981–990 of 1001 posts
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Ah I see, thanks for clarifying that your response was uninformed.
I don't understand your seemingly petty and demeaning retort. What makes me uninformed? It sounds like you were the one who was unfamiliar with the ability to interact with door dash with an ID and not having to upload it. I have accepted door dash as a non-door dash customer. They check for ID. Just like the store.
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>The faction that currently runs the Democratic party is the centrist, deficit-reducing, foreign-intervention-when-necessary party of Reagan/Bush. How are you defining "deficit-reducing"? >Over the four years of President Biden’s term – from January 2021 through January 2025 – we estimate that he approved $4.7 trillion in new ten-year debt through legislation and executive actions. https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much…
> How are you defining "deficit-reducing"? There are two ways to lower the deficit: increase revenue or lower spending. As you say, neither party does particularly well at lowering spending. The moderate Republican approach to raising revenue is typically but not always through regressive taxes. The general theory since Reagan (and before) has been taxing the upper brackets hurts economic growth. The ideal of this is…
>...Of the two, I think only the second offers any real hope of deficit reduction. The middle and lower classes are already tapped out, metaphorically speaking.
Many people point to the high government spending in some of the OECD countries, but what they fail to recognize is that the US has one of the most progressive tax systems in the OECD. The difference is that in those other OECD countries, the middle class pays a higher share of the taxes and there is more money available because there are a lot more middle class tax payers than high income payers.
>If the goal really is to reduce the deficit through increasing revenue, I think it’s likely that revenue must come from the upper classes in one way or another.
The tax to GDP ratio has remained fairly stable for decades: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
The effective tax rates paid by the high income earners is fairly close to the highest it has ever been.
Your original point was:
>The faction that currently runs the Democratic party is the centrist, deficit-reducing, foreign-intervention-when-necessary party of Reagan/Bush.
Again, I have a hard time considering a party that increases spending so much that debt will be increased by $4.7 trillion to be one that can be called "deficit-reducing". (Nor can the R party be called that either of course.) Just because the D party talks about raising revenue doesn't really mean anything.
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Absolutely not "banned". Movie theaters customarily won't let children under 17 into R-rated films without a parent, but there's no law that I'm aware of enforcing that - it's purely an industry custom. And there's certainly no analogous restriction when purchasing an R-rated DVD, or watching one on a streaming service.
The very reason this isn't legally enforced is because industry self-regulated this way (to avoid legislation that would come with actual liability). If the Internet made any effort at self-regulation beyond "say, you're over 18, right?" perhaps we wouldn't be in this situation.
All these ID check laws are out of hand. Parents are expecting the government, and random websites, to raise their kids. Why would anyone trust some random blog with their ID? If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should), there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18 without sending picture of your ID off to random 3rd parties, or giving actual personal details. I don’t want to give this data, and…
> If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should), there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18 without sending picture of your ID off to random 3rd parties, or giving actual personal details. I don’t want to give this data, and websites shouldn’t want to shoulder the responsibility for it. Sure. A government issued certificate that is required to get an IP and be able to navigate the internet. How d…
sounds like the solution to me. disallow under 18s from internet access. any parent who allows an underage to browse the internet unsupervised should be penalized to the same degree that they would if they directly provided hardcore pornography to the child, because thats exactly what it is.
I personally would choose this route, handing kids fully internet enabled pornography consumption devices is beyond ridiculous, and the size factor of smartphones (take them everywhere, camera connected directly to encrypted chats with strangers) well the fact that the government even allows this is simply a matter of confusion to my small mind.
What am I missing here? Why do we allow children internet access?
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The internet is not blocked by age. Any child with a laptop or phone, or any other device that can connect to a wifi hotspot, can access it. Do you refuse to watch age-restricted films in the cinema because the owner of the cinema might have a record of what you've watched? Age-restricted websites are no different. You can comply with the access requirement, or refrain from using the service. It's your freedom of cho…
Many public WiFi hotspots have content filters. Kids are not going to be seeing porn at the library. The issue here is there's a difference between a mainstream service, like a cinema, and a tiny author website which probably gets a few hundred hits a months at most. And the ultimate ideological aim is to take all erotica offline. Especially any kind of queer erotica. This is using ID issues for ideological censorshi…
Block kids at the on ramp to the internet, all the problems go away. I just don't understand what I'm missing here, why do we allow kids to use the internet?
A more effective solution would be to implement HTML tags for explicit sexual content (or any other kind of child-sensitive content) and allow the OS or browser to authenticate the user before showing that content, if parental controls are enabled. Legal obligations and responibilities become very clear: the site has tags - it's ok. No tags - guilty. It also allows for very fine-grained delimitation of sexual content…
The rub is how you authenticate the user. Most such content is already behind an age verification check. If the risk is that people who shouldn’t be doing so are clicking “yes I am 18” then whatever you need to do to authenticate the user otherwise to counter that sort of circumvention are going to be really ugly from a privacy standpoint.
This proposed solution allows the parent to choose whatever authentication he/she wants for the device. Windows login, browser login, 3rd party filtering proxy in the router, etc.
I know what you're about to say: What if the child gains access to an unrestricted device? Well, if you put it that way, what if the child gains access to an old stash of porn magazines? What are you gonna do? Sue the publisher?
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It's not about blocking it all. It's about blocking some, removing the monetary incentives to entice children from major players. It's about stopping some of the addiction and damaging effects. Just like we limit alcohol but kids still drink, or vape etc. They still do it, but it requires more effort and that barrier can be a very real barrier to addiction formation.
> It's about stopping some of the addiction and damaging effects I used to think this was a valid point, but I read something that changed my opinion completely. Pornhub, plus other large sites, have a lot of attention on them. They're a long way from perfect but they do self police, probably far more than anyone here knows, because they don't want to get banned. If you get rid of them, you're boosting smaller and fa…
I don't really see much of an issue with the content of the porn if that's what you mean by nastier sites. To me it's more like if you ban cigarettes and now kids are all buying black market cigarettes without nicotine.
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> I don’t see how you can ignore the massively negative effects pornography has on mostly young men I ignore it because I've only ever gotten responses of morality. Which, as I've said, I think are stupid. My point about morality is that it's the same morality that oppresses homosexuals, or previously black people and women. It's not a different morality - it's the same reasoning. Some thing is immoral because of our…
This is actually a pretty sound framework and I mostly agree. Usually it's justifiable to intervene when somebody is harming someone else and not before. I think it's a bit oversimplified, though. Do you think it might contribute to the incel epidemic and the associated violence? In that sense one could make a similar line of argument to that of the temperance movement's talk of alcohol contributing to wife-beating (…
No actually I don't, not at all. I blame the patriachy and feminism for the creation of incels. Not in the sense that feminism is bad, but the contrary.
What I mean is, incels have always existed. However, our tolerance for widespread misbehavior of men has grown thinner over the last 70 years.
When I was in college, it was typical to hear "oh man, don't go to that frat house, they roofie!" Looking back, it's almost comical. What? They... roofie? Is... anybody going to do anything about this? Should I tell someone? No, evidently - just don't go there.
Of course, it used to be worse. Men used to be able to just beat women, and nobody cared. Financial abuse was not only common, it was mandated by law.
We've come a long, long way. And, we've left a lot of men behind. Before, you could be a piece of shit and still be almost guaranteed a marriage, or at least sex. Our standards for behavior are much higher.
Men have been, understandably, slow to evolve. It's a much less sweet deal. This is compounded by the fact we've really never had a progressive movement for men. To this day, there are infinite ways to be a heterosexual woman - but there's only one way to be a heterosexual man. Men are closed in, trapped, by social expectations. We carry all the baggage of the patriarchy and misogyny of days gone, but we reap few benefits. We are not so liberated, not so open-minded.
It's a fine line. You must evolve, but not too much so that you may reject the performance of masculinity. You must be progressive, but not so much so. You must be traditional, but only in the right ways. Some men, even a lot of men, cannot keep up or fit into what is expected of them. And, there's no moving back.