Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

No one disputes this.

> significantly reducing VPN usage is a win for (totalitarian) govs

But a loss for non-totalitarian countries, and therefore a cost rather than a benefit in the context of US states doing it.

> it's enough to make it difficult for the layman to achieve govs' goal

And I addressed that, but I'll reiterate.

Even ordinary people can bypass VPN blocks with a trivial amount of effort. It's really not that hard, and in fact there is an entire cottage industry dedicated to making it easier, because we don't want totalitarian regimes keeping their population in the dark -- and the people thwarting those blocks are our friends, or often even the US government itself, for actually good reasons for once.

So if you block something that people aren't that interested in seeing, like criticism of the government when that's something that tends to make a lot of people uncomfortable, then blocking people from seeing it has an effectiveness which is a little better than totally negligible. Because some people won't go out of their way even a little bit to see it, and then they don't. (Which is why it's important that we make it absolutely trivially easy for ordinary people to bypass those blocks.)

Whereas if you're trying to block something that people actually want -- drugs, porn, whatever -- it's not going to work because that trivial amount of effort to bypass it is too small to be meaningful in a context where the user is actively seeking it out.

You have so many twits trying to get away with authoritarian nonsense that they're conditioning people through propaganda to accept authoritarian nonsense. What happens then? More twits trying to get away with authoritarian nonsense.

We need to come up with a better solution to this than the historical norm of things getting so bad that people are finally willing to fight a war over it.

This would require blocking VPN use for all users, regardless of where the user comes from (at just until their age verified). That seems like a big invasion of rights of users from other states.

If they insist on blocking VPN use, the onus should be on VPN service providers, or VPN service users.

If you are asking whether it is the same, everywhere. In my recent experience of flying out of international airports…

- LHR - you don’t remove your shoes and they have newer scanners that supposedly detect explosives in liquids.

- SJO - you don’t remove your shoes

- XQP - they don’t have sophisticated scanners. Security uses handheld scanners. But what do you expect when the terminal is literally a hut? (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Qu...)

> But if it happens to a train people don't think it could happen to them if they got on a train?

Well first most people outside of NYC aren’t as heavily dependent on public transportation. They already see it as dangerous and for poor people (yes I think that’s ignorant). In other words people with means already avoid public transportation and they would even be more likely to do so. This is very much a car centric culture

Do you know how many people outside of NYC believe the narrative that the minute you step on a train in NYC that you are going to be shot or raped?

No I don’t believe that. I’ve used NYC mass transit once when I went to the US Open (the reason I mentioned Queens where the Arthur Ashe stadium is).

I lived in Atlanta for 25 years. I took MARTA once to get from the north suburbs of Atlanta to the airport. The rest of the time we would drive or take Uber. I took it again recently to get from the airport to downtown when visiting.

MARTA also has such a reputation for only being for poor people to the point where its derogatorily called Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta (before the pearl clutching starts about me using a racist acronym I’m Black). If people started bombing trains. You would see even less ridership from people who had alternatives.

> All of the transportation systems are interconnected. What does the connectedness change? If something happens on a train in New York, does it materially affect San Francisco

You mean all 5 people who ride trains inter-city across the country?

> Which is another reason it's a farce, because it also affects flights entering the US and then it doesn't matter what the TSA does when you can go through airport security in the country of your choosing with the weakest or most bribe-accepting security that lets you get behind the checkpoint on a plane to the US.

Most bribes are for drugs and other contraband. Have you ever in the past 20 years heard of a case where someone bribed an official to bring a weapon on board a plane that was used to take over or bomb a plane?

But you still haven’t answered the main overriding question - why does every major airport in every country have the same procedures? Is everyone in the world wrong? And if it is because of supposed pressure from the US, why is it true for domestic flights within their own borders and for their train systems (at least my n=1 experience on a train outside of the US)?