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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: February 9th, 2025

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  • Why does every country on earth need to do it? Will a massive majority of the population switch to VPNs just to watch some YouTube videos? Is that any different from kids trying to circumvent other age gated activities? Does YouTube even want that VPN traffic if it makes them less money? Why not just ban smart phones for kids?

    What measures do you need to enforce it beyond what already exists? The only ones that matter are massive mega-platforms. If a platform isn’t complying just punish it.

    The main question is how much of your life really needs to exist in a digital space? People paid bills, shopped, watched porn, played games and read news before the internet. Democracy falls when an entire generation of voters is raised on supporting Tate-endorsed fascism. This is not a non-issue. It’s happening no matter how much you tut-tut everyone’s parenting.


  • The solution is to give those laws teeth. Harsh regulations on platforms that serve unmoderated content open to everyone. Enforce transparency on content serving algorithms. Massive penalties for security breaches. Ban platforms that don’t comply.

    If you’re worried about state actors having access to your clearnet data, that’s pretty much unavoidable in the internet age. You can lessen that by pushing against the digitization of society. You shouldn’t need a smart phone or internet service to live daily life.

    Support brick-and-mortar stores, your local library, a local hobby group. Campaign against always-online car features, IoT e-waste, traffic surveillance laws, etc… Don’t make me choose between subjecting children to a stream of unregulated bullshit and the right to privacy. It’s a false dichotomy propped up by our need for digital convenience.


  • It’s not social medias fault. This is POOR PARENTING. Plain and simple.

    Sounds like absolving social media to me.

    The complexity of social media engineering and the scope of its impact is unprecedented. It’s not at all the same thing as video game or TV panic. When you account for how much real-life peer discussion is driven by these platforms, protecting your child from this toxic rhetoric is nearly impossible.

    You used to have to show your ID to rent a movie in person, why is doing it online any different? If you (rightfully) are concerned about data collection and surveillance, push for legeslative protections on that topic. This is a completely separate issue with a very clear root cause.



  • I would argue that those factors aren’t a direct cause, but the isolation leaves them vulnerable to things like this. The internet used to be wide open and your semi-random traversal of independent sites would still expose you to a diverse array of people and content.

    The pursuit of profit led to massive, accessible, engagement driven social media platforms. Optimization for ad views meant segmenting demographics and serving them distilled content. The hyper specific content led to these demographics living in echo chambers based on their flavor of polarizing content.

    The Tate-sphere is built around exploiting that isolation and selling bogus solutions. There’s no specific reason the algorithm funnels into it other than it’s catches a broad user base on a charged topic => $$$. The algorithm could just as easily push young men into fighting for socially beneficial causes, but anger is a strong emotion that gives the most money.






  • An official language is not a lingua franca. A lingua franca is a bridge language. It is –and can only be– the most common shared language between native tounges.

    They could add Esperanto as the official language for government beuraceacy, road signs, laws, public schooling and anything else under the purview of the state. That doesn’t automatically expand the utility of the language beyond those use cases.

    The population of the EU is ~450 million people. Let’s look at how that stacks up against language demographics today (combined first+second languages for 2025):

    • English 1.5B
    • Mandarin 1.2B
    • Hindi 609M
    • Spanish 558M [the biggest non-english European tounge]

    If we take out the EU’s 44% English speakers and make everybody speak Spanish (who doesn’t already):

    • English 1.3B
    • Mandarin 1.2B
    • Spanish 931M
    • Hindi 609M

    So putting aside the logistical and diplomatic difficulties, the math just doesn’t add up.




  • That money doesn’t come out of nowhere; the stock market isn’t a magical wealth machine. It works by incentivizing unsustainable private growth at public expense. It’s a grand experiment to see who gets left holding the bag when you line shareholders’ pockets for decades.

    The results are in: after a century of trying, it’s not profitable to feed people who can’t pay or provide affordable healthcare or keep our shared commons livable. Public benefit is antithetical to shareholder interests.

    We’ve cut the corners as far as they can go; dismantled every regulation; manufactured every last drop of demand. The only growth remaining is mining public user data and selling it to the highest bidder. If you exclude technology companies, the market has already been contracting for at least a decade.

    You criticize older generations for expecting the line to keep going up forever and encourage everyone to do the same thing in the same breath.

    You’re only making money by fucking someone else today or yourself tomorrow. If you want to own it, that’s fine. But don’t act like you’re Robin Hood for encouraging people to buy in to a broken system.