.8% for Black women and 37.8% for Black men, neither of which I would round to 25%.
Uncorrelated: marriage rates dropped sharply among people of all single races on the Census except for Asians. It has dropped more sharply for Black respondents, but anything disproportionately affecting the lower and middle economic classes would disproportionately affect Black families.
Show me some data, and not outdated welfare policies from the 1980s, that supports the "social engineers" causal narrative better than plain deindustrialization. Or deindustrialization combined with good old American racism and mass incarceration. I am willing to change my position on this.
I’m actually talking about the period from 1950-1980 on the chart labeled: “Percentage of married men by race, 1950–2024”
You can see the collapse of black marriages started earlier and is steeper than other demographics — though eventually white marriages enter a similar decline, along with Hispanic marriages. (Asians hold roughly equal.)
This strongly suggests the effect is correlated with poverty and not race — especially with the white effect starting during the collapse of US manufacturing.
But if we agree the correlation is with poverty you haven't refuted my point — as welfare is a strong incentive structure on those experiencing poverty. That chart is perfectly consistent with what I said.
Politicians often have kids too, and what parent does not worry about their own kids? Is it that much worse if a politician genuinely cares about other people's kids too?
There are no politicians worried about kids. There are politicians worried about the votes of people who worry about kids, which is effectively the same thing.
It's very far from the same thing. The former calls for solutions that protect kids, the latter calls for solutions that can be sold as protecting kids.
> When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!
I work with those politicians. They have kids too and they are just as susceptible to media/propaganda/fearmongering as you are. However, unlike you and I, they can do something (usually wrong) about it.
The same reason you pay taxes. Not everyone is law abiding, taxes pay police to uphold order. Child laws improve upbringing, reducing chance of future criminal acts.
We live in a society, you wouldn't be on HN otherwise.
The main example that comes to mind is anything having to do with the environment. “The kids” will face the brunt of our actions (or inactions) on that front so a “for the kids” argument is completely valid. Dismissing a proposal simply because of a “for the kids” element is incredibly reductive and will genuinely end up harming kids.
“For the kids” arguments are distinct from arguments worrying about future generations in that they are almost entirely focused (ostensibly) on preventing harm to children while they are children rather than “all our descendants including the adults”.
Then let's ban child safety locks, child labor laws, and any law that distinguishes child abuse from other forms of abuse. Let's also allow minors to buy tobacco and alcohol while we're at it if we're claiming that any law that exists to protect children as children is inherently misguided.
I think if you spoke to the people actually making the claim they’d define it a little better to include only cases where adults are being asked to give up rights, freedoms, or privileges. But you can ask them.
I didn’t take a position on the argument. I pointed out a distinction.
Oh, I'm sure a lot of those people have been convinced to back these laws out of sincere desire to protect children.
The problem is that those laws are NOT designed to protect children, and the people who convince politicians and the public to support them are NOT doing so out of genuine concern to protect children.
The real, underlying reason why they are being pushed for so hard is to destroy privacy and control people which is going to make everyone but the elite less safe, children included.
Especially if and when we get another Nazi Germany type regime and realize that - oh shit, they have 24/7 overview of where every single person in the world is, what they do, what they think, what their worldviews and identities are.
The real underlying problem is that all the mass surveillance companies proposed laws that look like they protect children, and clueless politicians agreed, while the rest of us just shouted on HN about how they're building a digital dystopia instead of proposing any alternatives. The politicians have to choose between banning electronics for children, or mandating ID scans because those were the options presented.
When irresponsible parents raise irresponsible children, the effects will not be limited to themselves. I don't want to go back to open smoking, causing increased rates of cancer to everyone just because some people want their freedom to smoke. Preventing tobacco sales to children greatly reduced that.
This is coming up again and again because The current status quo does. Not. Work.
There is direct evidence from trials, in which Meta researchers told executives that features like infinite scroll and others “ are inherently at odds with well-being”
There is no effective fight for freedom if there is no effective understanding of the politics and social forces driving change.
The freedom of the internet in the 90s was in itself a social revolution, not just a technological one.
Fighting for a status quo that didn’t work for children and even for many adults is a losing fight.
Fighting for privacy and against ad tech, and against addictive design features for all users is a far stronger fight.
Those who sacrifice freedom for a functioning society deserve neither. We should just keep doing the thing that doesn't work, because the alternative is sacrificing freedom.
Those who defend freedom should do so by being effective at it.
The internet was a magical thing when it was introduced to society at large. However this is NOT the same era.
If we are fighting for privacy and freedom, then why the heck is ad tech still allowed to be accepted as part of this conversation? If we are talking about freedoms, this is one of the greatest moments to say lets not sacrifice any privacy at all in the first place?
There is no functional and effective defense of our values if people are showing up to argue what they feel like fighting, instead of where the challenges actually are.
> If we are fighting for privacy and freedom, then why the heck is ad tech still allowed to be accepted as part of this conversation?
Completely agree. Adtech, most of big tech in general, is harmful, and is pushing these panopticon solutions to preserve their own existence and profits. We should treat the root cause.
I agree. We should make a browser that blocks all ads, and a phone that comes with this browser and also doesn't track you, and all that. It should also ask you if you want the account to be parentally controlled, and if so, to what age.
> We should just keep doing the thing that doesn't work
That's not what he said.
He said:
> Meta researchers told executives that features like infinite scroll and others “ are inherently at odds with well-being"
> Fighting for a status quo that didn’t work for children and even for many adults is a losing fight.
By "status quo" he means the exploitative and addictive business models of big tech.
Why are we bending over backwards to preserve big tech profits?
That's what all of this is. It's big tech lobbying for draconian laws that "solve" the problem in a way that simultaneously preserves their business models. It's big tech saying "sure it's harmful and addictive but look it's adult only now!"
Which is of course total bullshit. Their "get people addicted" business models are the root cause, and "kids are harmed" is merely a symptom of the problem.
Treat the root cause by wiping out their harmful business models.
Incidentally, that was the conclusion:
> Fighting for privacy and against ad tech, and against addictive design features for all users is a far stronger fight.
Sincere or not, their arguments are automatically voided by the simple fact they are building a dystopian cyberpunk panopticon. Nothing justifies that oppression. Not even children.
We almost certainly have opposing ideological views, but something I said a lot during this era (that I'm happy to see you hinting at) was that if you come into office as a progressive prosecutor without any plan to deal with the people in your office or in law enforcement who aren't on board, then that's really the more immediate failure. You can't just say, "I would have been successful if not for my detractors," because the detractors are a totally predictable obstacle for which you need a plan.
In big systems you can't always just do whatever you want!
To some degree there simply isn't any plan you can have beyond that in the short term things will suck and hopefully the long term benefits will be worth it. If the existing incumbents are sufficiently ideologically opposed to your goals that they'll refuse to work rather than let you even inch towards them, there's not much you can do beyond try to replace them with people who don't have the relevant experience but are willing to work with you.
"Defund the police" didn't poll well so the progressive prosecutors who actually got elected were the ones who didn't admit that they were going to have to tear things down and start over (and maybe they didn't even realize it), but it was a very unsurprising outcome.
So it's not enough to say that the progressive ideology is a bad plan in that environment? You said it yourself, there isn't any plan. What happens in complicated high risk situations when there is no plan? You end up with bad results, which is a result of the failed ideology.
I mean, you have basically no control over law enforcement if they decide to arbitrarily slow down arrests or protest your leadership. This has been one of the more consistent issues in American politics and you can see it when the police union doesn't get their way they have a huge tantrum and make things worse for everyone involved.
This isn't really a statement on Boudin did or did not do since I don't have that knowledge but rather from separate experience seeing law enforcement shit itself during other elections.
The flip side I've heard is that LE doesn't arbitrarily slow down arrests due to a difference in ideology. It seems more simple than that. Who wants to go through the effort of making arrests if the DA is letting them free. The LEO will see them commit the same event the next day. I don't think anyone would want that in their day to day job, much less law & order.
It's like writing a PR/MR every day [by hand] and having it declined every day, eventually you stop.
Maybe so, but the difference is that my job is my job; if I don't do my job I get fired. If the police don't do their job they get rewarded with more funding because people see the effect and not the cause.
You could make the argument that it discourages them from making the effort, but they're still getting paid and supported by my tax dollars and so should do their damn job.
> How did Uber somewhat break even? They lost $34b before making a profit.
It took them ~14 years to lose that $34 billion. Some projections suggest that OpenAI has lost a third of that in a single quarter. Even the most optimistic projections indicate that they're losing that much every 2-3 years. There's talk that they might lose ~$150B before profitability.
These are just numbers on a page to regular people, but $34 billion and $150 billion are very different numbers.
> We can produce enough food for everyone on earth to eat,
Who is this "we?"
There's a kind of circular complaint built into all such endeavors that goes like, "we can do this, but unfortunately we as a group don't want to, but we could definitely do it if we wanted, but sadly we currently have the wrong opinions, but we can definitely do it, if only we weren't inclined not to, but we should and we will, as soon as we all come around to the truth."
Your "we" doesn't seem to want to do what you want them to do, which is why communists so often end up thinking that the real problem is the existing populace and maybe what they really need is to be re-educated or even replaced.
It's kind of darkly funny that NIMBY ever came to refer to housing in the first place. The term was originally meant to apply to stuff exactly like this -- i.e. genuinely noxious uses that most people nevertheless agree are necessary somewhere. Almost everybody is a NIMBY in this sense.
Incumbent homeowners (and sometimes renters in rent-control situations) voting for policies that prevent new housing from being built near them is a huge reason why housing costs so much where I live; and reducing local housing costs is probably the single biggest way that policy changes could directly improve my quality of life.
Also, housing itself is often a genuinely noxious use of land for incumbent homeowners. In part because construction creates noise and dust and requires upgrading other local physical infrastructure - but also because more housing implies more new people living in an existing neighborhood, and additional people living somewhere can themselves cause problems for the incumbent residents.
Developers share an enormous role in this problem. They want to enshittify nice places to live with overdevelopment, because people with lower standards want to live there - which is perfectly fine. But they could happily live in residential zones built outward instead - however, that doesn't get the developers as much money, so they don't.
This is an explicitly anti-density, pro-suburban-sprawl housing policy proposal. This is basically the opposite of what transit-oriented urbanists would like to see.
> A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of what turned out to be St. Louis's ring suburb design
Bartholomew was born 13 years after the Great Divorce between St. Louis City and County was approved by voters, establishing the city's modern borders, and ultimately dictating the "ring suburb design" that we see today.
Yeah, that's how I knew that he was born 13 years after the establishment of the city's modern borders and that your original claim is incorrect (and, incidentally, not corroborated by the result of your quick google search, which doesn't even attempt to suggest that he had anything to do with the city's "ring suburb design").
I am of two minds about this. As a matter of human disappointment, I totally get it. They liked working there. Now they don't. It's not their choice. And it sucks. This is extremely relatable.
But the naïveté and confusion on display in the post are extremely not relatable. What do you think a company is? What do you think a job is? What is it that you think you're doing there? And what is it that you believe you are owed?
On this front, this person talks like an alien -- or, more condescendingly, a child. I can't relate to it at all, nor do I think it's polite or kind to play along and pretend that their worldview is understandable.
Maybe -- maybe -- you could say something like, "look, these companies lie to their employees. They tell them that they're family, that they should bring their whole selves to work, that they are changing the world, that they matter to the company as an individual. You can't blame them for believing it."
But I do. Those are such ridiculous lies that I somehow have more contempt for anybody who believes them than I do the liars, who I view mostly to be playing out a kind of benign social fiction that's transparently fake to everybody involved.
> Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said.
Obviously you can write a law that says anything you want, but as an aesthetic matter, this strikes me as pretty ridiculous. A company makes up a thing called a "blue checkmark" and then, what, it has to mean the same thing for the rest of all time? It's not like the new Twitter lied about what was happening. They said plainly that they were changing the checkmark system to mean something new. Why would anybody cheer a government stepping in to say, "no, sorry, you can't do that?"
As much as we would like otherwise, law is a subjective tool. We implement objectivity as much as is feasible, e.g. using careful wording and precedent, but ultimately it would be a fool's errand to attempt to make it 100% objective/deterministic.
All this to say, we tend to oversimplify in our criticisms when more objectivity would have given us a result we agree with.
We tend to agree that we want laws to stop businesses from "tricking people". The specifics vary widely, but the goal itself is unavoidably subjective, so there will always be some subjectivity in its application.
There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here, so your comment is a non sequitur. If particular accounts are posting fraudulent information, then go after those through regular legal channels. The platform is not the problem here.
> There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here.
That is a purely subjective opinion, since I have talked to elderly people who assumed “blue checkmark = celebrity” and was therefore confused why there are so many such interactions on trivial posts.
Ignorant people sometimes have stupid thoughts. This is not an actual problem, or anything that governments or media companies need to fix.
Even under previous Twitter management, there were a lot of verified accounts who weren't celebrities by any reasonable definition. So only a moron would have ever believed that "blue checkmark = celebrity". We can't protect morons from themselves and it's pointless to even try.
Calling people stupid is a common and low-quality excuse to not regulate. It's part of how societies start to fail. If some percentage of people are mistaken about something, the reality of that is all that matters, regardless of how stupid you personally think those people are.
Nah. There's no evidence to support your claim. You're just making things up to try to find a plausible, friendly sounding excuse to justify government censorship. Citation needed.
Life is hard. It's even harder when you're stupid. Government regulation can never change that reality.
In the United States we have a long, foundational legal tradition in support of Free Speech and free enterprise for this very reason.
The bar is set very high precisely because we know where things go when it's not.
This specific case wouldn't clear a low bar, much less a high one. I, too, have been turned off by Musk's behavior over the last year, but the idea that this case has nothing to do with that is risible.
There's at least a little bit of strawman-ing going on here.
The regulators are not insisting that blue checkmarks mean what they've always meant. Secondly xitter hasn't been transparent about changes to blue checkmarks. There was a long period of time when blue checkmarks were given or even forced upon credible sources at Elon's whim while he sold them to hucksters and frauds. Even if blue checkmarks had been that debased throughout their existence, there's still plenty of basis for regulators to find that they are deceptive.
The worst part isn't that a company makes up a designation and is forced to stick with it by regulators. A designation could have been designed from the beginning specifically to head off regulators.
The worst part is that it is simply a lie. Blue checkmark never meant "trustworthy source of information," and most people who had blue checkmarks were not trustworthy sources of information. Thierry Breton is spreading misinformation here, but that would not have ever been grounds to remove his checkmark.
Blue checkmarks were an arbitrary piece of gamified tat given by twitter when it felt like it, and now it's a paid piece of gamified tat that can be revoked whenever Musk feels like it.
At best checkmarks were "verified" accounts. That meant that most likely party with access to account had identifiable identity connected to it. Say celebrity or real business. For any given value of celebrity also big enough "influencer" counting.
Now would celebrities, influencer or company marketing accounts always be trustworthy sources? For more cynical almost never...
Nope, its just that the current Eu establishment doesnt like how its narrative about the Gaza genocide or the Ukraine War was challenged by including even its own press, so they want control and censorship. The countries that are pushing for this are persecuting people for protesting the Ukraine war or the Gaza genocide. Also there's the thing with the current Eu commission president's secret whatsapp chat with Pfizer lobbyists, which has become a major issue that reached the top European court recently.
> "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
It's worse than that in that it's just plainly wrong. I learn about useful products via advertising all the time -- so often, in fact, that I'm sort of bewildered that anybody could claim otherwise. We must be experiencing the world quite differently.
Running a 2009 Mac Mini in a business setting. Connected to a barcode scanner within a local python development environment and communicates over a wired network. Runs 24/7 with barely an issue.
This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.
You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.