House of Lords Votes to Ban UK Children from Using Internet VPNs

I'm confused by what you mean (I'm an American though).

I don't think I'm unique for putting miscellaneous stuff like this on a credit card, and not even necessarily the one my bank offers. Not to hide the transaction, but because charging to debit/checking would make tracking my monthly expenses less straightforward. Payments online are also safer on credit in case a chargeback is required.

Also, are you sure you don't mean "proof of employment" showing the last three months of direct deposits? I've never heard of anyone asking for any other transactions. Similarly, pretty sure loan applications are based on credit reports. Transactions aren't relevant unless they got flagged for something so bad they showed up in the credit report (fraud, missed/late payments, etc).

It seems you want to talk about other things rather than the VPN age-gating or the online safety act this post is about. I'll engage with the content of this post.

> but then force you to send your children to schools that give them ipads and other distractions

What does the online safety act (OSA) or this VPN age check do to prevent this? Are the "ipads" at school giving the users "unfettered access to the internet"? That seems a bit irresponsible, however I would think that your ire should instead be directed towards the schools? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding?

> In addition to the fact that phones are engineered to be addictive

Is it the phones or the content? I interpret your views as someone who should be campaigning for phones and other "distractions" to be restricted in a school environment, however the OSA and this VPN age check do not appear to tackle this.

> there's a huge problem with people addicted to phones and children are especially vulnerable

I will assume this is true for the sake of conversation. Similar to my previous query, how does the OSA or this VPN age check tackle this problem? Will banning certain types of content prevent this, or perhaps shift it? Instead of social media, would it be preferable if children were playing games on their phone? If they were then "addicted" to gaming or socialising around a popular game, would the proposal be at that point to ban children from playing games on their phone? To me, it seems the problem is less the content and more that the environment is setup in certain ways that allows this. It is unclear to me how banning and gating certain content will prevent this.

> different campaigners care about different aspects, so I'm going to talk about the one I care about: addiction, destroyed ability to focus, and dopamine desensitization

What kind of things are you pushing outside of banning material and gating access? Is there a push for educating parents of the dangers of this "addiction"? Perhaps informing people about how to use parental controls to limit the access their children have? Is there a push on companies to provide robust, and easy-to-use parental controls? I feel that parents should have the tools, yet it seems that we consider the problem out of the parents control. Why is that? If parents make an informed choice and choose differently to you, should they be allowed to do so?

> I don't care if adults are vulnerable, they have to make their own decisions.

I feel that if you are caring about children accessing "addicting" material that you should also care about your fellow citizens accessing the same. How would those adults know that this material is addictive? Are they being informed by the state? What avenues are there for them to get help? It seems that the OSA and this VPN age check do not provide any assistance to people that are perhaps already addicted, or preventing people from falling into that trap. Does the care only extend to children and no further? Should we care about building sturdy adults regardless if they are currently children or not?

My general thoughts on this is that there appears to be a lot of restriction and preventing people from accessing certain content, however very little on informing people on what those perceived dangers are. The UK government is especially keen on this restriction, yet I am seeing no push towards informing people, or providing assistance for those afflicted. To me, the proposed motivation and the implementation are incongruent with each other. The perception of safety, as opposed to an improvement in real world safety.

Depends on the how you formulate the goal in the totalitarianism olympics. The goal of totalitarian regimes is not really to completely prevent the flow of information to motivated people. It simply needs to raise the motivation bar high enough so that all but the select few is fed only government-approved propaganda. The few that retain access is tolerated as long as they don't raise a stink. In this view, the efforts of China or Iran is fairly successful.

The UK has a different flavor of authoritarianism centered on surveillance to (ineffectively) improve "safety", and general paternalism at all levels. It doesn't really intend to prevent the flow of information all that much.

Did banning heroin soon lead to consuming any and all substances under mandatory supervision and only after an application and written permission for every individual act of consumption?

That depends if it's social media.