owisd

I think it's more of a problem that the dividing lines in politics have shifted from left vs right within a liberal democratic framework, to liberal democracy vs populism. 15 years ago everyone was arguing within a democratic framework, partly by social norm and partly because before the internet became so ubiquitous there were many more gatekeepers to the spread of information making circulating disingenuous arguments harder. So if hardly anyone was breaking the rules you didn't need to debate who was breaking the rules of democracy or even what the rules were. E.g. JS Mill said 175 years ago that you couldn't have freedom of speech if you allowed harassment or bad faith arguments, but plenty of populists these days would define freedom of speech precisely in the terms of allowing harassment and by extension whatever the consequences of allowing harassment were are just what freedom looks like, and would then gaslight John Stuart Mill into believing he's the real authoritarian for not agreeing with them.

Trusted authority with democratic accountability is the least worst option. Too much censorship is authoritarian, but too little and authoritarianism can flood the public discourse with so much noise that free speech becomes impossible.

Why not a layered system of all 3. Everyone starts in #3 by default, your grandma can do her shopping and banking and pay for parking without the constant risk of being scammed. Then jump through some hoops to get to #2 and/or #1. #2 has regulated adult content. #1 ends up only appealing to tech-types and so, due to self-selection, ends the Eternal September.

The path to deregulation creates a "market for lemons". Suppose any bank was completely unregulated and could abscond with your money and the government would just shrug its shoulders. Great, now there's no trust and everyone will go back to stashing cash under their mattress and you've killed the banking sector.

The extent of regulatory capture in the US is a problem it's created for itself by normalizing huge political donations allowing corporations to buy regulation.

We already tried that. The companies had the option not to exploit kids and chose exploitation, and given trillion-dollar companies they can massively out-resource any parent's individual action - no amount of parental controls will stop a teenager saving up their pocket money and buying an inexpensive second-hand device themselves - the parents' only option to fight back is the ballot box.

It was actually first cracked by Marian Rejewski at the Polish Cipher Bureau and the details were handed over to Bletchley Park at the start of the war.

Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone strongly insinuates Kinney Services got started as a gambling front, so possibly a poor example of a boring business turning a healthy profit.

If you've got an iPhone/Mac I recommend Apple's free Apple Configurator tool to lock down your phone to only the set of apps you whitelist and/or route all traffic through a VPN/Proxy that whitelists only certain IPs. You can only change the whitelist when you're physically back at your Mac so prevents me impulsively relaxing the restrictions in any moments of boredom.

You know any time any legislature proposes anything they have dozens of people involved in months of debates and consultations and reports and committees to go through all of this kind of minutiae to decide where to draw the lines.

A few options: (a) load a digital copy of an existing ID into your OS's wallet app then the wallet app can simply attest to any service that the device is owned by someone over 18 (b) sell single-use tokens in grocery stores that require an ID to purchase like alcohol. token can be used to verify you're 18+ for one site. (c) require that any network-enabled device can only be bought by showing ID to prove 18+ and then when set up can be configured at the OS-level as child-owned so a parent can buy a device and do the initial setup so it's locked in child mode.

> I'm not sure if the EU would really go along with it again.

Sounds like Project Fear to me! The EU needs Britain more than Britain needs them! The German car/French wine/etc. industry will beg the European Commission to give Britain all their opt-outs back to secure a rejoin!

Could solve this, and in turn rid the world of a huge amount of algorithmic slop, by taxing companies according to how much personal data they hold.

The article is claiming it's happened in the last 20-25 years but you seem to have used 1950 as your starting point, so you're not excluding the possibility it's been in reverse since 2000 but not yet fallen to 1950 levels.