> 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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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

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

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

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

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

TANSTAAFL.

Those Are Not Slogans That Are Applicable Followed Literally.