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Comment by snaking0776 | Hacker News Reader

Politicians will do any draconian measure to help kids except try and improve the lives of their parents so that they can actually dedicate time to parenting. Making it slightly harder to access the internet fixes nothing. What if instead of having the largest prison population in the world our government supported communities that make raising good children possible? Our society needs to lose this urge to diagnose each other and provide some forceful treatment and instead set sights on providing the pre-conditions for everyone to prosper and lead their version of a fulfilling life. Only then will we have functional, healthy children. I quite like what the mayor of Baltimore has been doing to revitalize his city and it seems to be leading to actual change there if you want a good example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XQs59YY-e2I&pp=ygUXY2hhbm5lbCA...

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IF it were for the kids - but I don't think it is.

> Making it slightly harder to access the internet fixes nothing.

This assumes it is about the children. But if you do not think so then it opens up new alternatives suddenly, be it from tracking people, to targeted ads or any other information that could be gathered and eventually either monetized or put in tandem with other information. We'd get age graphs that way too.

Before that we could speculate to some extent, but with mandatory age sniffing and id-showing at all times, those who track people and benefit from it, benefit now even more.

Agreed. I’m sure some house members will vote for it because they only had a random staffer read the bill and heard that it gives them a good talking point in the next election. I just wanted to point out what’s maybe obvious to everyone that this won’t help kids. I’m sure this is being pushed by Meta/whatever other ad dependent business wants to pass off liability of verifying age with the added benefit to everyone in power that it’s easier to track everyone as a result.

The proving-your-age thing seems like a weasely way to talk about it. As you mentioned, providing a legible photo of your US state ID is a lot more data than your birth date!

> IF it were for the kids - but I don't think it is.

Exactly. If it was about kids, then you do not direct legislation towards everybody, but at parents. Give parents the software and tools (parental control settings) to restrict their child from searching certain terms and accessing certain sites. Bob or Susan (middle age adults), down the street, should have nothing to do with that.

It's about outright surveillance, tracking, censorship, control, and politicians putting money in their pocket. "Kids" is just a cover for their intentions and dirt. More has to be done to call out the deception.

well, and this bill literally only makes you prove age to ... set up the device.

how are we in 2026 and phones dont have guest mode or "i handed it to my kid mode"

apple's guided access is a terrible 1% solution to the problem. in one click i should be able to put my phone into some kind of locked down mode that exposes only what is allowed, starting with nothing unless whitelisted, with multiple profiles.

in the same sense, all the streaming services having their own separate kids profiles, instead of the streaming device having a single kids mode that exposes only the kids mode content from each app makes kids mode useless when a kid can just change the app, or gets stick into a single provider and i have to go help them switch.

> how are we in 2026 and phones dont have guest mode or "i handed it to my kid mode"

They do. Android have had multi-user and guest profiles since Android 5.

The only reason I really know this is because I heard how Google completely bungled it in Android 14 on Pixel devices[1] :D

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/android-14s-ransomwa...

In addition to profiles you can also 'pin' an app from the recents menu so the kid cannot exit the app, sortof like a kiosk mode. It requires bio/auth to undo the pin.

To me that's faster and much closer to a safe "hand the device to a kid" mode.

While age gate attempts are comically stupid, an adult giving a kid a device purpose built for addictive behavior should absolutely be as illegal as giving them alcohol or cigarettes. I really hope Apple and Google are not stupid enough to further enable this.

I don't consider giving a kid a phone in guided access with calculator up to be addictive or something that should be illegal.

Same applies to guided access and a facetime call. I dont want them to switch apps or hang up the call, the phone gets locked down.

Apple is a hardware company. They want to sell more devices.

> Politicians will do any draconian measure to help kids except try and improve the lives of their parents so that they can actually dedicate time to parenting.

Because in their eyes your children are not your children. You are simply a custodian of their future work force asset. If you educate your children too much into individualism, they (today’s politicians) may see a diminished return of whatever they want to achieve.

And if you don’t agree with me on an emotional level, well, just remember the words of Elon Musk (paraphrasing): we need people to have children because we need to have workforce in the future. Translation: we need people to have children because who will work for us and makes tons of money.

If you have it too good, you aren’t dependent on them, you have all the carrots. They have no stick. They want to have the stick.

I agree. Just was trying to point out that this has nothing to do with helping kids

Translation: government is the problem not the solution.

Hard disagree. Corporations running the government instead of a nation's people is the problem.

Government should be so powerless as to be unattractive targets for corporate influence.

a government not worth of influence is not a government

That just creates a power vacuum that corporate techno-feudalists (or violence specialists) fill in.

It's not a solution to anything.

For example of powerless governments - look at literally any war-torn African country and their standard of living.

If you’re interested, see my response to a sibling comment of yours for a more complete description of my mindset.

Specific to this, though: there’s a big difference between a stateless society and a failed state. You’re describing failed states.

I also very much agree with you about the result of a power vacuum. I argue that a power vacuums exist not because of the absence of a state, but because of the absence of a state where the populace expects and relies on a state to be.

I didn’t say we should get rid of it all tomorrow morning :)

So you want to take power away from the people even more than now?

Sure, but this is only tenable as a technical position that aims to reduce all forms of centralized power. It completely fails as a political position applied to the nominal "government". Politically, pushing in this direction seems to only ever play out as reducing the power of governments over corporations, while often even increasing the power of government over individuals (spurred on by corporations looking to wield that power through the government). Whereas for it to achieve its intended individual liberty, the complete opposite would have to happen - decreasing the power of governments over individuals while holding or even increasing the power of governments over corporations - otherwise unrestrained corporations simply step into that nonconsensual role of government and we're back to step #1.

Would you believe that I agree with what you wrote completely?

I’m pretty much a pure anarchist in terms of principles, but I’m a pragmatist in practice. I’d describe my approach in politics as “What do you wish the government would stop doing? Let’s focus on making that happen.”

You can’t change a culture by changing the political system, but my hope is that you can change a political system by changing the culture. I want to be as independent of the state as I can possibly be, and I want to encourage others to do the same. My hope is that this sort of cultural shift will eventually lead the shrinking of the state. I don’t expect to live to see that happen, but I hope my children and their children do.

Aside from the above, just don’t harm others. That’s it.

I would. My own views had to come from somewhere, right?

Responding to what you've said, my unfortunate experience is that culture always ends up going sideways. As movements grow in mindshare they tend to attract people focused on power/expedience, only applying the initial precepts towards those ends. And gaining control over some existing centralized power structures is much more lucrative than a given person's share of the distributed wealth that would be created by successfully constraining them.

Which ties right into the problem I saw with your original comment. A statement like "Government should be so powerless as to be unattractive targets for corporate influence" lands in the political/partisan context by default. And while perhaps that's a symptom of how [unfortunately] inured in centralized politics we are, it's still a fact. So even though we can both take a step back and lay out the context where that can be an agreeable productive statement, the overwhelming use of similar statements is actually to attack individual liberty by getting people to overfocus on the nominal government while giving a pass to another primary contingent of the centralized power structure.

Name checks out.

Wait until you find out that I paid my state money I didn’t have to pay (a custom license plate) just so I could put an anti-government message on it.

I smile at that delicious irony every time I see it.

You rapscallion. You actual rogue.

I aim to be the penultimate knave of our time.

* Apple just autocorrected “knave” to “Kanye” when I typed it.

the governemnt is the only thing holding even worse things back.

those even worse things have tried very, very hard to obstruct, slow, impede, and ruin government trust so they can enforce their monopolies.

> Politicians will do any draconian measure to help kids except [...]

They are covering for and not prosecuting perpetrators in the biggest child trafficking and abuse scandal in recent memory -- the Epstein case. Let us do away with even a surface-level pretense that they care about kids at all.

I would rather them write a bill that says all kids are provided lunches at schools ("free lunch" if you will).

I believe that would help kids out much more than this shit bill would.

>("free lunch" if you will).

TANSTAAFL.

Whoa you mean public services are funded by taxes? I knew those free books at the library were too good to be true

No, they're funded by the work of net taxpayers.

And net tax payers are funded by exploiting the labor of lower tax payers

A self-employed plumber is a net taxpayer. Baby's first crayon drawing of an economy has few sensible conclusions from which to draw.

>TANSTAAFL

Those Are Not Slogans That Are Applicable Followed Literally.

Feed, cloth and educate our population? What's next? Structure society in a way that benefits the people? How horrifying!

panem et circenses

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

We can abolish prison right after criminals abolish crime. Also, most of the people in prison aren’t great role models.

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