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Comment by dpe82 | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't even need to be that complicated. OS asks you your birthday at setup time. Stores it. Later, an app asks whether the user falls into one of the following brackets:

A) under 13 years of age, or B) at least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age, or C) at least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age or D) at least 18 years of age.

that's it. The OS can decide how it wants to implement that, but personally I'd literally just do get_age_bracket_enum(now() - get_user_birthday());

The bill is here: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

The uproar seems to be extremely overblown.

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I think the uproar comes because the well is already poisoned. People are already trained to respond with an outburst of anger to any law that mentions the age of the user, and will find excuses to rationalize that outburst, even when the law isn't that bad.

I mean, "compelled speech"? Really? That's people's argument? This is about as bad as the government compelling you to write a copyright notice.

Compelled speech is bad and it’s something we don’t do, at all. All kinds of bad things come with compelled speech. Mandatory loyalty oaths, erosion of the fifth amendment, compelled work to weaken encryption, etc.

The well should be poisoned. The whole idea is poison.

Do you oppose mandatory food nutrition and ingredients labelling?

I don’t oppose limited regulation of messaging regarding products that are for sale, as long as they are aimed at ensuring that buyers have full and correct information about what they’re buying. Also some limited safety regulation on products, but I do think you should be allowed to buy/sell “unsafe” things if you really want to (if properly labeled).

Regulation of products for sale is in line with the commerce clause. (I also think federal regulations on this should comply with the 10th amendment and not apply to local-only products. Wickard v. Filburn was a poor decision.)

The boundary between what is speech and commerce can be fuzzy, but if something is free and provides no profit to its maker then it’s obviously not commerce.

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