> No connection between the individual agents and actors.
This is obviously untrue. They all know each other and communicate. This would be true even if it were something more anodyne like antismoking regulation (that governments maybe don't have a particular stake in.) They coordinate their messaging, they use the same publicity agencies, they apply for the same financing, they cosponsor and circulate the same studies and thinktank output. Why would you just say that there is no connection between them?
What I think you've done is silently dismissed the open connections as harmless. It's really a "no true connection." The evidence would have to be a bunch of connected organizations with Snidely Whiplash mustaches, or an explicit declaration of conspiratorial intent written down, signed, and published in a newspaper that you approve of.
Although I can't imagine what they could possibly confess to: "We coordinated with national governments to generate studies and messaging, were funded by them directly and indirectly, through foundation grants, lobbied politicians who would support the bans and gave them statements to make, and attacked politicians who were against the bans."
What's wrong with that? You make it sound like some sort of conspiracy.
If we try to argue this case on the merits we've already lost. There's no technical reason to root everyone's computer to keep kids offline. Just put age statements in the protocol, legally make people serving adult material require them, and give people the tools to strip those statements or put them behind passwords at the workstation, server, or even ISP level. Kids would get around it, but they'll certainly get around this, too, unless you're going to require cameras on computers to identify their users at all times.
It's so aggravating to have to have arguments about whether some coordinated political push is happening due to money being spent. Literally every coordinated political push, at least ones with any success, is consciously planned and lobbied for, even the ones that I support.
I don't get pretending that no one is behind it. There are definitely people sitting in conference rooms in front of whiteboards trying to come up with ideas on how to do it most effectively. But people compartmentalize so hard, some people in that room would call you a conspiracy theorist for pointing out the meeting that they are currently attending. "I just do social media for a nonprofit. No, there's nothing wrong with us getting 90% of our funding from the US government, you're just a cynic. What evidence is there that we are working on their behalf? Do you think social media is good for teenagers?!"
If you're proud of incuriousness, you'll never see evidence. I think I should be looking for evidence of the push being organic. I don't see it pushed anywhere but from the top down, even at sometimes heavy political costs to the incumbent leaders who are pushing it.
You should always be asking who politicians are serving. You seem to comfortable with thinking that they must be serving some part of the electorate without actually needing to identify that part. A lot of people think social media is bad for teenagers. There are a lot of things that are bad for teenagers that we aren't making any particular, coordinated effort to ban.
> The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global.
This is simply not true. The US puts pressure on countries to harmonize their regulations and laws to ours, unless it is to the US's advantage that other countries have different laws than ours. The world didn't suddenly get draconian drug laws through "political movements," it got them through diplomatic and funding pressures. The US often used those laws as excuses for military and intelligence interventions, or to build political organizations in those countries in the guise of antidrug organizations.
All countries do things like this, but the US is rich and dangerous enough to do it hardest. The US has decided that it wants everybody tracked at all times, especially online, and when it explains the advantages of this to the elites of other countries, they also like the idea.
Smaller European countries have also made it a cottage industry to fanatically push US agendas in places like NATO and the EU, because it gives their little homelands outsized influence (and bags of cash) to operate on behalf of the bully. For some reason, everybody in Europe has to care what e.g. Estonia thinks about something, although Estonia is just saying what the US wants Europe to be doing, and the US is financing Estonian candidates for European positions (and maybe even having Trump lobby against them to give them even more credibility.)
This attack on any sort of privacy online is not coming from the churches. There is no lobby group that it pushing it that doesn't get the majority of its funds from any number of governments, which is just government lobbying itself. The way democracy is supposed to work is that the people support something, and they then vote for candidates that will give it to them - but there is no visible constituency lobbying for this other than casual liberal cynics who aren't organized in any way.
As a comparison, in 2015 there was like 65-70% popular support for single-payer health care in the US. There were dozens of organized groups supporting it. It even crossed 50% among Republicans for at least a year. Not a hint of anything happened.
edit: Also Europe, like Japan, is one of those places that had a really emotionally tough time outlawing pedophilia and child pornography. They certainly don't care this much about the sexual aspect of child safety, at least. What Europe has never been behind on is the censorship of political speech. That is what can excite people.
the US has no laws about social media for u16. australia does, and countries are following suit.
the west is led by the people that lead now
countries also have single payer or other socialized healthcare, and have not followed the US into its junky private profits on extraordinary public money setup
this is not at all convincing. america used to have soft power influence, but its being left behind
> Why not just pass a law that says people born after 2008 have to pay higher taxes, and work longer hours for less pay? People should be equal under the law.
This is one of the ways they broke the unions in the US. They offered agreements where new hires would get lower pay and fewer benefits than the old workers. Evil.
> you can get a 10 year old ThinkPad for 10% of the price that will perform roughly as well as this one.
Eventually those Thinkpads will run/wear out. The hardware designs for a [pretty much a Thinkpad] will be a good thing to have then. Let rich nerds looking for bragging rights support development for the future; call them patrons.
Also, they will sell 6 of these, it's not an environmental concern in any way.
The philosophy that was not being understood was "move fast and break things." "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast" was mentioned as an opposite point of view.
To then explain "slow and smooth, and smooth is fast" as a reply is to not comprehend the comment at all. Then, it ends with a link to their own blog.
Yes. Journalists don't make a living from journalism, they live on family money. That's why working class journalists have disappeared along with working class perspectives.
It was once a job where many if not most of the practitioners didn't have a college degree, now it is the most expensive graduate school program you can do. I think the median price is something like $250K.
If you don't pay writers, you eliminate all of the writers who have to work for a living.
Don't disagree with the general point but I'm not sure J-School was ever a particularly good entree into journalism. Most of the journalists I know and knew didn't have the grad degree.
So your argument is that journalists must be wealthy because otherwise they'd be poor? Have you considered the alternative, that we just live modest lifestyles, like most other working class people?
That’s a fair question. My wife is cheap and I’m indulgent with my kids. So we compromised by sending our kids to private school with yacht club people, but not living around them. Our neighborhood is mostly well-off non-white-collar people: nurses, cops, navy enlisted, guys who did well in trades, etc.
But then capital can't pretend that it's doing anything. It spends all of its time now acting like ownership is a job rather than a title in order to justify itself. If a machine can manage, then it makes it more obvious that they are simply royals, ruling by self-decree.
Royals needed gods to justify themselves; when gods die or are switched out, royals are deleted or deposed.
I'm looking forward to the "coordination problem" being debunked. It's always been a demand that economic problems must be impossible to solve centrally, rather than a proof (a demand that justifies 2/5 of the economy going to the financial industry to produce nothing but coordination.) I actually thought that the success of algorithmic trading was enough to do it.
This is obviously untrue. They all know each other and communicate. This would be true even if it were something more anodyne like antismoking regulation (that governments maybe don't have a particular stake in.) They coordinate their messaging, they use the same publicity agencies, they apply for the same financing, they cosponsor and circulate the same studies and thinktank output. Why would you just say that there is no connection between them?
What I think you've done is silently dismissed the open connections as harmless. It's really a "no true connection." The evidence would have to be a bunch of connected organizations with Snidely Whiplash mustaches, or an explicit declaration of conspiratorial intent written down, signed, and published in a newspaper that you approve of.
Although I can't imagine what they could possibly confess to: "We coordinated with national governments to generate studies and messaging, were funded by them directly and indirectly, through foundation grants, lobbied politicians who would support the bans and gave them statements to make, and attacked politicians who were against the bans."
What's wrong with that? You make it sound like some sort of conspiracy.
If we try to argue this case on the merits we've already lost. There's no technical reason to root everyone's computer to keep kids offline. Just put age statements in the protocol, legally make people serving adult material require them, and give people the tools to strip those statements or put them behind passwords at the workstation, server, or even ISP level. Kids would get around it, but they'll certainly get around this, too, unless you're going to require cameras on computers to identify their users at all times.
It's a pretense.
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